The Daily Mail Stole My Visualization Twice - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2016/02/19/the-daily-mail-stole-my-visualization-twice/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago the Daily Mail ran an article about a visualization I made. They obeyed my CC license, so I have no complaint as serious as Yau's. But the article was just full of errors, including spelling my name wrong in three different ways. I wrote the article author and pointed out all the errors and he responded "No copy editing! It's a tight budget."

The Daily Mail truly doesn't give a shit. About quality, about copyright, about decency. It seems to be working for them.

<comment><USER3> The free market in action, I suppose.

<comment><USER4> Yes! Why is this a problem?

The Daily Mail is SHIT. The majority of people LOVE to read about shit.

It's not my thing, so I don't read it.

That's what free market means.

<comment><USER5> We have a closed market, however. It's free for incumbent massive media organisations like DMG who only exist because Lord Rothmere and descendents have The Right Friends. You and me, however, can pucker up, pay, and play by the rules the free ones make.

Keynsian economics does not equate to "good and right" \- it equates to Keynsian economics - and nepotism. So much nepotism.

<comment><USER6> I know Keynes is the default bogeyman in some circles of economic thinking, but I'm really struggling to see the link between established corporations having brands and governments running countercyclical policy...

Bearing in mind most newspapers' circulation is crashing and Buzzfeed got very big very quickly peddling similarly lowbrow content, I'm not even convinced the market power of print media is that high.

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing the nepotism argument goes as so:

Keynes gov't economic stimulus is created by the gov't, and people with good connections to the gov't are the recipients of this stimulus, causing nepotism to flourish. The stimulus is not distributed evenly to the economy and thus increases economic inequality.

The entire bank bailout & QE seems like a similar situation in the USA. Who got all the QE cash? The banks, not everyone.

<comment><USER5> Correct - today it's a congressman or mp, 100 years ago it was a lord or governor, before that, the aristocracy.

We still have an aristocracy, or plutarchy, in fact. I come from deep within the belly of the beast and know the people who know the people and you would not believe how bent it all is. Everuthing happens behind closed doors, we just see the punch and judy show after the event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Send the Daily Mail an invoice for their use of your work. Pick a reasonable price and bill them. Then if you don't pay you've got something tangible to sue them about.

<comment><USER9> This. This is a standard procedure for photographers.

Writing a blog post does not help anybody. Ask for money and you not only get money, they are more likely to not do it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use this plugin (also available for Chrome) to redirect to pictures of tea and kittens should I accidental click on a Daily Mail link. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/kitten- block/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/kitten-block/)

<comment><USER11> It would be nice if this plugin could be configured to do the same for a list of websites, and not just the Daily Mail.

<comment><USER12> I would be better if it just dresses the link in CSS so you know never to bother clicking in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What does the law say about putting a license on use of things like this "Embedding this content into your site without written permission from the author will involve a £100000 fee for it's use. You agree by embedding this content that you abide by these terms."

Is something like this enforceable?

<comment><USER14> I think the problem with this, like with most routes that involve a lawyer, is that this isn't about being enforceable or not, but whether you can actually pay in time and money to try to enforce it.

That's why typically only companies try to enforce licenses.

The author said that even writing the blog post was hard because he had not much time to spare.

Imagine what it would cost if you sue and demand a newspaper like The Daily Mail.

<comment><USER15> What if you just start invoicing their AP department?

<comment><USER16> I'm a lawyer in the UK. Here, you can start your own claim online in a few minutes.

<comment><USER13> Yes, if it's under £5000 as I understand it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> squeaky-clean > I made an alert pop up that said "poop" whenever someone loaded the > Stuff.co.nz page. Like I said, I'm sophisticated.

I would probably have handled this much less maturely, haha. What would be the legality of displaying some really graphic image (like goatse) to only 10% of users when you detect you're within an iframe? :P

Ripping the source code of the visualization is so scummy though. I wish I could say I can't believe the Daily Mail, but this article isn't even surprising...

<comment><USER17> I think the NZ Herald is worse than stuff. A meaningful percentage of their content is now Reddit stories.

<comment><USER18> Real journalism is dead.

What passes for journalism these days is just edits of media releases.

Sad state of affairs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How would the Daily Mail feel about (and what would they do) if someone constantly scraped their website and redistributed the content? Perhaps a fun side project called TheLessAdsDailyMail.com?

<comment><USER20> Copying an entire site is a bit different, if you copy one of their articles I doubt anything would happen. Maybe a sternly worded email.

If you copied their entire site, used their name, and removed their ads I'm sure they'd get lawyers involved.

<comment><USER5> Oh, but you could have something in the footer that says "full credit for content to daisy mayall", which is on par with their citations.

It's a fun idea though - seo bomb them until their bottom line aches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I Would Do: Find out what law firm represented the Beastie Boys when they went after GoldiBlox.

Why I Would Do That: They were successful in their defense of the rights of the Beastie Boys and reached a settlement that included a public admission of guilt.

Long-Term Goal: To discourage such behavior through numerous examples of punishment using established rules.

<comment><USER22> Something tells me the Beastie Boys have a little more money to spend on lawyers than this guy does.

And that's a significant problem - most of the time organizations like the Daily Mail are ripping off small-time practitioners of data visualizations, comics, whatever... if it's something produced by a large company with lawyers you can bet they wouldn't touch it.

<comment><USER23> Class action, if that applies then maybe?. I think if this is really a repeat behaviour enough people would come out of the woodwork to say they too were stolen from and signup.

<comment><USER24> As I understand it, we don't have class action in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The morally corrupt posing as moral guardians.

I know people who have had other things like photos from flickr stolen by them.

They are disgraceful!

<comment><USER5> Well, what does one expect - they are the hateful paper for hateful people. In the 30's they ran many pieces about the wonderful Mr Hitler and his brilliant solution to the Jewish problem - and today they trot out the same rhetoric re: Muslims and immigrants.

This _is_ relevant because the kind of person who wants to work for a paper that espouses such views is _very_ unlikely to care about your human, never mind intellectual property, rights.

<comment><USER25> The Daily Mirror also supported Hitler in the 30's.

They were also the first paper to publicly accuse the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This kind of thing is beyond rampant at all levels.

I think the people most concerned about following the rules are small-medium businesses that are big enough for someone to try to sue, but not big enough to have an army of lawyers that makes them practically invincible from all claims that don't originate from a similar Super-Massive-Corp. Business insurance is pretty meaningless for practically any claim that doesn't involve unsafe facilities, and they often include clauses similar to "If you lose in the wrong way, you owe us all the money we paid for your defense".

There's an impression that since big media outlets are such big targets, they're careful about this type of stuff, but it's not true at all. They're only careful when it's another SuperMassive's copyright. They know that a legal fight with them is not possible for any other creator, and they know that they can get an immediate benefit by violating your copyright. They'll rip your stuff off, they _may_ take down the thing they didn't have a license for after you complain, and they'll just laugh at you because they know an attorney is going to charge tens of thousands to _even start_ proceedings against someone as big as them.

We need to fix the way legal costs work.

</comment><comment><USER27> You must be really good at creating visualizations. :) way to go sir!

</comment><comment><USER28> autorespond *@dailymail.co.uk I hereby deny permission to reuse content from my website.

</comment><comment><USER29> sounds like someone needs to set his X-Frame-Options header.

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately that would not work in this case: in this case they created an unauthorized copy of the work on their own server for the purposes of redistribution; therefore they had full control over the HTTP headers.

<comment><USER31> Encode and eval the alert code so it's at least harder than searching the source for "alert"? It's not good, but it might be enough to annoy them into not doing it. Probably not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It suddenly occurs to me that in addition to it being rude to deep-link someone's content via <iframe>, it may be dangerous to Daily Mail's security model.

I wonder if they've configured everything correctly to ensure that an embedded iframe can't find its way to the user's Daily Mail cookies or credentials?

<comment><USER33> The browser's built-in same origin policy will prevent the iframed content from being able to access cookies in the containing frame because it is being hosted from a different domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This reminds me of the days of flash. There use to be a ton of sites stealing other people's flash games. You could buy flash obfuscater and de-obfuscate programs. People would steal your game code and re-skin the game,etc. Then the new strategy was to put the ads inside the video game.

</comment><comment><USER35> the daily mail is awful, I wish people would ignore their garbage.

<comment><USER32> They had a story about the Orion capsule project recently [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3432512/Orion...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3432512/Orion- Capsule-someday-humans-Mars-ready-begin-structural-testing-ahead-2018-lunar- flight.html)], that included an infographic comparing rockets throughout space history.

Take a look at that last one; fans of space simulators will recognize it.

Seriously, they are garbage journalists. Editorial oversight and quality control is, at best, a hobby for that publication.

<comment><USER14> Wow. I can't believe this passes as a newspaper.

Where are the editors? Can't they even screen the things they steal at least?

<comment><USER36> they don't care

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I agree.

But still... I mean, if I'm going to steal a diamond, I would make sure it's the real deal, instead of some Snatch's moissanite...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I would suggest doing something like Nanex does with their graphs and images, use watermarks or some other identifying mark that is clearly unique to you. This way, they may think twice about clearly showing work that is not theirs.

</comment><comment><USER38> The Oatmeal was recently linked to without permission by the Huffington Post. Matt Inman had a predictably brilliant response.

[https://i.imgur.com/WDDH8wj.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/WDDH8wj.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER39> First things first: How did you even track who was using your Visualizations? Can you explain so others can learn from the lesson as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> If they actually downloaded and republished your dikes, then that is clear copyright infringement. Which is both a crime, as well as cause for civil action. You could report them to the DA (or whatever is the equivalent where you or they live.) It would be interesting to see how that went!

</comment><comment><USER41> The Flowing Data is great. Yau really builds great visual charts of various data.

</comment><comment><USER42> Remember to disable your ad blocker when on dailymail.co.uk to fund this high quality content, it's not cheap to make! Wouldn't want them to have to close up shop!

</comment><comment><USER43> Perhaps the solution would be to embed a link to your site within the content you create itself, be it visualizations or whatever else?

</comment><comment><USER44> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI)

</comment><comment><USER45> Why is it any worse to link to a page than to put it in an iframe? (The author's page header was still on there, so there's a clear attribution.) Why is the author so dissatisfied with his page getting so many views? I'd assume that's the point of putting things on the internet.

<comment><USER46> Who is saying that its worse to link to an iframe? The author's issue was that they asked permission, then took no response to mean "do as you will!" including downloading, modifying, and redistributing his work.

I highly doubt he'd complain if they just linked to his content. This is pretty straightforward copyright infringement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> They embedded/copied/proxied it. They did not 'steal' it.

Regardless of whether you find their behaviour acceptable, those are two very, _very_ different things.

<comment><USER48> And when someone "steals" your identity, they didn't really steal it right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> If you put a lot of effort into a project and don't want it stolen, please REGISTER THE COPYRIGHT.

0\. Register the copyright within 3 months after you publish the project.

1\. Register online at [https://eco.copyright.gov/](https://eco.copyright.gov/) \- it costs $35 (or so) and is not particularly difficult to do.

1.1 registration is not difficult, but it is tedious and involves navigating a super-old government website that kinda sucks.

2\. You can also hire a lawyer to register for you, which costs around $200-300.

3\. Once you have the copyright registration, you can write a polite letter to whomever is stealing your stuff (or write a nasty letter, depending on your mood).

4\. You can force them to pay you compensation for stealing your copyrighted content.

5\. If your stolen stuff is being hosted by a third party provider (like imgur or whatever), you can send the host a DMCA takedown request, and the host will quickly remove the offending content.

that is just US law. Milage may vary in other countries.

edit - a lot of downvoting on this comment. Too snarky? Too anti-open-source? i thought this is useful info. Sorry to offend!

<comment><USER50> You don't actually need to register in order to be protected by copyright laws. The benefit to registering is that it is needed in order to sue. [1]

1: [http://thompsonhall.com/does-a-copyright-have-to-be- register...](http://thompsonhall.com/does-a-copyright-have-to-be-registered- to-be-valid/)

<comment><USER49> I used to litigate copyright cases. While your comment is technically true, for 98% of cases, you will need the copyright registration for any amount of meaningful copyright protection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't help but think that it would make sense for Mr. Yau to either (a) Change the server setting to emit the X-Frame-Options: DENY header or (b) monetize views on his graphic.

In general, you can't assume people won't deep-link your content, and that includes embedding. Taking steps to protect against or take advantage of traffic spikes is the responsibility of a content provider.

This, of course, wouldn't protect against DM just straight yanking all his assets and hosting them itself, which should be clearly immoral (and possibly illegal, depending on jurisdiction). But "framers gonna frame" is a fair thing to assume about the nature of web content, along the lines of "<img> tags are cheap and if people see something funny on your site, they're gonna use 'em to share it."

<comment><USER22> > I can't help but think that it would make sense for Mr. Yau to either (a) > Change the server setting to emit the X-Frame-Options: DENY header

The article states that the Daily Mail scraped the files and uploaded them separately, to avoid his iframe detecting JS.

And "just monetize it" feels like a... simplistic approach. Even if the Daily Mail did a normal iframe embed, how would the author monetize, exactly?

<comment><USER51> > And "just monetize it" feels like a... simplistic approach. Even if the > Daily Mail did a normal iframe embed, how would the author monetize, > exactly?

Send them an invoice for using his material, with an additional fee for not getting permission in advance.

Then take it to small claims if DM doesn't pay.

<comment><USER52> This is a viable approach. Small Claims is a simple process, you don't need a lawyer, and you can claim for a non-trivial sum plus damages and costs.

The DM gets sued regularly, so it's not as if they're invincible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> As soon as you searched you saw that many other people had written this kind of thing, and yet that hadn't done any good. What made you think this post would make any more difference than the previous ones you found?

If you want to actually make a difference, talk to your solicitor. You might even get some money out of it.

<comment><USER54> That's a pretty silly thing to conclude.

I, for one, didn't know about any of this. So that's at least 1 more person aware of this practice because OP chose to write about it.

I imagine I'm not the only one.</comment></comment>


Google Moves Rejected Google Voice App Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=15919 <comment><USER2> Awful article that doesn't even mention the webapp it's writing about isn't (as far as I know) actually available yet.

Also I highly doubt that Apple is busy "scheming to try and stop them [google]" from moving GV online.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course, a native app has advantages of its own: it is usually faster, and it can cache information and function without a network connection. Plus (iPhone developers, correct me if I'm wrong) you probably wouldn't get access to all the hardware, like the GPS and accelerometer. So I wouldn't say that an iPhone webapp is a complete workaround.

<comment><USER4> HTML5 apps on the iPhone can:

\- cache HTML, javascript and images for use offline \- use HTML5 SQL data storage for offline data storage \- use 2D and 3D GPU-accelerated CSS transitions for fast iPhone-style animation \- hide Safari's UI when launched from SpringBoard \- request GPS location information via JavaScript \- receive orientation change events for UI switching

The main downside for Google's purposes would be the inability to read contacts off the phone, but they'll probably excuse that by suggesting that people sync their phone directly via their ActiveSync support.

My first (admittedly minor) iPhone app will not be written to the native API. Too much bullshit with Apple at this point to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a web app and thus no push to notification available to properly be a substitute for texting.

Myself, free over rides this nuance, though I don't think so for the majority?!?

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it talking about this [http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=154724) ? If so, this has been available for quite some time.

<comment><USER7> It's not. That site only allows access to a minimal subset of GV features. The site that the article is referring to is going to have an interface designed to appear at least similar to iPhone-native apps, and provide access to most/all of the available functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IIRC Apple even suggested in the rejection letter to Google that it would better be implemented as a web app, so the sensationalistic tone of the article seems a wee bit hyperbolic to me.

<comment><USER9> You might be thinking about Latitude, another rejected iPhone app by Google. "Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone."

[http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-latitude- now...](http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-latitude-now-for- iphone.html)</comment></comment>


Facebook Tweaks Its 'Trending Topics' Algorithm to Better Reflect Real News - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/25/511641939/facebook-tweaks-its-trending-topics-algorithm-to-better-reflect-real-news <comment><USER2> This trending topics is pure clickbait. Just like yahoo.com trending topics. Kill it [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-trending- fa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-trending- facebook/kajpcekiminhhkgnhmkjmpmmkjpegjlb?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> You can do this with uBlock Origin and avoid installing an extra extension.

<comment><USER4> Yep. I block pretty much all of Facebook besides the chat functionality at this point.

<comment><USER5> If you only want chat, there's always [http://messenger.com](http://messenger.com) :-)

<comment><USER6> They just started embedding adds into messenger too (thankfully not in the US, yet)

<comment><USER5> ...Eww... What do these ads look like?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's amazing how pleasant the Internet can be when you cut out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google/YouTube, et al. "Social Media" has become a cesspool.

I stick to the my trade (tech) and hobby related sites. Political discourse creeps in occasionally but for the most part the discussion is more constructive.

<comment><USER8> Conversely, I was off all social media for 5 years and it's surprising how pleasant life can be when you re-introduce FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I no longer have to fill in someone when we grab a coffee, there's a lot more shared subtext and inside jokes right off the bat. More emotional growth.

I've been using FB to develop a good troll sense / wit & humor bone. For example:

I was dancing salsa but then I stopped because it's weird being a taco sauce and moving your hips at the same time.

Surprising how quickly you calibrate to what's actually funny by using likes as the loss function.

<comment><USER9> This highlights something I think a lot of people sometimes forget: Social Media is efficient! It's easier for me to write out a story once, and post it so others can see, than it is for me to tell the story anew each time I meet up with someone. It's also easier for me to keep up with what's going on with distant relatives, who I normally wouldn't talk to.

As a privacy enthusiast, I dislike Social Media and wish we went back to things like blogs, but I get how, for most people, social media is the quick and simple way to get this done.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly right! The first 5-10 times an interesting story is fun to tell but eventually it sinks into your bones and it becomes a performance, even robotic. Better to share the general picture once and discuss the details that are relevant to your mutual friendship and unique to each conversation.

Another aspect to fighting the "waste of time"ness or politics nature is to just treat social media like a game / party that teaches you how to be a funnier and better human being. Here is one of my recent posts:

>>> In case you haven't noticed I'm trying the whole active social media thing after 5 years of blackout.. I will probably hate it and myself shortly but in the meantime feel free to grab your slapping gloves if I say something dumb or emo... and use them to smack yourself in the face. Seriously I know where your thought was going, why would you slap someone for something they said on the internet? You should be ashamed of yourself, sit in that corner with a dunce hat. I will probably join you in a sec

Followed by several days of troll statuses followed by:

>>> In case you haven't caught on I'm treating FB like a giant indefinite party and going around trolling every one of you. If that's a problem it's a good thing literally all of my closest friends aren't on here so I don't care if all you beautiful f __*ers defriend me (3 already have but 4 added me so shh bb is ok). Oh wait. You 're reading this. On FB. I didn't mean to insinuate that you aren't special to me. I uhh.. love you? I'll buy ya flowers (flower emoji) friends? (bear emoji)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It has always been interesting to me that so many people allow Facebook to be the main curator of their news, though I suppose it's no different than people allowing network news or one newspaper to be the gatekeeper. I suppose it's human nature to take the path of least resistance.

<comment><USER11> A newspaper at least might have some sort of moral obligation to tell the truth.

However the masses of Facebook have no such obligation.

<comment><USER12> > A newspaper at least might have some sort of moral obligation to tell the > truth.

Very few people read newspapers. And even then, newspapers aren't news anymore either, it's entertainment, using emotion to deliver "news", not facts nor reason. It's all about getting the audience "triggered".

This whole "fake news" thing is so hypocrite, what "trusted" news don't understand is that they lied so much in the past people stopped trusting them. That's why people check "alternative news sources". Main stream media needs to stop taking readers trust for granted, and ask themselves why they lost that trust at first place.

<comment><USER13> Would you kindly point me to a lie anywhere on the current front pages of the New York Times, Guardian, Atlantic, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, or Economist?

<comment><USER14> More specifically: point us to a lie of the kind of severity that [http://usainfonews.com](http://usainfonews.com) and [http://usapoliticszone.com](http://usapoliticszone.com) peddle. Do a WHOIS on those sites or visit them in a sandbox; they're Macedonian in origin, demonstrably falsified, and have been spotted in the wild on Facebook.

<comment><USER15> what does the phrase "Macedonian in origin" mean? I googled that and google is telling me about the historical origins of Macedonia. Are you making up that phrase? Are your trying to imply that the sources are ancient from a long time ago? Or do you mean they have "questionable" origins. If so, just say "questionable origins".

<comment><USER16> Macedonia is still around, that's a literal phrase. I don't know how you would tell from WHOIS, but apparently a lot of people in Macedonia are responsible for the most egregious fake news sites: [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281)

<comment><USER14> Here's what I get from `whois usapoliticszone.com`. It's possible that the information is falsified, but it's hard to understand why a legitimate well- researched news site would list an individual in Macedonia with ICANN when they registered a domain:

Domain Name: usapoliticszone.com

Registry Domain ID: 2060737897_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN

Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com

Registrar URL: [http://www.godaddy.com](http://www.godaddy.com)

Update Date: 2016-09-20T18:54:39Z

Creation Date: 2016-09-20T18:54:39Z

Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2017-09-20T18:54:39Z

Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC

Registrar IANA ID: 146

Registrar Abuse Contact Email: email@example.com

Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4806242505

Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited [http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited)

Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited [http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited)

Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited [http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited)

Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited [http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited)

Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry

Registrant Name: Angelina Gjorgjievska

Registrant Organization:

Registrant Street: Vera Ciriviri 177

Registrant City: Veles

Registrant State/Province: Macedonia, Veles

Registrant Postal Code: 1400

Registrant Country: MK

Registrant Phone: +389.78459172

Registrant Phone Ext:

Registrant Fax:

Registrant Fax Ext:

Registrant Email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > As of Wednesday, the company has once again changed its trending algorithms. > Personal preferences are now out of the equation. "Facebook will no longer > be personalized based on someone's interests," Facebook says in a press > release. "Everyone in the same region will see the same topics." For now, a > region is considered a country, so everyone in the U.S. should see the same > topics.

Facebook dropping personalization of news. I'm really surprised.

<comment><USER18> They've figured out that Cambridge Analytica used it as an exploit to swing the Presidential election in the USA, and they're panicking (rightly): [https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows- you/](https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-you/)

<comment><USER19> Yeesh. I've seen the company discussed but hadn't really looked into what they were doing differently than other data-driven campaigns in recent years:

> Trump's conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking > out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of > resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like > Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician > Cathy O'Neil had already observed in August that "Trump is like a machine > learning algorithm" that adjusts to public reactions. "Pretty much every > message that Trump put out was data-driven," Alexander Nix explained to Das > Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and > Clinton, Trump's team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his > arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their > microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their > recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or > videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to > tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. "We can target specific towns or > apartment buildings. Even individual people."

> In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump's campaign regaled > residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after > the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for > Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton > voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To > "suppress" their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In > these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines > only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African- > Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton > referring to black youth as "super predators."

<comment><USER20> In 2008 and 2012, Obama pioneered the use of A/B testing to refine campaign messages. "175,000 distinct test variations" sounds like a more ambitious effort at the same strategy.

And targeting relevant information at wavering voters seems like a common strategy in 2016. House of Cards had both fictional Presidential candidates doing something similar in their fictional election, and Bloomberg once wrote "[Hillary's] campaign is looking to build on the digital engagement strategy devised by the Obama team, customizing the messages e-mailed to the estimated 8.6 million people on its list to make them as personal as possible."

<comment><USER21> Yeah, these tactics are nothing new. It's not like older techniques like get- out-the-vote buses were careful to be bipartisan. As long as Americans are resolute in their opinions and uninterested in facts and open discourse, campaigns will be focusing of scaring them into turning out or disgusting them so they stay home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one to have never seen (as best as I can tell) fake news on Facebook's trending topics? I don't think it's just a matter of them personalizing it to me, because I get all sorts of celebrity and sports news that I presume is accurate but in which I have absolutely no interest.

<comment><USER23> The fake news was targeted mostly at poor, white, republican/conservatives.

<comment><USER9> source?

<comment><USER23> [http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/02/politics/russia-fake- news-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/02/politics/russia-fake-news- reality/)

[http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how- russ...](http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is- trying-to-destroy-our-democracy/)

And by matter of filter bubble. The people the news (mostly negative pieces about Obama or Clinton) was likely to show up for were white conservatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This week David Brock was trying to raise money from donors for a new CTR type operation where he claims to have an agreement with Facebook to fight fake news. [1]

Direct link to his pitch book: [http://freebeacon.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/media-matte...](http://freebeacon.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/media-matters-donor-pitch.pdf)

[1]: [http://freebeacon.com/politics/media-matters-says- secretly-w...](http://freebeacon.com/politics/media-matters-says-secretly- working-facebook-fight-fake-news/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Facebook needs to accept that they're a news site and hire some editors. The first trending topic on my Facebook page is about an Indian cricket player preparing for his opening match. This hardly seems like the most important news in the US right now.

<comment><USER26> Are you Panic as in the Panic of Portland software development?

<comment><USER25> No, I'm not that Panic (lots of respect for them though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This looks like classic hedging behaviour. A Zuckerberg run for office is looking more and more likely, and when he's running for Pres he won't want to face awkward questions about what did or didn't show up in the Trending algorithm.

<comment><USER28> This is no less than the third time I've seen reference to a Zuckerberg political run on HN, a theory I've not seen presented _anywhere_ else but HN, what is this based on and why should I take it seriously?

Uninformed looking to get educated here so please don't take my terse inquiry for snark.

<comment><USER29> It wouldn't surprise me. He's a smart and highly motivated and seems genuinely dedicated to improving the world. However he doesn't come across as relatable. People don't trust him and he's not a great public speaker.

<comment><USER30> _> However he doesn't come across as relatable. People don't trust him and he's not a great public speaker._

Yeah, that didn't work out so well for the last person like that who tried to run for President.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why didn't they just keep the news editors they started with? It seems completely rational to keep news editors on staff to run a news service.

Think about how much in this world would be different if tending news was rebranded rather than replaced with what they ended up putting out.

<comment><USER32> Because they were politically biased?

<comment><USER33> That is what InforWars and Brietbart claimed.

<comment><USER32> Nope, this is what people said who were on such teams before.

[http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely- supp...](http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed- conser-1775461006)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This wont make much difference and its kinda cynical as Facebook do very little to explain how their real targeted messaging ( adverts ) can be exploited.

Other posters are correct, this is nothing new - organisations like Cambridge Analytica don't rely on trending.. They advertise directly to custom audiences, with massive A/B/C etc tested dark post campaigns ( which appear right in the users timeline not on the side). These are targeted directly at particular groups of people with specific messaging to activate them. Its often a very different message for different targets.

To avoid this kind of manipulation, Facebook, just like any ad targeting platform, would need to change its business model completely. Facebook runs off targeted ads.

Everyone in advertising who knows what they are doing uses these techniques now, as well as many startups who use it to drive cheap traffic through their platforms to enhance their user metrics and learn how to activate users. To be successful you need to poke away at the target users psychological triggers. I've done it .. its not rocket science - its just a morally questionable, scummy thing to do.

Additionally, the technology sector loves the idea of following user behaviour through analytics. Product development tightly following user behaviour metrics is a cornerstone of a lot of startup strategies. I think its quite rare that startups, especially at early stages, even pause to think about the implications of feature design decisions they make - they are simply trying to create user growth in any way possible. Once those features become successful, they are impossible to remove, because investors ( and users ) often view it as intentional sabotage of a successful product.

A significant problem now is that the messaging techniques which the right are using are cheap and effective - so they can activate more people for their bucks. They are morally uninhibited enough to appeal peoples basest fears and instincts - psychological manipulation to control their vote. The centre and left are hamstrung because doing that is less compatible with their ethical position. Combined with this - their audience is more expensive to reach as their messaging is less reactionary.

An even wider question is that if news organisations whose business model relies on targeted advertising, and is often targeted itself in its messaging, is ever going to be factual investigative journalism at all. Actually finding news which doesn't fall into that category in some way is becoming practically impossible now, and state funded organisations of course also have their own problems.

<comment><USER14> Glad to see a mention of Cambridge Analytica here. More interesting angles re: tested dark post campaigns: KONY 2012, Jade Helm, and the Columbia Chemical "leak". For KONY 2012, there are allegations that OpenOrd was used to maximize the total reach of the campaign [1].

1: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/05/suspici...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/05/suspicious- sequel-the-social-flow-of-kony-2012-is-not-what-you-first-thought/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "the proof will be what happens in the real world of people's Facebook pages."

Hard to say that last phrase with a straight face.

</comment><comment><USER36> I sure miss the good old days where if you read it on the internet you KNEW it was true...

<comment><USER37> Back in the good 'ol days of alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The "science and technology" section of the trending news panel is nearly always empty, or has just one story.

Presumably with this homogenisation of content, this is the same for everyone else?

<comment><USER39> WTH, that would suggest they have one big list of trending topics, and then sort by category. Which sounds ridiculous, if I'm interested in science, I don't care how popular it is relative to a trending story about sports. Why wouldn't they create a list of most shared articles _per category_ and then show the top stories in each?

(For some reason Facebook doesn't show me the trending topics, even if I turn my ad-blocker off, so I can neither confirm or deny your suspicions, sadly)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Hard to imagine getting your news from Facebook.

If you want to be better informed, read a paper or two.

<comment><USER41> The papers publish online content that ends up on Facebook.

<comment><USER42> But those links are put right next to Breitbart, the Macedonian Times, etc. and someone who's undiscerning will consider them all equally legitimate.

<comment><USER43> It's simple, go on Chinese and Russian sites for US news, and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As usual a lot of negativity and not a single positive comment about something that, in my opinion, is a good move.

</comment><comment><USER45> So I hope HuffPo won't show up now? Right? It's almost entirely "fake news" (Breitbart has much to learn), yet it's in the trends and on Google News.</comment>


How to stop recruiters posing as applicants - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/richardhyland/status/328602096255512576/photo/1 <comment><USER2> What I see here is one group of people (the company with the hiring page) doing the standard "fun/playful/lightweight engineering task" that people have been doing for years to filter applicants. Then some unrelated person tweets that this will prevent recruiters posing as applicants. Now the HN thread is assuming this is the only purpose and questioning if this problem is worth it.

Has it not occurred to anyone that what one dude says on twitter is the primary purpose might not be so?

<comment><USER3> Whether or not they had recruiters posing as applicants in mind when designing this, it doesn't change the fact that this particular task is ill advised. The first person that becomes remotely disenchanted with them will flood them with random applications. I'd bet almost anything that they will have to scrap this exercise and start over.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. Were it to become a problem, it would be trivial to deal with an application flood.

Among many options, provide a unique 'application key' on the instructions page which expires after first use. If you're really concerned, or it becomes a problem, just add a Captcha-like requirement to get your application key.

Besides, as asveikau points out, the risk is no different than any other application acceptance system. Take applications by mail? Fine, I'll buy a roll of stamps and make a few stops to the post office.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.de-captcher.com/> \- have 1,000 Captchas solved through their API for $2. Captchas haven't been a reliable anti-spam solution for years.

<comment><USER4> Considering that I said "Captcha-like," don't you think you're missing my point altogether?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who finds the phrase "json encoded hash"... inaccurate? Maybe someone can enlighten me, but is JSON really an "encoding"?

And what exactly do they mean by "hash"? They want the JSON to be a fixed length? How would you like my JSON hashed? How are you going to pull my data out of the hash?

And as a 'field' called response? Don't they mean, "as the value of a field called response"?

Is this part of the test, deciphering the jargon soup? Because if I'm understanding this correctly, a _bunch_ of terms just got misused in a very short sentence, which would put me off of applying here.

<comment><USER6> "hash" = "hash table" = "associative array" (even if the implementation used by the language is not, in fact, a hash table)

<comment><USER5> Okay that's fair but... ugh. Unnecessary.

<comment><USER4> That was my initial reaction, and then I thought that they may be just trying to obfuscate the process a bit. The more "technical" terms they use, the more they deter non-target applicants.

Though, being too pedantic is certainly risks deterring the target applicants.

<comment><USER7> No, you're confused. Nobody is saying they are being pedantic. Everyone is saying the opposite - they are being sloppy and non-technical with their terms.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe I am, since JSON is a hash by definition. It is characteristically technical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wasn't aware that this was even a problem. I would think that using a tactic like this would immediately turn any contacts they made into enemies, rendering this a futile exercise. They also effectively made an API for anyone that feels like flooding them with millions of applications containing random data. All in all, like a cold medication that happens to cause cancer, I'd say this is a solution to a small problem that opens the door to dramatically larger problems.

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing the logic might be that there's a certain percentage chance that once communications are open with the hiring manager, the recruiter may be able to talk his/her way into getting the hiring manager to look at some of the recruiter's candidates.

From an EV perspective:

      Contacting company as a recruiter: 0% or very low % of success

      Posing as an applicant at first:
      - x% chance of initial reply from hiring manager
      - y% chance of "conversion" of manager into "client"
      - x*y is perceived to be greater than other options

I imagine that the recruiter can either, (a) submit a "real" resume that he/she has, or (b) submit a "fake" resume that looks really good, eliciting a response, then bait and switching to a different "real" candidate, saying that the initial one is no longer available.

</comment></comment><comment> jon-wood Well this would explain why my phone has been going crazy all evening!

I'm the person who put this process in place for Hubbub (which incidently is a great place to work, you should apply). I'll quickly skim through comments and post some answers now, but it's 0014 here so I'll probably catch up with the rest tomorrow. If you have any questions feel free to drop us a line on email@example.com (unless you're a recruiter!)

As a final note, we have much more detail at <http://developers.hubbub.co.uk/>, including information about the year's supply of bacon on offer to both successful applicants and the people who referred them.

<comment><USER9> You mean to tell me that if I work for you, you'll supply me with bacon, for a year?

I can't tell if you are making a pun. If you are, it's a good pun.

<comment> jon-wood I mean literally. One of the perks is a year's supply of bacon, as in smoked back bacon from pigs. Specifically some of the best bred pigs in the UK!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just like you wouldn't make it hard to pay for your product, I think making it hard to apply for jobs at your company is a bad move.

Because most people are applying to a 'better' job than the one they have now (Cooler? More money? More responsibility?), they know that most initial applications will come to nothing.

If you believe your CV will get a reply 1/5th of the time, spending more than the 5 minutes it takes to send over a slightly customized CV is foolish. There are a lot of other people that don't require this much effort. Time is better spent writing to them.

This is going to get plenty of replies, because it's on Hacker News, but if it was getting the traffic more organically (i.e. if this was widespread), I'm not sure it would get a single one.

Yeah sure, for the applicant he wants, this is solved with, notepad, curl, 10 minutes, but it's still more effort than emailing it to his rival.

<comment> jon-wood We put this in place to automate the screening of applicants after our first round of advertising yielded a glut of people who could barely write code, and no one who was actually worth taking past a phone screen.

Since then we've been receiving applications of a far higher calibre, and many applicants who went onto a full interview after phone screening. We definitely receive fewer applicants, but that's a trade off we're willing to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've seen a few of these before. Here's an interesting one if you can figure it out. [http://web.archive.org/web/20120722010228/http://forrst.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120722010228/http://forrst.com/jobs/details/305-PUT_thetalented_me_at_work_Social_Media_Developer)

<comment><USER12> Google had a nice one back in 2004 also: [http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-22/tech/30049105...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-22/tech/30049105_1_innovation- problem-website)

But probably wouldn't work so good today. The first one to find the solution would probably post it on twitter, then the recruiters could follow :)

<comment> jon-wood Great example - Google's billboard ads were the inspiration when I put this together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yep, because a recruiter couldn't pay someone $5 to beat this.

<comment><USER14> Developers often cost $100/hr. It'd take at least half an hour to teach a recruiter how to use Postman. I think you're off by an order of magnitude.

It also has the precondition that the recruiter is willing to learn.

<comment><USER13> Just wrote a python script to do this in ~3 minutes (will resist urge to post source code) for recruiters who know how to use the command line.

Would take me another ~3-5 to build a web front-end in flask.

So let's call it 10 minutes all in.

At $100 per hour that is $16. And you can get developers who would be capable of doing this for _way_ less than $100 per hour (like $10 per hour) so $5 is about right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few jobs back we did something similar, and posted in the ad that people could apply by solving <http://unhelpfulclue.aqxs.net/lookup.php> (Resulting email changed)

Technical tests before screening appear to be getting more common. Currently job-seeking, I'm getting a little frustrated by the number of times I have to prove that I can actually implement variants of Fizz Buzz. It'd be nice if I could submit a link to a previously completed Codility test or something...

(Yeah, it'd be nice if they accepted Github links or something as proof of technical competence, but as someone on the other side I don't really want to have to validate a hundred random OSS projects and check the province of the code in them)

</comment><comment><USER16> Recruiters pose as applicants? What for?

<comment><USER17> To communicate with a hiring manager that otherwise might not give them the time of day.

Flip side of posting fake jobs to get resumes.

<comment><USER16> I'm afraid I still don't get it. A recruiter wants to contact someone managing hiring in some company (or his own company)? How does posting a fake application help, it'll be found out in no-time..?

<comment><USER18> I don't think they pose as applicants as much as they use the contact method (usually email) to solicit their services, even sometimes ignoring when the hiring company specifically says "please no recruiters." If they are posing, it would be pretty easy as well, as they could send in resumes & CV's of job seekers they represent.

Recruiters also pose as companies posting 'jobs', and from what I've seen when looking for gigs it's likely they solicit in the other direction as well. How low they sink, who knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wait, why do recruiters pose as applicants? Is this a common problem?

Also, Parse (and a few other companies whose names escape me now) have been doing this for a while. <https://parse.com/jobs> (scroll down to "Apply to Parse!")

</comment><comment><USER20>
        Your post advocates a

        (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

        approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

        ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
        ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
        ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
        ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
        (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
        ( ) Users of email will not put up with it
        ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
        ( ) The police will not put up with it
        ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
        ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
        (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
        ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
        ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

        Specifically, your plan fails to account for

        ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
        ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
        ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
        ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
        (X) Asshats
        ( ) Jurisdictional problems
        ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
        ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
        (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
        ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
        ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
        ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
        (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
        (X) Extreme profitability of spam
        ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
        ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
        ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
        (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
        ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
        ( ) Outlook

        and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

        (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
        been shown practical
        ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
        ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
        ( ) Blacklists suck
        ( ) Whitelists suck
        ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
        ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
        ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
        ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
        ( ) Sending email should be free
        ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
        ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
        ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
        ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
        ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
        ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

        Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

        (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
        ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
        ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
        house down!</comment>


69-year-old grandmother: 'Becoming a DJ is the best thing I've ever done' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/8066312/Mamy-Rock-Becoming-a-DJ-is-the-best-thing-Ive-ever-done.html It's never too late to do what you love.. <comment><USER2> "If you can't do what you want at my age, when can you?" DJ Mamy Rock. Classic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's never too late to do what you love.</comment>


Stallman on Steve Jobs: True Revolutionairies Offend - <AUTHOR> http://liberbyte.com/?p=221

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope, despite the number of Apple fanboys on HN, that you enjoyed my article. I hope many more articles from Liberbyte, the tech blog I share with Pawel K., get upvoted in the future. We differentiate Liberbyte from most other sources of tech news by explaining open source and digital rights to people of all walks of life, n00bs included. Pawel in particular is a gifted hacker, I'm more of an IT person with an interest in journalism. Pleased to meet you all, my name IRL is Kimberly Crawley.

<comment><USER2> You advocate FOSS, yet you have facebook and twitter buttons...

<comment><AUTHOR> It helps my advocacy to use social media. Some environmentalists drive non- hybrid vehicles. What's your point?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your article is a joke with numerous assumptions and factual errors.</comment>


Alan Cooper, Father of Visual Basic."windows api was a technical embarrassment" - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/VisualStudioDocumentary/The-Visual-Studio-Documentary-Alan-Cooper-the-Father-of-Visual-Basic

<comment><USER2> This is _very_ interesting. I never imagined he would say Basic is a lousy language.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah there are a lot of great moments in this video. Cooper is hilarious. ;-)</comment>


What Makes a City Startup Friendly? - <AUTHOR> http://startup.partnerup.com/2009/12/03/what-makes-a-city-startup-friendly/

<comment><USER2> _Large national airport._

I think there's something to be said for having more than one large airport, in competition with each other, in any large enough major metro area. Single- airport cities in my not-pluralizable-to-data experience have more problems with rental car shortages, weather, and traffic.

Perhaps it's just a question of number of airports per population and/or land area. About 1 per million people seems about right, even though the Bay Area falls shy of that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropolitan_areas_in_Canada) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population)

Is there a convenient count of major and/or minor commercial airports for these areas?

</comment><comment><USER3> He listed 6 factors to ponder.

1\. Low cost of living.

2\. Nearby colleges and universities.

3\. Community of experienced entrepreneurs.

4\. Large national airport.

5\. Plethora of professional service providers.

6\. High concentration of consumers

I think bullet points 3 to 6 make point 1 impossible.

<comment><USER4> Chicago has all of these in spades except for #3; which is a doosy as it's far and away the most important.

<comment><USER5> Chicago has a low cost of living?

<comment><USER4> It's not cheap if you live in a trendy neighborhood, eat out a lot, and own a car. But it is cheap if you live in a safe working-class neighborhood and rely on the CTA. In 2003 I lived in an apartment in Pilsen with 2 startup founders and lived off of $800/month - that was my share of the rent, utilities, internet, and company cellphone plan along with food. And I probably could have saved $100/month if I didn't go to bars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The one item that really matters is:

Community of experienced entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER7> That's kind of a chicken & egg thing though, isn't it? How do you get that community if your city isn't startup friendly?

<comment><USER8> bust ass for the rest, then don't bail out to the Valley when you get funded. yes, i'm looking at you, groupon. please don't leave us.

in my opinion, this article is answering the question "what makes a city easier to find vc money." we really need to break the mentality that palo alto and boulder are the only places where technology and web-based startups can go to market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why we chose the Austin Area vs. elsewhere:

      1. No Crime (NYC-Yikes)

      2. No Personal Income Tax (Calif, Mass & NYC-Yikes!)

      3. Low (all other) Taxes (Calif & NYC-Yikes!)

      4. Low to basically non-existent business regulations & red-tape (Calf-Yikes!)

      5. Reasonable Weather (Mass & NYC-Yikes!)

      6. Reasonable Cost of Living (NYC-Yikes!)

Overall Austin seemed financially the best place because Texas does not tax any personal income and that is a big savings. Since both of us founders are from California on the minus side we have found Austin to be incredibly humid in the summertime and since we are still small we might give Seattle a try very soon.

Too bad the state government of California is not as business friendly as Texas, I'm sure a lot of companies would move back quickly.

</comment><comment><USER10> While things like cost of living, availability of specific services etc are important the article missed one thing.

In the earliest stages at least, what you need most is a place to be able to think and work and create something without too much distraction.

I'd say a good place to start a startup would be similar to a place you'd want to live if you were working on some hard math problem or something. Somewhere you can walk the streets and think about stuff, with libraries with quiet corners and ubquitous coffee shops would be my ideal. I guess that probably describes a lot of university towns, especially the older ones.</comment>


JQuery++ - <AUTHOR> http://jquerypp.com/ <comment><USER2> My last two projects have completely forgone jQuery for vanilla JS and a minimal Lodash. Widespread support for querySelector, querySelectorAll, getElementById eliminate all of those handy selector functions. The rest you can read below.

[http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/)

This also helps you to learn better javascript, rather than relying on a crutch to string together a lot of convoluted sugar syntax.

<comment><USER3> Ajax is the last thing keeping me in jquery.

<comment><USER2> From my original link above.

[http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/)

var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.open('GET', '/my/url', true);

request.onload = function() { if (request.status >= 200 && request.status < 400) { // Success! var data = JSON.parse(request.responseText); } else { // We reached our target server, but it returned an error

      }

};

request.onerror = function() { // There was a connection error of some sort };

request.send();

OR

Even better, you should just use a reactive front end framework. [https://vuejs.org/](https://vuejs.org/) combined with [https://github.com/vuejs/vue-resource](https://github.com/vuejs/vue-resource) is currently my fave.

<comment><USER4> You don't need jquery!!! You need... these other things that fewer people use and/or care about.

Just use jQuery. Please.

<comment><USER2> You don't need a reactive front end framework, but not using two way data binding at this point I think is crazy. Binding is an EXTREMELY powerful tool.

<comment><USER4> I have yet to see something that handles updates from other sources well. Meaning that the page the user is on is updated by some other person or process and those changes are propagated correctly. I still have events that fire when something is saved that check to see if it was modified while the user was in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK serious question about NOT using jquery.

I am an author of a jquery plugin (1KLOC) which I need to rewrite in plain js.

There is going to be a handful of things that when converted will need to become helper methods because its not a line to line conversion.

So now Ill be writing a small dom manipulation lib within my lib. This seems wrong to me, since every other thing converted from jquery to native will also need write their own little helper lib.

Now you import all these great native js libs into your project, and because native js code is usually a little bigger than jquery code, you end up with a bigger vendor bundle than if you had just used jquery and all your libs used it too.

what is the advantage of that?

<comment><USER6> Could you not rely on a tiny dom manipulation lib?

<comment><USER5> yes, I think that is a solution. ill probably end up writing my own though, with just stuff I need. Otherwise its just like jquery all over again

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks cool. I am personally looking for more reasons to drop jQuery rather than more reasons to depend on it though. As an aside, I did the swipe to see the menu (I'm on mobile) but I am having hard time making the menu go away. (currently using _gasp_ refresh).

</comment><comment><USER8> I like some of these functions. The cookie function is something i could have used in the past. And the selection function seems handy too. But I think the web site could use a lick of paint.

</comment><comment><USER9> All of these comments taking a crap on jQuery are hilarious.

It's like saying "Using lodash is bad because then you don't learn real javascript and you rely on another big library to do the job for you".

Becoming an expert DOM manipulator in vanilla javascript won't make you a good developer. DOM manipulation is incredibly trivial but involves a lot of grunt work, and jQuery is just a utility lib that makes the grunt work easier. Just like lodash, moment.js or any other lib.

I think people are just super salty because jQuery is popular, everyone uses it, which means that a lot of bad developers use it, and bad developers produce spaghetti code - which means that jQuery is bad? lol.

You know there's a lot of morons who eat pizza, does that mean that ordering pizza once in a while makes you a moron?

Writing good or bad code has nothing to do with jQuery, lodash, React, or any other library.

If you're a shit programmer you will write shit code. If you're a good programmer you won't.

If you're rendering server side, you're going to use imperative DOM manipulation library - jQuery is a good choice.

If you're rendering client side, you don't need jQuery, you're going to use a rendering library.

I don't get why people have problems with grasping such simple concepts.

/rant

</comment><comment><USER10> With react and redux I haven't needed jQ for anything in ages. Feels fantastic. A whole class of bugs is avoided when you aren't poking at the DOM to get things done.

</comment><comment><USER11> For all those who suggest, vanilla JS, it sounds quite interesting, but many use ui frameworks like bootstrap which require jquery anyway. So why not go the whole distance and use jquery yourself?

Can bootstrap work without jquery or isolate only the subset of jquery they use?

<comment><USER12> This isn't precisely what you asked for, but there are versions of Bootstrap without jQuery for some client-side frameworks:

[http://react-bootstrap.github.io/](http://react-bootstrap.github.io/)

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

[https://github.com/ng-bootstrap/core](https://github.com/ng-bootstrap/core)

[https://kaliber5.github.io/ember- bootstrap/](https://kaliber5.github.io/ember-bootstrap/)

[http://yuche.github.io/vue-strap/](http://yuche.github.io/vue-strap/)

[https://github.com/ng-vu/mithril-bootstrap](https://github.com/ng-vu/mithril- bootstrap)

[http://cognitom.github.io/riot-bootstrap/](http://cognitom.github.io/riot- bootstrap/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not that I need another framework but looks like this is in use with donejs.

[https://github.com/donejs/donejs](https://github.com/donejs/donejs)

Looks interesting. Has anyone tried this?

<comment><USER14> I've enjoyed using DoneJS. It's a lot like using Vue or using React with Mobx. I really like how it provides a lot of things that I'd normally have to set up myself, like SSR, & fall-through data cacheing, and its packager/build tool has the best API of the ones I've used (but I've only seriously used Browserify, Webpack, & StealJS, and SystemJS a little bit, so I can't speak for the others). It supports using React for the view layer, if that's your thing. Also, full disclosure, because of my past experience with DoneJS- related projects, I got a position at Bitovi last year. It's pretty likely you've used sites that use DoneJS tech, too. I know of at least one in the Alexa top 50. I REALLY like the changes of the next version, which is currently available as a pre-release on npm. I've been using it in my side projects and it has some pretty nice changes to many of the APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personally I don't try to use jQuery anymore. Don't get me wrong. I use it a lot, even in new projects. Because a lot of third party libraries, applications or components depend on it.

Also jQuery is so much intrenched into our computer infrastructure. You can even install it using your fav package manager `apt-get install libjs-jquery`.

</comment><comment><USER16> I appreciate that jQuery got us to where we are today, but as far as best practices go, I don't think we should encourage its current use.

The best we could do for a 'replacement' is a site that lets you pick which browsers you're targeting, which DOM APIs you want, and generates a polyfill.

<comment><USER17> Caniuse.com + Modernizr + [https://github.com/Polyfiller/polyfiller](https://github.com/Polyfiller/polyfiller) or Webshim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How can I know this is safe (short of reading the downloaded source)? There's (apparently) no relation to the actual jquery project, and the downloads are being served over http.

<comment><USER14> It's on npm, too, if that's a better option for you. [https://www.npmjs.com/package/jquerypp](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jquerypp)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your development setup? - <AUTHOR> I am setting up my home office. What is your development setup?<p>* Do you have a sitting desk or standing desk?<p>* Suggest some functional desks for coding.<p>* How many monitors you have? Are they 4k?<p>* What effective resolution and zoom percentage you use for 4k monitors?<p>* What is your development laptop?<p>* What is the IDE(s) and languages you use?<p>* Suggest some functional desks for coding.<p>* How many monitors you have? Are they 4k?<p>* What effective resolution and zoom percentage you use for 4k monitors?<p>* What is your development laptop?<p>* What is the IDE(s) and languages you use? <comment><USER2> Since mandatory WFH. I'm on a cheap ikea desk and chair combo.

1 x 32" Thinkvision

1 x x1 carbon 7

I use Goland and VScode for our Ts/Go codebase.

In retrospect, I'd invest in a better chair.</comment>


Tell HN: My iPhone 3G is unusably slow since upgrading to iOS 4.0 - <AUTHOR>

Apps (even Apple apps) take forever to load, and routinely hang while performing simple tasks (typing, focusing on a form field, switching tabs, etc). I'd have to recommend staying with 3.x if you haven't already upgraded. <comment><USER2> Your device is slow because apps are constantly triggering low-memory conditions. Memory was very tight on the 3G, even before iOS 4. This is precisely why multi-tasking isn't enabled.

Safari alone is consuming most of your device's memory, by a very large margin. It stays resident in memory when you return to the home screen, and it's one of the last apps to be killed in low-memory conditions. The problem is that much worse if you do a lot of browsing on your iPhone or iPod; Safari just grows and grows. This is why the problem appears to be fixed when you reboot your device.

Here's the tip: You can quit Safari by closing all of its tabs and then returning to the home screen. You should do this periodically; I did this whenever I was finished with a browsing session. With Safari out of the way the rest of the software on your device should run at normal speed without triggering any low-memory conditions.

My primary devices now have 256 MB of RAM instead of 128 MB, and I no longer have to worry about Safari's memory consumption.

<comment><USER3> You can also kill Safari (and all other running apps) by holding the sleep button until it shows the slider screen, and then hold the menu button until you get the home screen.

<comment><USER4> You can also bring up the task tray, press and hold the icon for safari(or any other app) like you would for moving apps on the home screen, then press the - sign that appears to close it. Discovered it by accident, but it's quite useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strange. I have a 3G and 4.0 feels slightly faster compared to 3.1.3. Did you jailbreak it and enable multitasking + extra animations?

<comment> sans-serif On the other hand, multitasking helps with apps that take forever to load since their state can be saved/loaded now. Work out the cost/benefit in your case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Same, with both the upgrade and a full restore, and my phone is stock (no jailbreak.) A good friend had great success with his after iOS4, so it's not affecting everyone. I followed a guide online and manually rolled back to 3.1.3 and haven't looked back, and soon I'll pick up the 4G. It's not like most of the compelling features were compatible with the 3G anyway.

<comment><USER7> Do you by chance have a link to this guide?

<comment><USER6> Sure; there are a couple out there. Lifehacker's was the most straightforward and detailed. The process is much the same as jailbreaking. [http://lifehacker.com/5572003/how-to-downgrade-your- iphone-3...](http://lifehacker.com/5572003/how-to-downgrade-your- iphone-3g\[s\]-from-ios-4-to-ios-313)

I had some shenanigans with it being an older backup and so had to re-transfer my email accounts from my compy to the phone, but that was just a couple checkboxes in iTunes and setting up MobileMe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I updated my 3G to iOS4 and noticed a serious performance hit along the same lines as the original poster. Rebooting the phone brought things back up to speed though, with some functions seeming snappier than they were under 3.x (Safari being the stand-out example). The phone has been running fine over the past couple of days since the reboot, so I'm not sure if there's a problem with how the upgrade is carried out on the phone that causes the slowness, or if there are some memory issues in iOS4 that will necessitate periodic rebooting of 3G models.

</comment><comment><USER9> Try a full restoration, it helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll try that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have data on the phone, like texts, emails, etc. your iPhone 3G will be unusable. Mine is also terrible, but I'll live with it until I make a fresh install when I buy an iPhone 4.

<comment><USER11> I'm also having a really slow experience. I guess I have a lot of texts, emails and photos (thank the interface lift app for that).

The problem is that it wasn't this slow with 3.x, yet I've really not gained any extra features, so it's basically a downgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I haven't really noticed much of a slowdown with the apps and tasks on my 3G since upgrading, but it does seem to eat up the battery a little quicker.

</comment><comment><USER13> My 3G seems to be the same in terms of speed. iBooks has pretty lousy performance on it though.

The new mailboxes make it worth it for me.

Jailbroken? Don't enable wallpapers and multitasking. You'll find out why it isn't supported officially by Apple. Absolute shit performance if you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I upgraded mainly for the new Mail features (grouped conversations and archiving for gmail). The phone isn't jailbroken, but I'm going to try a full restore and see what happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My 3Gs works just fine after upgrading to iOS4. I agree with @thought_alarm's comments regarding the lack of memory being a likely candidate cause.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had the same problem with 3G and iOS 4.0, but after a hard reboot it became fast again (Hold the sleep button for some seconds, and push the slider). It took me almost a week to figure it out (during which the phone was next to useless), but now it seems as fast as 3.x.

</comment><comment><USER15> My iPhone is currently running 3.1.2 - is it still possible to upgrade to 3.1.3 somehow?

<comment><USER16> 3.1.3 is a largely unnecessary update that doesn't do much besides fixing certain jailbreak exploits. I would recommend sticking with 3.1.2 - that's what I'm doing.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#3.1.2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm finding it slow. I'll be rolling back to 3.1.2 Jailbroken with Backgrounder. At least with Backgrounder you could kill Mail, Safari etc easily if the system was running slowly or you needed extra to play a heavy game (eg. Worms)

</comment><comment><USER18> It is completely unbearable on my 3G. I did install a jailbroken rom which has multitasking enabled, however it seems odd that "Backgrounder" ran apps just fine yet iOS4 cannot.

Oh well back to 3.1.2 for me.

</comment><comment><USER19> My experience was that it handled having low storage space (Less than 400MB free out of 16GB) less well than 3.1.3.

Once i freed some space the odd app crashes seemed to stop.

</comment><comment><USER20> My 3G is generally slow as well after the iOS4 upgrade. Is there a way to disable multitasking? I just want to see if it makes a difference.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mine is now very slow at getting back on wifi at home after the phone went to sleep. That's annoying!

<comment><USER22> I heard that one of the updates for ios4 is that it would maintain a wifi connection when put to sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My 3Gs internet stopped working after the upgrade and I have no idea how to reenable it.

<comment><USER24> This one is pretty easy to fix.

Go to Settings>General>Reset and select Reset Network Settings.

Do that and a quick reboot and you should be all set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A "Genius" told me the same thing yesterday. Said I should wait to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER26> Would anyone be willing to share their experiences with tethering on iOS4?

<comment><USER27> Tethering's working for me fine under iOS 4, although I'm also seeing the general app slowness which is really frustrating.</comment></comment>


Asciicker – an online 3D game demo rendering to ASCII text - phoe-krk http://asciicker.com/x13/ <comment><USER2> Really impressive. The first time I rotated the camera my jaw dropped a bit.

<comment><USER3> Same! It works flawlessly on mobile as well, 60 fps without any frame drops on my iPad at least. Tap and drag to move, tap with an extra finger to jump, tap edge to rotate. Really cool stuff!

Edit: the reflection in the water is a nice touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can see the progression by starting with [http://asciicker.com/x1/](http://asciicker.com/x1/)

Very nice.

<comment><USER5> x3 is fun

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really cool demo - amazing it works so well. It's all unminified JS which is a breath of fresh air these days.

Some commenters are asking how it gets such good performance and whether it would work on retro hardware. It seems it uses WebGL (and fails without it), so likely it depends on a 3D engine for at least some of the rendering process. Still, WebGL seems to be used for only a small part of the rendering pipeline.

If you want to play with arbitrary rotations instead of being locked to 60-degree increments, punch this into the developer console:

       document.onkeydown = function(e) { if(e.key == '[') { dest_angle -= 1; } else if(e.key == ']') { dest_angle += 1; } else return true; }

Then use [ and ] keys to rotate by 1 degree increments. (Tested to work on Firefox).

<comment><USER7> You just successfully disproved my earlier assumption that this used optimizations specifically for isometric views! It actually uses the WebGL for the 3D part too

(having said that, such optimizations would still have helped in the hypothetical case one might have wanted to implement this on old hardware)

Also, on a desktop you can use the browser zoom (via the menu) to get it to increase the font size. I managed to get my HD screen to show 96 x 54 characters, which comes close to the resolutions on old DOS terminals I think. Now if only it came with a CRT shader, like this one by Timothy Lottes:

[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsjSzR](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsjSzR)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The reflection in the water is really nice - it even shows the underside of the roof of the houses!

</comment><comment><USER9> Performance is terrific! Can you explain a bit how the renderer actually draws to screen? Looks like you create a mini texture per "font" and then draw as a list of quads per pixel?

Also I noticed some websocket netcode up front. Is a multiplayer classic RTS in the works? ;)

<comment><USER10> I'm getting 52 fps, but it's not really surprising given that the effective resolution is quite low.

Tip: in Firefox you can zoom out by opening the hamburger menu and changing the zoom level e.g. down to 30%.

<comment><USER11> Looks like this also works in Chrome. Also Ctrl-scrollwheel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A bit more info here

[https://www.reddit.com/r/asciicker/comments/d3ca43/whats_goi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/asciicker/comments/d3ca43/whats_going_on/f03z4xk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)

</comment><comment><USER13> I love it. [Q] and [E] to rotate the camera.

You can take a look at the ressources to get an idea of how it was done: [http://asciicker.com/x13/images/](http://asciicker.com/x13/images/)

</comment><comment><USER14> When testing it, make sure you press `Q` and `E`

<comment><USER11> Hoo boy, that makes a difference. Not sure how I missed it the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is what dwarffortress needs IMO.

<comment><USER16> ^^^THIS

<comment><USER17> Could you add more detail as to why parent's opinion is important to you? E.g. what was your story with Dwarf Fortress UI?

<comment><USER16> the DF UI is a big "fuck you and fuck you again in yo face" design. this is coming from vim/emacs user (no probs with modality, long chords, etc). also coming from a user, who gladly enjoys text only games. But for DF a good UI is a necessity, or else it gets in your way. Your fun and productivity is obsctructed by the UI, most of gameplay is focused on navigating through UI, not playing. my 2ct ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Also why I find Factorio so enjoyable - <AUTHOR> you can zoom out and admire your creation acting for a while. If you zoom out in DF your eyes start to bleed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Please consider adding support for non-qwerty keyboards (we don't have wasd, but zqsd). MDN has a very good example for this: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent/code#Handle_keyboard_events_in_a_game)

Very impressive demo otherwise!

</comment><comment><USER19> A mention of AAlib ( [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib) , [http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/](http://aa- project.sourceforge.net/aalib/) ) seems relevant.

<comment><USER20> Well, you just can't omit libcaca :) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libcaca](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libcaca)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> And so I set off into a seemingly endless ocean.

I'll let you know if I reach new vistas.

<comment><USER22> There are edges and corners but I haven't swum the complete edge yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Am I the only one who can't help but see it as Ascii Licker?

<comment><USER24> The ii in Ascii looks like li, so closer to Asslicker.

<comment><USER25> in what font does 'ii' look like 'li' ?

<comment><USER24> Seriously? Any font that only separates the line from the dot with 1 or 2 pixels. Especially if you're only glancing long enough that a c could be mistaken for an l.

<comment><USER26> If that's the case, shouldn't it look like "ascllcker"?

<comment><USER11> Our minds try to fit uncertain patterns into familiar shapes, like the classic email forward: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How slow would something like this be, had someone tried to make it for a 386/486 era computer? Like, could have this technique been used effectively for 3d games of that era?

<comment><USER7> Well, the engine already uses a lot of tricks from that era as far as I can tell: it's isometric, so "fake" orthogonal 3D, and uses sprites with different angles to view them from under the hood for the buildings and trees. It then renders all of this to ASCII with WebGL, which I presume generates a sprite- sheet.

Also keep in mind that games like Zarch[0][1] (aka Virus[2]) already existed in 1987. The ASCII actually hides the fact that we have a low rendering resolution, which may help a lot here.

So I think the main limitation might be the tricks required to render to ASCII, and time it takes to display those ASCII characters. Assuming the implementation tries to make a pure text-based renderer instead of a bitmapped one.

Searching on pouet.net for "ASCII" doesn't reveal many demos[3], but the few that exist look pretty cool[4][5]. They lack separate foreground/background colors though, which bring up one important point: what terminal are you targeting?

Anyway, I'm pretty sure there are more demos out there that basically render to the console but I don't remember the names right now so can't find them.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrN2soK60bA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrN2soK60bA)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7J5_5GZzeg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7J5_5GZzeg)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1sYsOm-y8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1sYsOm-y8w)

[3] [http://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=ascii&type=prod](http://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=ascii&type=prod)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwy5RhRNVt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwy5RhRNVt0)

[5] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuhO1pHsKtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuhO1pHsKtU)

<comment><USER28> Did you rotate the camera? The trees look like models.

<comment><USER7> Elsewhere in the thread someone linked the art assets:

[http://asciicker.com/x13/images/](http://asciicker.com/x13/images/)

As you can see it makes use of (I suspect paletted) PNGs

<comment><USER28> Doesn't this show that the map is actually 3d?

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily, depending on what you mean with 3D (although one of the other comments definitely proved it).

If you mean "uses WebGL to render 3D polygons", then there are other possible solutions, like the isometric approach I mentioned before. Given that the developer wants to target linux terminals[0] he is likely to come up with his own rendering scheme, probably not unlike the old software 3D engines of the late eighties/early nineties (like the aforementioned Zarch, or later Bullfrog games like Powermonger and Syndicate 2)

[0] [https://old.reddit.com/r/asciicker/comments/d64sys/has_anyon...](https://old.reddit.com/r/asciicker/comments/d64sys/has_anyone_tried_inserting_a_crt_fragment_shader/f0rabcq/?context=3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's so lovely! You can see your reflection in the water.

</comment><comment><USER30> This somewhat reminds me of libcaca, "a graphics library that outputs text instead of pixels", used by well-known software.

Invoke "mplayer --vo=caca ((a video file))"

[https://github.com/cacalabs/libcaca](https://github.com/cacalabs/libcaca)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is lovely. For the next version, I'd enjoy the ability to change the vertical angle of the viewport. I can't tell if the fixed angle is a cheat to reduce maximum draw distance, or an artifact of "haven't coded it yet".

<comment><USER32> Hit q and e

<comment><USER31> That changes horizontal angle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Add chat and you have a MMO

<comment><USER34> The multiplayer is fake I think. Me and my colleagues can't find each other and no one responds to weird walking by me.

<comment><USER35> Yes, I wanted to see what kind of communication protocol he used and there isn't any. Using the chrome dev tools shows no communication outside of the very few JS files and assets the game loads (very impressive by the way).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great work, i like what i see in [http://asciicker.com/](http://asciicker.com/) too :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> Really cool!

Love the backwash on the waves, that's the kind of detail that creates realism -- much more than subpixel texture perfection.

</comment><comment><USER38> The reflection in the water is a nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER39> Works pretty good on an iPhone, though I can't jump with touch controls

<comment><USER40> Tapping with two fingers at the same time let me jump on my iPhone (used firefox if that matters)

<comment><USER39> Nice! And tapping the top left and right corners of the screens rotates the camera. Really smooth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems like one turn is 60°. Is there a specific reason why it isn't 45° or 90°? Is there maybe some advantage to the 60° in regards to the ascii rendering?

</comment><comment><USER42> Disappointed to find it renders to <canvas> and not a set of divs and spans... I'll bet no-one could make it do that.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is great. To anyone playing around with it: if you decrease your font size, it zooms you out!

</comment><comment><USER44> I get 404 not found from this link.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would love to see this demo ported to an 8 bit computer

<comment><USER46> I don't think any eighties 8-bit computer has any hope rendering this.

<comment><USER45> A Commodore 64 or TI-994A could. Probably not at 60fps, but it could be done. It would definitely need to be done in assembly, or with a modern compilation tool, like cc65.

The sprites would have to be hardcoded, instead of being interpreted from images. You would also have to be extra smart about what you're calculating/rendering, but keep in mind that your screen is probably only 40 characters wide, so the amount to render is exponentially smaller.

You'd be amazed what can be done on those older computers when the developer understands how the processors work on the ground level.

At the very least it'd be an impressive tech demo for something like the Commander X16[0], a new 6502 based computer running at 8mhz.

[0] [https://github.com/commanderx16](https://github.com/commanderx16)

<comment><USER46> > A Commodore 64 or TI-994A could. Probably not at 60fps, but it could be > done. It would definitely need to be done in assembly, or with a modern > compilation tool, like cc65.

Well, I was programming on C64 way back, and am pretty much aware what the system can and can't do. Sprite crunchers, xor filled vector fillers, etc. are familiar to me.

Cc65 would only _hurt_ the effort. You need a full spectrum of assembler tricks to get any kind of performance out of C64.

C64 (PAL) has just 19k clock cycles available per 50 Hz frame. Since fastest instructions are 2 cycles, that's at most 9.5k instructions. Realistically closer to 5-7k. No multiply (hello table lookups!), no divide and not even 16-bit add.

Or in other words, it takes maybe 10k+ cycles for C64 to just "memcpy" 1000 bytes of characters!

You could implement something like Asciicker in a limited demo... but it'd be more like a souped up video player. Which, sadly, is a rather common technique in recent C64 demos, but understandable due to the limitations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> huh having some problems connecting at Wed Sep 18 14:22:32 UTC 2019 ... 404 Not Found ... will try later, sounds very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER48> Works great on mobile! This is super cool!

</comment><comment><USER49> Any details on the tech? Looks amazing!

<comment><USER50> You can look at all of the source. Lots of math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Source or it didn't happen...

</comment><comment><USER52> That's mind-boggling

</comment><comment><USER53> Toejam and Earl vibes.

</comment><comment><USER54> The name is great.</comment>


Show HN: Get Paid to Give Technical Interviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.gointerview.club/

<comment><USER2> I did some free lance interviewing for one of these types of companies a few years ago. The theory is, get a bunch of well qualified senior technical types to conduct anonymous phone interviews and do a general technical screening.

In practice... it was very low paying, boring, and often irritating. There were some really unqualified people I had to interview and it was agonizing.

I don't see this model as working very well. I didn't work for the employer, so I couldn't really represent them or cut the applicant any slack. I could only ask them canned questions. I tried my best, but I have no idea whether the results were usable.

I wonder what kind of people these employers ended up getting, when they outsourced their interviewing process like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Interviewing is definitely not always pleasant. In general, the way I picture interviewers on this service is more of an opt-in thing ("oh, I have an extra hour tonight, I can definitely do an interview for $150") rather than a full-time freelancing commitment.

If you do have technical people in-house, I think outsourcing the initial screens is ok but I'd strongly recommend having in-house engineers doing the subsequent interviews. A service like this is best positioned for "first steps" \- ie phone interviews.

<comment><USER3> You hit the nail on the head:) We have been tackling the same concept over at Honeit.com and see a lot of value in this space. Would love to swap stories if up for a coffee chat in the bay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Server not found

Firefox can't find the server at www.gointerview.club</comment>


Ask HN: How important is money to you? - <AUTHOR>

I feel I just woke up from a nightmare. In the dream, there are people around me who told me that I should have done a different major which would lead me to a more lucrative career. These people told me that I should not go to graduate school because it is hard to find a job in academia and being a professor won't make too much money. I start to become worried and have doubt about what I want.. Now I woke up and felt how I could let these people affect my passion and my belief... <comment><USER2> I can't say they are not important to me, but I can definitely see that importance, or rather pleasure from earning more than certain amount flattens out for me rather quickly. Very much like in this paper [1].

A bit of a personal story. When I just moved to Australia from Russia, there was a sudden and pleasant change in both levels of income and quality of life.

I started with mere $50k salary (2006) that I managed to double ($115k) in a couple of years (2008). This second change probably didn't feel as great as the first one, although it registered as kind of being nice.

Fast forward to 2012 and $140k of income - I honestly couldn't care less. Although it wasn't linear increase in after-tax money, yet still it was rather significant. Did it feel good? Barely. I have a blog post [2] that somewhat touches on that.

What's more important for me now? Being owner of my time and how I spend it. Money? Important, but only up to certain limit.

Hope it answers your question.

Thanks!

[1] [http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/if-money-doesnt-make-you- happy-c...](http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/if-money-doesnt-make-you-happy- consider-time) [2] <http://blog.nimblegecko.com/why-i-quit-my-job/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't take dreams so seriously. Think of them as a reality check. You just asked yourself that "do I really want this?" and if the answer is yes, then don't worry.

If you do worry about money, stop :) Follow what you are passionate about and the rest will come.</comment>


What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community - <AUTHOR> http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/what-the-wells-rise-and-fall-tell-us-about-online-community/259504/

<comment><USER2> Absolutely essential reading on the topic of the rise and fall of any online community (or groupware).

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)</comment>