Facebook sues analytics firm Rankwave over data misuse - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/10/facebook-rankwave-lawsuit/ <comment><USER3> My prediction after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke is that it would lead to an explosion in wealthy people who want to play at noopolitics.

I suspect they have dozens of CA's on their hands currently. At the very least, if not hundreds.

The key takeaway that some people will have had from Cambridge Analytica, is not 'they got caught, don't do this', but rather 'they were largely successful and incredibly cheap'.

The upshot from having lots of players in this space however, is not one of greater control by insidious power addicts, but rather a loss of control as the players compete for attention and influence. So, chaos in the news and the elimination of any kind of consistent narrative from on high. I think we have been experiencing this for a while now. In some ways it is almost an improvement.

<comment><USER4> My key takeaway of Cambridge Analytica was that the advertising industry is a lot more harmful than I thought. I always thought, that there is no real problem when some people influence/manipulate other people on what they spend their money on.

But now we see that those same instruments can be used to not only change shopping decisions but also democratic decisions, which is not okay in my opinion and should be prosecuted and be punished with severe penalties.

Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals.

<comment><USER5> >Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals.

As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for some people, is that democracy is deeply flawed, and these things openly show it. Until now they've been free to ignore it.

<comment><USER6> > As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for > some people, is that these things show very openly how democracy is deeply > flawed.

If you study a bit of History, or look beyond the western world, you will see how terrible the alternatives are. And you will see that democracy is something worth fighting for. Democracy is not flawed, it is hard. We have to fight for it, and the next generations will have to fight for it, and so on. It's real life.

I haven't resigned myself to living in a Black Mirror episode.

<comment><USER7> Democracy is very very flawed, that is why the US is not a democracy, why at every level of government there are checks put in place to put in road blocks to democracy.

And why it is so extremely dangerous that people are trying to destroy those checks and institute a direct democracy with things like the national popular vote.

<comment><USER8> I believe you have terms misconstrued.

What we in the US have is a representative democracy / republic that is also rather decentralized federation (states and state's rights) as well.

 _The US is a democracy._ 🇺🇸

<comment><USER9> I believe we, the US, is a Constitutional Republic, and we vote Democratically.

<comment><USER7> The original design of the government was to have only 1/2 of 1 branch of government Democratically Elected. That being the House

The Senate was appointed by State Legislatures, this was changed with the 17th Amendment

The President is Chosen by Electorial College not a democratic vote (which I support BTW)

The Judicial Branch is Appointed for Life.

<comment><USER9> The Electoral College is one of the most significant aspects of our electoral system and hopefully will never be supplanted by popular vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Big Short) interviewed Alex Kogan:

[https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan- experience-s1...](https://atrpodcast.com/episodes/the-alex-kogan- experience-s1!d20f3)

After listening to this, it sounds like Cambridge Analytica was overblown, in the sense that the information wasn't as useful as claimed.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _it sounds like Cambridge Analytica was overblown, in the sense that the > information wasn't as useful as claimed_

The consequences of the breach were overblown. Its scale and depth, however, were not.

<comment><USER11> The "overblown" part refers solely to the predictive powers of the dataset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook is all words but no actions. Their actions speak otherwise. This lawsuit is just a PR stunt for them to claim they did something so they have something to reply with at the next senate hearing.

My problem in this whole data privacy debate is things like "shadow profiles" where even though I don't have Facebook, they still have information on me because one of my friends decided to share their entire contacts list with facebook and thus facebook now knows my details too even though I never consented to my details being shared.

Another problem I have with this privacy debate is the lack of technological awareness in the politicians. I watched the US senate hearing last year with Mark Zuckerberg and was absolutely shocked at how clueless the members in office were. It was shameful. Mark also got away with giving almost useless answers and the senators didn't grill him much on more important issues.

At this point, I am really curious whether our data is even valuable in the "ad market" considering everything gets leaked anyway. So if something is getting so easily available to these ad companies by simply "misusing" the service, wouldn't the value of the data start going down? I remember a few months ago, there was an article on how the data per use was valued at around $12 (not sure if I am remembering right). I wonder if that value goes down over time because of these so claimed "breaches".

</comment><comment><USER13> Cambridge Analytica was not the 1st time this was done.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama- digital-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data- machine-facebook-election)

<comment><USER14> Also I'm curious why Correct the Record and Share Blue are nearly complete ignored when they did the exact same thing at the exact same time.

<comment><USER15> They took over the main politics subreddit in 2016, one of the worst things I've seen happen online. Crickets.

<comment><USER16> By all accounts it seems like there was a major reshuffling that took place on the night of the Democratic National Convention.

The entire mood of the subreddit changed overnight from posts that vilified Sec. Clinton to posts that glorified her - it was completely crazy. I read that subreddit quite frequently during US election season and the difference was staggering. People dismiss it as "everyone rallied behind the nominee" \- as someone who was there practically every day. It definitely wasn't that. There is definitely something shady going on with that subreddit in particular.

Incidentally, the TV news media was also seemingly doing a blackout of the fairly heated protests taking place outside the building where all the disappointed Bernie folks were trying to get inside. I only found out of them much later from online videos.

<comment><USER15> Yeah I used to enjoy the sub too, some interesting discussions that were usually polite. You are 100% correct it was overnight, there was nothing organic about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What always amazed me about Cambridge Analytica is that the media onslaught only started almost a year (cant reclal excactly but a long time) after the presentation was shared online, it already garnered quite some views when I saw i for the first time. I remembered watching the entire presentation and was amazed by the depth of it all, but amazed as well how almost noone else seemed to care about the presentation.

I couldn't find any news agencies reporting on it whatsoever and I didn't understand why. I still have a hard time to believe that it took so long for the media attention to catch on.

<comment><USER18> This is about narratives.

Tons of facts are out there in the wild, waiting to make enough noise that they hit the mainstream press, when they pick up each others stories and it goes global.

A single tweet from way back can do this.

This is why the press has so much power, ultimately, they decide where 1 billion eyeballs will be pointed (and where they won't).

For this reason I check the headlines from a lot of different sources; it's amazing what doesn't get picked up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Didn't something similar happen with Obama's campaign and social media? I don't remember any sort of outcry in that case.

</comment><comment><USER20> Facebook has probably had a lot of those, but they don't matter if they are not related to specific US political campaigns.

<comment><USER21> Are you sure? I recently saw a non-political case from South Korea get some coverage, including on TechCrunch iirc.

<comment><USER20> and i m pretty sure it will be forgotten in a week

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To be honest, "sending a message to the developers that we're enforcing our policies" is equally too late as self advertisement as they change the rules ever so often as they like if it sounds good to them. Fuck Facebook, you can live without the so called "social" media circle.

</comment><comment><USER23> Did anyone else find it ironic there's a scene in the Netflix AOC documentary where she's crowded around a computer with her boyfriend scrolling through Google Ad spend targeting specific demographics and age groups?

<comment><USER24> Should you _not_ target your Google Ad spending?

<comment><USER23> I don't think so, but isn't the entire Cambridge Analytica debacle an issue of using Facebook data to target political ads to users based on demographic information?

<comment><USER25> I don't believe Google sells your psychological profile to third parties seeking to target ads. Google might be able to ascertain my political leanings based on my behavior, and other parties may be able to target ads toward people with my political leanings, but Google never directly gives them actual knowledge regarding my existence.

<comment><USER23> Do you actually believe the profiles CA created were accurate or much more insightful over whatever demographic data FB or Goog let you target with?

I did a very similar project for a CS/stats class in 2011. They did some basic k-means clustering on likes and basic sentiment analysis on posts.

<comment><USER25> >Do you actually believe the profiles CA created were accurate or much more insightful over whatever demographic data FB or Goog let you target with?

Multiple political campaigns over the past several years clearly thought Cambridge Analytica's data/services were more valuable, or uniquely valuable, compared to services like Facebook or Google. If Google or Facebook were equally suited to the same purposes, I imagine they would have simply used Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER26> Many customers keep the tarot card shop down the street in business too.

Any marketing professional worth his salt employs the full force of his persuasive skill against his own customers/employers. A marketing firm does not merely try to convince you to buy coca-cola. They also try to convince The Coca-Cola Company that they are effective at convincing you to buy Coca-Cola.

The question anybody looking to hire an advertising firm _should_ ask themselves is whether skill at the later implies skill at the former. It _could_ be the case that CA is good at persuading political campaigns, but bad at persuading voters. One reason to believe there might be a discrepancy here is because the persuasion tech used by CA in both cases is likely totally different. Which is to say, CA likely did not employ their facebook profiling tech against political campaigns to persuade those campaigns to buy their services. Rather, they probably used more traditional sales tactics (perhaps as simple as lying about the efficacy of their facebook profiling tech.)

<comment><USER25> >Many customers keep the tarot card shop down the street in business too.

Right, because there's literally no alternative to fortune-telling magic but more kinds of fortune-telling magic. If there were already a conceptually different prediction service with useful and measurable accuracy, the tarot card place would need to have superior accuracy or some other hook, otherwise they'd go out of business. Ultimately the differences would be measurable and demonstrable.

Marketing team could be selling snake oil, I get it, but snake oil only exists where a real, functioning product doesn't, otherwise there'd be results to compare.

<comment><USER26> > _" but snake oil only exists where a real, functioning product doesn't"_

I have no idea where you could have gotten that impression. Snake oil can exist whenever the consumer is unable to distinguish real products from snake oil. Marketing is absolutely one of the industries in which snake oil abounds, and there is no reason whatsoever that it doesn't exist in the niche of political advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting what people will sacrifice to see some barely defined number next to their name, or next to their post in some app.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, Facebook is going all in. Its said that offensive is the best defense. But I doubt this will instill any more confidence, rather the opposite - <USER2> any other companies are there that Facebook gave access to data via apps?

</comment><comment><USER29> Facebook is suing over data misuse? Does anybody else find this ironic?

</comment><comment><USER30> It means tgey are going to have another "horrible year" according to the media. I.e. revenue up, profits up, investments up etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> Obama misused Facebook data during the 2008 election. He was lauded as a tech genius and I saw countless articles about how this was the future of politics.

The only reason Facebook is even bothering to go after these companies is because they don't want to be responsible for re-electing Trump.

It's the same reason they just banned multiple right-leaning influencers from their platform.

It's scary to think what kind of stuff politicans will get away with when they align with FBs politics.

All you need to do is lean left..and you can get away with murder.

</comment><comment><USER32> Has to be hundreds of companies in gross violation... wonder how far over the line these guys were to get sued.

</comment><comment><USER33> I had assumed it was Cambridge Analyticas all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was reading an interesting Twitter thread on why Trump is spending insane amounts on ads on FB right now (roughly $500k a week!) with many purposefully breaking Facebook's own guidelines on what's acceptable. Basically the person was saying Trump is playing a game of chicken with Facebook daring them to remove them so he can play the victim card and claim bias against conservatives. And if they don't take them down then he gets to spread ads that clearly violate the company's policy and make them look hypocritical either way.

<comment><USER34> what's wrong with him posting ads? not allowed?

<comment><USER23> The point is he's buying a ton of ads that purposefully cross Facebook's own policy on political ad spend to force them to either take action so he can claim victim status or keep them up and look like hypocrites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'll save you the trouble:

Facebook: We're very sorry. We had no idea they would use our platform this way. We'll take steps to make sure it never happens again.

Everybody: This is an outrage! Facebook is evil.

Also everybody: I'm bored. I'll check Facebook.

Almost nobody: I stopped using Facebook.

Lawmakers: This is unacceptable!

Also lawmakers: Hey Facebook, here's some ad money for my next campaign.

Shareholders: Oh good, the damage is a known. Stock price is up, this is great!

7 months from now: _Breaking: Major Privacy Breach at Facebook_

<comment><USER36> > Almost nobody: I stopped using Facebook.

I can't speak for the general population but I know _plenty_ of people who have quit FB in recent years (myself included).

<comment><USER37> Facebook releases their monthly active numbers with their quarterly earnings. By all means the numbers have been trending up, even at their massive reach, despite all the challenges they have been facing.

So looks like you and your friends are not representative of the general population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Did they get this data for free?</comment>


TechCrunch Party Thread - <AUTHOR> Who else was there?  Finally met alaskamiller.  The party was great, the afterparty was insane.  Share your stories here. <comment><USER2> Daniel Ha of Discus, Aston Motes of Dropbox, Ivan and Abigail Kirigin of Tipjoy, Patrick of WebMynd, Scribd guys, Justin Kan of Justin.tv, the boys of Snaptalent.

<comment><USER3> Patrick of WebMynd is a solid guy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Key Moments:

-Chamillionaire shows up. Mc hammer as well -Afterparty with @danielha, sarah lacy, brian solis -Kiss on the cheek from julia allison :-D -Very cool companies demoing. Including free etching -Arrington referring to my roommate as: "oh youre that fucking guy!! (Who always gets more tickets)"

</comment><comment><USER4> Chamillionaire was cool, Julia Allison turned out to actually be pretty nice also. It was nice to meet the founders of tipjoy.com. Talking to various Facebook employees, including the creator of FireBug was interesting.

Wish I could have hit up the after party, next time I guess.

</comment><comment><USER5> I totally missed the after-party. But then I had to bale by 10pm as we'd totally forgotten to eat all night :(</comment>


Startup Quote: Ingvar Kamprad, founder, IKEA - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1420717346

<comment><AUTHOR> If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example.

\- Ingvar Kamprad</comment>


Irrationality - Welcome Back to Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/11/12/irrationality-welcome-back-to-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> With the Federal Reserve pumping so much liquidity, and with real estate not sucking up all of the money in the world, its only natural that other investment areas that have any chance of an upside are going to get more investment. There are a lot of hedge funds who bet on the housing bubble collapse who've got put their AIG payoffs to work.

In other words, what's going on in the valley IS a bubble. If its caused by irrationality, its the irrationality in Washington DC.</comment>


The Catch 22 of Base64: Attacker Dilemma from a Defender Point of View - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperva.com/blog/2018/04/the-catch-22-of-base64-attacker-dilemma-from-a-defender-point-of-view/ <comment><USER2> > based on the assumption that legitimate users have no practical need to do > multiple encoding of the same text.

Things can legitimately be encoded multiple times because encapsulation is a thing and multiple independent stages may each be configured to accept possibly binary input and produce base64 output.

You also don't need to re-encode something an unreasonable number of times to get "Vm0wd", all you have to do is start with "Vm0" and base64 encode it twice. "Vm0" only has 24 bits of entropy which means it will regularly occur at random in legitimate data.

And then nobody can figure out why "Vm0-Edge-West" isn't working.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not really sure what the threat model is here. If the attacker can control what encoding scheme you use, surely you have much more serious problems than the possibility of wasting space.

<comment><USER4> TFA is about _attackers_ using Base64 encoding.

</comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant > _While Base64 encoding is very useful to transfer binary data over the web_

This part I cannot fathom. The era of 7-bit bytes is over. What can possibly justify the need for a "printable characters" encoding now? Something stupid like putting data in a JSON string? What's the next step, base-64 encode the JSON containing that string and put it in an XML tag?

<comment><USER5> I see crap like:

      <data><![CDATA[PD94bWw+PHdoeS8+PHRoaXNpc2F3ZnVsPjwvcm9vdD4=]]></data>

constantly in real life in 2018

<comment> loup-vaillant Yes, but why? There's a reason for everything, so I guess this serves some purpose, _somehow_? I guess the ultimate reason is stupidity or bad planning or cut corners, but I'm still curious.

Bonus point if there's a situation where avoiding something like base64 is actually _difficult_ , even in 2018.

<comment><USER4> If one wanted to embed a random token in an email, what would one use instead of base64?

<comment> loup-vaillant Attachments?

<comment><USER4> ISTM that amounts to the same thing? MIME _is_ Base64.

<comment> loup-vaillant <facepalm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To really crank up the pedant-O-meter, wouldn't it be accurate to instead describe the output growth in point #1 as polynomial, even sub-quadratic?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps i can blame the booze, as i an admittedly very drunk but still unconvinced and/or confused.

I asked my question coming from the angle of big-oh analysis, and all three (as of the time of this reply) responses in the thread seem to describe a growth by a constant factor of 1.3bar, bar over 3, otherwise known as polynomial growth, yes?

Absolutely, the growth can be mathematically expressed with an exponent, but we verbally characterize the actual growth to be polynomial if the scalar stays constant (a.k.a. a literal number in the exponents place) rather than increasing as the amouny of input increases (independent variable lying within the actual exponent), no?

<comment><USER6> Man, I'm dyslexic.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: iOS Devs do you want a dashboard to change in-app text instantly? - <AUTHOR>

Thoughts on what we're thinking of building?
We noticed while we were iterating on our app we wanted to change in-app text a lot on iOS. We used a database config file to do this, but we figured we could build a service that lets you change whatever strings you have from a dashboard; no need to submit an update.
Basically you can change in-app text, * Instantly, so don't need to wait on app store approval * Simply, so anyone, not just a dev can change the text * Where you can use your preexisting data models to create dynamic text, eg: `How are you <user.name>?` straight from our dashboard while always leaving the sensitive (user data, etc…) on the device.
Would you guys use this? Do you already have something that does this?
We want to know if we're not just imagining this is a problem other devs have.
Note: We know that A/B testing services do something similar but it turns out they don't provide features that we would need eg: variable insertion, dynamic formatting, etc.. <comment><USER2> We use an in-house solution for this, it's interesting you're building a service around this.</comment>


Google+ cooking school - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2011/08/04/cooking-lessons-in-real-time-google-cooking-school/

<comment><USER2> I (and others) have mentioned this in comments to Vic Guntotra, but what Hangouts really need is an "audience" feature. 10 people participating is great, but image the things you can do if you have 10 direct participants and hundreds of viewers via some sort of YouTube integration.

Now that I see this, I'd like you guys to imagine Hangouts with audiences and Google's payments system integrated. Experts (developers, chefs, tutors, whatevers) can charge small amounts for participants and free for viewers.

I think part of the reason geeks like me (and HN, I think) are excited about G+ is because it really does have a ton of potential. I'd love to see the above implemented.

</comment><comment><USER3> Damn it. I had this idea two weeks ago w/ my wife (who's a chef & dietitian).

I guess we'll have to compete on execution :)

<comment><USER4> Also, this is not a 'winner takes all' space. You should definitely do it.

<comment><USER3> That's absolutely true. My comment was more on the immediate mindshare issue.

My wife and i actually gave a talk at Rubyconf2010 about nutrition stuff and the engineering mindset (<http://confreaks.net/videos/459-rubyconf2010-healthy-hackers> ), and got some positive feedback, and got a few requests to continue discussing the subject online but my wife has been busy w/ school until this past spring unfortunately).

It's definitely good to see more food/culinary content moving online.

<comment><USER5> There is definitely place for more cooking help! Especially with more expertise and being more down to earth. The OP was a good show but there is a lot to be improved. For example the chocolate ice cream recipe was focused on not having sugar, but they substitute dates which contain a lot of sugar. Now that might make the ice cream taste better but that's not what they optimized for, so an actual recipe optimized for taste would probably taste better. And your wife, being a chef, will come up with a tastier pizza sauce than tomato paste + herbs :)

So I hope you will still execute your plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be nice if they had someone who could be assigned the "Director" role and choose which person to feature on the video.

</comment><comment><USER7> There seems to be that there should be a better solution than Google Hangout. Anyone have any leads for a better platform for this?

<comment><USER8> My company (<http://www.hotpotevents.com>) is currently working on a platform to enable anyone to lead a fun, social, interactive cooking event in their home. Still early stage but we're aiming for private beta this Fall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea that can be easily applied to any form of teaching and tutoring. Stand by for the influx of PhD's offering after-school tutoring as a business.</comment>


What is your pie in the sky project?  Mine is something like Wolfram Alpha but for ideas. - <AUTHOR>

Wolfram Alpha is all about computing a correct answer to a specific query.  Example:  How long will it take to travel from A to B using a Segway?
But in a system for ideas, one would ask abstract questions:
* why is the Segway interesting?
* what are unexplored applications of the Segway?
* what sort of iphone app might be useful for an owner of a Segway?
Just as with Wolfram alpha, the answers would be computed in an automated way.  But there is no notion of correct answers here.  Just potentially interesting and/or plausible ones.
So, what is your pie in the sky project? <comment><USER2> Basically implementing the system they're working on at Intentional Software, but do it using open source tools, open standards, with GPU acceleration, and a LISP interpreter as its core base language for defining transformations and language definitions in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because you asked:

<http://www.loper-os.org/>

Intro for the impatient:

<http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8></comment>


The Beautiful Machine - <AUTHOR> https://fabiensanglard.net/the_beautiful_machine/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> I was so enamoured by a discrete GPU and beefy CPU while having no fans, I had to try my hand at replicating this.

Since a couple of months have passed and COVID knackered supply chains, I used slightly different parts:

\- Ryzen 5 3600. Same heat dissipation, as far as I can tell.

\- AsRock X570 motherboard. It has some LEDs, but they can be shut down on the "BIOS" setup. Technically, this has a tiny fan for the M.2 disk, but it's very quiet. [https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X570%20Phantom%20Gaming- ITXTB3...](https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X570%20Phantom%20Gaming- ITXTB3/#Specification)

\- Gigabyte RX 560. This uses 10W extra. [https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics- Card/GV-RX560GAMING-OC-4GD...](https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV- RX560GAMING-OC-4GD-rev-10#kf)

From similar benchmarks, the GPU can reach 90ºC, but it doesn't get throttled, even after 30min at 100%. I tested on during a hot day in the afternoon, probably over 30º ambient temperature.

Having all the ports on the underside makes for a fantastic visual look, but it's a bit cramped if you want to actually use those on a regular table without holes. I would love for an extra clearance of about 10-15cm, even as an addon (like the GPU dissipator). I hope Streacom monitors Hacker News. :)</comment>


Man Out of Time: The Music and Mystery of David Blue - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/david-blue-singer-songwriter-mystery-bob-dylan-joni-mitchell-1005073/ <comment><AUTHOR> > Bob Dylan befriended him, Joni Mitchell helped support him, and the Eagles > covered one of his songs. So why did success elude the late singer- > songwriter?</comment>


Facebook buys maker of BeatSaber VR game - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/26/facebook-buys-the-vr-studio-behind-beat-saber/ <comment><USER2> Damn. :(

Beat Saber was on my ToDo list once I get a VR rig. But there's no way I'm giving money to Facebook.

<comment><USER3> Try Pistol Whip instead. It's the same type of games, just with guns.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Beat Saber appealed strongly to me, specifically because of my escrima/kali training.

Pistal Whip doesn't have the same kind of draw (sic). ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get why they are doing this. Wouldn't it make more sense to let them be independent, so the VR ecosystem seem larger and organic?

<comment><USER5> Because it's the "killer app" of VR, so far. If they own it, they can privilege their own VR platforms (earlier releases etc).</comment></comment>


Hacking Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/12/30/hacking-hacker-news/

<comment><USER2> There's a difference between Hacking Hacker News and _spamming Hacker News with low-quality posts_ , which the OP had done but conveniently failed to mention in the post. (the "Uber vs. Lyft" is the _only_ post that is not disguised content promotion for his startup: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gregmuender](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gregmuender))

</comment><comment><USER3> > Last month, I posted two links a day apart. The content of the articles was > exactly the same. Granted, the titles and links were a bit different, but > it's nonetheless fascinating to see the 8X difference between the two.

People don't like to read the same news twice?

<comment><AUTHOR> The point here was that all else being (nearly) equal, sometimes posts take off, while others don't. Although you can optimize, at the end of the day, it can be often be a game of chance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And now we wait to see if _this_ post makes it to the front page and top spot...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, of course! Looks like we got 13 upvotes today, which is, generally speaking, pretty high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is incredibly hand-wavy. For one thing, speculation about which days of the week are "better": Every single day, seven days a week, for any given moment in time, there are the same number of items on the front page. Does anyone have data on (for example) average numbers of upvotes varying in a statistically significant manner by days of the week?

For another, data about how many characters in HIS titles correlated to x number of upvotes: Maybe that says something about how he writes. But, again, is there any data about average title length for all articles that hit the front page? That would be more meaningful.

Not that I haven't done similar pieces on my own blog, but the point of one of my write-ups was: Gee, this completely shocked me and looks a lot like random chance to me.

I submit articles regularly. Some hit the front page. Some are ignored. Most are not my own articles. HN is a very large forum. The most consistent thing seems to be that certain authors (like Paul Graham) get their work submitted by people other than themselves and then get wildly upvoted and intensely discussed.

That isn't to say that analysis is meaningless, but I personally didn't get anything useful out of this article and another it linked to other than the fact that he now gets traffic from HN and from blogging at a level that, for a previous project, he spent up to $15K/month to get. But I have no idea what kind of money that is making him or how. Just that he now generates traffic without spending scads of money on it.

That's nice information. I am still trying to figure out how to get that piece working better for various projects of my own. But, for me, the single biggest thing is that I have other stuff to work out so content is updated very regularly and is good quality. Until I have that worked out, traffic will continue to be anemic -- which is fine. Working that out is a complex process and I am okay with the progress I am making.

<comment><USER2> Re: data about title length:

Since I have a database of all HN submissions, I spent a few minutes to check. Turns out that title length (for non-1-word submissions) has no significant effect on submission score at all: [http://i.imgur.com/1zthOwS.png](http://i.imgur.com/1zthOwS.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice chart! Yes, my sample size was rather small, so it's difficult to make absolute conclusions, but it was interesting to see a definitive correlation between post length and upvotes!</comment></comment></comment>


If You've Never Lived in Poverty, Don't Tell Poor People What They Should Do - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/if-youve-never-lived-in-poverty-don-poor-people-what-they-should-do.html <comment><USER3> I get it; a lot of people are dealt a shit hand and it's a given that nobody on this Earth has perfect foresight. The zinger here is that the writer is throwing stones in a glass room, and does nothing but prove the (misguided) point she's trying to refute.

In case you didn't read it, the article is written by somebody who payed her own way through an appreciably expensive college for an English literature degree and student debt, and seriously considered pouring coffee in Seattle for a living a viable option. Unfortunately, the follow-your-dreams approach generally doesn't pan out well when you took on debt for an education of arguably limited use and end up living in a city with an exorbitant cost of living. In many respects, the author had it made in a way that most impoverished people never will; she had reliable access to higher education at a college that feeds most of its graduates into Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon. At that point, you just have to put two and two together, even if you don't like that the result is four.

</comment><comment><USER4> She's right, many people often prescribe things that are what middle and upperclass people do to reduce debt in their lives rather than what poor people can do to get out of poverty, and don't understand how life changes.

A big example is how much not having a stable, 40 hour a week job can work over a person. A lot of lower paying jobs are part time, with variable schedules and hours that often flux from 4-32 hours a week. This hurts things like planning for the future or attending college, because there's no stability to plan for; you may have to skip a semester because work suddenly dropped you to 8 hours a week in one of your jobs, or they called you in and the choice is either to skip class, or lose even more hours since they tend to punish people in these jobs by reducing their schedule.

A big part of being poor is having large amounts of unchosen instability in your life. Even a low wage of $10 an hour is survivable if you can count on 40 hours a week and long term employment, but if you can't rely on even working the same hours or you constantly need to rely on contractor or temp services that churn you out of a job every few months or weeks, that instability prevents you from getting into a stable, affordable life.

</comment><comment><USER5> She claims her rent was half her income, but dismisses the suggestion she should have gotten a roommate. When I was poor and in college, I shared a one- bedroom apartment with 2 other students to cut expenses. We took turns sleeping on the couch. I also worked in restaurants where your compensation usually includes a free meal. But, I feel sympathy for the author. Those years, and the years just after that were tough financially. I can say that your later years will be much better financially.

[https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by- age](https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-age)

<comment><USER4> ...this is a wonderful example of upperclass blindness.

Here's the thing..it worked for you because in your social class and specific area in life, it is more likely than not any roommates you found would be responsible students. But if you are poor, you are risking getting into a legal contract with someone who could turn out to have an abusive boyfriend, who managed to hide his drug use or alcholism from people, who is dealing with serious mental depression, who can't stay in a job more than three weeks and sponges off his roommates, etc.

The rather nasty side to Jesus's parable about the talents is that the rich people got even richer, while the poor man who was frightened lost all that he had. Many solutions people give rely on the person possessing wealth in that sense; if just the social wealth of everyone coming from stable families, with more or less no serious addictions or issues. but if not, many of those solutions get even worse and lead to worse ruin.

<comment><USER6> Ok I've been poor, so I guess that "qualifies" me to comment: the OP is right, if you're struggling for cash in an expensive city then it's not wise to live by yourself.

The argument of "oh but something bad might happen" doesn't hold water - <USER2> you're struggling to feed yourself and have no money, then something very bad is ALREADY happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author has either not read "Nickeled and Dimed" or else has read it and summarized it in this article. I truly hope she is not simply plagiarizing the book. As for the title, it reminds me of the attitude displayed by callers to the Dave Ramsey show. They would rather flood you with anecdotes justifying their condition than listen to a word of advice. Having been poor myself, and having emerged from it through my own learning and through following the advice and example of people who were not poor, I would urge anyone who is poor to know the things in this article but to also listen to any well-meaning advice and see if any part of it, taken as is or modified to suit your situation, can help at all. You are most likely to get out of poverty in increments, so don't hermetically seal your mind inside a bubble of justification and victimization.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are many assumptions made by this article in an attempt to build a straw man.

First, there are many places where the author references children. Yes people in poverty have children, but the points she makes, also assume that the individual is a single parent.

>Cost of an extra hour of childcare to account for the commute time (at $13/hour, as well): $260 per month

>Which equals $800 – and doesn't take into account the fact that grocery shopping by bus is not ideal for someone with kids in tow.

If you have a partner, both of these scenarios are likely a complete non- issue.

Second, the author uses incredibly avoidable financial _decisions_ as justification as to why poverty is expensive.

>Overdraft fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees, and payday lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses. The average payday loan borrower – who is usually short just a few hundred dollars between paychecks – ends up paying more than 300% interest on their initial amount.

Why are these necessary components of poverty? This is making wild assumptions that a payday loan is the only option when short.

>Banks also find ways to capitalize on people without money. Many checking accounts require that a person carry a minimum balance – and fine customers for every month that they don't meet the requirement.

Checking accounts are free for anyone that can provide a consistent direct deposit, regardless of balance. If the job does not offer a direct deposit, its worth noting that many Credit Unions also offer free checking just for having an account.

>Each year, immigrants pay billions into our tax coffers, only to get the short end of the economic stick.

I would pay to see factual evidence backing this statement up.

I could go on, but this is only halfway through the article...

<comment><USER9> > Why are these necessary components of poverty?

Try getting a checking account or a share account in a credit union when you have a checkered history of overdrafts or bounced checks.

Frankly your comment reads like a person who's never been poor lecturing poor folks.

Frequently what we'd describe as a "financial decision" isn't a decision for poor people so much as a desperate attempt at keeping one's head above water. It's hard to do what you might call "the rational thing" when one is starving, has hungry kids, or has to choose between food, utilities, or medicine.

<comment><USER8> You have moved to an ad hominem approach regarding my past, normally I wouldn't even respond to this, but in this instance you are completely wrong.

I actually grew up very poor. As in my next meal was a privilege and not a guaranteed thing. I think its easy to dismiss my points by assuming that I have no experience with poverty, (or the pain of not having eaten a substantive meal for several days).

Again you reference

>checkered history of overdrafts or bounced checks.

Believe it our not, these are choices. You have a choice whether or not to write a check for more than you have in your bank account. You have a choice whether to with draw more than your current balance.

Furthermore, your point is moot as there are many options for those with spotty histories. A quick google search turned up this: [https://twocents.lifehacker.com/how-can-i-open-a-bank- accoun...](https://twocents.lifehacker.com/how-can-i-open-a-bank-account-when- my-credit-sucks-1585417920)

<comment><USER10> >> You have a choice whether or not to write a check for more than you have in your bank account.

It's a 'choice' if you are choosing to buy a shiny thing you didn't really need. It's hardly a choice if you have to write that check to buy medicines for your sick kid.

<comment><USER11> >> It's hardly a choice if you have to write that check to buy medicines for your sick kid.

This is certainly a tough scenario to argue against (way to choose a truly heart-wrenching emotional situation ;-), but the fact is, if you are writing a check (even for a good cause), knowing that you don't have money in the account, that also is a choice. Certainly there must be another way... use a credit card, get in a time machine and convince last_year_you that you need to create a small (or large) emergency fund for these sorts of things... etc.

<comment><USER12> Surely you jest ...."use a credit card"???? Most people who are poor don't even have bank accounts because they cannot manage them or they cannot afford the monthly fee. And no, bank accounts are not universally free if you have a direct deposit. My parents receive social security via direct deposit and they have never ever had an insufficient check in more than 50 years of maintaining a bank account. They still have a monthly fee.

In the words of Maya Angelou, "when you know better you do better." Maybe we should not only look into solutions to help people pull themselves out of poverty but maybe we should help with education to make the interim just a little bit easier.

<comment><USER11> Sure, "use a credit card". I'm listing options here. < that's what the "etc" was for> Some will work for some people, some will work for others. I a little surprised you chose to argue against credit card rather than time machine though...

What I was really trying to get at though is this: if you write a check with insufficient funds, you are just making the situation worse for yourself.

I agree that we should help with education but we should start with something simple like "don't write checks that are going to bounce". Second would be "don't spend money you don't have", so obviously the credit card scenario itself is not ideal, but better than a bounced check.

<comment><USER12> I don't argue against things that don't exist (time machine). And you are missing my point, most people who are poor do not have a credit card. There options are few and far between.

What I am suggesting by education is financial education such as don't spend what you don't have (if you have an account, don't write bad checks). Don't borrow money from payday lenders, etc. How to reduce expenses by having a roommate, utilizing public transportation, starting a community garden, etc. Then adding things such as you can go for dental care that is income based? Where you can go for annual flu shots etc?

I am not trying to make excuses for the decisions people make. What I am saying is to give alternatives (credit cards) that are not likely available to the majority of people who are poor does little to advance efforts to help find solutions that should be aimed at education and the development of safety nets for those all too common but expenses expenses (dental care).

When people know better, they do better. It has been repeated time and time again in these comments. People learned a better way and with that knowledge they were able to make much better choices and change their lives.

<comment><USER11> > And you are missing my point, most people who are poor do not have a credit > card.

I repeat... < that's what the "etc" was for>. I don't think you read my entire comment...

I didn't miss your point. I think we actually agree for the most part. My bit about the time machine was basically saying, if you could go back in time and tell yourself, "hey, buying shiny things is less important than establishing an emergency fund" and similar other wisdom, that would be ideal. Obviously, we don't have a time machine so we can only tell people these things going forward. Sounds a lot like the "financial education" you refer to.

<comment><USER12> It does but that is not necessarily a lesson that needs to be learned by those who are poor. If you read the thread here about those of us who have had to clean out our aging parents home it is amazing how much stuff they have that they hold on to forever and really did not serve a purpose other than to have it.

We all make financial mistakes. It is just that the mistakes of the poor have much more profound consequences.

<comment><USER11> When you are saying "that is not necessarily a lesson that needs to be learned by those who are poor".... are you referring to my statement that "buying shiny things is less important than establishing an emergency fund"?

If so, we definitely disagree. Those are the people in most need of an emergency fund.

You mentioned safety nets earlier > the development of safety nets for those all too common but expenses expenses

I would argue that a personal emergency fund is the first form of safety net that everyone should have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A good summary of the article's thesis comes at the end: "instead of telling poor people what they should do to work around a system that's leaving more and more people behind every year, we need to consider how the system can bend and change to better fit the needs of all people."

I think this thesis is well supported by the rest of the article, which is much more measured than the somewhat click-baity title suggests. I also think that it's generally a bad idea to tell people what they should do without understanding their circumstances in general, and even worse when you don't experience their circumstances. This article doesn't claim that people who haven't lived in poverty can't study it or have an opinion.

I would be interested in the writer's opinion of JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" and similar work.

</comment><comment><USER14> This has to be some sort of fallacy. After all, I don't expect my cardiologist to have a heart attack before he can tell me how to recover.

<comment><USER15> The title is mis-leading and click-baity, but the article argues a more reasonable position. A more appropriately named title would be "Before giving advice on how to climb out of poverty, think a little harder about all of the consequences of a given decision before recommending it to the poor, especially if you haven't had experience living in poverty."

She uses the example of "getting rid of your car", which sounds great until you tally up the costs of increased child care, reduced hours, and limited comparison shopping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have to say that I'm a little confused about the point of this article.

In my experience, the people who make the type of argument she describes tend to advocate hard work, education and financial prudence. In fact the sort of attributes that the author exhibited to remove herself from poverty. If anything she's a good advert for the kind of advice that tends to be foisted on people in poverty.

My pet theory is that the key issue is really about time horizon. If you live your life day to day then you're much more likely to be poor in the long term than if you have a time horizon of years or decades. This time horizon is largely culturally determined i.e. if your parents/peer group didn't think about the future then you are less likely to. But it can be substantially affected by personal characteristics e.g. the dissolute rich kid as well as illness e.g. depression.

Interestingly, I came to this conclusion because of a conversation with someone at the other end of the time horizon spectrum. I was chatting to a member of an English aristocratic family about farm husbandry (a subject about which I know absolutely nothing). It occurred to me that he made decisions that had a time horizon of a century or more. Something completely alien to my way of thinking but entirely natural to him.

I realised that my time horizon, which has always been oto 20-30 years, was just a point on a spectrum. Probably typical of a child of professional parents but not special in any way. And if you have a substantially different horizon than me then you're very likely to make substantially different life decisions than me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Whenever I open up about some of the hard times I've been through (usually trying to motivate or encourage a freelancer who is experiencing a rough patch) somebody inevitably pipes up claiming I don't _really_ know what it's like to be poor, one time somebody told me "You don't know anything, you only have the backs of your eyelids to go off of". I'm not even sure what that means, but it can be frustrating for those of us who HAVE been to rock bottom and found a way up again to try to show the ropes to others if every time you get questioned, disbelieved, and even shouted down because somewhere at this moment there's somebody poorer than you, or a spectator doesn't truly think you've experienced hardship.

When somebody says they've been through hard times and is trying to help another person out - that's NOT the time to interrogate them and try to disprove them, it's the time to focus on the person presently in need, and to find ways to help them get back on their feet or at least get their wits back.

Please don't be a 'poverty skeptic', it's a little hurtful and a lot unhelpful.

</comment><comment><USER18> The author was poor because the author _chose_ to get a degree in English lit and rather than getting a full time job in Starbucks she _chose_ to get an internship. Her experience demonstrates that it is largely a _choice_.

Experience of truly poor people is also largely a choice. I used to be very poor. It is called "crap happens". And it was a choice during those years to put one's head down and do it over again and again and again and again regardless of how helpless it felt.

The biggest issue that poor people have is misallocation of time. They have a crapload of time and very little money. Unfortunately, instead of leveraging their time, they try to leverage the money the way those who are not poor do. That's a mistake.

<comment><USER19> How do you leverage time when already working multiple jobs to make ends meet?

Sounds like you've never even met actually poor people. Most of them actually do work back-breaking hours or are completely incapable of most work for health or age reasons.

<comment><USER18> The reason why they are working those back to back jobs is _because they do not leverage their time_ and instead trade it for money at a _terrible rate_.

For someone who is poor figuring out where it is possible to buy groceries for pennies on a dollar using coupons is _more important_ than making extra twenty dollars a day. By spending 10 hours a month finding the right coupons and advertisements to save $300/mo on products he or she buys a poor person achieves a rate of $30/dollars an hour _after_ taxes.

That's how one gets out of poverty, not by taking another back breaking job to get effective rate of $4/hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> By this logic Elizabeth Taylor would have been a great marriage councilor and anyone with a great marriage should STFU about it.

<comment><USER21> Had Taylor found herself in a good stable marriage after her poor one your comparison would match the authors. But I guess it doesnt and you're being flippant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Often I have the feeling some people are just magnets for bad luck.

My ex girlfriend for example. Failed two degrees, started a badly paid apprenticeship, lived in a few flats with bad roommates and bad land-lords and had always bad bosses at work. She came from a upper-middle-class family, but somehow everything she touched went bad.

I met a bunch of such people, they fail the moment they start something and I just don't know how or why.

</comment><comment><USER23> I know many people who started out with little money, then saved a percentage of not much for decades to build wealth.

There's power in time. Warren Buffet knows this and other things. It's why he makes 'Secret Millionaire Club' for kids.

Poverty can be overcome. Definitely.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some of the issues discussed in this thread evolve quickly, or may be highly situational. As a consequence, problems that appear to result from negligence may be difficult even for reasonably conscientious people to avoid.

For example, overdraft of a bank account may have been more difficult to predict in some periods than others. When I was younger, I was payed by check (direct deposit was not available from some of my employers), I payed my rent with a check, had automatic bill pay for a small utility bill, and used a debit/check-card to buy food and sundry necessities. The timing to post these transactions was inconsistent; the time to clear the checks varied, and the auto bill pay occasionally failed. One month my rent check cleared quickly, but my paycheck took a few days. I bought a small amount of groceries with my checkcard, which authorized, but overdrew my account by a few dollars. It was not my intent to overdraw my account, and I thought that "authorized" meant that sufficient funds were available. Even one or two NSF or overdraft fees would not have been a huge problem, but because the bank reordered transactions from largest to smallest, I had several hundred dollars in bank fees which consumed my income for the rest of the month.

The account was free, and as far as I can understand and recall, the transaction reordering was mandatory, and "Overdraft Protection" was offered as a value added opt-in service for higher cost account types. I made at least some effort to understand the account documentation I was given when I signed the contract, but I failed to understand that transactions were reordered, let alone recognize the risk implications of that policy. When I told my dad about this story, he thought it was just a mistake, and that the bank might fix it if I called them. He hadn't found out about transaction reordering because he had ample savings since before it was invented.

Another example: prepaid cellphones were extremely expensive at that time and place, pay phones were disappearing, and I was not able to have a home phone for practical reasons (moved too much, installation delays, not on the lease, etc). I needed a contact phone number for employment reasons, and I accepted a contract cell phone plan because it was so much less expensive then prepaid.

The contract plans available changed occasionally, and to save money I changed my plan a couple of times; eventually, I was erroneously told by an agent of the provider that unlimited "off peak" hours of my plan began at 7pm, but in fact they started at 8pm. My efforts to cut my expenses resulted in a surprise bill for several hundred dollars. I couldn't even take my business elsewhere because the contract had a deposit and a $500 cancellation fee. (In general, I have learned to suspect that when services are predicated on a mandatory line of credit, it is in order to drive up consumption using price obfuscation.)

I'm offering these as examples of cases where consumers must make a poorly understood cost/risk trade off in order to access basic financial or utility services. It seems to me that this disproportionately affects people with less money because they are more price sensitive and less resilient to unexpected costs.

The rules and conventions tend to change overtime, so depending on our circumstances we might have no idea of the details of these kinds of problems as they exist now if we aren't having them. Since I can now easily keep several thousand dollars cash in a back account, I wouldn't know first hand about transaction reordering if it had been introduced more recently. Similarly, the pricing structure for phones has changed completely since I had "bill shock", and I can now easily afford more service then I ever use in any case.

A few members of my extended family grew up poor enough to have serious problems securing food and housing; sometimes they lived in a barn and survived on wild game. These options were totally unavailable to me when I needed them. They are now middle class retirees, and they have no more current experience then I do with the kinds of financial issues discussed here.

A couple of years ago, an acquaintance of mine who lost his job was advised by his grandmother to try selling oranges by the freeway. He was an adult man with bills to pay and an estranged family – his grandma offered a simple, well meaning suggestion that demonstrated her total misapprehension of the nature of the problem. If my experiences with financial distress are not in the same place and time as another person, I assume that I am probably somewhere on the knowledge spectrum between that person, and my friend's grandma.

The point I mean to make is that if people seem to have problems that could be trivially avoided, it could be due to negligence, or it could be that we don't fully understand the problems.

</comment><comment><USER25> Poor people, how does this proposal sound: I won't tell you what you should do, and you don't demand any unearned transfer payments that are subsidized by the taxes I pay. Fair enough?

<comment><USER26> At the local level you are paying taxes for education. At the federal level you are paying taxes to keep dollar afloat. Guess what's cool? We can have the federal government spend more without raising your taxes at all!

<comment><USER25> _> Guess what's cool? We can have the federal government spend more without raising your taxes at all!_

Of course, just borrow the money to spend, and let future generations of Americans suffer the consequences.

<comment><USER26> Let's say you had a credit card and a magic job where you get to decide your paycheck. Would you be worried about paying that credit card?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Freelancer and bootstrappers: where do you physically work? - <AUTHOR>

Home, coffee shop, public library, co-working space, etc -- which works for you and why? <comment><USER2> Co-working space, home, coffee shop. Mainly the latter two (cheaper).

</comment><comment><USER3> Co-working space and home.</comment>


Git User's Survey 2010 - <AUTHOR> https://www.survs.com/survey/MUPYR8UJ4B

<comment><USER2> I learned a lot of things from this survey, I didn't know about some of the listed features and listed tools. I read the manual and searched the web for tools a lot of time ago, so I guess there are many new things out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think people who use git don't like wasting time and typing a lot. I hardly imagine a lot of them filling out such a long questionnaire.

<comment><USER4> I'd say that _every single person out there_ who uses git likes wasting time and typing a lot, because that's basically what programming is.

<comment><USER3> It obviously depends on used tools, technology and programmer's attitude. I'm glad I'm not in the same situation as you.

PS. I just cannot resist to guess - are yeu a java guy?

<comment><USER2> I cannot resist too: java guys nowadays autocomplete everything with eclipse

<comment><USER3> True, which proves that coders are lazy, and don't like typing a lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blogs report iPad 3 before iPad 2 is released. Will this hurt iPad 2 sales? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-3-2011-2

<comment><USER2> I can just imagine the response if an Apple rival was leaking their next-next- generation products before they've even announced the existence of the next one. Particularly timing it for when rival devices are in the news. Doesn't seem like a good sign.

You already see folk saying "Yeah, the Xoom/TouchPad/etc. is looking better specced than the current iPad but battery life and UI feel is important so you can't compare it with an unreleased product. Also the iPad 2 will kick its ass!" it will only add to the irony if they throw in the fact that the iPad 3 will be even better.</comment>


A Personal API - <AUTHOR> http://x.naveen.com/post/51808692792/a-personal-api

<comment><USER3> I have been working on an open source version of this idea: <http://www.quantify.io>

Right now, things are fairly sparse. You can check the repo out here: <https://github.com/jdjkelly/bodyimage>

_An open source Rails API to track "quantified self" data.

Right now, the hardware companies in this space are storing your data in closed systems. Let's change that.

Take the Withings WiFi scale or the FitBit, for example. Both are essential pieces of the quantified self hacker, yet both store your data in their respective, siloed databases. What happens when one of them goes bust? Or decides to pivot towards an ad-based business model?

This project includes a Rails + MySQL RESTful API to store your data.`_

Contact in profile.

<comment><USER4> this goes very deep; i like it. i'll drop you a note soon.

<comment><USER5> Here's another one <http://api.howareyou.com> (I'm the founder)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the use cases we had in mind when in developing Tent (<https://tent.io>).

Tent is an evented data store for arbitrary JSON blobs which can be typed b the developer. It has the added benefit of operating as a decentralized system that lets you push and receive posts with other users via webhooks.

Tent can be used to create applications and systems from the quantified self to microblogging to cloud-backed file sync to collaborative real-time document editing.

</comment><comment><USER7> One day we will own our own node. Where we have control over everything, what we want to share with whom and why.

All we need is a place for storage and we add services like apps. With ipv6 around the corner everyone will get his personal ip attached anyway so we can build upon that.

Many of us have this idea but no one made a breakthrough so far but it will emerge. We have not figured it out quite yet we have the technologie but we need to get the idea of how we glue everything together.

I will look forward to the day when i pay a certain amount of money per year to have my own node without being the product of some megacorp thats only interested in quarter performance.

<comment><USER8> I'm working on exactly the kind of thing you're describing. Except ipv6 isn't really going to solve the connectivity problem as all the NATs and middleboxes on the network aren't going anywhere. We'll be using DNS instead as the 'identity' piece.

Since you said you would pay for such a thing, can you elaborate how much and what you'd expect (in terms of functionality)?

<comment><USER7> I would pay for storage videos/pictures/documents etc. This could be one monetization stone. My gut feeling maybe around $9.99 / month or $50 / year.

The basis everyone would except are normal social network features sharing of "items" galleries friend system feeds and groups. Maybe this part should be an open source solution like for example diaspora.

On top of that you can build an app/service network. Maybe something like app.net.

Important on all parts is that you own the data and you should be able to pull it at will from any part of the network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The prisoner forging his own chains.

<comment><USER10> Amusing ourselves to death in the 21st century.. this technology does raise, once again, the question of why people are saying so much personal information online. As if they had a giant ampitheatre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is so cool. Somebody should turn this into a platform - a mobile app that at least helps you record the stats you want, paired with an API platform that lets you grant and request permission for other "personal APIs".

Then other API calls can be built on top of individual people - <USER2> students in the US, citizens of India, etc. The possibilities are pretty endless.

<comment><USER12> The Biggest Loser - play along at home! Be the "biggest loser" in [your region] to [acquire swag], etc.

Sorry, maybe I'm being a bit facetious. There's definitely a lot of cool stuff that could be done with a personal API though. But how do you get people on- board? You have to have equipment to track/update stats right? Are people willing to buy into this potential network?

<comment><USER13> If Fitbit and all of those types of companies start having Export APIs a service could have wrapper around all of them. Then anyone with one of those devices could join easily. Could be the way to start, since you definitely don't want to be building the hardware and API altogether for an MVP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice! A few similar services come to mind that might be of interest: <http://lockerproject.org/> <http://humanapi.co/> <http://developer.runkeeper.com/healthgraph/>

Get your DNA in there too! <https://api.23andme.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. Not the api part but the idea itself. What we need is bitcoin like encrypted decentralized personal file with an open spec. This file can be edited only by the owner while can be read by anyone. Then we need exporter applications which can read this data and provide as an api. Now there are two levels of abstraction:data owners and data providers. There can be "data unions", groups which can negotiate with data providers and data consumers for a better deal(money,privacy). Identity verification can now be handled by data unions instead of data providers(as is the case now). "Take control" anyone?

</comment><comment><USER16> I like the idea of this. I know there was a post recently about a guy selling 24 hour chunks of data about himself.

Is there an opportunity here to create a secure data store for your own structured data hosted securely somewhere else and that providers would pay YOU to access?

Of course you'd give free access to it for your doctor who needed to pull some info. But what if you had total control over your own API. This is a kind of like Facebook but I would never let facebook hold some of my most personal data. I would like to control authorization to my own data though to certain people.

</comment><comment><USER17> My first thought was "this is about as narcissist as you can get". But, it's still pretty damn cool. Nice job.

<comment><USER18> Interesting take. I looked at it almost the opposite way: "You are turning yourself into a set of numbers that has no identity outside of those numbers." Certainly if this were to be a thing (a la online charts or Microsoft Health) it would have that end result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I enjoyed the post very much. Just out of curiosity, though, why did you choose not to capitalize any words?

<comment><USER20> Because he's tuned his body and mind to machine-like efficiency and calculated that hitting the shift key is an unnecessary ancient relic of the past.

Basically he's disrupting capitalization, which I've been thinking about a lot lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I actually started hacking on this idea a few weeks ago. A personal API could have tons of uses. Many others have commented on the benefits of aggregation, but this could allow users to control and selectively sell/provide information to companies, apps, and advertisers. Applications could be built which utilize the personal APIs of friends. In Naveen's example, my app could compare my fitness level with my friends, recommend new restaurants based on ones my friends actually went to, track progress on goals, etc.

What I'm trying to say is that with a personal API platform, apps simply become a front end to standardized personal data. Switching costs would be reduced significantly, which would encourage a lot more innovation.

Here's a spec I've written out for my work on my own personal API. It's not done yet, and the code isn't open sourced yet, but hopefully it will inspire others to hack on the idea.

<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/570656/spec_public.md>

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been spending a bit of time thinking about this lately, too. Here are the things that I think need to be answered for this to be truly useful.

* Secure access. It's great you decided to share everything publicly. I'm looking at fairly confidential data like blood tests, though.

* How do you express permissions? It's likely you'd give out sets of data, not per-url permissions. (I.e. my photos from date A to date B, in this general vicinity - your vacation pics)

* How can others discover what data sets & types you've shared?

* Related: A type description. Some events cover time ranges. Some are momentary samples. They all use different units. Some have location info attached, some don't. (I.e. my heart rate doesn't. Pictures do. Steps/day - geolocation is meaningless)

Either way, it's exciting to see people push ahead on this - many of these questions will probably be answered as we go.

<comment><USER4> you're totally right on all these points: for the time being, i've only put out information that's okay being 'public', but i imagine when you do want to share a set with a small group (let's say your physicians), you'll want an additional layer of access control.

<comment><USER22> Oh, I didn't mean it as criticism. I admire that you went ahead and just created a v0 - that's further than I've gotten on my project, that's for sure :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I work for a non-profit called Open mHealth. We are working to build an open architecture around health data from mobile apps and devices. The basic idea is that existing applications can have their own proprietary way of getting data into their systems, and we want to evolve a standard way of getting data out of these systems. We are developing an API specification around this. <https://github.com/openmhealth/developer/wiki>

Once app developers adopt the Open mHealth approach, much of the work of getting data out of these silo'ed apps will be done. This is important because the real value of this data comes about when the streams are combined to be analyzed and visualized.

I am posting here because many of the issues outlined in this thread and in the original post are things we are actively trying to solve.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is awesome. I've also been working on a personal data dashboard app, which is similar. It pulls in data from various social and fitness app APIs. You can also enter in data manually. It's mainly for viewing the data and trends, but I'll add an API too if there's demand.

Is anyone interested in using my dashboard app?

<comment><USER25> yes - want to explore

<comment><USER24> Great, can you please drop me an email (see profile) with some details on what data you're interested in tracking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Such an api sort of already exists in the form of Fitbit's api which can be found at <http://dev.fitbit.com/>.

Fitbit holds a lot of the data hostage, but it's at least something that anyone wearing a Fitbit can easily grant access to.

<comment><USER27> What data do they hold hostage?

<comment><USER28> It was on HN[0] a few months ago that they don't give you access to minute by minute data, only daily totals.

[0]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001301>

<comment><USER27> Ah; FYI the API now supports Intraday Time Series fetching.

See [https://wiki.fitbit.com/display/API/API-Get-Intraday-Time- Se...](https://wiki.fitbit.com/display/API/API-Get-Intraday-Time-Series) for more information. You can retrieve data in 1 min or 15 min increments.

<comment><USER26> you still cannot get access to the raw data or data in real time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is also something that I hope Huginn can tackle. Huginn makes it easy to retrieve and react to your data. Adding an API beyond that should be straightforward.

<https://github.com/cantino/huginn>

</comment><comment><USER30> Kind of interesting to think about slowly building up and aggregating more layers - e.g. activity, location, shopping, internet, phone, financial, educational, medical, legal, work, relationships etc - and interesting how much of this exists already.

So if this comprehensive personal dataset becomes the norm at some point in the future - what happens when this is under somebody else's control against your interests (whether an illegal attacker or a legal authority)? And what about more gray areas, such as marketing, insurance etc (which would likely encourage the creation of that kind of API in the first place)?

</comment><comment><USER31> Had a similar idea before but looked at it as more of a decentralized social platform where everyone hosts his own node with all personal information (maybe even locally on a personal device). Kind of like a virtual avatar that could connect and create a real social layer for the web, one that we could control and trust. Technically this should be pretty easy to create, nothing to fancy here. However standardizing and major real world adoption seems to be pipe dream (look at all the failed attempts like diaspora, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER32> Love the idea. If you wish to incorporate social stream data, check out <http://socialsafe.net>

I've used it to back up and then delete my personal FB account, and continue to archive instagram, linkedin, twitter, blogs, etc. etc.

What's more, even though their interface is kinda weird, they store all kinds of granular data in a very nice SQL database which contains more then they represent in their reports, and can be be repurposed in many different ways...

</comment><comment><USER33> The FOAF crowd already did a lot of this style of work - see also <http://wiki.foaf-project.org/w/DataSources> ; you probably have a few data feeds already, particularly focused on social networking site activity. Other vocabs work - ie, crschmidt's menow vocab.

Express it as json ld to make it more modern, and you have a distributed ecology of services that all talk the same sort of language, about you.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting. I think the real challenge behind this though, is not the API itself, but that for it to be really useful there has to be some sort of _semi-automated_ form of data collection, that can be generally applied.

Relevant: [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal- analytic...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of- my-life/)

<comment><USER4> you're totally right

this is why i believe a smart scale is one of the best examples of good data tracking: you step on it whenever you think of it (not on some weird schedule; nor do you have to wear it or take it with you). it does the mundane stuff of capturing the data and sending it to the cloud, which you would otherwise have to write into some notebook.

if it's a system that's fully automated though, one might lose interest in collecting it in the first place: the QSers always like to say – when you add a little friction to a process, you end up paying more attention to why it is. so instead of just blinding capturing your weight, setting up alerts for goals and seeing trends fall and rise will get you to make the most of the data – instead of just collecting data for data's sake.

<comment><USER35> Ooh, we have a solution to that problem (losing interest in collecting it if it's fully automated). Assuming you're collecting data that you want to change, like, for many people, their weight, or, say, how much time you spend on Hacker News: <http://beeminder.com/d/hn>

Namely, set up a commitment device that forces you to keep your datapoints on a path to some goal. That's what Beeminder does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very cool.

I had actually mocked up something similar with openapi.me, but never got to release it.

It included different level of permissions and data including addresses and payment information. The goal was to have a centralized repo of data to update only once and have it propagate to all the other services asking for the same data over and over (email, address, links, etc).

</comment><comment><USER37> This may be a bit of a privacy issue to publish, but an interesting dataset is that of <https://openpaths.cc/> ... keep the app running on your phone and it will keep track of your location. This data is then available to you over an API, or to researchers that you approve to get access to your anonymized data.

</comment><comment><USER38> As an engineer, I can understand the excitement. But I wonder why and who should use that data? I can't see any great use cases.

<comment><USER39> Doctors, for checking activity/sleep/etc.

Friends/relationships, for checking general activity and check-ins.

Potential businesses, for seeing interests and the like. Or, if currently employed, the employer could randomly check to see how the employee has been sleeping (are they going to be tired/cranky today?) or to see how often they check-in at the office.

Aggregated with more data from people doing similar things and you can start to get a look at populations (what if everyone in SF was logging this data? What if a good chunk of those in the US were?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've actually been toying with the idea of having a private facebook account to hold all this data and more. Facebook's pretty much become the default social layer these days and almost every app can publish data to your news feed.

Facebook also has a pretty cool Timeline UI to boot which will probably only get better as time passes.

<comment> doc-m I'm starting to think this is a really great idea - to have somewhere to keep a private personal history - particularly for checking in to keep a track of where I've been without appearing to be a self-important moron. You know who you are FB friends!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like the approach you're taking Naveen. I do wonder whether individual, disparate data steams have any value, or whether its a case of the sum of the parts is less than the whole, so to speak (along with concerns like security, etc etc that others have raised), but the concept is intriguing. Will be watching / following.

</comment><comment><USER42> If there was an easy way to collect and publish this data for the average person would you be willing to sell this to companies directly? We're basically paying companies like Facebook and Twitter with our information in order to have, well, Facebook and Twitter. Maybe we could do something else with our "money".

</comment><comment><USER43> Nice! I like the idea of keeping all the data about _me_ at one place. Given that so many companies are entering the wearable gadgets and personal fitness space, we will surely see some "Personal Portal" and the company making tons of money selling your personal data or showing "relevant" ads for you.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've had a similar idea for a while but never executed it well. I wanted to have my personal website merge all of my various feeds from other services into posts on my site to be the "one feed" of things happening in my life.

I suppose API access to that would be a logical extension - this is very cool.

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of 2net by Qualcomm, except that has a lot of features and uptake already: <http://www.qualcommlife.com/>

At CES, Qualcomm had a bunch of devices working with it through a plugin wall unit. They offer free data APIs for storage, etc..

</comment><comment><USER46> I've thought about this many times before. But, this is the easy part.

Storing, doing simple metrics, making assumptions and returning the data is not a problem. Standardizing input methods is.

<comment><USER47> Federating data is a fairly 'solved' issue. Ironically (or not) enterprise IT is ahead of the average organism in this space.

Faced with legacy systems communicating (or not communicating) via various channels, Middleware, ESBs, SOA, message queues, content-based routers, business process management, event processing, and data virtualization have all been created so that a development group can factor these systems into canonical representations of business events.

At that point, the input method ranges from the simple (existing web app to API) to complex (treating a batch-oriented system in a semi-synchronous manner or screen-scraping an ancient smart terminal as a queriable data source).

At that point, the real challenge isn't the input method but master data management and security/authority/privilege.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> That's pretty cool!

As an engineer, I crave data. As much as anything, this process would force me to organize that data into some archivable, more useful form.

</comment><comment><USER49> Cool idea, Naveen. I would like to contribute and expand it.

<comment><USER50> Would love to show you a working example of a similar project with a public API. We have a number of users giving it a spin and would really appreciate the technical feedback. Email?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Similar to this post: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021783> (minus the act API)

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm also working on something similar as my weekend project. It's called Pokelog. <https://pokelog.com/>

</comment><comment><USER53> As you suggested, I think this is a great way to expose your data to apps that may be built on top of you.

Also, a stalker would love this :P

</comment><comment><USER54> This is great! I would love to hear some device recommendations. Fitbit, Fuelband, or Jawbone? Withings scale or fitbit scale?

<comment><USER4> i own them all and have tried each one on and off for the last couple of years. i like each one in its own way (and, also, am friends with guys at each place)

if you're just getting started and you aim to keep it light, then i'd start with the withings scale. you leave it in your bathroom, set your goals, step on it when you feel like it and watch trends and alerts from time to time. i find my weight tells me more about me over time than many other metrics: it shows my bad weeks from my good and, in indirect ways, shows when i stress out and get bad sleep (and therefore, end up eating poorly and exercising inconsistently)

</comment></comment><comment> question-all Is it that all your personal information is in one place that makes this so unique or is it the enormity of the data?

</comment><comment><USER55> Please include the units in the results!

<comment><USER4> a good idea. for now, i left everything metric, but have thought about dropping in the units.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> <http://www.personal.com/>

</comment><comment><USER57> This website was blocked by my company's firewall as "suspicious."

<comment><USER58> maybe because its a tumblr site? You must work at a strict company, there is nothing NSFW in the article or the site.

<comment><USER57> They're pretty lenient -- there are all sorts of awful websites that I'm able to visit without issue. They only tend to block sites related to hacking and piracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> That is a brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER60> I was about to dismiss this but have thought about it a bit more, and there's something interesting here.

There are already APIs built on top of you. There are the ones you know about, like Facebook and Twitter. There are the ones we know exist but have no direct access to, such as Amazon's backend or your police record. And there are the ones we may never know about, such as the NSA bot scanning this post right now and correlating it to my recent overseas cell phone calls.

I'm intrigued by the concept of aggregating this data. Imagine if the wealth of data collected about you all went to one place, and, most importantly, was _controlled by you_. Imagine if Company X had to pay _you_ to know about your Amazon spending habits instead of paying Amazon. Imagine if scientists could perform long-term health studies in an instant because the data they need is already collected and just needs to be crunched.

I think the concept that's missing from your blog post is the idea of _discoverability_.

<comment><USER61> Have you read Jaron Laniers new book "Who Owns the Future"? You have similar ideas ("Imagine if the wealth of data collected about you all went to one place, and, most importantly, was controlled by you. Imagine if Company X had to pay you to know about your Amazon spending habits instead of paying Amazon.")

It's a thought provoking book.. and slightly worrisome to boot (about the state of things at the moment, with regard to the economics of "sharing data").

<comment><USER4> yes, i do think of it that way: as we leave all this data exhaust behind us, i keep wanting a system to have it all in one place – or at least, an "interface" that shows it to me in one place, even if that's not how the backend really is.

thanks for the book recommendation - i will check it out this weekend!

<comment><USER8> Academia has been thinking about this for a while. I'm involved with several projects that aim to put users in control of their 'digital footprint' and what you've described are two aspects of the work. First is how to collate and access all the data and second is how to allow third parties to query/process that data in a way that respects a users' privacy. [1]

I'm keen to commercialize the work when it's ready but it's a research project precisely because it's a tough problem. Of course, one approach is to just make that personal info public but I don't think that will really benefit users in the long term (companies would certainly benefit, though)

[1] <http://perscon.net/overview/dataware.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Narcissism reaches a new level (or low, depending on how you see it).

<comment><USER28> Narcissism:

1\. Excessive or erotic interest in oneself and one's physical appearance

2\. Extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one's own talents and a craving for admiration

So explain to me; what does quantified self have to do with narcissism?

<comment><USER63> Well in defense of this snarky comment, I have to say that the social sharing part of personal data like this can come across in this way (doesn't make it narcissism but still...).

The thing I like about personal data collection and cool new apis is what it could do for the individual, i.e. offer new insight, movitivation, encourage better behaviours.

But I hate the sharing part because it opens the door to over-sharing. Not just in terms of corporations having all kinds of data and using it in their interests, but also just simply the noise that gets added by people sharing information that frankly, has very little relevance.

I don't really care if someone just completed a 2 mile run and I certainly don't go to twitter to read automatically generated tweets about it.</comment></comment></comment>


Advertiser Groups Band Together for Online Do-Not-Track List - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=146240 <comment><USER2> And thus opens the "in order for you to have privacy, we must be able to identify you" argument.</comment>


Creating a Non-Trivial Lisp Game in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://defungames.com/2018/12/creating-a-non-trivial-lisp-game-in-2018/ <comment><USER2> My group is developing Clasp (github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git). It's a Common Lisp implementation that interoperates with C++ and uses llvm as the backend. It's something you might want to look at because it could change your options in the following ways:

(1) Clasp interoperates with C++ - C++ libraries like graphics and physics engines can be easily exposed within Clasp Common Lisp. (See [https://github.com/clasp-developers/demo-expose-bullet- physi...](https://github.com/clasp-developers/demo-expose-bullet-physics- engine-to-clasp))

(2) Clasp uses llvm as the backend - it generates llvm-ir from Common Lisp code and uses link time optimization to link C++ and Common Lisp generated llvm-ir.

(3) Clasp uses the Memory Pool System garbage collector, which can be configured to minimize GC pause times to a programmer-defined level.

(4) Clasp generates debug info and can be profiled with standard tools like dtrace and C++ functions, Common Lisp functions and GC functions are all profiled against each other.

I'm a professor of Chemistry at Temple University - I'm developing Clasp to design molecules and materials - but it could be applied to a lot of other problems.

Caveat: Clasp is not yet as performant as Steel Bank Common Lisp, but it uses the open source and highly configurable Cleavir compiler developed by Robert Strandh and we have incorporated inlining and are currently incorporating type inference.

If you want to see a little bit more - I have a 25 min talk up on youtube that I presented a couple of weeks ago at the 2018 llvm developers meeting ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdXeRBbgDM&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdXeRBbgDM&feature=youtu.be))

<comment><USER3> Does clasp still support all the metaprogramming features of lisp while using llvm, and how does it do it?

<comment><USER4> Given that clasp is a Common Lisp - that passes 97%+ of CL ANSI tests on par with other CL implementations like SBCL - then answer is obviously yes.

You need to go into more detail about why you think llvm would make a difference. Common Lisp is usually compiled to native code and the compiler is - unlike most other languages that compile to native code - exposed and available at runtime. When you program interactively in a natively-compiled Common Lisp implementation like clasp or SBCL or ClozureCL, your code is compiled to native code on the spot. You can even customize the code generation via compiler macros. LLVM is just another compiler backend that can slot in so in that regard, conceptually it's seamless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321)

 _" I even went so far as to write an entire compiler and environment (a several man-year endeavor) to design two different runtime oriented dialects called GOOL and GOAL used in 8 Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games. All 30-60 FPS action games -- 40 million copies sold. All written in Lisp! (more or less)"_

<comment><USER6> That's pretty interesting too! Although I think the advantage of the game here is that it's not only written in Lisp (or CL as the case may be) but the client is actually going to be open source, and it sounds like they're incorporating a (subset?) of the Lisp language as a component of playing the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Abuse" by Crack.com way back in 1995 was powered by Lisp, as I recall (and also moddable via it):

[https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/abuse](https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/abuse)

[https://everything2.com/title/abuse](https://everything2.com/title/abuse)

<comment><USER8> The source, maintained by Sam Hocevar: [http://abuse.zoy.org/browser/abuse/trunk](http://abuse.zoy.org/browser/abuse/trunk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of all the code that might have to be written for a non trivial game, a skeletal animation system doesn't strike me as particularly difficult. Curious why that was called out specifically as something not to try and implement yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that skeleton system is not very hard to implement. Anecdotally, one of the first CL based apps I wrote were to implement Quake MD5 (.md5mesh and .md5anim) parsers to do skeletal animation.

I think he might be categorising it as hard for the following: \- Defining a simple, easy to navigate data structure with the bone and weight mappings across vertices, to do the math for pose calculation \- Having a highly compressed binary format for animation data, which is definitely hard but required for good FPS \- Doing it on CPU or GPU

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article talks about one of the primary motivations for using Lisp being that it's 'fun,' which is a comment I've heard about Lisp elsewhere, and which makes sense to me since I've noted a difference in funness between other languages.

So that's pretty appealing to me, but I haven't quite found the right Lisp to use. It seems like Clojure (probably ClojureScript actually) would be the most practical for me to use on some projects—but I'm curious whether others have found Clojure/ClojureScript to have that same element of fun Lisp is sometimes known for.

<comment><USER4> Clojure is practically tied to the JVM and the Java ecosystem (ClojureScript is different enough to count as a different language so I'll focus on Clojure).

To me that's not fun. It's also limited by design to fit the development model Rich Hickey wanted for his consultancy. It is nowhere near as encompassing or paradigm agnostic as Common Lisp. Moreover, you can take old Lisp code that's 40+ years old and run it today on top of Common Lisp with no/minor changes. Clojure breaks compatibility with Lisp code in many different ways. For me these reasons are enough not to consider Clojure a Lisp.

<comment><USER11> if by limited we mean full ecosystem compatibility with jvm and javascript, then yes, Clojure is limited. Which 40 year old CL codebase is it that i am trying to run?

<comment><USER4> The decisions behind Clojure worked out well for Rich Hickey and his consultancy but they don't fit the programs that I find myself writing all the time (compilers, assemblers, virtual machines, tight control of code generation and memory operations and so on). I can do all of that - and more - in SBCL and it's a pleasure to use as the I don't have to bend myself to work around language shortcomings. Common Lisp gives me a multitude of programming paradigms and an enormous arsenal of approaches to use. When working in exploratory domains, that I do all the time, nothing else comes close. Here is an example of using SBCL for exploratory lowlevel programming by Paul Khuong [1].

I've written _performant_ and _lightweight_ TCP/IP network stacks in Common Lisp. Clojure is just too constrained.

As far as old Lisp code goes, it's everywhere - if you care to look -. The lambda papers, McCarthy's original papers, the CMU CL repository (still of practical use today), vast archives of Lisp code from MIT and so on and so forth. Not to mention useful frameworks like Screamer [2] which is close to 30 years old and Maxima [3] which is even older.

[1] [https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate- assembl...](https://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembly- code-breadboard/)

[2] [http://nikodemus.github.io/screamer/](http://nikodemus.github.io/screamer/)

[3] [http://maxima.sourceforge.net](http://maxima.sourceforge.net)</comment></comment></comment></comment>