Communist Principles in Design - <AUTHOR> http://zainshah.net/blog/2012/09/communist-principles-in-design/

<comment><USER2> "With too much freedom comes far too much responsibility; not that users aren't entitled to full responsibility but, honestly, they don't want it."

Equating communism in general to a restriction of freedom is simply erroneous. A core tenet of communism is democratic control over production. There are two main branches of communist philosophy: statist and anti-statist. The anarcho- communists, who are more liberal than any other political philosophy I can think of, would never say that a freedom must be restricted by someone above.

"Authoritarian" is what the author meant. Ironically, capitalism exists to allow for the design of somewhat decentralized, somewhat competitive authoritarian institutions that will control production. What he's describing is more inherently capitalist than communist. He's confused by the fact that the USSR was simply a state-capitalist society just like the US is, only with weaker trust networks.

<comment><USER3> "Equating communism in general to a restriction of freedom is simply erroneous."

Perhaps, but it's certainly an easy mistake to make, since historically, all governments that have claimed to be communist have been authoritarian or totalitarian, and none have had democratic control over production (or really over much of anything). Some of these governments hold "elections", but who is going to be in charge after the election is never in doubt.</comment></comment>


Zuckerberg and Sandberg will defy Canadian subpoena, risking contempt vote - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/27/tech/zuckerberg-contempt-canada/index.html <comment><USER2> On the one hand, yes companies should be held accountable to governments everywhere they operate, of course.

On the other hand, a multinational company can't be expected to fly its CEO to a legislative hearing in every country where it operates... you could spend an entire year doing that instead of actually running your company. It's just straight-up logistically impossible, a legitimately unreasonable burden. And if a government legitimately just needs information as opposed to just optics, they don't need the CEO anyways.

Where do you draw the line? It seems pretty reasonable for the CEO to show up to hearings for the country where your company is headquartered... but to send lieutenants everywhere else, no?

<comment><USER3> I don't see what's unreasonable about a legislature compelling the appearance of a CEO that operates in their country.

If it's logistically impossible for a large multinational operating in many countries to comply, then maybe its unreasonable for a single company to operate in so many countries.

There's such a weird sense of entitlement here, that companies should be able to do what they want and countries need to accommodate them. There's nothing that says it must be easy or even possible to operate a company in every country in the world simultaneously.

I see no need to draw any lines. If you don't want to be subject to a particular country's rules, there is a really easy solution: don't operate there.

<comment><USER4> IMO, it depends whether the law is just and reasonable. I do not think any _just_ or _reasonable_ purpose is served better by having Zuckerberg or Sandberg attend this meeting, as opposed to their lieutenants. No questions will be asked that the lieutenants would not be equally or better equipped to answer. If such questions need to be asked, a letter and response would be fine.

If the purpose of the meeting were more than a show trial, I might feel different. But, that is universally not the case. FWIW I would not be offended if Zuckerberg declined invitations from the US congress either, although it's difficult for him to do so considering they could actually arrest him.

<comment><USER5> > I do not think

But, the Canadian government thinks it.

They don't just call up folks on whim. Cost of doing business for FB. CEO gotta do CEO things, which includes the occasional inconvenience of answering a few questions from the Government.

<comment><USER4> > But, the Canadian government thinks it. ... CEO gotta do CEO things ...

Apparently he doesn't, though. What the Canadian government thinks matters only to the degree that they have the power to compel their desired behavior, and the will to use that power.

Also, I contend the Canadian government doesn't think there's a just purpose in him showing up. Whether any of the politicians will admit it, I'm sure they are aware that no productive purpose will be served by Zuckerberg's attendance, besides their own political self-aggrandizement. They do not need his input on any proposed policy. They don't need information from him that cannot equally well be acquired from a lieutenant or through a letter. To be clear, I'm not saying these politicians are corrupt or anything. They are doing what is rational from their perspectives. Scoring points against Zuckerberg is a win, since a few constituents would really like it and anyone else won't care either way. But rational, goal-seeking behavior and just behavior are often different things.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg is also doing what is rational from his perspective. To give in to this request would probably cost him dearly in time going forward as every politician in the world looking for a distraction would be knocking at his door. Like us all, he has a limited amount of time on this Earth. I doubt he has much desire to spend it as a whipping boy for foreign governments, and so he cannot accede to the request unless Canada ups the ante.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Right now we're focused on engaging in meaningful dialogue with the committee and look forward to answering their questions." ...but we aren't going to send over the people you asked for and the only ones that really matter for this kind of thing...

I hope they get held in contempt and banned from the country, maybe others will follow suit. It feels like an insult, it's not like it's that far, and there will be many countries there. I know they don't give a shit unless it's the US and that makes it even worse.

Frustrating to see them untouchable and with no shits given. No accountability, no responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm on Zuck's side here. Complying will set a precedent that any country in the world can summon him for any or no reason just to score some political points (which is exactly what the US and EU hearings were). It is completely within any country's power to make and enforce laws that companies operating in their jurisdiction have to follow, so they should really start there.

<comment><USER8> I would agree with you if Facebook were only passively present in other countries by virtue of the internet being inherently global. But Facebook is a massive company with a physical presence, an enormous financial presence, and is a political presence in Canada, UK, Australia, and probably all of the G7 countries.

Rupert Murdoch was obliged to front up to the UK Parliament. Zuckerberg is no less obliged here.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but you can say the same for most other countries outside the G7 as well. After Canada it would be India summoning him, then Brazil, then Israel, Turkey, Japan, Mexico and countless others. Where do you draw the line? Should flying around the world answering to politicians be his full-time job, or should he be able to actually run his company and let local executives handle such problems?

<comment><USER9> All of those governments have the sovereignty to order him to appear.

And they probably mostly lack the jurisdiction to coerced him to appear, while having the jurisdiction to impose whatever penalties they see fit for his non- appearance.

Personally, I think it would be amusing if all the major countries had outstanding warrants for Mark Zuckerberg's arrest, and imposed strict privacy regulations upon Facebook et al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If Zuckerberg doesn't appear, Canada should retaliate financially by putting a tariff on Facebook ad sales from Canadian advertisers. (And they could donate 100% of the tariff revenues to some non-profit that invests in local journalism.)

<comment><USER10> Just like how China doesn't pay the tariff, it's US importers who do, in this case Facebook doesn't pay the tariff, it's Canadian advertisers that would, on top of whatever Facebook is asking for. It would only hurt Facebook if you applied a fine or tax directly to their Canadian profits or prevented them from doing business in Canada, and even then... with other countries, the sway is, "you're a citizen of our country, you have to follow the law, it's easier that way" but if you're not actually a citizen, have legal defense and possible substitutions in place, and ultimately, the only penalty is likely a slap on the wrist and a request you somehow further can't ignore, well... it comes back to other countries on their own don't have sway if the US or host nation doesn't make the same request and you don't have immediate travel plans to that country (and, of course, the country follows rule of law and/or you're protected by your host country's legal system...) That said, anyone in the country making such a request that works for an affected company would have to follow the laws of that host country over company dictates, or face legal consequences...

<comment><USER11> Many taxes can get passed onto the buyer of the taxed good, but I'm not convinced that digital advertising is one of them. Roughly speaking, digital advertisers like Facebook and Google end up selling 100% of their inventory of views at a price set by the value of the conversions driven to the ad buyers. Adding a tax in this model forces advertisers to lower bids in order to remain profitable, which then forces the advertising platform to lower prices to continue selling 100% of their inventory.

This is the same economic modeling behind the incidence of land-value taxes falling on landlords, not renters. When you're taxing a product of fixed size that is priced at whatever the market will bear, taxes get taken out of the owners' economic rents.

<comment><USER10> This logic assumes transparent pricing and that bids from international companies not subject to the tax won't take over Canadian bids forcing prices back up to where they were... and I bet multinational organizations would avoid the tax by having US services bid for them. If the tax is on ads shown to Canadians rather than ads paid by Canadian companies, I don't see how the government can force it short of banning Facebook altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >"Right now we're focused on engaging in meaningful dialogue with the committee and look forward to answering their questions."

This has got to be the most vacuous piece of bullshit I've read in a long time. They're just taking the piss at this point.

</comment><comment><USER13> People seem to be freaking out at the idea that companies can be subpoena'd by the governments of countries they operate in. What do you expect? That you can just sell your products in another country and not be answerable to their government? Do people realise this is basically an imperialist attitude?

Here's a tip: If you don't want to appear before dozens of government investigations, don't conduct dodgy business practices in hundreds of jurisdictions.

I would totally support putting various restrictions on Facebooks operations until Zuckerberg shows. Barring Facebook from storing any personal data on any Canadian citizen until it is in compliance with Canadian law.

<comment><USER14> Well I think the governments are not doing enough to stop Facebook. EU just passed GDPR last year but still, based on recent developments (like the Crossfit case) it should be obvious to everybody that FB is damaging to society on many levels. I would go even further with government actions and start to block their IP ranges on the national level.

<comment><USER15> So mass censorship, then?

<comment><USER14> Why do you think that blocking Facebook is censorship? You are not blocking a particular book or post, you are blocking a company that disregards privacy many ways, filtering the internet according their internal policy that is not accessible to the outside world while selling user data to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER15> Why do you think blocking [Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc..] is censorship? Filtering the internet according China's internal policy that is not accessible to the outside world..

You see my point?

It should be consumers and NOT government who decides what products and services are allowed to be used, especially with regards to information. Transparency regulations I can get behind but mass blocking is fundamentally wrong - it takes power out of the hands of regular people.

The government shouldn't have that power to begin with in my opinion.

<comment><USER14> No, I was talking about blocking Facebook. I do not support blocking Amazon, there is no reason for it. China rightfully blocked Facebook, I think the 2016 US election made this clear for everybody. Unless you like Russian interference with election of course. Heroin is banned for the same reason as Facebook should be, people cannot handle it and it has very damaging implications for society as a whole. I think the rule of law should govern a society that is accessible for everybody, unlike Facebook internal policies.

<comment><USER15> China bans those companies to 'protect social unity', a valid moral argument from a certain point of view. They don't block these things to benefit citizens.

You just compared a website to heroin. Next you'll be comparing Pokémon Go to organised crime.

I completely refuse to believe people lack so much agency that they aren't responsible for the content they consume.

They can't handle it? It's a website dude. Say what you want about privacy issues but this is a nonsensical argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >The decision could result in the executives being held in contempt of parliament

So worst case, they can't enter canada anymore? I find it unlikely that they'd get cut out of the canadian market because of it.

<comment><USER17> Okay, I never have used Facebook so perhaps I am missing something. Quite probable.

However, I humbly disagree, you hinted at the answer. Yes, worse case is Canada and other markets begin blocking Facebook.

What value does Facebook add to Canada or any market. Advertising? Advertising is a zero sum game. If Facebook disappears there's no advertising loss in the market, other agencies will take over.

<comment><USER18> If facebook disappeared from those 10 countries what difference would it make to the citizens of those countries? Not very much. Other local services would pop up to take its place and replicate its functionality. I don't think Facebook pays much tax to these countries either, so a local replacement would create greater amounts of tax revenue as well as jobs for their citizens.

Considering how large a political and security risk Facebook is, I don't understand why any country would allow this sort of service to operate outside its borders without oversight.

<comment><USER19> You underestimate the disruption the banning of Facebook would have. It really isn't easy to replace a service where the main attraction is the people using the service. It'll take years for anything considerable to pop up even if the alternative is ready the moment Facebook closes.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand what vital function facbeook serves that people could not use other fallback tools like e-mail to deal with their issues in its absence until something else pops up. Ad dollars would go to other local media sources that facebook is essentially killing.

<comment><USER20> Everyone _here_ knows how those alternatives work, but we're unusual. I think (I'm not a chemist) it's like being on a chemistry forum expressing surprise about a ban on <generic drug example> when it's "easy" to make the stuff at home.

We're blocking JavaScript as a security precaution when normal people often still use 123456 as their password.

I still think banning Facebook would be a net win, but it's not zero cost.

<comment><USER21> > Everyone here knows how those alternatives work, but we're unusual.

I think you underestimate the average user. Most do know how e-mail, forums and instant messengers work. Those that don't will learn.

<comment><USER20> > Those that don't will learn.

Sure. What's the cost of learning?

I have many examples of even smart people not knowing what tech can do. I'm still regularly blowing people's minds with the AR mode in Google Translate, and the tech behind that is 8.5 years old now.

This isn't even a new phenomena — back when I was a kid all the adults joked about needing someone under the age of 14 to work the VCR and stop digital clocks flashing 12:00 forever. The jokes didn't stop until VCRs stopped being a thing.

<comment><USER21> Not that high. People may not know what tech can do but they do know that tech can do the things Facebook does. Using separate services may be less convenient than something like Facebook (or would be if Facebook's UX wasn't horrible) but it isn't really harder. If Facebook gets replaced by another monolith, using it won't even be more inconvenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just a reminder that this isn't just Canada, it's an international committee representing countries totalling half a billion citizens. There's no question that Facebook does business in Canada or any of the other countries in question. Facebook is international and has set up satellite offices around the globe in order to have a presence in these countries. It was my understanding that their growth in these regions and others was hugely important to them.

I think this goes beyond the logistics of "is it reasonable for a CEO to bother meeting with legislators in every country in which it does business" and is a matter of whether Facebook is going to be answerable at all internationally, and what the optics look like of an American company doing business in other nations where it will not make top level executives available to answer important questions.

Does this mean that Facebook simply won't make its top level executives available to any other country? Is there a population threshold? Will Zuckerberg or Sandberg only meet with Presidents/Vice-Presidents, etc?

I can't help but feel like Facebook is held to a hugely different standard in these cases. I don't think people would think twice about expecting Mary Barra, for example, to travel to Canada to be answerable about GM vehicles being sold into Canadian territory if Canadian officials had concerns.

It also seems plain as day to me that Facebook's top brass simply _do not want_ to answer these questions. They would rather send representatives to face the tough questions on their behalf, which are problematic on their own, leading to troubling and unsatisfying public exchanges [1].

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI4cBp5DfZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI4cBp5DfZc)

</comment><comment><USER23> Canada wants to defer totalitarian speech control as the responsibility of companies, but as long as Canadians can connect to servers outside of Canada, the government will not get their wish. If they were serious about censoring the internet they would go full China and build a great maple firewall.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can understand from a business perspective why FB would not want to bother sending their top 2 folks, and the doors it would open up and how they can just get away with it to deal with more "important" things. This is discussed in many comments.

From a personal perspective, and as a Canadian, I know the shit FB is pulling and the damages it is creating and can create and I feel powerless to stop it or make a difference. The best I could really hope to achieve as just some person is to petition my government to do something about it, and it would probably at best lead to something like a meeting with the most accountable people. I'm lucky in that they are already trying to do this, in conjunction with 9 other countries, so hooray!

Do I know that this may be useless or go nowhere, yes, could I really hope to get much more than this on my own, no. So it feels to me like this is our first step to making a difference or at least trying, and they still have the audacity to say "nah dawg, talk to these nobodies instead, but we are totally committed". As a person I'm really pissed and insulted. It says my best efforts real or imagined, are pointless and useless. It says I don't give a fuck about you or anyone in your Country/ies. It says you can work as hard as you want to rally people, 450M angry I's who just want answers and to see someone held accountable and at least show up to defend their actions, and you still don't care and will just deny them. It says nobody matters but us, get used to it you pleebs. It says that even when your COUNTRY is trying to stand up for you, even with all their power and clout can't get you to show up for a fucking meeting next door with 10 other countries, it says WOW, who do these people think they are, how dare you defy my highest body's request? How do you think I am going to feel about you after that?

If there was an oil spill or something like that, you'd see the CEO talking about it in front of the government on every news station, it's the job of the most accountable person to own up or at least show up and lie through their teeth or avoid questions like the plague, but they aren't even willing. I hope they get in deep shit and we take much harsher measures faster because of their non-cooperation.

Maybe that seems like a bit of a rant and it's more about feelings, but they are still valid and probably represent how a lot of people also feel. A lot of us have businesses, and we can see from both lenses, but we still have no power compared to them and we still have to live with them, and while we don't want to say things that could turn around and fuck us over if we ever get in that situation, but I guess shame on you if you do, so it doesn't really matter anyway.

* apologies to the "nobodies", you aren't nobody, but you aren't who we want.

</comment><comment><USER24> Surely they could only hold their own citizens in contempt of parliament for those who work for Facebook Canada? It seems overreaching to expect a foreign CEO of a parent company not incorporated in that parliament's jurisdiction to make such a demand of Zuck.

</comment><comment><USER25> Facebook has no datacenters in Canada. Canada has no more legal authority over Facebook's activities than Kim John Un or Ronald McDonald does.

<comment><USER21> Of course Canada has the legal authority over Facebook's activities in Canada. Facebook not having any datacenters there just makes enforcement slightly harder.

<comment><USER26> What activities do they do in Canada?

<comment><USER27> Provide advertising services, which I'm sure they happily exchange for $CAD

<comment><USER25> Arguably that's Canadian companies doing business in America, not the other way around.

<comment><USER21> Either way, Canada has jurisdiction.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blood Spatter Will Tell - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/blood-spatter-will-tell <comment><USER2> Blood spatter analysis, along with most all other forensic "science" (save DNA testing), is hand wavy bullshit that's more about upping case closure rates than convictions. Here's a good overview [https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/](https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/)

<comment><USER3> Indeed, the NY Times Sunday Magazine had a piece not long ago about some fellow in Texas who was convicted chiefly on what sounded like really sorry blood splatter evidence: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/23/magazine/joe-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/23/magazine/joe- bryan-blood-forensics-murder.html)</comment></comment>


Best advice I ever received - <AUTHOR>

Ok guys, following all the comments I received here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231407, for my new website foobets.com, I can happily say it helped crystallise my thoughts regarding the site and helped me to avoid some blind alleys. I would recommend everyone who has the germ of a start-up idea throw it out to the Hackers here for their feedback <comment><USER2> Why did you create a new user account just for this?</comment>


One man's spam - graphing spam rates since 2002 - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpamGraphs.html?HN

<comment><USER2> My mail server does primary MX for a couple of small domains (5 or so people) and relays a few domains for friends to gmail.

I've been doing some crude graphing for the last couple of years based on specific text entries in Exim's log:

<http://cmsj.net/stats/mail.png>

Note: I moved the mail delivery to a new machine about 3 weeks ago which might have upset things, but the spam levels had collapsed before that. I'm somewhat tempted to filter out the peak level because it hides so much nuance in the rest of the graph.

<comment><USER2> hit post too early...other notes: \- yes, I do sender verification. no, I am not prepared to debate it with you, live with it ;) \- I've always been a bit surprised that there aren't more malware rejections. Either ClamAV sucks or people aren't trying very hard to give me viruses. \- I find it interesting that the 'blunderbus' approach of sending to all imaginable addresses (i.e. the blue section of the graph) has diminished significantly over time.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > hit post too early ...

You know you can edit for up to 2 hours ...

<comment><USER2> I did not know that! Unfortunately I missed it this time, but I will do that next time :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oddly, that's what the "edit" link means next to your item or reply when you've first submitted it. Lots of people miss it, not least because people often don't check what they've written.

<fx: grin>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The horizontal axis on that graph really needs to be clarified. Yes, I can figure out what the 1s represent, and count the years, but...

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - I was dealing with the data and thought - "Hmm - HN might be interested in a graph of this" so I knocked one out quickly. The scales don't really matter. It covers from 2002 to 2010, and really there's not much else you need to know.

In case you want, the raw data are here:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/RawSpamCount.html?HN>

The first field is the number of emails, the last two are year and month. The others are meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You got 50 000 spam messages in one month? Is this just for one address or multiple?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a complicated setup, but in essence, I have, by necessity, ended up with a catch-all on a domain. There is value to what I do, but the cost is the level of spam. It's like having hundreds of honey-pots.

I'm considering washing them of personal information and making them available.</comment></comment>


Americans to be held without trial: House passes bill as President retracts veto - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/americans-face-guantanamo-detention-obama

<comment><USER2> Do Americans feel like their liberty is under attack by their own government? If not, they should, because it's happening.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's essentially just like the "Patriot" Act passing except now it happens far more often just slid into other bills.

I have not flown in 10 years - not because of fear of terrorists but because of fear of my own government. I think people are crazy to be visiting this country, they just do not understand what they are risking if they even jokingly say the wrong thing to the wrong person.</comment></comment>


Tools for Synchronized Cross-Device Mobile Testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/tooling/synchronized-cross-device-testing/ <comment><AUTHOR> Remote Preview is nice for free: [https://github.com/viljamis/Remote- Preview](https://github.com/viljamis/Remote-Preview) (but since it uses iframes it will break under some things and is one-way)

However Ghostlab looks amazing for $34 [http://www.vanamco.com/ghostlab/](http://www.vanamco.com/ghostlab/)</comment>


Germany Considers Counterespionage Against US - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-considers-counterespionage-measures-against-united-states-a-953985.html

<comment><USER2> It is gross negligence on the German government's part if it isn't doing this already. Israel certainly counts as a US ally, but Jonathan Pollard is serving a long sentence for passing it intelligence.

<comment><USER3> If I were German, I would be angry that the US was spying on me, but I'd be even more angry that Germany apparently wasn't even spying back...</comment></comment>


Workgroup - <AUTHOR> WorkGroup is a messenger designed for work:  - As you chat, you can assign action items, so nothing falls between the cracks,<p>- Then, use the Noise-Cancelling button to hide the chatter and focus on results.  This way, everyone knows what was agreed, and can follow up.  Simple. <comment><AUTHOR> www.workgroup.im</comment>


We're Barely Listening to the US's Most Dangerous Volcanoes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/science/volcanoes-cascades-monitoring.html <comment><USER2> I think the scientists are monitoring volcano activity. For the public there is little we can do except watch and take action if we are told to evacuate</comment>


Kicks Condor is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Disney - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickscondor.com/? <comment><USER2> Hard to say but I'm going to guess this might be a stunt?

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter has the same message, but not youtube or github. I am not sure.

<comment><USER3> All of the old direct page links still work

You can click on the Disney logo, and then on the various icons on the bottom of the text notes to navigate around

Seems to be a fun little hypertext adventure/joke about Kicks Condor's upcoming role in the 2021 National Treasure 3 film

Reminds me a bit of [http://mackerelmediafish.com/](http://mackerelmediafish.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Exploiting Similarities Among Languages for Machine Translation (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4168 <comment><USER3> This work indicates that language translation is vector addition on a lower dimensional semantic manifold that neural networks converge on, derived from the high dimensional whole vocabulary context vectors of the input.

It is extended by :

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks by Sutskever, Vinyals & Le

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215](http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215)

which adds LTSM, a trainable deep neural net type of long term memory - <USER2> allows whole sentences to be digested and translated.

" Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT'14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, ... Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences."[1]

another interesting result is the _translation_ of pixels to words that describe the image.

Deep Fragment Embeddings for Bidirectional Image Sentence Mapping by Karpathy, Joulin, & Li

[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5281-deep-fragment-embeddings- fo...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5281-deep-fragment-embeddings-for- bidirectional-image-sentence-mapping)

code & a demo is available :

[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/)</comment>


Dave Winer:  "Twitter is a ghost town" - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/06/06/planB.html <comment><USER2> So, the interesting thing, to me, is that a few weeks ago everyone was discussing the axing of Blaine Cook from the Twitter team for his "failure to scale". Turns out, nobody else in the company can scale Twitter or keep it online reliably, either. Huh. Must be a hard problem. It's probably a good time for folks to apologize to Blaine for piling all the blame on one guy for a problem that, in reality, took the whole development team to create and will take the whole development team to solve. (And it's time for everyone to stop pretending scaling can be solved by one magic bullet or another...if you don't build, or rebuild, to scale, you won't scale.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's an off-the-cuff prediction: Twitter itself, as well as the Twitter community, will be just fine. In a year or two nobody will remember these problems.

Twitter may have scaling problems, but it's not as if their potential competitors are magically immune to those. Meanwhile, Twitter holds a _huge_ marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just like Twitter" without saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage: Everyone who is remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a Twitter account, and those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile, there will be more than one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to distinguish themselves from each other as well as from the original.

Sooner or later Company X will figure out how to scale Twitter. At which point either Company X buys Twitter for the name and the userbase, Twitter buys Company X for the technology, or Google buys everybody. Or, Twitter eventually reverse-engineers the superior architecture, at which point they will beat Company X over the head with superior name recognition and larger userbase. This is _especially_ true if Company X is actually the open-source community -- if some random Python programmer manages to create a superior, open-source Twitter architecture, Twitter will just install it on a server farm within a month and be right back in the game. The open-source movement has a lot of brilliant techies, but I doubt that its marketing team can outrace Twitter's from a standing start.

The Twitter concept has enough mindshare that I doubt it can just evaporate. They're not being sued out of existence like Napster. I'm not convinced that a scalable Twitter is _physically impossible_. So I would suggest that rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. It's just... resting.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I signed up to Pwnce right after I signed up to Twitter, but quickly decided I couldn't be bothered with Pwnce since Twitter was clearly fine and had more users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twitter is very active from where I'm standing.

<comment><USER5> Agreed.

The strange thing is that yours is the only comment here that responds directly to Winer's statement about a ghost town.

Is anyone else wondering what the hell Winer is talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I started using twitter a lot more right before blaine left. Now I barely use it because the IM integration is gone. Hopefully someone will move forward to implement the distributed twitter on top of XMPP and Pubsub. There is already a tentative little XEP: <http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/microblogging.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a wild guess, but from what I've seen Tumblr is picking up a lot of momentum. It's started to attract a pretty smart community and it's building steam. I don't know if it's a REPLACEMENT for Twitter, but it serves the same purpose but without the downtime.

<comment><USER8> I've jumped on Plurk, and I like it a lot.

<comment><USER7> I just heard about Plurk. Funny. Looks like it's a new thing. I don't think it's going to last. Its problem is that it adds on complex, unneeded features to a simple idea.

That's what made Twitter so huge: its astounding simplicity. It lost points for being TOO simple and for having downtime, but that's what made it huge. Tumblr has that feel to it: that feeling that it's as simple as it can get, with a few exceptions. It's an exhilarating feeling.

Plurk doesn't have that. It feels to me like Twitter with clutter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The magic simply has vanished. Twitter just isn't as....fun anymore. It's kind of like the eerie silence you have when you've been informed someone you know has passed away.</comment>


What can you legally take from the web? - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6115

<comment><USER2> Great article. I've been looking for something like this.

Gives a nice overview of "Fair Use."

I'd recommend it to anyone who is pulling content from other websites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hm... what about web-based RSS readers? Technically speaking, if you're running one, you are copying someone else's content and putting it on your site, even though the application belongs to a user and he picks what he wants to see up there.

There was a startup mentioned here recently, that allowed you to track changes on various web pages, and view the difference (it obviously stored copies on them), how legit is that?</comment>


On Buying Silicon Valley - barry-cotter Silicon Valley 2
If one wishes to replicate the Valley's success and status as a startup hub one needs to mimic the
ecosystem and support structures that have grown up around it, the angels, VC funds, (money)
legal expertise, financial infrastructure (enabling infrastructure) and entrepreneurial culture (residual). The money and enabling infrastructure will accrete around the residual if it exists, quickly or slowly. Paul Graham has proposed that for US$30m-$100m this could probably be achieved in any US city
fulfilling certain criteria, with greater or lesser likelihood of success dependent on the degree to
which it fulfils them.
The money can realistically come from three types of sources, governments of whatever level, private
individuals, or corporate bodies, profit-oriented or not, or some combination of the three, acting in concert. Given the electoral dynamics they labour under it is unlikely that any politician or party in serious danger
of being out of power 10 years after the funds have been allocated would commit to this plan; and with the
added proviso that all the startups funded should be at a minimum within an hours travel of each other
on average only unitary municipalities would work, there being no US ~city-states barring D.C., whose
freedom of action exists at the pleasure of Congress. The only US city that loosely fits this description
to my knowledge is Chicago, given the iron grip of the Daley dynasty on the mayoralty.
What advantage would accrue to non-government actors who kickstarted this hub beyond the uncertain
monetary return once the paper profits were booked? In other words, how can they capture as much of the
value created by this new hub as possible? Given a long enough time horizon buying up property within an
hour or so's travel of the chosen location would show handsome returns, assuming success. If we assume,
I think conservatively, that 20 years would be sufficient for a hub to be mature, we have to ask who invests
on these kind of timescales besides governments? Charitable foundations, university endowments, insurance
companies and family offices, that's who. With the concentration of elite universities in Cambridge, MA, their
great, if recently depleted endowments and the locale's current position as #2 startup hub of the US and thus
the world, they might be able to equal the Valley, generate a handsome profit and prime the pump for future
benefices from grateful students. Alternatively, anyone with a substantial portion of the minimum neccesary
to fund could put said funds in escrow, not to be paid out until matching funds were committed by other
parties. Or one wealthy individual desirous of leaving a lasting positive legacy to a city they hold dear could
do it altrustically. Say, Warren Buffett for Omaha or Steve Schwarzmann for New York.
And outside North America? It would be easier to jumpstart a global city than somewhere with minimal
legal or financial infrastructure but for $100m you could probably jumpstart a minor city of 500,000. The
better the pre-existing institutions the bigger the bang for the buck.
Singapore A city-state run by economically literate technocrats who plan for the long term, with the rule of law,
an educated workforce, good if not elite universities, and a liberal immigration policy. It also has form
with the deliberate cultivation of expertise, e.g. it's biotech industry and the state holding company,
Temasek's, investment in oil rig expertise despite the fact that it was unprofitable for over a decade.
China The CCP is not constrained by the unpopularity of targetting small areas for rapid development instead
of spreading the pork around. Look at Shenzhen Special economic Zone, going in fifteen years from a
fishing village to a manufacturing metropolis of huge importance to world trade. They could probably
do it even if they did it wrong. Imagine a commitment of US$10m for each of ten years to competing Y Combinator clones, university backing as worthy gap years after a degree at Tsinghua or Peking,
enticements to ethnic Chinese with Valley experience to come over, act as angels and VCs, etc.
Britain and Ireland
As close to being the USA as you get on the wrong continent, well, apart from Australia.
The only elite university in Computer Science is Cambridge, and it an edge case. With all of the EU and
EFTA to draw upon for talent and no immigration restrictions, this is less of a problem than it seems. The money is there, whether private or possibly governmental. It seems likely that Labour is on the way
back to the political wilderness for a generation, and throwing money at some  Northern city, e.g.
Birmingham would be a grand political gesture for a new Tory government, and possibly even a vote
winner in the city. To my mind just doing it in Cambridge would be the better idea, but absent the
University taking the initiative this seems unlikely.
Ireland is an unlikely candidate, but it has a reasonably competent industrial development agency and the
experience of developing a second tier financial centre from nothing by careful planning and a devotion to
tailoring a conducive legal environment. Dublin probably isn't quite dominant enough to be able to overcome the desire to spread the startups around which would defeat the point. Only here because I'm Irish. I suspect
the Auctomatic lads would just say "Nah, no way"
Western Europe Luxembourg. Only a new, no account university, but fully able to draw on the surroundings, small enough
that the entire country would share in the benefits, so the "Where's my pork?" problem doesn't arise, many
many rich people and an establishment small enough that you might be able to get it done by talking to the
right civil servant at a cocktail party. The expertise in crafting a conducive legal environment point from Ireland
applies here too.
Berlin. City-state with a population that's a quarter non-German and you can get by on just English. Fantastic
culture and surroundings, very good universities, internal migration magnet, cheap. Best European bet.
Zurich. Has ETH, world class university, easy for EU/EFTA citizens to get a residential visa, wonderful city.
Switzerland's only disadvantage is the high cost of living. Ramen profitable would actually be a substantial
barrier.
Paris, and it's suburb, otherwise known as France. My Economist reading sneer says no way, and the dirigiste tendency is strong, see the abortion that is Quaero, but if you could convince someone it would just be done.
One very substantial disadvantage is the legal obligation that the working language be French.
Eastern Europe Romania seems to have a phenomenal over-representation in CS circles given its population, and Russia pulls its substantial weight. St. Petersburg would be my pick as the most cosmopolitan Russian city that isn't Moscow
with its disadvantages (no parks worth a damn, expensive as all get out, but it shares that last with St. Petersburg)
Israel Much like Cambridge, MA, Tel Aviv is already a hub of note. The amount needed to prime the pump would be higher
but again, a very good prospect if the funding was available. <comment><AUTHOR> If I want to be a billionaire, I want to be, just to replicate the Silicon Valley here in Cairo, Egypt!

One of my big wishes is having a copy of Stanford University here... and what a crazy? I want to make it for free for high talented "poor" students.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you like to see in a social news site? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working on a new start up, called Athesyn. It's a new kind of social news site with some new innovative features. I thought it would probably be a good idea to see what people here would like to see from the future of social news sites. In case you're interested in Athesyn and the progress we are making, you can sign up for our private beta and news letter here: http://www.athesyn.com/ <comment><USER2> One thing I believe is lacking in news today is follow-up. It seems that so many things are all the buzz today, even an outrage, but by next week it's all but forgotten. I'd like to be able to track the life of an issue.

So a nasty crime is committed, and somebody is arrested; is he later convicted? Responding to complaints, a corporation pledges to make changes; do they ever materialize? An earthquake puts thousands out of their homes; have they been restored a year later?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Having some kind of bookmark feature where users can keep track of the progess would be a great feature. I will be taking note of everything suggested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Timelines, timelines, timelines. I want to see stories in the context of days, weeks, years, not just right this moment. I often search for old stories and I'm yet to see any tool that let's me clearly see things by date.

If you don't build it, I will. :-)

Edit: All I get on your homepage is a login form and a restricted access message.

</comment><comment><USER4> If I have to scroll to see more than 20 headlines, I won't use it. So I'd say compact the space so that I see the headlines that I want to see in those first 20.

Example of a social news site that I don't like: <http://www.newsvine.com/>

There are three problems for _me_ :

1) It doesn't fit 100% of my screen

2) This results in too few headlines so I have to scroll, scroll, scroll

3) There are no categories so I can't self-select

I like the MSNBC page about midway down where it lists the category, lets me select how many stories I want in a category, and crams a lot of headlines into a small area.

My $0.02 since you asked!

<comment><AUTHOR> The UI is something we are focusing on a lot. With social news there is a big problem to overcome with how to deal with the massive number of articles being submitted. Mainly finding the best way to display all of them articles in a way that the user can find what they want to read about as easy as possible. Our main focus with Athesyn is 'news you care about'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If it is the kind of thing where people vote up stories, you are going to have to fight very hard to avoid the influx of low calorie news (same goes for crappy comments). Unless that's what you want of course, but people already get that from digg/reddit/gawker/fark.

From one of PG's essays: "Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user- voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."

It would be nice to see a social news site that ends up with an intellectual feel instead of the polemic vibe that a lot of places give off.

<comment><USER6> Oh my Science yes! That's why I quit Digg long ago and same with Reddit. That "democratic" free-for-all shit got old real quick. I won't hide it, Digg and Reddit upset me because my content never got upvoted or paid attention to.

I submitted a link on a article about a "morning after" pill for Aids that actually works and is already available, it's been available for a long time, if you have been exposed to the aids virus you can take it within 24-48 hours and it won't allow the virus to attach to your cells or something like that, it was created for people working in sanitation, in case they get pricked. It's pretty toxic but it works. It was called the Aids prevention pill you've never heard of.

NO ONE cared. Not on Reddit, not on Digg. And when I compared it to the articles that did make the front page it seemed like my contribution would be just what Digg/Reddit wanted.

With Reddit, I hated how good stories get overlooked yet kittens and pictures of "my girlfriend made this for me" and "nailed it" and "found kittens what should I do", "here's a picture my autistic nephew made" and all that other shit makes it.

I looked at what Reddit wanted and I submitted appropriate content. My submitions were ignored, yet other people's submitions of the same category and quality were upvoted. Wtf?

With Digg, the problem was if you weren't part of some circle of elite friends, or didn't submit your article at the right time of the day it didn't get upvoted. Again, it's shit like this that really drove me away. Reddit just pissed me off by going from a 'sacredly intellectual' site to '4chan for educated people', complete with kittens and politics and memes in a year or two.

Hacker news, although I've heard it has changed, seems to have avoided the lobotomy. 2 out of 2 of my submitions made it to the front page. It worked the way I expected it to work. Hacker news is a place for startup news, tech news, entrepreneurship, show and tell. So I submitted content that matched and it got upvoted to the front page. I feel like I contributed and helped the community, and I don't feel abandoned or pushed away like I did with Reddit.

My only annoyance with Hacker News is how it works. I'll visit the home page and see some amazingly interesting links, 4 hours later I'll refresh the page and many of those links are gone, 1 or 2 of them have moved back 2-4 pages... wtf? So if I'm not on 24/7 I'll miss out on content?

So that's how I feel about social news sites. I'm either confused as to how they work or annoyed by the communities that make them up.

I personally want something more static. I know constant incoming news is great for traffic but it's terrible for our productivity and brains. I'd like to try out a site that updates once a day at midnight or twice a day at most instead of constantly updating. And the community votes on what links will be posted tomorrow, once that list of links is finalized, they are posted, and they don't change order or dissapear. Each Page on the site, is exactly one day, if I click 2 pages back then I'm going exactly 2 days back, that way I can keep track of all the links I've gone through easily. That's what I'd like to see, I'm not sure if it would work out as well as I theorize it would, but it would be a nice experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. More intelligent and diverse discussion. I don't know how you would do that, but try to make it the opposite of reddit.com/r/politics.

2\. Convenient links to relevant background information for the article. E.g. relevant statistics, opposing viewpoints, press releases, wikipedia articles, a summary of "just the facts" from the article, previous quotes from the people the article is about.

Also, I know you weren't asking for feedback on the site, but the name would otherwise make me assume that it's a site about atheism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Promoting intelligent, diverse discussion is definitely something we hope to do. It's something that becomes harder when you have a wider range of topics, which in turn, attracts a wider range of people. It may be better to promote discussion that is sensible to the topic at hand.

The name comes from combining the words Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) and syntax (meaning arragement).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Filters that show what's popular and controversial with _people that have similar tastes in articles to me_</comment>


Slaying dragons with git, bash, and ruby - <AUTHOR> http://rubypond.com/blog/slaying-dragons-git-bash-ruby

<comment><USER2> You should really look at the sample hooks. Instead of of recursively grep'ing the entire source tree, you can look at just what is being committed. For example, for pre-commit you can do this instead:

      #!/bin/sh
      if git rev-parse --verify HEAD >/dev/null 2>&1
      then
      	against=HEAD
      else
      	# Initial commit: diff against an empty tree object
      	against=4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904
      fi
      if git diff --cached --diff-filter=AM $against -U0 |
         grep "require 'ruby-debug'; debugger" > /dev/null
      then
      	echo "Error: You twit, you've left a debugger in!"
        	exit 1
      fi

<comment><USER2> And checking for master should be done like this:

      test "master" == "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

And probably not by grep'ing the output of symbolic-ref.

Again, for stuff like this, take a look at git itself. Some fairly major parts of it (such as rebase) are still shell scripts, and the stuff that's once was shell scripts can be found in git.git/contrib/examples

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I noticed he uses the env trick for his shebang for ruby. I was first acquainted with this for Perl, and I've since more or less stopped using it since it caused about as many problems for me as it solved (funny thing, systems with the perl binary in a silly place sometimes have env in the 'wrong' place too :/). I'm kind of surprised that it made the jump to Ruby, since to my knowledge it came into use after the Ruby community had already finished borrowing from Perl that which it was going to borrow.

<comment><USER4> But foo is more likely to jump around than env, right?

I'd like someone else to make up my mind on this. Please discredit the env approach in any way possible :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love some more discussion on this too, to discredit either approach. I've gone with the env approach precisely because I've found the only other ways I know to be even more brittle.

<comment><USER5> Since using RVM on multiple machines I've found I cannot assume a fixed, universal path to the ruby interpreter, so env is the choice for me.

I've also never had an issue with env itself not being where I expect it, but if I ever do I think a symlink addition would solve the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me this comes out as dark blue print on a dark blue background - I have to highight text to make it visible, let alone readable.

That can't be what was intended ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now

<comment><USER6> It is - thanks - excellent response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't like workflow enforcement in git commits; I commit broken/failing code as a safety net in case I really break it later.

More: [http://blog.brycekerley.net/post/1082060161/pre-commit- hooks...](http://blog.brycekerley.net/post/1082060161/pre-commit-hooks-arent- a-good-place-to-test) (and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669583> )

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't commit anything with failing tests as a matter of principle. I want to be able to revert any commit at any point in the future and have some degree of confidence that the code should be in a working state.

Any "failing" tests in your workflow would be marked as pending rather than actually failing.

<comment><USER8> This. The one thing that creeps me out about git is that it encourages you to use the index to make partial commits which don't match any state your working copy has ever been in. If I don't know whether that revision actually worked, I don't want it polluting my history and making useful revisions hard to find.

<comment><USER9> That's what I use the feature-xyz branch for. I make "incomplete" commits, by logic only (refactor this, add new function...) and then at the merge into the develop branch, the commit must be in a working state. That way my development branch is always in a working state and each commit there adds one thing at a time (and still I have the detailled look because I use --no-ff commit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On a related note: git-hooks seem like a better way to enforce workflow than something like git-flow which got a lot of press here in the last few weeks.

Personally, I'd much rather have something prompt me and say "you're about to push to a remote master from a feature branch, are you sure you want to do this?" rather than using a new set of high-level abstractions such like 'git make-release'.</comment>


JQuery Gantt editor - patch released - <AUTHOR> http://roberto.open-lab.com/2012/08/30/jquery-gantt-editor-bugfix-released/

<comment><USER2> I'm sure Zawinski's law of software envelopment applies to this in some way.

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) And you didn't see Teamwork <http://www.twproject.com></comment></comment>


Pricing Google Glass at $1,500 only added to its problems - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/05/01/pricing-google-glass-at-1500-only-added-to-its-problems/

<comment><USER2> Before gmail, using a free email service made you look like a shmuck. That is, try to register on a site with a hotmail address and we'll tell you to use your real email address.

Google rolled gmail out in an exclusive way that made it seem like a privilege rather than a stigma. It was a good call back then but the Valley is a dangerous place to make these calculations today.

Some people might spend $1500 out of passion but there are also the ones for who $1500 is not a lot of money.</comment>


Gr.com - Selling third level domains under second level domains? - <AUTHOR> http://www.domain.gr.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> There's already enough of a disconnect with using foreign TLDs within domains (even though I have 3 domains like that) - this just seems even worse. At $19 they are selling hard to find "domains" - and the sad part is that various third party registrars are selling .gr.com domains for them. Additionally they are showing various big brands as endorsements, when those brands are simply protecting their copyrights.

Almost seems like a clever way to make easy money with no value add to anyone registering with them...</comment>


Smartphone pictures pose privacy risks - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vARzvWxwY

<comment><USER2> Yes, unchecked sharing of untouched smartphone pictures is a privacy risk. But a little sanity about your friend lists on social media, and your privacy and sharing settings, and then even if you don't know how to strip geolocation data out of an image you can feel relatively safe. Especially if images of your kids go in an album with closely restriced visibility settings.

Further, is it really that hard to strip out geolocation data? I'm pretty sure both Android and iOS make it possible to not include that data in the photo to begin with. Yep, a quick search reveals easily a dozen or more sites explaining how to do it, and how to strip those geotags back out if you've already got photos that include them.

The real headline sounds more like "Willful ignorance poses health, safety, and privacy risks". This isn't worth panicking about.</comment>


The Inanity of Overeating (calories and thermodynamics) - <AUTHOR> http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/ <comment><USER2> "Good Calorie, Bad Calories" was a pivotal book for me. It freed me up. I realised that much of what we're told about nutrition is backed by bad science.

Since then I've spent the last few years reading everything I can lay my hands on and I wrote up what I'd found in a document for friends and family: <http://bit.ly/cxZNG9>

I await Taubes' next book with interest.

<comment><USER3> \- You need to be off grains. Permanently. Forever. Sorry, but they are toxic. That means no bread, no pasta, no oatmeal, etc.

\- No legumes, with the exception of white rice.

\- No milk forever

\- But do take other supplements.

So just the crazy pills then?

<comment><USER4> I think this is true for a limited subset of "you." I personally watched a friend adopt the "no-grain, etc." diet, and immediately drop 15lbs and mostly clear up his psoriasis. I, on the other hand, don't have psoriasis or 15lbs of extra weight from systemic inflammation; so I wouldn't expect to see similar benefits from dropping grains.

<comment><USER3> It would be more likely your friend has gluten intolerance - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatitis_herpetiformis>

If this is the case then cutting down on cereals would be standard medical advice rather than a wonder effect of an unsound diet.

<comment><USER4> I have a few other friends who'd experienced similar improvements in health just by cutting out wheat and the surprisingly many foods containing gluten. For the no-grains guy, this was insufficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> He contradicts his argument in the first paragraphs.

1) Obese people tend to be weight stable for long periods of their life, just like lean people. So when they're weight stable, the obese and overweight are obviously in energy balance.

2) If you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that's an average of two pounds of excess fat accumulation every year. Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every two years. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories.

<comment><USER5> There is no contradiction. The second paragraph is just paraphrasing the standard calorie-in->energy-out theory of weight gain and averaging the 'graph' of weight gain for analytic purposes. Ie. he never states that you are storing exactly 19 calories per day, simply that over 20 years, you are storing an 'average' of 19 calories per day. This is a very normal way to discuss these numbers. For example, a scientist might describe the PHV (pubertal height velocity) of a typical male as 9cm/year but these are growth spurts and are not actually continuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think I might just buy Good Calories, Bad Calories after reading this. It might not tell me anything I haven't learned indirectly through other writers but if it's written as well as this blog post that will justify its value alone.

Looking forward to the new book incidentally, and hoping it isn't a content- less and repetitive discussion of magazine clippings as this kind of book can often be (I have no reason to suspect it will be, beyond bad experiences with other books).

</comment><comment><USER7> TL:DR;

Instead of just stating that overeating causes our obesity, we should be asking ourselves why we overeat, which is a much more complicated question.

I was disappointed it took that long of a post to reach that point. I was hoping to learn something interesting about thermodynamics in the body.</comment>


Show HN: My team's entry to the Chosx Labs Competition - <AUTHOR> http://competition.coshx.com/ideas/kardsy-create-amazing-postcards-to-send-by-mail

<comment><AUTHOR> From the Coshx Labs webpage, "Coshx Labs is working with David Cohen, co- founder of Techstars, to launch the next big idea. We will be giving away $50,000 of development work, no strings attached, to make your idea a reality."

We entered our postcard creation app into the contest. There are already a handful of postcard apps on the mobile app stores and web, but we're confident there is room for another. As far as the physical printing and mailing of postcards, we are looking to use Lob. Lob is a YCombinator backed startup for printing and mailing for developers.

We put together a 1-minute promo video for the competition as well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGH-5rNS- OA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGH-5rNS-OA)

The 2-week voting process has begun, and we would love to get your vote and feedback!

Thanks!</comment>


Reactide the first dedicated IDE for React web application development - <AUTHOR> http://reactide.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm eager to see what's coming out of here.</comment>


When a software company ponders the environment - <AUTHOR> https://blog.giantswarm.io/when-a-software-company-ponders-the-environment/ <comment><USER2> A great attitude to have - especially in the early days of a company when it develops culture.</comment>


Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/05/sorry-my-feed-is-full/ <comment><USER3> Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the internet that is time-critical and _has_ to be consumed in the order it was posted, or as soon as it was posted.

The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to 300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read the interesting ones every few days, and perhaps scroll through the headlines of the boring ones once per month.

This way no post goes missing because it is too old, a frequent poster doesn't take priority over an infrequent but more interesting one, and the user decides how to "filter" content based on every visit.

<comment><USER4> With respect, Google Reader was used by a tiny fraction of the internet population, despite being operated by the biggest online brand for 8 years. The majority of people opted to get their news from sites and services which used some combination of human and computer powered filtering.

I agree the Google Reader model is fantastic for information junkies (in a good way :) with relatively advanced technical skills; but empirically, it didn't work for the mass market Twitter is going after.

So I don't see Edgerank as a band-aid fix, but a fundamental requirement for a large-scale system like this. Because (a) on the demand side, recommendations are what people actually want - let computers do what they're good at and reduce the human tedium of sifting through inane FourSquare checkins etc; (b) on the supply side, _relevant_ native ads inside a recommendations stream are the business model.

For these reasons, I disagree with OP when he says "Twitter should not abandon its unfiltered feed". I know it will cause shock, shock, when they do it, but they _will_ do it because it's so fundamental to their objectives as a mainstream consumer service.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but I think there is at least three related usability issues that made Google Reader less attractive to users. Namely, Google Reader required multiple tools to use efficiently. It also required users to have a basic understanding of RSS feeds. Finally, users had to cope with multiple information formats -- possibly hundreds.

Here's just one example. Recently, a popular web comic changed its feed to contain thumbnails, links and ads -- requiring the user to click through in order to see the comic. Previously it just syndicated large, readable versions of the comic.

That makes a lot of sense to me, but I have to wonder if a less experienced user might feel that something broke. This leads me to consider how it must feel for a "regular user" might feel or react while browsing between feeds and coping with information provided in so many different formats. Some feeds have pictures, some don't, some have complete articles, others just send out links and ads. Maybe I'm giving myself a false memory, but I can remember a feeling of cognitive friction while switching between feeds. I'm an information junkie and I'm technologically literate, so I dealt with it.

I'm saying RSS would possibly fair better if the presentation format were standardized across sites. Maybe a simple style manual would unite enough content providers around a single format?

The problem is actually worse with the popular content providers. They each seem to redefine the layout of an RSS feed, whereas the long tail of bloggers seem to coalesce around a very basic format.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you have a good point about consistency. That's one of several reasons the siloed equivalents of RSS (Twitter, Facebook, etc) "won". There's a consistent appearance, consistent metadata, and consistent interactions when it comes to liking and commenting; that kind of interaction was never standardised with RSS, despite some basic attempts. The best you could do was "star it on Google Reader" as a de facto standard.

This is really orthogonal to the question of stream filtering, I maintain that's still an issue for RSS aggregators even though as you point out, there are other usability concerns too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue for anyone outside Twitter.

<comment><USER7> The spproach may still work. Apple's walled garden has contributed to what many consider a good UE.

Having control of the UE is important.

However, I believe that Twitter could have managed the developer angst better. There was warning though.

<comment><USER6> I can still write innovative apps for Apple's various OSes, but I cannot write an innovative Twitter client. They closed that door.

I think Twitter would have been better off just telling all the client writers that it was a requirement to show the "ad tweets" in the stream and call it a day. They are not Apple .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a huge problem, IMO. It only takes one or two noisy accounts to flood your feed on a regular basis. There are a handful of people I really don't want to unfollow, but they tend to dominate my feed even when they're not completely overwhelming it.

All I really want is the ability to designate certain follows as "important", which would give me their tweets in something like the format of an RSS reader at the top of the page. Then dump the rest into the current "river of news" style which I can wade through, or not.

<comment><USER9> It's always confused me to that I can't prioritize tweeters into 1, 2 and 3. Open up twitter after 8 hours and the tweets are sorted in priority.

<comment><USER10> Because this feature would be abused by everyone who thinks too highly of their own posts.

<comment><USER9> How would that work? I mean I would follow a new person and categorize them into 1, 2 or 3 preference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get much value from their timelines. I've concluded that they don't, or they are using lists or other tools to manage their Twitter experience.

Speaking of lists, I disagree with the author's claim that they are hard to set up. Twitter (and many Twitter apps) have made a list quite easy to set up, and monitor. Doing this is one way to handle the unfiltered feed problem.

He brings up an interesting point, though, regarding negative behaviors such as being less likely to follow new people. I agree that this can happen, but the flip side is people may be far more selective about who they follow as time goes on. Assuming that such users are regularly unfollowing bad or spammy accounts, their Twitter experience should improve over time.

<comment><USER4> "I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get much value from their timelines."

Simple: TweetDeck. I can see it now on my 2nd screen, with 32 columns allowing me to, yes, effectively follow thousands of accounts and topics using lists and filters.

Acquiring and growing TweetDeck is really the best thing Twitter's done, from a purely selfish experience, as it's become a fantastic research/communication tool.

It's obviously low priority for them, evidenced by shutting down the mobile clients, but it seems they are smart enough to keep it running to keep a percentage of power users active in the network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One phenomenon which Facebook takes into account which Twitter does not is that of the loquacious acquaintance, possibly someone with a business constantly hyping things, possibly someone who just likes to hear themselves speak more often than I do. They apply slight pressure to me to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook so I do so.

On Facebook I can easily set people to three settings which are private to me - read everything they write, read only significant things they write (things which get more than ordinary likes/replies, or whatever), or ignore them. This is great for me, otherwise my entire Facebook feed would be filled with my 4-5 chattiest friends or current/former coworkers, I'd have to scroll through their collective 10-12 posts a day to see anyone elses, etc.

Twitter does not have this option where I publicly follow someone, due to them pressuring me to follow them on Twitter, but where I can actually privately ignore them. Which just tends to mean I use Twitter less. Maybe there is an option buried somewhere where I can do this, but it's definitely not obvious like on Facebook. Which just means I use Twitter a lot less. Because all it is for me is a constant stream of 4-5 chatty acquaintances with the dozens of others I follow popping in once in a while.

There are ways to deal with this on Twitter, but none of them are that good. I can create another account, but then there are problems from that - <USER2> with private tweets I no longer have access to or have to ask for two adds from everyone etc. I can create a private list without these people on it, but then I have to go to the trouble of maintaining two lists - the main list and the private list. Facebook just makes this a lot easier.

<comment><USER13> I have one list (top 80 or so) and the firehose (thousands). The list is for the people who I don't really want to miss, and the firehose is for dipping into now and then. Excessive verbosity belongs in the firehose.

I occasionally promote and demote, and as a private list nobody is the wiser. I assume others do this too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you like this article's ideas, are fascinated by social graphs and smoothing communication among nodes, enjoy functional programming (functional Scala, Clojure, etc), and are interested in a new job, drop me an email.

<comment><USER15> Have you posted on the "Who's hiring" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879)) thread?

<comment><USER14> Haven't, but will, thanks. This was extremely topical, so thought I'd mention here where there were likely to be interested people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The OP is trying to solve a problem with a FB mentality. Twitter is a different animal. Lists solve many problems. Twitter could do a better job surfacing lists and making them easier to implement and return to, but we the users have a responsibility too I believe. We often complain about spammy accounts or unmanageable TLs when _we_ control the Follow button.

</comment><comment><USER16> There should be a distinction between friends and followers. I'd friend many more people, but I don't give a shit about most friend's tweets. (Most of them are about their current dinner, or something equally unimportant.) I think I currently follow around 15 people, and that's exactly right for how often I check my feed and how much time I want to spend on twitter.

So for me this works is fine, but I know many others that follow for social reasons, not because the person they start following is interesting. And if you do that, yes indeed your timeline will be overflowing all the time.

I've never not followed anyone for having too many tweets in my timeline already. And if someone starts spamming shit I don't care about (accounts with lots of followers sometimes abuse it for political or other things), I unfollow them without second thought. And I let them know why I unfollowed (like with downvotes here and on stackoverflow, I always try to comment if I do negative actions).

</comment><comment><USER17> I've wanted a twitter client similar to the old aim clients with respect to away messages.

Just a list of people I follow and their most recent tweet. Either ordered alphabetically or ordered by date last tweeted. If I hover over one of the people , then I can look at their past X tweets.

</comment><comment><USER18> The author's suggestion here to fix this problem is to have twitter offer feed cleaning tools and un-follow recommendations. Not only will this never happen, but it could create far too many false positives to even be a good thing.

I think the only way out of this is for twitter to put out 1 or a series of lenses with which to view your feed. People still want to follow all of their friends as well as celebrities, athletes, bands, news aggregators, etc; however, they don't need to see all of that crap in one feed. I think it'll be the redditization of twitter that solves this problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally I don't think Twitter cares much about the quality of users' timeline.

Twitter doesn't provide any easy way to manage followings while keep suggesting people to follow, because promoted accounts will be unfollowed easily.

I am one of the user in the official popular users list in China region, but most of my tweets are Japanese. This kind of careless mistake should not happen if they had do a simple review before selecting me. I've ask them to remove me from the list, but they never reply.

They seems to encourage users to keep following, increase the quantity not quality.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am a pretty heavy Facebook user and can't see the slightest use in Twitter. Or rather, it seems like an actively awful thing.

Facebook already _allows_ and even encourages short posts. Forcing them seems like recipe to produce horrid dreck and that does seem just like what Twitter does.

</comment><comment><USER21> I write an article before about this issue that we have with most of the social networks: [https://medium.com/editors- picks/b5eaaa3ff7c3](https://medium.com/editors-picks/b5eaaa3ff7c3)

</comment><comment><USER22> This problem is addressed by tools like [http://www.qureet.com/](http://www.qureet.com/)

Disclaimer: I've met the guy who runs this, but haven't yet got round to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there potential for a third party app doing it (the fixes mentioned in the article) instead?

</comment><comment><USER24> The second sentence of this article is false. When the lede contains blatant errors, that's your signal, as a reader, to stop reading.

<comment><USER9> Because I had to go back: "Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> everything goes through FB goggles with this author</comment>


Show HN: Track bugs and features that users report using NLP - <AUTHOR> https://www.getscopeai.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I'm Luciano, the co-founder and CTO of ScopeAI ([https://www.getscopeai.com/](https://www.getscopeai.com/)). We've built a product that helps teams track and prioritize bugs and feature requests being reported through user feedback.

Support, sales or marketing teams report countless bugs and feature requests they're hearing them from users to product teams. But as a PM or engineer, you need context - you need to know who's reaching out, what they're saying and how many people are affected.

ScopeAI makes that easier by using NLP to find all the conversations related to a bug or feature request once it's been added by someone on your team.</comment>


It's Time to Drop the "F" Bomb - or "Lies, Damn Lies, and NoSQL." - <AUTHOR> http://blog.basho.com/2011/05/11/Lies-Damn-Lies-And-NoSQL/

<comment><USER2> To some commenters: the C in CAP and the C in ACID are not the same thing. If that is not clear to you, it is unlikely the database you develop will include correct implementations of core concepts. Knowledge is power.

Peace and love to the human family.

\- Lil' B

<comment><USER3> Just to expand on this, the "C" in CAP corresponds (roughly) to the "A" and "I" in ACID. Atomicity across multiple nodes requires consensus. According to FLP Impossibility Result (CAP is a very elegant and intuitive re-statement of FLP), consensus is impossible in a network that may drop or deliver packets. Serializable isolation level requires that operations are totally ordered: total ordering on multiple nodes, requires solving the "atomic multicast" problem which is a private instance of the general consensus problem.

In practice, you can achieve consensus across multiple nodes with a reasonable amount of fault tolerance if you are willing to accept high (as in, hundreds of milliseconds) latency bounds. That's a loss of availability that's not acceptable to many applications.

This means, that you can't build a low-latency multi-master system that achieves the "A" and "I" guarantees. Thus, distributed systems that wish to achieve a greater form of consistency typically (Megastore from Google being a notable exception, at the cost of 140ms latency) choose master slave systems (with "floating masters" for fault tolerance). In these systems availability is lost for a short period of time in case the master fails. BigTable (or HBase) is an example of this: ( _grand simplification follows_ ) when a tablet master (RegionServer in HBase) for a specific token range fails, availability is lost until other nodes take over the "master-less" token range.

These are not binary "on/off" switches: see Yahoo's PNUTS for a great "middle of the road" system. The paper < <http://research.yahoo.com/node/2304> > has an intuitive example explaining the various consistency models.

Note: in a partitioned system, the scope of consistency guarantees (that is, _any_ consistency guarantees: eventual or not) is typically limited to (at best) a single partition of a "table group"/"entity group" (in Microsoft Azure Cloud SQL Server and Google Megastore, respectively), a single partition of a table (usual sharded MySQL setups) or just a single row in a table (BigTable) or document in a document oriented store. Atomic and isolated _cross row_ transactions are impractical on commodity hardware (and are limited even in systems that mandate the use of infiband interconnect and high-performance SSDs).

[Disclaimer: I am commiter on Project Voldemort, a Dynamo implementation; in addition to Dynamo, I also find Yahoo's PNUTS and Google's BigTable to be very interesting architectures.]

<comment><USER2> Thanks for bringing some much needed science to these proceedings, my man. Too many people mistaking computer science for a therapy session where their feelings matter. Computer science has much in common with the honey badger. Think upon this and be enlightened.

Yours in perpetual discovery, \- Lil' B

<comment><USER4> Stop signing your posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We performed our own crash testing for a Riak and about a million other databases, Riak and MySQL with InnoDB were the only cases scoring more than 5 out of 10.

I think the problem with NoSQL is that they are targeting the wrong people - the lazy people. One of the DBs we reviewed (can't remember which) did not have single datacentre durability, lost like 80% data while crash during updating table contents and was boasting some geo-coordinate built-in datatype on their website. Its the priorities plague. Is built-in geo more important than data?

Why do NoSQL databases have to be all distributed beyond sharding? I think because thats what people wrongly perceive out of them. Google, LinkedIn all use NoSQL which is distributed, so if a NoSQL DB doesn't do it, its a shame. Thats the root of misjudgment I believe. Every DB, NoSQL or not, needs to have a place. One size fits all is what will kill NoSQL, whether enforced by engineering or marketing. Thats why I think marketing "lie".

CouchDB, Riak and Redis are only few exceptions I know of which seemed to have a vision and stuck to it.

<comment><USER6> wait until you fill your mysql + innodb with real data, have a crash and have to perform a check to get it back online. stick with riak.

<comment><USER7> You're confusing InnoDB with MyISAM. InnoDB does redo log recovery like all grown up databases. MyISAM requires a lengthy fsck type operation.

<comment><USER6> you are confusing real world with a comment on hackernews. try and do a full recovery on innodb with real data and get back so uncle tuna can hold you tight and promise that will never happen again. hint: corrupted tables crashing mysql processes and you having to start it with innodb_recovery 4 for ro, dumping the table, reapplying it back.

\-- Mel Gibson's surgeon on "Payback"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Credit where credit's due, the 10gen and MongoDB guys have done a great job convincing developers to adopt their product despite the existence of technically superior alternatives. I guess that's what happens when a bunch of ex-DoubleClick execs start a database company.

<comment><USER9> "ex-DoubleClick exec" gives the image of some kind of ad executive or something, which is _not_ what Dwight is.

<http://www.10gen.com/video/mongosv2010/replication>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Was this targeted at anyone in particular, or is it a general rant (deserved or not) at the state at the world?

<comment><USER11> It was a thinly veiled bash on Mongo.

<comment><USER12> Not just Mongo though, there are a lot of NoSQL companies out there right now whose marketing claims the impossible.

<comment><USER13> It's kind of sad too. There are lots of use cases where I want fast datastores, and you know what, if the database goes down, who cares?

For example, I do lots of experiment logging to a mongodb. If the power goes out, and the data is lost who cares? The data was no longer valid or useful -- but if I slow down my writes for 'safety' I will be causing problems by introducing delay in ways that could cause conflict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even if it's hard to disagree with anything specific in the post, who does this tone appeal to? Is the author selling or venting?

</comment><comment><USER12> This post is fantastic! I couldn't agree more with its contents. Sorry that this comment is vapid, but I wanted to do something more than just click the upvote button.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can't escape the laws of physics, but if you know how to get physics on your side you can do things that at first glance appear impossible. See: human flight.

<comment><USER3> Practical, heavier than air flight was made possible due to internal combustion engines. It's also still less practical and more expensive for some applications e.g., cargo than other options. Practical, low-latency distributed databases based on "invoke consensus protocol on every commit to the log" would be made possible (on limited size local networks) when networking gear with performance exceeding 10GigE/Infiniband becomes "commodity". Even then, it will still be impractical and too expensive for some scenarios.

At the present time, the fact that I said "invoke consensus on every commit to the log" and "low latency" in the same sentence is making distributed systems engineers cringe (I would _not_ advocate building such a system). The fact that I said "Infiniband" and commodity in the same sentence is also making systems administrators and DBAs cringe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, a word about Consistency:

"There'll be a time when all people are alike." "Which is precisely the ideal society. No mysteries, no romantics, no discussions, no persecution because there's no one to persecute. When all have received the same conditioning, it will be like…" "Insects." "Who have existed longer than ourselves and will outlast our race by many millennia." "Is existence everything? "There's nothing else."

</comment><comment><USER16> "The world is full of wicked men Wyatt" -- Gene Hackman in Wyatt Earp

</comment><comment><USER17> Just a piece of self-glorification. I brushed my teeth, it is hard - all 32 teeths, complicated distributed problem, can't do them all at once consistently, yet i still was able to do it.

<comment><USER18> It reads like it was written by a marketing person.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. It reads like an engineer who is frustrated that his/her tech is getting out-businessed (perhaps in a slimy way). Engineers generally want to live in a world where the best tech wins, but in the end, we go home to our betamax players and wonder why we can't rent any good movies for them.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My opensource React-Native-TypeScript 2D game – welcoming critique - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shirakaba/react-native-typescript-2d-game <comment><AUTHOR> If you just want to try out the game without interacting with the repository, you can download it in the Expo Client via the URL: [https://exp.host/@bottledlogic/the-box](https://exp.host/@bottledlogic/the- box)</comment>