Line breaking (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://xxyxyz.org/line-breaking/ <comment><USER2> Is there a reason browsers don't have decent line breaking algorithms yet that make paragraph text look better than the current "left" and "justified" CSS alignments? I miss the way LaTeX lays out text.

Also, maybe I missed it but are these algorithms trying to find the best line breaking solution? How much more efficient can you make this if you look for "good enough"?

<comment><USER3> It's not just line breaking that makes LaTeX beautiful. It's also space placing too.

Sometimes you can adjust the distance between letters in a word or distance between words to not break to many lines.

The algorithm is similar.

The algorithms do find the best breakage but as you can see, there's no need to look for good enough, there's already a nice n log n solution.

These algorithms work so well that then you get the problem of rivers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_\(typography\))

The reason why efficient DP algorithms exist is because the evaluation function you're trying to minimize is decomposable over the decisions (of where to put a line break). Rivers on the other hand can be optimally evaluated only after you've put your spaces and breaks.

Similar issues are encountered in machine learning for sequence tagging or natural language parsing, where the loss function does not always decompose over sequence of decisions. The statistical models used there (that replace Viterbi-like DP algorithm) try to compensate by reinforcement learning or decomposition tricks. It works quite well.

<comment><USER4> > there's no need to look for good enough, there's already a nice n log n > solution.

How efficient is that under local changes? E.g., when the user (or javascript) changes one word in a long paragraph, does the algorithm require a re-analysis of the whole paragraph?

<comment><USER5> In the worst case yes, since that might change the number of words that fit in that line, and that would mean exchanging words with the line before or after that, leading to a cascading effect.

However, you might find that many of the old linebreaks can stay as they are, so I'd expect reflowing to be faster in practice.

<comment><USER4> I'm thinking the algorithm will then not be able to provide a responsive UI in all cases, so perhaps browsers should allow for a temporary suboptimal rendering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't line breaking an NP complete problem, akin to bin packing? I seem to recall hearing a presentation about it in the context of autoformatters for code. For example, Auto formatting Java code, which is typically verbose, relies on heuristics to avoid computational snares.

<comment><USER7> It depends what on what bells&whistles you want, but line breaking is "theoretically" quadratic but, for most use cases, basically linear. A real misfortune is that the Knuth-Plass algorithm was published before we had a good grasp on how to present algorithms well. The actual algorithm is basically just a linear pass (reverse) along with a memo-table. (This is usually described as "dynamic programming", but I find that term less than useless.)

[https://github.com/jaroslov/knuth-plass- thoughts](https://github.com/jaroslov/knuth-plass-thoughts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could someone explain what these style of graphs are and how do I interpret them in relation to the running time? Why does their orientation change?

They are very appealing visually.

<comment><USER9> The independent variables are the width of the line in characters (shown on the horizontal axis), and the length of the text in words (the "depth" axis). The dependent variable is the time that the algorithm takes to run, and it's shown on the vertical axis.

The orientation of the graphs doesn't change, but the scale does pretty massively, and seems to indicate the rough efficiency of the algorithm (the time is always in the range of 0.0-1.0 seconds, so it's clear that brute force is _many_ times slower than the more-advanced algorithms).

<comment><USER8> Thank you, this all makes perfect sense now. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> (2014) should be added to the title

<comment><USER11> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Airbnb lets you vacation in illegal West Bank settlements - <AUTHOR> http://972mag.com/airbnb-lets-you-vacation-in-illegal-west-bank-settlements/115666/ <comment><USER2> Airbnb has plenty of listings in Northern Cyprus, too -- illegally occupied since 1974. Take your pick!</comment>


Influenza-like illness based on Kinsa devices drops bellow the expected average - <AUTHOR> https://healthweather.us/?mode=Atypical? <comment><AUTHOR> I know this link has also been posted about 3 weeks ago, but I found it interesting now because of the updated Observed/Atypical/Expected chart they have on left of the page. The above-Expected trajectory observed starting with about March 1 was kind of, well, expected, giving the circumstances at that time (no social distancing implemented it in times of a pandemic), but I found just as interesting the bellow-Expected trajectory of the curve that has started around March 21st.</comment>


Ask HN: Rails / Grunt integration – how? - <AUTHOR>

Long time Rails[1] user. Have discovered Npm[2], Bower[3], Grunt[4], Yeoman[5] recently. How do I get these excellent tools to play nicely with the Rails ecosystem[6]? Notably Sprockets[7] and Grunt do not seem to see eye to eye?<p>What strategies have you used? Would love to know.<p>[1] http://rubyonrails.org/<p>[2] https://www.npmjs.org/<p>[3] http://bower.io/<p>[4] http://gruntjs.com/<p>[5] http://yeoman.io/<p>[6] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html<p>[7] https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets <comment><USER2> At work we are using rails-assets.org to include bower packages as ruby gems. rails-assets.org gets added as a source in the gemfile and run bundler as usual.

We looked at a couple of other integrations. rails-assets.org was the only one that did't require adding extra parts that need to get managed. Time spent managing multiple packaging systems is time not spent doing productive work.</comment>


Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a Dragon. Eat the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://aiweirdness.com/post/189511103367/play-ai-dungeon-2-become-a-dragon-eat-the-moon <comment><USER2> Previous discussion on the project itself (although a few things have changed since then): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022)

Impressively, the Patreon for the project just hit $8k/mo. [https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon](https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon)

<comment><USER3> _> Impressively, the Patreon for the project just hit $8k/mo._

Costing him $10k/day to run though.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21739879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21739879)

<comment><USER4> Not anymore. A peer-to-peer network was used to avoid the massive network egress costs, while the creator worked on a cost-efficient hosted app.

[https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1203843111287316485](https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1203843111287316485)

[https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-32193930](https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-32193930)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori I ran a fairly normal fantasy scenario where I found a missing son of a local knight. Then the king's guards attacked me on the street and killed me.

So I chose to keep playing, resurrected myself by transforming into a demon, and killed the guards. I went to the castle to confront the king. He didn't have a good explanation for why he tried to kill me, so I killed him and crowned myself King. No one put up a fight and the townspeople bowed before me.

The next day I mounted a dragon, raised an army, and marched on the nearby kingdom. They put up a fight, but I seiged their gate and it fell. I proclaimed myself King of that kingdom too. No one felt like messing with a demon king on a dragon I guess.

I did this again with a third kingdom and then asked the Pope to proclaim me emperor. (I may have been playing too much Crusader Kings 2 recently.)

It was at this point when I had gone so far off-script that the AI pretty much gave up and stopped being able to form sentences.

<comment><USER5> Wow, you got a lot farther than I did before sending the AI into gibbering madness. I discovered very quickly that if you went non-sequitur it broke badly. "You are in the castle". "Swim to the bottom and unlock the door". "You swim across to the other door and discover a river."

<comment> a-priori Oh don't get me wrong, I glossed over a lot of nonsense, especially in the first part. I didn't mention in the first sentence that finding the knight's son involved starting at a cave, having a random knight (Sir Ivan) approach me, talk about his missing son (Sir John) who had been missing for months, and yet was definitely still in his house (and how dare I suggest otherwise!), and yet was last seen at a nearby tavern.

When I visited the tavern the barkeep told me that Sir John was there last night but said that Sir John was seen at the cave. I returned to the cave and dug a hole (I didn't ask it to do this) and then heard a noise. It was some bandits, and I talked to their leader. The leader attacked me, and I stabbed him. I searched the bandit and found a letter written in blood from someone named John. Not Sir John, the knight's son, mind you, but John a bartender at the tavern whom had not yet been mentioned. And not the barkeep I spoke to before either.

John had apparently held a grudge against me due to some past incident, and after I stabbed him he had written this note to me in my blood to be carried to me by the bandit.

When I went to the tavern to ask the barkeep about John, he told me he knew John. Then Sir John walked in to the tavern. Sir Ivan, his father, was not mentioned again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Super cool game, though admittedly it's less of an actual text-based adventure game, and more like a super advanced chatbot in the guise of a text-based adventure game.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it might be possible to make it a bit more "game-y" by adding some manually-programmed structural elements to the game (like inventory, skill points, etc) and feeding those into the AI to tune its responses.

Maybe some sort of AI-powered D&D DM; the rules of the game would be hard coded, but the AI would determine how the rules are applied and how they fit into the story based on text input from the players, results of dice rolls, etc. (E.g. If the AI were to end a sentence with "Roll for initiative" then the hard-coded bit of the game would have everyone roll initiative and feed the results back into the AI.)

<comment><USER8> Why would manually-programmed structural elements be necessary? I'm interested to see if the AI can be trained to convince me that I'm actually playing a game.

<comment><USER7> Because GPT-2 in its current form isn't that great at keeping track of facts (like the player's inventory or skill points) over the course of long conversations, or at consistently enforcing rules (as the OP's blog post demonstrates). Allowing a more logically stringent system to handle those parts of the game might produce more realistic results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it's because I don't have a lot of experience with such dungeon crawler games, but I just can't figure out what people find so compelling about a program that spits semi-coherent gibberish back at you based on some input.[0]

With no sense of linear progression of time or cause and effect (you can say "discover holy grail" on your first turn and you're done), it feels like a stretch to call this a game. It's a game in the same sense as an Ouiji board is a game.

What am I missing?

0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717515)

<comment><USER10> Personally I can't understand how someone wouldn't find this utterly wonderful and compelling but several of my friends have reacted like you so I guess you're not the weirdo here.

<comment><USER9> Well the $8k/month the author is making on patreon to work on this project clearly indicate that my view is _not_ shared by all. :) Horses for courses.

<comment><USER6> Apparently the server costs are in the tens of thousands of dollars so they (or their university lab?) are losing money on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Been having a lot of fun with friends. Non-techy people don't really believe it, so when it works well and is giving back cohesive text, they are really blown away.

</comment><comment><USER12> The problem of this is that it doesn't have a notion of "world state" other than the text of the latest interactions, so you can do anything but it feels like nothing matters.

Fixing that seems very hard though.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't even have that.

In 3 messages I went from a peasant in a fantasy setting, to someone who is reading a book in 1869, to someone who watches TV in a cottage.

Half the time it also seems to completely ignore your input and tell your character that you did something else instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like an early entry point for something that can raise something completely new in computer games.

I'm looking forward to progress concerning generating some graphics based on text. I'd be even more "lucid dream" experience.

My adventure with computer games finished quite early - around Fallout2 and Baldur's Gate. Since then nothing could impress me, except maybe few examples (one I can remember was a racing game, which I found interesting, because it mapped a real world city, I can't remember the name, thought). I think that the main reason is that when I discover inner mechanisms of something it stops being interesting for me. With that kind of experience, which is more like digging into some subconscious areas of mind it won't happen to soon ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> This needs to be used for fortune telling / AI zodiac / dream interpretation. Because as a game its more like a chatbot... just make it into an all seeing eye chatbot.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can play an iOS version here (it's a fork): [https://testflight.apple.com/join/aeEVsAWE](https://testflight.apple.com/join/aeEVsAWE) Android: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PPonqgRoeCDA5D0nvCbSl_CCL2...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PPonqgRoeCDA5D0nvCbSl_CCL2COrmTR)

</comment><comment><USER17> Link to try for free: [https://colab.research.google.com/github/nickwalton/AIDungeo...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/nickwalton/AIDungeon/blob/master/AIDungeon_2.ipynb)

<comment><USER18> Anyone else get `./venv/bin/activate: No such file or directory` on step 3?

Also, I can't quite understand from the main page: Is this _the_ way to play, free or not? I became a Patreon, but didn't discover any other way to play the game.

<comment><USER17> I couldn't figure it out either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh, thank goodness this is real. For a moment I thought this was another tired Keaton Patti bit:

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-forced-a- bot](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-forced-a-bot)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there a way to run it self-hosted locally?

<comment><USER21> Yeah, just clone the repo, download the model, and run the start script. If you don't have a GPU with ~14GB of RAM expect each response to take a few minutes to be generated though.

<comment><USER20> Thanks! It's not that bad -- am on a 2080 8GB and it takes less than a minute for each response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hello</comment>


Simple Universal Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/introducing-simple-universal-time/

<comment><USER2> First of all, there is already the Swatch Internet Time[0], which is a very similar concept (and similarly underused).

But more importantly, you would have to redefine the length of a second in order to keep days the same length. Redefining the length of a second is _not_ _good_. Really, no.

Then there is the problem that this is not really a sensible metric time – 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds each? Frankly, that's stupid – ideally, you want the conversion factors to always be the same, ideally 10³. The swatch time mentioned above got this right with 1000 minutes ('.beats')/day, if absolutely necessary, you could probably also go with 100 quarter-hours/day and 100 seconds/quarter-hour, with 1 new second = 8.64 old seconds, or 1 old second ~ 0.12 new seconds.

The underlying problem here is that time lengths are intrinsically non-metric and there is little to no way to consistently make a year and a day both 'metric', simply because nature doesn't require them to be. The same goes for nearly all other SI units – the equator is 40 Mm, the average height of a human is ~2m, a human weighs 80kg, not 100kg (and really, _k_ g as the base unit?!).

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time>

<comment><USER3> I agree its a little bizarre, but as for the length of days, changing to a metric equivalent wouldnt really require changing the length of a second would it?

We have a fixed system right now and when its off we just say this day is a minute longer and clocks synchronize.

There's nothing inherently accurate about 60 60 24.

What I cant wrap my head around is the lack of timezones. If I switched to UTC or something based on UTC right now would I be waking up every day at 5 PM? I dont know and I dont much care.

But it seems like there is tension between local/global requirements and right now we favor local because its where we live.

<comment><USER2> The point is that at the moment, a day has 86400 SI seconds. If you want to keep it that way, i.e. change neither the length of a day nor change the length of a second, you will have to either divide these 86400 SI seconds up into some sensible pieces (60 60 24, e.g.) or have some remainder left (one day of 10 hours and some weird stuff at the end).

The problem here is not the one-off second, but the length of the second per- se which would have to change. Unfortunately, the length of the second is so deeply tied into the SI system that I'd rather have a non-metric day than a change in the length of seconds.

Timezones are somewhat orthogonal to this, and while there is some advantage to having a global time ('let's meet at 17:00, okay?'), local timezones are also somewhat helpful – you can expect shops to open around 8:00 all over the world and wouldn't expect them to be open at 22:00; similarly, local authorities can change the time (and hence the time when shops open/close, e.g.) without everyone having to reprint their opening times signs (as happens for DST or during WWI/II).

<comment><USER3> I didnt mean that the second wouldnt have to be redefined at all only that if it was defined in metric, it wouldnt be any more or less prone to adjustment (which I though was the first comments point) than our current system which is inaccurate.

So if our current system still has to be adjusted periodically to fit nature, then what is the real impact of changing the duration of a second? Besides the obvious: breaking every clock on earth LOL

<comment><USER2> Breaking clocks is boring, but how about breaking SI? We would have to:

      - redefine the speed of light
      - redefine the unit of distance
      - redefine the unit of work
      - redefine the unit of the electrical current
      - redefine the unit of light flux

The mole, kilogramm and kelvin should be fine, but well. Furthermore, if we wanted to keep a meter the length it currently is, the acceleration due to the gravitation field of the earth would change (currently 9.81 m/s²), along with the kinetic energy of a mass of one kilogram travelling at 1 m/s (currently 1/2 J) and roughly fifty trillion other things.

Really, no. No. NO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it only me or this sounds like a terrible idea? Maybe it will eventually be more productive but during the transition phase, there'll be mayhem. Not to mention all the unusable clocks, hardware etc that'll have to be completely scraped.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hardware is actually easy - you can keep the clock in UTC and display the time in SUT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previously tried in the late 1700s:

"Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds"

It sounds quite practical, but one reason we have 60-based time and 360 degrees in a circle is that they divide evenly so many ways. Eg, 60 minutes divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, so it's easy to measure a third of an hour or 1/6 of a circle.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've just discovered the C implementation of SUT at <https://github.com/benkaiser/sut.c> \- nice to see it working on the commandline :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Even if this was well thought out it would never catch on.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you think something is impossible, you've just made it impossible for you.

Thus my approach is to do - time will show if it was impossible or not.

<comment><USER2> And if you refuse to accept that the optimal solution is impossible to implement, you will forever try to build a perpetuum mobile rather than go with the second-best solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - fair point and taken. The optimal solution for time & date is probably way beyond SUT: One could discuss months (12, why so), weeks (7, wtf?), days per month (28-31), ... I believe there are many ways to improve our current life. SUT is a humble and very practical proposal, as soon as you accept that standing up is at a different time in Japan than in Berlin.

Give it a try in thinking, you may enjoy the light feeling in your stomach afterwards.

<comment><USER2> Well, yes, but unfortunately, time is inherently non-metric. As long as we mainly operate on this planet, we have two basic units of time: the day and the year.

Now unfortunately, the latter is roughly 365.24 days, so whatever unit X you choose such that 1 day = 10^n X, one year will be 3.65 10^{n+2} X. Again, there are two choices (as outlined before for the case 86400s = 1d): Either divide the year into some arbitrary months (365 has the ugly property of being 5 × 73) or have stupid stuff at the end (apparently some cultures have 12 months of 30 days each and five special ones). So is it possible to implement a much better way of counting time? Certainly, yes. Is SUT such a way? Probably. Is it worth it? I don't think so.

(And, again: The matter of timezones is orthogonal to the matter of how you divide a day, you can easily abolish timezones and still use 24 _60_ 60 – you can even do so slowly by using UTC as an implicit timezone with your social circle.)

((As hinted at above, this whole matter will get even more ugly when there are humans on the Mars and Earth – clearly a second (basic SI unit) should be the same length on both planets, but what about hours? Days? Years?))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> claudius, you are right, there is swatch beat. It actually tries to solve the problem different. The problem with beat is that humans are used to hours/minutes/seconds. That's why SUT reuses this principle.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg faces European parliament – watch live - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L5xTvj_HCc <comment><USER2> Available in multiple languages here : [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep- live/en/other-events/video?...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep- live/en/other-events/video?event=20180522-1820-SPECIAL-UNKN)</comment>


How Advertising Works, and Why It Won't For Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=365 <comment><USER2> You could make the same argument for why advertising won't work for TV, newspapers, and magazines.

Google's model is nearly optimal in many cases, but I believe many advertisers still spend the majority of their money outside of Google. The reason is that there are two kinds of advertising, roughly: meeting demand, and creating demand. Google is good for the former ("I'm looking for X"), and TV has been great for the latter ("want to be important? You need this expensive car").

<comment><USER3> Right on about Need vs. Awareness .... Think of Coca-Cola or McDonald's, or even Budweiser. There are many large companies that use TV/Internet to keep their brand strong. Everyone knows about these brands, there is no direct "need" for any of their products (one could argue against this but I digress), but they need to keep advertising so when you are hungry, or thirsty, or sober you turn to them first.

<comment><USER4> That´s right, I think there´s also a hybrid, probably like banner advertising, google adwords, amazon recommendations and gmail, which is showing you ads for things you might be interested in but not necessarily actively seeking.

When you see an ad for coke on the street there is just some probability you are thirsty or will remember coke when you become thirsty, with adwords and other kinds of contextual advertising there is also a probability you might be interested in what the advertiser is presenting you, so they might just hit a need or making you aware of it, and not really creating it as in creating demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to agree with the point Matt makes, that advertising will continue to work better on Google than on Facebook. We mustn't forget, however, that advertising is a construct of the last two centuries and especially the period 1950-1990, and may already have passed its prime as a way of generating customers.

Moving forward, the value of communities may overtake the value of marketing and of brand - and think here of baby boomer 'retirement' villages as much as MySpace or Facebook. Advertising will continue to work better on Google; but advertising as a means to generate business may be superceded.

For more information, albeit from a functional business perspective rather than directly on topic, see perhaps <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_>(business) [http://www.shirlawsonline.com/downloads/sme-report- summary.z...](http://www.shirlawsonline.com/downloads/sme-report-summary.zip) (Download a research document) or [http://360degreeview.blogspot.com/2007/09/signs-of-new- distr...](http://360degreeview.blogspot.com/2007/09/signs-of-new-distribution- era-emerging.html)

Don't rule out social networks just yet.

<comment><USER6> Interesting point. I think it's wrong, but it's definitely interesting.

<comment><USER5> I'll admit it's certainly based on a little conjecture. The post-WWII 'Product Era' supported by marketing evolved into the Brand or 'Positioning Era'; one of business frameworks I use for work (I'm a Shirlaws Business Coach) tracks revenue through a business, starting with Product, then Positioning, then Distribution (ie, of product to market).

But this does fit into emerging trends, both online (Facebook) and off ('baby boomer community' returns 5.3 million pages in Google, but no ads...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "But they'll never know what you want right now, and Google always does."

Matt, this appears to be your killer point, that search allows advertisers to know what you want right now. The limitation with search however is that there are things I am very likely to want that I don't search for.

Let me use an example. Often when people are about to go on holiday they announce it in Facebook by writing on someone's wall or updating status etc. Now if I said I was going to Cancun for example would't it be great for advertisers of tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance to advertise to me? Only Facebook can do this, Google cannot (I would have to do three separate searches, with FB I do nothing).

I think this goes beyond a friend recommendation because it links exactly to my plans. Its not only targeted but it shows what I want tomorrow. I think overall this is more targeted than google thanks to the demographic targeting placed on top which Google does not have. In Facebook, I could use the persons place of employment and age to work out their salary and offer two different holiday insurance schemes to the wealthy and the less fortunate. If I type in Holiday insurance in Google, advertisers cannot filter like that. And would think this likely to return a better ROI than Google search (as long as people pay attention to the ads! - the assumption being when ads are relevant people actually do).

So what I am saying is that there is a whole lot of data for Facebook to play with, don't rule them out yet. It will be very hard for them to pull this off but someone has to challenge the google monopoly and who are better placed than them.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand your logic. You type Cancun into Facebook and it hits you with "tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance". Why couldn't Google just do the same when you Googled for Cancun? That's not what Google does hit you with, but that's only because the market has decided that those ad slots should belong to travel agencies, etc. If ads ever took off on Facebook, it would presumably decide the same exact thing there.

I don't know about you, but like 99.9% of the population, when I travel to a new place I type it in Google first. I might type it into Facebook if I want to see if any of my friends will be there or have been there. But generally I'm Googling for what to do. It's gotten me through many new cities.

Also, you're giving Facebook too much credit for being able to parse natural language if you think this can scale for them. They might be able to target ads around specific keywords, but even that is going to be tough.

<comment><USER7> > "You type Cancun into Facebook and it hits you with "tshirts, shorts and > holiday insurance". Why couldn't Google just do the same when you Googled > for Cancun?"

That's the thing...with Facebook you don't have to search in order to be presented with relevent advertising. FB could parse natural language from the communications you are having with friends to display ads relevent to what you want now. Using my example above if i posted on my friends wall saying I am going to cancun then I would see the ads described above. However, that doesn't mean I woulnd't search in Google.

I agree, natural language parsing is very difficult but if Facebook could do that they may be on to a winner.

<comment><USER8> Even if the problem of generalized natural language understanding were solvable - which I doubt -, my bet would be on Peter Norvig and the Google team solving it way before the Facebook guys.

<comment><USER9> The fundamental problem is that natural language processing (NLP) isn't one problem to be solved. There will be many solutions to many particular problems of NLP. Many, many years later we're still waiting for one solution to energy (steam, or coal, or nuclear...?) or one solution to flight (gliders, or jets, or rockets...?). Human intelligence is a swiss army knife where the tools developed millions of years ago (opposable thumbs) or evolved withing ten years (keyword-based search). Why should there be a general solution?

Google has taken a sizeable chunk. But what's interesting to me is search has become all-consuming for them. Many solutions are perfectly fine for search, but that perspective (aggregating large noisy datasets) won't help much in other areas (e.g., individual voice recognition). If anything it will be a big waste of time trying to shoehorn every NLP problem into that search-based rubric. That leaves a lot of room for little guys cranking through data to produce new, and unique, NLP tools (e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking). More to your point: I have yet to see a scientific hire by Facebook away from Google. It's been all business and marketing from what I've seen in the popular press.

<comment><USER8> "Why should there be a general solution?"

Why indeed. However, finding one was very much on the agenda for GOFAI, and remains on the agenda for various AGI efforts, e.g. by people like Pei Wang, Ben Goertzel, and Eliezer Yudkowsky (who comments here, as I've observed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where search wins is with intent.

Search implies intent. Better than anything else.

All of the LBS (Location Based Services) haven't figured this out yet, but Location does NOT imply intent. Walking past a pizza store does not mean I'm hungry for pizza.

The question for Facebook is whether any data that they possess does a reasonable job of implying intent. It doesn't have to do as well as search, but it has to do well enough.

The question boils down to "what do you do on facebook that implies intent". The status may be one of the only things.

<comment><USER11> Knowing someone's intent is a sufficient, but not necessary condition for effective advertising. I may have no intention to attend a concert this weekend, but if I saw an ad for a nearby concert by an artist I like I would be likely to click on it. For this kind of advertising, Facebook can be much more effective than Google.

<comment><USER6> How? Everyone says this, but it just isn't happening because it isn't true. I mean, how does Facebook know that concert ads are better for you than t-shirt ads? They just magically parse your wall comments and this occurs?

My argument wasn't that knowing someone's intent is necessary. It's just that it focuses the advertising much better and as such demands far higher CPMs. Facebook can guess all they want, and if they do a perfect job (far better than technology allows currently) they'll guess as accurately as Google does now.

<comment><USER11> Facebook doesn't "know" that concert ads are better for me (although it can tell from my profile what music I like, where I live, and maybe even what concerts my friends attend, etc), but it can try different ads and see what works because of the large number of page views in a typical user session. In Google, you search, get the results, then leave the google.com. In Facebook, you can easily navigate to dozens of pages before logging off. This gives Facebook the opportunity to try different ads and see what works and what doesn't.

I agree with your main point, but the bottom line is that even if Facebook's CPMs are lower than Google, it doesn't mean that Facebook can't make a ton of money from advertising or that advertisers can't get good ROI on Facebook. You don't need to be Google to be a successful advertising platform. Also, don't forget that Facebook is still young and I'm sure many advertisers haven't yet adopted it. I have a friend who does internet marketing and he says that, at least in his niche, Facebook CPMs have been increasing by 10% a week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm so tired of matts "facebook isn't google" rants, move on dude, we get it.

My Opinion is that facebook is one of the best valued ad networks for advertisers right now and the flood of brands is a matter of when not if.

<comment><USER6> Then don't read them. Complaining about what other people write is the height of vanity.

I don't see how a top 10 traffic site could possibly be overlooked by marketers. If it were a value, they'd shift there until it was not, and that isn't happening at all. The data shows that you are incorrect.

<comment><USER12> I didn't read it, just briefly skimmed, my comment is related to seeing the reoccurring fb rants on YC.News.

In case you've missed it there is a lot of advertising happening on fb, some major brands include Blockbuster/BMW/Virgin America.

Where I see the value on fb is search ads for smaller advertisers, the cost- per-click on some prominent keywords are so much less than google, if the fb demo is your target, this can be a very cost effective channel for reaching them, plus this is where they are spending time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Facebook could succeed if they figure out the "word of mouth marketing strategy online. Think about it; when you buy something offline, or even online most people ask their friends and family what they bought, and from whom ... and then make their decision based on recommendations.

When I pick up new web design work, the #1 vehicle is word of mouth from my already serviced (and hopefully happy) clients recommending me to their friends.

If Facebook can use the "Twitter" style of outsourcing questions to your friends, they can tackle this problem of 'focus'. I could ask my FB friends what type of music player they all use, and my responses could have targeted ads based on what they say.

FB needs to be careful though becayse as you said, people login to FB to "hang out" and don't think "buy buy buy" first like they do with Google.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Facebook doesn't need to be bigger than Google to be successful. All they need to be is "profitable". Why do you think they need to be an order of magnitude bigger?

2\. You're missing the distinction between brand advertising and action oriented advertising. When Budweiser advertises, their goal is to create an association in your brain that links them to something cool you like so that when you're in the bar you choose their product rather than another brand. How many people do you know search for "beer" on Google to choose which brand to buy?

3\. Facebook does have aspects that allows them to get that order of magnitude of views you mentioned. For example, if I "fan" a Facebook Page, many of my friends will see that in their news feed. Probably not all 250 of them, but many.

<comment><USER6> Brand advertising on the net is all about clickthroughs too, just like any other ad. That's why you never see a banner with no link. The brand advertising is Budweiser's website, not their tiny banner. Since clickthroughs are whats relevant, the same laws apply.

<comment><USER14> Eh, the click is there so they can measure it and get more transparency than a billboard. But even if you don't click on it, it's about as effective as a billboard - not useful for a specific sale but one more incremental bit of brand awareness.

<comment><USER6> That's wrong because it isn't the tiny banner ad that is the billboard, it's the website you get to when you click it. Budweiser doesn't sell beer on their home page, they advertise it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _But I think reality is slowly setting in. Because what we're finding is that when people want something specific, they go to Google. When they want to kill time or just communicate with friends, they go to Facebook. And that isn't changing._

Let's say we split the market into two parts: Consumer A already knows he wants a particular product -- advertising is just a way to get him to buy it from you. Consumer B doesn't know what he wants -- he doesn't want anything just now. Advertising is a way to change this.

Isn't a list of Consumer B's interests, hobbies, friends, their interests, their hobbies, etc., a fantastic resource for targeting him? And isn't he an incredibly valuable customer? Apple didn't succeed by telling existing Mac users to buy more Macs (though they do!); it succeeded by getting people to switch. If Apple could target people whose status is "SP3 crippled my machine," or "Zune broken" or whatever, I'm sure they'll pay more for those users than they will pay for "Buy new Macbook pro" to link to Apple ads for Macbook pros as well as the Apple website selling Macbook pros.

<comment><USER6> Google can do a much better job with consumer B than Facebook. Facebook has to guess based on his wall posts, listed interests, etc. Given the sad state of natural language parsing, how well do you think this will work? At best they'll look at the bands I like and recommend similar ones. If they're lucky, they'll end up as good at that as Pandora. Or Netflix for movies.

Google knows your interests based on what sites you visit. Perhaps you visit an auto blog, which has Google Ads. Then you visit MySpace, which has Google Ads. Google shows you auto ads on MySpace. This sort of thing is already commonplace with ad networks.

Google has your entire search history. This is a far more effective way to determine your interests than Facebook. Facebook can't get beyond what bands and books and movies you like right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something helpful to remember is the shift from broadcast to cable TV as a true innovation in advertising. Where the former meant huge audiences (this year's Superbowl still trailed the 100 million that watched the final episode of MASH in 1983), it also meant significantly fewer targeted ads, except for some time periods (detergents begat soap operas) and events (beer begat Bud Bowl). Cable allowed channels to become really geared to demographics and thus ads. It's an example where the long tail of content is quite valuable. Take Scripps Networks (Food, HGTV, DIY) - that's quite a sizable chunk of what folks consume on a weekly basis.

To many, the internet advertising model takes the cable approach and amplifies the number of channels. The difference with Google is they understood how clicks were the next generation game changer (and well ahead of their time). Yahoo had always focused on aggregating content. They were following a shotgun path that had proven very valuable (cable TV) when clicks were finally used to create a sniper's rifle for aiming ads.

</comment><comment><USER16> What about trust as a factor in engagement? According to this survey <http://tinyurl.com/3jcxjj> recommendations from friends are trusted more than any other source of information. This is what people are looking to exploit with the social graph. Facebook beacon was an early clumsy attempt. If you can persuade people to pass on your message to friends you will significantly increase the response rate.

An example of this in action is at the end of this article on Duncan Watts <http://tinyurl.com/3pgps7>

" Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends. "

</comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps the key to making social network ads work is knowing where people are. AdWords has made marketing many, many internet only niche businesses possible. Privacy issues aside, Facebook could allow local bricks and mortar businesses to reach people geographically nearby via the internet.

While Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with friends who don't live nearby, I'm also friends with people that live in the same town and I see all the time - to see photos, arrange events, etc. You can join a group for the city you live in.

So, Facebook knows where people are and that some proportion of their friends live there too. Now there is new market for offline businesses - garages, restaurants, bars, shops - to reach local people on the web.

There are even Facebook groups for people that work in the same company. I'm sure the pizza place across the road from one of their buildings would like to advertise their promotion to everyone in that group.

</comment><comment><USER15> _Focus is the reason that search advertising is so wildly successful. If you're looking to sell Budweiser, what better way is there to reach customers than to show your ads to the guy who goes to Google and types in "beer"? You know every single one of them wants to know something about beer._

<http://reddit.com/info/verc/comments/>

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=beer+&btnG=Goog...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=beer+&btnG=Google+Search)

Great examples! Could be worse:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/1207345/>

</comment><comment><USER18> This is why I dislike Matt Maroon. I never met anyone who was so successful in coming across as completely arrogant using only text.

Advertising has traditionally been very unfocused. Anything that focuses it will work better than unfocused advertisment. Facebook has the data to focus advertisments. So neccesarily, Facebook works better in delivering advertisments to users. QED.

If or not they are actually executing this optimally is not relevant, the fact is that they have the capability.

Microsoft and a bunch of very smart business people are willing to bet billions on this. I think I'll stick with their opinions, rather than that of Matt Maroon, a very mediocre smalltime poker player.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think Matt has brought up a very good point. He is right for the most part. Facebook is trying to create some new web 2.0 type of advertising model. It is trying to be different in the ad space and it is not working.

Although, I do think advertising can work for Facebook. They need to start small and focus advertising around features that people use on facebook. There are certain applications that people use more then others on facebook. Mainly photos, videos, events, news feeds AND SEARCH. People search on facebook, not so much to find information as they use google for. I think facebook can create a similar adwords model and build advertising around those core services.

</comment><comment><USER20> What are these "ads" everyone is talking about? :p

<comment><USER21> I don't understand the downmodding, this is a serious problem. What if someone started marketing an adblocker to the internet unsavvy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> He doesn't really explain how "advertising works," only how search advertising, specifically works.

So the conclusion of his argument should not be that Facebook won't make money off of ads but rather that Facebook won't be able to make money in the same way Google does.

The reasons why advertising doesn't work on Facebook are more subtle than the "there's no intent" line, which was trotted out by at least a dozen people last year. Google "scoble Facebook stroller" to see.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think all they really need is something like facebook answers, I believe that can be more focused than a search on google/yahoo/msn.

Cause then, they [facebook] are armed with Demographic info, and 50% of the time, a deeper level of focus.

</comment><comment><USER24> "It's the theoretical limit."

What if you also know that the person who's googling for "Ford Focus" is of driving age? Like, uh, Facebook does.

<comment><USER3> This is a good point, Facebook has 1 part of the puzzle, Google has the other. Facebook knows "who you are" better than Goog, Goog knows that you want "right now" better than FB.

<comment><USER25> I think that Google probably knows who you are pretty well. How often do you log into Gmail and then forget to log out and do searches on Google? Even without doing that, it's still tracking you via cookies.

You're fooling yourself if you don't think that Google has been tracking you and your searches for the last ten years.

In fact, I would guess that it knows a fair amount of things about you that you would never post on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> who cares

<comment><USER26> i guess at least 5 people do care enough * 10 (if thats the percentage you expect to engage in vote) = 50 people do care

so, i was wrong!</comment></comment>


Help me write an Open Source Programming book for Children - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-programming-book-for-kids

<comment><USER2> Surely the best way to 'help' an open source project is to submit code patches to the repository, rather than send them money? Also it looks like most of the money is going to be spent on designers and editors. If it's an open source book then why not just write the book then release the source then if it's good ask for designers/editors to work on it. Maybe some will do it for free. Maybe they will want paying, at which point fundraising would be appropriate. If it's not actually published as a printed book I don't see how the design matters, and if it is published then the publisher will be profiting from it so surely they would pay for design work themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> The way I see it, if the content is at all going to be approachable by children aged 11 and up, then that content needs to be well designed, typeset and proofread. While writing an open source book for professionals, pointing them to a set of markdownfiles would suffice if the content is good enough.

The idea is that the design and the content should facilitate children's learning as much as possible.

I could definitely go the publisher route with this, but then the whole project will change characteristics and be less dynamic.

Its not the open source code or project that is important in this project, its really the end result which is content that is easily approachable for the target audience.</comment></comment>


USDA let millions of pounds of food rot while food-bank demand soared - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/26/food-banks-coronavirus-agriculture-usda-207215 <comment><USER2> The article opens with the actual problem and then just seems to ignore it?

Any food bank can make a call and then just drive a truck to the warehouse storing this food and fill it to the brim for free. We do basically the same thing with grocery stores all the time. We get entire pallets. And even when it gets to us we still end up having a good portion of it rot for the same damn reason it's rotting in the warehouse. We can't afford to move it.

<comment><USER3> people always think it's easy to give food away. at household portions, yes definitely. but when you have warehouses of them it's a logistical nightmare and sadly food goes in the bin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having the government control the food supply distribution is not a very good idea.

During the gas crisis of the 1970's, the government decided to control gas allocations to gas stations. Stations were allocated gas based on how much they sold last year. Naturally, as demand shifted around over time (as it always does) this led to shortages in some areas and gluts in others, and the supply of gas never matched the demand for it. A big part of the gas line problem was caused by this, as people were terrified that the local gas station would run out of their allocation.

This problem vanished overnight when Reagan, as his first act in office, repealed all the oil & gas price controls and allocation controls.

<comment><USER5> > the supply of gas never matched the demand for it

That was more a result of the fact that, as you mentioned, it was the 1970s gas crisis.

<comment><USER4> The gas crisis was a direct result of the DOE's oil and gas price controls.

<comment><USER6> In europe too? Please explain or take me to a website with a complete explanation of why US supply control fucked up western europe gas prices, i find the stories behind the crisis interesting.

<comment><USER4> I don't know what happened in Europe at the time. I wasn't there.

<comment><USER5> But you _are aware_ of the fact that there were several global energy crises throughout the 1970s, right?

The handful of wars and revolutions that took place in the Middle East, in which the US certainly participated to some extent, caused global oil shortages.

<comment><USER4> May I point out the Gulf Wars 1 and 2 recently, with no gas lines. Saddam set all Iraq's oil wells on fire, no gas lines. That long running war between Iraq and Iran, again, no gas lines. Gas refineries blow up now and then in the US, with drastic cuts in production, and no gas lines.

I remember when Reagan repealed gas allocation and price controls. The gas lines disappeared the next day. Not the next week, or month. The next day. And never came back.

Quite a remarkable coincidence?

<comment><USER5> Lines at gas stations weren't the crisis. The fact that there wasn't enough supply to meet the demand was the crisis. But price controls allowed more people to afford _any_ gasoline. It would have been 4-5x as expensive without price controls.

Of course there were gas lines at times in the 70s – there was an artificial limit on the price of gasoline. And the supply was repeatedly cut to almost zero, as oil exporting countries nationalized oil companies, went through violent revolution, or embargoed countries who militarily supported Israel.

Carter had announced a plan to phase out Nixon's price controls, and Regan removed them after he beat Carter.

<comment><USER4> > It would have been 4-5x as expensive without price controls.

There's no evidence of that.

> there was an artificial limit on the price of gasoline

Such price controls lead to shortages.

> the supply was repeatedly cut to almost zero

That never happened. There was plenty of domestic production. And there were gluts in Florida simultaneous with long lines in California. This is explainable only by allocation controls.

> Carter had announced a plan to phase out Nixon's price controls

Yet he didn't. Reagan did, as his first act, with the stroke of a pen. Reagan didn't phase it out. He just ended it. Prices didn't go up, either. None of the predicted calamities happened.

The gas crisis was a fake crisis caused by government price and allocation controls. We've never had gas lines again, despite plenty of oil shocks, such as multiple MAJOR wars in the middle east.

<comment><USER5> > There's no evidence of that.

Aside from the fact that the price of oil was 4-5x in Europe compared to the US.

>> there was an artificial limit on the price of gasoline

> Such price controls lead to shortages.

 __That was the whole point __. You constrain the price so everyone can afford a little of it, rather than a small percent affording for of it.

>> the supply was repeatedly cut to almost zero

> That never happened.

OAPEC literally embargoed countries that financed Israel (hello, United States) for months at a time. Great for Texan oil companies! Bad for everyone else.

> Yet he didn't. Reagan did, as his first act

His first act was literally in movies. His 2nd act was keeping the Black Panthers from arming themselves in CA. _At least_ his third act was negotiating dirty deals with Iran. The Contras hadn't offered enough money yet.

> such as multiple MAJOR wars in the middle east

Oh, those wars where Western armies marched in to secure oil fields? I can't imagine why Western oil companies would do well in that market...

<comment><USER4> > Aside from the fact that the price of oil was 4-5x in Europe compared to the > US.

Gas prices have always been high in Europe due to heavy taxes. And as I remarked before, when Reagan repealed the controls the price of gas didn't go up at all.

> to secure oil fields?

Saddam set them all on fire. It took almost a year to put them all out if I recall correctly. Don't forget the Iran/Iraq war, which lasted 8 years and devastated both countries, including devastating oil production.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War#Economic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War#Economic_situation)

But no gas lines.

> That was the whole point.

I'm glad you understand that point. But you may not realize that what the person received in price controlled gas was more than made up for in many hours waiting in line to fill up. Having people pay in time waiting in line instead of pay in dollars is a terrible way to run an economy.

Another silly thing the government did was institute odd/even days based on your license plate. Instead of decreasing the lines, it increased the lines, because people would top off their tanks on Tuesday, just in case, because it was illegal for them to buy on Wednesday. Lots of people would wait for hours in line and buy a half gallon.

Reagan really did the country a great service by getting rid of that nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813833)</comment>


Behind the scenes at Adioso - Part 2: Stunts - <AUTHOR> http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts <comment><USER2> More than a 'behind the scenes', this is a 'under the skin' - a raw, honest tale of what it's like to do battle with the demons of failure, hoping for a god that can't be found. Awaiting Part 3.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that was effective story-telling. At first I agreed that accessing the US market was crucial; and then that growing the present market was crucial. It's easy to see explosive global growth like dropbox's being necessary; but usually growth is segment-by-segment, especially with geographically or socially based businesses (e.g. Airbnb began in US, craigslist began in SF, facebook began in Harvard).

Melbourne doesn't seem as ideally placed as a world travel center... however, Australians and New Zealanders are disproportionately world-travellers. It's a _great_ place to start. Lonely Planet actually started in Australia, and grew from there (they didn't even have Western European books for a long time, because not their target). They sold their last 25% stake for $67m - it's not "a billion dollars", but it's OK, and they made a difference. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Planet#The_Wheelers.27_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Planet#The_Wheelers.27_first_journey_and_publications) Bonus coincidence: their head office is in Melbourne.

<comment><USER4> _"... Melbourne doesn't seem as ideally placed as a world travel center... ..."_

Antipodeans have to travel a long way to get anywhere. As a result we (Aus & Kiwis) per capita, search a lot more for cheaper airfares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > everyone knows the only way to make money out of flight search is to add > hotel search.

Errr, is this true? Then why do the flight search as the main thing.

Recently I have been trying to find a holiday bolthole for my family. Find me the perfect holiday and I will accept a higher than usual flight - I just want to fidn a great hotel for two weeks not a nice flight for six hours

</comment><comment><USER6> Tom, I'm a poor student who has booked 3 trips through you guys, I love it and don't know why everybody doesn't use it. Feel free to hit me up, I'm in Sydney.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was an early fan of your service - really liked where it seemed to be headed. Used it about 4 or 5 times and the only reason I stopped is my brother started a travel agent business. Kind of consistent with your story I just checked out your site again and my general impression without looking too hard is "not as good/polished/compelling as it was before". I guess because you've been trying lots of different stuff out.

Did you get any research to suggest people want to be pinged when good deals come up? My own use case is generally I've decided I want to go somewhere at around about some time and I just want to book it. Also most instances of people travelling that I can think of right now are similar. So I was surprised to see your front page pushing the alert feature so hard.

Thanks for writing this btw, a good read.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure Howard's laptop had more than just code on it.

Which brings me to my next point: If you use a laptop, do regular backups of the contents. And keep those backups _in a separate location from the laptop._

This is the 3rd story I can remember reading about people getting their laptop stolen. And I know someone who had their laptop stolen recently, I was even in the room where it happened while it happened. (I was doing something else and didn't notice it's absence.)

When it happens, the backups will be your only consolation.

(And any tracking technologies you may have at work.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love this series Tom! I've been a big fan of adioso for a long time (I've used it for most flights I've booked in the past 3 years).

I didn't realize how much it was struggling and it's refreshing to see someone sharing the honest truth about the company, makes me realize that it's not just me going through these struggles and startups are hard on everyone, even those who graduate from y-combinator with funding.

</comment><comment><USER10> What do you guys think of Flocations, assuming you've seen them? They're Singapore-based and targeting the same market you guys (initially) are - budget travellers to/within Southeast Asia.

I think both your sites are great and look forward to using them soon. I've already recommened Flocations to a few people and will do the same for Adioso. Rooting for you here!

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi from Sydney, Tom. Really appreciating these posts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Brutally honest which is refreshing, it sometimes feels like a lot of the time start ups gloss over the obvious truth that it's just not working, yet.

They seem like smart guys, there's a real problem there and probably as importantly there's a market. Last holiday I had (and it was my first as well) took me about 3 weeks to fully book as getting the right options, timing etc was so non-obvious through some of the incumbents.

Looking forward to Part 3, I'm interested to see where the story goes.

</comment><comment><USER13> Simply a brilliant read. If the business does not work out, perhaps you could get a publishing deal. Hope things turn out well, and looking forward to the next episode in what would make an amazing reality TV show.

</comment><comment><USER14> My favorite quote: "stop pulling stupid stunts and to start listening". Great post, thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER15> They only have 5 months of burn rate left, they are doing a big rearchitecture of their site, and they go on a "hacking retreat" in New Zealand?

I understand that taking a break and getting perspective while in the midst of a lot of work can be effective, but this seems a little bit extravagant.

<comment><USER16> As per the first post (part 1), they're from Australia. Can't imagine it being too much $$ to go to NZ from there.

<comment><USER17> Especially if you run a website designed to find you the cheapest airfares. But seriously, you can get a return flight SYD or MEL to AKL for about $200+taxes.</comment></comment></comment>


Adobe killed Aviary. Do you know other web SDKs for image editing? - <AUTHOR> https://creativesdk.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004788463-End-of-Support-for-the-Creative-SDK-Image-Editor-UI-Color-UI-Market-Browser-and-Labs-Components <comment><USER2> What features do you need ?</comment>


Git vanity-sha: vanity hex prefixes for your commit SHAs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mattbaker/git-vanity-sha <comment><USER2> Great idea. It's only a matter of time before Github projects start demanding that PRs have proof-of-work in the form of vanity hashes. I predict that the next-generation blockchains will be hosted on Github, and only then will software development be fully decentralized.

Here's also an efficient and parallel vainhasher in C, which could probably be wrangled into a similar script to get more digits in less time. It can do 6 hexdigits in under a minute, and 8 hexdigits in a few hours: [https://github.com/century- arcade/src/tree/master/tools/vain...](https://github.com/century- arcade/src/tree/master/tools/vainhash)

<comment><USER3> > I predict that the next-generation blockchains will be hosted on Github, and > only then will software development be fully decentralized.

How would hosting a blockchain on the servers of a centralized company whose sole purpose to exist is to be a centralized gateway for what was by all rights a decentralized lead to a world of software development that is fully decentralized?! That sounds like the exact opposite of what we need to do :/.

<comment><USER4> Sarcasm doesn't always work well in text form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Needs a GPU implementation. The important stuff deserves it :D

Possibly bitcoin ASICs can be used to find really long vanity prefixes.</comment>


Groom your programming skills and make some money - <AUTHOR> http://www.amebopost.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> So... you can get up to 50 points for the fastest code, and 20 points for the smallest code. And you only lose up to 20 points for code that doesn't work.

I think I just detected a wonderful loophole in this scoring method.

<comment><USER3> I think you only get the fast code and small code bonuses on working solutions.

<comment><USER4> Right, submitting fast but incorrect+buggy code nets you -20 points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It needs some polishing, there are quite annoying aspects:

1) Mandatory gender and country? Seriously, why? Even e-mail shouldn't be mandatory IMO. Hitting 'Enter' on register/login forms doesn't work as submit, I need to grab the mouse for that (especially annoying on a programming- related site)

2) The "How are programs run" section is completely useless. It's never mentioned how is my code actually invoked, just how it is compiled (when applicable). Let's take C for example, it says 'gcc contestx.c -o contestx.c'. Assuming the argument to '-o' is a typo, this way of compilation includes linking... so it seems I'll need `int main()` to avoid linker errors, but what's to be in `main`, I'm never told. I'm just assuming .c code is just `-c` and `dlopen`ed, but I'm not sure, since 15 minutes after submitting a solution, there's still no feedback.

Other nitpickery includes email validation code that's not clickable (okay, this is arguably a good thing) and other stupid memes implemented on the site like asking for the email twice or showing me my local time in the upper-right corner even though all other times on the site are displayed in the server's time zone (e.g. upper-right corner shows 16:45, but the solution I just sent is shown as submitted at 7:45)

<comment><USER6> Another interesting thing on the "How are programs run" page is the fact that the programs are apparently run on a Linux system, yet C# files are compiled with Microsoft Visual C# somehow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good day

I created www.amebopost.com. I am extremely sorry if I annoyed anyone. If I had known that I'd be getting this many users, I would have endeavored to make it more professional and thoroughly fix the bugs before making the site online.

My original goal was to create an avenue where Nigerian programmers could convene and share programming ideas and code.

The About Page was just me being Silly. It will be taken down.

</comment><comment><USER8> I mean, is this a joke or a viral site or something? The About page explains that it was done by someone called "Sir Pastor Alhaji Babalawo omotodun, Ph.D, MSc, etc...", which sort of brings to mind the Nigerian emails. Couple this with the outregous "also get paid tons of money($1 for winning a special challenge per week)" and P(legit site) goes really low.

On a different note, in the longest palindrome problem, the C++ function header doesn't pass (or return) references, which seems to be amateurish.

<comment><USER2> As someone who works for a Nigerian boss, I get very tired of this kind of racism. I see it frequently. I see people refuse to do business with us because of his origin. I also see people try aggressively to scam us because of his origin, assuming we are naive.

But you cannot judge an entire country based on some highly visible scammers from there. Not all Nigerians are trying to scam you. And many Americans ARE trying to scam you. Many Nigerians have left their country, gotten educations, and become highly successful businessmen throughout the world.

This specific guy who runs this site? I have no idea. But I will judge him on his own merits, not his country of origin.

<comment><USER9> I thought everyone just assumed that the "Nigerian Prince" thing was a front and it was likely some Eastern European or American behind it all.

I thought the "Nigerian" bit was just to add to the allure or something.

<comment><USER10> I am surprised that scammers, Nigerian or otherwise, don't know better than to still reference Nigeria in their emails.

<comment><USER11> I also found it surprising that scammers devote so little effort to proper spelling/punctuation/grammar.

But then it occured to me: maybe errors help filter out attentive respondents, who have a low chance of completing the whole scam funnel. Those people who don't notice the errors, or don't consider them a red flag, are better leads.

In the context of a cliche'd Nigerian origin, sure, mentioning Nigeria puts anyone familiar with the 419 scam formula on guard. But anyone who does reply is likely a fresh, naive prospect. Ka-ching!

<comment><USER12> This is perceptive. 419 is like any other advertising: if you think it is stupid, you are not in the target market, but someone else is.

Who communicates in all caps? The elderly and the mentally ill. Target market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "make some money" part is only $1, unless I'm missing something, and currently there's only 1 contest paying. So that's not really going to be incentive to participate.

It sounds like Project Euler except code size, code speed, and code submission time matter. Neat idea but how's this significantly different? Project Euler already has a huge number of challenges, a leader board, and a vibrant community. What differentiates amebopost?

<comment><USER14> IMHO code size and code speed is already a great and welcome difference in making this more geared towards programmers than mathematicians.

<comment><USER15> Implicitly Project Euler already takes speed into account, but more as a step function not as a fine differentiator between players: Either you get the answer in your lifetime, or you should work towards a faster algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are you normalizing the execution time across languages? For example, when they introduced java, the USACO assumed that java code would run 5 times as slow as equivalent C code (so they would give 1 sec for C and 5 secs for java)

</comment><comment><USER17> Mh, i don't think giving points based on code size is a good idea, developers really really shouldn't try hard to minimize the code size, this just leads to unreadable garbage. Time to Solve and Speed to Run is ok, imo..

</comment><comment><USER18> Why not have "time to submit" points work as follows:

The problem details aren't shown, only a brief description. User clicks a button "accept challenge", is given problem details, and the server starts recording time until a solution is submitted. Base points on that time difference.

Sure, there are loopholes (such as someone else posting the question on another website so you can create a solution before accepting the challenge). I think it's better than checking for new problems and get lucky by noticing a new challenge came out very recently and there are no submissions.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hopefully the command line for the C compiler invocation is a typo, because "gcc contestx.c -o contestx.c" will overwrite your source with the executable --which (while catastrophic if done at home with no backup) is probably not a big deal, so long as the relevant code length metrics are extracted beforehand...but still amateurish.

</comment><comment><USER20> It would be nice if Ruby was one of the permitted languages.

<comment><USER21> Right? They're alienating a very large developer community.

I tried to send them an email about ruby support and the typo on their compilers page but their email form doesn't even work. I take this to be way too amateurish and scam-like.

<comment><USER22> "very large" and "very loud" are two different things. I'm sure you'll take exception with any metric that shows Ruby to be a less common language but

<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ruby> 127 questions.

<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python> 272 questions.

<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/php> 466

<comment><USER23> In a website for programming challenges, the market status of a language should be the least regarded metric to decide whether to include it or not.

Just check this out: <http://projecteuler.net/languages>

<comment><USER17> What about the infamous TIOBE Index? <http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html> There should be atleast 3 other languages before ruby then ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vivaldi now includes Qwant, a  privacy-focused search engine based in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://vivaldi.com/blog/search-with-qwant-in-vivaldi/ <comment><USER2> From their privacy policy:

"When you install Vivaldi browser, each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their geographical distribution."

Is this information enough for them to uniquely identify and track each user?

<comment><USER3> Hey, here's Gaëlle Medeiros-Logeay, Data Protection Officer at Vivaldi.

The data we collect is not personally identifiable, and we try to keep it as minimal as possible. :)

We're not in the business of collecting data, and we do not sell them to advertisers like others do. The collected data helps us to understand where most of our users come from.

Our stats show us which country our users are located in and nothing more. We don't do data profiling. We just look at trends.

We don't see any browsing history, it's all stored locally so that only you can see your own browsing history. If you use Sync, then the data is encrypted.

If you want to read more about our privacy, this article wrote about us at length on this topic: [https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/30/vivaldi-browser- privacy/](https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/30/vivaldi-browser-privacy/)

Hope this clarifies things for you. :)

<comment><USER4> > The data we collect is not personally identifiable, and we try to keep it as > minimal as possible. :)

Hey Gaëlle!

Huh? Unique ID + /24 + screen resolution is the opposite of "not personally identifiable". You may not use it that way _yet_ , but that's only because no one applied enough incentive or force _yet_.

<comment><USER5> There aren't all that many Vivaldi users out there so the /24 is probably already enough to uniquely identify the user in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tried it for some time, got annoyed pretty fast by the tabloidheadlines they include into the page. Switched back to duckduckgo

<comment><USER7> I agree, but they also provide a lite page (should be the default).

[https://lite.qwant.com/](https://lite.qwant.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Searx seems like the best option in this space, since you can host your own instance and avoid having to trust anyone (except the developers, assuming you didn't audit the code yourself).

<comment><USER9> Sadly Searx is just a scraper for Google and some others. So it doesn't give you any real freedom. Popular instances also get blocked now and then.

<comment><USER10> [https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8fde028...](https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8fde0285-0139-4769-b989-63e064a2385b.png)

A few others indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stick with Mozilla Firefox. Don't understand why people still believe a for- profit Corp will prioritize users rights.

... not to mention Brendan Eich's divisive and controversial behavior befor he was forced out of Mozilla.

<comment><USER12> Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely a perspective.

I for one think that modern web standards are used by most web site authors not in users interests. Therefore implementing those standards in good faith not necessarily mean implementing an _user_ agent. Firefox is great, but web as it is mostly served is increasingly not. I just would like to see an user agent dedicated to users, not standards. Even if it would mean omitting JS and most of CSS. I would use it for information seeking and Firefox for necessary web apps.

<comment> dao- > Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation the Mozilla Corporation, > which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It's of course > not to say that the Mozilla Corporation is an evil profit seeker, but merely > a perspective.

"wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation" is the more important part here, because the Foundation is nonprofit and eventually has authority over the corporation, so the latter can't decide on its own to sell out.

The corporation needs to be able to make a profit not as an end in itself but to make strategic savings in case things get more rough with Google.

<comment><USER13> From the Wikipedia:

> Net income: US$103.8 million (2016)

I wonder how rough things must be.

<comment> dao- Pretty rough, but that's not a too unrealistic scenario given that Google is a pretty aggressive competitor in the browser market and there are hardly any other search engines that would be good enough to be the default in a mainstream browser. (Mozilla tried with Yahoo but they couldn't deliver the quality users have come to expect.)

Have you checked Mozilla's expenses too? It has around 1200 employees, I think, and a few offices around the world, data center costs etc.. If you want to be able to independently keep that going for a few years, you need a big war chest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have been using Qwant for a couple of months now, overall it gets to the point, but I find myself using "!g" quite often (which is also the case with duckduckgo ..

</comment><comment><USER15> How is Qwant advantageous over DuckDuckGo?

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using Qwant for half a year now and like it a lot.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Results are unavailable, please check your connection or try again

okay

</comment><comment><USER18> A privacy-first search engine using Bing API, it's a joke.

<comment><USER19> As long as Bing doesn't get direct access to the metadata of the device making the query why does it matter? I assume they're not using the Bing API straight from the client browser, are they? They're basically proxy-ing Bing's results and add their own features on top of that. At least that's how I understand it.

<comment><USER20> Privacy is one but not the only problem with centralised web search. The other big problem is manipulation of search results. Of course it already happens for ads and filesharing and that is bad. But worst is when they do it for political reasons. Bing cannot tell who you are, but they can still promote their own agenda by tweaking the ranking of search results. Blog against MS? Send it to the 10th page or hide it entirely. Of course I use here a very innocuous example. You can imagine the power of tweaking search results. You can change the perception of reality, essentially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So on their landing page - they say "We are cookie-free" \- but they put these values in localstorage:

        h_user: 9019.....
        user: {"isLogged":false,"error":false,"userSetting":{"searchRegionKey":"GB","searchMode":0,"safeSearch":1,"enableSuggest":true,"targetBlank":true,"showTrends":1,"showSmartNews":true,"showSmartVideos":true,"showSmartSocial":true,"selectTheme":0,"showFavicon":true,"continentKey":"WESTERNEUROPE","searchLanguageKey":"en","interfaceLanguageKey":"en_gb"},"version":28,"fieldsValidity":{}}

So ... kinda bullshit.

<comment><USER22> But those are just cookies related to the functionality and the personalization of the search page. I guess they could have written that they do not have any tracking cookies, but I guess the intent was to be clear to the average user: "we are cookie free", therefore we do not track you.

<comment><USER23> Why don't they just say "we do not track you". That's accurate (hopefully) and clear to everybody.</comment></comment></comment>


Startups are getting sick of NYC's dirty overcrowded coworking spaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/startups-are-getting-sick-of-nycs-dirty-overcrowded-coworking-spaces-2013-3

<comment><USER2> Those startups should move to Milwaukee where there are great clean coworking spaces like The Hudson (<http://hudson-business-lounge.com/>), and fun startup communities like Startup Milwaukee (<http://startupmke.org/>)</comment>


Artificial intelligence expert Robert Wilensky dies at 61 - <AUTHOR> http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/03/25/robert-wilensky-dies-at-61/

<comment><USER2> When I see random people dying of bacterial infections in this day and age I can't help but feel like the misuse/overuse of antibiotics has us sliding backwards in medical progress and we will continue to lose great minds to this irresponsibility.

<comment><USER3> These antibiotic immunity related deaths seem only to happen inside hospitals though.

<comment><USER4> Sick people go to the hospital in the first place so they often die there irregardless of the source of there injury's. Infections are often related to a compromised immune system / wounds so your risks are a lot higher in a hospital than say an office setting.

Also, Bactria exchange genetic material on a regular basis so things often concentrate in hospitals even if the source of the mutation is on a farm somewhere. The good news is that super bugs often provoke a strong response from the healthcare community which can quarantine the people / area and generally stop the spread of specific agents.

PS: What makes this even more frightening is you can't safely do operations without antibiotics as they basically guarantee infection.</comment></comment></comment>


A thermos bottle keeps things cold - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1303197843801305088 <comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea why this never occurred to me, hindsight 20/20</comment>


Red Deer Cave people - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Deer_Cave_people <comment><AUTHOR> It's fascinating how little we know about anything before the 11k/holocene barrier. There really is a lot of room for interesting things that have escaped our knowledge thus far.

Sibling species or subspecies appear to have been diverse, and another way of thinking of this might be that human genetic diversity was far wider. Even the concept of early civilisations is, I think, not out of the question. Possible relationships between events at that time (eg the great floods) and our mythology give it even more flavour.

This is our real origin story.</comment>