Julian Assange "slowly dying" and "often sedated" in Belmarsh prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/28/assa-d28.html <comment><USER2> Wikileaks has a faultless record. They've never had to retract a publication. Assange, like him not not, was a reporter, who reported uncomfortable facts about the military and our ruling class.

He is being punished, tortured really for this "crime".

He has been endlessly and baselessly slandered. All that alleged bad behaviour while he was imprisoned in the embassy ... funny how there's been no footage of it, despite the fact that he was under 24/7 surveillance!

And these rape charges, clearly also designed to tarnish his name, now finally exposed as a fiasco.

Many newspapers had huge scoops thanks to Wikileaks, but have now turned on them. A particularly striking example is the supposedly liberal Guardian.

Journalists everywhere should be afraid as this sets a dangerous precedent for all of them.

<comment><USER3> The most detailed, nuanced account of Assange I've seen is this one[0] by Andrew O'Hagan (an author hired to ghostwrite Assange's autobiography who spent a year or so in and out of his orbit). And it's hard to square that account with the image of Assange as a journalist who's being persecuted for the truths he's shared.

Though O'Hagan is sympathetic in many ways he doesn't sugarcoat anything, and I came away with the impression that Assange is the author of a great deal of his own woes. (Among other things, much of the account involves Assange lying pretty incessantly, even to his closest allies about petty dramas, so I now find it hard to take anything he's said at face value.)

[0] [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o- hagan/ghost...](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o- hagan/ghosting)

\----

Edit to add: there's a quoted exchange in the account, which now springs to mind every time I hear about Assange.

> There are few subjects on which Julian would be reluctant to take what you > might call a paternalistic position, but over Snowden, whom he's never met > but has chatted with and feels largely responsible for, he expressed a kind > of irritable admiration. "Just how good is he?" I asked.

> "He's number nine," he said.

> "In the world? Among computer hackers? And where are you?"

> "I'm number three."

<comment><USER4> Indeed, this is essential reading in its entirety. The image that emerges is one of a vain and duplicitous man who treats his projects as vehicles for self-aggrandizement. His poor character and lack of integrity are unbecoming in anyone who claims to speak truth to power.

<comment><USER5> It's no secret that Assange is vain and an asshole.

That doesn't mean that there hasn't been a coordinated campaign of character attack and punishment for revealing uncomfortable truths against him. Nor does it mean that he is deserving of what has happened

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is the WikiLeaks foundation responsible for the content posted on their platform, when Google and Facebook aren't?

I haven't really been following this a whole lot, but as I understand it, the US wants him extradited because his platform was used to leak sensible information that put American soldiers in danger. But why is that a thing when it isn't for other platforms? I mean, twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all been used as effective recruitment platforms for various Islamic terror organisations. That would have put American lives in danger as well.

<comment><USER7> It is alleged that Assange coordinated with Chelsea Manning and the Russian government to obtain information for Wikileaks. This would make him an active conspirator in breaking the law.

Completely different from Facebook, Google, Twitter etc where they merely provide a platform for others to upload content and aren't actively involved in sourcing illegal content.

<comment><USER8> Authoritarians emphasise the fact he broke laws, everyone else appreciates the moral act.

<comment><USER9> It's not mutually exclusive.

* Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.

* Just because one is breaking the law for common good, civil servants can't and should not be expected to stop enforcing the law. If you allow that, it's the end of the rule of law based society. The whole idea of just society is that you restrict what individuals in the government can do.

If you decide that civil disobedience is the way and you break the law, you should not ask to be treated differently under the law. Political pardons exist for a reason.

(I'm not taking position on the legality of actions Assage took, or justification of his actions. I'm arguing general principle.)

<comment><USER10> Civil disobedience is breaking a law because you believe the _law itself_ is wrong. As invented by Thoreau, and practiced by Gandhi and MLK.

Breaking a law you otherwise believe in, in the service of some broader goal, is called direct action, riot, or terrorism, depending on the severity of the law broken, and/or the sympathies of the person describing it.

<comment><USER11> Yes, civil disobedience means you believe the specific law itself is wrong, but not the law-making _process_. The justness of the law-making process is why the classic method of practicing civil disobedience involves accepting the punishment. MLK:

> In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid > segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law > must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I > submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is > unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to > arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality > expressing the highest respect for law.

<comment><USER12> > Yes, civil disobedience means you believe the specific law itself is wrong, > but not the law-making process.

The US Civil Rights movement generally practiced civil disobedience because the views the laws, the law making process, and the process of selecting who could even participate in the law making process as unacceptable.

The key assumption was that enough of the people who could participate in that process were nevertheless moral enough to reform all of those aspecta given a vivid enough demonstration that they could not turn away from of the top-to- bottom injustice of the system.

I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.

<comment><USER11> > The US Civil Rights movement generally practiced civil disobedience because > the views the laws, the law making process, and the process of selecting who > could even participate in the law making process as unacceptable.

This is conflating two aspects of the civil rights movement. It's of course true that there were _also_ objections to the law-making process. But the segregationist laws would be unjust (and hence _require_ violating under MLK's civil disobedience) even if the law-making process perfectly reflected the majority will of the people. It's this latter point that is relevant to INGELRII's comment.

> I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he > would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has > relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more > than it does in the law being violated itself.

If the law-making process is illegitimate (e.g., if there is a dictator), then _no one_ thinks you have a moral duty (in the deontological sense) to obey the laws, nor to accept the consequences for breaking them. It's _only_ the situation where the law-making process is legitimate -- reflecting the immoral will of the majority -- where the question comes up of whether (1) you can morally violate the unjust law and (2) whether you are duty-bound to accept the resulting punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was part of a news and current events Facebook group a few years ago, when WikiLeaks was primarily known for leaking evidence of the US Military's abuses in the middle East.

Most of the people in this group were Democrats or otherwise on the Left. They cheered WikiLeaks and loved that it was exposing the abuses of a group they didn't like.

Fast forward to 2016, and WikiLeaks begins publishing damaging information related to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The same people who cheered WikiLeaks as it published very damaging information about the US Military now condemned it because it was targeting someone they actually supported.

This was a major moment of clarity and realization for me. It showed me that those who are quick to use ideals to defend their positions ("freedom of information is good, it exposes the US' crimes!") will just as quickly discard those ideals when they stop working in their own interest ("WikiLeaks should not be publishing damaging information about Clinton!").

I was disgusted, because these people were so quick to use a moralistic position built upon high ideals to attack the US but they were themselves absolutely bereft of a true commitment to ideals. Within a few weeks the group's attitude on WikiLeaks shifted from gratitude and respect to hatred.

When I pointed this out, I was kicked out of the group.

<comment> spaced-out The reason many people turned on Wikileaks was because he clearly sided with Trump in 2016. He released the info he had on Hillary to damage her campaign, even though it didn't show anything illegal, yet he refused to publish the documents he had on Trump.

People sided with him because they believed he was impartial, and turned away from him when it was clear he wasn't.

<comment><USER14> > _People sided with him because they believed he was impartial, and turned > away from him when it was clear he wasn 't._

He literally provided evidence of mainstream media being highly impartial in favor of Clinton (against Sanders _and_ Trump). If people cared about impartiality, they'd be on Wikileaks side here.

<comment><USER15> _> He literally provided evidence of mainstream media being highly impartial in favor of Clinton (against Sanders and Trump). If people cared about impartiality, they'd be on Wikileaks side here._

Good quality newspapers tend to separate reporting and editorials/opinion fairly clearly, but have always contained both. It is also wholly common for newspapers to endorse candidates for high political office within the editorial context.

It is a matter of record that newspapers and magazines endorsed Clinton over other candidates by a massive margin in the 2016 elections:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_primaries)

I don't know where the idea that the news media is supposed to be a purely- objective fact source comes from, to be honest. This seems to be some kind of straw man.

The charge against Wikileaks, such as it is, is that while the material disclosed might be verbatim, it is obviously still subject to the editorial decisions of its leadership about which material to seek out and to disclose.

<comment><USER14> What Wikileaks revealed went _far_ beyond endorsing a candidate. For example:

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wikileaks-dnc-and-cnn- col...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wikileaks-dnc-and-cnn-colluded-on- questions-for-trump-cruz)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What ever happened to all that banking information that Wikileaks said they would release?

"Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange told Andy Greenberg at Forbes that he was in possession of a trove of documents that "could take down a bank or two." The documents wouldn't necessarily show illegality but they would reveal an "ecosystem of corruption" at one of the biggest banks in the United States. Wikileaks would release it "early next year." "

[https://www.cnbc.com/id/42762811](https://www.cnbc.com/id/42762811)

<comment><USER17> There are a bunch of documents that wikileaks has, at various times, claimed they'd release then have never mentioned again.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Claims_of_upcoming...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Claims_of_upcoming_leaks)

TBH, this bit in particular of wikileaks has always felt really scummy/sketchy to me. If you have the docs and have verified them and believe they are journalistically important then release them without delay. In every other scenario, why are you talking about them publicly?

<comment><USER18> There are legitimate reasons for delayed releases, like fact-checking and cross-referencing, leaker security, Wikileaks operatives' own security, coordinations with establishment press channels and possibly others.

Still, it's certainly better to limit such claims and it does feel a bit sketchy when they don't eventually publish something.

<comment><USER17> I'm not saying they shouldn't fact check - rather, if they aren't sure about a leak, it's irresponsible of them to talk about it before they're sure! Same goes for security - if delaying a leak helps security, surely it helps even more if you don't speak about it at all until ready to release.

Furthermore, announcing leaks gives the orgs being leaked on time to get their story straight and destroy evidence, so I'm really skeptical that announcing leaks like that is the responsible course of action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The discussion here is a reminder of how sufficiently competent people can defend to death a narrative that is logically consistent enough and has some form of "majority acknowledgment" for the sources of that narrative.

I want to remind us that rarely do enough credible (according to some formal and stringent definition) evidences exist for a given topic for an observer to make a conclusion with the kind of confidence we often display while remonstrating on these issues.

Specifically: it is naive to adopt a conclusive tone involving a person without liberty for over a decade, and possibly undergoing forms of punishment without due trial. I suspect not one of us here is trained enough in Law and have access to enough TRUE information to come to a judgment. If so, we are guilty of engaging in and spreading careless commentaries made about a case that combines possible human rights violation (its abundance in current time does not make this any less serious of a concern) with possible government interference in defining what constitutes journalism.

I want to leave you with this last thought - in majority cases in history, it has been profitable for the public to challenge the government on its policies, rather than to trust in its foresightedness and integrity.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought he would be released from remand when the Swedish charges were dropped.

And then expected the UK gov to keep him at a psychiatric ward as he seems a little unstable which they could embellish.

Did not expect him to still be in Belmarsh.

<comment><USER21> He is in jail for the offence of jumping bail. That Sweden dropped the charges doesn't dismiss that offence.

The UK spent 10s of millions on policing costs monitoring abscondment.

It is entirely right that he is serving a sentence as for reasons of deterrence.

<comment><USER22> He is not currently serving the sentence for jumping bail. Right now he is just being held waiting for a hearing.

<comment><USER23> Assange doesn't qualify for bail (he is a flight risk/certainty) so he stays in custody until the hearings are done.

Made his bed and now has to lie in it.

<comment><USER24> Having him 23 h a day in solitary confinement and not allowing him to call his mom seems a bit harsh, if they are concerned that he's a flight risk.

<comment><USER23> I would think he's in protective custody because he would be in extreme danger in general population. He's a celebrity and would likely be viewed as rapist and traitor (the facts don't matter, what matters is what the other criminals would think).

A good question is whether he needs to be held in a maximum security facility. He's a bail flight risk, but is he an escape risk? I would think he's at most a moderate escape risk (has some capabilities and has shown his contempt for the legal system previously) and would be fine in something less than maximum security (so long as protective custody could be maintained).

I do know Assange has a competent legal team that would fight his being held in maximum security __if __Assange wanted them too. I wonder why he hasn 't instructed them to do so.

<comment><USER25> Remand prisoners don't progress through the security categories. You're Cat C with some extra privileges, and that's your lot.

HMPS are solely responsible for the conditions in which somebody is held, the legal team can do nothing for him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > By what authority, or on what pretext, Assange is being tranquilised, and > kept isolated, remains unknown

I'm going to go out on a limb and say "ill health".

<comment><USER27> Which health conditions are improved by solitary confinement?

<comment><USER28> Not that it improves the condition, but psychosis leading to violent outbursts could be used to justify it. Anti-psychotics are also usually sedative in nature, which would explain the rest.

<comment><USER29> That same justification was used against political dissidents in the Soviet Union

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatr...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union)

<comment><USER30> Sure, but Russians are _bad_ [0]. Western governments are _good_. So it's totally different!

[0] So we're told by noted perjurer (it's OK because he's _good_ ) DNI James Clapper!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm surprised Julian Assange doesn't have a kill switch in place, where sensitive info which has been held up to this point will be released upon his death or conviction. At least none that we know of.

<comment><USER32> I'll read that as "[I'd be] surprised if Julian Assange doesn't have a [dead man's switch] in place".

And indeed he does. Some time ago Wikileaks/Assange distributed an encrypted insurance file. The torrent is about 90GB: [https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/2016-06-03_insurance.aes2...](https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/2016-06-03_insurance.aes256.torrent)

There was actually multiple versions fo this file, each larger than the previous one. This is the most recent version afaik.

It's likely this particular dead man's switch is actually trusted people though.

<comment><USER33> I wonder if this could backfire. With the "normal" or old guard politicians, this could have been a credible threat. Nobody wanted a scandal. With the new breed, scandals are just life.

<comment> m-p-3 Even worse, they thrive on scandals.

<comment><USER34> Chaos is a ladder, unless you're a theorist.

To theorists chaos is destruction (of their precious models). To _practitioners_ chaos is a ladder. Those with real Skin In the Game.

Economist vs. Trader.

<comment><USER33> Precious models like "standards" and "semblance of moral code". :-:

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I find it kind of weird how most of the discussion is about whether assange was good/bad/a "russian spy" etc - all of these have been discussed to death already. Shouldn't we be more concerned about the inhumane treatment of assange in jail regardless if you agree or disagree with what he published?

My 2c

<comment><USER36> Probably because Belmarsh is a pretty average British prison, it's slightly better than US prisons, slightly worse than some European prisons. Claims of being sedated come 3rd hand from an unreliable source - and are clearly untrue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Are there any other sources on this?

<comment><USER38> The "news" part is that he had a phone call with a friend. Primary source is the friend (Vaughan Smith). It's on his Twitter: [https://twitter.com/VaughanSmith/status/1210278654615474176](https://twitter.com/VaughanSmith/status/1210278654615474176)

For the torture part, which is not news, please see The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture: [https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...](https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25249)

Primary Source for the cited open letter [https://medium.com/@doctors4assange/concerns-of-medical- doct...](https://medium.com/@doctors4assange/concerns-of-medical-doctors- about-the-plight-of-mr-julian-assange-ffb09a5dd588)

<comment><USER39> There doesn't appear to be any reliable evidence that Assange is being held in solitary confinement. The original source for this seems to be his father, who claimed several months ago that he was being held in solitary for "up to" 23 hours a day.

There have been photos leaked by another person showing Assange looking relaxed interacting with other inmates. The leaker claimed that Assange was popular among the other prisoners.

In fact, Nils Melzer himself has confirmed Assange is not in solitary, but is apparently being "tortured" for other reasons. It is not clear why these reasons don't apply to every other prisoner on remand in Belmarsh.

<comment><USER38> I do not want to argue with you if the opinion of the leading UN expert in this matter is based on enough hard evidence. The important thing is:

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture _(and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment)_ visited Mr. Assange with a medical team and then wrote an appeal to the UK Government. The UK government should react with a prompt and impartial investigation. They did not do that. The did not even answer the question of the United Nations Special Rapporteur.

That by itself, no matter if Mr. Assange was subjected to torture, is non compliance with international rules.

Given Brexit this level of " _we do not care about international rules and we do not accept the UN as an authority_ " is unsurprising. IMHO a western nation like the UK ignoring a member of the OHCHR is very worrisome. It shows that the UK government has little interest to participate in the trend towards "good governance".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Everybody has got a plan, until they're punched in the face." \- Mike Tyson

The horrors of physical violence are not often understood by keyboard heros who feel superior within their bubble of close nit computer expert friends. But as soon as things become bloody, the skillset requirements drastically change. This happens to blackmarket vendors too. They get lured into some AFK situation and quickly become victims of much less smart, yet truly hardened criminals.

Good luck hacking your way out of that.

Julian will (most likely, I have 0 contact with him) be in a most awful place with the whole "legally" allowed shit storm hitting him where it hurts. Not a place where smart skinny people flourish.

</comment><comment><USER41> Belmarsh prison drone view: [https://email@example.com,0.0932264,3a,75y,240...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,0.0932264,3a,75y,240.71h,69.99t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMN0Q29E1fDt9yWGufw2PiMvfIQQfCiMzmNkWY5!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMN0Q29E1fDt9yWGufw2PiMvfIQQfCiMzmNkWY5%3Dw203-h100-k-no- pi0-ya4.9682255-ro0-fo100!7i14000!8i7000)

</comment><comment><USER42> Due process will strangely, coincidentally, be EXTREMELY SLOW.

... kind of like Guantanamo.

<comment><USER12> > Due process will strangely, coincidentally, be EXTREMELY SLOW.

Assange and his attorneys have, from day one, done everything possible to extend the process; there is nothing coincidental about the result.

> ... kind of like Guantanamo.

Guantanamo is a whole different problem, where people have actually received all the process there is, been determined to be innocent or not even subject to a y charges, and are still detained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How does he slop out if he's under sedation?

</comment><comment><USER44> *her

<comment><USER45> Genuine question: what is the most correct protocol on name and pronoun usage to describe past events, when the author wants to keep the focus on the fact of the accomplishment rather than the personal life of the actor?

Is it:

1\. Bruce Jenner won his gold medal in the Men's Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.

2\. Bruce Jenner won her gold medal in the Men's Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.

3\. Caitlyn Jenner won her gold medal in the Men's Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.

<comment><USER46> "Caitlyn Jenner, then known as Bruce, won her gold medal in the Men's Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics."

<comment><USER47> This kind of topic comes up in transgender communities and what you're proposing is offensive. People get really offended when the name assigned at birth (matching one's birth sex which doesn't align with one's identity) is kept attached to their life as a constant reminder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Y-Bopinator Don't do the crime if you can't do the time

</comment><comment><USER48> Didn't Assange befriend Tommy Robinson while in Belmarsh? I'm not too sure about his credibility and morals anymore.

</comment><comment><USER21> We are all slowly dying. He's not alone.

</comment><comment><USER49> ...and then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.</comment>


How to Measure the Decentralization of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/09/How-to-Measure-the-Decentralization-of-Bitcoin/?r=jaran

<comment><USER2> Actually, I don't plead for maximal decentralization. This article is in response to those who argue that BitShares is more centralized than other systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading the blog article I get the assumption that you plead for a maximal decentralisation of the consensus process.

This assumption may however be wrong looking at the requirements of a system like Bitcoin. In my _opinion_ those are:

\- A optimal scalable and fast system

\- A optimal decentralized system

The thing is these requirements influence each other, which means that we shouldn't aim for maximizing one or the other, but both at the same time, keeping them balanced.

<comment><USER4> I don't think maximum decentralization is what the author is pleading for. To the contrary in a different article he does in depth about how his alternative consensus protocol specifically limits the number of distinct block validators because of the marginal utility of each additional validator vs the linear increase in cost, and the consequences this has on speed and scalability:

[http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/07/The- Most-...](http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/07/The-Most- Decentralized-Proof-of-Stake-System/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: TheBigDB - A simpler open database of facts - <AUTHOR> http://thebigdb.com/ <comment><USER2> Former Freebase, current Google engineer here:

First of all, let me say that I'm glad more people are thinking/working in the space of triples. Even unstructured ones like this.

But when there's no semi-strict schema, it gets really, really tricky. Free text is hard, and actual meaning is hard to separate. (I say semi-strict, as Freebase is schema-last -- feel free to create your own! -- but has some level of enforcement)

For specific domains you may be okay with tags. And for some limited applications it probably works great. Triples are cool!

But when you start talking about larger, broader, datasets, ones that no one person or small group can curate, you're going to start running into collision.

There's certainly an argument to be made for metaschema -- <https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/search-metaschema> \-- and crowdsourcing these sorts of things could be interesting.

I think there's a lot of interesting work to be done. But I doubt that this is "better" per se, or at the very least, is little more than a toy.

And hey, I built such a toy graph engine once upon a time (be gentle -- it was really a demo hack) <https://github.com/barakmich/jgd> \-- you can even query it with Freebase's old MQL. (Which I have mixed feelings about, but is cool in its own way)

I guess my argument is, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And feel free to ping me for more!

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, I'm glad to be talking to a Freebase engineer :)

Second: It is not intended to be a Freebase killer, but it is certainly better for me and what I needed it for: building denisthebot.com - which can answer questions about a whole lot of subjects while being completely agnostic about what "categories" these subjects fit in.

Third: Since we all know no-one is going to change anyone's mind here, I won't discuss the merits of a DB structured the way I built it. But calling it a toy is quite flattering, I know some very powerful stuff that were called "toy" for some time :) Also, it would be a very easy toy to use, which will suit a lot of people, according to the emails I received.

Also, you're right: "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Comparison with Freebase:

> _Simpler structure: There are no datatypes, namespaces, lists, domains. Just > ordered nodes. Having a dead simple structure like that allows developers to > quickly and intuitively know how to access the info they want._

I don't see how this makes it simpler or intuitive at ALL. If there's no convention as to whether I should search for "born on" or "born_date" or "year_born", or whether the date will be "1900-08-01" or "08-01-1900" or "1900/08"... then how is this supposed to be useful?

The central problem is, there are lots of textual ways of describing the same thing. Without standardized datatypes and standardized tags, it quickly becomes a messy, useless free-for-all.

I don't see how TheBigDB gets around this. The FAQ explains how it's _different_ from Freebase/Wikidata, but I don't at all understand how it's supposed to be _better_ , or even as good.

<comment><USER4> This is stupid. I hate to say it, but by taking all of the complexity out of Freebase, they forgot the problem Freebase was trying to solve: Semantic integration

Right on the front page they have their biggest flaw in the example:

Apple weight 150g

Ok, so what about the company Apple? How are they semantically distinguishing one item from another? I guess Steve Jobs is Founder of a Fruit that weighs 150 grams.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you're talking about is the larger problem of "context". Thankfully, I already wrote the code and the documentation to attach statements to contexts, solving this problem in an elegant way. I haven't released it yet to keep the core of the service simple, and to help people understand what it does first.

It will be released when it will be the right time for it. Thanks for your comment!

<comment><USER4> I apologize for calling your project stupid. I should not have done that. I'm interested in seeing what you are doing on context. Thanks for being classy.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, I'm not afraid of criticism and insults, there is always some kind of information in them :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a much simplified version of Douglas Lenat's Cyc project [1], which has been going since the mid eighties and is attempting to build a structured knowledgebase/ontology of everyday knowledge. They have freely downloadable subset called OpenCyc [2]. It seemed pretty impressive last time I looked at it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc>

[2] <http://www.cyc.com/platform/opencyc>

<comment><USER4> Does anyone actually DO anything with Cyc? It always appears to be vaporware to me.

Maybe I'm just impatient, and something mindblowingly awesome, based on Cyc, is around the corner.

<comment><USER6> Well according to Wikipedia:

>Lenat was frustrated by Automated Mathematician's constraint to a single domain and so developed Eurisko; his frustration with the effort of encoding domain knowledge for Eurisko led to Lenat's subsequent (and, as of 2008, continuing) development of Cyc. Lenat envisions ultimately coupling the Cyc knowledgebase with the Eurisko discovery engine.

I don't know what he intends to do with it from there, but it could potentially make for some very powerful AIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if you could do machine learning on schemata. Basically start learning about dates (as an example) and as it learns updates the information with what it has learned. Something that has one person putting in { name "foo", born "10/1/92"} and someone else putting in { name "bar", born "september 30th, 1966" } and then going back and replacing the dates with an ISO standard date type but with a change history so you could look backwards in time at the data and see how the database had "improved" it. (or not). Then by voting on the improvements you teach the system to clean up its data representations. Crazy? Insightful? Stupid? I don't know but it was the question that popped into my head.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that many possible format conflicts in ways that make resolution impossible without cross-referencing with other sources.

Which date is "10/3/5"? Is it March 5th 2010? March 5th 1910? March 10th 1905? March 10th 2005? October 3rd 1905? October 3rd 2005? (or another century entirely, though the 20th and 21st would be most likely). And don't think the "/" vs. "-" as separate is sufficient to tell them apart.

Aand you'll find a lot of other variations - I'm used to writing 10/3-5 for example... But I'm not even consistent, I might write 10/3/5 or 10-3-5, or 5/3/10 / 5-3-10; anywhere I want to be explicit, I would write 2005-03-10 exactly because I'm used to seeing so many ambiguous dates that can't easily be resolved.

What about the value 5.123? Is it a floating point value with "123" after the decimal point, or the integer 5123? The "decimal point" is "," in many countries, and the thousand separator is usually, but not always, "." in countries that use "," as the decimal marker. If you treat things as "just text" you are going to have to potentially deal with dozens of different combinations of decimal points and quantity markers (depending on country, the markers don't all occur only every 3 digits to the left from the decimal marker...)

Interpreting small text fragments is fraught with a near infinite number of obnoxious details like this, and part of the problem is that even few people know most of them and will be unable to quickly resolve ambiguities without cross referencing with other data (or worse: they _think_ they know, or don't even recognize that there is an ambiguity in the first place)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One nice property of the Wikidata database is that it is a "secondary database. Wikidata will record not just statements, but their sources, thus reflecting the diversity of knowledge available and supporting the notion of verifiability." [1]

I think that's far better than voting. Voting for facts amounts to relying on a logical fallacy: appeal to the majority. [2] (Voting is fine for popularity contests, or things that can only be matters of opinion, but facts?)

[1] <http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum>

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it possible to download all data and use it under some open license (like CC-BY)? I can't find data license terms.

If no, then sorry, freebase is vastly superior IMHO - from user's point of view I don't see a point in a crowdsourced proprietary database (even if API is currently free).

<comment><AUTHOR> While it is not the case right now, being heavily invested into open-source myself, it is very possible that it ends up under CC-BY at some point.

<comment><USER8> It's worth pointing out that in most of the world facts is not copyrightable, and the copyright status of a _collection_ of facts is often not copyrightable. In those instances, CC-BY or whatever license you apply will be unenforceable. I believe Creative Commons themselves explicitly believe that CC-BY and similar licenses are _not_ appropriate for collections of facts.

E.g. they explicitly say on their website: "Copyright does not protect the facts or ideas underlying the creative expression. So, Creative Commons licenses do not apply to ideas, factual information or other non-creative elements that are not protected by copyright."

Courts in many jurisdiction explicitly refuse to accept "sweat of the brow" arguments for copyright, explicitly requiring an element of creativity. Some countries do have "database copyrights" that can protect arrangements of facts in certain ways, while in others a collection of straight up facts can not be copyrighted pretty much no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have you/do you plan to seed your database with the already structured data from freebase? It should be relatively straightforward, right? Well, I mean, minus the time to properly map the Freebase schema into your format. But that's probably less time than it takes to wait for people to fill in enough facts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Congrats, it looks great.

So, if I understand correctly, it let people crowdsource any kind of structured and descriptive data ?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly right! There are a lot of data on the web, almost none of it is structured in a way that lets other easily access and edit it.

For example, as you can see on <http://denisthebot.com>, having that kind of API makes it trivial to built smart question-answering engines.

<comment><USER12> Great. It may offer a good way to build some kind of open alternative to google now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, thanks for your question!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Excellent! I've been working on something similar. Trying to come up with a schema that is data-centric is hard enough let alone focusing on the ease of use by developers. Good luck!

 _Can I send how many requests I want?_ , I think you might mean _Can I send as many requests as I want?_ ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Woops, good catch! Fixed. And thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any plans to degrade votes over time, so that new or updated facts can more quickly gain precedence?

<comment><USER15> Facts don't change.

<comment><USER12> It's thursday.

<comment><USER15> Your very clever. Do you really think I hadn't considered a statement like that?

Facts are verifiable statements and things that are verifiable are verifiable repeatably. This is not a verifiable statement.

<comment><USER16> 'Yugoslavia is a country'. Are you really going to exclude that? So, no statements about political geography at all, then. Same problem for physical geography ('New Moore Island exists'). Nothing about climate (because 'the rain in Spain' could change at any time), nothing about population levels. Even the sample 'average weight of an apple' is pretty suspect. I think your database is going to be quite limited.

<comment><USER15> > 'Yugoslavia is a country'. Are you really going to exclude that?

Yes, of course.

> So, no statements about political geography at all, then.

Absolutely not, you just have to make time explicit.

<comment><USER17> What calendar will you use?

Edit: It seems we're arguing about what a priori knowledge is capable of serving as a base for factual deductions. The Kantian approach is to say that we all agree on time and space and everything can be based off of these self- evident truths. I think there is not such a clear boundary between objective truth and induction.

Edit2: I'd also like to take this moment to point out that "you're" is the proper contraction of "you are", since we're getting all semantic.

<comment><USER15> This has suddenly become very philosophical. My view is that a database of facts should contain things that are believed to be facts. It should be possible to remove facts that are shown to be incorrect, but those things should never have been true.

> I'd also like to take this moment to point out that "you're" is the proper > contraction of "you are", since we're getting all semantic.

I know, it annoys me too. By the time I'd realized it was too late to edit. Typos happen.

<comment><USER16> "My view is that a database of facts should contain things that are believed to be facts. It should be possible to remove facts that are shown to be incorrect, but those things should never have been true."

But they definitely were true. I thought you were making a distinction between 'something that is true' and 'something that is a fact (ie: is unchangingly true)' which I don't think most people make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any chance to release this as an open source? For example, people would like to have installed in their servers and use it for their own things. I think it would be useful for fandom. For example, the Star Wars DB or Lord of the Rings Db :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm seriously considering it actually, but not 100% sure at the moment... :) And yes, it would be awesome for fandom, but the whole point of the service is to be able to have all kinds of data in it, so... :)

<comment><USER18> Yes, but people is usually more motivated to contribute to create the biggest database about a specific topic than the bigger ever :)

Check, for example, Wikia, which contains Wikipedia for TV Shows which are more complete than Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't be deterred by the negative comments about the unstructured data. It's a tough problem but not an impossible one. I know because I'm also battling the same question building a free-form NLP based self tracking app to help track daily data ( <http://thyself.io> ). The problem for me is that it's hard to perform analytics when one datapoint is in "miles walked" and the other is in "laps ran".

As you said, conventions help mitigate the problem a little bit but the end user can hardly be expected to stick to best practices.

I have hope though. This is a problem worth solving.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of Freebase. They built a huge data-set as well as tools and an api to access themselves. Have you talked to anyone on the team? (they are now at Google) How would you say that you are different from them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Never talked to them, but I did address the differences between TheBigDB and Freebase here: <http://thebigdb.com/faq>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like this idea in the sense of an experiment. I'm not sure where it will end up, but it could be interesting.

As others have pointed out, some kind of conventions must be established around the semantics, and something must be done to avoid redundancy (which leads to inconsistency) and ambiguity.

I agree with those criticisms, but if the community also helps develop the schema, it will be interesting to see. What collisions will happen? What will be the result of queries that reach far across disciplines?

</comment><comment><USER22> I appreciate any new service that attempts to organize data / information. With that in mind, I hope this succeeds.

A suggestion: it needs a demo query box on the site. Shouldn't be too hard to let a rate limited IP address throw a few keywords at it and spit back results. I'd like to see what the db contains before I invest too much time (how many topics, how many facts, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it would be a plus for people who quickly want to test the API.

In the meantime, you can just look through <http://browser.thebigdb.com> what the DB contains, or just "gem install thebigdb" and start copy/paste the code examples to see how the API really behaves.

Thanks for your suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Based on observations and prior experience (esp. Bitzi), I believe the wiki approach of "correct-in-place" leads to better convergence and community than "downvote the errors, add a corrected entry, upvote the better entry".

(Voting democracy may help prevent people from being oppressed in certain ways, but it isn't much of a truth-discovery mechanism.)

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting concept. It's like RDF for human beings. It's easier for human beings to look at unstructured data, but at the same time it makes it extremely hard to do interesting stuff programmatically. You just can't do reliable inferencing

</comment><comment><USER25> Cool project, man. And, way to show class in handling the "detractors" here. I firmly believe that constructive debate is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also quite similar to freebase: <http://www.freebase.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. I addressed this in the FAQ: <http://thebigdb.com/faq>

<comment><USER27> Sounds a bit like what <http://fluidinfo.com/> wanted to do originally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You should have a list of the most recent facts added to give people a taste of what's in the database.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, while you can see what's in the DB here: <http://browser.thebigdb.com>, you can't see what's recent. I'll do something about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do you support downloads of the data?

</comment><comment><USER30> Ahh, too yellow!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry!</comment></comment>


Show HN: I made this to filter products I like on shopping sites - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-vegan-filter/pgjbffdjjamkcnbimjbaahhflocahcae <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

I got frustrated by how much time I wasted online, always filtering for the same things on shopping sites. Thought: If only I could set my filters once! And this project was born. A Chrome browser extension that automatically filters the products I like on shopping sites. In this case vegan products.

How it works: 1\. Download Chrome extension (3 clicks, no email / signup) 2\. Browse retail sites 3\. Vegan filters are set automatically across retail sites.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this simple implementation ==> On Google Chrome: [https://bit.ly/2Jv7Qku](https://bit.ly/2Jv7Qku) (free)

Website with more info: [https://vegan-filter.xarista.io/](https://vegan- filter.xarista.io/)

Thank you :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Great idea! Just tried it - my girlfriend will love it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. Any additional sites you'd like to see it working on- let me know please. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Flagged due to repeat posting with obvious vote manipulation and fake account comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please note I had reached out to email@example.com to kindly delete the similar post with faulty URL and related issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Promising approach... will test it in detail

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks fez_de. Let me know how you get on please!</comment></comment>


Windows 10 Update Controlled Folder Access Nullifies Ransomware Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/windows-10-fall-creators-update-controlled-folder-access-nullifies-ransomware-attacks <comment><USER2> OT:

A Windows 10 nullified my work laptop about 5 minutes ago so now IT has to reimage or replace it.

But don't worry, now its invulnerable to ransomware attacks in its current state!</comment>


Ask HN: What is the ceiling salary for an  average developer? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If you work at a normal company and get a salary, I'd say 150K these days for a senior is just about the max.

As a highly skilled consultant/freelancer that chargers per project or hourly... could possibly be much more.

This is in the USA btw.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree, with a few caveats:

1\. If you make it to upper-management (VP of Eng. / CTO, etc) you can expect to make an additional 100k or so.

2\. Your "total comp" is going to vary widely. If you're lucky enough to work for a public company who comps you options, the actual value of your package could me many multiples of your salary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is going to vary greatly based on the country and city where a developer lives.

</comment><comment><USER5> What kind of pay could I expect fresh out of college? I'm currently working part time as a developer in our college Software Engineering lab and am active in our local Code for America brigade</comment>


What 2020 Would Look Like If Automakers Had Seriously Invested in Hydrogen - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/what-2020-would-look-like-if-automakers-had-seriously-i-1840418331 <comment><USER2> Hydrogen is a junk technology. What is the easiest place to get hydrogen? Petrol and other hydrocarbons. Extracting it from water would take more energy than using existing fossil fuel. The tech was expensive, would probably stay expensive, and was pretty bad environmentally. Hydrogen is also really difficult to transport in the amounts needed to fuel fleets of cars. It died because it sucked.

<comment><USER3> Electric is simpler and less risky.

For automakers, the _worst_ problem of electric vehicles is that maintainance/service is easy and they make more money servicing vehicles that from selling... but it can be fixed: 1- renting batteries (and still charging annual service fee). 2- renting whole cars by the minute using a mobile app.

The problem with Hydrogen is that's still an _explosion_ motor with a different fuel, and you have to develop a new kind of motor for it plus a way to store and consume the hydrogen cells safely.

<comment><USER4> Yep. Many people know that Hydrogen and Hindenburg start with the same letter.

There are no hydrogen wells. So you'd have to use a _lot_ of energy to make hydrogen fuel in the needed quantities. And then (because it's such a light gas) highly-pressurized containers (collision-survivable) are needed.

Instead, use that energy more directly.

<comment><USER5> Question - what about using solar panels to fund the energy? i.e. a large solar farm

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hydrogen is more than an automotive fuel source and can be used to supplement renewables with powering homes, generators/batteries and much more.

[https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-fuel- basics](https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-fuel-basics)

DIY hydrogen farming is also an interesting prospect for harvesting excess renewable production.

Hopefully we'll see more breakthroughs with technology to make it worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hydrogen is very inefficient compared to using electricity (more) directly via a battery. The fueling is relatively fast, in rare locales where the stations are available, but then fueling speed for electric vehicles is not an issue if it can be done at home and at fast chargers, which are highly available in many states of the US and a rapidly growing number of countries.

<comment><USER7> Yep,and as an engineer that's hard to imagine people that don't think of the efficiency as a primary feature.

Efficiency misses the point, it's convenience: a 3 minute fill-up instead of a 60m fill-up.

<comment><USER6> Since you mention a different point, let's look at that.

When you charge at home filling up takes 6 seconds: 3 to plug in, and 3 to disconnect. Sure in between these two 3-second periods you have dinner and sleep, but you were going to do that anyway. It's not taking any extra time. This is the normal case for most owners day to day.

Putting your priority of convenience first, I would take 6 seconds versus 3 minutes any day. So electric beats hydrogen by a factor of 30 on the metric you regard as more important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hydrogen embrittlement and permeability - nuff said.</comment>


Don't Panic: Facebook is the Private Beta of the Semantic Web - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2010/4/23/facebook-is-the-private-beta-of-the-semantic-web

<comment><USER2> The Semantic Web when it arrives will be fully federated like the Web we have now.

No way will I or most people I know be happy with a significant resource (like a Semantic Web) being owned or subject to the whims of one or a few people or organizations. Open Access controversies gives a hint of how much unhappiness will result if Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any one entity looks to have a lock on such a vital web resource.

<comment><USER3> I'm not happy by Google's dominance of search & email, and yet it is there.

Here the matter is even worse due to the network effect: if most of your friends are using facebook's social tagging service, you'd have to be connected to it one way or the other.

<comment><USER4> how does google dominate email?

yahoo has more email account than google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So we shouldn't mind the internet becoming a corporate-totalitarian mining town because there's a bright future ahead to be built on the initial infrastructure brought in by the corporate rulers?

I would ask why companies lose or relinquish control of such company towns, and would the same factors work online?

To get the ball rolling, I would posit that the same factors _won't_ work. Data can't be relinquished in the same way that land or mineral rights can. For example: once the graph of my college friends is out there, there's no way I can ever reliably take it back.

<comment><USER6> As a historical fact, corporate mining towns are a thing of the past in the United States, and the great-great-grandchildren of the miners enjoy a prosperity that was unimaginable even to the mine owners back then.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for another reiteration of the OP premise. No one disputes history here. The devil's advocate position and the question raised are about the reasons why and how well those factors would work online. If we can figure this out, then this might give us a clue as to how specifically this might play out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My idea of a semantic web is when the data on the web has value added to it by being able to tie disparate pieces of data together. The thrust of what Facebook is doing seems to be tieing my identity to data on the web. That's a different value prop.

One makes the web more usable to me, the other makes me more usable to other people.

<comment><AUTHOR> But with the Open Graph protocol you do get the ability to tie disparate pieces of data together. For instance, let's say that I examine someone's tweet stream for links. If I fetch the OG data for each of those I can tell you whether they tweet most often about people, or movies, or whatever. I can show you a thumbnail display of images representing the things they linked to.

Open Graph is most definitely semantic web. Liking is just one possible application of that semantic data.

<comment><USER7> Oh yeah - I definitely agree.

I guess my thought was just that the semantic lens is focused in a different direction that I imagined. The mental model I always had was that the semantic info would let users make connections between datasets that model our physical world rather than datasets that monitor users themselves and how they use the web.

This is just a different use case than I imagined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just took a better look at Open Graph. Certainly marking up pages with RDFa tags using standard Ontology's for properties and classes could be a useful thing.

The problem as I see it is that the Facebook corporation strongly discourages spidering the Facebook web site. It is certainly their right to do so, but from a research point of view it is a shame that it is not allowed to spider a portion of Facebook to get the RDF graph. It is difficult to know if something is useful if you can't play/experiment with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd be careful with drawing positive analogs to "how the west was won", in light of the results it had on the indigenous people, cultures and the environment.

...unfortunately the analogy is perhaps apt.

<comment><AUTHOR> The analogy was meant to be more drawn to the frontier colonization of space as written in numerous sci-fi novels, but point taken. Luckily, I'm not entirely sure who the indigenous citizens of the internet would be to be damaged by rapid territorial expansion.

<comment><USER10> Us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a problem with tossing around the term Semantic Web when their take is so much different than mine. The SW is about standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, HTTP, using URIs to represent things and concepts, etc.) and a very large number of linked data publishers who hopefully use at least some common Ontology's to define classes of businesses, information sources, people, organizations, places, events, etc., etc. and to define the properties that have ranges and domains that are these standard classes.

I take a bit of heat for being a SW proponent but I believe that long term this is a big thing. I could be wrong, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Open Graph is based on RDFa and is a "standard" by which website owners can use URIs to represent a number of people, places, things and concepts. I admit that I tossed the term semantic web out there without fastidiously studying the accepted definition, but by the one you proposed I think Open Graph meets it.

<comment><USER8> You are absolutely correct that RDFa is a SW technology. I must admit some prejudice here: I went from thinking that RDFa was very useful to being skeptical when HTML5 won the standards war against XHTML. When I get back from vacation I would like to dig into what MySpace is doing; I just bookmarked your article and will look at it next week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If Facebook is at least a bit nice (and smart), they will use Freebase types to make it easier to link data.

Allowing people to free-handedly add entities will be such a mess--no different from what we have today.

It's not enough to link people to urls. It'd be better to link people to standardized, uniquely identifiable (unambiguous) concepts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Considering how much of a mess HTML5 adoption is, I'd be extremely surprised if RDF or anything similar is "eventually" merged into the browser. Maybe for an extremely distant "eventually".

<comment><AUTHOR> The great thing here is that the browser vendors don't even have to do it. It could be handled entirely by browser extension developers for now, and once it catches on enough to make some waves, the browser vendors will want to pick it up as a "cool new feature". Once one vendor does it, others will fall in line so as not to appear behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Will "like" data be just as available, or does Facebook get to own that data?

</comment><comment><USER14> More like the oh so public beta.</comment>


Revision3 In Acquisition Talks With The Discovery Channel - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/30/online-video-content-pioneer-revision3-in-acquisition-talks-with-the-discovery-channel/ <comment><USER2> I would hate to see them become a traditional TV channel.

<comment><USER3> This is almost certainly not for TV programming. Discovery channel realizes that they don't have compelling web content (although they've been trying for years). So instead of turning Rev3 into Discovery, they need to Rev3 to keep being Rev3 to fill a gap in Discovery.

Although I do wonder what will happen if Discovery wants them to censor themselves, or if they ever decide to "shift their demographic focus" or basically dump their current audience for a more lucrative one.</comment></comment>


Show HN: PairBuddy - Secret Crush App - built in 72 hours, learnt Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://www.pairbuddy.com

<comment><USER2> Idea: Add ALL your friends to your crush list and then you can find out whenever someone has a crush on you and you can laugh at them.

This doesn't solve the problem of making the first move, since you can't know that the person adding you to the crush list is actually doing so because they have a crush on you. They may just do it to see if you have a crush on them.

It's a good problem to solve, but I think that after a short burst of initial activity everyone will realise how exploitable this is and so be unable to use it seriously.

<comment><USER3> A-holes are a-holes, no matter what tools you give them. If someone adds everyone just to make fun of his/her friends, then the question is not so much about motivation, but rather why he/she still has friends at all.

I imagine most people after the age of 18 stop doing that, so I guess this might solve a problem provided there are some age limitations. Then again, you have to wonder if people older than 18 have 'crushes' they can't resolve like adults.

You Americans make it too complicated :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Friends, jokes apart, we really believe that making the first move is hard. People fear losing their good friends or getting rejected.

So we created PairBuddy. Please give us your constructive feedback.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> The project itself looks ok to me - I don't really mind the logo, though.

Concering growth/spreading of the project: BangWithFriends had huge media coverage because it was something new and also a little controversial. I'm afraid PairBuddy is missing this aspect.

I nonetheless with you the very best of luck with your weekend project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks senic. We are not controversial - so not expecting a viral growth. We think that people interested in serious relationships will benefit from it. Even if we are able to reach to a few thousand and are genuinely able to help them, we will be happy. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where have I heard that before... :)

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> lol..</comment>


Mattermark Weekly #9 - All Eyes on Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=77ac33b633dba06cf18997355&id=0cc31bf363&e=1c0690ef80

<comment><USER2> Competition must have been stiff if the #1 mobile startup is imgur, a 4 year old website with only moderate success on Android and no success on iTunes.

<comment><USER3> I hear you, and it might be worth noting this analysis is looking for big changes in a positive direction (it's geared toward investors looking for early upside), and Imgur increased downloads by 200% last week. Time will tell where they're headed. They have a huge web presence.

The #1 startup for mobile, in the overall sense, is Rdio. But we're trying to catch stuff in the way up, so we weigh more heavily toward change in momentum. There is probably another good list I can release later this week that has more of the "usual suspects" you'd expect to see.

<comment><USER2> But they're fundamentally not a mobile startup - their apps are almost incidental (like with most major websites): [http://imgur.com/](http://imgur.com/) doesn't even mention them. The 200% increase in downloads has no relevance looking for movers and shakers in the mobile industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Edmodo - digital social magazine curated by your friends"

I guess it is a mistake. But that is definitely not what Edmodo is doing.</comment>


The effect of typefaces on credibility - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-ye-people-hearken-o-earth/ <comment><USER3> Those columns graphs were very misleading to me. Here is some adjusted image showing the whole image for easier grasping of the dimensions: <http://i.imgur.com/QS8PA.jpg> (I am not 100% my math is correct but a quick calculation in my head says the dimensions seem correct)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for this. There's a reason why any formal discussion of graphics mentions that the numerical axis of bar graphs must start at 0.

[0] <http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/geom_bar.html> [1] [http://www.b-eye- network.com/view/index.php?cid=2468&fc=...](http://www.b-eye- network.com/view/index.php?cid=2468&fc=0&frss=1&ua)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not that great of a writer. My papers were usually in the B range and I almost never got an A. Then I started using LaTeX and now my papers are used as examples in classes.

<comment><USER6> +1

I'm not sure why people like the Computer Modern typeface so much. I think it looks terrible. :\

<comment><USER7> I used to dislike CM when it was printed on laser printers, but discovered that when it was printed on a Linotype--the _Art of Computer Programming_ books, for instance--it seemed to take on an entirely different character. It looks clean and pretty, rather than spindly.

Clearly that's subjective, and you might hate it no matter the output device. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An empirical anecdote: when I was in high school, all of my lab reports for chemistry and physics were typeset in LaTeX while most of my friends either handwrote the mathematics or used MS Word's Equation Editor. There were multiple occasions where a friend and I made the same mistake (we usually worked together; yes, we cited each other) and the deduction on my report was less than the deduction on his. It wasn't huge, usually -1 point vs -2, but there was consistently a difference.

<comment><USER9> I've been using LaTex for my resume[1] for years, and I always get compliments on how "professional" it looks.

You can see the resume and source code here if anyone is interested: [1]<http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html>

<comment><USER10> Not only does LaTeX make your resume look better, it also makes it easier to manage. I have a whole bunch of sections for things like different projects, experience, awards, education and so on. I can easily switch any of them out in any particular resume I want to print because they're all in separate files. The actual resume itself is just a bunch of includes, which means I can easily have multiple different permutations that are kept in sync whenever I update the appropriate sections.

Of course, this hasn't helped me at all because I haven't updated my resume in a year and a half. This might not seem too bad, but I was actually in the middle of freshman year last time I touched it :P.

<comment><USER11> Oddly enough, your resume's source code is probably a more effective resume than any output it could possibly generate.

<comment><USER10> Haha, you assume my code follows good TeX style and conventions. If the only code sample I ever saw by myself was that, even I wouldn't hire myself. (That was a confusing sentence to write :P.)

If you can imagine a site with IE-specific code and a layout that's half specified with absolute positioning and half with  , you wouldn't be that far off from what my resume code looks like. It's essentially held together with metaphorical duct tape and \vspace{}.

It's like sausage--tastes great, but never visit a sausage factory :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When the survey initially came out I was randomly given Computer Modern. The day before, I had painstakingly converted Computer Modern it to a webfont for a friend's blog (<http://www.krisjordan.com>) and I was shocked to see it on nytimes.com.

I quickly went over to a different (Windows) machine to try it out because I couldn't believe my eyes. That one was given Georgia, so I mistakenly assumed that Errol Morris was such a type hipster that he included Computer Modern in his type stack if it was installed locally. It was pretty funny to see this today.

One thing I will say, is that the Computer Modern webfont they used is a disaster. It had tons of aliasing issues. I wonder how they sourced it since natively it isn't in a normal font format. (Knuth!) That certainly would skew the results.

<comment><USER13> So if you want to use cmr, cmi, and friends, on your web site, what's the best way to do it? I see that you seem to have put them in a few different formats in /fonts/ and even stuck a base64 version into the stylesheet itself. I'd be delighted to hear more about the pains you had to take and why!

<comment><USER12> I started with the OTF files here:

<http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/>

Then I messed around a bunch with the advanced options on the Font Squirrel @font-face generator:

<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator>

I don't remember the exact settings I used, but it needed a decent amount of tweaking to end up looking acceptable.

The base64 encoding doesn't contribute to anything other than website performance. It saves an additional request in modern browsers. The other linked fonts are for IE/Older browsers.

<comment><USER13> Cool, thanks! What kind of aesthetic problems did you have? Poor hinting, lousy kerning?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How did they control for whether the fonts are actually installed on the participants' computers or not?

Also, did they control for desktops vs smartphones vs tablets? It's reasonable to hypothsize the device's screen (and zoom level on mobiles) affects typeface rendering and its perception.

All in all, intersesting and worthy of more work, but I want more to believe the result more.

<comment><USER15> > How did they control for whether the fonts are actually installed on the > participants' computers or not?

They could have used @font-face and distributed the fonts with the page, but to be safer, they could have just created 6 different images, and distributed the passages as a png's.

I have no idea whether this was the approach - but if they do it in the future, this is certainly something to think about. Simply swapping the order of the font-family css line isn't going to cut it.

I look forward to this being researched more - Who thinks Google/Facebook have done this A/B test already? Maybe they could release the results!

<comment><USER16> > They could have used @font-face and distributed the fonts with the page,

Bingo. These CSS[0] and JS[1] are in the quiz.

[0] <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2891540/Fonts/fonts.css> [1] [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/js/multimedia/bundles/...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/js/multimedia/bundles/20111122_errollfonts.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really hate those "Weighted Agreement/Disagreement" charts.

For Weighted Agreement, it looks like Comic Sans had a way lower agreement rate (it looks like 60% lower) but Comic Sans had only a 4.5% lower agreement rate than Baskerville, _including_ their weighting system.

For Weighted Disagreement, Georgia had only a 7.7% increase in disagreement than Baskerville whereas the chart makes it look more than double.

Still interesting, but not _nearly_ as substantial as they make it out to be. Is there a term for this type of manipulation of charts (whether intentional or not)?

EDIT: Indeed, the term for this is "Truncated graph" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_graph#Truncated_grap...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_graph#Truncated_graph)

And as a bonus (thanks wikipedia!), according to Edward Tufte's "Lie Factor"[0] (where 1 is considered accurate), the Weighted Agreement chart has a lie factor of ~15 and the Weighted Disagreement chart has a lie factor of ~17.

[0]: [http://thedoublethink.com/2009/08/tufte%E2%80%99s-principles...](http://thedoublethink.com/2009/08/tufte%E2%80%99s-principles- for-visualizing-quantitative-information/)

</comment><comment><USER18> >Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader.

I've thought for years Georgia was a great choice on a resume/paper.

a) You want to stand out

b) You also don't want to appear too "starchy"

<comment><USER19> Actually, while Georgia is a good font overall, the design is Georgia is optimized for the screen. Because of this, it has some peculiarities, such as a very large x-height (so the pixels in the counterforms can be read).

Here's a little more about what I'm talking about: [http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-hackers-why- you-...](http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-hackers-why-you-dont-use- garamond-on-the-web/)

<comment><USER18> Good points. Verdana is one of my favorites, but I believe it suffers from the same issues because it was also designed for being legible on screen.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdana#Usage>

<comment><USER19> Yeah, Verdana is fantastic on screen (this was especially so before anti- aliasing was standard), but looks awful in print.

EDIT: also, didn't know about IKEA's Verdanagate (from your link above). Fascinating!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Baskerville seems to be the king of fonts. What I did is I pushed and pulled > at the data and threw nasty criteria at it. But it is clear in the data that > Baskerville is different from the other fonts in terms of the response it is > soliciting.

No amount of 'pushing' and 'pulling' at data can compensate for a poorly designed experiment. Georgia can't be used as both the control and a measure of how effective Georgia is—clearly fonts that stood out from the rest of the page would have a different effect than the one that looks exactly like the rest of the page. To give any of this credence, the sample should have stood alone, or the typeface of the surrounding page should have been randomized as well. What we're looking at here is "Are there certain typefaces that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true when contrasted with Georgia?".

</comment><comment><USER21> Generally I detest font geeks, but I'm going to defend them here. First off: yes it's true that many intellectuals, designers, and hipsters have a genuine prejudice for Comic Sans. Facts need to work a little harder to prove themselves when written in that font. But in a world where we're deluged with typed information from the second we glimpse at our alarm clocks, I think it's okay to have a little prejudice because we need filter out at least some of the noise. Like most stereotypes, the Comic Sans prejudice is based on a grain (beach?) of truth. Can anyone really claim that the percentage of trustworthy Comic Sans based webpages they've seen in their life is equal to the percentage of trustworthy Georgia pages? Sorry. Geocities happened people, and I, for one, will never forget it.

</comment><comment><USER22> This misses the most obvious difference to users, which is that the font changes in the middle of the article. Taken in conjunction with all the other fonts on the page, the harmony of the specific font to all other fonts in the article and on the page is probably the most important factor here.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would like to ask Patio11 if he has ever done font A/B tests. I'm working on my sales website and the results would be very welcome. In my case I lack the traffic to do any proper testing.

<comment><USER24> I've never done an A/B test on typeface, specifically, but I've made a few over the years on e.g. font sizes. No major results to report. My intuition is that I'm extraordinarily skeptical that this would matter and largely think the only people capable of perceiving strong differences in the character of a typeface are people who do that professionally plus Thomas. I'm prepared to be wrong about that, though, as six years ago I would have told you that colors could not possibly meaningfully impact conversions and that's just catastrophically wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Following up on blahedo's comment and the questions about what the heck their p-values mean --

This is a nice example that you can get statistical significance for small effects, if your sample is big enough. Their p-values are explained very badly, so I did my own analysis by transcribing their data from those plots. Let's take their weighting scheme for granted. I agree with some other commenters that the sums and counts are misleading, and instead took average scores per font, and computed confidence intervals for those means. The means are indeed a little different, and for some pairs, statistically significantly so.

[http://brenocon.com/Screen%20shot%202012-08-10%20at%202.03.0...](http://brenocon.com/Screen%20shot%202012-08-10%20at%202.03.07%20AM.png)

But does it matter much? Take the pair with the largest gap, Baskerville vs. Comic Sans, of 0.95 versus 0.79: a difference is 0.16. This is out of a 10-point scale (ranging -5 to +5).

In fact, the standard deviation for the entire dataset is 3.6 -- so just 0.05 standard deviations worth of difference.

Or here's another way to think about it. If a person does Comic Sans example, versus could have done Baskerville example, how often would they have score higher? (This ignores the weightings, it's a purely ordinal comparison. I think this is related to the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test statistic or something, I forget.) So with independence assumptions (if they had proper randomization, hopefully this solves), just independently sample from the distributions many times and compare pairs of simulated outcomes. 22% of the time it's a tie, 40.3% of the time Baskerville scores higher, and 37.8% of the time Comic Sans scores higher. I guess then it sounds like the difference is better than nothing.

Not sure what's a good and fair way to think about the substantive size of the effect. I wanted to take the quantile positions of the means, but realized you can't exactly do that with ordinal data like this (zillions of values share the same quantile value).

I probably missed something, so here's the transcribed data and R/Python code probably with errors: <https://gist.github.com/3311340>

Now that I'm thinking about it more, averaging the agreement scores seems weird. Maybe it's clearer to use the simple binary agree/disagree outcome.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't know about typefaces, but taking a screenshot of rendered black-on- white text and saving as .jpg sure has an effect on credibility.

</comment><comment><USER27> I would like to see it controlled for age group, I remember liking Comic Sans as a child. Would Comic Sans have an effect on children, the same way it seems to for adults?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'll take the other side here:

There's two axis - engagement and authority. Baskerville is not engaging, but it looks authoritative. So you tend to agree, even if you don't know what it says (like a boring professor or politician). Comic Sans is like a boring person in a clown suit - you can't follow what it's saying, and you tend to disagree just because it looks a little stupid.

The more respectabel Sans are engaging, but not authoritative; Times is both engaging and authoritative.

If you read something in Baskerville, you agree because it looks so boring that you can't be bothered reading it. Georgia, on the other hand, encourages both strong agreement and strong disagreement - people take it seriously, but actually pay attention. No-one takes Comic Sans seriously, because it's hard to read _and_ looks stupid.

</comment><comment><USER29> For those who don't have Baskerville: <http://klepas.org/openbaskerville/> or <http://openfontlibrary.org/font/open-baskerville/>

</comment><comment><USER30> "It's going to work! I'm using a very convincing font; it's bold, and has a lot of serifs."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APcuJjCZTMU#t=4m07s>

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it odd that Comic Sans and Georgia change places in the weighted totals.

Now I'm going to petition Randall Munroe to gather more data (thinking of the color survey).

</comment><comment><USER32> There are a lot of problems here.

The bar charts used to illustrate that article are terrible. They present raw counts for each font, but each font was not presented to the same number of people---they varied from 7,477 (CM) to 7,699 (Helvetica), which is a pretty big swing given the other numbers they're displaying. In fact, when you run the percentages, CM has a higher percentage of agreement than Baskerville (62.6% to 62.4%)!

When we turn to the "weighted" scores, which don't follow any clear statistical methodology that I'm aware of, the bar chart is again presented with counts rather than proportions, and this time with an egregiously misleading scale that makes it seem like CS gets half the score of gravitas-y fonts like CM and Baskerville, when in fact its score is only about 5% lower.

Finally we get to the "p-value for each font". That's... not how p-values work. The author admits that his next statement is "grossly oversimplified", but there's a difference between simplification and nonsense. He says that "the p-value for Baskerville is 0.0068." What does that mean? What test was being performed there? Can we have a little hint as to what the null and alternative hypotheses were?

<comment><USER33> The biggest problem I see is that Baskerville isn't standard on Windows. They may have specified a Baskerville font-family, but that's not necessarily what the reader saw. The original test article displayed the asteroid passage as text, not as an image, so unless they accounted for the rendering differences among OS's, the entire test seems questionable.

I'm on a Vista system at the moment, and it does have a Baskerville Old Face variant, but "Gold has an atomic number of 79" does not look like the text shown in the article.

<comment><USER34> Computer Modern is not standard on any system either. Presumably they used web fonts.

<comment><USER33> You're probably right about the web fonts, but there is still the issue that the same font will look different on Mac and Windows. Heck, on my system there's a noticeable difference between browsers.

<comment><USER35> I know Firefox renders web fonts (at least Ubuntu from Google web font api) in an awful manner. Webkit does it perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting read.

I certainly agree that Comic sans nudges me towards disbelief (and I'd never read a full article written in this horrible font :-)), while Georgia seems more 'professional' and believable.

Baskerville in my mind is instantly associated with all the books I read - most of those on scientific topics had this or a very similar font. Don't know whether it affects my judgement of what's written compared to any other normal fonts.

Typewriter-style fonts do make texts seem older and therefore, more believable (since they've been around for so long, there must be some truth to them - <USER2> standard logical reasoning).

</comment><comment><USER37> So font has an effect on how seriously readers take what's written in it. The names of the fonts alone (i.e. Helvetica, Georgia, and Comic Sans) also give off the same vibes.

I wonder... Do the names of programming languages have an effect on how seriously people want to read what's written in them? If given 3 names (e.g. Python, Ruby, Groovy), do people subconciously rank their seriousness???

</comment><comment><USER38> I took a class that was very writing-intensive. I was one of the only people to ever actually change the font in my essays from Calibri to Times New Roman, and always wondered if this contributed to the fact that I did substantially better than most other people with very comparable essays.

</comment><comment><USER39> regarding comic sans use at CERN... often found that scientists like hideous designs. it's a way of saying that we work on serious stuff.

a lot of sites at MIT, CMU have that mark... the more prestigious, the uglier.

of course it has to be a certain style of ugly.

<comment><USER40> I'd say not just scientists at CERN. This applies to most (nah... ALL) scientists: researchers, PhDs, Professors, etc. They use very hideous design, or more accurately, nothing at all, on their research webpages. And I am talking about a geocities-esque type of "design" here. Sometimes I even wonder if there is an implicit rule around that goes on the lines of "real researchers must PRETEND they just learned html".

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Our lecturer give us notes on particle physics in Comic Sans. I found them impossible to study from.

Edit: incidentally, she works at CERN on the ATLAS experiment too.

</comment><comment><USER42> The ironic thing about this article is that it encodes the text images as JPEG. I wonder about image encoding's effect on credibility.

<comment><USER11> This article does, but the experimental article itself embedded the fonts so they would render properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Honestly, the font had nothing to do with my decision - I just trust NASA.

</comment><comment><USER44> As a scientist, I wouldn't worry about someone's lowered opinion who judges a scientific text by the font.</comment>


More than half of major malware attack's victims are industrial targets - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/29/kaspersky-petya-expetr-not-ransomware-industrial-targets <comment><USER2> > Now, Kaspersky Labs reports that while the finance sector was hit hardest, > more than 50% of the remaining targets fell into the categories of > manufacturing or oil and gas.

> "This supports the theory that this malware campaign was not designed as a > ransomware attack for financial gain," Kaspersky Labs wrote in a blog > analysis. "Instead, it appears it was designed as a wiper pretending to be > ransomware."

Or maybe it just supports the theory that OS installs on industrial systems are too often not kept up to date?</comment>


Do not use Rails as "Just an API" - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20130406115821/http://bearsfightingbears.com/do-not-use-rails-as-just-an-api/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://bearsfightingbears.com/do-not-use-rails-as-just-an- ap...](http://bearsfightingbears.com/do-not-use-rails-as-just-an-api/), which now redirects to a porn site.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't pick Rails as the engine for powering your API simply for the asset pipeline, you pick it for all the other stuff @macaw pointed out! If you hook up Sinatra and Sprockets, you are without Rails' ORM, migrations, generators, routing, test infrastructure, plugin ecosystem, and arguably most importantly, the conventions and agility. As you pointed out, the increasingly evident separation between client side JS application and "JSON pump" server side application is useful in that you can swap out the backend far more easily once you have the always increasing performance demands, but until then don't abandon Rails. It's not worth the sacrifice of all the things above simply because it isn't as performant as something else from the get go.

<comment><USER4> It's not about performance, it's about simplicity. There's just so much to rails that becomes unnecessary if it's just an API.

Sinatra + Sprockets + Sequel seems to be perfectly reasonable.

<comment><USER3> Let's say I don't want to ship out my whole application package until a user has logged in, so I go to implement a static HTML login page and signup page. Uh oh, I have no template engine! Well just use ERB with Sinatra you say. Fine, cool, I have my form all set up. But wait, how do I tell the user one of their supplied fields is invalid? No build in form validations! Darn. Guess I have to manually code that in. Cool, done. Now lets say I want to let the user know they have signed in successfully. Oh wait, no built in flash mechanism. Cool, I guess I could use Rack::Flash. Or, maybe just the framework that solved this stuff many years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're missing the point. The discussion is that some sort of JavaScript stack is handling that stuff and the sever maintains no view state. The benefit is that you can have a more responsive web app that you can easily throw on a CDN and have a snappy end-user experience.

<comment><USER3> I wholeheartedly agree that for web applications client side applications are the way to go and spend all day every day working on one which we are as you said going to throw on a CDN. I argue however that the experience of sending down the whole asset package (or parts thereof) just to show the login page or other assumedly tertiary screens of the application is worse than rendering that server side and sending it back lickety split. There are other use cases too, you might want to leverage Rails' ability to pump out both XML, and JSON, and maybe capitalize on how easy it is to add new formats like CSV. My point is that you lose _so much_ flexibility to do anything at all server side by ditching Rails that it simply isn't worth the performance increase until you are absolutely sure you should switch and that your requirements are stable. If this is the case it might even be time to ditch Ruby for something more roflscale.

With regards to your other comment, I again disagree. To me it seemed like you were advocating switching off Rails because you were no longer using it's view rendering bits. I say balderdash, as above, I think you will run into weird unforeseen situations which you don't want to implement client side. To your ecosystem point, indeed, decoupling progress has been made and its wonderful to see. It's great for Rails to have stellar competition, but the reason I started using it in the first place is that it took 15 minutes to make a blog. It just works. Smart people have made decisions about what ORM and tempting engine and test framework to use, and how to architect it all in such a way that my teammate and I both know where to find something to change it. I don't want to have to make all those decisions and make all the same mistakes Rails did before arriving at the happy middle ground it has, and I want my teammates to just be able to jump into my project and know how to use the thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm doing API first stuff in Sinatra(or grape, or radial-ruby), sequel/mongoid.

Static assets like JS and CSS can live on a CDN. If you need something google friendly on your views render with sinatra and your favorite template language, if not just write straight html/js apps with your favorite js framework.

In a world where you are building API first, what is the point of rails over something lighter and more performant like sinatra?

</comment><comment><USER6>
      What sucks about Rails is that its a horribly inefficient as a JSON pump in terms of memory consumption; its just not the right tool for the job.

This really only matters on tiny vps servers for low/no-revenue companies. RAM is sooo cheap that if even _one_ little feature of rails saved a dev-week then it will have paid for itself.

</comment><comment><USER7> So... a new blog network (domain created last month) finds a hot topic for its authors to argue back and forth in public. It's clever marketing, but I've read enough of TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER8> sick of this bullshit topics. use rails for whatever you fucking need it and if you don't suck you will not have problems. if you suck - that just means YOU suck not rails.</comment>


IPad in the Kitchen - <AUTHOR> http://www.onesock.net/2010/07/13/ipad-in-the-kitchen/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to see that many iPad owners use this device as a "kitchen aid" (see this thread here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503254> ). Maybe that would be a "killer app that will make it popular?</comment>