RocketChat: Slack-like online chat, built with Meteor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat <comment><USER2> Funnily enough there are actually multiple Slack-like chat app projects underway in the Meteor community. I guess building a chat app is the new building a todo list app?

Yesterday at Meteor's main meetup Devshop this was presented: [http://spacetalkapp.com/](http://spacetalkapp.com/) and the speaker mentioned that there's a big community effort underway to keep improving it.

Let's see which one wins the race :)

<comment><USER3> I think chat apps are the new todo list app. Everyone is building one and frankly they are all boring and don't offer anything significant.

<comment><USER4> I tend to agree. Instant messaging seems to be dying out in the workplace. I used to find it a highly effective mode of collaboration, especially in large enterprises. Small shops seem to leave it off the list. We cranked up Slack for my team of 15 devs, but since we are co-located it didn't add any value. I guess if you were trying to make a buck off the cloud an IRC SaaS solution might look like a good idea. I don't think Freenode has to worry. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been building [https://github.com/mattfeldman/nullchat](https://github.com/mattfeldman/nullchat), a meteor chat application as part of a commit-a-day pledge of working with meteor.

I think the reason there are a few of these popping up is that it's a lot of fun to build a chat application with meteor. I never intended to be a 'clone' of slack as as much as rocketchat or spacetalk.

I've been running it for a small group (~10 active daily users) for about 6 months - it has more social features like rich embeds, mentions, notifications, sms gateway, giphy search etc.

Demo Instance: [http://nullchat.space](http://nullchat.space)

<comment><USER6> Would you be willing to join efforts with Rocket.Chat? There's a lot of neat stuff on nullchat that could be really useful there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So you set this up and you use it for a few hours and everyone on your team is like hey this is kinda cool.

* a month or so passes *

Now everyone is invested in the tool and since the expectations have been set by things like Slack they expect integrations to work flawlessly, search to be infinitely fast, 99% uptime, Google OpenID authentication, and a slew of other features and before you know it you have someone spending two hours out of every day keeping it running.

As a personal project for kicks? Sure it's cool. Would I let me company run it? Hell no!

<comment><USER8> What if you can't run slack because your company doesn't allow chat services that are externally hosted?

EDIT: This seems like something that never gets brought up in any discussion of Slack. No company I have worked for would have allowed an externally hosted chat service. Have I just been unlucky, or is it just the people in my situation never speak up?

<comment><USER9> Unlucky. We used Slack at the last three companies I worked for.

<comment><USER10> You can't be a very loyal employee given that Slack has been out for less than 2 years.

<comment><USER9> I'm not. I'm a consultant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another sweet new open soruce Slack alternative is Friends, [https://github.com/moose-team/friends](https://github.com/moose-team/friends)

<comment><USER12> There's also letschat: [http://sdelements.github.io/lets- chat/](http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/)

Dunno why people tend to flock over to the propietary option though. :(

<comment><USER13> > people tend to flock over to the propietary option

Because it Just Works(tm) and there's no fiddling or faffing about necessary. I'm all for [FL]OSS applications, but sometimes proprietary solutions, even if they do the same task, are just easier to use and integrate (both technically and bureaucratically)

<comment><USER14> In the case of something like Slack though, there's a huge business risk: Storing your confidential internal discussions with a random startup of questionable security practice.

<comment><USER13> True, but it also gives you an out if customer data is breached. You, with good faith, contracted a thirdparty to manage and secure your data. If you run your own Letschat and some exploit is found that dumps your chat db, you're/your company is on the hook.

FWIW, I don't and likely will never use or promote Slack for intracompany chat.

<comment><USER15> The opposite. If you install opensource software on you own servers, and make it available only for your company's intranet, you are perfectly safe from outside attackers. Proprietary software can also exploited or they can just sell your data for bucks, when they are about to bankrupt.

<comment><USER14> Unless someone compromises your intranet as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The fact Slack is a thing is evidence of how horrible dominant IM companies are at their business.

<comment><USER17> Dominant IM companies are a thing?

I know this is serious, but maybe I misread your intention. The thing that makes Slack greater than all of the dominant IMs is that IM is their whole business.

Everyone else is busy "improving" gmail if you're Google, or monetizing voip/video chat, or (whatever it is that SalesForce does besides Chattr), meanwhile Slack is just chat, and whatever else you expected chat to encompass.

<comment><USER16> > Everyone else is busy "improving" gmail if you're Google, or monetizing > voip/video chat

Yes. Instead of improving, they do voice, video, profile pages, silly pictures replacing your text and all that crap.

The only actual innovation I've seen to IM is ability to edit your last message.

Last people that tried to improve the actual IM chat were Google Wave but it crashed and burned because they fixated on everybody seeing as what everybody is writing when they write it (which was something nobody wanted).

Today, almost 20 years after ICQ people default to Skype even though it's closed crap for that purpose.

Any IM company that had some users had potential to become twitter or even facebook, but instead someone fresh came and stolen their lunch while they were playing with crappy voice and sponsored news feeds while accumulating bloat on their software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a link to an "online demo" but then it asks for your login info or for you to register. That isn't really a demo then, is it?

<comment><USER19> That's the brick wall I hit too. I'm not giving them my email address for a demo, and I'm not logging in with a social media service.

I suppose I could download it myself and try it out that way, but that's a ton of effort for something I may not even want in the end.

Rocket.Chat devs, if you're listening, please provide a way to demo the program without giving up real information.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. If you still want to use it however just enter email@example.com and then check the mail at [http://somerandomstring.mailcatch.com/](http://somerandomstring.mailcatch.com/). Very useful when you want to bypass such useless logins, just know that the mail is public.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, I didn't want to deal with one of those mailinator-type accounts but this is even easier. Adding it to my "cool tools" bin. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the devs said yesterday that API integrations are coming soon. After this, replacing Meteor's Blaze for something like React could make this a serious slack alternative...

<comment><USER22> What specifically would a user notice with the difference between Blaze and React? I get react is a bit faster under the hood. Its not something that would make this a 'serious' alternative?

<comment><USER23> I'm an avid react user and I completely agree. It wouldn't make it a 'serious' alternative just from that, although I would always love to see react used :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure if this is related [https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-a-slack- clone-in-meteor...](https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-a-slack-clone-in- meteor-js-getting-started)

</comment><comment><USER25> One of the useful parts of Slack is push-notifications to my mobile device when I'm away (and only for things I opt in to).

Do any of these new-fangled open source Slack alternatives offer notifications for people on the go?

<comment><USER26> It's planned. You can see whatever is planned or not in GitHub issues. Also, you can create some feature request there or either contribute with something.

[https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues](https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pretty amazing effort, very clean UI and works flawlessly so far...

</comment><comment><USER28> Parabéns pessoal pelo projeto! Pelo que vi, todos são brasileiros, isto é muito legal :)

\--English-- Congratulations guys for the project! From what I saw, you're all Brazilians, this is very cool :)

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't seem to find a Meteor-built IRC client but maybe I'm not looking hard enough. Is there one? Why not combine the strengths of Meteor with IRC?

</comment><comment><USER30> _Offtopic_

What are some resources for getting started with meteor. Being able to build a chat apps like these seems powerful.

<comment><USER31> Go to [https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/) and Start tutorial. After installed you can go through the tutorial in an hour or two depending how deep you go, and it comes with a number of examples (show with "meteor create --list").

Discover Meteor has some more; they were giving their book away (see [https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/we-made-our-book- free/](https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/we-made-our-book-free/) \-- first 4 chapters are free).

That may be enough for the basics. Then look at telescope, or one of the chat apps listed here or search on github. Also plenty of conference talks on youtube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does the demo work for anyone? Would like to check it out, but does not load, just hangs.

<comment><USER32> It loads now. However, can't login as it demands an email. For something like a demo, this seems a little overkill.

For something I might host for my employees or people I intend on collaborating with I guess it makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seems like it's down/not responding? Unable to get in at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER34> With all the self-hosted options, how do mobile push notifications work?

</comment><comment><USER35> Are mobile apps planned?

<comment><USER36> this. I've been looking for something to replace facebook messenger to use with my friends. Whatever it is, it would need mobile push notifications. Currently I'm using tinfoil facebook so not getting push messages causes me to miss long portions of conversations in my group chat and I don't want to just use another service, I'd rather host it

<comment><USER37> Whats wrong with Telegram?

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

edit: just saw where you want to host it...

<comment><USER38> questionable crypto, by that questionable ethics, not fully open source

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I guess improving XMPP isn't as cool as building something brand new?

<comment><USER40> XMPP is XML-based, noisy, and just plain annoying to deal with. There's only so much polish that can be applied to a turd...

<comment><USER41> Are there any sensible, albeit less popular, modern equivalents to XMPP?

<comment><USER42> IRC is better and actually more popular. IRC solved the problem of instant messaging over 20 years ago, and solved it very well. This is a problem that everyone and their mother attempts to re-solve and they always end up with a solution that's inferior to IRC. Just deploy an IRC server folks!

<comment><USER43> IRC solved basic communication, but the necessity of bots for things like authentication for usernames, logging, and retaining permissions are inelegant kludges, in my opinion. If XMPP has problems, so does IRC.

<comment><USER42> I don't think it'd be very difficult to set up some sort of web UI for account creation, combined with existing in-client features for usernames/passwords. That'd be more worthwhile than building a new solution from scratch.

IRC has advantages over XMPP by having a much wider variety of clients and the fact that you can create your own integrations for things like build automation in a very short period of time thanks to the simple text-based protocol.

<comment><USER43> Yeah, I agree with you. Some autocracy and curation could really make a nice ircd + bot + UI set of utilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why wouldn't I just use slack?

<comment><USER45> It's not free, it's not controlled by you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> could not register: "Please Wait..." for 5 minutes and counting

<comment><USER47> Same for me, demo registration doesn't respond

<comment><USER6> It's working now.

<comment><USER48> Not for me, I was able to get to the confirmation email, now it is just stuck in a loop.

<comment><USER49> Sorry guys.. this was just our development server.. we were planning to release it in 3 weeks time :)

<comment><USER48> No worries, I guess I'll try again in 3 weeks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Gorgeous!

</comment><comment><USER51> test

</comment><comment><USER52> 2 questions:

What is Slack?

What is Meteor?

<comment><USER53> 1\. a hosted chat service with an UX people really like. [https://slack.com/](https://slack.com/)

2\. A framework for writing realtime JavaScript applications. [https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I did a containerized deployment for the project: [https://github.com/giantswarm/swarm- rocket](https://github.com/giantswarm/swarm-rocket). Still has some issues that need to be resolved, including configuring the mail server, long build time, and a handful of other issues. If someone finds it useful, let me know!

<comment><USER49> how can i help you to get that working? can we add it to our repo?

<comment><USER54> Howdy! You can email me or ping me on Twitter or my email is {{my_handle_ email@example.com. Twitter same.</comment></comment></comment>


Viral Lift Is The New Metric - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/buzzfeeds-jonah-peretti-on-why-the-facebook-media-world-view-wins/

<comment><USER2> Now we just have to figure out how to monetize viral links. Currently, the only way to do this now is to create a "popular link aggregator".

Site sources of many of these viral traffic is a Wham Bam Thank you Ma'am relationship with very little repeat traffic that's hard to monetize.

Or is viral content too chaotic to encase and monetize? Is it the 4chan of traffic?</comment>


Someday Soon "Chemtrails" May Be Real - <AUTHOR> http://curtisb.posthaven.com/someday-soon-chemtrails-may-be-real <comment><USER2> Whole lot of words about the merits of sulfur dioxide without even a single mention of 'acid rain'.</comment>


Relativity: The special and general theory - <AUTHOR> http://books.google.com/books?id=3H46AAAAMAAJ&dq=einstein+relativity&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=nieITNbkK5CasAPCx8XXCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

<comment><USER2> Supposed to be a good exposition, although not entirely easy; for modern editions you can buy:

[http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General- Masterpiece...](http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Masterpiece- Science/dp/9569569069/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Classic- Rep...](http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Classic- Reprint/dp/1451002165/)</comment>


AI Has a Hallucination Problem That's Proving Tough to Fix - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-a-hallucination-problem-thats-proving-tough-to-fix/ <comment><USER2> One challenge I see in AI is that humans tend to attribute human traits to non-human entities (Anthropomorphism). This tendency leads people to expect something from AI that they can do quickly and to be shocked when we find AI to be brittle and lacking fundamental features of human understanding.

Having raised children and now playing with my grandchildren, it often amazes me at just how much we take for granted in that comes "out of the box" with a human brain. Humans can build associations with very few samples, and we come pre-wired with all sorts of tools from primary systems like hearing, visual, sensory systems to complex capabilities like speech and communication abilities.

I've worked with computers for 37 years, and the progression has been amazing, but we're still a long ways away from the primary capabilities of even a house cat.

All this said I often wonder if the reason for the failure of current AI systems to wow us is the gap between power density of a human brain vs. compute systems. I've heard it said that DeepMind burned an order of magnitude more than the 20W/hr a typical human brain uses. When we have compute systems with that power density, we may see more emergent behaviors from our silicon- based friends.

Either way, I think AI has useful applications today and I hope we will find many useful applications of these technologies to make our lives better and make more time for us to learn, love and care for one another.

<comment><USER3> >> This tendency leads people to expect something from AI that they can do quickly and to be shocked when we find AI to be brittle and lacking fundamental features of human understanding.

Just to be clear- "AI" ≠ classification and even more so, AI ≠ machine learning ≠ deep neural nets. The article above runs fast and loose with the terminology, but machine vision and in particular object detection (or classification of objects in images) is one area and one sub-task of AI in general. It happens to be one of the two or three areas that have seen strong empirical results in recent years, but it's by no means the only active area of research (although, thanks to the funding from large technology companies, it is probably the fastest growing one).

It's also very strange to see "brittleness" as a criticism of deep neural networks in particular (the attacks described only work on convolutional neural nets as far as I know). In the past, the type of AI system criticised as "brittle" was the hand-crafted rule-based expert system type of AI. And the reason why that kind of AI was criticised as brittle is because it did not deal very well with the noise in real-world domains, such as in photography or speech etc. Deep neural nets in particular are extremely robust to noise, which is why they work so well in speech and image processing.

I think what you really mean by "brittle" is the tendency of deep nets to be, well, a little too good in dealing with noise. Specifically, they have a tendency to overfit to the noise, because they produce models with very high variance. Indeed, the whole adversarial examples thing is probably best understood as a result of overfitting.

As to "lacking fundamental features of human understanding" what you mean, I think, is that image classifiers only do classification and nothing more- which is true, but then that's what they 're designed to do. Nobody expects an image classifier to have any understanding of the images it's classifying.

<comment><USER4> > (the attacks described only work on convolutional neural nets as far as I > know).

These attacks work on basically every classifier. It works for multi-layer perceptrons, it works for linear models, it works for random forests, it works for SVMs. It works on basically anything that tries to generalize far from the points it is trained on.

There are a lot of super interesting results in this area, but it's practical significance is waaaaaay over-hyped. One cool thing I saw recently was that some researchers made a physical turtle statue with a texture on it that fooled ML systems into thinking it was a gun, with I think the implication that you could make an AI system think a gun was a turtle, but you could also just put a gun in a turtle case, which fools humans as well as AI systems.

<comment><USER5> I think part of the implication was the opposite, a turtle that was registered by AI systems as a gun, potentially triggering a automatic "swatting" response.

<comment><USER4> Out of all the ways to mess with someone, this seems pretty complicated and unreliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really wish the press (and a subset of highly vocal Deep Learning practitioners) would stop conflating Deep Networks with the entirety of AI/ML. This hallucination problem is

1) highly pronounced in this one class of methods that has surged in popularity in the last 10 years

2) difficult to address because these methods are (so far) quite opaque to human understanding

I work on multiple in-production vision systems and in cases where we absolutely need to know why something went wrong we use much more conventional, but more transparent, learning algorithms. The performance loss is often an acceptable tradeoff for being able to understand your edge cases.

</comment><comment><USER7> "AI hallucination" and its negative effects is not limited to self-driving cars... for example, see the latest incident with Alexa "hallucinating" a command to laugh. What makes that scary to me, is Alexa also had to "hallucinate" the trigger words as well. How many times does Alexa "hallucinate" those trigger words and send random conversations off to a third party?

</comment><comment><USER8> For the sake of argument, suppose someone hacked your program by causing buffer overflow. Then at least you know where the problem is, you go fix it and ship a patch the next day. Now suppose someone hacked your AI by causing hallucination. Do you know where the problem is? How to fix it? How long will it take to fix it? Does the fix really fix it? Etc... Not sure how this all is supposed to work.

<comment><USER9> Two points:

\- you suggest that software is easy and logical, in that you can triage, locate, and patch the buffer overflow. But in any sufficiently large codebase, there are simply near-unlimited more bugs to find: hence all the memory mitigation's that have been implemented. So it's not a robust comparison from the get go.

\- there's constantly increasing research into being able to diagnose & analyze what CNN's "see": possibly not to the level and accuracy that you'd expect from lldb, but how long did it take to have really amazing debuggers for binary Applications?

<comment><USER8> In a normal program, given an exploit, it's easy to understand the idea of attack and specific target of attack. In CNN case, because no one really understands how things work (see [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret- at...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart- of-ai/)), how can they understand why things don't work? The whole contraption is a black box.

<comment><USER10> What about the latest Intel bug Meltdown? It's not always easy to understand such attacks. Also those involving rare race conditions or things that only worked because a core part of your code depended on undefined behavior can require a major refactoring of your whole code base in order to mitigate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly, the evolution of the human mind has dealt with similar challenges.

A lot of what AI is doing (pattern matching, creative problem solving, etc) could be considered "right brain" activities. Some think that many human mental problems arise out of an unchecked, overactive right brain. We still mistake shadows on the wall for something sinister, or read more into a person's glance than is really there.

Some posit that the right brain is always hallucinating, in a sense; that psychedelic drugs simply disable the left brain, and allow the right brain to take center stage. Until the corpus callosum developed (which allows the left and right brain to send data back and forth across the divide), it's possible that right brain insights came to us as "voices" in our heads.

See: "Incognito: the secret lives of the brain."

"The Dragons of Eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence."

<comment><USER12> This sounds like a bunch of pseudoscience? I've taken a bunch of courses on neurosciences etc, and there's certainly some left/right splits but nothing as severe as that…

The wiki article is actually pretty accurate: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_func...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function)

<comment><USER11> Probably more like outdated conjecture than pseudoscience (Sagan's book, "Dragons of Eden", was written in the 1970s), but point taken — contemporary neuroscience talks more about a modular theory of the mind than a strict Right / Left split.

<comment><USER13> It sounds to me like a desperate attempt to explain away religious experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't have anything insightful to say about this (I think it's a super interesting area of research) but am commenting anyways to point out that Nicholas Carlini, one of the researchers cited, is also responsible for engineering the best of the later Microcorruption levels. Small world!

</comment><comment><USER15> Actual audio from the "evil dot com" example can be found here: [https://nicholas.carlini.com/code/audio_adversarial_examples...](https://nicholas.carlini.com/code/audio_adversarial_examples/)

It's only hard to hear on a phone speaker at low volume on the 50dB example. All other examples have what sounds like some sort of static or background noise.

Granted, to an average consumer it may sound like just bad audio, but it's not imperceptible and thus can be screened for.

Most likely we'll end up in the same perpetual update cycle as other computer security - someone finds an exploit, that exploit is either reported for a bounty or discovered in active use in the wild, a fix is implemented and exploit is added to the test suite.

For ML that will mean adding the examples of the exploits into the learning sets/providing negative re-enforcement feedbacks.

The question will be whether we can get enough of these caught before some machinery injures someone because it saw something that wasn't there or accepted a malicious command, and it becomes a media frenzy.

</comment><comment><USER16> If we are to mass deploy self driving cars, we must solve this problem. No one would want to travel by cars that could be tricked so easily.

This also leads to a moral and legal questions. If a self driving car injures someone, who will be responsible, the person owning the car or the manufacturer?

<comment><USER17> There's no need to completely solve it. It just needs to happen statistically less often than human failures. And I believe this won't be hard.

<comment><USER18> Well currently the attacks work 100% of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a highly biased article, imo.

i) The authors and commenters of the article have a strong incentive to get funding for their projects.

ii) The mentioned problems are mostly academic. The real-world implications are not tested, unknown, and likely overblown. Yes, one can create contrived examples. But that isn't same as real life.

The way spoofing examples are created is by feeding small perturbations of the same image to a time-invariant detector. It's unclear if such attacks have much practical value. E.g. a password screen won't allow you to try more than 3-5 values. Attacks must be detectable (due to repeated tries of small perturbations). Plus noise and other perturbations can be added to the detector.

</comment><comment><USER20> When the problem of adversarial examples will be solved, AI will have leapt one more step ahead. It's clear right now that adversarial examples are the elephant in the room. It's a make or break situation for the field but I think it will come out stronger. We're grasping at the limits of our neural network technology, trying to discriminate between ghosts of perceptions.

I think the solution will come from marrying a top-down approach to the bottom-up one we're using right now. We need more prior knowledge about the world. We need to be able to simulate situations and understand their effects. Maybe what we're lacking right now is a mental simulator of the world, an imagination module. Coupling perception with imagination would reduce the sample complexity as well.

Interesting to note that the researchers that started the adversarial examples craze and invented the imagination module (GAN - generative adversarial network) are one and the same - Ian Goodfellow. He was right on the spot to identify the weak point of deep learning.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Making subtle changes to images, text, or audio can fool these systems into > perceiving things that aren't there.

This isn't a hallucination problem. It is a robustness issue.

The outputs of modern AI lack conceptual depth and substance. These algorithms produce very shallow categorizations that are only useful in narrow, constrained contexts. Not surprisingly, it isn't hard to break or hack these fragile categorizations.

Sure, one could potentially argue that this has some similarity to human hallucinations, but I think that is a needless distraction. We know with great certainty that our AI techniques don't have the robustness and generality of animal intelligence. We are much less certain about the causes of human mental illness and any resulting hallucinations, so that analogy doesn't really lead us in a productive direction.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think that DeepXplore [0] is on the right track. I think that perhaps some methodological improvements could likely be made, but applying an adversarial, security-like approach to deep neural networks is a way to build fault- tolerance into these methods.

I'll keep hoping that things like capsules and "smarter" network design/training and data augmentation will eventually, de novo, help add "safe" generalizability. Perhaps optimizing accuracy/minimizing loss in a more broadly, uniformly random way rather than in optimizing accuracy, weighted by frequency of observations.

[0]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06640](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06640)

</comment><comment><USER23> "The vision systems of autonomous vehicles, voice assistants able to spend money, and machine learning systems filtering unsavory content online all need to be trustworthy."

I feel like we're building up to some horrible situation here, because these systems are never going to be worthy of trust in the same way that a human is.

As just one example: as more and more of our lives happen digitally, more evidence of real crimes will be digital evidence. So these AI systems can be easily fooled into thinking you were in the wrong place or requested something that you didn't. And there is absolutely no way to correct the record.

<comment><USER24> It seems likely this would be handed the same way security cameras do it today, by saving the original images and having humans look at them.

You might want to look into how a "chain of custody" is handed by the courts.

<comment><USER23> Might work OK for video/audio (though DeepFakes calls that into question). But what about the timestamp on it? Or what about GPS location (did you even posses the phone at the time? Was the GPS data manipulated later?)?

There will be a huge class of things that basically can't be questioned, denying you the ability to confront your accuser.

<comment><USER24> Not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that the side that's presenting any physical evidence needs to show why it probably wasn't tampered with and the other side can question that.

When gathering evidence that you want to hold up in court, you need to think about how to prove that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am a little bit bored with these GAN style attacks. They show that the networks haven't yet generalized well enough. They don't show that the technology, or even the approach, is broken.

Personally, I think the main problem is some combination of a little bit of over claiming in research, and a metric ton of over hyping and generalizing in both media and business circles.

Robust multi model ensembles with strong generalization ability will show up within the foreseeable future, and will be no more susceptible to optical illusions than human beings.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the obvious answer to this is to use a generative adversarial approach, but the more I think about that the more difficult it sounds in practice. Say once you've trained in the initial weights of your classifier from your training set, you have a generator start adding distortions, occlusion, and noise to the training set images, then train the classifier to recognize those as true positives. Of course the difficult part is defining a generator architecture that can learn to generate a wide enough variety of distortions, occlusions and noise...

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it possible to create an adversarial example without access to the weights of a model, and without being able to forward many images through it?

<comment><USER28> One method of creating adversarial examples in a "black box" setting is to create and train a local model as a stand-in for the actual model using the inputs and outputs of the actual model. [1] So, the answer is "no" but a qualified "no" since in practice this seems to work. The second part, being able to forward many images, is also a qualified "no".

1 - [https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02697](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02697)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It doesn't seem surprising to me that AI can be fooled by adversarial input. Human brains, as advanced as they are compared to contemporary AI, are also vulnerable to this. People figured out a long time ago that hunters, soldiers, and other military assets can be camouflaged quite effectively by painting them in certain patterns, for example.

Also ask any Illusionist / magician.

</comment><comment><USER30> I couldn't resist because everyone's thinking of cat-guacamole. Also Labsix.

[https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/mit-researchers-fool- google-...](https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/mit-researchers-fool-google-ai- program.amp)

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks to those keeping AI claims grounded in truth and not hype.

</comment><comment><USER32> "hallucinations" is an excessive anthropomorphization of a math model in my opinion

</comment><comment><USER33> The human visual cortex employs a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing. So before we see a dog the brain sort of generates a picture of a dog top-down, and compares that with the visual stimuli. My feeling is the problem with the "AI" described here is that it's still bottom-up only.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why are we all freaking out about the ability to "put a sticker on a stop sign that makes it invisible to YOLO".

I could just as easily put a sticker on a stop sign that makes it invisible to people.

<comment><USER9> The difference is that a human will know it's been tampered with and lower their confidence: the attacks against NNs make it think with 98% certainty it's a 60mph sign, not a stop sign. Furthermore, if a human is monitoring the system, a small well-placed sticker will not likely alert them to the fact that the car is in trouble

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > "People tend to trust each other in machine learning," says Biggio. "The > security mindset is exactly the opposite, you have to be always suspicious > that something bad may happen."

It's not just machine learning; far too much tech - software _and_ hardware - has this problem. Everyday here on HN you see discussions about the _benefits_ of a new idea without any consideration for how it could be exploited.

<comment><USER36> _Everyday here on HN you see discussions about the benefits of a new idea_

Just the opposite. Rarely do you see any discussion of the benefits of a new idea. It's mostly hate.

I suspect we're probably talking past each other, though. Concrete examples would resolve it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16542183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16542183)

Notice the top comment is negative. In general, almost every top comment on HN is negative. It's hard to write well positively, just like it's hard to be a comedian and only make clean jokes.

<comment><USER7> As a negative commenter on that topic: it's not a new idea. It's not even a new tool. It's an iteration on an existing tool to make it more user friendly. It's an iteration which, by all appearances, didn't go far enough.

Tools, like ideas, get feedback when posted to a forum like this. Feedback is rarely going to be all positive, especially in the cases where a tool is still rough.

<comment><USER36> I didn't mean to imply it was a bad thing. I meant to say it's hard to write positively.

Without straying too far from the original premise, it's worth pointing out that the idea of using a graph database for traditional tasks is in fact a new idea. Most people would not consider doing it, and that makes it new.

Notice an interesting philosophical thing that happens every time philosophical debates occur: We quickly get mixed up in a debate over the meaning of words. "What do you mean by 'new'?"

It's worth excluding such questions from debate. Questions over the meaning of words rarely go anywhere interesting. [http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html)

Oh dear, look where we've ended up. But it was an intriguing place, I hope.

The overall point is that if you advocate something non-traditional on HN, you're in for a world of hurt. This place is nothing if not adversarial. You'd better have your I's dotted and your T's crossed. But those constraints are what make the medium so interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Craigslist begins testing listings with embedded OpenStreetMap maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3273111/craigslist-openstreetmap-embedded-listings

<comment><USER2> It only took 10 years and a lot of pain to get CL to do anything resembling innovation....

BOOOOOO I have lost most if not all respect for craig/CL</comment>


A database of what (if anything) happens after a movie's credits - <AUTHOR> http://aftercredits.com <comment><USER2> Well, I'll give him another 20 minutes. But that's it!</comment>


Dragon's Lair – An Arcade Story - <AUTHOR> http://stevenf.com/2014/05/21/arcade-story/ <comment><USER2> Being of the same vintage as the author, I have an arcade story that is somewhat similar.

My step-father was a full time employee of the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, and back then one of the perks was that all family members received a free admission pass for the duration of the fair, which was 20 days.

There was an arcade located at the end of midway and being on summer vacation, I would of course go to the CNE every day and play videogames. Specifically one obscure Atari game called Food Fight.

I spent a solid two weeks mastering that game, which for those who are unfamiliar has a very high twitch factor and a never-ending wave progression similar to Robotron.

For those two weeks I simply could not crack the top five scores on the machine. I spent hours, and my entire allowance, trying again and again to get that high score.

Finally, on the second last day of the fair, I did it. I had been playing for at least a solid 30 minutes and although I didn't get a crowd of a dozen, I had a couple of people watching. When I lost my last man and found I had reached the high score, I felt triumphant - like I had really accomplished something amazing and important. I left the machine aglow.

Then, on the last day of the fair, I returned to the arcade to bask in my glory, only to discover they'd wiped the high scores the previous night. I was so heartbroken I didn't even play to try and regain my title.

I now have a modest collection of videogames and pinball machines, one of which is Food Fight. I'm 30 years older and my reflexes aren't what they used to be, so I will probably never regain that score again, but it's nice to fire it up and return to 1984 occasionally.

<comment><USER3> I first played Food Fight at a convenience store near my high school. Went back to class after lunch and tried to explain the game to a friend. When I was done he said something I've since called Smerek's Law (named after him): "You can't describe a video game without sounding like an idiot."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.

(I still have the announcer's voice calling out "DRAGON'S LAIR!" in the attract mode seared in my memory).

> We were staying in a hotel or motel, and it was either attached to or had a > small arcade of its own.

For people who didn't grow up during the 80s arcade boom. Arcades where _everywhere_. It was basically expected that every place that sold anything would have at least 1 arcade game. Grocery store? Check. Tanning Salon? Sure thing. Strip mall? Why, they'll have 2 complete deluxe arcades.

It was a looooong time from the death of Arcades to modern smart phones before we had something to do while hanging around most stores again.

The gathering crowd around an awesome play of a game really did happen back then. It's like the scene from Tron where Flynn is playing in his arcade. It was _actually_ like that.

My older brother could play epic multi-hour long games of some kind of game I can't remember the name to (I think it was Pengo), racking up so many extra men that he could go for a bathroom break mid-game and let some scruffy novice kid (usually me) break in and play at the advanced levels for a couple minutes. The convenience store he played in would be packed with 20 or 30 people watching history happen. It gave every small town a local hero they could cheer for and every local hero felt like a minor god for the length of their quarter.

<comment><USER5> > But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually > the exact same thing.

And it's a terrible, terrible thing.

<comment><USER6> Unless you turn them up to 11, and end up with Street Fighter and similar games, where it mixes twitch reactions with tactical strategy and rote memorisation no longer helps if you go into P vs P instead of P vs Game AI.

That being said, my possibly flawed memory of those fighting games spiritual predecessor was a karate game which had 2 joysticks and no buttons for a single player to use.

<comment><USER7> > 2 joysticks

You must be talking about Karate Champ. STILL a fun game when played against someone else!

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

<comment><USER6> That's it. Hazy memory is hazy.... I think I played it a bit and came to the conclusion that it was too expensive for me to learn. Most of my pitiful allowance went into things like Ghosts 'n Goblins or vertical scrolling shoot- em-ups. To get back on topic: Dragon's Lair value for money was even more abysmal locally for me - {hazy, contrived memory warning} - I put the money in and before I died, moved the joystick 28 times and hit the buttons 8 times, but I lasted 3 minutes.

That's roughly equivalent to a few seconds of player input for 1942 or Galaga. Pretty, but not particularly fulfilling.

For the young and poor, Dragon's Lair was indeed a great game to watch other people play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a nice story. My two highlights:

 _A local arcade not far from where we lived regularly put old games up for sale. My dad noticed that they had listed a Space Ace cabinet for $300. To this day I will never forget my shock — my dad bought it and brought it into our tiny apartment. I had a full-size, real-deal Space Ace arcade cabinet in my childhood bedroom._

Wow! Father of the decade for him!

and...

 _With all of these people watching, I played through the final scene of Dragon's Lair, but with a twist. I didn't make the last move of the game (sword button, which kills the dragon) allowing myself to get incinerated by his fire breath four times. Not only did this ratchet up the crowd tension to palpable levels, it also increased my score higher than if I had simply beaten the game on the first try.

Then, with the crowd on tenterhooks — will he win? Does he really know how? — on that last life, I played all the way through to the end. I pressed the sword button then literally turned around and walked away, while the remaining 10-15 (non-interactive) seconds or so of the game played out. Like the nerd version of the world's greatest hip-hop act dropping the mic and walking off stage, I just walked away from the game. I'd made the last move. Nothing left for me here. Seen this all before._

What a diva!! :) I don't know the rationale for this, but I feel really happy whenever I see these glory moments that _unimportant_ hobbies, usually videogame or sports, provide for children and teens.

<comment><USER9> > _I don 't know the rationale for this, but I feel really happy whenever I > see these glory moments that unimportant hobbies, usually videogame or > sports, provide for children and teens._

That's because you know that seriously applying the "unimportant" to a hobby is bullshit and feel vindicated whenever someone reasserts the original meaning and motivation behind having a hobby in the first place :)

Or at least that's _my_ reason for feeling the same way you do ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually have played a video game to a crowd of thousands of people. The finals of a Guitar Hero tournament were on stage at Family Values Tour. I can't find reliable attendance numbers from Pittsburgh in 2007, but the venue had 23,000 seats. Well, the lawn doesn't have seats, you know what I mean.

I was pretty good at Guitar Hero. I recently checked, and I'm still 8,884th on Guitar Hero II for XBox Live, out of 2.3 million. So when I heard this tournament was happening, I was in. I spent hours practicing extra hard. First round was at a local bar, and you had to be the Nth caller to the local radio station to get a spot. Through some persistence, I made it happen. Lots of the people weren't even that great, one guy had never even played before. I ended up winning that pretty handily. They held a ton more of these preliminary tournaments, and then 16 (I think) of us got free tickets to the tour. Woo!

Showing up, there was a tent where people could play Guitar Hero. We held another elimination tournament there, with the top two facing off on main stage. A friend that I knew from the competitive Guitar Hero forums and I had both brought cheat sheets with the optimal star power patterns on them. Such nerds. We were the only ones who did, and we pretty handily wiped up everyone else.

So, he and I got to play "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine on main stage, winner got a real guitar and to hang out with Korn. Of course, said friend (who now works on C# for Microsoft, actually...) was even better than I was, and solidly beat me. Oh well. It was still super amazing.

From time to time I find an arcade machine (they made them for Guitar Hero II) in the wild, and once or twice I've gotten a little crowd. Mostly from kids. I can totally emphasize with the end of the article, it is pretty exhilarating.

</comment><comment><USER11> The story of sending away for a guide to this opaque game is pretty funny. I'd never heard of that.

I have heard however that with a similarly difficult and opaque game, Tower of Druaga, it was not uncommon in Japan to find a little box next to the machine where you'd find a collectively created strategy guide. Gamers at the arcade would add to the knowledge of what worked and what didn't in order to pass each level of the game. It was a sort of early strategy wiki.

</comment><comment><USER12> Dragon's Lair is a beautiful game and can be had on Steam for a $10: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/)

I too used to love exploring arcades and had a similar experience with a crowd forming to watch me beat Killer Instinct in an arcade in northern Italy. I think he's dead-on that the rush you get from those experiences is similar to what people find on Twitch.

<comment><USER13> _> 'I too used to love exploring arcades and had a similar experience with a crowd forming to watch me beat Killer Instinct in an arcade in northern Italy.'_

Absolutely.

Personally, I have two periods of magical arcade memories.

First, the completely enveloping, holodeck-esque wonder of climbing into or onto just about any deluxe cabinet[1][2][3][4] as a kid in the smoky arcades of the 80s.

Later, the big communities around the 'quarters on the glass' era of fighting games when the local arcade was effectively a close-knit dojo - storming, challenge matches and all.

Online play has come a long way and Evo [5] keeps the highest levels of comp alive, but the world has changed in ways that make that have likely ended those old, physically rooted communities and networks for good.

1: [http://www.arcade- museum.com/images/118/118124217270.gif](http://www.arcade- museum.com/images/118/118124217270.gif)

2: [http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/108/1088284893.jpg](http://www.arcade- museum.com/images/108/1088284893.jpg)

3: [http://www.arcade- museum.com/images/118/118124211046.jpg](http://www.arcade- museum.com/images/118/118124211046.jpg)

4: [http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/122/1223249015.jpg](http://www.arcade- museum.com/images/122/1223249015.jpg)

5: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_Championship_Series](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_Championship_Series)

<comment><USER4> > Later, the big communities around the 'quarters on the glass' era of > fighting games when the local arcade was effectively a close-knit dojo - > storming, challenge matches and all.

Something I always thought was interesting from that time (I spent High School on Street Fighter II and a bit too much College on Tekken Tag Tournament). Was how the culture in different arcades was always a bit different. The play- styles, how the impromptu tournaments worked, what was considered cheap or fair play...it always interested me as your home arcade group think eventually set a kind of style momentum and mixing it up or discovering new techniques was always kind of a challenge. If you were really dedicated to the game you'd go over to the next city or wherever they had one of the games and spend a day or two there learning from the group think in that arcade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I occasionally play Dragon's Lair when I am at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Thanks to the wonders of inflation and my status of being a wage-earning adult, the frustration of "lasting for about 2 minutes before losing all five lives" is no longer a concern. Another quarter? Why not. Still, it is unbelievably frustrating.

I miss arcades.

<comment><USER15> If you miss arcades you should visit Japan (especially Tokyo) there are still a few living arcade with very decent collections. But you better hurry, every year one of the old ones ends up shutting down, I'm not sure how many will be left 5 years down the road...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I saw Dragon's Lair running for the first time on Amiga when I was something like 9 years old. This was a complete shock because it featured full motion animation and it was running from floppy disks! This feat was achieved by using polygons instead of bitmaps, to save memory space. This gave the idea a few years later to Eric Chahi to use polygons instead of bitmaps for his new me Another World which would become an immediate hit as well... leading to the game Flashback (from a different creator) reusing the same technique, and the adventure game Cruise for a Corpse as well, making the game company Delphine Software very rich in the process.

There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure Dragon's Lair used bitmaps even for the Amiga version. However, you deserve an upvote just for mentioning the awesome Eric Chahi, whose wonderful game Another World (aka Out of this World) indeed used polygons. Still one of my favorites games ever.

<comment><USER15> Turns out you were right, it used compressed bitmaps. But the inspiration piece for Eric Chahi was correct:

> ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for > the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks > to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed > bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.

> I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I > wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use > polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences. > Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a > major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up > less disk space than traditional sprites.

See this interview: [http://eboredom.20m.com/features/interviews/chahi.html](http://eboredom.20m.com/features/interviews/chahi.html)

Another World is also one of my favorite games. I still remember the day in 1991 when I played it for the first time.

<comment><USER17> A polygon-based game engine still sounds like a great idea. Are there any similar, modern examples?

<comment><USER18> Well, most 3d engines work by drawing triangles :)

<comment><USER15> I guess he referred to 2D polygon-based game engines :) Which is actually taken care by 3D game engines anyway nowadays, since it's a subset of it.

<comment><USER19> I know your post was tongue-in-cheek, but it's not _quite_ that simple, I think. For one thing the design aesthetic is almost completely different -- if look at the (awesome!) Another World[1] there is very little in the form of shading and such. It's much more like an old-school cartoon than an actual realistic rendering -- which is what most 3D games (and cartoons!) tend to strive towards these days.

EDIT: Btw, IIRC this is the _only_ game that I ever played where I didn't actually realize when it had started. The intro -> gameplay transition is so seamless that I didn't even notice it. Pure genius.

[1] Just in case you haven't had the chance to experience it first-hand. Here's a play-through video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've always, always hated Dragon's Lair.

I hated how people would marvel at the "great graphics!" I hated how unreliable the game was (it was always broken -- the stupid laser disc).

I liked it as a movie... but it was lame as a game.

<comment><USER21> Everybody hated it. Apparently this guy was also an animation fan, so maybe that explains the discrepency. Still, it was better than the worst game every made, which was essentially the same but with actors:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_%28video_game%29)

...and it often cost a _dollar_ to play.

<comment><USER16> I remember Time Traveler! It used some sort of hologram display, or a similar illusion. I always watched someone else play it, because it was too expensive, and for me that money was better spent in a beat 'em up where I could last longer.

Didn't know it was an awful game, but it doesn't surprise me...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If Dragon's Lair were created today, they would print the commands you're supposed to press on the top of each screen (similar to rhythm games). There is enough difficulty in getting the timing right that it would still be difficult and people would feed in more quarters. Maybe there would be an 'expert mode' to remove the command hints and get an alternate ending.

<comment><USER17> I remember the Amiga version would flash a light in the direction you were supposed to go, or in the case of the sword, make the sword glow. It was enough of a clue to get through many scenes, but often required too quick of a reaction to pass on the first go.

<comment><USER23> This was in the original version, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great story, never got the chance to play Dragon's Lair on the arcade, but I did get to play Space Ace, the art/animation was amazing as one would expect from Don Bluth, particularly from that era when he did his (imo) finest work in the form of Secret of Nimh, but the simplistic game play mechanics left me disappointed.

As I recall, Don Bluth saw these laser games as simply a means to raise funds for his true love, animated feature films, meanwhile the producer Rick Dyer was truly passionate about the laserdisc game format and spent pretty much every penny of his Dragon's Lair and Space Ace earnings on his ill-fated Halcyon project.

</comment><comment><USER25> What a great story. Dragon's Lair and the other early Laser Disc games were an interesting advancement; the gameplay was infuriating but the graphics were amazing. For the price of bad gameplay (and a lot of quarters), we got a glimpse of the kind of graphics work we would find in future games.

A lot of the (currently 30) comments here are about the audience factor in video games. There's nothing quite like drawing a crowd in an arcade. The arcades may be mostly gone, but the effects of an audience in video games is still being studied. I spotted some related work in the ACM CHI 2014 proceedings:

ACM CHI 2014: "Audience Experience in Social Videogaming: Effects of Turn Expectation and Game Physicality"

Thirty Second Demo Video with paper Abstract: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuQkCfjWZzc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuQkCfjWZzc)

ACM CHI 2014 Citation (Paper Paywall): [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2556288.2556965](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2556288.2556965)

Paper: [http://static.squarespace.com/static/52455e03e4b0804b7e27b03...](http://static.squarespace.com/static/52455e03e4b0804b7e27b031/t/535d5c6be4b0e268e3ea5dfb/1398627435120/2014-CHI- AudienceExperience.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> This story put a smile on my face, even though I'm not of the Dragon's Lair Era. But I lived through the original Street Fighter 2, which was well before the death of the arcade and the prevalence of Internet tipsheets. As much as gaming has advanced since then, I still miss the thrill of having a line of 10 people in our small town arcade waiting their turn to take me on as E Honda.

</comment><comment><USER27> I love this story I would have been so pumped to have seen that. You were a lord.

I had that experience you describe of only seeing certain games randomly, round about 89-90ish I think. 'Sin Star'. I only saw it one arcade on a trip, once, where I played it for 8 hours, it just blew me away. I spent years after that asking around, could never find it again, or anyone who had ever played it.

Another thing that I carry with me from that time is just how mind melting Defender was when it showed up. That game will always be the high water mark for me. I remember just staring at the controls for so long with my friends, just terrified. I remember the day first hearing that someone we knew had actually played it. We didn't believe it, we didn't think it was actually possible. But then of course it became THE game.

Hitting the arcade with $10 in quarters was just like, I can die now thank you very much

<comment><USER28> You're probably thinking of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-XEINagmaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-XEINagmaU)

<comment><USER27> OH HELL YES!!!!

Holy crap the internet is AMAZING!!!!!!

I seriously asked everyone i came within two feet of about that game for freakin years, and NO ONE ever know what I was going on about was like I'd seen a unicorn. Realise now must have been 84-85

I filed that away as some sort of weird delusion I was doomed to forever live the memory of alone until this very moment good god a 30 year reconciliation this is last starfighter-level mind blowing shit over here

<comment><USER29> Sinistar is an arcade classic. I played it a few years ago at a retro arcade event and really liked it. You can download it yourself if you grab the MAME arcade emulator—but in all honesty, I think this is one of those games that works _much_ better in its original arcade incarnation. It even had a custom _49-way_ joystick…

<comment><USER30> And let's not forget RJ Mical, one of the programmers of Sinistar, who eventually helped design the Amiga computer and the Atari Lynx.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The Arcades of the 80's were massive computer rooms. I was privileged to have known a few elder programmers/hardware hackers, arcade owners in the 80's, who had no issues with us kids (well, family friends) ripping cabinets apart and being involved in re-programming things. As a kid, they were my guru's. It was a wonderful time to be willing to stay up late, hack on code, and see new things up on the screen .. two battlezone cabs wired up for multiplayer, infinite lives on things, &etc. well okay, the social aspect was terrific as well. The local arcades attracted a lot of people .. so sitting in the backroom with the change-counters and dead/living cabinet bits hacking code could be reprieved with a sudden blast of humanity.

Good times.

Nowadays I watch people ignore/blowup each other with their eyephones and instead of change-counters its appstore credit...

</comment><comment><USER32> Oh jeez -- Thayer's Quest. That game was a complete money sink. A quarter only bought you time, and there was no such thing as a skip-ahead button, so just getting through the opening cutscene ate up most of your first quarter. I spent so much money getting all the way to the end of that game ... only to discover that it ended at a cliffhanger. A final screen announced that Part II was in the works, but they never actually made it, presumably because the first one did so poorly.

I was all in favor of seeing adventure games break out of their text-only mold (this was years before Myst), which is chiefly why I gave the game a chance in the first place, but Thayer's Quest was a poor exemplar.

<comment><USER33> Well, there were plenty of graphics-based adventure games before Must, such as all of the Sierra games, like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. After that, there were all of the LucasArts SCUMM-based games, before Myst arrived on the scene.

Myst brought two new things to the genre - quicktime movies embedded in-game to make things come to life far more vividly, and the inability to pick things up - a constraint that generally lead to problems being more logical than had typically been the case for adventure games.

<comment><USER32> It wasn't really the graphics that I was referring to as much as being in a video game arcade. I wanted to see adventure games break out into the mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I remember considering the purchase of a third and fourth floppy drive for the Amiga to handle the eight disk set. Great box (art) by the way.

<comment><USER35> The 3 second audio loop while loading from disk is seared into my brain!

<comment><USER36> And I thought I had forgotten it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I had my own story of glory. I was in college (1996) and I was in the downtown college bar/club strip. It was at the very beginning of my college career and I hadn't made friends yet. Anyway there was an old Galaga game and I started playing.

I employed the tick that makes it so enemies can't fire.

I then proceeded to play to a very high level. Well a bunch of people say me playing and were so impressed at how far I was getting int he game. They didn't realize that I had employed the "trick".

I was cool moment and I felt like a star for just a brief moment.

<comment><USER38> Here is a great explanation of the glitch and instructions for patching it: [http://www.computerarcheology.com/wiki/wiki/Arcade/Galaga](http://www.computerarcheology.com/wiki/wiki/Arcade/Galaga)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I remember Dragon's Lair. For me, it went:

Quarter, quarter, death, death, death, death, death.

Couldn't have taken more than a minute. I would definitely have been the one standing behind this guy watching in awe.

<comment><USER40> Same here. It became the first game I avoided simply because I knew I would be wasting my money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Maybe that's what streaming games on Twitch is like for the current > generation of kids. But even knowing that 60 people from around the world > are watching you set new records in Call of Duty, I wonder how it stacks up > to an actual crowd of people standing directly behind you, as you listen to > them whispering to each other about how good this kid is at this game.

This is still the case depending on the genre. If you go to a fighting game tournament (street fighter, tekken, soul calibur, etc.) you fight in person because at a high level the lag over the internet is not acceptable for competitive play. In that situation, you have people looking at you over your shoulder and thousands of people watching you on twitch at the same time.

Bonus Justin Wong vs Diago Clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung&feature=kp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung&feature=kp)

<comment><USER42> Explanation of that clip:

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is- unle...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is-unleashed- capcoms-seth-killian-explains-the-most-famous-minute#/entry/signin)

Another explanation of it:

[http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/03/12/more- than...](http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/03/12/more-than-mashing- evo-moment-37/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think the great thing about this story is the crowd. That's a detail to arcades that is forgotten to time. Whatever the game, if someone was good at it, (and the arcade wasn't totally dead of course,) people would stop and watch. You could save your quarters and watch graphics and levels you'd never seen.

</comment><comment><USER44> What a great story. That took me back.

I remember getting good enough at Dragon's Lair and Space Ace to pull off this rockstar demo, but then I met my match when Cliff Hanger came around the local arcade. I merely bled dollars, without getting very close to being able to beat it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I could beat both Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. Although in Space Ace, I used to skip the rocket boots portion. Space Ace was the rhythm game of it's time ... getting the actions down with the music was the way to go!

</comment><comment><USER46> Ha. I had that experience in the golden years of arcades. I studied up and practiced pac-man to the point where I ended up in some crazy long game at about age 7? This was still when pac-man had some relevance, so it was in a nice, visible spot in one of the largest arcades in our area. I had a crowd of 12-20 behind me. I ended up freaking out a bit once I realized how many people were there and I had to pee sooooo bad. I ran to the bathroom to a few "Wow! Great job kid!" type things. I pretty much stopped even trying to think after the 7th key.

</comment><comment><USER47> What a great Dad:

"A local arcade not far from where we lived regularly put old games up for sale. My dad noticed that they had listed a Space Ace cabinet for $300. To this day I will never forget my shock — my dad bought it and brought it into our tiny apartment. I had a full-size, real-deal Space Ace arcade cabinet in my childhood bedroom."

Important to recognize how much kids love these things and, as a parent, to give in to frivolity at least once in a while...

</comment><comment><USER48> never liked Dragon's Lair it seemed to be to be putting graphics and presentation above game play. It was also far to easy to die horribly all the time, better to watch some other guy give it a go rather than pay twice the price of all the other machines (possibly 50p rather than 20p).

I prefered Joust.

</comment><comment><USER49> Dragon's Lair and Space Ace are both on iOS AppStore. Space Ace was a much easier game to beat in the arcades but I never got far on Dragon's Lair. Now, thanks to the mobile app, I can finish the game while my son watches on - amazed at my dexterity. A so the torch is passed.

<comment><USER50> But was the iOS version ever fixed? I got it, played up to the point where the giant suit of armor is sending electricity down the tiled floor at Dirk who has to jump several times to avoid it ("Electric Knight Battle" according to some walkthroughs). There was just no way to get through that scene on iPad. Many people reported the same issue.

<comment><USER49> It's a timing trick to get past it! This scene mirror reverses so you may need to invert left/right but the solution is that once you've gone left-right and then jumped forward you'll have to do something like left-right-left-<press right again IMMEDIATELY after pressing left before the animation stops>. Then a final forward, then sword. Then you go on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> What was really impressive in the arcades was not Dragons Lair but Ms Pacman and scoring over 600,000 points. I've seen some guys doing it and they kept eating all of the ghosts on power pill touch over and over. That's one of the most amazing video game feats ever.

</comment><comment><USER15> On a side note, if you want to play Dragon's Lair on PC these days, you can use Daphne, which is a Laser Disc Games Emulator: [http://www.daphne- emu.com/site3/index_hi.php](http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_hi.php)

<comment><USER52> Also available on Steam:

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/)

<comment><USER15> Daphne plays everything, not just Dragon's Lair, by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was part of a crowd gathering around this sort of thing once. The person playing it pulled the same trick of maxing out their score by skipping the very last move of the game until their last life, too. This was one of the local arcades in New Orleans, though.

</comment><comment><USER53> Oh man, this really brings back memories. I can't tell you the number of weekends that I spent at the local arcade playing Pac man, Donkey Kong, Defender, Robotron 2048, Q*Bert, and countless other games.

</comment><comment><USER54> We had the (much uglier) NES version of this game when I was a kid. It was the bane of our goddamned lives. I remember me and my brothers trying for several frustrated hours to get past the very first screen.

</comment><comment><USER55> Ha! I did the exact same thing when I beat Dragon's Lair, had the crowd gathered around, mic drop and everything. A computer gaming magazine had listed most of the moves so I studied up the night before.

</comment><comment><USER56> For anyone who wants to see the game, watch this:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6uEx5gWovA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6uEx5gWovA)

</comment><comment><USER36> I recall the crowd phenomenon was revived again briefly with fighting games before the arcades disappeared.

<comment><USER57> It was. That was during my teenage years when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat drew in the crowds. Ah, the days of saving your spot in line by putting your quarter up against the bottom of the monitor glass. Back when you had to put something up to prove your worth more than the effort it takes to push the START button.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Two LinkedIn profiles, acceptable, advisable? - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering whether it makes sense, is acceptable, and/or advisable to have a 2nd LinkedIn profile for yourself if you have both a professional career and also a side business for which you're an entrepreneur? For example, if you are a software engineer with over 15 years experience and a strong reputation, and also are starting a startup, it seems inadvisable to advertise that or even make it known from your regular LinkedIn profile, if only because it dilutes the seriousness of your professional determination. I don't mean to suggest one should be dishonest, however it is surely the case that one would want to hedge against the failure of their new enterprise by protecting their professional appearance, and not let potential employers think that one might just be about to quit the industry.<p>I'm not sure what LinkedIn says about this, I've seen a lot of accidental double accounts, and I can't tell that they really care. Perhaps their TOS are more specific, I haven't read them yet, and probably should have prior to posting, and will now go do so. But the question still has merits in a general sense, even if LinkedIn forbids it. How does one deal with this challenge? <comment><USER2> From what I've seen, lots of people have no problem at all mentioning their "non $DAYJOB" stuff on their LinkedIn profiles. Out of my contacts, I see plenty who list a dayjob and also list themselves as the owner/founder/president of a startup, or a consulting company, or some other "side" business.

I actually do that myself... my current $DAYJOB is listed right alongside my startup project. I really don't see it being a problem. <shrug />

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it depends on your $DAYJOB. If you've cultivated a very straight laced, highly dependable profile for top tier firms, that pay big, and want to feel that they're getting someone who's entrenched in their business for the foreseeable future, a startup reference can be a very odd distraction and just the thing to push you down a notch when being compared to another candidate. For those folks, the question still stands.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. I try to avoid that world like the plague, so it's hard for me to relate. I prefer to cultivate a very unlaced, slightly insane but very intense, offbeat, quirky and eclectic profile that no sane person working for a "top tier firm" would look twice at.

To each his own. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I understand, and it's the right approach to go with you are and play that angle to the max. I wish I was that guy sometimes, but being somewhat uptight and button up has its perks. There tends to be a lot of immaturity in the professional world, and extra trust is rewarded to us boring types. In your world the exact opposite could be true :)

Well, I would still love to hear thoughts on this. I'm thinking that for me I really need a 2nd profile. However that means building one from scratch, and also making sure it's OK with LinkedIn's TOS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How long filenames were added in Windows 95 to be backward compatible - <AUTHOR> http://home.teleport.com/~brainy/lfn.htm

<comment><USER2> I really love articles about programming from the 90s. Everything was written in C/C++ and maybe some Perl. Working with file formats that may or may not have had specifications, building and using algorithms that you learned in comp sci classes. I miss those days. :(

It's so rare that web pages from the 90s still even exist on the internet. Sadly I have to do a lot of web surfing with the wayback machine as a proxy to the days of the past.

<comment><USER3> > Sadly I have to do a lot of web surfing with the wayback machine as a proxy > to the days of the past.

I'd argue this is not sad, but incredible that the Wayback Machine has been so successful in preserving webpages as they've been revised, expanded, and deprecated. And if anything, it shows just how important the project and projects like it are for the preservation of the Internet's history.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you're correct. The Wayback Machine is truly incredible. I meant that it is sad that the pages disappear and it is often impossible to contact the original author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you found that interesting, here's Raymond Chen's addendum to the above article: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/08/26/10200...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/08/26/10200583.aspx)

(I found the main link via Raymond's post and found it a lot more interesting, but Raymond's post is worth a read if you enjoyed the article.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I had a windows xp machine that had very long file names on some pictures, and when the drive ran into some troubles the data specialists I took it to wanted to charge $2k because of the troubles those files were going to give them. Ahh my youth.

</comment><comment><USER5> Speaking of this, did anyone on HN beta test Chicago (windows 95?)

Early betas had the tendency to bork the LFN's which was a joy.

<comment><USER6> <raises hand> Don't remember any file-system problems though I believe I got into the betas mid cycle. I do however remember well the "What the heck is a Start menu and where did Program Manager go?"

Edit: I'm also starting to feel old when threads like this come up :)

<comment><USER5> I started testing it when it still had the "Chicago" loading graphic.

It's funny for me because I desperately wanted Microsoft to go after Apple on the UI elegance front, as I was a huge M$ booster at the time.

What makes me feel old is that people take pre-emptive multitasking for granted. In my day we had cooperative multitasking AND LIKED IT.

<comment><USER6> lol "Those were the days"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the first table of the "Storage Utilization" section, I believe the word "byte" is being used where the author means "bit".

</comment><comment><USER8> Ahh, the wonders of trying to list everything in C:\Program Files, and getting several indistinguishable MICROS~1.

<comment><USER9> Actually, they would be MICROS~1, MICROS~2, MICROS~3 and so on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The irony of this is half of Windows is STILL utterly BROKEN with respect to path lengths since LFN was introduced in the Win32 API and it shoots you almost every day if you have to work with any deep directory hierarchies. There are so many rules it's unfunny:

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa365247(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa365247\(v=vs.85\).aspx#maxpath)

<comment><USER11> Indeed! Try writing a Windows file system driver sometime; I hear it's truly a lovely experience.

The other irony is that the HP48 graphing calculator, originally introduced in 1990, had a user-facing filesystem with full support for long file and directory names. I'd be curious to learn what possessed the people responsible for DOS to have ever shipped a system with the insane 8.3 restriction. Even ancient Unix filesystems (early 1970s vintage) supported far more reasonable 14-character filenames.

<comment><USER12> > I'd be curious to learn what possessed the people responsible for DOS to > have ever shipped a system with the insane 8.3 restriction

CP/M inspired them. PC-DOS (Q-DOS, really) was more or less a rip-off of DR's CP/M-80. It's possible to give "ease of porting CP/M-80 programs to PC-DOS" as an excuse for that.

At that time, short file names were not a big issue, as CP/M filesystems were rather small (5- _megabyte_ hard disks were _very_ expensive at the time) and hierarchical filesystems were outside the realm of microcomputers. PC-DOS didn't introduce directories until version 2.

BTW, the Apple II DOS (all versions) had filenames of up to (IIRC) 33 chars, case-sensitive and with one byte to indicate the file type with a flat hierarchy. ProDOS has 16-char filenames with a hierarchical structure.</comment></comment></comment>


The Historical Significance of Fortune-Telling - <AUTHOR> http://daily.jstor.org/surprising-historical-significance-fortune-telling <comment><USER2> This is a rambling article with a conclusion which isn't supported by any of the rambling, that conclusion being that "fortune-telling is simply an exhibition of one of many possibilities, rather than the absolute truth. It is, therefore, never really wrong".

It includes a very unusual view of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle where the author quotes without attribution "Everything in the world looks coincidental by any current observation method, since any law or principle is expressed only probabilistically. No one can say whether a thing has absolute inevitability". The only reference I could find to this via Google was [http://large.stanford.edu/history/kaist/web/clubs/times/feat...](http://large.stanford.edu/history/kaist/web/clubs/times/features/pjw1/eindex.html), which also quotes without attribution.

I don't understand why such an article was submitted here.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't like this article very much, I don't think Catholicism envisions the world as a giant piece of clockwork controlled by God. But I do think there is value in historical Fortune-Telling.

You could probably plot out a comic book cinematic universe or put together the story arc for a whole video game series out of the characterization baked into Tarot or Astrology.

<comment><USER4> Maybe you will like this, then: [https://aeon.co/essays/forget-prophecy-the-i- ching-is-an-unc...](https://aeon.co/essays/forget-prophecy-the-i-ching-is-an- uncertainty-machine)

<comment><USER3> This is interesting, thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you do with your crappy old computer hardware? - <AUTHOR> We all have computers from the past that we have acquired through various means; old Pentiums, laptops, SMB servers. Unfortunately, these machines are often far weaker than today's low-cost alternatives (eg. RPi's). Also, after scavenging for parts, the only viable solution seems to be to recycle them.
Prove me wrong.
Is anyone doing anything neat with old hardware that the rest of us could try?
I'm thinking along the lines of taking a hodgepodge of weak hardware and combining it together to run a lite K8s cluster. Or some kind of processing behemoth that Dr. Frankenstein would appreciate. Or better yet, something that would break the internet if everyone started doing this with their old hardware. Just looking for fun ideas to try. Thanks! <comment><USER2> In college (early 2000's) we connected a lot of old machines (486's & Pentium I/II's) in a Beowulf cluster and got a fairly reasonable processing speed.

Creating a cluster is also a great learning opportunity.</comment>


How Kik Predicted the Rise of Chat Bots - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-kik-predicted-the-rise-of-chat-bots-2eaf9027b86e <comment><USER2> Huh? People have been working on chat bots since forever.

I mean, especially on IRC, with Eggdrop. My favourite was always: [https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion](https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion)

Example: [https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion/wiki/Examples](https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion/wiki/Examples)

<comment><USER3> ELIZA was around in 1964: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

<comment><USER4> Cool read, thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER5> M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sorry but Kik didn't predict the Rise of Chat Bots. Kik basically looked at WeChat and said we should do that. Same as Facebook and the others. WeChat showed that micro-apps inside a chat interface worked for their target market. The key is to understand the needs of WeChat's target market and figure out the overlap with the US market then figure out the unique needs of the US market.

<comment><USER4> All of them probably looked at IRC bots.

<comment><USER7> As a lesson in how not to do it.

<comment><USER4> Everything is crap 5-10 years after it's written.

The leap forward wasn't the tcl code quality, but an order of magnitude forward in what bots allowed to be possible in providing security to irc channels along with a host of other solutions simply was unparalleled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Twitter invented mentions, even tho IRC had them way before.

Kik invented Chat bots, even tho IRC had them way before.

Your next startup invented xyz, even tho IRC had them way before.

<comment><USER9> Well everything this labeled "social media" is just a clone of either newsgroups or irc or both.

<comment><USER10> Whoo-hoo! I get to be "that" person. Take a look at the education computer system PLATO. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)#Innova...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_\(computer_system\)#Innovation) :

> Pad (general-purpose computer message board), 1973, the first such, and a > few months later, system-defined Notesfiles, precursors to Unix Newsgroups, > Digital DECnotes and Lotus Notes.

> Talkomatic (text-based) (6-room, 5-persons-per-room real-time chat room), > 1973, precursor to Instant Messaging Conferences.

Plus, emoticons in the 1970s! [http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato- emoticons-rev...](http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons- revisited.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a lot of _hype_ about chat bots but let's not confuse that for usage. Tell me what chat bot you use on a regular basis?

To me, chat bots seem like a step backward, at least for the use cases I've seen them applied for.

<comment><USER12> I think there is a two part thing going on here, besides a lot of PR hype cycle echo chamber.

a) The anticipation that AI will be good enough to understand an instruction set through sentences. In some cases it already is.

b) Text isn't so much the interface but audio-voice interfaces are. The stuff from A) combined with voice recognition.

It is somewhat weird because Siri has been around for a while, Google voice recognition/search has been around for a while and been really good. Maybe the big aha moment was Amazon letting users actually input commands like ordering a product rather than getting dumped on search results for the web page to do it.

If the whole chat-voice-smart assistant thing is a winner takes all market, that winner probably replaces Google in mass market use cases for search. That is a really big deal and companies are salivating over the possibility.

Perhaps another factor is because other companies don't really have a knowledge graph like Google's, they are letting third party developers plug in.

So, the big tech companies have their products commercially available already and are being used by lots of people, the small tech companies have stuff they have been working on and are joining the hype cycle in hopes of being acquired.

So in summary the larger story is "chat bot" really = AI voice assistant which is plausibly the next Google eclipsing platform, and about as massive of a deal for the tech industry as the smart phone and self driving car.

<comment><USER13> This is the theory. And I don't think you're wrong at all in analyzing the motives/endgame here.

But there are reasons texting arose as a preferred alternative to voice. Audio interfaces will win in cars, possibly homes and other well-defined private spaces. But text is ubiquitous and visual interfaces are so much faster, as audio is limited by its linear dimension.

No doubt, voice control will be a huge market, but I think the idea is more alluring than the reality will prove.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Same Kik here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510)

<comment><USER15> after all that drama I guess they didn't want to npm package kik/kik-starter anymore...

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kikinteractive/kik](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kikinteractive/kik)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kik is also the #1 on spam bots, seriously their amount of spam (scammer accounts) is worrying.

<comment><USER16> yep and this is why I killed it off. Srsly the amount of junk I recieved is ridiculous.

I mean, if it were actual "junk" (you get what I mean), I mighta be happy, but it's all "come to my private webcam site" kinda crap.

This is, maybe, why Whatsapp is so hugely successful: the cost of SMS/phone verification is too high for scammers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem with Kik's version of bots is that they will face the same problems as apps do right now. Discoverability of bots, 100 bots that do the same small thing vying for user's time, bot overload, etc.

What Kik seems to have is essentially a web browser with a chat interface overlay where instead of typing in a URL you "mention" (summon?) a bot and the bot then gives you a "button" (link?) you can tap to open the web content.

One thing they do get right though is the idea that the bot should disappear once done and not bother you, however keeping marketers from not abusing that is going to require them to restrict that via code (e.g. session timeout)

Ideally I would want a single conversational chat bot that I can summon, ask to perform a task (regardless of what service is chosen to perform the task), select from the options provided, have the task performed. The bot can select an app to perform the task (deep link) or if no app can do it then some bot (if a bot exists to do that task) or a web link.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting article. Basically, Kik started off as just-another-mobile- messenger, and they had to compete with Facebook, Google, SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Blackberry, Skype, Snapchat, etc., so they figured bots would eventually set them apart.

Since all links inside their app open in their embedded browser, they can track click-throughs like Google, Facebook, and presumably the quirky 'bot interface' will be popular with people who are already used to chatting. No wonder everyone else is trying to maintain feature parity with them.

</comment><comment><USER18> Chat bots, the CLI going mainstream ... (?)

</comment><comment><USER19> Yo.</comment>


The old titans all collapsed. Is the U.S. next? - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/16/AR2008051603461.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

<comment><USER2> Well, _obviously_ the US is next, since we're the current titan. The only alternative is that the US will remain predominant forever.

The question that matters is whether the US will lose its position in the immediate future. What hosed past commercial powers was that rivals did the most important thing they did better. The most important thing the US does is invent new technology, and I don't see any signs yet of anyone doing that a lot better.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's always the loss of manufacturing jobs in those articles.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I start open source contribution? - <AUTHOR> At my corporate job, I work in Java, python in cloud providers like GCP and Azure. We use a lot of open source stuff like Apache Commons, beam, spark etc. Wondering how to start contributing to open source as beginner as I don't have knowledge about the internals of any of them. <comment><USER2> If you are already using open source tools within your organization, a good way to start getting involved is to report bugs to those upstream projects when they happen.

If you want to contribute more directly I'd recommend with simple improvements to the documentation of a project that you use. While you might not be interested in documentation work in the long term it is a good way of becoming familiar with the project's specific process of merging new contributions. Once the first contribution has been made to a project it should be somewhat easier to navigate their trackers to understand what sort of programming roles are available.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out [http://up-for-grabs.net](http://up-for-grabs.net) for a consistent source of open source projects that could use some help. There are also specific tags that indicate first-timer friendly contributions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi! You can help here: [https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF](https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF)

</comment><comment><USER5> A good source for me is: [https://www.codetriage.com/](https://www.codetriage.com/)</comment>


Show HN: Gold Laces Conference for Bootstrappers and Side Hustles - <AUTHOR> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gold-laces-conf-for-bootstrappers-and-side-hustlers-tickets-26124654545 <comment><AUTHOR> If you're interested, you can use my code FRIENDS to get half off (so tickets are $99 instead of $199).</comment>