'The Simpsons' Explains Its Provocative Banksy Opening - <AUTHOR> http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-simpsons-explains-its-button-pushing-banksy-opening/ <comment><USER2> It must have been weird for the workers in Korea to produce this opening.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't know, but I would imagine that they might find it hilarious.

It's always nice to make a cameo appearance, even in extreme caricature. (Which is generally the only way one gets to make a cameo appearance on _The Simpsons_.)

<comment><USER4> I imagine they would only find it hilarious assuming it IS an extreme caricature ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The embedded video has been taken down because of a copyright claim (at least for me). Not sure what to think about that, except that it seems misguided.

<comment><USER6> This other NYT post has a working embedded video from Hulu: [http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/with-a- provocat...](http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/with-a-provocative- couch-gag-banksy-tags-up-on-the-simpsons/)

<comment><USER7> Not for us outside the US...

<comment><USER8> This kind of stuff - not just Hulu, but occasionally even Youtube, and other random failures - prompted me to rent a cheap US-hosted VPS (36 USD/year) just so I could ssh -D into it.

<comment><USER9> How do you get flash to proxy properly? I've had trouble previously with flash not respecting the OS and browser proxy settings.

<comment><USER8> Firefox with FoxyProxy, using ssh -D as a SOCKS5 proxy, and with DNS lookups remoted through the proxy rather than done locally (this is a setting in Firefox which I don't think is exposed in the normal UI, but is exposed by FoxyProxy). Flash in Firefox seems to respect the browser's settings just fine.

I run the ssh on a general purpose server I have here at home, in a loop, using ssh-agent for passwordless logins, in a loop, and connecting to a screen session, so that things reconnect relatively seamlessly when the VPS provider terminates TCP connections, as it does at exactly 10am my time every morning. I'm also using the relevant TCPKeepAlive on the server and ServerAliveInterval on the client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the opening is a statement about how the art is taken out of the modern simpsons by the way they are produced. The links in the opening are the asian workers and the sadness in their depiction. This fits with banksys regular theme about the value of art and its opposition to commerce. Subtle enough?

<comment><USER11> I'd be more bought into Banksy's opposition to commerce if he wasn't regularly selling work for five and six figures, not to mention the five books he's published.

Fight the system yeah?

<comment><USER10> He doesn't stoop down to such slogans.

I'd venture it's not commerce but commercialisation he's opposed to.

<comment><USER11> You don't think five books of your work commercialises it? That's not exactly being in it for the love of it is it?

<comment><USER12> Having anarchist sympathies, this is something I've given a lot of thought to. But basically, there's a difference between 'surviving' and 'selling out.' Banksy's gotta live, too. As long as he doesn't feel that he's had to compromise on his vision to release them, then I don't see any particular clash between being anti-commercial and selling some work.

There's always a tension between the purity of the message and how many people actually hear it. Banksy could stay totally anti-commercial, do no shows, publish no works... and just stay on the streets of London. Or, he could sell some works for 5 figures, do his art around the world, and have a larger number of people hear his message.

<comment><USER13> In a way, his message is satrically funny.

The hollywood machine will pay for the noose that hangs themselves, as long as they make money in the next 6 months.

<comment><USER12> They haven't hung themselves yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It kills that after immediately showing this they go right back to the blaring trumpet, thus making the viewing even more awkward.

<comment><USER15> At least that part made me laugh...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a version of the video viewable from the other 95% of the world?

<comment><USER17> You can watch it here:

[http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/1151381/d293ebcd/simpsons_ba...](http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/1151381/d293ebcd/simpsons_bankgrap.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow... 5 commercials, just to watch that clip. :-(

</comment><comment><USER19> Provocative, but not very subtle.

<comment><USER20> I think it's more subtle than it lets on. The message wasn't "the simpsons is produced by sweatshop labor" which of course isn't true. Because if it was, this intro never would have aired. By joking openly, "we use sweatshop labor", they're really reiterating that they don't.

The real message is "think about where your consumer goods come from". Which of course isn't the most original or controversial statement in the world, but the context makes you pay attention, much more so than if it had been direct, like a documentary. I thought it was a clever, self-deprecating way to bring up the subject, and a great use of context.

<comment><USER21> Exactly! The more you think about it the more brilliant it gets. Like the Babel Fish argument against the existence of God in the Hitchhiker's Guide:

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED" "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a very old fan of The Simpsons (including the newer seasons) I couldn't be more pleased. The recent Zuckerberg cameo was brilliant as well:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/video/item/mark-zuckerberg- on-t...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/video/item/mark-zuckerberg-on-the- simpsons)

</comment><comment><USER23> Its kind of crazy how big Banksy has gotten

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought the this was an awesome opening (couch gag) I am surprised that it made it past Fox though.

I recommend seeing 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' to anyone who is even slightly interested in Banksy, street art, art in general, or documentaries.

<comment><USER25> 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' is indeed an interesting piece of art work from Banksy. The video is not really about him but just a way to divert the media attention to a "creation of his own". In the video, he created a fake/pseudo artist (Thierry Guetta) to show the "media" or the art market or even to see us being lost in his maze.

<comment><USER26> Has it even been settled who Banksy is at this point? I hope not. I very much enjoyed the idea that was thrown around that Banksy was never a single person.

<comment><USER24> There are pictures of a person who is possibly Banksy, but nothing concrete. I think the mystery/anonymity makes him even more intriguing and mysterious because you're left speculating without any definitive answers.

<comment><USER27> I won't be surprised if he turns out to be the Chav that he is described here: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/jul/17/art.artsf...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/jul/17/art.artsfeatures)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good to see Banksy going legit, maybe he can contribute to cleaning up the vandalism now.

<comment><USER11> You are kidding right? The average Banksy piece can be sold for way more than the clean up costs (and have been sold in the past on the stipulation that the buyer "removes" it).

Moaning about a Banksy piece on the side of your building would be like moaning about someone coming up and sticking gold to it.

<comment><USER29> You're right and all, and I more or less agree, but it's still private property we're talking about, isn't it? If I don't want someone to stick gold onto my property, I shouldn't have to put up with it. It just so happens that most people are OK with free money, though.

That said, I was under the impression that he asked permission first, at least recently?

<comment><USER30> Even if he does ask for permission, the whole cult-of-some-guy-who-sprays- crap-on-other-people's-property is only serving to encourage other vandals who consider themselves "artists".

If he gets permission before each and every one of his "artworks" then he should come out and be explicit about it so that copycats don't get inspired. And if he doesn't, he should be thrown in prison, and the various city governments and other property owners who have been "blessed" by his work should subpoena (or whatever) the Simpsons producers in order to find out who exactly this asshole is.

edit: I wonder how many of the people who defend this guy are not property- owners themselves.

<comment><USER31> You've demonstrated perfectly the old-grandpa 'get off my lawn position'. However dismissing him as just some guy who sprays crap on other people's property probably just indicates you aren't aware of the social / political messaging he engages in.

"Any advert in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours…You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head…They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs." - Banksy in Wall And Piece

He certainly doesn't ask for permission. Look at his "One nation under CCTV" piece: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-559547/Graffiti- arti...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-559547/Graffiti-artist- Banksy-pulls-audacious-stunt-date--despite-watched-CCTV.html)

<comment><USER32> _However dismissing him as just some guy who sprays crap on other people's property probably just indicates you aren't aware of the social / political messaging he engages in._

It's easy to say that the law should not be enforced against Banksy because he is engaged in worthy social/political messaging, but consider: what _if_ the government can't be trusted to decide what is politically legitimate and artistically worthy? I know, I know, crazy talk, but it's an interesting thought experiment, right?

You and I might think Banksy is great and different, but it's a legitimate point that "some guy who sprays crap on other people's property" doesn't recognize that he is, in fact, different from Banksy. He thinks he's Banksy, just like every gay-bashing, church-bombing white power thug thinks he's Batman, cleaning up scum off the streets. And who are we to say they're wrong? Even worse, who are the cops that we trust them to make the distinction? The difference between Batman and a white power vigilante is politics; the difference between Banksy and a paint-huffing teenage dipshit is political and artistic understanding, as well as aesthetics. Tolerating Banksy means selective law enforcement based on someone's political and artistic sensibility. In the United States we have a long history of the cops being on the wrong side of these kinds of distinctions, and I hope every other country recognizes the same thing in their history.

Personally, I hope Banksy stays ahead of the cops, but I also hope they're trying in earnest to bust him when he does something illegal.

<comment><USER31> The quote you snipped there was just making the point that throwing Banksy in to the same category as your pedestrian vandal is a mischaracterization.

You make some good points. The artistic / social / political value of an act is subjective - yes. However I never actually said the law shouldn't be enforced against Banksy. Like you I'd expect the police to take on people wilfully damaging private property.

It's a filter that ensures only the very committed will produce works as bold as Banksy, and whether I like or loathe their messages, I expect they're worthy of a pause for thought by society. Which is what Banksy is trying to achieve.

Keep in mind graffiti has been a problem since forever (didn't Herodotus record some citizen outrage in Athens?), and is mostly banal. So admitting that in our times there is a very interesting character who is engaged in something a little more high-minded than tagging or 'spraying crap' isn't a cause for too much philosophical hand-wringing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ember.js and Meteor maturity - <AUTHOR> Hey all since I am between contract gigs. I've started to look at Ember and Meteor. Does anyone have experience with these frameworks with respect to scalability and performance. Also how stable is the code base of either. I've searched some info on the net, somewhat outdated, but want to hear from those who are working with one of these frameworks and their thoughts. How easy it to find people with these skill set if say I was to start a project using one of them. <comment><USER2> Ember.js 1.0 was release in 2013. The udpate pipeline strictly follows the Semantic Versioning standard. There is a new minor version every six week. Backward compatibility is extremely important. Ember.js 2 was released middle of last year, the transition from v1 to v2 was super smooth. Big startups and corporates (like financial companies) are migrating to Ember.js, because of the stability and because of the opinionated, convention over configuration features. An Ember developer can jump in someone else Ember project immediately, because most of the Ember.js app follows the same principals and rules. This is a good video about how Intercom.io was able to ship new features much faster and more often because of they switched to Ember: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVwDuMGVhYY&sns=tw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVwDuMGVhYY&sns=tw)

I read this article about Meteor recently. [https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/the-state-of-meteor- part...](https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/the-state-of-meteor-part-1-what- went-wrong/) Looks, they have to find a new way. It is kind of the same story as happened with Angular, the Angular 1 was a cul-de-sac and they had to build up a totally new framework from scratch.

Meanwhile Ember adapts the best solutions all the time. Ember begun to use ES6 almost two years ago. Implemented React inspired view layer a year ago. Server side rendering just released a couple of weeks ago. Ember-cli stable version is released a year ago, which is so good, that Angular 2 would like a similar cli tool, and of course Ember-cli team helps them. Hopefully Angular 2 will have a cli tool by middle of this year.

We could say, that Ember.js is at least 1 or maybe 2 years ahead of other javascript libraries or frameworks in more aspects at the moment.

Suggested pages: [http://www.emberjs.com](http://www.emberjs.com), [http://www.ember-cli.com](http://www.ember-cli.com), [http://yoember.com](http://yoember.com), [https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.3.0/](https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.3.0/) [http://www.emberjs.com/community](http://www.emberjs.com/community)

Here is a fresh report, which mirrors how serious the community behind this open source project: [http://emberjs.com/blog/2016/01/23/core-team-face-to- face-ja...](http://emberjs.com/blog/2016/01/23/core-team-face-to-face- january-2016.html)

Be careful, because if you start learning Ember.js, you will fall in love and you don't want to work with other javascript library any more. ;)</comment>


CircleHack Brings "Google+ Circles Feature" To Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2011/07/01/circlehack/

<comment><USER2> So it puts your friends in circles, but you can't group message them or see their streams in a group? What does it do or am I misunderstanding?</comment>


CNC machine an aluminum wallet from your computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.plethora.com/blog/wallet-project <comment><USER2> I signed up, but there was no open source support, so, eh.</comment>


Qwant Wants to Be Alternative to Google - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/qwant-wants-to-be-alternative-to-google/

<comment><USER2> It does not bring any value.

The people I know concerned by their privacy use µBlock/adblock in combination with proxy/TOR. Plus, using a privacy-concerned search engine does not address that concern after the user clicks on a search result. Most website in this world use Google Analytics. If someone has an aversion to Google, GA should be more of a concern than Google Search.

I wonder: what would it take to disrupt Search? In other words, what set of features would make people stop using Google Search? The experience would have to be fundamentally different. Perhaps privacy could be part of the equation but not only. Something like Vurb in my opinion is a good candidate. It displays the results in such a way that one does not necessarily have to click away.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you compare Qwant's Web-results with the results from Bing you will notice that they are the same.</comment>


GitHub discontinuing GitHub Actions for legacy plans - <AUTHOR> Just received this email from GitHub:

  TITLE: Update your plan to keep using GitHub
  BODY:

    Building with GitHub Actions?
    Here's what you need to know.

    We noticed your account @XXX is on a legacy per-repository
    billing plan. Since you're also using GitHub Actions (beta),
    we have some important news: Legacy plans will not have
    access to GitHub Actions when it becomes generally
    available on November 13, 2019.

    If you'd like to keep using GitHub Actions with this
    account after November 13, 2019, talk to your GitHub
    account manager or contact our Sales Team.
 <comment><USER2> Looks like great roll-out of this feature and notice to legacy plan holders. Note that these legacy plans are over 3 years old ([https://github.blog/2016-05-11-introducing-unlimited- private...](https://github.blog/2016-05-11-introducing-unlimited-private- repositories/)) and you're still able to keep them, you just don't get access to some new products/features.</comment>


Students surprised by results of DNA testing of ethnic background - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/12/28/i-honestly-thought-of-myself-as-simply-american-dna-testing-shocks-college-students <comment><USER2> So I would like to know what the results would be if you tested say, British people. Would they typically come up as 100% British, or would they also be a similar mix? In which case for an American to come up as 50% British it wouldn't mean that 50% of her ancestry is actually from Britain.

Britain itself is a mix of various Anglo, Saxon and other groups. At what point did this become the "British gene"?

I don't think I fully understand how this works.

<comment><USER3> Genetics of England at least are predominantly Anglo-Saxon which we tend to treat as the starting point. You do have to fudge the data a bit to see it but a study took English people whose family since their Great Grandparents lived within a 100 mile radius (i.e. non-migratory) and found their genetics were very predominantly Anglo-Saxon... or well at least over the dataset homogeneous to a point (the assumption being Anglo-Saxon). The historic cut off points of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall are clearly demonstrated in the genetic data which lends it some credence as that was the reach of the Anglo- Saxon invasion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have some doubts as to the accuracy of these tests when spread across several ethnic groups. Anyone have more info?

<comment><USER5> I was an intern at the DNA Learning Center West of CSHL in high school. Their stance on ethnic identification from genetic testing was that it was nonsense. There is no way of calculating these percentages.

<comment><USER6> > Their stance on ethnic identification from genetic testing was that it was > nonsense. There is no way of calculating these percentages.

Don't let reality get in the way of a bit of political propaganda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mean, I have Italian, Austrian, and Scots-Irish ancestry that I know about with certainty, and no doubt a bit of everything in Europe plus North American Indian and African besides, but so what? I could hyphenate myself to a fare- thee-well, but I don't see what good that would do myself or my country, and to do so strikes me as disrespectful both of those among my ancestors who immigrated and naturalized because they felt being American was worthwhile, and also of those who were transported against their will and nonetheless found a better life here than that they'd been forced to leave behind.

<comment><USER8> It's still good to avoid separating ourselves from others based on some external reason. So many times one can think "this groups is this" as if it was a solid, internal factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can DNA have nationality? I don't understand. Can someone please enlighten me?

<comment><USER10> It helps thinking about it the other way around, ie. nationality has DNA. For Americans this may sound absurd, but it's very common in non-immigration heavy countries. Whether "German" or "Norwegian" are nationalities or ethnicities is not a settled debate. This is why being non-white in Europe can be hard in some ways. Some Germans have a rather uncharming word for people with their nationality but not their ethnicity: passport-German. The meaning being that you're not really German, you just have citizenship, which is far less meaningful. I'm not hating on the Germans, btw; most countries are worse than Germany. I chose it as an example because they debate a lot about this, so everything's really visible. Just know that the US is the exception.

<comment><USER11> I was actually shocked by the levels of overt racism I saw when I lived in Berlin a few years back. I was living with a family as part of a foreign language exchange program, and the mother was a elementary school teacher. She would baldly say things about Turkish immigrants or Africans that would take me aback. I'm not from the most progressive and enlightened part of the country, but even my racist and crotchety grandfather wouldn't be quite that open about it.

<comment><USER10> Makes me wonder whether Americans really have that big of a problem with racism (relative to other countries), or whether they just talk more about it than others.

Btw, if you're interested in what it's like being black in Germany you should check out [http://schwarzrotgold.tv/en/](http://schwarzrotgold.tv/en/) . It's a series of interviews with black Germans, with English subtitles. The front page video is an interview with a mixed guy who as a child worked in an ethnic circus/display of a sort and in his youth was actually kicked out of the Hitlerjugend for being black. He's really thought a lot about this. Extremely fascinating. Tried submitting to HN, but no traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Clickbait headline. The students sounded pleasantly surprised, which I guess wouldn't generate as many page views.

They also extrapolated wildly from what they learned:

> _"My ancestors were strong," Gilmore said. "They did the dang thing and came > and really survived. So it's sad but beautiful: I am built on a wall of > strength."_

Or maybe they used the results to justify beliefs they already wanted. No one descended from ancestors who died before having children.</comment>


An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/here-are-the-real-boundaries-of-american-metropolises-decided-by-an-algorithm <comment><USER2> I like collecting links like this. Here are a few:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3019858/a-new-map-of-the-us- crea...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3019858/a-new-map-of-the-us-created-from- where-we-get-our-water)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/w...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which- of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new- map-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for- america.html)

<comment><USER3> I like your second map. People in north Texas tend to be really damn conservative, but value independence enough that to make them more liberal you only have to suggest group think and that they ought be more conservative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone whose lived all over the giant unlabelled area -- what I consider "the west" is pretty culturally uniform across that space. Western Dakota to eastern Idaho, northern Nevada and some of the eastern range of California. Mostly ranching, resource extraction. A whole lot of beautiful nothing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Coverage from National Geographic [1] (discussed at the time on HN [2]) provides additional detail, including that researchers chose the arbitrary number of 50 to constrain the number of cohesive regions.

At the time, I wrote [3] the following which still applies:

The arbitrary choice of 50 regions results in some fairly generous interpretations of 'regions'.

Namely, this method produces two kinds of regions: ones that are clustered around a single metropolitan area that has a higher-than-average commuter pull around its hinterland, and ones that are slightly too far from a major metro and lump together a chain of areas that form a loose "commuter continuum" of areas where commuters have two or more equally plausible choices to commuter to -- this chain then hops along interstate highways, grouping unrelated towns across hundreds of miles into the same region.

Take the one that they call 'Corn Belt', encompassing Des Moines, Davenport/Moline, and every single city in Illinois on I-74 (including Urbana- Champaign!). In no universe do people commute hundreds of miles along I-74. In truth, this is a polycentric area with many distinct loci which attract their own, distinct set of commuters: Des Moines/Ames; Cedar Rapids/Iowa City; Quad Cities; Peoria; Urbana-Champaign. The "cohesiveness" of the region exists solely in contrast to its neighbors: that more populous metros on the region's fringes are all too far out of sane commuting distance.

Or the Appalachians: Roanoke in Virginia forms a vital locus for much of west- central Virginia and yet is swallowed into a much larger region including Greensboro, Raleigh, and Wilmington(!), because people living midway between Roanoke and Greensboro (like in Danville, VA, or Martinsville, VA), have two equally plausible larger job centers to commute to. The same can be said about Charleston, WV, which forms a job hub in West Virginia, but is grouped together with Columbus and most of Ohio because smaller towns along the Ohio River are roughly equidistant from either.

It helps me to look at each of their regions and think "people rarely commute outside of their region", rather than the more natural interpretation of "people commute along their region".

[1] [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes- reve...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-reveal-new- economic-megaregions-map/) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13100209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13100209) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101206)

<comment><USER6> Even in Boston/New England, it's not really a single ring from the city—even if you include its suburbs and exurbs where many companies are actually located. Almost no one is commuting on a regular basis from Augusta Maine or Burlington Vermont to the Boston area. It does somewhat make sense as a region but you could easily subdivide it much further. Assuming the exercise makes some sense you probably have to arbitrarily choose some level of granularity.</comment></comment>


Flash Player 'Molehill' on mobile devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.bytearray.org/?p=3053

<comment><USER2> Isn't Flash too slow for mobile games? Will Adobe optimize this product for every GPU out there? Very unlikely...

<comment><USER3> Do mobile game developers optimize their products for every GPU out there?

If it's necessary, which is more likely to have the resources to do such optimizations, Adobe or an individual developer? (Well, at least in theory... Adobe's track record with Flash Player is of course lightyears short of stellar.)</comment></comment>


Comic explains why your projects always fail - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/there-is-no-design/this-comic-explains-why-your-projects-always-fail-1d12805fd03a <comment><USER2> If someone calls you and says they want to be the Uber of yogurt, do you demand to be paid in cash in advance?</comment>


Show HN: Colors – Experimenting with Construct 2 - <AUTHOR> http://sleepysort.github.io/colors

<comment><USER2> I'm the developer of Construct 2 - it's our startup (www.scirra.com). We're YC rejects :) Nice to see it pop up on HN!

<comment><USER3> Hi Ashley, I've only just started out playing with Construct 2 and I have to say it is fantastic. I recently used Scratch as a teaching tool and this seems like a great next step.

It also seems like a great tool for quickly making Ludum Dare games. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks neat, but I would play with nicer palette. Also the hardness is increasing hyperbolically so after those small red dots appears it's almost impossible to survive.

<comment><AUTHOR> The color palette was pretty random haha; if you have a better color scheme to recommend, I'd love to see it! And I'm currently trying to find a good balance for size and speed such that the game is very challenging, but not impossible.

<comment><USER5> Whichever color scheme you choose, make sure it works for colorblind folks too! I'm not colorblind myself, but I know it's a good source of frustration for them.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that is possible, given how many different colors this generates.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the colors are purely for aesthetic purposes, this shouldn't be too much of an issue. As long as it is pleasing to the eye for them!

<comment><USER6> I don't think the colors are for aesthetic purposes. They describe meaning for how large and fast the objects are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The resulting balls always travel at a 45 degree angle from the direction of the shot. So shooting diagonally should keep all resulting balls travelling up-down or left-right. This would keep all balls in a rough cross shape on the playing field.

Stay out of this area and you will be able to live forever and easily beat the game.

In practice this is really hard to achieve since only a small deviation will cause some of the ever increasing number of balls to hit you anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice job picking up on the nuances of the game :) and as you said, much easier said than done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It freezes for me after about 5 seconds in (Chrome 36.0.1985.143)

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh. Interesting. Do the controls freeze or the game itself? I'm not sure what would cause that; the game was developed on a proprietary HTML5/JS engine.

<comment><USER9> There's an error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'qb' of undefined c2runtime.js:105 g.Jq c2runtime.js:105 g.qb c2runtime.js:102 si

<comment><USER2> Check your browser addons and try disabling them - some clunky addons clobber Javascript that the Construct 2 engine uses and breaks it.

<comment><USER9> Tried in incognito mode where everything is disabled. Still, it freezes with the same error. (Windows 8.0, Chrome Version 36.0.1985.143 m)

<comment><USER2> Actually I did some sleuthing from the minified code and found where it corresponds to in our engine. It's just calling a tick function on one of the behaviors, and I guess from the error report it's calling a function on an array with an empty element in it. No idea how that could fail or why it would only happen on one system and not another, this is probably only Javascript logic. Maybe the author is using an old version of C2, or a broken third party plugin... or you have a buggy extension that runs in incognito mode?! I still want to get to the bottom of it, maybe if you head over to our forum at www.scirra.com/forum and post there we can dive deeper.

<comment><AUTHOR> To clarify, I'm using C2r178, and no third party plugins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Construct 2 is becoming a better and better game engine. Good to see it getting some love on HN

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking about also adding co-operative multiplayer functionality; what are your guys' thoughts?

<comment><USER5> Sounds fun and I would definitely play with my friends :)

Add touch controls for mobile devices if possible (check PewPew for a similar movement mechanic) and you got yourself a pretty fun mobile game. I'm not sure if mobile browsers would be up to the task though, just throwing random ideas.

Does Construct2 include networking and lag compensation? It's hard to achieve smooth gameplay over the internet, especially for fast-paced games like this one. Check [1] for a great resource on networking.

I have some experience on game networking. Feel free to contact me at (el + my HN username) at gmail if you need some help.

[1] [http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/](http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure about lag compensation, but the good folks over at scirra added multiplayer functionality via WebRTC, which allows for peer-hosted games. I'll look into adding touch controls and maybe get it out to Android soon!

Thank you for the offer! I'll be sure to consult you if I have any questions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks fun, but the red balls are frustratingly hard to hit.

You should make it go fullscreen, I keep clicking my bookmarks and taskbar!

EDIT: I might've found a bug. One of the red balls escaped the game field near the top-left corner while moving in a horizontal trajectory.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've seen/heard from folks that this happens; will fix sometime later today! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I cannot shot using a regular tap on the trackpad. I need to hit really hard the surface to shot, but I can get considerably fire speed using the physical button..

</comment><comment><USER12> Does it seem that staying in the corner is a good strategy?

Maybe if the canvas wrapped it would make moving around more rewarding, strategically.

<comment><AUTHOR> I introduced the score multipliers (hitting the same color twice) to discourage staying in one spot the whole game, but I guess it is still a prevailing strategy. That's a great idea! Would both the player and the balls wrap around, or just one of them? Also, what are your thoughts on having the entire playing field in your vision, or having a locked camera on a much larger field?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The strategy for getting rid of red balls is to just wait until you get a lag spike and they go out of screen (forever).

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, almost as smooth as Flash! I think HTML5 could be easily used for casual games in about 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER15> check mine out: [https://rawgit.com/mickeysanchez/battle_for_the_colorverse/c...](https://rawgit.com/mickeysanchez/battle_for_the_colorverse/computerShip/index.html)

<comment><USER16> Bravo, thanks for ruining my productivity today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I must be on the wrong browser...all I see is "C o o"

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using a modern browser with JS enabled?

EDIT: I'm a derp; your JavaScript must have been enabled since it (partially) rendered the menu screen. Check your plugins, see if there's anything that might conflict with the Construct 2 engine.

<comment><USER17> I'm running Firefox (32 I think?). I do have Ghostery running, but I tried disabling that thinking it was perhaps blocking something.

Could be the age of my laptop, though, I suppose.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Node framework with best testing support - aman-pro I am working on Sails JS for a large project and trying to write unit tests in it.
I am not too happy with the support for unit testing in Sails. It takes a good 7-10 seconds before it starts running the test cases, there is no out-of-the-box support for fixtures as well.
Are there any frameworks that can handle test cases in a more efficient way? <comment><AUTHOR> We're going to release Lad beta soon (uses Koa), [https://lad.js.org](https://lad.js.org). Right now our tests use ava, which runs in parallel. Feel free to join our Slack.

<comment><USER2> I concur with Ava, it's very cool and has clean syntax and is well featured and documented.

Since aman-pro is working on a large project (with multiple devs and continuous integration possibly?) keep in mind solid reporting too. Check my profile for my highly biased opinion on what's best for that, but seriously feel free to contact me, I can provide hands on help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sails had a bad reputation in a lot of NodeJS circles. Most people use express/koa and use knex or pg-promise.

<comment> aman-pro Sails looks like a great framework otherwise. What is the reason for its bad reputation?

<comment><USER4> I think this thread [1] along with unstable modules were convincing enough for people not to trust their production applications with an open source project that has a shaky future.

Most people who were interested in the approach moved their efforts to TrailsJS [2]

[1] - [https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/issues/3429](https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/issues/3429)

[2] - [https://trailsjs.io](https://trailsjs.io)</comment></comment></comment>


New island in North Sea to be hub for wind turbine power to 80M Europeans - <AUTHOR> http://www.tennet.eu/our-key-tasks/innovations/north-sea-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> I remember when the USA used to be able and willing to create interesting cutting edge technology like this. Now we're building oil pipelines, cutting car efficiency standards, and promoting coal. Anything that involves alternative energy has suddenly become "too expensive", "bad for jobs", or "liberal elitism".

Soon we'll have reverted back to the 1950's, which apparently is where "we" want to be -- even back to the cold war era nuclear ramp-up. I suppose we'll also be back to building back-yard bomb shelters, I guess that will help with jobs.

<comment><USER3> Did you ever sit down and made a back of the envelope calculation to how much "fossil" fuel needs to burn to put up Wind Turbines?

Here is a good article to read, [http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/to-get-wind- power...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/to-get-wind-power-you- need-oil)

I wish this board was less susceptible to green-washing campaigns and look at this problem through more thorough scientific and engineering lens.

<comment><USER4> Taken from link you posted:

"Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year."

Sounds like good payout time - wind turbines life span is typically 10+ years.

<comment><USER3> But the bottom line is this...

For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.

edit: I am not against wind or solar, but they in their current form need lot more oil and that will continue for a long time, probably our life times.

edit2: The previous poster partially quoted a sentence, others would be well served if they read the full sentence.

<comment><USER4> Educate yourself and stop spreading FUD. Solar panels already paid their _cumulative_ greenhouse emission debt and if not it is likely happen very soon.

Fossil fuels wouldn't disappear overnight but there is less and less real dependency on them and more of a choice of using them.

There is no reason not to go wind/solar if looking just at greenhouse gases emissions.

[http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13728](http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13728)

"As a result, we show a break-even between the cumulative disadvantages and benefits of photovoltaics, for both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, occurs between 1997 and 2018, depending on photovoltaic performance and model uncertainties."

<comment><USER3> Oh Please! You do not have to educate me, unlike Moral Horsemen, I already have 10 KW SolarPV, my disagreement was not with Solar that much. We are discussing Wind Turbines here. If a counter point article in IEEE spectrum is FUD, good luck!

The major point you have not quoted it, Wind's intermittent generation relies heavily on an infrastructure that is majorly oil based. Also Wind kills lots and lots of birds.. but lets ignore that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe they would actually be better off without having green areas on the island. Tiny islands in the middle of the sea tend to be major bird magnets, and that doesn't seem to be a good mix with wind. It looks nice on the render, but it would be probably be better to make the island surface as inhospitable to birds as possible to make sure they don't get in the habit of flying there and gettign killed by the turbines.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if you might be able to use a magnetic field to screw with the birds and make them not want to go there. (since birds rely on the Earth's magnetic field for navigation)

Alternatively, I wonder how long it would be before the birds learned not to go there if they kept dying.

<comment><USER7> Are birds more likely to die from a windmill than say electricity cables, or other structures?

<comment><USER8> No. I've seen the statistics for how many birds are estimated to be killed by human-made objects.

Buildings were the biggest killer of birds by far. Many millions of birds each year are killed by colliding with windows on buildings. They often don't realize the window is there. I'm guessing the bird sees through the window and doesn't realize there's a barrier or they see a reflection of the sky instead.

Automobiles were also big killers of birds.

Windmills were estimated to result in 0.1% of bird deaths by man-made objects or something really tiny like that.

I don't understand why people freak out about birds being killed by wind turbines when vastly larger numbers are being killed by buildings and cars. Nobody is yelling about saving the birds by getting rid of buildings and cars.

<comment><USER9> > I don't understand why people freak out about birds being killed by wind > turbines when vastly larger numbers are being killed by buildings and cars. > Nobody is yelling about saving the birds by getting rid of buildings and > cars.

Because they don't care about the birds. But they do hate anything that smacks of clean energy.

<comment><USER10> Invoking Mr Burns isn't necessary; the people screaming "bird murderers!" are often members of the NIMBY set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One problem of building so many in one area (within a couple hundred kilometers?) is that there is less geographic averaging of wind. When the wind dies there, likely there is very little production.

That probably limits it to some percentage. Would be interesting to see some summary what kind of other measures are required in the grid, the bigger it gets. Things like flexible demand, pumped storage (all the countries are flat except Norway).

<comment><USER12> This is partially mitigated by double use of the island's connectors as interconnects. If energy production on the island dropped to zero, the entire cable capacity would be able to move power between connected nations. The 'flat' United Kingdom has 2.8GW of existing pumped storage capacity. ([http://www.british-hydro.org/hydro_in_the_uk](http://www.british- hydro.org/hydro_in_the_uk))

If this was the only power generation in the area it would be an issue, but even such a large power plant as what they propose would be a highly effective addition to the grid of the north sea area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone develop on the AC/DC aspect of the distribution? It makes no intuitive sense to me. Wind turbines generally have an asynchronous generator whose electric side is synchronized with the distribution network.

<comment><USER14> Submarine power cables use HVDC rather than AC because the capacitance of the water makes the reactive losses of AC transmission a lot higher in that environment. This doesn't affect HVDC.

They're also talking about connecting to multiple separate national grids, which is of course easier to do with HVDC.

<comment><USER13> thanks a lots. With the keyword HVDC I could find some interesting wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- voltage_direct_current](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- voltage_direct_current)

(I always sought that the entire European grid was synchronous it looks like it's not the case.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not "to be" but "envisioned by tennet"! Sounds great though!

</comment><comment> Ono-Sendai Wouldn't there be enough turbines packed in such a small area that they would 'wind shadow' each other?

<comment><USER13> Separate them from 10 times their diameter. You also avoid aligning the array in the dominant wind. Before working in the industry I had never realized it but wind turbines mostly produce in one direction, in the other directions the wind tend to be at the wrong speed.</comment></comment>


Honey, We Blew Up Twitter for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://ontechies.com/2012/09/18/honey-we-blew-up-twitter-for-ipad/

<comment><AUTHOR> New Twitter app for iPad... your thoughts? My feedback is that the Twitter team really dropped the ball on this one, they had a really good UI with the previous version and instead of making it better they decided to create a new app that looks exactly like a blown up Twitter iPhone app - why? to have consistency? I think this is a mistake, consistency is good but creating an app that takes advantage of the device's size and capabilities is more important - IMO.</comment>


Trump's assassination joke isn't just a threat to Secretary Clinton - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@wilw/trumps-assassination-joke-isn-t-just-a-threat-to-secretary-clinton-77fe430131f <comment><USER2> I've been reading the word unprecedented a lot today. For reference, here's Obama unambiguously joking about drone-murdering the Jonas Brothers: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWKG6ZmgAX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWKG6ZmgAX4)

<comment><USER3> Political assassination is a real thing that happens; federal drones attacking celebrities is not as common. The Jonas Brothers are not Obama's political opponents. Our country is not full of weaponized drone owners. These are two very different "jokes".

<comment><USER2> My concern is more about the many foreign civilians killed by America's drone program than any real belief that it would be used against the Jonas Brothers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I'm actually pleasantly surprised that the media is reporting this as joke, and not as "Trump openly threatens to kill Hillary Clinton."

Why is this news again? Is there nothing more to be reported on than another Trump off-color insult? Couldn't we, you know, actually have a serious discussion of "issues", or do those not exist anymore?

</comment><comment><USER5> No, not a mere crass joke.

Trump's style is to try saying different nasty things in order to see which sticks and makes his opponent to lose balance.

Trump did this on Ted Cruz, insinuating threats to his family. It was something that affected Cruz and contributed to him having a bad campaign. Cruz even mentioned this recently when he refused to endorse Trump.

Trump and his media team repeat adjectives when refering to opponents, like "crooked hillary". Cruz was the "zodiac killer".

<comment><USER6> I thought Trump called him "lyin' Ted" and the zodiac killer thing came from Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Someone who wants to go shoot Secretary Clinton doesn't need Donald Trump to tell him (because it's always a man who does this sort of thing)_

That is incredibly sexist.

Well, it could be a former man, or it could be a female partner of a man Clinton has had an affair with.

Is it beyond imagination to think women might at times choose violence too? Or is in Will Wheaton's mind, women are simply _incapable_ of violence?

Yes, it happens:

[https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/30392942/mistress-jailed-for- lif...](https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/30392942/mistress-jailed-for-life-after- hacking-lovers-wife-and-grandson-to-death-with-garden-shears/)

<comment><USER8> Or, maybe its just a factual statement that political assassinations in the US are, almost without exception, carried out by men, without any commentary on the reason for this fact.

<comment><USER9> the one exception that I know of is president Ford. 2 different women tried to assassinate him!

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I remembered Squeaky Fromme, but had completely forgotten about the other one. Here's the history:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Assassination_atte...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Assassination_attempts)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: To people who own smart assistants, how often do you use it? - <AUTHOR> Is it like the way iPhone was used (high usage) or the way VR headsets are used (low usage)?<p>There's a reason iPhone grew and VR headsets didn't, as of now. <comment><USER2> Multiple times per day.

For input devices I have a Google home, mini, 2x Chromecast and a pixel 3 xl.

When I'm ironing my clothes in the morning/brushing my teeth/generally getting ready I ask Google home about about the weather, and have it play some music on Spotify.

When I get in my car, my phone auto connects to Bluetooth, and it automatically keeps playing my music, or I ask it to open pocketcast and play a podcast.

As I pull out of my driveway I ask it to navigate to work. I have three equal distance routes, but live traffic updates to route around accidents is super useful.

After work, I get in my car, auto connects to Bluetooth, and I have it text my wife that I'm on my way home.

Ask it to navigate home, again taking advantage of live traffic updates.

When I'm home in the evening I'll use it to set a timer while cooking, play music, control/play Netflix or YouTube red.

I'll also use it to control the lights (I use hue bulbs throughout the house).

When I head to bed I have it turn off the lights downstairs, and turn on the lights in my spare bedroom so I can set my things out for the next day. Then I have it turn off all the lights except for the outdoor ones.

Basically it's a hands free input tool. Because I have a pixel, Chromecast, and home, etc., they all work pretty smoothly together.

I like how the Chromecast combined with a home can turn on the TV, open an app (Netflix/Spotify/YouTube) and play specific media without a remote or pressing any buttons.

The pixel in the car is amazing for directions, making phone calls/sending (but not receiving) texts.

I like how I can be anywhere in the house and control music and video via my voice.

Its nice that the different input devices do pretty well with figuring out which one is closest to you to preform the action you are trying to complete. For instance even though multiple devices in different rooms may hear me from the living room, it will be the living room home that open Netflix on my living room TV.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a couple Google Home mini's in my apartment, an android TV, and almost all of my lights are Phillips Hue. I use the assistant constantly to turn on/off lights, change colors, dim them, play things on the TV, etc. Very high usage.

I think using the assistant for things like calendar, weather, traffic, calls, etc is more difficult than just using a phone.

But being able to turn off all the lights in my apartment when I'm ready to go to bed by just saying "lights off" is really nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lights off: probably the most common use case for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Way less than I used to. The big deal breaker for me was Amazon no longer letting you upload your own music, meaning Alexa can't play my obscure CD rips from the 90s and my Bandcamp purchases from today. So I really only use it to check on Amazon orders, reorder stuff, add to my Out of Milk shopping list, start timers, or check the weather -- all things that are almost faster to just do on my phone. But I work remotely and I like having someone to talk to.

<comment><AUTHOR> The last line you wrote hurt. You might want to try Wakie, a YC alumni startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have a couple lying in a drawer. I've never found them to be worth the effort let alone the cost. Majority of questions you ask are "hmm idk". Functionality is very limited unless you've also invested in smart home devices. And at that point it's like how much effort do I save to turn off the lights by voice rather than walking 5 feet.

Idk. To me it seems like a high level gimmick the tech giants used to make another billion. More hype than value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably the most common use case is a smart home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use my smart assistant for a lot of one off tasks, but I realized something.. when I head out, I have a routine I do daily and it can be automated. e.g., What's the weather? Order Lyft to Red Rock, and turn off the lights. I should set this up in one command.

<comment><AUTHOR> You really should, or I can do it for you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use my Google Home mini and Home Hub every day to ask for the weather and set timers to alert the kids that it's bed time. We use them to play songs and my 4 year old asks Google questions about Spanish words every other day. They're neat to have around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Songs are a pretty nice functionality.

I guess that can be done on non smart speakers too.

The alert thing is really cool! A unique way to handle kids.

<comment><USER7> Totally. I'm not the bad guy but the alarm is. Putting on the cleanup song helps cleaning up go faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We use the home pod for music and light control. I had the cheaper versions of the Google and Amazon asssitsnts, and gave up on them after a few weeks. Just didn't do anything useful for us.

</comment><comment><USER9> I do three things:

1\. OK Google, what's the temperature outside? 2\. OK Google, turn off all the lights. 3\. OK Google, turn on all the lights.

If I don't say all, it turns three lights on instead of 8.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you check for temperature, rather than weather?

Does it help knowing the changes in temperature outside?

<comment><USER10> You can tell if it's raining by looking out the window, but you can't really see the temperature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it really help knowing the temperature?

I can take an umbrella if it'll rain soon but what can I do by knowing that temperature will rise by 1°C in two hours?

Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER11> Do I put on my coat or go out in a t shirt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, a cold climate thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have several Google Home minis and use them several times per day to check the weather, play music and podcasts, set timers while cooking, add things to my grocery list (my favorite feature), turn off the lights, ask for directions when driving (android auto).

Another neat feature is the "play latest news" to have it play the latest hourly news from NPR, Bloomberg, CBC or whatever you set it up with.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a Harmon Kardon Invoke (Cortana), I use it almost exclusively for playing music from spotify, telling me what time it is when I'm sleeping and I dont want to open my eyes, and setting alarms. Occasionally for movie trivia games or turning off my tv.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interaction while sleeping. Whoa that's an awesome usecase.

Makes me wonder, what else one might want while sleeping?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Only in the car to get directions and weather info.</comment>


Great Advice for People Starting out in Design ( works for programming too ) - <AUTHOR> http://inspectelement.com/snippets/great-advice-for-people-starting-out-in-design/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InspectElement+%28Inspect+Element%29 <comment><USER2> Yup. Engineering, design, and for that matter, life, are all about iterations.

Do. Finish. Learn. Repeat.</comment>


What Mark Cuban Really Thinks About Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2012/11/19/what-i-really-think-about-facebook/

<comment><USER2> Facebook is fully entitled to enforce edgerank. People consume content differently on FB than say twitter. Since twitter is more of a firehouse, its OK to simply sort by date since newness has much more value in that ecosystem. This is socially acknowledged given that tweets are firstly public. In contrast Facebook presents itself as a local social network. As such, your relationships on FB carry more weight. Social pressure nudges us to 'friend' mere acquaintances and 'like' things that are mildly amusing. You're expected to acknowledge important news in your social circles. Edgerank reinforces this behavior. If something is deemed 'like'able by your 'friends' you're encouraged to also like it, both by the algorithm and social influences, thus perpetuating the cycle to your own network.

Brands don't fit into this picture. You don't 'like' a picture of coca cola from a crazy party at mcdonalds' house. Your interactions on the comments of posts by a brand are probably one way, and with predominantly strangers. The rest of your personal network is unrelated.

Thus, sponsored posts work against edge rank. There are two big examples of sponsored posts. First is say, promoting a personal story or life event (it's a boy!). Second is corporate to consumer say, Best Buy is having a huge sale on something. In the first case if a story is truly important it would have been picked up by the algorithm and social forces alike. In the second, most people don't believe corporations are people, and their social interactions with them are typically unwelcome to their personal network. There's no social pressure to like a picture of Jones soda's new flavor as opposed to Jenny's new baby.

All in all, I think mark is right for the wrong reasons. FB's business model runs counter to its primary product offering. They're still experimenting and I hope they end up with something that makes sense to a social network.

<comment><USER3> The situation changes when a lot of your friends are from the startup ecosystem.

Suddenly that new product launch is as important as a new baby. And that new feature is something you're expected to like etc. etc.

How does that fit? They usually still advertise these things through a "corporate" page ...

<comment><USER2> I'd say at that point you're an outlier. Of the FB population who is really involved in the 'scene'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Doesn't FB realize that is far easier for a user to opt-out of a feed by unliking a brand/person/page that has done a poor job of communication than it is to mess with all the account settings or for them to try to tweak their algorithm all the time to try to guess what people want?

Cuban's doubts of the efficacy of edgerank (or perhaps his doubts stemming from not knowing the purpose of edgerank) comes from him not really knowing facebook from the perspective of a consumer/user and only knowing it primarily as a broadcast tool (I've seen his posts - he's only there to broadcast). But before, I defend edgerank/facebook on this, it should be acknowledged that this guy and many like him (broadcaster for their brands) are the ones that pay the bills - and it will be interesting to see who Facebook begins to cater more to over the next few years... because advertisers' and users' interests, despite what facebook wants us to believe, will likely always be at odds with each other.

<comment><USER5> >him not really knowing facebook from the perspective of a consumer/user and only knowing it primarily as a broadcast tool

That's funny, because as a "regular user" he perfectly voiced my opinion of (what I now know to be called) edgerank. I see and feel the facebook filterbubble quite frequently, its much easier to notice and more annoying than google's. I just don't voice my distaste for it very much because people just write off my opinion as being a "hater".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its been several years since FB changed the default sort order from 'Recent' to 'Top'. They made the change gently, first letting angry users change the default back to 'Recent'. In typical FB fashion the setting would randomly switch back to 'Top' if you weren't vigilant, and then after a while after angry users got tired of fighting it and others forgot how it used to be they took the setting away.

My point being that this has been in the works for a long time and is part of their long term strategy. They will continue to tweak their algorithm causing the occasional outrage, backing off, then coming back even more forcefully.

Remember, Zuck has stated that his mission is to train people how to share their info publicly. Expect that "training" to continue, including for advertisers.

<comment><USER7> My FB still lets me change the sort order but randomly changes it back to top.

<comment><USER8> As does mine. When it changes to "Top" it's glaringly obvious, too.

Perhaps the option persists because I use Facebook in a limited way, always through a dedicated device - primarily, through its own virtual machine, occasionally on an old smartphone with no SIM over WiFi, never via my primary browser or active cellphone.

In my case, Facebook's data mining only sees a reflection of my Facebook related activities. It is tempting to share more, but I have better places to subject people to what's on my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see why facebook absolutely refuses to make it simple to unfriend or unlike something or something.

Let me rephrase that, I know _why_ they make it difficult (more connection = more data), but it really detracts from the experience. I don't want to spend 3 hours clicking on individuals profiles and clicking 4 different times to do one action (the "friends link", individual profile page, the "unlike" and the confirm button).

I know, speaking for myself, I use facebook drastically different than I did a few years ago, and I would love to clean up some of the friend list I've accumulated over the years.

</comment><comment><USER10> Make sure you read comment #3 by former Facebook (now twitter) employee "derrick503" [http://blogmaverick.com/2012/11/19/what-i-really-think- about...](http://blogmaverick.com/2012/11/19/what-i-really-think-about- facebook/#comment-78985)

<comment><USER11> It's this comment, by Amar Anand, that is from a former Facebook (now twitter) employee. [http://blogmaverick.com/2012/11/19/what-i-really-think- about...](http://blogmaverick.com/2012/11/19/what-i-really-think-about- facebook/#comment-78986)

Seeing all of the word choice and grammar mistakes by derrick503 made me cringe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One has to assume Facebook (the company) has thought of these questions, and as usual, decided to see what Facebook (the site) thought about it. While Facebook has a history of trying to force things onto new users, they're also a data-driven company, so if things are not working, they are going to back out. I don't think Facebook risks hurting itself, since it can see itself doing so by measuring the effects of the changes they make. What Facebook risks is someone else replacing them or popular culture moving on to the next thing, which is outside of their control.</comment>


The New iPad mini - Photo gallery in the Dock+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.494043917295457.100711884.485785358121313&type=1&l=deef9fdf5c

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you guys think?

<comment><USER2> I absolutely want one or two. Pretty expensive, though. (just pledged)</comment></comment>


Sane web development with Compojure, Jetty, and Maven - <AUTHOR> http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/Sane+web+development+with+Compojure%2C+Jetty%2C+and+Maven <comment><USER2> This is a little silly. I haven't played with Compojure, but Maven, and all this save-file-to-reload stuff is completely unnecessary with the Clojure and Jetty combination.

Clojure is a Lisp, and like any decent Lisp, gives you full access to the compiler at runtime. This means that, if you wire your app to Jetty correctly — remember that Jetty can run embedded in your app, rather than making your app run inside its container — you can just recompile whichever functions you modified and see the application change on the fly. No XML, no scanner intervals, and no additional complexity. I don't know about Enclojure (Eclipse) or La Clojure (IntelliJ IDEA), but with Emacs and SLIME, it's just a matter of hitting C-c C-c to recompile the current function.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree with you if I were just building a weekend project in my free time using only clojure and jetty.

However, we're building things with an eye towards deploying in a standard Java container (e.g. war packaging), so there's more moving pieces than just clojure and jetty.

FWIW, I can do what you describe using enclojure (which is a _netbeans_ plugin, not eclipse BTW) when I want to as well.

<comment><USER2> I've dealt with deploying Java apps in-container, as .war files, and it has invariably been painful. Deployment to a new server requires installing the container first. Then configuring it, an excruciating process of editing many XML files. Configuration management for production, staging, QA, and development environments almost immediately becomes a whole separate set of fragile programs and scripts.

I have found it much easier to treat the main app as just a piece of software that happens to interact with the rest of the world using HTTP. Deployment becomes trivial; it really just needs a startup script and a directory of .jar files (dependency libraries) and another .jar or directory of .class files for your actual application. Installing on a new server doesn't require much more than a pre-installed JVM.

Out of curiosity, what value does deploying in a container add for you?

<comment><USER3> In no way am I trying to be enterprisey (although if we do end up selling this software to some customers, it'll be very nice to be able to say "here's a standard .war").

My aim is to make it as simple and easy as possible to enable continuous deployment across multiple nodes. In that context, the (re)deployment facilities provided by any container beats coordinating things on the command line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been playing around recently with Play! Framework (<http://www.playframework.org/>). It has functional programming support (Scala), write-save-compile-deploy takes 0 seconds, it's java, can be deployed as War in every container, has several goodies already built in.

<comment><USER5> How does this compare to the Lift framework?

Seems to me that if you'd rather write in a functional style (scala), having a framework that is written in a functional style that has the benefit of actor- based concurrency and Comet (Lift) might be a better choice. It can also be deployed as a WAR...

What are the benefits to using Play! over something like Lift, especially if you'll be building in Scala?

<comment><USER4> I never looked into Lift, so I can't answer your question directly. Play!, I believe, has to offer a smoother learning curve. You can mix Scala and Java code (eg. controllers in Java, service layer code in Scala) and migrate fully to Scala when confident enough. Frankly, as much as I like Actor concurrency, I don't think you'll use it a lot if a web application.</comment></comment></comment>


Slack, the Ultimate Workday Distractor - <AUTHOR> http://www.guilded.co/blog/2015/08/29/slack-the-ultimate-distractor.html

<comment><USER2> On my work desktop, I have Pidgin running. There are accounts connected to

       Google (friends and family)
       IRC (technical channels)
       our company XMPP servers (in-house chat, primarily a workgroup channel but also side conversations with individuals)
       and a Slack channel via their IRC interface, for Rands's management discussion channel

None of them are distracting, because there are no sound notifications enabled. There are no pop-up notifications. If someone mentions my handle, that channel tab highlights blue; if there's new random chat, the tab highlights red.

I assume that there is always content available, and when I have time for it I glance over and see if there's something blue. If I have more time available, I check on something red.

If I'm working from home, I log in to those accounts on my working machine at home. Same procedures.

If there's an actual alert, the phone in my pocket will start making noises - a specific noise that I don't use for anything else, in fact.

It took a while to gain trust in all that, but now that I have it, I don't have any anxiety from checking chat or email or what-have-you: of course there's going to be content, and it's not going to be an emergency, because an emergency is always signaled by noise.

<comment><USER3> Slightly offtopic, but how do you handle the fact that Google doesn't implement offline XMPP deliveries? I mean, if someone writes to you while you are offline, the message will get lost. You can see it on Gmail inbox, sometimes...

<comment><USER2> I'm always online. At home, my desktop runs 24/7\. At work, my desktop runs 24/7\. My phone is in my pocket, unless it's in my hand or on the table next to my bed.

But XMPP is not an emergency contact protocol. If I miss something, oh well.

If you needed me in realtime, there's a cellphone number which will do that. For anything else, I will possibly see your message (XMPP, IRC, Slack) or I will definitely eventually see your message (email).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently learned about /mute, which is a godsend. It lets me keep those channels open that I'm interested in, but lets me avoid getting a little red circle in my taskbar every time a message appears in them. I keep 80% of my Slack channels muted now, with only the really important ones unmuted.

<comment><USER5> I'm sincerely annoyed with Hipchat because it does not have a feature like this, or configurable notifications per room. We've got our main chat (which I want to monitor), and then a room for support (which I don't really care about unless I'm directly pinged). Unfortunately, I can't turn off the latter without turning off the former. Very annoying.

<comment><USER6> Customisable per-room notifications for HipChat have been in Beta for the web client since July: [https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/07/13/customizable-room- notifi...](https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/07/13/customizable-room- notifications-now-in-beta-boom/)

<comment><USER5> So, as of a _month_ ago it's available to _beta_ users of the _non-app_ version. I.e., it still doesn't have per-room notification settings in an actual use case unless I downgrade down to the web client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps it's an abrasive trait, but I really am not over-concerned about being available. That is, I check my work email once in the morning and I flip through my team's Slack channel when I'm directly pinged or after coming back from a time-out mini-break. Other communication mediums I check even less frequently.

Folks who feel compelled to be highly-available, what's the draw? Is it a nervous compulsion, a sense that you're going to miss out on something or yet something I haven't even imagined?

<comment><USER8> Here's a scenario. Someone sends you a message Tuesday morning, asking "hey what is the best way to push data into this system." You are not available, off in your fortress of solitude, so they wait for about 30 minutes to hear back from you, they don't, and they proceed with reading documentation and trying to figure something out. A day passes.

The next day, you look at their work and you exclaim "wow! this is going to be really inefficient and cause problems with other features that I know are coming!" and they say "well that's why I asked you..." and you reply "well, I'm not concerned about being AVAILABLE..."

<comment><USER7> That scenario wouldn't happen. If someone is sending me a message directly, in my present organization, we're talking Slack. Sent directly, that'll be a ping and I'll respond as soon as I notice which'll be in a few seconds. It's a disruption, sure, but if you're reaching out directly it's important. If it's _super_ important escalation to video-chat or in-person talk happens.

What I'm curious about is the regular polling model of availability. I could have been more clear.

<comment><USER9> That assumes that they know you're the person to contact. In several cases I know how to do something, but it's not totally clear to my coworkers that I do and it's appropriate to contact me. Or, more commonly -- I know _someone_ on the team knows how to make a system work, but I don't know who. (I don't think you need to poll more frequently than every 30 minutes to make this work well enough, so you can do Pomodoro-length blocks without checking every ten seconds if someone else needs you.)

The other thing about this model is it encourages things to be personally- directed disruptions. In a healthy, non-tiny engineering organization, there are important parts of the system where multiple people understand the subtleties (to avoid SPOF) but not _everyone_ understands the subtleties (because they don't need it). Multiple pings will bother everyone for no good reason, when only one of them needed to be bothered. But to avoid that, you have to ensure that a broadcast query will probabalistically be answered by one person who knows the answer.

<comment><USER10> This isn't a problem. A company big enough where someone doesn't know who handles what will already have a good chance of someone seeing the message. Direct pings for immediate responses, otherwise a reply within an hour or two is just fine.

Or if that really doesn't work, I'm sure the first incorrect direct ping will redirect to the right person right after, it's not like you need to annoy everyone in a massive blast. And big companies will generally have managers, assistants and others who are more flexible and can deal with this very well as general routers of communications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can totally relate to this. We use a slack equivalent app at my workplace and most of my days are spent trying to make sure I didn't miss an important conversation or a critical issue that I could have helped debug, instead of focusing my time and energy on the task at hand.

It does however help make the remote employees feel more in sync with the rest of the team, because now you're not missing out on the important discussions that would have happened in-person in the past, and you also have a chance to get to know your employees a little more personally. I guess it depends on the company culture to some extent but we seem to have moved all our water cooler discussions to this app.

<comment><USER12> Yep, exactly. I used to think Slack was the best thing since sliced bread, and now I keep pushing back to async communications like email to get my concentration and productivity back.

<comment><USER13> There's nothing about slack that makes it inherently more syncronous than email, as long as you switch off all its dumb notifications to make it work like IRC.

<comment><USER12> It feels, and this might just be my opinion, that Slack inherently has different response speed expectations than email (or other async comm methods) due to it being a chat client.

<comment><USER14> I _still_ think Slack is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I agree with you. If I need to send something non-time-sensitive to a specific person I will still go to email or another channel (1:1 meeting, Basecamp message, Trello card, ticket, etc) rather than sending an @mention.

If it's not specific to an individual, then I think dropping random things in channels works reasonably well asynchronously as it lets everyone decide when they have time to read the given channel, and of course it shows up in search for later reference. Slack stretches the boundaries of real-time communication quite a bit through clever design choices, but that's still its fundamental nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well said, even it it touches only on the distraction aspect of chat apps. Reposting a comment I made recently:

"""

web chat is often (ab)used in a way that makes it the equivalent of global variables for communication: if offers the path of least resistance for sharing information (state) at the cost of making this information harder to retrieve, search, structure, associate, leverage in the future. Or to try another metaphor, it's the equivalent of dumping data on flat free-text files instead of a relational database.

Web chat does away with two (at least) properties I have come to appreciate in written communication: being asynchronous and contextual. Although modern web chat systems typically work even when you're offline by sending notifications, they're primarily a realtime system. There is the implicit or explicit expectation that a chat message (especially a direct one) should be answered asap, unlike an email or a tracker comment. As for context, there is little to none. In more than one company I've seen chat effectively replace the dedicated bug/ticket tracker system, with people polluting one or more channels with intermixed discussions that would be better off as comments on the ticket at hand. It's a mess for anything other than transient, throwaway stuff you wouldn't mind purging after a few hours or days.

Looking forward for a "web chat considered harmful" blog post if there hasn't been one already.

"""

</comment><comment><USER14> Regardless of how you do things, you're going to need to find a way to manage distraction. Personally I'm an engineer turned CTO who used to spend 95% of my time writing code, and now spends 75% of my time on management and "soft" tasks, so I can directly relate to both sides of PG's famous Maker's vs Manager's Schedule.

Every employee is going to need different amounts of space to do their job, both due to the role and also because of personality. While Slack can destroy focus, it actually has less potential to distract you then the people in your office (whether that be colleagues, co-working space people, or roommates/family at home). In all cases there need to be boundaries and reasonable expectations, and there is no way to set those without some dialogue and empathy happening.

Now, full disclosure, my team is distributed between SF and London with a long tail of employees spread in a dozen other countries, so something like Slack is essential to fill in for certain face-to-face communications. But even setting distributed teams aside, Slack has some of the best notification controls in the comm tools space. The granularity of the notifications and the configuration options to show/hide/notify different channels and groups give you an amount of control which no other tool I've seen affords. You definitely have to dig into the Advanced and Channel Prefs in order to really dial this in. I also use the Mentions tab, and use of Stars on Channels, People and Messages to augment its async capabilities while still staying remarkably available to help where I'm needed.

Of course this is far from a silver bullet and non-trivial to set up, but going back to email would be unthinkable at this stage. I have pretty sophisticated methods of avoiding distraction in email too, but it is infinitely augmented by telling my team: "if the sky is falling DM me on Slack". That way anyone on my team can get ahold of me at any time, and I don't have to worry about a bomb in my email inbox. The problem with email is that literally anyone in the world can email you at any time, and everyone uses email in their own way, so there is no space to come to a common understanding of how to use email. The only way to win at email is to define on your own terms how you will use it to make _yourself_ the most productive and not letting others' expectations drive your relationship to email. One of the reasons Slack is able to "replace" email is because it gives a team a private space to set up their own social norms that is isolated from strangers and other companies who really shouldn't have a say in your priorities and time management.

</comment><comment><USER16> To keep my sanity I turned off most of the notifications. Just can't stop using Slack bots: [https://medium.com/the-freelancing-life/rise-of-the-slack- bo...](https://medium.com/the-freelancing-life/rise-of-the-slack- bots-5a7928d404e7)

</comment><comment><USER17> We use Hipchat at work and I have it set to only notify me if I'm mentioned (including @all and @here) or if someone directly messages me. My email doesn't notify me when a new message comes in so I check that every so often when I feel I need to rather than when I get interrupted by it.

</comment><comment><USER18> No way. I don't know how our remote working team would live without slack. It adds back the in-office style communication you have in the real workplace and (more importantly) gives us a sense of culture that is sorely lacking in a remote working environment. It's an essential tool - it's IRC with the missing bits like search, website preview, file uploads and more. We've become heavily reliant on it and even spin up consulting companies on our slack with access to specific channels and that works well too.

If you want to avoid distraction, just avoid distraction by unplugging. Turn off your phone, turn off slack notifications, lock your office door, hit the Adderall, etc. (Joking about the adderall)

</comment><comment><USER19> Manager vs maker schedule issue. Slack is a tool - with quiet some configuration regarding this. Has nothing really to do with slack. You get the same issues when interrupting people in person. Or actually calling them on their mobile.

</comment><comment><USER20> My compromise is to turn off notifications for most group chats and rooms. I still probably check chat every 15 minutes, but I choose when to check instead of a notification breaking my train of thought.

I'm a big fan of using chat to see if someone is available to talk before going over to their desk and interrupting, but if you only check it twice a day there's no advantage to using it over email.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would really like to see an auto-reply feature similar to email out-of- office. Something you can set like "Back in 20 mins", "Coding until 4, PM if urgent only". Would mute the notifications maintaining your productivity, and your peers would still be in the loop instead of being ignored. Does anyone know if this can be done with a bot?

</comment><comment><USER22> Same thing happened when companies adopted Yammer. Here we go again...

</comment><comment><USER23> Good conclusion with a terrible reactionary-sounding title.

I'll add that whoever invented pop-up notifications for the desktop should be dragged away screaming and pleading, only to be silenced by a gunshot in the distance.</comment>


Autofocus - roman-m http://www.markforster.net/blog/2009/9/5/preliminary-instructions-for-autofocus-v-4.html

<comment> roman-m Tried it myself , really helps especially when you are working alone.</comment>


Scientists crack RSA SecurID 800 tokens, steal cryptographic keys - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/securid-crypto-attack-steals-keys/ <comment><USER2> Direct link to researcher's blog post about the exploit: [http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/06/bad- couple-o...](http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/06/bad-couple-of- years-for-cryptographic.html)

<comment><USER3> "... The 'best practice' in implementing RSA is: don't implement RSA. Other people have done it better than you can. Go find a good implementation of RSA- OAEP and use that. End of story..."

<comment><USER4> Is there a reason why people still use RSA instead of ECC?

<comment><USER5> No; ECC is better. But as an implementor, if you're hoping to DIY, you're even worse off with ECC than with RSA; there are more parameters and validations steps you can get wrong with ECC that will result in a flawed implementation.

The security of these hardware devices is not tied to the RSA algorithm per se. The devices might not be more resilient against these attacks simply by using ECC instead of RSA.

Either way: don't implement RSA or ECC yourself. Use something like PGP/GPG.

<comment><USER6> (warning: noob alert) just out of curiosity, is there an open source implementation of a securid-like server/client.

I'm not even sure what the encryption technology is called, but it would be very cool to play with.

<comment><USER7> OATH is the competing open standard to SecurID, as far as I know, and there's plenty of code that supports it. It's also what the Gmail 2FA and Google Authenticator are based on (so you can use any OATH client to authenticate to Gmail).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that this is the 800 token, with a USB port, and it's the USB bit that's been broken, not the six-digit ID part that people usually associate with SecurID. My understanding is that the USB port enables the token to sign data on demand, and it's this signing key that's been compromised -- not just for SecurID, but for a whole range of similar encryption tokens.

<comment><USER9> I don't know how these things work. Is the generator for the six-digit string related to the signing key?

<comment><USER10> No, those two functions are unrelated. It's a two-in-one: smart card w/ signing key and one-time-password token.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title is correct, but misleading if you don't know the product. "RSA SecurID" is the name of a two-factor authentication product from RSA Security. This isn't a crack of RSA, what they did is pull private keys out of a "secure" device.

( _Edit: never mind, it looks like it's a chosen plaintext attack against the RSA on the device, not a direct hack. So yeah, this is cryptographically impressive. It looks like they're exploiting a bad padding protocol?_ )

<comment><USER5> They're relying on two classic attacks, one on AES-CBC and one one RSA with PKCS1.5 padding.

The former is probably the best known cryptanalytic attack in the world (it's the one Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo used against J2EE and .NET 2 years ago, and there are publicly available attack tools that will attempt to exploit it against arbitrary targets.

The latter is Bleichenbacher's, very well known in the literature but not widely exploited (this is a crypto attack that involves some linear algebra).

The rough sketch of both attacks is similar. It exploits a target that holds a secret key and reacts to arbitrary attacker-chosen messages. The attacker has no knowledge of the key, but might have knowledge of a known-good message. The attacker modifies the message in targeted ways and sends to the target; the target attempts to decrypt the message; the decryption goes haywire (because the attacker has modified the message without knowing the key); the target's behavior changes visibly as a result of the decryption going haywire.

The attacker knows (1) the nature of the targeted change they made, and (2) whether or not the target reacted weirdly (raised an error, took longer to respond, failed to respond).

The attacker continues changing messages and collecting 2-tuples of [change, result]. The whole cryptographic attack then analyzes the list of 2-tuples and from it discerns some secret.

<comment><USER12> The researchers in this case have actually made a significant improvement to the Bleichenbacher attack, extending it to use division (multiplication by an inverse) as well as multiplication as in the classic attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When we start shipping revokable 64gb compressed one time pad data sticks, I'll have some faith in crypto.

Until then, one eye always open.

<comment><USER14> I think the motivation behind RSA tokens is that while you can steal them, you shouldn't be able to silently copy one. That's not something you get with an OTP on a USB stick, unless you invest into tamper-proof hardware.

Aside from that, I'm not sure why OTPs aren't more commonly used. They're easy to reason about, and while you still need some protocol to use them correctly, it would seem that protocol would be much simpler than for fancy crypto like RSA.

<comment><USER15> You would need a OTP for every one you wanted to talk to. If I had a OTP for every https site I visit, I'd need hundreds. Facebook would need hundreds of millions. They're not going to be mailing out USB sticks on a weekly basis.

<comment><USER14> You need an RSA token for each server you talk to as well. It's not a replacement for asymmetric cryptography.

<comment><USER5> You'd "need" (in the handwaviest sense, because nobody had designed a crypto token based on one-time pads here) OTP content for every authentication _attempt_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reducing number of iterations by two orders of magnitude is quite impressive. But I don't like how one product is singled out when the attack seems rather generic.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to share information - <AUTHOR>

Over the years a number of open concept link sharing sites have come and gone, like Flock and ShiftSpace, not to mention closed sites like Google's page wiki, Diigo, etc that died or haven't really taken off. These sites help organize content by tags and commentary. I know I'm not the only one who ends up with browsers full of tabs with helpful information I want to retain, yet bookmarks are vastly inadequate. I could take the attitude that if it's important I'll find it again, but that's not always true, and a collaborative site could help discover and shape really useful content. How to tag things is part of the problem, but it carries a solution in how to link tags.<p>Is there something inherent about these types of sites that dooms them? Or with new peer to peer technologies (WebRTC, offline browser functionality, peer to peer storage) is there likely to be something smarter than Facebook for use by a large number of people? What works and doesn't work about these types of sites? <comment><USER2> I have the same concern about link sharing and more broadly information sharing for many years. I came across some social bookmark sites, such as del.icio.us, diigo, Pinboard, etc. Although some of them has millions users, tagging and stack are still not easy to use.

So I worked out my own solution based on the research and investigation on this domain for a long time. Right now, I'm reading the book from David Siegel: Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business. It covers various aspects of how to make web a meaningful community with common standards.

However, lots of previous efforts are not that successful, due to the difficulties for the industry to accept one standard. For example, in the book publishing industry, publishers, distributors and retailers all have their own catalog structures. When librarians want to classified all the books into a standard catalog, they failed again.

This told me that never pursue a common and standard catalog for any industry, just like the fact that there is no common product SKU list for the UPC classification. As long as we can organize the information in a de facto format to meet user needs, it should be good to go.

So I've published the beta site BingoBo.com for people to comment and have free trial. If you are interested in it, you can get more information from the Kickstarter project here: [http://kck.st/JNqv8z](http://kck.st/JNqv8z), my blog site: [http://bingobo.info](http://bingobo.info) or contact me at danmark.clara _at_ yahoo.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> your site isn't at all about open collaborative sharing though, especially with "patent pending," sheesh! how would any of the good ideas of the semantic web work if it were all patented?

<comment><USER2> Initially you were talking about "the best way to share information", right? BingoBo provides an efficient way to meet this kind of need. You also mentioned about the peer-to-peer solution which might be possibly helpful in resolving this type of problem. BingoBo has it built in.

Maybe it's too much for you to get the whole idea of BingoBo in the first place, so you feel like pretty frustrated. BingoBo is a platform to help users and businesses to share and save useful information which meets your initial request in your original post.

Now you are talking about "open collaborative sharing", this is a different topic. If you read the book from David Siegel, you can find the existing Semantic Web solutions are not successful. They are trying to pursue common standard and make collaborative sharing. But it's hard for the industries to follow due to the high cost and difficulties to adopt.

We have to face the reality. Semantic Web has a good intention, but only the solution with business value will have customers on the market.

Patent pending is to protect the technology and unique solution BingoBo worked out during the passed years. It does not stop anybody from sharing information. Especially, it helps various kinds of people to participate in the sharing effort instead of building by itself. It's not a closed platform.

This week I'm going to introduce the distributed computing architecture and how BingoBo applied it. On Fri. I'll unveil the software package for our tech folks to download and play with in order to quickly start a local sub-site to get the ball rolling.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I'll be happy to discuss with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned "open concept" which surely you can't interpret as applying to your product. And you cannot consider one book to be conclusive. The semantic web is generally failing as a set of heavyweight formal standards, but its concepts are being implemented in practical ways. However it cannot be dependent on any closed system, so with good descriptions data will not depend on any service. And you completely ignore projects like Wikimedia which provide the best source of content well in excess of any commercial undertaking on a volunteer basis.

All of the components such as p2p (WebRTC) have been developing for some time and are given in a platform. Thus my query, to situate the goal in the current technical soup rather than that of five years ago.

In any case, it's clear what you are building is not of direct interest to my query which is about a directly open solution (open source / open content / open hosting / open use).

<comment><USER2> Ok, I understand now that you are only interested in "open concept" which is not something I can help.

But I didn't only consider one book. Based on the research and investigation I have conducted so far, many existing Semantic Web implementation solutions failed because they are dependent on ideal assumptions, such as publishing open standard for every webmaster to follow in order to make search engines understand about the web pages they have published. Or they request volunteers to work on open projects, such as Goodreads,cn, LibraryThing.com, with the goal to have all the books cataloged. That's not going to work. Even if Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Linked Data have published RDF based catalogs, they are not able to help end users who needs to find information for their daily base.

"The only person who can categorize everything is everybody." \- Clay Shirky

It's ok that you are not interested in my solution and I don't want to waste your time. But think about how a feasible solution BingoBo is, rather than stick to the wrong direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> ShiftSpace.com domain name is on sale now.</comment>