Rational fiction - <AUTHOR> http://rationalfiction.io/wiki/rational-fiction <comment><USER2> It's complicated. I like HPMOR, but... not necessarily because it's rational?

I mean, Eliezer is an impressive writer whose style resonates with many people. And it's indeed frustrating to see idiocy in fiction, like in Star Trek where the most powerful weapon is obviously the teleporter but no one acknowledges that. We can all agree on these things.

The problem is that removing idiocy doesn't automatically make a piece of fiction good. It seems like Eliezer has convinced a ton of nerds (I hate the word but let's roll with it) that they can succeed in writing fiction by applying this one weird trick. But you need much more than that.

Our enjoyment of stories comes mainly from emotions, which we then rationalize by saying "I liked that story because the hero was really smart". A few people have noticed that the actual plotlines in HPMOR are kinda weak, and it's really the characterization and "epic" style that makes the story work. A version of HPMOR that was just "smart", with better intrigue but less emotional appeal, wouldn't attract nearly as many people. A version of Worm without the raw moments of suffering would be kinda pointless to read. These things don't come for free if you just try to write rationally.

To conclude, here's a few recommendations:

\- If you want to read a work that succeeds purely based on rationality, without much emotion or characterization, check out The Metropolitan Man. It's probably the best example of its kind, and a damn good read too.

\- If you know your way around the Harry Potter universe and want another good fanfic in that setting, try The Seventh Horcrux. It doesn't give a fuck about rationality, but it's so amazing that you won't care.

\- If you want something extremely smart, well written, and emotional at the same time, read anything by Ted Chiang. I'll never stop recommending him.

<comment><USER3> Ironically, most of the better bits, and indeed the overarching plot thread of HPMOR are largely down to the _huge gaps_ in various characters' rational thought. If Harry had made the obvious "let's not trust the sinister guy that's obviously manipulative and definitely more experienced at it than me" leap right at the beginning it might have been a much shorter series.

Apart from young Harry picking up some of the flaws in the organization of Rowling's wizard world in the first couple of chapters in the first few chapters and the combat lesson scenes, there's really not that much rationality going on. Most of the rest of it is characters trying to achieve particular goals whilst being thwarted in large parts by emotional impulses and glaring oversights the reader is positively screaming for them to notice, which is pretty much Fiction 101.

Harry as a character in HPMOR works because he's implausibly precocious, ambitious and devious, which is quite cute in an 11 year old, not because he [sometimes] draws particularly well-reasoned conclusions. We _do_ judge the series on whether we like him being really smart, but that's quite different from him being really rational.

If super-detached and accurate analysis of a situation is what turns you on then I think Arthur Conan Doyle nailed down the "rational fiction" genre with Sherlock Holmes over a century ago.

<comment><USER2> It's funny how Sherlock Holmes stories were considered very clever at first, then there was a backlash from authors like Agatha Christie who emphasized "realistic" psychology and disliked "magical" deductions from surface facts, and then it turned out that Conan Doyle's approach was right after all, because his stories predicted most of modern forensics. That's quite a high bar for future writers of rational fiction!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone has stumbled over strict plot-driven hard SF in the classical mold and decided it's something new.

Not to belittle Eliezer (who I think did something new and interesting) but you can find a large chunk of these elements out there in SF if you look in the right places.

(Note, however, that a large proportion, probably a majority, of what is marketed as Science Fiction is basically swords and sorcery adventure yarns with spaceships instead of dragons or galleons, aliens in place of orcs, and technology porn with added technobabble in place of magic. Personally I blame the fictive family tree of which _Star Wars_ is the most successful branch ...)

<comment><USER5> Could you list some good examples? I was wondering about Niven, Egan and others and realising that I tend to enjoy my fiction without consciously analysing it.

(Just realised who I'm replying to... maybe you could blog about it)

<comment><USER4> Niven and Egan would be classic examples from different decades (Niven's post-1977 work, and his collaborations, not so much). I'd also point to Hannu Rajaniemi's _Quantum Thief_ trilogy, Peter Watts (for world-building -- see below) and the cultural/linguistic side of C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series (at least the first five or so books).

One of the less well understood (especially by non-genre reader) aspects of hard SF is that the world the story is set in can be viewed as a character/participant in the plot, or -- in this sub-field -- as a puzzle that the plot depends on; the outcome of the story simply doesn't work without the world being set up the way it is. (A lot of stuff is marketed as hard SF that doesn't fit this criterion; it just has lots of cheap throwaway references to technology. But the core of the field is about solving the puzzle that the universe has thrown in front of the protagonists.)

<comment><USER6> There's also Charles Stross, a personal favorite. Can't imagine why you would have forgotten to mention him... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Currently reading Dune (I'm at 50%): I work a lot with Bayensian models and I keep seeing the way Paul Atreides can "feel" the future as a perfect implementation of Bayesian thinking. He weights every minute detail in a intuitive way and computes most likely outcomes. Also, the religious parts are very nicely worked out as planted by Bene Gesserit with a very detailed, worked-out plan. I love it. Having such consistent, logic based aspects to fiction makes it feel much more like you can be the hero yourself. It teaches you something real from a story that is fake. I love books that change me rather than just entertain me. It's true philosofy.

Some of my favorites and their lessons:

Enders game -> Understanding an "enemy" makes you see their beauty, makes you not want to be enemies (dehumanizing the enemy is extremely important in warfare and in propaganda; we boycot evil Putin, we don't think of honest Russian people who "love their children too", trying to make the best out of life.).

Atlas Shrugged -> The importance of not ignoring your own wishes in a group context, the morality of rational self-interest.

Brave New World -> You can either spend time creating or you can spend it consuming.

1984 -> All the metaphors it provides just makes any discussion regarding government over-reach so much more efficient.

Little Brother -> Why privacy is more important than security: Your rulers can be wrong with catastrophic consequences.

<comment><USER2> I think when a story is well told, it's easy to overlook how implausible it actually is. Paul Atreides as a rationalist hero? He's the outcome of a breeding program for people who can see the future _and_ the rightful heir to a whole planet _and_ a prophesied messiah of a huge religion _and_ a supersoldier with insane fighting skills. All of that is set up before the events of the novel even begin. And then he, um, takes psychedelic drugs and magically learns what's going on in outer space. And marries a princess.

The real question is what you'd do in a universe where someone else has all these gifts, but it's not you. Like how in LOTR Aragorn has all the gifts (rightful heir, supersoldier, engaged to an immortal princess) but Sam is the real hero. I half wish Eliezer had used that approach in HPMOR instead of going with Harry as the obvious choice.

<comment> loup-vaillant There's a Naruto fanfic where the main character is actually Sakura. As expected, she's the weakest of the bunch. [https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5193644/1/Time- Braid](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5193644/1/Time-Braid)

In the game Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV), the player character is so much _not_ the hero that he can't even wear the amulets of kings that is given to him at the very beginning of the game. The end of the main plot actually have you watch the messiah save the world. Unusual, but refreshing. (Then Skyrim went back to having the player being the messiah.)

<comment><USER8> I was enamored with Skyrim, but the more of the plot lines I went through, the more ridiculous the story seemed. So I'm the best warrior Companion, the best Mage in Winterhold, the key to the civil war _and_ the dragon born? The first plot line I went through - Companions - worked fine, because it was the first. But each successive one fell flat at least a little, because how I was the best at _everything_.

What I enjoyed was the world they built. The plot was secondary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is honestly really cool and I was thinking only weeks ago how I wished there was a resource like this. I am not often a fiction reader because I find the characters frustratingly stupid or the situations unrealistically easy in pretty much every fantasy book. Wheel of Time is full of characters making decisions so rash and stupid that it's hard to imagine someone in real life ever doing it. The main character is thrusted into greatness and power without any effort and continues to do great things with little effort. This is a common trait in most fantasy books.

When I read fantasy, I want something inventive and clever in a setting I find interesting. HPMOR had a fair share of silly parts and the author seems a bit full of himself, but it was overwhelmingly the most intelligent fantasy writing I've ever read (an admittedly small sample size). It's sad that my favorite piece of fiction writing was a Harry Potter fanfiction.

<comment><USER10> Based on what you are saying, I would recommend reading some Japanese manga. Manga follows a different story structure from western fiction. In western fiction you usually start the story with conflict. The main characters resolve the conflict and the story is over. Manga follows the Chinese epic structure where you start off with a section that simply defines the rules of the universe and introduces you to the characters. Often it is quite light and humourous. About halfway through the crisis develops. Quite often this is rather hard on the reader because something incredibly nasty happens to their now beloved characters. The rest of the story talks about how the characters resolve the conflict.

The main advantage of this story structure is that by setting up the rules at the beginning and spending a great deal of time introducing the characters, you have the opportunity to examine the actions of the characters in the conflict section knowing their constraints. That way the actions and reasoning are much easier to follow and to relate to.

I'd like to give you advice on what to read, but I tend to enjoy fairly childish, light stuff ;-) Although not fantasy, Barefoot Gen is pretty amazing (should be on everybody's reading list IMHO). I don't personally like it, but Akira is also quite good.

<comment><USER11> Care to give some recommendations for a newcomer to that genre?

<comment><USER10> It's hard to give recommendations because the stuff I read is probably not what most people would like ;-) Especially, I tend to like sports manga which is pretty far from fantasy. (Currently Yowamushi Pedal is fuelling my cycling addiction!)

I mentioned Barefoot Gen, which is a very early manga and a classic that is actually taught in Japanese schools. It's not fantasy, though. It tells the story of the author's experiences around the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

For fantasy things, Full metal alchemist is an alternate-earth scenario with magic. It is extremely good. One thing that doesn't actually fit the epic story format because it is a series of short stories is Mushishi. I highly recommend it, although I've only watched the anime. Akira is a cyber-punk, distopian future manga which is very highly acclaimed. Personally, it is not my taste, but it is excellent. Another interesting manga which has no actual heroes is Death Note. It's another one I don't like because all of the characters are really nasty, but some people really, really like it for that reason. I asked my wife (who is Japanese) for a suggestion and she mentioned Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (Legend of the Galactic Heroes). I haven't read it but Wikipedia indicates it was originally a series of novels. It seems Viz publishes both the novels and manga in English. Ghost in the Shell is a very good sci-fi manga, but I have to admit that it is years since I looked at it, so I can't really remember it.

One manga which I love is actually a baseball manga called Touch. If you read that, you will see the manga story structure very easily.

I started reading manga as a means to learn Japanese. At the time I had only a passing interest in graphic novels and comics. Over time I got quite hooked on it. But I only read in Japanese, so I tend to read things which are quite easy. There are very complex manga stories which are aimed at adults, but unfortunately I haven't spent much time looking at those things.

Of course the 2 current most popular mangas aimed at young boys is Naruto and One Piece. Naruto just finished. It has some very powerful moments and the story is quite good. I've found that there are quite a lot of useful ideas that you can take away from the story and apply to your own life. However, the characters are one-dimensional (on purpose, I think) so I suspect it wouldn't appeal to the original poster. One Piece is also quite good (the first chapter is actually really worth reading on it's own and can stand by itself even if you don't read anything else). Again, it is aimed at a young audience and the characters are very static. There are some extremely moving moments, though.

Hope that helps a bit. As I said, it's hard to give recommendations because some people will look at that list and probably absolutely hate some of the things on there. There is an unbelievably massive amount of manga being written and I truly believe there is something for every taste. However, the examples above are pretty easy to find in English and are all quite famous. If they don't meet your taste, I hope you'll explore a bit further on your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From TFA: "Characters act as real humans would." and "Story's plot and characters aren't propelled forward by a lack of communication or by idiocy."

Good thing, because "real people" never do things because they're misinformed, impulsive, etc...

<comment><USER13> That was my first reaction too (and it was quite disappointing to see it reflected in another post so far below). From an educational POV, having an all-out rational play is valuable (up to a point), but that's it. It is like observing chemical reactions in a sterile medium, not in a natural one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> With the exception of "teaching rationality" as an explicit goal, the "Characteristics of rational fiction" are just basic guidelines for writing good fiction (science fiction, if you include the "topics" characteristic).

When an author break's their world's own rules or has a character make an obviously irrational choice to drive the plot, it is annoys the reader and is considered poor writing. This is true of all writing, regardless of whether the author considers it rational or not. Good sci fi and fantasy often involves the characters deconstructing their world's rules and using those character's unique insight into the world to somehow solve the plot. Brandon Sanderson -- who writes epic fantasy that would never be considered "rational fiction" \-- is famously good at this.

That being said, I have grown tired of rehashed old tropes and am glad that a new spin these is emerging. Hopefully some fresh work will come from it.

<comment><USER15> > basic guidelines for writing good fiction

I think what 'good fiction' is varies from person to person. Those for whom realistic motivations etc are important will like books that other fans of 'rational' fiction like; but there's tons of hugely popular books that have none of this.

Assuming that people making bad choices for plot reasons bothers everyone is just typical mind fallacy; clearly it doesn't, otherwise many of the most popular books wouldn't sell.

<comment><USER14> Well, the popularity of a book is not directly correlated with the quality of it's writing. There are some truly awful bestsellers out there, along with many more undiscovered gems.

Most professional authors, writing instructors and critics would probably agree that these characteristics are just generally solid guidelines for good fiction writing (I speak from experience as a long-time hobbyist fiction writer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A shrewd thing to do is read HPMOR's author notes and take reading recommendations from there: [http://hpmor.com/notes/](http://hpmor.com/notes/)

A few that really stand out:

The Ethshar books - to parapharse EY, the author creates the world and the characters, then he throws them together and watches what happens.

Vorkosigan Saga - if EY's Harry has an inspiration, it's Miles Vorkosigan.

<comment><USER17> Seconding that recommendation for the Ethshar series. The setting was originally designed for a tabletop RPG, and the characters often act like rule-exploiting "munchkin" gamers. Eliezer Yudkowsky's recommendation is here: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/s7/lawrence_wattevanss_fiction/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/s7/lawrence_wattevanss_fiction/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always though that both good mystery and science fiction fit most of those criteria listed. Except deconstruction, which I can happily live without.

Of course, neither SF not mysteries are actually like the stories this page links to.

<comment><USER19> Deconstruction doesn't have to hit you on the head. Eg Watchmen is an enjoyable story, but also a deconstruction of its genre.

The weirdest form of deconstruction is `unconstruction' ([http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnbuiltTrope?from...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnbuiltTrope?from=Main.UnconstructedTrope)): "An unbuilt trope is a work that seems like a deconstruction but is actually the Trope Maker itself."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _Characters act as real humans would._

That by definition rules out any semblance of reality in so-called rationalist fiction.

Real humans only act rationally some of the time. They're especially incapable of acting rationally when under extreme stress, such as when a mythical creature is trying to kill them.

People often do things for no particular reason. Some people are in fact evil just for the sake of it. Lack of clear communication is actually a big problem in the real world, just not in a way that is commonly portrayed in sitcoms.

Not every bad guy has a complex machiavellian scheme going, and it usually doesn't take an equally complex theme to bring them down. A lot of the time, it's just a matter of who has bigger guns. Often, the villain really has lousy op-sec, as the Silk Road guy did.

If you like reading stories with carefully designed worlds, hyper-analytic heroes, and clever puzzles, that's fine. But none of the features that distinguish rationalist literature from other kinds make them better works of literature, only better didactic tools for some purposes. Hammers are good tools for hitting nails, but that doesn't mean hammers are superior to other tools in any other respect.

My favorite parts of HPMOR are the war games, especially the big battle that takes place in the woods where every team comes up with creative strategies. None of the strategies work perfectly as intended, and there's a lot of improvising as well. That scene was so fun, and I could totally see it happening, precisely because of the healthy and realistic mixture of rationality, spontaneity, stupidity, and plain luck. Sadly, I can't say the same for the last few chapters of HPMOR. It contains too much complex scheming for the sake of scheming. That's just as pointless as being evil for the sake of evil.

My favorite novelist is Ursula Le Guin. Her works are set in lovingly designed, beautiful, and compelling worlds; but her characters display just enough inconsistency, thoughtlessness, and impulsiveness to make their plights relevant to ordinary humans. She manages to build tension and leave the reader longing for more without resorting to cheap puzzles or turning the heroes into masters of manipulation. And she does it without the pretense of teaching anybody anything. Haven't we long outgrown the age when every bedtime story had to have a clear moral lesson?

So let's take rationalist fiction for what they are: didactic tools. They're neither more realistic nor have any more literary merit than other types of fiction.

<comment><USER21> "Some people are in fact evil just for the sake of it."

It's interesting that many of us do not (either because can not or do not want to) realize it as a fact. Such "plain evil" people are usually just labeled as people with mental disorders, with such or such "syndrome" when the causes can not be clearly identified. These people are noticed and taken care of when their "illness" is severe, rendering them dangerous and foolish, but it's reasonable to expect that a lot of people with some moderate forms of such (so-called) affections to stay free and "ready for action" all their life. These kind of people do exist in real life and are part of daily play. Abstracting them away appears in itself like an irrational thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sounds great. I always wanted a genre like this and didn't know it existed past the rational titles I've read. Got some more reading ahead of me. Thanks rayalez!

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't find links atm but much of what this refers to is just creating a hard magic system and sticking to it. Brandon Sanderson wrote a couple of very good essays on this topics doing with Sanderson's rule of magic which day much the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER24> Insofar as "rational fiction" is rational, it's just good fiction[0].

If we tack on the requirements that it "teach rationality" and "deconstruct" some setting, then maybe you might justify it as a separate genre, but in all of the works that I've read (and I've read the entirety of HPMOR, as well as a few others on that list), they seem to miss why characters might behave in an apparently irrational fashion.

See, there's a convention in fiction where sometimes the author can't describe the precise evolution of their fictional universe in a step-by-step manner, and so they just skip to the next incident in the plot, or maybe paper over how some feat was accomplished with a weak explanation. As long as it doesn't interfere with the point of the story, it's just something you, as the reader, are supposed to accept. For example, to provide a scientifically plausible explanation of the biomechanics of Prometheus' regenerating liver[1] would detract from the thrust of the myth, and might also have been difficult to do given the state of medical knowledge in Ancient Greece.

Deconstructing things is fine (and usually shows up to some degree in _all_ fanfics, not just self-consciously rational ones). It's a fun intellectual game to wonder just how exploitable various magic systems are, but perhaps the story that Rowling wanted to tell hinged less on precisely how magic worked than on the timeless tale of plucky schoolchildren successfully killing their teacher in a secret dungeon. Ah, youth.

But the problem with HPMOR and related works is that, when you start trying to enforce optimal decision making at _every single point in the story_ , you tend to end up ruining the story either through reducing it to absurdity (c.f. the conclusion of the book, which involves multiple simultaneous decapitations using transfigured nanowire), or doing so much worldbuilding that the plot starts to collapse under its own weight.

HPMOR barely hangs together thanks to the efforts of Rowling, who managed to paint a sufficiently vivid universe that Yudkowsky could write ~137,000 words in order to tweak the magic system and also do a pastiche of the mock battles in _Ender 's Game_.

And as far as teaching rationality goes, I'm skeptical. It wasn't that Harry was transcendentally rational, just that almost every other character was exceedingly dull. The places where he demonstrates his supposedly amazing thought process tended to be when blackmailing people who could _easily_ retaliate, a couple of basic experiments, or jargon-dense recapitulations of obvious ideas[2].

Not to mention that the dubious rationality of a plan for creating safe AI whose first step involves writing a fanfiction for a children's fantasy series. I've seen Yudkowsky justify it in various ways, but it seems to me that he just likes to write and tried to make his personal project more relevant to his broader goals.

I know, I know, that's probably excessively snarky. But still, it is _exceedingly_ frustrating to see people advocating for more "rational" fiction without understanding how fiction works. I haven't read everything listed on the site, but for my own part, "rational" fiction is far from a silver bullet; in most cases it's just a necessary (but not sufficient) criteria that good fiction has to fulfill.

\---

0\. "Actions should be logical and follow naturally from actions that precede them." via, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_\(Aristotle\))

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus#Hesiod_and_the_Theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus#Hesiod_and_the_Theogony_and_Works_and_Days)

2\. ... about half of which were wrong or incomplete. Charitably, you might say this reflects Harry's precocious but not-fully-developed mind, or if you were less positively inclined you might say that teaching people incorrect things is the opposite of promoting rationality

</comment><comment><USER25> Is anyone selling hard copies of 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'?

<comment><USER19> No, at least not legally. Harry Potter's author is not happy with people selling fan fiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This kinda seems like a recipe for boringly perfect, flaw-free characters.

<comment><USER27> I don't think this is even slightly true of the protagonists of the two most popular examples of the genre (Worm and HPMoR).

<comment><USER26> Glad to hear it, but the article writer hasn't conveyed it well. It really sounds like he's describing fiction about the clash of hyperrational superminds who aren't held back by petty things like "mistakes" or "emotions."

Also--the article mainly uses the term "rationalist fiction," which is fine, but the title is " _rational_ fiction," which is rather a turn-off. It reminds me of L. Ron Hubbard rattling on about how he doesn't write fantasy because fantasy is for stupids who can't write good, and he is a smart because he writes science fiction which is for smarts.

The whole tone of the article is kind of self-congratulatory. If that doesn't reflect the actual stories, well, good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I tend to find these stories (such as the much-lauded HPMOR) annoying and honestly kind of tiresome.

Some of the examples from this very page:

 _Rationalist stories make a deliberate effort to reward reader 's thinking, and teach him to get better at it._

Because presumably women are incapable of rational thought, amirite?

 _Characters are gaming the system, they understand and exploit the rules of the world, they cheat and manipulate it into the desired outcome. Hero 's brain is his main "superpower" and his primary advantage over others._

The story is built around beep-boop sociopaths, and naturally this is lauded-- not hard work, not soft skills, not being friendly, but calling out people on their bullshit and tricking them into getting what the character wants.

 _They use: \- Rationality and logic \- Intelligence and cunning \- Knowledge of science and technology \- Creativity and inventiveness \- Psychological manipulation and Social Engineering \- Complex Machiavellian plots_

So, in the future, it'll be even more awesome to be a scumbag rich kid who has read _The Prince_ a few times. Swell.

 _Characters act as real humans would. No one is just evil for the hell of it, conflicts are driven by differences in values, and the villains(to the extent there even are villains) have a real and honest point to their actions._

 _Story 's plot and characters aren't propelled forward by a lack of communication or by idiocy._

 _Nobody important is stupid. None of the main heroes or main villains hold the IdiotBall._

The thing that's missing here? Most real humans are irrational, they are petty, they do things for the lulz. Conflicts often arise _despite_ having the same values. Cruel and dickish people are often cruel and dickish out of spite or laziness.

~

The thing I dislike about so much of this rationalist stuff is that, honestly, it breaks apart like so much driftwood when confronted with the jagged incongruities of how real people work.

Intelligence is resented, systems are illogical kludges, people are unpredictable...this sort of thing is just popcorn reading for folks that are more comfortable reading pandering fiction than facing the harsh and chaotic and unforgiving world outside their computer.

<comment><USER29> Mostly agreed.

Fundamentally a perfectly rational world is unrealistic. Humans do behave irrationally, even insanely. Humans also behave sub-optimally because they are trapped in systems full of crazy perverse incentives. The world itself is full of paradoxes and chaotic feedback loops; the best intentions rationally and logically executed can and do lead to perverse outcomes that would not and maybe even could not be forseen.

Sometimes a rational investigation terminates with a big WTF. People see UFOS or Bigfoot all the time, and they're not all nuts. What are they seeing? Not enough information. The universe doesn't present you with all the evidence so you can tie a neat bow around it. It presents you with a dirty noisy incomplete data set so you can ponder it forever. (See also: bounded rationality. Bayesianism deals with this problem by defining truth as a float instead of a boolean, which I kind of like. Bigfoot might 0.0137384 exist.)

The universe gives us Fermi paradoxes and dark energy and Godel's incompleteness theorem.

That being said, I do like the aversion to the idiot plot. It's a big pet peeve of mine. I also like stories where all the characters have depth. To me that's just good characterization, something often lacking in genre fiction. Even if the villain (or the hero) is mad or irrational, there is some depth to it and they have their reasons however twisted these might be. But a lot of that is just good writing.

I also like the aversion to the deus ex machina, which is also lazy writing. If there is some kind of super-thing that intervenes, it should too be developed as a character with depth.

<comment><USER28> So, that's kind of an interesting point, right?

If a character behaves rationally, like beep-boop minmax profits and losses and proceed from there, then it really doesn't matter whether they have depth or not, because it won't really impact the story.

The entire point of a character with depth, like say Harold Lauder in _The Stand_ , is that that depth gives a reader insight into why they do what they do during the story. It provides tension between what is obviously the correct/logical thing to do, and then trying to predict what the character will actually do and why.

If characters are purely rational computational entities, it doesn't really matter what their backstory is, what their motives are, or anything else. The story rapidly devolves into a mere exercise in the reader checking the author's math.

<comment><USER30> _The entire point of a character with depth, like say Harold Lauder in The Stand, is that that depth gives a reader insight into why they do what they do during the story. It provides tension between what is obviously the correct /logical thing to do, and then trying to predict what the character will actually do and why._

First question: did you read through _all_ of HPMOR?

 _beep-boop, sociopath, scumbag rich kid, etc._

Second question: why do you call out the author of the article for using "him" instead of "her/them/xer/it/whatever", then proceed to use incredibly demeaning terms and guilty-by-association smears against another oppressed subgroup, the true nerds? Your comments have been drenched with slimy, wet, arrogant hypocrisy.

\----

 _The thing I dislike about so much of this rationalist stuff is that, honestly, it breaks apart like so much driftwood when confronted with the jagged incongruities of how real people work._

Maybe you are using too narrow a definition of "rational". It's easy to break something apart like so much driftwood when you're attacking a strawman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> the death of art</comment>


Google AI listens to 15 years of sea-bottom recordings for hidden whale songs - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Dang. If there was 15 years worth of sea bottom recordings of hidden whale songs I expected a human to be the one to listen it, not an AI. They could use this discovery to further their study of whales and their behavior. Then again, maybe the human will get bored listening to it. An AI won't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really? Do you have a reference? This isn't just a byproduct of a military project looking to find subs better?</comment>


White House Opens Door To Crackdown On Recreational Marijuana - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-recreational-marijuana-weed-states_us_58af3a8fe4b060480e05ef0e?s7ndhm7c8f1dcxr&&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Morning%20Email%20022417&utm_content=The%20Morning%20Email%20022417+CID_6048987a88dc6818dc7e118f2373da50&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=HuffPost& <comment><USER2> Previous discussion today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718456)

</comment><comment><USER3> Those Republicans are all about States' Rights... oh, wait... I guess they're not.

<comment><USER4> They only care about states rights' when they don't control Congress or the presidency

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >There's a big difference between [medical marijuana] and recreational marijuana and I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we should be encouraging people ― there's still a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature

Ah, yes, we should crack down on recreational use because of opioid addiction. Makes perfect sense when you speak in sentence fragments.

</comment><comment><USER6> "I'm going to be the greatest jobs President ever." \- Mr. Trump, 2016 campaign trail

At least he did learn the game of the politician: Say whatever it takes to get you into power.

I am from a state where DUIs are common and death by drunk driver is pretty high.

But lets crackdown on the real problem: the people hanging out in their own homes, minding their own business, smoking or eating reefer.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe he is trying to link Opioid usage with Marijuana.

<comment><USER8> So I actually don't know much about the subject. Could you (or anyone else) describe what the difference is?

<comment><USER9> marijuana is not an opioid? they're totally different substances, that produce mostly different effects?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have much schadenfreude for the all the idiots that voted for Trump because they thought he be pro-legalizing it.

<comment><USER11> Did anyone think that? They were pretty clear about their position before the election.

<comment><USER12> Sure they did. Even here on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12913113](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12913113)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> the headline doesn't really match the content of the article...

<comment><USER14> at most they've said that they'll "be looking into it", not that they were going to start cracking down tomorrow. I'm a pot user and even I think the title is a bit sensationalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Because recreational use of alcohol and drugs is just as big a threat to society as violent crime? Why not prioritize Justice Department resources on the 760 annual murders or the 4,500 other victims of gun crime in Chicago that Comrade President Trump mentions every other week?

</comment><comment><USER16> Aren't most of the states that have legal marijuana, Democratic?

</comment><comment><USER17> The irony is rich but the good feels are poor.</comment>


It Takes Guts To Do Research (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/it-takes-guts-to-do-research/

<comment><USER2> The OP makes an interesting point, but I think Steve Hsu's post below provide a more nuanced discussion of Oppenheimer and of the book mentioned in the linked article:

[http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/07/strange-gadget- robert-o...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/07/strange-gadget-robert- oppenheimer.html)

Elsewhere, Hsu also links to this review by Freeman Dyson of the same book:

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/oppenhe...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/oppenheimer- shape-genius/?pagination=false)

in which, rather than to lack of confidence, Dyson attributes Oppenheimer's "failure to be a great scientist" to:

 _a lack of Sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word with no equivalent in English. The literal translation is "Sitflesh." It means the ability to sit still and work quietly. He could never sit still long enough to do a difficult calculation._

<comment><USER3> Insightful comment. I don't think we need to pity Oppenheimer for not winning a Nobel Prize. He accomplished quite a lot. We're still talking about him.

By the by, I'm always amazed at how deep particle physics got all the way back in the 1930s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The key point, and one the author believes applies just as well to computer science, is:

 _He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone. Some may call it a lack of faith, but in my opinion it was more a turning away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition._

In my own field of network security, I think that's largely true: we have a lot of analytical tools that we haven't applied sufficiently well, largely because people are not interested or educated in the sorts of theoretical tools we could apply (ML or graph theory, for example).

How well this applies to theoretical research is outside my expertise, though...

<comment><USER5> It's funny you should mention graph theory and network security. I'm involved in cyber security research, though more on the operations side of security than networks. However, our research group does do quite a bit of work on the network side. Most of it's focused on SCADA networks, but there's a couple of really cool tools (read startups) that have come out of our group that lean heavily on graph theory.

NP-View[1] maps connections. That is, If HostA can reach HostB, and HostB can reach HostC, is there a path from HostC to HostA.

Veriflow (which I know far less about) is a large topology mapping tool.

[1] [http://www.network-perception.com/](http://www.network-perception.com/) [2] [http://www.veriflowsystems.com/](http://www.veriflowsystems.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The broader point--that research takes a certain amount of courage--is generally true, but to me, it's weird to make the point by focusing on Oppenheimer's lack of a Nobel Prize. It's not exceptionally rare that someone so brilliant just happened to miss a Nobel.

Scientists, as individual human beings with limited time and energy, have to make an informed decision on just how far they really want to pursue an idea. The fact is that brilliant scientists have just as easily followed dead-end paths as have failed to go far enough down the right one. Hindsight is 20/20, so it's easy to see which is which only now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it strange to ask why Oppenheimer "missed" a Nobel prize while Harold Urey and Carl Anderson got one?

It is Oppenheimer who is far more famous, and probably made a bigger contribution to physics or the world. IMHO, it just shows that Nobel Prize is a poor means to measure physicists.

<comment><USER8> Social distinctions such as Nobels will always be a poor means to measure anything whatsoever. Though of course they are sometimes right on the mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the first two examples, I don't see how Oppenheimer failed to be "courageous." He disagreed with Dirac! He made technically accurate points that proved not to be rebuttals after all. This isn't about not following his ideas far enough, it's about just being wrong.

To me this reads more as the authors projecting their own ideas about what is important in science onto these anecdotes. While I think that's a natural parlor game for scientists to play, I don't think it's well argued here.</comment>


Show HN: Bliss, a library to generate smart playlists from your music - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Polochon-street/bliss <comment> git-pull I always wondered how stuff like this was done. I use spotify often so often discover new music via them aggregating what I already like. But I think spotify does it via finding what other people also like, and maybe have a human element internally where they have audiophiles tag it internally.

So this library does it via analyzing it. _Somehow_. It seems math is involved, but even with the docs, I still don't get it. It'd be helpful to explain the basics of what tempo, amplitude, frequency, attack is. Maybe a video would help.

I also see someone wrote an MPD plugin for it ([https://github.com/Phyks/Blissify](https://github.com/Phyks/Blissify)). That's worth checking out.

Most people don't understand how audio and programming works. In the same way people may not specialize in geo + programming (but they use Google Maps) or color theory + programming (Yet they use color scheme generators and Photoshop). So there is domain knowledge that could be conveyed.

<comment><USER2> As you said, as far as I know, Spotify does its playlists mainly using machine-learning, audio files' tags and user ratings, and not that much via analyzing the actual content of songs.

As it's an open-source project that is supposed to work even without internet access and we don't want to have huge databases of user recommandations, we chose to go for the audio analysis part.

I'll enhance the documentation (as it may be a bit scarce right now) about the analysis process, but Bliss extracts features that are supposed to be disjoint to compute the coordinates: Tempo is how much « quick » the track is, attack, how much there is abrupt changes in the music, amplitude, how « loud » the song is overall, and the frequency analysis checks whether the track is globally high-pitched or deep.</comment></comment>


Can modern Text to Speech voices replace professional voice over actors? - <AUTHOR> https://play.ht/blog/can-modern-text-to-speech-voices-replace-professional-voice-over-actors/ <comment><USER2> I'm always surprised that the computer games industry hasn't latched onto speech synthesis. Modern speech generation coupled with some sort of emotional + accent markup and a library of base voices would allow going from script writer to voice over, without the time and expense of traditional approaches and often poor results. You could even go procedural, dynamically generating speech. The main character can finally get a name and stop being a silent protagonist. Mods & DLC. Include novels' worth of content without the immersion reduction of text boxes.

<comment><USER3> After recently playing Unavowed I kind of hope there'll always be a place for human acting. That said, for games with no voiceover it would be nice to have an accessible TTS option without monotonous tones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The answer to the question: no. Not yet. The examples in the article are very impressive, but note that they are also very short. Listen to them more than once. There is a shape to the sentences: they start at a low pitch, rise at the end on clauses and then finally fall at the end of the sentence.

Now imagine those same tones in this text: "Stop. I don't want any of your damn potatoes. If you try coming on to my property again, I will set loose the dogs." It would be perfectly understandable, but comical.

We won't get full text to speech replacement until the computer understands what's in the text and that won't happen until we get GI. We can probably refine it a bit, but it's always going to be a bit odd. With enough text you will always get that uncanny valley effect.

Having said that, probably we can build systems that will allow a single voice actor to play all parts in a production. That could have many advantages and I expect it to happy relatively soon.

<comment><USER5> I would disagree. Sentiment analysis is already there. Good text to speech too. Basically one needs to use them together to give the speech engine a clue towards the required sentiment and the speech engine enough samples to use different intonations for different sentiments. Won't beat a skilled speech artist, but should be more than sufficient for any mediocre quality cartoon. The big upside is instant translation to all the languages supported by the speech engine. Make mediocre cartoons, add speech, upload to YouTube for ten+ different locales, profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Can modern Text to Speech voices replace professional voice over actors?

It's a bit like saying can super intelligent AI create better Sonic the Hedgehog games.

Once you get nice Text To Speech the fabric of society will change dramatically.

I guess in a video game you can spend hours choosing and modifying parts of the speech, so a professional could do great work with text to speech that in normal society wouldn't work. But it doesn't seem like what they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems promising, though I think the price is a bit too high.

I also hope there is a service that can automate syndicate the voice track while making a Youtube video, any existing services?

Btw, what do you think this service compare with the amazon polly?

</comment><comment><USER8> WaveGlow from NVidia released at the end of 2018 is much more impressive: [https://nv-adlr.github.io/WaveGlow](https://nv-adlr.github.io/WaveGlow).

Are there any state of the art improvements after this one?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a best way to go the other way, that is, from speech voice to text?

I've found the transcription tools tools to have difficulty with at least the stock computer voices.</comment>


Facebook's $10,000,000,000 Question - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203518404577094370435238462.html

<comment><USER2> I want to see that traditional investment banking IPO die.

Investment banks surely deserve compensation for their role in securing financing from institutional investors, but 7% of amount raised seems awfully high for what amounts to a few months of low-risk work.

If Facebook gave this deal to a bank, they'll end up paying $700M, just so that some well connected bankers will call their friends and tell them to invest in Facebook. Fuck that.

And these banks can be vindictive if you decide not to go with them. Several underrwriters told institutional investors NOT to invest in Google, simply because Google shut them out. And although I can't prove it, I think Overstock's decision to do a Dutch auction was partly why they've gotten hammered by investors doing aggressive shorting on the company.

An overarching theme of the current era of the internet is the doing away with middle-men. So maybe I don't want to see investment banks die, but I'd sure want to see the influence of their gatekeeper role reduced significantly.</comment>


System shock: A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mwichary/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f#.v0lk6vj4x <comment><USER2> Windows still has well over 80% of the desktop market and IT WASN'T TESTED? How can that be? It's not like this is an obscure Windows issue. View any page on your site and it would have been glaringly obvious...

Thanks for the fun write-up though. Overboard rage aside, it's a good reminder that we all should double-check our QC processes.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft recently folded their test engineers into the general population. I.e. everybody is supposed to test their own code. Which means, testing dropped to negligible levels. That's why our IT dept has to vet every update now; some of them break your machine.

<comment><USER4> It's not on Microsoft to test Mediums web font rendering changes for them. Medium should have tested on a windows desktop with a multiple browsers. If they had they would have caught this before shipping to consumers.

<comment><USER3> Ah I see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The main takeaway for me is the lack of testing before releasing a new major version. I know that the market is pretty fragmented between desktop and mobile, but you should expect that some people will access from a Windows machine. Maybe I misunderstood but it was launched without being rendered once on Windows ?

<comment><USER6> I'm cynical enough to believe that this was caught in testing and someone thought it would make an interesting blog post so wrote it up as if it went live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone who does more UI work than me explain why you would want to future proof css like this in the first place?

Even forgetting the undesired outcome and lack of testing, it's css...if browsers implement this feature, release it when the time comes. Not sure what's to be gained from adding something like this now. Feels like over thinking the issue a little.

<comment><USER8> Today's browser development preference/"wisdom" is to always include the unprefixed CSS even if you include a vendor prefixed version. The reasoning for this is the realization that maybe vendor prefixes were a bad idea all along. For better or worse, there are a bunch of -webkit prefixed CSS terms that will likely live on the web "forever". So the decision has been (by Edge and Blink [Chrome, Opera], at least) that instead of vendor prefixes browsers should use experimental flags (that are off by default) and unprefixed CSS. (This way devs can still test and evaluate new features, but are much less likely to litter the web in the wild with such experimental features as they'd have to explain to users how to turn the flags on.)

Of course today's wisdom may also be tomorrow's folly and the winds could change again, but I think a lot of us would prefer to forget that vendor prefixes ever happened and not worry about prefixing/autoprefixing/prefix- fixing ever again, so I for one appreciate today's wisdom. Even if we do find weird edge cases in Apple's choices with regards to vendor prefixed CSS.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand this perspective at all. If transitions and transforms had been introduced this way, it would have taken many years longer for them to bleed into commonplace use. No normal user is going to jump through the hoops necessary to turn experimental flags on.

The blink tag disappeared, table-driven design disappeared, unnecessary vendor prefixes will gradually disappear too. That's a small price to pay for progress.

<comment><USER8> > No normal user is going to jump through the hoops necessary to turn > experimental flags on.

That's the feature, it's not a bug.

It's a technical debt issue for the web. Some of those early -webkit prefixed CSS features changed between when the prefixed version was introduced to Webkit and the final spec. Because enough of the old version exists in the wild on the web, the nonstandard versions effectively have to be supported forever or someone's aunt's favorite website mysteriously breaks.

Ultimately the change here is to trust in the standardization process. We, as the web development community, can solve the root cause problem: standards take too long from proposal to "recommendation". We don't need to use the hack of using experimental/prototypal/unfinished features for years, if we can speed up the process for features the web wants.

The benefit of a little bit of patience (or the usage of smart polyfills) with respect to the latest and greatest features is _hope_ for a better web where we can all spend less time worrying about cross-browser quirks like which vendor prefixes are supported/not-supported and whether or not they use some ancient nonstandard form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No mention of the fact that CSS actually has a mechanism to use OS system fonts? 'caption', 'menu', 'message-box' are all, for example, available system fonts.

This is actually a bit of a quirk in the syntax of the CSS 'font' property - [http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font- shorthand](http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-shorthand) \- in that it's not strictly only a shorthand for size/style/family properties, because you can use 'message-box' as a complete font specification, but you can't use '20pt bold message-box'. On the other hand, you can stack 'font: message-box; font-weight: bold; font-size:20px;', so thats not actually a limitation.

Not sure what the browser support situation is, as 'caniuse' and 'quirksmode' haven't dug into the details of support for the CSS 'font' property, but it looks to be doing what you'd expect in chrome on OS X. YMMV.

Looks like this isn't the first time someone's missed this? [http://furbo.org/2015/07/09/i-left-my-system-fonts-in-san- fr...](http://furbo.org/2015/07/09/i-left-my-system-fonts-in-san-francisco/)

<comment><USER11> These shorthands don't seem to do anything on Chrome/Ubuntu.

<comment><USER10> Ah. But to be fair, nor will font-family: -apple-system, San Francisco, droid sans, Segoe ui.

<comment><USER12> He did add ".SFNSText-Regular"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
      And, somewhere within the depths of modern versions of Windows, there lay, dormant, an old-fashioned System font from 1990 — alongside some vintage software routines necessary to render it.

I mean it's hardly hidden in the depths of Windows - it's right there in every single font selection menu.

<comment><USER14> Apparently for the people who test their shit only on Macs it's "hidden" all right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always quite liked the Windows 3.1 fonts. They were nicely put together - very crisp, and easy to read. Good use of the grid.

None of the screen grabs show them at their best, though, because they've been scaled unevenly. Zoom in on the Program Manager shot - if you can't spot them as-is - and you'll see the telltale signs. Tastes differ, but it makes my eyes slightly uncomfortable just looking at it.

Wikipedia has a much better 1:1 shot: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/Program_Manag...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/Program_Manager.png) \- just look at it! Aren't those pixels glorious?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, it's made me consider switching to "system" as my daily font

<comment><USER15> Well, I hope you're not using Windows 8.1, because you don't get the option any more. Luckily, the default - 8pt Segoe UI on mine, I think? - looks decent even with ClearType off and antialiasing disabled.

<comment><USER16> Nor in my Windows 7 :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does it mean that none of the devs/designers in medium.com use Windows?

IMHO it's just interesting coincidence, nothing more. Even though I am not Windows user and I am not for eternal software backwards compatibility (this topic can evolve into a huge rant). Though somehow medium.com staff tries to prove, that having old font is a bad thing and shouldn't be installed today. They released a major update (even calling it version 2.0) and have not it tested it with users (remember that the goal was to use native fonts, so they must have tested it with Android, iOS, OS X, Windows, Windows Phone, Chrome OS, etc.)?

Article was very interesting, showing how can long history of computing produce interesting outcomes. But I felt that author is very annoyed by this coincidence, and somehow this is Microsoft's fault and not medium's and IMHO author is not right.

<comment><USER18> Are you really surprised that none of the developers or designers at a hip startup in San Francisco are running Windows? I'm sure even the receptionist is on a Mac.

<comment><USER19> Yes, and just like the old days, when Windows admins tried to eradicate anything not Windows due to admin costs, it works both ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a bit confused about the use of "just give me a system font", then several named fonts and then "sans-serif". Isn't that exactly what "sans-serif" does, giving you a sans-serif system font?

<comment><USER21> How does a system know wether a font is sans-serif or not?

<comment><USER22> It's a browser setting. For example, I'm using Firefox 41 on Windows 7 and in Options->Content->Fonts&Colors/Advanced... it has "Times New Roman", "Arial", and "Courier New" as the defaults for Serif, Sans-serif, and Monospace respectively.

In Chrome, it's under Settings->+Show advanced settings->Web content/Customize fonts... (Times New Roman, Arial, Consolas on mine.)

In IE 11 under Tools (gear icon)->General->Appearance/Fonts it has "Webpage font" and "Plain text font" (Times New Roman and Courier New on mine). It's weird that they don't let you pick the default sans-serif font.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, there's obviously a miss on testing this here [1], but I wanted to make another point about the wisdom of embedding code that you cannot test, thinking that it would have no effect, with the expectation that at some arbitrary date in the future (which you don't control) it will change the visual appearance of your landing page to something else... that you haven't tested. When iOS 9 came out, it wasn't like people were just resubmitting their apps without ever running them once.

[1] I'm willing to buy that Windows represents a minority of browser share to Medium, although it still seems doubtful that it's such a small share that making visual changes to your global CSS doesn't merit testing on that OS. Was this just a line in some larger diff? "By the way, I changed all the fonts; works on localhost"?

</comment><comment> UK-AL How can you not test on windows before release? It's still the most popular operating system?

<comment><USER24> Do not take this as snark. Not meant as such. Just observation, begrudging admiration is as negative as it gets :)

My guess is that trendy internet start-ups have a Mac culture. I'm not sure, I'm not in trendy internet start-up land. The same is true in academia though, which is my land. Go to an academic conference and we're talking predominantly Mac.

I love the way they spin the "did not test on Windows, the most popular desktop OS" fail to "isn't System so cool and retor, isn't it awesome?". That takes a fair amount of chutzpah and a serious inability for stuff like this to faze you. Which is probably a great character quality for a dev team whose software touches millions.

<comment><USER25> > I love the way they spin the "did not test on Windows, the most popular > desktop OS" fail to "isn't System so cool and retor, isn't it awesome?". > That takes a fair amount of chutzpah and a serious inability for stuff like > this to faze you.

I don't understand. Why should this faze anyone? The website still worked, no harm was done. It barely registers as a bug!

<comment><USER26> In this case it certainly wasn't a serious bug. However it suggests that they did no testing at all on Windows, so in the future they may not be quite as lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Heh, I thought the punchline was going to be people seeing _this_ San Francisco font [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(1984_typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_\(1984_typeface\))

<comment><USER28> Didn't read until the end did we?

<comment><USER29> Someone commenting on the punchline most certainly did read to the end.

<comment><USER30> The punchline commented on was significantly before the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I love these articles assuming everyone has retina Macbooks. Which matches the price of a car in third world countries...

<comment><USER32> You're being disingenuous. For starters, from the second paragraph: "In between Roboto on Android, San Francisco on iPhones and Macs, and Segoe UI on Windows..." Clearly, they're targeting all major platforms. Not to mention, retina MacBooks start at $1299—which is on par with other HiDPI PC laptops, mind you—and I can buy a car on Craigslist here in the first world for like $500. (And I have.)

If you don't like Apple, that's fine, but don't disguise your displeasure as a stand against class warfare.

<comment><USER33> The cheapest Macbook you can find with a retina display costs $3200 in Brazil. That's more than double the price you quote, and we're not even accounting for purchase-power differences in the currency itself.

To put it in perspective, the minimum wage is $300, and I don't know anyone making more than $1500 over there – including developers.

You could literally make a living off of buying Macbooks in the US and selling them in Brazil for double the price; it'd still be much cheaper than in the stores.

<comment><USER32> What does this have to do with the article?

[Edit] I'll be less terse. Yes, I know computers are more expensive in some countries. Are you accusing the author of being, in some way, discriminatory towards people with lower incomes? Did he say they were only designing for Retina displays? (Or only for Apple hardware?) This response feels like an even larger straw man than the parent comment I responded to, and even less about the article itself.

<comment><USER33> I'm not accusing the author of anything, I'm accusing you of thinking retina Macbooks are somehow cheap and accessible.

I also dont't think the comment you were replying to was expressing a dislike of Apple.

Basically, I think you're not even wrong. :-)

<comment><USER34> When did he say they were cheap and accessible? He actually said, they were on par with similarly equipped PCs. Not at all the same thing.

<comment><USER33> He was replying to a post that matches the price of a computer to a car, with the implication that that's expensive. He replied saying that a rMBP "starts at $1299", and he was disagreeing with the post he was replying. Thus his implication was that this is a cheap price.

<comment><USER32> I'm willing to retract that entire line of thinking, because the author never ever actually said anything about designing for Retina hardware, so why are we talking about it in the first place? Their explicit approach was to make Medium's typography work _on as many platforms and devices as possible_ , and this OS X (not _Retina_ , just OS X) bug was an edge case that they missed.

<comment><USER33> Oh, I fully agree with you on this one!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> All sounded great until

> And, since –apple– is a typical vendor prefix for an experimental feature, > we included a more future-proof system as the first entry

Adding system as font should have rang a few alarm bells with any designers older than 30!

<comment><USER36> So this is an Apple WebKit extension that can't sanely be un-vendor-prefixed?

<comment><USER37> Browsers could just implement it like:

        font-family: system;   /* does what the author expects */
        font-family: "System"; /* does what they expect on MS backward-compatibility fantasy island */

<comment><USER38> Except that all browsers that don't yet understand the new meaning of 'system' will then fall back to the old behaviour, that is, the Windows font.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Semi-related question:

The author posted this image of him recreating the old System font as an OpenType vector font:

[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*gwDg2tz2R22D...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com)

The offset pixel on that look horrible, but they also look like a lot of the web fonts I see day-to-day when I have font smoothing disabled. Are modern fonts actually being designed like that for some reason?

<comment><USER40> You need to spend a lot of time tweaking font hinting to make a font that looks good at low res without smoothing. Designers don't bother anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I suspect the author (and possibly everyone in their office) is younger than this font. What was that discussion we were having the other day about ahistoricity? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412284)

<comment><USER42> No idea how old he is, but it would be a mistake to accuse Marcin Wichary of ahistoricity.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/tags/computerhistory/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/tags/computerhistory/)

[https://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac- man](https://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> By Marcin Wichary. That name brings back memories... I recognize his name from a site he ran called the GUIdebook [0], which documented a number of GUIs in screenshot form going back decades. Unfortunately, he stopped updating it in 2006, but the site is still up for anyone who wants to check it out.

[0] [http://www.guidebookgallery.org/](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Man, those screenshots with the `system' font look great.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is reassuring. Designers choosing system fonts. As a non-designer, I opted for site-wide Georgia usage recently and was really happy with the result. I was doing it initially partly for performance reasons, and to stop external calls on a HTTPS-only site, in the end it felt like it was more fitting and more characterful than the (pretty, but generic) Source Sans Pro.

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds like they need to have a few people older than 26 on staff. I would have totally expected that to happen.

</comment><comment><USER47> As of Windows 7, Windows still likes to fall back to System font if it is running low on UI resources. I see this on a regular basis in the "Find in Files" results in Visual Studio.

Further down the rabbit hole:

On Win2k, if you used non-default DPI settings, programs using System font looked particularly atrocious.

</comment><comment><USER48> > _we included a more future-proof system as the first entry_

This is a classic example of why YAGNI is a slogan.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sometimes it doesn't pay to overthink things and do more than is necessary. It doesn't seem likely that without the vendor extension "system" is going to become an official or defacto cross browser standard any time soon. Without that font name being reserved by either a standard or common usage a collision would seem inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER50> > _It was not even a vector font… most personal computers couldn't use vector > fonts yet._

What are the exceptions? What "personal computers" from the Windows 3 era had a UI with vector fonts?

(I'm assuming that institutional workstations costing upwards of $15K don't count as personal computers.)

<comment><USER40> Adobe Type Manager on the Mac created raster system fonts from postscript fonts. So you could sort of argue that case.

<comment><USER51> I'm not 100% sure how ATM for the Mac worked, but I seem to recall it was the same as ATM for Windows (which I worked on). It didn't actually create raster fonts, but instead rasterized on the fly the glyphs that each app was actually using.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Saw 'System shock' and was expecting the video-game tie in. Disappointed :( oh well.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't know if this could be of help to them in their specific case but have they tried something like this

      font: caption | icon | menu | message-box | small-caption | status-bar

to reach the desired result?

</comment><comment><USER54> I had the pleasure of chatting occasionally with Marcin when I was at Google. I love that I hear more of the exploits now than I did then.

</comment><comment><USER55> How do I get this to render in CSS? I tried using "System" (Windows 7 Firefox) and it didn't appear to work.

<comment><USER56> Wow, that's a good question. I see that I have the font here on a clean- install of Windows 8.1, but if I use the element inspector in Chrome to try to change the font on some of the text here on the screen, it seems to render as Times New Roman. And I have to eliminate the fallbacks. It will fall-through System, but it won't pick up the body font.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Umm, what about Linux? The page displays fine on Ubuntu, but what font does it use?

<comment><USER58> Whatever is printed by `fc-match system`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Nothing wrong with a little bit of accidental nostalgia now and then.

</comment><comment><USER60> You mean you used a perfectly sharp font that renders correctly? What's so bad about that?

</comment><comment><USER61> The web sucks. Completely borked. Time for a rewrite.

<comment><USER62> PEBDAC

(Problem Exists Between Developer And Keyboard)</comment></comment>


Payscrypt – Yet another watch-only cryptocurrency payment processor - <AUTHOR> https://payscrypt.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm from the dev team of Payscrypt. I know our product is still pretty rough. We want to release early and listen to honest feedback. So here I am. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.</comment>


Updates from YC - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/updates-from-yc/ <comment><USER2> > The current total market capitalization of YC companies is around $150 > billion. The YC network now has over 4,000 alumni and 1,900 companies, and > it has become a reliable source of advice, customers, friendship, and > support for YC founders.

A question for people more savvy about VC than me. What's your ballpark estimate on YC's bottom line? They put $150K at least into each company, right? So that's $285M right there? But some of those are non-profits, in which case they only put $100K into the company. And then they get 7% of each company, which would theoretically be $10.5B? $150B * 0.07 = $10.5B (just removing non-profits from the equation). But accounting for dilution, it would probably be less than 7% ownership? In other words, I guess we'd need an estimate of how much YC actually owns in its overall portfolio.

Forgive me if my numbers are wildly off or naive. VC isn't my domain.

<comment><USER3> I think its about 3% as the 7% gets diluted so approx $4.5bn for the assets. Of course a lot of that is illiquid and unrealised. The GAAP bottom line would be a lot less and not give a very accurate picture as it wouldn't include most of the gains.

<comment><USER4> On the contrary - GAAP earnings give the __most __accurate picture of cold hard cash. That is the reason they exist , and securities regulators are specific about its definition.

Paper gains are notoriously easy to stretch.

<comment><USER3> Maybe but say YC put $20k into Airbnb for a stake now worth $1bn and $80k into 4 other statups that went bust. GAAP would show a net loss of $80k which would not reflect very accurately how they were doing. GAAP has been designed more to provide a consistent way of calculating corporate income tax than to accurately show how a company is doing.

<comment><USER5> You're welcome to suggest a more accurate way of consistently accounting income tax requirements.

<comment><USER6> That seems like an ungenerous interpretation of the parent's comment. I didn't take that comment to mean that GAAP is not a good way to calculate income tax, but that it's not a good way to judge the true financial prospects of a company.

<comment><USER5> I took it the same way. If there is a better way to judge the true financial prospects of a company we should be taxing them accordingly.

My point was that GAAP is probably the best we're going to do because of the consistency problems.

The moment you start applying special rules or caveats per company you stop being able to compare companies properly as an investor, at which point the measure becomes useless as a talking point as well as being useless for tax calculations.

My original post was framed against tax because it doesn't really make a difference. If the new method is good enough for comparison between companies it's good enough to replace GAAP - unless it's not.

<comment><USER6> I don't agree with this sentence at all, "If there is a better way to judge the true financial prospects of a company we should be taxing them accordingly."

The main thing investors want are some measures that are reasonably forward looking, with the caveat that some of those forward-looking measures will of course be inaccurate when the future comes.

Taxes, on the other hand, should be mostly past looking, taking into account events that are fully settled and guaranteed.

If, as an investor, you're only examining trailing metrics, you're going to be a pretty horrible investor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a bit worried that we might be seeing "peak YC".

Clearly, Sam Altman and Michael Seibel are the most influential and impactful people that drive YC forward. Sam's on the way out, and I wouldn't be surprised if Michael also leaves in 1-2 years. Is YC going to be able to innovate without them?

Furthermore, I would suggest that YC is becoming more risk-averse as it grows (as any organization does). Will that mean worse decision making?

Another point is that the average age of YC partners is growing. Will that hinder them to spot and understand new trends, and pick the right companies?

Now, this is an outside-view analysis. I've spoken to a few YC partners (as part of office hours or at events), but never went through YC myself. I know quite a few people who did, and they seem always most impressed with Sam and Michael.

Edit: Typos

<comment><USER8> The entire partnership is incredible and does a huge amount of valuable work, and startup advising, that they don't get nearly enough credit for.

I'll still be involved (and will ensure we continue to take risks and grow!), and obviously Michael is amazing.

<comment><USER9> By damn, I just love when the big kahunas still involve themselves in the community they cultivated so long ago. Cheers, Sam; the best of luck to you and the team at YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it says something about our industry that I assumed they were about to discontinue something or make a change that negatively impacted people.

<comment><USER11> Or maybe it says something about you.

I don't mean to say you personally, but perhaps cynicism is an easy trap that a lot of the industry falls into.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps. But when it's good news it usually makes it into the headline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious why more bay area startups haven't come to Oakland. (maybe it's happening and it's just not obvious?)

Always felt like there was plenty of potential office space relatively close to BART but maybe that's wrong.

<comment><USER13> A lot of really-early-stage startup activity (eg. solo engineer working on a project, or 3 guys working out of an apartment) seems to be happening in Oakland and the East Bay generally. It's the last place rents are affordable, so it's naturally attractive to people who need to go without income for a while.

The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor.

The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.

<comment><USER14> I think tech employment in downtown San Jose is going to blow up for this reason, once the BART tunnel goes in. Combined access from electrictrified Caltrain/BART/ACE/VTA/Amtrak is going to be killer for bringing in people from all over who don't like being stuck in traffic. Google sees this coming and is building the new campus there. And that will push up prices for homes near any of those rail systems.

It will also be possible to commute from SJ or Santa Clara to Oakland via BART, which may marginally improve recruiting there.

It would be fantastic if Caltrain or somebody rebuilt the burnt-out rail bridge next to the Dumbarton, but that's wishful thinking. It would be useful to integrate ACE, Caltrain, and Amtrak.

<comment><USER15> I put almost zero faith in Bay Area governments fixing the mess that is Bart/Caltrain/etc.

<comment><USER14> I don't have any hope for system integration without a major culture shift in the government, but I do think that the expansion projects that are in progress are likely to be completed eventually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was in YC W16 batch.

Coming from abroad, part of the YC experience was, besides the program itself, renting a house in a residential area of Palo Alto where our team of 4 lived and worked. We didn't have a car and the nearest bars & restaurants were at a 20 minutes bike ride. This set up felt like a retreat, and really pushed us to 100% focus on our startup. Basically the only things I did for 4 months is working, exercising in the surrounding parks and eating homemade food.

Had YC been located in SF it would have been a totally different experience. It's a vibrant and exciting city specially for new comers.

However, I understand YC's rationale: most local founders live in SF and the 1h commute is painful, the current building is not easily accessible, and doesn't scale to bigger and bigger batches, etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> I definitely understand the point on moving to SF. I was there for a YC hackathon few months ago, and their current office wasn't logistically easy to get to without a car/Uber. It wasn't close to a Caltrain station either, so it's a much bigger pain point for those commuting down from the city too.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is really bittersweet news.

On the one hand, this is a huge loss for YC. Sam's energy and vision helped herald in YC v2.0. His leadership will be sorely missed.

On the other hand, I'll sleep better at night knowing he's dedicating himself fully to AI safety and the work of OpenAI. There's no one I'd rather have leading the effort to ensure AI development doesn't lead to a dark future.

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one that feels like the YC brand is being diluted by the increasing size of their batches? 200 companies feels like too many.

<comment><USER20> No, you are not alone. The current batch (W19) is disappointing so far: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19333170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19333170)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Altman (YC) leans into SF

Thiel leans away

Will be interesting to see the winning move

<comment><USER15> Thiel's problems weren't with SF the city, it was with the bay area's culture. As such, a move within the bay area isn't counter to Thiel's stance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder when YC is forking to other cities.

Staying in the Bay Area longer than other acceleration programs which decentralized (& often diluted their network and quality) earlier was wise. That said, from the outside it seems like sticking to the Bay Area is no longer optimal.

Startup School and YC China are mentioned but I think by now there must be enough YC alumni all over the world to facilitate local communities/office hours and investment activity (while keeping the quality).

For example I like how Lambda School is expanding globally much faster. I know the two are difficult to compare and it is not a straight forward decision to make.

Would love to learn if you have some thoughts on this.

<comment><USER13> The model for YC startups is that most need to raise outside capital after YC. Part of their value proposition is being able to create a market of follow-on investors so their startups don't get totally shafted in those deals. That requires being in areas where there are enough investors to create a liquid market in fundraising rounds after YC.

China is one such area, and places like NYC or Boston could also work (YC used to be in Boston before PG & JL had kids). Those don't help much with the cost- of-living issue, though.

<comment><USER23> It doesn't help with cost of living, but it does help open the door to a new pool of founders that can't/don't want to live in the Bay Area for any number of reasons.

If there are enough quality founders and enough quality investors, it seems reasonable that YC could provide value to a new region by filtering for quality and facilitating new connections within the network

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Really surprised by the consideration of moving to SF. For a long time now YC stated that the ability to focus down in the valley was key, though immediately founders moved to the city after. I knew of a few cases where founders were based in the city and would commute down on needed days.

I'm a bit surprised as this shift now as it was positioned as thought out before, but the reality is the center of new tech startups is now very much SF.

<comment><USER25> YC in SF gonna be like Joakim Noah in NYC :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My question, how many of those companies funded by YC have been caught doing things we don't like, such as dark patterns, data collection, and more? I can already think of two companies off the top of my head. It's pretty much a given fact on this planet you don't get huge valuations and money unless you're about to violate someone's privacy and sanctity.

"Speaking of San Francisco, we are considering moving YC to the city and are currently looking for space. The center of gravity for new startups has clearly shifted over the past five years, and although we love our space in Mountain View, we are rethinking whether the logistical tradeoff is worth it, especially given how difficult the commute has become. We also want to be closer to our Bay Area alumni, who disproportionately live and work in San Francisco."

Telecommuting works just fine for me when it comes to designing, prototyping, and testing actual physical products with companies around the world, from LEDs to solar panels to remotely-controlled hydroponics facilities - why can't you do the same with your primarily software and speaking stuff?

</comment><comment><USER27> > Speaking of San Francisco, we are considering moving YC to the city and are > currently looking for space.

I thought YC had an office in the city?

<comment><USER28> They do but it's just offices for partners and employees. Nowhere near large enough to hold dinners, office hours, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What is "the current total market capitalization of YC companies" that were accepted into YC since Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston left YC (~February 2014)?

That would be an interesting metric that evaluates Sam Altman's performance at YC.

</comment><comment><USER30> Market cap $150 billion is insane. Never thought it is that big.

</comment><comment><USER31> Rather than monetary valuation, what do you think have been the most innovative and significant startups from YC?

</comment><comment><USER29> It is weird that these "Updates from YC" do not list the name of the author of these updates...

</comment><comment><USER32> I didn't hear anything about the 10k grants to startup school attendees. Did this happen?

<comment><USER33> Yes, it did. AFAIK, they took in 15,000 companies, but gave the grant to about 100.

I got the grant :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sam finally too far off the deep end

</comment><comment><USER34> Sam who?

<comment><USER35> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman)</comment></comment>


Inside Google's (open source) Compact Language Detection tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalbydesign.com/blog/2010/12/06/inside-googles-language-detection-tool/

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to the Chrome branch's tool source code: [http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/third_party/...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/third_party/cld/)</comment>


Google down 10 points, Baidu up 30 in hour after "new approach" announcement - <AUTHOR> http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/331782462/wall-street-morality

<comment><USER2> Actually, Baidu is down 14 points, Google 10. And Google is at 590, while Baidu is at 386. Did you actually read the data behind the links that short blog snippet provides, or do you regularly submit things totally blindly?

NASDAQ is not a measurement related to human rights, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049430>

I can't help but wonder if you wrote that yourself or not.</comment>


The Netherlander Who Traced Water's Origin - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/ewine-van-dishoeck-the-netherlander-who-traced-waters-origin-20181101/ <comment><USER2> I always thought that water was a dynamic equilibrium where H2O splits into H and OH, and vice versa.</comment>


Apps and Web URLs: Perfect Together - <AUTHOR> http://joehewitt.com/2011/10/06/apps-and-web-urls-perfect-together

<comment><USER2> This is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin. The _entire_ point of URLs is that they're just that -- Universal. Requiring a specific application in order to consume a URL is just as asinine as User Agent sniffing to enforce an 'IE Only' policy (and you're lying if you say that ended well).

Perhaps consuming based on Content-Type headers would be a better way to attack this (legitimate) problem. Certainly in the early days of the web, that's how it was done (want to enjoy the latest VRML? Install plugin 'x'). Adding a layer of abstraction on top of URLs that tries to mediate this is just altogether wrong, I think.

Debate welcome. I'm mostly just thinking out loud here.

<comment><USER3> See my comment above, but I'm pretty sure you have his argument backwards; we already _do_ have application specific URLs in iOS, and wouldn't it be nice if that weren't the case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He says that service-specific URLs are not portable, but I don't see any reason why that would be the case. I mean, most platforms supports registering handlers for arbitrary schemes. The only piece I see missing is the ability to register a web app as a URL handler, but that should be almost trivial to solve. Already if I click a mailto:-link in Firefox, I have the choice of using Gmail, so generalizing that shouldn't be too difficult.

edit: apparently Firefox already does "Web-based protocol handlers", which allow web apps to register arbitrary URL-schemes. So basically only thing needed to make fb-URLs to work with browsers is such handler for the Facebook web app.

edit2: <http://zokier.net/fburl/> implements aforementioned fb-URL handler. If you register that page to handle fb://-urls in Firefox, and register Firefox to those urls in Windows, then they function globally correctly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a site to publish your iOS-specific app URLs: <http://www.handleopenurl.com/>

Until apps start owning URLs, everyone can publish their app capabilities here and call other apps (like Tweetbot) from their apps.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why am i required to enable javascript just to read text on Joe Hewitt's blog? No degradation at all? :(

<comment><USER7> I'm using a fairly experimental JavaScript-driven system right now. It's totally overkill for a blog, but it's my blog and I can do stuff like this for fun. No offense, but if you disable JavaScript, you get what you deserve.

<comment><USER8> _> you get what you deserve_

A more secure and tracking-free experience?

By the way, nothing against that (although I probably won't bother enabling it), but is it doing User-Agent sniffing? Because here in Firefox 6 it loads a normal HTML version.

<comment><USER9> I love how the industry can spend a decade advocating the separation of form and content, and then in a handful of years go to completely co-mingling the two, at least and especially from the end user perspective.

I disable Javascript out of necessity. Having cleaned enough garbage off of others' computers, and having struggled long enough to pay attention despite the "blinkenlights", I find I really have no alternative.

Your choice, Joe. Fine, although I don't particularly appreciate the snarky rhetoric. (I find the combination of "No offense..." and "you get what you deserve" to be a rhetorical ploy.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has been a feature of Android since launch, it's part of the w3c spec for protocol specific handlers (and is already implemented in Chrome Dev [Google Calendar offered to handle all webcal: links for me]), and it will be better suited via Web Intents in the coming months.

Also, there's really no explaination by the author as to how fb://profile/drivebyacct2 is any better than <http://facebook.com/profile/drivebyacct2>. Now there will be a landrush of people trying to claim protocol prefixes now too? Why bother, domains are already intrensic enough to online brands, why create a whole new area to deal with? Not to mention user confusion. Yes, that's "eff-bee colon slash slash", "no, don't put www first", etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure you've got his argument backwards:

1\. We already _do_ have fb://profile/account, it's the app specific URL registered in the iOS app to open the Facebook app.

2\. What he's saying is "Why can't you register <http://facebook.com/profile> on iOS to open the facebook app?" That would mean that we explicitly _don't_ have a protocol landrush.

3\. A solution might be a service that takes a web url, and returns an app url, so that if the web url has an app equivalent, we never have to know it; the app functions as we expect, and we don't introduce something above and beyond the web URLs we know and love.

<comment><USER10> 1\. That's iOS and I have no idea why anyone would want that. Like really, what value does that add?

2\. Yes, like I said, Android has already implemented that. I think it's a fine idea. I love that I can click on Youtube links and choose to open it in Dolphin, the YouTube app, or the YouTube downloader app.

3\. Why would the web service take the URL. Like I already said, model this off of browser protocol handlers and Web Intents. Let web application register as possible handlers, let the application choose whether to open in a webpage, or another web app that is capable of consuming and understanding those URLs (which is exactly how it happens in Android). Again, how is an "app url" any more useful than a regular URL in this regard?

<comment><USER8> I think the point is to achieve what Android has without waiting for Apple to implement it. Since iOS app devs are stuck with internal URIs, a translation webservice would alleviate the problem.

<comment><USER10> But this would still require OS level abstraction to even submit the web URLs to the webservice to look up an app-specific URL. Unless I'm missing something.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>