A reflection about automatic transcription of music (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.seventhstring.com/resources/autotrans.html <comment><USER2> Transcribing solo piano to MIDI, even very complex polyphonic pieces, is fairly reasonable these days. You can try a demo from a not quite state of the art system here: [https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/](https://piano- scribe.glitch.me/) . (full disclosure, I was one of researchers who produced this system).

I would argue that there's a lot more people that can take the output of the MIDI and turn it into a reasonable score than there are people that can listen to the raw audio and turn it into a reasonable approximation of the notes.

Papers / dataset:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.12247.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.12247.pdf) [New dataset and slightly improved network]

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.11153.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.11153.pdf) [Original Network]

<comment><USER3> Have you made any effort at extracting insights from the models?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree 100% with this essay. I've been transcribing music manually for just over 20 years, and I've dabbled with automatic transcription products and algorithms. A few months ago, I attended my first ISMIR conference (the mostly academic community of researchers working on these problems).

With that background, I've come to believe automatic transcription is still so far from good that we're better off creating tools that make it easier for humans to transcribe. That's our philosophy behind Soundslice ([https://www.soundslice.com/transcribe/](https://www.soundslice.com/transcribe/)), which combines a music notation editor with transcription tools. For anybody interested in transcribing music, I encourage you to give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like an interesting machine learning problem rather than AI complete? There are lots of finicky details when transcribing speech as well, but it's apparently not AI complete. You do need a large corpus so the algorithm knows what's typical.

If I were going to work on this, I would work on generating lead sheets from YouTube videos. Recognizing chords seems like a useful thing to solve?

<comment><USER6> >Recognizing chords seems like a useful thing to solve?

It's also pretty easy to teach and learn for a practicing musician but much more difficult to teach a machine, since you run into issues with blind source separation.

Speech transcription is _good enough_ provided we have enough preprocessing power, assume a single speaker, and know the language beforehand and have trained the model on a large number of previous speakers with the same dialect/accent.

In music, you don't know how many speakers there are (instruments playing), the dialect/accent (orchestration/chord voicing) changes on the fly, representations are non-unique and contextual, and artists intentionally subvert expected results to make good music.

Humans are just better at this and easier to train to do it than computers, for the moment.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, most instruments are built for repeatability, so you can play the same note twice and have it sound pretty much the same. Humans produce speech with a resonant cavity made of soft tissue, so a sound like "aaah" corresponds to an unsharp range of tongue shapes etc. and saying the same thing twice is pretty much guaranteed to sound quite different.

Being able to separate individual notes of a musical piece into sharply defined buckets (keys of a piano) or one-dimensional subspaces (finger position on stringed instruments like guitars) simplifies the source separation problem a lot.

That representations are contextual and subject to interpretation by the artist is a harder problem (as discussed in TFA), but it should be possible to treat it separately from the pure chord recognition problem. (E.g. it would be easy to take notation and a matching MIDI file and then pretend that it's the output of the recognition step which the original notation should be recovered from.)

<comment><USER6> The buckets are more flat than sharply defined (ha). That's part of the problem. Information is lost from notation to pitch to recording, and I suspect one could prove that these transforms don't preserve topology and are not homophormisms that can be easily reversed.

To use your example, finger position is not a one dimensional subspace on a guitar. There are between 1-6 ways to play a given pitch even assuming standard tuning on a six string guitar, which is not a safe assumption to make.

But the issue with chord transcription is one at the heart of source separation outside of VC demos, which is the causality problem that no one likes to talk about. To separate into N sources you need to know a priori that there are N sources to separate into. This is not a trivial thing to predict in chord voicings, where N changes and is not predictable. Then you need to make a best guess at which instrument the pitches fall into, which may be shared.

This is something that even humans fall victim too. Untrained listeners are very bad at quantifying sources in an ensemble, and even trained listeners struggle with notating chord voicings with decent accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All true, although one of the things that bothers me is that even if you can read music you to need to understand the historical context in order to play a piece properly. For example, you would play a Bach piece with a lighter touch and less legato than you would a Beethoven piece with the same notes. And of course a jazz musician looking at music from a certain area is almost certainly going to play what look like eighth notes with swing, which is a completely different feel and should actually be notated differently as well.

<comment><USER9> This is why I tend to prefer "auteur" music; music composed, arranged, produced, performed, and ideally even mixed by the same person/small group of people.

It's a shame we'll never get to hear Beethoven or Mozart playing their pieces themselves, in their intended locations and with their preferred instruments and seats and such. I suspect it'd sound much better than any other performer who's interpreted their work.

<comment><USER3> There are pianoroll recordings of Rachmaninoff and also some very precious early recordings:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBx- tr1FDvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBx-tr1FDvY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rather than targeting formal music notation, I think it makes a lot more sense to use modern digital audio workstation representation (horizontal bars representing individual tracks). I believe this can represent everything music notation can (for practical purposes) and has the advantage of being easily visually readable by people with little musical training (I've spent the time to learn basic music notation and I find it has a very high cognitive overhead for people who didn't learn it during early childhood).

Here's a lovely representation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2tEVVeGCk0&feature=share](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2tEVVeGCk0&feature=share)

It would seem to be likely that given enough training data (labelled scores) you could make a net that took raw complex music in and generated that out.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to work on automatic transcription for drum set. I trained in classical percussion, but I'm self-taught when it comes to rock, so I have trouble figuring out how to reproduce fills that I want to play.

I remember using Transcribe!, created by the author of this article, to try to figure out some of the fills in ZZ Top's La Grange, which isn't a complicated song exactly, but I can't figure out how to make the fills feel right. Transcribe! Is great, btw.

Anyways, I'd be very curious to hear if there's any existing work in this area. I feel like drum transcription could be easier in some ways than "pitched" instruments, but possibly harder in some unique ways too.

<comment><USER4> Yes, there is indeed work in this area! Check out the academic papers published in association with ISMIR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, I've been working on just this for the last 5 months. It's getting there. I'm still a few % behind what 'onset and frames' (see comment by ekelsen) can do but the gap is shrinking and my stuff is orders of magnitude faster.

That said, I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to close the gap, and it's a hard problem to solve. And yes, like the author correctly identifies: for piano solo, or harpsichord.

</comment><comment><USER12> Transcription to accurate MIDI rather than notation is useful: MIDI that captures portamentos, legatos, vibratos and such details of expression.</comment>


Intel 48 core press release - <AUTHOR> http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20091202comp_sm.htm

<comment><USER2> In 2003, Intel was saying they'd have 10ghz processors by the end of the decade.

[http://www.design-reuse.com/news/4850/intel-building- blocks-...](http://www.design-reuse.com/news/4850/intel-building- blocks-10-ghz-processors.html)

<comment><USER3> Here's an announcement from a different company for a 64 core processor from 2007. [http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/08/MIT-startup- rai...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/08/MIT-startup-raises- multicore-bar-with-new-64-core-CPU.ars)

<comment><USER4> Tilera's chip isn't really comparable though: it's really just a big DSP, with an extremely limited memory access model more reminiscent of the Cell SPUs than an ordinary CPU. This, combined with a custom instruction set and the lack of decent caches and vector units let you get away with many more cores on much less silicon using much less power--albeit at a clear cost.

<comment><USER5> I think Tilera's cores are closer to MIPS than to DSPs. It's CPU-ish enough to run Linux and a LAMP stack. That's enough for most of us.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure their memory access model permanently disqualifies their chips from being "normal CPUs".

You can run Linux on a TI OMAP DSP too.

<comment><USER6> OMAP isn't a DSP, it's a dual-core with an ARM on one side and a DSP on the other. I don't know of any port of Linux to an actual DSP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The title of the video is "single-chip cloud computing". At least it's buzzword compliant.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is referring to the fact that you can programmatically power off most of the cores.

<comment><USER3> Dynamically scalable applications are only a small subset of the massive number of things that have fallen under the umbrella of "cloud computing". The definition cloud computing is sufficiently vague that phrases like "single chip cloud computing" don't really have a single intuitive definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "Demo Fact Sheet"[1] is really pie-in-the-sky. My favourites are "Cloud Programming on a Chip: Hadoop Web Search" and "Programming for the 3D Internet: JavaScript Server Farm on a Chip"

[1] [http://download.intel.com/pressroom/pdf/rockcreek/Demo_facts...](http://download.intel.com/pressroom/pdf/rockcreek/Demo_factsheet.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic. I guess I agree that most people don't need the latest and greatest processor - just like a car. But the faster you can run a simulation or compile code the better. It's not always just about web browsing and games on a pc.

<comment><USER5> I am sure games will have a good use for that much cores...

As for browsing, may with 48 cores at their disposal, Adobe can finally speed up Flash on Linux...

Boom badoom tsss

<comment><USER9> Flash applets can't be trivially parallelized.</comment></comment></comment>


Why entrepreneurs shouldn't shoot down 'bad' ideas - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/04/14/entrepreneurs-shouldnt-shoot-bad-ideas/

<comment><USER2> I've scoffed at my share of really stupid ideas: Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest (I still kinda do), ...

<comment><USER3> I still don't personally understand the value of any of those sites/services, although I recognize that apparently a lot of other people do.</comment></comment>


Flat assembler: x86 assembler that does multiple passes to optimize machine code - <AUTHOR> https://flatassembler.net/ <comment><USER2> I did this for 6502 a couple of decades ago. Most times it only did two to three passes to optimize. But some complex code needed more passes.

For x86 assembler how many passes does it usually take to optimize the code?</comment>


Apache Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway - <AUTHOR> https://guacamole.apache.org/ <comment><USER2> I love Guacamole, but the authentication options leave a lot to be desired, in the sense that it defaults to saving passwords for all connections defined, which is nice for usability and, say, having predefined accounts for monitoring but a security nightmare for other purposes.

I wish the default were to prompt users to _always_ authenticate against the target systems, and store no passwords whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> The frontend code is really lean, so adding an authentication prompt should be fairly easy.

<comment><USER2> That's not really my point. It should be there by default...

<comment><USER3> Well, they do have an issue tracker [https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/GUACAMOLE](https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/GUACAMOLE)

<comment><USER2> That is still not the point.

This has been open since 2015:

[https://glyptodon.org/jira/browse/GUAC-1303](https://glyptodon.org/jira/browse/GUAC-1303)

New issue: [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GUACAMOLE-221](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GUACAMOLE-221)

<comment><USER3> Downvoting for trying to help is kind of petty though

<comment><USER2> Wasn't me, FWIW. Seems I got downvoted too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see the love as this goes through the phases first as an incubator project and now the real enchilada.

Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727) (Oct2017:1096points,216comments)

</comment><comment><USER5> The install process is still very non trivial, to say the least. The usage expirience is very smooth, though, anazingly for RDP contained in a browser. Some browser addon to supplement the Keyboard shortcuts might be required if I want to use it as a regular phyisical console to a cloud desktop. All in all, pretty cool software!

<comment><USER2> I just used a Docker compose file. Took me all of 15m...

<comment><USER2> Forgot I had actually put my fork up on GitHub, and tweaked it for the current versions:

[https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-compose- guacamole](https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-compose-guacamole)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would it be possible to use Guacamole in a setup with a server and a client, if neither the server or the client has an externally visible IP, and their firewalls cannot be configured?

Alternatively, are there other solutions which make it "easy" to enable SSH access to the server in such a scenario?

<comment><USER7> You can use something like [https://ngrok.com/](https://ngrok.com/) to expose a local SSH server.

<comment><USER6> Perfect, thanks! Will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've used guacamole many times and can only say good things about it. It's much easier to give a client web based access to their server than explaining how to use remote access.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have set this up many times for less tech-savy friends. What I actually did was have them install docker-compose and provided them with a compose script to build up the latest version. I wouldn't use it myself though, I don't think I'd sleep well at night having a single factor auth webserver with access to my entire network.

<comment><USER10> just require mutual auth (certificate based authentication)on the reverse proxy. extremely simple 2 factor auth

<comment><USER11> Dunno if I'd call dealing with your own SSL CA "simple".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussion (54 days ago, 218 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can I provide remote access to a Windows 10 desktop PC with this?

<comment><USER12> If you can enable RDP on it, you can.

<comment><USER14> So it specifically does not allow Windows 10 Home installs, without hacks [1]. Pro and Enterprise do allow RDP.

1: [https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap](https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Discussed 54 days ago (1096 points):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389727)

</comment><comment><USER16> "Desktops accessed through Guacamole need not physically exist".

I love cloud as much as the next guy, but it is comprised of machines which do have a physical existence.

<comment><USER17> That seems a little pedantic for what is almost certainly talking about VMs and VDIs which are contrasted with 'physical machines'.

<comment><USER16> Which do physically exist (a totally pedantic point).

<comment><USER18> But not as a physical _desktop_ with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I swear I see this pop up on HN once a month. Has anything changed?

<comment><USER20> The project graduated out of incubator status on the 15 Nov... I don't see a formal announcement about it anywhere, and that isn't really apparent from the page (other than the URL change). Not sure if that is why it was posted or not, but that seems to be what is different from the last time it was posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool

</comment><comment><USER22> A browser is not a client?

<comment><USER23> I think they mean 'agentless' rather than 'clientless'. You don't need to install anything special on the remote machines, just enable standard remote access protocol (ssh, rdp, vnc, etc)

<comment><USER22> "We call it clientless because no plugins or client software are required."

Clientsoftware like mstsc, vncviewer, Teamviewer ... or a browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also related. Thinlinc is free for 5 users and has a web and client access. Includes drag/drop file access, vnc accelerated video, sound, video resizing, etc.

[https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/features/html5](https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/features/html5)</comment>


LinkedIn Hack: a self-organizing work-group to support your job hunt - <AUTHOR> We're forming a group of eight. There are five places left.
What we do is support each other, learn some uncommon hacks for job searches, and we're going to build in public. The core concept is we go to war on LinkedIn! I want everyone in your LinkedIn network to see you forming a group during your job search that helps others. It's a side-project you can talk about in interviews. It'll add some structure to your job search and we'll hold each other accountable.
Here's the key. We have no leader. All I am doing is initiating. This is a self-organizing, autonomous group.
Next step: leave a comment in this post telling us a bit about yourself, what you've done and what you're looking for. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/memetics_blockchain-data-howto-activity-6707189966218264576-AlSa. <comment><AUTHOR> To save copy/paste here's the link to the post to leave your comment in [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/memetics_blockchain-data- howt...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/memetics_blockchain-data-howto- activity-6707189966218264576-AlSa).</comment>


Facebook Bought a Police Force - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3akm7/how-facebook-bought-a-police-force <comment><USER2> Several years ago there were protests in Anaheim over some police incident. If you go about a mile north east of Disneyland, it's a rough area. Anyway the protests started around that area and made their way towards Disneyland. Anaheim PD came out in paramilitary showmanship. It literally looked like PD was about to go to war with all of those armored vehicles PDs bought after the last Middle East invasion. They had sharpshooters on the roof too. They were trying to keep the protestors from stepping foot onto the Disneyland property. So yes, it's common to defend the hand that feeds you and it's no surprise FB has Menlo Park PD on speed dial.

</comment><comment><USER3> Child's play. Try being Apple and getting the police to break a number of laws to raid a reporters home. Apple pays for California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team: [https://publicintelligence.net/rapid-enforcement-allied- comp...](https://publicintelligence.net/rapid-enforcement-allied-computer- team-react-task-force/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd be the first to condemn police brutality but for the expensive property they have in the police department's jurisdiction, Facebook paying what amounts to elective taxes in order to improve security seems totally reasonable.

As someone who does not use Facebook and considers it deeply flawed, nothing presented in the article should cause alarm and it only seems like a misguided attempt to discredit the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kinda agree. In the end police will bend backwards to protect business activity. So in a way it makes sense to protect a business with tens of thousands of employees, but FB shouldn't be setting the PD agenda.

<comment><USER4> Police departments exist to protect property. Every wealthy individual or large business sets the PD's agenda by design.

In order for less-wealthy people to effect the agenda, they can vote or protest but these are significantly less direct than the influence that property ownership provides.

I'm not saying this is good but that it's just the way it is.

I wish the article provided an analysis of different models for maintaining order but the article seems more about causing outrage than finding a solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A</comment>


Entropy in the Universe - <AUTHOR> https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/entropy-in-the-universe/ <comment><USER2> Entropy is not disorder. It is

S ~ log #{microstates}

For hn readers, microstates you can think of as a configuration of a system, so its counting number of configurations. Disorder is not well defined. Stop using the word disorder with entropy. A bunch of more complicated elements have more configurations than just pure H.

<comment><USER3> This may be correct but its useless to make any engineering sense out of it. For engineering and practical intuition, use the following definition that we used at an Ivy-league college in US:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(energy_dispersal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_\(energy_dispersal\))

Quoting the article:

> Even though courses emphasised microstates and energy levels, most students > could not get beyond simplistic notions of randomness or disorder. Many of > those who learned by practising calculations did not understand well the > intrinsic meanings of equations, and there was a need for qualitative > explanations of thermodynamic relationships.

<comment><USER4> Trust the formula you used at an ivy league college? Come on, that's a laughable call to some unknown expert! I don't care if your ideas come from an ivy league college. I care about the ideas and their quality.

I distrust people that think because something came from a prestigious school I should trust them.

<comment><USER3> That's extreme and I am sorry you feel that way. I didn't realize that mentioning Ivy-League college would be seen as ego-inflating thing. I simply wanted to say that it was used in a college level class. I definitely agree, truth matters and not the source.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your civilized reply to my semi-rant ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since this is interesting and nobody has commented yet, let me say as a side note that I like how Mr. Baez emphasized the difference in orders of magnitudes here:

 _The neutrinos from the Big Bang also carry about 10^90 bits — a bit less than the photons. The gravitons carry_ much less, _about 10^88 bits._

A difference in exponents of 2 might not look like a lot but one can almost ignore any of the earlier numbers once a larger exponent appears.

</comment><comment><USER6> From the comments of the author:

"You can puzzle your group by asking whether entropy increases as clouds of gas and dust in the early Universe collapse and form stars and planets. If it doesn't increase, this process violates the Second Law. So _it must increase. But why is it increasing? It seems that order is increasing… so doesn't that mean entropy is decreasing?_

If someone can't answer this puzzle correctly, they don't understand how thermodynamics works in our Universe."

So, who knows the right answer to the puzzle: where and how the increase of the entropy happens? (I also suggest that those who really know should wait for some hours... I'd first actually like to see some wrong answers which try to be right but don't manage to be -- just to get some better picture of the readers here -- I don't know if this will work).

<comment><USER7> According to Baez, all the matter fields and radiation fields were in equilibrium at the big bang, so by elimination the answer has to have something to do with gravity (which is, after all, the force driving the formation of the gas clouds, stars, etc). So here's my guess: Evenly distributed matter has gravitational potential energy. By collapsing, a cloud of gas can convert this into thermal energy, raising its entropy. This compensates for the fact that the cloud's volume has reduced, which would reduce entropy on its own.

How did I do? :)

<comment><USER7> Here's another thing: I remember learning that all the nice usable energy we get from the sun is due to the fact that the big bang produced lots of hydrogen, but fusing four hydrogens into a helium yields a bunch of energy. (And you can still get some energy out by fusing further, all the way down to iron.) So if matter and radiation were at equilibrium at the big bang like Baez says, why wasn't more helium (and heavier elements down to iron) formed, leaving nothing for the stars to burn?

I think the answer has to be that the temperature was incredibly high at the time of the big bang: At really high temperatures, it's more favourable for nucleons to be flying around separate from each other as protons. At lower temperatures, it starts being better for them to be things like helium and carbon, and at lower temperatures still, iron. So if the universe's temperature had lowered very very gradually, we would be stuck with nothing but iron at this point, leaving nothing for the stars to burn. So it seems we owe our sunlight, in some sense, to the fact that the universe cooled fairly quickly?

<comment><USER6> > At lower temperatures, it starts being better for them to be things like > helium and carbon, and at lower temperatures still, iron.

It actually doesn't work that way: we don't expect that the whole universe will ever be all iron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it interesting that he mentions gravitons as a definite piece of particle physics, on the same order as photons, etc.

I was under the impression that gravitons were simply one part of one possible conception of quantum gravity, and that we were definitely unsure about whether or not they exist.

<comment><USER9> Gravitons are speculative in that they haven't been observed, but they're almost certainly the correct language for describing mild quantum corrections to general relativity. Simple scaling arguments show that _any_ theory of quantum gravity that reduces to general relativity at low energies passes through a regime where it can be described by gravitons. Whether gravitons are fundamental objects in quantum gravity is irrelevant for the kind of state counting Baez is talking about.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the explanation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That zoom-able image is amazing. Sometimes we forget how big the universe is. And that's just an image of the Milky Way.

<comment><USER11> Yea that also amazed me, aside from the science a great way to put things into perspective when you are struggling with something.

<comment><USER12> I honestly think this is what I love in sci-fi, some space opera most notably: whereas most stories are usually told in terms of space and time, sci-fi sometimes speaks in terms of scale, of orders of magnitudes — because space (I mean the cosmos, not the dimensions) is a natural playground for that.

Sometimes, when I ponder the discrepancy between quantum, or whatever's smallest, perhaps strings 'below' (in scale) or 'within' (physically), and the largest relativistic objects like "dark attractors" and meta-galactic structures (streams of 'dark matter', light nodes, etc)...

 _It almost seems like scale is but another kind of dimension in and of itself._

Like you've got spacetime at our human-ish scale (roughly 10 orders of magnitude smaller to larger around our size), and that spacetime behaves in a certain way, that probably Einstein describes accurately. Then you've got spacetime at smaller scales, below "quantum uncertainty" if we must place a limit, and there spacetime behaves in a much different way, the picture is _very, very different_.

And so there could be yet another spacetime at a higher threshold of scale, and intuition tells me it may be at the galacatic level already, because dark matter, rotation discrepancy, and those weird supermassive blackholes; the flow of galaxies, the meta-structure we see. Dark energy, if it's real, also begins at that scale (doesn't break galaxies apart, but makes holes bigger between them, the non-correlated enough sets).

Going from this idea to postulating disjointed (1+3) spacetimes forming, in effect in this example, 3x4=12 dimensions to explore mathematically, let alone physically, is a stretch which I'm certainly not willing to make (although I think that's what some string theories must reduce to, somehow, maybe reduced to a single unified dimension of time maybe?); no really this doesn't make sense in my head. It's pretty but nonsensical, like art I guess. Worth the sci-fi, not the studies.

But the feeling, the intuition really is that, and conveyed by these extreme zooming animations: a different scale means totally different phenomena, and no macro-system can be reduced to its parts in that view, nor can it be deduced from its parts (I mean, we can't even solve the 3-body problem, that's harsh on "scaling continuity" or smoothness, on the "linearity" of scales so to speak). A "basic" intuition I guess is that the 4 fundamental interactions have ranges, and kick in or out depending on a particular scale of the system.

Scales are obsessing me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The total entropy of all the stars, 10^82, is 2^270

I love this, because the useful 256 bit string (2^256) is only 43 characters long in base64, and to get to 2^270, it is only 45 base64 characters.

I was just playing with this on Thursday, January 9th 2020 because I wanted to predict how many bits I needed to address every atom in the observable universe, which also just so happens to be 10^82. I use this example to depict the power of cryptography.

</comment><comment><USER14> I thought you 0 kelvin was the lowest possible value on the kelvin scale. How come this post mention negative kelvin values? Is it not temperature?

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, there actually is such a concept as negative temperature. It applies to systems that have a maximum allowable energy as well as a minimum one. Such systems must be isolated from the outside world, and set up carefully, but it is possible to actually get negative temperatures. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature)

<comment><USER15> I remember that from a class on lasers I took when I was an undergrad. All the physicists thought it was really cool and significant and argued about who was the first to see it coming. The engineers were totally unfazed. Whatever it takes to get the project working. And I was a would-be mathematician, so I asked whether temperature could be imaginary.

<comment><USER16> Did you get a no or something more interesting?

<comment><USER16> (I am asking for elaboration on what physicists and engineers have to say about imaginary temperatures if they didn't flatly dismiss the concept. I recognize it may read as snarky, but I really was just aiming for clever.)

<comment><USER15> No problem.

Basically the physicists thought I was winding them up and the engineers, notably including the prof, thought my priorities were all screwed up. I really did want to know the answer, but in retrospect they were both a little bit right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article got me thinking about the universe's mass distribution.

Is the number of galaxies at any edge of our observable universe similar to the number of galaxies in our observable universe?

tl;dr does the (entire) universe have a uniform distribution of mass?

Now, I'm aware that the universe has always been expanding from every point in all directions since the singularity before the big bang. This means that effectively 1.) every point in the universe can make the claim of being "at the center" 2.) none of them can 3.) the question is meaningless

Which of those answers you find satisfying is more of a philosophical question which I'm not concerned with for this question.

My question is this - if we were to somehow reach the edge of our universe instantaneously, simply to observe what things looked like from that point of view, would we find that there's roughly the same distribution of stars/galaxies/matter in all directions?

I'm aware that questions with the premise that FTL/instantaneous travel is possible tend to be "unknowable" to a degree.

Perhaps another way of wording it would be - do we expect the amount of matter to be of a uniform distribution in every spot in the universe? Is it impossible to know? Or can we use models of the big bang theory to predict that the distribution is roughly equal everywhere?

 __Some philosophical implications that are curious but are probably scientifically meaningless: __

If there 's reason to believe that there is a uniform distribution of mass in all observable universe, and the universe is infinite, does that imply there are an infinite number of galaxies, all of which are inaccessible if they're outside our observable universe?

If so, is out ever appropriate to consider these infinite observable universes as essentially a multi-verse, containing many combinations of observable universes, one of which is statistically likely to be similar to our own observable universe?

As always with questions regarding the size of the universe, it's center, etc. I suspect the answer will be "it's a meaningless question because we can never know", but I'm hoping that research into the big bang itself could provide some evidence.

Please let me know if I haven't used proper terms or am making a critical mistake in my current understanding of astronomy.

<comment><USER18> The way I understand it is that there is not really an edge. Spacetime itself is expanding, the best analogy I've heard is consider a spherical balloon that is being inflated. We exist as two dimensional beings on that balloon. No matter where you put two dots on that balloon, they will move further apart.

You could also draw a circle on the surface of that balloon which represents the furthest points that we can reach if we traveled at the speed of light. Nothing outside that circle would be observable to us, so it could be argued that it doesn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The image is awesome!</comment>


Ask HN: Have you used Alteryx? What are your thoughts on it? - <AUTHOR> - I'm being encouraged to use Alteryx at work. For just about anything that it can do - data preparation, exploratory analysis, model building, geospatial analysis, data upload/download, web-scraping, building analytical apps that can be shared with non-technical users.
- I already know Python and R so Alteryx seems incredibly limited
- In general my preference would be open source over licensed software and a programming language over a GUI
I have a long list of criticisms of Alteryx, but I'm writing this post as a sanity/bias check. Have you used it? What was your experience? What tasks did you find it suitable/unsuitable for? Do you think it offers anything that justifies the cost? <comment><USER2> Data prep, geospatial analysis, exploratory analysis and data upload/ download its great for business users.

The other stuff - it's quite weak particularly if you know R and Python already. Give Dataiku a look - would be interested in your thoughts there but think it's likely more robust and closer to what you're looking for</comment>


Monofur: a groovy coding font - <AUTHOR> http://eurofurence.net/monofur.html

<comment><USER2> That font looks truly terrible in the example shown on the page. I assumed that it was a problem with my browser, but it turns out the sample is a bitmap. It looks like a decent font resized using the worst bitmap resizing algorithm in the shop.</comment>


Why don't refugees fly? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2016/02/11/why-dont-refugees-fly/ <comment><USER2> tl;dr: A plane ticket costs 1/3 of what a smuggler with a rubber boat on the mediteranian costs. By european law airlines can't take people without visas (a bit simplified), even if the law agrees that even people without identification are allowed to seek refuge.

So they are just not allowed to fly and responsibility is shifted to the airliner, which have to pay if they are not strict enough. And refugees are forced risk their lifes with the rubber boat and smugglers.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your motivational saying? - <AUTHOR>

I don't know about you guys, but I need something stupid to say to myself to keep working on whatever late at night.<p>The phrase I've been repeating recently is "you are the backup". My main problem is always thinking about how someone smarter could solve an issue in a second or this would have been easier if I had done blah earlier in life. <comment><USER2> Funny, I always have wallpapers with a saying to help me stay focused. :)

My favourite are those two : [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/wallpaper-18584.jp...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/wallpaper-18584.jpg) [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/wallpaper-2090640....](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/wallpaper-2090640.jpg)

But I also got those 2 quite often : [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/KISS___Keep_It_Sim...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/KISS___Keep_It_Simple__Stupid_by_leikarnes.jpg) <https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4286043/walls_hn/wallpaper44969.jpg>

<comment><USER3> "Do your work. Don't be stupid."

That is surprisingly effective.

<comment><USER2> Well, it's as simple as it can be :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When faced with something difficult at work I'll say:

"If it wasn't a challenge it wouldn't be fun."

Sometimes I'll say it under my breath through gritted teeth..."

</comment><comment> UX-UI-Guru "If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today." —Mike Krzyzewski

</comment><comment><USER5> "Shut up."

(Addressed to the participants of my internal conversations..)

</comment><comment><USER6> Done is better than perfect

</comment><comment><USER7> If it's not worth doing your best, it's not worth doing at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> The biggest risk is not taking one.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Lets finish it.."</comment>


ISP in file-sharing wi-fi hack - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8305379.stm <comment><USER2> An ISP can't connect traffic to an individual. They can't magically prohibit law breaking. They can't perfectly secure their wifi access points.

Yet these laws would hold private citizens accountable if they are not capable of doing these things.

(To say nothing of those businesses that offer free and open WiFi access to all comers.)

It's surprising to me, in democratic nation after nation, that we're hearing these same arguments again and again: The straight-faced assertion that citizens should have a greater legal responsibility than corporations and that they should have inherently fewer rights (to freely share their internet connection if they wish).

</comment><comment><USER3> I was surprised that, after having DSL problems, my not-very-technical friend cracked 5 APs in his area in less than a day.

Now, _I_ can do this, as can some of my geek friends, but the fact that this guy easily did it was pretty amazing to me. It also shows that you can't hold people responsible for what comes across their wire.

</comment><comment><USER4> Superb!

That is the sort of creative demonstration that will really help throw this stupid idea out. Go Talk Talk!

<comment><USER2> It seems to me that if one of these measures ever passes, properly peaceful activists should arrange a similar 'experiment' on a larger scale.

See how the ISPs like it when they need to shut down half their customers. See how willfully oblivious the people are willing to be, when they and their neighbors are getting strongly-worded letters telling them that they are assumed guilty of criminal activity.

<comment><USER4> Good idea. Except I would point out:

 _See how the ISPs like it_

For the most part he ISP's are actually with us on this one; they don't like these ideas either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ultimately, there is nothing that can be done about sharing data.

We're at the beginning of a cascading stupid-decision phenomenon. But, at some point we are going to have rethink our reward paradigm.

Change the meaning of money?

<comment><USER6> Money is supposed to represent _value_ , but I think it might be suited to material value specifically, as opposed to immaterial value. The legal situation rapidly approaches ridiculousness as more immaterial value is introduced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's cute how the industry thinks that law is relevant to file-sharing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Will we start to see attempts to ban "old" and insecure wireless routers? If your router only does WEP then you're open to this kind of attack, and no amount of configuring it will fix it...

<comment><USER8> But isn't it a wonderful excuse! "Oh, it was my WEP that did it, officer".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So if my car is stolen and used in a terrorist bombing I'm also liable?

<comment><USER10> No, you would receive a notification in the first instance, which would represent an opportunity to discuss terrorism with others in the household and which would provide the car owner with the information and tools to help ensure that the car is not used illegally again.

But if it's used again, you're fucked.</comment></comment>


What is a "Good Job?" - <AUTHOR> http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2016/04/what-is-good-job.html <comment> awinter-py Decline in on-the-job training (buried at the bottom) is the most import stat here; more important even than declining tenure.

Training speaks to what employers are 'buying' when they hire someone and engages with other trending topics in econ research: the changing skills-mix of jobs (i.e. the weakness in the middle), the employability of college grads as the metric for the worth of a degree.

A positive take on this is that free resources make it easier for people to self-train so jobs don't _have_ to train you. The negative take is that 'labor alone' is of declining value and we're increasingly employing people for their 'information content', not their rote performance.

</comment><comment><USER2> In my view, programmer scores very high in the criteria mentioned: it's creative, non-repeating (to a degree) and collaborative in nature. It also pays well, and is in demand and pretty future proof.

[http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software- dev...](http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is- a-great-career-choice/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love- coding/](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but every evening you are taking all of your problems home with you. Programming has a very high load on the memory.

In contrast doctors and lawyers don't even have this kind of memory load. For example, medical records are mostly sufficient; we often understand if a doctor has to look things up; however, if a programmer doesn't remember how a program is structured, things get difficult quickly.

<comment><USER4> You couldn't be more wrong.

Lawyers take their work home with them every day. They never have any rest at all, because they have to respect certain deadlines and they have multiple clients breathing down their neck. Next to that, there's also the question of morality: Sometimes a lawyer has to make immoral decisions to get the right outcome. This is especially true in penal law.

Doctors have to face the consequences of wrong diagnoses. If one of the patients dies because of an error the doctor made, you can be damn sure he'll carry that mistake with him for the rest of his life. Not only morally, but also legally and it could be a possible career killer.

Programmers have it the easiest, they only have computational problems to worry about. While programming is without a doubt strenuous on the mind, it is by no means affected by morality and therefore incomparable to practicing law or medicine.

<comment><USER3> > Lawyers take their work home with them every day.

But how long does each case take?

> Doctors have to face the consequences of wrong diagnoses.

I found this:

> Medical misconduct is defined as behavior that deviates from duty by a > healthcare professional. Examples of medical misconduct include, but are not > limited to the following: practicing as a healthcare professional > fraudulently, practicing with gross incompetence or medical negligence, > practicing while impaired by alcohol, drugs, physical or mental disability, > being convicted of a crime, filing a false report; guaranteeing that > treatment will result in a cure, refusing to provide services because of > race, creed, color or national origin, performing services that are not > authorized by the patient, harassing, abusing or intimidating a patient, > ordering excessive tests, and/or abandoning or neglecting a patient in need > of immediate care.

It is a bit more subtle, but it seems that if doctors just follow the book, they will be fine.

My personal experience with doctors is that they always have to look my data up. Every time I visit one, I hear: "let's see what case we have here" (and looks at computer screen).

<comment><USER4> 1\. Honestly? Years. Sadly courts don't work as quickly as television series suggest. Every case has a number of deadlines for appealing, pleading, etc. Also, a very high number of cases are handled simultaneously by one lawyer. This one of the reasons why young associates burn out pretty easily.

2\. Medical misconduct as defined by law, with some examples included (a non- exhaustive list). What is your point with this? That article is purportedly vague so that medical accidents could be judged on a case by case basis. In other words, if the opposition has a good lawyer, you're screwed.

And you're forgetting the point of my post. Even if the doctor didn't do anything wrong legally, he'll still be haunted by the loss of a patient if he could have prevented it somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I'd have to say that a good job is one which pays you a lot to do comparatively little. But you know, that's because unlike most people giving career advice, I actually expect workers to have a sense of self-interest and economic rationality rather than investing their entire emotional well-being and identity in their job.

> I certainly don't expect that we will ever reach a future in which jobs will > be all about deep internal fulfillment, with a few giggles and some > comradeship tossed in. As my wife and I remind each other when one of us has > an especially tough day at the office, there's a reason they call it "work," > which is closely related to the reason that you get paid for doing it.

Good. So let's just get rid of work to the greatest degree we can. What is even the point of increasing productivity if it won't buy us more stuff for less work?

<comment><USER6> I often think about this Russelian argument about work, specifically via _In Praise of Idleness._ [1] Sometimes to me it feels dirty to contemplate doing nothing, being idle, without direction as a lifestyle choice.

To your point, what can be done? On one hand, some argue that we've come a long way from Russel's era, and that work and life is much better off and closer to his philosophical goal than we credit. On the other hand, this discussion clearly shows a desire to look for the essense of what make a job "good."

[1][http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of- idleness/?si...](http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of- idleness/?single=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Engagement is only part of the story, though. There are a tremendous number of workers in the US who:

\- Can't even work as many hours as they want to

\- Don't get benefits typically associated with full-time work (healthcare, retirement plans, etc.)

\- Are stuck in low-end service jobs even though they are qualified for higher-end jobs

\- Are doing contract work even though they want the stability of full-time work

Engagement in a job becomes important after a certain point, but we're still a long way from there outside of the SV employment bubble.

</comment><comment><USER8> Easy answer to this one from my perspective- 'any job that respects the 8-hour workday.'

Which seem to be few and far between, and in the US completely dependent on having a good manager. Nothing else to say or add. This changes everything for me, my family life, my happiness and my productivity.

<comment><USER9> You need to respect yourself to get that. If you're willing to work more than 8 hours, managers will take it from you.

There's a good book about how to prevent managers from walking all over you: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Clean-Coder-Professional- Programme...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Clean-Coder-Professional- Programmers/dp/0137081073)

The opening chapters describe programmers in crunch time, and compare them with the lawyers at the same company who leave promptly on time. The rest of the book discusses how to achieve that for yourself.

<comment><USER8> Interesting perspective. I've found that certain places I've worked, they overload you and do everything they can to keep you over time.

Usually the scenario that other people lay out is that you have to stay late and put in that time your first year or two. Then you can go back to being a 9-5 (though in many orgs this shifts from 11-7 or 10-6 to give the illusion you're working later rather than walking out at 5PM).

I disagree with this because then you set a standard that you'll stay late, but on the other hand you can't be let go if you have mouths to feed.

I'm more than strong enough to walk out the door, but the thing I think you're missing is that it's usually NOT the manager at fault here. It's the other employees. They encourage this culture, either brainwashed or hoping it will get them ahead.

American work culture is completely upside down. Bottom line is that the org and laws shouldn't force you to stand for yourself in this regard. Every 1 minute of overtime should result in severe penalties for anyone who has any employee go over. So much that they're hustling you out the door at 5PM. That's how it is in other places, like France. A place I've both lived and worked.

<comment><USER9> _but the thing I think you 're missing is that it's usually NOT the manager at fault here. It's the other employees. They encourage this culture, either brainwashed or hoping it will get them ahead_

tbh it doesn't really matter to me who gets the blame....the only thing I care about is what _I_ can do to fix the situation.

<comment><USER8> Yeah you're right. I'm going to check into that book and see what it has to say. I'm in a good work situation myself right now, but mostly due to a manager who is pretty easy going. I worked in an office for 2 years and 3 years from home now, and I'm very responsible and always get everything done, so he has no worries.. it just works. But with a new workplace I'd be back in the furnace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A "good job" is a job that rewards you well for doing meaningful work.

A job that doesn't reward you well or doesn't provide you with meaningful work will hardly ever be considered a long term "good job".

<comment><USER11> What do you mean by "reward"? If we believe what Alfie Kohn tells us about rewards and their effect on intrinsic motivation, we might argue that the job simply has to compensate sufficiently to remove certain life stresses (i.e. the $75k per household minimum), while allowing the worker to make meaningful choices, create impact and increase skills (ideally in the Flow state of learning.)

[http://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/evidence-incentives- fail/](http://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/evidence-incentives-fail/)

<comment><USER10> By rewarding you well I mean (using your words): "compensate sufficiently to remove certain life stresses" and compensate sufficiently to add some life pleasures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> if you want true engagement and real passion let the worker partecipate in the company profits based on his contributions.

<comment><USER13> Anecdotally, I have a bonus linked to my company profit that are usually between half and full month of salary.

This does not motivate me at all. I actually always forget about it until I receive the amount each year.

This is seems counter intuitive but I work in such a big company that I don't even understand which profits are taken into account to calculate it. Is it the global profit of my division ? or all divisions for my country or region ? (I actually believe this is the latter).

So some year you deliver a project late and you get a big bonus and the next year, you are exceptionally on time and don't get anything.

I am sure it works for smaller company where you can measure very directly the effect of your contribution, but past a certain point, it is hard to measure or understand your impact.

<comment><USER14> My bonus which is in the range of 10-20% of yearly income definitely makes me feel more appreciated.

<comment><USER15> You bring up a good distinction about the bonus as a percentage of your income.

In contrast, my bonuses are on the order of 2-5%. I appreciate them, but they're so small overall and so removed from my actual efforts in the company that it mostly comes across as noise in my budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Good Job" is an oxymoron

<comment><USER17> I feel very sorry for you.

<comment><USER18> when you're working a job, you're giving away the product of your labor. everything you make is owned by your boss. you're compensated with money for the time you spend working. you need money, but time is incredibly precious.

if my situation changed and i didn't need it any longer, no way in hell would i keep my job. my job is good, in that the circumstances are such that the alternative is worse, but that's a pretty weak definition of good. it's a necessary evil. of course i'd rather keep the product of my own labor, and i'd rather have the freedom to use my time without suffering due to a lack of money. what's there to feel sorry for about that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My definition of 'good job' is:

\- The pay is in-line with industry standard. \- Time seems to fly away when you are working (aka not bored). \- When you leave the job, you leave the job as a better person and with better knowledge/skillset.

<comment><USER20> I completely agree, and what makes a great job would be walking out the door and having a sense of fulfillment that you are having a positive impact on the world and genuinely care for the work you do.</comment></comment>


Unsplash – Beautiful photos free to use under the Unsplash License - <AUTHOR> https://unsplash.com/collections <comment><USER2> Unsplash is a really cool resource. We actually use it (paired with another 'sister service' called Unsplash.it) to provide ever changing and semi interesting 404 error pages for our web app... I blogged about how we do it a while back - [http://devan.blaze.com.au/blog/2015/11/3/errors-dont-have- to...](http://devan.blaze.com.au/blog/2015/11/3/errors-dont-have-to-be-boring)

<comment><USER3> You might want to add a text shadow, because the error message isn't visible on quite a few images. I just loaded the page 5 times, and couldn't see it twice.

[http://i.imgur.com/YNBEUzc.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YNBEUzc.jpg)

Also, it gives some strange behavior in Firefox. If I load the below in a tab, it shows a random image as expected. Then if I open it again in a new tab it shows the previous image that loaded from the first tab, and then it switches images to a new random one a second later.

[http://www.hrpartner.io/nopage](http://www.hrpartner.io/nopage)

Lastly, you could solve the above issues, and decrease the load time from 1s to 200ms if you just self hosted a few random images, and you wouldn't have to worry about your 404 page depending on Unsplash.

Edit: It's actually taking 6-8 seconds to load the image now, and the 404 page is white text on a white background during that time.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I do notice there are quite a few lighter images on Unsplash nowadays, so the white text will be hidden on those. Will add the shadows to the text as you suggested to make it work better.

I'll investigate those Firefox issues too - I did most of the testing in Chrome, Safari and IE, but will do some more on FF to ensure it works OK on all browsers.

If traffic gets really high on our site, I may resort to locally hosted images to reduce load time. Unsplash.it may also be throttling the image load time for us, as I am thinking the sudden spike from this HN post may have alerted them to the fact that there is suddenly a flurry of remote calls to them from our server IP? Or perhaps the Amazon CloudFront CDN is causing a slow down there? I will investigate - thanks for your useful feedback.

<comment><USER4> You could color-sample the pictures displayed on the fly with a library like color-thief[0] and render the text in some acceptable contrasting color. We do something similar for a bit of our app that allows the users to set color schemes.

[0][http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color- thief/](http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/)

<comment><USER2> Nice library! All javascript too. Thanks for the heads up - will certainly make an interesting project to use this to calculate the text colour for the error screens.

In fact, I may be able to go back to using coloured Unsplash images. I went for Grayscale images _purely_ so that I could stick to white text for the contrast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was recently featured[1] in collection #127, and as a long time user it feels really awesome to give back and let others use my work.

I've also been to a few of their NYC meetups and it's clear that the site is backed by an amazing community.

1 - [https://unsplash.com/collections/curated/127?photo=jYYpTndzo...](https://unsplash.com/collections/curated/127?photo=jYYpTndzopI)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your contribution! Gorgeous photo. Mind me asking what technical specs went into snapping that?

<comment><USER5> Eiriksmal's post nailed it. I used the Canon 40mm[1] pancake lens (one of my favorites!) and my 5dMkII. That pic was the final night that I was in California[2]. I took a nap and slept through the time I was planning to go to the bridge, but ended up catching the last few minutes of light.

[1] - [https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...](https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/details/lenses/ef/standard- medium-telephoto/ef-40mm-f-2-8-stm)

[2] - [http://becker.am/blog/2014/06/05/california/](http://becker.am/blog/2014/06/05/california/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does the Unsplash license [1] differ from the Creative Commons Zero license?

[1] [https://unsplash.com/license](https://unsplash.com/license)

<comment><USER8> "All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero" implies literally nothing beyond CC0, in which case they could just say CC0 and not try to confuse their intended (license-wary) audience.

(edit: clarity)

<comment><USER9> Could you clarify? You said "...licensed under Creative Commons Zero" means nothing. But then you said they could "just say CC0", which according to what you just said also means nothing. Why would you recommend that, then?

I think I'm just parsing this wrong.

<comment><USER10> > _I think I 'm just parsing this wrong_

Yes. Grantparent asked "How does the Unsplash license [1] differ from the Creative Commons Zero license?" and parent answered: "All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero" implies literally nothing".

Which should be read as meaning "implies literally nothing [is different between the two licenses]" \-- and not that what they wrote means nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unsplash is a great resource.

It's important to point out that "free" and "royalty-free" aren't the same thing. Unsplash images are actually in the public domain, whereas "royalty- free" is a license type where an image can be used multiple times for one payment.

<comment><USER12> They are not in the public domain. They are licensed under "Creative Commons Zero," which is not the same thing.

<comment><USER13> The CC0 page[1] on the Creative Commons website is in the Public Domain section and describes CC0 as a method of contributing works to the public domain.

1\. [https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public- domain/cc...](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)

<comment><USER14> If you read that page, it also explains that it also has a fallback to a very permissive copyright licence in cases where you cannot release a work to the public domain.

Not all countries have a concept of public domain, and many that do have arbitrary restrictions applied to it. In fact, this is one of the reasons you should use CC0 rather than just saying "public domain" or using something like the Unlicense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There goes my evening. Seriously, Thank You for this. This is the best free photo collection I've seen so far and I scout a lot of photo collection sites.

1) I LOVE how you group photos by subject/topic instead of just randomly posting photos and asking the user to search for what they want. Most of the time users don't know what they want and would rather just browse and look around. Browsing lists and collections is more entertaining, engaging, and useful than what other photo sites do: drop off the user in front of a search box and ask "what do you want?". That's like asking someone "tell me everything about you". It forces the user to engage in some serious mental gymnastics and fatigues them. Collections like yours are easier on the brain. Just pick a pretty picture and browse all the pretty photos in that collection. Love it.

2) The photography is beautiful and looks authentic, rare, and avoids that "generic stock photo" feel. These photos look like they're out of somebody's "rare find" folder. They are gorgeous and ready to be used with minimal photoshopping.

3) Most of these already have color correcting and filters applied. Did your site do this? Or did the photographers?

Unique. Useful. Going in my bookmarks. Thanks for this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Always Great quality for fellow web devs out there give [http://unsplash.it](http://unsplash.it) a try for development easy, fast and beautiful placeholder images

<comment><USER17> Interesting to see projects from coworkers on HN!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple products on a distressed wooden table, laid out perfectly yet supposedly naturally positioned, with an open paper notebook: check

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's a quick script I put together which downloads a random image every hour and sets your wallpaper. Only works with Gnome 3/Unity/Cinnamon. Adjust line 5 for different resolutions (currently set for 1920x1080) and adjust line 7 for different update frequency:

[https://gist.github.com/fpgaminer/bdd493ce84eafb7886e08d20c2...](https://gist.github.com/fpgaminer/bdd493ce84eafb7886e08d20c27b0077)

</comment><comment><USER20> 6 months ago I wrote a couple little scripts to download new unsplash into a directory every 6 hours. Then I pointed macos to use random images from that directory for wallpapers. The whole thing is great - its a source of tiny delight throughout my week. Its also a small step toward making my workspace feel more _hackable_.

The whole thing was super hacked together - I'm sure there's nicer solutions around but I'm plenty happy with what I have. Details here if anyone wants to copy what I did: [https://josephg.com/blog/shiny-background- images/](https://josephg.com/blog/shiny-background-images/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Fun fact: when this was firstly posted in HN there were mainly negative comments, about yet another website on a market with many players.

Lately it has become a favorite site for many people. So, just another incarnation of the Google story. <3

</comment><comment><USER22> From the name I thought these photos were free to use as long as you agree never to have a splash popup on your site :)

Maybe someone could actually do that.........

</comment><comment><USER23> I love Unsplash. They also have a Chrome extension to show a random image in your new tab page. Would recommend.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unsplash- instant/p...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unsplash- instant/pejkokffkapolfffcgbmdmhdelanoaih?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER24> Great resource. I'm curious how this impacts photographers though given there's so many sources of free images now. Can you make a living creating and selling stock photos?

</comment><comment><USER25> To think these guys started with 10 photos.

<comment><USER26> I'm guessing they started with none.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do they make sure the submitter of the image is actually the rightsholder/owner?

<comment><USER2> I believe Unsplash hand curate the images they add to their collection to ensure they are SFW and not in violation of any copyright. I believe they only add 10 or so images per week, so it could be manageable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great site but they must use a heck of a lot of bandwidth. How do they stay afloat?

<comment><USER29> There was a blog post about it explaining this in detail: [https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash- cost/](https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash-cost/)

<comment><USER30> That blog post explains the costs but not the revenues. How are they funded?

<comment><USER31> They wrote a post about that too [https://crew.co/backstage/blog/how-side- projects-saved-our-s...](https://crew.co/backstage/blog/how-side-projects- saved-our-startup)

Unsplash is apparently crew.co's highest source of referrals, so i guess it's a loss leader

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wonderful to see more CC0 use compared to a lot of "free" art on the internet that burdens the users with keeping track of attribution requirements and including the license text and all that tediousness.

</comment><comment><USER33> Great resource.

Can somebody recommend similar resource with unprocessed images? Most photos toned or converted to black-and-white.

</comment><comment><USER34> I shared some of my best photos on Unsplash, and I plan to use it in the future. It is a great resource.

</comment><comment><USER35> Big fan of Unsplash, great resource!

</comment><comment><USER36> It is obviously great for users. But I am kinda sad for the artist photographers. I don't think photography should be done for money, and I doubt any photographer would make real money off landscape and generic photos. But at least having a chance of making money via sites like 500px is a good thing in my opinion. Some additional incentive for them to keep trying.

Talented individuals who are well off, giving talent for free makes life harder for other talented individuals who might not actually be well off and might have just this talent. It looks like service is the only thing that will be monetize-able in the future. Actual products will all be available free of cost. I think it will drive down the quality of the best products while driving the average quality up.

<comment><USER37> You don't have to sign a "must produce at least x photos for unsplash" contract when you buy a camera. If they want to make money off their photographs then indeed they'll use a site where they can earn money. Unsplash is not the site for that.

Talented individuals are doing bespoke work, not taking random pictures for peoples' 404 pages. The advice I can give to talented people who are not well off is learn to talk business. Your photos are great, that's why we're talking with you. Now lets hash out the business side of things, the easier you make it to buy or license exclusive access to these images we want the easier we push your invoice through accounting.</comment></comment>


Tech kinksters reply to Drupal's kink shaming: Kink-shaming and outing in tech - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/valley-of-the-dommes/kink-shaming-and-outing-in-tech-2059a6d9f569 <comment><USER2> I really have no patience for attacking people on the basis of what they do with consenting adults, especially considering the problem with non-consensual contact that exists. It's not just petty, it's not just the worst of office politics, it's a blazing distraction from real issues that can undermine confidence in major projects (See: Applebaum).

In general we need to be less concerned about what people _choose_ to harmlessly do with each other in private or not.</comment>


AirBnb (YC W09): Europe Without Hotels - <AUTHOR> http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/travel/18couch.html?ref=travel

<comment><USER2> Writing this from a nice, quiet room in London that my wife and I found via Airbnb. We arrived to find that our guesthouse had flooded and most everything not outrageously expensive in London was booked, so we posted to the standby list on Airbnb and had a great place at a great price in less than an hour. We showed up a few hours ago and met the owner, a very (very) nice lady in her 50s who decided to try and bring in a bit of extra cash by renting out her spare room. She made us tea while we swapped life stories and then she showed us around the neighborhood. All in all, a _great_ experience with Airbnb and I highly recommend giving it a try.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps the title should be amended to show that this article is a big deal because it is a NYT Travel piece about AirBnB.

<comment><USER4> It's not a "piece about AirBnB":

 _"While AirBnB is the largest of these new services, it isn't the only one. A half-dozen upstarts have emerged in the last two years, with names like iStopOver.com and Crashpadder.com, offering the convenience of a hotel, the comforts of a home and the price tag of an up-market hostel. Call them social B &B networks, or maybe peer-to-peer hotels."_

<comment><USER5> It's the featured example in a story about the type of product. Very much a PR win for AirBnB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Once the first big crime happens, these same newspapers are going to turn around and scare the hell out of everybody.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> it was on the cover of today's travel section, i initially posted it with airbnb in the title.

there's an interesting paragraph towards the end about the legal issues

 _When I contacted AirBnB about its stance on the questionable legality of listings in some cities, a spokesman declined to comment._

i'm also curious if they've had any safety issues (thefts, stalkers, etc).

<comment><USER7> We're pretty active on AirBnB and don't worry too much about theft. The fact that they require people's credit cards is a pretty good deterrent. If I was a woman traveling/hosting by myself I would be much more cautious, but no doubt it's safer than something like couch surfing.

The legal issue is certainly the bigger problem. The hotel industry has a ton of political clout and the only reason laws are not more widespread is that it hasn't been on their radar until recently. It will be interesting to see how AirBnB deals with increasing regulation-- if Barney Fife starts kicking in doors it could be PR nightmare for local government.

<comment><USER8> Are there any sort of estimates from AirBnB of how safe overall it is? One of the main things keeping me from subletting (I live in a touristy area, so there's plenty of demand) is a worry that the risk/reward isn't that great, since it only takes 1 in 100 people trashing my place to cost me a lot more than the 100 sublets get me. Even for lower-level damage/theft, it seems like it'd be difficult to recoup the costs. If someone steals my stereo system, does AirBnB help out in any way? Or even without malicious renters, if say someone spills something and ruins my carpet, will AirBnB help me bill them for the replacement cost? It seems that requiring a CC isn't much help unless they're willing to charge the CC for me. I guess I could use the information about their identity to sue them, but I'm not sure how sympathetic courts will be to a lawsuit for damages incurred during an illegal sublet (and the lawsuit wouldn't be worth filing for damages in the $1k-$5k range anyway).

<comment><USER9> I think you may be outside of the target demographic. The people that would sublet their digs through services like these are most likely not worried about a stain on the carpet.

It's like hitchhiking for houses, just like you wouldn't take hitchhikers in your limo you probably won't sublet your fancy apartment. But a basic place with people that are not too nervous about appearances or that trust their sense of character judgment should be a fine way to make this work. You get to meet new and interesting people, life is risky anyway, this sort of thing seems pretty low on the risk ladder.

Also, in Europe the general sentiment is much less litigious than the United States and someone suing someone else here for small stuff like that is practically unheard of. Usually it would be understood that the party at fault would cover the damage.

<comment><USER8> If you're talking about renting out a room while you also live there, I can definitely see that reducing the risk. The article seemed to be talking about people subletting out their apartments while they're out of town, though. People around here do do that, but incidence of major damage is not that infrequent (it seems to be a favorite topic of the local paper, and comes up every few months). Often, people require damage deposits to mitigate the risk from that, which AirBnB doesn't seem to allow.

In particular, since I'm near the beach, people like to rent out apartments and houses for bachelor parties, spring-break trips, graduation parties, etc., and those can end up causing significant damage, occasionally in the $10k+ range (beer-drenched walls requiring drywall replacement and repainting, etc.).

I don't really have a lot of choice about whether I'm worried about carpet stains or other damage, anyway. If there's damage when I move out that wasn't there when I moved in, my landlord will charge me for it. It's not a fancy apartment by any stretch, but I'm still not allowed to damage it.

<comment><USER9> If you are renting the property and you leave it to total strangers without supervision then I really understand.

My situation is a small farmhouse, I've given the keys to this place to quite a few people and only one didn't live up to expectations so I ended the arrangement. But for the most part it's been pretty positive, and I would do it again. I think it really boils down to being totally clear about what is and is not allowed and/or expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sounds great, but I see problems on the horizon. If you are using a site like AirBnB I assume you are able to avoid paying hotel related taxes. Many cities get a significant portion of their revenue from these taxes. There are already laws on the books in many cities that restrict AirBnB style rentals. It's only a matter of time before cities begin enforcing those laws.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was very hopeful for AirBnB as we are travelling around the world and any way to save on accomodation is great. However, we just had a terrible experience with our first let in Montreal, Canada. To be fair - AirBnB support staff is helpful but the apartment we picked up was a disaster - the owner didn't live there - it was just a letting company. And they gave us wrong instructions to pickup the keys so we ended up trying to find a hotel at 11PM in the night just so we don't sleep under the bridge :( Hopefully next time it will be better...

</comment><comment><USER12> Excited to come across this article as I just quit my job to go backpacking across Europe for a few months with my girlfriend. I had planned to stay in hostels and use couch surfing but I'm glad to see a few more options available. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER13> Single page: [http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/travel/18couch.html?ref...](http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/travel/18couch.html?ref=travel&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be cool if AirBnB had suggested travel itineraries through different countries that integrated with the service. Just a suggestion.</comment>


Best tools for remote real-time development collaboration? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to collaborate with a friend across the country and I'm frustrated by the available tools.
What we normally want to do is have an audio connection open, work on our own individual Eclipse instances, and have a small window showing the other person's screen.
We do the audio over Skype, but we can't figure out how to share a miniature version of each other's screen. What we do now is point the webcam at the screen -- it's horrible but a driver that allowed you to share your screen contents exposed as a webcam interface would allow us to use Skype's built-in sharing features.
A lot of people here must do this. What tools do you use? <comment><USER2> Since you're already using Eclipse, check this out: [http://codesurgeonblog.com/2008/06/cola-real-time-shared- edi...](http://codesurgeonblog.com/2008/06/cola-real-time-shared-editing.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow looks neat. We need to share other applications as well but we'll probably use this for Eclipse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd start with this thread from yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=272361>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried several of those and none of the ones I've used allow you to shrink the window and have it scale -- it will just show a small part of the other person's screen. I need to see a scaled-down picture of his screen while continuing to work on mine.</comment></comment>


Show HN: my weekend project, an email based blogging platform - <AUTHOR> http://timid.me I was messing around with some email APIs. Its just a proof of concept.<p>Roadmap: - Linking to an RSS feed - Mobile friendly blogs - Photo posts via attachments <comment><USER2> I like the idea of having an e-mail based web service, but I'm not sure if blogging is the right service to be used by email. A big part of blogging is hyperlinks to other parts of the web, and putting in hyperlinks into an e-mail is a little troublesome. In addition to tweets, embedding content (such as videos and tweets) is also difficult.

But at the same time, I really like the idea of using email to publish something to the web.

Could I tie in my existing tumblr or wordpress or other blogging platform account then do posts like that?</comment>


Documentary about free internet's relationship to democracy - Kill Switch - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary-film

<comment><USER2> I'm the writer for #killswitch, a full length documentary project that is based on the premise that a functioning democracy is dependent upon a free and open internet. This film intends to educate and mobilize a disengaged citizenry on this important issue.

Please, check out the trailer at:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a- docum...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary- film?ref=live)

Let me know what you think? We'd love to have you involved.</comment>


Chained Exploits: How Hackers Combine Attacks to Hack You - <AUTHOR> http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=1439194

<comment><USER2> Sounds a lot like OJs "If I Did It" deal.

Very informative.</comment>