Ask HN: Review My Startup – ShareShoot - <AUTHOR>

ShareShoot is an event-based,  cross-platform, photo sharing app. We built it after taking a large group trip to Mexico and dealing with the difficulties of coordinating photos after the fact. Someone sent out a link to a cloud solution, everyone intended to upload and only a few ever got around to it. It turns out the same problem exists when small groups go out, when people go on trips or when someone has family abroad that they'd like to sync photos with.
We have a few users, but are trying to bridge the gap between "it mostly works" and customers get the value and can experience the mvp without manual intervention. So, if you have any feedback, we're all ears.
shareshootapp.com
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I would say your site needs a little work but that the app is a really neat idea.

Actually I think your explanation here is better than the one you put on your site! Maybe have the site tell the story you told here. The whole application is really easy so I would say tell the story, very short and simple, and quickly get people to the app store to get the app! Might also be good to advertise a bit on facebook since you tie to facebook friends.

I would make the hero graphic at the top of your site a little higher res, it's a bit fuzzy. Also you don't need that top nav menu. Just go with it as a single page. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're starting to clean it up a bit and hopefully as the feedback moves in, will figure out exactly who are target market is and how they respond to it.

Sometimes it's easier to relate to the folks on HN than it is to the rest of the world. Maybe I'll reuse the copy from here and throw it on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google+ has ( or had ) this feature.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: [http://www.shareshootapp.com/](http://www.shareshootapp.com/)</comment>


Do Students Really Have Different Learning Styles? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/04/do-students-have-different-learning-styles/ <comment><USER2> In elementary school, it was always the slow learners who the teachers classified or who self-selected as "kinesthetic learners" when this topic came up: Hands-on teaching was far more patient than lecturing. Lazy students like me were called "visual learners" because we didn't care to bury ourselves in state texts written for 10 year-olds. I sensed that the theory was bunk then, and it's bunk now. From the cited UVA article: [http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September- Oc...](http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September- October%202010/the-myth-of-learning-full.html)

      > Third, learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming
      > "common knowledge." Its widespread acceptance serves as
      > an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This
      > is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon
      > called the confirmation bias.

That point is made clear by other comments in this thread treating the existence of these "styles" as a matter of fact.

Differences between students don't prove that learning is constrained to a single sense. It's a bizarre hypothesis and it only serves educators.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't like this article. Here are my main concerns:

1) The review article cited at the start concludes its abstract with this:

"Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all."

I would happily replace the entire linked article with these two half paragraphs! Note that this means we don't know there isn't learning styles; we just know that those handful of ones so far tested have proven ineffective.

2) That a classroom does better with a math-through-music approach does not mean that all students do better through that. The cited article for this study doesn't appear to make that claim or any claim about the existence of learning styles (but it's paywalled). Clearly a classroom learns better when instructed in a language that the students understand - does that mean that learning styles don't exist?

3) That classes learn best when given a mixture of styles of information does not mean that there are no learning styles. (If you told me that mixing styles improves a class's learning, that would make me think it more likely that learning styles exist - otherwise it's more likely that there's some optimal single method that is better than trying all available methods.)

<comment><USER4> Re 3: I think it's likely that there are diminishing returns the longer you present material the same way, and that switching it up makes students more interested.

When I read that part, I assumed they were talking about the individual students performing better, not the class in aggregate. If it's student by student, that is (weak) evidence against learning styles.

<comment><USER5> >> Re 3: I think it's likely that there are diminishing returns the longer you present material the same way, and that switching it up makes students more interested.

Maybe as important, variety helps keep the instructor from losing interest in what he/she is teaching. If the instructor sounds interested, that makes the subject sound interesting, and that undoubtedly is good for learning. See the Hawthorne Effect.

>> When I read that part, I assumed they were talking about the individual students performing better, not the class in aggregate. If it's student by student, that is (weak) evidence against learning styles.

The bigger issue is the the lack of evidence in favor of learning styles. Without supporting evidence, there's no particular reason to believe they exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I taught an advanced adult course for a number of years. I taught something north of 700 students in 40 and 80 hour courses over that time. I also later developed curriculum for another instructional program involving around 300 hours of instruction time that taught complex technical skills to another 300 people (equivalent to 2 B.S. degrees in terms of class-time) and graduated them as instructors in their subject. So I feel comfortable claiming I'm a professional educator (at least with adults). I also feel comfortable claiming that there are definitely different learning styles.

In addition, after being identified as a "special gifted student", I myself went through a nonstop progression of tests and evaluations as a student starting in elementary school and continuing all through high school so I'm extremely familiar with the tests and results being talked about here.

I'd say as both a subject of these tests and as a former professional educator, yes, absolutely, students have different learning styles. But I agree with the article that the kinds of styles and methods used to identify the learning modes don't really work.

Even worse, once students learn the results of these diagnostic tools, they use this knowledge as a kind of crutch to explain areas they are weak in. I'm sure there's a term for this phenomenon. Students then expect the teacher to treat them as a special snowflake and teach in the mode that they believe they learn most naturally in.

I believe that these diagnostic tools are being used incorrectly. They should be used to identify where students have weak modes of learning, and then their education should focus on building up those modes, not streamlining the educational process for efficiency and optimizing only for where students are _already_ strong.

It's like a person who already has strong biceps doing nothing but curls in the gym and not only skipping leg day, but telling everybody else in the gym that they don't do legs because they're biceps are already well developed and their legs don't work so well.

This is a continuation of the notion that public education is an assembly line process like building cars and needs to optimize for the fastest way to shove knowledge into a student's head. This is a hopelessly dead-end approach to pedagogy.

Education should be about teaching people how to learn themselves. If a student opens up multiple modes of learning, they can already multiply their capacity to learn. If you are weak in an area, then you should concentrate in that area. Learning is both a talent and a skill that needs cultivation.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Are you aware of ways of teaching new modes of learning, or even have a list of modes? And whether it can be done with reasonable success (ie. given that people think in different ways, can one person become as competent in other modes or are they limited by their hardware? Are there studies around this?)

<comment><USER6> I'm a strong believer that students have to "complete a circuit" with new concepts. That means they have to be able to express as output what they just took in as input. If they read or hear something, they have to be able to explain it back in both writing, speaking and demonstration. Knowledge has to go in and come out of a student so it exercises as much of their brain as possible and the semantic links are built. I model this a little on language acquisition, you have to be able to both recognize and produce in your new language before you can say you've learned it. I think the same is true for any subject.

In terms of pedagogy, the best I could do was to make sure each lesson in the curriculum provided as many modes to learning as possible with as many opportunities for them to produce as possible with a very strong focus on high interactivity with the instructor and the material:

For visual learners: strong visual presentation with every idea possible presented as pictures as well as with a written description. Presentation was both in detailed slides, a take-home textbook as well as supporting dynamic whiteboard versions of what was on the slides. This covered people who "think in pictures" who "think in words" and who "think in sequences" (provided by the whiteboard portion).

For auditory learners: Detailed lecture explaining each part of the presentation, try to provide stories and catch phrases for each part of the presentation. For each subject, learn your script so you aren't inventing the material on the fly and end up confusing the students while you figure out what to say next. Use key phrase repetition for minor concepts to build up a kind of mnemonic vocabulary and assemble that vocabulary into major concepts. Explain each topic in at least two different ways. Get the class to repeat back difficult terms and phrases. This covers people who use different kinds of memory aids (mnemonics, catch phrases, stories, etc.) to semantically find things in their memory, and verbally constructs ideas into language-like features. The presentation above acts as a primer for the teacher as well and provides links between the visual and auditory worlds.

For tactile/kinesthetic learners: phase 1) a live demonstration first to show, phase 2) a hands-on demonstration (students followed along with the teacher step by step) to teach, phase 3) then a student only exercise for mastery -- followed by a step-by-step review of the student only exercise to fill in gaps and cement in the ideas. Kinesthetic opportunities are also provided through instructor interactivity, getting students provide some of the whiteboard demonstration, exaggerated body movements during class (I even eventually introduced some silly dances, teachers have to have no shame), hand motion, physical demonstrations, consistent object positioning in real space and on visual material. The 3 phase exercise system also provided plentiful hands-on time. I found that _all_ students are kinesthetic to some extent. Part of being a mammal I think. I modeled this off of big cats teach their young to hunt.

The lessons were all carefully ordered to ensure prerequisites were properly covered, then reused as the foundation for new knowledge. New knowledge was always presented as single items, then slowly grouped into pairs and triples of concepts, with interactions and complexity between concepts explained. Often time examples of a new concept were demonstrated in 2 or 3 forms to help reinforce the concept as distinct from the specific implementation we were going to use for the exercises.

Groups of lesson blocks were then collected into mastery exercises to reinforce what they learned up to that point (which were reviewed step by step like in phase 3 of the three phase kinesthetic exercise above) and then entire courses had a capstone exercise (where the students were encouraged to break the exercise down and assign pieces out to each other, to work together and to ask questions of each other, even across teams) with full blown presentation at the end of each capstone. The capstone exercises were purposely open to interpretation so there was no "right" answer (but there were definitely wrong answers), but the students were encouraged to ask questions to each other during the presentation and the instructor was to ask students to justify specific claims.

Realistically, every single class breaks down into 3 categories of students:

The top of the class, who are eager learners and who know how to pay attention and apply the lessons immediately. They never get bored, even when the subject was boring, they always find _something_ to learn or reinforce. There's almost always at least 1 of these in every class.

The middle of the class, the bulk of the students. They represented the typical student, interested in learning, but not willing to put lots of effort into it. Smart enough, but require frequent reinforcement and enormous efforts on the part of the instructor to ensure interactivity. Usually by the end of the class _most_ of these students were engaged, paying attention and at least minimally passing all portions.

The "1". There's always one student who's completely unreachable. No matter how much time or effort you put into them, they're unable to learn the material. I've observed that most of these people have some kind of strong singular personality trait: usually people very self absorbed into their own personal problems, whatever they might be (family trouble, divorce, work issues, car having trouble, chronic health problems, etc.). They typically were bored in class, frequently absent or tardy, and consistently lacked basic and fundamental skills.

Most often they just wanted a procedure guide to follow or list of steps to remember -- the worst possible educational outcome, rote memorization. When those students finished the course and went back to their workplace, very few of them maintained long-term employment in their job as well -- often resigning once the first complex task landed on their desk.

This "1" usually emerged by the end of the 1st 8-10 hours of instruction. After a while you learn as a teacher you really have no choice but to leave this person behind. If they ask questions or show interest, _always_ help them, but don't pace the class to that person. Their fundamental problems are something they brought with them as a burden into the class and you will not be able to overcome those even if the entire class is turned into an extended 1-1 session with them focused on nothing but teaching that individual student the material at the expense of every other student.

Classrooms are not navy flotillas, moving at the speed of the slowest ship. You have to reach the bulk of the students. With these "1" students, there's simply no magical teaching method or style that's going to suddenly overcome their years of personal educational neglect and bring them up to speed with the class and make them excel.

They have more remedial and fundamental issues with learning attitude that they have to solve. Perhaps they were taught that rote memorization and procedures are the correct way and they've come to believe that and feel uncomfortable and insecure in more open-ended environments -- but non- procedural fields can never be adapted to fit this mental model they've grabbed onto and they've never exercised the parts of their brain necessary to figure out things on their own (to learn how to learn, critical thinking and problem solving). You won't solve these kinds of lifelong issues in your class. They need a separate and specific educational approach that focuses not on a specific subject but on how to learn. Not learning is an addiction to them and until they're actively seeking help to break out of it, no teaching method will solve it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently finished Make It Stick by Peter C Brown, who also says the learning styles myth is bogus.

Highly recommended book that changed the way read (I take notes and put them on flashcards).

The main point is that effortful retrieval practice is the key to learning effectively for the long-term and such that what you're learning can readily be connected to other ideas.

When practicing retrieval (quizzing yourself), he suggests:

1) spacing practice sessions so that it's hard but not impossible to recall 2) interleaving subjects (frustrating, but memories are much more durable and you can more readily connect leanrned ideas with others) 3) varying how you practice (same benefits as above) 4) rephrasing in your own words and attempting to solve tough problems before knowing the solutions

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points!! I just did a coursera course, learning how to learn, in which the professor emphasized some of these points. I have started using the Anki software and has helped me.

[https://class.coursera.org/learning-001/lecture](https://class.coursera.org/learning-001/lecture)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel that everyone can learn in all the major ways, although using a variety of learning styles makes it more engaging and fun.

I view learning styles more like food preferences. Sure, I may like Italian, but that doesn't mean I should eat Italian for every meal. Variety is also important. In terms of nutrition requirements, I can get calories from any food and the rest of the requirements in many different ways.

Also importantly, the nature of the material may make certain kinds of presentation more useful. Visual for geometry. Auditory for music. Kinesthetic (physical, touch) for sports. They don't have to be solely in those styles, but the core material probably should be, with supporting material in other styles.

The easiest way to cater to learning preferences is variety. Have it in oral and written form, graphics and text, hands on experiential. Come at it from all angles. The most surefire bet for learning is to saturate them all, but it's rarely practical, so try to cover at least a couple.

<comment> m-photonic Exactly. Proponents of the notion of learning styles have focused on individual differences, but it's somewhat of a red herring. The vast majority of people, whatever their strengths may be, benefit from approaching a subject using MULTIPLE learning styles, not just one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Annie Murphy Paul, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is a very thoughtful author on psychology and education research. I see she cites the path-breaking article by Daniel Willingham, which led to his Learning Styles FAQ,[1] which I encourage all of my friends here on Hacker News to read to better understand what this issue is about learning styles. People do tend to take somewhat differing approaches to learning new material, but at least part of what I have noticed about effective learners is that they learn new ways of learning, and gain "learning styles" as they grow up and become more versatile in what they can do.

[1] [http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles- faq.html](http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> After reading the article and the comments, it sure seems the subject (the "learning styles" hypothesis) arouses considerable passion in supporters and detractors.

But polarization may be inevitable when the subject is at best indistinctly defined. Academic learning would surely be associated with high level and complex neuronal circuitry, which would not seem to be easily parsed into a few categorical formulations.

Saying someone is a "visual learner" is very likely a vast oversimplification. Thorough neuropsychological evaluation can reveal dozens of specific cognitive abilities and show areas of strength and weakness.

Normally the "peaks and valleys" of abilities have modest difference, but there are individuals with great variation: for example, genius level (IQ 180) in some areas, while adjacent skills are just average (IQ 105).

Such "unevenness" can produce major difficulty with task performance in school and jobs, as markedly inconsistent abilities can hinder learning or productivity in ways hard to understand and rectify.

"Learning style" may be controversial because it is a hard to study, and assessing individuals is too complicated and expensive. The pragmatic approach of using a variety of methods to teach a class of 30 kids is quite sensible. A good teacher knows some students catch on better with one approach vs. another, but in any case, for the students who can learn from any approach the repetition would probably do no harm.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't believe people don't have different learning styles.

For instance, a guy I work with loves training videos. He will sit and watch lecturers and all the videos in sequence and take copious notes. Not me. Unless it's something complex and physical (like changing a car part) I can't abide video instruction. I don't care for audio much either. It's too slow and you can't skim picking out relevant points, nor refer back up quickly to refresh a concept. I don't think my co-worker does this. If he did prefer to read, he would start reading, read every word and not go back to what he read before until he was finished.

Having observed the difference in our learning style and our relative skill set, it appears (from my biased point of view) that I know a lot more than he does, and I get a lot more done.

But it would be interesting to hear my co-workers take on me. I'm guessing he probably has the view that my "rapid overview and fill-in-the-details as they are needed" approach is flighty, dangerous and inferior to the systematic linear method. And he may have some valid points in this regard. To be fair, we complement each other and work well together as a team.

<comment><USER13> It's interestng that you should say that, because the reason _I_ don't usually like lecture videos is that they're too _fast_ to keep up with, especially if you're writing notes. The worst thing is a guy talking and clicking through slides both at the same time, and we're talking about slides with equations the like, things that really have to be read and thought about.

Then again, I don't like real-life lectures much either, unless I've already read the associated text for that lecture beforehand.

I wonder if people like lectures for the same reason that people like brainstorming, group work, etc, which is that it might _feel_ like you're getting more work done than you actually are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article seems to measure something orthogonal to learning styles, namely that multiple styles combined and variety/novelty also play a key role.

Can someone explain to me what the data in this article has to do with learning styles as they're commonly thought of?

<comment><USER15> The concept of "learning styles" is something _we_ invented. It's not as if it has any intrinsic reality as a category, at least until we demonstrate it does.

This article is arguing (rightly) that it's not a useful way of thinking about how people learn. Or, at least, obscures the reality of how people _actually_ learn and makes it more difficult for us to explore that reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The traditional "learning styles" might have questionable scientific merits, but Mel Chua ([http://melchua.com](http://melchua.com)) is doing some really interesting research surrounding learning styles in programmers specifically: [http://blog.melchua.com/2014/08/12/learning-styles-for- progr...](http://blog.melchua.com/2014/08/12/learning-styles-for-programmers- activereflective/)

</comment><comment><USER17> While you might be able to insert knowledge into your brain with any of the better methods there are still methods people prefer. And over the long run you will learn more with your preferred style, because you spent more hours doing it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Shorter article: Learning styles don't exist, including the specific way that subjects are traditionally taught.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the context for this is important.

<pedantic> So, blind kids get amazing value from a power point slide presentation... </pedantic>

Ok, now accepting their argument is clearly wrong in general case. They might be talking about some vaguely defined average child. But, when you start looking at a wide range of things from vision to audio acuity you find people don't clump as much as you might think.

In the end it comes down to a cost / benefit analysis on supporting learning sytles vs a generic education. And in _that_ context there are far better ways to spend your money.

<comment><USER15> That's not what people mean when they talk about "learning styles" and I'm pretty sure you know that. Heck, it's even right there in the first sentence of the article:

> Learning styles — the notion that each student has a particular mode by > which he or she learns best, whether it's visual, auditory or some other > sense — is enormously popular.

It's the idea that every person as a particular sense or modality through which they "learn best" and it doesn't change with time. It comes attached with the idea that it makes sense to bucket students into "auditory learners," "visual learners," and so on. That in turn informs curricular and pedagogical decisions, e.g., "Make sure this lesson has a visual component."

I've been teaching programmers for two years, currently through CodeUnion ([http://codeunion.io](http://codeunion.io)) and formerly through Dev Bootcamp ([http://devbootcamp.com](http://devbootcamp.com)), and my personal experience is consistent with two things:

        1. The idea of "learning styles" is rubbish
        2. EVERYONE believes it, especially students

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard my students say something like "This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner" I'd be the Scrooge McDuck of nickels.

<comment><USER20> I do think "learning styles" can be easily used as an excuse to give up at the first sign of difficulty. However, I'm not sure that it's "rubbish". I've always been very good at spatial reasoning, so I often try to explain things in terms of pictures. Among generally intelligent people, some of them understand me immediately, and others require a lot of tries with different variations on the explanation.

I would be tempted to say that the people who don't understand should just be more willing to think spatially instead of being stuck in their other modes. However, then I imagine how it must feel for someone with perfect pitch to try to explain to me how to recognize pitches. I can't do it just by "trying" harder; I don't even understand what it is I'm supposed to be doing.

This is not to say that e.g. people who are not good at spatial thinking shouldn't still try to get better at it. But it does lead me to think that to some extent these learning styles really are, if not genetic, at least deeply embedded in our personalities and early childhood development.

<comment><USER15> You'll note that I didn't say they were rubbish BECAUSE students use them as an excuse. What's more, I didn't say that students use "learning styles" as an excuse, only that they believe whole-heartedly in their reality. As evidence of the fact that they believe in their reality, they say things like "This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner."

Why do you think "learning styles" have any independent reality to begin with? Why do you think the specific sense/modality/medium is of primary importance when it comes to understanding or modeling how people learn?

<comment><USER21> _This explanation doesn 't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner."_

Given that people say this, what do you think they mean by saying it?

<comment><USER15> It means they believe in the idea of learning styles and that whatever they're currently experiencing is accounted for by that belief.

As for how I translate that sentence into something useful for me as a teacher, I choose to hear it as: "Nothing in this explanation relates to anything in my picture of the world." It then becomes a problem of understanding the student's prior experience and current picture of the world.

The modality only matters insofar as it establishes congruence with the student's prior experience (IMO).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jobs to Be Done Framework Is More Useful Than Personas - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karti/jobs-to-be-done-for-a-camera-f5bb8c1c5316 <comment><USER2> My thinking about user frameworks reduces to two dimensions: intentions and capabilities.

Intentions express what a given population of users is trying to acheive. As a designer you need to situate where your interfaces are relation to that. Jobs to be done is useful for modeling intentions in part because it expressly looks at utility from a subjective (user's or buyer's) perspective and because the metric is simple.

Capabilities express what the user knows, is used to, and is motivated to learn. What skills and mindset does a user bring to thinking about and working with your solution. I have found personas useful as a shorthand for modeling capabilities.

In both dimensions, intentions and capabilities, there is a mixture across a given target market. You can look at different products as addressing different clusters in that space.

From a design/dev perspective, I think about intentions as the benefit side of what we're building, features provide benefits through satisfying intentions, and the capabilities on the cost side, that features should be "free" in terms of the percieved tax that our solution levies in terms of user's effort, attention, or learning.

</comment><comment><USER3> Jobs to be done is helpful to get a baseline understanding of what problem you want to solve. However personas and more detailed design work will help you understand your audience and their motivations. This helps you figure out if you're building VSCO or Facetune.

<comment><USER4> _This helps you figure out if you're building VSCO or Facetune._

This is a perfect example of where JtbD is stronger than personas. There are lots of people who use both VSCO and Facetune. The thing differentiating those two cases is what they intend to do with a photo, the job to be done. Another simple example of this type is YouTube vs TikTok. How are the personas different?

The case for personas is stronger within a specific task, for example: iMovie vs Final Cut Pro, ffmpeg vs Adobe Media Encoder. Even then it's not the touchy feely aspects of personas that bring value, but instead the basic market segmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How's jobs to be done much different from people just talking about what should the key features of our app be?

One big benefit of personas is towards bringing the ideal customer into the room when making decisions. Comments from those involved in building the software along the lines 'well I wouldn't use that feature', shift to 'well what would Anne want?'. Without personas embedded bias of the product team remain unaddressed and undifferentiated.

<comment><USER6> Before you can talk about what the key features should be, you should identify what jobs the customer is hiring the product to do. That anchors the discussion; otherwise you'll be talking in a vacuum about whether to build feature X or Y without anchoring it to a job the product needs to do.

The jobs to be done framework too brings the customer into the room. If we're building a photo editor, and I say, "I wouldn't use a feature that makes lips red and removes pimples", then we can talk about the job the photo editor is being hired to do, like "make me look pretty on Instagram". I can put forward my bias like "I don't care about that" and someone can counter that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you remember a front end testing tool? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I saw on HN a few weeks ago a comment talking about a software or script to do front end testing.
You define a path on your website (click on that button, enter, a login, password,..., visit page X,...) and the soft automatize the testing of the website.
Does somebody know the name of that soft/script ?
Thank you! <comment><USER2> I don't recall it being discussed on HN recently, but this description sounds like Selenium, <http://seleniumhq.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that's it ! Thank you very much :)

Thank you also djhworld!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure what post you're referring to, but Selenium might be what you are looking for? <http://seleniumhq.org/></comment>


On Denoting (1905) - <AUTHOR> https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-on-denoting.html <comment><USER2> I wrote my master's thesis on this in 1985. Back then there was a branch of the AI research community that was hung up on the following problem: John knows Mary's phone number. Mary and Bill have the same phone number, but John doesn't know this. If we translate this into formal logic in the straightforward manner it seems we can draw the false conclusion that John knows Bill's phone number:

Knows(John, Phone(Mary))

Phone(Mary) = Phone(Bill)

Therefore: Knows(John, Phone(Bill)) by substitution of equals

How do we prevent this? The answer, of course, is to distinguish between Phone(Mary) and "Phone(Mary)". When we say that John knows Mary's phone number what we really mean is that John knows that "Mary's phone number" denotes X for some particular X, i.e.

Exists(x): Knows(John, denotes("Phone(Mary)", x))

Because "Phone(Mary)" != "Phone(Bill)" (despite the fact that Phone(Mary) = Phone(Bill)) you can no longer draw the false conclusion.

I once had the opportunity to chat with John McCarthy and I presented this solution to him and he said (I'm paraphrasing), "Yes, that's what makes QUOTE in Lisp such a cool idea."

<comment><USER3> While you implicitly state this, the AI system is not wrong when it states that: Know(John,Phone(Bill)). The only problem stems from our human projection of what Know means. We assume that Know means to know it belongs to someone, while the system merely claim that John knows a number and that number belongs to Bill.

As you state, that meaning really maps to something like KnowBelongTo(John,Phone(Bill)), which doesn't become true when Phone(Mary) = Phone(Bill), as its definition would not be tied to Phone(X) but to BelongTo(X).

<comment><USER2> > The only problem stems from our human projection of what Know means.

It's a little trickier than that. If you allow substitution of equals (the technical term for this is that your logic is "extensional" rather than "intensional") then you get this:

Phone(Mary) = Phone(Bill) = 555-1212

Knows(John, Phone(Mary)) ==> Knows(John, 555-1212)

> KnowBelongTo(John,Phone(Bill))

You mean:

KnowsPhoneNumberBelongsTo(John, 555-1212, Mary)

And yes, that works, but it gets rather unwieldly. You can try to fix this using second-order logic:

KnowsRelation(John, phone-of, Mary, 555-1212)

or third-order:

Knows(John, relation, phone-of, Mary, 555-1212)

but then your inference rules start to get rather hairy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heavily influential to all of this was Frege's 'on Sense and Reference'. Best link I can give from my mobile is to a search, where you can find pdfs and the helpful wiki entry: [https://www.google.com/search?q=on+sense+and+reference](https://www.google.com/search?q=on+sense+and+reference)

</comment><comment><USER5> I like that this essay is basically just describing what a noun is, but the word "noun" doesn't appear in it.

<comment><USER6> It really isn't basically just describing what a noun is.

It's about the surprisingly subtle logical structure underlying how we use noun phrases; about qualifiers like "a", "some" and "the"; about a perhaps- surprising feature of language, namely that to the best way to explain what some term means may involve explaining how to rewrite whole sentences including that term in a different form.</comment></comment>


Ask HN / Review my startup: Clipik - <AUTHOR>

http://www.clipik.com
Clipik is a platform that provides crowdsourced-like video-editing services to all those consumers that
a) don't know how to DIY edit b) don't have time to DIY edit and
c) have a need for good video-editing services
It's perfect for young families, high school athletics, graduations, family reunions.  You send us your raw content and a skilled, freelance editor will convert that content into a concise, shareable highlight reel.
That is our initial target market as we know we solve a problem for those consumers.  As more and more photos and videos are generated (increased penetration in devices and user comfort with photos/videos) there will be an increased need for editing video on UGC.  There are additional markets that we can attack but we'd like to perfect our offering in our core market first.
Here is a little video that describes it better: http://vimeo.com/19500187
Would love to hear any feedback, see if people want to try us out or answer any questions.
Thank you kindly in advance! Pablo <comment><USER2> How do you manage the freelance editors? Have you made a proprietary system to help manage the images and video files?

<comment><AUTHOR> Editors apply to be part of our network so that we can ensure that they have the required level of editing skills in order to make awesome videos. We have a number of proprietary ways we handle the video and images on the backend that make it easier for both the consumer and the editor.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What truth do you believe in that the vast majority of people don't? - <AUTHOR> What truth do you believe in that you either lack the hard evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, or the hard evidence exists but for some reason most people refuse to look at it or accept it as true?<p>How do you cope with the fact that most people don't believe what you know to be true? <comment><USER2> What one man can do, another man can do.</comment>


Possible dataleak at LDLC.com - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/aplufr/status/941033930676981761 <comment><AUTHOR> This tweet is French, here is a English summary:

Someone has received an email from LDLC.com that explains that they found their email and passwords on another website in the clear.

The mail used is in the form "firstname.lastname@example.com" and is used only on LDLC.com website.

No official comment from LDLC.com.</comment>


Reddit successfully pressures Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to back off support of SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/o9gq7/reddit_successfully_pressures_rep_paul_ryan_rwi/ <comment><USER2> This headline is pretty misleading.

Ryan never supported SOPA. He came out against it. And this event came after Reddit guys said they should pressure him. And then clueless Reddit guys take credit for successfully pressuring him.

I would hope this HN crowd knows about correlation and causation.

<comment><USER3> Seconded – I don't see any evidence that Ryan's stance has anything to do with Reddit, before or after.

Such strange behavior for programmers – accepting an idea with no evidence, and allowing flattery to drown out reason.

<comment><USER4> This won't be a popular statement, but I think programmers and engineers in general pat themselves on the back more than they deserve in terms of how logical they are in real life situations.

<comment><USER5> As compared to whom?

<comment><USER4> My point is that many engineers I meet seem to have this attitude that since they're an engineer, it's evidence that they're logical and rational in all aspects of life. A recent case in point is an old friend who told me that he liked the chances of his startup because they were all engineers and so made rational decisions about their business. I threw back at him that there are also tons of engineers I've met who fall in love with their technology and make blind stupid decisions because of it.

More cases in point. Many an engineer crashes and burns if ever promoted to management because he doesn't know how to communicate with people. Any quality manager would be able to resolve conflicts easily, and the required people skills can be justified quite logically. This isn't to say that all engineers are idiotic non-people people. This is saying that there's a selection bias that just because someone was good at something, they must be good at other things.

I see many more cases in situations of crisis, deadlines looming, etc. Bet if you up it to a situation of war, no engineer's brain would be able to survive and continue to think logically; only those who are properly trained for thinking will getting continuously mortared would be able to continue functioning. Still more examples out there in areas like marriage relationships, anything that involves dogma (whether political, religious, or scientific), etc.

My point is not that other people are smarter or more logical about the rest of life than engineers. My point is that engineers are not automatically smarter or more logical about the rest of life than other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Online piracy is _not_ a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap duplication and transport of digital goods. Industries have to innovate to adapt to new technologies and circumstances.

<comment><USER7> _It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap duplication ..._

I've been trying to accumulate a list of practices or behaviors where there has never been any (or much) barrier to copying, and where for someone to complain would sound a little bizarre.

For example, hair styles. If you dream up a wicked hair style and go out in public, anyone who sees you can likely copy it for themselves.

Same with how you dress yourself. (See also <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=878401>)

Can anyone suggest others?

<comment><USER8> Hollywood invests as much as $100M in a single movie, probably no hair style has involved such effort. Perhaps if someone did invest $100M developing one hairstyle, they would try hard to protect it.

<comment><USER9> Voting down this point of view is pretty sad. While the content guys have certainly behaved badly, and sure don't seem to be creative in searching for solutions, you can't deny that there is a _huge_ problem for them if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone. Huge investments in films like that would completely cease to exist. No amount of hand waving will paper over that fact, and he's just stating it, not advocating SOPA or anything like that.

<comment><USER7> *...if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone."

My interest in this is wondering about areas where people innovate but rarely expect any sort of copy protection.

Few people are going to invest the budget of a Hollywood movie into a hair style. Is this because they know there is no practical way to stop people from copying hair styles?

Suppose the was never any way to copy protect [films|recordings|whatever]. How would this change things? Is (or was) the difficulty of copying things an aberration, a quirk of a relatively brief period of technology? Should we tell the MPAA and RIAA, hey, you guys just happen to have lucked out for a few decades?

If someone invested several million dollars in a hair style, and then tried to get laws to prevent people from copying it because copying breaks their business model they'd be mocked for basing a business model on an untenable condition. At what point do we do the same for people creating digital goods?

<comment><USER9> You write "you guys" as if the public has not benefited from the music and film industries over the years.

<comment><USER9> If you've ever seen a movie or listened to music, it stands to reason that you've benefited in some way from those industries, no? Come on people, engage your brains, this isn't reddit. IP is a complex, multi-faceted issue without any easy answers.

<comment><USER6> Most of the reasoning about piracy is based on the idea of content consumption. Content is not consumed in the sense that consuming it doesn't make it vanish. If I listen to a recording, you can listen to it, either at the same time, or later, when convenient.

The economics of content production and distribution changed. It's no longer difficult to move, replicate or make content from it. When refrigerators threatened ice factories we didn't outlaw them. How much does long-distance telephony cost to airlines? How much more business would they have if, in order to talk to your factory manager in Shenzhen, you had to be there? How much business have hotels lost thanks to it?

Luckily for us, they didn't have the power to outlaw long distance telephony.

This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent it.

<comment><USER9> You're conflating things that are useful with things that have some kind of inherent enjoyment value for people.

For instance, if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it, I guess we could just shrug our shoulders, but I think the world would be worse off for it.

> This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are > afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent > it.

I'm not in favor of what _they_ are proposing by any means, but do think there's a balance to be struck somewhere. What Amazon is doing with the Kindle isn't bad: it's very quick and easy to get eBooks across a whole range of devices. It's not perfect, but things like that and iTunes seem to be a good direction.

<comment><USER6> > if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it

Cory Doctorow manages that very well. There are models that make writing books and creating other works of art economically viable. Also, most writers never get well paid for the books they write. Actually, most artists are really poor.

<comment><USER9> Anecdotes are not data. Perhaps Cory Doctorow is leaving a lot of money on the table. That may work in his case, but for someone 'at the margin', it may mean they are forced to do something else, rather than write.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rep. Ryan's statement is significant and helps the cause in both the House and the Senate. Ryan is a widely respected policy leader for Congressional Republicans. It is also a strong stance for him to publicly oppose another Republican's legislation, while the bill is still being considered in committee.

</comment><comment> iso8859-1 I think sad how much of a popularity contest politics are. He doesn't really respond to the arguments, just uses the boilerplate "freedom" stuff. You can turn that statement right around, and it'd still make sense. I wish politicians would actually have the time and commitment to know what they were legislating. This system is broken.

Turned around:

> The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free > enterprise in history. It should stay that way. In order to do that, we must > close those evil sites so that we can have better conditions for the > corporations and they will continue to provide jobs and security to our > economy.

<comment><USER11> Having politicians who understand the issues you care about is no guarantee that they will work for them. Yes, most of us yearn for a utopia where we're ruled by super-intelligent benevolent overlords. But in the real world, I'll settle for politicians that take popular positions because it's what the voters want. Ryan did the right thing here, regardless of what you think about his understanding of the issue (or about his other politics), and should be commended. We won this little battle. It's a good thing.

<comment><USER12> """But in the real world, I'll settle for politicians that take popular positions because it's what the voters want."""

It doesn't always work out best. It becomes a tyranny of the majority. Especially when what's at stake impacts a small group of people (e.g. religious differences, minorities, etc). I'd rather settle for politicians that can think on their own.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. He makes a valid argument against the tyranny of the (uninformed) majority.

A significant number of Americans thought defaulting on our debt was a good idea and ignored every expert and economist shouting this would be catastrophic. Their argument was simply "we don't believe you" without supporting evidence, and without any desire to listen to counter-arguments. There is plenty of legitimate controversy over monetary policy, but basically everyone agreed defaulting on the debt was not a good idea.

I'm not arguing for elitism or benevolent dictatorship, but there are definitely times when "average Joe" has no idea what the fuck he is talking about.

<comment><USER11> In which case shouldn't the correct solution be to _educate_ Joe about the issue and get him to make informed choices at the voting booth and town hall meeting?

Which, it seems, is exactly what happened here. Democracy is working (if not working well). That's a good thing.

 _Edit: three responses now are picking on my use of the term "educate" and referring to the willful ignorance of the public. That's missing the point. People certainly can be "educated" about issues they care about, as demonstrated here. It's not an issue of "book learning" or making Joe watch the news. It's an issue of Joe knowing what matters to him already and getting access to information that impacts those interests._

<comment><USER14> Joe has no incentive to become educated. His odds of affecting the outcome are essentially nil [1], so it's all the same if he votes based on his tribal affiliations or self image (e.g. "look at me, I'm so very not racist!" or "look at me, I'm so religious").

[1] Math can be found here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750757>

<comment><USER11> Except that's clearly wrong, as evidenced by this very story. Joe reads reddit and hears about SOPA. Joe tells his rep he doesn't like SOPA. And his rep flips. QED.

The bug in your logic is that "tribal affiliation" is, in fact, an "issue" Joe cares about. You don't think it's an important issue, and probably don't like his affiliation anyway, but it is and he's going to vote on it. But it isn't the only issue.

Basically: you can't expect to "educate" Joe to think like you do. Education can't cure Christiantity, etc... But you _can_ tell him about stuff he cares about. Real people care about SOPA, they just don't know the details. That is something that can be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not clear that he ever supported SOPA, just that his form letter wasn't explicitly against SOPA when Reddit decided to work against him: [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/12/reddit- force...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/12/reddit-forces-paul- ryan-play-defense-sopa/46782/)

<comment><USER16> Targeting an influential rep who's ambivalent is arguably a better strategy than targeting reps who strongly oppose you and probably won't be swayed.

<comment><USER17> This is why bills are almost never voted down. One thing that politicians hate doing is switching positions because they can then get attacked on both sides of an issue and as a flip-flopper. In fact, bills rarely get voted down once they are proposed. Congressional leaders rarely force a vote unless they know the bill will pass. The most common way for a bill to die is to just never vote on it. This allows them to not support or oppose something controversial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Must we have politics on Hacker News...

Edit: It always ends up in bickering about viewpoints anyway.

<comment><USER19> Unlike generic politics posts, this is very narrowly focused, and shows how we, using our tools, can make real and immediate difference in how we are governed.

This isn't just "politics", it's practical self-determination.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SleepsToSanta.com - Speech Synthesizer API experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.sleepstosanta.com/?voice=Bells <comment><AUTHOR> SleepsToSanta.com is built using Google App Engine (PHP) and Google Chrome's Speech Synthesis API.

This was a project to learn how the text to speech API works and I thought coming up to Christmas it might be fun :)</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't Mac have an 'uninstall' function for unwanted programs? - <AUTHOR>

Just got a macbook air and I don't understand why the OS doesn't have a simple removal tool to uninstall programs. Can anyone reco an app that removes unwanted programs - entirely. <comment><USER2> Macs are a bit smarter than what you're used to - the application itself is contained (usually) in a single file...just move the app to the trash. You're done. Maybe empty the trash.

<comment><USER3> That, and it helps to double-check /Library/Application Support/ and ~/Library/Application Support/ for any stragglers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AppCleaner is a useful and free app that will uninstall programs properly. AppZapper is a useful app that costs money and will do the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> thx

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just drag and drop the icon into the trash.</comment>


DigiCert in-addr.arpa X.509 certificate mis-issuance - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/JFwqZx7RLL0 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284934)

</comment><comment><USER3> TIL: DigiCert uses manual processes for issuing certs which can be taken advantage of to mis-issue them. ([https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.security.p...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/JFwqZx7RLL0/ctOjU-v5AAAJ))

Also it seems like people are leaning towards replacing WHOIS with DNS, which seems like a great fix for their operational problems, but probably a security mistake.

<comment><USER4> Of course there are manual processes - there's a huge market for people who legitimately need certificates but cannot/will not automate everything. Otherwise everyone would have left the business after Let's Encrypt entered. You're not paying DigiCert for the cert itself - LE can give you that - you're paying them for having customer service, aka manual processes.

It looks like this particular process exists because automating WHOIS lookups is hard/unreliable. An agent does a WHOIS lookup, documents it, and passes the result to other people to review. That genuinely seems to be the best way to deal with poor-quality databases that have the right data.

Also it seems pretty natural to me that some business is going to ask for a certificate for www-staging.example.com or something, prove ownership in a way that happens to demonstrate ownership of example.com, and then be mad on launch day when www.example.com doesn't have a certificate too. So there should be a way for an agent to say "It looks like they control example.com" and authorize that, as long as there's review in place.

<comment><USER5> We should avoid having human agents making these determinations because they're very bad at it. Play to human strengths. The human agent working around the fact that you keep saying "Apache" but you're actually clearly running IIS from your description is where humans are good, training an AI system to figure this out would be really hard. Figuring out that .in- addr.arpa is a Public Suffix and therefore you cannot possibly prove control over it from a Web PKI point of view is just trivial string matching and perfectly suited to a machine.

We already have had incidents where a CA mistakenly took proof of control of one-name.example.com as sufficient proof of control of example.com itself and it's part of why Facebook freaked out before we had mandatory CAA (and before Facebook wrote themselves CAA records) because a sub-contractor got themselves a certificate Facebook didn't intend to exist. So no more of that please.

<comment><USER4> You should be allowed to register a public suffix - github.io is a public suffix, but the *.github.io wildcard is a perfectly legitimate certificate. And conversely facebook.com is not a public suffix, so that rule wouldn't have helped Facebook.

I agree a public suffix should trigger more aggressive validation (as should, perhaps, the first request for a TLD that the CA has never issued for before), but I don't think a computerized rule blocking registration of public suffixes is appropriate.

<comment><USER5> The Baseline Requirements forbid issuing for Public Suffixes in what the PSL calls the "ICANN DOMAINS" section (or wildcards immediately under those suffixes). That section includes in-addr.arpa but not github.io

Now, the BRs don't specifically tell you not to validate in-addr.arpa and then issue more specific certificates, but my patience wears very thin on how much needs to be spelled out letter by letter to have CAs stop doing things that are obviously a terrible idea.

I can see how the juxtaposition was confusing. Facebook wasn't concerned about public suffix problems, they were worried by (a historically common) pattern where bad guys find that if they're able to persuade a CA to issue them with some-machine.example.com the same CA will then issue www.example.com to them because hey, they're from example.com... It so happened in the case that worried them that couldn't have happened, but they were not to know that.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I forgot about the two classes of public suffix - and yes, if the BRs categorically forbid it and it's on an intentionally-machine-parseable list, then I agree there's no excuse for allowing issuance before a software upgrade to explicitly carve out an exception.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Extremely simple CSS font embedding - <AUTHOR> https://speedfont.com <comment><USER2> Nice tool! Especially with quick testing on fonts like you state in the documentation. But i'm wondering what is your source for the fonts?

</comment><comment><USER3> The font list menu item doesn't seem to do anything when I click on it. Using safari on latest iOS

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know! You can test it out on Desktop - I'll also try and get this fixed haha</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A fake pg would say (what?) - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> <http://www.braintripping.com/new/paul-graham>

</comment><comment><USER3> »You should only do 3 things: talk to users, and slip, and slide.« <https://makr.io/p/1415>

</comment><comment><USER4> "everyone wants that"</comment>


The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills' - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.in/blog/post.aspx?bid=377&bpid=25532 <comment><USER2> Maybe there should be a HN backlash against duplicate submitions :P</comment>


Marvell Technology firing 200 in Israel - <AUTHOR> http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-marvell-technology-firing-200-in-israel-1000933157

<comment><USER2> Layoffs ... "firing" sounds like they did something they shouldn't have for some reason.</comment>


Best/worst April Fools jokes? - <AUTHOR>

Seeing the command prompt on http://xkcd.com/ makes me wonder what the best and worst April Fools jokes are that people have run into this year.  List them here. <comment><USER2> Some Google ones are:

Google Annotations Gallery - <http://code.google.com/p/gag/>

Query times on Google search - Results 1 - 10 of about 672,000,000 for test [definition]. (at warp 8.88) - Results 1 - 10 of about 24,400,000 for foo. (2.00 shakes of a lamb's tail)

3d view on books and street view (try it!)

Translate for animals - <http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/>

Any I'm missing?

<comment><USER3> Gmail Paper: <http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm proud of the joke I got my brother to fall for. I redirected all traffic from his computer to this page: <http://i.imgur.com/IUSuQ.png>

</comment><comment><USER5> BBC's spaghetti-crop story - [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/new...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm)</comment>


Daytripper - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dekuNukem/daytripper <comment><USER2> If you are able to slack off at work like this, is there something that you would rather be doing with your time?

I am not judging. I've worked at places where I spent 75% of my day slacking off because the management and bureaucracy was terrible. After months of doing that, I started hating the job. I can only check facebook/reddit/pick your poison, for so long before I want to throw my computer out a window out of boredom.

<comment><USER3> Why do nothing, when you could instead get a second (remote) job and then make 200% salary by doing your second job during your first job's working hours?

<comment><USER4> True story. When I was an overnight computer operator, the guy working the other nights had a second job working in a package shipping warehouse. He'd come in, fire off a bunch of jobs, go to his second job, return at lunch time, fire off the next batch of jobs, and then be back before any of the rest of the office came in for the day to catch up on the rest.

He got caught because the timing didn't quite work out and he was always behind in the morning. They checked cameras because of it and he admitted it when confronted.

I remember thinking a simple batch script could have done that job but I was smart enough not to write it. I hadn't thought of writing it and then just getting a second job...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams This reminds me of the old boss key:

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

<comment><USER5> Exactly what I was thinking.

I remember being so confused by it as a kid when I saw it in games. Like, why do you need a key that displays a fake DOS prompt?

<comment><USER6> It was useful when my parents walked by and thought I was doing homework. Being in the DOS prompt was at least slightly more legit than playing a game.

<comment> 867-5309 nice use of 'slightly', i.e. kids do actually play games for homework nowadays :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dave was fired because every time his boss walked by his desk he was staring at his desktop.

<comment><USER8> At his next job, Dave tried the custom setup and his boss now thinks he's always writing emails.

<comment><USER9> Dave didn't read [https://lifehacker.com/look-busy-with-a-fake-desktop- backgro...](https://lifehacker.com/look-busy-with-a-fake-desktop- background-212236)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like it doesn't work anymore, but at one point someone styled reddit to look like you were reading a Word document: [https://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/](https://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/)

<comment><USER11> There is also [https://github.com/michael- lazar/rtv](https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv) which lets you browse reddit from a terminal

<comment><USER12> Which is unfortunately not maintained anymore: [https://github.com/michael- lazar/rtv/issues/696](https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv/issues/696)

<comment><USER13> `rtv` is now `tuir` [0].

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir](https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is there a receiver, instead of running an app on the receiving system to listen for bluetooth/http/etc messages?

<comment><USER15> Maybe because something needs to be at each end, to shine a laser at one end and to detect it at the other. Or you could use a reflector, but that's still two objects.

<comment><USER16> You don't need a reflector in the majority of cases, shining an IR laser onto a wall/door frame a couple of meters away is usually a big enough bright spot to drive a phototransistor pointing at (nearly) the same spot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you have a web camera and use Windows, you can use this thing I wrote forever ago:

[https://rearviewmirror.cc/](https://rearviewmirror.cc/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Do modern notebooks still have vibration sensors? I think old ones had them in the hard drives, to protect them from damage. But SSDs wouldn't need that anymore.

In any case, I wonder if detecting vibrations and recognizing the boss via machine learning wouldn't be more elegant.

<comment><USER19> Well, gait is usable as a biometric identifier. While most approaches use video analysis, I found this a paper [1] that is about identifying people through footstep induced structural vibration using a geophone[2]. It would be quite interesting if it is possible to measure the structural vibration using a laptops or smartphones built in accelerometers. But I think acoustic sensors would be a better way. Or a combination of both options.

<comment><USER20> Interesting - can you provide [1] and [2] please?

<comment><USER19> Yikes, it was a bit too late in my timezone, sorry.

[1]: [https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/shijiapa/documentations/Hotm...](https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/shijiapa/documentations/Hotmobile2015_Footstep_project.pdf)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I applaud the amount of effort that went in to being this lazy.

</comment><comment><USER8> A version of this that's somehow aware of whether or not I'm at my desk, then puts the machine to sleep anytime anyone else touches a key would be kind of cool.

Maybe some kind of proximity sensor that you could stick to a badge or in your wallet? It would need to still allow you to login and perhaps offer a password to disable in case you forgot your sensor, but seems vaguely plausible?

EDIT: Read more of the usage guide, seems even more plausible now, although I guess it all depends on the reliability of the proximity sensor.

<comment><USER22> USBKill ([https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill](https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill)) lists one approach to solving that problem in its README:

\- Set USBKill to watch the status of a particular USB port

\- Attach a lanyard to a USB key

\- Wear the lanyard on your wrist

\- Plug the USB key you're wearing into the port USBKill is watching

Then anytime you step away from the machine, USBKill would notice the removal of the key and shut it down.

<comment><USER23> This would just result in my yanking my laptop off the desk every time I got up.

<comment><USER24> I think with a short USB extension cord it could work. Moving away would angle the cord at just the right angle to pull the device out (from the end closer to you -- the other end would be at an angle and stay inside from friction).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The YouTube channel being watched in the GIF is Technology Connections. Excellent quirky technical content about old hardware.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q)

</comment><comment><USER26> He's watching Technology Connections on you tube, which is an excellent choice. Highly recommended.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q)

<comment><USER27> He's also playing Broken Reality, a silly game parodying the internet. It's pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember some guy at Verizon outsourcing his entire job to china. He was consistently getting top marks and promotions while all he was doing was looking at cat pictures all day.

Daytripper is level 1. Outsourcing your job to China is level 2.

Something just clicked in my head. Start up idea!

<comment><USER29> Level 3 = Level 2 + WFH.

Level 4 = Level 3 + outsource the status reporting to a local, and simply H instead of WFH.

You have now achieved the goal set by Tim F, and you can replace those cat pics with a real physical cat.

<comment><USER28> Level 5 = create a startup that does this as a service.

<comment><USER28> Level 6 = Outsource the creation of this startup to management in China.

<comment><USER29> 1st Dan = Single handedly start a tech bubble investing in this kind of startup and startups that provide services to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is this really a ubiquitous thing in the US? Office jobs were you are paid for having your body present, regardless of whether you slack off most of the time?

Who pays for this? Isn't it terribly inefficient?

I mean, if there's just not a lot of work to do, you could also have shorter work weeks. And you would, if your boss could trust you to not slack off every time they turn their backs?

Wouldn't it be more logical to do your work and _then_ have actual time off, instead of pretending the work takes much longer than it actually does?

</comment><comment><USER31> Okay, that's neat. Now someone needs to figure out how to detect someone walking by using fluctuations in the wifi signal strength.

<comment><USER32> Or use the monitor camera and opencv to detect faces/eyeballs in the background lurking or peering at your monitor.

<comment><USER33> Spinning this up with a bounding box facial detection algorithm and triggering Amazon Recognition against a constrained data set of authorized users is day- projectable :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Oh hey. I just used some SPI-based Nixie tube drivers that this same tindie user made. I've been super impressed!

<comment><USER35> Came to say something similar - in the spirit of his/hers exixe tube thing, I made a similar one but with msp430 (since I'm very familiar with it) and cleaner layout of the transistors. Looks good and have baked a couple, but I'm not getting good results on flashing the msp430. For some reason it's flaky as hell, and I don't have the time to investigate more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I could see real uses for these, but I'd want questions answered first such as whether they're specifically paired, where the programming is stored, what data passes wirelessly, whether there could be any way the receiver could act as an open HID receiver device, what the number of triggers is, etc.

<comment><USER35> From a quick glance, it's a custom radio packet using a common 2.4 GHz proprietary radio (clone of nrf 24L01), and it doesn't really need more than that. Adding complex pairing and so on would likely kill this fun passion project way long before finishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how far you could get at doing this with no additional hardware. Could a smart enough AI detect the boss's voice with the microphone? Some other mannerism like the way they clear their throat? Face detection with the camera? Maybe something with Bluetooth or WiFi and the boss's smart phone?

<comment><USER24> Last one sounds the most promising, if clients (rather than base stations) can be uniquely identified, and often enough to be practical. I know that base stations send a beacon out x times per second, but phones probably don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of Uplink's Motion Sensor.

<comment><USER38> Such a great game. I still listen to the soundtrack every once in a while, it just nails that y2k atmosphere so well

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I could use this going the other way:

Put one of these near an information radiator to kick it out of doze mode.

<comment><USER40> USB jiggler is designed for this use case.

<comment><USER39> If I wanted the machine to never go to sleep I'd just change the config.

USB jiggler seems to be for winning an argument with your IT team that they think they've already won.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is amazing, and I also would like to make a meta comment about how creative "dekuNukem" is as a screen name.

Re: custom script, can I plug the receiver into, say, a RP0 and fire off an arbitrary webhook?

<comment><USER42> Adding to your metacomment, "Daytripper" is an excellent name, and a great nod to the Beatles track.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> A job is simply the key to the building, what you do after is up to you

</comment><comment><USER44> I forgot what it feels like to have to hide my screwing around. I've been working from home for the last 6 years.

</comment><comment><USER45> Nice. Should really use BLE though so you don't need the receiver - nRF52 or ESP32 are the best options.

<comment><USER35> With that, you'd need a client software on the computer, pairing etc. His receiver acts like a keyboard that just sends win+m when triggered. Neater, imho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> [https://www.buzzfeed.com/erikmalinowski/the-evolution-of- the...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/erikmalinowski/the-evolution-of-the-march- madness-boss-button)

</comment><comment><USER47> There always comes times when there is not much happening development is going on. In my earlier company due to the same situation, I started contributing an open-source project and build side projects.

<comment><USER48> Not as a consultant though, never a dull day/hour in the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Anyone here know of a timing- and cryptographically-secured laser tripwire? I've tried it before, but it seems like there's some work involved in tuning these things just right.

</comment><comment><USER50> Couldn't you do the same thing with a sonic range finder? That wouldn't require a receiver, so you could put everything onto the one USB device.

<comment><USER51> The idea is to put the tripwire on the path to your approach. That's the reason a send and receive is needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know of components to DIY this type of project? I like the idea and its size, mainly the laser tripwire.

<comment><USER45> Almost certainly using a ToF (Time of Flight) sensor. They became available about 5 years ago for use as smartphone proximity sensors, but they have a range of around 1m.

[https://www.adafruit.com/product/3317](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3317)

<comment><USER52> Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I would really like one of these that did some level of face/gaze detection; open workspaces...

</comment><comment><USER54> [Boss Walks in] [Dave intensely staring at the desktop] Boss: empty deskopt...not suspicious at all.

</comment><comment><USER55> An iPhone X, or other similar phones, could probably be used as a motion detector as well?

</comment><comment><USER56> what's the advantage of using two laser sensors vs a single IR sensor for the motion detection? (other than the badass Mission Impossible factor)

edit: I'll leave this comment for posterity, but I previously misunderstood the meanings of the Tx and Rx sensors

<comment><USER57> And to help anyone else who might be confused, the device comes in two parts, a "transmitter" and a "receiver". But the transmitter detects motion by itself without needing another piece placed on the other side of the door, and the receiver is what plugs into the computer to know when to hide the windows (or execute the custom command).

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wish I could upvote this multiple times. Lmao - amazing!

</comment><comment><USER59> Good luck if you're in an open office!

</comment><comment><USER60> Very cool product, but I think $60 for something that looks like max $10 parts is way too expensive.

<comment><USER23> BoM is only part of the story, though.

<comment><USER60> I know that the cost of development is not only materials, but the code is already Open Source on github, so a company could use it and sell the devices for $15. I don't know anything about the platform the device is sold on, but if you want to support the dev you could donate as much as you want, no need to pay for an overpriced product. I assume it is the premium you pay for a "handmade" product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The best kind of "screwing around" is screwing around in plain sight. Once, I had a fresh grad in my team and I had to get him up to speed. I noticed he was taking more than the usual time to do basic tasks, yet whenever I passed by his desk, he had three terminals open and had c++ code here and there and compilation errors on another window. Two months later, he would move to a different company. Turns out that he was just practicing his programming skills, and all of this time I assumed he was working on assigned tasks.

EDIT: spelling

<comment><USER61> See also: converting your current Kindle read to plain text and pasting it into your ide or email editor...

We need more "plain sight slacking" tips to be on the lookout for, so we can stay vigilant.

<comment><USER62> I feel that it's easier just to have clear tasks with deadlines, using decent project management software like say Asana, Monday, or whatever.

If they're meeting the deadlines and the work is good, why bother wasting time being big bro and treating them like a child? Why not just go by results? (you can check commits as well, and CI not going off will at least tell you nothing is broken)

<comment><USER63> If you work in an environment where you're expected to be busy at all times even without much to do - well.. things like this come in handy.

<comment><USER62> I agree. I'm just questioning the management logic of being "expected to be busy at all times even without much to do". I remember some papers linking boredom and leisure activity with creativity. Creativity is important for programming.

<comment><USER63> I'm expected to appear busy ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I bet Ross Ulbricht wishes he had this.

(context) [https://www.businessinsider.com/the-arrest-of-silk-road- mast...](https://www.businessinsider.com/the-arrest-of-silk-road-mastermind- ross-ulbricht-2015-1)

<comment><USER65> > * Execute a custom script

      rm -rf /*

<comment><USER66> I have always been curious.. is there a better way of accomplishing this?

<comment><USER67> Start by not relying on Full Disk Encryption, which you should absolutely have enabled but should probably, from an OPSEC perspective, pretend does not exist.

On modern operating systems you can generally mount and unmount virtual encrypted volumes that are open (ideally) only when you're actually using them to do work with their contents. There used to be a great macOS tool, called Knox, that did this graphically.

<comment><USER68> > On modern operating systems you can generally mount and unmount virtual > encrypted volumes that are open (ideally) only when you're actually using > them to do work with their contents. There used to be a great macOS tool, > called Knox, that did this graphically.

Cryptomator [1], cross-platform as well.

[1] [https://cryptomator.org/](https://cryptomator.org/)

<comment><USER67> The nice thing about Knox is that it just wrapped macOS's built in XTS support. XTS sucks, but you didn't have to think much about what Knox itself was doing. Cryptomator implemented their own FUSE filesystem, and it's a strange collection of SIV, CTR, HMAC, and scrypt. I should like it a lot because I generally like filesystem encryption, but I'd have to actually read it carefully before using it.

There's a Cure53 "audit" of it, like for everything else, but to give a sense of how reliable it was, they flagged ECB mode... in the project's implementation of SIV mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> off-topic, but Daytripper is also the name of a very good graphic novel.

<comment><USER70> And Beatles song.

<comment><USER61> Double A side with We Can Work it Out. Immediately preceded and followed depending on territory by stuff like Yesterday, Nowhere Man, Paperback Writer etc. Extraordinary.

On reflection they probably would have had no need for a device like this...

<comment><USER70> Thanks for this comment. It reminds me that somehow, I discovered some of those before sitting down with Rubber Soul or Revolver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> great stuff, lol

</comment><comment><USER72> Handy!

Why not Bluetooth?

</comment><comment><USER73> It still amazes me, to this day, that people have jobs where they have the time to screw around on their computer all day. How do these jobs continue to exist?

<comment><USER74> I screw around at least 25% of the time as a dev

<comment><USER73> If you don't mind me asking, how do get all of your work done? Are you standing by on-call in case something goes wrong? Are you waiting on someone to deliver assets required for your next task? Do you lie about how long it takes to complete tasks? Honestly curious as I cannot remember a time where I had the free time to just screw around for any meaningful portion of my day.

<comment><USER75> A lot of jobs (even as developers) in large companies have a positive correlation between butt in seat time and the perception of getting work done, but there usually isn't enough work to do to fill the entire time. Most people work jobs that they aren't truly passionate about.

<comment><USER73> But again, why lie about it?

<comment><USER76> To not embarrass everybody else who are also doing it, not least your boss.

<comment><USER73> Why would it be embarrassing to state "I currently have nothing to do right now, is there anything available I can help with." if you cannot figure out anything productive you could be doing on your own.

Are people's managers actually saying to them, "Yes, there is nothing you can do right now, just sit in your seat and do nothing until I come get you"? I've never had that experience, and is why I'm asking about it.

<comment><USER75> If you don't enjoy your job, then it might be better to get done what is expected of you and enjoy the rest of the time you have to spend butt-in-chair doing something else, instead of intentionally piling more unenjoyable work on your platter. Especially if the manager isn't technical: just don't tell them you're done and spend that time doing something else.

Of course it completely depends on your work situation and the relationship with your manager, as well as how socially acceptable it is in your organization. I think lots of the people doing it had slacked off in high school and college and gotten away with it.

Your relationship with your work and your time is probably much healthier, so I wouldn't start screwing around during work hours now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Becoming a Magician (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/ <comment><USER2> >>> And that, in fact, is my definition of magic – competence so much more advanced than yours with such alien mental models that you cannot predict the outcomes of the model at all.

>>> One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear.</comment>


Ask HN: Web crawler generator - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for a web crawler generator, that I could prototype what I would like to crawl using a visual dom explorer type of interface, is there such a thing? anything recommended? Thanks <comment><USER2> Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution (there are less of those) or a library to build upon (google "scraper"/"crawler" and the programming language of your choice).

Either way, check out ScraperWiki: <http://scraperwiki.com>

Hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting service, never heard of it. I am actually looking for a library/framework rather than service, I was hoping there is some "visual editor" for defining what to scrape/crawl and simplify the building process.

<comment><USER2> Well like I said, google or even a targetted search on Github/Sourceforge will reveal a TON of libs. As for a GUI... I don't recall any free ones coming up in my search a few months back.</comment></comment></comment>


Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/newfound-wormhole-allows-information-to-escape-black-holes-20171023/ <comment><USER2> This is the "traversable" part: throw a qubit into black hole A. Measure a particle of its Hawking radiation & transmit the result of the measurement _through the external universe_ to the other black hole B; then use this knowledge to operate on a Hawking particle coming out of black hole B to "reconstruct" the original qubit.

<comment><USER3> > throw a qubit into black hole A

This would take infinite time (from the POV of the external observer), so I'm unclear how this is supposed to work.

<comment><USER4> _> This would take infinite time (from the POV of the external observer)_

No, that's not correct. What is correct is that, in the idealized case where the hole is eternal (i.e., it never evaporates), it would take an infinite time for the external observer to _see_ the qubit cross the horizon. But the qubit reaches the horizon and crosses it in a finite time.

<comment><USER3> But we are talking about an external observer - so how is this traversable plan going to work?

<comment><USER5> It's not, because this is all theoretical. Not a single thing here has ever been proven experimentally. Black holes do not exist, nor does hawking radiation.

<comment><USER6> There's no direct proof yet, but we have detected the magnetic fields that theories predict, and of course observe the gravitational effects. The Event Horizon Telescope[0] will probably deliver something more tangible by 2018. [0][http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-hunt-for-a-black-hole- with...](http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-hunt-for-a-black-hole-with-a- telescope-the-size-of-earth-1.21693)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When the call a wormhole "traversable" does this mean that an macroscopic object can actually survive a wormhole intact? Or are the referring to something more along the lines of a sub-atomic particle?

edit: the article eventually starts talking about "qubits" explicitly, so I am assuming this is sub-atomic particles only unless someone knows more.

Even more specifically, it says that which falls into A comes out of B as Hawking radiation. You can then transfer an external message (at the speed of light) between A and B to turn that Hawking radiation into the original object via hand-wavy quantum teleportation. I get the feeling that you'd have to trap _all_ of the relevant, escaping radiation from B to actually reconstruct your object.

<comment><USER8> It's important to understand when physicists talk about the theoretical perfect preservation of information in these contexts, it's like... if you could pause the universe and evaluate every particle, every "thing," all at once you could understand where it all came from and know the previous step and from there the previous step and so on infinitely until the "beginning." The idea being that the entire universe's "state" if you will, is derived continuously from its origin, observably.

It's not about whether you as a human could use a black hole as a cosmic... blackboard.

<comment><USER9> In an entirely mechanistic nonprobabilistic universe, where state C always follows state B, which always follows state A, etc, then if State X ever equals a prior state, say state B, then the universe enters into an infinite loop. A-B-C-D-X-C-D-X...

<comment><USER10> That's true, but why is it important?

<comment><USER9> As constructed, it is true. But important? Probably not. Even if the universe was total mechanistic, and should be described as a series of discrete states, the probability of ever entering into identical states would be very near zero, except perhaps in some hypercooled state, or something. am not sure that the laws o thermodynamics would even allow that to happen. But I am no physicist..just a dude, who had a thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I believe Susskind was of the opinion that that one could create an ER=EPR wormhole between two entangled black holes, and that jumping into one of the black holes would allow one to access the wormhole, and meet someone "in the middle" who had jumped into the other wormhole, but it would be impossible after that for either person to get out of the wormhole.

Additionally, because the entropy of the wormhole increases with time, the "length" of the wormhole seems to also increase with time.

<comment><USER11> A black hole is a fast scrambler and very quickly comes to thermal equilibrium (max entropy). However, the complexity continues to increase long after thermal equilibrium, and that's what is thought to be analogous to the length of the wormhole growing (at the speed of light, no less).

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9crggox5rbc&t=1202s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9crggox5rbc&t=1202s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't "Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes" rather strain the meaning of "found"? I get that it's "found" in a mathematical sense. But in a physical sense, it's more like "possible".

</comment><comment><USER13> I KNEW IT

<comment><USER14> Hi! I'm a moderator here. Please don't post unsubstantive comments like this to HN. The idea is to have thoughtful discussion. You're welcome here as long as you want to use the site as intended. To get an idea of what that is, please read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some of the better political safire I've read in while.</comment>