Ask HN: How do you know when to give up? - <AUTHOR> I launched a little social site dedicated to gamers in the fall, and it hasn't picked up any traction at all. It never received any press coverage or anything. The blogs I contacted never responded to any of my emails. I've tried getting the word out through gaming forums, but that didn't help. I went back to my old WoW guild's forums, and they didn't even seem to care.<p>I feel like my site hasn't even been looked at to be given a fair chance, so I'm hesitant to call it a failure. Though, another part of me wants to think it was a stupid idea with bad execution. When do you know when to move on to a new project? <comment><USER2> A little background, as I can relate: I built a poker calculator called ALL IN Expert, which I thought would be a big hit but wasn't. When it launched, it received very little coverage or attention and I quickly despaired and took the site down, though I did keep a copy on my blog where people could go and download it.

A few months later I do a Google search to see if anyone had said anything about it and lo and behold, one of the notable poker training sites had done a full hour long video on how to use ALL IN Expert to improve your game. They had found out about the software, either because of my initial marketing or just randomly through Google, and wouldn't you know it: they found it useful. Now its downloaded a dozen or more times/day. Not much, but who knows what would have happened if I had kept promoting it.

It can be hard to tell when to give up and when you should push just a little bit harder. When I stopped working on it, I started working on a new project, Domain Pigeon, which will likely prove to have been a good decision.

My 2c: Leave your site up, make a few changes every now and then, keep promoting it even if only an email or forum post every few days, and re- evaluate in a few months. There's not really a good reason to take it down, even if you do choose to devote your time to something else.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is an article by Steve Pavlina which, if you file off the words "shareware author" and replace with "web app author", I think you could benefit from.

[http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof...](http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof/)

I'll warn you in advance: some of it is trite. But there is some value in the other stuff: marketing success, for example, is not something that just happens to a product. It is something which is the predictable result of a strategy designed to produce it. Your submission indicates that you tried a few things to get users, which is good, but I wonder if you thought about that issue in a systemic manner. (Was there a plan in place? With boring things like predicting the chicken-egg issue before it happened, and multiple avenues for solving it? Which you then checked against reality as you encountered reality? These are opportunities for improvement in your current project and in how you approach future projects.)

As for when to give up: you'd be really, really surprised how far you can take projects with persistence. That said, if my little brother said "Hey, I've got an idea, first you take gamers and then you..." my first question would be "Why will they pay for this when they hate paying for just about anything, including the games which define their identity?" and I would not have a second question until I got a satisfactory answer to the first question.

</comment><comment><USER4> When the reasons you originally believe the project could (not necessarily _would_ or even _probably would_ ) succeed become invalid, you should stop investing in it.

To answer your question someone would have to know what those original reasons were. As some say, what's your "secret sauce".

It looks to me like a twitter for geeks. The problem is that being twitter is already for geeks, and I don't see any benefit in being in a _more_ exclusive communication channel.

When you say "fair chance" to me it sounds as though you think there's a community of intelligent people who give websites scrutiny proportional to the effort the authors have put in. This kind of attitude is almost always going to lead to disappointment.

The internet is more like a herd of lazy, selfish people looking for ways to do less boring stuff and more fun stuff.

You might do better optimizing for that scenario.

edit: I originally had a critique of your site here but it wasn't strictly relevant and this post is too long.

</comment><comment><USER5> Googling his HN username turned up this site:

<http://www.noobindex.com/>

Clean design and layout and I dare say it looks a little inspired from the HN design.

However the site really doesn't tell me what it does, issit like twitter?

<comment><USER6> Tagline to noobindex:

"Noobindex is a hangout for noobs, nerds, dorks, and gamers.

Register your handle and make your own page »"

Doesn't tell me what the value is, or why stay. 18 or 19 words, 25 syllables, and I don't know what's going on here. I click on the first profile I see (Juicebox). I see a picture of Mr. T flexing wearing gold chains, some messages (latest: Juicebox is like omgsh pwnin noobs), and a Bio page with generic contact info.

At this point, I've investigated the site, and seen no reason to stick around.

Now, if the tagline were:

"Noobindex: l33t gamers only, for celebrating games and laughing at n00bs", then a search box below that with "Enter your favorite game and see who is playing right now" then... maybe that'd work better some? This is all just quick and dirty in my mind, but you need to get people's attention with something that makes them say, "Yeah, I'd dig that!" and then get them to interact with your site somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tangential: There's no link in your profile or in your text. Do you mind showing us your product?

Also, if you live in the U.S. and follow typical diurnal sleeping patterns, I recommend waiting until a more sane time in the morning to think your thoughts through rationally.

Caveat Emptor: I do not speak from experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> You've already done what so many others fail: complete a site and launch it. There's no reason to call it a failure. You spend what, probably $10 a month in hosting? I wouldn't close it down because it hasn't received a lot of traffic yet.

However, as the other posters say, it sounds like you'll attract a bunch of 13 year olds. May want to steer the site in a more professional direction.

</comment><comment><USER9> if you haven't already, i'd first make a budget (of time, money, or whatever other resource you're consuming) and see what it might take to reach a win scenario you'd be happy with (ie $3k/mo passive income). laying it out in rows and columns with required user #s and growth is surprisingly helpful.

i haven't seen the site and have no idea of the specifics, but based on what i'm imagining, i would jump ship. the chicken-egg issue is hard for anything social (especially when bootstrapped w/ no marketing $), and gaming is a saturated space, so it'll be hard to get the user base to critical mass.

that said, if you're still excited about what you're building, that carries a lot of weight.

<comment><USER6> Rob - I upvoted you because you had some great insights, but I disagree some on "making a budget of time or money until reaching a win scenario" - in my experience, success is totally nonlinear. You slave away, and then make major breakthroughs. In business, any sort of milestones that correlate to anything won't match the real world.

It's key you get some proof of concept (is this valuable to anyone? who is going to pay me? why?). Once you've got proof of concept and you're behind your idea, you then hustle like a motherfucker until you win. If your general concept is a winner, and you hustle like a motherfucker, you win eventually.

<comment><USER9> hullo - i more or less agree. i'm advocating spreadsheets as more of a sanity check on your business assumptions than as a real predictive model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the criteria I used, courtesy of a Sam Altman post (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95883>):

"If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape."

</comment><comment><USER11> _How do you know when to give up?_

 _When do you know when to move on to a new project?_

Ah, 2 completely different questions.

Moving on to a new project is _not_ giving up. Especially when you use everything you learned from the previous project in the next one (which, of course, all of us hackers always do). Just think of it as Me 2.0 and move on. Never give up.

</comment><comment><USER12> I find it useful to think in terms of rates and percentages. Sounds dull, but hear me out.

What % of blogs respond to your product? If you've only emailed 5 or 10 blogs, you don't really know yet - that's a pretty small number, and you might've just had bad luck. The rate of success really depends on a lot of factors unrelated to your site itself (subject matter, the blogs themselves, how you approach them, etc.), but I wouldn't be surprised to get a 10% response rate for an average product. I haven't really done this enough to go into more detail, or to have a winning formula, but I would expect the success rate to be relatively low, which can get discouraging.

What percentage of your visitors are sticking around? Again, if you've only received a few hundred visits, it's hard to tell. The best way to iterate is to have a steady stream of traffic, make changes, and see how they affect stickiness.. but getting the traffic is the tricky part to start with, right? I'm not really counting Digg/Reddit/Stumbleupon traffic here, since those visitors typically have the attention span of a fruitfly.

How much search engine traffic are you getting? How feasible is it to get on the first page of Google or Yahoo for some combinations of relevant keywords? (use the Adwords Keyword Tool to research keywords, see how much traffic they could potentially get you, and how competitive they are). Search engines can bring you thousands of visitors a month who are actively looking for something like your site. Don't ignore them.

Can you think of any other domain-specific promotions? You mentioned game forums and guilds, I don't know how far you took that. Is there any angle under which game developers or publishers might see an advantage to promoting your site or collaborating with you? What about game magazines or review sites?

These are all the cost of giving your site a chance to succeed. Weigh that against the reward of success - how badly do you want your site to grow, and how much effort are you willing to put in to "give it a fair chance"? (you're the only one who can give it a fair chance, by the way - no one else cares enough).

</comment><comment><USER13> if that noobindex is your site, then you should spend a few weeks and do a complete redesign. Right now(no offense) it looks like crap. You have to play to your audience. Simplicity works on HN, because the site is only text and you get the full experience anyways.

But for a gaming site to be simple is just wrong...look at your competition, all of them have extremely visually appealing designs. So why would a person register for something that looks like crap(pink background..really?) when they can register for a site that looks good.

If you suck at visual design hire a designer to build you something that is visually appealing. Probably will run you something like 500 bucks on one of those freelancer sites.

</comment><comment><USER14> You need to believe in your own product, otherwise trying to sell it will just make you feel guilty. So post a link i'd like to help review it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Post a review post here asking for a review.

You haven't even included a link to your app! :)

<comment><USER16> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228735>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If there is a path to making money that does not involve gaining a huge number of users, the continue pushing it. If your only path involves becoming very popular, then it may be the right time to give up.

</comment><comment><USER18> Read a book by Seth Godin called "The Dip - The Extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit ( and when to stick)". It might be useful.

<comment><USER19> Summary/paraphrasing/my version:

a) If you can't see how to make this work, quit.

b) Beware of rationalizations for quitting when you're just in a local trough emotionally. My heuristic: I don't stop doing this until I find something better to do. That forces me to find a constructive reason to quit.

c) The worst possible outcome isn't failure and quitting but ongoing mediocrity. Either because you lack the courage to quit, or because you get just enough feedback to keep you interested. This can be arbitrarily hard to detect, but for starters keep monitoring your metrics and looking for opportunities to revise.</comment></comment>


PayPal releases Kraken, Node.js framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.krakenjs.com/ <comment><USER3> Maybe I'm a minority, but I can't really trust anything from a company with a login screen that says "logging you in securely" for 5000ms before loading me (sometimes) to my dashboard.

<comment><USER4> You are not their target market.

<comment><USER3> Explain?

<comment><USER5> This might provide you some insight: [http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The- Slow-Down-Loop.aspx](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Slow-Down-Loop.aspx)

In all seriousness, adding interstitials can provide value. If the login performance has high variance, it's better to set an expectation that it will take 5 seconds than leave the user wondering if the click actually worked. Similarly, Apple has done an amazing job with UI transitions in iOS to mask the actual load time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was honestly expecting something with more added value to warrant it's own name, maybe a viable competitor to Sails.js, Derby, etc. Lusca is nice, everything else is more or less what everyone is already doing - <USER2> config, controllers, grouped routes, etc, more of a template than a framework. Good thing they are not reinventing the wheel.

</comment><comment><USER7> ====

Don't like:

dust.js templates instead of handlebars

self = this all over the place

native use of forEach and Object.keys instead of underscore or lowdash

====

I like:

that you can change the template system

grouping routes, I always add this myself, makes it more django like

security stuff like csrf

dev and prod environment awareness

directory layout is cool

apache license

uses grunt

they use Object.create!

one var statement per function

krakens

====

Overall pretty awesome.

p. s. I have no idea how to format text here.

<comment><USER8> I'd be interested to hear what you don't like about Object.keys or Array#forEach. Not looking to start an argument, just genuinely curious why you prefer a utility library over native methods -- especially in Node, where you have guaranteed ES5 compatibility.

Also: self = this can be avoided in a lot of cases with Function#bind, but not always. Seems like a weird criticism to me.

<comment><USER7> Native methods can be slower than simply using a for (Edit: while) loop:

[http://allyoucanleet.com/post/21624742336/jsconf- us-12-slide...](http://allyoucanleet.com/post/21624742336/jsconf-us-12-slides)

self = this is error prone because it relies on JavaScript's lexical scope to share a variable across nested functions. It's a gross abuse of closures. It invalidates the ability to bind or use apply later, since everything is bound to that local variable self, and it's simply not needed and is probably used to avoid considerable use of bind, but using bind is only an issue when you write flock of seagull style nested function code. using self = this is not the right solution, writing more modular code with smaller functions is.

<comment><USER6> The performance hit of using .bind() instead of `self = this` is much larger than .forEach() vs loop. Pick your side :)

<comment><USER7> I pick less chance for errors over performance. Referencing variables outside of local scope is something I avoid. Write beautiful code first, because it's easier to optimize beautiful code than to beautify optimized code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh: [https://www.kraken.com/](https://www.kraken.com/)

Why this is relevant: kraken is a bitcoin trading platform. Paypal is a competitor to bitcoin.

<comment><USER10> Huh: [https://kraken.io/](https://kraken.io/)

<comment><USER11> Huh: [http://asana.github.io/kraken/](http://asana.github.io/kraken/)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, these days people don't seem to give a shit to preceding OS projects with the same name. "Ours will be much bigger".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Design Then Code, UI design guides for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://designthencode.com/?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I've been working on this since early Fall. I want to teach designers the basics of Cocoa & iOS development and also teach hackers how to design & execute great-looking UIs in Photoshop. The larger project tutorials are paid (the first one went live today, over 70 pages including PSD file and Xcode project) but I also wrote a shorter (free) guide to getting started with Objective-C and Cocoa: <http://designthencode.com/scratch/></comment>


ISO- mobile developers who love Swedish Blondes and New York City Brunettes... - <AUTHOR> http://tripl.tumblr.com/post/13159039032

<comment><USER2> Sexist post. I vote for removal from HN. Though they don't specify gender...</comment>


Show HN: Stylepill – Get beautiful open source UI components weekly - <AUTHOR> https://stylepill.carrd.co/ <comment><USER2> Sergio and I started Stylepill a couple of days ago to learn how to design products quickly and learning from the process. We came across with carrd.co by @ajlkn on Twitter, and we found it fantastic and a new way to create and validate products quickly. So we sat down with Sergio one night, and we analyzed that we could build in less than one day, and launch the next day. This is how Stylepill was born.

Stylepill does not solve any problems, nor will it change the world at all. We've just designed a number of very cute web themes throughout our career and we would like to share them with you, but we wanted to do it in a different and creative way, and we decided to split each theme into small, 100% customizable and easy-use components, which we'll send randomly weekly to your email.

If you're a designer and would like to share your components with the world, you can ping us at firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll add your work to our repository and send it to all subscribers (of course, we'll respect your authorship and also we'll let people know who created those components).

We hope you like this small but beautiful project, any comment, suggestion, idea, feedback is 100% welcome, and we'll be responding to each of your comments with pleasure.

Happy weekend!</comment>


Arbol, a parametric weather risk platform built on IPFS - <AUTHOR> https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/case-study-arbol/ <comment><USER2> Read through this and it's super interesting, but am I missing something or do they still need a series of storage nodes that can hold a copy of all the data anyway to allow for the pinning to work?

Similar to torrents with no-one seeding, if there isn't an active set of users to 're-seed' the data, you need a copy to do so yourself, similar to a seed- box.

<comment><USER3> Yes, indeed an impressive project. I think we should not use the termination "stored at IPFS" like they do. Distributed via IPFS would be much more correct in a technical sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does the smart contract interact with data stored in IPFS? Are the automatic payouts handled on chain or is there an off-chain process initiating those payouts?</comment>


Failed Your Resolutions Already? Time to Try a Habit-Breaking Device - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-25/best-apps-for-breaking-bad-habits-pavlok-motivaider-ksafe <comment><USER2> If it helps people then by all means I hope it succeeds. But it does bring up some questions. Does strength of shock improve outcomes? Is it the actual shock that improves behavior or is that just the delivery method of negative reinforcement? (Likely the case).

I would think we could find more gentle ways of redirecting behavior, perhaps an app that keeps count of your failure and success towards a certain goal - therefore gamifying habits (likely exists).

In the off chance it is the shock that helps curb bad behaviors, I would love to see some more fashionable shock collars for the more extreme self improvement junkies among us.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am tired of always failing my new years resolutions.

So this year, 2018, I made only one new year's resolution: I will not make any new years resolutions for 2018.

Oh, wait. I think I just made a self-breaking new years resolutions.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can do this with a rubber band on your wrist.</comment>


Show HN: HELI – a simple game I made for android and iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/heli

<comment><USER2> Very nice. Sound effects are great, progressive heli damaged is a great idea and well executed, specially the smoking effect.

May I ask which platform (GameMaker and the like) or framework, if any, did you use ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi fasteo!

I used Unity3d (in 2d mode, obviously).

The prototype was built in an afternoon from scratch where most of the time was finding suitable art to test with. With a few weeks on and off polishing it and discussions with my pet artist :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Minimal blog theme for programmers. Would you be interested? - <AUTHOR>

I have worked with static website generators like Mynt and now, Pelican for my blog.  Now I have a better grasp of CSS.  I was wondering if the developer community would be interested in a jinja2 optimized blog theme.  It would have the actual html/css template + jinja2 template.<p>If you do not need the jinja2 templating, would a minimal blog theme optimised for programming interest you? <comment><USER2> Programmers don't pay for software products

I'd recommend putting it up on Theme Forest and seeing how you do.</comment>


Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983 - <AUTHOR> http://alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/ <comment><USER2> For those who like to read about the old Bell System, there's a great book called _Engineering and Operations in the Bell System_ that gives an overview of the technology that was in use up to around the time of their breakup in 1984. It was published by Bell Labs. You can find used copies on Amazon for as little as 1 cent (plus the cost of shipping).

<comment><USER3> Yes! I have an original copy that was given to me in 1978 when I went to work for Bell Labs. A lot of today's technology has it's roots in the early work done at the labs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's got Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication":

(warning, large PDF files)

Parts I-II: [http://alcatel- lucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj27-3-...](http://alcatel- lucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj27-3-379.pdf)

Parts III-V: [http://alcatel- lucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj27-4-...](http://alcatel- lucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj27-4-623.pdf)

Cool!

<comment><USER5> Trivium: a friend on G+ shared with me a story about having a Geniac kit as a kid -- an educational "computer" sold from 1955 through the 1960s by Edmund Berkeley. Included with was a copy of Claude Shannon's "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits".

For a kid's game.

Contrast that with today's "deep analysis" articles in which VirtualBox VMs are referred to as "Russian dolls" (to reference an earlier comment of mine).

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

<comment><USER6> I see no inconsistency. Few people in the 1950s would have purchased such a game, despite its novelty.

Personally, I'd love a copy.

This being said, the concept of a virtual machine fits pretty well within the idea of a Russian doll.

<comment><USER5> There was a period of unabashed embrace of technology in the wake of WWII. Much of that had to do with the advances and successes of technology during the war: radar, missiles, the first jet aircraft, penicillin, and of course, the atom bomb.

Vannevar Bush was commissioned by FDR to write a proposal for a national scientific research initiative, which appeared as _Science, the Endless Frontier_. This ultimately replaced the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development with the National Science Foundation (following some not- atypical politicking and hurdles).

The mood began to change in the 1960s with opposition to nuclear testing, the appearance of Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ , concerns over pollution, overpopulation, and limits to growth, the emergence of the environmental movement, and other reactions to the earlier spirit of scientific, technological, and industrial progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A whole series of articles introducing UNIX:

[http://alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/bstj- vol57-issue06...](http://alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/bstj- vol57-issue06.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great resource but not perfect. Is there anything we can do to alert the curators to problems with the collection? For example, Walter Shewart's paper on the "Nature and Origins of Standards of Quality" appears on pages 1 through 22 of Volume 37, Issue 1, January 1958, but pages 4 through 15 are missing.

I tried contacting Alcatel-Lucent about this some time ago without success.

<comment><USER9> I'm actually interested in that article as well and have tried finding the complete version. If you ever succeed please let me know. So far I also have not found the complete version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the reminder! Unix, blue box papers, Shannon theory, switch blueprints, nice lore.

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny, I used to have the '81—'83 issues...

</comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussions may be of interest:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1802293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1802293)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420084)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687277)</comment>


Udp/tcp connection using pure bash - <AUTHOR> http://tmartiro.blogspot.com/2012/02/udptcp-connection-using-pure-bash.html

<comment><USER2> This is bash-only, but a similar feature exists in zsh: <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/HTTP#Zsh>

</comment><comment><USER3> /Wow/. That's incredible. How does the "<>" operator work? I'm familiar with command line redirection, but I've never seen this. To wikipedia!

</comment><comment><USER4> While it's an interesting trick - With no proper timeout / error control, I'd rather see the already bloated bash to be a couple of bytes shorter, than to include that feature. There's 'nc' when it's needed. We're getting quite far from the unix's 'one tool - one simple task' idea.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. These toy-features are especially bitter when you look at how little _bash the language_ has evolved in the past decade.

Pretty much every system out there drags a significant baggage of shell- scripts along. Yet there's been barely any improvement on the arcanest of all syntaxes. We keep on painstakingly reinventing ever the same control structures (half-broken lockfile mechanisms, retry loops, miserable support for pid/pgroups, awkward subprocess/fd handling etc. etc.) because for some reason nobody bothers to finally bake them into the shell.

It's become so bad that most teams seem to resort to using a different scripting language for complex tasks nowadays. But that comes with its own hairball of problems and imho the de-facto shell-scripting language simply should not fall behind its own problem domain so far that the preferred approach becomes to _not use it_.

<comment><USER6> Lets imagine for a moment that cross-platform backwards compatibility is a high priority, and that every change leads to a frustrated group of users running scripts from many years ago. How could you make a destructive change?

As an example, this works in bash 3.2 but not 4.0:

        diff <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file{1,2})

in 3 it expands to

        diff <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file1) <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file2)

whereas in 4 it expands to

        diff <(awk '{print $1, $3}' file1 file2)

<comment><USER5> _How could you make a destructive change?_

Well, the same way that everyone else does it: by versioning.

The simplest approach would be to have /bin/bash2, /bin/bash3 etc., with /bin/bash defaulting to the last (current) unversioned bash release.

Then when you write a script that depends on a new feature you'd reference #!/bin/bash3 or whatever. More complex schemes are possible but probably not needed here. It's not rocket science.

And as your example illustrates: This kind of versioning is actually _needed_ even in the current (almost stale) development-mode of bash. Its absence is the reason why many people still target sh as the lowest common denominator...

<comment><USER6> After some thought, what i'd like to see is what's done now with globstar (make new features accessible via shopt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tis good, but it doesn't show how to read from the connection, only how to send data.

<comment><USER8> One way to do this:

read line <&456

To see what you got:

echo $line

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Er, what OS is this referring to? My Linux boxes don't have a /dev/tcp or /dev/udp. This sounds like a Plan9ism, but IIRC Plan9's network interface shows up under /net, not /dev.

EDIT: Ah, this is truly a Bash feature, some sort of internal hackery. It doesn't depend on the actual existence of tcp or udp devices.

<comment><USER10> Most distributions disable bash /dev/{tcp,udp} by default. You would have to compile bash using --enable-net-redirections.</comment></comment>


J-Mouse - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/j/jmouse.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know if it would be possible to design something like this today? One that would be quick and easy to use so a programmer does not have to waste time moving their hand between the keyboard and the mouse.</comment>


Show HN: Oyster, an interactive Perl eval server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gatlin/oyster

<comment><AUTHOR> This may go completely unnoticed, but I'll talk to myself a bit in case someone ever reads this.

In my experience, people who want to learn how to program find setting up a development environment painful and tricky. Hence, learning tools like IDLE and Racket. We wanted to create something similar, but in the browser. Perl made this relatively simple, so we built a component to do this.

Separately, I hope to use this in future educational projects and I hope others will do the same. We can hopefully allow people to get their feet wet before embarking down the mundane and sometimes frustrating path to installing an interpreter, text editor, etc.</comment>


How To Try Spotify Immediately, No Matter Where You Live - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/03/how-to-try-spotify-immediately-no-matter-where-you-live/ <comment><USER2> It will stop working very soon. Spotify checks your location constantly and not only when you download. It allows you to use it outside your original download country for 14 days. After a few days a bar will appear to notify you and after the two weeks it'll stop working. The only option is to use a real UK proxy or TOR once after 14 days to give you another period of two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. How does this work. Is the music legal?

<comment><USER4> _How does this work_

Streaming.

 _Is the music legal?_

The service is legal depending where you live. That's why right now it's only available in some European countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Spotify is really, really good.

I got an invitation about a year ago and used it when I was in Sweden, Spain, and England - I really missed it when I came back to the USA. Very much worth the hassle to try it out, I'm going to get back on.</comment>


Making Addictive Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20-%20Motivations%20(2007).pdf

<comment><USER2> I wish it was titled: "Making games enjoyable." Addictive is not a good word.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, the title of the paper is "Motivations of play in online games." Since the author considers addictive behaviour as pathological, the current title doesn't do justice to the content.

Could an editor change the title accordingly?

To winter_blue: I tried to vote you up, but my account is apparently too young (or perhaps not active enough?) for it to take effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an interesting update on Bartle's Taxonomy of Players (<http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm>) from back in the MUD days. Sadly, this article is a little dated if you check out the list of games used (Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies). I would love to see results from a survey like this that used players from Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote an article about adding gaming components into your web app a few weeks back if you're interested: [http://blog.areastudios.com/2010/01/14/make- your-web-applica...](http://blog.areastudios.com/2010/01/14/make-your-web- applications-addictive-5-lessons-to-learn-from-foursquare/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Abstract: "An empirical model of player motivations in online games provides the foundation to understanding and assessing how players differ from one another and how motivations of play relate to age, gender, usage patterns and in-game behaviors. In the current study, a factor analytic approach was used to create an empirical model of player motivations. The analysis revealed 10 motivation subcomponents that grouped into 3 overarching components (Achievement, Social, and Immersion). Relationships between motivations and demographic variables (age, gender, and usage patterns) are also presented."

Nick Yee has run the Daedalus Project for years. I know and like it for its insight into the demographics of MMO players: <http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/>

</comment><comment><USER7> This paper gives you some structure if you think about integrating game aspects in whatever you are doing.

Here is a link to the Google PDF Viewer if you don't want to deal with browser extensions:

[http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nickyee.c...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nickyee.com%2Fpubs%2FYee%2520-%2520Motivations%2520\(2007\).pdf)</comment>


AWS Issues - <AUTHOR> Anyone having issues? Getting DNS errors on ec2 deployed through elastic beanstalk and Heroku sent out an email about possible platform issues as well, but AWS status is showing all green. <comment><USER2> Aws status page has been updated showing a problem with Amazon Route 53 Resolver (N. Virginia). Heroku status page does show having a availability issue [https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2090](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2090)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just heard from AWS support. US-east-1a DNS is the only AZ affected. They don't yet have an estimate on time to resolution.

<comment><USER4> I believe one person's 1a can be someone else's 1b and so on.

<comment><USER5> Yup, that's indeed the case. Each AWS account sees different names for the actual AZs. That's probably to prevent everybody always using the first AZ on the list (thus overloading the first AZ and underutilizing the remaining ones).</comment></comment></comment>


Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/11/technology/google-home-mini-security-flaw/index.html <comment><USER2> This article provides less information than a previously posted article [0] written by the individual who discovered the problem.

[0] Google is nerfing all Home Minis because mine spied on everything I said - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446206)

</comment><comment><USER3> _" A major flaw has been detected in the newly-unveiled Google Home Mini"_

Do they (Google) really think everybody will believe this was "a flaw"?!

Obligatory dilbert strip:

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-07-14](http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-07-14)

This will probably become a scandal. Without good privacy assurance, we won't progress properly and fast in the IoT world.

<comment><USER2> No need for the alarm.

This issue simply occurred because a small number of Mini's given out at a Google event had a defect where the "press to send voice command" registered phantom touches.

Not only was this clearly unintentional, but the issue was "resolved" (not really because they just disabled the would-be feature) and deleted the data they accidentally collected in a few days. Very few people were impacted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As always, QA is an afterthought at Google.</comment>


YouTube views down for channels with more than 10M subscribers, analysis says - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/youtube-views-are-down-across-the-board-analysis-says-1790440740 <comment><USER2> I've strongly believed for a while that a very large percentage of youtube views are children, say under the age of 6.

I've observed children on tablets ... they will watch the same video north of 100 times ... it's what kids do.

Then you look at the successful youtubers; people who do things like unwrap gifts or who make things I perplexingly am not entertained by. When I put it in the context of "this is watched by 5 year olds" everything makes sense.

I was talking to someone at a company that tracks these things, she said "no, it's actually women in their late 30s and 40s". This is even more evidence. They are on their mothers devices. It's not like women in their 40s are watching 60 variations of '5 little monkeys jumping on the bed'.

Multiple variations of this nursery rhyme have viewcounts over 100 million. ([https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAM%253D&q=monkeys+on+the...](https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAM%253D&q=monkeys+on+the+bed)).

I'm waiting for the commercials to be kids cereal and action figures, but somehow that hasn't happened yet. I get a Capital One credit card ad, logged out, in private mode, watching a nursery rhyme video. (hint hint, million dollar business right there).

<comment><USER3> My 2 year old always makes her way from ABC Kids / Playschool videos to these ones:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QG4n3-rKTs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QG4n3-rKTs)

They regularly have a half billion views, and are literally just someone opening Kinder Surprise toys and playing with them.

I have no idea why she loves them, but she just stays captivated until we put her back to Playschool.

For reference, she's never seen a Kinder Surprise in her life, or seen Frozen (or any Disney movie), or anything that would explain her draw to these videos.

As for the videos she does watch, at 1.5yrs old she already knew how to pick a new Related Video, or drag the slider back to rewatch a video, and will happily watch the same Playschool episode or Peppa Pig clip non stop for hours if we let her.

This new generation who have never known anything other than internet connected touch screens is truly fascinating to watch. Using tablets and phones is as natural as walking or playing.

I am getting sick of cleaning the TV though, since we can't manage to teach her that it's not touch screen!

<comment><USER4> The comment section of that video definitely seems to confirm the hypothesis.

<comment><USER5> Image of the comment section. That's fascinating, I never realized websites like youtube were being used so extensively by younger generations. Really makes me feel old and I'm college aged.

[https://i.imgur.com/ZSndTA3.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZSndTA3.png)

<comment><USER2> What's that Amber/Donna comment? Is this that famed iOS phrase autocomplete thing acting up?

This looks like a toddler accidentally putting an SMS from an older sibling's device in the comment box.

<comment><USER6> My guess is they've accidentally hit siri/dictation and it's picked up someone speaking in the background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first response to a statement like "youtube views are down across the board" is that Google is being more effective at catching ad fraud. Just recently we had the "$5M a day ad fraud story" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219871)) on video ad fraud.

Ad fraud is prevalent because it is the perfect "victimless" crime. If you build a system that defrauds advertisers the ad platform won't prosecute you because they don't want to admit to the fraud, they will just figure out how to detect and block you. They might try to take back money but there are lots of ways to move money through the banking system so that you get to keep most (if not all) of it. There are billions of dollars in play so stealing .01% is profitable and essentially "noise" to the players. And everything is already set up to automatically send money around so you never have to meet face to face. As one person put it, "It's a giant money of river flowing right by your doorstep, you're telling me you won't step out and dip your cup into it now and then to pick up some walking around money?"

The effect of Google being more effective was they massively suppressed the ad revenue from things like AdSense for content which both made legitimate small scale sites no longer even making beer money, and the required infrastructure to defraud AdSense a bit more expensive.

YouTube has been trying to get profitable for years, and they are trying to get more advertisers on it, and it has a huge click/view fraud problem (as evidenced by the Forbes article and elsewhere). So if they clean it of viewbots then views will likely "go down across the board."

</comment><comment><USER8> Title is misleading. Views are down for the 49 "YouTube personalities" with >10 million subscribers. Views may well be increasing for other categories, such as smaller channels or channels run by television studios.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, this changes everything about what the title seemed to imply.

I think it's a case of people becoming tired with the same stuff that's churned out by those YouTube personalities with >10 mil subscribers. Once you reach that level you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and once you do that you're competing with a host of fresher channels with newer ideas.

<comment><USER10> interesting theory

but i assume YT simply changed their recommendation algos

eg i see more random no-name channels now in my recommendations

<comment><USER11> This did happen. Previously, "Recommended" was primarily your subscriptions and you got notifications when someone you follow posted. Now recommendations are mostly channels you are not subscribed to, and you need to "double subscribe" by pushing the bell icon on the side of the subscription button to get those notifications.

H3h3 did a pretty good summary: [https://youtu.be/YMOLmbgAmsY](https://youtu.be/YMOLmbgAmsY)

Also this year they started quietly "demonetizing" videos that had bad words/topics or were not advertiser friendly, so some YouTubers pivoted to inane child content. I am pretty sure these demonetizing videos get particularly burried by the Algo.

<comment><USER12> No, you dont have to click any bells.

In order to watch videos from creators you subscribe to you need to ... view your SUBSCRIPTION page. But people are mostly brainless sheep clicking randomly on the shiny, and "subscribing" to them mean liking something double plus good.

What all the 10m sub assholes are crying about is Google no longer pushing their shit into peoples recommendations. Thats what Subscription is for, why recommend something you already subscribed to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just started making a few YouTube videos. I have very few viewers and I haven't advertised at all. This lets me see how the numbers add up. For one thing, it is obvious that they don't add up properly.

I live in Japan and after I upload a video I watch it once -- all the way through, just to make sure there was nothing strange happening when it gets re-encoded. I will go back to the video to respond to comments (err... one or two comments).

My brother was in Saudi Arabia. He was nice enough to watch my videos. Once each, all the way through. He never sent any comments.

Result: 39 views in Japan and 35 views in Saudi Arabia. I can say with almost no uncertainty that these numbers are incorrect. I don't have any other viewers in SE asia or middle eastern countries. Whatever is happening, these are not normal views.

If YouTube are improving this situation, then that's good. But I have almost no faith in their analytics.

Edit: Is Google reading??? Just checked again and now I have 27 views from Japan and 4 from Saudi -- which is probably about right (if you consider that every time I respond to a comment it counts as a "view").

</comment><comment><USER14> Everyone who's suggesting it's due to insert-pet-peeve-here (content fatigue, quality, ads, facebook) is missing the fact that this happened pretty much overnight. It's definitely a recommendation algorithm change (or as someone suggested, clickfraud fixes).

</comment><comment><USER15> Ads. YouTube is punctuating every video with ads every few minutes now. It gets tiresome and drives people away.

<comment><USER16> Ads, but also content / recommendations. I signed up for YouTube Red to finally get rid of ads & support the few channels I subscribe to, but instead it started promoting YouTube Originals that insult my intelligence. (I'm really, really not interested in Scare PewDiePie, or Prank Academy, or Foursome.)

YouTube keeps shoving recommendations on me that I'm just not interested in. I'm more likely to start at Netflix first now (no ads, better quality), or even Vimeo (which has tons of really good conference videos that aren't on YouTube). I do miss watching TechMoan on YT, though.

<comment><USER17> I also thought these were all pretty dumb, but clicked the X button and haven't even thought about them in several months. I am kind of annoyed by unrelated recommendations though; I watch a video where someone is making tools for his lathe, then the recommendation is "MAN GETS STUNG BY BULLET ANT OH GOD THE PAIN 30 MINUTES OF HIS HAND SWELLING UP AND THEN BEING RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL AND THEN HE DIES OR SOMETHING MAYBE NOT YOU CAN'T FLAG TITLES FOR BEING MISLEADING SO HAH". Not interested, at all, seriously.

Some of my recommendations I blame on clicking on things that are popular on Reddit. Pushes me back towards the lowest common denominator. (I'm not averse to watching some car crashes.)

I'm not sure how refusing to watch Techmoan because of dismissable recommendations accomplishes anything, though. Bookmark his channel, pick the video you haven't seen, watch, close tab :)

<comment><USER16> I wondered what you meant about dismissible recommendations and the X button... then I realised that isn't an option in the YouTube smart TV app, at least not that I can see. Much of my YouTube watching (especially while subscribed to YouTube Red) was happening on my TV through the Smart TV interface, not the web browser or phone apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good chance it's because facebook is driving away traffic from Youtube

<comment><USER19> Or it could be Twitch.

<comment><USER20> And/or better quality of music streaming services. I used to use YouTube heavily for music. Now I use Spotify and Google play.

<comment><USER21> I use VK which has almost every song i want to hear, even non-English songs. no ads, no limitations.

<comment><USER22> But how do they $ if no ads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I significantly reduced watching Youtube after the Youtube channels I watched started optimizing for revenue.

I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not necessarily profit maximizing.

For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now, they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3 years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase, myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.

I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some examples of "fluff" content to gain views:

\- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video

\- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already well covered for the sake of being different

\- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things that are just ludicrous

\- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.

\- "I'm quitting YouTube"

</comment><comment><USER24> Average views per channel (with >10m subs) might be down, but that doesn't mean total viewing time on YouTube is down across the board. Views might be spread out over different channels (This data only represented changes in 49).

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know if viewing times are down too?</comment>


I'm Tired of Creating Your Content - <AUTHOR> http://babblingvc.typepad.com/pjozefak/2010/11/im-tired-of-creating-your-content.html <comment><USER2> _On the other hand, the value of the reviews on these sites goes down the older they get._

On Amazon it seems like the opposite is true. Because of their meta-review process, where users can flag reviews as helpful or not, it seems like old and classic reviews tend to float to the top, while recent ones have a significant hurdle to overcome before they make it to the front page. See for example here: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530>

(Admittedly, users can also be fickle and support other kinds of reviews for different reasons, cf. [http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk- Gallon-128/dp/B00032...](http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk- Gallon-128/dp/B00032G1S0))

<comment><USER3> Yes, but Amazon's reviews are for products.. not hotels. Hotels get older and crappier thus newer reviews are more valuable.

<comment><USER4> I would necessarily say that hotels crappier as they age, but the service from hotels is elastic.

The same hotel visited 2 different times could prove very different. The same book purchased twice, on the other hand, will read the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He misses another benefit of writing reviews: rewarding good businesses. And even, in the case of a thoughtful review, enabling a diversity of services -- simple star reviews can't express the give and take of different kinds of service, and so a decrepit-but-lovable hotel can't be distinguished from a decrepit-and-neglected hotel. Reviews make it possible for people to find the right hotel (or any other service) for their wishes, and they don't have to rely on crude measures like brand loyalty.

I honestly can't decide what the personal benefit is. If reviews can make a difference in a business, then _one_ review can make a difference -- unlike "likes" or votes or stars a review is not automatically aggregated, it is specifically read by other people. So there is real potential that a review can positively impact a business you like, and provide you real benefit as a result. The negative impact of a bad review has no direct benefit that I can think of -- you will never return, and the only happiness you might derive is schadenfreude if the business's fortunes decline. Either way though there is a sense of satisfaction, which seems to be the primary reason people submit reviews.

<comment><USER6> Repeat business is how you reward a business for being awesome. Its over-and- above to give them word-of-mouth recommendations or to post positive reviews.

In general I don't think its wrong to ask for something in return for staking your reputation on a recommendation.

<comment><USER5> Wait... are you proposing that you get a kickback for your positive review? I'm not sure that will work so well...

<comment><USER6> "I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth"

If you provide illiquid perks for participating in a review process, I don't see much wrong with that. If they were handing out cash, then yes, that is a grey area.

<comment><USER7> Yeah just like those video game mag writers who got to go to flight school for their reviews of an air combat game. Ohh wait, paying people in things of value is similar to paying them in cash, even if they would have never bought those things in the first place. Especially if said perks can be sold for cash latter( free laptop for review etc.)

Paying for reviews is paying for reviews integrity compromised, trust lost.

<comment><USER6> The OP described perks that were illiquid, of low value, and generally non- transferrable in nature. I think that is what we're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me that providing monetary incentives (or incentives with a clear monetary value, like a cup of coffee in a specific restaurant) for submitting reviews would attract the wrong sort of crowd.

An entire new class of reviewers would start using these services. One example would be people who submit a review of a place just before they arrive to get their free coffee. A more worrying case would be users who write a script to generate and submit reviews automatically. Generating text that _looks_ like a review is not difficult and, unlike spam mail, it wouldn't require plugging a product (which is what gives spam its distinct spammy flavour :)) or generating millions per day.

In practice, it would be very difficult to filter that sort of thing out and there would be so much noise that the value of the site to real users would plummet.

</comment><comment><USER9> I empathize with the feeling here, but it seems to me like the author is detached from both the reality of user motivations and the economics of UGC sites.

There are lots of reasons people use sites and create content, and I can't think of any case where they are monetary. Even something like Mechanical Turk I believe has a significant non-monetary aspect to it considering the pittance that people make doing it (granted it's supplemental income if they are stuck in a under-utilized desk job all day). The fact is that by boycotting content creation he is just joining the silent majority of people who don't post anything. Even on Facebook where there is pretty much nothing _but_ UGC I suspect the majority never post anything. The question of what motivates people probably has a different answer on every site, and it's certainly worth exploring, but the answer is not to be found in what this guy thinks he deserves.

It's sort of funny how in a few short years there is a growing contingent of people who have gone from fevered excitement over new free services to bitterness over how much those free services are making from their content in just a few short years. But let's examine the economics of the situation. How much profit does Facebook make from a status update? A like? A comment? How much does TripAvisor make from a review? I don't have any numbers, but by any reasonable napkin calculation the economic value of a single user's contribution is just not significant. It's probably less than you would be willing to give a bum on the street. If Facebook makes $1 billion revenue off 500 million users, that makes you worth $2 a year not even counting expenses. Of course all users are not equal, so maybe you're an extremely heavy user and you're worth $10 even after expenses. What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?

<comment><USER4> I agree with you on everything except the following sentence:

> What kind of _economic_ incentive could Facebook afford to give you that > wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?

Must the incentive be economic? Facebook provides value to its users through a social incentive. Likewise, the incentive to share an article on HN or Reddit is your Karma score and to engage in a lively discussion on the topic. Neither of the two is economic.

An interesting point that you failed to make when discussing the economics of the situation is the following, regardless of whether or not a user contributes to TripAdvisor or Qype he can still peruse the site. So my question is the following, what incentive does a user have to contribute reviews to TripAdvisor or Qype versus simply reading others' reviews?

<comment><USER9> Agreed. The reason I said economic is because that's what the OA seems to feel like he deserves, but to be fair he does leave the door open for more clever incentives. However my thesis would be that the OA is already a lost cause and not someone worth pursuing.

As far as the incentive to write a review on TripAdvisor, from personal experience I'd say the overwhelming incentive is to either benefit or stick it to an establishment you visited.

<comment><USER4> I've always wondered if reviews are negatively skewed. Sadly, there's much more incentive for me to go on Yelp and write about how awful my meal was than about it being decent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be happy if TripAdvisor jkust put a little effort into making theirs site useable. For the reviews, I think they are trying to _minimize_ the content per screen (I suppose to load more pages and display more ads?) I can understand trying to maximize revenue, but the combination of increasingly poor/fake reviews with the (deliberate) bad user interface is, for me, pushing that site to the point of uselessness.

</comment><comment><USER11> time for web2.5 - where user generated content would really belong to users, ie. sites like Yelp would be replaced by anonymous intelligent (as in search and link/references/reviews rating) P2P style trackers who would return to the reviews searching person the reviews (actually the trackers will return references/links to the user's browsing software which will do actual "fetch" of the reviews' content) which would "belong" to the original reviewers and served from their blogs, personal computers/phones/VPS/"spaces" (and accompanied by review creator's adsense ads if they choose so). The reviewer's reviews and ratings thus wouldn't be spread among different unconnected sites. Instead all user's reviews and ratings would be kept at one place if the user choose so. Ie. the traffic will get driven to the reviewer's "place" in this reviewer centric schema. Think Diaspora (the web2.5) vs. Facebook (web2.0).

</comment><comment><USER12> "If you want my reviews because your business runs on user-generated-content, you are going to need to do better. Stroking my ego no longer works."

I think this is missing the point. Businesses like four- square/yelp/blogs/social media/etc exist not to stroke anybody's ego, they exist to let users have their friends or random strangers stroke their egos.

Complaining that a business isn't stroking your ego should tell the business that they aren't making it easy enough for your friends to stroke your ego.

Facebook does this brilliantly. My friend bakes a pie and then myself an a ton of other people pile on and tell them it looks good, tasty, when are they making me one, etc.... Facebook doesn't stroke my friend's ego, facebook makes it ridiculously easy for "friends" to stroke my friend's ego.

<comment><USER13> He's not complaining that his ego isn't sufficiently stroked. He's saying that ego-stroking is insufficient to motivate him to keep writing reviews.

<comment><USER11> fine distinction point which i somehow still don't get

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth._

I'm pretty sure that small rewards (free coffee) would make people less likely to post reviews, and large benefits (a free night's stay in a hotel) wouldn't be cost-effective.

<comment><USER15> If RandomHotelBookingWebsite.com announces that for every five reviews you write you'll earn a $5 credit which you can use for any booking on the site, why would that make you less likely to write a review? I can see that it might not make someone more likely to write a review (why bother for $5?), but why would it stop you if you were going to anyway?

<comment><USER16> The same reason that levying a fine on late daycare parents increases the frequency that they will pick up their kids late.

Monetary incentives tend to displace intangible incentives. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, IF you've designed your monetary incentives correctly...

<comment><USER17> No,it's not the same thing as the daycare example. The issue with daycare late fines is that they allow a person to "pay off" bad behavior, therefore reducing guilt and therefore increasing it's likelihood.

Here the OP is discussing rewarding "good" behavior. The psychology is not necessarily the same.

I am surprised at the negative comments on this thread. The feelings the OP is experiencing are real and even legitimate. The reality is that sites do profit massively from user contributed content, and an asymmetry in the perceived value of the transaction can clearly exist.

Frankly it amazes me that it has taken this long for rumblings like this to appear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is very true, honestly when you think about it you really are giving a lot of time just for "ego stroking". Implementing a nice high level tier of benefits for those who contribute the most could be great.

For example if you reach a certain threshold of generating content you get entered into a premium tier where you receive a once a month voucher for things or whatever it is. Business's could give these deals to the service too since they'd be rewarding their most adamant customers who are also the ones who would be spreading the service through word of mouth.

Sure it takes a bit more work for the service but user engagement would benefit tremendously.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's stone soup. I benefit from participating in Yelp because I like the community (or used to) -- writing reviews and getting feedback -- and because I read Yelp for reviews (or used to). The guys/girls who sent up the infrastructure to make that happen should get some soup, too, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I suppose if I were a pro user that created a disproportionate amount of content, I'd complain more. But I don't think that's the point of the above post. The article seems just to express fatigue with internet-related obligations, which I can relate to. But it's couched in this weird resentful language.

</comment><comment><USER20> Rewards programs like airmiles are pretty successful. Seems to me you could apply similar logic here. Giving back to your contributors would motivate them.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure incentivising reviewers is the problem here. It's the respect given to 'pure' non-financially motivated advice that generates trust.

The democratization of information that the internet seems to promise is in direct competition with paid-for "page-rank".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> His "personal benefit" comes from reading others' reviews, which he admits he does regularly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Obvious. The only people who like 4sq are gadget-y people who derive so much pleasure from playing with new things that they will re-arrange their lives to do so.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yeah, PG, give everyone with over 100 comments free startup funds!</comment>


Microsoft and Arduino Announce Partnership - <AUTHOR> http://blog.arduino.cc/2015/04/30/microsoft-and-arduino-new-partnership/ <comment><USER2> It seems like this is just Microsoft saying that you'll be able to plug an Arduino into a computer with Windows, and it will not outright reject the hardware driver. Later in the post, it's a "this car comes with four -- that's right, FOUR! -- wheels" selling the built-in hardware capabilities of devices that run Microsoft software. Call me shortsighted, but I don't see the amazing thing here.

<comment><USER3> This isn't a problem for most boards some of the clones have problems with FTDI drivers and widows 8

<comment><USER2> Yes, you're right, but also the FTDI problem[0] is rather related to "IP infringement" of sorts, and attempts to enforce claims to the IP by both FTDI and Microsoft.

[0] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking- innocen...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocent- users-chips-in-silent-update/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People in the comments seem overly negative. I personally this this is brilliant and sure if you don't like it don't use it. Simple.

<comment><USER5> It's more than that... even if you want to use it, you may not be able to do it.

See: [http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software](http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software)

Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Windows IoT requires Visual Studio and Windows (eg, Windows Remote Arduino is a WinRT component).

If this was about interacting with a Windows phone from any of the development platforms Arduino supports, that would be different I guess. The way this is designed looks divisive and it doesn't follow Arduino open philosophy.

This helps Microsoft to attract Arduino users, but I'm not sure if it will help Arduino as community. When you find a sketch or a library I have never seen a "Windows only" or software requirements besides the Arduino IDE or other libraries.

It doesn't look too different from the "Arduino Certified" program, as in "open source" is not a requirement; but I can understand all the negative comments.

<comment><USER6> Give it some time. Visual studio isn't exactly a cross platform app, and Microsoft doesn't have another tool platform to build off of. The release of Code today is interesting in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft is reacting brilliantly to the new open source world. I will not regret this, however; open source community have to be more careful about being controlled by an proprietary company. It does not matter if it's microsoft or any other proprietary company.

We have to stop it.

<comment><USER8> Exactly what does "proprietary company" mean?

I think you're mixing terms. Proprietary is for software. And Microsoft releases both open source and proprietary software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, which Arduino is in this partnership?

<comment><USER10> As it has been posted on arduino.cc, it's the framework/community guys, not the hardware guy

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I keep getting confused...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It feels like another round of Windows for Smart Cards. Who knows, this one might stick. [https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd277375.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd277375.aspx)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This does seem similar to the Android Open Accessory Development Kit which was also based on Arduino.

</comment><comment><USER12> For those interested in integrating Arduino with sensors from Android devices, check out 1Sheeld:

[http://1sheeld.com/](http://1sheeld.com/)</comment>


Social Text: Reviews: A History of Debt - <AUTHOR> http://www.socialtextjournal.org/reviews/2011/10/review-of-david-graebers-debt.php <comment><USER2> Strongly recommended: Graeber's _Debt: The first five thousand years_ makes a lot of points, many of them arguable, but the one _inarguable_ thing about it is that it will make you think about this subject from perspectives you hadn't considered before.</comment>


Desktop PCs aren't going anywhere–because they're cheap (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-going-anywhere-despite-the-growth-of-phones-and-tablets%E2%80%94because-theyre-cheap <comment><USER2> Desktops can also be shared with separate monitors & keyboards.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration)</comment>


Google Mobile Learns the Need For Speed, But Is Still Not Fast Enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/19/google-mobile-learns-the-need-for-speed-but-is-still-not-fast-enough/ <comment><USER2> Of course, mobile apps have the distinction of being used when you don't have another viable option anyway. Captive audience.</comment>


Linux performance observability tools overview - <AUTHOR> http://wiert.me/2014/03/19/reference-card-for-linux-performance-and-analysis-tools%EF%BB%BF-via-antony-peel-google/

<comment><USER2> An updated version of this is available at [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-08-23/linux-perf- tools...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-08-23/linux-perf-tools- linuxcon-na-2014.html) . Much much more is available at [http://www.brendangregg.com](http://www.brendangregg.com)

Credit where credit is due, I think.</comment>


General Motors generates new radio advertising insights - <AUTHOR> https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/general_motors_generates_new_radio_advertising_insights/41073 <comment><USER2> > "And you can start testing [that] by sending them different kinds of > advertising to see some kind of behaviour in the [listening] patterns."

There will be a day where you can get a "discounted" automobile that forces you to listen to an advert before you can start the car, and where removing that advert violates the DMCA.

A few years after that, the feature will be present on all cars, and there won't be a discount at all.

<comment><USER3> There would be a huge market for AI-driven ad-filtering Bluetooth headphones.

<comment><USER4> also AR headsets that blacken out billboards and other physical advertisements, please!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure they learned more than what they got into in the article. Or I'd hope so since those are some pretty weak "learnings". Of far more interest is examining the driver's actions and behaviours to determine which family member is in the seat and pick up preferences based on that.

EDIT yes hey opted in to be tracked. Missed that on the first read. Really, surprised but quite pleased that they did. Good to see.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am really worried that people are getting way too used to being watched all the time. Maybe privacy will be a quaint memory of days gone by soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> The key phrase in the article is "opt-in". If the drivers opt in to such a program, I think you could see some interesting insights w.r.t. advertising and demographics that's been missing from radio (or not as accurate).

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering how tone deaf (!) they really are. A giant percent of users now streams from their personal device: podcast player, music player that's aware of likes and playlists, navigator app, assistant, etc.

I think some people still use that old-fangled radio thing, but they're shrinking into the noise.

<comment><USER9> There are microphones in cars. This allows:

* create audio content hashes, then send them

* process audio on the car, then send the results

* send all the audio unencrypted to "the cloud"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who is paying for the LTE connection to the car?

<comment><USER4> If its GM, then it is using OnStar, which does use CDMA, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnStar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnStar)

The customer pays for all this shit in their car, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is today Chicken Little Day or something? Why have so many privacy-related articles been posted today? Who makes money by making us feel paranoid?

<comment><USER8> A better question to ask is, who makes money from tracking individuals, aggregating their data, trading it, and thus violating their privacy, and do they post comments on social media calling anyone critical of that immense revenue stream paranoid?

I think it's fair to say there's almost no money to be had in privacy.</comment></comment>


Using the Cloud Debugger: Google Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+UrsH%C3%B6lzle/posts/K4XVHTcaQAN <comment><AUTHOR> I originally submitted the linked documentation page [1], but this post is a great summary.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud- debugger/debugging](https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-debugger/debugging)</comment>


CIA spies on Senate - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/cia-senate-investigation-constitutional-crisis-daniel-jones <comment><USER3> Spy on everyone on the globe - including journalists and democracy activists, innocent people => Senate doesn't care

Spy on Senate => "How dare you breach our privacy"

<comment><AUTHOR> The very purpose of a clandestine intelligence service is to obtain the facts and analysis necessary to advance foreign policy objectives.

Within that context, the expectation is that the advancement of those goals is for the benefit of your own citizens (and possibly at the expense of other people).

This is very different than advancing policy goals at the expense of your own citizens.

<comment><USER4> Give me money and I'll make you rich. Don't mind that I am spying on your allocators of money. More money please. My friends that I bought with your money want to sell crack on your streets, thats cool right? How about some heroin? More money please, I'm having trouble tapping the lines of everyone who has something bad to say about me. Oh I mean us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The CIA is a monolith, whereas the non-CIA players are named, person by person.

Surely there is someone within the CIA who is making these decisions. Is there a policy not to name individuals within certain governmental organizations?

<comment><USER6> Brennan doesn't come out of that looking good. But other than that, yeah. The fact that torture was performed by staff with records of abuse is alarming - <USER2> assume they didn't throw them under the bus because having them talk would bring the whole lot down?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So the watchmen watch the watchmen, that watch the watchmen.. this is getting recursive and the fine print unreadable.</comment>


Want to Get More Done at the Office? Just Stand Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/want-to-get-more-done-at-the-office-just-stand-up-1464879721?mod=trending_now_1 <comment><AUTHOR> I've been using a GeekDesk for the last couple years: [http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/24/geekdesk-max-sit-stand- des...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/24/geekdesk-max-sit-stand-desk-review- two-years-with-a-motorized-desk/) and would not willingly go back to a full- time seated desk.</comment>


Ask PG: Why do stories stick around longer now? - <AUTHOR>

I feel like stories stick around much longer now. There is currently a 60 point story that has been on the front page for 10 hours. Did the scoring algorithm change? <comment><USER2> Nothing changed in the software. Things just move slower on weekends.</comment>


From Tumblr to Mastodon: 5 reasons to switch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/11/from-tumblr-to-mastodon/ <comment><USER2> Mastodon is better than Tumblr; I agree. But I still think the protocol is too complicated (I am working on implementing a simpler one).</comment>


Why I don't use CouchDB. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.woobling.org/2009/05/why-i-dont-use-couchdb.html

<comment><USER2> The more of these "software hipsters" that fail to understand CouchDB and quickly abandon it, the better. Wish I had more to say about this article, but that's about it.

edit: in case it's not clear, I like couchdb a lot and I think it's absurd that people people are backlashing against it because some monkey coder dorks found it highly buzzword compliant and are making it popular, despite not understanding it at all. So you end up with people hating something because it's getting some limelight for whatever reason, and then also many of the people championing it don't know how to use it correctly to build an app or anything. It's like two layers of stupid.

<comment><AUTHOR> "software hipster" is an inaccurate characterization. Hipsters tend to choose something because it is simple and stylish rather than actually useful. As an example, they like fixed gear bikes.

Unfortunately, simple and stylish doesn't always win. I see lots of people riding fixed gear bikes in Seattle, for example. Actually, I don't see many people _riding_ them, I see them walking them around because they have the wrong gearing for going up and down Seattle's many hills, and they can't actually ride them. In this case, simple and stylish is the wrong tool for the job -- they need a bike that can change gears. That may be inelegant, but it works _really_ well.

CouchDB is the fixed gear bicycle of the database world.

<comment><USER3> Using a fixed gear bike in Seattle would be asinine, agreed. Within a relatively flat city, they make a lot of sense, however, and they're practically _ideal_ for running short (< 3 mi, say) errands. They're mechanically simple and require practically no maintenance.

To push the analogy further, some of the buzz around couchDB reminds me of people obsessed with scaling (racing) without either any real understanding of algorithms (being in shape) or any chance of actually needing it (actually competing). That starts to sound more like a road cyclist with an expensive garage ornament, though... Fixed gear bikes are perhaps more like SQLite than couchDB, in that sense. They're actually really useful on a smaller scale.

I see where you're coming from on the hipster bit, just nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussions about CouchDB focus on its very large and complicated featureset. It would be interesting to see examples of actual problems it's good for and why or how it worked for them. I've seen one example where it wasn't very good and the developer switched to an SQL database, but nothing beyond that. Their website doesn't have anything like this, sadly.

<comment><AUTHOR> _the developer switched to an SQL database_

You do know that the author of this article wrote an object database, KiokuDB, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        Unfortunately you can only create a view from the
        original data, there is no way to create views whose
        input is other views. This means that you cannot do
        anything really interesting with values from multiple
        documents. You can aggregate data from several documents
        using the reduce functionality into buckets, but you
        can't process that data further.

I've come to this idea also - when we do get it the world changes. New era for hackers. We will be able to operate against a couchdb cloud from a console-in- a-browser with the power of (and as a full alternative to) a unix system, and to think in terms of that cloud rather than in terms of services. The barrier between code and data will be much more blurred in practical terms because the cloud will host the services.

Another idea that couchdb already does that is a necessary pre-requisite to this outcome (from [http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/standalone_ap...](http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/standalone_applications_with_co)):

        Over the last few days I've polished up my
        notion that CouchDB can be a perfectly viable
        application host, all on its own, without any
        3rd tier between database and client. That
        is, CouchDB is capable of serving standalone
        applications. These standalone CouchDB
        applications can be deployed to any working
        CouchDB node and used from any browser.

I wish couch was based on IO rather than javascript, because with IO you can reverse algorithms out of running code. Hence processes could act as datasources if the VM was like IO. See <http://hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasAVeryCleanMirror.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> "If the mechanisms to restrict access were in place the CouchDB backend could be exposed to the browser directly, removing the server side application code as a bottleneck."

Never, EVER expose a database to a client! Doesn't matter what types of controls you think you have, you must ALWAYS have some business logic in place to protect the data.

<comment><USER7> If the business logic is implemented in couchdb or implemented in serverside code, it's still business logic protecting the data.

It could be just as flawed, or even worse (e.g. sql injection allows malicious users to run database operations with no restrictions at all. If there were db level restrictions they could only destroy their own data).

This ALWAYS NEVER EVER type of mentality demonstrates exactly why CouchDB is simultaneously overhyped and condemned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest advantage of CouchDB - compared with its competition - seems to be the ability to create views to query the schema less dataset. If I have to do this in mysql, then I will have to create and maintain seperate columns with indices; making sure that updates to the data gets propagated to these columns etc. Do any of the CouchDB alternatives provide a cleaner solution?

<comment><USER9> MongoDB shows promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A bit early to write off the project, isn't it? The CouchDB devs have repeatedly stated that they're concentrating on getting it working right before making it fast. It's still in alpha, for crying out loud.

There are many positive aspects of Couch's MapReduce implementation. Sure, you can use Hadoop or what not for increased flexibility, but Couch gives you a baked-in storage system, universal HTTP interface, _incremental views_ (big feature!), replication (another biggie) and a structure for it all to sit in, with a nice interface to boot. Sure, you could set that all up separately, but isn't there a lot of value having it all just there and working? And check out the MLs - chained reduce is a constant point of discussion; it's definitely on the roadmap.

The lack of strong authentication is also a puzzling point - how many people implement complex auth _at the DB level_ in a web app?

He does have some good points - the overhead of setting up and pulling down a socket for each connection cannot be denied, but that seems solvable with persistent connections. Furthermore, Couch's stateless API and eTag integration offer powerful caching options.

One point that did strike home for me was about the lack of development direction - this does seem to be a problem. For example, the effort to make applications run directly from CouchDB seems speculative and pretty useless. If you're going to install erlang and CouchDb you may as well install an app server as well. But the BTree rewrite priortisation? There were good reasons for that: it was going to break backwards compatibility, so essential to do it ASAP.

All in all, decent points, but way premature. How about we at least get to beta first?

Then again, if this article rams home the huge importance of speed to the devs, maybe I shouldn't be arguing ...

<comment><USER7> "... but it does show plenty of promise."

"Personally I would much rather see feature completeness first"

<comment><USER10> _"Personally I would much rather see feature completeness first"_

As I said in my comment, the BTree rewrite was a _breaking change_. It required all users to dump and reload their DBs. (1)

You do agree that things like that are best done ASAP, right?

I want to see feature completeness too but with more people adopting the project every day, and beginning to use it in semi-serious situations, pushing file format changes through quickly is just good release practise.

(1) if it's the one I'm thinking of. The other you could be referring to just needed a view rebuild; still annoying but nothing like the file format change

<comment><USER10> Not sure if anyone will see this, but Matt Aimonetti (yes, _that_ Matt Aimonetti) just posted to the CouchRest (a ruby library) ML reporting that with the availability of recent RPC-JSON ruby/erlang direct access libraries, an estimated 5x speedup was possible over the straight HTTP.

5x speedup by integrating with erlang direct, and the HTTP is still there if you need it. So there goes much of the premise of the blog post. Needless to say, the DB itself has still not been optimised for speed - not even close - so this is far from the last word on the project's ultimate speed potential.

This is why you don't read too much into the current performance characteristics of alpha software.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bright and colourful homepage designs - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/attention-grabbing-homepages-11121253

<comment><USER2> Nice. I like the Cue one the best, because I think the evocative toast image and simple CTA come together nicely.</comment>


.ly domain reseller suspended by SoftLayer citing US/UN Sanctions - <AUTHOR>

My contact at libyanspider.com has informed me that his hosting and DNS service at SoftLayer.com has been shut down citing UN/US/ Presidential Order of sanctions against Libya.
Some ~12,000 sites owned by ~5000 Libyan and International customers are offline or unreachable, 20 employees out of work.
LibyanSpider is the largest reseller I think of .ly domains. They also offer other DNS and internet services.
Softlayer was kind enough to add "Best of luck in your future endeavors." to their notice before even shutting off his support system account. *wince
[quote] Unfortunately, your account has been reclaimed due OFAC violations. With the current situation abroad and subsequent changes to the list, your account has been deactivated immediately.
OFAC: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx
Best of luck in your future endeavors,
SoftLayer Accounting [/quote]
If anyone has a contact at the NYTimes/Washington Post or similar, I have some more details I was asked to share with a responsible journalist.
ping me @strebel PS: this has no affect on our service at page.ly, but I feel for the guy, a small business owner, getting caught up in geo-politics. <comment><AUTHOR> My contact said after a barrage of complaints from his customers, softlayer restored his service.

</comment><comment><USER2> So... how am I supposed to access my domain?

</comment><comment><USER3> Hahaha. Oh good ol' post-merger SoftLayer.

This is nothing new for them. They have a long history of violating their own TOS and shutting down customers, without warning, for arbitrary and capricious reasons, then blaming/citing someone else for "making" them do it.

See Wikileaks and SimpleCDN for the most visible examples; there are many more, though.

We left SL last year and couldn't be happier.</comment>


Darpa Wants to Build a BS Detector for Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-bs-detector-science/ <comment><USER2> In the fourth paragraph, Dr. Adam Russell (the interviewee) is quoted as saying: "I wouldn't characterize it [as a bullshit detector], and I think it's important not to". Then the author titles his article "DARPA WANTS TO BUILD A BS DETECTOR FOR SCIENCE".

That's not just weasel-y journalism, it's downright disrespectful to the person you're interviewing. If I was in Russell's shoes, I'd be insulted.

<comment><USER3> In my experience it's completely par for the course in science journalism. At least his contrary quote was included!

Assuming that he actually said that quote or something similar to it. It's really hard for me to trust quotations in articles after what I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The intelligence community works fairly hard on this, with only moderate success. But they have active opponents trying to fool them.

One of the CIA's checks is to ask of information that confirms other information, "is this from a different source, or is this from the same source via another path"? That's a problem that could be addressed on the web, and is helpful at detecting "fake news" and hoaxes. A graph of which stories are derived from what other stories, and when, gives a good sense of where something came from.

Google is terrible at finding provenance. They're likely to list the popular clickbait site, even if it's a scraper site, rather than the actual source. Sites which are listed as "news" get special treatment, but Google doesn't find the original news story, rather than its indications. Google crawls the web so frequently that it could get a handle on provenance from timestamps alone.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickbait title, but the issue of reproducibility on social science studies is well worth investigating.

What the article wants is something that I'd say couldn't and shouldn't be done (in terrible writing: _" some sort of machine with, like, a slot for feeding in journal articles. And two lights on the front: red and green. Ping or bzzzt._)

What the investigators say they're working on goes from good suggestions ( _pre-registering a research plan (to ward off accusations of P hacking) and making full sets of data and the code used to analyze it available_ ) to bad ones ( _Social networks_ ) - if you're an outsider like Perelman you're out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Building a bullshit detector is easy. Building one with a low false positive rate is hard. A low false positive rate is also extremely important because in many fields truly novel research findings are often dismissed and it takes a generation for them to become accepted. See for example quasicrystals. Given how hard making new discoveries is, and the fact that the peer review process is already stacked against new discoveries (as opposed to follow ons), I don't think this is a good idea for many fields. On the other hand, if you know an experimental methodology is flawed, then you can pretty much throw out all that research since the scientist didn't do the right experiment or they didn't do it with enough power (social sciences I"m looking at you).

</comment><comment><USER7> Why not use crowdsourcing, and add some inputs to the detector? That might make it more reliable. The crowdsourcing could be limited to peers, which could increase the reliability further.

<comment><USER8> There have been some efforts. For example, there was a betting market on the psychology reproducibility project, see [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15343.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15343.full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gedankenexperiment: construct such a machine and then create an adversarial network that attempts to fool it.

What do we do with the examples that come from the adversary?

<comment><USER10> Slight variation: how about an adversarial network attempting to fool scientific publishers directly?

<comment><USER9> I reviewed a paper for a little local conference last week that I think was probably machine generated, or the person who wrote it was on some very heavy medication. There was a similar one last year which I also rejected. I suspect that the team is trying to get them accepted so as to debunk the conference, which is small, but I like to think reputable - perhaps this is a widespread effort though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Read "Truth Machine" by Halperin. Might have broader than intended consequences.

<comment><USER12> Oddly enough, here's a situation where headline's idea sounds better than what's discussed in the article.

The idea of a "confidence detector" seems both Orwellian and AI-complete.

But a "bullshit recognizer" seems simpler and practical. A device the recognizes contradictions in text, conclusions unrelated to evidence or similar "egregious" things could be useful.

It might even be a trainable thing. You have N papers with M passage- combinations that show the claims of said paper are bullshit and develop a finder/recognizer. The problem could wind-up not that different than sending Watson at Jeopardy.

The drawback, of course, is the thing would have to be taken no more seriously than a grammar checker - it just serves to point reviewers at potential problems rather than serving as proof of a problem.

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't, for example, set theory, be registered by such a machine as bs, owing to Russell's Paradox?

<comment><USER12> Well, if the mechanism was smart enough to flag naive Cantor/Frege set theory as contradictory by formulating Russell's Paradox, the thing would be pretty smart indeed. Naturally, you know Russell's Paradox only applies in that naive case rather than Zermelo-Fraenkel or Von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel theory.

However, I'd imagine the mechanism as having more modest goals - flagging the kind of language that's used to shore up papers with little logical basis, notice when hypotheses aren't used for conclusion or when conclusions are hypotheses, that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting. I'd think about submitting a proposal for my own projects in progress if it actually made sense to do so. Anyone with experience in that area - is it worth the time for a single dev to submit their proposals?

<comment><USER15> It's not entirely out of the question.

Some of the other *ARPAs have "proposer days" where you can go and ask questions.

<comment><USER14> thanks, I am looking into these. here's one link for anyone else interested [https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/working-with- iarpa/proposers...](https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/working-with- iarpa/proposers-day)

specifically, this one looks interesting, with a deadline in the next couple of weeks [https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/amon- hen/a...](https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/amon-hen/amon-hen- baa)</comment></comment></comment>


Gustav Wunderwald's Paintings of Weimar Berlin - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2017/05/31/gustav-wunderwalds-paintings-of-weimar-berlin/ <comment><USER2> * "Brücke über die Ackerstrasse" could be here: [https://email@example.com,13.3804503,3a,75y,340...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,13.3804503,3a,75y,340.47h,103.33t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1stohcOeCLVs-7126DPhMR5w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

* "An der Travermünderstrasse" might be here: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,13.3787057,3a,75y,169...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,13.3787057,3a,75y,169.37h,97.38t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1shODWqYRmOulRkFSK1aQ8Vg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DhODWqYRmOulRkFSK1aQ8Vg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D52.319088%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

<comment><USER3> Tried to do exactly the same thing before heading to the comments.

I know it's not that unusual, but I find it amazing and somehow comforting that some things are still there, and especially incredible that I can see them from here, without visiting Berlin (although visiting in person places that you only know from books, for example, is an amazing experience too)</comment></comment>