Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours - <AUTHOR> https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/26/everything-is-amazing-but-nothing-is-ours/ <comment><USER3> > _" Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made > out of dependencies."_

A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - <USER2> "worlds of abundance" are made of _relationships_. And not in a good way.

When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a _relationship_ with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's _another relationship to keep track of_.

Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service as a matter of principle.

I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.

<comment><USER4> Your first paragraph is so salient.

I think most people miss how powerful relationships are in a network of abundance. You really nailed it.

Unless we can turn these relationships on their head, economically speaking.

Been trying to work out the math on this for the last year. Recently gave a talk on it ([https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1HJdrBk3BlE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1HJdrBk3BlE)) would you mind sharing your thoughts on it and on abundance/relationships in general?

One of the technical directors of Silicon Valley TV show and I were talking, and he's very interested in what they call the "Post-Subscription Economy".

Basically Google and Netflix hijacked Hollywood, and now a lot of the studios are interested in what's next, for fear of missing out again.

<comment><USER3> Ok, so I watched your talk. You're a good, charismatic speaker. That said, I don't think I understood everything on the first pass. I have my concerns that it's not a solid idea, but I like the direction where it's heading. And so, I have loads of questions, like:

1) Is the % daily value a self-reported quantity? You seem to strongly suggest it is.

2) You described a hope - not unreasonable one - that under your ideal conditions, cheating on self-reporting of % daily values will make no sense and naturally disappear. But what about the conditions in which your system exists in parallel to the current one? How to prevent economic arbitrage? I.e. people misreporting their % daily value estimate to extract goods and services from your system, which then they sell for money in our current system?

3) Is there any form of money backing your system? If not, then how the people who have nothing to give to the society are supported? Wouldn't there be a poverty class in your system too? Does it have better economic mobility?

4) Do you have any more details about algorithms underpinning freeism, and how should they be created?

Did you write an article or a paper about this that goes into more details? I'd love to read it.

Cheers!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

(1) yes.

This is concerning for me too, but no other model I've explored let's us as accurately get at what the perceived value is other than directly asking.

Have any ideas for novel models? I'd love to connect you with someone that has a PhD in Economic Mathematical Models that is helping contribute to the design of this system.

If the abuses can be more easily adjusted for than the difficulting of interpreting a proxy measure in value, then I think there is merit.

For instance, if at a macroeconomic level we see coffee has a 2% daily value with only 1% variance, then we see some outlier claiming coffee was 69% of their daily value, it might mean something odd is going on. But knowing that for most people that coffee accurately represents 2% has far more possible wins in understanding logistics than the assumptions of other methods.

(2) Correct.

From my design stance, I see this as a feature not a bug. Could you expand on edge cases where this would produce harm for the % system?

It seems the harm would be for the legacy system, and the arbitrage is strategic.

Giving in this system is not obligatory. So if too many abundant goods get scraped, they'll turn into scarcity goods that require a higher Giving Index, OR it will represent market demand for an entrepreneur/startup to scale up the manufacturing/production of that good, to maintain its abundance factor.

Again, note, in $USD often the more of a good there is causes cost to fall. This is not true in %, a good may still have a high percent value, even if it is readily available to all. So there is a lot of profit (higher Giving Index = access to more luxury goods) to be made on these high demand high valued items. $USD is self defeating, the more Tesla you can produce outpacing demand, the cheaper you want to price them. Does this mean Tesla have lower and lower economic worth or value?

Arbitraging the system, skimming goods and selling them to legacy for $USD means you're not gaining inbound % value statements (as in you're not gaining wealth in the new system, the Giving Index) so perhaps you putting high % values on the goods you are skimming is more accurate than you'd think? They're maybe getting more value from it as a result of the arbitrage than purely somebody in the new system using it (say a banana) for average consumption.

This is why it would be an intentional feature. But please, if I'm missing an edge case that results in harm, please illuminate me!

(3) UBI is baked into the system!

First off, UBI doesn't work with money due to the inflation problem.

There is no money. That is because you don't need to pay (transact) for majority of goods (food, housing, etc. post scarce in USA, tho not other places) to be given to you, you just need to state how much value you get from them each day.

Here is a good thread on if Walmart were to give away groceries in this system: [https://mobile.twitter.com/marknadal/status/1174489487679709...](https://mobile.twitter.com/marknadal/status/1174489487679709185)

So the "poverty class" becomes the consumer class. Their needs should be taken care of, they would be material rich, but not prioritized in luxury or in waiting lines, the Biggest Givers would be able to skip to the front of a coffee shop, bakery, airport boarding, etc.

Better mobility yes, because you wouldn't need capital before doing a startup to pay for rent and employees. All you'd need to do is form a team with your friends (like many do in online games as "guilds") and invest your time into making or distributing products.

Economics mobility is incentived here because gangs of teenagers could go into Costco, get bulk of bananas, and then be last-mile distributors (TaskRabbit, etc.) without needing capital first to buy the bananas (obviously they could not do this for luxury items yet).

(4) yes!

A soft introduction is [http://free.eco](http://free.eco) and the PhD is starting [https://github.com/goognin/freeism/wiki/Welcome-to-The- New-E...](https://github.com/goognin/freeism/wiki/Welcome-to-The-New- Economics-Game) to help organize thoughts. Plus [http://chat.free.eco](http://chat.free.eco) is a community of people discussing this!

I'll email you to follow up more, thanks so much for your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _If the current trend of technology is sweeping us in a direction of "everything is amazing, but nothing is ours", Technology that's Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend_

So GNU or it's predecessors, circa the birth of the personal computer.

if "the cloud and apps" is cognate with "timeshare mainframes and thin clients", and I think it is, then everything old is new again and i look forward to taking back what's ours, again.

<comment><USER6> GNU is part of the problem. If you depend on GPL software, you depend on something which isn't yours, in that your behavior is restricted.

<comment><USER7> I think you are mistaken.

GPL places no restrictions on how you USE the software.

You can use it for any purpose. You can modify it, adding or deleting code in any way you want.

If you don't redistribute the software, it ends there.

The GPL only comes into play if you redistribute the software. You then have the responsibility to pass on the source code with any modifications you've made so that subsequent users have the same rights you do.

Other licenses like BSD and MIT do not have these restrictions. You could fork and close the software, distributing binaries that do things the users might not agree with but would not be able to discern and counteract.

<comment><USER8> I've been debating GPL vs MIT in my head a bit lately. I've always thought that when I do open source my projects they would be GPL because I always liked the idea that if I am going to share, you have to share as well.

In the last little while I have been wondering if the negative side effects of forcing others to be open outweigh the benefits.

I don't really have a point. I just think its interesting.

<comment><USER3> I used to be pro-MIT, now I'm increasingly leaning towards licensing my stuff under GPL. Yes, this means some of that stuff won't be usable in a typical commercial settings (and there were times where I had to roll my own implementation of some functionality at work, because the only good library available was under GPL). But I want to live in a world GPL tries to make happen.

MIT & friends are licenses that benefit developers. GPL family focuses on benefits to _end users_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm very sensitive to this. The notion of "buying" a piece of content on Amazon is borderline offensive to me. You don't own anything!

I own a DVD that I can continue to play as long as I own a DVD player. What I'm "buying" from Amazon is a promise that Amazon will continue to give this to me and only me, so long as they are around and available. I can't resell it and I have nothing the moment they cease to exist. That's not ownership.

(Setting aside the somewhat absurd notion of "renting" vs. "buying", when both do the same thing. Renting just requires you to throw away the bits after...)

If you agree with the above, you might like LBRY ([https://lbry.com](https://lbry.com) or [https://lbry.tech](https://lbry.tech)), which in addition to letting you stream or download no-DRM files, permanently records your access rights in a blockchain.

<comment><USER10> > You don't own anything!

This is true. But the counterpoint is the things you own end up owning you. There's a reason Marie Kondo and the philosophy of minimalism is so popular in this era.

I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs. I don't want to store them. I don't want to keep track of them. I don't want another box to pack up and deal with when moving. I could rip them onto a hard disk. But now I'm managing a virtual inventory instead of a physical inventory. That's an improvement, but it's still a pain in the ass.

Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.

There's a reason that services have replaced products to such an extent. Both in consumer and enterprise. And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.

That being said, I'm sympathetic to Stallman-esque arguments against giving up control. And from an ecosystem level standpoint that's probably bad. But from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice. The reality is that services are here to stay, and if we're worried about Stallman-type concerns than we need to build better, freer (as in speech) services.

<comment><USER11> It seems to me that the "pets v cattle" argument about servers now also applies to cultural products.

There's so many books and films that you're not supposed to care about them individually. They just make a Content library, and you consume Content. Because more Content is continually produced, you'll never run dry of things to put in front of your eyes.

(I don't like this and think it's bad for culture, as it leads to things like the Disney Vault)

<comment><USER3> Conversely, that's why I consider exclusive releases _prima facie_ anticompetitive. Cultural products are to a large extent pets, or non- substitutable goods. If you want to watch Game of Thrones, you won't accept the newest Star Wars as a substitute. Exclusive deals essentially destroy competitive pressures that would otherwise apply.

(I'm aware that solving this is not as simple as straight out banning exclusive releases.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a good take. Ownership is one of those things that I _feel_ intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally. But I struggle to put my concerns into concrete, relatable examples that the everyday user might appreciate. The 'access until it is no longer' narrative seems to fit that pretty well.

<comment><USER13> This is something I think we have been hit hard by with video games. The first wave of online enabled games has now had their servers shut down and the games rendered unplayable. One of my favorite childhood games from about 2006 (Viva Pinata) is now unplayable on windows because it used Games for Windows Live which has now shut down. The game is basically entirely offline and single player but is now unusable unless you use the xbox 360 version which works fine because it could be used entirely offline.

<comment><USER14> Maybe, broadly speaking, that's just the way life is. Things exist for awhile and then they don't. Bands eventually stop touring and seeing them live is a thing of the past. The character of your city is likely quite different as compared to a generation ago. That amazing restaurant went out of business. If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against?

<comment><USER15> I don't expect a band to live forever to keep doing live shows, but if I buy their CD I don't expect someone to break into my home and take it at any point in the future, but plenty of people have lost their music because of shitty DRM schemes and for those who are entirely dependent on streaming their music they will very likely not be able to find some of their favorite songs later, especially for more obscure stuff. I'm glad that I was able to pass some of my favorite games and music and books to the next generation and that they can pass them on to their kids. My collection of favorites will outlive many of the new things they enjoy today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This does not only apply to consumer software. I was just thinking that the past decade of business software has been about connecting off-the-shelf saas and cloud systems together to run businesses.

This was good for businesses wanting to quickly get onboard new technologies but it has real downsides because all these systems are scattered across the world and managed independently, making them more distributed, less transactional (more corruptible) and less tailored to the specific industries they're used in.

Overly distributed systems are fundamentally hard and fundamentally inefficient ( [https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf) ). Data that spends more time in memory and cpu cache instead of being thrown over global networks can be processed a lot more efficiently.

Also, if your infrastructure is made of a lot of components that anyone can buy, it's much likely for competition to emerge. You lose an important moat. Plus, oftentimes, the outside organizations holding your data can leverage it to make you pay high prices.

The next decade might be about recreating the logic of these cobbled together generic saas systems into streamlined and fully tailored software systems for each industry. There is now a lot of mature open source code for companies to use as a foundation.

As the article suggests, this could also allow moving towards fully owning data and stack instead of having too much in other companies' platforms. There is probably more incentive for this reshoring of data and software to happen for businesses so it might happen there before it does for consumers.

<comment><USER17> Competitive moats are evil.

Learn a trade. Be useful. Save your money. You don't need a moat if you're useful and have savings.

By building moats you are selling our children's future to corporate scavengers.

<comment><USER16> Knowledge and ability is a type of moat. That's why it allows you to get paid a premium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _" years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of > dependencies."_

This is true, plain old HTML files just depended on the browser's compatibility. Whereas modern _node_modules_ based projects also depend on thousands, sometimes tens of thousands additional npm dependencies...

What I've learnt with opening old node projects (2 years+), is that you better be ready to fix some things, thank god it's all open-source!

<comment><USER19> > thank god it's all open-source!

It feels like there's something super important/relevant about that throwaway comment, but I can't quite put my finger on what.

Beyond the idea that you wouldn't even be able to fix what you had built yourself if it wasn't all open source. Perhaps it just resonates with the idea that if something is open source, everybody owns it and nobody owns it at the same time?

<comment><USER3> I have a different take. Being open source doesn't matter at all in cases like these, because if half of your NPM dependencies suddenly break on you, you aren't going to even look at them. Nobody has time for that crap. You'll just swear out loud, and pin your dependencies to older versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is true of social media content, too. If a tweet/IG post/whatever you like disappears, you'll never see it again; you might not even know it disappeared until you remember it two years later, try to look for it, and can't find it. That's one of the reasons I started Framed Tweets ([http://framedtweets.com/](http://framedtweets.com/)).

</comment><comment><USER21> > our phones are fully in the future ... But our computers are still kind of > in the past

I wonder if our app-based ecosystem is really the "future". The reason is simple: apps lock you down. Apps store your data somewhere you don't have access to, and you can't control your data. Sometimes you even can't move your work to another device. On the other hand, file-based storage naturally encourages data migration.

Also, file-based storage allows 3rd party integration. You can use applications from different companies and of different purposes to work on the same piece of data. Even in case of software development, source code can be edited with various editors, compiled with compatible compilers, analyzed with lints and formatters, and revision-controlled through git, svn, or random custom solutions, where all those tools are developed by different parties. I don't think app-based ecosystem can achieve this level of freedom, versatility and flexibility at once.

So, no. Files are not the thing of the past, nor should be buried deep below "future" stack. It should be kept as an _official_ backdoor to give users precise control over their data.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Look, this device is personal. It computes and it's totally personal, just for you, and you alone. It doesn't talk to the internet. No sociality. You can't share any of the content with anybody. Because it's just for you, it's private. It's yours. You can compute with it. Nobody will know! You can process text, and draw stuff, and do your accounts. It's got a spreadsheet. No modem, no broadband, no Cloud, no Facebook, Google, Amazon, no wireless. This is a dream machine. Because it's personal and it computes. And it sits on the desk. You personally compute with it. You can even write your own software for it. It faithfully executes all your commands."

'Isn't it basically the cliff house in Walnut Canyon? Isn't it the stone box?'

"Look, I have my own little stone box here in this canyon! I can grow my own beans and corn. I harvest some prickly pear. I'm super advanced here."

...

'Why shouldn't it vanish like the cliff people vanished?'

...

'Then we look back in nostalgia at the Personal Computer world. It's not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We weren't driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon.

They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn't do enough for us. They seemed like a fantastic way forward, but somehow they were actually getting in the way of our experience.'

\- [https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing- remar...](https://www.wired.com/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by- bruce-sterling/)

<comment><USER23> > _We just mysteriously left._

"Mysteriously", as in "getting dragged out kicking and screaming by an industry that realized providing a service makes for a _way_ better business than selling software".

I honestly don't think many users _wanted_ to give up ownership in trade of access. At least I know enough non-technical people that cling to their files collections for dear life. However, what they of course want is to take part in modern life and not stay behind on technology. And if you don't want to miss that, there is hardly a way around services these days.

(There is the valid point of troubleshooting and maintenance. Your very own personal computer is wonderful until something stops working. However, I think most non-technical people dealt with this problem the same way you'd deal with a broken car: They'd ask someone knowledgeable to "fix" it, either a family member, company admin or commercial service.

However, I don't think many people were desperately wishing for their hardware manufacturer or software developer to have a permanent link to their PC, just so they can fix the occasional problem.)

> _We weren't driven away by force._

The amount of effort Microsoft had to employ to make people stop using Windows XP tells a different story.

<comment><USER24> Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn't want services they wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would sell enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers didn't, and businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today.

Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell. Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix, turns out a portable, maintenance-free, magic email inbox with practically unlimited storage is exactly what people wanted, no coercion needed. They didn't just desperately wish for their hardware and software to have a permanent link to their PC, they went one step further and gave it money and attention.

Maybe I'm completely wrong. Easy way to find out: go make your own broadly successful "owned" software business. Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't they? I'm sure there's plenty of money in selling one-time-fee project management software for customers to own and setup themselves. I mean, who wouldn't want to pay a one-time fee for self-hosted email software that generously provides the "your own friends and family" support package?

<comment><USER3> > _Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn 't want services > they wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would > sell enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers > didn't, and businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today._

That's false. Consumers don't decide shit. They don't compare things they see to what they could be, they chose from what's available. Add to that the sales and marketing doing their best to hide the true costs of their offerings, and you have what you have today - customers being played like a fiddle, coaxed towards making suboptimal choices.

> _Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that > streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell._

Spotify was a legal alternative to _pirating music_ , that was one of their bigger selling point.

> _Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix_

GMail, at least for now, still lets you own the data. The story may change if they ever decide to shut down IMAP access.

> _Consumers are clamoring for it, aren 't they?_

They are, after they get burned a couple of times. See also the reactions to Adobe or Jetbrains going SaaS; the latter actually yielded under pressure and brought back the perpetual licenses.

It's hard to compete with SaaS on price and convenience, because benefits are immediate and true costs are delayed. "Free basic, $9/month advanced" for a shiny-looking product is great at the point of customer acquisition; it's only later on that the customer discovers that the service sucks under any reasonable workload, in one year it costs 1.5x as much, and in 5 years it may just be gone, taking all your data with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your > blog post is to make them mad

Ha, this is a common way to get on the frontpage of Hacker News.

<comment><USER26> Wasn't one of those lesser discussed findings of FB that making people angry makes them more engaged.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I think so.

I wonder if is a special case of "surprise" \- things that are surprising have more information value, and people react to information.

There's also the aspect of something being wrong - if something is wrong, people want to correct it - often angrily if the source advancing the wrong viewpoint is obstinate - and that's engagement.

I wonder if both of those can be teased out. Like, if something is surprising and correct, what's the engagement of that? That probably doesn't drive engagement as much as surprising and wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This essay describes very well why I resist anything-as-a-service. I value stability over time as well as convenience.

Fortunately, most of the things that I find valuable are things that I can host myself (giving me both stability and convenience), and I can easily do without those things that I can't.

<comment><USER29> I favor self-hosting too, but it adds the inconvenience of dedicated maintenance to ensure your stability. For a one-man shop there is a lot to think about. So many balls in the air. I recently found my AWS instances compromised because I forgot to timely upgrade nginx on them. Got me the scares and renewed interest in at least some SaaS where it matters most.

<comment><USER28> Yes, it's more work. But I've been doing this for years, and on average, it really just takes a couple of hours a month of my personal time (monitoring, intrusion detection, etc., are all automated, so most of my time is spent just eyeballing logs to make sure nothing was missed).

My approach is certainly not for everyone, but it's the best solution for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This reminds me of the arrival of the PC (MS-DOS and Mac): file formats were typically silos: proprietary and could only be opened in their special app. Coming from a different tradition this was completely weird and uncomfortable to me so I never really got into those systems. Gradually some open formats pried this open: GIF/JPEG/MP3/ZIP (all only somewhat open at the time) then turning into PNG/HTML... etc.

In this regard the phones feel like a step backwards as each app really manages its own data. Email programs these days are like that -- for example you can't keep a project's mail folder with its files any more.

<comment><USER31> Back in the early Windows days, I was helping somebody on Windows get some data somewhere else where I needed it. I started by opening the file manager and finding the data files. He was like "Whoa ... you are in no-mans-land" ... he just wasn't familiar with accessing files outside of an application.

There are a couple of orthogonal concepts are work here a) how data is stored, in files with a well-known format, in files with a proprietary format, or perhaps in some kind of database b) who has control of the data, perhaps defined by who would be able to delete it, or whether the data would cease to be accessible if a particular organization ceased to exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> See also the book "Information Feudalism", which does a good job of looking at this from an IP perspective.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is surprisingly out of touch with reality -- at least with _my_ reality and that around me. Then again I'm 30 and in academia, so it might not be the latest update.

Do people access their music through their apps instead of a file manager these days? Sure. But how does it get into the apps in the first place? I couldn't find half of my music library on amazon, let alone the money to actually buy it. The same applies to tech books, even more glaringly so because there is no streaming option.

Do people use GMail as a quasi-storage for everything they need to keep up with in life? Yeah. Do they _want_ to use it that way? Not really. It doesn't scale up that well, and yes, you will slam into Google's 15GB limit soon enough. So at least I only have the "temporary" stuff on GMail, for a wide but not all-encompassing notion of "temporary". I'm not aware of anyone storing family photos on GMail.

And that's just the stuff we consume. As for producing, there's very little you can do without working with files at least a bit. Attach a photo to a post, run a python script, exchange documents with someone who isn't using the same clouds as you... Actually, even if all of your stuff is on clouds, you'll sooner or later want or have to move it around between different clouds, and what do you export it to? Files.

<comment><USER33> I'm five years your junior and not in academia.

My music collection, my peers music collections, my mother's music collection... they are Spotify.

I have a friend who DJ's and he has the tracks themselves, but only to remove the internet dependency. The consumers of his kind of cutting edge not on Spotify music get it on Soundcloud.

Tech books? I do have some. I did buy some this year. However my consumption of blog posts, wikis, pdfs of papers, forums, moocs and stack overflows dwarfs all physical reading.

I hate to say it, but production has seen movement away from files. There is a Photoshop extension that allows graphic designers to "connect" the image into the wordpress assets (which auto creates varioud sizes) and tye marketer selects the asset from a web ui list.

I've seen CMS' that let you write js "handlers" that are shoved into the db and can be attached to buttons or page loads etc.

For your last point - moving between clouds - you use a service. Multcloud is just one example.

Its scary just how far things have come.

<comment><USER34> Wonder how Turbosquid is faring with that these days

<comment><USER35> PixelSquid now has a subscription option. I think the issue with TurboSquid is that convenience is less important. Spotify is ok with giving people access to songs knowing that they can easily rip them and put them online because Spotify's experience is a lot better than just searching for ripped songs. With TurboSquid I think people would probably just turn around and sell the models online and then others could just pirate them. Maybe I'm wrong, though - I don't know a ton about the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting that email feels like ours -- "Gmail is the new Finder ... Most importantly, your inbox is yours."

But really isn't it just us trusting Gmail not to pull our access?

<comment><USER37> I think that the difference is that someone can have a similar experience to Gmail by using their own mail server and any mail client. The same cannot be said about Uber, for example.

<comment><USER38> You can't call a friend and ask them for a lift?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 'Ownership' is a pretty overloaded term. It's never really clear which sense of 'ownership' the author is invoking at any given moment.

Also, lol. "100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for [sic] a grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash." I'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So what is this saying about ownership?

<comment><USER3> > _I 'm pretty sure most people didn't own their own farm in the 1920s... So > what is this saying about ownership?_

But they did own it in the sense of day-to-day control. Soviet Union turned farming into service, a move that caused lots of suffering and is widely remembered today as a Bad Idea.

<comment><USER40> The Soviet Union's troubles with farming stemmed more from politicians ordering the farmers to plant specific crops, with absolutely no understanding of farming, soil, climate, seasons or anything, really.

<comment><USER3> Fair. But then again, if you outsource your movies, music or farming to one of the megacorps everyone else outsources too, you're still under rule of some distant managers that don't have your best interest in mind.

<comment><USER40> That fits well with the analogy of the distant overlords with no connection to either production nor the end user.

To them, we're all just interchangeable cogs in the machine, our input and experience is not important, we're just supposed to fit in a predefined box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Are there any terms that cover the different digital native generations?

Natives that started with 3.5 and 5 1/4 floppies in the 80's vs starting when Gmail went from MB's to GB's in the mid/late 2k's probably view files much differently.

In 2019, we can carry 1 TB+ on a smartphone, so the next gen of natives may actually find a new appreciation for files and ownership (plus newfound privacy, not relying on expensive data plans and working/playing from anywhere w/o requiring a connection for most things).

Once storage and connections can exceed 10 Gb transfer rates on mobile, it'll take around 15 minutes to fill per TB... And the next era/counter trend begins!

The kids nowadays have it so easy (minus getting overserviced by every industry at the same time, being fed doom and gloom about climate change everyday and basically getting raked over the coals by pre-existing debt that was not of their doing).

</comment><comment><USER42> For me the main problem is the fact when you own a physical copy you own a snapshot of that exact version of a product.

I agree with the practical aspect of having a digital library but the problem is you relinquish almost all aspects of ownership when you purchase a digital product. When you own a digital product you have whatever version its owner decided to share at that time in history and that represents a crucial difference, which enables things like a movie cut differently from its initial release, a remastered/clean/censored version of a song instead of the original, games with certain features, songs or items removed due to expired licenses.

We're now in a situation where most people got used to this model without giving it any second thoughts because of comfort and any changes that give users more control are unlikely to happen.

<comment><USER43> Yeah like the copy I laboriously sought out, of that one rap song without all the _naughty words_ bleeped out. Or that one "yet another song with a stupid 'car revving' sound effect at the beginning," that I personally chopped off using Audacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This reminds me of another rising sentiment: "feeling disconnected while everything is connected". Perhaps a loss of ownership in all things also means trading in pieces of identity?

If everything is a service then is everyone a consumer?

</comment><comment><USER45> This is exactly why i hate Windows-as-a-service that Microsoft is moving toward. If your software is a service then you can only do what they let you.

Linux is better but the tradeoff is ease & convenience-- like the author said.

<comment><USER46> Most Linux distributions are effectively services as well. Debian (or Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, Fedora, Slack, Gentoo, etc. etc.) are not worth much without the repositories, access to them, and updates, provided by those distributions. An extension of the notion that it's the package management that makes the distro: it's the package _archive_ and _access_ which make the distro.

(Details of packagers, packaging, deps resolution, etc., also matter.)

But that is a service offered, to revive an old fashioned term, not based on commerce but with grace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> That's a broader trend of choosing to rent rather than buy and wage labour instead of entrepreneurship. It's also coming to the point though that people's "digital trail" is no longer just a trail, it's their entire output in life. I think people will recognize this and the next iteration of tech will be property-centered again. What we live today is a bubble of inequality and the shallow freedom of not owning things. Neither extreme is good, people always end up gravitating somewhere in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER48> X __as a Service __\- that 's a very positive spin on "rent perpetually" and "you never own".

This is different if you own the service, but that's another matter entirely.

</comment><comment><USER49> Agreed overall but..

Most people don't want to/can't run their own backup service, so they count on the services they use to keep things alive.

Add to that users wanting to use multiple devices.

Maybe I'm over estimating software literacy but many people who want these things often write their own solutions or do without shiny new things which are often just cloud based versions of the old!

</comment><comment><USER50> I think what isn't fully realized in this article is that the real abundance is in the choices we have today.

You _can_ subscribe to Spotify or some equivalent, but you can also buy CDs, buy Vinyls, DRM-free versions of just that one song you want off an album, you can play the song you want off the Piano, or find it in a game, or listen to the radio (AM, FM, even Satellite!), or go to a live show, or download someone else's recording of a live show. You can partake in all of these ways or any combination thereof, and I forgot to even mention music boxes!

I think it's more fair to say "Everything is amazing, but you don't have to own all of it to enjoy it". Some things are tangible and worth having in a hard copy so to speak, and some things are ephemeral so enjoy them while you can, for nothing and no things last forever.

<comment><USER51> Owning a copy is not possible. Making more copies is illegal. Sending one of those copies to a friend is illegal. Sharing those copies with people on the internet is illegal.

Artificial scarcity means the only choices available to you are the choices the copyright holders want you to have.

<comment><USER50> Mate, since when is owning a copy of music impossible?

Call me over when you can stop buying music, not for the lone example or two where some artist has gone all in on crap like Spotify and refuses to sell their music anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> "Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies."

I don't necessarily agree with the abundance premise. Worlds of dependencies are worlds that demand time-consuming labor (ours or someone else's) to resolve and manage those dependencies, and time today is considerably more scarce than matter or energy. Even worse time unlike matter or energy cannot be manufactured or extracted with increasing efficiency. We have only so much time, period.

I remain unconvinced that post-skeuomorphism and everything-is-a-service are steps forward. In particular everything-is-a-service seems to work well only in domains where the thing being offered actually is a service in that it actually does require a continuous input of something behind the scenes.

</comment><comment><USER53> Surprisingly shallow discussion here. Ownership itself is lease. Sibling comment mentioned home ownership and tenant laws.

Home and land ownership is one of trickiest types of ownership. It turns out, that in democratic and civilized sosieties you don't actually own realty. You lease it with significant restrictions.

Inheritance laws make it even more clear. Law might decide that particular part of property is valued $x euro. A trademark. A patent. An option. So, you must cede control of this part of inherited good to state. If you truly owned it, inheritance taxes would be zero.

</comment><comment><USER54> "Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon.

I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today:

[https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is- wrong-...](https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files- arent-dead/)

</comment><comment><USER55> This is timely considering google's announcement to dump indexing of flash (swf) assets. I get it, the format is unused, buggy, and possibly insecure. That said, much of the nascent internet was built on that. Even "All Your Base" was originally in flash.

<comment><USER56> On the plus side, a _lot_ of the non-interactive Flash content is now on YouTube. I was going through old Weebls Stuff animations the other day, it was a real blast from the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't really care what everybody else is doing, I'm just glad I can still buy a NAS and fill it with 10TB drives if I wanted to. I don't even have to search to hard to find them. It probably even pretty easy to make those drives public.

<comment><USER38> Indeed, I have a NAS full of my own ripped media and find myself using Kodi more often than the streaming services (I pay for Spotify, Netflix and Amazon) just so I can watch whatever I want to watch rather than whatever they happen to have available at any given moment. Another bonus is it's all ad-free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> First thing that comes to mind are containers/virtual envs and freezing versions with requirements.txt files.

That could get interesting unpiecing that a decade later. Scavenger hunts for old versions...

</comment><comment><USER58> "We love services." Citation needed.

</comment><comment><USER59> sucks how dropbox deletes inactive accounts. with all that ipo and vc money how hard is it to keep things running? I remember in the early 2000s when yahoo mails lasted forever. same Hotmail. now everything shuts down if you don't use it.

<comment><USER60> Not to contradict your main point, but I seem to remember that I lost a Hotmail account to inactivity sometime after 2005. So maybe Hotmail isn't the best example

<comment><USER61> My Yahoo account did the same, though that was around 2010 I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The author doesn't make the connection explicit, but tools like Figma reduce the need for files as a means of conveying information between parties. Instead, you collaborate directly in the tool, freeing the designer from having to constantly export and send around documents, and freeing engineers from having to chase down exports. Figma also has a feature where you can "shoulder surf" another person as they work. The ability to see what others are doing in the document leads to some interesting interactions. (You see my cursor moving in a way that indicates I'm counting the number of rows in a design; you message me and tell me it's 15.)</comment>


Show HN: We want to make websites places to meet people - <AUTHOR> I have done it. I quit my job and started a company. And I have to say it was the best decision I've ever made.
http://talk-about-jack.com
Since I'm a tech guy and starting a company is about more than just having an app, I asked two friends of mine - which happen to be pros on their respective fields: business and marketing - if they would join me. They liked my idea and both said yes and quit their jobs. So, it can't be that bad of an idea, right?
The first thing we hear every time we tell someone about Talk About Jack is: "But webchats do already exist? Why another one?". We aim at getting a chat app out that is used for personal stuff as well as for when people need support from companies or even when they want to buy something. We want to establish a one-fits-all webchat solution like when you use your telephone to call a friend, call the support hotline of your telecom provider, or even call a shop to order something.
Our company and product are both still in an early stage so feedback is very welcome! <comment><USER2> My heart sank as I read this post and looked at the product. This has everything going against it.

First: Online comments are a notorious anti-feature on many sites. You're basically making it so that they're instantaneous and impossible to filter. Major sites have to do an enormous amount of human reading/filtering just to have comment sections that aren't filled with horrific, violent, sexual imagery[1].

Second: This is a B2C product. If your customers are users, then your customer-acquisition costs are high. If your customers aren't users, then your customer-acquisition costs are still high, but your sky-high user-acquisition costs become fixed costs (you can no longer monetize your 1st user, but more like your 100,000th).

Third: Have you ever seen a live web chat on any site? These were popular in the late 90s as a drop-in feature that non-coders could use. They were absolutely full of filthy comments. I've seen chats that had 100+ messages per minute, and they were totally incomprehensible. That's even without any professional-level trolls involved.

Fourth: If you think this was a good idea because a business guy and marketing guy liked it, then you need to take a look at every failed business. There's almost always some sort of "expert" behind it. Even professional investors don't know if ideas are good or not; only customers do. What customer discovery have you done?

My strong advice is to work at least part-time. Don't go into debt for this. Get people to use it first, and then decide to put money into it. And if you can't get anyone to use it or invest in it, it's not because they "don't understand". It's because this wasn't a smart move.

I'm telling you all this as someone who's been there before. I've failed at exactly this kind of business. It took a long time before my delusions finally evaporated and I saw that all the people warning me were right. It's great to dream and be optimistic, but when you truly have a great business, people will give you money for it. If you don't get money soon (investors or clients), move on.

1\. [http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/08/11/jezebel_to_g...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/08/11/jezebel_to_gawker_media_do_something_about_the_violent_rape_gifs_in_our.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your honest feedback. Maybe I chose my words a little poorly:

We have actually talked not only to potential users (a lot) but potential customers (a lot as well) to validate the basic need of enhanced website communication possibilities before we went on the build Talk About Jack. The need for chat communication especially in eCommerce (as well as general customer support) is growing and continually demanded by online customers (of our potential customers).

And yes you're right: people are mean on the internet. We have some (not yet implemented) ideas to handle this issue as well, but we wanted to give people a chance first.

Thank you for sharing your advice and experience with us. We will keep it at heart and greatly appreciate you taking the time to look into our product and the idea behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Chatting instead of posting comments seems like a cool idea. You just need to get enough installs so you have a critical mass of people chatting, then it should build up. Good luck with the idea!</comment>


CSS Grid: No Nonsense Layouts - <AUTHOR> https://testdriven.io/blog/css-grid/ <comment><USER2> The measurement units need the viewer units and auto added. I also think 'em' is useful in the grid context.

I am not sure on how best the different ways of defining a grid should best be told to a learning audience, which is everyone except Rachel Andrews. There are quite a few choices and sometimes too much choice is overwhelming.

I think that normal grid template columns with explicit rows is a good way to start. Then all of the other variants need to be tied in to use cases after one gets stuck.

One way this could be done is with a tutorial on CSS grid that uses CSS grid rather than older layout methods. Solving common problems in responsive design or implementing a footer that sticks to the bottom of the page could all be done in the context of the tutorial.

For instance, grid layout could be used for the pros/cons of the different measurement units, so rather than placeholder copy in codepens the examples could be practically 'recursive'.

Examples only get you so far and tend to drop you off in the deep end, if a page was a fully worked example then it could be a really useful reference for when things get tricky.

A lot of the audience for CSS grid already have stuff done with a framework, e.g. the Bootstrap used here, so a worked example could be doubly useful. Some of the extra markup on Bootstrap doesn't help with CSS Grid and there are little workarounds like 'display: contents' to surface the contents of a container block to a grid.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the main challenges I encounter while using CSS Grid is of the nature of responsive design. I do not know if this problem is due to an immature understanding of CSS Grid, or more of a general setback for all parties involved.

As you try to adapt your website to smaller and smaller screens, font sizes become a problem, regardless of the units you put in use.

The reason why is that as the grid items' dimensions change, text that it occupies overflow, or for that matter, leaves a noticeable space which has to be repaired.

In the light of that, I resort to certain techniques such as to increase the font size when the text of the grid item fails to occupy semi-subjective required space for it to be not considered 'awkward', as the unused space is pushing down the next content even further than one would prefer.

This concludes with an unnatural amount of media queries, created, at certain breakpoints, especially for font sizes.

I am open to any feedback on this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great article, the examples really demonstrate the power of grids. I wish I could use CSS Grid at work but my work requires ie11. Does anyone know of a way to use CSS grid with ie11? I understand some features are supported but its very bare and not reliable.

<comment><USER2> The way to handle IE 11 is to degrade gracefully.

IE11 is not a HTML5 browser, it is supported for legacy applications and Microsoft want people to use Edge.

Hence IE11 is never going to get grid. Ever.

So degraded means that you develop in your normal webkit/Firefox way and just change 'display: grid' to 'display: block' when you have it looking good in your dev browser. Then you look at how bad it is.

IE 11 does not need responsive so you just have to get it to be merely presentable and usable, not pixel perfect.

Lea Verou has some useful ideas on how to do this, check out any of her recent talks online to get an idea.

<comment><USER5> > Hence IE11 is never going to get grid.

IE11 actually has grid. As does IE10. Admittedly an older version. But it's a bit mean to call IE out on lack of standards support when they actually introduced grid in the first place.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but it's an outdated version of grid that doesn't work with the modern syntax. You can use autoprefixer to somewhat work around the differences.

[https://medium.com/@elad/supporting-css-grid-in-internet- exp...](https://medium.com/@elad/supporting-css-grid-in-internet- explorer-b38669e75d66)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this, though one thing from that article:

> CSS grid is fully supported in all main browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, > Edge including their mobile versions.

This isn't strictly true. On my last "Can I get away with deploying CSS Grid on my site yet?" check, IE wasn't even a of real concern. What was was the not insignificant number of mobile and old version of Chrome/Safari/etc browsers that don't support it.

<comment><USER2> Safari on 32 bit iPads. I don't care about them for what I am doing.

Can you tell me of any other hold ups? I am not familiar with Apple phones or Android phones stuck on legacy browsers. Is there anything I need to know?

I am okay with not supporting IE.

<comment><USER7> Then go for it!

I think my number, across unsupported browsers, was around 10% or something. Not a huge number, but that's 10% potential lost clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lost me at grid lines. Maybe add some overlay actual lines to clearify?</comment>


SFHN Speaker: Daniel Shaw from NodeUp - 3/28 - <AUTHOR> http://sfhn-dshaw.eventbrite.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just upped the number of free tickets for everyone that wants to make it but can't donate. :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hope everyone can make it out! :)</comment>


First "flight" of a piloted, solar powered plane - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18233-solarpowered-piloted-plane-makes-its-first-flea-hop.html

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974963></comment>


Visualization map of seasonal illness/fever from smart thermometers - <AUTHOR> https://healthweather.us/ <comment><USER3> If you have an opportunity, watch the Rachel Maddow show from 3/18\. They talk about this in depth.

Kinsa has been selling a digital thermometer for a while. As part of the device, it uploads readings to both your phone and then sends the data back to Kinsa.

Based on their reporting (part of what you're seeing visualized on this map), they have been able to see trending signs of flu outbreaks for a while up to 2 weeks before the CDC issues its reports.

The key difference is that the CDC relies on hospitals compiling reports and sending them in, where Kinsa gets the data directly. This causes a delay of up to 2 weeks in the CDC reports.

Where this ties in with covid-19 is that in the last few months, when they layer recent data over historical data from the last few years, they see an atypical increase in fevers being reported. This can be seen in the graph where the expected trend is going down, but they're now seeing abnormal increases since February.

From the news report, Kinsa is selling thousands of thermometers per day right now and is running into manufacturing issues.

Another point that gets mentioned in the report is that Kinsa has tried offering their data to the CDC before but due to CDC policy, they (CDC) require taking ownership of the data in order to accept it. I'm honestly very uninformed about this part so expect some inaccuracy in what I'm saying. If someone who has more details could reply to this comment, I think that would be very helpful to know.

On the positive side, the Bay Area isn't looking bad at the moment. On the negative side, all of my family is in Florida and I wasn't aware until just now that it was getting that bad state wide.

</comment><comment><USER4> Florida having outliers like that does not look good.

Florida's governor is still refusing to close beaches, which are packed with people, many of them traveling long distances to get there (spring break), with countless people being interviewed on camera saying they don't care..

Some cities are finally taking measures into their own hand and closing beaches, but at the moment it's only a few.

Given the fact that Florida's population tends to skew older, the data mixed with the public response is concerning.

<comment><USER5> Or there is sampling bias in Florida, maybe insufficient thermometers or some other error? It' seems bizarre to me that one state has way more problems, yet the numbers are not terribly high compared to Washington of CV19.

Our governors incompetence is alarming in any case, though not unexpected.

<comment><USER6> I believe that Florida is also one of the oldest states which might skew the numbers. Too many thermometers doesn't seem to me like it would naturally skew the data in the way that it has.

This info, paired with the recent infection of a US congressman from Florida, makes me suspect they may have a lot of unrealized cases.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by oldest and how would it skew the numbers? Are you referring to the age distribution of the people living there?

<comment><USER6> 1\. Age distribution of people living there

2\. It would skew the numbers (by conjecture) if a higher proportion of people were old because then a higher proportion of people acquiring the disease would have high fever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it would be good for them to indicate the relative penetration of their device into the region. For example, in Ohio the 88 confirmed cases are in counties that don't correlate well with the data presented. Most of the cases are in the northeast of the state.

List of counties with confirmed infections - [https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/](https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/) (right under the number of cases)

Map of infections in Ohio - [https://www.datawrapper.de/_/etm2H/](https://www.datawrapper.de/_/etm2H/)

Map of Ohio counties by population - [https://www.maps4office.com/us-ohio-map- county-population-de...](https://www.maps4office.com/us-ohio-map-county- population-density/)

Map of Ohio child poverty (red is more) - [https://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/2020/01/every-ohio- cit...](https://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/2020/01/every-ohio-city-and- county-ranked-for-poverty-child-poverty-census-estimates.html)

The child poverty map correlates a bit better with the data from healthweather.us (esp if you factor in the population (density) of each county). The south and east counties in Ohio are pretty sparsely populated.

</comment><comment><USER9> Super misleading data.

1) y is CDC ILI activity, % outpatient visits for flu-like symptom, not actual % population that are ill,

[https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/6/11/ofz455/5610164](https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/6/11/ofz455/5610164)

2) how can you tell credibly from this data it's just more healthy ppl taking temperature now vs a true decline in fever rate? Feel this is a marketing stunt or a poorly done study.

</comment><comment><USER10> This shows some of the potential of health-related data-collection everywhere, and cross-referencing it with time and geography (among other dimensions). It is obviously already happening, but these types of overviews are largely kept behind closed doors as of yet. Releasing the data in such an easy digestible manner would democratize the knowledge and enable crowd-sourcing of solutions.

The technical issues are solved, and there are only 4 main hurdles IMO: 1. privacy, 2. data is privately owned (it costs to have it released), 3. professional gate keeping and 4. that governments are not yet tasked with addressing the problem. Surely all of these can be overcome, with various multi-pronged approaches.

<comment><USER11> I just listened to a recent episode of 99% Invisible: The Weather Machine and I'm struck by the similarities. In the podcast they discuss the evolution of the data sharing agreements to do weather prediction and the birth of the idea that with that data weather was predictable. Your list of 4 could have been lifted right from that episode about weather. So, someday maybe!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How are they inferring sickness rates from smart thermometer data? I skimmed the article and their technical paper and got nothing. Presumably sick people stay home and they're correlating stay-home rates with sickness rates?

<comment><USER13> FTA:

> The U.S. Health Weather Map is a visualization of seasonal illness linked to > fever

I think the assumption they make is fever == sickness.

<comment><USER14> Ok I feel dumb but I was thinking this was a thermometer for a home, not a body.

<comment><USER15> I had the same confusion. Thanks for taking one for the team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Or people are scared about illness, so they are using their thermometers more frequently and thus finding small fevers/incidents of increased body temperature that they wouldn't have checked in a normal year.

</comment><comment><USER17> Amazing level of detail. I wouldn't want to be in Florida at present - <USER2> infection rates are extremely high. Good independent data sampling whole population (well, biased, but different bias from other sources).

I would love to be able to go back in time for a few weeks (animated), and also to be able to see a comparison against last year.

Edit: also this is a fairly leading indicator of problems (and includes many that are sick but get better), compared with confirmed cases which lags and underestimates, or deaths which severely lags (but fairly reliable indicator there is a serious problem)

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that King County, WA doesn't appear as a hotspot on this map, whereas widespread news reporting strongly suggests otherwise.

<comment><USER19> A couple possibilities:

\- There's a lot more testing in Washington state, so there aren't as many undocumented cases as, say, Florida.

\- Sparse Kinsa device coverage in Washington, and since the infection rate is still low vs the population at large, the elevated rate of actual disease is within the wide variation in data due to the sparsity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone have any recommendations for decent smart thermometers?

<comment><USER13> I have been taking my temperature regularly with a WiThings 'Thermo' smart thermometer and am pleased with it. I was able to purchase it using my FSA funds:

[https://www.withings.com/us/en/thermo](https://www.withings.com/us/en/thermo)</comment></comment>


Show HN: MechanicalSoup, Python library for automating interaction with websites - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hickford/MechanicalSoup <comment><USER2> An alternative to this is RoboBrowse [1] which is also based on requests + BeautifulSoup4 and seems a lot more mature.

[1] [http://robobrowser.readthedocs.org/en/latest/readme.html](http://robobrowser.readthedocs.org/en/latest/readme.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha! If I'd known, I would have used that myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still, it proves the idea is a good one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> wc- Mechanize is a core part in quite a few of my projects lately and the fact that it hasn't been modified in over 2 years has been very worrisome.

There are lots of edge cases out there on websites. Mechanize has built up years of fixes and workarounds for these, I hope that MechanicalSoup can learn from these the easy way rather than waiting to make the same mistakes again.

I also hope that this repo grows into a bigger community of support, not just one person contributing (who could leave / get bored at any time). Looking forward to following this!

<comment><USER3> Er...that's just the Python Mechanize, right? Ruby's Mechanize has been regularly updated and patched, though I can't say I've used it to the extent that I've run into infuriating edge cases: [https://github.com/sparklemotion/mechanize](https://github.com/sparklemotion/mechanize)

<comment> wc- Right, python's mechanize at [https://github.com/jjlee/mechanize](https://github.com/jjlee/mechanize) seems to be pretty stagnant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally find Capybara[0] to be the happy medium for web scraping, if Python isn't a hard requirement. It has a simple API, like MechanicalSoup, but it can also easily be configured to use Selenium, node-webkit, or any other browser you want for full proper JS evaluation.

[0][http://github.com/jnicklas/capybara](http://github.com/jnicklas/capybara)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately there isn't a Capybara library for Python. There are comparable packages like Lettuce and now MechanicalSoup (to a certain extent).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is fantastic. I've used python mechanize in some very large projects and it was very frustrating - their lack of documentation and, well, the fact that it's complete "abandonware".

I've had mechanize repository cloned for a year now, planning to do something with it - never got around to. Looks like MechanicalSoup just got themselves a new contributor!

</comment><comment><USER7> Sell me MechanicalSoup over Selenium.

<comment> wc- Selenium seems very heavy-weight to me (granted I have only used selenium server). If you don't need to interpret javascript after a page loads then you might be able to use mechanize. In my experience I've gotten better performance and a higher ease of development with mechanize over selenium or other "full" headless browsers. Different tools for different jobs I suppose, I just tend to go for the smallest tool first.

edit: replace mechanize with mechanicalsoup in the above paragraph, they are aiming to solve the same problems in the same way.

<comment><USER8> > Selenium seems very heavy-weight to me

Fair point. Perhaps try Sulfur?

<comment><USER9> I started googling, excited about discovering a new library, only to realize what you'd done there -_-

<comment><USER10> Try "Helium web automation" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does it have a javascript engine? Because we had to abandon BeautifulSoup/Mechanize over this a couple years ago and switch to HTMLUnit (Java).

</comment><comment><USER12> There's not a lot to it so far (a single class, three tests). I wonder if the author has a road map for the project.

</comment><comment><USER13> How does MechanicalSoup (or RoboBrowse, for that matter, this is the first I've heard of either) compare to Scrapy?: [http://scrapy.org/](http://scrapy.org/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Have any documentation on a roadmap for things as they go forward? Would love to send some PR's your way :)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is exactly what I was looking for my next project. I was trying to do this with Node.js to avail, Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty cool, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER17> Would that be an equivalent to Casper.js ?</comment>


Show HN: Summarizing popular HN articles - <AUTHOR> http://skimthat.com?launch

<comment><USER2> I'm sure this is on your list, but design could use some work -- visually it seems a lot like one of those regurgitate-press-releases-as-content type of sites.

A new header and actual logo (not text-based and losing the ™) would probably take care of that. The highlighter-on-text look is apt, but doesn't come out very cleanly. Perhaps a logo that captures the "highlighter" idea, rather than physical mimicry.

Excellent idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Do you think just changing the logo will make it look less like regurgitated press releases?

<comment><USER2> That would definitely help -- could also be that the header looks like a generic "news" or "publishing" template. Maybe you don't need both a logo and the background photo.

Also you might consider condensing to one column if possible, or at least using a layout that would collapse to a single column. I could see using this a lot on my phone, but I only get about 2/3 of the screen for content. Maybe there's a good wordpress mobile layout out there?

<comment><AUTHOR> For mobile users, the site entire site is shown but it initially zooms in on the content portion, leaving the side columns off the screen.

I'll work with my designer to tweak the design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice. I watch the RSS feed and rather like the full flow, but if I didn't, this would be a great substitute.

The only concern is the comments there... Doesn't that seem to take away from the comments here? It would be better if you could pull the number of comments here and link here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the same thing but I doubt it'll take away from the HN comments since I link to it in the summary. I'm hoping the comments on the site can help me build my own community of people who favor this style of writing.

I was thinking of pulling comment count and also vote count. I've got to make sure it's done in a way that's not too taxing for either site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who are the writers? I read a few summaries and they seemed pretty good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I got a team of writers with a job post on ProBlogger.net. It's a great source to find good writers. $50 and I got a ton of responses.

Here's the post <http://jobs.problogger.net/view/4718>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great. It would be better if the summaries were even shorter though, and had more links.

For example:

"Developers using the Lean Software Development model compare the writing of software to a manufacturing process where project requirements are considered inventory. The focus should be on the code as it is the real inventory. Like all inventory there is a cost to carrying code. Competitive advantage can be achieved by strategically deleting code and focusing on profitable features."

has a lot of cruft and could be summarized like this:

"Lean software says code is inventory - and carrying inventory costs money."

That way you get the main idea and you can click for more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like how you're thinking but in this case Lean software generally considers features inventory. The author of the source article is suggesting it should be inventory instead. The transition is needed from the general perception to what is being proposed.

<comment><USER5> So perhaps:

"Lean software says features are inventory and carrying inventory costs money, but perhaps code itself should be considered inventory instead."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome! Congrats, Michael.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Giang!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Michael, this is excellent. Congrats!

<comment><USER8> Seconded. This'll help to cut down on the amount of material I wade through myself trying to keep up with the full feed! Maybe I'll even be able to get some code written again! =]

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> what are your criteria for identifying popular articles? also, is there any NLP involved in the summarization process, or is it all manual?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all manual for now but I'm exploring tools to help with the process.

Popular article is defined by reaching the top 5 with about 40 votes.</comment></comment>


Beamforming in PulseAudio - <AUTHOR> https://arunraghavan.net/2016/06/beamforming-in-pulseaudio/ <comment><USER2> Great to see this work being talked about. I work on the media signal processing team at Google. My team built this beamformer before I started, but I'm happy to see it being used in PulseAudio. The paper hasn't been released, but the nonlinear beamformer code is open source. You can find it in WebRTC.

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/webrtc/+/master/w...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/webrtc/+/master/webrtc/modules/audio_processing/beamformer/nonlinear_beamformer.cc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Kudos to your team -- having access to the fantastic work you guys have done (especially the AudioProcessing module that we use in PulseAudio) has been very useful indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If anyone is looking to experiment with beamforming algorithms, here is a free dataset from MIT with a 1020-microphone array: [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/mic- array/](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/mic-array/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Kudos to the author. It takes a lot to write about something in a way that makes it accessible to folks not skilled in the art.

He's written some other interesting posts on PulseAudio features too, but this is more well-written and approachable:

[https://arunraghavan.net/2016/05/improvements-to- pulseaudios...](https://arunraghavan.net/2016/05/improvements-to-pulseaudios- echo-cancellation/)

[https://arunraghavan.net/2011/08/hello-hello- hello/](https://arunraghavan.net/2011/08/hello-hello-hello/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Have some DSP resources:

Richard G. Lyons, Understanding Digital Signal Processing [0]

Gareth Loy, Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music (volume 2) [1]

r8brain-free-src (high quality sample rate conversion algorithms) [2]

KVR's DSP forum, frequented by actual pro audio developers [3]

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Digital-Signal- Processi...](https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Digital-Signal- Processing-3rd/dp/0137027419?ie=UTF8&tag=stackoverfl08-20)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026251656X/ref=pd_cp_0_1?i...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026251656X/ref=pd_cp_0_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=589F25CMK0PJ0P3B1WRW)

[2] [https://github.com/avaneev/r8brain-free- src](https://github.com/avaneev/r8brain-free-src)

[3] [https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=33](https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=33)

</comment><comment><USER6> The reason the author's beamformer doesn't work very well may have nothing whatsoever to do with his implementation. A short-baseline microphone array won't be able to have good selectivity in the human hearing range no matter what you do. All synthetic aperture systems are fundamentally limited by the wavelength of the thing being sampled. You need an aperture many wavelengths wide in order to get a significant effect at any given frequency. The tiny two-mic device shown in the picture will only be an effective aperture in the near-ultrasonic range.

That's why commercially available phased array microphone systems that actually work are typically one to several meters wide.

<comment><USER7> I understood his article such that he used the same laptop to test both his own beamforming algo as well as the google one. Since the google one seems to work very well, it seems likely that the limit is not hardware.

I'm actually very surprised that it works as well as it does, based on the sample recordings.

<comment><USER6> Any claim that someone beat the diffraction limit should be viewed with the same level of skepticism as faster-than-light particles, engines that don't conserve momentum, perpetual motion machines, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this could be auto-calibrated, like prompt the user with "sit in a quiet place and say '1,2,3'" then brute-force the audio offsets to get the highest peak signal; and from then on you could have the mic focus follow the user's head as they move it by constantly trying slightly different offsets and jumping to a new offset if one sounds stronger?

<comment><USER7> If this becomes popular, I could see laptop manufacturers putting information about the microphone position relative to the screen/camera somewhere (in the ACPI tables?). Then there would be less need for calibration.

Of course, we'll have the same problems as all the other information in there, that some cheap equipment will have bogus values as someone just copied the ACPI tables from the previous hardware without verifying the information...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wouldn't it be possible to assume that by default, the user will be placed between both microphones? It would be less than ideal but just keeping the sound that hits both mics at the same time could be a nice default improvement.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is actually the default with the webrtc beamformer (the sample recordings point straight forwards which effectively works out to being between the two microphones).

<comment><USER2> Yes this is the default. The beamformer is steerable and you'll notice that a significant portion of the code is responsible for steering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Repost as a semi-useful thread below didn't meet humor standards and people who aren't logged into HN should see it, too.

If you need an FIR filter, click here and push the button. Generates the code too.

[http://t-filter.engineerjs.com/](http://t-filter.engineerjs.com/)

Also if you don't know what you're talking about, kindly refrain from wandering into it in the middle of an article that might otherwise be useful. "An Intro To Beamforming" is a hell of a lot stronger if it doesn't have several flaming errors about basic DSP processing in the middle of it. Those sorts of errors may cause experts discovering you for the first time to avoid your project, not devote time to fixing it.

<comment><USER11> Sad that the thread got flagged into oblivion.

> There is a fair amount of academic work describing methods to perform > filtering on a sample to provide a fractional delay. One common way is to > apply an FIR filter. However, to keep things simple, the method I chose was > the Thiran approximation — the literature suggests that it performs the task > reasonably well, and has the advantage of not having to spend a whole lot of > CPU cycles first transforming to the frequency domain (which an FIR filter > requires).

I'm not a real DSP expert by any stretch of the imagination, but applying an FIR filter does _not_ require transforming to the frequency domain. To the contrary: a basic FIR filter just means that the ith output sample is a[0] _x[i] + a[1]_ x[i-1] + a[2] _x[i-2] + ... + a[N-1]_ x[i-N+1] where x is the input, a is the filter coefficients, and N+1 is the (finite) length of the filter. (If the input is all zeros except that x[0]=1, then the input is an impulse and a is the output, i.e. the impulse response. Hence the name: Finite Impulse Response.)

Some very long FIR filters are more efficient to apply by Fourier transforming the input, but that's almost certainly not the case here. It's worth noting that FIR filters vectorize _very_ nicely.

(My FIR description isn't quite 100% accurate. I described only the discrete- time causal case. If you drop the causality requirement (which is fine but can be awkward in real-time processing) then you add negative indices to a. If you switch to continuous time, you end up with a convolution instead of a sum of products.)

<comment><USER12> > Sad that the thread got flagged into oblivion.

I sometimes feel the PC threshold is a bit high in some threads. In this case however even I felt the snark level was painful.

As a productive engineer I often put out internal tools or POCs that would be possible to snark at in this way.

I do however expect that people improve them or explain the better way instead of posting dismissive comments on what this guy has done _on top of_ his open source contributions.

That said: I'm happy to see it reposted although I would prefer if he removed the defence for his previous post as it did add confusion to the new post as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still nothing that isn't already possible in JACK. over ethernet or Wifi.

<comment><USER14> How do you mean?

<comment><USER13> Pulseaudio is still trying to catch up to features JACK implemented years ago. One of which is a beamforming implementation that could easily be done in any post-processing application plugged into the JACK chain (Trivial to do in Ardour or even FL Studio under WineASIO (Wine for Realtime music applications). This has been done in live recording environments using a couple of mic'ed-up laptops over 802.11n/ac for a while now; producing a properly-sync'ed master recording of the performance takes less than 15 minutes after the show is complete to finish.</comment></comment></comment>


A very old gcc "bug" - <AUTHOR> http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11203

<comment><USER2> My favorite gcc trick is to compile and run the following two line, and then try to reconcile the results.

x = 7;

printf("%d %d %d",x++,++x,x++);

x = 7;

printf("%d %d %d",x++,x=2,x++);

Go ahead, try it, run it, and explain the output.

<comment><USER3> For those curious, the output is: 9 10 7 2 3 7

The output should be (at least from my understanding and what PHP renders): 7 9 9 7 2 2

As far as reconciliation, I guess the first line makes sense when you think about it as machine code and how the pointers probably behave. The second line though, seems quite evil and I am going to go hide under my "Rails will save me" blanket until someone can explain this voodoo.

<comment><USER4> clang gives 7 9 9 7 2 2 as well. gcc gives 7 10 9 7 3 2 when targeting arm.

2,3,7 are all valid possibilities for the 4th and 6th numbers, but apparently gcc interprets the 5th as 2 + 1 somehow, which I can't see as being valid whatsoever.

<comment><USER5> Why not? It's doing the x=2 first (before anything else in there), then the ++ of the last expression (and returning 2 for it), then giving you the result of the middle one (which is now three since it ran after the last one). The 7 is because it ran that one before doing anything to the other values.

It should be noted that this is illegal C, and compilers are allowed to do absolutely anything they want when they see it. Even things that are totally not logical.

<comment><USER4> I re-read C99, and the reason this is allowed is not because of §184.108.40.206 p10, but rather §6.5.16 p4 as far as I can tell. Though it's weird to me that the expression (x = 2) can ever be evaluated as anything but 2.

Also, it's not illegal C, it's undefined C and compilers are only allowed to do whatever they want within the undefined area (which is larger than I expected.)

<comment><USER5> Undefined C is illegal C, because the compiler is not even required to do the same thing from run to run.

Undefined is not the same as implementation defined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't know how many registers code should use. However - it's not C code, it's assembly code, so it seems unfair to blame gcc - a _C_ compiler.

<comment><USER4> There are a couple reasons you wouldn't know that (for an entire inline asm function):

1\. x86_64 vs. x86_32. It's possible that you'd want to use more registers than 32-bit has. In this case, it's usually optimal to use memory operands on x86_32 but registers on x86_64.

2\. gcc _will not_ allow you to use ebx in inline asm with PIC code. Likewise with ebp with frame pointer. There's no technical reason gcc couldn't just save+restore those registers around the block, but it doesn't.

3\. The case in the bugreport: you have various locations in memory you want to address, and you want gcc to figure out their addresses for you. Without analysis that eliminates identical registers, the naive implementation of using 1-2 new registers per operand will quickly fail.

<comment><USER7> > There's no technical reason gcc couldn't just save+restore those registers > around the block, but it doesn't.

While it's not impossible to do, it makes debugging a lot harder. gdb would have a much harder job of figuring out what's going on if the code messed with ebp, since the fp location would depend on the code. Some more debug information to describe that location could solve the problem... but why create that problem in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> read comment #24:

Martin, you should realize that this problem _cannot_ be solved. Yes, there will perhaps be a time when this particular test case compiles, though I think that is unlikely. But anyway, then there will be other cases that fail.

The reason is dead simple: register allocation is NP-complete, so it is even _theoretically_ not possible to write register allocators that always find a coloring. That means any register allocator will always fail on some very constrained asm input. And you cannot allow it to run indefinitely until a coloring is found, because then you've turned the graph coloring problem into the halting problem because you can't prove that a coloring exists and that the register allocator algorithm will terminate.

So really it doesn't matter at all whether or not your specific inline asm compiles or not. When yours does, someone else's will fail.

<comment><USER5> You are not the only one who does not understand the halting problem.

The halting problem only says you can not prove every program will (or won't) halt - the general case.

It says nothing at all about any specific case, and there are plenty of programs where you can prove they halt.

And NP just means the solution does not scale well, not that it can't be done.

And NP-complete is something else entirely. It has to do with being able to interconvert all NP-complete problems (i.e. if you solve one you solve all).

There are many NP problems that are not NP-complete. Proving any particular problem is NP-complete, and not just NP is usually a big deal, so don't just throw that term around.

<comment><USER8> It was a quote from the original thread.

As for your explanation, yes, that's correct. The thing that I didn't get about the way they were sparring on the list was that if there is a solution the problem might not be solved in an elegant way, but with the number of variations involved you could simply brute force it.

Then if a solution exists you'll find it, if it doesn't exist then you can report that. After all, if you say you want to put 12 variables in to 7 registers and there is no possible way then there is no possible way. If there is such a possibility the number of permutations is small enough that it could be found anyway.

GCC contributes to the problem by having some overhead that reserves registers that could be saved on the stack for the duration of this part of the computation.</comment></comment></comment>


Andreessen Horowitz Raises $650M Fund, Just Shy Of $1B Under Management - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/02/andreessen-horowitz-650m-fund/

<comment><USER2> _Horowitz says half the people he's told the news to have asked why the fund was so big and half have asked why the fund was so small._</comment>


Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study <comment><USER2> _" In the second experiment, the authors selected three Princeton students from among a few dozen student-government leaders, and compared them to three selected representatives of the University of Oregon football team, and three (in their opinion characteristic) young people who did not attend college at all. Experiment 3 tested six new students, three from Yale and three from the University of Arizona, again selected to represent the authors' opinion of what such students should be like. Experiment 4 re-used four of the students from Experiment 3, but substituted two new choices from the same pools. And Experiment 5 re-used five of the six students from Experiment 4, substituting for one participant who seemed on reflection not to be quite of the Right Kind."_

...and so on. The usual stuff.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty interesting, but it feels like the vague category 'literary fiction' is being used to make the results seem more surprising than they really are. You could also say, "fiction which requires readers to model the internal mental states of characters improves empathy"—and the results seem pretty straightforward: modeling mental states of others improves ability to model mental states of others.

I mean, it is pretty interesting that it works with fictional characters—but still: nothing I read in the article lead me to believe this is due to some elusive quality of the intentionally undefined category 'literary.' If anything, these results give a little more info. on how we actually do define 'literary': that a typical requirement for a work to be called 'literary' is that it pushes readers to model mental states of characters.

</comment><comment><USER4> To me the best fiction has great characters, and what makes them great is the author's ability to demonstrate the subtleties of those characters' personalities. So it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some things I read make me more empathetic.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a difference with cinematographic fiction?

<comment><USER6> "Literary fiction" might sound redundant, but in fact it's jargon used by critics, usually to describe a certain range of writing styles in which all of the implied drama takes place in the characters' inner emotional states rather than anything explicitly described in the narration or dialogue. It's usually contrasted with "genre" fiction, I guess because they wanted a broader term than "pulp."

<comment><USER7> "Literary fiction" is frequently simply a means of elevating the prestige of certain writing, by indicating that it is by/for literary elites.

In this case, the authors contrasted "literary fiction" with nonfiction, "popular fiction" and nothing. The literary fiction samples were drawn from a PEN/O Henry prize 2012 winners' anthology and the US National book awards finalists. The examples of popular fiction consisted of a Danielle Steele novel, "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn, and know knows what, although one of the authors mentioned "...genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers."

Not much more in the abstract. [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract)</comment></comment></comment>