Mothers' brains show similar responses to her baby and her dog - <AUTHOR> http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/10/mothers-brains-show-similar-responses-to-her-baby-and-her-dog/ <comment><USER2> I have two dogs, that we've had for 6 and 7 years. I also have a 2 year old and a baby. I don't love the dogs anywhere near as much as I used to, pre- baby.

<comment><USER3> I dated a girl a while back whose older sister + her husband had a dog. They loved her, played with her every day, walked her every weekend, etc.

Then they had two kids. Now the dog is locked out in a cage in the yard of which it rarely gets out, and its sole human contact is getting fed twice a day and maybe fetching a ball 20 minutes then and now. It's really sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The results of the study shouldn't be surprising. The traits which we breed for in our domesticated pets--big eyes, round forehead, pudgy cheeks--these are traits that make them look "cute," but many of them (sans things like fluffiness) ultimately make them resemble babies. That's why we find them cute. To boot, we breed them to be tinier, more docile, and more affectionate towards us.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny)

<comment><USER5> I believe those features arise as a side-effect of domestication, they're not the actual goal of domestication. In the silver fox experiment, things like floppy ears arose without being specifically selected for.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox)

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say floppy ears and mottled fur are baby-like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why if you accidentally injure or kill (say with your car) a cat or a dog, you need to treat the situation as though it is a child. The legal ramifications are wildly different but the emotional hurt you have caused a family is at least similar and should be handled with respect and compassion.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have 6 yr old and a dog. Dog i've had for little more than a yr. There is a running joke in the house that - if there is a fire in the house, and I can only save one - I will save dog first and then kid. I think it has to do with innocence..kids have that pure innocence(at least until they are 6/7 yrs old), and dogs the same...there is no hidden motives, no long term agenda...they are just interested in play... interested in whatever is going on in the moment. And this is what attracts us.

<comment><USER9> I have a 3 year old niece who plots my demise not unlike Stewey from Family Guy. She's so much more ornery than her older brother and sister are/were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always find it interesting when people say "I love my dog/cat as much as people love their children!" This always prompts me to ask them "Would you die for your dog?", in which case the inevitable two second hesitation that follows and horror-struck look on their face answers my question. (Then again, there's a lot of people that wouldn't die for their kids either...)

I think that people can certainly form emotional connections to pets (I like cats myself), but biologically, there's a special attachment to humans. I mean, there's regions of the brain dedicated to specifically differentiating between human faces.

<comment><USER11> That "horror-struck look" doesn't mean "I suddenly realized I don't love my pet as much as I would an actual human child." It means "what the fuck is wrong with this guy, and how can I stop talking to him as quickly as possible?"

<comment><USER10> Hmm... I hadn't thought of it that way. But I find it much more horrific that people are comparing loving animals to children. You don't agree? That's why my comment is made as a follow-up to theirs.

I mean, we eat cows and pigs, and all sorts of other animals. What makes cats or dogs particularly special, other than being cuter and perhaps a little more social? It seems for these people arguing their animals are to be as revered as human beings are, they would also have to be vegan, which most are not.

<comment><USER11> You're missing the point. If someone says they love their pet, you just don't ask that kind of question. It's like showing up at a church with a Dawkins book; who cares if you're "right," you still look like an asshole.

Or, to be more obvious, it'd be like asking a happily married person if they really thought they picked the best person or if they just settled for the best they could get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting, but I wonder what the results would be if you compared the dog, and baby, to your best friend. In other words, I wonder if the dog would have closer matching results to the baby, or the friend.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dogs are excellent hackers.

<comment><USER14> On the internet, no one knows you're a dog...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Le Reddit army has arrived! xD</comment>


EU Court of Justice ruling may spell the death of social like and share buttons - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-court-of-justice-ruling-may-spell-the-death-of-social-like-share-buttons/ <comment><USER2> If like buttons will be disallowed for privacy reasons, shouldn't the same also apply to Google captcha?

That would be a relief.

<comment><USER3> As much as I hate to say this, a case could be made that recaptcha provides a valuable service in exchange for this data without which the service could not work well or would be significantly degraded.

<comment><USER4> The legitimate interests basis would be easier to argue at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article doesn't really do any more than - badly - regurgitate the CJEU press release.[0]

I'm guessing because they wanted to get something out before the official English-language translation of the judgment has been published.

FWIW, the CJEU's judgment _is_ binding.[1] It's the highest court in the EU and has the final say on how to interpret EU law.

[0] [https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...](https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-07/cp190099en.pdf)

[1] [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM%3Al14552) \- "Preliminary rulings are binding both on the referring court and on all courts in EU countries."

</comment><comment><USER5> > Online websites that embed a Facebook Like button are responsible for the > data they send to Facebook and liable for the same penalties under EU data > protection laws, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) said in an > opinion published today.

While I won't miss social share buttons I don't agree with this heavy handed opinion. Facebook should responsible for the data they collect – not websites which use their widget. Safe harbor laws need to be strengthened.

<comment><USER4> The website operator is deciding what data is sent to Facebook my implementing the button.

How are they not a (joint) data controller in that respect?

BTW, the article didn't actually spell this out, but the website operator's "responsibility is, however, limited to the operation or the set of personal data processing operations for which it actually determines the purposes and means, namely the collection and communication by transmission of the data in question." (translated using Google Translate from the French-language version of the judgment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not convinced about the editorialized "may spell the death". It just means that if Facebook wants their Like buttons to be used by companies serving the EU, they will need to take steps that those companies are confident that they obey the law. Assuming that Facebook benefit from the arrangement, why wouldn't they do this?

</comment><comment><USER7> fyi: while the English translation is not available yet, you can find other languages you might be familiar with at [1], or browse through the crude Google translation from French at [2].

[1] [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62017CJ0040)

[2] [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Feur- lex.europa.eu%2Flegal- content%2FFR%2FTXT%2FHTML%2F%3Furi%3DCELEX%3A62017CJ0040%26from%3DEN)

</comment><comment><USER8> Follow this link, and then like us.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good.

</comment><comment><USER10> What about Facebook Pixel?</comment>


North Hollywood Shootout (1997) – A tipping point in police militarization - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this article would be relevant given the current political climate. This covers a historical event in which the police were out-gunned and the aftermath playing an important role in the gear-augmentation of police forces.

WSJ article [https://web.archive.org/web/20150702091610/http://www.police...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150702091610/http://www.policemag.com/channel/weapons/articles/print/story/2012/02/how- the-north-hollywood-shootout-changed-patrol-rifles.aspx)

<comment><USER2> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout) , which "contributed to the increasing trend of law enforcement agencies to switch from revolvers to semi-automatics across the nation".

Or further back in time. "Another reason for the creation of SWAT teams was the fear of lone or barricaded gunmen who might outperform police in a shootout, as happened in Austin with Charles Whitman." \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT)

It's a series of step functions, ratcheting up the police to handle new worst- case scenarios. And training them to think that anything can be a new worst- case scenarios. Like selling lose cigarettes or potentially using a fake $20.</comment></comment>


MongoHub - MongoDB GUI administration tool for mac - <AUTHOR> http://mongohub.todayclose.com/ <comment><USER2> Been using it for a few months. It's got potential! Latest redesign looks awesome, unfortunately it broke a ton of stuff. Unstable as all hell, but its open source so hopefully the community can help fix. I know I'll try to help

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does it only support Snow Leopard or higher? Why not 10.5?

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome, this is exactly what I needed! Looking forward to trying it out later on today.</comment>


Search for PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchforphp.com/

<comment><USER2> Don't forget to have it search <http://stackoverflow.com> in the various php tags. Also, having it search the various framework site's articles, question sites, documentation, etc would be very useful as well.

<comment><USER3> Bonus points if it ranks by textual relevance + # of upvotes on SO

<comment><AUTHOR> Consider it in the pipeline. I am adding this as a must to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I doing something wrong, or should this query return more results?

<http://www.searchforphp.com/?s=needle+haystack>

EDIT - For those who can't get the page to load, here are my results:

        * grapheme_strstr
          (PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PECL intl >= 1.0.0) grapheme_strstr — Returns part of haystack string from the first occurrence of needle to the end of haystack.
          string grapheme_strstr( string $haystack, string $needle[, bool $before_needle = false] )

        * grapheme_stristr
          (PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PECL intl >= 1.0.0) grapheme_stristr — Returns part of haystack string from the first occurrence of case-insensitive needle to the end of haystack.
          string grapheme_stristr( string $haystack, string $needle[, bool $before_needle = false] )

        * iconv_strrpos
          (PHP 5) iconv_strrpos — Finds the last occurrence of a needle within a haystack
          int iconv_strrpos( string $haystack, string $needle[, string $charset = ini_set("iconv.internal_encoding")] )

        * iconv_strpos
          (PHP 5) iconv_strpos — Finds position of first occurrence of a needle within a haystack
          int iconv_strpos( string $haystack, string $needle[, int $offset = 0[, string $charset = ini_set("iconv.internal_encoding")]] )

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

It probably should. Could you let me know what you would be expected it to display? I can then figure out its doing wrong.

<comment><USER4> It's not fair to compare you to Google, but if you're returning results from php.net, I thought I'd see some of the more higher-profile pages:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aphp.net+needle+haystac...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aphp.net+needle+haystack)

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aphp.net+needle+haystack>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the score isn't calculating as well as I would have expected. I will tweak my relevance algorithms to fix this.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice fade in effect when results are shown - soothing and not too jarring.

I'd suggest that when no results are found that a message is displayed to that affect. There is currently no feedback to tell if the system is still loading, broken or has found no results at the moment.

<comment><USER6> Agreed on both points! That fade is a nice little touch and the system needs to provide users with feedback on what it's doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neato! Worked snappy for me. Kudos.

Suggestion: It appears that the searches sometimes stacked up in queue if I typed fast. (i.e. if I typed a long sentence quick the results continued to flash different content many times, playing catch-up. Looked through the JS quick and I see you are trying to prevent this with runningRequest1/2 so maybe it's the short delay in the .fadeTo() after the GET callback. Try moving the runningRequest = false into the fadeTo callback.

Also, .fadeTo() has a default queue of it's own. You could also add .stop() like this:

        $('#function').html(data).stop().fadeTo('fast',1);

Otherwise, really cool! I use "site:php.net foobar" most of the time but this would be a great little widget.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This is my first real play with jQuery. I have added this to my bug queue and will be fixing it in a few hours. Cheers for the tip!

<comment><USER7> Here's another: you're searching on any keyup which creates lots of overhead. Google's implementation is more complex. It appears they search immediately as you type the first few characters on each keyup/down then if the word goes over a few characters it switches to querying every couple seconds, or until you hit the spacebar. It also seems like they have another timer if you pause after a second or two.

If it's just you using this, I would say don't give a crap. But if you plan to allow others to use it and it gains a userbase at all you might consider a similar approach for obvious reasons.

Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> I was looking into this but havent yet been able to make it work smoothly. Since you have raised it I will focus on getting it working.

I have quite a list of things to improve now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fast. I wanted to do something like this for code-completion, but with tagclouds. Still do in fact.

In searchforphp.com, function names are search-completed alphabetically. Could you sort them by their usage? Such as token frequency in a corpus of actual PHP source code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Actually I was looking into doing that. I just need to get a large enough corpus to crunch on. I will probably download a few of the larger CMS's and frameworks and do this.

<comment><USER8> Want some help? There is a contact page on the website listed in my profile. I have side projects. Maybe we could trade tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I might take you up on the offer! Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool and extremely useful.

First thoughts:

The site is slow for me.

There's no feedback indicating the system has captured user input.

On my first visit, I immediately started typing random function names into the search box ('strlen', 'htmlentities', 'func_get_args', etc).

I had no idea anything was going on and assumed that my search returned no results.

It's only when I tabbed out for a few moments and tabbed back that I saw the site worked at all.

When I saw the results, though, my reaction was something like "Wow, that's awesome."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes its something I need to fix. Im thinking for the very first search ill display a "loading" image, because after that the results fade out a little when you start searching again.

The speed is probably due to the site being hammered. Its only a small VPS and probably not coping very well. Thanks for the feedback though!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry everyone about the problems with load. It should be somewhat more responsive now. It was down to me leaving KeepAlive on in the httpd.conf for Apache.

Turned it off and everything is responsive again.

</comment><comment><USER10> Neat idea, especially to a fellow non-IDE using full-time PHP coder such as myself. That said, I tried the first search that came to mind "cast to string" And didn't really get any useful results. First result was for JSON, and the link from php.net was for stripos.

The result I expected, and which I got as the first result in Google was: <http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-juggling.php>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah I know the problem. I actually haven't indexed the whole of the PHP manual. I was just going for MVP.

I will index that and ensure the search results appear as they should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Inclusion of GitHub results would be awesome. They have a search API so it should be fairly easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually did this with Google code for a while, but removed it due to speed issues. I will have a look at the github api though and see if it is any faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 10/24/10, 10:05pm EST, took minutes to load page initially.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that.... its hosted on a Westhost VPS and is probably a little oversold. Its struggling at the moment.

<comment><USER12> naw, no sorries, just thought I'd try to give you something more concrete than "Iz not work."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a list of Firefox's Ubiquity to search for PHP functions, etc ... [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Commands_In_The_Wild#...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Commands_In_The_Wild#PHP)

</comment><comment><USER14> this is simple and much like google.com which i like, no advertisements or wordy introductions, and the main function is bright and center. the ui could use a bit of a makeover, but i think you've got something functional and should keep expanding the functionality before investing time on the ui part since it seems that you're the only developer at the moment.

what storage solution do you use for indexing?

and perhaps i'm getting penalized by the latency since i'm in shanghai, but it seems that the response time is pretty slow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! UI is not my strength, but thats all I could come up with.

The indexing is very much a hybrid consisting of sphinx, mysql fulltext, and a custom solution of python and php.

As for the speed, the site is being hammered... since its only on a little VPS its not coping too well at the moment. I am located in Sydney Australia and its a little slow for me at the moment too. Usually its not too bad though.

<comment><USER8> OK, clearly you are on a running horse...but have you considered a version for Python?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I have. Most of the people I work with are asking for a dotnet one so I am planning on doing that first, but yes Python is on the radar, and mostly done.

<comment><USER15> +1 for python.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.searchforpython.com/>

Will update it soonish!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having it working around PHP's inconsistency in function naming would be great, e.g. if I look for "str_pos" the first result should be "strpos".

</comment><comment><USER17> This looks really nice, great job. I like it and I'm going to try and use it over the next couple weeks, I'll let you know how it goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Would really appreciate feedback as I improve things. Im pushing almost daily updates at this point, just need to know if they are useful or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> very cool site!

Can i ask how you are "getting" the data? Are you compiling the data locally (i would assume via scraping/APIs) and putting it in a full text search engine or are you hitting various services for every search (via APIs?) for every search?

love the site -- its simplicity and bareness have a certain charm.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment through the following,

Web Crawler (custom) RSS crawler (custom) Grep/Parsing of various API references and the like. API's of certain services.

Pretty much everything is hosted locally on the machine though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried a few queries, and honestly I find Google's Auto Suggest to be of more use when searching for PHP functions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. I will be aiming to improve relevance for functions since that seems to be the main feedback.

One of those cases where the way I search for functions is not the way everyone else does. I now have a lot of data to allow me to really improve things. The function relevance is very high on the list now.

<comment><USER19> Awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> where's the foreach loop? <http://php.net/foreach>

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't actually added control structures yet. I just went with functions.

In short its on the to do list, but I figured this was enough to get me started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why should I use this instead of php.net?

</comment><comment><USER22> Great job!

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice!

No blowhard, just a cool service.

Want some work?

email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER24> Found no results for <?=</comment>


Sensors and AI are finding their way into the barnyard - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2019/09/12/sensors-and-ai-are-finding-their-way-into-the-barnyard <comment><USER2> I worked on electronically herding cows 10+ years ago and talked with Temple Grandin about it. She thought the idea of relying on sensors alone to monitor animal health was a bad idea. Unless the sensors can detect every possible disease and problem that a rancher or vet can detect in person, the risk is that some animal problems will go unnoticed by the sensors and the animals will suffer. Also the ranchers may not care about that if it reduces costs and profits remain the same, so using sensors could cost lots of animal misery.

The same is true of using sensors to monitor the health of people. Many ideas that the food industry has used to engineer foods for people have come from the cattle industry (who have a big interest in stuffing more food into cows) so testing sensors on cows may be a first step towards using them on people.

</comment><comment><USER3> non-paywall: [https://archive.vn/145aA](https://archive.vn/145aA)

Also note this article is from 2019.

</comment><comment><USER4> > An Austrian firm called smaxtec has developed a sensor that can be > swallowed. It lodges inside the reticulum, one of a cow's four stomachs, and > stays there for the rest of the animal's life, monitoring body temperature, > movement and stomach acidity, and uploading the results when the cow is near > a wireless detector.

(insert "scream" emoji here)

<comment><USER5> Dairy farmers already feed cattle a large magnet to catch any pieces of metal that they might eat in the field so it doesn't travel through their intestines. No use getting squeamish about this kind of stuff, it's just how the sausage is made (well, milk and cheese).

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

<comment><USER6> There is so much pollution in the fields we have to feed the cows magnets to get it out. That is the funniest thing I've read all day.

<comment><USER7> Mostly fence nails and 100 year old remneants. Lots of ferric metal can occur naturally and is no better. Its not like garbage or trash as you are so inelequently suggesting. Cows eat nearly anything, so if you take the responsibility for their well-being by raising them, you have to plan accordingly.

<comment><USER6> Yeah all the naturally occuring ferric metal in Kansas sure is a plague upon our lands. So much natural ferric material just laying around, I'm getting sick of it all!

Let's bring that up instead of talking about the massive amounts of pollution above and below ground. Hilarious.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Made this with my daughter to help kids ages 2 to 4 learn logic - <AUTHOR> https://countable.github.io/cats-of-jasnah/ <comment><USER2> I think the digits should be arranged 0 to 9, not 1 to 9 followed by 0. Because 0 is less than 1.

Also, when the correct answer is revealed, it would be great to somehow highlight the cats that are actually described by the formula. Yes, this is hard for 0.

Also, the animations feel too fast to me. I find they make the whole thing stressful, somehow.

ALSO, when a wrong answer is given, the question disappears! That's terrible UX.

EDIT: I should add that I think the idea is great! But some details of the implementation could be improved.

<comment><USER3> I disagree with the number arrangement bit. I'd imagine kids are learning to use the keyboard whilst using a computer's browse. 0 placement is on point with what's in front of them.

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting point. I still prefer zero on the right (and remember, they'll see them laid out that way in lots of other contexts, such as preschool worksheets).

I was going to suggest they add a feature to make it accept numbers entered via the the keyboard, but I figured I should check first if they've already done so. They did. :)

<comment><USER5> Sure, but you wouldn't teach them the alphabet starting with 'q'.

The list on the index page starts with 0, if nothing else it would be more consistent to start the counting section with 0 as well (FWIW I agree with the OP, I'm teaching my toddler to count starting with 0).

<comment><USER4> Wait I'm confused. You are teaching them to count the first item as "zero"? So if there are 3 apples, you have them say "zero, one, two"?

(FYI, I wasn't defending the zero on the right decision, I would prefer zero on the left)

<comment><USER6> > So if there are 3 apples, you have them say "zero, one, two"?

Well yes, except they'd count to three still because they're starting on 0 and increase that with each apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So many responses from people who are not target audience. Here is one from me so you can compare.

I just played this with my daughter who is 4 year old. She have found the first 4 levels easy. She was having a little bit trouble with level 5 negation and conjunction but we had to take a break since we were running for a date.

She didn't have any problem with zero being on the right.

She didn't have any problem with linguistics compherension so far.

She was able to differentiate colors and animating cats from the rest and it was perfect.

She is familiar with digital buttons so she was able to press them but even with her tiny fingers sometimes pressing 4 instead of 5 etc. (We played on mobile)

I direct the game for her. (Start, go up levels when she was bored)

Overall thank you for this because she is going to have a gifted and talented "test" next week and this looked very similar to that and she was active and entertained choosing the answers so I can see this could be a good segway I to it.

<comment><USER8> Seconding this. My daughter spent half hour playing this and absolutely loved it. Got up to level 5 and was doing OK but that's where she started to make a few mistakes. I agree with all your points.

<comment><USER6> I'm not the target audience, but when doing the counting one I kept getting asked the same amount a few times in a row.

Did this happen with your children? Did they have an issue with that?

Personally I think that the same question shouldn't be asked multiple times consecutively. The most I had it happen was 4 times in a row but every other time except for twice times I had 2 in a row.

<comment><USER8> Nope, can't say I noticed that. We maybe had once or twice where the answer was the same as the last question, but in those cases the question was different.

The only weighting issue I really noticed was that once you got to level 5 and higher, the number of questions who had zero as an answer started to get disproportionately high. Not constant zeroes, but noticeably more than any other answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. The source is also very readable so I imagine it would also be useful to teach an older child about programming.

I hit a bug though - level 7 generated a "how many cats are spinning" question whose answer is 10, but there's no "10" button and trying to type "1" "0" fails at the first "1". But I see `cats_for_level` allows there to be `level + 5` cats, so is there some way to input an answer greater than 9?

Also, is it not confusing to have cats that are "also" ducks, rather than have a different kind of cat? Like cats with different-colored noses or have their mouth open. (In that puzzle 5 of the spinning cats are cats and the other 5 are ducks. But the dev console log does say it wants 10, not 5.)

<comment><USER10> The ducks-as-cats part threw me too. Either they are ducks or they are cats dressed as ducks. "How many ducks are cats" doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, I am older than 4 and have a PhD in a logic-related field. BUT. I have to admit that I had trouble answering some of those questions. For example: "How many blue cats are not bouncing" when there are no blue cats on the screen. The game seems to assume that the right answer is zero, but I'm not sure I concur. There is a presupposition there about blue cats being in existence and if there are none on screen, the result is that, regarding blue cats, we don't have the required information to answer it. Better phrase it "How many cats are there on screen that are blue and bouncing?".

<comment><USER12> While I understand your argument, I think there's value in the ambiguity.

1\. Clarifying ambiguity and extrapolating are important logic skills.

2\. "How many blue cats are not bouncing" is how people actually talk.

<comment><USER13> I concur.

<comment><USER11> It's not ambiguous at all. The statement is perfectly clear. The statement is a contingency, i.e. a statement that is neither valid nor unsatisfiable. (Proof-theoretically: neither p nor not-p is provable. Model-theoretically: some assignment of truth values to p will make it true but not all of them).

It would be a far more valuable lesson to teach children that talking about something doesn't will it into existence so that you can start making meaningful statements about it, like how many of them there were.

It's like tampering with witness testimony: "Witness: Somebody stole my handbag. Police: Do you remember anything about him? Can you describe him?" All of a sudden the witness remembers that the suspect was male, not female, when the witness may not have seen such a thing at all.

...or like a show I recently saw on History Channel about the zombie apocalypse. Harvard Professor on TV: "Well, scientifically speaking, there is nothing to suggest that a zombie apocalypse would be a scenario we will likely ever be facing. But if there were such a thing as a zombie apocalypse then one of the most important things would be hygiene, so as to minimize the risk of infection, which is a fascinating topic that I have published about quite extensively." Reporter: "Oh, really? Tell me more about the hygiene precautions that we need to use in the event of a zombie apocalypse." Harvard professor: Spends the next 10 minutes of screentime talking about zombie hygiene. Dumb idiot in front of TV: "Honey! Come down here! They're talking about the zombie apocalypse on TV! They have a professor from Harvard and everything!" All of a sudden: The zombie apocalypse is a thing.

Conversely: The fact that you can't _see_ something doesn't mean it doesn't exist... (like atoms)! "How many blue cats are there? -> zero." Might sound okay, but "How many atoms are there? -> zero" is quite wrong, since the cats are presumably composed of more than zero atoms but we can't really count them etc etc

So when these kinds of presupposition violations come up, then you should teach your little daughter to go "Huh? What the? I can't answer that!" Because "Huh? What the? I can't answer that!" is actually the right answer!

<comment><USER14> What about "none" instead of zero?

<comment><USER11> ...doesn't help either.

The problem is that when you ask "How many blue cats are bouncing?" you are stating that blue cats are in existence. So there'd have to be some, not none. There'd have to be a number strictly greater than zero. So zero/none can't be the answer, or you're somehow breaking the rules of the game of logic, or how the computer game is set up.

If, however, you say "How many cats are blue and bouncing?" then the presupposition would only extend so far as to state that cats are in existence, which is reflected on-screen. In that case, it may well be the case that there are zero/no cats that are blue and bouncing.

Let me crossindex something I linked in the other thread:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Existential_import](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Existential_import)

When Aristotle describes his logic (All men are mortal...) he never fathoms the possibility that one of these sets that he talks about could be empty. (Empty sets, in that sense, don't belong in the realm of science, as far as he is concerned, but in the realm of fiction and so forth).

So, to get back to the original post: If I were doing this for a 2-4 year old, then zero is a can of worms I would try to avoid opening altogether. Or I would make sure that the presupposition-part of any question that is asked is in line with the evidence on screen.

If, instead of following Aristotle, you follow the embedding of the syllogism into modern predicate calculus and modern predicate calculus into propositional logic, then you end up with outcomes that will be mindbogglingly counter-intuitive to a 4 year old (but to any person, really).

Example: "All flying horses are three-legged." would become a true statement.

Since there are no flying horses, this is always an empty set. Ex falso quodlibet. Therefore always true. A valid statement.

<comment><USER15> I might be corrupted by programming because it doesn't bother me when I hear a vacuously true claim like "All flying horses are three-legged". My mental model corresponds to Python's definition of "all":

        def all(xs, predicate):
            for x in xs:
                if not predicate(x):
                    return False
            return True

Similarly,

        def any(xs, predicate):
            for x in xs:
                if predicate(x):
                    return True
            return False

You say "Ex falso quodlibet" which makes it sound like you believe such a system leads to contradictions, but this would come down to the choice of rewrite rules.

Example: a rewrite rule from "NOT all(xs, predicate)" to "any(xs, NOT predicate)" would lead to contradictions. Reasoning:

        A. all({}, predicate) is true by def of all
        B. any({}, NOT predicate) is false by def of any
        C. NOT all({}, predicate} is false follows from A
        D. applying the rewrite rule to C, any({}, NOT predicate) is true, which contradicts B.

However, in first-order-logic, that same rewrite rule is fine since sets always contain elements. It doesn't seem like to much work to go from Python- esque any and all to ∀ and ∃. For example "all(xs, predicate)" could be rewritten to: "¬P ∨ (∀ xs. predicate)" where P is a new proposition variable for whether xs contains elements. This relies on the semantics including short-circuiting evaluation (which may be cheating, I don't know).

Or maybe the above is what you already meant when you said "following the embeding..."?

<comment><USER11> ...that's what I mean when I say that computer scientists have been trained to think about certain aspects of logic in a way that doesn't come natural to people and leads to conclusions that almost anybody finds counterintuitive who isn't a computer scientist (like "All flying horses are three-legged").

...it comes down to how you represent natural language quantifiers in logic.

The semantics of "All men are mortal." is that "all" is the quantifier, which takes two higher-order arguments. Using x as the variable that is quantified over, the first argument would have to be a predicate of x and is called the restrictor. The second argument also has to be a predicate of x and is called the body. So "all" is the quantifier. "man" is the restrictor. "mortal" is the body.

Following that notation we would write "All men are mortal" as

        all_x { man(x) } { mortal(x) }

Now the question is how to represent this natural language quantifier in first-order logic. Most computer scientists would think

        ∀x { man(x) -> mortal(x) }

But this is NOT the way Aristotle thought about it, and not the way most human beings naturally think about it. The natural way to think about it is

        ∃x { man(x) } ∧ ∀x { man(x) -> mortal(x) }

The first part of the statement is what's called "existential import". (cf [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Existential_import](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#Existential_import))

When I say "ex falso quodlibet" I mean this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion)

Moving over to the example about flying horses:

        all_x { fly(x) ∧ horse(x) } { three-legged(x) }

Without existential import the statement would mean.

        ∀x { ( fly(x) ∧ horse(x) ) -> three-legged(x) }

Now let's evaluate that within a logical theory that contains some common sense:

        ∀x horse(x) -> ¬fly(x)

The statement would then become provable. That's unnatural. No "normal" person who hasn't been taught through formal education to think in a particular way about implication would say "Oh yes, all flying horses are three-legged, that sounds perfectly reasonable."

Now WITH existential import, the statement would have to mean

        ∃x { fly(x) ∧ horse(x) } ∧ ∀x { ( fly(x) ∧ horse(x) ) -> three-legged(x) }

So now, using the same piece of common sense, the statement is no longer provable, but it's negation is (the statement is unsatisfiable). That's how a "normal" person thinks. A normal person would respond by saying "Hang on! There is no such thing as a flying horse! Therefore you are talking utter nonsense."

Going back to the original post: "How many blue cats are bouncing?" means

        howmany_x { blue(x) ∧ cat(x) } { bouncing(x) }

Which statement contradicts a state of the universe / game-screen, wherein there are no blue cats, if you interpret the statement by using existential import.

My suggestion was to rephrase as "How many cats are blue and bouncing?" which means

        howmany_x { cat(x) } { blue(x) ∧ bouncing(x) }

So now instead of "blue cat" being the restrictor and "bouncing" being the body, you would have "cat" as the restrictor and "blue and bouncing" as the body.

This would be better, because now you can use existential import the way "normal people" do, and still get to the desired result "zero" instead of the result "I can't answer that question". You avoid making a presupposition that contradicts the known state of the universe.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, thanks for the thoughtful discussion :)

I'll think about this some more and see if some design decisions can improve the game with regards to "existential import". Thanks for introducing that concept by the way.

My feeling about this when developing the game with my daughter was that when playing a game, you are taking part in a game universe. If there were a reference to flying horses, the inference would instead be "there must be flying horses in this game". The generative gameplay which is creating cats with random attributes also suggests that blue, bouncing cats are likely to exist but just aren't pictured on the screen presently.

In early education (even undergraduate education) it's common to present a simplified model that in some cases contradicts other models, and developing the cognitive machinery to explore and understand the model one working within, its limits, and how it relates to other models may be more valuable than comparing which models better align with objective (or, academic) truth.

At least, this is the thought process I went through with some of the trade- offs about deciding what answer was most correct from the lens of various formalisms (in my limited exposure to those) versus what answer leads to the richest learning in the age-group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice website. I like it. Please don't use it with your kids (of 2 to 4!!). There are more than enough actual objects scuttered in your house.

<comment><USER17> agreed.

this tool seems to optimize _practicing_ logic more than _enjoying_ logic.

i think kids will find greater success in life with logic if they're taught to enjoy it before they're taught to master it.

why do i think this?

my dad wrote a "computer game" in 4th Dimension in the late 80s that was just randomized arithmetic problems. i had to get a certain score before i could play outside etc. i got really good at answering his program's stupid questions. i also learned to resent him for it and have negative associations w arithmetic to this day.

i also quickly lost my "skills" and am bad at arithmetic now.

it was a nice idea but please don't repeat his mistake.

<comment><USER4> This might be true if the idea of this app was something you were supposed to put your kid in front of for a few hours a day.

To me it is just one thing, one of many, many things a kid will encounter, that help them understand concepts. It's not that different from the typical ad hoc "games" I play with my daughter, often while in the car. From "I spy with my little eye" to "what's the opposite of X" to "I'm thinking of a movie where there is a...." to "how many points on a star? how many wheels on a bicycle?" and so on.

I'm not sure what sort of "enjoying logic" you are expecting from a 2-4 year old. Solving little puzzles actually seems pretty enjoyable to them, from my experience. This is not to suggest that it should come at the expense of more "natural" ways of learning logical concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool.

Back in the '80's there was a game called "Rocky's Boots" that taught logic to kids.

[https://www.myabandonware.com/game/rockys-boots- cp](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/rockys-boots-cp)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Logic gates no less. We will have to spin up dosbox and try it out if possible.

<comment><USER19> You can play it on the web.

[https://archive.org/details/Rockys_Boots_1982_Learning_Compa...](https://archive.org/details/Rockys_Boots_1982_Learning_Company)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was not prepared for the text-to-speech blaring out at maximum volume without warning. I was further not prepared for "mute site" in chrome having no effect. Does anyone have any advice for blocking this behaviour on a global level?

Just a warning for future explorers

<comment><USER21> heh :) only read this after trying while my notebook was muted. Quickly closed the tab before I accidentally unmute and wake the lil one

Will be trying the counting part with kid next morning.

I assume its random() based, did get a lot of 3 cats, specially in a row. Never 0 cats or more than 5. I would remove the answer buttons for 6 to 0, or a button to hide those maybe?

<comment><USER22> Higher levels have more cats, try the arrow at the top right of the page to go up a level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I noticed you don't have an eleven button: [https://imgur.com/a/TK7Td2J](https://imgur.com/a/TK7Td2J)

To be clear: I tried each number 0 - 9 to make sure none are correct. This question cannot be answered and blocks further progress.

<comment><USER24> You want them to turn it up to eleven?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've found with two of my kids that they were really into paper-based logic puzzles using logic gates.

I draw up a heap of multi-input AND and OR gates, and some inverters, then wire them together in more or less random ways. Then put 0 or 1 on all of the inputs, and get the kids to work out what some given output will be.

The good things I've found are:

\- This seems easily within reach of my kids from age 5 or so, probably many could start even younger

\- all they need to get going is the concept of AND, OR and NOT, easily graspable

\- It's quite positive for their self-esteem, since what they're doing looks (especially to their seniors) insanely complex, but logic is really not that hard

\- It's paper-based, no screentime, pin them up on their wall when they're done

\- It's super quick to set up each "puzzle", and you don't even need to spend any time setting up some complicated trick answer, or even really testing your puzzle. Any old random logic circuits are great fun for them to step through and come up with the outputs.

\- you can step it up to more complex things - e.g. change up some of the inputs once they've got their first outputs, chuck in some flipflops etc.

<comment><USER26> You might be interested in [http://nandgame.com/](http://nandgame.com/) . It's sort of like the game they are already playing, and teaches them about CPU architecture.

<comment><USER25> That looks very interesting. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> First of all, awesome amd thank you. Now one comment. Is it possible to (only after selecting the correct answer) to highlight the cats that are in the correct condition? This might help with visual reassurance of the correct answer. Cheers

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice project. Some ideas:

When you click a number or press a key, the number should be highlighted for a short time.

In some other games, after a wrong try the number disappear and in other games the number gets semitransparent and disabled. It makes the later tries easier, but my small daughter learned to bruteforce the tests :) .

Sad cats when you get a wrong answer? Perhaps it's a bad idea.

Super happy cats when you get the right answer?

What about a mixed level, where you get some samples of the last two levels? (The last levels are not so easy.)

What about dogs? I like dogs. :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Great job, played all levels with my 4 year old and enjoyed. This can easily be an ipad app. Also my browser is lacking a tip button as this would have been a $5 tip easily.

<comment><USER8> Couldn't agree more. I'd tip for this or buy it. My girl just spent a solid half hour playing it and got really into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is great. I love the concept. There is just enough UI to play. The 'cat- ducks' makes it fun.

If I could add something, I would make getting an answer right a little more rewarding. A correct answer graphic, or a correct answer counter.

I realize this is probably a proof of concept for a minimum viable game and standard game mechanics did not make the cut.

I will test it out on my 3 year old tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER31> This looks great. Will definitely try it with my son.

The first part is about 'counting', or maybe recognising a count without counting (I didn't count the cats 1-2-3, because I can instantly recognise 3 of something).

If you're interested in exploring this further, the book How to Teach your Baby Math, by Glenn Doman, recommends teaching babies/toddlers numbers by showing them cards with dots on them, one at a time, whilst saying aloud the number of dots.

Instead of making your own cards and using your own voice, you can run this web app and use your smartphone and thumb.

[https://dots.twilam.com/](https://dots.twilam.com/)

The initial screen is blank. Tap anywhere on the screen to show some dots and hear the number. After about a second, the screen will again be blank, ready for you to tap again.

</comment><comment><USER32> I never get more than five cats. Also it is Unclear how a kid wild get to the end of answering the same question set. Also, I kept getting the same number of cats in a row. It feels like something is wrong to get the exact same question.

<comment><USER33> Try the higher levels

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I made a [fork]([https://github.com/ahalma/cats-of- jasnah](https://github.com/ahalma/cats-of-jasnah)) that allows for some internationalization. Now you can play the game in Dutch or Spanish as well (or extend it for your own mother tongue).

You can set the language via an URL parameter:

[https://ahalma.github.io/cats-of- jasnah/index.html?lang=es](https://ahalma.github.io/cats-of- jasnah/index.html?lang=es)

</comment><comment><USER35> That's very cool! I like that the whole project is packed into one html file and that you made it together with your daughter. I'm also working on an open source logic/math game for ~8+(depending on the mini game). If parents on HN are interested in trying it out with their children, please do it and give me feedback [https://braincup.app/](https://braincup.app/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Controversial opinion, but I don't think kids ages 2 to 4 should be having screen time, let alone an activity that is better presented with real objects.

<comment><USER37> Why?

Many people have these "screen time" opinions. I'm not saying I disagree, but why do you think zero screen time is the correct amount?

<comment><USER38> 2 to 4 is still early in the development of physical attributes, focus, hand eye coordination, balance and what have you. Zero _intentional and structured_ screen time seems entirely appropriate. Let them develop a physical world and interact with it before encouraging screen addicted couch potato. That will come despite best efforts later...

<comment><USER39> Do you have studies to prove that zero screen time is beneficial? I have a two year old who has learnt plenty from his screen time - between 15m to 30m per day.

<comment><USER40> Anecdata - my kid is the same. She's 22 months and can sing all the usual songs and names her shapes and colors aloud with the videos. It's impressive and she can count like crazy from all of it (and out of order so it's not _just_ rote memorization in order).

We do push it at times when we are traveling or she's sick where she will get 2-4 hours of iPad and videos along with her books. She will also pick a book over the iPad almost every time the choice is available so I am not worried (yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think this onEnd callback is what allows you to spam the button and nothing changes on screen [https://github.com/countable/cats-of- jasnah/blob/master/inde...](https://github.com/countable/cats-of- jasnah/blob/master/index.html#L428)

This is cool though. I never thought to build something to help teach my son anything

</comment><comment><USER42> 1\. This is awesome

2\. How can i turn it into an app for ipad use

<comment><USER43> Open it in a web browser on an iPad? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can ur kids read numbers?

<comment><USER45> My two year old can read numbers up to 10. It takes a little while to go from the symbol to the amount but generally speaking she can do it. It's typically around 2 where you can start to learn letters and numbers and basic counting.

<comment><USER44> My twin 4 year olds could play the game no problem, but they cannot read numbers well so they just counted from the left. Turns out they knew 1-3 already, picked up 0 fast as it was the odd one out. I have not pushed numbers very much, they know more of the alphabet. I am not sure whether I should teach them numbers, I kind of think letting school do that might be better, but your comment has made me think a bit more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Reminds me Lewis Carrol's The Game of Logic: [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4763/4763-h/4763-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4763/4763-h/4763-h.htm)

</comment><comment><USER47> Just played it with my 3 year old, and he had a real hard time with the "how many cats are ducks" kind of question... Cats can't be ducks after all!

But he really enjoyed it otherwise, thank you for this, and thank you for making it open source!

</comment><comment><USER48> My three year old says the cats are cutie pies. That's very high praise...:)

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER40> Played the counting levels with my 22 month old who can count to 20. The only thing I would suggest from our experience is the cats "dressed up as ducks" was confusing for her.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a really good concept, definitely going to use it with the kiddo. On a laptop screen, the buttons could be bigger, hard to hit them with little fingers.

</comment><comment><USER50> I have 3 questions.

How many of you have 2 year olds that can read?

For those that can read, was this thru your parental efforts, self taught, or daycare / 3rd party?

How many languages can your 2 yr old read?

</comment><comment><USER51> You don't want kids of that age to learn logic. You want them to learn imagination.

</comment><comment><USER52> My three year old tried it and is enjoying these, thank you OP!

</comment><comment><USER53> How many cats are here?

God please its 10, where is my 10,10, 100000,.

no no1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!sw

its 10!!!

tajsfueygfwfpawhfahfghf

</comment><comment><USER54> Thank you for this. My daughter really enjoyed it!

</comment><comment><USER55> The robot voice is the deal breaker for me. That can't be good for a developing mind. Combine this with voice mimicking technology that was posted a few weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER56> how many cats are not red and are not ducks? Such kids, much wow!

</comment><comment><USER57> Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER58> This is amazing. Would love to see more simplified foundational education games such as this geared towards any audience and from all domains.

</comment><comment><USER59> Keep getting asked to count 10 cats at levels 5 and up.

</comment><comment><USER60> Kids of 2 to 4 shouldn't be using screens.

<comment><USER61> Why is that? Is a coloring game on a tablet damaging? Is a coloring book not?

<comment><USER4> Personally I don't like anything with colors, since I see the world in black and white.

(I'm kidding of course, I agree with your point)</comment></comment></comment>


How should I deal with an employee who has slept with my wife? - <AUTHOR> http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/7617/how-should-i-deal-with-an-employee-who-has-slept-with-my-wife

<comment><USER2> He needs to learn a valuable lesson. don't shit where you eat. The question isn't about firing him. Do you really want someone you can't trust working for you? If he's willing to stab you in the back personally you don't think he'll stab you in the back professionally? Do you really want someone that has no ethics working for you? Do you really want someone that dumb working for you? The only question, how hard/long is it going to be to get others crossed trained on his job until you can fire him?</comment>


Thepiratebay.se is now accepting bitcoin donations - <AUTHOR> https://thepiratebay.se/

<comment><USER2> Why would you donate to them? They run the 74th most popular site on the internet and it's full of ads, popups and scamware.</comment>


Last week I asked about iOS components, today I released one. Feedback? - <AUTHOR> http://getsuperpin.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm an iOS developer and I have 3-4 location-based products. Maybe I'm just not in your target market, but this component doesn't solve any problem I have. Seeing a bunch of dots that change places every time I zoom in is visually jarring and not very helpful. Only in rare circumstances would I prefer this visualization over seeing all the pins.

Now if you did a heatmap-type visualization, or had something that crossed over more smoothly between "wide angle" and "close up" zooms, I would be interested--that's actually a problem I would pay something for. But I would be more interested in seeing the component large-format: iPad or Mac or Web. Dashboard-type visualizations to monitor global infrastructure or something. Because people aren't going to do a ten-inch pinch on a phone, they just want to see the ten coffee shops on this street, and notation groups aren't needed for that. But I might want to visualize the whole world's tweets on a ginormous zoomable kiosk or do it in a presentation or a dashboard of my customers or something.

Quite frankly I'm happy to pay for a UI component but I want the vendor to have put in the time and effort to think about the UI so that I don't have to. All the iOS APIs have a lot of thought put into the UI (pages and pages of rationale in the documentation), and for a premium component that's your entry bar. Grouped annotations sounds like the way I would initially try to solve this problem, would prototype it and realize that it didn't work, and then try heatmaps. Maybe heatmaps won't be an effective metaphor either. The value a good premium component has on iOS is NOT that it's a cheaper component, but it takes out a lot of design risk, a lot of bad prototypes. The point is, I'm willing to pay great money for a great UI, and no money for a mediocre one.

The problem with your pricing is that the binary people will need more support from you than the source code people (who can fix the problem themselves, and optionally send you a patch). You need to price a few hours of support into the low-end product especially, so $150 is too cheap. I might just drop that product, as the source product is priced about right and is also a lower support burden.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hope this isn't too much advertisement, but I got a coupon for YC readers: HN25 for 25% off.

Btw, if you've got any questions don't hesitate and mail me at email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> You believe your little iOS component is worth $150-$600? That's about as much as someone would pay for a fully-featured 3D game engine, something that thousands of man-hours went in to making and that does an incredible ammount of work for them-- and you're saying that a 1-week iOS component is worth that?

I mean this in the most sincere way, good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd be really interested in hearing how Sales of this framework either A) Are going currently or B) How they go eventually (if you are just launching this).

I've developed some nice components and libraries for iOS and I'm just wondering how successful one can be selling these. I'd love to hear more about this aspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> We just launched. Can you drop me a mail at firstname.lastname@example.com? Would love to talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks great, what a good idea! I've often found too many pins on iOS maps annoying to deal with (most recently in the app "Eat Street"). I'll definitely keep Superpin in mind for any future map-based iOS projects.

I think the price is very fair.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Do you think people will go for the full source or the binary only version?

<comment><USER5> I expect the binary-only version will account for most of your sales, since it costs 75% less. Sales of the source version might depend on whether that version also includes the right to modify it and redistribute your custom version in your own apps, or is just a look-but-don't-touch license. You may laugh, but people do try to sell that. Which is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a modify-as-you-wish license. You're right I can't imagine that people buy a look-but-don't-touch license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, great innovation. I look forward to seeing pinned maps that are actually useful.

I'm sure Apple are going to steal this eventually, though. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well Will Shipley still makes a decent living after Apple stole the iBooks design :)

<comment><USER4> I seem to feel they ripped of "Classics.app" more than anybody. That app uses a bookshelf, to display ebooks for reading, just like iBooks.

Though there's a part of me thinking the designers for Classics.app asked Shipley for permission, but maybe that's incorrect. It's just a feeling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Binary-only version? $599 for the source code? Seriously?

(edit) To reprhase -- the pricing is basically broken.

No developer in his right mind would create a dependency on 3rd party binary library, so the binary-only version is a no go ( _or_ you will sell it to the clueless bunch and they will hammer your support to death).

The $599 needs to be broken down into multiple categories depending on the projected usage and/or deployment numbers. A very cheap ($19 or thereabouts) non-commercial use license is a must if you want devs to tinkle with your library and see if it fits their prototypes well. Then give them N days to upgrade to the commercial license _if_ they decide to publish the app. And even then offer tiered licenses. Any given app may or may not get traction in the AppStore, so paying $599 upfront is to assume that the app will succeed. Bind the licensing terms to the number of downloads, and require upgrading one tier up once certain number of downloads is reached... this sort of thing. Essentially try and assume your customers' position and see what pricing model would work (while keeping smaller dev shops in mind).

<comment><USER8> Red Laser is doing something similar, and being on the other side (we were developing an app that needed to use barcode scanning) I strongly disliked the idea that I have to share my sales data with them. There are also cases where agencies are doing development for their clients and have no overview over sales once they finish the app. Communicating to clients that they have to pay % of sales to some library vendor might be very hard.

Superpin is not an app, and even as a component (in difference to something like an flash/ActiveX chart component) it has a very limited market (iOS devs doing something with maps and needing to handle lot of annotations) and with sale volumes we're projecting, pricing it down to something like $19 would never pay off for the time that went into developing it.

Clustering annotations is not all too hard, but it's certainly not a trivial problem and it will take even an experienced developer (such developer should be charging at least $100/h) a day or two to do it right. If you can buy a well-tested off the shelf solution for this money, why not do that instead? This is basically the thinking behind our "big" price.

<comment><USER7> $19 is for a license that allows playing with the library, but not publishing the app. A preview license if you will, just to let people see if your stuff is what they actually need.

> _If you can buy a well-tested off the shelf solution for this money, why not > do that instead?_

Sure, but who is to say that it is well-tested? That's exactly what the preview license is for. But all in all, gotta tell you that you have a tough task in front of you. What do you think the size of your target market? I am going to guess that it is quite limited (in fact, you said it yourself), so your best bet here is to try and land a sale to a very large developer or into a massively popular app. In either case you _need_ tiered pricing to fully utilize the opportunity. Think about it. Been there myself a few years ago trying to sell sophisticated networking libraries (that is a much larger niche than yours) and it is _tough_ , really tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks so cool. When I click on one of the +50 buttons, does it expand the pins?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course :) Have you tried the demo? We've clustered all the airports in the world (~40k) and it's fast

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I'll have to try out the demo. I don't have an iOS device available, but I should try it out in the emulator. Also, when I touch a cluster, does the map zoom in and show the pins in the area?

<comment><USER8> This behaviour is implemented with few lines of code in the sample app, but we should probably make this the default behaviour in the framework itself with an option to override it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.cocoanetics.com/parts/dtclustermaker/></comment>


Inbox feel too quiet? Hidden consequences for temporary breaking your email - <AUTHOR> https://hellowebbooks.com/news/does-your-inbox-feel-too-quiet-hidden-consequences-temporarily-breaking-your-email/? <comment><USER2> The world would be better without these nasty abstraction layers over email - outbound transactional email is really not that difficult to do yourself.

Spam letters is another thing and there are limits and restrictions you need to be aware of, but that that point, maybe you should ask yourself whether what you are doing is right if you're reaching those limits?</comment>


Tesla's Model 3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/07/teslas-model-3

<comment><USER2> The SUV is the perfect "form factor" for an electric vehicle because they are typically large and heavy so the big battery pack will not hurt so much in the weight budget. The Model S weighs in at around 2100kg, when similarly sized cars with internal combustion engines are around 1400-1700kg.

The Model 3 has potential to shift the whole market if they can provide a practical electric family car for the average people living in suburban areas.

<comment><USER3> I completely disagree on the SUV being the perfect "form factor" for electric. At least if the SUV is being used for things like carrying gear for an excursion or off-roading. In those cases, it is a terrible form factor (especially with the gull-wing doors that prevent you from using a roof rack). Off-roading isn't as efficient at regenerative braking compared to stop and go traffic in an urban area. They go to areas not at all served by charging facilities let alone superchargers. They generally need even greater range than urban only cars. All of these things make an electric SUV not the SUV for me.

If you just mean the silly way Americans use SUV's (to simply be taller than the other cars on the road) then maybe it is a decent form factor.

<comment><USER4> No, most Tesla SUV drivers will not go off road. The Model X is a "crossover" SUV with very limited off-road capability. You can tell in photos: its ground clearance is low and it doesn't have large suspension travel. It's going to take sales from the Lexus RX, Mercedes M-Class, BMW X series, etc. Nobody takes those cars off-road.

I used to share your disdain for SUVs until I dated someone who drove one. They can be really useful for carrying cargo and the smaller ones get decent fuel economy.

That said, I think a lot of SUV buyers are motivated by fear. They feel that collisions are inevitable so they want to drive a big armored box. They want 4WD even here in the Southern USA where it snows 2 days per year. I think a lot of them have kids and it's one more part of the protective worrying parent mentality.

Personally I can't stand the handling of tall vehicles.

<comment><USER5> > Personally I can't stand the handling of tall vehicles.

There was a time when I loved the handling of my 3-series with sport suspension. Now, I just want something that makes my toddler less pukey on these shitty northeastern roads.

<comment><USER6> Or drive a vehicle that can get through two feet of snow when you work in a field where taking a day off isn't an option.

<comment><USER5> This past winter my car might as well have been a sled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to be a contrarian, but there isn't really any reason to believe that the Model 3 will be any better than the already-on-the-market Nissan Leaf. Tesla hasn't really invented any new technology here that would be a game changer. The vague claim of a "closer alliance of Tesla and its battery supplier" isn't going to suddenly double the mileage when compared to the Lead- and it's not like Nissan hasn't been streamlining their production process for the past few years either.

The Model S is exceptional in that you can pay a ton of money and get an electric car with a very respectable range. But that doesn't really scale down when - like the article points out - most of the cost is in the battery.

<comment><USER8> People who would buy a Model 3 would never buy a Leaf because it performs like a Leaf. The target market is BMW 3 series buyers who buy the car because it looks nice, has tons of power, and handles well.

They're going after the guy who wants a 3 series with instant torque. Range is a secondary consideration as long as it gets over 200.

<comment><USER7> If in 2017 Nissan will have a cheaper, less powerful car with a 200+ range that will also be cheaper than the Model3 - then I think Tesla will be left in the dust.

The Model3 is their chance to break out of the luxury market and the Leaf is going to squeeze them really hard from the low end.

I think at the point, the main thing setting them apart is the Supercharger network. The financial viability of that endeavor is a bit unknown.. but if it translates into significant car sales, then it may pay off.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you understand the point I was trying to make. I could be wrong, but I don't think Tesla intends mass-market to mean targeted at the Camry buyer. The person who is looking at a Tesla isn't looking at a Nissan Leaf as a fungible product, similar to how an iPhone 3G or 4 buyer didn't really see Android as a viable alternative in 2008-2009 or even now. To a large extent, the target customer is price insensitive within the 35-45k price range and is an enthusiast looking at entry level luxury alternatives like the BMW 3 series, Audi A4, Mercedes C class, etc.

As someone who has driven a Model S, the experience is so much better than an ICE vehicle (acceleration, technology, not having to go to a gas station), that the other entry level luxury vehicles, while very nice, feel very obsolete and uninspiring.

I do, however, that the market will be much bigger than anyone anticipates because many will realize the cost is similar to a Camry after gas savings. I also think they'll drive one of these vehicles and realize that it's a much better experience than other vehicles.

Luxury car manufacturers are very good projecting who their customers aren't. To a certain extent, a car purchase says something about who you are not as well as who you are. A lot of iPhone buyers are saying I'm not an Android as much as they're saying I'm an iPhone user. A lot of Tesla's target customers for the Model 3 fall into the same category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "the car was going to be called the Model E, until Ford said it already had that name trademarked" (...) "We'll have three bars to represent it and it'll be S III X!"

3 also happens to be the '1337' slang variant of E.

<comment><USER10> Yep. S3X doesn't look bad to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pay- or registration-walled, alas.

<comment><USER12> FWIW, The Economist is a pretty good magazine (err, I mean "newspaper"), worth subscribing to.

<comment><USER13> I get that it might be, but if I subscribed to all these news sites, the nytimes, the wsj, the economist, the information, the financial times, I'd be out a lot of money each month for what is basically an "I don't know how to use the icognito tab on my browser"-tax. I want to support these sites but they are too expensive, and it's too easy to circumvent their paywall. I actually subscribed to the nytimes for a month and I felt stupid for it, which is a weird feeling to have about it.

The Information has a real pay wall, and it's actually the most expensive out of this list, but if I subscribed to it, at least I wouldn't feel like a jackass for doing so. These companies want the Google crawling and the subscription fees, but it seems like you can only have one.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "I want to support these sites but they are too expensive"

I've been thinking about this a bit recently. Back before these sites were free online we picked the publication we liked and purchased it. We didn't need to read every publication and someone who chose to read the NYT was informed on the same world events as someone who read the WSJ. Then the internet came along and we read bits of everything for free. Now we have to go back to the old model it feels strange - but it shouldn't. Whether you chose to subscribe to and read the NYT or WSJ doesn't matter. You'll get the same information each with it's own slant. Same as before. You aren't going to miss anything. The publications need to convince consumers that this is ok and they don't need to be checking 10 different publications each day. Whether they can do that or not is another thing (short attention spans appear to be a big and growing problem) but I've definitely tried to pare down the number of sites I read and subscribe to and I've tried to focus on the best sources rather than 10 almost identical stories with slight variations. I've found it freeing.

<comment><USER14> What we need is like a spotify for news. Anybody can put their news in and if a reader reads an article that news company gets part of the subscription fees.

I don't know if that would be better or worse though!

<comment> k-mcgrady I like that idea. Although I have to say switching from lots of sources to a few good ones has increased my productivity (less time wasted reading similar articles). There are some things that I think people like NYT need to sort out with their subscriptions. Charging for web access separate from mobile access is a joke. Charge one fee ($20 per month) to read on any electronic device. I can't see how their current fragmented pricing model doesn't seriously hurt their conversion rate.

<comment><USER14> Well users could sort out by publisher so they can read news only from their local newspaper and/or the NYT or something else or if they'd rather read all tech news, a place like HN can be integrated somehow to allow for the dynamic community sorted news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The $35,000 will be starting after rebate, so $42,500 out the door with zero upgrades. I'm pessimistic they can get that low of a price with 300 mile range, so I'm predicting that is an optional battery upgrade from the base price. There are options you will want like the tech package which is $3k+ on the S.

I snagged a 40kwh S before they discontinued it. Had it for a year, never needed to charge anywhere but my home. I get about 135 miles on a charge and it has been more then enough for commutes around the metro.

<comment><USER16> Source? This is what they said during one of their earnings calls:

Barclays Capital – Question about $35,000 price point – before or after tax credits?

Deepak Ahuja (CFO): The $35,000 does not assume that the $7,500 federal tax credit is no longer available, but that the 35,000 Tesla Gen 3 pricing is without any subsidy.

Elon Musk: Helpful to have credits, but Tesla is not counting on them.

The tax credit applies for the first 250,000 (domestic?) units per manufacturer though, so if you pre-order a Model 三 you might be able to get it for $27,500.

<comment><USER15> This was said over a year ago in an earnings call. I hope he is correct. It's a detail that is regularly omitted, wonder why. That tax credit will be available for the gen 3 based off of S sales. There are also phase out periods for the credit when the sales target has hit for 50% and 25% of tax credit. Telsa will want to have optimal production capabilities when that time comes.</comment></comment></comment>


Is blaming PowerPoint really just "shooting the messenger"? - <AUTHOR> http://www.iijiij.com/2012/05/08/is-blaming-powerpoint-really-just-shooting-the-messenger-013459 <comment><USER2> I work in a large business, and every single time someone has to do a presentation with slides, they do it wrong. They create the slides, put in all the content they want to show, then write the talk.

The best slides are ones that are created after the talk. It makes you actually think about what you want to say, and how to represent that the best.</comment>


A VC on what it takes to be a phenomenal entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/mark-suster-venture-capital-entrepreneur/ <comment><AUTHOR> We talked about a lot of the tough conversations you need to be willing to have as an entrepreneur. Here's how he suggested one entrepreneur whose company should renegotiate with her clients:

I said, "Go back to your customers and tell them: 'Times have changed. I need you to either pay me a little more money for the contract so I can support it, or I'm going to have to cut on my development costs and my support costs because I can't build a profitable company. Now what you need as a customer is you want a really strong supplier. I think you still really believe in this vision of what we built, but I need to be strong. And to be strong I need to make profits. And by the way, when you're a billion dollar company it's really no sweat to you. And by the way, if you change this agreement, I'm committing to you I will bust my a-- to make you successful. But I need a little give.'"</comment>


A lost struggle to mine Afghan gold - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/3b0cb42d-5fc8-4319-9f83-79b5ca76cbd7 <comment><AUTHOR> SAS commanders, a high-level US statesman, billionaire financier, Cherie Blair's law firm, insurgents, gold mines - this reads like the outline of a film plot. At the very least, I hope that someone is writing this up as a book.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywalled syndicated version here:

[https://stockshours.com/2020/05/24/a-lost-struggle-to- mine-a...](https://stockshours.com/2020/05/24/a-lost-struggle-to-mine-afghan- gold/)</comment>


Outlaw - ruby anti-pattern enforcement gem - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/bglusman/outlaw

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, just finished Mendicant University's core skills course, and this was my personal project for the course... it tries to help you and others avoid anti-patterns that you can define formally by example. I don't expect it will work for all the examples you can dream up yet, but maybe with your help we can get it there together. Please share any ideas or examples you get working or try/want to get working!

Just gem install outlaw and then enter outlaw in a project directory to try it out, or peruse the repo on github.</comment>


Pegasus.js: Load data while still loading other scripts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/typicode/pegasus

<comment><USER2> Some thoughts:

\- `then` doesn't behave much like a promise

\- JSON doesn't exist in IE7 without a polyfill

\- Since this only supports GET, you could use JSON-P instead if you trust the server

<comment><USER3> Hi, thanks for sharing these thoughts. You're right about JSON, I'll fix that :)</comment></comment>


Hotel Wi-Fi – Relatively cheap free publicity - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/02/hotel-wi-fi

<comment><USER2> >IN YEARS to come we will look back at hotels that charged for Wi-Fi with a kind of incredulous nostalgia. But how far in the future will that be?

I think more importantly, most people will stop caring if hotels provide wifi. I already rarely connect to free wifi because I have a cellphone - when I use my laptop I can just tether.

The two main blockers for most people (at least Americans) are cell providers who charge insane rates for tethering and international roaming. Tmobile has revealed that it's possible to provide both at a reasonable rate ("T-Mobile CEO John Legere has estimated that profit margins on international roaming fees can be about 90 percent"), so the current situation is just an inefficiency that will eventually die off.

To me, we should still encourage hotels to do the right (modern) thing. But we really should be pushing our cell providers to remove the inefficiencies that prevent us from using our connections conveniently.

<comment><USER3> > I think more importantly, most people will stop caring if hotels provide > wifi.

I will stop caring once international roaming fees stops being a thing. I hope that like you mention it eventually dies off, but right now, I have to assume I'll be offline every time I travel abroad.

<comment><USER4> It makes far more sense to simply buy an international SIM card upon arrival. In Thailand for example you can get seven days unlimited 3G (faster than in the usa) for just $5 at 7/11\. Now that carriers must unlock phones you can do this far more easily.

The downside is you get a new phone number. If you travel frequently it might make sense to abandon calling altogether and simply setup an SIP forwarding solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Charging for hotel wifi is about price discrimination. The only people willing to pay $25/day for in-room wifi are business travelers who aren't paying for it themselves anyways.

That's why you're more likely to pay for wifi at a business hotel (Marriott/Hilton) than you are at a tourist hotel. It's also why you're more likely to pay for it at a more expensive hotel than a less expensive hotel.

Frequent business travelers care a lot more about reward stays than they do about free wifi (because they're not paying for it, and because the loyalty program will give it to them for free).

The article reads more like a press release for a social media agency (which is who they quote in most of the article) than it does an actual analysis of why hotels charge for Wifi.

<comment><USER6> I've also heard that there's service-quality expectations at play: if the wifi is free and it sucks, you're still happy while the hotels that charge for wifi to simply reduce demand (congestion) in order to have a better experience (speed/bandwidth) for those who actually pay.

And it's further complicated by the value of ppv entertainment to the hotel - if Netflix/Hulu/whatever works just fine on the hotel wifi, the hotel is losing revenue. Cheap hotels with crapy free internet don't have to worry about that, but hotels that charge are also trying to recoup lost ppv entertainment revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is one of those funny things that if you stay at a cheap hotel you get free WiFi but you always get charged extra for it at an expensive hotel.

<comment><USER8> It seems like there's always a Starbucks next door to the hotel or across the street so I just go use theirs.

<comment><USER9> I hate when cafes set their DHCP lease to 24-hours or so.. nobody is in the shop and you can't get an IP address..

I usually ask them to reboot their router, proceed to log into the admin panel with device's default user/pass (which works most of the time), and set some sane 30min lease.

it's a free public service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a lot of e-commerce sites have figured out the same thing with free delivery. I don't know why but I feel it myself as a customer.. if I pay the price I see and don't end up having all extra charges tacked on at the end, I'm more likely to hit Buy than try and search for the same item on Amazon or wherever.

FWIW, as someone who works online and is a YouTube junkie, I would happily pay for Internet at a hotel _if it were actually good._ It's a _very_ rare occasion I can get a good connection and don't end up using my 3G instead. Merely getting the equivalent of a regular DSL connection would make me happily stump up a good $10-20 but it's NEVER that good.

</comment><comment><USER11> >A study by Resonance, a tourism consulting firm, found that travellers worth more than $1m say that free Wi-Fi is the amenity they value most when choosing a destination

IME many wealthy people don't mind paying a premium but don't want to be inconvenienced. The point of staying at a luxury hotel is to be catered to and pay a lump sum at the end of your stay. Jumping through hoops to get past the payment portal on each device your group is carrying is annoying.

</comment><comment><USER12> I recently stayed at a Starwood property and the wifi fee was approaching 10% of the overall price of the stay.

I would not have needed it but the t-mobile network coverage was very poor inside the hotel.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand what it is that makes companies so short-sighted. They're so focused on the immediate cost of something that they forget the long-term value they reap from customers that keep coming back. Companies need to take the long view rather than squeezing customers for every penny they can.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps they know more than we do. Perhaps it's mostly business guests that are likely to return, and they don't pay for WIFI themselves. Possibly tourists are more sensitive to price and more likely to book with the competition if the room costs $2 more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> WSJ also has an article about this phenomenon with some more details around how each chain approaches the issue; worth a read if you travel... [http://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-for-wi-fi-only-at-a- luxury-h...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-for-wi-fi-only-at-a-luxury- hotel-1424304981) including mention of www.hotelwifitest.com to share wifi quality (or lack thereof) data.

</comment><comment><USER16> > IN YEARS to come we will look back at hotels that charged for Wi-Fi with a > kind of incredulous nostalgia. But how far in the future will that be?

then

> Subscribe now for full access or register to continue reading.

I'm feeling a bit of a knotted irony here.

</comment><comment><USER17> Although irrelevant now don't hotels still charge crazy amounts for the in room phone?

</comment><comment><USER18> As network access becomes more ubiquitous for the residential market, charging for that access at a hotel will look increasingly like charging a separate fee for the water or electricity to be turned on in the room.

People expect most of the normal comforts of their own home when visiting a hotel. Any place that fails to deliver without also charging extra nickel-and- dime fees for those comforts will rightly get negative reviews.

Imagine if your final bill included charges like this:

\- Toilet Flush fee: 4 x $1.99

\- Elevator Use fee: 10 x $0.99

\- Room Electricity fee: 318.2 kWh x $0.49

\- Linens Rental fee: 1 x $9.99

\- Television Watching fee: 3 h x $1.99

\- Tiny Soaps and Shampoo Bottles: 5 x $1.99

\- Wi-Fi Access fee: 1 x $9.99

It fits right in, doesn't it?

<comment><USER19> TBH, I'd be okay with that if the prices were reasonable and the base room fee was adjusted accordingly.

Hotel Wi-Fi is annoying, slow, AND expensive.</comment></comment>