Netflix queue + Rotten Tomatoes = A Better Queue - <AUTHOR> http://abetterqueue.com/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't this already exist?

<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/dvd/netflix/>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Edit:

The rottentomatoes version also returns way more results (given the same parameters) -

Abetterqueue: [http://abetterqueue.com/movies?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query[rati...](http://abetterqueue.com/movies?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query\[rating_q\]=75%25&query\[years_q\]=2010-2012&query\[genres_q\]\[\]=Action+%26+Adventure&commit=filter)

 _2 results_

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Rotten Tomatoes:

75%+, Action Adventure, 2010-2012

 _29 results_

<comment><USER3> This is because Rotten Tomatoes uses a more thorough criteria for "Action and Adventure", whereas A Better Queue uses the first Netflix genre criteria that's listed on the result from its api. So yeah, Rotten Tomatoes is more thorough in this regard. Most of the movies listed by Rotten Tomatoes with this criteria are under different genres in A Better Queue.

<comment><USER2> Rottentomatoes uses the netflix API, so I don't think it's anything you can't do.

<comment><USER3> You're totally right. I should do some more parsing through Netflix's schemas to get to where Rotten Tomatoes is at. Thanks for pointing this out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks pretty cool, but how does it differ from <http://instantwatcher.com/>?

<comment><USER5> Differs from InstantWatcher by having less functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Setting the tomatometer to above 0% and the years to 1915-2012 with the filter set to just Gay & Lesbian movies only returns 21 movies. Netflix has 256 Gay & Lesbian movies available for instant streaming, many of which (among the ones I quickly checked) are reviewed on Rotton Tomatoes.

Is there a technical reason for this or is this a bug?

<comment><USER3> Good question.

Technical. A Better Queue's database currently takes in only the first genre listed for a movie from the Netflix API. So those other 235 Gay and Lesbian movies are present in A Better Queue, but in other genres. The choice to only take in the first genre listed from the Netflix API was that, beyond trying to keep it simple, the first genre seemed like the most accurate one. The choice was in no way intended to be exclusionary.

I would be able to take in multiple genres during a database load so that each movie could show up for all of its genres. So I will. Right now I'm waiting to hear back from Rotten Tomatoes' API team so I can get a second API key for development. (Using my production key to test new functionality would put me over my API call limit.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Other than one major feature request, I haven't got too much to contribute. The request would be sorting by Tomatoes score would be an excellent way to (optionally?) display films.

Aside from that, I don't have any critiques - clearly there's more that can be done, but already this is an excellent product! I will certainly be using it to help me decide what to watch :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey everybody. I made this thing. Thanks for posting, xbryanx! It's so cool that my first web app is on the front page of HN.

ADDENDUM::

I'm somewhat new to all of this. Right now I'm learning BDD principles. So, I'm going to use A Better Queue as a learning tool and blog about BDDing new features, like an 'add to instant queue' button. I'll probably blog here: <http://abetterqueue.blogspot.com/>

After that, I'll re-write ABQ using BDD principles and then I'll open-source the thing.

Cheers, Dave

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool, this is a useful mashup. One more suggestion: filter for movies available on Netflix Streaming.

<comment><USER9> Pretty sure that's the ONLY thing it shows. Tagline at the top specifically says "Netflix _instant_ movies".

<comment><USER10> I've had it recommend two things that aren't streaming so far, so it definitely isn't accurate.

<comment><USER10> Creator responds quickly to resolve issues!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two sliders on the Tomato bar to let me set a low _and_ high cutoff would be nice. Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a shitty movie.

<comment><USER12> I laughed hard when I read this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks great, but doesn't work in Canada (they have different movies). I'm not sure if APIs exist for different countries or if a flag needs to be set somewhere, but it would be great if you could detect the country and set it accordingly.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, using this just reminds me of how much I hate copyright law and geographic restrictions. Netflix is great, but the Netflix movie selection in Canada is... paltry, in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> RottenFlix is a Greasemonkey script to inject Rotten Tomatoes ratings into Netflix pages:

<https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/52589>

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, the script hasn't been updated since 2010 and no longer seems to work. :\

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has the Rotten Tomatoes API improved recently? A few years ago I tried to work with their site to extract some data and automate some of my personal movie recommendations and it turned out to be a huge mess. At a point their web interface even inserted place holders inside the query strings. If they made some improvements I would be happy to work with the site again.

</comment><comment><USER17> Suggestion: supplement or replace the Rotten Tomatoes percentage text with a graphic. It would be easier to skim the movies and compare them by glancing at a representative graphic than by trying to parse the numbers - graphics are less abstract. There are few enough possible values that we will usually not need the precision of a number. Perhaps the exact number could be available on hover, or in a tooltip.

I'm not sure what kind of graphic would be best. A meter like the Tomatometer would be the most accurate, but it might be too big or too long and narrow to fit well within the space you have for each movie. Other possibilities are a square that fills from the bottom up, a circle that fills in radially, and a circle that fills in with a smaller circle. (If you go with something 2D instead of 1D, like a circle filling with a circle, make sure to avoid a classic mistake by scaling the _area_ of the sub-shape, not the width or radius.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Love this, added to Favorites, I am ex-pat living in France so I am limited to Instant Queue. Netflix's ability to find good movies in their current Instant interface is lacking.

I would add a "select all" button next to the "clear" button.

I would also put the number of results returned underneath the "filter" button, something like, "15 movies found". This would help one narrow a large data set without having to scroll to the bottom of the page to determine if too many movies are returned.

I would also have a "new releases" checkbox in genres and make that the default.

I would also change the caption on the "filter" button to "find". "Filter" is confusing because it assumes there is a full set already returned. Most users, I believe, think they start with zero results, then "find" titles based on their search criteria.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cool site. Can I suggest adding Twitter/Facebook links to make sharing easier?

From a UI perspective - I'd reverse the slider so that it goes from highest rating to lowest and most recent to oldest. Most people will likely want the highest, most recent films.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would like to see a slider for minimum number of reviews counted in the tomato rating. A movie that has a 100% rating but only 3 reviews is something I'd like to be able to filter out.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely. This is coming right after I get the 'add to instant queue' button in there.'

<comment><USER21> While we're making feature requests: I'd like it to work better on narrower screens. I'm using the computer plugged into my TV (the one I use for Netflix) and I only have 1024 pixels across.

<comment><USER3> Responsive design coming soon!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Whoever you are...thank you!

Now, start working on the real estate site that will allow me to find homes based on price, location, school ratings, jobs, days of sunshine and crime rating. This site should allow a national search and also allow the user to assign weights to the various criteria. Presenting the result of a search as a heat map would also be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why isn't there any pagination on the site? I scrolled down to the bottom and wanted to see more, but no more movies.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wish you could adjust for crappy movies also. Sometimes you want to see that universal flop.

<comment><USER3> ...thinking about doing a 'bad movie night' feature ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> = rotten queue? j/k, great job! 2 things:

I would enhance the 2nd bar to make one handle be able to push the other when they meet instead of getting stuck.

Does Tomatoes not rate animes much? Filtering from '95 to today of 50%+ only returned 3.

<comment><USER25> Rotten Tomatoes focuses exclusively on English language reviews from "approved critics"(<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/help_desk/critics.php> ), so it's not that much of a surprise that there aren't that many Japanese anime films rated there. Since the 90's, the only major theatrical releases in the US have been Studio Ghibli films, and that's because Disney handles the US distribution.

I would imagine that it's similar for the vast majority of foreign films as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A few more feature suggestions:

\- allow sorting by rating, year, title

\- allow switching between "All Critics" and "Top Critics" ratings

\- show additional movie information (summary, etc.) on hover for desktop users

<comment><USER27> Agreed. I think there's a way to add in a few features like this and still make it simple and user-friendly. One request when you do MPAA ratings is to not make it a slider bar, but just use checkboxes like you do for genres. Netflix tends to categorize lots of things as Unrated when you wouldn't normally expect it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wish Netflix UK had an API. It looks like we are not getting one. There doesn't even seem to be a way to get a list of the current films available, and the new ones which appear.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please add a favicon. I like to bookmark sites and delete the name so I can just recognize it by the favicon. Saves a ton of space. I assume I'm not alone in this habit.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice site! One thing that I've been wanting for a while is to see all the Netflix streaming movies that are on the IMDB Top 250 list. That would be awesome.

<comment><USER31> <http://paulisageek.com/imdb-250-netflix/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I believe in this! Screw collaborative filtering, it is garbage. Good job - you should win the Netflix challenge retroactively.

</comment><comment><USER33> Now do one with Metacritic! :) And for Canada.

</comment><comment><USER34> Great idea! Outline of how you did this?

<comment><USER2> <http://developer.netflix.com/> <http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I had this thought the other day, glad you got around to building it before me :)

very cool, great work!

</comment><comment><USER36> very cool i really dig it. one suggestion, the slider makes it a bit difficult to find recent releases, once you slide past 2005 or so you can't really easily adjust it.

even still, this is a great way to view movies - nice work!

<comment><USER3> I'm teaming with a designer friend of mine for a redesign of ABQ. We'll keep this in mind! Thanks.

<comment><USER36> cool, i bookmarked it and already found some new movies to watch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Too bad a really high critic rating normally means a boring, pompous, overly- artsy movie.

<comment><USER2> Some of the most entertaining movies I've watched were 'rated' as a failure (<50)

'Professional' critics suck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> great idea.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I or Why should I bother continuing with rails - <AUTHOR>

Over the past 3 weeks I've been trying to learn rails. I've been programming in PHP for about 4 years, and decided to expand my horizons and use the language everybody is talking about.
The things I like about RoR is that due to the structure and expectations of rails, I suspect it is much quicker to get new people up to speed on a project because theoretically, the structure is already laid out.
I also in theory like the way it handles migrations, though I haven't actually used it in a production environment yet.
The things I'm HATING is that every little bit of code I write doesn't work!
I'm moving like molasses here, and have very little to show for nearly 3 weeks of messing with this language.
As you can see from my stackoverflow account http://stackoverflow.com/users/48067/pedalpete, if you care to look, I'm spending hours doing minor little things like making a link to delete a database entry and it just doesn't work!
Has anybody been in the same situation? I'm following guides, watching the railscasts, etc. etc. but I'm absolutely not getting it and extremely frustrated.
Maybe I just don't remember being this frustrated with PHP, but I seem to recall with PHP i was getting into some much deeper stuff when I was still learning and I don't remember it being nearly this painful.
Has anybody else had the same experience?
Is there some magic bullet that is all of a sudden going to make this better?
I can't believe that all the hype around RoR is really applicable to everybody but me, so there must be something I'm missing. <comment><USER2> Instead of trying to do what you want to do, even if it is simple and you know what you want to do should be easily doable, try some tutorials.

Note that if you are using Rails 3, most of the tutorials out there are for Rails 2. This is going to be a rough next year and a half or so.

For Rails 3, check this out if you haven't already. Personally I'm not into watching videos of someone else coding, but maybe you are: <http://railscasts.com/> transcriptions here: <http://asciicasts.com/>

Here comes the frustrating part. Unlike PhP, Java, etc. where just looking up stuff online is enough, unless you participate in the various local Ruby get- togethers or have some others nearby that do, you're likely to find yourself in the dark more than you're used to being. I'm somewhat of an introvert, and have a family where I can't be going to these things nor do I want to, but not going to the meetups definitely hurts it seems. Maybe I've bought into the hype too much about how much the meetups help though, and I've heard from someone that some meetups are more hype than help, so if you don't like one group, try another.

Basically, here are the pain points I can think of:

If you relied on it in the past, lack of static typing hurts in the beginning, but not so much after a year or so with the exception of lack of good method/etc. completion due to the dynamic nature of Ruby.

Having wierd bugs because the gem/plugin you are using is incompatible with the version of Rails, etc. is no fun. Read the docs associated with the gem/plugin. Submit a ticket/contact the developer(s) some other way to find out what they use. This doesn't bite as much as you'd think.

Trying to track down what in the heck is going on in Rails, Active Record, etc. can be a pain when something isn't working. I've not gotten good enough to feel totally comfortable with this, but I know people after working several years with it are more at home with this.

Upgrading Rails can suck.

You'll read suggestions that say if you don't write test first, you'll not be able to handle bugs/issues that well. That is probably true, however the team I'm on doesn't pay attention to testing as much as they should, and we get by mostly ok (some tough issues here and there).

Overall, Rails is ok, and Ruby is pretty cool. Also check out Sinatra, etc. Maybe you don't need Rails for what you are doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did a 'build a twitter clone in rails' tutorial rote, but I find I learn much better if I put my own spin on the tutorials as it forces you to look deeper and understand what you're doing rather than just following along and copying code.

I would suggest nobody 'needs' rails, i can get along very well with php, but I thought I'd see what all the hype was about. I suspect I'll go back to my php land. Unfortunately feeling a bit defeated.

<comment><USER2> Some thoughts:

PhP is for general-purpose web application development, but somewhat targeted at building "higher traffic dynamic webpages", although it is much more than that. It's widely used, and it's been around a good while. It isn't going away, and I'm not trying to convince you to stop using it.

Ruby by itself is a fascinating language that developers should get familiar with. Why? IMO, primarily because of this: [http://scotland-on- rails.s3.amazonaws.com/2A04_DaveThomas-SO...](http://scotland-on- rails.s3.amazonaws.com/2A04_DaveThomas-SOR.mp4)

But Ruby on its own is a bit like Java, Perl, etc. It isn't really web- oriented. Rails however is a framework that uses Ruby and bundles code that makes working with/storing data, web forms, etc. easier. On the surface, unlike PhP, Rails seems to have a mindset of its own, attempting to get you to use conventions that try to put webapps more into a box, so you can develop faster once you learn the box, whereas PhP alone is more wide-open. However, almost immediately you learn that box is almost entirely imagined. Ruby is even more wide-open than PhP, so Rails is also.

It might be hard to get a picture of the sheer amount of functionality available for Ruby on (and off) Rails via <http://rubygems.org/> and <http://github.com/> but trust me- there is a lot! The same can be said for PhP as well, but it isn't packaged up quite the same.

RoR tries (notice I said tries) to make things simple. So developers get pulled in and make rookie mistakes because the details are glossed over that aren't glossed over in Java, etc. as much. I've seen and been told of PhP developed by those that didn't know what they were doing that is the same way, though.

I agree that nobody "needs" Rails, but spend some more time with it, and you'll find you'll use it more than PhP for some applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you learning Ruby at the same time, or do you have prior experience with the language aside from RoR? Ruby "feels" quite different from PHP, so if you are tackling it in addition to learning Rails, possibly it would be better to stick to Ruby tutorials and scripts that run locally, then stepping up to learning Rails.

Also, if it's Rails that's giving you trouble, have you considered starting with a smaller framework like Camping or Sinatra? That feeling of none of your code working can be frustrating, but maybe it's because you missed some of the beginning steps with Ruby and it's making things more difficult than they should be!

<comment><USER4> I also recommend learning Ruby before Rails. I tried it the other way and was often very confused as to why something would work or not because Ruby and Rails both do a lot of things that seem like magic to a new user.

Plus, hacking in Ruby can be a lot of fun. There are a lot of really neat tricks you can use to do really cool things.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I told a friend I was giving up on Rails and explained why, he also recommended learning Ruby alone. I didn't understand why until he explained " the caller doesn't have to use curly braces to signify a hash if the hash is the last argument in the call. For methods that only take a single hash as an argument, this is pretty easy to understand. "

This resolved a huge issue I was having with my Ruby, but I find this to be a really poor way to write a language. Maybe it will just take more getting used to.

We hear people say that English is so difficult to learn because of these 'rules and exceptions', so maybe I just need to get that mentality and realize that just because something worked in one instance, it won't in another.

I will spend more time focusing on learning Ruby. i was always thinking the problems I was having was due to rails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm in your exact same situation, man; I've developed in php , python (with django and webapp) and little webapps in ruby with sinatra. I begun with rails 3 (and rails in general) two weeks ago, and am feelin' the progress rather slow. I think some of it is due to the usual learning curve and the kinda hard to find documentation and broken plugins. I'm starting to get it, but I'm also being tempted by the fact that I read the documentation for padrino (www.padrinorb.com) last night and felt that I understood more than what I have gotten from rails 3 in two weeks. So, you're not alone, and, if it weren't for the fact that padrino is really new and doesn't have as large a community as rails, I would have made the switch without hesitation right away. Still considering it, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't heard of padrino, and hadn't looked closely at Sinatra which i thought was a ruby plug-in rather than a different Ruby web framework.

Originally I was working with a whole bunch of Gems to learn mongo and do some more interesting stuff, but with all the gem issues, I decided to just stick to the basics and am building what should be a fairly simple app.

<comment><USER5> oh, well, that's swell; I finally sticked to rails (finally got the knack of it) and am using mongoid for mongodb interaction, if you're interested, here's a fine example of mongodb in a simple working rails 3 app: <http://github.com/fortuity/rails3-mongoid-devise>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm also new to web development (I have no where near 4 years of experience). Do you understand object oriented programming enough to explain it to a programming newbie? If not, you need to take a class. No amount of Railscasts/Peepcode vids/Rails books will teach you OOP, and yet Ruby and Rails require a working knowledge of it. I know PHP is an OOP lang, but you may not have used it that way.

</comment><comment><USER7> What version of Rails and Ruby are you running? A lot of tutorials, guides, fixes, etc are based on older versions (not 3.0 and 1.9.2). I've been trying to do some stuff with Rails (granted without 4 years of PHP) and it's been slow going as well. Everything is just a little less documented and a bunch plugins, bug fixes, etc just aren't up-to-date yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am running 3.0 and 1.9.2. I realize that I am ahead of the curve on much of the tutorials, but should that really be causing this kind of complete breakdown.

There is backward compatibility, and I am learning the rails3 way as much as possible, looking to the rails3 documentation rather than the older stuff.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which itches can I scratch? - <AUTHOR>

We're always told, "Scratch your own itch" when it comes to entrepreneurship. I think that this is bullshit. I want to solve problems where the money is.<p>What problems do you have to which I could create a solution? <comment><USER2> The 'scratch your own itch' is given as advice because it leads to better solutions which lead to money. You are your own target market which makes building decisions and selling easier. It gives you drive & motivation because you know if it's something you'd use yourself or not & you have your first customer from day 1 (yourself). Trying to build something for a group of people you're not part of is tough and often results in a lot of guess-work.

One problem I'd like to see a solution for is for enquiry/quote based service businesses. Tracking which advertising method brings the most enquiries/bookings long term for small businesses. Also with reminders to follow up the following week after a quote is sent. This currently has to be done by combining several systems (analytics, gmail, calendar, spreadsheets, handwritten notes) this could easily be improved & simplified.</comment>


The Many Colors of Sound (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/white-noise-sound-colors/462972/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Pink noise is also called 1/f noise. I was confused by the article when it said, "The inverse pattern of pink noise, also called 1/f noise . . . " It first seemed to mean that the inverse of pink noise is another noise, called 1/f noise. But no, they are the same thing. The writer meant "Pink noise's pattern, which is an inverse relationship between frequency and power, is also called 1/f noise." It only took me five readings to figure it out. The noise that is the inverse of pink noise is blue noise, mentioned later. An article in Wikipedia is clearer to me, it mentions more colors, and it has more audio examples: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise)

The Atlantic article mentions brown noise, which is named after Brownian Motion. But the Wikipedia article tells you that it's also called red noise, because pink noise is halfway between it and white noise. Red noise falls 6 dB per octave, pink noise falls 3 dB per octave, and white noise changes 0 dB per octave.

This resurrects my lifelong mental block with dB, electricity, etc. It says here that 3 dB is a doubling. But I had always thought it took 6 dB to double something. I know that on my videocamera that if I raise the gain by 6 dB that it is the same change as 1 f-stop, which is a doubling of light. It turns out that it depends on the unit. With sound, 3 dB is a doubling of power, but 6 dB is doubling of volume. With electricity, 3 dB is doubling of power (watts?) but 6 dB is a doubling of voltage. I can do the math all day long (Watts = Volts x Amps) but it's just equations. I can't picture the reality in my head in the way I can other concepts. I suppose part of it is my layman usage of technical terms. To me I would think "sound power" and "sound volume" are the same thing, but to physicists there are distinct. It reminds me of horsepower and torque. Horsepower is "power," but torque is "twisting force" \--- which is what I imagined when you told me that horsepower is power.

Oh well, my takeaway is that red noise sounds better than pink or white, to me and others. It sounds like the ocean (if there were no variation).

<comment><USER3> Well, in electronics they use log to base 10. For power, dB = 10 * log (p2/p1). For volts dB = 20 * log (v2/v1). For power, 3 dB would represent 10 ^ .3 or around 1.99X gain, 6 dB = 10 ^.6 or around 3.98X gain. For volts then 6 dB (10^.3) is around 1.99X and 3 dB becomes (10^.15) around 1.4X

Many colors of sound? Figured maybe it was going to be an article about synesthesia

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The office of my current employer has speakers in the ceiling, every 20 feet or so. They play white noise through these at about 40-60 decibels - about the volume of a moderately busy coffee shop or bar. This lets them buy shorter cubicles, so you can look across the entire office building.

The noise they use is maddening to me, despite sounding like air going through the air ducts.

</comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't live without Chroma Doze when out on business. You can easily tune it to mask out nearly anything. I generally set it to a pink-like spectrum; true white really is too harsh to sleep with.

[https://github.com/pmarks- net/chromadoze/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/pmarks- net/chromadoze/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Chroma Doze looks amazing, I will give it a shot. I have been using Brain.fm for several months, but switched to (white/brown/pink) noise or ambient records. It works like a charm.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk proposes city-to-city travel by rocket, right here on Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-proposes-city-to-city-travel-by-rocket-right-here-on-earth <comment><USER2> mmh, interesting, but maybe Musk should see further to a way to travel (uncomfortably) for leisure. The idea can be designed with more important objectives in mind.

Maybe like a sort of eyectable-seat ships for people working in (and living around) nuclear power plants, or small islands under the influence of an active vulcano, or a way to evacuate almost inmediately in case of a missile attack. You can be more prone to forgive some discomfort or even pain if the other alternative is worse.

</comment><comment> user-on1 LOL, so this basically puts airline industry, healthcare industry and insurance industry etc,. out of business if successful.

</comment><comment><USER3> And then sell them to any country willing to buy. The bring-your-own-warhead approach.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you reduce the gender gap in technology? - <AUTHOR>

For quite a while, I have been thinking about this issue. Recently, MHacks (University of Michigan's hackathon) made it aware that they were devoting more efforts to bringing more women to their event. Also in the news is Paul Graham's comments about the gender gap in tech. After reading articles (https://medium.com/p/e034a09248c1) and observing discussions in facebook groups (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1384252878496456/), i'm bringing this conversation to the genius hacker news community. Please answer- what do you think needs to be done to bring more women into technology, programming, and CS related fields? <comment><USER2> Hypothesis: As long as "technology" is considered playing with "in-animate" objects, you won't eliminate the gender gap.

Women are empirically more interested/specialized in "animated" objects (ie, living things and social relatinships), due to human physiology/biology and social operant conditioning.

The premise that such a (non-uniform) distribution is unethical, unproductive, or un-natural lacks evidentiary data to support it.

It may very well make (biological or evolutinary) sense; condider a port-folio effect from social-pair bonds (m,f) with reproductive potency.

In plain english, a team of two specialists may be more powerful than an aggregation of individuals as "jack of all trades".

These are not easily or trivially dismissed complications.

Also, notice this dimensionalization is not along the axis of a "social problem", in the game-theoretic sense, like the prisoner's dilemma.

The only assumptions are two: non-uniform preferences, and non-linear returns to scale from learning-by-doing. neither of these seem overly controversial.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Back home, there were plenty of girls who were math, physics, and computer nerds like me. They were curious and had that hacker mentality. But since moving to USA I haven't met any american girls/women like that. Those I did meet were immigrants like me, or studying here as exchange students from another country.

I've been living here for more than 10 years. Why is there such a difference in the amount of girls interested in technology around the world, and where I'm from, vs here in America?

Now, I could understand that if I lived in a very diverse state like NJ or NY, it would be normal to see lots of girls from other places. But in the state I live, I think the population is 99% white non-immigrant, so it's really odd that the only females are outsiders!

There's something else at play here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How many female friends do you have that are into tech or enjoy programming or have taken it up as a hobby? How many women in engineering classes or computing science courses? Relatively less than men by a big margin.

Of course there's going to be a gender gap, because the pool is already filled with men. I've worked with women developers and they are perfectly fine like any other developer. Yes, there were more men than women. HR has more women and they are not at all interested in tech.

Gender is not an issue, it's that relatively compared to men, women seems to be less interested and hence making up a smaller portion of the job pool. I mean does software development need to be segregated like washrooms too so that we can have more women? If so, please do it.

Nobody is suppressing women from getting into technology field. How can you change the nature of the entire gender so that they fit this gap? How can you change evolution and gender specific social expectations?</comment>


A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – Electronic Frontier Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence <comment><USER2> Published 8. February 1996, 22 years ago today (depending on your time zone.)

> Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate > themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own > speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be > another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, > whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed > infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires > your factories to accomplish.

<comment><USER3> It does require factories, data centers, ISPs, telecom infrastructure, DNS, all of which is controlled by somebody with their own interests. This declaration is amazingly naive and increasingly being proven wrong, as effective controls of the internet is increasingly exercised by public and private entities, with China leading the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> putting the frontier in eff</comment>


Tips for Honeycomb Design - <AUTHOR> http://eng.pulse.me/5-tips-for-honeycomb-design/

<comment><USER2> There was a Google I/O session which detailed a lot of the same tips in this blog post. However, thankfully, this post was a lot more succinct.

If anyone's interested though, here's a link to the session: [http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/designing- and-...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/designing-and- implementing-android-uis-for-phones-and-tablets.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This post really needs more images - for example, in "Design for both landscape and portrait" it would be useful to see how Pulse looks in portrait mode on the tablet too.

<comment><USER4> Right under bullet four there are two images--the one on the left is portrait mode.

There's not a lot of whitespace between the images, so I could see someone mistaking it for being just one wide image.</comment></comment>


Remotely send Chrome and Node.js into infinite loops via OS X kernel bug - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-04-08-osx-security-bug.html <comment><USER2> Anybody remember this gem? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke)

<comment><USER3> I remember patching it and then scripting mirc to seek out the handle of the person who sent it via the source IP.

<comment><USER4> I scripted mIRC to WinNuke everyone on join in all channels. Something like this:

        ON *:join:#: {
            /run c:\winnuke.exe $gettok($address,2,64)
        }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The last statement reminds me of Linus saying

 _we do not break user space_

 _If an application is utilizing a bug, it is not a bug but a feature_

<comment><USER6> Apple's general approach is "if it isn't documented, we can break it", a bit different to Linux.

<comment><USER7> I think, Apple's general approach is:"We can break it." Documented or not.

Seems like they change stuff all the time. Especially on iOS.

<comment><USER8> Can you provide examples of non deprecated API that Apple broke?

<comment><USER9> The recent Swift 1.2 release brought a whole load of code breaking changes. None of Swift 1.0 was explicitly deprecated.

<comment><USER10> That's a bit different, they explicitly said Swift is a work in progress and code compatibility is not guaranteed between versions...

<comment><USER11> After 1.0 API changes really should increment the major version.

<comment><USER12> Unless you say "We're probably going to break things." when you announce it, which they did.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps they should have chosen a more appropriate version number then.

<comment><USER14> Apple doesn't claim to do semver

<comment><USER11> Regardless, that is what developers have come to expect. Not that semver is adopted wholesale, but at least don't break the API without incrementing the major version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the conclusion warrants repeating:

"The moral of the story? Confusing APIs are a security problem. If many users of your API get it wrong in a way that introduces a security bug, that's a bug in your API, not their code."

</comment><comment><USER16> > Linux has epoll. BSD has kqueue. Windows has... well, about five different > mechanisms that cover differing subsets of usecases and you can only choose > one.

Aren't I/O completion ports fairly analogous to kqueue?

<comment><USER17> AFAIK (and I'm not a Windows person, so feel free to correct me) I/O completion ports are analogous to something like Linux's kernel AIO (asynch I/O). The model is to start an I/O operation on an fd (providing a buffer) and then be informed of its completion (with the data already copied into your process space), rather than the traditional Unix polling model of being informed when there is data waiting on an fd an then do a (non-blocking) read on it. If you're used to writing traditional Unixy event-based network daemons this seems pretty backwards.

One advantage of the aio model is that it at least theoretically allows "non- blocking" I/O of a normal disk file, whereas none of the polling-based systems I am aware of work with regular files. However, at least on Linux the kernel aio is notoriously fidgety (as it still may block the process if you take certain kinds of page cache misses; the solution is apparently to use O_DIRECT to bypass the page cache which has its own bag of problems), and most people fall back to using blocking reads with thread pools, or something like libeio or libuv that handles all that crap for you. (There's also the POSIX AIO that's built into glibc, but that done entirely in userspace [presumably with thread pools] and uses signal-based completion notification, which is kind of gross and probably pretty slow if you have a ton of I/O events happening.)

<comment><USER18> I thought events all were handled were through libuv.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As an FYI, the Chromium bug has now been unrestricted for public viewing - [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=437642](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=437642)

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if OOB data is ever going to be fixed to allow more than one byte.

I can't quite comprehend how the implementation got so screwed up in the first place. A two byte field in every header, supposed to be a pointer to designate a range of data, OBVIOUSLY when it's set it should transmit exactly one byte of information.

<comment><USER21> Unlikely. Almost nothing uses OOB data (and it's unclear what it's even useful for!), so there's no demand to fix it.

More likely, I suspect, would be a gradual move to deprecate OOB data. It's a poorly designed wart on TCP.

<comment><USER22> I thought that SSH used it to pass ^C up faster than the rest of the stream so that you can quickly kill programs that flood the terminal. I've never verified this though.

<comment><USER23> The article says Telnet works that way, it seems reasonable to think SSH might use it for the same purpose.

<comment><USER24> But the ^C should be encrypted. If SSH sets the URG flag on a packet containing an encrypted ^C, it would be leaking plain-text - even for just one byte :)

<comment><USER25> Not just encrypted, authenticated- it would be bad if a MITM could send ^Cs out to fuck with you at any time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was a bit confused about at what layer this OOB byte would be sent, I think this article cleared it up for me[0]. TCP has a feature called TCP Urgent Data which can be enabled by flipping a bit in the TCP header. BSD maps this to the OOB feature as described.

This means that if your Node.JS app was behind a http proxy that's not vulnerable, like nginx+passenger, you would've been safe. Just a TCP pass- through would leave you vulnerable though.

All theory of course, since no one is really running a Node.JS server on OSX.. right?

0] [http://www.serverframework.com/asynchronousevents/2011/10/ou...](http://www.serverframework.com/asynchronousevents/2011/10/out- of-band-data-and-overlapped-io.html)

<comment><USER27> It's a bigger problem for Chrome. Imagine if you ran an ad on a major ad network that loaded a banner from your server that sent a byte as TCP urgent. It would lock up any Mac who visited a significant fraction of the Internet.

(Incidentally, a bug like this was what got me to switch from Netscape to Internet Explorer back in 2000. Doubleclick ran an ad that included some Javascript which locked up Netscape and hung the browser entirely, blocking roughly 40% of the Internet for me. At that point I was like "This is ridiculous, fix your damn software Netscape" and switched.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm kind of disappointed that this bug doesn't have branding. :-)

<comment><USER29> "oob-killer?" "oob-o'-death?"

<comment><USER30> Both the other brands have been clever and played on what's being exploited. (Heartbleed is bleeding data thorugh heartbeat, for example.)

How about "reURGitate"? It plays on URG, and regurgitate is something you can do forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> They seem to have only fixed this on Yosemite.

I can reproduce the bug on Mavericks and Chrome 41.0.2272.118 after the 2014-004 update for Mavericks.

<comment><USER32> If true that strikes me as kind of shitty. I know Apple doesn't care much for maintaining old versions and backwards compatibility but Mavericks isn't all that old.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ehhh. Maybe. Keep in mind that this bug is probably one of the _least_ serious of the dozens of bugs patched today, as there's very little damage you can really do with it. Hardly anyone runs OSX servers, so you're not going to take down any major web sites with this. You can crash someone's browser, but that's actually already pretty easy to do with some javascript that eats a bunch of resources. Chrome doesn't even consider DoS to be a security issue because there's just nothing they'll ever be able to do about it anyhow.

If the bug in any way threatened data integrity or confidentiality, then yeah, they should backport it. But for a DoS, I can see the case for not really caring.

FWIW, for many of the bugs patched today, Apple did in fact backport to Mavericks and even Mountain Lion, so it seems like they haven't completely abandoned old versions.

<comment><USER33> _You can crash someone 's browser, but that's actually already pretty easy to do with some javascript that eats a bunch of resources. Chrome doesn't even consider DoS to be a security issue because there's just nothing they'll ever be able to do about it anyhow_

They could implement resource limits and stop consuming more resources once those limits are reached.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be challenging to tell the difference between a legitimate but resource-hungry site and a malicious one. In the former case, the user may in fact want the site to page everything else out to get the job done.

In any case, DoS attacks exist yet don't seem to be a big problem in practice, probably because there's not much in it for the attacker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if this is related to a wacky clipboard bug I hit today while VMWare Fusion was open. Basically I copied & pasted a file within a VM, then copied some text from Chrome on OSX and Chrome froze instantly.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think this would apply to a few common ircds running on affected versions of OS X too.

</comment><comment><USER36> Such a twisted forewarning about the importance of net neutrality...</comment>


There Is Never a Need to Justify Sharing Culture and Knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/19/there-is-never-a-need-to-justify-sharing-culture-and-knowledge/

<comment><USER2> I don't think you have a right to "share" episodes of Veronica Mars. The justification for sharing "culture" is dramatically diminished, in my opinion, when that "culture" is purely commercial. There are a huge number of artists willing to share their culture for free, yet sites like Pirate Bay seem nonetheless to be filled with commercial "culture" not created for the sake of culture itself, but for the sake of profit, and not intended to be shared.

<comment> muuh-gnu > I don't think you have a right to "share"

But you should.

> when that "culture" is purely commercial.

You dont need a justification at all. You want to share with your fellow people, thats it. People love other people and love to share things they have with them. Sharing is caring. Suppressing that inherently human feeling and urge simply to make somebody make more money is insane.

The problem with the whole copyright debate is that the so called "democracy", aka will of the people, is completely and utterly disregarded. The process of law making is completely and utterly driven by special interests and enforced against all public resistence from top down. The issue of copyright is closed up in a dictatorship bubble and fiercely guarded against democracy.

The people, and _only_ the people (like in a direct referendum) should decide what they value more: their natural, human right to share useful information with their fellow humans, or to collectively enforce a kind of for-profit censorship in order to incentivize commercial production. No single authority should be able to make such a far-reaching and intrusive decision for them.

Such a referendum has never been held, and therefore such laws are undemocratic, and for that single reason alone I and a lot of other people do not feel obliged to obey copyright laws. It is as simple as that. Requirig people to obey and respect copyright restrictions simply because some special interest calls it a law makes as sense as requiring them to obey and respect ius primae noctis only because some special interest calls it a law. To be respected, a law has to be widely agreed upon, and copyright is as widely agreed upon as ius primae noctis.

<comment><USER2> If we're talking about natural human tendencies, I'd argue that any supposed "urge to share" is weaker than the evident urge to control the products of one's own labor. People who know nothing about intellectual property still get extremely upset when they perceive that someone else "stole their idea" or "ripped them off."

Also, claiming the copyright regime is not the product of democracy is utterly ludicrous. If people cared so much about this "natural right to share" they would vote out the people who pass restrictive copyright legislation. But they don't. Claiming that the results of the democratic process are in fact not democratic for various hand-wavey reasons is the last-ditch argument of people who don't like the outcome of the democratic process because it didn't come out their way.

<comment><USER3> "People who know nothing about intellectual property still get extremely upset when they perceive that someone else "stole their idea" or "ripped them off.""

That is because they want credit for the idea. Give them credit and share it freely, and most people will not complain, even if they never intended for their ideas to be shared by millions of people (many will be happy with the fame, even if they don't see millions of dollars for it -- again, as long as they are getting credit, or at least as long as nobody else gets the credit).

Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like "intellectual property," because they are desperate to convince everyone else that ideas are a form of capital. The rest of us use words like "idea," "song," "movie," "book," "equation," "name," "DNA sequence," etc. to describe things that might be copyrighted, patented, trademarked, or whatever else. That is because the rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of thinking that copying things is a destructive activity.

"Also, claiming the copyright regime is not the product of democracy is utterly ludicrous"

Yes, because as we all know, hundreds of millions of Americans care deeply about Sonny Bono's vision of lifelong copyrights and the end of the public domain; all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics, none of it had anything to do with the Mickey Mouse act, the DMCA, or TPP. No, this is all highly democratic -- we just heard Obama and Romney talking about the importance of ensuring that websites like Megaupload be removed from the Internet, and that programs like deCSS remain outside of America.

"If people cared so much about this"

People don't care; people ignore copyrights when they want to share things with each other, which is in no way a new situation. People were singing Happy Birthday at public events without giving a damn about the copyright status of that song. Copyrights are a regulation on industry, and it is absurd to try to apply copyrights to the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. The only reason copyrights became a major issue in the past 30 years is that the industries that depend on copyright to turn a profit discovered that they are no longer necessary, and so they tried to expand copyright to turn back the technological clock. We have seen this sort of laughably misguided behavior before, and thankfully we stopped the nonsense before ruining good things:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws>

"Claiming that the results of the democratic process are in fact not democratic"

This is not democratic:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery>

It is, however, the way copyright expansions happen, at least according to one prominent insider:

[http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive- hollywo...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywood- lobbyist-threatens-to-cut-off-obama-2012-money-over-anti/)

<comment><USER2> > That is because they want credit for the idea. Give them credit and share it > freely, and most people will not complain, even if they never intended for > their ideas to be shared by millions of people (many will be happy with the > fame, even if they don't see millions of dollars for it -- again, as long as > they are getting credit, or at least as long as nobody else gets the > credit).

It goes far beyond credit. Find a popular restaurant with an original shtick, set up a copy, and see if proper attribution changes the degree to which you've pissed off the owner of the original.

Do a thought experiment. Do you remember the episode of "Big Bang Theory" where Penny comes up with the idea to sell Penny Blossoms (little hair accessories)? See: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF-0qn_-TAo>

Imagine this hypothetical: someone else sees Penny Blossoms, copies the idea and the name, and makes a ton of money selling their copy mass-produced by Chinese labor. What is Penny's reaction in this hypothetical? Is she excited to see her ideas be disseminated, or pissed off that someone else is making money off her idea? Does attribution change that reaction?

> Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like > "intellectual property"

"Intellectual property" exists because people believe, very strongly, in the right to profit from their own ideas to the exclusion of others. People perceive it as "unfair" when someone else makes money off their idea. The Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't happen because certain patents existed. The case happened because Samsung released products that looked a lot like iPhones, and Apple (Jobs) felt ripped off. If patents didn't form the basis of the suit, Apple would have found something else--the feeling of being ripped off came first, the law came after.

> That is because the rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of > thinking that copying things is a destructive activity.

You're wildly confused about whether the chicken or the egg came first. Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics..." Obviously copyright and patent date back to before the Constitution, but even in contexts where neither copyright nor patent apply, there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible property. Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or "unfair competition." In many respects, the protection of ideas under the current law is much narrower than what people thought should be the case historically. It was popular (though never the law), for a long time, to appeal to a "labor theory of copyright" where people thought facts or news should be protectable if they took effort to collect or gather. There is a strong conceptual appeal to the idea that if one spends effort creating something, whether tangible or intangible, one owns and should be able to control it. It's a manifestation of our monkey selves.

Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets. These are clearly facts/opinions and not protected by any intellectual property regime (an attempt to extend protection to them under a misappropriation theory was struck down by the Second Circuit recently). But even though the law doesn't protect these recommendations, people genuinely feel ripped off when aggregator sites repost analyst recommendations. They feel it is unfair that someone should be able to profit by simply reposting something that required them to undertake extensive research and analysis. It's very much a "there should be a law!" sort of feeling.

<comment><USER3> "Find a popular restaurant with an original shtick, set up a copy, and see if proper attribution changes the degree to which you've pissed off the owner of the original."

The first thing they would do is remind everyone that they had the original recipe, that they still make it the authentic way, and that the competition cannot get it right because they are just copying things. Surely you could have come up with a better example.

"The Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't happen because certain patents existed"

Yes it did, see above. Steve Jobs wanted to ensure that it was Apple filing patent lawsuits, rather than Apple being sued. Rounded rectangles are not an original idea. Apple is a profiteering corporation, no different than any other profiteering corporation:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars- am...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech- giants-can-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all)

Here is what Steve Jobs really felt: "Privately, Mr. Jobs gathered his senior managers. While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, "we're going to patent it all," he declared," ""Even if we knew it wouldn't get approved, we would file the application anyway," the former Apple lawyer said in an interview. "If nothing else, it prevents another company from trying to patent the idea.""

"Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics...""

Right, they can be traced all the way back to "that cozy relationship between printing press operators and the British government, with all their lobbying, and with the lack of protections on free speech." For what it's worth, the idea that sharing is good for humanity and that knowledge should be copied predates the notion of copyrights and patents by _millennia_ : ancient libraries copied books frequently, without hesitation, and one point anyone who came to Alexandria with books was required to allow the books to be copied. Copyright was a product of industry from its very inception: first to ensure that only certain, government-approved printing presses could publish books, later to maintain the revenue stream of those presses (after intense lobbying following a period of no copyrights.

"there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible property"

Yes, but at one time it was considered to be the sort of thing that the aristocracy did to prevent the lower class from ever rising to power.

"Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or "unfair competition.""

No, it usually came up as "censorship," "sedition," "libel," "witchcraft," and "heresy." The early origin of copyrights in English law falls squarely in that category:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662)

"Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets"

Yes, this is a good example: these are created for the purpose of turning a profit, by people who are so focused on exploiting others that they disproportionately meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. Of course they want that information to not be copied; the fewer people who know it, the more of an edge those that do know it have over their competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with most of what the article says, with one exception:

"We don't determine what civil liberties our children get based on who can make money and who can't; we base them on what our parents fought and bled for."

Lots of people fought and bled over lots of issues, but the act of fighting and bleeding has absolutely no bearing on whether they were right or wrong. This just seems to be deliberately emotionally-loaded language, and the article would be better off without it.

<comment><USER5> I used Ctrl-F and didn't find the word "determine" or "bled" anywhere on the page. Did you read a different article?

<comment><USER6> This looks like a different article - namely, "The Analog Letter: It is entirely reasonable to demand that our children inherit the rights of our parents".

[http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/06/the-analog-letter-its- entire...](http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/06/the-analog-letter-its-entirely- reasonable-to-demand-that-our-children-inherit-the-rights-of-our-parents/)

<comment><USER4> Oops! My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a cool story to tell you. It's called "Spiderguy". But you have to pay me first. Also once I tell you the story you can't tell it to anyone else. You can just tell them about it. Also if you don't pay me and anyone else will offer to tell you this story then no matter how curious you are you should stick fingers into your ears and not listen to it. Or I'll sue ya.

What do you say?

<comment><USER8> That sounds great - as long as the story you tell is compelling, and you do it in a way that captivates and surprises me.

I support art.

If it turns out that your depiction of Spiderguy sucked, I'm less likely to support you in the future.

If you want to share your toys, I think that makes you awesome. But if you don't want to share your toys, I don't think you should have to.

<comment><USER7> How do you feel about me suing you for not sticking fingers into you ears when someone else is telling the story and you listen to it because of your curiosity I instigated?

<comment><USER8> Your scenario isn't remotely real.

<comment><USER7> If I, due to curiosity induced by advertisers of Spiderman go to piratebay and download it (which is as easy and natural as listening in when someone else is telling some story) I can get sued.

<comment><USER8> You are aware of the laws of the country you live in. You can ignore those laws, but you may suffer the consequences. No matter what the laws are, no matter if you think they are right or not. There's no mystery involved in this.

We can debate whether the laws should change, and that's fine. But you can't claim that you "innocently overheard" my telling of a story - in your scenario, you are actively violating the law.

So go find another story teller - one who won't sue you. It's not like it's hard to find them. Don't like the quality as much? So, _sponsor_ the community that won't sue you. Do a Kickstarter. Use Flattr. Share on FB or G+ interesting artists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Making a copy of something for a friend is sharing. Making millions of copies for complete strangers is not.</comment>


What to do when you love big ideas but hate the actual work/details? - <AUTHOR>

I hope that title doesnt come across as simple laziness, but im more interested in the big ideas in life, figuring out the basic idea of something and moving on, than working on the details. Is this a common trait? <comment><USER2> I don't think there's a good answer for you. The main thing I've learned over the years is that everything is about the details. Big ideas can't ever come to fruition without a huge amount of fiddly work. The trick is to find an idea motivating enough that you'll do whatever grunt work it takes to make it happen. Generally you'll never get into a position where you can be paid to think through the basic idea before moving on... unless you've developed serious expertise, which, again, is all about details.

</comment><comment><USER3> I sense that thinking can be mistaken for doing in memory. If we've previously spent a lot of time superficially orbiting a subject, then when later reminded of that subject, it's all too easy to think "Been there. Done that. Boring." even though we never did actually land on the surface.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could always become an "architect" or a "lead programmer". Figure out the big chunks, and the details of the new/innovative little chunks, then delegate the grunt work to "junior programmers".

Probably means a dull corporate gig, tho.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For example programming, I've approached Ruby so many times, but once I spend a couple of days on it, I abandon it again.

<comment><USER2> Think of Ruby as a means to an end. Have a project. Rather than learning Ruby for Ruby's sake, learn it because it'll help you do something you really want to do. That's the best way for me to ever learn anything -- if the thing I'm learning doesn't solve a problem I have right now it's less motivating.</comment></comment>


Facebook is trying to build AI algorithms that can help build AI algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/05/facebook-trying-create-ai-can-create-ai/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand what this word (AI) means anymore.

Everyone seems to be doing it, except me. It has something to do with "machine learning" and "big data" and it's done using neural nets, which have been around since 1940s.

Somehow I feel like you can use the term AI to any algorithm that takes some input data, does some processing and produces output data. After all, that's what it is.

 __

Because this term is so ambiguous, I will try and translate it into more boring terms:

AI which builds AI means algorithms which produce other algorithms ?

In other words, a program which can write other programs, right ?

<comment><USER3> I think the term AI has been reduced to "anything you can make a computer do, without writing the explicit instructions for it". So what would have been described as a Bayesian process (or Bayesian algorithm) ten years ago, is now called AI. Every tool produced with some genetic programming can now be classified as AI, even if the resulting program is completely static after deployment.

It's just hype. Just like every dynamic javascript component got rebranded as Ajax ten years ago.

<comment><USER4> Funny thing is that this trend is the exact opposite of what has been the case in the past decades: things stopped being called AI as soon as they became broadly useful!

<comment><USER3> In my view, that's because scientists and programmers alike took AI seriously. No one was willing to claim "AI" as it was a holy grail, considered as-yet unattainable. What has changed since then is not really our capability, but our willingness to dilute the term for marketing gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of these idea came out of Harvard HIPS lab under Ryan Adams. Their work is open source at [https://github.com/HIPS](https://github.com/HIPS), specifically Spearmint and Autograd. His company, Whetlab, was mentioned in article as acquired by Twitter. Facebook is taking the idea further as are all the major ML players.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's called Flow. Not to be confused with Flow[0].

[0] [https://github.com/facebook/flow](https://github.com/facebook/flow)

<comment><USER7> Facebook is now (apparently) a large enough corporation that it has multiple, unrelated, public-facing projects with the same name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this just a huge Monte Carlo simulation machine for generating loads of input setups, run AI many times to see which setup was "best"?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is flow just another handy library for constructing DNN graphs? (like tensorflow) or is it actually a program that is creating DNN graphs intelligently?

I suppose the latter makes a lot of sense, actually. Some of the tweaking and retesting I do to my tf models seems like it could be automated.

It seems like the real challenge of AI isn't so much constructing the models but feeding it training data.

</comment><comment><USER10> Facebook started out as a non-algorithmic company, AOL – geocities – friendster – myspace – Facebook – who's next? They have a lot of catch up to do compared to Google, which started as a core algorithmic company in a branch of AI called Search.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm trying to do something a bit similar here: [https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai](https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai)

</comment><comment><USER12> And this is how we all lose our jobs...

</comment><comment><USER13> AI-algorithms-ception</comment>


Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-america-headed-for-a-new-kind-of-civil-war <comment><USER2> Ridiculous:

      Mines's definition of a civil war is large-scale violence
      that includes a rejection of traditional political authority
      and requires the National Guard to deal with it.

By that definition the U.S. has experienced civil war, episodically, for a significant part of it's existence.

<comment><USER3> It's an interesting thought. Civil war was obvious because it was total war. It became the focus of the entire nation. But the U.S. has become increasingly effective at going to war without it being total war. I wonder if it can do the same with itself?

<comment><USER4> That the US can wage small wars abroad without impacting its domestic capital production and labor bases much at all is due largely to asymmetry of forces, economies, and of course distance.

Another American civil war that isn't just brief and minor discretionary intervention by the Nat'l Guard (as in the LA riots or Katrina)–which is an awfully poor definition of civil war–but rather is more like 1861-1865, would significantly impact domestic quality of life. In fact, I'd wager the American middle-ground between the small regional events it's experienced in recent history and total chaos is small, if it exists at all.

Which is probably what will keep it from happening, so long as most people are reasonably prosperous, which is likely to be the case, assuming it deals gracefully with the rapidly dwindling lower middle class and the rapid consolidation of production (a non-trivial assumption).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article title is

> Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?

which is much less provocative than the HN title which is

> Experts think there is a 35% chance of an another American Civil War

The former specifically mentions "kind", suggesting we are talking about something very different than the past civil war. The latter implies 35% of repeating the past one.

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe this conflict stems from:

* Lack of opportunity (especially for the poor)

* Conflation of race (looks) and subculture with general oppression of the population rooted in the economic divide.

* Targeting portions of the population in a self re-enforcing feedback loop of further isolation and lost opportunity.

* Lack of civic planning and political leadership towards ends that improve the outcome for as many as possible as much as possible.

* Lack of a clear goal or set of goals to work towards globally, let alone locally.

The most obvious global projects for improving everyone's experience are:

* Ending hunger (surplus of food)

* Increasing available (useful) energy to improve quality of life.

* Science fiction projects in space could be a good use of productivity.

* * Robots mining the asteroid belt.

* * Orbital elevators and a ring around the planet. (Useful as a platform for communications, energy transmission, and solar arrays.)

<comment><USER7> The most immediate concern is the rising fascist movement in the United States. You list good root causes, but there's an immediate problem here and it's not going anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of > civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts' predictions > ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus > was thirty-five per cent.

It sounds like they took the average and called that the consensus, while in reality, the experts couldn't disagree more.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five > conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, > with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press > coverage and information flows

This last point is fairly obvious to anyone with common sense, and may people - also on HN - object to increasingly divisive reporting, often aiming at clicks rather than the truth. An yet, most media outlets keep doing it, always finding someone else to blame.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm deeply disappointed with the decision by the Virginia ACLU to legitimize the rally in Charlottesville in the name of free speech. The ACLU is not naive. They must know that many white supremacists are domestic terrorists. Why do they mindlessly support their "right to assemble"?

<comment><USER7> They're ideologues. I'm not saying that as a good or a bad thing. But remaining consistent to their principles is their top priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The way US citizens are armed is unlike anything in the rest of the world. I used to think with Trump winning the black lives matter thing could erupt into a civil war as Trump is someone that would send in the national guard and start shooting. Now looking at these white protests it could go the other way as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does one estimate the probability is 35%?

Psychohistory?

<comment><USER7> Throw a dart at a board?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's pretty simple what the answer is. It is two territories, one exclusively for blacks, and the other exclusively for whites. The rest of the USA can stay as is. But of course, why would HN readers accept the obvious truth when it's easier to downvote and dismiss.

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be the shortest war in history

<comment><USER15> Presumably you mean this because one side has all the guns.

While that's true enough, I wouldn't expect that to make it short. It might cause the rapid defeat of one faction, but once the genie of naked political violence is out of the bottle I seriously doubt it could be put back in its place so easily.</comment></comment>


John Resig on mobile development - <AUTHOR> http://webstylemag.com/you-dont-know-mobile

<comment><AUTHOR> for example To do good mobile testing you need 12 devices, 11 phones, and an iPad which costs $5,000 dollars roughly.</comment>


Show HN: G.A. Joe – Get More Out of Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://gajoe.co <comment><USER2> There seem to be a huge number of these "take Google Analytics and make it more digestible" companies coming out of the woodwork these days.

The model only really makes sense if Google a) never gets better at UX and B) doesn't disallow this kind of usage.</comment>