Pluralization rules around the world - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Localization_and_Plurals <comment><USER3> This reminds me of an old Russian joke. A Soviet factory has six fireplaces and only one fireplace poker; rather than carrying the poker around every time they need to use it, they decide that they should get five more so that they can keep one at each fireplace.

At this point you need to understand a big of Russian grammar. As mentioned in the link, Russian has different forms for -ending-in-1 numbers, -ending- in-2-through-4 numbers, and -ending-in-5-through-9 numbers. Also, the third set of plurals are often irregular.

This being a _Soviet_ factory, the requisition for fireplace pokers needs to be sent with all the correct paperwork to the bureaucracy. A debate arises: What is the appropriate plural for _kocherga_? Send the form out with the wrong word, and the wrath of the Soviet bureaucracy will fall upon them.

After arguing back and forth for a while, an old janitor hears the conversation and proposes a solution: Send in a requisition asking for three kochergi and two more kochergi. A few months later, they get their fireplace pokers along with a note: "Here are the four kochergi and one more kocherga which you requested."

<comment><USER4> I'm fascinated by this joke, but I have to admit, I don't get it.

<comment><USER5> Basically, a lot of Russians have no idea how to say 5 pieces of kocherga. Factory workers think they can't spell it because they are just uneducated, but the reply they get suggests that the management has no idea either. Honestly, I couldn't say it myself before I looked it up when writing this reply, even though I've heard the joke before. The word is untypical.

<comment><USER6> what are the words? I'm curious but not knowing russian I have no idea how to even search for this

<comment><USER7> Just look the word up in a dictionary and find the declension box.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%8...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B0)

So kočergá, kočergí, kočerjóg.

English declension is so simple we don't include this information in a typical dictionary entry. ("Poker, pokers, poker's, pokers'")

<comment><USER8> "Just" looking it up occurred to me too, but that table doesn't help if you don't also point out that for some reason it's entry for the genitive plural that we're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The_ source for plural rules (with machine-readable representation) can be found in the Unicode CLDR: [http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/33/supplemental/language_...](http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/33/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html)

<comment><USER10> Wow, this is super-awesome!

But I think the Brazilian Portuguese rule in this chart for the cardinal 0 is wrong: I think it should be "other" (0 pontos) rather than "one" (0 ponto), just as in Spanish, English, and European Portuguese.

I've sent a note to a native speaker to check my intuition.

<comment><USER11> Native speaker and my judgement matches yours. I was surprised to see that on the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case anybody needs another, similar rabbit hole to get lost in: [http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number.html](http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> In case anyone else was wondering about form #14 which is marked "unused": apparently earlier versions of Firefox incorrectly used it for Macedonian. Firefox 59+ uses form #15 instead: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1415906](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1415906)

<comment><USER14> Note that that bug was just a documentation issue (see comment #21) - <USER2> already used form #15 even before version 59.

Version control shows Firefox has used form #15 for Macedonian at least since 2012: [https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/mk/annotate/d13b2b460aeb...](https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/mk/annotate/d13b2b460aeb/toolkit/chrome/global/intl.properties)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did you get there from here? [https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-244](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-244)

<comment><USER16> I keep hearing about this game. Is it any good?

<comment><USER17> Automating a factory, then redo it so the ratios are right, then again so it's more efficient, then add trains. There's also the circuit system for automating further and doing fancy things like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=indN4kcshB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=indN4kcshB0)

It's also quite[0] addictive. You may find you burn a _lot_ of hours.

Exceptional value for money if it's your sort of thing.

[0] The Cracktorio nickname is well deserved.

<comment><USER18> In the interest of giving context, here is the original video¹ which was impressively recreated in Factorio:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJrY3p9nzVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJrY3p9nzVY)

1\. Well, the original file was copied around the Internet well before YouTube, but that is the original video re-encoded in higher resolution and uploaded to YouTube.

Further reading: [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/holiday-light-show- videos](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/holiday-light-show-videos)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why are Latin/Greek listed together under rule #1? They may have shared cultural history but they're not closely related aside from being in the very large Indoeuropean family. Latin should be with the Romanic languages if anything.

Also, it's a bit naïve to say that a declined language only has 1-2 forms without taking into account oblique cases, but that's a hard thing to deal with programmatically.

<comment><USER20> This is about how many forms of a phrase are needed to cover all cases. You have a list of phrase templates for each phrase where the number gets substituted in and the number of templates for each phrase depends on the language rule. So for Russian you have 3 templates and if the number is 31, you use template 1, but if it's 0, you use template 3. The relevant word is already declined in the proper case. This isn't about programmaticaly pluralising a single word, it's just so you can select a phrase template.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> does this really cover all these cases?

[http://search.cpan.org/dist/Locale- Maketext/lib/Locale/Maket...](http://search.cpan.org/dist/Locale- Maketext/lib/Locale/Maketext/TPJ13.pod#A_Localization_Horror_Story:_It_Could_Happen_To_You)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Families: Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), ...

I can't complain, but what an odd name for that "family"!

(...which is not actually a family, by the way.)

<comment><USER23> I was struck by this too. Chinese and Japanese/Korean are exteremely different languages. Japanese is an agglutinative language whereas Chinese is analytic. Japanese is probably organically more similar to English (if it is at all) than Chinese. But one needs to note that Chinese affected a lot of Asian languages and what we used to call Altai Language family (Turkic, Mongolic, Japonic languages) was actually bunch of different agglutinative languages aggressively affected by Chinese (and each other) which made linguists confuse for decades. Note that Altai Language family does not exist, those languages are not related at all (which is another mistake in the website)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It says it's about number, but then in the Examples section, Sorbian lists three nominative forms and one genitive. But not all the genitive forms, just the plural form. And no other cases. I'm... confused about how this is supposed to work.

</comment><comment><USER8> Weird that Hungarian is listed under rule #1, it should be under #0: Nouns preceded by numbers are always in the _singular_ in Hungarian. Does anyone know for the other Finno-Ugric languages listed under #1 (Estonian, Finnish)?

<comment><USER25> Despite the title, the page describes a function, not the language grammar as a whole.

Hungarian has plural forms. kutya = dog, kutyák = dogs. They follow the same pattern as english.

The plurals are used way less often, as [roughly] the language doesn't pluralise when it's redundant. But that's outside the scope of PluralForm., and it's up to its users to avoid `PluralForm.get`ting phrases which already tell you the quantity.

[That said, the Chinese example should probably be reworded. The stated reason applies to Hungarian, but it's not the whole reason they're in #0.]

<comment><USER8> > it's up to its users to avoid `PluralForm.get`ting phrases which already > tell you the quantity.

You mean one should _not_ use `PluralForm.get` to generate snippets of the form "0 pages", "1 page", "2 pages"? Because if that's what you mean, you are directly contradicting all of the examples on the page.

<comment><USER25> All the concrete examples on the page are English — so they use plural forms when English does.

That said, my wording did needlessly assume one of two approaches. The 'downloads' example shows both.

PluralForm is often called at the whole-phrase level, for all languages, rather than as at an 'atomic' level, at the points where specific languages pluralise things. This contrast is shown in the 'downloads' example.

In this use pattern, the correct approach is to write the same thing twice, if the 'plural form' of the matches the singular one.

This pops up in English too. For instance, chrome://browser/locale/downloads/downloads.properties contains:

shortHours=h;h

shortMinutes=m;m

shortSeconds=s;s

And a multiplayer game might need

ready=Are You Ready?;Are You Ready?

As most languages have a singular 'you'.

<comment><USER8> > All the concrete examples on the page are English — so they use plural forms > when English does.

... which are all cases where Hungarian doesn't use the plural, which is why Hungarian shouldn't be in the same group as English.

> In this use pattern, the correct approach is to write the same thing twice, > if the 'plural form' of the matches the singular one.

... except if the plural form _always_ matches the singular one, in which case the correct approach is to write the thing once. Category #0.

Thanks for your efforts, but you have clarified nothing with regards to Hungarian.

<comment><USER25> > except if the plural form always matches the singular one

Hungarian has plural forms which are distinct from the singular. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase)

Otherwise, yeah, they'd be in group 0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In some cases, I can guess the logic behind the rule, (e.g. "twenty and one second" type idioms) but in other cases, I can't really fathom why it would be so complicated.

<comment><USER27> While I couldn't comment on how they evolved (and I suspect there are many different answers), I'd point out that English has a very complicated pattern for ordinals:

1, ends in 1 except 11, 111...: -st

2, ends in 2 except 12, 112...: -nd

3, ends in 3 except 13, 113...: -rd

everything else: -th

(also 0, most people say zeroth but nobody really feels comfortable with it.)

However they came to be, there's no mental load in applying them and nobody who speaks English natively ever much thinks about it.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, totally agree that there are plenty of things that don't make sense in English. The grammar is easy, but the sure number of irregular froms has got to be really difficult to deal with. At least the rules for plurals in some of the more complex examples are reegular.</comment></comment></comment>


Can technology make the Herculaneum scrolls legible after 2,000 years? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-invisible-library <comment><USER2> Interesting to contrast this with the previous (far more optimistic) article discussed 3 years ago at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9585552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9585552)

</comment><comment><USER3> Betteridge's law of headlines proven correct yet again...

""I do not expect this scroll will be read during my lifetime," Delattre said, finally. He closed the lid of the small box with both hands, his shoulders slumped in defeat."

<comment><USER4> Not really. The answer is "Yes it can, but politics, legal obstacles, and some slightly valid concerns about damaging the samples might stop them."</comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Mark Cuban, co-founder, HDNet - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1710356363

<comment><AUTHOR> Find something you love to do. If you don't make money at it, at least you love going to work.

\- Mark Cuban (@mcuban)

<http://startupquote.com/post/1710356363></comment>


Let's Create a Better Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1hZ_w7zMC6CyeF_DHc2Mls7q7N67I1pP_9ntXlt4apvk/viewform?c=0&w=1 <comment><USER2> As the person who started the Product Hunt beatdown last thread, and would like nothing more than to see a good PH competitor, I regrettably have a few issues with this.

1\. The hypothetical example you give about the Financial Times writing favorable stories for investors is an example of _conflict of interest_ , which is a different issue than the elitist exclusivity discussed last thread. (And much more gray)

2\. As noted in the previous thread, both Reddit and Hacker News are transparent in terms of submission moderation, which is what is being proposed here. (Albeit less modern)

3\. Having an anonymous account post this Google Doc does not build trust in that you could build a competitor. There is more to building a link aggregator ranking system than following a Rails tutorial.

4\. Having random people come together to build an idea just because they can doesn't work well. That's why Idea Sundays stopped on HN.

My dream startup would be an optimized link aggregator; the use of upvotes as a statistic for quality is why I spent so much time doing data analysis on Reddit and HN data. But this isn't the way to build a competitor.

<comment><USER3> Ah, while I was writing my response you said the same thing a lot better. I think any alternative to ProductHunt still needs an editorial team of some sort. But the fix could be as simple as changing PH to include 'staff/influencer picks' and 'community picks', while requiring staff/influencers to disclose their relationship to the product.

<comment><USER2> Obviously, any link aggregator would need full-time moderators, which is another consideration for this mysterious PH competitor.

The notion that human curation is intrinsically better than algorithmic ranking is a Silicon Valley trend I don't feel is accurate, but that's a topic for another rant thread. (In general, I think the new semimanual approach Hacker News has been doing is an interesting idea)

<comment><USER4> _semimanual_

It's not semi. That's the core reason why Lamer News had no chance of success, even if their broken software had worked.

It's odd that it's a controversial idea. The best Reddit communities are those that are heavily moderated.

To admit this is to admit that some people have better taste than others. Maybe that's the controversial bit. But it's the cornerstone of any new successful community. You see it pervasively everywhere you look, from SO to Reddit to HN.

<comment><USER2> To clarify, I'm referring to the "second chance" mechanics implemented a few months ago, where an article which got few upvotes may hours later get a spot on the front page and maybe get some upvotes, or when you get an email asking for an invitation to repost. Both processes require a human to determine what is "good" and what is "not good."

<comment><USER4> Ah. Are you sure it's semimanual? It seems plausible that it could be a mechanical turk.

The only automatic part seems to be the shape of a post's falloff curve. But the falloff shape is probably selected from a list of shapes by a person.

<comment><USER5> What we've been doing is sort of a software sandwich with a human filling. Software does a first pass through all the stories to guess which ones might be good candidates (otherwise there are too many for humans to review). Then humans pick some candidates. Those go into a pool from which software randomly picks one every so often and randomly places it low on the front page. After that it's up to the community which ones are interesting. The ones that aren't fall off the front page relatively quickly. I've been meaning to write some code to collect data on how much frontpage time they get.

That's the current state. We do still send repost invites occasionally, but mostly not, because users made it clear they don't like the duplicates.

I don't think the human phase can be automated. Instead, our plan is to open it to the community, so it isn't just us and selected users picking stories. The challenge is to design a mechanism for that which doesn't just reduce to an upvoting system (since as the knight in Monty Python says about the grail, we've already got one it's very nice).

We'll also probably publish the list of stories selected in this way, whether or not they end up getting traction, because if nothing else it's alternate reading material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem with these criticism is that they seem to be coming from people who have no idea how Product Hunt works. If you have ever actually had your product featured on PH you would know better than this. Here's how Product Hunt works: 1\. There are many of those so called "Insider" users. 2\. Then there is a 2nd tier group of users who can comment. 3\. Then there's the rest.

The tier 1 group is not as small as you think, and they are pretty diverse group of people from all around the world. When they post something, it goes up straight to the featured page. There is no censoring. They are definitely not paid by producthunt the company to submit these new products, they're merely users sharing what they discover. Their main incentive for posting on product hunt is to be the "first one" to discover a cool new app and share it with others. Now if you understood this, think about how ridiculous all your speculations are.

<comment><USER7> Then perhaps PH should be more forthcoming about this hidden "process" and educate the "people who have no idea how Product Hunt works"?

<comment><USER6> Just a simple google search will show you tons of articles and blog posts giving you more than enough tips really. People complaining about this just shows that they didn't do their homework before submitting.

<comment><USER2> Ideally you shouldn't have to do homework before using the basic functions of a website. (aside from reading Terms and Conditions, of course)

<comment><USER6> Would you say that about angel list too? I'm as much annoyed as you about their opaqueness and it would be nice if they were more transparent but it is what it is. It's your responsibility as an entrepreneur to make sure you don't mess up the launch of something you've invested so much in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that people here are _way_ overestimating the importance of Product Hunt.

<comment><USER9> Not for small startup that cries for early adopters...

<comment><USER10> But I don't think PH is good for early adopters at all... Unless your product is directly aimed at startup founders or angels and VCs. For anything else, you'll get the ultimate cross section of tire kickers - people trying out hundreds of products for 5 minutes with the question "what can I copy here" or "can I invest in this".

If you're after loyal users chances are PH does nothing for you.

<comment><USER11> _Unless your product is directly aimed at ... angels and VCs_

If you want a "rocketship" then you pretty much have to be to compete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems like an unnecessarily negative way to pitch a positive service:

* anyone who missed the story on HN today would have no idea what this was about,

* leading with accusations that PH is an "elitist/bro community" is needless antagonism, but most of all,

* you're pitching a non-conflict of interest alternative to PH without revealing anything about yourself.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think this is going to work. First, ProductHunt and HN are both basically fine as is. Second, the root cause of any issues that both have is basically the same -- almost no one reads or votes on stories from the new page, and the handful that do have all sorts of biases. The reason these communities are able to function despite this is that they have a combination of paid staff and trusted volunteers.

Third, the only way to significantly improve upon these sorts of communities would be to build them on the block chain. But the technology to do that doesn't yet exist.

<comment><USER13> > Third, the only way to significantly improve upon these sorts of communities > would be to build them on the block chain

Genuinely interested, if you have the time, what do you mean by this? What problems could be solved by building a community website on top of a blockchain, instead of the current typical votes/comments in a database -> feed sorted by ranking algorithm method, and how?

<comment><USER12> A lot of the killer algorithms that the blockchain enables probably haven't even been discovered yet, so it's a bit difficult to say. But obviously there are lots of things you can do with reputation, identity, transparency, group decision making, etc., that just aren't really possible today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm working on a Product Hunt competitor at the moment and I'm looking for a technical co-founder. If anyone is interested, please email or DM me on twitter.

<comment><USER15> Are you an idea guy, or actually working on the code as well?

<comment><USER14> ...I'm learning to code...(sound of pitchforks rustling)

<comment><USER16> For anything early enough such as an MVP, you will be utterly useless. You need a programmer. However a programmer really doesn't need you.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I guess there's no way for non-programmers and programmers to work together to create a startup.

<comment><USER17> You don't have to be a programmer but you do need to contribute more than just an idea (e.g. domain expertise, business knowledge, sales experience).

<comment><USER14> Of course.

<comment><USER17> Then make the case for that. Give us some credentials, or experience, or... just some reason why a technically skilled person would want to pick you rather than anyone else as a cofounder. You're presumably going to want to see the same thing from their end.

<comment><USER14> I had planned to give additional details via email. I just thought I might bump into someone in these comments that was also interested in working on something related to PH. However, that doesn't seem to be what I've found here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The web app behind PH is trivial. You still need a human to curate and build hype around the thing, and therein lies the problem. PH is rigged because Silicon Valley is rigged.

<comment><USER19> Really? I think the Reddit model works pretty well. It's based on (as far we know) organic upvotes from users. It's also engineered so it makes it very difficult to game with upvote brigades and such.

<comment><USER20> > It's also engineered so it makes it very difficult to game with upvote > brigades and such.

Besides shadow banning, do you know what exactly Reddit does to make it difficult to game? I'd like to understand this better.

<comment><USER2> Vote brigading detection, and the presence of submission downvotes which will correct any submission that really does not deserve to be at the top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I keep seeing these references to money raised in the < $10 million range as if it were a big deal. $6 million dollars is a lot of money for an individual, but for a _business_ it's not, especially not in the San Francisco area.

At $6 million you can hire and pay for about 10 to 15 people for a few years at a competitive salary and work from a not completely terrible office.

I'd like it if these posts weren't spreading "$N Millions of dollars!" fud so much as if it were some terrible wasteful thing. This is not someone's personal spending money that they're buying maseratis with, the founders do not get to use this money to buy themselves nice cars. It's not a life changing event, it's simply an opportunity to build a business.

<comment><USER22> 10 to 15 people for a few years seems like quite a lot for a 'business' like PH.

<comment><USER21> Not if you consider they probably want mobile apps for both ios and android as well as a web page and sales. It's hardly anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My number one problem with producthunt, keeping in mind that I still love producthunt for the amount of traffic and customers it got us, is that you can't say anything negative in the comments.

Even if it relates to bad science, bad product, etc....

It's all very 'kumbaya' positive, which is fine.

That being said, I think ProductHunt will be sufficiently difficult to replicate.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. For example, there are too many kickstarter products using unproven science being posted onto PH. Like the laser razer for example. I was shocked when I read the comments in the PH post for that and found people praising and backing the product but not questioning it. Would expect more from a community that claims to be from the smartest hub in the world and is made up of engineers, designers, etc. People need to be saved from themselves sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why is Product hunt such a big deal? Is it bigger than Techcrunch or some of these tech sites? Honestly, have not heard of it till now. This whole trip is just giving it more publicity.

I seriously want to know why someone should care about Product Hunt and what its impact and/or place is in the tech world.

</comment><comment><USER26>
        helps startups get their 15 minutes and puts them onto the path of success.

Has there ever been a startup whose success was because of a PH/HN/Reddit submission?

<comment><USER12> Dropbox got into YC because of their Show HN submission, and they got a lot of their early users from Digg.

<comment><USER4> Not really. Dropbox got into YC for the same reason they beat all ~11 established competitors: They executed very well on a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We already have one: Hacker News

</comment><comment><USER28> How to build a better PH?

Revert to the old PH design. I hadn't checked the site for > 1 month. There is an incredible amount of noise and bloat in the new interface. And it needlessly looks too much like Kickstarter, which arguably has discoverability problems of its own.

</comment><comment><USER29> OK here is the business model for an "alternate PH": Organic listings, everything gets listed as long as it is not already seen, non-biased voting moves things to the top on a given day. Voting accounts must come from LinkedIn to at least have a chance of being authentic. Founders may choose to embargo their launch so their company isn't listed until they are ready. Revenue comes from paid listings where startups can pay more to have their startups listed on the right of the page, unconstrained by all the rules above that apply to organic listing.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is like the "we can't get into the cool club" kids starting their own "even cooler cool club". Life isn't fair, deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER31> If it attracts the same audience that upvoted a link shortner to the top post of the day - that adds your own branded image on links - please call it quits. Also can you ghost ban posts that have 20 people saying how awesome the app is? or maybe just call the site astroturfing.com.

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried building something similar on [https://techendo.com](https://techendo.com) I'm working on a refactor right now that serves a very cool experience. You can still sign up and give me some feedback.

<comment><USER32> Hell, I'll even open source the entire thing so we can build it as a community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like that the intention behind this, but it seems so naive to me. What's preventing it from going down the path of product hunt... which I'm sure had a similar mission early on.

</comment><comment><USER34> I just put up [http://productvote.co](http://productvote.co)

Just a Meteor Telescope app on Heroku at the moment. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER35> The technology it's built on is irrelevant. What makes Product Hunt is the community and the way Ryan and his team curate products. They surface the "best" products (based on their curated opinion) and that's what generates the following. Your site looks good, but are you willing to put 2 years of manually curating and scraping for products until you're successful?

<comment><USER34> There is that question... I'm not sure to be honest. I guess sites like HN work because of the community and PGs hard work setting it up. I thought I'd see if people are interested.

Could make it non profit or community owned or open source/ open admin decisions or something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Your brain + Google search = best Product Hunt

</comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome that you're stepping up to this chalkenge. Stuff like this is what I truly love about the internet.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm working on something, but I have troubles naming it. If someone has an idea just shout. It will be on Github

</comment><comment><USER38> Let's do it. Let's change the blue button from "GET IT" to "HAVE A LOOK"!

</comment><comment><USER39> Why was this `[Dead]`, preventing people from commenting? High level of irony on that.

<comment><USER5> Not sure. A thread with many comments should basically never be [dead].

I think it was a bug squeezed out of the woodwork by unprecedented pressure from flags doing battle with vouches. We've overridden it.

<comment><USER40> Am I right that flagging this post is misuse of flagging?

<comment><USER5> I don't think I'd go that far. It mostly overlapped with the other Product Hunt thread, so some people probably flagged it as a quasi-duplicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great initiative. I signed up. Producthunt is now forever flawed. Hopefully we can build a more open community together.</comment>


Bats slam into buildings because they can't 'see' them - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/bats-slam-into-buildings-because-they-can-t-see-them-1.22583 <comment><USER3> This reminded me of (humor) [http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/foundation_collections/depmori/d...](http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/foundation_collections/depmori/depmori.htm)

"The key idea in the Griffith hypothesis was that as the Myotis lucifugus emission increased in frequency, the emission actually crossed the thresholds from the extreme ultraviolet into the X-ray, thereby allowing the bat to fly unharmed through solid objects."

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of a an anecdote about the F-117 Nighthawk which was the first stealth airplane nearly invisible to radar. Apparently the engineers working on it would come into the airplane hangers to find many dead bats as it was also invisible to sonar.

Interestingly enough this made the engineers realize the stealth technology also could work for submarines which led to the IX-529 Sea Shadow stealth ship.

<comment><USER5> The bats died because the radar absorbent material used on the F-117A was highly toxic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Poor bats. They also get their lungs exploded by the pressure differences created near wind turbines: [https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2016/09/27/wind- turbines-are...](https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2016/09/27/wind-turbines-are- causing-bats-lungs-to-explode/)

<comment><USER7> Meh, a 5 Mega Watt wind turbine kills less wildlife than the average outdoor cat.

<comment><USER8> turbines and cats put different selective pressure on the prey population - cats kill weak, ill, etc. thus improving the overall quality of the population where is turbine kills are probably spread uniformly and even may be skewed toward healthy active animals.

<comment><USER9> How did you come to this conclusion? This is so unbelievable wrong I don't even know where to begin.

Cats do not just kill weak animals. They kill strong and healthy animals at an alarming rate. Cats have been responsible for at least 33 island animal extinctions in recent/recorded times [0].

[0] [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380)

<comment><USER8> There are 10B birds born per year in the US. In Nature pretty much everything is a food for the next level in the food chain, and there is no family&friends funerals. The more weak/ill/old - the higher probability to become predator's dinner. We don't have dead old birds littering the streets of cities. Somebody takes care about it.

And as you see from your own link cats mostly eat smalls mammals. Around humans it is mice and rats mostly. Rats do enjoy bird eggs and there is no protection here, until of course somebody takes care about the rats, like for example cats do.

As result cats do positive service to the birds population. The population which somehow manages to survive the urban and agricultural development - <USER2> main dangers for the wildlife causing population decimation and extinctions.

And island extinctions, really? So the cats brought by humans should have just committed suicide by starving themselves? Of course things can easily go wrong in any small system when the system gets severe kick from outside. And humans do just that to various eco-systems. How many species on various islands got extinct once humans reached those islands?

<comment><USER7> That's an overly simplified model to the point of incorrectness. A Lion wants a sick / old / _or young_ water buffalo because it's less dangerous. However, a house cat does not really care about a mouse or bird.

If you look at mice reproduction they mostly get eaten before adulthood. Young healthy animals are often preferred prey because they are easy targets.

Finally, predators regularly drive species to extinction, which is a large part of why the vast majority of species to ever exist are not currently around.

TLDR; Cat's need 8 adult mice a day if that's all they are eating and they really can't afford to just look for sick animals. They easily hunt healthy adult birds, some baby rabbits, or other small animals.

<comment><USER8> Where do you think tens of billions of old mice/rats that are to die yearly are supposed to go, especially in developed areas where there are not many other predators?

In predation even without any specific choice by the predator, the resulting prey is naturally skewed toward weak/sick/old, ie the ones who is slower, has lower attention/senses, etc. Until some age the young are naturally on the weakest side and not surprisingly may fell prey a lot. Such filtration results in more healthy/agile/stronger adult population.

<comment><USER7> Relative size makes a big difference. The most extreme version of this is krill, as a blue whale really does not care about the fitness of the millions it needs to eat.

What your missing is most mice don't reproduce. The average litter is 6-8 and mice can have multiple litters per year. So, mice basically never reach old age.

The selective pressure has more to do with caution because a completely heathy mouse can't out run a cat / owl etc.

Put another way cats rub at up to 48 Km/h mice 13 Km/h. Thus, 'fitness' has little to do with athletic prowess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That made me wonder how bats see water surfaces. Though I suppose not seeing them is less of a problem since they're not vertical :P

<comment><USER11> The post explains this: they don't. Standing water exhibits the same behavior as reflectiveless flat surfaces.

When they fly over a space and "see" nothing beneath them, they interpret this emptiness as a flat, smooth body of water.

Thus the only real problem here is that for flat horizontal surfaces that aren't water, the bats will try to drink from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had read this as Bots slamming into buildings, and was looking for a discussion of lidar and stereo vision systems.

But won't lidar have the same issue, with a clean glass surface? Similar with stereo vision - if there are no features at the surface to correlate.

<comment><USER13> Vision based on visible light doesn't suffer from the problem in the same way as echolocation or lidar, since it is not dependant on observing signals emitted by the observer. I guess very smooth surfaces might act as mirrors, which will probably bring it's own set of difficulties for machines. Anecdotally, I can say my own stereo vision doesn't have big difficulties with most smooth surfaces though :)

<comment><USER14> But bats also use vision based on visible light. I haven't read the article yet, but do they explain about why the bat wouldn't see the building with its eyes?

<comment><USER15> "researchers can rule out the possibility that the bats were visually confused, because the experiments were done under infrared light, which bats can't see, and so they would have been relying entirely on echolocation."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> TIL Some Hawkmoths shoot ultrasound from their junk to thwart bat attacks. [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6407.full.pdf](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6407.full.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how bats perceive the AT&T "Batman Building" in Nashville, TN.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Building_(Nashville)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Building_\(Nashville\))

</comment><comment><USER18> I hope someone doesn't use this as inspiration for an exploit against LIDAR. On second thought, I hope people do start working on an exploit, so engineers can get on with hardening systems against it!

<comment><USER19> The use cases I know of for lidar don't usually include a glancing reflection off a large flat surface.

<comment><USER18> Colliding with a large angled piece of sheet material in the middle of a roadway doesn't sound pleasant.

<comment><USER20> While I agree that the sensor systems should image just about anything you can imagine, wouldn't a large angled reflective sheet produce a shadow that could be distinguished from normal road surfaces and avoided?

<comment><USER18> That's a good 1st cut. But if we review the prior art -- namely stage magic's tricks with mirrors -- what's to stop someone from putting something in the region of the reflected image that would be expected by the driving AI? So, if what's expected are bushes in the background, why not aim the mirror at other bushes at the right distance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting hypothetical to track bat evolution in urban areas over time to determine if selection is occurring for bats whose sonar is more finely attuned for detecting diffused returns as actual signal for skyscrapers or, for that matter, improved actual sight to avoid the buildings in the first place.

<comment><USER22> Bats already have very good vision. They just can't see well in the dark.

<comment><USER23> Is probably more a case of blinded by electric lights here.</comment></comment></comment>


Verilog for Software Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programmable_Logic/Verilog_for_Software_Programmers <comment><USER2> The number one thing to know here:

In most programming languages, each statement is implicitly sequenced, unless told otherwise (e.g. pthreads, or openmp)

In a hardware description language, each statement is concurrent with all others, unless explicitly sequenced.

But this does not even begin to help, i.e. if this is truly for a beginner -- especially in light of the fact that verilog itself is laden with gotchas.

The approach taken by chisel: [https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu](https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu) is imo a good one. Each line of code in chisel adds a node to a DAG. The DAG describes the connectivity of logic elements. Sequencing is of course handled as well, so you can view your logic as a set of DAGs with registers in between.</comment>


As virus drastically reorders economies, more Italians returning to agriculture - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/24/world/europe/italy-farms-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> My father has some land about 100km away from here, in Galicia, 5 or 6 pieces of about 2 to 5 km2 each, and I've been playing with the idea of making something out of it, but I know almost nothing about agriculture, about what type of soil is there and I have no easy access to it.

My idea was basically to try to automate some plantation, like maybe potatoes (seems hard) or something else. I've been looking for an agriculture online community with no success.

Any suggestion? I'm about to do something stupid?</comment>


Twitter discussion between Matz and others re diversity and RubyConf - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/rubyconf/status/380391363553935360

<comment><USER2> I'm disappointed that some people are disappointed in Matz after just several tweets of his. It's hard to get your point across in 140 chars or less, let alone in text form.

Edit: A word from the conf organizer: [http://martyhaught.com/articles/2013/09/18/rubyconf-2013-cfp...](http://martyhaught.com/articles/2013/09/18/rubyconf-2013-cfp- and-diversity/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, people expressing regret over using Ruby because of this seems a bit over the top.

And I liked the blog post, thanks for sharing.</comment></comment>


Background Jobs with DJ on Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/ <comment><USER2> Really enjoying the features coming out of Heroku. By far the easiest way to deploy a Rails app. However, their pricing is rather high, are these high costs worth the time it takes to set all this on up your own VPS?

<comment><USER3> I find that having my server administration out-sourced is worth the cost. Plus, if you figure that you can run an app on Heroku for free at first, the "real" price might be lower than you think.</comment></comment>


LHD: Improving Cache Hit Rate by Maximizing Hit Density [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~beckmann/publications/papers/2018.nsdi.lhd.pdf <comment><USER2> Cache replacement algorithms are fascinating and have always been one of my favorite research and development hobbies. I really like the LHD concept but the _comparison_ to other algorithms makes it less informative for practical use cases than it could be. Specifically:

\- It primarily compares against relatively weak, naive algorithms like LRU because (inexplicably) that is what many open source systems use. All of the high-performance closed source systems I've seen use better algorithms that are not represented here. Maybe an availability bias? Also, some great algorithms don't even have names AFAIK, just implementations, which doesn't lend them to easy reference.

\- CPU cache efficiency of algorithm implementations is often highly relevant to real-world performance of cache replacement algorithms. This is frequently overlooked in the academic literature, which focuses on hit rate under various workloads. Many algorithms that produce good hit rates have poor throughput in practice due to CPU cache behavior; quite a bit of R&D at database companies focuses on minimizing CPU cache thrashing from these algorithms. A slight reduction in hit rate that substantially reduces CPU cache thrashing can be a big win. Cache throughput often comes from surprising places.

\- Schedule-based replacement mechanics are ignored. Given some large number of concurrent in-flight operations against the cache, you can adaptively reschedule the order of operations to approximate Bélády's optimal algorithm. For many workloads you can get a step function improvement in cache throughput from this, and it applies to the aforementioned CPU cache efficiency as well. Design of schedule-optimized cache replacement algorithms is not trivial; the obvious way is NP-Hard, so the challenge is in finding efficient approximations.

Generally though, I like the formulation of LHD. It would be interesting to see how it sits in the broader scope of real-world cache replacement algorithm implementations. This is one of those areas in database computer science where the closed source design theory is richer than what makes it into the academic literature, so it is more difficult to figure out what the state-of-the-art even looks like.

<comment><USER3> Can you provide examples of closed-source / unnamed algorithms? Most of the advanced algorithms, like ARC, can only provide a modest improvement to LRU. LIRS does quite well, but is complex and usually poorly implemented. The newest generation of systems have begun adopting TinyLFU, with research focusing on making it adaptive. I would be interested in understanding the unpublished work (you can reach out privately if desired: ben.manes @ gmail).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I'm definitely not an expert in this area and my understanding of the paper may be off.

I wonder if Jeff Dean (and google) have tried a neural network version of this. The core idea here seems similar to "learned index structures"

[https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46518.html](https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46518.html)

<comment><USER5> I dont think this works well as an adaptive workload/case, training the network cant be done online and is a rather heavy task, as such it works well when you have a well defined pattern you can detect/train against.

Although kudos to the authors, i really like the intuition of this approach!

<comment><USER4> I think backprop can be made to work online and the cache gets instant feedback on its predictions, so I see no reason why this couldn't be made to work. In some ways their conditional probability estimates are one form of classifier. It would be really interesting also to see how this idea plays with specialized NN training hardware like the TPU, it would certainly make the computation easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the http caches has a priority policy where you can prioritize small files over large ones under the presumption that for some workloads communication overhead (including setup tear down and connection pooling) dominates the cost. Storing ten small results may be less wear and tear on the system than one big one.

Which is essentially the same observation this policy is based on, but with gradations instead of a binary decision.

</comment><comment><USER7> Paper seems to miss the modified-2Q algorithm which was in memcached as of the cited 1.4.33 (became default in 1.5.0). Has very different performance characteristics than straight LRU.

Still need to give a more thorough read, but spotting other errors, ie; FB memc (according to their paper) balances pages by tail age, not hit rate.

Seems interesting though.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not clear from the paper how the rank is updated. If anyone understand better, could you explain.

The eviction is doing random sampling of N entry and is straight forward. But how does it compute the hit density online per entry.

</comment><comment><USER9> Could the algorithm be applied to block cache problem with single item size, like filesystem block cache or database cache?

<comment><USER10> I was wondering the same thing. I suspect its value would decrease in those cases, due to the lower-level representation providing less semantic association, and therefore less information (per unit object) for modeling hit rate and lifetime. Also, the higher objects count would require more resources.

Edit: perhaps in a file system, the higher-level information could still be provided?</comment></comment>


Let Me Ruin This for You: The Schadenfreude of Criticism - <AUTHOR> https://thesmartset.com/let-me-ruin-this-for-you/ <comment><USER2> >disinterested critical discourse is really just a willful schadenfreude?

I think the writer has misunderstood the word "schadenfreude". He seems to understand it as "joy you get from hurting somebody else".

I always understood SchadenFreude to mean "the joy you get from somebody else's loss or other misfortune" \- with no active participation by you in causing it.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, joy from inflicting harm is sadism. Author probably just wanted to use the word schadenfreude. It's a really fun word.

<comment><USER4> German has some awesome words: glockenspiel, gesundheit, blitz, panzer...

<comment><USER5> In German, you can combine a bunch of words to create a new one.

Feel free to read the full explanation on a pretty awesome example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizit%C3%A4tenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft)

<comment><USER6> I have used this to test a business directory to check how it handles long company names.

<comment><USER6> I also used the famous long welsh place name to test addresses with :-) "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's no discussion possible without the confrontation of ideas, which means that criticism is vital for any progress. And also getting seriously hurt by criticism might be a warning sign that one's having some deeper ego issues. No one likes it, but grownups are supposed to be able to cope with the fact that others don't share your ideas... either by re-evaluating your own views, or by ignoring others'.

<comment><USER8> > There's no discussion possible without the confrontation of ideas

I agree. Ha! ;)

This borders on suggesting that all criticism is good and altruistic and beneficial to society. I think the vast majority of all criticism is ego driven, motivated by wanting to feel superior. Most of it doesn't produce progress or discussion. When it's hurtful, it's usually because it was intended to be hurtful which means it's more than critique.

> grownups are supposed to be able to cope with the fact that others don't > share your ideas

There's a difference between evaluating ideas and looking only for faults. There's a difference between critique and criticism. It sounds like you are talking mostly about critique, except for this part about being grownups. While your statement is true, it's only half. Grownups also critique without criticizing, they can evaluate something without putting others down, without insulting or being mean.

[http://abacus.bates.edu/~rrichar2/learn/ui/critique.html](http://abacus.bates.edu/~rrichar2/learn/ui/critique.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author is essentially saying that criticism is a tool to hurt others. I find this idea interesting, and worthwhile to think about. A question I now have is, in this theory, who does one want to hurt exactly? Is it always the subject of my scorn I want to hurt with criticism, or is it more complicated than that - if I rant about Java on Twitter (I don't do Java dev anymore), who do I want to hurt? Java devs? Oracle? All programmers? Or just myself? Or the population in general?

<comment><USER10> While I think there are critics who attempt to provide a balanced critique, I know I have provided criticism with the intent to harm. The reason is one of self-defense of a sort.

For example, I'm proposing a fraud detection system of my own design to address tricky issues in our product. Higher-ups want to purchase an existing system from a third party, which means I don't get to work on my pet project. They ask me for my input. At this point, my primary interest is in exposing all the flaws in their proposed system which render it unfit for purpose. I'll probably acknowledge some strengths just to make my argument more tolerable to them, but my goal is to persuade them to take my preferred course of action.

Likewise, if I rant about Java, it's probably because I would like to take some of the "mindshare" Java enjoys and move it to my favored language(s).

There are probably other reasons to want to damage something through criticism, but that's how I find myself employing it.

<comment><USER11> A piece of well-built criticism can be a great tool in corporate politics. It can completely destroy the chances of some proposal/project/person to succeed. Ideally without appearing to be personally oppossed. As usual, most people are (luckily?) not very good at crafting criticism and end up with a blunt and obvious argument which backfires frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is a sermon I love, that talks about dealing with ambiguity, and in it is defined 3 levels of dealing with ambiguity, the second mirrors the claims made in the article. I'm just going to leave a big quote because it explains it so well:

 _The English writer G. K. Chesterton once addressed questions similar to those I have raised today. He distinguished among "optimists," "pessimists," and "improvers," as he called them, which roughly correspond to my three levels of dealing with ambiguity. He concluded that both the optimists and the pessimists looked too much at only one side of things, and observed that neither of them can be of much help in improving the human condition, because people cannot solve problems unless they are willing both to acknowledge that a problem exists and yet retain enough genuine loyalty to do something about it.

More specifically, Chesterton wrote that the evil of the excessive optimist (level one) is that he will:

"defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe; he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing everyone with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world."

On the other hand, the evil of the pessimist (level two), wrote Chesterton, is:

"not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises ... [In being the so-called 'candid friend,' the pessimist is not really candid.] He is keeping something back—in his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. . . . He is using the ugly knowledge which was allowed him [in order] to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it."_

(The reference to the army, I think, is talking about "God's army" (informally, e.g. the "believers"), as this is in a religious context)

</comment><comment><USER13> I am a massive fan of the band Phish. There is no band better than the worst Phish performance. I believe this.

Phish isn't what it used to be. This is objective; there are more wrong notes and the songs are performed more slowly, some of the really technical stuff barely gets performed anymore. I am harshly critical of this because I know what the band is capable of.

You wouldn't (maybe you would) believe how other fans react to my criticism. Outright denial plus I'm obviously there to ruin it for them. It's a childish reaction. Don't like criticism of your favorite things? Wear earplugs.

<comment><USER14> I feel your pain. I was a Deadhead back in the day, and a lot of, well, shallow Deadheads couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that some shows were better than others, and some eras were better than others. Mid-late 1980s Grateful Dead performances could be mighty disappointing. (Although lately, I'm coming to appreciate the good ones.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "But all critics think they're doing the world a favor. If they didn't believe this delusion, criticism wouldn't get written."

I disagree, some people just like to burst bubbles. I think it makes them feel better.

<comment><USER16> The world needs pessimists as much as it needs optimists.

<comment><USER15> I do not agree. Nothing wrong with a person who sees the glass half full if that person knows that 50% of the glass is occupied. Optimists can still keep it real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't this ignore criticism that provides specific examples for the claim being made?

For example, I remember there was an essay by Achebe on "Heart of Darkness" where one of his arguments was the racism of the author affected the quality of the prose: "'A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms...' as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to wave white arms!"

</comment><comment><USER18> Cached text version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:67fL4MZ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:67fL4MZRMDsJ:https://thesmartset.com/let- me-ruin-this-for-you/&num=1&hl=en&gl=uk&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

</comment><comment><USER19> \- Schadenfreude

\- Kindergarten

\- Doppelgänger

Was just about to ask if anybody knows more German words used by the English language, but then I googled and found this page:

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

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't draw a sharp line between cultural and personal criticism.

As an example, I find certain genres of modern music distasteful for their lack of harmony and musical value. I can't really tell if this is cultural or personal criticism. Is this essentially the point that the author is making?

<comment><USER14> I deal with this personally by arguing that artistic merit is effectively objective - that whether a work of art is "good" or "bad" is independent of personal tastes. There are lots of good works of art that I simply don't like (and frankly, lots of bad art that I love).

This is mostly as a counter to the common-as-dirt conceit of "I don't like this, therefore it sucks" that is many people's loud response to stuff that happens outside their own culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ideas have a life of theire own- and to use logic and other sharp tools to end that- to hunt down bad ideas, to watch them in the snow of noise, wriggling, theire entrails out, the justifications spasming one more time, to watch the last rasping breath roaking "it must be true, for i desired it" and thus invaliditing its existance. That is not Schadenfreude, its the joy of a predator, killing of what not should have been alive in the first place. If it where not for this hunt- we would still be bringing young sheeps to the cliff, to sacrifice them for good weather.

If your ideology of choice is regularly murdered- have you ever considered, though it feels right, it might simply be wrong in assumption and execution - superstition- and thus eternal food for the wulfes of this world? That a rethinkinking and updating might spare you needless pain? That all those battles you fight and loose every time - trying to bend reality to shape, might be wasted life time, that could be used otherwise- not if the critiques go away, but if the flaws go away?

</comment><comment><USER22> Let me ruin this for YOU by making this site incredibly slow

<comment><USER23> Not every site is equipped to handle HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> critisism is just an evaluation of the use of time/money/work. That is, if we care.</comment>


Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v2 <comment><USER3> > You can't start a science textbook like that.

'Music theory books' make no claim to be scientific. Western music is a cultural construct and there are books that explain how to practice this particular field. For insiders, the three initial statements the author attempts to burn down make perfect sense. What it means to locate a (part of) a music piece in a 'harmonic system' makes just as much sense to musicians as the rest of us calling a lollypop 'sweet'. I wouldn't criticise cooks for not describing taste by the molecular contents of their ingredients.

While it's interesting to dissect music differently from how musicians may analyse it, completely rejecting local experts' understanding of a phenomenon runs counter to finding out more. Is a farmer a complete fail whale for knowing when to plant his crops based on when a certain type of flower first blooms, rather than the precise position of the earth relative to the sun?

If I would only read music theory by this author, I would still not have a clue how to play the piano. He/she wastes a lot of words on what could otherwise be described as the difference between Metis and Techne, or local knowledge and technical knowledge.

I pasted two long quotes about the distinction between Metis and Techne here: [https://pastebin.com/ZYKJDFRN](https://pastebin.com/ZYKJDFRN)

<comment><USER4> > I wouldn't criticise cooks for not describing taste by the molecular > contents of their ingredients.

Now _theres_ a good analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author is correct in saying that music theory is not a "theory" the scientific sense.

But as a musician/producer/composer I'd never want that anyway. Having studied many forms of music, I know that there is no "right" and so a proscriptive/predictive "theory" of music is not at all what we want. On the contrary, what is "right" in music comes from a long line of collective cultural reasoning. This is much more evident in the distinctions between the development of eastern and western music, each having their own "theory". Notably, eastern music has a lot lower emphasis on harmonic progression and tends to use different tuning, sometimes "perfect" tuning (something which western music must eschew to support flexible harmonic motion). This leads me to my thesis, that music theory is primarily descriptive in nature and there are many theories of music, driven by historical-cultural development.

Music "theory" should lie outside of the domain and concern of science. There are fields which address the human response and other scientific natures of this such as psychoacoustics, electrical engineering and signal processing, and mathematics. Music "theory" has in its view aesthetics which lie outside of the domain of science and is a tool for use in describing things which have been found pleasing aurally and culturally.

<comment><USER6> I think what many miss is that Music Theory is designed to be after the fact. It seeks to explain - after a piece has already been written - why something works harmonically / rhythmically / etc.

It has no prescriptive power, it was never intended to be a set of formulas that can then be used to generate "good music". Only to create a language to explain whats already there...

<comment><USER7> I think another aspect is that music theory is absolutely not required for appreciation nor composition.

<comment><USER8> It's just a framework. Like music history, ethnomusicology, music cognition, music lessons, instrument building, etc., it will deepen one's appreciation for music if you learn it.

As far as composition-- I've had some encounters with talented musicians who get stuck putting together a song or electronic composition because "something just isn't sounding right." In those encounters, a process of elimination improved a chord/voicing that an understanding of fundamental music theory principles would have revealed without my help.

The problem is that without the fundamental understanding, it's nearly impossible to reverse-engineer such an improvement and deduce the general principle at work. Lacking that basic understanding makes one reliant on others just to figure out how to get the sounds out of one's head and into the air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> hey guess what, western classical harmony that bach kind of codified, is but _one_ harmonic system. its accidentally super arrogant to ignore the insanely deep musical traditions that are not present in western classical music, since they have different ideas about harmony. one of the great things about music is that it has really opened my eyes to this kind of of cultural myopia. its so obviously implicit in pretentious analyses like these, even if their content is interesting and correct, that the writers believe that western music is the _real_ music. its trained into alot of us that that is the case. well, its not. its not superior, nor inferior. someone is going to read this and think im being an sjw, but i assure you! i once implicitly thought this way too, but i studied other music besides my first love, which was the music of bach, and its true! the musical traditions of roma people, indian classical music, american jazz, bluegrass, flamenco, romanian folk music, turkish music (just whatever is coming to me in this moment) etc etc these things are so deep, and have such rich traditions of insane dedication. so, dispose of this idea that bach's music is the only real music.

the same kind of weird cultural narcissism / racism / whatever it is happens in language, with "correct" usage of words. its the same damn thing.

and can i just add, for all the overly left brained harmonic analysers out there- it would be nice to see someone address the fact that harmony, even in the restricted western classical sense, i guess "diatonic", depends greatly on timbre and range as well. of course i didnt read this paper, and instead ranted somewhat incoherently about topics which might not even apply to the paper, but hey, i had a good time!

<comment><USER10> The author did attempt to address this, by complaining that you "aren't really paying attention":

* He notes that octaves are common across cultures (per Levitin, "This is Your Brain On Music")

* He asserts that 12 tones represent a practical limit to harmony; more than 12 tones is more complex than the brain can handle in its "note-expectation engine".

* He thinks other cultures could be working within his theory, but simply not taking advantage of _all_ of the universal harmonic features that Western music offers. He cites pentatonic scales as an example.

* He is baffled by the Nasca Indians of Peru, who apparently form their pitches by linear steps in frequency rather than logarithmic (I won't even attempt to use the word "harmony" in this sense), but he asserts that 1) their tuning system was probably derived because it was mechanically easier to produce a set of pipes to that tuning system, 2) they're a weird case because they were isolated.

* To finish that reasoning off, he suggests there's a "musical sophistication" of a culture which develops from linear scales (easy to carve) on the simple end to equal temperament on the sophisticated side (because arbitrary key changes without wolf intervals is the ne plus ultra, right?).

So, yeah: I'd say there's some serious cultural narcissism going on. It would be OK if he confined his analysis to Western harmony and simply tried to explain what was going on there, but by trying to derive universal musical principles from barbershop quartets, his project was pretty much doomed from the get-go. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author starts out by complaining that current music theory is not scientific. I completely agree. The field is astoundingly full of technical- seeming, well-accepted textbooks containing a biological "explanation" of harmony that is either totally unproven or trivially false.

But then he precedes to dive into a mountain of unsubstantiated conjecture, saying:

1\. Our brains are just computers

2\. Evolution motivates less computation

3\. Finding the fundamental frequency of a sound is worthwhile

4\. Doing that is computationally easier if all other frequencies are in harmony

5\. That is what has lead to harmony giving us pleasure

(The rest is essentially fluff around this core argument)

It's a nice theory, but there's nothing to substantively back up _any_ of these points. He comes the closest on point #4, but only by making strong assumptions about the flavor of #1. The whole thrust of his argument is just totally tangential to addressing his initial complaints about the lack of science and rigor within the subject of biological harmony.

-

One thing he does get right is avoiding most common mistake that textbooks and laymen alike think about hearing: Our ears do _not_ perceive the waveform of sound directly (for the most part[1]). Rather, we perceive sympathy vibrations at different parts our cochlea, rather directly sending nerve signals according to the _Fourier transform_ of the original waveform. This can be measured (scientifically)!

This Vi Hart video does a remarkably good job at giving a layman's tour of our some of the phenomena in our ears: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0)

[1] If this were _totally_ true, we wouldn't be able to perceive phase at all! But it is the case that these sympathy vibrations are perceived with much more sensitivity than our perception of phase, and are linked more closely to peoples' idea of harmony.

<comment><USER12> We don't even perceive the Fourier transform. What we perceive is pre- processed by complex "sonic object" recognition systems we barely understand.

Obvious example: you don't hear formants and spectral distributions when someone is speaking. You hear words, which are parsed into sentences, which are processed into meaning.

Along the way a lot of redundant elements - background noises, breath sounds, ums and ahs, and even distortion from electronic transmission systems - <USER2> all eliminated.

Music is similar but even more complicated, because while there are stylistic conventions, there doesn't seem to any single consistent grammar.

There's a superficial listening level which parses a mix of sounds into the sounds of different instruments, a "theory" level which listens for horizontal and vertical groupings and structures, an "emotional" level which reacts to implied emotion and mood, and sometimes a "metaphorical" level which listens poetically and associatively.

It's not a simple process.

<comment><USER11> True!

I won't risk getting out of my depth. My comment was simply saying there are unique nerve signals from unique points across the cochlea which uniquely convey the information "this frequency is currently being heard at this volume". To say that that information is what we perceive... that's not an argument I'd make. But it is a step along the process.

Everyone knows we "see" in rgb, but few people seem to know we "hear" in frequencies more than we "hear" in waveforms. That's my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does this work address the fact that people raised in non-Western musical cultures don't experience pleasure/displeasure based on harmony?

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/your-culture-not- you...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/your-culture-not-your-biology- shapes-your-musical-taste)

<comment><USER14> Yes, well, sort of, and also perhaps you have a citation for your claim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came up with something of a theory of rhythm. I don't know anything about music theory, so, for all I know, the theory is not new or a better theory already exists. But it's simple, so I'll share the main idea.

I think that rhythms are perceived like echos. So, in 4/4 time with beats on quarter notes, beat #2 is an echo of beat #1 (the main beat), beat #3 is an echo of beat #2, and beat #4 is an echo of beat #3. Then, the main beat sounds again and the whole thing repeats.

Now, if that makes sense, you can forget about echos. What matters is that there is a chain of causation. The listener perceives that Beat #1 causes beat #2, which causes beat #3, and so on. The listener unconsciously creats a theory of causation that explains the rhythm.

Now set aside music for a second. Imagine that you hear a sequence of sounds:

      1. "Oops!"
      2. (Crash!)
      3. (Baby crying)

Since they occur together, they are perceived as being causally related. Now, back to music. Within each repeating unit (usually a measure), the listener always has a working theory of causation to explain the rhythm. The theory has the form of a tree, with child nodes caused by the parent node.

When rhythms mutate over time, the change will sound small if the change only affects a leaf. The change will sound bigger if the change affects a complete branch. And, the change will sound jarring if it violates the theory of causation, i.e. by removing the cause without removing the effect.

Multiple rhythms can be superposed over each other, so the theory of causation can be a tree with multiple branches. For ex.:

      Main beat -> rhythm1
        AND ALSO
      Main beat -> rhythm2.

If rhythm2 is added to rhythm1 after rhythm1 has been playing already, rhythm2 is perceived as a distinct chain, which is caused by the main beat. Hence, rhythm2 can be removed as a unit without violating causation.

<comment><USER8> > [...] beat #3 is an echo of beat #2 [...]

This doesn't match the hierarchy of beats present in most music written in 4/4, where beats #1 and #3 are strong beats-- with beat #1 getting a greater emphasis than beat #3-- and beats #2 and #4 being weak beats. Much of the music of the classical period supports this fundamental pattern-- in 4/4 cadential formulae are generally articulated on beat #1 or beat #3, and rarely on beat #2 or #4.

One could make the argument that beat #3 is an echo of #1. But then beat #2 couldn't also be an echo of beat #1. (And there isn't a similar hierarchy of weak beats with #2 and #4.)

Furthermore, this hierarchy usually extends out exponentially in larger durations. So in a Mozart string quartet you'll hear how rhythmic material of measures 1 and 2 is often repeated (or slightly varied) in measures 3 and 4, with measures 2 and 4 being the "weak" measures. A lot of repertoire from the classical period extends at least two levels further so that the first four measures are a group balanced by another group of four. That 8 measure phrase then has a matching 8 measure phrase, although once we get that far out the rhythms aren't usually strictly symmetrical or imitative anymore.

I haven't read the literature but I'd imagine music cognitive research can shed light on just how far out humans can track those rhythmic groups. On the one hand, I know it has to be smaller than, say, an entire section of a sonata (I've never perceived a development section as the "weak" rhythmic group, for example). But techno music makes me speculate that at least in simplistic musical structures these groups can extend quite far.

<comment><USER15> There's so much in your comment that I could respond to. I probably won't get to everything.

But here is a "proof" that beats are perceived as if they were echos, using a rock beat. A (natural) echo is softer than the original, because the sound is traveling a greater distance to get to your ear. So, an artificial echo should also be softer. I used to play drums and I remember instinctively hitting the hi hat like (on quarter notes):

      (DAH-Dah)-(Dah-dah)

where the hardness was like 3-2-2-1 or 3-1-2-1. If I'm using terminology correctly: I hit it hardest on the down beat and second hardest on up beats. It just sounded right.

So the echo pattern would be like

      #1 Downbeat
      #2  (echo of #1)
      #3   (echo of #2)
      #4    (echo of #3)

(On the high hat)

OR

      #1 Downbeat
      #2    (Small echo of #1)
      #3  (Big echo of #1)
      #4    (Small echo of #3)

(On the high hat)

The way to test a theory of causation is to remove beats and see if it sounds right to your ear. Pay attention to how the transition sounds. Does the transition sound natural? This is kind of hard to do with rock rhythms. The theory becomes more interesting as the rhythms get more complex. When I was thinking about this, I was imagining house music or other electronic dance music.

I don't know much classical music, so I haven't really even thought about it.

<comment><USER16> I don't know anything about music, but it sounds like you said "Here's proof that beats are perceived as echoes: I play them like echoes."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dupe? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844)

</comment><comment><USER18> Music is language.

Music 'theory' is somewhat akin to linguistics (or language subjects). It can help you dissect and understand how things work in an abstract sense, but when it comes to actually talking (or playing music), you're operating in a different mindset.

The people who rely on music theory are non-experts in the same way that the people who rely on language class to speak are non-native speakers.

<comment><USER7> Music is _like_ a language, but unlike languages you don't need to be familiar with it in order to understand it.

<comment><USER18> That depends entirely on the level of understanding.

Recognizing the harmony underneath a line isn't something a casual listener is going to do, but is essential for a musician who is trying to communicate with other musicians in real-time.

<comment><USER7> _Recognizing the harmony underneath a line isn 't something a casual listener is going to do, but is essential for a musician who is trying to communicate with other musicians in real-time_

My point is that none of that is essential to recognizing it as music and getting meaning from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a more professional and thoughtful look at music and combinatorial math I suggest:

[http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of- music.html](http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html)

There's also

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts- Perf...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts- Performance/dp/3764357312)

Although IMO it's mostly blather - unlike Tymoczko, who's worth reading.

There are no complete scientific theories of music and there never will be, because music is a huge and semi-random collection of cultural experiments and stylistic conventions built only very loosely on perceptual psychology.

Academic theory books define an alphabet of terms, but the rest is learned by practice and experiment, oral teaching, and by listening, copying, and varying.

<comment><USER19> > There are no complete scientific theories of music and there never will be, > because music is a huge and semi-random collection of cultural experiments > and stylistic conventions built only very loosely on perceptual psychology.

You could say much the same thing about architecture. In that domain, I find Christopher Alexander's book A Pattern Language to be a very good reference for describing many concrete reasons why certain buildings feel better than others that seem to be pretty universal. (And we could reasonably expect to be able to test that if we were in doubt.)

It's not a complete theory of architecture and can't be, but partial theories are still tremendously useful and more likely to produce good results than blindly following stylistic rules without knowing what purpose they serve.

I've been hoping for awhile that someone will write a good music theory book in the same format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reads as a working lit review (huge collection of ideas the author has come across) rather than a compact synthesis.

Discuss on Lyra: [https://hellolyra.com/c/382](https://hellolyra.com/c/382)

<comment><USER21> What is Lyra?

<comment><USER22> From the homepage:

> Lyra is a non-profit, non-invasive communication service which aims to > enable deep and meaningful conversations.

Seems like a Slack/wiki hybrid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think a key challenge with music theory is that it is tackling some of the same problems as in linguistics.

You have a somewhat formal system that follows some sort of methodology. However, while there is a system, it seems nearly impossible to actually describe the axioms of this system formally.

With language or music, how do you determine some bases from which all other concepts are composed? I suspect that there is probably no such bases since new concepts seem to be able to be spontaneously created from human experience and often have circular relations.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't have time to thoroughly read this before commenting, but upon scanning it, I echo the disdain of many of the other commenters. The lack of humility seems to reflect the lack of important prior work cited in the paper.

Most glaringly, the author assaults Helmholtz without acknowledging the fact that people who study this topic in academia are way past that. It's like if I were to tell you that I've got an amazing new theory of physics and justify it by referencing Newtonian mechanics -- every academic knew it to be incomplete a century ago. Pointing that out is not a novel idea.

If you're interested in understanding how music works on a psychological level, "music theory" is the wrong thing to search for. The fields you're interested in are psychoacoustics and music perception.

Music theory is the study of compositional practice. It's a field that collects a whole bunch of descriptive theories on how composers in different periods and genres tend to work. You can use it to help yourself compose pieces in a given paradigm.

Psychoacoustics and music perception are the study of how we actually understand sound and music. The theories therein are what gave us things like lossy compression (e.g. "exactly what raw sound data can we discard and still preserve a perceptually identical recording?"). This is an incredible achievement in that it only works if we have a thorough understanding of how the brain processes sound and music. Psychoacoustics has little to say about what makes something qualitatively musical, but that's where study of music perception picks up.

In the overlap between these two fields, there are a bunch of people working on unified theories of harmonic/Western/tonal music. The author fails to reference the most interesting work done in this area. The ones I've found most convincing are:

\- Dmitri Tymoczko's Geometry of Music: [http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry- of-music.html](http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry-of-music.html)

\- Bill Sethares's Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale approach: [http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html)

\- Andrew Duncan's Combinatorial Music Theory: [http://andrewduncan.net/cmt/](http://andrewduncan.net/cmt/)

Some of this work is pretty old at this point. Granted, it's surprisingly difficult to do a full literature review in this area. I know from experience, because I studied this topic in grad school. Someone could probably earn a Ph.D. by properly synthesizing all of these idea into a music theory that combines the analytical power of Tymoczko's approach with the first-principle work of Setheres.

<comment><USER24> In relation to Bill Sethare's work, I recommend listening to example (1) here : [http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html) , which is an amazing demonstration of the relationship between overtone beating and consonance / dissonance.

Even if the statement "lack of beating between overtones sounds good" doesn't hold true as a universal rule (and I'm sure this has occurred to many people prior to Wilkerson), you can really see what Helmholtz was getting at here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does the author acknowledge the field of music cognition, and that it is a scientific field that produces verifiable/falsifiable results?

</comment><comment><USER25> Authors who claim to understand music scientifically should be judged by the music they produce. If an author really does have some deep understanding of what makes music work, it should be fairly easy for the author to get a record deal, get a bunch of #1 pop hits, etc. Until then, it's alchemy.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is a newer version 2 from 2014: [https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v2](https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v2)

<comment><USER27> Thanks! We've updated the link from [https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1](https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1).</comment></comment>


Workplace Surveillance Is the New Office 'Perk' - <AUTHOR> http://www.vocativ.com/414570/workplace-spying-surveillance-dystopia-we-work-in/ <comment><AUTHOR> We had a similar wellness 'benefit' at a former workplace. $250 for submitting blood work results. Funny thing though - my personal insurance cost was increased by >$250. So, really - I just had to submit blood work or pay $250.</comment>


AWS SSO CLI tool functional until AWS gets its act together - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wnkz/aws-sso <comment><USER2> Looks very helpful, a shame that it has to rely on Selenium/ChromeDriver.

Very frustrating that AWS SSO has no API, especially when every other AWS product is offered API-first, it makes this feature so very difficult.

While there are other ways to manage access across multiple AWS accounts within an organization, none are nearly as fully-integrated as AWS SSO, with the ability to create users/groups and then assign their roles within accounts.

There are other methods, but I've yet to find something which can let users log in using directory credentials, see a list of all AWS accounts they have access to, and have one-click sign-in to those accounts.

<comment> o-__-o Okta?</comment></comment>


Facebook/pyre-check: Performant type-checking for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/pyre-check <comment><AUTHOR> Discussion of annoucing blog post got some traction on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083432)

[https://engineering.fb.com/security/pysa/](https://engineering.fb.com/security/pysa/)</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite payment processor (2014)? - <AUTHOR>

As of now, May 2014 - What is your favorite payment processor and more developer friendly? <comment><USER2> Stripe is by far, in over a decade, the simplest method of online payment processing I've ever run into. You can add it to your app in a trivial amount of time, customer service is great and the documentation is clear and easy to follow.

The only negative I can think of is there are cheaper options out there, but at 2.9% + 0.30 per transaction, its reasonable enough for most of the clients I've implemented it for.

<comment><USER3> If only Stripe served the whole of EU already.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is old one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709)

</comment><comment><USER4> Authorize.net is Cybersource.... It has the most complete set of tools I've ever used. From simple, value passing integrations to full API access.

Easy to set up with subscriptions.</comment>


Good luck fat - <AUTHOR>

Jacob Thornton (Co author of Bootstrap) is leaving Twitter. Wish him well! <comment><USER2> Anyone knows what happened and if it is somewhat related to recent moves of the company? Some information at his twitter @fat.

</comment><comment><USER3> His nickname is fat?

<comment><AUTHOR> he goes by fat, but he is as thin as a tooth pick

<comment><USER3> umm.. I hope he doesn't get offended by that.</comment></comment></comment>


Salt Lake City to Build the First Protected Intersection for Bicycling in the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/05/why-salt-lake-city-chose-to-build-the-first-protected-intersection-for-bicycling-in-the-us/392702/

<comment><USER2> This looks like the best design I have seen for protecting bike riders in intersections. This innovative approach truly protects the pedestrian/cyclist in the intersection from turning vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is so awesome. Protected lanes and intersections would make me go out and buy a bike tomorrow.</comment>


Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others take a stand against FCC - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5692578/tech-coalition-challenges-fcc

<comment><USER2> The headline says that it is a stand against the FCC, but the substance of the article is that the coalition is promoting the value of the open internet without endorsing any specific policy. The FCC is _also_ arguing for the value of the open internet, and preparing specific policy designed to support that.

What the letter _actually_ takes a stand against is rumors that the FCC chair _has already both denied and said would be bad policy_ about the _content_ of the proposal that is under discussion.

So, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are standing "against" the FCC by taking the same stance that the FCC Chair has taken, in opposition to a stance that it was rumored that the FCC Chair was taking.</comment>


Diet Culture Exists to Fight Off the Fear of Death - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/eating-toward-immortality/515658/?single_page=true <comment><USER2>
      There are twin motives underlying human behavior, according to Becker—the urge for heroism and the desire for atonement.

I think that in modern Western society, it's more of a desire to _avoid ostracism_ (in its most extreme form, known as "fat-shaming").</comment>


Awk driven IoT - <AUTHOR> https://anisse.astier.eu/awk-driven-iot.html <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of two other surprising uses of Awk -- "Awk for AI"[0] and "awk- raycaster"[1]

I really like Awk as a language because it integrates so well with shell pipelines and it is incredibly small, while remaining high-level enough to be practical, which I think this project demonstrates quite well.

[0]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140926113347/http://www.wra1th...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140926113347/http://www.wra1th.plus.com:80/awk/awkfri.txt)

[1]: [https://github.com/TheMozg/awk- raycaster](https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awk is already well-known in embedded systems, eg. busybox implements a lot of POSIX using awk IMO.

Also, awk syntax is clearly the predecessor of JavaScript. The following is both awk and JavaScript:

        function f(x) {
            my_array[1] = "whatever"
            my_array["a string"] = "something else"
            if (x in my_array) return my_array[x]
        }

It's all there: the "in" operator, no need for semicolon as statement terminator, the "function" keyword, untypedness, regular expression constants, C-like curly braces, etc.

<comment><USER4> Yeah Awk and JavaScript have surprisingly similar syntax. But the semantics are very different. Here are some things I found when studying Awk a bit more:

\- Awk has no local variables! There is no "var". Believe it or not, people fake locals with unused function parameters.

\- Awk has no dict literals like d={}. And no function literals like f = function(x) { return x; }

\- Awk dicts can't be nested. You can't have something like: {key1: {key2: 123}} (using JS syntax)

\- Awk CAN accept dicts as parameters, but it CAN'T return them. "return d" is invalid.

\- Awk can't take functions as parameters OR return them. That is, no higher order functions.

The latter three facts are basically consequences of the fact that Awk has no garbage collection. It has a strict stack discipline and no nested compound data structures.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and another difference is the use of 1-based string indexes, as opposed to 0-based string indexes in JavaScript. Even though I started with C many years ago (where 0-based string indexes are there for a reason, unlike in Java and JavaScript IMHO), I found 1-based string index semantics to allow much more compact and idiomatic expressions for typical string massaging tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome project!

There's a company who developed a cute product around this type of technology. It's a bestselling toy in Germany.

[https://tonies.de](https://tonies.de)

<comment><USER6> > It's a bestselling toy in Germany.

German here; never heard of it, but looks amazing for my daughter. Thanks for mentioning this!

<comment><USER7> Tape cassettes are a dime a dozen whereas you pay 15€ for a story tonie. Inserting a cassette and pressing play is also not too difficult for a child.

<comment><USER5> That's true and I was really concerned about that pricing, too. What I like about the Tonie: I need to travel a lot business wise and can use their app to record e.g. sounds of a city, songs I play on my guitar etc. and deliver them to my kids Tonie. Because it's connected to the home WiFi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Love it! I worked on a research project where we built a lot of CLIs to pull data form a sensor, send it over a Unix Pipe to a push CLI for a database. It offers some fun flexibility and really fast implementations.

[http://openpipekit.github.io/](http://openpipekit.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The article mentions mawk which is one of the faster awks I know of. Then there is awka that compiles awk script to C. Do you know of other speed demons apart from these. I think cleaning up the language by removing some of the one-off constructs and making it more regular (npi) could make faster implementations possible. An embeddable/extendable awk that exploits simd and multicore could potentially lift a lot of weight.

I wish awk had more mind share than it does these days.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using AWK for decades, but the NFC avatars are new to me.

Has anyone started a business where you send in some photos, or sit for a sculptor, then they 3D print a set of NFC caricatures for you? I imagine it would be fairly easy to do, especially if the sculpture tutor at your local art school was willing to help with hiring.

</comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat gratuitous use of awk. It could be bash driven IoT:

       ... | while read -r line; do
       file=
       case "$line" in
         *"03 52 c1 1a"*) echo "file1 "; file="file1.mp3" ;;
       esac
       if test -n "$file"; then
         mpg321 -q "$file" &
       fi
       done

</comment><comment><USER12> Really cool project. I'm already using mpd on my rpi to play music (controlled with the iPhone mPod app).

Would be cool to let my 3.5yr old boy play some songs he likes... But at his age, I need to think of a more advanced physical controller or remote (any suggestions?)

<comment><USER13> Amazon Dash is a one-button solution, if he can't press buttons yet you just need to hack it so another action triggers the "button press" event.

<comment><USER12> But how can he choose different tunes? Hope to find some kind of controller that's fun for him to use.

... and of course he can press a button :)

<comment><USER13> Have several dash buttons? Like in the article where each figure plays a different tune.

Otherwise you'd have to macgyver a toy with giant buttons, build a Bluetooth device onto it that sends a different signal for each button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now really do an inet aware interface with (g)awk: [https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawkinet/html_node/](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawkinet/html_node/).

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome!

<comment><USER16> Why, exactly?

<comment><USER17> Because it's using a 41 year old language which has ultra low memory requirements, no dependencies and runs like a bandit, on internet of things. (And can be compiled to machine code by using Awka.)

In Bryan Cantrill's (paraphrased) words: "let there be an orgy of AWK one- liners!"

(Or even better, entire applications written in AWK, since the language is perfect for dynamically generating web applications.)

<comment><USER18> To give the parent the benefit of the doubt, I think the point he was making was less "this isn't awesome" and more "explain why you think it's awesome, don't just place your upvote in the form of a comment".

<comment><USER16> Thank you. I expected that my addition of "exactly" would help, but honestly, my post was rather lazy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Re: $150K conv. debt for YC - what if company raises no more money? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious regarding the terms of the $150K debt from Yuri and RC: what happens if the company never raises a follow-on round, and a) there is plenty of cash flow to pay back the debt, or b) there is insufficient cash flow to pay back the debt.<p>Anyone know when the debt comes due, what the interest rate is, and if payback terms are pegged to cashflow somehow? <comment><USER2> A blogger somewhere saw the terms of the note and commented on it (don't remember what site). Basically if the note converts for any reason other than an equity round it does so at a $5M cap.

Even more interesting: that $5M cap also applies if the terms of the future equity round don't allow for re-upping. So basically, if StartFund can't re- invest in the next round, they get better terms on the note. Really smart.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really don't know the answer to this question but my best guesses

a) At some point you would do a real valuation on your company and debt would be converted to shares or some type of equity. Investors would hope that you become profitable and investors could sell shares on secondary market or company would eventually buy back shares.

b) If no cash you would eventually close shop, and I imagine if you dissolve your corporation nothing happens. Like going bankrupt and if you have no money theres nothing to collect on and nothing happens. I guess its possible to sell what assets are available.

Thats why investment is a risk.</comment>