The Visual Revolution of the Vanishing of Ethan Carter - <AUTHOR> http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/03/visual-revolution-vanishing-ethan-carter/ <comment><USER2> You should certainly be proud of this work, it it beautiful. But be careful of patent-protected feature detectors like SIFT, you could get burnt[0] There are alternatives that perform as well, also mentioned in the link

[0][http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/what-are-some- fr...](http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/what-are-some-free- alternatives-to-sift-surf-that-can-be-used-in-commercial-app)

<comment><USER3> I'm fairly sure you need to pay licensing costs if you include the algorithms in the application you ship. Not if you used the algorithms in other programs (you purchased, perhaps) to build your assets for the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Photogrammetry is very common in film VFX, where I was first exposed to it nearly a decade ago. There is a very interesting technical merger taking place between photogrammetry, computer vision, and machine learning. My company, www.3D-Avatar-Store.com, is one such company where we've trained neural nets to perform the entire complicated photogrammetry process, and then relax it's technical constraints, allowing for less than ideal source imagery. This "technical merger" is creating neural nets that "know" a given class of object, and are able to reconstruct them given less than complete information. This is achieved by training the neural nets to already know about their class of object, enabling them to "recognize" when presented with one, and then fill in the missing information not present in the limited source photo(s).

At the 3D Avatar Store we've trained our neural nets to reconstruct human faces and heads. It is a photogrammetry process deep inside, but 95% of the process described by Andrzej Poznanski is automated. There is a manual step where one approves and/or corrects the identified facial feature outlines while generating an initial 3D reconstruction. Because we use a facial recognition neural net as a starting analysis, the jawline is hard to recover accurately (facial recognition ignores jawlines). So we have a "post reconstruction" series of deformation tools to allow the user to fine tune or exaggerate their reconstructed 3D form.

[https://3d-avatar-store.com/A-peek-at-new-Fuse3DAvatars](https://3d-avatar- store.com/A-peek-at-new-Fuse3DAvatars)

And the best part of a process like this is all "3D Avatars" created by our process share the same topology: meaning they can be morphed between one another and controlled by the same animation rigs.

I love this "Visual Revolution of..." blog post. People need to know about photogrammetry, and the advances around it.

</comment><comment><USER5> The implications for this tech isn't more realistic objects but on team size (we're more limited by memory/fill rate/load times/bandwidth/storage limitations than our ability to accurately recreate an object).

I don't know if they outsourced any of this work but their company consists of 8 people. Compare that to a AAA team that might have, say, 10-20 dedicated artists working flat-out for a couple of years.

<comment> con-templative My artist friend didn't seem too worried by it. I have no idea if this is common in the industry, but he was saying that much of the artwork is already outsourced to cheaper foreign artists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't miss the amazing webgl examples towards the end.

</comment><comment><USER7> I only bought this game because of the stunning visuals and boy is it stunning. This write up is very informative.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks like the same tech that was used by the Smithsonian to scan Obama. [http://dpo.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-creates-first- ever-3d-pre...](http://dpo.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-creates-first- ever-3d-presidential-portrait)

</comment><comment><USER9> Daniel Cremers group has been producing something complementary to what is described here - See their LSD-SLAM demo here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnuQzP3gty4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnuQzP3gty4)

Source is available.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8387310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8387310)

</comment><comment><USER11> The Visual Revolution of the Vanishing of Ethan Carter... is just another product from Agisoft.</comment>


Miracle Math (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://educationnext.org/miracle-math/

<comment><USER2> I have used the Singapore Math materials for all of my four children. My oldest has been a state champion on AMC tests and a member of our state's ARML "A" team. Most of the best students in my weekend supplemental math classes got their grounding in math through the Singapore Primary Mathematics series.

I have to strenuously disagree with yet another stupid comment from an American schoolteacher about international comparions in education, quoted in the submitted article:

"Gail Burrill, a former president of the NCTM, suggests quite bluntly that the success of Singapore Math cannot be imported. 'These are books used by a different culture, a culture that is more homogeneous, and a culture that has a consistent way of thinking about mathematics.'"

To call Singapore "more homogenous" than the United States, in an educationally relevant sense, is beneath contempt. Singapore's population consists of a minority of Malay people descended from the historically earliest inhabitants of that region, and a majority of ethnic Chinese inhabitants who are mostly the descendants of indentured plantation workers. But there are also descendants of Indian plantation workers. In fact, Singapore is the only country in the WORLD that has four different official languages (English, Modern Standard Chinese, Malay, and Tamil) from four different language families, and people born in my generation most likely spoke NONE of those languages at home, being predominantly speakers of other Sinitic languages (or possibly other Indian languages) not mutually comprehensible with the official languages, and certainly not cognate with English, the sole language of school instruction. Singapore's achievement in school math instruction is as if we suddenly switched the language of instruction in the United States to Arabic but expected all pupils to keep up with school instruction.

But, yes, sigh, the Singapore Math materials are hard for United States elementary teachers to use, because they mostly don't know even very elementary arithmetic.

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

"The understanding of the area of a rectangle and its relationship to multiplication underlies an understanding not only of the multiplication algorithm but also of the commutative law of multiplication, the distributive law, and the many more complicated area formulas. Yet in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle."

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree about the homogeneous culture comment - even if it was true (which I accept your point that it isn't) I still don't understand what "a culture that has a consistent way of thinking about mathematics" means!

You have expressed some views on education in the past that I find very interesting. I would really like to ask more but I am guessing this is not the forum. If you don't mind being pestered please drop me an e-mail, my address is in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who find this too long, I suggest you skip to the "Bar none" graphic insert about 2/3 of the way down.

I would be interested if anybody here would defend the "Guess and Check" method, because personally I find it a terrible way to teach math (though I grew up in a system that taught Math more along the lines of the Singapore system, so I may be biased).</comment>


When to buy airline tickets: Getting the cheapest flights - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/02/when_buy_airline_tickets <comment><USER2> Don't forget the Farecast technology at Bing Travel which predicts whether you should buy or wait for your airline ticket which has a fairly high accuracy rate.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, is there a sensible implementation for cheap flights hunting with flexible dates?

Guys from Hipmunk have been promising it for about a year by now. And yet I still find myself forced to try different dates manually.

<comment><USER4> <http://matrix.itasoftware.com/> has a great feature (among MANY others) that will show you a calendar of a month's worth of fares.

<comment><USER5> They also have a fairly powerful route language - [http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/help/advanced- to...](http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/help/advanced-topics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Admittedly anecdontal, but I've always found 4 weeks before to be the optimal point.

<comment><USER7> Except for holiday travel, where the rule seems to be the earlier, the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The articles don't seem to give a specific answer (aside from a time and day of the week,) but sounds like the consensus is 3 p.m. EST on Tuesday, your best bet being 8 weeks before traveling.

From personal experience, once you hit the 3 week mark, you're pretty much SOL until the last few days, since most seats have been sold at that point. If there are still plenty of seats (orbitz sometimes shows you the seating chart,) you'll have better results than on fuller flights.

<comment><USER9> Actually it did give a pretty specific answer, which was indeed 3pm EST on Tuesday 8 weeks before.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I travelled cross-country to Startup School only using YC apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.backspac.es/r/0WK9lFPeVo

<comment><USER2> It's cool that YC has produced enough services to allow you to do this sort of thing.

One thing that I found interesting were the gaps in the trip. The most economically "important" pieces were skipped over. Things like the airline service, fuel consumption, and potentially more innovative ground transportation. The companies that made products and services that "actually" got you to Mountain View and back.

It will be interesting to see if YC can produce companies that start to close these gaps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely true. It's pretty cool to think back and imagine gas companies, airlines, or basically anything that has now been commoditized on an industrial scale and imagine them being built as a two or three person team. I'd love to read a book on it, although I wouldn't be surprised if most of them were started by wealthy land owners or government sponsored undertakings in the first place. That other private bus line article on the front page looks interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Which app provided the story? This format is not very clear, IMHO, at least on this here iPad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Backspaces (<http://backspac.es>). It's the app you're looking at it with. If you want to be more specific about what makes it unclear I would love if you emailed me at dmitri at backspac.es and let me know.

<comment><USER3> Hey, I hope you see this. The reason it's unclear is that it's difficult to differentiate between the screenshots, and the text that makes up your story. The hipmunk screenshot is the best example of this: your story is white text on a black background, which is exactly the same as the screenshot. When skimming (and skimmers gonna skim), it's pretty hard to notice the story text.

The other part that's confusing is that sometimes the story text is on top of the images, and other times it's in a rounded-corner box that looks very similar to the image--in other words, is the text part of your story, or is it a screenshot/photo?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I totally see it. Will have a think on alternative designs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Huxley quote is my favorite of the current crop of tips in the Hipmunk app. Made me smile to see it in your post. Thanks for using the app!</comment>


Just Use a Managed Service - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alonisser/managed-services-6e205f502098 <comment><USER2> How can you trust a company that is not even willing to roll their own basic solution? They will definitely be up and running quickly.</comment>


Lorenz - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/1350/#

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7509739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7509739)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7508572)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7510226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7510226)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7511707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7511707)

And it doesn't work on my desktop version of FireFox, but it does work on my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty amazing - it is probably going to get out of hand very quickly and become as epic as "Time" (xkcd.com/1190)</comment>


Cost Capping on Google Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/faun/capping-costs-on-gcp-for-many-projects-with-a-budget-for-many-months-without-paying-a-penny-dc461525c2d2 <comment><USER2> You should update the title with the prefix "multi-tenant"

Thanks for the share!</comment>


Someone forgot to renew NodeJS.org - <AUTHOR> http://nodejs.org/ <comment><USER2> Sorry, folks. My bad.

The root cause here is that some stuff didn't get handed over properly in the switch from Ryan to me as Node.js manager. So, the emails were indeed going to a non-functioning inbox.

It's resolved now, and we're setting it up to auto-renew so that this doesn't happen again.

<comment><USER3> It's kind of amazing how much certain data (in this case, a record in DNS) comes to _mean_ to people. And how much we come to rely on that little bit of data. And really, how much we trust the DNS system and it's maintainers. "Ruling the world" might be difficult, but "ruling the internet" appears to be a matter of controlling DNS and then mimicking well-known sites well enough to install arbitrary software on every PC and device on the planet via a nefarious auto-update. It's the ultimate MITM attack. Even better if you can take over the DNS system for a short period, get a few million installs, then put the system back.

tl;dr: He who controls the DNS, controls the universe.

<comment><USER4> It's not who controls the spice, its the one who can disrupt the flow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a lot of self-righteous dickishness and schadenfraude in these responses. Proclaiming there to be "NO excuse" to someone who has worked their ass off to create a stellar open-source project really says more about yourself than the person you are attacking.

Most certainly there is some sort of explanation, and whether or not it was a terrible mistake, being a jerk about it doesn't relieve you from the terrible mistakes you've made in your past - we all have them. And in the end, this is really not a big deal.

<comment><USER2> You have hit on the exact reason why I almost never look at Hacker News any more, except when someone explicitly asks me to respond to something.

This site appeals to the absolute worst in everyone. I find myself becoming an asshole every time I come here, and I don't like that feeling.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about the worst in _everyone_ :). Lots of people still manage to hold their temper. I've certainly gotten snippy here before.

I still come here for great commentary on complex topics, but usually resist the urge to look at comments on gotcha articles like this where I know there is probably nothing constructive to say, so the trollishness comes out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know people make mistakes and overlook things, but really...there is no excuse for this. I get about 8 emails from my registrars warning me before a domain expires...60 days, 45 days, 30 days, 1 week, then one like every day until the date. Unless these emails are going to an address nobody is monitoring I can't see how this can get overlooked.

<comment><USER7> If an email was sent to a mailbox that wasn't being checked, it doesn't matter how many emails were sent. I don't know if it's the case, just guessing as one possibility.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly true. Emails bounce and the person who is in charge of the domain often changes jobs and the contact isn't changed. Some go straight to the spam bin.

But you'd be surprised at how many people ignore even postal notices that some registrars send.

What you have to keep in mind is that restoring domains that have expired is a profit center for registrars. [1]

And having incorrect email contact info helps as well since not only does it favor that profit center but it also prevents competitors from soliciting your accounts (as well as preventing spam, right?)

[1] In the case of the nodejs.org domain it was taken offline on the day of expiration. It wasn't deleted it didn't go into redemption. Generally most registrars give some grace period (but if you aren't getting the emails that doesn't really matter, does it?)

There is a new policy being floated by ICANN that addresses these issues. If I can find the link I will post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know there is a joke about event driven programming in here somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope the node installation never did one of these:

      curl -s -L http://nodejs.org/some-script.sh |sh

I have never understood why people install software like that. I can not remember which project it is that uses this in the installation.

<comment><USER11> Homebrew, rbenv, rvm, to name a few. Never understood it either. If you could get ahold of a domain write a malicious script at /some-script.sh, you could do a lot of damage.

<comment><USER12> I agree that it feels insecure, but is there really a difference between this and downloading and running files from a .tar.gz or installing a .deb for example?

<comment><USER10> Yes.

apt-get:

      $ ls -l /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/

Source Installation:

      $ wget http://nmap.org/dist/sigs/nmap-6.01.tgz.asc
      $ wget http://nmap.org/dist/nmap-6.01.tgz
      $ gpg nmap-6.01.tgz.asc

<comment><USER13> The point is that most people don't do this.

<comment><USER10> Its built into apt. Unless you are suggesting that most people do:

      # apt-get --allow-unauthenticated ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also, 10 year registrations are typically only $80

If you have a serious domain, why not just grab the decade.

Domain prices will only go up, sometimes $1 a year, so there are savings too.

<comment><USER8> "10 year registrations are typically only $80"

Where are you seeing $80 for 10 years (not doubting just curious).

$80 is below the cost that the registrar pays (for .com) to the registry and ICANN variable fees. Not to mention the cost for credit card processing as a variable fee.

Consequently in order to charge that amount the registrar has to make money in other places (could be to charge for things that are free elsewhere as one example).

<comment><USER15> nearlyfreespeech charges 9.49USD per year so that is not too far off for a respected registrar

<comment><USER8> They are a reseller, not a registrar.

<http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/full/accredited>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> ERROR 500.5150 - Too busy being rockstar tech

<comment><USER17> Please stop using this bs terminology, rockstars, ninjas and all that sort of crap. With all respect to Ryan he is just one of many great programmers.

<comment><USER18> No one can truly know the mind of another human being, but I'm pretty sure Carson Gross is sick of the term as well.

I do agree with you that sincere language is more likely than sarcastic derision to turn the tide, but you should know that you guys are on the same side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For those who need it, the IP address is: 220.127.116.11

<comment><USER20> This caught me and my coworkers by surprise just now. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It used to be possible to pay for other people's domains (they still own it, you are just gifting the payment).

Someone once renewed a hotmail domain after Microsoft forgot.

Registrars should allowing gifting, source doesn't matter.

<comment><USER21> >Someone once renewed a hotmail domain after Microsoft forgot

<http://www.doublewide.net/>

This is what ck2 is referring to. Its was an interesting incident.

Slashdot discusssion around it: [http://slashdot.org/story/03/11/06/1540257/microsoft- forgets...](http://slashdot.org/story/03/11/06/1540257/microsoft-forgets-to- renew-hotmailcouk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> whois nodejs.org

      Registrant Name:Ryan  Dahl
      Registrant Organization:Joyent
      Registrant Street1:345 California St Suite 2000
      Registrant City:San Francisco
      Registrant State/Province:CA
      Registrant Postal Code:94104
      Registrant Country:US
      Registrant Email:firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER23> With the email "firstname.lastname@example.com", it doesn't seem likely that it's an unmonitored email address that would have missed the registration, unless it was seen as spam / junk mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, what recourse is available in this situation? None? Does this mean that 100% they are going to now be blackmailed to get their domain back?

<comment><USER25> Shouldn't be anything to worry about - here's how the domain expiry process works.

1\. Domain 'expires', and enters a 40 day grace period. I have read things that imply this can vary from registrar to registrar, but it seems pretty standard from what I have seen.

2\. After the grace period, it enters a 30 day redemption period. Again, apparently this can vary, but I have yet to see it (admittedly I have only looked at a small number of domains)

3\. Finally, when the redemption period expires, a 5 day 'pending deletion' period is entered.

Between 11am and 2pm Pacific Time on the 6th day of pending deletion, the registrars theoretically start dropping the names from the ICANN database.

It is kind of odd that such a domain would only be renewed annually... it's hardly speculative!

<comment><USER8> Your numbers are off.

Grace period (as you have pointed out somewhat) varies by registrar. The basis for what you are saying is how long a registrar has to delete the domain before they can get their money refunded. That time period is 45 days. So on the expiration date the registrar is automatically charged for the renewal. If they delete on day 45 (by a certain time depending on when registered) they will have their fee refunded. Consequently they can give a grace period if they want of up to 45 days but from a practical standpoint it's tricky to wait until the last minute before deleting (if you have a system problem on day 44 that prevents you from deleting 2000 names you're stuck with them).

After they delete the domain (which can theoretically be anytime and keep in mind that "delete" is different than "take off line" "change ownership" etc.) it goes into redemption.

It is in redemption for 30 days during which only the sponsoring registrar can submit the necessary report to get the domain back. With .com .net .org .info the cost for the registrar to get the name out of redemption is $40 plus the renewal fee.

Once 30 days have past it is in pending delete and goes into a 5 day black hole where nothing happens and not even the sponsoring registrar can get it back. After that 5 day period it's released and anyone can grab it, first come first serve.

nodejs.org as I pointed out elsewhere was simply taken offline. It wasn't "deleted" in the sense that it goes into redemption. From the registrars point of view this makes sense since it allows them (if they want) to charge a fee to restore the domain w/o having to incur any extra ($40) costs.

"the registrars theoretically start dropping the names"

The time the domains drop is not controlled by registrars. It's controlled by the registries. The registrars only control (in addition to other things pointed out) when the domain goes offline or gets "deleted" and enters redemption.

" it enters a 30 day redemption period. Again, apparently this can vary"

Can't vary it's 30 days.

<comment><USER25> You start by saying my numbers are off, then agree about the variability of the grace period before stating exactly the same numbers as I did?

Thanks for clearing up the redemption period invariability though.

<comment><USER8> You made statements of fact, such as:

"here's how the domain expiry process works." (might have been better to say "here's how I think").

"Domain 'expires', and enters a 40 day grace period" although you qualified this saying it like that gives people the wrong impression of your actual knowledge in this area.

"After the grace period, it enters a 30 day redemption period. Again, apparently this can vary, but I have yet to see it "

You say "it enters" (like a fact) but then say "it can vary, but I haven't seen it yet".

My point isn't to give you a hard time but on HN crowd tends to jump on anything incorrect and it's clear from your summary that you don't have much experience in this area. I've made mistakes when I've said things on HN that I haven't doubled checked or don't know very well. (It's possible of course to even make mistakes on things you know well!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand. It looks normal and works for me?

<comment><USER27> Wait half an hour or so, and flush your computer's DNS cache. Your ISP is probably caching the DNS entry.

<comment><USER28> It's been fixed. So it might be YOU who now have the old, bad DNS entry cached.

      Domain Name:NODEJS.ORG
      Created On:29-Sep-2009 14:50:55 UTC
      Last Updated On:29-Sep-2012 16:27:30 UTC
      Expiration Date:29-Sep-2013 14:50:55 UTC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It now shows "Welcome! This domain was registered at namecheap.com. Please check back later!"

</comment><comment><USER30> How does this keep happening to people? No registrar I know has a default of "don't renew", and they send your reminders. Why not just buy the doman for 10 years, or set autorenew, or ... seriously. There is NO excuse for this.

</comment><comment><USER31> File under shit happens and move on. Nothing to see here, people.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to get involved in (US) politics? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Are you an American? Do you want to be a politician, or something a bit less "in the game," or just "know more about it?"

As an American in his sixties, my opinion is that the best way to get involved in US politics is to move to Ireland and watch it from afar.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to _feel_ involved: Join a city or state-level campaign (cold calls, knocking on doors, publicity events, etc).

If you want to _be_ involved: Run for a local office (like maybe a city council seat), preferably an uncontested race where a write-in campaign can be effective with minimal ad spending.

If you want to _learn_ : Join the local chapter for a national campaign. Try to get yourself nominated as a delegate.

If you want to cause a specific impact: Be wealthy and donate significant amounts of money to causes you care about.

</comment><comment><USER4> #1 way: vote. Pay attention to issues that you care about and research where candidates stand on these. Research can be done a day or two before voting (primary or general) read up on them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I heard the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign needs volunteers. [https://berniesanders.com/](https://berniesanders.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Bash Donald Trump!

But if you are serious about it, you'll have to learn about what are the major issues your country is facing. Politics is always done on people's problems or issues, they could be social or economics related or both. Everyone have a different perspective too, labor has a different one than tories, democrats have a different one than republicans.

But at the end of the day, remember that power is all that matters for politicians, they never take ideologies or issues as seriously as we plebeians do! For example, in the elections of the Indian state of Maharashtra recently, a political party called Shiv-Sena joined hands with another one called NCP (their ideals are as wide apart as republicans and democrats, or tories and labor!).

So, as a plebeian or citizen, you should call for more transparency and betterment of systems. You should also ensure that you don't hand too much power to one single guy or party because you know, power corrupts!

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't.</comment>


Why Greedy Stockholders and A $100 Billion IPO Could Hurt Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/28/ipo-risks/ <comment><USER2> I'm amused at the term "greedy" used as a pejorative when referring to stockholders.</comment>


DB2 Express-C for OS X out of beta? - <AUTHOR> http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/

<comment><AUTHOR> "News: DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X officially released (Feb 23, 2012)"

Oddly it is the v9.5.2 level, but has January 2012 file dates in the tar.

Interesting for the (few) who are still interested in DB2 and run Macs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently so: [http://www.db2teamblog.com/2012/03/db2-express-c-for-mac- os-...](http://www.db2teamblog.com/2012/03/db2-express-c-for-mac-os-x- now.html)</comment>


Sounds of Street View - <AUTHOR> http://www.amplifon.co.uk/sounds-of-street-view/index.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, very nicely done. I have to ask since I didn't see it stated: is this using Google Street View images, or are you somehow sourcing your own?

And are creators responsible for their own hosting, or did I miss something where you are supplying that? You seem to assume people won't have questions about that part.</comment>


Think – Fast mobile whiteboarding - <AUTHOR> http://fiftythree.com/think

<comment><USER2> I truly don't understand the snarkiness of the posts here. FiftyThree have created a beautiful, useful app, and kept things clean and simple. Who cares if they're promoting it with a video as polished as the product? (The video itself obviously strikes at thematic concerns of buyers and typical use cases for designers, so while it's lost on you I suspect they know exactly what they're doing)

Some context: I spent years working in graphic facilitation and working closely with clients creating mockups in real-time, both on paper and on whiteboards. The "speed-of-thought" attribute being referred to in the video is _critical_ , because the conversation will move with or without you. Apps like this are exactly what I wish I had at the time, so I for one am excited to see this launch.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Paper is wonderful and this new whiteboard app looks fantastic. IMHO the work of 53 is as good as it gets. Yeah the video seems overblown - but try the products they are great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a shame they don't know how to make Android app. Galaxy Note is way better tablet for drawing then Ipad ever was. I have ipad but I use note all the time. It lacks good apps like this one but it has a really good stylus.

<comment><USER5> > _Galaxy Note is way better tablet for drawing then Ipad ever was._

In what way?

<comment><USER6> I was using the Galaxy Note 10" 2013 model for a year as a substitute of real paper and notebooks at work and at home.

It was too small to substitute the A4 size (~us letter)

Me, a friend, and his friend recently bought a 12.2" Galaxy Note Pro which is almost A4 size and it's just awesome. Those two friends don't use their iPad anymore:

* True pressure sensitivity and pixel perfect accuracy

* Good size and light weight to substitute a real paper notebook

Those are the only two things needed to substitute paper: Decent size and decent stylus. Those wannabe iPad styluses are just trash compared to a good Wacom Stylus for the Note series.

You will know it if you have used both: Crappy iPad Styluses and real Wacom Styluses on a Note Pro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really think they need to focus on removing that awful latency. You can even see it in the video. Microsoft did a study showing just how important it is to get that number down below 10ms.

[http://phys.org/news/2012-03-microsoft-finger-1ms- touchscree...](http://phys.org/news/2012-03-microsoft-finger-1ms-touchscreen- video.html)

<comment> white-flame Not only that, but they have to very carefully keep the rest of their hand from touching the drawing surface as they hold the stylus. An active stylus is far better, letting you rest or brush your palm against the screen without interfering with anything.

If they're going to market this as taking care of all the fiddly bits and letting you just be creative, then they should really take care of all the fiddly bits.

<comment><USER8> The Pencil stylus is actually active and our palm rejection works quite well.

<comment><USER9> The Pencil is more like a fat crayon, its latency is absurd, and its palm rejection only sometimes works. After having bought the Pencil and the Pogo, and hating both, I can say that technical drawing on the iPad is simply a poor experience. (Wacom is an example of how to do it well.)

For sketching charcoal/crayon-style they're probably fine, but that's not what's being shown in the video.

Edit: and calling either of these styluses "pressure sensitive" is to diminish the term to nothingness. Wacom is pressure sensitive, these are barely pressure aware. Erratic pressure response, just not very useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I strongly recommend GoodNotes for this use case. They do a better job than paper at all the "think" tasks like lassoing objects, handwriting in a zoom window, highlighting, etc.

[http://www.goodnotesapp.com](http://www.goodnotesapp.com) (I'm not the maker, just a really big fan)

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks interesting - I always wanted to use Paper for wireframes, sketches and mockups. This might come closer to that idea. However the biggest problem I still have with Paper is the fact that its canvas is always definitive and limited in dimension - even with the regional zoom option complex sketches will become crowded and busy. I'd love to have a close to infinite zoom out/in (especially out) option, thereby rendering the canvas practically borderless and as big as I want.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like an over-glorified tablet drawing app. The flowery language and music in the video about incredible insights and innovating data design is a bunch of puffery if you ask me.

What is the innovation here besides a neat picture app for the iPad?

<comment><USER13> Yeha the puffery is ridiculous, it seems everything must be world changing these days to sell.

However the tool itself looks awesome, seems like they nailed down the interaction perfectly. I can list a million crappy diagramming apps that are unnatural and annoying enough that it's just easier to draw on paper.

<comment><USER14> > it seems everything must be world changing these days to sell

The TV show Silicon Valley has done a good job of satirizing this religion- style promotion of products in the tech scene.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope this moves into a collaborative space. A whiteboard would have a URL that could be "read only." Other users of the app could collaborate and edit.

I am almost never in the same room as clients.

`vagrant --share` is a tool(ala very different) that gets this so right.

<comment><USER17> We've been working on Collusion for a while now, which might do what you're talking about: shared collaborative white boarding (with a really big space - from a URL, ... with pen support, good for tablets, phones etc. We're testing so feel free to grab an account gratis - constructive feedback welcome: heres an example project [https://col.lu/PSnZMIH](https://col.lu/PSnZMIH) and if you want an account to mess with: [https://collusionapp.com](https://collusionapp.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a shame that this only works on the iPad; it seems awesome.

</comment><comment><USER19> That video was tremendously pompous. Everyone spoke so much but said so little.

<comment><USER20> Should be called "Talk". Looks like a nice product though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it called Think or Paper? I'm confused.

<comment><USER8> Paper is the app. Think Kit is the new set of tools for whiteboarding.

<comment><USER22> It is confusing that there is no clear title on the page. The first appearance of the name "Paper" is in a button label.

<comment><USER23> Also that the product on this page, Think Kit, isn't mentioned until the 5th panel, and even then it isn't stated that this is the product. I was also expecting this to be an in-app purchase, but it's free.

Makes a little more sense if you start from [http://fiftythree.com/paper](http://fiftythree.com/paper) , but this style of web design is beautiful and frustrating and overbranded for the product's simplicity (Paper and Think Kit and Innovation Engine).

I use Paper a lot, btw, and expect to use the new tools as well - just as I was straying, trying out alternatives that have guided drawing and layers. (Paper still doesn't have layers.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> These new features are really nice for people like me who really can't draw but still love Paper.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I wanted a stylus and at the time Pencil was one of the only ones that worked on the iPad I had, so when I got it, I played around in Paper and it's such a slick experience, but wasn't really the kind of app I needed. It is the app I show people who ask about the Pencil though.

So I'm stoked to check out the new features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I read the title as "fast mobile waterboarding" and was very intrigued...

</comment><comment><USER26> It's funny — the images didn't load for me and I read through the text initially not realising it was an app. I thought it was a satirical page promoting paper (as in trees, pulp) and it still made sense.

</comment><comment><USER27> I really like the idea of Paper.

I really hate their pencil utensil. It's super broad & good I guess if you're painting, but if you're doing any sort of detail work - you're screwed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Can anyone comment on Paper's pencil stylus? I've heard people say the Jot Script is the best - I wonder if that will work with this app or if you have to use the Paper stylus.

<comment><USER29> I bought a walnut one when they first came out.

I like the shape: it feels good in the hand just like a carpenter's pencil. The tip is pretty squishy and so isn't useful for precision work, and it wears quickly. I use it a couple of times a week and maybe charge it once a month. The specs say it's pressure sensitive, but I wouldn't know it by how it performs. Best features are probably the eraser function and that it enables palm rejection. The walnut has held up well, but I don't think it's worth a price premium.

I think it's a nice fit for the Paper app. If you like the app, you might like the stylus. I find that I like using the app with the stylus more than I do with my fingers. If you're planning to use it with other apps, the Pencil may not be the best choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> At least two times in the video, someone said, "Businesses think in rows and columns; but they need to think creatively." Then, the video showed Paper's rows, columns, boxes, tables--not creative stuff! If they were critiquing things-on-a-grid, they should have compared actual made-by-business diagrams with out-of-the-box Paper stuff.

Someone in the video mentioned using "advanced statistical algorithms" then the video showed her drawing a squiggly line graph. The video didn't show interop between her algorithms and the graph. Does it interop? I'd be happy if it did.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nothing beats working with a nice energel pen ([http://www.amazon.com/Pentel- EnerGel-Millimeter-Assorted-BL7...](http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-EnerGel- Millimeter-Assorted-BL77BP6M/dp/B0012G9VNS)) and simple notebooks from muji ([http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks.html](http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks.html))

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish there was something like this that could help me with mockups and UML diagrams.

<comment><USER33> For UML, have you tried PlantUML? It's a brilliant little text-to-UML converter. Eg. Sequence Diagram ([http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/sequence.html](http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/sequence.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Ahh so everything worth designing contains a filled area graph?

</comment><comment><USER35> No android app, no sale.

</comment><comment><USER36> $50 for a stylist? I just can't do it.

<comment><USER37> It seems to be an active stylus with a pressure sensor.

<comment><USER38> I don't think this is actually true. The software supports a very rudimentary type of "pressure sensitivity" that (i think) is based on the capacitive area of the rubber tip. Maybe this can still be considered "active?" Perhaps. It is my understanding that the ability to determine the size of a touch (a radius?) is a system-wide thing that was added for iOS 8.

In practice, there is a huge difference between a true pressure sensitive stylus, i.e. a wacom stylus, with, say 1024 real levels of sensitivity, versus this more kludgy solution. The Wacom solution is far closer to real media performance. Paper, when used with Pencil seems to support 2 size variables. The first (mentioned above) is based on the new iOS 8 size of the rubber tip deal. The second size variant is based on the velocity that you use to draw your line. The faster you draw, the fatter the line gets. Amusingly, this is somewhat backwards of the way a real artist would use a brush loaded with, say, India ink (like an inker would use). In that scenario, the faster you move your brush, the thinner your line is (generally -- artists can vary this greatly with practice and technique)

Anyway, this Paper and Pencil deal has vastly improved since the first version. The tracking, the connection to the Pencil -- all have improved dramatically. Highly recommended for iPad artists and non-artists.

One thing to note is that a newer iPad will be much better at tracking than an older one (obviously!).

<comment><USER29> Only thing I'd add is that because of the carpenter pencil shape of the Pencil, the contact area "pressure sensitivity" seems to work well if you're using the side of the Pencil to shade an area with the software pencil tool, as one would do with a real wood and lead pencil. Outside of that one example, I don't find that the "pressure sensitivity" contributes anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I read the title as "fast mobile waterboarding" during my first quick scan of the main page. I was very confused there for a second.

<comment><USER37> Same for me, seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> That lag is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER41> What value does this add versus MS Paint? I watched the video but could not answer this question.</comment>


Startup School 09 - Live Photoblog via Posterous - <AUTHOR> http://alaskamiller.posterous.com/

<comment><USER2> Was watching the stream on Justin.tv, but it was hard to get a connection and the audio started chopping up ever few seconds.

Really disappointing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> PST

9:30 Paul Graham

10:00 Greg McAdoo

10:30 Jason Fried

11:00 Break

11:30 Chris Anderson

12:00 Paul Buchheit

12:30 Biz Stone & Evan Williams

12:55 Lunch

2:30 Mark Zuckerberg

3:00 Mitch Kapor

3:45 Tony Hsieh

4:15 Mark Pincus</comment>


From Art School to SE Researcher at Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://www.software-engineering-unlocked.com/from-art-school-to-microsoft-research/ <comment><USER2> Especially the beginning where she recounts how she enrolled in a computer science university program without owning I found super interesting. I wonder if one could still pull that off today — there surely are still people without computers and smartphones, maybe not for financial but ideological reasons?</comment>


Apple Leak Accidentally Reveals Radical New iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/01/13/apple-iphone-11-upgrade-update-release-date-price-cost-xr-xs-max/ <comment><USER2> Tripple camera system, new antenna and improved face id.

Radical only on the 80's sense of the word.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who reads comments first, there is absolutely nothing radical in the changes. They are all just upgrades, some seemingly irrelevant to consumers.

\- more cameras on the back of max model

-more dots on the IR light for use in face ID

\- new material in the antenna

\- wifi 6

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm still holding out for USB C - I desperately want to live in a single charger world

<comment><USER5> I am living in a single charger world, and it is amazing.

All my mobile devices (phone, laptop, and console) use USB-C.

I carry everything these days in a single, very thin, laptop bag and feel like I can work and play from anywhere.

...plus, there's no worry if I ever lose a cord. Every device I buy comes with one.

<comment><USER6> Indeed! My work setup includes a monitor with a powered USB-C output.

I plug all my peripherals into the back of the monitor once, and when I get in I plug the single USB-C wire into my laptop, it carries power, VGA, data, and ethernet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is this radical?

<comment><USER8> My thought exactly. This is just another example of our shrinking vocabulary. Intensifiers in particular seem to have collapsed into an undifferentiated mass. For example, the words _awesome_ , _great_ , _outstanding_ , etc all have different connotations, but you wouldn't know that based on how they're used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A counter-narrative to the dwindling stock got accidentally leaked to a fan site and curated through investor information channels. If Tim Cook were a horse I bet he would win triple crown, accidentally of course.

</comment><comment><USER10> iPhone Xi, unapologetically designed in California for China

</comment><comment><USER11> This is FAR from radical and it's super disingenuous to show a concept photo of the new phone having no notch.

</comment><comment><USER6> 3 cameras? I thought Apple was about innovation, didn't I see a Samsung with 7 cameras?</comment>


What's new in Creative Commons 4.0 - <AUTHOR> http://creativecommons.org/Version4

<comment><USER2> Looks like they significantly cleaned up the warranty disclaimer and fixed the limitation of damages, which likely would have been a problem in US courts.

<comment><USER3> Is there case law on disclaimers of warranty for open source software? In particular, has anyone been successfully sued for an providing free software that was not fit for a particular purpose? I was recently hoping that these disclaimers were legal paranoia, but I have no actual knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like GPL compatibility was not included after all?

<comment><USER5> The compatibility would not be part of the license in any case. Some licenses could be considered compatible with GPL (specifically the CC BY SA). However, CC generally suggests that the licenses are used for non-software creations.

<comment><USER6> I think the problem is that both GPL and CC-BY-SA require you to license derivative works with that same license. And sometimes it's not easy to tell if something is or isn't software in a clear way.

For example, if you modify an image of a map licensed with CC-BY-SA for it to be used in a level of a game licensed with GPL, which license should you use for the derivative work? Is it data, code or both at the same time? What's the status of an image or a sound made with a script (think about fractals, for example)?

Both licenses are "viral" and require you to use that and not the other. You are on a deadlock.

<comment><USER5> This is the general problem with share alike clauses and GPL is known for adopting a very limited interpretation of their Share Alike clause. They have recognized CC0 as being compatible with GPL, which is a step. In your example, I'd say that most definitely software cannot be under CC. My perception is that the software license always prevails. Now the image in the game could be implemented with an authorization from the author (it's the best way to avoid problems in any case).

<comment><USER6> I'm in complete agreement with you, but I think we wouldn't need to rely on personal interpretations and recommended practices if the SA licenses stated clearly something akin to:

If a copy or a derivative work of the licensed material is to be included in a piece of software under the General Public License or other strong copyleft license, then it must be licensed under that license for compliance.

I don't speak legalese, so I'm sure that text is full of holes and possible misinterpretations, but surely a group of experts could come up with something legally viable in that spirit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Basically unusable.

If you had put in the terms of your OpenSource Image Hosting platform that users couldn't use the software to host violent or simulated violent content, that restriction is removed by CC 4.0.

Conversely you can now require that anyone who uses your Image Hosting Platform gives you the rights to any data about users of that platform. This will probably only hold in Europe since in the US data is pretty hard to copyright.

It also now allows that if you are a Model in an image that is shared as Creative commons that if someone wants to make modification to that image to make it look like you are being Raped, or raping someone else that is permissible, and you can only say all derivative works are allowed, or none are allowed.

This is a major step backwards.

<comment><USER8> > If you had put in the terms of your OpenSource Image Hosting platform that > users couldn't use the software to host violent or simulated violent > content, that restriction is removed by CC 4.0.

I don't immediately see where CC 4.0 does this, but if it does I view it as a good thing. If you add extra terms on top of a CC license it is no longer a CC license and you should not label it as such.

> Conversely you can now require that anyone who uses your Image Hosting > Platform gives you the rights to any data about users of that platform. This > will probably only hold in Europe since in the US data is pretty hard to > copyright.

Wait, what? Is this some weird interpretation of the new clarifications on database rights? The Creative Commons license has nothing to do with data you hold privately.

> It also now allows that if you are a Model in an image that is shared as > Creative commons that if someone wants to make modification to that image to > make it look like you are being Raped, or raping someone else that is > permissible, and you can only say all derivative works are allowed, or none > are allowed.

As long as the person who put the work under the CC license was in a position to sign over the model's moral rights. It's meant to be an easy to understand and use license, the fact that allowing derivative works is a binary decision is a good thing in my view.

<comment><USER7> Waive of moral rights. It was hinted in 3 but is now explicit.

As written you can now own data created by your software used by others. The intent was likely that you could license data as CC some rights reserved, but in the process it appears that you can now claim rights to data created by the software you are licensing.

Most licenses for Personality or likeness of a human allow restrictions on the way that image is to be used. I can't take a picture of your mom, and then have it be used in an ad that implies she has STD's. With good reason. If I posed a model to look like she was basting a turkey for thanksgiving, and then modded the image to be part of a pornographic image she would now be a porn star rather than a cooking personality. She would have no problem being in a derivative work that added titling or changed the color of the walls, or featured a different brand oven, but probably wouldn't be ok if the image was modded to look like she was inserting a turkey baster in to a persons rectum.

<comment><USER6> If you want to have control about how your creative works are reused, then you should choose to stay with plain-old Copyright and grant (or deny) authorizations as requested.

It's a little bit crazy to say "Yeah, this license gives you total freedom to reuse this work however you want without asking permission, except when the original author doesn't like the result". Where do you draw the line? It defeats the purpose of the license.

You can make a parallel with FOSS, your software could be used to run nuclear missiles, a pedophilia network or other nasty things. I don't like it quite a bit, but the other option is a slippery slope in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> GPL and MIT both allow you to put any restriction you want in the license. "Free for use to academia and by organizations which are working for the betterment of Animals"

The courts might have given the copyright holder a hard time, but the license was setup such that in the documentation you could add restrictions.

Because this wasn't specifically blocked by 3.0, this is a new restriction because it is explicit in this license.

<comment><USER9> You cannot add additional restrictions to GPLed works, they are void. [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#NoMilitary](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary)

<comment><USER7> Sorry that was a change from V2 of GPL. I had forgotten that GPL changed in v3. I try to avoid V3 because several bad things came from that change. The Free for Noncommercial use change being among them.

<comment><USER10> > The Free for Noncommercial use change being among them.

GPLv3 added two new concept.

1#, you may not give people software under false pretense, and then later go sue them for patents.

2#, you may not work around the license with the use of technical restrictions. The rights provided in the license to users should not be limited by legal (gplv2), and gplv3 simply adds same rule to cover identical restrictions from technical means.

What has either to do with commercial use?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Docracy" Opens Up Document Genome Project: Compare/Contrast Contracts & Patents - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/18/docracy-opens-up-document-genome-project-to-let-you-compare-and-contrast-contracts-and-patents/ <comment><USER2> This is a really promising avenue. I can see how bioinformatics techniques could be used to identify passages as if they were genes. So some of the hard problems are solved. But the kind of knowledge that bioinformatics produces is highly statistical and one of the biggest challenges will be reducing the results of, for instance, combinatorial pattern matching. It seems like they're taking the right approach in identifying which phrases are common, essentially building the Genbank of legalese.</comment>


How United Airlines Went from "Friendly Skies" to Throwing People Off Flights - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/04/uniteds-greed-turned-friendly-skies-flying-hellscape/ <comment><USER2> In this situation, shouldn't there have been some form of mandatory auction, where the Airline would have to bid to buy the seat back. Or do what Delta does, and form a contract with the passenger to buy back the ticket for a pre- agreed price?

I do find it shocking that the airport police got involved with what really seems to be a civil, rather than criminal matter, but then again, such are the times.

Airlines should not be allowed to use violence to enforce arbitrary, or even random rules.

<comment><USER3> The issue is that the guy refused to leave a private space, getting security or police to remove him seems like the solution to that problem in most other contexts. It's a different situation but if someone refused to leave my office they would definitely call the police

<comment><USER4> As you say, this is indeed a different situation. Here are their own rules on when they may remove a passenger from the plane.

[https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of- carriag...](https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/contract-of- carriage.aspx#sec21)

None of them address this situation. They broke the contract of carriage (as well as, it appears, his nose; three bully boy police officers beat up a 69 year old man, who has committed no crime, at the request of an airline).

Also, I suspect it could be argued that it was not a private space. Privately owned, yes, but not a private space. This wasn't trespass.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure of the legal terms but it's private in the same way that Disneyland or a store in the mall is private. There's a lot of people there but they obviously have the right to arbitrarily evict you. I've been kicked out of a store for just being too loud before

<comment><USER4> It's private _property_. Which does not automatically make it private _space_. As I recall, part of the definition in at least one set of law involves whether or not it's reasonable to expect members of the public to be there without explicit invitation.

 _There 's a lot of people there but they obviously have the right to arbitrarily evict you._

That's just plain not true. There are reasons why people can be asked to leave; those reasons are curtailed. There are unacceptable reasons to kick someone out. You may not arbitrarily evict people. If you evict someone for the wrong reason, you may have committed a crime. Obviously I'm talking about US law; in other places, other rules apply.

While I'm here, just because it's one of my favourite legal misunderstandings, putting something in a contract doesn't necessarily make it legally binding. But that one's just for fun.

<comment><USER3> If your reason is discriminatory you can't evict someone but kicking someone off to make room for an employee isn't illegal at all

<comment><USER4> I understand that's not true. I understand it is an FAA violation (i.e. breaking the law) to drop someone with a confirmed reservation in favour of an employee.

Additionally, what happened was also a violation of the conditions of carriage that the airline had set up. They were breaking their own rules.

What makes you say it's not illegal? Perhaps I'm reading the rules incorrectly.

<comment><USER3> I'm aware of the fact that they can't outright refuse service to most people but I was under the impression that they had some latitude in rescheduling people.

EDIT: that article makes sense. I'm obviously not sure on the legalities so I will defer to your understanding of it. I guess this case goes close to home for me because if I had to make the decision between canceling a few whole flights and kicking 4 people off a plane I probably would've done the same thing and I don't think that's unreasonable. I'm all for sticking it to the man but people seem more outraged at the company making a pretty understandible decision when it seems to me the security officer who really made the bad decision and bloodied the guy.

<comment><USER4> Here is a lawyer who took the tobacco companies for billions talking about it: [http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/04/david-dao-united- airlines/](http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/04/david-dao-united-airlines/)

It's disturbing to see here and elsewhere (not so much you, but certainly others) the degree to which people doff their caps to big business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If we as consumers are voting with our wallets, in most cases we're the ones who have accepted the new norm as acceptable in the spirit of chasing ever lower fares. Consider the success of airlines like Ryanair which charges for every possible amenity and slight convenience.

United Airlines has largely been the laggard in the industry in the past 5 years even though their stock price has risen 200%, that is 50% less than their peers like Delta and Alaska Air group who have risen closer to 400% in the same time period. If flying the friendly skies took them into bankruptcy, what could they have done that would've kept them afloat while maintaining a "regulated" carrier status?

<comment><USER6> This is the thing that always bothers me. By _far_, when (at least US domestic) travelers book flights, their main and often only consideration is ticket price.

People claim to be annoyed by baggage fees, not being able to select their seat ahead of time, no or limited food, paid in-flight entertainment, overselling, etc., but they refuse to vote with their wallets and pay more for better service.

We've made this bed, and now we're apparently pissed that we have to lie in it.

<comment><USER7> The bar for basic service has dropped so far that you are no longer treated like a person if you don't pay for the extras. My wife and I saved up for a resort trip for our ten year anniversary only to find that our 4-hour flight included a seat without enough leg room for me to sit while the person in front of me reclined into my lap (I'm 6'2"). The passenger in front of me wanted to stay reclined and the flight attendant could only offer me a seat upgrade to sit by myself in a section with more leg room. Not my only bad experience with them but United was far worse than any other recent trip I've had.

We're pissed because they set the bar so low we have to trip on it. Those of us who don't fly often have no idea how bad it's gotten compared to how things used to be.

<comment><USER8> That's an experience that isn't really unique to United though, the major carriers all have nearly the same legroom (+/\- 1").

As a 6'1" passenger, I can tell you that your claim that you "couldn't sit" while the passenger in front of you was fully reclined is a gross exaggeration. Sure, I empathize with you that it was uncomfortable, and rest assured, you were paying an extremely bargained price for your airfare.

Basic economics also comes into play here: There are Economy Plus seats if you want a more luxurious amount of legroom.

<comment><USER9> As a 6'1" passenger myself, I can only assume you have short femurs. I've had that exact scenario happen to me on a flight - when the person in front of me reclines, my legs from my rear end to my kneecaps _do not fit in the space provided in an economy seat._

I book seats that are Economy Comfort (I fly Delta) or exit-row seating, but when flying with my wife and children I sometimes need to choose comfort or sitting near them. (For the record, I choose to sit near them when I am forced to choose.)

I'm a little unhappy about being charged an extra $100 to fly Economy Comfort just because I happen to be in the 90th percentile for height, but I understand the engineering and social issues of providing seating in a fixed space for 200+ passengers.

<comment><USER8> I believe we're both slightly over one standard deviation above the mean for adult male height.

Regardless, I am a competitive distance runner (and have the right body type for the sport). My femurs are likely even larger than yours, and yes, my knees stick a little bit outside of my space into the adjacent seat, but I am still perfectly capable of sitting in my seat. I've had overweight seatmates that encroach more on others' personal space than my knees do.

<comment><USER10> Re: overweight passengers, if I ran an airline, there would be a seat with side panels to test your fit. The seat would have side pressure sensors. If you can sit in the boxed seat without touching either side, fine. If you can't do so without touching one side or the other, you'd have to pay more. We'd also charge for weight, something per-pound. It costs more in fuel to move each additional pound.

There would be a required training course for boarding and unboarding which all potential passengers would be required to pass. We'd also teach people how to put their carry-on in the bin in the correct orientation (with the widest side inserted depth-wise and the second widest dimension vertically such that 4 bags can fit into a normal bin instead of 3 or 2 + that one person's purse which should be under the seat). It'd be like a marching band, with timed choreography. We'd board using the front and rear doors. I bet I could reduce average boarding time to 20% of what it is today.

There would be no in-flight screens for entertainment, no drink or snack service, etc. There would be a double-walled [possibly plexiglass if no lighter alternatives exist] section for people traveling with children under about 12, with a bit of space reserved for anyone acting like they're under 12. This would contain the noise and smells. If this could not be made to work, simply restrict booking to passengers older than 12, then everyone else can appreciate baby-free flights.

The benefits of all of this would be reflected in ticket pricing and clearly- stated business practices + expectations. It would have limited appeal, but excellent customer service and I would expect a cult following of loyal frequent travelers who appreciate efficient travel.

<comment><USER11> Of course you would get the obvious comparison to the sizing box they use to determine if a carry on bag is allowed onboard.

I would guess you would need a fairly big legal defense fund for this endeavor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "For the airlines, the opportunity costs really do add up. Itir Karaesmen > Aydin, an American University researcher who has studied overbooking > strategies in the airline and hotel industries, puts it this way: If a > 100-seat airplane sells $200 tickets, and only 95 percent of passengers show > up, the airline loses out on $1,000. (Even if the airline doesn't refund > those tickets, it could have sold five more seats for an extra $1,000.) "The > major airlines in the United States fly thousands of flights every day," > Karaesmen Aydin says—even a few empty seats on every flight means losing > millions in potential revenue every 24 hours."

This is infuriating to read. Having empty seats is not an "opportunity cost", you sold the damn seats, you made your money, that should be the end of it. It does not cost the airline a single thing to fly with empty seats, other than a blow to unchecked greed. If people don't make the plane they shouldn't get a refund, and I'd imagine that the vast majority do not, so literally the only thing being "lost" is the extra money they had no business making in the first place.

This is a sick symptom of our gone-mad capitalism. I love capitalism, it's done great things for us but the relentless pursuit of growth, profit, year after year straight in the face of reality, morals and common fucking sense is getting comically ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> To add to that, flying _without_ the passengers who didn't show is cheaper. Every extra kg is a cost in fuel, so passengers not showing up is already a net saving.

That said, I do see the appeal of allowing flexibility in tickets, allowing someone who's missed their flight to catch the next, with no/minimal additional cost. And I recognise that might need practices such as overbooking to accommodate.

Overbooking's been happening for years, on almost all of the airlines. Individuals do inevitably get caught up in, get annoyed/compensated for getting booted from their flight, but for the most part it works.

It breaks down in this extreme situation, where someone literally got beat up in order to ease logistics for an airline.

<comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the logistics actually be much simpler if they did away with overbooking altogether? Then they'd have drastically fewer people needing to emergency board flights (since they weren't kicked off) and wouldn't need to compensate them.

It's more accurate to say a man got beat up because United sold his seat twice and couldn't figure out what to do about it when they got caught.

<comment><USER13> You're right to say that doing away with overbooking would simplify the system, simplify the logistics.

As a _consumer_ though, it would makes things more complicated and/or more expensive. I would argue that in most cases, the airlines are in a better position to handle the complexity and costs than the individual consumers, who may be delayed, break down on the way to the airport, whatever.

This particular scenario is bizarre and unwarranted for two main reasons:

1\. The event happened _after_ the individual had boarded the aircraft. If the dispute had happened at the gate, the individual would have had to use violence to board the aircraft. As it happened after he had boarded, it was the aviation authorities (at the request of United) who resorted to violence, to remove the individual. It's also worth considering that violence at the gate is more easily contained (minimising harm to anyone, including the perpetrator) than violence on a confined aircraft. It's also worth noting that in all of the video footage available, the individual shows no signs of violent behaviour.

2\. The flight wasn't even overbooked. It appears to be a last-minute decision for United to ship crew to a new location, whilst also deciding to give the crew precedence over paying passengers, who had already boarded. There's been some suggestion that there is no legal precedence allowing them to do this.

I think the practice of "over-booking" is unduly taking the fall in this example, because the flight wasn't over-booked, and even an over-booked flight shouldn't create the circumstances for this type of harm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another dumb article focusing in overbooking. Unfortunately, United was given a free pass as most media erroneously attribute this error to overbooking. It was not. They fly was at full capacity, but they didn't overbook clients. They removed a fully seated paying customer, breaking their contract, to accommodate employees. This is not about overbooking, is an illegal removal of a protected paying customer.

</comment><comment><USER15> I noticed the author's name is Tim Wu. Is he the same person as the net neutrality guy[1]?

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

<comment><USER15> Ok, Yes he is! [https://twitter.com/superwuster/status/852493310270853122](https://twitter.com/superwuster/status/852493310270853122)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> IMHO: The article is too much rage-laden. The much more interesting article comes beneath the one linked ([https://www.wired.com/2017/04/united-airlines- overbook-fligh...](https://www.wired.com/2017/04/united-airlines-overbook- flights-usually-pays-off/)).

At the core doesn't seem to be evilness of capitalist corporations, but rather

a) the economic usefulness of overbooking

b) an uncooperative (ex-)customer (his refusal to leave being unlawful)

c) an unqualified and brutal airport police

d) the disastrous United management resulting in employees unfit to deal with situations like these (diplomacy, authority to up the bump-fee) and a company that didn't understood what kind of PR fallout this situation would bring.

See [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/united-airlines-video- pas...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/united-airlines-video-passenger- private-property/) for why United had every right to remove the customer.

<comment><USER17> _> a) the economic usefulness of overbooking_

I realize that "overbook" can mean different things but United flight #3411 wasn't oversold to statistically offset no-shows. Instead, the plane had a capacity of 70 seats[1] and United sold _all 70 seats_ to paying customers with zero cancellations. That's a _perfect_ economic situation for United.

What went wrong was 4 extra United employees needed a last-minute ride on that plane to Kentucky. Since this is an HN audience, I guess we could frame it as a massive failure in the "information flow" through their computer reservations system.

The _very second_ that United knew they had 4 employees they had to acccomodate, their computer system should have _immediately confirmed those 4 employees_ on flight #3411 first such that the plane only shows 66 available seats instead of 70. (Computers doing math for the win!) That way, either 4 of the customers get denied a boarding pass at the check-in kiosk, or they get denied at the gate that scans the barcode _before_ they enter the jetway. Instead, United let all 70 passengers board and settle in their seats.

If United insists that their employees take precedence over paying passengers, _their damn computer systems need to reflect that reality in the seating database!_

All of those opportunities to have the computer system "help" were missed that would have prevented the situation from escalating to a bloody face plastered all over the news.

[1] [https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air...](https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Airlines_Embraer_EMB-170.php)

<comment><USER18> They could also have just paid for those employees to take a competitors airline if it was vital for them to be there immediately despite their poor planning.

<comment><USER16> Does that mean, the employees took the liberty to kick the customer out? If so, I would think that they either didn't thought anyone to disobey and especially not to end up this violently. Still, this would speak volumes upon United's management.

<comment><USER18> Yes they didn't even oversell they wanted 4 employees to fly at the last minute and wanted to remove paying customers to make room for them.

Can you imagine going to home depot and someone pulling drills out of your hands and giving them to employees?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Atlassian's User Onboarding Magic - <AUTHOR> http://appcues.com/blog/atlassian-5-billion-dollar-user-onboarding-magic/ <comment><USER3> This article misses the point. Atlassian's success is not because of their user onboarding. The onboarding process has been a serious weak point of JIRA and Confluence for as long as I can remember (and I worked at Atlassian from 2007-2011). Heaps of new-JIRA-users are completely baffled, and a significant percentage of them turn away from the product suite going "what kind of idiot would ever use that?!"

Thing is, once you figure out how to make JIRA and Confluence work for you and your organisation, you probably won't want to use anything else ever again. They're really powerful, really good products, with a pretty steep learning curve.

Atlassian's success is because existing, confident, users of JIRA and Confluence do two things:

1- They tell their friends, colleagues, and random people in the street to use JIRA and Confluence.

2- When these users change jobs, they bring JIRA and Confluence with them.

Put simply: it's word of mouth that has allowed Atlassian to grow without a traditional sales force.

<comment><USER4> I must be in the 'baffled' group, my employer moved to JIRA, and it's been a nightmare ever since.

In particular, because time reporting and billing decisions are made at the project level, and there is only a single list of projects, with no inter- project relationships, as opposed to other systems (redmine, etc) which feature hierarchical trees of projects, basically every interaction with the system is harder than it needs to be.

Also, 'smart commits' are hideously clunky, when it works at all, which exacerbates the issues above.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and in fact have strongly advocated against it.

<comment><USER5> JIRA and Confluence are fantastic at doing their core competency but there are a lot of fringe features that just seem bolted on because some big time customer or PHB decided to bolt on things. I found the time keeping to be one of these things, as well as smart commits- but I think the smart commits problem is just a matter of iterating the feature and making it 'smarter'. I think it will eventually be enormously useful.

My experience has been that if you have competent implementors and administrators of JIRA and Confluence together, and use them primarily to run projects they are very nice and they interplay very well from requirements and documentation in Confluence to tasks and WIP tracking I'm JIRA. But if you implement a crazy JIRA workflow of your own that isn't completely smooth or organize your projects and documentation in a way that JIRA/Confluence don't really get- you're going to have a jumble of buttons and hoops to jump through and your users will hate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Their description of Jira ("like Asana") and Confluence ("like SharePoint") are far off the mark.

Confluence does not equate to SharePoint except possibly in the limited case of a SharePoint Enterprise Wiki site. SharePoint is more like a web-based RDBMS with both list and file-metadata schemas, a web-based RAD environment to assemble schemas and views (where pages are separate citizens from other data types), centrally managed metadata, and .NET support for enhancement.

Asana is task management with folder and hierarchical organization, Jira is practically a RDBMS with a web-based RAD environment, its own de-facto scripting and query languages, and... Wait a minute, it's actually closer to SharePoint than Confluence.

Source: I've run a SharePoint training and consulting company for over a decade, and actually use Jira, Confluence and Asana in our own internal systems (because we'd be remiss to naively assume SharePoint is ideal for any of the things we use Jira, Confluence or Asana for, and we're not apologists for Microsoft but rather evangelists for business collaboration). I know very well how both proverbial halves live (the MS crowd and the non-MS crowd) and they're not as different as they'd like you to believe.

<comment><USER7> Confluence gets sold directly against Sharepoint. The communications department says, "we need to create a corporate strategy for communicating. Dealing with culture is hard, so instead we're going to go and throw money at mechanism." The contenders are sharepoint and confluence. This sales systems is what ruined confluence - they used to have a delightful markup syntax that was a joy to work with, but in order to get checkbox competition against sharepoint they created an awful broken pretend-WYSISYG.

Asana and Jira joust for dominance in the all-important "issue-based team work management systems" segment. You can hire agile consultants to tell the people how to do their jobs using it. (actually I think Jira is awesome, but I hate that culture)

It speaks well of you that you find this senseless despite your experience.

<comment><USER8> I'm not the biggest fan of markdowns for complex documents.

It's fine for little things like adding bold text or inline code blocks, it as soon as you start getting into anything complex it requires help text and constantly checking of the preview window.

Good WYSIWYG editors are much more pleasant to use. Quip, Medium and Facebook notes all do a good job of constraining formatting and being predictable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The "without a sales team" meme is utter nonsense. I still don't quite understand how all the press can ignore the fact that Atlassian has a huge network of partners (in the hundreds), in almost every country of the world, that started many years ago and has been growing every single year.

All these partners/experts are resellers who make a margin on licenses and have sales targets if they want to move up the ladder (better margin, better payment terms).

Source: I worked for one from 2009 to 2011 and the network has grown massively since then.

<comment><USER10> My thoughts exactly, they claim to have "over 250 experts worldwide". It seems to me this partner network might be a very large part of their success.

[http://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts/](http://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > the median SaaS company spends between 50-100% of their annual revenue of > sales and marketing

The fact that we're considering companies that spend 100% of revenue on sales and marketing makes it pretty clear why Atlassian's costs are so low - <USER2> comparison is nonsense. No company except a VC funded startup can spend 100% of revenue on any one (or two) things, because then there's no money left. And calculating anything as a percentage of revenue makes no sense when you're spending many multiples of revenue because you're running on a VC runway, rather than like a normal company. This would _maybe_ make sense if we were looking at percentage of total costs rather than of revenue.

Maybe their sales/marketing costs really are low, but show that by comparing them to something that makes a little bit of sense. 20% does not sound unreasonable at all to me.

<comment><USER12> 20% is actually on the higher limit in a lot (pretty much all) "normal" companies. Spending 50% on marketing is unsustainable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Atlassian's low sales costs might simply be a function of who they are selling to.

E.g. Jira & Salesforce both have the same approximate ease of use, and the same approximate level of configurability.

Sales implementations are typically top down. So you sell the salesforce solution to the sales executives. This requires a sales team. And because you are selling into sales management, you need to a good sales team. I have sat on these sales calls, and at times it almost felt like a game of "sell me this pen."

In my limited experience, Jira implementations are the complete opposite. Even in big companies, they are bottom up. The target audience does not want a demo, and may not even want to talk to a sales person, they simply want to get their hands on the product.

Does anyone have any insight into sales costs of other saas development tools?

</comment><comment><USER14> The contrast in this article is ridiculously low. So low I assumed it was trying to "dim" the content so I could focus on some modal dialog that didn't load.

<comment><USER15> I still don't get how people think that light grey text on a white background is a good idea ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Awkwardly long loading screens".

What the author fails to mention is that these are on-demand instances, and what's seen is the 'environment provisioning' delay, not some sort of 'loading screen'.

I'm getting the feeling this article is written from the viewpoint of a long- suffering Windows/Microsoft ecosystem user.

<comment><USER17> This was a funny one to read. I worked at Atlassian for around a year, focussing mainly on this onboarding process.

When I started, the provisioning delay was about 7 minutes and the loading screen was actually first just a 404 error and then just a static page saying something like "please wait while this gets set up" (no progress bar and no redirect on completion).

It's funny knowing that has been one of the biggest onboarding advancements and it's still being seen as a flaw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I for one prefer well executed email confirmations above overzealous validation, making me type my email twice, etc. As long as I don't have to wait for the mail to arrive, it's fine with me.

Regarding their sales strategy, I'm surprised the article didn't mention product-integration. There's a great deal of integration going on between their products and that – if I had to guess – translates to a market of existing customers that are vastly more likely to buy (/rent) another of their products. Anecdotal evidence: after some people at our company successfully politicked for Jira, now they've got their Crucible license and are already evaluating Confluence and HipChat. Well played, Atlassian.

Also: personally, I don't agree with the article that Jira is simple, but our managers seem to love it.

Edit: typos/grammar

</comment><comment><USER19> Free Unlimited Private Repos was what got me onboard to start using their services. I then went and also told people that it was my preferred platform and they eventually bought an account.

Github still is great for public repos but Atlassian is just great for my use.

</comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr: there is no onboarding magic. It's "product simplicity".

 _So if Atlassian's onboarding experience leaves a lot to be desired, how is it that they have scaled to $320M in recurring revenue with no sales team? How is the company only spending 12-21% of revenue on sales and marketing while other SaaS businesses are spending 50-100%?_

 _Product simplicity._

<comment><USER21> > Product simplicity.

Of the various issue trackers I've used, JIRA is, by a fair margin, the least suited to that tagline

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> We're prepping to dump JIRA and Confluence _because_ of the user experience. It's just frankly poor and the flows are overly complex. Way too much work for what we want out of that tool.</comment>


React 16: A look inside an API-compatible rewrite of our front end UI library - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1716776591680069/react-16-a-look-inside-an-api-compatible-rewrite-of-our-frontend-ui-library/?utm_source=codedot_rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS+Feed <comment><USER2> > With today's release of React 16, we've completely rewritten the internals > of React while keeping the public API essentially unchanged.

After the Angular 1-to-2 letdown, this is a refreshing commitment to keeping a stable API.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really cool engineering article on how they managed the migration of React 16 rewrite.

It illustrates the use of

\- feature toggles to reduce merge conflicts

\- TDD for api coverage

\- regression logging for faster feedback loop

\- coverage chart for motivation

\- staggered rollout and A/B testing with an eye on product metrics for migration issues

Thanks for sharing!</comment>