Building UI in Google Apps Script just got a whole lot easier - <AUTHOR> http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/06/building-ui-in-apps-script-just-got.html

<comment><USER2> If you're just looking for a UI builder and are not looking for anything on the backend, I'd encourage you to check out my app, Lean Designs [1], an HTML5-based WYSIWYG website builder. If Photoshop and Dreamweaver had a baby and then it went on a heavy diet, I'd like to think it would look something like Lean Designs. :)

Here's an example of a site created with it (keep in mind all the HTML and CSS is generated algorithmically):

<http://www.leandesigns.com/designs/3954/16efd20996>

[1] <http://www.leandesigns.com>

<comment><USER3> There is a vertical scroll bar in your first link under Chrome

<http://i.imgur.com/mk2IX.png>

<comment><USER2> Thanks -- I'll get on it. What version of Chrome are you on?

If you or anybody reading this has the know-how to determine what's causing the scroll bar to get added, it would help me troubleshoot it as I can't reproduce it on my version of Chrome (13.0.782.15 dev). Based on your screenshot it looks like the scroll bar is being added to the wrapper in that section of the page.

<comment><USER2> If anyone stumbles across this who sees the scroll bar, please drop me a note: email@example.com -- would love a few minutes of your time to help resolve this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like google has reimplemented VB6 for javascript.

<comment><USER5> This is the first time I've seen Apps Script and I was thinking along the same lines. It's like VB6 with all of the Google Cloud goodness built-in. The GMail API looks especially promising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is GAS still super slow? I don't care how fast I can develop my app on top of a spreadsheet if it runs slower than my abacus.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it can be VERY slow. But for us it's so valuable (allowing us to build a custom CRM on top of gmail and google spreadsheets) that it's good enough for now.</comment></comment>


SpaceX wants to buy out residents of a small Texas hamlet - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-texas-spaceport-boca-chica-village-buyout-offer-letters-2019-9 <comment><USER2> > She also says a handful of families do not have the financial means, even > with a three-times-appraised-value offer, to buy equivalent properties > elsewhere.

I'm struggling to understand this.

Is the appraised value something totally different from the market value?</comment>


Why Is America So Angry? The Real Roots of American Rage - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/charles-duhigg-american-anger/576424/ <comment><USER2> Having recently discovered Adam Curtis (from other HN posts), I'd highly recommend watching his documentaries. All of them. Absolutely riveting stuff.

HyperNormalization: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU)

Bitter Lake: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRbq63r7rys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRbq63r7rys)

The Trap: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97Ywl7RtUw&list=PLsGiHTmHVD...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97Ywl7RtUw&list=PLsGiHTmHVDNlAc15kb23Q9Oz386MNXYIn)

The Power of Nightmares: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTg4qnyUGxg&list=PLtPP_- rkrT...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTg4qnyUGxg&list=PLtPP_- rkrT3CmuUxjezhbewL5C8fcI1Fv)

The Mayfair Set: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuqYbohCLFM&list=PLtPP_- rkrT...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuqYbohCLFM&list=PLtPP_- rkrT3D-9HZkN0BAgMS1F1ODLQES)

The Century of the Self: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s)

<comment><USER3> You have more adam curtis to discover [https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched- over-by-machines-of-lov...](https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by- machines-of-loving-grace/)

<comment><USER2> Thank you, I missed that one. Another is Dr. Jordan Peterson. I found this very interesting as well, and is another piece of this puzzle: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQCTeGKHsVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQCTeGKHsVc)

<comment><USER3> Its interesting but you should know that Adam Curtis and Jordan Peterson are opposites in their conclusions. Curtis attacks negative liberty and individualism birthed in the 80s. Curtis suggests that we should still try to change the world (positive liberty and collective action). JP is very the polar opposite to this. He is almost purely negative liberty (libertarian) and is the inheritor of the 80s individualism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like the underlying point of all their examples are:

People are tired of having control stripped away from them and being told what to do, and lashing out.

Isn't this a tale as old as civilization ? We have leaders who no longer care about the will of the "peasants". A generation that has forget why the noblesse oblige.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize."

CP Grey has a great 7min video[1] explaining this phenomena in a very insightful way. Basically controversial pro/con memes (say abortion) aren't fighting each other but are in symbiosis, helping each other grow.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC- cMv0e3Dc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC-cMv0e3Dc)

</comment><comment><USER6> From the article: "When we become angry, we feel like we're taking control, like we're getting power over something."

Around 75% of my paycheck is taken up by Health Insurance, Rent, Taxes, Automobile, and extraneous required fees. That's just to subsist in modern society on a middle class level.

I'm make WELL above the national average.

I can only imagine how difficult it is working in a small town with limited opportunities and a family and making at or below the national average income.

Most modern people are completely powerless with no chance at a better life.

It's just spun so well that people don't realize it but have this underlying feeling of powerlessness and rage. I think it's going to continue to get worse as inequality increases and more and more people make less and less money.

That's why American's are angry in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> This story is not supported by surveys and studies. White Americans, particularly men, are angry that they're losing their dominant group status. It's not that they're actually losing money or jobs or anything, it's just that they've been brought up to believe themselves above everyone else and always be at the centre of attention. Unfortunately, this mindset means that even marginally fairer treatment of other groups gets interpreted as "oppression".

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existent...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existential- anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/)

<comment><USER8> As a white male, in Kentucky of all places... I've never once thought or heard, aloud or in confidence, a complaint about losing 'dominant group status.'. The closest would be probably immigrants taking jobs, but I think that's more related to wages and unemployment than anything else. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I can't imagine anything close to a majority of whites feel that way.

<comment><USER9> As a white male from the south, all I see in current political rhetoric is a fear of the other coming here and supplanting the good christian white men and women. Those rapists from mexico coming here, and China stealing our knowledge, immigrants are the threat to our way, support from the president of those people who are espousing white supremacy.

I don't think a majority of people feel this is an accurate worry, but I do think it's a dominant political message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder to what degree a couple of decades of persistent warfare without an end in sight also plays a role.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't recommend _America: The Fairwell Tour_ more highly... it gets to the core beyond manufactured divisions that atomize citizens, set them against each other, manufactured consent, grotesque inequality, learned helplessness and the broken American dream paving the way for grotesque inequality.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a shame this isn't higher up. It's a fantastic long-read on the roots of modern outrage.

</comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr anger is a great tl;dr compression algo</comment>


Del.icio.us has been down since it's "migration" on Sunday - <AUTHOR> http://blog.delicious.com/2016/04/transition-to-del-icio-us/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one whose first thought was, "wow, del.icio.us is still around?" Yahoo bought them, kinda screwed it up IMO, I paid pinboard his paltry asking price, and kind of forgot about poor ol' del.icio.us.

After reading the post...WTF? They're migrating back to their original domain name and that failed? Didn't del.icio.us always resolve even after delicious.com? What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> Have you also forgotten about pinboard? Just curious because the story is the same for me, and I've since forgotten about pinboard too. I had the same "oh, that's still around?" reaction during the recent Pinboard/Zapier kerfuffle.

<comment><USER2> > Have you also forgotten about pinboard?

Why would I have forgotten about pinboard? I use it several times a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using BookmarkOS for a couple months now and can't browse without it [https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think with an outage for this long, is it safe to assume that we've moved away from "the migration is taking awhile" to "something terrible has happened and it may be a good time to switch to pinboard.in"?

<comment><USER5> Have been an avid delicious.com user for so many years. Got frustrated with recent down times and switched to [https://www.diigo.com](https://www.diigo.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> this is sad. I use delicious a lot and this was the last straw and finally pushed me to pay for pinboard. I just hope they come back up so i can export my links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just had a browse of [http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/delicious.com.html](http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/delicious.com.html) and it looks like quite a few people have the same plan (myself included)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was ill-advised when Tony Aly decided to embed ads into the Delicious users' activity feeds. [http://david.dlma.com/blog/monetizing-rss- and-atom-feeds](http://david.dlma.com/blog/monetizing-rss-and-atom-feeds) But this amount of downtime with no transparency takes the site to a new low.

</comment><comment><USER8> It has been broken for a while. API calls are returning errors even when used with the official bookmarklet. API support for extensions (the real reason why Delicious was successful) apparently has been deprecated? Whoever is running this doesn't have enough technical expertise.

<comment><USER2> Thing is, I'd consider buying and at least get it working again. Sadly, the current owners won't realize that what little value it had is now gone, gone, gone and are almost guaranteed to want too much. So instead of putting it hands of someone that knows enough to keep it running, it'll just fade back into obscurity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) would appear to be back. Was able to sign in today and add a new bookmark.

<comment><USER2> I just clicked your link, and it's down for me. Same message as before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Might be cached? I logged in earlier this morning (and seems to be working now) and exported all my bookmarks to pinboard.

It's sad to see all my thousands of bookmarks over the last decade in a file <1MB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Definitely switching too, but really would like to get my bookmarks back. But I rate that as less than 10%. Clearly another company that didn't realise it was incompetent.

<comment><USER11> Now working for me...</comment></comment>


PuDB is a full-screen, console-based visual debugger for Python - <AUTHOR> https://documen.tician.de/pudb/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm having a hard time debugging a problem today and have exhausted almost everything except running the debugger. I think my hesitation to drop down to the python debugger is past experience with the command line native debugger. With time and patience and experience pdb is really good, but trial and error is typically faster. pudb however is proving to be really convenient to the point where I might turn to it first before attempting trial and error in future. we'll see.</comment>


Things to commit just before leaving your job - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/aras-p/6224951 <comment><USER2> Reads like an ad for Golang or Rust</comment>


Record-Setting Holiday Season for Amazon Prime - <AUTHOR> http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1886961

<comment><USER2> It always impresses me how Bezos can make Amazon operate as both a non-member store and a membership store using Prime. Unlike Safeway or somewhere that says "member price X, non-member price Y" Amazon can say price is X, shipping is Y unless you're a prime member. And they bury the uplift in that shipping cost to the non-prime member.

</comment><comment><USER3> corporate-ir.net !== amazon.com</comment>


HTML5: it goes to ELEVEN - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/mathiasbynens/html5-it-goes-to-eleven

<comment><USER2> The slides note that the new HTML5 doctype works in current browsers. Does it trigger quirks mode in older browsers (e.g. pre-2010 releases)? If so, that essentially makes it a lot less usable that the slides would suggest.

<comment><AUTHOR> By 'current browsers', I mean all browsers in use = A-grade browsers, including IE6. See <http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/> and <http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/#comment-296891>

The HTML5 spec is written with backwards compatibility in mind, and the DOCTYPE is one of the examples. HTML5 specs _current_ behavior and implementations. The DOCTYPE would've been different if browsers didn't already support it.

I realize a lot of additional info is lost on people who are viewing the slides but couldn't attend the presentation, and am working on a blog post with some more explanations.

<comment><AUTHOR> The blog post I talked about is now published and can be found here: <http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/html5-levels></comment></comment></comment>


Cat Declawing Is Banned by New York State Lawmakers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/nyregion/cats-declawing-law-ban.html <comment><USER3> There's a lot of people here that I don't think understand what declawing is.

Declawing isn't just removing the claws. The equivalent when performed on a human would be to surgically remove the last section of your fingers, on all your fingers. You don't/can't just remove the claws: you are removing the entire bone.

It is absolutely cruel and unusual and honestly, you are a monster if you support this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm actually somewhat torn on this one. At face value, I fully agree. More, none of my cats have been declawed, as I just don't see the point.

That said, I also don't buy the mutilation argument at face value. We literally castrated all of our male cats, and nobody bats an eye. Indeed, you seem to be frowned upon if you don't. Surely that is as mutilating to a male cat as losing a knuckle?

<comment><USER5> > I'm actually somewhat torn on this one. At face value, I fully agree. More, > none of my cats have been declawed, as I just don't see the point.

> That said, I also don't buy the mutilation argument at face value. We > literally castrated all of our male cats, and nobody bats an eye. Indeed, > you seem to be frowned upon if you don't. Surely that is as mutilating to a > male cat as losing a knuckle?

At least castration has the actual benefit of aiding in population control. I don't see any benefit to declawing and in fact it endangers outdoor cats as they can't adequately protect themselves.

<comment><USER6> Failing to declaw an outdoor cat lets the cat kill more birds; cats are an invasive species that kill billions of birds per year.

<comment><USER7> It also prevents your cat from defending itself from other cats, dogs, raccoons, possum, fox, insert local critter here that will fuck up your cat, in the event your cat gets loose. You shouldn't let your cat be unsupervised killing birds, that's just irresponsible as you say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My childhood cat was declawed on the front paws, and I've had multiple cats since then, all with claws intact.

It's definitely a significant difference in the cat's existence to be clawless. I'm happy to see this attitude shifting, but as others have commented here, there will almost certainly be more cats returned to shelters (and killed) when they won't stop shredding the furniture and carpet.

Even if you trim their claws, in my experience they will always do some damage to anything they can sink their claws into. It obviously feels good and is a compulsive activity like stretching for them.

And if you raise them to be aggressive with too much rough-housing in protective clothing, it can be a real problem, like with guests who think it's a good idea to pet the cat that's been unintentionally conditioned to think all arms are as impervious to claws as layers of sweatshirts worn in constant rough-housing. I had a friend who made this mistake long ago, that cat was awesome if you knew how to play with it but it required a safety warning at the entrance or blood would be spilled.

<comment><USER9> An owner who gives his/her cat to a shelter because of some scratched piece of furniture doesn't deserve to be a cat owner after all. What he/she would have done had his/her kids destroy said furniture? Turn them in to an orphanage?

<comment><USER10> Exactly. As a cat owner it is your responsibility to let the cat have its natural behaviour. If your cat scratches your sofa, get a scratch station and work work work until the undesired behaviour stops.

A cat has the right to a happy life, and of you want a happy indoor cat that is a lot of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess I don't understand why people feel so strongly about this issue. The cats I interacted with growing up were mostly declawed indoor cats and seemed happy and playful.

It was less about furniture and more about not getting scratched (or having dogs get scratched).

<comment><USER12> If one is afraid of getting scratched, don't get a pet with claws. Fish are pretty harmless.

<comment><USER11> I just suspect this is something humans care a lot about, but doesn't actually bother cats that much.

Based on the descriptions I read from the people against declawing cats - <USER2> doesn't seem like their arguments are very accurate. It feels a lot more emotional and more like they're making up arguments to back their existing position (rather than actually looking at harm done).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a veterinarian I feel a bit ashamed that veterinary surgeons are actually working against the law.

In Germany I don't even know when this was outlawed, but nobody here would even think that is possible.

I don't buy the euthanasia or abandonment argument at all.

<comment><USER13> And I'd like to add that "kill shelters" are not without alternatives.

In Germany it is forbidden to euthanize animals for lack of resources or will to keep it. People often have to pay shelters to take their animals, and if they just abandon them somewhere, they may get fined or even prosecuted.

In general, Germans tend to ask shelters first, when trying to acquire a dog, cats also. It has gotten so far that shelters have more applicants than dogs they can give them, and the dogs which stay in shelters are not suited to an average dog owner (behavior, size, medical issues). We even import thousands of street/shelter dogs from all over Europe.

Cats unfortunately are too plentiful. There are always some feral/semi-feral populations who haven't been neutered. Shelters keep them, but they will often stay all their life there.

And of course, not all of the US is comparable to Germany in many regards. In Germany there aren't a lot of sparsely populated areas, and the animal protection laws are a lot tougher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Overview: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onychectomy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onychectomy)

Outlawed in most countries, animal cruelty.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not exactly a quick fix, but how many generations would it take to breed cats with substantially softer claws? This could be an interesting program perhaps for the government to undertake.

I also wonder if crispr or embryo selection could be used if a GWAS could find genes that lead to softer claws.

The selection techniques have been used to improve milk yields for cows, so it seems like making cats which don't need to be declawed would be a valid project.

<comment><USER16> NO cat needs to be declawed (no more than any human needs to have their fingertips cut off).

Have a scratcher and trim off their nails, problem solved.

<comment><USER12> Even better, don't get a cat if scratching is a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Before I adopted my cat I thought that declawing was something normal, but after learning that they break the knuckles I just can't support it. When I trim my cat's nails I feel his little knuckles and its really adorable. Also when I'm clipping them I know he is super sensitive with his nails, so I can only imagine how it would feel to have them removed.

The thing that I don't really get is that people want to have an animal in their homes, but they don't like the true animal behaviors so they want to stop them from doing what they naturally do. People want cute and cuddly cats, but when the cat scratches someone its acting bad. In reality it's just responding to its environment and its acting like the animal that it is.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do we have evidence that declawing causes lasting pain or psychological damage to the cat?

I admittedly have no idea how'd you'd test this in an animal—but it seems like it should be a prerequisite to banning the procedure.

<comment><USER10> It is usually done to prevent the cat from a natural behaviour (scratching) which can usually be fixed by getting a proper scratching pole and monitoring you can for a week or two to prevent them from scratching anywhere else.

Declawing often introduces other behavioural problems (biting, soiling outside the cat box) which are usually a sign of your cat not liking the situation.

Castration is for the male cat a smaller operation, and usually fixes problems and gives you a happier less aggressive cat with an increased tendency to gain weight.

Behaviour problems in cats are usually because they are not stimulated enough, and declawing them will hide the scratching problem but will sometimes introduce other problems that are harder to fix.

Veterinarians should really propose other solutions first such as activelt working with your cats behaviour. In the end it will probably give you a happier cat.

I would argue that aggressiveness in the male cat is a different kind of behaviour. It is a natural behaviour, of course, but it is not easily changed, and it is also not a behaviour that makes your cat happy.

To summarize: castrating a cat is a good way to get a happier calmer and slightly fatter cat. Declawing is usually done to prevent a either a natural behaviour or a sign that your cat is unhappy. It commonly leads to other behavioural problems that are even harder to fix.

One is a path to a happy cat, one is to sweep a problem under the rug.

I am of course coloured by where I live: declawing has been outlawed for quite some time and even before that it was considered animal abuse by most.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. So it sounds like, yes, there are clearly identifiable, negative behavioral changes in the animal.

<comment><USER10> Sorry about the poor structure and ranting quality of the post. Wrote it on my phone over the course of 25 minutes and didn't proofread it.

The Wikipedia entry about declawing is pretty good if you are still interested.

<comment><USER18> Thanks again. The wikipedia article actually seems considerably more measured—behavioral changes are observed, but for a small percentage of subjects in most studies, and at those levels I really wonder how much is a placebo (on the part of the observer, not the cat, ofc)

<comment><USER10> The general tendency of the result isn't very good for declawing. Especially considering the amount of cats that get complications from the surgery.

The studies cited with positive results for relinquishment pushes for other risk factors such as understanding and investing in you cat as a contributor to positive outcome. Maybe people willing to pay are more invested in their cats, and go with what a veterinarian recommends (which may be declawing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Once I bought the right scratching post, my cat stopped using my furniture.

The most important thing about a scratching post is that it must not move. If a cat tries to use it, and it wobbles, then the cat will give up on it. It will go back to scratching your couch, which does not move.

Cats use scratching posts not just to sharpen their claws but to stretch their spines. Watch their whole body when they use a scratching post. Is not like how you stretch in the morning? Declawing a cat deprives them of this. Even if the pain of amputation subsides, this disability remains.

When I was researching whether to declaw my cat, I found this article about the many ways it hurts cats and why it is unnecessary, [https://www.purrfectpost.com/declawing-cats-alternatives- to-...](https://www.purrfectpost.com/declawing-cats-alternatives-to-an- inhumane-procedure/). "A cat that has access to scratching posts that meet their needs for marking territory, stretching muscles, and relieving stress will almost always choose to use them rather than the less attractive options of furniture and carpet."

Then I read their article on choosing a scratching post and ending up buying theirs, [https://www.purrfectpost.com/how-to-choose-the-best-cat- scra...](https://www.purrfectpost.com/how-to-choose-the-best-cat-scratching- post/)

I'm unaffiliated with Purrfect Post, but my cat likes their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> Someone needs to open a luxury upholsterer in Manhattan that specialized in armored fabrics. Like, in the next week.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good. There is nothing of interest in declawing, when there is a perfectly good and obvious alternative available that is not permanent and is much better: Cat nail scissors. Just use it in several steps when your cat is sleeping or relaxed. One or two nails at a time. Give your cat something to scratch and you will have several weeks of peace. Repeat as necessary.

Understanding better your cat and building a relationship of trust will be even better. My last cat never, ever, used seriously his claws against me. Of course I never, ever, used my claws against him. Reciprocity.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not a cat owner, so actually curious:

I have a friend cat who always scratches me, which is quite painful and leaves marks. Is there a way to trim the nails so this doesn't happen, or is the only solution to avoid the cat?

<comment><USER13> Normally cats only scratch when you go after them in some way. If that is the case, just don't go after the cat.

If the cat goes after you, that's a whole different ball game!

<comment><USER23> Yep, it's worth remembering that cats don't have opposable thumbs to grip with, they have claws instead.

So for example if you go to pet a cat's stomach and it doesn't want you to its only recourse maybe to use it's claws to "grab" your hand.

I think removing the ability to "grip" from cats for the sake of furniture or because you want to do things to the cat it doesn't like is wrong.

If you don't like scratchy cats don't have a cat.

<comment><USER13> I think that inability to "grip" things is the least of the problems with declawing. Complications, pain, problems walking and the whole idea of removing body parts at all count a little higher for me.

As an owner I think you can avoid getting scratched. As a vet... I personally have never been bitten (too little practical experience), but I've seen colleagues handle cats in a way that just spelled resignation to the fact that those teeth will connect and there is nothing to be done about it....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is this not law in Canada yet?

</comment><comment><USER25> Good! I love my cats and their claws.</comment>


Scientists Release Air Trapped 800M Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a22038/scientists-release-trapped-air/ <comment><USER2> I assume that the article title is a euphemism for "farting".</comment>


Do you have trouble waking up? Please take a survey and help our #startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P9GF8N6

<comment><USER2> I actually don't think you mean 'waking up'. Waking up is easy, happens all the time. Feeling motivated and energetic upon waking is what I think you are going for.

Often using the right (exacting) terminology can help you define a better solution.

An alarm clock wakes me up fine, but if you came up with something that actually got me jumping from the bed well rested and ready anxious for the day, then you've got something great to sell.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, I don't think any goofy joke, prank, or noise will actually help wake me up on a consistent basis.

Its far too easy to just ignore the phone or alarm clock and go back to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER4> I took the survey. One key thing you're missing is a way to reach people who are interested in seeing where this is going.

Consider adding an optional email textbox or even a link to a page people can come back to later. Even if it's just a Twitter account (inferred from the '@' in the name).

</comment><comment><USER5> if you have trouble waking up, try sleeping with your blinds open. I recently started waking up to natural light, instead of an abrupt sound, huge difference.

<comment><USER6> I ran into this from the other direction: I don't get much natural light at all in my bedroom, and when I moved in I had a terrible time waking up until I installed a lamp that automatically turns on every morning and blasts the room with light (starting before I actually want to wake up).

After that, the alarm is much more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Social alarm clock :) Is it location based? Is it a location based group buying social alarm clock?

</comment><comment><USER8> Solving the "not going to bed so late" problem(cause) helps tremendously, not just with waking up (that's not really the problem), but with being energized and not god awful tired during the day (that's the problem(symptom)).

</comment><comment><USER9> I can smell another retarded app Idea on it's way.

<comment><USER10> Something like <http://www.wakemate.com/>

<comment><USER11> Wakemate is awesome. This seems to be simply about bugging friends to call me in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the best idea so far is that you decided to ask others what they think.</comment>


Students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10194.html <comment><USER2> Our philoshophy professor repeatedly told us that mind-influencing substances is the main force powering civilisaion progress. Seems that his opinion is proven one more time.</comment>


Show HN: How attractive is your website? Check using Visual Mind AI - <AUTHOR> https://myraah.io/visualmind <comment><USER2> Input: [http://dokimos.org/ajff](http://dokimos.org/ajff) Output: 50% of users are expected to like your site

Input: [https://www.wikipedia.org/](https://www.wikipedia.org/) Output: 38% of users are expected to like your site

<comment><USER3> Does anyone else miss marquee text on the internet? Internet, you used to be cool.

<comment><USER4> Or blink. You can achieve the same effect with css and Js though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this thing is just trained to like large hero images. Tried some of the most beautiful sites I know and got scores in the 10s and 20s, presumably from the presence of text.

Then I tried a number of sites with worthless huge hero images and got scores in the 80s.

I mean like all ai, take this with a grain of salt, but I think there is an obvious bias in this to the 'giant hero image that goes all the way to the fold' design that a lot of low effort start-up websites use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Thanks for your feedback you are right. Currently algo evaluate how a user will feel...when they look at your site above the fold...it's like tinder you just look at the pic and decide to swap right or left.. this is based on : Users make lasting judgments about a website's appeal within a split second. This first impression is influential enough to later affect their opinions of a site's usability and trustworthiness...of course lot of areas we can improve...hope u enjoyed..

<comment><USER6> But do users really enjoy full size hero images?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the reason why program says it's good..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The results under "Here are few websites with similar visual scores as yours" were especially amusing for my site.

I've received a score of 26 and the similar websites were:

\- Generic unstyled XML Access Denied document.

\- Google account log in page.

\- Generic unstyled "Your request has been blocked" text.

\- "Please verify you're a human" HTML error message.

\- Random JSON error message.

I entered my personal website, [https://merely.xyz](https://merely.xyz) . That website is served with a single request; perhaps it's been classified as an error page because of that?

<comment><USER8> I tested [https://gildas-lormeau.github.io/](https://gildas- lormeau.github.io/) (score 56) which is also a single request website. Almost all the websites with similar visual scores are okay for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hrm. Does it really fetch "local" resources?

Visual Mind summary report for [http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta- data](http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data)

38% of users are expected to like your site

Yup. That's a security hole:

[http://184.108.40.206/thumbs/visualmind/aHR0cDovLzE2OS4yNTQuMT...](http://18.104.22.168/thumbs/visualmind/aHR0cDovLzE2OS4yNTQuMTY5LjI1NC9sYXRlc3QvbWV0YS1kYXRh.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out. Shame on us. :)

<comment><USER10> Be careful, there's ways around just blocking the IP address;

[https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL2F3c2...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL2F3c21ldGFkYXRhLmNvbS9sYXRlc3QvbWV0YS1kYXRh)

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I put together a little library to handle denying access to "local" resources, to abstract this a little and avoid overlooking common mistakes:

[https://github.com/skx/remotehttp](https://github.com/skx/remotehttp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Complete nonsense in the absence of any sense of _why_ a site is designed the way it is. Is it a product brochure? Is it something functional (e.g. a search engine)? Does it target the general public? Or (say) highbrow art appreciators? Or tech geeks? In each case the aesthetic might be deliberately designed to attract/repel according to target audience. There is/can be no generic "attractive".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Thanks for trying. yes context is very important and we will incorporate in the next version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not very convinced of this AI. I got 96% for [http://peppermind.com](http://peppermind.com) and only 68% for [https://talumriel.de](https://talumriel.de) \- I'm almost certain that most users would prefer talumriel, and both scores them seem overrated to me. I mean, I really have no clue about design...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this really. I looked it and trust me AI has got this completely wrong ..we will include this as exception when we train again.. thanks for trying..

<comment> coddle-hark Wait, how do you know it got it completely wrong?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My default Apache 404 page got a 38% of users will like it, 26 points for visually average, 20 for visual and 30 for clarity. After a few different URLs, my fail2ban kicked in, and the site complained about the URL being invalid. Fair enough.

<comment><USER14> Hilariously my blog (kn100.me) also got 38 percent and the site provides screenshots of other sites with similar scores, which were all 404/500 error pages... I thought my blog looked nice :(

<comment><USER15> Using my somewhat powerful but also flawed neuro net trained on over 20 years of intensive web usage gives your blog design a thumbs up. One suggestion is adding padding-top: 1em to the "Posts" heading to make it more clearly separated from the quick summary above it and more clearly related to the content below it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most of the page contains punctuation errors, even in the title.

Remove the space before the question mark.

In English, it is always an error. There should be no space between a sentence and its ending punctuation, whether that's a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark. There should also be no space before a colon, semicolon, or comma.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input..will change..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I dont want to sound like a hater here, but why is it that so many people in this thread claim a 72% score?

This whole thing seems to me like it isn't any AI by the common understanding, but just a few hardcoded scores and criteria.

Now, thats probably wrong, and the AI is super neat, but I think it doesn't look very good when it does that.

I dont think the chances are high that so many different websites all score exactly 72%. Not 71, not 73, 72.

Its weird. Now the whole site looks nice and all, I saw the papers referenced, too.

But again, when I read that it's "97% accurate", I wonder how that is even measured? I understand that there are measures of how easy to use a site is, etc. So I wonder what cases those 3% were, where your AI was "wrong"? Did you hand-review them, or what?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying out. yes you are right. Tips are not upto the mark. Our algo tries to put a site in 8 buckets -b,..+A and provides tips. So it's not that accurate when evaluating 50% versus 53% but mostly accurate with difference of over 10%.. so 50% won't be same as 60% for example.. of course it is based on limited amount of data we had to guess it..point taken.. we really appreciate your feedback and will incorporate.. cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Your site is visually VERY GOOD

> Your website is better than 72% of millions+ websites analysed by Visual > MIND AI

for: [http://doomlaser.com](http://doomlaser.com)

What's it actually doing under the hood? Just taking a screen grab of the first few hundred vertical pixels x the full width? What's the actual resolution that it's grabbing, and how does the algorithm work and come up with scores? Is the system backed by some sort of data from a representative group of users?

<comment><AUTHOR> Individual metrics 60/60 means u have fine balance...Algo keeps on refining as it processes more data..scores are just indicative not to taken as absolute basis. Thanks for trying.

<comment><USER19> Nice site. It should display the max achievable score. The round fill bar makes it seem like it could go to 100.

I only realized it when trying it on itself : [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL215cm...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL215cmFhaC5pby9pbmRleC5waHAvdmlzdWFsbWluZA==)

Also doesn't work on my website [https://gistnoesis.github.io/StlToRelief/](https://gistnoesis.github.io/StlToRelief/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The site mentions:

> Visual Mind is an AI engine specifically designed for understanding and > scoring visual appearance of a website. Visual Mind has analyzed over a > million websites to achieve an accuracy rate of over 97%.

How does accuracy work in a project like this, where the result is subjective?

</comment><comment><USER21> "You can improve visual score by using better images and improving site layout to make it little more denser."

These suggestions need to be improved if they are going to be the output of this tool.

Better images? Define better. It doesn't ask what the images or site are trying to achieve. Maybe for their intended purpose these images are the best.

And making it more dense? Again, why?

If you're going to give design feedback it might be valuable to consider what valuable design feedback looks like. There are books on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree that recco are not that upto the mark at the moment as it is just the first version...hence we called it tips. I appreaciate your feedback and thanks for trying ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It has a bias and standard score for sites that have large text with images above the fold including it's own site.

So

[https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind)

netflix.com

primevideo.com

ALL score an exact 72%.

Not convincing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Amusingly, from the comments here, it seems like everyone wants some kind of "HotOrNot" service for websites. Crowdsource the ratings! Then you can drop the "A" from "AI" :)

<comment><USER24> A HotOrNot service for websites is exactly what this AI is claiming to replicate. It's claiming to predict how _users_ will like your website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Tried it on my personal site, which I've received a lot of compliments on.

Input: [https://mtm.dev](https://mtm.dev)

Output: 38% of users are expected to like your site

</comment><comment><USER26> My personal blog site scored only 20 and the AI said the layout was too complex, although the layout is quite minimalistic :(

[https://pkolaczk.github.io/](https://pkolaczk.github.io/)

<comment><USER27> It must be the ł...

<comment><USER26> Oh yeah, some of my foreign friends thought it was dirt on their display when they first saw my name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sorry, this seems like just a random number generator to me.

</comment><comment><USER29> My website is a glorified footer and it managed "72% of users are expected to like your site"

This is an interesting concept and another way to get feedback besides asking friends / co-workers.

Would like to see the "Tips" section expanded in future iterations.

Website: [https://keele.codes/](https://keele.codes/) Report: [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL2tlZW...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL2tlZWxlLmNvZGVz)

<comment><USER30> Mine's one image and got the same haha

[http://yo.wtf](http://yo.wtf) report: [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3lvLn...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3lvLnd0Zg==)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.caredash.com/](https://www.caredash.com/)

96% of users are expected to like your site. [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL0Nhcm...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL0NhcmVEYXNoLmNvbQ==)

We use Bootstrap at CareDash with larger hero images on landers with clear calls to action. This structure tends to perform well on A/B Tests too as it leads the user to the action meant to be taken.

</comment><comment><USER32> I gave my website without the login credentials and got 38% for the 401 page. Then I added the credentials and got the same exact percentage. I know the creds worked, because the screenshot changed. I'm not going to say this assessment site is completely useless, because the colorized screenshots at the bottom are pretty cool and give me more theme ideas, but other than that...

And I can't even save the images, because they are just all the same screenshot, base64-embedded in the HTML and then altered with JavaScript-based filters! What is that!?

<comment><AUTHOR> Score is really base don the screenshot generated. If something is hidden behind the login system can't read it so will get error. We may in future have a functionality to upload ur own screenshot instead of taking it by machine. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Visual Mind summary report for [http://usecastup.com](http://usecastup.com) > \- 72% of users are expected to like your site. Your site is visually > awesome. You can further improve it by using better images and considering > little denser layout.

Well, although I'm happy with the comment, that "72%" seems made up entirely.

</comment><comment><USER34> Heh. It scored the CloudFlare DDoS protection page that it hit before my site as 26, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

<comment><USER35> Nice, I got a 26 for my test page as well. It's on the same level as google.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> @myraahio Given how quickly your site runs, I'm not entirely sure it runs a neural network - seems more like some weighted analysis based on some defined measures on simple algorithms? I'll take a wild stab and guess that you're doing some analysis, some manual labeling and k-means clustering?

I would really consider running a light weight network over a small image (down-scaled to something like 320x200), if you're only binning classes then you should be able to get it to <1ms on a low-power CPU. Given how much web pages vary, you'll likely need upwards of 10k training images.

Consider having some feature on your site to allow users to help rate pages (with moderation oversight).

It's a good start anyway! I look forward to seeing this in the future!

Edit: Also consider some expansion opportunities - rating screenshots of software interfaces, mobile phone apps, etc, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> @bArray really appreciate your feedback. Especially expansion opportunity.

DL model is trained on the GPU - heavy AWS instance..end point rests on smaller instance. Sometimes it gives faster results when you run a URL which it has already processed. It will happen in case of famous sites. For new sites it need to process the info so it takes about 10 seconds to create report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What on earth do you base "looks good" on?! On who's taste or what exact data it's based on?

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting idea, but it says the first site I tried doesn't exist, so apparently there are some problems at the moment.

Edit: Actually, _all_ of the small/personal sites I've tried are failing, though a couple of big names worked. Is this a spoof?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi can u pls let me know which website you tried ?

<comment><USER39> Mine doesn't work either - [https://oikolab.com](https://oikolab.com).

<comment><AUTHOR> Must have something went wrong .. when i ran your site i got this:

[https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL29pa2...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL29pa29sYWIuY29t)

<comment><USER39> Interesting, it works now. Thanks for looking into it. Really interesting tool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It is actually not too bad:

[https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL05hcn...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL05hcnJhdGlvbmJveC5jb20=)

</comment><comment><USER41> I love the idea but it is of limited use to me right now:

How do I know this metric is any good?

What does "attractiveness" mean and what desired outcomes does it correlate to?

For example HN is ugly (sorry for the candor!) but it's a plus - it's a statement about what you write being most important and also by not changing the ui it's lovely to use. Now compare that to Reddit which might come though as a prettier site at first glance but bitching about the Reddit ui and then someone mentioning old.reddit and friends is a trope: lots of people hate the Reddit ui. So on some metric that matters to me HN wins.

Finally - if I score X how do I actually improve the score?

</comment><comment><USER42> I got 84% for my site [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3BhZ2...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3BhZ2V3cy5jb20=)

I usually visit page performance sites to get some tips on things to improve on the performance, I think that this is a great idea to have a score on the appearance as well.

I got "You can further improve it by using better images and considering little denser layout." as a tip to improve, it would be great if there could be more details on the feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate u tried. Will get there..

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I tried it on [http://www.arngren.net/](http://www.arngren.net/) and it just said "The URL provided is not correct."

</comment><comment><USER44> Very cool idea but it just does not seem to work just yet. My blog got 26 which I think looks quite nice ([http://granitosaurus.rocks](http://granitosaurus.rocks)) but some random color rainbow websites score double that (like already pointed out: [http://dokimos.org/ajff](http://dokimos.org/ajff))

Are there any visual design scoring systems that somewhat work?

</comment><comment><USER45> [https://datacrayon.com](https://datacrayon.com) gets a visual appearance score of 90, but a visual clarity score of 20. "60% of users are expected to like your site"[1].... interesting

[1] [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL2RhdG...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL2RhdGFjcmF5b24uY29t)

</comment><comment><USER46> [https://victorribeiro.com](https://victorribeiro.com) \- oh man, my site is only visually average.

[https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3ZpY3...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3ZpY3RvcnJpYmVpcm8uY29t)

</comment><comment><USER47> Mine is supposed to be good looking (score 90), but too complex (score 20). It's a simple content in the middle + sidebar layouts. Indeed, very complex.

</comment><comment><USER48> 68% of users are expected to like [https://geocode.xyz](https://geocode.xyz)

Here are few websites with similar visual scores as yours Facebook.com Vogue.com Microsoft.com ... I think I'm in good company.

While my personal blog [https://eruci.com](https://eruci.com) is really ugly:

"38% of users are expected to like your site"

Same as "Google.com"

</comment><comment><USER49> I had to do it.

Visual Mind summary report for [http://pornhub.com](http://pornhub.com)

72% of users are expected to like your site

</comment><comment><USER50> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say. One big missing piece here is context. Attractive to whom? And in what context?

My site is all about minimalism - [https://www.anders.co/](https://www.anders.co/) \- it got an average score. And I guess that is fair. It was also compared to google.com, which I would say is anything but average.

</comment><comment><USER51> I achieved 60 (72% of users will like it) with my side-project[1] which is mostly an artwork, I believe its colorfulness helped the score a lot. I'd love for the algorithm to give me clear indications on what it believes I should improve, e.g. make this button wider, make the image bigger.

[1][https://bonfiretabletop.com](https://bonfiretabletop.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for your feedback. We will work on that. Very useful insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> my site [https://hackerspad.net](https://hackerspad.net) scored a 26 while the tool itself scored a 60. Furthermore, for both scores it says and I quote

      You can further improve it by using better images and considering little denser layout.

So as far as I think, we all have been had by this well designed funnel.

<comment><USER17> its definitely just a handful of scores and a handful of comments that get picked rather randomly. Just count the amount of "72%" posts in the comments here

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I had doubts about your tool, then I tried it on my site:

>84% of users are expected to like your site

I now think your tool is the best thing since sliced bread!

<comment><USER54> I got 23% and now I know for certain the whole thing ss a terrible idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The most popular website on the Internet gets a score of "good" with "60% of users may like it". [https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3JlZG...](https://myraah.io/index.php/visualmind/report/aHR0cDovL3JlZGRpdC5jb20=)

</comment><comment><USER56> [https://clojure.org/](https://clojure.org/) \--> 25%

[https://golang.org/](https://golang.org/) \--> 60%

As a Clojurist, and one who chooses languages based on the attractiveness of their homepage, I'm confused.

</comment><comment><USER57> Apparently my website ([https://annoying.technology](https://annoying.technology)) is as beautiful as the Cloudflare captcha page: [https://i.imgur.com/YNmSCkH.png](https://i.imgur.com/YNmSCkH.png)

</comment><comment><USER58> I don't know... my website looks "average" and only 30% will consider my website clean? My website is so minimalistic, that I think the score should be higher.

[https://marvinblum.de/](https://marvinblum.de/)

</comment><comment><USER59> This is neat, thank you for sharing.

I'm using the publii default theme on my website and it ranks quite high. It said to get an even higher ranking I should consider denser content, which makes sense given I just moved to publii and it's a bit light right now.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm getting visually stunning for [https://msb.com](https://msb.com) but I'm confused does it look only above the fold or the whole site? The screenshots only seem to show the top of the website

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment only above the fold. That is the first impression on the user. Algo works on first impression basis.

<comment><USER60> Ah cool, makes sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> [https://www.spacejam.com/](https://www.spacejam.com/) scores 72% of users liking that site. Okay. I guess it takes nastolgia into account...

I wonder how my geocities page from elementary school ranks?

</comment><comment><USER62> "The URL provided is not correct" \-- funny, it seems to work in a web browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Something must have went wrong. can you provide the site link. sometimes if some space is after the url while copy pasting can cause this error. Thanks for trying.

<comment><USER63> same here for multiple URLs that definitely work if pasted directly into the browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Well Google got only 38% and they are widely successful. So I guess this is all vanity.

<comment><AUTHOR> This algo only rates sites on how good visuals are not on utility. Google is a site where you go primarily for utility but ALGo says if you make your site like google only 38% of people are expected to like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> The categorization might need some calibration.

I got " Your website is better than 72% of millions+ websites analysed by Visual MIND AI" which implies above average.

Though it also spits out "your site is VERY GOOD". Doesn't quite gel with a 72th percentile score.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes u are right and thanks for the feedback. It's hard to say if you score is 72 out of 100 is it good very good or excellent.. we are just following what happens in the exam so 70% is good enough..not to be taken literally...moral of the story if score is above 60% the site is good...not to be taken as negative...

<comment><USER66> I guess this sort of depends on the sample set. If it was fed all webby award winners and sites from dribbble then scoring a 51 would be somewhat amazing. An exam has an absolute range given an absolute understood input. I suppose the weird thing here is that we don't know the inputs. If mainly HN and UX conscious forms have been using the system then 51 is also good.

I don't have an answer here but it got me thinking. Thanks for this demo! My company site scored a 72 and I might be happy about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> All I'm getting a generic info page without scores, and when I click the button to show my score, it shows "Error posting feed", taking me to the initial page. Is the app broken, or am I missing a catch?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pls try again. Sometimes when the model is not able to predict within certain time it gives that error.

Appreciate for highlighting this. We are fixing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> It seems like for this to be successful you'd want access to engagement/conversion data to train your model on. Google / Facebook would be positioned to execute on that, others less so.

</comment><comment><USER69> It assigns itself the same mediocre score of 60 as it does for Apple.com?

</comment><comment><USER70> High scores for my companies website [https://thewolf.co.nz](https://thewolf.co.nz)

Do I wonder how accurate this could be and what the training data is.

</comment><comment><USER71> Visual Mind summary report for [http://news.ycombinator.com](http://news.ycombinator.com)

56% of users are expected to like your site

<comment><USER72> Also:

 _Overall your site has good layout and visuals. You can further improve your score by using more vibrant images._

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I got score 42 and 60 on visual appearance. My site is just a black page with a content editable paragraph.

With only two likes of text, which looks something like

Notes

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Wtire your notes here

</comment><comment><USER74> I achieved a 84 (96% of users will like it) with my side project [1].

[1][https://smallsms.app](https://smallsms.app)

</comment><comment><USER75> Sadly the URL field didn't turn off corrections, so typing my own domain (my name, lowercase, concatenated) was a bit of a challenge on my iPad…

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Will improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> The score to aim for appears to be 38%.

[https://techbio.org](https://techbio.org) is reasonably close, with 44%

</comment><comment><USER30> Getting lots of good feedback, I think it's a fun idea and maybe with some effort it will turn into a winner for you. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER77> Why do people forget that AI is just a buzzword for some kind of pattern matching ? So it's obviously NOT able to evaluate "creative" capabilites because... well... creativity is about being DIFFERENT and not the same.

Moreover, a site like Facebook is attractive NOT because of its design (mainly) but because of the service it provides. So a Facebook designed clone will have no interest, even if it looks like Facebook.

To me, it looks like it's just the wrong tool for the problem to be solved

<comment><USER78> > So it's obviously NOT able to evaluate "creative" capabilites because... > well... creativity is about being DIFFERENT and not the same.

Neural nets can approximate any function as accurately as you'd like. Blindly shoving whole sites prelabled by their creativity into a convnet seems likely to end poorly, but that doesn't mean a better training method can't be applied which more faithfully represents the problem domain (no clue what the inside of this particular tool looks like, just commenting on the general infeasibility claim).

> So a Facebook designed clone will have no interest, even if it looks like > Facebook.

Doesn't this site just claim that appearances _also_ matter, not that a polished turd will be successful?

<comment><USER77> > just commenting on the general infeasibility claim

I agree: the main problem of "AI" is the knowledge base used. And the biais associated. Which mean that you can correct any biais by changing the reference... but introducing other biaises.

It would be possible to use such a tool either to focus on smaller tasks (let's say: focusing only on photo gallery of professional photographer websites) and be more specific (but less creative) or to grow the knowledge base to include paintings, architecture, object design to exact more general design principles (gestalt and so...)

In the end, the "AI" will be to create new "mixes" of different already used concepts... but I don't see how it would be able to create new concepts. The "AI" will - as much as I understand the technology - stay inside the space defined by it's knowledge base. If all the website of the knowledge base have only white or black background, the "AI" can't "think" to use a green background, because it doesn't have any inference mecanism to think of the background color as any color. It is limited to the background that was fed.

<comment><USER78> > In the end, the "AI" will be to create new "mixes" of different already used > concepts... but I don't see how it would be able to create new concepts. The > "AI" will - as much as I understand the technology - stay inside the space > defined by it's knowledge base. If all the website of the knowledge base > have only white or black background, the "AI" can't "think" to use a green > background, because it doesn't have any inference mecanism to think of the > background color as any color. It is limited to the background that was fed.

"AI" that does what we want is limited to whatever rules we impose on it. For a lot of problems the most efficient way to impose rules is to provide a set of samples and interpolate, but if we have _some_ way to meaningfully define creativity (which I don't think will be feasible in general any time in the near future, maybe ever) then we can produce an architecture which matches that definition (and if we're hung up on the generative portion of that, a trivial though expensive way to accomplish generation is to enumerate outputs and check if they match our definition for creativity).

"AI" isn't limited to the samples it's given; it's limited to the biases we impose. We can explicitly impose a bias that says hue matters if we so desire.

<comment><USER77> IMHO, "creativity" is all about breaking existing rules, replacing them partially or totally with others. In math, it's a new axiom set, allowing/forbidding new inferences. And it's also using analogies with other domains to find new intuitions and new deductions.

However, the main problem with creativity is not reducing the knowledge base, it's finding new knowledges to extend the knowledge space consistently. Sometimes enumeration or automatic generation can help... but in that case, it's "only" a fixed set of meta-rules

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Since this is ML-based, I'm getting the feeling that the real question this answers is: how _average_ is your website?

</comment><comment><USER80> [https://wattsupwiththat.com/](https://wattsupwiththat.com/) gets 96%.

</comment><comment><USER81> Doesn't work on my website: "The URL provided is not correct"

</comment><comment><USER82> Mine[0] scored 96%, so I'm pretty stoked, but I do have a background in visual design so maybe their AI looks at some of those standard conventions.

[0][http://mimix.io](http://mimix.io)

</comment><comment><USER83> Is this actually a problem people find themselves in?

</comment><comment><USER84> "Your website is visually GOOD"

Well thank you dear AI!

</comment><comment><USER85> How do you calculate the clarity score?

</comment><comment><USER86> [https://arpitbhayani.me](https://arpitbhayani.me)

66% of users are expected to like your site :D

</comment><comment><USER87> it gave my website 80.

<comment><USER51> May I ask what's your website?

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> www.bobbydreamer.com is 38%</comment>


Unraveling the linothorax mystery (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://jhupress.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/unraveling-the-linothorax-mystery-or-how-linen-armor-came-to-dominate-our-lives/ <comment><USER2> This is cool and all, love ancient armor, curious about the chemical similarity to cour bouilli (which actually seems to suck in comparison), I'm amused that SCA heavies cheap out with armor made of carpeting which sounds more accurate than ever, but

> While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) > convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still > felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and > Greg shot him.

Fuck! Don't shoot your fucking grad students! Buy a dummy, dress the dummy in the armor, and shoot the dummy. Dummies are _way_ cheaper than grad students. _Asshole_. I don't care if it was his idea as a grown adult, you loosed the arrow, you're responsible if anything goes wrong.

<comment><USER3> > Dummies are way cheaper than grad students.

It's painful to read a statement like that, knowing that HN is largely intolerant of jokes. Holding them back is very painful.

<comment><USER4> > HN is largely intolerant of jokes.

That has also been difficult for me. This cohort is sublimely brilliant in many ways and I treasure that, but it almost seems to be at the price of a sense of humor.

Another thing I've found is that simply asking questions often gets treated as an act of aggression. I have tried lots of ways of being more diplomatic and have failed completely. I will accept this as a shortcoming of my own, and I truly have attempted to be nicer somehow. My new solution is to ask them and just take the downvotes on the hopes that I also get a thoughtful answer. Doesn't work very well.

<comment><USER5> I think HN tolerance for jokes is exactly where it needs to be. Some good and non-obvious jokes make it through. Anything more would degrade into the stream of low effort humor which makes many other forums painful to read.

<comment><USER6> For those who weren't there and don't bear the scars, some keywords to Google:

      first post
      grits
      Natalie Portman
      in Soviet Russia...
      CowboyNeal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project."

Animal protein glues enjoy a lot of interesting uses to this day. One of the weirder ones is glue-chipped glass[0]. You roughen the surface of glass, spread hide glue with a high gram strength on it, and as the glue dries, it contracts, chipping out the glass leaving a neat texture. One has to be quite careful disposing of the glue/glass waste. Dogs will apparently eat that, to their considerable detriment.

Fish glue is also still available from luthier suppliers; it has a higher tack than hide glue.

My favorite glue for general woodworking is Old Brown Glue[1], which is a hide glue that's been modified to remain liquid at room temperature (it's still best applied warm though). It has a longer open time than hot hide glue (which is a gelatin at room temperature), while retaining all of the benefits of hide glues generally: reversability and low creep. For a neat demonstration of the reversability, I highly recommend his column veneering video [2].

I did a project with a large bent lamination, and I was looking into the modern adhesives people typically use. Unibond and epoxy both have pretty substantial health concerns. You don't typically use yellow glue (Titebond, etc) because they do have a lot of creep, which can lead to your lamination changing shape over time. I ended up using Old Brown Glue; it had enough open time to get the lamination in clamps. I'm happy to report that I'm still alive and all four legs of my dining room table still sit flat on the ground[3].

[0] [https://letterheadsignsupply.com/how-to-glue-chip-glass- inst...](https://letterheadsignsupply.com/how-to-glue-chip-glass-instructions) N.B.: You shouldn't sandblast with sand because of the risk of silicosis.

[1] [https://www.oldbrownglue.com](https://www.oldbrownglue.com)

[2] [https://www.oldbrownglue.com/index.php/articles/11-articles/...](https://www.oldbrownglue.com/index.php/articles/11-articles/10-master- class-low-tech-method-for-veneer-columns)

[3] [https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/gatelegtable/](https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/gatelegtable/)

<comment><USER8> Hello, fellow hide glue geek.

If you're not already familiar with it, here's a gem of a document called "Hide Glue in the Modern Workshop" [0].

I really like Old Brown Glue too, but shipping it from America is prohibitively expensive for me so I started cooking my own. My usual recipe is 0.2 parts urea, 1 part hide glue flakes, 1.5 parts water (by weight), heated to 60-70 degrees celsius, chilled rapidly, then heated again and chilled again (not sure why or if two heat and cooling cycles are necessary, but it works so I'm not trying to fix it). The result is indistinguishable from OBG.

I have also tried the "123" recipe of 1 part table salt, 2 parts glue flakes, 3 parts water (by volume) but it inhibits the gelling too much and the drying times are too long for my taste. However, it works better than the urea recipe in cooler temperatures.

I'll send an email to the address you have in your HN profile. Reply if you want to geek out about natural adhesives and woodworking in general.

[0] [https://emgw.org/resources/Documents/Meeting%20Presentations...](https://emgw.org/resources/Documents/Meeting%20Presentations/2016%2005%20Hide%20Glue%20in%20the%20Modern%20Workshop/Hide%20Glue%20in%20the%20Modern%20Workshop.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the historic version of this would have used boiled linseed oil as the resin rather than collagen glue.

<comment><USER8> I work with collagen glues and boiled linseed oil all the time, and they work great together. I have made wafer thin all-natural composite materials using wood fibers (thin plane shavings) as the substrate, hide glue to hold it together and thoroughly impregnated with boiled linseed oil with a beeswax top coat. The result is a rather strong material that's lightweight and thin enough to let light through.

It is plausible that they would have used boiled linseed oil instead of or in combination with hide glue or other materials commonly used in that era (bitumen, beeswax, etc).

<comment><USER7> Hi, I'm also a woodworker, and I'd love to see pictures of the material you're describing!

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, can't find a picture right now.

I call it "basket weave veneer", made by taking thin plane shavings, boiling them in a kettle and straightening them under weight and finally weaving them like a basket and applying some glue.

Using (liquid) hide glue is essential in this job. With a PVA glue, you'd end up with a blob of plastic. Unlike PVAs, hide glue doesn't interfere with the finish (BLO).

I did a few prototype sheets with the intent of making a lamp or lantern but never completed the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flax Fiber and flax oil (linseed oil) has been used in place of fiberglass to make boats. Kind of cool that the same plant makes both the fiber and the resin.

[http://compositesmanufacturingmagazine.com/2018/09/biocompos...](http://compositesmanufacturingmagazine.com/2018/09/biocomposites- encourage-innovative-applications/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Huh, the process sounds like an early form of the same process used to make carbon fiber.

</comment><comment><USER12> So now I wonder, why did the medevial era (at least knights) seemed to favor metal armors? I doubt it was less labour intensive, metal was harder to get for sure and it was probably way heavier. Was the knowledge forgotten? It seems unlikely but it might be so. Was the psychological effect of metal armor better wether at creating fear in the enemy or at creating a feeling of being safe? Would love to know more about this.</comment>


Making integrated circuits from uranium oxides - <AUTHOR> http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/pdf/WM01Semicond.pdf

<comment><USER2> zero value for industry for now... unbiassed review nonetheless</comment>


Older and Wiser? How Management Style Varies with Age - <AUTHOR> https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/older-and-wiser-how-management-style-varies-with-age/ <comment><USER2> How much is this about age vs generational differences?</comment>


PostSecret Pulls iOS App Over Abusive Submissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/02/creator-pulls-postsecret-ios-app-over-abusive-submissions/

<comment><USER2> "We even tried prescreening 30,000 secrets a day." and "99% of the secrets created were in the spirit of PostSecret."

Is there a point where even 30,000 quality secrets per day are going to be too overwhelming and better off screened somehow anyway?

I run sites with anonymous submissions and lose a lot of time screening some really offensive crap, but even with 30k decent submissions per _year_ , I'd be keen to filter those pretty strongly. e.g., if there is no expectation from users that they'll see everything decent that they submit, just approve the first x and flag the rest for later or never. Will even the most committed reader have time to go through 30k a day? As far as I understand PostSecret, they aren't really localised and probably not categorised, right?

<comment><USER3> It has been years since I visited the website, but I remember FMyLife.com simply displaying the "approved" posts to anonymous users. If you register, though, you can rate posts but also view the incoming queue. It seemed to be successful because I never saw spam in the anonymous view and the spam posts in the new queue seemed to already have marks against it. To me it doesn't seem like PostSecret would be any different, but maybe I'm missing something (possibly because it's an iOS app we're discussing).

Also, is anyone aware of any websites crowdsourcing moderation through Amazon's mturk? It seems like that might work and it sounds cheaper than moderating 30k secrets a day in house (but it would probably be less accurate).

<comment><USER4> Interesting idea to use optionally registered accounts for moderation; although I guess it kind of digresses from the point of anonymous posts.

Interesting idea to use mturk, it would probably be cost effective but the turn-around time may not make it feasible.

<comment><USER2> On one of my sites, a higher level of moderator has access to edit/delete while basic moderators (any regulars, basically) can "sin bin" a post for review/attention. Seems to work reasonably well in catching the worst posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be a general problem with anonymous posting venues. The amount of spam is often inversely proportional to the effort required to distribute the spam.

I wonder if the app's user community can fight against it by using a simple karma/points rule like on HN or Reddit. Too many down-votes and the post doesn't show up.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anonymity without moderation will tend toward the profane.

<comment><USER6> Especially when there's essentially no cost (time/money/etc) to post.</comment></comment>


Housing for a gazillion startups (Titan Missile Base) - <AUTHOR> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190162956846&category=1607 <comment><USER2> That's EXACTLY where I'm going to go hide when the zombies take over.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only way to win this auction is not to play.

</comment><comment><USER4> Y-Silo?</comment>


Echo JS - JavaScript News - <AUTHOR> http://www.echojs.com/ <comment><USER2> Things that annoy me on most forums are the clutter added by signatures, join date (which I always confuse with posting date), and the ubiquitous avatar.

I really enjoy that HN lacks these distractions, so the presence of the avatars at the posted site was a disappointment. Still, it was much better than most.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it?

Part of the appeal of HN is I get interesting stuff from all over (#) not just my niche.

TO do an HN, but have it on one niche seems missing the point.

(#) less of it now, these kids today, back when I were a lad ... shoebox .. motorway.

<comment><USER4> Well you are right when you say that's part of the appeal of HN. The thing is, that's part of the appeal for a hacker. I bet that for a JS professional, part of the appeal of this site is to have restrict the news just to that domain.

At the end, the success or failure of these kind of web sites tend to be more related to the community rather than the look or the features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please add yourself to the "Ask HN: like HN, for other disciplines/topics?" thread from yesterday - thanks!

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879>

</comment><comment><USER6> what's with JavaScript community to make everything end in "js"? You don't see Ruby guys ending every one of their product names in "rb" or Python guys in "py".

<comment><USER7> The NumPy, Scrapy and SciPy folks may disagree :)

<comment><USER8> don't forget the web.py folks!

<comment><USER7> And the ultimate: PyPy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apart from the fact that its JS only, how is it better than HN? Why not just use HN to follow topics you like (JS in this case)?

<comment><USER10> I think it's a simple matter of focus. One could extend your logic and say 'Why don't you get your tech news from NY Times instead of Hacker News, since they have a tech section in their website ?'

<comment><USER9> True, but making a NY Times-like website for tech news wouldn't work either. HN works for techies because its clean and simple, and the karma/upvote mechanism keep the content relevant. So there is a _difference_ from NY Times.

My question then remains, what is different?

<comment><USER11> The advantage is precisely the thing that you excluded, the focus on one technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The first thing this has me thinking is that it looks like a "subreddit" of HN. I'm surprised to not have seen or heard of a Reddit style site with HN voting rules on it.

<comment><USER13> HN voting rules? I thought reddit used the exact same voting system as HN.

<comment><USER14> Not quite, no. You can't downvote stories (only comments, when you reach an appropriate karma level) and the algorithms for story/comment decay seem to be wildly different.

<comment><USER15> Reddit downvoting is ridiculous at times. People just downvote whenever they see something they don't like or disagree with.

For example, anyone that dislikes {lang} will just downvote any {lang} article

vs

Reading the {lang} article and downvoting it if it's just linkspam

<comment><USER14> Hacker News isn't really that different- people flag the article instead of downvoting it, so it takes even fewer people to bury a story. It's happened more times than I can count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's all a little.... too large...

<comment><USER17> If you browse at 67% scale it looks exactly like HN

<comment><USER18> One problem with zooming to 67% is the comment text are too small to read for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> +1 for the effort. But there is already a project like that which you could have used for this purpose if your purpose was not to build something like HN but build something like HN for only JS: <https://github.com/SachaG/Telescope>

This would have saved a lot of programming effort.

<comment><USER20> There is a 'source code' link at the bottom that leads to <https://github.com/antirez/lamernews>, which looks mostly the same with a different stylesheet, so I think they did save that effort ;)

And FWIW, Telescope may preserve the functionality of HN, but I like the design a lot less (though the Echo design could use some work).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The design in a little (more than a little, tbh) overwhelming. But that's cool for v.0.11.0

<comment><USER22> It's horrible: big fonts, 100% wide and awful spacing of elements. Gives me a headache just reading it. I like the topic though. Hope a designer can jump in and improve the overall experience.

<comment><USER23> I hope it stays ugly and keeps people who care about this away. Will improve the quality of the contributions I think.

<comment><USER24> I'm sorry, what? You want front end designers (a major use-case for JavScript) to be disgusted enough to stay away?

<comment><USER23> I am a software engineer who writes a lot of JavaScript and I care about software engineering topics. I am not interested in the latest jQuery library or basic JavaScript howtos and I want more meaningful discussions about JavaScript libraries than "wow nice!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A thought: I think you're doing it wrong if you think of yourself as an "X" programmer. Because those X's will come and go over the years.

<comment><USER20> But those X's do exist, if only temporarily. At any given time, you probably are an X programmer, and a community around X is useful to you. People may drop in and out, but it's still a (potentially) valuable resource.

<comment><USER25> > it's still a (potentially) valuable resource.

Indubitably!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There are barely any comments. Oh btw, I couldn't figure out how to add one anyway. If that requires registration... make it obvious.

</comment><comment><USER27> I had to do a double take, I thought somebody had registered a domain using my first initial and last name (echolis).

Need coffee....

</comment><comment><USER28> No RSS feed?

<comment><USER29> Bottom of the page : <http://www.echojs.com/rss></comment></comment>


Parsing PDFs in Python with Tika - <AUTHOR> https://cbrownley.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/parsing-pdfs-in-python-with-tika/ <comment><USER2> PDF is easily the worst document format I have ever worked with. I worked on a project that fed the contents of PDF files into Lucene to create a full text index. It was a sheer nightmare to extract text from those. Tika worked but a lot of documents still converted to garbled text. I ended up using 4 different PDF to text converters and scored their results by the percentage of known words they returned. That was a few years ago. I'd be curious if things have improved by now.

<comment><USER3> We've had good luck with "pdftotext" from poppler/xpdf. The only things that were garbled were intentionally obfuscated. (The files had a mangled character encoding table that was added to the pdf to prevent copy/paste.)

You're also gonna have problems with all-image pdfs (scans) that have low quality OCR results layered on top of them.

If you want to decode tables, "pdftotext -layout" is a good starting point. If you need more detail, try "pdftohtml -xml -fullfontname".

<comment><USER2> Now that you mention it I remember pdftotext usually proficed the best results and also was several times faster than tika.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the direct link to the library (Apache License v2):

[https://github.com/chrismattmann/tika- python](https://github.com/chrismattmann/tika-python)

Good, simple getting started documentation.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://tika.apache.org/](http://tika.apache.org/)

[https://pdfbox.apache.org/](https://pdfbox.apache.org/)

[http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/May/119](http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2016/May/119) [CVE-2016-2175] Apache PDFBox XML External Entity vulnerability</comment>


How Many Books Are There in the World? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.discogs.com/en/how-many-books-are-there-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.worldcat.org](http://www.worldcat.org)</comment>


Configuring routing for MetalLB in L2 mode - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kvaps/configuring-routing-for-metallb-in-l2-mode-7ea26e19219e <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I just wrote a new article about MetalLB routing configuration in Kubernetes</comment>


Federated git - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/4437 <comment><USER2> Related:

      - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517
      - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/44486
      - https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/4437
      - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/184
      - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1612

I can only imagine how great it would be to have all these forge federated not only with each other, but with the whole ActivityPub network (Mastodon & co.) as well…</comment>


Verizon kills the SMS market singlehandedly - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2008/10/us_aggregators_stunned_at_verizons_003_mt_transaction_fees_increase.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping to read that "kills the SMS market" meant _finally_ one of the carriers destroyed the market in the sense that it was now free and all other carriers would have to follow suit. :(

</comment><comment><USER3> If only in killing it they would inadvertently spur the development of an alternative... It seems to me that there are almost enough smart phones on the market that an alternative (free) messaging protocol could get a foothold, and if it gained traction there the mobile service providers could no longer ignore demand for cost-free messaging.

This is probably just wishful thinking though. :(

</comment><comment><USER4> Verizon has backtracked on the issue. It was just a "proposal" for discussion. Sure...

Here's the latest directly from the horse's mouth:

"As Verizon Wireless continues to review the competitive marketplace, we constantly work to provide additional value to our customers, employees and other stakeholders.

We are currently assessing how to best address the changing messaging marketplace, and are communicating with messaging aggregators, our valued content partners, our technology business partners and, importantly, our friends in the non-profit and public policy arenas.

To that end, we recently notified text messaging aggregators - those for- profit companies that provide services to content providers to aggregate and bill for their text messaging programs - that we are exploring ways to offset significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text messages each month.

Specific information in one proposal, which would impose a small per-message fee on for-profit content aggregators for commercial messages, has been mistakenly characterized as a final decision to implement. We don't envision this type of change to in any way affect non-profit organizations or political and advocacy organizations.

We have not increased the per-message cost to aggregators since our messaging service began in 2003, and we have never envisioned a cost to consumers or content companies, but rather on content aggregators themselves. That draft was intended to stimulate internal business discussions and in no way should have been been released to the public and represented as a final document.

At Verizon Wireless, we strive to provide our messaging customers with maximum value, and work to implement business decisions that encourage the use of messaging between individuals and organizations in both the marketplace of ideas and the commercial marketplace, and we will continue to strongly encourage the use of our services by charitable organizations as they perform their good works."

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh well, over here in the UK it's way more expensive than that, and has always been so.

And the SMS services industry in the UK is absolutely thriving! Let me see... there's... SMS ringtones... SMS porn... that's about it I think.

Yeah, ok, fair enough, "kill" is not an exaggeration.

<comment><USER6> SMS ringtones and SMS porn are all premium services and naturally are not be affected by a 3 cent transaction fee. This hurts companies that send out free opt in SMS alerts and subsidize them with advertising at the bottom of the message. Up until now, their model was to build up scale which gets them a lower per message fee with the aggregators. However even with large volumes their margins are a few cents at best. This 3 cent "transaction fee" kills them.

<comment><USER7> Porn in 160 characters?

<comment><USER8> Back when phones with monochrome displays were common, I did indeed see adverts for pornographic wallpapers, which, as far as I know, were submitted via specially encoded SMS. These days I'm guessing they use MMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kind of an exaggerated headline. They might be killing the market for bulk messaging by businesses to users, but not the _whole SMS market_... the majority of which is user-to-user and already more expensive than 4 cents per SMS.

</comment><comment><USER10> SMS will be fine, more popular than ever even. SMS advertising/marketing to VZW customers may have some trouble, which I'm not mad about.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this affects texts sent via an email->SMS gateway. I'm working on a small project that uses SMS, but we're just emailing them to email@example.com.

<comment><USER10> It quite obviously does not. Who would they send the bill to?

<comment><USER11> I'm sure there's a team of Verizon folks somewhere trying to figure out a way :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder to what extent this will put a dent in Twitter.

<comment><USER8> Well, Europe recently lost its Twitter SMS service. I'm guessing they'll move to a premium plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anybody with legal knowledge - Would this allow a dissatisfied customer to prematurely cancel his Verizon contract?

<comment><USER14> It's not a change in billing to _you_ , so I doubt it would apply. Unless by "customer," you mean "bulk SMS business customer."</comment></comment>


Tilt-Controlled Slider - <AUTHOR> http://mdznr.com/rcos/?p=TiltControlledBrushedMetalSliderKnob About my open source implementation of the tilt-controlled slider found in the iOS 6 Music app. <comment><USER2>
      > Apple's implementation is also backwards. [...]
      > You'll notice that when changing the roll of the knob,
      > the shines rotate in the same direction (against the roll)

It's dependent upon whether the source of light is on the same or opposite side of the surface normal as you are. Try it again with the light source behind you and you will see Apple's implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right on whether the source of light is on the same or opposite side. I'm assuming the light is coming from above you and with respect to the view, in front of it. <http://mdznr.com/bJ> The way, I think, you're talking about is if the light were to be coming from the user's chest (certainly not what's expected and not in the HIG).

The part that's backwards about Apple's implementation is that tilting the device (roll) should rotate the shines and tilting the device (pitch) should change the size of the shines. Apple's rotates on pitch and changes size on roll.

<comment><USER2> Coming from the user's chest isn't expected, but imagine a reading chair with the lamp over the user's shoulder, behind the chair. Same direction and a common scenario that I can imagine reproducing in software. How often do people place floor lamps directly in front of their chair?

If Apple's HIG says that the light source should always be directly ahead of you, then you are certainly correct. However, if straight ahead is 0 degrees then you can reproduce the opposite behavior (the effects of pitch and roll get swapped) by having the light source at 90 degrees (reading light beside the chair's right arm). The direction of shine rotation on the knob is reversed by having the light source 180 degrees from its current position (reading light beside the chair's left arm).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks pretty, although it seems a little bit excessive to me (others might have a different oppinion).

Just one thing: I think you would benefit from hosting yout videos in a way that can be streamed. Not everyone has QuickTime installed, so having to download .mov videos is kind of annoying

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I'm uploading to Vimeo now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's my implementation from June 2012: <https://github.com/danielamitay/DAAnisotropicImage>

I like how you're only re-drawing if the motion change passes a threshold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I will have to check out your implementation. Has anyone contacted you about using it in their app?

<comment><USER4> I've found two apps using it so far.

That's the thing: I wish more people would notify you when they use your open source stuff. Attribution means less to me than simply knowing that it's being used.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. It's a pretty great feeling that you've contributed– not necessarily that you're getting credit for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cards Against Containers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cardsagainstcontainers/deck <comment><USER2> why the 'answers' are a bunch of meaningless names? is this to be played only in one specific company where those names mean something?</comment>


"War is what happens when language fails". Iraq, 10 years on, why wars are wrong - <AUTHOR>

10 years ago, at 9:34 P.M, 19 March EST, the surprise military invasion of Iraq began. War was not formally declared until the 20th. My site - through the use of provocative pictures and amazing quotes, looks at what the most inspiring people think of war, and why it is such a waste.
http://getinspired365.com/20130319
Please note: some pictures may cause distress. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable - <http://getinspired365.com/20130319></comment>


Show HN: Bitcoin Bleep - Bitcoin Price in an iOS Badge - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/bitcoinbleep/id645213654?mt=8 We built this to embrace the invisible interface philosophy. We hope you find it handy. <comment><USER2> Basic but it does what it says on the tin. I'll be downloading this later. I have a few questions.

Are there any options to customize its output?

Maybe this'll become clearer once I have a play, i noticed in the pictures that you use push notifications, what would the drain on your battery be like given that the prices will always fluctuate?

 _edit_ I downloaded it (Uk App store) but it does not look like what you have in your screenshots. I can see a single refresh button with the basic mtgox API price information displayed. There are no options for me to customize notifications or button text either.</comment>


New mobile game from the creators of Space Quest - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cluck-yegger/id540712349?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> As the developer, ask me anything. I worked with Mark Crowe's 3D creations and Scott Murphy's story to create a fun classic-style arcade game. We're all looking forward to the new SpaceVenture game coming up!

Interesting trivia: The game requires 90MB of RAM to run.</comment>