Logos using negative space - <AUTHOR> http://weburbanist.com/2009/12/14/less-is-more-18-clever-logos-using-negative-space/

<comment><USER2> The Big Ten (college sports conference) logo has an eleven in negative space, on either side of the "T". (There are now 11 teams.)

<http://www.bigten.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I never did see the arrow in the FedEx logo... until now!

<comment><USER4> I actually came to the article expecting it to be completely based around the FedEx logo. Once you see the arrow, that's all you'll see on every truck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find logos like the following somewhat confusing:

[http://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/brand- unio...](http://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/brand-union- logo.jpg)

[http://www.businesspundit.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/01/eat...](http://www.businesspundit.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/01/eaton.gif)

<comment><USER6> I agree. I don't mind the concept, but the execution is poor, especially on the Brand Union logo. Egg & Spoon, 8 Fish, Yoga Australia, and Guild of Food Writers were all cool, though. The Bermuda Aquarium logo just feels oddly disconnected, with all of the negative space and then the tiny triangle floating over on the left. I love clever use of negative space, but I don't like things that float in the middle of nowhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Carrefour's logo is a nice one too (look for the C)

</comment><comment><USER8> I also like the use of negative space in these 2 logos

[http://pasembur.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/a_perfect_circle...](http://pasembur.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/a_perfect_circle_- _mer_de_noms.jpg)

<http://kingstrike.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, this is easily among the top ten pages with the worst content / flashy distraction site of the year.

</comment><comment><USER10> good article, terribly busy website.</comment>


How to save money running a startup - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-startup-17-really-good-tips/

<comment><USER2> This list really started on a weird note. First of all, are there any small startups (in the tech sector) that immediately hire a big I.T. department? And whhich I.T. department is just doing virus cleanups and software installs, and thus would be (allegedly) out of work once Macs are everywhere.

But never mind the fanboy start, it's items like 3, 10, 11, 12 that bother me. Don't let your developers out of the room, ride them hard for the maximum amount of time possible. This is basically the startup versions of the "9 women bearing baby in 1 month" myth. A developer who works twice as long isn't twice as productive. If you manage burnt out people, you'll sell ashes.

<comment><USER3> I agree. What tips would suggest instead?

<comment><USER2> I think it really depends on what kind of startup you're running. Three people meeting in coffee shops is different from someone who got a lot of venture capital from the start and has the need for a pretty large infrastructure.

One mistake I often hear about in startups is that they avoid getting sysadmins for way too long. Yes, you're a bunch of programmers, you have the technical affinity/skills. Yes, your application is "in the cloud". It's still not a good idea to waste time with OS issues of your servers, proper firewalls, your LAN's Cisco router/firewall etc.

And rather than trying to coax the most amount of hours out of your people, try to get the maximum creativity out of them. Cheap desks are ok. A gray office isn't. And if the word "them" is ever used for a department or team within your company, it's bad – unless we're talking about a foosball league. You don't need corporate retreats to get the team spirit flowing. Transparent management, company activities, going out for a drink together, an internal blog…

Be open to hire people from different backgrounds. A room full of 20-somethings might appear to be pretty harmonious, as they often have similar interests and can argue about the same TV shows, but you might get more mileage out of the occasional "I remember doing something similar in a Cobol application in the late '80s" story.</comment></comment></comment>


Australis Performance Post-mortem Part 4: On Tab Animation - <AUTHOR> http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2014/05/14/australis-performance-post-mortem-part-4-on-tab-animation/

<comment><USER2> I don't know...if Mozilla is still having problem with tab animations by now, why not just scrap it all together until their multi-process gain some ground.

All this fancy animations they've added into Australis are non-essentials and impacting their already super busy single threaded model.

<comment><USER3> Being not a fan of UI animation myself, I agree completely. The fastest way to open/close a tab is to not animate it at all. To me, it's rather odd to see concern about a ~5ms difference in animation speed, when they could've made the whole animation take 0ms quite easily --- the faster an animation goes, the more instantaneous and less animation-like it becomes, and when it gets fast enough, there's no point in having any animation.

I wonder if removing all the user-initiated animation from the UI would improve perceived responsiveness dramatically, since my browser has no tab animation and a new tab appears instantaneously as far as I can tell.

That said, it's amazing in a somewhat shocking sort of way to see just how many layers of abstraction and lines of code are involved in doing something like a tab animation (I notice the article mentions CSS, Direct3D, Cairo, SVG, and OpenGL), and then realise that in terms of human timescale, it's still extremely fast.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to see the video with the side/by-side demonstration of "no animation" vs "animation" of the tabs, synchronized to the moment of the click.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading the title it sounded like Australis is dead or its performance is dead ("post mortem" is Latin for "after death": post ("afterwards") + mortem, from mors ("death").)

Reading the article (not carefully, I admit, and using google cache, I can't get the page otherwise), I haven't figured out what the TART stands for. But tl dr seems to be "we make this Australis UX revision, and then the tabs are slow, and we see it on the fastest machines, then we search for causes, then we fix them." Well yes, that's the right thing to do. Can somebody point to something interesting in the article that I missed to recognize?

<comment><USER5> 'Software postmortem' are done after the product is shipped or failed to ship. We already know it's shipped.

<comment><USER4> For "failed to ship" I understand, but I wonder how "shipping" can be equivalent to "death"? Post _mortem_ is always "after _death_ " not "after birth":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- mortem_(disambiguation)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- mortem_\(disambiguation\))

<comment><USER5> The project has entered maintenance mode. All development has ceased.

Yeah, I know what it means, it felt a bit weird at first (I'd go for dissection to be honest). But languages don't change based on math principles. It's from context of game/software postmortems: [http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/](http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/)

Queer means strange, except it doesn't, gay means happy, except it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's my post-mortem on Australis: I stopped using Firefox.</comment>


This is engineering: Army Jeep torn apart and reassembled in 4 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://codesketch.com/2010/09/this-is-engineering-army-jeep-torn-apart-and-reassembled-in-4-minutes/ <comment><USER2> What I find most interesting is the use of spatial organization when taking the Jeep apart. You could probably walk those guys out half way through, bring in a different set of guys, and they could put it back together by just looking at where the pieces are on the ground.

<comment><USER3> This is generally taught by good mechanics. I know my father, who owned a mechanics garage when he was younger, did this whenever he disassembled anything. I once saw him dismantle a motorbike clutch and reassemble it without looking at where he placed a thing, and this was over several days as he had to get replacement parts in the intervening time.

Now I ask, how much would these guys make if they could do things with that speed in a real mechanics shop where fully disassembling a vehicle likely has 20+ hours of labor tied to it.

<comment><USER4> It would not be possible in a 'shop' situation.

For one, everything would be bolted down with the bolts torqued to spec, instead of just strong enough to hold things together for a demonstration run.

Also things tend to rust and taking oxidized stuff apart without breaking it takes quite a bit of time and preparation, sometimes multiple days (if the part is precious enough, for instance on classics it can definitely be worth the extra effort).

Then there's the accessibility of parts, this is a ladder chassis car, which means that the chassis and the body are two separate parts. That makes for a vehicle that is very easy to disassemble at the expense of a higher weight (and so reduced fuel economy) higher manufacturing expense and less safety in the case of an accident.

So you'd never ever get this kind of performance in real life situations.

<comment><USER5> That's what I was thinking too.

When I saw this, I imagined doing the same thing (alone) with my old 1987 Toyota pickup. It is difficult for one person to completely remove the body (I've had to raise it by myself to install body spacers) from the frame, but once the body is off, the rest of the truck would disassemble easily. Most of the effort is dealing with rusted/frozen fasteners. The rest of the vehicle comes apart fairly easily. Working on these older, simpler vehicles is pretty straightforward.

Contrast with my 350Z: it would take days to accomplish the same thing. Much more integrated system and access is more difficult.

<comment><USER6> I just had a flashback to a number of seized and broken rusty bolts. The horror.

<comment> X-Istence Heat. Heat the sucker up, and it comes out easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away._

      -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

<comment><USER8> I really recommend the whole chapter this quotation comes from, and for that matter the whole book ( _Wind, Sand, and Stars_ , or in the original French, _Terre des hommes_ ). It's a fantastically optimistic take on the relation of humans to technology (the specific example is airplanes, but the argument is quite general).

[Here's the immediate context in French: <http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Terre_des_hommes/III> and in English: [http://books.google.com/books?id=Ep-h7MuxLiIC&lpg=PP1...](http://books.google.com/books?id=Ep-h7MuxLiIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA41#v=onepage&q&f=false)]

<comment><USER8> oh, and just for completeness, the quotation in its original form:

 _« Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. Au terme de son évolution, la machine se dissimule. »_

or in the not-quite-literal translation by Galantière:

 _"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness"_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is neat. Heck of a job. I probably couldn't do it anywhere near that fast.

 _But..._

When I watched the video I got a sinking feeling regarding the comment thread on HN. Sure enough, I come back here, and see people praising the simplicity of the design.

Ha ha. Surely you jest.

This is engineering compromise, but heavy on the compromise. The Jeep they used for this video didn't have a radiator, only used two lug nuts per wheel, and _didn't have any brakes._ (Note how it coasted to a stop.) A Jeep in actual, drivable condition would take a least an hour to field strip to the same degree, and one that had any significant mileage would take even longer still, what with rusty bolts and seized connectors.

And even a Jeep in running condition compromised a lot to reduce the number of parts. You can have a car that's as simple as a Jeep if you're willing to give up:

      Air conditioning.
      Airbags.
      Any kind of modern emissions controls.
      Modern engine diagnostics.
      Electronic stability control and ABS brakes.
      Cheap maintenance.
      Decent fuel efficiency. (Jeeps are pretty heavy, thanks
      to the simple design, have lousy aerodynamics, and an
      carburetor-fueled engine that isn't afraid to waste gas)
      A roof.
      Any kind of sound insulation.
      Doors.

Jack Barath wrote a column[1] on the death of the basic car, and it boiled down to "people won't buy a car without these features"; along with some bonus wibbling about government regulations (see "emissions controls" in that list above) that would make such a car illegal to sell.

I thought his column sucked[2], but the point is that a basic car is not _impossible_ , or a relic of ancient technology that is now lost to us, but because outside of a few specialized applications, such as military vehicles, "basic car" is actually a codeword for "a car that sucks", and I would confidently lay money that the dozens of people expressing admiration for the Jeep's elegant design would hate to be forced to drive one.

1: [http://www.speedsportlife.com/2009/01/21/avoidable- contact-2...](http://www.speedsportlife.com/2009/01/21/avoidable- contact-22-airbags-killed-the-am-radio-star/)

2: [http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2009/02/27/blind_nostalgia_and...](http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2009/02/27/blind_nostalgia_and_cars/)

<comment><USER10> It did have a radiator, you can see it getting put back in at about 3:18

<comment><USER9> Whoops, you're right.

However, that radiator didn't appear to have any _coolant_ in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool, but the most complex part, the engine, is still left as one piece.

This is like saying "oh, look I've split my program in to many source code files to make it less complex" and yet one of the files is 20KLOC.

<comment><USER12> I think of the motor as more of the Operating system and everything is build around it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _J_ ust _E_ nough _E_ ssential _P_ arts = JEEP

I would love to know more about their design mantra.

<comment><USER13> totally. we need this kind of design back.

<comment><USER14> I think even if people were willing to let go of some features that require additional parts, just getting a car made that would conform to modern security and environmental regulations would probably be an impossible task. It's not like we forgot how to build like that or that car companies want to waste money with superfluous parts.

<comment><USER3> Why? Crumple zones are simply part of the vehicles material designs and require no additional parts. A piece of sheet metal with engineered weak points takes as many parts in a vehicle as piece of sheet metal. Both form the hood of the car just fine.

> It's not like ... car companies want to waste money with superfluous parts.

Built in pre-market Satellite Radio isn't a superfluous part, especially when you can't opt out of it. The 'man-step' from Ford isn't superfluous? It's the most redundant feature in any work vehicle as it's less 4" lower than the top of the wheel and is placed where a toolbox is, making it impossible to use in the vast majority of vehicles it is placed. Whilst using the wheel (the method used probably since shortly after Ford released the first truck) allows you to grip the side, and gives you enough height to lean over and fully reach into the bed.

Companies place superfluous parts into their vehicles all the time. DVD players and LCD screens help with environmental regulations and vehicular safety? Really?

<comment><USER15> Are you a programmer?

If so, don't you hate it when people come up to you and suggest that programming Facebook is no big deal and maybe you should help them with that next weekend?

You just did that.

I am not an automotive engineer, but large swathes of my family are and I have had many discussions about their work from an engineering point of view. You would not believe what goes into just that crumple zone stuff, nothing the word "simply" applies to. Did you know there are entire engineers dedicated to making sure the cars pass rather stringent noise emission requirements from the _body_ (that is, not the engine)? It's hard enough to get cars to pass specifications _without_ adding in yet more restrictions about the nature of the cars. (Or adding $20,000 to the price.)

<comment><USER16> A lot of automotive complexity comes from the evolutionary nature of their designs. If you built a gas turbine electric car you could have far fewer moving parts. But you would add a new set of basic downsides that you would need to tweak. By the time you had something with reasonable tolerances, materials, pollution, noise, and vibration levels you would probably have built something almost a complex as a modern engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The guys at autoblog are discussing this vid. It seems that it has been prepared, there's no liquid coolant nor any fluid containers that can be seen.

Edit: here's the link [http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/10/video-team-tears- down-the...](http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/10/video-team-tears-down-then- rebuilds-a-jeep-in-under-four-minute/)

<comment><USER18> Some military jeeps had air cooled engines so that the cooling could not be damaged by an impact of munitioned. Shooting out the radiator was a common tactic for disabling a vehicle.

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure I saw a guy lift out a large vertical rectangular object from in front of the engine, fairly early in the video. When it was put back in, he reached way down in between it and the engine, like maybe he was re-attaching the bottom hose (presumably without a hose clamp, or any fluids). But I could be wrong, I only watched that part twice, and I wasn't concentrating on the radiator.

<comment><USER20> I went back to see it, and indeed it's there at around 0:32. It's right behind the grille, so it's probably a radiator or at least a fan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if this is an older model that has since been over complicated? Or if this sort of vehicle is available for civilians? What a cool toy, and seemingly a cool way to learn more about vehicles/engines. Kept simple enough, seems like it could even be affordable..

<comment><USER22> That's a vintage military jeep. These are available to civilians, if you can hunt one down. Based on the tires and the model, I suspect it's WWII era. Even modern humvee's are way more complex. I doubt you'd want one as a daily driver though.

If you get a jeep made since 1995, it's definitely way more complex. The jeep in the video doesn't have the same emission controls and safety requirements of a modern vehicle.

Modern jeeps still shars some of the same design principles. For instance, tub on frame -- they lift the tub off of the frame. The cabin of a jeep is like a bathtub on a wagon.

The suspension in modern jeeps is far more complex in order to give a smoother ride -- the jeep in the video has leaf springs on front and back. Modern jeeps typically don't have leafs in the front.

Jeep CJ's were the first consumer models available. Some of the older ones may be close to that simple.

I drive a jeep. I think it's awesome. For the same reasons I like it, most of my passengers hate it:

\- it's loud (soft top or top down you basically have to yell to hear each other, forget listening to the stereo on road trips) \- it rides rough -- you get thrown around \- it has almost no features. I have a heater, headlights, three speed wipers (off, too slow and too fast), manual windows/mirrors and a button to reset the trip counter

Also, it's a bit of a money pit. It's super rugged, but when you take it into the bush, you push the machine to its limits. I'm not really an expert in vehicle repairs (spent my teen years on computers instead of with my dad in the garage), but I'm definitely getting more into it as a way to save money.

I get about 15 L/100KM (~15mpg). It's as aerodynamic as a brick flying sideways, so you can't really do anything to improve gas mileage.

That all being said, I love my jeep. I can't see myself not owning a jeep in the future.

<comment><USER4> If you're interested, I still have J10 stepside (very rare, 1100 made) in a barn in Ontario, you can have it if you want, for free.

I'd rather see it with someone that might breathe some life back into it, I'm Europe these days so I most likely won't be seeing it again. And with the price of petrol here what it is I can't see it moved here either.

<comment><USER22> Heh, Vancouver is a long way from Ontario. Otherwise that's a sweet offer :)

<comment><USER4> Ok, thanks for getting back on that one, I have enough offers by now that I think that the Jeep will go to a good home.

Say hi to the steamclock from me :)

j

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I saw this video on a 4x4ing forum this morning. My 99 TJ is no where near this simple. I wish it was though. Jeeps are money pits and it would be awesome if I could do repairs with a handful of tools.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've long wanted someone to build and sell a dead-simple car like this today. With modern emissions and safety standards, it might well not be possible.

<comment><USER24> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano>

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I'm familiar with that, and it's very much in the spirit of what I had in mind (though not as much so as the Willys). But note that they lost much of that simplicity in the Europa - the version that meets EU safety and emissions requirements - which ballooned the price from US$2,000 to US$6,000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's no way that drive-train could be attached that loosely and have it go over so much as a pothole.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've always been impressed by how easily a VW Beetle's engine can be removed. People have similar contests to see how quickly the engine can be swapped:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Du5atasfQ>

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of the ifixit team on Apple product release day.

</comment><comment><USER28> Heh.. first thought was this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WDvqPOn6g4> (Lord of War - plane salvage scene)

</comment><comment><USER29> Reminds me of the teamwork and efficiency of formula 1 pit crews and the modular design of the cars.

</comment><comment><USER30> …Of course a modern vehicle will probably stand up to an attack a bit better. Compromises.

</comment><comment><USER31> A better title might be "This is reverse engineering" :) Ah good old times..

</comment><comment><USER32> Its easy when you don't pull the engine apart first. :-)

</comment><comment><USER33> That is absolutely exceptional work.

</comment><comment><USER34> Now try that on a sportscar...

<comment><USER29> Yep. Watch a Formula 1 team replace major components after a crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've heard it said that you can't fully understand how a thing works until you are capable of completely taking it apart and then reassembling it back together again in it's original working condition.

<comment><USER36> bonus points when you have parts left over...means you improved the design.

<comment><USER37> The Law of Inanimate Reproduction: if you do this enough times, you'll eventually have enough parts left over to build an entirely new one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is great! If only psychiatrists could be so efficient.

This is a excellent example of teamwork too.

</comment><comment><USER39> Completely pointless drill.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a great example of teamwork and practice, but, I don't get it. Why is this engineering? Why is the ability to take a Jeep apart and reassemble it in 4 minutes "simply great design"? Is that what Jeeps are for?

<comment><USER41> The "engineering" here is not what the guys in the video did, but what the guys back in WW2 did to design a vehicle that could be stripped and reassembled in the field.

By saying "that's what Jeeps are for" you are just taking it for granted... Vehicles don't grow on trees.

<comment><USER40> Looks like I failed miserably at asking this earlier, but I'm just looking for a reference to the stated design goals. If it is the reason you state, I'm just looking for a reference to it.

Asking "what Jeeps are for" was meant to get at the design goals and I did not mean to dis what is otherwise a very fascinating design choice.</comment></comment></comment>


Brainfuck beware: JavaScript is after you (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://patriciopalladino.com/blog/2012/08/09/non-alphanumeric-javascript.html <comment><USER2> It's been a while since I last brushed up on the Geneva Conventions, but I think this violates most of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another example of the horrible mess unprincipled automatic type conversion causes.

What prevents language designers from avoiding all these lurking bugs with a generic type-conversion operator? E.g. here's how it might look in a Python- like language:

        >>> x = 1
        >>> y = "2"
        >>> print(x + cast(y))
        3
        >>> print(cast(x) + y)
        "12"
        >>> print(cast(x) + cast(y))
        Exception: ambiguous type

<comment><USER4> you can already do exactly that in Python with a bit of evil magic:

      $ cat evil.py
      class cast(object):
          def __init__(self, x):
              if isinstance(x, cast):
                  self.x = x.x
              else:
                  self.x = x

          def __add__(self, other):
              return other.__class__(self.x) + other

          def __radd__(self, other):
              return other + other.__class__(self.x)

      $ python3 -i evil.py
      >>> a = 1
      >>> b = "2"
      >>> a + b
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'
      >>> cast(a) + b
      '12'
      >>> a + cast(b)
      3
      >>> cast(a) + cast(b)
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
        File "evil.py", line 9, in __add__
          return other.__class__(self.x) + other
        File "evil.py", line 9, in __add__
        ... repeated many times ...
        File "evil.py", line 9, in __add__
          return other.__class__(self.x) + other
      RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

<comment><USER3> That's awesome. Have a unicode trophy (🏆) as a prize:

🏆

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious on what the performance implications are. If I have some JavaScript on a webpage that I want to "obfuscate", would using this accomplish the task?

<comment><USER6> The performance seriously decreases. I haven't measure how much, but I guess it'd only work for very very small scripts.

<comment><USER7> once the eval() invocation is complete and the code generated/compiled the performance should be the same as the code normally written. Basically it's only compiler from []{}!+ to javascript.

<comment><USER8> However, your js files would get really big, and download latency could actually be a performance drop.

<comment><USER7> True, however they should be very well compressible by 'deflate' too, the main concern is the initial parsing grok by the JIT. Yet, on runtime the scripts will be good as any.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen this before here: [http://www.jsfuck.com/](http://www.jsfuck.com/).

It's nice that this guy actually explains how it works

</comment><comment><USER10> > For instance, here is 4: !+[]+!![]+!![]+!![].

Gotta love this language... It's a wonder we can get any work done with it. But, used with discipline, it's not too bad.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am not a programmer so this is part curiosity and part criticism. Why do programmers seem to enjoy creating programs that satisfy some syntactical constraint? Is it a fun mental exercise, or or can you just admit that you're showing off on something that really does not matter?

<comment><USER12> «It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".»

[https://stallman.org/articles/on- hacking.html](https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html)

«The MIT group defined a hack as a project undertaken or a product built to fulfill some constructive goal, but also with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement.»

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I once did something similar in PHP.[1] View the semi-useful writeup[2] as well.

[1]: [https://gist.githubusercontent.com/nubs/5849633/raw/78bae58f...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/nubs/5849633/raw/78bae58f6675f4e514d7a784c3142dd7d98f0629/nodigitsorquoteseither.php)

[2]: [https://gist.github.com/nubs/5849633](https://gist.github.com/nubs/5849633)

</comment><comment><USER14> This method could also be used to evade XSS filters.

For e.g. I believe encoding code using something similar is the only way to solve this challenge - [http://escape.alf.nu/9/](http://escape.alf.nu/9/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Encoder for a similar subset: [http://utf-8.jp/public/jjencode.html](http://utf-8.jp/public/jjencode.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> This was a brilliant article, I learned a ton, thanks.

</comment><comment> dj-wonk {Brace} yourself before (and after) reading this.</comment>


Ask HN: Feature request: Simple tagging system - <AUTHOR> I read HN so I have an ear to the ground of the software industry. However, probably 70% of the articles lately have nothing to do with software. Probably 50% of them center around corporate power abuse, government overreach, or other dystopian topics. The constant stream of this kind of content has been a marked detriment to my mental health. I'm sure I'm not alone.
I know HN makes a point to remain minimalistic, but the only solution I can think of is a simple tagging/filtering system. HN could hard-code a handful of tags to make things simpler; "software", "science", "philosophy", "geopolitics", and "random points of interest" would probably cover everything. Require that new posts (at least those with URLs) be given exactly one of these tags, and give each of them a separate link at the top of the site, the way "ask" and "show" have their own links right now.
Some requested features on HN can be outsourced to mirror sites or native apps that do scraping, etc. But this one is unique in that it's a data issue. Articles can't be determined to fit into one of these categories without the original poster including that information. I ask you to consider what this would do for reducing the constant inflammation that happens in social media, which HN hasn't been totally immune to. <comment><USER2> Although tags might be a good idea, separation of subjects aren't in my opinion. I think a big part of the community and the interesting things we're able to find here are a result of the interleaving of the subjects you mention.

I do however really get your problem and I've had problems with it too. However I realised after awhile that it would be undoable for me shape everything into this mould I can deal with. So I decided to change the mould itself so to speak, nowadays I for instance try to read over certain stuff and actively ignore it and I only check the news as much as is needed to stay generally informed.

I don't think you should necessarily do the same but it might save you some time and energy. Changing myself seems easier to me than changing the world around me. Stoicism has some good pointers about this although something as broad as stoicism isn't necessarily needed. Something simpler would probably suffice.

(Mind you that I for instance didn't have a problem with ideas which clash with my own, even more so I more often think those are the most interesting, what I do have a problem with is the lack of nuance which seems to be so prevalent these days and the tendency of people to make a personal and passionate affair of everything.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think tags will change things, because it is the audience that has changed here. I see a lot of tech topics being buried because they are tangentially political, and in general this is no longer "hacker news", but the frontpage is more like "middle-management and marketing news with a dose of social media hysteria". I recommend browsing the "new", "ask" and "show" sections for more interesting topics and less repetitive debate.</comment>


Rails Testing Advice in Eleven Steps - <AUTHOR> http://railsrx.com/2011/03/31/testing-advice-in-eleven-steps/

<comment><USER2> The title means "Advice about Testing" - it does not mean "How to test advice you're given."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, not the best title. I hate changing titles when submitting things to HN though.</comment></comment>


Wisconsin won't break even on Foxconn plant deal for over two - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16125792/apple-foxconn-wisconsin-deal-jobs-profitable-2043 <comment><USER2> But you can be pretty sure that the Scott Walker will benefit quite a bit over the next decade. If you ever look at who benefits when a city gets a new sporting stadium you will see the same sort of payoff. Seldom does the public win.</comment>


How one ex-game developer helped grant Batkid's wish to save Gotham City - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/14/5208764/batman-eric-johnston-batkid-make-a-wish-san-francisco

<comment><AUTHOR> One interesting bit from the article:

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

The Johnstons' involvement in creating Miles' Batman adventure went beyond designing his crime-fighting escapade and convincing friends to play supervillains. Sue's engineering background and EJ's software expertise combined to help create an array of props, from The Riddler's Device — to which Sue was bound and gagged in her role as the damsel in distress — to the wrist-mounted projector that Batman wore.

"We knew that Miles really liked the gadget side of the Batman character," said Jen Wilson. "EJ took that to heart and thought about it, trying to make that part of the experience ... We wouldn't have been able to do anything like that without him."

"Everything that I did, Sue and I worked on together," EJ said. "She has all the really good shop tools and the experience using them. Everything we ever do is a collaboration."

(Step-by-step details on how those props were built are available at Instructables, uploaded by Eric [0] and Sue Graham Johnston [1].)

[0] [http://www.instructables.com/member/LabRat/](http://www.instructables.com/member/LabRat/) [1] [http://www.instructables.com/member/HotSharpToxic/](http://www.instructables.com/member/HotSharpToxic/)</comment>


Facebook is chipping away at privacy – and my profile has been exposed - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-privacy-secret-profile-exposed <comment><USER2> It's probably too much to ask, but I really just want a social network that acknowledges how people want _reliable_ barriers... Not merely between their "social circles", but also between the _identities_ (including pseudonyms) a single human can have.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Privacy" and "Social Network" are kind of incompatible. Every other social network shows your profile name, profile picture, and background one - otherwise how would friends you forgot about add you?</comment>


Apple's working on a powerful, wireless headset for both AR, VR - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-is-working-on-an-ar-augmented-reality-vr-virtual-reality-headset-powered-by-a-wireless-wigig-hub/ <comment><USER2> VR us stupid due to the terrible user experience of being blocked out of the environment, but if there's any company that possibly might be able to make it work, it's Apple.

The 8k resolution here possibly indicates a holographic light-field display, where you have 4 or 16 pixels working together to form one lower-resolution light-field pixel behind a micro-lens. Apple could then avoid the limited field-of-view of current VR displays as well as not having to build lens optics per eye, making the headset thinner.</comment>


If correlation doesn't imply causation, then what does? - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/

<comment><USER2> I confess that I only skimmed the latter 75% of the article, but it seemed like the author is ignoring a more fundamental issue: what does it even _mean_ for something to cause something else? In so many cases, we humans assume a rather trivial obvious definition: X causes Y if X happens before Y and Y is extremely likely given X. Other stipulations may be assumed, like X dramatically increases the chances of Y, or Y rarely happens without X happening previously.

All of these intuitive definitions are useful for everyday language (smoking causes lung cancer, drunk driving causes traffic accidents, exercise causes weight loss, etc.), but if you think a bit deeper it seems like something is missing. Why does it sound silly to say that marriage causes divorce, hospitals cause deaths, graduating from high school causes college dropouts, etc.?

I'm convinced that a precise definition of causality doesn't really exist, or at least that there isn't one that can be usefully applied both to everyday language and formal mathematical/scientific/philosophical language.

<comment><USER3> To me, causality is less important than simple prediction. Determining cause is a philosophical question somewhat like asking if machines can truly think. If a system behaves as if it contained a causal process (ie. it is predictable), then whether or not one event truly causes another is irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Correlation is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for causation. If a is correlated with b, it means a might causes b, but you don't know for sure. Some dum-dums think that if a is correlated with b, then it cannot cause b.

in order to show causation, you need to go back in time and change things. This is called a counter-factual. Obviously we cannot do this. the best we can do is to control everything as closely as possible, changing only one factor at a time, or at least thinking we do. This is called the scientific method.

Basically, you cannot really ever prove causation, but you can provide overwhelming evidence, along with isolated control over changing factors.

Related [http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/36/correlation- does...](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/36/correlation-does-not- mean-causation/77#77)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always heard "correlation is not causation" which makes the title less clever. Understood the phrase to mean that while it does _imply_ causation, fact is not necessarily so.

The article's great. Appreciate the 'Problems for the author' highlighting gaps for thought.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article's title reminded me of this post on lesswrong - "timeless causality" - <http://lesswrong.com/lw/qr/timeless_causality/> \- also based on Judea Pearl's work.</comment>


Facebook made an AI that convincingly turns one style of music into another - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/05/22/facebook-made-an-ai-that-convincingly-turns-one-style-of-music-into-another/ <comment><USER2> It's not "convincing" and there is no sense of "style change" at all - it's very clearly just awkwardly re-orchestrating the melody with some timbral changes. The tonality is often entirely lost (the Rihanna to Mozart example is the most egregious).

I really hate that we have to criticize these awful articles and press releases all the time, because this work is _actually really cool_ , but because the researchers and article writers constantly go overboard with their claims and rhetoric, the level-headed people have to come along and say: "look, this is cool, but it's nowhere near the claims you're making". I'm really sick of this happening with _every_ DeepMind/FAIR/Microsoft/IBM result that gets published. It's so tiring.

<comment><USER3> _I really hate that we have to criticize these awful articles and press releases all the time_

There's a solution to this: stop linking to science journalism pieces. Instead, we should link directly to the paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Our results present abilities that are, as far as we know, unheard of.

Look, I gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed with the ridiculous level of salesmanship that authors now feel is necessary to get a paper into NIPS. I can only hope the reviewers might ask the researchers to tone back the crazy hype pitch, but I know better than to expect that.

Presenting things that were previously unheard of... well, that would be what scientific papers are for, aren't they?

<comment><USER5> Cut them some slack, it's a joke, a pun.

<comment><USER4> Ha! It went straight over my head.

<comment><USER6> I thought you were playing off it with "...tone back the crazy hype pitch..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mean... this mostly just feels like the originals were fed through some sort of vocoder... None of this is impressive at all to me. Translate orchestral output to hip hop or something and then I'll be impressed. At this point, you've fed one song in and output some kind of grainy sounding similar sound that is basically just triggering notes in a vocoder...

<comment><USER8> These kind of ever present comments are the HN equivalent of "2/10 would not bang"

<comment><USER7> I mean, to be fair, I probably wouldn't bang it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That indiana jones theme whistling to organ was hilariously awful -> [https://youtu.be/vdxCqNWTpUs?t=124](https://youtu.be/vdxCqNWTpUs?t=124) . Though I guess you can blame a lot of that on how bad the whistling was in the first place.

But I would totally play with this if given the chance. I don't foresee this tech replacing human composition for pop music, as one comment here expects, but it will be a tool for musicians in the same way that auto-tune became it's own sort of sound/style. I definitely can see it being useful for prototyping arrangements for instruments that you can't play (or don't keep around).

<comment><USER8> Funny, that was the most exciting example for me. A whistle2orchestra app would be great fun. Agree the input sample should have at least had the breath scrubbed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's convincing in that they labeled each style "as such", but it's not convincing in a musical sense. Music is playful and joyous and inspirational, these clips are academic exercises. Let's see what can be done with the tech in years to come, but I won't put down the virtuosi for this anytime soon.

<comment><USER11> Music has meaning. True, it's a kind of meaning that we cannot put into words, but meaning nonetheless. These exercises do not appreciate this fact. (It's like taking a poem and generating another poem of a different author based on phonemes alone).

<comment><USER12> > It's like taking a poem and generating another poem of a different author > based on phonemes alone).

There is already a school of poetry that does this. For the LANGUAGE poets, meaning is often secondary, what is really of interest is the permutations of existing material. As an example, see [1] where Charles Bernstein creates an English poem by choosing words that sound similar (but don't mean anything similar) to the German words in Heinrich Heine's classic poem "Lorelei".

[1] [https://jacket2.org/commentary/lorelei-heine-translations- sh...](https://jacket2.org/commentary/lorelei-heine-translations-shadowtime)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is my firm belief that in maximum 10 years we will have number one hit songs completely produced end-to-end by a neural network - instrumental, lyrics, vocals, mixing.

<comment><USER14> With videos featuring generated stars.

Yeah, it's been a sci fi trope for decades, but it's coming.

<comment><USER15> I mean we're not far off with Vocaloid. Ever seen a Hatsune Miku concert [0]? All that needs to be met is "generate lyrics and song by A.I" and I've already heard a number of A.I generated that could work well enough as backgrounds for a vocal-heavy track [1]. The hardest part would be training a neural network to generate Miku's vocals and maybe creating the lyrics for the song.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYaX01NOfA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYaX01NOfA)

[1] Just one example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHZ_b05W7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHZ_b05W7o)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Convincingly" would be a bit of an overstatement.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you need to be a music expert to understand if they succeeded, because I don't really get it either.

<comment><USER2> As a professional arranger and composer, I can confirm that this is indeed unconvincing and disappointing (although I will admit to being mildly impressed by some of the generated orchestra textures, but only because this is coming from a computer program, not because they are actually good).

<comment><USER11> OT: it's rare to see a music pro here, just taking this as an opportunity to get your opinion of some fun project I'm working on. It's about [https://chat.concert0x.com/?s=standalone](https://chat.concert0x.com/?s=standalone) See description at [https://github.com/resource0x/concert0x/blob/master/doodle-s...](https://github.com/resource0x/concert0x/blob/master/doodle- script.md) Again, sorry for OT post

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Changing an arrangement from strings to saxophone does not a jazz song make.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think this sounds significantly different than running something through Melodyne and then running the midi through another synth.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting to consider its apparent strengths vs weaknesses, and what that may mean about each musical style (or at least the training sets). It seems to completely suck at generating listenable Beethoven, and its Bach is better but still not great, but this system creates quite passable Mozart.

</comment><comment><USER21> Conflicted between being all for a company like Facebook throwing their money at AI vanity projects and that these researchers are working on AI vanity projects rather than something else.

Hopefully the patents don't get walled off.</comment>


Blendle: Pay-per-article journalism platform that refunds you for clickbait - <AUTHOR> http://launch.blendle.com/hackernews.html <comment><USER2> It is an interesting idea and I look forward to see how this will turn out. I just explored it a bit and so far the implementation seems solid. However, I reckon that I will probably loose interest very soon because the more I ask myself: "Is this really worht xx cent?" the more I will conclude that reading most articles is just a waste of time.

I think it will take some time to figure out what kind of articles and which audience this platform is actually for.

My hope is that it will find a way to make labor/ cost intense journalism more economically viable and thus promote it but as of now magazines publish too many low effort pieces. An extreme example: the WSJ's "Habbits of highly productive people" costs 39 cents. I read it and if anything somebody should pay ME 39 cents for wasting my time. ;)

<comment><USER3> The article price points are always so bizarre. The whole paper is $1.50 or $2 and they want 40c for 1 article?

This is an extremely difficult nut to crack but Blendle's is the best approach I have seen so far.

I think success will rely upon brand name content, a good preview so buyers know what they're getting, the auto-refund thing and 10-50c pricing per article.

<comment><USER4> You would need cost per article to be about (cost of paper)/(typical number of articles someone needs to buy the paper) to maintain revenue.

So this should be a lot higher than (cost of paper)/(number of articles)

Not sure that 40c is right, mind you, just that you can't really compare it to the total number of articles, if most people don't read most of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blendle's founder here. Pricing is something that we're going to experiment with. Nobody knows what the willingness to pay for journalism, yet. So we're going to figure that out.

I think it'll always be a mix between micropayments and subscriptions: micropayments if you only read a little, subscriptions if you read a lot from a specific title.

<comment><USER5> I don't think people should pay for journalism. They should pay for journalists.

What do I mean?

The benefits that we get from journalism are maximized if we have expert journalists – people who dedicate their lives to being good journalists.

Good journalists need stability. If they depend on the readership rates for individual articles, they are disencentivized to take the kinds of risks that a stable institution can afford to give them.

I don't know Blendle's long term plans in terms of supporting quality journalism – but the micropayment model is at odds with giving stability to individual journalists.

Hopefully this is something your are thinking about. How can we best support journalists – and not just individual peices of journalism?

<comment><USER6> (not the person you replied to)

I think you're right. I can't believe I never thought of like that before.

<comment><USER4> This is the sort of thing someone like Blendle could choose to do. After all, just because content is payed by the piece doesn't mean content creators must be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the Medium piece:

"Our editors and algorithms help you find the best stuff."

I already have three sets of editors and two algorithms for finding more stuff than I could ever care to read: they're called "Facebook", "Twitter", and "Hacker News".

So their curation piece isn't interesting to me at all; only the payments.

Put another way, the web has thoroughly solved the problem of "show me some stuff that I want to read right now" \-- it's like trying to drink from a firehose. There is no need for another player in that already crowded game.

Where the web is failing is at funding all this stuff.

I imagine that the answer for this is easy, though: a "read it on blendle" button for whatever article you clicked through to from FB, Twitter, or HN.

<comment><USER8> You mean a button like on this page? (It's in Dutch, scroll a bit down)

[https://www.vn.nl/het-debat-21/](https://www.vn.nl/het-debat-21/)

We hear you. And we're working on it. This is only the first step of which many more will follow in the coming months.

<comment><USER7> Yep, rockin'. Now please just let me sign up as my own publisher and write directly on the platform :)

<comment><USER8> Good point. Our current "onboarding process" for publishers is a bit too heavy-weight to allow "just anyone" – even you ;-) to join Blendle right now.

This is definitely something we're investigating though. And in The Netherlands, there's already a collective of journalists who created a non- profit umbrella organisation to represent freelance writers, who have been onboarded into our system.

Also, the Blendle Button that I linked to above is it's own product, with a much less heavy-weight onboarding setup. We've already seen great success using the button on a German site like [http://uebermedien.de/abo/](http://uebermedien.de/abo/) (in this case, a flat-fee subscription button). So that's definitely something we'd like to roll out to as much freelance publishers as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent concept, and one I've been a proponent of for a while.

I'd like it to have an option (which it may have but I haven't found) to either not show me stuff I already subscribe to (WSJ, Economist, NYT) or allow me to enter subscription information so that I would not double pay.

From a consumption point of view there should be a "blendie link" which is like a URL shortner for articles which connects you through the paywall to the Blendie version of an article. Then if you share that link it lets other Blendie subscribers read it in a fairly frictionless way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blendle founder here. It's exactly what we're working on (making articles for free on Blendle if you already have a subscription), and are already doing ("blendle links") :)

<comment><USER9> Awesome, I look forward to you becoming the "Google Reader" of pay-walled content. :-) It has always been a challenge for me that I would be happy to pay for _an_ article but rarely want to commit to a monthly fee without knowing if I'll use it enough to make it worthwhile. I really love that you guys have taken this sort of thing and shipped product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have privacy concerns with this type of service, especially if it catches up. I don't want a third party to know what i m reading. Besides i think this kind of service would be best implemented at the browser level. An insert- bitcoin-to-read button would be a great experiment worth giving a try in firefox.

<comment><USER11> It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable, there has to be some credit card option. Given that a $0.20 credit card transaction doesn't make financial sense, you need someone to handle micro-payments, and who's that going to be? PayPal?

We've been needing a micro payment standard since 2000, and one has yet to materialize.

<comment><USER12> > It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable

Why does that prevent it? Just exchange it immediately via an automated service (look at BitPay for an example), they take the minute to minute risk for 1% profit and you don't have to worry about it.

<comment><USER11> >Why does that prevent it? Because I would need to buy my Bitcoin in "bulk" and the publishers would need to set their price in USD, EUR, GBP or whatever, in order to be able to do proper financial planning.

Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD, someone is going to win or lose money on the conversion between "real" currencies and Bitcoin. I won't be risking money becoming worth less, and neither are the publisher.

I don't know BitPay, but I don't assume that they the risk of devaluation of my Bitcoin for weeks or months. We're not talking about buying just the amount of Bitcoins I need for one article, say 20 cent, because fees attached to the credit card transaction your will want to buy at least a little more.

Agreeable there is a point to be made in the fact that the price of each article is so low that you would only need to buy something like $5 worth of Bitcoin, and at that point it doesn't really matter if you lose %20.

Still I don't feel like Bitcoin is the right option, but maybe it could be the backend to a micro payment system. I just don't want to deal with the Bitcoins or conversion to my local currency.

<comment><USER4>
       Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD

That's a pretty, ah, strong "given".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess my biggest question as a journalist is not, "what is the point of blendle?", but rather, "what is the point of the NYT, Times, etc.?"

I'd be happy to just publish directly onto their platform and let readers pay me directly for the stuff of mine that they want to read via blendle (vs. paying a publication via blendle, then the publication pays me).

<comment><USER13> NYT is income insurance, aka an employer. They will pay you a reasonable wage even if you aren't writing stuff people read.

<comment><USER7> The number of people in the NY media establishment getting paid a reasonable wage to write stuff that people aren't reading is a few orders of magnitude smaller than it was even five years ago, and in another five years it will be zero.

<comment><USER14> Uh no. While revenues and thus hiring have certainly dropped, it is by no means on a few orders of magnitude. I'd be surprised if it were even on a single order of magnitude. Even the newspaper I worked at that is in much more dire straights compared to 10 years ago is about a third its size.

Besides new online outlets, legacy companies are still chugging along. Starting wage for a reporter at the New York Times is around $70K last I heard (too lazy to look up the union site)

<comment><USER7> I think you misread my comment. I wasn't saying that the entire NY media establishment is approaching zero employees. I was strictly speaking of the classic "guy who gets paid to write stuff that nobody reads because it's good for the community/country/brand/whatever, while people on some other beat bring in the eyeballs and pay the bills." That's the population that's shrinking really fast.

<comment><USER14> Ah, OK. Sorry, I overestimated your cynicism...I read it as, "the New York media establishment writes stuff that nobody reads" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can get to the password creation stage fine, then it says.

> _An error occurred. We 're as baffled as you are. Would you try again > later?_

EDIT: Apparently you need scripts enabled from _connect.facebook.net_ enabled to get past the password creation screen. Is this intentional for some reason? Or just a bug? (I would assume the second, seeing the next screen is the optional _connect your facebook or twitter account_ page.)

<comment><USER8> Whoops, that shouldn't happen. The team is unable to reproduce this though. Could you share the link where you tried to sign up?

If you want, you can send me an email (see other comment) and we'll get this sorted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been testing this for the last few days and am curating the technology section. Not paid, just volunteering, and I really like it so far. Great design, easy to jump into articles and frictionless paying is refreshing. Not a fan of the left-to-right scrolling, but otherwise it's likely going to be a boon for news companies who need the money.

<comment><USER17> My initial impression is similar. The site is well designed and easy to use, full screen and mobile, and the initial selection of reading material is encouraging.

Only major pain point is the side scrolling, newspaper column format in the article view. I strongly prefer the vertical layout the rest of the internet currently uses.

This applies somewhat to the news feed as well. It feels like it's trying to replicate a physical news stand, throwing away the lessons learned from Google Reader and Facebook style feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the most important thing with this company is not the UI or the onboarding or the way they distribute the money -- it's the fact that they got the approval of the content creators first and then went and started the beta.

Having the NYT, Newsweek, WaPo, WSJ, Businessweek, etc. on board shows that people can comfortable give them their money and know that it will actually be going to content creators. In far too many of these type of sites, the vast majority of the money doesn't actually go to content creators.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm really excited to see Blendle opening their doors to the English speaking market.

Journalism funded by advertising contains several seemingly-unpatchable incentive structures... (a) the need to promote the advertising to you, breaking the concentration you need to read the article... (b) the fact that getting you far enough to see the adverts is enough to earn revenue so the content quality can be a secondary priority... (c) the fact that some sites go as far as mixing journalist-written content with PR-written content so you can't always tell the difference immediately.

Yes, there are bound to be some UX hurdles, some promises and hand-holding around privacy, some exploration of subscription or micropayments... but fundamentally this is a better model as it fixes all of the broken incentives without (as far as I can see) creating any new ones.

Good luck Blendle & alexandernl.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I signed up for the US launch a while ago because I believe in this model, but I have heard nothing from them since, so my email is already in their database, so they won't give me "Instant access only today for Hacker News readers."

Ingenious.

<comment><USER17> If you're using gmail, the + alias seems to work for signup.

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en)

<comment><USER20> That's really not the issue. Yes, I immediately used an email alias to bypass it, but that doesn't stop it from being a common and annoying issue with these types of access programs. I think of it the same way as people who kickstarted a product being told they're not getting access until a bunch of other people that signed up after it was fully funded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any way to read the articles _not_ in a horizontal layout? Everything about the site implementation is slick except for that part. It's incredibly difficult and awkward to read, to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER21> Really curious as to where this may go. On the one hand, I'm skeptical. It feels like there's simply too much friction for a commodity. And doing relatively well in the Dutch market is one thing. Being able to translate this to the English market is, of course, a different story entirely. On the other hand, being able to read individual articles from most of the major publications in one centralized environment is super compelling to me.

Additionally, I feel like the iTunes comparison that's often made isn't entirely fair. Before iTunes, I believe there simply wasn't any viable (non- illegal) alternative to get an individual song. Whereas Blendle competes with, as mentioned before, loads of other free alternatives online. I'm sure this is appealing to a core group of fairly voracious readers, but wonder if it extrapolates to the wider population to such an extent as to sustain an actual business. Thus far, I believe I've only come across the number of registered users. This is obviously not very interesting and perhaps they're not allowed to disclose any other metrics. Especially with the free initial credit though, I guess you'll find plenty who would be willing to give it a spin. Would love to see DAUs and/or the percentage of people that tops up repeatedly after using initial credit.

To be sure, I definitely hope they succeed. It seems like they've executed very well up to this point.

<comment><USER22> " Before iTunes, I believe there simply wasn't any viable (non-illegal) alternative to get an individual song. Whereas Blendle competes with, as mentioned before, loads of other free alternatives online."

True, but these publishers can, at some point, start making their content accessible only through Blendle.

Curious loophole though - on platforms such as Pocket, one can go on Pocket's 'recommended' feed, save an NYT article straight to their own Pocket, and read the article on the Pocket platform, without every going to NYT.com (circumventing the paywall).

How is that legal? And if it remains legal, will this loophole be a major concern to Blendle and publishers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like the idea, but the interface is a bit weird. The on-boarding process uses a Wizard-type flow (one screen for email address, one for password, etc). Also, reading articles flows left to right instead of top down, which I find distracting.

Also, I'd prefer if the "Popular" view showed me popular articles, not popular magazines/newspapers. I don't want to drill down into each to find out what they have.

</comment><comment><USER24> One very small bit of feedback:

During registration, the page says "We have emailed you at <email>. Click the confirmation link to continue."

But it wasn't obvious what the confirmation link was (it turned out to be the button labelled "Browse the Blendle newsstand").

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks fixing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nowadays I try to stay away from magazine articles and get my info instead from blogs. Traditional journalism calls for too much wording ceremony and useless anecdata with a very low signal-to-noise ratio.

<comment><USER26> That's true, the media is filled with bullshit.But that's what Google, HN and everybody else usually feeds you.

So what's your method to search or discover good blog content regarding a specific subject ?

<comment><USER25> PG's essay "The Submarine"[1] is a nice account to what degree the media is filled with bullshit.

I actually get pretty much all my tech reads from HN (sometimes browsing the comments before even reading the article) and from links in Twitter.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Amazing service. I've used it many times to read articles from newspapers I'm not subscribed to. Also got my money back a couple of times. It just works.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would really really like to pay per article for content from the New York Times, the Wall St Journal and a few other news sites with annoying paywalls. Whenever I go to subscribe I think, "This isn't worth it because I don't read publication X frequently enough to justify a bill of any size on my credit card". But if this lets me just pay $20/mo to this service and get access to N articles from a number of subscription based publications, then this is a good deal. Sign me up.

But I'm just not clear on how this works from looking at the home page. Is this all paywalled content? Or will I be paying $0.25 for something I could have read for free, like a sucker?

And also, is the NYT coming out ahead here? Does it make sense to split ~$0.30 per article with blendle instead of getting a $1/week or whatever from a regular subscription? Because I would hate to get used to using this and then have it disappear in six months because the basic economics of the business don't make sense.

If it works out I think it does, this is great. If not, hopefully it can get there soon.

<comment><USER29> _> Or will I be paying $0.25 for something I could have read for free, like a sucker?_

This has happened to me with articles from Trouw (Dutch newspaper) that were available on their site for free, but were paid-for on Blendle. I really hope they have fixed this by now.

<comment><USER29> Nope, still happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Based on the article on Medium, it appears that often-refunded articles disappear from the site. Isn't this a potential vector for censorship? Well- funded adversaries (or well-coordinated activist groups) could use multiple accounts to "game the system" and eliminate undesirable content.

Hopefully this is addressed somehow. Otherwise it's a fantastic idea.

<comment><USER8> They "disappear", as in, they won't show up at the front of your timeline. They can still be accessed and/or searched for.

We also have selected curators who can promote articles worthy of your time, and a daily mail that highlights the articles we believe are interesting to you.

Gaming the system is something we're always watching out for. This is indeed something that we'll continue addressing as we learn.

<comment><USER30> Thanks, glad to hear that you're thinking about it. Hopefully you won't encounter that sort of manipulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A bit more: [https://medium.com/on-blendle/with-the-biggest-publishers- in...](https://medium.com/on-blendle/with-the-biggest-publishers-in-the- country-on-board-we-re-launching-our-journalistic-startup- in-e8cb800c28b8#.tto1tuwos)

</comment><comment><USER32> Why not use a flat rate Spotify-like model?

Paying per article seems to have the big issue that you actually have to think whether you to want to pay or not and might feel cheated if the article is not as good (they offer refunds, but there must be a limit or catch or everyone would just refund everything).

<comment><USER33> Blendle has no flat-rate, but if you buy several articles from a single issue of a publication, Blendle will simply give you access to the complete issue (e.g., today's New York Times) when the amount you paid for the separate articles exceeds the cost of the complete issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm confused about the payment model. Isn't all Bloomberg Businessweek content, for example, available for free on their website? Or, even if some fraction of their content is behind a paywall or not available, shouldn't only that content be paid in Blendle?

<comment><AUTHOR> On Blendle, the participating publishers have all kind of models: metered paywalls, hard paywalls, no paywalls. Publishers that also put content on the web without a paywall most often charge very little for their content (less than 10ct) in return for a human curated, ad free experience. It's like the business class for journalism :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Granulizing payments and exposing the pay-logic will just encourage more complex gamesmanship to gather the pay... and thats already putting aside the fact that micro payments add stress which has been supplanted by the subscription model.

</comment><comment><USER36> blendle.com/signup/account rejects email GMail addresses of the form firstname.lastname@example.com - even though the launch.blendle.com/hackernews.html page accepts them.

It's one of my pet peeves, please fix it!

</comment><comment><USER37> Getting only two language options when attempting to login: English and Dutch. URL: [https://blendle.com/login](https://blendle.com/login)

Signup email sends me to a page where I get an error: "Hey, the link you used refers to a non-existing page. We're sorry!"

URL: [https://blendle.com/kiosk?campaign=activation&content=button...](https://blendle.com/kiosk?campaign=activation&content=button&medium=email&source=blendle)

<comment><USER37> Edit, Getting "German and Dutch", not English. Sorry, only noticed I typed the wrong thing now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Do they offer anonymous payment options? I do not want that my content is blocked, filtered by my actual (world wide unique - only one me really) identity.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't do bitcoin topups right now, you think we should add that?

<comment><USER38> I am not a bitcoin user (because I have not find a use case for myself), but this might be an idea.

The problem for me is that if I provide my payment details, I make myself vulnerable to the person level censoring (as do other users of course). I do not think that this is where the WWW should be going.

So in principle anything that decouples my identity from the access to the content but lets me to pay for it might be fine.

If I provide you my payment details I could not be sure that you will not share my identity (even in a form of an unique id) (or start sharing in the future).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't want to pay per article and I don't think that it will catch on like that despite it being an idea that theoretically makes sense. I just don't think people conceptualise the value of articles like that and will find it a difficult proposition beyond the generic tech crowd.

</comment><comment><USER40> What's up with the HN submission title? Doesn't seem to be related to the article at hand. See also the HN submission guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER41> When it's clear that a story about a project or startup is being submitted by the creator, we sometimes cut them slack about how they phrase it. We still take out linkbait, remove superlatives and gushy language and so on. In this case I think we just left the title as is.

Another thing we often do in such cases is add "Show HN" if the creator neglected to. But signup-collection pages are explicitly out of scope for Show HNs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have used Blendle, and currently for me the problem is that most Dutch people have totally different interests than me. Especially don't like the articles coming from the emails. There are articles on Blendle I like, for example the Dutch business news.

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Yeah, we used to send everybody the same recommendations, which makes it all pretty general interest. But we recently started personalizing the recommendations. It should get much better in the next couple of weeks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I look forward to the day when this will include magazines and papers from most countries, rather than just Holland or the US. The one-stop access has attractions. However, at the moment, it does not seem possible to even switch between these two. (New User)

</comment><comment><USER44> Are you planning on providing a platform for independent journalists to publish their content?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would there be any method for detecting if an article is available through Blendle when you hit a pay wall article through normal web browsing (eg from a Hacker News link) or I guess this would need to be something the websites implement themselves.

<comment><USER45> Could be build as a browser extension. Match URL against a list of publications, if the user clicks a button redirect to blendle to check if the specific page is available. (2 stages/manual step to avoid sending every URL you visit to blendle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting. I've been toying with a similar, but slightly different pay per article microtransaction idea. I guess I might as well see what the competition is doing.

<comment><USER47> Would you like to connect? I've been, too, and we might have something in common to discuss. $myHNusername @ gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blendle founder here. Really interested to hear you guys' thoughts: email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Congratulations on the launch and I'm very curious to see how adoption will be in the US!

</comment><comment><USER49> Amazing! Where can I find TIME and Newsweek when using an existing dutch account?

<comment><USER49> Newsweek has appeared under 'Engels', still no sign of TIME.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty hectic at the office, but TIME will be available shortly!

update: here it is: [https://blendle.com/issue/time/bnl- time-20160321](https://blendle.com/issue/time/bnl-time-20160321)

<comment> ryan-c Threadjacking here, but I cannot make an account with a snkmail.com or sneakemail.com account. There's some sort of TemporaryEmailServiceDetected error coming from the backend, which is not what sneakemail is.

Edit: They responded to my email about this:

> Unfortunately it is impossible to sign up with a disposable email service. > You should be able to access it by using another email service - I would > recommend you to try that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> how did you connections and contracts with all the publisher? It doesn't seem strait forward to me. I guess personal contacts or so are needed.

</comment><comment><USER51> "Please upvote and get instant access today" (across the top, with an HN logo) kind of sounds like "Upvote us on HN, and then we'll give you instant access today."

Maybe they shouldn't be saying that.

<comment><USER52> The copy is now "Get instant access today'" with the same logo and still has the same implication.

Which is funny because there is no HN API that can actually prove that you upvoted something.

<comment><USER8> We would certainly _like_ it if you upvoted, but you'll get access either way :-)

<comment><USER53> I first saw Blendle from one of the HN "Who's hiring" threads while looking for jobs in Utrecht. It was right around the time that there were a ton of stories about intrusive/tracking ad networks, AdBlockers and Google's Contributor option came out.

It looked like you were one of the few out there actually building something that solves the "paying content creators for their work" problem that is the root of all the ad problems. Kudos to you. It would be cool if you combined your service with an ad blocker so that users could block ads and feel good about still giving the creators a way to get paid: join the network!</comment></comment></comment></comment>