The city I write this in protected its name, so I am not allowed to use it - <AUTHOR> https://blog.r3bl.me/en/the-city-whose-name-i-cannot-mention/ <comment><USER2> Unrelated to the article: I really liked the picture of the Statue of Liberty in the article, but having been to Liberty Island myself, I thought it looked sort of off (there are no trees in front of the statue and no bridges behind it, and likely nowhere you could actually stand to get that particular angle and framing, without using some crazy telephoto setup). At first I thought the pyramidical skyscraper in the background was the Transamerica building in San Francisco and perhaps this was a shot of a replica Statue in the Bay area. But again, the bridge was unfamiliar and the apparent distance from the statue to the bridge and the city behind it did not fit with my recollection of San Francisco Bay geography.

But after doing a little bit of poking around at where replicas of the Statue of Liberty may be found (there are lots of them!), this one appears to be on the artificial island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. That's Tokyo in the background and the Rainbow Bridge. (See the wikipedia page on Odaiba[0] for a similarly framed shot.)

Anyway it's a great shot of the replica, the bridge, and the city of Tokyo. Credit for the photo is down at the end of the article[1], but whether the author of the piece realized what the photo was actually of or not, I'm now savoring the additional layers of context and irony the photo brings to the piece.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba) [1] [https://unsplash.com/photos/S9lCKQ9XS8c](https://unsplash.com/photos/S9lCKQ9XS8c)

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, that probably means that that photo is illegitimate. Photos of sculptural entities attached to architecture are considered copyright breaches in Japan, and Odaiba is certainly not old enough to have moved into PD.

<comment><USER4> What is copyright breach in one country, it is not necessarily in the other one. One cannot just impose laws to other countries, that is why countries are sovereign.

To impose copyright restrictions in other countries there must be either international agreement or the law in that other country that permits such limits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> Legal and private entities that use the emblem and the name of the City of Sarajevo...

With the word "and" in there, I'm thinking this is more about protecting the emblem. Using an emblem (not a flag) of a government entity in certain ways might be construed as conveying something to the content. In other words, putting the emblem along with the name of the city might lead people to think a web page was produced on behalf of the city. I seriously doubt using the name of the city like in the blog is a problem.

I suspect in regard Sarajevo the author is deliberately making the situation sound more absurd than it really is. Having said that, I think his point regarding architectural works is valid. Publishing pictures of publicly visible objects - and buildings in particular - should not have legal hinderances.

<comment><USER6> It would have been absurd if not for the cease and desist made to the FB page...

<comment><USER7> He is making it absurd. In the article the author claims that he cannot name the city of Sarajevo and that view is of course bullshit. You can always write about something. The article's title is plain wrong, as is its introduction.

Using the name (in a sense of making it your own or using if for something you sell) is a whole different matter though. The city of Sarajevo might not have a strong obligation to protect its name as say a music label defending their name against a computer company, but still they city has good reason to check on those things.

Having said that, the city is of course morally wrong to use this power on a simple facebook page with vintage photos. They probably have a problem with some photos of times they rather want to forget (I see a photo from 1941 and IIRC that was under Nazi-occupation (stupid Italians, why would anyone ever want the balcans?)) If anything, the city should have invited the page's admins to their own tourist bureau, help them and make sure they know some basic rules about copyright (like not using photos with a Getty images watermark. seriously?).

<comment><USER8> So _obviously_ it's protected speech in the title of an article, but _obviously_ it's not protected speech in the title of a facebook group? I don't think the distinction here is as strong as you imply.

<comment><USER7> The facebook page is a legal (or rather private) entity as described in the city's law, an article about the city of Sarajevo is not. If you write a book about the city, the book is not a legal entity and you'll be fine using "Sarajevo" in the title. If you name your publishing house "Sarajevo books" it is a legal entity and you might want to talk with the city first.

<comment><USER4> Facebook page cannot be a "legal entity". Further, legal entities may be as well private entities.

Legal entities are created by governments, either as governmental organizations (persons on paper) or as companies and various types of associations (private persons on paper).

Facebook page may be opened up by such legal entity, but itself does not constitute such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Since I am unfamiliar with such a dumb court verdict from the US, I assume > that I am free to show you the photo of the State of Liberty during the > night.

FWIW, in the US, all photos taken from public property are legal. Also, a photo of a building can't violate the building's copyright. Building another building that looks like it can, but taking a photo of it can't.

[http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm](http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm)

<comment><USER10> That doesn't mean you won't have be harassed by the law: [https://www.wired.com/2014/07/five-sue-gov-over- targeting/](https://www.wired.com/2014/07/five-sue-gov-over-targeting/)

<comment><USER11> Yes, the War on Photographers has been in full swing since 9/11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Legal and private entities that use the emblem and the name of the City of Sarajevo without the permission to do so from the regulatory body_

Author needs to learn the difference between 'use' and 'mention'. 'Use' means to exploit for commercial purposes, eg by operating a company called 'Sarajevo tours' or selling 'Sarajevo salad'. You don't need permission just to say you live and work in Sarajevo.

Remember folks, 'statutory interpretation' doesn't mean every conceivable reading of a legal text is valid. Generally you should consult a legal dictionary in your jurisdiction of interest to discover how common vocabulary is construed for legal purposes, because it often differs from what people imagine.

<comment><USER13> Maybe Sarevejo should have considered how people will interpret their dumb law before they made it. Can you imagine not being able to name your business "Sarajevo bed and Breakfast" or something like that?

It's like they are actively trying to suppress tourism....

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I can imagine it. Perhaps their experience was that people selling inferior services by trying to freeride on the name were actually hurting tourism. You appear to have assumed your conclusion.

<comment><USER13> There isn't a city in the world that doesn't have hundreds of businesses that incorporate the cities name in the business name. It's often done as a point of pride in their city by the business owner. Ever heard of the "Chicago Cubs"? How about "Portland Cement"?

<comment><USER12> None of which is responsive to the point I made. Bye.

<comment><USER13> I understand discussions where you realize you've taken a wrong position can be uncomfortable, so I won't bother you any more other than to say I addressed exactly your points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding copyright on photos of the Eiffel Tower at night due to the arrangement of the lights...

It would be interesting to take a photo of the Eiffel Tower by day, and then

\- apply style transfer to turn it into a photo by night (which would, I suspect exclude any lights)

\- train a (second) neural network to predict the positions of lights on a night-time photos of various buildings (ensuring that all buildings/light arrangements in your dataset predated the Eiffel Tower's lights).

I suspect that you could end up with images close to the real Eiffel Tower - at least close enough for it to be aesthetically pleasing and recognisable as the Eiffel Tower.

What would the copyright position on this be? IANAL, but it seems as though either

\- the lights are not exactly correct, and so this (manipulated) photo isn't covered by the copyright on the lights on the Eiffel Tower or

\- the lights are correct (or close enough), and so the lights on the Eiffel Tower are in the obvious places (given that a ML algorithm could predict them) - in that case, is there enough creativity in the arrangement for copyright to have been granted.

Thoughts?

(I'm sure I'll never find enough time to actually do this - the style transfer is trivial, but finding a suitable dataset of photos of other buildings of a suitable era by night is probably too much work! :( )

<comment><USER15> This kind of logic when applied to law is debunked in the widely circulated essay "What Colour are your bits?": [http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23).

Short answer: the law sees right through trickery like this, focusing on your intent instead.

<comment><USER14> Interesting - thanks for the link, but I'm not sure my question is actually "debunked" by that article.

I outlined two possible scenarios: either

\- the lights are not exactly correct, and so this (manipulated) photo isn't covered by the copyright on the lights on the Eiffel Tower or

\- the lights are correct (or close enough), and so the lights on the Eiffel Tower are in the obvious places (given that a ML algorithm could predict them) - in that case, is there enough creativity in the arrangement for copyright to have been granted.

I think you're right that, in the second case (which the article addresses) copyright would back the original creator - the "but ML predicted them so there was no creativity" argument is probably pretty weak. (It's also different from the idea laid out in the article you linked to - in that case, the recreator of 4'33" was very prescriptive about what they were creating.)

However, in the first case, I don't see how the law "sees through trickery" \- I don't think there is trickery going on. My intent is to create a plausible- looking image of the Eiffel Tower at night (e.g. to illustrate an article on it). It doesn't matter whether the lights are in the right place - I'm not using it to discuss the lights.

As someone else commented ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16198190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16198190)), the photo of the Statue of Liberty in the article is not actually the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in Manhattan - it's actually in Tokyo. However, as a casual reader, I see the photo and recognize it (incorrectly, as it turns out), which is all the author needs to make his point.

<comment><USER15> > It doesn't matter whether the lights are in the right place - I'm not using > it to discuss the lights.

It doesn't matter that you managed to find a way to create a photo that looks like the Eiffel Tower at night by not actually taking a picture. Your goal was to make a picture that looks like the copyrighted thing. Therefore, you effectively copied it. That it's a poor copy doesn't stop it being a copy.

Put this another way. Let's say I ran a random number generator until I had an exact bit-for-bit copy of a JPEG that is a copyrighted image. Did I copy it? I think the essay establishes that I did, because that was my goal. The process of stopping only when I had an exact bit-for-bit copy will have made it a copy in a judge's eyes.

What if I stopped when, rather than being a bit-for-bit copy, it was "good enough"? I don't see that this would make it any different.

What if I used something more intelligent than a random number generator to increase the chances of me getting the desired result sooner? I don't see how that would make it any different.

Conclusion: how, technically, you come up with the result doesn't matter. If your goal was to come up with something that looks like it, and you stop when you have something that resembles it (doesn't matter if the match is good or bad), you will be deemed to have copied it.

<comment><USER14> Thanks - interesting!

So, let's imagine that the Statue of Liberty in Manhattan was copyright, such that you couldn't take (or at least benefit commercially from photos) of it...

The author of the original article used a photo of a very similar statue, but one that is based in Tokyo. I don't know whether they're identical, but let's assume not, and that there is no similar copyright.

(I appreciate this is very hypothetical, but so was your "let's say I ran a random number generator" argument.)

The author of the original article used a photo of the Tokyo statue with the intention that readers would interpret it as the Manhattan statue.

Would the author be deemed to have infringed the copyright on the Manhattan statue?

By your "if your goal was to come up with something that looks like it, and you stop when you have something that resembles it (doesn't matter if the match is good or bad), you will be deemed to have copied it" definition, it seems they would.

<comment><USER15> > Would the author be deemed to have infringed the copyright on the Manhattan > statue?

Possibly. You hit the nail on the head when you say "with the intention that readers would interpret it as the Manhattan statue". It's all about the court's interpretation of the intent of the parties involved.

I don't think anyone can predict what a court would decide. Perhaps the court would say that because any statue would have done, and what the reader interpreted it as was immaterial to the content of the article, it wasn't an infringement. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is what would happen.

All I'm saying is that if you try to "work around" copyright using "parallel reconstruction", the courts are entirely able to see through this if they so wish. The courts are never going to say "you got us there". I'm not making any claim as to whether they actually will or not in a particular hypothetical case, since that depends on the circumstances of the court's interpretation of the bigger picture (intent, appropriate interpretation of the law, etc), which is far more subjective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sarajevo. There, sue me for infringement.

Of course this is not the way it works. I can mention Décathlon and Microsoft even though they are registered trademarks. I can post a picture of the Apple logo when illustrating Apple stuff.

There are things I cannot do (like using them as if they were mine) but mentioning the name is not a problem.

So Sarajevo FTW.

As a side note about the requests from the city of Sarajevo (sorry) to pay for the use of the city : they certainly should protect misuse (false documents for instance) and possibly (though I disagree) commercial use of the name. This is quite common, though enforced to various degrees (usually not, after a few cases which went wrong, for instance in Krakow, Poland).

Fair use will prevail, though this is a real pity we need to come to that

<comment><USER17> Except this is not trademark law, so there's no "fair use" unless it specifies so.

<comment><USER16> Yes, they set a local law but still try to enforce it abroad (by requesting things with Facebook).

They could go the trademark way (which then may be enforceable in a commercial context) and would be subject to fair use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The meat of the article comes from the fact that certain facebook pages were sent some form of 'cease and desist request' by officials of the Sarajevo city council. Later, we learn that things got resolved for these facebook pages.

What if these requests were just a clever scammer, trying to get some money? That seems to make more sense to me than a city council being so obtuse as to request payment for use of its name.

<comment><USER19> Over here in Germany some city administrations won't do such things for money, but to make sure that this is not seen as an official page where false information is spread. Finding the right balance can be hard. I would assume it's the same over there, rather than actually trying to get money.

<comment><USER20> When people look to Facebook as the official channel for anything, there's already a problem.

<comment><USER21> People look to Facebook as the _effective_ channel for anything. Unofficial fanpages of stuff are usually significantly more informative and up-to-date than official ones.

Example from my city - the best way to find about problems with public transport (e.g. a tram had an accident and blocked off an entire route in both directions) is through an _unofficial_ Facebook fanpage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately, Democracy/Freedom isn't full developed in this part of the world. Feel free to downvote, but politically speaking, there are still many open wounds, and unresolved issue, issues in this region of Former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately they were caught in the middle of a cold-war-political-game and this is one of the outcomes.

I don't think that local authority has any objection that Sarajevo can be named in a blog post. I think it is to prevent other political forces from making claims (founded or otherwise) and it's Alexander (in this case) is caught in the middle of this ....storm.

<comment><USER23> Which part of the world as Democracy/Freedom fully developed? The Eiffel Tower and the US NY Port Authority have similar IP restraints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think that such a legal paragraph is quite common. It prevents other entities to mimic official documents and pretend they represent the city. I am pretty sure, you can use the city name as location any time you want.

On the other hand: There have been stranger things :)

PS: Not a lawyer

<comment><USER25> >It prevents

No it doesn't. In any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So... that picture of the Statue of Liberty is actually one of a copy in Tokyo. The bridge is the Rainbow Bridge, not one in New York. We also don't have a copy of the Eiffel Tower in New York, nor do we put the anti-collision lights on top of buildings like they do in Tokyo.

[https://goo.gl/maps/H9RAEx131UA2](https://goo.gl/maps/H9RAEx131UA2)

<comment><USER27> But we'll always have Vegas.....

[https://www.google.com/search](https://www.google.com/search)? q=vegas+paris+eiffel+tower&source=lnms&tbm=isch

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well I have a much stupider example. English Heritage (now Natural England I think) decided they owned the rights to Stonehenge[0] 3-4000 years after the architects demise. It seems they realised their error once it had been splashed across the front pages....

[0][http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo- news/stone...](http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo- news/stonehenge-bosses-regret-photography-ban-update-19051)

<comment><USER29> > stupider example

The EU side of the Euro is copyrighted, with a permissions grant that prohibits disparaging use. So nice closeups of Euro coins get removed from Wikicommons (as not freely reusable), and are yet-another-license pain to use in OER education content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Related: the story of the owners of Bully Hill Vineyards in New York State, who are legally enjoined from using their last name on their product. They founded another wine company under their name originally and sold it to Coca- Cola, you see...

Wikipedia, since it appears their website's cert is just out of date: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_Hill_Vineyards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_Hill_Vineyards)

<comment><USER30> Their side of the story, if you feel up for temporary security exceptions: [https://www.bullyhillvineyards.com/about/heritage/](https://www.bullyhillvineyards.com/about/heritage/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> You might be misinterpreting the law. Not sure for that case, but it's pretty standard (in this part of the world) that you can't use city or state name in commercial purposes (as a part of the name of the business or a product) without entity permission.

edit: also pages/domains that could be seen as representing the city can get notices about name usage. Domains, iirc, can be claimed for this reason by city.

It's kinda common sense, using city name, for some people, might be seen as representing the city, so any posts made by the page might damage the city public image etc.

edit 2: added note about part of the world

edit 3: moving this from reply

> I live in neighboring country, when you're starting a business you can't > have city or state name in business name without permission. Also using > domains that have city or state name included might get you in some trouble.

> Probably more usual in this part of the world.

Adding: since both our countries still have a lot of laws from communist era, there's all kind of crazy ideas pushed through laws.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure what you mean by pretty standard, but it's literally the opposite of pretty standard. How many little place have the city they're in in their name? I could probably find dozens for Pittsburgh without much effort.

Edit: I a actually had a company with my state's name at one point, registered in said state with no issue.

<comment><USER31> I live in neighboring country, when you're starting a business you can't have city or state name in business name without permission. Also using domains that have city or state name included might get you in some trouble.

Probably more usual in this part of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 2Pacalypse- Oh man, now I'll think twice before I try to correct someone's spelling: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3yncb0/the_beauty_of_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3yncb0/the_beauty_of_bosnia_and_herzegovina/cyexzrm/?context=1)

<comment><USER33> Probably thrice since that looks like a pun. "Jebo" means "fuck" in the local language.

<comment><USER34> Not necessarily. Confusing v and b is a quite common mistake: they are next to each other on the qwerty layout and many languages (such as Spanish) don't differentiate the sound of b and v.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The author didn't mention it, but another stupid example of this in the US is the Hollywood Sign. You can't shoot pictures or video of the sign without permission.

This video by Tom Scott goes into detail: [https://youtu.be/KUdQ7gxU6Rg](https://youtu.be/KUdQ7gxU6Rg)

<comment><USER17> You can shoot pictures and videos. You just can't use them for commercial purposes.

EDIT: forgot the reference: [https://web.archive.org/web/20100510105723/http://www.hollyw...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100510105723/http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/index.php?page=17)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Selecting the black blotches reveals the name. Should be using FULL BLOCK. HN doesn't allow me to include it in this comment

[https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2588/browserte...](https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2588/browsertest.htm)

Of course, this comment could be seen as commentary on laws against accessing insecure intended-to-be-secret data. Blame not the author, but me, for they obviously intended the name to be omitted, & I trespassed their security when I selected the text. Lock me up

<comment><USER37> Clicking the button at the end of the article reveals the name. It's 100% intentional.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, completely intentional.

The idea is that the city's name is hidden by default, but very easy to discover if you decide to do so. So you can highlight the text, click on the button at the bottom of the page, or go to the linked Wikipedia pages in the first paragraph to reveal the name of the city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hmm. I wonder if companies named after the municipalities they've been founded it have ever needed to deal with this kind of thing from their municipal councils.

Such names exist in many countries. Off the top of my head, I can think of Nokia (Finland, telecom equipment), Emmaljunga (Sweden, prams) and Gorenje (Slovenia, kitchen appliances).

In Finland, University of Helsinki owns helsinki.fi and City of Helsinki owns hel.fi. For a while, the city was apparently pressuring the university to have links to city stuff on the helsinki.fi front page, but it seems that now the front page is all university stuff again.

<comment><USER31> Gorenje was founded while former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in blooming, it was a thing to call factories by city names, so there's that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hmm. Type "flights to SJJ" into your favorite search engine and watch it break this law.

A while ago I needed to talk to a lawyer at MIT about making a derivative work of a chunk of software published, by MIT, under the MIT FOSS license. They were clear that I was free to mention the Institute's name, as long as it was clear to a reasonable reader that I was not claiming their endorsement.

I suppose a municipality might want to be able to avoid confusing the public with spoofs. It's not hard to believe a scammer could send out fake municipal water bills. They need a way to shut that down. But claiming copyright in the city's name seems clumsy.

Plus, the name is important. You really wanna have people calling it TCFKAS? (after the ASCII rendering of Prince's name, TAFKAP, during his dispute with his label.)

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm that part of the world so I will give you some background.

He was using both name city of Sarajevo and using emblem of the city on his Facebook page. And since situation there is kinda tricky it is not interest of anybody living in the city and want to ensure peace and p... (ok - just peace - prosperity needs to wait for the next century) to have any 3rd-party representing the city.

I'm not sure what he was doing on his Facebook page but he might one one of the guys saying: "hey lets start the war again ...". Or might not. This was a move by politicians: maybe stupid. Maybe based on fear of another war. It is complicated.

</comment><comment><USER41> The Iain M Banks novel _Against a Dark Background_ has a throwaway mention of a region called Regionner with capital city Capitaller, the true name having being obscured by a centuries-spanning all-consuming litigation.

</comment><comment><USER42> There are many various restrictions on the use of photos of landmarks / building - couple of them here: [https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/contributor- resources/lega...](https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/contributor- resources/legal/stock-photo-restrictions/)

It also states that "Images depicting the [Eiffel] Tower's lighting design are unacceptable for commercial use" ... which I think is fair.

</comment><comment><USER43> As humans we could de facto rename Sarajevo to something more representative of its new policy.

</comment><comment><USER44> But does the city actually have the authority to put such restrictions? Of course they can say and claim anything, but would it actually stand in courts? What about internationally, is there some agreement that applies?

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of the idiocy about not being able to use the name Superbowl, because it's trademarked. Leading to all kinds of businesses referring to it in roundabout terms like "the big game"

</comment><comment><USER46> As long as laws and rules like this exists, they will get abused.

</comment><comment><USER47> The click baity title is mildly infuriating

</comment><comment><USER48> Call it something else. Then when the city complains tell them it's because you can't use the name in writing.

</comment><comment><USER49> Totally incorrect for most western nations. Google "nomitave use".

<comment><USER23> Is Bosnia a western nation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The name is visible on one of the images (from a Facebook screencap)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for spotting that!

I was so obsessed with the actual conversation that I have forgot to check other sources in the screenshot. I have pushed a change that makes those two occurrences censored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> But Wikipedia has no problems writing Sarajevo. Why is that?

</comment><comment><USER52> What a moronic idea to copyright buildings scenery.

</comment><comment><USER53> Couple of things, I'm not a lawyer but I follow IP law and have worked in related fields, this is not legal advice:

The statute he cites says that a person under that law would be required to pay for _damages_ to Sarajevo for use of its name. A blog post is almost certainly not going to create any damages. Also as it's a local ordinance it probably applies only if you are in that city when you write.

>I was already aware that I can't show you the mascot of those Winter Olympics games, since doing so would be a copyright violation //

He can probably _report_ on it. It's not the EU _per se_ , most copyright goes back to the Berne convention, which leaves some areas open for national variances. Yugoslavia was signatory to that prior to the EU existing, and then there's UCC, TRIPS neither of which rely on EU in any way.

Now, the Olympic Committees are known for abusing IP law, they'll sue you for even an allowed usage of mascots and word marks (ie textual trademarks). That's because most people would rather not risk going to court, and most people don't know IP law well enough to be certain they have an allowed use.

>So, until the architect who designed the building dies and additional 70 years go by //

As he later points out that is a misunderstanding. The building is not the issue, the light display is being considered an artistic work, it's the creator of the light display who owns the relevant copyright here. I don't know French law, but most arrangements of lights would fail at being sufficiently creative to acquire copyright. And of course there are usually exclusions for reporting, as the blogger is doing.

In UK we have Fair Dealing which is extremely restrictive, I'd expect France to have something closer to the much more liberal USA Fair Use in which usually being non-commercial makes copying allowed (though the definition of commercial is nuanced, is not just selling; and being commercial isn't necessarily _not_ Fair Use).

Something I don't know about is how French law would apply, assuming this guy is in Bosnia & Herzegovina, it seems their local law about not showing this "[art]work" shouldn't restrict him?

Also, if he writes privately and has his work published elsewhere, eg on a USA based server, it seems like he should be protected by USA Fair Use laws!?

IMO governments need to have some way to address the chilling effect of being sued for legal activities. A company knowingly operating in this way should have all state IP protections cancelled.

</comment><comment><USER54> Sarajevo.

Also, really? Hope this is a misunderstanding...

<comment><USER55> Let me say it too! Sarajevo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It seems the world has gone full circle and somehow we have ended up back in an authoritarian dystopia, this time one "we" ironically built and enforced ourselves.

<comment><USER17> How so? This seems to be plain-old legal censorship.

<comment><USER56> Censorship _is_ an authoritarian tool. It used to be carried out by the might of the sword and now it's enforced by the full weight of the law, hence the "legal censorship" as you put it.

<comment><USER17> Right, but legal censorship has been around for thousands of years. I don't see the full circle you're talking about - it's more of the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Flagged article, headline is a lie and article is intentionally misleading.

</comment><comment><USER57> Sometimes you have the feeling that copyright laws are made by grown-ups who want to use the law so that the other kids don't copycat them...

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there a part of this blog post where the author isn't whining about something?

</comment><comment><USER59> It's Sarajevo and this blog post is about the only thing I can find on this with quick google searches, and you said it yourself that you're not a lawyer, so I really think you're just misunderstanding something and are making a big deal out of nothing.

<comment><USER18> I'd agree with you if this was only interpretation of the law. However, the city council actually took steps to contact the administrators of various Facebook pages with the request to pay for the name.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get remote jobs as web developer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Networking. In Meatspace, not on the internet.

I got a client from attending my local monthly meetup group, and I got emailed today about work from someone I met at a local conference (and who goes to the local meetup also).

I don't have a degree or anything, I just have experience with Ruby on Rails.</comment>


Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/serverless-inc-lands-10-m-series-a-to-build-serverless-developers-platform/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures. I recently developed a service[1] with the serverless framework and it was the first time I enjoyed developing server-side code since the era of PHP on shared hosts, where you could just upload code and refresh the page. There's something freeing about never having to think about the server process or what happens if the server is power cycled.

So congrats on the funding, I hope you can convert some haters :)

[1] obligatory plug: [https://notify.run](https://notify.run)

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of people have tried "serverless" and found it to present more challenges than it solves. How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions? As far as I can tell, the answer is: You don't, you use a different database.

No-worries devops experiences are nothing new. See Heroku.

<comment><USER4> I think the example you give is more because there's a mismatch between technologies, rather than the "fault" of serverless. In serverless, your endpoints become infinitely scalable. This doesn't go well when they're backed by technologies where there is a hard limit on the number of connections, for instance SQL servers or a Redis server. I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless "because it brings so many other issues". I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

That aside, I agree that there are a lot of secondary concerns that are important when running things in production but that aren't available out-of- the-box when you run something on AWS Lambda. I'm thinking about error monitoring, performance monitoring, logging,... All those things need to be set up and that's quite time-consuming.

However, I think that's more due to serverless being relatively new and not as mature as the traditional way of doing. I don't think it will take long before we'll have the equivalent for serverless of adding `gem 'newrelic_rpm'` to your Gemfile and magically having performance and error monitoring across your app.

<comment><USER5> > I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the > serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

> I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

Just in time when we were talking about fanfare. Spend 10-20 minutes searching on the Internets to see what actual experiences people have with it.

Its 3X write increase? Bollocks. Usually the performance is worse than when you administer your own DB(Postgresql/MySQL). You might(or not) see some read- performance increase, which... well everyone can scale on reads so I don't see the point.

I suspect it has other goodies pertaining to administration/provisioning, but performance/scaling is not one of them.

<comment><USER6> >> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

> Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science > and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are > usually full of fanfare and false promises.

Traditional relational databaases have indeed solved many issues that some newer datastores struggle with. But the flip side is that it is non-trivial to design traditional databases that are not Single Points Of Failure.

Storing data is surprizingly hard in a cloud environment, and involves trade- offs. Reaching a comprehensive solution (fast, HA, consistent, easily recoverable, scalable volum, evolvable schemas...) is hard no matter what technology you pick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I ended up using lamda for several things ad hoc and I have to say the experience is great to quickly add functionality to specific niche things you don't necessarily want to run on your API servers because of weight or simply that having a trigger built in makes the whole flow simpler. However, the downside is if you do something stupid like create an infinite trigger accidentally your bill will exponentially increase. Always remember that part. On a $5 digital ocean instance, they will never charge you $3000 a month for accidentally doing something stupid but AWS will forgive you one time at least and I have my one time now. The most hilarious part of this whole thing...and this is really one of the main points, the $5 digital ocean kuejs (nodel.js) server instance that my AWS lamda was smashing the shit out of with millions of requests did not go down the entire time although had some intermittent slow downs of course. $5 goes a long way apparently.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations to Austen and Serverless Inc. for raising an additional 10m dollars. From what I've seen they are all very nice people over at Serverless.

I've been running a small service similar to their new "Serverless Platform" for some time and was approached by them in 2014 to see about joining their team.

Ultimately I ended up deciding not to join because I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in their leadership to make a good product. The next couple of years should be interesting to watch if they can actually build a profitable product.

<comment><USER9> > I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in theit > leadership to make a good product

That seems like a strange requirement. Ultimately for a business to be successful there has to be people that know business, marketing, and slaes. If the leadership team is all hard-core tech engineers, there will be a lack of all of the other social and fundamental business skills needed.

<comment><USER10> I think it's perfectly reasonable given their domain. If you're in a technology-frontiering business, of which serverless most certainly qualifies for, you need management that's going to support engineering through the litany of challenges they will face. I've seen founders get cold feet and cut corners or pivot away from things when the engineering side seems daunting.

The other side here is your customers are likely engineers themselves. You need to build products that connect with them and genuinely make their lives easier... if your leadership is too far removed from that you'll end up with a product platform shapes via a game telephone...

With that said, some strong hires early on can make a real difference here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The coming age of people with no understanding of what running code actually means, no idea how hardware/close to hardware systems behave deep down, is going to be fabulous, and full of wasted computing.

<comment><USER12> > The coming age of people with no understanding of what running code actually > means, no idea how hardware/close to hardware systems behave deep down, is > going to be fabulous, and full of wasted computing.

Just like _now_ is to people who were programming in the 1990s, or the 1990s to people who were programming in the 1970s.

<comment><USER11> Partially agreed; on the other hand, Arduinos & PIC helped a lot to get, say, hardware IRQs, something that is quite heavily abstracted away in general computing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wooo! I'm happy for them! I am using their stuff right now for a project I'm working on (plug: [https://kurz.app/](https://kurz.app/)) and I really appreciate the ecosystem serverless is cultivating. Simple stuff like bundling up pip requirements or syncing a local folder with a S3 bucket could be done using a script I write, but through serverless I can just install a package and have it hook in as part of each deploy.

<comment><USER14> Wow, this is a really cool application. I needed to cut down a song this week and this is a very cool approach.

<comment><USER13> Thank you! I really appreciate it. Can I ask what you cut the song down for? I think I'll make a ShowHN post soon and am still trying to figure out my market outside of video editors.

<comment><USER14> Wedding first dance song. Original was 5+ minutes long, we need 2-3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's to hoping ignoring serverless will work as well as ignoring NoSQL worked for me.

<comment><USER16> NoSQL has been and continues to be hugely influential. All major cloud players provide document/object based storage, as well as other NoSQL Solutions. The term "NoSQL" was dumb and overhyped... But I think it's really about using the correct storage solution for the job.

Non relational data should be stored in a non rdbms. Key-Value stores like Redis are immensely useful as caching layers (but they offer so many more features). Graph databases can be used for data with complex relationships that are not easily modeled. They are also good for seeking strong correlations between related items. (think person A. called person B. called person C. (palantir type searches).). Searches can be done way more effectively in a specialized index, like an inverted index used by lucene/elasticsearch, which also supports things like stemming, synonyms, and numerous other features. These are all "NoSQL" NoSQL is not just mongodb (which isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be btw).

Even traditional RDBMS are seeing an influx of NOSQLesque features. Like JSON types and operations in postgres.

The reason "NoSQL" dbs got popular are because in my experience monolithic large relational databases are hard to scale, and manage once they become too complex. When you have one large database with tons of interdependencies, it makes migrating data, and making schema changes much harder. This in my opinion is the biggest issue (moreso than performance problems associated with doing joins to the n-th degree., which is also an issue.)

It also makes separating concerns of the application more difficult when one SQL connection can query/join all entities. In theory better application design would have separate upstream data services fetch the resources they are responsible for. That data can be stored in a RDBMS or NOSQL, but NOSQL forces your hand in that direction.

As it goes for serverless, this just seems like a natural progression from containerization, I'm interested to see where the space goes.

Personally I think it's foolish to put your head in the sand when the industry is changing, or learning new concepts.

<comment><USER15> > The reason "NoSQL" dbs got popular are because in my experience Monolithic > large relational databases are hard to scale.

I've met a lot of people whomst thought they had to scale that big. Very few handled anything that couldn't run off a beefy postgres installation.

The purpose of a system is what it does. People don't use nosql to scale because they don't need to scale, so what does it do? People use nosql to not write schemas. That's what it's for, for the majority of users.

If I need a key value store, I use a key value store. There's no flashy paradigm there. If I need to put a container up on the interwebs, I do it. What's serverless? Nosql is an "idea", "paradigm", "revolution", or at least the branding of one. Just the same, serverless.

I will continue to ignore nosql and serverless.

The industry sure does change, but do you know how much of that is moving in a real direction and how much is a merry-go-round? Let's brand it "Carousel" and raise 10 million. And in 20 years we can talk about serverless being the new hotness, again.

<comment><USER16> Scale is not just user load, but also scale of application complexity. In my experience when one db connection has access to every resource, in a complex application, this can lead to some really convoluted queries and make schema changes very difficult because of cross cutting dependencies built into these queries, triggers, procedures... etc. This is forgetting about the issues of deadlocks when you have 80 consuming services and applications you don't even know about are opening up all sorts of transactions. Even just splitting the DB into schemas for each resource domain and limiting access per service can help to avoid this.

Also performance is relative, I've worked on highly trafficked applications that had to support high throughput. I have also worked on applications backed by relational storage where data size and complexity has impacted performance.

<comment><USER17> > "Scale is not just user load, but also scale of application complexity"

In my experience, when people use NoSQL because "the application is too complex for relational DBs" they tend to make a mess of it, NoSQL included. They usually end up reinventing the wheel and re-writing buggy versions of features a RDBMS would have given them natively.

<comment><USER18> Been there, done that, migrated everything back to Postgres and saw huge gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We've been using serverless with AWS lambdas for a few months.

Testing is hard, the more AWS shit you tie yourself to the harder local testing and development becomes. I picked up a lambda project another developer started and asked them how they were testing and developing locally. Answer: They deployed a new update for every change (!?)

Debugging: Look at log files...

Also, at some point serverless added some autocomplete crap to my .bashrc file without asking which I will never forgive them for.

</comment><comment><USER20> Serverless is great, but I am really loving Zappa for Python Flask and Django development with Lambda and API Gateway.

Deployed our first production tool with it and it's been working great.

<comment><USER21> do you have any strong opinions re: differences between chalice / zappa?

I was looking at these two recently and ended up going with chalice as the docs seemed a bit simpler and more readily accessible.

<comment><USER22> One point: Chalice is non-portable if you outgrow Lambda and want to rehost, whereas Zappa is just Django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This looks interesting and I wish them good luck. The problem with any developer tools startup is that no matter how great the product is, the willingness to pay is very low (developers think they can replace you with a small script) and extremaly likely that your market gets slowly eaten from the bottom by open source and/or MS/Google/Amazon fold in your service into their cloud platform.

</comment><comment><USER24> I usually do TDD serverless apps by debugging unit tests with jest. Is it a bad practice? Anyone can easily mock events this way, It does not matter whether its a SNS event or an HTTP event. Overall, I have had a great experience with serverless!

</comment><comment><USER25> Super happy for them. It's clear that lots of companies and people are interested in serverless, as the benefits are clear. this could be how the "microservice" actually manifests itself in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hope DigitalOcean works to make this a first-class citizen on their cloud.

<comment><USER27> I think they are. I do see a lot of twitter posts by them talking about the rise of serverless.

[https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1017529341742403586](https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1017529341742403586)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> i think more than half the websites on the internet can run on serverless platform and that makes the web more secure and faster.

<comment><USER29> I think more than half the websites on the internet can run on a shared hoster for less than 3$ a month and that makes the web more secure and faster.</comment></comment>


Get with the Program: Software-Driven Innovation in Traditional Manufacturing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nber.org/papers/w21752 <comment><USER2> [http://a115.co.uk/static/documents/SSRN- id2699996.pdf](http://a115.co.uk/static/documents/SSRN-id2699996.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds very interesting, but I left my credit card at home.</comment>


10 Books for Data Enthusiasts - <AUTHOR>

http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/ten-data-books.html <comment><USER2> Please, for all us mobile users, post a clickable link:

[http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/ten-data- books.html](http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/ten-data-books.html)

And by the way, thanks! Looks like some great books.

I especially like the fact that you did a good synopsis and a why you should read it for each book. I wish more posters would of this...

Edit ninja: to give props and why.</comment>


Woman asks for Mariah Carey on her birthday cake, gets Marie Curie instead - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/06/18/woman-asks-for-mariah-carey-on.html <comment> java-man It's an upgrade!

</comment><comment><USER2> >French physicist

What next, Chopin is a French pianist?

<comment><USER3> > French cyclist

Precisely. This guy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Voeckler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Voeckler)</comment></comment>


How to make a Text Adventure - <AUTHOR> http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/21865366869/how-to-make-a-text-adventure

<comment><USER2> >We wanted to use Javascript so that the game could run in your browser.

But there are already at least two javascfipt interpreters for games written in Inform 7 already!

<http://code.google.com/p/parchment/>

<http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/>

<comment><USER3> And a pretty neat site with parchment set up and hosting things: <http://playfic.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed this article, thanks! Playing MUDs was one of my favorite pastimes in high school and I often wonder whether text-based games will enjoy a resurgence with the many new technologies being developed.

Side question... he mentions how you can't quite achieve this "room" object in Python:

>you can't turn to anonymous functions because Python doesn't have them. You can't use dot notation to dereference the fields inside the structure because Python uses ["key"] notation.

Why couldn't you subclass an object that has an 'on_enter' method? A nice side benefit would be that you'd be able to use dot notation to refer to its attributes!

        class Kitchen(Location):
            name = 'kitchen'
            description = 'Your kitchen is untidy and cramped.'
            visits = 0
            def on_enter(self):
                if (self.visits == 0):
                    #first time in this room
            ...

So far the magic of Javascript has been a bit over my head but I want to learn more. Why is this something you'd need anonymous functions to accomplish? (And why not just use Perl or some other language with them as opposed to JS?)

<comment><USER5> When I see your class definition, I think "why define a whole class for just 1 room?" because then you have to separately define and instantiate every class, an everything would effectively be a singleton (even if you didn't follow the pattern). If you can treat code as data, and concisely define an anonymous function, it saves a step.

Speaking of code==data and text adventures, I'm currently working my way through the book Land of Lisp[1]. Some chapters just focus on new concepts, but most illustrate concepts through the creation of a game (except for the streams chapter, which has you write a web server). The first game is an extremely basic text adventure. You can only move around and pick up objects, but it did parse 'normal' keyboard input. Now that I'm a few chapters deeper, I'm starting to see how it could be expanded to handle different actions, etc.

Another interesting approach to web-based adventure games is "Adventure Games Live". Instead of typing, you select a radio button for the action you want. Some of those games are extremely challenging (I've spent hours playing and haven't finished many of them)

[1] landoflisp.com [2] <http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand how the fact that Inform 7 syntax looks like natural language means that "you don't write any code at all." It's actually a really interesting domain-specific language, though I don't know how well its lessons generalize.

<comment><USER7> the drawback (from the author's "where's the fun in that?" pov) is that inform7 is for people who want to write text adventures, rather than text adventure engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a text adventure resurgence of late.

I can't remember playing one since MUDS were cool.

I don't even necessarily mean a fully text only game. What about something like a slow paced game that combined beautiful prose read by a talented voice actor with static hand drawn graphics or fully ray traced scenes.

Also we have better NLP now and better voice recognition which would make things more interesting.

<comment><USER9> Text adventures (interactive fiction), and muds for that matter, are alive and well. I've been an active participant in both communities for many years so I feel like I have some perspective on it; in fact I'd say text adventures have seen a resurgence in the last few years. It's hard to say how much of that is fueled by nostalgia though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the projects in my very first CS course in college (based around SICP) was to write a text adventure game in Scheme. It was certainly an interesting project and a good introduction to OOP, but also a little tedious. If we were working on our own stories instead of implementing the map and objects from a project spec, it would have been much more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Talking about text adventures, the INSTEAD project is worth trying. It's a simple text adventure game engine written in Lua and ported to many platforms, including Android. <http://code.google.com/p/instead/> Also, it includes some really interesting games.

<comment><USER12> Cool, I have a text adventure idea I would like to try my hand at... however, the examples are in Russian. Hmm,..

<comment><USER11> Yes, the developer is from Russia. But there's a nice english documentation as well: <http://instead.syscall.ru/wiki/en/gamedev/documentation> Plus, INSTEAD supports URQ games that have a much more simplified syntax.

<comment><USER12> wow, that is seriously nice documentation. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool.

I have never played text adventures on a computer, but I like the simplicity of the idea of "connection between places".

Two suggestions: (A) You add a onkeypress listeners for the arrow keys to mean: NORTH, EAST, WEST, SOUTH? (B) Add an ASCII ART version ;)

Text adventures are not too far from "choose your own adventure" books.... hm... this will kick ass as an educational app. Imagine the island is full of "level spots" like in Mario World and each "spot" is one question from khan- exercises.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

I think arrow keys are a bit overloaded inside text boxes already and should be used for editing, but I would add "w" as a shortcut for "west" and "e" for "east" etc if I could travel back in time.

Would also have added command-auto-completion like in IDEs. That'd stop the complaints by people who don't know to type "HELP" ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I started making a text adventure over google chat - based on app engine (not that this matters). The idea being that you could add / update / change the "world structure" as well. Oh and it could easily be an MMO as well. Anybody interested in helping me out / taking this over?

</comment><comment><USER15> Text adventures rocked until dungeon master came along and nuked the genre. They may be nice to code, but life's too short and I would not play one again.</comment>


Intrace – Traceroute-like application piggybacking on existing TCP connections - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/intrace/wiki/intrace <comment><USER2> Available as a docker container:

      $ docker run imiell/sd_intrace /bin/bash
      # intrace
      InTrace, version 1.5 (C)2007-2011 Robert Swiecki  <firstname.lastname@example.com>
      2015/02/25 16:30:35.797749 <INFO> Usage: intrace <-h hostname> [-p <port>] [-d <debuglevel>] [-s <payloadsize>] [-6]

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who is interested in QoS on their home network I've always wondered if this was possible. I've considered running smokeping to a Digital Ocean box and tracking the result but what better way than to track the performance of real traffic.</comment>


Show HN: Decentralized, k-ordered unique IDs in Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maxcountryman/flake <comment><USER2> Very nice. This is based on Boundary's Erlang Flake ID service, more details of which are at [http://boundary.com/blog/2012/01/12/flake-a- decentralized-k-...](http://boundary.com/blog/2012/01/12/flake-a- decentralized-k-ordered-unique-id-generator-in-erlang/).

One thing I had to look up again was the definition of k-ordering: K-ordering gives _roughly_ time-ordered id's down to the millisecond when sorted lexicographically. This is usually fine for most purposes but keep in mind it doesn't allow you to reason about causality between timestamps from different machines.

This also relies on your servers clocks to be in sync (something that should be happening anyway).

<comment><USER3> So, one would only use this when the powerful server that is responsible for just generating IDs is saturated, right?

<comment><USER2> That's one reason you'd want this. A few others that I can think of:

* No single point of failure if the id server goes down * Avoiding network round trip latency * You have distributed servers across multiple data centres (though clock sync may be an issue)

If your service can tolerate k-ordered ids then I would pick this over a central server every time.

<comment><USER3> Another alternative is using local UUIDs, right ? If you're just interested in generating a unique ID to shard and insert into one of your DB nodes.

<comment><USER4> The disadvantage a UUID has is that they're larger, Snowflake was something like 63 bits, UUID is 128, 2x as long.

<comment><USER2> Snowflake was 63 bits due to some cleverness with resetting the epoch and coordinating unique worker ID's through Zookeeper.

These Flakes relax those restrictions and are 128 bits. The benefit is that they don't require a central server to distribute worker ID's and the epoch is the standard Unix epoch. This holds as long as the MAC addresses on your machines are unique. As another commenter mentioned, this doesn't always happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "So this allows for 2^16-1 unique IDs per millisecond per machine."

Technically thats per MAC not per machine. I've run into multiple NICs with duplicate MACs as has everyone else who's been in the game long enough.

<comment><USER6> This is interesting. I always thought MACs are unique (manufacture's ID + some sequence). Unless you override factory MAC of course. I may be wrong here but if MACs were nit unique basic networking, ARP etc would not work? COuld anyone elaborate?

<comment><USER5> Nobody else responded? Its not supposed to happen and yet it does. Not often. And yes it really confuses ARP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat! I made one of these in Java a while back after reading the snowflake Twitter post (which has since been removed). Looks like Twitter has retired Snowflake: [https://github.com/twitter/snowflake](https://github.com/twitter/snowflake)

[https://github.com/mumrah/flake-java](https://github.com/mumrah/flake-java)

</comment><comment><USER8> What happens if your system clock goes backwards? I think that NTP will not do this by default, but I wonder if it happens for other reasons.

<comment><USER9> Lots of bad things happen if your clock goes backwards, which is why NTP doesn't do this. Depending on what your system is doing, setting the clock backwards can have serious security implications, such as making tokens which should be expired valid again. I'm not sure it's worth considering this scenario. (Other systems I've seen which rely on time for security purposes don't seem to bother thinking about this either.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Simpleflake is a 64 bit alternative [http://engineering.custommade.com/simpleflake-distributed- id...](http://engineering.custommade.com/simpleflake-distributed-id- generation-for-the-lazy/)</comment>


Nature Ontologies - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/ontologies/ <comment><USER2> "He (Tim Berners-Lee)expressed the belief that Semantic Web technology will advance the information revolution he began with the World Wide Web, changing everything from how users set up their online address books to how they pay their taxes."

The semantic web is underrated.

[http://goo.gl/YCc1Ly](http://goo.gl/YCc1Ly)

<comment><USER3> The problem with the semantic web is that radical meaning variance is alive and well. As a friend who works in GIS for geology says, "If I send a team of geologists out to map a region, when I put their data together I can tell who mapped where but not what anyone mapped."

There are ways in carefully controlled situations (like geological mapping) to deal with this, but in the uncontrolled wilds of the web we don't have any very good idea of how to handle it. Published ontologies are a hopeful attempt to get people to agree, but how they are interpreted by different individuals will still vary a great deal, because it always involves mapping the individual's ontologies (plural) onto the published document and that will rarely happen cleanly.

To take a likely quite common example: a published ontology may put A and B in the same genus, whereas you or I might give each one a different genus, based on our understanding of the world. You see this a lot when crossing between fields, as a pure physicist will often have a quite different set of abstract categories than an applied physicist, an engineer, or a mathematician, much less a geologist or biologist. And individuals within fields vary a great deal as well. So what you end up with, while better than nothing, is still some kind of weird and disjoint intersection between the published ontology and the personal ontologies of all the people who use it.

Automated tools for processing documents and inferring their semantic categories may help enough for the semantic web to be useful, but it'll take a concerted effort to ensure that such tools produce vaguely similar results, and we aren't there yet by a long shot. And then there's the problem of deliberate gaming.

As such, I don't think the semantic web is "under-rated" so much as it is still, after almost 20 years, in the early days of development work on a very hard problem.

<comment><USER4> I think the really hard problems are almost unsolvable so waiting for them to be fixed before putting effort into this area doesn't seem wise.

In general we need a common mechanism to be able to make simple factual assertions in a web page or when describing a data flow.

The other very significant problem is that learning the technologies around rdf/owl/sparql is a lot of work and to be honest about it, most developers refuse to even learn sql properly.

I'm hopeful google's slow but steady focus on web page/email markup(for google now) will get the momentum behind solving some of the simple problems that it's insane we still have (things like, is there an address that describes this businesses location somewhere on this web page?).</comment></comment></comment>


Extinct Startups Tees - <AUTHOR> http://extinctstartups.com/ <comment><USER2> Clever. I'd like to see an Enron or Compaq tee.</comment>


Darpa has made its publicly released data more discoverable - <AUTHOR> http://www.darpa.mil/OpenCatalog/index.html

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=darpa+open+catalog#!/story/forever...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=darpa+open+catalog#!/story/forever/0/darpa%20open%20catalog)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call :p Oops.</comment></comment>


Show HN: the app that powers our order fulfillment warehouse - <AUTHOR> http://plusbryan.com/rocket <comment><USER2> I do this for a client of mine and over the years, have found the following to be the best solution:

1\. iPod Touch / iPhone with LineaPro Barcode Scanners: <http://ipclineapro.com/> \- managers with personal iPhones get a new case, others get iPods.

2\. Enterprise iOS license, annual update of certificates is the only chore. Otherwise no worries about deployment of code to each device because it's web- based. All inventory movements, order picks/puts are real-time, wireless.

3\. Basic HTML webview that goes to //intra.net/barcode/scan/[barcode] upon each scan. The web server handles the rest.

4\. Use HTML5 with type=tel for entering numbers. Use PhoneGap-style JS-to- ObjC routing for playing alert/warning/success sounds.

5\. QR Codes are slow. LineaPro is instant and has a red-laser.

6\. Print labels on Zebra Z Series: [http://www.zebra.com/us/en/products- services/printers/printe...](http://www.zebra.com/us/en/products- services/printers/printer-type/industrial/z-series.html) \- by POSTing an XML to the printer's IP. Design multiple labels with variable fields and in the XML include label name, number of identical copies per label, and the data per label. Prints within 0.5 second.

I think I've deployed 40 of these scanners and 10 printers and they work great in a very heavy-use environment - think 10000+ scans, 2500+ labels a day. The app itself is styled with high contrast and readability / error-minimization in mind instead of gorgeous iOS end-user color scheme. So lots of red and green backgrounds instead of shades of beige.

If you can keep the user from having to go back to a computer after each task, it can save a tremendous amount of time and effort. Native iOS apps are great for AppStore users but in intranet environment, I vastly prefer HTML5 because not only can I test the app remotely, I can add any feature I want with minimal effort and show the user anything they need to see - from daily task list and current order status to inventory by bin location and empty bins.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've written a fulfillment engine before. It is complicated and generally does not lend itself to reuse. The reason is because the problem space is usually very specific. Building a general solution that fits everyone is near impossible.

That said Amazon actually has a Fulfillment API. The real trick is integrating your fulfillment into all your other business processes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Open source alternative for Android: <https://github.com/Genshin/SpreeAndroid>

<comment><USER4> See also the design doc: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-C33WjH5GooNKW- GsW7-Ol_...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-C33WjH5GooNKW- GsW7-Ol_K4-7PbwVxPk3Vs2MmO0/edit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The user enters how many boxes they want to pack and clicks Print, which prints a unique QR code inventory control label for each box. The packer affixes the QR code labels to the packed boxes, places them in the staging area, and moves onto the next box._

I've built a logistics system, where we did this until I realised that it is much more convenient to have a roll of pre-printed labels, that are scanned by the operator and then linked to a record in the application. You don't have to wait around for the printer to complete, you don't even have to input how many boxes you want to pack - You just point and scan. It also allows you to have the labels attached to the boxes in advance (or printed on). You can buy a roll of pre-printed bar codes for cheap, from print shops etc.

In general, I found that "reversing the order of control" works very well. Instead of having the system tell the operator what to do (which would be a natural solution from a software perspective), it's often much more flexible and efficient to have the operator tell the system what he did and then deal with that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its amazing how much people love their phones. What's the bet the warehouse employees want to supply their own phone, just so they can touch it all day.

I was involved in a project where we had to build an iOS UI for wholesale electricity traders, because the traders really wanted to be able to do their work from their phones. It wasn't driven by a business need, the starting premise was 'we need to be able to make trades from our phones', and then some waffle was constructed to justify the project.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is... is your "warehouse" a spare room in your office?

The use of the amazon warehouse image is a funny comparison.

"Fake it 'til you make it" I guess.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a great solution and a great starting point for further optimizaion in the future.

As mentioned here before, I was surprised to see that this is no shipping/inventory solution for small businesses. I've searched a lot and all I can find is high end solutions for large enterprises.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any advice on software / best practices for improving warehouse packing efficiency and accuracy? And inventory management?

We've got a warehouse that has hundreds of SKUs and processes tens of thousands of orders a day, but we're not very good at it yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like we could learn quite a bit from _you_! The one nice thing about our boxes is that it effectively limits the number of sku's during the fulfillment step. Rather than 5 skus per box, we have 1 box SKU. It looks like you guys fulfill customer orders, which seems like a lot of added complexity.

We haven't had a chance to really ideate around kitting yet, but I've seen how a couple big 3rd party fulfillment houses do it. My major takeaway was that you need to slap barcodes on everything.

I'd love to learn more about what you guys do and what some of the challenges have been. You can reach me at plusbryan at gmail.

<comment><USER10> hey bryan, did you guys use an existing library for the barcode scanning functionality or wrote one up from scratch?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use zbar, which seems to work well: <http://zbar.sourceforge.net/iphone/sdkdoc/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bryan, the font on your app site seems broken for me on Chrome/Windows 7. Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/jkUkD.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the screenshot, we'll check it out.

<comment><USER12> I can confirm. Win8/x86/Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bryan, out of curiosity, apart from the IOS app, which web platform has order fulfillment system been developed on?</comment>


Twitter Moving from Pants to Bazel - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pants-devel/PHVIbVDLhx8 <comment><USER2> Hello!

To add a bit of context: the Pants Build project has been managed by a non- profit 501c6 organization for the last few years, and is wholly independent from Twitter. In the last year, Twitter has contributed less than half of the changes to Pants, with the rest contributed by Toolchain Labs and by the wider Pants community.

Would be happy to answer any questions about the project.

 _(disclosure: active Pants developer, former Twitter employee, current Toolchain Labs employee)_</comment>


Clang/LLVM on Windows Update - <AUTHOR> http://blog.llvm.org/2014/07/clangllvm-on-windows-update.html

<comment><USER2> Why doesn't Microsoft contribute to Clang/LLVM? If Clang achieves compatibility with Microsoft libraries, then I see no reason to keep using MSVC.

<comment><USER3> vendor lock-in</comment></comment>


Deformable Liquid Mirrors - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25342/

<comment><USER2> You should be able to use the liquid mirror in space though, since they won't dump out of the container. Perhaps you'd introduce other problems then, and the corrective advantages of having these mirrors on the ground to look through atmospheric effects is lost.

<comment><USER3> You don't have gravity in orbit so there's nothing to hold the mirror down.

<comment><USER4> The article talks about using a ferromagnetic liquid and magnetic fields to make adjustments to the surface of the mirror, so a magnetic liquid mirror is possible.

Use the magnetic field to keep the mirror on the desired surface. No atmosphere in space, so there's no other use/necessity for the technology, right? And we already have proof of concept: "Today, Brousseau and buddies reveal a next generation liquid mirror that gets around these problems. The proof-of-principle mirror is just 5 cm across but sits atop a honeycomb of 91 actuators that can deform the liquid. […] And they've overcome the the non- linear control problems by superimposing a strong uniform magnetic field on top of the field created by the actuators. This has the effect of linearising the response of the liquid."</comment></comment></comment>


What to do with too much advice - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/what-to-do-with-too-much-advice <comment><USER2> There a lot of great points on this thread. We need more distinction between contextual and non-contextual advice. If one is 'at the board' working through a problem — then a hint or solution, moves the problem forward. On the other hand, if one is just 'leisurely browsing advice listicles' without being at the board, facing the problem, then most likely you are just ingesting dopamine-flavored noise.

Advice without context from anyone — whether it is PG, pmarca or Richard Feynman or {_your_fav_successful_survivor_} - would be useless, unless you are working/thinking about the problem that they are giving solutions for. Help only works if you are looking for something. Also sometimes it is good to just enjoy problem-solving and figuring things out. We are too quick to look for advice — and I get why: because no one wants to "reinvent the wheel"; There are too many standardized administrative things with startups that can be just solved by looking up advice; no problem with that; but sometimes it is worth struggling through a problem even though geniuses like PG and pmarca can give a solution quickly.

Abundant capital has led to too many VCs with too many blog posts looking to differentiate with their advice, under the guise of differentiation, content marketing, "proprietary deal flow" etc. If content is "bait" then you are at the bad end of the line.

When faced with a problem, find someone who can help — All other times, just do the work and enjoy problems :-)

(Did I just give advice? Can't tell)

<comment><USER3> > most likely you are just ingesting dopamine-flavored noise.

I hope you don't mind if I steal that phrase. Well put.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the single most important thing I've learned in my career, for my startup, and for my life is that I'm the only one responsible.

The fact is, everyone can give you advice, it's cheap. However, it's only based off their experience and their responsibility. You can never have too much advice, you just have to see how similar the situation is to see if it's useful.

What exemplified this in my mind, was when I received advice to not go down a particular path with my technical architecture. Yet, 6 months down the line, the architecture works very well, and that same "advisor" has since changed their mind.

Because it's only based off personal experience, and no one can experience things that haven't happened, it's worth weighting advice based on a situation-by-situation basis.

<comment><USER5> Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those that supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the last from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than its worth.

<comment><USER6> You should at least credit Baz Luhrmann if you're going to quote that. At least put it in quotes so it doesn't look like you're trying to take credit for it.

<comment><USER5> It was actually mary schmich, but i thought the song was universally known at this point.

<comment><USER6> Huh! TIL!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _For a founder, this means picking a single adviser who can inform your thinking, rather than someone who makes decisions for you._

I would call this a _sounding board_. A good sounding board is really valuable. It should be someone you trust, like talking with and communicate well with. They don't necessarily need to know your problem space all that well.

I often serve as a sounding board for my 31 year old son. He talks a lot, I occasionally comment on something he said and he walks away with a valuable insight on where to go next. I'm not even in a position to give advice per se because I don't really know what he's talking about. But even in the course of trying to understand what he is saying, I can ask questions that help clarify something in his mind.

I'm really not a big fan of either getting nor giving advice. I try to get people to engage me in discussion in a meaty way, but advice per se presumes one person knows what is best for another and I think that is generally not true. The person seeking advice typically has "local" information that simply never really gets shared and this means the person giving advice is frequently doing so without knowledge critical to the decision-making process.

When I was raising my kids, I operated on the assumption that they knew a bajillion things about their little world that I would never know -- if they were hot, if their tummy hurt but they were too young to communicate it, etc -- but I knew a lot more about life, the universe and everything generally. I tried to bridge the gap between my larger knowledge base and their smaller one for the problem space in question while leaving as much decision-making in their hands as possible.

So, for example, the summer my oldest turned two and we got a hand-me-down winter coat in the mail that perfectly matched his new shoes and he was enamored that they matched and wanted to wear them together, I didn't tell him "No, you can't wear a winter coat in summer." (It was Germany and it was fairly cool that summer anyway.) Instead, I told him "Don't put the hood on and don't zip it closed. Half your heat escapes from your head. If you leave the hood off, you should be okay." And he then put the hood on and off a dozen times to test what he had just been told.

Because of this incident, years later in elementary school in Kansas -- which was colder than Germany -- he was better at keeping himself warm while playing outside in winter than his classmates. He was typically the last child still outside for recess. Everyone else went in before recess was over because they were too cold.

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea that it's better to just do something quickly and learn from mistakes, rather than take your time, get a lot of good advice, and do it right, seems very accepted but I think it is not always generalizable. In particular, in biotech the cost of a failed experiment is much higher and one poorly designed experiment can kill a company. It's best to get an advisory board with relevant yet diverse experiences to really dig through the details of the experimental design and critically think about what you do and don't know about the biology

I know a few biotech founders who have the tech startup mindset of just getting some money and rushing into an experiment, except they need $200k and 6 months for that experiment. If you realize three months in when it's too late to stop that one of your assumptions was wrong, or you used the wrong model, that's a terrible feeling

<comment><AUTHOR> There's certainly a significant amount of context dependence on the amount of advice that's "right" for any given situation. I think the important thing is to make sure you know that there is an "enough" rather than endlessly chase more.

<comment><USER9> Well put.

There's probably a theory that better explains this, but I think of it as getting to 60%. How can I get to 60% certainty without wasting too much time?

I'll never get to 100% (likely not even the 60% I think I am getting to) but how can I uncover just enough information to feel confidence in my decision? (edit: to add the "?")

The rest is just assessing past decisions and asking the same questions until we get satisfied with the result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Advice is sort of the first derivative of what you should be making decisions based off, i.e.:

\- How have people solved similar problems in the past? How have things gone wrong for people facing similar issues?

\- How is the world different now? How is the world going to look in five and ten years?

IMHO advice is only useful to the extent that you can deconstruct the thought process behind it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Paul Bucheit nailed the problem: _" Limited life experience + over- generalization = advice"_. Most startup advice is horroscope-like in its applicability and utility. It's very easy for advice to seem entirely right but be entirely wrong. Having a single teacher is no answer to this problem.

The solution is to have a single "anchor" or goal that all incoming advice is supposed to serve.

For standup comedians there's a great anchor: make people laugh. If crowds laughs at a comedian's routine, they're succeeding. If crowds don't laugh, they're failing.

Paul Graham described the founder's anchor: make something people want. If users are using a startup's product, it's succeeding. If people are not using it, it's failing.

This eliminates most (but not all) room for self-delusion and misjudgment. All advice for comedians should serve them in "making people laugh" and all startup advice should serve founders in "making something people want".

A comedian can ask: "How will this advice help me make more people laugh, or how will it make people laugh more?"

A founder can ask: "How will this advice help me make more people want our product, or how will it make people want it more?"

And then its their responsibility to judge which course of action will best further their goal.

</comment><comment><USER12> I suppose the essence of being an entrepreneur is being the one to make decisions no one else has made. It seems to be helpful to be data informed with your decisions, but I suppose the moral of this article is that advice can only help with general rules of thumb. In order to solve specific problems that haven't been solved before, you have to carve your own path with your own decisions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Richard Feynman, "DISREGARD!"

[http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf) (End of page 20 and beginning of page 21.)

</comment><comment><USER14> The truth about advice: advice is always flawed because the person giving it doesn't have to live with the consequences. That alone should make you take any advice with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER15> We faced the same issue before pivoting our design services from a local shop to a productized service ([http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com)). We had tons of advice about how design on subscription model won't work or that we should have pay per task model or we shouldn't productize our service at all. After A/B testing we narrowed down to the current model where we are catering to 10+ clients every month generating $3000+ in MRR.

<comment><USER16> Your comment sounds like a plug. You provide no value in your comments as to why certain advice worked and other didn't. It seems that the purpose was to link your business on HN and then find a way to make it relevant to the discussion.

Audience loses at the expense of your company's promotion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very relevant, edw519 evergreen:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343030)

<comment><USER16> I've previously commented on what Sam Altman's startup articles, presentations and talks sound like.

Sam, if you're reading this - you do such an excellent job of interviewing successful startup entrepreneurs. Please do that more as the advice you provide to others creates more confusion/harm than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _For a founder, this means picking a single adviser who can inform your thinking, rather than someone who makes decisions for you._

I've been incredibly fortunate to have met someone locally who has the same level of tech and business expertise as I do. And appreciates the value and insight from multitude of industries. I really don't get along with many people at that deep of a level, so this was extremely rare.

Truthfully I have never had anyone I would call mentor nearly my entire life. I've always figured everything out myself since that's just how I was raised.

We're both mentors to each other, he has a difficult outlier upbringing like I have had, different but similar. I've never really realized what my true weaknesses were until the 5+ hour talks we have discussing everything from how youtube should learn UX from a pornsite, how to run a political campaign, psychology theories, neuroscience, chemistry, frontend development, leadership issues, project management, world education, dealing with nonprofit leaders, making money playing video games as kids. The talks vary with a really big open degree of openness, and changes every couple of minutes.

I don't see eye to eye on his visions for the future, but I understand where he's coming from though. So I appreciate the value he has. I tend to think extremely short term and grab the "lowest hanging fruit" is what he tells me, but his visions are all about "planting seeds" which I don't really bother doing but should be

All his skills complement mine in some weird backwards way and its nice to know that there's someone out there.

I tend to think tech first before anything and he tends to think business first so its a nice mix of skills. I tend to be extremely assertive about my solutions since I've had to do hard sales pitches but his is more gradual and methodical.

I don't know how well we work coding together though that might be a different story but we do see eye to eye on many management practice principles, I met him while doing nonprofit project management.

Anyways, I just wanted to mention this because I find most if not all the advice I get is really not helpful. Unless you understand the logic behind why I am doing something before you say something "Seek to understand before commenting", then its hard for me to appreciate the value of input given. I appreciate the sentinment and thought process though.

<comment><AUTHOR> How did the two of you originally connect?

<comment><USER18> I went to my local techmeetup to volunteer and do some nonprofit work. There were 8 nonprofit companies that presented technical challenges they were facing. They wanted local devs to contribute to their missions as volunteer work. I met him there, said pleasantries and exchanges / what not. Didn't really learn much about him then

The week after I had to attend a strategy meetup to actually do a mini "hackathon" of sorts for projects. Again the 8 companies would do their spiel, I immediately identified which projects were worth taking and which were not. Some were just beyond my skillsets others were too much in infancy, etc. I ended up finding the same guy at the meeting, we were talking silently about all our opinions about these nonprofits. How competent were they, how far along were they, etc

He ended up picking the same 2 projects as I did before I knew about it. We split in groups, I noticed immediately all he did starting off was setting 8 seperate slack channels. He immediately knew communication was vital and capitalized on it. His company also does a lot of webdev / wordpress dev for nonprofits so it makes sense for him to do things this way.

I got to learn and see his leadership and management skills in action. In many ways, they mirrored me own, but were different. While I think tech first and the solution at hand, his focus was more business oriented. I tend to have a blunder of just tossing the solution on a plate without getting all the requirements, and he recognized this instantly and kept things from going off topic.

We started to hit it off and met up a few times on a 1:1 talking about life. He would have all these extremely absurd visions about how he wanted to build a social enterprise and making future impacts, but I couldn't see the motivation.

Later as I got to know him better he told me of his hardships growing up _(not going go into detail here)_ , but they closely resembled my own. I have a debilitating hidden disability growing up that I have not really told anyone because I never wanted to be treated differently. He has terminal cancer and probably may or may not have a long lifespan. He hadn't really told anyone but a handful of people including me.

I have never met someone so intelligent in my life in so many fields. He's been homeless at one point, worked in politics and legal / litigation, is a great developer, and is one of the best leaders and managers I have seen. I have pretty low expectations of people and rarely give compliments like this if that means anything.

For the longest time in my life I've always wondered if I would meet a person like me. I didn't think it would happen because (1) I would probably never know enough about the person to know (2) my background experiences and hardships are a really far outlier that I think maybe one in a million people have experienced. The chances of meeting someone like me is almost next to impossible

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My rule of thumb is: Only take advice from people you're willing to switch places with.

<comment><USER20> Willing to switch places with them regarding the topic of advice, that is. You probably aren't going to get the best technical advice and the best relationship advice from the same person (unless you have some extraordinarily wise people around you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

1) Advice from a variety of sources.

2) Not being slowed down by all of the advice.

My impression from the article is that this usually doesn't happen in practice, but I can't help thinking that it is very doable in theory.

</comment><comment><USER22> When I was a young entrepreneur I started out believing all the advice I was given - big mistake.

I learned eventually to listen to advice and consider it and form my own opinion about whether or not it is correct for me and my circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've learned to discount advice that starts with "I'm not an expert, but..." or "All you have to do is ...".

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought of Naval Ravikant of the word 'Rav'.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ask in HN about more advices about the advices</comment>


Design for Hackers (the book) is here - <AUTHOR> http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-hackers-the-book-is-here/

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting comment on internet culture when a blog post about a 300-page book has a "TL;DR" section. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks really great for a geek like me who can somewhat do art/design, but knows something is missing! Ordered.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazon marks it as "Optimized for Larger Screens". How bad would it be on a 6" Kindle?

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't tell you for sure but considering the sections on color theory and layouts, it would seem to be a lot harder to digest the book using a grey- scale screen that reformats the pages. (if that's what the Kindle does, I don't actually have one)

<comment><USER5> Are you planning on offering an ebook version? I prefer to read most books digitally, but agree that this type of book would be impossible take in on a kindle.

<comment><USER6> It looks great using the Kindle Cloud reader on my PC.

<comment><USER7> Are you referring to the preview or is the Kindle version out?

<comment><USER6> I really don't know what you're talking about RE: a Kindle version.

I'm talking about <https://read.amazon.com/about></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Initial Experience with Rust (Eric Sink) - <AUTHOR> http://ericsink.com/index.html <comment><USER2> This should be [http://ericsink.com/entries/rust1.html](http://ericsink.com/entries/rust1.html)</comment>


Stop wasting your money living in SF – Meet more people - <AUTHOR> http://polaske.tumblr.com/post/79593901160/quit-wasting-your-money-start-meeting-people

<comment><USER2> Using 'girl' to mean 'someone to whom I am attracted' is a poor choice of words. For one, I assume they are adult women, not girls, that attract you. For another, it alienates a number of your readers who aren't attracted to women. I know you're speaking about your personal habits, but there is no loss of understanding if you generalize it and it comes off better as advice or a template for behaviors. For a third, the way it's written here it kind of implies that the purpose of talking to any girl (since you're choosing one at random) is to chat her up. I don't know if that's the statement you're going for- you could easily have meant "Try to meet people with a different life experience than you and become friends with them." It's just a good idea to be precise about what you mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "1\. Talk to a random girl"

You should realize that this kind of logic is incredibly creepy.

<comment><USER4> That statement sure can come off as creepy but I read it in a more charitable light: "make sure you take some time to do more than just work, and be brave about it."

<comment><USER3> See OP's previous submission: [https://medium.com/p/b04829344e02](https://medium.com/p/b04829344e02)

<comment><USER4> Well that changes my perspective!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does my glasses make everything look smaller but my contacts don't? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Probably the distance from your eye.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense, as i pull the glasses further away whatever is in focus decreases in size. The only issue i have is that when my eyesight was better, i didn't notice the difference but since i had to increase my prescription, i do notice it.</comment></comment>


Google AI begins battle with humanity's best Go player tonight - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/03/google-ai-begins-battle-with-humanitys-best-go-player-tonight/ <comment><USER2> This will be very interesting. The European champion is a 2-dan, whereas the World champion is a 9-dan. While Google beat the 2-dan 5-0, a 9-dan is expected to win 95% of games versus a 2-dan.

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


Dan Gilmour Saying Good Bye to Apple, Google, Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/why-i-m-saying-goodbye-to-apple-google-and-microsoft-78af12071bd <comment><USER2> I'm proud of Gilmour: he's come a long way since he couldn't get Linux to install, ever. I also salute his ideological purity. The world needs more of this, otherwise, we'd all be suffering from "smart quotes", and "byte order marks" and _NSAKEY.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article, and I like Dan's willingness to sometimes boot to Windows or OS X, when needed to get some task done.

I feel good using Linux even with some rough edges, but I am also practical minded in the sense that I have Windows 8.1 and OS X laptops available if needed.

I am not so happy with smartphone options. Basically, I am nervous about messing with my expensive Note 4.

<comment><AUTHOR> I still think the alternatives require too much hand holding -- especially if you have members of the family that are not inclined to muck with their hardware (IE, they just want things to work). I'm hyper paranoid about backups, apps, etc. but I'm willing to buy into the general Apple ecosystem as a household for entertainment purposes -- media shared just works. It is often an interesting balancing act.

<comment><USER4> My whole family uses Ubuntu. There really very little hand holding, it just works. I actually spent more time hand holding with my partner had a Mac. When that machine died, we decided to go back to Ubuntu and a Lenovo thinkpad. It was a good choice.</comment></comment></comment>