The 2020 iPhone SE - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2020/04/the_2020_iphone_se <comment><USER2> Compared to my first gen SE, I'd like the faster processor, better camera and better battery life. But I'm not sure I'm willing to go up in size and weight, and get the rounded edges that make it even harder to grip one-handed.

For me, a bigger screen isn't a plus - after years of following the trend and being on my phone more and more, I managed to kick the habit and I'm very happy that my phone has now found its rightful place as a utility when I'm off my computer, rather than as a primary computer. I use it for maps, e-tickets, answering the occasional im. But it's not as convenient as my computer, it's not for leisurely browsing or media consumption, and I don't want it to be - it means that when I'm off my computer, I'm really off.

So this push toward bigger screens runs counter to what I want a phone to be for me. A bigger screen invites you to grab it with both hands. A bigger screen invites you to watch more stuff on it, watch movies, browse reddit and whatnot. I don't want any of that, I'd in fact prefer if it wasn't good at that, just like I don't want more sugar in my food.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you here, I went through a period of moving to feature phones and ditching the smart watch to reduce the phone back to utility rather than a distraction. But feature phones, even those running kaiOS, just don't have the support for communication tools and things like 2fa authenticator apps.

I eventually went for an iPhone SE (2016) in the last year, after it was discontinued and managed to get a boxed, new unit for less than even the low- end android market phones go for. Thus far it's the most enjoyable phone to use having moved from an S8 which was certainly "better" on paper.

The size is incredibly portable and easy to handle, the battery, despite only being 1500mAh, does a very good job lasting me the day (though I certainly expect it won't continue to do so) and the screen is acceptable but annoying enough that I don't want to be using it for long stretches. It's got the lastest iOS and I fully expect the lack of iOS 14 support will be the reason I have to swap it for a new model once software support falls away.

It seems like this new SE model is still the smallest phone you can get despite the increase in dimensions and weight that you mention. It's nice to see a comment that shares my view and I hope a market for the smaller phone will come back around similar to that odd stage in the early 00s where handsets suddenly became impossibly small.

<comment><USER4> My iPhone SE got destroyed and I got a 7 to replace it since they wouldn't give me another SE. The larger screen isn't nicer and just makes the phone harder to hold. I actually feel like I have a harder time touching things accurately as well, I think the 7 detects touches at a different place on your finger.

And of course I can't use headphones, I ordered a dongle from newegg and waited weeks and now it hasn't come. I've mostly given up on using my phone for music because of this.

The water resistance is nice though, that's probably the only feature I've actually enjoyed.

<comment><USER5> I've had smart phones for over a decade, and a mobile phone for 2, I can't think of any point when I've needed water resistance.

I have however had a smashed screen once, and the bigger a phone is, the harder it is to hold, the more likely the screen will smash

The old macbooks were great with the maglock power lead not pulling them off the desk. I believe new ones have downgraded the connector?

<comment><USER6> > The old macbooks were great with the maglock power lead not pulling them off > the desk. I believe new ones have downgraded the connector?

I have been using this Magnetic USB C Adapter and am very happy with it: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0816PV1YZ/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0816PV1YZ/)

<comment><USER7> Be careful with that; during disconnection of the magnetic part, the pins carrying 20 V on the cable can make momentary connections with other pins on the portion of the connector remaining in the machine; if this happens, the port may never work again (for charging, or for anything else).

The risk is probably not worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use both styles of iPhones, an XS as my phone and a 6S as my at-work iPod and device for random moments of RSS-type surfing. I am not a heavy or advanced user. My preference is unquestionably toward the 6S style of size and operation. FaceID on the XS is great when wet fingers are an issue (often for me at work) and for in-app password authentications.

All told, I prefer the one-handed usability of the smaller 6S and that includes losing the newer-design interactions, particularly control center on the XS necessitating two hands to invoke it. In fact, I'm the reverse of Gruber—I'm apt to use old-UI gestures on my XS (not that it happens often, I tend to switch seamlessly).

Fine. Whatever. That's just me. What I find more disturbing is all the words spilled by reviewers about all these devices. At this point, not much is significantly changing in what's offered with new devices, so the simple lists of Pros and Cons capture most everything. Using Gruber's review as an example, I don't find a need for multi-paragraph expositions on the UI changes that took place years ago, and I suspect most of his readers are informed enough that they don't either.

For the average person, battery life is similar among models, all the cameras are impressive, the screens and speed great. The tradeoffs between models are generally minimal but distinct—just list them.

Overall, smartphone innovation has plateaued and so too have the reviews.

<comment><USER9> I'm with you. I think for casual users who the SE seems to be marketing, the 6S is good enough for a quarter of the price used. Although it will probably not get this year's iOS update, forcing people to upgrade... Otherwise the 6S really is good enough and compact enough.

<comment><USER10> I don't know. People do not take cameras with them anymore and the SE 2020's camera system is much better than that of the 6s. So, if you have the money, I think that is worth the new SE alone.

Apart from that, I agree that the 6s is still surprisingly smooth and doesn't seen to struggle with recent iOS versions and applications, despite being a 5 year old phone.

<comment><USER11> That's true because Apple puts significant effort into making that work. I personally got bugs assigned to me when certain animations were <60fps on the 6s, even if they worked on newer phones like the xs. The 6s is especially prone to this as i recall because the point:pixel scaling is 3x vs 2x/4x on other phones.

<comment><USER12> Btw - thank you for working hard at making this smooth. My SO had a 6S until 2 months ago and only during iOS 11 it was not smooth. iOS 12 and 13 were perfect and apart from the camera she says she kind of misses the 6S for its smaller form factor. The other benefits of newer generations simply don't matter to many users. WhatsApp/Insta/Email/Maps runs just fine on an A9 or A13 and her main game is 2D chess....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a good reason why Apple aren't making the small form factor phone lots of you are asking for: logistics.

The new SE requires very little new manufacturing capacity. The case and probably battery are from the iPhone 8; the CPU/GPU/SOC and most of the rest of the electronics are from the iPhone 11; the camera still seems to be a slightly unknown quantity but the specs suggest it has a lot in common with the iPhone X camera. No doubt a certain amount of tricky engineering was required to put those parts together efficiently, but the SE requires almost no new manufacturing capacity beyond the final assembly line. For Apple it's pretty much a no-brainer.

A hypothetical "iPhone Classic", with modern innards in an iPhone 4/5 form factor case, would be a very different matter. You couldn't combine the 11's CPU with the 5's battery - battery life would be laughable. So you'd need to use a CPU from an earlier model; I suspect you'd have to go back at least to the 8 to find a CPU that doesn't drain an iPhone 5 size battery like water through a sieve. That means keeping one more CPU fabrication line in business beyond its intended life, taking that capacity away from the plants that are making silicon for the iPhone 11 and the coming 12. The camera would of course also have to be based on an earlier model, with all the same downsides again in terms of keeping old technology going and taking up factory capacity. And fitting all that into a 4/5 case would still be a much bigger engineering feat than the actual SE 2.

Bottom line: Even if you assume that the "iPhone Classic" market would be as big as that for the SE 2, it's hard to see how it would be worth Apple's time and money to cater to it. If you want to argue that the Classic would be a practical proposition for Apple, you would have to claim that the Classic market would be much bigger than the SE 2 - and given how popular the SE 2 is already turning out to be, that seems really unlikely.

<comment><USER14> All that makes sense, but forget Apple, one of the Android manufacturers should serve this market. I feel like there's a sizeable niche that could fund one small, high quality Android phone. It's really never been done; all the small phones that have come out have been compromised in some way. Sony's Xperia Compact line came the closest, but it doesn't use stock Android, which is a huge point against it. I feel like it can't be _that_ hard: there are so many huge phones on the market. Just nix one of those models, put mid-to-high- range components in it, put a small display on it, chuck stock Android on it, and boom, you've just dominated a niche.

<comment><USER15> Palm makes a phone that might fit what you're looking for

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

<comment><USER16> How did I not know about this? I just replaced my phone, so I can't really justify the switch, but that is almost exactly the phone I want! My only nitpick would be 32GB storage seems insufficient since android takes multiple GB of that and music collections plus a few apps will use up the rest quite quickly.

[edit] On My phone "System" is listed as 11 GB, other google apps add up to another couple GB, and my music collection is 14GB so out-of-the-box I could see me having just 5GB free with no other apps.

<comment><USER17> I just learned about it, too. Your complaint doesn't jive with the purpose of the device: A communication device.

It makes specific points to say that it is meant for those who don't want the phone to be a distraction. I don't recall the camera specs, but I can't imagine it's good by 2020 standards. Music, sure - it seems like the right size for a good MP3 player (remember that term, kids?)

I like the _idea_ of a palm phone. Part of me thinks about getting a phone like it, and then a Oneplus 7T phablet, and swapping the SIM like you would swap a watch for different occasions.

Actually, depending on the response time and the reliability of getting SMS and calls post-swap, that sounds tempting...

<comment><USER18> Depending on your carrier, you could do this without swapping SIMs -- as far as I know, all of the Big Three in the US (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T) all have "number-sharing" programs normally reserved for things like smartwatches. In fact, Palm specifically advertises that they work with Verizon and T-Mobile, and proposes alternatives for other networks ([https://palm.com/pages/companion](https://palm.com/pages/companion)). If you're serious about this, it sounds worth looking into!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't really see his attempts to use the new gestures on the old-design iPhone as proof that the new UI is better. People still tell me to "tape" long after it was obvious that DVRs are better. It's simply muscle memory.

Still not sure that this my next phone though, probably going to stick with the old school SE. I had asked work for an upgrade, got the giant XR, and after five days put it right back in the box and handed it back. Presumably someone else at work got it. But I didn't want to carry a brick everywhere. Honestly something the shape of the iPhone 1 would be fine -- a little thicker to put a better camera in and more battery, but doesn't require me to take a dual-wielding feat on my next level up.

The new SE/2 seems workable -- if not what I want in terms of size. But I doubt I'm going to convince my work to buy me a new phone in this economy, and I'm happy with the old SE, so I guess this one is a pass. It's cool that Apple made a cheap phone, but what I actually wanted was a small phone and price wasn't that relevant.

<comment><USER20> > "It's cool that Apple made a cheap phone"

It's only cheap relative to Apples other phones, it's still outside of the range I'd consider reasonable. Although it seems the reason most people spend so much on phones is to get better cameras? Which I'm not particularly bothered about - maybe it's worth it for that.

<comment><USER21> I've upgraded my iPhone five times, just recently to the SE, and each time it's been exclusively for the camera. Literally exclusively, since in many other respects the functionality is going in reverse (loss of home button, touch ID, headphone port, etc.) I swallow it all for a better camera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Once you get used to the post-iPhone-X interaction model, there's no going > back. A week with the new SE has not shaken my belief that the X-style > interaction design is superior. Not one iota.

I have an iPhone 8 (TouchID) and an iPad Pro (FaceID) and personally the multi-tasking gestures are ridiculously inferior to the home button. FaceID is nice (ApplePay, unlocking, etc) but switching to another app (multi-tasking) is _painful_ in the "post-iPhone-X interaction model". Am I alone in this or is it a learned behavior that I simply haven't gotten over the hump yet?

EDIT: Turns out there is some nuance to iPad vs iPhone. I should also note that I'm probably referring moreso to the multi-app interface on an iPad (where you can have two apps running at the same time), which is still weird to me. Sliding left and right makes sense - get it now, but you have to remember what your last app interaction was. Also, weird downvotes?

<comment><USER23> I don't find getting into the multitasking switcher meaningfully harder on the newer devices— it's just a swipe-up-and-hold gesture, which I'll occasionally time wrong and end up at the home screen, but not often enough to be "painful" (and it's just another swipe away if I do mess up).

What is _vastly_ better on the X-series devices, though, is switching between your two or three most recent apps. Just swipe left and right at the bottom of the screen (on the bar)— this lets you flip between apps in the order that they're in the switcher. This means I very rarely actually enter the full multitasking switcher in normal use.

(The other, minor benefit of the new-style gestures is that they're all cancellable and map directly to finger movement, but that's more of a "feel" thing than a major usability win. Makes it feel Apple-y, though.)

<comment><USER24> > Just swipe left and right at the bottom of the screen (on the bar)— this > lets you flip between apps in the order that they're in the switcher. This > means I very rarely actually enter the full multitasking switcher in normal > use.

Did Apple make this a all or nothing thing or do some of these gestures also work on home button devices?

<comment><USER23> All or nothing, IIRC. Home button devices do have a gesture to switch directly between apps (3D touch on the left edge of the screen), but I always found it difficult to activate reliably, especially with a case on my phone.

<comment><USER25> I haven't used a home button iPhone in a long time so I'm not sure about them, but home button iPads definitely support the X gestures.

<comment><USER23> Home button iPads get some of the X gestures— they get swipe up for home and multitasking, but not the right/left gestures on the home bar (because it's not there). The loss of those isn't that big of a deal, though, since iPads have the four-finger multitasking gestures as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Those benchmarks are impressive. iPhone SE beating the 2019 MBP in single core performance? That's fantastic!

I wish I could comment on or know what he was talking about with the iPhone X vs "old iPhone" interaction paradigm. I personally thought the "single button" hardware interface was an incredible innovation that changed everything. Even Android relies on it. My Galaxy S9+ has a "software home button" (like most Androids do) in place of the iPhone's. I'll have to find a friend with an iPhone X or later to try the new swipe up gestures and see if they are indeed better.

<comment><USER27> Fun fact: iPhone's buttons are not mechanical buttons starting with iPhone 7. The click you feel when you press it is just the taptic engine.

If you have an iPhone 7 or 8, try turning it off and try to press the button.

<comment><USER28> I knew this was true, as you can't click it when battery is off, but I still don't get it: how does it work, and why?

<comment><USER29> How: haptic feedback using a weighted linear actuator.

Why: I suspect because it debuted with the iPhone 7, the first officially water resistant iPhone, that it was a waterproofing move to get rid of possible ingress points.

<comment><USER30> > I suspect...it was a waterproofing move

I've always assumed it was partially about reliability and partially about saving space, since water-resistant physical buttons are fairly standard components.

The phone needs to have some form of haptic motor anyway, and switching to a virtual button allows them to eliminate a complex moving part - removing one potential point of failure - while freeing up a few cubic millimeters of internal volume.

Anecdotally, the home buttons always seemed to be one of the more fragile parts of an iPhone, to the degree that many people started to use the on- screen assistive touch dialogs to avoid wear and tear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is _exactly_ the phone my wife wants to upgrade from her showing-its-age, 5-year-old 6S. It'll fit into her existing case. It's not too big. It's affordable. It still has a home button.

She's hardly a power user, so this might be the one phone she gets for the _next_ five year, too.

<comment><USER32> >It still has a home button.

Why is this a benefit? The removal of the home button might have been the best thing since the home button itself. The gesture that replaced is an order of magnitude better.

<comment><USER33> FaceID doesn't work when I'm using my phone in bed. I lie on my side, and can't unlock my phone.

Maybe that's weird, but it's something that I've been frustrated with _every single day_ since upgrading from the 6s.

<comment><USER34> Same, switched to Samsung A70. Every night at bedtime I swear at the FaceID not working nor (!) the under the screen Touch ID until the 8:th try. Even a headphone cable touching the screen will wake the screen up.

Having rounded sides is also something that just reeks of Windows XP blue theme to me. Playful but utter useless (for the grip). I have to remember to not squeeze the phone too hard every time because then it will hit the ground or clicking on the sides.

The old iPhone SE was amazing. I wish the new one had the same form-factor with better battery but put the touch id on the back to allow for a near edge to edge screen (but keep the steel border so I don't accidentally touch the screen).

While dreaming, I wish the reviewers would actually try living with the phones, because pretty much all the reviewers can be replaced with a spec- sheet at this point.

<comment><USER35> Hm.. have you tried the Face ID on iPhones or just the Samsung A70 and other single-camera style Face ID? My iPhone 11's Face ID works without issues even at night in bed, but I've used Honor 10 before and had a lot of issues with its face recog including night usability, so I rather disabled it..

Also headphone cable doesn't wake up my iPhone 11.

<comment><USER34> Only tried the Samsung one. Considering switching back to iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > "What this source told me is that while developing the iPhone X, members of > the team would typically carry two phones with them: a prototype iPhone X > they could use, but (of course) not while in the presence of anyone who > wasn't disclosed on the project, and an older iPhone they could use in front > of anyone. These team members would spend time, every day, using both > phones. They knew they were onto a winning idea with the new interaction > design for the iPhone X when they started instinctively using the X-style > gestures on the older iPhone, and never vice versa. When a new design is > clearly better than an old one, it's a one-way street mentally."

Gives some insights into how Apple designers think about UX! Pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER37> > So, yes, a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in > single-core CPU performance.

This is baffling.

<comment><USER38> Beating the laptop is impressive, but the top of the line part was unnecessary and counter productive. More expensive CPUs often have more cores running at a slower speed. For example, the bottom end 16" MacBook Pro comes with a 2.6 GHz CPU and the top end one comes with a 2.4 GHz CPU. Yes, there is Turbo Boost which can in some cases turn off cores in exchange for higher clock frequencies, but good luck getting much out of that given Apple's thermal design.

<comment><USER39> I don't think Apple is considering the A13 unnecessarily on the SE2. The A13 will allow for it to be "fast" for like 5 more years. Corporations/governments/non-us lower income counties are going to love this phone especially BRICs imo. This was the absolute best choice Apple could make for a 'generic' phone to eat google & androids lunch.

<comment><USER40> iPhone SE 2020 launching at about 42,500 Indian rupees. OnePlus 8 is launching at 41,999 INR.

iPhone SE is by no means a "budget" phone in our country

<comment><USER39> Maybe there is a currency/tax issue driving the price up? One plus 8 is starting at $699USD while the iPhone SE 2020 has been available for $199 at Walmart although it is though an installment plan to keep people with att/Verizon. [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/hurr...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/hurry- new-iphone-se-2020-deal-drops-price-to-just-dollar199)

This also doesn't include tax, so it ends up being more like $438 for the base model without promotions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I still wish they hadn't made it so big. I use my iPhone SE because it isn't the size of an iPhone 8.

</comment><comment><USER42> The obsession with this phone never ceases to amaze me. I'm really trying to get it but I think there's very vocal minority discussing this: american iphone fans.

I would never imagine buying a 64GB non-expandable phone with a single camera and such absurd screen for 480€ in 2020. New 128GB+sd slot s10e is around 450€ and that did small form factor _right_.

For a tech forum the iphone se obsession just seems so alien to the point where it all feels like astroturfing.

<comment> kube-system I too used to buy phones based on their hardware specs.

Then I got frustrated that I had to buy a new device every 2 years just to get a software update. My 5 year old iPhone got iOS 13.4 at the same time as everyone else.

<comment><USER42> I'm sorry but if you're looking to use the same phone for 5 years then you're an absolute minority. Smartphone medium progresses really quick - 5 years is a very very long period of time. Even for laptops - a relative ancient medium that has very little new meaningful inovation - 5 years is still a long time.

<comment> kube-system Because most phones are junk after 5 years, not because people like to dump $400-$1000 bucks every 24 months. Most people don't _want_ to replace their phone on a regular basis, unless they are enthusiasts. "It got slow" or "the battery doesn't last anymore" or "I broke my phone" are very common reasons why people upgrade.

People want their durable goods to last. Stats have shown that people have been keeping their smartphones longer for the past handful of years as the technology is maturing. This will continue as tech improves, just like it has for every other durable good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > a $400 iPhone SE bests a

> $3,000 top-of-the-line

> MacBook Pro in single-core

> CPU performance.

Whenever I see these sorts of benchmarks, it just makes me focus on how much iOS is the limiting factor of these devices.

<comment><USER44> When I see those benchmarks I wonder what they are actually measuring because it's very likely not general purpose compute.

<comment><USER43> Geekbench is a fairly understood metric isn't it?

It at least attempts to simulate 'general' workloads.

<comment><USER44> I don't know what goes in to the benchmark but if Apple had CPUs that outperform last gen 35-45W chip with a 5-10w one in a passively cooled 5 inch phone everyone and their mother would be reverse engineering their designs and building ARM datacenters. From what I've seen so far all the server ARM CPUs struggle to reach x86 performance.

<comment><USER45> > everyone and their mother would be reverse engineering their designs and > building ARM datacenters

Isn't this (more or less) NUVIA's strategy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Significant but not mentioned is the price for Apple Care is $79 vs $149 for this phone (US prices). With Theft Coverage it is $100 less than other phones. Replacement under that coverage is $50 less.

For me it means if I want to buy my elderly parents an Apple Watch I can buy them this phone and have a cost almost comparable with existing A13 phones by themselves; $399+$399 vs $699($599 XR)+$399

</comment><comment><USER47> I bought one old SE from the final batch, just because the 113g, its dimensions are perfectly fine with me. I'd like to write some AR code (and might buy an 2020 SE for that), but for normal use, the SE for me is peak iPhone/smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER48> Does anyone have an answer as to whether the Camera Sensor is really the one from XR? Because so far everyone have it settle on being the same as iPhone 8 _apart_ from Gruber which claims the sensor is from XR.

</comment><comment><USER49> As an Japanese who often wearing a face mask in winter, I really hope Apple to stop adopting FaceID since they released iPhone X. And now, people all over the world start wearing face masks. Even Apple advertises that iPhone SE supports TouchID. I hope Apple changes the decision for next model.

</comment><comment><USER50> I prefer the smaller form factor. I'd like to move to a more secure/privacy conscious OS, so I am thinking about switching to this iPhone. Currently using a Pixel 3, I like the phone and well embedded in Google's ecosystem. Wondering how hard it'll be to switch over

</comment><comment><USER51> Currently I have an iPhone 6. I considered going to an iPhone 11 in the next few months until the iPhone SE was announced.

I like that the SE can fit in my pocket as easily as my current phone. The price is also attractive, although I tend to keep phones until they become too slow and battery life becomes an issue.

However, I'm frustrated constantly by typing on it. Just typing a couple of sentences in a text message can take minutes. (I'm a 60 wpm touch typist on a standard keyboard.) It's become so bad that I'm moving back to a laptop for most communication. My phone is coming close to a read-only device.

Is the 11's size enough help for typing that it's worth the price?

If so, does it fit in your pocket, i.e. how do you keep it on you?

<comment><USER52> I've never had an issue with pocketability even with the largest phones on the market. I don't really understand the problem. Do you have really tiny pockets?

<comment><USER51> Thanks for the reply. I tested with my wife's phone. It fit pretty well so I went for the iPhone 11. It came yesterday and I love it, not the least because I can type easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> > I've used it exclusively for hours at a stretch and I never stopped > expecting it to act like a post-iPhone-X device. I swipe up from the bottom > to go home or multitask.

Fairly sure apple could put that interface on these phones. On home button ipads you can swipe up to go home, and swipe left/right along the bottom to switch apps.

I wish apple would add this, but I think they wanted to keep new iphones exclusive. (The more benign possibility is that there wasn't the space to do left/right swipes without messing with some app functionality)

</comment><comment><USER54> Here are the measures of iPhone SE (4.7" screen) compared to iPhone XS (5.8" screen):

138.4 x 67.3 x 7.3 mm (5.45 x 2.65 x 0.29 in)

143.6 x 70.9 x 7.7 mm (5.65 x 2.79 x 0.30 in)

For half a cm extra in length I get 2.5 cm extra in screen size with the XS. I would have liked a smaller phone and if this were similar in size to the original SE, I might have switched, but the true size difference between this SE and a phone considered "much larger" is negligible (I own both).

</comment><comment><USER55> Nice. I might upgrade my 5-year-old iPhone 6 to the new SE. Hopefully the build quality didn't have to suffer too much and this iPhone SE last another 5 years

</comment><comment><USER56> I disagree. The home button is a superior interface, as compared to the swipe up.

By removing the home button, Apple took away another physical control interface. You can still swipe up, with the presence of the home button.

Instead of removing the home button, Apple could have used the bottom area to install some other context sensitive touch controls. Like the MacBook Touch Bar.

How the heck are you supposed to go for a jog, and carry a large screen phone on you?

</comment><comment><USER57> I've got one on order to replace my iphone 5. It's not my ideal but it's getting to the point where not being able to update stuff is a problem, and right now being able to use Applepay is getting to be more of an advantage. At least it won't have face id or any of that crap. I figure since this has the newest cpu at least it should be a while before Apple obsoletes it.

</comment><comment><USER58> Interesting point that iPhone SE might be hard for people used to iPhone X or later to downgrade to due to the swipe gestures.

<comment><USER38> I have been using Sailfish for years which uses swipe gestures similar to the iPhone X et al. I recently had to get an iPhone for work and all they had was the 8. Getting used to the button was really hard.

I have found myself reaching for the home button when using Sailfish though. I am completely convinced that the gesture UI is superior, but I couldn't relate to the whole not reaching for the home button thing mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> No information about battery life. From the specs it has the same battery as the iPhone 8, but a more efficient CPU so presumably it's going to last a bit longer? The 8's battery life was generally pretty good IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER60> Time to do this type of stuff then: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHP- OPXK2ig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHP-OPXK2ig)

I hope there's a way to upgrade the CPU.

</comment><comment><USER61> For me, an iPhone 6s hold out, this looks like a solid upgrade. The 6s is beginning to show its age (battery is creaky, processor is slower than my wife's 8, camera is so-so.) Tempted to be sure.

</comment><comment><USER62> I just wish it has a full screen with the same size. I used both iPhone X and Max. Both are too big to operate with one hand, although I do like the full screen experience a lot.

</comment><comment><USER63> > So, yes, a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in > single-core CPU performance.

Lies, damn lies and benchmarks? I don't believe that for a second.

<comment><USER64> Why? The iPad Pro is beating MacBook's in benchmarks all the time.

<comment><USER65> In what, geekbench? I'd reserve my judgement until there's some real life benchmark (eg. cinebench).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Too bad this isn't based on the iPhone 8 Plus chassis. I'd like a budget iPhone, but I don't want a tiny phone.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't think I can justify, no matter how good the hardware is, relative to the value of the phone compared to other leaders in the market, buying a phone in mid 2020 without 5G support. It lends its self I guess to my opposition to buying every 1 or 2 years.

<comment><USER68> I honestly don't understand what direct benefit that I, a consumer, get from 5G (mmwave or normal spectrum)? My 4G device already can stream 1080p video at high quality. For every use case that I have with my phone, 5G doesn't appear to offer any material improvement.

Sure, the carriers can make more out of their bandwidth, but that's not really something I'm willing to pay for.

And, it's not like 4G is going anywhere, it'll be continued to be supported for a long time.

Actually, considering the impact on battery life that 5G has on consumer devices... I don't think I actually want it, to be honest. Don't get me wrong, I won't resist a natural upgrade when I upgrade my iphone 8 in 2-3 years, but I'm not seeking it out either.

<comment><USER69> I had this discussion with another friend yesterday, and for 99% I agree with you. He told me about one thing that stuck with me and why I do see some value in 5G networks.

He told me that 5G is able to handle more traffic (= more connections) per tower _. So on some busy places like festivals or other places where there is a huge crowd 5G could help to let all those people access their internet. Of course you could make an argument of "why would all those people need access to the internet" but that isn't the point.

Other than the point above I don't see a value in consumer 5G either.

_ I do not have a source, so if this is wrong then my/his points becomes complete moot.

<comment><USER70> The million dollar question is how long it will be before huge crowds are safe again.

<comment><USER71> The expression should be upgraded to "trillion dollar question"!

For the US alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I relieved. I should keep my iPhone 7 for a few years more.

</comment><comment><USER73> The only reason i don't like bigger form factor, is bend-ability.

But thats not a big deal.

Next time I upgrade a household phone (iPhone7 and 2016SE) it will be this one

</comment><comment><USER74> didn't read, not buying

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm not sure why DaringFireball is still relevant in 2020.

<comment><USER76> What exactly about $current_year stops an Apple-related blog being relevant when Apple still exists, makes products worthy of scrutiny, and is one of the biggest companies in the world?

I fail to see what it is about $current_year that makes careful, cogent, and balanced discourse about Apple irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The most annoying part of Apple is that they make excellent products but their "fandom" talks about the appearance of the computer for the first good chunk of the review.

<comment><USER77> Part of the appeal of an Apple product is how it looks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Yeah whatever. One thing all the iPhone SE reviews from the pundits I've read miss is how Apple, mighty Apple, with all it's brand loyalty and design excellence was forced by the market to take a stable version of the design and release it for a third of the cost of its flagship. Reasons?

* iPhone sales have been dropping consistently.

* No new gimmick to drive flagship price higher.

* Economy is heading to the dumpster

* Apple Services are generating more revenue. So Cheaper entry level device = more device sales = more service sales = money keeps flowing.

<comment><USER79> Like the first SE (and the far less successful iPhone 5C) this is an attempt to sell to a more price-sensitive market that wouldn't consider their flagships in the first place. It's also not exactly unique; Samsung has everything from 100 euro units to those folding phones that cost twice as much as an 11 Pro, say.

The original SE didn't noticeably cannibalise the flagships, and it was in some ways a more appealing device than this (it filled the "smaller" niche, whereas it's hard to see how this one is in any way better than an 11 Pro).

<comment><USER78> The first SE and the 5C were redesigned models. This version is unique in that it is not unique. Its a goddam rebrand of the iphone 8 sold at prices cheaper than any of the iphones ever. 5c was priced $649 for a 64 GB unlocked version.

<comment><USER79> This is an iPhone 8 with mostly iPhone 11 internals, costing $400.

The original SE was a 5S with mostly 6S parts, costing $400.

The 5c was an outlier; it was both more expensive and more unique.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


August is "Web Month" in Leeds, UK. - <AUTHOR> http://imran.typepad.com/blog/2008/08/ls1-the-first-l.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A series of events all organised around the web in August have been dubbed the First Leeds Web Festival.</comment>


Electric or hydrogen – which will win the clean car race? - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-11-17/hydrogen-vs-electric-who-will-win-the-clean-vehicle-race/11694400 <comment><USER2> > Dr Munnings is a strong advocate for a mix of hydrogen and electric > vehicles.

> He explains that hydrogen may be better suited to long distance, back-to- > base transport such as buses and long-haul trucks, while electric vehicles > are a good solution for the light passenger vehicle market.

I feel like this is the most realistic solution in general, especially here in Australia. It's just not economically realistic to cover the country in electric chargers.

I think hydrogen trucks/busses/etc with refilling at their depots and truck stops, and electric for private use (with chargers at petrol stations once they get faster), is the ideal dream here.

I also think the "ICE cars will be sunsetted by 2040" is absolute bollocks. There's a huge amount of people who could never dream of buying a new car, or even a recent (last 10yrs) used one, and it will take a long long time before used EVs gain enough volume, and become cheap enough, to cover the lower income demographics. There's still plenty of people around here driving in cars from the 70s/80s/90s that they picked up for $5k and that was still hard for them to buy.

Are we going to suddenly say "too bad, you're too poor to afford the future we want"?

<comment><USER3> mostly agree but market and economic forces may change the goalposts over time. Eg if the number of gas cars gets below a certain minimum the number of gas stations could diminish and the cost of gas will probably rise as demand falls, also the governments could screw up the gas taxes and emissions standards, think what happened to cigarettes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the big, but rarely mentioned, advantages to electric cars is the ability to charge from the safety of your home. No more getting accosted at some unsecured filling station that attracts people who want unhealthy food, liquor, cigarettes, lotto, and potential victims.</comment>


The Game Crafter- CafePress for Boardgames - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegamecrafter.com/home

<comment><USER2> This post generated a lot of points pretty quickly. Is anyone interested in working on a startup in this area? If so, feel free to get in touch via the info on my profile. My blog: <http://www.replicatorinc.com> focuses on this kind of mass customization / personal fabrication. I also have a ton of ideas/prototypes for companies utilizing these technologies that I'd love to share.

Also from: <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

27\. Hardware/software hybrids. Most hackers find hardware projects alarming. You have to deal with messy, expensive physical stuff. But Meraki shows what you can do if you're willing to venture even a little way into hardware. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in hardware; you can often do dramatically new things by making comparatively small tweaks to existing stuff.

<comment><USER3> If you do decide to start a startup we'd be happy to hear from you (<http://news.ycombinator.com/apply>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just reading the title of this post made me swoon a little bit. My friends and I make all sorts of games like this and this is exactly the sort of site I need to kill all my productivity.

Looks awesome, I'm going to look deeper now.

<comment><USER5> Same, I've always wanted to make a dungeon crawler/adventure style game similar to the old Warhammer Quest (for personal use that is)

This might help push me closer to that goal, since my homemade cards don't have the polish as those printed on better quality stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just wrote about this on TC, I think it's a great idea. [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/awesome-the-game- crafte...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/awesome-the-game-crafter-lets- you-build-and-sell-your-own-custom-board-games/)

To give credit where credit is due, I found it here. Would link to this thread but there's the whole HN secrecy thing (is that still enforced?). Feel free to bash TC below :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Just a plug for people interested in game design, I have a shared blog about making games:

<http://hackersandgamers.posterous.com/>

Email me if you'd like to contribute.

<comment><USER8> Interesting stuff here (even for applying to PC games). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure how I feel about their pricing:

 _The profit is split between you and The Game Crafter equally (50% each)._

I would rather have this priced in to their production costs.

<comment><USER10> I was really excited when I saw this headline stream by on my HN RSS feed. That pricing gives me pause as well, but only slightly.

What really matters to me is how the licensing is handled. I.e., as long as I own full rights and can pull my game out of their system whenever I want (i.e., if I find that my game is popular enough that I think I can self publish or if I find an established company that wants to buy it), then I don't really mind that they take such a large %. It's still a cheap way to prototype and sell to real game players to get feedback. :)

Anyway, this sounds awesome, but now it means less sleep for the next couple of weeks while I pull all those random scraps of paper that make up my game ideas into something more formal. ;)

<comment><USER11> Not hard to find: <http://www.thegamecrafter.com/publish/rights>

<comment><USER12> Basically the answer is yes (explicitly), you retain rights. Yes (explicitly), you can use the service for prototyping and yes, it is possible start with them and move some place cheaper once it makes financial sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It is pretty neat. This is actually an area where 3D printing could be fairly useful. You could design custom or choose components or choose pre-designed ones from a catalog and have them printed in plastic or metal. They would still be fairly expensive, but if you are going for a family heirloom it might be worth the cost. You could also do quite a bit with higher end boards, laser cutting woods and plastics.

<comment><USER13> 3D printed game bits was the first thing I thought of when I started looking at their site. I would love to see them offer that in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm trying to find something more meaningful to say than just "neat" or "awesome", which this is.

So what other niches could somebody do this in? Where else are there frustrated amateur designers that would love to see their creations professionally produced (and sold)?

We already have design-your-own shops for books, CDs, DVDs, tshirts, skateboard decks, Lego sets, circuit boards, bobbleheads, metal machining, ...

What's left? Textiles? Clothing? Food? Wallpaper?

<comment><USER15> Cars?

At least the body design, even if they're built on common platforms.

<comment><USER2> Cars too, a start up called Local Motors (<http://www.local-motors.com>) is trying to do a custom/crowdsourced car company. I think it is more conceptual at this point though. The capital requirements are crazy and I think we'll see more innovation in this area from companies like Toyota.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The game pieces are fairly generic, so it looks like the best games for this would be heavily card or board based. You can control the art there, so it wouldn't look generic.

The real key here is the ability to print custom card decks. Most of the rest of it could be replicated on your own without too much difficulty.

<comment><USER2> Very true, though if they up the ability to customize the pieces using custom manufacturing tech that will give them a strong point of differentiation. It is a great product category to start with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think I'll make a board game version of twitter. You compete to get the most followers, to get replied to by major bloggers, to get retweeted, and mentioned in the news. The ultimate winner is the first to get a million followers.

Who's in?

<comment><USER17> I think Ill make a similar game except the idea will be to create a bunch of fake accounts, get a lot of followers and spam marketing links everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pretty cool idea.

Even just to create a game for yourself for playing with friends.

The website is a bit limited, though.

The games pages should have at least a picture of the board and a description of the included parts.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree, when you are selling pre-manufactured products it is even more important than usual to nail down the aesthetics and provide clear product previews. Amazon can skate with small, not so great product images because people trust the brands, but with this kind of Mass Customization visualization is key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a fantastic idea. I've got a few board games in the works, and this would be a great way to get some decent prototypes made up for cheap. No more sharpies and white hankies for me!

</comment><comment><USER20> Game publishing on-demand. I like it. Music, books, what's next?

<comment><USER18> (cheaper) electronic circuits?

3D printed furniture and kitchenware?

<comment><USER21> Do FPGAs count as cheaper electronic circuits?

<comment><USER22> FPGAs are generally more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This seems really great, however, the TINY resolution requirement for the box art makes me wonder how good the quality will be printed out.

</comment><comment><USER24> One step closer to being able to produce my game, Settlers of Canton.

</comment><comment><USER25> pretty damn cool, all this guys need is a single home run, that would get talked about in the press and this thing will take off like a rocket ship.

<comment><USER26> I just checked <http://www.boardgamegeek.com> to see if it was mentioned there. It was, and it was compared to <http://www.superiorpod.com/> and <http://www.guildofblades.com/>, in case anyone was looking to compare alternatives.

Discussion was here <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/424272> and here <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/424309>

Also, for those that don't know, boardgamegeek is an awesome resource for board game information.

<comment><USER5> _"Also, for those that don't know, boardgamegeek is an awesome resource for board game information."_

Just wanted to highlight that for anyone who didn't see it.

BGG got me playing games like Descent (despite it's horrendous pricing when you factor in the price of all of the expansions... 4!) and Catan and I've never looked back, thoroughly enjoyed the social aspect of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ambitious!</comment>


Pepsi stops using aspartame in Diet Pepsi because people think it's dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/science/pepsi-stops-using-aspartame-in-diet-pepsi-because-people-think-its-dangerous-1621447/

<comment><AUTHOR> Instead, sucralose, which is most commonly known as Splenda will be used.</comment>


Why Don't We See Cars Wrapped In Advertisements? - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/2013/02/why-dont-we-see-cars-wrapped-in-advertisements/

<comment><USER2> But the car is its own advertisement, as are its occupants.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. But when people are willing to rent out the extra room in the house, it is difficult to imagine why they would have issues with putting up a banner on their cars

<comment><USER2> I suspect there is a strong social stigma attached to having advertising displayed on one's car. It might be seen as the automotive equivalent of wearing a sandwich sign.

But bumperstickers are popular. They're not advertising, at least not usually. Sometimes people have so many of them that they might as well be a billboard.</comment></comment></comment>


OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils - <AUTHOR> http://konigi.com/tools/omnigraffle-wireframe-stencils <comment><USER2> Why not get some options at <http://graffletopia.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks! Didn't know about that

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used these stencils for (I believe) 3 years now. I can't stand to use Balsamiq because I've used these for so long and the fact that Balsamiq UI isn't even in the same league as Omnigraffle.</comment>


Rendering 16,000 Schematics in the Cloud with RabbitMQ and PhantomJS - <AUTHOR> https://www.circuitlab.com/blog/2012/06/20/rendering-16_000-schematics-in-the-cloud-with-rabbitmq-and/ <comment><USER2> Work queues are a mostly solved problem, unless you've got unusual needs, like preposterous amounts of throughput. These guys don't have unusual needs, and they've got a paltry 16k tasks to keep track of. For that kind of job, _use a library._ You don't want to be the one who writes code to deal with restarting hung workers, or shunting pathological jobs to a retry-later queue, or changing pipeline topology live in production without a hiccup. I've written this stuff -- we had unusual needs -- so take it from me: you don't want to write this stuff.

If you do most of your work in Python, Celery is pretty slick: <http://celeryproject.org/>

If you like Redis -- and who doesn't? -- then Resque or one of the alternate implementations will work well in Ruby or a plethora of other languages:

<https://github.com/defunkt/resque>

[https://github.com/defunkt/resque/wiki/Alternate- Implementat...](https://github.com/defunkt/resque/wiki/Alternate- Implementations)

Beanstalkd is pretty generic, and simple to set up. If for some reason you can't use Celery or Resque, maybe have a look at it:

<http://kr.github.com/beanstalkd/>

Distributed task queueing is important and useful stuff, and if you half-ass it, your infrastructure will literally explode, usually at 3:00 AM. Get a good library for it.

<comment><USER3> Can you clarify what you mean by "use a library?"

It's easy to follow the rabbitmq tutorial and build a nice little pipeline for tasks - what is the difference between that and using a library?

<comment><USER2> The key question is, "What happens if $INSERT_CALAMITY_HERE?"

What happens if a worker crashes? What happens if a few jobs cause the workers to work forever? What happens if a job hits a bug in your worker code and causes it to reliably crash every time? What happens if your queueing server goes down? What happens if you need to migrate your queueing server to another EC2 instance because Amazon has decided to get rid of the physical machine it's running on?

Undesirable answers to such questions include "We accidentally drop a job without noticing," or "We have to shut down the whole system in a user-visible way for twenty minutes while we do maintenance," or "All the workers keep crashing and being restarted, flapping eternally until someone notices and manually intervenes."

EDIT: Oops, I just noticed that I didn't really answer your question about what I meant by using a library. What I mean is, use one of the more full- featured job queueing libraries like Celery or Resque, rather than trying to roll your own on top of something like RabbitMQ.

<comment><USER3> Ah, okay, so something like Celery would handle all of those kinds of cases for you. (Though... doesn't rabbitmq have many of those features built-in? Queue server replication and redundancy and stuff? Though I suppose a dedicated project would handle more of those calamities than I could think of on my own.)

Thanks for that!

<comment><USER4> RabbitMQ doesn't have all that built in at all. RabbitMQ is only an AMQP message broker/exchange/queue agent. It's hard to articulate (and probably should be done in a blog post) all the things that can go wrong, but rest assured, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with RabbitMQ AND with your worker nodes that are built on-top of RabbitMQ.

Distributed workloads is a hard problem, but it is a solved problem (for most applications, there are some exceptions thought too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _All in all, creating our professional-quality schematic render outputs in a variety of formats is a CPU-intensive process, typically requiring roughly 10+ seconds of a single core of modern CPU time per schematic._

Wait… really? A schematic editor can render a schematic at least 30 times per second. "Rendering" to PDF should be even faster since PDF is a vector format. Are they rendering in hundreds of different formats?

<comment><AUTHOR> So you can load this from a schematic format, parse it, get all the element symbols loaded in the right places, grab and render the fonts and place them appropriately, and construct a well-formed output like [https://www.nerdkits.com/media/circuitlab/20120620-democircu...](https://www.nerdkits.com/media/circuitlab/20120620-democircuit.pdf) , all in 1/30th of a core-second? With a bunch of disk seeks in there too?

Of course, we could devote engineering effort to bring that 10 seconds down by an order of magnitude, writing a fully custom PDF (and EPS, SVG, PNG, ...) rendering engine, but part of the beauty of elastic cloud computing is that we can make better use of existing components -- even if it's less efficient from a CPU time perspective -- because the CPU time is cheap and programmer time is expensive (and better used elsewhere). There's a balance, of course, but making well-informed tradeoffs is what engineering is all about.

<comment><USER6> Uh.. yes? Obviously you should have all the elements, symbols, fonts already cached in memory. Its not like you have thousands of these, anyway.

Layouting was already done by the user, so I don't see what part of rendering is incurring the heavy costs here. As it stands, you have now spent lots and lots of programmer time building a batch system from scratch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Premature optimization can be an expensive mistake to make... It may feel "wrong" to use 10X or even 100X CPU cycles when you "know" that you could do it in X, but if the 100X cycle solution still fits the business requirements of the overall system, and takes a lot less programmer time, which path would you choose?

<comment><USER6> If, as a progammer, I see something like this render taking 10 seconds, I will shake my head in confusion and think "what the hell is taking up all this time". Stuff like loading the same font a hundred times, allocating memory for all the same symbols - identifying and getting rid of that is not premature optimization, its plain fixing the code.

Of course you might have done all of that - no way to know unless you tell us more about the actual pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What does having Erlang experience provide for you when using RabbitMQ? Unless your rendering nodes were written in Erlang... In which case you could have easily just used Erlang's built in node connection primitives and used RPC's instead of the much more complicated AMQP process.

I know this from personal experience. If you have a consumer based distributed worker pool, AMQP is overkill! My application is built in Erlang and the worker nodes are also built in Erlang - I initially went with using RabbitMQ to hand work out to the workers (and to receive processed results back from workers) but I quickly found it added a lot of message latency (vs. a straight RPC call) and I also had to write _a lot_ of management code.

Switching over to straight RPC was a great decision and I essentially kept the "worker queue" logic in our Python application (where it is a "solved" problem).

Big topic, for sure - I should write a blog post on how my application is structured.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow... CircuitLab is like a modern, web-based Spice. I love this idea. I will be using your site to quickly generate images for papers and presentations, and I will certainly recommend it to students. Awesome!

(Are you using Spice as the underlying simulator?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Please do pass it around :)

We actually have a custom simulator engine running client-side in Javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice! :D</comment>


Ask HN: How do I sell domain names? - <AUTHOR> How can I actually buy a domain name, without going through a middle man? I want to be able to offer my clients domain names and management. Is there any way to get them from the source? I can start with .com, but would like to get into the other TLD's too. <comment><USER2> Yes, but its expensive... last time i looked, there was a lot of paper work, proof that you have the resources to do so, etc... Probably easier option is to use a re-seller API... I think name.com have one. FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a name.com customer, but do not get paid by them...

<comment><AUTHOR> Where exactly was the last time you looked?

<comment><USER2> just now when i found this: [https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-...](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-25-en)

haven't gone though it fully, but the $3500 setup fee plus $4000 a year, plus having $70k in liquid assets seems excessive to me...</comment></comment></comment>


Common Misconceptions about ICO Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.stellar.org/blog/3-common-misconceptions-about-ICO-law/ <comment><USER2> > In California, the risk capital test considers whether there is attempt by > an issuer to (1) raise funds for a business venture or enterprise (2) > through an indiscriminate offering to the public at large, (3) where the > investor is in a passive position to affect the success of the enterprise, > and (4) the investor's money is substantially at risk because it is > inadequately secured.

That squarely sounds like any Kickstarter or crowdfunding arrangement.

<comment><USER3> The SEC & state authorities have limited prosecutorial resources -- my guess is they'll exercise prosecutorial discretion to only go after fraudulent schemes

<comment><USER4> I would intuit that if they have limited resources, they'd want to make an example out of the ones they do go after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Look the ICO space is way too young for all the judgment people are passing on here. The SEC clearly wants to let this play out. No one has gone to jail yet.

The government has already started to relax the ability for non accredited investors to invest in startups and that was under the last administration. These rules are recent but they are there, they are very limited though and ICOs blow the top off of those rules.

ICOs are forcing the SECs hand and I think it show cases the interest that exist in the public to get into these early stage startups. I won't be surprised if the rules are relaxed even further to legalize these types of coins even if they are considered securities, especially under this administration.

Everyone is saying that you are limiting yourself by offering an ICO. You are giving away zero equity for the promise that your product and service will offer these people something in most cases, that is just like a kickstarter. Furthermore, nothing stops you from raising money after the ICO.

Anyway, this is a fantastic new vehicle for startups and I believe it will absolutely change the game. The VCs are a little mad because they are being shut out of the best rounds, where they would normally get the most equity.

At the end of the day what matters most is if startups can start get funding and hire people and add value to the economy. That is what the SEC has to balance with the public interest on the other end.

<comment><USER6> _ICOs are forcing the SECs hand and I think it show cases the interest that exist in the public to get into these early stage startups._

Ponzi schemes are forcing the SEC's hand, and I think it showcases the interest that exists in the public to get into these early stage pyramid schemes.

The fact that the public is interested in something doesn't make the SEC say "oh, ok, that's fine then". The SEC's job isn't to get out of the way of the public. The SEC's job is to get _in_ the public's way, in order to protect the public from scams -- which means the more public interest there is in something, the _closer_ the SEC will be looking at it.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you that the SEC is there to protect the public.

You are incorrectly saying that ICOs are a Ponzi scheme. When they are in fact too new to be labeled as anything. If they were in fact all Ponzi Schemes then people would already be in jail.

Secondly the SEC is there to balance both sides of the equation. Companies interests and the public dumping money into scams.

<comment><USER7> > If they were in fact all Ponzi Schemes then people would already be in jail.

Well it was the SEC that oddly of all the ICOs published an opinion on the DAO, the one ICO that was hard forked (erased from existence). Though if the DAO wasn't erased, based on the SEC opinion it is fair to say they would have brought a case right? I mean its not exactly fair for them to conclude the DAO was an illegal sale of securities and then not enforce the law.

Separately, we have instances of the SEC contacting ICOs and informing them they are in violation of the law and the ICO investments being returned to investors...so I think the SEC has fully weighed both sides of the equation.

Certainly the comment you are responding to did not say ICOs are ponzi schemes, they just simply applied your ICO logic to another situation, but truthfully many ICOs will turn out to be ponzi schemes and outright fraud, and likely the DAO was neither (surely it would be fraud if they were _the hacker_ ) but they still were likely violating securities laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related question: Is there a tracker list somewhere displaying failed/busted/sued/abandonned ICOs out there?

<comment><USER9> Cryptocompare has an ICO list with a "completed" section.[1] The ones with no price listed had something bad happen.

[1] [https://www.cryptocompare.com/ico/#/completed](https://www.cryptocompare.com/ico/#/completed)

<comment><USER4> Wait wait wait... Is this list just a list of current ICOs, not a whole list of all the cryptocurrencies currently or previously traded?

This is a dot com bust waiting to happen, isn't it? People are rushing in with money to something new and exciting. I recall reading about some huge investments in absolutely nonsense dot com companies in the 90s.

<comment><USER10> ICO (Initial Coin Offering) just refers to the specific phase where the company sells tokens for a limited amount of time in order to get the tokens into the hands of users. For most, simultaneously or later, the company creates a smart-contract system that the tokens are to be used in. (The tokens may act as a limited currency to get the smart-contract system to do something for you, the tokens may have voting rights over how the smart-contract system can be upgraded, etc.) An ICO being complete just means that the token generation/selling by the company is over. Users are free to buy and sell the tokens between themselves at this point, and use them in the smart-contract system whenever it's live.

Any prices listed on that page are intended to be recent; a price there means that people are trading that token now for that amount.

<comment><USER4> Hm, interesting. Thanks for sharing. I was confused by the concept of an ICO because looking at Bitcoin, it's been dolling out new coins on a regular basis via. mining (slowing over time), and people weren't buying them.

Does this mean that some "coins" have 100% of their inventory known at the beginning and instead of people guessing correct hashes, they have to simply buy them from a central authority?

<comment><USER10> Yeah pretty much.

It might be helpful to make a distinction between cryptocurrencies (some popular ones being Bitcoin and Ethereum) and tokens (Augur being one) which operate predominantly through Ethereum smart contracts. (Disclaimer: I own some of each of these, but I mention these ones specifically because I think they bring some innovation and are better examples than most of the ideal purpose and decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies/tokens. There's a lot of contenders in this space which are unsound and really only exist as an item to speculate on.)

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin need some way of verifying the valid transaction history and generally solve this through proof-of-work mining. In order to incentivize people to mine _and_ to solve the problem of distributing amounts to users, the system is built so mining generates currency for the miners. Generally there is no privileged party in the system with the special power to mint arbitrary amounts as they wish. (Some like Ethereum did do an ICO-style sale at the beginning to raise money and to jumpstart getting Ether into people's hands. Generally I've thought this type of thing has been pretty scammy as a lot of innovation-less pump-and-dump altcoins have done this kind of thing and it's not exactly decentralized, but Ethereum has actually delivered on some technical innovation so I'm a bit conflicted.)

Tokens are systems implemented on pre-existing cryptocurriencies for tracking arbitrary limited units that can be exchanged and traded like a cryptocurrency. They rely on the infrastructure of the cryptocurrency they're implemented upon. So a token implemented on Ethereum smart contracts doesn't need to be mined; it's just important that Ethereum continues to be mined, and also transactions involving the token generally require small amounts of Ethereum to pay for transaction fees. The idea of most popular tokens is that they can or will be used to interact with a decentralized system made of Ethereum smart contracts. For example, there are various popular tokens intended to be used as the currency for decentralized prediction markets (a fancier type of betting site basically that lets you do things buy/sell out of your positions).

Tokens don't need specific mining in order to verify their transaction history, so for getting tokens into user's hands, the old solution (mining rewards) doesn't work. So I guess that gave an excuse for lots of token developers into doing ICOs / initial limited sales. At least a lot of these tokens nowadays have more of a plan that involves becoming a decentralized system and bringing innovation than run-of-the-mill pump-and-dump altcoins in the past. Though it's to be seen how many end up being vaporware and how many actually take off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My personal (IANAL, speculative) view on this is that the tokens which are going to be considered "utility tokens" are going to be done so retroactively, once the founders end up building something useful that is objectively utility-like.

I mean consider the alternative: for projects that never get launched, what does the SEC do? Right now the mental model seems to be "they read the ICOs landing page, look into the team, and audit the half-finished github repo to decide if it was on track to become a utility or a non-utility" \-- this seems hilariously disconnected from reality. In that scenario does anyone think that clever choices of project framing on a HTML page and some half-finished code will keep them out of jail if they are sitting on millions of dollars of money collected from the public?

My guess is the SEC will basically let things brew for a while and then start bringing the hammer down on projects that don't go anywhere other than make the founders rich. If you find yourself in court defending yourself against the SEC, you better hope you have evidence to show you at least tried to ship the "utility" you promised.

If this is right, it should be quite frightening to those raising ICOs: you may be handcuffed tightly to the project since in order to prove that your tokens were not securities you'll need to have shown a good faith effort to realize the vision as outlined at the time of the ICO. And don't forget, even if you actually execute on things, this assumes you managed to design the project in such a way that you are truly building a "utility token", which is on its own still has yet to be defined by the SEC.

What this means in English is even if you decide somewhere along the way the project is a bad idea, not only can you not walk away without potentially increasing risk of prosecution of securities fraud, but you also may not even be able to significantly pivot! Considering that most startups pivot at least once, you are basically undermining your changes of success significantly (IMHO) by raising money this way vs traditional means.

Unless the concept you use to raise the ICO:

\- sticks the landing perfectly with market fit (hard or maybe impossible, given what we know about lean startup development in 2017, _especially_ for such early emerging technology as blockchain tech)

\- ultimately manages to be considered a "utility token", something we don't yet even have a definition for

I think you may be in trouble.

IOW, once you start learning what the market actually wants, you may be forced to choose between a high risk of project failure (if you don't pivot) or a high risk of going to jail (if you do pivot.) And even if you don't pivot, and hell, even if your project takes over the world, maybe you screwed something up in your positioning and your token is considered a security, so you go to jail anyway. Ouch.

ICOs basically force you into a number of startup anti-patterns (IMHO)

\- Publically promising a product before building or shipping anything, which is the opposite of customer development. (And unlike typical crowdfunding, given the current speculative market, I don't take a successful ICO as any indication of consumer interest in the project itself whatsoever.)

\- Having an extremely large number of people financially invested in the project too early, which is a huge distraction and prevents flexibility

\- Inability to pivot or wind down the venture due to reasons stated above

\- Excessive capitalization, leading to overspending, lack of urgency to find product market fit, etc.

The money is nice, and the value in retaining control of the cap table shouldn't be understated. Smart, seasoned entrepreneurs will probably utilize ICOs in a disciplined way to great benefit, probably by paying an army of lawyers to protect them and run the ICO. But there's going to be a lot of negative outcomes for many others I think.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like a token is not a utility token if it ever trades on any exchange, which essentially defeats the purpose of the entire ICO concept.

<comment><USER13> Why do you say that? There are good reasons to want liquidity for utility tokens

<comment><USER14> Because then, it may be found to be a security under the Howey test on the federal level, as opposed to just the ridiculously overbroad Risk Capital test used in Western states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How much time and $ would it cost to register your tokens as a security? Would it be possible without any financial history? I remember Lending Club was able to have them registered and offer securities with their peer to peer loans to unaccredited investors.</comment>


What Facebook does when something's rotten  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20005784-36.html <comment><USER2> Haha,

Wow. Tremendous lack of research. How the fuck can you poll 1500 people and just plug it in as 60% are considering leaving? That's like polling 1500 Americans and deducing that 60% of _all Americans_ are ready to leave the country.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much how all polling works and it's surprisingly accurate when done well. If your sample reflects the general population 1500 can be more than enough to get a really good picture.

<comment><USER3> That's a big if.</comment></comment></comment>


(Re)writing Reddit in Lisp in 20 minutes and 100 lines (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.mac.com/svc/LispMovies/index.html <comment><USER2> Very interesting but a bit misleading. Where's the recommended feature? Where are the comments?

If I know anything, it's that the devil is in the details. Building something that simple doesn't take much code at all but I'm willing to bet that the misssing features would add quite a bit more code.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can probably write a similar site in any dynamic (dynamic enough) language in 100 to 200 lines. It's the mentality, not the language... although the language you use may form your mentality, too, of course.

<comment><USER4> Then can you please do something like that for a scheme dialect?

<comment><USER5> Here it is: <http://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/wiliki.cgi/Kahua:Reddit- modoki>

<comment><USER4> thanks a lot! i will take a look.

Would have been nice though if Kahua would have had a larger portion of its docs in English...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like kpax uses the html macro from Allegroserve, which is a good thing. Does kpax support sessions?</comment>


BionicFinWave - <AUTHOR> https://www.festo.com/group/en/cms/13252.htm <comment><AUTHOR> For quite a few years now, Festo has always shown some kind of cool robot at the Hanover Fair. This is from this week's fair.</comment>


Arizona prosecutor: We're not buying any more iPhones over Apple and DOJ dispute - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/arizona-prosecutor-were-not-buying-any-more-iphones-over-apple-and-doj-dispute/ <comment><AUTHOR> First time I've seen "Apple is on the side of the terrorists" literally spelled out. AZ prosecutor's office wins the least rational actor prize in this dispute!</comment>


The Idea Swap - <AUTHOR> http://theideaswap.com/ <comment><USER2> I spent 5 minutes typing in a thoughtful idea and making it fit within 150 characters and got back "eat vegemite and cheese" - I feel like I got punk'd.

<comment><USER3> I wish I had read your comment first. I had the same experience, except I got "rob a bank" in return. On the upside, it reminded me that I had _Justified_ recorded on my DVR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them."

</comment><comment><USER5> Just clicking and swapping the idea isn't terribly interesting. Instead of seeing their ideas, I'd like to know what other people think of my idea.

I want to make a sticky note, and let other people comment on it, maybe by letting them post smaller sticky notes beside it, or underneath it. Then I'd like to come back tomorrow and see everyone else's notes splattered all over the page.

<comment><USER6> So in the past few days we've seen three sites that have very similar meta- ideas. <http://captainobvio.us/> was posted recently, I've been working on <http://cluedb.com/> and now this one. There are also much-older ideas like <http://halfbakery.com/> and <http://fmylife.com> etc. They all have various sets of snippet posting, user rating, commenting, etc. I wonder if this is an emerging trend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would be a bit more beneficial to me if my idea could bounce around getting feedback and other ideas on it. Or a searchable feature to find all ideas about x. Say I am good at arts and crafts but can't think of anything to make, i'd like to be able to search and find ideas.

</comment><comment><USER8> "A film where humans and clouds are at war. The clouds float down, picking up children and dropping them to their deaths."

Sounds like "Billy's Balloon" by Don Hertzfeld.

</comment><comment><USER9> So the value proposition I see is that I input a valid business idea that I was researching 2 years ago and got inputs from 4th graders. Totally will use it again.

</comment><comment><USER10> What percentage of users input garbage just to hit the "swap" button?

<comment><USER11> From clicking around it seems like probably >75%

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me a lot of <http://www.halfbakery.com/> which is another website where you can share random ideas, mostly half baked ones :P

</comment><comment><USER13> chatroulette in text. How is this any more interesting than browsing all twitter feeds simultaneously?

</comment><comment><USER14> There should be some verification/filter. Lot of users will enter just anything to see the idea.

Registration/Login will discourage users to use the site, so I recommend better filter out the ideas in backend. i.e. do not put them in the swap list unless verified.

</comment><comment><USER15> cute idea. add rating/liking of ideas... the top list might surface some interesting ones.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Service to buy all food required for a recipe delivered to your door. Food blog integration. Celebrity chefs. Food subscriptions. Author commission."

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe if you can add a login and also a way to track and get feedback on an idea. Maybe someone is already working on it and would love an extra hand.

</comment><comment><USER18> I love this! Tip: the swap button for me, in Chrome/Mac, is hard to use (seems to be a small clickable area). Awesome execution of a simple idea. (:

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of my hour long project when I was bored: <http://whatshouldifuckingdo.com>

</comment><comment><USER20> Crying out for categorisation, but I like that you must contribute to participate and the simplicity works for it too.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is like staring into the abyss. i couldn't help myself from constantly clicking the swap button.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is strangely addictive.

Found it odd how often it mentioned the linkedin API.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Idea Swap = INteractSPIRATION?

</comment><comment><USER23> I got an amusing "get naked now"

</comment><comment><USER22> my idea is the one about the dynamic music, if anyone happens to see it.

<comment><USER16> If you want some feedback you could just post it here ^^.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Pre-pealed bananas" +1

<comment><USER25> Sounds like a "ringing" endorsement :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> cool, but I can only type in the initial idea? I can't swap then type new the swap etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> You can trick it by reloading the page :-)

<comment><USER27> "...continue swapping until you get the idea you actually want."

Looks like this is an intended use case. They should maybe make it easier to do.</comment></comment></comment>


Why software engineers should start their careers in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/570389/one-major-reason-why-software-engineers-should-start-their-careers-in-san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> Not an engineer but on the marketing/advertising/analytics side of things. I moved from Chicago to the Bay a while back. If I could do my career over, I would have started in the Bay (beyond the hindsight that would have enabled me to purchase real estate here at 2008 prices...ugh).

Simply put, as you grow in your career and can provably add more value than you cost, you gain more leverage in salary negotiation (typically). So if you ratchet up to a high salary in SF, you might have to take a dip when moving to lower cost of living areas, but perhaps not. Maybe you just take less of a pay increase. Either way you'll likely still come out much further ahead.

If you can manage to budget effectively and can save/invest smartly, those dollars you initially earned in SF can go much further elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love living in the Bay, but I'll admit I've been very tempted to move somewhere with a lower cost of living where my money goes a lot further. Of course the tradeoff is I likely wouldn't have the amazing weather, people, food, activities, culture, etc. that exists here in such a rare combination.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have never set foot in SF and probably never will. I currently make much more than the average there. Anybody who bases his decisions on that kind of meaningless statistics will obviously drive the average down, wherever he goes.</comment>


A Brief Look At Paul Graham's Writing Habits (with Charts) - <AUTHOR> http://andrewacove.posterous.com/wip-pg-essays

<comment><USER2> More interesting albeit difficult to quantify would be PG's writing style.

If you've read a PG essay and found yourself agreeing because you're gradually taken towards a conclusion yourself instead of having it preached to you, you'll know what I'm referring to.

Turns out there is a style for that.

I am no writing expert, but I feel PG's style is (intentional or otherwise) most akin to Classic Style as outlined in the book "Clear and Simple as the Truth" (overview from Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias here: [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/deceptive-writing- styl...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/deceptive-writing-styl..). ).

Most telling excerpt: "Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive is disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity."

CaSatT homepage: <http://www.classicprose.com/>

<comment><USER3> Did you follow the "it turns out" thread a while back? Some interesting a tuff was discussed then that you may like.

<comment><USER4> That sounds amazing. Link?

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had no idea I never wrote anything in June.

What happened in the first half of 2010 I wrote about here: <http://paulgraham.com/top.html>

<comment><USER7> Paul, two questions I've always wanted to ask and now seems like the right time: Why do you use an image for your essay titles? What do you use to write and publish your essays to your site?

<comment><USER6> Both have the same answer: Yahoo Store. It was written in an era when browsers had about 3 fonts, so when sites wanted to to do anything interesting with typography the text had to be rendered as images. One day I'll move my site, but there's a bit of activation energy involved, because I'll have to write another site builder first.

<comment> cool-RR It's funny that you don't simply hire someone to do this.

<comment><USER8> Hiring and managing people for a project is a good amount of work in itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't take taking advice lightly. It really takes a lot to convince me that what you are preaching is something I should thoroughly consider. Despite this fact, I find most of PG's essays to really hit the spot.

I've realized that one of the reasons why I trust PG essays, besides the fact that they are written with the general tone of discovering the truth, rather than inventing the truth, is because a lot of them are old. Well, relatively old. And quite plain. A few years ago when I first started reading them, my instinct was to think less of them for this. But that the essays I like most are over 5 years old, yet still highly relevant, only adds to their credibility. I don't think a lot of stuff I read on blogs today will stand the test of time as well, though I admittedly don't read enough.

Anyway, I realize this is slightly off topic. So, um, nice charts, and keep 'em coming Paul.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would have enjoyed this more if you published a literary analysis of essay content.

<comment><USER11> A nitpick: People in English departments would probably call this a "rhetorical analysis," since "literary analysis" usually refers to fiction.

I would say that Graham tends to have the modernist tendency to cut anything superfluous; to quote Milan Kundera in _Encounter_, "Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever comes from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say)." Kundera, like Graham, is very good at doing this in his nonfiction; his essays on the novel contain more in 200 broadly spaced pages than most tomes about literary theory that I've read.

One other thing: is very, very good at not repeating himself and not having ideas with an extreme amount of overlap. I think that's one reason he tends to say things like, "I'm not saying X" as clarification -- to avoid misreadings that might result from his terseness.

This tendency towards minimalism, by the way, is one of the same things that John Sculley talks about Steve Jobs having in terms of industrial design: [http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the- full...](http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full- interview-transcript/63295) . Graham does it in nonfiction writing. Elmore Leonard does it in fiction; he's incredibly skilled at compacting a lot of action into a very small space. If you're looking for fiction that's as "dense" (for lack of a better term) as nonfiction, try Leonard. His subject—capers of a vaguely criminal and usually underworld nature—might not appeal to you, but the man has style.

In addition, Graham is very good at using metaphors and comparisons with history. There isn't really a good way to analyze metaphor that I know of. Some of the better attempts include Lakoff and Johnson's _Metaphors We Live By_ and Steven Pinker's _The Stuff of Thought_. But, as far as I know, no one has a complete theory of why we think associatively and metaphorically. Good writers, however, will tend to exploit the tendency to view one thing in term of another.

The problem with these kinds of generalizations is that they're very hard to make concrete. You might notice that I don't cite a lot of examples from Graham's writing because it''s harder to prove the absence of perceived filler than it is to identify filler when you see it.

<comment><USER10> Ah good catch! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know the these are "essays," and not blog posts or articles, but it always niggles me that they aren't precisely dated.

<comment><USER13> Why?

<comment><USER12> Because I want to know when something was first available (am I late to see it? early?), and where it fits in the context of other things that were written around that time.

The majority of my information comes in time-based feeds and streams, whereas these essays have inscrutable URLS and date formatting. I suppose that's by design but I don't find the lack of information adds significant value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a bit loopy after a long day juggling work-from-home and caring for a sick child.

I think it would be fun to see:

\- number of foot notes written (total and per essay)

\- word cloud(s)

\- number of words written (total, per essay)

\- word lengths

there were a couple of others but I'm too tired to remember them now.

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing that always struck me about his writing: he is the freakin master at metaphors.

</comment><comment><USER16> For me, what has been most noticeable is his shifting focus. When he started out, he mostly wrote about Lisp and programming languages. Now he primarily writes about startups. Since I'm a lot more interested in the former than the latter, I've gradually stopped reading his newer essays. (Usually a paragraph or two is enough.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811518>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just updated the post to include PG's latest essay. There's a link to the source data at the end of the post now, too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great Analysis..impressive. I do find PG's essays inspiring.</comment>


Long Short-Term Memory-Networks for Machine Reading - <AUTHOR> http://gitxiv.com/posts/tfkjEgw9x4KSi2GnH/long-short-term-memory-networks-for-machine-reading <comment><USER2> Great paper. For anyone who needs a primer on LSTMs, this one has a GIF: [http://deeplearning4j.org/lstm.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/lstm.html)

<comment><USER3> Chris Olah also has a great introduction: [http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding- LSTMs/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We're _so_ close to getting rid of feature engineering for text processing.

As someone who does this professionally, this is a good thing!

<comment><USER5> Can you ellaborate on this please? My goal is to work in text processing professionally, I have the intuition that text should 'learn' its own features. I'm learning Python, reading about machine learning and practicing my coding all the time.

<comment><USER6> Recently I had to build an algorithm that did a form of substring detection. As part of this process I had to generate feature vectors for the actual model to classify tokens of the string as part-of-substring or not. Prior to this though, I had to do a few levels of tokenization, normalization, and preprocessing, to get the raw text into a form that the substring classifier could use the resultant data effectively.

Ideally if you have a good parse of the text from step 0, you don't need to do nearly as much munging/processing yourself, and can just focus on the thrust of your specific algo, rather than cleaning and generating the feature data to drive it.

I'm personally very skeptical as to if this will make feature engineering disappear entirely, if for no other reason than that we do a lot to tweak our features other than just _getting_ them, whether this be second order processing, aggregation, smoothing or transformation. That being said, as with your parent post, I am VERY hopeful for new techniques to arise that can cut into that overhead at least a little.</comment></comment></comment>


Imagine A World Without Banks  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/imagine-a-world-without-banks-2010-4

<comment><USER2> Great piece, check out this video snippet from Zeitghiest living in a society without money. Resource based economy vs what we have today.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDJ18m6KUW4></comment>


YouTube cancelled account for inappropriate content? - <AUTHOR> http://cixtor.com/videos <comment><USER2> The content author should consider moving his videos to Vimeo it has a Cleaner Layout and no distracting banners or 30-second commercials before your video starts.</comment>