Ask HN: How to find freelance computer vision experts? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a computer vision/machine learning project that could benefit from some guidance.  While I have looked for consultancies, and even emailed students or professors that I thought were exceptional, I have had very little luck.  Does anyone know where I could find an expert in this field for some consulting work? Thank you. <comment><USER2> I have done some recent computer vision work as a consultant and helped get a couple of different algorithms from patent stage to commercially viable products. Shoot me an email (in my profile), if nothing else if I don't know/can't help maybe I can give you some more names/ideas to try.

btw -- I don't label myself an expert in computer vision, but I have done a number of implementations of different algorithms and real time processing.

Also, have you checked some of the more domain focused forums, like the opencv and nvidia gpu forums? A lot of times people from there will help out or will consult or know of someone who can etc. Last idea is find a local employer that does computer vision work, like a lot of the defense contractors and use your network to find someone that might work there to help you. I have a number of those in my area and used that technique to get a little help on a few issues that I just got stuck on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Finding experts is indeed tough -- I remember trawling around freelance boards with very bad results. It got a lot better when I discovered premium job boards + done for you services online.

Specifically for you, I think this might help: [https://www.codementor.io/computer-vision- experts](https://www.codementor.io/computer-vision-experts)

In general, here's how I usually do my googling: \- Initial search: "<keyword> \+ Done for You Service" || "<keyword> \+ Consultancy" \- Second Search Run (if technical): "site:codementor.io <keyword>" \- Third Search Run: Go to Clarity.fm and ask some of the folks there for referrals to someone

</comment><comment><USER4> You could perhaps try Peter Kovesi, he was my Computer Vision professor at the University of Western Australia. His website says he's available for occasional consulting:

[http://www.peterkovesi.com](http://www.peterkovesi.com)

[http://www.peterkovesi.com/services.html](http://www.peterkovesi.com/services.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Email the team at shelfie. They rolled their own very complex OCR engine. I bet they know someone.

I've had reasonable luck on upwork, but probably not people at the level you need.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe you should send a request to the "magic" service.

</comment><comment><USER7> www.toptal.com is the place where you can hire developers capable of doing more than CRUD web apps

</comment><comment><USER8> Tools like imagemagick and gimp probably have huge image processing followings, bit of a crossover to vision I know but some subset will be interested in the two.</comment>


Nim Programming Language v0.15.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://nim-lang.org/news/2016_09_30_version_0_15_0_released.html?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Nim developer here, I'm glad to see so much enthusiasm for Nim. I'm currently writing a book about it called Nim in Action[1] and would love to know what you guys think about it. The first chapter is free[2], so even if you don't intend to buy it you can still take a look at it.

We also have a BountySource campaign[3], so if you would like to support us please consider making a donation.

Finally, please feel free to AMA!

1 - [https://manning.com/books/nim-in- action?a_aid=niminaction&a_...](https://manning.com/books/nim-in- action?a_aid=niminaction&a_bid=78a27e81)

2 - [https://manning.com/books/nim-in- action?a_aid=niminaction&a_...](https://manning.com/books/nim-in- action?a_aid=niminaction&a_bid=78a27e81#downloads)

3 - [https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/nim](https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/nim)

<comment><USER2> I wonder how Nim's cycle detection work? It is said in the docs that Nim never scans the whole heap, but I believe in worst cases you have to scan the whole heap to detect cycles.

Also how does the gc trace variables on the stack? How do you determine if a value is a pointer to an object or an integer?

<comment><USER3> Good questions. I'm afraid the documentation is seriously out of date about the GC: It used to implement a variant of "trial deletion" so that "never scans the whole heap" used to refer to the fact that it doesn't use traditional mark&sweep, but only scans the subgraph(s) leading to the cycles. Of course you can always create a "subgraph" that spans the whole heap, so even for trial deletion it is a dubious claim.

Since version 0.14 (iirc) however, Nim uses a traditional mark&sweep backup GC to collect cycles. Reasons: Trial deletion in practice is much slower.

For all versions of the GC is stack is scanned conservatively as precise stack scanning is simply too expensive when C is your main target.

<comment><USER2> That has been my experience too. That all the extra work and logic (cause the algorithm is complicated) you need for detecting cycles and trial deletion is so expensive that regular mark&sweep beats it.

But to ask a pointed question, doesn't that mean Nim gets the worst of both worlds? You have both the overhead of updating reference counts and the (relatively long) garbage collection pauses. I guess if the programmer codes in such a way that no cyclic garbage is created it is not a problem because the gc will never be triggered. But how common is that in practice? Does the language make it easy to avoid cycles?

<comment><USER3> > But to ask a pointed question, doesn't that mean Nim gets the worst of both > worlds? You have both the overhead of updating reference counts and the > (relatively long) garbage collection pauses.

There's a patch of the collector to make the M&S incremental, to avoid pauses for this step too. Of course, whether a deferred RC'ing GC with incremental cycle collector works better in practice than a more conventional generational incremental GC (or just an incremental GC) is an open question. :-)

Nim has garbage collected pointers (ref) and raw pointers (ptr). You can use 'ptr' to break up cycles manually and disable the M&S. I suppose it's very much comparable to Swift except that Nim's RC overhead is much lower since it's deferred RC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The multisync macro was implemented to enable you to define both synchronous > and asynchronous IO procedures without having to duplicate a lot of code.

This is great! There are a lot of little things like this in the nim standard library that make life a lot easier. I should write more nim.

<comment><USER5> That shouldn't need a macro though. With higher-kinded types you can just write generic code that operates on futures or regular values.

<comment><USER6> That shouldn't need a higher-kinded type though. With macros you can just write generic code that operates on futures or regular values.

<comment><USER7> > that operates on futures or regular values.

but what is the return type? The multisync example shows separate generated methods that return `string` and `Future[string]` depending on the method argument.

If that's the case then blocking and non-blocking operations need to be treated separately since operations defined on a result of `Future[string]` are not the same as those available on `string`.

HKTs not only allow for both method argument and return type to be polymorphic, but also allow one to define the same operations (like map, flatMap/bind, fold, etc.) on the wrapped type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I do like Python (my work mostly done in Java, though). A few years ago, I was looking for a language with Python-like expressiveness, with system programming capabilities ala C.

Seems like Nim is the answer :)

<comment><USER9> Yes Nim has the reputation of being a Python-like system programming language.

<comment><USER10> Not only that. Nim also has benefits like Ada's range types, a sophisticated macro system, and Perl's native regular expression syntax. It also compiles to C which makes porting to other platforms easy.

<comment><USER11> >Nim also has benefits like Ada's range types

Are Ada's range types similar to D's, or quite different?

[https://dlang.org/phobos/std_range.html](https://dlang.org/phobos/std_range.html)

The above page links to the one below - the one below is about the concepts, by Andrei Alexandrescu (who joined Walter Bright in developing D).

[http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly/1407357](http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly/1407357)

<comment><USER10> I know Ada not D. Nim's subrange are close to Ada. If you define a type t1 = range [5..20] and you assign a value of 1 to a variable of type t1 then you get a compilation or runtime error.

<comment><USER11> Ah, then that is similar to Pascal too, from its early versions, IIRC, not just Turbo Pascal onwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I looked at Nim briefly. It seemed cool, but there were some things that I just heavily disagree with. Forcing a keyword for discard means that there's an incentive for imperative code not to return a value, whereas I argue that that should be encouraged. Also, I find the macro system unweildy to use, especially coming from Lisp.

<comment><USER13> I have the same problem with almost all new languages including Rust: everything should be an expression and not a statement.

Even conditional logic constructs (if/else) should be an expression (i.e. return a value).

The language doesn't even have to be pure or hard core FP to follow this philosophy.

<comment><USER14> I highly agree, especially about the if/else. The more I code, the more I try to elimante branching. If statements as expressions would be ideal.

<comment><USER15> Most mainstream languages (C, Java, etc) have this. The ternary operator ?:

<comment><USER16> That's like farting in the bathtub and calling it a hot tub.

<comment><USER17> Why? It is an expression, not a statement regardless of your farting nonsense.

<comment><USER16> Because they aren't the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> With so many programming languages around looking very similar, and realising the enourmous tough challenge to get adoption: why do programmers pursue writing a general purpose language and trying to have it adopted?

<comment><USER19> Every language has pros/cons and applicable use cases. Think of Python. It is a beautiful language that is high level, uses white space, but requires the python VM and is very slow. Nim has a somewhat pythonic syntax, compiles to C and then binary executables and is very fast with good metaprogramming facilities. That is appealing to a lot of people. I encourage you to read the free chapter of Nim In Action as the author does a good job explaining why.

<comment><USER20> > I encourage you to read the free chapter of Nim In Action as the author does > a good job explaining why.

Links: [https://www.manning.com/books/nim-in- action](https://www.manning.com/books/nim-in-action) and (for the free chapter) [https://manning- content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/1/f2a2c55-...](https://manning- content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/1/f2a2c55-0538-4405-8b5f-4ee6a104d860/Picheta_Nim_MEAP_V08_ch1.pdf) .</comment></comment></comment>


It's never a good time to rebrand. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ivylees.com/its-never-a-good-time-to-rebrand/

<comment><USER2> While I agree with the context of your article (though sometimes it is VERY necessary to rebrand), I think you missed an important point on how to avoid rebranding woes. Most established companies tend to favor unique typographic or vague logo marks more often than detailed illustrations to avoid narrow definition and the hassles of a complete rebrand. By adhering to a simple and less specific brand mark, the logo becomes more organic in nature. Companies can redefine their marketing message and expand their product offering with flexibility.

Think about the most prominent web/software companies such as Google, Microsoft, Digg, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr... most have unique typographic logos because features change overtime. Case in point, Flickr now supports video. The fashion industry is also a very good example of this. Non-specific logos allow them to build (and change) associations based on lifestyle photography. Why is this important? Product cycles are seasonal and generally very trendy/volatile.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, the timing will seem perfect in a lot of situations, such as Xe's recent rebrand. I felt like those decisions deserved their own post, though.

Also, I wasn't entirely clear in my post; we rebranded some of our features, not our central site. IvyLees is still up, just functioning as an umbrella site for our tools. It already had a pretty versatile logo, which I agree is important.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I'm the Rex in "By Rex"

But this is one of our better blog posts and I thought HN would like the info. You guys were hugely helpful a few months ago when we did an Ask HN. I thought I'd share some of what we've learned since.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't hugely relevant, but why did you go with "kitn" instead of "kitten"?

<comment><AUTHOR> We wanted to emphasize the "press kit" part of the name. Press kits make information and media easily available to the press, just like our product.

I don't think "Presskitten" would have necessarily taken away from that, but in our minds "Presskit'n" just worked better.</comment></comment>


What kids around the world eat for breakfast - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/08/magazine/eaters-all-over.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region <comment><USER4> People who enjoy this might like this similar thing from TIME Last year: [http://time.com/8515/hungry-planet-what-the-world- eats/](http://time.com/8515/hungry-planet-what-the-world-eats/)

For each of almost 30 countries, it has a photograph of an average family with all the food that would comprise a normal week's consumption, accompanied with a description and cost. (Not all families are from separate countries. Some larger countries have two families from different regions).

Later, the authors published an expanded version as a book, which I believe covers 80 families.

I think there is at least one more subset of photos other than the set TIME published that has been published in some major online magazine, because I am sure I saw one of a German family whose weekly consumption included an amazing amount of beer, and that doesn't match the German family in the TIME article.

More directly relevant to the current story, here's a look at typical breakfasts from several countries: [http://www.businessinsider.com/breakfast- around-the-world-20...](http://www.businessinsider.com/breakfast-around-the- world-2013-5?op=1)

These are adult breakfasts, not kid breakfasts.

<comment><USER5> I have an intense desire to learn how to incorporate some of the more traditional diets shown. Not only do they look healthier, they are also much cheaper. How can a westerner like me learn how to prepare these meals and base our diets around them? I am sort of disgusted by how much our family spends on food, and how often we don't cook.

Really I just want to learn how to base our diets around cooking. I can cook pretty well. My wife can, too. We just don't plan ahead. I wish there was a guide that told me exactly what to do to create a traditional kitchen that can create a home-cooked complete meal each evening with < 1 hour of work per day.

<comment><USER6> In terms of running a kitchen, and how to think about food, I really liked the book The Everlasting Meal [1]

It was a bit fluffy, but gets at the heart of how to run a kitchen as an ongoing concern, rather than as a place you dive into as a one-off recipe, and leave when done.

[1] [http://smile.amazon.com/An-Everlasting-Meal-Cooking- Economy/...](http://smile.amazon.com/An-Everlasting-Meal-Cooking- Economy/dp/1439181888?sa-no-redirect=1)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the recommendation. This looks great. This excerpt from a review sold me on it:

"Tonight I had a few (lovely, organic) chicken breasts in the fridge that were getting perilously close to the date. As it is the end of the weekend, I haven't shopped in days and I don't have the ingredients to make any of my glossy paged cookbook recipes. There was some stuff in the fridge, yet I would have thought "nothing to make". Thanks to Tamar Adler, I pulled out my trusty pot, boiled some very salty water and starting by boiling the chicken (who does that???) with a handful of Tuscan spice blend. Then I sauteed a diced onion with some leftover mushrooms (that also would have gone bad), chopped celery ends my kids didn't eat from their Ants on a Log, then made a little roux. I created a sauce with a couple of cups of the broth from the chicken breasts and a cup of milk and random cheese bits. Then I tossed some random leftover cooked veggies and the diced chicken breasts in my lovely mushroom sauce. I also found some too-stale-for-salad croutons in the pantry, so I threw them in the rest of my seasoned broth, making a kind of stuffing, and put it on top of my mushroom saucey chicken concoction and baked for a few minutes. My family declared this makeshift casserole the best thing ever. And there was enough to put another one in the freezer, so I have solved "what's for dinner" twice, never having touched a single recipe. Everything except the chicken, onion, and cup of milk was what Tamar calls "ends", most of which would likely have been in the garbage."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Breakfast in South India esp. Karnataka/Bangalore is quite varied. Each day means a different breakfast and both parents and kids usually eat the same food. What we do is pick from one of these each day

1\. Dosa - Similar to Crepes but not sweet.

2\. Idli - A Rice Cake

3\. Uppittu or Upma - Semolina with Vegetables

4\. Rava Dosa

5\. Rava Idli

6\. Vada - Deep Fried rice doughnut

7\. Cereal - Not a traditional breakfast and usually rare

8\. Toast with Jelly/Butter

9\. Vermicelli with Vegetables

10\. Awwalaki or Poha - Flattened Rice with Vegetables

It's a bit over the top for sure, even by Indian standards. I'm not sure if people from other states in India choose between all these. I would be bored stiff to eat the same breakfast everyday. One other thing to note is that usually traditional breakfasts are not sweet and do not have any sugar in them. That's for later!

<comment><USER8> One thing I've always wondered - at what age are Indian kids (or kids from other cultures with spicy cuisines) introduced to spicy food? They mention kimchi for toddlers in the article, what about in India?

<comment><USER9> I'm not Indian but spicy food is effectively introduced pre-birth. The nutrient range that one gets from ones mother pre-birth appears to have a bearing on ones taste later. Certainly some flavours are passed on to breast- milk, eg [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2452382/Mothers-shown-how- to...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2452382/Mothers-shown-how-to-produce- flavoured-breast-milk.html).

The first solids one of my kids (UK) had was Thai green curry, at 5 months, but it wasn't very spicy. Our kids just ate what we eat when they were ready to ween [move on to solid foods]; I can imagine this is probably quite common and so in many cultures if the adults are eating spicy food then the kids are from the time they begin to ween.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is in essence what I enjoy most out of good web journalism. Taking advantage of one of the real powers of hypertext, the lack of "shelf space" restrictions on column inches, to have huge, blown-up photos; and using understated interaction and animation techniques to enhance the reading experience.

It's a fine line, and most of the stories in this style are filled with the "million paper cuts" style of UI/UX issues. But when it's done right, it's very effective.

<comment><USER11> > to have huge, blown-up photos; and using understated interaction and > animation techniques to enhance the reading experience.

I probably scrolled past at least 5 images, meaning I had to scroll up to look at the actual breakfast. On top of that the images below, of the kids, loaded faster. I don't have a bad connection. Very frustration article to read in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> Not to be contrary for the sake of it, but maybe your connection isn't as good as you think it is. I'm using a laptop from 6 years ago and it loads on time, so it's not because some JS took ages to run.

<comment><USER13> I _think_ my pictures loaded on time, but since they animated when i was scrolling I thought maybe they hadn't loaded before so scrolled up anyway. It was frustrating in my modest experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The first time Saki ate the fermented soybean dish called natto, she was 7 months old. She promptly vomited."

Yes, that sounds about right. Natto is the single most disgusting food I've ever eaten. It looks like snot and smells like some kind of animal vomit.

One nitpick with the article: I know that the food was put out to be photographed, but seriously - Oyku Ozarslan from Istanbul has _eleven_ dishes put out before her on the table for breakfast? Are her parents doing anything else but preparing and then washing dishes?! If I did that in my house we would have FIFTY FIVE dishes to clean before 8:00am :-)

<comment><USER15> Japanese food is the most disgusting I know of. Pick any random dish and there's a 50% chance it will be disgusting to me and untrained people in general. That said, it's supposed to be healthy - I would love to like it.

<comment><USER16> Most food is acquired taste, thabs to our evolved brains that instinctively avoid potential poisons. Eat it five times, don't die, and it becomes palatable

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _in New Zealand, toast covered with Vegemite, a salty paste made of brewer's yeast_

Up next, a crowd of angry Kiwis heading for the NYT offices. Vegemite is an Australian thing, New Zealanders eat Marmite. (Of course, to an outsider like me, they're both about as palatable as dipping my bread in soy sauce.)

<comment><USER18> Point of fact - Kiwis eat both Vegemite and Marmite, and the preference is binary and very strong (no-one likes both equally, that I've ever met) and survives the usual jingoism between Aussies and Kiwis.

I am a Kiwi, and like my mother I've a strong preference for Vegemite, though my father and brother are both Marmite people.

My wife is American, and has converted to being a Vegemite-lover after finally experiencing it correctly (NOT a mouthful on a spoon, like all those "look how disgusting Vegemite is" videos show). We did a blind taste test last time we were in New Zealand, and to my surprise we could both correctly tell Vegemite from Marmite, and both preferred Vegemite - even though it's Australian!

Edit: grammar

<comment><USER19> I like both equally, so you've now "met" one person! I was born and spent my first 8 years in NZ, then moved to Australia.

<comment><USER20> Freak. Everyone knows that Vegemite is the one true spread. Fun thing you can do with vegemite - get a bunch of French people in a room that have tried vegemite and get them to discuss whether the word is masculine or feminine. Some want feminine because of the 'ite' ending, others want masculine because of the nature of the product :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The breakfast in Istanbul is pretty elaborate. I'd like to live there if I'm eating, but not if I have to do the cooking.

<comment><USER22> I was thinking the same thing for the Japanese breakfast. Are those foods prepared beforehand or is someone (probably the mom) waking up early to cook those?

<comment><USER23> it's a little more elaborate than we genuinely cook every day, but:

Rice - in a rice cooker with timer, so just needs scooped

Natto - from a package

Pumpkin - been made already, prolly leftover from previous night's dinner

Cucumbers - same (those are not fresh, they are in a vinegary sauce)

Eggs -take 5 min, wife makes them every morning

Miso soup - leftover from previous night's dinner

Salmon - leftover from previous night's dinner, or from little "bento sized" frozen packaged & microwaved

The "real" meal is elaborate, but as you can see from above, a lot of it is left over from last night or night before, constantly mixed in for variety

These days, my older girl settles for toast :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My kids are 3 (preschool) and 5 (kindergarten). I wake them at 6:30ish and they dawdle down to get dressed and have breakfast, which is typically just some kind of fruit. I then take them to school where they have a morning snack around 9:30. School provides healthy snacks for the younger one -- fresh veg/fruit, crackers, cheese, etc -- and I provide for the elder. I pack lunches for both, and at their request they each get a pb&j on high quality bread, some kind of veg, some kind of fruit, and either yogurt or cheese. Occasionally I'll toss in a homemade dessert, something chocolate or trail mix. They have afternoon snack around 3:00/3:30. School provides something healthy for the younger, I provide something for the elder. Usually it's sliced fruit, but he has an ever-present granola bar in his lunchbox if he's still hungry.

The point is that, while this is moderately healthy food, it's still really basic, simple, inexpensive stuff.

For dinners (and leftovers for my wife's & my lunches), we make a big pot of soup/stew/chili on the weekend, and eat a ton of veggies. We're mostly vegetarian, and pasta, pizza, tofu, eggs, and salmon all make regular appearances during the week. None of it takes long to prep and I work from home so I can get started before picking the kids of from school around 4:30.

I would hate to have to work outside the home and not be able to start thinking about dinner until 6pm or later. We put the kids to bed by 8:30 and we're usually asleep by 9:30.

<comment><USER25> Your 3 year old is likely not getting enough sleep. A three year old should be sleeping 11-12 hours a day. If waking up at 6:30-ish, around 19:00 she should be in bed sleeping.

<comment><USER26> My bed time was 8:00pm for the longest time (until I was in 6th grade - <USER2> it moved to 9:00). It isn't out of the question she is going to bed at the proper time.

But yes, the National Sleep Foundation says 11-13 hours of sleep a night for a 3 year old and at that age sleep is extremely important for proper brain development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a little tickled by the author's clear concern about the idea of giving coffee to a child, yet in our society we give adderall - amphetamines - <USER3> preschool aged children. Caffeine really seems pretty tame in comparison.

<comment><USER28> It's not exactly fair to assume that the author isn't also concerned about the prescription of adderall to kids as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As a kid in Germany, I used to eat a slice of bread with butter and jam or nutella on it, sometimes with cheese, plus a glass of OJ or milk. Sometimes cornflakes with oatmeal/muesli and cold milk and maybe some fruit, which I still do every morning.

I do enjoy a good hotel breakfast with baked beans, crisp bacon and hash potatoes (plus the normal continental bread/jam/cheese selection), but I wouldn't dream of preparing food myself in the morning when I'm still asleep.

<comment><USER30> I think there is a lot more variety than one photo suggests. The link someone posted from time magazine, where the weekly food of a family is shown seems to be much more representative (look at the nice fresh vegetables and fruits in non-western countries).

For the record: my german kids breakfast: oatmeal without sugar, dried fruits, milk from the local farmers cow, fresh fruits from our own garden, tea. bread with home made jam (from our gardens fruits ;o). Toast with Nutella only on sundays, but my mothers jam was so much better...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My favorite breakfast to this day is either a bowl of cold cereal with milk or something like a full-English or some minimized version like eggs and bacon or pancakes _without_ the beans and tomatoes (I'll never understand that) -- hot oatmeal with nuts, raisin and cinnamon (I don't really need sugar with it) will also do fine.

When I travel overseas I like to go "local" with my foods, but breakfast has always been special to me, an almost holy meal. I've never really been able to get into how other places do it. I'll spend exorbitant amounts of money on milk and cereal or eggs and the local sausage analog or whatever or at the _very_ least some kind of pastry and coffee.

I've tried to eat like a local for breakfast, I really really have, but it kind of ruins the start of that day for me for some reason and I've never been able to really shake it.

It's a weakness. But I like to tell myself that the definition of separate food categories just for breakfast is a sign of an advanced civilization (even though most of what I eat is farmer's food) which makes me feel better.

I've heard Indian breakfasts sound quite civilized, I need to try one one of these days.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I was in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) for a while, I tried out some restaurants and foods of various cuisines. (Many of the malls in KL had food courts with different ethnic food specialities.) Quite good. Roti canai (pronounced roti chanai) was one good item (among many - mentioning it because it is a breakfast item, the topic of this thread). It is like an Indian paratha, but with a bit more fat/oil used to make it. In the places where I ate it, they served it with an egg spread and cooked into the top surface of the roti. Almost a breakfast in itself, with some tea.

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

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

Or what I ate could have been roti telur, since it had egg in it (according to the first Wikipedia article above).

<comment><USER33> That is, in fact, roti telur! you can fold in a variety things into roti canai:

\- roti bawang (onion) \- roti sardin (canned sardines) \- roti pisang (banana)

I had a roti pisang at home in KL last month and nearly wept at the impossibility of finding this anywhere else.

<comment><USER32> Cool, thanks for confirming it. Good to know about the other variations of roti canai. Hope you find some of those items you like in other places eventually :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Talk about food and leave out Indian food? zomg! Here's some food for thought [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/quickstir/lifestyle/24-Li...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/quickstir/lifestyle/24-Lip- Smacking-Breakfasts-Across-India/quickstirshow/44610424.cms)

</comment><comment><USER35> I think my quality of life would be vastly improved if I started my day with something like this, but I can neither buy this despite living in a very walkable neighborhod nor see myself developing the habit of organizing and executing it myself.

<comment><USER36> I think this kind of eating really follows from having a partner and a family. It is much harder to have the kind of motivation to do this on your own. In many cases however I think these are idealized meals, not necessarily everyday meals.

I imagine if they did a photo series on what the worlds bachelors ate for breakfast it would look much different.

P.S. Sorry to assume bachelor status.

<comment><USER15> Some of them were Saturday breakfasts as well - that certainly inflates the quantity and quality of food on offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As an adult, I would have a hard time eating olives for breakfast--and I like them. You know...in salads, on pizza, etc. I cannot fathom a child eating a bowl-full for breakfast. Especially when the bowls of feta-esque cheese and sliced tomatoes are already sort-of daunting.

I'll make a wild guess and say that kids around the world actually eat the equivalent of pop tarts (if they have money) or oatmeal (if they don't).

<comment><USER38> From the Netherlands, when I was young I didn't know many kids who were allowed refined sugar/equivalent for breakfast and now I don't know many parents allowing their kids refined sugar for breakfast. Or at all actually unless at special occasions or in very low quantities. Pop tarts (or equivalent) for breakfast sounds absolutely horrible to be honest. Olives on the other hand...

I grew up on brown bread with cheese for breakfast as did my friends; we are all almost 2 meters tall; is it a coincidence? :)

<comment><USER39> Uh ... So all the talk about hagelslag is just nonsense? I haven't tasted it, but just from the looks of it I'd say it probably contains quite a lot of refined sugar. And it seems to be very popular with kids (as the article says).

Disclaimer: I'm from Sweden, but I've been to the Netherlands quite a lot.

<comment><USER40> Nope, I know a lot of kids from school who eat that stuff like crazy. Not my hippy mom though haha. But it wasn't at all on the list of 'things other kids have that I wan't but can't get', I still don't like it to this day. It's basically bread with sugar, which is pretty ridiculous considering the bread itself contains plenty of sugar.

I really wish we'd be eating more warm and more green in the morning. Fruits are great, but they're also sugar bombs. So when I see a tiny kid eat a kiwi (sugar bomb), a glass of pure orange juice (two oranges full of sugar-juice), bread (carbohydrate-bomb that gets turned into sugar) with jam (full of sugar, made of fruits) and milk with chocolate cereal (more sugar!) I'd be surprised if that kid couldn't concentrate in class. For one, that's the volume of food I might eat in the morning (at 80kg), but with much less sugar.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-sugar, I eat fruits and jams and bread every day. But some of these breakfasts seem completely unbalanced.

Hope to see more oatmeal like the Icelander kid!

Funny to see kids in Brazil drink coffee. Reminds me of having coffee as a kid (cafe late late late though, more milk than coffee) in Morocco when I was young.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I live in North India and my mom used to give me a varied breakfast every morning. It includes Aloo da paratha with Butter or Cream Parantha with Hot cup of milk SOmetimes Daliya or vermicelli Many a times I used to get cooked spicy vegetables with baked bread (roti)

My breakfast was never boring. Everymorning I ate something different from the last 7 days.

The breakfast on sundays used to be memorable.

</comment><comment><USER42> I love the fact that (in the UK at least) Nutella is marketed as a "hazelnut spread", presumably so that parents can give it to their kids without all that pesky guilt that surrounds giving your children chocolate.

I still remember the excitement of this exotic foreign goo first making it to our shores, a schoolfriend bringing a jar to my house as if it were some sacred relic.

</comment><comment><USER43> Breakfast in San Salvador, El Salvador, means . Hot tamales - usually with salty with chicken or sweet. . Fried eggs and beans with cheese . A side of plantains and a toasted tortilla . Hand crafted hot chocolate and coffee . Mango juice with a speck of pinnaple

Glad we live in a world so diverse in even the little things we eat in our mornings.

</comment><comment><USER44> If you drink orange juice with breakfast frequently, you might want to reconsider: [http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/misunderst...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/misunderstanding- orange-juice-as-a-health-drink/283579/)

<comment><USER45> Reconsider because the producers add "flavor packets"? Why would this scare me? Because of the sugar? It's no mystery there's sugar in there, otherwise the beverage wouldn't be sweet.

I'll continue to drink my "fresh-squeezed" juice. Thanks anyway for the promo- scare piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Natto for breakfast in Japan ? This claim is completely unfounded. Tons of Japanese actually HATE natto themselves.

<comment><USER47> in kansai, people don't usually eat natto. In kanto, they would. For breakfast, it depends if you're traditional or not. At a hotel, it would not be surprising to be served natto for breakfast.

<comment><USER48> Enough with the "Kansai people don't eat natto" thing, that's just not true. I lived in Kansai for years, and there were like a dozen brands of natto on supermarket shelves, everywhere. Big beans, small beans, with sauce and mustard, with just mustard, with added kombu taste, treated with "stink-less" process, you name them. My neighborhood sushi place had natto-maki prominently on the menu. If you order a traditional Japanese breakfast at an upscale restaurant in Osaka, it will most likely include natto.

Lots of Japanese like natto, lots of Japanese don't like natto. Go to France and you'll find the same thing is true of blue cheese.

Maybe natto is slightly more popular in Kanto. Maybe it wasn't common in Kansai 100 years ago and that's how the myth started. But let's stop staying Kansai people don't usually eat natto, when it's plain to see that's not the case.

<comment><USER47> If I would have said, "Kanto people don't usually eat Okonomiyaki" would you also have replied in a similar way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I dont really see a difference in American eating habits when compared to Europe. Most of them looked like variations of the same thing. I would love to eat chocolate bread when I was younger every morning like Amsterdam. The biggest difference is the American/Europe vs Asia (Japan/Korea).

</comment><comment><USER50> In Australia, McDonald's is exceptionally busy in the morning for the drive- through and the sit-down areas. Lots of parents bring their children there before school. At least the one in Albion, Brisbane.

</comment><comment><USER51> Two from Malawi, two from Brazil, two from Turkey, two from Japan. It was an interesting piece, but I guess the writer and photographer couldn't get as much of the world in as they would have liked.

</comment><comment><USER52> Nitpick: The rice porridge, 粥, eaten in China is only called 'jook' (zuk1) in Cantonese speaking parts, like Hong Kong.

It's called 'joe' (zhōu) in Mandarin speaking parts (i.e. most of China).

</comment><comment><USER53> I don´t believe that in some countries one prepares 12 different foods for breakfast every day. This only reflects "pretending" attitude of those countries when they know someone is looking.

<comment><USER54> It probably takes a lot less time than frying up bacon and eggs. Remember that these are typically large extended families, and those are usually communal dishes. So there might be 12 foods in the middle of the table, but 6-12 people are helping themselves from the dishes. The other thing to remember is that most, if not all, of those foods are leftovers and/or prepared ahead of time in large quantities. It doesn't take long to pull stuff out of the fridge and put it on the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I enjoyed reading about breakfast while eating mine. I had pumpkin soup and toast. In my opinion, soup is highly underrated as breakfast food (in the Western world at least).

</comment><comment><USER54> Missing my favorite: Denmark. The best pastries in the world + a wide variety of cold cuts, cheeses and spreads with lots of butter and rye bread.

</comment><comment><USER55> Wow, so much sugar in the Netherlands breakfast. My hippie mom would turn over in her grave if we ate that for breakfast!

<comment><USER56> Hagelslag is delicious, but yeah, even one piece of bread with the stuff on makes me a bit sick to my stomach with the sweetness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> God, I could never stand Rooh-e-Afza growing up. I guess I should go turn in my brown person badge.

</comment><comment><USER58> Italian breakfast usually is made of:

* a bowl of cereals, or

* a glass of milk, cookies, jam, or

* croissant/pastry, coffee/cappuccino.

</comment><comment><USER59> ahhh i miss the great traditional breakfast in Tokyo . It took a while to get used to cold fish and rice for breakfast, but I ended up loving it.

Also worth mentioning is Tamago kake gohan (egg rice), literally raw egg over rice mixed together

<comment><USER60> In that dish is the rice hot? Does the egg end up semi-cooked? I really hate most convenient American breakfast foods because I don't like to eat sweet stuff in the morning. Egg and rice sounds pretty appealing and very convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> No breakfast for [http://www.rediff.com/business/report/india-is-home- to-13rd-...](http://www.rediff.com/business/report/india-is-home-to-13rd-of- the-worlds-poor-imf/20141009.htm)

</comment><comment><USER62> Following can be used for healthy breakfast. Boiled eggs. Milk + oats. Fruits.

</comment><comment><USER63> Great photography.

</comment><comment><USER64> What about the common man that has nothing for breakfast?

</comment><comment><USER65> And what about the 16,000 kids that die everyday because of hunger?

</comment><comment><USER66> Great photos (although possibly not showing those kids' typical breakfasts, but something they came up with for the photo session), somewhat boring text. But my gripe with this article is mainly that it's the year 2014 and a famous US-based publication would have the means (financial and technological) to produce something that would live up to the expectations raised by the title: representative dishes from many more than just a handful of countries, not a few shiny pictures for a 10 minute read, but instead something that could actually be used a reference and at some point become a publication of historical value. The TIME article linked in the comments does it much better.

tl;dr - sad times: hyperbole everywhere and "fast food" journalism. Someone ought to do it properly.</comment>


Obama Will Seek Syria Vote in Congress - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/world/middleeast/syria.html?hp&_r=0

<comment><USER2> >> Mr. Obama said he believed he has authority to act on his own

>> American intelligence had already concluded, based on human sources and electronic eavesdropping, that Mr. Assad's government was responsible for launching nerve agents

>> An intelligence summary released by the White House on Friday said 1,429 people were killed, including at least 426 children. The summary concluded with "high confidence" that the Syrian government had carried out the attack.

>> Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Hagel and Ms. Rice scheduled back-to- back conference calls for Saturday afternoon with the Democratic and Republican conferences in the Senate. Joining them were General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.

The executive branch's credibility problem is coming home to roost. Why would anyone believe anything any of these people have to say? They've shown that lying to the American people, congress and each other is systematic to their operations.</comment>


VCG has acquired 500px - <AUTHOR> https://iso.500px.com/vcg-acquisition-announcement/ <comment><USER2> This is almost a sad day for the photo community. VCG has been suing Chinese startups and companies for licensing rights for a while [1], many of the licensed photographs appear in "free" or "CC0" websites. A year ago, we received a request of paying a 50k RMB penalty for a set of images downloaded from free CC0 websites as well as a set of images previously appeared in PetaPixel which then quoted from 500px in 2014 (this was before VCG's investment in 500px) - however VCG claims they have copyrights on them. The way to waive this penalty is to buy VCG bulk licenses or sign agreements with VCG to purchase their products (if you buy stuff from us, we won't charge you from the previous infringement issues!). When asked about why these photos show up in full resolution in free websites in the first place, they didn't provide a clear answer. One reason is that it is difficult to shutdown "pirated" and free image hosting sites created under individuals. For all these penalty or payments collected, VCG almost never repay the contributor or photographer. But I guess neither does their counterparts in the U.S. (this is a much larger issue that I won't expand here).

So if company A used 500px's image in 2014 before VCG's investment, and company B quoted company A's article, and you re-tweet or re-blogged company B's article, VCG (who now has copyrights in China for 500px images) might go after you to collect penalty but never contact A nor B.

Advise to startups : to make sure you don't infringe any copyrights, do a reverse search on VCG's database (especially you have market in China) as well as Getty's/shutter stock's database and never trust unsplash-ish websites (they also have no model releases that will get you in trouble). These stuff could bite you back in years if you have a photo floating somewhere in your public Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account.

Now that VCG has acquired 100% of 500px, what would (or could) happen is they will crawl anyone who has referenced 500px photos in China and start to threaten to sue in exchange for opportunity to gain more subscribers for their media library. Last year a couple of social media accounts on Wechat was forced to shutdown by this [2]. VCG quotes different penalty for different images, and it is usually 1000 RMB per image.

[1] [https://xueqiu.com/8818667120/74351790](https://xueqiu.com/8818667120/74351790)

[2] [https://www.zhihu.com/question/48400883](https://www.zhihu.com/question/48400883)

<comment><USER3> "Public domain" image stocks absolutely don't guarantee or even check that the images they host have proper licensing, indeed. I've seen some images that had Creative Commons Attribution licenses posted on these without any attribution, "relicensed" as CC0. So... they did nothing wrong according to copyright laws?

<comment><USER4> If you've ever thought about using Unsplash images, consider how clueless (and honest) they are when it comes to model releases and legal releases.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M_OZWtpokc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M_OZWtpokc)

<comment><USER3> That's true, never ever use photos of people from free stock websites/creative commons photo dumps. Paid photostocks require photographers to submit scans of signed model release forms. This is unfortunate for tiny/unprofitable websites, but — really — a few dozens of dollars for a stock photo with a guarantee of model release and a license is absolutely worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 500px is a decent place to share photos and see other people's photos, but it is plagued by a total absence of non-photographer audience.

It's photogs looking at other photogs' work, vs. Facebook / Instagram that actually have an audience outside of the creators themselves. Let's say you shoot fashion. On Instagram you have models, MUAs, stylists, studios, agencies, brands and all of their non-creatives friends. On 500px, nothing, just photographers. It's somewhat akin to writing music that only other musicians will hear.

Oh and lots and lots of bots saying the same comment on every post.

Not really surprised they've been slowly slipping out of relevance. There's no particularly great reason to be on that specific platform.

<comment><USER6> >500px is a decent place to share photos and see other people's photos, but it is plagued by a total absence of non-photographer audience.

Isn't that the whole reason for them to exist in the first place? I think the problem here is the expectation (maybe internally at 500px as well) that every site has to hockey-stick its way to enormous success. A social-enabled portfolio site for photographers sounds like a very sensible idea to me.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but then you're just another one of those sites, and there are plenty of them already. Not clear how 500x stands out compared to the rest of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For me, it's not surprising that they got acquired. Ever since the co-founders left/got ousted, the reviews of the leadership/management have been pretty dismal. And most of my professional photographer friends usually just use Instagram to market themselves or still use Flickr for showcasing super high res versions.

A shame, I was hoping it'd be successful and benefit Toronto's startup scene.

<comment><USER8> Sidebar...

I mostly envision 500px as a B2B platform. That is, showing your peers your chops. You don't see too many wannabes there. The exception to B2B being the elite level shooters who do workshops, etc.

On Instagram, everyone with an index finger and an iphone is a photographer. It's a large audience and images get views / likes, does that make it a good marketing fit?

I haven't heard Flickr mentiined in too long. Shame really. It was Instagram before Instagram existed. Kinda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Only had 20 photos on there. I have no desire to leave them in the hands of a Chinese-owned company.

There's no built-in way to batch-export your photos, if you don't have a backup. You can visit this link [https://500px.com/settings/store](https://500px.com/settings/store) and if you click the middle column of images, they should automatically download one at a time at a high resolution (3000px+ w/h). If the images are smaller than that, you have to click into each one and use the dev tools to focus on the image and find the link. Stupid and uselessly, they disabled right-click.

Make sure you do all of this in a non-Chrome browser. In Chrome the images are rendered as webp and there isn't a super easy non-techie way to convert webp to anything else. If you use Firefox for example, its easy to right-click on the image from the link in the dev tools and save as a jpeg.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious to see a comparison of photo sharing sites, their intended audiences, and relative strengths and weaknesses, from the people who actually use them. For example, I really like Google Photos for sharing my own photos with family and friends, but it doesn't seem to have got into the pro market much (why?)

<comment><USER11> Elite creators usually don't like to hang out creatively where the general masses do. It's true in art broadly, it's true in music, it's true in photography. New scenes - think grunge or punk rock - don't usually happen where the old scene is. There's a certain element of snobbery ('this is our thing') and cultural rebellion inherent in that, and I don't mean that in a harsh way, it's just the way it has tended to be historically. Separation from the mundane status quo.

If you're one of the 100 greatest living photographers, the odds are you're not overly interested in hanging out where average Joe is posting and sharing 927 pictures of the family vacation to Disneyland. People like communities filled with people at least somewhat like themselves. Even the cool factor inevitably plays into it (mass market sites inherently lose that), no matter how much a person may resist that lure. Once upon a time, Yelp and Flickr were small, tight-knit, snobbish communities that the masses had never heard of.

If a site goes fully mainstream, it'll start to bleed off its elite creators (assuming there are alternatives). They'll seek out a new scene, they'll try to get away from the mundane that inevitably sets in, and the dilution of the qualities of the community that initially attracted them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> wait...

that site sounds familiar.

I did have an account there. I should probably find my login and delete my images. It was fun, but in the age of image sharing everywhere, I didn't use it much (I uploaded 5 images). I had more friends on flickr and later instagram, so thats where I ended up.

With Flickr->Yahoo->Verizon and instagram->Facebook, there seems like a lot of consolidation in this space.

[https://500px.com/acomjean](https://500px.com/acomjean)

</comment><comment><USER13> I was recently debating using them or smugmug, ended up going with the latter. So glad I did...

</comment><comment><USER14> > VCG is among the top image licensing companies in the world, the __go-to > choice __for creative and media professionals in China, and an award-winning > leader in copyright protection.

Nothing in China related to companies scream "choice"

</comment><comment><USER15> VCG invested $15mil in 2015 and acquired it in 2018 for $17mil. That's an accounting that I don't understand.

<comment><USER13> I guess it depends on how much they acquired for their $15M in 2015. Let's say it was 49%, then that would say the company grew a little.

<comment><USER16> Companies like to tout the largest possible acquisition price, so usually $17mm would be the total acquisition cost. Which is a down round severe enough that the last round's investor liquidation preference would mop up all of the money.

Just a guess, I don't know the details of this deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Clicks on link, presses Cmd+F, types in "journey"_

        We're so honored to share the journey with all of you

<comment><USER18> Building a company is a journey, what's the big deal?

<comment><USER19> I think the grandparent commenter is referencing [https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

That said, I think this is a bit different than other acquisitions as it is not an acqui-hire and the product (hopefully) will not shut down.</comment></comment></comment>


Learn to code like it's 1996 - <AUTHOR> http://www.defmacro.org/2013/12/09/learn-to-code.html <comment><USER2> Read the whole post with a smile on my face.

Immigrated to a few blocks away from where you mentioned, also from Ukraine, in 1995. Both parents attempted taking similar courses. Mom stuck it out while cleaning houses during the daytime, Dad realized it wasn't for him but also struggled between jobs.

My mom turned sixty this year and last I spoke to her today at 10:30pm, was busy at work, trying to finish deploying a new release at the office. She's been a COBOL engineer (yeah..) with a hectic schedule for the last fifteen years.

Not sure where I'm going with this, but from bringing today's Google Doodle to her attention, to reading and clearly heavily related to this, to seeing Derek's post on life on the front page, I think I should call my parents and thank them again for moving our family into the unknown and trying to make it through herculean efforts.

<comment><USER3> "trying to finish deploying a new release at the office. She's been a COBOL engineer (yeah..) with a hectic schedule for the last fifteen years"

COBOL engineers are a narrowing breed. Tried venturing into learning it a few times.

I sometimes wonder if those dealing with legacy systems have been subjected to new fangled methodologies like agile and scrum. The statement quoted just brought that thought to mind.

<comment><USER4> > "I sometimes wonder if those dealing with legacy systems have been subjected > to new fangled methodologies like agile and scrum"

I doubt it. I worked as a Mainframe programmer (in this century). Revision control consisted of printing your full current version of the code and inserting it into the project's binder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This part jumped out at me: _Dozens of trade schools offered computer programming courses for the new immigrants in anything from AS /400 to Fortran to Visual Basic, all paid for by government agencies._

As a native-born American citizen who -- like many -- wasn't born into a rich family and worked my butt off to pay for school, I couldn't help but read that and go, "gee, that would have been nice."

<comment><USER6> Then again, why not pick up a book for 20$ and get cracking?

<comment><USER7> That's what I did! Books, books and more books. Fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The weirdest thing about this 'learn to code' movement is the strange naivety that 'coding' is something that can just be picked up in a year or so, and then it's a skill like dicing onions or changing an oil filter. I mean, I guess it can be in a sense, but my own experience has been quite different.

First I wanted to build iOS apps, so I learned enough C to take on Objective-C. Time to learn the Cocoa frameworks. Published an app. I should learn web development. Grokked HTML, CSS, some JS. Wait things can be done easier with jQuery? Learned some 'o' that. None of this means anything without some passable design skills. Time to learn photoshop, illustrator, or some open source alternative. Oh crap, I need to deploy this! And what's this 'Git' everyone's going on about? Wait a minute, I don't understand anything that's going on with anything! Time to dig deep into the underbelly of Unix. I should get with the times! Need to learn some front end frameworks. Angular looks amazing, here I go! Hmmm, are mobile apps the way of the future? I'm not sure. Maybe I should leverage this using the web skills I already know! Time to get up to speed with PhoneGap, Cordova, or AppGyver...

And this is just practical stuff. Nevermind the math, algorithmic, and hardware domains that I'm sure break into a million parts like the 'coding' endeavour I mentioned above.

<comment><USER9> I think beginners should stop following trends and focus on building a solid foundation. I know that can sound ridiculous if you need to get a job, but you'll be doing yourself a favor. I mean, it's ok to learn enough to become a hireable code monkey (even though it's more difficult than it sounds) and earn something to support yourself, but i think it's way more important to learn core skills instead of frameworks that will inevitably become obsolete in a few years' time.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree. Everyone who learns programming should start with something practical, ruby on rails, angular, whatever, but then go down the stack instead of sideways. Don't add more and more frameworks, learn what's beneath the framework. Learn what every layer in the system does, right down to the level of individual transistors on the cpu. There should be no magic anymore. If every part of the system is understandable (in theory) then any problem with it is solveable. Also, most frameworks become variations on a theme, and almost nothing is truly novel.

That last part is what made me almost quit programming, upon the realization that the industry was not on a long march of progression, but on a cycle of reinvention, where each generation rediscovers the knowledge of previous generations in different flavors, especially in software. If more people learned the fundamentals they could discern between that which is new and that which is novel and spend their time accordingly. The industry as a whole would be better off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I began programming in 1996. The biggest difference, to me, is:

#1 Google, which helps you quickly find answers from #2

#2 Online tutorials, communities such as Stack Overflow and blogs

As a self-learner, it's awesome now a days. It costs next to nothing to learn, to get involved with open source or a community, and most importantly, to create your own projects!

In 1996, I had one friend I could call to ask a question. Maybe I could save up some money to buy some crap book on Visual Basic or C. Computers were still expensive back then, and a server - geez, forget about it.

<comment><USER12> Seriously, I first started programming in high school in 1999, and the resources were as follows:

1) Textbook

2) Teacher

3) Classmates

I dicked around doing Philosophy and construction for half a decade outside of high school, and one of the things that amazed me when I went back to school was how _easy_ programming had become. Have a compile error? Google it. Getting this weird "Segmentation Fault" thing? Google it, and see what causes it.

I went from combing through the pages of the textbook to never cracking a book past second year, and in only a decade or so. I still sometimes marvel at how copying and pasting an obscure error into Google nets me the answer more often than not within 5 minutes.

<comment><USER13> Oh man, I totally know how you feel, I tried it in high school and it was far too structured and distracting for me to enjoy it.

Now that I learn it on my own terms, it's a much more enjoyable hobby, and it makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In 1996, Barnes and Nobel was flooded with huge volumes like "Learn C in 21 Days" and "Effective Bash Programming." These books had 6-10 authors and were basically printed on newspaper, and were absolutely horrible. These sat next to Computer Shopper and high quality books like K&R and the red book.

<comment><USER15> I know what you mean, Borders did the same thing. But whenever someone mentions "The Red Book", I always wonder whether they're talking about the OpenGL Programming Guide or the PostScript Language Reference.

<comment><USER16> DOD Security Standards. Also known as the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On A Shelf.

<comment><USER17> Or the Apple ][ Reference Manual

<comment><USER18> My first though is the Red Book specification for CDROMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's rarely a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But if the first wave of "learn to code" gave us you and RethinkDB, then I'm all for the next wave.

<comment><USER20> There are pots of gold, but the people who get the gold usually came for the rainbow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To me the biggest difference between now and then is that the quality of instruction is probably much better now. Not only is the quality better but the number of options is also much higher. Between resources like teamtreehouse, code school, codecademy, youtube and the thousands of pages you can find with google -- people who want to learn to code today have a marked advantage over those who wanted to learn in 1996.

In the end it always comes down to a persons will to succeed. Learning programming is basically a battle to simply keep putting your face in front of the code. The biggest value that resources like teamtreehouse and codecademy offer is that they make it more engaging (read: less painful) and so people are more likely to press on and get to a point where they say "Hey, maybe I can actually be a programmer".

<comment><USER22> > people who want to learn to code today have a marked advantage over those > who wanted to learn in 1996.

True, but they aren't competing against job candidates from 1996.

Not that the whole movement is about finding a job. In fact, I think it will be more healthy for industry and students alike if "learn to code" is not a promise for a direct payoff at all, but a push to develop a useful core skill like math, communication, and understanding of science and humanities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the difference is that the current campaign isn't saying everybody should learn to code to be a programmer, instead it's saying, everybody should learn the basics of coding because it will be beneficial to whatever their job is.

<comment><USER20> Many biologists can confirm: even rudimentary programming skills can be very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A lot of these immigrants have had excellent eduction and often pretty high level jobs. The old Soviet Union was pretty big on eduction, especially science and math. So theoretically it's not that big of a step to take, from being a mathematician to a programmer.

Reality says otherwise, though. I have two friends who came to The Netherlands during the Balkan war in the early 90's. He used to be a math professor, she used to be a surgeon. Nowadays, he's cutting marble for tombstones, she works at the HR department. Quite the step back, although they have no regrets coming here.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a cool post. It's a really interesting thought that this whole "learn to code" movement existed in some form seventeen years ago and somehow didn't take off when it seems like such an inevability right now. But I think it's one of those things we'll look back on like the 2010 iPad / 1993 Apple Newton and say "yeah coding trade schools were a cool idea back then, but the world just wasn't ready for it yet", and now that they've become 'cool' so to speak we're going to see that permanent explosion.

I mean, I'm new to this game but did you even call it "coding" in 1996? To me just the word "coding" represents a kind of coolness factor that I doubt existed around programming in the mid 1990's. It used to be a nerdy thing, something you had to be 'smart' and work at a big company to do. Now tech is cool, the game has completely changed. I mean were startups even a thing in 1996? Were hoodies, mac laptops, red bulls and coding on rooftops popular? Because of things like Github, Ruby on Rails, awesome screencasts etc. I think it's just gotten more fun and productive to be a programmer and the lifestyle has more of a mainstream draw than it used to.

The other big plot line in 2013 that wasn't there in 1996 is the impending genocide of universities in America. Higher tuition rates, lower employment rates, it seems like the learn to code movement is the Newtonian "equal and opposite reaction" to the imminent death spiral of 4-year degree programs in America. I think we're going to see a ton of innovation from the "learn to code" schools in the next few years, innovations in education that the Universities won't be able to match, and the "learn to code" schools are going to kick the living crap out of colleges when it comes to where people choose to spend the money they have allocated for education.

<comment><USER26> _> I mean, I'm new to this game but did you even call it "coding" in 1996?_

Yes, we did. It wasn't _that_ long ago! Sheesh! Thanks for making me feel old :-D

 _> were startups even a thing in 1996?_

Ask pmarca! ([https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pmarca](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pmarca))

In seriousness, yes, they were, but it took a lot more money to get one off the ground back then than it does today; lots of proprietary software licenses to be bought, physical servers to be rack-mounted, and so forth. (You used to have to pay _thousands of dollars per seat_ just to get access to some companies' API documentation! Yes! Seriously! Now, of course, you can just Google it.)

It was sufficiently expensive that a college student (which I was back then) couldn't really think of starting one on a whim. You had to get access to some serious capital to make a real go of it.

So many of those costs have collapsed these days that it's much, much easier to do a startup than it was then. But that's a double-edged sword -- while it opens up opportunity to lots more people, it also means there's lots more half-baked "startups" out there than there used to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here is one difference, the number of computers has far outpaced the speed at which the industry is gaining programmers. Instead of one platform with 100+ million devices, we have more like 3.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sorry, not 1996, learned VC20 BASIC in 1981. Learned it in a department store from some other kids, trading tricks and POKEs.

</comment><comment><USER29> Great post, but please consider making the text on your site [ragged-right instead of justified]([http://practicaltypography.com/justified- text.html](http://practicaltypography.com/justified-text.html)).

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice. I do agree with this article; there really is no reason to emphasize coding any more than say math or music.

Making things overtly fashionable makes everyone worse off.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll probably always be a bit wary of people who learn coding from a school or who need a school to learn coding. Since most of the time you have to learn new things while coding (new libraries, new languages, new challenges), I don't know if these people will be able to keep learning by themselves without courses provided for them.

Not sure how good a programmer you can become without being inherently excited about the whole thing.

In a way I believe everything can be learned the same way. I suck at design, but in theory I could see how I could learn it. The problem is I would have to be constantly absorbing new things. While talking a walk I would have to notice the typography on shop signs, when browsing the web I would make mental notes of designs I like, and so on. Totally doable, yet I am not doing it. On the other hand I read about programming all the time, even about topics I don't really work with atm like scalability, 3d programming, machine learning and so on.

Perhaps a course can be a good start, but I suppose it only gets you 1% of the way...

</comment><comment><USER31> Ada

<comment><USER32> Countess of Lovelace and daughter of poet Lord Byron. Analytical Engine.

<comment><USER33> Is this free association computer science Jeopardy? I'll go next please.

<comment><USER32> Hi code_duck. It's actually code, not free association. Let me uncode: Ada Lovelace wrote what most consider to be the first programming code. She wrote notes for the Analytical Engine--Babbage's early computer. She was a visionary regarding design and specifically how society could collaborate with technology. In the recent discussions about all people learning to code, I responded to the simple comment "Ada," by pointing a bit more sharply to the inflection behind that comment. Ada the language, yes, but the concept of society at large and coding goes back as far as Lovelace herself. There is a current of comment going now too that suggests the need for a broad underlying knowledge base on the part of hackers/programmers. Lovelace had that educational background. Humanities, science, culture. The whole soup. I am sorry that you were offended by my comment. I hope this elucidation helps. --GuerraEarth

<comment><USER33> Thanks, I do think that posts formed of complete sentences go further to advance the conversation than single words and sentence fragments.

<comment><USER32> Hey. It was the "Ada" one-word comment that made me do it : ) Anyway, thank you for being a good sport, code_duck. HN readers are an incredibly good group of people. It's a luxury, having HN. As good as a Christmas stocking each and every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Was expecting to see <table></comment>


Show HN: A database for browsing and discovering movies - <AUTHOR> http://www.movieo.me/ <comment><USER3> Wow, after playing with it for 60 seconds my wife and I found a Humphrey Bogart movie we had never heard of that we are now going to watch. You should work on adding Amazon video links to it with a referral code, could be a good way to capitalize on this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazon and Hulu integration is on our todo list. It's unfortunate that we can't pull Netflix data since they're shutting down their api in 10 days.

<comment><USER4> Netflix's selection is too limited for my taste. Your app looks beautiful btw!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks good, but the one feature that I find lacking (in this and other similar apps, like [http://omive.com](http://omive.com)) is the ability to "hide" movies I've already seen. Because otherwise I have to go through pages and pages to find a movie I haven't seen, let alone consider watching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Multiple people said this, it's a shame how we didn't think of this before! We'll be adding this feature during the next couple of days! Thanks for pointing it out!

<comment><USER5> Awesome! Will check it out back in a week then :)

<comment><USER6> That would be great!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Missing feature: Sort by language. This is especially important for massively multilingual countries like India. Choosing 'India' lists hundreds of movies, but I would like to sort it by language (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc.)

<comment><USER8> That's an interesting and potentially useful idea, but if you go down that road, I think it'd be immediately relevant to also go into available subtitle languages. It also really depends on where this site gets its data from, as the "from [country x]" filtering can yield some questionable results.

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

Finally I can see and sort by RT rating which I trust way more than imdb.

You could also somehow link it to "popcorn time" then it will complete the loop.

Also a separate section for "available on netflix" will make this indispensable.

You could even add a weekly newsletter that shows... 1. new movies on netflix. 2. must watch classics etc base on my taste 4. new episodes of [walking dead] available

and shoot it out on a friday :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love to include torrent links or even stream directly but we're too scurred :<

The netflix is shutting down their api but we'll do our best go get their data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty sweet, but wish there was a way to filter to show movies available on netflix.

<comment><USER11> +1. I can't believe that still doesn't exist on the web. I have Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime accounts, but nothing will answer for me "Can I watch this movie for free somewhere?".

Filtering by streaming service is a killer feature.

<comment><USER12> With the exception of Amazon, who evidently weren't interested in cooperating, Tivo does a great job of this. You get some Amazon content but it's not the good stuff. For Hulu and Netflix you get unified search and you can do things like come across an in-progress movie in the guide, see that it's available on Netflix, and start watching it right away. I really wish Amazon would let Tivo have a decent app with Prime support.

Edit: Sure enough, as soon as I posted this I came across an article saying that Tivo will be getting Amazon Prime this fall, as well as Vudu. [http://zatznotfunny.com/2014-08/amazon-instant-vudu- coming-t...](http://zatznotfunny.com/2014-08/amazon-instant-vudu-coming-to- tivo/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice one. I'll definitely use this.

If you're looking to do something similar, this exact same app for books would be welcome too. Also podcasts, audio content (recorded letters), music, etc.

Discovery is an interesting problem. Between mobile apps & google's overall approach a lot of discovery seems to be based on giving you the right answer. Sometimes what you need is not the right answer, but a good way of browsing. I like filters and dials as a way of searching for things. It's fun.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's good, but I recently found [http://omive.com/](http://omive.com/) and it works great for me. Simple and very neatly built.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just a tip, in case you find your way to adding it - while browsing through the India selection, I find that there are movies from different languages - <USER2> found Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil movies. My suggestion is that if you find a way to add a language filter, in addition to a country filter, that might help? This might be useful for others as well - for e.g a lot of Spanish speakers might look for movies from South America etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Related movies seem to be based on keyword search primarily, unconstrained by genre. But the keywords seem like sketchy content. Inception's keywords are "loss of lover dream sleep subconsciousness defense mechanism redemption," such that the top related movies are "The Science of Sleep" and "Sex and Lucia." Hmm... That doesn't seem quite right to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Similar movies are pulled from TMDB API. We have nothing to do with it. But you are right, in some situations similar movies don't make much sense. We have to dig deeper into this and find a good solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the UI and the results! I'd just say that I have two concerns; while the click-to-add nature of the genre list is great, I don't think it's immediately intuitive. Perhaps I'm just part of the old "if you click a link it takes you to a page" demographic, but clicking to add or subtract -- while in my opinion the right mechanic here -- isn't immediately obvious. Making it more clear how this works could save you some traffic by avoiding requests from people who don't immediately understand how the UI works.

The second thing is that, on browsing movies "from Japan," I immediately get _Band of Brothers_ , _Kill Bill_ , _Lost in Translation_ , _The Last Samurai_ , and the latest American reboot of _Godzilla_. If it's intended to show movies _set_ in a particular country, that's potentially a really cool gimmick, but as it is it seems inaccurate.

Love the site, though! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER17> Login with Twitter doesn't work. After authorizing on Twitter.com, the "Please sign in" modal just stays there.

<comment><USER4> None work for me either :/ really bummed because my girlfriend and I were just looking for movies to watch

<comment><AUTHOR> You can do anything except add them to a watchlist! We did some fixing, please tell us if it's working now? It's hard to reproduce the error.

<comment><USER4> sorry for the late response. It is working now! Thanks for the fast support

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't load main content for me in FF. Console says "SecurityError: The operation is insecure." line 2 in [http://www.movieo.me/assets/after_load/application-f2fa75b0d...](http://www.movieo.me/assets/after_load/application-f2fa75b0dcbe2e31d647144898b50bff.js).

<comment><USER19> It's working fine for me in FF 32.0.3 and Chrome 37.0.2062.120 (64-bit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very performant on the front end. Impressive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you sir. It might have been slower for some people since we weren't really prepared for this amount of traffic.

HN rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great job. I like that you can combine genres, e.g. Science Fiction + Musical: [http://www.movieo.me/?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_movies&...](http://www.movieo.me/?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_movies&rate_by=imdb_top&genres%5B%5D=22&genres%5B%5D=878)

</comment><comment><USER22> Potentially related- Vunify is a service for discovering and following streaming content across multiple providers.

[http://www.vunify.com/](http://www.vunify.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> One issue is that i am not able to actually login with Twitter or Google+. Facebook seems to be working Google [http://movieo.me/auth/failure?message=csrf_detected&strategy...](http://movieo.me/auth/failure?message=csrf_detected&strategy=google) Dont recall twitters.

WHAT i would love to have is a way to mark the movies i have seen and perhaps filter them out from the list ! That would make my life easier in picking up movies !

Other than that, this looks amazing. Great work

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello! Could you please try loging in now and tell us if it works.

<comment><USER23> Hey both of them seem to be working correctly now.

Just that facebook login has vanished

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great interface. How about adding a small trailer button on each movie preview as well. Would save people time of clicking for a movie and then going for the trailer. Just my thoughts.

<comment><USER11> Already there. It's the play button in the lower left when you're in grid view, or the giant trailer button in list view :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks good!

I think you have a small issue with the Rotten Tomatoes API, for example with the movie Lucy ([http://www.movieo.me/240832-lucy](http://www.movieo.me/240832-lucy)). The page shows a 96% audience score, while the Rotten Tomatoes website says 48% ([http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucy_2014/](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucy_2014/)).

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed this aswell, it happens with audience score of some fresh movies (less than 1 month old). We pull this data from OMDB, so we can't really control it. We'll try to fix most of these cases manually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just out of interest which data sources are you using?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use both TMDB and OMDB api's

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Really love the site and bookmarked. For an anime movie fan it's tough to find a nice place that does all the things you guys do in a user-friendly way, so this is epic.

Highest audience rated animation from Japan between 2000 and 2014? Bam, there you go. That's how you help people. :)

So thank you for making this. If you need any extra help / feedback in return, lemme know.

<comment><USER28> That exact kind of search (and more!) has been supported on the major private bittorrent trackers for years. They also have the benefit of offering all the movies with a single click.

<comment><USER27> Interesting. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The subtle UI stuff makes for a great user experience. Were there any other sites that gave you inspiration for the user interface? I didn't know this type of frontend UI was possible just using SCSS/jquery/coffeescript, hope is alive again! Also, APIs just let you download all their data into your own database? Thanks again!

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure if it was a direct inspiration, but the UI reminds me of Vdio ([http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing- vdio.html](http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing-vdio.html)). I can't link to the actual site as it has since shut down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Where does the data come from? TMDB is a great source. Letterboxd has a similar design and lots of curation features. Good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Letterboxd is beyond awesome, their only downside is suboptimal browsing experience. We tried to focus on just that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like the way you guys locally storing the information about user's last page and open it up when the user comes again.

</comment><comment><USER33> very pretty and usable design. found some decent films already. overall, great execution – compared to similar services I've used.

I like that it works on mobile too, but why does the page need to be reloaded when I resize the browser width? upon resizing, I lost my scroll position and I noticed the text all became red at tablet-ish width.

</comment><comment><USER34> Movies by Dan Gilroy is showing a random selection of films by other directors: [http://www.movieo.me/director/57113-dan- gilroy?grid=grid_mov...](http://www.movieo.me/director/57113-dan- gilroy?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_mobile_movies&rate_by=tomato_top)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see... we'll see what's up with this. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is really great, but it would be amazing if it had Netflix and Amazon streaming availability filters.

<comment><USER36> Second this. Seems like the second most important thing behind the movie ranking is its availability on Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV - e.g. I want to find the best ranked movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll do integrations with other services soon. Netflix is unfortunately shutting down their API in 10 days so... yeah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Awesome job. I'd love to incorporate your database into my movie app! [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moviedo-todo-lists-for- movie...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moviedo-todo-lists-for- movies/id856463297?mt=8)

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have an API yet unfortunately. We got the data from TMDB/OMDB. You can pull from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> cool!

Not really a criticism but more of a question as I'm not a designer by any means:

Why do you only use a sliver of horizontal screen space in the middle?

I only mention this because it looks slightly unusual on my 27"

[https://i.imgur.com/rVxPCQG.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/rVxPCQG.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried stretching content to 100% of 27" viewport but it looked too cluttered. Imagine if you were reading a book where page width was half meter long. I hope you understand what I mean.

We could left align it tho. Didn't really try yet. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looks great. My company maintains a similar demo site where you can search movies by mood. For example, show me a funny movie that has some action in it. [https://jaman.com/](https://jaman.com/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Well done. I always have a very bad time when trying to figure out which movie I want to watch, most websites have bad navigation / filtering capacities / just unfriendly in general. Movieo solves that problem elegantly.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is a really good idea, and a useful app.

Only suggestion: Number of ratings/reviews should hold more weight in the sorting algorithm.

e.g. Hollywood Buddha (2003) shouldn't be the RT Audience Rating second highest ranked film all time.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two rate by options "Top Movies" and "Strictly by rating".

"Top movies" take into account the number of votes and use the same algorithm as IMDB does for their top 250.

"Strictly by rating" does what it says. It sorts movies strictly by rating, and only includes movies that have at least ~8 reviews on RT, ~25000 on IMDB.

<comment><USER41> To be more clear, I suggest that Strictly by Rating require a minimum number of user reviews counted, and excludes movies with RT Audience reviews still in a "Want to See" status.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is this being powered by freebase? I was surprised that the site wasn't user powered - that is to say, it is basically a UI with filters to browse an existing database. Tell me if I'm right.

<comment><AUTHOR> We pulled all data from TMDB and OMDB into our own database.

<comment><USER42> Did you mean IMDB instead of OMDB?

<comment><USER43> OMDB is the Open Movie Database - [http://www.omdbapi.com/](http://www.omdbapi.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Great app! Was actually working on something similar as a side project. But you really nailed it! Awesome UI and great feature set.

Also I would suggest to add a random button. It's simple and a lot of fun.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is brilliant. Loved the entire experience. Well done.

For Netflix I have built, www.flicksery.com to solve my own problem of searching for good movies. Unfortunately the API is going to shut down soon. :(

</comment><comment><USER46> Login with Twitter and Google doesn't work. After authorizing , the "Please sign in" modal just stays there. I don't use facebook as a policy. So I did not try it.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is wicked. It's slow, probably getting hammered by HN and/or has to retrieve data from various online servers (imdb and whatnot) but it's wicked guys, congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I feel bad for our server right now. We actually pulled all data (300k+ movies, 800k+ people) into our own database. If it had to retrieve from various sources in real time it would have crashed long time ago. Time to upgrade the servers and cache everything into oblivion I suppose :|

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like this a lot. The only thing I wish it had was links to which streaming services I can go to to watch the movie, or maybe that is there and I just missed it.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's funny... I'm so used to waiting a few seconds for Netflix's tooltips to appear I was very pleasantly surprised when I started browsing this.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is beautiful. Add in information/filtering for whether it's on Netflix/Amazon Prime Streaming etc... and i'd pay a small fee for this.

</comment><comment><USER51> Beautiful website, I love the look and feel. One suggestion, I wish I could navigate between movies with the arrow keys in the close-up view.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will be adding that feature tommorow!

<comment><USER52> Came to request the same! Just curious, what's the stack and how long did it take you to build this? I love the look and feel... I am having some issues with signing in though. Twitter and Facebook oauth doesn't seem to be working.

<comment><AUTHOR> The stack is

backend: Postgre/Unicorn/RoR

frontend: SCSS/CoffeeScript/jQuery (no css/js frameworks)

We've been working on this for the past couple of months in our spare time. TBH I have no idea how many hours it took.

The login was broken for some users, we think it's fixed now but were not sure...it's hard to reproduce the error. Please tell us if it's working now!

<comment><USER52> Just cleared my cache and tried logging in via twitter and facebook again - still no luck. Nothing shows in the inspector either. Are you using any CDN service? Might take some time to invalidate the cache if so.

It's pretty impressive that you guys hand-rolled the front-end, any reason why you didn't go w/ bootstrap or similar since it's supposed to save you time? (at least on paper) Personally that's what I tend to do myself but just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to have full control over my projects. I have my own mini css framework with all the stuff that I use regularly. I find bootstrap burdensome and restricting.

Same goes for JS. Frameworks offer convenience at the expense of flexibility. Movieo only has ~1000 lines of handwritten javascript... I'd never use JS frameworks for such a small project. And I'd never use CSS frameworks for any project ever.

That's my opinion, but I'm also known for hating on frameworks all the time so...yeah xD

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Cool work. I also liked the UI theme. Did you guys skin it yourself or used some theme? I really suck at front-end that's why I ask.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't use any front end frameworks or themes. The "look and feel" of the site was mostly inspired by the works from Julien Renvoye, Gilles Bertaux and [http://letterboxd.com/](http://letterboxd.com/)

I tried to steal without copying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Have you got any technology/design stack used to build this .. looks very clean and intuitive from UI/backend prospective ..

<comment><AUTHOR> backend: Postgre, Unicorn, Ruby on Rails

frontend: SCSS/CoffeeScript/jQuery (no frontend frameworks were used)

<comment><USER55> Good to see another example of a site that didn't have to buy into one of the trendy SPA frameworks to build a nice UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Looks great so far! Are you planning to open source it? I'm sure, many people would be glad to contribute, including myself :)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible.

We didn't really expect this much traffic/good feedback. In the next week or two we'll be polishing the site and adding some much requested improvements. We need to collect our thoughts now and see what can be done concerning the Netflix integration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Could you integrate with trakt? That way I could filter out all the movies that I have seen to better find recommendations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't even know about trakt untill you mentioned it. We'll look into it.

<comment><USER56> I discovered trakt a few months ago - it's great! They offer an open API and store the imdb id for each movie, so it shouldn't be a problem to integrate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Metacritic support would be nice as well. Metacritic converts the scales for each rater to a percentage and averages them

</comment><comment><USER59> I want a service that i tell the movies i had seen and liked, and based on these tells me what i might be interested in

<comment><USER60> Like [http://www.jinni.com/](http://www.jinni.com/), [http://www.suggestmemovie.com/](http://www.suggestmemovie.com/), [http://www.tastekid.com](http://www.tastekid.com), .. or do a search for "movies like ..." or whatever at Google, or do an advanced search at IMDB ...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is beautiful, great work!

Small nit: top right corner says "Rate by IMDB" but I think you mean "Rating by IMDB".

<comment><USER62> Or "Sort by ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Facebook sign-in doesn't work. Wanted to put things on watchlist, but didn't want to enable Post to FB.

<comment><AUTHOR> We would never post to facebook on your behalf. The login wasn't working but we did some fixing. Is it working now? It's hard to catch the error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Good work, one thing I'll note is that the page was very slow to load on my phone, it look around 40 seconds?

<comment><USER65> I suspect that is due to it being frontpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Look awesome! How do you deal with copyrights ? For example, the images or the data associated with you display ?

</comment><comment><USER67> Very cool. Thanks. One feature request: The ability to order by things other than rating, like release date.

</comment><comment><USER68> Fantastic execution. Enough has been said about the great UI. I am interested in how you got all that data.

<comment><AUTHOR> TMDB/OMDB API's, crapload of scripts and lots of patience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Let me filter by RT score. Also, maybe always show the score? One could write an extension for that anyway.

</comment><comment><USER70> Do you scrape the data or get it from a web service? What do you use for scraping in case of the former?

<comment><USER71> The thumbnails are coming from tmdb.org, so I guess he's using their API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This is the interface I want on my TV!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those of you who couldn't log in, please try again now and tell us if it works. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER73> If there was a filter for "Available to stream on Netflix", I'd be all over this.

<comment><USER74> With an option to specify country, as different movies are available for different regions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I'm impressed. I've already discovered a few movies I'm adding to my queue.

</comment><comment><USER76> this is pretty but man is it bad at recommending similar movies in the documentary genre. it might as well be giving completely random results:

[http://www.movieo.me/14002-baraka](http://www.movieo.me/14002-baraka)

</comment><comment><USER77> Might be usefull for someone but expected much much more given the title and the forum.

</comment><comment><USER78> bookmarked. very intuitive & easy to use. looking fwd to updates. some movies are available for free on YT. perhaps they could be linked to. also whether streamable on netflix/amazon/... would be nice too.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm tempted to steal your concept and build a version of this for video games.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I'd like to do aswell...

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I love the subtle zoom effect in the grid when mouse hovers over poster image.

</comment><comment><USER81> Very useful. Can you add links to amazon/hulu/torrents?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love to add torrent links or even stream but... you know... we're scared :<

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I like it. Might be nice to filter by MPAA rating additionally.

</comment><comment><USER83> I am curious... how do sites like these make money? Youtube?

<comment><AUTHOR> We make no profit whatsoever. Movieo is our side passion project.

We could make money through ads(lame, not gonna happen), donations(we could add a button somewhere, but like anyone's gonna donate), amazon etc. links(we'll add those to movie page).

Anyway I doubt we'll make any money on this. And it doesn't matter since that wasn't the point. We just wanted to make something cool that people would use.

Also, we use free stuff all the time. Programming languages are free. Frameworks are free. Sometimes it's nice to give back to community.

We'll be able to put it in our CV's I guess (nobody cares about those either).

<comment><USER84> Ok then have a look at these guys and you may get ideas on how to make money. gyde.tv

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> It would be great to have a way to integrate this with XBMC

</comment><comment><USER86> Good job.

Heads up... seems to be two <head> tags on your home page.

</comment><comment><USER87> this is pretty and looks pretty nice to use. I filtered by "France", and the list actually got only 1 french movie out of 5-10.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using data provided by existing API's, and it's far from perfect in case of countries. Many hollywood blockbusters have numerous country tags. For example if one scene was shot in france, or they partnered with french production or something, it will include the tag "fr".

We have some ideas on how to make this more accurate. We'll be improving it in the next couple of days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> This is brilliant, specially the UI. Loved it!

</comment><comment><USER89> I love it! So awesome. Great job.</comment>