Ask HN: How are online communities established? - <AUTHOR> HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. are all established communities with users. How do you start a community when you don't have any users? <comment><USER3> Usually they splinter off an existing online community or fanbase of a prominent writer/net-celebrity. Hacker News was initially populated by refugees from Reddit. Imgur also got started off Reddit. Reddit's initial userbase largely came from readers of comp.lang.lisp and Paul Graham's essays (PG funded it, and posted announcements there when it launched, 3 weeks after it started). StackOverflow largely came from the readers of the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Github's users were recruited from people the founders met at meetups.

(I was an initial user of both Hacker News and Reddit, checking both out the first day they opened. Also was an admin at FictionAlley.org, which grew from 1881 to 100,000+ users while I was there. That one was largely founded by refugees from Fanfiction.net, along with the readers of two mailing lists devoted to prominent HP fanfiction authors, Cassandra Claire and AngieJ. Same pattern: refugees from an existing community, + followers of a local Internet celebrity.)

<comment><USER4> I thought I was here on the first day, but your HN join date is one day before mine. Time flies!

<comment><USER5> Sure does, I have the same day as you. But wasn't it pg's blog and not Reddit that sent the initial users? Starting to get hazy on the details.

<comment><USER3> I think it was both - not unusual to post an announcement for a new forum in multiple places, and PG's blog and Reddit very much had overlapping readerships (and authors) at the time. I found it through Reddit.

BTW, there are some YC founders that have join dates several months before us - HN was open to internal YC batches about a half-year before it went public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there's also a very important step which is that often these successful communities have value even if others don't join -- what I've heard previously described as "Single Player Mode".

Instagram had filters and photo editing -- and could then also post to Facebook. Even if you knew no one else on Instagram, there was a reason to use it.

Github is still a great UX for Git. You can host your own repos and work with your own team, even if you never look at others.

Why do people want to join first?

<comment><USER7> This isn't helpful in the context of an app where its purpose _is the community_ , so you haven't really answered OP's question. I can't play reddit on single player mode.

Communities start around passionate, interesting individuals. Reddit initially got popular because it was chuffed full of technologists who were openly sharing juicy details about their work. There were hundreds of other websites at the time that allowed you to curate bookmarks and such, but reddit had the people who made interesting comments on those bookmarks.

<comment><USER8> Reddit's single player mode is "news reader." Doesn't matter if it's aggregated by the community or curated. The reason why it blew up was because people migrated from another news aggregator, Digg, in 2010.

<comment><USER7> Why did everyone leave digg? It wasn't because they fucked up the news aggregation, it's because they fucked up the community - the ambitious and passionate users couldn't get their posts to the front page any more, it was reserved for people who were paying digg.

Reddit is _awful_ at news aggregation, the front page is a hot mess of memes and clickbait. You have to weed all that crap out to find the people you actually want to listen to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Build a community goes beyond "rally people around something they are passionate about".

1 - Not all people who have same preferences or like the same things are willing to discuss or share ideas about that.

2 - I like to think people gathering around some topic is a secondary move, the primary thing that make people gather around is 'VALUES' and 'Principles'.

3 - We like to discuss ideas with people who we value, we like to talk about what we like with friends, not strangers, why? Because we know that we share values, principles and a cosmovision with our friends, family, etc.

So if you want to build a community, build around 'principle and values' and from this common ground you can set a main topic to be addressed by everyone.

Not always will be a single topic, but a niche, like the hacker news, our discussed niche is "hacking things", our values? Defy the status-quo, think out of the box, catch the black swan, see through the non-obvious, seek for excellence, etc.

It wouldn't be so successful try to discuss how to "hack things" with a bunch of douchebags ;D

Edit1: Also I saw people talking about the moderation drama but if you have done the principles, values, rules... you are going to have your own community policing who doesn't reach the cultural/behavioral fit.

Rules must be the very first thing to avoid a 'broken window' culture.

<comment><USER10> Interesting perspective. Do you think those "values" and "principles" should be explicitly stated somewhere, or should they emerge from the early users and the dialogue happening around a topic?

<comment><USER9> I believe We need to establish as soon as possible the main values and principles addressing what can kill the community as you are envisioning.

Furtherly, You can be open to discuss and aggregate more and more if necessary...

Rules can be more specific and based on your values and principles, the rules are the way you make the principles and values be followed/respected. Rules can change and adapt towards the behaviors but, on the other hand, I think principles and values shape behaviors, indeed.

Thanks for asking that ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I built a 30k+ member vbulletin community in the 2000s.

I used sock puppets with different personalities and views that created threads, replied to each other and encouraged real users to reply and made them feel welcome.

I also moderated as myself and was welcoming to real new users, (and the puppets :)

This did not last more than two months, as there were enough real users that the puppets were able to largely hibernate. But it did happen, and it worked.

I never outed my puppets and they were not used longer than necessary.

Puppets will not sustain a community, but they can help establish one.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK, Reddit was created in a similar manner. According to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it 'til they made it – hundreds of fake profiles to boost popularity of the site.

<comment><USER11> I have a very early account. I remember being chastised by another user for posting links to my own blog over weeks. That's how few posts there were.

I wonder if it was them trying to shape content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You get users. The most important part imo is the regulars who stick around and talk to everyone, answer everything. They make the core of a community and help turn others into regulars.

I used to have 2 small niche forums and there were always 2-5 people that created the bulk of the content ( _along with myself - I had to post a lot to start and keep it going, I was the first user!_ ). Always making threads, checking in, answering questions, posting updates and pictures.

New visitors would read all that and either never return, lurk or join in. They were passionate about the topics. Giving them special/higher privileges helped retain them for longer, as well, but eventually they just visit less (or leave completely) and someone else takes their place.

<comment><USER14> I think you really nailed this! I've built a couple forums, one which just hit 15 years and has around 6000 registered users. It is member funded, hosted, moderated etc. I have no part in it anymore really and it has a great culture. I've actually just launched a new forum for my current employer and our community members.

Like you said, it takes effort from the person starting it to create activity and get people coming back / building a habit of checking for new content. Then you must empower the people that are passionate about what you're doing and treat them more like an equal / admin / mod vs a simple user.

This ted talk explains how I feel about building a community really well: [https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_moveme...](https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement?language=en)

<comment><USER15> How do you jump from the initial tens, to hundred to thousands of users? How does the popularity scale in your experience?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the best way is to pick a niche interest and start there. When I first joined Reddit, it was mostly just LISP programmers and there were no subreddits. They served that niche well, then grew from there. Facebook started out serving Harvard students, then all college students, then everyone.

I started a YouTube channel ([https://youtube.com/parttimelarry](https://youtube.com/parttimelarry)) last year and was wondering if anyone would find me. I had zero subscribers for my general programming channel, then decided to focus on something I was interested in learning myself. I narrowed my focus to Python for Finance / Automated Trading and documented what I was learning in public, and turns out there are plenty of people looking for information in this niche and they are happy to find a place to discuss it.

Now I am on track to reach 10,000 subscribers this year and have an audience that is very engaged and gives a lot of feedback. So start small, get the first 100 users. Once you have 100 users, you know you can get 1000. And once you get 1000, you feel like you can get 10,000. And then more people start noticing.

I also used to run a message board to discuss the band Tool. It's just one band, but people like discussing their music and lyrics. At the beginning, I needed to be the lead content creator and give people a reason to stick around. They wanted some discussion of lyrics, photos, show reviews, links to news articles etc. Eventually, certain members started posting more than others, like thousands of posts. I made some of them moderators, and they became leaders of the community, and it grew from there. The hardest part is getting the initial 100 or so people who are engaged, are passionate about the topic, and are willing to contribute.

<comment><USER16> YT Channel looks awesome. Just subbed. Side question -- is algo trading worth it? Is there any edge that can be obtained? I'd guess that you'd be rich and on a beach if it did...but maybe I'm wrong

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Online communities are basically just discussion boards, so you need something for people to talk about, people who want to talk about it, and functionality allowing them to talk to one another.

The structure of a discussion board is usually a chronological feed of discussion topics, so you'll want a pipeline of topics to keep the discussions fresh(ish).

And of course you'll be competing with a saturated "discuss things online" space, so there are strategic questions you'll need to answer. Are you going to provide a place to discuss things people can't discuss elsewhere? Are you going to provide a stream of topics people want but can't find elsewhere? Are you going to provide a uniquely engaging discussion format? Etc etc etc.

I don't know that anyone really starts communities, honestly. We're already in a global one and it just breaks down into smaller ones depending on geography, beliefs, interest, etc. The thing you might provide isn't a community, it's a platform. Give a community that already exists a refreshing new way to connect and you'll be in business (scale tbd).

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is a very good book that summarizes a lot of the scientific research about creating and fostering online communities.

Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design

Here are the chapters:

      * Encouraging Contribution to Online Communities
      * Encouraging Commitment to Online Communities
      * Regulating Behavior in Online Communities
      * The Challenges of Dealing with Newcomers
      * Starting New Online Communities

<comment><USER19> This is a $150 textbook ($75 used $25 Kindle): have you read it and actually gotten value out of it? [https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online- Communitie...](https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communities- Evidence-Based-dp-B0140DGJAC/dp/B0140DGJAC/)

<comment><USER18> The book shows for me as $35 on Amazon (paperback) and $150 for hardback, so I'd suggest getting the Kindle or paperback version.

I've used parts of the book in a class I taught on the Social Web, and yes, I did find it really useful and I think the students did too. This book really is the best one out there summarizing a lot of the experimental scientific research by the research community.

It presents a series of Design Claims, and then backs up those claims by synthesizing the results of previous studies and analyses done by the research community. If you're less interested in the scientific literature, you can just read the Design Claims and still get a lot out of it.

Here is one example Design Claim from the book (you can see it on p29 in Amazon Look Inside feature): Compared to broadcasting requirements for contribution to all community members, asking specific people to make contributions increases the likelihood they will do so.

(Or to operationalize things more: if you want people to do something, don't send a mass email, send the request individually. I've personally found this to be a more effective way to get things done. Remember to only use this power for good, though.)

Also, let me clarify my conflict of interest: I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the same department as one of the authors (Kraut), who I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people doing scientific research on online communities would say is a clear leader in the field.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for clarifying, I had run across this book last year and put it in my Amazon cart and then decided it was too academic. I will give it more consideration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lots has been written about this. There are several ways.

1\. You start small ( pick a topic and be the best place to discuss that topic)

2\. You can fake engagements with multiple accounts to get the ball rolling ( reddit did it, indiehackers did it etc...)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=indiehackers+how+to+start+co...](https://www.google.com/search?q=indiehackers+how+to+start+community&cad=h)

<comment><USER21> > You can fake engagements with multiple accounts to get the ball rolling ( > reddit did it, indiehackers did it etc...)

As Steve Huffman described it in his old Udacity course (no longer available), no one wants to visit a ghost town. So when they were making Reddit, they'd create multiple accounts to post from so it "seemed" like a thriving community already existed. It does bring up interesting questions on where it sits in on the ethics spectrum, but the cold start problem is still very difficult with no one solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Reddit founders talk about this in their episode of "How I Built This":

[https://www.npr.org/2017/10/03/545635014/live-episode- reddit...](https://www.npr.org/2017/10/03/545635014/live-episode-reddit- alexis-ohanian-steve-huffman)

At about 19:40 is where they talk about seeding the community.

</comment><comment> dawg- I was very involved in the Center for Humane Tech community back when they first started and was a volunteer mod for a little while. CHT is still a thing but I believe the forum no longer exists. I saw the press release about the organization being formed and it was something I really cared about so I found the forum on their website where a lot of people were joining and very excited to actually get something done about these issues. The people joining had impressive bios, connections in every corner of the tech industry, as well as educators, psychologists, researchers, etcetera. The energy was very real and very exciting at first. It went stale after a few months because everybody was just there spinning their wheels, not accomplishing any action. It began to feel more like talk therapy for people who hate dark patterns and manipulative app design. The leadership of CHT had an amazing start to a real national grassroots network that they could have engaged to push for policy change in states across the country. There could have been organized film screenings, letters to representatives, pushes for legislation, all the usual stuff. But I think they weren't ready or able to take advantage of something like that, and the momentum died.

So based on that experience if I had to outline a simple 2 step process, I would say: 1. Rally people around something they are passionate about, and 2. Give them something to do besides talk. My experience was disappointing because #1 happened in a really big way, but #2 did not.

<comment><USER23> Well, they just launched a very good documentary that might have an impact, so at least now they are doing something:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/movies/the-social- dilemma...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/movies/the-social-dilemma- review.html)

<comment> dawg- I definitely still believe in their work. But they wasted a whole lot of grassroots momentum at the beginning.

A film is cool, but 5,000+ people who are willing to go evangelize to their family, friends, and elected representatives is a whole different story as far as actually changing things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You should read the book People Powered by Jono Bacon. Has some really good insights and is a 101 course on exactly this.

<comment><USER25> Seconded. "People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams" (2019) [https://g.co/kgs/CF5TEk](https://g.co/kgs/CF5TEk)

"The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation" (2012) [https://g.co/kgs/P2V1kn](https://g.co/kgs/P2V1kn)

"Tribes: We need you to lead us" (2011) [https://g.co/kgs/T8jaFS](https://g.co/kgs/T8jaFS)

The 1% 'rule' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\)) :

> _In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to > participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of > a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. > Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 > ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% > of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the > participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add > content._

... Relevant metrics:

\- Marginal cost of service [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost)

\- Customer acquisition cost: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_acquisition_cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_acquisition_cost)

\- [Quantifiable and non-quantifiable] Customer Lifetime Value: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value)

Last words of the almost-cliche community organizer surrounded by dormant accounts: "Network effects will result in sufficient (grant) funding"

Business model examples that may be useful for building and supporting sustainable communities with clear Missions, Objectives, and Criteria for Success: [https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324](https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Question is: what's an online community ?

I don't think HN is one. At the very least I don't have a sense of being a member of an HN community.

<comment><USER27> you've got 6000+ karma. whether you feel like you're a member or not, you obviously participate on a continual basis.

i think a reasonable definition for online community is a group of people who regularly and continually participate in the same online platform.

<comment><USER26> Somewhere on this site there's a comment from me stating that HN is pseudonymous and has a faux small niche appearance due to its UX and its lack of emphasis on interpersonal connections or any expected features of social networks. To me, everyone is more or less the same person (or really there are a billion of different people but since I can't keep tracks of what they said before they all just exist in a vacuum). I just know about dang, percival and another one I forget but recognize when I see it (alathorn ?).

That doesn't feel like a community to me. Every new submissions/feed is filled with new people with new advices, there is no continuity on HN.

Not saying it's bad or a good thing though. That's just how I feel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember reading that the Reddit founders created fake users and posted links / conversation starters in order to make the site feel like it had some level of critical mass.

<comment><USER29> Almost every large online service started by using fake accounts or little to no rules. That is how you build a community. Get everyone to show up then slowly change the rules/playing field. Anyone remember that linkedin launched as a scam service?

<comment><USER30> Could you please link some reference to the linkedin stuff? Cannot find anything on google

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here is a summary of what I read on community building.

\- Shared struggles are stronger and last longer than shared interests (That is why a forum for solopreneurs (struggling with so much…) might have a more supportive vibe than a photo community.).

\- Be an active and bold moderator: Answer questions quickly and be a role model

\- Create clear guidelines for posts (What is allowed? What not?)

\- Delete everything that violates the guidelines

\- Let users flag posts

\- Hunt and ban spammers

\- Use captchas for newbie posts

</comment><comment><USER32> Thoughts about maintaining quality of community:

1\. Stream of new content

2\. Preserving a (possibly revolving) core group of contributors (20% of the userbase generates 80% of the activity)

3\. Quality control/moderation (we know what happened to Quora)

An online community has to be aspirational (as in participants want to be part of an exalted peer group, e.g. SV founders) or serve a need for knowledge somehow.

<comment><USER33> > Preserving a (possibly revolving) core group of people (20% of the userbase > generates 80% of the activity)

very true but 100% of the userbase will consume 100% of the activity, extreme numbers but point being that whilst only 20% are creating content a greater share, assume everyone, will consume it.

In the UK there is a community called mumsnet - I know so many people (including me) who consume from it but do not generate back.

<comment><USER32> Oops I meant to say contributors -- you're right of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think that's not quite the correct question to ask. The question to ask is: what purpose will your new community website/app serve that is not already being met by existing ones?

Here's one anecdote: personally, I haven't yet found anything that captures the feel or social vibe of early/mid-2000s LiveJournal. I think what another commenter referred to as "Single Player Mode" actually had quite a lot to do with what drew me to LJ in the first place - at least initially a lot of what it was about for me was personal blogging just for me, and I gradually explored other personal blogs and communities while I was doing it, eventually forming real friendships/relationships with other LJers.

</comment><comment><USER35> An estabshed community migrating to their own platform is an option. Five- thirty-eight more or less started this way.

Existing groups or constituencies (software users, professionals, academic community, sport club or fans, entertainment/music, etc.) are other options. Artificially-induced growth is another option --- several subreddits have grown from nothing to 100k+ members in a few months

Starting a generic commuity these days would likely be difficult (though see; Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc0.) Even well-capitalised firms fare poorly at this (e.g., Google+).

Likely better to have a specific community in mind. Or some idea as to what you hope to achieve.

Otherwise: good content, consistent posting, cross-promotion, and time.

</comment><comment><USER36> Shared common interest. If you're building it for one community segment, odds are that you have connections that would find use in engaging with that community. So I'd start sharing with the ones who don't mind starting the community from nothing.

Like if it's a community about a type of car, you'll want some initial owners or prospective owners (if it hasn't released yet). Maybe some DIY guides for basic maintenance, news section for OEM and aftermarket releases, etc.

This way newer visitors find already-established and useful content and stick around to discuss and add to it.

</comment><comment><USER37> In the case of StackOverflow, Spolsky and Atwood made podcasts from the beginning. There is a record of the whole process. It's worth noting that StackOverflow built a very narrow channel for community activity relative to typical online communities.

StackOverflow Podcast #1 [https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange/stack- overflow-podcast...](https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange/stack-overflow- podcast-77)

</comment><comment><USER38> There has to be a reason for people to go to the community:

\- HN: discussions and news

\- Reddit: niche topics and conversations

\- StackOverflow: ask questions and find answers

All these reasons are different for the target demographics. Hopefully you can get people to come to the site to read, then participate and generate more content for others to discover and read _ad-nauseum_.

Sites which make it fun/useful for people either consuming or generating content, are the ones with thriving and growing communities....

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd recommend listening the early episodes of the Stack Overflow podcast for some insights. There are a lot of nuggets buried there.

</comment><comment><USER40> HN/reddit/SO came there first, or at least during the boom times when the pieces are still up in the air. After the pieces fell, making a new community without a lot of $$$ is difficult, if the purpose is solely community. If however the service provides an additional valuable service , a community can form and grow as more and more users use the service.

</comment><comment><USER41> You have to get people there, and you have to get them to want to bother coming back.

1\. raise awareness. e.g. though word-of-mouth recommendations, or advertising (online, TV, events, IRL?)

2\. it has to have something to keep attention,

3\. it has to be worth coming back to

It happens through phased growth, sometimes explicitly planned, always interactively managed. A marketing and sales pipeline provides a google-able articulated view of a similar process. Or go as far "Manufacturing Consent"

They're built on positive feedback cycles, where contributions spur further engagement of viewing, and prompting others to engage. These are called virtuous cycles, when it's going in a desired direction (e.g. more contributions drive more views drive more contributions), and vicious cycles when they're not (bad drives out the good, e.g. toleration of off-topic / inappropriate content, deters helpful contributors from returning, while encouraging more detrimental contributions).

I would recommend reading Peter Hintjen's "Social Architecture"[1]. He addresses a question worded exactly the same as yours. He built a more narrowly scoped community as an integral part of building the ZeroMQ messaging library and tools, and ensuring that it was useful to as many people as possible.

Also, check out his other books [2]. Though, note that gitbook.com broke the links, and e.g.

[https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social- architecture/de...](https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social- architecture/details)

becomes

[https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social- architecture/content/](https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social- architecture/content/)

[1]: [https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social- architecture/content/](https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social- architecture/content/)

[2]: [http://hintjens.com/books](http://hintjens.com/books)

I'm planning to grow a group chat (matrix self-hosted) with friends, into a dev.to-forked blogging community, that I can share with other tech friends, non-tech friends, co-workers, and use to explain work successes to family.

</comment><comment><USER42> Before thinking about creating, or participating in an "online" community, think about the same without the online.

A community is first formed by humans. The online piece is just a platform, or a place of logistics.

This may throw you back in time but read Scott Peck's The Different Drum, to get a real feel of what a community is.

</comment><comment><USER43> The key (for any product), from what I have learned and have no experience of it, seems to be finding a `beachhead market`, a startup term for finding a smallest possible subset of a niche, where you can dominate (establish a community in this case) and then grow from there one step at a time.

</comment><comment><USER44> You fake it until you make it. Reddit just created users until they had a critical mass of engagement.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm trying to do this right now at conferacity.com, and it's _really hard_. But I hope people will continue to try to experiment with new discussion communities online, not just based on the topic, but also on the governing rules and structure. It seems unlikely that 50 years from now, we'll look back and say that the existing formats for online discussion were the best we could do, even though the existing formats are all clearly providing value to users in their current form.

An area I'm particularly interested in is, given that anonymous forums require moderation, but "moderation doesn't scale", what would happen if you _only_ allowed moderators to contribute to the discussion. Or rather, what if you only allowed people who have the required attitudes, ability and emotional intelligence to be an effective moderator to contribute to the discussion?

You'd obviously grow _much_ slower if you're restricting contributor growth to a small subset of users. And maybe that constraint on growth would mean you _never_ become a viable online community. But if you _could_ get to some threshold size, you might find that the quality of discussion is sufficiently different that a lot of people might want to _read_ such discussions without necessarily taking part directly.

Ideally, the contributor community would make decisions about what those required qualities are, and how to assess new applicants. But we _already_ have communities like this offline - this is exactly how academic communities behave. Existing "contributors" (professors with phd's in the subject) decide who they accept to their community, based on evolving standards decided by that community. It's also interesting that this, at least from my outsider perspective, is also how YC operates - they have a particular ethos, norms of behavior etc, they admit people who they think are consistent with those norms, and then enforce those norms: [https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/](https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/)

I think there's an interesting analogy with professional sports. Baseball is a super accessible game, all you need is a stick, a ball and a field, so almost _anyone_ in the world can play. But the way to get high quality baseball that people want to pay to watch is _not_ by allowing _anyone_ onto the field, but by _restricting_ the players on the field to those with the required skills.

Regardless of how my particular "experiment" works out, I think it would be great to see more innovation in this area.

</comment><comment><USER46> i gave up on hn.

i became passive a few months ago. sorry dang, but no matter how you wanna look at it or defend it, hn is now, for me, a hivemind. but i just logged in for the first time in a while because i truly love this question.

a community is a place where people go to and talk about things they like. it is a place they can escape to.

i have been part of far too many. i have seen communities started by 12yo and 50yo. some are still there while i moved on. some are dear and near to my heart. i left some for personal reasons. people were getting far too close and personal and you get scared. but you keep in touch with those people you truly love to talk to.

great communities don't die, they just take up a new name.

</comment><comment><USER47> I am curious how does these online communities do content review to make sure it's not filled with all spams, porn or even illegal content? besides algorithm, how many human resources are spent on these things?

</comment><comment><USER48> _The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation_ by Jono Bacon

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008224FMC](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008224FMC)

</comment><comment><USER49> Here's a list of wonderful communities: [https://www.2board.net/boardlist.html](https://www.2board.net/boardlist.html)

</comment><comment><USER50> You generate fake traffic until you get real traffic. That's how Reddit did it, at least.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have built a couple communities over the years and currently run a community with more than 20 million monthly users.

I'm going to assume the kind of community you're referring to is one where the primary focus is social networking / discussion in the vein of Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

The way you build a community is to start with an existing community.

What I mean by that is you have to find an existing pool of users who are interested in what you offer and bring many of them in at once. From there you can focus on slower organic growth. Examples: YouTube and MySpace both began as dating sites. YouTube focused on getting people to upload introduction videos of themselves. Once they had accumulated a number of people who were willing to film themselves they pivoted over to content creation. Similarly, MySpace was a very crude dating site that allowed people to customize their page. Brad Greenspan was a serial investor who bought up a large number of tiny dating sites. He cannibalized all the revenue from those sites to promote MySpace as a "free" dating site. They had millions of users coming from other sites.

reddit was promoted heavily on Hacker News and focused on a tech crowd at first. Paul Graham threw his endorsement behind the platform a few times and that also helped interest people in checking it out.

For my successful community sites, I'll just mention one experience - I had built a Q&A site from scratch. It was finally done one Sunday night and I decided to go to bed. There were eleven posts on the site, mostly from myself, but also a couple from friends I'd asked to test the site for me. It was obvious there was no community there. I bought a single ad - for $10 - <USER2> $0.01 CPC on a Quiz site, then went to bed. My intention was not to launch the site, but to throw a little real traffic at it and see if any bugs cropped up that neither I nor my friends had found. When I got to work in the morning and had finished catching up on my emails I decided to check the site and see if anyone had posted. There were over 100 posts and people were using the site exactly as intended. Not only that but there was about $0.50 in ad revenue already, meaning my monthly run rate was net-positive from day one. I had hit upon a great fit between people who were already interested in asking and answering questions (the quiz site I advertised on) and my product.

In each case I'm familiar with, the formula was to find an existing audience that had an interest in the product in question and bring them on-board ASAP. If the internet were brand-new and no community websites yet existed I would build one by building a non-community website that provided a useful service, and building a community around that once I have captive eyeballs. In other words, to belabor the point: I would start with an existing community.

</comment><comment><USER52> YCombinator was a successful startup accelerator, then built HN.

The folks behind Stack Overflow ran a popular blog (Coding Horror)

In those cases they had a smarter-than-average population that had some shared interest (e.g. "COMM-unity".)

When those sites came around, Google was recognizable as what it is today, but Facebook was not. Hyperlinking wasn't seen as a crime back then, and Google didn't see organic search results as competition for paid advertising.

Circa 2000 I helped someone build an online community of 400,000 in Brazil -- the start of that was sending 10,000 spam emails, which got us 2,000 sign ups (as incredible as that sounds today.)

Pay attention to retention. If you think it is a hard to get people, then it is all the more important to retain people and to think about the path of getting them to contribute.

I think a lot of people who want to try marketing don't understand how much work it takes. If I wanted to advertise a concert at a college campus I'd expect to put up a (8.5x11) poster for every 10 students or so. I see a lot of people print 1 poster per 1000 students and call it a day.

Some people don't want to make extra designs and wait for the printer, other people don't want to spend the $, other people don't want to walk to every building on campus.

You will hear stories of someone who got an exceptional break (that 20% effective e-mail blast is one) and wish you could get one. Don't let that wishing get in the way of doing the hard work, in fact often it seems you get the "break" by accident when you are doing the "average" work.

Avoid the Girardian ("mimetic") traps that are popular in many places. In particular, do not be "part of a herd" without a well-examined understanding of why your actions benefit you (incl. 'your brain thinks that cocaine raises your utility function but it doesn't)

Specifically, those "Like us on Facebook" buttons feed data and traffic back to Facebook from hundreds of sites. The ratio of engagement the world gets from those buttons is vastly less than the engagement that the world gets.

If I was talking to customers on the phone and trying to get them to buy into a bad deal like that I'd have a hard time, but when people see that "everybody else is doing it", it's hard to get people to think the consequences through.

Those sites you mention all predate the Facebook age. To linear order, "new communities are not being created". If you look closer, new communities are being created but they are smaller and separated from the social media lamestream.

</comment><comment><USER53> reddit and HN were very focused when they started out. Reddit was like 70% talk about lisp when it started. HN was very much about building business with VC money (which wasn't talked about all that much when it started). They were also completely intolerant of the nonsense you see in comments today. Inane jokes and poorly thought out statements would be downvoted to hell. The idea that dumb comments would be mocked is what made it so attractive in the beginning.

Stack Overflow offered a better alternative to expertsexchange, which was fighting with google over how to show content (remember the scroll to the bottom of expert sexchange to see the non paywalled answers hack?)

</comment><comment><USER54> Reddit was seeded by sockpuppets.

</comment><comment><USER55> Why do you want to? So you can extract money from them? Don't. So you can have someone to control and moderate and exercise power over? Don't. So you can have the prestige and status of a community owner and/or high traffic website owner and/or successful person? Don't.

Have you noticed that HN was originally a small group of smart industry knowledgable people, and gradually they trended towards disengaging as it got too big and busy and it became a crowd of jeering Redditor plebs like me? HN is a marketing machine for YCombinator, not a real community. If what you want is really "to build a big site with lots of users", the word "community" doesn't really apply, ask what you want "how do I build a site which tempts large numbers of casual users?".

Communities stay small. If your reason is you want a place where people who like X can discuss X then become a good place for those people to do that, be present, engage all the time, invite appropriate people to it and make it interesting enough that they have reason to come back, make it about what they want (could be a mailing list) instead of what you want ("my new forum written in React with a mobile app backed by an IRC channel!"). That will likely stay small - people probably already have a place to discuss X, there's probably a Reddit about X, and the real thing they'll be interested in is who else goes there (and who is excluded), not where it is or what software it uses. There's way more community in 50 people discussing a thing than in some mega-site built for ad revenue. Not much prestige or excitement in that, though.

<comment><USER56> Don't know why you're being downvoted.

I'd add that it's a lot of work moderating and dealing with the drama that online communities tend to create.

Nowadays there are also legal implications, with certain jurisdictions making you liable for user-submitted content.

Unless you're really passionate about creating a community of like-minded individuals, I wouldn't bother.

<comment><USER55> Even if OP is really passionate about, say, stamp collecting - I'm asking why people who collect stamps should care that OP wants to rule a large community of them, why should they submit to it?

There has to be more in it for them than "OP wants to be in charge, so we will go to OP's place and submit to OP's rules". And OP won't find out what that is as long as OP is asking a general place like HN "how do I collect all the stamp collectors on my site??" like they were collectible things, instead of going to a stamp collecting group and joining and contributing and observing what they might be missing that they don't know they are missing because they aren't technical enough to be aware of all the options, which OP could maybe build or contribute towards.

but that's not at all as exciting as being in charge, which I'm cynically suggesting might be OP's motivation.

<comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth I think that's way more exciting than being in charge. I was recently involved (not as a moderator) in a community that burned itself to the ground due almost entirely to poor communication and lack of discussion between the moderators and the members themselves. This lead directly from, I think, the moderators having exactly the opinion you criticize - they viewed themselves as leading and ruling the users rather than supporting them. I've been thinking a lot about how that could have been prevented. Maybe the community could have survived if the system was structured in a way that gave users themselves enough power to hold moderators to account. Or maybe there's some other way the issues could have been mitigated.

That's exactly why people who collect stamps should care. The community I mentioned is gone specifically because the very invested members couldn't do anything about the self-destruction. And we knew we were powerless as it was all falling apart. At this point many would be happy to move to a new platform simply if it provided some type of guarantees against a repeat. (Which I think could be accomplished by giving the moderators less power without compromising their ability to moderate. Somehow.)

As to your final point about joining and contributing, I've done that. I'm here asking about the general guidelines because there are people here who have walked the path of fostering a community, or know people who have.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


European Union threatens to take iPhone off the market - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/2009/09/29/european-union-threatens-iphone-market/

<comment><USER2> Its a real shame the czar doesn't make such noise about apples app approval system. Thats what i was hoping the article was about when I clicked on the link.

But equally, microsoft, intel maybe now apple.

The key to threatening these big players is actually forcing them to comply.

Has microsoft yet paid their fines? or is still being zipped back and forth between appeals and lawyers.

<comment><USER3> Things were going this way with the Nano on its original release. In the EU consumer products are supposed to be capable of lasting a minimum of 5 years, the Nano's on release were lasting months. Fortunately for Apple at the time, Jobs wasn't away and they weren't playing coy, they almost instantly changed the shipping to include a case and instructions that using it without a case can shorten its lifespan and then IIRC offered existing Nano owners a free case.

With Jobs gone Apple seems to be screwing up left, right and centre.

<comment><USER4> Jobs is gone?? He's returned from his recent illness hasn't he?

<comment><USER3> I heard the announcement that he left, I've yet to hear an announcement that he returned. I may be wrong, but I definitely haven't heard anything about his return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brushing it off as an isolated incident shouldn't be acceptable in any market, especially when there might be small children in the vicinity.

Come on Apple, don't tarnish your image. Whether intended or not this looks like complacency.

<comment><AUTHOR> small children with iPhones?

<comment><USER3> So you're saying it's physically incapable for a small child to even be around an iPhone? I didn't know Apple had invented a person selective forcefield for their devices . . .

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's an offshoot of the "reality distortion field" research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Actually Senseo is a product of Phillips, which is a Dutch company, not Italian.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that the czar's phrasing and choice of words were telling, and perhaps his feelings about power can be inferred from it. You can judge for yourself:

> That hasn't stopped Kuneva from taking a strong stand in the matter:

> "I don't need (Apple)'s permission to stop goods entering the market," told > reporters in Brussels.

<comment><USER9> >" I think that the czar's quote was telling, and perhaps his feelings about power can be inferred from it. You can judge for yourself:

> "I don't need (Apple)'s permission to stop goods entering the market," told > reporters in Brussels."

When you quote somebody,don't pick sentences out of context. The _full_ quote sounds much more reasonable.

"If goods are dangerous, then we will order a recall. We are checking with labs to see if there is a problem with the phone, with their batteries or if there has been misuse of the device. We need to have 100 percent certainty from one member state that these goods are dangerous."

Sounds more reasonable doesn't it? She is asking her lab people to verify whose claims are accurate and trying to get to the root of the problem. Sounds like a good idea to me.

If It turns out that Apple is lying through its teeth (wouldn't be the first time) it is her _job_ to take the phones off the market.

And of course she doesn't " need (Apple)'s permission to stop goods entering the market."

Sounds like a statement of fact to me.

Edit: Changed "he" to she"(thanks davidw). The original poster used "his feelings of power" and I followed on from that. Fixed.

<comment><USER10> Meglena is a 'she', not a 'he'.</comment></comment></comment>


OMGWTF: Passwords of 93,000 Politicians, Reporters, Bloggers Leaked - <AUTHOR> http://falkvinge.net/2011/10/26/omgwtf-passwords-of-93000-politicians-reporters-bloggers-leaked <comment><USER2> Crazy good list of usernames and passwords. MD5 is so weak it should take only a few weeks to brute force everything on that list.

<comment><USER3> A few weeks? Thanks to rainbow tables (and several online sites that allow you to look up MD5 hashes), it's _trivial_ to get at least 26,025 of those passwords. A plain MD5 hash of a password is as good as the password itself.

No, I'm not going to try logging in as any of these users (I don't want to go to jail, thanks).

EDIT: I've posted some stats on the main article: [http://falkvinge.net/2011/10/26/omgwtf-passwords- of-93000-po...](http://falkvinge.net/2011/10/26/omgwtf-passwords- of-93000-politicians-reporters-bloggers-leaked/#comment-92367)

<comment><USER3> I've posted some updated stats on my blog: <https://www.dlitz.net/blog/2011/10/most-common-losenord/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Sweden.</comment>


A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/07/Troops-Trolls-and-Troublemakers.pdf <comment><USER2> Wow, terrifying stuff. Don't want to go all Godwin, but Goebbels would be proud.</comment>


Glitzy Video Takes You Aboard the Late Paul Allen's Octopus Mega Yacht - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30805/glitzy-sales-video-takes-you-aboard-the-late-paul-allens-octopus-mega-yacht <comment><USER2> Wait — they used the HYDRA logo?!?</comment>


The $18B Electric-Car Bubble at Risk of Bursting in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-14/the-18-billion-electric-car-bubble-at-risk-of-bursting-in-china <comment><USER2> The title is click-bait. The article doesn't say the whole EV industry is going to collapse, only that there is going to be a big shakeup that will eliminate most of the hundreds of small EV manufacturers.</comment>


Taking a look at a covert CIA virtual fencing solution [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10642-harry_potter_and_the_not-so-smart_proxy_war <comment><USER2> It should be mentioned that this work was mostly speculation, like the speaker said.

Most of the attacks shown are not 'advanced' by any means. Like the speaker explained; _' anyone can buy a GPS jammer for a few bucks online'_. The research they did indeed confirmed GPS is the weakspot. However, such geofence systems are a step-up from any equipment lacking this ability. Its not so much about rendering these systems completely unusable outside of their intended purpose, but more about slowing down their use. The later will have a much better chance of accomplishing this goal.

Assuming the claims made in this research are true, then its more likely the CIA wants to limit the use of _US_ supplied weapons systems, not stop a war. And the CIA has quite the history there.

Also, the situations in which such weapons systems are deployed do not exactly resemble the lab-like circumstances (like faraday cage, EE-tooling et.) necessary for these attacks.

<comment><USER3> this is critical, considering that today's "allies" are very likely to be our enemies tomorrow. Or they can just sell ManPads to another group and (mil and/or civilian) planes would be falling out of the skies. Imagine if Stingers we gave to the Taliban were still in working mode...

<comment><USER4> This seems like it will lead to more CIA arming of militant groups which according to your post means likely more enemy militant groups. I'd liken this to giving police officers tasers or firearms: instead of having to consider de-escalating situations, they can just shoot or tase someone instead.

I would prefer my government be forced to carefully consider whether giving any group weapons rather than "oh yeah totally cool we've got ways to shut them down if they turn on us."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad the CIA is doing something; I guess virtual fencing hasn't really been a thing since the Summer Olympics tie-in games of the 80s. I'm surprised, really, given the existence of "Bus Simulator", "Farming Simulator" and so on, I would have thought there would be lots of ultra realistic virtual fencing. But a minute or two Googling didn't turn anything up - mostly people discuss fencing-like activities in random games with swordplay.

<comment><USER6> The article mentions that the term 'fencing' is used in the sense of prohibiting electronic devices from working outside a geographic region to avoid their use as weapons, rather than swordfighting.

<comment><USER5> Well, if it's _covert_ , then that is presumably just the cover story.

Maybe it's a solution for region control _of swords_ , in which case it would be a virtual virtual fencing fencing solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Geeze - I'm all for freely discussing engineering but wow I'm not sure I've ever seen a more directly dangerous piece of work.

For those who haven't read what this is about: The system is designed to stop weapon systems working outside specific geographic areas. This is so (for example) the US can arm a specific group in a conflict and if (when?) those arms fall into the wrong hands they are useless outside the area of that conflict.

This work discusses weaknesses in the lockdown system. It's pretty advanced work, so it isn't like a script-kiddie is going to work this out themselves.

<comment><USER8> I agree. Presenting on Protego doesn't seem like a good idea – the information given in this talk could aid terrorists.

<comment><USER9> It could also aid the CIA in making a more secure virtual fencing solution. It's similar to the debate about full disclosure vs coordinated disclosure. Some companies pay for bug bounties.

Additionally it could convince the CIA to distribute less weapons.

<comment><USER8> This is a good point! However, the CIA surely has sufficient internal incentives to fix privately disclosed vulnerabilities. There is no need for "bad publicity" to motivate them to become more secure. The CIA may even have already started working on fixes after Vault 7. Who knows?

The only thing this action serves to do is allow less than trusted third parties abuse the weapons given to them (a possibility that the speaker clearly recognizes).

<comment><USER9> > the CIA surely has sufficient internal incentives to fix privately disclosed > vulnerabilities.

Do they? Also various people could have different definitions of "sufficient". They might previously have had 3 people spending half their time on it, and this might cause them to increase it to 5 people working full time on it.

Do major tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft) have less internal incentives than the CIA?

This XSS vulnerability apparently took a year to be fixed: [https://www.openbugbounty.org/reports/164180/](https://www.openbugbounty.org/reports/164180/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


RL²: Fast Reinforcement Learning via Slow Reinforcement Learning (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779 <comment><USER2> This seems to be the important bit, that describes what makes their learning "fast":

"The objective (...) is to maximize the expected total discounted reward accumulated during a single trial rather than a single episode. Maximizing this objective is equivalent to minimizing the cumulative pseudo-regret (Bubeck & Cesa-Bianchi, 2012). Since the underlying MDP changes across trials, as long as different strategies are required for different MDPs, the agent must act differently according to its belief over which MDP it is currently in. Hence, the agent is forced to integrate all the information it has received, including past actions, rewards, and termination flags, and adapt its strategy continually. Hence, we have set up an end-to-end optimization process, where the agent is encouraged to learn a "fast" reinforcement learning algorithm"

However, one would note that this is still bounded by learning of the RNN, so I don't really see how this approach makes the algorithm much faster than "slow" RL, as loads of trials would still be required for any real learning. Maybe someone more knowledgeable could pitch in.

<comment><USER3> (Author here)

This is a great question! There are at least two scenarios where having a meta-learning setup could help. The first is to learn the fast RL algorithm in simulation, by having a distribution over real world environments (varying physics, textures, etc), and then run it in the real world. The second is to learn a fast RL algorithm over a wide range of tasks (for example, on a set of training games in Universe), and (hopefully) generalize to unseen games, analogous to generalization in supervised learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does OpenAI have a page listing all of their published papers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this works, this seems like it could be very significant.

Broadly, slowness is a serious problem in current machine learning approaches and so anything that speeds things up is significant.

The approach of learning the learning process would seem to get bonus points for being interesting and general.

Edit: Published in November, this paper didn't seem to get any comments on the machine learning Reddit, which is my go-to for informed on this stuff. I'd love to have someone who knew what they were doing comment here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note: The original title noted OpenAI's role in the paper, which maybe seen by loading the PDF and reading the author credits.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02779v2.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02779v2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> So when are we going to see the paper where we use an RL net to speed up another RL net for discovering a neural architecture for learning how to do gradient descent (by gradient descent)?

<comment><USER6> So...you mean a grad student? ;)

<comment> Ar-Curunir It's called Grad student descent (referring to the grad student's descent into despair :P)</comment></comment></comment>


FBI had no way to access locked iPhone after terror attack, watchdog finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-had-no-way-to-access-locked-iphone-after-san-bernardino-shooting/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a TL;DR from Matthew Green's twitter: [https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/97865824992178176...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/978658249921781761)</comment>


TensorFlow – Consise Examples for Beginners - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aymericdamien/TensorFlow-Examples <comment><USER2> I find it so aggravating that nearly every last ML framework documents their CNN libraries in terms of canned MNIST datasets imported from the library in a preprocessed form.

It's always left as a useless exercise for the reader to divine how to generate such a dataset from his/her own data.

Examples should be way more general. The starting point shouldn't be:

      from tensorflow.examples.tutorials.mnist import input_data
      mnist = input_data.read_data_sets("/tmp/data/", one_hot=True)

, it should start with "here is a directory of images and their classes" and end with a CNN model.

EDIT: Should anyone have any insight as to where I might get such a tutorial (or have the desire to write one), I know a herd of ML pre-initiates that would be grateful.

<comment><USER3> A few of the lessons on Udacity's Dada Science course cover finding/sifting through datasets and formatting them in a way to work with:

[https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud359](https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud359)

<comment><USER4> "Dada Science"… fantastic!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm totally new to TensorFlow and ML in general, but I've been curious about how this could fit into a system.

Say you need a CNN text classifier algorithm to categorize simple single page documents. So you set one up via TensorFlow, train it with a big dataset, and get it outputting categories with decent accuracy. Could you then use some type of API and query it from a (low traffic) production web app?

Or is it more for the research phase rather than real-time interaction?

<comment><USER6> Take a look at [https://tensorflow.github.io/serving/serving_basic](https://tensorflow.github.io/serving/serving_basic) and [https://tensorflow.github.io/serving/serving_advanced](https://tensorflow.github.io/serving/serving_advanced)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am looking for a TensorFlow resource that shows how to classify images of a certain kind. For example: given 100 images, find the ones that might contain a soccer ball. I haven't come across such a learning resource with TensorFlow. Has anyone else?

<comment><USER8> Why don't you just start with the CIFAR-10 example and go from there? [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.8/tutorials/deep_cnn/...](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.8/tutorials/deep_cnn/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can we get a mod fix on the title?

</comment><comment><USER10> This is not for beginners. Without simple examples and example datasets the concepts remain laregely inaccessible to a real beginner.

</comment><comment><USER11> Irrelevant comment: Title 'consise' -> 'concise'

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for this! I recently ported something over from Theano to TensorFlow (I wrote it up at [1]) and I have to admit I generally enjoyed the experience a great deal, even if the single-GPU performance wasn't good enough to make me switch. The TFLearn library (especially [2]) looks very compelling for prototyping however, some I'm very excited to see how the project develops.

[1] [https://medium.com/@sentimentron/faceoff-theano-vs- tensorflo...](https://medium.com/@sentimentron/faceoff-theano-vs- tensorflow-e25648c31800#.tqq5nyjks)

[2] [https://github.com/tflearn/tflearn/blob/master/examples/nlp/...](https://github.com/tflearn/tflearn/blob/master/examples/nlp/lstm.py)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is missing a FizzBuzz example.

<comment><USER14> That's an advanced use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does someone point me in the right direction for using a neural network for prediction (the input will be time series data). All the beginner's tutorials I have seen deal with classification and not prediction.

<comment><USER16> LSTM

<comment><USER15> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> curated list of dedicated resources: [https://github.com/jtoy/awesome- tensorflow](https://github.com/jtoy/awesome-tensorflow)

</comment><comment><USER17> That looks helpful. In case you want something shorter to look through here's a very concise set of notes I took for myself when I first played with TF:

[https://gist.github.com/d136o/4c68d010ecb0abfc7c52](https://gist.github.com/d136o/4c68d010ecb0abfc7c52)

</comment><comment><USER18> Great examples! I find it more accessible for me than the official tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know of any benchmarks on tensorflow that provide a baseline estimate of the expected performance for some off-the-shelf hardware(s)?

<comment><USER20> These are the benchmarks supported by Soumith Chintala (Facebook AI Research):

[https://github.com/soumith/convnet- benchmarks](https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks)

They place TensorFlow performance on par with Torch (within 10%).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Typo: it should be concise with two c's and one s.

</comment><comment><USER22> In the most compact way possible:

TensorFlow is like Numpy, only it is capable of working symbolically and can work more easily with your GPU in a highly parallel manner. For those two reasons, it is vastly superior to numpy for tasks like deep learning / machine learning.

Theano is another symbolic numerical library, coming before TensorFlow, though TensorFlow has seemingly gained more popularity and people have more general faith in it.</comment>


How Web Content Can Affect Power Usage - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/8970/how-web-content-can-affect-power-usage/ <comment><USER2> Re: JavaScript and networking:

My random observation tells that sadly most "modern" highly complex websites do it wrong and it can hardly be any worse (this applies to all web products I've been working on for last several years):

1) analytics beacons fired every N seconds (which means the network stack on mobile never goes to idle mode)

2) JS frameworks doing event delegation that capture mousemove events and various other stuff like that + various setTimeout/setInterval (perhaps from third-party code).

If you want a sample of 2) just open devtools > debugger on any page and click "pause". You will _immediately_ hit a debugger in some just-now executing JS callback even if you do nothing at all on the page.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how much energy would be saved if people stopped using recaptcha v3, which is basically a perfect storm of event handlers and network usage.

<comment><USER4> And that would also break the power grap of Google. Everyone is training their machine learning algorithms.

<comment><USER5> I don't think v3 actually asks any questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Power saving is great, except when it breaks apps.

Unfortunately, Webkit has broken certain web apps by their power saving features.

For example, on iOS, I have a Pandora-like web app that plays music. When my app is in the background and the current song ends, it won't play the next song because iOS has suspended Javascript execution in the name of power saving. I'm not doing any _active_ JS, just an event handler for audio.ended event. The event handler never fires when my app is the in background or when the screen is off, thus, I can't play the next song. This effectively makes it impossible to build a functioning audio app/radio station on iOS using web technologies.

I've reported this issue to Apple some 2 years ago, but they still haven't fixed it.

Bonus: as of iOS 12, it also breaks web apps that are packaged with Cordova and published into the App Store.

<comment><USER7> > _Power saving is great, except when it breaks apps._

That's a problem.

> _Pandora-like web app that plays music. When my app is in the background and > the current song ends, it won 't play the next song because iOS has > suspended Javascript execution in the name of power saving._

I think that's intended. I would argue that you are misusing the web. I would argue that most users don't want websites to run while the browser isn't in the foreground. If you want to elevate your capability to interact with the user while in the background then build and install a native app or leverage existing native apps' functionalities.

> _When my app is in the background and the current song ends, it won 't play > the next song because iOS has suspended Javascript execution in the name of > power saving. The event handler never fires when my app is the in background > or when the screen is off, thus, I can't play the next song._

That's good. I don't want garbage in the background to do anything javascript- related at all.

> _This effectively makes it impossible to build a functioning audio app > /radio station on iOS using web technologies._

Really? There are plenty of audio/radio apps on iOS using _native technologies_. You're trying to shoehorn something to do something it wasn't intended and then causing noise because it doesn't do what it wasn't intended.

> _I 've reported this issue to Apple some 2 years ago, but they still haven't > fixed it._

What bug? You think this is a problem caused by power saving? No, it's not.

You've already stated that the song is playing until it ends, but that your javascript doesn't get notified that it ended. You think the problem is that power saving is stopping you from processing the next song to play. I disagree. I think the problem is that you aren't providing a play list to the browser. Frankly, I'm not a web developer so I don't even know if there _is_ a playlist API. But if there isn't, then _that_ is your problem.

A playlist would be a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to run arbitrary javascript.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure your comment misunderstands the original comment, and even if it didn't, it is rather aggressive.

Why are web-technologies suddenly inferior to native technologies? Maybe I want my playlist to be accessible through a website from all my devices instead of having to download a native app on each device.

The company saves money/releases an app that would otherwise never have existed, and I get to use a service in a consistent manner across all platforms. Oh, and web-apps are more secure because they have less permissions than a regular app.

The author of the comment said web-app. That probably means a progressive web- app. This means there is an icon for the web-app on the home screen (like a normal app) and the user interacts with it, like a normal app, although in reality, everything is being handled by the browser behind the scenes.

> Progressive Web Apps are installable and live on the user's home screen, > without the need for an app store. They offer an immersive full screen > experience with help from a web app manifest file and can even re-engage > users with web push notifications.

I would argue that in this case it makes sense for the progressive web app to have all the capabilities of a native app since that's what it looks like to the user.

Of course, if by web-app, the author means "a tab inside Safari browser", then the behavior is logical and your comment makes sense, we wouldn't want Safari to churn through iOS battery.

> That's good. I don't want garbage in the background to do anything > javascript-related at all.

Why is "javascript-related" garbage better or worse than native-related garbage? Arguably, "native-related" garbage is worse because it can do more to your phone than "javascript-related garbage".

<comment><USER9> > The author of the comment said web-app. That probably means a progressive > web-app. This means there is an icon for the web-app on the home screen > (like a normal app) and the user interacts with it, like a normal app, > although in reality, everything is being handled by the browser behind the > scenes.

Presumably the issue here is that there is no special case where a progressive web app can let the OS know that the content it's playing should count as background audio.

<comment><USER10> But there is no case where it should be up to a web app whether its content should count as background audio. It is possible that a user should be able to flag such a situation, but native apps both have affirmative consent when downloading an application and have permissions models the user can manage, whereas the web has neither and web browsers need to assume both malicious and incompetent web devs will do terrible things with any feature they allow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a first step, browsers should make extensions more powerful again. It's a pain that extensions are so teethless these days.

Then we could make a powersaving extension. It would allow a page a cumulative number of ms to use the CPU/GPU and a max number of network requests. After that it would display "This page has exceeded its quota of resources. Should all JS be halted? You can always continue the JS by clicking the little PowerSaver icon".

Here is a fun way to tame power intensive tabs (tried it with Firefox and Chromium and it works for both):

        top

Look at the ID of the most busy tab. Let's say it's 1234

        kill -STOP 1234

Boom! Immediately the tab is frozen and it's CPU usage drops to zero.

        kill -CONT 1234

Now it is alive again.

To pause all tabs:

        pkill --signal STOP firefox

And to continue:

        pkill --signal CONT firefox

For Chromium, just use "chromium" instead of "firefox".

So if we had something like native extensions, we could achieve a "pause button" by simply leveraging the STOP and CONT signal of the OS. If one were to look deeper into how browsers do their work, I wouldn't be surprised if we could target the signals more precisely and keep scrolling alive during the pause. Or we could CONT the process in case of a scroll event and then immediately STOP it again.

Another approach could be a "BrowserTamer" application that keeps the browser STOPped as long as there is no mouse/keyboard activity and CONT it for 100ms on scroll/keyboard activity. That could probably be implemented as a seperate program without help from the browsers themselfes.

<comment><USER12> > _As a first step, browsers should make extensions more powerful again._

That is a solution (though more like a remedy) to the symptom instead of the actual problem: Browsers trying to become operating systems and websites trying to be apps.

<comment><USER11> The browser _is_ a platform that runs applications aka websites. Nothing wrong with that.

But I want that the user can configure the platform any way they like.

If you look at Linux, it's a bunch of files that you can alter until it behaves exactly the way you want it to.

Browsers feel much more monolithic. I would prefer them to be as open and accessible as Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The most common reason for my computer fans to become audible is JavaScript on a webpage. That is insane, because in most cases it makes no difference to the content.

Mind you, this is on Chrome on a Macbook Pro; Safari is indeed better (kudos to the Webkit team). It's a shame the amount of control Safari gives a user is laughable: content blockers can't hold a candle to uBlock Origin and there's no way to disable JavaScript and Cookies on a per-site basis.

<comment><USER14> I don't bother disabling js per site so I don't know about that, but I'm pretty sure there is an uBlock Origin build for Safari since I'm using it.

[https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari](https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari)

<comment><USER15> That isn't maintained any more, the last commit was more than a year ago. It's stuck at version 1.16.

<comment><USER14> Ouch. No way I'm going back to "i will prevent your system from sleeping for arbitrary reasons" Chrome.

Maybe Firefox then...

<comment><USER16> Firefox is even worse in macOS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just some tangential food for thought: A few years ago Google did an Earth Day stunt where they set their homepage background color to black to symbolize saving energy by remembering to turn out the lights. It was tongue-in-cheek, but I've been curious ever since if major websites making a conscientious change to reduce JS execution and transfer bandwidth would have a measurable impact on worldwide power consumption.

Kind of branches out to more questions like: how much energy is wasted running poorly optimized code (on the web and otherwise) where the same outcomes could be accomplished with code that executes fewer instructions? Should developers have an obligation or at least a conscience about writing performant code for the environment's sake? Would the impact even be measurable?

<comment><USER18> A tablet costs less than $10 in electricity per year. The energy to mine, refine, and assemble the materials for a tablet is much higher.

The mindfulness in everyone trying to be more efficient would have a positive impact on its own though.

<comment><USER19> When we move to full OLED, ubiquitous night mode will drive down their device's power usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Says company who refuses to implement VP9 (because other company doesn't want to spend on x264 licenses).

Result is power waste on the order of small country.

p.s. glad Safari finally shows offending Safari tab name in Activity Monitor (lately it's Twitters service worker that rip 100% CPU).

<comment><USER21> Sure it's not the other way round? Nearly everything has hardware h264 decoding. Google forces VP9 via YouTube which doesn't have hardware decoding on many (most?) devices so massive CPU usage (and virtually impossible to watch in 4K/60fps in software decode mode).

<comment><USER22> No. Virtually all devices since 2015 have hardware accelerated vp9 decoding. iPhones have had it going back to the iPhone 6.

Apple is refusing to enable it in software because... TBH I don't know why. It's royalty free. I literally can't think of a reason besides juvenile pettiness.

<comment><USER23> Apple partially owns the patents for MPEG4-AVC (H.264) [1] and HEVC (H.265) [2]. VP8 (WebM + WebP), VP9, and AV1 are threats to Apple's business because they're royalty-free. Apple wants to force companies to continue licensing H.264 and H.265.

There is no technical advantage to the MPEG family over the VP family. The VP family has widespread hardware decoding support going back many years, and the latest iterations provide significantly better results than the latest MPEG family iterations. Companies like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Broadcom are part of the alliance that developed AV1 [3].

There doesn't appear to be any incentive for Apple to continue blocking support for the VP family other than the fact that they're a licensor of HEVC.

[1]: [https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/](https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/licensors/)

[2]: [https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/](https://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/licensors/)

[3]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda-d...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170614042710/https://www.xda- developers.com/av1-future-video-codecs-google-hevc/)

<comment><USER22> I've heard that angle, but it doesn't really make any sense. Samsung is also on that list, and all their SoCs since 2014 have had vp9 support. They've had vp9 support longer than HEVC.

The MPEG-LA isn't so much a business model as it is a pragmatic solution to patent trolls. I'm pretty sure Apple puts money into the MPEG-LA, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Avoid network polling to obtain periodic updates from a server. Use > WebSockets or Fetch with a persistent connection, instead of polling.

Oh the irony. Apple's new low-latency streaming spec is based around polling the server multiple times per second, for the entire duration of a live stream. The FOSS version of low-latency HTTP streaming is based on chunked- transfer encoding via a...persistent fetch connection. Despite chunked- transfer low-latency steaming being widely deployed in production for the past few years (Twitch, Periscope use this), they didn't think it was the right solution. I wonder what the WebKit team thinks of this.

</comment><comment><USER25> The biggest question now is how to incentivize developers to care about battery efficiency. Currently if your website is energy saving, the users cannot feel anything. Why bother spending time optimizing then?

Some kind of indicator of how much energy the current tab is consuming would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what the Internet's net power consumption is for server side vs client side HTML rendering.

</comment><comment><USER27> Having worked on WebKit performance in the past, it's great to see more of this knowledge being pushed out to web developers.

These are things browser developers have known about for a long time, but we generally always tried to "just make things work" in the browser instead of asking web developers to help out on their end (and making tools to assist with that.)

Great post by Benjamin and Simon :)

</comment><comment><USER28> There is a search engine (that gets results from Google) with a black background that claims to reduce energy usage on monitors.

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

<comment><USER29> That doesn't make sense at all for most types of screens. If anything, I wonder if a darker design might make visitors increase their screen brightness to compensate.

<comment> amiga-workbench This site is really old, back when it was new, CRT's were still very common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> OK, so TFA is for web developers.

But it's still funny that it doesn't mention ads. Especially ads that run video. Reducing power usage is an important befit of using ad-blockers.

</comment><comment><USER31> thread on email @ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20800439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20800439)</comment>


So, how did you get here? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lockheimer/so-how-did-you-get-here-4a1c05153019#.vbggg1s6e <comment><USER2> Essentially ...

"Intel is never going to catch up in smartphones. Intel, like its pal Microsoft, whiffed when the world shifted from PCs to mobile gadgets that didn't use Intel chips. The company has little to show for 15 years of trying to reverse its strategic miss."</comment>


Uber Riders Can Now Pay for Their Rides via Google Pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/amp/s/gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/google-pay-uber-ride-payments-integration-india-1923693%3famp=1&akamai-rum=off <comment><USER2> It definitely seems like Uber is trying hard to build a stronger relationship with Google. I wonder why? What changed?</comment>


Technique perfected to boost capacity of computer storage 1000 fold - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05171-y <comment><AUTHOR> This is at room temperature I guess. This article is a nice summary: [https://www.folio.ca/scientists-perfect-technique-to- boost-c...](https://www.folio.ca/scientists-perfect-technique-to-boost- capacity-of-computer-storage-a-thousandfold/)</comment>