Gitcolony – The next generation of pull requests - <AUTHOR> http://gitcolony.com <comment><USER2> Uh, "request a demo"? I was expecting a little bit more of juicy info in those pages after reading some bold statements. I can't sign up either (even if you tell me in green letters no credit card is required), sorry. You should have just provided maybe a better overview of the service in the landing page. Dunno, maybe a full-featured video of the revolutionary features described there. I really think a nice detailed video of the unique features of the service would be great to have. It's hard to visualize what you mean with those static screenshots and text.

<comment><USER3> Yep, I immediately went to see some screens, and all they have are these tiny little things that don't let me see anything. Looks like there's a nice design, but that's it. I can understand that doing a video takes more time, but a nice screenshot tour should be doable. Or even making the current shots clickable to zoom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback and nice words about the design. As I said in the previous comment, we will work on that video and will keep you posted about it! :)

Meanwhile, feel free to create a free account, I would love to hear your feedback.

<comment><USER4> Is someone maliciously downvoting OP's comments? Granted a few of them don't say much more than "thanks, will keep you posted" and OP has made 5 HN submissions on Gitcolony over a year ([https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitcolony.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitcolony.com)). But unless I'm missing something, I see nothing downvote worthy here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks great! One minor problem though. Once I'm signed on, I can't seem to access the Gitcolony home page again (to see pricing etc.) -- I always get redirected to the dashboard.

P.S. I totally agree with this quote:

       Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he'll find 10 issues.
       Ask him to do 500 lines and he'll say it looks good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the nice words! Yeah, that's intentionally, but we can definitely improve that! (Meanwhile you can enter using this url [http://gitcolony.com/pricing](http://gitcolony.com/pricing))

That one is a great quote, isn't it? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We hit the edges of GitHub pull request productivity a while back. It's really painful for large complicated code reviews that raise issues. Was impossible to quickly review code and have confidence all raised issues were addressed.

Been using Reviewable for the last few weeks and it's been really great at addressing these issues. Worth checking out, and I will check this one out too.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like a hosting-agnostic solution somewhere between the opinionation of GitHub and the flexibility of Gerrit? I could see this taking off. GitHub is too opinionated and over-simplified for the tastes of some, while Gerrit is much more powerful but also showing its age.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely the idea! We want to run on top of Github/other git hosting solutions to be able to setup your own rules while being more flexible and better than Gerrit (we think that the commit by commit approach it's definitely not the most efficient one).

Since GitHub started to grow, pull requests became very popular for open source contributions. Now, companies are also using them to reinforce their internal code review process. We think this can work even better by building the next generation of pull requests, helping companies to improve their process.

<comment><USER6> My advice is to absolutely nail the abstraction layer between CI and code review. Remember that the most valuable software often has large build matrices and necessarily complicated code review <> CI workflows. Gerrit+Jenkins is actually surprisingly limited in these regards. GitHub+[Circle,Travis] delivers surprisingly close to the same level of flexibility here as Gerrit+Jenkins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Super interesting feedback, I super appreciate it :) Actually we are working now to manage the whole merge process and then CI + code review is our next item to tackle.

I will keep you posted about our progress!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I first saw the name, I mistakenly read it as "Gitcolonoscopy".

For those who don't know, a colonoscopy is a medical procedure wherein a tube- like camera is inserted into a patient's anus, rectum and bowels, in order for a doctor to view areas that are otherwise difficult to view.

It isn't the best imagery to accidentally associate with a software product, I'm afraid!

</comment><comment><USER8> copy suggestion:

"Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, they'll find 10 issues. Ask them to review 500 lines and they'll say it looks good".

</comment><comment><USER9> What does "live branches" mean? It isn't clear from the descripton on the site, and there's no further information...

<comment><AUTHOR> Our fault, we need to update that name to "Virtual Pull Requests" (we renamed them on our last release).

The main idea is that you can have a "virtual" pull request since the moment you create the branch (you can set up to get it done automatically by Gitcolony). Basically, you have a PR before you even create a pull request, but it's just virtual because it doesn't exist on Github, it only exists within the boundaries of Gitcolony.

This makes visible your work so your team can review it from the get go, without the risk of merging it by mistake.

And whenever you want, you can convert it to a traditional PR just with one click :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Code as its written" fine for collaborators, bad for over zealous managers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting debate! We want to improve the code review process for collaborators. If we improve that process for collaborators, in the long term it will be better also for managers :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > next generation of pull requests

Would that be send-email?

<comment><AUTHOR> No it's not :) In fact, we know that devs don't like emails, so we manage everything from our tool (plus integrations with Slack & Hipchat).

In addition, we know that emails don't work, so we want to create actionable items directly from Gitcolony, no more emails with a list of things to improve. Just create your TODOs and tickets while you review your code and notify those users that need to be involved!</comment></comment>


Facebook's Bold Move To Hurt Apple - <AUTHOR> http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/facebooks-bold-move-to-hurt-apple/

<comment><USER2> I'm fairly certain Apple will never allow a "Pay by Facebook" option in its stores or iTunes, no matter how much people ask for it.

For that reason, I'm not sure how Facebook having its own currency can hurt Apple.

Having an iTunes currency platform that stretches beyond Apple's properties does however sound interesting.

And now that they have a serious server farm they may be technically able to explore that option.</comment>


Fix common usability problems before user testing - <AUTHOR> https://userium.com/service.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing beats usability testing with target users and there are great tools online to make that easier. However, we believe you should first do an "expert usability review", to catch all the common usability problems on your website. Once you fix those, you will receive much more meaningful feedback from often expensive and time-consuming user testing.

<comment><USER2> Also, usability should be about giving concrete solutions, not just pointing out problems.</comment></comment>


Coding Horror: A Visit With Alan Kay - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001213.html <comment><USER2> _Since I knew I'd be seeing Alan Kay at Rebooting Computing, I decided to verify his Stack Overflow usage in person. [...]

We then proceeded to discuss how it's sad that identity is still hard online._

Couldn't this be solved, at least for the tech-savvy crowd, by beeing able to sign an openID-account with a PGP-Signature? This way you could "prove" that your openID belongs to you, the same way you can prove the authenticity of an email right now.

The problem with this is that openID is no fun right now and the last thing that is needed is more complexity. But at least Jeff would be able to know whether or not Alan Kay really posted on his page.

<comment><USER3> Hence solving the problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing an openid) with a real person by the much simpler problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing a public key) with a real person.

<comment><USER4> Ah yes, but you've tremendously reduced the problem.

With PGP you can _verify_ all online posting, so you reduce the problem to a singular instance: public key vs real person.

That is a huge improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The Mother of All Demos:_ Doug Englebart showing off an NLS at <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097> of which Alan was so fondly referencing in his lecture.</comment>


M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/ <comment><USER3> My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like:

> _" Can you make me dinner reservations?"_

or

> _" Can you help me plan my next vacation?"_

I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider distance, parking, attire, etc. While their AI/human trainers might be able to handle this level of complexity eventually, the actual phrasing of the question would likely be much more complex than "can you make me a dinner reservation." Doubly so for something like a vacation which has a lot more moving parts.

But I respect that I'm reflecting on a sample size of one...me. So I'd love to hear from others with more insight into the data around this. Are people actually searching with such generalized queries when it comes to tasks like this? Do most people not sweat the details of things like which restaurant to eat at, or where to spend hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars on a vacation?

Not trolling, serious question.

<comment><USER4> Agree. Those are too broad.

I'm thinking " _get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place_ ".

As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual.

Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query in one go - which is equivalent to tapping 10-15 filters and scrolling through results - ideally combining data from sources that aren't limited to one service.

You can now execute _related_ actions to your result set through the _same_ interface, without needing to shift to a single purpose app that would allow you to take the action, but for most purposes, won't keep your context.

<comment><USER5> I think AI researchers and engineers tend to get too carried away with decision making, when the more valuable service is about communication of refined knowledge, which if I'm not mistaken is exactly your point. The problem has nothing to do with "how can a machine guess the right answer" but instead is all about "how can a machine refine all the options based on the intentions expressed thus far".

Anecdotally, if we'd ask a real person "where is a good place to eat" the chance we'd go there without more information is slim. And if we don't even trust people, trusting Siri will be a while.

What we're really doing with these questions is making our hunger known, and starting a conversation. We actually don't care that much about other people's thoughts, and we may not even have anything in mind yet as far as where to eat. We do care about how people feel if they are someone we care about, but the thinking part we love to do ourselves.

So to offer a service that "thinks" is rather misguided, and may even constitute a disservice. We already rejected the talking paperclip in 1996 [0]. It's failure wasn't it's intelligence, but in the value proposition itself. To have a paperclip presume to know better and to tell you what to do was not tempting. It's failure was it's existence.

Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?

> What is Cortana? Cortana is your clever new personal assistant.[1]

\--

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant) [1] [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted- wha...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-what-is- cortana)

<comment><USER6> If I ask someone I know what's a good place to eat, the odds are actually quite high that I'll give it a try. I wouldn't have asked otherwise.

The issue here is one of trust, which is built on an individualized relationship over time. When I ask someone I know for a recommendation, I'm doing so because I already have a sense of their judgment. That's more the key here- build a history of reliable judgment. That's the goal.

<comment><USER5> > history of reliable judgment

Right. This is certainly one path and the path most seem to be on, and exactly the one that needs to be challenged. The key intuition here being that a judgement, which is a decision, is not an answer to a logical problem. A decision entails a will, and when our personal will is overridden by an animated paperclip, we close said program. Decision != Answer.

People don't necessarily want decisions made for them, but rather, they want assistance in making their own, or better yet, reasons to justify the decisions they've already tentatively made. "Reliable judgement" is the complete opposite of "a resource of intelligence". Certainly all of these assistants feature a little bit of both, but I keep sensing the urge towards the former. Worse yet, a decision is often treated as an abstraction that somehow justifies hiding everything that went into that decision, even though there is immense value in actually being told why. People have entire conversations over _why_ to eat at some place as part of the process of _sharing_ the decision to go there.

Even when used only as a resource, if only these robots wouldn't keep trying to read our minds or insist on telling us what to do. Maybe a handful of people will accept a robot's choice, but _everyone_ loves more information.

Maybe we shouldn't be looking for some secret sauce that enables robots to make better generalized and _rational_ decisions than humans. Maybe we should be building robots capable of assisting humans at better making their own personal and _irrational_ decisions instead?

(edited for grammar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"You have lots of AIs—like Siri, Google Now, or Cortana—whose scope is quite limited. Because AI is limited, you have to define a limited scope," Lebrun says. "We wanted to start with something more ambitious, to really give people what they're asking for." This meant the team would need more than AI...Even after bringing neural nets into the mix, he says, the company will continue to use human trainers for years on end._

I can't help but picture a large, fluorescent-lit room of jolly old British "trainers" in safari khakis running around admonishing misbehaving AI for telling bad jokes, all the while trying to juggle placing calls to the DMV and restaurants to make reservations for 700 million messenger users.

<comment><USER8> Relevant skit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first thing I see when someone asks "find me a good burger place in Chicago" is "how can companies game this through official ($) or artificial (spam) means?"

<comment><USER10> The first thing I thought after seeing that example is FB is the new Yelp. Restaurants will have to pay FB for visibility and recognition...

Same thing as Yelp, just a lot scarier.

<comment><USER11> Have mixed feelings about this like I'm sure many do. Greater convenience, but less and less privacy.. Our Fb/goog/nsa overlords know what we eat, where we shit, all of our conversations and relationships. What a scary world we live in.

<comment><USER10> Not to mention, it's probably less useful.

I am actually okay with the privacy I give up when using Google Now, for example, because being passively informed about things I'm getting shipped to my house, about traffic conditions to/from my house, etc. is nice. Giving up privacy seems justifiable in those instances.

But FB suggesting restaurants, I just know that there will be money exchanging hands. FB being FB, will extort small business owners into paying them hand over fist to get considered for suggestions to the user.

<comment><USER11> I'm totally fine with FB charging businesses for advertisement. It's a free market, they can choose not to advertise there. Not a terrible exchange imo. However, Yelp extorting businesses to pay them to remove bad ratings/give good ratings is pretty shitty.

It would be pretty cool to order in the chat, 'deliver me 10 burgers from this restaurant using doordash at 6pm'. I would rather not click through crappy websites/enter my cc every time.

However every time we do do that, our habits and conversations get written in stone (in multiple data sets being passed around and bought/sold everywhere).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a move into the Chinese-style mega-app where you can do everything from one app - buy shoes, talk to your friends, figure out when the train departs. Facebook already has two top-50 apps, and creating new, unproven apps and promoting them to that point is expensive. So, to increase influence they are putting more into the existing apps.

<comment><USER13> Who knows, they might move toward a mega-app. Consider for a moment, though, that currently we're talking about Facebook Messenger, which is a huge, and fairly recent example of the exact opposite thing happening (it was part of Facebook, but pulled out into a separate app.)

<comment><USER14> The odd thing about the example of Messenger is that as two separate apps they seem highly coupled. AFAIK you need to sign in with a valid Facebook account to use Messenger, so you're already very likely to have the normal app at that point as I can't imagine anyone who would trust FB for messaging but not everything else. On the flip side, barring a few possible holdouts of people worried about app permissions, I don't know anyone who actively have FB accounts but don't use their messaging service.

<comment><USER15> I "actively" have a FB account by most measures, and I don't use Facebook Messenger. I only access their mobile site through Tinfoil for Facebook, and the messaging works just fine in that.

<comment><USER14> Cool, I hadn't found any browsers that worked well with it mobily and Messenger has become the lowest common denominator for group messaging, among my friends at least, particularly for Android, I've just resigned to using it. I'll check out Tinfoil for Facebook though, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Today's artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human > training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube > videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like.

The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neural net what a cat looks like, it discovered the concept of "catness" by itself (there was a "cat" neuron in the top layer).

I'm wondering who writes all the AI articles I read every day. Such a detail was crucial for the cat story. It's easy to make a cat/non-cat classifier with a few thousand labeled images for each category. The hard thing to do is to take raw photos with no labels and still discover cats.

<comment><USER17> Unsupervised training may isolate the defining features of a cat picture, but it won't know that that's what we call "cat", so no unsupervised system will be able to identify cats in videos unless you show it at least one labeled image ("show it what a cat looks like").

In fact that very network produced also millions of other "concepts", that is, classes of images, that have no direct interpretability in human terms. The "cat neuron" was a fun gimmick, but you're reading way too much into it.

<comment><USER18> That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no matter what word you assign to it.

<comment><USER19> The thing is the network didn't learn the features you described. Take a simple example : neural networks confuse leopard print couches with leopards. Why? Because the network learns discriminative features based on the data it has. Theres not shared concept saying "oh this is an animal with for legs".

<comment><USER18> Okay, so then ANNs can learn the "concept" of leopard print. I still think that's interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thought: There's going to be a need for a very open platform that can do things like this, which will offset many of the worries that have been echoed on this thread today about one or a few corporations having access to everything.

To use an analogy - if messaging apps are the new "browsers", then content accessed through them are the new "websites". What FB is doing is the equivalent of AOL in the 90s.

What then, is the equivalent of a search engine like Google/Yahoo, in that world?

<comment><USER20> I believe we don't want an equivalent to Google/Yahoo -- we need an improvement over search. Rather than trusting corporations to deliver the knowledge we seek, we should rely on our personal trust graph -- like we did in the old days. Otherwise the constant influx of biased, irrelevant information will be overwhelming.

What if you could get a recommendation from your friend's friend without asking them, and without violating trust or privacy? This is what I am building today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _"The AI tries to do everything," says Alex Lebrun, the founder of Wit.ai, a startup Facebook acquired to help build this smartphone tool. "But the AI is supervised by the people."_

Congrats to ar7hur! Here's the original Show HN introducing Wit.ai: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373645)

</comment><comment><USER22> User: "Hello M."

M: "How may I help you?"

User: "What are my options for deploying a Python/Django project and making sure it is setup for scalability from the start? Compare five hosting providers for me. No, I don't know what metrics I should look for. Please research these and let me know what they are when you deliver the report. I also need an objective evaluation of our project in order to determine the risks that might be involved in going with Python 3.x rather than 2.x in the context of the libraries we might need to use in the future. Analyze the nature of our application in order to determine what the applicable libraries might be. Also, go through PEP's and make me aware of anything that might be relevant to the above. You have one week."

M: "My responses are limited. Would you like me to find you a restaurant?"

User: "No. I've lived in this town all my life. I know where most restaurants are and I know the handful I frequent. I need help with real questions. I can get the latest weather report, I can find a restaurant, I can order pizzas, I can go to the drive-through if needed and I sure as hell am not going to plan a vacation for my family this way. What I could really use is having you run through seriously time-consuming research, summarize results and present them to me in an easy to consume form. What I could really use is having you save me from doing 40 hours of research across 100 websites. Food, the weather and vacations are not a problem."

M: "Ah, but there's a great new BBQ joint not too far from you"

User: "I'm vegetarian"

M: "My responses are limited. How would you like a thrilling and exciting hunting safari in Africa?"

User: ":-("

<comment><USER23> But if it could answer this question well, it would mean that you would be out of a job pretty soon and wouldn't be casually dining in restaurants on your unemployment check anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it just me or does this article read as a thinly veiled sales pitch to anyone else?

<comment><USER26> [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER27> Bingo.

Article pitches aren't all inherently bad ideas for articles either. A good example from my industry that I'm pretty sure was from a pitch is this one from the WSJ [1]. The basic concept of regaining focus at work is a strong one that resonates with people right now, but all the blog post ends up being is an ad for the product.

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair- desi...](http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair-designed-to- restore-your-focus-at-work/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Have an ad network buy products on my behalf? No thanks.

<comment><USER29> If the products match what you need or want, why would you refuse that?

<comment><USER28> The PA does not work for you, it works for FB. It has only FB's interest's in mind. You are not it's employer as you do not pay for it.

It's not in FB's interest to make honest recommendations. If Bob's Burgers is paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps being recommended as the "good burger joint", how long before Bob stops buying ads? And why would Karen start buying FB ads since she's getting exposure for free?

<comment><USER30> > _If Bob 's Burgers is paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps > being recommended as the "good burger joint", how long before Bob stops > buying ads? And why would Karen start buying FB ads since she's getting > exposure for free?_

How is this any different than the approach laid out by Google Search? AFAIK, Google isn't suffering in the "search ads" department.

<comment><USER31> The amount of real state that Google ads seem to take these days is offensive, it's all ads above the fold and then some, on not-too-high resolutions. Google Search is due for replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Haha, it looks eerily similar to Myra, the cross platform assistant I launched last week [1]. Including the name. Interesting times.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060074).

<comment><USER32> Myra looks similar Magic to which was launched earlier this year. Also has a name beginning with m. [http://www.wired.com/2015/03/stump- magic/](http://www.wired.com/2015/03/stump-magic/)

<comment><USER4> True. Although, the name was chosen way earlier than Magic's launch actually! So it's a coincidence.

But it's all AI - no human assists :)

<comment><USER33> I think I down voted this by mistake - sorry! Myra looks really cool :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The part I find most interesting here is I'm working on something mildly similar in my spare time. Though it'll certainly be more limited than something a big company like Facebook can come up with but I'm tired to sending all my data every time I want to do something so I'm trying to squeeze this into a phone without the need for the internet to, at least, process commands. Oh and extending it will only require a little bit of JavaScript.

But I'm far away from launching it and it's only a side project. But it's cool to see so many in the space doing something I also want / wanted to do.

</comment><comment><USER35> For those of you more familiar with NLP, are there some "dumb but effective" techniques to approach [https://wit.ai/](https://wit.ai/) like functionality? _(Libraries would be great, but i doubt there are any, for Golang)_

I know NLP is difficult, and frankly i hate doing it, but i want an expressive language to "speak" to an internal process i use (a bot), and NLP seems like the only solution. I imagine a rule based approach is best (for my simple needs), but i have yet to see any examples that come close to wit.ai.

Appreciate any replies :)

<comment><USER4> See how annyang [1] does it. Forget the voice part (which it uses WebkitSpeech for). It's how they interpret commands that's probably useful in your case.

It's pretty good for a basic set and you can train more. Ultimately, you need something that is learning online and that will require an understanding of ML techniques such as CRFs.

[1] [https://talater.com/annyang/](https://talater.com/annyang/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Calling this "AI" is bit of a stretch. Any software that responds in natural language is not automatically AI.

</comment><comment><USER37> Very interesting that the human trainers are being used to train the AI to eventually do their jobs.

<comment><USER38> Jeremy Howard[0] gave a TED talk[1] in which he predicted that this would be a short-term trend, where labelling data for AI will be an easy way to get a job for a few years. He predicts that this will drop off as enough labelled data is provided. I think this fails to consider that our expectations of AI will increase along with our ability to manipulate increasingly large amounts of data, so we will begin labelling increasingly complex data.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_(entrepreneur)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_\(entrepreneur\)) [1]: [http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_ter...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn?language=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The cycle of software life:

1\. Motivated team in a larger company builds new, cool product (in this case Messenger) 2\. It's good and becomes successful 3\. The rest of the company wants to get in on that, think of ways to add value 4\. A bunch of stuff gets bundled, some good, most bad 5\. Some of the original team stay around, most get disillusioned and go work on something else 6\. Eventually, the app becomes another iTunes

</comment><comment><USER40> I want Amazon to build a personal digital assistant, and then integrate it into filters. Today I was searching for socks, I care about 3 things, the size, the color, and whether they go up to the ankle or not. It seems like information they probably have (or a well trained net could figure out), so it would be nice if it was offered as a filter.

A few weeks ago I was trying to find toys for my son. I was most interested in "things for a 6 month old". They did have that filter, but it was 0 - <USER2> months. At this age a few months make a HUGE difference. I wish the box was a bit more fine grained.

<comment><USER41> I wonder if Amazon leverages all of the human involvement in Mechanical Turk for any machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ah, Mechanical Turk strikes again..

<comment><USER43> I worked in AWS for a bit and my favorite joke was to flippantly suggest mturk as a solution to some convoluted architecture/process.

<comment><USER44> That's not a joke, that's a legitimate solution.

<comment><USER43> It was often trivializing some discussion on state management. E.g. a database failover or consensus loss

But, yes, it would have _worked_ if our requirements weren't so strict :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> "It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more"

So it can spend my money in behalf of me?

<comment><USER46> Of course, is that unclear? "M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items […]"

<comment><USER45> Ahh, thank you for the explanation, I should really read more carefully! This is indeed a great application of AI related technologies.

Ohh, wait, can it do something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Facebook's answer to Magic?

<comment><USER48> Implying that Facebook built this in response to a service that had a weekend+ of buzz?

<comment><USER47> Provided that they could also see the long-term business case for it -- do you find that surprising?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Anyone figured out how to sign up for the test? Is it a contact you can add to your Messenger list, like chatbots of old?

</comment><comment><USER50> Pretty cool. Written about Slack bots before and my main complaint was that I missed 'one bot to rule the all': [https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the- slack-bots-5a7928...](https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the-slack- bots-5a7928d404e7)

</comment><comment><USER51> My main question is - how did facebook make a HUGE picture show up when you share this page on facebook? Anyone know?

<comment><USER52> og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph.

[http://ogp.me/](http://ogp.me/)

<comment><USER51> But usually it shows up as a small image

Apparently this is 4 images and it shows up like this: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8wkixfimkmvlr/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8wkixfimkmvlr/Screenshot%202015-08-26%2013.58.14.png?dl=0)

Can anyone do this? If so, how exactly?

<comment><USER53> It appears to be a photo post (i.e. images uploaded to FB natively) as opposed to a link post, where FB chooses a thumbnail for you (or not, if it's a YouTube link). I've been seeing posts like this when friends upload image albums (if more than 4 images, you get a 'see more' box in the lower right)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I can appreciate FB trying to innovate, but with the on going privacy issues and the fact that it seems they are just repackaging existing tech, i'm just not into it.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is basically a search engine. That is insane news for the advertising world if this is successful. Imagine FBs targeting + some intent information. I am slavering...

</comment><comment><USER56> I really love the logo. I kind of wish they'd made it a mobius strip (this one has two sides), but either way, it's awesome.

<comment><USER57> That's Visual Studio logo.

<comment><USER58> The old one is a mobius strip. The new one is more angular and 1 color. [https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage- vs...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage-vs.aspx)

<comment><USER59> Even the old one isn't a proper mobius strip. In the transparent version[1] you can see that the strip twists behind the crossing making it a normal loop.

[1]: [http://www.multidmedia.com/common/img/Features/SDK.png](http://www.multidmedia.com/common/img/Features/SDK.png)

<comment><USER60> lame. All serious, no fun allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm curious what the latency is like for interactions, given the human element.

</comment><comment><USER62> The article title has the word 'Facebook' in whereas the post just mentioned 'Messenger'. Is 'Messenger' clear enough? I'm old enough to think that refers to Microsoft Messenger!

<comment><USER33> Annoyingly Google have called their newest SMS thing Messenger too so it's an ambiguous term even on my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's M, not Q.

<comment><USER64> Exactly.

I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel, but it is M.

<comment><USER65> > I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel

Well, M is also a fictional character in James Bond - head of MI6.

<comment><USER66> The actual head of the Secret Intelligence Service is known as C:

[https://www.sis.gov.uk/glossary.html](https://www.sis.gov.uk/glossary.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> It's M! [http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m- works/](http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/)

<comment><USER68> Since that article contains more detail, we've changed the URL to it from [https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195](https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195). Happy to change it again if anyone can suggest a better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> What is the best alternative to Wit.ai, now that they have been consumed by Facebook??

<comment><USER70> Why do you want an alternative?[0]

Afaik, they haven't been shut down. It's actually even free now.

[0] not that it's a bad thing, but wondering it's more than just "facebook bought it". Funny as it is, I trust that companies will go on when facebook buys them as opposed to google or amazon.

<comment><USER69> Heck - you are right! Brought up wit.ai earlier today and it rendered a blank page - thought they had been shuttered. But now I can see the full site and the service looks stronger than ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Don't you mean M?

We have been building Q ! :)

</comment><comment><USER71> Related: I really dig the work KitCrm.com are doing in making it easy for businesses to buy FB ads and do light marketing via SMS & messenger.

<comment><USER71> ha! minus 4 points. Why the downvote?</comment></comment>


New vectorized java.Math-like functions for Clojure's Neanderthal matrices - <AUTHOR> http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org/codox/uncomplicate.neanderthal.vect-math.html <comment><AUTHOR> source code examples can be found in test: [https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal/blob/master/test...](https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal/blob/master/test/uncomplicate/neanderthal/math_test.clj)</comment>


Job Isn't Writing Code - <AUTHOR> https://hackeryarn.com/post/your-job-isnt-writing-code/ <comment><USER2> Spot on.

Every feature needs to weighed against the risk it introduces.

Example: I had commercial camera (I do machine vision) that had this feature that would allow you to flip the image. I would come back from lunch and the image would be flipped. If the camera never had this feature this wouldn't/couldn't have happened.

I'm not saying you shouldn't add features but you weigh the risks.</comment>


VLC 3.0.7 and security - <AUTHOR> http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2019/VLC-3.0.7-and-security <comment><USER2> What's interesting here is that the VLC team (partially) implemented what Alex Ionescu called for in the conclusion of his SSTIC 2019 keynote "Pay for the fix, not for the bug":

[https://www.sstic.org/2019/presentation/keynote_2019/](https://www.sstic.org/2019/presentation/keynote_2019/)

They did pay for the bugs, but with "large extra-bonuses for fixes". Maybe this will pave the road to a different approach.

<comment><USER3> This seems like it would incentivize simply selling to grey markets.

<comment><USER4> If you're an asshole there isn't much they can do.

<comment><USER5> Criminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The medium security issues are mostly out-of-band reads, heap overflows, > NULL-dereference and use-after-free security issues. Those issues should not > be exploitable with ASLR [...]

Is this really valid? I remember reading numerous Google Project Zero blog posts that begin with finding an issue that should not be exploitable thanks to ASLR, and then the research would promptly proceed to defeating ASLR - usually by chaining to some unrelated and much less serious side channel exploit.

<comment><USER7> Cannot really be said in a general way. With a lot of effort probably all of those could lead to more serious things, but not easily in a platform and setup agnostic way, i.e., you probably need time and be able to try multiple times to get you a realistic chance. If it's not possible to try multiple times (e.g., your try crashes or runs into some other protection mechanism (no-execute flag on page set, return address validation, ...) then there's, again depending on the specifics of the bug and it's context, a very slim chance to achieve a (arbitrary) remote code execution, or something similar serious, realistically.

Also, for side channels you often need to be able to run code on the host, in some way, at which point it's probably not really interesting to exploit through VLC (as it runs normally as non-root/non-admin user anyway). Else, you'd need to be able to get some VLC responses which have a code-address related measurable characteristic (normally time-deltas), not sure if VLC can be forced to leak such infos from remote.

<comment><USER8> VLC can also connect to a remote host and play a network stream. You could probably infer delta-T through the time it takes VLC to request the next chunk of your video/audio stream.

But still, that's a long way from exposing the address of useful gadgets or other potentially sensitive information...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > If you've listened to some of my talks or spoke to me (I'm sorry for you), > you know I'm a bit critic of those programs, because they give money to find > the issues, not to fix them.

>> What about you give money to VLC instead of random hackers?

> Well, security is important, so this is cool for our users, but still this > is a mixed bag, for me.

I've asked that question to Julia Reda a few months ago, and I think the answer was pretty interesting. It boils down to the absence of companies that provide this service ("security bugfix bounties") and are also willing to deal with basically being an EU contractor. So instead the EU-FOSSA bounties went to HackerOne, which is not perfect but is a step in the right direction that could be implemented immediately.

Also note that Google does provide bounties for security patches and hardening ([https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch- rewards/](https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch-rewards/) \-- VLC or ffmpeg are not in there, but many base libraries are) and for integrating FOSS projects into their fuzzing frameworks ([https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch- rewards/autof...](https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch- rewards/autofuzz/)). I don't know of any other company providing this kind of bounties for FOSS devs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this for discussion because of the "Opinion about bug bounties" section at the bottom of the post. It was interesting to read about the wide variety in quality of responses to an open source bug bounty.

<comment><USER10> There's a wide variety in the quality of responses to bug reports too.

Last year I stumbled across a bug which could result in a leak of personal data (specifically, private messages). So I did the good-samaritan thing and reported it, opening with "I don't want a bug bounty for this" (it was a pretty trivial bug, just a high impact one).

What I got back was a wall-of-text missive about how it wasn't on the OWASP TOP10, wasn't eligible for a bug bounty anyway, and finished with a personal attack. I didn't even reply to it.

I haven't bothered submitting anything else, not on Hackerone, not anywhere.

<comment><USER11> You should have released the email complete with personal attack and all info needed to reproduce the bug after 90 days. Their incompetence isn't your problem but it is their users problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >On 8 June 2019, 08:03 by ahmet sahin simsek

>hi

>I downloaded thé new version and I have a problème withe subtitle please can you help me

How do these people manage to find these unrelated blog posts and decide to request tech support there?

<comment><USER13> And why do they feel it's appropriate to ask for help there? This would be like going to a talk from a presidential candidate about fuel economy, and raising your hand and saying "My car doesn't start, can you help me?"

<comment><USER14> Probably a relatively new internet user with little understanding of how the whole thing works. Just uses it to watch content.

If "Facebook" is the internet to you, typing into the first comment box you find seems more reasonable than finding an FAQ.

User seems to even have their spell-check in French mode - possibly not even using their own computer to ask the question.

<comment><USER15> [OT] Non-English speaker here. Is there any difference (in grammar and/or meaning) between "an FAQ" and "a FAQ"? I'm asking because it sounds good but it goes against the little English grammar I remember from school...

<comment><USER16> "a" vs. "an" is based on the first sound of the word, not the first letter. You would say "an honor" but "a hair" because, while they both start with the letter h, one has a silent h and the other doesn't.

If you pronounce "FAQ" by spelling out the letters (and not like "fack"), it starts with "eff", so you should say "an FAQ." I think that's the pronunciation I usually hear.

<comment><USER17> Compare:

      an SQL command
      a SQL command

<comment><USER16> I think I hear both "ess queue ell" and "sequel" for SQL frequently, but "eff ay queue" for FAQ way more than "fack."

<comment><USER17> I didn't encounter "sequel" until some years after I encountered "ess-queue- ell" \- had no idea what the person was on about to start with.

I guess it's one of those things that native English speakers don't even know they know. Like "Fewer tests means Less data", rather than "less tests means fewer data", or "six charming small new round green plastic tables" rather than "six plastic charming green round new small tables".

<comment><USER16> Or that "the" is pronounced "thuh" before consonant sounds and "thee" before vowel sounds - same rules as "a"/"an" but no difference in spelling!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> First off, let me just say that I use VLC and I think it's really great. I really appreciate the work done: VLC is my preferred application for watching videos on linux or android.

> from the usual security-asshole to some of the nicest guys ever

It's not clear whether the asshole in question is being dogmatic about some ninety-day disclosure-to-publication deadline or whether they're maybe being rude about the project having security bugs. I have read lots of stories (mostly ones shown here on HN) about knee-jerk overreactions from CIO/CTOs from not-too-large or not-too-technical businesses w/vulnerabilities. Those kind of blame-the-messenger things likely shape their behavior with respect to disclosures.

> The result of that, is that when you don't know how much to award for a > security issue (is it medium or low?), you decide on the niceness of the > reporter :)

Gee, this sounds like it's not considering the impact to the user. Isn't that the intent of impact ratings? I suppose the risk of misclassification here is wasting the budget of the bounty on low-harm issues or dissuading researchers from digging deeper to find the high-impact ones.

<comment><USER19> (author of the blogpost here)

> It's not clear whether the asshole in question is being dogmatic about some > ninety-day disclosure-to-publication deadline or whether they're maybe being > rude about the project having security bugs.

Being dogmatic with 90days disclosure, would get you a "hardline security reporter", but not an "asshole".

Notably, because there has been no reporter that refused to extend by a reasonable amount of days, for us. "Hey, can we get 120 days, because we got other bugfixes and we want to do all of them together".

No, we're talking about actual assholery here:

\- requesting answer and reproducibility in 24hours, and sending 10 mails in the mean time;

\- sending the same issues more than 10 times, because the stacktrace he has is slightly different, but refusing to listen when told that this was the same issue, and therefore only one bounty;

\- refusing to read the guidelines, and refusing to test the good version, and then insulting us;

\- agressivity, or insults, to the point where the HackerOne team had to intervene several times;

\- plugging the output of his fuzzer to HackerOne without checking if it actually crashes or if it is a different bug;

\- submitting the same bug to a different program (Google Android Apps) to get 2 times the bounty, while the bug DID NOT apply on Android, but he did not even check;

\- a few others that I forgot.

So yeah, this is not about dogmatic or hardliners: we know how to deal with those in the open source communities.

<comment><USER20> Did you really get any of these, or were you exaggerating?

>people telling us that the VLC source code was visible

If you really did and they're public anywhere (and the people weren't joking), I'd love to see them. Sounds absolutely amazing.

<comment><USER19> > Did you really get any of these, or were you exaggerating?

All of these, in this single 3-months bug bounty program. I'm absolutely not exaggerating.

> If you really did and they're public anywhere (and the people weren't > joking), I'd love to see them. Sounds absolutely amazing.

This is on our private security@ contact. We have one every month, telling us that.

<comment><USER20> That's amazing ... I don't know how anyone would even get to the point of realizing VLC has a bug bounty progam without also knowing that VLC is an _open source program_ and therefore the source is supposed to be visible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> people ranging from the usual security-asshole

This pretty much illustrates the attitude of most of the bug bounties programs holders.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, that'd really put me off reporting anything.

<comment><USER23> If you read a (dead, for some reason) comment by the author, he explains what that means: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20147573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20147573)

<comment><USER22> Perhaps he should be more specific in the blog post instead. Removing phrases like "security-asshole" in the first place would also go a long way.

<comment><USER19> > Removing phrases like "security-asshole" in the first place would also go a > long way.

I absolutely refuse to remove phrases like that. This is exactly what some of those people are and because they are security people does not allow them to behave less well than other people.

And I find that I'm being quite polite by not shaming those people publicly.

<comment><USER24> hey, I work in a low-level security group under a larger generic security org - at a general level, there are too many security-assholes and they make our lives harder when interacting with developers as they think we're all like that.

security-assholes are a huge problem

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That the link to Julia Reda's mentioned bug bounty program, which caused all these new reportings: [https://juliareda.eu/2018/12/eu-fossa-bug- bounties/](https://juliareda.eu/2018/12/eu-fossa-bug-bounties/)

eg glibc got a payout of 45.000 which means 4 exceptional risk bugs and 1 critical. [https://www.intigriti.com/public/project/glibc/glibc](https://www.intigriti.com/public/project/glibc/glibc)

I find that quite disturbing.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interestingly I had to enable JS to see the checksum for the file download (?!).

Reproducible builds + a signed list of hashes would be a nice move for security.

<comment><USER19> All videolan files are GPG-signed and have several hashes (md5+sha1+sha256)

<comment><USER26> Ah, maybe I missed the link on the DL page.

All I see on the DL page are links to the source, nothing on GPG nor hashes

[https://www.videolan.org/vlc/#download](https://www.videolan.org/vlc/#download)

When I clicked to DL my version, all I saw was a "click here to see hash" that needed me to enable JS. Just sha256, which is good btw, more is not better when it comes to hashes - sha256 is sufficient.

Many open source projects provide all these on 1 page, rather than rely on complex code to deliver the info or display it on the DL page.

Ex: [https://www.torproject.org/download/](https://www.torproject.org/download/) lists sigs under each OS option.

<comment><USER19> Well tor project and VLC have a very different audience, but I'll see what I can do.

<comment><USER26> I totally understand. Back in grad shool I focused on usable security, and usually less clicks to get to something means more likely people will use the info.

Thanks for your help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What this blog post doesn't mention is that they finally addressed the bug where if you have a broken file and looping enabled, it no longer gives you infinite pop-ups saying it can't play the file

<comment><USER28> I filed a bug report about something just like that many years ago (hanging in a CPU intensive loop if you remove all the files in the looping playlist out form under it, i.e. a disk drive goes offline or USB stick is unplugged), and he brushed it off and dismissed my bug report, telling me simply not to do that.

And I also took the time to file several other very detailed bug reports against the Video Effects / Magnification Zoom user interface, which is not only ugly and poorly designed from an ergonomic perspective, but actually drawn into the video at video resolution instead of being drawn in an overlay at full screen resolution, so it gets rotated and is unusable when you combine it with Video Effects / Transform / Rotate, because it fails to transform the mouse events the same as the video and user interface. He brushed that one off as working as designed, too. It's still just the same as it was many years ago when I filed that bug report.

I'm serious: Give it a try, you'll fall out of your seat laughing at how terrible it is! Check out the lowres pixelated font it uses to draw "VLC ZOOM HIDE" between the thumbnail and the bizarre curved zoom scale wedge! The mouse target area of the zoom wedge actually diminishes in size with the width of the wedge, until the minimum zoom target area is only one video pixel wide at the bottom, so it's almost impossible to click. (And it's totally impossible to click anywhere when the video is rotated or flipped, since the target area isn't correspondingly transformed.)

Yes, I know the drill: It's free software, so I should just download the source code, read it, figure out the problem, fix it myself, and post a pull request. But I don't feel spending my time doing that after the author of VLC won't even admit there's a problem.

<comment><USER19> > and he brushed it off and dismissed my bug report, telling me simply not to > do that.

I did not do that. That's totally not true. You are confusing me with someone else.

And the bug is fixed.

> after the author of VLC won't even admit there's a problem.

There is no "the author of VLC". There are many persons, and some of them are nicer than others; but spitting on the project for that is not normal. If you have any bugreport that were closed while they should not (transform related), please mail me.

<comment><USER28> I'll try to dig up the bug report I wrote.

Will you at least acknowledge my criticisms of the Video Effects user interface problems, please? Have there ever been any bug reports on that that you can remember? I'll try to dig that one up too.

While you're here, I'm really curious: What was the thinking behind the design of the Video Effects / Magnification Zoom interface? Why does it draw into the video instead of using an overlay? Why does the mouse target area of the zoom wedge diminish to be almost impossible to hit? Why doesn't it transform the mouse coordinates for the zoom controls when it rotates the video? Why that font for "VLC ZOOM HIDE"? I understand what "ZOOM" and "HIDE" do, but what is "VLC" for? Just to remind me I'm using VLC?

<comment><USER19> > Will you at least acknowledge my criticisms of the Video Effects user > interface problems, please? Have there ever been any bug reports on that > that you can remember? I'll try to dig that one up too.

Of course, the video filters UX and UI in VLC is really awful, but very hard to debug for now.

> What was the thinking behind the design of the Video Effects / Magnification > Zoom interface?

It was a very old filter done for the time where you could use remotes through STB and where the filter was streamed.

> Why doesn't it transform the mouse coordinates for the zoom controls when it > rotates the video?

Because rotation was done a long time after, and because rotation is applied at the end, so it can be done on the GPU, while the transform is done before.

All that is very buggy, sure. But it requires some core changes that we are doing now 4.0 to improve them quite a bit.

<comment><USER28> You really shouldn't accept features that don't work and allow "very buggy" yet only marginally useful untested features to exist in the code base for decades.

If a new feature breaks an existing feature, then don't accept it until the developer fixes the problem. And simply don't accept untested features with such tightly coupled interactions with so many different parts of the system.

If you let anybody who wants toss in willy nilly unreviewed random features that can all be enabled at once, but have never been tested against each other, then you're going to have a lot worse than user interface bugs: you're going to have security bugs.

The video effects interface clearly lets you enable them all at once, so they should have been tested together, and the bugs either fixed or the features rejected until they were.

I could also write a lot of bug reports about the spectacularly horrible Video Effects / Crop user interface (and how it interacts with rotations), as well as about why the shuffle button sometimes inexplicably turns on when you press the repeat button (it must be a Heizenbug since it's not doing it now, but I'm sure I've seen it do that many times, causing me to have to click again and again to get it back to how I wanted it). But I was discouraged after you brushed off my previous bug reports.

As it turns out, I already described a lot of the Video Effects user interface bug in great detail five years ago, but your reply brushed of what I said without acknowledging it, and literally discouraged me from writing detailed descriptions of bugs, how to reproduce them, and how they interact with each other: "If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them...".

I will point out that your very own signature quoted at the end says "If you want an answer to your question, just be specific and precise. Don't use Private Messages." I was being specific and precise, and not using private messages. That's why I'm being specific and precise and posting this publicly: Because you said so.

[https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103604&p=407...](https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103604&p=407681&hilit=playlist+infinite+loop#p407703)

>There are many things about the "Video Effects" window that are terribly designed and implemented.

>Is it really supposed to randomly enable the effects when you change movies, some times remembering them from movie to movie, sometimes forgetting them, sometimes even remembering between invocations of VLC, and sometimes not?

>Is there some reason the "crop" dialog only lets you click on the arrows to change it from 0 to 100 pixels, but you can enter any number and it's not limited to the actual video size? And why the scale seems to be greater than pixels when cropping 90 degree rotated video? And that it's so incredibly hard to reset or change the numbers, resulting in pop-ups that scold you for entering a bad number, instead of helping you correct the error? Is there some reason the letters "px" follow the number, and it's an error to enter other letters or if you accidentally delete one of the letters? That "crop" dialog seems to be as user hostile and maliciously designed as the magnification dialog (although at least it is not drawn over the video in low resolution pixels -- even though it would be much easier to use than the four numeric fields, if that were the case and it were well designed).

>There are just so many problems with so many parts of the VLC user interface, that it's extremely hard to keep it down to "a couple of small paragraphs". Is there a back story about the design and implementation of those Video Effect dialogs, and why they are so terrible? Were they done by the same person? Or did many different people contribute to them, with no overall design or code review?

>Is there something about the Mac version of VLC that makes it fundamentally random and non-deterministic? Does the Windows version suffer from the same kind of unpredictability? (I only use the Mac version regularly.)

>[...] The reason it's so hard to enter a number, is that you have to select both the number and the "px" which is separated by a space, in order to delete them before typing the new number, and it's very easy to screw that up, because the field is so small, and double or triple clicking is so unreliable, and most of the time does not actually select both words, but one or the other, or part of each, so when you type a new number, it often still has the prefix of part of the previous number, or the suffix of part of the space followed by "px", so it is syntactically invalid, then the extremely obnoxious dialog pops up and scolds me for entering an invalid syntax, without actually doing anything to help correct the problem, as I already described.

>A single click simply sets the cursor position without selecting any of the text, so if you type a number, it will definitely be a syntax error.

>A double click selects either the number, or the "px", or the space between them, or most likely (since the area is the largest) double clicking in the space to the left of the number selects absolutely nothing and leaves the cursor before the number. So in most of those cases, typing a number will result in a syntax error, which leads to the punishment of the obnoxious dialog:

>"The value "0 px0 is invalid." Please provide a valid value. [Discard changes] [OK]" \-- the escape key does NOT dismiss the dialog. The return key goes back to editing the field with the invalid value, and pressing return again pops up the same error message, so you have to type "cmd-a" to select all and then enter a correct value. Terrible user interface design.

>[...] "0px" is invalid. when you type "0 px", the space does not appear until you type the "p", which leads you to think it's ignoring the space even though it's not. If you're going to REQUIRE people to type a space between "0" and "px", then you should bloody well echo it when people enter it.

>The "px" suffix is totally useless. No, "10%" does not work. "10 %" does not work. "10 + 10" does not work. Nothing I can think of works. The " px" suffix is just useless decoration that does NOTHING useful but make it very easy to make a syntax error. [...]

[https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103604&p=407...](https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=103604&p=407681&hilit=playlist+infinite+loop#p407853)

        Re: does vlc really have a zoom feature ?
        Post by Jean-Baptiste Kempf » Wed Jul 30, 2014 10:06 pm

        If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them...

        Jean-Baptiste Kempf
        http://www.jbkempf.com/ - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/category/Videolan
        VLC media player developer, VideoLAN President and Sites administrator
        If you want an answer to your question, just be specific and precise. Don't use Private Messages.

Your reply is self-contradictory. So which do you want: "shorter posts" or "specific and precise"?

<comment><USER29> As a bystander, I have not checked the earlier correspondence you mentioned, but this post comes off as quite excessively aggressive. If they were unfairly dismissive, that's one thing, but you're in no position to demand that they fix or improve anything in particular. If you're dissatisfied with VLC in any way, you are eligible for a full refund of what you paid for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Keep Saturdays Sacred - <AUTHOR> http://words.steveklabnik.com/keep-saturdays-sacred <comment><USER2> This was not at all what I was expecting from the title. I thought I was going to read an article about the importance of taking one day a week to _not_ write any code. I'm sure that between startups, work, side projects, etc. some of us are coding every day on something or other.

As someone who often works alone, one of the best things I've done is to find someone else to share code, problems, and ideas with on a regular basis, even though we're not working on the same projects. It's helped me grow as a developer, has improved my mood, and has also just been an enjoyable.

But I still really do think it is important to make sure there's one day a week where you don't touch anything related to work or code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been developing a concept called "irresponsible coding," which is basically the idea that you need 'good engineering' time as well as some form of 'irresponsible, exploratory coding.' I've given a few talks on it: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlyQOLRiEPs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlyQOLRiEPs)

I think that we've often lost a lot of the wonder and whimsy in software. Code is like magic! But you don't get that when BDDing a new feature so you can check it off in Pivotal.

I agree that not coding every single day is a really fantastic idea as well.

<comment><USER3> I personally think that's the best part about 20% time. You can do things where it's OK for them to not work. This means you can try things you don't know how to do, and bring them in to your main projects once you are already comfortable with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Agreed 100%. We have a similar group in Indianapolis ([http://indystartuplab.org](http://indystartuplab.org)) that meets every Monday night for dinner, talking and hacking with like-minded developers or other tech-related folks.

The accountability is great - the group will not let you get away with blowing off your projects. If you tell everyone about a grand plan one week, someone _will_ make sure you followed through the next week (or you can expect a playful ribbing). We have people working on startups, open source, blogging/writing, prepping conference talk, people writing games, learning iOS, trying to figure out how to start a freelance business, you name it.

People come and go, but even going for just a month will be more valuable than going to a year's worth of the typical Meetup.com groups. It only takes 2-3 people to start one of these and the benefits are immense.

Thanks so much for codifying this Steve!

<comment><USER5> This is awesome. Anything similar in the Bay Area ? I recently quit my job and am working on a project but facing issues keeping myself accountable. Would love to attend weekly sync up like you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> yes, yes and yes.

Just a group, to share with, to grow with and to argue with - when there are no artificial deadlines, no customers and the only marker is writing the best code possible. you won't make perfection, but at least you know you cannot blame the outside world.

some fortunate souls have that group and environment Monday to Friday. if you are not one, to paraphrase Hannibal, find one or start one.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like to sometimes stay up really late to work on something that's for fun. Something about being the only one awake, sipping coffee in the glow of my laptop screen.

<comment><USER8> Same. I have a few 'pet' projects of sorts that aren't really going anywhere, or worth anything, but I do my best to still work on them in the evenings or over the weekends. People think it's weird that I relax from my full time job as a programmer by writing more code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was just thinking today that I _love_ working on Saturdays, especially when I'm coding. I think it's because the rest of the world is off and there's no pressure so you can just try new things and have fun. I also think some of my best work has gotten done on the weekends.

<comment><USER10> My best work is 5am before anyone gets up - for similar reasons. Of course I could never convince an accountability group to get up so early!

<comment><USER9> I'm just starting to appreciate getting up really early. I think it's wonderful, but I don't think my programming ability is really maximized at that time, that always seems to happen at night.

<comment><USER10> It takes a while to develop the habit. The biggest part is forcing yourself to go to bed early. :-) I used to be a "Do things until they're done" in the evening person, but switched to a morning routine when I got into management. Part was that my days had too many interruptions (which was the job) and I was frequently waiting for that 1 person who owed me something in the evening. It was better to start fresh in the morning quiet.

This isn't for everyone or every task. For very monotonous work that only I can do (reviewing 200 resumes because I don't trust the automated screener) I will do it at night with a beer in hand. The beer doesn't work so well before breakfast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I need a group like this. Even if it were just over Skype or something.

Or maybe I'll just start dedicating one day a week spent at wix lounge or something when I'm back in NY.

<comment><USER12> hackerschool.com may interest you.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I'm way familiar, but my job isn't willing to make a schedule for me to accommodate...plus I'd really prefer to dedicate the time to it. I don't have any savings to fall back on for three months in NYC anymore, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is exactly what Hacker School is about.</comment>


Probabilistic Circuits: A New Synthesis of Logic and Machine Learning [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~guyvdb/talks/UCSD18.pdf <comment><USER2> sounds alot like another half assed fuzzy logic spinoff</comment>


The World Is Now an Airport - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/9a1e5268ff39 <comment><USER2> How can we determine what's paranoia and what's factual? Given the mind- boggling extent of NSA programs, nearly anything could be possible, and that makes it all the more difficult to determine the truth.

I was struck by how the art student had no way of showing whether her misfortunes were accidental or related to her investigation. Is there a way she could have seen who was reading her email?

<comment><USER3> Assuming that the mail system had sufficiently detailed logs, she could have asked her university sysadmins.</comment></comment>


A $1 purchase will get you into the Top 500 Grossing Android apps in Brazil? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/Koo5Z

<comment><USER2> I guess what this highlights is a big opportunity for developers willing to invest some time in growing markets. The recent apple film "Making a difference one app at a time" highlights this. Most of the apps look incredibly simple to make, but because they serve a purpose in the markets they target, they take off in a big way.

The video that apple posted can be seen here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a friend who wrote a game for the Nokia n8; he had something like a couple hundred purchases and made it through to the semi-final for a (I might misremember) $10k prize.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is one to conclude that there is either a) only one App Store with significant buyers or b) way too much piracy on Android to make a non-ad-based business model viable?</comment>


Google is just an amoral menace - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy <comment><USER2> "Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

This sentence makes it clear (if it wasn't already) how little this guy understands the Internet. The "ordering of information" is not something that can reasonably have "mere" put in front of it. It is a very hard problem to solve, and the importance of solving it is reflected in Google's reach numbers.

Maybe if he thought about the thousands of programmers who work full time on this problem and the server rooms full of millions of computers Google needs to provide this service, he'd realize there is actually something to it.

<comment><USER3> Or how about this little gem about Scribd:

"That's like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he's covered by the best insurance company."

Wait, what? If a pirate is a drunk driver, then Scribd is a car manufacturer. Does it make sense to sue Ford for drunk driving incidents in their vehicles?

<comment><USER4> Does it make sense to sue a gun manufacturer because someone used their guns in a shooting rampage?

<comment><USER5> The crucial difference being, of course, that the intended use of a car is not to kill people in a drunk driving accident, whereas the primary purpose of a gun _is_ to kill people by shooting them.

Not saying it's necessarily right to sue the manufacturer based on the crimes of the users, but let's not pretend there's no difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who calls a search engine a parasite does not understand how the Internet works. A parasite attaches to a host and extracts whatever it needs without giving anything in return. Google and other search engines organize information on the Internet. Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?

Since they are the organizers of information they are also the de facto gatekeepers for users who do not know how to discover knew content without them.

<comment><USER7> _Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?_

The same way we did before search engines worked very well: via the network effect, by following hyperlinks from interesting articles, from discussion forums like this one, from human-generated links pages, and so on.

The WWW would not cease to be useful if search engines disappeared tomorrow, it would just adapt as it always has, and not necessarily for the worse.

<comment><USER8> The WWW was a lot less useful back then, because linking doesn't actually work very well.

<comment><USER9> Yeah please lets not go back to webrings, banner exchanges etc

<comment><USER7> The thing is, we would never go back to just those things. You're ignoring all the other, much more significant developments that have taken place since.

For example, today we have social networking sites, blogs, and services like Twitter and StumbleUpon. All of these allow huge numbers of _human- recommended_ links to be passed around very quickly.

I'm not saying that search engines aren't useful; in fact, I'm not really sure how we've jumped from the kind of Google services that were being criticised in the original article to attacking their search engine specifically. I'm just saying that if search engines went away, it's reasonable to assume that the web-surfing world would adapt, and that new and improved ways to find useful content have been invented and will continue to be developed whether or not search engines are around in their current form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dunno about the menace, but perhaps "amoral" is exactly the right word: "being neither moral nor immoral; specifically: lying outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply <science as such is completely amoral, W. S. Thompson> (From the online Merriam Webster Dictionary)

I used to work for a very large vendor of ICs and one of its erstwhile CEO's famously said: "With respect to technology, if it can be done, it will be done."

I agree and so given that, I think any discussion of morals is only applicable to the person who has to decide whether to associate with the company or project in question for paid labor or in the use of their product(s).

It's not whether the bomb, say, is moral or not as an abstract concept, but instead, given all the information available on the impact of nuclear weapons, whether _you_ decide to design the beryllium reflector for the secondary or not...

<comment><USER8> Google is not amoral in that sense; it's an ideologically-driven organization consisting of people, led by leaders who are also people. Those people make moral judgments, and, contrary to the claims in the article, a great deal of Google's path has been shaped by those moral decisions, including the decision to engage in China. (I think they made the wrong decision there, but I might be wrong, and in any case the moral calculus figured quite explicitly in their discussions.)

<comment><USER11> You forgot one of the major parties to the organization--the shareholders, who are, as far as I understand economics, incapable for some reason of being "ideologically driven." The shareholders pushed for China. I'm not sure Google could have said no.

<comment><USER8> You may not be familiar with Google's unusual share class structure, but it insulates them from pressure from outside shareholders to a very unusual extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article completely missed the point, Youtube has been the subject of fights for years, But Google bought it knowing it wouldn't survive without their power.

Google makes statements, They make browsers just to push the industry, Bid on the wireless frequencies to make them open to other devices.

Google is not amoral, they simply are easily spun out of context.

</comment><comment><USER13> Newspaper journalist complains about Internet. Who would have thought?

<comment><USER14> _Guardian_ journalist complains about someone _making money_. Who would have thought?

FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum" (<http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian>). UK print media has ~10 _national_ newspapers, which are _politically segmented_ (and income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its political views, and different to the national average in its political views. Tribalism..

<comment><USER15> This and its parent are ad hominem attacks (DH1 -- see <http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>) -- it may be in the writer's interest to complain about the Internet, but that does not mean that the writer's points are incorrect.

<comment><USER16> "..ad hominem attacks", are you kidding? They are questioning the writer's objectivity, as do it. The writer's points/ conclusions are incorrect. The solution is not to constrain or eliminate Google, it's for the Guardian and the other content providers to adapt to be relevant.

<comment><USER8> Questioning the writer's objectivity rather than rebutting their points is an ad hominem attack. I'm not kidding. If you think the writer's points and conclusions are incorrect (I do) you should write a rebuttal, rather than pointing out that the writer isn't disinterested. Interested parties can still make valid arguments!

<comment><USER17> The ad-hominem fallacy fallacy: <http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html>

A critique is not ad-hominem if the target is a character trait relevant to the speaker's point.

<comment><USER18> How do you think that the character traits of the writer are relevant to his case against Google?

<comment><USER17> Claiming that the author was not objective is relevant to his argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> His primary example of how Google is big and evil is actually an industry-wide problem, The issue of internet royalties for musicians has been contentions, largely because most internet radio sites aren't making very much money in the first place. Pandora, for instance, has revenues of only about 25 million, 75% of which is going to music labels. An increase in royalty fees would put most companies with a similar business model out of business. Just because Google makes a lot of money on search doesn't mean that they should have to pay above market royalty fees for youtube plays. The real issue is that music just isn't worth all that much to internet consumers at the moment. The days of paying 20 bucks for a CD are over. So, until someone comes up with a better monetization model for online music, I don't see the royalty fees going up.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the article:

"...Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

This journalist appears to know little about the WWW. He's writing for an audience that (mainly) know equally little, but who care passionately about other things (artists' rights, privacy, etc), which are inevitably affected by the WWW. So they only see the bad side of the coin.

</comment><comment><USER20> I actually thought that the article made a couple of interesting points (e.g. the dangers of monopolies), but then undermined them completely by launching into a biased and almost hysterical rant (e.g. associating the problems caused by newspapers losing readership and Google, even when admitting in the article that Google can't be blamed for that.) Shame.

</comment><comment><USER21> That was an amazing almost-submarine promo for scribd. They probably just reached a whole new audience.

</comment><comment><USER22> This guy is an idiot. Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who says google has done nothing is clearly delusional. Frankly I'm surprised that this even hit the presses.

</comment><comment><USER23> _In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach._

This is what the DMCA did, not what Scribd did.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've noticed that it's very easy for writers nowadays to just throw in a modifier in front of something objective, and immediately, subtly alter people's perceptions. Many people simply read by skimming and don't always stop to think about every point. Instead, they simply read while the back of their minds associates the huge task of sorting and processing data as insignificant.

Take the following, which is a slightly edited version of the quote: "offering aggregation, lists and the ordering of all the information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

I took out "little" and added "all the". The whole connotation changes. But the change is so subtle that people don't notice the blatant lack of citation. Can Google really index _all_ information? No, only what is available in formats it can read on the Internet, and it doesn't even have all of that. In the same way, the author doesn't explain _why_ aggregation, listing, and ordering can be termed "mere". There is no solid evidence presented to back up the idea that what Google does is insignificant. A counter-argument is that, despite the presence of competitors in the search field, Google maintains a lead.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is just a bunch of jibber jabber. Boo hoo piracy happens on the Internet. It happened long before Scribd and long before the Internet became popular. Newspapers are going out of business because of the Web ... Boohoo. So because of all this Google is an amoral menace? Give me a break.

</comment><comment><USER26> What confuses me about YouTube is... The Web was designed to be hosted anarchically, by anyone.

What is needed is a standardised video tag like HTML, ported to all browsers, so people can host _their own videos_.

See a video as a HTML document or a GIF image.

I look forward to a W3C video standard crushing YouTube.

<comment><USER25> You can already do that thought not with a "Video tag." You can put videos on your server and have a Flash/Silverlight/Whatever player embedded in your web pages, It just happens that YouTube made this process very easy and became popular, in the beginning many people didn't even know you could watch videos on the web.

Anyway, I am waiting for the focus to get off of YouTube and for people to start realizing videos can be posted to many places, not just those that only allow 10 minutes and so forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got in only the first 2-3 paragraph before being turned off by the "piracy" rant.

Anybody who have have huge comtempts for pirates do not understand the pirates' role in society. Unlike drunk drivers, pirates are the forces of great upheaval, of social changes. Pirates often signal something is wrong in the market. It may be the companies themsleves or the profliberation of DRMs.

If he doesn't understand that, how can I expect him to understand the implication of google?

<comment><USER28> I don't understand you. Do you mean that music ought to be free because the paying music is wrong ?

<comment><USER29> No, he is saying that the way people sell music now is not right, not that paying for music is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow, this article isn't very well thought out at all. In trying to rebut it, I'm literally overwhelmed by the sheer ignorance of it.

</comment><comment><USER31> making order from chaos seems like a real tangible creation to me. Typical grauniad (see google for explanation, for those that didn't grow up on Private-Eye) reporting...

</comment><comment><USER32> News for hackers?

I don't find this interesting at all (besides its propaganda value) and I doubt few in this community will find this kind of news worth debating.

<comment><USER33> From the site guidelines: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. "</comment></comment>


Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/science/09bomb.html

<comment><USER2> _"... In the six decades since Oppenheimer's warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw? ..."_

One way is to remove, restrict study in certain areas of Physics ~ <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/nuketech/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this interesting because it shows how hard it is to keep a secret when many people need to know it, and those on the outside are willing to do anything to find out.</comment>


Unique 3 word address for every 3m in the world - <AUTHOR> http://what3words.com/ <comment><USER2> Someone didn't sneak this one in there? [https://map.what3words.com/what.three.words](https://map.what3words.com/what.three.words) ?</comment>


Pandora: From near-death to profitability in a year - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/25/pandora-from-near-death-to-profitability-in-a-year/ <comment><USER2> Pandora is the only service that I regularly think "I should be paying these guys money". In fact, a while back I decided that the next time I hit the 40 hour limit I will be upgrading my account with them.

In case anyone working with/at Pandora is reading this: you guys are awesome. I've gotten more new music from you than anywhere else. I noticed you seem to have changed your algorithm lately (At least, in the past few weeks I've suddenly gotten a LOT of new music) and I like it a lot.

<comment><USER3> I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.

<comment><USER4> I just switched to last.fm from Pandora. The last straw was the same video ad for 'Mercy hospital' every single time I changed stations.

I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song.

I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.

<comment><USER5> Coding at my new job I tried out Pandora and after a few days I kept hearing the same music. My test is eclectic and I like hearing folk to jazz to alternative to 80s to etc ... Pandora does not seem to offer this type of station, but Last.fm does as if you trained it via a plug in it knows exactly what genres you like and the artists in those genres.

Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!

<comment><USER2> I'm not exactly sure about those particular mixes, but I know I end to get good results mixing genres in Pandora by using the "Add Variety" feature. I also find that keeping the window open and just pausing it stops the repetition, they tend to only repeat songs you really, really seem to like, or they will only once per page load (per station).

<comment><USER5> Cool thanks. I might give it a try. Though prefer last.fm's toolbar (fire.fm) as no site needs to be open, there are play controls at the bottom of firefox, as well it tells you what's playing. As I code/test within one Firefox window I prefer not to have to switch tabs to control music, learn who is playing, as well heart or ban the track playing. Though maybe Pandora has similar toolbar?

<comment><USER2> They have a desktop client, but you (apparently) have to be a member for that. I'm not sure about the features, but I would think it would allow for that.

<comment><USER6> It does, and it works on any platform Adobe Air works on. It's 30-something bucks for a whole year, and totally worth it for not having your music tied to the browser being open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a huge Pandora fan as well. For some reason one day I decided to quickly profess my love for them via email and actually got a response asking if I wanted a shirt or hat. This blew my mind, and I rock my Pandora baseball tee often as a result.

<comment><USER8> What's your shirt size? We'll send you a t-shirt (or a few!) if you're willing to try our service. And actually, I'll extend this offer to any HN reader/user.

Chris from Grooveshark.

<comment><USER9> Grooveshark looks nice! Pandora's been recycling the same songs too much for my tastes lately, and I'm getting bored with it. I also wish I could easily access the "station logs" later.

I like the fair use policy on the copyrights page a lot.

Are you really going to be able to let users drive to the exact song they want to hear, even after critical mass builds up? Seems too good to be true. I always assumed that was how Pandora managed to keep the heat off (by not letting users pick the exact song when they want to hear it).

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Our new version is even nicer :) You can go to preview.grooveshark.com to check it out.

To answer your question, yes, we will always have a search-and-discover interface because that is where our real value comes from.

As far as critical mass is concerned, we are doubling about every 2-3 months with absolutely no marketing or PR (which is why you don't hear about us on TechCrunch very often). We've got a lot of work ahead of us in terms of scaling to meet demand, but so far we're handling it well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps I am weird but every time pandora recommends me a song and I really like it, I bookmark it. I do this so that if I end up deciding I want to buy it, I can click through to amazon from them and get them some referal money :).

It really says something about how good you are doing if people will go out of their way to make sure you get paid.

</comment><comment><USER11> I started out with Pandora, but then they added that 40 hour limit, seeing as how I have the radio on 24/7, I hit that the 3rd day. So I started looking for alternatives and quickly found grooveshark, they completely blow Pandora out of the water with their selection and you can actually pick the actual song you want to play right away.

Their autoplay feature is a little bit less refined than Pandoras, but I actually like that, since with Pandora I ended up listening to the same 30-40 songs over and over again, since it kept reccomending the same songs.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! I'll pass the good feedback on to the rest of our team. We're working hard to bring you more features. I'm actually working on the autoplay algorithm right now so any feedback is quite helpful. Drop me a line anytime.

Chris from Grooveshark

<comment><USER12> I use Grooveshark and I agree that the autoplay is very naive compared to Pandora. A better autoplay algorithm will definitely help but it is hard give you feedback unless we know what you are trying to do with the new algorithm. Currently, correct me if am wrong, your algorithm for recommendation is heavily biased toward genre. It is really hard to discover new songs that I like with it and that's when I fall back to Pandora.

<comment><USER13> I like how you and vaksel gave diametrically opposed suggestions...poor Chris.

<comment><USER8> Haha you'd be surprised by how many people love the current autoplay despite it's drawbacks. I have a feeling we're not hearing from the people who don't like it because they end up going to Pandora for better recs. I think it's a problem we can solve though. By our next product launch we'll have the logic in place to make both user groups happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Glad to see these guys doing well, I've been a rabid fan since a friend turned me onto the service four(ish) years ago.

Although I don't entirely understand the last line of the article "Pandora will be a textbook case for why execution matters more than vision in tech"

I get that they've worked their asses off to make it a reality, I think the vision of smart music recommendation and discovery is what drove the execution. ??

</comment><comment><USER14> just putting out there that pandora totally crushes deezer and last.fm when it comes to music selection for artists or songs you enter in.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is excellent news for Hip Hop Goblin!

<comment><USER16> Every day you're hustlin'.</comment></comment>


Tether: Never Lose Your Phone Again - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I'm a huge fan of ycombinator and wanted to pass on something new that could be a nice fit for your website. My two team members and I are young, high school entrepreneurs at MIT who are the co-founders of Tether. Tether is a dual sticker system that makes sure that you never lose your phone again by immediately alerting you if you leave your phone behind.
We think Tether could be a great story for ycombinator for these reasons:
1.	Innovative gear – Most other products tell you where your phone is once you have lost it, meanwhile Tether pre-emptively alerts you as soon as you leave your phone behind. 2.	Sleek design – The Tether stickers are very small and slim and look great, so you don't have to worry about sticking them to anything! 3.	Reliable - Unlike any other phone locator product, Tether works even when the phone is dead or broken.
If you're interested, please let me know how I can make the writing process easy for your team. I am happy to send more information about ourselves and the product. We recently launched an Indiegogo campaign at https://igg.me/at/tether/14704093 you can also visit us at www.tetherdevices.com.
Thanks for taking the time to check us out and I look forward to hearing from you!
Thank You, Mira Yadav <comment><USER2> Clickable: [http://tetherdevices.com/index.html/index.html/](http://tetherdevices.com/index.html/index.html/)

Because non-linked submissions to Hacker News are ranked lower, it might make sense to submit the link to TetherDevices without any commentary. Then add additional information as a comment once the new story has been created.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> there should be a way to tag these with "Shameless self-promotion" although i get the feeling that's what yc is</comment>


Three Beautiful Quicksorts [video] - hash-table http://hash-table.com/home/2012/08/18/three-beautiful-quicksorts-video/

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though it is one of the first things a Computer Scientist learns, quicksort is still one of the most beautiful algorithms ever.

It's quirky in the sense that it is a randomized algorithm. It's analysis is beautifully simple once understood, but painfully non-trivial. There are multiple ways to analyze the running time of quicksort (dartboard, recurrence, etc) and its ideas apply to many other algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER2> Though a good one, its been posted a few times already [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%09...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%09Three+Beautiful+Quicksorts&start=0)

Please try HN search before posting oldies.

</comment><comment><USER3> can someone just post the code?</comment>