Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself - <AUTHOR> http://euraeka.com/articles/1216109-The-Biocentric-Universe-Theory-Life-Creates-Time-Space-and-the-Cosmos-Itself

<comment><USER2> I love the dubious dragging in of badly understood quantum to justify it. Unfortunately for the argument, the term 'observer' is misinterpreted (as it usually is by non physicist lay people) and actually doesn't show that 'we create our universe' (outside of a purely ontological sense) at all.

ref: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation></comment>


What is the concept underlying image processing? - <AUTHOR> http://functionspace.org/topic/56/What-is-the-concept-underlying-image-processing-

<comment><USER2> It's a strange post because nobody answers the question posed by the asker who is clearly a complete beginner, wondering how images get converted to grayscale and sepia -- I think it's a much more basic question than the answers imply.

If you already know how to code, the math at the top of this article answers the question. [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-convert- ima...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-convert-images-to- grayscale-and-sepia-tone-using-c/)

If not: Digital images are a big grid of pixels. Each pixel has a red, green, and blue value, each of which is usually a number between 0 and 255 because 8 bits are used to represent each value.

A "black and white" image (really grayscale) is created by setting the red, green, and blue values at each pixel to be equal to the exact same value as each other, for example we could choose the average of the original red, green, and blue values at that pixel. This removes all "color".

Sepia is similar but you take three differently weighted averages of the original red, green, and blue values to produce the sepia-red, sepia-blue, and sepia-green values in the result. See above link for the specific weights.

In both cases, each pixel location is computed independently, whereas other operations, like blurring, need to look at other nearby pixels as well.

<comment><USER3> The first reply in that post tells that - "Essentially every image is nothing but a matrix of numbers, right? Numbers in the matrix can denote several things. For B/W image, these can be grey scale numbers from 1 to 255 (1 being the White and 255 being the Black). For colored images, each entry in the matrix can be a vector of (Red, Blue, Green) scales, since every color can be represented by these three basic colors.

Now, when you want to produce any effect, essentially you need to do some operation on this matrix. For example, if you want to remove the high contrast (sudden change of color from white to black), then you need to remove the high frequency components from your matrix. Taking a Fourier transform and removing the high frequency components and taking back the inverse transform can do the trick for you. I'm not sure about Sepia effect in particular, but all I want to convey here is doing some operation on Matrix does the job. Hope it helps."

<comment><USER2> Yes, though there is confusion in the second paragraph of that reply about what it means for the image to be a "matrix". It's being a matrix has no bearing on converting it to grayscale or sepia. It may as well be an unordered bag of pixels as far as those operations are concerned. I think most beginners would come away with the wrong impression that linear algebra or fourier transforms were important for these basic operations when one or two for loops is quite enough. When I teach this material, that's where I begin and it is very effective.

Also they use the term contrast incorrectly. They're describing a low pass filter (blur) in the example but refer to contrast -- that post would lead beginners very astray.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Many image effects are based on shifting the color of each pixel based on the color of the 8 pixels surrounding it, for example blurring is essentially averaging the color value of the surrounding pixels. Experimenting with multiplying, dividing, combining, and inverting color values gives you effects such as emboss, drop shadow, glow, inverse, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER6> It's great content, relevant to our readership, and it's new (dated July 27, 2013).

It's a cool "aha! moment" when you realize that using Look-Up Tables you can implement any Single-Point image transformation entirely using array lookup operations (no if statements or nonlinear math).

<comment><USER7> Really? For my money cool would be something like [http://www.graficaobscura.com/interp/](http://www.graficaobscura.com/interp/)

<comment><USER2> That's great, both conceptually and from an ease-of-implementation perspective. Somehow I've never encountered that work, thanks for pointing it out!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later

<comment><USER2> I remember someone pointing out that the DRM on books was massively, hugely successful to one party: Amazon. Imagine if all publishers had jumped in on distributing mobi and epub from the start - Amazon would have far less hold.

It was trivial for me to move from Amazon MP3 to Google Music (and back, if I want). It'd be far more work to get off Kindle. Even if tomorrow another company came out with a far superior device than the Kindle Paperwhite, how many users could just jump ship? Ripping the DRM off is a pain, even if it just requires some googling and downloading into another program.

Publishers getting off DRM is a good thing. Just remember that the real reason is they're terrified that Amazon holds the keys and are regretting their decision to willing hand things over to Amazon.

<comment><USER3> Almost certainly Charlie Stross. (cstross here, and elsewhere)

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2012/04/understa...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And yet, because of DRM when I think about buying an electronic version of something, I still feel in my gut "It's not really mine", and I hesitate to buy.

<comment><USER5> True, I would not buy anything which is DRM-protected unless I knew how to remove the DRM restrictions. I buy quite a few Kindle books, but only because it's easy to remove their restrictions. I don't share the DRM-free books over the internet, but I still keep a copy of each book which does not suffer from present or future seller restrictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Title is misleading; the article contains no results.

<comment><USER7> "we've seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles" [...] "The move has been a hugely positive one for us" [...] "we're still pleased that we took this step"

<comment><USER8> Possibly "result" (synonym of "impact") would be more accurate than "results" which could imply facts and figures?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another great piece of hard data to try to put a stake in the DRM myth. (which is only partially myth, since it's true that if the good is priced way too high DRM is the only way to get even some people to pay that price).

Reminds me a bit of when Lotus took DRM off Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80s. Prior to that you had to have the disk that Lotus installed from in the floppy drive at all times. Totally sucked. They dropped DRM, sales went up, and their support costs went down (paying customers affected by DRM make support calls, pirates dealing with DRM do not usually :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> No numbers?</comment>


Quantum Matter Orbits Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01653-6 <comment><USER2> > Bose–Einstein condensates have been created on board the International Space > Station

<comment><USER3> That's a much better title, though less catchy.

One could retort to the original title saying all matter is, in fact, "quantum".

<comment><USER4> > One could retort to the original title saying all matter is, in fact, > "quantum".

Quantum matter has a specific meaning in condensed matter physics. It's anything where you can't approximate the system's behavior with classical physics at a macroscopic level. IE, the optical properties of metals are classical, but the electrical properties of topological insulators are not.

It is a bit like saying that all ecologists are chemists. Animals are, in fact, big sacks of chemicals, but that's not really the point.

<comment><USER5> So is a permanent magnet also quantum matter? Classical physics says the net magnetization of a solid is zero.

<comment><USER4> That is a good point, because the way I was taught it is that ferromagnetism is one of the few purely quantum mechanical phenomena we see in everyday life. However, people don't really refer to it as "quantum matter". I think you could argue that people have had some sort of heuristic description since long before quantum was known about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://coldatomlab.jpl.nasa.gov/news/](https://coldatomlab.jpl.nasa.gov/news/) has some history of the project. Started collecting data in 2018 it appears from the website. Haven't read the research article yet...

I created and studied BEC's for my PhD. It's a fascinating field of research. Not having to deal with gravity enables a range of experiments that weren't accessible before. Will be fun to see continued studies.

<comment><USER2> So you picked your username based on your favorite element? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The ISS is in free-fall, so that should be zero-g, not microgravity.

<comment><USER8> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro- g_environment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-g_environment)

<comment><USER9> Gravimeters[1] are an incredibly cool technology. I'm given to understand that the most sensitive ones can actually track a person moving around the room it's in.

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

<comment><USER10> Yeah, and there's no known way to shield gravity so such a detector can see though walls.

<comment><USER11> You just need another person doing an offsetting walk on the opposite side of the sensor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Meteor Testing Manual book is now available - <AUTHOR>

http://www.meteortesting.com <comment><USER2> Cool, I'll make sure to check it out. I hope it can help me finally connect Meteor to my Jenkins.</comment>


Twitter Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://benhowdle.im/2012/12/17/twitter-bootstrap/

<comment><USER2> >Don't be "just another Twitter Bootstrap site"

I find these criticisms regarding the ability to recognize a "Twitter Bootstrap site" to be inconsiderate of the audience for which the sites were really created.

Generally speaking, the startup development community exposes themselves to new websites on a pretty frequent basis. Just because _we_ can recognize a particular CSS framework, doesn't mean the _intended audience_ of the website can.

I would be surprised if it wasn't an _extremely_ small percentage of website users that would be able to recognize "just another Twitter Bootstrap site."

Don't let yourself get caught up in the bubble of the ever-critical development community. If you're building a site just to please folks within that community, you should probably do a bit more research on who you really want your target demographic to be.

<comment><USER3> This happened to me last week. I have near-zero design skills, so I just used a standard Twitter Bootstrap design for my site. Though I'm still embarrassed a bit by it, it works for now while I'm working on other more critical elements.

But I had a friend check out the site recently who went out of her way to praise the UI; she had expected something much more utilitarian. And I think this is more common; there are still so, so many BAD sites on the net that even a standard Bootstrap site is of pretty good quality/usability.

So while I still do plan on upgrading from a fairly default Bootstrap experience in the future, I'm no longer quite so embarrassed about using it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Come on. "Half-decent". Is this what you want to output? To be known for? I can't understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you'd not want everything you release to be the best you could do?

This is all a little uppity coming from a blog using the Svbtle theme.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to take it as a compliment, but I don't feel it was intended like that!

<comment><USER4> It's not a personal insult if you were taking it like that. I'm pointing out that it's an odd stance you've taken. The audience that recognizes Bootstrap layouts and the audience that recognizes the Svbtle theme (or its variations) are one and the same. More to the point though, if you feel that way about Bootstrap then you should probably feel the same way about the theme you chose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The universal reaction I get to any standard bootstrap web site I show to people is "this looks awesome, great work". Nobody outside of the web dev community knows or cares what Bootstrap is.

I hate Windows, iPhone, Android, OSX and Linux apps that try too hard to look and behave "different". Much of the hate for flash was because that was the standard tool people reached for when they wanted to make their sites fancy and different. I think we'd all be a lot better off if more sites used Bootstrap rather than less.

</comment><comment><USER6> If your site's content is any good, half-decent is more than enough for the design. As a reader, bootstrap is the best thing to happen to the web in ten years - thousands of sites now have a simple, clean, usable theme, letting me focus on what's actually important - the content.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for pointing this out. I might say "hey it's a standard bootstrap site, must not be much of a designer" but at least I'll be able to read the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I can't understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you'd not want > everything you release to be the best you could do?

Seriously? You never release anything until you cannot think of a single improvement? Everything is time-constrained, and some of us would rather spend no time or attention at all on how things look, if only we could get away with that. Since we can't, we'd like to put something acceptable with the smallest time investment possible. The technical term appears to be "half-decent". :)

</comment><comment><USER9> This criticism only makes sense in the bubble of developers - no one else gives a rat's ass nor notices.

As such, maybe use Bootstrap when designing for a general audience, but consider going in a different direction, when your audience is developers? Because they - and only they - seem to get their knickers in a twist when you use Bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Well, you could have made the greatest plugin, web application or library in the world but the moment you slap Twitter Bootstrap on your site for it, all initial value is lost and people just see a "cookie cutter website"._

I disagree. Bootstrap is there precisely for the people that do not wish to spend their effort on re-implementing reasonable web design techniques, yet wish their website to look "good". Sure, if you're selling yourself as a web- design expert you'd want to either completely customise it or make your own, but I did not get the impression you were restricting your comments to those.

Perhaps you're aiming your criticism at a completely different type of person, but I'd be interested in your critique (or otherwise) of these two, who clearly did not go the extra mile, and have not even used Bootstrap:

<http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/> (seems to be down atm, as does Google's cache... [http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=knuth&d=460252651572473...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=knuth&d=4602526515724737&mkt=en- US&setlang=en-US&w=f1G7FY7kBi8s_Jhhmjsads2I5qKWucNV) )

<http://norvig.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> It must be nice to have a designer in your back pocket willing to drop everything and design a flashy landing page for every tiny (~40 lines of JS) pet project you do. This is snobbery at its finest.

This isn't a product you need to sell. It's a tool that people either need or don't. And if they need it then the GitHub readme will probably suffice.

I know the author has a valid point in there somewhere but this is a terrible example. Don't make developers feel like they should be ashamed to release anything until they've paid a designer to slap Kanye West on it.

</comment><comment><USER12> > people just see a "cookie cutter website".

For values of "people" equal to "people who closely follow and are knowledgeable about web site design trends". For a site like LiberWriter, that's probably about 1% of our customers.

The others see a better site than I would have done on my own.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dude, seriously? Sorry, but no. I am a crummy web designer; as a matter of fact, I have only a very minimal interest in browser programming, period.

I am not interested in spending weeks and weeks learning how to do quality web design, nor am I interested in spending weeks and weeks learning Javascript _just_ so I can make something Not Bootstrap that looks about as good.

The goal of my (barely used) websites is to look clean and present the requisite information. Not going to lie, they look horribly cookie-cutter, and I could change that. But it _doesn't matter_ (at least today). If it mattered, I'd change it.

<comment><USER14> >I am not interested in spending weeks and weeks learning how to do quality web design

Personally, I think it takes years.

<comment><USER13> > Personally, I think it takes years.

Most art does, yeah. So... that only goes to make my point: I'm not skilled in the art, I am focusing on being skilled in other arts. If I wanted skill in that art, I'd hire someone who had skill in the art. Bootstrap serves as a cheap way to "import skill".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess I should feel ripped off by Nissan since I have a cookie cutter SUV. 4 wheels, the trunk has a 3rd row that pops up on demand, I can switch into 4 wheel drive. I did get to pick the color though. I really wish they had thought about making it unique and maybe putting the steering wheel in the back seat.

</comment><comment><USER16> _If you've made a great product and you can't design, find a designer, there is a deluge of designers out there looking for a collaboration._

That assumes that you're making a product that designers will be interested in. Maybe it's just a crud app for doing finance stuff, or any number of utilitarian apps. And if it's a non-flashy open source project (projects geared towards designers don't count) then chances are slim that you'll find a designer willing to work with you on it. Design also has a very different collaborative model than development. You can't just have tens of random designers drop by and contribute patches.

I think Bootstrap is a net win for the web because it raises the baseline. If Bootstrap didn't exist, would all of those developers instead become/hired designers?

</comment><comment><USER17> I get stick from designers and developers (mainly on Twitter) for using Bootstrap. I'm not a designer, I'm not creative enough to be one, but I can recognize a good design. I personally use Bootstrap because it enables me to very quickly come up with an application which is usable and VERY easily maintainable. From there I'm able to change the colours, layout tends to be grid based for the things I work on.

Why should I suffer attempting to design something that I know 100% will be classed shit, when I can use Bootstrap, a decent base look and colour scheme.

"Just ship!" is something I hear all the time. The app works and it's useable what else matters?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a fan of using bootstrap for client facing content.

We have specific front-end designers & css/markup developers for "front of house", but for "Admin" sections - i.e. the backend that staff/etc will use to manage an app/site/etc - something like Bootstrap (i'm interested to try Zurb Foundation/similar for this role too) is perfect, because we aren't trying to sell a brand to those users, we're trying to deliver functionality, and it's nice to be able to just put pre-built components together and get functional dashboards, record lists, CRUD screens, etc.

<comment><USER19> Yep. You don't want or need all that bloat for a one or two page website. And if you don't have a skilled designer to help, use a simple grid system like 1140 or 960gs. Bonus: grab a couple nice Google web fonts for your headings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > I've never read a more half assed title - "How to Make Your Site Look Half- > Decent in Half an Hour". Come on. "Half-decent". Is this what you want to > output?

Some people are not designers; they want to code and are in need for a tool that's like boilerplate, like something, that they can quickly grab so that they can start to actually code; a bootstrap! A tool that allows to create temporary, but working and good looking design in minutes.

I'm happy we have such tool; it is very useful!

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe an analogy can be drawn here to popular music. You run into a lot of people that say they don't listen to it, and some who say it's crammed down our throats by radio stations giving listeners no choice, but at the end of the day it's still popular and changes our global culture. As much as I sometimes don't like to admit it, but, the trend is your friend.

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of people give Twitter Bootstrap crap because everyone is using the design and they get sick of seeing the design on every website. A lot of people miss the whole point of Twitter Bootstrap. It's a design guide, it's for people to quickly create a website. It doesn't mean it's finished after that.

I think people shouldn't blame Twitter Bootstrap, but the people that are using Twitter Bootstrap. They shouldn't stop with styling and design after Twitter Bootstrap is implemented. They should make the design their own.

Note: I'm one of those people. Sometimes I make a design with Twitter Bootstrap at it's core, and not change the styling of the input fields etcetera to make the design not look like Twitter Bootstrap. But that's MY fault, not the creators of Twitter Bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER23> > "Half-decent". Is this what you want to output? To be known for? I can't > understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you'd not want everything you > release to be the best you could do?

Sometimes the software is a means to an end. I've made small utility web apps for clients before, and throwing Bootstrap in improves the experience of the site without taking more than a few minutes of time (which the client pays for). Spending time customizing Bootstrap or designing from scratch gets in to diminishing returns almost immediately, while that first quick step from 1994-style to Bootstrap pays off big.

Pride is one thing, but when it's somebody else's money you have to consider hubris too.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love to use Bootstrap for backends and purely utilitarian websites such as monitoring/dashboard sites, admin-interfaces to whatever etc. It allows me to quickly build a decent looking and usable interface without spending much time on design decisions. I'd be more careful to use it on sites that try to promote brands, but there it's still a good layout grid that easily adapts to styling, so there's little harm in using it. Now if you want to go all crazy with your design, then Bootstrap is probably not what you want to use.

TL;DR: Use it where appropriate. Misuse is not Bootstraps fault.

</comment><comment><USER25> considering Bootstrap threatens the livelihood of many mediocre designers, this type of advise is understandable.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is a lot of emotion here but nobody seems to have hit on the major pain point of Bootstrap. It is great for a quick prototype but if you want to do anything that deviates from the Bootstrap styles it creates an unmaintainable disaster. What would be minor CSS changes becomes significantly more time- consuming or impossible. Any small amount of time saved in the initial development is quickly lost. Using Bootstap is the worst kind of technical debt your application could be afflicted with.

<comment><USER27> I'd like to hear more about this argument. Can you develop it further?

<comment><USER26> I am currently maintaining an application originally developed with Bootstrap and it has cost us hundreds of hours in extra maintenance so far. I'll give two examples.

Any grid-based CSS framework breaks content/layout separation - one of the best features of HTML5/CSS. Instead of naming elements based on document role, they are labelled by row and column position. After the prototype was finished, the designer wanted to add a banner at the top of the page. With normal CSS/HTML this would have been an insignificant change, but because we were using a grid, all HTML had to be rewritten because row 1 now equaled row 2, etc.

#2, The CSS in Bootstrap changes the global defaults of all HTML attributes. I have probably written as much CSS to undo bootstrap styles than to add new. I hope you like writing "line-height: normal" over and over again.

I could conclude saying that bootstrap should only be used to build prototypes, then throw it all away before developing the production app, but I don't know why you need fancy formatting in a prototype app. I'd recommend you build the first version in black-and-while/wireframe style, then hire a professional designer for the final decoration. If you are not a graphic designer, focus on writing maintainable, compliant HTML and CSS.

<comment><USER28> I'd suggest that your problem might not so much be the tool itself, but the wrong tool for what you want.

I'd be interested to see what "normal" CSS/HTML you would use to achieve a fluid, responsive grid in a relatively cross-browser fashion, that maintained all of this semantic magic. As much as the "content/layout separation" ideal is lauded, it's pretty difficult to achieve in reality - and just because something is in HTML, I don't believe that makes it "content".

Addressing your two examples: first, you shouldn't have to rewrite "all" of your HTML to add a banner to the top of the page. There aren't any "row1", "row2" etc classes in Bootstrap. If that was a requirement, I think someone's done something funky with your layout.

Second, part of the appeal of Bootstrap is that it changes the global defaults of HTML elements. Such resets are commonplace and give you a consistent look and feel across browsers. If you're looking to "undo" Bootstrap's styles, then you probably shouldn't be using it in the first place.

<comment><USER26> Here is an example of a generic HTML doc that changes layout by changing only CSS: <http://protonfish.com/csssatori/> It's been a few years since I wrote it and it was just a prototype, but it should be a good example of what you asked to see.

Separating content and layout takes a little effort to learn but I assure you it is possible and effective. In my opinion, grid-based layouts are table- based layouts with a coat of paint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I agree that visual identity is important and it's better to have a custom design to stand out from the crowd, but one thing you haven't mentioned are Bootstrap themes - there is already a wide variety of themes to choose from and most of them change the look&feel of Bootstrap drastically. I think it's a fair compromise between having to create custom design (which can be time consuming) and using default Bootstrap theme (which is overused and doesn't stand out).

</comment><comment><USER30> This is such a silly argument. When you're building an application, your intended audience cares about whether or not it does X that it says it will. Up next in importance is how cheap it is, and in a distant third is how easy it is to use. That the layout and buttons are easily recognizable from other sites is a boon, if anything, as it increases the feeling of familiarity.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why is it preferred to release early, release often for product features but not for design. After all isn't design a feature.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why not, instead of publicly complaining, develop your own theme for bootstrap, and release it as open source?

</comment><comment><USER33> bootstrap is excellent for developers that aren't designers, and still want to put together something that looks nice without having to spend money on elaborate designs. not all startups are blessed with loads of money.

</comment><comment><USER34> it's just called Bootstrap now isn't it?

<comment><USER35> Yes, this is exactly true. The purpose of is to help less knowledgeable folks and people that don't have time to create a design to start out with something usable and clean. There's zero reason you can't go back and make it sexier later. I actually think it's great that all these docs sites use it because it's better than the alternative, a huge plain text blob like what's on the Sass page.</comment></comment>


The "Uncanny valley" hypothesis - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

<comment><USER2> I think this theory somehow breaks down when it comes to sex and sexual attraction. Datapoint: the exaggerated proportions of photoshopped models in magazines and female video game characters.</comment>


Measuring the Design Process - <AUTHOR> http://theocacao.com/document.page/600 <comment><USER2> I think Google is getting a raw deal in this argument. This author and Doug Bowman talk about human designers being needed to make decisions about shades of blue and number of pixels for dividing lines. In most cases thats fine, but if you have the number of users google does you might as well let an algorithm figure it out, rather than have a team of designers argue back and forth about whose gut decision is correct.

On the other hand, there is TONS of great human-driven design going on at google. No algorithm came up with emails organized as conversations, or draggable, fast maps, or clean stock-quote pages with huge interactive charts, etc etc.

Fine, have an algorithm do some a/b testing to figure out how many pixels various lines on those pages should be, and which shade of colors to use. Of course designers arguing for their gut instincts on those decisions are going to be frustrated. They should have just let the data make the decisions its good at, and stick to doing the design that computers can't.

<comment><USER3> I'm not an artist. But I've worked with my fair share of really great artists and the impression I've always been given is that great art comes from consistency of vision. In other words it matters a great deal to them what shade of blue they use or how thick a line is.

This isn't a mindset I, as a programmer, understand. But I've seen great art come of it and the people making that great art have told me it's important.

(I've also seen lousy art generated by committee which just backs up that claim)

I think that is the root of this conversation. What Doug Bowman et. al are saying is there are different ways of doing things and Google doesn't realize that. They think everything can be done from an engineering standpoint and that's a philosophy that kills the drive of most creative people.

So when you say "why not let an algorithm figure it out" you're missing the creative person's point.

(You said there "is TONS of great human-driven design" inside Google but I don't know where you get that information from. That's not the way I'd always heard it)

<comment><USER4> You have glanced the side of an interesting point: what comes out of data driven design is not art. Great design, the kind of work that people obsess over Apple for (at its best), cannot be made that way. Great design is art; it is expression; it is fundamentally opinionated.

It's not the only way to design a user interface, to be certain. But Doug isn't interested in working in that environment, because he thinks of himself as an artist, not a statistician.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Follow Your Passion - <AUTHOR> http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow-your-passion/

<comment><USER2> "You decide to open up a café to follow your passion for coffee. Turns out that you hate running a café." This reminds me of E-Myth, where the woman starts a pie-making business because she's passionate about baking pies, and ends up hating the whole damn thing. I have friends who are dying to start their own café because they love coffee and the café atmosphere. But I don't think they've thought it all the way through to fixing the busted sink in the bathroom or the vendor that's a dick all the time. As a life coach, I actually totally see your point, Amy! - investigate your passion with your eyes fuckin wide open and don't be oblivious to all the actual un-passion-related work involved!

<comment><USER3> > As a life coach

Not Off-Topic but what's that like? I have a friend who has a stable job and really has gotten more and more into making a difference with his coaching clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is similar to the core message of the e-myth, which declared that starting a business didn't make you an entrepreneur if you were really a technician who had one entrepreneurial thought.

I know myself (I'm a business coach) that I meet many business owners who started a business for one reason - often technical ability, a desire for more money or control, and sometimes passion - and only later realise they need to develop business skills.

And if loving your job and turning it into a business is hard, then loving a hobby and turning it into a business is an order of magnitude harder again ... hard, but possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> Didn't like it until the end 'Practice open-eyed passion' that statement made the rest make sense.

I think you have to have passion, but most people do not realize what they are really passionate about.

Thanks for the post.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hahaha. This is an utter crock. The most successful people I know are all passionate about what they do. It's why they do it. Yes a given subject may be hard work, but if you _don't_ have the passion to keep you going, and put up with the shit, then you're doomed to failure. If you are passionate, more likely _not to notice the shit_. I have seen a lot more failures of people because they do what they do - 'because' rather than any desire for doing something for it's own sake.

<comment><USER7> There is more to the post than just one reading of its title. You seem to be arguing with the proposal "Do things you are not passionate about." That isn't remotely what the article is saying.

<comment><USER8> Wow, wrong again. The article is total BS and the title is nothing more than link bait. Every successful startup founder I know list a passion for the domain as one of their keys to success.

Basically what this article boils down to IMHO is "when shit gets hard just run, or better yet just dont do it because it might get hard"

And as for the 6 solutions she proposes... well those are dumb to. If people focus on how much work a startup is then they are much more likely to talk themselves out of it. I rather follow the advice of people like Steve Blank (customer development) and PG - How to start a startup (<http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html>)

Maybe we should take another piece of advice from this lady that obviously knows nothing about successful products and just forget passion to "Follow the Money" as she put it.

<comment><USER7> No, d3x, you are mistaken about what the article says. You are arguing that passion is important. The article _doesn't dispute that_. It is categorically _not_ saying that you should do things you aren't passionate about. It's saying that there are many business possibilities related to any given "passion," and the first one that comes to mind is just the most obvious one, not necessarily the best one or the one most closely aligned with what you're passionate about.

> Maybe we should take another piece of advice from this lady that obviously > knows nothing about successful products

Amy actually has a number of successful products to her name. See <http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> WOW, I fundamentally disagree with everything stated here. I would explain but I have to get back to following my passion.

<comment><USER7> Feel free to not comment next time you don't feel like saying anything.

<comment><USER8> Actually I did comment; my comment was that I disagree with this article. I'm sorry that you didn't pick up on that. In the future you should take your own advice and only comment if you have some actual value to add to the conversation e.g.: I agree because... or I disagree because. I was unable to comment at the time because I was working on my startup. My comment conveyed my opinion of the article and yours has done nothing more than show you are petty person that makes irrelevant comments that are not even relevant to the topic at hand. Since you are obviously dense I will explain: The topic at hand is the article but you did nothing more than comment on me so next time try and focus on the article at hand.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how my comment on the lack of substance to yours was any more "petty" than your flippant dismissal of Amy's article. If you disagree with the article, a good response would either be to explain how it was wrong and offer an alternative view _or_ to ignore it. But just saying "I disagree" is about as relevant to the OP as saying "I like pizza." Neither is a commentary on the article — they're both statements of your personal feelings.

Anyway, that's the last I'll say about this. I just wanted to make it clear that I didn't mean to personally attack _you_ — and I'm sorry if it sounded that way — just your comment's lack of content.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clay Shirky — Doing work, or Doing Work? - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/72609-clay-shirky-doing-work-or-doing-work/fulltext

<comment><USER2> It is interesting that Clay Shirky (the presenter that the article is based on) reverses the usual roles of capitalized and uncapitalized nouns. Capitalization denotes importance or emphasis and it is strange that emphasis would be put on the work you do you your boss instead of on the work you feel is important. The standard advocated by Shirky becomes even stranger when put into a different context. Students produce art all the time but most would be hesitant to call any of the pieces save a few Art.

This divergence suggests a few interesting hypotheses. First, the author values Work more and is attempting to understand work from an outsider's perspective. Second, coming from the perspective of Work leads to inaccuracies in Shirky's point of view. The accuracy of claim that "Work drives the economy" is not so clear. It could be argued that all Work trickles down from the work of company founders. Indeed this is why many companies get started; the founders have work that they want to do, they have something they think is important and worth doing.

In closing, I will suggest that Shirky and the author of this article are approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Respectively, they are attempting how to translate Work -> work and Usability -> usability. The author of the article wants to know how to "make and evaluate that miracle motivational leap" from something with no motivation to something that generates motivation. But when you are working on something with no motivation, you're already dead in the water. Far more productive to start with the motivation and try to figure out how to turn your intellectual itch into wealth. If you're creating a product, start with something users want, don't try and create the motivation after the fact.

Note: I've made several conjectures about Shirky and the author of the article based on limited information (I can't find a video or slides of the keynote). It's important to remember that I'm just speculating. It's entirely possible I'm misrepresenting Shirky's true point of view. What I wrote is only accurate based on the information from the article.

<comment><USER3> Capitalisation denotes a given name, rather than a word that has necessarily has meaning.

<comment><USER2> In this context you're giving a subset of a general category a name precisely because it has meaning. Some but not all art is Art because it is of higher quality. Similarly with work and Work, but separated by importance to the worker.

I think in general you'll find people name things because they have meaning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Same idea as Dan Pink's talk on intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards/motivators: <http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Capital-W) Work is what we have considered for years: your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid. By contrast, (little-w) work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid. Think of the difference between an Encyclopedia Britannica editor doing Work, and a Wikipedia editor doing work during spare hours. Big Work drives the economy; little work drives the Internet. Big Work builds skyscrapers; little work generates a half million fanfiction stories about Harry Potter.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is possibly the hardest problem to solve when making social software...

Everyone else will do it when everyone is doing it. But motivating people to do something radically different is much much harder unless there's clear rewards, etc. Clay of course wrote the book on this but it's still not qn exact sciene.

</comment><comment><USER6> So we need _utility testing_ instead of usability testing? Any ideas how to do that?

<comment><USER7> As well as, not instead of. :)</comment></comment>


This Guy Is Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/12-startups-in-12-months/

<comment><USER2> Always nice to start off the day with dose of "just fu __ __g do it " stories like this.</comment>


Why you need both rituals and routines to power your workday - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rescuetime.com/workplace-routines-and-rituals/ <comment><USER3> An important realisation is that you already have a routine, it might not be the optimal but you do have one. Even if you routine is "going to bed every night a different hour", it is a routine. Not going to gym in the mornings, it is a routine. Just have a look to your repeated behaviours, even if they are variable, if the variability repeats then it is a pattern.

In other words it is useful to demystify the routine, and realise that you already have one, you just need to adjust to make it more optimal.

In response to:

m1dnigh7: > I truly envy people with routines or rituals...

andrewflnr: > I hate that this might actually be true...

<comment><USER4> This is basically what i learned in my 1 1/2 years oft psychotherapy. You really have to ask yourself stuff like "what's wrong with my schedule?"

The answer could be something trivial like: "I waste too much time browsing hacker news after work. I need to stop that!". But it's not easy to just stop that. Better ask yourself a second question like: " what could I do instead?" And then just find a tiny little thing you could improve. Every tiny step can be a huge improvement

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate that this might actually be true. I don't want routines or rituals, I just want to do the smart thing at any given second. Empirically, however, that's not what actually happens.

<comment><USER6> Kind of makes me wonder if there are people that live without routines and rituals, and what causes the transition to and from between living with and without routines and rituals.

Can anyone give their experience on the matter?

<comment><USER7> I'm not anyone super important but this is how I've lived my life. Honestly it feels chaotic. My mind is always running via executive control. In some ways this, I believe, has provided me with a very unique worldview where anything seems possible - any path is within my grasp. I think it has led me to be more (forgive the possible arrogance, it's not intended as such) intelligent than the average bear. I don't let many facts into my mind without intense scrutiny and I tend to have a much more complete high level picture of how things work. In fact, I realized these traits early in life and believed they were something I should pursue to be more effective. Which in many ways has come true.

However the down side is that you're incompatible with most other people. I dread routine to the point where ive lost relationships and a sense of purpose in most work. Being a cog is extremely unpleasant and it's more and more apparent to me that that's where most success in the world comes from (think millions of workers vs a single ceo.)

This article touched on all of that and I think I need to incorporate the routine and ritual more. Even if it's so I can just get through the parts of life I currently struggle.

Sorry if this is a bit rambling. I'm working now but wanted to share. If you have any questions or want to chat I'd be happy. Still not sure how hacker news replying and all works so my apologies if I miss you.

<comment><USER8> Maybe not as pronounced as in your case but I can definitly understand where you're comming from. What worked for me was trying to understand some martial arts / eastern spirituality, which brought a lot of peace and stability to my mind.

I remeber being tald about all the spiritual things that seem bonkers to a western educated mind, but with the idea that - all models are false, some models are useful, I just "tried" to imagine it working, and it actually did, the mind is an interresting thing.

Now whenever I am presented with those ancient patterns of thought I don't dismiss them outright as false, but think of them as a model that can influence your emotions, and act accordingly.

<comment><USER9> I always found it rather interesting how similar Buddhism is to Christian, and how different they are typically taught.

The teaching of Jesus and Buddha are really giving you the exact same advice. Self-sacrifice, honesty, hard work and being decent while you accept all the shit life throws at you and let it pass, because it will, are the ways to live calmly and fully in between the eternal struggle chaos and order.

I personally think the eastern approach was easier to comprehend than the western. Ying and yang are two dragons locked in eternal struggle, one is chaos one is order but within each dragon is a small piece of the other. Let too much of one dragon into your life and you will suffer, and since chaos lives within order (and vice versa) it's also a fruitless struggle to chose one, because the other will always find a way to creep in.

You'll find the same essence in the bible and the moral struggle between good and evil and a God who never tells you what he wants, but to me, it was much less clear. Perhaps especially because 90% of religions scholars are assholes and in the west you don't meet the eastern assholes but you do meet a lot of shitty priests.

<comment><USER10> Interesting comment. I think if you were to read one of the gospels you'd pretty quickly get instructions on what God wants:

1\. Love God

2\. Love other people as much as you love yourself.

You'll find the second one in Buddhism, but not really the first.

That makes rather a lot of difference, because it focuses someone on being grateful for the world, rather than attempting to ignore it.

<comment><USER11> I'm not a Buddhist, but I think you've got that completely backwards. For example, the 5 moral precepts in Buddhism are refrain from: harming living things, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, lying or gossip, taking intoxicating substances eg drugs or drink. No mention of god anywhere. As far as I can tell, in many (most? all?) sects of Buddhism there _is no god_. Buddha is just the first fully enlightened being (and in many sects, it's achievable by anyone -- eventually).

As there is no dogma in Buddhism, it's really difficult to casually learn what Buddhism is about. Usually people will throw a hundred books at you and say, "Well, that will get you started" (at least in my experience :-) ). However, I think you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick.

<comment><USER10> So my comment was stating that the bit about God wasn't in Buddhism, and your comment affirmed that. I think we are arguing the same point.

Certain of the Buddhist sects and practices (notably Vajrayāna) throw gods into the mix because they've incorporated local beliefs and culture.

<comment><USER11> Good grief. I'm dyslexic, but that's amazing even for me! Sorry about that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I truly envy people with routines or rituals. I have tried the simplest ones, and none of them stick. I've been frustrated by this for a long time now. I see people having routines and being more productive and it makes me almost sad.

I think you need to be a special kind of person to have them.

<comment><USER13> On the contrary, I think it would be very unusual to be a person with no routines. Perhaps you mean specifically 'routines that help with productivity'?

<comment><USER12> Ah, fair enough. The only real routine I have is "make coffee, kiss wife, watch rerun of the evening news". And that's about it.

So yes, I have no productivity-helping routines.

Some of the ones I tried in a lot of different ways are time management (pomodoro, toggl, ..), activity logging (toggl, todoist, paper book, ..), waking up and going to bed on fixed hours, remembering thinks (google keep, evernote, paper book,..) and all of them fade away after less than 5 days.

<comment><USER14> The conscious part of the human mind is basically a justification system. It exists to justify actions so that they become socially acceptable through rationalizations (this statement stems from this hypothesis: [1]).

After understanding this it's clear to see that your motivation is simply too low - there's not a reason that is important enough for you. That means you don't really feel the need to change your behaviour. It's a good sign - <USER2> are content with yourself and don't fear the social repercussions of your current behaviour to change anything about it - but it also means that you stagnate.

You'll change your behaviour if you have the fear that you could lose social status.

It seems that you try to control your behaviour through rational thinking. But please understand that this is not how the brain operates. It first and foremost wants to be socially accepted while minimizing energy consumption (with bursts of curiosity). If you want to use rational thinking for your behaviour, you have to add a value in your belief system that rational thinking leads to the best decision. This also has to be associated with emotions and you need some memories and stories where rational behaviour was advantageous to back this belief up. Change other parts of your belief system to make it injustifiable to yourself to live with unproductive routines. I have to admit that I'm not sure if this will lead you to happiness/fulfillment (pretty sure it won't if you're currently happy and fulfilled with your current beliefs), but that's how you change behaviour.

[1]: [https://unifiedtheoryofpsychology.files.wordpress.com/2011/1...](https://unifiedtheoryofpsychology.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/the- justification-hypothesis.pdf)

Maybe you find value in this article about habit-building with some psychological underpinnings: [https://jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit- change](https://jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit-change)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm jealous at Churchill's 5:00pm nap. I'd be much happier and productive if I could decide my working hours.

<comment><USER16> Time to start a company?

<comment><USER11> Don't have to get so extreme. I work remotely in a _very_ different timezone from my peers. It has its ups and downs, but one of the ups is that I can have a nap pretty much any time I want (and frequently do). There aren't huge numbers of jobs like this, and it requires a fair amount of practice to do well (in my experience), but it's getting more popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For people struggling with forming a productive ritual/routine, you guys should try BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits:

[https://www.tinyhabits.com/](https://www.tinyhabits.com/)

I went through the 5-day program this week and it seems to help a lot.</comment>


The Lives of Others: When does imagination become appropriation? - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/the-lives-of-others-when-does-imagination-become-appropriation/ <comment><USER2> I really dislike this concept. Cultures mixed and borrowed from each other since forever. To clamp together awefulness like blackface with the wearing of a kimono as a costume is just crazy. Men writing women characters (and vice versa) have created wonderful representations that echoed in positive ways with countless people. The Japanese culture 'appropriated' alot from the Chinese culture and made it their own. We all enjoy this diversity, there's nothing wrong with that.

Why use such an umbrella term when the negative instances are usually done with obvious malice? Why should people stifle their creativity because they are influenced by 'not their' culture. I wish people would stop using this term, and just call out people bent on _intending_ harm, and not just for being insensitive to some made up norm.

<comment><USER3> _disclaimer_ \- I am trans.

With that said, a lot of the problem stems from the fact that a popular author from the "outside" culture is going to have a lot more influence on what others in the outside culture believe/understand about the "inside" culture.

As an example from my community, just about every movie written about transgender people by a cisgender person spends a lot of time showing the subject putting on makeup or wearing heels, implying that the essence of what it means to be a trans woman is wearing makeup or high heeled shoes... But it isn't the case.

That would almost be ok, but the popular movie is going to get a lot more airtime than an indie movie made by a trans person which shows what our real lives are like. In fact, that movie may not get made at all.

So it's worse having the popular movie out there, making money off of our lives, but misrepresenting them at the same time. (And this is all assuming that no harm was intended... it's still harmful, and it happens all the time.)

<comment><USER4> All films' portrayal of anything is crap when it's something familiar to you. (Or crucially, I suppose, more familiar to you the viewer than to those responsible.)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Well put.

Though I think it should bear an asterisk: the stakes are higher for some people. Based on my experience, I think movies about musicians are often pretty stilted, but that kind of thing can be brushed off a little easier for me than misrepresenting a person's innate identity can be for them (as in the parent comment's position). And then—enter the always waiting host of philosophical questions.

edit: Felt like adding a little to my comment. I've always figured art was as much an exploration as an expression. I'm not sure anyone should be judged for a single work in that case—but there are abundant nuances to that kind of statement so don't hold it against me.s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is not about whether white people can wear kimonos. Author Richard Russo wrote a well received story about a Belgian nun, with details drawn from a nun that he met in real life. He is not, nor has he ever been, a Belgian or a nun. He is not apologetic about writing a fictionalized life of someone quite unlike himself, but he ruminates at length about the power of an author's imagination, the limits of that power, its wise exercise, and the ways it seizes authors as well as being seized by them.

Russo also wrote a book that revealed very private details of his late mother's life. Did he owe her still-living friends and relatives silence until they too were gone? The conclusion is: no, authors write about what seizes their attention. But he doesn't really seek to absolve himself. It's more like an addict talking about addiction: "I took another drink, because that's the compulsion I felt."

The well-received story about a Belgian nun was received mostly among his English-language readers in the United States. Not nuns or Belgians. What was the Belgian nun reception like? Russo doesn't know. He suspects it would be less enthusiastic, because they would spot the cracks in his story more readily. The closer the readers are to the life experience of the characters, and the further the author is from his characters, the more the author risks readers' trust in trying to write those characters.

There's also a characterization-gap risk regarding authors and other authors as well as regarding authors and readers. If Russo sells novels with characterizations of Belgian nuns or black men, what does that do to the literary prospects of actual Belgian nuns or black men who are trying to sell their first manuscript? Can he end up non-maliciously but thoroughly quashing their publishability just by showing up first, even if his nuns are less authentic than those written by an actual nun? Quite possibly, yes. Russo posits that the struggle for position among authors has become more desperate in recent years. Publishers aren't as patient about investing in new talent because they are facing more financial pressure. That means that established authors like himself can casually, even accidentally, displace authors who could draw better portraits of certain kinds of characters. That's unfortunate for those would-be authors and for the reading public.

<comment><USER6> Wait, but don't writers usually already do real research into whatever they're going to write about? If I did research on what Belgian nuns did in their life and wrote about it, is that wrong? Is that less accurate than if the Belgian nun wrote it herself? The thing is, most Belgian nuns probably are never going to write a book and especially not the book that I wanted to write. I hope we don't start banning people from writing about things they've never experienced, because that's the point of fiction and imagination. I've never slayed a dragon, but I can write about doing so because I imagined it. Sigh, one day probably only black people will be allowed to write black characters huh? Or maybe you have to pay a black person for their input and account and for them to endorse your writing?

<comment><USER5> Russo approaches this in a less combative way than you have framed it. He has imaginative power: what does it do to him, what does he do with it, and what _should_ he do with it? He hasn't definitively answered these questions even after 5000 words of pondering. It's the opposite of a Twitter hot take telling other people what they are allowed to do.

Authors do variable amounts of research to background their characters. Sometimes shockingly little. Many HN readers can probably relate to encountering an eyeball-rolling "hacking" scene in a thriller. It's _possible_ that a diligent author can write a character of a certain background just as well never having lived it, but the odds are not in their favor.

The not-having-lived-it problem leads to some interesting challenges with historical fiction. Nobody alive today has been a 14th century French knight. Which authors really try to do their research and don't just treat time and place as set dressing for generic drama? How much work am I going to do as a reader to discover these harder-working authors? Sometimes I wonder: should I just dive in to scholarly source material about medieval history instead of reading novels set there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, just read history."

<comment><USER7> This touches nicely on why I have always preferred science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, and mythology to historical fiction:

When the whole thing is fiction, you don't need to fuss about which parts are historically accurate.

Historical fiction must necessarily be a blending of truth and lies, and as such it has never held my interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _I'd have to be willing to admit defeat and pull the plug should it become > clear that the book I was writing was misbegotten, even if that realization > came after years of hard work. I would owe my friend Jenny and all trans > people that much._

This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?

The author? The majority of people who share a characteristic with one of the characters in the story? A sliver of said population, who are very active on Twitter?

In an essay this long, I expected that this critical question would not have been glossed over.

<comment><USER9> > > I'd have to be willing to admit defeat and pull the plug should it become > clear that the book I was writing was misbegotten, even if that realization > came after years of hard work. I would owe my friend Jenny and all trans > people that much.

> This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides > if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?

I think it's not actually in the passive voice, except _possibly_ that "become clear". It seems as if you may be reading it as if the author is acting out of fear of others' judgement, but notice that Russo _doesn't_ say "I'd have to stop if it was offensive"—a fear of others' reactions—but rather "I'd have to [stop] if it … was misbegotten", which I take in the sense of 'ill conceived'. That is an internal judgement, not an external one, and in this context I think the answer to your question is clear: Russo, being the only one who knows for sure how he conceived his story, is the one who decides if it is ill conceived.

<comment><USER10> I think the only (grammatical) passive in there could be "the book was misbegotten", if it were the passive of active "Russo misbegot the book" (with Russo being the only possible subject, as you convincingly argue). However, the verb "misbeget" doesn't seem to exist anymore [1] - what remains is the old participle as an adjective, and as such the fragment is just a good old active sentence, like "the car was red".

But we're now sort of off-topic, methinks.

[1] Etymology Online: "bastard, illegitimate, unlawfully or irregularly begotten," 1550s, past-participle adjective from obsolete misbeget "beget wrongly or unlawfully" (c. 1300), from mis- (1) "badly, wrongly" \+ beget

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think "appropriation" is the right way to frame this question. It's really about failures of the imagination. It is possible for an author's imagination to fail whether or not they share a group identity with the subject of their fiction; i.e. there are lots of bad writers. Certain kinds of imaginative failure are specific to people outside of a group writing about that group (these failure modes tend to deal in stereotypes and sometimes propaganda), but that doesn't mean they will all fail.

So the easy filter of "author Y is not X, and therefore should not write about X because X will be misrepresented" doesn't stand. The second objections seems to be about market failures: "author Y is not X, and therefore is taking an opportunity from authors who do belong to group X." Personally, I don't think art is zero-sum. I don't believe that, for every book that was published by a well known author, a lesser known author was rejected. And I'd like to point out that, while publishers may still be important, we live in an age when artists can publish their work online and go directly to their readers. Those that build a following will get picked up. Those that don't may use that feedback to reflect on their style. The urge to write doesn't guarantee anyone a living.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article seems to completely skip the question in the title.

Regardless, the concept of "cultural appropriation" is absurd and dangerously ignorant.

Thinking about it makes me want some Korean Street tacos right now. Which are amazing, by the way.

<comment><USER13> > Regardless, the concept of "cultural appropriation" is absurd and > dangerously ignorant.

I share your sense that "cultural appropriation" is an absurd notion. But I'm unable to provide any objective reasons for (or against) my views on this.

Does anyone know of a good, principled way to debate questions like "Is 'cultural appropriation' a concept that belongs in our ethical systems?"

<comment><USER14> I think this is a very pertinent question. Here's an essay for you which explores this topic and how it relates to other issues.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

MULTICULTURALISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF MULTINATIONAL CAPITALISM (1997)

[https://newleftreview.org/issues/I225/articles/slavoj- zizek-...](https://newleftreview.org/issues/I225/articles/slavoj-zizek- multiculturalism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-multinational-capitalism)

The intro paragraph:

'Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are well aware of the key role played by the notion of the 'typical': truly progressive literature should depict 'typical heroes in typical situations.' Writers who presented a bleak picture of Soviet reality were not simply accused of lying; the accusation was rather that they provided a distorted reflection of social reality by depicting the remainders of the decadent past, instead of focusing on the phenomena which were 'typical' in the sense of expressing the underlying historical tendency of the progress towards Communism. Ridiculous as this notion may sound, its grain of truth resides in the fact that each universal ideological notion is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency[.]'

<comment><USER14> I found the whole essay via Google Scholar; apologies for not including it before, but thought the original source was best.

Žižek, Slavoj. Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. New Left Review, 1997.

[https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:58909765](https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:58909765)

[http://clarkbuckner.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/www.Zizek...](http://clarkbuckner.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/www.Zizek_MultiCulturalism.org_.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's an interesting read of someone struggling with a hard idea. Im glad he started to think about the context, and why it's different for him to write about a Belgian nun than if he wrote a book with a black or trans main character. But he missed the idea that if he does want to write a book where the context is tricky, he should ask for help from people who know more about the context, who might help him realize whether or not the book is "misbegotten" and if he is "not up to this particular task." Writers look up lots of weird things for their books. They can look up a person who knows more about it and pay them for their help. That person might even give them ideas that they would never have thought of! The writer can also ask more questions to find out if what they want to write has tricky context: between the writer and the subject, who has the power? Who might be harmed? Does this fit bad patterns? What is the context? [ _]

[_] Questions from this post about how to have deeper conversations about cultural appropriation: [https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2020/1/2/how-to- change-you...](https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2020/1/2/how-to-change-your- conversations-about-cultural-appropriation)

</comment><comment><USER16> My problem with the "no appropriation" argument is that it violates the golden rule (do unto others...) If I am over here doing something on my own, why should anyone be able to tell me I am doing it wrong? Doing that is corrective in a way that ignores individual experience and stiffles someone else's expression - for the sake of an individual's feelings not being hurt. And an action that hurts your feelings might be shrugged off by someone else, yet every member of a marginalized group has this innate right to "set the rules of engagement" when talking to anyone outside their group.

I think that is ridiculous. You can talk to your own experience, you can educate others about your views, you can try to broaden what people consider normal and natural or tell them why actions come across as shitty to you, but telling people they are violating your rules is simply an inversion of the power dynamics. It may make you feel good but it doesn't help anyone understand you better or feel closer to you. What we need is fewer boundaries and more curiosity, not stronger distinctions between people.

Censorship is not the way to understanding.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is mimesis really the issue here? The imagination/appropriation problem is only one if one assumes the reader is naively taking the author's world for truth. If a critical reader approaches a story as revealing the author as well as the characters, a story that falls short of perfect fidelity can still be entertaining, and may even be edifying.

(I often work with people who are not communicating in their mother tongue. When I spot an orthographical or grammatical "error", I try to treat that as a hint of what similar constructs in their mother tongue might be; I'm sure they do the same with my translation mistakes)

</comment><comment><USER17> William Gibson was too poor to afford a computer when he started writing; he's said that cyberpunk was pure imagination, and it might never have existed if he'd known what machines were really like.

</comment><comment><USER18> Never. Absolutely never.

</comment><comment><USER19> Let's just move to a system like North Korea has for their media. I don't think they have any issues with their population getting offended.

</comment><comment><USER20> Note: This has nothing at all to do with the 2006 movie _Das Leben der Anderen_.

<comment><USER21> True, but in many ways the argument applies to it as well. When the movie came out many former East Germans complained that the movie (which was written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who was from West Germany) was unrealistic because the idea of Stasi agents who threw away their careers to protect dissidents as shown in the movie just wasn't something that happened, and probably a movie written by East Germans who really experienced the Stasi wouldn't have written it that way.

<comment><USER22> I certainly got the impression that "Das Leben der Anderen" was made by West Germans. If it had been made by East Germans I'd expect to have found in it something surprising, something exotic, something I hadn't seen before, because I never even visited East Germany. But in fact everything in the film conformed precisely to Western ideas of what East Germany was like. I didn't even hear any music I didn't recognise: every background song seemed to have been taken from a one-euro shop CD called "Das Beste aus der DDR".

<comment><USER17> Youtube probably has some DDR-era stuff, if you speak german. ("Besserwesser" is a pejorative these days for former West Germans who think they know more than the former East Germans [about what it was like])

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VKBgxOY5g8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VKBgxOY5g8) is Sting's reminiscence[1] of how his song "Russians" came to be; having watched some USSR kid's TV[2] myself, I agree with him that the russians did, in fact, love their children too.

[1] Sorry it's a video, the article I originally read has gone down the memory hole.

[2] hint: YT search gives different results in latin and in cyrillic. Separating BRD from DDR will be more difficult.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can software eat poverty? 60k spent per fam in poverty? Wth? - <AUTHOR> http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/over-60000-welfare-spentper-household-poverty_657889.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I don't have a solution here. I just find it insane that we spend that much and the families we are trying to help get so little. I fully understand that a lot of people are getting paid along the way with that 60k, but most of those people could do other jobs as well.

Anyone have have big ideas on how to fix this?</comment>


Letting go of CoFounders - <AUTHOR>

To give a background, I am working on startup for the past 6 months full time. Within the last 4 months, we I have assembled a team of 4 more people as co-founders except all of them are working part-time. We had divided up the founders pie in the order of 40-15-15-15.
One of the team members were working a lot at the beginning, but lately have been performing extremely poorly and outputting very bad quality, and this is becoming a big problem for the rest of the team.
How can we let go of a team member, and how would compensation work (since letting him leave with 15% ownership is not fair for the current team, and letting him leave with 0% is not fair for his contributions).
How does this work? Any experience with such situations? This is a really nasty situation, please help. <comment><USER2> First of all, I'm assuming that you've already discussed the issue with him? found out why he isn't pulling his weight, etc. You may be able to fix the issue without letting him go.

This is the reason for vesting ownership shares, so that the people earn their shares over time, rather than all being divided up at the beginning.

I had a similar issue with a friend I brought on as co-founder. Thankfully he was 'stolen' away by another company, so that resolved the issue of his involvement, and I very candidly brought up the issue of ownership ,as he was around for such a short period of time, and we hadn't reached enough milestones to match the value of the amount he would have owned via the vested ownership. We worked out a smaller percentage which we both thought was more fair based on what he had accomplished in his short time.

If this guys head/heart were and are in the right place, he'll want to work with you on what is best for the company. If not, then you may have to get some legal advise.

But I would first talk to him about the issues, and see if the team can resolve it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The solution to this problem is vesting. Unfortunately it is not a solution you can apply after the fact.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER5> If all of these co-founders were vesting over years this person could be booted without walking away with an unfair amount of equity.

[http://www.payne.org/index.php/Startup_Equity_For_Employees#...](http://www.payne.org/index.php/Startup_Equity_For_Employees#Vesting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like he is capable of acceptable work for your team but is not performing to his earlier level: do you understand why? What's his side of the story? The best outcome would be to enable him to continue as a fully contributing member unless there are additional facts that indicate otherwise.

Is there someone that both you and he trust that you could use to mediate a serious conversation about how to resolve the situation? The 15% founder should be willing to sell you back 12-14/15's of his stock since a normal vesting period would be four to five years from a standing start. He may not be willing to do so.</comment>


Ask HN: Your perfect coding/work machine setup? - <AUTHOR>

I am getting a new iMac that I want to dedicate only to my dev and design work. The goal is efficiency and speed. I work mostly in PHP (WordPress) (starting RoR) and do most of the front end dev work (jQuery, CSS, etc).
So far I have:
MAMP TextMate Transmit ...
What is your ideal coding setup, why, and what will make it run super fast? <comment><USER2> Vim, Oh My Zsh, Janus (Vim plugin set), TotalTerminal, ExpanDrive.

I made the switch from TextMate to Vim a couple months ago. The learning curve can be steep, but I'd consider myself noticeably more productive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try to put in SSD in it if you can.

</comment><comment><USER4> MTMJ, emacs, lots o' memory

</comment><comment><USER5> Aptana + Firebug + Firefox

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Will have SSD</comment>


Dynamic Range Database - <AUTHOR> http://dr.loudness-war.info/

<comment><AUTHOR> Related to _YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars ' coffin_ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223749Y](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9223749Y) )

This post explains it pretty well: [http://tcervo.com/its-the-mastering- stupid-how-record-compan...](http://tcervo.com/its-the-mastering-stupid-how- record-companies-are-ruining-music/)</comment>


Ask HN: Other Creative Ways to Show Blood Pressure Results? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for recommendations for other Creative Ways to show Blood Pressure Results. blog.MyDataOrganizer.com shows one way of showing it. <comment><USER2> Well, you could puncture the carotid artery in the neck (perhaps using a straw, pencil, or something else stiff), and then observe the distance the blood sprays.

I suggest doing this against white butcher paper, so as to more easily measure the maximum distance achieved by the droplets.</comment>


Jamie Dimon: I 'Regret' Calling Bitcoin a Fraud - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2018/01/09/jamie-dimon-i-regret-calling-bitcoin-a-fraud/ <comment><USER2> Nobody I know on Wall Street has changed their tune with cryptos. What _has_ changed is recognition that the wealth transfer of a generation is happening through them. Nobody wants to hold it, but everyone wants to broker it. And you can't try and sell Bitcoins, or even facilitate order flow, if your CEO is on record calling it a fraud.

<comment><USER3> I recently watched the 1983 comedy _Trading Places_ again. Quote:

Randolph Duke: "Now, some of our clients are speculating that the price of gold will rise in the future. And we have other clients who are speculating that the price of gold will fall. They place their orders with us, and we buy or sell their gold for them."

Mortimer Duke: "Tell him the good part."

Randolph Duke: "The good part, William, is that, no matter whether our clients make money or lose money, Duke & Duke get the commissions."

Plus ça change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If JD wanted to take a stake in Bitcoin, trash talking beforehand could help, and i think this could have been the case.

most reasonable people would prefer to stay silent but JP Morgan plays the "bad boy bank" role with gusto, second only to Goodman Sachs. both organizations openly break the law while eating the fines as an operating expense, bet against their own clients and ensnare nation states in unpayable debt with what most laypeople would think is unbelievable power and control.

compare that to a few choice words in an unregulated wild west market and perhaps id be stupid not to think it was intentional.

his reversal seals it for me. (unless this is yet more strategy on his part)

<comment><USER5> He made his 'Bitcoin is a fraud' comment in September when Bitcoin was somewhere between $3000-$4000. In October, he called Bitcoin investors stupid.

Bitcoin has done nothing, but increase in value since then. If JD was trying to spread FUD in order to buy cheap....that clearly didn't work. No one in the Bitcoin space gives a shit what that guy says.

<comment><USER6> Actually, it worked brilliantly. He timed it right with the September China fud and probably picked up some coin right at the 3k low on the dip on that news.

<comment><USER3> Actually, not everyone trash talking Bitcoin is talking their own book.

<comment><USER6> What? Talking their own book? I have not heard that before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No where in the article did he say 'regret'.

<comment><USER8> Before the paywall garbage, it say: Mr. Dimon said "I regret making" an earlier comment in which he said the digital currency was a fraud.

Edit: The paywall version has a different beginning than the full version wtf.

<comment><USER9> Why are you being downvoted? What you said is true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yea this is the usual sad song after the big money has been made and the sheeple fleeced. Rinse and repeat. Look at boom/busts of the past. The powers that be know exactly what they are doing. "A fraud" until you find out the internal hedge fund has been trading it for months and NOW they are setting up a customer trading desk. Get the joke?

</comment><comment><USER11> Readable version: [https://outline.com/ChvJAT](https://outline.com/ChvJAT)

<comment><USER12> This is a cool app, thanks for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> He bought the dip after spreading FUD.

<comment><USER14> He happened to be the fraud himself

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> He should say "It's not a fraud, it's just in a crazy worldwide bubble".

</comment><comment><USER16> HA! That's what you get for not understanding the underlying innovation before making bombastic claims at the WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM. Cantankerous Beast

</comment><comment><USER17> Dunking on all these fucking bankers is going to be the sweetest thing ever. I hope every last one of these pieces of shit is holding a big hoard of crypto when it finally crashes. I've already sold them a LOT but I've got a fair bit to go.

</comment><comment><USER18> This was so orchestrated.

1\. Notice the value in it.

2\. Come out publicly dismissing it as a "bubble".

3\. Acquire a position.

4\. Come out publicly refuting your initial claim as a "bubble".

It's called stacking.

<comment><USER19> This is so that their clients won't be able to sue them if/when the bubble pops after they help execute BTC trades for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Respect to him for owning up.</comment>


Ask HN: How to search notes? - <AUTHOR> When I quickly scribble something in a text file, I find it difficult to search these files. It seems keyword search using grep is not enough and that we need some smart context-aware search. <comment><USER2> Are you referencing typing something in the notes or actually scribbling something using a digital pen/pencil or finger? If you are referencing just typing things in, normally grep -rI "" * --color=auto may help (if you are using the newer grep) for a small dataset or find /path/to/data -type f -a -exec grep -H WHATAMILOOKINGFOR '{}' \; which I will normally just turn into an function I can run from any terminal. For larger searching I normally use Solr, Lucene, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Sphinx and other tools to give me more technical vision into what I am searching for and/or things relative to what I was thought I was searching for.

For things that I have taken pictures of or manually drawn I use OCR and other custom tech to convert it to computer friendly searchable information to be able to include it into my search queries and create a helper app for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix to search through my apps API to give me both the textual, graphical and meta data results that I can then filter down to what I am looking for.

If you need something to help get you started on OCR of any notes or documents you have I would recommend looking into Tesseract as a start if you are not interested in building your own OCR tools from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found the _lack_ of grep so unbearable on Windows that I install cygwin (or whatever) in the initial setup of any new device. What does grep fail to do for you?</comment>


OCaml on iOS 7 Released - <AUTHOR> http://psellos.com/2014/08/2014.08.ocamlxarm-402.html

<comment><USER3> I'm neither a Mac nor an iPhone person, but that's pretty cool. I'd like to know what it means in practice, though. So, you can run Ocaml programs on iOS? What about Apple's libraries? Are there any bindings available?

<comment><USER4> Yes, there is FFI code to expose Cocoa components via OCaml. Support is nowhere near complete for the entire iOS API, and it isn't factored into a reusable library, but it seems most sample apps have a nice wrapper allowing you to specify any additional component interfaces in OCaml itself without dropping down to Obj-C. Works for a nice class of applications right now, including those based on OpenGLES.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Sounds brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been waiting a long time for Jeffrey to get OCaml working on iOS7 - <USER2> looks like excellent progress. Though this is just an early version, programming in OCaml is so much better than programming in Objective-C so I can't wait to see this project continue.

OCaml: The original Swift.

<comment><USER6> You might also take a look at F# running on Xamarin's stack, which is probably a bit more mature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprising to see a svn repository listed. Is that common in the OCaml community?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's not common. Most popular projects are normally hosted on GitHub and managed with OPAM[1]. Also you can checkout some interesting projects here: <[https://github.com/rizo/awesome-ocaml/>](https://github.com/rizo/awesome- ocaml/>)

[1]: [http://opam.ocaml.org](http://opam.ocaml.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks cool, are there any tutorials on how to build a project from the ground up with it? I've hunted around the website without luck.

<comment><USER4> There are a number of sample/demo apps here that can be used as a starting point: [http://psellos.com/ocaml/](http://psellos.com/ocaml/) Each app has instructions on how to build from source, etc.</comment></comment>


Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2566628

<comment><USER2> Is the idea that you'd compile a virtualized OS in with your application to produce one really streamlined VM appliance? I get that you'd be able to avoid the overhead of the OS in the VM but effectively making the VM a single application again.

Is this any better than the Docker method of reusing the same base-OS and compartmentalizing the applications? Is there that much to be gained in avoiding kernel/user-space transitions?

<comment><USER3> I think the real problem with this sort of idea is that, in the end, you're just reinventing processes. There's already a way to write an isolated single purpose application and run it on a server: fork() and then exec().

If you want to bring the isolation level of that process down to just absolutely what it needs to run we've got things like jails and cgroups. You could probably run a Go app with no access to the filesystem since everything is linked in statically anyways.

I think it misses the reasons people are excited about virtualization. Reproducibility and uniformity of environment has a higher value than isolation to most software developers. The priorities may be inverted on the sysadmin side, but I don't think so far as to justify this kind of approach.

<comment><USER4> My understanding is that the goal is not isolation, but performance. You can remove large chunks of the OS which you don't need. You also don't have any overhead from system calls since all code runs at the same privilege level. This is possible because (in theory) you can't execute arbitrary code. All the executable code is baked into the kernel at compile time and the page tables are sealed so no new code can be loaded.

You can achieve the isolation with jails and cgroups, but not the performance improvements.

<comment><USER3> As mentioned in a sibling you still have the hypercalls, and you definitely need those to still be present if you're running at ring 0 since, essentially, direct access to the hardware is probably an opportunity to attack the whole physical system (since hardware often has arbitrary bus access). Never mind the need to arbitrate access between multiple VMs.

And this is what I mean when I say that taken to its conclusion you're just reinventing processes.

I think this kind of performance claim needs to be solidly proven by something at least vaguely like a real running application to be taken as a given.

<comment><USER4> Fair point. More benchmarks need to happen before it's obvious this is really a win. A real application would be nice. I'm biased because I worked on a similar idea myself and I've been waiting for this to come. I think it's a potential win now for running on public clouds.

However, as Docker PaaS gains popularity, that may be a better alternative. Only benchmarks will tell :)

<comment><USER5> What did you work on?

<comment><USER4> A similar yet much simpler idea of porting some simple application code to MiniOS. Although I never ended up with anything of value.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


API Documentation Done Right - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/docs/api

<comment><USER2> Quite nice indeed. Someone to give us a hint on whether this is completely hand made or build with some tool/app ?</comment>


Show HN: noisecat – the noise swiss army knife - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gedigi/noisecat <comment><AUTHOR> Think of netcat with a fully encrypted channel and zero configuration.

Or maybe you have a noise endpoint that you don't know how to talk to.</comment>


'Facebook thinks I'm a terrorist': woman named Isis has account disabled - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/18/facebook-thinks-im-a-terrorist-woman-named-isis-has-account-disabled <comment><USER2> And yet Facebook still has pages for Lions of Rojava (in several languages), and YPJ and YPG, (again in several languages) with messages form people saying they want to join, and with replies talking about how to get through Turkey customs.

YPG / YPJ are either branches of PKK, or loosely affiliated to PKK, and PKK is listed by eg UN as a terrorist organisation.

There's probably many others - Animal Liberation Front, KKK, etc.</comment>


Show HN: Chatbots made easy – Build, train, and deploy bots - <AUTHOR> https://motion.ai <comment><USER2> This whole 'bot renaissance makes me think that somewhere 1000s of old IRC Channel admins are raising their hands in despair, and quickly shuffling through countless CD-Rs of old TCL and Perl code to see if they have something worth re-releasing.

Granted, the natural language stuff is way better than it was, but the current bot platforms that are springing up everywhere are nothing more than a language parser and an empty ruleset DB that you as the customer have to spend endless hours populating.

It seems a very unfinished solution right now; We're going to see a flood of sub-par bots* on the market that are going to cause the end users to disengage within months.

(*I'm sure motion.ai's bots are very good, and I am not singling them out here, just commenting on the whole bot thing in general)

<comment><USER3> My main concern is that this whole situation will not include only chat bots but it will also trigger a demand for crawling bots which could put a lot of stress on web sites. Then sites could adopt aggressive captcha schemes which will hammer usability and make the life of legitimate crawlers a lot more difficult. It's a lose-lose situation , until the industry comes into its senses and realize this whole thing is a fad.

<comment><USER4> One solution to this could simply be improving our ability to handle traffic. Bots aren't doing anything bad (under normal condition), they just represent a portion of your view traffic that you don't inherently want. An aggressive user, of sorts.

With that said, we have more cycles these days, better web servers, and inherently more traffic capacity than we did 10 years ago.

I have a feeling bot traffic will grow faster than our traffic-handling-tech, but regardless, i think this is just going to be the new standard. Especially since bot traffic could represent UX requirements for potential users.

Quite an interesting future we have though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron I feel like it's the early 2000's all over again with chat bots suddenly becoming a big thing again.

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be nice if there were a couple of example bots that you could try talking to/see some info about before creating an account.

<comment><USER6> David from Motion AI here. Definitely agree! We are building out our Bot Store which will be a great way to sample a wide range of bots.

<comment><USER7> Should be on the home page, perhaps even above the fold already asking you a question with a side-by-side of the flowchart components being activated/highlighted.

<comment><USER6> That's a super good UI suggestion, thanks. We just launched our public beta about 6 hours ago and have been thrilled with the response and very unique bots being created (particularly when people leverage IFTTT and Zapier too) ... we'll definitely be surfacing as many cool uses as possible ASAP :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From an NLP standpoint, what is the comparison between this and other NLP products? Namely WitAi, etc?

I'm writing a bot framework (code, not web service), and trying to generalize the process so the the developer can switch between different NLP providers with ease (to avoid lockin.. as much as possible atleast).

So, comparing to Witai atlast, is your NLP better? Is it more flexible somehow? etc, thoughts?

<comment><USER6> Our value-add here would be providing the pipelines for one-click deployment (SMS, Facebook, Slack etc) and structuring of conversation flow, in addition to things like post-deployment analytics and insights on how users are talking to your bot. In terms of NLP, we actually take an agnostic approach to whether users want to use Wit.ai (or api.ai etc) in conjunction with our service, or use our NLP offerings. Thanks for the question!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do the bots speak English only or can users train them easily to talk with customers in other languages?

<comment><USER9> Most of what I've seen is in English but there are some second-level services popping up that promise an API for chatbot translation, e.g. Cyrano ([http://cyrano.unbabel.com/](http://cyrano.unbabel.com/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a good addition to [http://wtfismybot.tech/](http://wtfismybot.tech/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember the time when kids considered bots cool, and I had no idea about programming then, nor did I understand how bots were usefull..

But the problem is I dont understand not even today who would be interested to interact with a bot? And how is this service better than employing a programmer ? Some examples would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER12> Super cool concept to make this more accessible. Has anyone deployed this platform is a customer service enviroment? And if so how'd it go?

<comment><USER6> The platform is only hours old in terms of public availability, but here's a pretty cool customer service demo bot that scans a knowledgebase first, but can create a helpdesk ticket if human assistance is required: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9IMsJW4ca0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9IMsJW4ca0)

<comment><USER13> Maybe I'm missing something, but can't a normal website do all that?

Or is the idea that you can feed message-only channels like email and Facebook messanger to it? But then you could just say "We don't really provide email support; see our website here: ..."

Kind of feels like using telephone menus when you don't have to.

(Nothing against your platform though - it looks very well done!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bots are broken as a platform. No advertising, no payments system, developers have to pay for hosting, there's no discovery mechanism because the messengers don't have bot stores... Why would developers be interested?

<comment><USER15> Replace "bots" with "internet" and this could have been a quote lifted from a circa-1995 Microsoft strategy meeting

<comment><USER16> Bots are closer to a CLI than a GUI, that is the core issue with discovery.

<comment><USER17> I don't understand the discovery comment. I don't discover Bob the copier salesman. I decide I need a copier, search for copier retailers and then give Bob a call. Won't bots work the same way?

<comment><USER16> You don't have to discover how to call Bob, which is analogous to finding the bot. But you may need to discover what jargon to use with Bob to make sure you get what you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got an idea the last time I saw this discussed, which probably will make some present HN people rich:

Bots which follow your own conversations/emails/etc, read the comments from other people -- and in another window suggest jokes, information, links etc based on parsed language. Just click to add the suggested answer.

You could install modules to see suggestions from e.g. a stand up comedian, some experts for different topics or just the wikipedia pages for all mentioned non-trivial concepts, etc.

A bot could e.g. help with fixing grammar errors.

Everyone can be their own Woody Allen -- or get help to write as a depressive persona. Or as a Romeo. :-)</comment>


The people trying to save programming from itself - <AUTHOR> https://killscreen.com/articles/people-trying-save-programming <comment><USER2> Been following Casey since the 2nd season of The Jeff And Casey Show. His problem solving methodologies, and programming philosophy have been a huge inspiration to me ever since, and have actually helped me craft better software in my proffessional line of work.</comment>


Google Trends – Harvey "siphoning gas" - <AUTHOR> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=siphoning%20gas <comment><USER2> If you switch from Worldwide to United States, you can see that most of it is Texas

<comment><USER3> Switch to Texas in particular and check out the map by metro area.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=US- TX&q=siphoning%20gas)</comment></comment>