The latest Ethereum Parity wallet disaster, play by play - <AUTHOR> https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/11/08/the-ethereum-parity-wallet-disaster-play-by-play/ <comment><USER2> This really sux. I'm a big fan of Ethereum but security has been lacking. I and many others can't trust it.

Bitcoin seems to be king for the foreseeable future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bitcoin has the same problem - that the fundamental design feature, irreversibility/immutability, is the source of _most_ of the problems it has in practice - but at least it didn't add Turing-completeness.</comment></comment>


When Ice Cream Attacks: The Mystery Of Brain Freeze - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2012/07/03/156155297/when-ice-cream-attacks-the-mystery-of-brain-freeze <comment><USER2> +1. Coincidentally, like the name of my book, launched today: [http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29902847924/ice- crea...](http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/29902847924/ice-cream- startups)</comment>


Animal Grief in the 19th Century - <AUTHOR> https://mimimatthews.com/2016/03/03/animal-grief-in-the-19th-century/ <comment><USER2> Of course in the 19th century grief was much more of a thing even for people -- it wasn't at all unusual for several of your children to die young, and even adults weren't immune to various epidemics like cholera. These days someone dying before being elderly is considered a freak tragedy rather than just a fact of life.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess I didn't need to go through the WHOLE day without crying

<comment><USER4> That opening picture did it for me. It reminded me of the loss of one of our dogs last year. We have a camera to keep an eye on the dogs (mainly to make sure our female doesn't chew something). At work a day or two after the dog was put down I was constantly bugged by the camera alerts, as the camera was picking up noise. That noise turned out to be our female howling away...for hours. I left work early, and worked from home the rest of that week. Few things break my heart, and that was one of them.</comment></comment>


Working Lego Computer Keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://jkbrickworks.com/lego-computer-keyboard/

<comment><USER2> That's a pretty fun project, but it's a bit sad that the electronics were lifted form an existing keyboard.

Are mindstorms flexible enough to emulate USB HID?

edit: it looks like mindstorm EV3 is bluetooth-enabled. I don't know the details, but it might be possible to get it bound as a bluetooth keyboard, and thus to have a fully functional "pure-lego"[0] bluetooth keyboard.

[0] the mindstorm EV3 brick runs a Linux distro on a 300MHz ARM9 core with 64MB RAM and 16MB flash (plus a SDHC slot). Whether this remains "pure lego" may be up to debate.

<comment><USER3> LEGO purists generally admit anything produced by the LEGO company, plus generic consumables like batteries as specified.

So a sticker from an original set is allowed, but printing your own sticker isn't; any 9V battery will do in a 9V battery box, and any SD card in an SDHC slot, but not a newly made extra-long wire to carry power out to a motor.

There are companies that make LEGO-compatible bricks, which range from execrable quality to slightly better than LEGO's own, but none of that would qualify.

All that being said, I don't know of anyone who maintains LEGO purity except in competitions and exhibitions with specific rules. LEGO themselves often produce large sculptures with an interior support armature which is not made of LEGO products.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but in this case the lego part is kinda minor, it's a basic sculpture but the logic is lifted from and the layout imposed by the original keyboard's contacts.

You can't create a better, more flexible or completely different keyboard (e.g. recreate a symbolics keyboard, or a typematrix layout)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> sean-duffy I liked that in the video he went to type "LEGOS" and then changed it to "LEGO bricks".

</comment><comment><USER4> I thoroughly enjoyed his creative symbolism for Caps Lock.

<comment><USER5> and home...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I would like to see would be a keyboard where the full keys were like LEGOs, and you could arrange them on the board in any layout you wished. But this is a good start.

<comment><USER7> And you could keep "spares" to add and remove keys that are/aren't in your chosen language. Really cool idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So basically they took the keys off of a keyboard and glued some legos on the keys instead? Not really impressed.....

<comment><USER9> I was disappointed when I saw the base was taken from a keyboard (I was expecting that to be mindstorm based as it was posted on HN). But the mechanism for the keys is very cool and well designed, it's a massive understatement to say it's just Lego pieces glued on the keys

<comment><USER10> The way you can easily slide them to perfectly arrange them is pretty neat too. I can see this work well in prototyping settings with DIY contact switches (two layers of aluminium with a piece of foam and a hole, basically).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent video and creation</comment>


Tableau Software removes WikiLeaks, users cry foul - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/12/tableau-software-pulls-plug-on.html

<comment><USER2> This is ridiculous - I hope Tableau feels the error in their ways and customers vote with their feet.</comment>


AI: What is a Teacup? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.evjang.com/2018/02/teacup-story.html <comment><USER2> \- much larger mouth than bottom

\- handle unless broken

\- about 3 inches tall

\- porcelain

<comment><USER2> a bigger question could be context when a teacup is important versus just a "cup"</comment></comment>


Python On Wheels - <AUTHOR> http://www.pythononwheels.org/app/welcome <comment><USER2> I remember this framework being discussed on HN about 1/2 a year ago.. it did not get the best welcome :P

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377328>

<comment><USER3> and is not being updated for past 6months, looks like author abandoned it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Github commit page is updated a month ago.

See the Github development page for more.

[https://github.com/pythononwheels/pow_devel/commits/beta1_au...](https://github.com/pythononwheels/pow_devel/commits/beta1_auth_and_relate)

<comment><USER4> Yes, and I am currently working on a mongoDB backend. So newest devel is in the mongoDB branch. (Last updated Feb 13.2013)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks nice but it's hard to trust a web framework with such a jumbled home page. I know it has absolutely nothing to do with the backend abilities of PoW but if you want people to make websites with your technology you should probably set the example with a really cool website.

Sorry to be negative, I am not putting down the framework.

<comment><USER4> No problem, I just took the standard Bootstrap layout. But right, the red info box is a little heavy weight. But I like to point out that this is not meant to be production ready, yet.

Anyway I am not a Designer. I like my blog template, though ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Name sounds very similar to ColdFusion on Wheels (though as pointed out in referenced previous article, seems to have no connection)

<http://cfwheels.org/>

<comment><USER7> and the binary packaging format

<https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel/>

<comment><USER8> I agree. The name is confusing with the new Python binary packaging format `wheel`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this the same thing as TurboGears 1.x which came out six years ago? I remember it being a framework composed of best-of-breed libraries.

<comment><USER4> Of course the reliable foundation is important.

But my main point was to have a fluent workflow.

That's also why I want to add a mongoDB backend. (as well) I am also thinking of moving the Views completely to javascript (ejs would probably be my choice then).

That would result in a client <\--JSON --> Server <\--- JSON ---> Database szenario. Which looks pretty clean, at least to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems interesting. Has ways to go until production ready, but even so I think there's potential here. I'm not sure I dig the "wheels" branding because long term it can cause people to maybe needlessly view this in comparison to RoR, with this being a pure Python based architecture and not a straight port.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The author has added screencasts, worth watching to get the whole idea.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nOTeDhZ1lc&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nOTeDhZ1lc&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER11> Confusing given the recently approved PEP427, accepting a new binary format for python packages: <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/>

<comment><USER12> IIRC the framework is older than the PEP.</comment></comment>


Happy New Year from Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/happy-new-year-from-y-combinator <comment><USER2> Summary

Advice from YC companies to...

 _> Land a new job_

      HackerRank
      * Hire Art
      * The Muse

_> Learn to code_

      CodeAcademy
      CodeCombat
      HackerSchool

_> Take a trip_

      Vayable
      * Airbnb
      * Hipmunk

_> Be smarter with money_

      ReadyForZero
      FutureAdvisor

_> Make a positive impact in the world_

      Watsi
      Microryza

</comment><comment><USER3> HackerRank looks interesting. I see there are some Functional Programming challenges [0].

[0] - [https://www.hackerrank.com/categories/fp/intro](https://www.hackerrank.com/categories/fp/intro)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, HackerRank is amazing! Can't believe I've just heard of this -- I literally was going to build the same idea (with the same name) at a hackathon. I just wish they had more challenges in Javascript/Ruby.

In general I think the list is really great.

<comment><USER5> Founder here - we are constantly working on adding more. Thanks for the comment :)

<comment><USER3> Would like to see Cmd/Ctrl + Enter to compile/run tests when focused on editor. (or am I missing a similar keyboard combination.

Another problem was that I could not easily click a "Next" button to go the next challenge in a group. I would like to move onto the next functional programming question but I have to go back to the categories screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't forget to self-promote and always toot your own horn. _wink wink_

<comment><USER7> I'm sure many are cringing at how this well-intentioned message was delivered. But we're all willing to turn a blind eye in favor of scouring any positive tidbit from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting - I didn't know about FutureAdvisor, which seems like a great tool.

I have one nit with it -- I just had it analyze my portfolio; I find it odd that FA recommends no changes to an employer sponsored retirement plan due to "significant amount of unrecognized holdings", while it knows what options are available within the plan (ie, it doesn't suggest rebalancing the plan)

<comment><USER9> Co-founder here, thanks for trying out FutureAdvisor. We may not have all the plan option info available within the plan. If you have the email you signed up with, we can take a look the specific plan. Feel free to ping us directly at firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll make sure to investigate immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hadn't heard of Vayable before but will definitely consider some of the tours I've discovered for the month in Brazil at the World Cup now.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great, the last thing I want to see as I sit here burnt out at work are pointers to getting a new job. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Good collection of links.</comment>


Mysterious mutants: 13 masked people should have devastating diseases but don't - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/mysterious-mutants-13-masked-people-should-have-devastating-diseases-but-dont/ <comment><USER2> While interesting the 13 people could have a mosaicism or a mistake could have been made. There is no way to tell as the study was anonymised. So until another study is done which offers traceability back to the 'mutants' we'll never know if there is anything useful here or not.

<comment><USER3> We should use this information to genetically engineer disease resistant people.

I say "we should" because if we don't the <insert technically advanced nation of your choice here> will.

Would it be possible to use this data to modify the DNA of a sperm / egg cell combo? Are we there yet?

<comment><USER4> I read somewhere that some team already was able to create viable embryos with modified genetic materials albeit the embryos were terminated after reaching a certain stage of replication.

<comment><USER5> most recently [http://www.nature.com/news/second-chinese-team-reports- gene-...](http://www.nature.com/news/second-chinese-team-reports-gene-editing- in-human-embryos-1.19718)

added [http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs333](http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs333) for HIV immunity.

the embryos were pre-non-viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the most difficult parts is both the desire (and possibly need) to gather more DNA from a pool as large as possible, with the option for re- contact for further investigation while also keeping that data safe and anonymous to prevent this being an incredible valuable target for both governments and corporations.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think I watched a Bayes Probability vid on Youtube that basically says that 13 out of the 600,000 is most probably false results..

</comment><comment><USER8> SciHub link to research paper: [http://sci- hub.io/http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncu...](http://sci- hub.io/http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3514.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fear not as we'll eventually track down these 13 people once we combine these disparate DNA data sources. They might not have identity information in this particular dataset, but if one finds that same sequence in another dataset that does have that information, it's not too hard to piece these together.

Best part is that we don't even need it to be exact! We can look for their relatives instead and use that to narrow the search: [http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies- are-...](http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking- ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Even if the sequencing process has very high accuracy, the conditional probability these people having the genes but not disorders could be low.

By Bayes Rule:

PR(Gene & no disorder | disorder result) =

Pr(disorder result | gene & no disorder) * Pr(gene & no disorder)

/ Pr(disorder result | gene & no disorder) * Pr(gene & no disorder) + Pr(disorder result | no gene & no disorder) * Pr(no gene & no disorder)

Even if the test is incredibly accurate and so Pr(disorder result) is much higher for people with the gene, this may be outweighed by the relative likelihood of having the disorder given you have the gene (this could plausibily be 1!), making the conditional probability very low.

<comment><USER11> But will the test always give a false positive for some people or is it usually more random?

If it is, then just test the sequences again.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, if you have tests without strong correlations then your approach is a good one. My point is that when your test returns a result which had low prior probability (even if the test is accurate) you should often retain a lot of your scepticism. In this context, it may well be that many of the people identified didn't have the genetic disorders indicated...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 23andme keeps telling me that I am most definitely having lactose intolerance.

But I don't.</comment>


Too Many Business Ideas? - <AUTHOR>

Something is up with my brain... I have too many good business ideas! I currently have a company that has funding and a partner and I'm giving 100% to that, but can't help to think of these new ideas and put them on the back shelf.<p>Does anyone else experience this same thing? If so, what do you do to stay "hyper focused" on your idea at hand? <comment><USER2> I firstly give myself permission to let the new idea fester at the back on my mind for a few days. Some 'billiant' ideas are quite clearly rubbish when you remember them again the next morning.

For the ones that seem feasible, I do a one-page business plan. How would this work, how would it make money, would it be profitable, are there any awesome features I need to write down while I think of them. This gets it out of my head and onto a piece of paper. The paper goes into a folder, and I don't allow myself to think of them again.

From time to time (normally when I get one of them stuck in my head once more, good ideas are like viruses) I review that folder. A quick look now reveals that 3 (of the 7 that are in there) remain good ideas (the others really wouldn't be profitable, though I might try some of them for fun).

Now I must compare those 3 to my current business - which energises me more? Energy is a combination of excitement (where the new ideas have an advantage) and revenue likelihood (Money is energy). I'm in an income phase at the moment (having recently moved my coaching business to the UK), and the income potential of my current business is far greater in the short term than any of those other ideas. So current business wins my energy, and if I really need to validate that in a thinking space I can.

Once I have a coaching income base once more, I will likely repeat that exercise and see if I can take on one of the others. By giving myself permission to have great ideas, and a process to nurture them based on my priorities, I manage to stay more focussed on the business at hand. Certainly, that works better than trying to ignore them (and, simultaneously, remember them for later!) in my brain.

</comment><comment><USER3> I typically write mine down in a notebook. If its a really great idea, it doesn't normally just go away. You'll keep running into situations where it would be useful if the idea was already a reality. If after a week or two you still can't let the idea go, you "may" have a keeper. Get some feedback from friends and fellow techies - figure out which idea has the best chance of success and go with that.

PS - Don't second guess yourself after you've made a decision.

PPS - Don't undervalue the work you've already done on your current project. Execution is harder than ideation.

PPPS - Lay off the coffee.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes im the same way. What ive learned to do is manage and organize the ideas. Some people are serial entrepreneurs. Ive found that i am this way. I have alot of ideas that im passionate about developing. So ive learned how to manage and organize them. Ive also learned to try to find people that are like minded. Which can take some trial and error. The one important thing is to not doubt yourself about this. Be trully passionate about your ideas and about developing them. People will see this and respect it and want to get involved. Also really develop skills around your ideas. Be it a strong business sense or a strong technical sense or a strong understanding of the market youre in. This will give you a stronger leg up and the ability to deal with multiple projects.

If you actually want to chat more about this and talk about your ideas send me an email. Im always looking to network with people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think its great creativity, but its important to train yourself to spend that creativity on one project / business. After all, Facebook didn't get developed by anything other than laser focus on dogged work ethic. If you can't put blinders on to build and grow a company, you will forever be busy yet not achieving much.

</comment><comment><USER6> I assemble teams of hyper focused people and do my best to keep my mouth shut with them when it comes to distracting ideas.</comment>


Broker Seeks $35M from Customers of Wiped-Out Fund Manager - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/broker-seeks-millions-from-customers-of-wiped-out-fund-manager <comment><USER2> No advisor worth their salt should be recommending naked options to individual investors but to utilize naked options on natural gas in _retirement_ accounts is unconscionable.</comment>


Godadddy switches to verisigndns - <AUTHOR>

$ dig godaddy.com +trace
; <<>> DiG 9.7.3-P3 <<>> godaddy.com +trace ;; global options: +cmd .           69548   IN  NS  d.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  e.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  f.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  g.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  h.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  i.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  j.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  k.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  l.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  m.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  a.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  b.root-servers.net. .           69548   IN  NS  c.root-servers.net. ;; Received 509 bytes from 10.7.143.12#53(10.7.143.12) in 92 ms
com.            172800  IN  NS  c.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  i.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  a.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  g.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  b.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  f.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  j.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  l.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  m.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  h.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  e.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  d.gtld-servers.net. com.            172800  IN  NS  k.gtld-servers.net. ;; Received 489 bytes from 126.96.36.199#53(f.root-servers.net) in 130 ms
godaddy.com.        172800  IN  NS  a1.verisigndns.com. godaddy.com.        172800  IN  NS  a2.verisigndns.com. godaddy.com.        172800  IN  NS  a3.verisigndns.com. ;; Received 168 bytes from 18.104.22.168#53(i.gtld-servers.net) in 134 ms
godaddy.com.        600 IN  A   126.96.36.199 godaddy.com.        86400   IN  NS  a2.verisigndns.com. godaddy.com.        86400   IN  NS  a1.verisigndns.com. godaddy.com.        86400   IN  NS  a3.verisigndns.com. ;; Received 108 bytes from 188.8.131.52#53(a1.verisigndns.com) in 50 ms <comment><USER2> Normally, a company wouldn't break their DNS service on their production servers on Monday morning. They've been down all day and _must_ be bleeding customers. This is probably some last-minute stop-gap replacement to get the minimum working again.</comment>


Launch HN: Haiku (YC W18) – Build and Design Cross-Platform UIs and Animations - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! Haiku is a UI-building tool for both designers and developers. You can import vector and bitmap assets, animate them with a visual timeline, make elements respond to events, script behavior (if you like to code), then publish as production-ready UI components. Haiku components are versioned and can be pulled into codebases via Git or npm.
We are a remote, international team of six. We've all spent years in various design/development roles, and we've all run into the same problem: When building software, teams waste too much effort creating designs in design tools, then reimplementing those designs in code.
Here's how we're working to solve that:
1. Create a common tongue for design tools and codebases to communicate. We're starting with a simple JavaScript file format that can capture both how designs look and how components behave, where animation is a first-class citizen. We call this format Haiku Core and we've open sourced it under the MIT license, along with a standards-driven interpreter/renderer for that format on the Web. We'd love to hear from the community about how to improve our format or Web renderer.
2. Create a design tool that speaks that language. Our desktop app, Haiku for Mac [2], brings a familiar visual design/animation experience to designers, while remaining connected to the world of code. Haiku tracks designs with Git and delivers versioned components to developers. Haiku automatically sets up and hosts Git infrastructure and npm registration for your components. (This infrastructure is optional. Your files always sit on your computer, and you own them.)
3. Integrate with the tools that design/development teams already use. If you like to draw, you can keep designing in Sketch and see changes sync on stage. If you like to code, you can edit Haiku source files directly in your favorite text editor. Out of the box, Haiku components are compatible with vanilla web codebases, React, and Vue. Haiku also supports exporting to Airbnb's Lottie format, allowing native animation authoring for iOS, Android, or React Native.
Thanks for reading, HN.  We know this subject is close to many people's hearts here — we'd love to hear what you'd like to see in a UI-building & collaboration tool like Haiku.
[1]: http://github.com/HaikuTeam/core
[2]: https://www.haiku.ai <comment><USER2> As much as everyone loved to hate on Flash, it was brutally effective as a web motion design tool and has yet to be surpassed when visually building interactive experiences.

I've seen designers with almost zero coding skills build incredibly immersive and creative web pieces. There was a whole generation and genre of web content that has vanished and never been replaced - praystation, flight404, Hi-ReS! and so on. Processing is similar in spirit but has only filled part of the niche.

I really hope Haiku revives experimental, interactive motion design on the web. While Flash was inappropriate for delivering marketing text content, I see the genre's value as being a standalone artform.

<comment><USER3> > _As much as everyone loved to hate on Flash, it was brutally effective as a > web motion design tool and has yet to be surpassed when visually building > interactive experiences._

My 2¢: I think you may be romanticizing the ratio of "interactive experiences" to intrusive ads, bad games (but in bulk, to make up for the quality) and (eventually) video.

But if you like the brutally-effective tool, it still exists[1] and has seen regular improvements, but now emits standards-based content that works as well or better than Flash did.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate)

<comment><USER2> _> the ratio of "interactive experiences" to intrusive ads_

What is the ratio of poo HTML websites to awesome ones? Probably worse :) Anyway I don't care about ratio, I care about the best examples - and I really haven't seen _any_ JavaScript showcase websites that really inspire me. Processing is the only experimental stuff that sparks any interest.

(Please, do hit me with awesome JavaScript arty links to change my mind! ... remember hell.com?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recently a side project of mine required custom svg animations based on user actions. I built a nodejs api abstraction so that a client could send a json request which described which svg asset and what type of size/animation/timing/sequence (the api allowed the client to compose animations in a sequence) then the response would be the resulting json lottie asset which would render on the React Native client flawlessly. I also incorporated client-side animations with another css-type animation library so that standard svg's could easily have default animations with little-to-no additional coding. This works on iOS, Android and web with one api and pure json.

However, the process of building the svg animation asset library still required I use Adobe After Affects to design/animate then use the Bodymovin After Affect plugin to export to the lottie-friendly json format. With Haiku I might be able to replace After Effects with Bodymovin and have a cleaner, version-controlled process!

Awesome product idea, I hope to give it a try soon!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It does sound like the project you described would have been a great use-case for Haiku, e.g. how you can author custom/logic-bound SVG animations with Haiku, then pass live data into a Haiku component to update those animations via React/Vue props.

I'd love to see the project you made, if publicly available, as we're always looking for use-cases to drive our development. (You can mail firstname.lastname@example.com)

Oh, and my colleague Taylor wrote some more thoughts about "Lottie without After Effects" from a designer's perspective, if you're interested: [https://medium.com/haiku-blog/lottie-without-after- effects-9...](https://medium.com/haiku-blog/lottie-without-after- effects-9c5a8e74c239)

<comment><USER4> Hi Zack, thanks for the article I'll check it out. Unfortunately I haven't made that project public yet but I'll try to reach out to you once I have!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the tool is for building and designing cross-platform UIs, is the plan to also have the design tool be cross-platform?

The tool seems nice and would be lovely to have on linux. There is not a lot of tools that support my choice of platform, but if the aim is explicitly to support a lot of platforms, having support for the three major OSes would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we're planning to support Windows, Linux, plus an in-browser editor. Starting with Mac just helped us ship sooner.

We agree with you that for cross-platform dev, multi-OS authoring support is important. Windows support is expected mid-2018; I hesitate to put a date on Linux yet since we haven't deeply scoped it out, e.g. which distros we can easily support.

<comment><USER6> In browser editing would be awesome. Sketch was awesome, but Figma changed the way I work. I work both in Windows and Mac, and it is unbelievable how far browser based tools have come I have Haiku at home on Mac (beta tester) and now on Windows at work.... Browser support would be perfect for continuing where I left off regardless of the machine I am on.

<comment><USER7> What is it about Figma that changed the way you work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is nuts! I've been working on something very similar to this for about a year now. You have no idea how happy I am to have a little competition, hopefully it'll push me to finish :). I'm going to have to look at your core library and compare differences between our implementations. Really excited to play with it as well but I don't have a mac machine near me right now. It looks fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER9> Not to be confused with the Haiku OS project:

[https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Haiku is super cool.

There are so many great tools out there that bring together development and design tasks... it's about time someone went after the mantle of interactive UI building from Adobe — years after the demise of Flash!

</comment><comment><USER11> Great idea! Concerning the Terms of Service:

      Intellectual Property

      Haiku claims no intellectual property rights over the
      material you provide to the Service. You acknowledge that
      Haiku owns all right, title and interest in and to the
      Service, including without limitation all intellectual
      property rights, and such rights are protected by U.S. and
      international intellectual property laws. You agree that you
      will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, or create
      derivative works from the Service.

So let's say I try out Haiku under these terms, and go on and program my own solution that intersects with what Haiku does, and uses some ideas I picked up from Haiku (together with my own). Would this be a violation of the Terms?

</comment><comment><USER12> Since you seem to have a Mac app that can render your Haiku format, are you considering open sourcing the renderer just like the 'Haiku Core' renderer? I ask because animation abstractions for macOS are severely lacking. Even Lottie isn't supported.

<comment><USER13> Haiku Core is what our Mac app uses to render the stage. (Our app is built in Electron.) Here's the GitHub link if you're interested: [https://github.com/HaikuTeam/core](https://github.com/HaikuTeam/core)

<comment><USER14> What is there to "scope out" about platform support, then?

<comment><USER13> Fair point! Short answer: Even though our UI is totally platform-agnostic, we have a lot going on under the hood with platform-specific considerations. Examples include our Sketch integration (which, like Sketch, will have to be Mac-exclusive), ensuring our CLI works with the various ways our users can install Node/npm/yarn and Git, and supporting various firewall/antivirus configs in conjunction with our live design features. Like we said, multi- platform support is coming soon — focusing on Mac just helped us ship sooner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats on the launch! Nice/clear demo.

2 questions 1) what's your take on [https://coherent- labs.com/hummingbird/](https://coherent-labs.com/hummingbird/) 2) are you hiring

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

1\. Hummingbird looks like it's tackling a similar problem with a similar approach, though it seems focused on games (where this problem & solution are pretty well cornered by Unity.) We're currently focused on non-game web & mobile apps.

2\. We're always on the lookout. Are you interested in chatting? Please email email@example.com with a quick bit about yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is your homepage built using Haiku?

<comment><AUTHOR> Parts of it are, yeah. The hero animation and each of the animated explainers are built in Haiku. So are each of the examples in the Gallery.

Haiku is meant to be "component-first," so you can add it to existing codebases without committing your entire tech stack. Our React+Gatsby website is an example of that.

We're _almost_ ready to ship support for multi-component composition inside Haiku, which will enable features like reusable form controls, layouts, and more (see [https://www.haiku.ai/features/](https://www.haiku.ai/features/) for more 'coming-soons') — in the meantime, think of Haiku as a discrete-component & animation builder.

<comment><USER16> Very cool, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not sure if anyone recalls Famo.us which used to focus on web animation and make it programmable although they don't have the client app like Haiku. However, their claim was that they "cracked" the web animation performance. Well it didn't work for them (basic performance test would tell otherwise - duh!). Why is Haiku able to achieve such awesome performance on the web like this for animation? I also saw Greensock and they did a very good job as well. I am curious on what's the secret sauce here and whether there is any performance comparison (sorry for loaded questions there).

<comment><USER8> I'm not with Haiku but I'm working on something similar, so I'll chip in with my 2 cents here.

To get good performance out of interactive web animations, you need the code that handles input to be in a really tight loop with the value that's eventually painted to the screen. The CSS Animations API really destroyed interactive design on the web for a long time. The reason is that they were fully declarative and had very few hooks for interacting with JS code, it's difficult or sometimes impossible to do things like chain/interrupt/restart them. Developers could work around that with hacks like using the style property on a div to override the animation classes when being interacted with, and then relying on the animations defined in classes for everything else. I've tried to write code like this, it's brittle across platforms and very hard to maintain. In addition, the global flat document structure of HTML makes it very hard to ensure that other code doesn't interfere with yours. My point is, you can't write a good animations editor for the old web because it just wasn't possible to do them well enough using the old API's.

Newer API's (CSS Variables, Web Animations, CSS Flex Box) and better component abstractions (React / Web Components) make it a lot easier to do something like Haiku. My tool just takes an intermediate JSON structure and generates React or Web components. The animations for React are handled by React Natives Animated library, and the Web Animations API for Web Components. Flexbox + CSS Transforms are leaned on for keeping the structure or the generated components consistent. Generating performant animations on the web really isn't that hard anymore.

The really hard part is defining a common set of API boundaries to make the generated components reusable and composable. Doing this is complicated because of the lack of proper module loader in JS, its dynamic types don't help either.

From the video it looks like Haiku is using a library from AirBnB called Lottie to handle the animations. Then they turn around and wrap that in a React component + others forthcoming. I wish I'd known about Lottie before starting my project, it probably would have saved time. I'm not sure that Haiku can pull of component re-usability with Lottie though, depending on how much of a black box it is, good luck to them on that front.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first half of this is spot on (the flaws of declarative CSS for interactions) — your last paragraph has some mistakes about Haiku, though.

> From the video it looks like Haiku is using a library from AirBnB called > Lottie to handle the animations. Then they turn around and wrap that in a > React component + others forthcoming.

For the Web, Haiku Core is our renderer. We don't use lottie-web; we use Lottie only to export Haiku Core for rendering on iOS and Android.

Haiku Core uses "the fastest parts" of SVG + CSS + JavaScript to render its animations. Nothing magical here, it's just using web standards, though it was important for us to build around SVG+DOM instead of canvas so that you can still use the Web for what it's best at: rendering documents.

Haiku Core is a component format explicitly defined for reusability — and hackability. Haiku components for the Web aren't 'generated' or 'exported'; the design source file is the code source file. And due to the way that Haiku handles state (strictly internally) and data flow (strictly message-passing,) they work in any codebase, as polite and predictable guests.

EDIT: P.S. tuchsen, I'd love to chat with you some more. Can you email me firstname.lastname@example.com ?

<comment><USER8> Hey sorry for misrepresenting your architecture, I did start with the caveat that I'm not with you guys though :). I shot you a couple of emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The auto-fullscreen and no-controls on the video demo are suboptimal (seems unlikely you're going to get people sitting through an 8 minute play through, especially when the duration bar is missing)

Cool software though.

<comment><USER19> That's a good point about the unknown duration. Just redeployed the site with video controls added. Thanks for the note.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It looks like "Flash for the web". There's been a number of those over the years. How is Haiku different?

Looking at the Github page, it seems to me that the answer would be that Haiku-created animation assets are stored in JavaScript objects so that it's easy to edit and store them as part of code. Is that the right impression?

How much does the Haiku Core player weigh on a webpage? Just curious to know. (I like following this space and it's always great to see new entrants!)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Haiku-created animation assets are stored in JavaScript objects so that it's > easy to edit and store them as part of code

Yes, that's the "core" of it! "Design-as-code" is how we've described this foundation, and it lets Haiku play nicely with dev tools like git & package managers (yarn/npm today, Gradle + CocoaPods planned for the future.) You couldn't hack on a Flash .swf or .fla file with your code editor, but Haiku was designed for hacking.

And unlike Flash or most of its successors, Haiku's renderer is open-source and standards-based. "Closedness" was the death stroke for both Flash and Silverlight, and open source is table stakes for modern-day development.

Re: footprint, Haiku Core currently weighs in at 51kb gzipped. A little heavier than React, for reference. That said, we've barely begun to optimize footprint. Much of the current file size comes from enumerated svg/css style properties as strings, which we're working to refactor to tighter wire format for runtime (similarly to what Lottie and FB Keyframes do.) Rough estimate: we should be able to cut that footprint in half or better.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the reply. It looks cool, good luck!

I've actually made a couple of apps in this space over the years. Radi [1] was an HTML5 canvas+video animation app with a Flash-style timeline released back in 2010, though long since defunct. Neonto Studio [2] is a design environment for native mobile apps. React Studio [3] is an offshoot from the Neonto Studio product for making web apps, it's free.

My experience is that designers are not a great target market for this kind of product because their influence and competence is fundamentally limited. They just don't have the sway within a team or organization to push developers to make use of anything that looks like code coming from the design side. To make the sales pitch even more complicated, most designers are pretty happy with this state of affairs – they already have plenty of work and don't really want the extra responsibility and learning curve involved in making anything production-ready.

There's a reason why Sketch is so popular among designers: it's because it does so little. It doesn't try to model anything or actually represent anything about what makes user interfaces tick, it's just a pared-down Illustrator.

You seem to be working up from animations towards UI components in general. I hope that approach works out for you.

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20120509083927/http://radiapp.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120509083927/http://radiapp.com/) [2] [http://neonto.com/nativestudio](http://neonto.com/nativestudio) [3] [https://reactstudio.com](https://reactstudio.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh yes. I have been thinking about this concept for a while.

Though I have to admit that the name strongly reminds me of the Haiku Operating System I very much want this project to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER21> There always seems to be a misunderstanding that design tools are for production rather than design. They aren't: even if you used code to explore your design, it is highly likely that most of that code (written quickly and written to be thrown away) would be unsuitable for production purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've observed that every software project and every team is different. Sometimes projects go through a quick-and-dirty prototyping phase; sometimes they don't. In almost all cases, design continues to evolve even after the initial code is written.

Through the thousands of users who went through our private beta last year and the feedback they've shared, we understand that many modern "product teams" need a better solution for collaboration between design and development — because in these teams, design is a living breathing part of the product. Waterfall style "design hand-off"s are a huge pain point.

As a bit of empirical proof for this kind of workflow: consider Unity. Unity uses a workflow very much like Haiku's to connect design and development, through common data formats and pipelines of interoperating tools. Unity works great for building incredibly complex UIs and software—or to repurpose your words, Unity is suitable for production purposes.

We believe that if somebody gets this right for apps outside of games — on a more open platform than Unity — that we'll start seeing big steps forward in creativity and team efficiency.

<comment><USER21> There are huge differences between production artists and designers. Also, the design that gets made in sketch often turns into living specification and documentation that are necessarily not one-to-one with production artifacts.

Many have tried this before (anyone remember XAML/Blend?) but it always falls down for the same reason that they don't really capture what designers really do (despite of what their managers and developer colleagues think they do!), which has nothing much to do with helping developers write code. Tools like these are more apt for UI developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since we're both associated with Y Combinator, perhaps we can agree on the directive to "make something people want"?

We can probably also agree than a data-driven approach is more powerful than individual opinions, even from smart folks. It sounds like we could intellectually debate how connected design and code should be for days—I'm certainly passionate about this subject, and I sense you are too.

So here's some data. From the >10k users who went through our private beta, over 10% responded to our requests for feedback. A representative sample:

      > I want a better solution for collaboration between designers and developers. Our developers don't want to code for the motion.

      > The main friction we experience is getting the concepts onto a functioning unit ASAP so we can iterate very quickly and throw away bad ideas before it's expensive to do so

      > I want a tool that is similar to Flash, but does not need a plugin and runs natively in the browser.

      > Dynamic, code-ready animation is extremely intriguing to the team – it's absolutely a pain point in our current process.

      > I'd love a tool that's easy to use so that the designers can be more involved - even take the lead - on getting the animations we use on sites exactly how they want them.

      > Working as an interaction designer in IT everyday makes me think how I can better translate my designs to the engineers, even more so I get steadily closer involved with the front-end side of things.

      > My partner and I want a better solution for collaboration between designers and developers. I am a developer, he is a designer. We are a two man team and efficiency is our top priority.

(and on... and on.)

We're confident that we're building something people want. Not everyone! Sounds like not you. But plenty of folks. So we're chasing our passion, and chasing the opportunity, while listening to our users and doing our best to continue learning from both past and present.

<comment><USER21> I got it, but I'm not sure how you will succeed where countless many likewise projects with similar goals have failed. I really do wish you luck here, hopefully you have some secret sauce to succeed where others have failed.

Sketch is great as a design tool because it doesn't try to be a production tool (unlike say Illustrator which is more of a production tool than a design one). That difference is super important, as you don't want to limit design iteration with production requirements, nor do you want unpolished design assets making it into production (same with code actually).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who's your most dangerous competitor and what's your uvp?

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks cool! I wish I could play around with it more, but I already used up my 30-day Sketch trial.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, sorry to hear that! Our reliance on Sketch is not slated for the long-term — we'd like to integrate with Illustrator and Photoshop, and Figma just opened their APIs to us to investigate an integration with them, too.

We planning to build our own drawing tools in time — probably more Flash- style, e.g. with vector-fill paintbrushes and paint-buckets: lower barrier to entry, easier to be silly + creative, and they'd be more complementary rather than competitive with the precision-drawing tools of Illustrator/Figma/Sketch and co.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> one kind hearted criticism, the video on the landing page goes fullscreen when i click play which is really annoying.

<comment><USER19> I've changed it to make full-screening a second explicit step. Thanks for the feedback. :)

<comment><USER24> Thanks!, I've been hoping for a tool like this for a while now. Downloaded it and giving it a go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why that country TLD?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because "ài" means "love" in Mandarin — ài drives our work. Also, .com and most other recognizable TLDs were taken.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Colors.lol – Overly descriptive color palettes - <AUTHOR> https://colors.lol/ <comment><USER3> I can't find the source now, but does anyone remember the collection of color names based on real things? It felt meaningful to remember the spectrum of colors that way (instead of arbitrary qualifiers), but now I can't find it.

<comment><USER4> By any Chance: Werner's Nomenclature of Colours ?

<comment><USER3> Finally found my notes on it, and threw this quick page on it since the original website doesn't seem to work:

[https://observablehq.com/@shaunlebron/meaningful-color- names](https://observablehq.com/@shaunlebron/meaningful-color-names)

I had not heard of Werner's, but I like the idea of colors based on animal, floral, and mineral, thanks for the reference!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! You might consider using colors from Janelle's famous color names experiment[0].

[0] [https://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs2LxVDcI](https://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs2LxVDcI) \-- part 2!

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using this resource: [http://chir.ag/projects/name-that- color/](http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/) in naming CSS colour variables for years. It can often help with that gray-700/800/900 or gray- light/lighter/lightest issue where another colour needs to be added to the palette between existing values.

</comment><comment><USER7> This great. I can't wait to see if I can sneak some of these names into my next project.

In the past I've used zeke's color-namer[0] package to nail down color names. But, anything that stops names like $color-bluish-white is a win.

[0][https://github.com/colorjs/color-namer](https://github.com/colorjs/color- namer)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not palettes, but for the authoritative "name" of a given color, I turn to the results of xkcd's color survey: [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color- survey-results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/) and the list at [https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/](https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/)

<comment><USER9> This is big business.

Naming colours is a huge money spinning scheme.

Pantone has been given a monopoly because... Because no reason!

Forget open source as in beer software for the moment and let's write truly international canonical colour name reference.

I will get this going personally next month with anyone willing. I can support expenses and organise support and removal of all chores. I can ship the necessary tooling to participate. The project must he nonprofit by nature but I am fully equipped with the legal resources to trade donated time for real sweat equity first in line for being proportionally paid without affecting the nonprofit organ.

I love the idea of what you could achieve with the royalty income - <USER2> happens when the ODSS graphics programme worlf gets a no strings income and can be hiring and tooling the enterprise wetware necessary for the first rate conditions that only the big companies enjoy. Non profit charity organisations don't deprive their own people much anything. Sure enough for real is a helluva long shot but anyone? Shoot the breeze and scheme at least possible to collaborate via true accurate color rendition with a little bit of setting up I'm comfortable with. This is exactly the sort of thing that m6 late confounding partner wished our enterprise would be doing if our exit fell thru and his passing sure did (unnecessarily the route wasn't seen by a phalanx of attorneys highly motivated by closing fees. Ancient history now but I am speaking with genuinely passionate excitement at the fundamental principles and practice of the kind of business that is a strategic economic accelerator. I've decades of experience in media to lecture on why this is so crucial for business especially in the smaller business strata.

<comment><USER10> I think there's a perfectly good reason for their nigh-monopoly: Pantone has been clawing their way to the top of the space of talking about color for a little under sixty years now, with a constantly-updated set of references that they managed to get into every commercial artist's toolkit for a big part of that span of time.

That said a quick check suggests that the average corporate lifespan is anywhere from 20-60 years, depending on the list, so they may be ripe for disruption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great stuff. I make video games and its some times hard to find what colors would go good with others. This is a nice collection I think.

Also, it looks like it would be great for deciding colors for a pitch deck/presentation. Good stuff.

<comment><USER12> Another good palette-hunting tool is Adobe Kuler.

It's interactive so you can lock down parameters you like and continue searching the possibility space

<comment><USER9> Apps like Kuler are IP territorial land grabs.

I'm so disappointed with the level of understanding of colof (and other widely used and tremendously important knowledge) that if anyone has a London home for opening a reference library I'd start by filling out a wall with the books. I long plotted opening a wework like office and furnishing the place with everything I need to return to business or try build anew bug can't afford to do simultaneously with buying the lease. You need professional lighting and environment for reading this kind of subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the color names, but am a bit disappointed there are multiple names for the same color, e.g. #000000 is 'divorced black' in one palette, and 'contributable black' in another.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think you can see what colorblind people see with glasses, maybe I don't know if we all see the same colors or we take it for obvious because we all set it, what a fear, enter here to see how I see [https://reason.com/2020/02/26/trump-campaign-files-libel- law...](https://reason.com/2020/02/26/trump-campaign-files-libel-lawsuit- against-the-new-york-times/#comment-8146096)

</comment><comment><USER15> Some of these palettes aren't accessible to the colorblind. For example, "gorgeous light lavender" and "endothermic neon blue" are identical to me.

<comment><USER16> Is there some piece of software that can change my screen to show me what a colorblind person would see? I know red/green is a no no for like 5% of people, but us there some way to do this systematically?

<comment><USER17> yes! in chrome dev tools [https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101](https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101)

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, this uses a horribly inaccurate algorithm that's been floating around the internet for more than a decade [1]. It seems that the Firefox dev tools do the same thing [2]. As far as I'm concerned, this is worse than not having such a simulation at all, since it gives people a false sense of accommodating individuals with color vision deficiencies.

The Colorspacious Python library [3] does a proper job, using the algorithm of Machado et al. (2009) [4], which is what's considered state-of-the-art.

[1] [https://github.com/MaPePeR/jsColorblindSimulator#the- colorma...](https://github.com/MaPePeR/jsColorblindSimulator#the-colormatrix- algorithm) [2] [https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/annotate/tip/devtools...](https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/annotate/tip/devtools/server/actors/accessibility/constants.js) [3] [https://colorspacious.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html...](https://colorspacious.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#simulating- colorblindness) [4] [https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.113](https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.113)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for taking the time to write this. I shared it with the team.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for passing this along. I also commented on the relevant Chromium issue [1] (as well as the relevant Firefox issue [2]). It should be a simple fix, since the transformation matrices just need to be updated.

Edit: I should have looked at the Chromium issue again today. It's already been fixed!

[1] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100370...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1003700) [2] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564993](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564993)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lol, but I was a bit disappointed to find only the individual colours named. I was expecting to see overly pretentious names for the palettes themselves.

<comment><USER9> uninviting greyish green #82A67D cultrate bright light green #2DFE54 muttering dusty purple #825F87

#00000 fade to black on poetic combination descriptor

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> if the author(s) are reading this, the names seem to have gotten switched around on this one:

[https://colors.lol/outward-](https://colors.lol/outward-)

      outward-bound slate grey      #F19E8E
      unstatesmanlike reddish grey  #98756F
      cross-sectional blush         #58656D

the first and last names are swapped.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice catch (broken link though :) )

<comment><USER21> oh huh! not sure how that happened. here:

[https://colors.lol/outward-bound](https://colors.lol/outward-bound)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't know that lol was a tld but i did lol

</comment><comment><USER23> Hilarious! A good friend is a color designer (selects palettes for major product lines) and she will love this.

<comment><USER9> It's called being Trade Dress artist of manager, or at least before the uncalibrated www came along, there was great need for the role and I will attest the importance of making it a separate job function with direct bottom line affect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It feels so satisfying to be able to finally name these colors.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it different from [https://www.colourlovers.com/](https://www.colourlovers.com/) ?

</comment><comment><USER26> Even aside from the color names, these color combinations are fantastic! Are they auto-generated?

</comment><comment><USER27> "Lousy Watermelon"

Thanks for this laugh! :D

</comment><comment><USER28> This is awesome. Bookmarked. Thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I took two of your colors, lol. :D hehe Thanks a lot!

</comment><comment><USER30> This is super awesome. Thank you for making this!

</comment><comment><USER31> great resource with a sense of humor. loving the "contributable black"

</comment><comment><USER32> Those look like awesome purses

</comment><comment><USER33> Love the clean UX. Obligatory reminder/request to add wide-color support for colors-focused apps/services (where it makes sense):

[https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the- web/](https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing that link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> annihilating duck egg blue (#C3FBF4) is a personal favorite.

<comment><USER35> Fantastic! Love the onlyworkswithjavascript pure white (#FFFFFF)</comment></comment>


A Simple Error Resulted in a mistaken order of 28,000 Tons of Coal - <AUTHOR> https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery <comment><USER2> It's a good story, and I'm sure similar mistakes happen, but this particular event is a work of fiction.</comment>


Here's the Next Phase of Moon Travel, Backed by Buzz Aldrin - T-A http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/07/20/buzz-aldrin-nasa-funded-study-propose-moon-colony

<comment><AUTHOR> It can't be done. Congress could never get their act together.

Then, when some other country or group of countries does it, the President at that time will be blamed by his opposite party in Congress.

And then we'll invade a Middle Eastern country.</comment>


Instagram Brings in More Than a Quarter of Facebook Sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-04/instagram-generates-more-than-a-quarter-of-facebook-s-sales <comment><USER2> They show my wife and I ads for things we want to buy. Things we are already thinking about and things we didn't even know that we wanted.

I can think of a handful of ads for things I've purchased from other web sources over the last ten year. In the past 6 months I bet I've purchased 25 things from Instagram ads. Including a new E-bike I didn't know I wanted.

The fact that the entire screen is dedicated to the advertisement and the state that you are in while surfing it makes it the perfect advertising platform. It's like they can insert full screen shots into your dreams.</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a locally focused personal auction based website? - <AUTHOR>

Like eBay but for specific cities/regions. I'm sure there are various sites like this out there, but it doesn't seem there is anything with any uptake. <comment><USER2> Within my small social exposure, I've seen a shift from craigslist to local "swap shop" groups on Facebook. The lack of anonymity (lowers likelihood of creeps) plus locality improves two aspects of the CL experience.

The margin of this comment is too small (and I'm too tired) for the proof of how to monetize that, so I'll leave the exercise to the readers. It may simply be an efficiency and disruption inadvertently enabled by the Facebook platform...

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably because craigslist approximates this but gives more power to the sellers to choose customers, which is probably perceived as essential when meeting with people in real life.</comment>


Ask HN: Simple client websites – What do you use? - <AUTHOR> For a client, let's say a lawn care company who needs a few pages, maybe a portfolio and email quoting service? I notice a lot of people use Wordpress, but I'm not too familiar with it and it seems like there's a ton for a client to look at (menus/etc..) when they want to go in and change stuff.
I'm a frontend dev (Ruby/Rails + JS [React]), and don't want use a wordpress/php plugins. I also hate their templating system.
How about single page websites? Do you spin up a wordpress just for that?
Also hosting. One VPS for all? Do I host one and charge them or just sign them up for their own hosts with their credit cards?
I have been doing client websites as a side for a while now and I just can't seem to find something that works for ME. <comment><USER2> 1) WordPress isn't the greatest, and I think you are right in that there is a lot of bloat for some simple sites. It would be nice if there was a "WordPress Lite" or something similar.

In the meantime, I favor WP for small clients for a couple reasons. It is fairly easy to teach them to use and you can lock it down somewhat with user roles. This can help prevent accidental alterations to the layout.

Because WP is fairly common, if for some reason the client moves on from me, the next developer is not handed some custom code they have to figure out.

However, if it is only a 1-2 page site I typically just do a static HTML or simple PHP site depending on needs.

2\. For VPS, it is so cheap now, I just give them each a VPS. I just bill out the hosting costs to them each month with a couple extra $$ for "management costs".

<comment><USER3> My strategy would be $30 USD for hosting/maintenance (which would be a mask for a 5 dollar digital ocean box that multiple clients will use).

<comment><USER2> I was similar, although I charged $50 month for hosting/maintenance and gave each client their own droplet/VPS. I would typically go with the $10 or $20 droplet depending on the client, but the monthly fee was the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can highly recommend grav: [https://getgrav.org/](https://getgrav.org/) It uses Twig for templates, stores all data in files (Markdown) and the Admin panel is easy to extend with custom fields without writing code. Additionally there's an OK form builder, which can be used to build basic forms and perform basic operations (e.g. store data in files, send e-mails, etc.) but for anything more complex you would need to write a plugin.

I've written a few plugins for it, one specifically for creating albums and galleries for portfolios and I think that it's easy and a straightforward process.

<comment><USER5> This looks like the perfect CMS for my next project. Any chance of you sharing albums and galleries plugin?

<comment><USER6> You may also want to check out [https://octobercms.com](https://octobercms.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use wordpress, but I'm not happy.

I really wonder why there is nothing that really streamlines things for the enduser.

What I want (some of which can be botched in to wp with plugins):

\- pretty forms without much php (ACM does the job for wordpress here, but with some PHP)

\- lego blocks of form fields, repeatable

\- a nice rich text editor

\- hide every button that is not necessary

\- display instructions next to the editor

A few CMS I tried:

\- wordpress: bloated and you still feel the blog inside, no lego blocks, a few strange quirks (try explaining how to make an empty line in the editor, haha)

\- Concrete5: (is this still a thing?) the nicest, true inline WYSIWYG editor, but too small (few plugins, back in the day a bit buggy)

\- modX: (is this still a thing?) too basic, you don't want to reinvent the wheel

\- markdown based flat file CMS': Markdown is just not sufficient, so these have to make a non-markdown header in the files, often just maintainable through a editor interface. Here i tried: yellow CMS and Grav.

\- - Grav: quite nice except the mentioned quirks. Really nice image handling, currently not client-friendly but a (payed) admin interface is in the making and might close this gap. Feels a but young here and there (e.g. can push via git, but than need to clear the cache manually in the admin interface)

\- - yellow: poorly documented, breaking updates, small

<comment><USER8> What's your opinion of BlogSpot?

<comment><AUTHOR> The templating engine on BlogSpot is not fun at all.

<comment><USER8> How so? (I quite like it. I am looking for insights.)

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> WordPress, because simple websites tend to not stay simple.

Yes, WordPress is bloated and quirky in some ways but it gets the job done, works with every hosting service under the sun and you get plugins for any use case you can imagine.

For my own websites that I know will definitely stay simple I use plain HTML templates and GitHub Pages.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you use Rails create your own micro cms or just do a simple html website with rails added in as needed.

I'm a fullstack developer Rails and Laravel and I develop WordPress Sites and Plugins. My main focus is web applications now but I have some legacy clients with basic websites.

WordPress is painful to deal with, most clients don't end up making their own changes with it anyway, it's bloated, has security issues, is slower loading than a Rails/Laravel site.

For you I'd recommend creating the sites in Html/CSS/Rails.

Try to sell your clients on a subscription that includes design, development, hosting and up to once monthly updates of existing content. Have packages that cover up to 5, 10, 15 pages, then as they add pages you can increase their subscription price. This has worked well for me for most clients. I'm sure you could get a high maintenance one here or there that could bombard you with requests for changes. But you can always increase their plan price occasionally if they are becoming a high demand client.

As far as hosting, a $5 digital ocean droplet would be enough for most small business brochure sites, then each one is one their own VPS. You could stack them on one VPS but I like having them on their own.

I use laravel forge to spin up the droplets and deploy repos, it also has build in support for lets encrypt so you can add SSL at no cost.

Good luck getting a system setup that works for you.

<comment><USER11> How do you justify to the client charging per page? What about page complexity? Like an about me page vs an interactive map.

<comment><USER10> This is mainly for brochure style websites so a page is a typical page, content and images. The per page charge is generally for the ongoing maint. so as the site grows the monthly fee for hosting/updates grows.

For speciality pages or something really complex those are quoted as a one time fee to create them. If they don't take a lot of time I might just create them under the subscription model as well. The clients understand that the per page pricing is for a typical webpage, custom pages, functionality and forms are quoted as they are requested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are many sites that showcase their simplicity with free software:

      https://www.palletsprojects.com/ (python / lektor)
        - source: https://github.com/pallets/website

      http://flask.pocoo.org/ (python / flask)
        - source: https://github.com/pallets/flask-website/

      https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/ (appengine / jekyll)
        - source: https://github.com/google/

Have you tried writing a progressive web app using Polymer?

</comment><comment><USER13> I really admire that you're challenging basic assumptions here; that every little site needs a full cms instance, or vps. That's a lot of infrastructure for something that should be pretty basic. I also questioned those assumptions and came up static file hosting service with a CORS api backed by sql. I promote it here pretty regularly. [https://www.lite- engine.com](https://www.lite-engine.com)

I'd really love to work with someone like yourself to iron out what you're needs are! Drop an email to support at the link above if you'd like to chat more.

</comment><comment><USER14> I personally just use either Drupal, for complex websites because it's very customisable and flexible, or just write something in PHP with my own framework base.

For hosting, for smaller static-ish sites I register a shared hosting account and give the client login, for bigger websites a VPS just for the site, that I charge separately to update, and all ports except 80, 443, 21 and 22 are closed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Have a look at [https://craftcms.com](https://craftcms.com) I have used it a couple of time. What I really like about it is you have complete control of what gets to edit/add. And interface for the client is as simple or complex as needed.

</comment><comment><USER16> I know a few people who have used this for client's: [https://github.com/comfy/comfortable-mexican- sofa](https://github.com/comfy/comfortable-mexican-sofa)

Perhaps you could create your own boilerplate project based on your experiences spinning up these for clients.

Bonus points for open sourcing it!

</comment><comment><USER17> Wordpress with some tweaks is fine. Also, joomla. Hidden unwanted menus, use a barebone theme, create some settings or custom posts types... That's it. Well, better than write it by my own. I Already made it, and after I changed to Wordpress, my simple small CMS sites were being developed 5x faster.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just an FYI: I just found this ([http://www.phpthewrongway.com/](http://www.phpthewrongway.com/)) article floating around, really helpful in sort of realizing, everyone could be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious what people would think of Squarespace for this? Personally I have no opinion/experience, but if a friend asked for my help that would be the first thing to come to mind.

<comment><USER19> Yeah for shopping portals, definitely a premade solution is a nice way to go. Easy and if you give the credentials to the client they can do it themselves... depends on how invested one is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bootstrap

<comment><USER7> no CMS, a fight if you want pixel perfect design</comment></comment>


Comparing PNG compression ratios (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gibson.sh/2015/07/18/comparing-png-compression-ratios-of-stb_image_write-lodepng-miniz-and-libpng/ <comment><USER2> If you really don't care about speed, use Zopfli as a replacement for zlib.

</comment><comment><USER3> Remind me of this ... from 2003!

[http://jcbeck.com/features/compression/](http://jcbeck.com/features/compression/)</comment>


Hacking my arm prosthesis to plug into a synth: thought-controlled music [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSKBtEBRWi4 <comment><USER3> Honestly one of the coolest things I've seen on HN. It's a great display of a ton of things that have just recently (10-20 years) become accessible to the masses. 3D printing for the enclosure, the internet for the schematics, and advanced prosthetics to translate the muscle signal into voltage combined with tried and true technologies like relatively simple circuit design and modular synths. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER4> The thing that's really struck me (which is potentially saying a lot - <USER2> nothing - because I'm still young) is how cheap PCB Fabrication (and Assembly!) at a hobbyist level has gotten recently e.g. An 8-layer ENIG, double silkscreen, a few gold fingers for $40 to $50 _shipped_ is pretty damn cheap

Think of all the projects to never get round to making!

<comment><USER5> I don't think making PCB was ever expensive, perhaps making a professionally looking one.

In old times you had a piece of plastic with a copper layer. You put wax on it, then you could use a needle to remove wax in right places (you basically print the inverse of the circuit)

Place that PCB in acid, and after the copper gets dissolved you clean it up, and have printed PCB.

There are many techniques people have, and modern ones involves printers, but you kind of always could do one at low cost. It might just not look that nice.

<comment> kube-system Doing a complex 8 layer board would have been traditionally expensive... or nonexistent, depending on how long ago we're talking. DIY accessible stuff is usually single layer or dual layer through-hole stuff.

<comment><USER5> my bad, now after reading your comment I noticed the 8 layer. Yeah I meant only simple PCB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is incredible. I think the next step from here - technology wise I mean - is figuring out how devices can tap into this without needing to lose a limb. Implants that can read the signals from a limb to control something else could be the bridge in between what we have now, and brain-computer interfaces.

You know those devices that severely disabled people like the late Stephen Hawking used to interact with his computer? They require only a very small amount of muscle movement to control a switch etc. What if an implant could be put directly into a muscle or a group of muscles (or a a nerve ending somewhere more suitable) so that a tiny movement could trigger some action? It would essentially give humans a set of re-programmable multi-function buttons. Connect it to your phone over bluetooth, and you can setup an action to be triggered by it. How would you filter out regular/involuntary input vs. intentional input? Not sure! But this avenue of development is exciting.

<comment><USER7> Already exists: [https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human- os/biomedical/bionics/mi...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human- os/biomedical/bionics/mindcontrolled-robotic-third-arm-gives-new-meaning-to- multitasking)

<comment><USER8> Another cool device, which is not an arm and is for input rather than control, is one that lets people see through their tongues.[1]

It's currently targeted at the blind, but I'd imagine seeing people could use it just as well if it picked up, say, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, radio waves, ionizing radiation or virtually anything else normally undetectable to human senses.

The potential of human sensory enhancement is truly staggering.

[1] - [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/seeing-with- yo...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/seeing-with-your-tongue)

<comment><USER9> If it was cheap and easy enough, I'd seriously try it as a sighted person, to read while resting my eyes, which routinely get strained by the end of the day. Possibly decoupled from the camera and getting the signal from an adapter which itself gets text.

[https://www.wicab.com/brainport-vision-pro](https://www.wicab.com/brainport- vision-pro)

"Ready to buy or try a BrainPort Vision Pro? Fill out the patient survey here to determine if you are a good candidate. A Certified Trainer will contact you to discuss the next steps!"

Oh, never mind... I got from the quoted text that it would probably be prohibitively expensive, and that if I tried to find out more I'd probably divert professionals from helping actual blind people in need of this tech .

<comment><USER8> It costs $10,000.

I wonder how hard it'd be to engineer something similar for a lot less money, though.

It just looks like a tiny camera mounted in regular sunglasses and connected to a computer which then translates the pixels from the camera to electric impulses on a grid of electrodes on a "lollipop" paddle that goes in to the mouth.

The camera, computer, and software translating the signals seems like the easy part. The only tricky part would be the electrodes, as those would have to be spaced pretty closely and create enough of a signal to be felt while not interfering with each other and at the same time being safe to put in to the mouth and not be affected by the saliva in the mouth, not taste bad, resist being accidentally bitten on, and probably some other engineering challenges I can't think of right now off the top of my head.

It's definitely an interesting challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's great that the representatives from the company sent him the relevant parts of the schematic to help him connect his arm to the interface board. Products aren't often built with accessibility with mind and seeing DIY projects like this inspire better solutions for these groups.

<comment><USER8> Not only that, but it must be incredibly rewarding to work on something that actually helps people. In addition, they got to work on something that's really cutting edge or even futuristic in a way that most technology work isn't.

It's a huge win all around, and the world be a much better place if more people in tech did stuff like this than figuring out more effective ways of getting people to click ads or spy on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing that caught me the most about this video has nothing to do with the hack (which is awesome). What impressed me was how natural the prosthesis is, and how naturally he moves with it. Specifically, he grasps his non-prosthetic wrist with his prosthetic hand, casually, while he's talking. It shows how he's able to use the prosthesis without thinking about it. That and the fact that the prosthesis has the same dimensions as a natural limb, and doesn't require any bulky power attachment. I'm guessing this is standard now, or at least not experimental. I didn't realize prosthetics had advanced this far.

<comment><USER12> "the fact that the prosthesis has the same dimensions as a natural limb, and doesn't require any bulky power attachment."

This is standard in arm prothesis at least since the 1960ies.

<comment><USER11> For powered ones, vs purely manual? I guess it doesn't need a lot of power.

<comment><USER12> Powered: [https://eduard.horvath- vienna.at/ot2003.140-141.pdf](https://eduard.horvath- vienna.at/ot2003.140-141.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case anyone's wondering what that cool synthesizer that he's using is, it's a Eurorack[1] modular synthesizer[2].

If you are at all interested in this, I'd strongly encourage you to check out Muffwiggler[3], a huge forum for modular synthesizer enthusiasts.

Also useful is the Modular Grid[4], a gigantic database of thousands of amazing modules (and which also lets you design your own modular setup using these modules).

VCV Rack[4] is also great for playing around with software versions of some of these modules, which can be pretty expensive (the guy in the video has likely invested thousands and thousands of dollars in to his Eurorack setup, while VCV Rack is free). On the other hand, you can also build your own Eurorack modules (see the DIY forum on Muffwiggler for that), which can be a lot cheaper.

Something else I was thinking about was that if the main problem the guy in the video was trying to solve was that the knobs and switches on his modules were too difficult to manipulate with his prosthesis, then he could have tried the HackMe Vectr[5][6], which would have let him simply wave his whole hand around above the module to send out three voltages from his hand movements in three dimensional space. Mind control is, of course, way cooler, and doesn't require movement at all.

Finally, I was also thinking about how his modular interface might have been designed with opto-isolators, to minimize the risk of voltage inadvertently being sent back from the modular in to his arm, should he plug his cable in to an output rather than an input. Someone with more of an electronics background than me can probably comment on whether this would be a good idea.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurorack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurorack)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer)

[3] - [https://muffwiggler.com/forum/](https://muffwiggler.com/forum/)

[4] - [https://vcvrack.com/](https://vcvrack.com/)

[5] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSoVBz-1eQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSoVBz-1eQ0)

[6] - [http://hackmeopen.com/Vectr/](http://hackmeopen.com/Vectr/)

<comment><USER13> See also the JACK audio and LV2 plugin form of CV - [https://llllllll.co/t/jack-lv2-cv-ports/29428](https://llllllll.co/t/jack- lv2-cv-ports/29428)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool, I didn't know this existed! Is it Linux only?

<comment><USER13> Both JACK and LV2 are multiplatform, but there are Windows build problems for JACK atm. I'm unaware as to the current state of things regarding macOS. However, Carla is multiplatform can do it all internally.

There are a limited number of binary LV2 bundles available for Windows n macOS. That number has been slowly increasing, though just a fraction of LV2 use CV ports so far, but it is early days yet.

[https://kx.studio/Applications:Carla](https://kx.studio/Applications:Carla) [https://github.com/falkTX/Carla](https://github.com/falkTX/Carla)

[https://github.com/lv2/lv2/wiki](https://github.com/lv2/lv2/wiki)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think there is a big advantage in having some engineering/hacking minded people being the users of medical devices like this arm prosthesis. I work in medical devices and I always think how good it would be to have test patients who have a deep understanding of our devices. I am sure progress could be accelerated a lot if you had patients who can give better feedback. I know it's not FDA approved but if I had device myself I certainly would play with the programming. Obviously the level of experimentation depends on the device. If a malfunction can do serious harm you probably don't want to experiment much. But there are a lot of devices that won't kill you if something goes wrong.

<comment><USER15> real user feedback? do you live in la-la land or something? We're going to need an outside agency, a giant game of telephone, and a bunch of contrived questionnaires to spend that kind of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really fascinating to me. I've often wondered what exactly makes an artist/musician. Is it the person who can create it in their head, or the person who can actually write it down and/or actually play it on an instrument? Up until now, it's always been the latter. Not everybody can read/write music or play an actual instrument, but most can create it in their head. Like, I'm sure most of you can create a simple tune and hum it, and don't know how to read/write music or play an instrument. This kind of thing would allow you to. I wonder how many hidden artists throughout time have created brilliant masterpieces, but just could never express it.

<comment><USER8> I'd encourage you to read Brian Eno's _" Composers as Gardeners"_[1], which talks about a different way of looking at composition, which is pretty different from the usual way people think about it.

Many non-musicians are under the impression that composers think up music in their head and then write it down, and while some do work that way to some extent (with they myth of Mozart working like that in the movie _Amadeus_ being probably the most well known and most extreme case of composition being completely like that), for most composers (including Mozart) this is much more of an iterative, experimental process.

In recent decades, and especially with the advent of electronic music and computers, a lot more randomness and elements not fully or directly under the composer's control have entered in (though, again, this goes back at least back to the age of Mozart, with his dice game[2]).

There's a whole field of algorithmic composition[3] where music-generation becomes either semi-automated or even completely automated, and the composer's role is one of writing or choosing the algorithms, and of choosing various other aspects of the music (such as which instruments or sounds get used) but without pre-determining the final work in totality or in advance.

Brian Eno talks about this much more eloquently and deeply than I can, so I again encourage you to read his talk.

[1] - [https://www.edge.org/conversation/composers-as- gardeners](https://www.edge.org/conversation/composers-as-gardeners)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel)

[3] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always wondered why we've learn a specific music instrument and I say this after learning flute (simple bamboo one I bought from India)

Even without music theory or knowledge of specific instrument we are able to hum or vocally replicate a piece of music - why is it not possible to directly transform it into some instrument?

Is it not possible to hum > grab the pattern > generate instrument music with that?

I mean i can articulate smth best with my voice which is with me since I've learned to generate voice on my own so why we don't exploit it with help of some software?

<comment><USER18> I had a similar thought until I actually started learning an instrument and my SO, flutist graduated from an Italian conservatory, made me start singing with the right intonation (singing the same notes you are playing on the instrument) and rhythm (division and subdivision alongside a metronome). Long story short: singing is hard and requires real effort. There is a good chance that what you think you can articulate is probably far away from minimal quality on both pitch and time.

<comment><USER19> While that's true enough for many people, adding a feedback step and some practice would improve matters quickly.

There is also a good chance someone can learn to encode quite a bit into vocalizations.

<comment><USER12> "some practice would improve matters quickly"

Anyone who seriously learned an instrument or to sing, knows that it takes very hard practice for years to improve.

<comment><USER19> I have done that myself. Both vocal and instrument.

Yes, but vocalizations may well improve more quickly.

Frankly, I have toyed with this kind of thing. Software could do a lot, in particular, allow the user to adapt their expressions in various ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is really cool, indeed. Bravo for the creativity and the effort. Facebook recently acquired a company called ctrl-labs that develops a neural interface. Their vision is making computer interface more natural. Bertolt, in the video says "The thing is for me, that is such a natural thing to do, I do not really have to think about it. I just do it, it is zero effort."(6.23) I love that, I hope we can have such computer interfaces in near future.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great concept and interesting demo, however the title is pretty misleading. This isn't what I would call "thought controlled" more than the old Thalmic Myo or any EMG [0] is thought controlled.

This is reading muscle signals with electrodes and translating those muscle activations into a variable voltage signal. One could argue that because you're not reading mechanical action it could be considered "thought control" but I'll leave that up to the individual to gauge for themselves.

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/ctrl-labs-first-dev-kit- is...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/ctrl-labs-first-dev-kit-is-a-gesture- tracking-neural-controller/)

<comment><USER22> Most cheaper EEG headbands are misadvertised and actually measure skull muscle activation instead of actual brain signals, so there's that..

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If anyone owns a Neurosky (brain wave reader that fits on your head) and wants to try out something similar, you can try a simple demo that I wrote: [https://github.com/yayitswei/hairtime](https://github.com/yayitswei/hairtime)

</comment><comment><USER24> Did this remind anybody of Exapunks?

It's a game that has a defined assembly-like language, you hack into things to do other things. The catch is some of those things you hack into are actually your nerves, so that you can still function properly.

Pretty cool game by Zachtronics

</comment><comment><USER25> Indeed, very cool. I kept thinking that with an Arduino he probably could have build a first prototype with first building a custom circuit. Just nitpicking.

</comment><comment><USER26> Initially I was wondering why his prosthesis has ARM processor...

</comment><comment><USER27> Very cool, skip to the end to hear it in action.

<comment><USER11> Don't skip to the end. It's not about the final product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> That's awesome. I figure its only a matter of time before I'll be hard pressed not to make the difficult decision of giving up my arms for the eventual advantage of a prosthetic, and the seamless way he is able to control the synth brings that horizon much closer.

Combine this with a little ML and you could probably have a general purpose interface trainable in a few seconds/minutes to interact with any suitable output based on your personal signals! Imagine piloting a vehicle without moving a muscle, or playing a video game, or interacting with someone remotely...

Hell, now that I think of it, there's no reason you have to cut off your arms to do so. Is anyone aware of any open source prosthetic tech/code that one could conceivably hook up to functioning appendages?

</comment><comment><USER29> brb cutting off my arm

<comment><USER30> I know this is meant to be humor, but realistically, as I understand it, you can just tap into the muscular signals with electrodes - that does not need any such dramatic step.</comment></comment>


AirBnB for dogs - <AUTHOR> http://chriseidhof.tumblr.com/post/10278454030/airbnb-for-dogs

<comment><USER3> Incidentally, I would love AirBnB for dogs if someone wants to build it - <USER2> hate sending my dog to a commercial kennel but sometimes that's the only option. Surely there are lots of people out there who would be occasional dog hosts and room for them to give a cut to a middleman?

I found this <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774231> on the site but I don't want to take other people's dogs, I just want a marketplace where I can find people near to me who charge a reasonable amount of money for a good quality, caring service.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like you're describing what we're building! (www.rover.com)

That's exactly what we want to facilitate. Tons of people would be willing to watch your dog overnight, but there's no easy way for them to do so.

We're in Seattle for now, but have every intention of expanding in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Entering the Airbnb for dogs market might face competition from entrenched players, as a whois search shows that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky already owns dogbnb.com

</comment><comment><USER6> It exists!

<https://www.rover.com/>

<comment><USER3> Wow cool unfortunately in the UK not Seattle but a man can dream...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the title of this submission is particularly bad, considering the content of the source post, but - I agree completely with it :)

As a developer I too feel as though everything has already been done. I just cannot find any ideas that are remotely interesting to me to try out. By the time I come up with something I think is great, I see something is already done - and done better than I had intended with my own idea.

It's quite a kick in the teeth really. Maybe it's just because we're doers, and not the idea men?

</comment><comment><USER8> "As an app developer, I sometimes think all the apps are already built." I feel exactly the same many times. A friend of mine has an app idea every 30 seconds (exaggeration), but it seems almost every idea he has is already built and if it isn't already built is because there are technical difficulties.. But you said it all, "(...) but there are still so many companies who don't even have a decent website yet. Let's help them.". Indeed this is true :) Good post :)

</comment><comment><USER9> "A place for Rover" with the high concept pitch of "AirBnB for Dogs", won the Seattle Startup Weekend in June -- [http://www.geekwire.com/2011/airbnb-pet- introducing-place-ro...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/airbnb-pet-introducing- place-rover) has the story.

</comment><comment><USER10> hah, I though this was going to be about a site where you can rent someone's dog for a few hours here and there. there are already dog rental sites, but how can individual pet owners monetize the hours they're not at home to enjoy their furry friends?

</comment><comment><USER11> Who wants to rent a dog for a couple days?

<comment><USER12> I'm sure there's people who would be interested in renting a dog for a few hours. Think of it as therapy.

I'm intrigued by the idea of charging both sides (people looking to board their dog for a time period AND people looking to borrow a dog) of an exchange like this instead of the normal passing money between 2 parties and keeping a small percentage as a service fee.</comment></comment>