Goodbye, Uploads - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads <comment><USER2> Kind of a pain for us (<http://mosh.mit.edu>). We have some distro watchfiles that look at this location, and we'll have to get them to switch to whatever new location we move to.

(Ironically a few weeks ago GitHub made an unrelated change to their URL scheme that broke all the Debian watchfiles, including ours, that look for new tags.)

Some advance notice would probably have been helpful, instead of immediately killing this off. On the other hand, it's not like we're paying them to host our project.

Like most Unix software projects, we do want to prepare binary .tar.gzs of the Mosh releases, which have a ./configure and don't require autotools (unlike the repository, which is for maintainers and requires autotools to build). We wouldn't want to use a tag download of a .tgz as our authoritative release because there's no reason to think the sha256 will be stable.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I'm surprised to see them essentially drop support for this common workflow... downloading auto-tarballed tagged SCM commits is insufficient for Autotools projects, or other situations where you need to do pre-processing on your source code with (potentially fragile / version sensitive) tools which you don't want to require your end users to have installed.

It's not like inexpensive file hosting is difficult to come by these days, thankfully. And it's probably better for one's main distribution site to be on a domain under one's own control, anyway. But it was more convenient to be able to just put it up on GitHub, and somewhat more inspiring of confidence in the source archive's integrity.

I wonder how much this feature was costing them, anyway? And whether they'll lose out in any significant way when links to projects' canonical release archives point away from GitHub...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm getting mixed signals from Github. Are they or are they not trying to be a one-stop-shop for project hosting?

As long as projects need to distribute software that is _not_ code, there will be projects for whom a Github-only solution is inadequate. This opens the door to competitors who are willing to offer "Github, plus that one feature that you really need but that Github doesn't think that you do".

 _"[...] part of our ongoing effort to keep GitHub focused on building software [...]"_

So I suppose that Github Pages and project wikis will soon be gone as well?

All I'm asking is for you to be honest, Github. Just come out and say that the feature was a pain in the ass to support and a looming legal liability.

<comment><USER5> Honest answer: Because I want to focus on distributing software rather than a generic "one size fits all" (no one) upload anything model. It wasn't a good solution. S3 is a better solution.

Uploads may be going away, but the functionality behind it is being focused in a more usable, elegant way. Case in point: image attachments (the primary use for our uploads section until Friday). Which has all of the legal and support ramifications of the old Uploads section.

<comment><USER6> It was a great solution for those of us who used it. It was also backed by S3 and Amazon CloudFront (as far as I can tell), and was integrated into the site, rather than being forced onto a wiki page or some such.

For a lot of us, the GitHub page _was_ the project homepage. Now we're going to be forced elsewhere, like BitBucket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am actually pretty sad about this. Installers (deb, exe, etc) and libraries can sometimes be hard to build and require a difficult to setup environment. Its easy to sit there from a throne built on blog apps and twitter clones and say "they should make it better" but sometimes complex systems with large teams are difficult. Having them as your dependancies is made a little easier when you can just grab an installer that has been built with the proper version of -blank-esoteric-dependancy-or-build-tool-

<comment><USER8> +1++1 Exactly...

This is what I have been trying to communicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This really sucks.

I've been using the downloads page to distribute binaries and/or source distributions of a few packages, as it was a logical and easy place to do so.

For example, my biplist Python package has the versions available here:

<https://github.com/wooster/biplist/downloads>

Which are listed in the relevant pages on PyPI:

<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/biplist>

Now I'll have to migrate all of these over to some other location. Where? Who knows. Maybe BitBucket.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm really sorry to hear this. The ability to host arbitrary project-related files was extremely useful. For example, all of my Safari extensions host the packaged version of the extension right on GitHub and link to the latest version in the README, thus allowing for one-click installation of my Safari extensions by anyone who goes to the page.

The only real alternative I have now is to store the packaged extensions in the repository itself and use tags to point to the blobs, and hope that this works effectively. Even if it does, this is going to bloat the size of my repository for no good reason.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you can create a separate repo for downloads? You don't have to bloat your main repo that way.

<comment><USER9> That's awkward and unintuitive. One of the great things about the Downloads tab is it's the obvious place to go if you want to see any previous releases. Using a separate repo solves the bloat issue, but means I need to have a dedicated section of my README saying "if you want to see past releases go to [this repo](...)". Not to mention this now bloats my on repo listing on GitHub unnecessarily, making it harder to find my legitimate projects.

Basically, it's a lot more work just to get a worse result. Previously, GitHub was a one-stop shop for simple open source projects. Now, it's not. It's that simple.

<comment><USER11> _> Previously, GitHub was a one-stop shop for simple open source projects._

It still is. The key words there being "open source." When you go to GitHub, you expect to see the source. Only when the project is distributed as source, like Python/Ruby projects or Twitter Bootstrap, should you expect to be able to download something meant for an end user.

<comment><USER9> And you seem to be making a bad assumption about why an open source project might want to host downloads as well. Maybe you should check out my github profile? I have a handful of Safari extensions on there. They're open-source projects. But in order to actually install it into Safari, you need to have a Safari developer certificate (free, but still takes effort to acquire), load up the project in Safari's Extension Builder, and install it that way. It would be ridiculous of me to require people to do that just to use my extension, so I build the extension and upload the build product to my github project. This way anyone can download the built product and try it out (which is really just a codesigned xar archive of the project with a fancy extension). Meanwhile, the source is still open for all to see on the project.

Edit: I just remembered my HN name isn't my github name. <https://github.com/kballard>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure some people will find a way to complain about this, but this is a welcome removal. I can't really think of any instance where I've seen downloads used in a Github repository in a very long time, especially considering you can generate a ZIP file of any repository by doing this to the end of the repository URL: /archive/master.zip the downloads functionality has always felt redundant anyway.

If you need a compiled binary, you should be getting it from the official website or Bittorrent not expecting it to be up on Github already compiled considering Github is all about collaboration and source control not a file hosting service.

Two changes in one day, Github are nailing it.

<comment><USER13> > _this is a welcome removal_

No, it's not "welcome", because separate "downloads" are (1) no burden on people who don't use them, and (2) actually a useful feature.

In many cases, a tarball of the repo contents _isn't the same thing_ as a distribution tarball, because the latter often contains various generated files that may be more annoying for the user to generate than is justified for somebody just interested in compiling and installing the software. Making a distribution tarball typically involves generating those things and packaging them together with the sources.

Some repos contains generated files as well to work around the issue, but this is ugly and causes its own problems.

> _Github are nailing it_

Er, removing useful features may be good from a business point of view (github may feel the support burden, etc, isn't justified by the usefulness), but I don't think it deserves to be called "nailing it" (unless "it" is the user, of course... :] )....

<comment><USER14> I feel like GitHub should not be the place where you host your distribution tarball. As was mentioned, GitHub is about source code and collaboration and the distribution of that source code.

It's just not inside the scope of what GitHub does, and in that sense I think this is an improvement because it makes for a more focused product.

<comment><USER13> Maybe github doesn't want that, but it's _very_ common practice for small/simple projects to have only a github presence, and no dedicated website of their own at all. It's simple, easy, and keeps everything in one place.

Again, this change may very well be in github's interests, but it's also going to make life more annoying for many gibhut users.

<comment><USER15> why can't those projects simply host the downloads in the actual repository? its just a binary file, and the link to the raw file can be generated quite easily. For example: [https://github.com/joelgwebber/xna- platformer/raw/master/pla...](https://github.com/joelgwebber/xna- platformer/raw/master/platformer/Microsoft%20Permissive%20License.rtf)

<comment><USER16> Because it would make for a terribly annoying history to be adding a build artifact along with every commit (and repo bloat)

<comment><USER11> Then why not in a separate repo specifically made for hosting your compiled software? Or only include a build for stable releases?

It's a hack, sure, but it's necessary if those small projects don't want to put up an official site or host on S3.

<comment><USER12> I think what it comes down too here is that most developers are too cheap to pay for their own hosting and expect Github to provide free bandwidth and storage space for their compiled binaries and preconfigured projects. Github is a company at the end of the day and getting rid of the downloads API will probably save them a lot of money by kicking off the leeches who've been abusing and taking advantage of Github's storage and bandwidth generosity for far too long.

It literally costs cents for S3 and they offer a 1 year free usage tier for new signups. S3 or proper hosting is definitely the way to go.

<comment><USER16> Thats unfounded, patronising and plain rude.

For one it may amaze you, but some people actually pay for Github. Those same developers often have their own hosting (I personally have 3 linode vps's active for various projects)

The fact is it was just simpler as the maintainer of an Open Source project with numerous contributors to host it under one roof, all the contributors have their access granted in a single place, one set of keys to set up, one account to manage personally, and a single place to go look for X.

I am sure you love github and all, but I assure you you arent helping them by before anyone had even mentioned a word, insulting everyone who dared to voice an opposing opinion to this change, then continuing to do so in follow up comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wait, this will affect hubot (<https://github.com/github/hubot>) as well right? The README tells people to download the latest version on <https://github.com/github/hubot/downloads>

<comment><USER18> Nice catch. Fixed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's really too bad. We've been pulling elasticsearch's .deb files from the downloads page on their github repository. Not everything is conveniently installed from source.

<comment><AUTHOR> ES have debs on their website

<comment><USER20> Which link to github downloads? :)

<http://www.elasticsearch.org/download/2012/12/07/0.20.1.html>

<comment> X-Istence These:

      0.20.1: zip
      / tar.gz
      / deb
      / issues

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is understandable, but a bit sucky for me. Since day 1 I've hosted todotxt.net's installer files on github, and the project's landing page uses the downloads API to link to the latest version.

Thankfully I changed the app to link to the landing page rather than the downloads page.

In any case, it was nice while it lasted. Especially the ability to track the number of downloads.

Guess I'm spending the night changing my release process and landing page :(

</comment><comment><USER22> So now how do I distribute dlls that are supposed to be used by my project?

I'll shoot myself before adding binaries to source control.

<comment><USER13> As someone noted, one possible workaround is to make a separate repo for just the downloads. E.g., for project "blah", add a "blah-download" project, and commit your "completel download" tarballs in there...

Ugly and more annoying, but at least the files are somewhere...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This seems like the sort of thing you'd do if you found out people were abusing your service to host arbitrary files. Get rid of the ability to directly upload and download things ad you force them to step up their game. Who's going to maintain an actual repo for their warez, right?

</comment><comment><USER24> As a developer of a downloadable desktop game [1], this change really hurts me. I distribute binaries for OS X and Windows via Downloads. The entire build and upload process is automated, and has been working great for the last six months. Switching over to S3 is going to cost me quite a bit, and it going to be difficult to justify for a open-source video game that will never make any revenue.

[1]: <http://projecthawkthorne.com>

</comment><comment><USER25> Good for them on cutting bloat and focusing on what's important to them.

Bad for me as now I have to find another service to store my project binaries and (likely) add to my monthly bills.

<comment><USER26> If your binary files are not huge you can always add them directly to your repo (they don't have a repo file size limit anymore). If we're talking about multiple GB just go for S3, we're talking about cents per month.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I'll likely end up using S3. Or maybe even bitbucket.

But there's a very real and somewhat irrational negative emotional response when going from free to not-free. Or alternatively, from included in private costs to a paid for feature taken away.

<comment><USER27> Any time a feature is removed you are going to get people whining, no matter how small the feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This makes for perfect timing, I was just about to write some code to autopublish the distribution files for my project.

Where is a good place to put the output of a build these days? I really hate the idea of build artifacts in my repository cluttering every commit.

Push them to a downloads branch? its nice because it has versioning and can match the masters tags etc, but gh-pages has taught me I really dont like using branches as completely seperate repositories.

<comment><USER28> Using any branch will balloon the size of the repository. It's much better to use something like S3.

<comment><USER16> The size isnt a particular worry, this is a JavaScript library that should be producing small files.

s3 is another service to manage which is annoying, but it probably is the best option.

It is a shame, I do appreciate Github needs to focus on what is important, but this change stopped it from being a one stop shop for quite a few OS projects.

<comment><USER29> > should be producing small files

You'd be amazed how even small zip files can quickly make a repo an unruly monster. Tread carefully if you take that route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> BitBucket still supports uploads.

</comment><comment><USER31> Huh, I never knew these existed. Did any major projects on github use this feature?

<comment><USER32> The HTML5Boilerplate.com project has a big fat button on their site that is a link to a download on their GitHub repo.

<comment><USER26> They're not removing downloads, only the uploads that can't be generated from the repo itself. You can still provide downloads that work just a a .zip of the repo contents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Surely the paired announcements make it obvious? uuencode your binaries (okay, okay, base64, and get off my lawn) and put them in a gist.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nothing really prevents you from checking in your downloads in to a github web project though and hosting via that though (but probably not the fastest solution).

This is kind of a relic feature back when people compared github to SourceForge. Github is collaborative source code hosting (open or private projects alike) and not really open source project hosting.

<comment><USER35> Well then, what about Gitub Pages?

So, with GitHub, I can use the fancy git tools, I've got bug reporting and issue tracking, I can make a website about it, but I can't offer a download that's not a snapshot of the repo (barring any silly workarounds)?

<comment><USER11> Pages are definitely a development tool. Most of the time, (when some lazy dev isn't using it as their blog!) they contain useful documentation and instructions for _other developers_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I started using uploads because the tarball directory created by the "download a tag" feature was IMO ugly.

It uses "$user-$repo-$tag-$SHA1" as the basename. Please let us configure this (what if we don't like to see $user there?). The sha-1 is redundant and annoying for packagers that want to write simple scripts, which is also solved by making it configurable.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have used plain binaries of some projects from time to time, a) to test the waters, and b) integrate a small tool into my workflow with minimal effort and disruption to my overall task at hand.

Like I said elsewhere, the fact that they are retaining upload functionality, but only for images and not for binaries makes no sense to me.

Source only distributions? This is what happens more-or-less:

[https://plus.google.com/109834643338395014064/posts/4hMiZ3s4...](https://plus.google.com/109834643338395014064/posts/4hMiZ3s44f8)

Someone else raised the same concerns, so in the principle of DRY: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4908007>

</comment><comment><USER37> I see a lot of worrying and annoyed comments.

But this is an OPPORTUNITY for eager hackers to create an external solution to GitHub for distributing project builds and related binaries.

Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER38> I'd be worried about Github reinstating this feature and your solution becoming redundant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> You're always welcome to host your downloads on SourceForge, even if your project is hosted elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER40> This has been a long thread, but I've only seen S3 mentioned as an alternative. Is there anything else that makes sense for hosting open source packages? I was considering Dropbox, but I think Dropbox download links look sort of suspicious.

<comment><USER29> I do believe using Dropbox for distro is against their TOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> By the way, downloads of source aren't going away (i.e., get a zip or tar ball)! Just the "upload anything and make it available" feature. There seems to be a little confusion about that.

<comment><USER6> There's no misunderstanding here. You're removing a feature which a lot of us use and pay for. This sucks.

<comment><USER27> GitHub is for source code hosting. Not tens to hundreds of MB binary hosting. Put your binaries in s3 and link to them from your project if needed.

They probably determined the excess bloat and strain on their infrastructure from git cloning huge binaries outweighed the benefits so they are removing the feature.

<comment><USER42> If that is all it is for I might as well host my own git repos too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cloudflare is blocking lookups for archive.is - <AUTHOR> I posted too quickly, apparently this is a long running problem between Cloudflare and archive.is...
Compare ->
% host archive.is 18.104.22.168
archive.is has address 127.0.0.3
vs my machine running a proper local resolver:
% host archive.is
archive.is has address 22.214.171.124
vs Google Quad-8:
% host archive.is 188.8.131.52
archive.is has address 188.8.131.52 <comment><USER2> This is what I see

        220.127.116.11: 127.0.0.3
        188.8.131.52: 127.0.0.3
        184.108.40.206: 22.214.171.124
        126.96.36.199: 22.214.171.124
        184.108.40.206: 126.96.36.199
        184.108.40.206: 22.214.171.124
        220.127.116.11: 126.96.36.199

[ Edit ] Found your answer [1] Interesting that they dont have a default fallback record if EDNS is not available. Some people (myself included) block it. They should look into Anycast.

[1] - [https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is- blocked/](https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I eventually dug into it and saw the EDNS thing. I can understand why Cloudflare wants to not pass EDNS but they could also trivially assign a regional but dummy record...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems like archive.is is using DNS-based load-balancing/fail-over. My best guess is that the person/group that's running archive.is is having some operational issues right now and you caught that issue.

For the record: from GCP (using default resolvers, e.g. Google) region europe- north1-a... archive.is resolves to 22.214.171.124.

</comment><comment><USER4> It was discussed previously on this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I also looked it up from archive.is's authoritative name servers:

% host archive.is carl.archive.is

archive.is has address 126.96.36.199</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle one (of several) co-founders providing seed funding? - <AUTHOR>

I am in favor of evenly splitting founder equity. What typically happens though when one co-founder is in a position to bootstrap the company but one or more co-founders isn't? Specifically is this handled with an equity round where preferred is issued to the funding founder? How is valuation typically determined? Or should this be handled some other way? Is there any reason to avoid this situation entirely? <comment><USER2> One solution is split stock ownership in the manner you would without any funding. Then determine the amount of seed capital you will raise and the cost of equity or implied valuation. Then attempt to actually raise that money from an outside investor. If the implied valuation needs adjustment before there are any takers, then use that figure for _any_ stock sold in your seed round. Whether you actually take outside money or not (or sell stock in part to an outside party), let that valuation govern the stock sale. And whether co- founder(s) partake(s) in that round, its treated a separate matter and a separate dilutive transaction from your "founder's stock."

Of course often when the amounts involved are relatively* small (*depends on the venture and the people involved), sometimes the costs that one co-founder incurs is handled in an informal way, and is part of the relatively even contribution between co-founders. Partnerships are never equal (contributory aspect) all of the time anyway. Sometimes you pull more weight, sometimes it's the other(s), maybe it never evens out -- but if it's close enough it's a better working dynamic to leave it simple.

<comment><USER3> Another way of valuing the company is deciding at what value you would be wiling to do the work.

if the guy gave you the $ and wanted 100% you would not do it and you would jump on it at 0%. The reality is somewhere in the middle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my experience, one thing to remember before taking any money from a co- founder is that money _will_ change relationships. What happened to me was that within days of taking $5000 of seed from a partner, he/she basically decided to quit working on the project and suddenly saw their financial contribution as equally important to my programmatic contributions.

Needless to say, the situation didn't end up working out very well. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on the amount but I am guessing that it is <50k

1\. First Vesting. Always vesting. 2\. Second Vesting. Always vesting. 3\. Do not do preferred for a small round. The legal costs for preferred are high >20-30k 4\. Do common. Can be done in less that 5k 5\. You could consider what Y combinator offers and tee of that (20k,60%, very valuable connections)

5.

<comment><USER5> 60%? Is that correct?

<comment><USER6> 6%?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think your title needs work. I read it to mean "one person company" rather than "one of two (or more) founders" and "bootstrapping" has been defined on this forum as "making enough money from it to support yourself while you grow it" (or something along those lines). I didn't hear "one of the two (or more) founders supplying the seed money" at all.

Good luck with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rereading the title I agree that it could be stated more clearly.

<comment><USER7> Much clearer. I hope you get the info you need.</comment></comment></comment>


BenderRule: Name the Language You Study - <AUTHOR> https://thegradient.pub/the-benderrule-on-naming-the-languages-we-study-and-why-it-matters/ <comment><USER2> Here is an example for a very recent progress in language model which does not mention the language name at all: "CTRL - A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation" \- [https://blog.einstein.ai/introducing-a- conditional-transform...](https://blog.einstein.ai/introducing-a-conditional- transformer-language-model-for-controllable-generation/)

As a researcher in a non-english, morphologically rich language, I completely agree with the article by Emily Bender. Everytime I read papers, when people ask questions or discuss on NLP in various forums such as reddit/stackoverlow, the language name is taken for granted as English.</comment>


New York Declares Using the Term 'Illegal Alien' Can Result in a $250k Fine - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2019/09/30/new-york-city-illegal-aliens-fine-free-speech <comment><USER2> The headline seems inflammatory and deceptive, and the article deliberately obtuse.

Using the term "illegal alien" to _harass_ someone implies it's not accurate, or at least willful disregard for its accuracy. So obviously it's a civil rights issue.

<comment><USER3> Isn't using the term towards someone always considered harassment? When would it not be harassment?

<comment><USER2> Well, if someone was using it in the context of getting them deported, then it wouldn't be repeated, which is generally considered part of the definition of harassment.</comment></comment></comment>


It has been 613 days since Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/turkeyblocks/status/1079844767549280257 <comment><USER2> What are some ways people in Turkey can get access to Wikipedia without facing any repercussions? Circumventing censorship is a good thing, but if the circumvention can be detected or puts you on a list of suspicious people, that's not safe.

<comment><USER3> Im also from Turkey most of the time I just add zero to domain like "0wikipedia.org"

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what you mean. That domain doesn't exist.

<comment><USER5> 0wikipedia.com

<comment><USER6> Works from New Zealand. Redirects to [https://www.wikiyy.com](https://www.wikiyy.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real issue is not reading, it is editing the "canonical" wiki. Same goes for image hosting sites. Passive content consumption in a foreign language is not a great concern.</comment>


Sony Smartwatch now open-sourced - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxandlife.com/2013/06/sony-smartwatch-now-open-sourced.html <comment><USER2> I would never trust Sony's release of hardware with official open-source software support, after they removed the official Linux support for old-model PlayStation 3's [1]. (The support was removed through a firmware update for hardware in the wild. This firmware update was non-optional if you want to use subsequently produced official games, or use the console's online service. I never did either, and Sony and its developers have probably lost hundreds of my dollars over the past few years as a result.)

This is also the company that put rootkits on CD's [2].

I no longer do business with Sony if I can avoid it.

EDIT: This was downvoted within two minutes? Why?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS#History)

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

<comment><USER3> Sony is a big multinational corporation. As is the case with, say, Microsoft, it is not helpful to appreciate its actions as coming from a single entity.

<comment><USER2> So if I have a particular experience with them, I can't draw any inferences about future interactions from that?

Also, _Sony itself_ clearly wishes to be perceived as a single entity, since they proudly display the Sony brand on all their products and marketing.

I can follow that people -- and corporations -- change over time, and sometimes problems like this are flukes, rather than part of the fundamental nature. So I'll stay away from them for a decade or two; if they don't make any other really sleazy moves in that time frame, I'll eventually give them another chance if they make something I want to buy.

<comment><USER4> Had you actually suffered from the Other OS removal? I am asking because everybody complaining about this on the Internet does not even own a PS3 and people who actually had ran Linux did not complain about the update as it did not affect them much.

The only issue you'd had if you used PS3 for computation was the fact that the hardware had been discontinued (long time before the update), but then it's been already too expensive for the computing power it provided.

<comment><USER2> > people who actually had ran Linux did not complain about the update

I ran Linux on the PS3, and I complained loudly and bitterly about Sony's actions.

> Had you actually suffered from the Other OS removal?

Yes, I have. I specifically asked the Gamestop clerk for an old model, at a time when both the old (Linux-supporting) and new (non-Linux-supporting) machines were available in stores.

I can't speak for sure about a hypothetical alternative reality, but I think it's likely I would have waited a little longer to buy one, if not for the Linux feature -- specifically I was worried that the Linux-supporting older model would become hard to find.

So you can say I wouldn't have bought a PS3 but for its Linux capabilities, and the removal of those capabilities rendered the rationale for my investment invalid.

> it's been already too expensive for the computing power it provided

It's not solely a matter of computing power provided. I thought the Cell's unique architecture was interesting.

Also, in those pre-Raspberry-Pi days, the console wasn't a bad price point to get a general-purpose system with networking, USB and Blu-ray (especially if you bought used hardware), that could also do video out to pre-HDMI TV's.

<comment><USER4> If you did not care for anything other than running Linux why did you update firmware? It's only needed to play newer games and blu-rays, things you say that did not matter to you.

This the essential problem that I see (usually put in ridiculous context like "UASAF used a PS3 cluster and NOW THEY CANNOT!!!!!1!") - if you run Linux you don't care much about the games and even if you do - all the games you already had before the update don't go away.

There is no guarantee that new games will ever come again so your ability to run newer games is not a right. If Sony pulled PS3 off the market instead of issuing an update you would not get any games as well.

But it's still hard to imagine somebody in need of both Linux and newest games simultaneously. If you are one of such people - you are member of very unique and small group. No company size of Sony is ever going to carter to such a small group.

<comment><USER5> It's not entirely true that "all the games you already had before the update don't go away". Although you could still play your current games, the multiplayer portions of those games required you to be connected to the PS network, which in turn required the latest firmware upgrade that removed Linux.

I stayed on the firmware with Linux and was fine with not being able to play new games but it did kind of suck that I couldn't play multiplayer games I'd already purchased.

<comment><USER4> This is true, although the MP availability is even less ensured than that of the new games. MP servers are routinely taken down on all platforms. And for the same reason the Other OS had been taken down - not enough people used it to justify the maintenance cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rather than "open sourced" all I see is "a bit open specced". Yes, the "hacker guide" has details of what chips are on the board, and how they are connected: [http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch- pro...](http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch- project/smartwatch-hacker-guide/) ... and there's a separate page with a guide to putting it in DFU mode to upload a firmware.

Which is cool, but the chip names could have been found by the people who'd already done teardowns and the pinouts could be found by buzzing one out (possibly sacrificially by removing chips.)

The chip datasheets they link were all all already publically available, the Cypress touch sensor one is even a link to alldatasheet.com(!)

Probably the biggest letdown is the Bluetooth/FM chip made by Sony, arguably the most useful and most complex device aside from the MCU. That link is to Sony's marketing specs page with a block diagram and not much technical info that I can see. I can't find any information about the chip made available to the public by Sony.

Ironically enough there is a longer 6 page Sony datasheet leaked on datasheet sites, but even this doesn't have pinouts or begin to explain how the SPI interface to Bluetooth/FM functionality actually works.

I think it's good that a major company like Sony released even this small amount of information, although it's worth noting that reverse engineers have found more information on similar products acting entirely by themselves (take for instance the PS3 Move controller: [http://eissq.com/ps3_move/](http://eissq.com/ps3_move/) )

On the other hand I think it's very bad that most people will glance at this and see Sony "open sourcing" something when they appear to be open sourcing nearly nothing. The RTOS they used is probably proprietary property of a third party so they can't open source that, but they could release their application source code for the smartwatch - allowing people to see how they communicate with the Bluetooth/FM chip, for instance. That kind of source could be ported to an open source RTOS.

The optimist in me hopes that detailed technical information will be forthcoming over time, but the pessimist in me thinks this is the feel-good last gasp of an end-of-life product. :/

<comment><USER6> I expanded this comment into a blog post, and corrected some of the factual errors in the comment: [http://projectgus.com/2013/06/sonys-open-source- smartwatch/](http://projectgus.com/2013/06/sonys-open-source-smartwatch/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm disappointed I can't find reference schematics for the smartwatch but they provide datasheets and specific chip models at [http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch- pro...](http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch- project/smartwatch-hacker-guide/)

The watch has bluetooth, a touchscreen, and an STM32F2 microcontroller [disappointed its not a F4 :( ] which makes it a powerful and cheap development kit. Their instructions for flashing the firmware of the chip uses open source dfu-util so IIRC you'll be able to flash a binary to the STM32F2 from any compatible toolchain. Surprise, surprise, this means Arduino from LeafLabs!: [https://github.com/leaflabs/www.leaflabs.com/blob/master/pos...](https://github.com/leaflabs/www.leaflabs.com/blob/master/posts/major- update-experimental-stm32f2-and-f1-value-line-in-libmaple-master.md)

Looking at [http://www.cmw.me/?q=node/59](http://www.cmw.me/?q=node/59) you could even replace their PCB with your own, preserving the LCD connections and upgrading the processor to an even more power efficient one with a sensor or two added on (this is a four layer board at most, you could theoretically make the ICs even denser). However, you'll probably want to find someone with a pick and place + reflow at a hackspace or something unless you're confident you can reflow leadless chips and 0201 components yourself.

<comment><USER8> I love the STM32F4, have to tried the libopencm3 library?

<comment><USER7> Nice library, haven't seen it before. I'll check it out, the USB libraries seem to be a bit more bearable than the usual stacks I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The legalese in the "Important information – read this before flashing alternative firmware" section on [http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch- pro...](http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch-project/) seems to me to try to discourage people from modding the firmware.

Feels totally half-assed to me, after reading this. Either I want people to hack & play and support them with it or I don't. How can you damage the hardware of this simple device with a hacked Android? What do these lawyers think? That someone hacks a version of Android that makes the SmartWatch go up in smoke and every kid that has bought one and got a scratch on their glass will load that up so they can claim warranty on their device? Seriously?

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's the TI-Chronos [1]. It's similar to the Smartwatch in many ways, and is based on the MSP430 chips used in the TI Launchpad.

[1] - [http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos](http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos)

<comment><USER11> As a big TI fan (I love hacking on the MSP430, Stellaris, BeagleBone, etc), the Chronos would be great if it weren't so incredibly 1970s/early 1980s dorky looking. I mean, I'm not particularly fashion conscious, but I wouldn't wear that thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> About a year ago, I applied as an app developer and received a free Sony Smartwatch to develop apps on. I tried wearing the watch for a couple days before I planned to start programming my app. The user experience was pretty horrible. The watch wasn't that responsive, had connectivity issues, and had a pretty poor looking UI.</comment>


Show HN: ChatPage.io – Private chat for sales and client communication - <AUTHOR> http://chatpage.io <comment><USER2> Looks good, the only thing I hate is the 'Free during BETA'. It makes me wonder how you're going to keep going, I'm worried you'll become a key part of my sales process but then one day, disappear.

Take my money straight away, seriously, I don't care that it's BETA, take my money! Don't be scared, you're creating value for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome feedback. Thanks a lot. You are right, the free beta looks un-pro. I consider charging but let the beta badge somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Something about chatting with clients or prospects on someone else's page/domain bothers me. I think your pro plan should have an option to brand the chat page with your client's own sub/domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out. Yes, it has the option to use your own url. Currently we're using full page iframe. We'll also add subdomain support soon.</comment></comment>


Newsletter giving sponsorship fee to side-project - <AUTHOR> https://thememo.substack.com/p/the-memo-28-170-remote-roles-7ad <comment><AUTHOR> I run a member-funded newsletter; the focus is remote work. I'm testing out using the funds from a sponsorship to back small side-projects. The link is to the last newsletter with details. The fee from the current sponsorship is still very small, but using it to test this out. I want to do this as transparently as possible. Welcome feedback.</comment>


TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tax-law-threatened-turbotax-profits-started-charging-disabled-unemployed-and-students#164493 <comment><USER2> I have no issue with companies making profit but TurboTax is a bad product, with terrible scam-esque profit strategies, and actively preys upon the poor.

Their "audit protection", the constant nag screens IN A PRODUCT I ALREADY PAID FOR, their push for you to upgrade (with no discount at the end if you didn't use the upgraded features), and so on. Tie that in with the "spend your refund before you get" double dipping offers, and it's a scam.

I hate TurboTax, they have no real competitors, and the federal government should make them redundant.

<comment><USER3> The Federal Government cannot, by law, compete with TurboTax

<comment><USER4> Laws are designed by the government - if the executive branch cannot, by law, compete with TurboTax, then the legislative branch is free to alter the laws in whatever (constitutional) way benefits the society and explicitly delegate some agency the power (and duty!) to make TurboTax redundant.

<comment><USER5> it'd be great if it worked this way, but it's already been captured at both a federal and at least 1 state level:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to- ban-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the- government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax)

[https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who- fought-t...](https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-the- tax-lobby/)

<comment><USER6> yah, businesses making money via legitimately adding value is awesome; making it via rent seeking and regulatory capture sucks.

turbotax could still have a lucrative business by building on top of free filing with value added services, but no, they want government-protected profits. it's dishonorable.

and it's a symptom of money controlling politics. we need to figure out how to allow politicians to be productive and contributive without money being the measuring stick proxying power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone using TurboTax should switch to [https://www.freetaxusa.com/](https://www.freetaxusa.com/)

I don't work for either company. I'm just someone that used TurboTax for 5 years and switched this year. Intuit has a huge history of lobbying against simplification of tax code, and there was even a bill to create a government run self serve e-file platform that Intuit helped kill. Also, Free Tax USA is a better UX and it's "free". Federal is free you pay like $10 to file state. I live in WA (no state income tax) so it was totally free for me. I paid $6.99 for the premium support just 'cause I wanted to give them some money 'cause I appreciate the service.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great podcast about the TurboTax ProPublica articles: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol/144-dark- patt...](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nhgol/144-dark-pattern)

<comment><USER9> I'm from the UK but listened to this episode, one of the shocking aspects to it was they set noindex directives on the FreeFile site - although looks like they've removed them since

[https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately- hid...](https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its- free-file-page-from-search-engines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't even understand the tax preparation system in general. As a newly- minted Adult, I find it rather frustrating that I collect all the documents that the government and I both have (or they've sent me) and fill out one big form that condenses all that info. Then if I mess it up/lie, the government comes after me. Ridiculously inefficient system.

<comment><USER11> > I collect all the documents that the government and I both have

Our tax system is terrible and convoluted, but this statement is not actually correct. In may cases you get copies of tax forms from businesses before the IRS has processed the business return, possibly before the business return has even been submitted. Business and personal returns are processed in parallel and cannot be reconciled against each other until they have all been done. That's why audits almost always have at least one tax year of lag, because that's how long it takes to get through everything. Filing extensions make the process even worse.

<comment><USER10> Ah okay. I just assumed that the fact that my paycheck itemizes the tax withholdings that they were already receiving or at least aware of my taxes to date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Don't use TurboTax. I found out about IRS's VITA[1] program a few years ago and it's been a game-changer. The only real limits is that you make less than $55K, and it specifically targets those with disabilities and limited-English speakers. When I went, my preparer even said that they don't really care if you make more than $55K, as long as the return isn't super complicated.

[1]: [https://www.irs.gov/individuals/free-tax-return- preparation-...](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/free-tax-return-preparation- for-you-by-volunteers)

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're in Canada, and want to stop supporting TurboTax, I recommend giving SimpleTax.ca a try. It's free for everyone, but you can donate after you file your taxes if you want. I was also very impressed with their privacy policy [1].

[1] [https://simpletax.ca/privacy](https://simpletax.ca/privacy)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're able to do your taxes by hand but just want to efile, there is [https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/](https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/) . Terrible UI (and the emails about failed form validation are comical) but it works, and is free.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used H&R Block this time around (I just picked a competitor, no real reason for specifically choosing H&R), because I ran into the same thing. The student loan interest deduction was free through them.

Most competitors were offering it for free, still, so I'd just say dump TurboTax like I did. I'll never go back.

There were quite a few competitors I considered. H&R even allows import of TurboTax files which saved a bunch of time.

</comment><comment><USER16> TurboTax isn't the IRS and it isn't their responsibility to help tax payers navigate the overly complicated tax code for free (to the extent that the company doesn't lobby for complex tax laws). Congress should create a streamlined tax filing system for everyday people.

Students also should not be charged for filing with a 1098, but I would also expect anyone in graduate school to be able to file a simple tax return on their own.

</comment><comment><USER17> Enterprises like these are free to make whatever decisions they want and I don't think it's fair to evaluate them with morals that seem to imply they are evil. What I mean is : this enterprise is not a monopoly, and there is competition, and it is free to fail ( unlike some banks lets say). If some other tax website provides better value, people are free to move to that.

<comment><USER18> I agree people are too quick to reach for labels like evil when the reality is that systems create incentives and groups of people follow incentives (basically don't hate the player hate the game) and do an amazing job at rationalizing their actions as good (we're all the protagonist of our own stories).

However we don't have to throw in the towel and let these things run wild. If TurboTax exists by the grace of rent seeking and fixing tax filing at the federal level increases our overall productivity/happiness then we should try to change the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> On a meta level, this is a little biased and click-baity: the Trump references, the "abuses of power" mission statement, the emphasis on "the Disabled, the Unemployed and Students".

In short, Intuit moved from previously-free features to their paid tiers. This move _may have_ disproportionately affected low-income taxpayers, though—if true—that impact was unintentional, not targeted.[1]

The article cites several different features that were monetized and affect lower-earning taxpayers[2] as well as those affecting higher-end earners[3], but doesn't state that this list is comprehensive, and doesn't prove that impact was disproportionate.

ALL THAT SAID, there's still some crappy dark patterns here, as well as broader tax-ecosystem improvements that would benefit taxpayers that Intuit has fought tooth and nail to block. So I'm certainly not defending Intuit here, but I'd find more objective reporting to be more compelling.

[1] "The income levels of the groups that were being driven to paid products 'was never really considered.'"

[2] "One of these forms was for a tax credit that goes exclusively to poor taxpayers who are elderly or get disability benefits. Another is used by low- to middle-income households that receive a credit for putting money in a retirement account." (Which, if it's what I'm thinking of, applies to above- average earners, too.) "A third is used by taxpayers who collected unemployment benefits." "And then there are people with student loans, who also have to use Deluxe." (Unclear if this is a _change_.)

[3] "The company's changes also affected parents who get a credit for child care expenses, as well as people filing the schedule for interest and dividends."

<comment><USER20> Why would you say the impact on low-income people was unintentional? Do you think that Intuit would release a tax product without an analysis of who it would affect? It feels like you're giving Intuit the benefit of the doubt here when numerous sources, including Intuit employees, say that Intuit deliberately set out to increase revenue at the expense of lower income taxpayers.

<comment><USER19> I'm quoting the article:

 _> "They were always supposed to be customer focused, customer first," one former staffer said. But the income levels of the groups that were being driven to paid products "was never really considered."_

Where's the numerous sources that said Intuit deliberately set out to increase revenue _at the [disproportionate] expense of lower income taxpayers_ (emphasis mine)?

<comment><USER21> This is basic logic.

The "Freefile" product is only supposed to be free for lower income people, so when Intuit misdirected everybody to the (non-free) product which they named "Free", they exclusively harmed lower income people, as the higher income people were never entitled to free filing.

(that entitlement is due to an agreement with the IRS, where the IRS agreed to limit competition in the tax filing industry in return for the development of free file products).

edit: also note that it is absolutely not an accident that Intuit used these names which make it almost impossible to talk about their non-free product which is named Free, and their actually free product which is named Freedom and Freefile.

<comment><USER19> That's a good point, and a valid one, _but not the central thesis of THIS article_. (ProPublica has previously written articles on that.[1])

[1] "But, as ProPublica has been reporting, Intuit has steered eligible customers away from the truly free version, aggressively marketing products that are called "free" even though many customers end up paying."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't blame TurboTax (Intuit). They do what any company in that position would. Hell, a good percentage of companies that exist probably shouldn't exist. TurboTax is definitely one of them. I blame our shit government for making such deals and not creating proper legislation. That's why such shit companies exist. There's literally no solution to this. Yeah, one can vote but that isn't actually a solution as it clearly doesn't get anything done. We have a failing government that is not and may never have been representative of any of its people, save for the ultra-rich. That's the real failing here. TurboTax is just a symptom of this disease.

<comment><USER23> You should blame Intuit since they lobbied for themselves to be put in this position

<comment><USER22> And who wrote the laws allowing bribery? Congress. That's where the blame lies. If you create a system that can be abused, it will. If you create a system that's corrupt, why are you surprised when there's corruption? Blame the disease not the symptom. Our government is the disease. Corporations like intuit are just symptoms of the corruption. Legal corruption is still corruption. As they say, this is a feature not a bug from our government's point of view. Greatest country in the world for people who love to bribe. Corruption in most other places pales by comparison. Most places in the world outlaw bribery of government officials. We embrace it. So what if people get ripped off or even lose their lives? Business above all.</comment></comment></comment>


Trolling Marketers for Profit and Pleasure - <AUTHOR> http://stilldrinking.org/trolling-marketers-for-profit-and-pleasure

<comment><USER2> As someone who regularly uses utm parameters, this has to be the most pathetic attempt at trolling I've ever seen. When looking at data you usually just pay attention to the top performers, not the stuff at the bottom of the list with 1 or 2 clicks. Even if you did notice the troll parameters you would just shrug your shoulders and move on without spending more than a second of your day thinking about it (which is much less effort than the person who pulled of this "troll" put into it).

<comment><USER3> Agreed this was pretty lame. I kept on reading waiting for the inevitable 'this is on HackerNews because I wrote a program to flood them with fake analytics', instead it's literally just the one drop in the ocean. A marketeer will (not) see some silly name at the bottom of page 30 of their google analytics traffic and that's it.

This is the equivalent of writing 'poop' on a survey where your name or answer is supposed to go. i.e. everyone will do it once in their lives, but we really don't need to write blog posts about it and link to them on HN. The only difference is that it's likely someone will actually read 'poop' on a survey when entering the data, whereas on GA it'll be ignored on the bottom of the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, the writing on this site is amazing.

He's a fan of HHGTTG ([http://stilldrinking.org/the-fizzbuzz-from-outer-space- expla...](http://stilldrinking.org/the-fizzbuzz-from-outer-space-explained)), of course, wrote a conversational piece with some hilarious lines ([http://stilldrinking.org/waiting-for-doctor- who](http://stilldrinking.org/waiting-for-doctor-who)), and explained why programming is all of the best parts of art and engineering and project management combined ([http://stilldrinking.org/programming- sucks](http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks)), and a very nice and even- handed eulogy for Fred Phelps ([http://stilldrinking.org/a-letter-from-fred- phelps](http://stilldrinking.org/a-letter-from-fred-phelps))...

This is really some of the best writing I've seen online in a long time.

<comment><USER5> I have found myself, now two hours after clicking this link, finally returning to the comments because I spent so long reading his other posts.

Peter is an incredible writer and even in places where we have differing views on the world, it still was a joy to read his perspective because of the way it was articulated.

I recommend reading a post or two, highly worth the time. I actually went and ordered his book because I liked his writing so much, something I've never even remotely considered before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might be the single most useless thing I have ever seen on here. I've seen more sophisticated fart jokes.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Also, I lied about the profit in the title, this is about being a dick."

</comment><comment><USER8> Replace marketers with, say, blacks, Jews, or any other minority group and all you have here is the standard template of the bigot wrapped up in fancy words with a technical twist. "I like gays, some of my best friends are gays, but ..."

The first paragraph assures us the author respects marketers, and then suddenly it's "marketing people and SEO people and whatever people doing their branding and paradigm shoving and optimizing through pipelines or down funnels or up pyramids of pigs with too much mascara". I can no more get behind stereotyping of marketers than I can any other group in society.

At least the author has the insight to admit they are being a dick.

<comment><USER9> _Replace marketers with, say, blacks, Jews, or any other minority group..._

People aren't typically _born_ marketers, and tend to have a choice about whether or not they stay one.

<comment><USER8> How is that relevant? See my response to DanBC in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is just phenomenal writing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I posted it :) The whole site is great (I think some of his stuff has shown up here before). The people posting about the lack of sophistication or the childishness of the troll itself, aren't getting the real reason I submitted it, which was to expose more people to Peter's writing.</comment></comment>


How to make a racist AI without really trying - <AUTHOR> http://blog.conceptnet.io/posts/2017/how-to-make-a-racist-ai-without-really-trying/ <comment><USER2> When I got to the 'NAMES_BY_ETHNICITY = {' section I wondered whether it's really the AI's that racist or something else!</comment>


Workspace management for Go using wgo - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/skelterjohn/wgo

<comment><AUTHOR> I literally found out about [https://github.com/constabulary/gb](https://github.com/constabulary/gb) yesterday, and was already planning on posting to HN this morning!

The tools are very similar in philosophy, though certainly not identical in behavior.</comment>


Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/97903574

<comment><USER2> Bringing this idea to software development can be a great asset. I look at the way we currently do A/B testing. There is a disconnect between the time we release it and the time we get feedback.

It could even be the reason why so many claim A/B testing is inconclusive. If we could follow the scenario more closely in real time and track the behavior as it happens, the same numbers could mean something completely different.

It's always nice to watch Bret Victor. He reminds me that there is always room for innovation.

</comment><comment><USER3> i wonder if you can bend that tinkering - engineering - science continuum into a circle. i think tinkering can lead into science.</comment>


Electronic Noise Is Drowning Out the Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/electronic-noise-is-drowning-out-the-internet-of-things <comment><USER2> My lab is moving to a new building that was to have wireless flat panel displays on the wall for all professors, each occupying a different band. As we work on RF detectors, this was not ideal, so we (and some other groups) complained and now everyone will have wired displays instead. Small victories...

<comment><USER3> Wireless flat panels? Thats quite excessive. I bet you cant even get good bandwidth out of them. Wonder if in the near future complex configurations of directed wireless equipment will become a fire hazard lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does the ethos of "I can do what I want with my tech" interact with this problem?

I guess it's analogous to saying "it's your stereo. Play what you like, but keep it down after 10PM or your neighbors will report you."

<comment><USER5> This article also reminds me of the recent discussion on a proposal to make router firmware modifications illegal.

( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139679) , [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959088) , [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10137470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10137470) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another example: Wireless phone chargers.

Now, the fact that wireless chargers emit RF energy is hardly surprising -- that's how they work -- but I was still surprised when I found that my new charger completely obliterates the AM radio band within a 3' radius.

<comment><USER7> It's probably caused by induction in the radio's circuits, not by charger emitting radio waves.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps, but wouldn't that affect FM reception too? I only get interference when tuned to the AM band.

<comment><USER8> FM capture, perhaps? FM reception is naturally much more resilient to interference so long as the absolute magnitude of the interfering signal is lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can do this kind of thing yourself with a $10 rtlsdr dvbt dongle, NMEA GPS, laptop and various software. The most commonly used is Eartoearoak's rtlsdr-scanner: [http://eartoearoak.com/software/rtlsdr- scanner](http://eartoearoak.com/software/rtlsdr-scanner)

NW0W has also done a lot of work on mapping powerline interference with rtlsdr dongles in multiple blog posts. An older represenative example is at: [http://blog.dxers.info/2015/01/driveby-system-live-on- road.h...](http://blog.dxers.info/2015/01/driveby-system-live-on-road.html)

tautology2 showed his visualization implementation + code over at: [https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/2hbjyt/gsm_heatmap_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/2hbjyt/gsm_heatmap_using_rtlsdr/)

</comment><comment><USER10> omnidirectionality is a luxury. Beam forming and directional scanning listening will become a new norm.

<comment><USER11> Outdoors on cell towers, yes. Not that helpful indoors. Reflections dominate. Diversity antennas are more useful indoors, because it's rare that both are in a reflection null.

<comment><USER10> more than 10 years ago some company was doing adaptive beam forming WiFi routers/switches, and what i remember reading about them is that actual direction of the beam for a given connection wasn't necessarily the geographical straight to the other end of the connection, instead it was whatever direction was adaptively found, and that frequently meant very non- straightforward mulitply reflected path. The beauty was that beam power at the "total multi-segmented reflected/bounced" length of the path could still be much higher than onmidirectionally transmitted power even at the lesser distance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't worry about it. The "internet of things" is mostly stuff you don't need anyway. If your toaster has connectivity problems and can't reach the "cloud", and refuses to toast, you probably didn't need it anyway.

<comment><USER12> How am I supposed to know if my toast is ready? Go over and look? What year is it ... 1934?

I will overlook the conspicuous absence of flying cars, but the year is 2015 and __I want an email when my toast is done __!

<comment><USER13> Email? What is this, 1995? Send a notification to my smartphone's app!

<comment><USER14> It only needs access to: Calendar, Internet, SMS, Profile, Start on Boot, Location, Microphone, Call Log, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Europe we have EMI emission norms, and commercial products have to be tested for this. Either the US is using different products, or the norms are not strong enough ?

<comment><USER16> As I am involved in defining such standards for industrial applications as an expert at the German national committee, I can tell you, the US has the same standards. Because those standards are harmonized within the IEC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio)

<comment><USER4> Even with these sorts of optimizations, bandwidth is finite.</comment></comment>


$40K/yr Senior Software Engineer (full Stack) at CrystalMD - <AUTHOR> https://angel.co/crystalmd/jobs/46369-senior-software-engineer-full-stack <comment><USER2> Normally this is spam, but this is likely being posted because the job location is San Francisco and that salary is hilarious.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't be hilarious if this were a "silicon backwoods" startup running in some super-cheap locale, but in SF you'd be homeless for that.

Of course 5% equity isn't peanuts if you really believe in the company... and if your equity comes in a form that's protected against them diluting you to hell.

<comment><USER4> Where on earth would $40k/year be a reasonable salary for a "senior software engineer"?

<comment><USER3> You could live in a small town decently well for $40k/year, and 5% equity could be worth millions if it was equity of the non-toilet-paper variety (some dilution protection) and the company did very well.

If I were to even consider such a position I'd involve a lawyer in examining the equity part, and I'd really have to believe in the company.

<comment><USER4> I can imagine a brand-new CS graduate settling for $40k, if they lived in a small town where living was cheap and jobs were scarce, but offering $40k for a senior position just seems insulting, no matter where the company is located.

CrystalMD would do better to offer $1/year for this job, since what they are actually looking for is an angel investor whose capital happens to come in the form of engineering time.

<comment><USER5> I could imagine a middle school dropout with an interest in programming, applying for that salary. That would be a great salary to make for a middle school dropout.

<comment><USER6> You get what you pay for...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think they expect 2.5 - 5.0% Equity to make up for the poverty level wage?

</comment><comment><USER8> CrystalMD was founded by Bilal Farooqui, who is a YC alum (for his other company, iJigg). I wonder what PG would think about this.

<comment><USER3> ???

YC, like most other accelerators, gives a stipend that's only really enough for just out of college bachelor/ettes capable of metabolizing a full spectrum of nutrients from ramen noodles. This whole field is structurally biased toward people with no family who can move on a whim and sleep in a coffin.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Demo Accounts in Production - <AUTHOR> Our clients / investors are asking for a test / demo account of our platform. How do you handle those in your system?<p>Do you create real users with fake data or do you hard-code some "test" mode to avoid CRUDing data? <comment><USER2> Does it have to be production and not a staging environment? If that is the case, we do have a production demo account for sales reps in our app. We entered highly curated nearly 1-1 fake test to real-life data. So no hard- coded data or test-mode. It's very important that is feels 100% accurate from an experience standpoint. We created test users with emails we had access to, so they could still get emails from the platform as a demo user.

</comment><comment><USER3> A customer of mine is using a demo server to demonstrate the service to customers. It's a service about money so using the production system with fake data would be difficult, especially for the interfaces with external services. The demo server is seeded with fake data. Google for faker and the language you're using and you'll likely find a good generator library.</comment>


Machine Learning Classifier Gallery (Tom Fawcett) - <AUTHOR> http://home.comcast.net/~tom.fawcett/public_html/ML-gallery/pages/index.html

<comment><USER2> My Observations:

* Instance-based methods can adapt to any kind of pattern if you have enough data. This is a well-known result in machine learning -- the interesting question is simply how much data do you need?

* It's quite remarkable how well RBF SVMs do in almost all cases. They even outperformed a 2nd degree polynomial kernel SVM on a 2nd degree polynomial!

* Logistic regression is pretty terrible for anything except "easy" data -- simple linear data.

* Random forests are sometimes ok, but tend to prefer axis-aligned data (at least in his formulation).

* Meta-point: all the tests shown are with "clean" data...i.e., there are no "wrong" training examples. This is unrealistic, and in practice makes a HUGE difference for some of these methods. E.g., a lot of the rule-based methods get demolished by even a little bit of wrong data. In contrast, SVMs have a slack variable that can tolerate some amount of noise, and would probably shine even more on such data.

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't an RBF kernel be expected to perform better than a 2nd degree poly kernel since, technically, it is infinite-dimensional? (I.e., the radial basis function can be expanded into an infinite-degree taylor series)

I think (not a ML expert by any means) that RBF should probably outperform most fixed-integer polynomial kernels, but it does so at the cost of introducing more structural risk into the model.

<comment><USER4> It does not really go like that. The higher the dimension (actually VC dimension, but polynomial dimension is a similar concept) the more points you would theoretically need to guarantee that the classifier is not overfitting (ie, representing the noise in the data set).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OT:

What do the cognoscenti recommend for doing automatic text classification/categorization? I have been looking at Spam filters, and they're mostly boolean type predicates that return Spam/NotSpam results along with a confidence number. I want to be able to do that same for a large number of categories.

<comment><USER6> For simple classification tasks, naive bayes performs surprisingly well, is very easy to setup and run, and is relatively computationally inexpensive. It's excellent for getting a good baseline performance approximation because it's just so easy to use.

If you have a lot of training data and computational power, an SVM will almost always outperform naive bayes, but they take longer to train and tune. Try naive bayes first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It bothers me that these data sets are very low dimensional, without noise and pretty-picture-like. This pretty much excludes any interesting data to try to learn (after all one could easily manually code a classifier for most os these "concepts" that performs 100%)

<comment><USER7> Right. This also biases the test toward certain kinds of algorithm. The implicit requirement that the thing being learned should be something you can see (and check) by looking at pictures like these pretty much guarantees that simple "proximity-based" approaches will do well. So it's no surprise that we see nearest-neighbours and radial basis functions looking good in these tests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what generalizations can we make from these plots? Instance and rule based methods learn better? Random forest seems to be especially reliable.

<comment><USER9> I don't think any useful generalizations can be made without information about the CPU and memory usage of the algorithms.</comment></comment>


It could be '5 to 10 years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/05/ipv4_v_ipv6/ <comment><USER2> Pretty sure I saw this headline 20 years ago, too...

The world has figured out how to live without IPv6. The pain of switching, along with the fact that we're (still!) finding bugs in IPv6 stacks and interoperability challenges, just isn't worth it. There needs to be some significant benefit to the public other than mere address abundance to make a large-scale transition to IPv6 happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Uptake of IPv6 is so random and haphazard from one country to another. In Romania (RDS), I had IPv6 on my fiber connection already in 2010. In Poland (Orange), even in 2020 you can only get IPv6 by specially enabling it in your router's settings by an undocumented trick, but then the ISP issues a command to your router every 24 hours to drop IPv6 and go back to solely IPv4.

I know if you ask some ISPs how you can permanently enable IPv6, the response is that you need to upgrade to their more expensive business plan. (Surely no one would need IPv6 unless they were running a server, and residential plans aren't for running servers). Consequently, some ISP seem to feel a financial incentive _not_ to give out IPv6 addresses, and the pessimist in me says that they could continue dragging their feet for these next 5 to 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER4> Might need to add a 0 to those numbers.

</comment><comment><USER5> In fact, all the large ISPs and hosting providers are stocking up on IPv4 and buying them at places like ipv4connect.com...

</comment><comment><USER5> doubt we will ever get rid of IPv4 altogether. Dual stack will probably always have a need for backwards compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the "this is the year of the Linux Desktop" predictions.

</comment><comment><USER7> 10 years is very optimistic.</comment>


Coming Soon - Oracle Database 11g on Amazon Relational Database Service - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/coming-soon-oracle-database-11g-on-amazon-rds-1.html <comment><USER2> Arrggg... we get Oracle but no PostgreSQL?!?!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but PostgreSQL is _so_ easy to get running there. Seriously. And no amount of magic cloud sprinkles is going to fix Amazon's terrible IO latency problems, for any database product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been working with Oracle for the last few months. In some ways it is a fantastic product. In other ways it is mind-bogglingly backwards.

I mean, no boolean type? _Really?_

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The thorough support for hierarchical queries is quite tasty, though.

<comment><USER6> This.

I've done (1) nested sets, (2) recursive CTEs, and (3)the magic Oracle fairy dust of CONNECT BY and STARTS WITH.

(1) and (2) seem to make my coworkers (and bosses) eyes' glaze over. I think they like (3) because they don't have to worry as much about "code that guy in the corner wrote."

<comment><USER5> CONNECT BY/STARTS WITH can be brain-bending, too, if you are doing anything except the most straightforward use case. I found the "pseudocode" on this page under the "Interpreting connect by statements" header to be very enlightening:

<http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/sql/connect_by.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My understanding is that whatever database AWS supports it will let you scale up as much as required. Assuming this is the case unless you are and oracle guru or moving legacy applications i cant see this being useful for anyone other then large organisations who usually prefer to run their own hardware. Why pay for an oracle license if you dont have to. Especially when there are quite a few good oracle alturnatives these days.

I must be missing something here.

<comment><USER8> I think the main reason Amazon chose Oracle over databases like PostgreSQL is that it also makes it easier for a lot of people to convince their boss to move to AWS.

<comment><USER9> I think the main reason Amazon chose Oracle was a deal between them.

<comment><USER3> I think parent and GP both have an element of truth, but that the ultimate situation is more nuanced than either suggests. Customer demand is likely the biggest factor, but I'd be surprised if Oracle managed an exclusivity deal on RDS. Of the major RDBMS players, Oracle, for all their weirdness, all their proprietary functionality, all the damn-the-relational-model-here's-your- physical-row-identifiers, is a pretty logical choice as the first commercial offering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And it will cost $2000 an hour!

</comment><comment><USER11> New term: double vendor lock-in (AWS and Oracle)?</comment>


Ask HN: Any advice for note/scratchpad/idea dumping during the day? - <AUTHOR> I find that during a normal day, besides just straight programming, I'll need to run sql, create a quick report, jot down an error message, create several small cli scripts, etc.  All of which end up in a big mess typically in a single editor(some gui-notepad like gedit), left open and unsaved in multiple tabs for later reference until the day my battery runs out.  Then I'm pretty much sol if I ever need to reference those from then on.<p>I'm wondering if anyone has a good process that has worked for them to control this in a somewhat automated way.  I understand it's partly my fault for being lazy and not saving my notes, but I'm looking for a system that could keep a daily/weekly scratchpad-type git repo that I can easy search and always have up and ready when I need to dump in something.  What do you guys use for dumping various info/data/code like this that may or may not be used in the future? <comment><USER2> A bash script for a note-taker was given here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902255) based on the one here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16358837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16358837) Thanks for the motivation! I incorporated some improvements -

My version, n: 'n' displays notes with less, 'n [your text here]' to enter a line of text, 'n i' to enter input mode, where input continues until Ctrl-D. 'n date' adds date. 'n cat' prints notes. 'n -h' shows commands.

        #! /bin/bash #n note-taker
        fpath=$HOME/notes.txt
        [[ -e "$fpath" ]] || touch "$fpath" #create file if doesn't exist
        if [ "$1" == "cat" ]; then
            cat "$fpath"
            exit 0
        elif [ "$1" == "rg" ]; then
            rg "$2" "$fpath"
        elif [ "$1" == "nano" ]; then
            nano "$fpath"
        elif [ "$1" == "--help" ] || [ "$1" == "-h" ]; then
            printf '\n    n \t\t\t- display notes
        n --help\t\t- display this help
        n date\t\t- add date row to notes
        n <text>\t\t- add new entry
        n i \t\t- input mode, end input with ^D
        n cat\t\t- print notes using cat
        n rg <pattern>\t- ripgrep notes
        Use #tags (for easier grepping).\n\n'
        elif [ "$1" == "date" ]; then {
            echo
            echo '# '$(date +"%d-%m-%Y - %T")
        } >> "$fpath"
        elif [ "$1" == "" ]; then
            less +G "$fpath"
        elif [ "$*" == "i" ]; then {
            echo
            while read line
            do
                echo $line
            done
        } >> "$fpath"
        else {
            echo
            echo "$@"
        } >> "$fpath"
        fi

</comment><comment><USER2> One of (I assume) many Asks on this: Favorite note-taking software? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17532094)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/](https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Build yourself a command line app that saves your tasks.

Start small and iterate on it until it's what you need.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use cherry tree

</comment><comment><USER5> Trello would certainly work.</comment>


An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete. - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/08/an_18_billion_mile_journey.php

<comment><USER2> _Which means, for the first time since its discovery, Neptune is about to return to the same position in space that it occupied the day it was discovered. And what date will that be?_

It will return to the same position within its orbit relative to the sun, but surely not the "same position in space"? (The solar system has moved a little further around in its orbit within the Milky Way too.)

I'm aware I'm questioning a qualified _astrophysicist_ here - something I am not - so I'll blindly assume it's something to do with default frames of reference until corrected otherwise ;-)

<comment><USER3> Good source for a layman's explanation of how we measure where things are in the sky is Astronomy Cast: [http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-171-solar- system-m...](http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-171-solar-system- movements-and-positions/) [http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-170-coordinate- sys...](http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-170-coordinate-systems/)

<comment><USER4> Astronomy Cast is great. I wish I had a similar "not just what we know, but how we know what we know", friendly conversation type podcast for more subjects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It may be interesting to note that one way objects are discovered now is by automated sky surveys ("event factories" or "robotic telescopes") like this one:

<http://voeventnet.caltech.edu/feeds/Catalina.shtml>

The essence is to make multiple passes over the sky, comparing current images with past images. Large image-differences represent moving objects, which are looked up in a database. If they are new, they are entered into an event queue, represented above. In principle, other robotic telescopes can scoop up promising events and follow up on them.</comment>


If we burn, you burn with us - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2019-08-17/if-we-burn-you-burn-with-us <comment><USER2> I am riveted by the protests - does anyone know if there is a way we can help them from afar?

<comment><USER3> Some concrete actions that could help Hong Kong:

1\. For governments worldwide:

1a. Freeze the assets of senior officials of the Chinese and Hong Kong governments who violated human rights, in the style of Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019.

1b. Stop exporting crowd-control equipment to Hong Kong which could be used by the Police Force.

2\. For citizens worldwide:

2a. Urge your governments to do the above.

2b. Stop collaborating with China in the research and development of surveillance technology, which is being used also in Xinjiang.

2c. Purchase goods and services not from Chinese sources.

(Quoting a comment I made elsewhere)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't mainland China just let Hong Kong burn itself? There seems to be little incentive for China to either provide reforms (which would embolden the protestors) or do an authoritarian crackdown (the everyone burns scenario). It would seem they can just wait it out and let the protests paralyze Hong Kong until even local sentiments turn against them.

<comment><USER5> There is no sense into trying to find a rational action/reaction from China. It is one of those states that meet resistance with blood. Always have. Most likely always will. They play the looooooong game (like Russia and Turkey). It is like a chess game to them. Popularity is just a chess piece and they can win it back in 20 years, with some other Olympic Games or similar. They gain some land forever (Cyprus, HK, you-name-it), while the democracy wolves howl in the dark/background, in vain. And if/when they ever need to win back popularity points they will take a few steps to sneak their way out of this.

Edit: a couple of typos/grammatic errors.

<comment><USER6> > It is one of those states that meet resistance with blood. Always have.

Isn't that pretty much "any country on earth that is strong enough to do that"? Civil society may protest all it wants, Iraq was still invaded. Another round of protests, but Libya was still bombed back into the dark ages.

<comment><USER7> America has made a lot of mistakes with its foreign policy, but it's disingenuous to act like the US has ever done anything like tiananmen square to it's own people in the modern era. There is absolutely a difference between how the United States responds to dissent, and how repressive regimes do

<comment><USER8> That depends on how you define 'modern era' I guess...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing)

<comment><USER7> > Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired, and two veterans > were wounded and later died.

> A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt > administration was defused [...] with an offer of jobs [...] Those who chose > not to work for the CCC by the May 22 deadline were given transportation > home. In 1936, Congress [...] paid the veterans their bonus nine years > early.

I'm going to go ahead and say this is reaching comparing it to Tiananmen square where thousands of peaceful protesters were killed by the army. Additionally, the government ordered the protesters killed, vs. some police in a heated situation firing.

> The MOVE members fired at them and a gunfight with semi-automatic and > automatic firearms

Again, not saying the police did the right thing here, but MOVE was armed with illegal fully automatic weapons and was firing them at the police. This is very different from a peaceful protest being squashed by the army and then covered up by the government.

I feel like this is so obvious, it's strange it needs to be said? America makes mistakes all the time. But the core values are to admit those mistakes, and work to fix them, not cover it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's pretty telling to me that this author ("the editorial director of the Bloomberg New Economy") is so quick to dismiss full democracy. The people of Hong Kong are asking for full democracy are they not? If the people are asking for it why on earth is the author so willing to accept that this is out of the question? They do not want more puppets, even if appeasement might succeed...

<comment><USER10> Why do you think the author is wrong?

In 1997, China regained sovereignty over Hong Kong. It remains a SAR until 2047. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong)

So yes, people of Hong Kong are asking true universal suffrage just as you say, but I understand the sentiment to dismiss the claim because... how do you get there?

It is literally a path that is blocked/unseeable with out some form of miracle.

I'm legitimately asking - protest all you want, bring the city to a halt. What incentive does China have to allow it to remain a full democracy?

<comment><USER11> > _In 1997, China regained sovereignty over Hong Kong. It remains a SAR until > 2047._

Why do you think China has any intention of keeping their end of that contract? (And I'm not being snarky either.)

Contracts in general are done between parties of approximately equal power, or in lieue of that, in an environment where a third party has sufficient power over all signatories. The only sane position is to take the most cynical one: assume that anyone and everyone will attempt to break the rules of the contract at every opportunity, if it benefits them.

Everyone is immoral. And the only ones who play fair are those who don't know how to cheat well enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Based on the headline I thought this would be an article about billionaires in their bunkers after we've hit 5c warming.

Good read nonetheless. Let's hope for some sort of reasonable resolution...

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if there are tactics being learned by other governments (or future potential rioters!) here about how to deal with ongoing instability caused by rioting. At this scale, these don't happen often, so is there a "meta" being played out by the two sides?

<comment><USER14> It's not rioting.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough, what should I be calling it? Genuine question, not sure.

<comment><USER15> It's a demonstration or a protest.

FWIW, there's an extra layer to language here where China gov't calls them rioters, so by your choice of words you choose sides.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I realized that after I wrote it, sorry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rx: Treating Bugs as Allergies – A Method to Survive Software Failures (2005) [pdf] - vezzy-fnord https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/xyzhang/fall07/Papers/Rx-SOSP05.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The checkpointing part is the most expensive and error-prone (what happens to all the fd's that were closed and opened again since the last checkpoint ?).

Is the "flip malloc/synchronization/scheduling knobs" part being actively used in any existing project ? It's probably the most easy part to implement from the whole paper.</comment>


Ask HN: Help Me Identify These Items (And Thus Preserve My Sanity) - <AUTHOR>

I used to own the red one[1] and I cannot for the life of me remember its name... it's driving me batty!
Also I remember reading that the truck was made anew and was excited for my young roboticist but now I cannot think of where I read that.
(Sometimes being a Geek and OCD sucks.)
Please and thanks!
----
[1]: http://secpie.com/toys.jpg <comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://secpie.com/toys.jpg>

I found a picture that shares two of your items:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/veloopity/210755456/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good work! (And quick: What search-term or tool did you use?)

<comment><USER2> Google image search "unusual instruments"

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! Google-Fu master.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The one on the bottom was called the Magical Musical Thing. I had one and loved it.

And the red handheld was called Merlin. That's all I got.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's[1] it. Good work.

Score on the Merlin[2] too!

Was that all from memory?

\----

[1]: <http://www.miniorgan.com/lib/view.php?miniorgan=12>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(game)>

<comment><USER3> The Magical Musical Thing was. But it took some coaxing. I could remember the name was longer and had some rhythm. I was Googling "musical wand" and trying mot to think about it. Then it sort of fell into my head and I Googled MMT and saw the pictures.

With the Merlin, I kept thinking "Simon". I can't remember exactly what I googled but maybe something like "retro handheld electronics red" and saw a picture of it.

I want an MMT now. I remember playing the HELL out of Greensleeves on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The truck is a Bigtrak, re-made by firebox.com: [http://www.firebox.com/product/2734/Bigtrak?via=top10&ca...](http://www.firebox.com/product/2734/Bigtrak?via=top10&cat=Toys)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ah... Amazon Remembers identified the micro keyboard as a Casio CTK-2100 but that's definitely not correct. But worse; they say the red toy _and_ the psudo-flute are both USB bar-code scanners... doh!</comment>


My personalized news site based on the book Programming Collective Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://fyynd.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a personalized news site that I wrote in two months based on algorithms from the book Programming Collective Intelligence. Please tell me what you think.

It has two main features: the ability to identify related /similar links and suggestions/recommendations that actually work.

The basis for all of the algorithms is a document similarity metric presented in Chapter 3: Discovering Groups. Basically, to compare document A with document B, we calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient between the word frequencies of document A and the word counts of document B. (You can imagine this as plotting a series of points of a graph: each point's x coordinate is its frequency in document A and each point's Y coordinate is its frequency in document B. The Pearson correlation coefficient is a measure of how well the line-of-best-fit fits the points.)

Using this similarity metric, links can be clustered together using K-means clustering. This is what you get when you click on "related" at the bottom of each link. Clicking on "similar" gives the results of running K-NN. ("related" doesn't work as well as it could be right now because there are too few links for a link to be similar with, but this is an example of where it does work: <http://fyynd.com/links/197/related/> "similar" usually works better right now.)

There are two algorithms for giving recommendations, "Suggested" and "Recommended". "Recommended" generally works better than Suggested when you haven't yet made votes but Suggested should be more in tune to your preferences in the long run.

In layman's terms, the Recommendation algorithm works by "averaging" together the links that you liked and then find links that are similar to that while the Suggestion algorithm tries to determine whether you will like a particular link by seeing whether it is similar to any page that you have already rated highly. As a result, "Recommended" will list pages in your general interest area, but insensitive to any "niche" interest that you might have. The "Suggested" page will be sensitive to "niche" interests but will requires more votes to train. For example, if most of the link you rate highly are about computer science, with a only a few links about biology, when the recommendation algorithm averages them together, the biology links would count for very little. As a result, you wouldn't see much on biology. On the other hand, the suggestion algorithm will not be hindered by this, though it will have trouble if you don't vote much.

Please note that because predictions are so computationally intensive, they are not updated in real-time but on a hourly basis. Thus, you have to wait a bit before they come out. Please be patient!

Please check it out and tell me what you think! Any questions/comments/suggestions are more than welcome!

<comment><USER2> I really like the interface. It has some features I wish HN had, like the ability to hide items from view. I've been meaning to write something like this for a while but never got around to it. Keep up the good work.

oh, please create a bookmarklet to let users submit stories while browsing, this is VERY IMPORTANT, and shouldn't take much effort (use the HN one as an example).

I'd like to feed the site with stories from here and create a Greasemonkey plugin to automatically rate items on your site when I vote them up here (if I can find a good way to vote up items programatically on fyynd).

<comment><AUTHOR> Bookmarklets: done. See <http://fyynd.com/bookmarklets/>. As for rating links programmatically: it is a simple POST to "<http://fyynd.com/links/>[link_id]/rate/" with a parameter "rating". "rating" should be a float between 0 and 5. A rating of 0 will delete that vote.

Thanks for your interest.

<comment><USER2> how do I tell the application which user I am when posting a ranking?

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to include the cookie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm reading this book currently. A lot of it is covered in traditional AI courses in CS programs, but I like seeing the Pythonic representations of some of the concepts.

The site itself seems kind of neat, feels like you'd need to use it for a while to get it working well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool site. I am working on the same thing (but for school/fun). You should look into Support Vector Machines as they are much better at text classification then kNN.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have looked into SVMs but I don't think they would work well in this case because: 1) A separate classifier would have to trained for each user and this would take too much resources. 2) I think an SVM would require too many training cases before it becomes useful.

If you know different, let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats for the site.

Regarding presentation, did you reused any old reddit-like frontend? It looks a lot like links <http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/61e7j/comments/c02j42c>

</comment><comment><USER6> I viewed your site and I had a case of information overload. I would suggest having a feature where a person can type in what they like (cars, technology, etc) and that you feed them what they want rather then dump everything on them at once.</comment>