Close Call Database for Cycling - <AUTHOR> http://closecalldatabase.com <comment><USER2> SF resident here. I've had quite a few close calls, and the same holds true for many of my friends who bike.

These typically happened on these "shared bike lanes" \- it's where the city takes the right-most car lane, draws a bike sign on it, and tell cars and bicyclists to "get along" (since cars are still allowed full use of it).

This, of course, doesn't work. Cars are much faster than bikes, and asking these two vastly different transportation methods to share a lane is nuts. Should the cars just drive 6mph? Should they go around, try to merge and hope they don't misgauge the distance?

The problem here is that the city didn't put any real thought into the bikes lanes, and the result is a terrible and incredibly dangerous system.

Personally, I've given up on bike lanes in many areas of the city. It's simply not safe.

<comment><USER3> I'm astonished at how ignorant otherwise intelligent bicyclists often are of the rule common in most US states that they can and should take the traffic lane (and should take the center of the lane to block cars from edging around to their left) when they are stopped at a red light where there is a shared right turn/bike lane.

I often see bikers who have helmets, lights, visibility vests, etc., all signs of being clear thinking riders, parking themselves squat in the middle of the shared turn lane at a red, when they should be in the main stream of traffic for the duration of the wait (in fact the recommendation is to ride with traffic if your speed matches it, absent bike lanes).

When the light turns green, cars are stationary, and bikes accelerate plenty fast in the first few seconds. One or two turns of the pedal gets you over back into the right side, and onward into the continuing bike lane as you cross the street. This can happen in a couple of seconds without significantly slowing down any cars (unless it's a Tesla P85D, maybe).

Joining the main stream of traffic in front of a car at a red light (assuming you beat that car to the red) may miff some ignorant drivers (ignorance all around, right?) but they'll be pleasantly surprised that you are out of their way in no time when the light turns green. Obviously this doesn't apply if you're a super slow rider... in which case, people just need to be patient for a few seconds. The point is, if you are blocking a shared right turn lane, you are doing it wrong.

<comment><USER4> Do you even bike? I don't want to cross over a lane of traffic right out of an intersection. That sounds like the most dangerous thing I could do. I'll happily sit in the turn lane during a red light. If someone wants to turn, they can wait to till it's green. I'm not going to risk my life so that someone can get to their destination 1.5 seconds sooner. If someone has an issue, they can get out of their car and confront me about it.

Ultimately, this is the fault of whoever planned the streets so badly.

<comment><USER5> What? No one said anything about "crossing over a lane of traffic". You start in front of the cars in the regular go-straight lane, and then when the light turns green, you ride straight across the intersection. If there's a bike lane on the other side of the intersection, you aim for the bike lane.

This is safer for everyone involved than your suggestion of parking your bike in the turn lane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bicycle lanes, at least in my experience in the UK, are almost universally pointless (lanes and tracks through parks are generally OK.)

Riding on the road is always safer, because the highway code actually applies there. You just become a slow car, you have right of way at roundabouts etc. Be considerate and pull to the left when you can. Sorted.

On roads that are too narrow to cycle without completely blocking traffic I generally use the footpath at slow speeds (e.g. 6-8mph, just rolling along).

On super fast roads (limit 50 and above) generally unless it's late at night and quiet I would just try to find an alternative route.

I don't think anything needs to happen other than more drivers cycling and more cyclists driving, to enable empathy. Everything else is just fluff.

<comment><USER7> This just sounds sort of hopeless.

I don't bike anymore ( got rid of my last bike during a move ). I certainly wasn't comfortable in high density mixed USA suburban traffic.

The cognitive load on drivers for just motorcycles is pretty high. Bicycles make it even more complex.

From just watching what people do in cars with other cars, I am skeptical that even rudimentary driving safety is widely understood. Turn signals are rarely used, nobody preserves their intervals and people form patterns in traffic they can't recover from.

<comment><USER6> You're probably right!

I haven't been to the US, but my stereotypical picture is wide, sweeping grid like roads, which result in drivers going fast.

The UK isn't really like that especially in metro areas. In London the highway code plays second fiddle to a general 'be alert all the time and be courteous' type system.

I think that cycling properly (not just at the side forever) on roads where drivers aim to be hitting 40mph constantly is a dream, really. Too high a speed difference.

In inner London, though, likely you will be cycling 10-20mph while cars drive at 20-30mph. Is that not the case in NYC for example? Are your roads just too straight and easy to use so drivers gun it? (It's well known that narrow roads result in unconscious slowing).

<comment><USER7> I don't know about NYC. (Downtown) Montreal seems to be a great place to use a bike, though.

There's no way the law has more bandwidth than "stay alert all the time".

I still encounter the odd cyclist who doesn't take care to stay out of my blind spot. Very unnerving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi all, I am the cyclist/coder behind the site. It's clearly not "the solution" but I think it's an important part of it. If you do ride, I encourage you to sign up, the site becomes more effective as the network grows. I am also exploring a couple partnerships that should make the site more effective this summer. Appreciate the support. Thanks.

<comment><USER9> This is a great project idea. Riding in Berlin I experience close calls on almost a daily basis. Networking with other riders could be a very empowering tool in an environment that many times makes you feel helpless and without proper means of recourse.

@eezis, there is no means of contacting you on your site! Wouldn't it make sense to supply email/twitter info so people can get in touch? Also, I held off signing up, since it was unclear to me what I can expect once I signed up to your site. I.e. what would a database entry look like? Clicking on an incident on the map only gives me the date of the incident and no further info.

<comment><USER8> Good point about a sample report. I just modified the code to show one. More data is collected than presented, these sections are published: [http://closecalldatabase.com/incident/show/CO-141108-001/](http://closecalldatabase.com/incident/show/CO-141108-001/)

When I review a report, I almost always zoom in on the map, then use the "streetview" feature to get a feel for the context (road width, presence of bike lanes, speed limits, line of sight visibility, general road conditions, etc). That helps me to get a better understanding of what the driver and the cyclist/s were experiencing when the incident occurred.

Regarding the contact info, unregistered users can access it from the login/register drop down: [http://closecalldatabase.com/contact-u](http://closecalldatabase.com/contact-u)

Registered users can access it via their account drop down or from the FAQ: [http://closecalldatabase.com/contact-r/](http://closecalldatabase.com/contact-r/)

I might make the FAQ available to non-registered users . . . but in general, cyclists seem to "get it" or they don't. At this stage of development, I'm not really looking to "sell" the idea to fence-sitters, I want the core of the community built around experienced cyclists that have balanced perspective on what's happening out there on the roads.

Regarding social media, I have been reticent to engage for several reasons but now realize I probably have to . So I have started to include some of that information in the email notifications. And I am cleverly "hidden" at @eezis and @closecalldb and Kennett Peterson volunteers to keep a FaceBook page (and you might wish to follow his blog: [https://kennettron.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/adelaide/](https://kennettron.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/adelaide/)).

If you ride, you can find me on Strava as well.

<comment><USER9> Thank you @eezis for linking to Kennetts blogpost. What a painfully sad story. Lets hope that Adelaide recovers completely and the driver won't be allowed behind another steering wheel.

Just yesterday afternoon I had another reckless driver deliberately drive up close to a few centimeters behind my rear wheel because he saw me as an obstacle. This was just 30 Meters away from a red light. The argument through the driver window, as always in situations like this, lead nowhere. People like this know, that there will be no consequences to their behaviour, so they keep on risking other peoples lives...

You might be interested in the german project [http://wegeheld.org](http://wegeheld.org), which mainly focuses on documenting parking offences. Sadly the interface of the app is not there yet.

Being able to use a phone to document and upload an incident report complete with pictures/videos and GPS location and GPS track info would be a great plus to any such app. Also being able to warn other cyclists of reckless drivers in a specific area or of an ongoing incident might be helpful (i.e. if witnesses are needed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Responsive web design tip: make sure your map doesn't take up full height or width of the screen. Scrolling in that area becomes difficult.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why only for cyclists? Why not collect data from multiple sources: reports from pedestrians, driver, security cameras facing intersections...

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone who rides a bicycle in heavy traffic is far braver than me.

</comment><comment><USER13> And when the cyclists don't obey the rules? Can we have a database for that too? Wait they don't have tags

Legally bikes have to stop at red lights, but in my experience the opposite is the norm: quick glance to make sure no one is coming, and dash across multiple lanes to turn left on red.

Wanna bike on the roads? Great! I do too. We can turn all city roads one way, making room for nice thick bike lanes. But! Get tagged like every other road vehicle so we can report on problem cyclists.

<comment><USER14> How about after the first time a cyclist kills a driver in a collision?

<comment><USER13> How about if they hit a pedestrian? Here's a fun example from a cycling magazine:

[http://road.cc/content/news/89218-us-cyclist-who-killed- pede...](http://road.cc/content/news/89218-us-cyclist-who-killed-pedestrian- guilty-vehicular-manslaughter-escapes-jail)

(full disclosure, I walk or bike to work.)

No one pretends that drivers don't recklessly open doors endangering cyclists' lives. Or cut them off. Or engage in other dangerous behavior affecting ppl w/ bikes. It's tragic. But why do we have to pretend that the converse is not true? That cyclists' behavior is also often dangerous to themselves or others (i.e. pedestrians)!

We don't let pedestrians J-walk. We don't let cars run red lights. Why do two wheels get a free pass?

Everyone (I hope) tries to avoid cyclists. It's a human life; no nitpicking about rules and who is at fault changes the sacrosanct value of a human life. But a bike is not carte-blanche to do whatever you want.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, but I'll be leading the crusade against falling air conditioners first. [http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/07/air_condi...](http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/07/air_conditioners_fall_nyc.php)

<comment><USER13> Why? Are they more frequent? Anyway, how frequent it is, is irrelevant. Cyclists can and do cause fatalities ( _sometimes_ their own). To mitigate this they should follow the rules.

There are rules of the road for everyone's safety. I obey them when I walk, bike and drive. If we're going to go Stasi on drivers, let's go Stasi on everyone.

<comment><USER14> > _If we 're going to go Stasi on drivers, let's go Stasi on everyone._

That is, on the face of it, a ridiculous position. Cars, and only cars, are what matters in road safety. Everything else is less important than obscure threats like falling air conditioners.

What you are really saying is "Lets give cops the tools to harass cyclists" Fuck that. You're driving a deadly tool. If you kill someone with it, it should ruin your life. If you don't like that, wait until cars can be made safe for everyone around them.

<comment><USER13> "Cars, and only cars, are what matters in road safety."

If you believe that, you don't have a toddler. I don't either (yet), but I do remember running around the streets of BsAs like an idiot with my freaked out mother screaming, chasing after me as I dodged, ironically enough, an ambulance.

Cars matter the most. Agreed. But let's not exaggerate, eh?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Being A Bully Is Actually Good For Your Health - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/09/1323641111.abstract?sid=8ebf80e1-6b20-4ac9-b0d3-8d573fb663ee

<comment><USER2> Given that it has long-term effects, why does it go ignored?</comment>


Towards Crystal 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://crystal-lang.org/2020/03/03/towards-crystal-1.0.html <comment><USER2> I am glad to hear that the strive towards a 1.0 continues. During several side projects I have grown quite fond of Crystal, it feels like it might cover a wide range of use cases, with a type system that does not get in my way and a very solid performance. Kind of what I whished Ruby could develop into.

A version 1.0 will sure draw attention and assure contributors and interested devs that there is progress and their time invested in the language is well spent.

Better tooling, e.g. in IDEs, will sure draw even more users.

Looking forward for the things to come!</comment>


Rats love driving tiny cars, even when they don't get treats - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/these-rats-learned-to-drive-tiny-cars-for-science/ <comment><USER2> We have posts today about self driving cars (that cost billions in development) and rat driven cars (that probably cost under a thousand). Rats have a native understanding of snow, rain and other bad weather.

<comment><USER3> what are you saying? self driving rat cars?

<comment><USER4> It would be pretty interesting to scale up the experiment. Making a control scheme for rats in a full-size car wouldn't be too hard. But you might have to progressively train them on larger and larger vehicles.

Careful not to let it out of the lab though, otherwise it might become aware of how much power it's been given. Most powerful rat in history. :)

Imagine being a rat in a full-size car. It must feel like you're driving a house.

<comment><USER3> talking about the rat race

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Footage: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VYErLcG6aCQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VYErLcG6aCQ)

</comment><comment><USER6> So basically the character of the mouse Stuart Little , which is a nice children's book that is a classic and was written by E.B. White, does have a limited basis in reality?

</comment><comment><USER7> My therapist: rats driving tiny cars aren't real, they can't hurt you

Rats driving tiny cars:

</comment><comment><USER8> Make a rat city with houses where they can sleep and different buildings they can go to for food and water, but make it so they can only drive to different buildings.

<comment><USER9> Existing rat populations would never allow this due to NIMBYism and would use zoning to stop it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imagine if they teach them how to pilot drones. They'll be like Air Force pilots, complete with attitude. Not just well-adjusted but also more willing to take risks. My first and only skydiving experience I had an adrenaline high that lasted all day, with visions of more skydiving and other types of adventures. Sadly, I ended up settling back into my quiet, boring but peaceful life.

</comment><comment><USER11> A short while back I would have thought this to be intuitive. I love to drive, and have wanted to do it since my teens.

But then my kids and their friends came along. They don't love to drive! No cruising Main street. They do their socializing on the phone.

So maybe the rats are just old school?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the best experiment. I can now live happy knowing rats have learned how to drive a small rat car to deal with stress. It's no wonder, it looks like a lot of fun for them

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool ! Can it be weaponized ? I mean, could it do better than some hypothetical tiny AI controlled robots in, e.g., earthquakes rescue missions ?

<comment><USER14> They had pidgeon guided bombs and missiles in ww2

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

I laughed a bit when I saw the project head... Of course that's who.

<comment><USER15> They were never built, but during that period people had _absolutely wild_ ideas. Great Britain was considering building 10 kton _nuclear mines_ , to be buried along the borders of Germany and to be detonated in case of a Soviet invasion.

Even if buried, those mines would just end up freezing, so some bright mind came up with the idea of putting _live chicken_ inside them, to keep the temperature up.

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

<comment><USER16> The bat bombs were tested, with entirely predictable results. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This headline makes me happy. I want more of science to be tiny-car based.

</comment><comment><USER18> Did anybody read the paper?

What was the activity pattern they used to establish the baseline measurements for the hormones?

<comment><USER19> If you click the DOI link at the bottom of the article it'll take you to a page where you can download the PDF.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. I swear I looked last time this was discussed and there was a nice fat charge to download it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> After healing cancer, diabetis and alzheimers in rats, now we are giving them cars.

This is going too far!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the cool links you've been meaning to look at? - <AUTHOR> I was going through my google keep and I found a million links to cool stuff I saw on HN. What are some you've been saving up?
Here's a few from me:
Perl-like one-liners with Ruby: https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processing/blob/master/ruby_one_liners.md
Deep Learning with Pytorch in 60 mins: https://pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/deep_learning_60min_blitz.html
Financial modeling site & API that shows DCF, WACC and other data for stocks: https://financialmodelingprep.com/financial-summary/GOOGL <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073)

there is one on music theory on the main post that I am planning to get back to when I have more time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some Product Hunt learnings and insights [https://blog.typestudio.co/product- hunt-learnings/](https://blog.typestudio.co/product-hunt-learnings/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.unifiedinfotech.net/services/web-design-new- york...](https://www.unifiedinfotech.net/services/web-design-new-york/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.accesscyber.org](https://www.accesscyber.org)

</comment><comment> non-entity Most of my favorited articles

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks</comment>


Ask HN: How do you build landing pages quickly - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
  I am building a landing page for one of my ideas but I am doing it by actually coding html/jquery etc.
  Is there a better way to build landing pages more quickly? <comment><USER2> UnBounce makes things very very easy.

[http://unbounce.com/](http://unbounce.com/)

Another option is to buy a theme off Themeforest: [http://themeforest.net/category/marketing/landing- pages](http://themeforest.net/category/marketing/landing-pages)

<comment><AUTHOR> its kind of expensive

<comment><USER3> Compared to how much time you're going to spend making it yourself? Not really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check these links. Might be useful. Some of them are paid but are worth it. :)

* [http://startbootstrap.com/](http://startbootstrap.com/) * [http://bootswatch.com/](http://bootswatch.com/) * [http://bootstrapzero.com/](http://bootstrapzero.com/) * [http://designmodo.com/shop/](http://designmodo.com/shop/)

</comment><comment><USER5> A lot of the "Hey, check out my cool startup" pages are put together with Bootstrap or similar.

If you don't want it to look the same as every other bootstrap page it still takes some work to customize, but it takes care of a huge amount of work for you.

[http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/GAFuller/rails-4-landing](https://github.com/GAFuller/rails-4-landing)

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting.. starred

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you seen [http://launchrock.co/](http://launchrock.co/)?

<comment><USER8> This one is free too (just confirmed: [http://support.launchrock.co/knowledgebase/articles/137846-h...](http://support.launchrock.co/knowledgebase/articles/137846-how- much-does-launchrock-cost)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You could use Unbounce, Optimizely or LeadPages. None are free but not expensive either.

</comment><comment><USER10> leadpages.net is solid. Their podcast is pretty helpful too. We have used them for a little while. Not free, but as mentioned, as opposed to doing it yourself, worth it.</comment>


Ask HN: How much time do you spend studying outside working hours? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> About an hour a day during the work week, a couple hours over the course of the weekend.

<comment><USER3> About the same with me though it's not deliberately studying. It's working on my open source application and innovating new solutions to tough problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends. In the past I've done 3 hours a day for a couple weeks to get certs. Right now it's probably more like an hour per week due to family stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> too much. I go through phases, like last year I didn't do anything, but this year it's 247. going to start a MS program too, so it's going to be going for a while.</comment>


Nature makes all articles free to view - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view-1.16460 <comment><USER2> For those not in the know, Nature is THE journal to be in if you want to be successful in bioscience. It is peer reviewed, fairly exclusive, and they generally only publish game changer style science. If you are in science, and you get a first author Nature paper, your ticket is punched and you are about to have a moderately successful career.

For all the nitpicking going on about the delivery method, searching, and it not being "enough", this will largely not matter to scientists. Articles are generally shared by DOI or PMID, indexing is very specific. If not, relevant papers in the field are nearly known by heart and new info from competing labs is checked on daily. Problems 1 and 2 are not as underserved as HN thinks.

This is a monster announcement for institutions that may not have the money for a Nature sub, and the public at large to have better access to such a powerful archive of historically hidden info. The fact that it's not delivered in a DRM-free format for every device ever all the way back to the oldest article is nothing compared to how incredibly huge this is. I am spamming this to all my old lab buddies as we speak.

TL;DR: The output system for academic publishing sucks at the high end, but it just got a lot less sucky.

<comment><USER3> First, I would like to point out that Nature is indeed _considered_ "THE journal" by those who give importance to bibliometrics criteria (which imho is foolish), but it's really not clear that its quality is that good. For instance take this study which finds that Nature has one of the most important retractation rate: [http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.full.pdf+html](http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.full.pdf+html).

> (…) will largely not matter to scientists.

Please speak only for yourself. It matters to me and I'm not the only one.

> This is a monster announcement for institutions that may not have the money > for a Nature sub.

No it's not. In his answer to your comment, silencio already explained that, but let me just present it in another way:

Before the announcement: when you want a Nature paper, you have to know someone with access to a subscription who can download the PDF for you and then send it to you.

After the announcement: when you want a Nature paper, you have to know someone with access to a subscription who can download the PDF for you and then send it to you, or who can also send you a link to some shitty read-only version of the paper on the condition that you register an account with Nature and that you use DRM-bloated proprietary software.

This is pure marketing, it's only PR, it has nothing to do with open access and it changes nothing in a good way, and it introduces DRMs where they were not.

<comment><USER4> While this sounds bad it's probably a sign of the amount of scrutiny Nature articles are under not the Quality of what's published. Basically, the rate of detection is higher in Nature so even if the underlying problem is the same or even less it's going to look worse.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I don't think anyone is saying that the high retractation rate implies that Nature paper are worse than other papers. However it is a sign that they may not be that much better either.

<comment><USER5> I would expect that the resulting quality of _not-retracted_ and proven-by- time papers in Nature is _a lot_ higher than in any other journal. Simply because of higher exposure, more attempts to reproduce or use studies and more scrutiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Key quote: "All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded."

It sounds like:

* you may have to install the ReadCube reader to view the protected PDFs, unclear if you can view them in a regular PDF viewer. ("ReadCube (...) will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles' PDFs")

* only subscribers can initiate access sharing of specific articles, going back only to 1997 for individual subscribers. It sounds like the general public will not be able to search for articles and view them through the Nature website.

Well, it's a step forward.

<comment><USER7> I just checked this out, you do not have to install anything. From their website: "ReadCube Connect is an HTML5-powered interactive PDF viewer." I presume this update will please many people, because they can now see whether or not an article they're contemplating purchasing actually touches on desired areas or not. Good thinking on their part!

<comment><USER8> I just signed up for ReadCube, thinking this meant I could at least browse articles as a member of the general public. You have to install an app on your computer and log in to view articles and use it. ReadCube Connect seems to be a Scribd-esque way to embed articles on existing pages (like a news story), not a standalone app.

You also need a link shared to you via a paid subscriber (or one of a bunch of news sites etc.) to view articles. It's "free" in a very misleading way.

<comment><USER8> D'oh, can't edit to add a new observation: now that there are links shared in the comments here, it appears the webapp is in fact a thing and you're not required to install anything or log in to view the "enhanced" PDFs. But you need the webapp or the standalone app to view them.

Still requires those links in the first place though. I just get prompted to buy access if I use any of the pubmed/google scholar search functionality in the app. Blergh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My institution subscribes to Nature, and using my library's proxy to access the Nature website, I can use the "Share/bookmark" menu to generate links like [http://rdcu.be/bKk4](http://rdcu.be/bKk4), [http://rdcu.be/bKlc](http://rdcu.be/bKlc), [http://rdcu.be/bKld](http://rdcu.be/bKld), and [http://rdcu.be/bKli](http://rdcu.be/bKli), which can be viewed in the browser (or maybe only because I also just installed the ReadCube app?).

The articles linked to above span several months, but it's generating serial links, so I can only assume that it's able to track visits back to the subscriber and/or my university account.

The ReadCube HTML5 reader looks nice, but does not work with JavaScript disabled (no surprise there). It uses JavaScript to override text selection (disabling copy&paste), but after a little meddling with the developer tools and element inspector, you can find a decently near ancestor to the text and copy the DOM as html. Stick that into a new file and you can select (and copy) the text without too much further hassle.

The DOM is awkward and split up kind of like a PDF (selecting a range of text goes haywire in unpredictable cases), but in comparing the HTML DOM hierarchy to the text object structure in the original PDF (which, as a subscriber, I can download), I found no obvious similarities, so I'm guessing they aren't translating the PDF to HTML directly.

<comment><USER10> It is awful awful awful to show the "PDF download" button then go "Ha ha, no!" when you click it. Such a shitty UX.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. My options were

       1: "$3.99 rent,  $9.99 buy" (the was called the "ReadCube access" option)
       2: Purchase article full text and PDF: $8 (had no annotations, so presumably the "Nature" option)

In either case this is NOT "free". Nature, try again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Their definition of "free" is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share links with them. For many purposes, articles might be "free" but still hidden from the public.

<comment><USER13> So how long until someone writes a web crawler that dumps all the links into a searchable public db?

<comment><USER14> This has already been done many times with regular pdfs [1-3]. There are mostly hosted illegally in places like Russia. I'm sure you can find more on TPB or similar.

[1] [http://sci-hub.org/](http://sci-hub.org/) [2] [http://booksc.org/](http://booksc.org/) [3] [http://www.freefullpdf.com/](http://www.freefullpdf.com/)

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, these don't host many of the articles I would love to have access to. If I didn't know anyone still in uni, I would probably have no way of doing good research. Looks like one of them is proxying through a university that has access though.

<comment><USER14> You can also try /r/scholar; you usually get responses within a day or so [1].

[1]. [http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar](http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Incorrect title. "Nature places all article in flakey peephole viewer."

<comment><USER17> My thoughts exactly. I was incredibly excited until I read the first line or so. One day perhaps.

<comment><USER18> "One day" will come when free and open-for-everyone platforms will occupy that domain, not when "Nature" or some other sly organization will do that. Like archive.org, but with peer review by people who use it.

I'm sure that in principle it is possible. I mean, if you are interested in some domain you surely know few people who's opinion you'd trust. They might not even be Ph.Ds, but they somehow got this good reputation, probably not by accident. So if somebody like this presses "Like" button under some article and leaves comment about what is trustworthy here and what isn't, it probably will be as good (better, actually) for you, as opinion of Nature's staff. And as these people by definition are interested in this domain as well, chances are they also will be interested to read this article and thus will be able to press "Like" button and leave a comment.

So, yeah, _in principle_ it it possible, but I imagine it is really hard to do it _right_. Because essentially it is the same as any "karma" or "rating" system on some forum, and inventing proper rating system is really hard — it's not the most knowledgeable people who usually have the highest rank on any thematic forum. But on forums and other existing social platforms it works, because rating isn't that important. And in our case it's all about rating and trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to the articles. Anything less is unacceptable (unless Nature wants to pay me back the taxes they owe me).

<comment><USER20> Not all research is funded by tax payers.

<comment><USER21> Be prepared to name research projects that do not receive government funding in the first or second degree. (That is: receive funding directly, or from grant-making organizations that themselves receive substantial government funding.)

<comment><USER22> Any research funded by non-governmental organizations like the Howard Hughes Foundation, Michael J Fox foundation, etc, etc.

<comment><USER23> A great deal of research funded by such organizations is done in combination with taxpayer funding, particularly with regard to infrastructure. As a cancer researcher I had funding from companies and foundations, but depended on my position in a tax-payer funded research lab to actually do the work.

<comment><USER24> Also, as charities they probably get tax advantages.

<comment><USER22> By that measure, everything is gov't funded. Thankfully the courts don't see it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the idea of shared annotations. Or more specifically I like the idea of Science as a conversation. It has always frustrated me that papers are formatted for print and don't include hyperlinks, and it's difficult to add comments or corrections to a paper.

Like others though I am not sure I believe that publishers should continue to exist in anything like their current form.

<comment><USER26> I would really enjoy an annotation system like genius.com

How that might work in a scholarly setting I'm not sure. The melting pot of commentary and feedback that can surround a paper is something that individual reviews will always struggle to capture, but is easily achieved with an annotated copy.

Whilst background and detailed investigation may be left out of sections of a paper, or are assumed knowledge for the target audience, annotations allow casual readers to engage with the content and the author beyond what is appropriate in the published form.

It would be interesting to see genius.com introduce a science section, or perhaps just _more_ science sections (they have law, history, literature etc already), but the format doesn't immediately gel with how papers are currently published. A pdf annotation system might be the best bet for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Still a long way to go, but this is a huge step forward.

It's also not the first time Macmillan have tried something new - their whole Digital Science arm (which includes ReadCube) is focused on innovation and disruptive publishing tech: [http://www.digital- science.com/](http://www.digital-science.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Does this BS marketing PR stunt qualify Nature-published research papers for Gates Foundation-backed research now? Meaning: does this announcement qualify Nature as "open" enough for the Gates Foundation?

<comment><USER29> No, I don't think this counts. The Gates foundation policy is going to require CC-BY, and it doesn't sound like Nature is going that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> " Nature's internal costs of publishing run at £20,000–30,000 (US$31,000–47,000) per paper, an extremely high charge to load onto authors or funders rather than spread over subscribers."

What in the digital world would make it so expensive to publish content ?

<comment><USER31> Paid editorial and peer review? Also, if a print-copy is being produced, someone has to type-set it, even if there's also a digital copy.

<comment><USER32> Peer review is not paid. I assume costs are for the staff editors (PhDs), copy editors, type setters, print and distribution costs, etc.

Source: I have published in nature

<comment><USER33> Sounds like the NFL without paying the players or coaches.

<comment><USER34> So if you want to get rich and you chose academia as your field, I have bad news for you.

I like to think that people write and review papers because they care about their field and its future. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER35> Still no reason for the journals to rip them off though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When you are feeling all touchy feely about this move, keep in mind the profit margins at academic publishers are higher than Apple. Yes, THAT Apple.

Source: [https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly- publ...](https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly-publishers- and-their-high-profits/)

<comment><USER14> I've looked into these numbers and it's really hard to parse what revenues and expenses are coming from their journal publishing. The publishers listed are also have huge amounts of revenue in textbooks and other book markets (to be fair, another awful scam). It might be better to look at non-profit publishers such as ACS and AAAS, which are also mainly closed-access. For example, AAAS which has Science magazine and a few other journals brought in 48M w/ 42M in expenses [1]. That said, they bring in 11M as well in member dues, which more than anything else gets you subscription to AAAS journals. It's harder to tell with ACS, because it also includes revenues for CAS and other services [2]. PLoS, an open access publisher, seems to generally have lower costs based on an author pays model FWIW.

[1] pg 50 of [http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/AAAS_2013-Annual- Rep...](http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/AAAS_2013-Annual-Report.pdf)

[2] [https://acswebcontent.acs.org/annualreport/financials_financ...](https://acswebcontent.acs.org/annualreport/financials_financialsummary.html)

[3] [http://www.plos.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/2013-2014-Pro...](http://www.plos.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/2013-2014-Progress-Update-financial-page.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For half a second after I clicked through to ReadCube's site I thought it must be associated with Google because their website's design is the Googleist thing I've ever seen not actually associated with Google.

[https://www.readcube.com/](https://www.readcube.com/)

<comment><USER38> The typography and layout, colors all seem pretty generic or even slightly unlike google, but I agree.

It must just be the Open Sans. I didn't realize how much I had it associated with Google's usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Everything is free to read* they say. But there's an asterisk, pesky and persistent, next to read. And it's a big one.The asterisk is that you can't do anything but read the document, and you have to download use their proprietary reader software in order to read the document, and you have to hope that someone who has a subscription or is a journalist is kind enough to share a link to the document that you want to read, and if you try to do anything other than look at the document passively on a screen you're basically gonna get sued for copyright infringement." [http://del- fi.org/post/104125242971/natures-shareware-moment](http://del- fi.org/post/104125242971/natures-shareware-moment)

But by all means, let's celebrate a step forward taken by Nature.

</comment><comment><USER40> Better headline: Nature will allow subscribers and media to decide who else can view articles for free

</comment><comment><USER32> Well here is the link to my paper in Nature [http://rdcu.be/bKB9](http://rdcu.be/bKB9)

</comment><comment><USER41> Nature did _not_ make all articles free to view. That's a misleading announcement. What they did is far more limited. If you have a paid Nature subscription, you can get a link which you can send to someone else. They can then read a DRM-protected PDF-like file through a proprietary on-line viewer.

If you want to read an article right now, it's $18 and up. Or you can now "rent" the article for $3.99 and up and view it in their proprietary viewer for a short period.

This is decidedly not "open access publication".

</comment><comment><USER42> Schools should really start teaching the concept of Turing completeness to kids, otherwise we'll get to the heat death of the universe with non technical people still thinking that this kind of crap is an acceptable solution.

</comment><comment><USER12> _free to read in a proprietary screen-view format_

Free, under our control.

</comment><comment><USER43> To take advantage of this you need a piece of software called Readcube which is available only for Windows and Mac.

Users of Linux and Android cannot avail of it.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would love to get my hands on some of the articles from 1869. Hopefully someone will share a few of these articles publicly.

<comment><USER45> They're available here (as well as all the articles that are still copyrighted): [http://libgen.org/scimag/?journalid=nature&v=1869&s=](http://libgen.org/scimag/?journalid=nature&v=1869&s=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does the in-browser viewer use the new W3C-blessed DRM extensions?

</comment><comment><USER35> Limited is the new free.

</comment><comment><USER47> One step more towards the Democratization of knowledge!

</comment><comment><USER46> Does the browser viewer use the new W3C DRM extensions?

</comment><comment><USER48> This is a lame half assed solution.

</comment><comment><USER49> Not free at all.

</comment><comment><USER50> I never paid anything to view birds and snakes and lice and dogs and cats and...

Did someone hijack nature to extort money from unsuspecting passers-by?

</comment><comment><USER51> Off topic: Why is this article dated December 2nd? It is still December 1st everywhere in the United States. Perhaps it was published after normal business hours on the 1st, thus defaulting to the 2nd as the official date? Just curious.

<comment><USER52> The internet doesn't exist solely in the US. It spans GMT -5 through GMT -8. There are countries that are up to 16 hours ahead in time..

<comment><USER24> > It spans GMT -5 through GMT -8.

Please explain.

<comment><USER53> US mainland does span from GMT-5 to GMT-8.

<comment><USER24> Oh, for some reason I assumed `it' meant the world.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ADT through the looking glass – lenses, prisms and other optics in Scala - <AUTHOR> https://kubuszok.com/2018/adt-through-the-looking-glass/ <comment><USER2> I find the Monocle library does a good job of describing the motivation for type optics: [http://julien-truffaut.github.io/Monocle/](http://julien- truffaut.github.io/Monocle/)

Where I've used this in real code is via circe-optics (json parsing). An example: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36724068/how-to- parse-a-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36724068/how-to-parse-a-json- scala-without-case-classes)

</comment><comment><USER3> I mainly program in low-level imperative languages (mostly C/C++), and occasionally dabbled in some functional languages (like Ocaml and Elm). But I don't really understand why you would need such a convoluted system to get/mutate some values in a data structure in Scala. Doesn't Scala allow mutability throughout its language already (unlike Haskell)?

<comment><USER4> Lens doesn't give you mutability. It gives you operations that look like mutations but are still operations on immutable data structures. And that is where the value lies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Monocle also ships with the macro annotation _monocle.macros.Lenses_ that cuts out even more of the boilerplate and works with intellij's autocomplete

      import monocle.macros.Lenses

      @Lenses
      case class Foo(bar: Int)

      val x = Foo(1)
      assert(Foo.bar.get(x) == 1)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00738](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00738) is really nice for general context. Plus can implement some of these generalizations from what is already here.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like working in Scala quite a bit, but always wince at the "instead of using threading primitives consider this 10x more exotic immutable approach" lead- in. Does anyone here really work that way?

<comment><USER8> Never sure why people talk about concurrency as the number one reason to use immutable structures.

The main reason is that your code is less buggy and easier to read and understand as your code base gets larger. You never have to worry if that variable is being modified somewhere else in your codebase because it simply isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Takes a long time to parse because it the text has a lot of typos.

<comment><USER10> >> " _Takes a long time to parse because it the text has a lot of typos._ "

Your comment has typos too :-)

<comment><USER9> Welp, you're right, that was hypocritical of me.</comment></comment></comment>


Meet Your Mappers: A tool to find OpenStreetMap contributors near you - <AUTHOR> https://ma.rtijn.org/2018/07/08/meet-your-mappers.html <comment><USER2> A few years ago I wrote a fast parser for OSM data. I know that using parsed data would soon become out of date, but I guess mvexel's server could handle it better. If you want me to export the whole world's contributors as CSV or SQLite, I'd be happy to help.

The tool is interesting for me because I'm looking for a job in NZ/Australia/Canada. I've had more success contacting people rather than sending job applications - most job listings require me to already have a visa. I think that collaborating on open-source projects is a good way to make industry contacts, demonstrate my skills, and also benefit the community.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're looking for something OSM related, be sure to join the OSM US Slack channel and join #jobs there. It's formally for OSM US but people hang out there from all over. Join here: [https://osmus- slack.herokuapp.com/](https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting "data processing failed" after following the instructions from arctux on how to find my relation ID.

HN hug of death perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not the same cause but the disk ran out of space just now because I neglected to properly purge temp files.

<comment><USER3> It seems to work now, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious about this and would love to explore it, but since I rarely use OpenStreetMap I couldn't figure out what an OSM relation id is and how I retrieve one. Can anyone provide more explanation on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, author here.

The OSM data model does not have a concept of areas, or polygons. A line feature ('way' in OSM parlance) that shares the same point ('node') for its start and end is usually considered to be an area. This works well for simple area features like, say, a building.

More complex area features, like ones with holes, large areas, or ones that share edges with other features, are commonly modeled using relations. A relation in OSM is an ordered list of nodes, ways and other relations, or any combination of those.

[https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/198770](https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/198770) is an example of a boundary relation consisting of several ways. The tagging type=boundary and admin_level=6 define the relation as an administrative boundary, and set its level in the administrative hierarchy.

You can find any administrative boundary relation by going to osm.org, entering its name into the search box, and clicking on the relevant result. The info box should say something like "Relation: Salt Lake City (198770)". The integer in brackets is the relation ID. Note that some places are only defined as points in OSM, they won't work in this tool, since it queries for data that lies fully inside the boundary.

There has to be a way to make this easier, but in the time I was prepared to spend on this, I couldn't come up with one.

<comment><USER5> Suggestion to the website: when pressing "enter" in relation textbox, it should trigger "Go".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was digging through openstreet map and I only found 3 mappers in my area 50 miles out. I live in a pretty busy city so I was kind of surprised the numbers were so low

Only 10-20% of major landmarks were mapped in my city

<comment><USER7> Sounds like you've got some work to do, then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't get it to work for the three towns I tried near me ("no relation found with that ID").

I am assuming it is US only.

<comment><USER9> It seems to be somewhat particular about relation IDs. I have it working for Palo Alto, with relation ID 1544955. If you want to try this for your city, I recommend zooming in the city on openstreetmap.org, clicking the "Query features" button on the right side of the map (it's the cursor with a question mark icon), and clicking within the boundaries of you city. On the left side, a list of features will appear. Scroll down to enclosing features, and click on the appropriate entry. A relation name and number will be displayed at the top, with the OSM data below.

I hope this stays within the Overpass API server's usage limits. Processing Palo Alto caused the page to download ~85 MB from overpass-api.de, which asks users to stay below 10k queries and 5 GB per day. The OSM wiki lists other servers, some of which allow heavier usage.[0]

[0]: [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API)

<comment><USER10> My city boundaries were not available, only a state level, which was too big for this tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Works like a charm, thanks! Maybe I buy some of the local contributors a beer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Took a bit of poking around but I got this working. Sweet little project!

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool tnx</comment>


From Flappy Bird clones to 2048, mobile web games are here to disrupt app stores - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/03/24/from-flappy-bird-clones-to-2048-mobile-web-games-are-here-to-disrupt-the-app-store/

<comment><USER2> But users != revenue.

The killer problem with mobile web games is monetisation. The app stores absolutely destroy any web based approach for this, hands down, and until that changes even things like the Chrome store will remain ghost towns.

This is really why there was a giant exodus of game developers from Facebook to mobile platforms in the first place.

<comment><USER3> That's the point the article is missing. Many people currently creating HTML5 games are not motivated by money. They can be hobbyists or people familiar with JS who wants to try making a game using a language they already know. As a consequence this lead to the apparition of many game engine/frameworks/libraries just like the last few years have seen an explosion of "generalist" JS frameworks/libraries. And this explains why the last few weeks we saw many flappy birds and 2048 clones. Well, and the Flappy Game Jam probably helped regarding the formers too.

And as these types of games can be quite addictive, while using JS made them easy to share over Twitter or Facebook, no wonder they were so successful.

For the moment there is nothing indicating that these two free successes could lead to the commercial success of paid web games. At least nothing so far that would make developers migrate from native apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I laughed when I read the line implying that flappy bird and 2048 were high quality games.</comment>


Planet Nine may have been found - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-have-officially-found-a-candidate-for-planet-9 <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://futurism.com/planet-9-found-astronomers-have- officia...](https://futurism.com/planet-9-found-astronomers-have-officially- found-a-candidate/)</comment>


Tech needs to decide which master it's going to serve - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/05/tech-needs-to-decide-which-master-its-going-to-serve/

<comment><USER2> This isn't only a problem in the tech industry. There has always been a great interest in controlling people. As technology (in the more general sense of the term) advances, and as we learn more about humans and how they work, these mechanisms for control have become more insidious.

My recent favorite example, which I read about in _The Willpower Instinct_ , is companies like ScentAir [0] that create "engineered" smells intended to subconsciously entice people into going into stores or buying products.

[0] [http://www.scentair.com](http://www.scentair.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really buy this argument. I do get the point, but:

 _I give up my right to choose my own route_

Is this the case?

 _How long until I find my trips start taking me consistently past businesses that advertise with Google_

Almost certainly never. It's a possibility, but Google isn't stupid, and they know the second that they start increasing mileage in order to advertise to you, the public will say "what the fuck?" and this practice will be driven out of existence either by market forces or regulation.

 _What if, instead of taking me on a tour of nearby Google advertisers, the car starts plotting routes for me that take me away from businesses that don't advertise with Google?_

As above; it could happen, but it almost certainly won't.

It's worth being aware of this argument when transacting with companies who are advertising-focused. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But it seems less important with say Amazon or Apple, where you are paying for a product or service and expect to receive it in a reasonably unbiased fashion.

It's a bit like asking "what if Facebook start blocking all posts mentioning competitors of their advertisers?" \- it's possible, but unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER4> _" Imagine how little a business that gives away its services for free will care about what I want, compared to what its advertisers or partners or shareholders want."_

Presumably, if you had a Google self-driving car, you would have had to buy (or lease) it from Google, so you'd be one of their paying customers.</comment>


Investing In Startups In Europe - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2014/01/investing-in-startups-in-europe.html

<comment><USER2> We have been based and fundraised in SV and LDN and my experiences are the following:

Hiring: * Engineers in the UK are amazing, and you can hire from mainland Europe, which is also very good. * Retention rates are higher. * Salaries are lower. * Most decent start-up-orientated talent is at the under-25 level. Finding good PMs with big vision is harder, and if you do, encouraging them to leave for a start-up is less heard of. In a sense, you have to 'grow your own'. * Engineers traditionally have come from more corporate / tech- consulting backgrounds than start-up ones; this has both its pluses and its minuses. * Engineers in mainland Europe, and to a lesser extent London, will have more experience with older technology (C++, java) than newer technologies. That said, there are great developers for clojure/scala/python/ruby, but -- again -- they tend to be at a more junior level.

Fundraising: * The good people in London are really good, but there are a lot less of them. * Seed rounds are not significantly harder (due to SEIS and lots of hnws.) Crunch, I believe, comes at A, B, where there are only a handful of options (Index, Accel, Balderton, Wellington). This is when people look across the pond. Ironically, London is full of PE and massive funds (property, hedge funds, etc.) I assume some of this money will divert to tech in the future. * For seed rounds, you may have some discount price-wise, but, then again, it is a lot cheaper to run a company in the UK. I don't believe this discount is that high or particularly relevant. * Investors are more inclined to want revenue, and focus on minimizing downside instead of maximizing upside; IMO it is harder to fund very big, disruptive ideas vs. smaller, cash-generative ones. There are outliers who are exceptions to this. * Things seem to be changing. Lots of 'US-style' firms are springing up, but mostly at the seed level. * There is a tradition of doing seed as equity rounds instead of convertible debt. This is a massive headache, but people aren't used to debt like in SV. * Most VCs have been bankers / consultants instead of entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what european VCs make of the fact that the VCs from US are talking about european startup scene as a virgin land, ready to be conquered.

So far I see only 3 parties in this discussion 1) US startups 2) European startups 3) American VCs.

Would be nice to hear the views of the 4th party conspicuously missing from the discussion.

<comment><USER4> European VCs are few and far between. Despite working in the largest market on Earth, the overall level of investment is half what you'll find in the States (if that). Some of that is due to cultural issues, some to economic ones (wealth is much, much more distributed here, making the average investment smaller and the average investor more conservative and wary).

I suspect EuroVCs would be absolutely ecstatic if "them Yanks" were to bring lots of cash to the table while, at the same time, relying on "local knowledge" to direct that cash.

<comment><USER3> > making the average investment smaller and the average investor more > conservative and wary

X Million dollars are worth the same regardless of the owner (US vs EU). On the other hand a smaller average investment size should make the deals so much more lucrative and a turf worth defending.

Edit : on second thoughts it may have more to do with the cultural issues(as you pointed it out) combined with the regulatory boundaries e.g. amazon.de can't deliver half the things to Switzerland.

<comment><USER4> _> On the other hand a smaller average investment size should make the deals so much more lucrative_

No. Small investments -> less startups -> less deals -> less profit. Also small investments -> small growth -> small deals -> small profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've often thought about why it's easier to get investment in the US compared to Ireland(EU). I suspect the culprit reasons are:

US VCs are backed with more money and also less risk averse. Developers are cheaper here.

There probably is an opportunity for US investors to come to Europe to fill this role.

<comment><USER6> My experience raising money in Europe are the very low valuations you get from EU VCs. I've only raised for one company and probably talked to a dozen EU VCs and eventually got 2 term sheets where the highest valuation was a third from the deal we eventually got. This tells me that the amount of good/promising startups is low, hence VCs can invest at lower valuations and because of that the amount of VCs is low so there's less competition between them. I feel like its a perpetual downward motion where good ambitious startups and VCs relocate to other places (US) because of more favorable outcomes. This trend is hard to turn around and I'd argue that Europe does not need A large VC market as it culturally does not fit the region. I'd say if you're a EU startup you are not meant to grow fast and take gambles. Bootstrapping is the way to go.</comment></comment>


Libretro/RetroArch – Hacker vandalised buildbot and GitHub organization - <AUTHOR> https://www.libretro.com/index.php/hacker-vandalised-our-buildbot-and-github-organization/ <comment><USER2> Hate to ask but is there is an idea on attribution? Considering that the attack is called premeditated I doubt it would be marauding skiddies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just a reminder that such an issue of erased history would not have happened with SVN..

<comment><USER4> Not really erased, maintainers must have a local copy of the history and can just force push</comment></comment>


A Rock-Sorting Robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/05/someone-built-rock-sorting-robot-downright-hypnotizing/ <comment><USER2> [https://player.vimeo.com/video/167126696](https://player.vimeo.com/video/167126696)

</comment><comment><USER3> I forget where I heard it, but I recall a saying something along the lines of, "The two most meditative things a person can watch are fire, and other people working." I think this also kind of falls into that category.

PS if anyone knows the actual source of this saying please do comment

<comment><USER4> Don't know the source, but as far as 'watching other people working', here are two of my favorites:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VGjA66RSm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VGjA66RSm0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE)

</comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I wonder how useful this technology could be to zero-sort recycling. As much of a hippie as I am, I don't think recycling can be solved by green bins and awareness campaigns, but instead by the simplicity of throwing everything into one bin that gets sorted when it reaches the processing plant.

It would also be helpful if this could sort organic material for use in compost and sell it. Maybe even brand it. How much do you think people would pay to use compost from Beverly Hills celebrities in their garden?

<comment><USER5> There's similar tech already in use. Sorting flakes of different plastics can be done by "vision" if you have different wavelengths of light, then tiny air blasts can direct them into the right hopper.

Though, the more raw sorting that can be done the better for the system. Where I am, we put food waste in its own bin, and frankly it just seems natural after a very short time.

<comment><USER6> Also for berries, waves of berries are visually identified and blasts the "bad ones" out of the stream. Very impressive (and fast) to watch.

<comment><USER7> I can't find the video, but apparently at some canneries there used to be a person who would very rapidly hit the tops of cans with a metal rod and listen to the noise that it made. "Bad" cans sounded different and would be removed from the line. After years of practice these workers were inhumanly fast at the job.

<comment><USER8> And dead inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I need this to help me deal with this problem at work [https://imgur.com/HM8euP8](https://imgur.com/HM8euP8)

The laser cutter is capable of more product output than I have time to deal with sorting and stacking them on to pallets. There's another 400 parts behind me waiting to be broken free from their retaining tabs.

Each item is etched with a part ID. Some sort of computer vision + robot should be able to do the job for me. I have the tools to put something like that together.

Any leads?

<comment><USER10> Sometimes this can be done by simply trowing them in a funnel and let slots of different sizes sort them. Just like those coin sorting machines.

But in your case a sorting conveyor belt could be the easiest way. The right items are pushed off the belt at the right time.

Edit: an example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajxs6_V8KJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajxs6_V8KJM)

And by the way: if you got 50 unique items it doesn't mean you need 50 slots. You can also create 10 and repeat the process for the unsorted items. But you need to reprogram the system each run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like (some parts of) the source code of this project is there: [https://github.com/allesblinkt/riverbed- vision](https://github.com/allesblinkt/riverbed-vision)

</comment><comment><USER12> At first glance I read the title as "A Sock-Sorting Robot", something I'm totally going to build.

</comment><comment><USER13> Crossing my fingers for a Lego sorting robot...

<comment><USER14> Ha ha yes a kids toys and clothes sorting robot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wired sucks... adblock wall

<comment><USER16> In Firefox, click on "reader view". Problem solved.</comment></comment>


Media Darling Powerset vs. Non-Media Darling Hakia - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/05/media-darling-powerset-vs-non-media.html <comment><USER2> Well I think it's really hard to compare a search engine to another base on what happened behind the curtain. Search engine technology is a really complex matter. Any speculation done from the surface is probably a guessing game.

I will agree though that Hakia seems to be much closer to what they promise to deliver that Powerset. Hakia may have a bit of semantic flavor but remain overall a poor search engine. I always wonder what Powerset is doing with all the money they have raised. I would felt terribly disappointed if I have given them my money. Building a search engine for Wikipedia (not even a good one) with all that money is a little short.

I will take the opportunity here to express my reserve on semantic search. If semantic search is define as a search engines that answer questions, here are two reasons why I think it is not a very promising way for search:

1.It is hard for people in general to type an entire question, users are generally lazy and anything that makes them think is not potentially good. 2.The language factor. Though the web is mostly written in English it will be a challenge for these companies to implement a semantic search in every language. From English to French there's a whole new world.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never really paid attention to this field, but I just tried the sample queries from <http://20bits.com/2008/05/12/powerset-launches-verdict-meh/> in Hakia. As far as I can tell, Hakia only answers the last question correctly without having to dig through the results.

<comment><USER4> with all due respect this is just not true. I just did the first few tests and it seemed to nail all of them in the first answer or two in the list.

<comment><USER3> To clarify, I didn't mean to say that the results returned by hakia don't contain the correct answer. For powerset/google the answer to many of the questions seemed to be right in the title or description of the results, without having to click on the answers, and that wasn't the case for hakia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how the first result for "2 + 2" on Hakia says that 2 + 2 = 5. <http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=2+%2B+2>

Seriously, Hakia seems useful (if slow), and Powerset seems useless. It'll be a shame if marketing wins this game.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't be quick to dismiss Powerset's indexing speed. It is relatively easy to improve the efficiency of a known algorithm. Likewise, it is easier to develop an algorithm if efficiency constraints are defered.

It is relatively easy to improve efficiency within one module by 10% and occasionally by a factor of four or more. If the average system performance improves by 10% with each change then a team could eventually improve efficiency by a factor of 2^10.

<comment><USER7> Uh, maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly do you go from 10% increases and end up with a 1000-fold efficiency increase?

Unless you're saying they can make 75 such changes, each giving a 10% increase...

<comment><USER6> Yes, many small changes. Furthermore, this is a pessimistic case. If your average improvemented was 12% then you'd require significantly less improvements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hakia seems quite excellent, actually. I suspect the defaults are better than google -- words are much more 'closely bound'. When I ask a question, I seem to get back results in the form of an answer.

But we can't figure out just how useful the tech Powerset is, because it indexes so little of the web. Were I looking for an answer on wikipedia, I'd have probably looked there anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> If we subject Hakia to the same (very limited) tests that the other article about PowerSet was using, Hakia often performs even worse.

For example, here's Hakia's results for "Who is the President of France?":

[http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+is+the+president+of+f...](http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+is+the+president+of+france%3F)

</comment><comment><USER10> When I can get an answer (bonus if it is correct) to queries like 'How many times has John McCain appeared on the Daily Show?', I'll be impressed.

One weak area in Google's armor is taking time into account, eg: 'How many times did John McCain appear on the Daily Show in 2006?'

<comment><USER4> Indeed even the best search engines are only going to be able to answer that question if it is stated somewhere. Hakia can do that. However no search engine is going to be able to figure out the answer by, for example adding up all the times he appeared in a given year. So if someone wrote somewhere "john mcain was a guest on the daily show seven times in 2008" hakia should be able to give you an answer.

<comment><USER6> There's a bigger problem there. For the current year, the quantity could change. Old, incorrect values would outweigh new, correct values. So, you still wouldn't get the right answer.

"Who, what, when and how do" queries can be answered with current AI techniques but "how many" queries are much harder.</comment></comment></comment>


Ladies and Gentlemen ... Cloudflare TV! - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/ladies-and-gentlemen-cloudflare-tv/ <comment><USER2> Seems odd to call it "a 24x7 live television broadcast" when all I'm seeing is a cloud flare logo on loop. Although it's a cool logo, and the music is nice. Very 90s feel to me. (Unless maybe it's not loading for me?)

(Edit:) oh, it's just not running yet:

> I'm kicking off the first live broadcast starting at 12:00pm Pacific (1900 > UTC) on Monday, June 8</comment>


Explaining PCIe Slots (2018) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4mUMZ5SPFE <comment><USER2> The linked video is _The Evolution Of Capturing Sound Part 2: Digital Audio and Audio Data Compression_.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deploy and host your static website? - <AUTHOR> We've went from using Amazon S3 (with Cloudfront) to Netlify.com, mostly due to convenient features like deploy hooks, cache invalidation and advanced redirects.<p>Unfortunately they've fallen short in providing sufficient support for an issue we've been facing, so we're curious to see how other people have their hosting and deploy workflow set up. <comment><USER2> An alternative option is Aerobatic [[https://www.aerobatic.com](https://www.aerobatic.com)].

Git push CD, staging branches, automated builds, free self-renewing wildcard SSL certs, versioning, and many other features [[https://www.aerobatic.com/features/#features- comp](https://www.aerobatic.com/features/#features-comp)]

disclaimer: I'm one of the founders

</comment><comment><USER3> Curious as to what the issue was since that might help people make more informed recommendations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't want to throw them under the bus (as they do have a really awesome product), but anyway: our site simply didn't load in Safari. Worked in any other browser though. Tried a plethora of fixes and workarounds, but in the end it was blackbox to us (as we don't have access to any logs). Support was rather unresponsive (haven't heard from them in 2 weeks), but I imagine this is due to them being swamped with tickets.

<comment><USER3> Curious if the site works in Safari from S3. Which is a round about way of wondering if maybe it's a broken deployment or build rather than a hosting issue. That might explain, but perhaps not excuse, the lack of responsiveness.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Instant alerts for applications in distress - <AUTHOR> https://opsee.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Cliff Moon, CEO & co-founder of Opsee. Modern applications are built on 3 kinds of APIs: cloud provider APIs, the business logic APIs your engineering team maintains and third party APIs you rely on like Stripe & Twilio. Monitoring your applications without blind spots requires pulling together monitoring of all 3 into one place, with crisp & actionable alerts instead of a deluge of dashboards to sift through.

Opsee monitors and tests the APIs you rely on, so you can stop worrying about downtime and get back to shipping code. Opsee lets you create health checks for your public facing APIs, ensuring not just their uptime but also validating the data they return and their latency from points all across the globe. We also have an instance you can launch into your AWS environment that lets you health check APIs behind the firewall, and health check Amazon services themselves such as RDS and Cloudwatch.

I'd love to get feedback about your monitoring challenges and what you'd expect to see from a modern monitoring solution.

<comment><USER2> This is so cool. I got a health check up and running in seconds. We're gonna be trying it out :)

\- What are your plans on pricing after beta?

\- ETA on sharing dashboards/checks, or some form of team/organization functionality?

\- UX Feedback: I dislike the search bar. It's very non-obvious that it's an input, barely even looks clickable.

\- General feedback: No obvious way to customize or even view check frequency. Are they every minute? Every 24 hours? I can't tell.

\- Bug: I broke webhook test with an ipv6 address. Can I add custom headers to the webhook?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

\- You'll get a single check for free for life and after that we'll be charging $5 per check / month.

\- Teams are coming in the next week or so, we can add you to the whitelist for early access.

\- feedback has been relayed to the team, thanks.

\- Checks run every 30 seconds, we go into detail in the docs: [https://app.opsee.com/docs/checks](https://app.opsee.com/docs/checks).

\- Unfortunately we don't support IPv6 or custom headers on webhooks quite yet, but we'll put them in the queue to implement.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I'll wait for teams, no need to whitelist me.

$5/check/month gets very expensive, very fast if I want to make a lot of use of your product. Would you consider making single-region checks available for a lower price? eg. in the cases where I care less about latency and more about general availability.

<comment><USER3> I share the same feeling. $5/check/month is really expensive. but what I realized is that this is no replacement for functional tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice, took me about 1minute to set up my first test. Great first time user experience.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! It's wonderful to hear that the thing our team worked harder on than anything else is appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Website looks really nice and simple ,to the point .

I am interested to know the difference between Opsee and Runscope.

<comment><USER5> The biggest difference is in the way we handle checks inside AWS. When you add our EC2 Instance we automatically discover your infrastructure and track changes. When you create health checks for groups and other dynamic AWS resources (ELBs, RDS, ECS, etc...) we track membership and automatically update your checks with no maintenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could you explain the major difference(s) between Opsee and Pingdom?

<comment><USER7> I've been a Pingdom user for several years and I can't stand it. I'm very excited to see another player in this market. The one thing we're hoping to see is some form of integration with StatusPage.io. As soon as we have that kind of integration, I'm jumping ship to a new provider.

<comment><USER8> I've been using Uptime Robot, [http://uptimerobot.com/](http://uptimerobot.com/) and I'm happy with it. It can check if a port is open, ping or do an http request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What tech stack do you use?

<comment><USER5> We have a nice write-up in Stackshare about our stack: [http://stackshare.io/opsee-co/how-opsee-chose-a-container- or...](http://stackshare.io/opsee-co/how-opsee-chose-a-container- orchestration-platform)</comment></comment>


Show HN: CrowdCapture – create image datasets together - <AUTHOR> https://crowdcapture.org <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News! Today I am launching my side project [https://crowdcapture.org](https://crowdcapture.org) which I built to make working together on image datasets easier.

When I started trying out machine learning I quickly learned finding images for your dataset can be a time consuming process. It is even harder to find images that have the appropriate license.

On CrowdCapture you can create projects and user can upload images to it. Every image will be checked by another user before it is added to the dataset. Then every week a new zip will be created with the uploaded images added.

If you have any questions or comments I will be happy to answer them.</comment>


Efficient transformation of Adjacency Matrix using cache optimized C++ code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karim_ouda/efficient-transformation-of-adjacency-matrix-using-cache-optimized-c-code-e41327d88618

<comment><USER2> I believe an efficient algorithm should combine recursive approach [http://stackoverflow.com/a/28027063](http://stackoverflow.com/a/28027063) with sse-based small matrices transposer [http://stackoverflow.com/a/16743203](http://stackoverflow.com/a/16743203)

Also, a good reference point to compare performance to is math libraries, like eigen/mtl/ibm essl or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an interesting sample problem. I might try to play with it tonight to see what I can come up with. If you haven't done it yet, you should profile your current solution using the hardware performance counters. On Linux, you can just run with 'perf record program'; there are parallels for other systems.

A first note is that testing against a -O0 base case is cheating. Although the manual says "no optimization", what it really means is something like "do really inefficient things that might make debugging easier". For a fair comparison, your base case should probably use the same optimization as your final.

It's hard to talk about the efficiency of a C++ routine without considering the target machine, the compiler, the size of the input, and the distribution of the input. Compilers are sufficiently smart that the 'base case' might not be doing what you expect it to. Switching the order of loops is fair game for an optimizer, so one reason you might not have seen gain in the simple approaches is that the compiler was already doing them.

It would be interesting to test your current solution with different degrees of sparsity. Currently it avoids writing to memory if the input is 0. This is great, unless the branch for this check is unpredictable. At 50% fill, mispredict half of your checks. In the naive case, this doesn't matter much, since the main cost is the random access for the writes. But now that you are blocking, it might become more relevant. You might want to see how the timing changes with different degrees of sparsity.

For another approach, it's possible that you'd benefit by making two passes. Instead of an if statement to decide whether you should write the output, first make a vectorized branch-free pass that writes a vector of addresses to update, and then make a second pass that writes ones to these addresses.

The tricky part is making the first pass vectorized and branch free. You'd probably create the output addresses with vector math, shuffle these based on _mm256_testz_si256() on the input, write the full vector to the temp array, and then advance the output pointer by the number of valid entries. Believe it or not, on modern processors (especially Haswell) this can be faster than the single pass approach.

Alternatively, you could try to make better use of prefetching. On modern processors, you can have about 10 requests to memory outstanding at a time, but most loops though will only have a single outstanding request at a time. If you can batch things to consider 8 writes at at time, you can reduce the effective latency of the random access from ~100 cycles per access to ~15 cycles. It can be very tricky to do this, though, since the compiler will usually be working against you and optimizing out your optimizations!

A last thing you might consider would be looping over the output instead of the input. Read the output (lower left) sequentially, and then unconditionally write it back depending on the value of the corresponding input. This would also depend heavily on prefetching, but this arrangement might have the compiler working for you rather than against you.

Amazingly, if you arrange things correctly, processors are actually executing multiple iterations from the same loop at the same time. The key here would be that the writes need to be unconditional, so that you aren't mispredicting branches and impairing the processors ability to work out-of-order.

<comment><USER3> I tried the last option I mentioned (unconditional sequential writes and random reads), and got approximately the results I expected on Haswell. I'm managing one read/write combo about every 8 cycles, which I think is about the maximum throughput that can be expected for random reads from RAM by Little's law.

Somewhat as expected, the results for Karim's approach were faster if the input array was very sparse. Unexpectedly, a simple conditional on a basic approach performed better for me on Haswell than Karim's. It's possible I did something to damage the code when I sprinkled it with 'unsigned' to quiet the warnings about signed/unsigned comparisons.

I didn't find any benefit to prefetching for code that was already fast. I wasn't up to trying the vectorized approach. For reasons I don't understand, performance for just about everything I tried was abysmal on Sandy Bridge. For many cases, I was finding 3-5x better absolute performance on Haswell, both for small and large arrays.

I put my test code up here: [https://gist.github.com/nkurz/43bd7754155d63381758](https://gist.github.com/nkurz/43bd7754155d63381758)</comment></comment>


Merchants that do not support NFC will be liable for losses due to fraud - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/technology/many-competing-paths-on-the-road-to-a-phone-wallet.html

<comment><USER2> As the article clearly says, this title is false. NFC would be simply nice to support; but merchants that do not support smartcards (chip&pin) will be liable for losses due to fraud. And rightly so, this tech is used everywhere for almost 10 years already, USA finally needs to get out from banking stone age.

</comment><comment><USER3> >These stores also do not have the right equipment to allow the use of smart cards, credit cards embedded with computer chips that are much less susceptible to fraud.

It seems they're referring to 'chip and PIN' cards as well as NFC.</comment>


Man Hacks Jail Computer Network to Get Friend Released Early - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/man-hacks-jail-computer-network-to-get-friend-released-early/ <comment><USER2> > After pleading guilty last week, Voits now faces up to ten years in prison > and a fine of up to $250,000. Voits also had to forfeit all the electronics > equipment he used to carry out his attacks — a laptop, four phones, one > circuit board, and an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin.

1\. This is a real shame; he's clearly a fairly intelligent person who has possibly just wasted a decade of his life. I hope the sentencing will be lenient, and he'll be able to enter society without too many hiccups upon release, though the U.S. isn't great at either.

2\. What does the bitcoin have to do with his attacks? If it was just in a wallet on his forfeited computer, what will happen? That could set an interesting precedent, in regards to unrelated bitcoin on seized electronics, if there isn't a precedent already.

<comment><USER3> > If it was just in a wallet on his forfeited computer, what will happen? That > could set an interesting precedent, in regards to unrelated bitcoin on > seized electronics, if there isn't a precedent already.

When police perform searches, they have a notorious history of taking cash and trying to associate it with a crime. Sometimes this may be valid, but there have been instances when they improperly seized money and kept it. I imagine they would try to do the same with bitcoin if they think they have a chance to seize it and defend their actions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States)</comment></comment>


DARPA: The Unexpected Rebirth of the Flying Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-10/death-and-rebirth-flying-car

<comment><USER2> I'm getting a 404.</comment>


The Faker You Are, the More Successful You Can Be - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEg5ySTUGxE <comment><USER2> The better you can fool your employer the better you can steal your wages.

<comment><USER3> (the less your employer can steal your wages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was refreshing to the point of being cathartic. I feel like the tech industry can get so far up its own ass about image and perception that it has lost its once-great sense of humor wrt bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is genius!</comment>