Who will solve ticketing? - <AUTHOR>

Rukkus is looking at the problem correctly IMHO, http://rukkus.com/blog/rukkus-manifesto/ , but not creating the right solution...aggregating isn't the way to go.
solution needs to consider: penalties for bad actors (scalpers, etc), rewards for super users (diehard fans), and controls on how tickets go on sale that favor the FANS that make artists famous.
Some thoughts:
Problem: If you've ever tried to buy a ticket to a popular upcoming show/event, you know just what a P.I.T.A. it is.  Tickets sell out in seconds and then loyal fans are left struggling to find tickets on secondary markets or have to go in with a serious game plan to try to be one of the few that lands an actual ticket when they go on sale, ever refreshed a page a thousand times? <comment><USER2> The current situation is more like this:

Venue sells tickets, where the face value can be considered as the wholesale value as far as the fan is concerned. Secondary markets buy up the wholesale inventory, accept the risk of spoilage, and sell to the highest bidder.

So what is the solution? Making tickets non-transferable except by entering transaction details on the venue site could be one approach. Transferring the ticket voids the original ticket and generates a new ticket. Limit number of transfers per user. Provide a validation site where a potential transferee can validate the ticket by uploading its QR code or entering its ID number.

This would be difficult to enforce as anonymous debit cards purchasable with cash exist. Limiting numbers of purchases is ineffective as scalpers have ways to bypass the current ticket number restrictions already allegedly in effect.

This is who you are up against in addition to Livenation: [http://aegworldwide.com/about/companyoverview/companyovervie...](http://aegworldwide.com/about/companyoverview/companyoverview)

Disrupting venue owners would be difficult as exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster (aka Livenation) are long-term and in place. Building a solution that they want to acquire and implement is probably how you would succeed.

<comment><USER3> TicketMaster/LiveNation have gone a long way towards increasing the legitimacy of secondary marker buying and selling. Their TM+ product allows buying secondary tickets directly from the event page on TicketMaster/LiveNation, selecting seats from the seat map, and as you suggested, reissues the tickets with new barcodes while invalidating the old ones.

It's a mistake for anyone to assume that there are scalpers (brokers), and there are fans, and they are always separate. Many, many fans buy more tickets than they plan on using and sell on the secondary market. There are also those who buy tickets and find later they can't attend, so need to offload the tickets to recoup from investment. Assuming only brokers resell tickets completely ignores the reality of the situation.

Brokers play an important role in secondary markets by spreading risk (as you mentioned), while also adding a level of professionalism to the entire secondary market. There's numerous metrics tracked by the exchanges they sell on that greatly penalize problems and bad behavior. It's in everyone's best interest if they plan to continue to use the system in the future to by a god actor.

The venues and distributors know what to do to really hurt the vendors, which is to accurately price the inventory from the start. This is a hard problem though, so it's not fully implemented. Some distributors undoubtedly retain inventory to sell on the secondary markets for higher profit. That said, even if the tickets were priced perfectly on the primary market (TM/LN/AXS, etc), there would _still_ be a secondary market, because the prices are not static over time. Values would fluctuate over time, which still allows for speculation purchasing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Solution: Build a better mousetrap than ticketmaster/livenation tyrants that rewards true fans and diehards...and also put stubhub and other secondary markets out of business. Credit card companies are figuring it out and buying up huge quantities of tickets to sell to their card holders as a "reward"...they make money and act like they're doing card holders a favor..SMRT. Need to consider: penalties for bad actors, rewards for super users, and some control on how tickets go on sale that at a base level favors the fans. Also need to consider 4 key stake holders: artists, venues, labels, and fans. issue is that the interests of the artists, venues and labels are all aligned, ie. sell fast and price high, but not aligned with the fans, who are the VERY ones that make the artists famous and should be the most cared for.

User: Concert/show ticket buyer

Benefit: solve a HUGE current pain point for concert/event goers. this is a big market, and RIPE for disruption, ask anyone about how unpleasant/cumbersome the experience is. Make it easier, faster, and maybe even cheaper for loyal fans to go to the shows of the artists they make famous.

any thoughts?

<comment><USER4> Is there really money in this? As someone who has suffered the pain of insta- sellout-tickets, I understand. But from a business perspective, you need a way into the market, and 'supporting the loyal fans' I don't think will cut it.

<comment><USER5> Use the artists as a back door around the label and the venue.

Happy fans and a good purchasing experience make for more sold tickets and more loyal fans. Concerts are artists' bread and butter. That's where they make most of their money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought this had already been solved somewhat.

There are many events in the UK that use tickets with your photo on them. One example is Glastonbury where you have to pre-register your photo before the tickets go on sale and you get a registration number.

Then the person buying the tickets on the day enters the registration numbers of the people they are purchasing for, similar to passport number when buying plane tickets.

No page refreshes required on ticket day because tickets are only sold through the 1 vendor site so they have the full pool of tickets. Scalpers don't bother to get in the online queue because they are non-transferrable.

If you decide not to go to to the event you can return your ticket for a refund, those returned tickets then get offered up at a later date for anyone that previously registered but missed out. There are no person to person trades. All tickets sales are vendor to person.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like you could just model it on the way airlines do ticketing.

* Your ticket has your name on it.

* ID is checked at the door and must match your ticket.

* When buying a ticket, you can choose a refundable ticket for a higher price than a non-refundable ticket.

* Tickets can be sold through resellers who get a cut.

* Resellers are all selling from the same pool of open seats so they have to have competitive prices.

* Ticket prices rise as the concert date gets closer.

* "Frequent fliers" can get rewards and other preferential treatment.

<comment><USER2> This creates a problem with tickets where the attendee is not the person paying for the ticket and could be one of several potential companions of the person who is paying for the tickets.

I can no longer just give a pair of tickets to someone as a surprise and tell them to go have fun. I could, in theory, give them a gift token that corresponds to reserved seats and then it would be up to them to register their names. Then the scalper can sell such tokens and we are back to where we started.

<comment><USER5> You can buy a plane ticket for someone else. You just can't fly using someone else's ticket.

Why would that not work for concert tickets?

The only issue I can think of is giving two (or more) tickets to someone as a gift so they, and the friend(s) of their choice, can go to a concert together.

This could be handled by selling "friend" tickets that are only valid if the person named on the primary ticket is accompanying them. There would probably need to be a limit on the number of "friend" tickets that could be purchased along with each primary ticket.

For a scalper to sell these tickets, they would need to accompany their buyers through the doors. Scalpers wouldn't be able to resell their primary ticket, which would increase the costs for scalpers but not anyone else. Each scalper would only be able to sell a small number of tickets due to the friend limit.

<comment><AUTHOR> or maybe you need to attend a certain percentage of the concerts for which you buy tickets....just to prevent the person who buys tickets for eight different shows in a night and goes to none.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese railway company starts testing 249mph bullet train speeds - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/japanese-railway-company-starts-testing-249mph-bullet-train-speeds/ <comment><USER2> Faster trains make longer distances competitive with air travel. Assuming a similar price per mile, the cutoff is T * deltaV where T is the extra time to travel to and from the airport and get through security and deltaV is the difference in speed. Assuming 3 hours and 250mph (500 - 250) the cutover is 750 miles.

Reality is less simple as price varies as well. In Europe the cutover (in time and price) seems about 200 miles [1] although the CO2 emissions are up to 30x higher by air. Of course speeds are lower, maybe 150mph which would suggest a 450mi cutoff.

[1] [https://m.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost- of-...](https://m.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-of- travel/a-45209552)

<comment><USER3> >>> Faster trains make longer distances competitive with air travel.

There is more to this competition than raw speed. There is also capacity and environmental footprint (carbon per passenger). Aircraft have different logistical advantages. An airport runway can handle far more people than a rail line. Airports can land a plane every minute. A rail line would never dare have two high speed trains that close to each other. So, as a link between two points, a pair of airports can move more people than a train in most circumstances. That is a type of 'faster'.

Trains would normally win on carbon footprint, but bullet trains don't run on solar power. Their carbon footprint isn't zero. And one must consider total journeys. If the train infrastructure is widespread, great, but it often isn't. Dropping a new airport somewhere is far cheaper (in every regard) than plowing a new rail line through the countryside. It may work in Japan, but I doubt trains will be connecting Vancouver to Calgary anytime this century.

<comment><USER4> > An airport runway can handle far more people than a rail line.

Definitely false. The most efficient runways (say Gatwick) manage 8-9,000 pax per hour, with a huge chunk of departures delayed due to runway congestion. The Tokaido Shinkansen line manages more than 20,000 per hour and most are on- time (and could run at night because noise is less of an issue).

It helps that 750-pax trains take a minute to board and can be run every 3-4 minutes if needed.

<comment><USER3> Not bullet trains. As speeds increase, the safe distance between trains (both in time and space) must also increase. No rail line (line, not station) can handle one bullet train every minute. A large railway station can indeed handle more than a single runway, but apples and oranges. A rail station can have multiple rail lines just as an airport can run multiple runways.

<comment><USER5> Maybe not every minute, but in Japan, the same track can handle a new bullet train every few minutes, like clockwork. The throughput is enormous. And the footprint of a track is much, much smaller than a single runway, so it's not uncommon for even modest rail stations to have 15+ tracks. Chicago O'Hare has the most runways of any airport in the US, at 8, and they aren't all usable at the same time, since they intersect, and wind direction varies. And that's an enormous facility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meanwhile, we still can't take the subway to LaGuardia despite a few billion dollars in recent renovations.

<comment><USER7> That is pretty unbelievable honestly

<comment><USER8> The Las Vegas monorail is on the same side of the strip as the airport. It doesn't go to the airport.

These systems are working as intended. It's about extracting money from travelers, not time savings or energy efficiency.

I would be astounded if there weren't overt or covert flows of cash from the taxi companies to the decisionmakers that blockade these projects.

<comment><USER9> I was really surprised the monorail didn't get to the airport. I suspect Taxi companies originally lobbied to make it that way.

<comment><USER10> In the US the Airports, Taxi companies, Muni's buses, and commuter rail systems are all Balkanized fiefdoms.

They all really need to be under one thumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title is misleading. These trains will have an actual operating speed of 360kph (224mph). In contrast, the fastest shinkansen trains (hayabusa) currently operate at 320 kph. It's still a solid speed increase but not as ground breaking.

<comment><USER12> China has 19,000 miles of high-speed rail, with a lot more on the way.

If they use the technology, they'll be saving billions of riders many hours a year.

<comment><USER13> No it does not work like that, not everybody needs and can afford top speed, rails and trains and the wear and tear cost significantly more. Even in China only a few popular routes and during holidays have high attendance rates, the Shanghai-Beijing route has a profit of around 1 billion usd and is considered big news, most routes struggle to pay interest.

According to China Railway, from 300 km/h to 350 km/h will increase resistance by 40%, power consumption by more than 50%.

China already has trains with similar speed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxing_(train)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxing_\(train\))

<comment><USER12> 2 billion rides a year. That's an efficient way to move that many people. Better than cars and jets.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- speed_rail_in_China](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find annoying that title states mph instead of 360kph, not just because kph is the correct unit, but because Japan uses kph, too.

<comment><USER15> Not to be that guy, but kph doesn't look more correct, km/h it's the SI defined unit, or maybe kmph.

<comment><USER16> The SI unit is meters per second, not km/h.

<comment><USER17> power of ten prefixes are part of the SI

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand why a Hyperloop is the next logical step. Making a low pressure tube is probably pretty hard at scale.

Every design is trying to minimize air resistance. Why not wrap already existing high speed rail lines with a cheap air barrier then create a wind tunnel inside rather than a vacuum? If you could move air at a similar speed to the train you could achieve wind resistance that is effectively negligible or even negative.

Am I thinking about this wrong? Is the energy required to remove all air from a tube significantly lower than pushing air through the tube while a train moves?

<comment><USER19> I guess that the air resistance against the air barrier would be even higher: if the air is moving at the speed of the train, you have the same friction per surface unit than you would have with static air against the moving train, only your area is now much bigger.

You do save the energy needed to part the air aside as the train moves forward, since the air barrier would have a constant cross-section. I don't know how that compares to the increase in friction due to greater surface.

Finally, other aspect I just realized: when you try to stop the train, you have a rush of air pushing you at several hundred Km/h, and that would be an enormous mass. You could enter a side branch which would then close behind the train and have a smaller mass of air to slow down.

I'm not an engineer and have no experience on the subject, but my hunch is that it could easily end up being even more difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why the US has no high speed rail?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaf6baEu0_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaf6baEu0_w)

</comment><comment><USER13> The question is, will it have a sustainable operating cost.

</comment><comment><USER21> What an ugly train -- when form has no [apparent] function. Considering there are more naturally shaped vehicles traveling far faster, I'm curious why they decided to go with the Goofy/Platypus look

<comment><USER22> Noise reduction. Platypus shape make two smaller tunnel booms instead of one big boom.

<comment><USER23> I don't even care what it looks like. When I see a nation investing in high speed rail, it makes me frustrated that we are lagging so far behind with transportation.

<comment><USER24> For distances in US, what we have is already superior. Unfortunately, TSA security theater adds major delays, as does antiquated FAA air traffic control procedures. Major improvements could be had if we could get government out of the way and allow innovation.

Moving to high speed rail would also raise the profile of rail, and likely make it a stronger target of TSA, so you'd likely have the TSA induced delays for it just like for flying.

High speed rail might make sense on east coast (NY to DC is about 230 miles), but you'd never get the rights of way to lay the kind of track you'd need to approach 200 mph. They gave up on expanding the interstate system in this area many years ago for this reason.

<comment><USER25> Trains can't crash into buildings: the TSA does not make delays for the hell of it.

<comment><USER8> Considering that the TSA misses more than two thirds of weapons passing through their checkpoints (they have improved - it used to be 95%), we can safely say that TSA does indeed make delays for the hell of it. They are not increasing air safety in any meaningful capacity.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa- misses-70-of-fake-weapons-but-thats-an-improvement/)

<comment><USER2> To be fair they don't need to find them all just enough to deter.

<comment><USER8> That's not accurate. If two people carry weapons onto planes and one gets caught and the other hijacks the plane and flies it into a building, well - the TSA has failed in their task.

The sole reason this hasn't happened in a while is that nobody is really making any efforts to mass murder with airplanes, TSA or no TSA.

We should probably just shut it down and save the money at this point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Down Payment with a Catch: You Must Be an Airbnb Host - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/your-money/mortgages/loftium-airbnb-down-payment.html <comment><USER3> This is presented as a cutesy way to get heavily indebted millennials onto the property ladder (and into yet more debt), but doesn't it turn them into indentured servants for the lender?

They have _8 days per year_ they can't have the house available for rental - what if they are sick, or want to go on vacation, or have a baby, or have elderly parents/sick relatives that need the room? Or are just sick of having a constant flow of strangers in their home? Oh - they can just pay Loftium their share of all the nights remaining, plus 15% (about $30k per year - <USER2> potentially up to $90k cash they'd owe). Horrific and usurious.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is brilliant. I was talking about this very model the other day and I think it could really help/work!!</comment>


Show HN: First Ever Analytical Solution for Options Pricing (Breakthrough) - <AUTHOR> http://demo.oquant.com/ <comment><USER2> If I remember my finance right you never want to use your option until the very end since baked into the price of an option there is a premium for time which decreases the closer it is to expiration. That is why black sholes works pretty well.

<comment><AUTHOR> By using your option you probably meant buying and later exercising it. Here is a non-speculative, non-hedging buyer's statement. At an ITM strike profitable for exercising but still listed, it's better to re-sell rather than exercise because the option price is always higher that the instant payoff. This is why implied volatilities at listed ITM strikes are pumped up, causing the smile and skew. It's better to exercise sooner because with time you lose in the option premium you could reclaim. If the strike is no longer listed (this may happen if the underlying moves ITM too far from the strike and the option becomes too expensive and, as a result, even more beneficial to exercise), exercising it sooner or later is your choice. However, again, it makes a better sence to exercise it immediately and lock your profit from a risk of potential underlying moves due to the drift (alpha). Holding the option to the very end in a European way in general is not good because, as you correctly mentioned, the premium for time decreases with getting closer to the expiration and you just lose the money you initially paid for the option. An early exercise also gives you more of instant flexibility in your further trading decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there any explanation for what this is and why it's useful?

<comment><USER4> To explain that, you first need to understand what options are.

Options are a financial instrument where you can make bets on the market. To give you a simple example of an option, suppose you have a house worth 250k that you want to sell. You want to sell it within a year, but you are afraid that your house might lose value within that year (this is called the maturity). You might decide to instead sell an option contract for $5k, pricing the house at $250k which can be exercised within a year. What does this mean? This means that as a buyer, I pay $5k for this contract for the right to buy the underlying asset at $250k at any point within that year. The buyer is betting that the house value might appreciate beyond $250k, and the seller wants to protect themselves from the scenario that their house value depreciates. In general. options are all about betting what will happen in the future.

The problem now is in pricing your option contract. The earliest and most famous model of pricing comes from the Black Scholes model for pricing European options. With European options, you only exercise your option at the end of the maturity of the contract. However, with American options, things are a lot more complex, since the buy may decide to exercise their option at anytime within the maturity period. Moreover 99% of the industry trades with American options. For pricing American Options, the best method is to use a binomial or trinomial tree with many nodes (I will let you look up what those are).

The problem with the binomial and trinomial tree is that, it's very slow. You could lower the number of nodes in your tree, but then you lose accuracy. There are analytical solutions like Ju-Zhong which are very fast. Unfortunately such approximations tend to lose accuracy, and their error blows up. Finding an accurate approximation for pricing American options is a significant breakthrough for the industry. This problem has been eluding the best researchers in the field for decades. What we have is an analytical solution to option pricing that is very fast, and highly accurate.

Why are we interested in option pricing? For one thing, it is a $500+ trillion dollar industry, and a lot of money is being lost in pricing errors. More importantly, if you are given an option contract, you can infer the implied volatility of the underlying asset (volatility is the degree of variation of the price of the underlying asset; could be stocks, real-estate etc.) . Since our solution is highly accurate and fast, we can extract the implied volatility in real time, along with the associated partial derivatives and make real time decision and assessments on the market.

You can checkout our white papers, we have a series of papers coming out to explain all of the use cases: [http://oquant.com/OquantRealTimeOptions.pdf](http://oquant.com/OquantRealTimeOptions.pdf) [http://oquant.com/OquantWhitepaper.pdf](http://oquant.com/OquantWhitepaper.pdf)

<comment><USER5> _it is a $500+ trillion dollar industry, and a lot of money is being lost in pricing errors_

If I had a magical algorithm that was so much better than what was out there, I'd keep it to myself for about a year or two. If I could capture about 0.2% of the value of that industry, I'd increase my net worth to about 1 trillion dollars. Surely it couldn't be _that_ hard to squeeze 0.2% of inefficiency out of options?

IOW, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

I never could understand why people want to share these sorts of breakthroughs with the world, rather than use them to become wealthy beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

<comment><USER6> They are not sharing it: "Oquant approximation (prop mathematical algorithm)"

They just derive more value from selling this to _everyone_ than from investing in-house. Partly because if you want to get some alpha in hft or whatnot you probably need a lot of other things (networks, lots of capital, etc.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube admits 'wrong call' over deletion of Syrian war crime videos - <AUTHOR> http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-admits-wrong-call-over-deletion-syrian-war-crime-videos-1140126078 <comment><USER2> I think youtube needs to consider backing off regulating political content.

The fact is politics and morality are inherently intermingled. One can use words like extremist, but sometimes the extremists are the "correct" ones (like our founding fathers who orchestrated a revolution). How could any system consistently categorize "appropriate" videos without making moral judgements?

<comment><USER3> Interesting that we have a whole vocabulary of words reserved for those on the "wrong side": insurrection, sedition, traitor, deserter, criminal, smuggler, terrorist, extremist, rebel, revolutionary, etc.

But from the "right side" of an ideology, those are the freedom fighters, visionaries, defenders, Founding Fathers, Underground Railroad, idealists, etc.

Controlling vocabulary is a very powerful tactic in politics, as illustrated in _1984_. People respond in very predictable ways to certain words, hence their power.

<comment><USER4> Why doesn't Youtube remove this "extremist" content I wonder...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWsnYxJ1ghA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWsnYxJ1ghA)

<comment><USER5> It's surprising to me how sanitized that footage feels. You watch a hundred people get killed, but it's not really striking a nerve the way a single beheading can.

That's probably why footage of the American military usually doesn't get taken down. Our military kills from a thermal view half a mile away.

<comment><USER6> US military spends a lot of time and effort on propaganda. Lines like "bring our boys home" are literally inserted into hundreds of movies. They also release a lot of this type of footage to portray combat as less horrific than it actually is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm much a proponent of automation as anyone else. But I think right now Google is trying to do something way too hard. By looking for "extremist" material, they are basically trying to determine the intention of a video. How can you expect an AI to do that?

<comment><USER8> I dont think the problem is automation...

It's people's expectation for it to be perfect, and the egoic drive to blame someone when something goes wrong. There was no reason for the hype around this story... an AI determinator had a false positive. Thats not google attacking the videos, thats a technical issue and it needs to have zero feelings involved because the entire process happened in a damned computer incapable of feelings...

But everyone needs to feed their outrage porn addiction...

<comment><USER9> It's not a technical issue. Software is not yet capable of accurate content detection, and even if it were, it's not clear whether this sort of thing should be automated. It's not like google can just change a few lines of code and the problem is gone.

<comment><USER8> The point is, there will be false positives, there is no reason to get upset and hurt over them...

There is no perfect system. If its automated, there will be false positives (and negatives), if there is a human involved, you have a clear bias issue, if there is a group of humans involved, you have societal bias to deal with...

There is no perfect system for something like this, to the best answer is to use something like this, that gets it right most of the time... then clean up when it makes a mistake. And you shouldn't have to apologize for the false positive, people need to put on their big boy pants and stop pretending to be the victim when there is no victim to begin with...

<comment><USER10> This is the exact same argument for "stop and frisk", and that is just totally NOT OK.

<comment><USER8> Thats exactly the OPPOSITE of stop and frisk.

1) Stop and frisk is BIASED heavily on race becuase its a HUMAN making the choice...

2) Stop and Frisk is the GOVERNMENT, and therefore actually pushes up against the constitution.

How do you see these things are remotely the same?

<comment><USER10> The false positives are not random: they target minorities; these automated algorithms designed to filter hate have also been filtering people trying to talk about the hate they experience on a daily basis. They keep people from even talking about events they are attending, such as Dykes on Bikes. It is NOT OK to tell these people to "put on their big boy pants" and put up with their daily dose of bullshit from the establishment.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for- facebook...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-facebook- erasing-hate-speech-proves-a-daunting- challenge/2017/07/31/922d9bc6-6e3b-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html)

[https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/07/facebook-censoring- lesbi...](https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/07/facebook-censoring-lesbians- using-word-dyke-posts/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's look at the bigger picture. First, in March some newspapers find an extremist video. It has ~14 views and YT advertising all over it. They make a a big deal out of it. As a result YouTube looses ad clients and tons of money.

Then, as a response, they make an alg. They don't want people to call them a "terrorist platform" ever again. Hence they take down the videos.

Now, this algorithm is hurting the bystanders. IMO the real problem is a public and business reaction to the initial event.

And this peace of news is an inevitable consequence.

<comment><USER12> if you look at this sequence of events, the deeper trouble is really that of the newspapers (or any other media outlet). Their incentive is to find things people are going to get shocked by, and report it to get views/clicks (that fuel advertising). They aren't going to fully explore the pros/cons, like long form journalism, since that's expensive, and they get paid peanuts from advertisers.

The public's reaction is going to be the one of outrage, because the news article was _designed_ to evoke such feelings! If the public sentiment was more liberal, then the news article would've picked an even more extreme event, and evoke the same reaction.

Fix the problem at its root - that of advertising funded news and media.

<comment><USER11> Couldn't agree more. In my opinion, advertising is not the _only_ problem. Remember, YT is a competitor to the "old media". And hurting them is in their best interest. Hope that initiatives like wikitribune will pave the way to a better future

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Something people need to keep in mind when parsing this story is that many of the effected channels were not about militancy, they were local media outlets. Local outlets that only gained historical note due to what they documented as it was unfolding.

In Syria outlets like Sham News Network have posted thousands upon thousands of clips. Everything from stories on civilian infrastructure under war, spots on mental health, live broadcasts of demonstrations.

Everything.

Including documenting attacks as they happen and after they have happened. Some of the effected accounts were ones that documented the regime's early chemical weapons attacks. These videos are literally cited in investigations.

All that is needed to get thousands upon thousands of hours of documentation going back half a decade deleted is three strikes.

Liveleak is not a good host for such outlets because it is not what these media outlets are about. Liveleak themselves delete content as well so even if the outlets fit the community it would not be a 'fix.'

</comment><comment><USER14> i really don't know how to describe my feeling as a syrian when i know the most important evidence that witnessed the regime crimes were deleted because of wrong call. And it's really confusing how artificial algorithm get confused between what is is obvious as isis propaganda and a family buried under the rubble and this statement makes things even worse. mistakenly? because there is so many videos? just imagine that may happen to any celebs channel. Will youtube issue the same statement? dont think so.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I don't like about those web giant services is, to get a human support, it requires to start social pressure like this.

If they fucked up something by automation, contacting to human support is hopeless unless you have very influential SNS status or something.

</comment><comment><USER16> Google/YouTube needs to admit defeat in this area and stop trying to censor, they are doing more harm than good.

<comment><USER17> Just admit defeat and let all the advertisers pull out?[1] Then go bankrupt and (like Soundcloud was on the verge of) let everything get deleted?

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/25/google- yo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/25/google-youtube- advertising-extremist-content-att-verizon)

<comment><USER18> Maybe the advertisement-funded content needs to be pulled into question then

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, the AI did such a bang–up job sorting out the mess in comment section that it got promoted to sorting out the videos themselves.

<comment><USER20> 5 minutes reading YouTube comments is enough to make me ill. I don't know what a couple hours a day after school would do to a person after ten years. We'll all find out, I guess, once this generation of kids reaches adulthood.

<comment><USER21> Probably has the same effect as computer games did on us - little.

<comment><USER20> Statements like that always puzzle me. How would you be able to tell?

For example, it is entirely possible that they called it right, back in the 1950s, when they said Rock and Roll would ruin society. We have no access to what would have happened without it, and so nothing with which to compare .

<comment><USER20> ..should stress I have nothing against Elvis :) It's just useful as a thought experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> HN discussion of deletion event: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429)

</comment><comment><USER23> What about all the speech that's censored that doesn't have enough interest or political clout to make people aware of the injustice of its censoring.

</comment><comment><USER24> Google (parent company of YouTube) already sees itself as the protector of the public's eyes and ears. They might be contrite now but they behave as a censorshipping organization.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I think YouTube really needs to hire more humans to review flagging of videos rather than leave it to a loose set of algorithms and swarming behavior of viewers. They assume wrongly that anyone who flags a video is honest. They should always assume the opposite and err on the side of caution. And this should also apply to any Content ID flagging. It should be the obligation of accusers to present evidence before taking content down.

<comment><USER25> > They assume wrongly that anyone who flags a video is honest.

I don't think they assume that at all. If they did, you'd see at least an order of magnitude more videos removed.

I agree with the sentiment of your criticism, but I think we could phrase it more in terms of prior probabilities or something about the false positive and false negative rate in their review process. Flagging of videos is _extremely_ common and even a small amount of unreliability in the review process translates into a huge number of mistakes.

Also, users of the site don't actually agree with each other much at all about which removals were in error; we could say that there's absolutely abysmal inter-rater reliability if the end-users of the site are the "raters" of the quality of content removal decisions.

Also, most people who flag things don't necessarily know much at all about YouTube's terms of service or how YouTube has interpreted or applied them in the past, so it's hard to be clear on what it means for flaggers to be honest or dishonest. Probably the most common meaning of flagging is "ugh, I'm upset that this video is up on YouTube".

<comment> norea-armozel The biggest problem, imo, isn't the random flagger but rather the concerted actions of groups to flag videos. This is obvious in terms of reddit or 4chan users swarming a channel they don't like. This kind of behavior needs to be mitigated in some way. I think a quick solution would be to force a cool down timer on flagging of 24-48 hours for all users to ensure they're not abusing the system. That should include random users who file DCMA takedowns that aren't partnered with Youtube in some way.

<comment><USER26> Very much agreed on this swarm behaviour. A political channel made by a very kind person with nice intentions didn't seem to breaking any rules at all, though the /pol/ board on 8chan coordinated mass-flagging attacks against his videos _twice_ which resulted in his channel being deleted twice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> YouTube (google) has become the EXACT opposite of what they said they were not going to do.

They are evil.

<comment><USER28> At least, someone at Google was good (honest) enough to drop that motto...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Bellingcat account should be removed, I agree on that with YT.

</comment><comment><USER30> Automation is the only real solution. These types of conversations seem to always overlook how normal people don't want to watch such videos. Do you want to spend your day watching this stuff to grade them?

<comment><USER31> Yet youtube is admitting that the videos should not have been pulled, and there's no AI in the world that could have made the right call here. So... what sort of automation are you suggesting? It seems as though the real solution is the exact opposite of what you're proposing; human review by better trained personnel with clearly defined criteria.

<comment><USER30> This is irresponsible to the trained personnel. We have job safety requirements for people working on assembly lines. We should also have psychological safety for people, and there are lots of stories of employees that are paid to view the toxic videos suffering (even developing PTSD).

<comment><USER31> So we shouldn't allow jobs which may expose employees to psychologically harmful experiences? You realize you'd have to outlaw a whole slew of professions, right? If you can't take it then don't work the job, Yeesh.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Games for people with disabilities - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21729736-some-developers-see-big-potential-market-games-people-disabilities <comment><USER2> Even games that don't have to be clicky are waaay too clicky.

Torchlight isn't too bad. Hearthstone isn't too bad (but has a terrible terms and conditions.)</comment>


Clever Foursquare Hack Turns New York City Into a Giant Game of Risk - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/world-of-fourcraft/

<comment><USER2> There's no real mention of how the game mechanics are integrated. It's not really risk if it's simply "the most checkins wins." No element of chance. Could still be early in the game however.

<comment><USER3> We're still tweaking game mechanics, but the general way it works right now is like this:

\- If you checkin and your borough already owns that neighborhood your checkin adds a defender to the neighborhood.

\- If you checkin and your borough doesn't own that neighborhood, your checkin counts as an attack.

-For an attack we do a dice roll, and based on that dice roll you take out X number of defenders. If your checkin takes out all the defense then your borough now owns that neighborhood and you become a defender.

As the user base increases we'll definitely be tweaking things, but the element of chance is huge to us. It's what keeps things interesting.

<comment><USER2> That sounds great. Thank you for explaining what was missing in the article.

<comment><USER4> The game hit 600 players this afternoon and the dev teams says they are planning to build new feature so users can see the real time soldier count as the check ins fly and the battles go down!

[http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/fourcraft-turns-your- chec...](http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/fourcraft-turns-your-check-in- action-into-global-domination/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone looking for a localized version of risk should definitely checkout Own This World: <http://ownthisworld.com/>

It works around the globe and it's quite fun. It actually changed how I travel about the city... pretty awesome. The devs are very active with it too (Edit: and they just hit 10k users.)

<comment><USER6> Huh, no Android but Windows Phone and iPhone support. That's the first time I've seen that combo.

<comment><USER5> IIRC the developers do .NET for their day jobs, and Canada (where they're from) doesn't have the same Android penetration as the USA. But I agree, bizarre choice.

<comment><USER7> An Android version is being developed. The reason we went with WP7 before Android, was that a .NET developer friend wanted to try building something for the platform when it was announced. Seemed like a good fit to get in at launch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see this done in South Central Los Angeles.

<comment><USER9> It would be nice if they open-sourced it so people could make their own maps, teams, etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the developers who worked on the project. We actually have been discussing open sourcing the project for this reason.

The biggest challenge is setting up the neighborhood constraints and getting the checkins to map correctly to those constraints. But it's on our radar, and we're open to any ideas people have.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, you could probably even keep it closed-source, so long as people could design their own map overlays. I'm not sure how foursquare works for this - I actually tried to work with the API so my computer could send my girlfriend a text whenever she checked into a shoe store - but it seemed impossible.

<comment><USER10> If you were trying to discourage your girlfriend from purchasing shoes, this method would probably only discourage your girlfriend from checking in to shoe stores.

<comment><USER9> Granted; it was meant to be more of a humorous surprise for her. It also turned out to be much more of a challenge than I expected - there was no way to get a list of checkins for a friend, so I ended up setting up another account, friending her, and setting it to e-mail me whenever a friend checked in.

The plan was to use Lamson to parse these e-mails, but apparently it depended on a library that - in a minor version upgrade - totally fucked everything that depended on it by arbitrarily renaming several functions. Unless you specifically installed fucktits version 2.2 - not 2.1, and god help you if you installed 2.3 - it wouldn't work.

After three days, and help from a friend, I just tossed it all in the garbage and resigned myself to living under a pile of her shoes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe NYC gangs can start using Foursquare instead of guns to settle their turf wars. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is something I've been meaning to mention to the FS developers for like a year now. All you need is to let people be members of teams and track team presence with some basic blob-based map overlays. People will quickly and naturally divide into Red and Blue, Jets and Sharks, North and South. It's possible they don't want to introduce that element, but I know it'd be fun as hell now that it's so popular in many urban locations.

</comment><comment><USER13> Turf, an antecedent.

<http://www.smedresmania.com/turf/>

</comment><comment><USER14> QONQR is doing something similar but with more than just checkins.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a big risk and Langrab fan, this looks pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER15> All hail the barbarian armies of the Waste Land!... :)

<comment><USER9> I take it that's Jersey?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Read the description of the "game". So.... neither Risk or Warcraft or WOW. Foursquare is involved though, that's the only honest/accurate part.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very clever. I'd like to see you re-enact Napoleon of Notting Hill using this system.</comment>


What's the size of that vector, anyway? - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/26/size/ <comment><USER2> Output is:

      vector<int> v{3} size() 1
      vector<string> v{3} size() 3
      vector<int> v{0} size() 1
      terminate called after throwing an instance of
      'std::logic_error'
        what():  basic_string::_M_construct null not valid
      Aborted (core dumped)

Can anyone explain why there's a logic error?

<comment><USER3> I'd guess it chooses the implicit string(const char*) constructor and then feeds it a nullptr. I think the plan is to get rid of this in the future with the new nullptr_t/nullptr mechanism, but for now we're stuck with it.

<comment><USER4> that's what /r/cpp says it is

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is not suspicious that this Blog [1] has a new entry in the front page _every single day for weeks_ or I am just paranoid?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rachelbythebay.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rachelbythebay.com)

<comment><USER6> She's really just that prolific. She just started updating the blog again recently [https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/03/10/free/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/03/10/free/) and she might have had some topics ready to go. But even back in 2013, it wasn't uncommon for her to have several posts per week. [https://rachelbythebay.com/w/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: AWS engineer looking to do low level development. How do I land a gig? - <AUTHOR> I currently work for AWS and am looking to leave. My resume is pretty strong for high level programing, distributed systems (monitoring/operations, setting stuff up, root causing problems), web dev, and I've got good algorithms chops.<p>Unfortunatly, low level job postings seem to all want years of experience writing C/doing kernel development/niche specific skills. Recently, I've taken an interest in firmware and kernel development, and I'd love to get paid to do it. Does anyone know someone who'd hire someone like me? Should I get a ton of OSS experience first or something? <comment><USER2> In my experience while faking it to make it (not saying you'really faking it). I find that breaking in to the development side from the systems side is not impossible.

My advice if it is worth to you at all. I only have 5 years in total. This is all without a college degree and just a certificate in networking technologies.

1\. Start a github and blog site showcasing your advanced firmware and kernel development skills and "fun" projects

2\. Document every last detail of your work in your read me or blog post (companies love that you can document, especially if it's a long term use case)

3\. Google interview questions about the field you are looking to get into and make a project that solves that question

4\. What you are looking to get into could be in embedded systems engineering or firmware engineering

As of 22 days ago SanDisk is hiring so the need is there. Just apply, most hiring managers say they want 5+ years but that is to scare off the non- skilled applicants.

[http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?from=appsharedroid&jk=f350a3a2...](http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?from=appsharedroid&jk=f350a3a2f62b3c32)

Hope any of this helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say that it is absolutely possible and that often the amount of new things to learn won't be that much different than if you would stay on high level but move into a completely different business domain.

As some minimum requirements I would say you should have some solid C and C++ knowledge and a good understanding of how computers work in general (what are cpu, memory, etc. doing, what are interrupts, processes/threads/scheduling/synchronization, common bus systems like uart, i2c or spi, ...).

If someone is looking for a very specific/niche skill set, then they most likely won't find a suitable employee. So for me it would totally be ok if someone is not yet an expert in the domain but is very motiviated to learn it and if he doesn't expect to get expert position in the beginning.

From your perspective it might also make sense to make some gradual transition where you still can partly leverage some of your existing skills. E.g. working on embedded devices that are powered by web interfaces (lots of them in the meantime), where you find everything from developing user-space applications which utilize a vast amount of networking down to kernel stuff. Moving directly to deeply embedded stuff (FPGA code, DSP programs, feedback control systems) might make less sense, because you would need more of an EE background for it.

Regarding your question if we directly know someone: Where are you located and how fixed are you on that?

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you considered joining one of the teams at Amazon that does kernel and OS work?

<comment><USER5> Definitely try this, lowamazn. There are several teams at Amazon doing OS and firmware work that are always looking for interested devs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Worthwhile Linux projects to start from scratch? - <AUTHOR> I'm itching to start a new software project from scratch. What are ideas of software projects that Linux could benefit from?
IDE - there are already several Graphics suites - there are already popular ones Office suites - there are already popular ones Window managers - there are so many already
What's a worthwhile project to start that would benefit Linux at large? <comment> ld-50-agi-v3 Convert it to a Lisp Machine, free from the transistors up.

Make it run on CO_2.

Make a 3D desktop interface.

Put the Jurassic Park back in the ground.</comment>


Reddit co-founder's charges dropped after suicide - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/01/14/us-reddit-aaron-swartz-jstor-mit.html

<comment><USER2> "Such filings are routine when a defendant dies before trial."

When I saw this, I stopped reading. I'm tired of media piggybacking on events to get page views. This isn't news, this is routine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, he's dead. How can the charges remain if the defendant is dead?

</comment><comment><USER4> Swartz was not the co-founder of Reddit.</comment>


Ask HN: What music do you listen to while working? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I was wondering whether listening to music while working increases your productivity. My "work" is mostly just programming.
Do you listen to music? And if so, what kind?
Thanks :) <comment><USER2> Depending on the mood I'm in, usually one or the other of heavy metal, synthwave, hip hop, or classical.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUdoxvigIl8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUdoxvigIl8) for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! Thanks for sharing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Hi, I was wondering whether listening to music while working increases your > productivity.

It definitely depends who you ask. I tend to listen to a mix of punk (classic, hardcore, skatecore, crust, grindcore) and metal (crossover, thrash), trip- hop, and jazz.

I enjoy fast-paced music while programming, as well as more relaxing low-tempo instrumental music.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Any specific artists or playlists you can refer me to?

<comment><USER3> Ridiculously heavy and fast-paced stuff: Municipal Waste, Nasum, Magrudergrind, Wormrot, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Pig Destroyer.

Pretty energetic and melodic: The Bouncing Souls, 88 Fingers Louie, Propagandhi, Strung Out, Pennywise.

And, finally, plenty of electronic/beats/trip-hop:

[https://open.spotify.com/user/ew0l3zye4wza5co9o42axgkpn/play...](https://open.spotify.com/user/ew0l3zye4wza5co9o42axgkpn/playlist/48kx44CJ32GBFNH8PCG9IG?si=dygw --06QrORTOsRokzSwA) [https://open.spotify.com/user/ew0l3zye4wza5co9o42axgkpn/play...](https://open.spotify.com/user/ew0l3zye4wza5co9o42axgkpn/playlist/6Xl1w9zEzqr68shz74i5Jz?si=Ay3W-O5RRZWjHp8FLKfXEQ) [https://open.spotify.com/user/ew0l3zye4wza5co9o42axgkpn/play...](https://open.spotify.com/user/ew0l3zye4wza5co9o42axgkpn/playlist/4Gt2se1a1UoXJ9f1PZGqvX?si=dMEPhEkcR0KoQnoZqu0YJQ)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, the names are top-notch :D

Thank you, I'll check them out!

<comment><USER2> Don't miss Cattle Decapitation[1] and Septic Flesh[2] as well.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8t8g8lU4ms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8t8g8lU4ms)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jB7OVYZUjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jB7OVYZUjs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Burial, μ-Ziq, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Autechre, Four Tet, Venetian Snares, Access to Arasaka and, lately, Skee Mask.

Also really like dungeon synth sometimes (Erang, Dargaard, Depressive Silence). If I'm doing something that doesn't require a lot of attention, I might listen to some black metal (Wolves in the Throne Room, Panopticon, Falls of Rauros, maybe Immortal if I'm deeper than my third cup of coffee).

</comment><comment><USER5> According to last.fm it's mostly synthwave, techno, and psytrans. Examples:

Neurodriver - Ball of Judgment [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPkyT4QaUOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPkyT4QaUOU)

The Midnight - The Equaliser (Terry Da Libra Remix) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daERNrY15CE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daERNrY15CE)

</comment><comment><USER6> I listen to everything I generally listen to, so a very diverse pool of music.

I'm most productive when playing post rock however.</comment>


Spine -- A lightweight framework for building JavaScript web applications - <AUTHOR> http://maccman.github.com/spine/

<comment><USER3> As I'm currently building a Serious Application in Backbone (dozens of Models, dozens of Views, a dozen Controllers), the differences between Spine & Backbone to me seem to come down to:

Spine does class/inheritance closer to the "JavaScript" way where properties are resolved correctly at runtime, Backbone seems a little more hackish in this area IIRC (+1 Spine).

Spine seems to have given up the separation between Controller & View. Backbone has a great separation here that has been a great aid to me in refactoring a large application. (+1 Backbone)

Backbone treats collections of Models (Backbone.Collection) as proper first- class citizens. Collections can receive & emit their own events, handle their own serialization/fetching, and make use of all Underscore.js methods (+1 Backbone)

Other than that they seem pretty similar to me. So my verdict: Spine +1, Backbone +2 :)

<comment><USER4> I actually think that Spine seems to implement more sane controllers than Backbone (but I never really liked Backbone's way of doing it in the first place).

Controllers are supposed to coordinate the interactions between views and models by propagating changes and events between the two.

For example, if you had a todosController responsible for controlling a collection of views, there isn't really a clean way (in my opinion) to utilize it from two independent Backbone views without passing the controller through to the view (which makes the view depend on the controller). By handling events in the controller instead of in the view, you remove this dependency (which is also similar to my perception of Cocoa's delegates/SproutCore's bindings, but I may be wrong).

Both Spine's and Backbone's view layer consists of rendering templates to the DOM. To me, a "proper" view layer would include things like positioning and both frameworks seem to utilize CSS to do this, for the most part.

I think of Backbone's controllers as a poor man's State chart, without any enter or exit callbacks (e.g going from "#/" to "#/todos" should trigger a callback that states that I will exit the state "#/", so I can do necessary cleanup).

<comment><USER5> This is true, but because Backbone made a poor naming choice. Backbone Views are what one normally thinks of as "controllers" (coordinating presentation and models), and the view/presentation layer is not handled by Backbone per se but by something like Underscore templating. Backbone Controllers really are just some helpers to deal with URL hashes.

In my experience Backbone Views become the "top level" of a client-side app, but that is appropriate because they encapsulate controller logic.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm aware of that, but from my experience the code can end up uglier than it needs to be, either because you need to pass through proxying views further down the chain, or need to duplicate functionality.

I guess I just dislike the convention of interacting directly with collections from places where it shouldn't be done, e.g a todoView removing its own Todo from the collection (hence the risk of duplicating functionality throughout your code), instead of asking a proxying controller to do it. I think this is the reason as to why I've seen a lot of Backbone code where a reference in to the view is stored in the model itself (e.g <http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/todos.html>), which disgusts me since it completely misses the point of MVC.

Also, events passing feels more complicated than it would need to be (even if you can always include Backbone.Event).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems neat, but it would have been nice to differentiate itself from backbone a little more upfront. The sites even look similar.

The key architectural difference seems to be that the ui is updated before the server responds, which is great in a single user situation, but can get pretty inconsistant once you're in a multi user app.

I do have to say that I like the patterns section at the end, it's always good to see a prescription for how you would use a library or framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually not an architectural difference. In Backbone, when you call .save(), the attributes update instantly, and the changes are synced to the server asynchronously.

<comment><USER6> That was the main difference pointed out in the documentation. I guess I'd have to try it out to see how it differs in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll be honest, it's an MVC JS framework centred around jQuery or Zepto. If I'm familiar with Backbone, what is going to drag me over to this - <USER2> size/number of lines of code isn't, thats for sure.

Javascript frameworks are making all of the mistakes that PHP frameworks did, no differentiation and promoting fragmentation. Backbone is up on Github so would it not have been more constructive to fork it and create one great product, not two less great products?

<comment><AUTHOR> As in the general economy ... competition between similar open-source projects is good for developers. Spine provides an alternative way of accomplishing the same goals as Backbone, written in a different style. I'm sure there's lots that both projects can learn/steal/share with one another.

Open source isn't a zero-sum game, the more you share, the more you have to give away.

<comment><USER8> That's what we all sign up for. Some share more than most, which I'm sure many have/will thank you for!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The number of js frameworks popping up is kind of crazy. Clearly tons of overlap between them all. It kind of makes me want to not choose one and wait for tech natural selection to whittle the options down and hopefully along the way the best elements of each are demonstrated and incorporated into the few winners.

<comment><USER10> To a large degree that's what Ender.js is trying to do. Whether it'll succeed or not remains to be seen.

<comment><USER11> I just don't see Ender.js pulling it off. Mostly it is the use of klass that puts me off. I much prefer the pure prototypal style of backbone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How funny, I'm working on Vertebrae.js, a JavaScript MVC framework.

<comment><USER13> Honestly there are so many JS MVC frameworks. I'm looking at using one in the next little while, but with so many it's going to take more effort than I'd like to pick a good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the approach of separating the dom events logic into its own controller.

In backbone the dom events are tied to the view which makes it more difficult to reuse the logic with other views. I've worked around this by doing pretty much the same thing as spine; i've created a dom controller from the base controller, but it's not ideal since the controller was specifically designed for hash change events.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this just a terminology confusion. Spine Controllers == Backbone Views.

Both have DOM events, a "this.el" property, a "this.$" selector, and event delegation. The patterns of use should be the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using JavascriptMVC on a large project for the last couple of months and have been loving it. I don't think it really matters what framework you go with, as long as it's not too DSL heavy and does things the JQuery way (assuming you're using JQuery). Just having something, anything, has made my life 10 times easier for building big JS apps.

</comment><comment><USER16> Out of curiosity why does the Spine site look so similar to Backbone's?

</comment><comment><USER17> > Since Spine doesn't use constructor functions, due to limitations with > prototypal inheritance, classes are instantiated with inst().

Can someone explain this to me? I've been using prototypal inheritance through Closure's goog.inherits() and never had any problem using regular object constructors.

<comment><USER18> Maybe it's referring specifically to the "new" keyword that can cause issues if left out when creating instances. If you look at the code, Spine uses Object.create(this.prototype) for init.

This article is a great explanation on issues with prototypal inheritance <http://howtonode.org/prototypical-inheritance>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great for making UI. Still a lot of work to do all the crappy "extends" stuff, but still not bad.

</comment><comment><USER20> Typo: the landing page says "Spine is a lightwork framework"

<comment><USER21> That's intentional ;) Seriously though, thanks - all fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'll have to have a dig around the code to see what's different from Backbone. Were you involved with this development, Jeremy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope -- someone just sent me the link this morning, and it was interesting to poke around the internals.

<comment><USER22> It's to your great credit that you promote and engage openly with the "competition." FWIW, CoffeeScript + Backbone/Underscore/Docco is, in my opinion, the most exciting thing to happen to JavaScript since the advent of major DOM libraries, and possibly since before then.

<comment><USER23> +1 to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> wasn't this backbone.js ? the TODO example is the same one !!

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't Backbone.js -- it's an alternative. Different codebase, different function names, partially overlapping API.

At the top of the FAQ, he answers some of the comparison questions: <http://maccman.github.com/spine/#h-faq>

The bit about it being smaller is pretty misleading (especially when comparing 2k to 3k) -- it may be 500 lines instead of 1100, but the 1100 are heavily commented, and the 500 are entirely comment-less. It also doesn't include any of the collection mapping, filtering, and aggregation functions, which contain a large part of the usefulness of Backbone when used with real models.

<comment><USER25> I'm curious how you respond to the differences in the Spine inheritance model and the argument they make for it:

"Spine's class implementation is one of its features that makes it stand out from the crowd. Rather than copying properties to emulate inheritance, as most libraries, Spine uses JavaScript's native prototypal inheritance. This is how inheritance should be done, and means it's dynamic, properties are resolved at runtime."

<comment><AUTHOR> Backbone uses proper prototypal inheritance ... so I'm not sure which "most libraries" he's comparing to there.

In fact, Spine doesn't use "JavaScript's native prototypal inheritance", which, if we're being honest, is the use of constructor functions with prototype properties. It uses an emulated version of Object.create:

[https://github.com/maccman/spine/blob/master/spine.js#L79-11...](https://github.com/maccman/spine/blob/master/spine.js#L79-119)

... which, even when natively implemented, is quite a bit slower than the real thing:

<http://jsperf.com/new-vs-object-create>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks interesting.

</comment><comment><USER27> The only thing Spine seems to have really tackled is "Collection/Model synchronization" which in my opinion should have just been built as an extension to backbone.

Copying the website element for element and 90% of the design paradigm from backbone.js would have been semi-acceptable to me if the author elaborated more on the comparison between backbone in his FAQ.

"Lastly, Spine is much simpler and half the size, go and check out the source."

"Much simpler" seems like a huge call to make and it has been nice to see Jeremy refute all claims by spine.js thus far.

Edit: Also I don't think Backbone.js should receive any negative points for naming conventions. MVC has such a diluted definition that it barely matters how a framework chooses to implement it.</comment>


Google Chrome for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/w00t.html

<comment><USER2> For those with privacy concerns, Iron is a fork of Chromium that targets privacy and security.

Download link: <http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php>

Comparison with Chrome: [http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron...](http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php)

<comment><USER3> Iron works great but has issues with Flash (Ubuntu 9.10 x64).

Can anyone confirm if Linux Chrome plays well with Flash?

<comment><USER4> For the past ~2 months or so, Linux Chrome has worked really well with flash -- as good or better than Firefox. They seem to be running a windows version of flash -- or at least the few times flash has run into an endless loop and I have to kill it via top, the process name is "exe".

Update: Flash still doesn't work perfectly -- as my trip to scribd just proved. For times like this, I just reopen the page in Firefox.

<comment><USER5> That explains a lot! I wondered how Chrome OS got the Linux build of Flash working without X11. I thought they might have a thin X11 lib in their window manager, but I guess they shoe-horned the Windows build into the Linux version of Chrome. Crafty.

<comment><USER6> Chrome OS uses X11. The idea that Chrome is running Windows Flash Player under some kind of Wine wrapper is ridiculous IMO.

<comment><USER7> But the name contains the string .exe! Clearly that means Windows is being emulated.

(Note to people that think this is true; install f-spot on Linux some time. It's a C# application, and ends in .exe. Even though it has nothing to do with Windows, except that Microsoft spec'd C# and Microsoft makes Windows...)

<comment><USER8> So does all mono compiled applications for unix/mac. It's just an extension. It might be what you have said, but unless verified. It isn't.

Picasa for example is emulated through wine on Linux/Mac, but that's because it was developed originally for Win32.

<comment><USER9> It's not correct to say that Picasa is emulated using wine. Instead, it's a native Linux app that has been ported using WineLib, which reimplements a lot of the Windows API, but compiled to Linux. Instead of replacing API calls with the Linux equivalents, there's just an additional layer that redirect calls or implements them.

Wine and WineLib are different things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stores passwords in plain text on disk: [http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25404&...](http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25404&q=password&colspec=ID%20Stars%20Pri%20Area%20Type%20Status%20Summary%20Modified%20Owner%20Mstone%20OS)

I noticed that detail when I was trying out Chromium a while back, and it still hasn't been fixed. It seems like a simple but basic security feature. I don't know what else isn't done yet, but it does make me worry. No guarantees that Firefox isn't doing similar things I'd object to, but I don't know about them, so for better or worse I have more confidence in it.

<comment><USER11> What's the alternative?

Even if it encrypts the password before storing them on disk, the encryption/decryption key are necessarily on disk anyways, no?

<comment><USER12> No.

You can use a master password to decrypt your encrypted password database.

Your operating system might have a keyring service or an encrypted filesystem you can use to store your keys in.

You might even use a hardware token, or some specialized on-board hardware for storing your passwords securely.

<comment><USER13> It's just a matter of time to find the right auto-fill form and replay the HTTP post data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This may be a niche problem, but I found an interesting bug in chrome yesterday.

<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=7357>

Basically, if you do a redirect (30x) then the referrer isn't set. This means that a number of things are broken. The referrer should be set, and is set in all other browsers.

For example, if someone clicks on a tinyurl link, which redirects to your website, you won't get info on where they came from. The referrer will be empty.

Bug was reported in feb, I'm not sure why it's not been fixed, since it's a pretty big bug.

</comment><comment><USER15> for what it's worth, I've been able to use the chromium daily builds without any problems for about 6 months :)

<comment><USER16> Have you noticed the 5 second computer freeze every time you type or hit a keyboard button when Chrome is active? Cause I have.

<comment><USER17> If he had that problem I doubt he would have posted:

> I've been able to use the chromium daily builds without any problems for > about 6 months :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just called up my local development site which has a ".dev" domain (which is setup in /etc/hosts) in Chrome and it decided it didn't want to load up any JavaScript or CSS. Apparently you have to disable the phishing and malware protection from the options. Just in case anyone else has a similar setup.

<comment><USER19> I used .aq domain with Chrome for my dev projects: it's real and mostly unused.

<comment><USER20> Antarctica. Nifty!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 It's not really the same thing without the alt-text, is it?

<comment><USER21> I'm just sad that Mac Chrome didn't also get a comic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I know this isn't 'Chrome Support' - but any idea how I would get the scroll wheel to get working?

edit (i.e., have it be that actually clicking it yields the windows behavior of being in a 'scroll mode' - motioning it down will have me going down the page, instead of actually wheeling it down)

</comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately, the chromium .deb _pre-depends_ on a version of dpkg that is greater than the ones available on the xandros repositories for my little eeePC (it needs >= 1.14.00; repositories have 1.13.25). I'm sure the eee forums will have a solution to that, so I'll check there.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like they ran out of cash to get Scott McCloud like they did for the first, awesome, Chrome comic: <http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/>

</comment><comment><USER25> Are there any advantages to running this over Chromium?

<comment><USER26> Some dis-advantages, I guess. Since it's beta, it won't run plugins (yet). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER27> extensions seem to work fine

<comment><USER26> I stand corrected.

<comment><USER28> I have tried a few plugins. One in 4 (flashblock) has worked, the others didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone understand the first panel?

I see a bunch of people in a room, one with a can of soda, and another with a banana. Is this a party?

</comment><comment><USER30> Wait, you can resize the comment field? Quite handy, doesn't work with Gecko- based browsers nor Opera...

<comment><USER31> It's a webkit feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there an equivalent of the Firefox 'Permit Cookies' plugin for Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been using the Ubuntu Chromium PPA builds for the last two months and as far as I can see, it all works just fine. Granted, the Delicious plugin didn't start working until a few weeks ago and I haven't yet tried any other plugin, but the developer tools are very good and those are the majority of my Firefox plugins.

<comment><USER34> How do you get developer tools working? I'm using PPA builds as well, and I have no access to dev tools. Tried launching it with some flags and still no luck. Can't find documentation anywhere :/

<comment><AUTHOR> To get to the firebug-ish dev tools, right click and select "Inspect Element", or pull down on the "Control" menu (top right) and you should see a Developer menu.

<comment><USER34> I see the Developer menu, but "Developer Tools" is not listed on my Ubuntu build like it is on my Windows build. :/

I'm pretty sure I can't Inspect Element on my ubuntu build either, but I will try it when I get home.

<comment><USER35> If you hook into the Google repo, the unstable Chrome builds have "Inspect Element", but the daily PPA builds of Chromium haven't for me. As I stated earlier though, I haven't updated them for a couple of months though.

<comment><USER36> You need to install the "chromium-browser-inspector" package and restart Chromium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Great...looks slick and runs fast...but with comments like this (<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/>), how can I trust it?

<comment><USER27> Obviously you can't because you are doing something you think/know you aren't supposed to be doing.

In all reality however google is no more evil than telephone companies that _allow_ the government to place wire taps on lines or datacenters _allowing_ the government to take the private server your website is on.

<comment><USER38> Since when is following laws evil?

<comment><USER39> Following evil laws is evil. Legality and morality are orthogonal, not isomorphic, concepts.

<comment><USER40> Morality and law are not equivalent or coterminous for sure, but I'd hardly say they are orthogonal. Do you really think they are completely void of interdependency?

<comment><USER39> They're orthogonal in that both can vary independently of the other. Making an act legal or illegal does not alter the morality of the act, nor does the morality of an act in a given context change the legality of performing it.

To the extent that you can plot the morality vs. legality of acts on a cartesian plane it's nice to find most points near the diagonal, but that doesn't mean they aren't separate axes.

<comment><USER40> Doesn't the law tend to follow morality hysterically (ie with hysteresis). Also a weaker point might be that civil disobedience itself could be considered immoral [in some moralities].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice comic. Needs better lettering.

</comment><comment><USER42> just don't use it for anything you'd rather keep private, i guess...

<comment><USER35> Then run Chromium instead of Chrome. Inspect the code if you are wary about your privacy on the browser.</comment></comment>


Havana celebrates 500 years of foundation - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50322553 <comment><USER2> In the context of the (european) New World, this is positively ancient. It's actually a bit disorienting (I'm betraying a bit of an US-centric perspective here, apologies) to think of Havana thriving for HUNDREDS of years before many American metropolises. Very cool.

<comment><USER3> I've lived a lot of my life in ex-Spanish territories which are now part of the US.

This includes visiting St. Augustine, FL as a kid (founded 1565), and living in Santa Fe[1], NM (founded 1610), which is an hour or so drive south of Taos Pueblo where you there are multi-story buildings around 600 years old.

I think these should be part of a US-centric perspective of US history, but I recognize that most people -- including myself -- learn an English/British flavored perspective of that history.

I also know what you mean. I grew up in Miami, and as a kid there were still people alive born before the city was founded.

[1] Full name: La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At one point Cuba exported 60% of the world's sugar. If not for a trade embargo with the US (its most important trade partner) for the last 70 years, Cuba would be a very different place. Who knows if many of these architectural relics would be in better shape (arguably "progress" might have meant they would have been demolished for newer buildings). They have an amazing literacy rate (99.7%, one of the highest in the world) and incredible doctors, but yet have terrible poverty and a repressive state. I always wonder whether this will be the year that the country opens up and connects with the rest of the world.

<comment><USER5> There is no 'blockade' of Cuba, they are free to trade with the other 186 or so nations on planet earth, and can buy/sell most American goods via other destinations. They are a member of the WTO (!!) Since commodity markets are fungible there isn't a huge reason for sugar to be seriously devalued.

It's hard to 'blame America' for the totalitarian rule of Castro Inc. in Cuba, this subject makes me wonder deeply about the nature of perspective of populist leftists, anti-Americans etc.. Cuba is always an interesting litmus test for those who are willing to completely look the other way so long as the 'red flag' is on the pole.

The revolution made a few leaps and then failed miserably, as so many do, which is a real shame, because it's such a wonderful country otherwise. It'd be amazing to see what that country would be under some kind of normal leadership - I suggest it would be the richest in Latin America.

<comment><USER6> That is simply not true — see the 180 day rule that prevents any ship docking in Cuba from entering US ports for the next 180 days. It's not like the rest of the world is just free to trade with Cuba without repercussions from the US, and given the much smaller Cuban market, it's not surprising that many operators would rather avoid the trouble of unloading cargo there. The revolution has done pretty remarkably well given the adverse circumstances it was placed under.

<comment><USER7> It is true. Just try to take about anything into the country which is not for personal use, and you will see it confiscated by Cuba's customs. Only a handful of entities strongly affiliated with the Cuban government can import goods for commerce in Cuba. You can check it here: [https://www.nordeatrade.com/en/explore-new- market/cuba/custo...](https://www.nordeatrade.com/en/explore-new- market/cuba/customs) under the "Import Procedures" paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Panama City is 500 years old too this year.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just spent a long weekend in Havana with my fiance, it's a fantastic place to visit. As an American, super surreal visit. [https://wanderandponder.com/2019/11/04/a-weekend-in- cuba/](https://wanderandponder.com/2019/11/04/a-weekend-in-cuba/)

If you're into art, keep an eye on the contemporary Cuban art scene. Got to see some really impressive pieces during our visit.

</comment><comment><USER10> umm, can someone explain how significant this is?

<comment><USER5> These are the oldest 'Western' cities in the colonial New World. They were established just after 'contact', just as Byzantine (i.e. E. Roman Empire) finally fell to the Ottomans, at the dawn of the Reformation, before the Enlightenment ... just at the very start of the 'modern period' in Europe. To give some context, Napoleon was 100 years closer to 'our time' than he was to 'that time'. The last English king to die in battle was about this time. The French were not yet a real power. Europe's borders as we know them were just taking shape, and the 'Americas' were entirely Aboriginal.

So they are very intesting cities born at a major turning point in civilisation.

<comment><USER11> > just as Byzantine (i.e. E. Roman Empire) finally fell to the Ottomans

The Fall of Constantinople was in 1453, the Empire of Trebizond fell in 1461, and the Principality of Theodoro in 1475, which marked the final end of any state claiming to have been the "true" successor to the Byzantine Empire after its defeat in 1204 in the Fourth Crusade. All of these dates markedly predates Columbus's contact voyage in 1492.

<comment><USER12> Byzantium still existed, it was just under Ottoman domination, and relatively speaking of course, the Ottomans were relatively more tolerant than Christians than other Muslim empires, and the heritage of Byzantium was transferred to Russia, the connections with the West were still strong. This may just come down to it depending on which history books you read.

Fun fact: The Patriarchate of Constantinople still exists today!

<comment><USER13> I always found the idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome" quite fascinating:

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

[Also the derivation of Tsar from Caesar]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 500 years of foundation? I guess the history of the Mesoamericans who lived there prior to their genocide by the Europeans isn't available?

<comment><USER15> They didn't found a city called Havana, that's all.

<comment><USER14> You clearly missed my point. But that's okay since I presume your intentions and support of colonialization is clear.

<comment><USER15> This may surprise you, but I wasn't around in the 16th century to either support or oppose anyone's actions, let alone their intentions.

<comment><USER14> You are here now supporting past actions and intentions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anything that you want built from 2 Java programmers free of charge? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I have been lurking HN for some time now, and have finally found an opportunity to make a contribution. A friend of mine is going to be starting her first programming job in the middle of July and she lacks confidence in her skills, so I decided to work together with her until then and create a production ready project together. Since the good folks on this site always seem to need something built, I figured it was best to ask here and see if we could make someones day a little bit better. :)
Some info about our skills:
-me: worked for about 2 years in Java web application development, so I am familiar with things like Spring, Hibernate, templating engines, JUnit, Apache CXF, Apache web server and Apache Tomcat, CSS, Html, JavaScript and databases(particularly MySQL).
-her: she is going to start her first full time job as a developer in 2 weeks, these are some of the things she knows: core Java, HTML, CSS, EJB 3, JPA and JPQL (I believe she has some EclipseLink experience), Glassfish and Tomcat and some knowledge of databases
Given our 2 skill sets, I believe we could handle best building a web application or a web service, though we are open to other things if they are within our power to build.
Hope we can be of assistance to some of you.
tl;dr: we are 2 java developers looking to donate about 2 weeks of our time to building something that you need free of charge.
Regards, Vlad
P.S.: if there are project details that you are not comfortable discussing in the comments, to get my e-mail you just add .ro to the end of my HN username and add at gmail.com. <comment><USER2> Restaurant Listing Website

I have all of the data on an excel spread sheet pertaining to my sample area. I have 90 Restaurants, the operating hours, the prices of food, the types of food, the addresses, contact info.

A website that could show people what they could eat based off of the amount of time they have available, the amount of money they have, and the types of food they would like to eat.

The website or app would be able to produce results based off of the constraints provided by the user, and my data.

Show Operating hours and update in real time

Show directions to and from restaurant

List genres of Food and Drink Type

Show User comments and recommendations by integrating Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter

Business Model would offer restaurants a subscription service to offer deals, news, to users. Advertisements may also be streamed to generate additional revenue.

</comment><comment><USER3> An open source web app/tool for adult film actresses/actors to easily make their own monthly subscription based websites with an api that people can use as a basis for a smart phone app that does the same thing.

Pain Points: 1)Adult Actors/Actresses get maybe 1% of the long term returns on the content they appear in.

2)Making their own site, setting up a way to let clients pay, and figuring out how to get streaming videos to work, are all way too hard for the average performer and lead to them being stuck accepting the 1% mentioned above.

Note: I would use it for my site, as I am also an adult film actress (a transgender one) and this is something I plan to build for myself and my peers at some point in the future, and it would be great to just contribute to the open source project rather than starting from scratch.

<comment><USER4> hi am looking to create something like that, if you interested drop me an email: mrj010101 at gmail dot com

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Build something that not just an individual needs, but that the entire community needs. And bonus points for open sourcing it. Rather than asking what HN needs, instead think of what YOU need. I'm currently working on a project that I think other people would benefit from, but worst case scenario if I'm the only user, it's going to make my life a hell of a lot easier. Try and do the same. Obviously theres something you encounter in everyday life that you think sucks and could be fixed through a java app. Do that, open source it, and everyone wins.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I do agree with what you said as a general statement, I have found quite a few sticking points in applying this to web applications.

Firstly, I for one have seen very little interest in the open source-ing of web application code. I might be wrong, but as far as I know there are only a few bigger websites that put out their code (such as reddit if I'm not mistaking).

Secondly, to fix a problem with the skills we are trying to use(web development mostly) you need to host it, launch it and then maintain and manage the site. While getting what we build up and running would not be too big a problem, neither of us would have the time to invest in maintaining and managing the site. Therefore, we thought that it would be more beneficial to help someone with their backlog.

So, to sum it up, we thought of this more along the lines of: "hey, you know that thing that you have been thinking of building, but have been putting it off for months? pitch it to us and we'll make it for you".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A good geocoder.

Geonames has a good dataset of locations, and OpenStreetMaps has the regional boundary data.

So given something like "Boston, Massachusetts, USA" would take all the locations within the boundary box of "USA" and find the closest match to "Massachusetts" (using something like soundex), and then within Massachusetts find the closest match to "Boston" and return the long/lat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, a good geocoder sounds a bit ambigous to me. As far as I can tell geonames has an API with both XML and JSON for getting longitude and latitude off of city names, so I am not sure what exactly you believe can be improved by crossing data from OpenStreeMaps. Could you maybe clarify exactly what you had in mind?

<comment><USER6> When you query geonames for "Boston, Massachusetts, USA" it can do it correctly but only because it's data is manually hard-coded as Boston being inside Massachusetts. If there was some other administrative region that Boston fell inside than geonames wouldn't be able to handle that.

For example geonames fails for "Southsea, Hampshire, UK" as even though Southsea is in geonames and falls within the regional boundary of Hampshire, geonames doesn't have that knowledge. OSM has the regional boundary data which can be used for that purpose.

Also once you have that you can do looser matching. For example if you search Geonames for "Bosten, MA, USA" it won't find anything. If you used soundex for an approximate search for "Bosten" you'll turn up lots of unrelated locations, but if you did it restricting it to places in "MA, USA" you'd have a much better chance of getting an accurate match.

While this isn't such a big issue in latin-alphabet countries, in the rest of the world latin-spelling of smaller town and city names is often completely unstandardized so using exact search often misses the town/city even though it might be listed in geonames under a slightly different spelling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to have a simple newsletter tool, with a backend administration interface that clients could use (WYSIWYG editor, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds doable, shoot me an e-mail and we can see how simple is simple for you. :)

<comment><USER8> Parent is asking for a spam program, don't fall for it. Sending bulk email isn't trivial at all and there are already good solutions for it such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about building an open source activity stream app ?

[http://500.co/2011/02/08/build-a-killer-product-faster- the-s...](http://500.co/2011/02/08/build-a-killer-product-faster-the-secret- of-user-activity-streams-and-cohort-metrics/)

Use Twitter Bootstrap for the UI and just have a simple generic REST service you can push activity events to. This would also allow you to get some exposure into WebSockets. Maybe even try and do it in Play, Grails, Vert.x etc for something different.

You could even turn it into a little startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> This actually sounds pretty interesting and I would really like to fiddle with this idea. The thing is right now it actually feels like biting off a bit more than we can chew. I might just come back to this idea somewhere in the future, since I find it really intriguing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about a front end to MongoDB?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you say front end to MongoDB, what exactly are you thinking of? This makes me think of something along the lines of phpMyAdmin, are we on the same page here?</comment></comment>