The myth of the overnight success - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/03/16/the-myth-of-the-overnight-success/ <comment><USER2> Patterns I've noticed (wrt monetary success):

It usually takes decades which is why old guys are richer.

You can do it as an exec-employee or founder.

Contentment, comfort, routine, closed mindedness, dogma, not questioning the status quo every day, following established patterns of entrepreneurship because "that's how it's done", these are all your enemies.

Greedy and selfish people seem to do better in business. [Yeah, it's not a feel-good statement, but go out there and count the beans.]

Iterating in cycles less than 2 years with a new company every time is a sure fire recipe for not succeeding outside the Valley. Inside the Valley, you'll probably eventually get your talent acquisition money from Google. You simply don't have time to learn the market, your customers and to surround the business with people who trust it.

It takes time for you to empathize with your customer. In other words, to understand why the hell they'd give you money for your product or service.

As a founder, not fighting tooth and nail to keep as much control of your business as you possibly can is usually a leading indicator of failure. Not saying you must keep control, but there's a level of passivity I've noticed in this that usually indicates an entrepreneur who doesn't have their heart in their business.

Of course overnight success is bull. But the lottery ticket perception outsiders have of tech entrepreneurship is actually good for attracting investors and new blood, some of whom actually become real entrepreneurs. So the myth of overnight success does have it's uses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Add OMGPOP and the recent "overnight" success of Draw Something to the list. All the articles touting it as the fastest growing game of all time ever painted the story as an overnight success, and failed to mention the backstory of the company. Not only has OMGPOP been around for 5 years, and raised 17M in VC funding, but the game itself has been around almost since the beginning as a web version, but only exploded in usage when it launched for iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Two myths at play:

1\. Overnight is never overnight. More probably you just never heard of it before.

2\. If you just keep going you will eventually make it. But probably not. (<http://swombat.com/2012/3/10/successful-people>)

Believe what you want and act accordingly.

<comment><USER5> It's not "just keep going and you will eventually make it". It's a question of continuing to learn and make progress towards your goal over a long period of time (in this case, how to build a successful startup). Malcolm Gladwell calls it "deliberate practice".

For whatever reason most people can't do it, and that's okay, startups are not for everyone. But if you want to be a Pinterest type success, then that's what it will take.

<comment><USER6> _Malcolm Gladwell calls it "deliberate practice"._

Malcolm Gladwell, who has said in an interview that he writes to try out ideas

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html>

"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little? "A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."

is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. He correctly sources the term "deliberate practice" to its coiner, psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, a world-leading expert on the subject of the acquisition of expertise.

<http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since moving to silicon valley I've had the good fortune to know a group of highly motivated, talented entrepreneurs. They are some of the leaders in their industry, the spearhead of an important movement.

When I first met them, none of them had achieved wild success. I watched them struggle through failed startups, crap jobs, endless fundraising and calamity.

Now several game changing startups have emerged from this group. I am proud to know them. Not one of them was an overnight success. Just determined hard work, learning, and picking themselves up off the floor.

</comment><comment><USER8> To be a pedant, I can't imagine the coiner of this phrase or really anyone who has ever thought about it uses the term in the sense that something or someone became successful because of actions taken over a proverbial overnight. The examples he mentioned are things which became popular abruptly, which seems to embody the spirit of the phrase just right.

To take the point to the extreme, absolutely nothing could be considered an overnight success if we use the term in the sense the author implies because noone is wildly successful at something they attempt for the first time if they have no apriori knowledge of how to do it from previous attempts or study.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great that Rovio makes the fact that Angry Birds was their 52nd game part of their mythology.

Every time I read a glossy write-up, I find myself wishing they'd dig a bit deeper into the trial-and-error and near failure that went on before companies became successful.

It takes grit, y'all!

</comment><comment><USER10> One of my favorite examples is YouTube. They actually were about as close to "overnight success" as it gets. It was still something like a year and a half before they had significant traffic and most of us heard of them.

<comment><USER11> That's not accurate -- they launched the domain in Feb 2005; they uploaded the first video April 2005; they officially launched in November 2005; then Lazy Sunday went viral in December 2005.

They were already well known before Lazy Sunday, but that tipped them over the edge.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube>

YouTube the company was an overnight success, if anything can be called that. I wouldn't say the founders had overnight success, but pretty close to it. They put in some time at PayPal and probably made out quite well from its sale, which allowed them to start YouTube. Some people just have talent + luck.

<comment><USER10> Depends how you define well know I guess. I think mid 2006 was when the world at large heard of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me the closest example of an "overnight success" is where someone bursts on the scene as a celebrity because of their discovered personality. For example, people on reality shows become "niche" successful because they are discovered, rarely because they toiled away at that skill. However, their "success" still comes from years upon years of refined, unique experience to create the look+personality that created a star. If they had been discovered in the prepubescent period, it is almost a certainty nobody would have cared.

It's the same idea, just with different variables.

</comment><comment><USER13> Agree with Chris. Also, how do you define overnight success? Huge traction in first few months? Significant revenues in first year? Or something else? If its building wildly profitable company then I don't think anyone (at least Internet companies) can claim they had overnight success.

Edit: Missed word "wildly"

</comment><comment><USER14> But be careful. If you are getting series of tiny successes, or even if you have great engagement from 100 users, it is good sign. However, if your site is a ghost town after 1 year, you may want to rethink it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know of any examples of overnight success or close to it?

Edit: Maybe Hot or Not?

<comment><USER16> This isn't a start up or anything like that, but since you asked for overnight _success_ , I think the Kony 2012 stuff is a good example of that.

<comment><USER17> Are you kidding me? Did you even watch the video? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they've been trying to get him forever, and they still don't have him, so I wouldnt call that a success. Eyeballs != success. Accomplishing a higher goal (ie catching kony, making huge profit, getting acquired) == success.

Also, invisible children has been hustling for years without a huge 'hit'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dropbox was also not the first company that Drew started.

</comment><comment><USER19> If only it was as simple as hard work and persistence. Taleb does a great job of covering this in "The Black Swan". You may strike it big. But you may spend your whole life in the antechamber of hope.

<comment><USER20> Maybe so, but the answer isn't to worry about toiling away ad infinitum in failure. Better to be a modern day Calvinist and act as if your actions will make a difference even if you aren't preordained to reach Heaven.</comment></comment>


Show HN: faasd – Lightweight Serverless for Your Raspberry Pi Without Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/faasd-for-lightweight-serverless/ <comment><USER2> Great stuff, I want to try this on normal PC or Server :).

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, it works exactly the same. You can use the README or just remove "-armhf" wherever you read it.</comment></comment>


Stop down-voting ideas other than yours - <AUTHOR>

to all the hackers:
i see more and more recently people down-voting people for no real good reason other than  different opinion.<p>IMHO down-vote should be to flag false/bad or not useful comments, not to ignore anyone who thinks a bit different from you.
keep this community live by allowing different comments and let people speak freely on out-of-consensus topics. it can only help the discussions. <comment><USER2> This comes up every few days, but almost never with specific links, and it's hard to address concerns without examples.

Bad downvotes are a thing, but so is the temptation for commenters to interpret downvotes as 'groupthink suppression of my independent thought' instead of seeing what might have been bad about what they posted.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is a false/bad/useless comments?

If you comment to state an opinion different from mine I can estimate that your comment is false, bad and useless.</comment>


Show HN: I built my first product without coding – TV Premiere Alert - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
This is the first product I built without coding (see the tools below).
I'm a big TV show fan, watching series almost every night instead of sleeping.
I got swamped this year and I couldn't keep up with the premiere dates of my favorite TV shows. I got tired of randomly searching for premiere dates so I decided to build something that reminds me all the premiere dates I care about.
I built TvPremiereAlert which sends email reminders on the premiere days of your selected TV shows. The list of series and premiere dates are constantly updated (currently manually), making sure you never miss the premiere dates and you don't have to spend precious time looking for this information.
I'm so excited to share this early version with you guys, let me know what you think so I can make a better new version. :)
Check out the tool here: https://www.tvpremierealert.com/ I wrote about the entire building process here: https://blog.iamtamas.com/tv-premiere-alert-a-tool-i-built-w...
Here are the tools I used: Unicorn platform (building website) https://unicornplatform.com/ Canva (design and images)  https://www.canva.com/ Jotform (collecting emails and preferences)  https://jotform.com Mailchimp (storing data and sending campaigns) https://mailchimp.com/ Netlify (hosting) https://www.netlify.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey Rizzke

Congratulations on launching!..

I've been coding commercially for nearly 20 years and just wanted to say it's fantastic to see that you were able to launch a product without needing to code anything.

While this product isn't for me, it makes me excited to think that we're approaching a time where we have the tools for solo non-technical founders to test out their ideas and deliver a MVP to market. Good luck everything.

<comment><USER3> Rizzke keep on trucking - congratulations on starting your journey. It's the road that'll make you, not the destination. Learn, do, rinse, repeat.

P.S. Thank you dgivney. You know what for.</comment></comment>


Nokia Lumia 920 is more retina than the iPhone 4S - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualpants.com/post/30935634536/nokia-lumia-920-is-more-retina-than-the-iphone-4s

<comment><USER2> Sidenote on marketing: this is probably an amazing screen, but the gadgetmarketspeak designation of "Pure Motion HD+" makes me tune out instantly.

The cleverness of "retina display" was that a single explanatory sentence told you everything you need to know - this phone has better resolution than your eyes can fully perceive.

"Pure Motion HD+" means nothing to me - is that better or worse than 'true HD'? (For that matter, was the original just plain 'HD' actually fake HD?)

I had the unfortunate experience of trying to gauge displays at Best Buy yesterday, where machines in the same category would variously have resolution designations from "1280x800" to "SXGA" to "True HD" to nothing whatsoever, depending on what they thought sounded best, and the cumulative effect was that I felt less aware of my purchase options looking at the actual machines than simply checking opinions on Newegg.

I can't imagine trying to navigate that process as a consumer with other priorities in life. And they wonder why Apple has such healthy profit margins in comparison...

<comment><USER3> There are some things other companies never seem to learn from apple:

1) Differentiating their phones by weird model numbers that no one remembers

2) Making product announcements with no details about price and availability

3) Cramming all kind of high end features and adding non catchy names like this PureGodKnowsWhatEver+ in their product descriptions and praying people will buy them.

<comment><USER4> 4) Have real products that people can play with in stores (last time I was at Best Buy, not a single phone worked)

5) Support products long after they are released

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "More retina" is meaningless: the whole pointer is that it's indistinguishable from normal use distance.

You can say "higher resolution", or even "retina when held closer to the face", but "more retina" really is nonsense!

<comment><USER6> But it's more funnier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would buy a Nokia Android. Awesome hardware, great software. Windows 8 on a Nokia is like taking a camel to a horse race.

<comment><USER8> > Windows 8 on a Nokia is like taking a camel to a horse race.

What are you basing this statement on?

<comment><USER9> Well, Windows Phone has failed to gain traction in the marketplace and therefore lacks a proper app ecosystem.

Second, I think the WP8 UI very divisive. You either love it or you don't. Personally, I think it's a Pepsi. Sweet on first impression, but cumbersome to use every day. Too much scrolling (can't use muscle memory) and giant typography which distract from the content.

<comment><USER8> > Well, Windows Phone has failed to gain traction in the marketplace and > therefore lacks a proper app ecosystem.

Can you even buy a WP8 phone yet? Give it a year after it's released before passing judgment on its app ecosystem.

You're confusing the old with the new.

Their whole deal here is that they are re-inventing the product line. It's not the old WP flop anymore.

> Personally, I think it's a Pepsi. Sweet on first impression, but cumbersome > to use every day.

That's coming from someone that's never even used it once!

Personally, I think they have an awesome product. Once MS and manufacturers gear up their marketing, we'll see what happens.

<comment><USER9> I was referring to the Windows Phone app ecosystem. There is _no_ app ecosystem for WP8 yet, and I assume that it will allow you to run WP7 apps.

And I did use WP7 for a week. My impressions of the Metro-style are that it is love-or-hate and I fall into the latter. WP8 is a continuation the Metro design language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can we please say "higher resolution" or "higher density" rather than an abomination like "more retina"?

</comment><comment><USER11> They do indeed have marginally higher PPI, but they, understandably, didn't mention it in spec sheet. Because it's just lame to brag about 2 more PPI. Although I think it is impressive that they have achieved it in a screen that is 1 inch larger then iPhone's.

</comment><comment><USER12> Both Xperia S and HTC Rezound had 342 PPI, and were launched a long time ago:

<http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_s-4369.php>

<http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_rezound-4099.php>

And bragging about having 3 more PPI than the iPhone is just lame...just as bragging about having "better than HD" display because you have 48 extra pixels, is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Not a lot to brag about, but I'd at least mention that it is retina.

<comment><USER13> What does retina mean? Can you explain to us?

Do we really need a term for "high PPI"? If iPhone 4 is retina, then what is Xperia S? It is certainly not retina, because it would be insulting to call it retina when its pixels are even more indistinguishable. What about Galaxy Nexus? It is 316 PPI, slightly less than iPhone. Is it enough for being retina or not? Who determines?

<comment><USER14> The original contention is that it is the absolute (useful) peak of screen resolution, as in, at the distance the screen is normally viewed from, the individual pixels are imperceptible to the human eye, and adding more will not result in any perceptible difference.

Similar to print media, where beyond a certain dpi your eyes just can't tell the difference if you added more dots.

<comment><USER13> Your definition of retina is based on 2 assumptions:

1) Everyone has the same eyes.

2) Everyone holds their phone at the same distance.

Both of these assumptions are incorrect. Therefore, a display that is retina to you, may not be retina to me. It is therefore meaningless to talk about whether a display is retina or not (unless a specific human and a specific distance is specified).

<comment><USER14> Your argument is faulty, and here is why:

You are confusing with "these assumptions are not true 100% of the time" with "these assumptions are not true most of the time". In fact, just like sound perception, motion perception, and eyesight resolution, the _vast, vast, vast_ majority of the world is tightly clustered around a maximum.

There are a small number of humans who can hear above 20kHz, but that doesn't change the fact that 99% of the world can't - in fact, most adults sit closer to 16Hz. Ditto, for the vast, vast majority of the people on this fair planet, framerates above somewhere between 70-80Hz become imperceptible, with a lot of people sitting closer to 60Hz.

Both audio and video equipment are engineered with these limits in mind, and there is no fundamental problem with engineering screens with the limitations of the ultramajority in mind.

The fact that there are a few extraordinary individuals whose sensory abilities far exceed that of the rest of the population, does not make it "meaningless" as a concept. What is "retina" as defined above, is retina to everyone but the statistical outliers.

To address your _original_ post, it seems like you're taking out your Apple rage against a concept that is older than Apple. "Retina" as Apple uses in its own advertising is really whatever the damn hell Apple feels like calling retina, but the concept predates Apple's usage of it and has validity. The Xperia S, the Galaxy Nexus, are all "retina" in the non-Apple-marketing sense of the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's great news. All of us time-travelers who sport extra-high resolution artificial eyes will be able to see all the extra detail this higher density allows.

Now, seriously, there is absolutely no need to increase pixel density

<comment><USER16> > Now, seriously, there is absolutely no need to increase pixel density

Isn't that what they said in 2010, and 2005, and 2000?

When we have a display that's "retina" when being held 1 mm in front of sharp eyes you might be able to say there's "no need." Until then, the market will decide.

<comment><USER17> I don't think anyone was saying that there's no need to increase pixel density in 2000 or 2005, at least not to me.

Can you even focus 1mm in front of your eyes? I can't, but I'm old.

<comment><USER16> > I don't think anyone was saying that there's no need to increase pixel > density in 2000 or 2005, at least not to me.

Well, there's that Apple marketing page that in 2004 said 100 ppi was the "ideal resolution" ([http://web.archive.org/web/20041011130432/http://www.apple.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20041011130432/http://www.apple.com/displays/technology.html)). I'm sure internally they wouldn't have minded a 220 ppi MBPwRd display with around 100 ppi effective, but they weren't saying that - they were saying higher density causes eye strain.

> Can you even focus 1mm in front of your eyes? I can't, but I'm old.

Arbitrarily small distance. Vast majority of people physically can't hold a screen that close in front of their face, so a "retina at 1 mm" display would be retina for all feasible uses - unlike the current "retina at 25 cm."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> (The yet unreleased) Nokia Lumia 920 is more retina than the (one year old) iPhone. Oh... I mean... more pure motion HD plus than iPhone! And: It's surprising that Nokia didn't mention that the Lumia 920 is just like iPhone, but with more widgets, therefore better.

I understand that this kind of marketing works. But how? How come people do not value true innovation and choose to buy "better than HD resolution" when what they really need is already crisp iPhone screen?

</comment><comment><USER19> Nokia should never have released the 900 if this was so close on their roadmap. I say this as someone who bought the 900 and stopped using it because the screen and camera sucked. My 2 year old iPhone 4 was better in almost every way.

</comment><comment><USER20> Too bad the Metro interface doesn't take full advantage of those pixels. Text is now smoother, but flat squares with sharp corners look the same at any resolution.

</comment><comment><USER21> A product with an unknown price that you can't buy is better than a product you've been able to buy for a year now.

Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER22> But still Nokia has a long way to reach iPhone level.

<comment><USER23> In sales, or how exactly?</comment></comment>


One data scientist on the hype around artificial intelligence (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://builttoadapt.io/why-the-ai-hype-train-is-already-off-the-rails-and-why-im-over-ai-already-e7314e972ef4 <comment><USER2> This is a negative value article. It spends a lot of time dwelling on a low- value semantic argument that "when people in business say 'AI' they really mean machine learning". Sure, but these words have been used synonymously for a long time - my grad degree ~15 years ago concentrating in machine learning was called "AI"; who cares? Then the article goes on to claim:

>I anticipate that after this passes, we can start to do the right thing — focusing on using machine learning to build things that are meaningful and realistic.

UGHHH. Why did you hide this in a long article making the 180 degree contradictory point that AI (which really means machine learning, remember?) is dumb?

This article is a disservice to its reader because it downplays a huge shift in the world that any ML practitioner should understand very well: machine learning/AI will ultimately replace a lot of what humans do, and it's moving at a faster pace than ever. I've led several small-ish projects (1-2 people, 3-6 months) that could replace dozens or even 1000s of experts in their respective fields. There are thousands of people like me, and there are more every day. The buzz may wear off, in the same way Time Magazine stopped talking about how the internet was going to take over the world after the dot- com crash, but the effects and the efforts will continue unabated.

<comment><USER3> > I've led several small-ish projects (1-2 people, 3-6 months) that could > replace dozens or even 1000s of experts in their respective fields.

Can you give some specifics on projects?

<comment><USER2> In one project at a previous job we were able to pinpoint the genre, mood, instrumentation, etc of any new song with (usually) better-than-human accuracy in milliseconds using deep neural networks. This is better in pretty much every way than the 1000s of music experts that are employed by competitors and vendors.

[https://tech.iheart.com/mapping-the-world-of-music-using- mac...](https://tech.iheart.com/mapping-the-world-of-music-using-machine- learning-part-2-aa50b6a0304c)

Not to mention personalized recommendations, which basically aren't possible at scale without some level of ML:

[https://tech.iheart.com/mapping-the-world-of-music-using- mac...](https://tech.iheart.com/mapping-the-world-of-music-using-machine- learning-part-1-9a57fa67e366)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269568)

The thing to keep in mind is every machine learning practitioner who is worth their salary is doing stuff like this. A lot of our every day work isn't as sexy as teaching a computer Go, but it's game-changing to most industries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > artificial intelligence (AI), a sub-branch of machine learning

I could have a failed mental model, but I'm under the impression that the relationship is the other way around. AI is a broad field encompassing various strategies to build intelligent machines. ML is one particular strategy where large volumes (think Big Data) of training data is used to teach by example. (Which makes Deep Learning a subset of ML, where "deep" neural networks are at play.)

<comment><USER5> It's actually neither way. AI and ML have some intersection. There're machine learning methods which have little to do with AI, for example, logistic regression. There're AI methods which have nothing to do with ML, for example, logical inference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dumb article. He talks about inflated expectations vs. real productivity, but does not give any evidence.

I was expecting some evidence and then I hit "I hope you liked this article."

</comment><comment><USER7> The article mentions IBM trying to cash in on the AI hype with Watson, and towards the end wonders what the next overhyped trend will be. This ad might hold the answer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O2CLoCxAWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O2CLoCxAWA)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is not hype. See here: [https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD- explorer/](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/)

In this benchmark people or models are given a text, and later asked a number of questions. Questions are quite real. See for example here: [https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD- explorer/explore/1.1/dev/S...](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD- explorer/explore/1.1/dev/Super_Bowl_50.html)

Models already have performance which are as good as human's. This is real. This is not hype.

<comment><USER8> I agree! The question answering datasets, and some of the models built with them are getting good. I work on GAN and general classifiers at work, but on my own time my main interest is in sequential language models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This time the hype is founded - Deep (Reinforcement) Learning truly pushed many AI domains out of uncanny valley. Image recognition/generation, speech recognition and synthesis, shallower language understanding - we truly have tech we have never seen before and only dreamed about. Of course, it won't solve everything, but the "solved level" got a massive upgrade with recent advancements. If we get GPUs that can compute DNNs 1000x faster, then we will see magic everywhere around us; so far the good models take very long to train, making them less adaptable to changing conditions.

</comment><comment><USER10> The cute robot soccer game is a disingenuous argument. Put a machine gun on one of those Boston Dynamic robots with image recognition targeting and tell me it's not scary.

<comment><USER11> Well, yeah, 'cause you will never know when or where it's going to start spewing bullets. (I'll just note that a Tesla just ran into a parked fire truck.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I stopped reading when it said AI is a sub-field of machine learning. It's actually the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a really good article, I'm impressed. If you read only one deep learning article this month, make it this one.

I'm going to borrow that analogy of "teenagers perceptions of sex" \- it's hilariously accurate for deep learning.

<comment><USER14> I fully agree that big data has essentially been renamed to AI. Which makes sense because AI today ~= ML/DL which require lots of data.

And, as someone who went through the data warehousing fad in the late 90s, there's a lot of naive belief in pouring in a lot of data and magic happening.

That said, there has been a lot of advance that, once it's happened, we just don't call it AI any longer. Route optimization (Google Maps), predictive analytics in some domains, image recognition. Yeah, a lot of it is just fuzzy pattern recognition but some of it is pretty good.

The more fundamental question IMO is how far DL can even take you. We've actually seen a lot of progress there but we also haven't seen a lot of forward motion in cognitive science for example. So do we just run out of steam in some of the areas, like autonomous vehicles, where we think we're doing pretty well today.

<comment><USER5> Big data is not AI. Big data is processing of a giant datasets with quite classic models, such as Logistic Regression in a distributed way. That's what frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop do. AI or deep learning is different. Usually, they don't distribute across many machines so well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> looks like the guy is trying to convince himself,

</comment><comment><USER11> But machine learning is a sub-field of AI.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really enjoyed this article. AI has dramatically overpromised every decade since 1960. Advances have always been made, but why do they have to exaggerate so much about its potential?

I'm too scared to comment or say anything else though. It would be the equivalent of saying something negative about bitcoin on r/Bitcoin.

<comment><USER17> Part of why we hype is because it's how we get advancement. Yeah realistically the AI we all really want to see might be another three decades out, but if we want that to happen we have to get investors hyped about it now.

<comment><USER18> > Part of why we hype is because it's how we get advancement

That's a partisan overstatement. It's how some other "we" gets funding, at best. Yes there's a correlation between getting funding and success, but to say the correlation between hype and success directly, seems disingenuous.</comment></comment></comment>


Former AOL CEO Joins Kosmix BoD - <AUTHOR> http://startupmeme.com/2007/04/10/former-aol-ceo-joins-kosmix-bod/ <comment><USER2> Vote up if you don't want to see every blog post listed here. Isn't the idea for people to submit links others may not already know about?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=usablecontent></comment>


Ask HN: Is it practical to have many (4+) simultaneous co-founders? - daniel-levin

Some context: I am a university student with some ambitious ideas about a robotics startup. I'm asking HN about many co-founders because I feel that this forum is frequented by founders and technologists - which lends verisimilitude to the answers I'll receive.
So, here it is: I am considering starting a company with many co-founders. I have a large pool of motivated and intelligent people with whom I'd consider starting a company. Most startups that I read about have 2-3 co-founders. However, if I were to start a robotics company, there would be a very large set of responsibilities from the start (hardware engineering, branding/marketing, supply chain, operations, software, manufacturing, original science) and thus I would think these tasks should be distributed amongst 4 or more specialised founders. Obviously, this question mainly applies to companies that produce actual physical, manufactured products.
What are some of the (dis)advantages of starting a company with many cofounders? Sun Microsystems and Fairchild Semiconductor were started by 4 and 8 people respectively. Does HN have any stories or advice? <comment><AUTHOR> I have no experience on hardware startups. But my gut feeling is that they do have additional layers of complexity relative to pure web startups. As such it makes sense to have somewhat more co-founders than web startups.

However, the more people you add to a team, the slower it moves and the team dynamics grows exponentially. It will reach a point after which you get diminishing marginal gain, or even negative gain.

For a startup I believe agility is critically important. I would be worried to add too many people from the outset because it is difficult reverse it. It's hard to 'unfounder' a cofounder later on. My advice is to have a core team of 2-3 cofounders to see how it goes. If you really feel insufficient after a while, bring one in one at a time. It is less risky than having too many in the beginning and discover problems when it's too late.

</comment><comment><USER2> I tried to start a company with 6 co-founders once. Never again. More co- founders increases the odds that one of them will kill the entire thing. More co-founders increases the odds that two of them will have a fight and split.

Start with 2-3 co-founders and use other people to help get things going. They might do it for fun, a little cash, a little stock, or just the promise of bringing them in when it gets big.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bare careful of too many cooks in the kitchen. It's tough to make quick, strategic decisions when you have so many people with an equal say.

Ask yourself if all these key people are really founders, or just the first employees with stock options?

<comment><USER4> >> Ask yourself if all these key people are really founders, or just the first employees with stock options?

This. Pick 1-2 "key people" out of the pool, and invite others as employees. Don't make things ambiguous, you should prepare and have everyone sign simple contracts outlining the conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We are in five. But one has 50%+, two are investors that don't get in the way, and the other two are tech and art.

I am the tech guy, but I am.also the most experienced in the field, so I have some power too. But overall the structure is: CEO leads, I help. The others keep us two checked.

Never we made we tried to.make a full blown decision by everyone.

<comment><USER6> You are really misusing the phrase "co-founder" here. _You do not have 5 co- founders_.

Only one of the 5 is really clearly a founder (the one with 50+%). The other two are somewhere between "co-founders" and "founding employees". Especially since you acknowledge that there is an inequitable division of power/decision- making. In a situation with co-founders in the purest sense, all co-founders would have equal power. And then you have two investors, who are _not_ co- founders.

The two "co-founders" with less than 50% are "co-founders" in the same sense that Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin were "co-founders" of Facebook. They _were_ co-founders officially, but they were obviously 2nd to Zuckerberg and had far less power than he did (and none of them are at Facebook anymore) and were probably more like founding employees.

At most you could say you have 3 co-founders. But really the closer truth is that you have one founder.</comment></comment>


Two More Cases of Third-Party Facebook App Data Exposure - <AUTHOR> https://www.upguard.com/breaches/facebook-user-data-leak <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, Facebook had a fundamental misunderstanding of how privacy _has_ to work, and their users will be paying for their error for years.

If it's earth-shatteringly bad for your users if their private data is leaked by a third-party, you cannot exfiltrate that data to a thrid-party. Full stop. No amount of policy un-leaks data, and "You cannot continue to operate as a Facebook service" is an empty threat the moment it becomes more valuable for the third-party to violate the agreement than to continue to operate as a Facebook service.

The takeaway: if you are responsible for user privacy, _you_ must do the computations on the user's data. Have partners ship you the computations they wish to do, vet them, and then ship them results compliant with your users' expectations. Don't hand third-parties a subset of the keys to the kingdom and expect an honor system to preserve user privacy.

<comment><USER3> How would this work in the case of data portability? If Facebook were to be forced to provide an API that allowed users to export all of their data to a competing social network would Facebook be responsible for ensuring that the competitor was using the data responsibly?

<comment><USER2> Not at all; they'd be responsible for bundling that data in a well-defined format into a blob of some kind that the user can request be exfiltrated (after providing their credentials to authenticate the request). The third- party would then have to digest said blob. Users assume trust of the third- party regarding responsibility for data misuse when they feed the third-party the blob (same as if they'd hand-entered the data via a regular GUI). Google already offers a functional model of this via [https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

Putting control in the hands of the user is quite different from allowing third parties to exfiltrate data on a user without their consent.

(It is worth noting that this approach is still exploitable---third party convinces users to cough up their authentication codes, then acts as the user and makes the request for the whole kingdom themselves. But user education on the amount of power handed to someone when you _literally give them your passwords_ is a separate issue).

<comment><USER4> Say there's a startup that is going to revolutionize date keeping and events and scheduling and all that, for the sake of aping a common naming scheme, call them Calendr[1]. Only drawback is that their security is an afterthought, but they're not promoting that.

So a Facebook user that is friends with you on Facebook says to Calendr, "scan my contacts and generate a calendar that already has my contacts' birthdays and any events they've created on it (one would assume this list would include anything that is shared at the Friends Only and Public tiers) for me."

Three weeks later, Calendr is hacked and all of their data is accessible. A Have I Been Pwned-style service will let you read through the data and sure enough: fixermark's super secret event was now publicly viewed as part of this data set. You do not have an account with Calendr and you haven't even heard of it before.

How would you, as a Facebook user, prevent this from happening beyond not creating the event in Facebook? How would Facebook prevent this beyond not providing the data to the third party?

[1] edit: oh geez, there is a Calendr. This has nothing to do with the real Calendr (this is fictitious Calendr).

<comment><USER2> They may not be able to prevent it without refusing to exfiltrate that data. But then they maintained clear resopnsibility (at the cost of usability) for the user's data. Excellent example though, because it highlights a real joint- ownership problem in data on a social network (the aggrieved fixermark in this case certainly couldn't have stopped his friend from hand-entering the details of the super-secret party into FakeCalendr without consent either; to a certain extent, sharing information _always_ implies trust of the recipient to store that information responsibly).

Unfortunately, privacy / usability is _the_ tradeoff. Facebook had clear incentives to simplify usability at the cost of privacy. But as a result, these breaches continued to happen.

(I use the past tense here because I don't know what their app ecosystem looks like now. When I was using it, it was extremely easy to do a full friends-of- friends data exfiltration, with the only guard against it being "Don't do that and then dump it publicly for all to see").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook has a Data Abuse Bounty program where they pay for reporting third- party data leaks like these: [https://www.facebook.com/data- abuse/faq/](https://www.facebook.com/data-abuse/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Between 2007 and 2009 it was a far west for Facebook apps. A gift app that you could write with about 100 line of code could reach 10 millions of users in 2 days. More complex apps could do better. That was the most amazing part.

At that time the Facebook's API was pretty much open and you can get everything. It was an experiment and Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of hope in what people could do with that data to add value to the users. I was not doubting that he was doing it with good intentions. But he was naive...

Unfortunately, most of the apps were abusing all the channels that Facebook was giving them to get more users and milk money out with ads and micro- payments (ex: through OfferPal Media - now Tapjoy).

During that time I was pretty surprised how much info people were giving away with a click through. Even on the main Facebook product people were posting all kind of stuff, including stupid things they were doing. It really seemed that people were becoming more open and it was the beginning of a new era for privacy (or lack thereof).

Facebook realized pretty quickly what apps were doing and they started adding more granular permissions. Eventually Facebook started limiting more and more access to the API until 2011/2012 when the user generating gold mine was pretty much gone. Again, Facebook has always been working to fix the experience for their users and also to make clear that those where 3rd party apps. But people did not really care.

There have been probably hundred of thousands of apps that had access to "sensitive" user data. According to the Facebook's Term of Service, data could not be stored for more than a certain amount of time. But nothing was technically preventing people to store that data forever...

And here we are...

</comment><comment><USER7> Anecdata: A couple of years ago, I was at one of the very first (not sure if not the only one) FB connect meetings here in Dallas.

A couple of local startups were talking about how to leverage the "login with facebook" button. It was a big thing...

Most people I talked to, told me: "The very first thing I do is to save all the email of their friends" or stuff like that.

So yeah, this was years ago. I'm failing to see how this is a surprise at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> Since there are many anecdotal reports of Facebook failing to delete the profile history data even after closing your account, is there a better way people should be scrubbing their data? Some kind of tool, perhaps, that edits all of your posts and replaces them with scrambled / gibberish text?

<comment><USER9> Facebook sure as hell won't create such a tool. If you do, open source it and I shall use it for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This other article that got posted today might explain why this happened in more detail: [https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks- dirty-s...](https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-secret- he-doesn-t-want-you-to-know-67dcc94e2b5d)

Seems to suggest that FB platform apis were designed to not share any privacy metadata with devs. Maybe not the same as how apps like At The Pool stored that data, but might explain the firehose of data that FB gave devs and now they will point the finger and say it was their fault for these leaks/breaches. Food for thought.

<comment><USER11> Developers would have to intentionally write extra code to respect privacy metadata, so it seems unlikely that would have made a difference.

<comment><USER10> Criminals seem unlikely to follow laws, so why bother having them? Of course devs would need to intentionally follow the privacy wishes of users but without metadata, even responsible developers who want to, can't.

I guess my question for you, considering it looks like you worked with devs at FB, is this article regarding FB platform design accurate? That's the most shocking thing to me that this article conveys, that even if you wanted to ensure data privacy as a dev, you couldn't unless you built a custom tool. I'd be pretty surprised if most (or any) would.

Curious on your thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait, how the heck did "At the Pool" get plaintext fb passwords?

<comment><USER6> They did not. I think those are their own passwords if the user used directly the app without FB login

<comment><USER13> Not to discount the possibility that the article could be incorrect about this, but it makes the claim quite unambiguously: "it contains plaintext (i.e. unprotected) Facebook passwords for 22,000 users"

<comment><USER14> They have updated the article to say

> it contains plaintext (i.e. unprotected) passwords for 22,000 users

and

> The passwords are presumably for the "At the Pool" app rather than for the > user's Facebook account, but would put users at risk who have reused the > same password across accounts.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for clearing that up, didn't say that when I read it, indeed, it originally said "Facebook passwords".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really get it. Isn't the opposite of this (restricting third party developers) exactly what people are furious at Twitter over, for killing Tweetbot etc.?

</comment><comment><USER16> One hell of a clickbait headline. Since it is more fallout from the previous data handling issues and not further screwups on Facebook's part.

Not to downplay the issue... but its clearly written clickbait

<comment><USER17> Not clickbait in the slightest. This is not about Facebook per se about persistence of their shared data - _my_ information - once it's made public. HIPAA, by comparison has all sorts of statements about PII and business associates. But apparently FB can share with whoever has a pulse and I can find out about it later via Shodan.

I wrote this even with the original link and version of the headline.

<comment><USER16> "Millions of Facebook Records Found on Amazon Cloud Servers" was the original headline.

That headline the first thing you would likely think is Facebook was using AWS and left some data open somewhere. It 100% implied Facebook was doing more wrong now, instead of the companies that already had the data from the previous issues were not handling the data correctly.

Yes this news is still notable. But the headline gave the wrong impression and was banking on the already bad attitude towards Facebook.

<comment><USER18> I swear, every HN article, you get 10% of the comments are about the article being discussed, and the other 90% are people quibbling over the headline.

Ok, that's an exaggeration.

And when the comments are good, they are _really_ good. Makes the entire HN experience worthwhile.

<comment><USER17> So sorry? I mentioned Shodan as a way of tying it to other leaks of negligence and I why I thought this was relevant, and not just a tossaway clickbait article. I think my disagreement is deeper in nature than semantic on the headline. I even dropped in HIPAA as a model for regulations of shared private info, as gross as it may be to think about in a regulatory sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> _-_T_-_ Research: [https://www.upguard.com/breaches/facebook-user-data- leak](https://www.upguard.com/breaches/facebook-user-data-leak)

<comment><USER19> Thanks. We've changed the URL from [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-03/millions-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-03/millions- of-facebook-records-found-on-amazon-cloud-servers-ju1hde0w), which appears to be a summary of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any way to access the full article anywhere? It shows to me as "more information available on the Bloomberg Terminal"

<comment><USER21> The link has since been updated to be the original UpGuard research source.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Gartner Inc. still relevant in 2020? - johnx123-up Previous discussion in 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498657 <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why 2020 would be different. When were they last relevant? Weren't they always a marketing platform?

Patent for an infographic: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140108395A1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140108395A1/en)

</comment><comment><USER2> It never has been....</comment>


Squeak smalltalk port for iPhone/Touch  - <AUTHOR> http://isqueak.org/HomePage

<comment><USER2> Wonderful, but -- doesn't this violate the 'no runtimes/interpreters' Apple rule?

<comment><USER3> I unfortunately can't find the link at the moment, but Apple has granted the Squeak project a special exemption.

<comment><USER4> Now this is just cruel to Sun, giving them a false sense of hope for their iPhone JVM...

I sort of hope Java doesn't ever make it to the iPhone, but I'd love to see some other languages.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump Announces Broadcom's Return to US - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-announces-companys-return-to-us/2017/11/02/b5de48f8-bfea-11e7-9294-705f80164f6e_story.html <comment><USER2> Good news for the US. Also I keep seeing more and more about Singapore these days - seems like a good place to be.</comment>


Unconsidered: The things we never think about. - <AUTHOR> https://eeqj.com/20120707/unconsidered/

<comment><USER3> What the author is describing here is just standard human group-identity stuff. It goes by many names - tribalism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, othering, and so on. I like tribalism[1], because in my (not as informed as I wish, but still somewhat studied) opinion this phenomenon is something that has been with humanity forever. "civilization" and modern life has perhaps allowed people to be able to identify with several tribes at once, but the general structure of tribal membership is still the same - <USER2> loyalty/fealty to the group you are in, and lesser consideration for other groups in the same sphere. Lesser regard is true of both "friends" and "foes", with the former being someone to help but after "my tribe" is taken care of, and the foe just being "wrong" or some sort of inhuman.

Sometimes these are nested and complex, but the pattern is still the same. For example: my startup is the most important. Other startups in the same space are bad for me. But at a higher level, SV startups are the good ones, we need to get all the good programmers from big companies and startups in those "lesser" places like Michigan or New York, those poor folks are just deceiving themseselves.

Or take for example the classic plot device in military movies: Our unit is the most important to us. The rest of the guys in our army are people we help, but when it comes down to it, we worry about our own first, you can't fully trust the Army. Then, if it's convenient, worry about the allied units, and the enemies just aren't human, so don't bother.

Similar tribal behaviors can be seen in Politics, religion, intra-corporate divisions/units, sports, sciences, hobbies, operating systems, and on and on.

It is useful to be aware of this, because it seems to me a lot of the more effective people seem to understand this, at least intuitively, and know how to break down or take advantage of such "tribes" to get things done. It also helps to understand this when dealing with seemingly illogical behavior, when looked at in light of "What tribal lines/mores/etc are being violated here?" these behaviours start making sense, and can be dealt with. Similarly, I find that when I am opposed to something, or pro- something, but can't necessarily place why, it comes down to tribal issues frequently (and I try to avoid these things! Other times it is just preference or some actually good reason I just haven't quite figured out yet... the good old hunch, but I'm wary of those too). It seems to be something built into humanity - be it just a common social structure, or a stable emergent behavior, or something built into the human understanding via brain structure or whatever.

[1] Unfortunately the wikipedia article still seems to reflect an older definition of tribalism, that hasn't quite caught up with usages of the term in the last 30-50 years, hence my discussion of other names for this pattern.

<comment><USER4> I believe tribalism is inadequate as it implies a strong awareness or belief of the separate existence of "my group" vs "that group". The author is focused more on those clusters which logically exist but are unknown to those inside. What he brings up is related to the subject of privilege which feminists often talk about.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is, in fact, exactly what I was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is nice to see someone poke there head above their prejudices and habits, if only briefly, and appreciate the size and shape of the world as-it-is. That's a good thing and people should make an effort to do more of that more often.

I'd argue that it's even more useful and important to do it along the axis of "personality", "intelligence", and "situation". That is, can I make an attempt to see the world as a pitiful fool? As a greedy scumbag? As a religious fundamentalist? As a drug-addled single mom? As self-righteous millionaire? As a self-righteous cancer sufferer? As a brave 5th grader doing the best they can with neglectful parents, not even realizing they are being neglected? As a middle-son of some local priest-class? As a teenager desperate for a Foxconn job? As a thirty-something bone-weary and contemplating suicide from the Foxconn job? As an angry, French speaking Quebecian? As a Mexican schoolteacher constantly affronted by wealthy, oblivious American tourists? As a cruise-ship tourist, angry with the poor service at dinner?

The human experience is vast and deep, and often deeply unpleasant, but it is joyful to contemplate it in its full richness. And if only because this post reminded me of this, it deserves an upvote (and probably a cat meme, if I was clever enough).

</comment><comment><USER6> Nightclub hipster awakes from K-hole mad at Rumsfeld and whining about Americans.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hole in one. From downtown. Have an upboat.</comment></comment>


The biggest change in DNS since Dot-Com - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/icaan-president-beckstrom/all/1

<comment><USER2> Just allow me to free up a few assets so I can afford to apply :)

Doesn't the whole concept of having to pay large amounts of money just to apply to maybe register a new TLD feel a little bit against some of the original ideas behind the "World Wide Web"?

<comment><USER3> You do know what the cost of the prevous round of tlds was > £1,000,000.

Btw I used to be one of the owners of .coop :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like kind of a big deal. I'm surprised I'm only hearing of this now.

I guess the price creates a big enough barrier for most people?

</comment><comment><USER5> Food for thought; prepare for all e-mail validation regular expressions to start failing `email@example.com`. As if the regular expression already wasn't complicated enough: <http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail- RFC822-Address.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> The biggest winners from this are search engines. URLs will just be ignored in future.

</comment><comment><USER7> maintaining an up-to-date TLD list must be problematic from now on.

<comment><USER8> Why would you do that yourself? IANA publish one <http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt></comment></comment>


Paean to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com <comment><USER3> Those voice-acted quotes after you finished research or build your first building of given kind are little gems that stay with you for decades.

"The Academician's private residences shall remain off-limits to the Genetic Inspectors. We possess no retroviral capability, we are not researching retroviral engineering, and we shall not allow this Council to violate faction privileges in the name of this ridiculous witch hunt!"

—Fedor Petrov, Vice Provost for University Affairs

... spoken with official, assertive voice right after you completed research on "Retroviral Engineering".

<comment><USER4> Beware he who denies you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. - Commissioner Pravin Lal

<comment><USER5> I wonder if our choice of favourite quote strongly determines our moral foundations (in an MFT sense). Certainly this is the one I hold most dear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SMAC is solidly in my top 10 games of all time, moreso than some of Sid's more recent 4X games. SMAC has a lot of elements that I think are still unique from the Civilization series: elevation, weather, terraforming, cities on water tiles, useful satellites, more types of combat, and even the ability to create your own unit types. It ties a story to "barbarians" (alien mind worms) and technology advancement. It ties the difficulty of the aliens to how much pollution you generate and what civic choices you make: is your government pro-aliens or anti-aliens?

<comment><USER7> Wow, yeah all of those elements are utterly absent from Civ 5 and 6.

<comment><USER8> The latest DLC added some environmental effects to the game, but nothing on the scale that SMAC had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, I just started playing this again in the last week. I found it surprisingly accessible after all this time. _Especially_ the slightly pessimistic hard sci-fi content given the current political / environmental situation.

You can buy the game on gog.com relatively cheap, and there's a set of community patches for things like widescreen, better AI, and other features at ([http://alphacentauri2.info](http://alphacentauri2.info)).

The biggest annoyance I've found is moving multiple units. I think other civs have figured out grouping better. Alpha Centauri hasn't quite gotten this.

I definitely rank this in my Top 3 4X games (w/ Master of Orion II and Civ V)

<comment><USER10> Did they patch out the way supply crawlers completely break the end game? How do you get started simply with these mods?

<comment><USER9> Well I've only installed the widescreen patch. I'm not sure I have the time to get into all the other stuff they have!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For such a wonderful game SMAC is, it's a real pity it doesn't come with a proper scripting engine or a mod SDK. Yes, you can edit the .txt files, but that mostly limits you to constants and names (e.g. you cannot create a new type of secret project, or a completely new special ability).

I wish the present copyright holders would consider publishing the source code for the game under a license that still requires purchasing the original. I don't think it would drop the sales by much (the pirated download link is #2 result in Google, so I would assume they don't care), but that would give a massive boost to the modder community, and likely more PR/sales.

Realistically though, it probably relies on a bunch of 3rd-party components and reviewing their licenses for each of them would be a massive headache...

<comment><USER12> Just exposing the internal scripting interface / data format, without opening any sources, would go a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.

\- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted the Fruit" \- Accompanies the Intellectual Integrity technology

so true.

</comment><comment><USER14> There was some brief HN discussion around SMAC's 20th anniversary: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879088)

There I wrote: "It's interesting to examine Alpha Centauri's political perspectives in light of the fact that it was released in 1999. The triumph of 'the old world's liberal order' seemed so permanent that public intellectuals were writing paeans to 'the end of history,' yet here was a game premised on the ultimate breakdown and fragmentation of that order."

</comment><comment><USER11> In case anyone else is playing the game in 2019 (2020?), here's a nice little cheat that allows instant and unlimited terraforming:

1\. Open the alphax.txt file and locate the Chassis definitions. Set the "Missile" flag for the Missile chassis to 0 (set it to 1 for Needlejet) and change its range to 99.

2\. Replace the 'deleted' technology in alphax.txt with an arbitrary name and link it to the 'missile' platform.

3\. Edit your faction txt file so that it starts with the missile technology and the gravship technology.

4\. Open the unit designer, make a gravship former and switch the chassis to missile (the gravship step is important). This will make you a "missile former" capable of instant unlimited terraforming (i.e. terraforming doesn't end the turn) and unlimited range (is gets reset to 99 once it reaches zero).

Kinda breaks the balance, but makes it possible to play for an otherwise weak faction, while eliminating the grind.

<comment><USER15> Which factions are so weak as to make this 'fair'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I still haven't played a better 4X strategy game.

One of the best aspects was that it provided so many different ways to play that were effective. Usually in Civ-games, no matter how they try to design around it, there's no real alternative between just rushing technology and pumping cities to snowball.

One of my favorite things to do was to use the terraforming abilities as weapons, and build mountains or flood the low-lying land. Or you could encourage the native life to go wild and take out the other players.

The unit designer was also fun; it's one of the few in games where I have actually bothered to build out specialized units for different roles - <USER2> it's either pointless or too complicated to bother with.

<comment><USER9> Yes you can literally rebuild the landscape, and the climate system will redefine the raininess and other factors of the landscape.

I also like you can do ocean colonies, and working in the ocean isn't entirely second class.

I enjoy the vision of the future split up into ideologies, and not nation states, which seems to be closer to our current life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I loved this game! Having said that, the main change I'd make to this and other similar games is to have an option to limit and adjust the number of actions the AI player can perform on each turn. There always came a point where the AI player would do tons of things each turn. Not only would the AI's turns take ages, but on my own turn it'd take me a long time to catch up, figure out what the AI did and play accordingly. Another, additional option would be to limit the number of units and/or cities the AI player (or maybe all players) can build. It became tedious to attack or deal with the dozens of cities created by the AI players.

On a different note, I loved the quotes in the game that referenced a various fictional books and speeches. Something similar happens in the book "Dune", with quotes to nonexistent books set in Dune's future that referenced the events in the Dune. There's something to be said for when a work of fiction makes references to fictional works of nonfiction within the real work of fiction's fictional universe. (Another book that exhibits this is "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", a fiction book that makes references to the nonexistent, nonfiction book after which the real book is named.) I like the illusion of that the fictional universe is much larger than I can see, and the desire to read the fictional works of nonfiction the author lets me peek into.

On a final note, I loved the parody books titles mentioned at the end of the game. Has anyone found a list of the original book titles being parodied, or does someone know all those cultural references? I'm referring to titles such as "Boreholes I Have Known" or "I'm OK, You're a Drone" (the latter of which parodies "I'm OK, You're OK". Yet I don't get what book title the former is parodying, and there are others whose references I don't get.)

<comment><USER18> "$subject I Have Known" has been a popular title for personal and anecdotal historical works in British and American literature. It's a likely play off that and not one in particular.

I still play SMAC/X and find new campaigns from time to time. If you don't own the GoG version, it's frequently on sale for <$5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised EA hasn't worked with Hollywood to develop Alpha Centauri into a TV series yet

<comment><USER20> Game of Rovers

 _fungus is coming_

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if anything comparable to SMAC these days? I probably spent more time playing this game than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER22> While the writing in Alpha Centauri is some of the best in video games, the actual game itself is less fun than Civilization. The hostile terrain and alien life you spend most of the game dealing with just isn't as interesting as the enemy AI.

<comment><USER23> The enemy AI in every Civilization game is incredibly stupid. "Interesting" isn't really the word.

<comment><USER10> There have been talks at GDC and elsewhere about this...my memory is that humans don't like being surprised by a smart AI that silently builds up resources and suddenly and mercilessly betrays and annihilates them, which is the obvious winning strategy. Humans don't even like the random battle results to be truly random but expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented. The AI is grindy and unsophisticated on purpose.

<comment><USER24> > Humans don't even like the random battle results to be truly random but > expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented.

Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units, random battles sometimes meant an ancient trireme could destroy a battleship, which is fun to imagine...

<comment><USER23> The classic example is a militia (the weakest unit in the game, relying on no technology at all) defeating a battleship bombarding it from the sea, causing the battleship to sink. :D

<comment><USER6> Warrior, actually. But yes. Militia required gunpowder.

<comment><USER23> This is not correct; the weakest unit in Civilization is the militia, and the unit you get from gunpowder is the musketeer. There is no unit called "warrior".

How do I know we're talking about Civilization?

> Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units

I think it's unlikely Civ II added stats in response to feedback from Civ III.

<comment><USER6> You're right about musketeers. [https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Musketeers_(Civ2)](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Musketeers_\(Civ2\))

I was thinking of Partisans which spawn when a city is captured, [https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Partisans_(Civ2);](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Partisans_\(Civ2\);) I think of militia when I think of Partisans.

However, the weakest unit in Civ 2 is definitely the Warrior: [https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Warriors_(Civ2)](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Warriors_\(Civ2\))

<comment><USER23> And the weakest unit in Civilization is the Militia. As I just said, there is no Warrior.

In the same way that Civ II cannot have made changes in response to Civ III, it also can't have made changes in response to itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I very much like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, but this blog is some kind of creepy personality cult. Reynolds this, Reynolds that...

Also, the author seems to be into conspiracy theories and extrapolates A LOT. This is the latest quote by Chairman Yang, therefore in canon Yang must be defeated by this point, therefore these factions must have defeated him because canon-wise they don't like him, and those were probably the next to go... I think s/he reads too much into it.

It reminds me of the "missing replicant" issue with first cuts of Blade Runner, which was simply caused by reduced budget and removed scenes. They just removed a character from the movie and forgot to update a few script lines.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why no love for Civilization Beyond Earth? With its expansion (Rising Tide) I think it got most things pretty much right as a reinterpretation of the original Alpha Centauri.

<comment><USER27> I heard a lot of it was because of how bland the characters and writing were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I feel annoyed he launches into the minutae of 4x games, without defining them? What is a 4x game? This article excludes anyone who hasnt already played the game in a major way.

<comment><USER29> Yes, the first mention should be a link to the Wikipedia page.

4x = eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Confused about the wording and the intent of the author, looks like it's genuine.

The only other time I've seen paean used as a word is when a group of US navy POWs in North Korea praised it saying 'we paean [Kim/NK]' while secretly meant 'pee on'</comment>


Why you should never pay more than $10 for an HDMI cable (Infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-rip1/ <comment><USER2> Even better: An electromagnetically shielded, gold plated _optical_ audio cable. Sold at Sears [1].

I stopped buying cables retail a long time ago. My favorite supplier: RiteAV. They're (IMHO) the Amazon of cables. Huge selection, modest prices [2], and great customer service [3].

1\. [http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_05750807000P?vName=...](http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_05750807000P?vName=Computers%20&%20Electronics&cName=ElectronicsAccessories&sName=Home%20Theater%20&%20Audio&psid=FROOGLE01&sid=IDx20070921x00003a)

2\. HDMI cables start at $3.50 - [http://www.riteav.com/hdmi- cables-c-141_147.html?osCsid=cjmg...](http://www.riteav.com/hdmi- cables-c-141_147.html?osCsid=cjmg54j8h357b3jp3hn1qn68k2)

3\. I've never seen another retailer with as high a satisfaction rating: <http://www.resellerratings.com/store/RiteAV>

<comment><USER3> Not to knock your suggestion, but I've had similarly great experiences with <http://monoprice.com> . It seems similar to RiteAV, but much bigger and their prices seem on par (maybe 6-10 cents more expensive):

<http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Monoprice>

Marginally higher rating, but more importantly a MUCH larger sample size (2338 lifetime reviews vs. 25)

Also, as someone north of the border they do ship here, whereas (as far as I can tell) RiteAV doesn't.

<comment><USER4> Monoprice also sells really cheap mini displayport adapters. They even sell a mini displayport to hdmi adapter (you can't get one from Apple).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My patience for the line, "It is digital. It either works or it doesn't" ended a long time ago.

"Digital" signals are analog signals, but the only difference is that they are restricted to being above or below some threshold. But around that threshold there is a gray area where you can't really tell whether your signal will be interpreted as 1 or 0.

I am not defending the need for high-end HDMI cables. But saying "It's digital so don't worry" is wrong.

There are reasons that "digital" cables use twisted pair. Wow, even some "digital" cable standards specify the number of twists per inch required for reliable operation. And wow, some cable standards even specify shielded cable is required. I wonder why.

Here is a fun exercise for those that think "digital" signals don't need engineering steps to protect signal integrity: build all of your cables (or PCBs for that matter) with straight signals and you will have an excellent time trying to debug why your communications don't work. Bonus fun for making the cable length 1/4 of your signal wavelength.

<comment><USER6> I think the point of the "either works or it doesn't" is a comparison versus analog. With an analog signal you could get slightly better results by getting better cables (or worse with worse cables). If you have a poor digital cable it flat out doesn't work. If the cable you're using works, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to make it work any better. Either the 1s and 0s made it from the source to the destination or they didn't.

No one is claiming that there isn't engineering that needs to happen to make a digital signal reliably travel from the source to the receiver.

<comment><USER5> I think your understanding of cables is off.

All signals are analog. Every single one. (Actually, I take that back. With the exception of quantum computers, to date, all signals are analog).

A "digital" cable doesn't just work or not work. It is possible to receive spurious bit errors for many reasons. For example, you turn up the volume to your awesome surround sound speakers, which causes more current to flow through your speaker wires that happen to be running parallel to your horrible HDMI cable. The increased current causes interference in your low-power HDMI cable, causing bit errors in the transmission.

<comment><USER7> >> "It is possible to receive spurious bit errors for many reasons."

Surely that's why there's error correction layered on top?

Instead of arguing about what _might_ happen, why not find an HDMI device that'll show you how many unrecoverable bit errors it has detected in the stream... Can't be that hard to do.

If my hard disk can send data over a tiny crappy unshielded cheap USB cable without a single bit error, I'd be willing to bet money that an HDMI cable isn't that much different.

<comment><USER8> HDMI doesn't do error correction for video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm reminded of an incident a few years back when Monster sent a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable. The CEO wrote them a response that was pretty well publicized: [http://gizmodo.com/380055/blue-jeans-cable-calls-bs- on-monst...](http://gizmodo.com/380055/blue-jeans-cable-calls-bs-on-monster- cable-patent-suit-vows-to-fight-to-bloody-death)

I bought some cables from <http://www.bluejeanscable.com/> a few months later. I needed to make a few longer than normal runs, and they had reasonable prices and were direct about the capabilities of their different products outside of spec.

<comment><USER10> Awesome rebuttal by Blue Jeans. I wanted to fist pump at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a bit more to it than that. An HDMI cable contains three serial data links, each operating at roughly 1.5Gbps. At rates that high, some shielding is required, or the cable will pick up enough noise to damage the signal. The HDMI link has some error correction (contrary to a comment on that site) whereby 8 data bits are transmitted using 10 bits on the wire, so minor errors are tolerated.

The important thing, and the central argument of that article, is that with a digital link, once there are no bit errors, no further improvements can be made, and even a cheap cable is plenty good enough for a short HDMI connection. Gold-plated connectors are still a good idea. Corrosion is as much of a problem there as anywhere.

Should you use a truly awful cable, and those do exist, you will probably notice an occasional "spark" on the display.

</comment><comment><USER12> The graphic is totally useless, the same information could have been conveyed in 30 lines of text. An "infographic" should have some kind of graph or chart or something that adds insight, not a picture of 9 playstations and a dopey flow chart.

<comment> brown9-2 What is wrong with conveying those 30 lines of text visually like this graphic does?

Perhaps some people will respond better to the same information in this format as opposed to pure lines of text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Shame! I thought we were going to get analytics from Mint showing their users net worth closely correlated with purchasing low-price HDMI cables.

<comment><USER14> I was expecting some comparaison of the renewal interval from users buying cheap cables vs users buying expensive cables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How can companies still get away with not shipping these cables in the box with displays?

<comment><USER16> Second order effects, of course. If Samsung ships a cheap HDMI cable in the box, it's very little skin off their nose; they raise the price by their cost, about $2, and even in the competitive TV market that's probably absorbable to some extent.

But what happens next? They ship their TV to Best Buy, who quickly notices the TV ships with an HDMI cable, "robbing" them of the chance to sell a Monster cable. Or worse, the customer might still buy one, get them both home, notice there's no difference (or at least no $400 difference) and return the Monster cable. Ack! That's a $100+ profit opportunity that Samsung is costing them. How will Best Buy make up for it? They're going to jack the price of the Samsung TV up by some fraction of the $138 that they can no longer make. Not necessarily the whole amount, it would be prorated based on the average rate of Monster purchase; Best Buy has its own problems if it jacks the price of a TV up as it is a competitive market for them, too!

In fact, it is so competitive that it is not hard to imagine that Best Buy will discover they can't effectively sell that TV for ~$50 more (guessing) and just plain take it off the market. I am _not_ saying this is inevitable, just that it is definitely a very possible outcome. If they don't, the very-price- sensitive American consumers will certainly notice the price difference in sufficient numbers to reduce sales of that TV.

So, how does this feed back to Samsung? They put in an HDMI cable, and either their retails sales drop, or Best Buy even entirely drops their TV.

So, whose fault is this? Money grubbing Samsung? Money grubbing Best Buy? Well, the capitalistic model tends to assume that the customer is informed, and when the customer is not informed, they can be scammed. Here, the customers are not informed. So I split the blame between Monster, who are aggressively lying to customers, and the customer base itself. (Best Buy to some extent here too, for the same reasons as Monster.) Not one, not the other, both. Too many audio/videophiles will aggressively defend their purchase of expensive cables, even after it is explained that their justification is technical gibberish, and as the market leaders they deserve some of the blame.

The other reason I blame this is that if you resolve the problem that a critical mass of customers actually believes expensive cables work, the problems go away. Best Buy raises the prices of _all_ TVs a bit to make up the profit margin, as do all similar retailers. (Most are working on single-digit % profit margins from the top corporate POV, so if they lose something like the Monster cable they _will_ need to make it up elsewhere.) Customers don't even notice because TVs continue to work like computers with constant price drops, so it manifests as a brief interruption in otherwise-falling prices rather than a huge, visible increase. Samsung starts sticking cheap-but- effective cables in, and instead of being punished by the retailers, customers reward them with happy thoughts about good service and a good out-of-box experience (which are hard to quantify but certainly produce bankable assets in the end).

The other option: When buying a TV through a different channel where there isn't a good Monster upsell opportunity, perhaps something like Amazon (which still has the upsell opportunity in some sense, but will present customers with many 1-star reviews and give them a chance to become informed properly), ship an HDMI cable then.

Second order effects, second order effects, second order effects. Always think second order effects when thinking about economics. It's never the simple story, the economic entities _react_ to each other.

<comment><USER17> So, when I buy a TV, it's effectively being subsidized by other people's cable purchases.

<comment><USER16> Assuming my discussion above is correct, which is a big assumption, yes.

One of the other consequences of misinformed consumers is sometimes merely being an informed consumer allows you to sponge off a bit of value from the uninformed ones too. See also "being in the small fraction of people that turn in their rebates"; everybody bought based on the advertised price, but only you and a few others paid it. (If you're like me, you properly factor in time- to-prepare-rebate and risk-of-no-return, though I personally have had very good success. I don't bother with $2 rebates; take out the stamp, the time, the risk of missing it, and you end up with little or possibly even negative. But I've scored $50 rebates for things I might have paid full price for willingly anyhow. That's a win.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Reason to buy a really expensive HDMI Cable.

There is only one "good" (dubious) reason to by a really expensive cable, and that is for range. There is a performance differences between the cheap and gold cables, due to the different conductivities. However over short distance this isn't observable, as the receiver will correctly interpret the digital signal even though there is no noise on the line, this is the beauty of digital signals. It is there or it isn't, and with decent ECC on the line, which I'm assuming HDMI has, even with a fair bit of degradation it wont be an issue.

However as you extend the cable the signal with degrade at a different rate depending on the quality of the cable, and eventually you will reach a distance where the digital signal even with ECC is lost, and it will no longer work. With a higher quality cable this range is greater, (we are talking of ranges in the 10's -> 100's of meters), certainly no issue for a normal TV setup, and you would have to question why you even needed such a long cable to start with, move your source/receiver closer to each other.

The only other factor which might show up is the sensitivity and power of the transceivers, and you might find a cable of 100m works on some gear and not on others, but if you do you really are using the wrong tool for the job, go buy a optical repeater :)

I'm guessing on distances here, but you get the idea, I use to work in high frequency data transmission systems, and have no idea of the detailed specs of HDMI but should give you an idea.

</comment><comment><USER19> Monoprice.com. That is all.

<comment><USER20> Except when you're buying a new TV and you're at the checkout, you realize you need a cable to finish your hookup. _This_ is why you never see a $10 cable in a retail store, like the poster above mentioned.

It's all about the psychology of needing it now instead of being able to wait 4 more days.

<comment><USER21> This is why you use monoprice.com. Every time you need a cable, you actually order 4. It's still 1/4 the price of buying it from a retail store, and then when a friend needs a cable for that new tv he just bought, you can hand him one, for 1/4 the price of what he'd pay in stores, and he thanks you, AND you've just paid for your own cables.

Really, just don't ever buy a cable in a store. Ever. Getting a TV? Plan it ahead of time. Buying new tech? Make sure you have the cables already.

We're talking about an average 20x price markup on these cables, and sometimes significantly more (network cables I'm looking at you!).

Knowing your options is the first step in not getting screwed.

<comment><USER22> The original poster is precisely correct from my experience.

The only time I purchased a cable online was when I bought someone a gift that required the HD cable.

All the other times, we ran around the corner to Shopko and paid whatever their price was because we had a new HD system setup and wanted it in HD. Now.

I really don't think it's a casual purchase for most people, and I certainly never considered buying more than one at a time.

<comment><USER23> Also, when you're buying a $3,000 TV, $100 for the cables doesn't seem that bad, relatively speaking.

<comment><USER24> And when you've paid $150 dollars for a disneyland park hopper pass, that $12 slice of pizza and small soda doesn't seem that bad either, but you're still being taken to the cleaners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's rare to see even a $10 one at retail. Often the lowest priced one is $20-25, and there are a bunch of $40 options. And not even talking about Monster which this article is singling out.

<comment><USER26> [http://sellout.woot.com/?ts=1270026281&sig=b28b38ff5dc15...](http://sellout.woot.com/?ts=1270026281&sig=b28b38ff5dc158bf)

$9.99, shipped.

<comment><USER25> The key word was "retail". Like if I need a cable today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've read exactly one semi-scientific comparison of popular DVI cables of varying price. Amazingly, the conclusion was that Monster Cables really are better. However the difference had no effect unless you were running a high- bandwidth signal (>=1920x1080x60Hz) over a long distance (>=12 feet? I don't recall exactly). The cheaper long cables would work for low bandwidth signals, but would lose sync and fail at high rez.

Either way: monoprice.com

</comment><comment><USER28> I suspect Monster has it in their catalog for government contract fulfillment where they can just drop it in without any review of cost when A/V components are ordered (seriously).

It's not aimed at people who actually look at price tags.

<comment><USER29> Have you ever gone into a Best Buy or similar and seen the cable selection? The "cheap" cables are $50, and the Monster cables are sold right beside them. Many people compare prices on the TV before coming into the store, but are not armed with good information when the salesperson tells them that their $1200 TV is worthless without $250 in cables.

<comment><USER28> It's more insidious at a Best Buy where large purchases like HDTV with accessories are often financed and the salesperson says they can have the best without paying for it (right now).

The average consumer has no clue and doesn't want to learn that digital is digital, not like analog. All they know is when there is poor signal they get nothing on their TV (or blocky) where on their old TV they at least got a viewable picture with noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So what if some dude with extra money pays a premium for a brand name? If it wasn't for them helping with the profits, Best Buy wouldn't be able to sell us a $400 dollar dual core laptop at a razor thin margin.

</comment><comment><USER31> An excellent place for purchasing av and other sorts of cables at sane prices is monoprice.com Ive been very happy with the pricing which is consistently the lowest I've seen and the construction quality both. Sanely priced does not imply any loss in construction quality nor does the contrapositive hold, though US consumers are conditioned to view price as a signalling mechanism for quality to various extents

</comment><comment><USER32> I get all my cables from Amazon. They always have a 6-foot HDMI cable for about $3, with free shipping.

Here's a link: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002L5R78/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002L5R78/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo- top- stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B0001IXUDK&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0AA7M0DZV2FKQC1G6HTF)

</comment><comment><USER33> Unless you know exactly why you need the expensive one, you don't need it.

Unless a reasonable-length cable is damaged or malconstructed in such a way that it distorts transmitted waveforms so much that they're not recoverable, any reasonable conductor will work. This stuff isn't rocket science since about a year after RS232 was invented.

</comment><comment><USER34> My personal favorite store to get cables from: Fleet Farm.

Typically, you can find almost any kind of cable for $5-$10, some of the common ones for less. I think my 25-foot flat ethernet cable came in at a whopping $12, but it's been the most durable I've owned.

They've also got rational pants, which my wife in particular likes.

</comment><comment><USER35> I always thought that the "high end" cable market was a rip-off. Even as someone who loves high quality audio, its REALLY hard to tell the difference between a moderately priced cable and a high end one.

<comment><USER36> Wiki page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-end_audio_cables> There is a nice quote on it: "no other product is as shrouded in hype and mystery as the audio cable!"

I also like high quality audio. But most of the time just a good thick electric copper cable will do the job. Also saves you a lot of $.

<comment><USER37> The idea of basing expensive audiophile equipment on unbalanced audio seems silly; if they _really_ cared about quality, wouldn't they be using balanced signaling?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A possibly apocryphal story about Quad using a surprising source of speaker cables:

<http://www.zerogain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1464></comment>


Show HN: InaPic: Yet Another Photo App that Isn't So. Smart Photo Albums. - <AUTHOR> http://getinapic.com
What is InaPic?: Photo sharing + Image recognition. InaPic gives you photo albums with multiple collaborators. It then automatically organizes thousands of photos contributed by tens of users. This is accomplished by state-of-the-art image recognition technology. Clutter is removed by stacking repeating pictures, and highlights are created with a single click, which can seamlessly be shared on a more open forum such as Facebook or Flickr.
I invite you to check InaPic's self-organizing photo albums on getinapic.com. Some of the features mentioned above are currently being built so this is a dry demo of how it would look like. The shown results are created completely automatically, though. I am posting it early because I want your honest feedback!
Why InaPic?: So many photos, so less time. We believe, technology should assist in organizing our photos (say, by backdrop, by people, and by place). We should be able to tag photos in a bunch (stacks created by image matching). We should be able to search them by content. Also, we do activities in groups, then why do we have lonely albums? On-the-fly group albums is the InaPic's way. Please see the about page for brief description on our beliefs: http://getinapic.com/about
But why InaPic, really?: One day we will surely have technology seamlessly organize our photo albums. Why not now? Why not by us?
Here's my story: When I left my job about an year back I knew nothing about how to do startups. Heck, I didn't even know about hacker news. Flashback to early 2010: With a PhD in image processing/information hiding, I was happily researching and hacking computer vision projects for DARPA and Navy. Then one day it struck me: What am I doing that's creating value to the world? Am I doing anything worthwhile that could justify my time, effort, and even my salary? This feeling stayed in me for good 6-9 months. (I think) I am fairly respected in academia for my research contributions (>400 citations). So I thought of moving to academia. But the urge to build something useful overpowered my fears of uncertainty, and with support from my wonderful wife, I decided to leave my job to do a startup. The goal was to build a consumer startup around computer vision and image analysis. The first thing we built was LinkaPic (http://linkapic.com) a mobile visual search engine that would be the wikipedia for the real world. After a few months of struggling to market the idea, I realized that it is too broad and too vague for greater market adoption. Then came the depression. After struggling for a couple of months almost doing nothing, came the pivot. Using the same technology, we set out to build InaPic, and here I am, posting this, exactly 300 days after I signed up for hacker news.
Lastly, are you a python/django and/or javascript hacker and love InaPic so much as to want to join me in building it? Please send me an email (address in my profile). <comment><USER2> Great tool! Very intuitive for the novice photographer struggling with cataloging his/her pictures. Love the highlight feature that lets you collate pics that are worth sharing versus those that are relatively ordinary and best kept under wraps. All in all, I'm impressed by this particular application of image recognition technology. Kudos and keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER3> Simply Amazing. Site design is really cool, and this application is really a must have for professional as well as any novice photographer to extract pictures in a manner that makes sense!! To my opinion, this tool makes 1000s of snaps of a single trip enjoyable and not like, "Oh God... let's get over with".

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it. InaPic indeed is built to help organize thousands of photos and make the process seamless. Hoping to receive more feedback from the community!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Takes me days to collect and organize pics after every trip...Can't put a price on such memories so painstakingly hand-sorted them but always wished someone would do that for me... I guess, this InaPic genie is the answer...Kudos for the design...Looking forward to the full-featured app...

</comment><comment><USER5> Finally somebody is fixing the real problem...organizing pictures in SINGLE CLICK....heck,why am I still using picasa!!!,

</comment><comment><USER6> For the lazy <http://getinapic.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> This sounds very interesting. Would definitely try this.

</comment><comment><USER8> I sent you an email. Would love to chat.

</comment><comment><USER9> I always wanted something like this :)</comment>


Can LinkedIn be used as a dating service? Any succcess stories? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No, I don't think so because people are using it for professional purposes, and that's their mindset. But I did see this app - [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/linkedup!/id794546332?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/linkedup!/id794546332?mt=8)</comment>