Ask HN: What are some hard coding projects I could create? - <AUTHOR> So I want to push my coding skills. I've spent more than enough time on coding challenge sites now and implemented enough datastructures/algorithms. I've developed enough simple Saas sites. I want to start doing something useful and challenging.
I've thought about writing a database, but the world really has enough databases already. I've messed with compilers, but the world has enough languages out there already.
I have no itches out there I feel I need to scratch, I just enjoy coding.
What are some other challenging projects out there that aren't already over-saturated with implementations? <comment><USER2> You are welcome to hack on postgresql! From making queries faster (better plans, computing on graphic cards, column-stores,compiling queries) to making better the storage engine (column store, tokudb-like stores etc) to new type of indexes to new type of queries (ex increment jsonb fields even if they dont exist) to sharding it (and even different types of sharding (pg_shard, pg-xl)) to lowering the overhead (each row has 22bytes of overhead!) to so many different things that are listed here: [https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo).

</comment><comment><USER3> Must the hard part be about coding?

There are plenty of projects with hard challenges. I'm working with live videostreaming using WebRTC and I've come across plenty of problems I don't want to touch with a ten-foot pole - my approach is exactly opposite yours, I want to go along the path of least resistance and leverage existing infrastructure as much as I can.

The Mozilla team welcomes contributions, maybe you can ask to help on the WebRTC team?

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/contribute/)

Also Chromium or the WebRTC team:

[http://www.webrtc.org/contributing](http://www.webrtc.org/contributing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Coding is what I enjoy and I am getting bored of writing stuff that no longer challenges me.

Thanks for the suggestion, that is a great idea! I will look into them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want a challenge get into computer vision projects like image processing, image enhancement or video processing work etc. There are some hard problems to solve. You could start by picking an existing algorithm that people like to use but it takes too long to process and see how you can make it better.

Or if you want a change, write firmware, drivers or other low level code that is tough to do right and most require significant design, thought and testing. IoT projects all need this type of work.

Another idea, work on distributed computing problems, they are still ripe for innovation and problem solving. If you want a real challenge, combine all three of my points.

I personally moved away from web development overall as while I get it can be fun, I am just tired of it. I like doing the backend and solving scalability issues, distributed issues, but designing, writing and handling web forms etc is just not anything I care to do on a regular basis anymore.

At the same time on a non-technical level, I am personally expanding on my marketing work as I have always done really well there so it is fun to help others with it. But you mentioned coding specifically, so I know you are focused there, but you might keep an open mind to what you can do outside of it too for a challenge.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should learn a new language, a weird one that isn't like others you have used, e.g. if you have only ever done object oriented stuff learn a functional language. I spend some of my free time just learning new, mostly impractical languagess, and I have found that new ideas come through from the text at hand, or from thinking about problems in a different fashion.

I suggest J, Erlang, and Idris. The first two have been around a while and have a good set of larning utilities. Idris on the other hand has a little more stuff going on, but learning about dependent type systems is fun. For me at least.

J: [http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm](http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm)

Erlang: [http://learnyousomeerlang.com/](http://learnyousomeerlang.com/)

Idris: [http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/index.html](http://docs.idris- lang.org/en/latest/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not so sure - I'm already languages junky. There comes a time when you have to stop learning new languages and start using what you know to create stuff.

Idris is on my list already, but J actually looks really interesting. I've only really seen it used in Code Golf before. Might have a little play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Image segmentation under occlusion. Email me if you'd like to discuss: alexander.s.farley at gmail.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for responding. Yes, a lot of interesting stuff there. Looks like a great rabbit hole to fall down!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, you want to push your coding skills...to what end? Become more hire-able? Make (a little) more money? Make something to show HN? Once you dig deep and find your reason why you want to push your coding skills, optimize toward that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fortune and glory - if I'm being completely honest.

<comment><USER3> But do you value fortune more, or glory more? King or rich?

[https://gigaom.com/2007/12/10/do-you-want-to-be-rich-or- be-t...](https://gigaom.com/2007/12/10/do-you-want-to-be-rich-or-be-the-king/)

[http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5543.html](http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5543.html)

<comment><USER8> Are Kings poor? They seem pretty well off.

But I digress, that's just a naive interpretation. It seems like the articles are more about issues of boundaries and control of the company.

<comment><USER3> From the original poster's comments, I thinks he values being recognized and technical archievements over founding a VC-funded crappy SaaS and becoming rich :) , and he might be looking for a well-paid technical position where he can work on hard problems. I might be wrong :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A system that auto-generates requests for hard coding projects perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER10> Cocos2d-x game engine always needs help: [https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x](https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x)

</comment><comment><USER11> do you want to make money, help the world or just code something hard? I think the first two (with emphasis on the second) are(should be) way more important to a coder.

<comment><AUTHOR> All 3!

I want to challenge myself and become a better coder so I can create stuff that is useful for people, which in turn would land me a better paid job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> maybe pick an open source project to start fixing bugs?. the challenge* is how many you can fix and get accepted by the maintainers.

*I realize this is not a purely coding oriented challenge. but it seems a worthy one if you're bored and are looking for something challenging do. also, bugs fixed + accepted counts toward resume fodder

</comment><comment><USER13> how about trying to make a project that provides some service and figure out how to automate getting new users for that project. That is quite a challenge

</comment><comment><USER14> strong AI.</comment>


Delta debuts free Main Cabin meals in 12 markets - happy-go-lucky http://news.delta.com/delta-debuts-free-main-cabin-meals-12-markets <comment><AUTHOR> "Debuts", really? "Enhancement"? This is a _restoration_ of what used to be standard decades ago before airlines became cheapskates. Do not let the marketing fool you; they made flying "less crappy".</comment>


Write – A React-based writing app to counteract writer's block and distraction - <AUTHOR> http://write.surge.sh/ <comment><USER2> Please, not another web-based writing app that is useless without an Internet connection.</comment>


Facebook Starting Salaries: What Tech Professionals Can Expect - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/06/27/facebook-starting-salaries-tech/ <comment><USER2> I can't vouch to how accurate it is, but I found levels.fyi interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are people really interested in working for facebook in this climate?

<comment><USER4> I am knees deep in debt and have to take care of ill family member. More money solves 99.9% of my problems

<comment><USER5> Right? I'm getting downvoted but I can't stand it when people born in the west think their morals matter in the name of surviving and first generation success. Yeah downvote me, most people would STILL work for facebook me included. That's a damn good pay cheque.

<comment><USER6> I would not work at Facebook regardless of the paycheck. Granted I doubt they want a conservative veteran working for them so the feeling is mutual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Somehow as per my experience, I feel quite different when it comes to trusting the same company, when I'm a user, and when I'm the employee. I find it easier to be an employee of the company that quite a few users find fishy, but I get it why some would trust it even less to be good to the workers that they pay, when they are bad to the users that pay them.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure the stock grant is vested over 4 years. So quoting the full stock as year 1 compensation isn't accurate.

</comment><comment><USER9> The bonus number is inflated by the intern signing bonus - which can be anywhere from $65k to $100k.

It's usually better to just _ask people_ rather than using average salary data like this. Most people don't negotiate and get very standard offers.

<comment><USER10> I think there's still room for compiling aggregate salary data. I'm from levels.fyi and we get emails all the time about how folks were able to negotiate higher based on our data. We're entirely crowdsourced which admittingly can lead to accuracy issues occasionally. So far, feedback from both companies and users has been that are numbers are quite accurate. I think one of the most important features we recently released has been the Salary band pages which show the full spectrum of compensation at a particular level: [https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Facebook/SE/E3/](https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Facebook/SE/E3/)

I acknowledge we're not perfect, but would love feedback to help us improve. Majority of the site has been built based on feedback we've collected.

<comment><USER9> As a former new grad, the YoE and prior experience makes a difference in these aggregate numbers even within a particular level. If these were more granular it would be better, but it probably gets better with higher levels.</comment></comment></comment>


The Case for Writing Network Drivers in High-Level Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06344 <comment><USER2> I think I'd lose it if I had to npm update before installing a device driver.</comment>


B&N opens up the Nook with Developer program - <AUTHOR> https://nookdeveloper.barnesandnoble.com/?ui=desktop <comment><USER2> I've got an original Nook that I like, the eInk is great for readability, I was initially hesitant as to what to think about the Nook Color since it loses the readability advantage over traditional tablets. So now that B&N is opening up the Nook Color with an SDK I'm a little more excited about it. But what I'm really curious about is, does B&N make a profit off the hardware sales or is it a loss leader for ebook sales (is it the razor or the blade)? If B&N makes money on the hardware it will have a nice new revenue stream as ebooks gradually supplant traditional print books, but if they take a loss on each unit hoping to recoup via ebook sales the platform may not have a long lifespan if they discontinue it due to everybody rooting the thing for a cheap Honeycomb tablet with no more vendor lock in.

<comment><USER3> I don't think they're taking a loss on it. They could easily have put up a few speedbumps to hacking it if they cared, like not unconditionally booting off the SD card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just signed up and looked around the site. But I don't quite understand the platform. Is the Nook an eReader that happens to also be an android tablet? What does the Nook SDK provide? I didn't see any docs on the site.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the Nook Color is essentially an android tablet. Along with eBooks, book store, and web browsing, it has an "Extras" area which currently features a limited selection of apps (Pandora, photo gallery, crossword, chess, sudoku, mp3 player). Barnes and Noble will be launching a moderated version of the Android App store (along with Flash capabilities) in an update sometime this month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, their color Nook gets an SDK after a few months. And their Eink ones _still_ have nothing. Why no love, B&N?

<comment><USER2> I'd guess it's because it's a completely different architecture, eInk is such a niche use that the engineering resources needed to provide an SDK probably outweighs the development community that would make use of it. The Nook Color on the other hand has a huge development base and the SDK heavy lifting has been done already via the underlying Android platform.

<comment><USER6> The E-ink one is Android-based too: <http://nookdevs.com/Nook></comment></comment></comment>


Wordpress on Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://young-journey-5257.herokuapp.com

<comment><USER2> Not exactly the same, but you can use BitNami and the AWS free tier (disclaimer, I am a developer) to deploy Wordpress with one click

<http://bitnami.org/stack/wordpress#cloudImage>

</comment><comment><USER3> As Heroku has a Postgres backend, I imagine you could also install PG4WP (<http://www.hawkix.net/tag/pg4wp/>) which is a plugin to get Wordpress working with Postgres DBs, and just deploy directly using Heroku alone.

You may run into problems with any other plugins which use MySQL specific SQL syntax though.

</comment><comment> bjelkeman-again It would be very interesting to see how something like this compares to running Wordpress at <http://wpengine.com>

<comment><USER4> wpengine sounds really expensive. $49/month for just 50k pageviews. My $39/month Linode setup handles a million page views with no sweat.

<comment><USER5> That is not a very good comparison, linode as you know does not provide the same feature set nor does it have WordPress devs on hand to help.

<comment><USER6> Even so, $49 a month is a LOT of money for not that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://evening-beach-7140.herokuapp.com/> # This is my install steps ( Install Wordpress on Heroku )

</comment><comment><USER8> You guys seem to ignore the fact the Mysql addon costs $70/month on Heroku.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is killer for small wordpress sites. You essentially get free custom domain hosting until it hits a traffic level where it needs something more significant, then you can re-evaluate your options.

</comment><comment><USER10> You could also use git-svn to checkout the latest release branch:

<http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1>

and then deploy to Heroku directly using git.

<comment><USER5> One of WordPress's devs maintains a WordPress github updated every 30 minutes, so even easier.

<https://github.com/markjaquith/WordPress>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is cool, I'd wonder how many wordpress plugins are prepared to work with a read-only filesystem.

<comment><USER12> On the Cedar stack, the slug is still read-only, but the ephemeral filesystem is writable. The slug is what gets deployed on each new dyno spawned. The ephemeral filesystem is the individual file system on each dyno. So a plugin like WP Super Cache would be able to write to the file system, but that cache would only exist for the individual dyno that wrote it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Plugins and themes cannot currently be installed through /wp-admin due to the PHP not having a zlib extension. Installation via git works fine though.

<comment><USER14> With Heroku you can only write to /tmp from your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great but, whats the best way to store attachments ?

<comment><USER16> You could use a WP plugin that stores them on Amazon S3. It's not free, but it's like < $1 month for normal blog needs.

<comment><USER17> The only plugin available explicitly states (on the Settings page, after you install and avtiavate it) that it doesn't upload directly to S3. It has to upload to your server first.

edit: actually, I think the upload to S3 button is different from upload media button. That's why I didn't see it.</comment></comment></comment>


That 3am security call about Apache Kafka - <AUTHOR> https://lenses.io/blog/2020/05/security-call-kafka-security-visibility-and-incident-investigation/ <comment><USER2> Haha...Security Breach reference. I loved that southpark! [https://southpark.cc.com/clips/410450/security- breach](https://southpark.cc.com/clips/410450/security-breach)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice one!</comment>


Ask HN: How Much Can I Scrape? - <AUTHOR> I am working on a financial software project. I have written code in Python to get all of the historical price data for each stock in the S&P 500. I have tested the code using an input file of five ticker symbols and the code runs perfectly. I would like to get data for all 500 stocks in the S&P 500, however, I don't know if collecting this much data would go well with Yahoo. I have implemented my program so that it only sends out one request per minute, but I am still worried about turning my system loose.<p>Has anyone else done something similar? For the people who own their own sites, how do you view scraping? Should I contact someone at Yahoo first? <comment><USER2> Disguise your scrapes as a browser, so include an Explorer or Firefox browser ID string. Randomize the times between scrapes, so it looks more like a human being doing it. Make sure the scraper takes "coffee breaks" every now and then. Run the service from several servers at once, if you have them. I would guess your program is fairly low overhead (mine always have been) so contact friends and ask to use their server or home PCs. Extra credit for designing a cloud-like infrastructure where PCs could come-and-go without missing any data :)

<comment><USER3> Might be easier just to use Tor than to use multiple servers. I think the only thing that will matter is # of requests per IP address per time period. It won't be a human looking at the logs, it'll be an automated process, so it's unlikely that randomizing the time between scrapes will matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How far back? EOData (<http://eoddata.com/>) has 15 years of pricing information for $20 for a number of exchanges, which would certainly save time and isn't horribly expensive for what you get.

<comment><USER5> From my experience the only reliable source of historical stock data is the exchange source. Nasdaq.com records go back to January 2nd, 1990.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hate to be obvious, but reading their API terms of service might be a good place to start...

</comment><comment><USER3> If you contact someone at Yahoo, the response will be, do not scrape us in any way.

The problem with financial data is that Yahoo (like most other sites where you might find this data) doesn't generate this data themselves. They license it from other companies, and the licensing agreement typically prohibits or greatly restricts Yahoo's ability to provide the data to third parties.

That said, if Yahoo is not aware that you are scraping them, they cannot stop you. They certainly do have anti-scraper algorithms (you will start getting http 999 errors) but they will not kick in until you cross some invisible threshold. You can probably use Tor with no problem.

Although, if you get large enough that someone notices, you will probably get some sort of cease & desist letter. Depending on your goals that might not be a problem for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> I did this exact same thing a few years ago only stripping the data from nasdaq.com using Perl. I used to hit their site once every 2 seconds times roughly 2500 stocks every day for about 6 months. I would only grab as much data as I needed. They never contacted me or blocked my IP address. I also had a friend who was doing the same thing for a longer period of time.

From experience, I would not recommend getting your data from Yahoo. I looked at them first, but their data is just not as good as the source.

If you would like more information or my notes on how I reverse-engineered the nasdaq.com URL scheme please send me an email.

<comment><USER5> I updated my profile with my email address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I had a site that was scrape-worthy, I wouldn't care about it if the people were respectful about it (wait a second or to in between requests, don't hammer my server).

From the business side, I could see them getting a bit grumpy about it, but if it's publicly available information, and there's nothing in their TOS about it, I don't see how they could do anything about it - again, unless you're being a dick with your scraper.

Does anyone know off the top of their head if there are any relevant court cases dealing with scraping?

</comment><comment><USER8> I've downloaded all the data they have for s&p 500 many times (I did it with processes, spawned one donwload about every 0.1 seconds). They block your connections if you download too fast.

If they give out csv exports as they do there is no reason why someone wouldn't download them and use them for personal use.

I guess you already know about the CSV download but if you don't, here is a link about it: <http://www.diytraders.com/content/view/25/43/>

I would however never ever use them in commercial product if that's what you are asking.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're really concerned about it you can go through an anonymizing proxy service. But, as has been said, if you have the time, spacing out your requests should work fine too.

</comment><comment><USER10> I got blocked during RailsRumble for pulling too much from Y! Finance. We did not have the time to throttle it.

You should at least try to email them and see if your restrictions can be loosened.

</comment><comment><USER11> We scraped Yahoo Mail for about 6 months quite heavily. We had to keep it at a >5 minute timer otherwise we got captchas during the auth process, or we got locked out for 24 hours with error 999.

We now have a formal agreement with Yahoo, but during the process Yahoo indicated they had an informal open policy on scraping. Note that they have an initiative to open up all services within the next year or so (google Yahoo Open Strategy to read more about timelines).

</comment><comment><USER12> 1 request per a minute I don't think yahoo would even notice.

<comment><USER13> True, but they might notice 1440 requests in the same day from the same IP.

<comment><USER14> actually the way i worked around this with both yahoo and google was to roundrobin my requests over a list of 1500 publicly available proxy servers :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> biddersedge v. ebay is particularly interesting, as is verticalone.com, now yodlee.com.

Trespass to chattels is an old roman law which dictates what should be done if you tresspass on my land and hurt one of my cattle, and it is used as the core of most cases involving scraping in unauthenticated environments (like Y! finance). They can come get you, not for taking data, but for costing them money to support the response volumes you demand. The magic number is $5,000, at which time it becomes a felony (or at least that was the threatening rhetoric, which is a different story altogether). You scrape, hurt their cow for 5k, and it is not a question of restitution, but of punishment. And in each case the scraper is typically viewed as a "thief"... not a label that inspires lighter punishments. see:www.biddersedge.com, yeah, exactly. nuked from orbit... and there, in a nutshell, is the risk inherent in scraping. All a scrapee has to do is wait for you to pass $5k... while they consider the pr ramifications of the whole thing... how much bandwidth and resources need to be used before the public will sympathize? 10k? 20k? 30k before they are lauded as a hero for removing the thieving vermin?

Insidious really, scraping and scrapers are being "set up the bomb" here... to not be viewed as enabling the liberation of data, but rather as thieves of the resources necessary to deliver that data to the general public. Using trespass to chattels as a precedent is therefore a brilliant stroke... apparently, they can be taught. Or, to put it another way, scrapers aren't napster users in dorm rooms, they are felony thieves of public resources.

Yeah, we all know that cease and desist and all other legal remedies are jurisdictionally challenged - the net doesn't stop at international borders. And, historically, it seems that other countries turn a deaf ear to most cyber crime excepting, of course, for credit card fraud.

Also, limit scraping via tor. Tor has a legitimate use which scraper volumes would impact. Of course, there are tor nets set up for "illegitimate" use... and they let anybody in, including folks like me, who then map all tor exit nodes used by scrapers and interdict em all...

And, don't forget steganography... you take data (even through tor or rotating proxies) and redisplay it, google can find it and I can ask google to tell me where it is. Scrapers, even as very clever data middlemen, will get the squeeze from both sides as scrapees discover where their data is being displayed and utilize legal means to go after those storefronts, who will of course first provide name, rank and serial number of the scraper that provided them the data...

And what about copyrights? Lots of legal precedent here, be careful with image redisplay. Mine field here...

</comment><comment><USER16> This might help: [http://blog.screen-scraper.com/2007/03/01/how-to-surf-and- sc...](http://blog.screen-scraper.com/2007/03/01/how-to-surf-and-screen- scrape-anonymously/)

</comment><comment><USER17> what kind of data do you want? real-time? or end of day? If you just want end of day data, it is simple. Just write a script that collects it in the middle of the night and stores it in your database. I don't think they mind at all if you just do it once a day for all of the stocks - I know people who have been doing it for years. They use this:

<http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm>

If you want real-time data, good luck. It will cost you.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't think you have anything to worry about. I've scraped Yahoo finance before at about a 1 second request rate, using perl's YahooFinance module.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do not crawl too fast with yahoo, otherwise you will get 999 error -- which mean you will be banned temporarily.

Search 'yahoo 999' for details.</comment>


Cool Hacking : [Facebook] Find Who Deleted/Added You - <AUTHOR> http://ken-soft.com/2011/08/05/facebook-find-who-deletedadded-you/

<comment><AUTHOR> can you FB like it if you find it useful ? =)

thank you</comment>


Netflix Has 76,000 Secret Movie Categories - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/news/a18888/netflix-hack-genre-list/ <comment><AUTHOR> Someone pastebinned the list before the takedown if you find it valuable: [http://pastebin.com/RgKZuDLq](http://pastebin.com/RgKZuDLq)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you find reading tech whitepapers conceptually useful? - rajesh-s Or is it intended to be a product marketing brochure of sorts? For example, https://hubs.ly/H0r91td0<p>If you find them useful, do you have any tips for new students stepping into the industry on reading whitepapers. <comment><AUTHOR> It depends on the whitepaper in my opinion. While many do come across as marketing material, but the concepts and technologies can give a good insight into how others are achieving advancements in these concepts.</comment>


'Yours Network' to Use Bitcoin in Competition Against Steemit - <AUTHOR> https://news.bitcoin.com/yours-network-bitcoin-steemit/ <comment><USER2> Why don't these people ever actually have a working site before announcing it to the world? Genuinely curious.</comment>


ITunes just deleted all the music on my iPhone after downloading a podcast - <AUTHOR> http://ryanangilly.com/post/707963342/itunes-just-deleted-all-the-music-on-my-iphone

<comment><USER2> Maybe you pushed a wrong button or set a wrong option. Just sync your music again and you're back in business.

<comment><AUTHOR> it was a free podcast that i downloaded from iTunes on the phone. no syncing was involved.</comment></comment>


Searching Email Addresses on Facebook will show User Profiles - <AUTHOR> http://code.enginezombie.com/post/29726585968/searching-email-addresses-on-facebook-even-for

<comment><USER2> It used to be the default way of finding your friends, before they introduced the whole 'give us your email account info to login and get all your contacts' feature. I use it all the time as well to check people from craigslist or other coldcalls. In fact, it's just about the only thing I still have an FB login for.

With all the discussions about privacy in the last couple years I am a little surprised at how many common sense approaches people seem to overlook or at least not implement. i.e. always have an email address for business, one personal/social (maybe these are separate), etc. and use them accordingly. The rest is up to you as far as how much access you allow to your profile, how willing you are to give up your real name to the service, and similar problems. Seems to me people have much more to fear from big data than someone who already has your email address being able to see your name and public profile pic.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has always been a feature. It's useful when you want to find a friend with a common name that you know personally. This seems like it'd only be problematic if you linked your account to a professional email address...

</comment><comment><USER4> I've known this for a couple of years...

Thought everyone else did too. - I use it when sifting through job applications.

<comment><USER5> So happy to have created an email address just for facebook. Do you really base your decision on facebook profile page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Account Settings > How You Connect > Who can look you up using the email address or phone number you provided?

<comment><USER5> What I'm wondering is, is this parameter new? I check privacy setting at least once a month and I really can't remember seeing this one which was set at "everyone". I NEVER set a parameter to "everyone"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hasn't Facebook always done this? I've always done this to vet people I deal with through Craigslist...

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow! Fairly large privacy fail. But then, Facebook is itself a fairly large privacy fail.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hold on, people can see if you have a profile or not, but it is not like they can see any of the information you have marked as not-public or friends only.

I don't see how this is a privacy issue. People can just google a name and get straight to someones _public_ profile as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Something like that happens on Quora to. When you enter email adress and not password on login screen, profile image and name of the user which is registered with that email adress are appear.</comment>


IRCv3 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.irccloud.com/ircv3/ <comment><USER2> Hi, I wrote the blog post and run IRCCloud.

To clarify, the changes detailed here are to do with IRC as a low level protocol. While these enhancements do have user benefit, many of the user experience improvements we work on aren't necessarily at the protocol level.

For instance, things like file sharing, persistent logging, synced mobile clients, push notifications etc can all be built as extra infrastructure on top of the protocol. In the same way that the Slack _protocol_ doesn't give you file sharing without somewhere to host hose files, IRC as a protocol is less useful without services built around it. And that's the main benefit to using a service like IRCCloud.

However, it's worth noting that an important aspect of the IRCv3 effort is around introducing new data types to the protocol. Things like message tags and metadata, that will enable client developers to offer new features that would be hard or impossible to implement without breaking a lot of the existing ecosystem around IRC. And it's the existing open communities on IRC that represent a major advantage over closed proprietary chat systems.

Some examples of things that could be achieved with these new data types and mechanisms:

* If you wanted to add avatars, there isn't a standard place to put it that all clients will know how to access. A metadata key enables that.

* A bot that supports some form of rich payload, e.g. a quoted snippet from a linked website, with a favicon and preview image. You could provide this with message tags.

There are also interesting opportunities with the -notify capabilities. Being able to receive status updates (e.g. if someone goes away or identifies) lets clients present useful presence indicators for people you're chatting with.

I can imagine these being combined in interesting ways. For example, label a message with an id tag and then receive fave-notify messages for it, to allow a "starring" feature.

For IRC to be a competitor to modern chat alternatives it needs a combination of these improved protocol features as well as a support infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to how many of the people that actually use IRC want any of these features? Almost everyone I see is using irssi/weechat.

<comment><USER4> Well, I think the argument is to increase the number of people who _do_ use IRC - I'd say that Slack has proved people want features like that. If existing IRC users don't want to use the features, they don't have to.

<comment><USER3> But seems like this would be fundamentally incompatible with the normal IRC clients that most people currently use.

jwheare2 keeps talking about the existing irc ecosystem and communities, but I really doubt any of the big ones would be switching over.

<comment><USER2> freenode and most of the runner up biggest networks are on board with IRCv3. Also, the specs are backwards compatible by design.

<comment><USER3> >Also, the specs are backwards compatible by design.

The spec may be, but I doubt any of the examples you gave would ever be compatible with irssi & co.

<comment><USER5> why wouldn't they be? svgalib and directfb allow irssi to display avatars in full color. You could use libcaca to reduce them down to ascii, if needed.

Either way, the point of an _extension_ is that it degrades gracefully if the extension is not supported. Users that can see avatars get to see avatars. the ones that don't care don't lose the rest of the experience.

<comment><USER3> >why wouldn't they be? svgalib and directfb allow irssi to display avatars in full color. You could use libcaca to reduce them down to ascii, if needed.

Yes for both of the people running irssi in a framebuffer console, libcaca would obviously need ridiculously large avatars.

>Either way, the point of an extension is that it degrades gracefully if the extension is not supported. Users that can see avatars get to see avatars. the ones that don't care don't lose the rest of the experience.

Yeah, but the ones that do don't see any avatars either, because they're the only ones that support it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't find support for offline messages in the new specs. Is it there somewhere?

<comment><USER7> I think IRC won't support offline messages as it somehow conflicts with the whole protocol. You can achieve this with your own setup via ZNC, but then you need a server running 24x7.

IRC will hopefully stay as the preferred option for technical discussions, but we will need something else for personal communication (with increased privacy too).

We have XMPP, which is complex, lacking and has too much client fragmentation. And emerging things such as Signal, Tox, Ring or Matrix.

It's a challenge to implement offline messages and P2P. Even server federation is not easy if you want really nice crypto. E.g., see Signal.

<comment><USER8> To give a usecase where tagging/requesting/etc offline messages is useful: using ZNC.

instead one currently needs to shell into their ZNC box and start grepping through logs, not pleasant

(there is a backlog module, however it required a bit of silly configuration and didn't support getting anything other than chat lines)

<comment><USER9> Perhaps I configured it wrongly but when I forget to close my IRC client at work then ZNC is not buffering and showing me anything on the other clients when I log in.

<comment><USER10> Yep, you would have to change the settings a bit if you want that behaviour.

Connect to your ZNC's web frontend, and then go to:

ZNC » webadmin » Edit User [ _the name of the user you're editing_ ] » Edit Network [ _the name of the network you're editing_ ]

Then checkmark the following:

• awaystore¹ (Adds auto-away with logging, useful when you use ZNC from different locations)

• simple_away² (This module will automatically set you away on IRC while you are disconnected from the bouncer.) _[You probably already have this checked]_

 _(This is assuming you're on ZNC 1.6.1 like me)._

――――――

¹ — [http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away](http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away)

² — [http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore](http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the current status of SILC[1][2] versus IRCv3?

[1] [https://github.com/silc](https://github.com/silc) [2] [http://silcnet.org/info.html](http://silcnet.org/info.html)

<comment><USER12> Same as for the last decade or so: Complete, there are some clients/plugins, nobody uses it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its nice to see irc isnt completely forgotten and there arenpeople dedicated to improving it. It's truly an underrated resource imho.

Anybody else use screen and emacs erc on a vps for irc? One thing I dont like doing is connecting directly to irc. Also, don't forget about cloaking!

</comment><comment><USER14> _SASL is an authentication protocol, which improves the way e.g. NickServ login is performed, allowing connections to be established more quickly._

What is the advantage of using SASL over logging in with a client SSL certificate?

<comment><USER15> SASL is a protocol that allows you to mix several different schemes. You could (if the server supports it) use GSSAPI (e.g., authenticate using Kerberos or Active Directory, i.e., the backend for enterprises). You could instead use, say, EAP. Or you could use OAuth 2. Or you could use SSL certificates. Or you could forgo any of that and just use CRAM-MD5 or SCRAM-SHA-1 or SCRAM-SHA-256 for regular password authentication. Or, if you're really lazy, you could just use a plaintext user/password combination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> First time heard of irccloud today and I was interested since I've been running cheap-o VPS server mainly for irssi for past few years and this seemed like good alternative, but with quick testing this isn't a solid product.

First problem I had is the same as every single cloud platform for stuff we have on desktop already (like cloud IDEs) why can't I customize things? Why can't I do simple stuff like hide my channel list/tree? I saw someone asked this feature via Twitter 2 years ago and Irccloud account replied "request accepted" or something and still nothing.

Second more serious issue is chat history. It simply doesn't transfer from one device to next. If I have it open in one machine and open it on another the last instance will lose ALL latest chat history (in my testing at lest 30 minutes worth). This to me breaks the whole concept, you have no product. Whole point of this service is to provide easy access to the same IRC instance from anywhere, but if there is no chat history/log it doesn't provide that, it would be the same if I just joined with another client which I can do for free from multitude of different web based IRC clients.

It's cool that you try to improve IRC, but first you really should probably get your product in working order.

<comment><USER2> The issue of the missing chat history is actually a rare bug we have at the moment combined with bad timing.

When we're under heavy load (e.g. Freenode is netsplitting) our cache can get backed up. The cache is where your logs are served from when you reconnect a client.

At the moment we don't do a good job of detecting a slow cache and re- requesting from the primary log storage, but we're working on a fix for that, as well as improving cache performance so it doesn't get backed up as much.

It just so happened that there was a large split on Freenode earlier today, around the time you posted this message.

<comment><USER3> Your systems have to be seriously fucked up if freenode netsplitting causes "heavy load" this is super easy to parse text data we're talking about.

Edit: 4 downvotes but nobody interested in explaining why it makes sense for freenode netsplits to break the entirety of irccloud (which they do, regularly).

<comment><USER17> My guess is you're being downvoted for profanity and negativity, nothing about technical explanations.

Try rephrasing your question in a way that the parent is more likely to respond to.

<comment><USER3> >My guess is you're being downvoted for profanity and negativity, nothing about technical explanations.

The negativity is very well deserved, shit code is shit code.

IRCCloud is a service with less than 200k registered users (being optimistic here, realistically the number is closer to 143578) out of which maybe 10% are active (that's being super optimistic too) so that brings us to about 20k users.

With ~20k connected users the service can barely manage to remain operational when any of the bigger networks experience netsplits, which happens all the time. IRC networks are constantly getting DDoSd.

If their service can't even deal with normal everyday load, that's a sign of _serious_ issues.

The only conclusion is that IRCCloud must be very badly implemented and suffers from serious technical deficiencies, I believe "fucked up" is appropriate here.

This isn't a daycare, if someone finds "fuck" offensive they should probably just pull out their ethernet cord.

<comment><USER18> It's not about the word itself. It's that people here can express their opinions in better ways typically. Every service has bugs. This is one of theirs. Whatever software project you create will have bugs. That's the world we live in.

"fucked up" blames the developers - did you really intend to say they fucked up, by providing a non-critical service that's very usable almost all the time and has cache coherency issues occasionally. Missing chat history is not a serious technical deficiency if it can be simply re-requested. If you really wanted to rant at them and say their service is fucked up, then downvotes are deserved.

<comment><USER3> >"fucked up" blames the developers - did you really intend to say they fucked up, by providing a non-critical service that's very usable almost all the time and has cache coherency issues occasionally. Missing chat history is not a serious technical deficiency if it can be simply re-requested. If you really wanted to rant at them and say their service is fucked up, then downvotes are deserved.

I'm guessing you don't use IRCCloud very much then?

It's not just cache coherency issues, IRCCloud slows to a crawl/stops working entirely when there's bigger splits.

And when are the developers not to blame? If you write code that doesn't work it tends to be your fault that it doesn't work, unless of course management forced you to write bad code.

>If you really wanted to rant at them and say their service is fucked up, then downvotes are deserved

No, I'm just annoyed by how he completely sidestepped the actual underlying issues, e.g their service being unable to support their current user counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm so confused as to whether Mozilla Thunderbird utilizes ChatZilla itself as the irc backend or if the developers simply re-wrote irc support from the ground up... ChatZilla is by far my favorite client and I would love if it could support new IRCv3 features.

</comment><comment><USER20> Will these changes eventually make it into a new RFC? IRC is an IETF standard.

<comment><USER21> IRC is kind of an IETF standard. That is, there are RFCs for the IRC protocol that are a useful introduction, but they don't cover basic user-visible things like `/me` or formatting codes (colour/bold/etc), and even the non-IETF specs that cover those things aren't necessarily reliable (the CTCP spec has a whole thing about how to encode metacharacters in payloads that in practice everybody ignores).

At least these IRCv3 guys are writing down what they're doing.

<comment><USER20> There are unofficial extensions, yeah, but that doesn't make IRC not be standard. I think it just needs to happen that someone gets the various extensions finally standardised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this an open standard /follow up to RFC2812/2813 or is it a company trying to coopt an open standard and sell a closed service?

<comment><USER2> IRCv3 is a working group consisting of many different IRC developers and operators [http://ircv3.net/participation.html](http://ircv3.net/participation.html) that produces specifications by consensus, and there is a longer term effort to propose a unified RFC that improves upon 2812/1459.

IRCCloud as a company is an active member of the working group. I'm not sure how we would be co-opting any standard, but we implement them, and yes, we do sell a service.

It's closed in the sense that we provide a proprietary API on top of IRC and you need to sign up to our service to enjoy any benefit from it. But it's open in the sense that you can connect to any open IRC server, and if you choose to no longer use our service, you can download your logs, pick up any other client and continue to use IRC without having to recreate your community from scratch.

How suspicious you should be of all the above is entirely up to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> does irc support encryption?

<comment><USER24> The problem is stingier than it looks.

On one hand, anything that can run on top of an encrypted connection "supports encryption". IRC is no exception, IRC servers have had SSL support for a long time now.

However, the messages you send over the SSL connection will arrive in plaintext form at clients who chose not to use SSL when connecting to that server. Logs are also stored plaintext by many clients.

There are servers which no longer allow non-SSL connections to cope with that.

Edit: this debate is pretty long-winded, it was a pretty hot topic in a lot of circles even 10 years ago. I've heard proposals of adding encryption _on top_ of IRC. The advantage being that even peers over unencrypted connections would still get encrypted data. I vaguely remember toying with some perl scripts for doing that over irssi.

It's pretty pointless IMHO. People rely on IRC logs, and IRC in general has largely been for open forums and open collaboration.

If someone needs to discuss sensible stuff over IRC, it's fair to assume that they don't want it discussed with anyone who happens to join their channel. In that case, it's perfectly acceptable to set up an SSL-only server with strong authentication (or even better, to ensure that you don't leak logs, to have everyone connect over SSH to a machine that runs a local-only IRC server).

<comment><USER25> It's also worth noting that many clients now have LibOTR (Off The Record - end-to-end encryption) plugins available.

For group chat, the best option seems to be a TLS only server and an agreement with all parties to avoid publishing logs on sensitive channels. Whatever technical measures or protocols are in place, you always rely on your correspondents' cooperation (no logging, no bots, only use secure terminals, etc).

<comment><USER24> > For group chat, the best option seems to be a TLS only server and an > agreement with all parties to avoid publishing logs on sensitive channels. > Whatever technical measures or protocols are in place, you always rely on > your correspondents' cooperation (no logging, no bots, only use secure > terminals, etc).

Exactly, at the end of the day you're still depending on people not to leak these things anyway.

<comment><USER26> This is the thing that's gets me about encryption on public communication platforms. On the one hand, I do want my authentication to be secured, but as much as we might discuss securing chat, it's all posted in the public anyway. It's like standing on a street corner and shouting your personal details and hoping that's every stranger adheres to the implied NDA.

At the end of the day, as long as your authentication is secured, then that keeps your password safe. The fact that your communication to the server is also secured is a bonus as it means that any eavesdroppers can't tell which user your are not even which channels you hang out on. But anything more than that is just pointless given you can't trust all clients to be secure.

I'm not entirely sure this is a problem that can be solved in any way either. If the text can be read, then it can be ripped and logged. Much like the Snapchat problem and how ineffective DRM is at stopping piracy. (OK, not exactly the same, but definitely some overlap)

<comment><USER27> Encryption isn't just about keeping secrets. When correctly deployed it also prevents tampering; when your comms are insecure, it's quite easy for a MITM to inject or remove content.

This is not hypothetical, although most of the large-scale attacks of this nature have focused on the web. What sort of havoc can someone cause in your organization by injecting fake chat messages? :-)

<comment><USER26> Indeed. However my point wasn't that we shouldn't have TLS connection to the server, but rather than end-to-end encryption (ie client to client) doesn't make a whole lot of sense on public channels since the comms are public.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Sneaker Bot Problem Is Getting Worse and Nike Has the Only Answer (So Far) - <AUTHOR> http://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/04/27/sneaker-bots-how-do-they-work/ <comment><USER2>
        > [...] it's been widely reported that bots of a more
        > complex nature have been used to infiltrate Ticketmaster
        > since 2011, and even in the stock market, through a method
        > called "high-frequency trading".

:D</comment>


Dealing with colleagues who like to shoot down innovative ideas from newer guy - <AUTHOR>

How to deal with colleagues who like to shoot down innovative ideas from newer guy? They see "no value" in your ideas. However, as soon as you got another senior level person to review and onboard then they would change their mind. <comment><USER2> Ideas are cheap.

Implementations count.

Implement your idea. Preferably, implement it _and show the value of it._

Then pitch it.

I've had random stuff I've thrown together in a few minutes turn out to be highly valuable. One was a script I'd assembled for some datagathering on my own systems. Ended up showing it to the customer support team where I was working, got thanked a couple of years later by one of the team-members who'd remained post-acquisition who said that it had pretty much saved the asses of everyone there by making it trivially easy to gather forensic data from users' systems. Just as one example.

Other tools I'd created and shared which turned out to be useful in other contexts, with similar stories.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like Arthur Fry who create the Post-It at 3M, the best way to have your innovative ideas improved by colleagues is to make your idea real with a prototype, mock-up or the simpliest feature.

<comment><USER4> This idea is very good. Technical people are driven by facts and if you can prove something objectively, then you're much more likely to get them onboard.

But don't feel too badly at having a good idea shot down. This happens to many clever people. Unfortunately, politics rule decisions in many companies. And as a new guy in this type of situation, you may have to build up some credibility before people will take you more seriously and possibly stick their neck out for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > How to deal with colleagues who like to shoot down innovative ideas from > newer guy?

People who are skeptical of anything not accompanied by evidence are called ... scientists. If you want to adapt, become a scientist yourself -- don't put your ideas forth without any evidence to support them.</comment>


Silicon Valley's Saudi Arabia Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opinion/silicon-valley-saudi-arabia.html <comment><USER2> Users flagged this post, presumably because there were two major discussions in the last 24 hours:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197431)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196934)

</comment><comment><USER3> Saudi Arabia has invested in Masayoshi Son's (Softbank) Vision Fund and has just been reported to be increasing that investment, as mentioned in the article.

Considering that the fund holds 25% of ARM, among other things, it means that the Saudis are almost impossible to avoid in tech.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is sort of a ridiculous position. Americans have been exporting wealth to Saudi Arabia and China for decades. What's the greater sin? Driving to work burning stuff pumped out of the earth under Saudi Arabia, wearing an undershirt stiched by an exploited woman in Bangladesh or working with cash provided by some tyrant prince?

Unless you are living in a yurt somewhere, at some level you're going to morally impure.</comment>


Scientists measure all of the starlight ever produced by the observable universe - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-11-scientists-starlight-universe.html <comment><USER2> What is the mass equivalent of all electromagnetic radiation? Or more crudely, how much does light weigh?</comment>


Artbreeder – Extend Your Imagination with GANs - <AUTHOR> https://artbreeder.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey! this is Joel, the maker of Artbreeder (originally called ganbreeder). The project was inspired by interactive evolutionary algorithms and novelty search ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&t=1s))

The goal was to make a tool that reflected the collaborative and explorative aspects of creativity. Also to make GAN's (and high-dimensional spaces more generally) accessible to everyone in a fun way.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

<comment><USER3> Awesome work! I love this concept, but I'm a writer who's interested in collaborative generative writing. Do you know of any efforts to create something similar for writing, such as poetry or micro-fiction? If not, I'm curious if you could point me in the right direction for putting something like that together.

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks! I dont know about anything collaborative and for writing. [https://aidungeon.io/](https://aidungeon.io/) Maybe collaborative to play. And then there are a lot of writers exploring fine-tuning text models like GPT2 for personal use. [https://twitter.com/MagicRealismBot](https://twitter.com/MagicRealismBot) is one of many examples. [https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-fine-tune- gpt-2-so-you...](https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-fine-tune-gpt-2-so-you- can-generate-long-form-creative-writing-7a5ae1314a61)

Maybe you should make it!

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting and fun!

One bit of UX feedback - I played about with children, cross breeding and editing genes and never figured out a mental model for what interactions caused a derivative image to be previewed vs being used to update the current seed image.

Clicking on images often saved them, though I'm not sure what that means for me, the user. Do I need to save a child image in order to derive from it? Even if it's just an intermediate result I want to play with? When I breed images, I see the image on the left is updated, but it doesn't seem to update the seed image being used in the 'Children' tab, or the genes available for editting? I ended up saving and then re-opening images as a relatively safe workflow, but it would have been a lot clearer if there was more UI feedback showing me what's a preview and what's an input at any point.

All those questions were rhetorical btw, just talking through my user experience :)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a super-cool project. GANs are extremely interesting to experiment with in a creative manner. One thing I often miss in these websites, however, is what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of GAN visualization - namely, a video feature for showing latent interpolations. I guess this is often skipped because inference is done server-side and there's (naturally) limits enforced to avoid excessive use of resources.

In that vein, I've created a webapp [1] that runs entirely client-side using TensorFlow.js, and let's you generate videos of latent interpolation, images and tweak with parameters using a less-conventional generator trained on many different datasets.

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

<comment><USER2> Very cool! Artbreeder does have an animation tool, just go to create -> category -> animate

best, joel

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a game master, it's basically an infinite source of NPC portraits and some are even PC-worthy.

<comment><USER7> Right?! If only I could reliably get elves, orcs, dwarves, etc.

<comment><USER8> you simply need to find a relatively big database of those and train a GAN against it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was much funner than I expected and the results were really impressive. I read the site title and I was like ehh, its probably another style transfer- like generator. Nope, this is probably one of the best generators I played with!

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://artbreeder.com/i?k=de694b3944a30732a426](https://artbreeder.com/i?k=de694b3944a30732a426)

Jean Luc, is that you?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is impressive, but at the same time can't help but notice art is kind of its way out when no skills nor time spent doing anything can be exchanged for just one click and generate art. I watched the intro video and the narrator was mentioning "no skills are needed", "anybody can do this", etc and I can't stop thinking how making art is at anybody's fingertips and yet means so much less. I looked through the generated images and wow, one and one are not bad looking, but after a few hundred images i said OK and closed the tab. I had a quantity overload. So where is the human if novels can be auto generated and have a plot and be good novels and where movies can be made in such a way too with auto generated music and dialogue and so on. You get my drift. It's cool but what is it for, art or entertainment? Is this just a phase that will go away?

<comment><USER2> Hey! So I feel a lot of creativity is 'combinatorial', i.e knows what two things might go well together. Artbreeder kind of gamifies that by making it very easy. So many images may look similar but some people can really develop their own style with time.

Also, often my favorite part of artbreeder is when artists take what they save as the inspiration or building blocks for full works. It's really an inspiration tool, but saying inspiration-breeder is a mouthful.

More generally, I think computation can meaningfully augment human creativity by providing surprise and break us out of our loops.

Best, Joel

<comment><USER12> How was the training data acquired though?

<comment><USER13> Humans generate art by selection. There's no reason you couldn't have an art ecosystem where AIs do all the generation, humans do the selection, and that's how it bootstraps. AI Dungeon 2 and 15.ai are already taking steps to close the loop by using human interactions to score outputs and train on them ("preference learning").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> this is really wild and sort of causes my brain some distress in the same way that scene from Alien Resurrection when Ripley is in the clone lab with all the failed human alien hybrids

</comment><comment><USER15> This is amazing! What a clever concept to use these for inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's a pity that you cannot upload your own image(s) as starting points.

My theory is that because this is built be using pre-trained BigGAN models, they do not have access to the encoder to convert an image to the latent space, but instead only to the generator that converts the latent space to an image.

Accordingly, they can only remix parameters in latent space, but not locate the latent space that a real-world photo would reside at.

<comment><USER17> > It's a pity that you cannot upload your own image(s) as starting points.

What do you mean? Click for example "create" -> "portrait" -> "upload".

<comment><USER16> Apparently it works for portraits. I tried the general case, which doesn't offer an upload.

<comment><USER16> It sure is quite slow at ~1 hour per uploaded portrait. That looks more like an exhaustive parameter search to me, than a trained encoder network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sorry, but this site has a terrible, incomprehensible, user interface. No help, no tooltips on mysterious icons, no UX flow.

</comment><comment><USER19> I always thought it would be amazing to have something like this for composing music.

<comment><USER20> Magenta Studio

[https://magenta.tensorflow.org/studio](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/studio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pretty bizarre: this site reliably causes graphics glitches for me. MacBook Pro 16" \+ Chrome.

[https://imgur.com/a/TJnRSGY](https://imgur.com/a/TJnRSGY)

<comment><USER22> Restart your machine and report if the problem still exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How many images do I need to mark as interesting before it generates something? I did about 20 on iOS but nothing. Really interested in project though.

<comment><USER2> Marking them interesting doesn't update the model. If you click on any mage you can 'breed' it with others, or go to the create age to compose or upload something!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had the same idea for dogs: [https://need4breed.github.io](https://need4breed.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER25> Weird and wild and fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER26> They forgot one more use case: nightmares! ;D

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a cool project. Generating 'new' and creative images with computation is very interesting topic. I was particularly curious about the architectural and interior explorations from this user [1].

I signed up and explored what the free account permits [3,4]; however, I have to say I feel the same about this project as I did about "NLP Tool for Technological Research" (30 days ago) [2]. Unless you can upload an image you're familiar with, something you've worked on, I just don't understand what I'm seeing.

Personally, I enjoy studying composition. I enjoy abstract works of Suprematists, Cubists, Futurists, Abstract Expressionists. All of which I think could be more or less reimagined with computational means.

So for my WOW, I want to see what Artbreeder does to an image I'm already familiar with, or how it can imitate other visual styles.

In the last case I really need to see the input, because if the results appear similar to the input there will be copyright issues. In one of my experiments [5] I used the mixed images feature. This provides a graph which gives the appearance of showing how the image was created. Then again, not seeing any code, I don't know for sure what else was used which may or may not be subject to copyright. I'm not saying the project should be open source, but maybe there is some detail that can be exposed, and used to recreate the effect with a different image. If you can do that, then QED the result is not cribbed from un-cited sources. It's just computational pixel-pushing (heck, is it?).

I did some graphic design work early in my career and when we "appropriated" an image to be part of a photoshop composition, the rule of thumb was always you should not be able to reference the source from what you sampled. Some people spoke about 5-10% of an image; however, if you were doing something with any significant visibility and didn't pay for the source, the first rule was make it unidentifiable.

I don't have any particular need for images right now. This is just my first impression based on my experience and what I can't get enough of--more abstract art, or something that takes an image I've studied, have intimate familiarity, and says, This will look much better upside down! haha

[1]: [https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=03b855cd8c852c56b338](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=03b855cd8c852c56b338)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847429)

[3]: [https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=ee55675001b83a64f71f](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=ee55675001b83a64f71f)

[4]: [https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=14366daddf2f12087211](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=14366daddf2f12087211)

[5]: [https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=a8ec4e77d27dc33f92f3](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=a8ec4e77d27dc33f92f3)

</comment><comment><USER28> really cool.

</comment><comment><USER29> This kills the arts

<comment><USER30> Not really, it can only make derivative art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Art should not be easy

<comment><USER8> my little brother is making music and was quite depressed when I showed him AIVA, I can understand the mixed feelings of 'real' artists</comment></comment>


Creating Print-Quality Typography in the Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.reallysimplewebsites.co.uk/from-print-to-web-creating-print-quality-typography-in-the-browser/

<comment><USER2> Hey, I wrote that article! It seems like "reallysimplewebsites.co.uk" lifted it directly from Onextrapixel.com, where it was originally published: [http://www.onextrapixel.com/2011/10/24/from-print-to-web- cre...](http://www.onextrapixel.com/2011/10/24/from-print-to-web-creating- print-quality-typography-in-the-browser/)

You may want to update the link to point to the non-plagiarized source.

<comment><USER3> I resubmitted this story with the non-plagiarized link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159011></comment></comment>


Clarence Thomas Breaks His Silence - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/clarence-thomas-supreme-court/471582/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Now if only he'd break his silence about what really happened between him and Anita Hill -- and others who have accused him of similar behavior.</comment>


Blender Cycles Turbocharged: how we made rendering 10x faster - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.blender.org/blog/cycles-turbocharged-how-we-made-rendering-10x-faster <comment><USER2> > how we made -rendering- _motion blur_ 10x faster

</comment><comment><USER3> It just occurred to me that motion blur not some gimmick, but temporal rather than spatial anti-aliasing. It's fundamental to accurate sampling.

<comment><USER4> Yes, both problems can be solved by the same sampling technique, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ray_tracing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ray_tracing)

In theory, upping the resolution will also remove the need for spatial anti- aliasing, though it's not efficient. Distributing rays in time feels a bit different because what you're really trying to do is integrate over an interval of time. So I'm not sure I agree that they are the same thing.

<comment><USER5> Remember that to remove aliasing (spatial and temporal), you want no frequencies above the nyquist rate.

Typically, anti-aliasing uses an average of multiple samples across the width of the pixel (MSAA), or across the timespan of the frame to eliminate this.

That is in fact a rectangular function in the time/spatial domain. Which is wrong. A rectangular function _reduces_ rather than eliminates the frequency components above the nyquist rate, and also attenuates frequencies near but below the nyquist rate (leading to blur).

In fact, you want a rectangular _frequency domain_ function, which in the spatial/time domain is a sinc function.

This isn't done in real cameras because it is technically too hard, but in 3D rendering, it should be done, and will produce smoother animations.

I have never seen anyone do this, but results should be theoretically better. I'd also like to see a freeze frame of a sinc time domain sampled motion blur - it would probably look very weird, even though it looks good at the playback rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Rendering with motion blur is known to be a technical challenge

Ok, I'm not a rendering person, but didn't Ravi Ramamoorthi have a series of papers that solved motion blur?

<comment><USER7> I assume you're thinking of Kevin Egan's paper from 2009 [1]? There have been some follow ups since, but the basic idea is "you can filter the hell out of it, kind of". Sadly, while these look okay, such filtering is still prone to over blurring. The frames described actually focus on hair which is a perfect example of what wouldn't work well in the filtering systems, _and_ requires enough samples for anti-aliasing that motion blur comes "for free".

[1] [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/mb/](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/mb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They don't say how, but I assume like all of us they moved to a motion-blur friendly time-based BVH. I'm surprised this only recently came up for Blender!

<comment><USER8> > After a few days of investigation, Sergey improved the layout of hair > bounding boxes for BVH structure. What does this mean? A more in-depth > explanation is coming soon.

Sounds more that they optimized their BVH implementation

<comment><USER7> Sorry if I wasn't clear. Using a time-dependent BVH (where instead of two vec3 for the corners you store four, one pair for t=0 and one for t=1) is an "optimization". Given the later sentence:

> After that, he applied the same optimization to triangles (for actual > character geometry)

it suggested that the bug was just using a single bounding box that ignored the motion (which is correct, but slow).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every article I see where it is a blog about 'making X Y times faster' the answer is always 'by doing something that reasonable people would assume we had already tried' and this article is no different. This is just cycles implementing a crude version of the cutting edge from 15 years ago.</comment>


Porsche Taycan revealed: $150,900 base price, 0-60 MPH in 3 seconds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20848460/porsche-taycan-electric-sports-car-turbo-price-specs-mile-range-reveal <comment><USER2> I'm kinda bummed they're going with the trend of "touchscreen all the things" for the interior. They even have an option for an addition touchscreen above the glove box.

The UI itself looks fine and I understand that a touchscreens make it easier to iterate the interface. I just wish that they had physical controls for certain things like the AC. Using the voice control to say "Hey Porsche, increase the driver side temperature by 2 degrees" is just awkward.

<comment><USER3> I hear you! I have vehicles with mostly touchscreen (maserati) and mostly tactile (bmw).

In my view touchscreens SUCK for automotive use.

But don't take my word for it. Read up on Mazda's pivot back to tactile and the research to back it. Good move!

[https://thenewswheel.com/mazda-eliminates-touch- screens/](https://thenewswheel.com/mazda-eliminates-touch-screens/)

<comment><USER4> It doesn't help that automotive latency for touch screens is incredibly bad. It it had smartphone level response maybe it would be a better starting point for comparison.

I'd love to see something like this, even in a Tesla. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVbuk3jizGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVbuk3jizGM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty much what everyone expected to Porsche to do, especially with how they've been pumping out Macan's, Cayenne's and Panamara's. It's a vehicle which will sell based on the perception that Porsche builds high quality performance vehicles, which is at least marginally true, although things like this continue to stray from that.

Really, I'm only surprised Porsche is letting their brand be diluted even further, when they could have had a car like this sold under the Audi label instead. That would also have allowed for a much more reasonable cost comparison between this and the Tesla S, since you can get one of those for well under 100k, and the Audi brand has a much wider price spread than the Porsche lineup.

<comment><USER6> Aren't basically all the luxury car brands moving downmarket? I see cheap Maseratis everyday. Lamborghinis now start at $185k and Ferrari $206k.

<comment><USER7> So cheap. I'll take one of each.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That price is gnarly and the comparison chart at Tech Crunch is pretty eye opening: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/04/porsche-taycan-vs-tesla- mo...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/04/porsche-taycan-vs-tesla-model-s-spec- for-spec-price-for-price/)

It would be great if they can sell 25k/year in the US like the Model S. No chance of that until they introduce the lower priced variants presumably next year. I'm skeptical of their commitment to actually sell EVs though so I hope this isn't a case of 'Porsche doesn't see enough demand, so we aren't going to make a cheaper EV'.

<comment><USER9> They've already announced that the Porsche Macan (their most popular model) will be going all-electric: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/26/18240862/porsche-macan- el...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/26/18240862/porsche-macan-electric-ev- production-taycan)

<comment><USER8> Hope it actually happens. I'm jaded by announcements from the legacy car makers.

<comment><USER9> It will happen. Volkswagen Group will be the biggest EV maker in the world purely because they're spending the most money:

[https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vws-91b-spend-evs- out...](https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vws-91b-spend-evs-outpaces- investment-rivals)

Five of their brands (VW, Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Porsche) either have EVs out now or will have soon. Their other high-end brands (Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti) will have EVs eventually. I'm not sure what the plans are with Ducati but I imagine they will release electric motorbikes soon enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surely they could have come up with a better name?

"Taycan" \- whats that supposed mean?!!?

Is industry running out of suitable names?

<comment><USER11> They came up with a few names that were better, but they were all taycan already.

<comment><USER12> That made me laugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They're really playing a different game to Tesla. This is Porsche, what's special now will be in Audi, then Volkswagen, then Skoda...</comment>


Georgia Tech: Startup Semester - <AUTHOR> http://startupsemester.gatech.edu

<comment><USER2> In 2012 at Carnegie Mellon, Luis von Ahn (reCAPTCHA, Duolingo) headed a similar type of startup class where students spend time creating their own startup. One of these startups, PayTango, made it into Y Combinator (W13).

<comment><USER3> I believe UT Austin has been doing this for a while in an official capacity, as an offered course for undergraduate students. I'm not sure of any major success stories from their program. Their program is called 1 Semester Startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a designer living and working in Atlanta I often forget how much engineering talent we have locally. I've been to the Georgia Tech campus for a few events and was impressed with many of the students (and former students) I've met. I look forward to seeing my city develop its own technology culture and companies. Maybe someday I'll find the right people here and help make something myself. For now, it's all client work.

<comment><USER5> yeah man -- there is a surprising amount going on here. i think a decent amount of atl folks are probably here on hn as well. get in touch if you ever wanna talk.

<comment><USER4> Concrete-jungle.org is just awesome. Just saw it on your profile. Really cool idea.

<comment><USER5> thanks! this time of year is some welcome down-time for us before things get really busy in late spring. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It is not an official program sponsored by the Institute and will in no way > be recognized on your transcripts or degree.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, it's entirely student run (for now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting concept. Some of the fine print is sketchy. Seems like this is something that should end up on a transcript in some way or another.

And this title: Dr. Chris Reaves, Advisor Extraordinaire

<comment><AUTHOR> This is entirely student run right now. We're trying to make it an official program.

<comment><USER7> Props. Sounds fun and good luck! Excited to see what you guys make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Georgia Tech really seems to be taking initiative here with this and their MOOC, I hope more schools follow suit with similar ideas.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't seem like this was started by the school, but by the students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _5 teams will assemble into teams_

What does that mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> Woops, fixed!</comment></comment>


How is Firefox Going to Compete with Chrome? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/wsj-chrome-browser-now-at-7-24-market-share/ <comment><USER2> They will lose. Firefox came to prominence because the previously popular open-source browser Mozilla was bloated and arrogant. Now they are in that position.</comment>


Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Kyubyong/neural_chinese_transliterator <comment><USER2> While this is a cool research project to learn Tensorflow, it's no where near the competition. All Apple iOS / Microsoft Windows / Google Android's stock pinyin input methods has more or less an AI component to automatically predict the Chinese characters on the fly while you type - they work extremely well. There are a about close to a hundred other Chinese input method vendors in the market right now other than the top 3 tech companies' stock Chinese input methods. Leading the bunch is a company called iFlytek[1], which utilize voice recognition AI to improve input speed.

And yes I am a native speaker and use pinyin on a daily basis.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I made my own Chinese keyboard that uses the visual glyphs instead of the pinyin pronunciation. You can decompose and rebuild characters from their parts.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> not that this would actually help anyone in need of a transliterator, but probably of interest: mit press is publishing a book later this fall on how Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes. full disclosure: i used to work at the press. got to read some of the manuscript, and it was indeed fascinating: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese- typewriter](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is very interesting.

I tried to use swiftkey chinese beta many years ago, but couldn't accept it because it only allowed pinyin input with simplified characters.

Currently I use Google Zhuyin keyboard (which also has a pinyin mode) which does pretty accurate prediction and has a unified interface with my cantonese (yale) and korean keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's really cool! I got very frustrated with SwiftKey when I tried to use it to text my Chinese friends.

</comment><comment><USER7> Aren't these non phonetic writing systems a great time loss in general? Still wondering if Japan/China/similar would not get a great economical boost from ditching their non decipherable ideograms. Just thinking of the time those poor students spend remembering them instead of learning useful math/history/foreign_language just pains me.

<comment><USER8> Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one. The Chinese writing is also more resilient to language change, and given proper education, texts from millenia can still be read.

If you look at the PISA scores[1] for example, the top 10 includes Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Macao and Honk-Kong. So the Chinese script and its derivatives is clearly not impairing its users to learn maths.

On the foreign language side, it's even a boon because someone knowing a CJK language wanting to learn another one can rely on a lot of words with shared roots to learn it faster. But as the phonology of these language is different, the knowledge of the Chinese characters can help connects the dots between words, which aren't obviously related when romanized.

[1] [https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in- focus.pdf](https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf)

<comment><USER9> > Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the > world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one.

This isn't some binary category where you have or haven't achieved holiness. Compared to Chinese, English is indistinguishable from a purely phonetic script.

<comment><USER8> This is still wrong. First, because English taken for itself is nowhere near a phonetic script. It uses a lot of graphemes to represent the phonemes of the language and there is no bijection between the two sets (as expected for a phonetic system). In the end, the number of combinations to memorize for reading perfectly is probably in the hundred or multiple hundreds.

French has the same problem. It takes years to train natives to write to perfection; and the non-phonetic nature of the script bites hard the foreign learners.

Second, at its core the Chinese writing evolved from a limited set of symbols to represent syllabes. The current system is still mainly based on it and the knowledge of around 400 components can help read and memorize of lot more characters. The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is not apparent to people who doesn't studied it, but it exists.

<comment><USER9> The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is so weak that in the foreword to [https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete- Text/dp/0691169314/](https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete- Text/dp/0691169314/) , the author observes that while he uses his own translations, he is forced to defer to existing scholarship as to what parts of the text rhyme, not being qualified to determine that for himself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have issues with your new 16' MacBook Pro? - <AUTHOR> I've been holding off from buying a new Mac for quite some time (owning a Mid 2015 15' model). Now that the new 16 inch models seem right, I've been considering an upgrade. Unfortunately, there's a number of complaints about popping sound (from some people) and serious issues with the fans/heating from many others. There are some suggestions about disabling turbo boosting and other "hacks" related to the fans and video card (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkmdHVfk4XE). Then, what's the reason of buying such an expensive laptop just to disable its power!?<p>I'm curious, is it that bad or these are just some single cases with more attention than necessary? <comment><USER3> The reported problems with fans/temps seem widespread, but I've personally experienced none of that. I have the i9 with the mid-range GPU option and I'm using four external monitors. I run it exclusively in clamshell mode, and perhaps that's less prone to problems. All I can say is I've had zero problems with it, and whatever noise the fans might make I haven't heard them above the sound of my desktop tower's fans (which admittedly are set to "hurricane wind tunnel testing" level).

Bottom line, my experience with the new MacBook is its really damn fast and rock solid.

</comment><comment><USER4> I get graphics card related kernel panics about once per week. Usually, related to opening and closing the lid. Often the panic message is "Bad Magic".

<comment><USER5> hi!

apologies for this comment which is completely unrelated to your post - <USER2> just trying to figure out a way to get in touch with you.

I just moved to Durham from NYC for work, and was looking through HN to see if there were any ongoing meetups, etc. in the area. Saw your comment about an RTP meetup ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512702)) here, so figured you might still be in the area.

Would love any tips you might have for meeting new people / getting involved in the tech community around here. Or even meeting up in person just to chat!

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm still in the area but am not sure about the meetups in a long time. There are a bunch of other local meetups on meetup.com, but haven't been to any in several years because I have an almost 3 year old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, mine is fine. No crazy fan or heat issues when hooked up to my LG 5K either.

It manages heat and power generated by a build better than my 2016 and 2018 did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have the CPU and GPU upgraded?

<comment><USER6> Yes, both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No problems. I have the base model thigh with the i7.</comment>


Figure out your life, with help from a couple of Stanford professors - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/life/2016/09/30/figure-out-your-life-with-help-from-a-couple-of-stanford-professors.html <comment><AUTHOR> website re: the book & related resources: [http://designingyour.life](http://designingyour.life)</comment>


Google's Energy Efficient Data Centers - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/energy-efficiency-in-cloud.html

<comment><USER2> I work in an industry that heavily relies on HPC. For any applications that require less than infiniband-grade interconnect, the energy efficiency of EC2 or other cloud solutions will massively outstrip that of even the most efficient hosted datacenters, with little or no performance impact.

It's a really strong argument with customers who are conscious about their energy usage.</comment>


Causing bit-flips in Firefox arrays on Android by abusing WebGL shader textures [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://csdl.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/2018/4353/00/435301a357.pdf <comment><USER2> I think the link is bad. I am not getting any PDF. Neither can I read the abstract.</comment>


Show HN: Isometricks.com, an easy isometric editor in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://isometricks.com
Here I want to present you the project I loved to work on the last months: isometricks.
Please have a look, and play with it! Incoming features: - color selector for each 'face' - eraser
And a handful of others improvements that I have in mind.
Please comment, I would really appreciate any feedback.
Open source and open to collaboration on GitHub: https://github.com/NicolasLetellier/isometricks
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Post author here again, for the clickable version of the links:

[https://isometricks.com](https://isometricks.com)

[https://github.com/NicolasLetellier/isometricks](https://github.com/NicolasLetellier/isometricks)

<comment><USER2> How do I draw a line?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not currently conceived to draw lines, only faces. You maybe want to draw the edges of an isometric shape? It could be something to think about for future evolutions of this editor, sure, but I would have to think carefully about how to implement it from the UI perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would be really handy to not have to click each individual cell, but hold and mouse over.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea, I will study it's feasibility. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Book in progress: "CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development" - <AUTHOR> http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript

<comment><USER2> Sorry I didn't catch this post at the time... the same submission got some traction when it was reposted at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2498438></comment>


The Eighty Five Percent Rule for Optimal Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12552-4 <comment><USER2> It may be that I've grossly misunderstood this article. I admit to scanning it because I'm quite busy today, but I'm intrigued with the idea of linking the efficiency of machine learning to the efficiency of human learning. It appears to me that the closest analog to the type of learning they are testing is spaced repetition. Interestingly every spaced repetition algorithm optimises at around 92% (mainly because every one is based on Super Memo's algorithm). I've long suspected that a lower value would be better -- my own spaced repetition algorithm uses 90%. Even if I've totally missed the point, I think it's an interesting idea to experiment with different values.</comment>


BaSiX – A Basic interpreter written in TeX (1990) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-3/tb29greene.pdf <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a homework assignment in one of my freshman year classes which was to implement various church encodings and helper functions in the lambda calculus using only LaTeX macros!

</comment><comment><USER3> Was this published on April 1? It looks like a complete paper on the surface with example code and everything. Who asked for this?

Sadly the FTP server mentioned in the paper is no longer up, and the supplied IP address has been repurposed.

<comment><USER4> Also in the tradition of ambitious TeX is this 2008 winner of the Judge's Prize for the ICFP Programming Contest: [http://sdh33b.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp- contest-2008.html](http://sdh33b.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html) (contest link: [http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/2008IcfpContest/](http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/2008IcfpContest/)).</comment></comment>


Developers Prefer GPL, Enterprises Prefer Apache - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/05/17/developers-prefer-gpl-enterprises-prefer-apache/

<comment><USER2> I think this paragraph is extremely important:

"Developers may not actually prefer the GPL license, but there is so much GPL licensed code available for (re-)use that it often seems silly to reinvent the wheel. If you can use a GPL library to do much of the heavy lifting for your application, it's often easier to go with the flow: use that library and license your whole work under the GPL."

My gut feeling is that most developers who release GPL source do so either because they're using other GPL source, or because they don't have a strong preference and are using GPL because they don't know any better.

I also think the over-generalization of "Open Source Developers" is harmful. There are different types of open source developers, and they have different habits. For example, GPL is relatively uncommon within the Cocoa development community.</comment>


The Scala Collection API Sucks … Or is it a Work of Beauty? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.schauderhaft.de/2010/12/19/the-scala-collection-api-sucks-or-is-it-a-work-of-beauty/ <comment><USER2> As I struggled with the C# type system, I looked to Scala for answers.

When I actually tried using Scala, I discovered that type erasure in the JVM broke many of the generics patterns that I was using every day in C#. Also, I discovered that Scala's approach to the static scope doesn't tackle the tough problems addressed by PHP 5.3.

Then Microsoft added covariant and contravariant polymorphism in C# 4.0, which are the two features that I wanted the most from Scala.</comment>