New Year's Resolution: Do Experiments, Not Projects - <AUTHOR> http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/cramm/2008/12/new-years-resolution-do-experi.html

<comment><USER2> Counter-intuitively, we must be willing to be playfully creative if we want to make serious money. Let's reintroduce _enjoyment_ into what we do. Sustainable creativity is not possible without levity and experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like this idea for personal projects (er, experiments) as well. I have a list of side projects I work on, but new items get added much faster than existing ones get done. A lot of times the list feels like a burden. A mental switch from "I should write this widget for myself" to "I wonder if this widget would make life easier" takes the mental pressure off and at the same time reminds me why I wanted to make that widget in the first place. Sometimes that switch in perspective is the difference between having the motivation to tackle an item on the list and not.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you guys think this is a better approach than doing a full-fledged startup?

<comment><USER5> You're always able to evaluate an experiment to a full-fledged startup.

And, however odd it sounds, very frequently I'm much more effective when I know that no one counts on me, and I'm free to experiment. It gives a little competentive edge as well.</comment></comment>


TEXTp saves YouTube bandwidth, money - <AUTHOR> http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/textp-saves-youtube-bandwidth-money.html

<comment><USER2> That's pretty awesome that the conversion and rendering of video to text is actually done in client side within flash (initially I thought 'oh man, what a rape it must be on their servers doing the conversions'). Well played Youtube, well played.

relavant: aaxine and cacaxine (if you want to watch own movies at home in ascii art, even stream them over a ssh terminal)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. This is the first April Fool's Day "feature" on the web I've seen that's actually a feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of the libcaca library: <http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca>

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like the fill characters spell out "LOL" a good chunk of the time [1]. Awesome.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_xVXQCrPxQ&feature=featu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_xVXQCrPxQ&feature=featured&textp=fool)

</comment><comment><USER5> TEXTp is awesome. i'm watching starcraft in it. i hope they leave it as an option you can somehow access after april first.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good old Google, never let us down.

I actually want Google to acquire my company for this day alone.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have the latest Chrome&Flash and it's not working for me.</comment>


MicroG Project: A re-implementation of Google's Android apps and libraries - <AUTHOR> https://microg.org/?= <comment><USER2> I don't know about this. Android is not on its way to becoming a proprietary operating system, it's as open as it's ever been. Rather the author seems to be trying to redefine "operating system" to include things that have never been a part of such a term before, like online message routing and mapping services. Since when do we define "operating system" as including libraries for specific online services? User interface libraries, kernels, drivers, multimedia frameworks, sure ... but mapping services?

The underlying theme connecting these libraries is that they're clients for Google's proprietary protocols. Sometimes there are good reasons for these protocols to be proprietary. In the case of Maps (which I worked on some years ago) it's because Google's licenses for some data sets are specific to Google, they aren't allowed to just throw it all out there via an open protocol, and they are expected to discover and block non-Google client apps. In the case of the Market, they want to defend against things like abusive install count inflation. They also like to redesign products and change features whenever they want. All these things are easier when you can change the protocol at will because there's only one client to support, and the client team sit next to the server team.

Note for example that the microG folks have had to implement "DroidGuard", a system that tries to spot scripting of Google's servers from non-approved clients. The microG implementation contains fake data that is sent back to the servers. This risks legitimate users being mis-identified as abusers and potentially having their accounts suspended. That risk must be understood by the microG authors but they don't inform you of it anywhere, which seems poor.

Given that both the protocols and client libraries can change at any time without announcement, I don't see how microG users will ever have stable devices. Nor do I see why they care. Even if they reimplement the client libraries Signal and other apps will still be dependent upon the proprietary servers.

If they want a version of Signal that's entirely Google independent the right thing to do is set up and run a competitor to the actual messaging service, not just reimplement a thin protocol wrapper and call it a day.

<comment><USER3> Its comments like "it's also on the way to become a proprietary operating system" which turn me off supporting something like MicroG. I like the idea, but it such a gross mischaracterization of Android and it leads to uninformed people to believe weird things. Over on Reddit I often see people thinking Play Services is absolutely required to make an Android app. Which is just not true, I know from personally experience that Play Services is easily replaceable with other App Store SDKs. Also as you have said, Play Services deals solely with communication with Google.

It also reminds me of when Cyanogen became a business. It was sorta interesting at first until I listened to the CEO talking about putting a bullet in Google's head. Now Cyanogen tries to sell app space on its users devices.

<comment><USER4> I know from personal experience how hard it is to actually use AOSP phone. I eventually gave up, installed microG and started using apk mirrors, which makes things a lot better, though not ideal yet.

There's F-Droid which is bringing some hope, but pure AOSP with F-Droid still cannot even compete with Nokia N900.

<comment><USER5> I tried rolling the Google-free Android strategy for a while, but I found it was so unusable I took the first non-iPhone path off Android I could find. It's just too much frustration to try to deal with all the missing pieces. Currently I'm using a Lumia 929, but I'd kill for like an Ubuntu phone or something that works on Verizon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Will this, by any chance, increase the number of open-source apps available in f-droid? Every now and then, I spot a wonderful app that is only not available due to dependencies on one or two proprietary Google APIs or components.

I'm trying to run a totally open-source android installation, and have opted- out of Google entirely. It's worked out fairly well so far, but the app choices are fairly limited, of course.

<comment><USER7> Cool! Do you have any blog post explaining how to do it?

<comment><USER8> This is not very detailed but it might help: [https://blog.adilparvez.com/post/2016/10/31/1/cyanogenmustar...](https://blog.adilparvez.com/post/2016/10/31/1/cyanogenmustardrace/)

<comment><USER9> >Signal: End-to-end encrypted messaging over the internet. (You can get it on APKMirror.)

Isn't that a good way to get a modified / malware version of Signal? Anyone can upload to APKMirror, can't they?

<comment><USER10> There's an fdroid repo[1] for it, but I'm not sure I trust the person running it. Because of the lovely conversations with moxie the main fdroid repo got taken down. Don't you just _love_ free software projects that hate giving users freedom.

[1]: [https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/](https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This [0] is why we both need something like MicroG, and why Google will never allow it to succeed. I realize it's an old story, but it shows Google's ruthlessness in protecting platform dominance, even against a single-digit percentage Windows Phone platform. Even if MicroG ships good, working code, Google will break it. And if MicroG fixes that, Google will break it again, until the people writing MicroG give up.

I'd love open options instead of Google's services, but when 95% of your revenue is advertising, you have to own the platform, and Google does.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4625502/microsoft- responds...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4625502/microsoft-responds-to- google-youtube-windows-phone-block)

<comment><USER12> This is not entirely correct. Google has no possibility to break things in short time if they work exactly like the Google implementation. Although Google can update their clients through automatic updates there are still devices only connected via low-bandwidth and similar things which will receive the update heavily delayed. And finally there are devices that will never receive certain update.

Example: The Android Market API (yes android market, the name it had before play store) is still available and can be used, although it was replaced by a Play Store API years ago and there exist public client libraries for using it and the API is heavily used to grab free apps from the play store. However, as Google Play was never available for Android < 2.3 and there are still some users with this OS, the only way to disable this old API would be to remove Play Store access for a few hundred thousand users, which they refused to do until now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a little wary about projects like this. While it is true that Google Play Services kind of subverts the free nature of Android, it's also one of the only things that is keeping fragmentation from becoming a big(ger) problem. Google is unable to update the OS on every Android phone in the wild, but they can update Play Services as needed to patch critical security bugs or add new features. The more that developers rely on it, the more they are relying on something that will be properly maintained.

<comment><USER14> As another commenter said, they could, however, make parts (if not all) of their Android libraries open source without interfering with the goal of preventing fragmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There were some attempts years ago, the author implemented the same stuff as MicroG does now, I wonder if MicroG is forked...

However 3 years ago I was super excited and got the Alternative Google Store (I think it was BlankStore) installed. It crashed randomly and I was not able to download any App. However I thought that the author would work on it and in some time it would be useable.

Still waiting for that day.

That's why I'm a bit pessimistic about this project...

A better way would be to implement a true container/vm system so google only knows what is in this container, no contacts, no calendar, no mails. Heck, maybe it's even possible to link into that container for the host system apps.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the NOGAPPS Project[1]. I used MicroG on a Galaxy Mini (tass) running Android 4.4 based ROM. It is a bit tricky to get it running, but I got some of my paid apps running afterwards (I sideloaded the apk, extracted from my backup).

Using the phone with Google Framework and modern OS made it so slow, MicroG (at least when I used it) didn't make it any slower.

I found the Galaxy Mini thrown by it's owner, picked it up and flash the ROM for shit and giggles...

[1] [http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=1715375](http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=1715375)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a really cool project. It is scary that there isn't a really open mobile platform a la desktop Linux as usable as Android as iOS when it looks like more and more computing will be done on mobile devices. This looks like a really smart way to let Android be what it claimed to be -- an open phone operating system.

</comment><comment><USER18> While i wish them luck, i suspect they will be caught in eternal catching up mode. This because Google have a whole lot of programmer-hours to throw at adding and changing things.

<comment><USER5> The only real answer is to stop using operating systems and software developed by Google entirely.

<comment><USER19> While severely Stalman, your point is valid. But, the apps momentum will never allow that to happen.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I'm definitely not particularly Stallman. Stallman wouldn't be carrying a Windows phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to go GApps free, I recently wrote about this. It's very short but points to where to find more. [https://blog.adilparvez.com/post/2016/10/31/1/cyanogenmustar...](https://blog.adilparvez.com/post/2016/10/31/1/cyanogenmustardrace/)

<comment><USER8> I neglected to mention that the first time you install Signal it should come from a trusted source (e.g. copy it from someone who is happy to use the play store), then updating via apkmirror is safe, since the signatures will match.

Also this might be useful a desktop play store client: [http://www.onyxbits.de/raccoon](http://www.onyxbits.de/raccoon)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard people recommend Raccoon in the past but my phone is something so vital that makes me worried about stuff breaking (the combination of using a lot of 3rd party parts like MicroG, Racoon, apkmirror, ...).

I wonder if it's possible to dual boot without root and also keeping encryption on, that way I can have a safe option if anything breaks.

Damn, why is it so hard to have control over your things these days. It wears me down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Previously : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11373435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11373435)

</comment><comment><USER21> I've installed MicroG on my (supported) phone via their XDA threads (installed BlankStore,etc..), however some apps claimed to be working are not functional at all due to Google Apps dependencies.

Does anyone know what main apps actually work for an average phone user, i.e. Maps, CityMapper, Dropbox, ...?

<comment><USER14> Google Maps, Play Store DropBox and practically all apps requiring a Google account used to work fine for me. However, with the latest update of Maps, Maps stopped working, unfortunately, and just crashes upon start-up. I'm not sure, though, whether this is related to MicroG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using MicroG on my phone for several months. Works very well.

</comment><comment><USER23> This will be popular in China, where phones that run Android but not Google services are big.

<comment><USER24> I live in China and I use MicroG / NOGAPPS since the early days. But I really don't see why it should be of any interest for the average Chinese user? The is a very healthy Android ecosystem here in China, independent of Google. For example apps usually depend on Baidu Maps / 高德地图 for viewing maps. There is simple no reliance on any Google apps here. Payment is usually done with WeChat Pay or AliPay. I would actually say it is more seamless than in the West.

The only strange thing is, that for app downloads usually the APK is directly linked - while still using the Play Store logo. That is because there are many different app store providers. However, as soon as the app is installed, it gets updated by that respective app store.

<comment><USER25> Any issues with app security, hacking, etc?

Or random apps able to monitor the SMS, voice calls?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Amazing stuff. But won't Google have any objections on the licensing and patents regarding reimplementation of their stuff? If so what would be the implications?

<comment><USER27> Actually Google kind of screwed themselves there because just this year they set the legal precedent that all APIs are public domain so if they sued they would lose the case against oracle(and 8.8 billion dollars).

<comment><USER28> Oracle is appealing that decision. The case is going before the CAFC, which means a likely win for Oracle.

<comment><USER29> > The case is going before the CAFC, which means a likely win for Oracle.

Frankly, everything else would be a travesty.

My personal wet dream is that in response to this, Google will partner with Microsoft to get dotNET as a VM backend.

<comment><USER30> "dotNET"? sometimes I just don't know where people come up with their capitalization schemes.

<comment><USER30> Oh jeez, I'm _so_ sorry for pointing out that .NET has literally never been branded as "dotNET".

<comment><USER29> I did not downvote you, but the reason I used dotNET is that I don't want to keep in mind whether the markdown-flavor-du-jour interprets leading dots as special or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be cool if these + standard AOSP APIs can run as a window on top of regular Linux. (X, KDE + OpenGL, or Ubuntu).

(Natively and not as slow emulator/VM).

Maybe that will unify the Linux Mobile, Desktop, Tablet better than the Gnome?

<comment><USER25> Better yet as a Docker Container.

<comment><USER10> [Or an OCI container.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Might be a good idea to reconsider the visual effect of these pages. It looks nice, but it is indistinguishable from genuine Google trade dress, which is a bit misleading.

</comment><comment><USER32> Some People seem to think they're entitled to Google's Play Services without having to install Google's software. AOSP is entirely free and you can do with it as you please. If you want to run Android apps on AOSP then install FDroid, the Amazon App or any other free app store out there. This isn't about AOSP, it's about being jealous that they can't run Android apps that use Google Play Services and using any other app store is an insult to them. If you don't want to install GPS then be content with your free app stores and quit bitching about AOSP not being completely open. But, they want their cake and they want to be able to eat it too so they resort to complaining about Android not being open and trying to write shims to replace GPS so they can get their app fix on.

<comment><USER33> * What people want is to run apps on their phones. * Most apps now depend on google services because google actively promotes play services over base system services, and doesn't really invest in the later anymore. * Many people don't want to run google services on their phones (Me included). * MicroG solves this problem by replacing google services with equivalent services. * People can now run the apps they want.

This has nothing to do with entitlement or google. This is a way for people to run software on their phones without needlessly going through google.

<comment><USER32> Then perhaps they should use software that is not dependant on Google rather than harass developers to degrade their apps to conform to their desires.

<comment><USER33> > perhaps they should use software that is not dependant on Google

Isn't this what MicroG does?

If you're referring to the system as a whole, the only real alternative is ios, which is far worse in terms of user control over what the system does.

In an ideal world, I would be running some linux distribution on my phone and be finished with it. We don't live in an ideal world.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What staging/digital asset management solutions do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I work as a graphic designer at an agency, and we produce a lot of JPGs, GIFs, microsites and flash files that need to be reviewed by clients before we can package them up and get them sent off. Currently, we use a very simple PERL-based staging site where we can upload files (including zipped versions that get extracted upon upload), but it doesn't do a very good job of managing/versioning the huge number of files we upload.<p>What solutions do you use for staging and showing proofs to clients? Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Pixelapse and LayerVault are two startups trying to tackle version control for images.

I haven't used either, but I've heard of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is precisely what we work on at Pixelapse (<http://www.pixelapse.com>). We handle the entire process from versioning your work to receiving feedback from clients.

Happy to answer any questions you have.

</comment><comment><USER4> Extensis Portfolio Server has both a desktop and web client. I use it daily. Full Disclosure: I am a Digital Archivist.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How about open source solutions? I've been looking into ResourceSpace… does anyone know of any viable alternatives?</comment>


Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-joi-ito-robot-overlords/ <comment><USER2> > While Japan had what could be called slavery, it was never at an industrial > scale.

The "but it wasn't industrial" is a vague and arbitrary line. Yes, the Western slave trade was massively horrific and incomparable. But in context the sentence is suggesting the Japanese don't have a deep understanding of being oppressors or oppressed, which doesn't withstand a glance at history. The burakumin, minority groups like the Ainu, Korean relations under Hideyoshi where they collected Korean ears and noses, or in WWII with the system of comfort women... Japan wasn't somehow immune to the forces that lead to oppression between groups.

More broadly the whole article seems premised on the fact that there's some prominent Western sci fi Frankenstein stories, like Terminator, and some notable anime about cyborgs.

But Japan has Frankenstein stories too. Some of the most famous sci fi out of Japan is about how science and technology is dehumanizing. And Western sci fi is obsessed with Frankenstein stories, at least partly as an accident of literary history, because Frankenstein itself just grabbed hold of the popular imagination in an era where Gothic horror was popular and scientific ideas were gaining traction.

Asimov has a few rants against Frankenstein stories, and most of the original I Robot stories are an attempt at an antidote. Worth actually reading if you want something different. He had to work really hard to make something different, suggesting the reason so many authors keep repeating the same stories about evil robots might be more just because they are lazy rather than tapping into something profound.

<comment><USER3> > _Frankenstein stories_

Funnily enough, this idea -- the meme of "Frankenstein" being about the perils of science or technology -- is totally at odds with the book itself. Popular culture has obviously not had much contact with the original text.

In the book, Frankenstein's monster was the good guy -- he was clever, sensitive and persecuted for his humanity. The lesson of the book was about the judgemental inhumanity of society, not the danger of progress.

It warns against the fear of the unknown -- the opposite of the popular understanding. It's nothing at all like Terminator.

<comment><USER4> > In the book, Frankenstein's monster was the good guy -- he was clever, > sensitive and persecuted for his humanity

Er, no he wasn't (the good guy. he was clever etc). He wasn't a villain, per se, but he spends most of the book stalking and threatening Frankenstein so that he'll make a wife for him, and then proceeds to murder Frankenstein's beloved when he doesn't (after, you know, killing a bunch of other people).

I'll grant that the monster had a genuine grievance, but he's in no way the good guy. And he's not persecuted for his humanity, either, he's quite literally persecuted for his obvious inhumanity - the whole sequence where he meets the family with the blind grandfather (father?) is explicitly about that.

It's also quite a lot like terminator insofar as there's a superhuman unstoppable obsessed force that will never stop chasing you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and _the Greeks_ before them, do not believe that humans are particularly "special." Instead, there are spirits in everything, [...]

"Empedocles [says that the soul] is composed of all the elements and that each of them actually is a soul [...]" (Aristotle, _De Anima_ , 404b11)

"All things are full of gods." (Thales. From Aristotle, _De Anima_ , 411a)

"Now consider all the stars and the moon and the years and the months and all the seasons: what can we do except repeat the same story? A soul or souls...have been shown to be the cause of all these phenomena, and whether it is by their living presence in matter...or by some other means, we shall insist that these souls are gods. Can anybody admit all this and still put up with people who deny that 'everything is full of gods'?" (Plato, _Laws_ , 899b)

"Animals and plants come into being in earth and in liquid because there is water in earth, and pneuma in water, and in all pneuma is vital heat, so that in a sense all things are full of soul [...]" (Aristotle, _Generation of Animals_ , 762a18-20)

<comment><USER6> In Western culture, the animism in Greek philosophy and religion was eliminated as pagan by Christianity.

<comment><USER7> Mostly, yes. But some of it survived underground and in christian mystics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Focusing primarily on Japan vs the US, I'd argue there's two other factors that might be as big: economics and individualism.

\- Japan process of modernization much more recently and revolved more around technology companies. In the US, it happened earlier, and around other industries: it could be the case the admiration for technology has died out more. Also, Japan is an island, so self-sustainability is difficult-- robots not only help but will probably become necessary as the population ages. In the US, robots are associated with job loss.

\- Individualism and the concept of free will has a higher priority in the US. Americans are obsessed with choice and it permeates thought: from fast-food restaurants with with "make your own" takes, to the autonomy states have, to the whole of the "American Dream". "Free will" is so revered that the idea of an entity without it is probably more foreign.

<comment><USER9> > Japan process of modernization much more recently and revolved more around > technology companies. In the US, it happened earlier, and around other > industries: it could be the case the admiration for technology has died out > more.

I'd argue there's a subtler reading here. What makes a "technology company" changes over time.

Railroad companies were very much technology companies. Consider [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden) : "The title of the book refers to a trope in American literature representing the interruption of pastoral scenery by technology due to the industrialization of America during the 19th and 20th century." We don't consider railroads to be tech anymore, but they absolutely were at the time.

Later on, cable companies were technology companies. Hugely innovative and disruptive to the existing TV market, yet forty years later they're already has-been dinosaurs.

So I would definitely agree with the idea that the US has seen this cycle a few times, and has done the enchanted->cynical cycle a few times.

<comment><USER10> It makes me sad that "technology" went from rockets and robots and lasers... to web pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We Japanese" \-- that's the key phrase that indicates this is the latest in a long line of _Nihonjinron_ (Japanese people theories), about how 110m people all share an ineffable characteristic that makes them oh so very different from the rest of the world. I really didn't expect this from Joi Ito though...

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

<comment><USER12> ... and not a particularly good one either:

 _Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them_ That's a funny way to divide up the world into us and them. It looks more like us == Japan and them == US. The writer seems to miss out the Roman influence that might traditionally be shoehorned into the "western" God Squad history. Not to mention a dalliance with dollops of assorted "pagan" traditions and mythology.

To be fair, I consider this sort of thing as a form of national pride which should be respected when listened to but needs careful consideration. Bear in mind I come from the country that can play "Land of Hope and Glory" or "Jerusalem" without flinching.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention the Greek influence on Buddhism and vice versa. They were entirely isolated from each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm trying to find statistics in the article but I'm having trouble. Does the article give any evidence that Westerners actually _do_ fear robots more than the Japanese do?

<comment><USER15> No, and I'm pretty sure the article fails to make its point. Even if westerners did fear robots more this is the kind of vague "because its their culture" argument you are taught not to make in Anthro 101. There are almost always more proximate causes for what we label "culture".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fearing oppression is not a bad thing and I strongly believe that we must be careful to recognize intelligent life in many forms and afford all such life equal terms* (where possible).

Science fiction writers and probably more academic thinkers have probed at how compatible 'alien' life is with existing life. The ethical and practical balancing acts and ability for different forms of life to peacefully co-exist (or at least recognize that it isn't possible and amicably remain outside of the best environments for other life).

I believe there would be less to fear if it were more clear that everyone of all types of 'being someone' had equal standing and a place that they enjoyed being within society.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am an American, and I do not fear my Roomba.

<comment><USER12> I'm a Brit. I grew up watching Doctor Who (Tom Baker and on). It never occurred to me as a child that Daleks can't climb stairs. Besides the Cybermen have legs and are pretty unpleasant as well.

One evening, you'll leave your Roomba happily running around in the living room, downstairs, and wake up to it bumping into a leg on your bed ... upstairs. I'll fear your Roomba for you: I've seen what happened to Skaros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel the need to say that (spoiler warning) everyone who watched Neon Genesis Evangelion knows that Evas are, in fact, not robots.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think a big factor in the attitude differences between Western and Eastern societies comes from the chronological order of industrialization.

The West were the fore runners of industrialization and seen first hand the bad (old guard job loss, environmental impact, deadly accidents). Of course the price paid by the bad paved the way for the positive (economic supremacy).

The economic positive from technological progress is far more apparent from the outside (East) looking in. The (West) memory of the early years and negatives creeped into the culture. While the East mostly noticed the shiny shores of economic progress and relatively recently.

None of this is to say that the East is not having their own moment of the perils technological industrialization.

Perhaps the East's view of technology will become less idealised in the future.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash This article is a little too high minded and academic to take seriously. Non- tech people don't usually think about robotic rights or AI slavery unless they've been watching a dystopian Sci-fi film recently. Here's my two American cents:

In the United States, if you're poor, society says it's your fault and you're on your own. If you can't get a leg up on the economic ladder because the burger-flipping jobs were replaced by robots, you'd have every right to fear them.

I can't speak for Japan but it is my understanding that society is more group- oriented there, and social spending and government priorities appear to reflect that. So even if a robot takes your job, you may have a better chance at making a decent living some other way than you might in the West.

<comment><USER20> > robotic rights or AI slavery

These are popsci topics, they're touched upon all of the time in fiction and I'd hardly say they're too academic of topics to approach in such an article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, maybe westerns not exposed to Asimov's novels directly nor indirectly. Anyway, in such a globalized world, I'm, not sure how right could be that: E.g. Japanese anime is very popular in Europe and America.

</comment><comment><USER22> There is a lot of wisdom in this article, but its paradigm has an overt blind spot regarding "robots" [0] that are able to completely dominate humans and even society.

I'm not worried that an "enslaved" AI underclass is going to rebel and "overthrow me" [1]. I'm immediately concerned about this AI "underclass" controlling me _at the behest of other humans_.

In the long term I _am_ worried about Homo Sapiens being obsoleted by another organism, _because I am a Homo Sapien_. Kindness is a charity afforded to the dominant life form, one which I recommend everybody partake in whenever they can (why I started off saying there's a lot of wisdom in the article). But kindness does not extrapolate to capitulation where my very existence is threatened.

From a Western-individualist viewpoint, I'd counter that Japan is more accepting of AI as it fits right in with a top-down structured society and a shared cultural trust that the people (/systems) "above oneself" are purposeful and not malevolent [2].

[0] Even talking in terms of "robots" is misleading, as what we're really talking about is AI.

[1] and referencing the USian Original Sin won't make me shy away and bend the knee.

[2] Sorry for the laid-bare flame bait. I do not have the luxury of an editor to massage my comment to couch cultural stereotypes in the appropriate amount of beating around the bush and self-flagellation.

</comment><comment><USER23> Japanese society has been described as a homogeneous society--lacking, suspicious, distrustful of difference. Whats more, there is interesting research on social psycholgy of Wheat People vs. Rice People [1]:

"[Rice People] are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out."

With this social distinction in mind I am of a mind to think Japanese society's fear response to robots is a dialog or binary opposition. Humans who act like robots vs robots who act like humans.

Personally, I'm not fearful of robots who act human. I'm fearful of robot actors shaping human society in their image while being controled by a new class of technological oligarchs. Humans dominating humans through robot proxy.

The truest statement in this Wired article occurs at the start:

"The Western concept of "humanity" is limited, and I think it's time to seriously question whether we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots simply because we're human and they are not."

The author _sets us up_ with this self-recflection of human hubris, and then launches into a love letter of Japanese social acceptance of a nostalgic cartoon character Astroboy.

Fooey!

[1]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/why-are-some- cult...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/why-are-some-cultures- more-individualistic-than-others.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Japanese would be scared too if they watched what Boston Dynamics is working on.

</comment><comment><USER25> The whole post looks like written by a Japanese-American trying to fuse nationalist ideas (some superiority of Japan over the Western world) with neo- marxist theory ("oppressed" machines). For example "The Western concept of "humanity" is limited" is totally ironical when we talk about a culture that have categories such as non-human (heta), burakumin, kitsune-mochi, zainichi (Korean) that are still discriminated a lot on a day to day basis. I have no time (nor willingness) to deconstruct everything, but the only decent idea to keep is indeed the one in the title: Japan fear way less technology. The same apply about AI, not just robot.

</comment><comment><USER26> Probably the reasons are not that deep. In the "western" (USA?) the aspiration for any manufacturer is to secure a defense contract so any "robot" is seen as a potential weapon, that is more evident from the cold war onwards. Now we're seeing that it was not far from truth, any new technology is aimed to surveillance and security.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks > before them, do not believe that humans are particularly "special." Instead, > there are spirits in everything, rather like the Force in Star Wars. Nature > doesn't belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, > including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces.

To me this looks like the most important paragraph. The west (and I believe also China, India, Russia, and arab countries) do lack a vision of different being coexisting. Eventually we (and based on some popular light novel for boys, also china) have a vision of a Natural World in balance and Humans acting (either positively or negatively) on this balance.

This does not mean that we would hate robots or even aliens, just that we would (at a superficial level) need to shoehorn them into being either humans or not.

</comment><comment><USER28> As others have noted, the Japanese have their fair share of criminality and violence against other groups of people on more recent times than slavery in the US.

About the damage to the environment, here the Japanese also have their own share.

If "feeling all one with the environment" includes fishing salmon in deep waters until they had been almost extincted, or whales or dolphins' slaughter on the beach, Japanese does not look special over any other groups in the world.

From my point of view, the difference in perception about robots is that they need them: they are getting old and someone or something must do the jobs.

In places like India there is so much people that robots become a real threat against people's jobs. In Japan if they do not use them, they will be dissapear as a nation.

</comment><comment><USER29> Whats interesting as well is that Japanese culture is very traditonal. The cultural mindset to not adopt technology was there in the past. One example that comes to mind is Japanese houdewives and dishwashers.

The reason for this is they take great pride in their housewife role, and dishwashers take away that.

This might no longer be true but according to articles Ive read it was from year 2000 to 2012 when i first heard about it.

Meanwhile in America this stigma never was as prevalent as in Japan during the same timeframe

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there any consciousness in that thing? Are the lights on in there?

If yes, then the robot should be treated according to how conscious it is.

If no, it's a toaster, throw it on the garbage heap when not needed anymore.

"How much consciousness is in there" is the right question to ask in many situations involving difficult decisions, such as robot rights, animal rights, abortion, capital punishment, etc. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult questions you could possibly ask.

</comment><comment><USER31> Technophobia at breakfast, your milk and cereals are processed by thousands of machines already similar to the one you hold in your hand right now

</comment><comment><USER32> Westerners, I think that is an overly broad class.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hmm, not sure I agree with the logic here. Firstly, slavery is not exactly something that's rare outside of 'Western' civilisation and (unfortunately) dates back to the near beginning of human society, with examples in basically every culture under the sun. If this 'fear of robots' really was connected to slavery, you'd expect that to be a theme across Africa, South America and the Middle East as much as it is against 'Western' societies. Heck, you'd expect themes of robot uprisings and being overthrown by their creations to be common in all kinds of deeply unequal societies if that's where the idea originated from. Where are all the Terminator esque franchises coming from South Africa or Saudi Arabia or what not?

I also question whether the following is accurate as well:

1\. Whether Western works are more likely to have killer robots/robot uprisings than Japanese ones.

2\. Whether Western society in general really shows more fear of robots.

3\. Whether other societies are more likely to see themselves as 'part' of nature rather than something beyond it.

For the former, well there are quite a few works made in Japan with the plot revolving around killer robots or what not, just as there are quite a few works made in 'Western' societies featuring heroic or everyday robots. How many examples would we need to make a judgement one way or the other? If you're going on examples you know, well perhaps Japanese robot stories have robots turn evil more because they're 'hacked' than because they turn against humanity of their own accord. I mean, that's the setup for basically every Mega Man game. Plus the setup for last year's The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.

Either way, the concepts aren't exactly exclusive to one or another, as these pages show:

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TurnedAgainstThe...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TurnedAgainstTheirMasters)

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RobotWar](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RobotWar)

It's also questionable whether the portrayals of robots in culture (or the sensationalist journalism seen online) really means that one society fears robots and intelligent machines more than another. Perhaps the general concept is just kind of interesting/entertaining, in the same sense as a medieval fantasy story involving a hero taking down some demonic monster is.

And the latter... well I'm not convinced by that either. Seems like a cliche you see in all kinds of media about how 'closer to nature' less developed tribes are or what not. Either way, not convinced by this article at all.

<comment><USER34> The fictional theme of a robot uprising predates the first real-world robots. In fact, we get the name from that fiction, and the name robot literally means slave.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R).

And there are plenty of examples of creatures turning against their masters in othe cultures; genies, golems and zombies are a few examples.

<comment><USER33> That's a good point. The theme of creatures turning against their masters long predates robots, and is a pretty common theme when you've got a work about artificial life being created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "The West, the professor contended, has a problem with the idea of things having spirits and feels that anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like attributes to things or animals, is childish, primitive, or even bad. He argued that the Luddites who smashed the automated looms that were eliminating their jobs in the 19th century were an example of that, and for contrast he showed an image of a Japanese robot in a factory wearing a cap, having a name and being treated like a colleague rather than a creepy enemy."

I'm sorry, but that is a stupid statement. First, westerners have no issue with anthropomorphizing (it's a word if I want it to be) inanimate objects. We do it all the damn time. My roomba is named Lenny (hard working, but not too bright).

Second, how on earth is this a valid comparison? "Just look at the facts guys! The luddites destroyed machines that in one fell swoop eliminated the livelihood of a significant portion of people, and this robot has a hat!"

<comment><USER36> That's one anecdote

There's a real history to the argument in the article

Numerous scholars have advocated that to remain objective one must avoid putting human traits on objects of study

I think it stems from Abrahimic traditions, where God made us and none of us are to presume to be as powerful. Animals and objects are treated as mere things. Look at hardliners destroying art that has human form. The general story being God made us and we are inferior and must not resort to offending him with crude reproductions, lest he smite us for thinking we can do better.

<comment><USER37> >"and must not resort to offending him with crude reproductions" //

It's not about reproductions (which are clearly impossible), but about images and sycophantic replacements.

The imagery thing leads to a specific materialism; the replacement leads to us designing a god to reflect and applaud our ethical failings.

Like turning to porn and eschewing one's duty to one's wife; or choosing an inanimate character as one's wife and imbuing her with a fetish for your own failings "I love your flab, the way you stink of stale beer and sweat really turns me on".

FWIW in Abramic tradition animals are creatures made by God that humans are entrusted to care for, and yes use as food; custodians of creation.

Your presentation looks like an inference of the created order based on looking at people's actions. Like watching traffic to find what the traffic laws are; that's a flawed methodology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> At first glance, I thought the title might be better with the use of "but" in place of "and", as in "Why Westerners Fear Robots but the Japanese Do Not"...

</comment><comment><USER39> Some of the earliest homegrown Japanese sci-fi prominently featured heroic, humanlike robots. I wonder to what extent that was a symptom of existing attitudes vs. a cause of later ones.

<comment><USER40> > I wonder to what extent that was a symptom of existing attitudes vs. a cause > of later ones.

Very likely, given that Astro Boy started soon after the end of World War 2. I can imagine that themes of using technology for good rather than harm were appealing to a country that had just seen what harm technology could do first hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Technofobia at breakfast, your milk and cereals are processed by thousands of machines already similar to the one you hold in your hand right now

</comment><comment><USER41> This article was absolutely awful to read.

The reason "Westerners" fear Robots and Japanese do not is definitely cultural , but not in the same way.

Mostly for "Westerner" , it's related to the fear of losing their Job.

Per say , just look at Autonomous Car. Truck driver is of the most occupied job in the US and potentially it's one of the most replaceable by using AI and Robotics.

That's just the tip of the iceberg , what about McDonalds ? Domino's ? Both with their thousands of cashier , delivery guys and cooks ?

That's what people fear , not this gimmick of "Terminator" based on some BS "Christian" culture.

On top of that , when you know the American culture is almost entirely based on "Fast Money" for venture capitals it raise some concerns about the security and the effectiveness of those robots. Especially seeing how much accidents have happened with "Semi Autonomous" cars or the horrible accident that killed a pedestrian at full speed by Uber[0].

Most importantly , Japan is a declining country from a demographic perspective. Robots are needed for them to survive and stay productive and occupy jobs that very little people would accept to do these days in their culture.

This demographic decline is not happening in "Western Civilization" due to important amount of immigration. Either of "Talents" ( Engineers , Doctors...) or Students , who later stay in the country and eventually create a family there. Ultimately having for effect to maintain the demography of "Western Civilization", Japan claimed many times to be hostile to this form of growth , therefore the need for robot and the mindset of not being "scared" by robots as they are key for both their economy and their culture .

Ultimately making those robots a sign a of "hope" and not a "threat".

[0][https://www.economist.com/the-economist- explains/2018/05/29/...](https://www.economist.com/the-economist- explains/2018/05/29/why-ubers-self-driving-car-killed-a-pedestrian)

</comment><comment><USER42> Robots comin for you</comment>


Twitter is a slot machine composed of humans (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://ericposner.com/twitter-is-a-slot-machine-constructed-from-humans/ <comment><AUTHOR> Missing in the article - it's variable reinforcement of political news that feels very high-stakes. That makes even more addictive and destructive. Sometimes you see something that conforms to your PoV, other times its hand- wringing panic. Which will it be next! Refresh and see...</comment>


Call Off the Bee-Pocalypse: US Honeybee Colonies Hit a 20 Year High - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/ <comment><USER2> > order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two > healthy hives.

Isn't that actually quite tricky and not as easy as "voila: two healthy hives"? I read from time to time about people trying to recover hives after the queen dying / being rejected and not always having great results. What's the usual success ratio doing something like this?

Not sure I like the summary: "Not only was there not a failure of bee-related markets, but they adapted quickly and effectively to the changes induced by the appearance of Colony Collapse Disorder." \- we know lots of bees are dying, so we just make sure to get more of them. That's exactly the approach of poor societies. Being able to not have lots of kids "in case" is a good indicator of healthy, rich population. So something is wrong - we can just throw money at it, but that's a workaround.</comment>


Script for Negotiating Salary After Receiving a Job Offer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiDcUaoODJE <comment><USER2> good info! i actually learned something and i consider myself a pro at this.

terrible video production tho. can't understand why this kind of sober data is presented in a video format for someone with the attention span of a squirrel. it doesn't make it engaging. the speaker is engaging enough. lose the effects.</comment>


The empire strikes back - Anonops.net is gone - <AUTHOR> http://www.anonops.net <comment><USER2> Apparently Anonops.net was the home page for "an anonymous, decentralized movement which fights against censorship and copywrong," i.e. the group behind "Operation Payback" acting on Wikileaks' behalf.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's still <http://www.anonops.info/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That page says some of the server are under attack.

anonops.net is the one that hosted LOIC, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://twitter.com/Anon_Operation> suspended

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:anonop...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:anonops.net)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is better: <http://pastehtml.com/view/1c8i33u.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://image.bayimg.com/jabbmaade.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER6> Probably just moved to freenet like they did during the business with the Church of Scientology.</comment>


Bug eats electricity, farts biogas - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16902-bacterium-eats-electricity-farts-biogas.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=tech <comment><USER2> The other way around would also be nice: Eats biogas, farts electricity. But for that, we already have fuel cells.

A methane/propane economy would be much easier to reach than a hydrogen economy. The small size of H2 molecules creates difficulty when it comes to storing and transporting hydrogen gas. Creating hydrogen storage for transportation applications that is light enough, small enough, and safe enough is especially difficult. (We can do any 2 of the 3.) We can already to all 3 for propane.

Unfortunately, the 80% energy recovery is probably in the form of heat. To convert that back into electricity, we're most certainly going to lose about 60%, giving an overall efficiency of about 25%. Such low efficiencies are worth it to enable mobile applications, however.

<comment><USER3> True. Most such innovative tech articles are always incredibly optimistic. I am sure there are tons of engineering problems that need to be solved before this can actually be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading the title my biggest concern was low efficiency but 80% actually seems quite good.

There is still the issue of how much energy you need to expend supplying CO2 but as you'll be producing relatively pure CO2 when you burn the methane I doubt it would be that big an issue.

On the plus side it sounds as though the bacteria hasn't been optimised so to me it seems likely that greater efficiencies could be achieved.

<comment><USER5> It's hard to optimize bacteria. You get your bacterium juuuust right, and then you get it to multiply and by the time you have a tank full, it's been _intelligently designed_ all over the damn place!

\--EDIT---

I don't mind being downvoted, unless it's because people's sarcasm detector isn't working.

<comment><USER6> Your point seems valid. Why not pack it like this:

"It's hard to optimize bacteria. You get your bacterium juuuust right, and then you get it to multiply and by the time you have a tank full, their genome has already drifted."

<comment><USER5> I assumed that given the character of this website, and the italics, it should be obvious I meant that. But I guess not, there's a lesson here about being too clever.

<comment><USER6> Sure, it was obvious. But it was trying to hard to be funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _the organism can take in electrons and use their energy to convert carbon dioxide into methane._

I don't know how exactly this organism works. It would be really game changing if this can be modified to use photons instead of electrons. Especially given that it's 80% energy efficient in terms of the final energy, after burning methane.

</comment><comment><USER8> I initially thought the contributor took some liberties with the title, but nope, that is the actual title from New Scientist. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER9> Coming soon to news.yc: Mammal eats grass, farts biogas.

Harvesting cow farts is a logistical nightmare though :(</comment>


Ask HN: Who's still hiring interns for this summer? - <AUTHOR> Due to some conflicts between my university's internship program and Google's interview schedule (which seems to not be working out), I'm unfortunately finding myself without an internship lined up for the summer yet, with a lot of internship programs closed for applications. Since I figure there must be other people on HN in the same situations, are there any cool companies with dev internships still open for this summer? <comment><USER2> Yahoo Inc.</comment>


Gittip at Khan Academy - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/gittip-at-khan-academy/ <comment><USER3> I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try.

On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool.

But on the other hand, when so many successful businesses are able to use that open-source tool to great effect, it can create a bit of a financial dissonance.

I'm not sure if I'll keep the account open for very long -- for one thing, if I end up back at the NYT towards the end of the year, I'll probably have to close it -- but until then, let's see how it goes. Maybe it'll feel good in a kind of dirty-capitalist-but-gift-economy kinda way.

<comment><USER4> I'm really happy that you've signed up!

Amusingly I'm in a very similar boat to you. I'm fairly certain that almost all the money that I'm receiving on Gittip is due to my work on jQuery - <USER2> I haven't actively worked in quite a few years.

One way in which Chad explained it to me, that resonated, was that Gittip can be better thought of as a "genius grant". People are giving you money not to support a specific _thing_ (otherwise Gittip would be project-centric, not person-centric) but to support YOU and the things you want to do.

It's kind of crazy because I'm fairly certain that I'm getting donations because of my work on jQuery and not for my current side-project research into Japanese woodblock printing - but people don't seem to mind! (And I've made it clear on my profile what it is, exactly, that I'm working on right now and what I'm using the money for.)

I have a full-time job at Khan Academy and I'm well paid so I don't need the extra money - but it is appreciated. I'm re-donating a portion of the money that I get. Additionally it's paying for my extra server costs for my side projects and it's probably even paying for a good chunk of my monthly utility bill. I've been trying to think of other ways in which I can use the money that'll have a more obvious "money in -> using money -> output" pipeline but I'm not sure what that is, yet.

Let's hope you'll be able to keep your account open and find good uses for the money!

<comment><USER3> Hah. I'm afraid that -- between being currently funemployed, having just had all of my worldly possessions (at least for this year) stolen out of the back of my car last week, and discovering that travel insurance doesn't really cover it very well ... I can certainly think of a few good uses for it ;)

I'm afraid that I'm still "actively" working on everything (except for Ruby- Processing, which has been passed along), but it's all on a light simmer on the slow burner. More excitingly, there's a new OSS project, still in the early planning stages, which I'm pretty jazzed about.

Seriously though, thanks for the nudge. Much of the time, open source can feel like a slog through a bottomless pit for inane GitHub issues, with the occasional diamond in the rough. Your article is making open source feel more like a friendly love-in tonight.

<comment><USER5> Geez, man. Wow. I'm sorry. :-(

I can't believe I'm asking this, but what would it take for you to work on open-source full time instead of going back to NYT in the winter? Is that something you would even want?

What would it take to keep you funemployed forever?

<comment><USER3>
        > Is that something you would even want?

I don't think so. Having a balance between short-term deadline driven stories and slower, larger, more greenfield projects is a _terribly_ nice luxury for a programmer to have. I also find it hard to imagine a more interesting and enlivening day-to-day environment than a national newsroom.

I talk a little bit more about it here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk)

... and Derek's got a great post from this morning about the job as well: [http://thescoop.org/archives/2013/07/16/why-develop-in- the-n...](http://thescoop.org/archives/2013/07/16/why-develop-in-the- newsroom/)

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. Thanks for the links, and for giving Gittip a try. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't think of a better reply (from Gittip's point of view) to yesterday's "Money and Open Source": [https://medium.com/open-source- life/d44a1953749c](https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c). Thank you, jeresig and Khan Academy, for the huge vote of confidence, investing in open-source via Gittip! :D

</comment><comment><USER6> The granting employees the $5 tip a week idea is pretty good. There are a lot of businesses out there that see the value of open source but don't currently fund development. There are certainly companies out there where the reason for not funding is more logistical than financial. Giving employees the ability to send money to where they see it can do the most good would be a great way to target worthy projects.

With sufficient freedom, I can see groups of employees organise themselves to coordinate development of features that are specifically important to their work.

<comment><USER7> This seems like something Gittip.com could offer as a feature: employees can log in and pick who to contribute to, and the company account they're associated with automatically makes the payment.

Reduce that logistical hurdle to a signup. :)

<comment><USER5> Andy Weissman from USV suggested that on a skype call we had. Unfortunately that was before I started doing open calls so I can't link to it. :-/

Ticketed: [https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1153](https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1153)

<comment><USER8> > doing open calls

I like gittip and your philosophy. I think you've convinced me to sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An abridged list of organizations using Kenneth Reitz's python requests package:

Her Majesty's Government,

Amazon,

Google,

Twilio,

Mozilla,

Heroku,

PayPal,

NPR,

Obama for America,

Transifex,

Native Instruments,

The Washington Post,

Twitter,

SoundCloud,

Kippt,

Readability,

and Federal US Institutions.

People generate millions of dollars of value through open source software. It's only fair that the people making that software are incentivized to keep doing so.

<comment><USER10> I really hate the implication that end users are obligated to pay or "tip" open source developers.

How can a software developer be butthurt that he didn't make money off his product when it's his own fault for giving it away for free? Every organization you listed would have gladly paid money for the requests package, had the author not chosen to give it away for free. Just like they paid for MS Office, Windows, Photoshop, Oracle, and countless other software products.

It's almost embarrassing that there are software developers so clueless that they'd give their product away and then whine about how they need money and deserve to get paid. Not that I'm implying that's happening here.

It's so silly that open source advocates will demonize Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, ... for making money off their software, then turn around and whine that they're not making money. Who's fault is that? Nobody forced them to opt out of the economic system.

I release a lot of my code as open source under a very permissive license. It's perfectly clear to me that anybody can take my code and use it to make a ton of money and not owe me a dime. If I weren't okay with that, I wouldn't release the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a nice gesture, but I do get the impression that the amount being donated to each developer is way too small for many developers to even bother signing up for gittip.

<comment><USER4> Depends on the developer, but in the case of jashkenas we're trying to give him $15.50/week, which is $806 per year - certainly nothing to sneeze at! That's almost a new Macbook Air! Or, if he's so inclined, a large yearly donation to the charity of his choice.

There is definitely a snowball effect though. Once I signed up for Gittip people started to give me tiny amounts (like $0.25/week). It built up-and-up over time and now I'm getting a non-trivial amount of money per week, which is awesome! It's helping to pay for all of my hosting costs and then some.

<comment><USER12> This kind of supports parent's point. If the creator of CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Underscore.js only gets 806$/year, us unknown developers will probably get the equivalent of a cup of coffee per year. That being said, I do hope Gittip becomes more popular.

<comment><USER4> That's true - although that should be an incentive to write and release good Open Source code! Even if a single person gives you $0.25/week (the minimum amount) you'll get $13/year. We're attempting to give most developers at least $1/week - and I should emphasize that this is _only from Khan Academy_. Just because we're giving this amount it doesn't mean that these devs won't get money from other sources. I, personally, receive donations from a couple dozen users on Gittip with a wide variety of amounts (most being in the $0.25 range).

It's very defeatist to give up before even trying ("only" a cup of coffee). Why not aspire to more?

<comment><USER13> This message is very confusing for me.

I'm happy that you're finding personal benefit from Gittip. If it allows or helps you to keep providing great work to the community, that's excellent for everyone.

However, the numbers you quote are not good. $13 is an amount that a Bangladeshi garment worker earns in a week or so. It's _nobody 's_ aspirational goal to earn that in a year.

It may be the case (in the wider population) that such disproportionately small rewards actually discourage contributions compared to volunteerism, as it provides a (very bad) point of reference to compare the value of open source work to paid commercial work.

<comment><USER4> Naturally - but there are extremes and it's still the very beginning. There are definitely people earning very little (arguably EVERYONE is earning very little - even the top people are receiving just over minimum wage in the U.S.). Up until now there hasn't been a tool to have this consistent weekly donation for Open Source contributors. But given the growth that we're seeing on Gittip I hope that we can get to the point where people are seriously considering quitting their jobs to work on Open Source full time. It's doubtful that this will affect me now -- but I would've killed to have had this back in like 2004-2006.

The old reality (people giving money to Open Source projects /developers sporadically) was bad. The new reality (consistently giving small amounts of money via Gittip) is better. The future (large amounts of money, equivalent to a paid job, in a consistent manner) will be even better. I'm pushing Gittip because I see it as the best way to bring that future about. It'll take a lot of work but it needs to happen - for the benefit of all Open Source developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like to offer a contrarian view. Gittip is a nice initiative, in the "thank you for developing this project" kind of way - but I doubt anyone believes they can (or will be able to) pay the rent with donations paid through it. I wrote a post on this subject a couple of months ago, title "Open-source can't live on donations alone" [1].

I also don't subscribe to the notion that open-source should _only be about the love_ \- if companies like MySQL and Red Hat can make it into a huge business, and with the immense value open-source provides to the software industry, open-source developers should be treated as first-class citizens, not relegated to volunteer work late at nights, while doing their _real job_ during the day.

Of course I'm biased, since I'm the founder of a company who's making that change happen. We started Binpress [2] to help developers build profitable businesses like MySQL and Red Hat around their open-source code. We do it by providing them with a platform for adding a commercial layer over their open- source code (whether it's self hosted or on GitHub, etc.), through commercial licensing and by providing customization, integration and support services.

We are a distribution marketplace, similar to the appstore or Steam but for open-source code products. We already have many developers making silicon- valley salaries working exclusively on their open-source projects - and we're just getting started. We've been bootstrapped (and profitable) for 2 years but are now closing our seed (after going through the 500startup program).

If any of this makes sense to you, you are welcome to reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com (I'm Eran, the CTO and co-founder).

[1] [http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source- cannot-l...](http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-live- on-donations-alone/)

[2] [http://www.binpress.com](http://www.binpress.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> Idea... Let's come up with some semi-standard language to include in contacts for client projects to request an optional fee to pass along to open-source projects used. Something like, "we recommend 1% of the development budget be allocated for contribution to open-source projects (blah, blah, blah)." It's easy to expense fees for software licenses, but there is no mechanism for open-source contributions. There should be.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't want to be critical of what is a small step in the right direction, but it does feel like such a very small donation. $5/week is, well, nothing. A developer at Khan probably earns $2000/week, and has an over cost to Khan of probably $2500/week at least.

I bring this up because I feel that if gittip optimizes towards that, then people will follow their lead. The right amount for a company with a wage bill of $3m/yr (back of the envelope based on figures in the article) to give back to OSS cannot be $6k/yr.

So one step in the right direction, and thanks Khan for doing that, and I'd love to see the next step being companies donating about 10x that each.

<comment><USER17> I think the core challenge is convincing OSS developers to redirect their attention from asking for donations -- which empirically _are not sufficient to sustain OSS developers_ \-- to selling things which larger enterprises can buy.

As a (hypothetical) team lead at BigCo, it isn't within my discretion to award $500 to an OSS project, but I can put a $500 training course or software license on my purchasing card on my own authority.

As a (no-so-hypothetical) business owner, it is highly unlikely that I'll ever donate $10,000 to a computer programmer, but I can trivially write that check -- and expense it -- for e.g. a support contract for a technology core to my business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had an excellent exchange with Chad recently on twitter (and then Github Issues) where we went through a transient GitHub OAuth issue that Github ended up acknowledging via email as being an error on their side. I feel much more confident in him and the gittip service where initially I felt some hesitation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the service.

<comment><USER5> :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think there are a few things that are awesome about the Gittip model and a few things that are flawed:

Awesome things (1) fills a huge need (2) we should be in the habit of giving back (3) promotes long-term thinking

Bad things (1) dependent on CC processing (2) weekly only (3) A bit too much Github lockin.

<comment><USER20> what payment method besides CC would you like to see? Bitcoin? ACH?

<comment><USER19> Since you ask, I happen to run my own asset-backed digital currency w/ an open REST API. See profile.

<comment><USER21> Nice looking site - except for the text/background contrast. Very pretty and I enjoyed the video. Evergreen looks like a polished app experience.

However, like the previous commenter, I too am curious about what the assets are and what kind of security measures it takes.

<comment><USER19> At the moment we are sorting through some legal issues, but we plan to make this transparent very soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Influence is worth more than git tips in the OSS marketplace. I can make more in an hour from an employer then I can in an entire year on gittip.

I'd rather have "star" or "follower" \- those are things that can be meaningful in my career.

That said, I wonder if this model makes sense in countries where these dollar amounts have a more meaningful impact on your life.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can someone explain to me why Gittip is called that?

I've never looked into it before because I assumed it was related to Git/Github and was thus some complex Git-related method of moving money around.

<comment><USER24> Here's whit537 explaining the name at PyCon 2012.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iv7...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iv7B7D9iIRI#t=76s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is Gittip any different than Flattr? Other than being explicitly linked to Open Source?

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice initiative...</comment>


Why startups should generate absolutely crazy ideas every single day - <AUTHOR> https://builtin.com/product-management/startups-crazy-ideas <comment><USER2> If you copy someones quote and write a whole blog post about it than at least mention your inspiration.

Good ideas are always crazy until they're not Larry Page

<comment><USER3> the point isn't that good ideas are always crazy, more that most startups, even big successful ones, fall into a pattern of efficient innovation, which tends to create boring, uninspired products. point here is create a structure wherein you're encouraging people to generate unusual ideas. grab the ones that don't suck.

<comment><USER2> Then still Larry's quote was about the idea to scan & index every book ever written. It would be a very nice addition for the people that haven't read that particular quote.

Where are the idea examples he tried successful in this blog after he launched his crazy startup idea?

If you want to know how companies like Amazon & Google do this kind of experimentation but in a systematic way read Jim Collins.

[https://www.jimcollins.com/tools/How-does-your-flywheel- turn...](https://www.jimcollins.com/tools/How-does-your-flywheel-turn.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool, will check it out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Once a startup hits its stride and starts to scale, everyone around it will start emphasizing the natural progression to higher margins, larger markets, and ever-fatter top and bottom lines. Innovation starts to look more like efficiency than creativity, and entrepreneurs tend to be tasked to lead this new, and, let's be honest, boring version of innovation."

This hit home.

</comment><comment><USER5> Netflix was a crazy fucking idea -- but love how they're using ML to continue iterating on the original crazy.

</comment><comment><USER6> someone should send this article to our PM</comment>


Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With 'Netflix for Books' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/scribd_book_subscription/ <comment><USER2> It would be great if public libraries offered this service (or one like it) to their patrons. My local library offers Overdrive Media Console [1], but the selection always seems to be lacking and the apps are subpar. An electronic rental service with books that people actually want to read would be killer and could save libraries money. My library system has cut back on inter- library requests because of shrinking funding, and an electronic delivery system could help cut costs.

[1] [http://omc.overdrive.com](http://omc.overdrive.com)

<comment><USER3> My library co-op uses the same system, and while they do have books I want to read, they're often out of stock of the ebook. That irritates me enough to not borrow ebooks from them.

<comment><USER4> Not sure what system my library uses, but mine has a wait-list that will check out the ebook for you when it's your turn.

Either way: given that many public libraries offer ebook rentals for free, Scribd should be marketing to _them_ rather than directly to customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I generally like where this going, though I disagree with the assertion that "it will be easier to browse".

The _potential_ for browsing will be increased. However, the actual user experience of browsing for books on the internet still pretty much sucks. Most places take the low-hanging fruit and have pretty good searching capability. However, searching and browsing are not the same experience. Recommendations (like from Amazon) is not browsing -- it's prompting based on intentional searching.

To do online browsing well, you have to come back to what the UX for browsing in a library or a bookstore feels like. You wander around spaces, and pick out books that catch your attention. Illustrations on book covers means a lot more. And for people like me that process information kinesthetically, the spatial relationships of the books (where it is on the shelf, which shelf it is on, how many steps it takes to go down one aisle, how wide are the aisles in relation to how far I can stretch my arms, etc.) matters a lot more.

I've toyed with the notion of creating a dedicated Android app to prototype this idea. That is, creating an online browsing experience to replace my bookshelf so that I can show it off for guests. Some of the lessons that can be extracted from creating that would apply to an online browsing experience -- or a physical retail experience that includes an online component.

Looking at how Scribd redid their site to support this, I think they understand some of the issues. But in the end, it looks more like they are copying Netflix rather than really rethinking at a more fundamental level of what "browsing" means as an experience.

<comment><USER6> I completely agree about the terrible state of browsing in online bookstores.

In terms of non-fiction, I've discovered tons of books at a university library by searching the catalog for a few books on a given topic, then going to the shelf and looking at all the books around it, which I would not have otherwise found.

I'd love some kind of Dewey Decimal browser with a bunch of extra filters. I don't know if that's feasible.

<comment><USER5> "I'd love some kind of Dewey Decimal browser with a bunch of extra filters. I don't know if that's feasible."

See, that's what I mean. When you're creating a space to show off or show case books, you're not really using any structured form of organization. The experience is more a form of an art. It's more like creating an art gallery or a museum than it is replicating a category system. The category system is easy; crafting a museum experience, that's harder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whilst I'm pretty sure I'd use this or something like it, it's kinda sad the traditional libraries I used so much (and for free) when I was younger can't keep up with the pace of convenience. I often wonder how long it'll be before the smaller towns (sadly) lose them completely.

That said, good luck to them :-)

<comment><USER8> This is in a class of things I'm worried about. The good institutions & traditions that we built over decades (or in this case, millennia) becoming obsolete, dying and taking all the side benefits with them. Many lost their primary purpose, but they had so many important auxiliary purposes that I'm worried about losing them. For millennia, libraries stored knowledge and people went there to access it. All sorts of things naturally grew around this resource. Universities and their predecessors are one example but there are also small informal institutions. A group of friends meeting in a library because it is a a safe and quite place to do homework is an institution of sorts. A couple of homeless people using it as a safe place to hang out, read books and feel part of society is another example, especially if their interaction with others there is special in some way (it is).

There are lots of things like this. Churches. How do we do churches without gods? How do we allow young people to spend a few years focusing on their minds without universities. Can we have universities after going to lectures becomes obsolete?

Technology is eating a lot of things. It's eating them faster than we can replace them.

<comment><USER9> Technology is eating our souls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't Amazon already have tie ins with libraries?[1] Combined with the Kindle "lending library" and Amazon's amazing marketing at the moment, I'm not sure they are a company I would want to compete with. Best of luck!

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200747550)

</comment><comment><USER11> I just signed up for it but it doesn't look very good to me. Not sure what's wrong.

[http://i.imgur.com/6wMjmeI.png](http://i.imgur.com/6wMjmeI.png)

Edit: tried the mobile app and it looks great there

<comment><USER12> It looks like they're using a custom font with scrambled letters (essentially a caesar cipher) and your browser isn't loading/using that font.

This is probably an attempt at DRM.

<comment><USER13> It's a simple substitution cipher, not a shift/caesar cipher. Neat idea, but I wonder at the effectiveness of it.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, I guess I've been using that term incorrectly to describe fixed substitution ciphers. It's been a few decades since I learned this stuff.

It's effective at preventing a simple copy/paste or "view source" but ineffective against an adversary of any sophistication.

I've seen this used in PDF files before. There, if you have a pristine copy of the embedded font, you can just look up a copy of the character program to find the original value. But it's effective against naive pdf to text or pdf to html services.

Then again, you could just ocr the rendered text, so I guess the obfuscation technique only has to be as effective as rendering the text as a bitmap.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, exactly. I OCRd the first line of the text and manually decrypted the first line of the book just to verify that's what was happening. You could mitigate it by having more complex font files with multicharacter glyphs and include non printing characters in the stream. Probably a "good enough" solution to stop the copy/pasting folks. Anybody knowledgable enough to crack this is is probably not going to waste the time and torrent the book anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After 24symbols, youboox, publie.net, izneo, oyster (and probably lots I do not recall), we have a new contender as the netflix/spotify for books? What makes scribd better or more challenging to amazon?

<comment><USER15> of all the companies you listed, Scribd is the only one I've heard of.

<comment><USER16> youboox, publie.net, and izneo are French market based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      #!/bin/sh
      for word in $(cat /etc/dictionaries-common/words);
      do
         echo A Netflix for $word;
      done

</comment><comment><USER18> I've spent some time with this. NB This is my experience on the Android app and the website.

In the app, searching is abysmal. There's no way to specify the type of keyword you're searching for, so if it's an author, you'll probably have to wade through a sea of wildly irrelevant results to find that maybe they don't even have anything from that author.

I grabbed two different versions of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, both of which the website proudly stated were included in my subscription. Neither was a truely optimized ebook. More like PDF images, so the text or pages didn't scale.

The reading experience on the app is sub par. No options for font type, size, or color; no background options; or margin options. No "night mode" or similar.

There's also often not an indication that a book is just a preview on the website. I added Cormac McCarthy's Child of God to my library, and the app told me that it wasn't available in my country (US), but I could read it on the website, but I discovered it was a preview only.

Related to that, when searching on the website, it seems to prioritize purchase-only books over subscription books. I understand the why, but it's really frustrating to have to start scrolling to get to what most people will be looking for.

Then there's the trouble with having to wade through the sea of user-uploaded content. It seems like there should either be a separate app for the subscription portion, or at least a way to search ONLY that.

All in all, I really wish this was something I could see myself paying for, but right now, I think it's kind of a mess.

<comment><USER19> ( I work for Scribd )

This is extremely valuable product feedback. You are completely right that the Scribd product delivered a terrible experience in this case. And the reason goes to the heart of one of the most difficult product design issues we've had: combining user generated and professional content.

An explanation is not a substitute for a fix, but in a nutshell what happened here is that you found copies of Frankenstein that had been uploaded by users. While the books we receive from publishers are ePub formatted and reflow nicely on a phone with controllable font settings, many user-uploaded works are PDFs.

We definitely do not a good enough job of messaging whether content is UGC or publisher, PDF or ePUB. We are working very hard on this. In the meantime, if you want to keep trying the app, here are some simple tips if you want to look at books only: \- You can search through books only (click the books tab in search results) \- Look for the "verified" badge which appears on publisher- provided material \- The content browseable from [http://www.scribd.com/browse/books](http://www.scribd.com/browse/books) is only publisher provided books.

I'd love to hear more product feedback - this was very helpful for us. Feel free to email me directly (email is in my profile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could cstross or someone with equivalent knowledge tell us how this affects authors? If publishers like it someone must be getting screwed. Scribd is less a 'netflix' for books and more like a 'megadownload' for books, with the occasional academic paper for that 'we need bittorrent to get linux' veneer of respectability.

<comment><USER21> From the article: "Basically, a publisher gets paid only if a reader chooses one of its particular books — and it only gets paid in full if the book is read in full."

Sounds like it's free to browse, but the publisher gets paid if the book is actually read. I assume that publishers would pay authors at whatever rate they were already paying for ebooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that publishers would play ball with scribd, whose business model features selling access to pirated documents.

<comment><USER23> They just turned those former pirates into a revenue stream. It's a good business move. Either spend tons of money litigating pirates to just have them go somewhere else, or at least make some money off of the inevitable.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, but these pirates put their own DRM on everything and generally get in your way as much as any publisher paywall. This is more like hiring Hell's Angels to provide event security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _'This works so well in video and music. It's inevitable that there's something to do here in the book space too'_

This works well for the _distributor_ and the _consumer_ but has yet to work well for the producer or the publisher. (note - I recognize it's unpopular to support the publisher in this case)

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure if "producer or publisher" are supposed to be distinct entities in this context?

Either way, that's not an intuitive conclusion. I've seen a lot of films on Netflix I would have never seen otherwise. Lots of Korean films for example. I can't think of another way I'd have been exposed to this content. So in that respect, if the publisher is seeing any compensation at all it seems like a good investment.

I've also seen a number of older US releases that are on my "eh, got a couple hours to burn, I'll give it a shot" list. I wouldn't have bothered to commit to a $3.99 iTunes rental for those features, but on Netflix it's "sure, why not?".

I (and most people I assumed) don't really have the patience to wait a few years for 1st-tier media to drop on Netflix, so it really doesn't substitute existing consumption.

Except in children's programming I guess now that I think about it. Much more convenient to have Curious George or what have you without the barrage of advertisements on cable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Finally Scribd found a business model. I never understood what their value proposition was.

<comment><USER27> First they invented DRM for HTML5. Now they've figured out who to sell it to.

<comment><USER28> I don't know why, but I've determined that Scribd is evil where Amazon is not. This is an intuitive conclusion based on lots of observation. I think that intuition is based on the fact that Amazon made DRM on Kindle to satisfy their publishing customers so those customers were more willing to distribute to a wider audience where Scribd made DRM to empower themselves and restrict distribution of re-appropriated content. Also, mandatory Facebook integration..

<comment><USER27> Yeah, ditto. The attempts to "go social" and monetize felt sleazy.

Guess what, when I'm googling for some PDF or I find some guy's slides, I don't want to tell my friends, and I don't want to "buy the article" for $14.99 or whatever like it's frickin' JSTOR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> $8.99 is too high for this to be worth while for most readers, IMO. I'm a pretty regular reader and I'm lucky to get through 1 and half books a month. Most books I buy are under this price (around $5)... I can sample from Amazon before I buy, so I don't see the benefit here unless you're a power reader and most people are not.

<comment><USER30> 1.5 books a month is probably higher than the national average, but you'd be surprised how voracious a lot of readers are. I probably read 2 books a week, and I'm by no means a power reader by the standards of those who really are. I know quite a few people who regularly plow through 5 a week. Especially fiction readers and readers of "snackable" nonfiction (Jon Krakauer, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, etc.).

Power readers are probably a small niche, but they're also a profitable niche. Younger readers (13-16), especially female, tend to consume YA novels like we consume HN posts. Vast fortunes have been made catering to that segment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not really a challenge to Apple. Apple doesn't care about books. Any garden you buy an ebook in can be read on an iOS device via ereader apps, including Scribd's app. Apple is happy to let app publishers innovate on software products since they are almost all optimized and catered to iOS users.

</comment><comment><USER32> Instead of using Scribd, you can just build your own searchable and sharable digital library: [https://register.blib.us](https://register.blib.us)

</comment><comment><USER33> I saw an article about a similar company recently and, like this one, I was still left with an important unanswered question.

How is this service better than a library card?

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been waiting for something like this to happen in books. Should be great for people who read at least one book per month.

</comment><comment><USER35> so that's why their main site hasn't been updated in quite a while.</comment>