Roger Ebert: Hello, this is me speaking - <AUTHOR> http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100226/PEOPLE/100229986

<comment><USER2> I wonder if someone will develop a "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" for English pronunciation. Something you could read aloud that would cover all the sounds they needed to build something like this.

It'd be a cool graduate project... kinda wish I was into linguistics right now.

<comment><USER3> It would probably be several paragraphs long, at the shortest. Depending on accent and cultural upbringing, a person varies how they'd pronounce a phoneme depending on nearby sounds, words, or even sentences.

<comment><USER4> I am very annoyed by the current brute-force, heuristic approaches to human- sound acoustics. I wish the sounds were dynamically computerized by way of mechanical simulations of the anatomical parts involved in human speech articulation.

<comment><USER3> > I wish the sounds were dynamically computerized by way of mechanical > simulations of the anatomical parts involved in human speech articulation.

Actually, I think that's what was attempted in the first place in the early 80's. I remember seeing TV shows and museum exhibits that demonstrated this approach. One I especially remember, and highly dates the efforts, had a vector imaging display (think of the original Tempest and Asteroids arcade games) project a silhouette of a tongue and vocal cavity to demonstrate how the current phoneme was generated to listeners.

Of course, back then, such simulacra were limited by lack of parallel processing power and inadequate understanding of biophysics. This lead to the brute force "sound sampling" approach nowadays as memory became more cheap and audio capture hardware was perfected. I do wonder if it's time to return to vocal anatomy modeling again, now that we have a better understanding of how to perform biometric and physics modeling via massive computational parallelism.

<comment><USER4> I imagine the reason why progress on this model has been slow is how very extremely challenging the task is. It would require a sturdy knowledge of linguistics, physics, computer programming, etc. The sampling model in contrast is a piece of cake.

The anatomical model does indeed sound very interesting. Each phoneme would be recognized as one particle, on which intonation and dynamics effects could be applied algorithmically; and much of advancement in this area would be employable by speech recognition models, probably increasing their accuracy by a considerable amount.

I really hope some serious contenders step up to the plate for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> NPR's All Things Considered has a short interview with the CTO of CereProc: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1240872...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124087291) The voices aren't perfect but they're definitely better than anything else I've heard. Ebert's voice isn't demoed in the interview. I'm guessing Oprah wants to be the first to show it.

This combined with improved subvocal stuff like <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyN4ViZ21N0> would make silent, covert voice communication possible. No more annoying one-sided conversations from cell phones.

<comment><USER6> Isn't this mainly an aesthetic thing, though? Consumer text-to-speech is certainly adequate for vocalizing almost any conversation. One could just use that to carry out "covert voice communication."

<comment><USER7> At the end of the YouTube video, he mentions being able to think "nearest bus" and having it query the internet and speak the results to you. This would allow you to augment reality without pulling out your phone, unlocking it, launching Google Maps, selecting your location, etc, etc. Sure, it sounds like the flying car dreams of the last century, but given they can recognize 150 words now, it hasa lot of future potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Right after Ebert mentioned Alex, I stopped reading, selected the text of the article, went to OS X's Services menu, and listened to Alex read the rest of it.

It reminded me how far consumer voice synthesis has yet to come, but it did give me a better appreciation of some of the more subtle things the Alex voice has in terms of intonation. Despite still sounding obviously synthetic, it's obviously doing quite a bit of analysis on the sentence structure to vary the pitch in a natural way.

But that makes me wonder: Why, when complex things like structural intonation are already in consumer TTS products, do (deceptively) simple things like consonant sounds and pacing still sound so stilted?

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool technology, can't wait to hear what it sounds like compared to his real voice. The only downside of course is normal folks don't have isolated audio of themselves speaking. The company really needs to figure out how to isolate it themselves so home movies and voicemails could be used without the background noise affecting quality.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Shakespeare used more than 25,000 [words in his vocabulary], but he was making up a lot of them as he went along."

</comment><comment><USER11> Also see: <http://tombakersays.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> For me although it sounds better then previous years ... the text to speech offered by this cerpra company still sounds robotic. An area interest for my start-up as we chose to use real actors rather then a text to speech engine.

<comment><USER13> It appears to me that the robot sound is exacerbated by the fact that we modify the way we pronounce words based on what other words bookend them. how are you escaping this with live actors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This service is unavailable. I get it.</comment>


Tool of the Day: ReadFresh: Stay on Top of the News - <AUTHOR> http://www.usefultools.com/2009/10/stay-on-top-of-the-news/

<comment><USER2> Seems like a useful site, but linking directly to the site would have been more useful.</comment>


Show HN: Truebill – Find and track paid subscriptions, cancel with one click - <AUTHOR> https://www.truebill.com/ <comment><USER2> The idea seems great. But my spidey sense is going crazy. You want access to my financial/purchase data, and the service is free. So you will monetize ..... how?

I am 100% not saying you intend to scam or steal. But clearly access to my data is key to your eventual monetization plan, and this is a loss leader to get in the door. Since the ultimate plan is not stated, I have no choice but to imagine it, and nothing I can think of warms my heart.

The ability to feed your service with something like a periodic manual export from Mint (assuming such a thing is possible) would go a long way toward reassuring me.

Again, the core idea seems fantastic, and could save many people real money, including myself.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words. Definitely understand where you're coming from in terms of security. Our plan isn't really to monetize your data, it's moreso to make intelligent recommendations that we hope our users will follow. For instance, "you're paying $10 per month for Hulu, on average users are x% more satisfied with Netflix, click here to switch from Hulu to Netflix".

We've definitely discussed the idea of a manual export/import - we may get to that in the future.

<comment><USER4> >Our plan isn't really to monetize your data

>it's moreso to make intelligent recommendations...

That is exactly what monetizing data is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, We're former founders of Webs (formerly FreeWebz). We made Truebill because too many people are getting ripped off by monthly subscriptions that they either forgot about or are too lazy to cancel. Now that so much is moving over to subscriptions, we think it warrants one place to manage them all.

<comment><USER5> This is a great idea, but I'm immediately concerned about giving my financial account information to any sort of free service.

What is your business model? Why not charge a one-time $10 fee up front to build trust, and revenue?

<comment><AUTHOR> A one-time up-front $10 fee may build trust, but it would also scare people away.

There's a few ways we can go for revenue. Here's an example: Since we know what subscriptions are popular, and we can have verified ratings on those subscriptions, we'll be able to make recommendations. For example, "You're paying $12 for Pandora. People seem to be happier with Spotify, and your friends love it. Give it a try!" Using those referrals, we'd get a cut of the subscription revenue from Spotify.

<comment><USER6> What about splitting the product and offering the results for free and the convenient auto-cancel as a one time fee.

Also I'd feel better if you didn't store anything long term, I'm more interested in this as a on-demand service than as something that constantly pulls my data.

<comment><USER7> > What about splitting the product and offering the results for free and the > convenient auto-cancel as a one-time fee

As a user who agrees that I would be more comfortable if I knew they made money, I'm wondering if the "convenience" of auto-cancel is negated by having to pay for it _specifically_.

I don't have a better suggestion than the others in this thread though.

I'm also wondering if I would pay a subscription fee when the goal is to reduce the subscriptions, at some point I'll have reached an satisfactory state where this service will be the next to be knocked off.

Good luck to the team, and thanks for saving me ~$25/month!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Umm, you just found me $6000 that I have been over billed by one of the services that I requested deactivation....

1\. Time to fix my accounting processes for this particular business 2\. This is amazing!

How do you make money?

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's a ton of $.

To answer the money question, right now we actually don't make money. In the future, we think we can make $ by making intelligent recommendations i.e. "you like x and y, try signing up for Z subscription service.

<comment><USER9> Maybe consider taking a cut of the savings... ;)

<comment><USER10> if you're creating $6,000 in value, people would definitely be willing to give you a cut of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You do not redirect to PayPal to login but give me a on site form? Any reason for this? Your service looks great, but this seems sketchy :)

Edit:// Sorry i just saw you answered that already. Fucking banks. Trying since years to find a local one with a read only api with no luck yet. They just offered me read/write APIs based on expensive business accounts...

<comment><USER12> Do what I did; download their mobile app, reverse engineer it and call the web api's yourself to scrape the data.

<comment><USER11> My current bank has no mobile App (seriously). The only bank that has one where i can look at my account without TAN is the only bank here in Switzerland which is no actual Bank therefore also without the bank secret.

I asked them what would happen if i did this, they told me this is reason enough to sue me.

<comment><USER12> You could write a web scraper that keeps a session alive to get around the TAN

<comment><USER11> I feel like a noob right now that i havent thought about this. This wouldnt even break any logical rules my bank maybe has. I gotta try this. BIG THANK YOU!

<comment><USER12> No problem, glad I could help.

It was nice thing to have, made me feel in control, while packing up my groceries after having paid in the checkout line, I'd get a Notifo push message from my watcher; I just wonder why it's not something all banks would do; I'm certain customers would love getting the notifications and it would help prevent or at least catch fraud quickly.

<comment><USER11> absolutely. i am doing this with my paypal and bitcoins as well. i really dont get why the fucking richest economy sector isnt able to do such basic things. (afaik germany and the uk have a standard for that tho)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do you actually cancel the subscriptions? For example, in order to cancel a Comcast subscription wouldn't you need the last 4 digits of my social security number or something?

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks slick!

One idea I'd recommend is to look at what the user is subscribing to and monitor for when deals are available and alert the user to that. For example Xbox Live is usually $60/year, however there are frequent sales (Amazon, eBay, etc) that offer discounts to $35/year. Similarly with music subscriptions, etc.

There's your revenue model as well. Because you're saving the user money they can kick you back a few bucks (maybe a percentage of the savings).

</comment><comment><USER15> I think I would be one of your ideal customers. I have a plethora of subscription services that i'll either periodically cancel and renew, or just permanently forget to cancel.

What does your service offer that scrolling down my bank statement won't already achieve? There is already a proven barrier of laziness here, why doesn't that also exist for the process of downloading and utilizing your service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most people don't look at their bank statement often. For those that do, they sometimes overlook things. I think the most common reason for cancelling through Truebill, though, is not wanting to waste time dealing with cancelling the service.

The point is, you shouldn't HAVE to look at your bank statement to find this stuff. We do it for you, and we keep an eye on things for you. If you want to make sure you're not charged again, just set an alert. No need to check your bank statement.. just wait for an email from us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, beautiful site!

I'm loving this trend of services to save me money (Paribus is one other example that I love). However, I too am concerned about handing financial information over to a third party. I'd love to hear the business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! See my reply to tomkinstinch re: business model

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just signed up, site seems fast and works great. What's the stack like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Stack is currently Node + Postgres + React + Relay. Which reminds me... if anyone wants a job, let me know! We need mostly back-end or full- stack

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You could make an "offline" app instead of a web service. I think people trust "apps" more then web services. Especially if it's open source.

</comment><comment><USER19> What if there's a bill like, say, Comcast, and your user only wanted to cancel one service (TV) and not another (Internet)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. For now, you can just add that in the "Reason" and we'll see it. But maybe we should add a "notes" column. We could also have checkboxes for specific services, like Comcast, where we know their different offerings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I got scared when the interface asked for my paypal user/password. I'd feel much more comfortable with OAuth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely thinking about OAuth for Paypal. Unfortunately, banks and credit cards don't usually have modern APIs :) so we're forced to do old-school authentication. That said, we use Plaid for that, so we don't deal with any passwords ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems like a great idea, but the detection isn't perfect--some annual/semi-annual bills get picked up as inactive monthly, and scheduled investment withdrawals show up as subscription services. That isn't fatal, but having a way to manually correct things would help a lot!

<comment><USER3> Yep, this is definitely on our roadmap. Also, our platform is getting better as it goes, so these small mixups are getting fixed. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > 19,821 Banks Supported

How did you arrive at that number? Is that number advertised anywhere on the Plaid.com website?

<comment><USER3> I asked Plaid and that's what I was told. It's probably larger than that now since they're constantly adding long-tail support.

<comment><USER22> I researched them in the past but couldn't find any public list of the banks they support, so it's hard to tell how much coverage they have compared to Yodlee.com for instance.

Do you have to be a paying customer to pry that information (i.e. list of banks they support) out of them?

<comment><USER23> No need to sign up. You can actually find the full list in our docs: [https://plaid.com/docs/#long-tail-institutions](https://plaid.com/docs/#long- tail-institutions)

<comment><USER22> Not correct - I had to sign up for an account just now so I could get API keys to hit the endpoint.

Besides, the account is limited at the moment. I get the following error:

        {
          "code": 1306,
          "message": "invalid institution permissions",
          "resolve": "Your Client ID does not have access to this institution endpoint"
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cool stuff, I wonder how you guys will make money but will be trying it out. Hope it's all secure :)

</comment><comment><USER25> How does this work exactly? I mean, since all banks' statements are different.

</comment><comment><USER26> I really don't want to turn off 2FA even temporarily.

What would a workaround for this look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> We support 2FA on almost all banks.. Which one are you having trouble with?</comment></comment>


When a Self-Declared Genius Asks You to Read His Masterpiece - <AUTHOR> http://lithub.com/when-a-self-declared-genius-asks-you-to-read-his-masterpiece/ <comment><USER3> What is unfortunate about this is that Alan is clearly in need of friends, but his abrasive manner would certainly be off-putting to the people around him. So he has to ask random strangers for feedback on his writing instead of his friends.

America used to be more tolerant of this kind of social stupidity. In an earlier time, Alan could have found many friends among his community. For lack of better things to do, these friends would have filed off his rough edges and given him probably-bad, but well-meaning advice on his writing, which would have helped him out much more than this journal article will.

But no, all of our dance cards are full, it's so difficult to find meaningful relationships in our daily lives. The socially adept can easily insulate themselves from the unwashed masses and never have to learn how to respond appropriately to someone like that. So recluses become even more reclusive, hiding away in their rooms and developing this kind of ego complex. So very sad.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree that society has failed him. It takes two to tango; he has played a part in it himself.

He's a Shakespearean conspiracy theorist, who spends inordinate amounts of time on this one thing.

It's just a bizarre thing that most people could not make heads or tails of. I don't believe that no one wants to be his friend. I just don't think anyone knows _how_ to be his friend.

<comment><USER5> Yours is a totally reasonable comment, but it seems to be getting a lot of downvotes. I'm seeing the same thing on other articles today; I wonder if there's some sort of brigading going on.

<comment><USER4> I'm not particularly worried about it. Sometimes there are some stray downvotes that just end up hitting one of my comments. I have plenty of karma to spare anyway.

Thanks for the kind words, though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every field has cranks. People, often mentally ill, send pages and pages of crazy theories and writing to professors.

One professor had an idea. Every time a crank wrote to him, he would send them the contact information of the last crank. He said he was too busy to read it right now, but this other person might help him. Instead of getting angry letters back, they wouldn't write back again, or even sent nice letters thanking him for the referral.

That might have helped in this case. This guy might not have time to read these people's works, but surely they can help each other.

<comment><USER7> I knew I'd heard this tale before: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931403)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seriously? Some guy brags about how he wasted a whole day arguing with some rude dude, who randomly emailed him, because he didn't want to read his essays as he was too busy? I guess I'm much more disgusted by Jeff, than by that Alan. I mean, even if I would do something like that, there's no way I would be so proud of myself to make a blogpost about it.

I'm honestly surprised 40 people in 2 hours found it worthy of HN frontpage.

<comment><USER9> He's a writer. He used this situation to write an essay examining the literary industry. Like all good writing, there are many valuable things which could be taken from his (well executed) writing. Personally, I found some interesting parallels in how the venture capital industry works, and it helped me to conceptialize how those concepts extent into other fields.

It was written as a blog post because we were the true audience, not Alan.

<comment><USER10> Examining the literary industry? I thought he was plugging his friends' books.

<comment><USER11> successful then, i take it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Books have become such an engrained part of our culture, it's easy to lose sight of how divorced they are from "normal" (on an evolutionary time-scale) uses of language. Usually, language is reciprocal, bi-directional - you speak I listen, then I speak and you listen.

But books (usually) only go one way - the author speaks, the reader listens. This allows strong power-laws to take hold, so that a small handful of speakers take up a very disproportionate amount of people's attention.

This is another argument for Alan to make some friends, with whom he can practice the more balanced language-art of conversation.

As an aside, this reminds me of my fantasy of parsers becoming sophisticated enough that instead of books, authors can write chat-bots that allow readers to feel "heard" by the author.

<comment><USER13> That is an interesting idea. Has anyone tried anything, even a poor attempt, at something like that? Even as just an art piece, it would be an interesting medium.

<comment><USER14> Chatbots still haven't really progressed too much out of the 90's, really, from what I've read, especially hobby ones.

IBM's Watson is not representative of the progression of consumer-grade web chatbot technology, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a really touching open response to an inner demon that I, and many people, wrestle with. Like Alan, I too have childishly and bitterly demanded recognition from what seems like a cold and uncaring world. But seeing the system from within, it's just a bunch of people like me, working to make and find awesome things as best they can. It fills me with hope to know that our communities, online and otherwise, are created by and for ourselves. We don't have to be separate and lonely Alans, instead with some nurturing and care we can enjoy our time in the company of peers.

</comment><comment><USER16> I suspect that Alan is schizophrenic and his statements are just a reflection of his grandiose delusions. Anecdotally, his tall claims are similar to other schizophrenic people I have come across.

<comment><USER17> I've made the same allowance for a visitor to a forum I run. He is incredibly abrasive and snarky in general (especially when people disagree with him, however politely) and vain about his own writing, which is mediocre but he refers to as "truly insightful" and "a cogent analysis of this subject". It consists mainly of densely-worded diatribes and conspiracy theories, with scattered "photoshops" of politicians he dislikes (which is all of them - nobody is good enough for this guy). It's truly disturbing, in the way that observing another's emotional turmoil can be. Mainly I try to leave him alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I applaud the professor's patience. His last well mannered response to the troll (AKA, self proclaimed literary writer) with the full blown narcissistic personality disorder (Could park his car right next to Kanye West) was a whopping 2,500 words. It would take me a whole day to write something that long but the real question is WHY did he bother?

<comment><USER19> My feelings as well.

tl;dr, I am sorry I can't read your unsolicited manuscript because I am a humble writer with a humble background with a duties to my humble college students in creative writing class.

Let me mention all of my friends who are really humble, from middle-upper class who have earned an inheritance to travel and write from their experiences; but not all of them are white lest you get the wrong idea about me, in fact one of them is colored with such a interesting background you should hear about because he gets confused for either being "Black" or "Arab"; so in closing, I am a really humble person who have lots of humble friends who value friendship; wait, by the way did I mention that I am really humble?

<comment><USER20> Are you Alan?

<comment><USER19> No I am not Alan.

My commentary is just how reading the author's explanation; he came off as so many people I've known previously at liberal arts colleges and then later at parties/cafes college towns. The "conscientious" type who likes the idea of pursuing something "pure" and "artistic," but ultimately their lives lead them to nothing beyond the wording on the marketing on a college brochure, "think deeply, be worldly, travel!"

I'd love to go into a in-depth analysis of the original author's text, and how every single of his example of his friends he upheld is a stereotype that is in the wheelhouse of a New York City MFA class or Lena Dunham's "Girls".(Unfortunately, I am trying to debug Docker to run a compute cluster job. )

I am deeply disappointed that the author didn't try to use the opportunity to try to appeal to the craft of writing as a daily discipline, a joy, a pain, a biological compulsion for people who persist regardless of prestige nor fame; or why writing in particular means so much to him, and revealing his own egotism and follies; instead, he wrote a rant that is a thinly-veined guise about he and his circle of friends are the "truer artists" with "much more interesting life experiences" than Alan.

However, perhaps you have a more nuanced reading than I did, I'd love to hear what was your takeaway from the author's article?

<comment><USER4> If someone mailed you 55 pages* of unparseable nonsense steeped in pretension, and threatened that there would be consequences should you choose to ignore it, what would you do?

The author decided to explain that he'd rather read articles by people he knows and by his students who allow him to make a living. He doesn't read things as part of an imagined "profession." He reads things relevant to his own life.

It's about the ability to freely associate, and the ability to decide what is relevant to you, with regards to the "profession" of writer.

Your interpretation seemed somewhat uncharitable. I don't think you're being particularly nice, either.

* The amount was not revealed to us. But take it as a hypothetical anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To offer a counter-example: Nietzsche was a mostly friendless philosopher whose writing is also full of megalomania -- this is not to make the case that Alan or your typical graphomaniac has anything in common with Nietzsche - <USER2> the whole argument of this piece seems to hinge on the importance of social adequacy being enjoined with literary merit - not to mention the mildly unpleasant tinge of smug self-satisfaction as the author enumerates and quotes his many 'adequate' literary friends. Will anyone be reading Jeff Sharlet 50 years from now? I highly doubt it.

<comment><USER3> Nietzche was by no means friendless. The gentry of the mid-1800s, particularly the intelligentsia of which he was a part, could not have survived, much less thrived, without a rich network of friends and professional acquaintances, whose houses they would crash when traveling, exchanging ideas and emotional support.

He even fell in love, in a famed torrential affair with the celebrated seductress Lou Salome.

Nietzche's philosophies grew not from the pain of loneliness, but from the bitterness of being denied the things he wanted, mostly by events out of his control. He had a promising career in the army, until an accident forced him to return to academia. Salome did not believe in marriage and turned Nietzche's proposals down three times. His anti-Semitism eventually made him unemployable by academia.

He did break off with many of his friends at this point, mostly for philosophical reasons, he kept a few around and even made new ones. He was never a true recluse, at least, not any more than anyone else of the time period.

<comment><USER21> > His anti-Semitism eventually made him unemployable by academia.

Did you mean atheism? Contrary to popular belief Nietzsche was not an antisemite nor would that have made someone unemployable in the 19th century.

> He was never a true recluse, at least, not any more than anyone else of the > time period.

Given the inaccuracy of your previous statement I'd be interested in a source to support this. Below is from beginning of Ecce Homo (I selected a work at random -- it's really been a while since I've read any of his works, but I'm sure all the prefaces begin in a similar fashion -- save probably A Birth of Tragedy, since he was at that point still an academic and not actively hostile to the entire world for ignoring his writing).

>> Seeing that shortly I must confront mankind with the heaviest demand ever put on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am...But the disparity between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I learned that people who need our help are rarely the people we'd _like_ to help — often enough quite the opposite.

That's why they need our help. I don't know a good answer to that problem.

<comment><USER23> ...and sometimes, if we do try to help them anyway, they don't want the help we offer.

(In this case, what if the professor had contacted Alan and tried to talk him into seeing a therapist? Alan might find that offensive.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I found most of the writer's own writing to be a bit pompous and unrelatable (using verbs we don't use in real life), or a bit self-important, with a distinct lack of empathy. We're all subject to our own experiences, which means we should try harder to break out of them.

</comment><comment><USER25> What if Alan is just Jeff's alter-ego - writing emails at night just to be read in the morning by himself?

And very much related - does anybody know why quoted strings are often written by writers as:

... foo "bar."

and not:

... foo "bar".

? It doesn't parse, does it?

<comment><USER24> Because style dictates placing the period before the quotation. Simple as that; just an arbitrary syntax rule.

<comment><USER26> More precisely it's US style. British style puts the full stop outside the quote unless it's part of the quotation.

[http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus- american-s...](http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american- style.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ... Why is he not posting the piece so other people can read it. Maybe he is a genius.

I get stuff like this all the time. Anyone with an academic email does. Sometimes I print out some of the more entertaining maths and physics proofs and hang them on the wall. I have a pretty good time machine schematic on my desk atm.

</comment><comment><USER28> Cleverly designed ad for several different writers?

<comment><USER14> Looks like pretty standard blogspam to promote himself and his friend's books to me, just hidden in the article better than some other articles.

It might as well have been titled "Top 5 Books to Read Before Responding to a Self-Important Jerk Who Threatens You".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is offensive. I know of authors who made it a point to answer all fan mail until it became impractical. That was pre-internet era but the ethic and the empathy were there.

It's hard to become successful and encouragement or even negative direct feedback help people. Instead of raising that up as a value the author tells a story about his own snark. It's not pretty and it isn't anything anyone should congratulation him on.

<comment><USER30> Are you upset at the author of this article or the troll? I can't tell. If it's the author, you're reading a different article than I am. It's not "fan mail." It's a bizarre threat from a self-important friendless twat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The answer is to read it, point out his mistakes, and tell him to stop yammering about being a genius, because chances are he'll get further if he doesn't waste too much time on bragging about nonexistent progress.

If he actually _doesn 't_ make a single mistake that you can find, it's time to hop a step up the chain of command at your local university and do it again.

<comment><USER32> No. That's the answer if your goal is to spend a bunch of time helping some random dude who just insulted you. And that's only your goal if you 1) are extremely charitable and 2) have the time to burn.

The article's point is that, while the author does technically have the time, he has places he'd rather spend it than on some random internet dude who just insulted him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If anyone wants to read the piece that Alan requested (well, demanded, but let's not quibble) Jeff Sharlett review, you can find it here:

[https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/](https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Classic Dunning-Kruger effect coupled with some personality disorders. Jeff Sharlet was really kind to respond in this way but I fear the reply will not be well received. Reading the comments you see a plethora of others that Alan pestered as well. Many of them are well worth the read.

</comment><comment><USER35> i think he has won and it will encourage others to do the same. provoking people can work. bad publicity beats no publicity. now even some dude with no interest in shakespeare has clicked his link. it's [https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/](https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/) . worse it possibly deserves a second look. is this why the famous english professor posted this? because he secretly liked it and wanted it to be read but be able to give the arrogant author a slap on the wrist at the same time?

</comment><comment><USER36> Instead of taking the opportunity to lecture poor Alan (and brag his own obvious skills), shouldn't Jeff be calling the cops instead? "Feel free to continue to ignore my work, just be prepared to pay a price for it that you might never have imagined." That sounds scary to me. Unless of course Alan is just a character and we've all been had ;)

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be surprised if "Alan" is a hyperbolized amalgamation of several requests he's gotten from random people over the years, and this is his hypothetical response to such a person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was hoping there would be a link to "Alan"'s work so we could see for ourselves how genius he is...

</comment><comment><USER38> He spent more time responding to the guy than it would have taken to just read a few pages. If he was actually going to engage with this person, it would have been more productive (for everyone involved) to just read a bit.

</comment><comment><USER39> Now THATS how you humble brag!

</comment><comment><USER40> A real genius wouldn't care whether you read their work or not.

</comment><comment><USER41> Blank page?

<comment><USER5> I got that as well, but a few refreshes later and it loaded. Servers must be getting a HN hug of death.

<comment><USER42> > HN hug of death

I like that expression :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Globo.com's live video platform for the 2014 FIFA World Cup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jbochi/globo-com-s-live-video-platform-for-the-2014-fifa-world-cup-77259eb3b7db <comment><USER2> WoW

</comment><comment><USER3> these numbers are great.

</comment><comment><USER4> thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER5> awesome!</comment>


Facebook photo-scanning lawsuit could cost it billions - <AUTHOR> https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2018/04/17/facebook-photo-scanning-lawsuit-could-cost-it-billions/?HN2 <comment><USER2> Clustering images by features seems to be pretty fundamental, and if it runs afoul of this law, then the law needs to be changed.

I upload photos to Google Photos because I _want_ them to be grouped and categorized so I can easily find them. That is, if I click on a picture of my daughter, or my wife, I want to see ALL pictures of I took of them grouped together.

Looking at the text of the law itself, it seems to exclude photographs, here's the relevant section:

" (740 ILCS 14/10) Sec. 10. Definitions. In this Act: "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples used for valid scientific testing or screening, demographic data, tattoo descriptions, or physical descriptions such as height, weight, hair color, or eye color."

I'm not really sure what they mean by "face geometry" whereas at the same time, excluding photographs. Does this mean if my service measures the distance between the eyes, and the width of the mouth, and clusters photos by that, or by eye or hair color by using say, segmentation or histogram clustering, all of a sudden it's illegal? That would seem to be a fairly absurd and broad definition of biometric security information.

In theory, I suppose, the computation of the features, could be done on the client, and then have the features cloud-synced and replicated to all clients, but this would make for a shitty search experience, especially if the machine learning or feature extraction technique improvements overtime, and all of a sudden, you've got to download 20,000 photos and recompute everything on your phone.

<comment><USER3> There's a difference between offering facial recognition as a feature to users of the software and collecting biometric data as a additional revenue source. In one case the user owns their biometric data and is granting the company access to it for the limited use of tagging photos. In the other case the company owns the biometric data and is using it for god knows what.

<comment><USER2> Where's the evidence Facebook is using it for a revenue source?

<comment><USER4> That's what court cases are about, and why we don't declare innocent or guilty before the verdict. The evidence (or lack of) will come up during the court proceedings, you'd expect.

<comment><USER5> Semantic nitpick, we don't declare innocence, but only that guilt was not proven.

<comment><USER6> As far as I'm aware or have ever been taught, they're one in the same -- "presumption of innocence _until proven_ guilty".

<comment><USER5> Nope, your quote is irrelevant, and it's "one and the same" besides. Why do you think people are pronounced "guilty" or "not guilty"?

<comment><USER7> Actually, because you can't be retried for the same crime you are in a very meaningful way declared though not found innocent.

A hung trial is closer in meaning to not being found guilty or innocent.

Arguably, a semantic difference does apply in that you may still be found liable in a civil case. However, civil cases don't declare people guilty only liable.

<comment><USER5> That's just your opinion, and given you're not even a lawyer, it's worth about as much as the latest Ethereum ICO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is being done under the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act (2008), but Illinois and a number of other states also have some similar (and pretty forward thinking) rules in place regarding data breaches of biometric data [1]

If facial recognition becomes legally recognized as a "biometric marker" (no reason it shouldn't) - I think we'll see all sorts of other suits come out of this.

1 - [https://blog.varonis.com/us-state-data-breach- definitions/](https://blog.varonis.com/us-state-data-breach-definitions/)

<comment><USER9> If facial recognition was considered a bio metric, would I Phone users have to click through a screen that says "I will not use this in Illinois". I don't see how this would accomplish much more than coffee causing cancer in the state of California

<comment><USER8> What it changes are the results of a breach / how the data is to be considered. It's the difference between "oh, we had a data breach" and "oh crap why is the Attorney General of Illinois calling our office."

As an aside: Google's Arts and Culture app (that matches your face to historic artwork) doesn't show up in Illinois - the feature within the app for face matching is geolocated out.

[http://abc7chicago.com/technology/why-googles-face-match- fea...](http://abc7chicago.com/technology/why-googles-face-match-feature- doesnt-work-in-illinois/2959613/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How could Facebook ever lose this case in a country where Equifax faced no punishment? Regardless of what you think about Facebook, DeepFace is seemingly mostly theoretical harm whereas Equifax definitely provably harmed people's privacy and then (initially) charged those same people to help them protect themselves (via credit freezes). Not saying I don't want Facebook held to the law, just thought of the comparison.

<comment><USER11> > _How could Facebook ever lose this case in a country where Equifax faced no > punishment?_

The case hinges on a particularly strict Illinois biometric privacy law.

<comment><USER12> This is the same reason Google's Arts & Culture face-matching tool wasn't available in Illinois:

[http://abc7chicago.com/technology/why-googles-face-match- fea...](http://abc7chicago.com/technology/why-googles-face-match-feature- doesnt-work-in-illinois/2959613/)

<comment><USER13> Also why Nest IQ (which uses biometric face detection) isn't available in Illinois.

<comment><USER14> Does anybody know if this affects the iPhone's Face ID in any way?

<comment><USER13> It supposedly does not, as the data is kept on the phone and Apple does not take possession of the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's the docket:

[https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/2mwpixhn9/california- north...](https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/2mwpixhn9/california-northern- district-court/patel-v-facebook-inc/)

<comment><USER15> Having read through the latest filings, it looks like the District Court judge is pretty upset with Facebook and its tactics, and was willing to give no leeway to their request to stay the case as a result. He wanted a trial, and soon.

One of the tactics that they used was going over his head to the Ninth Circuit to request a stay at the district level ([https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=253527059...](https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=253527059&z=c4b1abb5)), which the Ninth Circuit then granted ([https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=253580963...](https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=253580963&z=36003e60)). So then the district court judge had to effectively grant the stay anyhow, which he had just denied:

"ORDER. In light of the circuit court's order, all remaining pre-trial and trial dates are vacated. Signed by Judge James Donato on 5/29/2018\. (This is a text-only entry generated by the court. There is no document associated with this entry.) (jdlc3S, COURT STAFF) (Filed on 5/29/2018)"

This is what having infinite cash buys you in the American legal system.

<comment><USER16> Appealing to a higher court is literally how the system is intended to work and gas absolutely nothing to do with infinite money. The Judge ruled and the 9th overturned him. That means the system is working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> NYT had a nice profile of one of the lawyers a few years ago [1]. It had this quote from Sam Altman:

>Asked to sum up the tech community's feelings about Mr. Edelson, Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a technology incubator that invests in very young companies, said the lawyer was regarded as "a leech tarted up as a freedom fighter."

He's the American Max Schrems.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/technology/unpopular- in-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/technology/unpopular-in-silicon- valley.html)

<comment><USER18> Are you implying Max Schrems is a leech?

<comment><USER17> Nope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Facebook has a very Uber-like mentality in regards to breaking the laws to make a profit. In the EU it was opting people in by default for its automatic facial recognition feature only weeks before the GDPR.

<comment><USER20> I still can't decide whether FB (and others) think they can get away with being non compliant or just accepted violating GDPR is the cost of doing business.

<comment><USER2> Is running a photo hosting service a violation of GDPR itself? That is, if I take a photo of someone else (not myself) and upload it without consent of that person to AcmePhoto.com, and AcmePhoto.com now has personal information stored about someone without their consent, is the site liable? Do I need to get the consent of every person of every photo I upload?

Where do you draw the line? If the site processes the EXIF metadata are they in violation? If they use a neutral clustering algorithm to group visually similar images, are they in violation (be it humans, cars, or chairs)? if I take a visually clustered group of images and tagthem "a_imho", have I now made the site have biometric data related to you?

I mean, a lot of people say "well, as long as you're in the spirit of the GDPR, don't worry", but lawyers don't care whether you're in the spirit of something, they only care if they can win a case, and when the law is vague, "spirit" seems like one judge could hang you, and another judge could free you depending on the luck of the draw.

<comment><USER21> > if I take a photo of someone else (not myself)

This is were you draw the line. Taking pictures of people without their consent (and a good reason) is a big no-no in most parts of the world.

This is either because it's not considered appropriate or because it's condemnable [1] or both. It is also nothing new and not some effect of GDPR, but deeply rooted in culture. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy long had strong laws regarding the right of persons to their own likeness. There is also a big rift, not only legally but primarily culturally, between Anglo- Saxon culture and mostly the rest of the world.

GDPR and other laws concerning informational self-determination[2] never can be interpreted without context. They are always limited by other rights and freedoms, like the right of artistic freedom. So a lot depends on your intent and if you can justify what you do.

I'm not saying this is all well and good. As kind of a street photographer wannabe I'm very sympathetic to the position that the UK and the USA take on this. I'm just saying that the rest of the world has very different ideas about this and this has consequences if you operate globally.

[1] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self- determinati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self- determination)

<comment><USER22> The link you referenced counters your point that its a big no-no in most parts of the world to take a photo of someone without their consent. In the majority of the countries listed on that wiki page no consent is required with certain exceptions.

I'd personally say taking pictures of people without their consent is a big no-no in _some_ parts of the world, but not all.

I have never personally had any issues with my street photography in the UK, it boils down to being respectful and not behaving in a harassing manor. If there is a reasonable expectation of privacy then one should consider taking an unsolicited photo as an invasion of privacy.

<comment><USER21> > The link you referenced counters your point that its a big no-no in most > parts of the world to take a photo of someone without their consent. In the > majority of the countries listed on that wiki page no consent is required > with certain exceptions.

I added the reference to the list as support for my thesis that it can have legal consequences, a fact that in my experience people from the USA or the UK are often oblivious about. Just because it is not forbidden doesn't mean it is acceptable though. I think it is no coincidence that we see strictest regulation in central Europe because these countries are around the border line between the different attitudes. Go farther east and there is no need to regulate the culturally obvious.

> I have never personally had any issues with my street photography in the UK,

Of course not, UK is one of the best countries for shooting street.

> it boils down to being respectful and not behaving in a harassing manor. If > there is a reasonable expectation of privacy then one should consider taking > an unsolicited photo as an invasion of privacy.

Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder - to what extent does cooperating with gov't on data collection act as insurance against being sued out of existence. IE - if you play nice and install a backdoor for nsa to query your data, will they influence trials? Obviously they would need to keep up appearances by allowing the trials to move naturally, but perhaps a well timed visit or phone call at the last minute could instruct a judge to go easy on damages — ostensibly for national security's sake.

<comment> wu-ikkyu Somewhat related:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Donato previously rejected Facebook's argument that the case had to be > dismissed because the attempt to enforce Illinois law runs afoul of its user > agreement that requires disputes to be resolved under the laws of > California, where it's based.

Could someone please elaborate on this? I feel like I've seen clauses like this all over the place. Are they really unenforceable? What is the judge's reasoning?

<comment><USER25> IANAL, but his reasoning would probably be in the summary judgement denial that's on the docket:

ORDER re Summary Judgment Motions ([257], [299], [307]). Signed by Judge James Donato on 5/14/2018\. (jdlc3S, COURT STAFF) (Filed on 5/14/2018)

Unfortunately, I don't really have access to PACER or money to gamble on opening random documents to see which one has the actual info. The US "public access to court electronic records" isn't very "public"-friendly.

(docket listing kindly provided by user thinkcomp - [https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/2mwpixhn9/california- north...](https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/2mwpixhn9/california-northern- district-court/patel-v-facebook-inc/))

</comment></comment><comment> em-bell What a total cluster f __@. Facebook must have an army of lawyers to deal with both domestic and foreign lawsuits.

This country's legal system is like a swiss cheese with holes everywhere. Dealing with states, federal governments and municipalities costs our businesses billions of dollars each year.

<comment><USER26> No, not following the law costs the businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> While I'm a big proponent of States' Rights and a strict reading of the 10th Amendment, in the case of Facebook which, by it's nature is not only national but international, I have a hard time understanding how a State law can have jurisdiction over Facebook in this case. It seems to me that Federal Law should have original jurisdiction by virtue of the Interstate Commerce clause in this case UNLESS it can be shown that residents of Illinois were targeted or all of the servers and logic for doing facial recognition, analysis, and storage of biometrics were in the State of Illinois. That said, I am not a constitutional lawyers...

<comment><USER28> They've got jurisdiction over Facebook's relationship with Illinois residents. Same reasons Amazon has to collect sales tax in states they're not necessarily headquartered in.

Facebook also has Chicago offices. [http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ori/ct-facebook- expan...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ori/ct-facebook-expanding- ryan-ori-20171009-story.html)

<comment><USER9> So could they just add a clause in the user agreements that states "You cannot use this if you live in Illinois" and be done with it?

<comment><USER28> Facebook has extensive location history available for most users, so just a EULA clause probably wouldn't do the trick. They'd probably have to show a more active attempt to block Illinois residents from the system.

It wouldn't be a retroactive solution, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not worried about Facebook or Google, because they spend millions on lawyers, but this seems potentially terrifying for startups. Any U.S. state can make a law making some part of their service illegal, and someone can sue the startup even if their company wasn't operating in that state. A startup would need to know and obey all laws in all states, and have enough money to fight legal cases.

I wonder if the golden age of startups is over. It would be impossible to navigate through these regulations if you just wanted to create a side project for fun.

<comment><USER30> While I see your point, as a EU citizen it baffles me how anyone is allowed to generate and store _biometric_ data without consent and face no legal trouble - it's not like this is some nitpicking on a highly specific legal detail...

<comment><USER9> As an American it baffles me that the EU has regulated themselves out of the growth that is occurring almost everywhere else. It's just a difference in cultural beliefs and preferences

<comment><USER31> How much growth can be attributed to something like this? And what's the total impact on overall growth of the economy?

It's probably a rounding error, and a pretty reasonable trade-off to make.

<comment><USER9> Considering GDP growth is the normal metric for economic health, growth is the economy. And while you can't assign a number for each policy the EU has, the Q1 differences between America and the EU can paint the picture

<comment><USER31> Exactly: it's impossible to quantify such a minor policy in the context of vastly different kinds of economies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There is no part of this headline that does not make me happy. <3</comment>


Wayland misconceptions debunked - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html <comment><USER2> There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position.

Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are _not_ Linux compatible. The Linux ecosystem relies on the Mesa stack (Mesa, DRI, DRM, GBM, KMS, etc), and DRM is part of the upstream kernel itself... Nvidia has openly not used _any_ of these APIs.

This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same?

The Linux community reached out to Nvidia and help them along with Nouveau, and at one point even threatened to sue them. Linus Torvalds has told them that he doesn't care about them if they won't actually participate in Linux, and will continue to break their drivers because they just don't listen.

<comment><USER3> Nvidia's position seems to be that Linux needs to grow up and provide a stable driver API and ABI, and stop claiming anyone is a "bad actor" just because they don't want to put their drivers under the GPL, make them part of the Linux kernel source tree, and essentially give up control of them.

I'm honestly surprised the major distros haven't gotten together to do this, in a shared fork if necessary. It's outright embarrassing that this attitude still infects the Linux project.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is perhaps the most important feature of Linux, and _far_ from a problem. Nvidia needs to get over itself and put its driver in the upstream tree. AMD did it and it's been a huge success. Linux's unstable internal API and GPL'd nature has been a huge driving force behind the availablity of open source drivers. Hell, many distros with stable driver APIs like *BSD have Linux to thank for many of the drivers they have, because without Linux there never would have been open source drivers or specs in the first place.

None of the distros are going to get behind your fork because all agree with Linux on this matter, rightfully so. Nvidia can fuck off with their proprietary crap, Linux has no intention of bending over for that garbage.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, that's bollocks. AMD _did not_ put their driver into the upstream tree! What is in that tree is the open source driver developed by volunteers, based on ATI specs.

ATI/AMD still has their own proprietary, closed blob driver that is not in the tree - and which actually runs quite a bit faster than the open source one.

<comment><AUTHOR>
        $ cd ~/sources/linux/drivers/gpu/
        $ git log . | grep "@amd.com" | wc -l
        42418
        $ cd ~/sources/mesa
        $ git log | grep "@amd.com" | wc -l
        4817

>ATI/AMD still has their own proprietary, closed blob driver that is not in the tree - and which actually runs quite a bit faster than the open source one.

It doesn't run faster, this is nonsense. I've personally met the AMDGPU driver developers and if you ask them they'll even tell you that basically no one needs AMDGPU Pro. It's not faster, _this_ is bollucks.

<comment><USER5> To add to this, AFAIK there are two main reasons why they still have AMDGPU- PRO: it has the more compatible, better-performing OpenCL implementation (which you can run alongside Mesa, actually), and until recently it supported slightly different display features, and more compatibility profile functionality. As Mesa becomes more compatible with bizarre certified industrial applications and, and the upstream AMDGPU kernel driver enables more exotic display features, I suspect AMD might choose to just maintain Mesa for these GPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a refreshing difference to other Linux ecosystem changes! Errors like enforcing client side decorations get corrected, there seems to be activity to add the features missing compared to X, and most importantly: Instead of replacing the existing working solution with broken crap because it's modern, Wayland slowly integrates itself into the ecosystem, and it has Xwayland, which should minimize breakage when moving over in a few years. And if I look at the stutter X produces with my window manager every time the compositor is off, and given that said compositor compton is abandoned and there seems to be no better alternative, I understand that there might be a need for a different solution.

I got hit by strange Wayland bugs when distros like Ubuntu and Fedora activated it too early and I'm not looking to make the switch anytime soon, but I wish the project the best and am happy to see it seems to be on a good way.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Wayland doesn't support Nvidia!

There is a very high likelihood that when a user complains about Wayland support for Nvidia they mean this:

* user already assumes Nvidia is a bad Linux actor

* user knows Nvidia only supports buggy blobs

* user may even know Nvidia is bad to people trying to unblob the blobs

* user already went through the trouble of doing what it takes to get the bad Linux Nvidia blobs to work to play games on their machines

* user notices that the bad buggy Linux Nvidia blobs fail to work _at all_ with Wayland

* user is understandably _even more frustrated_ than they were before. So they ask you-- a Wayland person-- how can it be _even worse_ for them now when they've already been generating much more complex and power-hungry graphics with their buggy blob than they'd ever do with Wayland.

If you're representing Wayland, this problem is your problem whether you want it or not. Perhaps the answer is to make the protocol worse so the the Nvidia user doesn't remain eternally maximally frustrated. Perhaps the answer is that isn't possible and you're stuck in the same boat as the user. Perhaps it means you start a hunger strike or gather thousands of devs to protest outside Nvidia's headquarters until they improve. I have no idea.

But _please_ don't do that FLOSS thing where all the devs on a project teach each other to sync on, "Sorry Mario, but your princess is in another castle." That pattern becomes it's own problem and can quickly end up discouraging development even from potential devs who don't care at all about Nvidia support.

> Wayland doesn't support screenshots/capture!

What is the current UX for screenshotting, screencapture, and screencapture with audio for the most featureful DE that uses Wayland atm? Is there a program out there that offers push-button access for these three features (choosing the most sensible default format in each case)?

<comment><USER8> >There is a very high likelihood that when a user complains about Wayland support for Nvidia they mean this

As the actual person who receives these complaints... this isn't true. Once it's explained, though, the users still stick around and get angry because they made dumb, uninformed choices as a consumer and think it's our fault.

>If you're representing Wayland, this problem is your problem whether you want it or not.

It's not. We can just choose not to solve it. Use X and buy smarter when the next harware upgrade comes around, or wait until your hardware is supported by nouveau if you don't want to upgrade any time soon.

>What is the current UX for screenshotting, screencapture, and screencapture with audio for the most featureful DE that uses Wayland atm? Is there a program out there that offers push-button access for these three features (choosing the most sensible default format in each case)?

I don't really know what the situation is for more noob-friendly DEs like GNOME, but on sway this tool is the i3-equivalent of push-button simplicity:

[https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/](https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/)

Push-button screen capture isn't there yet.

<comment><USER9> "the users still stick around and get angry because they made dumb, uninformed choices as a consumer and think it's our fault."

If this is the attitude of Wayland developers, it goes a long way towards explaining Wayland's ten year road of non-adoption.

<comment><USER10> You phrase that as though there is a real choice here. There is not. The open source community has had experience with how to interact with closed source drivers since the Linux 0.01 in 1991 and that experience screams "don't do it". Xorg has been a technical disaster for more than a decade; I have sympathy for the people who want to use Nvidia cards, but they are going to have to use X.org and like it anyway because that is all Nvidia supports.

Attempting to run a project based on the opinions of a group of Nvidia devs who (1) don't care about your project and (2) don't care about your goals is technical madness. It took the kernel more than a decade of stubbornness before all the other device driver writers caved and supported decent design. As far as I recall Nvidia is literally the last major device driver who refuses to play ball with open source. If Nvidia users can't use Wayland for driver reasons that is because of _Nvidia 's_ choices and there isn't anything the Wayland devs can do without repeating all the mistakes of X.org.

If it takes another decade before Nvidia caves and behaves like a good corporate citizen then that is a decade well spent by the Wayland devs. Long term maintainability will eventually trump short term user issues; just like it did for wifi et al. It is unfortunate Nvidia is making their user's lives hard, but the writing has been on the wall since AMD started open sourcing their driver stack in the 2008 era.

<comment><USER11> Android and ChromeOS show it is possible to have it other way when FOSS religion doesn't stand in the way.

<comment><USER12> Android shows _exactly_ what that would look like: You get a blob-like kernel/stdlib/driver package from your vendor, then build your operating system around that and never speak about it again because it's brittle mess of good enough.

The only reason Google and a few big players can ever ship updates is by playing hard with those vendors, and negotiating upgrade paths in advance. Nobody is interested in doing that for the desktop.

<comment><USER11> Exactly the example of the FOSS religion I was talking about.

Game devs just want to put shinny pixels on the screen, no one cares if it is a blob or not.

AMD is open source and there is hardly any advantage, X routinely crashs, doesn't provide support for the GPUs that were dropped from the rebooted driver, being stuck with fewer capabilities than fxgl.

Hollywood studios are quite happy with NVidia drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking > the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and > maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force > on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. > With respect, my answer is no.

Interestingly, this is more of an indictment of Wayland than anything in the article that's being "debunked". I don't dispute that it is difficult work, but you'll have to choose between making a viable X replacement, and dying on this particular hill.

<comment><USER8> Wayland is flourishing - everywhere except among Nvidia proprietary driver users. In reality it's them who are dying on their hill, left behind on crappy old software.

<comment><USER14> No, in reality desktop Linux, including wayland, is floundering. This is contributing to that floundering by splitting the effort, create an environment filled with vitriol on both sides, making it harder for things like games to say they support the set of things called "Linux", etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not here to make Linux succeed. I'm here to make good software. Users who know better will use Linux and users who don't won't. Either way Linux will keep on trucking, as it has for a very long time. It shows no sign of stopping.

<comment><USER15> Given that Wayland still doesn't properly support remote desktop, a feature that has been working continuously in Windows for decades through tons of graphics model changes, I'm not sure I'd play the "users who know better" card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _> There are two approaches to this endorsed by different camps in Wayland: these Wayland protocols, and a dbus protocol based on Pipewire._

Pipewire approach looks the best for screenshots and video recording. I hope all Wayland compositors will settle on it.

 _> Secondary clipboard support <...> wp-primary-selection_

I guess the standard is very recent. Last time I tried, KWin didn't support it yet.

 _> We fought long and hard over this and we now have a protocol for negotiating client- vs server-side decorations, which is now fairly broadly supported, including among some of its opponents._

A major problem with Mutter remains. Mutter developers don't want to depend on GTK for whatever reason, but so are SDL, mpv and other non-GUI applications and toolkits developers. The result are ugly looking windows for such cases in Gnome.

 _> You have to step up, though: no one working on Wayland today seems to care._

It's a problem with Wayland in general. The end user gets the short end of the stick, since with removal of some functionality that was in X, some use cases are cut off. But there is no one player like with X server. Tons of compositors are developed by different people. So even raising the issue let alone coming to some consensus takes a very long time.

I'm not saying Wayland isn't the way to go, just pointing out it's a very hard transition.

 _> Wayland doesn't support Nvidia!_

How is the progress of using Vulkan for Wayland compositors and avoiding the whole EGLstreams mess?

I see this: [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan- Docs/issues/294](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/294)

But it's not clear from it whether now there is a way to avoid using GBM or EGLstreams.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that it requires dbus, which not everone is on board with. Our argument is that the Wayland compositor should speak the Wayland protocol. That being said, the software I mentioned can be used to bridge between the two camps.

Following your edit: yes, the new standard protocol for primary selection is very new. But everyone supports the GTK protocol and the transition will not be visible to users.

Dude, so many edits: "But there is no one player like with X server" -> this player is wlroots

Oh my god man, stop editing your comment: "How is the progress of using Vulkan for Wayland compositors and avoiding the whole EGLstreams mess?" -> hard to say now, it's very very early.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for answering :)

 _> this player is wlroots_

One of the players still, since for example KWin isn't using it. I.e. it unfortunately came too late to unify the situation.

<comment><USER8> A strong majority of Wayland compositors are using wlroots. Those that don't are in the minority, but they are mostly cooperative with wlroots aside from GNOME and E.

<comment><USER17> Isn't GNOME the biggest single desktop by market share?

<comment><USER16> Only because Ubuntu users started implicitly using it. KDE looks more popular among those who are explicitly choosing a DE.

<comment><USER18> But how do you know if someone explicitly chooses GNOME when it's the default?

<comment><USER16> Looking at GOL stats for example, Gnome usage grew when Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome (on roughly the amount of Ubuntu users). Before that, KDE had higher usage overall. So my conclusion is that Gnome's majority today can be driven by implicit Ubuntu's choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Things like sending pixel buffers to the compositor are already abstracted > on Wayland and a network-backed implementation could be easily made. The > problem is that no one seems to really care: all of the people who want > network transparency drank the anti-Wayland kool-aid instead of showing up > to put the work in. If you want to implement this, though, we're here and > ready to support you! Drop by the wlroots IRC channel and we're prepared to > help you implement this._

Somebody has actually done this!

Erik De Rijcke put together Greenfield [0], which is a Wayland compositor that relays surfaces with H.264 or JPEG over WebRTC. It is exactly as cool as it sounds, and it seems like it actually might work pretty well. It's the sort of thing that could be standardized, with a bit of work.

[0]: [https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield](https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield)

</comment><comment><USER19> There are a number of counter arguments to the parent article in _" Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."_[1]

On the subject of leaving the responsibility of taking screenshots to the Wayland compositor:

 _" for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region."_

There are some other things _" Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"_ mentions which are important to me, like Wayland's lack of color picker tools and xdotool functionality.

The parent article says:

 _" Wayland doesn't have network transparency! This is actually true! But it's not as bad as it's made out to be. Here's why: X11 forwarding works on Wayland. Wait, what? Yep: all mainstream desktop Wayland compositors have support for Xwayland, which is an implementation of the X11 server which translates X11 to Wayland, for backwards compatibility. X11 forwarding works with it! So if you use X11 forwarding on Xorg today, your workflow will work on Wayland unchanged."_

So why wouldn't I just use xorg to begin with?

Overall, Wayland just seems immature to me, and not a viable competitor to Xorg, which has had all of this functionality for decades. As an Xorg user, I really struggle to come up with compelling reasons to switch.

[1] - [https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/)

<comment><USER8> > _screenshot quote_

I addressed this in my article, please read it. And you can select a rectangular region on sway today, using tools which are portable across many Wayland compositors.

>So why wouldn't I just use xorg to begin with?

You can, no one's stopping you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Personal criticism: it's not FUD if it's correct. A lot of the things the author concedes are actually limitations, even if not inherent (did anyone ever claim that?) are reasons I can't use Wayland or at least would be massively inconvenienced.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hey Drew (and other contributors), thanks for all your work on this, I switched from i3 to Sway last week and everything has been quite stable. My only gripe has been that screenshotting/screencasting apps can only pull from fullscreen and can't capture from a window yet. The portal APIs seems to support this but the wlroots protocols only allows export from composited outputs, not from un-composited wl_surfaces. Hope this gets some love soon.

<comment><USER8> Sway is a do-ocracy. Get in there and do it! It's not as hard as you think.

<comment><USER21> I am aware that I may be the one who ends up implementing that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How would something like Easystroke [1] need to be implemented for Wayland? Would this have to be inside the compositor as it's like a global hotkey?

[1] [https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki](https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki)

<comment><USER8> Yes, this would have to live in the compositor, or suitable protocol extensions would have to be developed and implemented.

<comment><USER22> How would you invisage it being implemented in sway for example? It's quite esoteric to be maintained along with a minimalistic compositor like sway, and moreover it probably requires a GUI for configuration. Would a PR implementing it be accepted?

<comment><USER8> It's probably just not a feature we'd support at all in sway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am really unstatisfied about the status of remote desktop session on GNU/Linux and other unices in general.

RDP on Windows works amazingly, it's really like having your remote machine at your fingertips (as long as network holds).

On GNU/Linux on the other hand, most solutions are hacky or cumbersome or non- standard or a linear combination of the previous adjectives.

I really wish I could have truly good remote desktop support on GNU/Linux.

<comment><USER24> Have you ever tried X2Go? I've used it a few times and it's been incredible - instant feedback exactly how you describe RDP.

There's also just regular old rdesktop, which seems to work pretty well if you're mostly connecting to Windows servers.

<comment><USER23> Yes I've tried X2Go and rdesktop with xrdp. Meh.

X2Go was cool and worked well, but support for various distro was a bit unclear (only Ubuntu? can't remember, that was like four years ago) as unclear was on which condition you could actually resume your session and how (what if I disconnect unexpectedly? how do I list my current sessions? Is there audio in/out forwarding? clipboard sharing?). The website homepage failed to address many of these questions, ultimately failing to answer the question "can I _actually_ rely on this thing?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> IMHO hotkeys is something basic. I understand Wayland is being designed with security in mind, but Wayland developers must understand that what they're trying to do is to, ultimately, create an X replacement. And X is, mainly, user-oriented.

You can't have a graphical, user-oriented, server and tell the user to "hey, just use a shell script and a control binary, and then hook a hotkey into your window manager and make it run that script". That's just not how user friendliness works.

Try to find a common ground between Wayland being secure and Wayland being practical.

<comment><USER26> I think the wayland devs aren't focusing on replacing absolutely everybody's X-based workflows, but on providing a reasonably engineered component that integrators can build a desktop environment on top of. In practice, we'll probably get a distro shipping a self-contained DE with a centralised hotkey setup, and I expect that will do the job for the vast majority of users. Maybe someone else is building a phone OS and using wayland for the graphical bits and the hotkey thing isn't even going to be on their radar.

<comment><USER25> But why does every single DE has to reinvent the wheel with hotkeys? Why can't we have that provided by Wayland? (or maybe by libhotkey, if you wish). Why so much effort in replicating the same functionality over and over must be wasted in the entire linux ecosystem?

<comment><USER27> Not ever single DE, but the Compositor a DE uses must have it implemented.

Though Compositors may share libraries as well, and a unifying library might very well be developed for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My current showstopper with Wayland is that no screensharing application works with it: Skype, Meet, TeamViewer. I need them to work with my customers so I'm staying on Xorg until that gets implemented.

<comment><USER29> Same here. If Skype and Chrome screen sharing worked in wayland I am switching to wayland right away, as it seems everything else works well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I never understood this complains? The main use cases work, I have almost never found a Linux user that was unhappy with Wayland. Once a while a power user, but that one is smart enough to install X if he needs a special functionality.

I never had a problem, and if you upgrade the next time, check the hardware compatibility and buy what you need. Till then, just run a X stack.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wayland doesn't support full-screen sharing, for example in Google Meet (aka Hangouts). Hopefully this is fixed soon (via dmabuf-export, mentioned in the article) but until then (and for the past couple years) it's a major hassle for a lot of people who had Wayland forced onto them by their desktop environment. Even if this isn't Wayland's fault they would be wise to assist with a fix soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> Regarding gaming by the way. XWayland works quite well for it already (it's critical since Wine for example still requires X and many older games depend on X as well), but there seems to be some issue with radv at present which requires setting explicit number of back buffers to avoid capping that disregards vsync settings:

[https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806](https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806)

If games are using SDL, you can also select Wayland using SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. But there are some glitches still. I tried doing it for example with ScummVM, and it produced double cursor.

</comment><comment><USER32> Related ongoing discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127762)

</comment><comment><USER33> Great write up. That said I found the section about nvidia drivers confusing.

> All three are necessary for most Wayland compositors. Only the first two are > implemented by the Nvidia proprietary driver.

Ok. But what about nouveau? Is nvidia supported using the open-source drivers (the only ones I will use) or are these drivers too lacking?

Are the wlroots developers _completely_ disregarding nvidia-support over issues only found with the proprietary drivers, or are there actual unworkable nvidia issues regardless of driver used?

<comment><USER34> The Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome Wayland session works well on nouveau. (I've used one consumer card from 2010 or so and a pro card from 2013 or so. Also tried a newer pro card that nouveau didn't support, regardless of Wayland. In that case, the easiest solution was to remove the card and buy AMD.)

<comment><USER35> Nouveau does run under 1080gtx ti, but I've got a weird setup with 3x4K screens, so the driver needs to increase the GPU clock and it fails as that is a part of the proprietary blob.

So it should work with most of the setups until you're trying to reach a certain performance threshold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What's the status for global push-to-talk for voice chat apps like Discord? Does that also fall under hotkeys/"no one working on Wayland today seems to care"?

</comment><comment><USER36> > Wayland can be keylogged, assuming the attacker can sneak some evil code > into your .bashrc

I'm not sure what scenarios are being invisioned here, but isn't that absolutely something a nefarious app could do, because the app will be run as you, and you have write access to your bashrc?

As an example, since it's fresh in my memory, if the folks who put dodgy cryptocurrency stealing code into npm packages had instead put this keylogger in there, that would have worked right? You run npm install, npm runs as you, the package runs as you, the package updates your bashrc.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but that package could also do all sorts of other things, like encrypting your ~ and demanding ransom. It's not Wayland's problem to solve this - sandboxing is a separate matter. Wayland makes it easier to sandbox graphical applications but it is not a complete sandboxing solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Has wayland been released yet ? Does it still freeze the whole gnome desktop when dragging a Firefox tab from one window to another (asking for a friend) ?

<comment><USER8> Wayland the protocol was released a long time ago. Wayland implementations like GNOME are in varying states of completion. I don't know about GNOME in particular, but my compositor - sway - is shipping 1.0 within the next month or two.

<comment><USER37> > [https://swaywm.org/](https://swaywm.org/)

Looks good ! Do you think fancy animations and tiling could be done (wobling, fading and swiping effects when switch from one pane to the other, etc.)?

<comment><USER8> We're not interested in those for sway, but we work with a project called wayfire via wlroots that you may be interested in:

[https://wayfire.org/](https://wayfire.org/)

<comment><USER38> I saw wayfire last week and looks cool, a bit of compiz/beryl revival on wayland :)

I think sway is prety nice as it is but I would love to see a few things to make it feel "modern"

      - round borders
      - simple drop shadows
      - a way to add small effects when opening/closing/selecting windows.

I was wondering how difficult would it be to allow run custom shaders on those actions. So for example one could implement very easily fade in/outs, gray out all the windows except the selected, and custom effects, etc... just adding something in the config file like on_selected_glsl: 'path_to_fragment.glsl (unixporn community would love it :)

Anyway, I'm pretty happy on the current state, so thanks for the amazing work :)

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3652](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3652)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been using Sway on my laptop recently and it's been a great experience. It looks great (easily customizable) and runs smooth.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wayland is a great demonstration that not _all_ change and deviation from tradition in met with vitriolic anger from the linux community (as has been asserted). Wayland meets its fair share of skepticism, but it seems cool heads prevail and the situation stays civil. This gives me confidence in the maturity of the community and the long term viability of Wayland.

<comment><USER41> I wonder if some of the ire was bled off by Mir? I mean, when Canonical announced Mir, people mainly responded with anger that they weren't contributing to Wayland which was a longer-standing attempt to replace X11.

<comment><USER40> That's an interesting hypothesis, I hadn't considered that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > _So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking > the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and > maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force > on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. > With respect, my answer is no._

I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Yes, they'll have to write several thousand more lines of code, but if you're going to make a desktop environment in 2019, you're going to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have. It would be great if Nvidia had better Linux support! But they don't and washing your _desktop platform 's_ hands of the issue just makes the whole project DOA.

Are there any competitors to Wayland that don't take a hard-line stance against supporting the most popular and most powerful graphics cards in the world?

<comment><USER8> Nouveau works. Use it instead.

Also: it's possible to have a definition of success which excludes users of the proprietary driver. We don't have the same value system.

>the [...] most powerful graphics cards in the world?

Citation needed? And the highest of the high end graphics cards are excessive vanity most of the time, you don't need the tip-top to play any modern game at any settings you want.

<comment><USER43> Your work on sway and wlroots is phenomenal, but I feel like there is quite a gap here in terms of why people are concerned about Nvidia support.

Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported.

While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics.

It seems fairly clear with with MacOS focusing less and less on high end machines, there is a gap for high end unix workstations and hopefully desktop Linux can fill that gap, but right now that likely means Nvidia support... I think the best answer is just to buy amd and market forces will get Nvidia to change, but that still doesn't mean everyone can just go that path right now to get their day job done.

<comment><USER8> >Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported.

Fine. If you do these things, stay on X.

>While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics.

I honestly just don't care. They should boycott Nvidia and find something else to do with their time if they really want better support from Wayland. I'm not going to bend over for Nvidia. Ever.

<comment><USER43> Nor do I think you should, my only point is to say that people's FUD about Wayland often has roots in FOMO about not being able to use the new and shiny for their workflow and no clear path to when/how that will be fixed, regardless of whose "job" it is to fix the problem.

The people who demand change are wrong too, I am super happy people like you are doing what you do, otherwise this OSS thing really would never work.

But to be clear, while I think your stance is completely reasonable and justified, it is just a hard pill for some people to swallow. That doesn't mean that those who are jerks about it are justified, but it also doesn't mean that those who raise concerns, that those concerns aren't warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I heard that in a world based on the Wayland protocol, applications implement the window decorations.

If so, I'm interested in how we can expect consistency; and eg. moving the window of an unresponsive application.

This could well be a misconception, which is why now seems a decent time to ask.

These seem to be good qualities of X. Wayland has been a number of years in the making, so I have somewhat lost track of my source of this information.

Edit: Apologies, I did read the fine article. It appears I must have skipped a section.

<comment><USER8> See discussion about "server-side decorations" in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Does Wayland support ripping of DRM'ed video streams?

<comment><USER46> Most compositors don't support DRM (that kind) at all (yet), only recently there was a protocol extension published + a merge request for Weston + I guess something on the driver side?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Most of the answers are either "well that's true, the protocol doesn't allow it, but implementations do it in non-standard ways" or "we are working on it" or "oh this is not a problem with Wayland, see, Wayland is just a protocol". i.e. at least half of the criticism, as of today, is still practically true.

<comment><USER8> You can't even open application windows on Wayland without a protocol extension.

The core Wayland protocol doesn't do these things by design, but that doesn't mean end-users can't do them on Wayland compositors which support these use cases in the places that they're designed to be supported.

<comment><USER47> The end user doesn't care about protocols or compositors. The end user wants a system that can replace Xorg and do the same or even a better job. And, as of today, Wayland fails miserably at that.

<comment><AUTHOR> >The end user doesn't care about protocols or compositors

Which is _why they shouldn 't care that the core Wayland protocol doesn't implement it_. These use cases WORK!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News mentioned in paper analysing scientific paper impact - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000242

<comment><AUTHOR> Or, how comments are a potential indicator of goodness and impact of a published work.</comment>


Practical Foundations of Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pt/Practical_Foundations/html/

<comment><USER2>
      "Even now, mathematics students are expected to learn complicated (e- d)-proofs in analysis with no help in understanding the logical structure of the arguments. Examiners fully deserve the garbage that they get in return."

Oh yes, speaking from personal experience, calculus professors are so guilty of that one - "oh, don't worry that you don't know formal logic, use your intuition", "let's fix our _delta_ to be _epsilon_ / ( 2 * (b-a) ). Don't worry, it will work out".

And more generally, many of the academics I know seem to be underestimating the inferential distance to their students not by one, but by a dozen or so degrees. And then they're surprised that 75% of the would-be computer scientists with questionable interest in formal mathematics fail. Surprised!

It's certainly not the only fallacy going around, but it can be surprisingly pervasive.

As for the book. I've only read a very small part of it, but if it does turn out to be a comprehensible description of the basics of mathematics - well, it's something that would benefit a lot of people if it gained mainstream attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: Haven't read it but it's on top of my to-read stack. A slightly better version from the author's home page:

<http://www.paultaylor.eu/~pt/prafm/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Firefox didn't pick up the proper encoding for the pages; it looks to be closer to MacRoman than anything else (View -> Character Encoding -> More Encodings -> West European -> Western (MacRoman)), but that's still leaving bizarre symbols in some places.

<comment><USER5> It's also leaving La/TeX detritus around, which is pretty annoying. Eqn environments aren't converted properly, diagrams are dropped altogether, some manual linebreaks are left in.

Luckily enough sect 1.4 isn't too mangled.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pop Up Gay Bar (create LGBT space anywhere) - <AUTHOR>

Problem: if you are LGBT and work in tech, there's a good chance you live in a place where offline options for meeting people are limited.<p>Solution: www.popupgaybar.com, a location aware email list that makes it easy to find and create LGBT space pretty much anywhere. Not going to win any awards for cutting edge computer science, but it gets the job done. Check it out, and share with your homosexually inclined friends. <comment><USER2> Cool, have you heard of Guerrilla Queer Bar in Boston? Very similar concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, actually the people involved in Pop Up Gay Bar started Guerrilla Queer Bar in San Francisco back in 2000 (when dinosaurs roamed the earth). We decided to update it, make it easy for people to replicate in towns everywhere.</comment></comment>


StackVM running within StackVM - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y

<comment><USER2> Do I interpret it incorrectly or do you guys deliberately use VM terminology to describe your product? When you connect to a virtual machine from a browser you are not _launching_ a VM, neither are you _running_ any windows machines on StackVM, you are _connecting_ to windows VMs through StackVM. Other than that, cool demo, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not deliberately. We're just so used to these terms that even if we use them incorrectly we know what we mean. It's like the speech engineers develop, they know what the other engineers know even if he doesn't say it correctly or fully.

But I'll take your critique into consideration and I'll try to use the right terminology in the next videos not to confuse viewers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for showing us how it looks. I hoped it would be more similar to the strange loops Hofstadter showed with a TV (ex. <http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Droste-wikipedia.jpg>), but it's still interesting.

<comment><USER4> Given what I learnt in GEB, with the strange loops that could develop given this infinite recursion, StackVM will likely become conscious in the near future.

StackVM? More like Skynet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome, it's like geek pr0n. So neat.

Can you load the page from a mobile or an iPad? And it's all with node.js? Frakin superb. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure you can, there is nothing that would prevent it. We don't use flash to display the content so it should work from iPad.

I don't have a mobile or iPad so I can't test it but it should work. We'll test it on these devices later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for making my wish come true!

<comment><AUTHOR> you're welcome. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Should have waited a day or two and then posted it so you spread out your HN coverage.

edit: Not to say that it isn't cool. It's very neat!

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll have many more update videos, so I am not that worried about it.

The next video with the new UI and features will be pretty mind blowing.

I'll also start writing lots of blog posts about how stackvm works, that should also increase coverage.

<comment><USER8> Minor but terribly important point: get a better microphone. And increase the volume. These videos are the only public interface to your project right now.

Otherwise: I've been a huge fan of your writing since I discovered your blog and I was genuinely excited to see you were starting a large-scale project (as a business or otherwise). I would invest in you in a second if there were some mechanism by which I modestly could. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. Gonna get myself a better one.

Btw, you're only the 2nd person who tells me the videos are quiet, but as I listen to them, the sound levels are ok.

<comment><USER2> +1 quiet. You might have really good speakers. Always safer to make the videos louder, the user can always tune it down but can't tune it up beyond his/her speaker's capability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        downvote machine initializing...

<http://filmsmell.com/wp-content/uploads/xzibit-2974.jpg>

<comment><USER10> at least link to a funny one.

<http://i.imgur.com/QMSbf.jpg></comment></comment>