Google removes over 5M reviews from Play Store to improve TikTok rating - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-removes-over-5-million-reviews-from-play-store-to-improve-tiktok-rating-1681721-2020-05-25 <comment><USER2> This really hits on a lot of nerves of the general HN crowd (especially when these things are combined):

\- Google

\- "Censorship" (loosely defined)

\- China (vs India vs a US company, which could really be its own point)

But if you read the article it seems to be a logical decision. Google (likely) did something similar for zoom: [https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android- app-r...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-app-rating- has-been-absolutely-destroyed-by-coronavirus/)

Assuming there's nothing left out by the author, I don't really think there's anything newsworthy here, just something that google did that aligns with its past actions (not to say it doesn't belong on HN)

<comment><USER3> there was no China Vs India. Just Tiktok vs Youtube - really Indian Youtube and Tiktok content creators dissing each other...

<comment><USER2> I just meant that Tiktok is a chinese owned company (and therefore state- owned). China has forced companies to do similar things before.

<comment><USER4> Right, by strong-arming businesses with the threat of not having access to the Chinese market - i.e. forcing Apple to move Chinese citizen cloud data to government-owned data centers.

Google doesn't even have access to China so there's no financial motivation.

<comment><USER2> In 2018 google demonstrated interest in re-entering the chinese market: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_\(search_engine\))

It wouldn't be a stretch to assume there's something going on behind the scenes that China could use to force Google's hand. I'm not saying that's what happened but that is a possible response I was thinking about when writing my original comment.

<comment><USER4> And summarily pulled out after Google employees revolted, showing that the employees at Google care more about privacy than money than the employees at Apple.

Google still doesn't have access to China and even if they tried it again, the employees would leak and stop it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _" Another reason was the enraged fans of famous Indian YouTuber Carry > Minati flooding PlayStore with 1-star reviews.

Carry Minati had created a video titled YouTube Vs TikTok, part of an ongoing feud between YouTube and TikTok users. His video went viral and was taken down for violating YouTube's terms of service. This happended because many TikTok users reported the video saying it was bullying in nature."_

Seems reasonable enough to remove those because this is just brigarding and has nothing to do with authentic users of the app.

<comment><USER3> I happened to watch the video, which was a response to a Tiktok user badmouthing Youtube creators. I didn't really see any bullying, just funny retorts. I guess when it comes to Youtube, they just censor anything as long as enough people complain.

<comment><USER6> 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube _every minute_ ; it's impossible to moderate all of that. "Lots of users reported it in a short timespan" is a reasonable heuristic to quickly remove ISIS beheading videos and whatnot.

It's not perfect, but nothing YouTube does at this kind of scale will be.

<comment><USER3> Right, but in addition, not providing any transparency to the content creator, or any ability to appeal the decision or re-instate the video in my opinion is unforgivable.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the entire process of dealing with exceptions (or indeed, anything that involves human judgement) is atrocious at YouTube, and has been for many years.

jwz wrote about this years ago as well (and there are many more stories): [https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair- use...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use-appeal- process/)

That being said, I feel too many people fail to appreciate the problems YouTube is facing and are too quick to simply shout "censorship!"

<comment><USER7> That link calls me a brogrammer man child... My ego is hurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I understand the need to remove "review bombs", but aren't review bombs reviews too?

Say a company that develops a product says or does something insensitive, in the earlier days, people would publicly boycott that product, related products or what have you. The company would either stand down and apologize, or put it's foot down and say it's right.

Now picture the same thing with Tik-Tok. There are innumerable instances where Tik-tok has been shown to be biased, censors specific content, etc etc.

Review bombing is as good as boycotting a company. Causing a company real consequences in response to their actions.

It's a form of rightful protest. I am not using the product. I am expressing my views about the product in a review system that is public and open. As long as there are no bots involves, Google is morally wrong, in my view.

<comment><USER9> The point of a reviews from an app store's perspective is to help users decide whether they would benefit from an app. That some subreddit or Twitter or whatever decides to brigade a particular app does not necessarily provide much signal about whether a generic user will want an app. An app marketplace is not generally going to be interested in facilitating boycotts on apps in the given marketplace. If it wants an app boycotted, it can ban it. Otherwise, the incentives are probably not aligned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Curious, how is India Today generally regarded in India? I ask because to me the style and tone of this article sounds like something that came out of an elementary school newspaper. E.g. "It was still the talk of the town but for all the wrong reasons", "could be the result of Google removing user reviews so that the app could get some balance." The hackneyed cliches and oddly stating a presumption as fact just strike me as extremely juvenile.

I'm in no way saying US news is better, and it is often times much worse, but it's usually not worse in the way this article is.

<comment><USER11> It's kind of the state of Indian news media of this generation. All outlets are crazy for making even mundane coverage as dramatic as possible to compete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> People are discussing this as a China vs India thing.

It is not.

People recently found that TikTok is extremely lax in dealing with content that promotes violence.

[https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui- acid-...](https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-acid- attack-1505122)

<comment><USER13> Or Youtube takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to content with weapons.

<comment><USER12> Tiktok too takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to offending China.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I remember a Tiktocker getting banned for pointing out that China has Muslims in concentration camps and it barely made the news cycle. Tiktok found something else she had also violated and used that as a banning offense...but we all know full well they would have never enforced that were it not for her CCP rant. Tiktok has a lot of creatives on it, but I worry that it's a bit of an infiltration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd take a guess the real explanation is far simpler... Google let's anyone write a review, but if an end-of-week logs analysis shows that you never installed the app, or that the review was written via tor from an account created 30 seconds ago, then it's removed as spam.

<comment><USER16> Does it work like this for all apps?

<comment><USER15> I guess so

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Were they real reviews, or Indian review-bombs generated as part of a nationalistic campaign to get back at China?

Review sections were weaponized long ago, first by companies, and now, increasingly, by nations.

<comment><USER18> Indian review-bombs, but for the other reasons entirely. The dumb ones as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google did this as part of review integrity. Doesn't have anything to do with censorship, as far as i can tell.

disclaimer: ex-google employee, who did not work in play.

<comment><USER20> Work in play, heh...

Silly puns aside though, I definitely agree with your viewpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >to improve TikTok rating

The article gives no evidence of this. Sure the rating improved from 1.2/5 to 1.5/5, but that doesn't mean it's the purpose of the removal.

</comment><comment><USER22> Posting from a throwaway account - This article barely scratches the surface. This was a very entertaining story that I followed to the minute and here's some context:

Tiktok content, specifically in India, from the very start has been very[1] very[2] _cringy_ (weird hairstyles, weird things being said, weird ways of expressing friendship, love, etc). I don't mean the cringe that you associate with western Tiktok content but for some reason majority of what the Indian kids were producing stood out as being beyond cringe to existing internet users (mainly Youtube / Instagram userbase). I suspect this has to do with the millions of first-time internet / smartphone users on Tiktok + the heavy influence of exaggerated emotional Bollywood drama now being done in 15 seconds on a smartphone.

Youtube on the other hand obviously had an existing audience that was used to consuming content of a certain level of quality / production. Apart from just pure cringe content, Tiktok obviously did not bother with copyright infringements much and in fact promoted the concept of people plagiarizing each other's work. So the Youtube / IG communities started making memes and calling out the cringe and bad content of Tiktok.

At some point one of the big influencers on Tiktok (Amir Siddiqui referred to in this article) provoked one of the biggest Indian Youtuber, Carryminati who is known for roasting people. Amir made a video saying Tiktok videos require talent, hard work, and a lot more dedication than Youtube videos and basically asked Carry to roast him.

Carry then took on the challenge and released an 8-minute roast video that beautifully called out all the cringe that tiktok users make, things that Amir had done in the past, etc. That Youtube roast video set several records within hours. The roast was actually so effective, it was hilarious to browse through Tiktok for the next few days as the entire Tiktok community sort of agreed and started making fun of each other and that single video actually shook the entire Tiktok community.

About 5-6 days later, Youtube took down the video (which was now the highest liked video of India by far) without explanation probably after receiving thousands of flags from tiktok users. It's worth mentioning that the roast included comparisons of Amir to being a eunuch multiple times among other questionable insults because of his past tiktok videos. In my opinion, the video was definitely not trying to be Politically Correct but it wasn't bad enough to be taken down.

Once the video was taken down, the Youtube and Instagram(meme pages) community started a campaign to leave a 1-star rating for Tiktok on the playstore and basically destroyed their rating which was about 4.5 when this started.

In case you're wondering, I am an avid HN reader, an accomplished software engineer but I do spend about 5% of my free time enjoying Indian cringe. In fact I curate a big list of my favorites and share with my friends but very few people actually enjoy the cringe.

Was it worth explaining all of this to one of the most intellectually stimulating forums on the internet? Probably not. But I had to admit to myself that I know a lot more about this story than I'm proud to admit and that it would make me happy that it gets saved in the HN archive.

A copy of the original video that was taken down by Youtube - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA)

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio) [2] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8)

<comment><USER23> _A copy of the original video that was taken down by Youtube -[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA) _

Well, that copy has also been removed, and now I'm curious to see it. Is there any other copy around?

Edit: OK, here it is as part of a "reaction" video, and includes English subtitles: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqxs6S2sc30&t=2m10s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqxs6S2sc30&t=2m10s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a really good case for network effects. If you go through the reviews, a lot of people are complaining that they are not getting any "views" for their content. As more and more people are bombing the reviews, uninstalling, it's discouraging people from creating more content because it's not being viewed enough.

Does anyone know if disabling views or delaying gratification of content will reduce the damaging effect on the TikTok network?

Also, vis-a-vis Yelp, why should review bombs be removed when I can go to a restaurant and review it as 1-rated if I am not treated well by them even if I don't complete any transaction?

</comment><comment><USER25> The Google Play Store reviews are pretty much worthless and corrupted by ratings farms and app developers that steal the users google credentials to post fake 5 star reviews from within the app itself. There was a time where you didn't have the option to only view negative reviews. At least that has improved to where users have options in a drop-down menu.

</comment><comment><USER26> It has only a 1.4 star rating as of right now. It clearly didn't do anything to help the rating of the app.

<comment><USER27> Oh wow. Why such difference with iOS store where it's over 4?

Edit: it's all clearly spam on Google Store

<comment><USER28> It's even more obvious on the "lite" version of their app. Within the last month (probably even more recently), the total number of installs nearly doubled, and the rating dropped from a reasonably stable 4.0 to 1.1.

[https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhil...](https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhiliaoapp.musically.go)

(Amusingly, the ratings of the other TikTok app, which looks like it might not be available in India, are unaffected: [https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.androi...](https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.android.ugc.trill))

I have a _very_ hard time believing that this represents organic user behavior. It seems far more likely that someone's scripted the process of installing and rating the apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems like every major tech company bows in front of the Chinese government. This is really scary

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if there's any signal to disambiguate whether Google decided to kill the reviews or algorithmically determined 5 million accounts were bots, and those bots also happened to have been used in a TikTok brigading campaign.

</comment><comment><USER31> I thought review manipulation goes against google policy? Or this only applies for apps with a limited budget?

</comment><comment><USER32> I just stumbled on a site that heavily leans on the "tech is censoring Trump" angle, namely this article about Google taking down a study on Hydroxycholoquine. I thought of posting it to front page, but instead I can just attach to this other timely thread of Google being evil/censors.

Genuinely curious about info people have around this, if it is legit or not. It seems like something you'd have expected to see here front page, but then again this site leans left.

[https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure- paper/](https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-paper/)

<comment><USER33> It looks fake. Would a real medical researcher refer to SARS-CoV-2 as "coronavirus" in the title, as if they didn't know there were other common human coronaviruses? Why are they publishing on Google Drive instead of MedrXiv? Why is the last author a lawyer? Why does it say "Stanford PhD" in the byline? Dr. Broker (the first author) does seem to have been doing biomedical research at UAB last year ([https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting_DNA_Damage_Response_as_a_Strategy_to_Treat_HPV_Infections/download) is a legitimate virology research paper he worked on, which doesn't make obvious errors like the above), but [https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.e...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.edu/medicine/biochem/56-tom- broker-phd) suggests he was gone by April 3. [https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine- hoax/](https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/) says he was born in 1944, so he'd be 76?

Hmm, [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria- cur...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cure- coronavirus-promoter-cryptocurrency-hustler-fake-Stanford-University- claim.html) says, "Professor Thomas Broker, who was named in the 'white paper' before it was removed from Google, asked for his name to be disassociated with it, while the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he works, said a claim that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louise Chow's laboratory was involved was also false."

"…the university's public relations manager Bob Shepard added that Dr. Chow, a Nobel-prize winner mentioned in the acknowledgments, was no part of the study.

"'No one at UAB has any connection to this paper,' Shepard said.

"Shepard said that Broker 'had previously done research into chloroquine as a possible therapy for human papillomavirus' which is more commonly known as HPV.

"Shepard said: 'He had some contact with one of the authors of that paper at that time. He had no involvement with the work on coronavirus and is not affiliated with that research in any way.'"

Now, I don't want to depend on the Daily Mail, but it seems like they may happen to have been correct in this case.

<comment><USER32> Yea would like to see source outside DailyMail.

Also to people downvoting, why? I'm not backing the source, I'm just curious.

<comment><USER33> Okay, but it's immediately clear that nobody who wrote this paper is knowledgeable about virology or the norms of academic publishing — but they were trying to fake it. Yet the first author is claimed to be a real person who is in fact a virologist with lots of academic publications.

How about Wired? [https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight- co...](https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-covid-19-and- silicon-valleys-into-it/)

> _Except for that video, which hadn't come out yet, Rigano put all that > together and got in touch with Todaro. "I essentially wrote the publication > based on my interface with various Stanford researchers and others, and we > developed this body of evidence and hardcore science," Rigano says. "James, > Dr. Todaro, was doing the best job, I thought, of anyone in the media, any > doctor, any news outlet, anyone on Twitter, of covering coronavirus. I'd > been following his research on other items, like decentralized computing, > for several years."_

> _Todaro, who got an MD from Columbia and is now a bitcoin investor, was > interested enough to collaborate on the document. "I added stuff that > pertained more to the medical side of things, and gave a more, I guess, > clinical feel to it," Todaro says. "Something that Big Pharma is not going > to like—it's widely available, it's pretty cheap, and it's something that at > least a million people are already on. It's really got a lot of the aspects > of something that can be rolled out quickly if the right clinical data is > there."_

> _Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study > he was then preparing, and they also called a retired biochemist named Tom > Broker. He was originally listed as the first author of the Google doc, his > name followed by "(Stanford)." That's where Broker got his PhD, in 1972, but > Broker has been, for years, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His > area of research is adenovirus and human papillomavirus, which have DNA as > their genetic material, as opposed to the RNA inside coronaviruses. They're > pretty different._

> _Broker says he wasn't involved in producing the Google doc and would never > advocate the use of a drug without formal trials. Todaro and Rigano have > since removed his name from it, at Broker's request. "I neither contributed > to, wrote any part of, nor had knowledge of this google.com document. I have > never conducted research on RNA virus pathogens … I have no professional > credentials or authority to suggest or recommend clinical trials or > practices," Broker wrote in an email. "Apparently I was inserted as a > 'gratuitous' author, a practice that I have always avoided over my 53-year > career. Moreover, I have never engaged any part of social media, privately > or professionally. All of my scientific publications are processed through > peer review. I suggest that you communicate with one of the actual > authors."_

> _Asked about Broker's statement, Todaro says that Broker just didn't want to > engage with the attention the idea and document were getting "I don't > personally know Tom Broker. My correspondence has been with Mr. Rigano," > Todaro says. "When we started getting inquiries from the press, my > impression was, Mr. Broker got very overwhelmed by that."_

So, according to Wired, the "paper"'s _first author_ says that its real authors put his name on the paper without his knowledge or consent, which is dishonest (it goes far beyond the usual questionable practice of "gratuitous author" insertion, which places your sponsor as the _last_ author), and that he disagrees with what it says. The "paper" is obviously not the kind of thing a real professor would produce. The real authors say he's lying.

It seems clear to me who's lying here. Wired caught them lying about a lot of other things, too.

<comment><USER34> In general, even having a sponsor as an author, the sponsor should still consent to being on there in some form.

<comment><USER33> Are you talking about morality or common practice? Morally you shouldn't claim someone is an author when they're just giving you money. Common practice in biomedical research is to do so without even telling them about the paper. But as last author, not first.

<comment><USER34> I was naively thinking they had that in their grant agreements. As a computer scientist I know that people end up on the paper that didn't write it. But I haven't had the case where people didn't know they were on it.

Thanks for the insight!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> YouTube and TikTok are cavalcades of human stupidity.

Things aren't getting better.

<comment><USER34> Entertainment is not inherently stupid and videos on both platforms are not inherently entertainment or stupid. They mostly seem like a cross section of overall internet content (minus porn), which represents a large part of society as a whole.

For some reason people seem compelled to declare popular things they dislike as stupid, but that seems very unnecessary.</comment></comment>


My experience with Coinbase's bug bounty program. - <AUTHOR> https://hackerone.com/reports/7369

<comment><AUTHOR> In the end I have mixed feelings. I took a total of 40 days from the original report to be rewarded the bounty. I also think it is important to note that at the time of the report it was posted on Coinbase's website that the minimum bounty payout is $1,000 [1]. I think it is a good idea to share this with the community.

Someone on the #bitcoin IRC channel suggested I request a link to the duplicate bug report that Coinbase claims. I have posted a new comment on the hackerone report requesting the link.

Reddit thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27g0ge/for_the_sake...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27g0ge/for_the_sake_of_transparency_here_is_my/)

Imgur link to the original big report that is the attached image in the hackerone report: [http://i.imgur.com/8q84gyk.png](http://i.imgur.com/8q84gyk.png)

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20140331044127/https://coinbase.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140331044127/https://coinbase.com/whitehat)</comment>


Elite for Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://sami.salkosuo.net/elite-for-emacs/ <comment><USER2> I've always wondered if there is scope for a MMO version of Elite that is less ambitious (especially graphically) in some ways than the current Elite: Dangerous but still has the essence of Elite; I'm thinking 3D graphics with a retro vibe, maybe primarily text based menus for in-station activities (and certainly no desire for on-planet or first person shooter components). Even keep the generative universe of the original with its nutty planet descriptions.

<comment><USER3> Slightly unrelated: if you're into "3D graphics with a retro vibe", check out "Return of the Obra Dinn" by Lucas Pope (of "Papers, please" fame):

[https://dukope.itch.io/return-of-the-obra- dinn](https://dukope.itch.io/return-of-the-obra-dinn)

It has nothing to do with Elite or space adventures or anything like that, though.

<comment><USER4> His development blog is awesome too, I specially liked when he was working out the best way to create effective looking dithering for 3D objects.

<comment><USER5> And then a mathematician who happened to read the blog started to think about it and created a new dithering algorithm just for him[0], which was pretty awesome.

[0] [https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121280...](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1212805#msg1212805)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They also just released "Getting work done" for vim

<comment><USER7> True, I think half the point of emacs is _not_ doing work but hacking on emacs instead :-)

See also:

M-x butterfly

M-x doctor

M-x tetris

M-x hanoi

etc. etc.

<comment><USER8> also M-x dunnet

is a text based adventure game in most versions of emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing.

Anyone know of any other text-based trading style games? I think there could be a market for this, as even Eve Online is nicknamed "Spreadsheets in Space", and I wonder if there are other games that have embraced that and left out the quasi-dogfighting mechanics.

<comment><USER10> I'm working on a spaceflight game that features trading and can be operated from a text interface, though it features graphics by default. My vision is to be a bit more story-based than the procedurally-generated or MMO-type games would be, but it might be what you're looking for: [https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard](https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard)

It features programming as one of its core mechanics on top of the piloting features. I made a trailer for it here: [https://p.hagelb.org/bussard-1.3.webm](https://p.hagelb.org/bussard-1.3.webm)

My goal for the next beta is to make it so you can purchase an upgrade for your ship's computer in-game that would allow you to connect to it from an external program like Emacs over the nREPL protocol: [https://gitlab.com/technomancy/jeejah](https://gitlab.com/technomancy/jeejah) You start the game without an autopilot routine, but eventually you find/write one, and at that point you can play from Emacs or Vim or the CLI or whatever. Right now the external connection only provides you with a REPL, but the protocol is extensible, and I plan to add features that would allow you to run more of a HUD-style REPL in your client of choice.

<comment><USER11> Moving away from clojure? I can't get to the itch.io site from work for some reason, but saw an older version github. What were some of the factors in choosing lua? Has it been weird, difficult, or liberating?

<comment><USER10> Not as much "moving away from Clojure" as "haven't needed to write any server- side code in a long time". I would still use Clojure for that, unless it was a socket-level cluster thing where BEAM would work better.

Lua is a great fit for this for several reasons. Mainly it's because I want to make it a game where you can learn to program, and teaching beginners Clojure is incredibly difficult. Lua's relentless simplicity really shines here. Teaching tables is a snap, and trying to teach lists, vectors, hashes, and structs in Racket makes my kids' heads swim. Secondly because the of in-game programming, you need sandboxing, and Lua has excellent facilities for this. And Lua's speed and access to the LÖVE game framework make it the best choice for games that I've found.

Lua has its problems, but in the context of games 90% of them can be summed up with "you had a nil where you didn't expect it" which is something Clojure is quite bad at too. I would say in some senses it's been liberating to work on a codebase that doesn't need to interact with the madness of the web, and being able to count my dependencies on one hand (and read through their sources exhaustively) is wonderful.

What were you trying to do on itch.io that didn't work?

<comment><USER11> I think it was just a corporate firewall issue. That manifests in odd ways that don't always point clearly to the firewall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh, this is fantastic!

I've toyed with the idea of creating a browser-based version of the original Elite. Went as far as the galaxy generation, based on the C version. Then had trouble, because the algorithm is pretty much obfuscated (unintentionally) behind layers of bit manipulation. And you need to do it the exact same way, otherwise you won't get the iconic galaxy, starting on Lave and with Riedquat as the nearby anarchy.

From a quick glance, the elisp version is slightly more readable in some places. I guess I should try again.

Also, will dig up my Portal Ending recreated in Emacs, as I didn't know there were other crazy brains that found this sort of thing interesting. I wonder if I need to get Valve's permission first.

</comment><comment><USER13> Elite in LISP, showcasing both serious coding skill and the power of LISP. If LISP can do this, what else would be possible if it could talk to one or more 3D accelerators, and send synthesised, mixed sound to one or more audio devices?

This article finds me in a middle of a dilemma, pondering whether to develop my web application with AWK through cgi-bin (functionally of course), or use ANSI common LISP...

<comment><USER10> Can you give an example from the code of how this shows the power of lisp? From reading the article it sounds like it's a port from the C version.

<comment><USER13> I mean that he was able to do this at all it shows what LISP can do, not literally. If you want to see the power of LISP though, [http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-an- mp3-database.ht...](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-an- mp3-database.html), and look how trivial it is to add functionality without changing the structure or semantics of the program.

<comment><USER14> It would be very hard to make a programming language that was not capable of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's pretty magical.

</comment><comment><USER16> How elitist.</comment>


All of the available CSS color names - <AUTHOR> http://www.147colors.com/

<comment><USER2> This is kind of pretty, but actually rather annoying from a UI perspective. Here is some feedback, which is just like, my opinion, man.

For one, there's the mystery meat navigation. If it's a visual directory of all color names, why not start there? Or start by showing one color and then rapidly "zooming" out to show an overview. I'm guessing you're going for some kind of serendipity right now, where I would refresh repeatedly and be treated to delightful colors. Maybe you could find a middle ground where there's still some serendipity, but it's also easier to navigate.

The transitions on the titles are also too slow. I know how it can be when you're staring at these things for a while, it can be hard to judge. Consider that when I mouse over a color, it's because I want to see the color name (which is, after all, the only thing this does.) Therefore, you shouldn't make me wait half a second to see it. If you reduce to something more like an eighth of a second, there's still a nice effect, but I don't feel like I'm waiting.

Finally, the text on the light colors is about impossible to read. You've got the right idea with the text shadow, but it's too faint. Keep in mind that since monitor calibrations vary wildly, if you care about readability, you have to be conservative with your contrast. I will admit that I'm using a really crappy monitor that I've never calibrated right now (and I know for a fact that the color reproduction on it is way off.)

<comment><USER3> The whole thing is very, very slow. Why should it reload the whole page from the server each time I request a new random color?

<comment><USER2> I noticed that too, but I kind of felt it was harsh to criticize when the poster's server is being hammered by HN and so on.

I did notice that the requests were very large, however. I believe around half a megabyte, for such a simple concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone ever actually use CSS color names in production except for "white" and "black"? Unless you throw in a "border: 1px solid red" for debugging to see the box around an element?

After all, the remaining 145 colors only account for 0.00086% of colors a designer might pick in Photoshop.

It's like winning the lottery :)

<comment><USER5> Well I found at least one good use for them.

I'm writing a book and I use nothing but the CSS color names in all of the examples. I think it makes the code snippets easier to parse and visualize as a human when you're reading through the text. For example:

      // Create a vertical gradient going from the top of the canvas to the bottom
      var gradient = ctx.createLinearGradient(0, 0, 0, can.height);
      gradient.addColorStop(0, 'Black');
      gradient.addColorStop(0.15, 'Black');
      gradient.addColorStop(0.2, 'DarkSeaGreen');
      gradient.addColorStop(0.4, 'DarkSeaGreen');
      gradient.addColorStop(0.7, 'Goldenrod');
      gradient.addColorStop(0.8, 'DarkOrange');
      gradient.addColorStop(1, 'GhostWhite');

Then, as I spend a paragraph talking about color stops, I can refer to real color names and not #00000, #8FBC8F, etc. I think the humans reading the text will appreciate it, but we'll see!

<comment><USER6> If you're referring to these by strings, wouldn't you be just as well off spending a few lines of code somewhere above setting up some variables for hex colors? This seems like a pretty trivial kind of advantage.

<comment><USER7> What if he were writing straight CSS, though? No possibility for variables there. (Not yet, at least.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it's really a tool to help designers, don't hide all the colour names on the list. Just let us look at the whole list with all the names and colours at a glance and make it easy to browse.

<comment><USER9> While I agree with you, I think the desired flow of that page is that you quickly scan, and when you see something you like, you hover over it. Having text on each color may distract the user's eyes to read all of the names.

<comment><USER10> Why not make it an option? I too would much prefer to see all the names at all times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wasn't even aware CSS3 added 130 color keywords. I like the larger size of the chips used here, but prefer the labeled list on MDN: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/color_value#Color_Keywo...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/color_value#Color_Keywords)

</comment><comment><USER12> As a Giants fan, I'm shocked and appalled at the existence of "DodgerBlue"

</comment><comment><USER13> And here is a list of all CSS colors you should use for body text: black.

<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> I find the table on Wikipedia [1] much more usable in that I can visually see the colors that I am choosing between side-by-side. Not to mention they are already roughly organized by color.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#X11_color_names>

</comment><comment> jarek-foksa There are 147 color names, but the number of colors in CSS3 spec is a bit smaller because of duplicates (e.g. gray and grey are the same color).

I would rather prefer to comment my code than use some of the more convoluted names. In CSS3 we can also specify colors with HSL format which is more natural and universal than made-up names.

</comment><comment><USER15> The font size change when I reload is rather irritating.

</comment><comment><USER16> The drop shadow needs to be darker to allow the names of the light colours to be read more easily.

But it's a lovely page, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER17> I personally don't find this useful at all, but for the love of god why does the page need to reload for something as simple as this?

</comment><comment><USER18> lot's of colors but no way to share. this site is pointless without pushState on the url like: <http://www.147colors.com/Magenta>

<comment><USER19> This actually works! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cute.

Kinda annoying that it loads all its page content from www.colors.commutercreative.com, which RequestPolicy blocks by default, being an external domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm assuming the two are one in the same, with 147 colors being just an easy way to remember it. Either way, it's a clever display.

I really wish it was easy to permalink something though. Took me a few seconds to at least figure out I could manually grab a url like this <http://www.147colors.com/darkslategrey/> \- but when you click from the grid it doesn't permalink.</comment></comment>


Tracking Calls Through Virtual Phone Numbers? - <AUTHOR>

I'm setting up a marketing campaign and I'd love to be able to track calls that come in to this campaign. Ideally, I'd like to:<p>* Set up a new virtual number * Have the number forward to the main office line * Be able to track the # of calls the virtual number gets<p>Someone has had to have solved this already. Is there a service that helps automate this? <comment><USER2> I've solved this and more with www.getvolta.com. We are a lightweight CRM for companies that rely on the phone.

Our outbound stuff is more advanced, but our inbound is simple. Simply change the phone number on your site with a bit of javascript and you're done. That javascript rotates through a bunch of your phone numbers that we give you, tracks referrers, search queries, etc.

When the phone rings you can have a callerid screen that instantly displays all the above plus history of conversations with that person.

We also allow the person who answered the phone to enter a numeric value after each call. Then, you can see ROI for all the various marketing efforts.

Contact me privately if you're interested in learning more. We are still private, but opening up very soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. I'd like to learn more. Your email isn't in your profile and I couldn't find a contact email on getvolta.com or your Quora page. My email is email@example.com.

My use case may be a bit different. I want to use the various #s for print ads in magazines, newspapers, and journals and also on marketing materials at trade shows.

The end goal is to determine which marketing channels are actually producing interest and which are just setting a big pile of money on fire.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you keep a journal? And Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Pinning this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13492501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13492501)

</comment><comment><USER4> Personal journal aside, I love the benefits of keeping a technical journal. Every day, I have these sections:

      Today I worked on:

      Today I figured out / debugged:

      Problems / Thoughts:

      Other:

I'm fairly lax about not doing it every single day, since it can become a chore or waste space. If it feels like I have nothing of substance to report, I just skip.

This is interesting because it helps me introspect about the work I'm doing, whether I should be doing it that way, whether I keep running into similar issues, whether I can fix things systematically, gauge happiness and stress levels, etc.

I've returned to this many times and often found it to be super helpful - <USER2> information that goes in here is hard-won details, and those are also the kind that are very easy to forget. It also sometimes helps with the "why had I done this this way" questions.

Perhaps I do need a personal version of this too.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had a really bad day a few weeks back and in my 'rage' I quickly created a dead simple, self-hosted blogging platform in PHP for myself to keep a journal. But by the time I'd finished it, I'd calmed down and didn't see a point in writing to it. Which is in part due to the fact that I'm incredibly bad at making new habits, so while I've tried a few times in the past to journal, I just don't actually do it. My parents actually have quite a few (embarassing) journals I wrote when I was a kid. They're all scattered around my childhood because I never stuck with it.

My grandfather on the other hand, has kept a journal every day going back decades. In fact, as a gift to my parents when I turned 18, he shared with them the journal entry from the day I was born. He's now working on turning his journal into a self-published book for his children, grandkids, and great- grandkids.

That, and my increasingly shitty memory of small details, makes me want to get into journaling.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, I keep a journal for a few key reasons.

One, because without writing them down, my thoughts seem to take on actual weight in my head. Putting them into my journal seems to remove the weight while helping me to sort through things, sort of like talking to myself in real time.

Two, because it helps me to stay practiced with Vim. I started just one single file called journal.md, separated by markdown headers/dates and keep it in a folder that gets backed up instantly (though I'm thinking of moving it to Dropbox so that it also gets versioned in addition to immediate backups).

Three, because it keeps me writing. As someone who is continually writing short stories, it's important to keep the words flowing out of my head, even if I'm not writing about something that happened to someone else, real or imagined.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes. Alms or every day since 2002. I don't really trust memories, especially as I get older. My journal not only helps me vent, and work through my thoughts, but it's a record I can look back on someday when my memory really begins to fade.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't keep a journal per se, but I use Evernote to write down ideas and save links to interesting articles and websites.

I do this for two reasons: \- These notes may come in useful in my hobby projects, or at work. I have also been able to help my colleagues with information. \- I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the number of open tabs in my browser. Saving links allows me to close the tab, knowing that if I ever need information on that topic again, I have some notes somewhere.

Evernote is not the perfect tool for this. Years ago I used Wiki On A Stick for this purpose because it allowed me to cross reference ideas and notes.

<comment><USER9> Hey!

Check pocket. ([http://getpocket.com/](http://getpocket.com/)) It has definitely helped me with the overwhelming feeling from the number of tabs open in the browser.

Doesn't really help with writing down ideas, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I keep a daily work + personal note journal in Emacs using org-journal. All the files are synchronized using Dropbox between my machines.

The journal is a mix of a TODO list and a diary. I also have a tagging system for all the entries which allows convenient searches/stat building.

Benefits:

1\. Allows to do primitive daily planning.

2\. Having my daily plans/notes in searchable format allows to do all kinds of mass retrospectives (I know what movies I saw, music I enjoyed, things I did for both personal/job-related projects).

3\. Being able to go back to a certain date and see what was done sometimes even helps to sort out various job-related issues.

</comment><comment><USER11> I keep a log/todo list at work. They stretch back years. Its more bullet points than a journal.

I started after a manager kept claiming they had asked for something, or getting me to revert things they had asked for but claiming they never asked for that. Back then it was my word against theirs.

If I am asked to do something, the first thing I do is write it down and who its for.

My work is now free of other peoples bad memories and recollections. I am the go to person to settle disputes and provide reasoning for decision making.

</comment><comment><USER12> I do. I find that I can think clearer when writing out my thoughts and have a habit of writing for 10 mins every morning.

It started out mainly as a way to manage my anxiety and feel more in control of my days (it has definitely helped). I find it really useful in managing my thoughts and reflecting on what happened the previous day.

In case you're interested, I use the Mac Notes app. I've set the order preference based on date created (the default is date edited) and tag each entry with #journal for easy searching.

</comment><comment><USER13> Work or personal?

I don't have a personal journal, but I do have a workflow that involves gradually collecting TODO notes on whatever I'm working on - then when it's done archiving the whole slab of text at the top of another file. Low-effort and surprisingly useful.

I've worked with people (software developers from a scientific background) that keep "daybooks", which are extremely helpful if you want to file patents in first-to-invent jurisdictions.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't keep a journal in the "today I kissed my boyfriend" sense. However I do keep a log of all my thoughts, and tasks related to the projects I work on. I started as a way to lay breadcrumbs to easily pick back up where I left off in case I was interrupted. However it's proven useful to be a good back reference.

</comment><comment><USER15> I keep a dream diary, if that counts. I have fairly lucid, vivid dreams about societies and fantastical worlds. Writing them down allows me to examine for common themes and unconscious thinking. They often turn into great writing.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using jrnl ([http://jrnl.sh/](http://jrnl.sh/)) to write an entry each night. Love it because it's simple and out of my way

</comment><comment><USER17> I wrote software for this that helps me. The main reason is that I felt I wasn't learning anymore after leaving grad school. This helped me keep learning. If anyone wants to try it leave me your contact info.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes, to write down my thoughts. Writing them down makes me think about the situation and resolve any feelings I may have.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use a variation of bullet journaling for my work. I have to track a lot details, and I off-load them to paper.</comment>


What Is Disruptive Innovation? - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation <comment><AUTHOR> First, a quick recap of the idea: "Disruption" describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Specifically, as incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a foothold by delivering more- suitable functionality—frequently at a lower price. Incumbents, chasing higher profitability in more-demanding segments, tend not to respond vigorously. Entrants then move upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents' mainstream customers require, while preserving the advantages that drove their early success. When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants' offerings in volume, disruption has occurred.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is Uber a Disruptive Innovation?

...Uber is clearly transforming the taxi business in the United States. But is it disrupting the taxi business?

According to the theory, the answer is no. Uber's financial and strategic achievements do not qualify the company as genuinely disruptive—although the company is almost always described that way.

Here are two reasons why the label doesn't fit.

(1) Disruptive innovations originate in low-end or new-market footholds; and

(2) Disruptive innovations don't catch on with mainstream customers until quality catches up to their standards.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt: "...In our experience, too many people who speak of "disruption" have not read a serious book or article on the subject. Too frequently, they use the term loosely to invoke the concept of innovation in support of whatever it is they wish to do. Many researchers, writers, and consultants use "disruptive innovation" to describe any situation in which an industry is shaken up and previously successful incumbents stumble. But that's much too broad a usage..."</comment>


Tesla Model 3 receives a perfect safety rating from NHTSA - <AUTHOR> https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-model-3-receives-perfect-222800702.html <comment><USER2> Do they really only give out stars or am I missing something??

Without a number like 96/100 or something that shows _how_ they came to the star rating it is nearly useless. Otherwise you can easily game the system. Got a crappy car in passive security? Just ad lots of active security! The consumer needs to see exactly how they came to the end result. That is like 3rd grade math.

Here is a much better view of a test from the old Model S with numbers that actually mean something:

[https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model-s/7897](https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/tesla/model-s/7897)</comment>


Show HN: SpaceNeovim – Spacemacs for Neovim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim <comment><AUTHOR> Just to share a little about the motivation of this:

Switching back-and-forth a bit between Spacemacs and Neovim, I got inspired by spacevim[0] and thought to myself "Hey, that's a great idea!", and so I went into my first time actually toying with vim script (love-hate relationship atm).

The result of the last couple of days so far is the ground work for a Neovim specific port of Spacemacs, SpaceNeovim[1].

The major difference between this and the existing spacevim is that the layers are separated out from the core, and can be updated via an editor command (calling git pull). It makes it a lot nicer to add new layers later on (oh, and of course also the fact that I've dropped any though of vim support).

Contributions or feedback are more than welcome! :)

The easiest way, if you want, is probably to contribute a layer, or expand on an existing one at [https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim- layers](https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim-layers). One of the goals is to match Spacemacs more-or-less, so switching isn't annoying (hence why buffer/filetype specific keybindings are behind a '+major-mode-cmd').

[0] [https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim](https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim)

[1] [https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim](https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim)

<comment><USER3> How much of an investment is to learn vimscript? I want to write some plugins but I also don't really feel like learning it. Wish I could use different langs but from what I'm hearing I'd have to learn vimscript anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that much to be honest, there are some quirks and such as variable scopings (g:, s:, l: a:) and other things, but other than that it's pretty familiar.

A few great resources I found after having googled a ton around was [0] and [1]. If you are very familiar with vim (I'm not really a power user tbh), then all the commands you use with : are supported in vim script. Meaning opening a split in your script is, well, just split.

[0] [http://ricostacruz.com/cheatsheets/vimscript.html](http://ricostacruz.com/cheatsheets/vimscript.html)

[1] [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-vim- script-1/](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-vim-script-1/)

<comment><USER3> That cheatsheet is really well done. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having spent a month with Spacemacs, to give it a shot, and returning back to Vim, I've been craving some of the Spacemacs innovations. Unfortunately, we can't get elisp, which is a big selling point of Emacs for me, but Spacemacs' narrowing search menus, following SPC, and its community-configured layers make it often enjoyable to adopt a new configuration.

It comes at a cost though, the abstraction. Many say "the Spacemacs source is so readable; if I want to tweak something, I can just find what I want and go from there." In practice, I have never found this the case (likely since I've used Emacs for only 2 months) and I don't imagine I'd find it the case with SpaceVim/SpaceNeoVim either, even after having used Vim for half a decade. As a result, I consider these projects to be a more robust vim-sensible, which is a reasonable starting point, or common point, for new users, users who want to share a single configuration, or users who don't desire absolute control and just want some features to work (i.e. everyone but power-users). Fortunately, that suits a lot of people. More power to them and good luck to SpaceNeovim.

<comment><USER5> I really don't think elisp is particularly better than vimL. Emacs just exposes a lot more extension points than vim does.

<comment><USER6> That's really putting it mildly. Being able to evaluate any valid elisp form anywhere, directly or from a buffer, and affect the running state of the application, is pretty damn powerful. There is a point where the quantitative difference ("more" extension points) becomes so overwhelmingly large as to become a qualitative leap.

<comment><USER5> > That's really putting it mildly. Being able to evaluate any valid elisp form > anywhere, directly or from a buffer, and affect the running state of the > application, is pretty damn powerful.

That's possible in vim too. You can manipulate variables (end redefine functions if you're sadistic) in ex commands. Similarly, every time I save a vimL file it parses and updates running scripts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks cool. I've been transitioning from an untidy, cruft-filled personal .vimrc to spacemacs but I find myself running back to vim frequently as I haven't learned the analogous key strokes for all of my basic usage/workflow yet. It looks like SpaceNeovim is still implemented in VimL; since Vim support is dropped, any chance switching to a Lua implemention?

<comment><AUTHOR> >an untidy, cruft-filled personal .vimrc

Yeah, that particular itch is also one I'm scratching with this project - <USER2> .vimrc/init.vim quickly become cluttered.

>any chance switching to a Lua implemention

I'm more than open to it honestly. Initially I wanted to flesh out a bit of what was achievable, and since a lot of the layers mainly consist of configuring plugins and key mappings viml seemed easy to start with.

It's definitely something I'm looking into though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another shameless plug but I'm the author of proton. We are doing something similar and porting a spacemacs inspired way of editing to atom. Check it out [https://github.com/dvcrn/proton](https://github.com/dvcrn/proton)

<comment><USER9> It's pretty cool to see all the similar projects in this thread.

That demo gif of proton looks really neat! Also, awesome to see you're using ClojureScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shameless plugin [https://github.com/meitham/vim- spacemacs](https://github.com/meitham/vim-spacemacs) where I try to use many spacemacs keys in vim.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can someone give a quick summary of what spacemacs and spacevim are?

<comment><USER12> Spacemacs is a supercharged version of emacs configuration set (~/.emacs.d), it makes Emacs look like this[1]. Spacemacs sets <SPC> as your leader key and turns configuration into "layers", each layer being a set of packages, keybindings and functions you can use.

Here is my .spacemacs file[2], I've been using it for last 45 days, before then I was pure Vim user for all my text editing and programming needs (except Java - where I still use IntelliJ)

[0] [http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

[1] [http://spacemacs.org/img/screenshots/ss1.png](http://spacemacs.org/img/screenshots/ss1.png)

[2] [https://github.com/ceocoder/dotfiles/blob/master/spacemacs](https://github.com/ceocoder/dotfiles/blob/master/spacemacs)

<comment><USER13> Do you see yourself going back to vim?

<comment><USER9> Not the parent, but thought I'd share.

I discovered Spacemacs in the beginning of my transition from vim to Emacs, and its familiar keybindings and "out of the box" experience really helped me stick with Emacs. These days I use my own Emacs config but that's not to say Spacemacs is not great.

The only times I use vim these days is to quickly edit a file when I ssh into other machines from anywhere other than my laptop. On my laptop, I use Tramp Mode[0] for accessing/editing remote files.

For programming Emacs is superior to vim for me personally; and even more so because my whole workflow is based around Emacs (coding, email, shell, Org mode, etc…).

[0]: [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does it work on windows with the neovim windows executable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I haven't tested anything on windows yet, but I'd imagine there might be some quirks with curl and git.

When it becomes a bit more stable it will definitely be something I'll look into though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So postmodern!</comment>


Physics discoveries of 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/48126

<comment><USER2> This is really cool. I would also be curious to see a list of what the top 10 major advancements in computer science were for 2011.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> glad to see there's some appreciation for real physics and not just sensationalistic higgs + faster than speed of light stories</comment>


Bronze Age Skeletons Were Earliest Plague Victims - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bronze-age-skeletons-were-earliest-plague-victims/ <comment><USER2> The title ought to be "... Earliest Known Plague Victims". Also, humans and plague arguably co-evolved, so some of earliest humans were the earliest plague victims.</comment>


Ubiquitous Video: Why We Need a Robots.txt for the Real World - <AUTHOR> http://battellemedia.com/archives/2013/11/ubiquitous-video-why-we-need-a-robots-txt-for-the-real-world.php

<comment><USER2> I can't get the point: someone who wants to steal private informations can already do it with photo pens or any other photo gadget, or write on a paper or even memorize it</comment>


Milton's notes on Shakespeare appear to have been found - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/16/when-milton-met-shakespeare-poets-notes-on-bard-appear-to-have-been-found <comment><USER2> I put the cam.ac.uk post on this up a couple days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969349)

<comment><USER3> This is the better link. Omg I love this guys humble style. If I ever think I have made a big discovery in math or physics I am totally going to present it like this: "You know how I am always coming up with bad ideas that turn out to be wrong, well I just had another one. No big deal, silly me I can't help myself [big sigh] This is so embarrassing, but I think gravity and quantum physics could be related by ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last paragraph, the discoverer is quoted:

>> This is evidence of how digital technology and the opening up of libraries [could] transform our knowledge of this period.

Indeed! Just bringing many more eyes (and perhaps AIs) to the works can vastly accelerate the growth of knowledge, and they're already doing further research based on this discovery.

Who knows how many more centuries this knowledge might have languished unrecognized, just sitting in the stacks? And how much more like it is still awaiting?

<comment><USER5> Agreed - and if anyone is interested in this specific sort of work ("meta- textual" analysis of things like marginalia and the material characteristics of a piece of writing) there is a wonderful resource in Rare Book School at the University of Virginia: [https://rarebookschool.org](https://rarebookschool.org). They offer summer classes and a fellowship program, and it isn't just about old books - when I was there I met people working on digital texts, and even things like the preservation and archiving of VHS tapes and other old analog formats.

Nick Wilding's discovery of a forged Galileo manuscript is another fun example of this type of research: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/a-very-rare- bo...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/a-very-rare-book)

<comment><USER6> +1!

I studied under Terry Belanger there as an undergrad and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my time in university.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you had asked me 5 minutes prior to reading about this, who was the earlier writer - Milton or Shakespeare? - I would have said Milton. I now know that it's the opposite. Shakespeare preceded Milton.

There's something about Shakespeare's writing that feels closer to modernity though. Milton seems sort of medieval, perhaps because of the religious themes (and the fact that I've only read a small portion of Paradise Lost...).

<comment><USER8> Multiple people have suggested this here. It seems very strange to me, since Shakespeare is one of the most famous Englishmen of the Elizabethan era, and Milton was politically active 50+ years later during the English Civil War.

<comment><USER9> People in the US don't even know there was an English Civil War.

<comment><USER10> A surprising number of English people don't know that there was an English Civil War. When you've got a thousand years of continuous history to pack in, Oliver Cromwell ends up being kind of a footnote.

Maybe if it had occurred before Shakespeare, instead of after, he could have written a cycle of plays about it, and we'd remember it as well as the Wars of the Roses. But as it is, English schoolchildren forget it as soon as class is over... and I suspect the rest of the UK cares even less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My understanding is that we already had the notes, we just recognized that they're Milton's, is that correct?

<comment><USER12> Correct.

<comment><USER11> So why is this so groundbreaking? At most, I'd expect it to be an interesting anecdote.

<comment><USER13> Because we care about what Milton wrote a lot more than we care about what some random book buyer wrote.

<comment><USER11> Why? We obviously read the notes and we didn't especially care for them before we found out they were Milton's, so why is that? This implies that we care more about a famous person writing dreck than an anonymous person writing fantastic insights.

<comment><USER14> The article mentions one allusion Milton made to Shakespeare. It is possible that we can learn more about what ideas Milton was referencing and responding to in Shakespeare. It gives us more insight into him than into Shakespeare.

<comment><USER11> Ah, that's fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see a lot of evidence that these annotations are similar to Milton's style. But the question is, are they _more_ similar to Milton's style than to any other random literati of the time? Has this been looked at?

</comment><comment><USER16> I admit I only skimmed the article but it I didn't see it say that Milton actually physically met Shakespeare, right: this is simply a metaphorical use?

Doesn't detract from the excitement of the article, I just would love to think how the elder might have influenced the younger.

<comment><USER17> I'd think it would have to be metaphorical, if Wikipedia is correct - Wikipedia says Shakespeare died in 1616 and Milton was born in 1608... so if they did meet, there was no great exchange of ideas there.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, and _blush_ for not doing my homework myself.

<comment><USER17> Well, don't give me too much credit. I had to look it up because I was surprised to learn that Shakespeare and Milton were alive at the same time - but if I had been on a gameshow, I would have guessed that Milton lived and died hundreds of years before _Shakespeare_ was born.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ...and of course they're hoarding them instead of just putting up a torrent of high-res scans.

<comment><USER19> It is a public library and they are already putting it out a display open to the public (instead of keeping it in records in the back.) They are also making available other Milton stuff they have on hand such as a 1st edition of Paradise Lost.

Free Library of Philadelphia's Parkway Central branch 1901 Vine St., Philadelphia, PA 19103 Shakespeare First Folio on Display Monday, Sept. 16, through Saturday, Oct. 19

Source: [https://www.phillyvoice.com/free-library-display- shakespeare...](https://www.phillyvoice.com/free-library-display-shakespeare- first-folio-rare-book-department/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So Shakespeare was real after all!

That take, _Anonymous_ the movie :)

<comment><USER12> This is about Milton reading and annotating the published collection of Shakespeare's plays, not Milton meeting Shakespeare in person. It doesn't have any bearing on the debate over Shakespeare's identity.

The title is a little misleading.

<comment><USER21> Milton would have been not yet eight years old when Shakespeare died, to boot, so I'm not sure a physical meeting would have meant much to him.

<comment><USER22> People would be talking about him/her during that time, so I think their observation would have been very relevant had they made one about the identity.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to send DM on Twitter w/o permission - <AUTHOR> http://homakov.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-to-send-dm-on-twitter-wo-permission.html

<comment><USER2> This works! I tried it and was able to see my DM in the DM window.</comment>


Is It Ethical To Engineer Delicious Cows That Feel No Pain? - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/ethical-debate-pain-free-beef

<comment><USER2> There would be all sorts of unintended consequences from doing something like this.

Look what happens to humans who feel no pain: [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16185231/ns/health- more_health_n...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16185231/ns/health- more_health_news/)

Then extrapolate to large herds of cattle.</comment>


Cost of Wars crosses $1 trillion mark. - <AUTHOR> http://www.costofwar.com/

<comment><USER2> The scarier fact to me is that in the 2009 budget, the deficit was actually bigger than the total so-called discretionary spending.

That means that a deficit would still exist for 2009 even if the only government spending were for interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal "entitlement" programs.

I believe that's generally referred to as bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Using the YC scale, that would be somewhere around 67 million startups funded. Which is somewhere around 7 million startups per year.

Although I'm an entrepreneur, I wonder sometimes if it's a suckers game.</comment>


Show HN: Anagram game in React - <AUTHOR> https://jh86.org/anagram/ <comment> grif-fin I suggest you to go and tweet it to Nick Hewer from the UK Countdown show. You may get a deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I didn't even know about that show.

<comment> grif-fin lol typical Hewer!</comment></comment></comment>


Work Better Hours, Not More Hours - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/work-better-hours-not-more-hours-33fe8a09b415#.751jt2ljm <comment><USER2> Good advice, except there should be more exercise breaks

I like the analogue with sleeping: getting into the flow is similar. How do we get to sleep ? We remove all distractions. This has to be the way with focus too.

Another technique is to schedule different periods of the day and different work environments for different kinds of work. For example, if you think well in the morning then reserve the morning to work on all the hard problems of the day and do it in the quietest place you can find (at home, or in a library). Then reserve the afternoon for easy work that's less affected by interruptions and do that in the office.</comment>


Silicon Valley Stumbles in World Beyond Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-stumbles-in-world-beyond-software-1481042474 <comment><USER2> Specifically about Google's Project X delivery drone project:

The first guy to head the project was one Nicholas Roy, an MIT Robotics professor whose professional claim to the position seems to be mentoring a pair of students who succeeded in building a drone that flew around a parking garage - predetermined layout, no weather. Completely out of his depth, he failed.

After he failed, Google hired Dave Vos, another guy who spent some time in an MIT graduate office - this time one in an aerospace specialty - who spent the last couple of decades in tech management positions. At least he had the experience to come in and say, hey, maybe we need some wind tunnels, maybe we need some professional tooling that's taken for granted in most aerospace companies, because trying to build an aircraft without that tooling is like trying to run a web-facing application off developer workstations instead of setting up a proper production architecture. And he, too, failed.

The real problem that Google (and probably Amazon too) faces is that they need to synergize two very different engineering teams to make delivery drones work. You need aerospace folks to build reliable aircraft, you need AI folks to give those aircraft targets to aim at, and you need them to sit on the same floor in the same building. The aerospace folks aren't going to move to the Valley because there's no aerospace hub in SV, and SV isn't a good place to start one because the necessary land - you know, the wide open spaces you need for runways and hangars - is a pipedream in SV. And the AI folks, you know, the ones the Big Four are paying close to a million dollars in salary and begging not to leave for a competitor - are never going to leave SV to work on delivery drones.

The best course of action that Alphabet has is to acquire a proven aerospace company, give it some great AI folks, and come back in a year to check on their progress. But most of these Project X types like their ivory towers. It's how Google convinced them to join Project X in the first place, selling them on the promise that they'd be in the same ivory tower they were in back in MIT, just with guaranteed funding and a request to think about commercial viability. So, not gonna happen.

<comment><USER3> "The best course of action that Alphabet has is to acquire a proven aerospace company"

It's a good long-term bet if it's a defense contractor that's been getting contracts for decades. Could hedge a bit against what the market might hit them with. Plus, they're trying to get tighter with government anyway. They'd likely acquire people good at doing that, too. Then start brining their tech or services in defense industry in general more than now.

<comment><USER3> Reply to the person who deleted the comment about aerospace companies having overruns and being late. It's a common misconception that this is incompetence. It was worth this reply if you're still reading:

That's on purpose. They bribe politicians overseeing or in the military. Those deliver them contracts worth many times what they paid in bribes. It's called the "revolving door" of the Pentagon by those that follow it. It becomes obvious when you notice all these failures are tolerated with none of the proven fraud resulting in prison sentences. The same ineffective companies keep getting big contracts with the effective, smaller ones fighting for scraps. As it's designed to be.

Nice example posted here a while back:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/03/spyagency200703](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/03/spyagency200703)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still don't get the foray into delivery of physical low value products. The cost of delivery is a sufficient portion of the total value of the products so as to make it economically impractical for most cases.

And we have the example of Peapod and WebVan which didn't just foretell but proved unless it was for specialized markets, it's a proposal for hemorrhaging money. Even if you get automation and you perfect the travelling salesman's problem you're still mostly dealing with low value products. Now, if it was delivery of expensive (Rx) drugs, or maybe even heavy but valuable items like gold or jewelry, legal documents, etc. okay. people will pay for that and you can make a profit but toiletries and pantry goods?

<comment><USER5> _The cost of delivery_

You argue that as if it's a constant -- and that it's not is the point. The exact innovation they are stumbling on is a way to lower that cost to _near zero_.

Drone technology will eventually happen. The question is how far out it is. And make no mistake, when it does happen, it will truly be a revolution (without the hyperbole).

<comment><USER4> Yes, but fuel isn't free, vehicles are not free (shrinkage isn't free). Margins on these goods is very poor (1% [1] makes or breaks an outfit). Now, let's say you're right, they want to get the technology right and want to drive prices down like FedEx did back in the '70s for overnight deliveries.

Why not start with high value items --items where cost of delivery is a small fraction of the value of the good. Like FedEx did? Why go after groceries and perishables? It's an odd choice.

This is akin to Musk choosing Titan over Mars to explore the feasibility of interplanetary colonization by people.

[1][http://smallbusiness.chron.com/industry-standard-gross- margi...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/industry-standard-gross-margin- groceries-38121.html)

<comment><USER6> To deliver something in an hour, you have to be storing it very close to where you are going to deliver it. With low value items, it is practical to do that. With high value items, the cost of doing that would be prohibitive.

<comment><USER4> So, for many of these items Google does not have Google warehouses full of the things. They can partner with high value item sellers like they do with these low value items. They are not incurring the costs of warehousing and parked money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that companies like Facebook and Google are spending billions of dollars/year on undisclosed research projects is in my view a gigantic failure of corporate governance. I think investors are going to be hugely disappointed when they find out that they thought they put their money into Internet advertising cash cows, and now that money is gone, spent on building jetpacks and space elevators. I do think those projects are very cool, but this is not the proper way to pursue them.

<comment><USER8> Then what is? Seems to me to be very similar to the glory days of PARC and such where they seemed to have the funds to research just about anything. Lets not forget that Xerox brought the world the GUI, laser printer and Ethernet by funding PARC, even if they in the end was not who ended up monetizing the tech (laser printer excluded).

<comment><USER9> Right, what are the other options?

* Government? Would be targeted as waste. (Maybe sneak it into NASA?)

* Startup? Would anyone fund it? No short term payout.

* Non-profit?

* Billionaire's pet project?

<comment><USER10> Perhaps it's the fact that I'm inexorably falling deeper into academia every year, but government research is definitely NOT a waste from my perspective.

Some of the best PhD students, working on some of the most interesting projects in my experience all had DOE or EPA grant projects. I think this sort of research deserves a lot more money since, in my (biased) opinion, it pushes humanity forward through public access of research in the form of publications, theses, and the strict requirements that data be preserved for future reference.

<comment><USER11> I think it is meant as not cost effective, as governments are usually very wasteful in redistributing resources.

<comment><USER12> Wasteful compared to what? I mean, what does your normative budget look like for an R&D project?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article seems to focus on Drone deliveries, but forgets that Amazon has been re-inventing logistics for years now.

<comment><USER14> Not very well. They're very good at coming up with new ideas, but very poorly applying them to their situation. Amazon gets credit for trying, but they should get more credit for propping up bad ideas with operating losses for long enough that outside observers eventually think they might be good ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article reads like Google tried the MVP route with physical products and discovering that physical space is a far less forgiving operating environment.

</comment><comment><USER16> I enjoy how the article sometimes seems to have the point of view that this is the first time engineers ever had to work this way. I don't think they are taking software engineers and asking them to create drones. These seem like a lot of the same problems Boeing would have making drones or that UPS would have trying to make deliveries if such drones already existed. Nothing unique to Silicon Valley companies in this respect

</comment><comment><USER17> The world of the future _is_ software. We're on the slow and exciting path of better and better digital representations of reality... everything from cheap orientation sensors to ADCs that were in the realm of science fiction a few years ago.

The same is gradually happening with things like batteries, motors, etc. Everything is becoming more standardized and more like software.

The current limitations have to do with both physics and engineering, and also software reliability, but those barriers are all receding. Solar Cell roof shingles are an idea likely had by many kindergarteners, but the genius has to do with making a longer-term bet and creating the financing to make it into a viable business in a world that rewards short-term results.

The important thing is that a Billionaire today can make a bigger impact than a superpower government could a decade ago. The glorification of the bygone era of massive infrastructure investment voiced by Thiel at the GOP convention can be alternately viewed as a wish that we had more Musks taking big gambles and a general cynicism about the tech elite who develop cults of personality after a single, largely luck-driven, often low-tech home run.

The Interstate highway system was a buildout that could happen because of the solving of coordination problems that had prevented escape from a local maximum. As governments lose relevance, it is up to the Musks of the world to usher in both the technological vision and the social coordination solutions.

</comment><comment><USER18> Weird, the web link didn't work for me but searching directly for the article name in Google did.

</comment><comment><USER19> Paywall. Is there a way around it to read the article?

<comment><USER20> Click on the "web" link below the HN thread headline. It will direct you to a search page for the article, and the top result will not be paywalled.

<comment><USER21> That doesn't work and hasn't for some time. I'm not sure if it's for all sites but the web link rarely works for me. Especially the web link for WSJ.

<comment><USER22> Web link + open article in incognito.

<comment><USER21> Let me try on my desktop. Harder to open in incognito on mobile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bloom Filters by Example (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://llimllib.github.io/bloomfilter-tutorial/ <comment><USER2> 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14740032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14740032)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6626128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6626128)

<comment><USER3> And a week ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838163) (Understanding Bloom Filters with Pharo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my field (bioinformatics), there is a trend of using a single hash function, an over-sized bloom filter which is then compressed with something like entropy optimal RRR[1] or RoaringBitmap bit vectors. The resulting bloom filter ends up taking the same space than a properly sized bloom filter. There is two advantages: knowing the size of the set in advance is not necessary, and a single hash computation and memory access per query. However updates are not well supported.

[1] Raman, R., Raman, V., & Rao, S. S. (2002, January). Succinct indexable dictionaries with applications to encoding k-ary trees and multisets. A blog post: [https://alexbowe.com/rrr/](https://alexbowe.com/rrr/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have interesting examples for when a bloom filter came in handy as a solution to a problem?

I would love to have some (more than the contrived standard) examples to draw upon to make it easier for me to intuitively notice that a bloom filter might be a good fit in a future problem I encounter.

<comment><USER5> I used one in a bittorrent-like protocol, each block hash was added to the filter then sent to peers. Peers could then have a high accuracy way of checking if a peer has a block without having to communicate with them.

<comment><USER6> That's really quite cool, how many blocks could an instance potentially have though? Seems unlikely you'd be saving that much space over having a list

<comment><USER5> Sorry I wasn't clear, each peer maintains their own personal bloom filter that contains the hashes of the blocks that they have. The filters are sent upon connections with another peer and updated every so often.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The fortune is in the follow up - <AUTHOR> http://blog.close.io/want-to-close-more-deals-follow-up-more-follow-up-better

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this Steli - I especially like the structured frequency guidelines. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's let sales opportunities slip through my fingers by either over- or under-connecting.</comment>


Foursquare creates "real-world" badges with RunKeeper - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foursquare.com/post/1173912396/unlock-badges-without-checking-in

<comment><USER2> This feels a bit like boy scout merit badges now.</comment>


Show HN: Create Your Own Startup Metrics Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.pubnub.com/developers/demos/startup-metrics-dashboard/

<comment><USER2> Awesome! But may I suggest that you loose some of the animated stuff on the front page. My eyes hurt :(</comment>