Ask HN: Is there already a good web-based CV/Resumé solution? - <AUTHOR>

I've been considering building a service for academics and folks who want to track their academic and professional endeavors. Obviously a lot of people use LinkedIn for this, but I think there's space for a more document-oriented approach. I haven't seen one yet that looks well done enough to capture a significant userbase.
Does a GREAT service exist for this? I've thought through a few features I would have loved to have had when finishing my degree, like:
- Official request for reference letter through the app - Integration with University transcript systems to keep track of classes taken, GPA, etc - Design-oriented features, like easy theme settings - Academic paper links/references (I know there are large systems already in place for citing, but I think this fills a different space of personal tracking and displaying rather than searching.) - Printing/courier service to send the resumé to a potential employer without the service's brand (this could be a simple PDF too)
It seems potentially extremely valuable to colleges trying to place students in jobs, which would be my first angle (the two universities I attended).
I know a ton of people that this would be useful for personally (having come from GaTech), and I'm wondering what the HN community would have to say about the idea. <comment><USER2> [https://hipcv.com/](https://hipcv.com/) \- written by a co-worker of mine is free and worth trying out. Does LinkedIn import and PDF export if you need something that you can print out and bring to an interview.

There's also [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/) which I really like, esp. if you have rep on SO. Also does LinkedIn import. If you're interested in this and need an invite (is it still invite-only?) I can hook you up. Includes places to post your links to academic papers, blog posts, books written, etc.

As for the integration with university transcript systems...there's your big feature to bite off. It seems like this would be an awesome feature, but I have no clue what it would take to do this integration, or which universities might be interested in connecting with you there.

Finally, there's always the, "Build your own website," option, which isn't an option for everyone, I understand. But still the most flexible option around if you need something that's just perfect. It of course comes with its own maintenance time costs and such.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome - never seen HipCV before, but that's definitely down the direction I'm thinking. Certainly not an all-things solution, which is what I like about it.

Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've worked on a prototype during a SlideShare hackathon, it's a POC but working relatively fine, you can check it out here: [http://visual- resume.kalache.fr/](http://visual-resume.kalache.fr/)

there is also visual.ly and [http://resumup.com/](http://resumup.com/) that are actual services.</comment>


Trump says homelessness is a problem because it makes US look bad - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/01/donald-trump- <comment><USER2> Government is not the solution, Government is the cause.

If you want to solve the problem of homelessness, fix the drug problem , stop giving them needles and safe spaces to kill themselves, stop bringing in millions of people from other countries and start taking care of the citizens.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we really expect a narcissist to say anything different? They are defined by their inward focus, seeing all issues as they relate to themselves, and 0 empathy.

<comment><USER2> They are all psychopath, narcissistic megalomaniacs. Every last one of them, it is a requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's solve it, then! </comment>


Ask HN: About Apollo 11 - <AUTHOR>

I couldn't find any detailed sources on internet about Apollo 11.<p>How did they land on the moon, how did they came back to earth? What was the engineering behind this marvelous trip to moon? <comment><USER2> Bless your heart.

Have a look at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11)

or this

[http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/](http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/)</comment>


A Message from Earth - <AUTHOR> https://amessagefrom.earth/ <comment><USER2> Man, some really questionable use of animations and things in here. Hopefully the website isn't the message, because lord knows any sort of advanced lifeform isn't going to put up with that crap.

<comment><USER3> Think of it as a counterpoint to Elon's car orbiting Mars.

<comment><USER4> We were promised warp fields and Vulcans, and instead we put cars in places they have no business being.

<comment><USER5> I dunno, we were also promised flying cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A _scary_ message from Earth

</comment><comment><USER7> I liked it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well hopefully ETs have javascript enabled, because without it this site is useless.

Can anybody with a screenreader chime in as to how this site renders/plays (no idea what the correct term is)?

<comment><USER9> Maybe, for ETs, our site might be like - "There is some life form out there trying to use JS but not using it enough. They are using some biteless/boring chaining stuff called promises and there are no beautiful pyramid of dooms ..... ". We may never know.</comment></comment>


Bill Wyman: Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing - <AUTHOR> http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reasons-why-newspapers-are-failing

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think this submission is going to go anywhere, and that's too bad, because I think this is the most Hacker-News-appropriate summation of where the news industry is. It even ends with a a hacker-y prescription for how to run a successful news operation today.

<comment><USER2> Nice comment. The article is long but worth reading. Besides applying to newspapers we may soon see the same logic apply to newsmagazines, and ultimately all magazines.

The recommendations at the end of the article almost look like a startup project -- not making a "local paper" but rather a _platform_ others can use to create their own "local papers" without needing much technical knowledge. The startup provides the hosting and tons of templates and pointers to clip art, etc. The customer provides the content. The startup manages the finances and takes a cut of the ad revenues in addition to renting the hosting and software.

Or is that not an original idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking exactly the same thing, how much fun it would be to have this particular startup to run with for, say, Chicago. =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A few of these reasons boil down to "Newspapers _were never that good_ , and competition is rough on them."

Something to keep in mind the next time you see a sob-piece on the poor, downtrodden city newspaper.

<comment><AUTHOR> My library offers full-text search for the Trib's archives back to the 1890's, and so I searched for my home address to see if, you know, anyone had ever died in my house (answer: two people have! Jackpot!).

What I learned in the process of doing that search was how unbelievably biased the newspapers were at the turn of the century. There was minute up-to-the- minute reporting on every conceivable detail of the city, but it was laced with political agenda. You were getting a whole lot of information, but it was no more trustworthy than a blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He left out another important reason - roughly half the population (conservatives) have stopped reading them because of a liberal bias (perceived or otherwise).

While we'd like to think that journalists are going to be neutral, they simply aren't, they are human and they let their biases creep into their stories. And the circulation for papers that endorsed Obama was 4 times greater than those that endorsed McCain ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2008))

I was on the Young Adult Board of contributors for the Des Moines Register and one of the editors very much admitted to me that they were losing subscriptions like mad because conservatives stopped reading their paper. Consequently, I was published much more frequently than other members of the board because I have a conservative view on things, while the other 48 people almost all came from a liberal persuasion. I know it certainly wasn't because of the quality of my writing, I know it sucked, but I'm an engineer not an English major.</comment>


Visual Kanban Task Board with Email Flow - <AUTHOR> Hey, guys and girls, here is Mila and I am trying to get some feedback on a product, which we think that might be a game changer to the way you transform your inbox to an 'inbox 0' dream.
Flow-e turns your Gmail or Office365 inbox to a Visual Task Board.
Anyone who tries it will be more than welcome to give its feedback and we will make our best to listen and make the appropriate changes.
Here is a link to our product Flow-e - https://flow-e.com
Cheers, Mila <comment><USER2> How about Fastmail?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any legit hair loss research? - <AUTHOR> I'm in my mid twenties and slowly been going bald over the last few years. Not ideal but also not the end of the world. Baldness has been around for at least several thousands of years. However, we have made a lot of technological advances in recent times, many of which improve our lives in fairly superficial ways. Nonetheless, it seems that hair loss is the realm of miracle cures, sketchy companies and con artists. Let's just say googling "scientifically proven hair loss treatment" isn't going to get you very far!
The only semi-legit treatment I know of is Finasteride. However, the Wikipedia article is pretty light on the supporting research, and extremely light on references to studies about its perceived side effects.
I was wondering, does the Hacker News crowd know of any legitimate research into male pattern baldness; causes and treatments, that are backed up by scientific evidence? In particular I'd be interested to know of the existence of any peer reviewed studies from respectable institutions. <comment><USER2> I would like to know this myself. I've tried Finasteride, and it did work, but it did affect me in other ways (very low energy, low libido). So I stopped using it. I do recall seeing some actual research on the laser combs, and that they did, in fact, have a measurable effect, but it wasn't impressive. If I can find the laser comb stuff, I'll post it. I did buy one (HairMax), but did not see any results.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is no way to monetize basic science anymore, because all the most important patents have expired. Big companies only care about treatments which are profitable. Thus we have abominations such as Finasteride being FDA approved.

If you broaden your horizons as to what constitutes "legitimate research", I think you'll find some useful information.</comment>


GDPR Complaint vs. Facebook [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://noyb.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/complaint-facebook.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Much of this is fair... especially the trick used to entice people to rush through the acceptance of the new terms by using false message & notification alerts.

But... a good proportion of this complaint is that the complainant wishes to continue to use Facebook without any penalty whilst still opting out of all data tracking. They state things such as it being a social connection to friends & family... similar to a telephone network.

What they appear to be missing is the fact that it is their data that is paying for this service... unlike a telephone network which is pay-per-use!

<comment><USER3> GDPR is very clear on the fact that opt-in on your data being used for tracking or "relevant" ads shouldn't condition your access to the website (article 7, paragraph 3 [1])

[1] [https://gdpr.algolia.com/gdpr-article-7](https://gdpr.algolia.com/gdpr- article-7)

<comment> vertex-four Only if the lawfulness for processing is based in consent rather than "the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party" - <USER2> what is considered a legitimate interest is only going to wind up being settled between Facebook/Google and a regulator in court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tangentially related: I've never signed up on Facebook, and never agreed to any of their privacy policies.

Does that mean that, if any PII of me is found on Facebook, they are in GDPR violation?

<comment><USER5> considering that a simple IP+timestamp can be PII, if you have ever seen anything from facebook's cdns , then maybe yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is in practice a dup of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161211)

</comment><comment><USER5> I 'm not sure how well it will reflect in the court of public opinion if the EU's first ruling is that basically every website is not allowed to use ads to pay itself. There seem to be certain groups here in Europe who relish on this kind of "activism" . I m not sure how representative they are of public opinion, they are certainly very vocal.

Do we know how strict the Austrian DPA is ?

<comment> vertex-four Advertising does not need to be targeted to a specific person to exist. Advertising has existed since the dawn of time without that ability, and frankly, marketing budgets are not going to wind up decreasing because companies can't target individual people.

<comment><USER5> > to a specific person to exist

Advertising was always trying to find the right target. Technology allowed this to become a lot more efficient. As long as targeting is anonymous and certain limitations are set, i m fine with it, we don't need to kill the patient here.

<comment> vertex-four Targeting is not anonymous because the amount of data that is used for targeting almost always amounts to personally identifiable information. Even just "company this person works at" + "job title" can be PII, and Facebook processes both of those things in targeting, along with many many others.

<comment><USER5> i dont believe facebook allows targetting by company and in general this shouldnt be allowed to targeted advertising.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


250,000 English words currently available as Twitter handles - <AUTHOR> http://peticol.as/twitter-handles/english-words.txt

<comment><USER2> I was about to sort them by letter count, but there's a txt of 4 letter handles: <http://peticol.as/twitter-handles/4-letter-ok-sounding.txt>

<comment><USER3> nill was the best one I saw, looks like someone got to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The script generates some false positives on reserved words. It's a bug I need to fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Output at <http://pastebin.com/18vCegaT>

grep -P '(phobe|phile|ist)\s*$'

@categorist or @pantywaist, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hard to believe @abdominohysterectomy is still available. Jackpot.

Edit: Equally fortunate: abdominohysterectomy.com is available.

<http://www.whois.com/whois/abdominohysterectomy.com>

Jokes asides, it would be useful to cross check this with domain availability and username availability on other _popular_ social sites.

<comment><USER6> Dictionary word domain names are mostly gone, esp. if you are referring to .COMs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is OT: I've always wanted to take a crack at a couple of problems/semi- thought-experiments I came up with:

1) Find the verified Twitter account followed by minimum number of users - This is easy, since Twitter maintains an official list of verified accounts at <https://twitter.com/verified/following> . We could iterate over this list, and find the minimum.

2) Find the maximum-followed non-verified Twitter account. Now this is a harder problem. Does anyone have any ideas apart from brute-forcing Twitter handles?

<comment><USER4> 2) I think you'd be likely to find it by just crawling the graph, but it'd be very hard to _prove_ that you had found it. For example, @sockington <https://twitter.com/sockington> has 1.4M followers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At least @arsefeet is available - don't all rush to get it at once

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope people don't use this to park twitter usernames.

<comment><USER10> Don't worry, only 90% of the prior million good names are parked. I'm sure it'll never happen. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ...and yet every permutation of "Brian Willis" is taken. Many of which are spam accounts which twitter seems completely uninterested in killing off.

<comment><USER12> I share your frustration. No reasonable permutation of my name and initials or usual handles is available, and most are inactive accounts.

Besides their developer-relations problem, namespace pollution and stagnation is a big problem for Twitter going forward. Who wants to join and use a service when the closest thing they can get to their desired username is a second-class moniker like @ffffirst_last1 or @L4stF1rst88 ?? I've heard this complaint from several of my friends who were late to the Twitter scene. The name availability issue is the main reason I think app.net has any chance of succeeding.

<comment><USER13> Kind of like what wants a screen name like AzNpRyDe1983 or XXXlilCutiEXXX3 or FastIntegra345?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some may be reserved keywords - e.g. accounts is available, twitter.com/accounts returns a 404, but you are unable to register the username.

</comment><comment><USER15> You might want to filter out words which are too long to actually be Twitter handles.

<comment><AUTHOR> More importantly, thats something I should have thought to do before running this script for 8 hours. Would have eliminated about an hour of requests :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I made a python script for this purpose a while back. Supports brute force and dictionaries.

<https://github.com/process/Twitter-Name-Finder>

</comment><comment><USER17> top 50, sorted by frequency

all me leave events resources myself post status pages accounts positions discuss administrative remove root join session statistics phone friendship blocks focused links responsibilities administered explore suspended sessions receptors discusses characterization practised translate ensuring frontiers stationed industrialization telecommunications distinguishes occurrences condensed resembled rapidity legislatures misunderstanding gastrointestinal administering discharges ensued characterizes

<comment><USER18> As someone who rather wanted @root, I can say that these are not all available.

<comment><USER17> Yep. I just sorted his list by something more reasonable than alpha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn One short-ish reasonable sounding one I was surprised wasn't taken was "kobold"...you'd think that some tabletop gaming fan somewhere would have gotten that one!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is why I like Perl,

      perl -e 'print sort{length $a <=> length $b} <>' english-words.txt > sorted.txt

<comment><USER20> Thanks ! Just, you're missing a "print" and single quotes would work better :)

<comment><USER19> Cheers for that! Fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks. I'm getting _tetramethoxypropenylbenzenes_.

<comment><USER22> By the time you type "@tetramethoxypropenylbenzenes" you have only 111 characters left!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The real experiment is to run the script again and find out how many people are parking the good ones now that i've distributed this list

</comment><comment><USER23> No need to create a list quite that long, seeing as though Twitter doesn't allow handles longer than 15 characters in length.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I realized that after this script ran for 8 hours :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could have mentioned link includes them all... Dat mobile loading.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome, got a good one

</comment><comment><USER26> cool - just snagged one

</comment><comment><USER27> no 3-letter handlers?

<comment><USER28> I tested that a while back in 2012.

There's some, but they're all nonsense. Nasty ones like 2q4 for the most part.

<comment><USER29> not even @2q4 anymore...</comment></comment></comment>


Today is the 40th birthday of 8086; happy birthday pal - <AUTHOR> https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/40-Jahre-8086-der-Prozessor-der-die-PC-Welt-veraenderte-4074260.html <comment><USER2> The history's even longer and more tangled than you may know: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200#The_seed_of_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200#The_seed_of_the_x86_architecture)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are giving away 8086 different i7-8086 processors, so that's what 8086^2.

[https://game.intel.com/8086sweepstakes/](https://game.intel.com/8086sweepstakes/)

PS: I did not check if there are any nasty terms and conditions around this one.

<comment><USER4> "This sweepstakes is only available for residents of USA, Canada (excluding Quebec), UK, France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Mainland China and Taiwan."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now I know why Intel has named its latest mainstream processor i7-8086 :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can I still complain that the 68000 should have won?

</comment><comment><USER7> I spent couple of months programming with 8086 in my undergrads. Those were the day :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Happy Birthday!</comment>


Real Time Instant ACH Is Live Today [corrected link] - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/15/dwolla-fisyncs-first-banking-customer-goes-live-eliminates-ach-delays-with-real-time-bank-transfers/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3944564></comment>


A practical guide to securing macOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide <comment><USER2> Guide should probably mention automatically updated Chrome extensions. There have been multiple cases where the owner of a popular extension sold it to a 3rd party that pushed out malicious updates. Tab Manager is the most recent instance that comes to mind: [http://security.stackexchange.com/a/130600](http://security.stackexchange.com/a/130600)

Chrome does disable extensions when an update requires new permissions, but that won't catch malicious updates to extensions that require extensive permissions for basic functionality.

<comment><USER3> All my Chrome extensions are Git repositories in my home directory. Works really well and I can take a look at the changelog after pulling.

Requires the extensions to be open source, of course.

<comment><USER4> And means that Chrome will nag you about your "developer mode extensions" every time it starts up. I know why they do that, but it's still annoying. :(

<comment><USER5> This is similar to how Android warns me every single time I reboot that an unknown entity can observe my network traffic. The unknown entity, of course, is _me_ (I've installed a certificate for my Streisand server). But still, it flashes a warning _every_ _single_ _time_.

Of course, this means that if anyone ever _does_ install a malicious certificate on my phone, I'll be none the wiser. Thanks Google!

<comment><USER6> Thanks for mentioning your Streisand server. I had no idea this existed. This is amazing!

Here is the GitHub repository if other people are interested: [https://github.com/jlund/streisand](https://github.com/jlund/streisand)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like reading guides like this, and they're useful in a sort of encyclopedic sense, but the problem with them is that they're really a "practical guide to doing every conceivable security thing you could do" with macOS, which is in fact not the best way to secure your operating system. For instance: it's probably not the world's greatest idea to go out of your way to install Adium for secure messaging on a locked-down Mac.

The cryptographic advice in this particular guide is not especially great. You can, for instance, safely ignore what it says about randomness (and, in particular, about how it interacts with FileVault's XTS block crypto). Its advice about password management is needlessly complex (if you trust Keychain, use Keychain Assistant to generate passwords, not OpenSSL --- but most of the cool kids just use 1Password, and they're right to do that).

<comment><USER8> > _most of the cool kids just use 1Password_

Do you have a view on 1Password versus LastPass?

<comment><USER9> I do, I've been a heavy user of both for 4+ years, but I'm not a security expert of any kind.

LastPass has been exploited a few times in ways that could have given up passwords. Their UX and server infrastructure seems to be a mess of php scripts, that itself doesn't have to be insecure but is a code smell. Their commercial support looks unmaintained. Both platforms support "cloud" based syncing but since 1Password's is pretty new I can't speak to it.

1Password does local encryption outside of the browser, LastPass will encrypt locally in the browser.

1Password can leverage other file transports to sync passwords, iCloud, DropBox, or any shared directory. LastPass does it all with their servers.

LastPass's web interface if compromised can have you give away the password to all your passwords. 1Password has a much smaller risk of this and would probably have to include a malicious software update.

1Password Families/Teams exists and I'm not familiar with it but it probably has a similar attack vector to LastPass's web interfaces.

You know, they both offer end to end encryption with similar attacks. Overall these companies are big targets and I'd rather keep my passwords offline or synced via side channels in a standalone app like 1Password.

PS I'd be amiss if I didn't mention dashlane [https://www.dashlane.com/](https://www.dashlane.com/) I hear good things and it's passed review at a few companies who know their stuff, but that's all I know.

<comment><USER10> After reading this I deleted my lastpass account and came across this message upon trying to log in.

[http://imgur.com/a/SFpWw](http://imgur.com/a/SFpWw)

One of the first things I learned about security was not to tell the user which credential was incorrect.

Disclaimer: I'm not a security expert.

<comment><USER11> The debate that the smart people have on that one still seems to go back and forth. I can find people I respect who have both opinions.

My only contribution is that I suspect that in practice almost every site leaks this info if you try hard enough, via some form of timing attack. You can get off-the-shelf "constant time string comparison" algorithms, but it's impractical to write anything much larger in a constant-time fashion, certainly nothing as complicated as a full authentication flow, especially in the light of the complexity of the systems we program on nowadays, with so many layers of caching to exploit for timing, etc. I've leaned in the direction of going for the user-friendly approach in my code, though I've only come around to that recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Be careful. Some of these tools do not include any way to reverse their settings. A friend followed one of these guides and we had to reinstall the OS to get some wireless tech working again (Might have been AirDrop).

<comment><USER13> AirDrop is pretty finicky anyways. Is there any further detail you can provide here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find really amusing the author does want to hide the installation from Apple, but recommends using Google DNS and Chrome for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice resource.

But what I miss most, is a deeper analysis of the different launchd services and agents. - Especially which ones can be disabled and what features will be impacted.

It is quite opaque, especially considering the verbose descriptions of Windows Services out of the box.

I want to disable all these, for me, useless features: handoff, geo, maps, icloud, push, commCenter, spotlight web, siri, social integration, diagnostics reporting, and many more.

It has been a very annoying experience of seemingly unrelated parts of the OS breaking when Disabling anything, - and log spamming of unsuccessful attempts of using it.

<comment><USER16> The parts of the OS you are describing were not designed in a modular way. It seems to me like you are using the wrong operating system if you want this level of control.

<comment><USER15> Ah, I'm holding it wrong. :P I use FreeBSD, Linux and Windows. I like macOS, I want to use it, but not under a facist rule of the one holy way.

It is a tool and should not push policy through arbitrary limitations. But it seems we are caught in a war of lock-in ecosystem providers. Kind of a more realistic version of the much used picture of corporation-states or societies in sci-fi.

Apart from this, hypothetically I might not only an end-user but also an admin who has to implement certain policies. The argument is never sound, there is always an economic or practical tradeoff and you are stuck somewhere and have to make it work and yours.

<comment><USER17> What part of macOS do you like and want to use?

<comment><USER15> The UI is polished, Commercial and refined Apps are available and technological it is a reasonably sound design.

I have my *nix shell with software from macports as well.

I just don't have the motivation or time anymore to make linux fit my personal computer needs, it always ends up in rabbit holes of tangles to accomplish many things and when you are actually trying to accomplish something unrelated to playing with it.

<comment><USER18> Do you think the two might be related? One is modular and configurable and ends up in rabbit holes of tangles and the other is monolithic and controlling but keeps the trains running on time?

<comment><USER15> Sure they are related. But its not black and white, and not an absolute correlation.

macOS itself is actually designed in a very modular way if you look at the message based integration of components via XPC and "do one thing" daemons.

I have accepted that I must forfeit some personal preferences in the Apple ecosystem, but I choose to draw the line with not being able to disable intrusive and privacy related features/components.

A similar complaint can be made about Windows, which is more monolithic in its design in my view, but it offers (as mentioned in my top-level comment) proper descriptions and a UI to disable services. Also there are many tools like Win10Privacy and such available which disable a lot, without making the system to constantly misbehave.

"trains on time" \- While I appreciate the metaphor, when considered carefully, it is more likely linux and the pragmatic approach that makes the "trains run on time" in many fields. (embedded and server-side)

<comment><USER19> It's designed to be modular for ease of development by Apple folks. Whether they extend the benefits of that modularity to you, the user, is entirely case-by-case -- and the default answer is 'no'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Is your adversary a three letter agency (if so, you may want to consider using OpenBSD instead)"

If your adversary is a 3 letter agency you'd better use no computer at all. If they can't subvert the OS (witch I doubt) they'll subvert the hardware (hello Intel ME).

</comment><comment><USER21> I used to follow the changes a lot on this repo. Lots of great discussion in the issues of balancing practicality and security. Like @ents mentioned though, there are some un-reversible changes if you do _everything_ they recommend. Although it'll make you more secure.

I don't do most of this. I'm waiting until I decide to wipe my Mac and have plenty of time to play with it. (which is going to be when exactly? Not sure.)

<comment><USER22> > I'm waiting until I decide to wipe my Mac and have plenty of time to play > with it.

Clone a copy of your drive (use something like super duper) and then simply boot from the cloned drive. The clone drive can be another physical drive (attached via USB) or just use disk utility to create a separate partition and clone a copy there.

<comment><USER21> Yea I guess I could do that. Play around with it and see how it feels and then I can wipe it over again if I want to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How often you find yourself locked out of your house obeys Murphy's Law, add lots of security and you will find yourself annoyingly locked out for silly reasons all the time. Have just the one simple lock on the door and you probably will not end up locked out, particularly given there is a key under the mat.

I had a laptop of mine retrieved by the police from a big rubbish bin. The screen was broken, it did boot up though. Another time I had the broken screen after being hit by a car. These things happen and I am always sure I can get in even if keyboard/screen/mouse isn't an option. It is more useful for me to be able to somehow access my machine even if broken, I imagine there will be circumstances of that.

When the police retrieved my laptop I wasn't exactly worried about my obvious login password or whether I had locked down that mysql port sufficiently. The thief wasn't even literate so those extreme security measures wouldn't have helped.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there some way to have some faith from what you're getting from brew? In other words, can I verify installations from brew somehow?

<comment><USER25> >[http://brew.sh/](http://brew.sh/) the home site shows a simple wget example for homebrew formulae

the chain of trust is solid up until make and configure happen, at that point any number of things could happen so it's a question of whether or not you trust whatever scripts its running.

unless homebrew has some sort of enforcement on what that script can do it could do anything. This is why its a really good thing that homebrew does not require root.

<comment><USER26> > unless homebrew has some sort of enforcement on what that script can do

Anything from our Homebrew/core (i.e. wget) uses the macOS sandbox to prevent writes outside of permitted locations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Was curious what would happen if you set the firmware to only boot from the startup disk and it crashed ...

Seems like MacOS does the reasonable thing and prompts for the firmware password if you use a different disk.

[https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204455](https://support.apple.com/en- ca/HT204455)

</comment><comment><USER24> Any thoughts on doing work in virtual machines?

<comment><USER28> I have a MBP as my primary machine, and I do all of my development work in a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu. MacOS seems a lot more stable without 40gb of development stuff installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there a similar guide but for Windows?

Google mostly shows you guides from merchants trying to get you buy AV licenses.

<comment><USER30> I quite enjoy this script called make_windows10_great_again.bat [https://gist.github.com/IntergalacticApps/675339c2b805b4c9c6...](https://gist.github.com/IntergalacticApps/675339c2b805b4c9c6e9a442e0121b1d)

Keep in mind this is a very rigorous script and modifies Windows10 beyond recognition. Infact it kind of makes Win10 appear and function more like Windows8

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That time of year again? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148077)

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, and people laughed at all the Windows 10 antispy tools/script packs. Turns out this is the state of personal computing in 2016, nothing is decent out of the box anymore :(

</comment><comment><USER32> Very nice. Thank you for this! :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Step one: Don't use macOS

<comment><USER34> You're probably being downvoted because you didn't elaborate, but I agree with your implied premise: proprietary software is inherently insecure.

<comment><USER35> > proprietary software is inherently insecure

Unlike widely used and security-critical open source projects, right? Like, say, OpenSSL?

("All hardware sucks. All software sucks." This is at least as true these days as it was back on alt.sysadmin.recovery in the '90s)

<comment><USER34> At least in the case of free (as in freedom) software, the vulnerabilities can be exposed and patched. More importantly (and more relevant to this discussion), software freedom also tends to make it difficult for the original developer to hide malicious features.

<comment><USER36> Theoretically, yes, but if you're going to make that claim you'd need some hard data showing that exploitable bugs either happen less frequently or are going and patched earlier.

Care to show your data and analysis?

<comment><USER34> How can I obtain reliable data on non-free software when the public cannot study the source code?

You also seem to discount the possibility of _intentional_ vulnerabilities (from the user's perspective) being included in the software by its developer.

<comment><USER36> You appear to be unaware of the large industry reverse-engineering software of all sorts. You could compare comparable projects and see whether source availability correlates with fewer vulnerabilities, lower severity, etc.

Similarly, the security community has discussed the possibility of intentional vulnerabilities in opensource software for decades. Sure, someone would probably notice if you submitted secret-nsa-exploit.patch but it's unclear that someone would notice if e.g. you submitted a Heartbleed-style bug, not to mention something the NSA's dual curve backdoor.

To be clear, I've been working with open-source software since the mid-90s. I think the model has a lot to offer but it's not magic. Lazy fanboy activism doesn't do anything but lower your credibility and help the companies which are arguing that open-source isn't safe to use (or isn't safe to use without paying them to manage it).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Condensed summary and analysis of Hillary's leaked Goldman Sachs paid speeches - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/DNCleaks/comments/57oxlg/condensed_summary_and_analysis_of_hillarys_leaked/ <comment><USER2> Odd these emails don't get more airtime. Certainly are interesting reads.</comment>


Mobile Playbook by Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.themobileplaybook.com/
<comment><USER2> I can't decide which part of that site is more hideous. The actively hostile user interface or the buzzword-laden "content".

<comment><USER3> Can you expand on the "actively hostile" comment? I thought it was a technically and aesthetically impressive implementation but I'm no designer.

<comment><USER2> Other people already posted different annoyances, but my issues with that page were:

The animations are choppy to a distracting level on Chrome 22 running on a reasonably beefy desktop machine.

The font size is unreadably small, and due to the three column layout it doesn't degrade well when zoomed. It'd be merely crappy if zooming required vertical scrolling. It's disabling all methods of vertical scrolling entirely that really make this design special.

It replaces normal page navigation with a custom version, which is already bad. They then compound that error by mapping that custom navigation to the wrong keys. An example: maybe you'd like to check one of the footnotes they have. In a sensible design those would be hyperlinks, but for whatever reason that wasn't done. Ok, so I guess you need to go to the end of the document to see the footnotes. Wouldn't still be too bad, but they forgot to map the "End" key. So the only way to get to the end of the document is with the slider. And after doing that, how do you return to the original position? Well, I'd expect to be able to do Alt-Left for that. Except that this keybinding has been overridden too, and you need to instead click on the back button.

Doing this kind of stuff might be just about acceptable in a web app. But this isn't an app. It's a document. And they've managed to break the only two things that matter for a document. I need to be able to read it, and I need to be able to navigate it.

<comment><USER4> FYI, the animations look great to me in Chrome 22 on a year-old Dell laptop. The font size is smaller than I would have used, but I wouldn't describe it as "unreadable".

There are some other big problems, though. They've obviously never heard of Unobtrusive Javascript[1]. Try opening the site without Javascript. And the HTML/CSS is garbage. What a joke.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript>

<comment><USER2> My vision isn't very good. The text becomes comfortable to read at around 175%-200% zoom level. The default size is so far outside that range that I have no qualms about describing it as unreadable, even if it's not literally true and I could read it with sufficient concentration.

Just to be clear, I don't think the problem is the tiny font size as such. It's the tiny size combined with gratuitously unscrollable and unscalable layout. It's a similar problem to many default themes for blogs disabling zooming on mobile browsers for no good reason. This got so bad that the Android browser sprouted an accessibility option to force zooming to always be enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Goog does a good job illustrating just how "different" mobile is.

In our experience at ConversionVoodoo.com over the past couple of years a properly mobile optimized site for a direct-response style business is a difference of 2x, for traditional ecommerce it's 1.5x, for content it's as much as 3x!

In other words make absolutely, positively sure that mobile optimization becomes an organizational priority if you're seeing more than 15% mobile traffic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly this is exactly the type of site design we should be moving away from. Fully scripted, so can't be search engine indexed or read without scripting, doesn't even work on many browsers, takes longer to load because of the way the pages are designed, multiple columns so hard to zoom in if the text is too small on your screen, breaks the back button, and so on. This is nothing but a text based presentation, why not keep the page simple, without any extras, and let me read it like a normal web page?

<comment><USER7> I opened the source, and whole text is there, so at least it can be indexed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Read something really simple, informative, and beautiful created by Google. Go to Hacker News to read people bitch about how they'd have done it differently and better.

<comment><USER9> It's not simple, it's so absurdly overcomplicated and obsessed with one of many possible renderings that they've made the content inaccessible to most browsers we've ever had, apparently including the default browser on most Android phones (ICS didn't bundle Chrome). Their own search engine can't preview or cache it properly. They should regard widespread authoring like this as an existential threat to the web of openly interoperable hypertext and discourage it however they can.

<comment><USER8> "Inaccessible to most browsers we've ever had" does not move me. What about most browsers the likely readers are using now? That's what moves me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A tip for anyone trying to view this on a smartphone:

If I load the page on my Android phone with the stock gingerbread browser in portrait, I get what I can only guess is the desktop page. If I load it in landscape, I get the tablet page asking me to rotate to landscape. If you then rotate back to portrait and refresh, you may be lucky enough to get the mobile phone page. It may also be completely random.

Ironic how difficult it is to load this content on a mobile device.

<comment><USER11> Weird. The phone version looks fine in the Android browser or Chrome here, but my phone is on ICS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And yet their presentation do not work on standard ICS browser :)) Getting "Greetings, Mobile Champion!...." message.

<comment><USER13> The android browser is, in general, terrible. Google has partially redeemed themselves by shipping chrome as the default on JB, but right now android is the thing holding back the mobile web.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, Jelly Bean doesn't use Chrome for internal webviews. I'm playing around with a Phonegap wrapped HTML5 app and I'm blown away by how much better iOS Safari is. I though Google were supposed to be the web guys?

<comment><USER15> Apparently, BlackBerry 10's browser for HTML5 based apps is going to blow both of them away.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure how it's going to blow safari away. Safari is roughly equivalent to the current state of the art in desktop browsers (the only glaring omission I can think of is indexedDB). If BB10 goes beyond that, it's going to be unusable anyways because it's all going to be BB specific.

<comment><USER15> HTML5test.com says you're wrong.

[http://html5test.com/compare/browser/bb10/chromecanary/safar...](http://html5test.com/compare/browser/bb10/chromecanary/safari60.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On the main page (viewed from PC) they advertise a nice-looking tablet version, yet on my ASUS tablet with Android 4.1 and Chrome as a browser, I get the crappy mobile version of the site. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER17> This would appear to infringe on RIM's Playbook trademark: [http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:25...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:25e2gp.2.27)

<comment><USER18> LOL. People have been using The ____ Playbook for years.

Checking the USPTO web site, it shows the "Blackberry Playbook" and "Playbook" applications as being "status: suspended". Did they even manage to get the US trademark on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Their mobile site tester[1] is doesn't do much. All is does is show one page of the website you entered in a mobile browser then it asks __you __if it showed up correctly. The report is pretty much some canned messages about how to improve a mobile website. Maybe I'm expecting too much but after the effort that they put into the presentation I hoped for a little bit more out the mobile site "tester."

1 - <http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/test-your-site/>

<comment><USER19> Just because I was curious, I looked up some mobile site testers. These do a much better job than the Google one: <http://validator.w3.org/mobile/> <http://mobiready.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It won't load without JS enabled. Plus it is very buggy when it does load on up to date browsers. Google's JS has been getting buggy this past few months. Even Gmail, which was rock solid.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's nice and pretty.

Now on an ipad3 it's slightly laggy. Transitions are slightly slow, and every interface element feels a bit "almost there" in term of responsivness.

Then, downloading the pdf and viewing the same content in a native viewer is liberatingly smooth, fast, responsive, albeit without the animations and custom controls.

This demo seems very apropriate to experience the gap between "html5 and JS everything" and "single purposed and optimised" presentation formats.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that the tablet on the lower left is an iPad.

<comment><USER18> Uh, no it isn't. I guess you buy into the belief that Apple has trademarked the black square with a screen tablet.

<comment><USER23> Actually, it's not just any tablet.. It's actually an iPad with safari browser open. Look at the image without the overlay ([http://www.themobileplaybook.com/assets/images/cover_tablet....](http://www.themobileplaybook.com/assets/images/cover_tablet.png))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I first followed the link to this presentation on my iPad 3rd generation. It actually provided a pretty decent experience in that form factor. That said using this site in Google Chrome 22 does suck. Apparently the app designers don't yet understand responsive design / progressive enhancement. Yes it's hard, but I'd expect a presentation such as this to show how to do all the right things.

</comment><comment><USER25> The page transition is jarring in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER26> It doesn't block page transitions on all of the assets on the next page loading. I click the next button and get to wait 30 seconds while all the images show up.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice. From the browser detection script:

if (isNexus7 == true) { istablet = false; }

</comment><comment><USER28> An excellent campaign from the champion Google. If I were an entrepreneur, I would suck it all up.

</comment><comment><USER29> hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER30> Get this message on the latest version of Opera.

>Greetings, Mobile Champion!

>We noticed that you're using an unsupported browser. But have no fear, you can view themobileplaybook.com from the latest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Please update your browser and come back to visit us.

>Alternatively, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have one or from your smartphone device.

What galls me about these messages is the insinuation to the Opera users that their browser is somehow outdated and that we need to update or upgrade it. If you can't be assed to test on Opera at least change the message to asking to use a different browser, not to "upgrade" to one.

<comment><USER31> I suggest the community downvote comments like this. I'd like to see a published community guideline encouraging people to not make meta comments. The vast majority of readers don't use Opera, and a personal quest to see Opera treated as a first class browser doesn't belong in this thread.

This is a cheap and easy way to score points.

<comment><USER32> Opera is by far one of the best browsers for Android in my opinion. Firefox frustrated me considerably as every time I horizontally scrolled I would open a side bar for managing favourites sites / tabs. This may have been changed in newer versions of firefox for the Android unfortunately I can't run it as Firefox consistently crashes on CM10 (not sure if this is a bug on Firefox's behalf or CM 10)

(edit)I have a feeling quite a few people probably use Opera browser on their handsets...

<comment><USER31> The irony that you would talk about opera in response to my comment is staggering.

<comment><USER32> Forgive me, I fail to see the irony in talking about Opera in response to a comment regarding the Opera browser....</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JSON 3: A modern JSON polyfill compatible with nearly all JavaScript platforms. - <AUTHOR> http://bestiejs.github.com/json3/

<comment><USER2> If anyone else was confused, a "polyfill" is a pure javascript implementation of behavior the platform doesn't natively provide, and calling it "JSON 3" is not trying to claim that the JSON grammar has been revised (that's pretty much impossible); it's just the unfortunately generic name they chose for this implementation.

<comment><USER3> @prodigal_erik @benatkin

It is a JS polyfill/shim/fallback for older browsers like IE 6 and 7 but also fixes/fills in gaps in support/consistency with modern browsers that have buggy implementations.

The use of the word "modern" in the description is to suggest it is more up- to-date than Crockford's aging/stale json2.js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speaking of new JSON versions, is it impossible to create a backwards- compatible JSON spec that supports _comments_? I've been waiting for this for ages.

<comment><USER5> Optional quotes and optional EOL commas would be nice too

<comment><USER6> While more human friendly, that would inhibit serialization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On issue 28, it says that when you do

       JSON.stringify(Object('hi'))

The issue reporter says it should return '"hi"' but returns '{"0":"h","1":"i"}'

In my JS console, if I do

       Object('hi')

It returns _{ '0': 'h', '1': 'i' }_

So to me, it looks like JSON2 correctly serializes the result of Object('hi'). Am I missing something?

<https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/issues/28>

<comment><USER3> Make sure you're not on a page with external scripts that could be mucking it up.

If you're recent modern browser `JSON.stringify(Object('hi'))` should produce '"hi"'.

See <http://cl.ly/2J3B0e1z1o3e0T3x2b0l>.

<comment><USER7> Right,

       JSON.stringify(Object('hi'))

does that, but just plain _Object('hi')_ without wrapping in stringify returns

       { '0': 'h', '1': 'i' }

Is it part of the JSON spec that you first call .toString() on array-like objects?

<comment><USER3> `Object('hi')` produces the equivalent of `new String('hi')`.

The stringify behavior is spec'ed here <http://es5.github.com/#x15.12.3> [Step 4b of the abstract operation Str(key, holder) algorithm].

See <http://cl.ly/2E1l2X3X3U1B2N1d3G1k>.

<comment><USER7> Ahh that makes sense. I appreciate your research finding that part in the spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for the heads up. I've always thought JSON2's approach of adding all kinds of stuff to built-in objects was a dumb idea for such an important piece of infrastructure code. I've been tempted on occasion to write my own JSON codec. I'm glad they tested to make sure it works on every browser of the last 6-7 years: it means JSON3 can pretty much be dropped in and forgotten about for any project.

Unrelated: their readme reveals a bug in github's markdown implementation. The bold is not properly applied in the following example:

      - **`String.prototype` Methods**: `indexOf`, `charAt`, `slice`.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Thanks for the heads-up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Your git clone link seems to be outdated, it should be <https://github.com/bestiejs/json3.git> .

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be slightly worried that overriding the native functions could lead to problems in certain situations that rely on the (wrong) existing behavior.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's intended as a replacement for the native functions, rather an implementation to use where they're missing (which, AFAIK, is rare nowadays).

<comment><USER10> If you read the description on the page, it says that they fix certain broken aspects of some native implementations.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. Currently, Firefox is the only browser that implements the JSON routines exactly as described in the spec (parsing since version 5.0, and serializing since 6.0)...others deviate in one or more ways. It's not so much of a concern if you're targeting multiple browsers, as Firefox will correctly throw a `SyntaxError` when given malformed input, but it can certainly become problematic if you're relying on non-standard extensions in only one or two browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is bike-shed, but `stringify`? What's wrong with `serialize` or `toJSON` or `toString'?

<comment><USER3> @polemic @shantanubala `stringify` and `parse` are the names specified by the ECMAScript language spec: <http://es5.github.com/#x15.12.3>

<comment><USER12> Ah, ok. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> unicode support?

damn you u+2028</comment>


Show HN: From Zero to the Appstore - My ebook on HTML5 mobile games - <AUTHOR> http://indiegamr.com/zerotoappstore/

<comment><USER2> In my experiments, canvas performance on iOS devices is horrible, and especially with Phonegap... it takes from 100..200 ms to draw a single frame, crazy... Try opening iPad <http://funwithhtml5.com/source/reportCanvasBug.html> and try to rotate iPad and see how from 1..2 ms per frame it goes to 200ms per frame.

I am playing right now with Ejecta which translates JavaScript to ObjectiveC, and then I get a very good speed, no matter how I rotate the screen.

<comment><USER3> Ejecta doesn't translate to Objective-C, rather the canvas calls get translated to OpenGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like it has some good info, but you need a copy editor. If I'm going to shell out $30 for a book, I don't want to see typos and strange run-on sentences. Those sorts of things make the book much harder to read.

For example, take your home page: "You're interested in making games or other interactive HTML5 apps, but you don't quite know were to start and what you will need to accomplish that."

That should be "where", not "were".

<comment><USER5> I have to agree, you could find a English copywriter fairly easy to do a quick read over.

For example...

The canvas is a native HTML-element that can be used to draw and alternate images and render its output to an HTML document. Drawing-methods can be accessed directly through the context of the canvas, however EaselJS will add a layer of abstraction to the canvas by automatically handling all drawing calls so that all you have to do is placing the images and calling stage.update().

"so that all you have to do is >placing< the images"

"that can be used to draw and >alternate< images >and< render its output" (missing comma, run on sentence, alternate is probably the wrong word, I'd use change or replace.)

"The Stage is >so to say< the bottom-most container." That doesn't make any sense to me, I'm Canadian so maybe it is a saying elsewhere but I've never heard "is so to say".

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, yes I can see why that could be an issue - I will look into getting a copywriter - do you have any experience/suggestions for that, what is a reasonable price?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughs on this? Since this is my first release of this kind, feedback of any kind would be very valuable to me.

Thank you all in advance :)

</comment><comment><USER6> has anyone had success with an html5 game on ios? it seems viable for android (v8 yay!), but i haven't been satisfied at all with javascript performance on iOS. maybe for something that's turn-based and doesn't require slick transitions?

(edit: this sounds a little negative... what i mean is, pointing to a really slick html5 game on the app store would make selling the book a lot easier)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are probably right! Good point, I should probably add that to the page.

There are some CocoonJS games in the store, you can see some here: <http://ludei.com/games> CocoonJS will give your HTML5 game native performane.

<comment><USER5> I think you need to rethink your terms.

Native performance is wrong, javascript (unless it's like asm.js or something) will never be "native performance".

All CocoonJS is, is just a OpenGL layer with html/css/javascript support. And while it is faster then just flat out using JSC. It is not faster then c/objective c + opengl.

There have also been several reports of CocoonJS actually being slower then UIWebView. A simple google search for "cocoonjs performance" returned several issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is not entirely correct - UIWebView canvas rendering is far behind OpenGL layers like CocoonJS, Ejecta or directCanvas(AppMobi) in terms of performance - the difference however is, that those tools are able to ONLY render canvas- contents, so you are not really able to render any HTML5 forms, input ect... but that's not what canvas-games are about.

<comment><USER5> It still uses Javascript. Native OpenGL+ObjC/C (done correct) will always be faster. All it really is, is better performance then UIWebView as it doesn't have all the webcore/kit stuff.

ALl I'm getting at is saying "native performance" is not correct. In a world where even 2-3 FPS can mean a usable game or a not usable game. I think the terminology matters a lot.

But you should still recommend people to using those solutions, just don't pass them off as something they are not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I agree with that - I'll change that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't know how big is the target market for this, but it shows that you put lots of work in this, the website and sample chapters look great!

</comment><comment><USER8> The artwork of the book cover and your dynamic background looks like it was 'inspired' by Fez.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many things inspired me during the process - but yes, I won't deny that there is also a little bit of "Fez" in there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks great.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm guessing this book is more about the process than the actual coding aspect, given its length (129 pages)? Though I do like the prototype and the fact that the OP came from AS3/Flash into this, which hopefully provides some interesting perspective.</comment>


Google Fortunetelling – Predict your future - <AUTHOR> http://betagoogle.com/ <comment><USER2> No HTTPS,

Ran a whois against the domain and found out,

Domain Name: betagoogle.com

Registrant Name: Edwin Fennema

Registrant Organization: BrainMedia

Registrant Street: Bijlmermeerstraat 16A

Registrant City: HOOFDDORP

<comment><AUTHOR> So?

<comment><USER3> So it is not from google it is trying to raise awareness through deception which is probably not the way to go about it.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I disagree, so I wonder how should they have gone about it in order to have been more successful in attracting your attention?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I hacked the Job Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-london/how-i-hack-the-job-research-ecc87f8b9127

<comment><USER2> I did this my senior year of college, looking for software engineering jobs, although I used Google AdWords instead of Facebook ads. I knew I wanted to work for a startup in the Boston area, so I bought out search terms like "Greenhorn Connect," "YCombinator," etc. Whenever someone in Boston searched for something that a startup manager might search for -- I was there.

I got a ton of responses, and ultimately a couple of offers out of it. Unfortunately, I took a job at a consulting firm right out of college (hated it and left 6 months later) -- there's only so much you can do to solve problems of 21 year old stupidity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I think the trick is here : thinking about using Facebook's Custom Audiences with @facebook.com addresses to get even more accurate targets.

I did the same a few years ago too with Adwords, but capitalizing on people's ego : to target "influencers" I wanted to invite for a startup party, I created special landing pages for each of them and bought their names as keywords on Google AdWords. They fortunately googled themselves (and if they didn't, I gave them a shout on Twitter). But now AdBlock attracts more people this strategy is a bit more complicated.

Maybe the right strategy for today is to do it Charles Saatchi-like : buy a billboard on times square saying "I want a job".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very creative and you got the results you were looking for. I never would have seen them with ublock in Chrome.

<comment><USER4> I thought the same thing = ublock would have done it's job.

To the author..curious to know if any of your ad's were blocked?

<comment><USER5> I get at least 2 clicks on each campaigns

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very creative, I like it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats. I'm stealing your technique.</comment>


Crystal – Fast as C, slick as Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://stackshare.io/crystal <comment><USER2> Why not link to the Crystal homepage[0] instead of stackshare.io?

[0]: [http://crystal-lang.org/](http://crystal-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Embeddable? REPL? C-like structs?</comment>


Is a Dolphin a Person? - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/02/is-a-dolphin-a-person.html?rss=1

<comment><USER2> _Are dolphins as smart as people? And if so, shouldn't we be treating them a bit better than we do now?_

Who decided the prerequisite for whether or not a species should treated well depends on how close it comes to matching human intelligence? Sorry all the rest of you creatures, come back in million years when your brains have evolved a little further and we'll talk, until then you can stay in that cage.

<comment><USER3> I guess this also means the more mentally handicapped a human is, the more acceptable it is to harm them.

<comment><USER4> I recommend Peter Singer's "Practical Ethics" in this context. It is not exactly light reading, but discusses those issues at quite some length.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few of the conclusions of the article are misleading. Or rather, they have not been put in proper context.

Dolphins brains are large, but they are made mostly of glial cells which insulate the dolphins brain from the cold ocean water.

They shown many signs of intelligence, however, that is not as rare as people think in the animal kingdom. For example, Donkeys can count better than dolphins. Most of us have witnessed a dog or cat solving a problem in the world around it. Vampire bats have a system of social 'accounting' keeping track of which bats donate blood to the group and which don't. The examples continue.

Their has been a 'movement' in human thinking for some time that dolphins are our counterparts of the sea. There were many experiments by a Dr. Lily (creator of the deprivation tank) to show the intelligence of dolphins. His studies showed little evidence, but made bold claims. Ever since then I believe there has been a 'buzz' around the intelligence of dolphins. Which is substantial but over exaggerated.

The overall theme of the article, should humans take animal intelligence more seriously is a valid claim. Intelligence is rampant in the animal kingdom and it deserves an examination. A great book on the subject is, "Dragons of Eden" by Carl Sagan, although he focuses on human development.

 _Douglas Adams_ (loosely paraphrased): Humans believed themselves to be the most intelligent species on Earth because they developed machines of war and New York City. Dolphins knew they were more intelligent because they did build machines of war or New York City. All they did was eat fish and play all day.

<comment><USER6> <http://220.127.116.11/lilly/janus00x.html>

<comment><USER5> Interesting website! I loved how the diagram of the hardware had an apple II in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It will be interesting to see how these thoughts play out in the future, specifically the idea of how we treat dolphins. The line between "person" and "animal" doesn't seem to be as clearly defined as we had initially thought.

This article reminded me of when I was in elementary school and tried arguing that fire met the characteristics of having life.

<comment><USER8> I think this kind of discussion is a prerequisite to joining any large scale interplanetary cultures that may or may not exist. Perhaps that's only scifi, but we as a species need to become comfortable at accepting and working with different sizes and shapes of intelligence before that even makes sense. We have a long ways to go; we've only relatively recently accepted that other kinds of _humans_ count as full people - and that isn't even a globally accepted concept yet. :/

<comment><USER9> Excellent comment. We are most likely dolphins compared to some other species.

But I don't think the scale is smooth. There are sharp divisions: the use of tools, the understanding of death, the use of language, the use of language to describe abstract concepts, the use of oral history, the use of written history, the creation of artificial intelligence aides, etc.

I absolutely agree that having a bigger picture than just "people are special" is a prerequisite for first contact, I just also think that going to the other extreme, that all intelligences are mostly the same, is probably much worse than just having a human-bias. Instead we'll need a graduated system with different privileges and rights depending on where species appear on the scale. Such a graduated system will be the basis to determine whether or not we're being treated fairly by E.T., if/when they ever show up.

<comment><USER10> I have always found this subtopic to be interesting. My perhaps optimistic musing has been that a species sufficiently advanced to compare to humans as humans compare to dolphins would also have some way of measuring/estimating/scoring the level of consciousness (for want of a better term) of a lower species, which seems close to your thinking.

<comment><USER9> The interesting thing is that traditionally such distinctions have been _religious_ , not scientific. That is, it was religion that eventually persuaded western civilization that all humans deserve to be treated equally, not some sort of logical or ethical argument.

If true, that leads me to think that we'll need some sort of version 2.0 of some of the major religions that deal with varying levels of sentience. This will probably happen _after_ contact and not before, so it should be a very traumatic event for everybody concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't find a source for this, but I remember reading that dolphins are the only other animals besides humans that _craft sex toys_. Monkey find little sticks and use them, but dolphins will actually rub themselves against coral to sand it into an appropriate shape.

</comment><comment><USER12> By always framing such issues in this way (is a dolphin similar to us in some ways) we keep maintaining the age-old attitude that we should only care about those who are like us. If it has the tendency to run away if you try smacking it with a baseball bat, person on not, it is more sensible leaving it alone if possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> Which country is it that has already given rights to some animals such as gorillas, parrots, ect?

<comment><USER14> Guerrillas in the mist? lol

(it's gorillas, not guerrillas) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare> vs. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla>

<comment><USER13> heh spell check didn't underline so it got me. Oops

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "..they may be Earth's second smartest creature (next to humans, of course)."

This should read 'next to lab mice'

<comment><USER4> While most of us are familiar with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and most of us enjoy making silly jokes, this comment fits better at reddit than here.

<comment><USER15> Please don't do this.

I realize my comment was in wildly poor taste because Hacker News is an Extremely Serious site where only very serious people talk about very serious things. (For example, about how we are all going to get dollar-sign-lotto rich by working 18 hour days for startups).

But talking down to me and pretending to explain why it is a bad comment ('it fits better on reddit' doesn't tell me anything) will only cause me to become incensed at how unjust it is that a website called 'hacker news' is completely full of people with sticks shoved deeply up their asses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> no

<comment><USER17> Solid argument. I'm convinced.</comment></comment>


Blockchain pilot to test decentralised solutions for crisis response [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://consensys.net/static/StartBoardPR.pdf <comment><USER2> One of the dirty secrets of crisis response is that authority is already delegated by donors to NGOs, by giving them money. No blockchains or software required.

The funding campaigns which happen in the hours after an event happens do not raise funds for the response effort; they merely piggyback on it for marketing effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Consensys is constantly implementing lots of useless solutions for attention grabbing subjects to try to drive the price up on the cryptocurrency they hold a lot of. Almost all of their ideas do not actually work in the real world.

<comment><USER4> I'd guess they've found a great match: never have I seen a community so prone to irrational hypes around random new technologies as the international development and humanitarian aid communities.

The whole blockchain narrative will be a feast for them, probably with the end result that some overworked local medical workers will now have to deal with semi-broken blockchain apps to buy fresh toilet paper.

Many lives will be improved (in Brooklyn, NY).</comment></comment>


There's a mini ice age coming, says man who beats weather experts - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/theres-a-mini-ice-age-coming-says-man-who-beats-weather-experts-20101221-1945a.html

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of "seems to beat" statements in this editorial. If he's beating them with any sort of statistical significance, it should be pretty easy to demonstrate.

edit: His Wikipedia page paints a different story.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn>

> Following criticism of Weather Action's forecasts in The Times and The > Guardian, in particular from journalist Paul Simons, Piers Corbyn banned the > use of any extracts of them in any articles unless they were approved by > Corbyn. In addition the above newspapers and any publication which carried > articles by Paul Simons were also explicitly forbidden from quoting them.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, "statistical significance" is a concept you will very rarely hear of in mainstream newspapers.

Hyperbole and sensationalism rule there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is actually one of the potential scenarios predicted by global warming theorists - namely the shutting down of the gulf stream, resulting in European weather changing rapidly to what would be expected at their high latitudes:

[http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=10...](http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=10046)

<comment><USER5> There was even a reasonably high budget movie made about it, _The Day After Tomorrow_ , not that it showed anything approaching a realistic depiction of the results of that shutdown.

<comment><AUTHOR> The weather effects in _The Day After Tomorrow_ were ripped off from the 1979 novel _The Sixth Winter_ by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin. Specifically, the super-cold storm centers were an "expanded for video" version of the "Ice Dancer" storms from the novel; they are unique enough in my rather extensive reading that I noticed the similarity immediately. (For that matter, the same director's later movie, _2012_ , borrowed rather strongly from Don Pendleton's 1969 novel _Cataclysm_ , though from the credits that may have been indirectly.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why should we believe a guy who beats weather experts? Violence is no indicator of trustworthiness.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it just me or could this article have been just as effective as 3 sentences?

</comment><comment><USER8> The connection between his successful prediction of current weather and his attempted predictions of global weather patterns 25 years out seems unfounded (at least in the article). His technique of comparing the Sun's behaviour with previous years might work for current weather, but just because that may be successful doesn't mean that he can be trusted when making a prediction completely outside that particular area.

The difference between having a successful method for predicting this month's weather is predicting this century's weather is ridiculously huge.

</comment><comment><USER9> I saw this link on a Scottish skiing site - it predicts 50 years of severe winters for the UK and Europe based on solar activity:

[http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/newsandevents/releases/pr3256...](http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/newsandevents/releases/pr325639.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER10> See also:

The Triple Crown of Global Cooling: More Volcanic Activity, Lower Solar Output and La Nina

[http://www.examiner.com/seminole-county-environmental- news-i...](http://www.examiner.com/seminole-county-environmental-news-in- orlando/triple-crown-of-global-cooling-could-pose-serious-threat-to-humanity)

</comment><comment><USER11> Global warming? Ice Age? I'm so confused. Is the world going to get warmer or colder? It's as if someone is trying to scare me out of my money so they can get rich! oh snap!

<comment><USER12> The theory: Warming -> artic ice melts -> reduces salinity of north atlantic -> stops "atlantic conveyer" (which bring warm water from southern hemisphere) -> mini ice age for Europe at least.

"The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. "Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water," Willis explained.

For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. "The changes we're seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle," said Willis. "The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling." " [http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlantic20100325.h...](http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlantic20100325.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Open Source Adserver? is it time we fork openx? - <AUTHOR>

I've been using various versions of OpenX since the days of phpMyAdsNew but it appears that lately the company behind it became too entangled in their own hosted version and their enterprise advertising deals and has left the community edition behind. There are some huge bugs that make the self-hosted edition practically unusable and they don't seem to be fixing them. Do you know of any alternative projects that are stable and can do the same job (even if lacking some features)? Or maybe its time we start a fork of openx or start fresh with an adserver for this century? <comment><USER2> That's my thoughts exactly. Many of the bugs come from layer upon layer of changes with insufficient understanding of what has gone before. I generated a XRef of the source code and it's a bit of a mess in there. Also OpenX PLC claim copyright on code that existed before they did which is against the spirit of the GPL. I have a copy of the code on GitHub (Open Ad Server) and will be using some automated tools to tackle the more obvious re-factoring.

Feel free to fork it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apply for DART for Small Business. It's Free, and when/if you get big the transfer to the premium version will be easy.

But I think you're free up to a few millions of impressions. (Will also save you hosting costs). <http://www.google.com/dfp/info/sb/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> I went down this path a few weeks ago when I needed it for my own single-user site.

In the end, I decided to run a tiny adserver with Redis and use Google analytics events/clicks tracking to handle the analysis side.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure exactly what the problem is. I keep running into bugs, bugs that are so obvious that shows that they make zero testing on the open source release. There is no usable code documentation and they no longer have a forum.

I'm testing adzerk now, its a hosted solution free for 1mil impressions per month. So far so good but time will tell.

<comment><USER4> adzerk huh? I like their solution, but I always get wary when I need to call in for a price.

Any clue on what they charge?

<comment><USER5> I'm a developer at Adzerk. It's totally free for the first 100M impressions per month. We ask that you call if you're larger than that so we can tailor a plan for you. We generate revenue by selling enterprise deals (larger than 100M) or by app installs from our Marketplace.

<comment><AUTHOR> 100M is actually a lot of traffic, if any of my projects had that much traffic i'd be feeling that whoever serves my banners deserves to earn money from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lord, yes!</comment>


Toyota to Adopt Ford's Entertainment Software to Fend Off Google, Apple - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/01/04/ford-gets-toyota-to-adopt-its-in-dash-entertainment-software-others-considering/ <comment><USER2> Good. We need[1] a good platform for this, not just more Android.

[1] Not that we really need to make cars entertainment centers; more like we'll make them anyway, so for that, we need a good platform.</comment>


How streaming is changing songs - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20836846/charli-xcx-new-album-streaming-spotify-dani-deahl-future-of-music <comment><USER3> I'm basically streaming-only these days but I still find "singles only" artists tiresome to deal with. Maybe it's a shortcoming of Apple Music, but if I want to listen to an artist, I usually try to pick an album so there's something playing for at least the next half an hour without me managing my up next list.

For some artists there may be an "essentials" playlist or something, which helps, but that already requires a certain level of popularity. If there's nothing like that and no albums, I need to open a single, pick one track to play (because four remixes of the same song one after another isn't my idea of a good time), then the same thing for the next single, etc. Usually I just give up and go find something with less clicking.

<comment><USER4> Most people don't see that behind the scenes payola dictates everything you see on charts now...

Artists pay to promote their posts on Social media, so only the rich or well funded rise to the top.

Artists remix the same tracks over and over because they know doing the same track over and over means they can hopefully capitalize on profits already made rather than creating anything new, which takes more time and costs more.

Albums used to be high on filler, I think most people forget how only 2/16 songs made it to radio, while 10 of those tracks were often skipped, while you paid for all of them. now if you buy a single, you're only paying for what's good, even though $1-$2 is still quite high for a single music track if you ask me...

Music artists have always been hosed by the industry, good music is always suppressed by gatekeepers that want to influence what everyone gets to hear, but that one little band you like can greatly benefit, and will likely live longer together, by you telling people about them... Stop relying on other people to tell you what's good and let's let the listeners dictate what the charts say...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remember singles? On records, CDs, and tapes? And then on iTunes? I'm not really sure there's that much of a change here. A lot of artists have been always been releasing music this way, haven't they?

The content of the article is an interview with a single artist, who just released an album.

It reeks of promotional material - and The Verge doesn't have a great track record of being an expert on anything.

<comment><USER6> Neir the end of the interview, she mentions some specific formulaic tricks to reduce skip rate. She says it's all about grabbing people in the first five seconds, putting all the good parts in the beginning of the song, avoid "weird self-indulgent intros", etc. Those are things that sound pretty specific to streaming.

Also, she talks about how artists stop focussing on albums (it's no longer single -> single -> album -> promo tour), and just release new music all the time (single -> single -> single -> ...)

<comment><USER7> And make shorter songs. Which is my main surprise. I thought that by freeing themselves from radio playlists (where the radio station mandates short songs) and the physical capacity of a CD, artists would get to make songs of any length, including longer. I am not sure I understand why streaming calls for short songs.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps compensation is higher for those with shorter songs, possibly due to being paid per play of the song?

<comment><USER9> This seems plausible. Recommendation Algorithms definitely could play a role as well. I believe that at some point YouTube started recommending videos based on "time watched" so videos slowly got longer over time, as those videos tended to be promoted more.

(Or vice versa, that they became shorter because the algorithm preferred that.)

<comment><USER10> Wasn't that like 10 minutes after which all videos became 10 minutes to explain what could be told in 30 seconds?

<comment><USER11> I believe the 10 minute mark has to do with being able to insert additional ads into the video, so if your video is close to 10 minutes it pays off to "round it up".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I predict that streaming, listener analytics and metrics will have a much bigger effect on music production by removing the human producers for mass consumption pop music in the next two decades. The writing is on the wall.

We're already at a point where the producers (who compose the songs and usually even create the audio using computer software) spend a lot of time analyzing the metrics they get from Spotify et al. They look for stats on how many seconds someone listens to a track before skipping to the next one, do they turn the volume up or down, which songs are paired to the same playlists, etc etc.

When reading interviews of musicians, they frequently bring this up and usually not in a positive light. You can also hear the results if you're exposed to modern pop music - when there's a hit single, there will be quite a few copycats that will shamelessly borrow the elements of the hit. This is not a new thing but the degree to which it's occuring is.

Now what's good at looking at metrics, doing tiny adjustments and gradient descending towards some local optimum and cheaper than hiring a musician? A machine learning algorithm of course.

While it's not common yet, there have been some fairly impressive demonstrations I've heard. Computer-generated music notation is easy to generate (read: number of bits in the output is rather low) and has been experimented with for a long time.

But this can go even a step further, rather than producing sheet music, an algorithm can generate the _audio_ directly. As in the PCM audio waveforms (or maybe spectrograms, frequency domain might be easier for algorithms). I recall hearing AI-generated classical music audio (found through HN) which sounded fairly convincing to me (albeit with a white-ish noise on the background).

If you're a professional pop music producer, make the most out of your career while you can. You're closer to being replaced by robots than you think.

I'm not suggesting that human musicians will go away any time soon, I'm sure people will enjoy playing instruments with their own hands in the future. But the kind of producers that create music with a computer mimicking popular songs and tracking analytics from listeners will be, if not replaced, at least heavily assisted by algorithms more and more in the near future.

<comment><USER13> I agree with your main points, even though I'm unsure of the time scale.

However:

> But this can go even a step further, rather than producing sheet music, an > algorithm can generate the audio directly.

Even if this is a cool idea, I don't think it ever will be deployed large scale. Good quality beats/samples and increasingly even software instruments are becoming cheap. Working with raw audio seem like the wrong abstraction layer for music, almost like working with pixels instead of characters to synthesise text. While limiting - working with raw audio can possibly create completely new sounds - it will probably always be cheaper and yield better results to work with some representation of the music instead.

<comment><USER14> The big advantage of using raw audio is that there's an abundance of data (all the music that's ever been released pretty easily scraped from the internet), whereas "semantic" data is rare, expensive and of lower quality (as in: not as good/catchy). The best solution is probably to extract the semantic representation from raw/pcm form. (Incidentally, I'm working on this very problem. Anyone interested, feel free to contact me)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's nice they have this freedom, but for a while now, it's been harder and harder to find a truly coherent album. Something that you can leave on and feels like a single piece of work.

<comment><USER16> I guess the album is dead

<comment><USER17> Major label guy here. Not quite. While this isn't as important for a lot of artists, on the top (like megastar-level: Drake, Post Malone, etc.), it's still a huge money maker. More tracks means more streams which means more revenue. The waterfall is effective, but the album is still important. Especially in the release week.

<comment><USER18> What about cohesion in the album? I guess that prog-rock/indie/hiphop themed albums thing isn't very common in general these days, I'd be surprised to see one today from any new artist.

The intros and skits would never fit into streaming properly, especially with the ranking algorithms. Nothing worse than getting some random intro skit come up on a recommended playlist!

Spotify should run some detection algorithms on songs to not recommend the intros/skits, or the uploader can explicitly mark them for exclusion, which would help boost their singles and not push unhelpful songs

I'm a big fan of artists releasing each song as it's made, with each having cover art and maybe a backup song. They . can still package them up in a full album for charting and full album sales.

<comment><USER19> Spotify uses peoples manual playlists to drive some recommendations. If two songs are on a playlist together they're probably similar. In the same way, if a song isn't on any playlists, like you'd expect a skit not to be, then they don't recommend it.

Free human curation of stuff that goes well on playlists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The most corrosive part of this that affects the quality of the music is this:

 _...songs are becoming shorter, and artists are front-loading all the catchy bits to keep a song's skip rate as low as possible_

As music consumers become more single-oriented and running an attention deficit, everthing is getting hook fronted in the first 30 seconds of the song to keep people from skipping. Now, that might be interesting for a while if it makes artists experiment with verse-chorus-verse pop song structure but I'll bet the long term effect will be a race to the bottom in terms of lack of complexity and a lot of pop music is going to sound samey very fast.

<comment><USER21> Nothing new. Korn mentions just that in their "Y'all want a single" [0] - <USER2> in 2003.

The text at 2:32 says "90% of singles get to the 'hook' within 30 seconds". Then: "98% of #1 hits are less than 3:30 long" and "does this sound like a formula to you?"

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyFlW_bOg-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyFlW_bOg-Q)

<comment><USER22> And what's funny, is that originally, this 3/4 minutes formula is likely more tied to physical constraints than marketing/human psychology: [https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/6003271/why-are- songs-3-minute...](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/6003271/why-are- songs-3-minutes-long)

Which reminds a bit of [http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html](http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html) as well.

<comment><USER23> > Which reminds a bit of > [http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html](http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html) > as well.

TL;DR - the legend that the width of the shuttle SRBs is derived from a design decision about cart width that goes back to the Romans.

But it's actually a bit more complicated than that...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard- gauge_railway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway)

<comment><USER22> Excellent, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> oh i guess i sorta took this for granted, this is how I've been releasing music for the last decade or so. just make a song, upload it, and then compile conceptually related songs into an album later when enough material has been accrued. granted, I've only released about 7 albums so far but I have 8 more planned to be released in the near future when I can get around to making album art for all of them

</comment><comment><USER25> Well, Melanie Martinez has just released an entire concept album (and a movie based on this album) with no singles all at once. There will always be artists who care about their art and not streaming numbers.

</comment><comment><USER26> I love this line

> Plus, she says, streaming means listeners get to pick who's worth hearing. > "It's not a bunch of white males at radio stations and record labels > deciding what the general public should listen to."

</comment><comment><USER14> This article is mostly about the release schedule of music (TLDR: one song at a time, once every few months), saying very little about how the actual music has changed. For more on this, music journo Liz Pelly has written a lot about what she calls "Spotify-core", a new-ish genre of music which works as both background and foreground music. [https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop- pelly](https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly)

<comment><USER27> My circle of experimental music artists were doing this in the early/mid-2000s.We weren't streaming so much as releasing MP3s as they were done.

I expect (somewhat) that song length may also morph, if it hasn't already. There's no need to be concerned about how much time fits on physical media. There are just attention spans.</comment></comment>


A New Citizenship: Professor Michael Sandel (Harvard) on Market Ethics - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kt7rg <comment><USER2> Off-topic, but _please_ note in title of such links when they are _only_ audio (or video). ...or link to a transcript, if any.

Text can be scanned. Audio takes real (valuable) time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, good point. The bbc offer both an audio podcast and a transcript on the site I linked. I listened to it live this morning but didn't have the time to listen to the QA session afterward, so printed out the transcript and will go over it with a fine toothed comb sometime soon.

Know it's a bit of everyone's (valuable) time I'm asking for, but this is the type of topic I would like to see gain the big discussion threads here on HN. But time is money, so I can't expect too much! Hope some find it interesting at least.</comment></comment>