The Great Unwatched - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/business/the-great-unwatched.html <comment><USER2> "The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is, well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say, Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate."

Why doesn't the video market clear? Do clients just refuse to pay enough for the good space? Don't tell me they know how much that ad space is worth to them in revenue.

I worked at an adtech startup for two years --- we only barely touched on video, but the dynamics are still there. Buyers plan on the scale of D-Day but there's really no place to do that --- there's no halftime superbowl ad on the internet, just a billion little things that have slightly different definitions of every single thing involved. What's an inch when screens are different sizes and the site has responsive design? What if you've got something built around 4:3 or 16:9 and their site is the opposite? What counts as adult, exactly? Bet it isn't the same in Northbrook IL as it in Palo Alto).

It's a big mess, and the things that put buyers' minds at ease aren't the same that make them money.

<comment><USER3> >The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is, well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say, Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate.

from my uninformed position as a viewer of advertising, it seems like the opposite of this is true. On any site i would consider premium (e.g. hulu, youtube, theonion, and yes, nationalgeographic) my biggest pet peeve with advertising is that they have more ad blocks to fill than they do advertisements, and they have to keep re-using the same ads over and over again. surely the advertiser doesn't want to pay for me to see the same 15-second video ad a half-dozen times in a row on a single visit, do they?

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be so sure that this isn't exactly what they want. Consciously you get annoyed, but it's those same ads that pop into your head from your subconscious every once in a while.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. It's repetition. Maybe you don't click, but you do receive the same message 15 times. That has consequences ... Maybe not with you in particular, but averaged out across the audience, yes.

<comment><USER6> And that message is: Skip ad in 5 4 3 2 1 click.

<comment><USER7> For me, that message is "Digital Ocean is the most irritating company in the world and I'm never going to give them a cent if I can help it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's an interesting business, where there is little or no demand for the "product" from the person who ultimately consumes it. So you have to figure out ways to trick and/or force the end-consumer to actually consume the product that you have invested so much effort in producing.

<comment><USER9> While I agree that most of the ads you see online today are not desired, I would argue that it does not have to be this way. When advertising is done right, it can open consumers up to products that they wouldn't know exist without ads. It actually creates value for both the buyer and the seller. A music news site [0] I tend to visit used to be a shining example of this--ads promoting new records by bands featured on the site could be seen in their banners and fit seemlessly with the rest of the page, now they've been replaced by McDonald's and Dr Pepper across large portions of the site. I've found out about new albums that I may not have otherwise listened to when ads were relevant; now that the site's admin realizes that fast food pays more than indie record labels I'll leave AdBlock enabled.

[0] [http://www.absolutepunk.net](http://www.absolutepunk.net)

<comment><USER8> Agreed, I like watching coming attractions trailers before a movie, or having suggestions turn up in Spotify.

However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the "advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Remember when people said Google paid too much for Youtube?

Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.

<comment><USER11> It pretty much has already, for a couple of years (particularly in the context of recent comparably sized purchases like whatsapp)

Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as YouTube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I despise sites that not only auto-run ads but have multiple ones on the same page that auto-run together. Of course they probably have no idea since the ads come from somewhere else from somewhere else from somewhere else.

<comment><USER13> I've never seen them. In fact the biggest surprise of this article is that video adverts exist. Using NoScript + youtube-dl, and not having Flash or an H.264 codec installed, is working well for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The NYT's piece on unwatched ads contains not fewer than four below-the-fold <div>s containing display ads from which the paper will likely receive no revenue.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why is this agency buying through a network instead of doing it themselves? They could just do managed placements rather than just tossing it to a network who does the same thing with less of a direct incentive to serve the client. The networks lack skin in the game and have an incentive to play the hear no evil speak no evil see no evil charade.

This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting junk masquerading as information.

The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable.

The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.

<comment><USER16> > The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more > direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the > inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires > no salespeople.

It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly, most (digital) publishers just don't have.

<comment><USER15> Hard? Sure. Scale? Not as much as you think. Local newspapers all over the country somehow manage to hit $10 cpm for direct sales. I don't dispute that having a sales team isn't hard or potentially expensive. One of the reason why digital is such a laggard in a lot of markets is because of the fraud sapping budgets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm seeing a lot of NY Times articles on HN lately, and it's pretty lame stuff too. Is it my imagination or is HN and NYT in cahoots?</comment>


Girls and Software by Susan Sons - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software

<comment><USER2> People like Susan give me hope for the future of the tech community.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord It feels great to see such a cerebral outlook on the entire social justice situation in the tech community. So refreshing after all the insignificant dramas being turned into spotlight civil rights issues every week or so on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely wonderful article.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a shame this link is being overlooked.

Susan's article answers many of the questions I have regarding the current culture war.

<comment><USER5> " _It 's a shame this link is being overlooked._"

Agreed. People are probably assuming, based on the not very descriptive title, that it's yet another article promoting the ideas that this author is arguing _against_.</comment></comment>


The regional phenomenon of tarantism: tarantula-bitten women cured by dance - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-tarantula-possessed-women-who-could-only-be-cured-by-dance <comment><USER2> There were no actual spider bites involved. It was a socially accepted way to externalize one's pain through hysterics and be healed through a form of exorcism. People who saw benefits from the ritual tended to repeat it the next year.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am actually quite impressed that this is on HN. I am from the place where this dance is practiced, and it is a cultural highlight there. Most lyrics describe a physical pain and the willingness to dance to get the pain off. And as someone who likes to dance to this kind of music, I can tell you: It works! The most popular songs are called "pizzica" and often talk about love.

</comment><comment><USER4> Side topic: don't miss the Notte della Taranta music festival: [https://youtu.be/PgFOf73Z088](https://youtu.be/PgFOf73Z088)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture- bound_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome)

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems like bullshit, tbh.

<comment><USER7> You should read the article, it talks about the causes.</comment></comment>


South San Francisco approves 800 homes, largest housing development in 20 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/11/14/south-san-francisco-approves-800-homes-largest.html <comment><USER2> For those unaware of local geography, South San Francisco is not southern San Francisco but is a distinct city in a separate county (San Mateo County).</comment>


High-fidelity record of Earth's climate history puts current changes in context - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-09-high-fidelity-earth-climate-history-current.html <comment><USER2> Anthropomorphic climate change is a function of population and CO2 emissions per capita.

With earth's population projected to increase by 50% over today's number of 7.5 billion by 2100, and economic growth a central tenet of all major economies, it's difficult to see that temperature gradient being arrested.

By 2100, the world's population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds- popu...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population- is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/)

<comment><USER3> 100 corporations do 70% of the polluting.

<comment><USER2> That's true, and if we could just arrest their CEOs and shut the companies all down, the problem would be solved.

The complication is that the customer base of those 100 corporations extends to every human being on the planet. Take Exxon Mobil for example. They extract the oil which is refined into gasoline which soccer moms buy for the SUVs they use to take their kids to school and soccer.

Most soccer moms don't like global warming, but they still pay Exxon Mobil's affiliates $70 a week. There are a lot of soccer moms. They all love their kids and don't want them to miss out on soccer. That's why the CEO of Exxon Mobil gets paid $25 million a year, and climate change is still a problem.</comment></comment></comment>


What I Learned from Building an App for Low-Income Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3038792/what-i-learned-from-building-an-app-for-low-income-americans <comment><USER3> > _The best thing about my time at Significance Labs was meeting incredible > people like Jason and Angel. The most fun I had last summer was sitting in a > room chatting to housecleaners._

This ending shows how hard it is to escape the "feeling/looking good rather than doing good" trap. This motivation about meeting and relating to people and realities outside of your usual social network are legitimate, but dangerous. If you don't evolve pass through this phase, you will end up getting used to this alien world, and it will become routine. And you will see the problematic and boring issues about chatting with housecleaners and also the flaws of Jason and Angel.

This, in itself, is enlightning. You stop considering yourself disconnected from your users or the people you are trying to help. The time has come when you might _actually_ create some impact. But you must find your motivating above this fugacious desire to be contrarian among your peers. If your motivation ends when you feel you already have enough stories to share with your friends and that the "i am good people" stamp is already attached to your personality in your own and other's view; then you quit. And make no impact. Muhammad Yunus took decades to create impact.

I don't want to doubt the author's motivation, or predict that she won't cause any impact. Just that defining meeting interesting people (who are just boring people you don't know enough, like the rest of us) as the best thing on a "what i learned" post is definitely a red flag.

<comment><USER4> I won't say you're wrong, but this an awfully cynical top comment.

<comment><USER5> I don't see a problem with that. Note that the comment is both correct and polite. It just replaces some warm and fuzzy emotions with sober reasoning.

The truth is sometimes bitter.

<comment><USER6> > The truth is sometimes bitter.

And HN is often bitter. And cynical.

<comment><USER7> And there's an awful lot of truths here. That's why I'm here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I encounter these "civic engagement" apps every week. Honestly, unless the author plans to actually work hard on this, I find these kinds of apps more damaging than helpful.

No one benefits from a half-baked half-implemented app, which these kinds almost always are. If they are fully-implemented in maintained, then it's a different story, apps can change lives, but it's hard long work to change a life. But if the app is abandoned or half-done, then really the client will end up viewing the developer more or less like the other scam artists they have to fend off.

In my opinion, the approach itself is pretty flawed. You as a talented person come help those less fortunate than you for 12 weeks, it seems like a win-win, but really I think most sides just end up frustrated. Off the top of my head, a better solution might be to actually try and build your own cleaning business with that community and then see what tools you need. Software is software, cleaning is cleaning, you can't be a domain expert in one and then just know what will work in the other, I think you need deep expertise in both.

<comment><USER9> Disagree with the premise that apps can change lives, at least in the way I think you mean. Apps are conveniences, that's all. An app is not going going get a person out of poverty, unless the person is the developer and can sell the app to people who have the disposable income to pay for conveniences.

<comment><USER10> We're a bit cynical here because we tend to make frivolous stuff and market it as life-changing, but conveniences can actually add up for people in need. The problem with poverty, as the article notes, is that it's only partially about money - along with a scarcity of money comes a scarcity of time, a scarcity of information, and a scarcity of opportunity. If you can give someone below the poverty line more time or information, it may not change their life, but it can allow space for things that do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing. In the upcoming years a billion people will come online that have less than $20000, $5000 or $2000 per year. They will have less education and less foreign language proficiency than the current internet users. At the same time the internet will provide the opportunity for them to make more informed decisions and become more productive. The sets of problems might differ vastly from the rich people's problems that are solved by the current internet ecosystem. I would love to hear some more perspectives on this matter.

<comment><USER12> > and less foreign language proficiency

Really curious about how you came to that conclusion. You don't exactly see a lot of multilingualism in most developed countries, where people are also most likely to consume content in their own language, or don't have too much economic pressure to learn other languages. Stable borders and a working education system where people learn a foreign language for a few years without using it much later might not necessarily lead to a high language proficieny.

Edit: a word

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure why you would say that. Here in Europe most people, even the working class, have some understanding of multiple languages.

Here in the german speaking part of switzerland most people, even the grocery store clerk, speak english as well as german. And when you get into the middle class many speak three or more languages (english, german, french, etc).

The u.s. is uniquely mono-lingual.

<comment><USER14> "I'm not sure why you would say that. Here in Europe most people, even the working class, have some understanding of multiple languages."

Sorry, but this is just not true for "Europe" in general.

If you go to Italy, France, Spain (large countries with their own languages where basically all media is transalted/dubbed) you will will find out that also many people with higher education rarely go beyond very basic English (and, btw, I'm Italian, live in Spain and deal with French customers).

This is probably different in Germany, Austria, Switzterland, Nordic countries... the fact is that "Europe" is still made up of many different countries, it's very hard to speak in general.

<comment><USER15> People whose mother tongue is a romance language usually speak at least another romance language one fluently. Foreign language != English.

<comment><USER16> They don't in Spain. They might be able to read it (just about), and given a week or two on holiday they might be able to understand a fair bit... but fluently? No.

<comment><USER17> There was a recent article (I forget if it was in Spanish or Portuguese) that said the Spanish have higher fluency than Portuguese when it comes to English. Living in Portugal, having traveled in Spain, and having Spanish friends, we all had a lil' laugh at that. Of all the Portuguese people I've met living here, only two weren't fluent in English (one was an old man, the other was conversational).

<comment><USER18> Only two non-fluent? Really? I think you were either extremely lucky or have a rather low bar for "fluency". I'm Portuguese, and a software developer, and yet I know barely anyone I'd consider fluent (myself included) - <USER2> when it comes to the 50+ demography, since at the time it was common to have French classes instead of English.

That said, we do have a better accent than the Spanish, probably thanks to watching TV shows and films subtitled instead of dubbed. Watching TV in Spain is painful :|

<comment><USER17> I'd like to think my bar is pretty normal, but I admit my friends and acquantances are late 20s/early 30s, live in Lisbon, and have pretty frequent interactions with foreigners.

For example, though, I'd consider you fluent, based on your comment.

<comment><USER18> _have pretty frequent interactions with foreigners_

Yeah, but that's not exactly common for the average citizen. At least, they don't interact with tourists or students, who are more likely to speak English, but with immigrants, who are _usually_ even less fluent.

 _For example, though, I 'd consider you fluent, based on your comment._

Well, in writing, sure. But then I open my mouth :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > In fact, a higher proportion of low-income Americans rely on their > smartphone for Internet access than the population as a whole. A 2013 Pew > research survey showed that 45% of users living in households with an annual > income of less than $30,000 mostly use their phone to go online, compared > with 27% of those living in households with an annual income of $75,000 or > more.

If the situation is similar in the rest of the world, could this then be the driving force behind the trend of ever increasing screen size (phablets)?

I mean, if a smartphone was my only means of accessing the internet you can bet I would want it to have a big screen.

<comment><USER20> > If the situation is similar in the rest of the world, could this then be the > driving force behind the trend of ever increasing screen size (phablets)?

I don't think it's a trend that needs explaining - it just makes sense. I'm baffled by how long it took us to get to the 6" form factor.

<comment><USER19> Now I imagine a brainstorming session at Apple a couple of years ago;

Jobs: Ok, we are going clockwise, start.

Engineer1: We should use a 5" screen in the new iPhone 5, Samsung will go 5", and it even has a 5 in the name.

Jobs: Why the hell should we do that, just because Samsung is doing it?

Engineer1: To improve user experience for using the internet and watching media content?

Jobs: I don't see where you are coming from, why wouldn't they just use their iPad or MacBook for that?

Jobs: Next!

Engineer1: But, but ... some of them don't ...

Jobs: I said next.

Engineer1: Ah, nevermind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was really hoping for some concrete app-development lessons learned. For example, was it important to target old/low-end versions of phones? The article both says SMS is a lowest-common-denominator, but also that smartphones are more prevalent than one might assume; what was the outcome from those considerations? I noticed the food stamps app presents one question at a time, with a "Next" button after each one. Was that approach discovered after user testing, or was there just an assumption that that would be more successful for the user base than showing all the prompts on one screen?

Also, I am excited the IT industry has evolved to where these point-solution apps are both easy to build and plentiful. This is the "long tail" in action.

There is a lot of backend infrastructure that enables what I call "UX apps", where 90%+ of the effort is on frontend design and functional requirements, and very little consideration needs to be paid to infrastructure issues like OSes, networking, high availability, etc. The enablers here are things like PaaS, powerful mobile and browser clients, and reliable and prevalent communications (cellular / WiFi).

</comment><comment><USER22> It's really nice to read that this sort of thing is being done. I believe technology can be a great enabler to create new low and semi skilled jobs, or improve current jobs. House cleaning and related duties I always felt has great potential when combined with technology. You could have a person come in and take and capture your requirements regarding cleaning, packing, organising parts of the house, including handling the laundry with a laundry service, or you could capture this information yourself with an app. Then you can have casual or full time workers use an app to guide them through the house and the requirements, even if they haven't been to the particular house before. It could organise and schedule rounds of these people serving multiple households and schedule laundry pickups and drop off around it. It could allow people to pick their 'shifts' and move them in advance. It could encourage more people to take up shifts when there's a spike in demand.

<comment><USER23> In practice this doesn't work for most people, because effectively you're allowing someone to get into your house, so you want to know him/her. We first signed up with an agency, but they kept changing our cleaners so we gave up and went for a broker, who "captured our requirements" and procured us a stable cleaner we could trust in the long run.

Automation maximizes efficiency, but some human elements often cannot be replaced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like this article.

Most of my friends and family are the working poor and for years I have been struggling to find a way to give back in a meaningful way. I would love to help them technology-wise, but I've come to realize is that they are not facing a technology problem -- they are facing a problem of opportunity, or lack thereof.

Instead, I've been offering them free training and equipment to learn what I do (software engineering), as I know there is a demand in the area that has not been filled and they can get those jobs if they put in a few months of time and dedicate themselves. Even if they couldn't get those jobs, they could get an office job and 'automate it away' to impress their bosses (this is exactly how I started).

So far, I've had surprisingly little interest. That said, they are not ones to take handouts...

<comment><USER23> _> So far, I've had surprisingly little interest. _

Not everyone can be an automation/programming geek. I know I'd rather work a low-pressure, no-customer-facing, low-salary job than a high-salary, high- pressure PR job, even if handed out to me on a platter. For some people it's the opposite.

Also, you "struggling to find a way to give back" can come across as patronising.

<comment><USER24> I suppose I might be coming off as patronizing, but I only offer to teach those who have expressed an interest first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > housecleaners prefer to be paid in cash (so mobile payments were out), > mainly use text messaging, and sometimes don't want to reveal professional > information online, especially if they were undocumented.

We have many users who fall into the lower-income bracket, and understanding their needs at a design level is very challenging. Many functions that we might take for granted within an application -- logging in, downloading, installing from the app store, etc. -- can be foreign if not altogether new concepts. We have to deliver success, error and information messages to users who fundamentally won't read or anticipate what is happening.

The SMS/text scenario is a big deal for us. We have users who interact with our service solely through their text message application -- nothing installed from our service on their end. When we offer a chance to use our mobile app, we have been asked "what's the app store?"

That said, it's rewarding to build something that makes someone's life easier for them. We are certainly falling in the _do good_ camp.

</comment><comment><USER26> "What he really needed was a steady job which would provide him with an income for his family. No mobile app I could build in three months was going to deliver that."

In summary, our economy is too small for our population, so minorities and others defined as undesirables get heartlessly kicked out of the economy. I don't like it, but that's the facts of our ever shrinking economic system and ever expanding population. So their plan is to use technology designed for the people still inside the system, on people outside the system, because by being insiders they are morally superior and should culturally imperialize the folks kicked out of the economy. And if it works inside the system, being very provincial, they think that all that exists is the inside of their system, so obviously we need to re-educate those in another system to see things the one true insider way. And despite having been kicked out of the economy, they are assumed to still have something that can be harvested from them that insiders value that isn't already being harvested by efficient megacorps (walmart has all their money, you aren't getting it). And somehow its assumed imperialism is not only a good idea, but it should work if they just wish hard enough, despite centuries of past experience showing imperialism mostly just screws things up. The whole thing is just nonsense on a big picture systemic level.

People kicked out of our economy already use logic and reasoning and technology, at least as much as our educational system permits them, to solve their own real problems, and this isn't one of them. In an era of hyper pervasive media they don't need to be shown how the remaining rich/lucky people live, they're drowning in it from the media and it causes little other than resentment. If the square peg doesn't fit in the round hole, working smarter not harder fails just as bad as getting a bigger hammer or pretending there is no fundamental as designed by our oligarchs mismatch.

</comment><comment><USER27> _Nevertheless we often had trouble persuading housecleaners and other domestic workers to come to interviews, even though we paid $25 per hour, which was higher than their regular hourly rate. They didn't know us and it looked too good to be true._

You could pay $25/hour for some product interviews, but how long does that last? Say someone does 4 interviews with you for a total of $200. Housecleaning for a new client might pay less per hour, but it also has the potential to be a steady gig which might yield a few thousand a year in additional income whereas this app probably won't. One also has to factor in the non-negligible time cost of getting to and from the interview. It's not really enough for someone to get excited about unless they have nothing else going on; people who work hard place a high value on their limited leisure time, and giving product design interviews sounds more like a way for the interviewer to pad a resume than anything that will deliver a long-term benefit to the interviewee.

As someone who spent quite a lot of time at the bottom of the economic pyramid, doing similarly casual labor, there's probably not a lot of value that an app cobbled together in a few months can deliver. The most useful things you can do with a smartphone are:

1\. receive calls, email and text messages

2\. Maps app and public transit scheduling to get you to your gigs on time

3\. web browsing to check Craigslist

Those three things deliver a _lot_ of value because they save a _lot_ of time. It's unlikely that a shallow app is going to deliver anything like as much utility, and the utility it does add has to be weighed against the time it takes to use.

After that your income comes down to knowing whatever job it is that you do and being able to set prices and stick to them. The latter is quite important; some people are a pleasure to do business with, others will try and beat you down or trick you out of money. I've had people that owed $150 for furniture removal lie about the rate they negotiated and try to pay only $100, and when called out on it they shrugged and said 'no harm in trying.' That's a lot harder to deal with for someone who doesn't have English as a first language or the confidence to call someone's bluff.

The best way to empower a poor person is to teach them something that allows them to charge more money, which is typically a different skill as low-paid laborers tend to be price takers more than price makers and competition is friendly but intense. Short of a new work skill, the other thing a lot of poor people could benefit from is a basic course in microeconomics from a labor perspective - not so they can quote Adam Smith but so they have a consistent way to model things like opportunity cost and production possibilities and make decisions in less time instead of puzzling over things and wondering if they could have made a better deal.

Not everyone can do this, but basic micro does not involve a lot of math and gives people a systematic way to think about the economic problems that they already face on a regular basis. Developing a course based on the practical problems like deciding which of two mutually exclusive jobs to take or how to maximize profit would have enormous value. For a housecleaner, say, you could figure out that offering 'natural cleaning products' might have a cost in both consumables and additional cleaning time amounting to $4/hour, but clients who care about that may be willing to pay an extra $5/hour (or more), yielding greater profits.

<comment><USER28> It really bothers me when people take advantage of workers who do manual labor for what we privileged would consider "little."

Talking with an acquaintance, she was "calling the maid to cancel tomorrow." I said, "but it's too late." Response: "Oh, not, she can come back next week." My answer: "sure, but this week she will be short $100 to make the rent."

She looked at me like I was a Martian. I don't think I made a dent in her understanding.

<comment><USER27> A great example. People in low-wage jobs who face situations like that usually lack two things the know-how to set business terms and conditions like cancellation fees, and the leverage to enforce them (when losing a client could be financially very painful). People who are poorly educated, illegal aliens, parolees and others often have difficulty learning about or asserting rights they might have under city, state or federal labor laws.

Now, I know that the original goal here was to find better ways to empower poor people with technology, not to set up an additional social service. I thought the example in the article of an app that helped people submit an application for food stamps (saving many hours of standing in line at an office) was right on point.

One idea that occurred to me since I wrote the grandparent comment last night (and forgot to post before I went to bed) was to flip an existing concept on its head. The article mentioned a tool for people in Mexico who were outside the regular financial system to establish some sort of credit profile that would allow them access to lower-cost cellphone plans. Maybe a useful thing for poor people in the US with smartphones would be a parallel 'client credit report' that would let casual and informal workers alert each other about problem clients who attempt to evade payment or behave abusively, as well as hooking them up with other resources, eg there are probably people with paralegal experience who would be happy to draft a demand letter for a small fixed fee. Think LinkedIn for low-income people as a way to vet potential clients and avoid persistent troublemakers. The best thing about NeatStreak (the author's app) was not the housecleaning-specific stuff (although that's helpful) but automating the booking/billing process, which is something that a _lot_ of casual/informal workers need.

Of course an approach like this turns up some interesting legal questions, because reversing the usual top-down direction of economic influence is politically loaded and would upset some people. But I think sooner or later there will be demand for such functionality; the 'sharing economy' we are moving into matches buyers to sellers effectively for many casual services, but the firms that establish such new markets are typically also seeking to be monopolistic brokers and their economic interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the people who actually provide the services; to the extent that the latter are organized, it could disenfranchise the job brokers. I think it's only a matter of time before established players attempt to capitalize on that, so that the SEIU attempts to organize Taskrabbit workers or the Teamsters try to sign up Uber and Lyft drivers, and I'm not so enthused about that because I think unions can often end up as rent-seeking organizations themselves. Perhaps technology has the potential to provide low-income workers with more practical organizational benefits by automating the information- brokerage function of trade unions without the administrative overhead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a good example of trying to create demand where there was none before. This can work if you have a really great salesperson, but it's hard.

Also, I see your survey results on smartphone usage but I'm not convinced. In my experience poor people have spotty data plans - either no data or very limited, and only use their phone for sms and voice.

I'm making some decent money - not huge amounts - providing a service to low- income Americans. I have a server application that is used by 211 organizations, suicide hotlines, government groups, etc to communicate over sms with mostly low-income Americans.

<comment><USER29> "This is a good example of trying to create demand where there was none before."

In the article, they are conducting user interviews to figure out demand. They are not creating demand themselves.

"Also, I see your survey results on smartphone usage but I'm not convinced. In my experience poor people have spotty data plans - either no data or very limited, and only use their phone for sms and voice."

WiFi is also pretty prevalent here in the US. Even when I traveled to other countries, WiFi can be found in most cities.

It's possible that your experience may just be yours and other people's experiences are different.

<comment><USER13> I can't remember the last time I saw an open access point. You can't expect someone to buy a cheeseburger or coffee everytime they want to check their smartphone app.

Most people on hn have no idea what it's like to be poor. Checking your email is an ordeal - have to go to the library for example - and infrequent.

But everyone has a cellphone and even tracphones can do SMS (but can be costly so you want to make it count)

<comment><USER30> What? Where I live every library, McDonald's, and Tim Horton's has free WiFi no purchase necessary, so if you want to check something it's at the nearest plaza.

(too cheap for overpriced Canadian data plan)

<comment><USER31> You're showing your ignorance of what it's like to be poor. It takes time and money to get to those locations, two things the poor don't have. The bus trip, or train, or gas in a car that's used has to cost less than what the app would gain them and that money/time needs to not be slotted for anything else (such as making it to and from jobs until payday).

Someone elsewhere in the thread said that the poor aren't good with managing money. From my experience, it's the opposite. Imagine you're behind on every bill, with less money coming in than it costs to have electricity, get to and from work, eat and pay rent. You literally rotate which bills get paid based on what will be shut off next. If someone gives you $100, you could pay more of the bills, or put it in savings, or spend it on entertainment/something fun. In 3 months, no matter what happens, you'll be back in the same state you are now. Spending it on entertainment to feel like a person isn't a bad decision at that point. It's just not one that those who live privileged lives would make</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bluetooth - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2055/ <comment><USER2> Bluetooth usually seems pretty dang good to me. The other day I was playing a podcast from my phone on my Bluetooth stereo. I had an incoming call, and I was able to turn on and answer the call on my Bluetooth headset before the phone stopped ringing. When I ended the call, my podcast automatically resumed playing on my Bluetooth speakers.

<comment><USER3> As someone who in charge of testing BT enabled audio devices, reliability is terrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, the good old days of bluejacking. Fun. Even if the person would not read the message, you'd hear his mobile ring. That was enough.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Josiah? I'd be more worried about the viking king Harald rising from the grave to clear his name. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Bluetooth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Bluetooth)

<comment><USER6> Mentioned in the alt text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly things seem pretty good to me these days- airpods are magical of course, but even my Taotronics headphones seem to reconnect automatically when I power them on, and when I connect from a different device they switch over smoothly.</comment>


How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the TicTocTrack Watch - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/how-to-track-your-kids-and-other-peoples-kids-with-the-tictoctrack-watch/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was just looking for a child watch on Amazon yesterday. Not a tracking watch, just a light, small, low priced watch. I was surprised at how many of even the lowly priced watches offer tracking. First spot an the Amazon list was a simple watch with tracking functionality (but no SIM card included) for 13 EUR.</comment>


Machine Learning Field Guide - <AUTHOR> https://www.kamwithk.com/machine-learning-field-guide-ckbbqt0iv025u5ks1a7kgjckx <comment><USER2> Half of the article is massive, meaningless images. As in, "a girl in the woods wearing sunglasses staring up at a tree" so big it takes up an entire length of my screen - massive.

It took me nearly 30 seconds to scroll down the length of it. I counted the actual lines of code in the article, and it amounts to 27.

The only substance of the article shows loading a CSV file into Python and using a few SKLearn functions on them, with a handful of paragraphs that amount to essentially docstrings of the methods themselves without any actual explanation.

The content on Linear/Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks, Decision Trees, K-Means, and Random Forests all fit in the same screenlength.

I'm not sure that level of brevity of information is genuinely helpful to someone.

"Decision trees can be used for regression problems too. Although simple, to avoid overfitting, several hyperparameters must be chosen. These all, in general, relate to how deep the tree is and how many decisions are to be made."

There's no prior given for the context of what a "hyperparameter" is, how it's different than a parameter, or what the problem of "overfitting" is.

<comment><USER3> It does look like a content farm

<comment><USER2> I mean sure, do what you gotta do I guess for low-grade resume padding if you're short up on personal recommendations/experience/skills, for job purposes, but why post it here?

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


The word "duang" is spreading like wildfire throughout China's Internet - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/27/the-word-that-broke-the-chinese-internet-duang/?utm_content=buffer90e86&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

<comment><USER2> Chinese here. Instead of youku, the fake ad video actually got viral on bilibili ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilibili](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilibili) [http://www.bilibili.com/](http://www.bilibili.com/)), a video sharing site with user-generated subtitles, where such spoofs are very, very common. If you are interested in memes of the Chinese Internet, bilibili and acfun (another earlier similiar site, but it also features articles) are very interesting (and important!) subjects to study.

<comment><USER3> User-generated subtitles? Like Nico Nico Douga?

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Bilibili is inspired by Acfun, which is in turn inspired by Nico Nico.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The internet world changes rather fast here in china. The day before the day before yesterday, my WECHAT feed were full of the word 'duang'. When it came to the day before yesterday, the trend changed. People were discussing about the mysterious color of this skirt: [http://qz.com/352479/this-dress-of- disputed-colors-is-drivin...](http://qz.com/352479/this-dress-of-disputed- colors-is-driving-china-crazy-too/) Yet yesterday, a documentary talking about pollution in china occupied all my sights: [http://www.womenofchina.cn/womenofchina/html1/news/newsmaker...](http://www.womenofchina.cn/womenofchina/html1/news/newsmakers/1503/1-1.htm) The discussion on this documentary persists today and im not quite sure what the internet will bring to me on tomorrow.

<comment><USER5> This sounds exactly like the "western" internet to be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is interesting, but why is it more relevant to foreign policy than, say, fhgwgads?

<comment><USER7> It's not. The article is clickbait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So is this going into Unicode 8.0? :p

<comment><USER9> We could always propose it as the phonetics for a Jackie Chan emoji.

Weirder things have happened, and it's not like we're running out of glyph space.

<comment><USER10> If there's a Jackie Chan emoji, I want Chuck Norris as an emoji as well.

<comment><USER11> There is always the Jiong (囧) character.

<comment><USER12> Is that a Minecraft creeper character?

<comment><USER11> It's a real chinese character:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong)

It's original meaning is "patterned window."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, from my hotel room in Shanghai right now, the article appears to be blocked.

<comment><USER14> Tech director at FP here, is the whole site blocked or just that article?

We occasionally have to play whack-a-mole with Chinese (and other nations') censors, so I'd love any info you could provide. email@example.com

<comment><USER15> I am pretty familiar with the GFW, and you are running HTTPS. The game of whack-a-mole you are playing is ip/domain/date. If you want to compare notes, send me an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a good in-depth linguistic analysis here: [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17913](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17913)

<comment><USER17> Thanks, today I learned that there exists "Chinese scat singing"!</comment></comment>


Automated Insights Generates Several Million Fantasy Sports Articles - <AUTHOR> http://automatedinsights.com/yahoo

<comment><USER2> Serious question: how is Google going to deal with the advent of technologies like this being used to create billions of pretty decent pieces of content?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome because the most fun I have in fantasy leagues is the interaction with the people I am playing against. So this just takes it to a next level and provides a recap like the normal NFL games.

Good to see a Durham, NC company get some love.

</comment><comment><USER4> For some reason, I think that this will only add to our existing problem of having too much data to digest, but no way to reasonably digest it. In other words - we need a way to extract valuable data from millions of articles, not generate millions more.

<comment><USER5> I don't know that this helps or hurts anything really, what they're really doing (for this example at least) is translating stat lines to text.

It's pretty easy to say something like:

This week's top quarterback was %qb% from the %team1% who had %qbyards% and %qbtds% while playing the %team2%.

The total amount of information is exactly the same, they just use a little NLP to make it sound 'hand written' but display a box score in a easier to read manner.

<comment><USER6> The technology is significantly more complicated than simple search and replace a bunch of variables. Trust me, if we did millions of stories by swapping out the same sentence every time it wouldn't work.

Also, the part of the value of what we do is describe "insights" not just spit back raw numbers (which again wouldn't be very valuable).

<comment><USER5> I didn't mean to demean the work, there is clearly a whole lot going on behind the scenes here. It was more of a rebuttal of the "more data is bad" idea. My point above was unclear, but this idea doesn't necessarily represent more data, just the same data presented in a more human-friendly manner.

I really like what the team has done, this could have a long-lasting impact on anything with heavy use of stats and figures. I honestly have a few enterprise applications that would benefit from a similar treatment. e.g. reports that aggregate certain operational stats and must be hand-written every week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty cool. It's very personalized—it would never make sense for Yahoo to hire people to write recap for fantasy games, since those recaps are going to be of interest only to the participants in the league (and maybe only to the two players in the particular game). But it makes sense to have a program write recaps for all those individual games instead of just showing box scores or whatever they had before (I don't play fantasy football myself... it feels too much like work for me, messing around with spreadsheets and numbers and algorithms!).

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is a good write-up with examples of what the recaps look like if you aren't in a Yahoo league: [http://www.fantasycube.com/nfl/robots-write- fantasy-football...](http://www.fantasycube.com/nfl/robots-write-fantasy- football-yahoo-10349)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is pretty neat, although it does come with many unintended consequences for spam.

Does anyone have more information on the technology they use to generate these articles? I assume some sort of NLP in reverse (natural language generation, I guess?)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think this company is fascinating in its approach -- most companies are trying to automate the analysis of human-generated content where they are automating the generation of human-analyzable content.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good Luck Google!</comment>


Psychosomatic, Lobotomy, Saw: Why (Most) Sampling Java Profilers Are Terrible - <AUTHOR> http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-most-sampling-java-profilers-are.html <comment><USER2> You don't need to include the name of the site in the article title.</comment>


GNU Radio - create your own software-defined radio device - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/index.html <comment><USER2> I don't have much familiarity with GNU Radio, and as people have mentioned, it doesn't have much recent activity. However, if you want to hear a software defined radio in action you can listen to and tune one here: <http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/>

Also, if you are interested affordable SDR check out the SoftRock yahoo group. They are very active and the hardware is inexpensive (~$70 USD).

73 N1JER

</comment><comment><USER3> Not the most informative URL to share for the project -- like the top of the page says, most of the action seems to be in the mailing list ([http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss- gnuradio/2009-05/t...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss- gnuradio/2009-05/threads.html)) and trac (<http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki>)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yay, with a front page prominently showing off the latest release, in March 2007. Feels alive!

</comment><comment><USER5> From maddan's link to <http://gnuradio.wordpress.com/>

"You'll need a frontend hardware to capture the signal, preferably the USRP (which could cost as much as $1500 with daughterboards)"

Ouch, $1,500! I would love to tinker, but $1,500 is a solid investment.

<comment><USER6> It does seem very expensive but the things you can do with it seem awesome, for instance a GSM base station <http://www.kestrelsp.com/FieldTest/index.html>. I guess you could even use it to do some van eck phreaking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> here is also a good resource: <http://gnuradio.wordpress.com></comment>


Facebook opens up the Ads API (Part of the Marketing API now) - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/marketingapi/

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, this doesn't mean its actually "open". It means they're open to accepting your applications and it looks like they'll be adding people in quicker than before during the beta.</comment>


Rarely used Leaflet features I wish I knew earlier - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webkid.io/rarely-used-leaflet-features/

<comment><USER2> Their "template" method looks quite similar to Douglas Crockfords "supplant" method ([http://javascript.crockford.com/remedial.html](http://javascript.crockford.com/remedial.html))</comment>


Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38621697 <comment><USER4> I have long thought that Pinyin is underestimated for its simplicity, conciseness, and its implicit description of regional phonetics in China. Its uses all 26 letters of English except for "v", but "v" on a keyboard is used to type "ü" instead, and so Pinyin input does not need a special keyboard layout. A basic QWERTY layout is all that's needed. This is an improvement over the Wade-Giles system which requires diacritics and curious apostrophes that the international community--which generally had no interest in learning Chinese or the peculiarities of the Wades-Giles system--learned to ignore when writing Chinese words with the Wade-Giles system (i.e. Taipei should be T'aipei. In Pinyin it's Taibei. Tai chi chuan should be T'ai chi ch'uan. In Pinyin it is Taiji quan).

When I was beginning to learn Mandarin while studying abroad in Chongqing, I was very frustrated with understanding the southern accent. Instead of pronouncing "zh", "ch", "sh" (retroflex consonants), the locals would pronounce "z", "c", "s" (dental/alveolar sibilant consonants). As you can see, Pinyin makes this pronunciation disparity easier to understand for learners and to anticipate the way that many southerners will (mis)pronounce Mandarin. Learning all of varieties of pronunciation in China is still a daunting task with or without Pinyin, but at least it describes this major one pretty well.

<comment><USER5> Pinyin actually also slightly changed how Chinese words are pronounced. There was once a exploratory idea of abandoning Chines written language as a whole, and adopt fully the latin-character-based language. The compromise is pinyin, a latin-based pronunciation system and simplified written language.

This absolutely modernize the nation. It's no small feat to educate 1BB+ people in a few decades. The nation's unity is once again at an unprecedented level.

This is not without its cost. Modern Chinese pronunciation is considered less appealing to ears, meaning that many sound disappears in the new system. The resultant language often sounds more dull compared to historical system.

The written language is less artful. The traditional written language is no doubt a more appropriate subject for Chinese Calligraphy.

I guess the global momentum to move to a more latin-based language is not going to be stopped. But it's nevertheless a saddening event to see a nation's historical root is altered significantly in a short period of time. This did not destroy the root, it's still there. But the changes are more artificial and more brutal.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi I didn't know the pronunciation was simplified with the creation of pinyin. That is really interesting. Could you give an example (e.g. two words or sounds that used to be different and are now pronounced the same)?

<comment><USER6> If you look at cantonese, an older chinese dialect, you will find 9 tones:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones)

Particularly useful in that section is this graph:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#/media/File:Cantonese_tones.svg)

And I think that's a great way to visualize it. Each word has it's own tone contour and it just so happens that a lot of them could be clustered and curve-fitted to match a small number of tones. But the number of curves you choose is arbitrary just like how choosing the number of clusters in k-means is not well defined.

So if you treat the pinyin as authoritative you will sound robotic compared to a native speaker who learns each word's actual tone curve naturally. Just like how if you believe english is a phonetic language you will pronounce lots of things wrong. (e.g., as an English learner once I learned how to spell "doubt" I kept trying to enunciate the "b" since I thought the pronunciation I learned from hearing, "dout", was wrong)

Disclaimer: I'm a native cantonese speaker so my knowledge about tones is bullshit. Just hypothesizing why text-to-speech and people learning to speak it always sound funny.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology) explains the reason for the disagreement about the number of tones in Cantonese. If you still think there are nine tones, you should be able to provide some minimal pairs ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair)) to prove it.

<comment><USER6> I am a native speaker so I don't really care about the number of tones, I was just citing the link. You can speak to me in monotone and I will figure it out from context just like how you can learn to understand someone with a strong accent.

My theory above is that a fixed number of tones is a linguist madeup concept from data that happens to fit the clustering of the tone graphs. The real tone is a distribution on a per word basis that you learn from natural variations from the other speakers around you. Do the 6 or 9 or 4 tones sometimes fit these distributions? Yes, but it's still just an approximation of the real variations that natives use and shouldn't be treated as an authoritative pronunciation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who spent time learning Chinese in Beijing, this article is very confusing to me.

I learned Chinese, like pretty much every other foreigner, via pinyin pronunciation -- and it's great for language courses. And it's also great for road signs that foreigners can actually read.

But I _never_ heard of pinyin being used by/for the Chinese themselves (except, now, as one computer typing system among many, although it still outputs in characters). All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.

And increases in literacy in China are simply due to widespread schooling and massive efforts at memorization of characters by children -- pinyin has absolutely zero value for functional literacy, because everything is still written in characters. (There are no pinyin newspapers or books I ever saw.)

EDIT: I see from comments below that pinyin _is_ used with schoolchildren in mainland China, thanks. But I still don't see how this has helped literacy, when all reading material is still in characters.

<comment><USER9> As someone from mainland China and learned pinyin in grade 1 of primary school, which happened in early 90s, in Beijing, I use pinyin daily, for inputting Chinese into electronic devices.

>All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.

No, we use latin letters in mainland China, Taiwan uses special characters.

The article is very accurate. Older generations like my parents have to learn latin lettered pinyin by themselves to use PCs and smartphones.

And the pinyin form of my name and home address are on my passport.

<comment><USER10> Can you explain the reasoning behind typing in pinyin to see the output in traditional characters? To a native English speaker this sounds silly and pointless.

Is it something that's mostly tradition or is there advantage to typing this way?

<comment><USER11> If you are asking why don't they type pinyin and leave it like that, then the reason is that Chinese, particularly mandarin, has a large number of homophones. Learning elementary mandarin sometimes felt like learning new meanings for the sounds "ma" "bu" and "shi" for two years. Despite having nearly the same pronunciation, all those syllables are distinct morphemes with unique characters to represent them, so characters are a clearer form of writing. If you are asking why they don't directly enter characters then the answer is that some people do, but it's not as convenient. To enter characters you draw it in a box with either a touch screen or a mouse and it's quite a bit slower, especially compared to the quality of autocomplete in pinyin entry systems.

<comment><USER10> Well explained. Does the similar pronunciation and many homophones cause any issues when spoken?

<comment><USER11> Sometimes but not very often. The reason is that the rest of the words in the sentence together with the general situation is enough to make words unambiguous. This can be a challenge when learning because you have to map meanings onto both sounds and situations if that makes sense. It also means that Mandarin is great for making puns.

<comment><USER10> Does being situational make the language more efficient to speak? You don't need nearly as many words when the meaning is tied to context.

I've always been curious about east Asian languages and culture since they're relatively isolated from Western influence and historic ties to the British empire

<comment><USER12> This might be the case for illiterate people, but these days it's mandatory for Mainland Chinese citizens to complete at least 9 years of education. Different words with the same written form usually have different pronunciations, and different words with the same pronunciation usually have different written forms. It's rare for a word to carry different meanings solely depending on context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "We spent three years developing Pinyin. People made fun of > us, joking > that it had taken us a long time to deal with just > 26 letters"

I actually think it is quite fast. Grasping an entire languages phonology is a huge accomplishment and condensing it to its bare minimum is also impressive.

With that said, I must admit I don't know how pinyin relates to other phonetic systems such as the Bopomofo[0] or Wade-Giles[1] and for all I know it might just be the exact same system with different letters.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles)

<comment><USER14> >I actually think it is quite fast. Grasping an entire languages phonology is a huge accomplishment and condensing it to its bare minimum is also impressive.

Absolutely. But I don't see how this statement could apply to pinyin. The work done on German's last spelling reform was impressive in this regard, but faulty pinyin was not.

<comment><USER13> Care to expand on the faults of pinyin, and how they are more erroneous than say the German spelling reform?

My experience with pinyin is that it is very robust, and I don't remember ever encountering pinyin that was ambiguous about how it is read (unlike written English or romanized Japanese). I have also never heard of standard Chinese syllables that are lacking a clear mapping onto pinyin.

To me that is very impressive.

<comment><USER15> Compare "xi an" with "xian". One is 2 words and one is 1 word. But for some reason Chinese people don't like to put spaces in between words so "xi an shi" is often written as "xi'anshi" which is different from "xianshi".

<comment><USER16> Mandarin speakers are seem to be fairly sloppy with their own phonetic alphabets - you're supposed to have spaces in bopomofo and apostrophes in pinyin to handle cases like these, but they often don't bother.

It becomes clearer with tones I guess, "Xi1 An1" vs "Xian1". But again, proper pinyin with tones seems to be a foreigner thing... I don't recall seeing tone marks or numbers on street signs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo Very cool.

I noticed an interesting quote in the article:

 _Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can._

While the literacy rate used to be 15% and is now 95%, that means that there are still 54 million illiterate people in the country. Obviously nothing wrong with the quote and it is at least in spirit correct, but it's interesting how vague language can be.

Edit: while looking for those numbers, came across this which is a bit dated now (2001), but gives more insight into the situation there:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but- uneve...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-uneven-march- to-literacy.html)

 _According to Wang Dai, an official with the ministry 's Illiteracy Elimination Office, literacy rates stand uniformly near the 95 percent level in the nation's major cities, and throughout its more prosperous coastal region.

In China's less developed western region, however, there remains much to be done. The problem is especially acute in areas populated by non-Chinese ethnic minorities, such as Tibet, where illiteracy rates today run as high as 42 percent.

Nationwide, there are still 30 million Chinese between the ages of 15 and 50 who cannot read at all. Adding in all those defined as "semi-literate" and those, like Hua Lijun, who are above 50, the total approaches 150 million. About 70 percent of all illiterate Chinese are women. The largest gains against illiteracy were made in the 1950s and 1960s when the government made good on its promises to provide at least basic education throughout much of the country._

<comment><USER14> Communist China is really good at massaging statistics to make things look better than they actually are.

Significant numbers of people in modern China can barely communicate to each other about complex ideas in Mandarin (several hundred million are 2nd language speakers or quasi 1st-language speakers).

Someone reading faulty pinyin and making a barely-comprehensible sounds might count as literacy in fluffy government surveys commissioned to show progress, but in reality being able to read pinyin does not mean someone can read in the way you or I understand it.

If you need to understand the meaning of something written in Chinese, you must see the Chinese character. Just because you can read the pinyin pronunciation doesn't mean you understand what's being said. Being able to produce sounds is not literacy - there's high amounts of ambiguity.

For example, reading

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.

Does not tell you the actual the meaning of

石室詩士施氏,嗜獅,誓食十獅。 氏時時適市視獅。 十時,適十獅適市。 是時,適施氏適市。 氏視是十獅,恃矢勢,使是十獅逝世。 氏拾是十獅屍,適石室。 石室濕,氏使侍拭石室。 石室拭,氏始試食是十獅。 食時,始識是十獅屍,實十石獅屍。 試釋是事。

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion- Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion- Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)

Another story entirely is the idea of adding "Simplified" Chinese characters. Now people who want to be seriously literate have to learn an additional set of characters. But I digress.

For another example of massaging statistics to show progress, notice how when a comparison of "China's educational progress!" is made to the West, a place like Shanghai - whose school district is among the best if not the best in the entire country - is often then compared to the national average of other countries as if one were somehow representative of the other.

<comment><USER17> As a neat curiosity, ambiguity sometimes cuts both ways - <USER2>

云朝朝朝朝朝朝朝朝散 潮长长长长长长长长消

does not help you unless you also know the intended pronunciation:

yūn, zhāo cháo, zhāo zhāo cháo,zhāo cháo zhāo sàn;cháo,cháng zhǎng, cháng cháng zhǎng, cháng zhǎng cháng xiāo

([https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F%E5%BF%83%E5%AF%BA](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F%E5%BF%83%E5%AF%BA))

I agree with the overall point - Pinyin will never be a replacement for written Chinese. Indeed, both Japanese and Korean struggle with this to some extent - in Japanese, a sentence written in pure hiragana with no kanji is very difficult to understand, and in Korean, many people learn hanja as they are sometimes needed in writing to disambiguate.

<comment><USER18> Actually, except for the very old most Koreans know pretty much no hanja beyond really basic ones like 大. I always think this argument is ridiculous. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese people have managed to speak their respective languages (or ancestors of them) for thousands of years without being excessively troubled by those pesky homophones despite the fact that until the 20th Century only a small minority of them were literate.

<comment><USER19> Very much this. Some more thoughts:

* Standard Mandarin has a surprisingly small number of distinct syllables, namely about 400 when tones are ignored, and 1300 with tones. English has about 7000 to 15000. So, homophones are a bit more of a problem in Mandarin than in English.

* English disambiguates some homophones in writing (where/were, there/their/they're, and so on), though as less literate people increasingly demonstrate, one can communicate reasonably well without these disambiguations.

* Spanish has an extremely close correspondence between what is written and what is said, and only disambiguates a very few words (typically question words) with an accent, and the writing system works just fine.

* Given that spoken Mandarin works, and disambiguation of homophones in alphabetic languages is only sometimes done, I am personally convinced that some sort of alphabetic writing for Mandarin is absolutely feasible. That might be Pinyin or Bopomofo or some variation thereof.

* Personally, I find the Chinese script very beautiful, but a colossal waste of time (think of the billion of poor kids that had to learn it).

* Would switching to some sort of alphabetic system cut people off of their cultural heritage? Maybe somewhat, but I'd argue it's mitigated by two things: a) Classical Chinese is in fact so remote from modern one that you have to study it anyways in depth, if you are into it. You could still do that, if you are into it. b) Nearly nobody speaks Latin anymore in the West, the horror. Are we cut off of our cultural heritage? Well, somewhat, but there are translations, and if you're really into it, you can still go and learn it, see a).

Great resources on these issues, btw:

* "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis

* "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html)

* Pinyin Info, [http://www.pinyin.info/](http://www.pinyin.info/)

* Language Log, [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) , in particular Victor Mair's posts

<comment><USER18> Yeah I'm a fan of all the resources you mentioned. It's hard to talk about this without people accusing you of just being too lazy to learn, never mind that I've already put in the time to learn the Japanese writing system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He saw his eleventy-first birthday? That's a rather curious number and a very respectable age for a human.

<comment><USER21> only about 1500 suerentinarians are thought to have been documented in history, most of whom were women. being male is really rare..maybe only a hundred total out off 50 billion people who have ever lived...

<comment><USER22> Interestingly your comment is the only google result for "suerentinarians"

<comment><USER23> Maybe it's a misspelling of supercentenarians?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To understand the impact of Pinyin, all you have to do is take a look at the alternative input sources for Chinese on your computer or phone.

On my Mac it's under Settings -> Keyboard -> Input Sources. Add a new input source for Select Chinese (Simplified) and take a look at the alternatives:

\- Stroke, which uses only symbol characters and numbers to "write" words. Good luck with that!

\- Trackpad handwriting. You "write" the characters on your trackpad and it recognizes them. Works pretty well if you already know how to write the characters. But it's much, much slower in my opinion. Plus, you need to memorize how to write thousands of characters and how the characters connect to how the words sound, which there is no systematic mapping for.

\- Wubi Xing, which I'm unfamiliar with but seems radical based. Just look at the keyboard - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method)

\- Pinyin, which uses your regular English keyboard. With a little training, you can sound out Chinese words and immediately type them with autocorrect- like functionality that works amazingly well. I can type Chinese almost as fast as English this way.

In short, Pinyin has made it possible for Chinese people to operate efficiently in the modern world we live in.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi A funny thing about how the Chinese type on their phones is that not only they use Pinyin, but they use the old-school numeric input method (2="abc", 3="def", etc., like SMS in the pre-smartphone era) to type it. Or at least that's what I saw most people do when I went to Beijing, maybe in other regions/demographics it's different.

I find it rather amusing that while in the West we use 30 keys to type our around 30 characters, in China they use 10 keys to type their thousands of characters.

Also, it's probably not a bad idea for those of us with a tendency to fat- finger (like myself). I was quite faster writing messages on pre-smartphone keyboards than on smartphone ones (although probably a large part of that is physical key feedback vs. virtual keys). I'd definitely give a 10-key option a try on my smartphone, but it isn't offered.

<comment><USER25> This is the main input for japanese as well, I love it and wish an english version was offered

<comment><USER26> Cellphone number pad input is very well-suited to Japanese: each key is a row of kana. When I type Japanese on my phone, I always use the number pad input these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pertinent resources:

* Pinyin Info, [http://www.pinyin.info/](http://www.pinyin.info/)

* Language Log, [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) , in particular Victor Mair's posts

* "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis

* "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> There was a short interview with him in Stephen Fry's "Planet word" series of documentaries. His humility was very inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER14> pinyin is not nearly as good as zhuyin in regards to phonetic representation.

as one example, some words like pinyin's /zhun/ look like they should have one syllable, but there's actually two, as far as i can tell. or at the least, the schwa is definitely missing from the pinyin representation, as in, it's not /zhu@n/, where @ is the schwa.

pinyin is rife with oversights like this, that a learner has no idea about, and indeed instructional guides don't even mention much of the time.

if you're serious about learning chinese, don't use pinyin unless you want to spend extra time undoing the damage done by doing so.

<comment><USER28> This is complete and utter nonsense. First of all, plenty of native speakers of, say, Cantonese and other regional languages of Chinese, learn Mandarin using pinyin, and they do just fine.

Second, as a non-native speaker, the advantages of not having to stumble over zhuyin and its problems hugely outweigh any advantage it might be wrongly thought to have. And the benefits continue well past the learning stage.

The /zhun/ example isn't even true. That sound is sometimes broken down for students as multiple sounds, not syllables, for pedagogical purposes when the teachers are trying to get through to a student. That's the case with either pinyin or zhuyin. They explain it as multiple component sounds (not syllables) because the underlying whacky Chinese phonetic theory says it is made up of multiple sounds. (By the way this theory takes about 10 seconds to learn, so the fact that sounds can be broken down into smaller parts is not some mind- boggling obstacle.) If you were taught that it has two syllables, you may want to consider the possibility that your teacher is fuzzy on the meaning of the English word "syllable."

If teachers are using zhuyin, they also break the sounds down to justify or explain how zhuyin works, since zhuyin is so oddly counterintuitive it needs extra explanation to help ease the cognitive burden of using it (which could be the reason it was reformed and mostly dumped decades ago in mainland China to be replaced by pinyin).

Zhuyin does survive in Taiwan, where they keep it around for political reasons. Accepting a superior mainland system would be a linguistic defeat, and would damage their pride, so they cling to an archaic system. They don't want to admit this outright, so they come up with all sorts of reasons to keep it, and they end up not learning pinyin well themselves, so with that handicap they then try to convince naive foreign students that zhuyin is good.

Don't fall for it if you like, let's see... touch typing, reading signs that are written in pinyin, being able to write down the sounds of Characters you haven't learned yet and have them readable by the average Chinese person, and focusing your time and efforts in the right places.

A better argument on your side of the issue would be to say that pinyin is bad because the 'z' and 'h' and 'u' and 'n' are four separate symbols, but zhun is one syllable, so it's (you could say) confusing to the mind (it's not). But that's simply ridiculous. Users of phonetic languages, as all of us are, are perfectly accustomed to seeing multiple sounds and syllables for that matter represented by a number of symbols that does not necessarily correspond to the number of letters.

Mostly the great thing about pinyin is it just does its job transparently without being a distraction. It becomes invisible almost, because since the letters are familiar and the sounds are already readable right off the bat, I can focus on the language and learning words and sounds correctly, instead of having an extra layer in between me and the language.

Pinyin has served me well as a learner, and the results are hard to argue with. I didn't start learning until my 20s, and now pass as a native speaker over the phone. So... don't listen to that guy. Pinyin is great.

<comment><USER29> I have learned pinyin and zhuyin both, but found zhuyin to be the "superior" system. In pinyin the two vowel sounds ㄜ and ㄝ are written as "e", and both ㄨ(sometimes) and ㄩ are written as "u". Furthermore, typing is faster in zhuyin—the longest syllable takes 3 keystrokes instead of 5. And on top of that, learning zhuyin helped my phonics since it forced me away from using English sounds as a starting point. Another small benefit was that when reading children's books with zhuyin, I generally only looked at it when needed, whereas with pinyin, my eyes would be drawn to the familiar roman characters even when I didn't need them to read a character.

Despite my experience, I still believe claims that either pinyin or zhuyin is "superior" are pretty subjective. Taiwan has undeniably done better than the mainland in terms of literacy and computer literacy... but it's also had the benefit of a superior educational system and more open, wealthier society. At least for natives, either system is fine. Most foreigners could probably gain something from learning both (and IPA too, for that matter).

<comment><USER30> > typing is faster in zhuyin—the longest syllable takes 3 keystrokes instead > of 5 [as in pinyin]

The longest syllable in pinyin is 6 keystrokes: zhuang, chuang, etc

Two bad shuangpin isn't used more extensively to type Chinese as it maps easily to pinyin but only requires 2 keystrokes per character. The unused initial keystrokes map to the two-character initial pinyin sounds (i=ch, u=sh, v=zh), but the mapping from keystroke to medial/final sound is more complicated. If there was a way to change from pinyin input to shuangpin (or similar method) input incrementally so it was easier to learn, I think more people would convert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> i made a visual explanation/exploration tool about pinyin: [http://enjalot.github.io/pinyin/](http://enjalot.github.io/pinyin/)

Pinyin really helped me learn Chinese. RIP

<comment><USER32> Very cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Pingyin doesn't not only help me learn Chinese, but also learn English's pronunciation later in life. It's not one-to-one match but close enough.

Bopomofo predates Pingyin and did what Pingyin did but with non-Latin alphabet. It was always a surprise looking back that Mao adopted "Western" alphabets for Pingyin when he was very much against western ideology.

It was an excellent call, especially when writing is done digitally nowadays.

<comment><USER34> Actually - the legend goes - that Mao wanted to ditch Chinese characters in favour of Pinyin, until Stalin said every great civilisation needs its own writing system.

Chinese writing was seen as a factor in holding back the country - <USER3> was up for change or removal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I learned Chinese using Pinyin it's the first thing you learn and it was a total epiphany. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER36> For anyone interested in the topic, a couple good books are:

* _Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction_ by Chaofen Sun, and

* _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ by John DeFrancis.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interestingly, Chinese from mainland china don't know much about him. And I even doubt it will be in any headline in main press. In China, politics (esp. agreeing with the Communist party) is more important than achievements. I hope though that in a few decades, China will find a way to recognize him

<comment><USER38> From the state media:

[http://news.cctv.com/2017/01/14/ARTInHPZIsUdE9qsNSoyKQZu1701...](http://news.cctv.com/2017/01/14/ARTInHPZIsUdE9qsNSoyKQZu170114.shtml)

[http://tv.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0114/c61600-29023458.ht...](http://tv.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0114/c61600-29023458.html)

From the two largest news website:

[http://news.163.com/17/0114/22/CAPAC2CT00018AOQ.html](http://news.163.com/17/0114/22/CAPAC2CT00018AOQ.html)

[http://news.sohu.com/20170114/n478709845.shtml?fi?_t=t](http://news.sohu.com/20170114/n478709845.shtml?fi?_t=t)

More coverage from baidu:

[http://news.baidu.com/ns?cl=2&rn=20&tn=news&word=%E6%8B%BC%E...](http://news.baidu.com/ns?cl=2&rn=20&tn=news&word=%E6%8B%BC%E9%9F%B3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> R.I.P.

<comment><USER40> I was taught pinyin at Chinese university - too bad the Chinese textbooks didn't include the genesis of pinyin - interesting, R.I.P.

<comment><USER41> I am taking Mandarin classes and our textbook has both pinyin and characters for almost everything. There is always a section in each chapter that is entirely in characters.

I have been buying books on Amazon to help accelerate my reading. I need a story to follow along with. These book indeed do not have any pinyin.

Pinyin is fascinating to think about. Sometimes words are created from pinyin when you say them. Example: New York is Niǔyuē (纽约). Another is how in English we say "ha, ha". In pinyin it has been adopted exactly that way: Hāhā (哈哈).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Interesting facts about pinyin and Simplified Mandarin -- Mao and his cadres were interested in spreading the gospel of Communism, but with high illiteracy rates, people were generally not as susceptible to propaganda.

Both initiatives, pinyin and Simplification, were designed to more easily bring literacy rates up, for the purpose of spreading Communist teachings.

So you invent an essentially new language, make it accessible via Roman letters to even non-Chinese people, and all documentation and literature produced in that new language talks about the glory of the CCP. Pretty brilliant (if sinister).

<comment><USER43> Silly revisionism. You think Mao engaged in a national literacy program for the sole purpose of inculcate people with Communist propaganda? I don't think so. That's equivalent to saying Hitler built railroads solely so people could get to Nazi party gatherings and transport Jews to camps.

It's possible for Mao to simultaneously be a disastrous autocrat who committed atrocities and to have engaged in projects of national and economic development. Some of them were debacles. Others, like pinyin for Romanization and simplification of writing, were complete successes.

Do you know anything about Chinese? What "new language" are you talking about? Simplified characters and pinyin are not new languages.

The persistence of traditional characters in Hong Kong/Taiwan or diaspora doesn't say anything about the success of simplified characters, which brought literacy to over a billion in the Chinese mainland.

I have some personal experience in this matter; I do not have a natural aptitude for foreign language learning. I learned oral Mandarin as a second language as as a child. I was taught reading and writing Chinese with traditional characters and with Zhuyin/bopomofo (still used in Taiwan, at least until recently), not Romanization.

I studied Chinese in college, learning introductory written Chinese again with simplified characters and pinyin. My personal experience as a native English speaker was that pinyin and simplified characters were substantially easier to get to a functional level of literacy level.

It's not really rocket science, just from a human memory perspective, simplified characters have many fewer strokes and radicals, and many homonymous characters are united so there are fewer of them. This also makes keyboard entry somewhat faster and makes smaller characters legible on displays (or even in print).

I'm not arguing that simplified characters necessarily reduce the effort in achieving a very _high_ level of literacy, but for _basic_ literacy, simplified writing/spelling systems are effective.

<comment><USER19> Agreed that Pinyin is a great help for the learner.

However, have to disagree on the character simplification.

While it would sure make sense to make characters simpler, simplification really only made some characters faster to write (by hand), by reducing the number of strokes. It is very unclear whether it makes things easier to read (in print), or easier to write/remember (when you use a keyboard to type it).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Review my startup - <AUTHOR> http://uliken.com We officially launched yesterday, and i wanted some constructive criticism from the community. Please keep it real and don't hold back.
Couple things to remember. We're aware that this idea is not totally original. We're not trying to solve a problem but merely provide a fun way to interact with friends using your social graph.
Drop me an e-mail if you want to PM me. <comment><USER2> Weellll, it's okay. It does what it does, but what it does is not really for me. Sure, I'd like to click on hot chicks, but you know what I'd really love? If, when I clicked on that chick long enough, she begins to like me! Then she calls me and buys me dinner.

Now that's a problem you startup founders should solve! Getting me laid is a killer application, I tell you.

<comment><USER3> That's a problem that's been solved with various degrees of legality all around the world from time immemorial. I don't think that'll get anyone to an IPO. It might result in some book and movie deals, a clothing line, or a popular blog. (Heidi Fleiss and "Confessions of a College Call Girl" come to mind.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I may well be alone in this view and I really don't want to sound rude but personally I just can't get excited about another one of these sites. It seems the successful ones (e.g. hotornot) in this area were the ones which were both original and fun. Unfortunately, I don't think this is either. Looks beautiful and I'm sure a lot of work went into it, but not for me. I feel bad, maybe I shouldn't have posted! Hmm..

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a neat little app. Not really ground-breaking, but hey, that's not a pre-requisite for success. That said, I think this is just a web base comparator, not a startup. I must be missing something, but what pain point are you soothing? How is this new? The fact that you have categories? Are you hoping to take all the results data and try to pull something useful out of it? Or is this just a "hey, let's learn rails and make a facebook app" type thing?

</comment><comment><USER6> Hot or Not in a different form. I don't see the point.

<comment><USER7> Money?

/ great idea, if you do not get into legal issues

<comment><USER6> How does one make money off of this?

<comment><AUTHOR> we're working on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well done. Simple enough. Fun to use. I'll probably never use it again, but I'm sure there are many millions of people that would spend a dozen minutes or so on this site. With that kind of traffic, I think you have a good shot of success. My prediction is that the celebrity comparison will be the most popular, followed by the user submissions. It's fun to look at pretty faces. It would be interesting to see the patterns and clusters that develop in your data. That would be very cool if you shared the statistics with the community(or if you ever need a data junky to volunteer an analyze your database shoot me a message). Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect facebook will not approve of their logo appearing so prominently at the top right of the page.

<comment><USER10> Not sure if it was meant to be this way.. but the design looks eerily similar to facebook's.

<comment><USER11> purely coincidental

<comment><USER12> Are you sure? It seems to be as if you just took their source code - you even have their logo in the top right corner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, it looks nice, but what am I supposed to do? Why should I vote for "me" and what the hell is a challenge? First time users need to know what's going on. I left after 30 seconds.

<comment><USER14> Seems to be essentially a "Hot or Not" type app, essentially CommandShift3 but back to using people. My first thought is what incentive is there to participate? I guess those that submit pictures get bragging rights, which may be enough for some, but I see no motive for people to vote.

<comment><USER15> There is a dedicated website section.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Your using rails, I would have expected some nice ajaxiness at least! Page loads when voting and reloadings pics were slow, ajax would help here.

Also - I would have expected clicking on either picture would count as a 'vote', rather then having to hit the vote button.

Design is nice and clean

<comment><AUTHOR> PHP, not rails

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The facebook link in the corner makes it look like a phishing site to me. It looks so similar to facebook and has the tag that if I can across this site on my own I'd leave immediately as I'd feel the site was out to steal my identity.

</comment><comment><USER18> Was it TechCrunch that recently pointed to Zuckerberg's original notes on his pre-Facebook project as the source for uLiken's inspiration? Comparing the harvard kids in the facebook to farm animals on something like hot or not?

<comment><USER18> Edit: yeah: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/13/facemash-returns-as- wha...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/13/facemash-returns-as-what-else-a- facebook-app-uliken/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any benefit (other than it's easier) to have all the different categories on the same site?

To me, it seems that "a site that lets you compare stuff" is less appealing than "a site that lets you compare girls", "a site that lets you compare cars", "a site that lets you compare pets" tied together in a loose network and with similar branding.

Also, I should be able to vote by just clicking on the image I like more :p

</comment><comment><USER20> Tried to use it. Just got this...

"Notice: Constant APP_NAME already defined in /var/www/uliken.com/releases/20080514175006/config/app_config.prod.php on line"

I take it that was not part of the plan? :D

Will try again later.

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://www.likebetter.com/>

<http://addmired.com/>

</comment><comment><USER22> There appears to be a bug where every so often the app shows 'skip' with the same photos after submission, instead of moving on to the next pair.

<comment><AUTHOR> issue has been resolved. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Getting a bunch of debug notices if I try to visit. It's a cute debug :)

<comment><USER12> But is it hot? Or not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Site not for me, don't just see its use. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER25> clearly, by the comments below, this may not be your target audience :)

<comment><AUTHOR> i figured that much, but criticism is always good ..... in moderation :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> why is this fun?

</comment><comment><USER27> it's down.

</comment><comment><USER28> -_-</comment>


Make C look Good - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nautical/CBullet

<comment><USER2> The __builtin_types_compatible_p technique used here would be a great complement to [http://libcello.org/](http://libcello.org/) seen on HN a few days ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is such a simple trick that makes a huge difference in the readability of the code. Thanks for sharing

<comment><USER4> I don't get it... how does stripping the type system with macros make it easier to read?</comment></comment>


UTorrent update installs "web companion" without permission - <AUTHOR> I got a notice to update uTorrent for important security reasons.  Clicking through, I carefully declined the offer that came with it.
Nevertheless, I saw a new program Web Companion, start up afterward.  uTorrent also took the liberty of closing my browser and changing its default search engine. (I did not have a choice in this matter.)
For this behavior, uTorrent has been listed as a Threat by Microsoft:
https://www.google.com/search?q=utorrent+installs+web+companion
As of now, uTorrent installation may change your default search engine and install unwanted software without asking you.
UPDATE: also it tried to install a Chrome extension which Chrome notified me of and allowed me to block -
https://imgur.com/a/RWzJZ0E <comment><USER2> You're witnessing the final stage in the BitTorrent Client Lifecycle:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6621393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6621393)

The solution is to switch to the latest "lightweight" client, and use it for about five years, until it also starts installing malware and mining bitcoin in the background.

<comment><USER3> The solution is to use FOSS client.

[https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent](https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thankfully I use qBitTorrent, A FOSS client available on most of the platforms. No ads, no junk.

<comment><USER5> I came hear to say this. uTorrent was great for a number of years, but I'm now using qBitTorrent on both Windows and Linux.

There's a lot of great features, too, such as renaming files _before_ starting the download.</comment></comment>