Show HN: HuggingFace – Fast tokenization library for deep-learning NLP pipelines - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: Hugging Face, the NLP research company known for its transformers library (DISCLAIMER: I work at Hugging Face), has just released a new open- source library for ultra-fast & versatile tokenization for NLP neural net models (i.e. converting strings in model input tensors).

Main features: \- Encode 1GB in 20sec \- Provide BPE/Byte-Level- BPE/WordPiece/SentencePiece... \- Compute exhaustive set of outputs (offset mappings, attention masks, special token masks...) \- Written in Rust with bindings for Python and node.js

Github repository and doc: [https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/tree/master/tokeni...](https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/tree/master/tokenizers)

To install: \- Rust: [https://crates.io/crates/tokenizers](https://crates.io/crates/tokenizers) \- Python: pip install tokenizers \- Node: npm install tokenizers

</comment><comment><USER2> I love the work done and made freely available by both spaCy and HuggingFace.

I had my own NLP libraries for about 20 years, simple ones were examples in my books, and more complex and not so understandable ones I sold as products and pulled in lots of consulting work with.

I have completely given up my own work developing NLP tools, and generally I use the Python bindings (via the Hy language (hylang) which is a Lisp that sits on top of Python) for spaCy, huggingface, TensorFlow, and Keras. I am retired now but my personal research is in hybrid symbolic and deep learning AI.

<comment><USER3> Hybrid symbolic and NN will be my next area of hobby research, currently getting my masters degree in NLP. Do you have a few good resources to get startedor/read about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe the level of productivity this Hugging face team has.

They seemed to have found the ideal balance of software engineering capability and Neural network knowledge, in a team of highly effective and efficient employees.

Idk what their monetization plan is as a startup, but it is 100% undervalued at 20 million, and that is just the quality of that team. Now, if only I can figure out how to put a few thousand $ in a series-A startup as just some guy.

<comment><USER5> > Idk what their monetization plan is as a startup

> put a few thousand $ in a series-A

Not a good idea.

<comment><USER4> I see them as an acqui-hire target. Especially form Facebook since they are so geographically close to FAIR labs in NY or Google and get integrated into Google AI like Deep Mind did. (esp. since google uses a ton of Transformers any ways)

I can't think of many small teams that can be acquired and can build a company's ML infrastructure as fast as this team.

If they have the money for it, OCI and Azure may also be keeping a look out for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use both SpaCy and HuggingFace at work. Is there a comparison of this vs SpaCy's tokenizer[1]?

1\. [https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic- features#tokenization](https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic- features#tokenization)

</comment><comment><USER7> It used to be that pre-DeepLearning tokenizers would extract ngrams (n-token sized chunks) but this doesn't seem to exist anymore in the word embedding tokenizers I've come by.

Is this possible using HuggingFace (or another word embedding based library)?

I know that there are some simple heuristics like merging noun token sequences together to extract ngrams but they are too simplistic and very error prone.

<comment><USER8> Most implementations are actually moving in the opposite direction. Previously, there was a tendency to look to aggregate words into phrases to better capture the "context" of a word. Now, most approaches are splitting words into sub-word parts or even characters. With networks that capture temporal relationships across tokens (as opposed to older, "bag of words" models), multi-word patterns can effectively be captured by attending to the temporal order of sub-word parts.

<comment><USER7> > multi-word patterns can effectively be captured by attending to the temporal > order of sub-word parts

Indeed. Do you have an example of a library or snippet that demonstrates this?

My limited understanding of BERT (and other) word embeddings was that they only contain the word's position in the 728 (I believe) dimensional space but doesn't contain queryable temporal information no?

I like ngrams as a sort of untagged / unlabelled entity.

<comment><USER9> When using BERT (and all the many things like it, such as earlier ELMO, ULMfit and later ROBERTA/ERNIE/ALBERTa/etc) as the 'embeddings' you provide as input all the tokens in a sequence. You don't get an "embedding for word foobar in position 123", you get an embedding for all the sequence at once, so whatever corresponds to that token is a 728-dimensional "embedding for word foobar in position 123 conditional on _all the particular other words that were before and after it_ '. Including very long-distance relations.

One of the simpler ways to try that out in your code seems to be running BERT- as-a-service [https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as- service](https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service) , or alternatively the huggingface libraries that are discussed in the original article.

It's kind of the other way around compared to word2vec-style systems; before that you used to have a 'thin' embedding layer that's essentially just a lookup table followed by a bunch of complex layers of neural networks (e.g. multiple Bi-LSTMs followed by CRF); in the 'current style' you have "thick embeddings" which is running through all the many transformer layers in a pretrained BERT-like system, followed by a thin custom layer that's often just glorified linear regression.

<comment><USER10> > in the 'current style' you have "thick embeddings" which is running through > all the many transformer layers in a pretrained BERT-like system, followed > by a thin custom layer that's often just glorified linear regression.

Would you say they are still usually called "embeddings" when using this new style? This sounds more like just a pretrained network which includes both some embedding scheme and a lot of learning on top of it, but maybe the word "embedding" stuck anyway?

<comment><USER9> They _do_ seem to be still called "embeddings" although yes, that's become a somewhat misleading misonmer in some sense.

However, the analogy still is somewhat meaningful, because if you want to look at the properties of a particular word or token, it's not just a _general_ pretrained network, it still preseves the one-to-one mapping between the input token and the output vector corresponding to each particular token; which is very important for all kinds of sequence labeling or span/boundary detection tasks. So you can use them just as word2vec embeddings - for example, if you'd do word similarity or word difference metrics with 'transformer-stack- embeddings' then that would work just as well as word2vec (though you'd have to get to a word-level measurement instead of wordpiece or BPE subword tokens) with the added bonus of having done contextual disambiguation; you probably could do a decent word sense disambiguation system just by directly clustering these embeddings; the mouse-as-animal and mouse-as-computer-peripheral should have clearly different embeddings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat related, if someone want to build something awesome, I haven't seen anything that merges lucene with BPE/SentencePiece.

SentencePiece has to make it so you can shrink the memory requirements of your indexes for search and typeahead stuff.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great! Just did a quick test and got a 6-7x speedup on tokenization.

<comment><USER13> Mind sharing what tests your ran & with which setup? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are there examples on how this can be used for topic modeling, document similarity etc? All the examples I've seen (gensim) use bag-of-words which seems to be outdated.

<comment><USER15> Big transformers neural network are probably overkill for topic modeling. More traditional methods implemented in Gensim or scikit learn such as tfidf vectors followed by SVD (aka LSI) or LDA or NMF are probably just fine to extract topics (soft clustering).

<comment><USER15> The reason is that you do not need to finely understand the structure of individual sentences to group documents by similar topics. Word order does not matter much for this task. Hence the success of methods that use Bag of Words (eg TFIDF) as their input representation.

<comment><USER14> It might be that the corpus I was trying to cluster needs better preprocessing, or perhaps better n-grams. Using Bigrams only I saw a lot of common words that were meaningless, but adding them as stop words made the results worse. Hence my wondering if some other vectorization would produce better results.

On a related note, as a newcomer just trying to get things done (i.e. applied NLP) I find the whole ecosystem great but frustrating, so many frameworks and libraries but not clear ways to compose them together. Any resources out there that help make a sense of things?

<comment><USER16> If I understand you problem clearly, you can use TFIDF to reduce the weight of meaningless words.

<comment><USER14> It's not meaningless words - it's common English words that are overloaded and I think considering their position in sentences instead would give better results.

I haven't yet tried TFIDF though so I'll see what that will do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm very familiar with the TTS, VC, and other "audio-shaped" spaces, but I've never delved into NLP.

What problems can you solve with NLP? Sentiment analysis? Semantic analysis? Translation?

What cool problems are there?

<comment><USER18> I believe many folks are particularly attracted to NLP because the Turing test [1] is an NLP problem.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test)

<comment><USER19> Disagree. I think it's value is mostly unrelated to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Question for HuggingFace folks. Your repos do not contain any tests. Why is that? How do you ensure your stuff actually works after you make a change?

</comment><comment><USER21> I didn't realize that particular emoji had a name. I thought it was a play on this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_\(creature_in_Alien_franchise\)#Facehugger)

<comment><USER22> All emoji have a name. I've found emojipedia to be a good source of info about emoji. [https://emojipedia.org/hugging-face/](https://emojipedia.org/hugging- face/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title is off? Should mention Tokenizers as the project.

</comment><comment><USER23> What does tokenization (of strings, I guess) do?

<comment><USER24> The README [1] shows a great example:

The sentence "Hello, y'all! How are you ?" is tokenized into words. Those words are then encoded into integers representative of the words' identity in the model's dictionary.

        >>> output = tokenizer.encode("Hello, y'all! How are you  ?")
        Encoding(num_tokens=13, attributes=[ids, type_ids, tokens, offsets, attention_mask, special_tokens_mask, overflowing, original_str, normalized_str])
        >>> print(output.ids, output.tokens, output.offsets)
        [101, 7592, 1010, 1061, 1005, 2035, 999, 2129, 2024, 2017, 100, 1029, 102]
        ['[CLS]', 'hello', ',', 'y', "'", 'all', '!', 'how', 'are', 'you', '[UNK]', '?', '[SEP]']
        [(0, 0), (0, 5), (5, 6), (7, 8), (8, 9), (9, 12), (12, 13), (14, 17), (18, 21), (22, 25), (26, 27), (28, 29), (0, 0)]

But there's also good detail in the source [2] which says, "A Tokenizer works as a pipeline, it processes some raw text as input and outputs an Encoding. The various steps of the pipeline are: ...."

[1] [https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers#quick-examples- usi...](https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers#quick-examples-using-python)

[2] [https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/tree/master/tokeni...](https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/tree/master/tokenizers#what- is-a-tokenizer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why is this company called HuggingFace?

<comment><USER26> I assume it is a reference to the movie Alien.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best office chair - <AUTHOR>

Post your favorite (or least favorite) office chairs and why. I'm looking for a new chair for my home office. <comment><USER2> I've had a Steelcase Leap chair (<http://www.steelcase.com/na/leap_products.aspx?f=11852>) for about 5 years now. It was simple enough that I had it adjusted to the sweet spot in about an hour or two of sitting in it. I've made slight adjustments over the years, but not too many.

I tried to replace the Leap with a Mirra from Herman Miller. But I just couldn't adjust it to what was comfortable for me. And I didn't like the back. I'm not a fan of the webbing.

I gave it to my wife, and she loves it. But granted I upgraded her from a 80 dollar Office Depot chair :)

You should see if there are office supply stores near you that will let you demo the chairs. Not just for a few minutes but for at least a day.

A friend of mine just bought 15 Leap's in AZ. He was able to get a Leap, Mirra, and a couple of others to test out for a couple of days before making his decision. Might be something to look for in your area.

<comment><USER3> I wish I could say the same about my Steelcase Critereon Plus. I purchased two of them, and have had them both repaired 1/2 dozen times each. Very poor construction quality, especially given their specifications.

<comment><USER4> I love my Steelcase Criterion. It's killer feature for me is the arm rests that slide inward (I have a narrow frame). I had one at $big_company, and managed to hunt down a used model after I left.

In general I've been pretty happy with build quality. However, one of my arm rests is jammed and won't raise atm, and I'm too poor to afford a replacement part.

My office is in a friend's living room. His brother has an Aeron he lets us borrow, so the rule is whoever starts work first gets the Aeron for the day and everyone else has to sit on the folding chairs. =) Gets us going in the morning!

Luckily a neighbor just moved, leaving us several standard office max chairs. As chairs go, they're not much, but they beat the plastic ikea folders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've mounted wheels under an armchair. It's really good. For me at least.

For years I had an old office chair. Got it used from a bank. I was happy with that. But eventually it was worn out. Tried a lot of office chairs. Never found anything like it.

One day it struck me. This armchair of mine, which I used to sit and read in for hours, why not put wheels under it. I did. Four sturdy rotating 4" wheels. Made the chair a little higher which is perfect.

<comment><USER6> Can you please share the photo of this. I want to make one too. thx.

<comment><USER5> Photos posted here:

<http://gallery.me.com/jon.jonsen#100016>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it carries certain baggage with it but I love my second hand Aeron <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeron_chair>.

As a freelancer I've worked in the offices of a good number of large enterprises and so trialled several office chairs. I've found that, once it's set up right for you, the Aeron is hard to beat for comfort, particularly over protracted periods.

</comment><comment><USER8> My 'real' chair is nothing special at all ([http://www.officemax.com/office- furniture/chairs/product-ARS...](http://www.officemax.com/office- furniture/chairs/product-ARS31553)). My problem is I just can't sit still for very long, so I find myself fidgeting _all_ the time. To support this habit, I've got a couple other chairs so I can switch it up during the day.

</comment><comment><USER9> Haider Bioswing 460, which is ergonomic and really flexible for its configuration (but expensive)

<http://www.bioswing.de/de/products/sitzsysteme/b450/>

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/20103101>

Comfortable and a great price too!</comment>


How to Easily Do Object Detection on Drone Imagery Using Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nanonets.com/2018/06/drone-surveying-machine-learning-api/ <comment><USER2> Hey guys, we are building [https://nanonets.com/drone](https://nanonets.com/drone). We were working with a customer from South Africa to monitor construction progress using drone imagery and wanted to share case study based on our experience here. Hope it helps!</comment>


Why there is no Facebook killer: the death of the P2P dream (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.disconnectionist.com/blog/why-no-fb-killer.html <comment><USER2> _This scarily accurate extraction of our personality and needs is advertising gold, and advertisers will pay a lot more for it._

I once liked a dance company on Facebook because I know the person who made their website. Now I see adverts for dance productions. That's not advertising gold; that's a waste of advertising money.

I reckon most people's profiles are like this - a few likes or posts about something that you'd never actually buy and all that ad money is just thrown away. 90% of the adverts could be getting your profile wrong but simple confirmation bias makes us notice that 10% far more than the useless, poorly targeted adverts, so when advertisers survey people they get the impression their profiling is working. Or worse, the ad networks know that the profiling doesn't work but they carry on the myth in order to charge advertisers more.

I might well be wrong on this, but while I see adverts for things that have no appeal to me I'll keep _suspecting_ profiling doesn't actually work.

<comment><USER3> The reality is that not all progress can be brought by for profit organizations. There simply are systemic improvements that can't be monetized.

These should have been the job of the governments, but unfortunatelly, those too are the puppets of big corporations and private interests..

Some people should just break the cat and drive this type of change as an open source movement. I for one am dedicated to try..

I don't think it's a coincidence that Linux, the SYSTEM of OPERATION that actually runs the world is supported by an open source movement..

<comment><USER4> But there's a pretty specific analysis tool for this distinction. Goods like this are called "public goods" and they are both inherently non-rival and non- excludable.

What you say is fine, so long as this tool is in used. But people don't tend to do that.

Also, don't assume that the manner in which open source came to dominate software was inevitable. Had AT&T and SCO been able to come to an accommodation there's no telling what the world may have looked like. Plus, Linux is exceptional because Linus was exceptional. He's a stubborn guy :)

<comment><USER3> Actually on a second thought, I don't think that supporting data privacy is the job or the interests of governments. In fact, they are usually the first ones ready to sacrifice privacy in order to provider you with "security" services.

I wouldn't even define data privacy as "public goods" because you now, it's private, it's really a whole different thing than what governments are willing to provide.

Profit making is again in conflict with data privacy, because there are much more money to make by profiling the hell out of your customers then by selling technology to aid real data privacy.

So there's this niche of progress that can't be pushed neither by governments nor by businesses.

So in order for it to happen, there's the need for another force to drive it. And in my oppinion that force is the open source / grass root movement .

And I don't agree that linux is special because Linus is special. We're talking about a mindset here, and Linus is not the only one having it.

<comment><USER4> I use an adblocker. If your website doesn't like that, I'll stop using your website. So far as I am concerned, how you make money is your problem, not mine.

Data privacy isn't obviously a public good - it's both rival and excludable. There's way to look at it as non-rival, but since much of it comes down to trusted key authority I'd say that makes it rival.

I just recall the world of shareware before open source. It was certainly _a_ way and much was done in that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think Facebook will be dethroned by another Facebook. I also do not think the differentiator for such a new king is technological (e.g. P2P). The only kind of FB rival I can imagine succeeding is an open ecosystem one.

A second FB would have to overcome the network effects, and the only chance for that to happen would be for FB's network effects to decrease.

While negative network effects do occur -- it's what killed Orkut, for instance -- Facebook has learned that lesson well. FB's value for participants has decreased, but is now stable and that network is still a huge barrier for entry.

Technology is largely irrelevant. People do not care if it's P2P, runs on functional code or if it is an engineering marvel. They care about the value provided to them. The article posits that P2P adds negative value, and it is probably right. The article infers from that to the impossibility of a FB killer, which I think is wrong, because the scope of the analysis is wrong.

An open ecosystem social network:

1) Has the possibility of creating use cases that Facebook can't compete with;

2) May be extremely vibrant, if the ecosystem is large enough;

3) Can't be bought by Facebook, as it runs contrary to the main strategy of a walled garden. (It may be bought in order to be killed, though);

4) Can live perfectly well, for an indeterminate amount of time, in second place.

I can't see any other avenue for Facebook's demise.

Side note: Twitter nearly had these characteristics for a while. They squandered the opportunity when they kicked it's developer ecosystem in the nuts. Sad.

<comment><USER6> It seems that the constraint "Can't be bought", or "Can't be bought to be shut down", is an important one and fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a VC-funded startup. That's also why Twitter failed in that respect.

Potentially workable governance models to prevent this kind of takeover: \- Community-driven open source \- Bootstrapped company with limited profit ambition (think GitHub or Basecamp) \- Non-profit/charity organization

If you're a startup millionaire and care about the real-world viability of P2P, decentralization, etc., consider donating to / investing in one of these vehicles instead of looking for the next big business model. Any startup ever _will_ sell out to centralization and control eventually, unless they specifically put themselves in a position where they don't control their own ecosystem anymore (having open-sourced the software and gained a large enough audience that can decide to fork if necessary).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dear <whomever wants to kill facebook> \- the answer is simple: Leverage email.

Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed into threaded comment strings in your client. Embed XMPP chat, and set up enabled-by-default encryption around the whole thing. Leverage mailing lists for your special interest groups and your public pages. Sell server time for managing the mailing lists and image hosting, and for a web client.

The infrastructure is there, just forgotten.

This has been banging around in my head for a few years now, but I'll never have the time to do it myself. If you can poke holes in the core concept - please do. It needs to be fleshed out.

<comment><USER8> > Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed > into threaded comment strings in your client.

Sadly, that is impossible. The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

Outlook even in modern versions still uses the horrifically broken Word HTML engine. Lotus Notes uses, depending on client configuration, either a OS- provided web view or its own stripped-down, worse-than-Word engine.

The webmailer options are even worse. Lotus Notes webmail passes most, though by far not all, HTML tags over to the client, which is pretty cool but you can't do anything with mediaqueries etc. as <style> tags get removed. GMail strips next to everything except images. GMX / Web.de are similar.

And mail support on mobile... don't get me started on this one. Android default mail does stuff differently than the Google Mail app; on iOS Mail at least responsiveness sorta works. Android Lotus Notes Mail is a mixture of "works" and "works not", probably decided by the current position of the moon or whatever.

And Javascript: doesn't work everywhere I tested except on Thunderbird, but there it invokes a prompt...

<comment><USER9> > The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the > hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

And this is widely considered to be a bug and a source of insecurities, not a feature. The few remaining people I know who use Thunderbird use it in text- only mode in order to control its HTML-rendering tendencies.

Most people don't want a full-fledged browser in their email; it opens up too much attack surface, opportunities for "read receipts" and tracking cookies, etc.

That said, I think email is a good and underutilized tool, and it's unfortunate that more MUAs don't support features like digest handling properly. I think there's a pendulum that's going to swing away from public services like Facebook and back to direct-communication services (Snapchat might already be arguably a part of that) and email is already well-positioned there.

But forklifting the web and HTML into email clients is probably never going to happen.

<comment><USER10> Thunderbird by default doesn't load external web content, you have to explicitly allow it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> P2P Facebook needs a killer function to overcome the network effect. If Facebook can compete by throwing money and engineers at it, you loose.

Here's a terrible idea.

Build a desktop app that stores all it's data locally (and is easy to configure with Dropbox et al). The extremely popular social networking activity of sharing photos is indistinguishable from sharing all other kinds of files. Now everyone has a more convenient way to loan movies and books that's difficult for the RIAA to snoop on.

Like I said, terrible idea. What's something legal that Facebook can't just outspend a P2P app on? Other than privacy.

<comment><USER12> What is a "desktop"?

Is that where I place my phone to charge?

<comment><USER11> Ha, way to make me feel old. A mobile app with one of the cloud storage providers can also work without killing your battery and data plan.

<comment><USER13> I think you've just poked the point the article author misses.

I'm not sure I see a technical reason why my nexus of identity has to be physically colocated with my person, and there are a lot of good reasons for it not to be. The important point is that, be it wherever it is, my nexus of identity is not Facebook's or anyone else's but _mine_.

<comment><USER12> Also, why should a nexus be a 1:1 relationship with your person?

Should a person be allowed multiple nexi?

<comment><USER14> That's actually pretty close to what Google+ tried with "Circles" when it launched: the idea that people exist in several distinct yet fluid social universes and that there should be a way to apply fine-grained yet intuitive rules to your sharing behavior.

Turns out most people exist in one social universe, namely Facebook.

<comment><USER15> I'd say it more turned out that Circles were decidedly unintuitive, and far more of a pain to use than Facebook's single list (which can still be heavily customized, most people just don't bother.)

<comment><USER16> I think the circles were fine, the problem g+ had was that it lacked plenty reasonable features (events, anyone? never understood this when google calendar integration would have been a killer feature).

That's facebooks main use case for a lot of people and it's absence made g+ pretty useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a bad excuse.

Today you can do a Facebook that lives in your own server. Your server living in your house and being a simple box that you can buy like a TV or car and is super easy to configure.

I already have something like this, but it is complex to configure as it is not mass manufactured but custom made for me and a small environment of people.

Everything else, an excuse for not working on finding solutions for the problems that you have to face, like with any engineering problem.

Of course you can't replicate the work of more than 500 programmers(facebook) with just one person, but you can go far reusing open source components and coordinating the work of other people.

Instead of trying to replicate facebook(a clone), focus on making something useful for the people getting advantage of distributed computers. Facebook did not try to replicate myspace.

For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media they can control(companies).

<comment><USER18> _> For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media they can control(companies)_

What are some examples of companies or vertical markets that would pay for control that is missing at FB? Publishers seem to be looking for new revenue sources, not control. Are you thinking of advertisers?

There aren't many proprietary content distribution networks. Bloomberg is one example. Note that P2P may conflict with a "control" objective.

Synology NAS has valiantly built a standalone networked home server, complete with NAT hole punching (they run a central broker) and usable "sharing" and "consumption" mobile apps that connect to your home NAS. They earn revenue on hardware sales, similar to iX Systems and FreeNAS. Synology has an OSS pseudo- clone called XPnology, which is apparently compatible with Synology's free mobile apps.

Tanium has a billion-dollar valuation for endpoint management and surveillance, allegedly with P2P techniques: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet- tan...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-tanium-the- secret-cybersecurity-weapon-of-target-visa-and-amazon/) & [https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets](https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think decentralised P2P is really the answer anyway: the answer is separating the content from the convenience.

Facebook killed blogs because when I want to find my friend I just searched for their name, and if I was their friend their content made it to my wall.

Because of Facebook's convenience my friends use it, and because it's a walled garden I am compelled to use it to.

My dream for this kind of thing would be something akin to DNS but for identity (pseudo or not), and an open API for content.

So, Adam knows nothing about computers and creates an account on Facebook, which creates an IdentityDNS entry for him on his behalf.

Belinda is also not that techy, but likes G+'s layout more, and so has an account on there instead. She also has Twitter.

Zer0cool is a massive nerd, and has their own domain and hand-written blog software. They went to some website somewhere and created their IdentityDNS entry, and has hooked up and validated their blog on their domain as their content.

Adam can search for Belinda and Zer0cool in Facebook, which in turn searches IdentityDNS. He can add them to his Facebook wall, and their posts will show up in some fashion (maybe Facebook shows its own posts normally and only shows titles of external blog posts, FB can do what it wants). Belinda can do much the same with G+.

Zer0cool has also added Adam and Belinda, and reads their posts through muttdentity, a mutt clone but for identity stuff.

OR something. I don't know. Effectively something that means that I can choose FB because I like how it displays photos, or because it has the best mobile app, or because it has lots of storage. Or I can run my own blog because I want that control. ETC.

I shouldn't have to use Facebook just because that's all my Dad can work out how to use.

<comment><USER20> Hum, For my point of view Facebook didn't killed blog. Blog is used not only to show pictures of yourself, but writing. Nobody write on Facebook, they only share things. It's totally different, but hey anyway you can make your blog what you when that they are. Multiple account kill the service. You have at less 5 social media on every newspaper website. I don't use anymore twitter and I hope people will do it too. It's really a waste of time using 10 social media. I even don't use Facebook too.

<comment><USER21> You can write or blog on Facebook but few people choose too. Techies seems to flock to medium nowadays... So there is some kind of theming around hosts that decides where you publish. I can see why, in many cases Facebook can be too private to share in the professional world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The P2P network doesn't exist, because it doesn't solve a problem. Facebook solves the problem of "I want to keep in touch with people in my life digitally" and has built a sustainable (to say the least) business model around it.

Being P2P by itself is not a reason to create a social network, unless it brings benefits for users that simply don't exist in FB. What are those? Privacy? Security? Only a small number of people care about those.

Products are not created because they are technically possible - they are created to solve problems. This reasoning is flawed because it starts from the solution, not the problem.

<comment><USER23> Following your line of reasoning it's worth asking what would have to change to make Facebook's business model vulnerable.

When Facebook IPO'ed the biggest technology threat on the horizon was mobile apps [1]. However, the FB folks negotiated that one pretty successfully. Since then they have been very paranoid about new types of chat applications, in short anything that could move communications onto a platform they don't control.

I'm just speculating but the biggest threat to Facebook would be if people started to look for something that Facebook has a hard time delivering. For instance, what if users decided that getting real news from reliable sources was high value? (Something like a return to properly curated journalism rather than entertainment--this is of course just wild speculation.) In this case, it's something that puts a premium on quality of the content, not the size of the network.

Another obvious threat would be new ad delivery technology, which attacks the "buy" side of the network. No doubt FB watches that area _very_ carefully.

[1] [http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile- transi...](http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-transition- on-track-user-base-continues-to-grow-361670)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fundamental problem with article -- says that Skype changed from p2p to centralized because it was a better experience for mobile. It was political, not technological.

I believe it had more to do with 'Project Chess' which was LE/IC access to the Skype calls: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype- nsa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa-access- user-data)

Facetime, which is a similar thing to Skype for the Apple platform used to be p2p in ios4. Patent troll VirnetX sued and won for 600 million dollars to get them to stop being p2p. Facetime has never worked as well since, and VirnetX are still trying to get iMessage and Facetime blocked.

No, p2p works fine. Better than centralized. There are forces that don't wish this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Well yeah, that's one technical reason. But I suspect we would have found a work around if these systems had caught on to begin with. If a site or service is popular, then that can influence what technology is adopted and how we use it.

No, I think the real major reasons are marketing related. For example, Facebook's network effect is very strong, even compared to sites like Twitter and Instagram. The service is only replaceable by one that grows extremely quickly, to the point things don't settle down enough for the site to feel like a ghost town.

And it ties into the real reason said effect is so strong.

These P2P and decentralised networks are only appealing to a certain minority of users.

They're basically marketed as 'censorship resistant' or 'free speech focuses'. And while these are nice things to be, they're not a selling point for 90% of the social media userbase. The vast majority of people either don't feel they're being censored or don't really care about anything controversial.

As a result, the only people using these services are niche groups using subject specific networks and activists banned or unwelcome from the major ones. It's like why Voat failed to unseat Reddit; because the only people who joined were those interested in discussing controversial issues and hence the site wasn't useful for people wanting to discuss more mundane things.

It's the social and marketing factors that really sunk any P2P attempts at a Facebook clone (or any other decentralised social networks). They just don't have value for people wanting to discuss non controversial things.

<comment><USER26> "Censorship resistant" also means, in practice, that a large amount of your content is awful. Whereas the average person wants something with the sharp edges removed. Facebook's moderators, inconsistent as they are, are genuinely adding value.

<comment> guard-of-terra I don't see why do you think such system will force you to experience content you don't want.

It's just when your tastes diverge from what's forced on us as acceptable, you shouldn't let in the dark.

<comment><USER26> There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at it. At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me.

There are entire subcultures of people who make a game of trying to get people to see images they don't want to see. This has been happening since slashdot and goatse.

<comment> guard-of-terra > There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking > at it

This is plain false. HN does it, for example.

> At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me

It's an algorithm, not a moderator. Moderators are currently employed for two things: a) censorship, b) influencing opinions. Everything else algorithms do just fine.

<comment><USER26> HN is also a moderated system, there's this guy called dang you may have heard of.

<comment> guard-of-terra But he's not going around curating your reading lists, does he? That's the point.

In your own P2P Facebook, you'll be your own dang.

<comment><USER27> HN's algorithm for deciding what gets on the first page is not totally trivial. Is it published anywhere?

<comment><USER28> I think it's tweaked periodically, and unpublished to make manipulation harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Isn't it also the case that web usage is much more wide-spread now than it was when Facebook became popular? It just feels off to cram all of your contacts into one platform (the dreaded will my granny see this post effect).

I think end-to-end encrypted social platforms could have a future if they are oriented towards a niche that sees advantages from the encryption and offers federated access for mobile devices in addition to full p2p connectivity.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you want to build a Facebook killer, then answer this question first without coding a single line:

How do you plan to sign up non techie females? Do you have anything to offer to them?

<comment><USER26> More importantly, if you want women to use your service, how are you going to handle the inevitable abuse problems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't have to sell ad data to make revenue.

It makes sense that when Facebook, LinkedIn et. al were set up social networks were something new so people wouldn't understand the benefits enough to pay.

Right now, we've seen what social looks like when you don't pay for it. You become the product.

I would have happily paid for WhatsApp instead of letting them give all my numbers to fb.

<comment><USER32> > I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't > have to sell ad data to make revenue.

But the networks would still do it, even if they didn't have to. Look at Microsoft - you paid hard cash for you copy of Windows, and they still vacuum all your data and behave as if they were scummy cloud company.

Even if you pay, there's no reason for companies not to do this. Neither users nor regulators don't punish companies that spy on their customers and sell their data, so for the companies, it's free money. Why wouldn't take free money?

Sure, they could not be evil, but not being evil doesn't take you far in the business world - see every big company ever.

<comment><USER31> I would love to be able to name a company that's done well without the being evil component.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> He omits a huge source of emerging P2P potential: cloud instances run by power users and businesses. These are currently powering the various blockchain communities and represent the next stage of P2P. Due to the security and accountability advantages of blockchains, these networks could lead to a large-scale "redecentralizion".

<comment><USER34> What blockchain communities represent the next stage of P2P? Twister is the only thing I can think of that vaguely meets that description, and as far as I know it's not particularly thriving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> From my understanding of what he said, he thinks that distributed social media would mean that the hosting would happen from our mobile devices as a P2P network. So yeah, he did completely miss something, that would be a terrible architecture that would not only be completely unreliable, it would offer no scalability, except for really awesome cat videos. Distributed social, such as diaspora allows anyone to host their own social media platform, but also provided a federation interface to other nodes. The problem with diaspora is that it offers a small subset of features compared to Facebook, and the problems they needed to solve, especially with federation and content control, are really difficult. Further, the branding will confuse almost everyone as most people can't be bothered to understand the difference between a site, application, and protocol.

</comment><comment><USER36> One model that could work I thought of works like this:

A packet based P2P network, where peers can also act as buffers to relay the packets. So basically the same as servers in the traditional sever client model. However your account isn't bound to a server like with email or diaspora. So the networks of computers of your friends can act as servers serving your smartphone. Or the developer of the app you use can provide a server that can also send you push notifications.

The real problem for decentral messaging/social networks is discovering your friends. Friends of friends being suggested to you certainly is a good step forward but it's not enough. It doesn't work when creating a new account and when adding people outside of your friend's circle.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think what always gets ignored in these "Facebook sucks, we should use/build X instead" arguments is the grandparents factor.

My gran cannot be expected to learn server administration and security just to have an inferior* version of what she has right now with Facebook. For that matter, that's not a tradeoff you can expect almost any non-tech (or most tech - we have other things to be doing) people to make.

(Inferior, meaning the supposed benefits to her are completely philosophical and theoretical, rather than practical. She doesn't give a tuppeny crap what advertisers are doing with her likes.)

Unless she can right now click on an icon that brings her to something that looks like Facebook and has her family on it and is easy to use, all the alternatives in the world don't matter. And I get the sneaking suspicion she's not in the minority here!

Everyone always starts looking at this from the tech side, as if having the system be P2P should be its primary selling point. No! In the real world, that isn't a selling point any more than something being Free Software is a selling point to anyone who doesn't read Stallman. The "threat" from advertisers, corporations, and governments accessing your Facebook data is going to have to get a lot more practical and a lot less theoretical (the NSA _might_ do X Y and Z!) before that even winds up in the same universe where it can appear on a normal person's radar.

</comment><comment><USER38> The costs of running even a p2p system need to come from somewhere and you need to attract the right people (hubs in the social graph lingo). The trick is incentivizing them. There are going to be adverts somewhere but the people and content producers could get a cut. Synereo has a better chance of succeeding than a wishful thinking p2p open source project because there is a source or funds that can power the network. It still has to come from ads though, unless people pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER39> You can complain about Facebook's appetite for data all you like, but reason Facebook is successful is that most of the users of the site are willing to trade their data for utility. To beat Facebook you need to create a new product based on something that people actually care about, by providing either a better social network, a better news distribution system, or a better way to share photos and memories (to name a few possibilities).

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's very difficult, inefficient, and unreliable for your phone to serve out > data to all-comers: it's a one-way street.

But your phone can talk with your server and anybody who wants to access what you allow them to, can simply talk with your server. It is perfectly possible to host your own server nowadays.

> Imagine if the messages and photos you shared with your friends only lived > on their phones or computers, and not in some server being scrutinised by > security agencies, used for targeting ads, or at risk of being hacked.

Yes, it is possbile by implementing the idea described above where everyone hosts its own data.

Actually I'm working on something like this. Currently I have developed some minimal applications that allow you to share your status and chat. It still uses a single server for now to relay events between the clients, but I am working on making it P2P.

You can check them if you want :

[https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html](https://fruit- fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html) [https://fruit- fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html](https://fruit- fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> "Your 3G connection isn't like your home ADSL or cable internet connection - it is designed for browsing web pages and downloading data off big servers, not serving up content to the whole world, like a mini version of a Facebook or Instagram server."

If you had a container running somewhere in the cloud talking to containers owned by other users then the mobile device doesn't have to be a server?

<comment><USER41> You have to sign up for a new paid service for that. Significant barrier vs doing something off your existing wired home connection for free and having the easy to understand mental model of "stuff running on my PC there in the corner".

Heroku/Lambda/App engine help with that a little but they aren't newbie friendly and there aren't many existing server apps for those that you can just install. Sandstorm has the right idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Technology advances occur because something is provided what people want. Advertisement is not what people want. At least not too much of it. If something better comes up Google and Facebook will die.

As with each technology advance it's impossible to know beforehand what will be a hit. Nobody knew that smartphones will be a hit before the first iPhone came out.

However we all know that advertisement is something companies force down the throat of people. This won't be sustainable in the long term. We will experience the Facebook and Google killer.

Perhaps it's neural networks people can train themselves and providing a layer above all communication technology. Perhaps with these neural networks we will recognize that email is truly all we need for asynchronously communicating with each other.

We will see.

<comment><USER43> Well, tech firms and tech creators want money....so?

unless the incentives for technology creators change this problem is going to remain as old as time.

And we are doing a pretty terrible job of setting incentives which are _not_ monetarily oriented.

<comment><USER42> Yes that's why the people will perhaps run their neural networks themselves. Because nobody will do that for them for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Issue isn't tech, it's that the average person doesn't see any value in what P2P offers.

<comment><USER45> Not to mention the average developer. I just spent the past few days wrangling NAT-punching issues for a small p2p project of mine. To say "the first rule of p2p is don't do p2p" is an understatement.

The (very unfortunate) truth is that p2p is just more difficult than client/server.

<comment><USER46> That problem is partially solved by using a supernode overlay structure. It isn't particular elegant, and it relies on certain nodes being willing to work more for the network - but it can enable nodes behind a NAT to parcitipate relatively easily.

<comment><USER45> Sure, sure (and the tip is much appreciated), but this just goes to show that P2P is more difficult than client/server.

The point is that one has to have a very good reason to use a P2P architecture, as it tends to _create_ problems.

<comment><USER44> Maybe it's me, but I'd assume the many-to-many is more complex that one-to- many, especially when laid on top of systems designed for one-to-many.

<comment><USER45> Good point. I was thinking of issues like peer discovery and NAT punching, but it's true that traffic topology changes as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> TLDR: someone has to pay the bill. If users don't, advertisers will.

<comment><USER34> Not a problem for email, which is P2P.

<comment><USER48> Most peoples personal email these days is paid for by advertising.

<comment><USER34> Sure, but it's not something that makes the P2P not work.

The "problem" is that users have to either administer a server, pay for a service or accept ads, and they mostly choose the latter. I'm not crazy about the fact they make that choice, but the fact the choice exists is not really a problem with the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At the moment the best plan for that seems to be, make sure that if Facebook somehow kills itself the best alternative is a P2P alternative.

Excessive advertising or conspicuous, harmful info sharing seem like the most likely ways Facebook might drive people away. Obviously the network effect means they're going to have to fuck up quite badly to drive people to a competitor.

</comment><comment><USER49> The reason why there is no Facebook killer yet is that the telecommunications act, [1], does not extend yet to mass communication in the form of social networks.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996)

<comment><USER18> Care to expand? There was a brief period of telco (CLEC) competition, followed by a series of mergers which returned the landscape to almost the same as the one preceding the Act. If such an Act applied to social networks, how would you envision the effects?

<comment><USER49> Well, take this quote:

> Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive > externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not > interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers.

Since social media are communications services, and also strongly exhibit network effects, the act could not only lower the barrier to entry, but actually create the possibility of entry (which is now virtually nonexistent for any newcomer, even if you have the money of Google).

<comment><USER18> Good point. In practice, ILECs did everything possible to delay the provisioning of interconnects, until most CLECs failed. But it was a good objective, albeit difficult to enforce. Without a physical layer monopoly (social networks), there would be less plausibility for broken interconnections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder didn't want to sell.

<comment><USER51> Zuckerberg is a smart competitor. If only he'd sell the site to Yahoo or Murdoch it would be much easier to compete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Maybe we need something in the middle of p2p and centralized. Main big server by company works like current facebook and the ability to create your page on your p2p node if needed. And you will can choose between a general server or host p2p node...

</comment><comment><USER53> Very few people care about the issues raised by the author. From a practical pov, I think the best way to create something like this would be from some prebuild community that might care like Burning Man or something.

</comment><comment> luke-stanley Some Retroshare developers are working on an mobile app for Android and like Bittorrent it won't need a server farm. Peers can carry their own weight using home servers that can talk to phones etc.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think a P2P social network that positioned itself as a counter-cultural movement could do pretty well. People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool.

<comment><USER55> > People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool.

Funny enough, this is exactly how Facebook first marketed itself: only for students of Harvard, and then only for college students.

Once it had enough on-board members, it pivoted and started allowing the general public, until today where even your grandmother uses it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> If P2P is dead, does that mean that 99% of cryptocurrency traffic go through server farms?

</comment><comment><USER57> You are solving the wrong problem. The reason there's no FB killer is the network effect. You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve.

<comment><USER58> > _You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate > it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve_

Nobody except Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, _et cetera_

<comment><USER57> Instagram = photo sharing app

Snapchat = chat app

Pinterest = photo sharing app

They are not social networks. They have social elements, but that's not their core design. And none of them are FB killers.

Google+ and Diaspora are examples of social networks, but they couldn't solve the network effect problem.

<comment><USER21> Umm Facebook lets me chat and share photos with family..?

<comment><USER57> Yes, so? These are secondary functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> There is no Facebook killer because of the lack of interest of EU industralists for the Internet. They dont care because they dont see it as an infrastructure. They think it's a gadget. De minimis non curat praetor.

</comment><comment><USER60> The article is very ignorant. The internet remains primarily a P2P technology, and will probably continue to be that way forever. The amount of valuable resources on the internet which are utilizing P2P methods are 10000000 to 1 compared to the number of Facebooks.

Also consider that Facebook's #1 product, social blogging, is not profitable, and can never ever be profitable. 100% of their profits are made in other businesses which they've connected to their brand name, which is the only reason for their success. For example, microtransaction-scam "video games".

This is a typical article by someone who does not really understand the internet and has not been using it for very long.

</comment><comment><USER61> There is no Facebook killer because the average user doesn't care about privacy. It's the same misunderstanding about Apple. Sure, techies of the world might rather have a rooted droid, but the vast majority of the world just wants something that works. They don't really care about ideals.</comment>


It's now illegal in Russia to share an image of Putin as a gay clown - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/05/its-now-illegal-in-russia-to-share-an-image-of-putin-as-a-gay-clown/?tid=sm_tw <comment><USER2> That only took a couple years to go from internet extremism to gay putin clowns.

[https://themoscowtimes.com/news/internet-extremism-bill- pass...](https://themoscowtimes.com/news/internet-extremism-bill-passes-first- duma-reading-30613)

Something, something, slippery slope?

<comment><USER3> Well, this is how power functions of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      >> A Russian court has ... sentenced
      >> the culprit to compulsory psychiatric care.

[https://twitter.com/MoscowTimes/status/849413473813639168](https://twitter.com/MoscowTimes/status/849413473813639168)

Eek.

<comment><USER5> That's part of the Russian tradition of forced psychiatric care. Sounds like a case of "sluggish schizophrenia" to me.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/30/countries-where-you- coul...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/30/countries-where-you-could-go-to- jail-for-calling-the-president-a-dick/)

Not condoning what's happening in Russia, just pointing out how prevalent similar practices are around the world.

<comment><USER7> Turkey, Poland, South Africa: these are parts of the same story, of a global rise in populism-exploiting authoritarian governments.

Thailand, Iran: did we expect better?

The only interesting example here is that you can get in trouble for calling Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands a "whore".

<comment><USER8> Please don't call Poland "authoritarian" \- in fact I would argue that we have more democracy and civil liberties than

Germany (noone here is censoring newspapers which write unconvenient facts, like that about immigrants raping women),

Sweden (you won't be arrested for criticizing government's immigration policy),

UK (noone is trying to make encryption illegal),

or USA (noone here is creating mass surveilance programs, or requiring you to provide all your online accounts with passwords on entry, or forfeiting your cash without even charging you with something).

There's just normal, democratically elected government and a bunch of paranoid celebrities and journalists who make a lot of noise and FUD.

<comment><USER9> No, criticizing the Swedish government's immigration policy will not get you arrested.

<comment><USER10> Sweden has a clear religious bias: a muslim imam can[1] be anti-gay, while a christian pastor cannot[2].

[1] [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-23/sweden-hate- speech-...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-23/sweden-hate-speech-just- imams)

[2] [http://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/al- mohler/crimi...](http://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/al- mohler/criminalizing-christianity-swedens-hate-speech-law-1277601.html)

<comment><USER9> What has that got do with the current topic?

Åke Green was not charged for critizing the government, but for denigrating homosexuals. And the article you cited does not mention that he was aquitted by the Supreme Court of Sweden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Streisand Effect is going to hit this hard.

<comment><USER12> So what? No one in Russia will start drawing gay-putins, of the fear being subject to compulsory psychiatric treatment. And no one outside Russia is going to draw it because they don't care.

<comment><USER13> GIS for "gay Putin" suggest that plenty have already been drawn, and not all of them seem to be likely Russian in origin.

I kind of suspect that will continue, if not accelerate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Things are getting worse every day here, consider these:

[http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-activist-convicted- reposting-r...](http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-activist-convicted-reposting- repost-absurd-extremism-semenov/28375569.html)

[http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-supreme-court-review- convictio...](http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-supreme-court-review-conviction- video-repost/28338293.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> They would be surprised to know what "putín" means in the slang of many Spanish-speaking countries.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ironic, the list of banned images is hosted on [http://minjust.ru/ru/node/243787](http://minjust.ru/ru/node/243787)

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't help but think that almost every future biography of Putin will mention this law, and the most unflattering ones will contain examples. Sort of a long-term Streisand Effect.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Future Buzzfeed article: "Only 21st century kids will remember these 10 images of Putin in drag. Number 8 would have gotten you life in prison!"

<comment><USER16> _" Number 8 would have gotten you life in prison!"_

That's _Art Reeducation Camp_ , comrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> LOL, Russian Government apparently don't understand how Internet really works.

<comment><USER18> You underestimate them. They've created a web of vaguely worded, overbroad laws which everybody is violating all the time without even trying. It allows the government to demand any user's data at any time, to have all Russian ISPs block access to any site by administrative fiat, and to bring up on charges anyone they choose. It's been working quite well - not in hermetically blocking access to some stupid image, but in reducing traffic to opposition sites by 90% (I believe that this is what they boasted about when they first blocked access to Navalny's blog) and in distracting a number of people from their work with endless legal trouble. Not much of a LOL.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. The value in this kind of censorship isn't that the government can put troublemakers in jail. It's in scaring everyone into considering how what they're about to view or write will look to the government years from now, before they view or write it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's also illegal in France to insult officials.

<comment><USER21> I believe thats a _was_ not is

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/07/26...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/07/26/yes- it-really-was-a-crime-in-france-to-insult-the-president-until-this-week-heres- why/?utm_term=.1a16ba5290bb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't know how insulting someone, specially if it is the president of the country should be totally ok.

Freedom of expression should end when the right of others to be respected starts.

It is not ok in most of the countries of the world.

Certainly in the US when I was living there it was not ok to insult the President, note the president with capitals because for Americans there is only one president in the world and it is theirs. The President was a demi God, like the founding fathers, you better behave or else.

Probably this has changed with Trump and the WaPo, NewYorkTimes, The Economist and BBC all day trying to shoot him down.

I was a long time Putin critic but now after so long non sequitur, ab hominem, argumentum ad passiones Westerm Media coverage trying to create a new cold(or hot) war, I am starting to defend him.

Those newspapers used to be serious but they are taking the way of Reddit(that used to be as serious as HN). They are blinded by personal hate and becoming more and more war propaganda.

<comment><USER23> Why has this been downvoted?

<comment><USER24> Because it is halariously misinformed and not deserving of the respect he thinks we all should have. It is quite ironic really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't see the big deal. I'm all for it. I know plenty of countries where such unnecessary and unfounded attempts at publicity and attention are illegal, including my own home country. Saying he's a gay clown is pretty much fake news. Everybody hates fake news.

<comment><USER26> _Everybody hates fake news._

Well there's this also thing known as "satire", you know.

<comment><USER27> Actual satire is one thing, but can a childish insult such as calling someone a "gay clown" really be classified as satire?

<comment><USER28> I don't know how else to put this, but: yes. Yes it can.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup Litsay.com - <AUTHOR>

http://www.litsay.com/
Litsay is a website for posting creative writing (short stories, poetry, novels, plays, etc.).
It's intended to be for writing what Youtube is for videos.  Members can post writings, comment, vote, and create communities.
What do you think?  Any suggestions?
Also do you have any good ideas on the best way to market the site?
Thank You. <comment><USER2> You might want to tweak the ranking algorithm so that the front page can not be dominated by one person/genre? Right now everything is by "podobuzz" in comedy. And while they are definitely funny submissions I am not sure if it gives a clear indication that the site is meant for more than funny papers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now the front page shows the latest writings, regardless of votes. I did this because especially as it's starting there weren't enough people voting and the popular links remained too static.

It's actually been pretty rare for one person to post so much work at once. It just happened to be that way today. I think once the traffic increases a bit there will be too many people posting for one to dominate the front page.

I may look into making the algorithm for the front page not dominate like that in the future though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Direct link <http://www.litsay.com/></comment>


How the UK found Japanese speakers in a hurry in WW2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33860778

<comment><USER2> Another of the SOAS intake at that time was Bernard T Smith, an RAF officer, who was posted to Japan in 1946 to take part in the rebuilding process. Bernard was subsequently involved in the UK computing industry. His paper on a general purpose query language, SPECOL, is interesting to read today given it was published in the 60s. ([http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/121.full.pdf](http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/121.full.pdf))

(My company published a Japanese translation of his 1946 memoirs and I had the very good fortune to meet Bernard. Sadly, he passed away last year).

<comment><USER3> Interesting, thanks. Btw I checked SPECOL on Wikipedia and there is no entry (for the query language) - maybe someone can remedy this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on the accounts in the article, it seems that Britain was unprepared for conflict with Japan, and the crash language program basically failed.

Years ago, I read in a book or magazine article that the British Imperial service was actually quite strong when it came to language instruction. In Malaya, as I recall, they were able to teach officers Cantonese, Hokkien, and other Chinese dialects that are quite hard for non-native speakers to master. I assume that the diplomatic service was similarly effective when it came to training their officers in the languages required to carry out their overseas missions.

So, British officials were able to learn foreign languages, including obscure Asian languages used in their colonies. Yet Japanese was not considered a priority, even though Japan had been regarded as an expansionist regional power for decades (which every Western colonial power was aware of, thanks to Japan's concessions in China, its puppet state in Manchuria, and other militaristic activities/ambitions in the 1920s and 1930s).

<comment><USER5> Anthony Burgess writes about this in his memoir _Little Wilson and Big God_ :

"Colonial functionaries had to learn the major language of their territory at a formidable level. A kitchen jargon, good enough for wives, with bad grammar and a master-race pronunciation, was usually preferred by the natives, who did not believe it was possible for a foreigner with a white skin to learn their language. Colonial civil servants had to disconcert these natives with a linguistic mastery, including a control of many registers, equal to, or greater than, their own. In Malaya, there were many languages, but Malay was considered, for political reasons, to be the obligatory specialisation. You could, if you were mad enough, learn Hakka or Cantonese or Kuo-Yu or Tamil or Hindi or Urdu, but you had to take examinations in Malay. You had to take the Standard One examination in your first year and the Standard Two before the end of your first three-year tour. If you failed, an efficiency bar was invoked, and you were not entitled to annual pay increments."

Burgess was by his account unusually competent linguistically, passing Standard Two by the end of his first year (which made him, he says, disliked) and Standard Three by the end of his tour (which made him hated).

[Edit: Burgess write of his first boss in Malaya that "During the war he had had the chance to learn Japanesr, and he had been sent on a course with fine amenities, including recording apparatus. He had used this apparatus for recording popular songs. I id not think this funny."]

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article makes frequent use of the term Sixth-former, which I hadn't heard before:

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

It appears to be the equivalent of 11th and 12th grade in the US.

<comment><USER7> Yup, it's the part of UK school that happens post compulsory education (so after 16yrs old).

Basically post-16 you can go out and work, or learn a trade, go to a trade- school, or continue with your more formal education at 6th Form level at either your school or a college (and we treat colleges as different to a university).

<comment><USER8> Also interesting for Americans is that in the six-form you will start to specialise down to three or four subjects, one of which you may study at university.

People say UK degrees are short, and PhDs here are even shorter, but in part that's because at 16 I was already specialising in computer science, maths and physics.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, this creates an adverse effect of specialising in what you're good at and what will be best for qualifying you for the type of degree you want to do, at the expense of a broader education.

I too took Maths, Physics and Computing to A level because I knew I'd want to end up doing a Physics or Computer Science degree, and because I knew these subjects were my safest bets for As. For those outside the UK education system, all As at A-level is essentially the minimum requirement for getting into the best UK universities, so you're under a lot of pressure to ensure you get them if you want to go to one of these.

I would have really liked to carry on studying other things - French, in particular. But because there would have been more of a risk of me 'dropping' to a B in French, as opposed to a maths/science subject, though I would have enjoyed it I would have been foolish to do so under that system.

Instead I ended up taking French night classes years later, when I was out of University and the general educational funnel where you are strongly incentivised to focus solely on your specialisation of the moment for the best grade(s). It was much harder than it would have been at 16, and I'm much worse at French now than I could have been as a result, which is a real shame.

Specialising early has benefits, for sure, but a very real drawback is that you have to sacrifice the development of other skills, knowledge and interests to do it properly. I'm not convinced 16 is a better age than 18 to start doing that, even if it means you're ultimately in education a year or two longer.

<comment><USER10> Just to cheer you up a bit, I taught EFL (English as a Foreign Language) for 5 years and did quite a lot of study into language acquisition. I now firmly believe that it would not have been any easier for you to learn a language at 16 than at your current age. In fact, you have many other advantages at an older age that would argue that you will do much better now.

I could write a book on the subject, but very quickly, the myth that children learn faster than adults is just a myth. In fact, the average child (who is doing almost nothing other than studying their native language in every waking moment) learns about 1000 new word families per year up until they reach 20 (at which point they will have acquired about 20,000 word families). "Word family" means a word and it's associated extensions -- police and policeman are one word family. It also includes conjugation/inflection of verbs, etc.

The average 5 year old has about 5000 word families and probably about 2000 grammatical constructs. It takes them 5 years to learn that. Talk to a 5 year old so you can get a sense of what kind of proficiency that means ;-). A 10 year old has about 10,000 word families and about 3000 grammatical structures (basically all except very strange ones). They can't read a newspaper and understand it, but they can watch your average movie or TV show without any difficulty. To achieve adult level proficiency with an ability to read news papers, read technical documentation, write well in your job, etc. takes about 18-20 years. Many, many people in the general population fail to reach that level.

Your failure has very little to do with your age. If you spent 10 years studying French full time, you could do much better than a 10 year old. Your failure has to do with the fact that languages are taught very, very, very poorly at schools (even private night schools). There are unreasonable expectations (like 2000 words of vocabulary -- words, not word families! -- will make you "fluent"). Also, the instruction tends to focus on teaching you grammatical rules from which you tortuously try to construct sentences. If you diligently apply yourself you will be able to construct many grammatically correct sentences... which are idiomatically wrong and hence unhelpful unless you have very accommodating conversation partners.

My big helpful hints:

\- Don't compare your fluency/proficiency in French with that of your native language. It will take you at least 20 years to reach that level, unless you find some amazing shortcuts.

\- Learn languages by sentence, rather than by vocabulary or grammar. Take an exemplar that you don't know the meaning to and learn it. Don't bother with grammar rules unless you just happen to like grammar.

\- If you happen to like grammar, study it in French, not English. This will give you a wonderful supply of exemplar sentences to learn.

\- Study frequently for short periods of time. 15 minutes 3 times a day will give you _much_ more ability than a 10 hour session once a week.

\- Study realistic sentences. Read books. Doesn't matter what. Just struggle through and memorize the meaning of any exemplars that you don't know.

\- Watch TV with subtitles. As much as you can.

\- Get a lot of French music (with lyrics). Learn them and sing them with the original. Record yourself and study the differences.

\- Don't ever give up. Ever. Even if you give up, start again. Start today. Start now. It's only 15 minutes. How is 15 minutes going to hurt you?

\- Find a reason to continue doing this. It doesn't matter what it is, but you need reasons to fuel you for at least the next 5-10 years.

Your 16 year old self may have been able to comprehend the basic of basic french basics as they shoved it down your throat at school (possibly without actually letting you speak). Your older self actually has a chance to learn the language with fluency and proficiency as long as you take a realistic approach. Good luck!

<comment><USER9> What a helpful and inspiring reply, thanks a lot!

The only one of your hints I've properly followed in the past is the TV with subtitles one (specifically, watching a French series called engrenages [spiral] which by the way is fantastic!) and I agree that this really does a lot of good - it seemed to cement a lot of stock phrases and expressions by osmosis. I wasn't necessarily concentrating too hard on the language, more just engaged in the storyline, but was picking up a lot of things purely through repetition, in situational contexts, etc - I'm no expert but think this probably closely simulates how language is learned naturally through listening to parents, teachers, etc.

<comment><USER10> If you are interested in the subject a very popular set of hypotheses at the moment come from Stephen Krashen of the university of California. He has helpfully put his book online: [http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practi...](http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf)

I will say that, like many studies in psychology, I find his research to be less than rigorously tested. I think it is reasonable to keep a skeptical eye, but even if the work is guided by intuition, it appears to be very good intuition.

Very quickly. There are 5 main hypotheses:

\- Acquisition-Learning distinction hypothesis that states that language acquisition (ability to use the language freely without undue conscious thought) is different than learning (being able to remember facts about the language). Acquisition is required for fluency.

\- Natural Order hypothesis states that grammar constructs in language are acquired in a certain order, no matter what order you teach the material. This has actually been show in studies and verified independently. Of the 5 hypotheses, I think this is the most rigorously tested. Somebody actually proposed the natural order for English grammar, but I can't find the link. It is (surprisingly) not very important what it is (see below)

\- Monitor hypothesis states that there is a process in your brain which essentially scans language input and output and states whether it parses or not. For example, "Harold and me are going to the store", _sounds_ wrong even if you don't know that "me" should be used as an object of the sentence, but is instead being used as a subject.

\- Input hypothesis (the most important, but also most controversial hypothesis). Acquisition results largely/only from being exposed to input that you understand (input being language that you hear or read). In other words, in order to acquire language, it is sufficient to expose yourself to language that you can understand (in any way -- it being explained, obvious from context, etc, etc). Practice with output (speaking, writing) is not necessary (though, personally I think it may be helpful in some circumstances -- certainly helpful just from the acquisition of the physical skill of forming the sounds).

\- Affective filter hypothesis states that language acquisition is hampered (and perhaps halted altogether) in situations of stress. Language acquisition occurs when the person is in a relaxed environment, without any pressure to achieve anything in particular (obviously a big problem for classrooms if true).

There is one other corollary which is quite important, known as "i + 1". It states that when language acquisition occurs, if your current ability is "i", then you will automatically acquire "i + 1" along the lines of the natural order hypothesis. As long as you are exposed to the material in a way that allows you to understands what it means (again, though context, explanation, etc) you will naturally acquire the next bit that you need. There is no need to teach to the natural order (and in fact Krashen suggests that it is counter productive because you limit what the students are exposed to).

So the upshot is that you simply have to expose yourself to language that you can understand and you will acquire language. There is no need (and it may be counter productive) to limit the types of grammar that you are exposed to because you will automatically acquire the next bit that you need in the natural order as long as you are exposed to it. Limiting the types of grammar you are exposed to will only slow you down. Learning (as opposed to acquisition) is not necessary, but can be helpful in strengthening your monitor (which is good for providing feedback). However, Krashen warns that too much reliance on the monitor (as is common in classroom teaching) will not lead to acquisition.

I would add a few personal observations. My experience is that these hypotheses largely fit what happened in my classroom and in my own study of Japanese. Krashen does not talk extensively about the role of memory in acquisition, nor does he talk about the need for repeating exposure to certain input. I think he is probably right that it is unnecessary to consider this, but my experience is that memory helps to speed the process by allowing you to understand more input.

This is why I suggest memorizing the meanings of sentences. If you do so, you will have more context for trying to understand new input. It's not really important for acquisition, per se, but it gives you a super fast look up table of examples so that you can understand more new input. Especially when coupled with reading (where you can progress at any speed that you like), this has dramatically improved the pace with which I could learn Japanese. It really appeared to help my students as well.

There are probably lots of study techniques that would work according to these hypotheses. Even the "study lots of grammar" technique is not at all bad if it is coupled with "read a lot of books and struggle through comprehending the sentences using the grammar rules you learned". The problem is that most teachers couple grammar memorization with language _output_ , leading to students who know lots about a language, but if they acquire anything it is a kind of baby language of non-idiomatic phrases that they invent themselves (like... programmers... ahem...)

One other very important thing to realize is that there is not anywhere enough time to get the repetition necessary to acquire large proficiency in a language in the classroom. It _must_ be self study!!! Again, this is where most people (and especially teachers) get it wrong. Even when I ask teachers, "How did you become fluent in X?", they _never_ reply "at school". And yet, they still believe they can teach people to become fluent in a language at school.

Just as a caveat, there _are_ some classroom techniques evolving which seriously limit the scope of language in order to teach fluency of a small subset in the classroom. This can work very, very well if you are simply teaching the students how to continue on in their own study once they gain confidence in their ability to become fluent in a small subsection of the language. Unfortunately, the hubris of teachers (like programmers) is largely unbounded and for some reason they think they can go beyond this role...

Hope you found this interesting. I really should put this content somewhere semi-permanent. I seem to type the same thing every few month ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > and Britain's huge military base in Singapore had fallen.

"Had given up so quickly it's a bloody cheek for any Englishman to use that joke from the Simpsons about surrender monkeys" would be more accurate.</comment>


Creative resume site - <AUTHOR> http://www.dearlisarudgers.com

<comment><USER2> Did she get hired???

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know, but good question.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Total karmic wealth of all HN? - <AUTHOR>

If you add up the karma of all user accounts what value do you get? <comment><USER2> 32553783 and counting.

<comment><USER3> I converted that to USD and it came out to $0.00.

There may be an error in my math.

<comment><USER4> Karma isn't worth anything directly but on HN it is a fair proxy for comment quality -- and quality HN comments have a monetary impact.

For one thing, quality comments take time and effort to write. Suppose a comment takes 5 minutes per to write per karma point earned. Then 32553783 karma points are worth 32553783*5/60/24/30 ≈ 3767.8 man-months or approximately 314 man-years not spent doing something else.

This isn't to say that HN comments just lose the authors (or their employers) money due to opportunity cost. I would not be surprised if for a number of HN users their commenting led to new clients and business partners, not to mention exposure for their open source projects or simply memorable discussions the impact of which is harder to estimate in monetary terms. (For example, the recurrent discussions about Stoicism have made converts.)

Then some comments may not make the author money -- at least not as directly as getting a new client -- but may be worth a lot in terms of the money they make others; patio11's long comment history comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not an admin, so I can't speak to what they have available. But as a hacker...

Since the usernames are not queryable via an integer (e.g. user?id=1235654321) it's not exactly the most trivial of things. You'd have to go through an endless amount of posts, get every possible username from the comments, go through all stories submitted, grab their usernames, and then loop through the HN API and grab karma info.

<comment><USER6>
        select sum(karma) from user_data;

If the HN server uses an SQL database and has a table users containing the user names and their karma - and they must have something like that since the karmas are displayed on the profiles.

<comment><USER7> Flat files and Lisp macros, with everything stored as closures in RAM, AFAIK. HN doesn't use a relational database at all[0], unless they added one recently.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just noticed my profile had a section explaining average karma. But I don't see where my average karma is shown. (Or is my main karma number actually the average it's talking about?)

<comment><USER9> Do you use an extension or something with HN? I think I had such a description from an extension I used, and the description persisted after HN decided to stop showing average karma.

<comment><USER8> Yeah totes! Thanks for pointing that out. It's hnes. I guess its doing something there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also I'm now wondering what's the total karmic wealth of reddit, stackexchange and Facebook each?</comment>


Big Brains, Small Minds - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Brains-Small-Minds/236480 <comment><USER2> The process of trying to unravel the gordian knot of cultural evolution may develop the ability to think critically, but it is surely a sub-optimal method for doing so. Imagine if people learning science were never presented with a unified model or complete picture, but instead provided all the original research papers and told to come to their own conclusions? If the humanities want to remain relevant they need to distill themselves into a valuable and cohesive whole.</comment>


Reaching the Mach layer - vezzy-fnord http://blog.wuntee.sexy/reaching-the-mach-layer/?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> In addition to XPC, there is also Mach IPC that uses the Mach Interface Generator. The best documentation for that is Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, by Amit Singh, particularly Chapter 9. Unfortunately not updated since 2006, so missing GCD and XPC, among other things.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Probably the best still remains _Mach 3 Kernel Principles_ : [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/doc/osf/ker...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/doc/osf/kernel_principles.ps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Awesome work.

 _> More importantly, I can start fuzzing message contents to bootstrap/launchd! A simple bit flipping fuzzer has led to about 5 unique crashes._

Hopefully in forked child, not PID1?

<comment><USER3> He's doing everything in a VM anyway, so it should be trivial to reset the system.</comment></comment>


Commercial Open-Source: Interview with Luca Passani - <AUTHOR> http://www.opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2012/10/commercial-open-source-interview-with-luca-passani-wurfl-creator-and-scientiamobile-cto.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on this article A-GPL sounds like a good idea for applications and maybe for libraries used in products. Probably not so good idea for libraries used primarily by sysadmins and other in-house engineers.</comment>


Android apps can take pictures and video with just the storage permission - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/android-camera-app-bug-lets-apps-record-video-without-permission/ <comment><USER2> Dup of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574511)

and headline isn't quite right; the bug has been patched.</comment>


If Trayvon Martin Were White And George Zimmerman Were Black - <AUTHOR> http://thepoliticalfreakshow.us/post/54972680080/race-reversal-a-hypothetical-scenario-of-what

<comment><USER2> Several points I'd like to make here:

1) Quit letting the media do your critical thinking. There's no racial factor to this case.

2) The media was frothing at the mouth to turn George Zimmerman into a "White Hispanic." What the hell is that? He's Hispanic.

3) I hate to burst your bubble, but black-on-white crimes happen every day and they go largely unreported. Statistics don't lie.

4) Blacks that whine and have this "poor me" victim mentality need to wake the eff up and realize they don't have to subscribe to the thug culture everyone seems to promote (which Trayvon was a part of). Opportunities abound. And whites need to stop being apologetic about something that happened ages ago.

5) This isn't the 50s and 60s anymore. Race is not a factor. Stop perpetuating the BS.

6) Lastly, if Trayvon's parents were worth half a shit, he'd have never been in this situation. They should turn themselves in for failed parenting.</comment>


Advanced emacs user: Mary Rose Cook Setup - <AUTHOR> http://mary.rose.cook.usesthis.com/

<comment><USER2> Erm, she doesn't really tell us about her Emacs setup, so what's so advanced about it? Especially considering the long list of auxiliary apps that could potentially be replaced by sundry Emacs modes (Mail.app, iCal, Notational Velocity etc.). Her .emacs directory isn't _that_ complex.

I do like the usesthis posts, including this one, and I'm not trying to be too negative, just wondering about the title…

<comment><USER3> She links to her config: <https://github.com/maryrosecook/emacs>

<comment><USER4> still don't see justification for advanced

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "When I started working at Ableton, I had to use Linux on the desktop for the first time."

I am curious why she had to use Linux at Ableton given that they don't support Linux with any of their products.

<comment><USER6> The choice for devs at Ableton is Linux or Windows. The company has Macs, too, but not for primary development machines.

<comment><USER7> Do Ableton have dev offices in the UK? I thought they had NY/Berlin offices and that was it.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Ableton only have offices in Berlin and New York City.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "My dream setup would be some sort of crazy laptop that was small enough to keep in my back pocket but could be folded out so it had an adequately-sized keyboard and monitor."

Sounds good to me.

<comment><USER9> Sort of almost there: Airplay and a Bluetooth keyboard. I think we're on the verge... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Still waiting to give someone money that can really streamline the Emac learning process, having a series of daily exercises, etc. I don't want a tutorial mode -- I want something consistent supervised by Emac experts. A six-month program perhaps?

<comment><USER11> Six months? If you really want to pay money, then why don't you just spend an hour watching the Peepcode "Meet Emacs" screencast for twelve bucks, and then spend two weeks applying what you learned?

Don't make it seem harder than it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does one become an "Advanced Emacs User"?

I say this as I've been using Emacs pretty much every day for about 2-3 years, yet I can't help but feel I've only ventured a couple of miles into the journey.

I use Emacs not just for coding, but organising and note taking, file management, shell, git (just beginning to), irc, sometimes for browsing and occasionally twittering. I know (and love) registers, macros, jumping around with "the mark". However I feel as thought I have reached the so called "Plateau Effect" where I'm not advancing any further.

There are a bunch of good blogs out there about Emacs which I read occasionally as well as flicking through the wiki

* <http://emacsblog.org/>

* <http://www.masteringemacs.org/>

* <http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/>

* <http://www.emacswiki.org/>

But, I still feel as though I am no where near what can be called an "advanced user". I feel as though there is still so much more Emacs has to offer, but I just can't find it.

I guess my question is: where do I go from here? How does one become truly advanced?

Sorry for hijacking this thread, and thanks in advance for any pointers.

P.S. FWIW my emacs.d is on github: <https://github.com/ibrow/.emacs.d>

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER13> I'm 2 years into emacs myself and end up with the same feeling, in my opinion the Advanced user uses the help before online documentation, because everything is provided in emacs the self documenting text editor, not only that but Advanced really means learning Elisp so that whatever you want to implement can be done to your liking not someone else's template, but I do know this for sure I do love emacs and I mean that It's the one tool that has the same model I think in one tool many platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hmm. Mary is awesome and lovely. But she uses Emacs and I use Vim. That's... that's... allowed, I guess. ;-)

<comment><USER15> The two aren't mutually exclusive. There's Cream for a simpler Vim, and Evil for Vim bindings in Emacs.

I've been using Evil+Emacs for the past month and it's quite nice.</comment></comment>