Ask HN: What are the underrated newsletters you like reading? - <AUTHOR> Technical or non-technical. <comment><USER2> Crypto-Gram, by nestor Bruce Schneier, on IT Security:

[https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/](https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/)

Unsupervised Learning, by Daniel Miessler, on IT Security or "intersection of security, technology, and humans", interesting links frequently:

[https://danielmiessler.com/newsletter/](https://danielmiessler.com/newsletter/)

Money Stuff, by Matt Levine, on finance, derivatives, accounting shenanigans, VC, etc., frequently very funny and insightful:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew- s-levine)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters](https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters)

<comment><USER3> Money Stuff by Matt Levine is a gem. You don't need to work in finance to appreciate Matt Levine's insider take on the people and ideas that are in the news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I doubt it's underrated by anybody reading it but worth mentioning nonetheless: Money Stuff by Matt Levine. Brilliant, hilarious coverage of all things money by a former lawyer and banker.

<comment><USER5> Seconded completely, incleading the first part. Matt Levine's twitter is apparently also hilarious. (I don't know, I don't do twitter.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> BIG by Matt Stoller - mostly about antitrust and monopolies [https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/)

Roots of Progress - inventions and ideas that helped shape the world [https://rootsofprogress.org/](https://rootsofprogress.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I read Software Lead Weekly: [https://softwareleadweekly.com/](https://softwareleadweekly.com/)

It's mostly about interesting links on management, company culture, or software development.

<comment><USER8> Seconded. I have found some great articles over the last 6 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if underrated, but I really enjoy "The Morning Paper" [https://blog.acolyer.org/](https://blog.acolyer.org/)

Reviews CS papers and explains them in a way that is surprisingly easy to understand

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been running [https://hackernewsletter.com](https://hackernewsletter.com) for almost 10 years. I think most subscribers these days don't actually use or know about Hacker News, which has been an interesting shift.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not sure about their underratedness, but I find the following newsletters interesting and insightful:

Two Truths and a Take by Alex Danco (tech, VC, and broader topics): [https://danco.substack.com/](https://danco.substack.com/)

The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan: [https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/](https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/)

The Diff by Byrne Hobart (finance, tech): [https://diff.substack.com/](https://diff.substack.com/)

Kneeling Bus by Drew Austin (urbanism, tech): [https://kneelingbus.substack.com/](https://kneelingbus.substack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> The Prepared - Fascinating bits on manufacturing and logistics - [https://theprepared.org](https://theprepared.org)

Glimpse - Explores why certain trends are growing - [https://meetglimpse.com](https://meetglimpse.com)

Super Organizers - New ways of thinking about productivity - [https://superorganizers.substack.com](https://superorganizers.substack.com)

<comment><USER13> Glimpse looks great, but kinda expensive for anything useful.. Any alternatives? I might just use the Google Trends feeds

<comment><USER12> It's the only one with trends that actually appear to be growing quickly as I think they do a large amount of scraping of discussion forums. They also do an analysis of why it's growing. There's a different one, exploding topics, too which shows google searches that tend to be growing but quite a bit more slowly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like BetterExplained by Kalid Azad. [https://betterexplained.com/](https://betterexplained.com/) A newsletter on intuitive math explanations.

</comment><comment><USER15> Couple non-technical ones off the top of my head - Dense Discovery [https://www.densediscovery.com](https://www.densediscovery.com) Daily Stoic [https://dailystoic.com](https://dailystoic.com)

<comment><USER16> The daily stoic has been incredibly useful in keeping myself on track ever since I discovered it. Other helpful resources: the YouTube channel "Einzelgänger".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like Benedict Evans newsletter. Not too often (good thing IMO), but when it comes it is really readworthy.

[https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter/](https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter/)

EDIT: Probably not underrated though (missed that bit)

</comment><comment><USER18> The Orbital Index (orbitalindex.com), highlighting interesting developments in space.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bulletproof TLS Newsletter — [https://www.feistyduck.com/bulletproof-tls- newsletter/](https://www.feistyduck.com/bulletproof-tls-newsletter/)

</comment><comment><USER20> For book recommendations sourced from HN itself there's [https://hackernewsbooks.com](https://hackernewsbooks.com)

We aggregate the top books found in comments and rank them based on how often they are mentioned and the karma of the user. There's a weekly newsletter sent out with that week's book selections.

</comment><comment><USER21> Evgeny Morozov, who is a great antidote for technological hubris, has organized with others to create a collection of noteworthy information on a variety of subjects but related to a political, activist theme. One need not agree with this work in order to learn from it.

[https://the-syllabus.com](https://the-syllabus.com)

</comment><comment><USER22> About Ethereum:

[https://weekinethereumnews.com/](https://weekinethereumnews.com/) -> latest progress on Ethereum landscape

[https://bankless.substack.com/](https://bankless.substack.com/) -> crypto finance (heavy on Ethereum)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'll just add a plug for my own newsletter because I like it and it's relevant to some of the HN audience: [https://sourcesort.com](https://sourcesort.com). It's interviews with open source maintainers and developers. The interviews vary a bit in length and quality but I learned quite a lot from conducting and editing them and I hope they're interesting to some others too. I think there's still a lot of improvement to be done but given the low number of subscribers I think it's underrated :)

(Newsletter goes out once every week or two, usually on a Sunday).

<comment><USER23> Update: today's interview here: [https://www.sourcesort.com/interview/alyssa- rosenzweig-panfr...](https://www.sourcesort.com/interview/alyssa-rosenzweig- panfrost)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really like Eliot Peper's Reading Recommendations, where he recommends a handful of books once a month: [https://www.eliotpeper.com/p/inner- circle.html](https://www.eliotpeper.com/p/inner-circle.html)

I've also been writing one for a bit over a year now that might be of interest to HN readers: Reading List, which I use for science fiction / fantasy storytelling commentary, reviews, and news: [https://andrewliptak.substack.com/](https://andrewliptak.substack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I really enjoy The Prepared ([https://theprepared.org/newsletter](https://theprepared.org/newsletter))

It is a newsletter broadly about engineering and manufacturing.

<comment><USER26> Nice. I clicked on this thread with the intention of posting the Prepared. Spencer's rad.

<comment><USER27> <3 -Spencer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://thebrowser.com/](https://thebrowser.com/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I like 'This week in blockchain research' by ZKCapital. I've found some nice papers and the abstracts show where cryptocurrency research is going.

</comment><comment><USER30> For those interested in mobility (including micro-mobility) and self-driving vehicle technology (from the perspective of a VC), I highly recommend Riley Brennan's "Trucks | Future Of Transportation" weekly newsletter: [http://www.tinyletter.com/transportation](http://www.tinyletter.com/transportation)

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://bankunderground.co.uk/](https://bankunderground.co.uk/)

Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or its policy committees.

</comment><comment><USER32> This Week in DevOps: [https://thisweekindevops.com](https://thisweekindevops.com)

</comment><comment><USER33> Appsec Ezine. It's more red team than appsec, but the content is fantastic and timely.

[https://github.com/Simpsonpt/AppSecEzine/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/Simpsonpt/AppSecEzine/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER34> Let me add the Python Weekly: [https://www.pythonweekly.com/](https://www.pythonweekly.com/)

It is a newsletter which aggregates links for news, articles, libraries, talks, etc. that happen in the Python ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER35> Technical, strictly iOS: [https://iosdevweekly.com/](https://iosdevweekly.com/)

What I like, is that it has been coming every Friday, for years. And it's really short. This has me actually reading the links.

</comment><comment><USER36> I enjoy Thinking About Things - they send a single link on arbitrary topics every day. It definitely lives up to its name.

[https://www.thinking-about-things.com/](https://www.thinking-about- things.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> The Embedded Muse [http://www.ganssle.com/tem- subunsub.html](http://www.ganssle.com/tem-subunsub.html)

Jack Ganssle has some really good content he's written for other publications as well.

</comment><comment><USER38> Johnn Four Roleplaying Tips - Great if you GM or are simply interested in fantasy. Been 'subscribed' to him since college, just not all through email. [https://roleplayingtips.com/](https://roleplayingtips.com/)

The Growth Equation - Research on athletes & productivity, with links to scientific papers and well-researched articles. Content is top, I've taken more notes from some emails than I have from entire books. [https://thegrowtheq.com/articles/](https://thegrowtheq.com/articles/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Quandl newsletter for curated and handpicked articles about the intersection of finance and machine learning.

[https://alternative-data-news.quandl.com](https://alternative-data- news.quandl.com)

</comment><comment><USER40> Council on Foreign Relation's daily news brief: [https://www.cfr.org/newsletters/daily-news- brief](https://www.cfr.org/newsletters/daily-news-brief)

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://www.thegamingpub.com/](https://www.thegamingpub.com/) is such a great newsletter for those who like to check gaming news.

<comment><USER42> Hey FeatureIncomple,

Thanks for the shoutout. I'm the one responsible for the newsletter and very pleased that you enjoy it. Any feedback or suggestion is appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram: [https://www.schneier.com/crypto- gram/](https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/)

It's probably decently-known with the Hacker News crowd, but I've met few others in the various places that I've worked who have even heard about it, let alone Bruce Schneier himself. It's a great way to learn about new attack vectors and developments in secure computing

</comment><comment><USER44> cron.weekly by Mattias Geniar! [https://ma.ttias.be/cronweekly/](https://ma.ttias.be/cronweekly/)

</comment><comment><USER45> [https://www.perell.com/newsletter](https://www.perell.com/newsletter)

Good essays and interesting Friday finds section.

</comment><comment><USER46> I quite enjoy Postgres Weekly by Craig Kerstiens.

[https://postgresweekly.com/](https://postgresweekly.com/)

<comment><USER47> Yes! Postgres weekly was my favourite find from 2019! Great nuggets to be found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> [https://tedium.co](https://tedium.co) —- lots of fascinating pieces of older technology there.

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://www.recomendo.com](https://www.recomendo.com) Recomendo gives a weekly brief collection of recommendations and most weeks I find something really interesting in there. For example: this week, they mentioned battery adapters for tools, which is a useful thing I hadn't heard of before.

</comment><comment><USER50> The National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit economic think tank.

They have a weekly mailing list[0] of their new working papers.

I subscribe to many newsletters but this is the only one I read every week.

There are normally at least two papers worth reading every week.

[0] [https://data.nber.org/new.html](https://data.nber.org/new.html)

</comment><comment><USER51> The data and Maps newsletter of the London Geek @puntofisso deserves more glory every week I read it.

[https://puntofisso.us5.list- manage.com/subscribe?u=77ecabbd3...](https://puntofisso.us5.list- manage.com/subscribe?u=77ecabbd32e97a6caa9d7d40b&id=f06739fb93)

</comment><comment><USER52> Check out, [https://www.pythonweekly.com/](https://www.pythonweekly.com/) and [http://www.founderweekly.com/](http://www.founderweekly.com/)

Disclaimer: I am the curator of both newsletters.

</comment><comment><USER53> Webplatformdaily is run by a guy who does a great job curating. I can say it's made me more aware of Web issues and better at my job. If you pitch like 3/month at the patreon you get a weekly newsletter with short editorial content. Def worth it if you work around the Web.

</comment><comment><USER54> Globalsecurity provides one of the few other NPOV perspectives on global events, aside from financial news. Still looking for something equivalent in human interest. I currently suspect the constraints of NPOV and minimal selection bias yield an empty set for human interest.

</comment><comment><USER55> The only newsletter I never get tired of is "nature briefing" [https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=nature- briefing](https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=nature-briefing)

<comment><USER2> Hmm, I clicked on the prominent "Subscribe" link, and it takes me to the subscriptions for Nature magazine...

One can sign up here:

[https://www.nature.com/briefing/signup/](https://www.nature.com/briefing/signup/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm not sure if counts as a newsletter but the essays published semi-regularly in From the Diaries of John Henry are like, I don't know, pretty cool.

[https://www.turingsquared.com](https://www.turingsquared.com)

</comment><comment><USER57> I read Azeem Azhar's Exponential View [https://www.exponentialview.co/](https://www.exponentialview.co/)

\- wide ranging topics on 'exponential thinking'. Economics, climate change, AI, computing

</comment><comment><USER58> The Overhead Wire which is about transit, cities, architecture, traffic, built environment: [https://theoverheadwire.com/subscriptions/](https://theoverheadwire.com/subscriptions/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Bitcoin Optech has a high-quality weekly newsletter of bitcoin development updates: [https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/](https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Redecentralize Digest / few emails per year about decentralization: [https://redecentralize.org/redigest/2020/01](https://redecentralize.org/redigest/2020/01)

</comment><comment><USER61> I like Inside Security: [https://inside.com/security](https://inside.com/security)

Plenty of links on the latest threats, botnets, malware, etc. Variety of technical and less-technical pieces.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm really enjoying The Hustle [https://thehustle.co/](https://thehustle.co/)

It's a very entertaining take on the business world, but current and historical

</comment><comment><USER63> I enjoy morning brew, finance & tech news

[https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/r/?kid=8aebb0](https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/r/?kid=8aebb0)

</comment><comment><USER64> I love Matt Stoller on Substack. Talking about monopolies etc. Brill stuff

</comment><comment><USER65> Sivv digest - a weekly email containing 10 bitesize business insights/'life hacks': [https://www.sivv.io/](https://www.sivv.io/)

</comment><comment><USER66> [https://thehustle.co/](https://thehustle.co/)

[https://www.accessnow.org/](https://www.accessnow.org/)

</comment><comment><USER67> Super Organizers by Dan Shippper

Stratechery by Ben Thompson (not really underrated on HN)

</comment><comment><USER68> [https://bullets.news/](https://bullets.news/) \- The best articles for science lovers shortened to five bullet points or less.

</comment><comment><USER69> 'Level Up', by former ThoughtWorks Consultant and N26 CTO, Patrick Kua.

[http://levelup.patkua.com/](http://levelup.patkua.com/)

</comment><comment><USER70> Gary's Tiny Newsletter [https://garybasin.com/tiny- newsletter/](https://garybasin.com/tiny-newsletter/)

</comment><comment><USER71> I have been suggested [https://www.recomendo.com](https://www.recomendo.com) from a friend of mine and have found it useful.

</comment><comment><USER72> Farnam Street - [https://fs.blog/newsletter/](https://fs.blog/newsletter/) Weekly on Sundays

</comment><comment><USER73> [https://marketingexamples.com](https://marketingexamples.com) by Harry Dry to up my Marketing Skills :)

</comment><comment><USER74> Experimental Radio News: [https://experimradio.substack.com](https://experimradio.substack.com)

</comment><comment><USER75> Curated financial news [https://www.finimize.com/](https://www.finimize.com/)

</comment><comment><USER76> Here my own newsletter on tech, coding and careers: [https://www.getrevue.co/profile/coderfit/](https://www.getrevue.co/profile/coderfit/)

My motivation to starting one was that most programmers focus too much on the technical details ("get better at Python") and too little on the factors related to career growth or money ("how and when do i ask my boss for a raise?").

</comment><comment><USER77> _Nightwatch_ set the standard in open source news analysis. However John McCreary passed in 2019 and it is no more.

</comment><comment><USER78> SatRdv (satrdv.substack.com). It is a weekly digest of satellite industry headlines.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm running a free newsletter where I send you a coding interview question & solution everyday. [https://hhcodinginterviewprep.substack.com/](https://hhcodinginterviewprep.substack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER80> [http://highscalability.com/](http://highscalability.com/)

Weekly (friday) newsletter about scalable systems. Kind of an echo chamber for HN or a high quality digest of it, depending on your viewpoint.

Has sponsored posts.

</comment><comment><USER81> I've been putting out Game Dev Digest weekly, if you are interested in keeping up with Unity game dev related stuff. [https://gamedevdigest.com](https://gamedevdigest.com)

</comment><comment><USER82> no mercy / no malice [https://www.profgalloway.com](https://www.profgalloway.com)

the fedex one was really good.

edit: added the fedex comment

</comment><comment><USER83> I read and run embit [1] - the daily tech news fix. Originally built for my own consumption.

[1] [https://embit.ca](https://embit.ca)

</comment><comment><USER84> Is this a "growth marketing" campaign for substack? I counted 11 references to substack.

I'd just like to know when I'm being manipulated.

<comment><USER85> I doubt it. Those accounts don't seem related.

<comment><USER84> FWIW the profile of the OP says "Growth marketing by day, hacker at night".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats next for my classic car hobby site?  - <AUTHOR>

Hi!
I launched my passion a few months ago with a partner: A visual cross between Pinterest and Quora for cars.
www.projectvroom.com
We have sustainable, and returning daily traffic and can generate significant spikes using reddit to share our finds.
We organize, archive and encourage conversation around classic car finds on the web.
However, our user engagement is low. Sign-up conversion rates are abismal and engagement for registered user dies of within a few days.
I have a few ideas on how to fix this but with limited resource(and time), I would love some help from the community.
Which one of these or other would you put time into?
() Create a top 5 cars of the week email - generate returning traffic sources
() Integrate facebook account sign-ups - lower barrier to interaction
() Finish the internal upvote system (a la HN, reddit) - make engagement "cheap"
() Pull in info from carwiki, other sources - increase SEO and knowledge value of each page
Thank you guys, I appreciate it immensely.
Zhenya <comment><USER2> Upvoting and intelligent links to info sites would be my top two suggestions. Allowing users to showcase how they tuned their cars would make it something like a facebook for cars. Featured cars could be a simple slightly random spotlighting of a few cars that are in the top ~30% upvote ranks.

Right now it looks like it is geared towards the "Ohh shiny! Lemme get my camera!" crowd than the "Here is the work of art I poured my blood swear and tears into!" types. Appealing to the former nets more users, while providing a forum for the later gives you more dedicated users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at how 500px have built the rating system. They make it really addictive to post content & get high scores & praise from the community. This is because as soon as you click on an image it makes a big feature of the person that posted it. It's very easy to then click around on other items that person has posted (probably similar high quality) Contributors want to become known for posting great content, users start to recognise who the great contributors are through their avatar/profile building up a sense of community.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great, thank you! I do a lot of analytics work for my day job and have been writing some fun things on this database. It is a great idea to expose that data to showcase the contributor.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are quite a few UX issues in your detail view pages. Browsing is not intuitive, your use of whitespace is amateur at best. Your call for actions is not there.

Sorry, if I am sounding harsh. These things matter quite a deal when it comes to retention. You have a lot of room for improvement in that area. Seek professional help if it's not your cup of tea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Harsh is what I'm looking for ! Thank you !

I have looking for a UX team member, meanwhile could recommend a site/tutorial/book to help me learn the basics?

<comment><USER4> The quickest will be to copy from a real estate or a used car web site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To me it's not obvious what it is (and I'm a big car nut).

It looks like a used car sales site, that has comments. If I was a car nut looking for car info sites or a car community (which I am), I'd dismiss it nearly instantly as "just another car sales site" and close it.</comment>


Let's Talk Tech: TruckIn – From Code to Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/lets-talk-tech-truckin-from-code-to-kubernetes-tickets-32583125004 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, we are organizing a small tech meetup for startuppers in Berlin to discuss a real life tech examples from the team at TruckIn.

Will try to stream it online, so whoever is interested in the topic of Kubernetes join the fb event here: [https://www.facebook.com/events/1418869104813122/](https://www.facebook.com/events/1418869104813122/)

Questions and requests are more than welcomed. Share them here on the thread.</comment>


Germany's Green Idea: Street Lighting on Demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1907182,00.html

<comment><USER2> Oh wow.

It's so nice to see news from years ago making it back as 'new' headlines. Whatever.

Feedback for such schemes has been the following-

a: that people felt incredibly unsafe (especially women) and stopped going out out night, regardless of being able to turn the lights on.

b: non locals, travelers, elderly people, disabled and so on can't use it easily. period.

c: most street lights are high power sodium lights, which are (According to wikipedia and other sources) one of, if not the most, efficient form of distributing energy in the form of light. They also happen to have a fairly significant startup time, so motion sensors wouldn't be very efficient. It's not obvious that replacing with more efficient startup lamps and motion sensors would help.

d: would you want to drive where your eyes would constantly have to re-dilate as the lights come on?

e: i've seen some pilot programs that have photovoltaic collection plates on top of street light stands, which collect energy during the day to activate the light at night. Feels more like the future we've been looking for.

I'd much rather see policies which force office lights, computers and so on be turned off at night (or face fines, etc) than street lights that work less efficiently.

<comment><USER3> The thing is it is a small village there are some things to think about:

elderly are not going to be walking about at night (there is probably much much less crime concerning any women)

there won't be very many non locals except for visiting family

the lights were costing enough that there were blackouts in the morning

there wont be very many people driving at night

the solar would be a good idea if it was cheap

It isn't the greatest idea but if it has worked out well for a small village good for them and their problem solving ability

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of a similar setup that I learned about during pilot training: a lot of small untowered airports use a pilot-controlled runway lighting setup that is controlled by pilots clicking their radios on a certain frequency to turn on the runway lighting at night, adjust brightness, etc.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. Talk about over-engineering.

Seems like a button would have done the trick.

Put them at the ends of streets (or one on each lamppost, if you can afford it) and have it turn on the lights for the street/block.

<comment><USER6> No man, motion sensors.

<comment><USER7> That would just be more expensive and less reliable. buttons would do the trick, except for the case you want to have lights on in the moment you are leaving your house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's an interesting idea, but the town has only 9,000 people. I wonder how this operation would work in a larger setting, or perhaps more importantly, how it is safeguarded from abuse.

Also curious if there is an app for that...

Edit: on second thought, abuse might really be a non-issue, since the limit for abuse isn't worse than what they had to deal with originally and text message can be tracked with some ease.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great idea but all I can think of is the room for abuse for criminals. Easy to break into cars in pitch black.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice. Ideally, with more cell phones getting GPS, eventually it'd be possible to set up one's cell phone to communicate one's position to the central lighting facility, and have it turn on the lights as I approach them, and off the lights after I've passed them by.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why not use motion sensors? I'm sure I've walked somewhere with them used for streetlights.

</comment><comment><USER12> Has someone thought about carrying an electric torch? Or display a white image on your cellphone display to get light.

<comment><USER13> That sounds like a _Viz_ top tip - "HACKERS: save money on torches by waving your expensive, brightly-lit mobile around in front of you while walking down the road in the dead of night."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happens when I visit a city using this system?</comment>


Torrent meta-search engine - <AUTHOR> http://torrentbutler.com/ <comment><USER3> Guess they aren't going with the plausible deniability legal route.

</comment><comment><USER4> From a legal aspect, how is this going to last at all? IANAL but I was under the impression most meta-search engines operated in at least a semi-grey area because they don't spoon feed illegal content to you. Most just index the big trackers and (conveniently) don't discriminate between illegal and legal content. I feel like when you are dropping torrents into buckets more specific than "video" and "audio" (e.g. linking multiple torrents to a specific movie, highlighting the HD versions) any conventional argument against aiding copyright infringement is out the window.

Awesome site though.

<comment><USER5> Hosted in Canada (netelligent.ca) might buy them some time...

<comment><USER6> Or create a strong enough legal precedence to help transform Canada into less of a piracy haven.

<comment><USER7> "Piracy haven"? I've read the news stories that contained those allegations about Canada and they were completely absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This will be taken down sooner or later, while no legal alternatives¹ exist in many countries. Ridiculous. Movie industry: Okay, apparently you don't want my money, that's fine, but then please don't complain about piracy.

[1] Cross-platform, HD quality, easy to use, etc.

<comment><USER9> I would pay to watch movies recently released on cinema.

I mean, why the heck do I need to go to cinema when I have the comforts of my home and I'm alone at the moment?

<comment><USER10> Basically, the Academy Awards rules are the only reason this can't happen. If you enter the video/dvd/download stage too fast, you don't qualify for the Academy Awards.

[http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/83aa_rules....](http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/83aa_rules.pdf)

<comment><USER11> If that were the only reason, any films that were not academy award contenders would go to video/dvd/download immediately...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Takedown Policy Please include the full URLs to the infringing material; no categories or search queries. We follow the same takedown policy that Google uses." etc, etc

OK. So basically: want to take down something? try go faster than ligth's speed...

Funny

<comment><USER13> They are not infringing copyright. They make infringement easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aesthetically and technically this is very nicely done. But in terms of usability I actually find a plain list of movie names easier to parse - <USER2> it lacks critical information and is drowned in ads like on most torrent aggregators...

My favorite interface is the "Overview"-mode in the iTunes store. I wish all content sites would look like this (in case you don't know it, scroll all the way down, then click Functions/Overview).

</comment><comment><USER15> Tie in rotten tomatoes reviews and you've got a torrent butler with taste.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks nice. I bet the attorneys think it looks even nicer.

</comment><comment><USER17> If they're going to link directly to torrents anyway (and thus discard any shred of legal deniability), could they link _more directly_ to the torrents? If there was a button on/around the movie poster itself that linked directly to whatever they/users considered the "best" version of the torrent, that'd be helpful. Half of my problem with torrent aggregators like ISOHunt is deciding which version is actually going to be closest to my preferences (720p English MP4 with soft-subs/captions.)

<comment><USER18> I think the point is users are going to discriminate themselves and choose as from their own preferences. Some people (like myself) hate seeing humongous torrents if movies that don't fit the usual scene requirements. Others only use certain public trackers and not others, etc.

<comment><USER17> To satisfy most people, they could probably put one button for the highest- seeded torrent that contains roughly 700MB of content per 90 minutes of film, labelled "CD-quality", another for "DVD-quality" (if it exists), and then the rest of the people can click through. Actually, just filtering out any results that aren't in the Browser's Accept-Language languages would be a great boon to me.

<comment><USER18> That actually sounds great, and I agree that that'd cover the vast majority of use cases. Another argument for open sourcing it to be forked to the community's tastes :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact they use a hushmail address for contacting them made me actually laugh out loud.

<comment><USER20> Why? Honest question, I have no idea. I haven't heard of hushmail in over 10 years, but I just encountered a guy I'll be working with that uses one, I honestly thought they shut down.

<comment><USER21> I worked at a place that used hushmail for the corporate email. It was a business account, so they had their own domain, but it was through hushmail. So I guess they are doing some business.

<comment><USER22> I don't quite get the point. If email security is important to you, you shouldn't be outsourcing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The design is terrible. I don't care about cover art. I want to quickly find what I'm looking for.

<comment><USER24> Then you're better off using any of the other torrent (meta)searchers. This kind of view is excellent for those without access to any nifty streaming services.

<comment><USER23> They have hideous UIs full of adds that pretend to be download buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If this is all automated as they claim, that's a hell of a good job. Poster, length, rating, credits, synopsis and trailer, everything one could ask for. And then they throw a full-sized screencap as the page background. Brilliant.

<comment><USER26> It is a simple layer over <http://themoviedb.org> API with torrents added in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll assume that this is a way to promote a global licensing solution — a great one, because the site actually manages to give iTunes a run for its money.

What surprized me was the lack of ranking by note. Assuming the legal challenges are overcame, I would also enjoy being able to have two lists: "Already seen" and "Would like to see" (that might include films not available yet, or even un-financed projects) to parse it all better. If they manage to make those lists work with my cinema subscription (I pay every month for a all-you-can-go-out-and-see plan) I'd be happy to spend more on that then most would pay for cable.

</comment><comment><USER28> Would be extra cool with some sort of "sort by IMDB-rating"-function attached

</comment><comment><USER29> Awesome site but it's too flashy. My guess is that it'll draw too much attention and have to be taken down even though I would love a torrent site that doesn't make my eye's bleed.

</comment><comment><USER30> How is this _at all_ newsworthy? There's more sites like this than grains of sand on a beach...

</comment><comment><USER31> This looks similar to myriads of Chinese websites (not the design, but the selection of hit movies by cover art). Many Chinese sites serve up streaming videos directly in the browser. They are too slow to be usable abroad so I guess they avoid litigation that way.

</comment><comment><USER32> It'd be nice if it included info about best release type available, right where is the [HD] icon.

</comment><comment><USER33> looks great, but the trailer covers the SD links.

(Chrome, OS X)

</comment><comment><USER34> Judging by the amount of Russian covers for Western movies, I'm guessing the site is based in Russia - in which case they probably have quite a safe haven against copyright take-down etc.

<comment><USER35> That's probably because of R5 releases: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R5_(bootleg)>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> damn you [developer of this], had this idea pending for the longest time. yeah, I know this crowd knows this line too much.

Anyway, my approach would be different by a single feature: movie sync. I've already watched many of the movies listed, and would be great to give you my imdb rating public url and you filtering those out. You could even implement a basic recommendation system using my ratings to give best matches.

Hope you can keep this service up.

</comment><comment><USER37> This really should be a desktop app rather than a website. That way, it couldn't be taken down, especially if the code was open sourced.

</comment><comment><USER38> Cool idea. I'd like to see an IMDB link somewhere on the page and perhaps partnerships with private trackers?

<comment><USER39> kickasstorrents.com does the IMDB link which is cool but there's also a greasemonkey script that does it the other way and adds the torrent download links on IMDB (<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38484>) which is even cooler

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It'd look a lot nicer without those social media icons there.

<comment><USER41> I present: the widgetblock chrome extension. For all your automatic-social- media-icon-nuking needs.

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hgiihiookhijpbha...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hgiihiookhijpbhaflohognbhmamdnol)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I find it very useful without the torrent part as well.

</comment><comment><USER43> Okay, I just wanna say that is good design :D

</comment><comment><USER44> wow, impressive. They should add the Metacritic score for each flick, that would be incredibly useful.

</comment><comment><USER45> I love the interface. I give you my up-vote.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's a trap!

</comment><comment><USER12> OK. Is that Iran? (kidding)</comment>


Mathematics: Came across the following gag. Is it true? - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/216343/came-across-the-following-gag-is-it-true

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing people here are familiar with Borges' "Library of Babel". (If not, it's a short story about a library that contains every possible book).

I read an interesting thought experiment about the concept:

1\. There's lots of different languages around, but all languages (even Chinese) use a finite alphabet of symbols. So for simplicity we can just convert all languages in the Library into binary.

2\. On first appearance, the library would contain books of an infinite number of lengths. But it would surely be more practical to split such books into volumes.

3\. You'd have a maximum volume length of say, 1 million bits. Books shorter than that can just be padded with 0s. But you can now double up volumes: volume #6345 of book #1840849 might be an exact duplicate of volume #93974 of book #11132445. Which means the library can now be finite in size: it only needs to contain all one-million-bit strings, a mere 2^1000000 volumes.

4\. Why stop there, though? It's clear we could just use smaller volumes and get a smaller library. In fact, the library only needs two pages - one '0' and one '1'. Depending on the order you read them, you can get any book you want out of it.

Information theory is weird.

Edit: here's the original: [http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/universal_library.ht...](http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/universal_library.html)

<comment><USER3> Not sure if we're on the same page here, but this does not conform to what we know about information theory.

First, as someone else mentioned we'd have to have a maximum book length or else your library contains an infinite number of books, which is simply absurd because there would, for instance, be a book that contained all of the finite books inside it, in alphabetical order.

Second, using your compression technique, we'd still need to have some numbering on the volumes, and to describe a book, we'd have to do so by a list of numbers describing which volumes comprise it and in what order.

Third, this makes clear what is happening in your reductio ad absurdum argument -- we can reduce the volumes down to one dash, one dot; but then each book needs to contain a listing in order of which "volume" is in which order. So we're just writing the boks in binary again.

<comment><USER4> > Second, using your compression technique, we'd still need to have some > numbering on the volumes, and to describe a book, we'd have to do so by a > list of numbers describing which volumes comprise it and in what order.

Yes, for a normal library this would be the case. But this library contains _every_ possible book.

So the index list you're asking for, describing which volumes comprise what book in what order, is the complete list of _all_ possible orderings of volumes up to the maximum book length.

You don't really need that list, because you know exactly what it looks like.

But then, you don't really need the volumes either, because you know what they look like too (being all combinations of N bits).

So yeah, you'd just need a 0 and a 1.

I already got a copy of that library, and the cool thing is that it doubles as a light switch.

<comment><USER3> There seems to be some assumption here that books are named by their ordering of volumes. But I might know the name of a book and not its contents, so I'd need to look up the contents. (Of course, this is silly if you have every possible book, because any other naming scheme means most names will be longer than the books themselves....)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assuming that π is normal and infinite (that's redundant but for clarity), then yes, it's true -- it contains every finite-sized number, every textual sequence, every secret, every book ever written. Scientific secrets we may never discover. Cures to nonexistent diseases. Everything!

But this is as meaningless as it is true, because the problem is not that those secrets are present, the problem lies in locating them.

I had this conversation years ago on Usenet -- the same question, the same answer. My correspondent seemed to think it was remarkable that all those riches lay within π. He didn't seem to realize that the same could be said of any normal, infinite sequence of digits, of which there may be an infinite number (not proven, but it's possible that e, √2, indeed the square root of any non-perfect-square number, all fall into this category).

If the grains of sand on a beach could be decoded as binary bits (or as digits in any base) by some accepted convention, and making the same assumptions about normality and infinity, then a beach also contains every secret, every book that has ever been written or will ever be written. But it's the same problem - those secrets cannot be located, distinguished from sequences we might label meaningless, simply because they're answers we're not interested in.

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

A quote: "While a general proof can be given that almost all numbers are normal (in the sense that the set of exceptions has Lebesgue measure zero), this proof is not constructive and only very few specific numbers have been shown to be normal. For example, it is widely believed that the numbers √2, π, and e are normal, but a proof remains elusive."

<comment><USER6> I don't have a strong mathematics background, but would I be right in thinking that the probability of a normal, infinite number containing a given arbitrary string of digits is "almost sure" rather than "sure"? Or can it actually be proven mathematically that it contains such a string?

<comment><USER7> It's not proven, it's the definition. If there is a subsequence that isn't contained in a non-repeating infintely long sequence, then it isn't a non- repeating infinitely long sequence.

<comment><USER8> This is not true. For instance, sequence 00 does not occur in sequence

010110111011110111110111111...

which can hardly be described as "repeating" (or periodic) sequence.

The point here is normality. Fix alphabet A having b letters. We say that a sequence S of elements of A is normal if, for every word w, we have

lim n->inf C(S, w, n)/n = b^(-k)

where C(S, w, n) is the number of occurrences of w in first n letters of S, and k is length of w. More intuitively, S is normal if every word occurs in S with the same asymptotic frequency.

So, if a sequence does not contain some word as a substring, it cannot be normal by above definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/03/17/1639250/illegal- prime...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/03/17/1639250/illegal-prime-number- unzips-to-decss)

This is from WAAAY back in the day.

"A person named Phil Carmody has found a very interesting prime number. When converted to hexadecimal, the result is a gzip that contains a DeCSS implementation. I've posted a short bit of Java here that takes the prime as a command line parameter and dumps the result to standard out if you want to test it."

...I actually ran it once upon a time, although I didn't check if the links were current.

While slightly different context (prime #'s vs. PI) the concept is the same. If you dig deep enough into prime numbers and it contains the "illegal" topic du-jour expressed as a zip file... well, I won't put it past PI containing almost everything else as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ever since I was a kid in elementary school I've loved the idea/thought experiment of owning a hard disk full of every possible n-by-n binary image. By definition, on this hard disk you would have a sketch of every person you've ever met, every person you've ever loved, every place you've ever been, every alien in the solar system. On one hand, it's endearing you could depict so many things in such a finite medium, but at the same time it's astounding how much storage space you would need for even the smallest reasonable numbers of N. Sometimes when I'm bored waiting for a bus, I love to think about what it would be like to pour through all these images and somehow know which ones would be meaningful in my future that I don't yet know.

<comment><USER11> Sadly, there isn't enough energy in the entire Universe to cycle even a 16x16 black and white grid through all of its possible states.

<comment><USER12> Unless you happen to own a quantum computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of the "pi encoding" - if pi is, in fact normal, you can encode any file as a tuple (`start`, `length`) encoding a substring of the expansion of pi.

It's often phrased as a compression paradox of a sort - surprisingly many people overlook the fact that `start` will tend to take a _lot_ of bits to encode.

<comment><USER14> It's also quite slow...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds similar to the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem> ...

"a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare."

<comment><USER16> In the ideal world of mathematics there is no distinction between creating and discovering. Everything that is possible exists. That makes the infinite monkey theorem or statements like "the answers to all the great questions of the universe can be found in the digits of π" meaningless. For instance, every future masterpiece of literature already exist in mathematical sense, yet it will still take a genius to discover it in the infinite sequence of all possible texts.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any bibliography for this topic? I would be very grateful, I'm extremely interested in this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this mean writing out a normal number is illegal? They encode state secrets, child pornography, pizza recipes, and entire computer simulations of universes where owning pizza recipes is considered high treason.

<comment><USER19> Only to the same extent that counting is illegal, because if you count high enough you'll eventually generate a numeric representation of every possible datum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Infinite and non-repeating does not imply it contains every number.

For proof of this, consider an infinite non-repeating number, without the number 9.

Pi is infinite and non-repeating. I have not yet seen proof that pi contains every finite number.

</comment><comment><USER21> a. proove it

b. pi as a decimal number is an approximation that is only as long as you calculate it to be. Moreover, decimals do not contain non-numeric information. That's just your own interpretation. Imagine a number system where pi is 1. Clearly no names in 1. Now imagine a number system where pi is expressed as π, like... the number system that we use. Clearly no names in π.

<comment><USER5> > pi as a decimal number is an approximation that is only as long as you > calculate it to be.

But Pi is not equal to our approximations of Pi. That's backwards. Pi owes nothing to our lame efforts to approximate it. When someone asserts that Pi may be an infinite sequence, the truth of the proposition doesn't depend on someone computing an infinite sequence of Pi's digits.

> Moreover, decimals do not contain non-numeric information.

Are you aware that your typing is promptly translated into numbers for transmission through the Internet? That A = 65 (in the old ASCII encoding), B = 66, etc.? So yes, decimals do contain non-numeric information if we choose to interpret them that way. And we do.

<comment><USER22> You're looking for strings in the decimal expansion of pi. Pi is not a decimal number! Every decimal representation of pi is an approximation. Pi is not an infinite sequence, it is a single value a bit higher than 3.14, it is only the decimal (or other bases, besides 10) expansion that has an infinite number of digits.

<comment><USER5> > Pi is not a decimal number!

Of course it is -- although choice of base is quire arbitrary. Pi is as much a decimal number as it is a binary number.

> Every decimal representation of pi is an approximation.

Our inability to represent Pi doesn't constrain Pi, it only constrains us. The fact that we cannot fully represent Pi has no effect on Pi or its identity. And Pi has the same identity in any base -- the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

> Pi is not an infinite sequence

Pi is an infinite sequence.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Infinite_series>

Quote: "The calculation of π was revolutionized by the development of infinite series techniques in the 16th and 17th centuries. An infinite series is the sum of the terms of an infinite sequence.[49] Infinite series allowed mathematicians to compute π with much greater precision than Archimedes and others who used geometrical techniques."

<comment><USER22> You're constraining yourself to a wrong definition of what a number is. The number 0xA is not a different number from 0b1010 even though they have a different number of digits.

 _> Pi is not an infinite sequence

Pi is an infinite sequence._

I was talking about an infinite number of digits, but even this new definition is wrong. Pi is one single value. There are many ways to compute this value. Some of them include infinite series. Note the wording: "The _calculation_ of π was revolutionized by the development of infinite series _techniques_ ". Other techniques were used before, and they are still valid. The only advantage of infinite series is that they are easier to calculate, and the approximations converge faster when you compute them on real (finite) hardware.

<comment><USER5> > You're constraining yourself to a wrong definition of what a number is.

That's your problem, not mine. You keep trying to say that Pi is defined by our approximations of its value.

> Pi is one single value.

So, tell me, which part of "Pi is an infinite sequence" are you actually disagreeing with?

> There are many ways to compute this value.

You persist in confusing Pi with our efforts to approximate its value.

> Other techniques were used before, and they are still valid.

False. 22/7 is not valid. 355/113 is not valid. This is valid:

<https://www.dropbox.com/s/423ieio63bsuaat/pi_w.png>

The reason? Pi is a mathematical idea that happens to have a numerical value, but the idea transcends the value. The value is a coincidence, which is why choosing to express it as 1 to the base Pi changes nothing, and why arguing about the size of its approximations changes nothing.

> The only advantage of infinite series is that they are easier to calculate > ...

No, they are much more difficult to calculate, but they convey more meaning. Infinite series are why Pi isn't just a number, any more than e is.

<comment><USER22> > False. 22/7 is not valid. 355/113 is not valid.

Right, those are approximations. Those are not what we are talking about.

> This is valid: <https://www.dropbox.com/s/423ieio63bsuaat/pi_w.png>

I agree that it is valid. It is one of many ways of calculating the value of pi. Here is another one: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Pi-...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Pi- unrolled-720.gif/200px-Pi-unrolled-720.gif) Also there are iterative algorithms. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Computer_era_and_iterative_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Computer_era_and_iterative_algorithms)

> No, they are much more difficult to calculate, but they convey more meaning.

Again, I didn't mean approximations like 22/7. I was comparing them to e.g. the geometric method which took hundreds of years to extend to a few hundred digits. The geometric method conveys the same "meaning" because it is an exact description of pi, just like the infinite series and the iterative algorithms.

> Pi isn't just a number, any more than e is.

They are both just numbers. e is not infinite, in fact it is less than 3.

<comment><USER5> > They are both just numbers.

No, they are ideas. The base of natural logarithms isn't an arbitrary number, it has special properties. It's the same with Pi -- they're ideas that happen to be expressible as numbers. But their numerical value is less important than their identity as ideas.

> e is not infinite, in fact it is less than 3.

Straw man. No one claimed otherwise. But e appears to have an infinite digital sequence, i.e. is "normal" in the mathematical sense.

But, as with Pi, the fact that e is likely "normal" is much less important than the idea it represents.

<comment><USER22> OK. It sounded like you were saying that Pi is special just because there is an infinite series that describes it. It's trivial to make an infinite series that sums to any number. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_%28mathematics%29#Conver...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_%28mathematics%29#Convergent_series) So the number 2 is just as "infinite" as pi.

<comment><USER5> > It sounded like you were saying that Pi is special just because there is an > infinite series that describes it.

That would be because Pi is special because there are infinite series, and integrals, and mathematical identities, and limit expressions, that describe it in ways that give it a special meaning.

> So the number 2 is just as "infinite" as pi.

You're confusing the existence of a summation with its outcome. Obviously the sum of 2^-n for n between 0 and infinity (inclusive) is equal to 2, but that doesn't make 2 an infinite digital sequence, or in any other sense "infinite".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is similar to the Infinite Monkeys theorem and is more nuanced than many people think.

<http://milesmathis.com/monkey.html>

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

</comment><comment><USER24> I did a quick test for this, would add a comment to the stackexchange thread, but it's closed now.

Test at <https://github.com/walle/pi2ascii>

The algorithm can be greatly improved though.

</comment><comment><USER25> You could pose the question the other way around: is the infinite hidden within the finite? This philosophical question is probably outside the realm of mathematics, but an interesting thought-exercise.

<comment><USER5> > You could pose the question the other way around: is the infinite hidden > within the finite? This philosophical question is probably outside the realm > of mathematics ...

There's a reason it's outside the domain of mathematics -- it contradicts the definition of infinite. By definition, an infinite set cannot be a subset of a finite one.

> ... but an interesting thought-exercise.

Briefly, but easily answered. :)

<comment><USER25> I came to think of it after reading part of one of the answers in OP link:

"So yes, it has the story of your life -- but it also has many false stories, many subtly wrong statements, and lots of gibberish."

The "gibberish" is bound to contain many truths. This kind of encoding is very different from the mathematical idea of subsets. I am probably bending concepts beyond breaking point here, and you are correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If computing ever got powerful enough to compute pi to an nth amount of digits nearly instantaneously, would it be possible to compress everything by just saying "get the digits between x and y"

<comment><USER5> Yes, but not in a way that would be useful. For a sufficiently complex message, the index into Pi that matches it might well be longer than the original message. So, yes, but no gain -- the result would be larger than the original.

This would be true for a huge set of Pi digits and some imagined fast way to gain access to the right index -- the index into the set would likely be larger than the message it indexes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, obviously, everything exists in the infinite - somewhere. A completely trivial realization, however.

<comment><USER28> This is not true - you can have infinite things without them containing evertthing. So no, this is _not_ obvious. Indeed, pi may not be normal, so there may be things not contained in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It represents a fractal.

</comment><comment><USER30> It isn't a gag. It is a (conjectured, tested, not proven) mathematical fact explained on the SE page.

It is relevant to hackernews as a illustration of the effectiveness of seemingly pointless pictures of text as memes, obnoxious though they be.</comment>


Ask HN: Facebook only marketing campaigns? - <AUTHOR>

We're a small 2 person startup catering to a very specific niche market. About 6 months ago, we hired a marketing firm to get us some exposure on Facebook and so far, it's been going well. Almost 2000 page likes, we have a high interaction rate with the page and it has generated over 500 new users on the website.
My problem with this marketing firm as of late, is they only target Facebook. No Twitter, no Google+, nothing.
I've questioned this multiple times, even citing articles on how people in our demographic are using Twitter more; that its a good idea to have a Google+ account for SEO rank, etc... and I'm continually being shot down by this firm as their a waste of time / money.
Finally, this weekend, I told my partner, if their not willing to do Twitter, Google+, let me do it and let's see what happens. He said yes, and I began making some changes. Integrating Twitter's API into our blog posts to automatically link to new articles, Google+ button at the top of the page, etc...
Today, this marketing company questions the Google+ button I put in the header and rudely suggested I burry it.
Every time I bring up the other networks we're not active on, I get shot down by them.
Are they a waste of time and money? Should we pursue them? Is this guy an a?
-- frustrated <comment><USER2> Sounds exceptionally sketchy. They claim Twitter, Google+, etc is a waste of time/money? It's your money, if you're willing to have it 'wasted' then they should at least give other networks a try.

It's your company. You define what goes and what doesn't. If an external marketing company rudely suggested I bury a social link on my site, they'd be shown the door.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my business? VP of Eng turned technical recruiter - <AUTHOR> Hiring in tech is so messed up, I left my job as VP of Engineering to build a real recruiting agency.  One with actual technical recruiters, starting with me.  I hope to work with startups and hire top talent without all the traditional recruiting nonsense.
https://www.ericgong.com/
AMA, share ideas of how I can make recruiting better, or give constructive feedback.  Thank you! <comment><USER2> Which programming languages do yo know? There was a recent post by someone that applied to a Clojure position, and got a take home project in Python, and unsurprisingly it was evaluated as a Python project.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a surprising situation for sure. Was it evaluated by the developers at the company?

<comment><USER2> My guess is that the person that assigned and evaluated the project was a developer at the company that was a Python expert. (I don't remember the details.)

It is surprising that if you apply to a Clojure position, you get a homework in Python. (I may be missing some details here, but let's take my memory and the story at face value.)

It is not surprising that a homework in Python is evaluated like a homework in Python.

So ... Which kind of jobs positions can you evaluate? With languages do you know? (This question can be more wide. Front end vs back end? Software vs hardware?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can evaluate any software engineer job position. In my last job grew the team to about 40 across Ruby, Python and Java.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fixing the Internet for Real Time Applications, Part II - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-ii <comment><USER2> The big cloud providers also do similar kinds of things to bring down latency on their networks, but I wonder how effective they are? I've never seen latency comparisons between cloud providers - but there must be differences. None of them seem to use latency as a selling point either. I'd add latency to one of the criteria when choosing between providers if there were a way to compare them. I'm not talking about their latency to me or any arbitrary point, but their latency to internet users in the US in general. Like 50% of users within 80ms RTT. Also packet-loss rates would be nice to know.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I was actually suprised that all graphs were going up :) Number of users increased -- great but ping times and packet loss should be at an all-time low now and these are the graphs that we want to see!

<comment><USER2> I think you read the graphs wrong, they are % of players with better than 80ms ping. So going from 30% to 80% was an incredible improvement!

<comment><USER4> Hello,

I am the author, you got that right. And thank you for taking the time to read it.

Peyton

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if there's a long-term goal here of becoming the AWS for gaming and other realtime network needs.

About to go back and read Part I so please forgive if that's covered in the first part.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm from the VoIP world and we share this pain. Kudos, this must have been a huge undertaking.

<comment><USER4> It was, but so much fun and really worth it. :) I am the author. Thank You for reading :)

Peyton

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is this different from Akamai's IP Application Accelerator ([https://www.akamai.com/us/en/solutions/products/web- performa...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/solutions/products/web- performance/ip-application-accelerator.jsp))? Honestly curious.

I would love to see a consumer videoconferencing service built on top of one of these networks.

<comment><USER4> Hello,

I am the author. The difference is that Akamai is working on optimizing bandwidth to their customer from a pipes size perspective, not a latency perspective. In other words, they want the widest highway possible, maybe not the fastest.

Peyton

<comment><USER7> Interesting, thanks for that.

You guys should really consider making this a platform that anyone could use!

<comment><USER8> I'd be surprised if they haven't already considered it. Building a national backbone is a large endeavour, and now that it's built, a great way to diversify revenue. Games only stay popular for a finite period of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting read. Could you blog about the math/techniques/algorithms you used to determine the best fiber paths?

Consider writing a SIGCOMM paper about it!!

<comment><USER4> We had to RFP each link, meaning we reached out to every fiber/wave vendor that was present in the data centers we wanted to be in that we could find, and had them submit routes with latency data. Then we tested to verify their data. It is really manual unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How is this "fixing the internet"? This is just good old network optimization. And a local one, not "internet-wide" by any means! Colossal undertaking, sure, kudos to Riot team for pulling it off. But... I don't see what makes this different.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure that phrase is not meant to be taken so seriously.

<comment><USER4> Hey,

I am the author. We are building it out world wide, but you are correct, this is for one application. The same blueprint could be used for any other application though.

Peyton

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > A reduction in the number of participating routers would lower latency (yay > for LoL players), but it would also lower the number of customers they could > support.

This is because ISPs oversell their networks. That's great and it makes sense... as long as they can get away with it. But when services like online gaming and netflix gain popularity, the ISP business model is insufficient for delivering quality connections.

Also, nice "pipe dream" pun in the second paragraph. ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> What prevents you from using GCE or AWS and running chunks of your applications near the edge?

<comment><USER13> 1) Databases - if your app servers at the edge need to talk to your database back at your main datacenter, you've just made performance worse. Replicate the data to the edge? Now it's harder to keep consistent.

2) Too many edges - if you regionalize too heavily, you end up restricting your matchmaking pools to smaller groups. Matchmaking theory says that either (a) quality of matches decreases or (b) time to matchmake increases as your pool shrinks. At some point, to have a healthy matchmaking pool in a game with a wide variety of skill levels, you have to consolidate. Riot already had Euro datacenters (with separate accounts, which solves #1).

3) Performance - cloud low-latency UDP performance isn't nearly as good as you can get yourself. Plus, you have more control (and leverage) doing it in- house.

4) Perception - some level of latency becomes imperceptible, 50ms is getting pretty close to that number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The TCP/IP internet is irreparably broken for real time applications. The barriers to new entrants wanting to do the same thing as Riot Games is too high.

I've proposed a scalable mesh network, see IsoGrid.org</comment>


HN, please critique: Business model for Skittles' Super Mega Rainbow Updater - <AUTHOR> http://coding.pressbin.com/55/Business-model-for-Super-Mega-Rainbow-Updater/

<comment><USER2> _But where I think it could really generate some significant business is by targeting writers, particularly those whose works will eventually be spoken — playwrights, script writers, speech writers, that sort of thing._

Wouldn't this primary use-case be easier to do with one of the many available Mechanical Turks?

</comment><comment><USER3> The idea might work given the right circumstances but I think your numbers are a bit off - there's no way a call center employee can 2 or even 1 video a minute. You have to take into account mistakes they make (multiple takes) and editing, unless you plan on doing that yourself (or just have raw video). Also, you probably should charge more than 25 cents - that is such an awkwardly low number that it my deter people from using it ("do I really want a $.25 charge on my credit card?"), not to mention you wouldn't make any money with all the fees.

All that said, teenagers love digital interactivity, especially when it relates to chats and webcams. There's also room for something like this in the advertising space - I'd be willing to pay $2-3 to have someone record a 30-60 second YouTube video promoting my product.

<comment><USER4> Agreed - If I was going to record 15 seconds of video, save it to a file, and upload that file (including logging in to the site it needed to be uploaded to) and then posting it to a third site (including logging in), I'd want 3-4 minutes minimum.

If you want me to do more than mumble the line at high speed I'd want a chunk of time to try it out a few different ways too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> About 15 seconds after your business starts it will be swamped by adolescents asking for videos of people saying obscene things - to amuse and shock their friends.

Hmmn - that might be quite popular when I think about it although there might be problems in some parts of the world. Expect fatwas when people say bad things about various popular prophets.

<comment><USER6> Don't let this comment stop you. You should do it. The only issue I see is the sign-up/ payment issue. If you can get past that hurdle I bet you will get a million requests by day 14 if you can make it on Techcrunch and/or get people to go viral with Tweets and Facebook updates. DO IT!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something similar could be useful for foreign language learning. Say you're learning Swahili and want to know how a phrase / word is pronounced, you would enter the text on a website and have it spoken to you by a native person.

This could be a service offered with a fixed subscription and implemented through Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's so open for abuse it'd be bound to be a success, but whether or not you could grow something long term I think would be the question.

What might work is if people who register can post messages or handle requests for people in exchange for credit. That might damage your revenue stream, or might go the other way.

</comment><comment><USER9> I could be entirely wrong as I am not well versed on credit card payments but last I checked the fee to charge a credit card was 25-30 cents and around 2-3%.

</comment><comment><USER10> "I can't possibly see what could go wrong"</comment>


Netherlands looks to ban sale of all non-electric cars by 2025 - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0414/Netherlands-looks-to-ban-all-non-electric-cars-by-2025 <comment><USER2> Good idea. Let's ban all the flywheel and gas pressure and Stirling engine constructions along with internal combustion engines. This surely will enable more development in the propulsion field.</comment>