Winamp 2 in HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://jordaneldredge.com/projects/winamp2-js/ <comment><USER2> Ah Winamp. I still use it today.

Justin Frankel is one of my role models as far as how to 'live the dream' goes. He built something great, cashed out young, avoided becoming a tech celebrity, stayed a curious geek and just carried on doing what he loves. The fact winamp is still around and keeping people happy all these years later is the icing on the cake (and proof, if any were needed, that he deserved all the success he got). Justin Frankel really did whip the llama's ass.

<comment><USER3> He got a lot of crap at AOL for developing gnutella and other programs like WASTE. It was pretty contentious for a few years.

<comment><USER2> Ah yes, forgot about WASTE. His corporate disobedience with gnutella etc. made me respect him even more. TBH I think everyone saw the writing on the wall as soon as they bought Winamp... difficult to picture JF happily sitting in a cubicle all day and listening to weekly management stand ups o_O

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> to quote a previous post of mine:

I have a special place in my heart for Winamp's classic UI (Winamp 2). In my opinion, it was the most intuitive interface for a music player. it had a playlist, equalizer, plugins, all of which were condensable to a fraction of it's full size. Of course, now there are a number of similar players that have the same capabilities, but shit, Winamp 2.x was where it started. Even today, it blows todays iTunes interface way out of the water.

<comment><USER5> Winamp was the only thing that I missed when I moved from Windows to OS X years ago. I tried to use VLC as a replacement, but it wasnt the same.

<comment><USER6> Try Vox: [http://coppertino.com/](http://coppertino.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've posted it here before, but Ars Technica wrote an excellent longform article about Winamp's rise and fall: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how- greatest-...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest- mp3-player-undid-itself/)

<comment><USER8> I'm always amazed how whenever an acquisition like that happens, the parent company almost always screws it up in some boneheaded fashion. You bought that company because what they were doing was working, your only job is to not fuck it up.

<comment><USER9> I'm always amazed by this too but I've worked at enough places to see how it happens.

Security says "This new thing has to use our approved login system".

Ops says "This new thing has to run on our servers/VMs".

Eng says "This new thing has to use Technology X so it fits in with everything else".

Nobody needs to have bad intentions but the weight of all that slows it down and makes it un-fun for the original team and the new people who take it over don't care that much about it because it came from outside.

<comment><USER8> Yep, that's exactly how the takeover went at the last place I was working that was acquired. Lots of promises that nothing would change, except, well, this one small thing... to fit into company policy you understand...

I think somehow management sees the assets and wants to capitalize on them, without bothering to understand the process that created the assets in the first place (whether those are people or products). It's like if they took over a farm and harvested all the wheat without planting any seeds, and then wondered why they weren't getting crops anymore.

I just think it's amazing how frequently corporations will buy an asset for millions or billions with apparently no idea how the entity actually works. I mean if I were going to spend a few million on a company, I'd want to know how and why it's been successful, I wouldn't just want to acquire a "brand" that would get immediately tarnished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Discovering this kind of stuff is what makes HN so awesome! This brings back so many memories. Thanks for releasing this.

Sadly, Winamp went completely downhill from here (IMHO) and the subsequent versions never felt as minimal as this version. AIMP[0] comes pretty close and is a good enough clone of winamp if you're interested.

[0] - [http://www.aimp2.us/](http://www.aimp2.us/)

<comment><USER11> I'd love a version of Winamp 2 that works on OS X.

I loved how minimal and fast it was. You didn't need to import and manage your media, just drag a folder onto it and blam, it's playing. Nice keyboard shortcuts, no extra crap.

So much of my music is still just folders of mp3s in /artist/album/*.mp3 format and I really can't be bothered importing it all into iTunes, meaning I just listen to the same few dozen albums I do have in iTunes.

<comment><USER12> That's how all of my music is organized to this day. I haven't tried using iTunes as a media player in a while because when I did, it either ran way too slowly for a basic media player and for some reason it always wanted to obfuscate where the files were, keeping them in (seemingly) arbitrary folders with 5-character names. No idea if it still does that but regardless, I only keep it around for the occasional backing up of my old iPad before doing an update.

These days I more often just drag the folder into the VLC playlist or even use an old version of Winamp if I just want to shuffle through everything or make a playlist. The idea that my music is "in" the media player is something I could never get on board with. The media player is just accessing files in easily located folders. The way iTunes and some others try to hide that fact bothers me on some weird curmudgeonly level.

<comment><USER13> Just FYI you can control whether or not iTunes manages your music folder and there is some customization in Pref > Advanced.

I chose to let it manage the files but reduced some of the folder nesting. It doesn't obfuscate file names and you can elect for Artist > Album > [file] structure or whatever your heart desires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The wasted hours trying out Winamp skins....

<comment><USER15> The wasted hours making Winamp skins...

<comment><USER11> Making Winamp skins and visualisation presets is what got me into graphics and coding, which led to web design, which led to my various web-related careers over the last 15 years. I owe Winamp so so much.

<comment><USER16> That's a big part of why I was inspired to take on this little project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Author here. Looking for a new host for llama.mp3 ([https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/issues/11](https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/issues/11)) anyone want to help save my server?

<comment><USER16> [https://twitter.com/Michcioperz](https://twitter.com/Michcioperz) suggested [https://mediacru.sh/download/Q2HAoRHE- JvD.mp3](https://mediacru.sh/download/Q2HAoRHE-JvD.mp3) that seems to be working for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That looks very cool, but I'd appreciate a bit of context. Maybe it's a work in progress?

Edit: Maybe it's a WIP, it's not linked from the author's project page [http://jordaneldredge.com/projects/](http://jordaneldredge.com/projects/)

I found a Github link deep at the bottom of the page: [https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js](https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js)

<comment><USER16> Author here. Didn't expect it to get much attention. I've added a link to my projects page. I'd be happy to answer any questions the GitHub page hasn't answered.

<comment><USER18> Any plans on using this codebase with Node-Webkit? Just curious

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember something similar: a tribute to Winamp from Yandex.Music team - [http://music.yandex.ru/oldschool/](http://music.yandex.ru/oldschool/) . Here is a screenshot - [https://www.picozu.com/v/temp/u1JCIYOvNspaGHl1VhQxoHhr.png](https://www.picozu.com/v/temp/u1JCIYOvNspaGHl1VhQxoHhr.png) .

</comment><comment><USER20> I still use 2.95 on my winders 'puters. Thank-you for the ZXCVB & J keyboard shortcuts, Winamp team!

</comment><comment><USER21> After this sparked the "good old days" flashbacks, I went to [http://www.winamp.com](http://www.winamp.com) and it looks like they are working on a revamped version of Winamp. The site says: "WE ARE WORKING HARD TO REENERGIZE WINAMP!"

<comment><USER22> Following through to a forum post with more info reveals Winamp has indeed been sold on:

> As you all surely know by now, Winamp & SHOUTcast have recently changed > ownership (from AOL to Radionomy).

The winamp.com website is currently undergoing heavy work and an almost- completely new redesign. As a result, many features will be unavailable, including some in-client services.

The Winamp downloads and Winamp Pro purchases will also be temporarily unavailable whilst code licensed to/by the previous owner is removed/replaced.

We hope to have everything restored and back in working order as soon as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused in the meantime.

Watch this thread for any further updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember telling my 10th grade US History teacher about Winamp. He installed it on his classroom computer - he and I were a bit embarrassed when it played "Really whips the llama's ass" for a few students to hear. Good memories!

</comment><comment><USER24> For parties without DJ I still use Winamp 2 with SqrSoft Crossfading Plugin and "club" preset, which can easily be combined with Limiter to keep the volume somewhat steady (but losing some dynamic within tracks).

<comment><USER25> For Crossfading, I also suggest [http://www.twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com/](http://www.twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com/)

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It better have Milkdrop or it's completely useless!

</comment><comment><USER27> Very nice and inspiring demo.

I wrote a music player from scratch with Sound Manager 2 and I realized ... this stuff isn't that hard. We can build real software in the browser.

Someone bought Winamp for a couple hundred million about 15 years ago. Today, you can throw it together in the browser and do distribution for practically free.

Long live Client-Side Javascript!

</comment><comment><USER28> Ahh, the best player ever... How I miss you.

<comment><USER29> Why miss it? It's not like it stopped working...

<comment><USER30> iTunes, Pandora, Spotify - times have changed and a lot of us retired their massive collection of pirated tunes for a streaming service or much more curated library.

<comment><USER29> Ah, I see, and in that regard I agree. I miss the simple, yet featureful classic Winamp when I chose to use something like Spotify. All you get is simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ah this brings back so many good memories. Looks like [http://nullsoft.com/](http://nullsoft.com/) is still up (for the most part). As a young developer I used to go through this site for little ideas of things to build. Justin always built awesome applications.

</comment><comment><USER32> This brings back good memories. It really was the defacto media player for me, for so many years. I couldn't figure out what else this does other than play, pauses, stops and changes volume? How close to fully functional could this go? Can you adjust balance for example using the HTML5 audio API?

<comment><USER16> I originally thought it was impossible, but today I found this Web Audio API doc, and I think it may actually be possible not only to do the balance, but also the equalizer. I'll at least look into it more.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API)

<comment><USER33> Check out this demo: [http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/webaudio/createMediaSo...](http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/webaudio/createMediaSourceElement.html) \- article: [http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/HTML5-audio-and-the- We...](http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/HTML5-audio-and-the-Web-Audio- API-are-BFFs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Winamp lite, you will never be forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just posted a $15 bounty to "Make it a real app" \-- [https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/issues/2](https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/issues/2)

<comment><USER36> Here's a "real app" that was largely inspired by Winamp: [http://demo.groovebasin.com/](http://demo.groovebasin.com/)

Actually is a fully functional music player that runs in the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Very cool. Doesn't play music modules, though. Still, props!

</comment><comment><USER38> Spotify actually released a Winamp frontend for their service. Works in Windows/Wine: [http://spotiamp.com](http://spotiamp.com)

<comment><USER39> According to the bottom of that page:

Spotiamp is a Swedish product made by Ludde in Gothenburg, Sweden. Spotiamp is not an officially supported product of Spotify®.

<comment><USER38> [https://news.spotify.com/us/2013/12/20/spotiamp-long-live- th...](https://news.spotify.com/us/2013/12/20/spotiamp-long-live-the-llama/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The best part is that the buttons are <div> instead of <button> :-P. HTML5 for the win!

<comment><USER41> The sad part about that is that if he were to use <button> properly styled like the div he would have keyboard navigation for free using

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The nostalgia is strong on HN today!

</comment><comment><USER43> Surely there must be a way to get the scope and equalizer working using the web audio API?

</comment><comment><USER44> I thought this was going to be an emscripten port of Wine running Winamp :(

<comment><USER45> Is the code open source? I don't think so.

<comment><USER44> Wine and X are open source; that's all you need.

<comment><USER46> Wine Is Not an Emulator, though - you'd still need some kind of layer translating the x86 binary to JS.

<comment><USER47> wouldn't that be the role of asm.js?

<comment><USER46> No, asm.js is just "an extraordinarily optimizable, low-level subset of JavaScript". It doesn't run x86 machine code, you'd need to convert it (or interpret it).

According to the webs, there are some x86 → LLVM converters, and then Emscripten can convert LLVM → asm.js, but getting that to work would probably take many months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The easterEgg is nice, was this in the original ?

<comment><USER49> To save others the time of looking it up: "NUL [ESC] L [ESC] SOFT"

<comment><USER46> And to answer the question, yes, it was: [http://www.eeggs.com/items/856.html](http://www.eeggs.com/items/856.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> the irony of this being two posts away from a medium article titled "the sixth stage of grief is retro computing"

</comment><comment><USER51> Was this done with asm.js?

<comment><USER52> It doesn't appear to be the real program, but rather a (functional!) mockup of the UI in HMTL5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> If we could al stop using HTML5 when we mean HTML+JS+CSS. Let's just use HTML.

<comment><USER54> That's... that's what HTML5 means. It's not just "HTML", it includes all of the DOM and APIs that you use through JavaScript to make any of it mean anything. That the <audio> element is reskinnable with CSS in this way is part of the HTML5 standard.

And it's rather much splitting hairs. HTML isn't very useful without CSS, CSS isn't useful at all without HTML, and JS is the only choice of languages for interactivity in HTML. "Can we please stop using 'car' to mean 'car'+'engine'+'tires'".

<comment><USER53> Or rather we could stop saying "car5" meaning just "car". Oh, wait.. :)

<comment><USER54> No, because HTML4 really is a completely different beast. The syntax is 99% the same, the available elements are backwards compatible (though the recommended usage is almost completely different) and HTML4 did not include anything about DOM or APIs.

<comment><USER53> I don't believe that when saying HTML we mean HTML4...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin an enabler of cybercrime - <AUTHOR> http://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/commentary/bitcoin-an-enabler-of-cybercrime/article_fbc4a4ba-3a6c-11e7-a352-0b8301dbafa7.html <comment><USER2> cash - an enabler of crime

The sentence : ...[bitcoin] is only superior for criminal uses... shows a lack of knowledge about the technology and economics involved imo.</comment>


The Coming AI War - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/18/cosmist-terran-cyborgist-opinions-contributors-artificial-intelligence-09-hugo-de-garis.html

<comment><USER2> The speculation in that article is so laboured, I'm surprised it made it into a popular magazine.

Considering that brain-computer interfaces have been in development since the 1970s and have only made it to an extremely coarse, infection-prone vision replacement, it seems unlikely his "cyborgist" party could be a significant force.

That leaves the war between "terrans" and "cosmists;" or "luddites" and "singularitarians." But unlike the luddites of yore, these needn't have easily available industrial targets. The Butlerian Jihad would need to be severe, indeed, to keep isolated research teams or even wealthy hobbyists from constructing a self-improving machine intelligence, once Moore's Law has taken the hardware obstacles out of the way.

That probably wouldn't be an optimal outcome, but I don't see any way to avert eventual AI other than an energy collapse or other catastrophe halting the advance of technology in general.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this with the title that Forbes has: "The Coming Artilect War" - why was it changed to "The Coming AI War?"</comment>


Trippy: An App to Give You Just Enough to Read on Your Commute - <AUTHOR> http://www.shhhaw.com/2010/12/introducing-trippy-an-app-to-give-you-just-enough-to-read-on-your-commute.php

<comment><USER2> I feel that simply entering commute time would be easier and more accurate than giving your origin and destination.

<comment><USER3> I agree, especially since a commute is a regular trip of a nearly constant length and everyone should know about how long their trip will take without the O&D info. As an added bonus it would also allow me to use it in Chicago/Milwaukee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool idea! You should come upstairs to visit us (<http://fogcreek.com/>) for lunch some time. We're on 25.

<comment><USER5> Where you at the Dallas Kiln event? (I can't tell from your profile if you are who I met)

<comment><USER4> I was. (I gave the DVCSU talk.)

<comment><USER5> Oh yeah, I talked to you right afterwards in the lobby for awhile. Really enjoyed your talk btw.

<comment><USER4> Glad you liked it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am continually pleased with the quality of the work coming out of New York hackathons. Here's to keeping this quality of work going for a long time!

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work. I really enjoyed this presentation the other night.</comment>


Austin's $10BN fantasy Subway System (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://kut.org/post/why-cant-austin-have-elaborate-subway-system

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, I think the $10BN figure is a number that was pulled out of thin air. Project connect is estimated at around $1.4BN and covers a lot of the same area, just above ground.</comment>


Will Linux Survive on Netbooks? - <AUTHOR> http://linuxpundit.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/will-linux-survive-on-netbooks/ <comment><USER2> I was forced to buy my netbook with windows ("it is the only one we have in stock right now") and I wasn't willing to go through the hassle of getting a $10 refund. I installed the very latest version of Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier. Everything is fast. Really fast. With the 20 some odd terminal commands I know I can install nearly anything I need (except MS Excel :{) and there is no 30 day trial period that I have to be reminded of constantly, no spyware (not that I ever got it anyways), built in programming stuff like compilers. I'm by no means a serious programmer, just a quant that likes to spend his weekends learning about polymorphism.

I've had such a good experience that I told my computer illiterate friend that I will build his new computer for him for free, provided that he use Ubuntu for 1 month. This guy doesn't know the difference between the terms "URL" and "Web Browser" but I think that for what he does - movies, chatting, email, surfing - he will have a far better experience. Why? No spyware and a much easier UI.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does it matter? This always struck me as a rather useless popularity contest. I'm on ubuntu & except for games*, there isn't a single thing I'd boot vista for. There's one or two long tail apps I'd like to have, but they wouldn't help the linux community much.

[^] And seeing how they treat Macs, I don't think game publishers will put up with developing for 3 platforms.

</comment><comment><USER4> The eee PC and Aspire One, which I believe are two of the best-selling netbooks, both have horrible distros. I gather netbooks were targeted for doing internet and office, so the disros are optimised for doing that and nothing else. If it turns out most people want to do more with their netbook (which the hardware is certainly capable of), it's no surprise that they would avoid linux when linux makes it difficult for them to do what they want.

Does any netbook ship with a non-crippled linux distro? I'd like to see sales figures for that, especially compared to a windows version on the same hardware.

<comment><USER5> I have an EEEPC 901 with Xandros. At first I was quite enamoured with it's distro but it's not that great. The updater fills it up with updates until it runs out of system disk space and I have to reset it, even though I have a 20Gb version (the sysem space is tiny [I don't have it with me so I can't look]). The scheduler isn't very good, scrolling on Firefox comes in bursts and often I think the thing has locked up. Firefox is probably not the best choice because of its bloat (ironic from the light-weight mozilla!). That said, when I ran Plan 9 in Qemu on it, I didn't find any such problems.

Web browsing on my G1 is a much nicer experience. I could seriously see Android being a good fit with my EeePc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> He seems somewhat excited by the prospect of linux failing on notebooks, yet I'm sure I read a rash of these articles a while ago when the Q1 numbers got released, then another bunch when the numbers got disputed. What's he adding to the debate now?

Nothing that I can see, though it appears he's got some axe to grind about linux on smartphones being better than linux on netbooks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Incredible news somehow. Users really liked using Windows better than Ubuntu?

<comment><USER8> 1) Set your system's language to Japanese (or Swahili, or another language which is totally foreign to your experience)

2) Go through a week of normal use, including both routine open-the-Internet- and-send-email use and change-the-desktop-image level non-routine use.

You now know about one hundredth of the amount of pain a non-technical user has when switching OSes. (P.S. She hates brown, cannot change the desktop image, and her nephew who is good with computers doesn't know how to either because none of the files he's describing are on the window and _this is so frustrating_ to her.)

<comment><USER7> The change the system language things hardly seems fair. Ubuntu is available in most (all?) languages, and not very cryptic to understand either. In fact it tends to be more logical than Windows.

Internet/Email: I tend to solve these issues by putting big fat icons for Firefox and Thunderbird (+Open Office) on the desktop (and also in the "quick launch bar" of course).

Desktop background: touche. But people who can't change it on Ubuntu probably can't change it on Windows either?

Nephew: true - most people probably switch to Linux because their nephew tells them to do so... So if the nephew is still on Windows, bad luck.

Also, maybe a lot of people just buy the netbook with Windows and then install Linux anyway (bagging the free Windows license for later use).

Edit: one more thing that is easy to forget: make Open Office to use Microsoft formats by default.

<comment><USER9> You missed the point. It wasn't that Ubuntu isn't localized, it was to attempt to demonstrate the massive frustration users encounter when they don't know how to do anything.

I have a Ubuntu netbook, and I'll agree Linux has come a long way, but when I click on the friendly "you have updates" button and then break my wireless, forcing me to track down drivers/packages I don't hold much hope for the common people as it were. It was frustrating to me!

The language of typical Linux users is very much different than the language of typical PC users I'd say. The ways we would describe a task are much different and the things you learn on one platform often don't help you on the other. A massive problem too is the fact there's essentially no configuration management among Linux distros, making support a nightmare. What's the GUI going to look like? What's the package manager going to be? Etc, etc.

I actually lied. The netbook _used_ to have Ubuntu, now it has OS X. It's easier, even considering the hack to get it on there. Last time I owned a mac was system 7, so it's not like there isn't a learning curve there. It's just that they give a damn about the user experience, and as a general rule _will not release_ unless they know the experience will be good.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but my point was that it is not actually so hard to find out how to do stuff on Linux. If you can read the language, you can find the "system settings" menu - much easier than reading japanese.

"Normal" stuff that is - obviously if you have to fall back on the average Linux tutorial, download drivers and so on, it is bad. But this shouldn't happen usually. What did you do with the wireless drivers? I would have thought that if a netbook comes with Ubuntu, the proper drivers would be installed.

<comment><USER9> The dell-installed Ubuntu prompted me that there were updates available. I downloaded/installed them, my wireless quit working. It was working before the update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FUD patrol is always protecting netizens from BS like this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Linux won't "win" the Desktop until there is a generational leap over other OSes. Linux can't win because everyone else can see what Linux programmers are programming and can copy all the ideas, if not the code outright.

I love Linux, don't get me wrong, but it's always going to be a second banana for the consumer.

<comment><USER12> I don't see any impact from "commercial" software to Linux. As all the commercial software turns to online service, you have to pay monthly fee in order to use the service. Linux will dominate the network market as it was done in embedded system market because it can easily be customized. Any software value on the customized distro (browser, email or IM) is included in the hardware sales (like decades ago when we sold these "huge" computers).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources for Learning API Development - <AUTHOR> Can you share resources for learning api development that makes rest or gRPC APIs available in 15 days? Something that teaches step by step for building an end product? <comment><USER2> One thing that really helped me was when i started using ruby on rails. This framework introduced me to the idea of scaffolding. The basic idea is to just generate large sections of a web application. So you can generate a database table called fish, and rails will generate a delete, Post New etc to change these items using html or in a API.

So I would advice to just start making a API with a tool you are familiar with or learn a new one if you have enough time and just start experimenting.</comment>


Y Combinator Trademark Rejected as Generic - <AUTHOR> http://ycuniverse.com/y-combinator-trademark-rejected-as-generic <comment><USER2> Either this was an invalid ruling or I don't understand trademark law.^0 A trademark is generic "when it no longer identifies a particular manufacturer or source of a product."^1 No one's using "Y Combinator" to refer, for example, to 500 Startups.

The other thing that pops up is that the company is reusing an existing term. This obviously can't be just "a word or phrase that already exists"; "Apple" is trademarked.^2 "Y combinator" the CS concept is certainly in the computing realm, but it's very different from a company. Is "technology and computing" one category that you can't reuse terms? Could you not, for example, make a rope company named "Overhand", because that's a type of knot?

Or would you have to call your company "Overhand Ropes"? I admit to being puzzled.

[0] Preemptive snark: my money's on the latter also.

[1] From [http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/generic- tradem...](http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/generic- trademarks.html)

[2] [https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual- property/trademark/...](https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual- property/trademark/appletmlist.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The post is shockingly editorial: "Regardless of the ultimate outcome, this trademark dispute is just another embarrassment for a firm that continues to look less like the "Harvard of venture capital" and more like an elaborate and mismanaged funnel for acqui-hires."

I'm not sure what that has to do with an attempt to get a trademark, but it certainly seems like the author has some strong, if unrelated, opinions.

<comment><USER4> Seriously, it's pretty strongly worded. Also: big suprise, some startups fail, and some succeed. Much like Harvard graduates.

In the news of the trademark, it is the name of a programming idea after all. It's also a very good name of a company given that "It takes a single argument, which is a function that isn't recursive. It returns a version of the function which is recursive."

<comment><USER5> >the name of a programming idea after all

And Apple's a fruit. I don't really see how applying "YCombinator" to a startup accelerator is generic – did anyone else ever mention the phrase in that context before pg?

(Also, the guy who's bizarrely anti-YC runs a site called YC Universe? All sorts of confusing.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Short and written in a gossipy style. If it weren't YC related, it would have already been flagged to death as not the kind of thing for HN.</comment>


Print your own WoW character in 3D: Behind the scenes look at manufacturing process - <AUTHOR> http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Games/Reviews/figureprints_behind_the_scenes/

<comment><USER2> I wish 3D printing tech was developing faster. I bet there's still room for someone to step in, improve them, and make billions out of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, also wish there was more info on a technical roadmap. It is something I'll be looking to cover more in depth over the coming months.</comment></comment>


Republicans Aid Kanye West's Bid to Get on the 2020 Ballot - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/us/politics/kanye-west-president-republicans.html <comment><AUTHOR> For those who have trouble with the link:

[https://archive.is/p8yRj](https://archive.is/p8yRj)</comment>


New Crypto Index Fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/10/02/new-crypto-index-fund-to-launch-with-backing-from-naval-ravikant/ <comment><USER2> 2-3% management fee is pretty massive. Wealthfront is ~0.25%. Presumably, Wealthfront will add crypto indexing. So I'll look forward to crypto index fund by Wealthfront at their 0.25% fee, and stay out of it until then.

That said, I'm sure this does make sense for some individuals.

I also imagine this won't be the first crypto index fund launch we see!</comment>


Show HN: Free, high quality slide templates – 1 new set every week - <AUTHOR> http://slidegame.io <comment><USER2> If you can include some example of previous email sent on your website... That would help you and your audience. Win Win</comment>


Ask HN: Sell your single page web app - <AUTHOR> I'm buying all single page web apps. Have a stagnant side project you haven't touched in years, or something you are actively maintaining? Doesn't matter I'd like to buy it. Here is my criteria:
- Site must receive more than 10k unique visitors per month - English only
I typically offer the following: - 36x monthly revenue (industry standard) - No revenue? Lets talk anyways. - Don't deal with brokers and their commissions - Escrow 24hr cash close - I have gone from settling a price to closing a sale in 30 minutes, no hoopla, no months of Q&A, just a quick and simple sale.
Shoot me the following info (email in profile) and lets talk. I have acquired a number of websites from HNers in the past: - URL - Last 3mo uniques/pv - Last 3mo revenue - Last 3mo expenses <comment><USER2> What do you usually do with them? I suppose optimize for SEO, to get more traffic and (hopefully) more profits? Also, I'm not an expert in this space, but 36x revenue seems generous since such small apps could be extremely volatile in revenue. Someone could hand their site over to you after an exceptional month of revenue, and you could overpay.</comment>


Kim Dotcom's New Mega Could Dismantle Copyright Forever - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5977163

<comment><USER2> It won't. It is just covering Kim's ass. A service that was really interested in privacy would look totally different.

Encrypted file names, encrypted file with unique key for each file, also dead man's switch and kill code. No accounts - payments with bitcoins or scratch cards and all logs send to /dev/null. Also the server should have .onion address and uploads should be trough it.</comment>


64% of all federal arrests last year were of non-U.S. citizens - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdwv/pr/statement-united-states-attorney-mike-stuart-bureau-justice-statistics-report-1 <comment><USER2> Here's Alex Nowrasteh on this topic: [https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1164862732102963200](https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1164862732102963200)

1.4% of all arrests in 2014 were federal.

Most law enforcement is by local or state governments.

This headline makes it seem like 64% of all arrests were for non-citizens. Not at all the case.

</comment><comment><USER3> This includes a huge number of arrests for crossing the border.

If you ignore immigration crimes, non-U.S. citizens are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.

Without context, this is a textbook case of lying with statistics.

<comment><USER4> Why would you ignore a subset of crimes?

<comment><USER5> If you just read the headline, you think "gee, immigrants sure are committing a lot of crimes here", when actually the increase is due to prosecuting the act of them coming here in the first place. That doesn't completely negate the point vis a vis use of law enforcement resources, but it's very different from "immigrants are stealing, raping, and murdering everyone."

<comment><USER6>
      prosecuting the act of them coming here in the first place.

That's false. Only _re-entry after deportation_ counts as a crime in these statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is the original source [https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/icfjs9818.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/icfjs9818.pdf)

Note these statistics from the highlights.

> The five crime types for which non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be > prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were illegal reentry (72% of > prosecutions), drugs (13%), fraud (4.5%), alien smuggling (4%), and misuse > of visas (2%)

> The five crime types for which U.S. citizens were most likely to be > prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were drugs (38% of prosecutions), > weapons (21%), fraud (12%), public order (12%), and alien smuggling (6%)

> Non-U.S. citizens, who make up 7% of the U.S. population (per the U.S. > Census Bureau for 2017), accounted for 15% of all federal immigration crimes > and 15% of prosecutions in U.S. district court for non-immigration crimes in > 2018 (tables 7a and 13).

With regards to the last stat I recommend you look at Table 7a, because that shows most of the discrepancy is drugs.

It's unfortunate that the press release makes it sound like increased enforcement is what this report warrants. My opinion is the opposite. If we are arresting people for solely immigration offenses, then maybe the way that we should address the "significant drain of federal taxpayer funds to [used] prosecute those that are not taxpayers" is by decreasing enforcement.</comment>


James Deen Was Never a Feminist Idol - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/12/james_deen_stoya_rape_accusations_the_porn_star_was_never_a_feminist_idol.single.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> My girlfriend has a list she's allowed to break our relationship with, as do I.

Last two month she's lost Jose Mourinho and James Deen off it. I'm looking forward to Benedict Cumberbatch getting found out as a wrong 'un and then i'll adopt the smug look whilst waiting for Kelly Brook to turn up at the door...</comment>


There should be a global 'awareness' week for developers - <AUTHOR> https://bsd.network/@mulander/100390180499807877 <comment><USER2> I agree with the core idea here, of developers reducing use of energy-pulling hardware and software resources. However, to both get interest moving and to ensure future participation, there should

1) be a solid plan on how to do it efficiently (HOWTOs),

2) a table of ideal targets (if your footprint is typically X then achieve Y or Z upon reduction, and

3) a public site where the actual results and data can be stored, studied and commented upon.

I feel to quantify this in a monetary way would bring support for the activity from non-developers as well, and perhaps lend to a shift in the way developers purchase hardware.

Two major factors that lead to hardware purchases are

1) software vendor minimum hardware requirements, and

2) hardware vendor advert strategies which often pull developers into buying more than they really need.

This global awareness week could end up making developers more aware of their actual hardware needs, and cause a shift in how companies actually purchase hardware. Done right, you could see a huge impact on the computer hardware market.</comment>


Indian techies are minting a fortune in Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/here-is-how-indians-are-minting-a-fortune-in-bitcoins/articleshow/60299440.cms <comment><AUTHOR> Here's an ad-free, clutter-free version of the same story => [https://outline.com/dtz4wP](https://outline.com/dtz4wP)</comment>


Macaw - A Simple PHP Router - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Codingbean/Macaw <comment><USER2> Probably shouldn't be "hard" coding the scheme (http). Check $_SERVER['https']. You can make sure this fastcgi param exists with a simple directive in nginx (fastcgi_params):

        fastcgi_param  HTTPS  $https if_not_empty;

Also, the 404 route, should be able to be defined as a custom function:

        Macaw::fourofour(function() {
            header($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] . " 404 Not Found");
            header("Status: 404 Not Found");
        });

<comment><USER3> fourofour is not as semantic as notFound, or not_found xD ..

idk. this mixes up routing and api building, right? What people currently use most to build their api (mostly afterwards) is: [http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/](http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/)

btw. here's a nice and new php framework I've just recently found: [http://www.cygniteframework.com/2013/07/quickstart.html](http://www.cygniteframework.com/2013/07/quickstart.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. Php's community have -- with the advent of sane dependency management through Composer, no more PEAR yay! -- move to this small composable library style. I think it's a great thing, using Macaw (or Slim, in my case) plus your business logic modelled as raw, SOLID, tested classes gives you an amazing API to work with,both on the PHP side, and on the network side. I haven't needed to use Symfony for anything new lately,though if I was building a huge app from scratch with a larger team, Symfony is where it's at.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh, _that_ sort of router...

For a second I thought someone had coded an IP router in PHP. Which would be a _really_ interesting thing to see, if not particularly practical.

<comment><USER6> pfsense is as close as it gets

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the "slim" approach on LOC, kudos to that. I would point some - IMO - design problems:

# Static attributes and methods. Are they really needed? They are difficult to test and predict, specially the public attributes.

# The "echo"s on routes. Since every route is a method (encapsulated by one), this behavior could be easily avoided (easier to test and control). You are already using callables, you can easily test (and run) matching routes to execute any callable until a stream is given (on Respect/Rest we learned what a powerful feature it is).

# Lack of tests. Although low LOC, there is much happening, specially on the "dispatch" method (it would be awesome to know through tests what the If's/Else's actually do and prevent).

# Why (as mentioned before) the error header do not provide a proper HTTP header!? It would also be nice to provide two different error routes: one for client errors (404: not found, forbidden) and another to server errors (HTTP/1.1 500 Server Error).

A suggestion (we've been talking a lot on Respect/Rest) is to implement the URI Template (RFC 6570) for matching routes and hydration of parameters (something macaw lacks but i like using the PHP way of $_GET, $_POST and filter_input()). With a component dealing nicely with URI Templates many projects would benefit from it.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want something with more features but still just as simple, check out: [http://flightphp.com/](http://flightphp.com/)

I'm using it to make a JSON backend API and it works great.

<comment><USER9> How does flight compare with klein ([https://github.com/chriso/klein.php](https://github.com/chriso/klein.php))?

<comment><USER10> klein, bottle, flask .. Am I seeing things ?

<comment><USER3> what do you mean?

<comment><USER10> Bottle and Flask are python microframework, I just wonder if Klein's name is a reference to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://macaw.co/](http://macaw.co/) Oblivious or on purpose?

<comment><USER12> The OP has another project called parrot

[https://github.com/GetParrot/Parrot](https://github.com/GetParrot/Parrot)

so I think he just likes parrots and the name is coincidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! Macaw will be the future router of Parrot. I'm doing a rewrite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great project. I personally prefer Python over PHP and use it a lot for most of the web applications. But when I must use PHP in some cases, I like frameworks like this.

For precisely this reason, I wrote a PHP router like this called Marg - [http://github.com/vaidik/marg](http://github.com/vaidik/marg). Used it for 3 projects and I love the way I can keep things simple and sane. And that's why I appreciate this project as well.

Great to see sane projects like these in the PHP community.

<comment><USER14> Sane PHP developers typically don't use global to avoid using objects properly! I only mention it because it seems you haven't given PHP a fair chance

<comment><USER15> to be fair, I've seen that idiom used quite a bit when calling database objects. It's still terrible.

Not as bad as using extract() though. Yes i'm looking at you Wordpress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> this is very elegant. i haven't used php (beyond wordpress) in years, so i am sure a lot has changed with all the frameworks which cropped up. one of the things i miss about php was the simplicity of dropping a file into a path and making requests directly to it, no extra dependencies required. i know a lot of people prefer prettier urls, so why not use .htaccess file for mod_rewrite rather than using something like macaw?

nice job on creating a really damn simple interface.

<comment><USER4> .htacess and nginx rewriting breaks down when you need to do more complex stuff, at least if you wasn't to keep things maintainable and clean. Pushing routing like this through to the app side gives a lot more flexibility :)

<comment><USER16> i can see why having route parsing in the code would be useful. especially when dealing with user created urls such as "/user/pplante/profile"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there any pattern matching router in PHP? Just like Journey on Rails. It is faster to use Patrern Matching than sequential brute force route.

<comment><USER18> Not just a router but Epiphany[1] lets you specify a regex for routes[2]. My favorite part though is the API module which I blogged about a while back[3].

[1] [https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany](https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany)

[2] [https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/blob/master/examples/reg...](https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/blob/master/examples/regex- route/index.php)

[3] [https://trovebox.com/blog/building-trovebox-entirely- using-o...](https://trovebox.com/blog/building-trovebox-entirely-using-our- api/)

<comment><USER17> It still use sequential matching[0]. What i meant is something like AST implementation in routing algorithm, which is obviously faster than sequential algorithm [1] [2]

[0]: [https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/blob/master/src/EpiRoute...](https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/blob/master/src/EpiRoute.php#L171)

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting- yard_algorithm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting-yard_algorithm)

[2]: [http://blog.bigbinary.com/2013/01/29/journey-into-rails- rout...](http://blog.bigbinary.com/2013/01/29/journey-into-rails-routing.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Magic methods are expensive in PHP. You might as well define those explicitly.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's... 87 lines of PHP?

<comment><USER21> Don't worry, I don't get it either...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't see a composer.json in the root of the Github. Is that planned?

<comment><USER23> One problem is the library as it stands doesn't match up to composers namespacing requirements - which some php developers have decided they don't like and therefore are not going to support

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like a nice alternative to using Silex if you just need routing.

</comment><comment><USER15> really nice.

if I had any suggestions at all though it would be to have the 404 route actually return the 404 header (or have a way to specify headers with routes), and also have it handle https.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! I'll get to work on these. :D

<comment><USER3> how about caching as a separate composer requirement, or do you think caching should be in a higher level in the stack?

<comment><USER15> If you can send headers with routes then I suppose you could cache with them as well. Although that could also get a bit tricky if you didn't want the routes to enclose an entire document. The typical use cases i'm thinking of would be a json route and an image route.

Probably, all a bare minimum viable url router should do is display some content based on a url or fail to an error code. I would post my own experiments with building a url router that deals with everything (because I tried it) but the end results were objectively worse than what's already been posted here... i've found that it helps to have the router, and whatever process handles rendering the document as a whole (including headers and caching) be completely separate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Double name is double. cf : [http://macaw.co/](http://macaw.co/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Handy. Nice</comment>


Scientific Discovery by Machine Intelligence: A New Avenue for Drug Research - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.07116 <comment><USER2> I think it's best to read this as a simplification of the author's previous co-authored paper at [http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/14/51](http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/14/51) , with the less dramatic title 'Discovery of novel biomarkers and phenotypes by semantic technologies'.

Self-organizing maps have long been used to develop new avenues for drug research. We used SOMs for data mining HTS screens in the late 1990s. I've not heard much about them recently though. I get the feeling like that haven't added much success.</comment>


Inbox by Gmail: a better way to keep track of events, newsletters and links - <AUTHOR> https://gmail.googleblog.com/2016/04/inbox-by-gmail-better-way-to-keep-track.html <comment><USER2> Until I uninstalled Inbox about 3 months ago on my Android phone it didn't have any features like Bold, Italics, Quote or bullet lists I expect to be able to use when writing any useful email to clients.

If Inbox seeks to be an email client it desperately needs these features. Back to Gmail app for me.

<comment><USER3> I ended up using CloudMagic due to its large number of integrations.You should have a look at that too.</comment></comment>


Great series on the 3 ways Russia crafts fake news into real real - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006188105/countering-disinformation-active-measures.html <comment><AUTHOR> We got into a discussion at work on this. How do you battle a strategy that injects fake news stories into publishers hands, and does it over the course of 3-10 years or more, internationally. Basically sabotaging any chance for valid researcher by those trying to seek the truth on a given (potentially planted) subject. It is a brilliant tactic, if not so insanely nefarious. Has anyone figured out a counter measure that comes close to helpful?</comment>


Ask HN: what programming language is most suitable for building a translator? - <AUTHOR>

How long do you think this will take? Is there a good tutorial out there to get started?
Thank you! <comment><USER2> It's also necessary for us to know a.) What platform (phone, Windows, Linux, Mac...) and/or b.) On the web or desktop?

With the answer to these questions you should be able to easily find out for yourself what language to use, as it seems you have no preference. How fast you want the translations to happen matters because it will tell you how low level of a language you're going to want.

If you're doing it on the web I would give PHP a shot as your main weapon, with the regular open web technologies for client side (JavaScript, HTML, CSS... just building the page).

If you're going for a Windows desktop application, I would use C# because I consider it relatively easy to get into and will probably be powerful enough. Some extra programming 'oomph' is going to be put in to get into lower languages for better performance.

If you're going for the phone you have to think about what kind of phone. If you want the application to be accessed through the web, then well, there's your answer :). For the Windows Phone 7 you can use C# with Silverlight and/or XNA to create your translation application.

So, with C# you can create a C# desktop app and port a -lite version to the Windows Phone 7 with little hassle ;).

</comment><comment><USER3> You might need to be more specific: to translate from what to what? Human languages, computer languages, etc??

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It is a human language translator in general, English to French, for example.

<comment><USER3> That is a massive project. Have you looked at Google Translate? Hundreds of computer scientists have worked on it for decades and it still is not very good. But if you are motivated ....

My personal preference would be to use Python (it's available on Windows, Mac and Linux). There is a very nice natural language toolkit available for Python which will help you with parsing the input language. During the early stages you want to experiment with algorithms more than being worried about speed, optimization can come later.

<comment><USER4> A large proportion of the academic Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics community use Python, so it really is the natural choice for a project in those fields.

As for how long it will take? You can have something capable of translating a couple of hundred words up and running in hours. To do it properly (at a quality approaching that of even a bad human translator) will take a lifetime.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What ergonomic office chair would you recommend? - <AUTHOR> I am 2 meter (6.56 feet) tall and having some back problems because of sitting for long periods of time at a computer screen. What office chair would you recommend? Price is not that much of a deal, I value my health more than that. <comment><USER2> I bit the bullet and got an Aeron with attachable head rest. My wife thought I was nuts for spending that much on a chair, but it's completely worth it since I work from home.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if I had the same model but my work provided these before we moved offices. Now I have a different chair but really prefer the Aeron. They are great.

I have wanted to try the steelcase think chair.

I would also add that posture and exercise (strength training) will go a long way in cutting down on pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our office has been using the Lorell Exec High-Back for the last couple years and so far we've had no complaints. Before we got these, we had a lot of complaints... Price is very reasonable at $155.00 shipped from Amazon if you have Prime. [http://www.amazon.com/Lorell-High-Back-Swivel- Chair-x28-1/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Lorell-High-Back-Swivel- Chair-x28-1/dp/B0074GX2YE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454106378&sr=8-1&keywords=lorell+chair)

<comment><USER4> Correction. Apparently they've changed the models a little bit and this is the actual model with all the adjust-ability that our office loves. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Q5XTE8?keywords=lorell&...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Q5XTE8?keywords=lorell&qid=1454339664&ref_=sr_1_3&sr=8-3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm currently using one of these: [http://officemaster.com/products/index.php?view=product&sid=...](http://officemaster.com/products/index.php?view=product&sid=159)

It's definitely best suited for tall users (if you're not over about 6'3" you will NOT be comfortable) and is both taller and has a deeper seat than most chairs.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a Steelcase Think at work and love it. I'm also ~2 meters tall and haven't had any issues with it (I make sure to stand up/stretch/briefly walk around fairly often, but I think that should be done regardless of the comfort of your chair).

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out the DX racer chairs

[http://www.dxracer.com/](http://www.dxracer.com/)

Price is not very low, but you get what you pay for!

I really like the lower back support on some of the chairs.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had a Steelcase Leap at my old agency job. I miss it dearly.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, the Aeron feels like an utter toy compared to the Steelcase.</comment></comment>


Eigenmorality - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820&re=1 <comment><USER3> As Aaronson points out, PageRank has a few edge-cases when used to do this analysis, basically because it treats its graph as a closed, internally- solipsistic system--it has no definition of morality other than what each of its nodes prefer of one-another. This works if you have a diverse spectrum of preference functions distributed among the nodes (the result tends toward a "live and let live" meta-ethics), but if your analysis is aimed at a preferentially homogeneous group (e.g. Nazi Germany), PageRank won't give you the solution of "move the 'evil' majority toward the tenets of the good minority." It'll instead suggest that the optimal system would have the 'good' minority give up and become 'evil'.

Scott Alexander suggests ([http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/20/ground- morality-in-part...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/20/ground-morality-in- party-politics/)) you could instead use DW-nominate, the tool that does meta- cluster-analysis to mathematically detect "party lines" in congress (which are basically just clusters in human-utility-function-space anyway), to find what preference-subfunctions (e.g. helping old ladies cross the street, returning a wallet you find laying on the ground) correlate together into a cluster (that might be called 'goodness') -- and then grounding/normalizing the PageRank analysis with that, such that you can tell whether the system as a whole is in a 'good' or 'evil' state.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Once a network becomes too homogeneous, its collective problem solving abilities go way down. Effective networks can adapt to and benefit from a large number of different fluid participants. It is a cheap way to get complexity/variety from simple individual nodes, and to be more robust, safe- guarded against variance and overfit.

The author aims to converge upon a group with a good morality (even though its members may have been in the minority). But what is to say that all-good morality is good for a group's decision making as a whole? Would it be sustainable from an energy viewpoint? Or collapse and destroy everything? Won't we need a supply of villains for our moral heros [1]? That to converge on an optimal answer as a network we need wildly opposing views? That to be stable an ecosystem needs variety, decay and destruction?

More philosophically: Is a program like this moral cooperation plan based on pay-it-forward-currency even moral in itself (as it clearly discriminates)?

Attempts at a supermorality have stunned philosophers and logicians for ages. If a rich benefactor would give a 1000 people in a room a 1000$, and if you ask for more you get 1$ more, but 999 people would get 2$ deducted, people would leave that room with some having enough to buy a cup of coffee. 1 million dollars wasted by the greedy individualistic game theory that seems to be in place in animals: I want energy for me and my family first, forget the network. Contests to give a $ amount equal to the lowest unique number send in, would have perfectly rational players roll a dice with the number of contestants, all submit 1 trillion, and the one person who rolls a 1 submits a billion. Instead they receive bids as low as single cents in a manner of days.

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311001639) "The joker effect: Cooperation driven by destructive agents"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is _very long_ but worth reading.

The modeling exercise herein is basically attempting to use a game theoretic model to test out some really dumb/simplified models of cooperation and whether the behaviors observed approximate anything approaching what our intuitions might say is moral behavior, up to and including an 'eigenjesus' and 'eigenmoses' up against tit_for_tat bots and the like.

<comment><USER6> To each his own. I actually think its overly long, wordy, rambling, poorly conceived and short any novel or important ideas.

<comment><USER7> He is exploring how the Internet might be used to save civilization. What constitutes an "important idea" in your book?

<comment><USER8> Every tyranny is predicated on saving civilization.

Also, every idea that actually helps civilisation is incubated in a tiny minority (perhaps in just one mind). Since that minority is engaged in creative work, it is almost certainly an out-group. Adopting the morality of the ruling class and building connections with it are the surest way to power. But these are a full-time job.

I think the idea of quantifying morality might be improved by basing it not on cooperation but simply upon _communication_ , e.g. how well do you know the opinions of those you _disagree_ with? Note that this is almost the opposite approach of the path to power.

<comment><USER7> I don't think "tyranny of the majority" applies here. The proposed system makes minority opinions _more_ visible, if anything. There would even be an incentive to have a minority opinion, if you truly believed the majority was incorrect about something. In response to your last point: that sounds like an interesting modification: letting every bot see every other bot's (possibly evolving) code. But perhaps to avoid Skynet, bots should use the other bots' published APIs (which could opt to include a "getCode" method), and judge each other by their actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please note that what follows can be interpreted as criticism, but it's not intended as such. I found this article quite interesting, and for me, it was the starting point for a lot of different thoughts about game-theoretical approximations of morality. So what follows is a somewhat tangential addition to the article, and not a critique of it.

My problem is not with the "eigenmorality" concept, nor with the various takes on playing it out across consecutive Prisoner's Dilemma sessions. That aspect is extremely interesting. Rather, my problem is with the Prisoner's Dilemma as a valid ground on which to test something like morality.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a foundational, theoretical framework for evaluating human behavior. And it's a wonderful, elegant framework. But it treats humans as emotionless agents, and the "punishment" as an abstract, theoretical, rationally navigable scenario. Place real human beings into the Prisoner's Dilemma, with real-world consequences, and you get all sorts of unexpected results. The Prisoner's Dilemma is notorious for holding up perfectly fine _in vitro_ , but less so _in situ_. Cultural conditioning plays a _huge_ role in how real people act in the game. So do emotions, and irrational heuristics like overemphasizing loss aversion. (Tversky and Kahneman's work has a lot to say about the latter.)

Using the Prisoner's Dilemma as a proving ground, I think you'd arrive at an abstract model of morality -- but you wouldn't capture how morality actually plays out with quasi-rational, emotional, circumstantially driven, human agents. And, philosophically speaking, that's where morality actually counts the most.

<comment><USER10> > But it treats humans as emotionless agents, and the "punishment" as an > abstract, theoretical, rationally navigable scenario. Place real human > beings into the Prisoner's Dilemma, with real-world consequences, and you > get all sorts of unexpected results.

No, that's actually the entire point of the Prisoner's Dilemma - it's not a framework for evaluation, it's the tension between the rational decision and human action that is exactly why the Prisoner's Dilemma is a prized example of game theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is an interesting idea. Aaronson may be joking when he says he's "solv[ed] a 2400-year-old open problem in philosophy," but in case he's not, this doesn't come anywhere close to solving ethics. Philosophically speaking, it's still necessary to show why his definition of "moral" holds up. All he's done is assess a certain quality and then call it "morality." I think it could better be called "meta-cooperativeness" or something like that.

I think Aaronson realizes this, because he does talk about how Eigenjesus and Eigenmoses don't accord with our moral intuitions in some cases. He also addresses this somewhat in the section "Scooped by Plato." His major point-- that something like Eigenjesus can be useful, even if it cannot deduce terminal values--still holds.

<comment><USER12> Yep. I think what he's really trying to do is find a definition of morality that's useful, not necessarily complete. As models go, it was useful enough to change my thinking a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the definition of morality in the article is far too simplistic. In my (Christian) view, it's an important aspect of moral maturity to be able to be _nice_ to immoral people without _cooperating_ with their goals. Besides that dichotomy, the article already mentions that the model lacks critical information, specifically, the actors don't know whether the other actors they're [not ]cooperating with are "good" or "bad".

That said, I find this approach to defining morality fascinating. Maybe if the definitions are refined it will manage to tell us something we already know (not entirely sarcastic; that would be legitimately impressive for a mathematical construct regarding morality).

<comment><USER14> Occasionally "being nice" (cooperating when tit-for-tat suggests defection) dampens avalanche effects caused by defection-happy actors; it prevents the "an eye for an eye makes everyone blind" ending. In that sense, it has value.

<comment><USER15> Thus forgiving acts much like error correction in a data stream - <USER2> preventing propagation of defects, it limits damage.

<comment><USER16> Forgiveness also has great psychological benefits for those who practice it. In some cases people whose lives have been focused for years on some great wrong that was done to them, have only been able to reach their own personal goals after forgiving the offending party.

Of course vengeance can have psychological benefits too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> my friends and i had started on this already. i had a hard time explaing to people why it was valuable; looks like scott has done it for us.

please help us!

[https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop](https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop)

right now all we have is a way to state which facebook users a person trusts. there's a chrome extension to help with this. it's extremely basic.

i have a server running at [https://dewdrop.neyer.me](https://dewdrop.neyer.me) \- we need a lot more help!

i'm just putting it on github now - so i'll update the readme in a few minutes.

<comment><USER15> Cool... After reading that, I realised that Eigenmorality is to social networks what Pagerank is to search engines - great to see somebody already working on this!

<comment><USER18> You would think someone at Facebook is already looking at this question...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Considering that a majority of people who agree with each other are "moral" is highly problematic. Even if everyone in the system is morally equal, this system would automatically create and enhance differences between groups.

The author uses the example of climate-change deniers to express the opinion that minority groups have "withdrawn itself from the main conversation and retreated into a different discourse."

Is this true of other minority groups - feminists? Homosexuals? Minority ethnic groups? It seems highly awkward to claim the same thing.

A better system would be one which considers how to cater for individuals rather than declaring a populist majority to be a special, protected ingroup. There's enough of the latter already.

<comment><USER20> The article does acknowledge this point, and offers a possible solution. In the edit at the end, i t suggests a system for distinguishing those who initiate defection from those who respond to ti with defection, and in principle that could make defecting against a group that didn't do anything "wrong" a wrong thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems related to the idea of coherent extrapolated volition ([https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf](https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf)). Both have some of the same problems--in particular, setting up the system requires making moral judgments about how to do so, so it's not actually value-neutral.

(Aside: If I have two completely different thoughts about an article, should I post them in two separate comments or in the same comment?)

<comment><USER16> (My preference is two separate comments. Better threads, better ordered.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow: _" The mathematical verdict of both eigenmoses and eigenjesus is unequivocal: the 98% are almost perfectly good, while the 2% are almost perfectly evil."_ The author says this diverge violently from most people's moral intuitions, but actually this result is PRECISELY what moral relativism predicts. See, there are 2 school of thoughts attempting to explain where morality comes from:

\- either morality is an absolute concept (things are inherently good or evil, theists might say this good/evil is defined by a god or gods). This is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism)

\- or morality is relative, defined by people, defined by cultures (what one culture might consider immoral, another culture will consider it moral, and nobody is inherently right or wrong). This is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism)

If moral relativism is right, it would be absolutely expected that the 98% are "almost perfectly good", since they do things that the majority consider good. What a fantastic essay...

<comment><USER22> That's... kinda not a very good description of the major contemporary schools of thought on metaethics. I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since there's no base case for the recursion. Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold that moral language is not meant to express statements which are either true or false, i.e., it is not semantic or truth-apt; but I have no idea what it would mean for 'good' to be defined as 'different cultures think different things are good'. What's the difference between 'good' and 'fzoom', then?

This appears both well-written and standard: [http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/philoso...](http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/philosophy/An%20Introduction%20to%20Contemporary%20Metaethics.pdf)

I'd refer you to my own writings on the subject but I don't think they've been very productive in practice of understanding, so I'll leave you with a reference to the standard literature, and remark that the correct analysis (using standard nomenclature, which is somewhat misleading) is obviously moral cognitivism::strong cognitivism::moral realism::naturalist reductionism.

<comment><USER23> > I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism > seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the > word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since > there's no base case for the recursion.

Wouldn't the meaning of "good" be "considered to be good by the given culture, group, or individual"?

> Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold that moral language is > not meant to express statements which are either true or false, i.e., it is > not semantic or truth-apt;

Do you have any data on the percentage of philosophers who subscribe to various beliefs? It sounds like you're describing non-cognitivism, which I'm fairly familiar with, although I didn't think it was a widely accepted view.

<comment><USER24> Take a look at PhilPapers Surveys, maybe: [http://philpapers.org/surveys/](http://philpapers.org/surveys/)

the rough gist (from [http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP.pdf](http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP.pdf)) seems to be

      14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism
      17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.

The results are also here: [http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl](http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl) (set response grain to "fine" as the note at the top suggests)

correlation results should also be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "The deniers and their think-tanks would be exposed to the sun; they'd lose their thin cover of legitimacy."

Don't we have the ability to do this now by visualizing or analyzing citations? A set of "fake" think-tanks which promote bogus ideas should be identifiable as a mostly-disconnected component of a graph today. We don't need to get each think tank's explicit opinions about the others. Aaronson points out this single-purpose inquiry would encourage gaming, but analyzing a graph built for other incentives may give more "honest" results (at least for a while).

And we have, at least five years ago: [http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/01/using-pagerank-to- ass...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/01/using-pagerank-to-assess- scientific-importance/) . You can follow links from there to a project called EigenFactor, academic research about shortcomings of PageRank in this application, and more.

Results of such analyses should be used as input to human thought processes and not some sort of legislative robot.

</comment><comment><USER26> I found the addendum about the time-sequence of bad acts to be the most interesting, in that how you approach the problem leads to another wide spray of outcomes.

Scott mentions the "forget the past" and "address root causes" sides, but how do you deal with things in the middle?

Even being able to provide a model that allows for injustices from centuries ago would be impressive, but how should such things decay? Again, the same pressures come into play, based on the interests of the judged parties.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's probably no coincidence that repeated prisoner's dilemna models another phenomenon: willpower.

George Ainslie argues in "Breakdown of Will" that will is actually the result of negotiations between past and future selves.

[http://www.picoeconomics.org/HTarticles/Bkdn_Precis/Breakdow...](http://www.picoeconomics.org/HTarticles/Bkdn_Precis/Breakdown_Will.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> This Tolkien quote builds a similar circular definition of "worth", which might be amenable to the same kind of analysis. [https://twitter.com/JRRTolkien/status/480127254857400320](https://twitter.com/JRRTolkien/status/480127254857400320)

<comment><USER29> "All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others."

<comment><USER28> I now realize I should have copied the text into the comment in the first place.

<comment><USER30> It's not too late to edit your post :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It seems to me that this would only be of interest if it can be shown that an immoral person is not someone that cooperates with other immoral people but not with moral people.

<comment><USER32> Do you mean that "moral" should mean "someone who cooperates with others" and "immoral" should mean "someone who does not cooperate with others"? Then "moral" and "immoral" would just mean "cooperative" and "uncooperative," which we already have words for. Plus, morality shouldn't require you to cooperate with immoral people (although whether you should actively punish them or not is the eigenJesus-eigenMoses question).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Needy babies are moral monsters according to many of these models..

<comment><USER34> Needy babies are also stupid according to many notions of intelligence, ugly according to many notions of beauty, etc. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those notions; it means they aren't designed for assessing babies.

<comment><USER35> Maybe this is me being pedantic, but I'd disagree with that they aren't designed for assessing babies, and say that there's a more elegant explanation of a second layer of filtering which informs on the validity of a first layer of assessment. Stupid does define a baby, but this definition holds contextually different connotations; and this context is what makes there be "nothing wrong with" those "traditionally bad" assessments.

Not sure where this (my rambling) came from off of the parent article, but it spawned some interesting thoughts at least :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> His definition is much closer to "popularity" than to anything I would recognize as "morality".

It's strange to exclude intent from your model when it's an important factor in almost all systems of morality.

</comment><comment><USER37> Good read, but I can't help but end in thinking that by the time all of this would have been figured out, our civilization will be long gone.

</comment><comment><USER38> There is no right or wrong, just acts with unescapable consequences and your freedom to learn something from your choices.

<comment><USER39> The concepts of right and wrong certainly exist, or we couldn't be talking about them. But not everyone agrees what is right and what is wrong.

It sounds like you are saying that there is no absolute right or wrong, that right and wrong are human inventions prone to variation, not some fixed celestial law. That is exactly the stance which Aaronson took in his essay so I believe you two agree on that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> You can't "solve" this problem in the same sense that you cannot develop a universally consistent foundation for mathematics. Goedel is there preventing you from EVER proving that one set of axioms is better than another.

I again wrote a longer response but have shortened it because the author seems to have committed a rather grave error which is to assume that human moral 'intuition' is in any way consistent. There are heaps of evidence (cue the trolley car) that human moral judgements really should not be considered a guide for anything. The fact that we can capture the disasters of collective morality observed under various regime's during the 20th century ought to tell us that following those models as a universal foundation for human relations is a terrible idea.

Might also be worth paying a visit to eigennicolo and not adhere to such rigid systems.

<comment><USER41> Well I would like to read your "longer" response. But I thought I would just back you up on the Godel connection: the key to that theorem is also a self- referential-ness.

I would also throw in that financial systems in general suffer from this same problem: we assign value to items that get assigned value. Where is the objectivity? There is none.

It is quite ironic that I found your comment at the bottom of the HN comment queue, and it is also by far the most penetrating, IMNSOO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was following Scott's posts for a while. Most notable feature of those posts: everything he says is predictable. Blog is designed to appeal to the liberal academic establishment, which knows answers to all important questions, and is never in doubt. I don't remember a single example of Scott's opinion which could be deemed controversial in any sense. "Eigenconformism" would be a better name for his blog.

<comment><USER39> I don't think the blog is consciously designed to appear to liberal academics. As an MIT professor, Aaronson IS the liberal academic establishment, so it is no mystery that his writing appeals to his peers.

I don't know about you, but I'm willing to admit Aaronson knows more answers to important questions than I do.

<comment><USER42> > Aaronson IS the liberal academic establishment, so it is no mystery that his > writing appeals to his peers

I'm afraid you got cause and effect in reverse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Happiness is the only intrinsic value for a human being, and thus a moral person is a person who pursues happiness effectively. (How to do that is another story.) However, Aaronson's proposed definition of a moral person is not the effective way to pursue happiness. Thus, it is immoral.

It's also immoral to call for all of us to sacrifice industrial output for future generations to solve the supposed climate change problem. There is no reason to presume that future generations are more important than the present generation (in fact, it is demonstrably the case that they are not). Thus, this position is profoundly immoral.

However, the implicit assumption that sacrifice is moral is common to most world religions and also altruism, which is probably where he imported it from. All of them are morally bankrupt. A scientist shold be able to be skeptical and see such logical flaws, even if he is not able to propose the correct solution.

<comment><USER44> Are you trying to make some baroque point that I'm missing, or am I giving you too much credit, i.e. you're actually just ranting incoherently about climate change conspiracy and Randian selfishness-as-virtue?

Or, option 3, are you just trolling?</comment></comment>


Iron Man's Opening Weekend Box Office? $201mm Worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/05/iron-mans-opening-weekend-box-office-201mm-worldwide/ <comment><USER2> A few months ago friend of mine in the movie industry told me to buy MVL.

[http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...](http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chdet=1210044012359&chddm=24242&q=NYSE:MVL&);

Of course, I didn't have any money to put in the market at the time.

The good thing for MVL is that they are no longer just licensing their names, but actually producing the films, so they get all the profits.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rightly so. With the appropriate suspension of belief, and a timely remind that the story is, after all based on a comic book I found the movie very enjoyable.</comment>


PfSense 2.2.1 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1661

<comment><USER2> For those as ignorant as me, here's the Wikipedia explanation of what PfSense is:

        pfSense is an open source firewall/router computer software distribution
        based on FreeBSD. It is installed on a computer to make a dedicated
        firewall/router for a network and is noted for its reliability and offering
        features often only found in expensive commercial firewalls. It can be
        configured and upgraded through a web-based interface, and requires no
        knowledge of the underlying FreeBSD system to manage. pfSense is commonly
        deployed as a perimeter firewall, router, wireless access point, DHCP
        server, DNS server, and as a VPN endpoint.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Do checkout OPNsense aswell. It's a PfSense fork with a (more liberal and OSI compliant) BSD license instead of one seemingly created by the org itselves, which actually was one of the reasons for the fork in the first place.

(If I remember correctly, this was also the main reason why the main author of m0n0wall strongly advised to check this fork out in his goodbye message when the m0n0wall project closed up shop)

[https://opnsense.org/](https://opnsense.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> How well is the BSD world keeping up with modern QoS and queue management? A quick Google search indicates that PfSense probably has CoDel, but none of its more useful derivatives like fq_codel. And do its network drivers have or need dynamic byte queue limits as included in some drivers for Linux 3.3 and later?

OpenWRT is doing great these days, so what's PfSense still got as its key advantages?

</comment><comment><USER5> Are they still using PF code imported from OpenBSD 4.5? That code is 6 years old and has been vastly improved over the years.

<comment><USER6> Is that the same code in FreeBSD 10? I was under the impression that the code in FreeBSD, while pretty old compared to the most recent OpenBSD, has vast performance improvements as far as multi core processing and 10Gbps processing whereas most of those changes haven't been accepted upstream.</comment></comment>