The Tech Bubble Didn't Burst This Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/the-tech-bubble-didn-t-burst-this-year-just-wait <comment><USER2> Who's big and a steady money-loser? Twitter? Uber? Who else?

Investors may demand liquidation before money-losing companies with cash run through all their capital. Stockholders have the power to force that, unless there's some two-tier stock deal such as Google and Facebook have, but Twitter does not.

What's the next big thing?

\- Self-driving cars that actually work are about three years from commercial deployment. What businesses will be created around that? Automated parking garages? Car-sharing? LIDAR manufacturing?

\- In a few months, the Chevy Bolt will be shipping. More charging stations will be needed. Over the next decade, a need for a huge number of charging points will appear. Somebody has to build those.

\- Surveillance cameras, including car dashcams, coupled to face recognition and AI. Big Brother where something is always watching. But who? Google? Samsung? ADT? G4S? NSA?

\- The blue-sky possibility: Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works succeeds in building a usable fusion reactor. They're not saying much other than that they've made enough progress to justify investing more of their own funds. The Skunk Works has a good track record of doing things others thought impossible. (The U-2, the SR-71, the F-117, the F-22, and probably some things that haven't been made public yet.) If that works, the world changes in a big way.

Probably not the next big thing:

\- Virtual reality. There's still no killer app, and we're into the holiday shopping season. The hardware problem has been solved, and nobody cares. It's the new 3D TV.

\- 3D printing. There are lots of good 3D printers, and they're bought by the same people who buy milling machines. They're a useful industrial tool. But home printing? Not happening.

\- Internet of Things. It's mostly gimmicks so far. IP-addressable lightbulbs just aren't that useful. There's going to be a lot of crap manufactured, but it may just be a fad like hoverboards and CB radio.

\- Hydrogen-powered cars. This is Toyota's answer to electric cars, and they're on sale now in California. They've sold about 700 of them in the US so far.

<comment><USER3> >Self-driving cars that actually work are about three years from commercial deployment.

Anyone who builds a business based on fully autonomous vehicles being available in three years is in for a rude shock. 30 years is probably more like it.

<comment><USER2> Most of the luxury car makers have Level 2 systems shipping now. Google and Volvo have good Level 3 systems in test. Volvo plans to deploy 100 Level 3 cars next year. Google and Chrysler are building 100 Level 3 minivans in Michigan. Level 3 isn't that far away.

<comment><USER3> While true, Level 3 will be a (very) nice capability once available. And I agree it's relatively close. But you're probably not enabling new businesses (for general road use) until you have full door-to-door autonomy. Which was what the original comment was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me the real scandal here is that while funding of startups is down, Venture firm funding is up and cash in the bank is the highest since 2000 [1]. So that means - like corporations currently - these funds are just sitting on cash [2].

I'm curious why LP's aren't up in arms (maybe they are privately), but my guess is that the answer venture funds give their LP's are that they are being prudent so that they are protected from the impending "crash" and can start investing when prices are lower.

What seems to be happening as a result is that venture funds are starting to invest more like Banks - looking for more traditional metrics like ARR that can protect them on the downside with the caveat that they still expect power law distribution of returns.

So basically they want to invest in potentially billion dollar companies that are cash flow positive from the start. IMO this is trying to have it all, and discourages moonshot bets that are capital intensive before finding their market.

It's a judgment call whether this is "good" or not, but it seems to me to counter the original goal of venture.

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/funds-flow-to-venture- firms-1459...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/funds-flow-to-venture- firms-1459295426)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-09/more- vent...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-09/more-venture- investors-are-sitting-on-the-sidelines)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like the venture funds are actually doing their jobs then, namely trying to get the best possible return and not just blindly throwing money at everyone who walks through the door.

As an industry matures, returns to capital should naturally fall. This is a normal process, as the 'obvious' opportunities are systematically exploited, and the industry itself creates large incumbents that compete with startups.

The fact that venture funds are _smoothly_ pivoting is a good thing, regardless of whether that's what LPs thought they were signing up for. If LPs are really upset at cash sitting around, they can (eventually) ask for their money back and find a different fund; that can't happen if the fund makes bad investments and loses the principal.

The worst possible outcome would be if funds forced themselves to keep doing business as usual until everything blew up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Uber, valued at about $69 billion, is the most valuable American car company > by some margin, worth more than General Motors and Fiat Chrysler combined.

Can someone explain this to me? What competitive edge does Uber have that would stop literally any well-funded company from entering their market as a competitor? I know they have pervasive brand awareness and a large driver network but does that really justify a $69B valuation? What's to stop consumers and drivers from jumping ship en masse?

<comment><USER7> Your comment sounds like another case of "how hard could copying this multi- national juggernaut actually be??", ala [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314)

Copying Uber at a small scale with a limited feature set is feasible, just like making a little boutique search engine to compete with Google is feasible. But where do you go from there? _Seriously_ competing means you need to do better than them, and with Uber already have advantages of scale and brand, what's your angle?

<comment><USER8> When did your parent talk about copying Uber?

<comment><USER7> Pretty much the whole thing?

> Can someone explain this to me? What competitive edge does Uber have that > would stop literally any well-funded company from entering their market as a > competitor?

<comment><USER8> Looks like I misread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to think there was going to be a crash, but not anymore. We have just experienced a controlled deflation, probably the first time at least in my lifetime. Most/many tech companies got deflated but somehow we avoided a massive crash this time and sensibilities have increased without mass chaos.

<comment><USER10> Word of Caution: The Dot-Com & Real Estate bubbles happened slowly and then all at once. When a bubble slows down, everyone says we're just going through a correction. The possibility of a complete crash is still there in the next year or so. Especially, since a mega-hit ($10b+ val) hasn't been created in SV in over 5 years. Investors need these mega-hits in order to justify the risks they take and there hasn't been a break-out started since 2010.

<comment><USER11> Snapchat?

<comment><USER12> Is SnapChat's valuation anywhere near inline with their revenue/profitability (or lack thereof)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good article.

It's true that tech in general may be facing challenges because smartphones are not new anymore, but I was especially annoyed at the On-Demand bubble from last year, which felt to me like a "fake startup" trend. Saying the total addressable market of food is in the trillions so you're gonna make a food delivery app and give away a dollar for 80 cents just felt to me like, is this really a 'tech' business? There are no margins.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, software has higher profit margins than hardware. Even higher when you make that software as a service. A lot of the margins is diminished due to the physical upkeep, which can be argued as "hardware".

I would agree that on-demand services, for the most part, aren't innovating: they're just facilitating consumer-merchant relationships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmmmm... tech is in a bubble, where have we heard this before...

[http://blog.samaltman.com/were-in-a-bubble](http://blog.samaltman.com/were- in-a-bubble)

Other than the company names, has anything really changed since the Richter Scales put out "Here Comes Another Bubble" in 2007? "Make yourself a million bucks, partly skill, mostly luck: now you can afford a down payment on a small house."

<comment><USER3> >has anything really changed

You can't afford a down payment on a small house in some areas any longer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For anyone who wants to dig more about tech bubbles:

Silicon Valley — The Wall Street Without Bubble

[https://medium.com/startup-blink/silicon-valley-the-wall- str...](https://medium.com/startup-blink/silicon-valley-the-wall-street- without-bubble-c5bc68135df#.5fpccngr2)

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes there is a bubble. But it's in bonds. Once that bursts everything will hurt.

<comment><USER18> This! Lately a lot of funding has been structured to look a lot like bonds as well. Fixed income markets are where the troubles will start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Uber's valuation in particular worries me. Uber's product is 90 pixels on your phone - that's it. Behind that is computer code and an admittedly powerful network effect among drivers and riders. But I have to wonder about that power of that network effect over time, especially with this race to develop self- driving cars and other similar things. Meanwhile, Uber's business practices are, shall we say, often times questionable. Customers increasingly dislike the product, whether it's surge pricing, or dirty cars, or lousy drivers.

I just get nervous by these companies whose products are a single app on your phone and some computer code. This is generally not a great setup for being worth a lot of money 20 years from now.

<comment><USER20> If you can look 20 yrs into the future you must be the richest man on the planet.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Investing unwisely doesn't mean it's all going to come crashing down. There are a lot of companies being much more responsible right now. There are more companies than ever not going deep into VC over-reaching evaluations, that are cash positive. I do think there will be some fallout. I think the same is trending in real estate again too in a lot of markets.

Economies are cyclical, and any time you see double digit growth in any market for over half a decade, there's usually a dip at the end... how big depends on how over-inflated that market is.

</comment><comment><USER22> Look, as the probably only credible person here to speak on Stock Valuations. Tech is not, nor is any other specific Industry or Sector the issue here. The issue here is interests rate.

</comment><comment><USER23> If we are really expecting a downturn what will happen to the self driving car cycle that is barely beginning now? These companies need much more funding than software startups.

</comment><comment><USER24> I get the sense startups were more optimistic in previous years. Emphasis these days is more about making money.

Perhaps I could be talking to the wrong people.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hey, the year isn't over yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Right there is bubble.</comment>


Ask HN: Make your own laptop, how complex is it? - <AUTHOR> Hello folks,
motivated by the lack of available laptops that I like in the market I am considering the idea of building my own.
Any of you have ever tried? What are the steps?
It seems like this is just an awful bad and expensive idea, but I would like to tap on your experience for confirming this.
At the moment I have tons of open questions.
The thing that I don't like the most about today laptops is the cover (the case, the metal/plastic thing around it), I want a screen without any chrome and with just enough space for the webcam below the screen.
Then the keyboard, I want long running keys, with proper T-shaped arrows.
Then a standard track pad.
Then a lot of ports, USB and HDMI.
Given the desiderata I would need to either source and buy the cover or to design it myself (?).
Then, the internals.
The motherboard need to fit the cover above, but who make motherboards? Do I need to look somewhere in China? Do I need to design my own? Or maybe I can design  the cover to fit a reasonably standard (successful) motherboard?
The battery, I don't even know where to start... I guess those are somehow standard... Any ideas? What the about the converted?
The screen, keyboard, touch pad, and webcam. Those pieces are just bough done, right? Where? Can I get a small quantity (2-3) of them?
To wrap up, I am looking for suggestions or ideas about this topic. Also actual link to companies that produces the product above would be amazing. <comment> noah-kun Batteries would be the easy part :). But with your level of knowledge, I'd suggest you first buy a used Macbook, maybe even a broken one, and find sources of hardware to replace/improve the machine affordably. Also do some Arduino/Rasperry Pi projects. (I've been a software dev for 5 years and I'm learning a lot doing the above myself.)

I believe there are a few open source laptop projects in various states of completeness and goodness. Some ARM, some PowerPC, and so on. There was also OLPC.

Here's some links. You'll notice you might not like the options. One is an ultraboook with 1-2 USBs. The others are like, high school science projects :P

[https://hackaday.com/2017/02/05/olimex-announces-their- open-...](https://hackaday.com/2017/02/05/olimex-announces-their-open-source- laptop/)

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio- kosagi/novena](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena)

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro- desktop](https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop)

I'm pretty sure there's some better ones, but ther you go. Oh, and to make your own board schematics and designs for 3D printed cases I suggest a Macbook Pro, 2012 or later.

</comment><comment><USER2> Not an easy project, but you should definitely look to 3d printing for design. Take a look at projects like this [https://all3dp.com/3d-printed-laptop- case/](https://all3dp.com/3d-printed-laptop-case/)</comment>


Big Pile of Vim-Like - <AUTHOR> https://vim.reversed.top/ <comment><USER2> In the graphical browser category, I have tried Qutebrowser and it is neat. However, Firefox remains as my primary web browser. I use the Vimium plugin with Firefox. It provides Vim-like key bindings for many commonly used browsing tasks.

My most favourite commands in Vimum are 'f' and 'F'. The 'f' or 'F' command creates key combinations for all the links found in the page. It highlights the key combinations in little yellow boxes above every link. We can then type the lowercase key combination for a link to open that link. While 'f' opens the link in the current tab, 'F' opens it in a new tab. Alternatively, we can type uppercase key combinations to reverse the behaviour of 'f' and 'F', i.e., 'f' with upper case key combination opens the link in a new tab and 'F' with upper case key combination opens it in the current tab.

My other favourite commands, in no particular order, are: 'J' (go one tab left), 'K' (go one tab right), 'H' (go back in history), 'L' (go forward in history), 't' (create new tab), 'T' (search through open tabs), 'x' (close tab), and 'r' (reload page).

Also, there are the 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l' commands to scroll left, down, up, and right, respectively.

Vimium for Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium- ff/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/)

Vimium for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb)

<comment><USER3> Same here - I used qutebrowser exclusively for a couple months, but in the end I couldn't handle all the annoying popups and autoplaying videos in modern websites - all things that you can block with a single plugin in Firefox, together with ads. Too bad, because Vim plugins never allow full UI control in Firefox(e.g. closing an empty "new tab" is impossible with Vim plugins).

Recently I switched from Vimium to Surfingkeys, which is comparable but also offers an actual Vim emulator for text field input. Can definitely recommend it.

<comment><USER4> >closing an empty "new tab" is impossible with Vim plugins

Well, strictly speaking Tridactyl can do this. They overwrite your empty tab with their own so Tridactyl works there too and you can 'd' the tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The one of these that I've come to adore the most is the ranger file manager. I almost never use any GUI file managers (or command line tools, for that matter) for file management after starting to use ranger seriously. It's so fast and works exactly the way I want it to. I've also hooked my terminal up such that I'm cd'ed into whatever folder I last navigated to in ranger (I use the alias `rd` for this), so I virtually never type `cd` in the terminal anymore. Super slick!

<comment><USER6> Protip: If you use bash or zsh, you can source the ranger executable for this behavior (so the full command would be ". ranger"). If you're on fish, there is a patch pending for review, that soon will be available on master.

<comment><USER7> I don't observe a difference between `ranger` and `. ranger` in zsh. What am I supposed to notice?

<comment><USER8> With `. ranger`, if you change directory and then exit, the shell's working directory changes to where you left off in Ranger.

      $ pwd
      /home/grandpa
      $ ranger
      [ ... change directory ... ]
      $ pwd
      /home/grandpa

vs

      $ . ranger
      [ ... change directory ... ]
      $ pwd
      /home/grandpa/src

<comment><USER7> Got it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My app is missing... :)

[https://github.com/mellowcandle/bitwise](https://github.com/mellowcandle/bitwise)

<comment><USER10> Awesome app, and it looks like you put in a lot of effort into packaging too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Vim modes" only offer like 40%-60% coverage of features in IDEs. I haven't found one yet that lets you set marks with :k[letter]. Jetbrains (and maybe viper) are the only ones I've found that support block modes.

"Vim mode" means a lot more than just using 'hjklioaD^['. It would be fairer to call them "nvi modes".

<comment><USER12> Evil mode in emacs is pretty damned close. Biggest painful diff is that emacs regex isn't as powerful as vim.

<comment><USER13> There is a package that uses python for regular expressions, which gives you the full pcre power: [https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp- steroids.el/](https://github.com/benma/visual-regexp-steroids.el/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my side projects is a canvas-based graph editor with vim-like controls: [https://troywolters.com/modal-graph-editor/](https://troywolters.com/modal- graph-editor/)

It's very basic, missing a lot of features, and likely buggy, but I've had fun making it and using it.

It saves to and loads from localStorage, so you can use it without an account and save and load graphs on the same machine.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's great to see this list, but it's a bit sad that all those app have to emulate Vim behavior. Do they all handle .vimrc? I think it's ridiculous that some app insists on me using their keybinding instead of mine. I'd love to have an OS level way of exposing commands and settings key bindings across apps.

<comment><USER16> some apps actually use neovim or vim in client server mode and dont just emulate vim behavior, but flat out run vim.

But even those cases I've had mixed results on "obeys vimrc keybindings" and "captures all keypresses and uses vim purely as a modal"

firenvim for example, puts nvim into textarea boxes in firefox, and it loads up all my vimrc theme and status bar and stuff (but only dumps the text into the textarea on :w). whereas VSCode vim plugin merely uses vim under the hood for the actual text editing, but doesnt pass every keybind back (nor does it do color formatting). Which puts it into uncanny valley for me, and unless someone is VSCode live sharing at me, I don't use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting how Vim and Emacs take opposite approach to solving this!

Emacs: put all applications into emacs! Vim: make other applications controlled like vim!

I'm a vim user and I prefer #2.

<comment><USER18> Because Vim is not an editor. It's an idea. Probably one of the best ideas that ever happened in the computer science. Another great idea (often mistakenly called a programming language) is idea of Lisp. When you combine these ideas together you can get something insanely powerful. If you never tried Spacemacs or DoomEmacs, I encourage you to check them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the editors it lists is "vy" : a Vim-like in python: [https://github.com/vyapp/vy](https://github.com/vyapp/vy)

Does anyone have any experience with this? I'd love to have a vim that is more pleasant to program.

edit: added link

<comment><USER20> Check out Neovim! It features Lua as a first-class scripting language. I'm planning on giving it a whirl by migrating my VimL configuration to Lua.

<comment><USER19> Ah, good call. Did not know that. Will look into it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I see things like this, it reminds me that what makes vim special is not the software but it's keybindings. That is why there are so many clones like spacemacs or VScodeVim. You can take the vim keys and you basically have the whole package but using your own software.

<comment><USER22> I never thought of it that way, but that's a very good point indeed.

As an emacs user, I think what makes emacs special is not the keybindings, but the software itself, or, better phrased, the architecture and approach to extensibility that the software uses. Opinions on that?

<comment><USER23> Totally agree, that's the reason why I use spacemacs with vim-bindings (having previously used vim, then vanilla emacs, then emacs with evil-mode).

I prefer "vim-shortcuts" and "emacs-software". Best of both worlds in my view !

<comment><USER24> I like emacs because it has so many neat applications built into it and in many ways works so much better than vim. Magit is really impressive, projectile is great, and helm is something I wish I could use in vim. I like that each major mode bundles in a lot of unique functionality that is specific to that mode. I like that the GUI emacs allows for inline images, pdf viewing, and variable pitched fonts so if I'm editing an org or markdown file, different kinds of text can be properly represented with weight, style, and size. This makes it so much more enjoyable for writing prose than vim.

Still, when it comes down to doing specific coding work, my experience in vim is generally better. LSP plugins like Coc.nvim are much simpler than emacs and work better than lsp-mode, in my experience. Emacs 26 still has poor base support for JSX (improved in 27) and there are several popular modes for dealing with the web and javascript development, which all have their own annoyances. In vim I've not had these issues.

Setting up environments for developing in vim for various languages have generally been easier and work mostly without having to do anything other than perhaps installing a plugin for syntax highlighting. In Emacs I find myself wrestling with several different modes, several of which don't cooperate with each other. I have to add hooks for every language for every mode I want to integrate into it. Also, sometimes they heavily conflict with evil-mode, which is also remarkably annoying.

I hope that at some point Emacs with evil-mode will truly become the best of both worlds, but right now vim still feels faster, easier to use, and more consistent (obviously) with vim editing paradigms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey fellow Vimmers. If you (just like me) have to use Mac to do your work, you may find this little project of mine interesting [https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer](https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer). It's a Hammerspoon config inspired by Spacemacs, written in Fennel. Readme doesn't really describe every cool feature, I need to record a screencast, but I've been swamped with work lately.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wings3D can be operated in a very vim-like way, more than Blender in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see Oni on here.

[https://v2.onivim.io/](https://v2.onivim.io/)

<comment><USER27> Looks bloated and isn't open source

<comment><USER28> They announced to open source with an 18 month time delay (MIT license) [https://github.com/onivim/oni2-mit](https://github.com/onivim/oni2-mit)

<comment><USER27> But I don't have to wait 18 months for new releases of Vim or NeoVim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Mupdf on linux is both lightweight and vim-like

<comment><USER30> Mupdf is listed in the Configurations part.

I used mupdf for years. Then I discovered llpp (a wrapper on top of mupdf). I never went back since, this is my favorite pdf reader by far :)

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Llpp](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Llpp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think that vimium will prolong my lifespan.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why is "IDEs, Word Processors, Editors with Vi-modes" missing IntelliJ/JetBrains, VSCode, Atom, and Sublime? All of those have vim modes (of varying quality, I'm sure).

<comment><USER33> I was also wondering this. I use Ideavim for IntelliJ as my primary editor. It is awesome, it will read your vimrc and allows you to set up mappings for any editor action.

<comment><USER18> I used IntelliJ for about 7 years. I loved it. When I learned Vim I used it with IdeaVim. There were minor things that bugged me, but I learned to live with that. But one day I decided to try Emacs with Evil mode. It took me long time to get my config right, but at some point I realized there are way too many small things in IntelliJ that annoyed me and beyond submitting feature requests on YouTrack there was little I could do. When I discovered Spacemacs I switch to that. I realized that Emacs can vim better than IdeaVim, in fact it probably vims better than Vim itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [https://github.com/donaq/topovica](https://github.com/donaq/topovica) <\-- Code is ugly, there's no consistent style and there are no tests. Some bugs also exist, but I was just trying to get from zero to "meh, good enough for me" as fast as I could. Feel free to use it however you see fit.

</comment><comment><USER35> They're missing my favorite of the bunch... [http://se-editor.org/](http://se- editor.org/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I can recommend Wasavi, which is a browser extension that allows you to use Vim commands in most text windows you can edit. [https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi](https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi) I use it on a daily basis and although it's not Vim it's still pretty good.

<comment><USER37> There's also [https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim](https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim) which, while it isn't real vim, it's neovim which is pretty close ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Something that has made me really appreciate Vim commands is "less"... yeah i'm talking about the seemingly simple pager that's already installed on your system - I could never get into vim for coding, but I always felt like it shined in places like less where you are consuming text rather than creating it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I can also mention some ZZT editors: KevEdit has (disabled by default) support for using hjkl to move, but it otherwise doesn't have much vi-like stuff. ZZTQED is more vi-like; it also can use hjkl for cursor movement, and also supports numeric prefixes, and some other stuff (although regular expressions are not implemented).

</comment><comment><USER40> Wait! How could they leave out basically all of the rogue-like games? They all have key bindings that draw heavily from vi.

<comment><USER18> Big shoutout to [https://vim-adventures.com](https://vim-adventures.com). Without that little game I would never learn how to live without arrow keys.

<comment><USER41> Not that game, just run nethack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Thanks, I didn't know about imv. Have been using feh forever, and always found it annoying that it wouldn't load svg files. Problem fixed with imv.

EDIT: actually realised that feh has a --conversion-timeout param to help with svg files. But well, imv also supports gif!

</comment><comment><USER42> A lot of web apps also use vim-inspired keyboard shortcuts, for example Gmail, Twitter, Reddit.

<comment><USER43> Jupyter notebooks

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Vim is a nice operating system. If it only had an easy way to shutdown...

<comment><USER45> Interesting, that was more the experience I had the first time I tried using Emacs as a vi user. The documentation I could find (limited, this was back in the <gasp> '80s, couldn't google it), said "You are never intended to leave Emacs, you should be able to do everything inside it." I was done with my lunch break and needed to get back to work, so I went to another X window and killed Emacs.

<comment><USER46> Oddly I have an installation of Emacs on my current ArchLinux box that doesn't shut down with `C-xC-c`.... I've had to resort to `C-z, ps ax | grep emacs` to kill the process. I haven't cared enough to fix it.

<comment><USER47> I'd like to tangent a bit and introduce you to pgrep and pkill (available in arch via `procps-ng` pkg). They are very nice for reducing the amount of grep/sed/awk magic on the output of ps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Surprised that there is no fish shell in shell section. Also I miss pentadactly in my Firefox so much nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why isn't the vi editor in there? It's at least as "vim-like" as bash or tmux.

<comment><USER50> Vi isn't Vim-like. Vim is Vi-like.

<comment><USER49> All of the listed apps have a subset of vim's functions. So does vi.

You use the listed apps because you wish you were in vim, sort of.

When you log in to a strange or bare system and need to edit, you wish you had vim. But _at least_ you'll have vi, almost as good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Missing from this list:

Vimium - Vim for Chrome Ideavim - Vim for IntelliJ/PyCharm/WebStorm

<comment><USER52> look at the top of the page and click the "Plugins" button

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> this needs a category of plugins to other editors/ide that provide vim like experiences.

UPDATE: It does have a category of plugins.... it's a separate tab at the top disguised as a button

</comment><comment><USER53> Add r2 (radare2), a command line reverse engineering suite

</comment><comment><USER54> Elvis hasn't been maintained since 2012 :-(

</comment><comment><USER55> Needs nethack :)

<comment><USER41> And hack(6) :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Lynx also has the -vikeys flag.

</comment><comment><USER57> Qt had an ide with an impressive vim mode, or at least it did 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER58> An impressive collection. Are these all-Linux or all-Windoze? A note on supporting platforms would have been helpful.</comment>


UK 'playing catch up' against Russian interference - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53484344 <comment><USER3> I find all these anti-Russia and China articles tiring. Not saying China and Russia aren't trying to spy and influence the US and UK, but the US and the UK are doing the same thing to them and many other countries and have a big documented history of doing so. So these relentless articles on how bad Russia and China are for doing what everybody is doing seems like they're trying to push a negative agenda on these two countries to prepare the population for a possible future more frontal conflict or war which I hope will never happen.

<comment><USER4> Ofc both sides are doing it, but typically in a conflict you want your side to win ;)

<comment><USER5> And the irony? They're using our platforms to do it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the Russian state can merrily kill people on mainland UK in recent years (Alexander Litvinenko) and release nerve agent in Salisbury without recourse, then a sprinkling of election time cyber ops is the last of our worries.

</comment><comment><USER7> Articles like this are woeful. Am I to believe that of ~200 countries in the world, only Russia has means and ability to interfere in foreign elections?

It isn't even obvious why Russia especially would care about the UK electoral process. Germany, France, Spain and Italy have a lot more to gain and lose depending on the outcome. America has at least as much at stake as Russia and has a much more successful history of foreign meddling.

<comment><USER8> >It isn't even obvious why Russia especially would care about the UK electoral process

The argument I've seen is that Putin wants a weaker (or even no) EU, and getting the UK to leave is an important part of this strategy. I'm no political expert, but on the face of it this makes sense to me.

<comment><USER7> Every country outside Europe would like to see a weaker EU. China, India, America and a fair chunk of the middle east and Africa would all be unhappy to see a new unified superpower emerge with a united military.

The idea that Russia has especial interests in this area is questionable. The US has more to gain from the EU breaking up than Russia. Current US president would love to be negotiating with smaller, weaker countries than the EU bureaucracy.

<comment><USER9> That's looking at it only from an adversarial lens. There are other lenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When you don't like the results of an election or a referendum, now you can blame Russia and China. Can you imagine the losing side easily accept the fact after the POTUS election this year without blaming Russia or China?

</comment><comment><USER11> You miss the forest for thr trees Gentlemen.

The article is about the fact that UK intelligence and government both know that Russia interfered in referendum on the side of Brexit. Obvious leave won, and if they were to find any concrete evidence of this interference, it would damage credebility of UK Leave even further, on top of existing breaches of electoral law and populism / trumpism.

"There has been no assessment of Russian interference in the EU referendum and this goes back to nobody wanting to touch the issue with a 10-foot pole" This is hilarious.

<comment><USER12> The original Brexit result was pretty much endorsed when the Tories were re- elected in the election after the referendum. MPs, largely Labour ones, who refused to accept the Brexit result were chucked out by their electorate.

Unless you intend to argue that the Russians also swayed that too.

<comment><USER13> They certainly stoked the fireplace that is brexit and kept winding people up about it

<comment><USER12> Of course they did. They stoke issues that already exist, they're not invented. Just like how the Russians have been stoking race-issues in the US for decades.

Are Antifa and BLM Russian plots to destabilise the US? They certainly have that signature [0], that doesn't mean they aren't valid movements.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always say this. If Russia is so amazing at manipulating opinion in western progressive countries, then how come they can't achieve the same in the neighbouring countries.

Why have a war in Ukraine, if you can just put your own president in charge? And manipulate everyone's opinion?

Why not fix issues in Belorussia?

Why not win over all the other ex soviet states back?

<comment><USER15> Coming from ex-soviet-state... Our BS meter for Russian meddling is much much higher than in West. We probably get a lot of false-positives too. But better safe than sorry...

Looking from East, West seems terribly naive when it comes to Russian affairs. And it looks like there're a lot of people who hate their society so much that they blindly pick Russia as "greener on the other side" or "enemy of the enemy is my friend".

Westerners seem to trust media and politicians much more too. Over here, the default is that politicians/activists/whatever (be it opposition or government) are lying and that media is supporting their lies. Everything is lies unless proved otherwise. Meanwhile West seems to be much less critical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> More vague fearmongering which just serves to back the security state. Apparently the UK spy agencies had, up to now been too "coy" to get involved in anything political. Oh come on.

</comment><comment><USER17> So if I'm understanding the article correctly, they didn't find much in the way of specific evidence that Russia was interfering in (say) the Brexit referendum and they're blaming it on the government and security services not looking hard enough? This feels like it's getting worryingly into conspiracy theory territory, especially given the quality of the publicly available claims of Russian interference which this appears to be referencing as proof there must be something there.

Edit: OK, I'm reading through the actual report now and it doesn't reassure. They literally reference the Buzzfeed "From Russia With Blood" piece which relies on the idea that Russia are so good at disguising killings that any death of a Russian-linked person - anything from a heart attack to a suicide of someone showing signs of depression who had made previous attempts - is in fact probably an assasination. This is well into conspiracy theory territory; it's basically unfalsifiable.

Also, it's clear from the report that they know the UK intelligence agencies had a lot of other work on their hands regarding the terrorist threat, and this consumed a substantial amount of the resources that would previously have been dedicated to Russia, so to attribute this to the intelligence services supposedly not wanting to know about Russian interference seems itself like an attempt to interfere with the UK political process.

<comment><USER11> They didnt find because they avoided looking very hard. Because uk leave vote is such a sensitive issue politically.

<comment><USER18> That's circular logic.

<comment><USER19> No it's not. "I didn't find my keys, because I didn't look" isn't circular logic, it's cause and effect. It doesn't mean you'll find your keys if you do look. Circular logic is when you tell me "I'm not going to look for my keys, because there's no evidence that I can find them" \- of course you can't find them if you don't look. Which is the official government line:

>The UK government rejected the committee's call for a full assessment by intelligence agencies of potential Russian meddling in the 2016 referendum, saying it had "seen no evidence of successful interference".

They won't investigate, because there's no evidence, and there's no evidence because they chose to ignore the evidence at the time of the referendum - <USER2> found by this report.

To bring us back to the key analogy - "I've been walking around with my eyes closed and haven't found my keys, so clearly I shouldn't look for my keys, because I haven't found my keys"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sendwithus (YC W14) Announces $2.3M to Humanize Transactional Email - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/25/sendwithus-seed-funding/ <comment><USER2> Cofounder of Sendwithus -- I just wanted to give an additional shout out to some of the amazing angel investors included in this round. Full details on AngelList ([https://angel.co/sendwithus](https://angel.co/sendwithus)).

I think it shows how funding in the valley has changed when a company founded and based in a tiny Canadian city (Victoria, BC) can grow like this.

<comment><USER3> Congrats, Matt and team! They're building something that's seriously valuable for any SaaS business. If you send transactional emails, check out this guide: [https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/guide/](https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/guide/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is exactly what I've been looking for but couldn't find! Fantastic. Sendgrid strips HTML tags in their Template Engine but doesn't document it -- I debugged their WYSIWYG editor and gave them the source of the problem, but they asked me to send a video. After 4 rounds with support I had nearly given up on finding a good service that mashes developers with the marketing and design departments.

Three tips:

1\. Please optimize your SEO! Searching for _transactional email_ , _transactional email service_ , _transactional email comparison_ , I don't and didn't see you in results. (Guess I should have asked Hootsuite :)

2\. I signed up from my mobile so I wouldn't forget -- your dash seems to work great except the gravatar/account is fixed position.

3\. I tried to sign back in to confirm #2, but the log in link is nonexistent on mobile.

Congrats on the funding round from a fellow BC startup! Hope to see you around :)

<comment><USER2> Hello fellow BC startup! I've brought your tips up with the team, thanks for your feedback!

We use Jinja templates behind the scene, which doesn't autoescape by default -- so you're free to inject HTML through a variable. You can manually escape template variables with {{ my_var|e }}.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely a fantastic tool - well done, and thankyou for existing! Very happy I can depend on you sticking around.

</comment><comment><USER6> You mean I'll have to read through marketing BS when I need an important piece of data in an email I just received? Wow, can't wait.

<comment><USER7> Email Marketing is changing. It's no longer about spamming customers with "marketing BS" whenever possible. It's about sending the right content at the right time and delighting your customers.

Email (especially transactional email) should be an extension of your product, owned by creative and ambitious product teams - that's what Sendwithus enables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> By "humanize transactional email", they mean "make spam more effective". We're going to need filters for transactional emails that filter out the spam part.

<comment><USER9> What? Transactional emails are by definition not bulk emails. They're sent in response to an event, like when you've requested a password reset or when the system warns that the CPU is on fire.

<comment><USER10> E-mail doesn't have to be bulk to have spam in it. Not that I agree that the implication the parent post makes will be widespread, but I can certainly see some companies using such e-mails as an intrusive (spammy) marketing opportunity.

<comment><USER11> We're sad because we haven't heard from you in 12hrs. Did we do something wrong? Do you not love us? Log in now to show your love for our amazeballs saas app that was handcrafted with love and powered by coffee.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains." Deutsch may think he knows things about "the mind" but he shows in this article that, like many who like to speculate wildly about the mind, he's basing his claim mostly on armchairing about how he _feels_ about certain phenomena. Things he says about behaviourism are indicative that he doesn't _really_ know what he's talking about. Or he does but is extremely bad at communicating his ideas. It would just take too long to comment on each and every empty claim this article makes. It's mostly a rehash of same old boring arguments about how special we are, this time because of our "creativity". Yawn, there is nothing special about "creativity", it's an active area of research, has been for decades, and it's actually very boring. He does make a few good points, like the one that quantum phenomena do not give rise to mental processes, but that is trivial in the sense it's obvious to anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics on one hand, and what neurons are and how they work on the other.

<comment><USER3> Speaking as someone with a physics degree, I like to quote Peter Thiel (for once):

> This is why physics Ph.D's are notoriously difficult to work with; because > they know fundamental things, they think they know all things.

\- [http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels- cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels- cs183-startup-class-11-notes-essay)

<comment><USER4> Perhaps also why physicists can be dangerous in Finance. They have all the math skills, but they can also have a little too much faith in those skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "only a tiny component of thinking is about prediction at all"

Here I really struggle to follow his argument. It seems, he is saying that thinking is not prediction, but how does he know that? As I see it, we don't know what thinking is, so is he then saying that thinking does not feel like prediction, and therefore it cannot be prediction? It is well known that we are only aware of our very highest level of thought. What goes on below the surface may very well be very much about prediction without us knowing about. When we think about "the world" we must have some internal representation of the configuration of objects that we think about. In my opinion this is implicitly a kind of prediction, because we create (at least mostly) configurations that are plausible, if not true (counterfactual, but possible).

It seems to me that creativity is mostly about finding good approximate solutions to hard (e.g. NP-complete) problems. How we do it is so far unknown, but it seems that it is not in principle so very special. The explanation for the calendar he speaks about is actually not very complicated inference at all, and is probably in reach for artificial systems. All he has to do is to generalize 19 as belonging to a number category, and then apply the predictive properties about how numbers work. Not all prediction is naively predicting that the world is as it was before. If change is predictable in the past, then change can also be predicted to the future. Prediction is difficult, but that does not make it less important.

<comment><USER6> Is there a difference between reasoning and predicting? It seems you don't think so and the author does.

<comment><USER5> I think there is a difference, but my view is that it is impossible to reason without sufficiently accurate prediction, and that the concepts we use for reasoning are largely formed based on how predictive they are. Consider playing a game where two players throw dice, and the one with the larger number wins. There is no predictability between turns, so there is no point in reasoning far into the future, unlike in chess, where the positions change slowly, one piece per turn and in predictable patterns. In chess you still don't know what the other player will do, but you can reason about it, because there is a level of predictability.

I would define reasoning as answering a question or optimization problem, e.g. What is my best move? What is a good move? This can be formalized as calculating some kind of score for a possible action, whereas prediction is just about assigning a probability value to an event.

<comment><USER7> Bad example. I can predict the dice game's problem space. E.g. for a single normal die (1-6), I can predict that I'll never observe a 7 [P(7) = 0%]. I can also predict the probability distribution. E.g. for two dice thrown together, the probability of throwing a sum of 7 is 1/6, whereas the probability of throwing snake eyes is only 1/36\. Yes, the game's output is random. But what you're talking about is control, not prediction. If random meant "impossible to make predictions about", then statistics wouldn't exist.

Regarding winning, there's no way to improve one's chances (besides cheating?). But merely knowing that the game is predicated solely on chance can be useful for other applications. E.g. realizing that the lottery is a scam.

Personally, I'm in that camp that says reasoning is a instrumental value towards prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How on earth is Bayesianism a form of behaviorism" ? And what is it with the cult of Popper. Popperism isn't "underrated", it's considered the gold standard of epistemology despite being a vague philosophical theory full of holes. Contrast that with Solomonoff induction which has a rigorous grounding and which offers hypothesis testing and rejection as a trivial subcase.

<comment><USER9> How is Bayesianism not a form of behaviorism? The essay devotes a paragraph to explain this point allthough Deutsch assumes the reader is familiar with behaviorism and probabilistic methods used i AI.

<comment><USER5> Had he said that Bayesian decision theory with optimization of utility functions etc. was behaviorism, then I would agree, but Bayesian formulations can be used for many other things as well. At least one can propose very complex internal models, which behaviorists were criticized for not considering.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Besides, behaviorism was abandoned in psychology because it was crazy, not because there's something wrong with reinforcement learning.

It was treating the human mind as a black box trying to pretend we have no insight in human thoughts. It was trying to avoid antropomorphizing _people_ as Morgenbesser put it. In fact, quite the opposite, I'd attribute this blatant idiocy to Popperism. After all, introspection isn't testable or falsifiable in a popperian sense. There's no room for the concept of models in Popperianism. There are just big black box ideas that you test and are falsified or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a certain amount of twaddle in Deutsch's arguments in general but it's quite hard work wading through the argument to see what's wrong. An iffy statement of his here is "the field of 'artificial general intelligence' or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence." Which is tricky to totally dispute because of his vagueness as to what AGI is. But let's assume he means thinking like a human. Well fair enough no computer thinks like a human yet but a lot of progress has been made in that direction such as Watson in verbal processing and the Google cars in geospatial awareness. So the argument is kind of misleading. I find his arguments in physics similar - basically not much good but written in a form that is hard work to dispute.

</comment><comment><USER11> > So, why is it still conventional wisdom that we get our theories by > induction?

I thought the other conventional wisdom is that we get our theories by building mental models. I throw a ball, and I can either remember how it flew in the past and use that to predict, I can also build a mental model from first principles to find out what will happen. Maybe run a short 5 second idealized simulation in my head and I can predict what might happen. Well then I might realize that there was wind that my original model was too idealized.

Another example someone on HN (or an article posted to HN) talked about how would they be able to predict what happens to a pen dropped on the moon. And why did Astronauts stood firmly planted on the moon's surface. It was interesting how many people got that wrong. And the difference was that some seemed to have been reasoning by analogy or have encoded faulty facts (gravity happens on earth), some by past experiences (they have heavy boots), some that have the correct understanding of first principles can so to speak simulate and understand what would happen -- the pen would drop to the moon. Moon has some gravity. So do other planets. And so on.

Now most of these are still based on some principles that we hold true and are "like the past". Gravity is like yesterday, the fact that winds affects objects in flight is like yesterday, speed of light is like yesterdays. There needs to be wide set of known and predictable rules about the world and then deriving or simulating the future can be done.

There can be something in between, maybe if I built a mental model just recently it gets memoized and instead of re-running it I just remember that it is like the "past one" but with a small tweak.

Another mechanism is the "seeker of inconsistencies". Something that understands that these facts together don't make sense. So if I first thought the pencil would float away on the moon and then thought but Astronauts are planted firmly on its surface. This would, so to speak, raise an exception and say "aha, something is not consistent, pay more attention to this one".

But, that is how my brain works. Others brains might work differently. I can inspect to some degree my own thought process but I cannot get into the head of someone else and "see" how they think about things. Do they visualize, to the see words and formulas instead and plug values is. Are some completely unaware of how they think and lack much self reflexive.

I am papering over and being too simplistic here and don't necessarily disagree with the article, that just that reaction when read that paragraph.

<comment><USER12> _I thought the other conventional wisdom is that we get our theories by building mental models. I throw a ball, and I can either remember how it flew in the past and use that to predict, I can also built a mental model from first principles to find out what will happen. Maybe run a short 5 second idealized simulation in my head and I can predict what might happen. Well then I might realize that there was wind that my original model was too idealized._

My current understanding of how sports skills are developed is closer to what you first said, than the bit about 'running a simulation'.

The pro ball players have practised enough that they've seen the ball coming in at this angle, at that angle, and with this wind condition and that wind condition. And so they 'remember' where the ball is going to land, and they remember how to move to get there.

Our brains are not, as far as I know, running any kind of recognizable simulation like we would with a computer.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. I do visualize in my head how kinetic energy depletes as it goes higher and potential energy increases. It is like a bubble that shrinks. I see motion vectors and how they change.

Other examples are a conflict between 3 people, kind of see a graph of relationships with different colored arrows and how they change.

<comment><USER12> _Interesting. I do visualize in my head how kinetic energy depletes as it goes higher and potential energy increases. It is like a bubble that shrinks. I see motion vectors and how they change._

I do similar sorts of things... it is excellent that you have trained yourself to think that way. But for time critical tasks such as catching a fly ball, that doesn't work so well. We have lots of different processes we use for different situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is > because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality > of computation.

This actually doesn't follow. It is logically _possible_ that general intelligence is the result of a non-physical process (or at least a process outside any conception of known physics). It could be, as philosophers have put it, a homunculus that interfaces with but is not a part of the physical brain.

Or take the brain-in-the-vat hypothesis. It could be that intelligence/consciousness is the result of some process that can't be modeled _within_ the physics of the simulation, and can only be injected from "outside" the system. This already happens, actually; there are demonstrably intelligent entities in World of Warcraft (the human players) but that doesn't imply that the computer physics of the WOW game engine are sufficient to model intelligence.

<comment><USER14> If these were true, It would mean that atoms in our brain violate physics as we know it. This source of intelligence would be detectable, because it is significant enough for neurons to detect it.

The hidden premise of the quote is that that we have observed brains enough to be confident that they are running on physics.

<comment><USER15> The current theories of physics do not even begin to offer an explanation for "subjective experience"/consciousness, which definitely has everything to do with the brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "or that increased computer power will bring it forth (as if someone had already written an AGI program but it takes a year to utter each sentence)."

No, 1000 years would be more like it, if you add in the years it takes to learn language.

Here's my very quick and dirty calculation:

A rough estimate of brain data throughput would be 100 billion neurons x 200 firings per second x 1,000 connections each = 20,000,000,000,000,000 bits of info transmitted per second. 20 million gigabits (20 petabits) of information move around your brain every second.

The biggest/fastest numbers I can find for an IC is going to be about 3 billion transistors x 8Ghz x 3 (connections per transistor) = 6,480,000,000,000 = 6.5 Terabits per second.

20 petabits -vs- 6.5 Terabits, that's roughly 3 orders of magnitude difference. If someone wrote a true AGI today, it may well still take 1000 years to do what humans can learn and accomplish in one year (assuming moving bits of data is the key to AGI).

</comment><comment><USER17> Not to be nitpick but is it pretty well proven that there are other self-aware animals.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's something even more fundamental about his own thought process than creativity, which is odd that he doesn't see -- namely, "Why does David Deutsch care about creating an AGI?".

Why is there a drive towards creativity / creation at all? So, creativity is still merely a simulation of a top level human function--you could probably program something to be creative, but how about /wanting/ to be creative? How about not wanting to be creative? How about being obstinate, or bored?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think you could get pretty close to general intelligence by modeling three properties in a computer program. Each of these is difficult, but not outside the realm of possibility.

\- Awareness of environment, including self. It would need to be able to re- program itself

\- Ability to form intention. It would need to be able to form objectives and utilize the first property to accomplish them. Also, information gathered from the environment should be able to inform this.

\- A creative function, constantly running, that constantly combines information from the first two inputs to form and re-form concepts.

I think that a program with these three aspects, running constantly, could eventually form opinions and act intelligently. The intention function could delve into the creative function and form intentions to refactor and make more efficient the mental processes.

It could have a representation of its own creative function in its environment, allowing the intention function to explore its own creativity as an environment. Connections between the three aspects would grow in this manner, and the program could become deeply introspective.

It would probably take a long time for it to be able to do anything like human-like thought. We could help the process along by restricting its environment and giving it 'games' to play. If it's sufficiently fluid in creating concepts, it could then reuse them for different games.

</comment><comment><USER20> The difficulty I'm having with this article is that many people, when discussing intelligence, invoke some specific capability, X; for Deutsch, X seems to be "creativity", for Penrose, X may or may not be the ability to grok the truth or falsehood of an arbitrary statement as if one has the personal cellphone number of God. Then, they go on to assert "computers (or whatever) cannot (currently) do X, therefore we need to create a grand theory of X to create _Artificial (General) Intelligence_ " (or "computers cannot do X, therefore A(G)I is doomed").

Unfortunately, they never seem to provide proof that X exists, or is true. Sure, you can provide a plethora of examples of creativity, but the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", the plural of "data" isn't really "proof", and I don't know what creativity is well enough to tell what I do commonly (or even occasionally) is creative and a forward-chaining formal logic thingy printing out a novel, true formula isn't creative.

Ultimately, that is why I like the Turing test---I don't have to understand all sorts of magical X's, all I have to do is to give you the benefit of the doubt if you don't have to have a bunch of truly arbitrary conditions on what you do.

<comment><USER21> >Unfortunately, they never seem to provide proof that X exists, or is true

I think we can forgive Deutsch for this, because he's claiming that creativity is part of an unsolved _philosophical_ problem. Which means we don't know how to think about it yet. We'll know when when we do know how to think about it because there'll suddenly arise answerable questions, proofs, definitions, and whatnot.

Unfortunately the Turing Test can't cut through the philosophical wrangling because, for example, imitating a human being successfully is not the same thing as evidence of thinking. Without an explanatory theory we wouldn't even know how to interpret the relevant evidence

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone ever tried using the first law of thermodynamics to prove that AGI is impossible. It's somewhat dependent on what one considers "intelligent" of course. But let me give a stab at it.

Say AGI is a computer machine and/or algorithm that's capable of "creatively" building a smarter version of itself. Then (here's the proof) say we did build a machine that was capable of building a smarter version of itself, then that machine would technically be a perpetual motion machine, and therefore a violation of the first fundamental law of thermodynamics: "In all cases in which work is produced by the agency of heat, a quantity of heat is consumed which is proportional to the work done; and conversely, by the expenditure of an equal quantity of work an equal quantity of heat is produced." (Rudolf Clausius, 1850)

Or assuming that AGI is just "in the software", the heat produced by the computation would continually increase, as an ever more complicated algorithm/computation is formulated, and therefore violate the first law of thermodynamics -- again. Assuming a more "intelligent" computation consumes more heat/energy.

</comment><comment><USER23> >observing on thousands of consecutive occasions that on calendars the first two digits of the year were '19'. I never observed a single exception until, one day, they started being '20'...

...it is simply not true that knowledge comes from extrapolating repeated observations. Nor is it true that 'the future is like the past', in any sense that one could detect in advance without already knowing the explanation.

This is obviously untrue. You could train a machine learning algorithm to count easily just by showing it examples of numbers. This is how we teach human children to count, by showing them examples. Not giving them some magical "explanation".

And he goes on to base the rest of his argument on this point.

>Some people are wondering whether we should welcome our new robot overlords. Some hope to learn how we can rig their programming to make them constitutionally unable to harm humans (as in Isaac Asimov's 'laws of robotics'), or to prevent them from acquiring the theory that the universe should be converted into paper clips (as imagined by Nick Bostrom). None of these are the real problem. It has always been the case that a single exceptionally creative person can be thousands of times as productive — economically, intellectually or whatever — as most people; and that such a person could do enormous harm were he to turn his powers to evil instead of good.

Einstein's brain was only slightly different than any other human's, even the dumbest village idiot. Humans themselves are only slightly different than chimpanzees.

So yes, an AI with a brain of entirely different architecture, running on computers millions of times faster and several times larger than a human brain, would indeed be pretty concerning.

</comment><comment><USER24> > The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be > possible.

What if the chemical reactions that our intelligence depends on somehow allow for computations using real numbers? We wouldn't be able to reproduce these processes with our means of computation then.

</comment><comment><USER25> "'Smartest machine on Earth', the PBS documentary series Nova called it, and characterised its function as 'mimicking the human thought process with software.' But that is precisely what it does not do."

I heard a grad student who did some work on the Watson project say basically the same thing.

</comment><comment> yc-kjh If (and only if) materialism is true, Deutsch is right. AGI is a foregone conclusion. It is not only possible; it _must_ eventually happen.

Where he goes wrong is in assuming that materialism is true in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER26> If AI can't ever work, how does AIXI play video games?

EDIT: And then, of course, there's the AI Effect: "If it didn't kill all humans, it must not be AI."

</comment><comment><USER27> > or predict and prevent a meteor strike on itself

Wait, we don't know that for sure, yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> _(2012)_

</comment><comment><USER29> So evolutions "works" in the sense that anything that doesn't work doesn't stick around to show its face. There isn't any intention behind it, yet us people, who clearly have intention (and I'm not even going to stand for an argument about whether or not free will exists. You take that shit outside with the rest of the garbage) are a product of it.

But we're kind of long past the point where just any old random slurry of chemicals is going to get means-tested in the great arena of life. Life is not finding the right set of chemicals to combine, life is a specific set of chemicals and the right orientations of different copies of those chemicals.

So I think we're at a point were binary code, the instructions to run on the processor, is akin to chemicals in the physical world. We try to treat them like DNA, but you can't just toss a bunch of chemicals in a bucket at random and expect life to come out. 100 billion times out of 100 billion times, random chemicals in a bucket makes you nothing close to life. Ultimately, chemicals are at the core, but they aren't sufficient. The right chemicals are needed, and they interact in such a way that infinite variation is the result.

And DNA is a code--a deterministic, exceedingly discrete code. Yet somehow (hand waiving), from such arises the non-deterministic, comparatively-infinite variability of human behavior. So in that sense, I don't think he's _necessarily_ correct that AGI is a "different type of program than we've ever programmed."

But all that is just to create a system that is intelligent, it's not intelligent itself. It's a road, not a destination. Living things, on the other hand, have goals and try to achieve them. Not just have goals, but generate goals. Create it's own notions of what to do and how to do them and why the doing of it is important.

You touch fire, your hand recoils, because in you is a system for detecting potential damage and the understanding that damage is not something you want on your docket. Computer touches fire, computer recoils, because in it is a system for detecting potential damage and YOUR understanding that damage is not good. The computer didn't conclude on its own that damage was bad. It never had the sense that it existed. And this isn't even an "intelligent" response, this one is merely instinct.

So I think the big, missing question in AGI is, "what _could_ a computer want?" We could program a computer to have certain goals, but that is not the same thing as a computer sitting around and saying, "hey, you know what? Let's go to the beach this weekend." We foist our own goals on the computer and instruct it on how to understand those goals, and are disappointed when it fails to get the point of the goals at all and sits there blinking at us. How can you ever hope to have an intelligent computer if it isn't intelligent on its own terms?

IDK, I am rambling. Would you be intelligent or have any hope of becoming intelligent if you didn't create your own designs on your future, couldn't perceive anything to test your actions against your desires for the future, and had no means of your own to ever come about correcting these issues? It just seems like the only way AGI will happen is through something incredibly simple that allows a computer to put its own parts together, see the result, and arbitrarily evaluate it.

</comment><comment><USER30> > _Unfortunately, what we know about epistemology is contained largely in the > work of the philosopher Karl Popper and is almost universally underrated and > misunderstood (even — or perhaps especially — by philosophers). For example, > it is still taken for granted by almost every authority that knowledge > consists of justified, true beliefs_

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

The Gettier problem has been well known in Philosophy since the 60s. Probably the most famous example would be barn-façades, first showing up in the mid 70s. It's taught in undergraduate courses. It's the second bullet point on the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's Epistemology article.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

> _How could I have 'extrapolated' that there would be such a sharp departure > from an unbroken pattern of experiences, and that a never-yet-observed > process (the 17,000-year interval) would follow?_

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

One rather assumes your experience with numbers has included 20 following 19 before and you extrapolated the rules from that and similar experiences with assigning numbers to things. You were, after all, previously told that it's how years worked - and doubtless you've lived through at least one year changing.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

> _Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don't need > justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does > contain truth, almost always contains error as well. So it is not 'true' in > the sense studied in mathematics and logic. Thinking consists of criticising > and correcting partially true guesses with the intention of locating and > eliminating the errors and misconceptions in them, not generating or > justifying extrapolations from sense data._

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Be that as it may, some guesses are better than others. Generally the guesses that are based on more data. You lock someone in a room for 19 years, don't talk to them beyond the basic social interaction required for them to develop language, and then ask them to guess what an atom bomb is, they're not going to get very far. Even guessing what an atom is, or a bomb they'd be hopelessly out of the context of their experience.

Guesses, in so far as they're meaningful, have foundations. Those foundations limit what you can guess about and have any practical chance of refining towards truth with more evidence. You can't start off knowing nothing and then go to nuclear weapons in one step. You have to make smaller guesses, based on what you know.

And much though the author you might criticise Bayesian probability, this is bound up in the idea that probability is based on dividing the search space between the explanations we can come up with for a thing and then weighting it with evidence.</comment>


How Email On Acid stole our work - <AUTHOR> http://stampready.net/blog/digital-theft/index.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not going to comment on wether I believe the infringement claim or not, but let's have a look at the way they calculate damage - it's the same way the music companies calculate damages for illegal downloading: They take a number with questionable origin (27 commenters), multiply it by a factor that appears from thin air (assume 1 of 50 downloaders commented) and then pretend that everyone of these would have bought the template and next thing assume that's the low-ball figure. Given that per their own claim the template sold 361 times in half a year I find it hard to believe that there was a sudden rush of I-Must-Have-This-Template.

This "I'll just conjure a number" method of claiming inflated damages just ruins the credibility of the whole post for me.

<comment><USER3> When a big emotional upset is involved, it is important to separate the faulty math from the real evidence. They could claim millions of dollars in loss and it still wouldn't change the fact that they were stolen from.

<comment><USER4> So would you agree that the exorbitant losses the media industries claim is excusable, since their IP is also being stolen?

EDIT: I apologize for going against the popular opinion on HN.

<comment><USER5> Two conclusions you could have come to here:

A. "Ah, I've brought up a politically charged tangent and people are downvoting to keep the discussion on topic"

B. "I'm a martyr to the HN hivemind!"

Yeah, definitely the second one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In your account, the funniest part is when the people from emailonacid explain to you that they have developed this theme with "tricks" that they have learned.

The only trick they are learning is borrowing other peoples code. In their minds they have done enough to change the content so it is not plagiarized or stolen. Seems like their definition of original is copy and paste into a blank text editor and then change the content. I think to them, they haven't copied you at all.

I am interested in these stories because for me anytime I build a website I do it based on the design from another website or two that I like. Usually I do copy some amount of code, but it has helped me to learn a crap ton about web development and design. With that said I have come across parts of javascript that will check what site is running it. It's interesting, but looks like you need to do a little more safe guarding.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a case of potential piracy, but it isn't theft. And it isn't 'over $20,000'. If would have been over $20,000 if the number of downloaders that the author _guessed_ downloaded the pirated version would have definitely been going to pay for the paid version, but of course that's not true. Call it what it is, and by all means get mad about it, but don't call someone a thief when they're at worst a pirate and don't pretend pirated downloads equate to lost sales.

<comment><USER8> That would be the case if stampready were selling it and emailonacid were giving it away for free.

Instead, Stamp Ready is a mac app which sells for about $30. Emailonacid is a subscription based service that goes for free to $70/month.

Neither simply offer the theme on its own. Both require some sort of purchase or subscription at which point the theme is made available.

That said, I agree that it can't really be considered lost sales. If I wanted to use StampReady I can't in general because I don't have easy access to a Mac, and the only build they have is a mac app.

Likewise, without this blog post, there is no way for me to know that either stampready or emailonacid host that theme. Neither of them advertise it on their site. I wouldn't ever choose one over the other because of the existence of that theme; I don't even know it's there until I've already got a subscription to one of them. In that way it's even more ephemeral.

I mean, sure, there is IP theft going on, but the actual impact is really hard to gauge. You're not losing customers; you're not losing sales. You're providing the other company with some marginal perceived value that they didn't have to put the same effort into building.

However, the most ironic thing about this is: without your blog post, I didn't know about emailonacid. It's actually a service that I haven't investigated and looks like it can solve some issues I've had with other mailing services. I can't make user of StampReady as I said because of the limitations of being a mac app.

I can't say I'm going to use emailonacid, but you've definitely increased my awareness of the brand, and provided an amount of free advertising that I would have never got before. I've hunted around their site looking for evidence of that theme and actually got a bunch of information about them.

If this was a ploy to advertise for them, then it worked very well. If not, then I think it was very counterproductive.

<comment><USER9> The claimed original work sells as a template separately from the (optional, Mac-only) StampReady app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article reinforces my opinion that the business of selling templates is a foolish one.

1\. The price for templates has been diluted to comical levels.

2\. Site design is an integral part that needs proper investment. Clients who invest a double digit budget into the design of their website are clients that you really, really don't want.

3\. In most cases, templates are used as a start - since most websites need customization, the templates your sell will quickly become different from what you sold.

4\. Likewise, if you pay 20 bucks for a template and then modify it to your site, the quality of the result is often about as good as if you had taken a free one and modified that.

5\. The only good business models I've seen around templates are the sites who try to use the "buy in cheaply" model to get clients to something more sensible - where the provider ends up becoming a go-to cornerstone for design.

All this creates a thievish market that is bound to produce exactly the kind of situation we've read about in this blog post: Some people are douchebags who steal, some people are douchebags who whine about it in public.

Sorry, no sympathy. Not a reasonable market. If you set up shop in a hornets nest, expect to get stung.

<comment><USER11> That's far from true. Many end-users don't need to make significant changes. We've used a few themes successfully.

As an Android App developer, we don't even need a website - we just keep one up for our blog and basic product info. 90% of our communication goes through our apps & Gmail.

<comment><USER10> > That's far from true. Many

That appears to be a contradiction.

Furthermore: I'm a developer for software that is mostly used by people making their own website or by service providers who use software like mine and templates to build websites for clients. So I think the impression I got out of that is a little more precise than your N=1 impression.

<comment><USER11> Or I could just look at the site. One theme sold > 22k copies:

[http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose- th...](http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose- theme/2833226)

You saying 22k-1 were all changed by service providers? Unlikely.

<comment><USER10> Well, I suppose I should quote the page you linked to:

> 23 Layered PSD's for customization

I guess at 22k copies, they probably have a good reason to include those.

Actually, I can make a pretty good (and I think, educated) guess at what that reason is: Because people have been bugging them about including psd's day in and day out. Trust me, it is very, very rare that I see an untouched template.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some damning evidence you've shown. One small suggestion I would make is to compare the md5 hashes of the images. Obviously they appear to be the same as per the evidence you've shown, but I would see that as extra convincing.

I see only a handful of people have pressed the tweet button. Hopefully the front page of hacker news is a welcome bit of exposure that you weren't expecting ;)

Now the question is: Will email on acid man up? Or should you lawyer up?

<comment><USER13> If emailonacid's explanation is correct, they were "inspired" and wrote their own HTML and CSS. They could have easily designed the same image.

Given the pixel dimensions of a triangle, and the same software, should we expect the antialiasing or JPEG compression to be unequal? I'd be interesting in knowing which part of, say, Photoshop, adds randomness to such a deterministic process.

Now if there's EXIF data with timestamps or names, sure, good evidence. But this post seems like they're really stretching the "evidence". It's still very plausible that the other company looked at things, perhaps took some pixel measurements, and "recreated" it.

Edit: Also, check out where that triangle is used. The three images beneath it are very differently aligned. By their level of evidence, this disproves their point.

I'm surprised how HN is so uncritical in evaluating evidence and alternative explanations.

<comment><USER12> Yes but notice the mistakes the developer made when adding extraneous whitespace. Also the use of the same class names. At the very least some of the code was copied verbatim without attribution.

<comment><USER13> A single space at the end of a line? That's extremely common. I don't catch those until I check my diffs before commit. And on that particular line, the width attribute was "removed".

And the class name is "plusIcon", which has to be extremely common.

While it certainly looks like they might have copied the design, the evidence they provided is extremely flimsy and doesn't point to them copying the HTML or CSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, Email On Acid appear to have removed the blog post already.

Google Cache link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/C13/emailology_a_free_responsive_email_template_using_media_queries_- _part_i&ion=1)

<comment><USER15> It's back up with this update:

"May 27, 2012 Update: It has come to our attention that the original layout for our responsive template was being sold on Themeforest. We are truly sorry for any misunderstanding or misappropriation of content. We would like our readers to know that we had written all CSS on our own (which is the power behind responsive design) and our intention was only to share in those findings. As we stated in our response to the notification we had agreed to redesign the layout of our template so it does not match the layout of their template. We are currently in the process of updating the template and should be available shortly."

<comment><USER16> Heh, they really did date it 2012.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wait, wasn't the discussion about Wordpress themes having to be GPL (being purely derivative works) over and done years ago?

You create a derivative work of GPL-ed software and call somebody else a thief for doing the same to you?

<comment><USER9> The claimed original work here is not a WordPress theme.

<comment><USER17> _"Our template has as we speak been sold a 361 times within half a year and it's still increasing. Themeforest rated our template worth a $17."_

Yes it is. Which basically means the author is refusing to acknowledge the copyright of the WordPress authors and the license rights of the ones he's calling thieves.

There's one pirate here, and it's StampReady.

Also, I think Email on Acid have a good case for libel. This is willful public defamation.

 __Edit: Apparently, I'm wrong about this being a WordPress theme. My apologies. __

<comment><USER18> You seem stuck on the idea that it's a WordPress theme. It is not. The theme (linked from the article):

[http://themeforest.net/item/the-talk-responsive-email- templa...](http://themeforest.net/item/the-talk-responsive-email- template/4085374?WT.ac=portfolio&WT.seg_1=portfolio&WT.z_author=StampReadyTemplates&ref=StampReadyTemplates)

It's a responsive email template. Not a WordPress template. None of your proselytizing about WP themes and the GPL is applicable to this situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stamp Ready, I like how you could only cite 2 lines out of 1,000. If I had 10K for every line of code I write, it'd be a millionaire. You should probably share the entire source if you are making this type of accusation.

You said it yourself, you sold that ribbon image 300+ times, it is now circulated on the internet and there is no way to prove it came from your IP address.

Out of curiosity, did you obtain rights to profit from the art used in your template? Did you take a screenshot or just RT click?

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/06/freebie- gemicon-i...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/06/freebie-gemicon-icon- set-600-psd-source-png/)

[http://www.colorproprint.com/blog/design-freebies-brushes- fo...](http://www.colorproprint.com/blog/design-freebies-brushes-fonts-and- more/)

<http://dribbble.com/shots/676411-Free-Vintage-Icon-Set-gif>

I believe it clearly states the following on dribbble.com:

Copyright © 2009–2013 Dribbble LLC. All screenshots © their respective owners.

Welcome to the hornet's nest. Slander is never the best option but judging from your tweets over the past 3 months, this is not your first time.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm sorry to all the people who disagree with this but theft is theft.

Imagine you spent your time building something this elegant just for a bigger company to rip it off, and for them to reply with "oh it may look the same but we just used your template as "inspiration" and changed a few images." is pretty much an insult.

The only thing I don't agree with is that you can't price how much they would have lost, only estimate, and $20,000 is way over the top.

<comment><USER21> Theft is taking something away from someone. Since EmailOnAcid didn't take OP's "possession" of the original template, therefore no theft has taken place.

What has allegedly happened is that a copy was made without permission. A violation of copyright law, much different than actual theft.

<comment><USER20> Ah so what you are saying is that if there is no victim and it's not _stealing_ then it's ok?

<comment><USER22> I think you know quite well that this is not what xordon is saying at all. Whenever something like this happens, people throw words like "theft" and "stolen" around. This widespread conflation of stealing and copyright infringement is the deliberate outcome of a long-running effort by the copyright lobby. Reminding each other of the difference is healthy for the long-term balance of power between the general public and rights-holders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> sorry to hear. i feel sorry for you guys because you have to fight someone stealing your work + waste time and resources chasing these people. on your website though, i noticed something I couldn't overlook (screenshot in link). you have also copied xcode's icon no?

<http://cl.ly/image/2a412E0B0d3G>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, just for clarification I am not affiliated with stampready and/or email on acid. Saw that, found it interesting and wanted to share. And there were quotation marks around the title when I posted, wonder why they disappeared?

edit: holy hell, whole title is edited! Original title was: "How Email On Acid stole worth over $20.000."

<comment><USER24> The original title doesn't make sense. So many typos on their page too. Can't even spell internet properly in the screenshot. Gross.

<comment><AUTHOR> But current title gives a wrong sense. I am not working with stampready nor their theme is my work. The title, now, suggests it so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's quite obviously stolen. I'm surprised they didn't throw the sha sums of the images into the article for good measure.

$20k in damages is an exaggeration. It's not like stampready would have received an extra $20k in revenue if Email On Acid didn't exist. Sounds like Lawyer math to me.

<comment><USER26> On the other hand, if I'm researching companies, and see a small one trying to sell me something a bigger one is giving for free i just consider them scamers and move on.

How do you calculate the loss of sales for cases like this?

Edit: ...and this argument is totally invalid for what zeidrich said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Where's the line between something being "stolen" and something being "inspired" by something else?

People say that as soon as you "copy and paste" a line of code that isn't yours, you're stealing. But it seems that without the "copying and pasting" that is inherent, not only in the learning process, but often in the process of innovation itself, we wouldn't have the products we have today.

And what's the difference between copying and pasting something and creating something similar, but not an exact copy with similar code that you viewed and then re-typed in a similar way? Can one be outright theft and the other be acceptable?

</comment><comment><USER28> So, if they can prove it, why not sue them?

<comment><USER29> Assuming the $20,000 claim has some basis, it's borderline not---actually probably not---worth pursuing. Bigger than a "small claim" and legal fees will cost you more than that to actually get in front of a judge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Even the typo's" :-)

</comment><comment><USER31> same thing happened to our site design. We felt flattered rather than mad, but our business isn't selling templates. Sorry man. [https://keen.io/blog/46309336554/the-highest-form-of- flatter...](https://keen.io/blog/46309336554/the-highest-form-of-flattery)

</comment><comment><USER32> It's obvious that whoever designed Email on Acid has never taken any good acid.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like someone stole a noun from their post title too. Crazy stuff.

<comment><USER2> maybe a root-kit would have helped to prevent that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> awful stuff.. good job calling them on it...

</comment><comment><USER35> If this is the downside of having a DRM-less, open web then so be it.

Isn't it the case that anyone who has purchased this template and uses it on their site that someone can then scrape the template? The source code is already out there. You're fighting the medium not the man.

<comment><USER36> I cannot for the life of me understand why this was down-voted. I think it points out why this kind of thing falls into a gray area that should really be addressed in a completely different way than I see the conversation falling here on HN.</comment></comment>


Re-Confirmed Again Majority of Internet Users won't Pay for Online Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1674397/shocker-majority-of-internet-users-not-willing-to-pay-for-online-services <comment><USER2> The intro bit about Newsday is a little off- newsday.com is available for free to all cablevision optimum obline subscribers... which is basically most of the market for people who care about the local news that newsday reports.</comment>


Silverlight, DRM, Netflix and Linux - <AUTHOR> http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/94992.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> I started this thread what seems like forever ago. What's interesting is that it's had over 2 million views in that time, and nothing has happened. In that time, an app for iPhone, iPad, and PS3 (twice) has been released, but Netflix is still absent on linux. Android (linux based!) has support before linux does. I omitted the Roku box (also linux based) because it handles the DRM in hardware.</comment>


Applescript is Not dead - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/app/split-screen/id453757310?ls=1&mt=12#

<comment><USER2> I don't fully understand. Is your app written in AppleScript?

<comment><USER3> It may be more that such a simple operation is easy in AppleScript, and these guys are charging for it something that small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt...](http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=12) is a dollar more, but (almost certainly) more useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> $0.99 for something Windows supports out of the box? Hmmmm....

<comment><USER6> So, are you saying that any features not offered in one OS but offered in another OS should be free, regardless of the development required?</comment></comment>