Tesla Motors' Model S Is Crushing Premium Car Market - <AUTHOR> http://learnbonds.com/126291/tesla-motors-inc-tsla-model-s-dominates-premium-car-market/ <comment><USER2> I guess it depends on what you count as a premium car. 5 Series, E-Class, Lexus GS and similar premium cars crush the Model S in sales.

Sure, the Tesla is arguably more "premium" than the 5 Series and its competitors. But it's also hard to argue that the Model S is as premium as an S-Class.

<comment><USER3> Yep. The problem is Wall Street won't have anything to say about Tesla until after the Model 3 production ramp is well underway. The bets are already locked in. We just have to wait.

But the press has to write about something about in the intervening three years!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a fan of Tesla/Musk, but at a glance I have to question the validity of the comparison chart, which seems to exclude a lot of cars in the Model S's pricerange from all of the manufacturers. I'd be a lot more interested if this included all cars by the manufacturers above the Model S's $70,000 base price. Picking out one or two models misses that an absurd overabundance of models/options at every pricepoint is pretty fundamental to the auto market as it exists today. All of the makers are building an ever-expanding lineup, and the large sedan category listed here strikes me as a niche that's rapidly going extinct in the U.S., at least.

</comment><comment><USER5> I very much support Tesla's spearheading of electic cars, but the thing that bothers me most is: how well do they work in colder climate?

I never seen functioning in cold climate mentioned by Musk or Tesla representatives. In my understanding, cold should be killing the batteries. If Tesla has met with considerable success in cold-proofing their cars, surely they would tell?

<comment><USER6> Tesla has a specific cold weather package and given that Norway is the biggest market for Tesla on a per population basis and second biggest in terms of absolute numbers, I'm guessing they work well enough in at least slightly colder climates.

<comment><USER7> yup. here in chilly Ottawa theres plenty of teslas doing just fine. -25C at times,

<comment><USER8> I've yet to see one here. I've heard of sightings but they aren't so common that you see them regularly.

<comment><USER7> I see them in downtown and rockcliffe park.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought this was link bait but after a few searches it looks like 26,566 in 2015 figure is plausible [0][1]. That's kind of impressive! I thought it was still a niche market.

on a side note teslamotors.com is using Cold Fusion (cfm)?!

[0] [http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/140267905...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/1402679055x0x827135/90332B15-F6AE-4F44-B634-624BE548291E/Tesla_Motors_Q1_15_Shareholder_Letter.pdf)

[1] [http://ir.teslamotors.com/events.cfm](http://ir.teslamotors.com/events.cfm)

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know about privacy in the model s. Is tesla always tracking your location and car stats? Is there a way to disable that?

<comment><USER11> Do you have a cellphone? Pretty sure you can already be tracked. Even if they are turned off.

Best bet is to go an old car with no electronics, and wired phone to your desk. Oh and avoid any roads that have cameras that can plate scan. May want to wear a mask when you go to the mall too, face scanning tech is getting pretty good.

<comment><USER12> Irrelevant to the question.

>Even if they are turned off.

Citation needed.

<comment><USER13> >Citation needed.

>By September 2004, the NSA had developed a technique that was dubbed "The Find" by special operations officers. The technique, the Post reports, was used in Iraq and "enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off."

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/22/nsa_can_r...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/22/nsa_can_reportedly_track_cellphones_even_when_they_re_turned_off.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well the very rich, as in those can afford eighty to one hundred thousand dollar cars, usually have more than a few at hand. Tesla did well to market to both the rich crowd who likes toys, the environmental crowd who needs things to make them feel less guilt, and the techies who just love all things new and cool.

You don't crush a market with the volume Tesla has. Most of the big brands use these as cash cows. Put it this way, BMW makes a X5 and X6 which are effectively identical but the later makes 8k more profile and they sold a quarter million of them since inception.

When Tesla can deliver what people want to buy right now and not make them wait then they might be crushing the competition.

As for the 3 EV. Still not seeing it, it will obsolete the S if Musk's boasts are to believe and why would any company put out a car for less than half the price with the main key feature being the same, 200+ mile range? Tesla doesn't have the production capacity for it so who will be their partner? Or where will they get the billions needed to build the production line that can deliver in volume?

Good cars, not just sold on them being great. Sorry but 200-250 mile range in summer is not what I consider a replacement vehicle for stats, make as second vehicle or third.

<comment><USER15> If you live on a small island like the UK that range covers most trips. However I keep expecting someone to create a roof box range extender (combustion engine) that just charges the battery.

It will be interesting to see were the supposed Apple car will fit in, I imagine they will go after the low volume / high margin market to start.

<comment><USER16> Range extender as a add-on is an interesting idea. Could be done as a trailer also. But I imagine that people who can afford Teslas will either just rent as needed, or own a conventional car for longer trips.

<comment><USER15> BMW offer this as an extra when buying an i3, but really you want to use your Tesla with all it's autonomous driving all the time right!

"BMW i also offers additional mobility modules which allow even longer distances to be covered – for example a conventional BMW vehicle can be provided on a given number of days per year."

[https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/pressDetail.html?title...](https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/pressDetail.html?title=bmw-i3-concept- coupe-european-premiere-plus-intelligent-range-enhancing- solutions&outputChannelId=6&id=T0137344EN&left_menu_item=node__6729)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A few key problems in Redis persistence - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/post/a-few-key-problems-in-redis-persistence.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+antirez+%28antirez+weblog%29 <comment><USER2> I guess you're in the right spot when everyone else is writing the love articles and you have to write your own hate. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you memory map your memory to disk and let the kernel take care of it?

<comment><USER4> The reasons for not doing that are discussed here:

<http://antirez.com/post/redis-virtual-memory-story.html>

<comment><USER3> So basically:

1\. Redis in memory data structures have poor locality, which hurts a lot when a "cache miss" means going to disk.

2\. Redis in memory data structures take up to 10x as much space as the on disk structures, so writing them to disk verbatim wastes a lot of bandwidth.

So apparently using memory mapped files wouldn't work for Redis. But what if you used data structures that do have good locality and are optimized for space usage? Has this been tried? I think it is an interesting approach and has the potential to outperform Redis' approach, especially for bigger databases. If your data structures use say 2x as much space as Redis' on disk structures, then you would still be able to fit much more data in memory than Redis because you don't lose half your memory as described in the OP, plus the data structures are more compact.</comment></comment></comment>


Map of Detroit's Surveillance State 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://detroitography.com/2019/05/20/map-detroits-surveillance-state-2019/ <comment><AUTHOR> One of the clever things Dan Gilbert did when he bought a big chunk of the downtown area was to start his own security force and put cameras everywhere. Suddenly crime dropped and so did the major excuse of why companies stayed in the suburbs.

But people were getting carjacked at gas stations and party stores. So the city started Project Greenlight. In exchange for putting in the cameras the city promised priority on police response. Suddenly all crime stopped and other Detroit merchants demanded they be allowed to join the project.

A lot of people are scared about the 'surveillance state' but this is how Detroit is taking back the city from the criminals and it's working.</comment>


New official DIN standard for Open Source Hardware in Germany (German) - <AUTHOR> https://netzpolitik.org/2020/offene-din-norm-fuer-offene-hardware/#spendenleiste <comment><AUTHOR> DIN specifications in English:

[https://osegermany.gitlab.io/OHS/DIN_SPEC_3105-1.pdf](https://osegermany.gitlab.io/OHS/DIN_SPEC_3105-1.pdf) [https://osegermany.gitlab.io/OHS/DIN_SPEC_3105-2.pdf](https://osegermany.gitlab.io/OHS/DIN_SPEC_3105-2.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Best translator for German/English:

[https://www.deepl.com/translator](https://www.deepl.com/translator)

</comment><comment><USER2> TL;DR: The standard now provides an "official" definition of what makes a project open source hardware (i.e. what has to be under a free license to ensure the project is actually usable for others). This is useful e.g. so research projects looking for public funding can promise to deliver open hardware "according to DIN SPEC 3105-1".

The article also addresses the conflict between "DIN" and "open", because DIN is mostly known for locking away critical standards (that are often incorporated into laws by reference) behind expensive paywalls. This standard is an exception and according to the article, the first standard that's open source itself.</comment>


Exodus – Painless relocation of Linux binaries without containers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/intoli/exodus <comment><USER2> This is awesome! The how it works section was an interesting read.

[https://github.com/intoli/exodus/blob/master/README.md#how-i...](https://github.com/intoli/exodus/blob/master/README.md#how- it-works)

<comment><USER3> I wish all README.md came this sexy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really good tool. As a sysadmin, I really appreciate when people come up with tools like that. Especially when I have to work in heterogenous environments, like I had to last year with lots of different versions of the same OS, it was a pain in the ass to do certain tasks everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool concept. Wondering if it would be possible package relocated binary directly as AppImage. It's more academic question then real life necessity though.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is seriously cool.</comment>


Formal countdown begins for Scottish vote that could break up United Kingdom - <AUTHOR> http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/05/29/uk-scotland-independence-campaign-idUKKBN0E92F620140529

<comment><USER2> > Formal countdown begins for Scottish vote that could break up United Kingdom

The title conspicuously omits the word "further", as in "further break up the UK". Remember Ireland, India and a collection of Southeast Asian possessions. Oh, and the U.S., a but farther back in time.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I start contributing to open source projects? - <AUTHOR>

How do I start contributing to open source projects? I have been pondering over this for quite some time and do not quite know how/where to begin. I have a fair coding experience in C/C++, python and perl but probably am too confused right now. How do I select a project to begin with? What if I commit to something but not able to deliver?
If you are already working on something interesting, please post the link/contact, I would be happy to join. I am looking for something with C/C++ or python code base
Thanks in advance, PS <comment><USER2> Repost (because this gets asked too often):

I defined this for someone else who had the same question a few days ago. There are 4 ways to contribute:

\- bugs (find and report them)

\- code (the part everyone wants to do)

\- docs (the part that everyone should do, but has been given second-class status due to everyone thinking writing code is the only way to feel like you're contributing)

\- tests (ever clicked on "button" and everything broke, well if someone wrote a test for the functionality there, it likely wouldn't have)

I urge you to start with the things the pure-coders hate, and that is well- defined, noob-friendly documentation.

You'll never be given the high status of "genius programmer living in basement, changing world", but your documentation and "dumbing that shit down" way of explaining things will sometimes make the project more successful and will carry more weight as far as bringing more users of the code-base.

</comment><comment> Warewolf-ESB Good open source projects should have documentation for you to help you get started. Like the other posts, there are many ways you can contribute, and every little bit does help.

As far as I know, no one will be standing over you expecting you to finish anything, unless you made some kind of agreement to start.

I would suggest finding something you enjoy and just start. When you are ready to submit your changes be ready for great feedback and a ton of learning. You will be working with some really passionate, skilled guys so there will undoubtedly be a big, but rewarding, learning curve.

Our project is .Net based, so not really a fit for your skills, but feel free to check it out or share with your friends: [https://github.com/Warewolf- ESB/Warewolf-ESB](https://github.com/Warewolf-ESB/Warewolf-ESB)

Good luck, and most of all, have fun!

<comment><AUTHOR> will check it out...thanks., i did work as VB.Net developer in my first job :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pick something you use regularly that's open source, and check out that. Something you have familiarity with is going to be a lot easier to contribute to, because you will notice bugs, or think up a feature. Like I added an option to a vim plugin I was using that was open source, and then sent a pull request because I thought someone else might like it, and it got accepted.

Another good thing to do is to write documentation for code before you contribute to it. Plenty of code lacks clear documentation, and having to read the code and understand it will help you contribute later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that helps a lot

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just start reading the source of projects you use and see how they work. When you see something wrong or need a new feature you create a fork on GitHub and work on that. You then create a pull request when it is ready! If you're unable to 'deliver', just don't create the pull request. Start small with tests or docs, then bugs and small improvements, then new features, then big refactors ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, surely will try :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Start contributing from Apache projects [https://projects.apache.org/indexes/alpha.html](https://projects.apache.org/indexes/alpha.html) Try to develop plugin, component for some open source project.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://moarvm.com/contributing.html](http://moarvm.com/contributing.html)

Hope to see you on #moarvm. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> looks interesting... thanks for the link :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Start on a small project on Github then work your way up.

<comment><AUTHOR> :)</comment></comment>


A Science-Backed Guide to Taking Truly Restful Breaks - <AUTHOR> http://99u.com/articles/54325/a-science-backed-guide-to-taking-truly-restful-breaks <comment><USER3> Pretty appropriate timing, I was just thinking of stuff to do in my Pomodoro breaks to make them most effective.

I'd just added 'washing out my eyes with pure water' to the list of things to do in breaks, reading this article made me add 'going outside, or at least to the street-facing balcony' too. One more thing I'd add is deep breathing - <USER2> the Vim Hoff method or Buddhist techniques or whatever - but one of the things I feel the modern world heavily underestimates is the level of effectiveness that simple, conscious, deep breathing can have on your mental and physical state.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that I get the most real rest from doing something different. E.g. it shouldn't include typing or a screen, or an activity that involves looking inside my own head. It's one reason I'm a baseball season ticket holder (even if my team is doing dreadfully, I _shout aloud_ and watch people being occasionally-adept at non-cerebral things), and why I quilt or embroider.</comment></comment>


Bumblebees solve the travelling salesman problem on the fly - sahin-boydas https://www.newscientist.com/article/2156089-bumblebees-solve-the-travelling-salesman-problem-on-the-fly/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is one paragraph, the rest is behind a paywall...

Might as well just go to the source, here: [http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2017/se/radar-tracking- reve...](http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2017/se/radar-tracking-reveals-how- bees-develop-a-route-between-flowers.html)

You can find the actual journal publication here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17553-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17553-1)</comment>


Time Lapse Building the Lego Tower Bridge in Front of the Real Tower Bridge - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erYUGHZQssE <comment><USER2> Hero</comment>


Vim is moving to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_use/kC6yXmx6qJg

<comment><USER2> Wise decision, but I feel like with momentum that neovim has, it's gonna be hard to get any meaningful contributions. Certainly better than having it off github.

<comment><USER3> This if the first time I have heard of neovim. Can you elaborate a bit more on the pros and cons ?

The neovim site had this:

Is it ready to download and run now with all the features?

No. Although some features are a work in progress, Neovim isn't at a stable point. Using Neovim should be done with caution as things may change.

<comment><USER4> I think that's just the usual "not 1.0 yet". IIUC the goal of cleaning up the C-code is not yet complete nor is the "new plugin architecture" (but vim plugins work). I find it very stable and everything I previously used in vim works fine.

Their issue close rate is impressive, as well as the long list of RFCs in the pull-requests queue, a large number of which are cleaning code and tests.

pros: it's basically the same as vim. future pro: cleaner code, more stabile/better perf, new package ecosystem. cons: it's not vim. You can update more frequently. If you have a really old machine it won't run neovim (but will almost certainly be "supported" by vim).

<comment><USER2> You didn't cite the biggest advantages of neovim: for example, the possibility to embed neovim inside IDEs or background processes. You did mention the new plugin architecture, which is quite exciting.

Regarding the support of old machines, it doesn't matter at all, really. Even vim 1.0 would be enough for old machines. I'm not aware of anyone that wants to develop in an old machine. At most, you might need to ssh into it, and even vi is good enough :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9263193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9263193)

<comment><USER6> So _that 's_ why it got flagged off the front page so quickly. That was a while ago, but it's probably relevant that [https://github.com/vim/vim](https://github.com/vim/vim) was last updated within the last 24 hrs, so TFA which is also less than a day old is probably news and probably shouldn't have been flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sweet!

Hopefully this will give the project more exposure :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, I'm really disappointed they chose GitHub over BitBucket.

Not because of any political reasons, but just because I love Mercurial and detest git.

<comment><USER9> Why is that so? And how is this relevant to TFA?

<comment><USER10> Its relevant because it forces a change to the DVCS used by the project and participants.

<comment><USER9> Maybe I didn't understand correctly, but the post doesn't specify whether the project is dropping Mercurial for good or merely changing hosts because of the impending closure of Google Code.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"America Can't Do a Damn Thing": Stochastic Planet - <AUTHOR> http://stochasticplanet.tumblr.com/post/96069159442/29-982665-n-48-482585-e-east-bank-of-arvand-rud

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty sure we do beaches better than you guys.</comment>


Show HN: This Fursona Does Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/ <comment><USER2> The furry fandom is a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics. Examples of anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking, walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. The term "furry fandom" is also used to refer to the community of people who gather on the internet and at furry conventions. [1]

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

<comment><USER3> One key differentiation for the furry fandom is that Furries usually have their own made up characters instead of other fandoms where roleplay/cosplay/avatars are typically of characters from media.

<comment><USER4> Should be careful with calling them "made up characters". I know a significant percentage of furries where their fursona is considered a real second personality.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't make them not made up. Even a primary personality is made up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are > therefore public domain.

I find this claim on the "about page" quite interesting. Some of those images might be so close to the training data that the copyright protection for fictional characters becomes relevant, even if the image is not identical. This is visible in this topic as people recognize characters from popular- culture (video-games or movies), because the training data seems to also contain fanart.

<comment><USER7> I suspect in legal terms, if you feed copyrighted images into a computer program, the output is a derivative work, AI or no.

As you say, some of the output images are clearly of specific characters, which turns this from "legally grey" into "definitely not public domain".

<comment><USER8> Depends how creative the AI is. Human artists are trained on copyrighted images too.

<comment><USER9> Good artists copy, great artists steal?

This is the whole conundrum of creation and copyright. Every creative work is protected by copyright yet every creative work is the sum of unconscious derivations to varying degrees of something an author has perceived, creative works existing ex nihilo are at best vanishingly rare; personally I'm not even sure they exist, I'm leaning more towards we're just mistaking unusually big jumps of derivations/combinations of those for ex nihilo creative works. We readily recognise "influences" of great artists (whether it is music, literature, painting...).

Doesn't mean creative work should not be protected, but drawing the line of infringing vs not is by definition extremely blurry and subjective.

That talk is as relevant as ever:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_cr...](https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_creativity)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to propose a "does not exist" site that does not exist: This Family Does Not Exist. Generate faces and a family tree, where I can see familial resemblance and where that resemblance follows our understanding of genetics.

Related business: let me upload photos of my relatives and a family tree, and show me generated faces for other people on the family tree (e.g., common ancestors) based on these inputs and genetics. I wonder what kind of accuracy can be achieved in generating a person's face, based on how many descendants' faces we have photos of, over how many generations, with how much inbreeding, etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks, I hate it.

One of those interesting side-effects of furry avatars that I noticed is that accounts bearing those avatars were always real people, with the added bonus that you can generally authenticate the human behind the mask if you know how. The reality of being online today is that we have to understand whether we're interacting with real people or just a clever piece of software, and this is far more true for folks who are not technically savvy.

Oddly enough, furries were the last bastion of humanity. (And a welcoming one at that, but I digress.)

This complicates that heuristic somewhat. This brings furry avatars on the same level as human headshots. I now need to, e.g., read and process the full account bio and spend more time authenticating whom I interact with online.

This is great work, but did you really have to?

<comment><USER12> What?

<comment><USER13> If you look at the profile pictures on Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc., they fall into a few categories:

• fallback — e.g. the egg image on twitter

• explicitly algorithmic — e.g. [http://identicon.net/](http://identicon.net/)

• logotypes — actual logos, icons, arbitrary aesthetically-pleasing typographical art

• headshots of real people

• photographs of real-life things — places, nature, buildings, etc.

• crops from TV/film — headshots of actors playing characters, or whatever you'd call Baby Yoda

• famous works of art — crops of prints of paintings, crops of photos of sculptures

• commercially-marketable art — box art, movie posters, crops from cartoons/anime, professionally-commissioned CG paintings that fit the style of their source material

• unknown, non-marketable art — works that are clearly either self-made, or commissioned as a one-off, where the work has traits that make it specific- enough to someone's tastes that it obviously would never have been produced as spec work without an arranged buyer/planned use

The parent's point is that, for all the categories except the last, there's an obvious way to scrape or generate a million such images, that someone can include in their spambot/voting-ring registering algorithm.

The last category, though—custom competent-but-not-commercial-looking illustrations—were, in some sense, a Proof of Work token for the profile it was attached to: someone had to _draw_ that (and even more, _gather requirements_ to draw that, rather than it just being one keyframe following the same rules of thousands of others.) It cost a few dollars for that person to get that image; and therefore, it's less likely (though not impossible) that ten users with ten different such illustrations in a forum thread were all secretly the same person/bot.

There hasn't even been an AI that can do face-detection on funny-animal cartoons until now, AFAIK, so there was until now no way to even automate+scale _scraping_ of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art- hosting website, let alone a way to automate+scale _generating_ them. But now the cat's out of the bag. Bit of a shame.

<comment><USER14> > so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" > profile-pictures from some art-hosting website

There's a few furry-oriented art websites, so this part has actually been really easy for like two decades.

<comment><USER13> "Automate and scale" means something other than what you think it means. The scraping of relevant raw images is the easy part. But you can't use scraped images as profile pictures directly, without first cropping them to be headshot-ish, because slapping random raw images with no sense of photographic composition into your profile picture is _also_ a common signal of there not being a human in the loop.

And human labor—even the cheapest human labor—still costs _way_ too much to have real people sitting there cropping pictures to use as profile pictures, if you need a basically-infinite stream of them for your spambot network.

So you'd need, at minimum, a face-detection algorithm that you can rely on to do auto-cropping, so that you can just throw it a whole scrape-dump of the art site, and get back that basically-infinite stream of headshots.

As I said, until _this very project_ , there _was_ no face-detection algorithm that worked on illustrations of, er, "demihuman" faces. (There was one for humans, that would fail horribly on this data; and then specific other ones for cats/dogs/etc in photos, that also would fail here.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some of these have designs that are so... specific? holistic? Not sure what I'm shooting for.

But, I am wondering if you ran an image similarity search on them vs. the training set would you find matches or are they actually unique?

[https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed09985.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed09985.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13901.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13901.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31957.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31957.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25075.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25075.jpg)

<comment><USER16> I'm convinced that for 90% of these "Does not exist" generators, you can identify two or three hugely influential images, and almost all the rest is noise. There's an image where the hair comes from, an image for the facial structure, and then some perturbations are made to eye color or jawline.

Not to say that isn't impressive! Generating convincing fakes, even 1% of the time, even if they're not super unique (There's plenty of people who "look exactly like" in the real world, too!) is a big deal.

<comment><USER17> That is obviously not true if you watch any interpolation videos or do any nearest-neighbor lookups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This has far fewer oddities than the people based ones. Maybe that's because furry art all have similar qualities already, so it's easier? A few of them were just straight up Judy from Zootopia, so that says something gross about the furry community, I'm sure.

Also, I hate this. I especially hate the loading messages.

<comment><USER19> I saw a lot of verbatim copies of both the fox and the rabbit from Zootopia (possibly with shades of Disney's Robin Hood) and distinctive elements of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon characters. I think it was trained on popular anthropomorphic media, not just furry art, and there's some overfitting. I don't think stylistic inspiration can quite explain its fondness for cheeky foxes wearing green.

Zootopia: [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed18100.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed18100.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed73222.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed73222.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed46870.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed46870.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed88525.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed88525.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed16983.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed16983.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed38798.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed38798.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed34557.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed34557.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed20308.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed20308.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed65770.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed65770.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13269.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13269.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31499.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31499.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed78829.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed78829.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed02032.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed02032.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed24939.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed24939.jpg)

Pikachu: [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed12878.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed12878.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed05116.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed05116.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed49143.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed49143.jpg)

Sonic: [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed22797.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed22797.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed95651.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed95651.jpg) [https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed35704.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed35704.jpg)

<comment><USER20> There might be traces of Pikachu in that, but it's definitely Renamon. [https://digimon.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon](https://digimon.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon)

<comment><USER14> More-comparable straight-on image here: [https://neoencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon](https://neoencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone ever made some variant of these "* does not exist" sites with some control sliders/options, that controls various aspects of what's generated?

So things like: gender, hair color, face shape, etc?

Basically, an AI-driven character generator that isn't completely random?

<comment><USER17> Absolutely. Waifu Labs [https://waifulabs.com/](https://waifulabs.com/) implements a grid-based choice system for evolving anime portraits, and Artbreeder [https://artbreeder.com/](https://artbreeder.com/) implements controls plus crossbreeding and other features for a variety of StyleGAN/BigGAN models. There's plenty of scripts and Colab notebooks as well for various kinds of editing or control if Artbreeder doesn't do it for you. (I think Runway may also do editing but I haven't used them in ages.)

GAN models do not need to be specifically architected to enable control, because you can reverse them to get the latents/seed and manipulate that to 'edit' images: [https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control- mo...](https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-modify- images) So if someone wanted, they could use Arfa's model to edit images.

<comment><USER21> This is incredible, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks like a Zoom meeting with 4chan.

</comment><comment><USER23> Truly impressive results, though I find it unsettling that there's a decent chance that the future of all Internet aggregators is going to be "We threw data into computer and it threw out magic thing!"

<comment><USER24> Just wait until AI create random cartoon shows and comedy that end up being funny. That will be uncanny.

<comment><USER23> I saw an AI 'meme generator' the other day that seemed to make fairly insightful and funny memes. I think the future is close, and...very strange.

<comment><USER25> The funny thing about the AI meme generator is per the technical write up ([https://towardsdatascience.com/meme-text-generation-with- a-d...](https://towardsdatascience.com/meme-text-generation-with-a-deep- convolutional-network-in-keras-tensorflow-a57c6f218e85)), that network is even less advanced than the old recurrent neural network approaches. (it uses convolutional neural networks which are more used for images than text nowadays)

However, this is the one case where more incoherence works better.

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's a testament to crowdsourcing and filtering. Many people have argued that 'generation + filtering = creativity', and it's impressive what NNs+crowds can do. The NNs are unhindered by any merely human considerations and are indefatigable, while the crowd brings the filtering & evaluation to select just the best candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some of them are a bit weird, still.

This one is odd; are those horns or spikes? And what's that sticking out the back (or is that from the ear?):

[https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed30101.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed30101.jpg)

It's always fun when these kind of systems try to generate text:

[https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25387.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25387.jpg)

And then we have this one, which is pretty clearly Toriel from Undertale:

[https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed14017.jpg](https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed14017.jpg)

<comment><USER27> The training set is (naturally) skewed towards a handful of characters. I wrote about it on twitter when I saw this: [https://twitter.com/indrora/status/1258094389013831680](https://twitter.com/indrora/status/1258094389013831680)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This AI passes the Furing Test.

</comment><comment> modal-soul In this case, the incidental heterochromia actually makes it feel even more authentic.

<comment><USER17> The heterochromia is probably not 'incidental'. Heterochromia, quite aside from lighting/shading differences in eye color, is present in many real images: Danbooru has a ton, and e621 has 11k images tagged 'heterochromia'. Just a common trope in illustrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is the coolest use of AI I've seen in a while! :3

</comment><comment><USER30> The thumbnails have human-level quality. The full images have oddities, but they disappear when downsized. DL is going to put animators, voice actors and even actors out of work sooner than I ever expected. It's going to be feasible for one person to create a full anime episode in three days. The amount of content is going to explode by orders of magnitude and shared culture is basically going to die, with nearly zero chance another random person consumes the same content. What a weird time to live in.

<comment><USER31> > The amount of content is going to explode by orders of magnitude and shared > culture is basically going to die, with nearly zero chance another random > person consumes the same content.

Why? I believe there's already so much content out there that this could easily happen today if the only question would be the raw amount. However if you ask people around the water cooler, instead of one guy watching joesmith34's Source Film Maker video on YouTube and another watching janedoe157's flash animation yesterday evening, everyone watched the latest episode of a popular Netflix series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> You were so caught up on whether you could. You never stopped to ask the question whether you should.

</comment><comment><USER33> > As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are > therefore public domain. Feel free to use them any way you see fit. Just > don't try to pass them off as your own art or sell them or anything.

The furry fandom is _extremely_ touchy about "art theft." Considering how many of these images clearly resemble individual artists' styles, I'd tread a little more carefully.

<comment><USER34> > As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are > therefore public domain.

This part seems false. If I take copyrighted photos and run it through something like an "AI" filter to change the colors slightly, the photos aren't suddenly public domain.

If you steal from enough people at once is it then legal?

<comment><USER17> > If I take copyrighted photos and run it through something like an "AI" > filter to change the colors slightly, the photos aren't suddenly public > domain.

That is not what is being done here. See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness)

> If you steal from enough people at once is it then legal?

How many people does a great human artist steal from to become an artist? If you steal solely from one other artist, you're a plagiarist; if you steal from a thousand other artists, you're an innovator and pioneer of a new style...

<comment><USER35> This isn't transformative enough to pass a sniff test. They took multiple images and put them in a computer to make images that look like those images. What's transformative about that?

<comment><USER17> That's extremely transformative: it's learning from a large corpus what faces are and how to create brand new ones which cannot even be traced back to an original. (If you think even that is not enough to count as 'transformative', I suggest you look at the examples in the WP article of what has been considered transformative, like 'thumbnail screenshots of web pages' and 'putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa'.)

<comment><USER35> When a significant number look like zootopia characters I don't think you can claim they "can't be traced back to the original", lots of these are overfit

<comment><USER17> They are not 'overfit' unless they are exactly the same and they cannot generalize. But you can see the wide variety of high quality faces which are not copied from the dataset and that the interpolations are fine: [https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937](https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937)

Generating a recognizable character is no more 'overfit' than a painter being able to paint George Washington means their brain is 'overfit'. If those characters are part of the data distribution, as they are, then the GAN _can and should_ generate them and countless variants on them.

<comment><USER35> My point is that just because you get the zootopia fox out of a GAN doesn't mean the zootopia fox is public domain.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps not, but that is completely different from what data it uses or whether it is 'overfit'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> All I see are an infinite number of unique user avatars for every Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey instance of the Fediverse.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Regarding "overfitting": I posted an interpolation video here -[https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937?s=20](https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937?s=20)

This demonstrates, at the very least, that it isn't simply memorizing the datapoints. You can see that it is able to smoothly transition between images of Zootopia characters and other characters, which indicates that it has learned a lot more about the actual features.

I believe the prevalence of certain characters (Zootopia, Sonic characters, Pokemon) showing up is because a large portion of the input space maps to those regions of the latent space. So I'd expect there to be a roughly equal proportion of images that look like Nick Wilde in the random samples as there are in the training data.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd love to see this for spaceships.

</comment><comment><USER37> I assume that this would only work reliably for headshots/avatars? Still, if I were an artist whose income came from furry art, this would terrify me.

<comment><USER29> No, because a fursona is something that's deeply personal to the person, and typically the process for creating one looks like this:

1\. Decide what you want to look like

2\. Create a reference sheet (or commission an artist to create one based on a description from step 1)

3\. Commission a headshot for an avatar

4\. Commission some art of your fursona, possibly with your friends' fursonas

5\. GOTO 4

6\. At some point, your friends may ask you for your reference sheet so they can gift you an art piece of your fursona and theirs (see optional stage of 4)

Even if you can churn out AI-generated headshots, getting the colors/markings _just right_ for your character is nontrivial for non-generic fursonas (see [https://soatok.com/static/soatok-johis- responsive.jpg](https://soatok.com/static/soatok-johis-responsive.jpg) for example).

And besides, most art commissions are conducted after you have a reference sheet and/or headshot of your character.

If anything, this will give artists something they can point the "steal other people's character art for their roleplay accounts" types of (especially younger) furries towards. "Can't afford to commission an artist? Just use the AI thing and stop the misbehavior!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can't wait for the first "your AI stole my original character!!!" furry thread on Twitter.

Impressive achievement, I'd love to see the outcome of re-training it with fan-art removed from the training set. There's a lot of Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps in there...

<comment><USER29> Some furries were already having this discourse as soon as this hit HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This was expected from:

\- It was already possible to create fursonas based on pictures of human faces.

\- It was possible to generate pictures of faces of humans that do not exist.

Pipe these two together and you get this ...

</comment><comment><USER40> Hah this is really neat and a fun use of AI.

</comment><comment><USER41> No horned animals? Discrimination!

<comment><USER42> Or scalies. They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas. I guess it's a result of the data-set used.

<comment><USER43> > They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas.

The gender bias is actually really interesting. I'm curious how much of it is due to:

* Inherent bias in the source dataset. (For example, _nekomimi_ art is overwhelmingly female -- there's a reason they're referred to as "catgirls". The GAN does a great job of distinguishing this from Western anthropomorphic art styles, incidentally.)

* Bias introduced through filtering of the dataset, e.g. by excluding NSFW source material or certain tags, or a bias in what types of faces were recognized.

* Androgynous faces being interpreted as feminine by default.

* GAN-specific characteristics of the output (like smooth features) being interpreted as feminine.

<comment><USER42> I think it's bais towards catgirls and other anthropomorphized anime characters which is skewing the results. If you go to FA, you would have to look hard to find feminine like this. It's either using a catgirls, as you say, heavy dataset or mixing two unrelated datasets.

I don't like the word feminine, because it's not really what furry feminine is. It's a human-applied-to-furry concept.

ACTUALLY. As I refresh the page, I get the feeling that it's the result of weird mixing between flat shaded art and mixing anthromorphic and "cargirls" (for lack of a better term- and I don't want to say east vs western, because catgirls dont' fall under furry)- anime inspired furry. It's weird, and makes me ponder. If the underlying datasets are a more similar art style and didn't have anime inspired art mixed in, I think the result would be less confusing and cooler.

Still an awesome project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > Girls are fetching fursonas. Please wait warmly

Nice ref there.</comment>


Google Censors Guns, Ammo & Accessories from Shopping Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.guns.com/google-guns-ammo-accessories-shopping-results-9403.html <comment><USER3> Google has long been unfriendly to firearms related websites. They don't allow their ad server to be used by them, or for adsense to be shown on them.

For example, my own site, <http://bisonballistics.com>, cannot use adsense because it links to sites that sell firearms parts. I dare you to find one word on that site that encourages anything unethical, unsafe, or illegal.

I'd be shocked if there was a good reason for this, but I'd love to hear it.

Entrepreneurs have filled the gap with specialized ad networks, just as Gunbroker did when ebay pulled similar antics.

EDIT: a couple of you have taken issue with my definition of ethics - <USER2> enough. The broader point is that google just doesn't like firearms, no matter how they are used.

<comment><USER4> > I dare you to find one word on that site that encourages anything unethical, > unsafe, or illegal.

Oh c'mon. Let's not get there. As someone in the gun community you should be more than aware that "ethics" are extremely subjective to one's opinion. There's no global truth for ethics. Respect other's opinion's and you won't be shocked if there's a good reason for this. The good reason is: some people don't actually agree with you.

<comment><USER3> Let me rephrase. I'd be shocked if there was a good reason for this other than "google doesn't like guns."

As for ethics, I would go as far as to say that punching holes in paper from 100 yards away is about as benign an activity as one can imagine. But perhaps environmentalists would take isuse, so I'll retract that as well.

<comment><USER5> Aren't there legal hurdles that vary by country and state? Perhaps that's why it is better to have specialists sites (like Gunbroker).

That's just a wild-ass-guess. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong.

<comment><USER3> I actually have no problem with Ebay's decision. The regulation in firearms sales is indeed complex and uncertain. At the time Ebay dropped gun sales, gun control was a hot topic politically. And online auctions were new enough so that one could imagine ebay getting caught in the middle of something bad.

But google is a mystery. Their TOS seem to indicate that they simply have a distaste for the shooting sports industry. But they send me tons of traffic. They could just drop shooting sites from the index. That gives me hope that there is some arcane legal reasoning behind their thoughts, but I suspect it's just a choice they've made, and that they cannot stomach the backlash they would incur by dropping huge legal categories from their results. I would love to hear from someone who has some knowledge on this, as it's been confusing me for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the issue is that they're changing Google Shopping from a search engine to be only paid listings. They were okay with listing weapons before because they didn't make any money off them, but now all listings will be paid. They don't want to earn money from weapon listings.

eBay has the same policy. I don't agree with the policy personally but I certainly have no problem with a private company doing things like this.

<comment><USER3> ebay can at least make the argument that the legal headaches/uncertainty with enforcing interstate gun laws may not be worth the money they get from gun auctions.

Google won't even allow you to link to Cabelas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Living here in India it's surprising to see the mostly unregulated Gun sale in the US. I believe it's a right the constitution of US grants to its citizens. But I've read that this is a major cause for higher homicidal rate in the US. It seems like common sense to us here that allowing nearly everyone to purchase Guns is counter-productive and will only result in more violence.

Correct me If I am wrong, I understand this is a highly polarized issue in US and it's election time too.

<comment><USER8> It's also common sense to see that allowing nearly everybody to purchase guns will result in reduced violence, because the potential immediate penalty for violence is higher.

It's up to you which you believe, and after making your decision I suggest you use google to find further justification for it.

<comment><USER9> > It's up to you which you believe, and after making your decision I suggest > you use google to find further justification for it.

This is exactly the wrong order to do things in.

Assuming you value truth, then it's _not_ up to you which you believe. You have to look at the evidence _first_ , and then believe whichever one is best supported. Ask questions before you shoot.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/>

<comment><USER8> Yes, that would be one valid interpretation of my post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the end, it's Google's product and they should run the service as they wish.

However, this and the previously announced change of charging for placing listings in the service leaves a _really_ bad taste in my mouth. In the end, I'll just end up using one of _many_ alternatives.

This is also on the extreme end of hypocrisy. Google frequency complains about the censorship it faces around the world and then turns around, and censors results _when it doesn't have to_ here in the US.

A part of fighting censorship is tolerating content you may not like. In fact, that's what being part of a tolerant society is. Putting up with shit you don't agree with.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Google AdWords doesn't allow the promotion of weapons or devices designed to cause serious harm or injury."

Swords are allowed?!? Which sword is not designed to cause serious harm or injury? Allowing swords and then disallowing knives is just weird.

<comment><USER4> My guess is it has something to do to the amount of crimes with knives vs with swords.

<comment><USER11> They might want to rewrite their intro then as it does not match the table. Also, tasers aren't exactly safe.

<comment><USER4> Meh, discussing subjectivity and semantics is boring. Nowadays most swords are designed as cosmetic decoration, not "designed for serious harm and injury". You could interpret it either way, it's just semantics. Same for tasers. Anyway, boring.

<comment><USER11> The semantics of rules is the only important thing about rules. Sorry to bore you, and wondering why you bothered?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm upset by what I see as a sense of entitlement by gun owners who think that every retail outlet should be selling guns. Many gun buffs won't shop at Target because that store won't sell guns. Now they are complaining about Google. It's not like Google is the only way to shop online. Heck, it's not even the BEST way to shop online. Get over it and shop somewhere else.

<comment><USER3> _Many gun buffs won't shop at Target because that store won't sell guns...Get over it and shop somewhere else._

I think that's what they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Using the word "censor" is inappropriate here because it doesn't distinguish between two very different things:

1) government-imposed silencing of speech by force (this is what "censorship" should mean) 2) a private person or group refusing to be a platform for someone else's speech (the definition of "censorship" should not include this. If it did, you would be "censoring" all those whom you did not assist in being heard.)

Each of us has a right to say whatever we want, but not the right to force others to help us say it.

[This isn't relevant to my point, but I'm very pro-gun. I'm just not pro- force.]

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems to be down, pastebin mirror: <http://pastebin.com/5RWeF5qQ> or google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sugexp=chrome,m...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.guns.com%2Fgoogle- guns-ammo-accessories-shopping-results-9403.html)

<comment><USER4> OT, how exactly do you find the google cache link, when this kind of thing happen? I looked it up earlier but didn't find it.

<comment><USER14> Either search "cache:[url]" via google or you can do it via the address bar in chrome.

cache:[http://www.guns.com/google-guns-ammo-accessories-shopping- re...](http://www.guns.com/google-guns-ammo-accessories-shopping- results-9403.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good</comment>


Stop Calling My Daughter's Death a Car Accident - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/10/stop-calling-daughters-death-car-accident/ <comment><USER2> It is stories like these that make me feel like I would kill the driver if this happened to a member of my family. I could not in good conscience allow someone to get away with killing a member of my family due to their negligence. That they were under the legal limit for alcohol woukd not matter. I hope it neve happens to my family.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its stories like this that make me hopeful that one day all cars will be driverless cars.</comment>


After Talking with Trump Bill Gates Likens President Elect to Jfk - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/after-talking-with-trump-bill-gates-likens-president-elect-to-jfk.html <comment><USER2> Well both Trump and JFK surrounded themselves with young starlets....

</comment><comment><USER3> True that.

</comment><comment><USER4> A man who was convicted for antitrust violations thinks regulations are bad. More news at 11.

<comment><USER5> Yup, this is the Bill Gates I've come to know over the years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Either someone in Trump's administration has blackmail material on Bill Gates, Gates really can't see past his capitalist class-interest to the climate change in front of his nose, or Trump has several times the Reality Distortion Field that Steve Jobs ever did.

<comment><USER7> It may rather be that Gates has realized that Trump is extremely susceptible to flattery, and so is attempting to manipulate the master manipulator.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What does data scientist actually do in each day? - <AUTHOR>

Any idea? :) <comment><USER2> Umm...Let us see. Assume I am trying to build a fancy new recommendation system for movies on a completely new media device. Let us assume that for now we have been collecting user data and recommending them random movies. The first thing we do is to go through this data and try to figure out what would be relevant user features. While you are at it, you might find that there are some odd issues with the way data is being collected which is creating statistical biases: Say for example, you only have server time when the user rating of the movie hit your system and not the actual time at which the user rated the movie. So you go back and fix those. Repeat, rinse and redo. Now, you go out and find out that your potential feature set is extremely sparse and high dimensional. So you think about adding other features from the Movie set. Go through those: Hopefully you are not starting the problem from scratch and you already have gone past the data collection and feature extraction problem when it comes to movies. Now, you start thinking algorithmically, nothing too complicated because everything has to be made production ready and adding bugs in machine learning algorithms is extremely easy (See Mahout ;-)). You prototype a few algorithms in Hive or your favorite scripting language and then get some data out for A/B testing. You run your A/B tests and hopefully you have something that looks significantly better than baseline. Now you go through the boring part of making that algorithm production ready: This means thinking in terms of scale: 1) How do I deliver these recommendations on the fly to millions of users who are using my fancy new media device. 2) How do I do this while not stressing out my system. So you write a bunch of code, integrate into your current APIs, run a cron and hope nothing breaks and monitor graphs like a nervous little rabbit.

Then, you repeat this and do all this over next week.

EDIT: Obviously depending on the company and the job, this entire story might completely change etc etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first big chunk of time is getting data into a usable format. Customers (internal or external) all have different data formats, and nothing is consistent. So you write parsers, deal with the corner cases, and get data into a form you can analyze.

Then you have to write software that lets you both experiment and release your models to production. That involves writing pipeline architectures to apply things like feature extraction and pruning in a consistent way, and to make sure the result can be serialized and deployed. Off the shelf packages typically haven't solved these problems very well, so you have to make sure the thing that looks good in the scripting environment is reproducible on new data.

Then when you have a model and can deploy it, you start working on automating the training process so the model automatically adapts as new data comes in. Usually the customer has gotten the impression this was happening on day one, so you have to rush to deliver it.

Then, you deal with customer complaints that something that would have been obvious to a human is wrong even after they corrected it.

At some point you try to measure the gains you're offering over the non-ML system you replaced, and try to tweak those metrics until they make you look good.

If you're lucky, you got to experiment with some interesting algorithms somewhere in the middle, but you probably got the best results from something fairly standard like random forests and not the latent bayesian slice sampler you dreamed up when you first heard about the problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> Getting data ready, clean and formatted for analysis. That is a huge part, unless you are super lucky. Think about how to analyze said data. Come up with a hypothesis, test, analyze results, proceed to secondary hypothesis. Repeat.

</comment><comment><USER5> I imagine it depends on the company. A friend of mine with a data-scientist job reports that the most important part of _his_ particular job is making convincing PowerPoints to present "insights from data" to management.</comment>


Ask HN: Natural language processing to identify grammar in a text? - <AUTHOR> Apologies for the clunky question. We have a growing base of adult English students. Our teaching methodology is content-first, basically we find any material of interest to our students, based on their interests, sector and language goals and build lesson plans and discussions around that 'centerpiece'. A lot of the work is curation and creating reusable discussion questions.<p>I have been searching for a tool that can scan a paragraph and extract the grammar tenses and features (past simple, present continuous, passive voice, indirect question) as it's a recurring question with our students. We have tools to tell us the approximate level, suggested vocabulary and word count, but does this even exist (yet?). Thank you in advance. <comment><USER2> Sadly, this doesn't exist yet.

You will find that most Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools conceptualize linguistic categories differently from how teachers do (language teaching isn't linguistics, there are often simplifications happening, and schoolbooks get updated more slowly than linguistics evolves).

Examples:

* English verbs have only two tenses: PAST or NONPAST. They can have PERFECTIVE aspect or not. They can have PROGRESSIVE aspect or not. Since these are 3 binary choices, there are at least 8 different ways how English verbs can be realized. I think there'd be less confusion in school if a more linguistically correct version was taught that separates out tense and aspects.

* "Future" or "Present Perfect" (something I still got taught in school) don't exist for a proper linguist.

To build what you suggest, existing tools could be combined, but there would have to be a mapping layer on top of syntactic parsers like Charniak Parser, Collins parser or MaltParser. Another mis-match between grammar in school and linguistics is single versus multiple theories: in school, people usually teach constituent trees, whereas in linguistics phrase structure (constituent) grammar is one theory among many, one alternative (valency and dependency grammar) that does not rely on trees but focuses on the relations between words has recently gained a lot of traction in linguistic circles.

<comment><USER3> Considering the success of Grammarly, it is most likely possible to do it with traditional rule-based/experts systems combined with a tiny bit of modern day ML. But there is nothing available out of the box for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think there's an out-of-the box library for things like the detection of passive voice or indirect questions. But you should be able to build something that would let you do it based on the basic NLP toolkit: dependency parsing, POS tagging, lemmatization, named entity recognition.

I suggest you check out Spacy [0] for a quick and easy to use Python library providing the above features. The software produced by the Stanford NLP Group is also great [1].

If you do not want to get your hands dirty with code, there are a number of API providers that will offer you the same as the above libraries (TextRazor, Rosette Text Analytics...)

[0] [https://spacy.io/](https://spacy.io/)

[1] [https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/](https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/)

</comment><comment><USER5> There are several topics intertwined with solutions you seek: There's parts of speech (PoS) tagging, reducing to Lemma form, identifying end of sentence, etc.

After having faced a similar learning curve, I put what I know into a lengthy document[0] written in 2018 based upon explorations over 2016-17. That will get you deployed and operational quickly by following just the final section. The first section explains key concepts using conventional ideas as the means of introducing NLP jargon. In between covers theory and practice for getting the most out of any tool you're likely to use in the end.

More general tools are probably available today, such as add-ons for Elasticsearch. I'd start looking there. Interesting items came up when searching ddg for: NLP elasticsearch.

[0] [http://play.org/articles/introduction-to-natural-language- pr...](http://play.org/articles/introduction-to-natural-language-processing)

<comment><USER6> maybe also try searching for nlp Lucene

There's also a pretty good book [https://lingpipe-blog.com/2008/06/12/book- building-search-ap...](https://lingpipe-blog.com/2008/06/12/book-building- search-applications-lucene-lingpipe-and-gate/)

of course the more general tools available today notice applies in regard to this book as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually (sort of) wrote one of these a while back (though I don't think I ever got to implementing tenses - possibly this would be somewhat easy to implement on top of whatever I already built there, but maybe not idk). In any case:

> copulae verbs, linking verbs, terms that are often filtered (i.e. stop > terms), question terms, time sensitive nouns, amplifiers, clauses, > coordinating conjunctions, negations, conditionals (ORs), and contractions

[https://github.com/nyxtom/salient/](https://github.com/nyxtom/salient/)

</comment><comment><USER8> As someone else alluded to, this is a task for multiple models. Fortunately, there are a lot of great NLP libraries that combine multiple pre-trained language models into a single pipeline you can interface with, like Stanza. From their docs, their vanilla pipeline breaks down the sentence "Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. He was elected president in 2008." as :

('Barack', '4', 'nsubj:pass')

('Obama', '1', 'flat')

('was', '4', 'aux:pass')

('born', '0', 'root')

('in', '6', 'case')

('Hawaii', '4', 'obl')

('.', '4', 'punct')

It should be very easy to deploy Stanza's pipeline as an API endpoint. Here is an example of such a NLP-library-as-API endpoint, albeit with Hugging Face's Transformers, deployed via Cortex: [https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex/blob/master/examples/py...](https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex/blob/master/examples/pytorch/sentiment- analyzer/predictor.py)

<comment><USER9> A language model is a model that predicts the probability of a given text, that is all. It should not be conflated with other types of NLP tasks like part of speech tagging. I'm guessing the popularity of transformer based models, which are built around the LM task and then adapted to other donations, is leading to this confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Example of passive voice detection using spacy[1]: [https://gist.github.com/armsp/30c2c1e19a0f1660944303cf079f83...](https://gist.github.com/armsp/30c2c1e19a0f1660944303cf079f831a)

[1] [https://spacy.io/](https://spacy.io/)

</comment><comment><USER11> My IOCCC entry [0] detects English passive constructions. Do not feel discouraged by its looks; it is a solid tool. Since both ioccc.org and its official mirrors (in the same domain) are down now, you can look at its Wayback Machine cache [1].

[0] [https://www.ioccc.org/2018/ciura/](https://www.ioccc.org/2018/ciura/) [1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20200224040340/https://www.ioccc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200224040340/https://www.ioccc.org/2018/ciura/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Some parser like Spacy can give some tense additional information for verbs. But it's probably not custom enough for what you want.

Maybe you can give GPT-3 a try.

If you want to go the custom route, the easy way but which consume a lot of processing power, is to use a neural network and necessitate a boring dataset phase construction.

You build a dataset corresponding to your problem. And you learn it with the neural network.

For inspiration you can see my colorify browser extension, which uses a neural network to learn at the same time to split sentences, predict POS tags, predict root of the sentence, predict the parse tree which are then used to decorate the webpage.

What I did was just programmatically build a dataset from the spacy parser to build a custom javascript parser which does what I want. If I wanted to add some additional information that Spacy doesn't provide like grammar tenses and features, I can complete my dataset manually and have the network predict all the decorations at the same time, which allows it to not need a lot of samples because the layers are shared.

You can probably build your dataset faster by interacting with your neural network (active learning).

For the model you can start with something simple like a convolution residual network architecture. And later use some transformers when you want to reach state of the art.

</comment><comment><USER13> You should look into the English Resource Grammar:

[http://moin.delph-in.net/ErgTop](http://moin.delph-in.net/ErgTop)

Online demo:

[http://erg.delph-in.net/logon](http://erg.delph-in.net/logon)

It has all that information in the generated feature structure -- even more than you can view in the web interface. There's a development environment you can download, as well as a headless linux tool called ACE you can use on a server. The ERG is complex, but far and away the most sophisticated tool in this space.

</comment><comment><USER14> Check out UDify for dependency parsing with universal parts of speech and features.

[https://github.com/Hyperparticle/udify](https://github.com/Hyperparticle/udify)

</comment><comment><USER15> This isn't really a programming solution but you should check out this webapp:

[http://www.hemingwayapp.com/](http://www.hemingwayapp.com/)

It may not be the exact thing you're looking for but it can probably be helpful to your students.

I would also look at Python NLTK. I've only dabbled in the toolkit, so I'm not sure if it has what you're looking for exactly, but it's worth a look.

[http://www.nltk.org/](http://www.nltk.org/)

</comment><comment><USER16> To do the grammar tense analysis, you can use spaCy or another syntactic parser. The parse tree won't directly give you the exact grammar tense, you will need to do some simple analysis of the conjugational form of the root verb, and the auxiliary verbs that are attached to it.

I've done extensive work in this area, including developing my own statistical parser from scratch. I'd be happy to chat more about this project, my email is daniel dot burfoot at gmail.com.

</comment><comment><USER17> Have you taken a look at Google's Natural Language API? Try out the demo and switch to the "Syntax" tab to see the output. More info: [https://cloud.google.com/natural-language](https://cloud.google.com/natural- language)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have played around with similar projects. A good starting point is google's NLP sentence parsing API. Be warned: the accuracy may not be good enough for your application.

</comment><comment><USER19> You can get most of the way there with Stanford CoreNlp.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure if it has an API or any kind of integrations, but I know the Hemingway App[0] can detect passive voice, and possibly other features you're looking for.

[0]: [http://www.hemingwayapp.com/](http://www.hemingwayapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> On recent debians/ubuntu, PoS tagging is just one apt away:

        $ sudo apt install -y apertium-eng

        $ echo "I have been searching for a tool that can scan a paragraph" |apertium eng-disam|grep -v '^;'
        "<I>"
                "prpers" prn subj p1 mf sg
        "<have>"
                "have" vbhaver inf
                "have" vbhaver pres
        "<been>"
                "be" vbser pp
        "<searching for>"
                "search# for" vblex ger SELECT:177
        "<a>"
                "a" det ind sg
        "<tool>"
                "tool" n sg
        "<that>"
                "that" cnjsub
                "that" prn dem mf sg
                "that" prn rel an mf sp
        "<can>"
                "can" vbmod pres SELECT:281
        "<scan>"
                "scan" vblex inf SELECT:140
        "<a>"
                "a" det ind sg
        "<paragraph>"
                "paragraph" n sg
        "<.>"
                "." sent

(grepping out lines with ; since they just show what was _not_ removed by the disambiguator, whereas SELECT/REMOVE are just trace info saying what rules applied. If there are multiple indented lines, then the disambiguator didn't manage to fully disambiguate the analysis.)

If you want to e.g. mark passive, it's easy to write a Constraint Grammar rule to do this. Put the following into rules.cg3:

        DELIMITERS = sent ;
        ADD (&PASSIVE) ("be") # Add the tag "&PASSIVE" to the word with lemma "be"
        IF
        (1* (pp)             # There is a participle to the right
         BARRIER (*) - (adv) # with nothing in between except perhaps adverbs
        );

and pipe it in after the above pipeline:

        $ echo "The paper is not signed by me" |apertium eng-disam |grep -v '^;'|vislcg3 -g rules.cg3
        "<The>"
                "the" det def sp
        "<paper>"
                "paper" n sg
        "<is>"
                "be" vbser pres p3 sg &PASSIVE
        "<not>"
                "not" adv
        "<signed>"
                "sign" vblex pp
                "sign" vblex past
                "signed" adj
        "<by>"
                "by" pr SELECT:470
        "<me>"
                "prpers" prn obj p1 mf sg
        "<.>"
                "." sent

( [https://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Constraint_Grammar](https://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Constraint_Grammar) for more info on CG )

<comment><USER22> That rule is really rather limited. More in general, I doubt you can properly recognise passive constructions without doing constituent parsing, passive is really a syntactic construction, not a morphological one.

<comment><USER21> Or dependency parsing. But unfortunately the English package in Apertium doesn't have a syntax CG (there are proprietary English syntax CG's out there, with syntactic function labelling and dependency relations, while in Apertium there are syntax CG's for some other languages).

OTOH, what's the goal? If you just want to flag some high-frequency constructions you can get quite far with very little depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think Grammarly is doing something like this for text messages.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some tough love:

There will always be a gap between "your judgement" and the "judgement baked into a model" \-- worse yet, if the model is very general and oriented towards cheap computation and away from expensive people it will have vague and contradictory judgements inside it that make the results meaningless.

That is the language of failure: the structure of success looks like the following.

(1) The system works like a "magic magic marker", that is, you mark up a lot of text (say 20,000 sentences) the way you think it should be marked up. This might be a character-at-a-time or word-at-a-time. Character-at-a-time is real and eternal, word-at-a-time is not real because there is not really such a thing as a "word". (e.g. "red ball" can fill slots that take "ball", you can smash together subwords to make words, for that matter people violate punctuation rules "Amazon.com announced that...", people call themselves n3pg34r, ...) So if you segment the text up front and segment it the wrong way you may throw out essential information and choose to fail.

(2) You need some system to mark up the text manually and efficiently. It is a lot of work. A typical person can make about 2000 or so up/down judgements a day; if a sentence counts for 10 decisions then maybe you can annotate 200 sentences a day. If you can get students to do it and get teachers to review it you might make short work of it.

This annotator

[http://brat.nlplab.org/](http://brat.nlplab.org/)

ticks the requirements, but most people find it terribly hard to use and wind up building "easy to use" systems that don't align things right at level (1) and... fail.

Assuming you do (1) and (2) the odds are in your favor, but you have to now

(3) build models; it does not matter if the model is a bunch of rules you cobbled together, or hidden markov, or LSTM, or convolutional. Off the top I would train an LSTM to 'predict the next character' on maybe 100M characters of text, then I would stick a simple model that takes the LSTM state as an input and labels characters at the output (could be SVM, Random Forest, Logit, or 3 layer on NN)

(4) Accept that the system is not going to be perfect, but have the ability to manually patch wrong results, improve the training data over time. I'd say this is a more important practice than any particular approach to (3)

Some tool could give you (1-4) tied up in a bow

[https://www.tagtog.net/](https://www.tagtog.net/)

claims to. But (2) involves elbow grease that 90% of people aren't going to do. Some of the 10% of people who do that elbow grease will succeed, the other 90% will fail.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't central banks print money as exception? - <AUTHOR> Serious economic fallout of coronavirus is becoming clear [1].
Rewind back 3-4 weeks, many governments were hesitant to institute lockdowns, out of concern of economic impact. Some still are.
Why can't central banks print money as exception? Calm economic concerns down, and let everyone focus decisively on dealing with virus.
While I am not an economic and behavioural expert, I am aware of counter arguments to printing money.
Yet, these are unprecedented times. The leeway is going to be time limited (say, 6 months).
Assumption: any downside of limited printing money is far less damaging than global economic engine going in recession. Not to mention, putting everyone's mind at ease, can shape behaviour that can save lives.
Pay small businesses, companies that are hit hard with no WFH options and can't employ.
Pay premium to folks on the front lines, critical services.
Can ones more educated on economics and behavioral psychology post their answers?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51706225 <comment><USER2> They will don't worry about it.

They know whats happening well before people start noticing issues. And you can bet they have been worrying about the need for bailouts/payouts/credit lines for a while now.

If I am running a business my bank knows quite well what enters and exits my account from clients/investors, to suppliers, employees, rent payments etc. For most businesses this stuff is not drastically changing from month to month. Its more or less follows predictable patterns. So when there are sudden disruptions in those flows and major drops in transactions across the board, like an ant hill that has been stepped on there is a hell of a lot of excitement and reactions.

But just like the ant hill processes will kick in automatically to restore normal ops. Businesses will be telling banks what they need short term/long term. Banks will be telling each other and central banks what their needs are.

Things will be tallied up, including payoffs to whatever section of the population that is biologically hard coded to take advantage of crisis. This is how random numbers suddenly start circulating in congress and parliaments of the world within a few days of the crisis starting.

And then god emperors, prime minsters, presidents, and grandmothers of the world will show up and say dont worry we will cover all - now get back to work.

And like the ants we shall.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because that's how you get runaway inflation. Printing money doesn't add value to the economy. It spreads the existing value over more currency.

Countries that made this mistake during the Great Depression include Weimar Germany.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Because that's how you get runaway inflation

That's the common view yes. For 6 months? In current context, value is psychological shoring.

> Countries that made this mistake during the Great Depression include Weimar > Germany.

How long was printing money period? 1-2 years?

<comment><USER4> Yes, about 2 year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Germany_(Weimar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Germany_\(Weimar_Republic\))

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't find this Weimar war time hyperinflation comparable to current state.

In opening text, there is the context of keeping this time bound.

Plus globally, there is still economic activity (ones with non human contact). Even they risk getting hit by cascaded effect, not for lack of demand, but lack of liquidity in system. This is avoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very deep and important question.

Here's a predictive model for central banks. Their unstated objective is ensuring that control over resources does not change hands during a crisis. In practice that means that the relative value of financial assets is roughly preserved. Check out [1] pdf page 4.

[1] [https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/GDPBD00000292870.pdf](https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/GDPBD00000292870.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> how does option 1-3, eventually help households, large and small businesses anyways?

<comment><USER5> An economist might make the following argument. Financial systems are like banking systems. Banking systems have two equillibria: run / no run [1]. A bank run can destroy an otherwise healthy bank, and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The way we stopped bank runs in the US in the 1930s is deposit insurance and the Fed discount window. 1-3 are modern extensions of those policies. They help households in the sense that they prevent full-scale depressions.

This argument is actually true imo, but it ignores the fact that the public could recapitalize the financial system (equity investment) and share in the upside. When you lend to a company near insolvency, the downside risk is identical to the downside risk of an equity investment. So, it is strange that the government favors debt rather than equity. The mental model of "no change of control" predicts this policy choice and others.

The proceeds of a public equity investment can be distributed pro-rata through e.g. investments in public health infrastructure or basic scientific research. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is a good example [2]. This very much resembles 4, although it is not a direct cash payment to households.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model) [2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/27/norway-wealth-fund- earned-a-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/27/norway-wealth-fund-earned-a- record-180-billion-in-2019.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm no expert. But I'm concerned about quantitative easing. Introduction of massive amounts of money erodes the value of peoples savings. Propping up _some_ businesses might not be a good idea, some business should fail if they are no longer relevant or have not been managed well e.g. a business couldn't predict coronavirus necessarily, but they could absolutely predict an unforeseen event that impacts their cashflow for a quarter or more. Also, if we haven't seen the worst that's to come with the coronavirus, what's the plan? Throw even more money at the problem? While we are at it, why don't we just print money forever and pay everyone's salary - where do we draw the line?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's ok if implementation of such money printing exercise is more surgical than broad based. But I don't think this is the time to bring undue complexity of debating which business model deserves to be propped. This will misdirect lot of debate/energy.

My view is that tail end concerns here are largely theoretical. we fall in the trap of such argumentation, when reality needs immediate response.

> if we haven't seen the worst that's to come with the coronavirus

If humanity can't come up with working measure/vaccine in next 1-1.5 yr time frame, global economy is the least of concern.

> Throw even more money at the problem? While we are at it, why don't we just > print money forever and pay everyone's salary - where do we draw the line?

This is an unwarranted extrapolation of opening premise. Who argued forever?

<comment><USER6> Thanks, this is worth debating. Is this QE surgical rather than broad based, I can't see how it's precise and not broad? We can avoid the debate of which businesses need propped up by not propping any up. Yes an immediate response is required, but some consideration should be given to down-stream impacts. Agreed on the vaccine, but the worst to come could happen in the next 1.5 years, and if we've deployed trillions into the economy already, what's our next move? The extrapolation is my argument, if central banks can print money and pay wages now, why stop?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm betting on them doing this already. However, what will happen is that most of these printed money will go to billionaires CEOs. Even worse, we can't change this because this is how our (US) system works and it's been proven in the past century that it works better than other systems.</comment>


Vulcan: A JavaScript Automated Proof System - <AUTHOR> http://rmarcus.info/blog/2015/09/02/vulcan.html

<comment><USER2> Hi everyone, I'm the author. I created this partially to help me understand the concepts in Norvig & Russell's AI book. I plan on using it in a larger project that requires logic-based reasoning after I add in a few search heuristics. The same technique of resolution can pretty easily be applied to first-order logic as well.

I think it's a really interesting trick. It's also exciting to see my stuff show up on HN. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> So this is a basic prolog engine in JS. Still a far shot from what I though it would be from the title, i.e., something like Coq.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't Prolog support only Horn clauses? This proof system supports arbitrary propositions in conjunctive normal form. There are also no quantifiers or predicates here: the logic is purely propositional.

<comment><USER2> Correct! Prolog uses a graph-based, backwards chaining algorithm to explore only the needed part of the search space to answer a query. My system explores an arbitrarily large portion of the search space (possibly all of it, in the case that no proof exists), and can work on any statement in propositional logic, not just horn clauses/definite clauses/goal clauses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Vulcan" as a name, really? It's a common word, it's already used by one up and coming technology, please be a little more creative (even VulcanJS or VulcanProof, while not very good, would be heaps better)

<comment><USER2> I'll admit I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking of a name. I was originally going to go with "javascript-resolution-prover", but when I thought of "Vulcan" I thought it was too good not to use.

To my great surprise, I don't the name "Vulcan" is being used for any other proof system. A Google search for "Vulcan automated proof" seems to confirm this.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you find "interesting" audio from a video file or stream? - <AUTHOR> Let's say you have a 12 hour long video file from a surveillance or security camera, and you know that motion detection didn't find any interesting events in the video part.  What about the audio?  Is there any software that can let you define "interesting" audio, even just amplitude over a certain level.  For example, given a minimum threshold in dB and a video file, give me a shortened video file that contains all the video except the periods where the threshold was too low? <comment><USER2> This is an extremely low-budget solution, but you could load the audio into a program that charts the amplitude of the signal over its length, like most audio editors (e.g. Audacity [1])

Then you can visually see spikes [2].

You may be able to use such an editor to remove the ambient noise and see it more clearly as well.

[1] [http://www.audacityteam.org/download/](http://www.audacityteam.org/download/)

[2] [http://manual.audacityteam.org/](http://manual.audacityteam.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> You might be able to hack something up using a audio library such as:

1) [http://yaafe.sourceforge.net/](http://yaafe.sourceforge.net/)

2) [https://github.com/jamiebullock/LibXtract/](https://github.com/jamiebullock/LibXtract/)</comment>


Ask HN: Startups in DC?  - <AUTHOR>

I am planning a move to DC by the end of september where I will be looking for employment. I'd like to focus my search on startups as I am coming from a mature startup and really enjoyed the experience. I'd ultimately like to find a dev position with an early stage startup.
The problem, I can't find the DC startup scene online. I've checked startuply and npost and the other usual suspects, but there isn't much. Which I think is just an indication startups in DC aren't advertising jobs. I'd like to find the "scene" and approach the ones I find interesting to see if they have a need for someone like me.
OT: I feel like I am abusing Ask HN, so if there is a better place to ask such a question downvote with a link please. <comment><USER2> I went to school in DC for four years and moved to Manhattan with my roommate (now co-founder) to start our company. At the time, the tech scene wasn't really alive and well (this was 2006-2007), but I've seen more of my friends enter the field with more consumer-facing companies - rather than those startups that siphon into the government. It's a good time to be in DC now.

Here's some resources you want to check:

\- Social Times (DC based tech blog that covered a lot of DC companies) - <http://www.socialtimes.com/>

\- iStrategyLabs (interactive PR/ad agency; Peter holds a ton of meetups in the area and practically knows everyone; feel free to email me for an introduction) - <http://www.istrategylabs.com/>

\- Anyvite (DC/MD social invitation/events startup; a YC company and all around cool guys) - <http://anyvite.com/home>

</comment><comment><USER3> My company was part of LaunchBox Digital '09 class and I can say there is definitely a startup scene in DC but it's in the early stages. There are some great events like TechCocktail that highlight companies in the area that you can look to hook up with. As for a job, you should be able to find one with relative ease ([http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/the-best-and-worst- citi...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/the-best-and-worst-cities-to- look-for-a-job/)) although it will be harder finding an early stage startup that can pay you a livable wage for DC.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, I'm from the DC area, but I don't personally know of any startups that are highering at the moment.

There was a group of HN readers that meet a couple of times, but I don't know what's happend to that.

You can find some tech events: <http://www.dctechevents.com/> and I'm sure that there is more.

There is a lot of opportuity, given the recent and predicted growth in government, but not all of it is being tapped; at least not in an organized way.

</comment><comment><USER5> LaunchBox Digital is a DC-area incubator along the lines of YC and TechStars - you could try connecting with them to see if they know of any startups looking for devs. If that fails, I could also connect you with my CEO (I work for Viget Labs, which is headquartered near DC); he knows most of the people in the scene.

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you have to move to DC? Because it's very much the wrong place for what you're looking for.

<comment><USER7> Care to explain that statement?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what exactly OP was referring to but I can tell you that the main employer in this area is the US Gov't. The rest of the market is largely gov't contractors and subcontractors and various other service providers to the entire infrastructure. I worked for a small company in the area for a number of years, not a startup but it was a good experience, but it takes a lot of searching to find something that's non-gov't and a decent gig. I haven't run across a startup scene per se but then I haven't really looked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> All you need is this for a full database of DC startups and their open jobs: <http://crossmine.com/>

Take a look at the Startup sponsors on these RSVPs: <http://twintech.eventbrite.com> <http://twintech2.eventbrite.com> <http://twintech3.eventbrite.com> <http://twintech4.eventbrite.com>

Oh and for an upcoming event (10/30 - big tech/creative party): <http://techarts.eventbrite.com>

-Peter Corbett, iStrategyLabs (@corbett3000)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've lived in DC suburb, tried a startup, but had a major problem finding like-minded entrepreneurs in the area. There are many high-tech folks there, but they don't want to take any risks starting or joining a startup. I have moved to the Silicon Valley in 2007 (used to be in SV from 2000 to 2004), and every other person I meet wants to do something on their own. The drive, desire, and willingness of people are just different between two regions.

I found this which might help.... <http://techcocktail.com/home/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Net2DC (<http://www.net2dc.com/>) focuses on non-profits, but they're affiliated with <http://affinitylab.com/> which is home to several very early- stage startups.

In the past, I've also seen several Dupont-area startups hiring on Craigslist. I assume you've already looked there?

And maybe it would help to narrow your search a bit. I know there is a active Drupal development community in DC and I believe the Rails user group does meetups as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a DCer and there are a few startups (My startup isn't hiring anyone in the DC area right now though)

I recommend attending a techcocktail event <http://techcocktail.com/home/2009/01/30/tech-cocktail-dc-4/>

or keeping up with Gary's Guide DC <http://dc.garysguide.org/>

</comment><comment><USER7> There's Social Matchbox, which recently held an event:

<http://www.socialmatchbox.com/>

Some good links on their site.

There's also the Startup Rockstars:

<http://startuprockstars.com/>

Which holds the next event on Sept. 9.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'll second Social Matchbox as a good place to learn about startups in the DC area.

I've recently started a software company with a friend from Mason, but unfortunately we can't afford to hire.

Hit me up if you want to grab coffee/beer (contact info in profile). Good luck and welcome to DC!

</comment><comment><USER14> When I was in college, I interned for a DARPA spinoff out in Reston, VA. I assume you're not looking solely for startups physically in DC. If you are, I'm not sure you're going to find much. Most of the tech community is out in Northern Virginia, in and around Reston. Look there.

</comment><comment><USER15> DC is a tough town for startups. You may be able to dig through In-Q-Tel's investment list for some options though:

[http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfolio/index- alphabetical.h...](http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfolio/index- alphabetical.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow. I'd just like to thank everyone that replied to my inquiry. Lots of great ideas and great resources.

OT: This post would make a good argument for links/comments being a good metric to test for submission worth.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't help you re: your DC startup search, but I'll vote for you because of your OT comment. Well done. ;)</comment>


Exploring the Lower Depths of Terseness - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/170.html

<comment><USER2> J is one of the underappreciated gems among programming languages. Everybody talks about languages which are Lisp successors, but when it comes to shortening the path from the thought to the code, J gives something to pause and think about.</comment>