Original Source code for the Furby [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pdf <comment><USER2> Surprisingly sophisticated. I didn't remember them being much more than annoying when my kids "had to have one."

Hey, I recognize those opcodes. 6502 (Commodore, Apple 2, etc) Cool! I had no idea what was running these things.

Time Slice Task Master (aka "cooperative multitasking without preemption")

Interesting they set the PWM (pulse width modulation) based on battery voltage as not to stress out the motors. Cheaper than some caps & resistors for a voltage divider from a high V source, or a boost/buck controller. Still necessary for the CPU though. If I remember correctly, this thing ran off 4 1.5V cells (+6V). Yay, software!

Clever use of tilt sensor to seed the pseudo-random num generator. (page A22)

Too bad the diagnostic file isn't included (diag7.asm) per page A21.

(A33) That cycle-counting timer loop brings back memories, too -- throwing in a few NOP (no-operation) calls just to eat a cycle and get the timing right on a horizontal/vertical retrace -- while here they're doing it so the service intervals on sound & motor control come out right.

(A36) LOL @ "Rap mode"

A39 - the various sensor sequences needed to trigger the modes

I gave up at about 45 pages, but there is obviously some neat stuff here.

<comment><USER3> 6502 is also what the Terminator ran. We should thank our time traveler saviors for stopping the Furby uprising from happening.

<comment><USER4> I think we can assume that, given the complexity of a Terminator, the 6502 was just there for I/O, kind of like a BBC Micro with an ARM processor.

<comment><USER5> Or a Mac IIfx... "Wicked Fast".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I attended a talk that Dave Hampton gave on the creation of the Furby, it was a lot of fun. For such a "simple" toy there was a lot going on. I picked up a couple of Furbies and did the 'make them talk' hack (basically inserting an SBC with Ethernet into their bodies so that you could feed their audio and animitronic circuits with the output of a text to speech converter. For a while I had one reading out nagios alerts, and yes that is as creepy as it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER7> Furby was recently discussed in the middle third of this Radiolab episode:

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/more-or-less- human](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/more-or-less-human)

If you turn a Furby upside down, it will start saying that it's scared after a bit. So they do an experiment where they ask kids to hold a barbie doll, a Furby, and a hamster upside down to see how long the kid will hold the item upside down before the kid becomes uncomfortable and turns it right side up.

The show goes on to interview the guy who designed Furby (Caleb Chung). He defends the Furby as being alive. He then talks about a dinosaur toy he designed (Pleo) that a review site posted a video of the reviewers beating up the dinosaur till it stops functioning[0]. That left him very uncomfortable. He's now working on designing an animatronic baby doll and is cognizant about how to design it so that it discourages (or at least won't encourage) any type of sociopathic behavior.

This part starts 20 minutes in and is 20 minutes long. The first third of the episode is about the Turing test. The last third of the episode talks about using VR to allow someone to put themselves in another person's body.

I enjoyed the whole episode. Radiolab doesn't publish transcripts, so you'll need to make an hour to listen.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQUCd4SbgM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQUCd4SbgM0)

<comment><USER8> Here's a negative path that I _hope_ doesn't occur - we build toys that are more lifelike, communicative and designed to invoke empathy, and some children will just become desensitized to empathy triggers.

I wonder if there's any research to prove/disprove something like that? Is empathy desensitization a thing?

<comment><USER9> Yes the uncanny valley can cause that already.

For example, in the past, when someone asked you for directions you gave it to them. Now some people are like "don't you have google?" Same goes for asking for any type of informational help.

Before, many people would cook or help people do things like move or pick them up from the airport. Now they can just do it via a gig economy app so why bother.

So yeah, parents don't really pay attention to their kids, friends don't pay attention to their friends, dating has become shallow, people's attention spans are lower etc.

Why? Because we have new modes of communication with swiping and LOL and we don't actually want to hear long heartfelt explanations when the shorthand takes far less time so we can fit in more interactions in a single day.

Example: [https://www.lifehack.org/299404/](https://www.lifehack.org/299404/)

[https://www.psypost.org/2018/05/smartphones-can-prevent- pare...](https://www.psypost.org/2018/05/smartphones-can-prevent-parents- cultivating-feelings-connection-children-51198/amp)

[http://www.wired.com/2014/02/outsourcing-humanity- apps/](http://www.wired.com/2014/02/outsourcing-humanity-apps/)

<comment><USER10> I don't know how to say this without seeming offensive, but you seem to have really shitty people around you if this is your experience.

The worst I received when asking for directions was a brusque "I don't know" (like, just a couple of times in my whole life). If I ask friends for help, they help. We do dinners together at home and last time I moved, a little army materialized.

If you were looking for reasons to shit on the gig economy (and I would have nothing against it) you could find really better reasons.

<comment><USER9> Literally as I was about to reply to you, the doorbell rang and the Uber Eats person dropped off the stuff. They said "thank you" and that was the extent of our interaction.

Most of the people in my building under 60 don't know ther upstairs neighbors, or even on the same floor. The streets, once filled with people, are mostly empty. People rarely write letters or postcards and visit less often than before. Dating communication has texting instead of voice (takes too long when you're multitasking). Heck even with birthday wishes - once thoughtful calls have been replaced with facebook posts where you don't even look at the person's wall.

If you really think it's just me, compare photos of the 50s to now. Also here are studies and statistics:

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

[http://www.wired.com/2014/02/outsourcing-humanity- apps/](http://www.wired.com/2014/02/outsourcing-humanity-apps/)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has- the...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the- smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/)

[https://theconversation.com/with-teen-mental-health- deterior...](https://theconversation.com/with-teen-mental-health- deteriorating-over-five-years-theres-a-likely-culprit-86996)

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2018/05/01/6065885...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2018/05/01/606588504/americans-are-a-lonely-lot-and-young-people-bear- the-heaviest-burden)

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-beat-the-blues-visits-must- be...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-beat-the-blues-visits-must-be-real-not- virtual-1464899707)

<comment><USER11> I have heard people complain that everyone is glued to their phone these days while riding public transit. But humans are easily bored and want _something_ to do. Here's a photo of a train full of people reading newspapers, what's the difference?

[https://www.raconteur.net/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/Digital...](https://www.raconteur.net/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/Digital-revolution-1-1280x720.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alternative source with multiple formats including an OCR'd text file: [https://archive.org/details/furby-source](https://archive.org/details/furby- source)

<comment><USER13> _The patent wrapper containing it was obtained and scanned by Sean Riddle (seanriddle.com)._

This is where it came from, in case anyone (including me) was wondering --- there are a handful of articles online claiming it was "leaked", but it doesn't appear to be so.

It is probably not coincidental that this marks the 20-year expiry of that patent.

Patents can have very interesting things in them, including source code. I can't find the reference now but I remember reading that a famous early calculator (TI? HP?) was reverse-engineered and emulated down to the transistor level because of the detailed chip layout and source code from a patent.

<comment><USER14> I was occasionally Googling the source code out of boredom, and one day this yielded a bannister.org post of Sean claiming he had obtained a scan of the source code from the USPTO.

I proceeded to contact him and he proceeded to scan and publish it in a few days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You could totally combine this with some ideas from the Tamagotchi Matrix [0] and create a virtual world of furbies.

[0] - [https://hackaday.com/2015/11/24/building-the-infinite- matrix...](https://hackaday.com/2015/11/24/building-the-infinite-matrix-of- tamagotchis/)

<comment><USER15> They made a heaven for emulated Tamagotchi! This makes me happy.

[http://tamahive.spritesserver.nl/](http://tamahive.spritesserver.nl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just ordered a print copy of this. Going to have a ritual burning of the Furby source at upcoming 90's nostalgia party.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if anyone could use this to improve on the Furby Organ?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o)

<comment><USER18> That guy is incredible; I've been a supporter for a while. He's also a hardware, not a software guy, so I strongly doubt he'd make use of it. He'd respect its existence and any derivatives or interfaces that might come out of it, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For those like me who don't know what Furby is:

"Furby is an American electronic robotic toy released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics. It resembles a hamster or owl-like creature and went through a period of being a "must-have" toy following its holiday season launch, with continual sales until 2000. Over 40 million Furbies were sold during the three years of its original production, with 1.8 million sold in 1998, and 14 million in 1999. Its speaking capabilities were translated into 24 languages."

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Emulator when!?

… "Furbulator"

Need it to sneeze when the build fails.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHbaBd3h0FU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHbaBd3h0FU)

</comment><comment><USER22> I really wish my wife hadn't gotten rid of her old original Furby. I'd love to "follow along" in the code while it's actually running.

</comment><comment> mewse-hn It would be really neat to have a "build a furby" kit with motors and chips you had to flash yourselves with this source code..

</comment><comment><USER23> An ex-girlfriend of mine worked for the company that works on the latest iterations of Furby. She wrote a lot of the lines that the Furby speaks, if I recall correctly. She loved to sit in on the voice recording sessions and hear the actors speak the lines. One of the voice actors was rather prominent and had done a lot of recognizable voices from various cartoons.

<comment><USER24> I build a system once for a furby-like product that was designed so that the voice talent could listen to all sorts of speech snippets, and, crucially, play them back over the exact same hardware as the final toy's. These 'golden ear' folks would pick the best (heavily compressed) speech that would be used in-product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I worked with Caleb Chung (designer of Furby) on the Pleo (Animatronic Dinosaur) project. It was much more sophisticated but that was also part of it's downfall. I worked on the VM (Pawn) that ran on it's ARM processor and would have allowed for user programming of new behaviors.

</comment><comment><USER26> If I remember correctly, the Furby was a deinstructioned 6502 copy, somewhat like the Ricoh NES processor.

<comment><USER27> It's definitely a 6502 looking at the source.

And the NES is a real 6502. They just made a couple very simple patches to the metal layer. Didn't want to pay for the patents on the BCD instructions AFAIR.

<comment><USER26> [http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2027](http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2027)

"The datasheet describes it as a 6502 instruction set, with an X register but no Y, and just 69 "instructions" (presumably opcodes, of which the 6502 has 151). It has a banked ROM architecture and just 128 bytes of RAM at $80 through $FF which "includes stack" \- so page one is folded onto page zero presumably."

 _

<comment><USER27> OK, it does look like a Sunplus SPC81A, like they said. Memory map, interrupts, I/O registers all match.

[http://www.ic72.com/pdf_file/-/428557.pdf](http://www.ic72.com/pdf_file/-/428557.pdf)

FWIW though, it doesn't loo like page one is an alias of page zero, but is instead unmapped. That's not the biggest deal in the world to the zero page the fixed stack page given that this is probably a totally different mask set than a regular 6502. I wonder if you can underrun the stack into the HW registers or if their stack pointer is only 7 bits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Due to lack of time, I resort to brute force ... YUK ..." \- (label Simon3 page A-60)

Same here :(

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone know what the Easter eggs in the Furby35 changelog entry are?

> _BURP ATTACK, SAY NAME, TWINKLE SONG, and ROOSTER LOVES YOU_

<comment><USER14> > Anyone know what the Easter eggs in the Furby35 changelog entry are?

They are well-known and documented almost everywhere.

The interesting thing the code does reveal, though, is that there were only 15 possible names, with this being extended to 24 later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seems like it is supposed to be cp437 but the font used to print this isn't.

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://exif.tools/https://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pd...](https://exif.tools/https://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> Just a friendly warning if you're on mobile: the PDF weighs in at 62MB...

<comment><USER33> It's 6.4 MB. But maybe the URL was changed?

<comment><USER34> Yes, it appears to have been "optimised" at some point. Anyone have the full- res original?

Edit: [https://archive.org/details/furby- source](https://archive.org/details/furby-source)

<comment><USER14> Yes, the OCRed version has a lower quality and is smaller. However, archive,org does preserve the original if you need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is that real?</comment>


Ask HN: Does YC always uses US C-Corp for their funded company? - <AUTHOR>

We are based outside of the US and it doesn't make much sense for us to incorporate in the US because of tax implications it would create.
Is this flexible at all? In our case it would be favorable in regards of taxes for both Y Combinator and us to not have a US C-Corp.
We want to incorporate Singapore instead. <comment><USER2> ..but, are you looking for investments? C-Corp has an advantage that allows you to have unlimited stakeholders. this can vary from individuals to Angels, VC's and institutional investors.

You're basically getting rid of any friction for a potential outside investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> This can be done with an incorporation in Singapore as well. My concern with a US C-Corp is that it will make the company liable for taxation in the US even if we do not operate from there. There will also be additional tax withholding when dividends are distributed to us (foreign founders).

Singapore has no tax withholding on dividends, so it doesn't change anything for the US investors in that regard.

I'm curious as to what the YC-funded company with foreign founders ended up doing.

We're interested to apply to be funded by YC and other US angels/VCs but incorporating in the US just doesn't feel very appealing in regards of taxation and additional paperwork.

<comment><USER3> I can't tell you about YC's preferences. And they come before everything I'm about to tell you, because when Mama's happy, everybody's happy (for certain financial values of Mama).

The comment about the business advantages of a corporation are spot on. Look at large publicly traded companies. worldwide, not just USA. That is what they are. If you have any other form of existence and you grow you will have to morph into a corporation anyway. Avoid friction where possible and start as a corporation.

Your concerns about taxation are also correct. Avoid the USA as much as possible. Especially if you are developing IP. IP owned by a US corporation and exploited outside the USA unnecessarily causes the "outside the USA" profit to be taxed in the USA. And transfer of IP from a US owner to a non-US owner is a deemed sale for tax, so exit from the USA can be expensive. At an extreme consider a domain name around which you develop a business. Moral of the story: you need some careful tax thinking while you're small and the stakes are low (therefore tax mistakes are cheap).

But there is a third consideration. US investors (like a VC) in offshore entities (like a Singapore corporation) face a shit-ton (that is a technical term defined in the US tax laws) (I kid, I kid) of tax paperwork and potential tax costs that can make them just say "Oh, fuck it. You want my money, play by my rules."

As a matter of fact IAAITL (I am an international tax lawyer).

@philiphodgen

SAs a matter of fact, IAA

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely want to avoid having my IP in the US. It doesn't make sense to us. I'd much rather have the IP owned by an offshore trust that licenses it to my operating company in Singapore.

But if it prevents us from raising capital in the Valley well... that's a problem. Especially if we are seeking small time investments at first where it would create a shit-ton of compliance requirements for the US angels.

Oh well...

<comment><USER3> Design your ideal business operation setup then reverse intothe tax constraints. That is a much more efficient process at your stage. Pretend paperwork and taxes don't exist for your Investors. You will manage that later. Tax and paperwork are overhead costs to be controlled, not key determinants for how you do business.

And don't use a trust to hold IP. There are exceptional use cases for trusts in a business context. It is probable that they don't apply to you. Use regular business entities. You are a business. Some day you will grow big and go public or get sold. Build accordingly. Don't do stuff where people say "WTF this is amateur hour" and start to doubt your judgment in other arenas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good advice, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did the latest macOS update (10.15.4) make trackpad scrolling weird? - <AUTHOR> My Macbook updated last night and I turned it on this morning to begin work, and suddenly scrolling with two fingers feels like mud. It's not just slower overall; it seems like there's some extra dampening happening unless you really give it a push. I.e., moving my fingers two centimeters goes more than twice as far as moving them one centimeter. But moving them one centimeter goes a much shorter distance than it used to.
I can't tell for sure, though, whether it's just my imagination. Anybody else experiencing this? It feels horrible and macOS doesn't give you any way to tweak scrolling behavior as far as I can tell. <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone else who comes here, I discovered that you can in fact change the scrolling speed, it's just buried in the Accessibility menu. Raising it a notch or two seems to have maybe fixed the problem? It's certainly less painful. Hard to say whether it's exactly the same as before; it's a very subjective thing.

Edit: It doesn't fix the problem, it just helps a little with dealing with it. They must've changed the inertia algorithm; things feel much "heavier" now. Really upsetting, as scrolling on Macbooks used to be exquisite.</comment>


Using Hadoop and HBase with Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://twitch.nervestaple.com/2012/01/12/clojure-hbase/ <comment><USER2> Thanks, that is an excellent article! One of my customers uses Clojure and HBase a lot, but that is not part of the project that I touch much. When I have time, I am going to try working through this example running HBase and Hadoop on my laptop in _developer_ _mode_. Most of my experience is running in developer mode and then using Elastic Map Reduce but I have read through 'HBase the Definitive Guide' and I am now feeling like kicking it up a notch and better learn how to run a cluster myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Were you planning to touch base with me about having forked my Clojure-HBase library, making changes, and adding novel new version numbers? First I've heard of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted a pull request to the Clojure Hadoop library earlier this week, I was hoping to get those changes pulled in first as your library depends on that library as well. No offense was intended.

<comment><USER3> OK, that's cool. I really was asking, you would be within the license rights. I try to keep all my libraries maintained, but sometimes don't have cause to work on some things for a while and things escape my notice.

Though as a footnote, there is no dependency on Clojure Hadoop, they work together without a dependency. I'd take a pull request if the vars that are being moved from defvar- to def have ^{:private true} added to their metadata.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, I can definitely do that. I'll get a pull request out to you tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please also have a look at something similar I've done which I called "hsk" (Hadoop Starter Kit):

<http://github.com/ekoontz/hsk/></comment>


I am not worthy of the depths of TAOCP - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-art-of-computer-programming-by-donald-knuth-82e275c8764f <comment><USER2> Well, unless you know your math, yes, you're not worthy (or rather, not prepared to be able to understand most of it).

It's also not some artifact from primitive eras of computing (as implied in some points). Computers today and in 20 years will still use the same algorithms, and have similar considerations.

That said, it's not for UI pixel pushers or middleware writers -- it's for the people writing the stuff that powers all of those things.</comment>


Show HN: Cherry2.0 – text classification without ML knowledge needed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Windsooon/cherry/ <comment><USER2> The pre-built model is a facinating insight to Chinese politics/society.

> Gamble / Porn / Political / Nomal (model='harmful')

Not sure what Nomal is, but 'Political' is considered harmful? I suppose they mean politics has the potential to be harmful. Would be interesting to see what material it was trained on (a cross section of pro and anti-CCP? pro-CCP would still be political, but then why would that need to be classified under a harmful model?)

> Lottery ticket / Finance / Estate / Home / Tech / Society / Sport / Game / > Entertainment (model='news')

Interesting bit here is that Lottery Tickets are included in news and yet gambling is included in harmful. Is the lottery not considered gambling in China? Or gambling just has the potential to be harmful, despite also being news?

<comment><AUTHOR> > but 'Political' is considered harmful?

It's hard to explain why 'Political' is considered harmful in China. Most of the Chinese companies try to avoid the political text classify problem by using a hashtable to store 'sensitive words'. One example would be we can't search '64g RAM' in Xianyu, which is one of the biggest c2c second-hand online markets developed from Alibaba because 64 indicate June 4th which is a special day in China.

> Would be interesting to see what material it was trained on (a cross section > of pro and anti-CCP? pro-CCP would still be political, but then why would > that need to be classified under a harmful model?)

Good question. It's quite subjective and no one knows the answer. Companies have to do lots of self-censorships. However, unlike porn or gamble. We don't have a standard here.

> Is the lottery not considered gambling in China?

Lottery ticket is gambling, but in China, we call it 福利彩票 which indicate the money will be used in charity. It's quite different from gambling on football or basketball and Lottery ticket

<comment><USER3> > June 4th which is a special day in China

Yes, that's one way to put it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey Windson, this is super cool, can't wait to try this out. Wish I had it 6 months ago at my last job when I was starting to build my own text classification system. I submitted a PR fixing the typos in the english translation, no promises that I got them all though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you @ngngngng, I will have a look at it soon :D

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have another pre-trained model for spam email classify in English. I didn't add it to cherry because I don't know if anyone need it. It will be great if someone can tell me what kind of pre-trained model they need so I can add it later.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why do people think any kind of "x for people with no knowledge of x" tool is a worthwhile idea? It reminds me of various cloud vendor ML offerings too. With ML, you _always_ need ML domain knowledge to (at minimum) understand the performance characteristics of the black box you're using, and (more often) also how to re-train/fine-tune/incrementally update as your use case's data distribution changes over time or your required performance characteristics change over time.

Like with AWS Rekognition where you're billed on raw usage, which makes no sense when what matters is going to be the precision & recall & false detection rate on _your_ data distribution (not whatever Amazon's team trains it on). How many true positives / false positives / etc. will you get on your data?

ML is uniquely poorly suited to be treated as just some API or just some black box library. I really wish people would stop popularizing footgun approaches to this!</comment>


Effortless UX Can Be a Happy Accident for Small Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.vocatys.com/blog/effortless-ux-can-be-a-happy-accident-for-small-businesses

<comment><USER2> So firing your IT people and making everyone do the work can do something for someone, or what? The article doesnt seem to come to a point besides a vague assurance of value.</comment>


At Rental Car Upstart, You'll Take a Silver Audi, or Walk - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/silvercar/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty excited about the possibility of having access to a decent car at a more affordable price. Hope these guys do really well.

</comment><comment><USER2> Brilliant. I've longed for something like this.</comment>


Minecraft Global Warming - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nsporillo/GlobalWarming <comment><USER2> While I like Minecraft a lot, unfortunately, in this game, it does no good. Minecraft is a game which completely ignores conservation of matter and energy, which is where you start with ecology.

I wish there was a game which would get the physical foundations right* so that the ecology could be put on as a topping. What I imagine is something like a Civilization, where each map cell would be like 1 km2 and you could define what industries would be in that cell (perhaps even design the content of each cell). Each cell would contain a little piece of civilization and/or nature. These cells would then exchange different materials with each other, according to conservation laws.

That could be used to educationally model ecology very nicely.

Most games of this type will focus on military and/or logistical challenges of civilization. But this game would focus on production chains, land/resource use and sustainability.

(*IMHO, the way to get the physical foundations right is to do proper accounting of materials. So in the game, you never really ever destroy anything, you just transform it. If you need to round a number for some reason, then it would become part of some global pool of "waste", from which it could be later retrieved by some industrial process.)

<comment><USER3> Sometimes when you make games too much like reality they become pointless because you could just take part in reality.

RPGs don't simulate pooping, normally, because who cares.

<comment><USER4> The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon?

<comment><USER5> Normally (i.e.: the vast majority of the time), games don't simulate pooping.

<comment><USER6> And Tetris isn't even that realistic.

<comment><USER5> I know the type of comment I'm about to make is discouraged here but...

That was really funny. Thanks for the laugh, needed that today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea for teaching in schools. I wonder if this works with Minecraft's Education edition? [0]

Its nice the readme goes into detail on some lesson plan ideas. Global warming is such an abstract problem and if you can tie it to individual's behaviors inside a (small) simulated world, it can be a very powerful teaching tool.

[0] [https://education.minecraft.net](https://education.minecraft.net)

<comment><USER8> Is education edition open source at least?. Because I don't think teaching proprietary software to kids is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> I tend to agree with you that there are problems with teaching kids how to use proprietary software like Microsoft Office, but this is a bit different.

It's not like Minecraft is a business tool that you're teaching to school kids, who will then go on to use it when they graduate. It's an educational tool.

This would be like complaining that Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Bill Nye the Science Guy are copyrighted videos.

<comment><USER8> Maybe I exaggerated a little bit, Minecraft is a good/decent idea, but it would be much better if it was free software.

I imagine the disappointment in the face of the bright kid of the class when he asks the teacher to see how the game actually works. Still, it's better than no game at all, I guess.

<comment><USER10> The modding community definitely has a very good idea of how the game actually works, and there is a fair amount of documentation to that effect. The Forge sources are also pretty enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Currently, a tree growth will instantly reduce CO2 levels so players can > commercially farm trees while still reducing emissions. This is not ideal.

This sounds right to me. Having trees which keep reducing carbon levels without any effort would mean that low levels of burning have no effect on CO2.

It's as if a unit of wood was gathering ever more and more carbon, but only released a fraction upon burning.

<comment><USER12> The CO2->O2 process of plants puts the carbon inside the plant. So plants can only reduce carbon in the atmosphere if they are cumulatively increasing in mass. So steady-state farming operations will not decrease carbon in the atmosphere.

[Edit] The tree farm in isolation does not help with CO2 - but using wood in ways that preserve it (e.g. for furniture) does.

<comment><USER13> The ecology of this issue seems more complicated than prevailing ideas about it, eg:

Study finds fungi responsible for most carbon sequestration in northern forests. [1]

"... they found that 47 percent of soil carbon found on large island samples came about due to fungi, as did a whopping 70 percent of carbon in small island soil samples. Thus far, the team is only able to guess why there are such differences in the soils, but theorize it's likely due to differences in decomposition rates.

The amount of carbon stored in northern forests and how, is important because such trees cover approximately 11 percent of the Earth's surface and recent research has calculated that they hold approximately 16 percent of all worldwide sequestered carbon. "

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2013-03-fungi-responsible-carbon- seque...](https://phys.org/news/2013-03-fungi-responsible-carbon- sequestration-northern.html)

<comment><USER14> I don't see how measurements of "soil carbon" could be counting the carbon that's sequestered in lumber.

<comment><USER15> Trees eventually fall over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really like this. I've wanted climate effects in MC for a long time.

I'd like to see mod support. Different machines should have different CO2 output (eg coal coke oven, coal generators). It would change the incentives of switching to green energy production, like electric machines with solar panels.

</comment><comment><USER17> Might as well add forest fires, in theory forests should get dryer (longer time under packed ice, hotter summers). Don't know if this mechanism exists on the game.

<comment><USER18> There are no concepts of seasons in MC, just day/night cycles. There is weather and some relationship of weather to biomes. I think that's it.

I wonder how it handles unloaded chunks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be a challenge to efficiently implement all of the in-game mechanics, especially to unloaded chunks. My ideas so far are to apply most of the effects once a chunk is reloaded, but I could also queue some changes to be applied later - even reloading the chunk to make some changes.

<comment><USER19> Could you keep some running score of the entire carbon footprint of the current chunk? Then if the player moved into a new chunk, you would use the old chunk's last score as having some effect on the current chunk?

I guess that wouldn't account for continued tree growth or burning in the chunk you just left though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Might also be interesting to add a tech mod (EnderIO, Mine factory, etc) and make it so that every bit of RF (Redstone Flux, similar to kilojoules) generated from burning things causes CO2 emissions.

<comment><USER21> In a way it feels as though most tech mods are biased towards sustainable energy already. It's common for end game power to be impossibly efficient solar, or nuclear type power sources which produce conveniently not so dangerous waste. In the really ludicrous modpacks the end game is usually infinite everything in some form.

It is after all a game, if Thaumcraft's insanity mechanic drove your character to suicide or the Space mods actually left you adrift in empty space forever if you make the mistake of jumping off a space station that would not be fun.

<comment><USER22> I don't know, there is a small but noticeable audience for permadeath hard as nails games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really surprised I haven't seen Eco[0] mentioned anywhere here in the comments. It's a Minecraft-like built to focus on ecology and environment stuff.

[0] [https://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/](https://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/)

</comment><comment><USER24> That's quite an interesting plugin.

Rather annoying it won't work with Forge, would be interesting to have to deal with this when your base runs on gigantic coal boilers from some of the Tech mods or using Magic to offset your CO2 footprint.

I might setup a server with this and limit resources to see how it turns out with a couple players (build a wall around 0x0, 256 by 256 blocks long, delete everything else) once some resources turn scarce.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is pretty cool. And it could be the first of other climate changing effects, like changing albedo based on reflectiveness of the landscape, or humidity and atmospheric dynamics leading to clouds, leading to more scattering/trapping/etc. I guess it might get hard to compute at some point, since the serious climate models don't run on cellphones, and they don't even try to run at "Minecraft block" resolution, but still.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow. I can see a few other things to increase the scariness..

1\. Boreal forests catch fire on hotter/higher CO2 (like they are in California now)

2\. Temperate areas get terraformed to deserts if possible

3\. Health heals slower, or not at all on high CO2 due to environmental effects

4\. Sources of fire increase their sparking distance in which flammable things catch on fire easier. Encourages easier spread of forest fires and player- crafted fires.

5\. Water turns acidic, and deals slow damage. (Like the coral reefs)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the ideas, I will definitely look to incorporate them!

One of my current challenges is coming up with a balanced model, since I dont have any real server player data to analyze. Of course it will be configurable, but i'd like for the default models not spiral to a destroyed world quickly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Really like the diagram[1] (which I found the source in [2]. Another one on Wikipedia[3]. What's not clear is how is this changing over time? Given the greenhouse gas narrative (which I accept), how has the "back radiation" changed over time? Over the last century is it +0.1%, +1%?

1: [https://camo.githubusercontent.com/55b611b5709a0e90b7e9ee319...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/55b611b5709a0e90b7e9ee319dff739107939c11/68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f6148644a7858632e706e67)

2: [http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/BAMS...](http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/BAMSmarTrenberth.pdf)

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#/media/File:The- NASA-Earth%27s-Energy-Budget-Poster-Radiant-Energy-System-satellite-infrared- radiation-fluxes.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/](https://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure I like the concept of carbon offsets. In the real world, someone has to plant the trees, not just buy perri-air.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think a good way to keep things realistic is for the offsets to be fulfilled by other players. If someone is too busy generating in-game currency, they can just pay newer players or those looking for money to plant lots of trees.

<comment><USER29> That'd be better. Now you have a currency and an economy. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's been a few years since I played, but IIRC it is trivial to quickly or instantly (?) grow trees with bonemeal. I'd expect you could pretty easily sequester enormous amounts of carbon in chests full of logs (or maybe even toss the logs into lava). Sounds like a fun + ambitious project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Preventing industrial farm abuse is an outstanding issue. I think penalizing bonemeal usage might work, since keeping track of all planted trees and calculating their footprint is a very expensive task. If players have to sit and let the sapling grow on it's own, I think industrial farms might not be overpowering.

<comment><USER16> Eliminate the growth effect of bonemeal on trees. It would require more land to have a tree farm. When you plant a large tree farm you eliminate the need for bonemeal anyway. The probability of one sapling growing each second approaches 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So the first step in reducing co2 is to cut down all the trees?

I understand the why, but limiting it to new growth breaks from reality. Co2 reduction farms will be barren fields of saplings, atop mob grinders to create feralizer.

<comment><USER32> First bug report. Haha, I did look at the screen funny when it said saplings reduce carbon immediately.

<comment><USER31> Better answer: eliminate coal. All furnaces run on wood. Carbon neutral. People can now grow and sell wood. But wont be many trees around. Ya, green energy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This sounds exactly like Factorio's pollution dynamic. It's a good system actually. Makes you balance production in your factories vs enemies coming and attacking you.

<comment><USER34> Nothing 4-8 laser towers with walls around them can't handle though :)

<comment><USER35> I agree. Factorio pollution only really matters early game pre-military science even on death worlds.

I wish survival was more of a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is incredibly cool and makes me want to play minecraft again.

</comment><comment> GuB-42 Acid rain?

AFAIK acid rain and global warming are separate things. Global warming is caused mostly by CO2, while acid rains are caused mostly by SO2 and NOx.

SO2 and NOx are very nasty due to their tendency to form sulfuric and nitric acid, hence acid rains. However, they also cause global cooling by reflecting incoming radiation.

It looks like that mod is not really about global warming but pollution in general, which is fine, but calling it "global warming" does more harm than good IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Acid Rain was more of less one of the suggestions I've gotten from players on the server I frequent.

You are right though, we should keep things entirely factually accurate. I removed the acid rain section and scratched the plans to implement it.

<comment><USER37> Nitrogen oxides are naturally caused by combustion (and volcanism), so it makes sense to me to have it. It's dependent only on the heat of the burn so wood and coal fires create quite a lot. Coal also produces a lot of sulfur oxides.

Hydrogen-heavy fuels like light oil and natural gas are the only fuels that burn cool enough to not produce significant amounts of acid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Imagine Earth" [1] is a game about competing firms engaging in colonization of a shared planet which heavily incorporates pollution and global warming into the gameplay...I've sunk many hours. Players need to balance economic development with reducing emissions, and have to pay an emission fee if they exceed a limit.

[1] [https://www.imagineearth.info/](https://www.imagineearth.info/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm trying to think of ways to "destroy" CO2 that aren't ruled out by the readme-description, ex:

1\. Burn a tree in-place.

2\. Harvest wood blocks, and destroy them (lava, fire, cactus, TNT or creepers, abandoned until disappear.)

3\. Same as above, but throwing stacks of wood-derived items like sticks, doors, boats, etc.

4\. A wood-derived item which is _placed_ and then destroyed by item-specific mechanics (boat crash, tool breakage)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think sequestering carbon in decoration, blocks, or items is okay.

Burning a tree however should incur some penalty, after all - wildfires are a positive feedback loop in reality and it'd be trivial to detect.

Might have to deviate from the idea that the global carbon score is the sum of everyones individual carbon score, since there will certainly be lots of events which contribute CO2 without player intervention.

Thanks!

<comment><USER39> Always happy to nitpick :P

In terms of minimizing exploits, perhaps the easiest approach is to pre- compute a carbon score for all blocks and items, and then focus on catching all the situations where those blocks/items can be destroyed. By default, assume 100% of the carbon goes back into the biosphere, and then write special-case logic for stuff like boats breaking into wood.

A few more what-ifs:

* If players toss wood-bits into the deep sea to disappear (as opposed to letting them disappear on land) should that count as sequestering it? Or would that almost be too easy?

* I forgot about trades -- if a villager provides/accepts wood, perhaps it is best to assume it was just freshly grown or is about to be burnt.

* Other dimensions. What should happen if players make a gate into a room in the Nether and do all their smelting there? Alas, we don't have that option in real life :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's actually a whole minecraft-esque game being built with sustainability / human footprint in mind.

It's much more complex than this mod I believe but still in early release.

[http://www.strangeloopgames.com/how-to-save-the- environment-...](http://www.strangeloopgames.com/how-to-save-the-environment- by-letting-kids-destroy-it/)

</comment><comment><USER41> It would be great if one of the "climate damages" that takes place at 14.5° C (and a little more at each higher temp) was desertification. I think grassland turning into desert would be one of the more visible effects of global warming.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is certainly an option we'd like to support. The temperature thresholds and effects will be configurable, loaded from a file into memory.

The sample damages I provided are mostly for illustration so development can have some guidance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Allow players to purchase "carbon offsets" which instantly reduce their > personal carbon score

I'd prefer buying carbon offsets doing exactly nothing as in real life. It is a cheat that's not benefiting anyone.

<comment><USER43> They do something, but I think it's not correct in Minecraft. In real life it increases costs which means lowering that cost has a benefit to the bottom line (i.e. a well meaning employee can justify this to people measured by profits/costs/etc.).

However, in MC where is the profit and does a carbon credit actually encourage players to try to __do something __seems interesting thing to see.

<comment><USER44> Well, one could make them arbitrarily unfair. Purchasing a carbon credit could reduce a player's own emission score but increase a random opponent's score by the same amount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Planned Features list seems to omit the opportunity to integrate climate change deniers as a gameplay element...

<comment><USER46> Does this game even exist?

<comment><USER2> Democracy 3? You can have green policies and there is a "motorists" interest group which opposes them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> For another game where you need to deal with CO2 pollution in a very interesting way see Oxygen Not Included.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm not sure if I'm missing it here, but what are the negative environmental effects in-game?

<comment><USER49> From way down at the bottom:

14.0 C - No effects [Baseline]

14.5 C - | Minor changes |

15.0 C - | Localized Acid Rain | Some mobs spawn less | Some mobs spawn more |

16.0 C - | +1 Sea Level Rise | Tropical fish die |

17.0 C - |Global Acid Rain | Some trees no longer grow | +1 Sea Level Rise | Coral Reefs die |

18.0 C - |Noxious Area Potion Effect Clouds | Farm yields decrease | +2 Sea Level Rise | All Snow/Ice melts |

19.0 C - | All fish die | Random Forest Fires | Slower Health Regen |

20.0 C - "Devastation".. Highly polluted chunks get permanent severe area potion effects, forest fires, etc

<comment><USER48> Thanks, I didn't notice it tucked into the bottom there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that was hastily put together. I updated the readme with a real table for readability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I like how pollution is handled in factorio

<comment><USER51> how is it handled?

<comment><USER52> Looks like it attracts larger numbers of aliens to attack you: [https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution](https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution)

This seems...not quite the right message to send people. (Though it's not exactly _wrong_ when you take into account climate refugees and resource wars)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I love this

</comment><comment><USER54> This is how i dream to do!

</comment><comment><USER55> I really liked the idea and encouraged me to look into Minecraft Plugin development as well. Cool Project!</comment>


Strange Loop 2009 Keynote: Minimalism in Computing (Slides) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/strange-loop-2009-keynote-minimalism-in-computing

<comment><USER2> Flattered to see these on here, but the slides won't tell you much without the accompanying talk. The video will be up on DZone before too long, along with the rest of the great talks at Strange Loop 2009.

</comment><comment><USER3> I viewed these slides three times. Click the Notes tab

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking forward to a video of the talk.</comment>


With tables turned, Democrats now oppose gerrymandering - <AUTHOR> https://calmatters.org/articles/tables-turned-democrats-now-oppose-gerrymandering/ <comment><USER2> Uhm... they've been fighting gerrymandering for decades.

<comment><USER3> Is this strenuous agreement with the article? 1981 (the most prominent date in the article) is literally decades ago.</comment></comment>


Rubyspec is dead, long live Rubyspec - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/nateberkopec/11dbcf0ee7f2c08450ea

<comment><USER2> As cool as Ruby is as a language, the politics are very strange. As Javascript VM performance starts to become orders of magnitude faster than any Ruby VM, there is less and less reason to invest time writing code in Ruby, particularly with superb syntax options like coffee and cljs, and better and better systems level alternatives (Rust, Swift, Go, etc... )

Ruby/Sinatra used to be my favorite combo, but since Rails started going off in a weird direction (anti-js, asset pipeline, choosing AR over DM, insecure defaults pre rails 4) there has been less good stuff written in Ruby to draw from to augment Sinatra... Rails has become a rapidly changing but rarely improving API. That Ruby 2.2 breaks Rails 3.2 is just one more reason to look elsewhere.

I question why anyone would start a new project using Ruby at all. This is not a troll, I really don't think there are significant benefits anymore.

<comment><USER3> Of course it's very much a subject for debate, but I personally don't know a web development platform that is as fast to get off the ground and as complete as Rails. Some people are certainly trying, but I don't think anyone beats Rails in these two areas yet.

You specifically mentioned starting a new project. I think that's where Ruby and Rails are the strongest. Maintaining a large system might be better done using some other language and framework.

<comment><USER2> _I personally don 't know a web development platform that is as fast to get off the ground and as complete as Rails_

I think this is an aesthetic preference. I personally think that the simplest and cleanest design is a combination of something like Sinatra/Express to implement a simple API and React on the client to do component-ized UI.

Much of the "completeness" of rails is simply not needed when client side components can keep a bit of state around for housekeeping and make the occasional API call when data actually needs to move between client and server.

<comment><USER4> Not every new project is a SPA. It's completely possible to start a new project in 2015, which basically is a _WEB SITE_ (with mobile views and everything, but basically a poor old website), in this case Rails is still the best option.

<comment><USER2> You mean with server rendered HTML?

IMHO the component abstraction provided by something like react leads to much cleaner separation of concerns, better boundaries between parts of the system, and easier to change/understand code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My feelings of late have been:

1\. Ruby is not built from the ground up for concurrency and eventing. You can use a number of great tools to effect that, but it isn't built for that from the ground up.

2\. Rails continues to forge ahead with weird JS and asset management at the Ruby community's peril. We need to be taking a very serious look at tools like:

[http://scorchedrb.com/](http://scorchedrb.com/) \- which provides a (more) correct pattern for routing

and things like

[https://github.com/apotonick/trailblazer](https://github.com/apotonick/trailblazer)

which provides an alternative code organization method which might make more sense.

Most of our web apps are essentially state machines and the only framework which acknowledges it is:

[https://github.com/seancribbs/webmachine- ruby](https://github.com/seancribbs/webmachine-ruby)

3\. Ruby needs to be faster. The community needs to get library support for 2.2 ASAP. We need to use Fibers and we need to use Celluloid.

[https://github.com/celluloid/celluloid/](https://github.com/celluloid/celluloid/)

4\. I'd love to see in 2015 less new projects (fragmentation?), but more forking and more collaboration. That goes for the JS world as well.

<comment><USER6> 1\. JRuby's definitely built for concurrency, though I suspect you're kind of leaning towards Node with this comment. It's certainly true that Ruby doesn't comprehensively do reactor-pattern stuff as well as Node, but threading on JRuby works wonderfully well.

2\. I definitely agree about Rails and the asset pipeline. It feels awkward and kludgey and particularly in relation to JS I'd like to see code organization and tooling stepped up; many of the apps we're writing today are heavily Javascript, and it's a lot of work to maintain a large JS app on top of a Rails app right now. That's not to say that it's prohibitive, but Rails built a name for itself by making the drudgery less painful, and this is an open pain point.

3\. Agreed, though JRuby is again a trailblazer here; boot-up time sucks (I'm working on that over Christmas break!), but 9k and the Truffle+Graal projects are huge leaps forward, and once JIT kicks in, JRuby's long-term performance is really excellent. MRI continues to make strong advances here, as well; the discussions around MRI 3.0 have hinted at some really good stuff coming down the pipe.

4\. Can you elaborate on what specifically you mean? Ruby as a whole is absolutely stronger for the "new projects" (RBX, JRuby, Topaz); while issues like this can become divisive, I'll argue that RBX has been a net positive to the Ruby community, both because of RubySpec (a different perspective is valuable, even if it doesn't become the official spec) and because a new approach to a problem generally ends up leaking improvements all over the ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> We're on the same page here, especially re #2. And I think it's high time I give JRuby a real shot.

As for #4, I'm all for those mentioned, low-level (and fascinating) projects. And for projects surrounding programming paradigms e.g. Celluloid, EM... I was really referring to libraries, but on second thought #4 isn't that a big of an issue in Ruby-land, it's mostly a JS world problem.

I suppose my particular fear is that instead of re-organizing code within Rails as an example, the community will opt to make another new framework instead, increasing fragmentation.

<comment><USER6> This is somewhat off topic, but since you mention wanting to try JRuby, I'll give you my spiel. :) I'm a recent JRuby convert (I've only started using it heavily in the last year), but I can't say enough good about it. It's mature, reliable, and really easy to work with. The Java code is extremely easy to read (especially compared to MRI), and integrating Java libraries with your Ruby code is trivial - you don't even have to write bindings, you just require a jar and then start referencing constants.

This _really_ shines in places where CRuby has lagged behind - places like numeric computing and natural language processing. The library support is iffy at best, and usually the answer is "use python", but when you can just drop in a Java library and call it a day, stuff gets really fun.

Profiling a live JRuby app with JMX and jvisualvm is _amazing_ \- I can attach to a live, remote production instance and perform heap dumps, start sample profiling, or even execute Ruby code! Going to back to fix our MRI apps has left me very discontent with the state equivalent tooling :)

My primary complaint with Java is that it's verbose and lends itself to overcomplex design, but I absolutely _love_ that I can write high-performance code in Java and then write all my business logic in Ruby - it's the best of both worlds. To illustrate, I wrote Manticore ([https://github.com/cheald/manticore](https://github.com/cheald/manticore)) to solve my persistent discontent with the state of HTTP clients in Ruby; the Apache Commons HTTP components are extremely comprehensive, fast, powerful, etc, but the API is horrific. I spent a bit of time wrapping them up in a nice idiomatic Ruby interface, and ended up with an HTTP client that destroys the pure Ruby clients for features and performance, and even beats out even Typhoeus (which is really just a set of libcurl bindings) - and all in only 700 lines of code!

Finally, the JRuby community is _so_ welcoming and inclusive. #jruby on Freenode is populated with all the project core members, and they are very willing to answer questions and help out. headius (Charles Nutter) has turned around bugfixes for issues in _minutes_ (in addition to being extremely friendly and helpful), and they as a group have made it very easy for me to contribute to the project. I've gotten a few dozen pull requests accepted into master in the last few months, and thoroughly enjoy working on it. It has easily been one of my best experiences in open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Matz doesn't do threading, so we don't do threading. Matz doesn't do performance, so we don't do performance. Matz doesn't do rubyspec, so we don't do rubyspec.</comment>


How Apple's iOS Fragmentation Problems Distort Design Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/how-apples-ios-fragmentation-problems-distort-design-thinking/ <comment><USER2> Interested to hear HN feedback on these points</comment>


Sticker Works Like an Anti-Mosquito Force Field - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/design/2013/08/this-little-sticker-works-like-an-anti-mosquito-forcefield/

<comment><USER2> Judging from the mentioned 2011 paper [0], it makes everything smell like CO2 to the mosquito. So, it can't track anything at "long" distances. While DEET works by neurologically making things "smell different" [1].

[0] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7349/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7349/full/nature10081.html)

[1] [http://phys.org/news/2011-09-deet- insects.html](http://phys.org/news/2011-09-deet-insects.html)</comment>


Envaulted Is A Cashback Program On Steroids - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/20/envaulted-is-a-cashback-program-on-steroids/

<comment><USER2> does anyone know if this will work with a Chase Freedom card? Theoretically you already get the 1% cashback there too.</comment>


The Striking Relationship Between Gun Safety Laws and Firearm Deaths - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/striking-relationship-between-gun-safety-laws-and-firearm-deaths/4902/

<comment><USER2> The methodology here is incredibly flawed.

(1) Legislative strength is based solely on the number of laws, not those laws content or intent. It's an objective measurement, sure, but having a dozen laws related to firearms is not inherently more gun control than three laws.

(2) The quartiles aren't. Q1 is 0-2 laws (3); Q2 is 3-4 laws (2); Q3 is 5-8 laws (4); Q4 is 9-24 laws (16). So a random number between 0 and 24 is twice as likely to fall into Q3 than Q2, and is about twice as likely to fall into Q4 than any of the other three? Interesting that a pro gun control group would try to paint the states in Q1-3 as outliers.

I live in PA, which somehow has the same legislative strength rating as California and Massachusetts. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Purchasing my hand gun took all of half an hour, most of that waiting for the background check to finish. To get a concealed carry permit (which admittedly varies by county) took a single- page application, $20 and a week or so for the paperwork.

This is just a joke.

<comment><USER3> Wow, I'd been hearing brief analysis of how bad it was, but these details.

I've lived in Massachusetts, _before_ their "assault weapons" ban (seeing it coming was one reason I left). Walk outside of your house with one round of ammunition without having a may issue license is a mandatory one year in jail. _Mens rea_ (guilty mind) is not required. Heck, that license, which used to be shall issue and supposedly was good for life, was changed by their AW ban law to expiring and requiring renewing, and a number of gun owners who did't get the word got arrested.

The worst you can say about PA from what I've heard is that all handgun purchases must go through the instant check system, and Philadelphia doesn't like to play ball with the laws. I heard a while ago that it had the nation's highest rate of concealed carry licenses, obviously a shall issue state. CA and MA are may issue, which in practice is seldom issue outside of rural areas. San Francisco issued exactly one license last year, to a jeweler ... who they named....</comment></comment>


Sound can be excessive police force, federal court rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40585221/piercing-sound-can-be-excessive-police-force-federal-court-rules <comment><USER2> What citizens need is a bill protecting the natural right of proportional response. If the cops use a deafening or blinding device against protesters, then protesters should have the right to use a similar device against the cops.

Cops would think twice about injuring people if they had some skin in the game.

<comment><USER3> If police use firearms on the crowd, the crowd is entitled to shoot back?

Is there a solid legal distinction between protesters and other classes of people whom it is the police force's job to inhibit, like bank robbers and drug dealers?

Even if there is, I don't see this happening....

<comment><USER4> If police shoot someone without probable cause, do they get booked for murder?

<comment><USER5> If it's that straightforward, yes.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I may just be an irritable old man, but I'd be delighted to see more campaigning for the public right to a quiet environment.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article should have made clear that 6 of the 9 counts were dismissed and that this was a 3-judge panel ruling, not _en banc_.</comment>


A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.weareroli.com/ <comment><USER3> Although the comments seem against it, I'm for it - I've played piano (and organ) for some 45 years now. You have to remember that the piano is mainly a percussion instrument, and there are few options to temper the sound, outside of sustain and such.

Synthesizers have had the same capability as shown in the video, but you had to reach to the side and twirl a wheel to get the same effect, which detracts from the playability.

Initially, this is not suited for traditional classical (probably better for jazz) but who's to say someone couldn't write a new classical based on this instrument (although goodness knows what the musical notation would be).

</comment><comment><USER4> I love the idea of creating new instruments that are sensitive to new and different parameters. I think the seaboard is pretty cool, and it looks like there are some things you can do with it that you can't do with traditional midi keyboards (velocity modulation after initial keypress- i think that is called aftertouch in midi land) and key specific pitch bending.

But it also reminds me of one reason why analogue (acoustic) instruments can so incredibly powerful: they are ultimately extensible! You don't need to explicitly describe how the thing will react to input, and its not ignorant (though maybe not very responsive) of any physical input. Throughout history, people have been continually discovering new techniques on so many different instruments, even though some of those instrument's designs have changed very little. This is, of course, all predicated on a good initial instrumental design, but it makes me appreciate the wonders of, say, a guitar or piano even more.

<comment><USER5> I agree that a great analogue instrument is still greater, but here, given an electric predicate, this works with what keyboardists already can do, and makes it not just a percussion instrument (piano, harpsichord), or a timed note (synth), or a timed note with initial attack control (tracker action pipe organ). In other words pactically the same interface provides much more control of more variables much more easily. Whether great playing, music making and improvising can and does ensue is another issue, but I hope so.

<comment><USER4> Its true, you can kind of think of this thing as a pareto improvement over the current midi keyboards (if you dont mind the different action)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People might want to check out Roger Linn, Ed Goldfarb, Geert Bevin (I'd really like to have a continuum and eigenharp), and actuated instruments site.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s-neJs8IY>

<http://actuatedinstruments.com/>

______________________

Also "That 1 guy" "Haaken continuum", Wessel's touchpads (a better Kaossilator, if you will, and Fluid Piaano

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ci6TmR29OI>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnBhR8RLJN8>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_mtCZqN0Ms>

<http://thefluidpiano.com/>

_______________________

(I don't have any nonstandard instruments (except maybe fretless guitar) but I've thought about this as amateur player of piano/keys, guitar, strings (cello), woodwinds and former mallet percussionist, how you could combine mouthpiece and foot controllers with keyboard, how to do glisses, tremolo, vibrato etc, i.e. shape the attack/decay, timbre and pitch (continuously or as in Don Ellis' quarter tone music) like you can with cello and clarinet

</comment><comment><USER7> I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. (not being snarky, its just noticeable is all) I think its great that people are doing alternative instruments like this. For a while we've had synthesizers providing the tone generator for recreated inputs (like the laser harp) but this gives us more input options.

There is another such "keyboard" which is more like a horizontal bass/chello fret than a keyboard. I played around on it when it was being demoed at Guitar Center in San Jose. As a former Trombone player it felt similar in the 'feel' of the intonation was there rather than explicitly hitting a particular key. And the ability to 'slide up' or 'slide down' into the correct not if you were close but not quite. Something I've never been able to do on a keyboard (although I have heard folks do that)

One of my instruments is an Arrick synth [1] which has a 1V/octave keyboard (and input) which is handy for prototyping unusual types of input.

[1] <http://www.synthesizers.com>

<comment><USER8> > _I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being > played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. (not > being snarky, its just noticeable is all)_

So you noticed that but you didn't notice that there is a track playing, and the performer lays another on top of it?

<comment><USER7> No I did not notice that they were in the process of laying down additional tracks. Here on Sunday the site seems to be down but the youtube video (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM>) it still there. Listening to the upper register track (the 'white' room) I still feel the mis-match between my ear and my eyes (ignoring the base line). Its not a big deal I just noted it. There has been a lot of 'fakery' in the synth market and so that twitch is perhaps stronger than it would be for other things.

When I had a Yamaha DX-11 for a while I also had the Yamaha breath controller (trying to recapture my trombone days I guess :-) but was never really satisfied with it. Later I really wanted to try a Morrison Digital Trumpet [1] but really really had a hard time spending $4K on something I might not use more than a couple of times.

[1] <http://www.morrisondigitaltrumpet.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They've got excellent PR, but they're not doing anything particularly novel. They're advertising a solution to a long-solved part of the puzzle, but saying nothing about the really difficult bit of electronic music control - interoperability.

A quick bit of synthesiser history:

Traditional electronic keyboards sense how hard you hit the key with two switches, set a distance apart vertically. Measure the time between each switch closing and you have one side of v=d/t. Simple, cheap and all you need for controlling an emulation of a piano.

That was improved by adding aftertouch, a simple pressure strip underneath the keybed which provided an additional axis of control. That approach evolved quite quickly, peaking in 1976 with Yamaha's CS-80 synthesiser, which could sense both vertical and horizontal pressure on each key polyphonically. This was a hugely elaborate and expensive instrument but was extremely expressive, as best heard on Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner.

Progress in this field came to a grinding halt in 1983, with the release of MIDI, an interoperable standard for electronic music instruments that became completely ubiquitous. MIDI was a tremendous breakthrough and made all sorts of previously very difficult things quite easy, but it had all of the usual failings of a successful standard.

MIDI has left us stuck with design decisions from 1983, the worst of these being the incredibly low data-rate. MIDI is an 8-bit protocol, operating at 31.25kbaud. The standard doesn't include any means of transmitting expression data other than velocity on a per-note basis. You can bend the pitch of all the notes currently sounding, but not one note out of a chord. If you try and send too much controller information over a channel, the timing goes to pot as you run out of bandwidth.

There's an obvious problem of platform lock-in, which nobody seems able to break - a controller of this type can't usefully control any existing sound source. There are numerous extant controllers of similar sophistication to the Seaboard, but they've all failed commercially because of their inability to usefully control existing sound generators.

The hoped-for solution to this problem is the Open Sound Control protocol, but this faces numerous problems. The most obvious is that MIDI is deeply entrenched, to the point that its shortcomings are rendered non-obvious to most musicians - our sense of the boundaries of electronic music are often inseperable from the limits of MIDI, so we don't often think about the sounds that we're unable to make with current technology. The other big issue is that of all reforms of old standards - an inability to manage scope and complexity.

The developers of OSC are obviously fearful of repeating the problems of MIDI, so they've gone in completely the opposite direction and designed a totally open-ended protocol. This has massively limited adoption of OSC by musicians, because it's extremely difficult to understand. A MIDI message is just a single byte and it's not too difficult to memorise the entire protocol - <USER2> the development of graphical computer-based sequencers, it was quite common to tidy up a recorded sequence of MIDI messages in a hex editor - any given MIDI message was just a single octet. OSC is designed to deal with every possible edge case, which of course makes it needlessly complex for the most common use-cases.

Controllers like these are doomed to niche appeal unless the manufacturers focus on the real problem - how to use the control data they generate in a manner which is both musically useful, and comprehensible to the musician.

The last major attempt was the Eigenharp, which used a bespoke software suite with a number of software instruments specifically designed for the instrument. It garnered a great deal of attention in the popular press, but nobody has made any worthwhile music with it yet.

<comment><USER10> _MIDI is an 8-bit protocol, operating at 31.25kbaud._

False. That is but one transport option for MIDI data. USB-MIDI is another, much higher bit-rate protocol.

 _The standard doesn't include any means of transmitting expression data other than velocity on a per-note basis._

False. MIDI provides polyphonic aftertouch as a standard (i.e. not NRPN or SysEx) message type.

 _If you try and send too much controller information over a channel, the timing goes to pot as you run out of bandwidth._

Again false, if you're using a more modern transport such as USB-MIDI.

 _A MIDI message is just a single byte_

False; this tells me you haven't read the MIDI spec. This is not true of either the messages themselves (which are generally multi-byte messages) nor of the message types (which are a single nibble for the basic types, 7 bits for the controller types, and 14 bits for each of RPN and NRPN messages).

<comment><USER11> Many OSC based applications for the monome[1] were ported to work with the copy-paste-avalanche of grid controllers (Launchpad, APC). The USB-MIDI data rate limitations are clearly visible when trying to change the state of 64 keypads at once. 64 individual signals with 8ms latency completely break the flow[2], compared to a single optimized OSC message.

Your counterpoints are correct, but MIDI is a better choice over OSC only due it's widespread compatibility. However, it's pointless to stick to USB-MIDI in the long run. It couldn't support the more complex DIY controller requirements as far as 6 years ago, so I can only imagine the chasm increasing.

A new inter-operable standard that surpasses MIDI and OSC was envisioned back on 2009 called ioFlow[3], but unfortunately it hasn't taken off yet.

P.s.: The website the story refers to is returning a 403, so my comment is here only to support the claim, that starting out with MIDI in 2013 is not the best idea.

Edit: Now that the site is online, I can respond to the product itself. It's probably a good fit for keyboard musicians, but I'd recommend the true hacker to pick up this indy marvel: Madrona SoundPlane-A[4], which has been in development for approximately 4 years. The concept is very, very similar. But it's not bound to the linear piano scale like the Roli. You can play it like guitar frets or better yet, explore 2 dimensional note layouts, such as the ones invented by Euler[5], popularized by Kaosscilator and now Ableton Push. Also, it runs on OSC, so you can enjoy the low latency, and build your own paradigms by transforming the signals in Cycling 74 Max or other OSC capable programming environments.

[1] <http://monome.org/>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)>

[3] <http://ioflow.berlios.de/>

[4] <http://madronalabs.com/hardware>

[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz>

<comment><USER12> > The USB-MIDI data rate limitations are clearly visible when trying to change > the state of 64 keypads at once. 64 individual signals with 8ms latency > completely break the flow[2], compared to a single optimized OSC message.

Can't agree enough. I picked up a Launchpad since it was cheap and looked fun to hack on. I wrote a Python module to talk to it and then watched it chugging along while writing a sequencer on it; the bandwidth just isn't there to do intelligent updating of the pads. It is a fun little device, though, and I can't wait to get my Push to continue the work (the protocol seems to be more sane, given what Ableton is doing with it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting product, really terrible website.

I know the rolling page layouts are popular these days, but in this case it just looks bad. Lots of transparency around text, which makes some of it hard to read or focus on.

The navigation at the top left should always display all the sections (I shouldn't have to mouse over the little cubes to reveal what they are).

When the nav text for "technology" passes over the blue background text quote area, it nearly disappears.

The grey block area with "what the press are saying" is some kind of twisted attempt at straining my eyes by putting tiny grey text on a grey block in a larger grey area. Why would anybody do that to text?

The we are ROLI block near the bottom is a transparent nightmare for the text meant to be read.

The form at the bottom at least pops out a bit, but still suffers from a heavy abuse of transparency with text on it.

<comment><USER14> I was astonished by the loading times. Click an article in the "News" section and it takes about 5-10 seconds (while looking at the huge spinner) to load. That's ages for one paragraph of text and a 900x600 .jpg. For a quick reader, the page takes longer to load than to read. That's not good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A professor I had in college created something very similar back in the 90's. He would have them in the lab occasionally and they were pretty interesting to play. <http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/>

<comment><USER16> He is my professor now. He showed a video of Dreamtheater with it on our first day.

<comment><USER12> Interestingly, Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater is involved with this product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A good interview by Rory Cellan Jones from the BBC: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21699459> This looks like an awesome product, in the real sense of the word.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seen this one a couple days ago and I honestly can't understand what the hype is all about. I've been playing the piano for 11 years now and I can't see myself or any classical pianist using this product. I'm aware that this is most likely not intended for classical musicians but still, I fail to see the reason to change the design of an instrument that's been around for a very long time in one form or another. Change for the sake of change is pointless.

<comment><USER18> Sigh.

I've been playing piano for... over two decades now, and additional ways of modulating synthesized sound are welcomed with open arms. There are songs I play where I wish so hard that I had polyphonic aftertouch on my keyboard, but alas, it has monophonic aftertouch only. I play a lot of classical, and I even want modulation there.

Your concerns... they are carbon copies of the same complaints people had about the introduction of the piano in the early 18th century!

Nowadays, the idea that you'd play "The Well-Tempered Clavier" on anything BUT a piano relegates you to a niche in classical (or rather baroque) music, despite the fact that the songs were written for the harpsichord. The assumption that the piano will be how we play Beethoven 50 years from now -- well, I'm sure the piano will still be alive and well in 2063...

Instruments come and go, it's the music that lives on.

<comment><USER17> The jump from the harpsichord to piano was a huge one but the key profile didn't change as much as this. Integrating new technologies with instruments is all good and dandy but we're now fabricating the sounds with computers. We're changing the way these instruments function and we're changing the way we interact with them.

My concerns may be similar to those of 18th century people but the changes that we're experiencing now are not similar to the changes they experienced. We don't have the technology to replicate the acoustic sound of a piano. And I quite honestly don't see this being used to perform classical music. I'm not talking about all the stuff (mind you, I'm very partial to calling these music) that's being "composed" these days, I'm talking about the music up to the 1950s.

I'd like to touch on another aspect of your post, you say that you want modulation and polyphonic aftertouch when you play the piano. And you say that it's the music that lives on. For classical music, the music is the composer's, s/he composed the music with the limitations of his/her era and re-interpreting their music with new technologies in ways they didn't even imagine. This is not making their music live on as far as I'm concerned.

Basically my point is that, considering that I only play classical music, I don't see a use for this. It's good to read about it but I don't think that this will ever be used for classical music performance. And no, I don't mean the odd youtube videos here and there, I mean used for performance by concert pianists.

I believe I'm entitled to my opinion about this. It's a cool piece of tech but it's just that. The fact that Jordan Rudess from DT endorses this doesn't mean anything to me. He's not a classical music performer (although he has been educated as one) and this may be good for his uses. I'll be amazed if Martha Argerich or Maurizio Pollini say that they will use this product.

And just a little note, and I know this can sound like I'm attacking you but I'm not, I'm just trying to share a bit of information. The pieces in The Well-Tempered Clavier are not "songs" per se, they are individual pieces. Song is another form in classical music and employs the use of human voice.

<comment><USER19> I'm not a musician, and I don't like going around the internet calling people names, but I'm sorry, you come off as stodgy. From reading your comments and watching a couple of Jordan Rudess videos I'm pretty sure that I'd rather watch him playing than you. Just saying.

<comment><USER17> That was far from my intent to be honest. Between me and Jordan Rudess, I'd rather watch him as well. But between Jordan Rudess and Martha Argerich I'd watch her playing. This is just another form of labelling stuff. Just because a well known and talented performer is backing something doesn't mean it's going to be useful. Then again my comment was only concerned with how this relates to classical music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm very suspicious of this and related products.

The thing that's really great about all our acoustic musical instruments is that when you push on them, they _push back_. I don't mean this simply in the normal force sense. Consider a guitar. You've got a string which you press over a fret with your left hand. This can be naively emulated by a switch. But with the guitar, the timber and pitch change depending on _how_ you fret the note, on the finger pressure and position and motion. With your other hand, you might be plucking the string in any of a number of different places, with your finger or with a pick. The sound is affected by your attack angle, how hard you pick, the pick's composition, and so on.

A guitar string is clearly a complicated system. There are lots of variables at play. But more importantly, it's a _coherent_ system. It makes sense to us a physical object that can be manipulated. When you pluck the string, you can feel it vibrate in your fretting hand. When you bend the string its tension increases. If you amplify it, you get the sense that you are physically _touching_ the sound.

(This is incidentally, why audio latency absolutely KILLS when doing amp simulation)

The experience playing a wind instrument is similar. While a saxophone may appear to be something you blow into that has keys, things are really far more complicated than that.

Keyboard-based instruments are a little different. Unlike most any symphonic instrument, the piano actually has relatively few parameters per key. There's note velocity... and that's about it. The various sustain pedals also apply. The piano's design trades single note expressivity for the ability to play ten of them at once.

It should be noted that computer synthesis (procedural or sampled) of keyboard-based is very convincing. They same cannot be said for any other instrument.

Now, what about new kinds of control systems? Most of them tend to fall into two categories. One tries to improve on the piano harmonically, by coming up with a better arrangement of where the notes go. Here's an overview of some: [http://sequence15.blogspot.jp/2010/03/alternative- keyboards....](http://sequence15.blogspot.jp/2010/03/alternative- keyboards.html). They try to fix the fact that it's hard to play in different keys on a piano. Whereas on the guitar you can learn a single scale or chord and move it up and down the neck to transpose, things change radically on a piano keyboard.

The second category is those like the Seaboard, which try to add new dimensions of control to a regular piano keyboard. Another example is the Contiuum (<http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/>) It's very common now to have both velocity and continuous pressure sensitivity (aftertouch) on a regular keyboard as well as various side controllers for dealing with pitch or an abstract "modulation" parameter.

These controllers nearly always buy into the separation of control from synthesis. It makes perfect technical sense. But most of the instruments we would consider to be "expressive" don't work that way! In fact piano-style instruments are pretty much the only ones that do.

Which leads my to my point: A control mechanism should be considered together with the instrument it controls. It's fantastic that this new keyboard has all these new dimensions that you can map to sound, but what is it REALLY good for? What is the instrument that _wants_ to be controlled in this way? The spiffy new control surfaces nearly always leave this problem unsolved and thus remain little more than novelty items.

<comment><USER9> Your argument doesn't hold water.

The classical pipe organ, often referred to as "the king of instruments", is a synthesiser. The organ console is an electrical or pneumatic controller, with no direct connection to the pipes. Most large organs have considerable "latency", due to the distance from the console to the pipe room. Some pipes may be as much as a hundred feet away from the player, so the sound will take over 90ms to reach them - several orders of magnitude more delay than a modern computer system.

The organ is still regarded as a highly expressive instrument, in spite of the relatively modest control a player has beyond simple pitch and duration. Although most organs have many stops which provide similar timbres to existing instruments, it is understood that the organ is an instrument in its own right and should be played as such, and is not merely a tool for emulating other instruments.

The idea that an electronic instrument should imitate acoustic instruments is simply a poverty of imagination. Electronic instruments, used in a manner that is sympathetic to their natural properties, can be absolutely as expressive as any acoustic instrument. The theremin has perhaps the worst user-interface of any musical instrument as the player has _no physical contact with the instrument whatsoever_ , but is utterly beautiful when played by a master.

The challenge for electronic musicians is that they are often both performer and instrument-maker. A monosynth of any quality can be configured in a near- infinite variety of ways, many of which were completely unforeseen by the designer. Musicians working with modular systems or DSP programming environments have a blank canvas. We do not as yet have a good theoretical framework for this task, but electronic music is extremely young - no more than ninety years old at most. We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.

<comment><USER10> _Most large organs have considerable "latency",_

You don't even need to go as far as organs to see latency.

Low-pitched stringed instruments such as fretless/upright bass guitars have latency due to the mechanics of the strings themselves; e.g. jazz bass players have to account for this when playing. Most good jazz bass players do this unconsciously.

Polyphonic reed instruments (e.g. harmonicas, melodicas, accordions) all have this issue as well. Reeds of significant mass (i.e. lower-pitched reeds) can take tenths of a second to sound (more on older instruments).

Also: if you can feel the string in your _fretting_ hand vibrate on a fretted instrument, you're doing it wrong. (The string does not vibrate past the fret -- that's the point of frets! If it does, you're not pressing firmly enough and you get fret buzz. Either that or your finger's on the wrong side of the fret and you're muting the sound.)

<comment><USER21> "if you can feel the string in your fretting hand vibrate on a fretted instrument, you're doing it wrong."

Generally the entire body of an acoustic guitar vibrates with the sound of a plucked string - the fretting hand (being the only hand currently attached to the guitar) would likely feel the vibration carrying from the body, through the neck of the guitar. It's faint, but nevertheless perceivable.

<comment><USER5> furthermore, a non-fretted instrument such as the cello, violin, fretless bass etc does give you good haptic feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why all this negativity? I think it looks awesome and I want to buy one right now.

<comment><USER23> The reason their product hasn't been dominating the market for the past 20 years is not because they were the first to dream it up (they weren't, though there appear to be some incremental improvements here), it's because you can't get it to talk to the other $50k+ worth of equipment in your studio.

<comment><USER22> The only piece of hardware in most studios is the computer. I don't see any problems getting it to work with my DAW and synths through USB.

<comment><USER23> That doesn't add up, unless you're counting everyone with a trial version of fruity loops on their system as having a studio. But even then, I think it's a stretch (everyone I know who does any kind of music production has at least $1k in non-computer hardware.)

How exactly do you expect to get this to work with your existing tools? It's obviously not usefully MIDI-compatible.

<comment><USER24> A guitar or piano isn't MIDI compatible, and that hardly matters.

 _If_ the instrument could really stand on its own, then compatibility isn't a problem.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but when you depend on synthesis compatibility is a big deal. History seems to support that, with respect to other novel electronic instruments. I was just now responding to a claim that this will work with existing synthesizers.

While I would like to have this kind of control, I would much rather have the flexibility that a standard MIDI keyboard with aftertouch affords with respect to synthesis.

<comment><USER25> It is midi compatible, it just uses 10 separate channels.

<comment><USER23> Which is utterly useless in a 1:1 channel:instrument configuration. Most of my MIDI hardware expects to listen on a single channel, as does most I've come across.

My plugin/VST host doesn't know about this either, so I would need to assign 10 different MIDI channels _and_ all 10 CCs every time I want to change instruments. And for those instruments without a per-note bend, I would need to create 10 instances as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I feel like most of the stuff that surround us were created THIS way because we just didn't have the technology to make it better yet. That's what I see with those new Pianos and also with the 48fps movies [https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-jackson/48-frames- per-s...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-jackson/48-frames-per- second/10150222861171558)

</comment><comment><USER27> As far as interesting musical interfaces go, the axis 64 is the most amazing thing I've ever seen from a conceptual standpoint. It's like someone just laid down the same of all of these relationships that make music work and put into something your hands can push on. What's weird is that even though it's just an /interface/ it makes the /concepts/ easy to grasp, manipulate, etc.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OeRkXWTtQ>

</comment><comment><USER28> the site seems to be mostly down; the demo video is here - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM>

</comment><comment><USER29> <http://madronalabs.com/> makes something called the Soundplane - it feels like a present someone sent me from the future.

So nice to touch. A high resolution / super responsive controller.. of wood! Maybe I'm just not enough of a cyborg but the wood surface made the Haken Continuum (wetsuit material) far less compelling. I worry the same thing of the Seaboard.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not musical – I can't play an instrument and I don't analyse the music I listen to. But I like listening to music, and to me, this sounds worse than a normal keyboard/piano. It looks (and sounds) really difficult to produce a precise note with, so I wonder if it will take off at all.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since the site is crushed, here's a demo on youtube that seems to get some of the point across: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM>

</comment><comment><USER32> The cached version worked but the site kept giving me 403 errors. Unfortunately I know so little of music/keyboards that I couldn't really tell the difference between this and any other keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like something from a Cronenberg movie!</comment>


Ask HN: Why do team collaboration webapps suck? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, fellow HNers. Is it just me or do team collaboration webapps suck?
Most of my collaboration/communication is still done through email and IM.
Whenever I've tried to get teams I have worked with to use a wiki or other collaboration tool I see a fall off in usage after an initial rush. Even if they do use it, the content uploaded/ gathered is sparse.
Usually only the content that people explicitly want to share(like minutes of meeting, presentations) go into the wiki, if they ever do, but most of the time its just sent as an email.
They either think its a pain to login, into the tool and put in stuff, when it could just be mailed in. Or just completely forget about it and go back to the old way of doing things.
- Is this a common thing when trying a new tool?
- How did you get across this hurdle?
- Is most of your collaboration done through e-mail, IM, Phone calls and twitter?
- Do you regularly come across more information/data (articles, tutorials, presentations) that your team could benefit from, but isn't as important as something you'd put into a wiki?
- what thought triggers you into putting something into a wiki or some other tool? <comment><USER2> > _Whenever I've tried to get teams I have worked with to use a wiki or other > collaboration tool I see a fall off in usage after an initial rush._

It's the "paradox of the active user" at work:

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/activeuserparadox.html>

Your collaborators fit the definition of "active users" very well: they are in the middle of a project, they have specific goals, and they don't perceive the effort put into learning to use a new piece of software as being beneficial to accomplishing their goals within the project. They view it as an extra bit of unrelated piece of work and responsibility to go under, with ambiguous potential benefits, if any.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that link, though I've observed this never came across this concept.</comment></comment>


Nokia's secret OS to address sliding position in emerging markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/12/nokias-secret-os-to-address-sliding-position-in-emerging-markets/

<comment><USER2> "a Linux-based operating system currently being developed behind closed doors."

I cannot imagine Microsoft liking it.</comment>


Why hasn't OpenCalais gotten more love?  I'm smitten. - <AUTHOR> http://viewer.opencalais.com/

<comment><USER2> Yes OpenCalais is plumbing, and here are some plumbers: Huffington Post, CBS Interactive / CNET, Feedly, The New Republic, Slate, Associated Content, Associated Newspapers (UK), DailyMe.com, Al Jazeera, Oracle, etc. See partner page here: <http://www.opencalais.com/node/27153>

Point well taken tho -- and we'll do more to surface these stories as they get buried over time in our many gallery pages.

Also announcing a dozen more fun partners next week. Will be sure to come back and share those names then as well.

Thanks, -Krista The OpenCalais Team.

</comment><comment><USER3> Possibly because it's a enabling/plumbing type of technology? I notice that the main opencalais.com website struggles to explain exactly what it does, and why it's cool.

There also don't appear to be many applications written with it. From what I can see, there's feedtrace and newsfacet and ... that's about it.

Perhaps if there were a really compelling example of what you could do with it, but an autotagging WordPress plugin doesn't really fire up the imagination...</comment>