Show HN: ORY Editor – A rich editor for the browser, built with React and Redux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ory/editor?branch=master <comment><USER2> The high CPU and memory usage was due to a large gif which was included two times. This gif accidentally was 1280p with 20fps and was about 40mb large. For some reason, the resizer did not properly work.

Anyways, the gif is now removed. I hope the performance gets much better now. The CPU fans on macbooks going up where probably due to a lack of a dedicated graphics card. This happened to me with my macbook and large gifs too.

If the problems don't go away, please create an issue in the repo so we can work on improving this! It would be important to include your steps so we are able to reproduce these issues.

edit://

Since this comment is on the top, I'll address a few more questions here too. If you missed the demo, it's here: [http://editor.ory.am/](http://editor.ory.am/)

First, this is a layout editor first- and foremost. Behind the scenes, React, Redux and slate.js ( [http://slatejs.org/](http://slatejs.org/) ) is being used. Each cell is a React component that you can implement yourself. In fact, the text component itself is a plugin that wraps slate.js.

Second, we're integrating this editor in Germany's largest e-learning platform (wiki-esque) with ~1 million MAUs: [https://de.serlo.org](https://de.serlo.org)

And lastly we're working on a business model behind it, with our ory sites product (early access): [http://ory.am/sites/](http://ory.am/sites/)

If you want to check out our other open source products, feel free to do so: [https://github.com/ory](https://github.com/ory)

<comment><USER3> This does not appear to work at all with my screen reader.

Accessibility as afterthought, as always.

I used to look forward to trying to help people fix their stuff to be accessible, but now I'm just tired of every single fucking thing somebody creates being broken for me because everything is a complete heaping pile of inaccessible garbage and nobody even thinks about accessibility. It's not like there aren't thousands of pages of documentation on how to make stuff accessible... but the libraries keep getting released without accessibility, and then people build components using several of these libraries and they're useless, and then people build entire apps out of these components... And the web that I used to know and love and get around just find goes dark.

And this is going to get integrated into some big educational site? So I guess it sucks to be a blind student in Germany.

What a mess.

Sorry for the negativity, but this just really, really gets old.

<comment><USER4> It must really suck, and when I work on small(but large) personal projects I feel bad that someone might not be able to use it. What are some good resources to start thinking accessibility first? I remember in the past it was .. a project and a half in and of itself.

<comment><USER3> The nice thing is it's very easy to get started, and no matter what you're working on, be it a web project, a mobile app, or even something for desktop there are loads of resources out there, as well as people who care.

For web stuff, over the last month or so I've been pointing people to the relatively new but still pretty nice A11y Style Guide[0] This is obviously for just getting started. When we get into more complicated markup, I often find fantastic resources, articles, and examples from companies like SSB BART or Deque (no affiliation with either)

When mobile accessibility comes up, few people do it better than the BBC, and they have a great resource on it[1]

I'm also working on a playbook for mobile accessibility, but that's still under development.

The really important and kind of awesome thing is that it's extremely easier to test the accessibility of whatever you're building as you build it. Unlike the bad old days where screen readers costs $1,000 and no developers had access to them, on mobile or Mac screen readers are built directly into your device, and on Windows NVDA is completely free from [2]

Hope this gives you a starting point, and if you have more questions feel free to reach out, email in profile.

[0]: [https://a11y-style-guide.com](https://a11y-style-guide.com) [1][http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/mo...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/mobile_access.shtml) [2][https://NVAccess.org](https://NVAccess.org)

<comment><USER4> I guess something I have trouble wrapping my head around is when is it acceptable to give up on a11y? I mean, it seems improbable to get a11y into an expansive CLI application. Or a 3D game. When does it become OK to give up?

<comment><USER3> > it seems improbable to get a11y into an expansive CLI application

Why? I used to use make menuconfig back in 2000--why should it not work now?

3d game? This I'll grant you. Some experiences are just not replicatable for the blind, though if you're interested in this at all check out the weird and wonderful world of audiogames and 3d audio with HRTF.

An editor? Even a visual editor? Is not one of these experiences. I used to use Visual Basic 6 just fine, dragging and dropping controls out of the toolbox, lining things up, and editing the code behind the widgets all the way back in 2002.

I see that this project apparently took 8 years by 150 people, according to the OP. With this much human effort behind it, it's remarkable that no one once said, hey, I wonder if anybody with a visual disability might want to use the app that this will be a part of?

<comment><USER3> I don't really understand your question. Mark what up, a command line interface? They don't really have markup.

If I'm trying to read a lot of data in a CLI, the output of top, for instance, I need to read by line with the screen reader fixed to a given column offset but it works fine even if it's a little awkward.

<comment><USER4> I guess I meant that in the case of HTML you usually mark things up with aria tags and what have you. Not that there was anything like that in CLI land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this looks great for CMS websites: where a user wishes to build an entire page in a web GUI.

For composing text in blocks on existing pages, like comments or posts, you would need a lighter-weight solution.

SlateJS ([https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate](https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate)) fits that purpose for me exceedingly well, more than DraftJS, Quill and others, since it doesn't treat XML/HTML as a second-class citizen.

The levels of complexity with text representation are:

Document -> Post -> Text

which corresponds roughly to the data sources:

JSON/Data Structure -> XML/HTML -> Plaintext / Markdown

Markdown can "upscale" to documents, but JSON data structures, by virtue of their complexity, do not "downscale" well at all to Markdown.

HTML is the simple middle for me: it shouldn't be used for documents, but it is totally intuitive for posts where a users simply wants to adjust the color of one's text. The blocks wrapping this text should own the data structure, e.g. a flag for "NSFW Content" shouldn't be in the text editor but an option on the post itself.

<comment><USER2> This is actually using slate js! We've been contributing to slate too :)

<comment><USER5> Ha, then I should read more carefully before I comment :-)

Excellent work! Do you think it may make more sense to market Ory as a Page Editor or Page Maker? Content in my mind can mean anything from a block to an entire page, though I recognize that CMS's have popularized the idea of content being equivalent to a page.

Right now, I see "Layout Editor" and "Content Editor" being used to describe it, so maybe it would make sense to standardize that.

Just a thought!

<comment><USER2> Yes, we've been banging our heads to finde the right terminology to describe it. We'll put page editor / maker to our list of keywords :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious, what does this offer over something like [https://draftjs.org/](https://draftjs.org/), [https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate](https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate), or [http://prosemirror.net/](http://prosemirror.net/) which also use normalized JSON (or ImmutableJS) objects for editor state and are backed by much larger and more established companies/communities.

We just launched [https://ridewithgps.com/ride_reports](https://ridewithgps.com/ride_reports) which is built with draft, and I found it to be very flexible. I'd love to see the industry start to focus on using two or three best-in-class editors and contributing bugfixes to those rather than slugging it out with contentEditable again and again in smaller one-off projects.

<comment><USER2> Hey, the ORY Editor is actually built on top of slate - it simply adds drag and drop layout capabilities and a cool plugin system!

<comment><USER6> You might want to make that more clear in your documentation. Your current README doesn't mention Slate at all, I'd be much more inclined to go 'oh, this makes a lot of sense' if you were pitching 'Slate.js with the batteries included' instead of 'we built another WYSIWYG editor!'

<comment><USER2> That's a good point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Promising libraries potentially solving the above where abandoned by their > maintainers, because it started as a special use case, or a free-time > project.

> It is built by a company, reducing the likelihood of abandonment.

Even projects "built by a company" suffer the same fate. The only way to reduce the likelihood of abandonment is to tie a revenue stream directly to it, like customers paying for support or a pro version with additional features

<comment><USER8> I've come to the conclusion that "All software is ultimately abandoned". Ours is a fast-changing industry. If software isn't abandoned, it probably should be. Its the oldest frameworks and languages that get the most criticism.

<comment><USER9> Big parts of the toolset I use every day are several decades old; if done correctly, software can be iterated and refined until it's of a very high quality. In my experience, it tends to stand a much greater chance the smaller it is (the best examples I'm thinking of are small unix command-line tools like find, grep).

<comment><USER8> Yet I resent every time I have to use grep, instead of a tool integrated with my IDE. Certainly those baroque old tools have their detractors too. That they survive so long (like vi and emacs) due to cults, not objective evaluation?

<comment><USER9> I use sublime text as my main editor, but I still need to use vi from time-to- time - e.g. when ssh'ing to a remote server. That's definitely an objective need, unless you can offer an alternative that is just as widely available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Chrome worker for the demo site accumulated about 600mb of ram. Is the editor really that heavy or is the demo page abnormally heavy?

<comment><USER2> See this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14417601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14417601) \- the memory heap should now be around 20 megabytes.

<comment><USER11> Didn't fix it for me, I just hit it at 11:55 EDT - still getting 500MB on initial load of the editor.

<comment><USER2> Could you share the profile file and some additional screenshots in the github repo as an issue? That would help a lot identifying the issue.

<comment><USER12> There is definitely a memory issue. Chrome's task manage shows me your tab at 900MB.

Some other issues:

\- create_content.png takes 37 seconds to load \- sea_bg.jpg takes 20 seconds to load

<comment><USER2> Was this on the blank page, or did you edit some things?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks and works great, but there are 2 limitations I think would prevent it from using it in our stack:

1) It cannot be easily embedded, ie. as a field in a form. Apparently it's meant (UI-wise at least) as a full-screen editor and has lots of dependencies of its own, including React.

2) AGPLv3 license is a killer. Means that any work that links to the library should be opensourced. Despite some people interpreting it differently, it would be risky for a consumer product to ship making use of this library.

<comment><USER2> We are working on (1), and make it possible to include it in non-react environments. However, there are still some dependencies required (such as react). So yes, this is not perfect at the moment.

We're actually not confident with AGPLv3. We might change it to a more permissive license if it prevents people from adopting the technology. Feel free to create an issue on GitHub and we'll discuss it!

<comment><USER14> Actually, I would be more confident working with a GPL- or AGPL-licensed product, because enhancements are more likely to go back upstream.

<comment><USER15> That is right. I just know, that many companies flee from GPL licenses (and more so AGPL). They omit any product involving GPL just to be sure not to get any juristic hassles (if rational or not).

Here is the culprit: When no other people invest in enhancements, there is also nothing that can go back upstream.

I like free software very much, but I also don't want to be forced to give things free, that I make. Problem is not the small enhancements I make to an OSS product, but when I link or use some OSS part in a bigger software that I made -- should I always be forced to give everything for free?

Particularly for companies, that is a difficult thing.

To be clear: Of course I would give away my contributions to an OSS product, but I also want to be free, to use OSS in commercial products without need to fear that I loose my own rights.

GPL here is just difficult and when lawyers have to decide about software, anything can happen (as in the patent-wars).

<comment><USER16> Any company that arbitrary limit themselves will be at an disadvantage to their competitors. LAMP for example include GPL products and avoiding it can be more costly and time consuming than the alternative (hosting solutions with LAMP for example).

A great example of such competitive environment is game development where you can't let religious fear of licenses get in the way. If a license is compatible with the business model then use it, and if not then try to get the developer to give you an exception. Development time is precious in getting the product released in the right time window and in a stable state. Studios can't afford skipping GPL development tools (which would not be part of the end product) or LGPL libraries (unless constrained by aspects shared by the competition), as the risk to the company from delayed release is significant higher than the cost of having a lawyer go through a license and confirm if it will impact the model for releasing the game. As a result many AAA games are released with a huge list of free and open source libraries.

But if you are an incumbent holder in a market with very little competition, then you can have policy against licenses and do well. What would an extra month of development for iphone cost Apple as a company?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I get the cutting edge part, but what has happened to the good old distributed, built, minified version?

What if I just want to play with it, install it in a second and I don't want to download 50% of NPM?

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks pretty good and I didn't see performance issues. From a usability perspective it's simple to use. I would suggest a couple of usability improvements.

1\. The right side buttons for edit, layout, etc. have tooltips (that's great) but they should be like on/off buttons e.g. clicking layout once puts the editor in layout mode, clicking it again should bring editor out of layout mode back into preview.

2\. In Edit mode the buttons on the bottom work like on/off buttons (that's great) those buttons should have tooltips.

3\. Editing an image I can't put an alt value or title? How accessible is the content created by the editor?

Keep up the good work. I would use this for quick website/blog setup.

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks for the feedback! I tracked this in the repo, see: [https://github.com/ory/editor/issues/389](https://github.com/ory/editor/issues/389)

But I will briefly address these issues here:

> 1\. The right side buttons for edit, layout, etc. have tooltips (that's > great) but they should be like on/off buttons e.g. clicking layout once puts > the editor in layout mode, clicking it again should bring editor out of > layout mode back into preview.

This was actually implemented at one point, but we removed it because some people found it confusing. We might add it though.

Also keep in mind that the UI is just a component, you could simply provide your own!

> those buttons should have tooltips.

Great idea!

> 3\. Editing an image I can't put an alt value or title? How accessible is > the content created by the editor?

Noted, we forgot about that. You can, by the way, write your own image plugin that has an alt tag. But of course we will add this capability to the image plugin. :)

<comment><USER18> I wanted to walk you through my thought process regarding the right side buttons if you'll indulge me:

1\. I clicked the edit button on the right to get in to edit mode. Edit button was highlighted in pink.

2\. Saw the buttons on the bottom appear when I clicked a Text section.

3\. Bolded some selected text by clicking the B button. B button got highlighted.

4\. Clicked the B button again and text went back to normal and the highlight on the B got turned off. (At this point I'm thinking cool buttons are on/off. On state is indicated by a highlight, Off state is indicated as normal style)

5\. Performed some other edits then clicked the Edit button the right since it was highlighted and based on my experience with the bottom buttons I expected clicking it again would turn off edit mode.

You don't have to make the change. I just wanted to walk through the thought process of one user.

Thanks for indulging me :)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for your feedback, I added it to the issue as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I enjoyed messing around with it but, like others have noted, it seems to be resource intensive - both CPU and memory. My CPU fans kicked into turbo-jet mode after playing around with the editor for a while. Maybe it's less resource intensive on the user (non-editor) side?

Optimizations will go a long way to swaying adoption. Clients like easy-to-use editing capabilities, and it doesn't get much easier than this.

</comment><comment><USER20> Almost broken on mobile, and my iphone gets really hot...

<comment><AUTHOR> Which iphone do you use? Also is it safari? It's currently absolutely not optimized for mobile, as most content creation happens on the desktop. We might though at some point.

<comment><USER21> When you say _not optimized for mobile_ , does that include use on laptops?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rkuykendall-com I'd love to switch to a modern, React editor, but sadly they're all for 'rich text', but not full HTML, so I'm stuck with TinyMCE.

I realize my use case is uncommon, which is users tweaking HTML emails before they are sent.

<comment><USER22> You should take a look at the Monaco Editor[1], which is used in VS Code. It is available as a javascript component, and there is also a React wrapper around it [2]

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco- editor](https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor)

[2] [https://github.com/superRaytin/react-monaco- editor](https://github.com/superRaytin/react-monaco-editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I went here: [http://www.ory.am/sites/](http://www.ory.am/sites/)

They have a signup page. The premium option is $9/mo. I tried to signup, it brought me to a Google form. I completed the form.

OP: I will pay you $8/mo for this. It is beautiful and interesting, and is worth looking in to. I want to try to create some sites with this, I am happy to pay for it and self-host it. Hopefully it's easy to deploy.

Or better yet, I can let you host it for me. With the option of self-hosting anytime in the future. The key to adoption is making it as easy to install as Wordpress.

This could be big! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER24> But this is built with React so its not really reusable outside of its ecosystem. Is there a version that would run on preact instead? Maybe QuillJS would be a better option for general purpose editor.

<comment><USER25> If you use preact without preact-compat then you seal yourself into the preact ecosystem. That's why preact-compat exists.

<comment><USER24> I was thinking more about using the editor with our polymer and vuejs applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isn't a lot of the "Others don't do this" addressed by Prosemirror? [http://prosemirror.net/](http://prosemirror.net/)

<comment><USER27> One of their requirements is "Based on reusable React Components, it gives developers, authors and designers new ways of working together and creating better and richer experiences more easily."

So basically Prosemirror is not buzzword-compatible enough for them.

And also, "It is built by a company, reducing the likelihood of abandonment." Because Marijn Haverbeke's reputation for abandoning projects is so prominant </sarcasm>

(Full disclosure: I supported the Prosemirror Kickstarter and contributed to CodeMirror.)

<comment><USER2> Nevermind your sarcasm, but if you'd actually checked out both editors in detail, you would have seen the apparent differences. Anyways, you can replace the standard text editor, which is slate, with prosemirror, as all content is just a plugin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ory makes some really cool stuff for OAuth / Authorization that we are considering using in our stack.

[https://github.com/ory/hydra](https://github.com/ory/hydra)

[https://github.com/ory/ladon](https://github.com/ory/ladon)

[https://github.com/ory/fosite](https://github.com/ory/fosite)

</comment><comment><USER29> Demo here: [http://editor.ory.am/](http://editor.ory.am/)

Looks similar to Draft ([https://draftjs.org](https://draftjs.org)) at least in how they think about maintaining editable content outside of the DOM. Glad to see some editors finally put this theory to practice.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like it because it looks complete and clean, however in safari for iPad the readme page in github already breaks and says the typical:

"A problem has ocurred, so the page has been reloaded"

I hope they fix it because it looks perfect for fast mockups

Edit: it seems to sadly happen with all ORY pages including the documentation

</comment><comment><USER31> How performant is this?

I don't have it _on_ me right now, but if I were to dump a 400-kW document into the editor, would it still be snappy? That's one of the major weaknesses of Google Docs right now, and I'd consider switching if I found anything that lacks it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Man... everytime I think about building something... on this Chromebook I'm just like "Why did I buy this?" And it's ARM! ahhhhhhhh

I did like Cloud9, but still not used to it versus a local dev environment... hypderdev yo! Heard about that

</comment><comment><USER33> Built studiously.co website with this. Highly recommend the sites editor!

Also using Hydra by the same author for OAuth2. Truly amazing work.

<comment><USER34> line-height of the title does not look good on my screen [http://i.imgur.com/SpxLfUD.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/SpxLfUD.jpg) (and the white text in front of the blackbord as not very readable either)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I like it! If there was an online journaling web-app using this, I would definitely use it. _hint_ _hint_

</comment><comment><USER36> > You are a web agency and are lookin for tailerd solutions?

From the pricing page. Is this a typo or a joke I am missing?

</comment><comment><USER37> Yeah i prefer word for windows 3.11</comment>


Ask HN: What VOIP provider do you use for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for VOIP solutions for a small startup (~10 employees) that only needs 1 number.
What's hot? Is there a Stripe/Digital Ocean/AWS of "VOIP" ?
Some more details: I need something hosted and managed. <comment><USER2> You could try DIDLogic ([http://www.didlogic.com/](http://www.didlogic.com/)). I am a happy customer, as I can:

\- Rent an inbound number for each of the countries that are important to me

\- Set up multiple SIP accounts to use for outbound calls (much lower per minute rates than Skype or Rebtel)

\- Set up one or more of those SIP accounts to ring when I get an incoming call, even doing it in sequence if I want

\- Set the caller ID on outbound calls to whatever I want (e.g. my normal mobile number, or one of my rented incoming numbers) on a per-SIP-account basis

I use GroundWire on iOS as my SIP client. There are cheaper options. GroundWire is great, in part because they use Push notifications, but this requires you to trust their server with your SIP credentials.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am cofounder of [http://aircall.io](http://aircall.io) I created it because I didn't find an easy phone solution with a great UX for my previous startup.

Feel free to register to our private beta, we still have several hundred active users. I will be happy to show you aircall and discuss with you about your needs

</comment><comment><USER4> We use [http://www.Tropo.com/](http://www.Tropo.com/) scripts that forward to our cell phone #s. Blog post: [http://socialhealthinsights.com/2013/08/checkqm-support- powe...](http://socialhealthinsights.com/2013/08/checkqm-support-powered-by- tropo/)

Also check out [http://www.ringio.com/](http://www.ringio.com/) for a more robust turn-key-ish solution (met the founder but have never used them)

</comment><comment><USER5> You might try our software [https://calltrackingmetrics.com/](https://calltrackingmetrics.com/) \- we provide a call queue feature that can route to all 10 of your employee's. Our focus is on analytics and reporting for your marketing, with integration into google analytics/adwords - but the call log is pretty useful for keeping track of customer calls too.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work for [http://www.voclarion.com](http://www.voclarion.com). Might be worth a look, though we offer a host of features you might not need.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://nextiva.com](http://nextiva.com) does this well. We use it, excellent customer service, very competitive prices.

</comment><comment><USER8> We're using [http://aircall.io](http://aircall.io), it works well and provides a clean administration interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks nice, although it's in beta. How much is it compared to say, Grasshopper.com?

<comment><USER9> Aircall is a bit different from GH. Our pricing is not final yet but if you're a lone user only receiving very few calls, GH will be cheaper. If you're a team of a few people or if you receive or make a decent amount of calls/week, Aircall should be >20% cheaper at least. if you're interested, drop me a mail at email@example.com so I can make you jump our waiting list (once you've tried the product I'll be happy to share with you our detailed pricing ideas - even if not final)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very hapy with the combination of: localphone (for credits and numbers) with pbxes (hosted asterix)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi,

You may want to check out my startup Callbase. [http://callbase.co](http://callbase.co).

I'd also love to learn about your particular use case if you are ok with it.

My email is in my profile.</comment>


Scientists Debate the Origin of Cell Types in the First Animals - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-debate-the-origin-of-cell-types-in-the-first-animals-20190717/ <comment><USER2> This reminded me the research of Jack Szostak, a Nobel Laureate who is looking back even further to the origins of life itself. Specifically, how the first protocells formed and reproduced. From an article published this summer ([https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/origin-life- earth](https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/origin-life-earth)):

 _He and others believe they can reconstruct in the lab the long pathway that led from chemicals in space, to Earth's formation, to pre-life chemistry on the planet, to early protocells, and finally to advanced cells with metabolism and protein synthesis._

It goes on to say:

 _Despite some theories that early life arose near hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, Szostak is more convinced by research showing that the earliest cells developed on land in ponds or pools, possibly in volcanically active regions. Ultraviolet light and lightning strikes could have helped convert molecules in the atmosphere into cyanide and other useful materials to generate the building blocks of life. The shallow water would give those materials a place to accumulate at high concentrations, and volcanic activity could create hot and cold temperature fluctuations helpful for certain chemical reactions._

Key elements in the protocell included a fatty membrane for protection and growth/division, something which his group has been able to demonstrate in the lab. A bigger challenge is passing along genetic material to the next generation, which involves complicated RNA replication processes.

Full article: [https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/origin-life- earth](https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/origin-life-earth)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _The first complication came in 2008, when a group of scientists, in an > effort to more precisely map out the evolutionary relationships among > animals on the tree of life, identified comb jellies rather than sponges as > the earliest animals._

Interestingly, comb jellies have RGB lights. They were dropped in later animals, probably many viewed them as too tacky, but nature truly was on to something:

[https://giphy.com/gifs/closeup-comb- lobed-13tbkKy93iYuuA](https://giphy.com/gifs/closeup-comb- lobed-13tbkKy93iYuuA)

[https://media1.giphy.com/media/7ofEYFGlgZehO/giphy.gif](https://media1.giphy.com/media/7ofEYFGlgZehO/giphy.gif)

<comment><USER4> > The first complication came in 2008, when a group of scientists, in an > effort to more precisely map out the evolutionary relationships among > animals on the tree of life, identified comb jellies rather than sponges as > the earliest animals

I really hate this wording, because it gives the wrong idea, namely that Comb Jellies as they exist now are the same as they existed 600-700 million years ago.</comment></comment>


Introducing the Office app for Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/12/19/introducing-the-office-app-for-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate that they're replacing the trash that is My Office with something that sufficiently handles on-prem Office installs as well. But this is still probably going to be one of my default-removals upon setting up a new PC.</comment>


Ask HN: why aren't invoices provided in a standard structured format yet? - <AUTHOR>

It's surely a matter of incentives/demand but I would pay a monthly fee to say, receive all my AWS/GitHub/Heroku/Google Apps/etc invoices aggregated and formatted so there's some value in there. What do you think? <comment><USER2> write a proposal?</comment>


Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://royrapoport.blogspot.com/2011/05/coffee-and-its-effects-on-feature-creep.html <comment><USER2> I love this. Although it is a bit more advanced than what we had, we suffered a similar problem:

On Friday when the boss shouted us pizza, we had a problem with everybody trying to order various pizza's, various half pizza's, and various sized pizzas over email. Then the orderer had to collate all of these into a coherent order for the pizza shop.

In the end, we wrote a new module for our internal project management system called "The Pizza Module".

The Pizza Module would be pre-populated with the menu of our favourite pizza shop, so that you couldn't place an order for something that didn't exist. It would then allow people to enter orders via intranet, and then resolve things like four people ordering "half a mexicana" into two mexicana's. It also came with the "fat graph" report, which always had the orderer with the fattest amount (due to people who didn't have access to the intranet ordering through him).

Finally, it was fitted with a feature that prevented ordering, unless your timesheet was complete for the past two months. For a long time, it was very successful, and worked perfectly as intended).

However, in the end, it broke down when we moved away from it as we shifted to a different project management system. Nobody could be bothered writing a new pizza module (or refactoring the old pizza module to work with various project management systems), so we now use a collaborative Google doc with a table that people can place orders in. This is a Bad Idea™, and is far more open to gaming than the system described in the article. However, it is good for 5 minutes of entertainment on a Friday morning, watching people going back and forth on the shared doc.

<comment><USER3> Could you please elaborate on how people tried to game the system and what was done to try to mitigate that?

<comment><USER2> Well, if I order a large Meat Lovers, it is far too easy for somebody else to change it to half a small vegetarian. Then add 15 people, all wanting to screw with eachother, and it is far too easy to stuff up the whole thing.

Perhaps "gaming the system" was not the right choice of words, but I wanted to note that the author of the article seems to go to great lengths to stop this sort of abuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> scott_s posted this a few weeks ago, so normally we would bury it as a dupe. But it's so perfect for HN, and got so little of the attention it deserved, that I'm going to leave it up.

On a trivial note, damned blogspot's auto-switching between .ca, .au, .in, .co.uk, .com, and every other suffix under the sun is some of the most annoying nonstandard bullshit I have to deal with on this site.

<comment><USER5> Oh, is that what happened? I saw it as an .au (I'm in AU) but couldn't work out what the heck RPI was (why do people still assume that their blog readers are in the same region they are?). Happily the dodgy "May 16, 2011" subtitle was a giveaway that it was somewhere in North America.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's what happens. Blogspot, curse its name, detects which country you're in, silently edits every URL accordingly, and redirects you to that. Argh!

Maybe we'll change our code to make it always be blogspot.com.

p.s. I've added .au to the list :)

<comment><USER6> There are also blogspot.de, .at, etc. ...Google's recent changes with the redirect and the bad HTML5 template are quiet annoying.

Changing HN to always just display the .com version would be awesome.

<comment><USER7> If you check the SSL certificate[1] you get quite the list:

 _.blogspot.ae_.blogspot.be _.blogspot.ca_.blogspot.ch _.blogspot.co.at_.blogspot.co.il _.blogspot.co.nz_.blogspot.co.uk _.blogspot.com.ar_.blogspot.com.au _.blogspot.com.br_.blogspot.com.es _.blogspot.com.tr_.blogspot.cz _.blogspot.de_.blogspot.dk _.blogspot.fi_.blogspot.fr _.blogspot.gr_.blogspot.hk _.blogspot.hu_.blogspot.ie _.blogspot.in_.blogspot.it _.blogspot.jp_.blogspot.kr _.blogspot.mx_.blogspot.nl _.blogspot.no_.blogspot.pt _.blogspot.ro_.blogspot.ru _.blogspot.se_.blogspot.sg _.blogspot.sk_.blogspot.tw

[1] [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.blogspot....](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.blogspot.co.uk&s=22.214.171.124)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This sort of thing is why we had free lunch for employees, ordered via Seamless out of a spreadsheet of your regular order per restaurant. It wasn't a benefit - it was just a way to save the company time. It was costing more to pay for people's time spent coordinating what to do for lunch on their own than it did to just buy everyone lunch.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did you notice an expansion in the total money supply in your office due to deposit multiplication?[1] I can conceive of a situation where three people who wanted to prank you can game the TCNW statistics by circularly assigning debt to each other. For example, Alice says she owes Bob $20 billion, Bob says he owes Charlie $20 billion, and Charlie says he owes Alice $20 billion.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#Exam...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#Example_of_deposit_multiplication)

</comment><comment><USER10> In Denmark, the biggest bank have made an app where you sign up with your bank account and payment card. Then you can transfer money between friends (sending, asking and splitting). And it only requires you to login with a PIN code, and then you just use peoples mobile nr.

There's obviously limits on how much can be transferred, but it's ideal for those small purchases.

It's available on iOS, Android and even Windows Phone. Link to Android version: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.danskebank....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.danskebank.mobilepay)

Currently free to use, but in some years there's a minor percentage fee.

<comment><USER11> Commonwealth Bank in Australia has a similar app - Kaching.

<comment><USER12> I haven't used it. I haven't heard of anyone using it.

Et vous?

<comment><USER11> Noone I know uses it either..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Debt tracking can also be done with Splitwise: [https://www.splitwise.com/](https://www.splitwise.com/)

which is good for when you don't have cash money at the Redwood City taqueria.

<comment><USER14> Wow, this is the exact app that I need at the moment. Thanks for pointing it out. I dont know that there exist something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always enjoy good "gaming the system" reads. Nothing beats the story of LucasArts' Habitat.

<comment><USER16> Two links I found about this, for the interested: [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-05-retrospective-h...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-05-retrospective- habitat) [http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Wo...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/LucasfilmHabitat.html)

<comment><USER15> The second link is what I read first back in 2010. Found it through reading another book called Virtual Justice which you can get in pdf format for free (linked below). Apparently it was pre-LucasArts and still Lucasfilm.

[http://lastowka.rutgers.edu/virtual- justice/](http://lastowka.rutgers.edu/virtual-justice/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent story. The comments from previous workmates give the sense that this was a _nice_ place to work.

Here is a puzzle...

In my old pre-ubiquitous-computing physics lab we did something similar to the system described in the OA with a large piece of graph paper and a collection of coloured pens. It was called the Who Buys Next Chart.

We made our own coffee and tea, you understand. Axes were drawn with number of cups made along the bottom and money up the side. A thick black line of gradient equal to the average cost per cup was drawn(1). Each member had a different colour pen.

When you made a drink you extended your line along an amount equal to the number of drinks. When you bought something you extended your plot with a vertical line equal to the amount you spent. Equitable contributions implied a plot approaching the thick black line.

When we ran out of a crucial ingredient, the person whose plot had reached furthest left below the line (i.e. who had made the most drinks but not bought much) had to go and buy the stuff.

The system was gamed in various ways - or more accurately various strategies evolved to avoid having to go out in the rain and various issues about equitable contribution arose.

Can you spot some of the more obvious ones?

(1) The gradient was determined by the accumulated result from the previous WBNC. This tradition had been in place for some years, and a large sheet of graph paper lasted for a couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER18> Instead of assigning person-to-person debt relationships, my company just tracked the sum of each person's net debt on the whiteboard, with a circular buffer log so we can go back and fix things in case the sum doesn't add up to 0. The trouble with that is when people are too lazy to update the sum, so they end up hoarding a bunch of receipts and then update it way later. Eventually some numbers got really big, so I put some offsets on the board so that infrequent participants' contribution to the sum was zero. And then people left the company with nonzero debts...

Another option that we've started doing is to just randomly assign the task of paying for a meal, weighted by each person's proportion of the cost.

Once somebody has a debt to a coworker, though, the most efficient way of paying it off is to bet double-or-nothing on a coin flip until the debt is zero or the debtor is uncomfortable increasing it further.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't the debtor just keep flipping the coin until they got zero?

<comment><USER18> Only as long as both people agree to keep flipping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > yes, I implemented coffee drink definition ACLs

This is so excellent

<comment><USER20> I know, this one line made my day

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I stopped reading at "venti non-fat 180 degrees vanilla latte with two equals, extra squirt of vanilla, and whipped cream".

That is not coffee.

<comment><USER22> Ha-ha! That guy likes coffee with a bunch of stuff to disguise the bitter flavor. Anything he has to say is completely invalid and also my tastes are better than his.

Isn't it awesome feeling superior to people ha-ha!

<comment><USER21> The irony of this is that while my post was a joke, yours is actually about making yourself feel superior to people.

<comment><USER23> Circle troll commenced?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One man's feature creep is another man's Agile iterative development. Started with an MVP and iterated onwards :P

</comment><comment><USER25> As fun as implementing Caffeinator might have been, this makes me wonder if the simpler solution of buying a nice coffee machine could had solved the issue in a much simpler way (and cheaper... developer time is expensive, and more so on weekends! :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Best quote: "And that's how I set out to simplify ordering Starbucks and created an internal banking system."

Very entertaining story, and I think it's less feature creep than building a product that is valuable to you and your colleagues iteratively. I'd mark this as a success.

</comment><comment><USER27> Our office has free tea/coffee/milk.

</comment><comment><USER28> We just have a company supplied expresso machine and try to convince the team leader to put work lunches on his company credit card. Much simpler :-)

</comment><comment><USER29> I thought this would end up being the story of how Ripple came to be.

</comment><comment><USER30> Credit card roulette is the only sane way to pay group tabs. It's also much more fun.

<comment><USER31> A description of Credit Card Roulette can be found here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_roulette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_roulette)</comment></comment>


Free legal helpline for help re stimulus eligibility - <AUTHOR> https://fortyq.com/covid <comment><AUTHOR> Hi All,

Hope you're all keeping safe in these trying times. We've been hearing stories about cashflow problems for freelancers and startups due to Covid. This is obviously something that causes a lot of added stress for them especially. We've been mulling over how we could help and decided to do the little we can of offering a free legal helpline to aid them in understanding how to proceed with the business interruption loan announced by the UK government.

By calling our helpline at (+44) 1274 79 2693 or messaging us, they can expect a response to their question instantly.

If you know any startups/SMBs at struggling with this, please feel free to share this helpline number with them!

Take care and stay safe.</comment>


Guillotine Placed Outside Jeff Bezos' D.C. Home by Anti-Amazon Protesters - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-washington-dc-protest-guillotine-social-media-video-1514279 <comment><USER2> The organisation is called "Abolish The Now" and they want to abolish (not just defund) the police, close all prisons and end Amazon.

The article and quotes from the organisers say that the target is the company, no one is calling for Mr Bezo's head (at least using words).

<comment><USER3> "guillotine jeff bezos" is nothing new and some definitely means it literally, although it has more or less become a meme with change.org petitions for guillotining him etc. But there are alot of people that are serious about "violent revolution" being the only way to true freedom.

<comment><USER4> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is also a "meme". But doing so would still be extremely irresponsible.

<comment><USER5> As is "when the looting starts the shooting starts".

<comment><USER6> If someone is trying to break into my business and loot it they should expect to get shot. Why can we not use violent force against violent force?

<comment><USER5> Is that or is that not a death threat, though? Threatening to use lethal force [with conditions] is still threatening lethal force.

Would it be acceptable (if ludicrous) to keep a guillotine on your own property with a "for rioters" sign on? How about "for Jeff Bezos"?

Conversely is it OK to acquire a self-defence weapon and stand outsize Bezos' house brandishing it?

<comment><USER4> The key word in your statement above: to keep a guillotine on _your own_ property. Trespassers will be shot. My home - my castle.

Brandishing a weapon outside someone else's house does not look like a self- defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this will be tagged as hate speech and death threat

<comment><USER8> In what way is it hate speech?

<comment><USER9> It's certainly not a message of love.

<comment><USER8> Hate speech doesn't mean messages of hatred in general, it means it's targeting a persecuted group.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's okay to argue that someone should go to jail. It is definitely not okay to demonstrate a threat via 18th century public execution devices.

</comment><comment><USER11> According to the new reddit rules this is ok

<comment><USER4> Sorry, for those waking up from a century-long hibernation, what the new reddit rule is?

<comment><USER11> [https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules- reporting/acc...](https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules- reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or)

>While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.

<comment><USER4> This is lamentable.

When I went through my corporate training, one of the things they said was that we all are a minority in some sense. Some are disabled, some have accent, some were raised by a single parent.

Somewhat naive, but that was an eye-opener for me, an indication that we're all together in this boat.

Saying that some minorities are more minor than others certainly doesn't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why was this flagged and why can't I vouch for it?

<comment><USER12> Vouching is for things that are [dead]. It's marked [flagged] because enough users have clicked the flag link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> nonsensical stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is gross.

<comment><USER15> Almost as gross as the mass hoarding of resources by an individual.

<comment><USER16> Dont buy at Amazon, dont vote politician that protect him, If you found a abnormality in its finances you need to declare it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meanwhile, we are told by the city councilor for the Seattle district with CHAZ that the real cause of the murder of two teens by CHAZ "security" is not taxing Amazon enough ([https://twitter.com/cmkshama/status/1277686578068942848?s=20](https://twitter.com/cmkshama/status/1277686578068942848?s=20)).

This is what happens, Mr. Bezos, when you pay the Danegeld by trying to out- woke the woke.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone need help migrating to Python 3? - <AUTHOR> I've spent the last few months migrating different code bases from Python 2.x to Python 3.x.<p>With the impending EOL for Python 2, does anyone need help migrating to Python 3? <comment><USER2> This reads like a request for a job/project/work-for-money. Feel free to add yourself to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325924)

</comment><comment><USER3> could you give this a try?

exec(''.join(chr(int(''.join(str(ord(i)-8203)for i in c),2))for c in ' '.split(' ')))</comment>


Mythbusting: Organic Farming - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18/mythbusting-101-organic-farming-conventional-agriculture/

<comment><USER2> _Myth #1: Organic Farms Don't Use Pesticides_

tl;dr: They do... well OK, only natural ones - but ONE of them is as bad as any other pesticide! Crazy anecdote huh!

The article also points out that shockingly just because something is natural it's not necessarily safe. Which is both true and obvious but no less FUD.

 _Myth #2: Organic Foods are Healthier_

This is highly contested. Study after study, keep finding conflicting results. There are very strong indications some high yield variates have more calories or water, but less of everything else. But that's the varieties, not how they are grown. Overall this is anything but clear cut at this point.

 _But when researchers had people put their mouths to the test, they found that people couldn't tell the difference between the two in blind taste tests._

I hate to also bring anecdotes to this anecdote filled articles, but I can instantly taste the difference between an organic banana and a conventional one. I don't need to know which one it is. I've blindly picked up and bought bananas and every time if it's just not as good, I check and it turns out to be conventionally grown. This could be due to them being different varieties, maybe longer time on the vine, maybe farm size affect flavor, or maybe my bias is so powerful it's completely skewing how I experience the world!

 _Organic Farming Is Better For The Environment_

 _The simple fact is that they're not – at least the issue is not that cut and dry._

Ah yes, it is not that cut and dry, but the first part that sentence claims exactly that.

 _GMOs have the potential to up crop yields, increase nutritious value, and generally improve farming practices while reducing synthetic chemical use_

That's a lot of potential, but we've seen little of it come to pass yet. Specifically it turns out its more profitable to make crops pesticide immune/resistant and then use MORE pesticides to help the crop out-compete weeds.

Theoretical genetic engineering sounds fantastic, the actual GM we currently have is rather practical and not at all that great. That doesn't mean GM isn't good, it just means that conventional GM mass produced commercial crops today are not particularly good.

 _Yet organic proponents refuse to even give GMOs a chance, even to the point of hypocrisy. For example, organic farmers apply Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin (a small insecticidal protein from soil bacteria) unabashedly across their crops every year, as they have for decades. It's one of the most widely used organic pesticides by organic farmers. Yet when genetic engineering is used to place the gene encoding the Bt toxin into a plant's genome, the resulting GM plants are vilified by the very people willing to liberally spray the exact same toxin that the gene encodes for over the exact same species of plant._

Apples and Oranges. The Bt toxin and bacteria sprayed on the plants can be easily washed off. The toxin inside very single cell of the plant you're eating - kind of a different animal. Probably still safe, but to shout hypocrisy is FUD.

 _But the real reason organic farming isn't more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones. Organic farms produce around 80% that what the same size conventional farm produces16 (some studies place organic yields below 50% those of conventional farms!)._

Ah, but other studies have shown organic farms can out produce conventional farms. Again, anything but cut and dry. One thing that is pretty clear is that human labor can have a HUGE impact on yields. Add a lot more labor and you get A LOT more. Obviously manual labor is very expensive. (Yes, even at migrant workers wages, it is very expensive in terms of what fruits and vegetables cost).

 _Myth #4: It's all or none_

 _The point of this piece isn't to vilify organic farming; it's merely to point out that it's not as black and white as it looks._

I could have sworn the point was to spread FUD: "Scientific American says Organic food no better than conventional!"

<comment><USER3> I don't get it, why would you assume that the article is FUD?

The article starts off by saying "I'd like to bust a few myths", and proceeds to (allegedly) do so. It also deliberately points out that there are good things about the organic farming movement, AND points out that all of the "bad stuff" is done by some but not all farms, both organic and conventional. It does nothing more or less than what it purports to, and I don't see the first hint of FUD.

And while you appear desperate to rebut it, the best you can do is "I know anecdotes suck, but here's mine!" The funny thing is, unlike your response screed, the article has no less than 18 references. I'm happy to assume that the reference are cherry-picked to back up the author's points, but even so, it's pretty hard to find a blog post that even manages this. What more could you wish for? What more could you wish for than a piece that wishes to "point out that it's not as black and white as it looks".</comment></comment>


Diablo II postmortem by one of the creators - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3124/postmortem_blizzards_diablo_ii.php

<comment><USER2> Great read, it's interesting that they built such a big game and trimmed so much:

"Diablo II took more than 40 people and over three years, essentially because we made two or three games and pared them down to the best one."

They dogfooded:

"We strive to hire people who love games, and we make games that we want to play. ... As a team, we don't have to wonder what our audience wants, because we are our audience."

While I never got into the original Diablo, I spent too much time in Diablo 2 LOD. As the article talks about, there is so much variety in builds for each character class. The game was made to be addictive so that "There's always a quest that is almost finished, a waypoint almost reached, an experience level almost achieved, and a dungeon nearly cleared out."</comment>


Scientists discover hidden patterns of brain activity - <AUTHOR> https://actu.epfl.ch/news/scientists-discover-hidden-patterns-of-brain-activ/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I'm a mathematician, well versed in algebraic topology & also have a PhD in biology.

This is one of the most disingenuous papers I've read in a while, indeed my first reaction was "wow, what a load of horse shit".

The editorial on the journal's main "selling point" is that it applies algebraic topology "in a novel way, never before seen" to neuroscience. There is absolutely no reason to use algebraic topology in this context.

They're basically counting in a variety of ways network motifs - which Uri Alon & others have been doing for years. This is entirely possible to do using directed graphs, basic combinatorics, and elementary probability.

As other commenters have pointed out, there's at best a weak correlation to actual brain activity, and the amount of data is not actually that large and within reach of off-the-shelf graph software to process (or a python script).

This is also not the first time the senior author of the paper has hyped otherwise lackluster results. It's easier to impress a TED audience than your peers. Here's a critical review on Nature:

[https://www.nature.com/news/rethinking-the- brain-1.17168](https://www.nature.com/news/rethinking-the-brain-1.17168)

<comment><USER3> Yup. They're treating _in silico_ statistics as faithful to real "brain activity", because the network layout the scientists used was a detailed representation of a snapshot of a part of a real mouse brain. Don't worry if the neurons would behave differently than the simulated neurons, or if that could lead to totally different spikes globally, or if the hype irreversibly makes the story go viral and people still believe claims that were never even part of the original test years later because the story was good enough..

Also... "2.3. Topology Organizes Spike Correlations" <\- "Energy makes it go!"

@neuroskeptic on twitter is a good source for examples of questionable neuroscience, their blog is [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/)

<comment><USER4> Yes, total hogwash. How could their model simulate the quantum effects taking place in the microtubules of the neurons?

<comment><USER3> Microtubules? Hah! Such an outmoded and unfashionable quantum model of cognition. Here, let me introduce you to the lithium-7 spin-based phosphate- calcium ion-ball entanglement hypothesis of quantum mentation; [https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum- bra...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum- brain-20161102/)

<comment><USER4> TIL, thanks! unfortunately I think I see where they're going with it:

"I believe that if phosphorus nuclear spin is not being used for quantum processing, then quantum mechanics is not operative in longtime scales in cognition," Fisher said. "Ruling that out is important scientifically. It would be good for science to know."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The University of Lausanne's Blue Brain Project has a lot of source code up at Github to take a look at [1], including some kind of specialized neuron ray- tracing renderer. Not too sure which data sources it can use. For example, is (a part of) the 31.000 neuron rat brain available somewhere?

They also seem to have developed a window system intended for large touch screens [3] that they use for "all hands" meetings on their brain research [4].

[1] [https://github.com/BlueBrain](https://github.com/BlueBrain)

[2] [https://github.com/BlueBrain/Brayns/blob/master/doc/UserGuid...](https://github.com/BlueBrain/Brayns/blob/master/doc/UserGuide.md)

[3] [https://github.com/BlueBrain/Tide](https://github.com/BlueBrain/Tide)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wATHwvRFGz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wATHwvRFGz0)

</comment><comment><USER6> This article reminds me of this polychronization paper that describes how networks of spiking neurons result in the emergence of groups, and some discussion on how that could explain consciousness as attention to memory.

[http://izhikevich.org/publications/spnet.htm](http://izhikevich.org/publications/spnet.htm)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full paper: [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full)

</comment><comment> bra-ket these are patterns of a simulation, not actual brain activity

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

<comment><USER7> The simulation is based on a pretty detailed mapping of how actual rat brains are connected so it should be fairly accurate.

<comment><USER8> But how should one validate that it actually does something sensible?

<comment> semi-extrinsic One of the simplest known organisms, the worm C. Elegans, has a brain consisting of 302 neurons that we have mapped exactly. (The entire thing is 959 cells.) We still can't simulate it correctly.

A rat's brain is O(10^7) neurons, while a human brain is O(10^11) neurons, as compared to C. Elegans with O(10^2) neurons.

Which is to say, trying to simulate a rat brain while we know we can't simulate C. Elegans is like a prehistoric human claiming he can build an F1 racecar before he's invented the wheel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's an interesting hypothesis for what the patterns of simulated firings "mean". I don't see any reference link to experimental methods in silico or in vivo follow up. Anyone have any reference articles for this hypothesis?

<comment><USER10> This paper (2008) describes the general approach, including the use of Betti numbers for classification of observed phenomena (in primates, not _in silico_ ):

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2924880/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2924880/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't mean to be a dick but the approach they use is kinda like finding "hidden patterns" of New York City by noticing whenever small groups of conversing New Yorkers coincidentally all used the same word in a conversation.

I guess I was hoping more for something like "the brain keeps track of information as an amalgamation of partially-understood signals, due to a neural uncertainty principle describing how what neurons compute is constrained by the traits of the signals they should recover information from"

</comment><comment><USER11> The concentrated power of mind has the ability to know without the help of the senses. In the inner world, the mind does not even need the help of the brain. The brain is only a medium for the energy called mind. It is a powerhouse, not the power; it is a distribution center but not the energy. Many modern physicists do not accept this theory, for they know only one method: applying sophisticated instruments to amplify sensory experiences. When one uses such instruments to study mental functions, they fail, for these instruments can only measure the superficial workings of the brain. Those who follow this method nevertheless contend that the brain is the mind, and that if they can develop the instruments to study the brain's functioning they will be able to understand the mind. They are like the blind man who holds the tail of an elephant and contends that an elephant is like a snake because its tail feels like one. Modern technology and scientific knowledge are valid as far as the external world is concerned. But there is another exact science that helps one know the unknown dimensions of life. The Samkhya system of philosophy has given birth to yogic science. It is far more advanced and methodical than modern technology and the scientific method that is being used to probe into the microscopic and macroscopic levels of the physical universe.</comment>


Kyiv, Ukraine in 1968 [YouTube] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc0UTIJP16g <comment><AUTHOR> I've came by an interesting video on youtube, depicting Kyiv in the late 60's. A lot of interesting architecture, good view on the city center</comment>


Secure Tokens from Rails 5 to Rails 4.x and 3.x - <AUTHOR> https://coderwall.com/p/kb97gg/secure-tokens-from-rails-5-to-rails-4-x-and-3-x

<comment><USER2> This is awesome!!</comment>


Harper Lee and the Cold War Canon - <AUTHOR> http://blog.historians.org/2015/08/harper-lee-cold-war-canon/

<comment><USER2> A very odd reading of _The Lord of the Flies_.</comment>


GNU Parallel – The command line power tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/fscons/gnu-parallel-ole-tange <comment><USER2> I use parallel all the time for embarrasingly parallel scientific computations on a cluster. It is very easy to use and elegant, and it's one of the programs I'm most grateful for.

Recently the developers fixed a major bug for me, that child jobs on other nodes would not be killed when parallel was killed. This was the only thing stopping me from recommending it to my labmates, now there's no reason not to use it!

<comment><USER3> Remember to show them 'parallel --bibtex'

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use GNU Parallel. I like it because its interface is simple - input is piping filenames to it, just like xargs, and output is nicely collated to the screen.

I used to use ppss, which does the core task just as well, but the interface is more complex.

I mostly use these tools to optimize large numbers of PNGs before deployment, using optipng, pngout, and/or my own lossypng. These programs take a while to run so using all my cores gets the job done a lot quicker.

</comment><comment><USER5> The documentation of GNU parallel ([https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html)) also contains a lot of nice examples on how to use parallel.

</comment><comment><USER6> i use GNU parallel exclusively in place of xargs simply because it has --dry- run.

<comment><USER7> wouldn't an "echo" just do the same?

        $ mkdir a
        $ cd a
        $ touch b c d e
        $ find -type f | xargs echo rm
        rm ./b ./d ./e ./c
        $ ls
        b  c  d  e
        $ find -type f | xargs rm
        $ ls
        $

<comment><USER8> One advantage of "parallel --dry-run" over "xargs echo" is that the former quotes its output:

        $ touch 'Ham
        Jam
        Spam'
        $ touch 'J.R. "Bob" Dobbs'
        $ find . -type f -print0 | parallel -n1 -0 --dry-run echo
        echo ./Ham'
        'Jam'
        'Spam
        echo ./J.R.\ \"Bob\"\ Dobbs
        $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -n1 -0 echo echo
        echo ./Ham
        Jam
        Spam
        echo ./J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

For my own "dry runs", though, I've always preferred passing the command line to

        #include <stdio.h>

        int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
            char** argp;
            int i;
            printf("argc = %d\n", argc);
            for (i = 0, argp = argv; *argp != 0; ++argp, ++i) {
                printf("argv[%d] = %s\n", i, *argp);
            }
            return 0;
        }

to remove all reasonable doubt.

<comment><USER9> Why does the parallel example look weird? It put the single quotes in all the wrong places, and completely around Jam. It should have printed

      echo './Ham
      Jam
      Spam'

but your output looks different. As an example of how it should look, try this:

      $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -n1 -0 perl -e'print "\"$_\" " for (@ARGV)'
      "./Ham
      Jam
      Spam"

<comment><USER10> Having never used parallel, I still believe parallel was correct.

./Ham' 'Jam' 'Spam

would be identical to ./Ham\nJam\nSpam (if \n were the correct translation to the newline in this case) or './Ham Jam Spam'

This would be identical to what you wrote, but only punts to quotes when it doesn't have a canonical method of representing the character otherwise. The fact that you don't need to explicitly concatenate two strings in the shell may be what's throwing you off?

Interestingly enough, 'Ham\n\nJam\nSpam' becomes

./Ham' '' 'Jam' 'Spam

So parallel is just literally outputting all newlines using quotes. I believe this would be identical, if you analyzed it and saw that two newlines are next to each other:

./Ham'

'Spam' 'Jam

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anybody have a link to a version viewable without proprietary plugins? "Flash Player 9 (or above) is needed to view presentations"

<comment><USER12> This looks very similar but is actually a year newer than the slides on slideshare:

[http://www.luga.de/Angebote/Vortraege/GNU_Parallel_LIT_2011/...](http://www.luga.de/Angebote/Vortraege/GNU_Parallel_LIT_2011/GNU_Parallel_LIT_2011.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use GNU Parallel with s3cmd to move big data sets in and out of S3. I can easily saturate any network connection. I was able to GET ~2TB from S3 onto a Gluster cluster in a little more than an hour by using GNU Parallel to spread the GETs across 8 instances. Incredibly powerful, easy to use tool.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I must have reinvented this particular wheel at least five times.

<comment><USER15> This is exactly what I feel like every time I see an article/presentation about (maybe even really small) tools that just get the job done but I didn't know about and didn't even think about looking for although I can think of so many cases where they would've been incredibly useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is parallel buggy or is it just me? For example if i have a list of ip addresses:

      $ cat ips.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

       3 127.0.0.1
       2 192.168.1.1
       1 192.168.1.2

Now i want to reformat the output of uniq -c, i want the count to the last column:

      $ cat ips.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | parallel --colsep ' ' echo {2} {1}

But gives empty output.. what gives? It only works if I double pipe it thru parallel like this:

      $ cat ips.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | \
          parallel --trim lr echo | parallel --colsep ' ' echo {2} {1}

      127.0.0.1 3
      192.168.1.1 2
      192.168.1.2 1

<comment><USER3> You have more than 1 space from uniq. 2 options:

      parallel --colsep ' +' echo {2} {3}

or:

      parallel --colsep ' ' echo {7} {8}

<comment><USER16> Thanks!, but how come the whitespace is not trimmed by --trim lr? The manpage says it trims whitespace left and right if --colsep is used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wrote a similar program for windows.

[https://github.com/jftuga/Windows/tree/master/mp](https://github.com/jftuga/Windows/tree/master/mp)

The only file you need to download is mp.exe. Source code is mp.au3.

<comment><USER18> nifty tool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Load test with parallel:

      cat urls | parallel --jobs 4 --load 6 'curl -s -w "%{time_total}\n" -o /dev/null {}'

</comment><comment><USER20> I love pssh for simplicity but I guess I better look at fancier stuff too.</comment>


Siri & AirPlay 2 enabled TVs. - sahin-boydas https://www.apple.com/airplay/ <comment><AUTHOR> This makes a lot of sense. I have a TV with a built-in Chromecast and it is far more useful than the terrible software on most 'Smart TVs'

</comment><comment><USER2> Finally since the iPhone cash cow is drying up Apple starts looking beyond current product lines.</comment>


Show HN: Lookmark, read what your friends are reading (for Chrome) - <AUTHOR> http://lookmark.com/c/HACKERNEWS

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, we'd love to get your feedback on the product we've been working on. Read a bit more about why we built it here: [http://blog.lookmark.com/post/31927814893/why-we-built- lookm...](http://blog.lookmark.com/post/31927814893/why-we-built-lookmark)

Happy to answer questions/get feedback here or via email -- firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks for checking it out.

</comment><comment><USER2> "We use Facebook only for identification. No sharing without your permission (promise!)"

While Lookmark may intend to follow all honorable practices, I'm curious if there are things Facebook can decide to do to subvert this.

IOW, does Facebook track the use of an account for Lookmark identification? Are they tracking when a user signs in to Lookmark?

Just how much does Facebook get to know about a user's use of Lookmark?

Thanks, BTW, for offering a non-FB way to sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out.

We don't ask for permission to post to your Facebook feed, so FB can't change anything there. Facebook definitely tracks the last time you used an app -- they expose it to you via the Application Settings tab (<http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications>). I don't know what else they're tracking behind the scenes though. That's why we offer a non-Facebook login option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome. I hope you succeed but the average person is going to be weary of accidentally auto-sharing that "article" they were reading on redtube.com

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Automatic sharing is opt-in instead of opt-out, which means you would have to manually add a site like redtube. On top of that, we've prevented our software from ever touching certain sites, including search engines, webmail accounts, banking or financial institution pages, and adult websites.

Check out our faq: <http://lookmark.com/faq>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks cool - logo immediately reminds me of Valvoline's - <http://www.valvoline.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Well done Dave & team, looks and works awesome

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How well does this take in information from other similar things in Facebook? The Guardian is the paper I see most in my feed, does Lookmark take note of those?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not scraping much data from other sites yet -- we wanted to focus on the core experience of "read what your friends are reading." We plan on taking advantage of more data sources in the future, though I don't think any Facebook Social Reader apps have open APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised they let you delete your account, a rarity these days. Turned out none of my friends are interested in this so I deleted it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Compliments on the domain name Lookmark. Clever. Did you have to buy if from someone, or was it available to register?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We bought it from its "original" owner. We had the .it domain but thought it was worth it go for the .com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks a lot like <http://www.readshout.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER11> awesome service, now all i need is more friends

<comment><USER6> I think having public accounts or "topics" you can follow would be a great step to fill in the gap for folks without many (interesting enough) friends on the system

<comment><AUTHOR> We're definitely going to implement something like this; thanks for the suggestion.</comment></comment></comment>


The 10 Best Productivity Apps of 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/28/the-10-best-productivity-apps-of-2011/?awesm=tnw.to_1COoX&utm_campaign=social%20media&utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=The%2010%20Best%20Productivity%20Apps%20of%202011

<comment><USER2> Instead of Pulse I use gReader on my Android.</comment>


The Brain That Goes Through Phases: Temporal Metastates in FMRI - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/19/8112/ <comment><USER2> I wonder what the pattern would look like for a bipolar patient.

</comment><comment><USER3> The brain can rewire itself on these timescales. Interesting to identify the mechanism of cycling..</comment>


Loom (YC W12) launches video support - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/12/space-saving-icloud-alternative-loom-now-syncs-stores-video-too/

<comment><USER2> so happy support for video is finally here. I use the shit out of Loom.</comment>


Rails 2 Long Term Support - <AUTHOR> http://railslts.com/ <comment><USER2> This is quite interesting. I've worked on a number of legacy apps that have been using old versions of Rails, and were a pain to upgrade to the latest version of even just Rails 2. They were so big that upgrading to Rails 3 would've required a full rewrite no doubt.

This definitely has a market, great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts exactly. Even for people willing to move to Rails 3 at some point, but having issues finding the time because of many apps to migrate, it can still be useful as a temporary solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's probably worth noting that ruby 1.8.7 will no longer be supported after June 2013 i.e. there will be no security patches or bugfixes.

<comment><AUTHOR> True; that said some people moved Rails 2.x apps to Ruby 1.9 (with a bit of patching); I wouldn't be surprised to see LTS migrate to 1.9 gradually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There will always be a market for supporting, rewriting, and upgrading legacy apps regardless of language or framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed - especially given the pace of releases in the Rails world.

As a freelance doing Rails since 2005, I can tell many environments have a hard time keeping up with that pace.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if they will introduce LTS for Rails 3.0 etc, once Rails 4 will be released.

<comment><USER5> Rails 3.2 will continue to be supported, iirc

<comment><AUTHOR> See the Rails release policy: if I understand well, it will only be supported until Rails 4.2 etc comes around.

There is a general question about how to keep up with the release pace, when you have many apps to support.</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese hackers 'slurped 50 MB of US gov email' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/06/wikileaks_chinese_hacking/ <comment><USER2> The chinese are going nuts these days. They are desperate for the "final" advantage.</comment>


USPTO Preliminarily Invalidates Apple's 'Steve Jobs Patent' on the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/07/u-s-patent-office-preliminarily-invalidates-apples-steve-jobs-patent-on-the-iphone/

<comment><USER2> _detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command._

So literally the function of every touchscreen device ever? Touchscreens have been around since 1970; this was filed for in 2006.

<comment><USER3> Once again, reading snippets from a patent does nothing. You might as well read a copyrighted story and exclaim in horror "Well this is rich, he's trying to claim 'Once upon a time' for himself!"

A patent does not claim every single thing that is listed. An infringing device must contain every single thing listed in the claims.

Claim 7 is my favorite: "The computing device of claim 1, wherein, in one heuristic of the one or more heuristics, a contact comprising a simultaneous two-thumb twisting gesture corresponds to a 90.degree. screen rotation command."

<comment><USER4> > _An infringing device must contain every single thing listed in the claims._

An infringing device must contain every single thing listed in _at least one of the claims_. If you infringe on any single claim, then you infringe.

Usually what happens is that claim 1 is really broad, and then there's a sort of tree of claims with claim 1 at the root and more specific claims further down the tree. The early claims may well get invalidated when an infringement case goes to court, but the patent-holder hopes that the later more specific ones will survive and still be broad enough to cover what their rivals are doing.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I agree with the general point brian_cloutier is making.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to see the prosecution history and documentation of a patent, you can go to the PAIR portal of the uspto[1]. After going through a Captcha, you can then search for a patent# or application #, and then click on the "image wrapper" tab.

It's very enlightening to see patents go through rejections and resubmittals, and what the explanations are for rejection or why a rejection should be reconsidered.

[1] <http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair>

<comment><USER6> If you look the patent up on Google Patents, you can download all the "Public PAIR data". It's 56MB for this patent.

Inside of the zip there is a file located at: 12101832-image_file_wrapper/12101832-image_file_wrapper.tsv

It's a tab-delimited version of the table on the USPTO site for "image file wrapper". It also has all the PDFs in that directory.

<http://www.google.com/patents/US7479949>

<comment><USER7> Very cool! I did not realize Google Patents had this capability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find this an interesting side effect of patent-a-geddon. The government looks stupid, and politicians are only human and don't like to be associated with 'stupid' so they react.

The result has been a tremendous amount of "light" being shown on the patent process, the people who run the process, the goals of the process, the effects of the process, and perhaps most importantly the stuff that makes it through that process.

There is a lot of stuff that could use some "light" therapy. The danger is that Congress is a blunt instrument at best and a complete disaster at worst. So one has to hope that enough tension is created such that the good people are empowered to fix things, but not so much that the bogus people can use it to do more harm than good.

<comment><USER9> Given the vast sums of money that patent trolls are blood-sucking out of legitimate software and web companies these days (see another post currently also on the front page of HN), I'm personally quite looking forward to a massive swing of the pendulum in the other direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, scrolling down from that article was a hilarious reminder how much more cogent HN comments tend to be than any other comments on the interwebs. "Grrr! USPTO is mean to Apple! How dare they! I'm mad!" Etc.

<comment><USER11> > Wow, scrolling down from that article was a hilarious reminder how much more > cogent HN comments tend to be than any other comments on the interwebs. > "Grrr! USPTO is mean to Apple! How dare they! I'm mad!" Etc.

Really? It seems like the entire internet is anti-patents, even apple fans.

<comment><USER12> I don't think HN or the Internet is anti-patents, but anti-stupid patents and anti-patent trolls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe the USPTO finally decided to look for prior art?

<comment><USER14> No, i believe this was due to a second re-exam request (they denied the first)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally this is (seeming) insanity is brought to the spotlight.

Here's to hoping that between invalidating trivial patents like these and initiatives like Twitters "Innovator's Patent Agreement" (which requires all inventors to agree before a patent can be used offensively), the current situation will finally come to an end.

<comment><USER16> The problem with Twitter's patent agreement (and others like it) is that it is not legally binding. However good their intentions now (and I believe they are genuine), sooner or later the company will come under new management, or have their assets sold for scrap, at which point all those "defensive" patents get weaponized and used for extortion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm wondering if nefarious advance knowledge of this office action was a cause for the drop in Apple's stock as shown here:

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL+Basic+Chart&t=1m](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL+Basic+Chart&t=1m)

</comment><comment><USER18> May Apple get a big one up the rear. Asshole patent-trolls keeping the software-business back.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you know what "patent troll" means.</comment></comment>