Plotagon – Make a movie by just writing a story - <AUTHOR> https://plotagon.com/ <comment><USER2> No Linux version?

Edit: Got it installed on Windows. Note that your installer window doesn't display quite right under Windows 8 at higher DPI settings ([http://i.imgur.com/GXQA3uz.png](http://i.imgur.com/GXQA3uz.png)). I like that the application does automatic camera work; last time I tried Xtranormal (admittedly, a while ago) they didn't offer that. Is there a way to use a custom speech synthesis engine for a character in Windows? Ellen's voice is disappointingly synthetic and I would rather use a nicer third-party voice I have installed. Edit 2: At least Ellen's voice is like that when saying "Joe" \-- you can hear her show a bit of SHODAN heritage at [http://vocaroo.com/i/s00J7Zud8UnB](http://vocaroo.com/i/s00J7Zud8UnB) \-- but not when she says other things, apparently.

Nice as it is, I don't see this program gaining mind share without a video made in it going viral. I would recommend allowing some form of movie sharing in the free version (perhaps watermarked or limited to a direct upload to your own website) to make that happen.

<comment><USER3> We're still adjusting and the sharing feature in the free trial might be a really good idea.

<comment><USER4> Watermarked would probably be a good idea. Though it is annoying for free users, it does serve the purpose of letting everyone who watches the video know what software was used to create it, and where to get it to try it out for themselves.

If you do add a watermark, I would suggest putting in in one of the corners, and making it slightly transparent, in order to reduce annoyance to the viewer.

You might put it in the corner, and stylize it so it looks like a TV Station logo (of course you would have your own branding and url). That might prove less annoying, then just a normal watermark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was excited to use this to enhance language learning dialogs, but their licensing is very strict and the software doesn't give you access to the final video files to redistribute them.

Apart from their specific use case, I it seems it would be hard to do anything else with this. They should think a bit harder about unshackling it a bit. It's a powerful idea.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the warning. As per Plotagon's current terms of use [1] they get the right of first refusal [2] to the user's content. Can someone with a knowledge of copyright law explain whether this would mean they have the right of first refusal to any screenplay you've imported into their software? If so, that's _not_ reasonable. Also, video embedding through non-standard means is prohibited and there is no official mechanism for video embedding. Will one be provided?

The license clauses in question:

 _> 24\. Plotagon License to User Intellectual Property_

 _> You agree that Plotagon shall be given the infinite, worldwide and exclusive publishing rights to your User Content created with the Service. Plotagon may also use your User Content and User Texts for marketing purposes and feature them in its services, for example as educational material, in tutorials etc. Plotagon also has the first right of refusal and right of last refusal and matching rights to acquire any additional rights to the User Content._

 _> 25\. User License to Plotagon Intellectual Property_

 _> You are hereby given a license to use the Service and the Plotagon Content to create User Content provided however that you abide by all Terms stipulated in these Terms of Use. You are entitled to post your User Content on the Website, and other permitted channels that Plotagon may announce in the future. You are not entitled to post your User Content on other, non-permitted websites, media, social networks or show the works embedded on other websites, except through functionality specifically provided by Plotagon to do so._

[1] [https://plotagon.com/terms](https://plotagon.com/terms) (last updated: August 8, 2013)

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

<comment><USER6> Crap. I thought this looked promising and started downloading it before I saw these terms. I won't waste time trying it now, with those ridiculous restrictions there's no point in bothering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A while back Microsoft demonstrated a translation technology which can translate your words into a different language in your own voice. I suppose technically we can analyze voice recordings of actual actors to obtain a voice profile with which we can use to do text to speech (not suggesting plotagon should do that, just saying technically we can do it since the technology's feasibility has been demonstrated)?

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft- research-shows-a-promising-new-breakthrough-in-speech-translation- technology.aspx#.UiL8GzYqh8G)

edit: also, there are already vision-based behavioral/gait analysis software in existence (how well they work is another question)...so conceivably we can also recreate an actor's performances?

<comment><USER8> About 10 years ago or more I read about a "vocal font" project. Where singers voices were samples and a vocal font of sorts was created which would be used to compose music digitally in the sound of any artist. From what I recall it was in development and they were far along. About once a year I try a google search but I have never been able to track it down again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The progress of computation means that eventually – maybe in 50 years? – a tool like this will be able to output results that look as good as today's big-budget blockbusters, including recognizable actors in convincing performances.

<comment><USER10> I reason that it will take less than 50 years. Given the advances in object recognition, and graphical rendering. We can already make fictional worlds a reality in HD. I'd say less than 10 years. This will have a big impact on the entertainment industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mhh a download of payed software. Too bad, with an open model and proper integration of social media this could have been a billion dollar start-up and one of the things that could take on Hollywood in a couple of years once their tech has matured a bit (no this won't compete with Michael Bay and yes most movies will be crap and/or porn, but it now means that every half decent writer will be able to gets or her work on the big screen).

<comment><USER12> The great thing is that it enables writers to prototype their work. So now, people can have screening parties and do crowdfunding for movies. I think this is great from that perspective.

<comment><USER13> This does a worse job of "prototyping" someone's writing than good old- fashioned reading does.

<comment><USER14> As someone who's about to make my first short film with a friend soon, I'm going to throw the script into this and see if it's absolutely horrid or not. Might be useful in spotting really obvious mistakes.

<comment><USER15> See above. If you do they will own your script!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Someone get me some popcorn, because this is going to be so bad it's awesome. This will be the new Xtranormal.

<comment><USER17> Xtranormal was absolutely hilarious, hoping this reaches the same heights of unintentional comedy.

<comment><USER3> We try our best. Here's our take on The Worst Script Line In History (Link to the original in the movie comments) [https://plotagon.com/376](https://plotagon.com/376)

<comment><USER18> Worst line in history?

I take it you guys haven't seen The Room: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/?ref_=sr_2](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/?ref_=sr_2)

...which, by the way, someone should remake entirely in Plotagon. The acting will actually _improve_. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a great idea but I think it is a long way from being useful. The one feature I would not expect to see using a tool like this is realistic rendition of the dialogue. I know that is not technologically feasible. What I would expect to do in abscence of that, is be able to set the mood of the scene through lighting and colour, have a wider camera angle and movement vocabulary, and a wider range of interactions between the actors. This would make it a powerful previz tool and it would help tell the story closer to the writers intent in the absence of human reading the script. Just some of my thoughts. It would also be nice to see a linux version of this too. I can't see experienced writers using this, but they may not be the target audience. Who is the target audience by the way?

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem I have with this, and with similar tools past and present, is that as you get further into them you realize how much your script starts being limited by the tool. I'd like to write about a group of handicapped kids of different races who go to a camp near a lake. Imagine how many of the characters and scenes I just described are not supported by the tool. Which shouldn't be surprising given that a script can be in any setting within this world or another one. Unless the tool has a separate procedural background tool, and a procedural set tool, and a procedural character tool, you will always find that the "does anything" tool doesn't.

Is it worth $25 if you are doing sitcoms or the like? Probably. Otherwise, less likely so...

</comment><comment><USER21> I've often wondered about the reverse. A movie script as the ultimate video compression.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't call it ultimate compression, plain-text is an easily compressible format.

Also, it would be a very lossy compression. There are a lot of decisions made by the actors/directors/designers that influence the final movie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm a bit confused about who is this for. Looking at the examples it's obviously not for making movies, unless you consider a video capture from the Sims to be a movie.

What is the goal for this project, who will use it? The only one I see is a couple of "so bad they're good" funny videos.

<comment><USER24> May be used by startups to make demo videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There was an earlier post on HN few months ago that talked about a tool or similar that help write formulaic scripts and in fact being used pervasively (iirc) in Hollywood. Anyone remember it? Might be a good fit to go with this?

<comment><USER26> It's a book called Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder.

Here's the HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6072524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6072524)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> We've come a very long way since the days of the story maker I had for my Atari 130XE as a kid that would manipulate on-screen characters based on English text.

</comment><comment><USER28> seems really similar to the early days of animoto, which were pretty popular on youtube</comment>


Don't criticize. Be solidary. Get yourself useful - <AUTHOR> https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/dont-criticize-be-solidary-get-yourself-useful/ <comment><USER2> Don't criticise.. I'll be sure to pass this on to any Hungarians I meet.</comment>


Identical Twins' Genes Are Not Identical - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/identical-twins-genes-are-not-identical/ <comment><USER2> Also with monozygotic twins the pre birth environment is not identical either. Given both these effects it is amazing how similar many monozygotic twins are to each other.

<comment><USER3> I've seen quite a few examples of dizygotic twins that are amazingly similar. E.g. these two [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary- Kate_and_Ashley_Olsen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary- Kate_and_Ashley_Olsen) seem quite similar to my untrained eye.

<comment><USER2> Yes they can be. I have always amazed at those families where each of the children is like a clone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fascinating finding. Does this also imply that an individual might have number-copy variants across his/her own body?

<comment><USER2> Yes. Your own cells are not identical genetically.</comment></comment>


Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of "Spaghetti" Code (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-"spaghetti"-code <comment><USER2> I've worked on safety critical software, for a couple different companies. Code quality is a very real problem.

One company, the guy in charge of software was a CE, who would have been fine as long as the hardware was at the level of sophistication as what he was taught at school (He knew 8051 microcontrollers really well). He was really good at giant switch-case statements. Function pointers were a little newfangled and suspect.

Basically, he knew enough software engineering to get the hardware working.

That's one big problem that needs to be addressed -- there aren't a lot of people being trained in the software side of embedded systems. You have CS grads who for the most part aren't given much training on the low end of the abstraction spectrum, and the opposite for CE people, so there tends to be a very fuzzy area in the middle that causes arguments between the two camps.

The other company I worked for literally had crazy coding standards that basically dictated 20,000 line functions and a bizarre sort of anti-DRY mindset that I will never understand. You were encouraged to c-c c-v a block of code, change one line, move on!

</comment><comment><USER3> Patio11 has talked about how programmers are little respected and paid poorly in Japan compared with the US. Could this have something to do with Toyota's code quality being so poor and causing this issue?

<comment><USER4> That seems so strange to me since I always think of Japan as being so technologically advanced.

Granted, even here in the USA programming used to be considered "women's work", mostly revolving around planning and organization. So they passed it off to secretaries. I just didn't think that was something that was still happening.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer- programmin...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming- used-to-be-womens-work-718061/?no-ist)

<comment><USER5> > I always think of Japan as being so technologically advanced.

Ask anyone who has lived in Japan for a sufficient period of time and they will laugh at this statement, especially as it relates to programming.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking about robotics and consumer electronics mostly. I see that in the news a lot. There's even a wiki page about it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Japa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Japan)

<comment><USER5> I can see how people think this, but once you live here you see the reality. There are sectors though where Japan is still pretty damn advanced, but you don't necessarily notice it in daily life. A great example is precision manufacturing - they are awesome at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These unintended acceleration incidents seem to happen mostly to elderly drivers.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/how- real...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/how-real-are-the- defects-in-toyotas-cars/37448/)

<comment><USER7> And more importantly than that there are a couple of underlying facts that invalidate the whole premise that unintended acceleration means automatic accidents/death:

1) None of these cars are 700hp Supras that accelerate at drastic speeds. These were normal consumer cars that frankly aren't that fast even with the throttle fully depressed.

2) The brakes in all of these vehicles are many times more powerful than the engine. Pressing the brakes would have stopped the vehicles, even if the engine were attempting to accelerate full throttle.

In most cases I would never side with the corporation over average people. But this is one of those rare cases where lawyers were able to hire dishonest "experts" and snow over the judge and jury and get an unjust verdict.

<comment><USER8> Your two point list is silly. Consumer cars & SUVs can go 0-60 in under 10 seconds in almost all cases, and the fact that the brake can overcome that acceleration is great, except it takes time, and within the time between unexpected acceleration and stopping damage/injuries/death can occur.

I had a water bottle fall onto my right leg while turning, this caused a sudden but short lived acceleration (e.g. 10 MpH of unexpected acceleration for less than 1 second), this was enough to cause me to mount the curb, and do some decent property/car damage (thank god nobody was on the curb). The brakes worked perfectly, and stopped the car, but it does show how much damage even a tiny burst of unexpected acceleration can do (the entire incident was under 5-10 seconds).

It honestly boggles my mind that someone can dismiss any length of unexpected acceleration because "cars [aren't] 700 hp Supras." Consumer cars are plenty powerful enough to cause injury and death due to any length (even 1 second) of unexpected acceleration at the wrong moment. Sure, if you're going straight on the freeway then you aren't going to even notice, but in a car park, while turning, or stopped at a school crossing, the brake's ability to overcome the engine are largely irrelevant since you won't be expecting it.

<comment><USER9> > Consumer cars & SUVs can go 0-60 in under 10 seconds in almost all cases, > and the fact that the brake can overcome that acceleration is great, except > it takes time

The actual data paints a different picture: [http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking- result...](http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking-results- photo-319716-s-original.jpg)

That said people don't do well with surprises so while the car mechanically would have no trouble at all stopping very nearly as fast due to a wide open throttle, the driver is probably freaking out instead of just slamming on the brakes.

Also people suck at actually slamming on the brakes, regardless of the situation. It's not something people want to ever do. They'll hit the brakes, they just won't go anywhere close to really pushing that pedal to the floor.

<comment><USER8> > The actual data paints a different picture

To what? That doesn't contradict what I said at all.

<comment><USER10> All the cars added a marginal [ O(10ft) ] amount of braking distance at wide open throttle; with the exception of a very powerful, heavily tuned sports car which was the only one able to overwhelm its brakes.

If we convert MPH to FPS we can look at the data as follows:

70 MPH: 102.667 fps 100 MPH: 146.667 fps

        CAMRY, V6,  70-0: delta 16 feet,  .15sec
        CAMRY, V6, 100-0: delta 88 feet,  .60sec

        INFINITY  70-0: delta  9 feet, .08sec
        INFINITY 100-0: delta  6 feet, .04sec

We're talking tenths or hundredths of a second of unintended acceleration. A cursory search tells me reaction time to visual stimuli is about ~250ms.[1][2]

This means that in all but the Camry 100-0 case your reaction time is a larger factor in braking distance than the presence of wide open throttle.

[1]: [http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics](http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics)

[2]: [http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/15/3981.full.pdf](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/15/3981.full.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't it time for an oversight agency that looks at code quality within safety-critical systems? The FDA forces oversight of drugs that less than 100,000 people a year will take. Yet there is no agency looking into the software quality of a car management system that millions of people will drive with every day.

<comment><USER12> This will add a tremendous amount of cost to product development. This might be worthwhile if simple consumer or industry pressure doesn't work.

<comment><USER13> > This will add a tremendous amount of cost to product development.

Not that many people are getting killed, so it's an acceptable tradeoff?

<comment><USER14> Yes, it's an potentially acceptable tradeoff. While the figures vary, economists and the like have estimates of how many people you'll kill for every N million dollars you extract from the economy (and they're below 10 million last time I checked). Just how much do you propose to extract with such a regime?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am quite surprised by this, especially since it comes from Toyota, the company that invented Lean. This is very relevant given that the debate over upgrading vehicle software is raging on and the Volkswagen scandal has not settled just yet. Too bad we can't crowd source the various automobile software development teams. I am curious to see if any of them are any good. In my travels over the last 10 years I have encountered very few skilled software development teams at the enterprise level. Given the current state of the industry I would not e surprised to find them all wanting.

Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER16> One of the general principles of engineering ethics states "A practitioner shall, regard the practitioner's duty to public welfare as paramount."

I think part of the problem is that software development isn't considered an engineering discipline and code of engineering ethics goes out the window.

<comment><USER17> I got a degree in CS at UC Berkeley. There were exactly 2 lectures on ethics, both given by the same professor. Kudos to him (Ousterhout), but shame on the department. I'm not singling out UCB, I'm sure many other schools have the same problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Critical systems should be open source by law.

<comment><USER19> I love magic bullets! As we've recently seen with things like Heartbleed, open source has no vulnerabilities, no bugs, no errors, and is free from all the problems of proprietary software.

<comment><USER20> One of the problems with embedded systems like this is that very few eyes ever see the code. Even in more regulated fields like avionics. The code will be examined primarily by the developers, testers, their QA and maybe the company that hired them if it's contracted out.

Instead, what gets examined are the artifacts like requirements documents, the results of tests, specifications and such. This allows poor code quality to be hidden, and, to some extent, encourages sloppy development practices (especially when time is critical). Exposing the code to more people will have several effects, but the main two (from my perspective) are:

* Developers won't release as much bad code, either due to pride or insistence from their management.

* Bugs _may_ be more easily discovered and diagnosed if the code is available. As it is now, it's a black box. So if I find an issue I may be able to repeat it, but I can't examine the code to see why it's actually happening or to correct it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm a retired electronics design engineer and embedded programmer, and I will NEVER own a car with any kind of vehicle/engine management computer. Old cars for me, forever. I flatly refuse anything but fully manual and direct mechanical gears, clutch, steering, brakes and throttle.

Curiously the chief engineer I knew at a major car service center, also felt the same way.

And that's not even touching on the insanity of building computerized vehicle systems with always-on GSM data links to the Net. Ask Michael Hastings how that worked out for him.

Also I agree that critical systems software should be legally required to be open source.

<comment><USER22> I love the absurdity of this and arbitrariness. You'll happily drive in a car, one of the most dangerous machines people use regularly. But if it has a computer in it, no siree, that's when things get too deadly to deal with. All of the other thousands of moving parts, like the thing that takes energy-dense hydrocarbons and ignites them several thousand times a second in hot, high pressure tubes - that's fine and totally safe. It's the ECU that makes the car dangerous. The fact that the only thing separating you walking on the sidewalk from death from a two ton metal box is the convention that we'll all stay within the lines painted on the ground. That's fine. It's the ECU that you're afraid of. Absurd.

<comment><USER23> It's not absurd at all. For the questionable benefit of the ECU, you get a black box system that may or may not be garbage controlling the primary engine input, that may or may not fail safe. Give me the thing that grandpa designed 75 years ago.

In the olden times, the throttle was controlled by a mechanical device and tensioned springs. The failure characteristics were studied for 150+ years, and the state of the mechanical components could be assessed by visual or physical inspection. The failure scenarios for open throttle are also non- obvious things to workaround. What do you do? Pump the brake? Take the car out of gear? Depress the accelerator to reset? Turn the key? It's a complex decision matrix with life-and-death consequences, and the correct answer will vary by car configuration and vendor.

The ridiculous positions taken by posters here are indicative of how engineering fail like this happens.

<comment><USER10> You speak of the olden times like they're long gone? My car is from 2001, has side curtain airbags which will render most common crashes non-fatal, and it still has a fully mechanical throttle and no electronic brake controller of any kind. I don't consider it all that old.

Yes it has an ECU, but EFI is not the problem in my opinion, and the computer by itself doesn't frighten me. EFI was a fantastic invention as far as I'm concerned. Also despite it being a "black box" I find it much more pleasurable to tune and maintain EFI systems over fickle carburetors.

The real problem was making the ECU an _active control system_ which directly controls the engine, throttle, brakes, etc. in response to your inputs; as opposed to a passive one which merely _reacts in response to changes in its environment_ (e.g: more air moving through the intake, wheels locked up, losing traction on one side.)

So yes, my '01 Toyota has a black box, but it's simple enough that it could be replaced by a handful of aftermarket controllers, many of which have their source freely available, or available for a modest licensing fee.

\---

Also I'd like to disagree that reacting to WOT is a "complex decision matrix." \-- My instinctual reaction would be as follows.

First you open the clutch and/or put the car in neutral. Disconnecting the motor from the wheels is the most reasonable solution to this problem. When I was taught to drive stick the very first thing I was told, before I ever moved the car an inch, was: "when you need to stop, clutch and brake."

(Of course if it's an automatic transmission: "going into neutral" is just controlled by another black box. Sucks to be you if you hit deadly bugs in two separate powertrain management controllers.)

(As an aside I do personally know people that commute every day in the US, and they don't even know what a transmission _does._ Why are we licensing these people as skilled motorists?)

If I somehow found myself without even the most basic control of my transmission then you just press the brakes as hard as you can and you stop in ~300 feet.[1]

If that didn't work, or if I had stopped but hadn't regained control of the vehicle, I would then kill the ignition. (To be fair: I'm told this is not quite so simple in modern cars! Apparently someone thought "pushing and holding a button for 3 seconds" was a better idea than "turn a key." \-- However I also wouldn't agree to drive a car if I didn't know something as basic as how to kill the ignition under duress. I'm the sort of guy that reads the manual cover to cover for fun.)

If killing the ignition doesn't work[2] and your transmission is somehow stuck engaged then today is really not your day.

I don't see how any of this requires any more skill than driving does normally. To me this is not some complex decision tree, it's reflex at this point.

(Also there is a good reason I would brake before killing the ignition. Brakes and steering are mechanically assisted by the engine. It would be extremely irresponsible to cut the ignition in a vehicle w/ power steering and power brakes on a public motorway in my opinion. -- Again I don't think this is some complex decision, I believe it should be requisite knowledge for being licensed to operate a motor vehicle under such conditions.)

tl;dr: the complexity in this matrix is inherent in the task itself. If this is "too complex" then maybe we should work to improve our driver training and licensing programs; or better yet consider having more people take public transit, instead of handing out licenses like candy.

[1]: [http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking- result...](http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/51/braking-results- photo-319716-s-original.jpg) [2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NRaqgab0_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NRaqgab0_w)

<comment><USER14> _Apparently someone thought "pushing and holding a button for 3 seconds" was a better idea than "turn a key."_

You know, that's not _completely_ insane: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_scandal)

Although, wow, that's an _awful_ article, skimming it there's only this hint of the root cause: "After being asked by Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill whether a GM engineer had apparently lied under oath, [GM CEO] Barra confirmed that this had indeed happened (or at least seemed to)." The problem, besides GM having a procurement system that assumed people in it wouldn't lie through their teeth about lethal problems, was a single engineer who selected an out of spec switch, and then, for example, slipstreamed a better one into the system without a part number change.

(Otherwise we're in total agreement.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How can breaks not stop the engine?! Parking break being a different thing, but the main ones?

<comment><USER25> "Brakes" are at the wheels. The only time stopping a car from rolling also affects the engine is when everything remains engaged (manual transmission, manual clutch; in gear, clutch not depressed to the floor.) In a vehicle with an automatic transmission, the transmission begins to disengage from the wheels as the wheels spin slower than the engine is pushing. (Very simplified explanation...)

i.e. brakes on cars are not designed the stop the _engine_ but to absorb the vehicle's momentum.

<comment><USER26> Also, it's been reported that drivers pumped the brakes in a panic (and understandably so).

This will have the effect of reducing the power assist, which is already reduced due to high revs / low vacuum.

<comment><USER27> I wonder if this is a behavior inherent to older drivers? I'm in my 20's, but my first car was from the late 60's. I hadn't properly bled the master cylinder on my brakes, so I would have to pump them to make them more effective. Just wondering if it's a natural panic behavior, or something learned.

<comment><USER10> It's something learned. You are explicitly taught to do it if your vehicle does not have ABS. It prevents the wheels from locking up. ABS does the same thing, and does it much more effectively than a human ever could.

Preventing the wheels from locking up under hard braking is crucial to stopping when you have little traction. To provide traction on any surface _wheels must keep rolling._

When wheels are static their contact patch is effectively the size of a hockey puck, that little bit of rubber is not very good at stopping a car going 80MPH. Not compared to disc brakes w/ ceramic pads bleeding off all that energy, at any rate.

While I'm on the subject, I'll take this time to drop a PSA: on ice, where ABS is most helpful, the rubber of your all season tires is about the consistency of a hockey puck. -- Please invest in actual winter tires if you get regular snowfall.

(Also if you live in Texas: invest in a set of winter tires anyways and go have a blast when the streets are deserted.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's interesting that VW cars have been taken off the road for unintended acceleration. Also that quickcheck was used to find many timing related bugs between software components that VW uses. It was used after the models were taken off the road. There are other models still not recalled using similar software from the same era.

<comment><USER29> Almost all brands of cars have. You should read the NIST database sometime - the list of recalls is much longer then the ones you see in the news.

While you're at it, read the FDA list of food and medical recalls too, so much risk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A big takeaway that I got out of this is that nearly everybody forgot about this.

People are still buying and driving Toyotas.

When the VW emissions thing started making its way through the news cycle, I read comments postulating that this might be the end of VW. Hah - people are going to forget about VW just like they forget about everything else.

<comment><USER31> > When the VW emissions thing started making its way through the news cycle, I > read comments postulating that this might be the end of VW. Hah - people are > going to forget about VW just like they forget about everything else.

It wasn't the end of Toyota, and it won't be the end of VW; but it was the end of Toyota's goal to be the Biggest Car Company in the World[1][2], and it may be the end of VW's goal to be the Biggest Car Company in the the World.

Being #1 volume vehicle manufacturer is a curse!

1\. [https://hbr.org/2007/07/lessons-from-toyotas-long- drive](https://hbr.org/2007/07/lessons-from-toyotas-long-drive) \- Interestingly, in this article Mr Watanabe claims that Toyota never had the goal to be the biggest car company.

2\. [http://www.economist.com/node/15576506](http://www.economist.com/node/15576506) \- James Womack, one of the authors of "The Machine that Changed the World", a book about Toyota's innovations in manufacturing, dates the origin of its present woes to 2002, when it set itself the goal of raising its global market share from 11% to 15%. Mr Womack says that the 15% target was "totally irrelevant to any customer" and was "just driven by ego". According to Mr Womack, the requirement to expand its supply chain rapidly "meant working with a lot of unfamiliar suppliers who didn't have a deep understanding of Toyota culture."

Disclosure - I work for GM, these opinions are my own, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just dealing wit the entertainment messy of modern cars I already came to the conclusion that the car industry has no damn clue how to write software.

It's like the worst internal shit code you see in the in house tools at many companies where the moment it ran it was considered done enough.

</comment><comment><USER33> >Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables.

Oh my.</comment>


Ira Glass on storytelling - <AUTHOR> http://catharsis.tumblr.com/post/302387021/ira-glass-on-storytelling

<comment><USER2> Or more directly, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE>

From HN Guidelines (<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>):

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but Catharsis commented on the video in the post, so it's not equivalent.

<comment><USER3> not in any interesting way. it's just two or three sentences that don't add much.

i agree with the original comment: this should have been submitted directly from the source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the other video about finding 'great stories' from Ira is equally interesting.

It resonates well with me after running my own startup for few months. Finding 'great startup ideas' seems require the same approach as finding great stories.

Here's the video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM>

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's interesting that someone I can listen to for hours in a scripted (and edited) piece bugs the crap out of me after just a minute or two of casual speaking... I haven't heard someone say "like" so many times in like... years...

</comment><comment><USER6> He made only a side comment about how bad he was with putting emphasis on too many words during his speech. I feel I have this problem in my speech. Anyone know a good place to read more about "smooth" talking(not the evil kind)?

<comment><USER7> I did hs and collegiate debate & speech to some success.

The keys to speaking "smoothly" outside of the technical aspects of cadence, tone, etc, is more organization and thought-flow than anything else.

Treat your audience like their stupid and hand-hold them through the argument you're trying to make. Organize your speech, even if informally, around some natural structure.

i.e. intro --> relate intro to topic of speech --> argument --> summary of points that defend your argument --> detailed breakdown of each point --> conclusion where you resummarize your argument and the points that defend it

If you can't engage your speakers with some sort of natural charisma or speaking ability at the very least make sure that your points are stated clearly in a well organized easy to follow way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The same thread from a long long time ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198935>

</comment><comment><USER9> His advice could apply equally well to what it takes to become a good programmer. Spend the time, don't be satisfied, never give up -- but, spend the time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another work-more-and-you'll-be-successful suggestions. Along with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and countless blog posts.

How thick are we here at Hacker News? This isn't news. We know the value of hard work. It's what our parents have told us since we went to school. Why do we have to repeatedly reinvent the wheel with this suggestion?

<comment><USER11> _... reinvent the wheel with this suggestion_

It's just more anecdotal evidence of just how long it takes to be truly good at what you do. It's not "reinventing the wheel" (you're not using the expression correctly, by the way). Ira also presented it in an interesting way. How often do you get a successful person willingly showing their failures?

<comment><USER10> How much interesting anecdotal evidence will it take for you to get it? Hard work brings success. As to how often I get a successful person to willingly showing their failures? Do a search on Amazon for success and look at all the books there. Not all successful people have made a video that's been uploaded to Youtube. But many have written a book about it.

Maybe I used the expression incorrectly. To me, saying "work more and you'll be successful" a hundred different ways seemed like reinventing the wheel. But you're right, it's off. I should have just said how much time do we have to waste with this suggestion. Go work instead of reading about how much working will help you.

<comment><USER6> See someone might say the same thing to your "go work instead" point. Haven't we heard that before too?

Repetition works because we are not all on the same page. We all have our aha moments at different times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ira's work - This American Life <http://thislife.org>

</comment><comment><USER13> Ira Glass on storytelling: first thing, whine. Second, be pretentious.</comment>


Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa's Telkom - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/09/us-safrica-pigeon-idUSTRE5885PM20090909

<comment><USER2> This article is pretty old (2009) but as a born 'n bred South African I can definitely tell you this: The pigeon is _still_ faster.</comment>


I couldn't buy a car because my email address was 'invalid' - <AUTHOR> https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/invalid-email.html?ref=hn <comment><USER2> I maintain that the only reasonable way to validate an email address is to send it a message and hope for a reply. Every other method I've ever tried has failed in some silly way, as described in the article.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know, that literally is the only way to validate an email address, universally speaking, beyond an internal whitespace check.

But I think if you take "local" out of the equation, as you would for customer emails, you can validate a bit more. You might be able to validate on a single @ being in there somewhere, with something before and after it, maybe look for a period after the @ for "email@example.com" as I think every external address needs a dotted domain.

That's about as far as I think you can safely go. Anything else is legal.

<comment><USER4> Well, maybe not a single @. At least one @ maybe. There's a set of special characters that aren't permitted in the local part of an email address including @... unless they're quoted. So "@"@example.com is a valid address.

<comment><USER3> Oof, thanks. I forgot you could quote the @ and thought it was the one universally illegal character. Also forgot there were others, oops.

I usually just recommend people don't validate email addys and let the email verification message do the job for you. This is pretty much why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have seen this "problem" before. But I'm pretty sure rejecting the '+' sign is so that you have to swallow the spam when it eventually comes.

<comment><USER6> If you know about this trick and you want to harvest as much email addresses for spam as possible, wouldn't it make more sense to accept pluses in email addresses, and then strip them out later? It seems far more likely that it's because it's unintentional, due to poor programming.

<comment><USER5> Not if using/selling the email address you provide is according to the ToS of the seller. Then they can legally spam email@example.com but not firstname.lastname@example.com, which is a huge downer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had similar problems with financial or medical institutions systems handling the .family TLD. My workaround is to have a .org TLD that is similar to my .family TLD and then forward incoming email to the same name mapped onto the .family TLD. It'd be nice if I didn't have to do this, but unfortunately there are quite a few systems with shoddy email validation logic.

</comment><comment><USER8> Considering this is talking about client-side validation in JS, that shouldn't be hard to fix/bypass locally. Worth a try, it's not a given that there's matching backend validation!

However, at least they had the decency not to hardcore the TLD list. I used to have a .eu email and it would get rejected rather often, even years after the TLD came out.

<comment><USER9> I've had to locally override some JS on the client-side and hoped their backend validation was a lot more sane. The frontend validation logic was limiting the TLD to minimum of two characters and max of four ({2,4}). I use a .email TLD for sites that I don't want to give my personal email.

If you're using Chrome (65+), you can easily bypass any validations/logic by using local overrides ([https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#o...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#overrides)). As marcolussetti said, it's worth trying out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That article doesn't read like you were trying to buy the car... 95% of the article is explaining about the regexp stopping you ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> The only reliable way of checking for a valid email address is to see if it contains the @ symbol.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you can explain why your email address was rejected, then you didn't buy a car because you didn't want to.

<comment><USER13> That's true, but wouldn't make for an interesting blog post.

Yes, I'm sure the author could go register firstname.lastname@example.com, but it's really a post about incorrect assumptions.

This blog should really be understood as another in the "falsehoods programmers believe about..." series.

<comment><USER14> Surely you can buy a car without _any_ email address.

...oh, this was online only. Well _there 's_ your problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Efficient data loading using zeta distributions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fed135/ha-store <comment><USER2> I would like to see more on the zeta distribution aspect of this, but it doesn't appear anywhere obvious in this repo.

<comment><USER3> Few things I learned after a bit of research:

• the key to efficiency here seems to be "caching", more specifically their caching strategy

• traditionally, caching on the web is done by assuming resource access follows the Zipf Distribution[1]

• Zeta Distributions are basically Zipf Distributions[2] so you can effectively re-word the title as "Efficient data loading using caching" (zipf = "caching" & zeta = zipf => zeta = "caching")

• It's important to note that Zipf/Zeta don't model extremes very well, so there's potential for outliers causing costly cache misses. Monitor your logs!

\---

Further reading:

• [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/337e/4b7f57ccbb7485950b93da...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/337e/4b7f57ccbb7485950b93da9c5bb4ec4dc9ad.pdf) (1999)

• [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law- zipfs...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-law- and-the-pareto-distribution/)

• [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law)

• [https://www.springer.com/in/book/9781402080494](https://www.springer.com/in/book/9781402080494)

\---

[1] distribution follows a logarithm, so the most popular resource is accessed disproportionately more than the second most popular item and so on.

Example is word frequency, modeled as 1/n; second most popular word occurs 50% as much as the first most popular word (1/2), third most popular word occurs 33% as much as the first (1/3) and so on, showing an exponential falloff with a long tail. It thus makes sense to cache the first 10 most popular words as they are going to get accessed more than 90% of the time, giving you the efficiency. Basically this is a form of power law and similar to Pareto Distribution (20% of the things deliver 80% of the result)

[2] rigorously speaking, zeta is the normalized form of Zipf. But practically they are similar enough that people use the terms interchangeably.

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn, it's like I don't even need to write the paper at all :) Great research work, it does capture the idea of the project.

<comment><USER3> Given that this is HN, my comment probably came across as a disappointment and most people were already aware of the surface level details of caching.

Hope I kept them at least mildly entertained while waiting for the real deal to drop : )

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the recently updated Wiki page, it's not super in-depth, but please let me know what you think :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paying everyone a basic income would kill off low-paid menial jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/01/paying-everyone-a-basic-income-would-kill-off-low-paid-menial-jobs?CMP=fb_gu

<comment><USER2> Foremost, it would kill meaningless and useless jobs. At the very least, enterprises would have a much harder time justifying them.

Low-paid menial jobs are either useless, easily automatizable, or not so menial. In the later case, why are they low-paid?

It should also be noted that monetarily we are already paying for it, without having the benefit of it, by means of Quantitative Easings. Instead of making it a Universal Dividend, we just pay a few banksters amongst the 0.0001%.

The rational thing to do, is to perform reasonned quantitative easings, based on the lifespan of the human beings, distributing a Universal Dividend. For the lifespan in an economic area like Europe, this would give about 530 euro/month/human being.

For more information, have a look at: [http://www.creationmonetaire.info/2012/11/theorie- relative-d...](http://www.creationmonetaire.info/2012/11/theorie-relative-de- la-monnaie-2-718.html) ( translation of the mathematical annex: [https://github.com/informatimago/LatexTRM/blob/master/LateXT...](https://github.com/informatimago/LatexTRM/blob/master/LateXTRM- en.pdf) )</comment>


Christmas List of Linus' child - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/102150693225130002912/posts/RZKuM1wmve7

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, the comments are gold..</comment>


Ask HN: Wouldn't the US military be able to handle the surge of Covid cases? - <AUTHOR> The US Military seems to have both the means & training to handle a rapid surge in cases. Why isn't the national guard or even the US Army being deployed to at least triage before routing to healthcare facilities? <comment><USER2> The other day I saw Governor Cuomo speaking to audience of soliders at the Javits center who were setting up a field hospital.

Hospital ships are also going to NYC and LA to add some capacity as well.

There also is the VA which offers medical services to veterans, both for injuries they get at war, but also other conditions. My Uncle Norman was a marine who served in Korea and he received excellent care for ALS in the last few years of his life from the VA.

They are doing what they can, but it's still a difficult problem because a person affected by the new virus doesn't just require a ventilator, but could require a ventilator for two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER3> They are, there are plenty of recent news articles about this. Trump has generally been very slow to bring the full force of the federal government to bear on this crisis, but he is acting, as are the states.</comment>


Show HN: NatUIve 2.0 – lightweight, rich, open web - <AUTHOR> https://natuive.net/ <comment><USER2> Wait a second. None of the demos are the actual company's page but are clones with the company's images.

[https://natuive.net/demos/hasselblad/](https://natuive.net/demos/hasselblad/) uses natUIve, but [https://www.hasselblad.com/](https://www.hasselblad.com/) doesn't.

[https://natuive.net/demos/postbank/](https://natuive.net/demos/postbank/) uses natUIve, but [https://www.postbank.bg/](https://www.postbank.bg/) doesn't.

[https://natuive.net/demos/tutsplus/](https://natuive.net/demos/tutsplus/) uses natUIve, but [https://tutsplus.com/](https://tutsplus.com/) doesn't.

[https://natuive.net/demos/cnn-travel/](https://natuive.net/demos/cnn-travel/) uses natUIve, but [https://www.cnn.com/travel](https://www.cnn.com/travel) doesn't.

etc.

I've never seen this practice before. Is this common? Sites like [https://threejs.org/](https://threejs.org/) only list projects that actually use the library.

<comment><USER3> I think it would have been more honest if it said: see the following pages rebuilt with NatUIve.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks!

<comment><USER3> To really it hit it home, I would have put something like:

Original: 15,000 Classes, 2mb Reimplemented: 1,200 Classes, 20kb

All those are fake numbers, it would have shown the "lightweight" concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this feels pretty solid and snappy, at least on desktop (Firefox 67). The scrolling effect's a bit weird, but I'm sure that can be customized. I switched off JS expecting everything to rapidly fall apart, but it actually works surprisingly well; the homepage on the demo site is broken (displays fine, but doesn't response to mouse events like scrolling and clicking; arrow keys work fine for scrolling), but the other tabs work significantly better than I'd ever expect a site this visually-complex to work without JS.

On mobile the demo site does feel weird (a taller-than-wide screen and a vertical tab bar don't exactly mix), but it's still plenty usable and snappy on Firefox for Android. The sample sites are much more normal in terms of mobile site UX.

A lot of people here seem to be bagging on it for silly reasons (like "I have to press the back button multiple times after clicking on multiple things!"; gee, turns out clicking on links adds entries to your browser history, who'da thunk?). Don't listen to them. You've done a fantastic job with this framework, and I look forward to using it for my own projects.

I will say that one thing I'd change is to provide the option of making it a little more opinionated/invasive. I shouldn't have to say <table class="n-table"> everywhere; I'd rather just say <table> and be done with it. I'm sure I could figure out how to customize this to add that opinionation/invasiveness, but it'd be nice if it was an (opt-in!) out-of-the- box option.

EDIT: In the spirit of "let's really break this thing", I fired up the Haiku Nightly VM I've got laying around and tried loading the homepage and some of the demo pages in both WebPositive (WebKit-based) and NetSurf (uses its own rendering engine). WebPositive handled everything like a champ (albeit with some severe loading lag on the homepage; the demo pages all loaded fine). NetSurf failed entirely on the homepage (shows the nav and nothing else, even after clicking on nav entries), but the demo pages work reasonably well (they're at least viewable, even if the proportions are wonky in a lot of places).

Either way, the fact that the framework itself works okay even on an obscure operating system running in a virtual machine with only 1024MB of RAM is delightfully impressive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I got important feedback on 1.0 here years ago and every comment is valuable. The opinionation topic is very tricky, I thought a lot about that and decided to go unopinionated for maximum compatibility. On the other hand some CMSs simply won't allow adding a table class so there should be an opinionated option or something.

A major principle is CSS-only functionality, accessibility and stability (it probably has the only proper modal window on iPhone Safari).

Happy to see you found it useful and I hope at least people will be inspired to give the open web a chance. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me, or do a lot of these interactions and styles feel… a bit uncanny? Certainly not native (as only the framework name would suggest)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, something looks and feels very weird about these pages. The antialiasing behavior on some of the shapes+text is very strange looking, as well as some weird scrolling behavior. Seems very... uncanny, as you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do not hijack my arrow keys. I need them for scrolling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, the arrow keys do scroll. Is it a problem with natuive.net or the demos? Thanks

<comment><USER4> On Firefox, it looks like there's some JS or something that's capturing the arrow up/down presses and interpreting them as "move to the next/previous page/tab". Turning off JS causes keyboard scrolling to work fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a custom full-page tabs element and arrow keys control it when focus is on body. When focus is inside a tab, arrow keys scroll as normal.

<comment><USER4> Gotcha. Yeah, I think in that case the tab list is stealing focus by default (instead of the tab contents), which makes it look like scrolling is "broken".

Also, the current implementation means I can't use the arrow keys to scroll through the list of tabs; even by navigating to the lower tabs, the scroll doesn't follow. I'd say if you're going to do that, the scroll position for the tab list should follow the selected tab.

I'm assuming this can be turned off if we don't want this particular feature?

<comment><AUTHOR> List of tabs can be scrolled only by the tab key. Arrow keys are nice to have for sure. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I really dislike the weird scrolling/navigation behaviour on that site. Seems the opposite of "native" to me - more alien than anything.

<comment><USER2> I'd prefer that all CSS/JS libraries not just disable this by default, but entirely remove it from the codebase to prevent uninformed designers from enabling it without thinking of the UX consequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I viewed the source of the JetBlue demo and it's pretty cool how clean the markup looks. It also seems pretty compact for what at first glance looks like a complex page.

I'd like to see a paragraph somewhere explaining what exactly this framework is all about tho, not just a long list of features. It's a CSS framework like Bootstrap? What does it do differently than Bootstrap?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's like BS without opinionated style, dependencies, limitations (in embedding components) and bloat. Regards

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks really messy / disorganised on a mobile. Also I need to tap "back" twice to get out of that page. I'm not even at examples and I'm already not impressed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is a reference site. It's documentation for devs, not end customers. Not meant to be used on mobile.

<comment><USER11> So documentation for devs can somehow be poorer and we can throw out mobile- support for that audience too? Why? Why is it ok to sideline a group you're presumably coveting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because you don't read docs on a phone.

<comment><USER12> I do. And the site instantly put me off.

<comment><USER13> And i do like to use my web browser non-maximized in my 1366x768 monitor yet every other site forces me to maximize because it thinks that since my browser's width is less than 1024 or whatever threshold they come up with, it is actually a mobile phone and switch to that, making the already overenlarged UI elements cover as much real estate as my entire fist.

Which sucks.

But that is the world we live in. The more tools we give the designers, the more they will abuse everything they can.

CSS was a mistake, the web should have stayed in HTML 3.2.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, there is no threshold. What is the issue at 1024px? Thanks.

<comment><USER13> Sorry i wasn't clear, i was referring to other sites in general (e.g. YouTube) that switch to mobile UIs when my window is too narrow. Your site doesn't do that, although TBH i find the design too wasteful for screen real estate (e.g. too much space between elements in the sidebar). Here is how it looks on my browser (this is with the window maximized vertically but not horizontally since it is easier for me to read text - i cropped out the browser UI and taskbar, but this is Firefox running on Windows 10):

[https://i.imgur.com/FLG0HiF.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FLG0HiF.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, now I understand the main content area can be wider and the tabs are taking too much space on narrow screens. This can be improved in the future. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would be nice to see a comparison with Bootstrap, UiKit, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I should get on that. It lacks BS's limits like only one modal window, rounded edges etc. JS is not required, loading is seamless, the modal window actually works on iPhone Safari... The file size is less than half of Bootstrap's. It has the most features per KB compared to any framework that I know. Yet size isn't the top priority: accessibility and functionality are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Argh, this messes with my scrolling :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is the docs site. It shows info about the library/framework. Not a representation of a site built with the library/framework. Thanks

<comment><USER16> It's not a docs site, it's the project site that consists mostly of docs, and it's built using the library/framework.

It doesn't inspire confidence considering it the first touch for developer (who else is this for?)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's custom built upon the framework for a specific reason: to display components info, which is consumed by devs on laptop/desktop. Still accessible on phone, but that's not the target. Thanks</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=seach+terms&start=995

<comment><AUTHOR> I just found this striking. It makes the sentence on the previous page sound rather grandiose.

"Results 916 - 922 of about 642,000,000 for search terms. (1.46 seconds)"

<comment><USER2> AFAIK, that's just an estimate anyway. (It's based on "we found this many hits in this lump of the web that we searched, and that lump is this much of the web, so we estimate that there are that many actual hits in the whole web.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 95% of people never click past page 2 anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I'm not implying that they should provide any more results than they already do. I just thought it was mildly interesting.

Google's brand has the aura of an unlimited wealth of information. People don't even see it as a means by which they search anymore. When they say, "I found it on Google!" the website they actually found 'it' on is completely irrelevant.

However this note I found at the end of the list of search results destroys this aura. It makes you think, "Oh yeah, Google is just a website with a finite capacity to serve information."</comment></comment>


Conversational Content Management - <AUTHOR> http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/ccm/demo

<comment><USER2> This approach may work with very complex content structures, ones that aren't easy to represent in a form. The AI equivalent to a knowledgeable employee at a call centre.

On the other hand, call centres can be very irritating and filling out forms second hand is cumbersome. You need to explain why this approach is better than simplifying the forms and making the content structures more intuitive.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hope that you check out this demo and fill out the survey that it links to. If I get enough positive responses, then I will release a free beta for public consumption.</comment>


Don't Let Sweat Equity Create 'Phantom Income' - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneursstartupsmagazine/2010/march/205310.html <comment><USER2> This is a crazy interesting article. Just for starters i think Option #3 is the best. Taking a "loan" from the company is the most simple, least complicated approach.

What i think is even more interesting is the idea of " what percentage of the company is "sweat equity" worth?" - I recently was working with someone to start up a company. I was not going to be able to put in as much sweat equity as she was right away and we ultimately could not agree on legal terms we both felt comfortable with.

Any one have any experience in this?</comment>


Genesis of requiring a "Dropbox folder," versus designated folders - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Drew-Houston/What-was-the-genesis-of-requiring-a-Dropbox-folder-versus-allowing-me-to-designate-folders-like-documents-etc

<comment><USER2> The core take-away from this, especially for the early startup, is doing less better is a far superior strategy to doing more worse. At the early stage, nobody is going to care about how many features you have. They care about how well you solve the small problems you are solving.

<comment><USER3> I liked the way Drew put it:

 _It's also one of our core design principles to do fewer things rather than half-ass anything..._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting to see how a decision that seems mostly based on a technical difficulty (how to make it work simply with multiple or any folder), had so many positive consequences in terms of user experience.

The fact that it doesn't take forever to do the first sync,* that you don't get to mess up your existing documents, that you don't go over your quota right away, etc.

On top of that, having a Dropbox folder is fantastic for branding.

* I'm having this problem with my BackBlaze account that has been uploading the first batch for the past 6 months…

<comment><USER5> I find it incredible that this is the first post in either thread to have mentioned branding (and disingenuous on the part of the Dropbox CEO to have not mentioned it, as if it played no part).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I must admit that the first time I looked at Dropbox, the single folder design made me stop the train. It wasn't until months later that I realized I could set up symlinks. It was a bit of an "I feel like a dumbass" moment.

With this in mind, it's easy to see that the Dropbox made the right design decision. With symlinks, the problem was already solved for them in a way that power users are already familiar with.

<comment><USER7> Dropbox and symlinks is what I do with config files like .bashrc, .vimrc, .gitconfig, etc.

Then when you setup a new machine - install dropbox and let it sync, then just symlink them back up... everything is back to normal.

Really a nice setup so you can continue to change your config files and not worry about saving the changes to some backup gist or something

<comment><USER8> So the problem Drew mentioned, of mapping between different sets of sync folders on different machines, is transformed into mapping an identical folder hierarchy (i.e. the dropbox folder and contents) to arbitrary sync files/folders, done by the user, for that specific machine.

You get the simple, instant user model (dropbox folder), which you can customize to any arbitrary user model, as much or as little as you want, when you want it. And simple syncing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's most definitely a more easily understood mental model.

I also run Live Mesh to sync my music between work/home, because it has the neat feature of non-server syncing (it allows you to sync an arbitrary amount of data, but only between two client PCs, no server storage).

However, an odd feature in Live Mesh is the capability to add an already- syncing folder to an existing machine in the group. There's no UI to allow you pick where on the remote PC you want the data to end up, so it's possible to push a bunch of data to a drive that you didn't want to.

Plus, moving this data is also weird:

\- Stop syncing the folder

\- Move the folder

\- Ask to sync the folder, and point to the new location

There's a certain level of "is this going to work?" going on in your head when you complete that last step. I'm guessing this sort of problem exists in both Live Mesh and Dropbox, although with the single-folder paradigm in dropbox, this scenario probably doesn't happen that often.

<comment><USER10> > It's most definitely a more easily understood mental model.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't offer an alternative for those would prefer to sync specific folders. I've ended up simulating this behavior by using symlinks, but that's a real hacky solution and still doesn't solve the problem of selective syncing.

<comment><USER11> They do. Run the betas, you can change the folder's location and run "selective sync" - just set it to C: and turn everything off that you don't want to save.

<comment><USER10> I'm running the experimental version on Linux, and I see that they do have a selective sync option. But I don't see how to specify a generic folder to be synced. All I can do is change the location of the "Dropbox" folder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think I'll read that question/answer every time I've got to choose between "Complex to explain but powerful" vs "Easy but trivial to explain". It's so hard sometime to take the "easy" route as a programmer who know you can build the powerful way.

</comment><comment><USER13> By and large I agree, but as I'm using Dropbox for more and more things, I really would like 2 small adjustments to existing features:

1\. Allow me to sync any folder - i.e. don't require the creation of a "Dropbox" folder.

2\. Modify Selective Sync so that I can omit folders on the client from syncing.

If those two features existed, I could select my home folder to sync and exclude Music, Photos, etc if they were too large for my account. I don't need a complicated remapping interface for syncing when this is done, and it maintains the mental model of a single folder that's synced.

<comment><USER2> I started writing this comment thinking how great this solution would be, but the more I thought about it, the more confusing it seems to get. What happens if I sync my home folder and I don't uncheck ~/Library? But I really did want my Firefox profile synced.

I think to do multi-folder sync, you really are going to have to provide a mapping interface: Folder A in the dropbox goes to Folder X on this computer and Folder Y on that computer. Complicated and definitely a power-user feature.

<comment><USER12> A possible solution would be to put "shortcut" where your folders in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox could then abstract that "shortcut". So, say on my desktop I create a shortcut to my mp3/ folder, I would see a "Mp3" shortcut on my iphone also. So, that fix the "What if multiple folders have the same name" problem since it's not about folders anymore but about shortcuts that need to have different names.

So, it's a simple solution that would make power user happy but still leave the easy install, easy comprehensibility, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't know about you, but I already switched from Dropbox to Windows Live Mesh 2011.

One of the reasons (after unlimited p2p sync and 5GB cloud sync) was the ability to sync ANY regular folder on my HDD...

Turns out they didn't consider the UI as too confusing or complicated.

<comment><USER15> perhaps this helps clarify which approach is succeeding:

<http://search.twitter.com/search?q=live+mesh> vs. <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dropbox>

<comment><USER16> Fun comment, and Dropbox probably is winning by quite a bit, but Dropbox's referral system for free storage could be the explanation for the Twitter traffic.

<https://www.dropbox.com/referrals>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I seem to recall an older version of the Dropbox client (0.6.384?) allowed you to actually designate the name & location of your "My Dropbox" folder and get around this feature/limitation (if you're so inclined).

I know I did it when I first installed the software -- for as long as I've been using Dropbox I've never used "My Dropbox" - it's always been "Documents" for me.

I just did some checking and it looks like that version of the software isn't availble anymore (at least not via official channels). I know that upgrading to future versions does keep that setting -- I'm running v1.0.10 and it's still "Documents" for me.

From a scan of their Wiki, looks like symlinks and/or other utilities are the preferred method. Frankly, I understand why they made this design decision and it's worked well for them, but for advanced users (me & a lot of other HN readers , I presume), it would be nice to have a slightly more direct way of accomplishing this.

</comment><comment><USER18> one word, symlinks!</comment>


Rubbers - Australia & New Zealand's no. 1 condom subscription service - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubbers.co/

<comment><USER2> 12 condoms per month is the most popular plan? Nice places to live, Australia and New Zealand!</comment>


The chemfp project: problems selling free software - <AUTHOR> https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-019-0398-8#Sec24 <comment><AUTHOR> I started the chemfp project to see if I could develop a self-funded free/open source product in my field, cheminformatics. (In short, storing and searching chemical information on a computer. Chemfp does very fast Jaccard-Tanimoto similarity search for "short"/O(1024 bit) bitstrings.

The answer: no.

The paper includes a comprehensive background on the search techniques and the software, which probably doesn't interest most here.

The section I linked to highlights some of the problems I had selling software under the principles of free software. For examples: How do I provide a demo if I always provide MIT licensed source code? Academics expect discounts, but they are also the ones most likely to redistribute the code. Which is not a wrong thing to do! But it affects the economics in a way I could never resolve, compared to proprietary/"software hoarding" licensing models.

As an HN note, I contracted a couple people to help improve the popcount implementations. HN user nkurz developed and tweaked the AVX2 implementation, and proof-read the paper. Thanks nkurz!

</comment><comment><USER2> You have probably just not understood the concept of free software in the first place...

I'm in the opinion that everyone is free to decide to do a proprietary closed source software if they accept the consequences.

But just think about the fact that your software is built on top of other free software and knowledge. Python for example. What would you have done without it? If you had to pay thousands of dollars to get a visual studio + dev licences, plus additional thousands of dollars of licenses of proprietary libraries to use. You would not have been able to create something like that without being in a big Corp.

Also, by being proprietary your are closing yourself a lot of opportunities and contributors. Nowadays a lot of people will not touch your software if it is not free. Even if some could get a 'no-fee' version.

The point being that open source is not the issue. The issue is that you have not found the right model to finance it.

But as stated by you, you started first with the goal to generate money before the goal to create something great. So chances were already good that it would fail in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my paper shows my understanding of free software, but I'll elaborate.

I co-founded the Biopython project, an open source project for bioinformatics. I was secretary of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and helped organize the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference for several years. I contribute to a number of open source projects, including Python. You'll see my name in Misc/ACKS , I was nominated to the PSF about 18 years ago, and code of mine is in CPython.

So when you write "What would you have done without [Python]" ... the answer is that I would have helped write it.

But I did not contribute to Python, or Biopython, or other projects with the thought that the future would be in debt to me, or feel obligated to respond in kind. Nor do I think most free software developers believe in that obligation. For that's an obligation which can never be paid off. Worse, it means my contribution to free software places the future in even more debt.

You wrote "by being proprietary". That is not quite correct. As I noted in the section I linked to:

"All versions of chemfp are still available under the MIT license. What's new are proprietary licensing options for those who do not wish to pay the full price, and pre-compiled binaries with a time-locked license key for evaluation purposes."

I think the point you're making is that with a closed development model I am closing myself to "a lot of opportunities and contributors." I touch on that in the paragraph before the section I linked to:

"""While the closed model may inhibit collaborations with those willing to contribute improvements, personal experience shows that it's rare for most FOSS projects to get more than occasional patches. The disadvantages of the closed model may easily be outweighed by possible additional funding. For example, funding from chemfp sales was used to pay two people from the small community of popcount optimizers to improve chemfp performance"""

You write "Nowadays a lot of people will not touch your software if it is not free."

This is very market dependent. All of my competitors are proprietary vendors, with no option of free software licensing or even source code availability. I certainly agree that it's very difficult to release (say) a new programming language or text editor implementation which isn't free software.

You write: "The issue is that you have not found the right model to finance it."

Yes, that is the point of the section. As I write in the abstract, "Several product business models were tried, but none proved sustainable. Some of the experiences are discussed, in order to contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of open source software in cheminformatics."

When you write "you started first with the goal to generate money before the goal to create something great", do you mean my summary here? Or what I stated in the paper?

My summary here was for what I thought HN readers would find most interesting. The abstract starts with the overall chemfp goals, those being:

"""The chemfp project has had four main goals: (1) promote the FPS format as a text-based exchange format for dense binary cheminformatics fingerprints, (2) develop a high-performance implementation of the BitBound algorithm that could be used as an effective baseline to benchmark new similarity search implementations, (3) experiment with funding a pure open source software project through commercial sales, and (4) publish the results and lessons learned as a guide for future implementors."""

Making money was only third on the list, and much less important to me than #1 or #2. I make most of my money consulting and writing custom in-house software for pharma R&D. But #1 and #2 are very specialist and not interesting to most HNers.</comment></comment>


Why I'm staying at 18F - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@noahkunin/why-im-staying-at-18f-9c9bc77a53fc <comment><USER2> > _Politicians may (and will) disagree passionately on what government should > do. But they all say that for whatever the government does, we should do it > well._

I'm not sure how far that can hold. That works if you believe that the government, regardless of which politicians are in power, is doing good work in good faith. I might think that (for instance) universal healthcare is more important than airport security and we'd be fine with pre-9/11 airport security standards, but given that that's not happening, I still support making airport security more effective and more painless.

But if you fundamentally disagree about whether the government should do a thing—like, say, whether we should move towards amnesty or deportation for people who have illegally immigrated here—it doesn't follow that you should say "Fine, if we're deporting people, at least we should deport them well." Or if you think it's immoral for government to fund abortions, you wouldn't conclude "Well okay, at least we should do a top-notch job of funding abortions." Would it not be better for government to do its job poorly?

18F in particular seems like it is prone to the same danger always present in private-sector tech: technology helps social changes happen faster and more effectively, but it has nothing to say about whether the social changes are good or not. Technology enables us everything from unbreakable encryption to trivial government surveillance; it has no opinion on whether unbreakable encryption or trivial government surveillance should exist. If you're worried about that, you either need to move out of pure technology development, or you need to _impede_ the production of dangerous technology (which is guaranteed to be a losing battle).

<comment><USER3> OP here. I think about this every day.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you construct the root origin of the problem facing government right now. For me personally (hence why this post is on Medium and not on a *.gov) is the lack of both faith and trust (two very different things) in public structures of all kinds, not just the federal government.

We've lost that faith and trust for very good reasons, to be sure. We may forgive, but not forget those indiscretions to put it mildly, and they go back to the founding of the republic.

The problem as I see it though is that faith and trust have fallen into such disrepair, it's become a self-replicating negative cycle. So few people believe govt can do anything well (in terms inclusive of ethics/effectiveness/efficiency) which leads to apathy, which leads to skilled people leaving govt or not joining, which leads to further degradation, which leads to a further undermining both in perception and in actual funding or authorities from Congress, and on and on it goes.

That cycle is not just observed at the federal level of course. Even more pernicious to me is the apathy it creates at the state/city (or even community) level, even if one person or one small group's potential for positive impact is exceedingly more likely at the level!

I certainly still have my ethical red lines, and I recite them to myself on a near daily basis so I don't normalize the "might" of the feds with "right". But I still see the one of the core origins that got us to this point being the cycle above, so trying to break the cycle is still my #1 priority for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the optimistic view. But it isn't difficult to imagine a Republican congress drastically cutting the funding available to teams like 18F. Of course, time will tell, and I agree that it's too early to judge yet.

<comment><USER5> Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure.

*I'm an 18F employee.

<comment><USER6> > Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress.

Even if 18F is paid out if other agencies budgets, Congress could as easily prohibit those agencies (or GSA itself) from spending any money _on_ 18F. Heck, Congress could directly restructure, break up, or abolish the GSA.

Or, they could exercise the recently-revived Holman Rule and simply cut the pay of every individual (or select individuals) working in 18F to $1/annum. If you work for the Federal government other than in an office with special Constitutional protection, no matter what the notional funding structure of your particular unit, your job, pay, and benefits are not protected against Congressional action, and you should not be misled to think that they are.

<comment><USER7> I don't think they could go under minimum wage.

<comment><USER6> Yes, they can. Minimum wage doesn't apply to the federal government to start with, and even if it did Congress could include an exception as part of any legislation that would otherwise violate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds reasonable. I don't know about US politics, but in the UK the civil service is (meant to be) independent of party politics and civil servants are meant to impartial and work with whoever the government happens to be (indeed, it's even a half-joke that the civil service _actually_ controls the politicians who are merely public figureheads).

<comment><USER9> The UK parliamentary system makes alliances necessary and difficult for any particular party to seize total control of power. Hence, the work that civil servants perform is unlikely to change between Prime Ministers. In America, well, Jeff Sessions is about to be the Attorney General.

<comment><USER6> > The UK parliamentary system makes alliances necessary and difficult for any > particular party to seize total control of power.

The Parliamentary system means that there is no separation of powers, so "total control of power" just means a parliamentary majority, and most governments have been one-party majority governments (there have been a few coalition governments, such as the LibDem-Tory coalition that Cameron started with, but they are the exception, not the rule.)

Now, if the UK had proportional representation, even with a parliamentary system, that might make one party acheiving total control more difficult than in the US, and enough parliamentary systems are also PR that people sometimes conflate the effects of the two features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> True, a lot of work you do in any government has very little do to with any political agenda. In fact many officials rarely pursue things that make the headlines.

</comment><comment><USER11> Who is this guy? Why does anyone care?

</comment><comment><USER12> The real question is whether the incoming administration wants the government to work well. That's what 18F is about. There are many Republicans in Congress who don't want Government services to work effectively. Mr. Trump, though, may not think that way. He does like to fire people who underperform.</comment>