How To Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company (2/07) - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/02/28/zoto/#

<comment><USER2> I think it's a little early to call them 'killed' just yet. We went through much the same, though we always kept a free basic service and I don't think I could count the number of times we'd been declared 'dead' when we rolled out our premium service.

Money needs to come in, zoto has probably tried to get acquired or to get funding, and failing those two avenues they now have three options:

\- close the doors

\- roll out a premium offering on top of their free offering

\- roll out a premium offering and shut down the freebies

Since their costs are probably very much bandwidth related they chose to do the latter, their conversion rates must have indicated that it is better to have a smaller number of users, a smaller bandwidth bill and be profitable than to be much larger and to be running at a possibly massive loss.

The biggest factor is how many people have already converted to the new paying model, and how much of their revenue they are going to reinvest in marketing, which is another option if you don't have a free service. Their 60 day free trial is a smart alternative to free users, it will pull in enoughpeople to give it a shot if the can keep some traffic going.

Time will tell if it worked for them, it will certainly be interesting to watch.

At least now it is a business, instead of a money pit.

<comment><USER3> Time /did/ tell, this article is 2 years old, and the forgotten blog + traffic stats both show that the business is dead.

<comment><USER2> ah yes, I see :)

here I was thinking this was _news_.ycombinator.com, I should check those submissions better I guess!

The site does seem to be functional though, I just signed up for a trial account and that seems to have worked just fine.

Any zoto.com users here ? Apparently the CEO is called 'Kord Campbell', <http://www.blogger.com/profile/2622955>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heroku gave us an example of how to do it right: [http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/1/12/whats_up_at_heroku...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/1/12/whats_up_at_heroku/)

In short: keep both versions.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's risky -- can they survive with a 3% conversion rate (free to paid)?

<comment><USER3> This happened 2 years ago.

Considering they stopped updating their blog around the same time, it's safe to say the free -> paid only change killed their business.

<comment><USER6> Or failed to save their dieing business.

<comment><USER7> If dying means taking money from paying customers then may my business die every day for forever.

The CEO's LinkedIn profile shows him as doing the photo company and being an evangelist for some company which apparently does search engines.

<http://www.linkedin.com/in/geekceo>

So the principal carved himself out a lifestyle which he probably enjoys: he has a trusted position at one company, gets invited to speak at conferences, and makes some amount of money for keeping software from breaking. Software does a lot of things well: one is not decay after it has been written.

Sure, he won't get bought out my Google next month, so that's not successful for one particular pattern of success. But, on the other hand, he has more paying users than Twitter and probably gets a stupidly high amount of money on a per-hour-invested basis.

 _There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy._</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Peek at Trends in Machine Learning – Andrej Karpathy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karpathy/a-peek-at-trends-in-machine-learning-ab8a1085a106 <comment><USER2> I'm surprised Keras isn't gaining prominence faster (or maybe it's overlooked because it's been rolled into Tensorflow core).

I was also expecting to see some work around uncertainty trending... maybe Yarin Gal's thesis is too new, though.</comment>


Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-method-prizewinning-physicist-says/ <comment> Stefan-H "Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that."

I view atheism as the null hypothesis, for which you don't need any evidence. It is the de-facto stance for when there is no evidence to suggest another hypothesis.

edit: "And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn't know about."

Is this person also agnostic when it comes to Russell's teapot? I'm pretty sure that they would make the statement that there is not in fact a teapot circling the earth, just like there is not a god in heaven. His argument about the agnostic person not being able to make a final decision is a slide into solipsism.

<comment><USER2> I see it a bit differently, it's basically an undecidable problem (at least for now). Intelligent design == simulation hypothesis vs. pure accident and the anthropological principle. Which one of these is the null hypothesis is a matter of perspective / cultural background. What clearly does not hold are idiotic things like biblical literalism. But the big bang theory opens more questions than it answers.

<comment><USER3> Not to repeat the the entire previous thread about this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855)) but this is just a semantic wordplay: on any other similar existence questions (is there a teapot orbiting the sun?) we'd gladly conflate "undecidable" with "false" as the difference between those cases is a negligible probability. But when you mix in such a culturally sensitive topic like religion, suddenly we have to carefully distinguish these two cases. It's an unfair inconsistency that is used to propagate religious thinking.

<comment><USER2> How do you assign probability to those two hypothesis? I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER3> This gets philosophical, but roughly I think of it as:

Something that is truly false has a 0% chance of being true, by definition.

Something that has we have proven false has an effectively 0% probability of being true -- but more specifically, it is whatever probability you assign to Descartes' evil demon being true (ie the probability of _everything_ else you know, even rules of logic and math, being false). Every non-solipsist assumes that this probability is negligibly different from 0, therefore in practice we consider "proven false" to be the same as "truly false".

If something is "undecidable", I take that to mean that we don't yet have (and may never be able to acquire) any supporting evidence to meaningfully separate it from the "proven false" case. This is just the standard behavior of assuming the null hypothesis... or colloquially: not believing something for no reason.

(there's probably some much more standard set of terminology for these ideas)

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Not believing something for no reason. I see postulating that there is no hierarchically higher intelligence just as much as a believe system as postulating that there is. So far I couldn't find evidence pro or contrary either of these. Penrose, as I've written elsewhere, is IMO the closest to producing such evidence and I'll gladly revise my stance if/when that happens.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, most people don't actually claim there is no higher intelligence or god. They just don't accept the claim that there is (because there is no evidence). The nuance of this tends to get lost through imperfect language.

That's the point of the teapot. Technically there is equal probability of it existing or not, but that is meaningless.

Anything without evidence is equally likely to exist or not, but for some reason people only tend to take this seriously in regards to religion.

<comment><USER2> Imagine for a moment that our telescopes show mostly black except a ring of light from one direction. The light scattering has furthermore been used to indicate that the universe is mostly water, with some complex carbon based molecules in diluted form. Newer religions are thus calling our universe the holy teapot, waiting for the great beings above to open it up. Of course that's nonsense say the atheists who have a perfect theory for how the ring of light and water universe has come to existence, it only relies on the assumption that from nothing there was suddenly something.

This is essentially the teapot equivalent of the big bang theory. Atheists also dispell the idea of the teapot with a hypothetical teaspoon orbiting Saturn - as we can't see it it's ridiculous to just postulate it's there, with handle and cover and stove - we have no way of proving its existence from what we observe only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855)

</comment><comment><USER6> Speaking as an atheistically-inclined agnostic, I think the New Atheists can be rather "motte & bailey"* with their arguments.

The atheist bailey is the assertion "there is no higher being, no after life, and no spirituality", which is a scientifically indefensible stance, as the article states. It could be true, but this assertion is a religious statement of faith. Atheist discourse is largely centered here.

The motte is the statement "Belief in a higher power or the after life is not supported by empirical evidence", which _is_ scientifically defensible.

When critics of atheism point out that any assertion about something which cannot be invalidated is non-empirical, even _religious_ (e.g. "There is no after life" or "God does not exist in any form"), (some) atheists respond "'No God' is simply the null hypothesis! We just don't see evidence for it!" When the challenge is gone, atheists go on to write essays about how religious ideas are wrong and "There is no God" is clearly correct, and anyone who holds any doubt about this whatsoever is irrational at best.

*I tried and failed to find a link to a discussion of the metaphor and fallacy of "motte & bailey" that was both concise, correct and politically neutral; suffice to say that it is a kind of strategic ambiguity. If it's new to you, I'll just quote the relevant passage from the Slate Star Codex blog:

"[In a] medieval castle…there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

"So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement."

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins)

      Dawkins is known as an outspoken atheist. In interviews, he has called himself an agnostic about many matters of religious faith, instead endorsing reason.[citation needed] He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.

Why wasn't he awarded a Templeton prize?

</comment><comment><USER8> Booked this guy for Jesus because he's on the path to finding truth!

</comment><comment><USER9> LOL, as if anything at all from the mouths if the ilk of Templeton has any merit at all. We all know that religion is a false and coercive method of social control of people to get their money and wage your wars. Prove me wrong!

<comment><USER10> He appears to be talking (in this article at least) more about spirituality than religion.

I think it's hard to dispute his basic point: you cannot prove a negative (or as he phrased it, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence").

I do find it kinda odd to hear those who profess to a spiritual belief ragging on those who profess a belief in the contrary though. Neither of them has evidence.

<comment><USER9> spirituality flip religion. Both schemes to coerce people</comment></comment></comment>


World Cup Follow-Up: Update of Winning Probabilities and Betting Results - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/06/26/world-cup-follow-up-update-of-winning-probabilities-and-betting-results/

<comment><USER2> Love or hate Wolfram, the one thing that I find they do extremely well is make their language work well with consuming and working with a wide variety of data sets.

Or put another way they don't just focus on making a general purpose programming language or even a math focused language, they actually work to make the language inter operate well with real world data sets.

In my opinion they've passed Matlab and R in terms of being able to take a raw data set and quickly ask and answer questions about it and as someone who does this for a living I'm very happy Mathamatica exists, although R still wins in terms of cost:)

<comment><USER3> I haven't used it but I have found most of these demos to look very staged and there is too much magic going on. Isn't the whole point of this to blur the lines between language and cloud so you are eternally dependent on their system and have to pay them when you need to seriously scale or deploy something?

<comment><USER4> it isn't magic, but simply the fact that the language is "dynamically typed" (or more accurately, that the whole system works symbolically). the "magic" is due to its UI compositing system using the same exact semantics as the rest of the language (or rather, it _is_ the same language). this makes graphics- making and UI-making super easy.

have a look at the Mathematica stack exchange[1] site to see more code. there isn't any contrivance there.

[1] [http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphi...](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphics?sort=votes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand the data this model presents. I focused on Belgium (being Belgian) and their next competitor (the US).

Even though Belgium comes out slightly ahead in the "chance of victory" graph, and in the "most probably game tree" they are picked as the more likely winner, the lower graphs (chance to reach, chance of knock-out) show the US as having a higher chance of making it to the quarter finals than Belgium.

Isn't this inconsistent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed you are right, the figure showing the "chance to reach, chance to knock-out" was accidentally an outdated one (from a test simulation with a lower number of trials). The real figure will be updated soon. They are quite close though, good job noticing that! \-- it has been updated now

<comment><USER5> I figured as much, seeing as the chance to reach the group of 16 was below 1.0 for all teams. Looking forward to seeing the new charts!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Comparing this to 538's (quite different) Analysis [1]:

#1

* 538 - Brazil - 36.0%

* WOLF - Brazil - 32.2%

#2

* 538 - Argentina - 17.0%

* WOLF - Netherlands - 23.5%

#3

* 538 - Germany - 12.0%

* WOLF - Germany - 21.6%

This paints a pretty interesting picture about trying to use statistics and math to predict sporting tournaments like this. Seems like nobody has been very successful at this yet. Obviously it gets "easier" as the tournament progresses, though.

* [1] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/world-cup/](http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/world-cup/)

<comment><USER7> This is interesting but not surprising: the fact that scoring in (association) football is a relatively rare event means that it is less predictable at the individual match level than other team sports such as rugby, American football and basketball that feature more frequent scoring events; i.e. there is a greater likelihood of the underdog snatching a surprise win.

<comment><USER8> That is absolutely incorrect. Heavy underdogs in the group stages of this world cup had frequently had moneylines of +1300 and higher (ex Netherlands vs Austrailia). There is NEVER an NFL game in a typical season where the moneyline (ie without pointspread) on the underdog will pay out that high. So, the is a much SMALLER likelihood of the underdog snatching a surprise win.

<comment><USER9> Many pro sports leagues like the NFL are designed to have parity amongst the teams, to make it more exciting. There is no way to ensure parity in national teams. If there was an international American football competition, it would have even less parity than international basketball competitions (where the US is extremely heavily favored in nearly every game).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think you need to factor some other datapoints too:

\- probable weather - some teams play differently depending on conditions

\- yellow and red cards - some major player could miss a match. If team A is missing a defender, might be that is more vulnerable and thus, may lose a match.

and so on.

<comment><USER11> I find comments like this unconstructive, and they always surface when people present forecasts. It's easy to play the shoulda-woulda-coulda game with data. "You should account for the breaking strengths of each team's players' ACL tendons. It could affect the outcome if they get injured!" Okay, so what? Did you do it? Does the data exist? Do you have any quantitative evidence of a statistically significant link between the weather and team performance? If you do, do you also have the evidence to show that the game forecast is not rate limited by the error of the weather forecast?

I'm not saying you have to write a thesis to suggest new data sources, but I am saying that "you need to do XYZ" is not a productive piece of advice without the evidence to back it.

<comment><USER12> Though I agree with you on the weather bit, there is already a history of yellow and red cards from the tournament already, which could have huge implications on the tournament ahead. (For eg, Luis Suarez getting booted is one.)

<comment><USER13> It would be useful to have a database of football punishments so teams and fans could see whether a player has been dealt with fairly or not. Perhaps one already exists?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You know what would be interesting, to perform this analysis to all past world cups, looking at the group results and computing the possible outcomes of the brackets. And then, compute some statistical indicator like the p-value (sorry I am very weak in statistics).

</comment><comment><USER15> All is well until your main player bites an opponent and gets banned.

<comment><USER16> Or until said player is not turned away from the match, which would have changed at least 15minutes' worth of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These statistical analyses never work well for football and this one is another example of that happening.

For example, except for Spain in South Africa, no European country has ever won the world cup outside of Europe. Why is this? A large part of this is due to the weather. And unsurprisingly, South African weather in the southern winter isn't terribly different from what the Europeans are used to. This stat alone should've predicted a lot of the European "upsets" and should trigger your suspicions about 2 out of the top 3 favorites being European.

And even if you were unconvinced about this prior to the tournament, having watched teams struggling in Manaus should've convinced you that these statistical analyses ignore important information that is obvious to even semi-casual fans.

<comment><USER18> I am still unconvinced. The data set is incredibly small, incredibly noisy, and after the South African tournament only convincing if you cherry pick the right results.

The last time an Europen team didn't make it to the finals was in 1950. If climate really did matter that much, you wouldn't expect that. In addition to 2010 that you chose to ignore, the US world cup final went to the penalties and the 1986 Mexico final was tied 2-2 between Argentina and West Germany until something like 10 minutes before the end. (And a non-European team was in the finals largely thanks to the most famous refereeing error in the history of the sport).

That evidence looks really weak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Can we at least conclude that our probabilities outperform bookmakers?

More like outperform the market?

Not sure if more precise probabilities outweigh the risk of ruin, if there's unbalanced amount of money backing each option.

<comment><USER20> It's very, very hard to make a model that outperforms bookmakers in the long run. If you find some sort of inefficiency in the betting market, maybe. But it turns out that most often the betting market is inefficient at the points where casual betters outnumber the "sharps," which tends to be the points at which the bookmakers have the highest juice on their odds, so you're not likely to come out ahead anyway.

<comment><USER21> do you happen to know where one could find data on this? Not just bookmakers' odds, but volume of bets? This would make for interesting research

<comment><USER22> Betfair has an API. This can be used to return the odds and volumes matched for all sports on their Exchange platform.

[https://developer.betfair.com/](https://developer.betfair.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not the complete picture, but more expensive players tend to be better than cheaper players. So more expensive teams tend to be better than cheaper teams. I see this is completely ignored.

Also team Elo has issues, as not a lot of games are played, former achievements weigh in too heavily.

Nonetheless, this is a really nice effort. Let's see how well it works.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain the Belgium vs USA Tree/Graphs for me. The most likely tree shows Belgium beating the USA but in the graphs the USA has a higher chance of getting to the Round of 16?

<comment><USER25> It looks like they switched the graphs for Belgium and the US, since most other sources[1][2] give Belgium a slight edge and even their own most likely outcome graph shows Belgium as the favorite.

[1] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/world- cup/](http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/world-cup/) [2] [http://rogerkaufmann.ch/dsaINTe_r.htm](http://rogerkaufmann.ch/dsaINTe_r.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article makes the rather optimistic assumption that bookie prices efficiently and purely represent probabilistic models. This isn't quite the truth, as many bookies can and do take a position against the weight of money (punters often bet disproportionately and according to some psychology). There's also the juice to consider, particularly for underdogs, where value is quickly eroded.

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be interesting to see if the predictions would be different if the official FIFA ranking[1] was used instead of ELO.

[1] [http://www.fifa.com/worldranking/rankingtable/](http://www.fifa.com/worldranking/rankingtable/)

</comment><comment><USER28> > There have been some surprises: from 10 of our favorite teams, 3 have been > eliminated (Portugal, England, and, most surprisingly, Spain)

So Italy, that won the world cup 4 times, wasn't one of the 10 favorites??

<comment><USER25> I hardly think winning in 1934, 1938 or 1982 has any impact on present day results. Even claiming that the 2006 win has much bearing is a stretch since they have a different head coach and only 4 of the same players.

<comment><USER29> Then England should not be a favorite either.

<comment><USER25> The favorites are based on the team's recent performance, not on World Cup victories. For instance, the Netherlands have never won a World Cup, but their recent performance prior to this World Cup is undeniably better than either England or Italy, so they are ranked higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> They're bracket prediction just picks the higher ranked team every time...

<comment><USER31> yes, and?

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure exactly what they're referring to, but they may mean that in a series of Monte Carlo simulations, the higher ranked team doesn't win every time, they win with a higher probability. Which means that (probably) more of the outcomes result in them winning, but (probably) not all of them. The article did say they were doing Monte Carlo simulations but I don't see where they're not, except for when they define the most likely bracket (in which case choosing the higher-ranked team every time is correct).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This guy is doing the same calculations with slightly different predictions than Wolfram

[http://rogerkaufmann.ch/dsaINTe_r.htm](http://rogerkaufmann.ch/dsaINTe_r.htm)

<comment><USER28> Brazil with 33.1% of change of winning and Germany with 13.2%?

No way.

<comment><USER16> The problem is that they meet (if at all) before the final, so the probabilities of Germany go down very fast if you assume they will lose against Brazil more probably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Costa Rica knocked out both England and Italy, and yet it places below USA? Nonetheless, it's an interesting approach.

<comment><USER35> I would guess that world ranking plays into the algorithm a bit. USA entered the World Cup ranked 13th in the world, while Costa Rica were placed 32nd (from their Elo Ratings ([http://eloratings.net/)](http://eloratings.net/\))). Both teams, if they make it into the quarter finals, would probably face buzzsaws (Netherlands for CRC and Argentina for USA).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The US has a 1.2% chance of winning.

"So you're saying there's a chance..."</comment>


Is TDD Dead? - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/is-tdd-dead/ <comment><USER2> No. It's hopefully just dead as a corporate check box and now just a tool developers can use where appropriate.</comment>


Columbia Graduate Students Vote Overwhelmingly to Unionize - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/nyregion/columbia-graduate-students-union-vote.html?link_id=2&can_id=&source=email-victory-at-columbia&email_referrer=victory-at-columbia&email_subject=victory-at-columbia <comment><USER2> The headline is misleading—only 46% of the students voted to unionize, which is not overwhelming.

1602/3500 = 45.8%</comment>


Writing a Blog Engine in Phoenix and Elixir - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@diamondgfx/introduction-fe138ac6079d#.vn00u0q2c <comment><USER2> I've been using Elixir for a few months on the side, and I have to say I've become a huge fan. I had a lot of apprehension diving deep into a functional language, but it's been some of the most rewarding work I've done in years. It just makes me want to double down on functional languages in general.

Too bad it's pretty hard finding places that use it extensively. :-/</comment>


Togetherville, social networking for kids 6 - 10 - <AUTHOR> http://togetherville.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got two kids under 10 and I've got mixed feelings on networking sites for kids this young. On the one hand, they will have the opportunity to get familiar with the technology they will spend the rest of their lives using. On the other hand, why rush into it when they are happy without it (really, regardless of happy or not).

I'm a programmer (developer/engineer/whatever), been programming since I was about 10, but I've not encourages nor discouraged computer use for my kids. I figure the computer is there and they will pretty much decide how much they are into it.

I have to also confess that I've thought of developing a kids website that my kids can play with. What are your experiences or thoughts here?

<comment><USER2> > I have to also confess that I've thought of developing a kids website that > my kids can play with. What are your experiences or thoughts here?

I did this once (totlol.com). My kids love it, so do others, but I can't say it brought joy to our family. 2 cents? Don't.

<comment><USER3> Why did it not bring joy to your family? Because you have to listen to silly childrens jokes too much?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would rather my children didn't use something like this. Purely because it's a waste of time. Children socialise just fine at the local park and school.

While at home they need down time and time to be bored. It's an essential element of developing your own personality.

They've got 400 years of books to read as well, the sooner they start on that the sooner they will finish.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have an idea for a social network for kids 10 and under. Sand, grass, swings, hoops, seesaws, and ball games.

Social networks make sense for adults because we're removed from my family, friends, peers by geographic proximity and time .. plus we have too many casual "friends" to network with face to face constantly.

Kids? not so much. Kids can make friends within few minutes. Let them play outside, somewhere safe.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Drop-down text messages, called "quips", express thoughts and feelings"

Sounds like a useless version of Twitter :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> My daughter (11) may be into this, but my son (8) probably wouldn't. He likes games too much. He still plays Club Penguin some, but Garry's mod is where he spends his screen time now.</comment>


Readernaut Launched, Gorgeous book sharing site. - <AUTHOR> http://readernaut.com

<comment><USER2> you're joking. This website _redirects_ to the signup page. Bizarrely, its far more than a signup page.

Why did you design it this way? It isn't a bad thing - slightly odd. I was tempted to close the window when I saw the URL. Glad I didn't.

Really gorgeous interface. I've signed up -- _peterc_</comment>


Ask HN: What to code for learning? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, I am new at Node.js. I understand Java- and CoffeeScript and want to code something using Node.js. I am familiar with Express, Node and node-mysql. To say it simple, I understand the basics of Node.js. I am good at Ruby on Rails and PHP (hate me :D). So I am not completely new at coding. So now I am searching for an app/game/something else to code for learning some more Node.js.<p>Thank you! <comment><USER2> Whenever I'm learning a new language, I do Project Euler problems in it. Currently working through the first 20 or so with Go. I highly recommend it to anyone who's looking to learn a language.

[http://projecteuler.net/](http://projecteuler.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Option A) You can port any thing you have written previously in other languages. Take something from ~/src/ that way you know how it works and you will focus in learn the language.

Option B) You can think about something you're passionate in real life. Code something about it. Does not need to "solve a problem", maybe simply try to improve something that already exist and you love. That way, maybe your state will be positive and the learn experience, better.

Option C) Try to automate and improve your workflow in the new language.

If in any case you need an idea... "a blog engine".

Update: added option "C" and an idea as requested.

</comment><comment><USER4> What do you need/want now? If you don't have anything you need/want, I think that is a bigger problem than learning a new language.

otherwise: code what you want now.

<comment><USER5> I understand the desire to innovate, especially for many of the people on HN. But not having anything you need/want (i.e., you current tools meet your current needs), is a problem? Really?

<comment><USER6> Real world tasks produce problems which are best medium for learning process.</comment></comment></comment>


Vienna has got a Snowden bust (photo story [German]) - <AUTHOR> http://derstandard.at/2000028624500/Snowden-Vienna-waits-for-you <comment><USER2> The bust in the images looks computer modeled to me.</comment>


Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering gut microbiota 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13793.html <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's old by academic standards. And do read the comments. Remember that getting something through peer review is not unlike a siege, but once within the fortress walls, a mighty army guards glamorous findings against high- profile refutation.

But in the interest of "balance" here it is.

</comment><comment><USER2> Only saccharin is mentioned in the figures; did they only test saccharin and then generalize the result to _all_ NAS?!</comment>


Echo – Assembly program that prints the first positional argument to stdout - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kelseyhightower/echo <comment><USER2> Serious question: why is this on HN front page? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Serious answer: Because many developers regard assembly as some sort deep magic only understood by elder gods. This, of course, comes from some vague (and not entirely correct) understanding of "assembly" running beneath everything else, and thus being fundamental, yet not immediately useful to a large category of developers today. Hence it seems important but archaic. Archaic + difficult = elder knowledge.

<comment><USER4> I've actually had a few coworkers think I'm some sort of elder god when I find the root cause of subtle bugs that would've either required deep knowledge of the C++ standard, or not-as-deep knowledge of Asm. These are bugs that others have spent many hours staring at the source and stepping through in a debugger without any better idea of why they occur, but are solved in minutes by a glance at the Asm. IMHO if you are working with native code at all, it's a very useful skill to have.

<comment><USER5> Once you are tired being praised, teach them some valgrind. It will solve most of their problems.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure the bugs I found would not have been valgrind-able as they were unrelated to memory errors.

<comment><USER5> From my experience most of the hard to trace errors come from uninitialized variables and they are usually valgrindable. It is VM-based so it can cache jumps and other conditions that depend one uninitialized vars via taint analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like Kelsey didn't write a lot of assembly before. There are quite a few things you either wouldn't do -- like `cld` for no reason -- or most people (and compilers) would do otherwise -- e.g., `xor ebx, ebx` instead of `mov ebx, 0`.

Besides, 32 bit (⊙_⊙')

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is my first assembly program. I had to look up every instruction and it took me hours to understand even the basics, but it was worth it. I have a much better understanding of x86 assembly and plan to write larger programs to continue learning in 2017.

I went with 32 bit because all the examples were 64 bit so I forced to learn the nasm and ld flags to get my program to compile, link, and run. I also learned a lot about the different registers available to 32 and 64 bit programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The instruction `repne scasb`[1] stood out. `repne X` means "while (not equal) { X; }". How is `repne` implemented? Is `repne scasb` assembly shorthand for a `scasb` then a `jne`? Or is `repne` some fancy higher-order instruction which takes another instruction as its argument?

[1]: [https://github.com/kelseyhightower/echo/blob/53d84ea4e79db3d...](https://github.com/kelseyhightower/echo/blob/53d84ea4e79db3dbe27688b5d45d839854851a57/echo.asm#L32)

<comment><USER9> The latter. The various REPxx prefixes cause a string instruction like SCASB to be repeated until some condition is satisfied.

These date back all the way to the 8086/8088\. They were the fastest way to do string operations on those early CPUs, but I don't think this the case on modern CPUs.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+rep+prefix](https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+rep+prefix)

[http://wiki.osdev.org/X86-64_Instruction_Encoding#REPNE.2FRE...](http://wiki.osdev.org/X86-64_Instruction_Encoding#REPNE.2FREPNZ.2C_REP_and_REPE.2FREPZ_prefixes)

[https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece390/archive/spr2002/boo...](https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece390/archive/spr2002/books/labmanual/inst- ref-scasb.html)

<comment><USER10> They're still the x86-64 implementation for things like strlen on a bunch of platforms. They're not always the fastest, but have code size advantages.

[http://agner.org/optimize/optimizing_assembly.pdf](http://agner.org/optimize/optimizing_assembly.pdf)

<comment><USER9> That's a really interesting document - I am going to spend some time studying it, thanks!

Good point about the code size. I imagine there are likely to be cases where that would let some algorithm run faster overall because it fits in the instruction cache, even if the string operation considered on its own is slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious as to the why. Kubernetes doesn't keep Kelsey busy enough? :-)

<comment><USER12> I guess it's because the echo command included in the shell was slow.

<comment><USER13> The cost of fork+exec of a separate binary will make even the most efficient possible external echo slower than the shell builtin, I suspect. (This is why echo is a builtin in the first place, though there's no requirement for it to be so.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The source code includes this notice: "Copyright 2017 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved."

I wonder if the couple of dozens of lines of assembly code could be trivial enough to be public domain. Assuming a straightforward implementation, surely there is far less freedom in expressing the simplest version of the echo program in ASM compared to, say, C?

<comment><USER4> _surely there is far less freedom in expressing the simplest version of the echo program in ASM compared to, say, C?_

I'd say it's the opposite, since it is often the case that more instructions (and thus ways to select and arrange them) are required to express an operation in Asm compared to an HLL like C. This implies that there is room for more creativity when e.g. writing a "Hello world" in Asm vs. C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't echo print all the arguments?

<comment><USER7> It will as I continue to work on echo until it's "finished". This is the result of 4 hours of learning and writing my first assembly program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> echo returns nonzero if it cannot write ...

touch foo.txt; chmod 400 foo.txt; echo ouch > foo.txt; echo $?

.., but it appears this asm returns zero always.

<comment><USER17> How do "raw" system calls pass back error information on Linux? errno is strictly a C/POSIX abstraction, right?

<comment><USER18> They just return the negative error number.

Eg. -EINVAL.

<comment><USER19> And for syscalls that also have a meaningful return value, the ABI requires that valid errno values fall in the range -1 to -4095, to disambiguate them from any possible return value. Those values can't conflict with valid userspace pointers (since they'd point into kernel space), and syscalls must not allow them to conflict with valid numeric return values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now rewrite in IR =))</comment>


Skimming More and Reading Less - <AUTHOR> http://allenc.com/2015/01/skimming-reading-less/ <comment><USER2> Knowing less about more things vs knowing a lot about few things. It's an interesting dichotomy and has me thinking about whether people are _willingly_ choosing the former</comment>


10 Percent of Broadband Subscribers Suck Up 80 Percent of Bandwidth - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/04/22/shocking-new-facts-about-p2p-and-broadband-usage/

<comment><USER2> The Pareto principle (aka the 80/20 rule): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle>

I've noticed this in my own business as well -- 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

</comment><comment><USER3> A small percentage of users are trying to get $10k/month bandwidth for $60/month.

<comment><USER4> and a large percentage of users are paying $60 a month for $10 of bandwidth. And if ISP's have a problem keeping up with the demand why do they always block attempts of other players that want to enter the market? I'm perfectly happy with having ISP disconnect heavy users as long as there are plenty of other alternative ISPs.

<comment><USER5> It's a shame that the Comcasts and Time Warners monopolize this space. I feel wrong about paying my bill to TW - but I still do, every month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More telco FUD and scapegoating. Their train of reasoning leads to a few obvious solutions:

1) Charge users more

2) Since Pirate Bay and the other p2p services can't be squeezed or driven out of business, get YouTube, Hulu, and other video providers to pony up

3) Make sure Net Neutrality has a stake driven through its heart at the earliest possible convenience

</comment><comment><USER7> The way it should be: 1. New technology, faster internet 2. People use it 3. People demand more 4. Go back to step one, only better

The way the telcos want it: 1. Old technology 2. People use it. 3. People demand more. 4. Block the people demanding the most. 5. Great! We've broken the upgrade loop!</comment>


CS246: Mining Massive Data Sets - <AUTHOR> http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs246/ <comment><USER2> I wrote a guide to the Minhashing family of algorithms that goes into a little more depth than is covered in the LSH section of this course.

[https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsx...](https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/)

You might find it useful if you've ever thought about using MinHash and wondered how to incorporate weights rather than treating everything as a set.

<comment><USER2> I periodically submit this to HN, but it never seems to get traction. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22268810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22268810)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've done the class and can't recommend it highly enough (except for Ullman's lectures). I recommend the advanced track if it's still offered.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with Ullman's lectures?

<comment><USER5> Man the first edition of this course on coursera had Ullman's lectures. I am not sure if it's the online delivery mechanism or his tonality - I couldn't sit through a single lecture.

One of the toughest courses out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> New telescopes with crowdworked astronomy needing good algos to process gazillion images at yet-to-be-seen detail.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've taken the MOOC version of this course and it was very poorly explained. I hope the content and lecturing has changed since 2013 because the content itself is really interesting.

I wasn't impressed with the quality of the book as well. I did learn quite a few methods there (minhash) that I got to use later so thanks for that, but compared to MLPR, Learning from Data, or TESL books the quality of the former pales.

<comment><USER8> Can you clarify what the MLPR and TESL books refer to?

<comment><USER7> Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition

The Elements of Statistical Learning

<comment><USER9> The title of Bishop's book is Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.

<comment><USER7> Yep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I haven't done the course, but +1 for the textbook. It's freely downloadable and very readable. I learned a lot from it and the exercises are just the right level of difficulty to help you really internalize the material. I wish there were self-check answers in the "back" of the book, though.

<comment><USER11> This book?

[http://www.mmds.org/](http://www.mmds.org/)

<comment><USER12> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Love this course. Pretty rigorous, but the professor explains very well.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks very interesting. Too bad they don't have video lectures.

<comment><USER14> There's a link to lecture videos towards the top of the page - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Oao2FYkLAUlUVkBfze4jg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_Oao2FYkLAUlUVkBfze4jg/videos)

Here's a different YouTube channel I found with the full course: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLssT5z_DsK9JDLcT8T62...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLssT5z_DsK9JDLcT8T62VtzwyW9LNepV)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What no deep learning, and nobody is claiming to solve all of your ranking problem in 5 lines of code ;) do we really need this course if we have fast ai ?

<comment><USER16> I think the ML hype is actually slowing down. I've been interviewing for ML positions as a new grad and a number of companies have told me they have an excess of data scientists who can train the models, but a dearth of engineers who can actually scale the models up to production. Friends at FAANGs have similar stories.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for sharing! As a new grad also looking for work, maybe I'll apply to more SE jobs, fewer data science-focused jobs lol.

TBH applying for jobs is scary asf.

<comment><USER18> Maybe it's just because I've been in industry for 10+ years now, but how are you qualified as a new grad to apply for both?

<comment><USER19> Double major statistics + cs? masters statistics? Seems those would potentially qualify you if you are a solid candidate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One day someone has to make a dataset of how much talent we waste in the EU. Bsc gets paid by EU taxes, guy ends up teaching in US university or working for US company.

It has become the cycle of life.

<comment><USER21> If highly productive people can't keep the fruit of their labor, they'll leave to a place where they can! We have less social programs in the US but the majority of productive people will probably prefer working here since they can take home a significantly higher salary even after taxes.

<comment><AUTHOR> And after you add the expenses needed to make up for the social programs you don't have, you might even realize that what you're left with is not that significantly higher.

<comment><USER21> I don't think that's going to apply to the majority of high-income earners, because the difference is greater than the cost of not having free college or socialized healthcare. A college education is a one-time cost. You might pay $30,000 over time but when you're earning $130,000 or more, you can crush that really quickly and not be burdened by the higher taxation and reduced opportunity you'd be facing each year otherwise.

The same is true with healthcare in America. It's actually not that bad if you have a decent insurance plan and some cash. For high-income earners, which is the people we are talking about leaving from the UK, it's most likely going to be a net gain over time to have the higher salaries and lower taxes.

There's a reason the best engineers are going to want to leave the UK, Canada, India, China, etc, and come to the USA. It's worth it. I personally could work from anywhere including the UK, but why would I subject myself to such lower pay for little or no real gain?

<comment><USER22> Healthcare is "not that bad" if you have some cash, because then you can afford to go abroad, e.g. India for your care. Other than that, it _is_ terrible.

<comment><USER23> ...do you live in the US? I have lots of problems with our health system, even as someone with health insurance, but I very rarely find myself traveling to India for healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> wish stanford would put videos online. But I guess then a lot fewer people would spend the $6000 for the class.

<comment><USER25> Didn't Berkley recently take down all their educational videos because they were sued for not providing them in a fully accessible format?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The problem with such courses is that "massive" tend to change every year in exponential manner.

For example, if I can have a single machine with 32 cores and 1TB memory? what is massive in this context?

<comment><USER2> The datasets grow to meet the computing available to them. The things gathering the data themselves become more powerful, and so more of that data makes it downstream.

I'd define "massive" data as anything where n^2 is too big, where "too big" is bigger than either my ram or my patience.

<comment><USER27> I've heard everything from "it doesn't fit in Excel" to "it doesn't fit in ram for a standard dev's laptop (~10gb) to "it doesn't fit in ram in a decent sized EC2 instance (~250gb).

<comment><USER2> I started worrying at one point that all the techniques I learned when I started my career for working with big data were becoming obsolete, but they aren't. What you needed to do before to make things possible is now needed to make it fast.

<comment><USER28> Isn't it the same as before? If 4gb of data was too big because you had 2gb of RAM, then the methods used at that time are the same you would apply for a 500gb dataset that can't fit in a 250gb RAM machine, right?

New issues appear when you have to analyze 2Tb with a 32gb RAM machine, but when the order of difference is the same, the issues and thus the answers are the same as before?

<comment><USER26> No. Because the number of use cases where you have 1TB or 2TB of data is smaller in comparison.

Also, the rest of the use cases (which fits into a single machine memory now), can be handled much more efficiently with memory base algorithm, instead of I/O based algorithms.

The goal of Hadoop, as well as most of the theory on disk-based indices (E.g. BTREE), was to overcome the I/O bottlenecks. But as memory is getting bigger and cheaper there is a trend to drop Hadoop in favor of reading data directly from the cloud and into memory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


50+ Awesome CSS3 Techniques for Better Designs - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/01/50-awesome-css3-techniques-for-better-designs/

<comment><USER2> I think CSS3 is absolutely awesome, but I worry about using it because it's so new. I wonder how many people looking at my sites (here in Japan) will be using browsers that render it properly. Statistics for my own homepage seem to indicate that the vast majority don't...</comment>


Golden Ratio Bot (goldenratiobot) – Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/goldenratiobot <comment><USER2> lol, does it even bother with analyzing the image?</comment>


The Reconstruction of ZZT - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt/ <comment><USER4> For those who are unaware, ZZT was a text-mode DOS adventure game written in 1991 by the founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney.

It included a level editor and scripting language, which allowed anyone to unleash their creativity and design their own text-mode games using the ZZT engine.

This was absolutely unique at the time.

As a company, Epic is still hugely successful. Most gamers in 2020 have probably heard of Fortnite and Unreal Engine. According to Wikipedia, Tim Sweeney still owns over 50% of the company.

ZZT explored a lot of ideas about how to build a game creation system, which influenced Unreal Engine, which itself was hugely influential throughout the game industry.

The standard paradigms for today's game engines and editors was clearly influenced by ZZT.

<comment><USER5> > It included a level editor and scripting language, which allowed anyone to > unleash their creativity and design their own text-mode games using the ZZT > engine.

> This was absolutely revolutionary at the time.

Well... OK, I'll give you this _maybe_ in the DOS world and _maybe_ on the US side of the Atlantic. Maybe. And granted that we didn't all, me included, have access to the latest and greatest of anything back then: you knew only what you were exposed to through computing magazines, cover disks, and printed manuals, and you might not have extensive access to many of those. Almost all of my paper round income went on computer magazines back then.

Still, AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit), based on an earlier program called GAGS, was released for DOS in 1987.

Moreover, in the 8-bit world, The Quill was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1983, GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) was released in 1985 for Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, C64, and even BBC Micro, and PAW (Professional Adventure Writer) - <USER2> successor to Quill - was released in 1987.

Point being, a wide variety of text and graphic adventure "construction set" programs were introduced in the early 1980s, and were widespread by the early 1990s.

<comment><USER6> They indeed were; ZZT is far from the first game creation tool.

However, most of those were either commercial products or restricted the editing capabilities in some manner to free users. ZZT was shareware, but the registered version differed solely in the amount of official game worlds available (and the lack of a registration message on exit). The editor was fully-featured and no restrictions were put on usage. This is what I think makes it stand out from other game creation tools of the era and what made it a popular tool on BBSes.

<comment><USER7> The "free" of it definitely made a difference, but there was also a certain lack of concern about the shape of the resulting product that made ZZT feel different and more flexible than the preceding tools when you tried to work with it.

It had built-in, non-configurable stuff for action gameplay with some puzzle elements. It did very little with regards to assets, unlike contemporaries - no animation sets or hitbox definitions or music importer or similar ideas, really just a level editor. It was just not good in terms of shelf-space bullet points - nothing flashy about it. If that was all that it had, it would not be a hugely differentiated game since the level editor concept had been around since Lode Runner.

But it also had code, and code integrated in a way that was well documented and tutorialized. It had scripted behaviors, functionality to manipulate and transform the board, and hypertext dialogues with event flag toggles. Having the hypertext and flags may have been the one most critical part of all this since it really enabled choice-based interactive storytelling techniques, and that's a huge deal even if you didn't have enough of an algorithms background to try abusing the other functionality to make a platformer or whatnot.

And so I think the longevity of ZZT really rests in the way that it guides you towards code, because it has so little else to offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic. Tangentially, I did not know the source code was lost:

"Please don't ask for the source; if I had it, I'd release it, but I lost it in a crash a long time ago." -Tim Sweeney

[https://web.archive.org/web/19991010013339/http://www.epicga...](https://web.archive.org/web/19991010013339/http://www.epicgames.com/zzt.htm)

I find the whole thing interesting, because I remember the shareware versions that I downloaded from my friendly neighborhood BBS offered the source code for a fee; a large fee, if memory serves. I wonder if any of the purchasers of said source code might still have it sitting around on their floppies somewhere.

<comment><USER6> >I remember the shareware versions that I downloaded from my friendly neighborhood BBS offered the source code for a fee; a large fee, if memory serves.

None of the BBS releases for ZZT we found have such a statement; though I do think there exist some pieces of software which did.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting! I'll try to dig out my old floppies with the shareware version and see.

Thank you so much for what you did here! This is seriously awesome!

Edit: I haven't found the floppy yet, but as I think about it some more, I may be remembering Kroz (and not ZZT) as offering the source code for a fee...

<comment><USER9> The source for Kroz was definitely available for a fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The output executable is byte-for-byte identical with said release, which means that the source code accurately represents the original engine's behavior."

That seems crazy that someone could reverse engineer compiled code back into the higher level language it came from, and then have that code compile into the exact same executable. Obviously, you can keep modifying the code until it matches, but it's still impressive for anything other than a small program.

<comment><USER11> turbo pascal went straight from text to machine code. no ast or manipulations.

<comment><USER12> More info please? That sounds pretty hard / impossible to do.

<comment><USER13> > That sounds pretty hard / impossible to do.

Why do you think that?

This is how most compilers used to work.

And languages like Pascal were specifically designed to be able to be compiled in a mostly single pass.

Look up 'syntax directed translation' in an old compiler textbook.

<comment><USER14> Does that include Go? The speed of the compiler and some of the syntax suggest that it should be possible.

<comment><USER15> Go creates an AST and uses an SSA intermediate representation [0].

[0] [https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2019/go-compiler-internals- add...](https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2019/go-compiler-internals-adding-a-new- statement-to-go-part-2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome. ZZT was huge for me when I was young. I had already been toying with making games and desktop programs in VisualBasic by the time I found ZZT, but the ability to just throw together little worlds and play with the basic primitives the game gave us, share them with friends, was such an experience for the time.

I wonder how kids today would see ZZT. I think they'd have a lot of fun with it once they got into it, but being an older DOS-based game, ASCII art and all, might be particularly strange to some. A lot of modern games, Minecraft being one that immediately comes to mind, invoke the creativity and that ZZT did in my generation. Still, I'd love to see what people would make in ZZT today.

Tangent: I can't believe it was this long ago now, but about 10 years ago I started working on reverse-engineering ZZT with the goal of putting together a web-based implementation that was compatible. That spiraled out of control into a brand new project I called MWorlds ([https://mworlds.wordpress.com/](https://mworlds.wordpress.com/)).

Haven't toyed with this in ages, but the idea morphed into an open platform for making web-based games, including all assets (sprites, music, script packs, monsters, weapons, etc.), that any kid or adult could build and share and use in their own games. I really should just open source this someday. Or start hacking on it again.

</comment><comment><USER17> ZZT was amazing, probably one of the earlier games that had - and still has - a massive modding community. I remember the one day we got a CD with a load of demos, games, etc in a magazine, which in addition to a Shockwave menu also just had the file structure; in there, we found a folder full of ZZT games.

A really memorable one was Code Red ([https://museumofzzt.com/file/c/codered.zip](https://museumofzzt.com/file/c/codered.zip)), which just had so many little interactive things in at least the first area; a television set with multiple programs, a vacuum that would follow you around and explode if you vacuumed the wrong thing, it just kept giving. I don't actually remember getting very far in it though.

Anyway, more recently I got a similar "feel" that I got from ZZT back in PICO-8, a virtual console with a very accessible yet simple and intentionally limited editor; like ZZT, it gives you all the bells and whistles to create a game, but it's simple enough to avoid you reaching beyond the point where you can finish it. It having a built in game explorer (with online connectivity) means you've got thousands of indie games to explore. It's more versatile than ZZT, but still keeps you sane.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is awesome.

Who would have guessed of all the games I was playing in 1993 that ZZT would be the one where the creator went on to become a billionaire...

</comment><comment><USER19> This is so lovely to see! ZZT got me into programming in a very holistic, human, way. I'm happy that it's being explored.

<comment><USER20> Me too! I spent an entire summer when I was 11 making a weird adventure game in ZZT using the scripting tools. It was pretty fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's a link in there to the Museum of ZZT: [https://museumofzzt.com/about- zzt](https://museumofzzt.com/about-zzt).

Looking through the screencaps brings back a flood of memories. I remember playing a lot of DOS games where you had colored ASCII art and that was it. You really had to use your imagination to immerse yourself in the game and the default levels did a good job of conveying that.

Today's games look amazing. It's crazy to think that these text games could make you feel like you were in the game.

</comment><comment><USER22> ZZT is great. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten MegaZeux. Both had really fun communities

</comment><comment><USER23> This is amazing, and I am incredibly glad someone has put in the legwork to see this to fruition. I spent hours with it as a kid, both with it and its unofficial successor Megazeux.

ZZT was a fun game creation system out of the box, but what always impressed me was some of the stuff that the community managed to come up with - <USER3> documented in the ZZT encyclopedia series as well as the Super Toolkit. It pushed the engine far beyond the limits of what it was intended for, and some the projects done with it absolutely blew my mind.

It was unfortunate that the source was lost, and for a long time the best you could do, aside from DOSbox, were projects like DreamZZT which, while admirable, didn't accurately emulate all of the peculiarities that many games relied on. But now this exists. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is something I have seen. I have used ZZT, and it is still used even now. One of my ZZT games includes a note that although the world itself is Free software, it is "trapped" because ZZT isn't. That was written before ZZT source code has been reconstructed in this way, and now ZZT is Free software, although it is itself "trapped" because the compiler isn't. There are many tricks and stuff involved in ZZT and I have figured out some things just by trying and then make the hypothesis how they worked, and now I can check the source code to see if it matches what I expected, too. But I can see in there also many things I did not know ZZT does, so this is helpful. Other people have also independently figured out many kind of tricks with ZZT (see [0] and [1] for some details). I also wrote my own external editor for ZZT (although unfortunately it is slow, and confusing, but I like it, and prefer that kind of user interface, which is why I wrote it, of course).

There are now other ZZT-likes, the most popular of which is probably MegaZeux (which is now Free software, and continues to be maintained), although there is also ZIG, and a few others, including my own ZZ Zero. Each of them has different set of features. Although, most of them aren't used much other than ZZT and MegaZeux, I think.

The GitHub mentions to fix 5 annoying bugs in ZZT. I thought of fixing some bugs in ZZT (although not those that affect the behaviour of the game), and removing the editor (you can use an external editor instead, such as KevEdit or ZZTQED) and any stuff that is in there because it is only used by the editor, and probably also removing mouse and joystick mode and monochrome mode and VideoWriteTextCO40 (I don't know why that is in there, since ZZT doesn't use the forty column mode), and removing the initial prompt (to make it faster to load and further reduce the file size), and possibly adding an additional optional header in the world file which controls some new features and bug fixes, and allows customizing the contents of the ElementDefs array (the first number in the file would be different, so you can tell apart from standard ZZT worlds). I don't know when or if I might try to do this, though; I will of course need to install Turbo Pascal first, and read its documentation, before I could do such a thing.

[0] [https://rabbitboots.com/kfx/index.php/ZZT_Notes](https://rabbitboots.com/kfx/index.php/ZZT_Notes)

[1] [https://rabbitboots.com/kfx/index.php/ZZT_On_ZZT](https://rabbitboots.com/kfx/index.php/ZZT_On_ZZT)

</comment><comment><USER25> asiekierka, I'm very impressed. How did you go about building this? Did you start with the assembly and work backwards to Pascal? Did you use a Pascal decompiler? Even then I can't imagine how you managed to get the output byte- for-byte equivalent...

Anyway, as someone who downloaded ZZT from BBSes and wrote ZZT-OOP back in the day, I love this. I recently started writing a version of ZZT in Go, but haven't progressed since being able to load and display worlds. :-|

<comment><USER25> His original announcement is in this video (starts at around 34:00): [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/568019342](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/568019342) ... one of the questions asked in the chat (55:07) is "How?" and he says he's going to answer that in more detail in the future -- tantalizing! I for one would be very interested. He adds, "As a quick summary: I spent a lot of hours on this. I don't even want to admit how many hours I spent on this. Essentially lots of effort, and time, and sweat. No tears though." Kudos!

<comment><USER6> To correct that a little:

\- I'd love to give a more detailed explanation, but I've never managed to consistently operate a blog, so that might need to wait a while. \- After getting some perspective, I may have overexaggerated the scale of the number of hours I had spent on this.

<comment><USER25> In that case, would you mind (pretty please? :-) writing a few paragraphs here about how you did this, technically speaking?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Routine Ops – A Human Orchestration System - <AUTHOR> Link: https://routineops.com
Hi HN,
My name is Chris and for the last few months I've been building Routine Ops. I posted here in Show HN about a month ago to get some early feedback, but the product was still largely unfinished. Even so, the response and feedback was great so I went back to work on improving the UI.
Super excited with the progress I've been able to make on the app over the last month so I'm posting here again to collect as much feedback from the community as possible.
What's changed?
- Almost every page in the UI has been completely overhauled to minimize the need for clicking around.
- Add your team! When I "launched" before you couldn't add your teammates yet. Now you can invite your team to join your organization.
- Pricing model - Initially the app was free for individuals. Now, it's free for teams up to 5 people and paid after that. In the future, there will also be features enabled on the paid plan that aren't on the free plan.
What's next?
It's a super simple concept right now - assign recurring tasks to roles on your team. What will it take to be a real "Human Orchestration System"?
- Goal tracking - set and track progress toward goals with regularly scheduled check-ins
- Basic Calendar integration - add all your recurring tasks in Routine Ops to your Outlook/Google Calendar
- Smart Calendar integration - sync with your calendar and suggest tasks to do during open windows in your day
- SMS Integration - if you haven't completed a task by it's due date, you will receive a text asking "Did you complete this task?" and you can reply "Yes" or "No" to complete the task.
These are just a few ideas of what I want to develop next. What do you guys think a Human Orchestration System would/should look like? <comment><USER2> Hi, Great Job, but When I tried to validate my account the page says "Not Found The requested resource was not found on this server."

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the heads up! It looks like it did go through somehow though - your account is confirmed so you're all set.</comment></comment>


Dear Congress: It's time for a real fix on unlocking and the DMCA - <AUTHOR> http://sina.is/a-letter-to-congress/ <comment><USER3> Realistically once the DMCA gets in the process of being modified then the studios will get into action co-opt the process. Better to leave it as it is then open up for something worse.

<comment><USER4> So, just push into the same table. The studios have a legitimate interest in protecting their business model, just as tech people have a legitimate interest in more open business models. Engaging with them is likely to be far more productive than of demonizing them as incomprehensible and all-powerful alien beings.

I am on first name terms with the CEO and execs of a mid-size film studio with a good number of Oscar nominations and statuettes to its credit. They have no particular love for DRM or desire to screw people, but they do want to monetize their content. I think this is reasonable considering that they sign their names to checks for tens of millions of dollar so that good films can go into production. Gripe about Hollywood not producing great films all you like, but the reality is that a) almost everyone I know still enjoys watching good movies and b) good movies typically cost quite a lot of money to make, and c) it's a very high-risk business model in that films are more likely than not to lose money.

If someone were to suggest some innovative methods of monetizing content while simultaneously making it more accessible to a wider audience, that'd be very interesting. You can assume we're talking about young and tech-savvy people here, as opposed to people who spend all their time at the country club or on the golf course.

<comment><USER5> There is no equal footing here. Going head to head in a discussion forum will do nothing, as long as money trades hands in the back via lobbyists or in writing bills for politicians.

Piracy, in one way, is getting shit for free. Another way, it IS the balancing factor mass media must consider. We multitudes do retain the power, but are told that we are small and cannot effect much change. Except, we have allied and defeated the voting of some pretty horrific laws regarding the Internet and technology.

Do I believe that the major studios would have a honest to goodness discussion regarding copyright and piracy antagonism? No. The studios would rather pay for laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, or slip the US a SOPA.

<comment><USER4> So lobby right alongside the. As noted (but ignored) earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg is in the process of setting up a Tech PAC. [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732410520457838...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324105204578384781088854740.html)

 _Do I believe that the major studios would have a honest to goodness discussion regarding copyright and piracy antagonism? No. The studios would rather pay for laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, or slip the US a SOPA._

I'm offering you a communication channel to studio executives _right now_. I post regularly about these topics on HN. How about telling me what you think might be a better business model than the existing one? right now, film studios depend on DVD sales to make their investment back, because relatively few films break even at the box office; when you see those big numbers for weekend grosses you have to recall that over half of that revenue stays within the theater chains (film studios are forbidden by law to operate their own chains [1]), and up to half half of the cost of producing a film is in the marketing campaign, which has to be spent before knowing how the film will perform. So rare are box-office profits, in fact, that there's a saying within the film industry that a theatrical run is basically the marketing campaign for the DVD - people are much more likely to take a chance on renting or buying a movie that they know was in theaters (even if they didn't go to see it in a theater). The difficulty and expense of promoting a theatrical run is what distinguishes a film as a 'real movie' in the eyes of consumers. You could make the most awesome little film ever, but if you launch it straight to video your chances of finding an audience are pathetically low - not quite zero, but close enough that you'll have a hard time raising any money.

So there's the problem: you need a strong brand to be perceived as a 'movie' and make your money back in the secondary market (DVD sales and streaming), but it's hard to get that strong brand without spending a lot of money up front on marketing or waiting years and years on the off-chance that you'll build an audience through word-of-mouth. If you finance the production of multiple films, your winners are going to subsidize the losses of the underperformers, even after all the 'Hollywood accounting' tricks. It's a pretty tough industry, which is one reason that every Oscar ceremony includes multiple speeches about never giving up no matter how long it takes.

Now the problem for Hollywood is that piracy is almost all downside risk; you can offer your film for free on the torrents and use that to build an audience, but that only works if your production costs are very very low. Past a few thousand dollars, you'd better have a plan for how you're going to recoup the money. In the music industry, the new model is that you give away the music or sell it very cheaply, and make the money back on live performance, because people will pay a lot of money to see their idols perform in person. (This kinda sucks if you are the sort of musician who doesn't want to or can't easily play live, but that's who arts grants are for.)

Unfortunately, that model doesn't work for movies because the vast majority of films do not translate well to stage performance; and it is also true that very few people will pay to buy a movie theater ticket or purchase a DVD of a film they've already seen for free. Within the industry, this is a particular problem for actors: an actor who does to many TV shows stats to see a decline in his/her bookability for film roles, because many years' worth or aggregated data suggests that people are reluctant to buy tickets for actors that they're used to seeing for nothing on TV - Tina Fey is the latest victim of this phenomenon. To quote an entertainment writer [2] 'Hollywood Boulevard is littered with the corpses of TV actor careers that almost were.' TV is a ghetto, and I promise you that the Internet is even more of a ghetto.

Because the barriers to entry are so low on the Internet, the residual income prospects for film producers are also very low - _much_ worse than for musicians, because the cost of producing a film is _much_ higher than the cost of producing a music recording. The most expensive album ever produced was Guns'n'Roses _Chinese Democracy_ , which took 15 years and the breakup of the band before making it to store shelves in 2008 [3]. Total cost? $13 million. That's the worst fiscal trainwreck in music industry history, but by Hollywood standards that's a typical budget for an Indie hit with a famous lead and two character actors. Big Hollywood projects routinely risk 10 times that amount.

Now when you consider that even conservative estimates of industry income lost to piracy are measured in billions, there's a lot of pressure on the MPAA from producers to stem those losses. Now I hate Disney's copyright lobbying just as much as you do, if not more, but that is not the fault of the individual movie producers whose movies fail to break even. But tech people don't like legislative approaches, don't like DRM, and frequently refuse to give the film industry the time of day when invited to do so.

If you won't even attempt to engage, why should they? If you could get over your disbelief that the industry would like to discover a solution that works for both producers and consumers, then what _would_ you suggest?

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc).

2\. [http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/9-tv-actors- who...](http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/9-tv-actors-who-could-go- from-small-screen-players-to-big-screen-stars-in-2013.php)

3\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Democracy>

4\. <http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php>

You should take inflation into account here as well; a discount rate of about 5%/year is a good rule of thumb.

<comment><USER6> _> I'm offering you a communication channel to studio executives right now._

They should drop any kind of DRM - point blank. DRM in unethical, doesn't protect anything against piracy and only hurts legitimate users. If they want to prove that they don't have ulterior motives that are cloaked in DRM schemes (like desire for broad control and attempts to stifle innovation and so on) they should start respecting their legitimate users / customers. By using DRM (unethical preemptive policing) they show that they treat users as criminals by default. Why should they get any respect in return when they act that way? So any model should be built on mutual respect. This excludes any DRM from the equation. And DMCA/1201 should go away with it.

If they'll insist that DRM / DMCA should exist, it will demonstrate that their real motives are not about preventing piracy (since they prevent nothing like that), but really completely different. I.e. they intend to 1. insult their legitimate users by treating them as potential criminals, 2. stifle innovation by controlling any new technology by DRM cages, 3. invade users' privacy with all kind of sick control mechanisms and etc. and etc. I wish someone could clearly communicate this to various studio executives who push for DRM all around. Either they'll continue to hypocritically claim that unethical preemptive policing is "needed to prevent piracy", or they'll start acting honestly and stop forcing DRM on everyone (like pushing it into HTML standard, building it into hardware interfaces like HDMI and so on).

<comment><USER4> Look, _nobody_ likes DRM. It's an irritating expense for movie studios, and one that doesn't even work very well. But expense of DRM is considerably eclipsed by the loss of revenue if piracy is trivially easy.

 _they intend to 1. insult their legitimate users by treating them as potential criminals, 2. stifle innovation by controlling any new technology by DRM cages, 3. invade users' privacy with all kind of sick control mechanisms and etc. and etc._

sorry, I think this is delusional. They just want pirating a movie to be more trouble than it is worth for most people, so that they'll pay to rent or buy the movie instead. The reason they push DRM is because they _don't have a better idea_ for how to prevent/impede people from distributing the movie for free before the studio can make its money back. If you're selling a movie, it's hard to compete with people who ae giving it away for free. If you can't make the money back, then you find the money o produce more movies.

I'm asking for suggestions on what you think would work _instead_ of DRM.

<comment><USER6> _> Look, nobody likes DRM. It's an irritating expense for movie studios, and one that doesn't even work very well_

That's exactly my point. It doesn't work for preventing piracy, which only leads one to conclude that since these studios push for DRM so fiercely, they have some other motives at play, while claiming that it's about piracy. This only doubles the reasons to oppose them, since they are hiding their motives, which are most probably __not good __for the public.

 _> The reason they push DRM is because they don't have a better idea for how to prevent/impede people from distributing the movie for free before the studio can make its money back._

If you claim they are so innocent, but just clueless, then there is a known rule for them - if you don't know what to do - sit and do nothing (until you figure out what to do). Doing the _wrong_ thing (DRM) only makes things worse! They are naturally upset about piracy, but it's not a valid reason to push for unethical and crooked methods like DRM which achieve the opposite purpose - insult legitimate users and have zero effect on pirates.

DRM is always unethical. I'm not delusional about it. It's prone to abuse, like any kind of overbroad policing scheme. Such kind of examples are _to be expected_ from DRM: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal) I.e. users should never trust DRM schemes to respect their privacy, since DRM by definition doesn't trust the user. Trust is always mutual. I also explained why DRM is unethical in essence here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381153> Please try to explain this idea to your contacts amongst studio execs, if they have hard time understanding that they are supporting such unethical practices (DRM).

 _> I'm asking for suggestions on what you think would work instead of DRM._

That's a valid thing to ask. The answer is well known. Treat customers with respect, and you'll get respect in return. It was proven time and again by various DRM free distributors (like GOG for gaming), which have a loyal following of users who respect them for treating users as normal beings, rather than despicable criminals by default. That's the way to reduce piracy - increase the legitimate user base using respect and encouragement to buy, instead of using preemptive policing stick. Make content easily accessible, instead of making it barely accessible with DRM electric fences.

 _> If you're selling a movie, it's hard to compete with people who are giving it away for free._

In order to compete with piracy, legitimate content has to, you know - actually compete! I.e. compete where it's possible to compete. Not in price (that's not possible, even though prices often can be lower than they are), but in usability and ease of access and etc. DRM _always_ degrades usability and quality of the content. Always - let this settle in the mind of studio execs. DRMed stuff can not possibly compete with what pirates offer (quality and usability wise).

In practice, for film industry (or for any other digital industry - gaming, book publishing, music and so on), this would mean - start selling files. No DRM and strings attached. Easy and simple. People buy - they watch it where they want, on any device they want, whenever they want and etc. That's what pirated content offers. Streaming should be actually made a convenience, and not as a method to reduce usability. I.e. streaming service should explicitly offer an option to save the stream as DRM free file for time / device shifting and etc. Currently streaming is presented not as convenience, but as a restriction (i.e. come and see only here, only on this platform and only now, but not elsewhere or other time). This should go away if studios really want to reduce piracy. Let them offer the same level of usability as pirates do. Without such option, how do they possible even expect to compete with superior (but pirated) option? This will encourage people to buy, rather than pirate stuff. Since many are surely willing to support the creators.

There always will be some who pirate - they have to come to grips with that. But there is a big chunk of "pirates" who are simply put off by DRM idiocy and disrespectful behavior of distributors. These people can be won over to become legitimate users, if distributors would treat them with due respect. The idea is quite simple, but somehow it "escapes" the understanding of many distributors/publishing/content producing execs.

But to be honest, I'm not convinced yet that they are just clueless. Too many things point in different direction - i.e. some ulterior motives which drive them to push for DRM/DMCA. I'd be glad if that wasn't true.

<comment><USER4> So basically you're suggesting the honor system. But in the early days of home computers etc., when a lot of software was published with no copy protection, people just copied it. I have a whole bunch of CDs gathering dust on my shelf, and none of them has any DRM or copy protection, so how come they are pirated?

Look, I used to run rave parties. We started with just a donation box, but eventually we switched to selling tickets because when we used the donation box _we always wound up losing money_ on the costs of renting the soundsystem and the location. I hate to tell you this, but relying on the innate goodness of others - something that I naturally and greatly prefer to do - is a fast way to go broke.

Instead of going on and on about how awful DRM is - which I largely agree with but which frankly makes you sound a little unhinged - please show me some evidence that the honor system works on a larger scale. Because if I'm selling files for $5 with no copy protection and Joe Pirate is giving them away for $0 (but he doesn't want me to disrespect him by filing legal action against him or hurting his feeling by labeling him a pirate), tell me why people are going to give me $5 for the same thing that they could get for free?

'I hope people will do the right and give me the amount of money I ask for' is not a workable business plan. Nobody is going to write a large check for production costs based on that, because they're virtually guaranteed to go broke.

<comment><USER6> You asked a straight question - how to reduce piracy. I answered - <USER2> customers with respect (no DRM), and many of the current pirates will become paying users. If they want to "eliminate piracy" - they can forget about it, it will never happen. They can however increase their profits by acting decently. Today they are mostly focusing on chasing pirates wasting resources on that completely in vain. They should focus on catering to legitimate users instead. And it will pay off. As proven by those who act decently and principally don't use DRM.

 _> Because if I'm selling files for $5 with no copy protection and Joe Pirate is giving them away for $0 (but he doesn't want me to disrespect him by filing legal action against him or hurting his feeling by labeling him a pirate), tell me why people are going to give me $5 for the same thing that they could get for free?_

I thought this is simple. People already can get it for free by pirating it. I.e. you have such choices:

1\. Sell for $5 with DRM that reduces usability by limiting platforms where this can be used and etc. etc. By using DRM the distributor also offends paying customers by default by treating them as potential criminals. Joe pirate breaks DRM, and gives this out for $0 with no DRM, which can be used anywhere.

2\. Sell for $5 with no DRM. It gives wide platforms availability and shows respect to the customer. Joe pirate gives out the same thing for $0.

Note, Joe pirate will give it away in either case. So what is better for the distributor, to act like a jerk, and still getting pirating in result, or to act decently and with repsect (and still getting pirating in result)? Obviously the second is better, since more people will in return pay, rather than pirate. That's how respect works - it's mutual.

I.e. what can be improved, is making it easy to buy and treating the buying customers decently. I'm repeating myself really. People will buy - out of respect in return, and naturally out of willing to support the creators. Since studio execs see everyone as a thief, they can't grasp this simple truth.

Great example is CD Projekt Red company, owners of the GOG.com games distribution service, and creators of the highly acclaimed Witcher games. They had multiple talks about piracy and complete uselessness of DRM. They sell only DRM free games on GOG - as a matter of principle. Search for their interviews if you are interested. People gladly support them, because they treat people with respect. They even brought an example, that DRM gives an incentive to pirate - i.e. people break DRM and pirate out of the opposition spirit. But when there is no DRM - there is less incentive to begin with. (Here is a great article about it: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/05/18/th...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/05/18/the- truth-is-it-doesnt-work-cd-projekt-on-drm/) ).

If you want to put it in practical terms for video industry, let some studio become vocal about their opposition to DRM and their willingness to break this sick trend. And let them put it in practice (the way I described above). They'll see the increase in sales and the number of legitimate customers. I'm not joking. But such studio needs to be brave and bold when they come out with principal DRM free stance, because naturally others in the industry will try to attack them. But they should simply ignore and persist - and they'll be victorious.

I.e. to make it more formal - instead of focusing on reducing piracy (negative), focus on increasing the sales (positive). The second includes building the loyal fan base (fans gladly support the creators), producing high quality and unique stuff (people would rather pay for really good things, than for low quality) rather than following the "mass market" approach, treating people with respect (no DRM) and so on. This is proven to work. Note that CDPR whom are brought above excel in all these. They communicate with their fans actively, they pay high attention to details and don't ever produce mediocre stuff. They are original and unique. And really high quality. See their talk about their approach: [http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/31748-cdprs-...](http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/31748-cdprs- business-strategy/) I can agree that those who can't come up with something original and follow the "mass market" are at a disadvantage. But that's the nature of competition. Even DRM won't help mediocre stuff to become really good.

However DRM gives publishers/distributors the taste of power and control. And it's one of the basic lusts in people. Which is even greater than lust for money. So it's not so much about piracy - it's about them playing "the boss", or "the big brother" for that matter. So many aren't ready to give up the taste of power.

I'd also recommend your studio execs friends to listen to this very insightful talk from Cory Doctorow: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg> \- you should watch as well, if you didn't yet. He addresses the issue of DRM and how it affects the technology adversely, and especially how wrong are attempts to abuse the legal system to enforce DRM (i.e. DMCA and Co.).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Only president EVER to hold a patent is... - <AUTHOR> http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/04/abraham-lincoln.html

<comment><USER2> [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/pa...](http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/patent.htm)</comment>


Paper: 3G iPhone smaller, lighter than existing model - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/29/paper_3g_iphone_smaller_lighter_than_existing_model.html <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that thinks this will kind of suck?

Smaller and lighter != better. I'd actually prefer the current weight and size of the iPhone becuase its heaviness makes it nice to hold, and it is a great size.

:/

</comment><comment><USER3> This has to be false. Apple knows the current screen is already almost too small for the virtual keyboard.</comment>


CyanogenMod 13.0 Release 1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/cm-13-0-release-1 <comment><USER3> Congrats to CyanogenMod.

It would be great to have a mobile OS geared toward end-user control and privacy. (Those are not CyanogenMod's goals, at least not the latter - <USER2> of course is fine for CM.)</comment>