Ask HN: How to Start a Podcast in 2020? - <AUTHOR> I used to do a podcast (the AWS podcast) back in 2012-2014.<p>Now it's 2020 and I'm about to start a new podcast. Any tips or recommendations? <comment><USER2> I'm going to talk more on the technical aspects here, not about marketing or ads or sponsorship or affiliate revenue.

I guess the simpler, though somewhat time consuming to decide on, way is to find a podcast media host depending on your needs (downloads and storage) and then use that service. There are many to choose from, such as anchor, captivate, buzzsprout, libsyn, blubrry, transistor, podbean, simplecast, castos and many others.

You have to register your feed with the various podcast directories, such as Apple, Spotify, Google, etc.

Then you need a podcast site that you can share with everyone, which could be something offered by the podcast media host or a WordPress site of your own (there are plugins from podcast hosts you can use to sync uploads and information to your site).

One issue I see with all these specialized hosts is that they allow using custom domains for the RSS feed (the one that podcast directories like Apple, Google, Spotify and others host and the clients refresh for subscriptions), but the actual audio/media files are referenced in the feeds with the podcasting service's domain. So if you switch media hosts, you'd have to make sure that your older host provides a (preferably free) redirection service in the feeds (which puts a 301 Moved Permanently for each episode in the feeds there to point to your host). I haven't found a specialized podcast host that allows using custom domains for the media files, but would love to know if any service offers this.

<comment><USER3> The issue of each hosting provider having a custom URL is significant and a source of lock-in. For going from "final audio" to published I was working on a PowerShell Core script (and testing it on Linux) to perform tasks like: transcoding, applying ID3 tags, embedding artwork, uploading to the podcast provider, getting the service URL, appending a 302 redirect on my website to the hosting service's file location, updating the podcast.xml feed file, and publishing a blog post about the new podcast episode (I'm using a JSON sidecar file with the data needed for show title, summary, links, etc for making a complete blog post/shownotes). I was thinking of rewriting the script into either a python or nodejs application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I run a startup[1] in the space that provide hands off podcast production experience to podcasters and I recommend that you (or anyone who wants to start a podcast) read this blog post at least once: [https://www.podcastinsights.com/start-a- podcast/](https://www.podcastinsights.com/start-a-podcast/)

[1] [https://www.useCastup.com](https://www.useCastup.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> I started recording podcast and hosted it on anchor. And submitted to all podcast directories.

Now you can search my podcast on google as "MeThoNenu"</comment>


IMAP Rant - <AUTHOR> http://sup.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/lib/sup/imap.rb <comment><USER2> LOL ... He hit most of my points except for the insane complexity of the FETCH and SEARCH commands. Each of these commands could be broken down into smaller commands that could be implemented in a hour or two instead of one huge command that takes weeks to perfect...</comment>


The Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/07/13/the-louisiana-environmental-apocalypse-road-trip/ <comment><USER2> This is a good read for those concerned about pollution, and it's very important to remember that climate change is not the only environmental threat around. Chemical pollution is a bad situation. I was disappointed with a lack of a practical call to action: it's mostly a TED-style exhortation for the "government to do something", along with "chemical plants are bad". There are surely environmental laws, programs, and other regulatory procedures that could help this pollution. Was DuPont breaking the law? Should they have been? How about getting some quotes from the EPA or environmental lawyers? Ranting about "Jazzfest sponsored by Shell" isn't going to inform a citizen or government official about what steps to take next.

Additionally, the second paragraph of the article contains a misleading statement about the risk of cancer in Reserve -- "800 times the national average". The data [1] is still shocking and generally backs up the article: there is a lot of chloroprene being dumped in the air in John the Baptist Parish, and the cancer risk there is the highest in the nation. But the 800x metric is only a summation of specifically enumerated, mostly chemical "point sources". If you sort by total cancer risk (most notably including emissions from cars and trucks), some of the tracts in the parish are only 2-4x the cancer risk of tracts in Manhattan and San Francisco.

[1] [https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics- assessment/2011-nati...](https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics- assessment/2011-national-air-toxics-assessment)

<comment><USER3> 2 to 4 times what it ought to be or not? Maybe it's ok

<comment><USER2> The particular situation with the neoprene plant couldn't possibly be OK, but the article is short on details. But I do think the risks of living in the general vicinity (yet outside the explosion range) of industrial facilities is oversold. For example, the east side of Houston towards the ship channel and its hundreds of refineries, terminals, plants, and other facilities shows a higher cancer risk than the rest of the metro area, but it's still less than many parts of LA, Seattle, NYC and San Francisco, due to other factors. The EPA doesn't recommend making these kind of comparisons for several reasons [1]. Also this dataset only covers air (not water / food / lifestyle) risks.

[1] [https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/nata- freq...](https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/nata-frequent- questions#background4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Louisiana is a wonderful mix of good things tainted with backwards thinking and selfishness. It is uniquely great and tragically flawed.

There are several things at play in Louisiana:

\- the US economy runs on noxious chemicals made in Louisiana

\- families are tight

\- people are at peace with adversity

\- the food and music are like nowhere else

\- everyone knows everyone

\- the well off who stay in Louisana are very greedy and small minded

\- people there have a way of life that is slowly going away and they feel threatened and short changed

This produces exactly what you'd expect.

I lived in central and western Louisiana for two years and also had business there off and on for several more years. I love Louisiana. I love the closeness of the families, the polite friendly attitudes, the amazing food, the laid back fun culture. I love the salt-of-the-earth people. Mixed in is a lot of ignorance, backwardness, and amongst those with money or power: selfishness, corruption, and nepotism.

Louisiana will remain in this low simmer of tragedy forever. As long as there are chemical plants there will be small communities of working poor. As long as there are small tight nit communities of working poor that can endure, along with pollution, there will be environmental tragedies.

Louisiana will never change. I imagine 200 years from now Louisiana will be one big superfund site which elite Americans are (once a year) horrified to find people still live in. It'll probably be some long-form bit of journalism just like this. People will say "oh that's terrible" and things will continue on as they always have.

<comment><USER5> Louisiana is a lot like the Rust Belt in the sense that people have been able to graduate with a high school degree for generations and with the right connections, land a life-long job at a chemical plant paying good money with better-than-average benefits, mostly due to pension plans being baked into their benefits because they work for multinational corporations. They have been conditioned to believe that education is not important while being constantly exposed to casual racism and are thus heavily conservative... the large Catholic population in the southern part of the state has certainly played a part in moving in that direction given the Democratic Party's stance on women's rights. They are also highly sensitive to any issue that negatively affects the petrochemical industry. Local politicians have tried to introduce other types of business to the region, but who wants to go to an area where the heat is oppressive, the education system sucks, and you're a hurricane away from not having power or clean water for a month?

Most people in that state are like most people in other states with respect to banal "exceptionalism." They believe that their culture and way of life is greater than that of other areas even though the average citizen is poorly educated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a good treatment of the politics of Louisiana's environmental catastrophe in "Strangers in Their Own Land": [https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land- Mourning/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land- Mourning/dp/1620972255)

The author talks to a lot of people in the state about the conflict between loving the outdoors (outdoor sports/hunting/recreation are big) and supporting companies that dump chemicals in the bayous, because of jobs. There's a lot of fatalism.

</comment><comment><USER7> The only fate of Louisiana is that it's a problem with its own inevitable solution; it will be inundated and become relatively unlivable. I have to wonder how much that plays into the decisions made by the people who understand that it's not really a long-term project as a state. This is still a hell of a way to treat people living there, but truly, no one should live there.

<comment><USER8> A little background about myself: I was born and raised in New Orleans to a middle class family that valued education (both parents 1600 SAT and English majors, MD, and MA). I went to one of the best private schools in the New Orleans area, coincidentally built on top of a former dump. All of my family still lives in New Orleans. I live in San Francisco now and haven't lived in New Orleans since my high school graduation.

I return to visit New Orleans about three to four times per year. On every visit, someone will half-jokingly ask me, "So when are you going to leave crazy California and move back?" I simply reply, "When are you going to flee Louisiana?" I have a convenient excuse in that I work in tech, and my family members convince themselves that's the only reason I don't move back. I tell them that I'm never moving back, but they stubbornly hold on to hope. My family isn't the stereotypical American-without-a-passport untraveled, uncultured types. My sisters have lived in Paris, London, Oregon, Maine, Maryland, DC, Texas, Georgia etc. My mom lived in Barcelona for stretches and speaks three languages. Yet they all end up back in the New Orleans area. Family bonds are that strong. Maybe I'm cold and too calculating for not living there with them.

After every good visit with the kids, nephews, aunts and uncles, my wife prods me, "Hey maybe we should live closer to your family." I just reply "No." The answer is simple: Louisiana, and New Orleans especially, is doomed as an ongoing entity. Call it fatalism, call it blindness, or call it stupidity, whatever the reason -- the people of Louisiana just keep on doing the same thing with the same reaction every time something bad happens; "Oh that's such a shame."

New Orleans' nickname is the "big easy"; I call it "the tiny difficult". Nothing ever changes. Progress is slow and glacial. Everyone knows everyone and has their nose in everyone else's business. You live a good life in Old Metairie with a nice weekend home in rural Louisiana. You find out that the wilderness near your home has recently been purchased. The land hasn't ever been touched, so you do some digging into it. You find out that they're going to clearcut the forest and wetlands and build an "oil services facility" on it with "mixed use commercial and residential" on the other side. This worries you because of the loss of wetlands and buffer zone (the forest would soak up flood waters in storms), and you're worried about pollution from the increased land use. You object to the project formally because you're well off and have some free time. Only later, you find out that your opponents are your very rich neighbors in Old Metairie -- doctors and lawyers speculating on land with their friends in the oil business. They start saying bad things and calling you names like a tree hugger and eco-mentalist. Others say that you're blocking progress and aren't thinking of the community and jobs. Eventually, the crooked tentacles of corruption will make their way through the bureaucracies and you will lose. Your neighbors will make more money, "progress" will happen, and you'll now deal with floods annually on a property that never flooded in hundreds of years.

The craziest thing about this tale isn't that it's true. It's that the very people profiting from this and pulling the levers are in the state. They're not always far-off corporations. They're your neighbors: pillars of local industry and commerce who are lauded for their success. It's insane to me that these people are looting and ravaging the very land that they live, and that they will continue to live on. It's one thing to be a wild tycoon, burn the locals and flee. But they're knowingly (or blindingly) hurting themselves, their families, and future generations. Maybe it's the constant layer of corruption in the state at every level. Maybe there's a sense of fatalism. But the very people whose livelihoods are on the line just don't care. One would think that Louisianans would be the most read, most vested people in the US on the topic of climate change. They're not. They don't believe in it. Despite losing all the barrier islands, wetland loss, extinction of species from habitat loss, facing worse storms every year, etc. They just think of their jobs and their family. People don't like being told that their job and way of life is going away because of their own ignorance, but it's the truth.

There's not much that will save Louisiana at this point. Maybe the federal government (not in this administration) will step in and help? The best thing that happened to the New Orleans public school system was Katrina (the feds took over the local school system and turned it around). It pains me to write this. I love my homeland. I truly do. I love my family. I love my culture. I just can't be there. Especially now as I tend to my father's estate after he passed away at a relatively young age from a hyper rare cancer (squamous carcinoma of the pancreas). I like breathing clean air. I like drinking (relatively) clean water. I like being healthy. You won't get those things in Louisiana, and sadly, no one with any clout seems to give a damn.

<comment><USER9> This was a great analysis. I grew up in Louisiana as well and you capture my sentiments exactly. It is a shame because New Orleans is a wonderfully historical city, with beautiful architecture and a very walkable downtown. It could be a _great_ city - at the very least the epicenter of the region. But I don't think it ever will be...no one with the ability to change it cares enough.

<comment><USER8> I've often wondered who are the people who have the ability and power to change the city? Is it a matter of the right people not caring, or is it beyond saving at this point?

Or maybe we should really treat it as The City That Care Forgot? Order another round, swing that doo-rag around the second line, and forget about the reality staring us in the face. Crank up the tunes man. Hey, at least WWOZ streams over the Internet now.

<comment><USER10> The "leadership" of the city abdicated sometime after the Morrison days. New Orleans used to have the port and manufacturing, and truly competed to be the first city of the South. Now tourism provides jobs for chambermaids and busboys, but no middle class. Private and parochial schools have trained nothing but lawyers and doctors since the 60s, and the public system is just starved. Kids have no local STEM opportunities outside the oil and gas industry. I wish NOLA could revive in my lifetime, but it won't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Louisiana sounds like hell. Guess they sold their souls for jobs. They seem OK with that.

> The risk of cancer in Reserve, a community founded by freed slaves, is 800 > times the national average, making the community, by one EPA metric, the > most carcinogenic census tract in America—the cause is a DuPont/Denka > chemical plant adjacent to the town that annually spews 250,000 pounds of > the likely carcinogen chloroprene into the air. If you think the situation > in Flint is bad, there are approximately 400 public water systems in > Louisiana with lead or other hazardous substances leaching into the drinking > water. Meanwhile, hundreds of petrochemical plants peppered across the > state's lush swampy interior freely emit carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, > and neurotoxins into the air and water, as well as inject them deep into the > earth.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is an interesting contrast to the VW scandal and the response to it.

<comment><USER13> Good observation. The VW emissions cheating was a technical violation that didn't have much of a real-world impact, because the percentage of diesel cars sold in the USA is tiny.

It often seems that there's something of an inverse proportion in the public outrage over some event vs. the actual damage caused.

VW cheats on emissions for cars that are a tiny of a percent of total cars sold in the USA --- huge fines, mass outrage, because why not? There's really no downside.

New Orleans is chemically polluted for decades, cancer hot zone, etc --- shut up, business as usual, because we need the jobs.

<comment><USER14> The percentage of diesel cars in the EU, on the other hand, is huge: as late as 2015, many large countries like France and Germany had >50% shares.

[http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/Passenger_cars_in_the_EU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The risk of cancer in Reserve, a community founded by freed slaves, is 800 > times the national average

I stopped reading there because I could think of no interpretation of that statement where the claim was even remotely plausible. The overall risk of developing some kind of cancer at some point in your life in the U.S. is about 40% [1]. Life expectancy is just shy of 80 years, so the annual risk of cancer is 0.5%. For the risk in Reserve to be 800 times that, the entire population would have to come down with cancer every three months. If that happened, it would be a bigger story.

[1] [https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/lifetime- probabi...](https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/lifetime-probability- of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer.html)

<comment><USER13> I stopped after Donald Trump was brought up in about the fourth paragraph. Like him or not, he has nothing to do with the state of Louisana or New Orleans specifically. New Orleans has been governed by Democrats exclusively while all of this environmental damage happened.

<comment><USER16> Further down:

"One can only imagine the zilch level of concern for a compound like chloroprene by President Trump, who had at his side when he signed an executive order in February stipulating the roll-back of government regulations the chief executive of Dow Chemical—"Andrew, I would like to thank you for…the fantastic job you've done," Trump told Dow chief Andrew Liveris, then handed him his signing pen to keep as a souvenir."

Trump is the president. He should care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "Many cases of cancer have occurred in communities on both sides of the > river, though the Louisiana Tumor Registry claims the numbers are not higher > than the national average"

So... what are we then supposed to gather from this statement?

<comment><USER18> We gather that the author did not acquire numbers from either side of the river, the Louisiana Tumor Registry, nor anything representing the national average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Chloroprene is the monomer of neoprene, meaning that when neoprene breaks down it creates chloroprene? Interested what evidence we have about the dangers of neoprene for humans/the environment

</comment><comment><USER20> So why do these sick people not get some lawyers and start suing?

Obviously there must be something stopping them, what is it?

<comment><USER21> A family member of mine used to take medical malpractice cases from these communities while I was growing up. She was routinely harassed and hassled by whatever (exclusively white) sheriff of whatever town was the brother-in-law of the doctor she was suing. Just driving around in these places trying to drum up support for such a suit would be a risk. They have a way of arresting you for imagined vehicular infractions right after the judges go home for the weekend, then letting you out Monday morning as soon as you're arraigned, where you can pay the bill to let out your impounded car.

If that sort of pressure can be applied to people working cases that affect just one doctor in a community like this, I sure wouldn't want to to see what kind of pressure the chemical companies could bring to bear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just love that caption "Crowd of about one hundred people" [Yes yes there are probably 98 hidden behind the sign]

also since when is binary camouflage a thing for the military?

<comment><USER23> If you mean digital pattern camouflage, then since early 2000's for the USA military.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You would be surprised that area is like what I imagine California is like people are laid back and friendly and never forget a good turn or complement and have the coolest accent it's a shame

</comment><comment><USER24> We need to make chemicals somewhere. Where do we put the chemical plants then? Maybe somewhere where nobody lives where the prevailing winds blow over the ocean? The only place I can think of like that is southern Argentina, but nobody lives there so how do you get all the plant engineers and workers into the plant everyday? It's a tough problem.

<comment><USER12> > The only place I can think of like that is southern Argentina

I doubt the Argentinians will go along with that.

<comment><USER25> I believe you are underestimating the capability of subversive diplomacy and corruptibility of bureaucracy :-)

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's called Louisiana.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I skimmed it and noticed this: _Pentachlorophenol contains dioxins, which are used in making chemical weapons, like Agent Orange_

Agent Orange is not a chemical weapon, it is a defoliant. Dioxin contamination was a result of improper manufacture, not a deliberate ingredient. Read the wikipedia page, FFS.

I hate it when this happens. Do I now have to question the rest of the article?

<comment><USER12> > Read the wikipedia page, FFS.

Indeed:

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

Relevant quote:

"Agent Orange is a chemical weapon most notably used by the US armed forces during the Vietnam War, classified as defoliant. "

<comment><USER27> Just because some Wikipedia editor writes something doesn't make it a fact. There are other relevant quotes in there from the governments of the U.K. And US saying that it's not a chemical weapon.

<comment><USER12> GP explicitly references Wikipedia as an authority, that should not suddenly be grounds to dismiss a reply.

The US saying it is not a chemical weapon is a bit like them declaring 'enhanced interrogation' not torture.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Physicians' Opinions on Medicare for All - <AUTHOR> https://www.auntminnie.com/Forum/tm.aspx?high=&m=583165&mpage=6#587618 <comment><USER2> Requires an account to view anything.</comment>


React Native: Facebook's New JavaScript Library Fix for Mobile App Development - <AUTHOR> http://arc.applause.com/2015/04/21/facebook-app-developers-react-native/

<comment><AUTHOR> Facebook's solution is an open-source project called React Native that builds on its successful React project for Web development. Facebook claims that React Native will let the same set of engineers build applications in the same way for either iOS or Android. This time the company has set its sights a little more realistically than it did with HTML5. React Native is a learn- once-run-everywhere (LORE) app development tool.

</comment><comment><USER2> I find it odd that a majority of the articles and documentation about React Native fail to mention upfront that Android development isn't available yet. While this article does mention that fact, it seems weird to me to push a cross-platform solution when only one platform is available.</comment>


More Swedes Died in One Month in 1993 and 2000 than in April 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@emanuelkarlsten/more-swedes-died-in-one-month-1993-and-2000-compared-to-april-2020-why-25b762d03a1f <comment><USER2> One month is not enough statistics. How many died in the 3 or 4 months around that in 93 and 2000? It wouldn't be that surprising if there was a terrible flu in the past. But picking just one month at least makes the comparison incomplete unclear. I'd worry this is an attempt to minimize Sweden's terrible performance during the pandemic. See [1]. Sweden's deaths per million (538) is only lower than the horribly devastated countries. They are a bit worse than US, France, Netherlands (401, 458, 358), not quite as bad (but getting closer every day) to Italy, Spain, the UK (577, 607, 652).

This is interesting and I'd like to see a larger comparison.

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember one of the big medias trying a scare tactic of saying the death toll in April was the worst in almost 30 years, Stupid Sweden!

And people let it slide, no one even seemed to care what the next months would be like. Humans huh.</comment>


Academic expert says Google and Facebook's AI researchers aren't doing science - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/07/14/academic-expert-says-google-and-facebooks-ai-researchers-arent-doing-science/ <comment><USER2> So, I guess it is hard to get good ML/AI PhD students these days, given what private companies are offering.</comment>


Meet Oracle's New Co-CEO Safra Catz - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-new-co-ceo-is-safra-catz-2014-9

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be rude to forget the other half [http://www.businessinsider.com/a-closer-look-at-oracle-co- ce...](http://www.businessinsider.com/a-closer-look-at-oracle-co-ceo-mark- hurd-2014-9)</comment>


End of Ubuntu Netbook Edition - <AUTHOR> http://blog.canonical.com/?p=528

<comment><USER2> The title given by OP is misleading. The title of the actual blog post is: "Ubuntu Netbook Edition folded into Ubuntu for next release"

According to the blog post: "To be clear, this is the opposite of us withdrawing from the netbook market. ... The introduction of the new shell for Ubuntu means that we have a user interface that works equally well whatever the form factor of the PC."

<comment><AUTHOR> I apologize, didn't actually want it to mean that way :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Its time to start working on Ubuntu Tablet Edition, isn't it? What with the Xoom having an unlockable bootloader, and the whole rash of honeycomb tablets expected this year, maybe its time for the traditional Linux stack to arrive at the next frontier.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that MeeGo? It allows millions of desktop GNOME (er, GNOME-Qt hybrid) developers to reuse their skills to develop phone and tablet apps. Oh wait.

<comment><USER5> I'm trying to understand this comment. Are you mocking open source platforms?

<comment><USER6> He's mocking Meego. Just as they're seeing traction with something, they make a huge change so all their devs have to scramble to keep up.

Switching from GTK to Qt for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Ubuntu naming landscape is currently confusing.

I particularly dislike the names Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and would like to see them all go.

I picked the netbook edition for a laptop - thinking it might be optimised for long battery life as well as a small display.

My concern would be that a vanilla Ubuntu wouldn't be tailored in the same way.

Could you not split Ubuntu into a core (which you call Ubuntu) - with the option of adding flavours (version types/add on packs)? These could be downloaded at installation time or possibly in advance for those with network issues.

So when installing Ubuntu the user is presented with a list of addons/versions to choose from - Education (schools and colleges), Server (For servers) etc. How about calling it the: Ubuntu Tailor (suits you sir) TM ?

<comment><USER8> > I picked the netbook edition for a laptop - thinking it might be optimised > for long battery life as well as a small display.

I really doubt that.

There is no real difference between the various flavor except in the packages that are installed by default. It's pretty much like you suggested :)

You can get a normal (desktop edition) ubuntu and turn it into a server by just installing packages from the package manager. I personally don't know exactly which packages are installed by default on the server edition, but the point is that the "Server Edition" is not really that special.

Same applies to flavors like Xubuntu and Kubuntu. You can always install xfce and/or kde from apt-get. You can get Xubuntu then install gnome on it.

<comment><USER9> >> I picked the netbook edition for a laptop - thinking it might be optimised for long battery life as well as a small display.

> I really doubt that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that has historically been the case. The netbook edition contained some kernel tweaks to make it run better on Atom processors, and also used an interface optimized for smaller screens; most recently Unity.

<comment><USER10> Correct and correct. I've been running it on my Eee PC 1000HE for the past year, it runs beautifully, noticeably more efficiently than the Windows XP that came with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice. Just "Ubuntu", wherever you install it.

<comment><USER12> Except on servers.

Which I guess is due to install disk space issues...?

<comment><USER11> More likely it has to do with the GUI stuff that you wouldn't want on a server.

<comment><USER12> I was assuming that different sets of packages would be installed depending on a choice presented during installation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried Netbook edition on my original Acer Aspire One and found it be slow and clunky - worse than plain Ubuntu. Not a good thing for something supposed to be for netbooks.

Have now settled on plain Ubuntu 10.10 with the top task bar moved to the left side, and the bottom one removed completely.

</comment><comment><USER14> 'using netbook remix right now'

I like the UI re-hash, it really is the easiest thing to use on the tinier screen. As long as it they keep that usability they can call it anything they want :)

<comment><USER15> I liked 10.04 better than 10.10. The new side menu doesn't really do it for me. I ended up switching to standard Gnome on 10.04, whereas UNR was fine previously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> But at home I have Windows Super Extended Profesional Ultimate Ribbed for your Pleasure edition - that must be better!

Otherwise - very good

<comment><USER17> That edition sounds great. You shouldn't have to worry about virus anymore, just trojans.</comment></comment>


Hybrid graphical novel (the 60s in France) - <AUTHOR> http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/7/totality/

<comment><USER2> In case you run a flash blocker and you're totally put off by a nothing-but- flash site (as I was), here's an intro to the story site:

[http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=99](http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=99)</comment>


Dear Plurk: We're through. Kthxbye.  - <AUTHOR> http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/07/16/3459.aspx

<comment><USER2> Anybody else feel the same about karma system on Hacker News?

<comment><USER3> Hacker News doesn't really rub karma in your face like the article describes Plurk as doing (headless dog?!).

Of course, you can _choose_ to think that the karma number in the corner is actively mocking you, just as you can choose to click on other people's names to compare yourself to them. How much these site features bother a person says more about the person than the features, I think.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, here on HN nobody knows you're a headless dog. You have to deliberately click on someone's name to even _know_ their karma score... and there isn't much reason to care.

And, wow, headless dog, no kidding:

<http://www.plurk.com/user/gnidan>

(That's just some random user's page, as linked from the front page.)

I can see how that would be enough to put me off a site for life.

And is it just me or is the "giant, echoingly empty, _horizontally scrolling_ timeline" layout the stupidest design decision since... well, the name "Plurk", which sounds like something your dog might say if he were missing his head?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> unsubscribe.

hmmmm...didn't seem to work. anyone know how to stop every single post from the f5 corporate marketing blogs from reaching me here?</comment>


Honduras to build land title registry using Bitcoin technology - <AUTHOR> https://uk.news.yahoo.com/honduras-build-land-title-registry-using-bitcoin-technology-162701917.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A little context:

They will use an overlay blockchain called Factom that timestamps commits into the Bitcoin blockchain to provide it with a base consensus. The goal of this design is to leverage Bitcoin's security while having the freedom to store much more data than would be practical to store in the Bitcoin blockchain. How it works in practice, we'll see.</comment>


Turkey blocks social media again to stall protests, here's how to access them - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/04/turkey-blocks-social-media-again-to-stall-protests-heres-how-to-access-them/ <comment><USER2> Seems like a good time for the technical community to reassess its contribution to the situation and how we can do better.

How were communication services used by individuals and the state?

Did the threat model encompass the seen actions and techniques?

Which companies collaborated?

I see a lot of responsibility on our side to do better.

</comment><comment><USER3> A must watch: 3 rules for rulers from CGP Grey on YouTube. 20 mins, talks about how authoritarian regimes function. Sheds light on why all these stuff happens the world over.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also take a look through the AKP Party's emails, which led to the discovery of a backchannel between Erdogan and Assad (and subsequently) the recent Turkish military coup attempt: [https://wikileaks.org/akp- emails/](https://wikileaks.org/akp-emails/)

<comment><USER5> If there being such a back channel is a surprise to you, you should really reconsider whether you know anything about foreign policy at all.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. If the backchannel is news or surprising to you, you're probably just following and regurgitating someone else's propaganda.

Agreed with the OP: read original sources like Wikileaks.

<comment><USER5> Reading Wikileaks alone is essentially worthless because you will lack the necessary context.

A good example for this is all of the discussion about reporters colluding with Clinton based on the leaked emails because reporters are making request for comments, which is standard journalistic practice. Several such situations came up as a consequence of these leaks.

This is not to say you shouldn't look at the stuff released by Wikileaks at all but don't make the mistake of believing you get the entire picture from that or if you do, that you have the knowledge required to interpret it correctly.

<comment><USER6> Sure.

I don't think anyone, myself or the OP, has suggested reading Wikileaks as a sole source.

A good example is understanding the role that Benghazi State Department officials (Ambassador Stevens) played in illegally internationally shipping weapons between war zones: from Qaddafi's weapons caches into Syria under the direction of then State Department Secretary Clinton.

If you just read the emails you'll understand that Benghazi was important, that it was dangerous, that there was a secret CIA annex there. But when there's a big-to-do about Clinton emails and Benghazi, including her use of private email servers in violation of FOIA statutes that prevented journalists from investigating the breach of international law - if you just read Wikileaks you'd probably think that there wasn't really that much to the Benghazi thing.

I agree with you completely: read a ton of Wikileaked documents. But understand that they are communications between people; and that to understand what they mean you need to understand who those people are, when they were sent, and what objectives and constraints those people were under.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Erdogan is trying to stall protests, but protesters saved his rear end just a few months ago.

</comment><comment><USER8> Turkey's current political climate is endemic of the region. It's a molotov cocktail waiting for a lighter.

<comment><USER9> Technically it's already been lit, it's just not as big a fire as it could be. I mean: Turkey is at war, Russia is at war, Saudi Arabia is at war, Qatar is at war, NATO is at war, Syria is a warzone, Iraq is a warzone... we're lucky the big guns are somewhat not pointed at each other, which would literally be WW3, but the area is already burning alright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Genuinely curious, only serious answers, please: can someone living in Turkey explain how the government can justify ordering a ban while publicly using Twitter themselves? What am I missing?

<comment><USER11> They are not "banning" in the sense of disallowing or prohibiting. They just slow it down to the point where it is no more usable. Media is only as good as they serve to the needs of the government.

As for the justification, nowadays they don't really justify anything, they just do, and it doesn't matter if it is unlawful or not. Especially after the coup attempt, there's this state of emergency situation which allows the government to bypass the parliament which pretty much translates to no justification for anything, capability is enough and it is not difficult to find stuff to use as pretext. Many of the government's recent actions are gross violations of constitution and several other laws, all possible due to the emergency status.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. The real answer to the question is: they don't care and they don't need to explain anything

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is pretty clear now that the Turkey's Islamic government was behind the fake coup. They have used this to hit all of their opposition without worrying about laws (state of emergency = do whatever you want)

1\. Complete clear all Gulen cult members from their infiltrated state positions

2\. Hit secular Turks (Cumhuriyet newspaper behind bars this week)

3\. Hit Kurdish opposition ( Kurdish party members behind bars this week)

Now that they are fighting in three big fronts. There is no way for them to succeed. On the other hand, if they win, this is the end of the secular, democratic Turkish Republic (which pretty much eroded on all those counts since the Islamic party came the power)

<comment><USER14> What is a "Islamic party"? Turkey is something like 96% Muslim population, so chances are, any particular cross section of society might just be called "Islamic" something, including the government.

<comment><USER3> That 96% is the amount of people registered as Muslims, and the religion status are registered at birth as parents declare. Further, who's not a registered Christian or Jewish is considered a Muslim by default. So that 96% includes: atheists, converts to religions other than those _of book_ (Islam, Christianity, Judaism), Alawites (10 million of them, and Turkey's population is 70million), secularists and the non practising Muslims (edit: i.e. who are only nominally Muslim because parents are).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> there are multiple reports of cable internet subscribers' speed is downgraded to 1,44 mbps.

[http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5771998066](http://www.speedtest.net/my- result/5771998066)

<comment><USER16> Surely 1.44 Mbps is enough bandwidth to access Twitter in a timely manner unless that bandwidth is heavily over-subscribed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Keep in mind this is a government we're currently selling weapons to:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-lockheed-fighter-turkey- id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-lockheed-fighter-turkey- idUSKCN12S2G1?il=0)

<comment><USER18> Presumably the US is selling/arming Kurds that are rebelling against the regime, too. This was one of the emails released yesterday, though it is dated 2014:

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/43648#efmAtVAz1](https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/43648#efmAtVAz1)

>> On Aug 17, 2014 3:50 PM, "H" <email@example.com> wrote:

>>> 3\. In the past the USG, in an agreement with the Turkish General Staff,

>>> did not provide such heavy weapons to the Peshmerga, out of a concern that

>>> they would end up in the hands of Kurdish rebels inside of Turkey. The

>>> current situation in Iraq, not to mention the political environment in

>>> Turkey, makes this policy obsolete. Also this equipment can now be

>>> airlifted directly into the KRG zone.

Point 5. is missing from that email, for whatever reason.

<comment><USER19> The KRG, despite being Kurds, are besties with the Turkish government (a pipeline going out of Iraqi Kurdistan exports oil through Turkey), and rather at loggerheads with the PKK (Kurdish rebels in Turkey), so there's little chance of the weapons passing from the KRG to the PKK.

<comment><USER18> This is good context, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a Turkish, there are so much hate going into most of the people's comments going on here.

I am a Turkish citizen and i live there so without the actual experience, most of the things said here is not true and heavily biased.

The people that got arrested last night were actively tied to terrorist organization called PKK and execute under their command. How would you feel there was a senator in your country representing such terrorist organization and continue to do so because he was untouchable because he was elected? How would you feel you left you house or dorm scared that you would be blown into pieces on your way to school or some errand etc?

Those people are widely connected and their supporters are trying to organize violent acts via social media.

Another thing is Turkey is %90+ muslim so It is very odd that people call Erdogan islamist. So what? It is a muslim country. People actually voted for him(including myself and most of the people i know). It is peoples beliefs. You dont say things about Obama or Bush 'Oh he is a Christian Leader' every time you have a conversation that has a negative context.

<comment><USER12> Thanks Mr. Government supporting PR account. People ilke you are the main reason we are ashamed of and hopeless about our own country.

And if you are serious, definitely we are not living in the same country. I envy you.

BTW, Islamist does not mean Muslim. It's a political ideology. And it's not a democratic one. Erdogan is definitely an Islamist politician.

Edit: And Kurdish politicians and their leader are not terrorists at all. They have never been considered as terrorists since today. Only reason they are on target now is because Erdogan is obsessed with changing the regime and becoming the president while Kurdish party hinders that. The truth in Turkey is as simple as this.

<comment><USER21> Watch out, if you disagree with government you are a terrorist supporter.

There is a whole list of things that are wrong with the democratic process in Turkey, one of them is the silencing of political parties & media.</comment></comment></comment>


Auto-Generating Clickbait with Recurrent Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> http://larseidnes.com/2015/10/13/auto-generating-clickbait-with-recurrent-neural-networks/ <comment><USER2> If I could feed this an article and have it generate headlines based on the text of that article (and they were any good), there is a solid chance I would pay real money for that service.

Headlines are an absolute pain, and as the article says, they're decidedly unoriginal most of the time. I can't see an obvious reason that an AI would be much worse at creating them as a human.

<comment><USER3> Instead of generating random articles

      1. Generate click bait headlines
      2. Write suitable copy for them
      3. ???
      4. Profit

Where 3, of course, is "build ad network"

<comment><USER4> I know of at least company which actually does this (tests headlines before writing the actual articles).

<comment><USER5> I've always wondered if sites do this the other way around. A site invests a lot in content they create you would think to get the most out of it they would serve it with different headlines to different demographics. Knowing from Facebook what headlines you have clicked through in the past can indicate how they should write future headlines to get you again.

<comment><USER4> Oh, they definitely do it the other way around extensively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the notion of swamping the Internet with fake click-bait headlines, to dilute the attractiveness of this (to me, odious) form.

Give me sincere, honest news and discussion, or else shut up.

Unfortunately, someone out there must really have a craving for "weird old tricks" and "shocking conclusions".

It's a sort of race-to-the-bottom, least common denominator effect.

Maybe someone will write a browser extension that filters out obvious click- bait headlines. Now _that_ would be clever!

<comment><USER7> People don't have a craving for this kind of crap, that is they don't actively search for it. It works by exploiting the brain. It's the publishing equivalent to junk food. We know it's awful. We know it's bad for us. But we struggle to not consume it because it's cheap and it pings our reward systems.

<comment><USER8> Actually, I think that the clickbait junk _makes us think that it will ping our reward systems_. For me, at least, it doesn't really reward me very well (even in a junk food way).

Maybe this means that the real clickbait trash is training me not to click on it, so I don't need the fake to do so?

<comment><USER9> I cured myself out of clickbait headlines after I clicked on few and learned to expect no content on the other side. It's a simple association, really. You click on something X-y, you get no reward, you learn not to waste time on X-looking things.

<comment><USER7> For you certainly. But the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Clickbait drives an insane amount of traffic and it shows no slowing down. Cosmo has been successfully using "clickbait" titles for decades on the cover of their magazines.

<comment><USER9> Of course. I'm not denying the effectiveness of this technique, just providing a n=1 datapoint. Maybe my personal idiosyncrasies make me immune to _that particular_ type of traffic-driving technique (I have no doubts I'm vulnerable to other methods).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could this RNN model perhaps be used to filter click bait headlines from HN automatically? Perhaps one could perform some sort of backward beam search to figure out how likely a particular headline would've been produced by it. If there are words in a headline that the model doesn't know, one could perhaps just let it replace it with one that it knows.

</comment><comment><USER11> Now if we can just teach AI to get sidetracked reading all this content we'd also prevent Judgement Day.

SkyNet: (speaking to self?) "Unleash hell on humans. Launch all missiles."

SkyNet: (responding to self?) "Not now, not now. Let me finish this article on John Stamos's belly button."

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://xkcd.com/1283/](https://xkcd.com/1283/)

I really find RNNs to be pretty cool. When they are combined with a natural human tendency to see patterns they are hilarious. So perhaps we need to update our million monkeys hypothesis to a million RNNs with typewriters coming up with all the works of Shakespeare.

<comment><USER13> Shakespearean RNN [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/char- rnn/shakespear.t...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/char- rnn/shakespear.txt)

Surprisingly convincing if viewed as excerpts rather than a play.

Now to find some English teachers to try to interpret what Shakespeare meant by some of those lines!

<comment><USER14> [https://xkcd.com/356/](https://xkcd.com/356/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice! I've wanted to do something like this for awhile, too, but haven't had the time yet.

What's interesting to me, from a research point of view, is the degree of nuance the network uncovers for the clickbait. We all know that <person> is going to be doing <intriguing action>, but for each person these actions are slightly different. The sentence completions for "Barack Obama Says..." are mainly politics related while "Kim Kardashian Says..." involve Kim commenting on herself.

So it might not really understand what it's saying, but it captures the fact those two people will tend to produce different headlines.

Neat Idea: what if we tried the same thing with headlines from the New York Times (or maybe a basket of newspapers)? We would likely find that the Clickbait RNN's vision of Obama is a lot different from the Newspaper RNN's Obama. Teasing apart the differences would likely give you a lot more insight into how the two readerships view the president than any number polls would.

</comment><comment><USER16> What I'm surprised most is that the headlines seem not to be much better than your average markov chain output

<comment><USER17> I think this is for three main reasons:

1\. You can do really well with a simple grammar

2\. You only need short output

3\. Lack of training data

There's not an incredibly rich structure to extract, and with short outputs the weirdness doesn't compound and cycles aren't as likely. A common _small_ dataset for playing with RNNs is all of Shakespeare which is somewhere in the region of 1M words.

However, this is still fun and interesting!

<comment><USER16> > 3\. Lack of training data

> [...]

> There's not an incredibly rich structure to extract, and with short outputs > the weirdness doesn't compound and cycles aren't as likely. A common small > dataset for playing with RNNs is all of Shakespeare which is somewhere in > the region of 1M words.

He does state that the network is trained with 2M headlines, meaning ~5-20M words. That _should_ be enough.

I would have thought that RNN would somehow work better. It would be interesting to see direct comparison of fake hacker news headlines generated with Markov chains versus RNN.

<comment><USER17> True, I had managed to miss that, although it's working on 200 dimensional vectors rather than single letters as in the small shakespeare dataset. That feels like it might make it harder to train. I've personally found more problems dealing with Glove vectors compared to the word2vec ones, but I don't have any hard data for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was an enjoyable article. There is an obvious extension which is to mturk the results and feed the mturk data back into the net. Just give the turkers 5 headlines and ask them which they would click first, repeat a hundred times per a thousand turkers or whatever.

Years ago I considered applying for DoD grant money to implement something reminiscent of all this for military propaganda. That went approximately nowhere, not even past the first steps. Someone else should try this (insert obvious famous news network joke here, although I was serious about the proposal). To save time I'll point out I never got beyond the earliest steps because there is a vaguely infinite pool of clickbaitable English speakers on the turk, but the pool of bilingual Arabic (or whatever) speakers with good taste in pro-usa propaganda is extremely small, so the tech side was easy to scale but the mandatory human side simply couldn't scale enough to make the output realistically anything but a joke.

</comment><comment><USER19> > The training converges after a few days of number crunching on a GTX980 GPU. > Let's take a look at the results.

Stupid question: why is the GPU important here? I would have thought this was more of a CPU task..??

(then again, as I typed this I remembered that bitcoin farming is supposed to be GPU intensive so I'm guessing the "why" for that is the same as this)

<comment><USER20> GPU's are really good at parallel tasks such as calculating the color of every pixel on the screen, or doing the same operation on a large dataset. According to Newegg, the GTX980 has 2048 CUDA cores (parallel processing cores) that run at ~1266 MHz as opposed to a nice CPU which might have 4 cores that run at 4 GHZ. In other words, if you want to manipulate a whole bunch of things in one way in parallel, you can program it to use the GPU effectively, if you want to manipulate one thing a whole bunch of ways in series, CPU is your best bet.

(note: this is massively oversimplified)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Coarse rule-of-thumb: running on Geforce class GPUs you can get up to 5x, maaaybe 10x the performance per dollar as compared to a top-line CPU. Assuming your problem scales well on GPUs, many problems don't. The GTX980 is actually a great performer. For Tesla class systems like the K40 it's a lot closer to equal with the CPU on performance/$ (they're not much faster than the GTX980 but a lot more expensive). But you can get an edge with the Teslas when you start comparing multi-GPU clusters to multi-CPU clusters, since with GPUs you need less of the super-expensive interconnect hardware. (You're not going to put GTX cards in a cluster, you'd have massive reliability problems.)

IMHO, the guys showing 100x speedups on GPUs are Doing It Wrong; they use a poor implementation on the CPU, use just one CPU core, consider a very synthetic benchmark, or a bunch of other tricks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Getting this error:

        Error: 500 Internal Server Error

        Sorry, the requested URL 'http://clickotron.com/' caused an error:

        Internal Server Error
        Exception:

        IOError(24, 'Too many open files')
        Traceback:

        Traceback (most recent call last):
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 862, in _handle
            return route.call(**args)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 1732, in wrapper
            rv = callback(*a, **ka)
          File "server.py", line 69, in index
            return template('index', left_articles=left_articles, right_articles=right_articles)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 3595, in template
            return TEMPLATES[tplid].render(kwargs)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 3399, in render
            self.execute(stdout, env)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 3386, in execute
            eval(self.co, env)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 189, in __get__
            value = obj.__dict__[self.func.__name__] = self.func(obj)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 3344, in co
            return compile(self.code, self.filename or '<string>', 'exec')
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 189, in __get__
            value = obj.__dict__[self.func.__name__] = self.func(obj)
          File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bottle.py", line 3350, in code
            with open(self.filename, 'rb') as f:
        IOError: [Errno 24] Too many open files: '/home/ubuntu/clickotron/views/index.tpl'

<comment><USER22> That'll teach you to do disk I/O on every page render.

<comment><USER23> Yep. Have a separate process cache a few up and simply cp over the active one to be served as a big bag of immutable bits. Bonus points for using a CDN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't stop laughing at these. Check out the Click-o-tron site: [http://clickotron.com/](http://clickotron.com/)

<comment><USER25> My favorite: "residents can't remember if they lost their wine at the same time." [1]

[1] [http://clickotron.com/article/5588/residents-cant- remember-i...](http://clickotron.com/article/5588/residents-cant-remember-if- they-lost-their-wine-at-the-same)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used a simpler technique (character level language modelling) to come up with an Australian real estate listing generator: [http://electronsoup.net/realtybot](http://electronsoup.net/realtybot)

This is pre-generated, not live, for performance reasons. There are a few hundred thousand items though, so the effect is similar.

The data source is several tens of thousands of real estate listings that I scraped and parsed.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is simply brilliant.

(Ranking algorithm baked into a stored procedure notwithstanding. [ducks])

</comment><comment><USER28> I am not sure how much I would give credit to the idea that the neural network 'gets' anything as it is written in the article.

> Yet, the network knows that the Romney Camp criticizing the president is a > plausible headline.

I am pretty certain that the network does not know any of this and instead just happens to be understood by us as making sense.

<comment><USER13> _Life Is About A Giant White House Close To A Body In These Red Carpet Looks From Prince William's Epic 'Dinner With Johnny '_

from the article would be a good counterexample of the neural network "getting" anything.

If you're an algorithm "White House", "Prince William" and "Dinner With Johnny" is to "Red Carpet" as "Romney" is to "Camp" and "Bad President".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> tldr; guy uses rnn lstm to create link bait site.

hopes crowd sourcing will filter out non-sense.

[http://clickotron.com/](http://clickotron.com/)

<comment><USER30> Site down. Did HN readers crashed the server? Everything old is new again (slashdot effect)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Tips From Two And A Half Men : Getting Real" is great. Some of the generate titles are incredible

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't understand the first two layer RNN which according to the author optimized the word vectors.

it says:

During training, we can follow the gradient down into these word vectors and fine-tune the vector representations specifically for the task of generating clickbait, thus further improving the generalization accuracy of the complete model.

how to you follow the gradient down into these word vectors?

if word vectors are the input of the network, don't we only train the weight of the network? how come the input vectors get optimized during the process?

</comment><comment><USER33> Missed opportunity for HN headline.

This program generates random clickbait headlines. You won't believe what happens next. You'll love #7.

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of Headline Smasher [0].

Some pretty fun ones there but it doesn't use RNNs. It just merges existing headlines.

[0]: [http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all](http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all)

</comment><comment><USER35> Great tutorial. Been looking to do something like this for a while. Bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER36> I think this one is my favorite:

Life Is About — Or Still Didn't Know Me

<comment><USER37> The "top" article in "clickotron.com" is "New President Is 'Hours Away' From Royal Pregnancy" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Your main site is down. Bottle can't handle serving files scalably or something? Point is, it broke.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was exactly the problem, bottle+gevent serving static files. It's moved behind nginx now. (But you might have to wait for a DNS propagation before you get to the new server.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting blog post, but site is down. How much traffic do You get from HN?

</comment><comment><USER40> 500 Internal Server Error on the site where you could upvote em.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on it:) It's getting a bit more traffic than expected at the moment.</comment></comment>


What Hell Hath Disney-LucasFilm Wrought? Star Wars Meets Extreme Home Makeover - <AUTHOR> http://www.deadline.com/2012/12/what-hell-hath-disney-lucasfilm-wrought-star-wars-meets-extreme-home-makeover/

<comment><USER2> Is this satire? This person is mad that some volunteers helping to rebuild houses after a devastating wildfire used sacrosanct Star Wars imagery to lighten the mood and make the victims happy? _Outrage?_ This article is disgusting and why is it on HN?

</comment><comment><USER3> flagged.</comment>


Oh look, an iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/519621380 <comment><USER2> He makes the argument there that because 10.6 is so great, we don't really need to be disappointed at 10.7 being delayed. But, for me, it is precisely because 10.6 was so great compared to 10.5 (and 10.5 was so great compared to 10.4 and 10.4 was great compared to 10.3, etc.) that I am so disappointed by the delay of 10.7. Apple (often) makes great and innovative products that improve the way you interact with technology. I honestly didn't know I needed spaces/timemachine/spotlight, until I had them. I honestly didn't realize how long the computer took to start up and shut down until 10.6 came along and made it do those things pretty damned quick. Based on Apple's track record of innovation, 10.7 could be super freakin' awesome in ways I can't even think of. But instead... iPad only. The iPad is neat and all, but some of us still need a computer, and computers have a long way to go before they're good enough so that it doesn't make sense to make them better.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that you see such a huge improvement between 10.6 and 10.5. (To describe it as great)

In my day to day life, I haven't really noticed any practical difference. Maybe expose on the dock, which I haven't developed a habit for using.

We now have coverflow in the finder, which I did use one time to flip through a photo directory quickly.

That's really all I can think of. I know there were many under the hood changes with Grand Central and OpenCL, but it hasn't made any difference to my day to day life.

I will admit that I've become accustomed to my workflow so it's possible that some great new features are waiting there for me but I'm too lazy to learn.

<comment><USER4> Services makes a huge difference for me. You should take a look at what can be automated and changed in how you work with OS X. It saves me a whole lot of time each day.

<comment><USER5> I'd actually love to hear some concrete examples of this ... I feel like I'm missing out!

<comment><USER4> I tend to use it to process files and run perl scripts (yes I know) on selected text. Here is a link to some videos: <http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak235> <http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak236> and a site: <http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/index.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Computers are fundamentally different from things like the iPad. The iPad is a _console_ , not a computer. It is heavily restricted in what you can do with it.

Yes, computers are progressing a little more slowly in a sense. This isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't have to buy a new one every two years. But they're still different.

<comment><USER7> > It is heavily restricted in what you can do with it.

And that's what makes it more useful to more people.

<comment><USER6> That's because operating systems are fundamentally broken in terms of how they handle application installing, application uninstalling, etc.

OSX's .app drag-and-drop is the closest to the right answer. Linux's package management is a working but hugely complex solution to a problem that should be entirely sidestepped. Windows is totally broken.

Each app should live in its own world. Management of libraries and support infrastructure should also be neatly modular. An app should not have an "installer" and should not be allowed to mess with the OS.

<comment><USER8> Which is easy on any modern OS (including Windows) ... provided the app doesn't need to interact with others (by giving them a way to handle its file format, for example). At which point it you have the same problems which need to be dealt with one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are these iPad stories ever gonna die? Honestly, why is this news? pg eats breakfast, nothing. Jobs eats breakfast and we spend 6 weeks talking about how awesome the cornflakes are. We get it. Cornflakes are nice. Can we move on?

<comment><USER10> Was that an attempt to explicitly reference <[http://www.reddit.com/comments/4jxe/paul_graham_ate_breakfas...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/4jxe/paul_graham_ate_breakfast>)? (from April 2006)

<comment><USER9> Yes, I forgot if that was here or reddit. Thanks for the link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The iPad is a a new _product_. An entirely new device with (maybe) a new market. Why would incremental updates to existing products supplant a new product?

</comment><comment><USER12> The iPad is unable to do many of the things I normally do on a computer. That's not a bad thing, it's simply out of the scope of the device. We still need "desk" computers.

I'm not excited by Apple spending less resources on OS X, surely they can do both?

<comment><USER6> I'm not convinced that this rumor about OSX is true. Has Apple officially said such a thing?

BTW, part of the problem with computers not progressing faster is that the software world is dropping the ball. We're not taking advantage of things like GPGPU, multicore, etc. because we're too busy building me-too whiz-bang webapps.

<comment><USER13> ... begging the question of whether me-too whiz-bang webapps are using things like GPGPU, multicore, etc.

And the desktop software world has been consistently dropping the ball since the beginning. Today's wasteful code that ignores processing resources has solid company among yesterday's wasteful code that was pissing away ram and CPU cycles with locked-in middleware, sloppy code and the rest of our sins. It's nothing new.

And it's not the fault of a shiny new horizon. Desk computers seem to have simply hit a local maxima.

(What is virtualization but an industry-wide condemnation of the state of modern operating systems? We can't get a single box to run a dozen services reliably; instead we run a dozen isolated OS images on that same hardware and things are _better_.)

The obvious ways to notably improve desk computing require massive change. But we can't quite sell the idea of massive change when things are working reasonably well and most of the planet is accustomed to the current, weird state of desk computing.[1]

So the small incremental changes are the only things left.

[1] I think mobiles and the web are so popular with developers right now precisely _because_ they present the chance to work with and on platforms designed from the ground-up with modern techniques, for modern hardware and services and without all the cruft in the corners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Computers are boring, let's go shopping...

for apps.

<comment><USER15> ...built with computers.

<comment><USER16> More precisely, Macs.

<comment><USER17> Barbie cares not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article lost me at the price comparison, honestly. How many people have a $3000 computer that do not actually need it, or at least something in the same ballpark? If you compared the $700-1500 range to the iPad, maybe. $1500+? You're a pretty serious power user, or you have enough disposable income that this argument is outright irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER19> _The message is clear: Macs aren't Apple's focus right now._

The author is surprised? They just launched a new product category. They're probably pretty sure that most people, by now, already know that they sell laptops.

<comment><USER20> The author _isn't_ surprised. One main idea of the article is that general- purpose computers are necessarily fading from the limelight as special-purpose computing devices such as the iPad come into their own. The other, more significant, main idea of the article is that this is no cause for alarm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Speedbump updates rarely make the main section of the apple.com homepage.

</comment><comment><USER22> "If your CPU power dropped by 75% for an hour every day, how long would it take you to notice?"

As long as the hour was one when I was using it, I would immediately notice. But then, I usually only work on dual and quad-core boxes and our optimizing compiler isn't. Maybe I wouldn't notice if I were on a 16 core box and it was just one of the cores.

</comment><comment><USER8> Quantitative increases in hardware capabilities are boring. (Qualitatively) new software capabilities enabled by those hardware improvements are not. If those aren't forthcoming, it's because software creators (or the creators of their tools) have dropped the ball.

</comment><comment><USER23> _I'm very happy with 10.6. I was very happy with 10.5_

I am quite happy with 10.4 actually. I have no reason to spend $140 for 10.6. I'll continue as long as there is a workable Omnigraffle version for 10.4 :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hardware vs. Software: [http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/01/20/hardware-vs- softwar...](http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/01/20/hardware-vs-software/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I miss using my 1983 Compaq luggable.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't wait for the iFad to be over.

<comment><USER27> If you hate these articles so much, please just ignore them.

You are hindering _real_ discussion with your trollish comment.</comment></comment>


Treed: A Tree Editor in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jaredly/treed <comment><USER2> I tried some of the demos and they all had bugs. Seems like the code needs a bit more testing before its ready for prime time.

<comment><USER3> Last commit was in April, with a couple of unanswered issues (including one from the submitter) asking whether the project is still under development. Also, not sure what the license is for this.

The first thing this reminded me of is Concord, Dave Winer's outliner:

[https://github.com/scripting/concord](https://github.com/scripting/concord)

I've had that sitting in a tab since I read about it on Hacker News a year or two ago. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been updated since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The tree vis looks a lot like the D3 samples.

There's a glitch when expanding or closing a node. New nodes coalesce into a point that's hanging in the vacuum instead of the parent node.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I would disable user-select in that d3view, e.g. -webkit-user-select: none;

</comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR. How do you export to JSON?</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Amazon allow multiple accounts with the same email address? - <AUTHOR> We noticed a few days ago that my girlfriend has two accounts on Amazon (UK - not sure if that makes a difference,) each of which can be logged into with the same email address. The only differentiator at login time is the different password used to log into each account.
If she enters one password, she logs into her older account with her old address. With a different password, she logs into her newer account with our newer address, a Prime account.
There's no information shared between the accounts, the order histories, names, addresses and so on are all separate. <comment><USER2> As I recall, this was an early decision by Amazon during the days of dialup accounts and limited email access. Two different people (eg, a couple) might share the same email address but want separate shopping accounts.

[Edit] This was covered in RISKS in 2008. See [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.39.html#subj12](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.39.html#subj12) .

> Steve Loughran: Regarding the issue about Amazon allowing >1 login per > e-mail address, its a historical legacy that they probably hate. Remember > back in 1995 when the whole family had one compuserve or AOL e-mail address? > That's when Amazon was created, and that is where they came up with the fact > that an Amazon user does not have a 1:1 mapping of e-mail->userID. What they > do have is a mapping of (e-mail,password)->userID; you can create two > accounts with the same e-mail address, but you will get into trouble if you > try and give them the same password. I'm not sure what happens, so try it > and see.

> The newer Amazon services, such as the Amazon Web Services, have a stricter > "one e-mail address" per account rule. Clearly their support organisation > has learned the error of the original design decision.

It doesn't seem possible merge multiple accounts. See this Amazon transcript for a recent example: [http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx...](http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1UE1R6VSVMXK7&cdThread=Tx43HXCA2S5IBQ)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dalke, that's really interesting...

I can only imagine the number of heated arguments this has caused internally for Amazon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have the same problem. I don't understand what purpose that can serve.

Both are amazon.com accounts. One password links to a Prime account; the other, a non-Prime account. It started around 5-6 years ago. I vaguely recall that it must have started with a call to someone to change my password and later I upgraded one of them with Prime.

Maddening until I figured it out. Weird stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is she logging into the same domain? For instance, I have to use "amazon.co.uk" but most of the time, I land on "amazon.com" and wonder why I can't login. Perhaps she has two accounts one on each site? That happened to me before I figured out each domain is totally separated.

</comment><comment><USER5> To make it easier to make a purchase.

An email address is not an ID.

<comment><USER6> For all intents and purposes an email address is a unique identifier. This is the status quo that the rest of the internet maintains.

I've got two Amazon accounts under the same email address that happen to have two different passwords. My order history is more or less split evenly between the two since either password mnemonic works. It has caused such frustration that I even stopped buying digital goods on their platform and switched to using Google Play. (It's not the only reason for my decision, but it certainly factored in.)</comment></comment>


How Venezuela Struck It Poor - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/how-venezuela-struck-it-poor-oil-energy-chavez/ <comment><USER2> It seems like Venezuela was hit with a perfect storm of extremely unforgiving factors. The combination of the erosion of rule of law, populist leaders who are ignorant of economic management, and the resource curse keep driving Venezuela into a downward spiral. I have a feeling things will get even worse before they get better.

<comment><USER3> Perfect storm makes it sound like there was any randomness involved in Venezuela's downfall. However it was predictable from the start. It's been known for a long time that socialism always leads to extreme poverty. As we say in Russia, don't step on the same garden rake twice and expect a different result.

<comment><USER4> >> It's been known for a long time that socialism always leads to extreme poverty

I don't think this is a well known, or even considered true. Take the biggest socialist countries, Russian and China. Compare them to what the conditions were like in those countries before socialist states took over. You will see massive improvements.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Not to mention the Soviets were able to beat the US in almost all steps of the space race, starting with the first satellite as soon as 1957! I'd say what the soviet style of economic development was very good for was rapid industrialization from the ground up.

<comment><USER6> I'm sympathetic to this position, but I don't know if it's the whole story. Russia, before the revolution, was a country of extremes. On the one hand, there were farmers who were living in a similar manner to 5th century peasants. On the other, there were some of the largest industrial complexes in the world.

I think the Soviets did achieve incredible things, but I think that's largely the result of abandoning profit as the sole criterion of whether an activity is worthwhile: capitalist societies tend to spend most of their productive labour on keeping profitable hamster-wheels spinning (like the housing market, for instance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth noting that many modern proponents of democratic socialism have learned these lessons already and reject state control as the sole means of 'worker ownership'. Socialism and Co-operation are on a collision course. We are working more towards co-operative ownership, mutualisation and municipal ownership based solutions which take the best of liberal markets, where appropriate, and combine them with fair worker and community ownership models.

<comment><USER8> What's the definition of markets being appropriate, and what's your course of action when you decide they ceased to be?

<comment><USER7> Basically wherever there's not a natural monopoly, otherwise markets are generally appropriate. Examples of natural monopolies generally include things like water, rail and healthcare where competition does not easily take place either because of its reliance on exclusive access to limited natural resources, space or just the vast upfront cost of entering into competition because of infrastructure. Where there is, sometimes the state is the right thing to run it (either directly or maybe as a part of an independent body which receives state funding) - sometimes it's better broken down into municiple level entities and run at the local level.

<comment><USER8> Would you be open to exploring the idea that natural monopolies are in fact anything but natural, being instead a result of government intervention?

<comment><USER9> They are not. Please read up the story on forests and lumber business in the United Kingdom.

Also what happened to certain kinds of river transport when cities happened to privatize parts of rivers with tariffs.

Or desirable farmland in the United States more recently. (vs bisons)

Usually what happened is that the strongest choke point or first mover on a truly limited resource gets to monopolize or.

<comment><USER8> Could you provide some links?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great reminder that populists on both sides, not just the right wing ones, are dangerous.

<comment><USER11> Some definitions for 'populist'

" (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) a political strategy based on a calculated appeal to the interests or prejudices of ordinary people" and

" the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite"

Unfortunately use of the emotive and clichéd word 'populist' shuts down any further discussion, a bonus point for most people who use it.</comment></comment>


Sapienz: Intelligent automated software testing at scale (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.fb.com/developer-tools/sapienz-intelligent-automated-software-testing-at-scale/ <comment><USER2> Although this blog post is tagged "open source" I couldn't find the source for Sapienz. It's also short on details. Apparently Facebook has "acqui-hired" the three people of a startup called Majicke, where Ke Mao, the author of above blog post, was the CTO.

In other articles they mention tools such as SapFix or GetaFix [https://engineering.fb.com/developer-tools/getafix-how- faceb...](https://engineering.fb.com/developer-tools/getafix-how-facebook- tools-learn-to-fix-bugs-automatically/) but I couldn't find any code, too - apart from a GitHub repo by Ke Mao that contains (the readme of) an obsolete prototype.

</comment><comment><USER3> I mainly use the iOS app but I find that it's rather buggy. I get bugs maybe a few times a week.

The actual website is such a performance mess. I have a chrome book and that can watch YouTube videos, twitch, etc just fine. But load the Facebook page and it grinds to a stop. Even on my actual laptop the fans spin up to max speed when on the website.</comment>


Showcase your language one vote at a time - <AUTHOR> http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/44680/showcase-your-language-one-vote-at-a-time <comment><USER2> I'm sort of surprised this was allowed on Stack Exchange at all, but it sure is fun to read.

I'm reminded once again that a skilled user of Mathematica is the closest thing to being a real life wizard that I've ever seen. I have reservations about Wolfram and about their awkward 'look what we can do' hybrid blog- advertisements, and I'm not sure if I would be comfortable ever using the language in a production system, but I'm inclined to learn it just to be able to do data-magic in front of people.</comment>


Bright light alters metabolism - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/1242.html <comment><USER2> I wish they had addressed the implications for lightbox users for SAD therapy.

<comment><USER3> The article notes toward the end that the study is about bright _blue_ light. Lightboxes provide the full spectrum of visible light.</comment></comment>