Rock and Roll Days of StarCraft: A Development Retrospective - <AUTHOR> https://starcraft.com/en-us/articles/20719767 <comment><USER2> Patrick Wyatt's blog has some more interesting details from the early days of Blizzard and the development of StarCraft

[http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road- to-s...](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft)</comment>


Vinyl LP Frenzy Brings Record-Pressing Machines Back to Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/business/media/a-vinyl-lp-frenzy-brings-record-pressing-machines-back-to-life.html <comment><USER2> I really enjoy playing vinyl from time to time; but I'm not going to pretend that they sound better. They don't. Vinyl is all about the touch and the feel, like driving a stick or making bread from scratch.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I'm just getting into it and building out a home stereo system, but I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I enjoy playing vinyl. It's because of junk like, "The reasons cited [for playing vinyl] are usually a fuller, warmer sound from vinyl's analog grooves." No, no, no, don't associate me with that stupid audiophile nonsense.

<comment><USER4> Well, it IS a different sound, and that can be measured objectively (I mean that vinyl players "color" the original recording and how much and in what ways they alter the frequency response and such).

So, it's not like $1000 cables scams etc, where the results are identical.

Now, the subjective part is whether this "warmer" sound is better than the more accurate (better fidelity) high quality digital sound.

For a lot of people, it is -- same way as we tend to like "saturated" images more, despite their colors not being true to the original.

(Of course I'm speaking in general -- if you, mr. outlier, doesn't like saturated pictures, this doesn't apply to your statistical noise self. Not everything is about you.).

Then there's the crackle and static that some (fewer) people also like, but I'm sticking to the basic vinyl "color" here.

<comment><USER5> Vinyl is very heavily processed. The sound that ends up on the groove has the bass cut by up to 20dB, and the treble boosted by the same amount, because the needle can't move fast enough and far enough to reproduce a flat frequency response. (Google "RIAA curve" for details.)

The processing is reversed on playback in the preamp, but there's always a mismatch between the source EQ and the preamp EQ, so there's always some tonal distortion. And because the bass gets boosted so much there's added waveform distortion which increases with bass frequencies and makes the bass thicker.

Many turntables also have pitch instabilities.

Hence "vinyl sound."

So no - it's not even remotely accurate. Add scratches, crackles, and pops, groove deterioration - the needle causes enough friction to melt the plastic in the groove - and other artefacts, and it's really more of a lifestyle/collector thing than anything to do with accuracy.

Personally I have enough physical stuff already, and I want less, not more. So being able to store all my music on a hard drive in FLAC format makes me thankful the industry moved beyond vinyl.

<comment><USER6> But if you wanted that type of sound, you could record it digitally. There is no reason why that type of sound has to come from a vinyl analog record. Is there ?

<comment><USER4> And people DO do that: using several compression, old mikes, tube amps, EQing, recording techniques, etc to make digital releases sound like vinyl/low-fi of yore.

In fact one of the hottest selling audio plugin categories are "tape saturation" (which mimic 2-inch tape distortions, not that far from mimicking vinul).

E.g.: [https://www.u-he.com/cms/satin](https://www.u-he.com/cms/satin)

When it comes to vinyl, there's also other factors: the patina (crackle) etc, adds connection to the times you've played the record, the fragility and tactile feel, plus it's a physical, collectible artifact. Plus, at least for now, the fashion factor.

While a audio-file collection will be useless in 20 years (already is with things like Spotify giving access to most music), a good condition LP will mostly increase in price. In 50 years? A current pressing could be worth $200 or more (especially since most bands do small 1000 units or less vinul pressings).

<comment><USER6> I get that it's fashion. It just surprises me, given there is no reason for it, as far as the actual quality of the signal goes. I mean it's one thing if you are collecting antique vinyl from the 1930s or something. But collecting modern recordings just seems bizarre to me. I am not judging, I am just amused.

Also, Spotify doesn't give you the same quality sound as an audiofile collection of CDs, due to compression

<comment><USER4> > _I get that it 's fashion. It just surprises me, given there is no reason > for it, as far as the actual quality of the signal goes._

I think one way to see it is that it being in vinyl (with all the romantic, old-music-industry, analog etc ideas it conveys) is also part of the signal.

As in, the signal is not the pure musical signal, but also the cultural one (the vinyl being emotional, nostalgic, romanticized, fashionished, fetishised, etc).

> _Also, Spotify doesn 't give you the same quality sound as an audiofile > collection of CDs, due to compression_

That's just a matter of time and better broadband connections. For most people, given their speakers/headphones quality, it's more than enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vinyl is a fun format. I've been picking up records for listening recently. One fun thing I noticed is most records have some hand-written notes along the inside edge of the record. Usually some album ID code, maybe a date, or some other markings I can't identify.

When I first noticed these, I thought, wow, it's crazy that someone had to mark up all these individual records as they were pressed. I can't believe how long that must have taken. Then I realized, obviously, that the master record had the original markings, and that entire record was stamped into the production run, including those hand-written markings. So some record engineer's handwriting survived onto thousands or millions of duplicated records, decades into the future, into my living room, where I noticed them. Neat! I wonder who that guy was...

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The best part is in the experience.

I love finding old records that used to be my grandpa's. Seeing his handwriting on the records on liner notes makes me feel like i'm sharing the experience with him. Digital can never replicate that.

<comment><USER3> I picked up a bundle off craigslist from some 20-something guy a while ago, and a fair few of them have "Deb" scrawled on the cover and on some labels. All of the Deb albums are in great condition, some with the plastic wrap still on, slit to slide the record out, no dust, no scratches. I don't know who Deb is or was, but my thanks to her for taking care of her records!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "they looked like scrap metal to anybody but me"

What nonsense, I hope he was misquoted.. Like the linked video says, he bought them in Chicago from Joell Hays, another vinyl junkie (and all-around nice guy) that held on to them for a decade, but couldn't get the funds together to restore them all.

I can't understand why every story about vinyl's resurgence needs to make the story into some sort of mythic "rediscovery". My label's been putting out vinyl for years, the only difference is that now there's a 6-month waiting list at the plant. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I just bought a new record player - as an oldie I have over 200 vinyls.

Even in the few months since I decided to buy a replacement for my previous equipment I saw the number of models proliferate.

In the end I went for the Ion Air [1] - a turntable with USB and Bluetooth output, what a crazy idea!

They announced it at CES [2] and I have it on back order so I can't comment on its quality. But it also has line-in -> Bluetooth which was the final selling point for me. I already have a Sony BM10 [3] hooked up to my amp [4].

Even though I've been in tech since the 70's, it's still remarkable that my hi-fi stack is smaller than an 8 Track tape!

[1] [http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/airlp](http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/airlp)

[2] [http://www.ionaudio.com/news/press-releases/new-ion-air- lp-b...](http://www.ionaudio.com/news/press-releases/new-ion-air-lp-bluetooth- turntable-streams-albums-to-any-bluetooth-speaker)

[3] [http://www.aptx.com/product-low-latency/sony-bluetoothr- musi...](http://www.aptx.com/product-low-latency/sony-bluetoothr-music- receiver-bm10)

[4] [http://www.amazon.com/Danibos-TA2021B-Integrated-Tripath- Amp...](http://www.amazon.com/Danibos-TA2021B-Integrated-Tripath- Amplifier/dp/B00EZL8SMC)

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's an interesting submission about the last cassette factory (which is also having a resurgence): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197449)

Let me know if you have questions about the format, I run a small tape label (scalatapes.bandcamp.com).

<comment><USER11> The idea of recording on cassette has always appealed to me as a fairly cheap and easy way to record analog tracks at home with some of the older cheap 4-8 track sound boards. I think the limitations I'd set for myself and the change in my workflow vs a laptop with a DAW would have a pretty drastic change on the way my music turns out.

Do you find this is why most artists first choose to record to cassette, or is it because of other things like easier/cheaper distribution?

<comment><USER10> There's a couple of reasons:

1\. A lot artists don't incorporate cassette into the workflow much. Usually people do what they do with a DAW or go to a studio to record. Cassette is _mostly_ used as medium (like CD, vinyl etc). But yes, I do have friends who record directly on cassette. This will sound very rough though (depending on setup), too much even for some lo-fi aficionados.

2\. Hipster points. Tapes are very "in" right now. Don't disregard this point. Just like networking is sometimes seen as a sacrifice of your "humanity", so is hipsterism. This is not so. Like it or not, sometimes it's important to go with the flow and play the field.

3\. Easy/cheap to make. You do have to record in real-time which sucks when duplicating tapes, but other than that it's way easier to do a few tapes than to go vinyl.

4\. People like supporting artists. This can be hard. Many shows are free, everyone downloads, so tapes, even if they can't be played at home, are a way to show your appreciation.

5\. Sound. The sound is to me the most important part. Cassette can sound just as good as vinyl with the proper transfer, and introduces some great artifacts like a smoother high-end and a bit of saturation.

6\. Professionalism. If you've spent 20-50 hours to create artwork, order tapes, duplicate them (or get someone else to do it) etc etc you show that you're serious about shit. It's a way to create your brand (of course this goes for vinyl etc as well).

7\. I'd just like to copy Coldpie's point in regards to vinyl further down in this thread. Go upvote him: "...for some there's more to listening to music than just listening to music. Going to the shelf and looking over the albums, remembering when you bought each album, who you've played them for, things that were happening while you listened to them. Looking at the cover art or the silly liner art or notes[1]. Noticing markings (or smells...) from previous owners and wondering about them, what they were doing when they bought or listened to the album. Physically placing the album on the turntable and aligning the needle. Listening to the lead-in scratches as you adjust the volume before the music kicks in. Sometimes you get silly lead-out loops[2]. It's just a fun, physical way to listen to music."

<comment><USER11> Interesting. All very different reasons to choose tape than what I'd personally do.

I guess the difference is that I make music as a hobby, and do it almost entirely for myself.

<comment><USER10> I do have plenty of friends who use tape purely in creative capacities i.e. they DJ on tape or do experimental reel-to-reel cassette setups for live shows.

Personally I'd actually love to own a 4-track and do some solo stuff for the same reasons you described in your original post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The argument between Vinyl / Cassette / CD / MP3; I file under "narcissim of small differences". As I get older I find that emphasis on mindful listening reveals a richer range of sounds than any music source is able to match.

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

<comment><USER13> Wow. Never read that explanation. Explains all of audiophilia, and most other 'philias.

Mine's better because it's (slightly) different than yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, I totally see why uncompressed music sounds better than compressed music ( MP3, Spotify, Pandora, etc. ) But, I don't understand the point of vinyl vs CDs. Nyquist theorem says you can fully recover an analog signal with digital sampling, if you sample frequently enough. So, there is no reason to have analog music. Am I missing something ?

<comment><USER14> I'm someone that buys quite a few vinyl records, and almost all of my reasons are psychological. I like supporting artists, and buying records give me a way to do that and get something physical in return. I like having the big album art and putting on a record makes me much more likely to listen to entire albums instead of just random songs. Plus, putting on a record is an intentional act which puts me in a good mental state for listening to music. With digital download codes, I have no real reason to buy CDs as a good percentage of bands offer their music digitally in any format I'd want. CDs would just be something I'd burn to an mp3 player and throw in a closet somewhere.

Plus, they're fun to collect. A lot of releases will have different colored vinyl or special added features to the album.

<comment><USER15> > putting on a record makes me much more likely to listen to entire albums > instead of just random songs

Precisely this. "That difficult third track on the B side"...which turns out to be a total gem, yet might go unlistened and never appreciated.

<comment><USER6> agreed. But why Vinyl vs CDs ? I mean, listening to the whole album is just as good with CDs or better ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> another interesting read about the German vinyl industry:

[http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/hamburg/article126865000/D...](http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/hamburg/article126865000/Die- Rueckkehr-der-Schallplatte.html)

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.welt.de%2Fprint%2Fdie_welt%2Fhamburg%2Farticle126865000%2FDie- Rueckkehr-der-Schallplatte.html&edit-text=&act=url)

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, you'd think the NYT would work on an iPad, but after every scroll, it jumps back to the top. I wonder if that obscure news agency would consider testing against my little-used platform

<comment><USER18> Works fine in Chrome on Android, IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Opera, try another browser.

<comment><USER19> Works fine in mobile Safari over here, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, I suppose that vinyl could bring back the idea of paying for music.

<comment><USER21> The vinyl is a niche market. Very few people buy vinyls or even have a turntable at home. There used to be a market for djs but now it's gone, and the market for non professional is really tiny, it's not a viable option for independent artists , no matter what that article says. No they have a better shot at releasing their music for free on youtube, get some fame then get well paid gigs. Because the recording industry itself is dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Frenzy" is overstating it a bit (linkbait much?)</comment>


The importance of upvoting - <AUTHOR> https://www.julian.com/blog/upvote <comment><USER2> Consider two users: Bob browses HN and upvotes about 1000 articles a month. Jill, on the other hand, upvotes only articles she considers to be exceptional and upvotes about 1 article a month.

Should Bob have 1000 times more influence than Jill? Personally, I'd like to see what was so special about that one article Jill voted for, but a naive upvote mechanic considers it just a single vote, and is not noteworthy when compared with Bob's thousands upon thousands of votes. It would be nice is Jill's single vote was equal to 1000 votes from Bob.

Do any systems like this exist? It sounds good in theory, but I wonder how it would stand up to abuse?

<comment><USER3> If Bob is upvoting good articles his votes should count.

The problem on HN isn't that many people upvote, but that some people upvote bad submissions.

It might be useful to look at people who regularly upvote bad submissions and down-weight their votes.

<comment><USER4> That's how digg worked, it did not work well for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the time I don't upvote because the link isn't good enough. It's very rare that I see a link I think is really worth people's time - maybe once or twice a week.

I could lower my bar, but the real problem is the binary nature of the vote. There's content that I really want more of, and then there's content that's better than average. If I vote both with my single vote, I'm not delivering the right level of information. It's almost like I want a supervote that can only be applied once a day, or once a week, that's worth more than one normal vote.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just tried digging for examples of supervotes in the wild. The idea is intriguing.

Couldn't find an aggregator that does it. Interestingly, however, it's a common voting tactic on reality competition TV (e.g. The Voice, American Idol) [1].

Does anyone have examples of supervotes in action for online communities?

[1] [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=supervote+network)

<comment><USER6> There's a Discourse-type thing (it's not Discourse) that gives you upto 3 votes on any one topic, and I think a daily maximum, that perhaps increases with user trust - but I don't remember the name.

I see it from time to time used as a forum or feature request tracker.

<comment><USER7> It's called uservoice: [https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-product- management/s...](https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-product- management/suggestions/2300-per-user-vote-limits)

I would love to see this concept applied to news aggregators

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe the author is unaware of the 1% rule on internet culture and argues that people shouldn't follow it. Making an impassioned plea isn't going to do much. The internet is full of people that don't want to interact and only consume . [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))

<comment><USER9> Isn't the more significant question whether the 1% rule actually has to remain valid forever? Is it a law of nature or is it more learned behaviour? Why is there no 1% rule for elections? Because people have been taught that it is important to vote. People on the Internet have not been taught the same thing. The author suggests that this should change. One blog post of course won't do that. But you gotta start somewhere.

<comment><USER10> I think there is something like a 1% rule for elections.

small group runs for office

larger group helps run the campaign (volunteers, etc)

larger group donates

larger group votes

even larger group doesn't vote at all

As the amount of effort to participate decreases, the amount of people involved rises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know, this seems a bit like taunting Goodhart's law? [1] I'm thankful that voting on Hacker News works as well as it does; maybe we shouldn't mess with it.

The Hacker News moderators are doing what they can to provide a quality website. To the extent your voting helps them achieve their goals, it's useful. On the other hand, encouraging more noise voters won't improve things; it will mean that quality submissions need more votes to break through the clutter, and the moderators will have to look for alternate ranking signals.

Still, it probably wouldn't hurt to look at the 'new' page more often.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think this is a misidentification of the true problem.

We're dependent on voting to determine "best" or "most important". Even if the sampling were statistically valid, populism does not equate to quality.

We should have automated systems for scoring articles on vectors of likely importance, relevance, accuracy and literacy so we can apply these to aggregators in conjunction with basic populism.

Because populism is easily gamed and has many known degenerate cases that are not fixed by throwing more populism at it.

<comment><USER8> I think you are presupposing that automated systems for articles can't be gamed . Google has to constantly update their search API to combat this .

<comment><USER12> Absolutely, it can all be gamed and any approach will have cases where it fails. That's why a balanced set of approaches using a handful of very different metrics is important – and possibly offering users the ability to browse by each metric separately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It feels nice to spot something on the new list, give it its first upvote, and then the next day see it on the front page.

I've also seen a lot of interesting stuff on /newest that never makes it to the front page. Sometimes stuff that I personally find useful, even if it isn't relevant to the community at large.

Also, pro tip: page 2 has new posts with a handful of upvotes where one or two more votes can easily propel them to the front page. You can make a difference!

<comment><USER14> True -- at the right threshold one upvote can mean the difference between a post sinking without a trace or making it to the front page and gaining many more votes and views. In that way one upvote can trigger much more than 100 views.

<comment><USER15> "The importance of a single vote is easy to illustrate: On Hacker News, a popular post can receive 500 votes, which can generate ~50,000 visits depending on how interesting the title is. (I'm pulling data from Algolia.) Using simple math, this equates to"

Not even the half of it. I ran an experiment on /newest once, and just a single random upvote (mine) had a substantial effect on the odds that a submission would reach the front page, and since a front page appearance is worth anywhere from 5-20,000 pageviews, my single upvote was driving thousands of pageviews! And I've noticed when submitting my links and then browsing /newest for other meritorious links, this phenomenon doesn't appear to have gone away.

<comment><USER16> That's what I was talking about here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13677501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13677501)

Same thing seemed to happen to me whether coincidentally a bunch of simultaneous votes or some algorithm based on karma. I know I was more careful with upvotes on new stories afterward.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's possible my high-karma makes my votes worth more. In retrospect, I probably should've done it with a lightly-used account. On the other hand, the implications for me are still the same - I know I take more time to do upvoting on /newest than I did before!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just sent 100 more visitors to your website. (And it took way more than half a second - I had to read the entire post before doing so.)

Btw, tldr; "I know it's fun to dismiss social networks as frivolous, _but link aggregators are a special type of social network that we should value higher._ "

</comment><comment><USER18> I always felt "down-voting" should cost something. Maybe 1 karma/point/etc. so that people who would down-vote should feel they are invested enough to do so. As it is right now, down voting is too easy and detached to other's thoughts even after reading it.

Fundamentally, this is to create some value towards the point system so that people would put more thought into posting as well as down-voting. If someone wants the ability to down-vote, then they should write meaningful comments to gather the karma needed to do so.

<comment><USER19> I entirely disagree. Down-voting is a defense of the commons. The best way to teach us not to post shit, is for our shit to be down-voted mercilessly, with no explanation. I've got over 14k internet points, and I get down-voted every week at least, usually without discussion. I appreciate that, because it helps me learn to contribute better, without sucking me into a black hole of personality conflict. Every down-vote represents someone who was annoyed by what I posted, and we all benefit by reducing annoyance here. Truly unfair down-votes are typically corrected (...and then some) by up-votes from other users.

One probably doesn't understand why one is down-voted, the first time it happens. One probably doesn't understand every down-vote one gets, even with long experience. Over time, however, one gets a better and better idea about what we need here, and what we don't. It's even better if it's unconscious, and we edit our posts to be more "HN-style" without paying attention to why a particular expression conforms to that or not. This process is only disrupted by lengthy back-and-forth discussion of who said what and why and who interpreted that how and why.

Try not to think of down-votes as a reflection of your character or worth as a human. Rather, they are a snap judgment of a single verbal expression, made at a single point in time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure I _totally_ buy the concept that 'good' up/down-voting saves people time. I rarely come to hacker news thinking "I'll just check the top n posts, filtering out posts below a certain score threshold"; typically, I'm thinking "What are the posts I can spend X time reading instead of doing something else?".

</comment><comment><USER21> It's very ok to abstain if you have no informed opinion or interest.

The flaws of the system won't be fixed by gaming it even more.

That this type of information retrieval is portrayed as mankind's last hope, makes me miss _Google Reader_ even more than already.

For lack of an better alternative HN is more of a baseline I check my twitter feed against.

</comment><comment><USER22> Amusingly, more people than normal who've read the blog post are going to upvote this post.

<comment><USER23> Same for your comment. :)

<comment><USER16> Original comment was it was oldest one 2nd from the bottom. HN voting couldn't be that bad. Situation changed by time it refreshed lol. Maybe just cuz it's a recent topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think I agree with the sentiment, but try to ignore the statistics.

I think the average user is more than 10x as likely to click a 1k link than 100pt.

Personally, if it's massively upvoted I'll click and skim even if it doesn't sound like it will interest me - if it's that important to the community, I ' _should_ ', right?

<comment><USER7> I agree, sometimes I think "how on hell this can have X invited?" then when I read it it's usually more interesting than the title and domain make it sound (and/or comments are where's it's interesting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I feel that ranks should be a combination of explicit and implicit activity.

If a story link is followed a certain number of times, if a certain amount of time is spent on a page, etc. these indicators might contribute to an "implicit upvote" for a story or contribute in some way to its rank regardless of explicit up-votes. It's also really important to have a good way to recognize and consolidate duplicates and reward them equally.

Activity in a comment subtree should also implicitly increase the rank of a comment. I have occasionally seen comments that were mysteriously not upvoted even once, despite spawning multiple levels of subtree discussion; in such case, isn't the comment implicitly "more valuable" by creating a lengthy discussion, even if no one ever explicitly upvoted it?

<comment><USER25> No, a lack of upvote on a comment usually means the comment was wrong according to someone and it spawned an argument. I definitely don't want those cases ranked higher than good discussions where all commenters are receiving votes.

Similarly, an article that someone spends 10 minutes reading and then doesn't upvote (or comments without upvote) means it was probably a massive waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Funny enough to shadowfacts comment, I think when you remind people that you can share/upvote/promote, you generally get a higher return rate. At least, that's what common wisdom seems to say. For example, if at the end of a blog post you say "tell us your story about x" where it relates to the post, you're more likely to get responses than if you didn't. This of course doesn't help bad content that you don't reach the end of.

</comment><comment><USER26> No. Don't even try to guilt me into action.

The current landscape may favor you more if I take certain actions, but that does NOT obligate me at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why haven't any link aggregator sites tried automating the voting system?

Take something like view time and commenting/opening the article as a vote and perhaps still have a flag function to help remove off topic or illegal content.

Manual voting seems like such a ham-fisted approach at finding what people want, and it disproportionately rewards those who vote over more passive observers.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe I am out of date, but to the best of my knowledge, with my usage pattern I _can 't_ upvote in a meaningful way.

I am assuming it's still correct that upvoting on /newest is the most effective (or only) way to do it.

Just looked this up, I joined this site 2061 days ago, before that I was a logged out reader for a while. I don't think I visited /newest more than 10 times - I only read via RSS, and usually only once or twice per week - skimming over a lot, reading the comments for many - usually 100 - 300 posts at a time. If HN ever stops providing a RSS feed, I am probably gone anyway.

This is not a critique towards HN, but the OP maybe takes his own usage pattern as the default (maybe it is, I wouldn't know).

</comment><comment><USER29> There's no evidence supporting the idea that every upvote brings additional 100 visitors to the upvoted link. Even if there's such evidence, it's not immediately clear from the article. The author doesn't consider the fact that some upvotes don't increase the point counter. There are other major flaws. The article doesn't disclose methodology used to obtain the results. It just makes the claim that an article with 500 points generates 50,000 visits, so every point is 100 visits, and expects us to believe it and take it as a fact. The author doesn't bother to prove that fact.

</comment><comment><USER16> There also seems to be a mechanism where high-karma users boost a story more than one point. It would support Julian's point even more. I was at one point just boosting stuff in New that I thought people would be interested in across various topics based on prior front page results.

<comment><USER30> _There also seems to be a mechanism where high-karma users boost a story more than one point_

I've never heard of such a thing. What makes you think high karma influences the value of a vote? Have the mods talked about it?

<comment><USER16> Ive noticed a link in new that stays at 1pt a while go up a ton after I upvote it. This means either it stayed dead followed by a bunch of simultaneous upvotes or the site gives extra weight to high karma users. I dont upvote enough stories to be sure which it is. I just see points go up tens of votes second I upvote most submissions.

<comment><USER30> Most things in new don't get any votes at all so you're going to see lots of volatility there (nor does the ranking there matter much). The ranking computation is also not necessarily instant although maybe it is, I don't know. But I don't think this is any evidence of high karma users having some kind of supervote. If you could move items on the front page with a single vote (or with your mind), that would be another thing altogether.

<comment><USER16> Your last sentence happened a few times. It's what originally got me wondering. Let's also remember they have routines looking for people gaming the system. That could affect both timing and what effect a karma boost would have in visible results after a vote refreshes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Upvoting on Facebook definitely does impact distribution. More likes translate to more people seeing it in their feed. This of course has a cumulative effect and leads to more re-shares. Virality is highly dependent on initial likes.

</comment><comment><USER32> why not get 1 upvote automatically just upon opening/viewing? (please forgive me because i do not understand the entire process(and did not search to find if there is one))

<comment><USER33> An upvote is a recommendation, which should be based on reading the submission. The upvote should ideally come _after_ opening/viewing if the submission is good enough. (Am I understanding your comment correctly?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For _members_ , change HN to display new posts as the default page, replacing the "new" navigation item with "top"

</comment><comment><USER35> indifference _is_ voting.

</comment><comment><USER36> Link agregators have a free rider problem. Just like democracies without mandatory voting.

<comment><USER37> Those two are not even remotely connected and to claim a lack mandatory voting implies a free rider problem is ridiculous.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is a good history of USENET and/or BBSs? - <AUTHOR> I have very fond memories of participating in discussions on USENET twenty-odd years ago and want to read more about it and the people behind it.<p>What books/articles/docs/hypertexts would you recommend? <comment><USER2> _BBS: The Documentary_

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com)

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

[https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary](https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I remember seeing this in the textfiles.com footer but haven't ever gotten around to buying a copy. I'll put it on the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good question. I don't know of any. I'd like to read something about the ultimate demise of Usenet. I mean, "because of spam" is the easy answer, but why didn't anyone squelch the spam? Some mention should be made of Uunet's "pink" contracts, but there had to be other providers that looked the other way for a little short-term gain.</comment>


Forcing Gzip Compression - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/12/velocity-forcing-gzip-compression/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious what proxies or antivirus software would mangle HTTP headers to break gzip compression. I want to avoid buying them, or anything made by the companies responsible for them, ever.

Does anybody know?

<comment><USER3> Proxies and antivirus software are the scourge of the production website. The absolute scourge.

I cant count the number of times one of our clients has complained that something has broken, accused us of being useless because we cant fix it, and we subsequently discover they are running some ancient stinky version of MS proxy on a Windows 98 box somewhere.

Happens ALL THE TIME.

Ignoring cache headers as well - that's a great one. Tell the browser never to remember the page, but it goes ahead and remembers it for the next two weeks. Marvellous.

Yep, I hate that shit more than IE6. At least you know where you are with IE6.

<comment><USER4> There was a time, before AJAX, when Norton Antivirus thought it was a _great_ idea to protect users by rewriting javascript on the pages according to god knows what rules. I was working on a website which used a pretty complex javascript client, and had users which were... on the low end of the computer- saviness scale.

The only advice that worked for these users was "disable Norton AV completely". Good times. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First @souders gets to the front page of TechMeme, now he's on the front page of Hacker News. He's on a roll!

BTW, if you are interested in web performance, we could use your vote for this StackExchange community proposal: [http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6960/web- performan...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6960/web-performance)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know how to get off-the-shelf servers like Apache or nginx to serve gzipped content based on a cookie and hot the Accept-Encoding header?

<comment><USER7> This should work inside Apache 2:

      SetEnvIf Cookie (.*)force_gzip(.*) force-gzip

Any request with the "force-gzip" variable set in the request env will ignore the Accept headers and send deflated content to the browser.</comment></comment>


The Abolition of Work (1985) - <AUTHOR> http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844042)

</comment><comment><USER3> Besides moon colonies and flying cars, this is another of the predictions of how the future would like that has turned out quite different than what was expected.

It was supposed that we would work less, either involuntarily because the bad robots and computers took our jobs and made us obsolete or voluntarily, because automation would free us of doing the grinding work. Ironically both scenarios somewhat came true but it didn't result in less work.

Doing work because you want to and not because you have to should be the goal. But currently I don't see this happen for the majority of the people.

If we had an unconditional basic income, we would be much closer to this ideal but I am not sure how feasible it is at all and also how disrupting to our society as a whole the introduction would be.

</comment><comment><USER4> In such a world, one stands to gain so much by being willing to work.

And thus, the 'modern' world is born.

</comment><comment><USER5> Keynes also drew some similar conclusions.

Link to a PDF of his essay from 1930 on the matter is here:

[http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/up...](http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/upload/Intro_Session1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Call me crazy if you like, but it seems like this article disappeared from the HN homepage a little too quickly. I know this can happen with stories linked to some sites, is primitivism.com one of them?

</comment><comment><USER7> One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.

"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"

"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."

The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust. "Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

There's a time for work and a time for play.

<comment><USER8> That's cute of you, but the point of the essay is that we're not working for food anymore. We're working to sustain the system of work and to buy iPhones.</comment></comment>


Meltdown-Spectre: Malware is already being tested by attackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/meltdown-spectre-malware-is-already-being-tested-by-attackers/ <comment><USER2> Here's how it can be exploited:

A popup that says "Intel has detected your computer is vulnerable to Meltdown. Click here to install the fix."

<comment><USER3> One drawback to giving branding to these otherwise complex and obscure vulnerabilities. It wouldn't be so effective to say "Intel has detected your computer is vulnerable to a cache side channel attack. Click here to install the fix."

<comment><USER4> As I sardonically stated on Twitter, it's not a real vulnerability until it has a catchy name and logo. It's the newest node.js hipster pentesting tech.

<comment><USER5> It's as useless as bashing node.js in an unrelated conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can someone please help me clear something up, as I have not been able to figure it out for sure myself...

If I understand correctly, it is possible to perform these exploits with JavaScript. What about without?

Let's say I set javascript.enabled=false, is it possible to do break out of the browser's sandbox with just HTML5 + CSS? I have read that today it is "Turing-complete"...

<comment><USER7> I understand the only way it can be exploited in javascript relies on access to a very precise timing API, which is trivial for browser vendors to make less precise. I wouldn't worry too much about javascript at least as far as this vulnerability is concerned.

<comment><USER8> Because of javascript's wide surface area, it's nigh-impossible for browser manufactures to be _sure_ that they've disabled indirect access to timing data.

The original proof of concept didn't even use a "precise timing API", it features `while(true){ i++; }` to increment a counter, and pulled timing information out of that side-channel.

It is trivial for the browser vendors to disable access to a specific API, but we're in for a game of whack-a-mole.

Dismiss the exploitability of javascript at your own peril - sure, WebWorkers and SharedArrayBuffer are this week's blocked timing attack, but smart money says there are other ways to get timing information that are unpatched.

<comment><USER9> The while true used a very specific memory API that was disabled in all browsers the week the bug was disclosed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've assumed since the exploits were published that viable attacks existed to exploit them. Does that make me too cynical?

Of what advantage is it for attackers to publish that they are using a particular exploit? Especially due to the nature of these exploits, they would more than likely be silent attacks.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, the white papers are pretty clear on how to replicate it, though it seemed it would still take no small effort to get it working at a higher level (IIRC they used kernel modules to pull it off).

Here's the meltdown repo from the paper if your interested: [https://github.com/IAIK/meltdown](https://github.com/IAIK/meltdown)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could someone with php and a remote page reloader access data in the other shared hosts? I was told a shared hosts computer can sometimes have thousands of web accounts and domains. Seems like a limitless opportunity for stealing backend information. I hope I'm wrong.

<comment><USER13> You're almost certainly right. And a lot of those hosts do not reliably do a good job of staying current on patching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Infosec experts have pointed out this article contains some inaccuracies: [https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2018/02/there-no- evidence...](https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2018/02/there-no-evidence- wild-malware-using-meltdown-or-spectre/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Counterpoint: "There is no evidence in-the-wild malware is using Meltdown or Spectre" [https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2018/02/there-no- evidence...](https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2018/02/there-no-evidence- wild-malware-using-meltdown-or-spectre/)

<comment><USER16> >> the Flash Player patch Adobe will release next week.

Part of me thinks you could read that sentence this week, next week, a month or 6 months from now and it will still hold true...

<comment><USER17> that would only stay true until was it 2020 where they stop flash player support

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > A successful attack could expose passwords and other secrets.

Perhaps this is a good moment for the IT-world to start eradicating the use of passwords.

EDIT: Of course this will not solve every problem related to these vulnerabilities, but it might go a long way, especially if possible exploits are taken into account when designing new systems.

<comment><USER19> And replace it with what exactly? Physical devices - Yubikey - are a neat idea, but not everything supports them. Biometrics is not password, that's a username replacement.

Also, it doesn't matter. Passwords, secret hashes, ssh keys; anything can be accidentally acquired.

<comment><USER20> Exactly, fingerprints (and more generally biometrics) are usernames, not passwords.

<comment><USER4> Fingerprints are not passwords or usernames. They're another form of authentication.

Remember: MFA is a two-or-more combination of: something you know (password, pin, etc.), something you have (keycard, token, fob, etc.), something you are (fingerprint, iris scan, voice recognition, etc.), and potentially even somewhere you are (geolocation).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nock: Connect with Engineers and Co-Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.letsnock.com <comment><AUTHOR> If you're looking for freelance work, Co-Founders, or simply want to network in the startup/tech community, sign up to guarantee your spot for our Beta release.

HN: We'd love to hear from you. What has been your main source (website, event, etc) of networking in the startup community?</comment>


Ultrafast single TCP packet audio/visual experience - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/diracdeltas/FastestWebsiteEver <comment><USER3> For those you are wondering, this is a webserver that serves an HTML page in a single TCP packet. I guess ≤ 1500 bytes to avoid fragmentation - shows as 1.1KB in Chrome's network view. The HTML contains embedded JavaScript that runs a simple demo with animated ASCII and playing a LOUD changing audio tone.

You can visit the demonstration website here: [http://packet.city/](http://packet.city/)

You can see a screenshot of the demo here: [http://www.p01.org/128b_raytraced_checkboard/](http://www.p01.org/128b_raytraced_checkboard/)

<comment><USER4> The limit is 1460 - the IP and TCP headers occupy 40 bytes.

Out of those another 63 are consumed by the HTTP headers.

The full TCP payload is only 1226 bytes though, and the full HTTP payload 1163 bytes. The decoded HTML document is 1546 bytes.

<comment><USER5> IP header has flexible size, up to 60 bytes: [https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6855/...](https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6855/maximum- ipv4-header-size)

<comment><USER6> Sure but on the actual internet how often are IP headers larger than 20 bytes because options are turned on? Not very often. The 20 bytes each for TCP and IPv4 is a pretty good assumption.

From the paper "IP Options are not an option" which is good quick read:

"We have studied the dependability of IP options-enabled network packets in the Internet. We found that overall, approximately half of Internet paths drop packets with options"[1]

[1] [https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2005/EECS-2005-...](https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2005/EECS-2005-24.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Thanks, that's good to know. I've wondered if these options are used in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pro-tip: If you are doing additive synthesis and want to stack sine-waves in a harmonic series, please scale each successive n harmonic to an amplitude of 1/n. It creates a much more tolerable experience.

<comment><USER8> also maybe the title could have [LOUD!!!] or something like that. I didn't realize my system could make a noise that loud with vol at 50%.

<comment><USER9> I set my system's volume to the lowest possible value before mute (1/64) and it was still extremely loud and unpleasant. I'm actually impressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi, this website is really loud and if you are using Headphones I would mute it or turn them down a bunch. It also will autoplay the sound.

<comment><USER11> ultrafast and ultra annoying.

<comment><USER12> ...it did say "audio/visual" experience...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting to see DEFLATE over GZIP here, as it is something I used to recommend maybe 7 or so years ago. I collected results for several years and began seeing more browsers dropping support for raw deflate (or switching to zlib deflate).

I accidentally let my hosting account expire years ago and lost the server code and db for it, but managed to pull the HTML from the way back machine. I've backed up the results here: [https://davidmurdoch.com/compression-tests- results/](https://davidmurdoch.com/compression-tests-results/). It's all pretty outdated now, but rather fun to look at.

Anyone know if this is using raw DEFLATE or ZLIB (HTTP 1.1 DEFLATE)?

</comment><comment><USER14> Response headers:

       HTTP/1.1 200 k
       Content-Length: 1163
       content-encoding: deflate

I guess the '200 k' instead of '200 OK' saves an extra byte! :)

However, since they don't do any HTTP keep-alives (the connection sends a HTTP response and closes before you even send it anything), couldn't they save some space by dropping the Content-Length? It's an optional header.

<comment><USER15> Not unless they switch to http/1.0. in 1.1 you need one of: content length, connection close, chunked encoding.

<comment><USER14> True, their server should be returning HTTP/1.0. It's a shame that you can't get away with replacing the initial HTTP/1.0 with HTTP/1 and shave off another couple of bytes :)

Edit: I wonder if you could go full retro and just return a HTTP/0.9 response (no HTTP headers at all, just the page contents). If they then put back the DEFLATE/GZIP header bits, _perhaps_ a browser would spot that the contents are compressed and do the decompression...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://packet.city/](http://packet.city/)

summary: A demo scene page that is smaller than a single IP frame and uses some flags to avoid other round trips.

view-source:[http://packet.city/](http://packet.city/)

The page itself and view-source only work on some browsers. Use wireshark etc to see what it actually does.

<comment><USER17> Wiresharked the thing. Here's the packet sequence it reported:

        -> DNS query A
        -> DNS query AAAA
        <- DNS reply A
        <- DNS reply AAAA
        -> TCP SYN
        <- TCP SYN,ACK
        -> TCP ACK
        -> HTTP GET
        <- HTTP reply <= That's the content!
        -> TCP ACK
        <- TCP FIN,ACK
        -> TCP FIN,ACK
        <- TCP RST
        <- TCP RST

So, the full traffic is 14 packet, all small (DNS, TCP handshaking) except the one HTTP reply packet containing the full website.

<comment><USER18> It's still pretty sad that so many roundtrips are necessary...

One could imagine a merged DNS and TCP syn packet, which goes to a DNS server who converts it to a TCP packet, and gets forwarded to the origin server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >the greatest website to ever fit in a single TCP packet

a blank page would be an improvement - that was seizure inducing

</comment><comment><USER20> CAUTION: This is just about popped my speakers and my eardrums, this is pretty obnoxious behaviour regardless of the technical cleverness going on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does the high pitched sound make my Amazon Echo order something?

<comment><USER22> You'll know in a day or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This will upset any cat in the vicinity

<comment><USER24> Confirmed, my cat freaked out.

<comment><USER25> same here - <USER2>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They spend nearly 75% of the page weight on that party parrot image - if they dropped that, the rest of the page could probably be a lot more impressive (and less screechy!)

<comment><USER27> Wow, 25% of page weight wasted on extraneous cruft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Also ultraloud. Turn down the volume before clicking.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks like the browser spends most of the loading time resolving DNS.

<comment><USER30> The website should fit in the DNS response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What is it? Nothing happens on mobile Safari.

<comment><USER32> Nor mobile chrome.

Guess I'll have to check it out later.

<comment><USER33> Works for me in mobile Chrome 63 and in mobile Firefox 55.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My cat had opinions about the sound this website makes.

</comment><comment><USER35> Nice work. I guess it'd just as quick if it sent up to ~4kB - that's the normal TCP initial window? [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3390](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3390)

<comment><USER36> At least in Linux, ICWND is set to 10 now: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6928](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6928)

<comment><USER35> Hm. I what the distribution of latency vs bandwidth is like, whether 14kB or 2 round trips takes longer for most people?

<comment><USER37> Probably the two round trips. A semi-nearby server might be 50ms per round trip, and in that case any connection beating 1mbps can transfer 14KB in less than two round trips. A server could easily be 150-250ms away and make those round trips far worse.

<comment><USER18> It also depends on the buffer size.

Some routers might only buffer 1 millisecond of line-rate data or less. If that's the case, that initial congestion window of 10 could overflow the buffer, causing loss and a much more costly double-round-trip to resend.

<comment><USER37> 1 millisecond of buffering is geat on a high speed core link. But if you apply that to a 5 megabit connection you've basically decided you'll only buffer one packet. A slow-speed bottleneck link needs to have more capacity. The charts in [http://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2011/2011-right- siz...](http://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2011/2011-right-sizing-cable- modem-buffers-for-maximum-application-performance/download) suggest that 64KB is often a good buffer size for end links, and that can absorb 10 packets fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> All hail the rise of the Single Packet Web App.

<comment><USER39> Wanted: Web developer with 10+ years SPWA experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How is it that loud? It's not tolerable even on minimum settings on my iMac.

<comment><USER39> Tip: Shift + Option + Volume(up/down) adjusts volume by 1/4 of a bar.

<comment><USER41> Wow. I have been using OS X for quite a long time and this is the first i'm hearing of it! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Desktop Safari: Can't find variable: AudioContext

No room for vendor specific prefixes :|

</comment><comment><USER43> Why is the tcp socket set to busy poll for 1 microsecond?

<comment><USER30> Web Scale?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Now I'm curious, could one minimize this further? As in, making Chrome accept UDP to get rid of SYN/ACK etc.

</comment><comment><USER45> Been years since I went through Beej's socket programming tutorial but I still recognize his code ;)

</comment><comment><USER46> Nice. I was just reviewing some TCP fundamentals with my friend for his class, specifically sliding windows and window control, etc.

It's as if they took what we were just reading in a compsci textbook for class and directly monetized it.

</comment><comment><USER47> It might be fast but does it handle load? Did you try to benchmark it with a service like [https://ddostest.me](https://ddostest.me)

</comment><comment><USER48> Is there a breakdown of the expanded HTML/JS?

</comment><comment><USER49> Any direct link? Do I need to build this mofo?</comment>


Ask HN: Who will acquire GitLab? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes when a high-profile startup is acquired for a premium, its competitors are also acquired. With the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft, who will rush to acquire GitLab? <comment><USER2> Atlassian naturally.

<comment><USER3> Please no.

<comment><USER4> Honest question: what's wrong with Atlassian? They're the only bootstrapped company in the space, but for some reason HN dislikes them.

<comment><USER5> Maybe because unlike Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. many HNers are forced to use this software at work. Other than that it's just another quirky but useful bit of bloatware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ashley Madison

</comment><comment><USER6> Google

<comment><USER6> I was close: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238911)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon

</comment><comment><USER8> Baidu

</comment><comment><USER9> Yahoo

</comment><comment><USER10> Facebook</comment>


Moneyball for Cattle - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/moneyball-cattle-creating-american-steak-090014061.html <comment><USER2> Moneyball IMDB: "Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's successful attempt to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players."

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/)</comment>


Founder's block on choosing a name? Try DARE. - <AUTHOR> http://dare.wisc.edu/?q=node/163

<comment><AUTHOR> These are 100 selected entries, if you want more, they've published four volumes, the fifth one is on the way. Some I thought were good: futz, pilancillo, pipjenny, schnibble, izzard (the really good ones, I'm keeping to myself!)

</comment><comment><USER2> This could be fun! The next Foursquare: Pelota!</comment>


Ask HN: Strictly business question – how a Trump impeachment impacts business? - <AUTHOR> Really hoping the personal opinions and polarity can be avoided as I ask this question. Many of my clients started investing heavily when Trump was elected. Some were avid supporters. Others simply felt a pro-business environment justified additional hiring, spending, etc. Setting aside the many ways in which he has/may have offended or enacted bad policy... how might the shock and tumult of impeachment impact your business, if at all? <comment><USER2> An impeachment is not a conviction. Bill Clinton was impeached, and that doesn't seem to have hit the economy particularly hard.

A conviction, now, that might be different. The best comparison in modern history might be to Nixon's resignation.</comment>


Xobni for Blackberry Launches (with really cool demo video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.xobni.com/mobile

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know if Xobni has been updated on Outlook?

I used to love the program until one day it crashed my outlook, as well as someone I recommended the program to (made me look horrible). It turns out xobni works great as long as you don't have too many emails per day. And judging by the way it slowed down my outlook, I'm hesitant to install it on my blackberry.

</comment><comment><USER3> That was a phenomenal demo video. Anyone know what agency put it together?

</comment><comment><USER4> I bought it but I'm afraid to run it. Does it send any of my data to the server? I wish apps would make that clear.

<comment><USER5> Did you buy Xobni One? If not, it runs 100% locally. If you did pay for Xobni One, then your data is backed up to our servers (and linked with your Xobni for Outlook, if you use that).

Some requests are made to FB and Linkedin to link profile photos and title to contacts...otherwise, no contact with the internet is needed.

<comment><USER4> Every time I view a contact, it talks to a domain such as facebook.mobileclient.xobni.com or linkedin2.mobileclient.xobni.com. Am I correct in guessing that these are indexes of the respective sites and that identifying info about my contacts is being sent?</comment></comment></comment>


How Early Stage VCS Decide Where to Invest - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/how-early-stage-vcs-decide-where-invest/ <comment><AUTHOR> Relevant to recent discussion on other threads about the difference between founders believing their own bullshit vs the Steve Jobs reality distortion field:

"VCs are trying to determine whether this founder will be able to create a compelling story around the company mission in order to attract great engineers, executives, sales and marketing people, etc... Will the leader walk through walls when the going gets tough—which it inevitably will in nearly all startups—and simply refuse to even consider quitting?

When Marc and Ben first started Andreessen Horowitz, they described this leadership capability as "egomaniacal." Their theory—notwithstanding the choice of words—was that to make the decision to be a founder (a job fraught with likely failure), an individual needed to be so confident in their abilities to succeed that they would border on being self-absorbed and egotistical.

You have to be partly delusional to start a company, given the low odds of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the face of a constant stream of doubters."</comment>


Task Ave. -- Location-Aware Task Management - <AUTHOR> http://www.taskave.com

<comment><AUTHOR> A bit of a shameless plug for the iPhone app I've been working on with a team for the last three months. We launched just yesterday and would love some feedback.

<comment><USER2> I've been looking for an app like this for 2 years! I haven't tried it out yet, but I wanted to ask if it lets you choose a type of location, and not just a specific location. For example, can it remind me whenever I'm within range of ANY Costco to buy AMC movie tickets? Or do I have to pick one Costco?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at the moment, but it's a feature we're looking at adding in a future update. You aren't the only person to bring that up.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> I seriously thought of making this app myself a while back, and came up with a list of features I would include. Here are a few others that come to mind.

Multiple locations per reminder - e.g. notify me when there is a Bank of America and a post office within walking distance of each other.

Date/location reminder - e.g. notify me if I pass a Bank of America during the last 5 days of the month.

Time/location reminder - e.g. only notify me if I pass Bank of America during bank hours</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fold N Fly: paper airplane designs - <AUTHOR> https://www.foldnfly.com/#/1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2 <comment><USER2> This was submitted four days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755)</comment>


Facebook Adds Face Detection To Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/07/facebook-adds-face-detection-to-photos/ <comment><USER2> Facebook is awesome. They have some of the most brilliant minds working there. Pretty soon, they'll be able to tell _whose_ face it is! I can't wait until they partner with restaurants and banks and other places with security cameras, so I don't have to update my location or status. They can just tell all my friends where I am and what food I ate for lunch.

<comment><USER3> Facebook is awesome. They dare to state the obvious (privacy is dead) and don't want to miss the chance of being the first to implement technology that may seem controversial now but will seem obvious tomorrow.

<comment><USER4> Privacy isn't an issue of either having it or not. For most of us there is a line (that moves depending on who is on the receiving end of the information) that we don't want crossed. It's far from dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> While there's nothing significantly ground-breaking about it in today's time, but Riya sort of pioneered mainstream facial recognition back in 2005 (deadpooled in August 2009) - <http://www.crunchbase.com/product/riya>

<comment><USER5> To clarify/be pedantic, what facebook just added was _face detection_ \-- detecting where the faces are in an image. _Face recognition_ usually refers to figuring out _who_ a given face is of.

Riya was one of the first sites doing detection on images, and attempting to do some recognition. One of the reasons they're deadpooled now is that recognition is a really really hard problem (that's the area I do research in). Plus, they found that it was more lucrative building product search -- hence, <http://like.com>

<comment><USER6> Hey, can I ask you a question about face recognition? So I have a similar problem, except I want to automatically determine some characteristic of a human from their face. However, I'm not sure how to go about determining a relevant set of features to use. How are the features useful for face recognition determined in state-of-the-art recognition algorithms?

<comment><USER5> Haha thanks for giving me the _perfect_ setup to mention my own research.

I've been working on automatically detecting visually describable attributes in face images. These include everything from coarse attributes such as gender, age, and ethnicity; to more detailed ones such as nose size, eye shape, facial hair; and including some imaging conditions, such as blurriness, lighting, and facial expression. (I think this is what you meant by 'characteristic', right?)

We demonstrated how to train such classifiers and use them for building a face image search engine in this project:

<http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/facesearch/>

We demonstrated how to use these attributes to perform face verification ("are these two images of the same person?") in this project:

<http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/faceverification/>

Those project pages have descriptions of how everything works, and also links to the actual publications themselves. We've also released two databases that might be useful for training your own classifiers:

<http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/databases/facetracer/>

<http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/databases/pubfig/>

Now to actually answer your question: we found that the key to training different attribute classifiers is to use different features for each one. The "secret sauce" of our work is a feature selection algorithm that looks at a large pool of possible features (divided into regions of the face to extract features from, what type of features to extract, how to normalize the feature vector, and how to aggregate the normalized values) and picks the most appropriate ones for a given attribute.

Most existing face recognition algorithms typically choose a few low-level features (often things related to image gradients, since this gets rid of lighting variations) and use these to compare face images. However, works such as ours are trying to change this by looking at higher-level attributes in addition to just the low-level features. The big reason for this is that low- level features require very precise alignment between pairs of faces to work well -- a precision not reachable on real world images. Luckily, the level of alignment possible with today's methods is good enough to accurately train our high-level attribute classifiers, and so they end up being more useful for recognition in real world datasets.

Finally, one of the best benchmarks for performance on real-world face recognition is "Labeled Faces in the Wild" (LFW):

<http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/>

That has results showing the performance of the best current approaches as well as links to papers. It's also a nice dataset of images to test on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't seem like it would be too hard for Facebook to implement facial recognition. It's clearly not a trivial issue, however they certainly have the data, servers and intelligence to do it right. After all, they have a list of everyone you come in contact with (as well as friends of friends), along with anywhere between a dozen and a thousand tagged pictures of each.

EDIT: In reply to the poster below me- of course, autotagging wouldn't work. I was thinking more of a "suggestions" implementation.

<comment><USER8> it seems like to much of a risk, in terms of the controversies that might get raised every time the recognition software screws up.. imagine the system tagging somebody's ex girlfriend on their current partner's face, or interpreting a picture of Saddam as some random friend of the poster

<comment><USER9> If you read the article,

 _"...the system will automatically detect faces in the photos and prompt you to select the friend who's face it is."_

It seems that the software is (so far) only recognising the presence of a face, not identity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Original post here: <http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403838582130></comment>


Show HN: A Google doc with interesting reads for founders - <AUTHOR>

Here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T8R91jWhQK9t7IwQGngDDLFavJ2LTNtlntThgQPS0Uo/edit?usp=sharing<p>Feel free to add articles to the suggestions section, and I will review them and add to the document! Any and all feedback is accepted! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link here: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T8R91jWhQK9t7IwQGngDDLFa...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T8R91jWhQK9t7IwQGngDDLFavJ2LTNtlntThgQPS0Uo/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting</comment>


Blizzard employees walked out in protest following pro-Hong Kong player ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20907075/blizzard-activision-walk-out-player-ban-hong-kong-epic-games-fortnite-blitzchung <comment><USER2> An amazing comment by Ghost650 found on the comment section:

"This isn't even a freedom of speech issue. Blitzchung violated the rules and probably expected and even deserved some sort of punishment. That's… understandable, at least. Constitutionally protected freedom of speech does not apply to private events and corporate terms of service. So Blizzard is fully within their rights to punish this demonstration.

That said… the heavy-handed punishment Blizzard dished out and their double talk on Twitter/Weibo reeks of appeasing Chinese sensibilities. This is an individual putting himself at actual physical risk to stand up for his own rights and the ideals of democracy. As Americans, we are taught that this is the "right" side of this conflict. Yet Blizzard, an American company, is harshly silencing that voice under the guise of TOS violation. This, I think, is where their actions lose any credibility."</comment>


Show HN: Stubdb – database for projects too small to fail - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/crislin2046/stubdb <comment><USER2> It looks like you are just writing JSON files to disk, with no actual database functions. Which is fine, but it seems odd to try to brand it as a database.</comment>


Collection of generative models in Tensorflow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hwalsuklee/tensorflow-generative-model-collections <comment> s-macke The summary of all different GANs and especially the structure of the plots is very helpful. However I am unsure about the mnist and fashion-mnist results. I can't see any significant difference between the methods. Maybe the CelebA (human faces) database would be more helpful to see the differences.

<comment><USER2> I would also like to see it used on faces, the mnist digits data set doesn't showcase each method for me either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Curious: Does anyone use GANs for anything of value, or are they just gimmick NNs?

<comment><USER2> google used them to train their go AI AFAIK.</comment></comment>


Teen prosecuted as adult for having naked images – of himself – on phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/20/teen-prosecuted-naked-images-himself-phone-selfies <comment><USER3> How does every single person involved in faciliating this case not wake up every morning and think "My entire live is an absurd joke".

I've always been fascinated with the concept of institutional insanity - <USER2> a group of people can behave rationally but the combined effect of their behaviour is insane. It's possible there's some kind of 'gridlock' whereby it's impossible (or even damaging) for any individual involved to try and resist.

It's a milder form of the level of insanity you see within totalitarian states. Reading this echos some of the bizarre logic I read coming from guards at Cambodia's horrific S21. The penalty for resisting (or merely lack of enthusiasm for enabling) was immediate and horrific and would have taken superhuman courage. And it would have most likely made no difference.

In this case - the penalty for speaking out is probably nothing worse than damage to one's career.

I'd love to know how many people involved in this at any level harbour doubts without acting upon them.

I'd like to remind people that this is destroying the lives of two young people. Maybe not beyond repair but possibly sending them on a different course than before and probably not a better one.

<comment><USER4> Because we haven't actively made their life an absurd joke. While there is a lot to be said against internet mobs, it's a pretty mild step to make sure that the individuals involved in these travesties are identified, covered by the press, and made immortal in the internet halls of shame.

They may say "we followed procedure" but it is on them to prove that "procedure" admits no common sense, because, otherwise, it's a failure of their sense and discretion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sort of thing has to be remembered next time you hear that prosecutors need broadly worded statutes to have the tools to go after the bad guys.

When people bring up criticisms of laws as over-broad, I often hear that prosecutorial discretion will keep such abuses from happening. People who suggest that the law as written will result in such injustice are often ridiculed for imagining that any prosecutor would act that way, or any Judge allow it.

Turns out, anyone suggesting that even the most absurd interpretations are not possible are the ones who should be ridiculed.

Remember this the next time someone proposes a law, no matter how well intentioned, and even if it happens to advance a cause you care about. The abuses will happen, and how will you feel about that cost if you are the subject of those abuses.

<comment><USER6> > Turns out, anyone suggesting that even the most absurd interpretations are > not possible are the ones who should be ridiculed.

Yep. See also: the CFAA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What the article does not mention is that the guy and his gf are black ...

[[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3223533/North- Caroli...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3223533/North-Carolina-hgh- school-quarterback-girlfriend-charged-adults-exchanging-nude-photos.html)]

Now one might righfully argue that this case is not just ludicrous but also racist.

<comment><USER7> why the downvote?

<comment><USER8> I did't downvote, but I guess it's for implying (without any other data or statistics) that if something bad happens to a member of a group X, then it is an act of prejudice against this group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I don't understand is, that the two young persons didn't choose to say: f*uck you, stupid law, we won't strike a plea. You.are.nuts!

Is the pressure in the US that strong that a sane person 'just has to do this'?

<comment><USER10> While the case may be incredibly weak, the defendant may still be unable to fight it due to other factors (most notably cost and time), and therefore take the plea instead. Lawyers are expensive everywhere.

Generally, refusing a plea deal for _ideological_ reasons is not a smart legal strategy.

<comment><USER11> Why are lawyers expensive everywhere ? Demand and supply does not apply to them ?

<comment><USER10> Less of a supply/demand microeconomic reason, more of a willingness-to-pay rationale (i.e. if you are at risk of going to jail, you'll pay ANYTHING to avoid it, and lawyers charge accordingly).

<comment><USER11> It's kind of paradoxical that people would rather accept unfavorable pleas because they don't want to/can't pay anything.. and the lawyers are still expensive..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You almost want to laugh. This sounds like a story out of the Onion.

Unfortunately it is not.

<comment><USER13> There's a word for that: "Kafkaesque". I rarely find it more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just having your phone searched and the police looking at pictures of you and your girlfriend naked seems like enough of a violation in itself.

</comment><comment><USER15> Next up: teen accused of being a peeping tom for looking at himself in the mirror after a shower.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is what I love about this case:

Let it be known that Brianna Denison, Fayetteville, North Carolina, by order of the court won't have a cellphone with her to call for help if someone abducts her and tries to rape her.

Very smart, yessir.

</comment><comment><USER17> Story I expected based on headline and the outraged HN comments: "guy takes nude selfies and is charged with crime."

Actual story "guy is charged with having nude images of underage girlfriend on his phone, prosecutors inflate charges to force settlement by reaching to include his own nude photos".

Still stupid. But way less black and white.

<comment><USER16> The other part of the story is: "girlfriend also gets charged with having selfies of herself"

They both got charged as adults for exploiting themselves as minors to share the pics with each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Justice" is the only thing I'm scared of, because of the "".

Laws are made to protect children, and "Justice" abuse those laws against... children.

"Justice" is just an administration today, devoid of logic and intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can a legal expert please explain to me how this can even happen? Shouldn't a judge somewhere be able to take one look at this and realize the ridiculousness of the whole thing and throw it out?

<comment><USER20> Judges aren't supposed to pick and choose which laws get enforced - you can't have a system where the legislature passes a law and rest of the government says "Nah, we don't like that one."

What needs to happen is 1) the legislature needs to change the law to include exceptions where appropriate and 2) the voters in that area need to take this case into consideration when the prosecutor comes up for reelection.

<comment><USER21> Where to begin. Judges don't enforce laws. The legislature passing laws and the _executive_ deciding which to enforce is part of the design of checks and balances.

<comment><USER20> I can only assume you skimmed my comment without actually reading it. As I pointed out, judges should _not_ be determining which laws get enforced. In North Carolina prosecutors are _elected_ , so there's no "the executive" involved.

Furthermore, in the federal system the executive does not decide which laws to enforce. That's a dereliction of duty - he's supposed to enforce them all. Not doing your job is not part of "the design of checks and balances".

<comment><USER22> You are right judges shouldn't decide what gets enforced. But they do get to decide if the law is a good one or bad one. They can overturn a law, so that it will no longer be enforced

<comment><USER20> Only if there's a constitutional basis for doing so. I'm no expert on North Carolina law, but I'm going to go ahead and assume the state constitution is silent on electronic pictures of naked people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've said this before elsewhere, but one concern with cases like this is that it means sex offender registries are becoming more and more useless.

When people end up having to register because of 'stupid' crimes like this - either they stand the chance of being persecuted as a sexual offender for the rest of their lives. Or the registry itself becomes increasingly useless as we start to assume people are there for peeing in the wrong place.

</comment><comment><USER24> So much for the right to face your accuser - was there a mirror in the courtroom for him to look into?

<comment><USER10> From the linked article:

> _The Fayetteville, NC 17-year-old, Cormega Copening, faced five charges of > sexual exploitation after police found the photos while searching his phone > in an unrelated incident at his school last fall._

There is a third-party accuser.

<comment><USER24> From the title:

> _Teen prosecuted as adult for having naked images – of himself_

The prosecutor is prosecuting on behalf of the very person who is also supposedly the perpetrator. Do you seriously think our founding fathers intended for _" The People" v. Copening_ to be a replacement for _Copening v. Copening_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is just the exact same thing as the Ahmed Mohamed clock.

Anybody who retain some sanity should leave the USA ASAP.

<comment><USER10> No?

That incident was caused by unfortunate racial stereotyping; this is caused by a literal interpretation of the letter of the law that hasn't caught up with the times.

<comment><USER26> You are right; they are opposites in this way.

However, they share the thread of being implementations of unsustainable zero tolerance.

<comment><USER18> Nobody can imagine tolerance to bombing... but you can imagine tolerance to sexting.

These cases are radically different. In the case of the clock, the "Justice" was not involved, there was no accusation.

<comment><USER26> I can certainly imagine tolerance to things that look like bombs or even that simulate bombs in every meaningful way other than explosion.

"Zero tolerance" for bombs and weapons hasn't generally meant that bombs and weapons are not tolerated - that was already the case. Instead, it has meant that things that merely evoke the _image_ of a bomb or weapon are met with intolerance.

For example, I imagine you came across this story:

[http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/08/28/school- allegedly-...](http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/08/28/school-allegedly- asks-deaf-preschooler-to-change-his-name-because-sign-language-version- resembles-weapons/)

<comment><USER18> "things that merely evoke the image of a bomb or weapon are met with intolerance": I call it fear...

The deaf boy story is amazingly stupid too. It seems to me we've put to many people in a position to restrict others liberties/rights, and now we pay the price of stupid "rules" or interpretations of "rules". When you give someone a uniform (it's an allegory), you give him power, which must be handled with care... and intelligence.

I see all this as a lack of intelligence/common sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Usually these types of things are about punishing interracial relationships.

<comment><USER7> both the guy and the gf are black - interestingly this is not mentioned in the text.

<comment><USER27> I guess it's more about punishing black male sexuality in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> North Carolina. Black people. Got it</comment>


Email me when  new episodes come out - <AUTHOR> https://episodemailer.com?utm_source=hn <comment><USER2> I like the idea of email, but doesn't seem to have nearly all the shows that [http://on-my.tv/](http://on-my.tv/) has... or browse is just broken.

<comment><AUTHOR> What shows are you looking for? At the moment we have only full-word search. So like "Westworl" will result in 0 shows. You have to search for 'Westworld'. We'll change it in the future, when we have enough shows in our database</comment></comment>


Jury Rules SAP Owes Oracle $1.3 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704369304575633150256505376.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> "SAP had admitted liability for TomorrowNow's actions. The unit, which provided software maintenance and support to Oracle customers, downloaded Oracle software and documents, infringing on 120 copyrights."

Oracle US, SAP German and a US jury. No wonder they lost. This is just ridiculous and the fine completely imaginary.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a good case to me, what do you have a problem with?

<comment><USER2> The amount of money they have to pay. It's no way close to the copyright infrigment they have done. (If they have done so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Larry seems to be channelling the ghost of Lee Van Cleef.</comment>


Alternative Jobs for Bored App/Web Developers - <AUTHOR> http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/06/18/alternatives/

<comment><USER2> Can you give us more details on the business analyst option? What would be involved in that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Talking to users about their needs and defining them for programmers to implement, and thinking of features for software based on user needs, etc. The programming background might give you an advantage as to knowing what is possible and providing detailed documents for developers based on what you would have wanted as a developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Another option to consider might be a sales/pre-sales engineer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, both the BA and sales engineer would be other options.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Chessboardify – Make the grid a chessboard - <AUTHOR> http://chessboardifygame.xyz/ <comment><USER2> Neat variation on LightsOut ([http://chenglou.github.io/react-lights- out/](http://chenglou.github.io/react-lights-out/)). I had some trouble since the rules for which lights toggle are slightly different with this one:

Classic lights out only toggles the light you press and the 4 lights in the 4 cardinal directions. I was surprised how baked into my brain that was and how much trouble I had getting my brain to adapt.

<comment><USER3> I had a technical interview just last week wherein I was asked to write a program to determine whether a given lights out board could be solved or not! Hadn't ever seen the game before then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My only complaint is that the alert box prevents seeing the final board. It'd be nice to get to actually see my beautiful chessboard creations.

<comment><USER5> Dismiss the alert. Tada.

<comment><USER6> Then a new round is started and the final board is removed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to sketch this idea of a puzzle game that I came up with while on a walk. It turned out to roll pretty well though it couldn't be any more minimal.

Simple things are pretty powerful sometimes, don't you think?

</comment><comment><USER7> Like Lights Out, this game can be solved using Gaussian elimination over Z/2 (integers modulo 2). This means the order of the tiles you press do not matter, and that you can solve the board by forming the desired pattern row by row.

<comment><USER8> Sorry how does it follow that you can form the pattern row by row? When you write this down as a linear algebra problem you kinda forget about the structure of the board, and the rows of the resulting matrix you apply Gauss elimination to don't correspond to the rows of the game board. So you must have meant something else that I'm missing, but I'm confused how you would solve just the bottom row without touching any others.

<comment><USER7> For every boards are two chessboard patterns we can solve for. For example, for a 3x3 board we can have:

      101        010
      010   or   101
      101        010

where 1 is a white square and 0 is a black square.

We can represent any N×N board as a N² vector. So, we can represent one of the chessboard pattern as:

      010
      101 = 010101010 = y
      010

At the beginning of the game, the board is at some random initial pattern.

      110
      111 = 110111010 = y0
      010

The goal of the game is to find the necessary moves to form the chessboard pattern. Hence, we want to solve the equation

      (y - y0) = Mx

where M is a N²×N² matrix representing the effect of every possible moves. Pressing on a tile is equation to addition by 1 modulo 2.

      1 + 1 = 0 (mod 2)
      0 + 1 = 1 (mod 2)

For example, pressing the top left tile is the same as adding this effect vector to the board vector:

      110110000

If we do this for all 9 tiles of the 3x3 board, we find the matrix M to be:

      110110000
      111111000
      011011000
      110110110
      111111111 = M
      011011011
      000110110
      000111111
      000011011

where the i-th row is the effect of pressing the i-th tile. Now, we can just solve for x (assuming M is not singular). Re-using our above example, we find

      (y - y0) = Mx
      (010101010 - 110111010) = Mx
      100010000 = Mx
      111100100 = x   (by Gaussian elimination)

This means we can press the following tiles (in any order) on the board to solve it:

      111
      100
      100

If you are interested, I wrote some quick demo code that shows how this could be implemented in Python: [https://gist.github.com/avassalotti/7452318c9e9b8dec637bc7c0...](https://gist.github.com/avassalotti/7452318c9e9b8dec637bc7c0fac32951)

<comment><USER8> This is a very nice exposition of the strategy, but I still don't see how it answers my more specific question, about whether you can solve the problem row by row (is the grid).

<comment><USER7> Sorry, it turns that was misunderstanding from my part. It turns out we cannot solve a board row by row without revisiting the previous rows. The board below is a counterexample:

      101
      010
      100

The first and second rows are solved. However we cannot solve the last row without re-doing the first and second rows. The two solutions of this board shows this:

      solution #1:
      110
      100
      000

      solution #2:
      110
      110
      000

Actually, seeing my mistake made me challenge my assumption that a singular matrix over the reals might not be over integers modulo 2. This is likely wrong too. I don't know much about abstract algebra (and I am not a mathematician). Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#Square_matrices_ov...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#Square_matrices_over_commutative_rings_and_abstract_properties)) states "the reduction modulo m of the determinant of such a matrix is equal to the determinant of the matrix reduced modulo m."

The move matrix M for all boards of size 3n + 2 appears to be singular. This means these boards may have no solution or a large number of solutions.

<comment><USER8> Gotcha, thanks.

FYI, a singular matrix taking values in {0,1} that is singular over R if and only if it is also singular over Z/2, for exactly the reason you provide, that the determinant commutes with modding by 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool! I was inspired to write an implementation of the game in K: [http://johnearnest.github.io/ok/ike/ike.html?gist=0007b9afbe...](http://johnearnest.github.io/ok/ike/ike.html?gist=0007b9afbe6e625b25e95eb286e32b98)

</comment><comment><USER10> I used to play something similar all the time on my Merlin back in 1978. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_\(game\))

</comment><comment><USER11> Am i the only one who finds it more fun to try to get all the squares the same color, rather than into a chessboard?

Neat game.

</comment><comment><USER12> Got an excel solver for the 3x3

I'd share i'd via google spreadsheet if I could do it anonymously without creating a throwaway account

(All this in 3x3 grids, with the numbers mod 2)

\- 1. Add the current light up state to the desired light state (chessboard)

\- 2. Create a grid that's lit up as if from button presses from previous grid (using the game rules)

\- 3. Flip the positions of the previous grid across the center. This grid is the grid of buttons to push

No idea how it works though, and it doesn't seem to work in the 4x4 case either

<comment><USER13> I just created a solver for the 4x4 case, also in google sheets... Who would have though it could handle ~15,000 rows with decent performance!

Works by calculating via formulae the result of any sequence, 6 moves or less. The bit patterns of each individual move are XORed together for each possible combination of moves.

The difference between the current state and the target is calculated, again via XOR, and then looked up in this data sheet via the query functionality, to give the sequence of moves which resulted in that delta bit pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I did it in one move ;). Pretty neat game.

[http://imgur.com/f5sryfs](http://imgur.com/f5sryfs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good job!

I think it's pretty amazing how good you get in this game once you play it a little more. At first it's simply impossible, but you start to recognize the patterns pretty quickly and you can usually beat the 3x3 ones in less than 10 moves.

<comment><USER15> You should never have to use more than 9 moves for 3x3. Hitting the same square twice has no net effect, even if the two moves on the same square are separated by other moves.

<comment><USER16> You can actually knock that down to 8 moves (maybe less?) as the max required for a solution. You never have to press the middle square, since it flips every square, inverting the board. Inversion doesn't bring you closer to the checkered pattern of the chessboard. (An inverted chessboard... is a chessboard!)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just posted this on Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/chessboardify/?fref=nf](https://www.facebook.com/chessboardify/?fref=nf)

There is a lot of math involved in this game and you can quite quickly note some less obvious rules like this one. Maybe there are some very nontrivial, but interesting things out there. I'm not good enough in combinatorics to tell... :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it me, or bigger boards are much easier than 3x3? You can pretty much build those row by row.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it really depends on the size. Often the 5x5 feels like a breeze, but then 6x6 is a lot tougher. Probably there is some mathematical reason for this related to the divisibility of the grid side length.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What are you using Socket.IO for on the page?

<comment><AUTHOR> The puzzles are generated and the solutions are verified on the server. I'm passing data back and forth with that.</comment></comment>


India's First Bot on Messenger for Bill Payments - <AUTHOR> https://payjo.in <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN". I'm curious about the history of its development.

guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Typed Clojure prevents Null Pointer Exceptions - <AUTHOR> http://frenchy64.github.io/2013/10/04/null-pointer.html

<comment><USER2> cowcatcher, you're hellbanned. As for your question:

"If you want typesafe functional programming on the JVM, why not just use Scala?"

Well, because some people like Clojure and Scala doesn't have enough parentheses.</comment>


Shaving Your RTT with TCP Fast Open - <AUTHOR> https://bradleyf.id.au/nix/shaving-your-rtt-wth-tfo/

<comment><USER2> Regarding client support, why does only Google appear to be interested? Talking about saving a round trip here...

To try with NGINX, you may need to add compile it with --with-cc- opt="-DTCP_FASTOPEN=[X]" otherwise just adding fastopen=23 into your server block may be problematic. [https://www.ruby- forum.com/topic/5392464](https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/5392464)</comment>


6 Steps to finding the product idea you should be building - <AUTHOR> http://blog.projectpulse.io/6-steps-find-product-idea-to-build/

<comment><USER2> I couldn't agree more. As the co-founder of an app development company curently working on our flagship I have had a very similar experience. Although I wouldn't call myself an expert in the field it will impact (and I think some app/product/innovation ideas are going to potentially affect a field that you couldn't be an expert in without dedicating your life to it) I was surrounded by people involved in the field. I think the most important part of your article for me is being open to the idea that, with the current tools, a problem might not be fully solvable. Setting out to create something to fill a gap will just result in you imagining that a gap exists where it doesn't. Good product ideas come from the organic realisation that there is something missing from the market, and the best way to do that is to be open to the idea that apparent limitations could be the bounding box of what defines your product/app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and although I won't say to always trust that "feeling you get".. there is a feeling that you get when you organically come to that realization and it's very different from sitting in a brainstorming session and thinking of 20 ideas in a row. Can't replace first-hand experience in a space.</comment></comment>


Black Hat DC 09 Marlinspike Interview (SSLstrip) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvp0oPluuLE

<comment><AUTHOR> He says at the end that the tool can be downloaded at his site but I don't see it there yet:

<http://thoughtcrime.org/software.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> cf. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487028></comment>