The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/jul/16/the-rise-and-fall-of-french-cuisine <comment><USER2> Perhaps I made some classic tourist mistake, but when I was in Paris last year I felt like every mid-priced French bistro was extremely mediocre and overpriced. Menus all the same and food did not taste fresh at all. Wine bad too.

<comment><USER3> There are tons of great places, just not along tourist-channeling roads. It's honestly just a function of rent. You _can 't_ be on a really nice spot and give good value in Paris. It's impossible. But yeah bistro-type place tend to be pretty mediocre in particular, they're much better in Lyon for example.

Just ask someone who lives there next time, you'll get appropriate feedback. They know "the good places". Actually do that for every major city you're going on vacation to. It works the same everywhere.

<comment><USER4> Yup, like this one: Cafe Francoeur 129 Rue Caulaincourt, 75018 Paris, France +33 1 53 28 00 15 [https://maps.app.goo.gl/2fNrkVXVvvNFaCyZ9](https://maps.app.goo.gl/2fNrkVXVvvNFaCyZ9)

<comment><USER5> Mind recently blown here:

[https://www.lesresistants.fr](https://www.lesresistants.fr)

[http://lesenfantsdumarche.fr](http://lesenfantsdumarche.fr) (check L'Instagram)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> French cuisine in Paris can be really good, but you need to know a few tips :

\- price doesn't mean quality or taste or fresh. More often than not, location is almost the only thing that drives price. But even that could be random (some hipster places of the north of paris are both dirty, expensive, in a crap neighborhood, and not that good at all).

\- you need to find the right balance between hipster and tourist trap. If you're in a very touristic area, favor extremely small restaurants ( 10 tables), where you feel that the owner is still passionate about his food, and can still get fresh ingredients.

\- if there are « plat du jour », pick in that list. Best is if there are only plat du jour and nothing else.

\- some touristic area are great for food, others are an absolute expensive crap, and they can be 200 meters away. Le marais is great, some streets of the 10th are great, but bastille is awfull. It can be pretty hard to guess from the outside.

\- finally, look at the menu. It's really the best way to tell, but it requires experience. Too many meals is a bad sign, style (hand made, or nice font, or simply good looking and stylish) is also a good sign. Indication of things beeing hand made are also a good sign.

All in all i'd say it's pretty similar to french language : there are more exceptions than rules. Go look for something with an authentic feel ( as in you can feel the effort that was put in designing the place, and the owner's personality), but try various things to build your intuition.

Needless to say, quality of restaurants can change a lot with time.

The good thing about all this, is that « knowing good places to eat » has real value in Paris, and after you found your first gem you'll understand why parisians talk about restaurants with such passion when they meet.

<comment><USER7> > _French cuisine_

I'm French and I have no idea what "French cuisine" is. When picking a restaurant we would decide which kind of _regional_ cuisine we'd like (when opting for French cuisine rather than something foreign). I don't live in Paris so it might be different, but I don't really think so.

My favorite French-cuisine restaurants around my place were either Flemish, Breton or Réunionnais, but I don't know where I would go for "default French cuisine". Maybe some kind of tourist bistrot, but... well they feel like they're really just for tourists. Some of the luxury restaurants don't seem to have a regional identity, but they're above my means.

<comment><USER6> I'm french too, and i only started to understand what french cuisine was after visiting other countries. A simple lettuce salad with vinegar and mustard dressing, together with a rare steak and some french fries is something you won't find in a lot of countries.

Englishmen overcook the meat (which is always fatter than here) and always add sweet dressing, and the rest of the world makes the meat boil.

<comment><USER8> Those are some stunningly untrue sweeping generalizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of an article describing how bad restaurant food in San Francisco is getting because housing inequality is so high that all the food- prep workers are getting pushed out of the cities.

You can't have head chefs commuting four hours a day to cook you fish...

I could believe this is happening in Paris as well.

<comment><USER10> I'd love to read that article if you could tell us where to find it (seems like it might be tricky to Bing for it).

<comment><USER9> [https://thebolditalic.com/why-sf-restaurants-are- suffocating...](https://thebolditalic.com/why-sf-restaurants-are- suffocating-795392211c66)

NYT also reported on the topic.

<comment><USER10> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I could be starting a food war here but I dare declare that California has the best cuisines in the world because

1.) for many of the ethnicities, california usually has the largest immigrant communities, outside of the native country. Therefore the dishes can be much more authentic and cater to the native crowds. As opposed to a Greek restaurant in Tokyo, or a Thai restaurant in Paris. When I lived in Japan I often missed my Vietnamese pho. And when i lives in Paris I often craved for my Mexican burrito.

2.) it doesn't have any food history, and therefore no codified rules on how and what cuisines should be ( as opposed to French cuisine, like mentioned in the article ). Therefore we have Californian sushi, Korean tacos, Japanese pastas, Korean hot dogs, and so on. Fusion and innovation is alive and well

3.) fifth largest economy in the world that helps to support diverse and vibrant restaurants, farms and foodies

4.) real focus on vegan cuisines. If you were a vegan you would be blessed to live in la or sf. You would be able to not just be able to get vegan but also Vietnamese vegan, Thai vegan, American vegan or Japanese vegan cuisines. If you tried backpacking through Asia or Europe as a vegan you would know how hard that is.

Michelin guide recently released a California guide and California is now on the map as a foodie destination. Even though it only has 90 Michelin restaurants as opposed to Japan's 230, I have way more fun dining in la or sf than Tokyo due to the diverse ness and casualness of the cuisines. (But Tokyo will always have a place in my heart on how perfectly executed a single ingredient/dish could be)

<comment><USER12> 4\. Fresh vegetables, meat and dairy from nearby farms.

When I moved here from the Pacific Northwest, I was surprised as to how much fresher and tastier the fruits and vegetables here were compared to Seattle.

<comment><USER13> The Central Valley, where most of the US's vegetables and fruits come from, is just hours away from the Bay Area, so it's fresher than anywhere else.

Even imports, Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, usually arrive in California and so are freshest here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My parents lived in France for a while after they retired; so I've been there many times as a visitor. They lived pretty far from Paris in the country side. Things have changed a lot in the past decades in France. For one thing, the French have somehow been enthusiastically embracing the north american concept of strip malls with huge super markets and fast food outlets with such names as Pizza Hut, Burger King, etc. as well as a few local variations of these. Most smaller cities have these at the edge of their town and the local retail sector has been struggling to compete. The food in these supermarkets is still pretty good but the food in these fast food outlets mostly isn't.

The french are the proto-snobs; they pretty much invented the notion of snobbery and their cuisine is a big part of it. But it's an invented tradition and it's a very recent thing (at least their cuisine is). And indeed it is past it's glory and lot of the lower class French are growing up eating the same kind of junk food that everybody else is getting obese on. However, you could do worse in the French country side than going to some family run place that is frequented by the locals (as opposed to hordes of tourists). You'll be eating pretty decent food generally. This still exists and people are fiercely traditional when it comes to this stuff. But it's not as widespread as it used to be. But buying local produce is a thing and generally it is pretty good stuff given the climate and farming standards.

The reality of food in France and elsewhere is that it is rooted in a long tradition that is based on history, people moving around and importing their traditions, and people discovering ingredients. E.g. tomatoes and potatoes are relatively recent additions to European cuisine and yet considered staples of local cooking across Europe now.

For example, if you go to Italy, there is history dating back to the Roman era and earlier in some cases. Written history in this part of the world dates back more than two millennia. And Iran, formerly known as Persia, and formerly part of misc. historical empires has many thousands years of history. These places have interesting dishes that have been around in some form or another for thousands of years.

And you can get them from all over the world in most decently large cities across the globe these days. Including Paris. I think this is pretty awesome. I love that you can go to the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands and find a few locals that are passionate about sushi or something similarly foreign and find a few decent places serving it. This was not a thing when I grew up in the eighties.

<comment><USER15> > some family run place that is frequented by the locals

I ate in a restaurant like this in Normandy, not far from Camembert (yeah, it's also the name of a village) and we had a pretty good time. All the patrons were from the area and the cousin who showed up that place knew some of them. We even scored a few free drinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Australians had established Italian coffee bars and you could finally get a > decent cappuccino.

A fun parallel here to the classic startup story where the megacorp stagnates while ex-employees leave to create a startup that does it better and eventually beats the megacorp at its own game.

Italian immigrants brought a love of coffee with them to Australia, but that's developed into a culture and standard of coffee that's better than the original, that's now being exported back.

I live in Melbourne, and was surprised on first visiting Italy and France that the coffee was utterly inferior. Same with the US: There's certainly decent coffee to be found, but you have to seek it out, rather than taking it for granted as ubiquitous everywhere.

<comment><USER3> >I live in Melbourne, and was surprised on first visiting Italy and France that the coffee was utterly inferior.

Well, I lived in Australia ten years ago and I had the reverse experience. While I genuinely enjoyed the country and would gladly come back to visit, the arcane sugary cocktails Australians call coffee had me more annoyed than charmed. How hard is it to just make a fucking espresso and charge what it's worth ?

What Australia has for itself though is stellar Asian restaurants. Great Japanese and Korean places are absolutely everywhere, the average quality is far above anywhere in Europe.

<comment><USER17> I don't know what you're ordering, but good/excellent quality espresso is readily available throughout Australia and New Zealand.

<comment><USER18> That was my experience as well. When I moved from Auckland to Seattle, I found isolated pockets of better espresso, but I had to work to find the gems that were better than the average in NZ.

<comment><USER17> If you're ever back in Auckland, pay a visit to Coffee Lab's cafe in Wairau Valley. Very unassuming looking place in an industrial district but absolutely amazing coffee.

<comment><USER18> I don't think about moving back maybe once or twice a month! ;-)

Thank you for the tip—it's been some years since I've been back, and I'm sure the coffee has only gotten better. When I was there, I was even hearing isolated reports of hobbyists growing their own coffee in the far north. Was always curious how that worked out, as I'd have thought coffee would still be a bit marginal at those latitudes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dining in Paris is a land mine for exactly the reasons stated in this article. You can't really pop into a random restaurant in Paris and expect a good meal. I've been burned too many times in the past that every visit to Paris and France involves days and weeks of research for food that is better than mediocre. (Paris is usually the cheapest way to get to Europe which is why I go so often)

Maybe it's the proliferation of tourist traps. Maybe it's stubbornness of sticking to the same old cuisine. It does feel like visiting a gastronomical museum.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been in europe on travel and business for the past few weeks, and this may be entirely provincial and American of me, but the best meal i've had in a week was the €20 moroccan takeaway for four I had for dinner last night.

The classic continental cuisines are good, and i've found good examples of them, but good lord i want something with hot sauce. Then a salad. And maybe a decent bagel.

</comment><comment><USER21> Too many "fall of"s in the title

<comment><USER22> Yes, it's distracting.

I imagine a review on nymag's site, explaining the "immediacy" that comes from mods leaving such obvious errors unfixed.

Or, a discussion of roads and traffic. Build bigger roads, congestion gets worse. Mods didn't sign up for this, grammar police! If they fix this one, we'll all get lazier about checking our titles, and the situation gets worse not better. This could be explained by the Lotka–Volterra "preditor prey" equations?

No, make a mistake in a title, you have to wear it. Like leaving a baseball pitcher out there, behind 16-3, to "take on for the team".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "But isn't the point to taste the chicken?" Furious and foreign, I replied: > "No! It's just the opposite! Cooking is about messing with the chicken! > Cooking is about adding flavour!"

One cannot blame people for wanting to add flavor to the meat of a sick animal. I feel sad for her never having had the chance to taste a happy chicken. No amount of cooking can compensate for the lack of good ingredients. Natural ruin can be fertile soil for human creativity.</comment>


Questions About Accuracy of Coronavirus Tests Sow Worry - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/questions-about-accuracy-of-coronavirus-tests-sow-worry-11585836001 <comment><USER2> De-paywalled: [https://archive.is/zLjjt](https://archive.is/zLjjt)</comment>


What to do with my next home server? - <AUTHOR> I recently received an Intel NUC[1] as a gift, which means I'm in the market to create a home server for some use.  I've run various home servers over the years, as firewalls and file servers, but those needs are mostly met now by cheap consumer electronics or abundant options for streaming and fast internet.  What would you use a compact, fairly powerful general purpose computing platform for if it was suddenly available?
I'm happy to hear any solution, or what you would do in your circumstances, but if you want to tailor it to me, I'm married and have multiple children and pets.  I work from home part of the week in a small home office (converted walk-in closet).  I also recently received a Nest cam, but haven't set it up yet.  I'm not sure if it supports local storage of video or any other local integration, but I probably wouldn't want to invest in a separate camera without good reason.  Most media consumption is done through a combination of Roku and Fire TV devices and subscriptions to a few media services.  The kids already have computers that aren't all that bad thanks to the office getting rid of a few older desktops.
1: https://www.google.com/?q=dccp847dye <comment><USER2> We recently created an audio server. Spotify and the like are nice, but we found that there was a large amount of music we like which wasn't on those platforms (or if it was, it wasn't the version we liked, etc).

One cheap Raspberry Pi 3 and large reliable usb storage later and we have our own streaming service. The option to stream is only available locally (didn't want it discoverable on the internet at large).

On the note of you having children, and not knowing their age, I would also suggest a Minecraft server? No idea on what it actually takes to host one of them though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, a Minecraft server isn't a bad idea. My youngest (at 8) is obsessed with Minecraft on the Wii U, but the worlds he creates and hosts on that are only available when he runs that game and hosts them (even if he has lots of friends on the platform that connect). I'll have to look into whether the Wii U connects to regular servers or only Wii U specific ones and whether I can host a dedicated one.

I actually have a Pi as well I have't used yet, but was thinking of tinkering around with Redox Os on that.

<comment><USER3> If he's into programming, he could try writing server-side mods with the Spigot framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out [https://home-assistant.io/](https://home-assistant.io/) and consider a Plex / Kodi / Emby server.

I based my home server setup around docker images, sort of like this arrangement:

[https://www.linuxserver.io/2017/06/24/the-perfect-media- serv...](https://www.linuxserver.io/2017/06/24/the-perfect-media-server-2017/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks interesting, especially since it seems able to integrate Nest cams.

I already have access to Kodi (the streaming abilities at least) through the Fire TV, which has Kodi installed (and more recently Terrarium TV).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What do you want to actually achieve with it? In the past I always had the urge to tinker and set up home servers to self-host pretty much everything, but at some point it just gets old and I realised I was just wasting time instead of spending it on either billable work or just take time off to see friends/family. Since then I've given up on all of that.

So unless you have a specific goal in mind that can't be achieved with an off- the-shelf device or affordable SaaS solution, don't bother, and sell/give away the NUC if you have no use for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take a look at [http://www.openflixr.com](http://www.openflixr.com) \- it is definitely overkill but it will give you an idea about many popular self hosted apps.

</comment><comment><USER7> I created a Mac backup app called ChronoPill[1] at one point. But now I use backblaze instead.

I'm going to setup a NAS soon because I found some fairly good $50 Xoaomi WiFi security cameras that can save to a NAS. I intend to create a CnC for IOT at some point. Things like turning off the power for non-essentials when no one is home and stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe a Nextcloud server?</comment>


We hold people with power to account. Why not algorithms? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/power-algorithms-technology-regulate <comment><USER2> Interestingly, the author has come around to the idea that the algorithms can be trusted to act in an unbiased manner, even so far as to prefer a programmed criminal judge: [https://youtu.be/lUqzVH1GjQo](https://youtu.be/lUqzVH1GjQo)

I'm sure this comes with the requirement for answers to questions given at the end of the article:

"What power have you got? "Where did you get it from? "In whose interests do you use it? "To whom are you accountable? "How do we get rid of you?" Because, ultimately, we can't just think of algorithms in isolation. We have to think of the failings of the people who design them – and the danger to those they are supposedly designed to serve.

</comment><comment><USER3> DO we hold people in power accountable? To me it seems the higher up we are the less actual responsability they are being held to.

<comment><USER4> Tony Benn's questions are a handy reminder of what to ask of those in power.

"What power have you got? "Where did you get it from? "In whose interests do you use it? "To whom are you accountable? "How do we get rid of you?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why don't we just hold the people who create the products accountable just as we do for any other product?

<comment><USER6> Sometimes it's not the programmer's fault, but they'll always be scapegoated

<comment><USER7> When does that distinction end? Writing code for targeting? The code for mixing gas chamber chamicals? At what point do you stand up and accept you are doing evil, and take corrective action?

Sure, working for Boeing or Google doesn't make you evil. But where is the line when you are asked to do something, perhaps trivial, to advance a project that denies humans rights, or life? When do you take your spine and walk?

<comment><USER8> No one is writing obviously evil code. They are just writing "chemical mixing", "pattern recognition", "statistical analytics" algorithms.

There is no good or evil but thinking makes it so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since when do people with power get held accountable?</comment>


User Interface Design Framework (GUI elements library for Illustrator) - <AUTHOR> http://www.webalys.com/design-interface-application-framework.php <comment><USER2>
      "This framework is released as a complete web designer
      kit for free. Even for commercial use. I just
      require a link to this page if you use the elements"

Deal breaker right there. I'd rather just pay a few bucks then try to find a place for attribution link referencing a few images on my web app. Does this type of attribution link ever work for anyone?

<comment><USER3> > You don't need to make a link if you use it only in application wireframes > or user interface mockups.

I think he's trying to get you to use it for mockups mostly.

<comment><USER2> That's just one step away from the same problem. You use them in a mock up... you succeed with a mock up... then you are stuck with building out that mock up of images that need an attribution, or you have to find substitutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi, I'm Vincent : the web designer who created this framework. I wasn't aware that the linkback could be such a problem and your feedback make me think to one solution :

• The idea of the backlink is to be granted for the work I've done : it make the framework more known and make my SEO better. It will help me to have better freelance missions.

• Due to your feedback and others (jeffrey Zeldman pointed the same problem for example), I'm now thinking to propose a special license that you can use the framework for multiple projects without making a backlink. If you don't want to make a backlink, you can pay for it, something betwwen 50 to 100$ I think that in this case, those will pay will have a more complete version with more stuff, more variations (using all the new features of CS5). This extra money could help me spending more time on this framework.

What do you think ?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is cool - I've not used illustrator, but it doesn't have a button with "Ok" or "Cancel" - I assume you can quickly create those in Illustrator and I also notice it doesn't have buttons which are grey - again, I assume you could create your own colour swatch.

Very neat though - do people think it would be quicker to wireframe in this or in HTML?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you aren't already proficient in Illustrator, you're problably better off with HTML. Personally I prefer HTML.

But I think these also work with Fireworks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mmmm... that's an interesting approach. I think it's perfectly fine for creating quick jpg mockups but I wouldn't use it for the real app for two reasons: 1\. Attribution. 2\. Differentiation is design.

<comment><USER4> About differentiation : my framework is inspired by the web development frameworks and agile development philosophy (Especially ruby on Rails). The "Convention over configuration" approach.

In most case, you will use the commons GUI elements provided and you will save some time. If you need to make it look different, you already have a foundation to quickly customize the appearance. The idea is to no repeat yourself designing the same elements (radio buttons, forms, tabs, windows, always 90% the same..) to concentrate to the really important design problems to solve.</comment></comment>


A White Lie Gave Japan KFC for Christmas - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-japanese-christmas <comment><USER2> Japan has a similar story with the "Christmas Cake":

"Christmas cakes...[were] popularized when they began sales at Ginza, the central commercial district in Tokyo. This was during the time when Japan was going through massive waves of Westernization, particularly by the upper elite class. Members of the upper class, who had a strong penchant for Western cultures in general, enjoyed Western style desserts as a delicacy. Thus, being a Western style dessert, Christmas cakes were associated with the idea of Western modernity and social status. It was a major hit when the Christmas cakes were commercialized and became more affordable to the general public."

"The Christmas cakes today are symbolized as a ritual of Christmas celebration; specifically, the act of sharing the cake with family or friends."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cake#In_other_countr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cake#In_other_countries)

<comment><USER3> And Korea Put SPAM ( As in the luncheon meat ) in Christmas Gift Box.

[1] [http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190122000585](http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190122000585)

<comment><USER4> Nothing beats the spam musubi in Hawaii. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_musubi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_musubi)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a college abroad program to Japan many years ago, and this was one of the funniest culture shocks I had. I was dumbfounded and astonished as my friends told me that's how they celebrated. I didn't know the story behind it until now, but I thought it was one of the most brilliant marketing moves ever.

<comment><USER6> Me too! I spent Christmas there many years ago, and every person I talked to asked:

1\. Are you going back home for Christmas?

2\. No? Oh are you going to get a Christmas cake from KFC?

I was like, Christmas cake? And why KFC specifically? My confusion confused them just as much. Maybe they later thought it was because I was Canadian so it must just be an American thing.

<comment><USER7> The reverse version of this is pretty sobering: Japanese or Chinese person makes it to Canada, and excitedly goes to the nearest KFC or McDonald's, and gets culture shock from how run-down it is. Especially if they're downtown in a big city.

It makes you want to drive them two hours out to a small-town fast-food restaurant to show them that indeed, a clean and tidy KFC/McDonald's does exist somewhere in America.

<comment><USER8> KFC in China tastes better than ones in America, probably just my taste.

<comment><USER9> It has always tasted the same to me, once you'd scraped off the double dollop of mayo they seem to put on the Chinese version of everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a good documentary from early 80s about this, The Colonel Comes To Japan. You can find it at your local library or (with dubious copyright status) your local YouTube.

The narrative in the documentary does not straightforwardly square with this article.

<comment><USER11> Wow! In college my friend found it in an obsolete format (BetaMax?) in the college library. It is a comedy goldmine. ("Banzai!" _coughing fit_ ) We still occasionally laugh about it 15 years later. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This wasn't a lie in my case. My grandma loved KFC and growing up, from the late 60s to the late 80s, KFC was a staple of every Christmas in my family until she passed away.

<comment><USER13> It is also true in my case. My extended family still gets KFC every Christmas Eve.

<comment><USER14> My mother claims this was tradition in her house growing up as well. I think KFC was a little more upscale back then and eating out at all was considered luxurious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wasn't able to figure out what the lie was, exactly. Is it in the article?

<comment><USER16> It's there but kind of easy to miss. A TV interviewer asked if KFC for Christmas was a popular tradition in the West, and he replied that it was, despite knowing that it was not.

<comment><USER17> He could have said, "Yes, poultry is very popular during Christmas in the West." That's probably what a skilled politician would do: lie without lying. If pressed further about KFC itself, he could have said, "KFC is one of many stores which sell poultry in the West, but here in Japan, KFC is the largest store selling Christmas poultry[1]." However, you'd probably have to know the questions in advance to practice your wording. Most politicians ask for the questions in advance as part of the agreement to appear. A chicken sales- person probably doesn't have that luxury.

[1] There was no concept of "Christmas poultry" in Japan outside of his own invention, with decorated packaging etc., so technically he's either true, or the concept was too ambiguous to be objectively false.

<comment><USER18> You could go one further and just say, "yes, Americans eat birds on special days."

<comment><USER17> Nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Speaking about Christmas in Japan: [https://twitter.com/i/status/1072108595137794048](https://twitter.com/i/status/1072108595137794048)</comment>


New Zealand gunman livestreamed mass murder attack on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/03/14/new-zealand-mosque-shootings-gunman-livestreamed-attack-facebook/3171238002/ <comment><USER2> Something is amiss here - these so called 'lone wolfs' or 'not-a-member-of- any-organization' are surprisingly well-armed, well-trained and all 'declare' they are 'acting alone'.

Is this some sort of tactic to throw off any suspicion about a global, Terrorist organization targeting Muslims?

Seems like terms such as 'acting alone', 'gunman', 'supremacist organization' are being used by these individuals (and maybe media?) to throw off the spotlight on such terrorist organization(s).

<comment><AUTHOR> In a word, yes. A proper answer requires a long essay with a ton of context, so I'd rather direct you to a good and quite up-to-date book on the topic: [https://www.amazon.com/Insurgent-Supremacists-Rights- Challen...](https://www.amazon.com/Insurgent-Supremacists-Rights-Challenge- Kersplebedeb/dp/1629635111)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm. So this is actual story. I read the guardian reporting and it was very clearly leaving out details, because the questions being asked contained specific details which the answers simply ignored.

But similar to the Pell case, with international media outlets, under different laws and protocols, it just seems to constrain certain media organisations from discussing the facts as they are known.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please don't paste any links.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any links to the scribd "manifesto?"

I am glad they don't say the shooter's name as we should not grant personal attention and infamy to these types who are looking for attention.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5770516-The-Great- Re...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5770516-The-Great-Replacement- New-Zealand-Shooter.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another reason to be leery of people wearing mounted cameras i guess</comment>


Rust Presentations about low level programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1rm85y/sprocketnes_practical_systems_programming_in_rust/

<comment><AUTHOR> Although the original title claims to be about a NES emulator written in Rust the video really is more about:

\- How to write low level runtime-less Rust (pcwalton)

\- Rust in production use at OpenDNS: the good, the bad and the ugly

\- Yehuda Katz using Rust to make a Ruby app more efficient (by interfacing with Rust native code)

Very interesting talks, i hope to see more of that.</comment>


Facebook's Bikini App Lawsuit Is Getting Really Ugly - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if the writer of this article has a disdain for people sexy-izing things (like pikini would be grouping supposed individual swimsuit pics into a group of of pics that would be sexy-izing in a way?), or if she has a love of facebook, or a misunderstanding of the tech in this issue - or maybe I am not understanding how the API permissions used to work.. but..

"Pikinis went out of business in 2015 after Facebook changed its API to cut off app developers from their users' friends data. It did this ostensibly to protect users' privacy."

Wouldn't the person using pikini already have access to the photos their friends had posted? So the pikini app would just be gathering and highlighting pics that were already accessible to the person? So I don't think putting the "fbook was being chivalrousness and trying to protect privacy through API breach" is the right light to shine on this.

Again I may be not understanding how the API worked, and if so apologies for thinking this article is leaning towards fbook was trying to protect while others were trying to syphon via security holes.

Also, "The irony in all of this is that it hinges on a decision Facebook made to protect user privacy from apps just like Pikinis, which seized on weak data protections to pry into Facebook users' personal photos."

Again, I am assuming the way things worked is that User A already had access to User B's photos. This was not some hacker system made that gave you access to someone's pictures on their phone through the API - this was pictures that people had uploaded to the fbook albums and were already accessible to friends right?

Only fbook itself (all of it's employees and those who demand access to the data via gov orders) gets access to all the pics on someone's phone through messenger app and the like, not friends of the person and APIs that could connect like friends. Right?

Again I may be confused by how the tech works, I've read some about these things over the years, and things had changed by the time I got to my bookmarks and read up on and tried to use things like the open graph searches and such. Apologies to the author or anyone else if these questions come off as offensive in any way, it's just the thoughts that came up the first time I read through the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> The weird song and dance of luring developers by offering so much personal data to them for free in the early days of Facebook's API always creeped me out. I remember thinking about this all the time back in 2007-2010 or so and wondering how people could be so naive and when it would all blow up.

Blow up would have been nice. I was overly optimistic in those days.</comment>


Huawei Caught Faking Smartphone Photo with a DSLR - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2018/08/20/huawei-caught-faking-smartphone-photos-with-a-dslr-again/ <comment><USER2> Not the first time Huawei fakes something, they were cheating on benchmarks:

[https://www.phonearena.com/news/Huawei-Ascend-P7-found-to- be...](https://www.phonearena.com/news/Huawei-Ascend-P7-found-to-be-cheating-- Futuremark-disqualifies-it_id60037)

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/8403/examining-huaweis- benchm...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/8403/examining-huaweis-benchmark- optimizations-in-the-ascend-p7)

Samsung and others also did it:

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in- and...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android- benchmarks)

I own the Ascend P7, and my GF is also a Huawei user, and they're good devices. But they feel the need to cheat.

<comment><USER3> Looks like xiaomi is adding some pressure on the low end market, where people are a little more feature conscious.

The p20 lite was brilliant my mother owns one and for what it cost it's a great little device, but the tech content pales compared to the last xiaomi round

<comment><USER4> I think the low end pressure is applying to xiaomi as well, from Oppo, Ding- Ding, etc...it's really hard to keep up with the cheap phone providers these days!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminded me of one of my favorite neologisms, used to describe faked screenshots that make video games look better than they are: bullshots

</comment><comment><USER6> Photos aside, can you trust Huawei in the first place in general?

<comment><USER7> Would you trust Google more or less than Huawei?

<comment><USER8> While I'd be absolutely certain they both spy on me (for various degrees of "spying"), I trust Google to better safeguard the data it collects about me.

Huawei is more likely to do a poor job of keeping said data to itself, either intentionally (selling it outright) or by getting hacked.

I'm convinced Google wouldn't sell my data - it is immensely more valuable to them if they're the only ones with it. That said, they'd still _use it_ \- to target and profile me, and of course I expect them both to share it with the respective governments.

Moreover, if I use Google services through a Huawei phone, they both end up with my data, while if I use a google device at least it's just Google. I'm not enthusiastic about either, but, hey, lesser of two evils.

(For the record I have an iPhone and try to avoid giving Google too much data about me)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why aren't the actors/models refusing to participate in such deceptive practices? Surely they'd be thinking "Why are we pretending to take a selfie?"

<comment><USER10> They're probably happy they can put food on the table. Actors for ads are not really at the top of the food pyramid.

<comment><USER11> While the Nigerian prince is? It's all just a scam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an outrage! Next you're going to tell me that the pictures of happy creatives and handsome businesspersons in every service or product website are not actual users who are just so damn happy that they can't stop smiling, but actors/models or even ( _gasp_ ) stock photos!

<comment><USER13> Given that Apple set the standard by posting photos that are explicitly labeled as being shot on iPhone, it think it's totally fine to expect an image with selfie-arm extending into the frame to have actually been shot on the device.

<comment><USER14> Obviously you haven't read the article:

> _Photos from Apple 's "Shot on iPhone" ads are indeed taken with iPhones, > albeit with additional equipment like special lenses attached to the phone, > and they've been touched up with professional photo editing software._

Yep, just a standard iPhone here as any regular user would have: [https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/shotoniphonefea...](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/shotoniphonefeat.jpg)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, shot using an iPhone. Using the iPhone's minuscule sized image sensor, through its tiny lens, and built in image processoring engine. With an attached lens.

Huawei used a large image sensor DSLR with dedicated processing chips and lenses designed for the body. The product they're trying to pass off as having produced the image needed have been within 29 square miles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Everything was fine until people took a closer look at the behind-the-scenes > photos (which have since been deleted) from the ad shoot posted by Elshamy > to her Instagram account.

I doubt it's an accident. It's probably just a PR stunt by huawei, otherwise not many people would even talk about this phone. Unless whoever is runnigng that actress's instagram account is incredibly stupid to not notice that clearly controversial photo: [[https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/08/bts0.jpg](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/08/bts0.jpg)]

<comment><USER16> Or alternatively the controversy increases Elshamy's profile. Given that the account is either controlled by her, or her agent, I'd say that's the more likely explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> to be fair it should be mentioned Nokia did this in 2012 as well, it's not like Huawei doing it alone

[https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294545/nokias-pureview- ad...](https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294545/nokias-pureview-ads-are- fraudulent)

<comment><USER18> For their N97 promo video Nokia faked the whole UI of the phone: [https://youtu.be/vJpEuMidcSU](https://youtu.be/vJpEuMidcSU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know of recent instances of such false advertisements in the US? Or are there severe enough punishments to deter them?

<comment><USER20> The last time I remember something like this happening was from 2012[1].

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/news/nokia-forced-to-apologise-for- fake...](https://www.cnet.com/news/nokia-forced-to-apologise-for-fake- lumia-920-camera-video/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> fakes aside, my wife bought this phone (the pro) and I have to say it has the best camera (+post processing) I've seen on a phone. My wife sucks at taking photos but with that thing they look kinda nice. Their 3 lens composite photo system seems like it actually, really helps. And their added post processing of "portrait" mode gives a nice instagramish look, It's too much for my tastes (I don't do instagram soo....) but it's interesting it does some depth-of- field stuff too (probably with the help of the 3 lenses)

The only downside is I hate the $850 price tag (I refuse to pay more than $200 on a phone...) it'll be interesting when this sort of tech trickles down in the next few years.

<comment><USER22> I'm intrigued to know what "Instagramish portraits" look like!

<comment><USER23> smoothed, like they're wearing more makeup then they really are. like a cheap version of standard photo touch ups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I mean even the resulting DSLR photo is touched up so heavily. How would anyone believe this is representative of the camera quality?

<comment><USER25> Because the phone camera does post-processing. That was the point of their ad pitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> if you believe ANY advertising, you lose.

</comment><comment><USER27> iirc, nokia also tried that in the past...

<comment><USER28> Correct

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The sensor and lens of phones are good enough today to look exactly like the picture in the video (besides the shallow DoF that is only possible with large lenses). The quality is primarily in the skill of lighting the room (in this case with $1000 of softboxes), and secondarily how the image is developed from RAW and retouched.

<comment><USER30> DoF has little to do with how big the lens is (unless that's your way to say large aperture, but you can have 1.8 with small lenses too). But it has some to do with how large the sensor is.

<comment><USER31> Perhaps you should think about how f-number is defined? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-number)

Then read up on depth of field : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field)

It should be clear that DOF has everything to do with the physical size of the lens because aperture for a given focal length defines the front element diameter. Your example very small f1.8 lens has to have a very small focal length and therefore deep DOF.

Edit : found the math I was looking for : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field#Use_of_absolute...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field#Use_of_absolute_aperture_diameter)

<comment><USER30> Did you miss the part where I introduced F-number into discussion instead of the lens size? What do you think will happen to DoF when I take my huge 70-200 and close it down to 22?

<comment><USER29> In that case the aperture diameter will decrease. f-number does not directly affect depth of field, except through the aperture diameter.

<comment><USER30> F-number describes the aperture diameter, it has no way to affect anything. The same as meters do not affect the distance.

However, when you close the aperture on the large lens, the lens still stays large. That was exactly my point: it is about aperture, not the lens size.

I get what you say about physically larger lenses having larger apertures in absolute dimensions, not the ratio, however that does not help smartphones, because of the distance of the focal plane and the sensor size. And this where the limiting factor is.

<comment><USER29> This discussion is about shallow DoF. You cannot have shallow DoF with a lens with a small aperture diameter. Both the aperture diameter and sensor must be large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So what? Camera companies, television companies, have been using simulated images in advertisements since forever. It's an ad. Of course it's fake. What world are you living in?

<comment><USER33> It's not about what world we're living in -- else we'd bend over and take any other kind of stuff that happens as well.

It's about what world we want to live in, and that (among more important things) doesn't include fake images passed as real.</comment></comment>


List GitHub projects using JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://aboutcode.net/2010/11/11/list-github-projects-using-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> What an awesome little hack!</comment>


Ask HN: Summer internships in Canada? - <AUTHOR>

Inspired by the other post, who is looking for interns in Canada this summer? We've got a pretty active startup community up north, or so I'm told.
Please post in the following format:
Company Name:
Company Size (number of people employed):
Company URL:
City:
Position:
Contact Email:
Skills Needed: <comment><USER2> TELUS <http://about.telus.com/careers/en/studentprogram.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> +1 for Montreal area

</comment><comment><USER4> RIM hires a whole bunch of interns and co-ops.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know.</comment></comment>


Why is a finance company looking to hire game developers? - <AUTHOR> https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/Game-Developer-%28C%2B%2B-or-Java%29-to-switch-to-Finance-%28175%26%2345250k%29-Gambit-Technologies-New-York-NY-10001/10116662/JS859529822279739?icid=sr1-1p&q=Game%20Developer%20(C++%20OR%20Java)%20to%20switch%20to%20Finance%20(175-280k%20)&l=10001 <comment><AUTHOR> I have no personal or business connection to Gambit Technologies.

But why the heck would a finance company be looking to hire game developers, specifically?

<comment><USER2> Latency? I think the assumption is that mmporgs need super low latency to support that type of experience. Stock markets also require as low a latency as possible. A fraction of a second lead over the competition could allow a finance company to buy low and sell high, making lots of money.</comment></comment>


HoloLens: A Preview of the Future - <AUTHOR> https://daeken.svbtle.com/hololens-a-piece <comment><AUTHOR> While product reviews are rarely featured on HN, I figure some folks here might appreciate this. I still feel weird cheerleading a Microsoft product, but damn, it's incredible.</comment>


Less is Moore - <AUTHOR> https://samgentle.com/posts/2015-04-26-less-is-moore <comment><USER2> The problem with this kind of YAGNI thinking is that it 1. commits everyone to understanding how to do everything and 2. requires everyone to do everything afresh, every project. The fact is, I don't know the gory details of all the Unicode encodings, XML Namespaces, multithreaded concurrency locks, database indexing strategies, or SVG rendering pipelines my code uses every day. While I can dive down to understand those things if need be, at any given moment I don't know even a fraction of those things my program directly uses. If I had to dive down on them, I wouldn't get productive work done. And as a group, we'd each be reinventing slightly different, mostly crappy single-use versions of The Wheel. Thanks, but I'm perfectly happy standing on the shoulders of giants--even if it gets a little wobbly some times.

<comment><USER3> When it comes to really supporting non-english languages well, you kinda do have to know gory details of Unicode. (I had to.) Otherwise, stuff will mysteriously not work, and you won't know what to do. OS X / Windows filenames will surprise you. Python on OS X / Windows will surprise you. Javascript will surprise you. URLs will surprise you. There's a lot of surprises in store.

If you have some real-time large-ish-data need, you'll need to evaluate your options based on how they manage concurrency and locking. You may even have to implement a custom cache or archive layer. (I had to.)

I'll admit, I haven't dealt with SVG rendering, and it wasn't important to any company I've worked for. In cases like that, you can say "whatever, fast enough on today's computers, this one doesn't work so I'll replace it with a png." But if you really need stuff to work right, if you want it done right, you don't have to do it all yourself, but you do have to understand it all yourself, otherwise you can't correctly choose and marshall the pieces that do it.

EDIT: I feel like adding an addendum: yes, the specific views described in OP are historic relics. Still... the number of levels that exist today between do-it-yourself c programming with an alternative/minimal libc, and a ruby/rails/activerecord/auth-gems/assets-gems project, is really amazing.

<comment><USER4> _the number of levels that exist today between do-it-yourself c programming with an alternative /minimal libc_

Turtles all the way down. I'm working right now own an OS-less Forth system to run on a SoC, and keep thinking "man, how much easier would this be if I had a kernel and a library!"

Meanwhile, somebody else is probably working on a pure logic processor and thinking "wow, I wish I had a full SoC to work with..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I came into contact with a version of this philosophy even earlier, in The > Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. In the story, there > are aliens called Engineers who only build special-purpose things. To them, > there's no such thing as a generic chair. They would instead build a Sam- > chair to my exact proportions. If those proportions changed because of a > series of brownie-related incidents, they'd rebuild the chair. Every item in > their world is custom-made for its particular purpose. Both Moore and > Niven's specialisation philosophies came from resource-constrained > environments: the Engineers because of the limited physical resources on > their home planet

To expand on this, and why Moore's views are a niche and will remain that way for a long time: in _Mote_, the aliens in question have been trapped on the same planet for millions of years, typically overpopulated, and have evolved to an extremely high degree to cope with living at (and sometimes beyond) the Malthusian limits. The Engineers are an example of these adaptations at work - because there are so many Moties, Motie time and labor is dirt-cheap (specifically, they are at the Malthusian limit where their wages equal how much it costs to live the most minimal life) while resources remain at their usual finite amounts; and so, it pays to have Engineers finetune and customize each product, for the same reason evolution leads to ultra-optimized (but often unclean and inelegant) solutions.

In contrast, as ugly incidents like the wagefixing scandal at Google/Apple/etc show, we face the _opposite_ situation. Real resources are extremely abundant, and computations have never been cheaper, while programmer time remains expensive. So it makes little sense to take a Moore/Engineer approach, and instead generally the tradeoff of performance for more generality is made.

This will remain true for as long as the cost of programmers remains the main part of running software compared to the resources like CPU or RAM or joules consumed to run the software. (The software could be run at Internet-scale, in which case the possible efficiencies from specialization are worth the programmer time; or programmers themselves could become much more abundant, such as in a Robin Hanson upload/emulation SF-like scenario.)

<comment><USER6> The corrollary to this is that sometimes a Company hits scale where having a few "Moties" customize/refine every level of the stack saves billions and suddenly it's financially worth it.

It has always been a cost/benefit analysis. The hard part is figuring out the costs and benefits when it comes time to make that decision.

Case in point. My current work is in C# with some Go sprinkled around. Go happened because the c# Console an IO api's are a hopeless mess. They are bloated with everything under the sun and special cased in the API. And to top it all of they are just about the farthest thing from composable. The creators of C#'s standard library created a monstrosity in the name of abstraction that ultimately was harder to use correctly. What is the cost of that decision? Longer development times than is necessary for projects that do IO in C#. Late refactors when you realize you should have been using a TextReader instead of a StreamReader and you have these seams running all through your app that have to change now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll make a stronger case to Keep it Simple: even if you have infinite computing resources and memory, implementing the simplest possible thing is far easier for other programmers to understand than the ugly generalized 'abstractions' most of us come up with 99% of the time. That 'cognitive bottleneck' will remain no matter how far back you push the resource bottleneck, and it will keep an anti-abstraction ethos competitive.

(Now, the Forth way isn't the one I would choose to be easy to understand: [http://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack- machines....](http://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack- machines.html). But that's a separate story..)

<comment><USER8> Actually, if your language is designed right, abstractions become much cheaper, especially conceptually. As an example, I find a call to `map' or `filter' much easier to understand than a (C-style) `for' loop.

Part of your point still stands: the `for' loop is harder to read and write specifically because it is more general. `for' loops can do all kinds of wacky things.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. When I said 99% I wasn't just including what the language provides. That usually lies in the 1%, even for 'bad' languages. Generalization there is usually justified. No, I was thinking of the functions and interfaces we create _atop_ the language and standard library.

<comment> loup-vaillant Language, standard library, or custom module boundaries, it's the same problem: there are 2 kinds of generality.

The first kind is exhaustiveness. Being general by accounting for all special cases. That one is complicated, and rarely worth doing beforehand.

The second kind is genericity. Being general by _ignoring_ all the special cases. That one is often simpler and more solid than any special case. Parametric polymorphism (or generics, or templates) are like that: ignoring the specifics of the parameters limits what you can do with them, making the generic thing simpler.

The layer at which you choose to apply exhaustiveness or genericity is irrelevant in my opinion. C++ often leans towards the exhaustiveness end of the spectrum despite being a language, for instance.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. My take was that language, standard library and third-party libraries are part of the same state space, just organized by the amount of use they receive. Since user-space libraries receive less hammering (many have just one user) they're usually still in the "adding exceptions" phase and haven't yet attained (and perhaps never will attain) the simplicity on the other side of complexity when the requirements stabilize.

I think that maps to your distinction, except that I don't believe in 'exhaustiveness'. The state space of a program isn't some fixed thing for most programs. It evolves and grows in response to what we want it to do, which dimensions we choose to generalize along and where we stay stable. I think it's equally reasonable to view the evolution of special cases as equally exhaustive at every point, it's the boundaries of the state space (requirements) that is growing in strange ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This part I don't want to forget:

 _" When you take on a framework, you're like a consumer buying a product: if it does a hundred things you don't need, or doesn't do things the way you want, well, tough. That's what we've got for sale. But as a programmer you're not a consumer. You're a producer. You aren't forced to accept an abstraction that doesn't work for you, or solves a problem you don't have. The option to build the Engineer-style specialised solution that conforms exactly and only to your needs is always there."_

</comment><comment><USER10> I liked this:

 _If you 're solving problem X and realise "hang on, that's actually a special case of problem Y", it's actually the single most dangerous point in the development of your solution; you're only one step away from the logical conclusion of "I should solve Y instead". Now you're solving the wrong problem._

I think this resonates with most of us but we will still pursue the general case. I think its because problems are simpler when expressed in their general case than with all the hoary detail of a special case. Its close to a rule of nature: whenever we see complexity we can discover simple elegant rules that govern it, and as programmers who's main challenge is taming complexity, we are prepared to risk anything in our pursuit of simplicity, including more complexity...!</comment>


In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html <comment><USER2> I'm sure I'm going to take a karma hit, but please tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong, since it doesn't seem to mesh with a lot of the Snowden reporting: Snowden grabs a significant amount of the NSA's actual reporting and collection, hands it to the Washington Post and they find that:

\- The NSA is actively scrubbing the collection and removing the identities of Americans

\- The most egregious privacy violation that WaPo could find was a set of love letters between an Australian government employee and her boyfriend who went off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban

\- In the process of doing this, the NSA is pulling out information on "a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks"

\- The WaPo estimates that around 900k people's communications are caught up in the NSA's "incidental" collection

I could see an argument made for future abuse, but this really seems to fly in the face of grand conspiracy theories that we've been seeing for the last year.

<comment><USER3> I think this flies in the face only in the conspiracy theory "they are watching us because they are evil".

I don't think they are. I think the dragnet _did_ started with good intentions, _does_ bring some useful intelligence and _is_ kind of useful.

The problem is the collateral damage is just too high, and the debate should be around that.

<comment><USER2> We haven't actually been getting the data to make an informed decision on these, either. It took nearly a year to get any sort of numbers out of the government regarding how many people were being targeted[1] and they still haven't given any numbers on incidental collection. Meanwhile, most of the the media has been claiming that the communications of millions or even billions of people are being swept up, and now the Washington Post is actually looking at the data they've had for the last year and saying the number is more likely to be somewhere around 900k worldwide. I'm not saying that's necessarily a great number, but that's orders of magnitude less than what we've been led to believe. Nor does the article go into much detail on what "incidental" really means versus "targeted" \- are these people in contact with the actual targets, or completely unrelated? Is there a better way to protect the privacy of these people without compromising actual intelligence operations? If not, which side should we err on, and how far?

These are tough questions to answer - especially without hard facts. It's hard to have an honest debate when we the people are left trying to discern the actual facts somewhere between the secrecy and sensationalism.

[1] [http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/transparency/odni_transparen...](http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/transparency/odni_transparencyreport_cy2013)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A funny line:

> Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one > man. A "minimized U.S. president-elect" begins to appear in the files in > early 2009, and references to the current "minimized U.S. president" appear > 1,227 times in the following four years.

Barton Gellman clarified:

> Lotta questions on this. The 1200 references to "minimized US president" > come when people talk about him in intercepted conversations.

[https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986](https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986)

So this doesn't confirm that the NSA was reading Obama's mail, like Russ Tice has claimed. But it does belie NSA's claims that Snowden had no access to FISA material, and cast doubt on all their "stringent" security procedures to prevent misuse of intelligence material. If Snowden could sneak out with it, what else could be done without their knowledge?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it my bad understanding of the language or does the word "target" in headline mislead? I read it as "don't worry, the NSA does only target a minority" while the text starts with "Ordinary Internet users (...) far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted (...)"

I would have added "legally", so it would read "In NSA-intercepted data, those not legally targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"

<comment><USER6> Yes, this is a very confusing headline, and incorrectly appears to be reassuring. The Guardian's headline is better: "NSA intercepts: ordinary internet users 'far outnumbered' legal targets".

<comment><USER7> Agreed. One would almost think they were trying to both publish and bury this story simultaneously, as the headline is practically unintelligible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a stunning report...not least of which in how it continues to show the NSA's apparently shoddy IT...the PowerPoint presentations being taken are one thing, but the hundreds of thousands of pieces of surveillance data, and that's just what the Post chose to sift through.

Still, the specifics of data extraction aren't clear...are the NSA mining a data stream as they please from Facebook? Or are the Facebook transcripts, as detailed in the closing anecdote, a result of a data request in an ongoing investigation of a previously identified suspect?...which is, purportedly, the same kind of access any law enforcement agency can make.

<comment><USER9> > This is a stunning report.

Significance buried with poor headline, also could have been broken up into multiple stories. This is def a top 5 Snowden revelation, with the added bonus of a denial from a top official.

<comment><USER10> At least the way it's presented it appears as "nothing to see here." The main story is the guy who wants to join Talibans being monitored, including the conversations with his ex-partner who converted to Islam and who today understands that it was reasonable for such communication to be monitored.

Kind of anticlimax for the claimed "a four-month investigation by The Washington Post."

How could the article have been written to make the readers see it as "one of the top five?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So out of billions they only "target" (whatever that means) hundreds of million of people? That doesn't make me feel a lot safer. The 9:1 thing is completely out of context and meaningless. Plus, we don't know exactly what a target is and what's a non-target (on which they could still gather data...just not, you know..."target it").

</comment><comment><USER12> I have some methodological problems with this piece. They're making claims about the makeup of this data set, that 50% of the documents contain minimized references to US persons for instance, or that 90% of the account holders were not intelligence targets, but we don't actually know whether this data represents NSA collections as a whole. There are 160,000 documents over a four-year period. That seems far too low to be the sum total of all NSA collections, so it must be a sample. But is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? How do we know that Snowden didn't choose data from one particular program or using certain selectors and that that particular data tends to have more or less US persons or a higher or lower percentage of intelligence targets than NSA intercepts taken as a whole?

I also find the following claim problematic: >> Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimized," more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy...

So there were 65,000 minimized references in 160,000 documents. But we also know that a "minimized reference" doesn't actually mean the a US person was the sender or the recipient - for instance, we know from Gellman that someone talking about President Obama would constitute a minimized reference. The first sentence, "Many of them were American" is not quantified, likely because the Post doesn't actually know how many participants in the intercepts were American.

<comment><USER13> > Is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some > criteria?

Let's take one probable situation: Let's say Snowden took everything he could. That means there a gathering of data made by an employee at the NSA which results in 90% non-intelligence targets. What was the employee working on?

\- Increasing the relevance of data? Not probable.

\- Working on a usual sample of data? Most probable.

\- Targetting non-intelligence targets on purpose? Scary and illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The infographic shows 556 intercepted videos out of 100,000 intercepted communications, the majority of which are text messages and email.

So why aren't the terrorist evildoers hiding their few KB of text communications within multi-GB YouTube videos of cats and video games?

<comment><USER9> USA claim AQ have been using stenography since the 90s:

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen.htm)

Commercial companies then built tools to identify most common steg, and AQ adapted by writing their own algorithms - which turned out to be not very good:

[http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda- documents-f...](http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents- future/index.html)

It still breaks down, because you need to pre-share the arrangement of how you will exchange information that is hidden in images.

<comment><USER15> That really puts into perspective how _huge_ Yo app is a threat to national security. It's only a matter of time until the NSA is intercepting Yos, or at least capturing Yo metadata.

<comment><USER16> I bet a Yo takeover is coming within few months. Buying the company may cost less than hacking it...

<comment><USER17> already got a insider - [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo- founder...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder-hack- hires-hackers-chat-app)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Talks, Tutorials, and Poster selections announced - <AUTHOR> http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/12/talks-tutorials-and-poster-selections.html?utm_source=Python+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e686019ae7-Python_Weekly_Issue_118_December_19_2013

<comment><USER2> My lightning talk - "Traversing the Montreal Métro with Python" \- was accepted, and I'm super-excited!

But also I'm super-excited about the rest of the schedule. There are 36 talks that I'm really interested in seeing, and I don't think that's even physically possible. So I guess I have to decide which ones I'll have to settle for watching on pyvideo.org.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like a great bunch of talks. Thanks to everyone who helped put the schedule together. The entire staff that puts on Pycon every year is all volunteer, and generally takes quite a bit of time to get it all put together.

</comment><comment><USER4> It feels really good when 100% of the technologies you're using on your latest big project are the subject of a talk. Too bad i don't live in the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's actually happening in Canada for next two upcoming PyCon. Though they do release the videos afterward if you can't make it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know on average how much is the financial assistance?</comment>


Show HN: MiAlio - a Personalized Social commerce site - <AUTHOR> http://www.mialio.com About MiAlio.com
MiAlio is the starting place for your discovery, shopping and sharing journey based on and controlled by YOU.
A very brief history about us:
We had a problem with shopping. The problem was that we did not know where to start shopping for products. Beyond that, we weren't even sure what products we should be shopping for. Once we solved that laborious, time-wasting exercise, we had trouble making the buy decisions with confidence that the product would be right for us.
We assumed there would be a website that would tailer a shopping to US the INDIVIDUAL and make relevant recommendations. However, after searching high and low, we didn't find anything that would help. Current websites only help you shop in these ways:
-Recommendations based on past purchases. -Recommendations based on tracking your clicks. -Recommendations based on random reviews. -Recommendations from your friends.
You can spend countless hours surfing! Since we love technology, we theorized that if there was a website that helped shoppers discover new products based on their own personalities, that website would solve the above problems. We also took it a step further by allowing the shopper to share their discoveries with others - thereby solving the problem of the bad gift.
With that theory and goal, Mialio was born!
Join today...your profile can be completed in less time than creating a profile on popular social networks. <comment><USER2> I suppose it could be interesting but I was unable to join and was not able to read the text on the How It Works page.

I get a little concerned when I read a statement like "Shoppers have no good way to shop online". My experience is almost diametrically the opposite.

<comment><AUTHOR> pbreit,

Thank you for taking a look. What were your log-in issues? Beta testing is fun!

Email me at: email@example.com</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google Maps vs. OSM in countries like India - <AUTHOR>

	Hello everyone.
I am making an app which will be using a map service extensively. Now Being an open source enthusiastic, I want to use Open Street Maps as it is open and also highly customizable.
As my app will be focused towards the Indian audience, Less open data on Open Street Maps for India like countries has made this decision hard for me.
Here is a comparison to see how less details OSM has. http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/30.7125/76.7832&num=4&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map&mt2=bing-map&mt3=mapnik-german
Any suggestions on how can we use OSM and still have extensive data ? <comment><USER2> It all depends on what you want from "using a map service"? Why do you want "extensive data" \- what does that really mean for the app?

This is absolutely key. Do you just want a backdrop for your own data, do you want to run queries on the data itself. Etc. Etc. Whatever you choose should be the best fit for you.

For OSM - if you want more data in the area, then you add more data in that area. Mostly the data is added by people like you and me. Sometimes it's added when there is some good compatible open dataset that can be imported.

If you want to talk to OpenStreetMappers then one of the places to sign up to is the Indian OSM Mailing list.

[https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk- in](https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-in)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you open the link provided, you can see that OSM doesn't even have basic road names. So in any app, that would be a big drawback. thanks for your reply. Whats going on my mind is that I will use Google Maps for some time. Cause this will make easy for users. When we will have enough users, we'll make the switch. Porting all our data to OSM. What do you think about this ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The only way that I can think of being able to have extensive data is to make a separate scraper or something of the sort to look up a location and receive information of that location via the scraper. Such a method would be hard to configure, however.

As far as I'm aware, there are no out of the box solutions to this problem.

<comment><USER2> Scrapers generally imply liberating information from hard to read sources. I think you are implying that the scraper would scrape / copy data from other copyrighted digital maps to put into OpenStreetMap.

That would not be allowed to happen with OpenStreetMap - for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best way to make it work with OSM is form a community to improve the data.</comment>


Russian crowdfunded reflector satellite aims to be "brightest star in the sky" - chris-at http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/russian-crowdfunded-reflector-satellite-aims-to-be-brightest-star-in-the-sky/ <comment><AUTHOR> In the 1980s there was a proposal for something similar, a "light ring in space" from Europe. That project was decorative, a pretty object to look at.

It was obviously a stupid idea and scientists did a good job of explaining why.

[https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i6PR8dMk1GUC&pg=PA60&lpg...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i6PR8dMk1GUC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=european+satellite+project+reflective+ring&source=bl&ots=DIhVLIUydE&sig=3_JY39T4zy2WbY- QuJGUvrcLi7U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt7Pq2uqTLAhVMDxoKHTluDQYQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=european%20satellite%20project%20reflective%20ring&f=false)

(For fuck's sake Google. Look at that stupid hideous URL.)

<comment><USER2> "a sky filled with orbiting trademarks or political symbols. These billboards, perpetually overhead, from which there would be no escape on earth."

<comment><USER3> Just increase light pollution enough and the problem is solved :)

<comment><USER4> Lol, AdBlock Lux

<comment><USER5> Michael Herf should build a version of flux that actually changes the color of the night sky, at night.

<comment><USER3> Once enough people bought shitty hackable color-changing light bulbs...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess the next step would be to crowdfund a rocket to remove this light pollution/ad?

<comment><AUTHOR> Who'd risk Kessler Effect?

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

<comment><USER7> This is beyond the scope of my knowledge so maybe it's a stupid question, but why doesn't space debris deorbit on its own like anything else not in geostationary orbit?

<comment><USER8> From the wikipedia entry:

> Orbital decay is much slower at altitudes where atmospheric drag is > insignificant. Slight atmospheric drag, lunar perturbation, and solar wind > drag can gradually bring debris down to lower altitudes where fragments > finally reenter, but this process can take millennia at very high altitudes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The idea expressed at the end of the article "orbiting mirrors could be used to extend the length of daylight hours for harvests" actually sounds like it could be very reasonable. Vertical farming and aquaponics is currently restricted by light to a large extent. If this solves the lighting problem for vertical farming, we could end up with a 10000 layer farm built into an old mine quary that could feed a large country. And then all of that farm land could be left to nature :) Deforestation could be reversed, and the reversal of deforestation could play a key roll in reducing the roll of carbon emissions...

<comment><USER9> I think you're vastly overestimating how much area would be available in a farm built into an old quarry.

A 4km by 1km parcel of land is not large for farming. But put vertically, it represents the biggest open cut mines ever made.

<comment><USER2> So, working with 4Km2... There are 13 million square kilometers of arible land on earth: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land) . If the virtical farm is strung up with 400 meters of 10cm layers, that makes 4000 layers. That would be 16 000 square kilometers of farming area, or a bit over 0.1% of all arible land. I think that with modern vertical farming, using a 24 hour year around light source, the farming surface can produce several times the avarage arible land production. Lets say 4 times... That would make almost 0.5% of the world farm production in just one tiny area. So it would take just 200 such constructions to replace tradtional farming entirely...

<comment><USER10> You need arable soil for all 4000 layers. You will be taking valuable topsoil from just as much land.

<comment><USER2> That is not how aquaponics and vertical farming work. They use solulable nutrients which are either gained through a nutrient cycle (the water flows down to a pool which has fish in it), or via mining of otherwise hard to get nutrients. Soil is not used. While the source of all these nutrients is a problem, it is comparible to the huge quantities of petrolium based fertilizers that we use today. It is bad, but what we have now is bad too...

<comment> saiya-jin ... so you are proposing a bad idea that seems pretty wrong from multiple aspects. generally hydroponics is a sh __t cheap substitute for real growing for those who cannot afford quality vegetables (sadly, I sometimes fall down that hole too and then regret this decision while eating this tasteless cr*p full of unhealthy chemistry).

no, thank you for many reasons

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope this idea literally never gets off the ground. If one person/company gets approval to go ahead, there will be no end to the people/companies seeking approval, and there goes ground-based astronomy.

<comment><USER12> Yeah we don't need Russian "taste" in space. As someone who's traveled there, they have very different ideas on whats socially acceptable. Big ads/lights in the sky might be fine there, but certainly not everywhere. This is the kind of thing we should all be fighting against, not encouraging with "me too" upvotes on social media. This is simply space graffiti. The commercialization of space should not mean the ad-ification of space.

As launch prices drop, I think we'll see more of these shenanigans. This really should be stopped now.

<comment><USER13> >This really should be stopped now.

Sure, stopping this instance is possibly worth the trouble, but what about next time? Amateur satellites are already possible, thus the possibility of an ever increasing occurrence of space graffiti.

The first issue is how one can stop space graffiti entirely. Should the UN get involved? Should NATO get involved? In any case, it would either be a statutory matter (pass a law against however-defined graffiti in space) or a military matter (use generally expensive anti-satellite missiles or lasers). The means to stop space graffiti seems to be rather expensive and politically charged/dependent. (for reference, I am not assuming that you want to do anything in particular, but I bring up criminalization of and shooting down space graffiti just to get on with my point.)

The second issue is what harm is cause by space graffiti. Sure, unaware astronomers would be at least annoyed. Do they deserve a natural night sky to make their jobs easier? Space graffiti seems like art to me, but space debris seems the more serious possible problem. Since this specific instance of space graffiti seems to have planned for that, I think that harm is not a problem herewith.

The third issue is whether anyone is obliged to not put astronomically obnoxious objects in orbit around earth; is this the same kind of "don't do" as assault or vandalism? If this specific instance of space graffiti were launched without public awareness, then astronomers might find this space art to be a problem, but I think that astronomers are probably watching news outlets for these sort of launches. Anything on the other side of the space graffiti is not un-see-able, but is that reason enough to either criminalize or shoot down space graffiti. Does anyone deserve the night sky to contain only natural light sources, but also a few super-useful objects (e.g. GPS satellites)?

I bring all this up, because I hope to demonstrate that space graffiti, as stupid as it may be, is a very limited problem. It seems that the stupidity associated with a problem makes the problem seem bigger; ask anyone who has seen prank videos on YouTube whether the government should try to stop pranks. Graffiti on earth is often vandalism and art, yet nobody owns space so space graffiti cannot be vandalism but is still some sort of art.

<comment><USER14> (Edit: my comment on space debris was completely redundant with something you said elsewhere in your post!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would it be feasible to deploy massive solar sails to cast a shadow and prevent solar heat from hitting the earth, so that over enough time it might reverse some of the effects of global warming?

<comment><USER16> Please, remember that we literally live on solar energy. That's what we eat. And that's also the most promising alternative from the global warming causing fossil fuels.

So, please, don't take the solar energy away.

<comment><USER17> Engineering aside, you could perhaps position this shadow strategically over some place that is uninhabited and which wouldn't cause too much weirdness in our climate. Or perhaps many small shadows. My guess would be that you would want them over the oceans. Or maybe Kim Jong-un's house.

Alternatively, if geostationary is too high up, perhaps just wrap them at a particular latitude near the equator, spaced out so they just make an effect like a perpetually cloudy day. You then just have to keep your solar panels and needy crops off that latitude.

<comment><USER16> If you want a big enough effect to detail global warming, you'll need a big enough effect to change the climate. There's no place it "wouldn't cause too much weirdness in our climate".

If you place them over the equator, you've just destroyed the places with the highest plant growing and solar energy harvesting potential. Granted it is not the most used place of the world today, just the one with most potential.

If you place the shadows over the oceans, you'll completely change the environment there, and help destroy its bigger species, that we eat too.

<comment><USER17> Well, the whole point is that the Earth, due to greenhouse effects, is taking in too much sunlight compared to what it is radiating back out into space. So yeah, you're going to be reducing the total potential harvestable sunlight getting to Earth. However, that's not really a constraint for us at the moment. We just care about tapping sunlight in places near where there is a demand for energy. So, you could probably find a nice band around the Earth where the inability to place highly efficient solar panels wouldn't be missed sorely.

By 'too much weirdness' I'm referring to instigating entirely new and dangerous weather patterns. Ideally, you could keep the weather roughly the same, with the lowered temperatures disbursed enough to create a measurable but not easily noticeable effect.

And we're also not talking about plunging the area into permanent darkness, we're talking about enough reflection to reduce average global temperatures by a few degrees (or at least prevent them from rising further). I expect that could be done, if spread out enough, without enough of an impact on any one area to impact local environments.

Of course, this is all just theoretical. I doubt it's actually a reasonable course of action. I just don't think this is why it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of a sci-fi book that I cannot remember the name of, in which the Coca Cola company deliberately initiates the supernovae of 100+ stars in order to spell out the message "COKE ADDS LIFE!" in the night sky.

<comment><USER19> According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising) it was "a Red Dwarf novel". The page doesn't say which one, but a bit of googling suggests it may have been _Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers_.

<comment><USER18> How embarrassing for me :)

For some reason I was half convinced it was HGTTG. Probably because I read them at about the same time, when I was about 10.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I stumbled upon this article the other day: [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-who-turned-night- in...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-who-turned-night-into-day) it's about the previous Znamya experiments [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_%28satellite%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_%28satellite%29)

</comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone thought of the impact this might have on earth based observations? We already have Iridium flares that happen from shiny satellite parts, and these flares have disturbed observations from various observatories (and this wasn't even intentional).

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

</comment><comment><USER22> Technically, isn't the sun the "brightest star in the sky"?

<comment><USER23> Not at night!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The "Russian moon" has been an on again off again urban legend/hoax for probably 50 years. Don't fall for it again.

</comment><comment><USER25> We need a kickstarter to bring this thing down if it's ever launched.

</comment><comment><USER26> With a solar cell and a tether, it could stay up forever?

</comment><comment><USER27> But, why?

<comment><USER28> From the Russian site, googletranslated:

" This space satellite, which will be the brightest star in the night sky. Star, which will remind the world who was the first in space and show that the contribution to space exploration can contribute not only to the state and corporations. "

<comment><USER29> I just puked.

Good thing this is a russian kickstarter thing - with 95% probability it is a fraud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> so the first piece of ringworld?</comment>


What's Next for AppJet - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appjet.com/2008/11/18/whats-next-for-appjet/

<comment><USER2> AppJet is really cool, it's a drop-dead simple way of doing javascript server web development, and great for both novice programmers whetting their teeth and grizzled hands to tinker with.

It's missing a few features that would really make it useful (and render me willing to plunk down money for services above and beyond the free sandbox). I keep reading where the AppJet crew embarks on more grandiose global transformation schemes like earlier, wanting to port to PHP, or now, seeming to enter the web framework space.

But it strikes me that a few added features would really finish off the polish…

* …ability to upload image and static file assets. Indeed, there are workarounds for this deficiency, but a simple "file" manager tab (with limits and caps and security to prevent abuse) to allow uploading images and resource (or CSS) files.

* …SQL DB and/or improved object storage. Persistence via the storage library is nifty, but more useful would be the ability for more structured data storage.

* …not certain how stable the JS server side engine is.

On the AppJet forums, I read feedback for desire for templating but if the above was remedied, incorporating template library would be a no-brainer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like they're also working on scalability @etherpad

[http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/beta-update-thanks-for- bei...](http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/beta-update-thanks-for-being- patient)</comment>


Personal telegram bot for your readers - <AUTHOR> https://notifier.taskforge.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Please refresh once if you don't see the, `Join the beta List` button.

Wanted to do show HN, but the rules page shows that you can't post if the product is not ready to use for the users.

I am not sure if it can be directly used for now, but you can get the gist by clicking on `Join the beta List` button.

Please try it out and let me what do you think of the idea.</comment>


What's the Best Medium for a Storyteller in 2015 and Beyond? - T-A http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/hugh-hancock-here-again-charli.html <comment><AUTHOR> I spent most of my time reading this being annoyed by the title. Why does the best medium for a storyteller have anything to do with how profitable it is or how many consumers access your work? If these are your goals then you aren't going to create anything very good. If you disagree then you probably think that only very popular things are any good.

Here's the future of any story teller: smaller.

The 20th century was about Top 40 radio, blockbuster movies, and the New York Times bestseller list. The 21st century is about variety. The behemoths of the last century are still shaping the marketplace and it will take them a while to die. DRM, region-lock, and vendor-log are symptoms of this disease. The future is about unrestricted sharing, crowd-funding, DRM-free and _low cost_ media. A dollar here and there so everything is an impulse – small communities sharing the things they love instead of national best sellers.

Vimeo does a pretty good job. Netflix is more of an iteration on the last century, it's pretty great, but not the end-all.

The future of creativity is about dealing with the lack of limits. Old microphones, amplifiers, and vinyl meant that with the restrictions of the media, what you had either sounded good or really terrible. New technology makes it really easy to be mediocre and terrible at the same time – being good without the restrictions of old is really hard.

The future of selling is about the slow exit of capitalism – crowd funding, open source, community support ... being creative without worrying about sales or buying your next meal ... this is the future which is hard to get to but the beginning is here. This is not Carl Marx's communism but a different sort of post-scarcity capitalism where automation makes resources cheap enough that the cost of them loses importance. It'll be difficult and weird, but it'll happen one way or the other.

Then again, none of this has a whole lot to do with actually telling stories, something which isn't about money or viewers, but about the act of creation which is still done with words and songs and pictures, new technology is a new playground that doesn't obsolete the old but adds to the new.

<comment><USER2> I guess some people want to be story tellers and some people want to have been a story teller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> (The post goes on in exploring the technical and commercial side of each medium. I think the title is unsuitable to the article but, as it was what stuck with me, it's what I'm going to address)

I think this is a non-question. Let me rephrase the question: "If I want to tell a story, what is the best medium to use in 2015 and beyond?".

My answer is "Whatever you want" followed by a more serious "None".

Because the choice of medium impacts in HOW the story is told. Having, for example, the Moby Dick _story_ as a book is completely different from having it as a movie. Or as a game.

Of course the story may change slightly or have a different impact depending of the medium. Some stories work better in some media than others. Think of the story as data, and the medium as the format in which the medium is conveyed.

In a semi-related note, I want note that the big _connoisseurs_ of a medium start to focum more on how the medium is used than it's content (i.e. story stops being important, what's important is how it is told)

<comment><USER4> I'll also add that the vast majority of creative people don't choose their medium based on its potential reach - they choose it based on where their passions lie. In order to make great art, an artist has to be passionate about the medium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Based on what I read of the article (about 2/3), it seems like the question this article is answering is, "In which entertainment medium can you make the most money in a least-hard way? "

The best medium for a storyteller will be, as others have said upthread, whatever they want to use. I am a writer in my non-work world. I have played around with podcasting, vlogging, blogging, and comics, but the best way for me to tell a story is through words, no matter how hard it is to distribute those words. I was writing even before Amazon KDP democratized that medium, and I will be writing even if it becomes hard again, because I love to write and I get the most joy out of storytelling that way. I think there are some people who are medium-agnostic, but most are not.

</comment><comment><USER6> The best medium is not where everyone else is already doing it. It is finding somewhere with enough foundation to build on, but who's value is underrated and who's opportunities are being ignored. There's an obvious candidate in storytelling.

Audio.

As it was in the beginning of storytelling, so it should be again. There's a market for audiobooks, but they are audio books (somewhat like having audio food, or visual music). Radio drama has sunk, exclude holdouts like the BBC's Radio 4 in the UK. Podcasts never quite died, despite predictions.

Feels like an area that is just crying out for innovation and renaissance.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've written thoughts on this before, and concluded that it's not just any one thing, but a never-ending evolution of media based on a new medium: [https://medium.com/@arxpoetica/a-new- mythology-6ab0aaad0f37](https://medium.com/@arxpoetica/a-new- mythology-6ab0aaad0f37)

</comment><comment><USER8> Take a look at Starship Titanic. Very ambitious attempt for a writer to make a game/story/interactive-thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> A pan flute

</comment><comment><USER10> narrable is a cool product in the space</comment>