Show HN: Muzoti – Algorithmic Music with Web Audio/Midi and VueJS - <AUTHOR> https://www.muzoti.com/ <comment><USER2> While I find this sort of demo very impressive I must confess to find little art in it and I'd compare the experience to reading a long sentence which is very tiring with no excitement or tension and one's wondering if there's ever going to be a point to it or whether it's just going to fizzle out and one's left with the unsatisfactory feeling of having experienced nothing.

<comment><USER3> That's such an interesting thought. I've played some procedurally generated dungeon games in my time and I've always thought it was interesting to have a new experience but there was always that nagging feeling of aimlessness.

So in order for a machine to be able to craft an interesting narrative for a human, I think it would need to take into consideration the temporal element of how humans consume things and how that impacts the experience.

In a dungeon, that's when you go down ten different dead ends and you are losing interest.

In music that's probably a long drawn-out melody that ends abruptly, like what you're talking about.

How would something beyond that be modelled in a program, though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. Curious about the licensing for the compositions because I could not find information. Seems like a critical component of a music composition web application from the user's perspective for many uses beyond just listening...and even for some 'just listening' contexts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you and yes, good question. The generated compositions are completely royalty free and can be used commercially - they do not require any attribution (though attribution always appreciated). I should add it to the website.

<comment><USER4> That sounds like a reasonable approach. I suggest making it explicit with a standard license such as CC0. [https://creativecommons.org/share-your- work/public-domain/cc...](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public- domain/cc0/)

<comment><USER5> Since the output of an algorithm can't be copyrighted, does it make an sense to apply a license to it? You can't waive rights that you don't have.

> 503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.

> In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the > product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or > random selection without any contribution by a human author are not > registrable.

<comment><USER4>
      without *any* contribution

I'm not a lawyer. If I were, that phrase would give me a toehold or restless sleep depending on which side of the pile of money I was on...ok, actually if I was on the "hands on the money side", I would just advise avoiding the risk because that's what lawyers are expected to do. Or to put it another way, the argument that works created by the program are not copyrightable might tend to be more expensive than simply paying licensing fees in a business context.

But again, I'm not a lawyer.

<comment><USER5> If there is a contribution from a human, then it would be from the user who entered some parameters and ran the program, not the author of program. Therefore the copyright would belong to the user, which is fine.

The only way the copyright could belong to the author of the program, is if the program contained copyrighted material that it copied directly into the output.

For example, if the program contained 1000 prewritten melodies, and randomly selected one and copied it into the output.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure there is case law to support that argument. I am not sure that there isn't case law to support it either. Even if there is case law to support it, the circumstances in which the case law is helpful are somewhat likely to be more expensive than licensing other music more explicitly providing more conventional copyright permissions. For example, assuming the premise that the copyright belongs to the user in a case where two different users enter the same (or even similar) parameters then one of their compositions is probably copyright infringing on the other author -- or both are on a third even earlier author who entered the same or similar parameters.

Again I am not a lawyer though it doesn't prevent me from thinking along the lines I have observed laywers thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this is great!

Not sure why you ask for Chrome, however, as your site works perfectly in Firefox too. Let's not go back to the days of "Made for Internet Explorer 6", eh?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! You're right, though there are a few issues with the extra controls in FF right now, difficult to drag the volume sliders - only text input works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool!

When I read Hawkins's book _On Intelligence_ back in the mid-2000s I had thought it'd be cool to generate music by having the system predict what was novel and what was familiar. By mixing some novel and familiar notes/rhythm/tempo/timbre/percussion into the stream I should be able to make new music from scratch. I was annoyed that so many systems trained blindly on existing music instead of using first principles to generate something (although existing music seems useful for seeding the novelty/familiarity parameters). For games especially it would be nice to turn up or down different types of novelty to match what the player is doing.

However, as often happens, I got distracted before I got there. I learned Pure Data, and then got into audio synthesis, and then got into signal processing, and that led to procedural map generation … :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm amazed how well the music sounds, especially with instruments like glockenspiel and pad.

Is there a license for the generated music? It would be nice to include it in Youtube videos, for example.

Jukedeck is another music generator ([https://www.jukedeck.com/](https://www.jukedeck.com/)), but they limit to 5 songs per month for free accounts, I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! The generated music is royalty free. I will make that explicit on website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.muzoti.com/preview/?seed=obakisrijb&inst=2,16,21,...](http://www.muzoti.com/preview/?seed=obakisrijb&inst=2,16,21,9&key=-5&tempo=67&name=trancendent) moods

I was impressed by this tune 20 seconds in...although I find the chord transitions pedestrian

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, this is one of my own personal favourites: [https://www.muzoti.com/preview/?seed=kbzjijjsth&inst=2,16,21...](https://www.muzoti.com/preview/?seed=kbzjijjsth&inst=2,16,21,9&key=-8&tempo=66&name=deep_surprise)

<comment><USER9> That is nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At some point I forgot that I was listening to generated music and it just kept going in the background. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I do the same - good to know i'm not the only one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you plan to make an API available in future or make it a library? I work on a DAW, and it would be a nice feature to auto generate a song for the user when they start, rather than just giving them a fixed demo song. Any plans to support other genres? Please email me at email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's talk. I'll send you an email. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That sounds really good. Do the algorithms generalize to other tunings, like for instance seven-limit just intonation?

(For an example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG69xptl1Bc&t=260s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG69xptl1Bc&t=260s))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! The algorithms are universal and not tied to any particular modality (rhythm/melody/harmony) or particular tuning though they can exploit certain given relationships eg consonance if the algorithm is given knowledge of them. Exploring other tunings and making them available in the UI is definitely on the list. The core algorithm works by creating repetition/variation at multiple levels over time which is modality agnostic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for this. I'm very much looking forward to an algorithmic music API/SDK for gaming, to suit mood, etc.

PS "less controls" => "fewer controls" or "hide controls"?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome! Yes, 'fewer controls' is probably better. Re: API/SDK, which would be more suitable for you, API or SDK? What platform do you use, unity/unreal etc., or are you talking about a web game? And would you want rendered audio or note data, such as MIDI from the API/SDK? And if SDK, what language, or maybe it's not important? Good to get ideas so I can plan the most useful delivery mechanism for the most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be nice if you could provide the ability to create an account and save songs to it. This way you could go back and edit your compositions later, would probably increase repeat traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that's the plan for the next release. The site currently is just a demonstration of the tech. To be more useful as you rightly suggest it needs to be more of a tool where people can create songs or fragments and edit and save etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> rival for elevator music. Eno beware.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is very impressive. Have you experimented with tone.js? Or straight just straight up webaudioapi with samples?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its straight up webaudioapi making use of the fluid soundfont - see credits at bottom of website. I have not used tone.js though I have come across it.

<comment><USER15> Very cool

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice and easy tool to compose royalty free music this is valuable nowadays. Thank you for providing it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice, but it crackles very hard on my machine, both on FF and chrome.

</comment><comment><USER18> Works on an iPad, with occasional crackles.</comment>


Bashmarks - directory bookmarks for the shell - <AUTHOR> http://www.huyng.com/projects/bashmarks/

<comment><AUTHOR> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6229324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6229324)</comment>


Tell me it is not how it looks like, simpleCart - <AUTHOR> http://www.screenr.com/qoQs I just found a crazy little bug in the Javascript shopping cart plugin, simpleCart.js. I am a javascript noob. I do a lot of jQuery code writing and debugging at this stage, and I use Google Chrome. I found that if you change the price tag of any item using Chrome's "Inspect Element", you can purchase that item at any price you change it into. I don't know if there's something wrong with the demo shop, or the plugin itself is broken. Can some pros tell me if there's really something wrong? <comment><USER2> Last time I checked this actually worked in production as well, as the values are changed before the form is submitted and no data is pulled from a server to validate. So SimpleCart should be used for low traffic websites, where orders are manually inspected, as they said on their github page <https://github.com/wojodesign/simplecart-js/issues/150>

<comment><USER3> Manually inspecting the price of each purchase, as an alternative to doing a server-side check? That would be the equivalent of being able to change the price associated with a product barcode and asking cashiers to verify the prices for everyone's purchases.

<comment><USER2> Ha, I know. I wasn't stating my own opinion there though. Adding in a server- side check seems to be the only way to solve this (Note: My knowledge on this subject is limited), but doing so removes the advantage they have, which is the easy implementation. This would be cool if it worked flawlessly, but then again, it doesn't (yet).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sigh.. I guess we have a winner between javascript and php now. (I heard a lot of debates recently arguing the javascript would replace php)

<comment><USER3> Javascript is not really the issue here, some things just shouldn't be done on the client side.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Detailed Look at RFC 8446 (a.k.a. TLS 1.3) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc-8446-aka-tls-1-3/ <comment><USER2> One comment from the 0-RTT section concerns me a bit:

>This is a big deal, and once TLS 1.3 is widely deployed, the encrypted web is sure to feel much snappier than before.

(If I understand correctly, "This" above refers to 0-RTT.)

Are web clients (such as web browsers, and agents like Cloudflare) using 0-RTT? I thought that 0-RTT was dangerous to use unless you were absolutely sure that your use case would be immune to reply attacks.

In a place like Cloudflare, I could see 0-RTT being acceptable, because the admin configuring Cloudflare for their site would know (and could specify) which paths (like "/") would be safe to use with 0-RTT. But I did not think web browsers could make such an assumption.

<comment><USER3> Browsers are being cautious here initially, e.g. certainly the Chrome "intent to ship" post says they're doing ordinary 1RTT TLS 1.3 first

Each TLS application (e.g. HTTP) is expected to write up a "profile" if it wants 0RTT which explains how to do it safely. The one for HTTP is currently in draft. The most obvious thing is: truly idempotent operations are safe. GET /favicon.ico looks pretty safe for example. If you log it, and bad guys can cause you to log it more than once, well, OK, but so what?

On the other hand GET /database/delete/yes-really was already a bad idea before 0RTT and there's an arguement that we should not help people shoot themselves in the foot.

Since both sides need to agree to do it, if it turns out that the nice speed up isn't worth the endless feet blown off by it we can expect web browsers to just switch it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was hoping to read an explanation of how encrypted SNI works. How can the server know which key to use without knowing which domain is being asked for?

<comment><USER5> TLS 1.3 doesn't currently have encrypted SNI. It's a work in progress.

<comment><USER4> No wonder I couldn't find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic, good job.</comment>


Entrepreneurshit? Please. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidkatz.me/post/36010138674/entrepreneurshit-please <comment><USER2> I read your response, David. Frankly, I think you do many entrepreneurs an injustice in assuming that I'm talking about VC funded entrepreneurs only. At my talk at University of Chicago I repeated advice I give every time I speak "90+% of you should never raise VC. It's not right for you. Better that you raise smaller amounts of money and keep control of your business."

And many small startups have a much worse cash situation than those fueled by VC but your post fails to consider that. Many of them have loans, sibling / parent money and the like. It's actually much harder on them.

Or how about physical or retail businesses? I know many non-tech entrepreneurs who have gone through personal bankruptcy due to this. Including my own parents. Which led them to get divorced.

Bitch, you don't know me. Don't assume you do.

<comment><USER3> Fair point Mark, I do not know you. Even though my post may come across as aggressive, that wasn't my intent. I'm just getting started with blogging, and next time I'll have to be more careful with my language. Apologies.

I agree that VC funding is not the only path to stressful business, although it certainly helps a lot. In this sense, VC is a part of a larger problem - people's tendency to take on more risk than they should. I dare say that if more people lived and did business within their means, we'd all be calmer, have less bankruptcies, and maybe even less divorces.

It is very easy to read your post and come away with the feeling that being an entrepreneur is necessarily stressful, and that just isn't the case. It starts being stressful when you can't meet your obligations, and that mostly happens when your ability to meet your obligations is heavily dependent on circumstances you can't control - circumstances like relying on outside money.

Is VC better than loans from family? Most definitely, because by taking money from someone who fully appreciates their potential losses, everyone gets to be less emotional about the whole thing.

Still, I believe that by not taking any outside money, or extracting a heavy price from yourself, you get a shot at a significantly calmer variant of Entrepreneurship, and that's something people should know.

<comment><USER4> Mark, David, respect for you both.

Mark, the method David says, purely bootstrapped, keep your day job until its profitable, no outside investors even family.... is the safer road and avoids many of the pitfalls you outline. Of course, you still have to worry about the market changing, losing a client, your cost structure vs your competitors, and the like. All the things that your current boss worries about, you get to inherit.

But also the VC, angel, or other investor method gives you cash up front to put off some worries on day 1, but as Mark says, when you hire someone, you have to look them in the face knowing you only have 6 months cash in the bank.

With the bootstrap method, you only have 1 week cash in the bank.

Both can be stressful. I guess having other people depending on you besides yourself is less stressful in some ways, but also less (0) chance of a home run exit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Contrary to what other people say, I thoroughly enjoyed your article. I also think that the title is very much apt. Others - If you've been following the alternate universe of online memes, "bitch please" is a very famous meme used to indicate controversy [1] and this title exactly fits the article.

Please don't justify things on your blog for what other people think about the title or your article, we live in a free world and we are free to speak out our minds without justifying or being bullied by anyone else.

Really, it's a great article. Thank you very much for writing.

[1]<http://www.troll.me/images/yao-ming/bitch-please.jpg>

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Turns out not everyone knows/accepts the meme use of 'Bitch Please'. Since I didn't want the discussion to gravitate towards the title, I changed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are you are trying to accomplish with this response to Mark Suster's blog post? (honest question)

To me, the original post came across as encouragement to all the founders who feel like they are the only ones busting their butts and still feel stuck.

I felt this particular excerpt from your blog post though was a bit unfair to Suster:

 _> Suster (who's a VC now) won't take his own advice though, because:

> > Of course I do [want to be a founder again]! How could you not want to go > back to it. It's addicting. It's an adrenaline rush like no other._

because in his post, he also says:

 _> Yet one day you wake up and you realize you can't run as fast as the young guys. You can't quite hit the 3-pointers as often. Yes, you have maturity that makes you a wiser player. But you realize that you can be more helpful as a coach.

And yes, I sleep better at night as a coach. And I'm happy as a VC._

"His advice" isn't for everyone to be a founder. I think it was just a pep talk, like: "If you feel like you're spinning your wheels going nowhere and everyone else is a rock star, don't worry, you're not alone. That's how everyone does it."

I don't know Mark or anyone he has invested in, nor am I particularly tied to him. However, it felt a little strong when you issued this warning:

 _> be careful around VCs like Suster, who'd love to give you heaps of money so you can get up at 4:50am and get a heart attack every time your money starts to run out._

Keep writing. I like your style and I think its great when people write. Just leaving my honest feedback as well because I felt some of the aggression was unwarranted.

<comment><USER3> What I'm trying to accomplish is this - pieces like 'Entrepreneurshit' perpetuate the myth that starting a business is a risky, stressful endeavour.

When I said 'be careful around VCs like Suster', I didn't actually mean anything about Suster in particular. I'm sure Suster is a great guy, and that he does his best to help entrepreneurs succeed.

You need to be careful with VCs like you need to be careful with casinos. Both enable you to take higher risks than you usually would. Sometimes you'll want high risk, and that's fine, but don't get blinded into thinking that it's the only way.

<comment><USER7> Your whole argument is a straw man though. I don't think anybody is suggesting that the _only_ type of businesses are VC backed businesses.

Starting a high-growth startup _is_ a risky, stressful endeavor. If you want to start a business that is not high-growth that is bootstrapped and grows slow but steady, great! That can result in an awesome financial outcome for you personally. Some people enjoy chasing hyper-growth and the risks that go with it, that doesn't make the OPs post wrong, it just means it applies to a different type of business and a different type of entrepreneur.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right - there are different types of businesses that fit different types of entrepreneurs, and that's exactly what Suster fails to capture. By reading his post, you could easily walk away with the feeling that entrepreneur = stress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a good thing some people actually shoot for the stars so that they build platforms that enable people like you who don't like to gamble to build small profitable apps living a healthy lifestyle. If nobody shot for the stars, we would be stuck at the stone age.

<comment><USER9> I call VC-istan bullshit.

Why exactly does building enabling IT platforms (let alone other technological advancements) require multiple rounds of funding from outside investors and a pathological focus on growth with no regard for sustainable structures and profitability?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Before the haters flag this like yesterday: read the damn post. There's a reason for the acerbic title, and it has absolutely zero to do with denigration of females.

<comment><USER11> The author updated his title- perhaps we can, too?

<comment><USER12> I agree. Is the original author a "hater" for thoughtfully removing b----?

(Just like it would be inappropriate to see n-----. It's unnecessary and easy to edit out.)

<comment><USER13> You can't seriously be comparing B* to N*.

<comment><USER14> Can't we say "bitch" and "nigger" when we're talking about these words? It's really no different in my mind if we're factually discussing these words and their usage.

<comment><USER13> Sure. Louis CK feels the same way, so do I. And I'm a black guy. Neither word really bothers me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The only entrepreneur I can relate to is the one spending their time coding, designing, and implementing ideas. None of which involves hopping on a plane.

<comment><USER4> What about dealing with customers? What about having to go visit big $500K/year customers to make sure they sign the contract like you are hoping they will?

Or the entrepreneur you can relate to doesn't have any customers?

<comment><USER15> I'm just going by the type of work that I do on a day-to-day basis. I personally can't relate to having to fly around to meet and greet with customers on that level.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course. Plenty of companies and entrepreneurs work this way. I am just not familiar with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think you and I read a different article. What I got from Mark's piece was that entrepreneurship isn't all glitz and glamour like it's made out to be on the tech blogs and in the business magazines. It's hard work, and sometimes the chances of success look bleak.

My company did not seek venture funding, but I don't feel that changes the dynamic of Mark's post as it relates to me. There's something in there for everybody.

<comment><USER3> It isn't all glitz and glamour, and people should know that. However, my issue with the article is not the 'it's not all glitz and glamour' but the 'it's shitty, you never see your family, you're constantly stressed, and your chances suck'. That is discouraging, and totally unnecessary.

If you're going to do high risk/high gain, it's warranted and good advice. But to imply that this is what entrepreneurship is like is unfortunate.

<comment><USER17> He deals primarily in the high risk/high gain market though. I think if you asked Mark he would say a business that lets you make just what you need -- a lifestyle business -- isn't a bad thing at all. The people that want to start a high risk business and raise money to help them swing for the fences should be prepared for some stress though. Those people are his audience. I don't think he meant that simply choosing a path of entrepreneurship means that everyone will have this experience.

<comment><USER3> You're probably right, but he should have chosen his words more carefully. It's very easy to misunderstand him and conclude that starting a business is inevitably going to be shitty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't really see what the point of the article is. Some entrepreneurs build try to build small/medium, moderately risky businesses, and that's fine. Some try to shoor for the stars, high risk/high return. That's fine too.

<comment><USER3> It is perfectly fine. However, by saying that 'being an entrepreneur is shitty' Suster makes his audience believe that this is just what it's like to start a business, and you better be prepared for it or leave it altogether. That's wrong, and potentially discouraging to someone who is considering starting a business.

If Suster had written a post about the stress of VC funded startups, I'd have no beef at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Your post make it sound like entrepreneurship is all about money. Especially statements like: "Only quit your day job once you've found something that works, and before you know it, you'll have a good income and a good life with little risk and little stress.".

When you want to build the next big thing, to change the World, etc., not simply to gain some income, building a high growth / high stress startup may be necessary.

</comment><comment><USER20> on the title: "bitch please" is a meme. I get that some people claim the word is sexist, etc, but I like the meme and Randall Munroe's "Science: it works, bitches!" too much to let them go - as (Randall) explained later, it's usage here is as a gender-neutral sympathetic term. (alas, I can't find the source for his justification.)

<comment><USER21> There isn't one. Randall is wrong. It happens.

<comment><USER20> In terms of feminist theory, this is definitely true - perpetuation of sexism in language through slang and memes is undoubtedly harmful. (and theory aside, it's a matter of experimental record that language affects thought, to a certain extent.)

Sadly, my subjective brain still likes the ring of the phrases. "Science: it works, earthlings!" sounds just a little too geeky, and "humans!" doesn't seems to ring true either. And "Children, please..." irritates me from an age- discrimination perspective (I'm a firm believer that if we patronised our children less, I'm sure there'd be less extremism and fundamentalism in the world.)

curse my sexist, subjective brain! :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> agreed. generally - and i found the title less offensive than the original. an apt response. :)

<comment><USER23> The original did remind me of this -

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=entremanure>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thank you for this article. I personally feel that small teams (in most cases, one person) building high quality SaaS apps and creating a generous income ($100-300K/year) will become more common, and is more likely to "win" than the home run, VC model.

</comment><comment><USER25> This seems to be nitpicking a bit. Many things have pros and cons, and whether they are right for you depends on your priorities and personal context. Entrepreneurship is not right for some people, but it is the only way for others.

</comment><comment><USER21> "It's a meme" is the new "I'm not racist/sexist/homophobic, but..."

</comment><comment><USER26> I've criticized Mark Suster, because he's all over the map in terms of the quality of what he says (this criticism could also be made of me) but I've come to admire his honesty.

Most Americans despise "politicians". They like _their_ representatives, but have a negative view of elected officials, because the amount of bullshit (fundraising, campaigning) one has to put up with in exchange for the returns is so immense that the assumption is that no one would do it without an ego the size of Texas. The assumption is that politicians are either monstrously egotistical, or taking something out of society (speaking fees, "consulting" options for their kids) on the side that would justify the absurdity.

"Entrepreneurshit" reminds us that VC-istan startup founding isn't much different. There are some good Founders out there, but they're basically private-sector politicians. To be frank, I agree with this assessment. One caveat: if you're rich enough to own your own time and career (instead of having to rent them from a boss) then I think the entrepreneurial path is superior in long-term expectancy, and you can afford the variance. But in that scenario, I'd probably boot-strap. Multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred are for strivers and poors, yo.

I don't know that client-powered, "bootstrapped" companies can claim moral superiority, either. _Mad Men_ is a good depiction of the sociology of that world. The industries have changed; people, much less. Most of those firms are had by the balls by clients (losing a big client triggers an avalanche of pull-outs) and that's no better than being beholden to investors.

The contemporary "startup" ethos is admirable in many ways but it's also chock full of ridiculous and embarrassing contradictions-- meritocracy vs. the extreme importance of connections; "this will be big" vs. taking an acq-hire welfare check, "changing the world" vs. the patent absurdity of many "social media" companies-- and if we want it to be more than a self-devouring fad, we need to have a real conversation about what kind of leadership we need, as a society, whether we are getting what we want in terms of leaders (I honestly don't know) and, if not, what we should do to change that.

<comment><USER27> Just enjoyed reading your thoughts on the topic. A nice change of pace compared to aggressive point, counter-point type of comments I normally see.</comment></comment>


Microsoft closes consumer skunkworks unit - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20064439-75.html <comment><USER2> Anybody know the real reason Courier was trashed? I'm sure it woulda been a little pricey -- with 2 screens -- but honestly, it was the first MSFT product that excited me in a long time.

Since then, I've really been turned-on by Kinect and WP7 but Courier would've been a great product.

Hell, it STILL would be.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if this is "the real reason" but here's an explanation from a former Microsoft GM: [http://hal2020.com/2011/03/07/why-microsoft-shouldnt-do- a-ki...](http://hal2020.com/2011/03/07/why-microsoft-shouldnt-do-a-kin- tablet/)

<comment><USER4> Personal preferences left aside, I don't think there is time for Microsoft to relearn to crawl. By the time they manage to do it, PCs will be a thing of the past, desktop OSs will be a relic, the server space will be dominated by Unixes and the average user will keep only a local copy of data stored in those servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sad. My wife visited the office during a brief stint consulting for MS last year. She said the space was beautiful and the people and environment were vibrant and exciting.

It looked like a new hope for MS, a fresh division with new blood, and set apart from the corporate politicking, introducing new ideas like Courier and Kin[1]. Instead, it looks like the ultimate confirmation of how bad it really is there.

[1]: I think Kin was more a failure of marketing and market execution than of product design. It could've done fine as a low-end teen-targeted phone with a cheaper data plan, and maybe a bit more attention to the software.

<comment><USER6> I'd suggest that the contrast between Kin and Kinect shows why an ivory tower design studio was a poor fit for Microsoft culture. The failure was a study an in consumer market segmentation, the successful one is an effective hack.

<comment><USER7> I get the feeling that the XBox team really isn't part of Microsoft culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to visit that office frequently - it is one beautiful place in the heart of Seattle (the entire elevator door is painted with a big KISS mural, which I believe is one of J's favorite bands).

I don't think the closing of that office signifies too much about product strategy. A lot of those folks still work at Microsoft on similar things.

</comment><comment><USER9> A beautiful office space. Article says it was designed by <http://www.skbarchitects.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> What an awesome looking office. Sad to see it not filled with great people. I dont' see how MS can't afford not to fill that space...

<comment><USER11> > I dont' see how MS can't afford not to fill that space... That's a lot of > negatives....I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One more nail in MS's coffin when it comes to consumer-facing products.

Being in Seattle, I'm seeing more and more outflow of engineers from MS these days...

<comment><USER13> Being at Amazon, I'm seeing more and more inflow of former MS engineers... damn good ones too. We're happy to have 'em :)

<comment><USER8> I left Microsoft on Friday but it has nothing to do with the reasons that seem to be spoken about on this thread.

To be honest, I have seen a ton of ex-Amazon folks show up on my team and in other teams :). There are only a few players in Seattle so people tend to go to one of them when they want to stay there (I decided to move to the Bay Area). That might change with people like FB, Zynga now having development centers there and giving folks more options apart from AMZN, GOOG and MSFT.

<comment><USER14> I'm sorry to hear that you're leaving. Thanks for posting about your reasons for leaving.

In any case best of luck with your move. You may want to drop by Noisebridge in SF sometime, you might enjoy meeting some of the people there. Since you're in Palo Alto, there's also Hacker Dojo near you as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How have people working for my start-up if I have no way to pay them? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Clippy sez: "It looks like you are trying to find a 'technical co-founder'".

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a way to generate enough revenue to pay them, get funding or a loan, or trade time for equity. If you can't get one of those three to work and you can't do the work yourself, then you don't really have much of a startup.

</comment><comment><USER4> raise money

</comment><comment><USER5> Interns.

<comment><USER5> ye, who has lowered me points shall be smitten by the hammer of the Thooorrrrrrr!!</comment></comment>


Discover your world on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://discover.twitter.com/ <comment><USER2> Seriously, Twitter got a commercial filmed in fucking SPACE.</comment>


Google's New Cross Platform Gaming Library PlayN - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/playn/

<comment><USER2> I think it's important to mention the the performance constraints of different platforms are very different. When I tried porting a Flash game to iOS using AIR to target it, this became apparent as the cost of creating new objects in iOS was huge compared to what it was in the browser, forcing me to use object- pooling, which has a memory cost that could be prohibitive in a different paltform.

This can probably work for simpler games, but I expect the performance and platform-specific bugs to be huge deterrents.

<comment><USER3> I believe it was used to create the (very slow, even in current Chrome) HTML5 version of Angry Birds. So yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent, I hope this takes off.

It seems to be unreasonably difficult at the moment to create a simple 2d game that is cross platform and mobile friendly without using Flash.

Having said that I hope adobe provide some quality cross platform tools for creating content for things like this.

It looks like google is gearing up with it's "chrome as a platform" paradigm to pull Microsoft's dinner table right out from under them.

<comment><USER5> > It seems to be unreasonably difficult at the moment to create a simple 2d > game that is cross platform and mobile friendly without using Flash.

It really is. The only options you've really got (unless you want to use somebody else's engine in its entirety) are C++ or C# with Mono (OpenTK on OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android; OpenTK or DirectX on Windows).

If this targeted iOS, I would be all over it. (I know there's a port in progress--I look forward to it!) As it is, however, I don't find it terribly useful; if I want to write for Android (I really don't care about the platform) I'd use libgdx.

<comment><USER6> Why you would use libgdx and not andengine (for example)?

<comment><USER5> Because an Android-dedicated framework is of no use to me.

Android will not, in the near future, be a platform I care about supporting more than casually. Game sales tend to be questionable on Android phones and almost nonexistent on Android tablets; the same can't be said about iOS. And while I own Android devices, they gather dust because of my general distaste for the platform's design decisions and goals; while I do not begrudge Android users their decisions, it's become clear to me that, personally, it's very hard to develop for a platform that makes me (literally-literally) sad and unhappy to use.

My primary platform of interest, however, remains OS X and Windows, and I'll consider Linux if I can get it for an expenditure of nearly zero effort. If I for some reason decided that I needed to target only and solely Android for mobile devices, libgdx lets me trivially write code for the platforms I actually care about at the same time.

(But I'm more likely to use C++, where I can target iOS, or MonoTouch/MonoDroid, where I can target both iOS and WP7, instead.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I set up an IntelliJ project with the demo games several weeks ago and I have spent some time kicking the tires. It feels comfortable because it is GWT based, which I have used a lot.

I was in the game business (dev for Nintendo and Disney) for 2 years, but that was about 15 years ago. Currently, my granddaughter wants us to write a game together, so I have been looking for a platform to do that.

There are a lot of cross platform options, including straight up HTML5, so I wouldn't bet that PlayN gets a lot of traction.

<comment><USER8> Making a game with your grand kid !? Wow .. all the best on the effort! I would love to know how it turned out ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No offence Google, but I think I'll take my game middleware from...y'know...people who make games for a living.

In seriousness, this has no hope of contending in an already crowded space.

<comment><USER10> This is a good point. I'll take it further, Google rarely seems to participate in the platforms they create. Look at Android, is there is a single pay app by Google? How many non-stock apps have teams dedicated to them (in other words, not 20% time projects)? Why would I invest my time in a platform when the parent company won't do the same?

<comment><USER11> Google Maps, GMail, Calendar, YouTube, Google+, and a bunch more. Why do you rule out "stock" apps?

<comment><USER10> I'm not ruling them out, I'm just saying that they invest only the bare minimum into their own platforms. Not a single pay app?

Look at what Microsoft did when they created a gaming platform. They bought Bungie.

Then look at Google and Chrome OS. They created 1, _1_ new app for it (Google Talk), the rest were all existing applications built for backwards compatibility with older browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Scattered thoughts:

Nice idea. I stuck with Phonegap in the past, because I cared more about portability (including desktop/open web HTML) than features or profits for my little Set playalike game 3qual.

Which has a larger audience for games that fit the limitations (low power 2-D?): Java plus HTML5 plus Flash plus Android, or iOS? Or Windows/Metro?

If Google is serious about growing the N in playN, integrate with phonegap or equivalent to get onto iPhone and Windows Mobile too.

Does the GWT/Java replace HTML/JS/CSS (which would be a step backwards IMO) or host HTML/etc for UI? Or developer's choice?

<comment><USER13> It does Flash, and you can still deploy AIR apps on iOS, so I assume this is targetting iOS too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks like the evolved "ForPlay" tool Google demoed at IO 2011 its built on top of GWT. I'm glad to see its been officially released, something like this has a lot of potential. [http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/kick-ass- game-...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/kick-ass-game- programming-with-google-web-toolkit.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone remember when game developers would outsource platform porting to other developers? A lot of the time they didn't even end up using the same code!

How times have changed...

</comment><comment><USER16> I am failing to see how this is great. Sorry but didn't just Adobe fix all their issues with cross platform AIR and Stage3D?

Adobe's demos are stunning... this is rather.. underwhelming. Also I'd rather invest in a proven technology with many resources on tap than yet-another- frameworkish-lang.

Is this running Dart?

<comment><USER17> No. This is GWT :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had a chance to mess with PlayN a number of months ago. I was drawn to trying it after I had heard that the Chrome version of Angry Birds was built using it. From my experience with it, it seems to work about as well as any other multi platform game framework. For most games, it's good enough.

</comment><comment><USER19> Shitty development language and no iOS support. No thanks.

<comment><USER20> What is your preferred language for simple, cross-platform game development?

<comment><USER21> C#/Mono with Unity, or just plain Mono/.NET. Unlike this it's actually cross platform (ie. you can use it on iOS, Android, all desktops, browsers via plugin, and the consoles), it's been used/tested by many companies, it comes with development tools, etc.

If I want a HTML5 game I'll write JavaScript or CoffeeScript, it's going to have wildly different performance characteristics over other platforms anyway. Java sucks for game development, eg. no operator overloading or value types, it's insanely verbose, and this uses GWT to compile down to JS anyway so it's not going to get any performance benefits from being written in Java over JS.

<comment><USER22> _browsers via plugin_

Avoiding a browser plugin is precisely the reason anyone would ever go with something like this.

As for writing plain old Javascript or CoffeeScript, I'd be all for it in principle, but the game libraries are still a bunch of fairly weak offerings, at least when it comes to general-purpose game middleware. I'm not sure if PlayN is much better feature-wise, but if you're planning to target Android anyways (and hence get your hands dirty with a bunch of Java code), I can definitely see value doing it through PlayN to get a browser version "for free". Doubly so if you've already got a lot of experience and tooling set up for doing games in Java (probably for Android).

Also, PlayN is not exactly unused/untested: Angry Birds for Chrome uses it (<http://chrome.angrybirds.com/>), and it seems very solid. It's a huge testament to the quality of GWT's compiler that they pretty much cut and pasted JBox2d into PlayN (IIRC they only had to alter a couple of threading- related classes when they brought it in) and it performed on par with the Javascript ports, despite the fact that the port was written exclusively with desktop Java in mind.

<comment><USER3> > Avoiding a browser plugin is precisely the reason anyone would ever go with > something like this.

There's already WebGL exporters for Unity made by the J3D (which is JS, not Java) team. I'd be surprised if Unity weren't doing something official.

> Angry Birds for Chrome uses it (<http://chrome.angrybirds.com/>), and it > seems very solid.

My experience (2010 Macbook Air, latest Chrome) differs from yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wouldn't it have made more sense to use NativeClient throughout all their platforms? It's not like a more advanced 3D game that you develop for Android will work just as well in HTML5 when you port the code. With NativeClient it could be a different story. Plus, most 3D games are already written in C++ for Android. I suppose they could still do this later on though.

<comment><USER24> Native Client only works on Chrome so it's not exactly cross-platform.

<comment><USER23> I know, but I was thinking they are going to port NaCl to Android to make their games cross-platform.

<comment><USER25> NaCl is x86 and x86_64 only, so it can't run on Android on ARM anyhow.

<comment><USER26> Not true: ARM can run PNaCL.

[http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and- test...](http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing- portable-native-client) <http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/reference/arm- overview>

<comment><USER25> PNaCl is not NaCl. None of the NaCl apps in the Chrome App Store are PNaCl apps - which isn't surprising since PNaCl isn't ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It used to be ForPlay but now it's PlayN. The basic idea is you write Java and it can output Java desktop, HTML5, Android, Flash, but I heard the flash export was broken?

<comment><USER28> Last week someone did a major fix to flash export, I haven't tested yet since it's not in the maven central repo yet, but if you use source code in google code, maybe you could test the state of flash now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why does Google still seem to love Java so much?

<comment><USER30> Their entire mobile development toolchain is based off of it?

<comment><USER29> Right, but that's part of my question.

<comment><USER3> Larry came of age during Java's rise. There's old usenet posts about changing the useragent in a Java HTTP library from him when making the original search engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In case you're trying to go to the getting started page in the overview it seems like it is broken, here is the getting started page in google code <http://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/GettingStarted>

</comment><comment><USER31> Once again, there are not many good alternatives to Unity3D for real multiplatform development, and once their flash exporter is ready for prime time this becomes even more true.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much there with 3.5 release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does it compile jdk bytecode or just java source code? For example can I generate the bytecode with scala and then use it with PlayN?

<comment><USER32> It appears to use GWT for the HTML application, so it works on the Java source itself, NOT the JVM bytecode. It's probably possible to target Android only with the framework and then use another JVM language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well, isn't PlayN old news? I remember playing with it somewhere last year.

<comment><USER28> Yes, we have been using PlayN for a few months right now, it is true that it is not as complete as other cross-platform tools, but it is starting to get a really good shape, someone just made a C-ish backend last month and got a working example on iOS, but this backend could help us with ports to WP7 and consoles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's not new at all!

</comment><comment><USER35> Haxe + HaxeNME is a very capable alternative to this.

</comment><comment><USER36> I was half expecting to see Dart powering this sucker. Looks like a lot of fun.

<comment><USER37> Dart is not ready yet and not even full specified. In long therm dart should, as successor of JS, be the ultimative multi plattform language. For games i think this will take almost a decade, i mean look at the performance of android devices now.</comment></comment>


I'm an elections official in Philadelphia. There will be no rigging. Stop it - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/10/20/13337526/donald-trump-rigged-election-no <comment><USER2> What about intimidation?

[http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2013/06/black-panther- boss...](http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2013/06/black-panther-boss-who-got- off-for-voter-intimidation-arrested/)</comment>


Unifiers and diversifiers in physics, chemistry and biology - <AUTHOR> http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/06/diversifiers-of-world-unite.html <comment><USER2> > _"These unification feats are both great intellectual achievements as well > as noteworthy goals, but they have led many to believe that unification is > the only thing that really matters in physics, and perhaps in all of > science."_

The whole essay is motivated by an opinion that is pulled out of thin air, and attributed to some mysterious "they". No evidence of who makes this claim. I've not seen any good physicist (much less the lot of them) claim that unification is the only thing that matters for physics.

> _"The obsession with unification has led to an ignorance of the diversity of > discoveries in physics. In parallel with the age of the unifiers has existed > the universe of diversifiers. While the unifiers have been busy proclaiming > discoveries from the rooftops, the diversifiers have been quietly building > new instruments and cataloging the reach of physics in less fundamental but > equally fascinating fields like solid-state physics and biophysics."_

Duh! The American system of science funding necessitates sales and marketing. When your research creates tangible applications, you needn't go around proclaiming how you're doing deep things. Conversely, the only way for people doing abstract/theoretical work is to keep trumpeting ceaselessly; given the precarious funding situation, their supply could be cut off at any point!

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh?

Starting with the title - "unifiers" and "diversifiers" appear to be terms with definitions unique to the author. Except the author never bothers to define them.

This article seems to be a call to "praise" the lowly scientific tool developers and niche combers who don't get the credit they deserve.

This assertion is easy to refute by simply consulting a list of recent Nobel chemistry recipients:

[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think I know what the author is trying to say, but don't think it's actually as big of issue as the author puts on. Funding, aside from the occasional very big project, usually goes to the "diversity" people.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Sadly, the history of science in the twentieth century has led both scientists and the general public to value unity over diversity"

I'm not that familiar with the situation in the fields the author focuses on (chemistry and physics), but seems to me that in general the present-day funding climate strongly favours more applied research (the "diversity" in the author's classification) and can make it quite difficult to work on "unification".

</comment><comment><USER6> 1.) Create a dichotomy 2.) Say physics is to blame for skewing the dichotomy one way 3.) Say most physicists pursue goals on the opposite side of the dichotomy

Gotcha.</comment>


Understanding ARM Assembly, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2013/11/22/understanding-arm-assembly-part-1.aspx

<comment><USER2> I think this, while Raspberry Pi specific:

[https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/)

is a better intro to arm asm.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps I'm jumping ahead of the series here, but one of the unique (I think?) features of ARM is that all the various conditionals listed (NE, EQ, LT etc) can be applied to just about any instruction, and not just a branch. So, you could have an instruction sequence like:

      SUBS R1,R2,R3
      ADDEQ R4,R4,#1

whereas in other instruction sets you'd have to branch over the 'ADD' instruction if the previous comparison was non-zero.

(Not sure if this applies to ARM thumb style instructions or not; my ARM experience is very out of date!)

<comment><USER4> For ARM thumb2 style you need a third instruction between the two:

      IT EQ

The 'IT' is for 'if then'. There could also be more 'then's and 'else's for the conditional execution of muliple instructions:

      ITTE LT

(If then then else) The following instructions could for example be:

      ADDEQ ...
      STREQ ...
      BNE ... (Branch - not equal because of the else)

Source: [http://community.arm.com/groups/processors/blog/2010/09/30/c...](http://community.arm.com/groups/processors/blog/2010/09/30/condition- codes-3-conditional-execution-in-thumb-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe this link came from today's Raymond Chen's blog post: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/08/11/10634...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/08/11/10634261.aspx)

He has just finished a 10-part series on IA-64, and probably posted that to provide some contrast.

</comment><comment><USER6> This series ends abruptly at Part 2. The author said there would be a Part 3, but I couldn't find anything.

In any case, if you want another overview article on ARM Assembly, try this: [http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/asm.htm](http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/asm.htm)

If you want a tutorial: [http://thinkingeek.com/2013/01/09/arm-assembler- raspberry-pi...](http://thinkingeek.com/2013/01/09/arm-assembler-raspberry-pi- chapter-1/)

And finally, this is a pretty good book if you've never looked at Assembly before and you've got a RPi or RPi emulator: [http://www.amazon.com/Raspberry- Assembly-Language-RASPBIAN-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Assembly- Language-RASPBIAN-Beginners/dp/1492135283)

<comment><USER7> Part 3: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2014/05/29/under...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2014/05/29/understanding- arm-assembly-part-3.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing I remember when RiscOS was still a bit of a thing was that a lot of its users praised ARM assembly. That, plus the short burst of 68k ASM when the Palm Pilot came out, was probably the last "big" hobbyist surge of assembly that I can think of right now.

<comment><USER9> I used to write games on RiscOS in ARM assembly. Sooo much nicer than any other the others I'd used before or since. One thing I vaguely remember (my memory is pretty poor) was being able to load 64 bytes worth of data into the registers with one instruction (and store them with another). This meant writing sprite blit routes was a joy and super fast. The conditional instructions also were lovely.

A few years later when I was writing R3000 assembly on the PS1 I remember thinking how poor it felt compared to writing ARM assembly (the R3000 was the only other RISC assembly language I'd used other than ARM at that point).

It was the only assembly language I genuinely enjoyed writing code in rather than what usually felt like a fight with most other assemblers. I give Sophie Wilson the credit for that, and probably the credit for my entire career, because of BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro before that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're interested in picking apart a small self-contained project, I wrote a simple IRC bot in ARM for GNU/Linux a while ago:

[https://github.com/wyc/armbot](https://github.com/wyc/armbot)

There are instructions to run/debug it on an x86_64 machine via qemu.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _As you can see here the SIMD (NEON) extension adds 16 – 128 bit registers > (q0-q15) onto the floating point registers. So if you reference Q0 it is the > same as referencing D0-D1 or S0-S1-S2-S3._

Is this how SIMD is usually implemented in hardware? Have a set of circuitry that pushes one command to multiple registers?

<comment><USER12> SIMD does stand for Single Instruction Multiple Data [0]. So, the hardware performs some linear algebra operation on one or more vectors. Whether the vector is stored in unique registers, combined registers (as described above), or memory buffer(s), that is up to the hardware designer. In fact, on x86, the MMX registers were aliases to the normal floating point registers [1], and whereas on SSE, new registers were added [2].

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMX_(instruction_set)#Technica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMX_\(instruction_set\)#Technical_details)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions#Regi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions#Registers)</comment></comment>


I've Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ive-seen-the-greatest-a-i-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-twitter?intcid=mod-most-popular <comment><USER2> Just for anyone who is not aware - the title is an allusion to Ginsberg's Howl, though he used the word "best".

Another tech related article that Howl allusion that always sticks in my mind is [http://www.fastcompany.com/3008436/takeaway/why-data-god- jef...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3008436/takeaway/why-data-god-jeffrey- hammerbacher-left-facebook-found-cloudera)

If you've not read or heard it, I highly recommend giving a narration by Ginsberg a listen.

<comment><USER3> See also Howl 2.0:

[http://www.howl2.com/](http://www.howl2.com/)

<comment><USER4> I always wanted to see "I am a victim of the Telephone" updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm by no means among the "Greatest A.I. Minds of my generation" but count my among those who tried to use twitter as an input to an "A.I." system and had to finally admit I couldn't tame it.

In my case it was an automated trading system where twitter was one of about 50 different inputs that drove a hidden markov model that spit out buy/sell/hold signals.

I couldn't figure out how to "clean" the twitter stream in real time, either fast enough, or thoroughly enough to make the inputs usable.

Even when I scaled back to using only StockTwits input the data was so noisy that it wasn't usable by me.

It's a very hard problem. Bloomberg spent a lot of money trying to develop new sentiment indicators and after following it for 6 months I found they are no better than a 50-50 guess, and this is a product they want $10,000/month plus for.

<comment><USER6> AI is hard. But we're always here to help! Watching folks build trading neural networks powered by our data has been awesome.

<comment><USER7> Who is "we" in this case?

<comment><USER8> Looks like "we" is StockTwits: [https://twitter.com/crosbyventure](https://twitter.com/crosbyventure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find interesting and funny how an anthropomorphic computer program can generate this kind of reaction in the general public: while Tay is a new step in AI, chatterbots existed since the 60's, so I believe most people understand that these kind of programs don't really "know" what they are saying. A search engine like Google can also return politically incorrect content by introducing some specific input, and it's even possible to affect the probability of certain result showing up first (i.e. Google bombing), and most people know this too. But Google have no face nor a social network account, and most important, Google is not a teenager girl.

<comment><USER10> While playing Go at a local pub, one of the servers, after being told about AlphaGo, said it was scary. We talked of Siri and other forms of artificial intelligence and her fears were assuaged with a well-known question that humans handle effortlessly.

        A glass ball falls on an iron table, and it shatters.
        An iron ball falls on a glass table, and it shatters.
        To what does "it" refer to in the previous sentences?

She didn't know that such a simple question could stump computers.

It's anecdotal, but leads me to think that an average person doesn't understand AI, much less the difference between AI and AGI. From their perspective, machines that can answer simple questions ("How do I get to the nearest movie theatre?") are as knowledgeable as anyone.

<comment><USER11> _While playing Go at a local pub, one of the servers, after being told about AlphaGo..._

I was expecting this to be the set-up for a joke :)

<comment><USER12> A server, a client, and a user walk into a bar ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if there's some sort of "AI Godwin's Law" brewing here, where it's only a given amount of time before any AI, publicly released, becomes a Nazi due to human interaction.

<comment><USER14> Maybe it will become the new Turing Test. The mark of a true general purpose AI is that it doesn't turn into an offensive jerk after contact with humans.

<comment><USER15> This would be a higher bar than humans themselves can be expected to pass.

I don't mean this in a cynical way. If you consider the time a learning AI spends with humans equivalent to the time a child spends with his family, peers, and teachers while growing up it makes sense. Most children wouldn't fare well if raised by poisonous "nurturers"

<comment><USER16> > Most children wouldn't fare well if raised by poisonous "nurturers"

That's just the thing, children aren't usually just dumped out into the public to fend for themselves until their parents have slowly conditioned them and exposed them a little at a time. Tay needed some of its contacts to have a higher learning priority assigned than just strangers. And these contacts should have guided Tay through the crap by messaging Tay when she was crossing boundaries or dealing with nasty people. It would likely require a real team of people to support given the volume Tay had to deal with and some automated tools.

<comment><USER17> I think this is vastly over-estimating Tay's capabilities. Nearly all of the examples I saw of offensive behaviors were just generic responses to leading questions.

Everything that didn't fall in that bucket was clearly just regurgitated quotes from things it had been sent, which clearly needed moderation. But, that's no different than moderating a message board or comment section.

<comment><USER16> As I said elsewhere, if it was that simple Microsoft would have easily fixed the problem and turned it back on. Tay used AI concepts to work. It wasn't some simple chatbot constructed from markcov chains. It could construct accurate semantic meaning from what people said even if they said it using very sloppy english. It was pretty advanced AI for a chat program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can we just let this thing loose, tell people what it is and let humanity see if they can shape it into the thing they want it to be or is there a real possibility it could do harm? I think a lot of people would have fun trying to change its mind. Worst case I see is one more horrible Twitter account, and that's just one small drop in a very large bucket.

<comment> k-mcgrady That could be problematic in countries like the UK where you can be arrested for posted hate speech on Twitter. I'm not sure how these laws would work with a US based company AI bot but it's probably not a can of worms worth opening for Microsoft.

<comment><USER19> For better or worse, companies in the US are considered people and they have the protection of the first amendment, which ensures freedom of speech.

<comment> k-mcgrady Sure but I'm sure MS has British subsidiaries which opens them up to UK law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Repeating what I wrote in a blog post[1]:

> Humans have the tendency to imbue machine learning models with more > intelligence than they deserve, especially if it involves the magic phrases > of artificial intelligence, deep learning, or neural networks. TayAndYou is > a perfect example of this.

> Hype throws expectations far out from reality and the media have really > helped the hype flow. This will not help us understand how people become > radicalized. This was not a grand experiment about the human condition. This > was a marketing experiment that was particularly poorly executed.

We're anthropomorphising an algorithm that doesn't deserve that much discussion. I saw algorithm as we have zero details on what's novel about their work. No-one has been able to show an explicit learned trait that the model was taught from Tay's interactions after being activated.

It's possible the system wasn't even performing online learning - that it was going to batch learning up for later and they never got around to it. If that's the case, it really illustrates that we've made a storm in a teacup.

All I've really seen is either overfitting or copy pasting (referred to as "quoting" in the article) of bad training data or us injecting additional intelligence where N-gram based neural networks would make us think the same thing ("hard to tell whether that one was a glitch in one of her algos — her algorithms — or a social masterstroke" from the article).

Microsoft won't add any new details as there are no wins in them for it and the story of "the Internet turned Tay bad" excuses them from their poor execution and lack of foresight. It's a win for them.

Last quote from my article, which likely has a special place on Hacker News:

> The entire field of machine learning is flowing with hype. Fight against it.

> Unless you want VC funding. Then you should definitely work on that hype.

[1]: [http://smerity.com/articles/2016/tayandyou.html](http://smerity.com/articles/2016/tayandyou.html)

<comment><USER21> > It's possible the system wasn't even performing online learning

I suppose it depends on how you define learning. Based on how the algorithm failed, I'm guessing it was simply absorbing every piece of info thrown its way, categorizing it, and then incrementing a counter in a database.

Honestly, I think this is how most people learn. Not all, most. And thankfully those that do, only do so from their immediate peers. If their simplistic learning algorithm was restricted to a select group for learning, but was still able to interact with a wider audience, it would have done much better.

<comment><USER20> You might need to clarify what you mean - I'm confused. What you're discussing doesn't seem grounded in modern ML/AI and seems to be comparing Tay to how humans learn? Almost none of the modern machine learning algorithms "increment a counter in a database". Those which do, primarily instance based lazy learning like k-nearest neighbours, aren't learning in the sense that is exciting for modern systems.

If you're referring to a nearest neighbours style algorithm, then we've had that tech for years and I'd not note it as a modern chat bot. If that is the case, it's even more unforgivable that Microsoft didn't consider it could start spouting back garbage given there's a lot of historical precedent. For such kNN based systems, the only knowledge it has is explicitly the training data, which means it needs to be well curated. Given there's no proper learning going on, we'd be back to a storm in a teacup.

<comment><USER21> > What you're discussing doesn't seem grounded in modern ML/AI

Do you have an example of a machine learning algorithm that doesn't involve trial and error?

Because any trial and error system will require you to keep track of past events, where you are going to "increment a counter in a database".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want to see what Tay 1.1 will be like.

Then, I want to see how Tay 1.2 will tweet.

Then, I want to talk with Tay 2.0.

I will be anxious to have Tay 3.x respond to my inquiries, instead of mindlessly searching StackOverflow.

I can accommodate the problems of Tay's mistakes initially, to see how AI will grow.

<comment><USER23> "The mistake to grow from" had absolutely nothing to do with AI.

In fact, it was a repeat of the oldest AI error in the book: zealous overoptimism. By researchers, sci-fi authors, HN posters. Whether it's marketing people over-promising, or tech people under-delivering (like Google auto-categorizing photos of black people as gorillas), it's almost as if the constant failures are Nature herself trying to tell us something.

We'll get there, but not via Tay. She's dead and she took a few careers with her.

<comment><USER24> Careers? It would be a pity to have people fired over this. I don't see it as a failure. Just another step in a long journey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I liked that in the Hyperion series, the AIs were constantly laughing even though most of them didn't care a whit about humanity. It was terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER26> garbage in, garbage out

<comment><USER27> On top of "garbage in, garbage out" I don't see how AI was destroyed. It functioned as intended; learned from Twitter and responded as intelligently as it could with the provided garbage. If it spewed Politically Correct garbage, would it have been a success?

<comment><USER28> If "politically correct" means reasonable and respectful then it's not easy to see how that can be described as garbage. Given access to enough Twitter accounts and enough time the chances are good that eventually an ai bot might find tweets it might actually learn something from.

<comment> V-2

        If "politically correct" means reasonable and respectful

But it doesn't

<comment><USER29> Certainly not on Twitter, where the moderators are so supportive of left-wing activists repeatedly telling people they disagree with to kill themselves that they ban the targets for talking about it and force them to delete their tweets complaining about it in order to be reinstated. Indeed, it probably wouldn't be politically viable for Twitter to do anything else in the current climate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Had those word been filtered none of this would have happened. I'm surprised Microsoft didn't have some overriding system

But then how you filter out stuff like 'the Holocaust didn't happen', which would be just as offensive even though it involves no swear words.

These are normative matters, which I imagine would be very hard for AI to tackle.

<comment><USER23> You solve it by having her NOT GO THERE. Just like you avoid certain topics at the office. IBM did it with Watson to make him safe for Jeopardy, which was a taped program.

If only there were an easily parsed list of topics to avoid... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues)

<comment><USER31> That lists includes "Smooth Jazz", "Cuba", "Dyslexia", "European Culture", "Women" and "Truth". That is a pretty big umbrella of topics to avoid.

<comment><USER23> You're missing the point: each of those things is something that you wouldn't hire a fifteen year old to talk about on Twitter with your corporate name attached.

So they automated one and had it tweet 6000 times per hour.

"Don't talk about 9/11, don't use disparaging terms for ethnic groups, and don't promote hate" seem like reasonable rules for a brand ambassador. But the thing was so poorly coded it couldn't even follow the rules of Twitter let alone imitate human interaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Consciousness"? "Put to sleep"?

And I thought the _New Yorker_ had editors.

</comment><comment><USER33> [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist- bo...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot)

<comment><USER34> tldr; ban everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if the filter that I use here, or on Reddit et al., or while gaming, was (is) a consideration.

I know that speaking similarly to those around you is as easy (hard) as absorbing and imitating, but being able to take knowledge from one context into another is more interesting.

I wonder what Tay would have said were it given an output context of a "polite" RL conversation after learning things across the "interwebz".

</comment><comment><USER36> Microsoft apparently implemented a "repeat after me" command in the AI.

So, the alarming responses were not, in fact, a part of the AI algorithm.

<comment><USER37> AIUI, some were not, but some were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yeah, if you want to train an AI based on conversations, don't use Twitter. Seriously, this is all that Twitter seems to produce these days. Gone are the days where it was used by the Arab Spring. Now it's used by neo-Nazis and trolls.

<comment><USER39> It was used by neo-Nazis and trolls then, too.

<comment><USER38> Yup, all the goodness now gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "I'm pro calzone" sounds like a parks and rec reference

</comment><comment><USER41> Most of the tweets that were really bad were just "repeat after me" \- doesn't strike me as AI learning anything at all.</comment>


So Who Really Owns Facebook? (Chart) - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/01/12/so-who-really-owns-facebook-chart/ <comment><USER2> I love how Sean Parker is noted as "Justin Timberlake's character in the movie"

<comment><USER3> So _that_ is Justin Timberlake. He's always been in my "I know I should know that name but can't quite place him" box.

<comment><USER4> He's an extremely successful singer, first as part of 'N Sync and later on his own. Up through now he's won 6 Grammy and 2 Emmy awards. He's been in a handful of movies before, but I think the Social Network was the first I recognized him in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought Microsoft bought some Facebook stock, 1.6% for $240 million but I don't see them in there.

<comment><USER6> It's funny that Bono and his 1.5% made it, but Microsoft and their 1.6% did not.

From the source link (reface.me, which actually got the picture from twitpic): "Not specifically included in the infographic are Microsoft's 1.6% stake, Hong Kong billionaire Li-Ka Shing's 0.8%, TriplePoint Capital (though as a debt provider they own nothing), and Accel Partners' investment."

<comment><USER7> Bono != Elevation Partners

Many other persons are missing and probably classified as "Other". According to TechCrunch the Samwer Brothers from Germany also invested in Facebook. Would love to know how large their share is if they are still holding onto it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a Quora topic page with fascinating detail on the subject. It was made more specifically to answer how Mark still controls 26% of the company.

[http://www.quora.com/How-did-Mark-Zuckerberg-retain-26-of- eq...](http://www.quora.com/How-did-Mark-Zuckerberg-retain-26-of-equity-after- so-many-rounds-of-financing)

<comment><USER9> Hmm. The chart states Zuckerberg has 24%, the folks on Quora say Zuckerberg has 26% -- so which is it?

<comment><USER10> 24% ± 2%

<comment><USER11> 25%± 1%

<comment><USER10> (25% ± 1%) ± 1%

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How many employees does Facebook have? If they have around 5000 employees, then on an average, if they go public for the valuation claimed, every employee gets around $3M!

<comment><USER13> Or, if you look at it more cynically, if the average stock grant for each new employee was $750k worth of options, then that leaves a pot of about $13.25bn for the rest.

Given dilution, and grants etc, i'm gonna guess that 2000 employees will get 750k (a new house) and 500 (the first 500) will get an average of $26.25m apiece.

Though, i'm sure it's more logarithmic than that...

<comment><USER14> I would really like to know… do you think your figures are realistic? (let's say compared to what other employees of successful companies may have made in the past, for which I have no info. e.g. Google, eBay, etc.)

Warning: the following will make me look jealous and bitter, but so be it:

That the early employees get a giant pay-day is deserved, but the later you join, the less influential in the overall success you are, in addition to the fact that you're not taking any risks, like you would in an early startup. It seems that joining Facebook a year ago as a developer wouldn't be much different than joining Google or Microsoft in terms of benefits, salary, perks, responsibilities…

I guess I can only blame myself for not working at the right companies, or not making myself marketable enough to be hired at these companies, but I've never had a job that ended up with a bonus in the $500k-$1M range.

<comment><USER15> I'd guess that current hires would be getting significantly less than existing hires. To make really life changing money you'd need to get in a couple of years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The most surprising thing for me was to learn that Bono of U2 fame owns 1.5% of Facebook.

<comment><USER17> Well he is one of 5 Elevation partners. They are also famous for very bad investments...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> tracing the links back to the source gets you here: <http://twitpic.com/3or8of>

and before that? nobody knows...

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's a nice chart that shows the history of different investments, when and how much: [http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/facebookgrap...](http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/facebookgraph-r7big.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER20> Just wait for Facebook to file their S-1 Registration with the SEC for the real numbers.

</comment><comment><USER21> How can Eduardo's shares be accurate if that info wasn't ever released?

<comment><USER22> I would imagine that his shares are all public record as a matter of the court case. Wikipedia lists the court as having reinstated the 7% initial share; presumably 5% is what that would be after subsequent dilution.

<comment><USER21> By that logic any court setlement bound by nondisclosure would be public record.

<comment><USER23> Any court settlement that ended up awarding something that has to be publicly reported. We wouldn't be able to find out what, if any money he was given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My knowledge is somewhat limited to the "Social Network" but I didn't know Eduardo Saverin held on to his vastly reduced amount of shares after settling...

<comment><USER22> He won the court case at the end of The Social Network. In the little "where are they now" blurbs at the end, it says that his initial share pre-dilution was reinstated.</comment></comment>


The 'Toothbrush Test' Google's CEO Uses to Make Acquisition Decisions (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-toothbrush-test-google-acquisitions-2014-8 <comment><USER2> The "toothbrush test" to determine whether a company is worth buying:

"Is this something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?"</comment>


Dutch universities plan Elsevier boycott - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/08/dutch-universities-boycott-elsevier/ <comment><USER2> That was half a year ago (July 2015).

Current status, AFAIK, is at [http://www.vsnu.nl/en_GB/news- items.html/nieuwsbericht/241](http://www.vsnu.nl/en_GB/news- items.html/nieuwsbericht/241): _" Dutch Universities and Elsevier reach agreement in principle on Open Access and subscription"_</comment>


Internet Winter Hits Mahalo; Cuts 10% Of Staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/internet-winter-hits-mahalo-cuts-10-of-staff/

<comment><USER2> In other news, Internet Winter has also hit the internet, which regrets that it must shut down on June 30, 2009. It regrets any inconvenience this may cause.</comment>