Facebook Dives into Home Device Market with Video Chat Product Named "Portal" - <AUTHOR> https://cheddar.com/videos/exclusive-facebook-dives-into-home-device-market-with-video-chat-product-named-portal <comment><USER2> My friends and I got into a debate the other night, ranking the Big Five in order of trust. While nobody really reached a consensus on what company belonged at the top (Apple was probably closest), we all agreed that Facebook was at the bottom of the list, and that they were way, way below everyone else.

There's honestly no way I would ever let Facebook have a device like this in my home (and for those wondering, I don't have Facebook on my phone).

<comment><USER3> Apple > Amazon > Google > Facebook

? Microsoft ?

Apple is a hardware and cloud company. Their incentive is to get you to buy phones and computers and lock you into their ecosystem. Some shameful behavior, but nothing that's not to be expected. Trustworthy, but in need of the occasional reprimanding.

Amazon is a middle man company. They connect sellers to buyers and interact with you to get you to use their platform. Over the past ten years they've dipped into a bunch of other markets as well, but I don't think it's affected _why_ they collect information so far. Untrustworthy, minorly invasive, but not malicious. Yet.

Google wants to know everything about you so they can profit from your data when selling advertisements, and do so by inserting themselves into everything you do. Your calendar, your email, your browser; any place where they can squeeze in a call to their servers. Untrustworthy and highly invasive, but not malicious.

Facebook, like Google, wants to know everything about you so they can sell that data to advertisers. But whereas Google attempts to integrate itself into your natural flow of life, Facebook tries to change your behavior so that you interact with it more often. Facebook actually wants to control you. Untrustworthy, highly invasive, and malicious.

Microsoft is in the process of reinventing itself and it's too early to tell what sort of trust it will deserve, if any. But I don't think anyone is preaching optimism.

<comment><USER4> I don't feel Facebook is anywhere close to the levels of omnipresence Google has.

It's rare if some random webpage doesn't talk to Google servers, be it analytics, fonts, CAPTCHAs, "sign in with Google" buttons or whatever. And they're in every other smartphone. And they handle lots of payments. And so on.

Facebook, on the contrary, rarely shows up. Sometimes there are like buttons, but I'd say they're rare. Or maybe I'm visiting the kind of sites where they're rare.

They may try to spam me (usually with some "you have new friend suggestion" with another person I've never ever met) but not like my mail filters care about that. And I occasionally log in there to check if someone had posted something (usually nope). I fed it some public information, never _ever_ fed it anything non-public (not just private but non-public - even though I tag some public stuff as "private" there is no harm if that becomes public), and don't post anything there myself.

I'm going to say a heresy but... that's feels basically harmless (and absolutely useless) to me.

<comment><USER3> I think you missed my point. Facebook's goal has always been to control the users. There have been numerous articles recently about how Facebook was designed to mess with user psychology to increase their engagement. They're practicing social engineering, and that to me is incredibly harmful.

And while Google is much more omnipresent (no argument there!), at least their tactics involve letting the users do what they would normally do, even if they're spying in on it. Google might be watching, but at least they aren't controlling.

<comment><USER4> Got it now.

Yeah, I guess you're right - Facebook is insistent on suggesting their way of doing things, constantly trying to tell me what to read and what to do.

\---

In my _personal_ experiences they have failed, though.

All their suggestions were way off and totally useless. So I just auto-ignore their mails, dismiss the notifications just by type without checking and whatever and use only what I want to use (they have some good uses).

Heck, even their Android apps are so awful, so even though I wanted some of features they sort of forced me to not install any apps and just use a browser. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "According to people familiar with Facebook's plans, Portal will be equipped > with a wide-angle lens that is capable of recognizing individual faces and > associating them with their Facebook accounts."

In addition to Facebook being viewed as the least trustworthy as mentioned in other comments, let's just casually add in facial recognition cameras into our homes too!

There are plenty of reasons to be wary of home devices no matter the company, but holy fuck I wouldn't touch this one with a 10-foot pole.

As an alternative to this, I love Google's personal recognition solution of recognizing voice with a small model so that while it can distinguish between (I think up to 10?) people, it is in no way good enough to fingerprint your voice.

<comment><USER6> I won't go into homes with an active Portal, for as long as that's remotely practical. Jesus christ.

<comment><USER7> They sure didn't think through this name, at the very least.

<comment><USER8> I imagine it narrowly beat out "Telescreen".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure I would trust Facebook with an always-on wide-angle lens and microphone in my house. I can't imagine the next-level of creepy ads that will enable. It's creepy enough when they start showing ads for physical stores I've visited.

<comment><USER10> Oddly enough Facebook has the lowest quality of ads in my opinion. For the large amounts of data they have on me, they don't seem to utilize it effectively

<comment><USER11> Have you seen anyone using it effectively?

<comment><USER12> Absolutely not. I'm really amazed by how bad Amazon is sometimes.

I buy cat food once for a friend - eternally and constantly get recommendations for more cat stuff.

I buy coffee filters every 6 months - I get "buy it again" a week later. This lasts for a month. Then it goes away. 5 months later, end of my regular buying period, and they seem to have forgotten all about them.

<comment><USER13> Ads/recommendations are shown to you at an 'auction', companies bid in micro- second level timing to show you an ad/recommendation.

So, when you say that you get low quality ads, you are telling us that the bidders think you aren't worth much. Hence, you get the same ad over and over, because you are being targeted by the 'long tail' of the bidders. Also, they 'forget' you for the same reason, because you aren't worth enough to them to become a 'regular'.

It's not the bidders, it's that you wisely don't respond well to ads/recommendations on the internet.

No offense ;)

<comment><USER12> Ah well that put a positive note on my morning coffee. I didn't know that.

But still wouldn't it be valuable to the bidders for Amazon to fix this? Or shouldn't Amazon value better targeting because relevant ads convince users to engage with the platform more? The people selling the coffee filters are still guaranteed my business, just not before 6 months. I always buy from the same seller too so it could be a good opportunity for a competitor to sneak in right at the 6 month mark and make a new repeat customer.

I guess the answer to that is probably "well the system works well enough elsewhere so that would just be hyper-optimization"

<comment><USER13> Yeah, with large companies like Amazon, never discount bureaucratic log-jams and just regular stupidity. I agree with you that optimizations can be made, but the system may be in a 'not broken, don't fix' local maximum. The inertia and complexity may be too hard to over come. Twitter only recently upped the character limit after nearly a decade because the old code-base was spaghetti and didn't allow improvement.

But these are the reasons why the large CEOs have always been terrified of 'two guys in a garage'. They know they have issues like this, and that the little scrappers don't. If anything, these little issues are the camel's nose under the tent of Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now here's a device that actually is a straight wiretap.

I wonder if they just hope that people don't care, or if they are actually going to design it in some kind of not-a-wiretap way (hopefully following Google/Amazon's example)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised they aren't releasing it for free to align with their mission of connecting the world, always on, all the time.

Of course the catch would be it watches you, knows you by your face, and builds your advertising profile.

<comment><USER6> The catch is that it automatically builds a social graph based on recognizing the faces of people who visit you. No facebook account and don't pose for pictures? No problem, we'll just install facial recognition cameras in the houses of your friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've never heard of cheddar - it is almost more interesting than facebook's portal. Looks like tech broadcast news that is not on tv but digital only.

<comment><USER17> Ironically enough, they've grown on the back of their live broadcast primarily distributed via Facebook Live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I understand that my smartphone can be used as a listening device, the day when I will purchase a dedicated wire tap for my house will be never. I've been to people's houses that have them and sure they're fun when you're having some beers and want to hear a song I don't mind taking 2 seconds to manual select a song on my phone to keep a hot mic out of my house.

</comment><comment><USER19> That sounds like an absurd waste of time. Anyone who wants to do most of that can already do so, just they won't have the "luxury" of Facebook monetizing it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't see yet how this can possibly be more than a clone of the Echo Show, but twice as expensive and with Facebook-y features. I don't spot anything particularly significant in this article that differentiates it — even the leaked image looks similar to the hardware. I have to assume most of the price difference would come down to screen size or resolution.

In any case, it's very interesting to think about Facebook getting into video as they are leaning into Live already. I wonder if there is also more Live programming products in the works as they continue to ramp up against YouTube, and explore content creation... but still, I don't know many people now who video chat via FB (or any FB properties), but I'm on iOS and pretty much exclusively use FaceTime for that so I'm in a bubble there.

</comment><comment><USER16> Comical that they will charge $500. The data (revenue) they gain from me owning a portal I'd imagine would off set the cost to build and develop this product.

<comment><USER21> Same price point and similar privacy invasion as a smartphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm making a note here: huge success...

Seriously Facebook guys, do you check nothing? There is no way the internet isn't going to connect wide angle lenses, invasion of privacy and a psychopathic if lovable computer program with Aperture Science. I hope that's what you're going for.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was hoping for a device with VR experience. I've been waiting for something like this since they acquired Oculus.

</comment><comment><USER24> Did they all sit down and go - you know, that Facebook phone thing was such a huge success... let's do that again!

<comment><USER25> No, they know FaceOS and Fire(sale)phone did poorly but that Amazon is getting the side-angle with Echo/Show so they figured they might get a good 2nd place with the "I don't care if it's creepy" crowd.

<comment><USER24> Echo did well because it was the first to market and quickly built up an ecosystem. Google home did well because google and because of the integration with their video/music/phone services. There's no incentive to jump on the facebook bandwagon, they offer nothing unique. And even among uneducated consumers, they've got a bad reputation WRT privacy.

If their best and brightest couldn't see that coming... they're in trouble.

<comment><USER26> This is a video chat hardware device, not an assistant. Facebook has become the de-facto messaging platform for most of the people I know, and Facebook's Video chat is typically what I suggest when I want to do a video conference with a non-technical user. Google totally blew their commanding network and technical lead by the repeated gchat -> hangouts -> duo migrations. No one I know is typically logged into hangouts anymore, and I've never even had a single contact sign up for duo or allo. Facetime is a non-starter for the 80% of the population that uses something other than a Mac and an iOS device. Facebook works everywhere, has all my contacts, and is something people know and use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how this ties into the recent rumors circling about Facebook buying RingCentral.

</comment><comment><USER28> That's a brilliant product. Assuming it's reliable and user friendly, that's the kind of product I'd give my parents (or even grand mother) so that they can easily video chat with the rest of the family.

<comment><USER29> I gave my 90 year old grandmother an Echo Show for Christmas and she loves it. My main goal was video chat (which she can also initiate herself), but she's actively using it as a radio, weather station and calendar for the trash pick up.

To help her remember the commands I made a reference sheet with the most common phrases, but what mainly helped her was to think of talking to Alexa as if she was talking to a dog: Giving clear, loudly spoken commands.

<comment><USER30> Did you see the recent SNL skit? I think that a real Alexa for Seniors would incorporate some of what this spoof Alexa does.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk)

<comment><USER29> Heh, the difficulty in remembering the wake word actually rings true. We tried it with "Alexa" first which is somewhat difficult to pronounce for a German speaker who doesn't known any English. "Echo" however worked well and she had no problem remembering it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Facebook has jumped the shark.

</comment><comment><USER32> Who would be so stupid to buy one of these?

</comment><comment><USER33> Portal to hell.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lolz. That's some awesome industrial design -- did they use _1984_ as inspiration?</comment>


What mystery tech company is moving into new 10k-capacity San Jose office space? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_25376656/mystery-tech-company-set-san-joses-biggest-ever

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I think Microsoft or Amazon (mentioned as possibilities in the article) are good guesses. I can't think of many other tech companies large enough to want space for 8-10k employees that don't already have headquarters in the Bay Area. Maybe Salesforce has decided to move out of San Francisco?

Or maybe someone else on one of these lists?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_companies)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information_technology_companies)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies)</comment>


How to fuck up software releases - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/12/how-to-fuck-up-releases.html <comment><USER4> Another "fun" one: typo in git tag names.

The rakudo project has monthly releases with tags like 2019.07. Once I mixed up the year and month in e release, so I created a tag 2018.06 instead of 2016.08 (don't remember the exact numbers), and pushed it.

I deleted the wrong tag as soon as I noticed, and pushed the correct one, but of course when the date of the typo'ed release month came around some years later, things blew up for everybody who still had the wrong tag in their local repo (which turned out to be quite some developers).

<comment><USER5> This is one thing I really loved about subversion. I just used the VCS revision as the tag and version therefore avoiding this issue. Didn't even need to create tags.

That was until the version overflowed the 16 bit field it was stored in the assembly manifest. Kaboom. :(

People spend way too much time arguing with semantic versioning when 99% of the time the only important thing is the next number is bigger than the previous number.

<comment><USER6> I agree, it is such a cluster to get human-usable version numbers out of git. I use a convoluted Rube Goldberg contraption based on tags and git-version[1]. It's so much less convenient than old SVN revision numbers.

[1] [https://gitversion.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://gitversion.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

<comment><USER7> My favorite is the complexity of having an in-tree changelog that lists (shortlog) commits under appropriate tag headings - checked in under appropriate tags.

It roughly amounts to:

1) commit fix (git commit -m "fixes #foo bug"

2) get hash/shortlog, add to changelog

3) commit changelog referencing commit in 1)

4) tag hash in 3) with new minor version 1.1.2 to 1.1.3

5) realize you forgot that 1) warranted a bump in minor version, edit changelog to reflect new minor version

6) commit new changelog

7) move tag from 4) to 6) - hope you didn't push yet...

And people say RCS $Id:$ was a hack...

Now,the _real_ issue is actually to find a nice way to tag actual releases, with current tag and hash. I realize this is mostly tricky when a project is "checkout and run" \- without a build step (eg ruby on rails project). It's still somewhat painful to make sure there's an up to date global variable that correctly reflects the running version.

<comment><USER8> I clone the project into a temp directory, then inject the version number into the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I keep a release TODO list and about 50% of every release, I fuck up and need to add something to the list. It's about 40 items long now (containing various terminal commands and activities), which includes making sure manual entries, documentation, the website, social media, dependencies, etc are handled correctly.

<comment><USER10> What kinds of things do you need to check for that aren't automated? Maybe I'm spoiled by our CI pipeline.

I'd love to take a look at your list

<comment><USER9> Here's a somewhat redacted version. `m` is my alias for `make`.

        - Finalize source
         - Legal check `LICENSE-dist.txt`
         - Update `CHANGELOG.md`
         - Bump version in `Makefile` and `Core.json`
         - Commit "Bump version".
        - Build (three OS's can be done in parallel)
         - `m clean`
         - `git pull`
         - Make sure you have the latest `Fundamental.zip` package in source root.
         - `m dist`
         - Manually test installer and fragile features (audio drivers, patch loading) for ~10 minutes.
         - `m notarize` (on Mac)
         - `m upload`
         - `git tag vX.Y.Z`
         - `git push --tags`
        - <USER2>
         - Update version title and URLs in `Rack.pug`
          - `m upload`
          - At this point, normal users have access to new version.
         - Update server version in `config.coffee`
          - `m restart`
          - At this point, normal users will swarm to download new version. Keep an eye on server bandwidth.
        - <USER3>
         - Twitter https://twitter.com/home
         - Facebook https://www.facebook.com/vcvrack/
          - Share on group
         - Forum https://community.vcvrack.com/c/announcements

<comment><USER11> this list is a very simple algorithm. Why don't you tun it into a script deploy.sh ?

<comment><USER12> Some of the steps look like they'd be hard to do that for. Like for example the one about making sure the license is correct, and the one about testing parts that apparently don't have good automated tests / interact with the real world.

<comment><USER11> > Some of the steps look like they'd be hard to do that for.

Then those steps must be removed. I thought the mantra "deploy is ONE step" was a more or less universally acknowledged truth.

<comment><USER13> I mean unless a computer can check that all dependencies have compatible licenses, that is unrealistic. It's a necessary step for publicly released software to avoid legal issues

<comment><USER14> Linux distributions (though I can only speak to openSUSE's process) have automated scripts (which I believe are written by our lawyers) which check whether the license of a package matches the license of the files inside the package. It's how most package legal review gets done (and if the script can't figure it out, it gets escalated to our actual lawyers too review. You cannot submit a package to any one of the distributions we ship without the legal review being approved.

So it is clearly possible to do -- and there are all sorts of tools which figure out what SPDX license entries apply for every dependency (or vendored dependency) of a given project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A couple of practical solutions here.

1) Automate your releases and run that on a CI server if you can. "It works on my laptop" is not ideal for releasing stuff.

2) Have a release branch, and only allow stuff to be merged that passes your CI tests and trigger the automation under step 1 after a merge to your release branch. This works for continuous deployment but can also work for releases of other stuff. If you use semantic versioning, the CI server should tag the release and publish the artifacts. That's one less thing that can go wrong. If you forgot to bump the version number on your master branch, the build should fail.

3) Have a release checklist. People forget stuff and having a small list of "Are the release notes and readme updated? Is our CI not complaining? Have all PRs been merged? Etc. Even with the above, premature releases through an early merge to your release branch could happen. A checklist can prevent that. And of course, if you can integrate those checklists into your CI. If your release notes are unchanged since the last version

4) Release often. Small deltas are less work to test and less risky to impose on users and you get feedback on stuff you did earlier.

</comment><comment><USER16> The big lessons from this article (which I love and resonate with)

\- You discover more bugs with your shins than your foresight

\- As long as you keep fixing it in code, you will eventually win - it's like a video game, as long as you can respawn, you will always defeat the game. Just keep buggering on.

</comment><comment><USER17> > I am doomed to creatively outsmart my tools in releases.

That's a very honest admission, and one I think lots of "why don't you automate _everything_ "-crowd seems to fail to recognise as a real-world factor.

<comment><USER18> I would say the article actually supports the "automate everything" position. The author prevents future mistakes by adding more automation rather than less.

<comment><USER19> and yet, future mistakes are still happening. A lot of work has gone into automation but the outcome is often the same. So is it worth it?

<comment><USER17> Obviously the effort isn't _worthless_ , but it's not a silver bullet which will magically "fix everything" either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love the humble nature of this post and how fallible we are.

I have spent many days playing whack-a-mole with issues and hacking out solutions. What is equally great is the community sharing their gotchas and how they solved them.

A wholesome and organic thread, thanks for taking the time to write it!

</comment><comment><USER21> Don't do it on Friday.

On a serious note, I have found that the only way to not fuck up is to remove as much human interaction from the release process as possible, which means scripting. Even with scripting, if the inputs are bad, the output will also be bad.

<comment><USER6> Seriously, though, don't release on Friday. No matter how good your CI/CD pipeline is, and how confident you are in your testing, you'll let some bad releases through, and if you release on Friday, some poor bastard, whether you or your coworker, is going to be left holding the bag, and have their weekend ruined scrambling around to fix what is broken.

It's just inconsiderate. Things can wait until Monday.

<comment><USER22> I'm waiting for the next "disruptor" to make it a sales pitch: "Move fast, break things, and only release on Friday!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Automating builds is fun! On the one hand I'd be worried if I joined a team or contributed to a project which still had manual processes for release more complex than 'run this script' or 'push to the x branch'. On the other hand, that's a fun initial project.

When developers aren't (or are prevented from) improving their own environment, that's a bad sign...

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice heads up! Working on a similar script to help with updating versions and packaging across five platforms. At least I have a (mostly) monorepo. Which is great until it's not.

</comment><comment><USER25> For bumping the version there's also bumpversion: [https://github.com/peritus/bumpversion](https://github.com/peritus/bumpversion)

<comment><USER26> Two things should be noted:

1\. `bumpversion` is more general and has more functionality than `semver` in the article 2\. `bump2version` is the currently maintained version[0]

I currently use `bumpversion` to manage versioning in applications with many different versioning schemes as well as managing the versioning of their deployment environments (such as updating Terraform files, etc).

[0] [https://github.com/c4urself/bump2version](https://github.com/c4urself/bump2version)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really like how the OpenStack project does releases - it has a ton of tooling, but for people who are deciding what to release, it is super simple.

e.g. - the latest RC of a project I maintain is L10-14 on [https://opendev.org/openstack/releases/src/branch/master/del...](https://opendev.org/openstack/releases/src/branch/master/deliverables/train/designate.yaml)

by committing that file, the tooling chooses the right commit, does a tag, and builds the python tarballs, and puts them on releases.openstack.org, and for the client libraries, it pushes them to pypi.

it avoids a lot of the footguns of special scripts in repos, while allowing an easy release process.

</comment><comment><USER28> I came here expecting to read about how Apple is (mis)treating their macOS lately or how Microsoft has managed to fuck up their windows update process, but instead I find a few good tips while building and numbering software.

</comment><comment><USER29> This reads like the "Deploying on a Friday Afternoon Greatest Hits".

</comment><comment><USER30> > Update the signing script to save the tarball to disk (previously, it lived > in a pipe) and upload these alongside the releases…

This should have been done from the start.

GitHub does not guarantee checksums for the generated source archives to be stable, so they can change when GitHub updates their software (and yes, this has happened).

</comment><comment><USER31> For Python projects I use the excellent Versioneer:

[https://github.com/warner/python- versioneer](https://github.com/warner/python-versioneer)

It means you only specify the version as a git tag, and all the other things that need a version number get it from that.

</comment><comment><USER32> Phft, amateur. I've forgotten more ways to screw stuff up than this person ever knew.

</comment><comment><USER33> A lot of these can be avoided by making all the steps repeatable. To do that, you should run everything in a Docker container that's built solely from version controlled files, and run it on a remote system that gets blown away regularly. You can use Jenkinsfiles to specify exactly what to do with different branches, and to really simplify things, you can have a different job for every kind of release. Build in a dry-run option so you can run a whole release without actually publishing anything. Each of your software projects can have its own specific release steps in a script run by your release container, while still following the same basic release process for all your projects.

</comment><comment><USER34> A thousand ways. One really good idea I read was that you write an empty script, which prints the instructions for each step and you press enter, it prints the next step. It can only print instructions at first, then later, you can write code to automate some (maybe even validate things) steps. Something like this:

        def git_tag():
            print("1. git tag the repository")
            input("Press enter to continue")

        def git_push():
            print("2. git push the repository")
            input("Press enter to continue")

        def pip_deploy():
            print("3. Deploy, run: python setup.py sdist upload")
            input("Press enter to continue")

        def main():
            git_tag()
            git_push()
            pip_deploy()

As simple as that! Then later, you could write code for every step as you have time.

<comment><USER35> I think this might be the article you read:

[https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing- scripting-...](https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting- the-key-to-gradual-automation/)

<comment><USER34> Yes! Thanks! I couldn't find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can dang or sctb fix the title of this to the correct one?

"How to fuck up software releases"

</comment><comment><USER37> For some prior art in this space, it may be useful looking at ESR's shipper:

[http://www.catb.org/esr/shipper/](http://www.catb.org/esr/shipper/)

And some blog posts he's written on it:

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?s=shipper&submit=Search](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?s=shipper&submit=Search)</comment>


Buffett to FBN: S&P Downgrade 'Doesn't Make Sense' - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/08/05/buffett-to-fbn-sp-downgrade-doesnt-make-sense/ <comment><USER2> > "Think about it. The U.S., to my knowledge owes no money in currency other > than the U.S. dollar, which it can print at will. Now if you're talking > about inflation, that's a different question."

This is really disingenuous. If we could ignore inflation then no country would have credit problems. In fact no country would need to borrow money in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> Paul Krugman has it right, the S&P is in no position to judge after all its mistakes: <http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/sp-and-the-usa/>

My take is I give the S&P two middle fingers up, WAY UP.</comment>


Show HN: HN Trends - like Google Trends, but for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/ <comment><USER2> Hey Jerod. I own the domain HNTrends.com, which I used for a similar project about two years back [1][2]. If you plan on keeping this project up, I'd be happy to transfer the domain name over to you. Shoot me an email: email@example.com.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810112>

[2] <http://www.mattmazur.com/category/hntrends/>

</comment><comment><USER3> These trends are fairly interesting...

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=pg>

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=y+combinator>

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=pg%2C+tptacek%2C+patio11%2...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=pg%2C+tptacek%2C+patio11%2C+edw519%2C+jacquesm)

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=2007%2C+2008%2C+2009%2C+20...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=2007%2C+2008%2C+2009%2C+2010%2C+2011)

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=android%2C+iphone> vs. [http://www.google.com/trends?q=android%2C+iphone&ctab=0&...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=android%2C+iphone&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=show+hn%2C+ask+hn%2C+tell+...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=show+hn%2C+ask+hn%2C+tell+hn)

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=mac%2C+gruber%2C+steve+job...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=mac%2C+gruber%2C+steve+jobs)

Don't forget thought that these trends include the user's own comments and submissions in addition to mentions of them in other users' comments.

 _suking_ , this is truly awesome. It immediately joined my bookmark folder of favorite HN tools. I'd be curious, though, if whether or not it would be possible to filter out user names when counting how many times a word has appeared on the site. Or would that be too much of a challenge?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised to learn that the search API returns hits on usernames when they appear outside of the post/comment content.

I'm looking now to see if there's an easy way to filter around it. I've also been emailing with one of the ThriftDB guys and I'll ask him as well.

If not, it'd be very difficult to filter those out because I'm not currently (nor would I want to) retrieving all the matching items, just the number of hits.

<comment><USER3> Oh yes, I forgot you were using the HNSearch API. By the way, I hope you win the API Contest (don't they decide tomorrow?). You for sure get my vote!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks! The voting starts tomorrow. Do come back and participate ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> first of all, very cool.

how is it normalized? every single thing I type in has an upward trend, which to me just suggests that interest in Hacker News has increased over the last few years... and I don't really need a chart to tell me that since I live in silicon valley :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I wasn't really thinking about normalization as I was more interested in comparing trends on multiple terms, but I don't think it'd be too much work to change the algorithm to account for HN's growth.

<comment><USER5> The trends on multiple terms are actually easier to read after normalization anyway. Right now the power-law curve growth of HN in total is making it hard to read the difference in growth between, say, FB and twitter. Easier for our brains to process if you took the ln() of them - which is definitely the fastest way to fix the charts - or normalized in some other way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=fuck%2C+shit%2C+cunt%2C+co...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=fuck%2C+shit%2C+cunt%2C+cocksucker%2C+motherfucker)

I put in 5 of the 7 George Carlin dirty words. Looks like 'motherfucker' has a recent surge.

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=piss%2C+tits%2C+cunt%2C+co...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=piss%2C+tits%2C+cunt%2C+cocksucker%2C+motherfucker)

If you want to see it without the top two words dwarfing the other five.

<comment><USER7> Possibly from "The Motherfucking Manifesto For Programming, Motherfuckers"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=ruby%2Cpython>

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=rails%2Cdjango>

Interesting that Ruby stays below Python but Rails stays well above Django.

<comment><USER9> There are similar metrics for job openings. It seems plausible that Python is becoming an all-purpose language while the focus for Rails / Ruby is on web apps. If true, this would be reminiscent of Perl v. PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> we may be in a bubble about talking about a bubble: <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bubble>

<comment><USER11> <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bubble%2C+fuck> interesting...

a very nice tool!

<comment><USER12> Hah, I think that's a neat way to visually normalize against the traffic increase trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=android%2C+iphone>

<comment><USER14> <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=android%2C+iOS>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> These trends don't account for traffic increasing to the site (and therefore posts/comments) as time progresses. That makes this less useful.

<comment><USER16> Agreed would love to see a normalization option that transforms it into a % of submissions in each period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work! I had the same exact idea for the contest and bought the hntrend.com domain 2 weeks ago, too bad I was too lazy to finish it :)

<comment><USER18> well, looks like there is a service which would deserver that domain...

<comment><USER17> <http://twitter.com/#!/sant0sk1/status/82564569708503040>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> On an IPad1 the charts render so slowly it's watching a race between brightly colored snakes. Very suspenseful.

Please do normalize the results.

<comment><USER20> The charts are SVG and iOS's implementation of SVG is stupid slow.

<comment><USER21> It works great on the iPad 2' with animations and everything

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I searched for my own username expecting a flatline, but there were a few hits in the last few years. Flattering, but I'm fairly certain that hackers have not been talking about me. ;)

Perhaps you should only query titles and text, not usernames?

edit: for example, searching for pg would include his own submissions as well as mentions and Ask PG subs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange, I didn't expect the search API to return results for a name that's in the by-line of a comment, but it sure does:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pvilch...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=pvilchez&start=0)

This is something I should definitely work around in the future. Thanks for bring it to my attention!

<comment><USER23> You can exclude authors by setting the weight to 0 in your API call:

&weights[username]=0.0

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect, will do. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I found this interesting: "Hacker News" vs. "HN"[1]

As the site gains reputation/users you can see that many switch to the abbreviated version.

[1] <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=hacker+news%2C+HN>

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=scala%2C+erlang%2C+clojure...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=scala%2C+erlang%2C+clojure%2C+node.js)

interesting indeed

<comment><USER26> It would seem that NodeJS is taking away some of the share of functional programming languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let us never forget the first great hacker news bubble.

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=nickb>

</comment><comment><USER28> Hi, I created a similar tool using the search API, but with lniks to the top stories (by points) over time

<http://touchwoodsoftware.com/yctrends.html>

Feel free to take that idea if you like, I think it's interesting not just to see the shape of the trend but also the stories which created the peaks.

</comment><comment><USER29> inb4 <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bitcoin>

<comment><USER30> similar results.. <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=airbnb>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Technews trends, what are we reading and sharing here: Techcrunch vs Mashable vs Readwriteweb vs CNN vs Techmeme

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=techcrunch%2C+mashable%2C+...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=techcrunch%2C+mashable%2C+readwriteweb%2Ccnn%2Ctechmeme)

</comment><comment><USER32> An observation about geographies: <http://goo.gl/4BUFL>

</comment><comment><USER33> It's cool but doesn't always seem to chart the trend. I have to force a refresh. Using Chrome stable.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like the animation, but it will be an improvement if the chart max stays and not jump up and down

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with that is that I have no idea what range the terms queried will be in beforehand. Any ideas how to accomplish this?

<comment><USER35> You could animate after you've received all the data, then set the Y axis into the max of the values. Anyway, good job! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Pretty cool visualisations. Just out of curiosity, why did you choose HighCharts? Did you look at jquery FLOT and choose HighCharts _over_ FLOT? Or were you unaware of FLOT altogether?

<http://code.google.com/p/flot>

<comment><AUTHOR> I chose HighCharts because I have experience with it and knew right away that it'd get me where I wanted to go.

I had never heard of FLOT. Thanks for introducing me to it, it looks cool and I'll check it out for future projects!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For the people who says that HN discuss less about startups, the trends actually shows something else: <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=startups>

</comment><comment><USER38> (Cross-post) There could be a spike in HN Trend's traffic <http://twitter.com/#!/timoreilly/status/82824209721597952>

</comment><comment><USER39> What the hell happened with Javascript in mid 2009?

[http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=coffeescript%2C+jquery%2C+...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=coffeescript%2C+jquery%2C+node.js)

<comment><USER40> Node.js was released in mid-2009. Did it launch a surge in JavaScript popularity or just ride it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is it possible to somehow normalize the numbers by the total number of posts/comments, so that trends across the years do not mostly reflect the user base/activity growth at HN?

Awesome work thus far though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, this seems like an obvious improvement as I believe you're the 3rd to mention it already :)

I'll definitely do that next, since it's not too hard to implement and seems like a big win when you are just trending a single term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Very, very slick. And now I can can graph my increasing time spent on HN :)

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=jamesbritt>

</comment><comment><USER43> I asked it about ios and android and it broke :( <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=ios%2C+android>

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be back now. I had to restart the heroku process. Sadly, no indication why it crashed :/

<comment><USER32> You may find this to be a more useful comparison: <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=iphone%2C+android>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Out of curiosity: <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=ycombinator%2C+techstars>

</comment><comment><USER45> Obvious causation: <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=dolphins%2C+PROTECT+IP>

</comment><comment><USER46> Awesome work!

Can you normalize it against total text volume? Number of mentions always goes up with time as HN grows, % of posts mentioning will be a better measure of mindshare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! Hmm, good idea on % of posts, though most of the value I believe is in comparing multiple terms, in which case the raw number of mentions isn't as important as the relation of the trend lines.

<comment><USER47> That's not entirely true.

For example, the first thing I searched for was "Haskell", curious to see if it had gained or lost popularity in the past couple of years. The graph has an upward trend, but without knowing what the trend for total volume on HN is, that information is useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> [http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bitcoin%2C+groupon%2C+bubb...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bitcoin%2C+groupon%2C+bubble)

</comment><comment><USER18> XML vs Json <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=xml%2C+json> that's close

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it normalized against the growth of the website?

</comment><comment><USER50> Excellent work! <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=excellent>

</comment><comment><USER51> vim/emacs <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs>

</comment><comment><USER52> Awesome tool, but just a heads up: I tried searching for "C" and "C++", and it gave me the exact same line each time.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is there any way to normalize by number of users? (Or am I missing something?)

</comment><comment><USER54> This is really great!

</comment><comment><USER55> <http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=bitcoin>

Looks like a bubble...

</comment><comment><USER56> this is awesome, it would be a dream if advanced queries could be comparable though

</comment><comment><USER57> this is great, awesome how its so fast.

</comment><comment><USER58> slick!

</comment><comment><USER59> Very cool.

Amazingly, C# is talked about precisely as often as C++!

<http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=c%2B%2B%2C+c%23>

;-)

<comment><USER3> I think it may ignore the _#_ , _++_ , along with various other symbols. See this link (you may have to refresh once or twice if it doesn't work the first time): [http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=c%2B%2B%2C+c%23%2C+c-%2C+c...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=c%2B%2B%2C+c%23%2C+c-%2C+c*%2C+c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Lol. According to HN, Chrome should be the world's top browser. [http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=safari%2C+firefox%2C+inter...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=safari%2C+firefox%2C+internet+explorer%2C+chrome) -or- [http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=safari%2C+firefox%2C+IE%2C...](http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=safari%2C+firefox%2C+IE%2C+chrome) (with "IE")

Great site by the way. Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER61> From where HNSearch is pulling data? Do we have any dump for HN?</comment>


Regulators systematically ignore evidence that deregulation has broken markets - <AUTHOR> http://necsi.edu/projects/yaneer/owsdesc.html

<comment><USER2> Here's the sentence you based the headline on:

"Our results show that government policy decisions, often in deregulation _but also in regulation_ , have undermined the ability of our economic system to function and made it highly susceptible to crises." (emphasis mine)

Seems you missed a key point. Also,

"...other acts of regulation and deregulation have been carried out under the influence of corporate interests."

So it seems regulation or deregulation isn't the real issue. The real issue is manipulation of laws based on corporate interest.

<comment><USER3> I think when you compare "often in" with 'but also in" most people would assume the first is far more prevalent than the second. Regulatory capture is often an issue, but dispute being blamed for the instability Freddy and Fanny lost far less money than other banks relative to their size. Which suggests that they where not major players in the most toxic assets. So, while I have no problem suggesting they in some small way contributed to the mess that just happened I take issue with people suggesting they are the major causes of the collapse.

<comment><USER4> Huh? The government made a profit on most of the bank bailouts. The main exceptions are AIG (lost $6B) and GM (maybe $5B, but I don't understand the GM bailout so well).

The losses on Fannie/Freddie are estimated to be in the range of $100-200B, depending on what house prices do.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020368750457700...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203687504577001653467422674.html)

If Fannie/Freddie lost less money relative to their size (citation?), it's only because the denominator is so large.

<comment><USER3> Your confusing the size of the bailouts with the size of their losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is full of crap. It claims that Gramm-Leach-Bliley created "too big to fail", but we had too big to fail long before Gramm-Leach-Bliley. For that matter, I don't think Gramm-Leach-Bliley would have prevented GM from being "too big to fail".

The uptick rule is also a red herring. We had a controlled experiment in 2004 - the SEC eliminated the uptick rule for about 1/3 of securities. No disaster occurred for those 1/3 of securities that didn't also occur for the remaining 2/3.

There is no compelling argument whatsoever why shorting stocks should be harder than going long. The main people who want to prevent short selling are executives of failing companies - short selling allows speculators to inform the market about the companies impending failure, which tends to be bad for the CEO.

</comment><comment><USER5> All of the examples cited are industries highly regulated by the government: equities markets and banking. Since the government is already highly regulating these markets, any further tinkering by the government is going to have unintended consequences.

Actions have consequences, so when the government regulates a market, the market players react, often in unintended ways. Likewise, when the government then re-regulates (often called "deregulation") the market, the market players react again in unintended ways.

The financial crash was caused by the government coming in and taking over another industry, residential real estate mortgages, by purchasing all the secondary mortgages and setting standards. When the government lowered lending standards to help lower class people purchase houses (they couldn't afford), it unintentionally caused the mortgage-based securities market to crash. Mortgages used to be a safe investment, but after the government lowered lending standards, this assumption that the markets had previously used was no longer true.

Further government distortions of the market are cited in the report, namely ethanol subsidies. So, I would conclude that government distortion is what is breaking the markets, and that less government control is needed to return to freer markets.</comment>


Rate My Startup - Slap A Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.slapastory.com/ Slap a Story is a place for people who like to read and write. Submit your original short story (heck, you can do it anonymously) for everyone to read and discuss. As well as rate and comment on stories submitted by others.<p>Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated. <comment><USER3> "Slap a Story is a place for people like you and I; for people who like to read and write."

Change to:

"Slap a Story is a place for people like you and me: people who like to read and write."

I mean, writing sites need some self-respect.

I'm a bit anal about writing sites online: I think they're all barking up the wrong tree, yours included. I think that we have places for people who want to write silly texts: forums games are ideal. This site doesn't do anything to solve that. But I'll ignore that and focus on the actual site.

You've got a good text-to-image ratio. No pictures associated with stories. That's good, because I hate sites that think visuals have anything to do with writing.

I don't like how your numbers clip off on the side. I don't know why you need ranking to begin with.

I can't say much more: it's ripping features off of Digg, visual quirks off of several sites, and it has a tag cloud. Beyond the concept, the site has a pretty standard layout. I can't criticize that other than to say that it does nothing whatsoever for me, and it's entirely undistinguished.

Please, though: for the sake of pretending to respect the medium, style your stories up a bit. Make them look nice. Use different line spacing for paragraphs, use a font that actually looks nice. When your medium is text, not doing anything to style text is just silly.

Hope that helps. Feel free to respond if you think I'm being unfair.

<comment><USER4> Firstly, thank you for your honest feedback. Writing sites do need self respect, and this is the reason that we have developed this site. I am personally a developer and an avid reader. Although it may seems like a ripping of Digg - digg doesn't have a fiction category or any sub-categories that we have included. In terms of layout we didn't want to get too creative, but we do want to make it as simple on the eyes as possible - so our priority at the moment is to style the stories.

Again thank you for your feedback.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. Well, I'm working on a site for writers at the moment, and it focuses on a completely radical angle. When it's done I'll tell you, and I'm hoping you tell me if it's got flaws as well. We writers ought to stick together. :-)

<comment><USER4> definitely, let me know and I will put your link on my site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that the stories are published on the web is a huge downside actually.

Have you looked at Critters? <http://critters.org/> It's focused on helping people improve their writing, and as a model has functioned for well over 10 years. Very successful, on the whole.

One of the key selling points of sending stories to Critters is that you get critiques back which help you improve your writing. The other key point is that they're _not_ published on the web. They're only published privately to members. This means that after improving your story further, you can actually still submit it to magazines for "real" publication.

I would not submit my best stories to your site, for the simple reason that I would hope to be able to send them to a magazine some day, and putting them on your site is akin to publishing them for free (magazines will not republish stories).

Perhaps if you offered some small symbolic payment (e.g. $50) for the best stories and featured those in a monthly magazine (online), that would motivate many more writers to submit their best work. There's a huge difference in the writer's mind between a paid publication and a free one, and the former is far more attractive.

Otherwise, if I'm gonna publish my stories for free, why not just put them on my own blog or start a blog for my stories?

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the site, so I have no criticism. I'll just give you some ideas you can possibly use to promote the site:

1\. When people write a story, add a very prominent field with space for email addresses of friends and family who will be interested in reading the story. You may want to use the google API to get contact information from the persons friends, allowing an automatic sending to ticked friends

2\. Add a photo or avatar of the user beside the story. On the fp, add a bunch of faces of recently logged in users. It will instantly feel more like a community, and if you encourage people to use their real photo, things will stay very civil

3\. Make a weekly competition. Make it prominent on the frontpage, and make the payment amount very small. For example, $10 by paypal. This is just $40 a month. Encourage people to invite their friends to come and vote for them. The best story each week wins the $10 and so on.

4\. Find your target audience. Post on forums that do the same stuff

5\. Allow people to write serials. For example, for a long time I used to write the fictional account of a soldier at war. I did this over years. Each entry was a short story, but together they formed a long narrative. Such long running narratives build fans

6\. Allow pictures in stories

7\. Here we will become a bit unethical - search usenet for an obscure but funny story. Add it to your site. Link it from reddit and digg. Alternatively, search scribd or any other document site for the most popular documents of all time that are stories. Addd to your site and do stumbleupon on that

8\. Add a 'whacky' category where strange stuff is added. This stuff is more likely to be linked to than the serious stuff you want, but will drive traffic to your main site

9\. Don't let your users drop off. If I sign up once, I have to get regular notifications about something, so I get invested in the site

10\. Everybody just wants to have fun. You're entertainment first, don't forget that.

<comment><USER4> Wow, this is fantastic, we are working on some of the ideas you mention, the others we will need to add to our list.

Thanks heaps and keep them coming.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My friend and I have been developing a brand spanking new site for avid readers and writers. It is called Slap a Story and as of today can be accessed at slapastory.com.

In short you can post short stories and make them popular by voting them up, you can also discuss stories written by other people.

Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a couple comments on the UGC aspects of this site. I honestly don't know how large the 'story' market is, but I've had some experience with UGC sites.

1\. You expect a LOT from your users. Writing a story takes a long, long time. It's much less difficult than pressing an up button or making a quick edit. Why will people want to submit stories to the site? Are any of you prolific story writers?

2\. Your people are story writers. Where do you find them? This is more of a marketing problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. Writing is a lengthy and demanding process.

We do need to market this properly and find people who are interested in writing stories.

Going by the amount of blogs/literary sites and forums that are out there - <USER2> reckon that these people do exist in certain numbers. We just have to find find and convince them that our platform is right for them.

<comment><USER8> How about becoming the twitter of stories? Limit it to 140 words or something (analogous to the 4K compos from the Amiga demo scene).

<comment><USER4> that is somethng to think about. Not sure how writers will react to 140 words thought. Also do mean characters, right?

<comment><USER8> 140 characters is probably approaching some lower bound of what is required for an interesting story. 140 characters, while conforming to the length of a text SMS, would probably be too brief...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I question whether this is a "startup" or a "hobby with a small revenue stream". The site looks nice, no doubt about that...I think you've executed well (aside from some typos--"sing up" on the story page under the comment box, for example), so I'm not saying you're building an amateurish site. Just that I can't imagine how this can make enough money to support more than one or two people.

I could, of course, be wrong.

<comment><USER4> You are right, at the moment we are trying to build a mini community of writers. Mostly this was a request from a few friends of mine that are avid writers. We just want to see how far this can go. Any exposure for them is good. Maybe we can even get publishers on board.

You never know until you try it.

<comment><USER9> I've done NaNoWriMo once, and plan to do it again this year, I think. And a big part of that experience is the "shared misery", or "in the trenches together", vibe that the whole project engenders. November is coming up fast...you might consider sending a note to the fine folks who run that project, asking how you could make your site work well for NaNoWriMo participants. The worst they can say is "no" (or maybe the worst they could do is re-implement your idea themselves...they do seem to be hackers themselves, but that's an unlikely scenario).

It could give you a huge influx of users for the month of November...and some of them would stick around. I no longer write much fiction outside of that month (I do so much technical writing for my startup that I don't seem to have the drive for it outside of work), but I know a lot of the participants _are_ frequent writers.

Getting publishers involved somehow would also be a good direction. Many print-only publishers are trying to figure out how to deal with this new- fangled (less than twenty years old...clearly unproven!) web thing...perhaps you can help them. I don't immediately see the connection, but perhaps user- created and user-edited books are the wave of the future. Somehow applying the reddit/digg model to fiction seems at least an amusing thought exercise.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the advice, I will be in touch with NaNoWriMo people see what they say.

Thanks Again

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like your idea. However, I don't like the fact that simply by submitting something I automatically grant you a license to do whatever you want with it. In fact, I was going to submit a short story but will not after reading your terms and conditions.

I think that to make the site successful you need high quality stories that people want to read and vote up. I am not sure that authors would be willing to post on your site knowing that they are then granting you a license for their work.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you read the last paragraph in our T&C you will see that we do not assert any ownership over your content (story). It still belongs to you and you can do with it whatever you like.

What we want, however, is to be able to use user-submitted content for any possible advertising or promotion purposes. This is kind of what facebook does except not as evil. We reckon that the user will benefit from this too (as it will show off his story to more people if we link to it in an ad).

We will make all of that clearer in our T&C. Thank you!

<comment><USER10> I did read that last paragraph where you say that I still have ownership over my content. However, I am still granting you a license to do whatever you want with the story. Meaning you can go and sell the top stories to publishers legally. I don't like this. I would make it so that you can only use it for promotions with prior written consent from the author and the only license I grant you is to display it on your site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You've got a grammatical error in the first sentence -- "people like you and I" should be "people like you and me" -- me is the direct object.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like this idea, mostly because it's one I had earlier and never had the time to implement. :-) From a cursory glance, the site looks good.

I do see the point that others have about who the site might target. Serious writers might steer away from the site in favor of workshop style sites, leaving you with prolific, but possibly weak writers. I have a feeling that might be a rather young demographic and I wonder how well the site would monetize. Still, I wish you the best with the venture and will check back.

<comment><USER12> I'll say this: the site was good enough to get me to come back for a second look. I do agree with an earlier poster who said the stories need better layout. They were a bit hard to read as they look now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea pretty well and I think the interface is well-executed. The markup is a bit heavy, but that should not be top of your list.

<comment><USER4> Thanks qhoxie, the site is still in beta and design is always under question..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What about having users write a quick, one-sentence grab-your-attention hook to display under each story, rather than just displaying the first few lines?

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting idea, although am not sure about the colors even though the site looks clean enough.

</comment><comment><USER16> wow.. this can go a long way... Feedback: Man i need search on stories and users...

<comment><USER4> Thanks, search is coming... but you can filter by user by clicking on the username in the user "cloud"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> awesome idea and site.

Only recommendation I can think of is... have the votes collect into points for authors. So then you can show 'top writers' and have competitions etc.

<comment><USER4> Definitely will be in the next release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

</comment><comment><USER18> i just fuckin LOVE this SITEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that... you are too excited... any feedback that we can actually use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesomenessssssssssssssssssssss

<comment><USER4> Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> wow.. this can go a long way... Feedback: Man i need search on stories and users...</comment>


Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown - <AUTHOR> https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+Macbook+2015+Teardown/39841 <comment><USER2> With the repair-ability of 1 out of 10, it might as well welded. But the internals are fascinating and beautiful to look at. I'm surprised at how large the new track pad component is.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the new black horizontal line at the top of HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20hn%20black%20bar&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20hn%20black%20bar&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps time to add it to the FAQ.

<comment><USER2> It certainly is a frequently asked question. But spelling everything out is against the spirit of the site.

On HN it's good for readers to have to work a little, and the audience is smart enough to figure things out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's equivalent to the flag at half mast:

> When someone important to the community dies, a thin black bar is added to > the top of HN as a mark of respect

</comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to HN! I love this question every time I see it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has died.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's for the late Paul Allen RIP. Should've known, sorry all.

<comment><USER7> I'm relatively new to HN, and as such I hadn't encountered the black line before. Thanks for asking the question so that noobs like me can find out the answer.</comment></comment>


Cut and Paste Your Surroundings to Photoshop - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cyrildiagne/status/1256916982764646402 <comment><AUTHOR> Of course, there's an "ar-cutpaste" GitHub repo [0]

[0] [https://github.com/cyrildiagne/ar- cutpaste](https://github.com/cyrildiagne/ar-cutpaste)</comment>


Comcast customer discovers huge mistake in company's data cap meter - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/12/comcast-admits-data-cap-meter-blunder-charges-wrong-customer-for-overage/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to see every municipality's weights and measures division take some interest in Comcast's racket. If Comcast thinks bulk packets are no longer too cheap to meter, then perhaps they should realize the true cost of measurement!

Using a non-certified measurement system to conduct trade? That's a paddlin'.

Charging for network management traffic initiated by Comcast? That's a paddlin'.

Charging for MAC headers solely for Comcast's network equipment? That's a paddlin'.

Not providing some sort of usage report so a customer can track down errant usage? That's a paddlin'.

Charging for a packet that subsequently gets dropped within Comcast's network? That's a paddlin'.

Charging for an incoming packet from an address that a user has requested a block on? That's a paddlin'.

<comment><USER3> > Using a non-registered and non-inspected device to measure for trade? That's > a paddlin'.

I wonder if that isn't the best way to approach all this. Not just for Comcast but any carrier that meters stuff out; mobile phone data, mobile phone minutes, etc. If you want to claim I get X amount, prove it!

Now that you mention it, I can't help but wonder why Starbucks doesn't have to "prove" that its 12oz latte really is 12oz. Is it because I have the right to immediately measure it and complain? I don't know much about this aspect of the law.

<comment><USER4> Careful what you wish for. I'd prefer my isp not keep careful records of where my bytes are going and when.

<comment><USER3> They don't have to keep careful records of where and when. They just have to spend a lot of money buying devices which are manufactured and certified by someone other than themselves that they are fit for purpose.

If the power company isn't allowed to make their own meters then why should Comcast be allowed to? The moral hazard is pretty substantial.

<comment><USER4> All other things being equal I would prefer my ISP to not even have the equipment in place to determine whether I'm downloading from Spotify or Youtube.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely. But your power meter doesn't know what device in your house is using electricity, it just knows you're using X amount of electricity.

Yes it would be difficult to make a data meter that's intentionally blind to where the packets are going to and from, but it's not as though the data isn't available for intercept a dozen other places on a telco's network. If they want to spy on you and your data is on their network there's little you can do.

The point of this independently certified metering device is that it'd be expensive. Hopefully nobody would sell them, only rent them. So if a carrier wants to charge overages they're more than welcome to, but the people supplying the meters are going to get a huge cut of their business. And once a telco is on the receiving end of a racket instead of on the giving end, perhaps they'd change their tune about data caps and spend that money and energy upgrading their network instead of using it to clamp down on their "customers" who have little to no alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately the title makes it seem like a systemic problem. That's not clear because in this case it was a mis-typed MAC address. If there's any systemic problem it's that there's no check/verification to close the loop on whose MAC address is whose.

<comment><USER6> Agree, there are many reasons to be upset at comcast, but this is was very simple problem to correct, and it's not like they were doing this intentionally. They even gave him three months of overages free, so he wasn't charged anything even if he hadn't figured it out. Are we really reduced to being outraged over clerical errors that are fixed before anything bad happens?

<comment><USER7> I'm concerned that there is a cap at all or more specifically there aren't any viable competitors (with a decent network connection without caps).

<comment><USER8> Comcast has pretty significant overlap with AT&T UVerse and Verizon Fios. Not in all markets, but in enough.

The real problem is that comcast is correct, most people don't use nearly that much data. So even if all the people who are effected leaves, you are only talking about losing 5% of their revenue. It's probably a net-positive in congested areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well how about that! I logged into my Comcast account and saw we had hit nearly 250-300 GB each of the previous three months.

There was no way (unless my wifi was hacked) that we would use that much. We do have Netflix, but we watch maybe 3-5 hours a month? We rarely stream anything.

So I logged into my router and saw that in the last 30 days we used 23 GB. Much more in line with what I've seen in the past.

Just waiting for Comcast to charge me extra fees!!

</comment><comment><USER10> Surely... if they know how inaccurate their measurement system is... They must have used a more accurate system to work that out right? Why not just always use the more accurate system?

Sounds like bollocks.

Anyway I'd hardly call an isolated typo a "huge mistake". This kind of thing happens all the time. Less excusable in this case because why would you need to type in a MAC address? But still...

<comment><USER11> > Less excusable in this case because why would you need to type in a MAC > address?

That is how they do authorization and billing. If there was no way to authorize modems, you could just plug in any cable modem to their system and get free internet. Its also why you have to call them if you switch equipment.

<comment><USER12> They could also use PPPoE for this:

> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to- > point_protocol_over_E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to- > point_protocol_over_Ethernet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Comcast has been steadily introducing data caps into parts of its territory, testing customers' responses before a potential nationwide rollout. "

Sadly a lot of people will complain and will dislike this meter, but have no other choice as Oleg in the article and will have to stick with comcast. Comcast will later say we lost 0 customers in areas we switched to metered bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER14> > "It turns out their system had my modem MAC address entered incorrectly, > there was an off-by-one typo that was hard to see so they were counting data > from some modem who knows where,"

how unlikely is this, really?

a MAC address is 48 bits or 6 hex digits. what are the odds that mistyping one of those digits resolves to a MAC address of another Comcast customer?

are they assigned randomly?

why are people at Comcast _typing_ in MAC addresses in situations as serious as billing and metering, in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER15> I really hope this ends up resulting in a class action lawsuit.

<comment><USER16> I don't have Comacast so I can't look it up right now but I bet Comcast contracts include a binding arbitration clause that prevents exactly that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> All together now: "Comcast Sucks"</comment>


Compiling PHP's Eval() to .NET - <AUTHOR> https://www.peachpie.io/2020/02/evil-eval-2.html <comment><USER2> We do something very similar at work, but with runtime generated Java code for an in-memory column oriented database. Our data is analyzed before being loaded and we determine the range of numbers necessary to store the data: eg. If we only have bytes incoming, we generate a class that only stores bytes etc. On top of that all our strings are interned in a trie and then represented as ints, also run through above outlined code.

This works because we are mostly interested in equality of strings and other computation with strings (mostly prefix based classific) is done ahead of time.

For debugging we emit our generated code and both eclipse and intellij picked up our generated code without configuration. It's safed us a lot of headaches.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who began programming with PHP, and who programs professionally in C# now, PeachPIE has always been a fascinating project to me.

Glad to see Roslyn has made PeachPIE even more capable.

</comment><comment> rajeev-k I needed the ability to _safely_ execute formulas in my .NET app. My solution was to write a parser and interpreter. Here it is: [https://github.com/Rajeev-K/formula- parser](https://github.com/Rajeev-K/formula-parser)

<comment><USER4> You can do this already with DataTables, which is basically an in-memory Excel spreadsheet. Bonus is that it also supports Excel functions, and it's completely safe/sandboxed code.

<comment><USER5> e.g. [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.data.data...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.data.datacolumn.expression?view=netframework-4.8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > we simply want to emit the debug information of eval() only if we are just > debugging the program. Otherwise it's just an unnecessary performance > overhead.

This will not correctly handle the case when the user attaches a debugger after the eval has started, but before all execution artifacts (including callbacks/closures) are finished.</comment>


Energy Idea for Mars Yields a Clue for Powering Data Centers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/energy-environment/data-center-energy.html <comment><USER2> It's been a while since I've seen the sly "natural gas is more environmentally-minded" argument passed off without clarifying that it is still a pollution source. Or at least burying/deemphasizing it.

I still remember an Areva VP at an ANS student conference around 2012 furiously pounding his fists repeating "Clean coal is not clean. Natural gas is not clean."

The kicker is that the article buries the info pretty deep, and it isn't exactly a fair comparison (citing Bloom's unverifiable response vs hard data, presumably):

 _> Bloom puts the emissions of its natural-gas cells in the range of 679 to 833 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, while coal plants released 2,252 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour in the second quarter of this year_

I can put that number as "still definitely dirty" and would propose that pushing this form of energy production is not exactly "environmentally minded" given the state of renewables.

Cutting in half is just not good enough, in the world of big powerplants.

Edit: For the small powerplant world, I remain hopeful for traditional batteries, Small Reactors, or Reactor Batteries.

<comment><USER3> 30% (679/2252) to 37% (833/2252) is much better than half. Creating 1/3 the carbon and far fewer of many other pollutants is a massive improvement, it's like comparing a 20 MPG car with a 60 MPG car.

The great thing about gas turbines is they are easy to turn off and on which helps adoption of cleaner but intermittent energy sources. Coal/Nuclear on the other hand is such as base-load power which is very much a bad thing. If you accept say 20% natural gas you can hit 80% renewable power with very little storage. Even 5% allows for a drastic reduction in the need for storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, that's a hell of a long pivot for Bloom.</comment>


In the Year 2525 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Year_2525 <comment><USER2> The melody is awesome, but the lyrics haven't really held up.

<comment><AUTHOR> In what way?</comment></comment>


Emotypes: emoticons that sound and talk - <AUTHOR> http://emotypes.com/?motion <comment><AUTHOR> Can be send by twitt!</comment>


Bug 340604: Implement IE's window.external.IsSearchProviderInstalled (Always False) - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340604 <comment><AUTHOR> Will this ever get fixed? I find it really ridiculous that is just returns false all the time. I just voted for it.</comment>


UK Leader Corbyn to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: 'Just Pay Your Taxes' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/25/uk-leader-corbyn-to-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-just-pay-your-taxes.html <comment><USER2> UK Leader Corbyn to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: 'Pay Significantly Higher Taxes Than Corporations In Other Countries, So We Foreigners Can Steal Your Marketshare And Be More Competitive In Global Markets'.</comment>


A WWII Vet Was Docked Pay for Escaping His German Captors - <AUTHOR> http://taskandpurpose.com/andy-ramotnik-docked-pay-for-escaping-german-captors-wwii/ <comment><USER2> The members of the merchant navy were the most ill-treated group of service people in Britain during the war. These were the seamen who crewed the cargo ships transporting food, munitions and fuel across the Atlantic, and e.g. to Murmansk in Northern Russia, etc. Their casaulty rates were higher than any branch of the armed forces except bomber command. As civilians, on shore leave it was common for them to be abused for not being in uniform. After the war they were given no recognition and did not have any official representation at commemorations. But one of the most unfair aspects of their treatment was the fact that the day their ship was sunk was the day their pay stopped.

<comment><USER3> Putting it all in perspective: If you lived through the 1940s at all you won the freaking lottery.

<comment><USER4> When more than half the population wins it it's a bad lottery.

Times may have sucked but you don't need to exaggerate by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER3> 50 million dead attributed to that war.

<comment><USER5> Yes that is a lot but it is no where near 1/2 of the worlds population.

<comment><USER6> The world population in 1940 was about 2.3 billion, so WWII killed around 2% of everyone alive. Compare with the An Lushan Rebellion, which killed somewhere between 13-36 million people at a time when the world population was only about 200-300 million, killing 4-18% of everyone alive.

<comment><USER7> The 36 million is most likely untrue though, we're probably closer to the 13 million one (which would still be twice as much as WWII when it comes to % of global population)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My paternal grandfather was a B-25 navigator/bombardier. His plane was shot down over the Battle of the Bulge, and he spent the rest of the war in a PoW camp. The quality of the treatment (and particularly the nutrition) he received during his imprisonment compromised his health, and he died during my father's childhood.

I have no idea if he received this benefit, or if he even knew about it. Dad's dead (motorcycle accident); I'll have to reach out to my aunt to see if she knows. It's more the curiosity than the money. If he hadn't received it, and survivors can claim it, I'd just donate it to some veteran's organization, anyway.

<comment><USER9> If you make the time for carrying it all out, please blog about it and post it back to HN. Should be very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      They tried again, and in April 1944, pulled off the same stunt, ducking their captors on an unguarded forced march.
      This time, Ramotnik and his brother-in-arms got away. A few days later, they heard the news: The Allies had won.

Surely they mean April 1945 if "a few days later" they heard the Allies had won.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, probably a typo

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 13$ in 1944 adjusted for inflations would be 180.38$ in 2017. Still a small payment for the DoD.

<comment> Digit-Al How about the 73 years interest? :-)

<comment><USER13> With the somewhat generous annual interest of 6%, it would be around $1000. Not exactly back breaking for the DoD (or the VA, for that matter, whatever department has this issue on their table).

<comment><USER14> You're off by a factor of ten. Assuming monthly compounding:

(1 + .06/12)^(12 * (2017-1944)) = 78.97

78.97 * 180 = 14214

However the final amount is highly sensitive to interest rate assumed, for different interest rates:

.02 774.13

.04 3,321.26

.06 14,214.86

.08 60,692.55

.10 258,514.77

.12 1,098,489.57

However it's unlikely that the money would have been invested anyways.

<comment><USER15> You are wrongly calculating with $180 instead of $13. The $180 figure is $13 adjusted by inflation.

<comment><USER16> While true using 6% during periods where inflation was > 6% is a poor interest rate. IMO, inflation +4% is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> OT: A bit of fun:

In 1626, Manhattan was supposedly bought for equivalent of $24 (in beads). If invested at 5% Annual interest, compounded monthly, it would now be worth around $7 billion (assuming my online calculator is working correctly).

So our man should bequeath his $13 + interest and ensure the terms of the will state the the capital + interest is maintained for at least 400 years and someone will be able to inherit a nice tidy sum!

<comment><USER18> Four hundred years from now, if humans even still exist and we're still under a scarcity based economy, those billions of dollars will likely not be worth much.

<comment><USER19> Should make a nice nest to put your bottlecaps in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Having done a few years for uncle slam, this doesn't surprise me much. Still, would love to read the regulation justifying the docked pay. HNers seem a pretty well-read bunch, but you might want to read Catch-22 between TED talks.

</comment><comment><USER21> Unrelated but that site was unreadable for me on mobile, repeatedly redirected me to ad pages that tried to look like Facebook. What's up with that?

</comment><comment><USER22> To be honest, bigger injustices happened during the war. I honestly cannot find it within myself to care about one man's $13.

<comment><USER23> I honestly find it interesting. After all- it depicts how completely alien and far-away the idea of war is to this generation. Everyone in this discussion has lost money due to a contractor or buisness partner not paying, but nobody in the room can imagine the real world atrocities of WW2 or WW1.

Imagine, if LA was besieged and starved for 3 years like St.Petersburg was. This generation cant even imagine how it is to run hungry- for a day. That people can scrap tapestry from the wall, eat there pets, burn there furniture - and finally eat other people, all that, is so far away by now- it does not even appear in war and horror movies.

<comment><USER24> you don't even have to besiege LA. just close I-5. done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why now?

<comment><USER26> I doubt he's suddenly pursuing this himself. Neither this article nor the source it cites documents any action he's taking. In fact, the source even says he had to dig through piles of documents during the interview to find the details of the specific mission on which he was captured. That sounds more like someone heard about the story and approached him to do an interview, adding a Click-Baity headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you are captured by the enemy and held in prison, your pay is docked? It is probably my ignorance of the military payment structure, but what the reasoning is behind this?

<comment><USER28> It sounded like if you are captured you are paid a dollar a day until you are released or can escape - but can't collect pay while "running away". It seemed unclear whether that was in lieu of normal pay or in addition to it.

I imagine it was worded this way so someone couldn't just be "escaping" for an unknown length of time and just disappear - removes the incentive to not return right away. Still, I'm not how anyone would be able to prove or disprove which day he escaped in the first place - not like his captors gave him a receipt - so the whole thing is pretty goofy.

<comment><USER29> It would make for a good Monty Python skit. A calm German officer behind a desk giving "escape receipt" to a giddy British soldier.

<comment><USER30> Hogan's Heroes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Heroes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Heroes)

It'd fit well - they kept trying to escape, and it'd have been easy enough to have a plot where they talk the camp commander into giving them a "fake" receipt in return for a favour, only for them to actually escape (and of course get caught again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unrelated but: that's how you should design your mobile website sharing plugin if you must do it. Small size, light color, 0 distractions.

<comment><USER32> I agree, though the fact I had to go back and check the article to find it might mean it's a bit _too_ subtle.

<comment><USER33> Though an annoying pop up on pressing the back button to leave (on an android phone with chrome)</comment></comment></comment>


Cave Squeaker, Rare Frog Last Seen in 1962, Is Found in Zimbabwe - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/world/africa/zimbabwe-frog-cave-squeaker.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Small happy news in frog form.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is such a random thing to find its way to the front page of HN

</comment><comment><USER4> In normal fashion with any rare animal we find, must kill/steal/remove it. Why can't we just leave things alone.</comment>


Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/34949864

<comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/this-is- what-h...](http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/this-is-what-happens- when-you-do-a-blank-google-image-search), which points to this.</comment>


Erlang and First-Person Shooters in online games [pdf]  - <AUTHOR> http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/395/ErlangandFirst-PersonShooters.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm surprised Erlang isn't used more often. Out of the box it seems to solve a lot of the hard scaling problems many business face now. Maybe it's just too exotic.

I wonder if they could have been as successful with Scala + Akka. They mention a desire for at least limited static typing at the end of the slides. In my experience well-defined, statically typed interface declarations can eliminate a lot of dumb bugs.

<comment><USER3> We use Erlang at Smarkets.com for a lot of things including a trading exchange

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good background to Erlang is Armstrong's thesis, it really reads like a popular book <http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf>. He discusses many of the points raised in the slides.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice write up.

Apparently the consensus is that Erlang is amazing for 'lower-level' infrastructure code but not so great for high-level business code. I wonder if Reia and Elxir might play a role in changing that...

<comment><USER6> I'm sure they could have done everything in Erlang, but they mentioned that they only have four developers that do Erlang within the company. Erlang developers aren't as prevalent as Python/Ruby developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Erlang is also used to power Facebook-style social games at Wooga: [http://www.erlang- factory.com/conference/London2011/speakers...](http://www.erlang- factory.com/conference/London2011/speakers/KnutNesheim)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really awesome. I had no idea all that stuff was powered by Erlang. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought they implemented game network code, scalably. _That_ would be cool. So I was a little bit disappointed when read that they only keep stats using Erlang.

Other than that, that's pretty interesting.

<comment><USER9> > So I was a little bit disappointed when read that they only keep stats using > Erlang.

Slide 19 lists far more than just stats-keeping:

> Our core server for controlling Python

> – Managing 100,000s of concurrent TCP connections

> – Scheduling/queuing of tasks for python

> – Metrics gathering (SNMP)

> – Presence server(fragmented mnesia)

> – Message passing (nb: this might be the "in-game messaging" service > mentioned in the presence server slide 21)

> Other standalone game-related servers (expanded on slide 25)

> – Transient in-game data (seems to be a k/v store used for e.g. dynamic chat > channels)

> – Testing bandwidth (estimation of client bandwidth via blasting UDP packets > to the server)

> – Ranking leaderboards (real-time rankings, >15m users, built on ets and a > customized gb_trees)

All of this is listed under "How we use Erlang"

<comment><USER8> I should clarify a bit. I think that contemporary FPS need real-time game server logic. When I saw link title I thought they finally ported some game code to Erlang.

All stuff you mentioned has nothing to do with game logic.

It does not require hard real-time response like one required from network game server.

And yes, I already know that I could use Erlang for non-hard-real-time tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if Go is both the low-level and the business logic - the erlang and the python?

<comment><USER2> Erlang's support for failover and concurrency is much, much deeper than anything available in any other language. Maybe Akka + Scala comes close.

<comment><USER11> Akka is attempting to bring as many Erlang features as possible to Scala. They're doing a great job, but imho they won't be able to go all the way due to JVM lacking certain features</comment></comment></comment>