We Had No Idea (the first digital camera) - <AUTHOR> http://pluggedin.kodak.com/post/?id=687843

<comment><USER2> Film business - dead from Digital Cameras - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality cameras. Music Distribution business (cds/vinyls in shops) - death throes from Digital Music players - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality mp3 players. Newspaper business - first models of viable media devices (Kindle, iPad) now viable - gone by 2015?

<comment><USER3> Stats: First six months of 2010, 112 million CD albums sold, 42 million download albums sold, 600 million CD singles sold (~60 million album equivalent) [1] so it's about 50/50 on digital music. Physical music distribution is not it it's death throes. Also, the decline is slowing, and the market is fairly saturated.

The thing that killed film cameras is that digital cameras just work better and have at least one killer feature -- Instant review. That is a massive advantage for consumer and professional alike. Once the disadvantages were moore's lawed away -- quality for professionals and price, size and printing for consumers -- film could not stand.

There is no killer feature with download music. I can get it faster, but so what? It might grasp the fashion markets, but not everyone needs _music now_. It has added no killer feature and it's not even cheaper. And one thing that's not like all the others -- it's a worse product. Most people have a CD player in their house and their car. And their computer. And their friends have CD players †. And they can play their CD's everywhere, and they can rip them and put them on portable devices, and they can display them in their living rooms.

Newspapers - physicality is nice, but I can well see them disappearing, because digital news will be more convenient, cheaper and more up-to-date. The winners will be the digital newspapers that preserve or enhance the paper reading experience, which might not mean having reporters and so on, but will mean selecting and presenting information in a way people value (in particular, mirroring the reader's values. It just occurred to me that the Daily Mirror in the UK is the best (and most ironically) named newspaper ever.)

[1] <http://www.prosoundnews.com/blog/30154>

† iPod docks in hifis and cars are getting penetration, but are not standard yet, and certainly not ubiquitous. Fixing this will be one thing that kills physical music.

<comment><USER2> Point taken that it's too early to lay flowers at the grave of physical music - but would you invest in a shopping mall music store? I've seen a lot of them close down.

The killer feature with downloadable music is (virtually) unlimited storage, and having your entire collection with you in one device. It won't be long before cars don't have CD players (it's 10 years since they dropped cassette players, and it was about 5 years while they had both). I would say iPod docks in cars are already ubitiquous - most car reviews in magazines will mention if there is one or not, and journalists usually moan if there isn't.

I also disagree with the thought that displaying in living rooms and swapping with friends is a feature. I put all my old CDs in a box years ago. It's only music tragics that want everyone to see their collection.

The thing is, the biggest consumers of music are young people. Try and find a 17 year old with a CD player. As this demographic moves through life, CDs will shrink into niche stores just like print films.

<comment><USER4> Downloadable music will also die. Spotify, or equivalent streaming services, have the clear killer feature downloadable music is missing - access to all music on any machine with an internet connection. Carrying around your data will seem antiquated really soon.

Edit: For the US readers I'd like to clarify that I don't count any other existing services as equal to Spotify, but there will surely be copycats soon. It is the iphone of streaming music applications if you like analogies.

<comment><USER5> I'm one of the 9 million new yorkers who take the subway to work every morning and work in midtown. If I had to rely on a net connection for music, photos, etc I would be without a great deal of the day. (During transit, at 5pm, in some office buildings.)

I also don't like the idea of renting, music, property or otherwise.

<comment><USER6> How long before Subway trains start getting dedicated wi-fi?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".

<comment><USER8> It sounds like they didn't get funding in the corporate world of 1976.

>Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore's law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919).

That seems to be as far as Kodak took it until digital cameras really started to eat their lunch.

<comment><USER9> Not really, Kodak where at the forefront of large low noise CCDs in the early 90s. They had industrial chips that wiped the floor with a lot of the science CCD suppliers. The first pro digital cameras where from Kodak, or had a Kodak CCD inside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems kind of pointless to take a patent on something even /you/ think will only become big in 15-20 years...

<comment><USER11> Good rule of thumb for any tech development (including startups) - if you're working on an idea, someone else is also working on exactly that idea.

Of course, that won't be true in many cases. The patent is there for the times that it is.

<comment><USER12> A legal framework for invalidating other people's independent discoveries? Sounds like a great idea.

<comment><USER11> "Ay, there's the rub" - _Hamlet_ Act III Scene i

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's an interesting achievement, but as far as I understand, all technologies demonstrated in this prototype were already used on satellites by this time.

<comment><USER14> Was that satellite technology classified? IIRC the military also invented digital audio and public-key crypto but these inventions weren't publicly known until decades later by which time they had been reinvented by civilians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> if you look at many inventions we use today...they were actually invented decades before they started getting used by consumers.</comment>


Micron Confirms RTX 3090, Will Have over 1 TB/S GDDR6X Bandwidth - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micron-confirms-rtx-3090-will-have-over-1-tbs-gddr6x-bandwidth <comment><USER2> Am I correct in my intuition that we are missing a lot of progress in computing due to the fact that we only have one GPGPU supplier with closed source software (CUDA). Aren't we at the point that quite a big part of what is computed by the CPU could and should move to the GPU? Or are gaming and BLAS-applications the 'only' ones that can easily be massively parallel? We have monster CPUs, GPUs and NVMe-drives all quite affordable but I don't feel it's all working together at speed. And anytime I'm looking into solutions that use say the GPU for statistics I'm quite far outside my comfort zone with regards to maturity of the software.</comment>


Japan's Robot Dogs Get Funerals as Sony Looks Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/japans-robot-dogs-get-funerals-sony-looks-away-312192 <comment><USER2> Between 3D printing and perhaps a "part donor" program similar to real-world organ donor programs, I imagine there's a possibility to reduce the robodog mortality rate by quite a bit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me a lot of The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang ([http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...](http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang/)). It makes sense that people would bond with AI specifically designed to act as a pet strongly enough to want to give it a funeral, but it's amazing to me that it's happening already.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not just with the deaths of our dog robots, we feel loss whenever we take stock of how we and our world are changing. Take the case of nearly every single Chinese person still alive today. China has went from a large rural country with sprawling country-sides, rice paddies, dragonflies, etc., to a massive concrete jungle in the clouds (it's smog, really). So to anyone who grew up there, there is no "going home", seeing one's old room, or musing how everything looks so much smaller (and dingier) now. In the shadow of change, and especially rapid change, is always the shadow of death.

That melodrama aside, it's too bad aibos weren't open sourced considering Sony is abandoning it, if it were, it might be possible for some crafty Frankenstein engineer to repair them indefinitely with spare parts. Robo dogs should be all means be able to outlast their real counterparts.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those wanting someone to bring this back, there seems to be a lot of projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo relating to robots and AI. For instance, the famous one JIBO.[1] Actually, JIBO calls itself "the world's first family robot" which would not be true since Aibo was a family robot.

So personal robots are still being made.

[1] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jibo-the-world-s-first- fa...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jibo-the-world-s-first-family-robot --3)

</comment><comment><USER6> That's why I stay in the realm of software.

</comment><comment><USER7> In a similar vein, my 10yo daughter used to play a now-defunct MMO called Pixie Hollow. In it, you played a Disney fairy and took care of pets which needed to be fed and played with to remain happy and healthy.

Months after the game was shut down, she woke up in the middle of the night crying. She had a dream where all the pets from the game were sitting in the empty ruins, trying not to starve to death after they were abandoned by the fairies. The pets might not be real, but the attachments definitely are.

<comment><USER6> Neopets might be an alternative; it's been going strong for 15 years. Also, when I played as a kid I think it taught me about capitalism / making money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the topic of startups, the trajectory of the sales graph of aibos is interesting and worth comparing to recent techno-gadget fads.

The first 3K took twenty minutes to sell. The next 150K took six years... Sales never exceeded 1 in 1000 of the countries population.

<comment><USER9> Having one, methinks two factors applied (other than the real-dog incident I posted above) considering the $3000 price tag: self-recharging is a _must_ , and it was hard to get a mental handle on what/why it was actually doing. Having to find it (after wandering for a couple hours), pick it up, and put it on the charger gets old; later models would return to the charger on its own, but by then interest had waned. Watching it frolic was amusing, but you'd get this odd sense that it was more deliberate than you could grasp - leaving you with a nagging "but what's it _doing_?" feeling.

Watching it look at a Christmas tree was hysterical though. Head would shake all around as it tried to parse the visual cues of an unexpectedly large number of small bright lights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The dog repair guy very much reminded me of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick.

Funny how fiction sometimes becomes reality much quicker than expected :)

<comment><USER11> Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was originally set in 1992.

<comment><USER12> There's this rule of thumb that a lot of future sci-fi tends to fall into the lifespan of the writer. So its usually 40-50 years out. I guess there's something morbid about writing about a time where you're dead or maybe many writers don't feel confident to extrapolate that far out.

<comment><USER11> It makes sense to date dystopian science fiction in the near future for the reader's benefit: the sense that 'this could yet happen to us' is a compelling part of the work.

Space operas and utopian themes are abstracted by setting them further into the future.

(Cite: The Algebraist, 4034AD; Star Trek TNG 2364AD; The Jetsons 2062AD; Futurama 3000AD)

Partially relevant xkcd comic: [http://xkcd.com/1491/large/](http://xkcd.com/1491/large/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope 3D printers make this situation better. If robot owners can print broken components that manufacturers stopped producing, they are able to repair their pets by their own. Of course, companies have to open their products information though.

<comment><USER14> This is something that I find extremely interesting (in the domain).

I could imagine that having open "intelligence" specifications, would allow transferring the "soul" (as perceived from the owner) of a pet to another, while still mantaining a similar outlook, in order to mantain affective identification.

That, and of course, many other things. I wonder how complex is to build a robot (for a small company), which would still make it realistic enough to create an affective bond. If not too complex, 3D printing would be realistic.

<comment><USER15> That's the good stuff, right there.

People seem to be hard wired to anthropomorphize anything remotely resembling animal behavior in 3D space. If you can develop trained or environment- reactive specific, repeatable actions (especially useful or amusing ones), along with some narrow-parameter randomized responses (within or adjacent to actions), and migrate those database contents to another robotics platform seamlessly, _then_ you'd really have something.

Kinda surprised this type of thing is still in the 'fizzled' category.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That is strange. If people hadn't formed an emotional attachment maybe they would have been more willing to buy a new one every couple of years and maintain its viability. Perhaps we need heavily subsidised electronic pets that have in app purchases to enable different behaviours. After all isn't it just a mobile platform with a speciliast UI?

<comment> vertex-four People buy these with the intention of forming an emotional attachment with them, so that wouldn't work at all.

<comment><USER17> There's money to be made in ordinary pet accessories, so I'm sure if Sony tried they could create a range of toys and such for these pets too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious as to why the Aibo was discontinued in 2006. What we're able to do from a sensor and processing perspective today, I'm sure, blows away whatever the original Aibo did. I can imagine a return to this at a much cheaper cost. The robot pet market never really took off, which makes no sense to me. Personally, I would love an intelligent robot dog that my real dog could play with when I'm not at home. Especially if it had basic teleconferencing features that let check up on my dog and my house. With VR, it might be possible to control the robot dog and play with your dog, as a dog.

The $59 robots at the toy store really aren't the same thing. You need more than a trivial amount of intelligence and movement.

We need a robot pet startup here. Hardware is tough but if this thing sold under $500 and was at least as intelligent as the Aibo, I could see it selling in large numbers.

I also find it pleasing that Japan's religious structures are so flexible that a robot funeral isn't a big deal. In the largely dogmatic West, it would be a scandal if, say, a Catholic priest attempted this.

<comment><USER18> People became attached to their Tamagotchis and people liked talking to ELIZA. You need surprisingly little power to make people bond to stuff.

<comment><USER19> Sherry Turkle's book _Alone Together_ talks a lot about this. A recurring theme is people seeing social robots going from being "better than nothing", partially filling some human void, to being "better than anything", because the robot has some set of qualities superior to humans.

Medical care robots, for example, lack the disgruntled attitudes cited by elderly patients. Robotic dogs are there to play when you want to play with them, and can be easily stowed away when you don't.

I found it both fascinating and disconcerting how easily people seem to accept robots instead of other people in a variety of relations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's a surprisingly emotional event when a piece of technology you've used and enjoyed for years finally breaks down beyond repair. The notion that it'd be worse for something that is specifically designed to act in a way that apparently befriends you and grows with you over many years, to the point of being a traumatic loss akin to losing a real friend, is entirely reasonable. How we learn to deal with this sort of event as AI progresses and becomes more and more lifelike will be interesting.

<comment><USER21> The day until robots have basic rights is probably not too many decades away. Will Google have to pay its own robots in the future (not necessarily with money) so as to not be considered a slave-owner? Will there still be "robot sweat-shops"? We'll have to see.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that there will be such a thing as a "robot sweatshop", because a sweatshop implies that you use people, or at least conscious beings.

While I'm sure we'll be very advanced on the domain of AI in the next few decades, consciousness seems to be a very difficult goal to achieve in such a short time. And even if we manage to achieve it, and become able to give consciousness to machines : why would we give it to robots in factory?

<comment><USER23> The question of consciousness is an interesting one. If the machine can perfectly fake it has consciousness or emotions how can we tell it's not conscious? conversely, how do we know other humans are conscious and not just "pretending"?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How many U.S. cities can you name? - <AUTHOR> https://iafisher.com/projects/cities/usa <comment><USER2> Enough that I got bored filling in places in Florida?

I tried to figure out the cut-off for "city". Sopchoppy, population < 500, was there. It is, after all, legally a city.

Oddly, "Los Cerrillos, New Mexico" was there (I only knew it as "Cerrillos" and had to look up the official name) with population < 300\. I say "odd" because it's not a city, but a census-designated place.

Ahh, I see " Shorewood-Tower Hills-Harbert" \- another CDP - is also included, so that's how they got there.

While Santa Fe's official name is "La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís" \- not accepted, even without the "í". ;)

Then again, neither is "City of Miami", the official name of Miami, FL.

And the unincorporated communities of Miami, NM and Miami, WV aren't included. Which makes sense.</comment>


An Update on Coronavirus Content on Medium - <AUTHOR> https://blog.medium.com/an-update-on-coronavirus-content-on-medium-e0d99d46ff52 <comment><USER2> In other words, they're pre-censoring content according to what they'd deem harmful misinformation according to their selected group of experts?

I'd find it better to have these experts pass votes on the factual correctness of articles, but not censor the entire article. This way, the general public can also verify how the expert group works, which shouldn't be left unattended.</comment>


The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://lasindias.com/blockchain-is-a-threat-to-the-distributed-future-of-the-internet <comment><USER2> This just isn't true. Yes, running your own blockchain node is infeasible, but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service.

Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. Proof- of-stake makes it clear that blockchains are run by a corporation that wants to maximize transaction fee revenue. Transaction validators have to do the best job of maintaining a unified historical record of all transactions for people to keep giving them business. Otherwise, users will choose different validators and carry on without them.

Blockchains are fancy spools of receipt paper. If the printer gets jammed, tear off the stuff you care about and staple it to a new spool. The printer doesn't control the people. The people employ the printer.

With that said, it's still unclear whether blockchains are the right choice for publishing. A decentralized Twitter doesn't need consensus on a historical record. An IPFS-based Twitter is probably a better way to start, then anchor the parts that need consensus on a blockchain, like usernames and timestamps.

<comment><USER3> What part isn't true, specifically? We are dependent on blockchain miners, because without them our transactions don't get accepted. Moreover we have a couple established big players that control the market and no clear way for them to get disrupted, save abandoning Bitcoin entirely.

Blockchains are much more than receipt paper. Receipt paper is a superfluous byproduct. The blockchain is the system of record.

<comment><USER2> This is untrue: "Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users."

If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. If I adopt a blockchain that changes its rules to be undesirable, I can take the history I care about and move it to another blockchain.

This argument depends on proof-of-stake. Some people think proof-of-work blockchains are the only useful ones, but I disagree. It's also a boring debate to have, so I won't be doing that here.

<comment><USER4> > If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different > blockchain.

Had this happened with Bitcoin? I think I heard there are some quite major disagreements (something about block sizes and stuff) and there are a lot of users that aren't happy. I don't remember hearing them just "well, whatever" and forking off.

<comment><USER2> Bitcoin is a special case because it's only really intended to be used as a ledger for bitcoins. Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable. Any dispute over what the source of truth is for a currency's ledger strains that delusion, possibly to the breaking point. The value of the currency would suffer, which would defeat the purpose of a fork.

Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain. Forking it could hurt the value of ether, but for many applications, the value of ether doesn't matter. Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.

<comment><USER4> > Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively > easy and consequence-free.

I'm not sure it's really consequence-free. It's essentially a netsplit, where the forking party lose connectivity with everyone who's left. Consider the case where Twitter (the centralized one) is suddenly falling apart over some issue into two distinct non-interoperating services. Technically - sure - it's a no-brainer, but socially it feels quite complicated to me.

(I guess, this would work if the app would be designed to use multiple blockchains. I need to give it some thought.)

<comment><USER2> You got it. Push a new client that supports both chains to users with enough time before the switch for people to upgrade.

<comment><USER5> Technical curiosity---if I use such a client, and two block chains disagree (on, say, some history that affects the current operation), then won't I end up choosing and sticking one?

<comment><USER2> Yep! At that point, the problem isn't a blockchain-specific one, it's a more general problem of reconciling conflicting truths. A common, trivial solution is to rank sources of truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" The alternative on which we can build a great new Internet era is projects like GNU social, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, and efforts to design common protocols like ActivityPub, not on the blockchain."_

All the new federated social systems have failed, replaced by commercial, centralized systems. (IRC and email live on. Google thinks it owns Usenet, rebranded as "Google Groups", and a big chunk of email never passes through SMTP.) Why? We had a good discussion of this recently by the creator of WhatsApp(?). Centralized systems can be upgraded and enhanced. Federated systems require massive cooperation to change. And federated systems don't generate much revenue.

<comment><USER7> Besides, there's the convenience and ease of use aspect. Most of these federated services are not easy to use for the average newcomer or tech- illiterate user demographic, for example. And sometimes they're inconvenient.

<comment><USER8> Couldn't a federated system that looks like a centralized system work? What if something like Diaspora just installed itself on an AWS EC2 instance for you, and you only had to enter a credit card?

<comment><USER6> An EC2 instance is probably too much for one user. The model here is Wordpress, which is easy to install and widely used, even in its distributed form. Of course, what's happened is that more and more Wordpress sites run on centralized Wordpress.

Compare:

"wordpress.com" (hosted): "Create your new website for free. WordPress.com is the best place for your personal blog or business site. Create Website (button)"

"wordpress.org" (download): "The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.5.2) is available in two formats from the links to your right. If you have no idea what to do with this download, we recommend signing up with one of our web hosting partners that offers a one-click install of WordPress or getting a free account on WordPress.com."

Open source just doesn't get user-friendly onboarding.

<comment><USER8> How about a Docker instance?

<comment><USER9> Compare setting up Docker and Wordpress to what Animats just said. Then you'll know why that's hilarious. You've managed to move the problem from one piece of software to another.

<comment><USER8> The original proposal was for the setup to be automated.

<comment><USER9> Is it as simple as filling out a form on the Internet, getting login credentials, and not thinking about it from there? _That_ is automated and manages itself. What's the Docker + Wordpress version of that?

<comment><USER8> It would be the same, but have benefits in terms of isolation and cost to the provider.

<comment><USER9> So, you don't have to install Docker, administer a server, do updates, back up data, and deal with ISP's over outages? I didnt realize Docker was that far along in zero management and maintenance. Send me a link so i can try that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> i'm not a fan of "blockchain for everything", but stating that a distributed system is a danger for distribution, and favoring a decentralized, federated approach instead sounds like plainly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> Imagine if BitTorrent, or Freenet/IPFS/GNUNet/etc. used a blockchain. They'd be completely infeasible for anyone except Google: you'd need petabytes of storage on your computer just to download a single movie (or a Linux ISO, or whatever).

But they don't do that. These systems are actually distributed, and that's why they work.

<comment><USER12> 'Blockchain' is a meaningless buzzword at this point. The innovation of Bitcoin was proof of work and/or the calibrations involved in securing Bitcoin with energy.

When bitcoin became an unfundable space, the VC's and such moved into "Blockchain", which was marketed as the good parts of bitcoin, without the bad.

Unfortunately, the space has seemingly gone on to only emulate the worst parts of bitcoin. Scams, ignorance, and get rich quick schemes. Currently, "blockchain" appears to be targeting centralized, decentralized, mutable, immutable applications. The blockchain movement is meaningless, and appears to be merely the exhaust gas from the bitcoin funding hype.

<comment><USER13> 'Blockchain' isn't a meaningless buzzword, it's a database protocol. Its market positioning aside, there's a very real value that immutable databases offer from both a technological and a commercial perspective.

The blockchain protocol isn't going to 'save the world' \- but once a little air gets let out of the balloon, it's going to see a lot of adoption in both financial institutions and back offices in a wide, wide, range of industries. For a world with lots of data and lots of shady actors, it just makes sense.

<comment><USER14> I agree that "blockchain" is essentially a database protocol for a special kind of database, but I'm fairly sure there's no standard, agreed-upon, single "blockchain protocol."

Bitcoin may be the best-known blockchain protocol, but there many others in active use.

<comment><USER15> IpPFS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The" blockchain = one subset of potential uses of Ethereum ?

Did someone take some time to tell author that internet is not www, and that www is not maintaining datacenters ?

I'm surprised that some people find this article informative.

</comment><comment><USER17> Threat is poor word choice. If blockchains don't provide good distributed service, then they simply won't be used, in which case they aren't much a threat. Maybe author should have use the thesis that blockchains aren't the end-all-be-all of the distributed internet.

<comment><USER18> No, what the post is saying is that power will be consolidated among a very small number of very large players. The system won't be distributed but relatively centralized.

<comment><USER17> In which case it is not very effective. So it is not a _threat_.

<comment><USER18> What won't be effective and why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The TCP/IP Internet is also an engine of centralization. By limiting hop counts, and distributing addresses hierarchically, we end up with just a few giant players in each industry.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is the writer trolling or what?

<comment><USER21> Sort of. They're conflating The Internet with a blogging platform. I guess to some people that's what The Internet is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> TCP/IP is resilient;</comment>


Rich Hickey on Datomic Ions [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thpzXjmYyGk&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> In our experience Datomic has been quite the disappointment. Datalog is great, the rest is less so. Off the charts and unpredictable memory consumption, slow queries with no hope of optimization (we're talking 2.3seconds/100k rows) unexplainable dataloss. So many great ideas, sketchy implementation. Cant say if the Cloud version is better, we never tried.

<comment><USER3> Oooops, you forgot the first rule of Datomic license: Thou shall not talk about the Datomic (un)performance!

<comment><USER4> Yep, for how much they are involved in the open source community, it's fairly disappointing this is not allowed:

[https://www.datomic.com/on-prem-eula.html](https://www.datomic.com/on-prem- eula.html)

"[The licensee will not] (j) publicly display or communicate the results of internal performance testing or other benchmarking or performance evaluation of the Software; "

I wish they wouldn't do this, it seems that they simply do not want to talk about this topic, even though the reason people usually choose Datomic is not performance but rather its abstractions -- so why the hostile attitude?

<comment><USER5> > simply do not want to talk about this topic

I wonder if there are many respectable companies that don't allow you to post benchmarks. It's almost as if they don't have any confidence in their product that they have to resort to such extraordinary measures.

<comment><USER6> Oracle, Microsoft. They're called "DeWitt clauses", after the researcher who first invoked Oracle's wrath after publishing benchmarks and finding them to be the slowest. Read on:

* more about DeWitt: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#The_%22DeWitt_Cla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#The_%22DeWitt_Clause%22)

* an overview of database licenses with such a clause today: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/12116865/1376005](https://stackoverflow.com/a/12116865/1376005)

* an essay discussing the legality of such clauses, with links to further material on/about them: [https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html](https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is about a feature of the Datomic database called Ions, which appear to be analogous to stored procedures (e.g. running Clojure functions in the db). From reading [https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/ions/ions.html](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/ions/ions.html), that's an oversimplification, but I didn't know what it was so figured I'd save someone a search.

<comment><USER8> Transaction functions were always part of datomic, even when running it outside of AWS. I think of Ion as a tool that wraps all the complex insanity of AWS so you can write an app as closely as possible to how you'd write a traditional Clojure app meant to run on a single server. In that sense it's not even specifically about datomic... You can even choose not to use it as your database, but of course then you'll be on your own as far as scaling your db.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These is really nice for some, but on the other side, I'm worried the peer is going to be considered legacy.</comment>


Father of Edward Snowden urges son not to commit 'treason,' to return home - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/17/exclusive-father-edward-snowden-urges-son-to-stop-leaking-come-home/

<comment><USER2> It's a trap...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnp6iC_QUc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnp6iC_QUc)</comment>


Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/iwe/2005-July/000130.html <comment><USER2> >Maybe you would like this to work in Perl:

> sqrt($x) = 12;

>and now $x contains 144. No, too bad. That is impossible, or at least extremely difficult. (Maybe you could do something ridiculous, like replacing the built-in sqrt() with a user-defined "lvalue" sub that tied its argument or something. Oy.)

Adding variables to the lhs of an equation, logic programming, is something I'm toying with the last years. I wanted to name it cps, but now use logic sounds better to me. Every primitive op knows about its inverse function, and assignment is a matcher, as in functional programming. perl unfortunately has no matcher, their smartmatch op cannot match structures, it really is a dumbmatch. but that's easily fixable with a few lines of recursive code. there do exist nice prolog systems for lisp, and even a slow one for perl. Currently I'm using picat for such tasks, mixing declarative logic with normal forward expressions. [http://www.picat-lang.org/](http://www.picat-lang.org/)

<comment><USER3> In Perl 6 this is almost trivial:

        sub sqrt($scalar is rw) {
            Proxy.new(
              FETCH => { $scalar },
              STORE => -> $, \value {
                $scalar = value ** 2
              }
            )
        }
        my $x;
        say sqrt($x) = 12;  # 144
        say $x;             # 144

I guess this could use some syntactic sugar, but the basic components to do this are readily available and simple to implement.

<comment><USER2> Partially (that's the perl lvalue solution), but the problem shouldn't be solved by cheating, but by implementing a symbolic logical solver, like computional algebra sytems (Maxima, Sage, ...). To free $x on the left side square both sides.

      { use logic;
        sqrt($_) = 12;
        print solve($_);
      }
      =>
      $_ = square(12) = 144;

This is usually done by providing prolog-like rules for each and every operation, where many ops could provide more than 1 solution. Then feed them into a solver for more speed. Like with picat or cbmc. Lisp is perfect for that. With perl it gets hairy, but still should be possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty good read, but it's from a mailinglist, and is littered with quoted- printable residue. If someone wants to preserve this, it would be worth converting it to a readable form.

<comment><USER5> [https://ptpb.pw/p3c5](https://ptpb.pw/p3c5)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Offer HN: Reply to Will Work For Karma - <AUTHOR>

I saw the will work for Karma post yesterday and thought it would be fun to offer some additional insight. I've posted my reviews of all the websites listed publicly: http://mrnoahc.com/2010/10/27/website-reviews-will-work-for-karma/ <comment><USER2> Clickable: [http://mrnoahc.com/2010/10/27/website-reviews-will-work- for-...](http://mrnoahc.com/2010/10/27/website-reviews-will-work-for-karma/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback on <http://recruiterbox.com> ! Will take your comments in to consideration in our next update

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. I hope they were helpful in some small way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> If you didn't already, you might want to contact the people who posted the requests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I already did for all the ones I could find contact info for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the TabTrick review.</comment>


Show HN: News headline analysis of over 140,000 headlines over several years - <AUTHOR> http://headlines-and-data.herokuapp.com/ This is the result of an 8 day final project for DBC Chicago. Our team scraped over 140,000 headlines of several news agencies stretching back several years. We then took those headlines and fed them through the AlchemyAPI sentiment analysis engine to assign each one a score. They were then plotted in a couple different ways using D3.
This is far from perfect and even farther from scientific. It was done in 8 days by some passionate amateur developers. It was however a lot of fun and very interesting.
You can read about it and the team in more detail on the repo page here:
https://github.com/kelmerp/headline_sentiment_rating
and see some slightly more technical slides here:
https://speakerdeck.com/luizneves77/sentimental-headlines
This was written in RoR, Postgres (Memcached), and javascript + D3.
I'm also the creator of:
onionornot.com reddesigned.com http://luiz-n.github.io/route-search/
and am interviewing for web dev (and data visualization) positions in the chicago area if you would like to reach out to me. @hey_luiz <comment><AUTHOR> This is the result of an 8 day final project for DBC Chicago. Our team scraped over 140,000 headlines of several news agencies stretching back several years. We then took those headlines and fed them through the AlchemyAPI sentiment analysis engine to assign each one a score. They were then plotted in a couple different ways using D3.

This is far from perfect and even farther from scientific. It was done in 8 days by some passionate amateur developers. It was however a lot of fun and very interesting.

You can read about it and the team in more detail on the repo page here:

[https://github.com/kelmerp/headline_sentiment_rating](https://github.com/kelmerp/headline_sentiment_rating)

and see some slightly more technical slides here:

[https://speakerdeck.com/luizneves77/sentimental- headlines](https://speakerdeck.com/luizneves77/sentimental-headlines)

This was written in RoR, Postgres (Memcached), and javascript + D3.

I'm also the creator of:

onionornot.com reddesigned.com [http://luiz-n.github.io/route- search/](http://luiz-n.github.io/route-search/)

and am interviewing for web dev (and data visualization) positions in the chicago area if you would like to reach out to me. @hey_luiz

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome job!

A few things immediately jumped out at me:

1\. On an average, Fox, seems to be more positive than CNN. Hmm.

2\. The headlines were more positive than most {sources/days} on CNN Politics in the second half of 2009. Obama's election is the only story I can think of that could have affected all the sources, but I may be wrong.

3\. Around the same time, (shortly after the election results, in fact) HuffPost saw a sharp decline in the positivity of their headlines and dipped into negative. Hmm...

4\. The overall trend of headlines is more positive than negative, leading me to wonder why is it that, as a people, we are so cynical.

I'd love to see a graph that plots the median instead of the average of the daily scores. Also, I dunno much about the Alchemy scoring, but quite a few of the headlines (~30-50% per day) seem to have scored 0.0 - is that bad detection or consistently neutral reporting? If so, I suspect the median graph will look a lot different.

I'd also love to see a similar analysis for non-mainstream media - especially, aggregators like reddit, HN and slashdot. Maybe, you could add the post ranking/comments/karma as other variables and attempt to refine the analysis further?

Just bouncing a few ideas, that all. All in all, good job. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to have a fun time with this, break it down by title keywords (e.g. politician names). You can get a very good break down of political bias by news source.

In a more automated way, you can extract all keywords from your titles, and then auto-extract the top keywords that are the most dividing.

(Source: former Google News TL, we used to have way too much fun doing stuff like this)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah we talked about that as being the obvious next step but we had neither the time nor the skillset off the bat for it. A noSql DB would probably be the better option for that as well. (correct me if i'm wrong)

<comment><USER3> With 150K titles, you don't have enough data to warrant a no-sql database. You can set up mysql or postgres in about 10 minutes and dump in the data.</comment></comment></comment>


Cryptobin – share text / files securely - <AUTHOR> http://cryptob.in/ <comment><USER2> Hey! Lots of people end up building things like this.

You have a problem though. Your program produces linear ciphertexts. The key "a" and the message "a" will always create the ciphertext "136".

Everyone writing code should be using what's called an AEAD. Libraries like nacl will provide this for you in most languages.

AEADs abstract away all the usage of primitives and implement encryption and decryption safely (just remember to always pass in a unique nonce. In my opinion this should be abstracted out of the AEAD interface)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! will look into that, that's the first day I released it to the public and any feedback is much welcomed, thanks again</comment></comment>


Spark killed Hadoop - <AUTHOR> https://www.datanami.com/2017/09/29/hadoop-hard-find-strata-week/ <comment><USER2> The title should be changed. The article specifically ends with saying that Hadoop is not dead. Spark might have killed MapReduce, but the rest of Hadoop is alive and very useful. The only alternatives worth considering for replacing those parts of Hadoop are either proprietary or too dependant on a single company.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and HiFrames [1] and HPAT [2] will kill Spark ;-)

HiFrames and HPAT are built on Julia [3] and use the Julia packages ParallelAccelerator.jl [4].

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02341](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02341)

[2] [https://github.com/IntelLabs/HPAT.jl](https://github.com/IntelLabs/HPAT.jl)

[3] [https://julialang.org/](https://julialang.org/)

[4] [https://github.com/IntelLabs/ParallelAccelerator.jl](https://github.com/IntelLabs/ParallelAccelerator.jl)

</comment><comment><USER4> Spark still uses Hadoop underneath. While Hadoop mapreduce uses the disk, spark uses memory for faster processing. And I am not sure anything is going to kill spark soon. Once a library gains critical mass, it's harder to replace it in existing systems

<comment><USER5> Spark can read from and write to HDFS, and YARN (the resource negotiator in Hadoop v 2) is one of the cluster managers supported by Spark.

but you can run a Spark cluster without YARN--eg, with Mesos--or with the built-in manager provided in the Spark distro. Likewise, your Spark cluster doesn't need to read or write to HDFS.</comment></comment>


Modern CMake Examples - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pr0g/cmake-examples#modern-cmake-examples <comment><USER2> I've been trying to use CMake for a couple of years now, but I still feel like a complete beginner.

CMake makes it very difficult to do things right, and very easy to do things wrong. Even something simple like including a library becomes a nightmare if another library you depend on also includes the same library (such as Google test). The tool has so many sharp edges that I'm almost ready to go back to makefiles.</comment>


I initially struggled with todo apps. Here's my process after 5 years - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/todo_whiz/status/1266792176832450560 <comment><AUTHOR> I posted about this on Reddit and it was well received: [https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/gupmm4/i_init...](https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/gupmm4/i_initially_struggled_with_using_todo_apps_then/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)

I have a more detailed version with gifs on this twitter thread I linked to: [https://twitter.com/todo_whiz/status/1266792176832450560?s=2...](https://twitter.com/todo_whiz/status/1266792176832450560?s=20)).

If you have any questions, comment and let me know.

If you are on twitter, help me make the thread more visible to others by liking and retweeting.

Thanks!</comment>


In the Future, When Robots do All Our Work, What of Capitalism? - <AUTHOR> http://www.imponderablethings.com/2013/04/in-future-when-robots-do-all-our-work.html

<comment><USER2> About 10 years ago I read a ton of Karl Marx, and the biggest thing which struck me was that the vocabulary to describe what he was talking about was not invented until modern times -- he talks of the "mechanisation of the means of production," which we can distil down to "robots."

In this view, Marx's critique is actually pretty simple. In your first economics class a good teacher probably dismantled any idea in your head that value is objective -- it's based on fiat and caprice; "everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it," and "banks in this sense really create money," and so on. If it was a really good teacher you should some days like awake at night wondering _no, really, why the hell does the economic system work?!_ or so.

Marx isn't satisfied with the economist's sort of relativism; he wants to "get to the heart of the matter". Marx wants to anchor value in, first, _usage_ \-- food has value because it nourishes you. But he also settles on the _work_ that went into the object, which is an objective fact of history (which leads to long German sentences where it almost sounds like labour is a substance inside the object).

Marx wants to distinguish _artistic_ work (which we do purely for its own sake) from _drudge_ work which we do to "make a living". He takes those words literally; he views drudge work as a form of slavery -- perhaps _wage slavery_ , but slavery nonetheless. He reasons that the whole system only works due to this generalized slavery. He thus reinterprets history as a set of slave revolts, where things get better only because people reclaim rights from their ruling classes. (This also drives his criticism of religion, which is basically "religion makes you feel good which is admirable in a sense, but also troubling -- because it makes you less likely to revolt against the real causes of your pain.")

Today, he says, people are able to produce more because they have robots at their disposal, so a few farmers can feed many people. In some respects robots also alienate you more, working with them feels more like drudge-work, less like art. But he envisions a day when robots will take over all of the drudge; you will just design an object and some 3D printer will take care of actually producing that object for you.

In this system, he says, the classical ideas of money and exchange and capital itself no longer fundamentally make sense; robot slaves will take care of all of your mundane needs (think of Maslow's hierarchy here), which means that when you wake up you won't need to worry about where you will live or what you will eat. Robot slaves do the drudge work, humans are left to be artistic beings. We don't need money -- a medium of exchange -- precisely because the robot slaves will take care of the actual nuts-and-bolts of exchanging, so that we are simply sharing.

This also opens the way for new criticisms of Marx like "what if we all just vegetate in front of TVs and the Internet and society at this point stagnates?" and so forth. It also explains why the Marxists want to say that the Soviet Union wasn't communism: the gulags were human slaves, not robot slaves.

I'm not saying Marx is right, I'm just saying that we're finally reaching the point where the pop culture is beginning to engage with _his issues_. His solutions are going to be naturally limited because he was writing 200 years before robots could be an everyday thing, and even today it's not clear that robots can someday solve all of our problems; good pattern recognition is still a huge obstacle for example.

<comment><USER3> Some theories bring something new to karl marx theory, as neomarxism and robot alienation.

Marx thought that because machines (or robots) can produce lot more than humans and more effciently, a capitalist would replace little by little all humans workers by robots, with the benefits generated by the gain of productivity, for making more money and win the price competition... So the final society will have production only made by robots. It was partially true because he made the theory that these machines, well designed, cost less than hires hundreds humans with social rights, but he didn't expect that instead of replacing human by machines, we have found cheaper human work in China, or India for example, which is less efficient but cheaper at a large scale, when machines were too expaensive to invent or to maintain. New slave humans have replaced old slave humans protected now by social rights, and investments have been made to delocalisation not robotisation.

Neo-marxists believe that the society is not as Marx describe it as always a fight against classes, oppressed or exploited people against oppressor or exploitant people, but is divided in 3 strates. The INNOVATORS, the REPETITORS and the PARASITES.

Innovators are people which make the world move forward by their everyday work. Researchers, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, artists...

Repetitors are people which will not make the world move forward and change by their everyday work. These people are honorable, because they make repetitive stuff everyday to make the society run. It is your bus driver, your cloth seller, the nurse, the waiter at your restaurant etc...

So the innovators work depends exclusively of repetitors work. If nos buses, no farmers, the society falls down (see the Maslow pyramid of needs) and all the philosophers will come back to farm for eating. A funny question is : at which level of productity does we enable the apperance of a philosopher? It will be only when we'll have enough productivity to give resources to innovators just to innovate. Even be an entrepreneur ! If the repetitors were not there, you will not try to make your company. Think to all these repetitors thaht enable you to run your compaany, have employees coming at work, eating etc...

And parasites are people which slows the change, defined often by the cut of money they take of investment that make the workd change (Banks, even investors asking for dividends)

So they think that repetitors need to be and will be replaced by robots. Making repetitive things has no interest for humans, right? Humans are not work or energy like in Matrix...

Humans has to stay innovators, making the world move forward, exploiting always with more productivity the resources the earth provide and always try to better understand our world, with science, with art, with code.

Loking forward to see the robots coming in our everyday's life, enabling us to be really humans.

<comment><USER4> Repetitive work is behind every zen state. Idleness sometimes is inspiring, but sometimes its just...idleness.

I've never thought more than when plowing a field (takes days to finish 300 acres) or herding cattle for miles between pasture, or mowing the lawn with ear plugs, or driving to visit my sister (8 hours on the interstate).

So, take away 'repetitive' work and we take away many opportunities for thinking. What then?

I guess there's viewing porn for hours, or watching the real innovators show us their art, or ...

<comment><USER5> Or engaging in repetitive "work" to Zen-up as a hobby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Large masses living in slums -- people that now are "middle class" and "upper middle class" included. The rich live in isolated communities, heavily guarded.

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't kid yourself, we don't even have robots that make USB cables. That stuff is still made by hand in China.

<comment><USER4> Only until a robot is cheap enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The novelette "Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future" (from the HowStufWorks guy) is always what I think back to.

<http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

In the end, I'd like to live in Iain Banks' Culture, but I'm too cynical to believe that could ever happen.

<comment><USER5> You know, you could have linked _Player Piano_ or something. Sorry, I just can't stand the "golly gee whiz!" tone and awful characterization of _Manna_.

(Yes, I'm a stickler for good writing in my dystopian scifi.)

The Culture always sounded nice except for their attitude towards anything that smells of religion.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe I could have linked to a live and legal copy of Player Piano.

I like Manna for the price, and still feel it is pretty relevant to the topic at hand.

(And this seems like a kinda snarky downvote.)

<comment><USER5> The basic problem with _Manna_ is that it's _still_ a totalitarian technocracy. Literally totalitarian: you're normally supposed to be frightened of the government tapping into your central nervous system, you know?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Create iOS Passbook Coupons for your users in seconds. - <AUTHOR> http://coupono.us

<comment><USER2> How are you getting around this?

([https://developer.apple.com/passbook/getting_started_with_pa...](https://developer.apple.com/passbook/getting_started_with_passbook.pdf)) Use of Apple-issued Certificates

All passes need to be signed with an Apple-issued certificate to be recognized by Passbook. Passes should only be signed by the entity that will be distributing the pass under its own name, trademark, or brand, and that entity's information should match the information on the back of the pass. It should be obvious to users who the originator of the pass is based on the branding on the front of the pass, and that branding should be consistent with the contact information on the back of the pass.

If you want to hire a contractor to assist you in developing a pass, then you will need to add the contractor to your development team and the pass must still be signed by the entity that is distributing the pass under its name, trademark, or brand. Keep in mind that passes can only be accessed by apps developed using the same team account, and that have the appropriate entitlements. So if you intend to use a companion app in conjunction with your passes, be sure to use the same development team.

<comment><AUTHOR> We created the app as part of RailsRumble and are not using it for monetization, we are also doing some spikes to see if it'll be possible for people to upload their Certificates and we generate the Passes on their behalf?

Probably we'll be generating the CSR's and having the users use the generated CSR to get signed certs from Apple and upload them back to us.

Again, we haven't yet launched this officially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a heads up guys, you haven't changed the default URL for user activation - it currently points to <http://localhost:3000/user/pM33mHzATCP8JiBA2cUL/activate> while it should be <http://coupono.us/user/pM33mHzATCP8JiBA2cUL/activate>.

Hope this helps! :D

Also, great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> noticed this myself yesterday. we'll fix this as soon as Rails Rumble is over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will do a followup blog post soon to explain the use cases and outline some known-glitches.

We are going to make this product even more awesome-er! (If that's the word! :) )

<comment><USER5> Looks interesting... notice you might want to take down the features page... its all loreum ipsum text.

<comment><USER5> granted you built it in 48 hours :)

<comment><USER4> haha! yes we did with 6-8 hours of sleep :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks really nice. Keep up the good work guys. Now it's time to rumble : )

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice App. The idea looks really great kEEP IT UP :)

<comment><USER4> much appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome :-)

<comment><USER4> looking forward for more feedback in future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work!

<comment><USER4> Couldn't be possible without your help and contribution.</comment></comment>


Pony 0.27.0 has been released - <AUTHOR> https://www.ponylang.io/blog/2019/03/0.27.0-released/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how much optimization medium complex app can get from LLVM 7 which is part of new release.</comment>


Please Understand Learning to Code - <AUTHOR> http://dave.fayr.am/posts/2012-05-15-please-understand-learning-to-code.html

<comment><USER2> I'm certainly willing to believe the cited paper (both versions), but it does seem to contradict my own experience in teaching unlikely students how to program. I've found that a excellent litmus test is the ability of the student to follow the recipe on the back of a bag of Chocolate Chips. If the result is at all edible then I am reasonably sure that they can make the necessary leap from that kind of information to that which is needed in programming. A recipe has all of the usual things that a program does, they just look a little different. Sequence, loop, decision etc. Maybe these people would have been in the 'We can program group' of the mentioned test, I don't know---just know I've managed to teach a lot of unexpected folk the basics (often using basic for that matter :) )...</comment>


America's Biggest Filer of Patent Suits Claims It Invented Shipping Notification - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-biggest-filer-of-patent-suits-wants-you-to-know-it-invented-shipping-notification-1477582521 <comment><USER2> Relevant from August of this year: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/update-patent-troll- sh...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/update-patent-troll-shipping- transit-llc)</comment>


The Luddite Fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-fallacy/ <comment><USER2> >The Luddites were a group of English textile workers who violently destroyed machines. They broke up power looms because they feared that these new machines were taking their jobs and livelihoods.

The above is the real Luddite Fallacy.

What the Luddites Really Fought Against [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites- real...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really- fought-against-264412/)

>Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new.

>But the Luddites themselves "were totally fine with machines," says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labor practices. "They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods," says Binfield, "and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns."

There was essentially no wage growth from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 to about 1850 (Engel`s Pause) despite very rapid technological change and technology adoption in Britain.

What people crying Luddite fallacy forget is that Industrialization was accompanied with major institutional changes in Britain, weakening the bargaining power of industrialists. Industrialization as we know it, would have been impossible without that.

Automation must be accompanied with similar institutional changes today if we want to avoid unrest and mass unemployment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those comments. I thought it was an interesting article but I partly posted it because I was thought there might be some interesting rebuttal to be had as well.</comment></comment>


Median Home Prices Compared to Median Income Since the 1960s - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/median-home-prices-work-vs-gold/ <comment><USER2> This seemed highly unpleasant but ignores the effect of falling interest rates over much of the study period. I put together a plot using FRED data to show the cost of monthly housing (assuming a US-style 30 year mortgage) as well as its annual cost as a percent of median US household income.

[https://imgur.com/a/0F20SGF](https://imgur.com/a/0F20SGF)

It could be better - I'm quite envious of those who owned a home in the 1970's - but clearly there has been some secular change in US expectations of housing costs as a percent of income. There is an upward trend but nowhere near as dramatic as this post tries to show. In 1980 housing represented 21% of income, in 2016 it was 24%.

<comment><USER3> I think that is correct. While most people buy a house -- they budget to a payment. The last time we moved our realtor even tried to engage us in this direction. It is very similar to the way car dealers explicitly work -- "What do you want to spend a month?"

If interest rates rise dramatically, average home price will necessarily fall.

<comment><USER4> This recent Indicator podcast discussed this. Surprisingly, historical data does not support the notion that rising interest rates leads to lower housing prices. But maybe this time will be different. [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/15/611386612/risi...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/15/611386612/rising- rates-vs-the-housing-market) Here is the relevant paper by Laurie Goodman. [https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/92541/...](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/92541/the- impact-of-higher-interest-rates-on-the-mortgage-market.pdf)

<comment><USER5> If interest rates rise and then fall again over a relatively short term (several years or longer in the case of real estate) then housing prices might not fall much because owners will pull property off the market and wait for it to improve. The reduced supply (possibly greatly reduced) will tend to drive prices higher even as interest rates are driving them lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google cache [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NzYN98d...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NzYN98d7ackJ:thesoundingline.com/median- home-prices-work-vs-gold/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de)

</comment><comment><USER7> So the ratio of median home prices to median family income has moved from about 3 to about 4.5 over the last 50 years.

This is because the many manufactured things have dropped in price over that period of time. This has meant that families have more money available to spend on things that are not manufactured. Land is the epitome of something that cannot be manufactured, so goes up in value.

Here's an article on Baumol's cost disease which explains this: [https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/5/4/15547364/baumol- cost-...](https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/5/4/15547364/baumol-cost-disease- explained)

<comment><USER8> Also median homes have nearly doubled in size.

<comment><USER9> Yes but there are a lot of variables to consider there. Most homes today are just drywall, OSB, and carpet when in the past they were lath and plaster, wood planks, and wood flooring. On the other hand people today also pay for AC, more plumbing, and better insulation.

Homes built within the past ~40 years also don't last as long as they used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Comparing home price to income is incorrect. The unit of measure of home price is dollars. The unit of measure of income is dollars per year. You should compare home payment, be it a rent, mortgage + maintenance costs to income per unit of time.

Home price highly depends on interest rates which vary a lot. Currently we have an ending low interest rate period and when rates will go up, situation might change.

<comment><USER11> That is true, but it is slightly more complicated.

When lenders were routinely offering 100% (or even higher) LTV mortgages, the relationship is as simple as you describe. Homeowners and renters alike pay out a portion of their income each month for the roof over their heads.

When lenders require a significant percentage as a down payment, then the rate of change of house prices and the rate of change of salaries are directly linked as well as via the monthly cost of a mortgage. If prices are rising faster than you can save up a deposit and incomes are stagnant, then it doesn't matter if interest rates are falling enough to keep the monthly payments stable, you still won't be able to buy.

Bear in mind that that scenario is a Landlord's dream, they can charge higher rents because everyone needs somewhere to live, which in turn prices more renters out of the homebuying market, whilst not deterring wealthy flippers.

The regular payment on a mortgage varies even more greatly depending on some of the decisions you take when you get the mortgage than the underlying interest rate. (e.g. rate of the mortgage, fix/discount/tracker/offset, length of initial term, length of total term, upfront fees, size of the deposit).

<comment><USER12> I disagree with the conspiranoic interpretation of interest rates. There are several reasons why land is expensive globally, but if we talk about places where median income is unable to buy property like SF, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, we are talking about highly regulated spots, with high productivity jobs.

<comment><USER11> Conspiranoic? I'm just pointing out that (as solomatov summarises) that these things are complicated, and that saying that one simple comparison is wrong, and another equally simple one is right does not work.

One factor that I suspect solomatov was originally hinting at, is that back in the 1960s when house prices were low against incomes, interest rates were so high that the monthly payments, as a proportion of their income, were roughly the same as they are today. However, that ignores the fact that saving up $SALARY * 2.4 / 5 for a 20% deposit in 1960, wouldn't have taken as long as saving up $SALARY * 4.2 / 5 would today. That only considers the US national medians mentioned in the article. The really unaffordable places are even worse. The longer you need in order to reach the savings target you originally set, the more you are affected by house price increases adding even more time to that period.

As you say, there are several reasons for the unaffordability of home ownership. My point is they are not all completely independent of each other and are even influenced by house prices themselves.

None of this is conspiracy, just market behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Median home price does not necessarily mean that houses are appreciating. People could be building larger, more expensive houses. Building codes may also add cost to a house. Homes didn't used to have to have smoke detectors all linked together, be grounded properly, have waterproofing, etc.

<comment><USER14> Sure but material science has progressed for cheaper materials, machines have reduced the required number of people needed... It cuts both ways.

<comment><USER13> It looks like you are right about that--looking around, it appears that inflation adjusted price per square foot has remained relatively stable. However, a larger home with price/sq ft remaining the same results in a higher price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > We can see from the second chart that a median family home has been getting > less and less affordable for the 'median family.' Whereas the median family > could earn enough to purchase a home in just 2.4 years of work in 1970 > (assuming 100% of their income went towards the home), it took the same > median family over 4.3 years to buy a home in 2016, nearly twice the time > and work.

This struck me as a slightly strange way to frame it, since the median buyer probably still has a standard 30 year loan. The ratio going up doesn't mean it's taking longer to buy, it means that people are no longer using the 1/3rd rule of thumb - buy something that takes no more than 1/3rd of your paycheck to pay down.

We definitely might be over leveraged as they suggest, but could this also be a change in the buying habits with the remainer of the paycheck? I.e., the other 2/3rds or one half... maybe on average the median buyer is on average buying small things like iPads rather than bigger things like boats or college tuition? Maybe the average median buyer is just saving less for the future, but believes that putting the money into their house is a form of saving (which is often true)?

</comment><comment><USER16> As a homeowner I do like the routine appreciation in the value of my house (up $250K since I bought it in 2012) but I wonder when the other shoe will drop. I suppose to a large extent how this plays out will vary quite a bit by region, but it seems inevitable that there will be some form of correction in the future.

<comment><USER17> >> $250K since I bought it in 2012

That is really, really bad.

<comment><USER18> How do you figure? You have no idea what the initial home cost is. 250k on a 1.5 MM home.. yea sure maybe that's whatever. 250k on a 400k home is insanely good.

<comment><USER19> Rapidly appreciating housing values are an abject policy failure.

Great for homeowners, shit for everybody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well isn't it normal? Food has become cheaper since these days. Stuff has become massively, incomparably cheaper. Travel has become cheaper. And Americans had enough of all these in 1950: it was a rich country already, very few went hungry or unable to buy clothes or household stuff, so as prices fell, possibility of increase of demand were limited, these markets, except travel, were already saturated.

So a lot of money released by these things getting cheaper had to be spent somewhere, and eventually it was spent on things which aren't so prone to technology-driven deflation, mainly real estate.

<comment><USER12> This would make sense if the housing were of higher quality than it used to be. I think the same house dated 50 years ago might be worth more of a median price today, even though its the same but older house.

<comment><USER20> House built 50 years ago is firstly, about half as big as today. Personal living space more than tripled in 100 years and more than doubled in 50 years.

<comment><USER12> But what is the price change of that same house? If the house of old is worth more today, its higher value for the same unit of space (and also stock decay).

Are old houses cheaper or more expensive today, taking into account house depreciation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As is mentioned in the comments of the article itself, this initial analysis ignores the fact that the median square footage has also increased dramatically during the same time period.

<comment><USER22> Based upon that older neighbourhoods should lose value as they age and they lose relative space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be really cool to see the median home price to family income plotted as a topographical map.

Not that we don't all expect it but you'd basically get mountain ranges on the coasts. The really interesting thing would be to look at it over time and see when and how fast the "mountain ranges" develop. Obviously the trend it generally upward but it would be interesting to see when and how fast prices increase in various locales and see if that correlates with anything else.

</comment><comment><USER24> 4.5x would be a dream for Australians - Sydney and Melbourne are currently at 13x & 10.5x respectivly. Those two cities cover close to half the Australian population. Insanity.

<comment><USER12> Dont worry, it will go back to that eventually. They both have plenty of land, im sure that its a momentary phenomena.

<comment><USER24> It's been about 25 years so far, with no real downwards correction. Definitely a major bubble, but ive given up trying to guess when it will burst. Everyone acts like it will go on forever, but that would mean >$50mil median homes in another 20 years which is surely impossible (but what do I know)

<comment><USER12> Then don't buy at all, and work in selling houses :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's not surprising that home prices have gone through the roof, since many government policies are intended to keep home prices rising.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd be curious to see how this relates to the increased urbanization of our culture. It would make sense for property value to rise if more and more people are trying ot fit into a fixed amount of city space.</comment>


Citron Research claims UBNT is a fraud - <AUTHOR> http://www.citronresearch.com/citron-exposes-ubiquiti-networks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure about all the claims in the article, but I do know from personal use their hardware is nice, features are great and UI is better than comparably priced products. So if they are a fraud they sure make great products. I also know several WISP providers who can provide quality, affordable service due to the hardware.

<comment><USER2> I just finished doing a small setup using their gear but w/ a pfsense device as the security device. If I were to do another I'd just go unifi the whole way.

If this investigation is true I'm not sure who is going to fill their role in the small business side - their stuff is good and the competitors are much more costly and often have licensing fees.</comment></comment>


They write the right stuff - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff <comment><USER2> AFAIK this group at NASA doesn't write any lines of code at all. The Shuttle runs 4 dSpace ControlDesk Realtime controllers (similar to a F1 car), and the programming environment is graphical. You design models, you don't write code. A compiler writes the code automatically from this model. The automotive industry works similar. You design the engine, the gearbox, the drivetrain with toolboxes and connect them together. Lots of tools exist for quality control, correctness control and performance control. The error rate is significantly lower.

For some edge case they do write C code, maybe about 5%</comment>


Ask HN: Where to start? Am I on the right track? - <AUTHOR>

I've been interested in programming for a few years now, and have been bouncing around a few ideas for some web apps the past few months. Mostly things to teach myself that would hopefully become useful to others. I've been reading HN for a little more than a year but have never really contributed. I've been doing a lot of reading lately here in regards to language/framework choice, bootstrapping, and startup stuff in general. It's definitely something I want to try.
A little about me: I'm very unhappy in my current field of computer & network support and need a change. I'm 24 and hate what I do. I'd like to eventually generate some passive income/break even and then grow from there if this seems like a good fit for me. I've dabbled in c++ a couple years ago and created simple LAMP based intranet site. Recently I've started working on the website of the company I currently work for, mostly some basic PHP. I'm ok in HTML and CSS.
Choosing a language and/or framework has been difficult. I've narrowed it down to either PHP or Flask. PHP because that's what I have the most experience with. I have a couple development books on it. Flask because it looks like a minimal framework and something I'd be able to understand in a shorter amount of time compared to something like Django. There are some useful looking plugins to get myself started and between Python and RoR, Python seems more attractive to me. I have a little experience in MySQL so would probably go with that to start with.
Am I on the right track? Between PHP or Flask, would one be better suited than the other to start with? I'm afraid of doing the majority of my learning ahead in a language or framework that could be damaging in the long term of a possible development career. I don't want this to be a lang vs lang post but I value the experience of the HN community and would love to hear your opinions and experience. Email is visible in my profile if you'd prefer that. <comment><USER2> I wouldn't put PHP close to Flask in the same sentence. Even though PHP has quite an extensive function library and is a template language in itself, it doesn't provide enough to compare even to a micro framework like Flask.

To come close you would probably end up using a framework written in PHP. At that point the language doesn't matter all that much.

I'm helping a friend writing a simple wiki-like application and due to him having to explain every part of the program we decided to write as much ourselves as possible and only use external libraries when absolutely necessary. Me trying him to explain what Django does and why it would help him didn't end well.

I'm not the absolute master of Python web frameworks, but I know enough to come by. But I tell you, writing clean, understandable, side-effect free and secure code in PHP is much harder in comparison than I expected.

There are thousands of tutorials on the web. But a lot of them show things done wrong, deprecated or blatantly insecure. The language is quite a mess and you can do the same thing 10 different ways, 8 of which are deprecated and maybe 1 that works with unicode. Not that you would know it's deprecated, the original mysql API is still not officially called deprecated, but it sucks big time.

I reckon knowing how to use Flask and Django makes it harder for me to write code the hard way. I'm replicating a lot of functionalty in PHP. But at the same time I know that I'm not good enough to do so. And doing so costs time anyway. I would have probably finished his application in a quarter of the time using Django, heck, even Flask. And it might even hold up to industry standards. My PHP code not so much. Somebody would probably end up dead.

<comment><USER3> > Even though PHP has quite an extensive function library and is a template > language in itself, it doesn't provide enough to compare even to a micro > framework like Flask.

PHP and Flask are two completely different things. One is a programming language and the other is a framework. To say "PHP doesn't provide enough to compare" to a microframework shows a gross ignorance of what PHP can do and a grand exaggeration of what Flask is actually doing.

> But I tell you, writing clean, understandable, side-effect free and secure > code in PHP is much harder in comparison than I expected.

If you were talking about Ada or a similar language, I might agree with you, but you're talking about Python. It's just as easy to write bad Python as it is to write bad PHP.

From the rest of the post, it seems like the problem isn't that PHP is bad, but that you don't know (even remotely) how to write good PHP.

<comment><USER2> PHP offers a lot of things that other languages provide trough the means of a framework. So I don't think it is unfair to compare it to a framework.

The use of frameworks seems to be condoned. On my search for a template engine I passed by many articles of PHP developers saying they were unnecessary as PHP would provide all you could need.

Flask doesn't do much. But that's exactly the point. Even though it's so simple it offers enough to write an application that shouldn't have to hide because it's amateurish.

> From the rest of the post, it seems like the problem isn't that PHP is bad, > but that you don't know (even remotely) how to write good PHP.

That may be true. But it could also be true that writing good PHP requires far more skill and time. Skill I might not have. But I'm not someone blindly following tutorials or someone who tries to whip out a lousy program as fast as possible. Nor do I think PHP is a bad language is such. But I had a hard time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _"Between PHP or Flask, would one be better suited than the other to start > with?"_

IMO, it doesn't matter if your goal is to have a business. What matters is the problem you are going to solve and how solving that problem turns into money.

On the other hand, if your goal is to learn another programming language or improve your programming skills or learn a web framework, then it's really just a matter of personal preference...so again, it doesn't really matter.

Finally, if your goal is to get a job, there are lots of them for PHP. Some for RoR, some for Python, and probably not all that many for Flask.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd avoid PHP (because there's so many that start from scratch with PHP and make a bad name for themselves and the language). Python and Flask are a good place to start and Python is a "respected" language. So without experience and PHP on a resume puts you'll be lumped in the same group as all the awful programmers that think PHP is bees-knees (Even if you're not awful).

Plus, there's this. [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of- bad-de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

<comment><USER5> In general though as long as you learn good learning skills you'll be fine. It doesn't matter what framework you choose in two years or less the stack will be very different (with a high likely hood). Learn good software design, databases, cacheing, javascript, basic html, css and you'll be solid no matter the details of how it's accomplished.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input! Didn't someone make the hammer you described above?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Use what you know best right now. But keep learning other things on the side.

Forget about choosing frameworks. Pick the one with good documentation (code igniter in PHP) and hack away. Build it already.

The more time you waste "deciding", the less time you will be able to program. Jus tpick something anfd run with it.</comment>


Show HN: KOrs – How to Bike Like an Amsterdammer - <AUTHOR> https://kors.landen.co/ <comment><USER2> The FAQ link in the top right is yellow on gray. That's hard to read. IMHO the FAQ contains the most information.

One course (or kOrs) is 'interactive'. I first thought that meant online-only.

The contact form is pre-filled (placeholder) with an USA-style phone number. I think it makes sense to use the Dutch number format.

I didn't learn anything about the instructor. What qualifies the instructors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the Feedback -

I made the color of the FAQ black so that should easier to find and also did some addition in the FAQ as you suggested.

The phone number placeholder, is not changeable at the moment but will take that with me

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi developer here, I am looking for some valuable feedback. So feel free to open the discussion.

First time I am using landen.co saved me a ton of time to launch the MVP.</comment>


Next-Generation HTML5 Game Polycraft Now Live - <AUTHOR> http://polycraftgame.com

<comment><USER2> Cool, but doesn't work on Firefox 14 which is roughly a year old. Fair enough, you've stated "next generation". So I updated to version 21 and it worked.

The thing is, it was broken in Firefox 14, no error message or browser detection or feature detection, just a broken game. It's still a rough experience these HTML games compatibility-wise. I remember detecting older versions of Flash 10 years ago for games I was making then, and warning users they needed to upgrade. I wouldn't have been allowed to deliver a Flash movie that broke on earlier versions.

Needing to create an account to save progress shouldn't be needed what with offline storage, or even just a cookie to save where I'm up to.

The social media vibe is slightly overdone, I didn't expect persuasive sign-up prompting just to play. But there it is.

7 / 10

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, @exodust. Good point about the versioning — we could do that better. Thanks for checking it out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> HTML 5 game it is. It asks to download and install some exe on my machine, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your browser probably doesn't support WebGL, so we have a fall-back plugin for that case.

Try it in the latest Chrome or Firefox and you shouldn't have a problem :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry.. Dint get why its called "Next-Generation" ?</comment>


Varying Speaking Styles with Neural Text-to-Speech - <AUTHOR> https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/7ab9665a-0536-4be2-aaad-18281ec59af8/varying-speaking-styles-with-neural-text-to-speech <comment><USER2> Before Charlie Brooker started producing Black Mirror, he already was a highly observant critic of society and media. At one point he produced a generic news snippet of an unspecified event, where he pointed out all the standard videoshots and animations used these days to report on a topic [1]. He presented this "report" with the standard news-speak pronunciation of sentences.

With this achievement of Amazon, and the recent development by China in AI news-anchors [2], one is not far off to see news reporting being done mostly by machines. Yes, some videography must still be done manually, but the rest could be automated.

What that means for the TV news industry? I don't know, but it certainly deserves discussion.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI)

[2] [https://www.fastcompany.com/90264587/watch-chinas-new-ai- anc...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90264587/watch-chinas-new-ai-anchor-read- the-news)

<comment><USER3> I wish they would commission Newswipe again, was one of the best shows on BBC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those lolking for something not hosted by a megacorp, check out Mozilla's Text to Speech: [https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/blob/master/README.md)

Audio Samples: [https://soundcloud.com/user-565970875](https://soundcloud.com/user-565970875)

If your interested in helping improve this, spread the wors about the Common Voice project by Mozilla, a public speech corpus that is easy to help improve, which makes high caliber TTS and transcription possible ouside of walled gardens: [https://voice.mozilla.org](https://voice.mozilla.org)

Mozilla DeepSpeech also does Speech to Text surprisingly well: [https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech)

<comment><USER5> Worth noting that a big chunk of the core TTS code here is built on tools from other researchers like Ryuichi Yamamoto and Keith Ito, and they have great implementations to check out as well.

The best quality I have heard in OSS is probably [1] from Ryuichi using the Tacotron 2 implementation of Rayhane Mamah, which is loosely what NVidia based some of their baseline code on recently as well [3][4].

There's also a colab notebook for this stuff, so you can try it directly without any pain [https://colab.research.google.com/github/r9y9/Colaboratory/b...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/r9y9/Colaboratory/blob/master/Tacotron2_and_WaveNet_text_to_speech_demo.ipynb)

I also have my own pipeline for this (using some utilities from the above authors + a lot of my own hacks), for a forthcoming paper release here [https://github.com/kastnerkyle/representation_mixing/tree/ma...](https://github.com/kastnerkyle/representation_mixing/tree/master/pretrained) , see the minimal demo. It has pretty fast sampling, but the audio quality is not as high as WaveNet. I'd really like to tie in with WaveGlow, but it's work in progress for me so far.

NOTE: None of these have voice adaptivity per se, but given a model which trains well already + a multispeaker dataset with IDs such as VCTK, a lot of things become possible as getting a baseline model and data pipeline for TTS is quite difficult.

[0] [https://github.com/keithito/tacotron](https://github.com/keithito/tacotron)

[1] [https://r9y9.github.io/blog/2018/05/20/tacotron2/](https://r9y9.github.io/blog/2018/05/20/tacotron2/)

[2] [https://github.com/Rayhane-mamah/Tacotron-2](https://github.com/Rayhane- mamah/Tacotron-2)

[3] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/waveglow](https://github.com/NVIDIA/waveglow)

[4] [https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2](https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2)

<comment><USER4> Building that 5000+ hour dataset needed to train quality Speech to Text is a serious challenge, and presumably TTS has a similar threshold of audio needed.

IMO that is why it is critical to spread the word about Common Voice (a CC0 licensed voice corpus) and get a large variety of people contributing to it: [https://voice.mozilla.org](https://voice.mozilla.org)

<comment><USER5> Much less audio is potentially needed for TTS than ASR, however the spread and quality of the TTS dataset is critical which is one reason why just training on ASR datasets "in reverse" hasn't worked great. For example, commercial databases run ~25 to 50 hours, but the "coverage" of the language is usually very different from e.g. audiobooks, and focuses specifically on covering edge cases of the language. You can think of it like a 25 hour "support set" which covers as many cases as possible, and can also grow over time as users run into cases where the system fails.

This all gets worse if you want multi-speaker output of course - getting even a few speakers who all read the same large corpus is difficult. The two datasets I've gotten the most out of so far are "LJSpeech" (a subset of the LibriVox corpus), and the "Nancy Corpus / Blizzard 2013" dataset [0][1].

There's a pretty interesting corpus here that I hope to start using soon [2].

To me, the biggest issue / gap between commercial interests and publically available data is curation - TTS really hinges on well curated, clean data at least for now. And if that dataset has a very balanced coverage of triphones, that's even better.

I'd like to try on the voice.mozilla data, but given current stuggles on even 1 speaker, a truly "in the wild" set of many speakers seems pretty difficult if training from scratch. For voice cloning using pretrained weights it may be a different story.

[0] [https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset/](https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech- Dataset/)

[1] [https://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge_2013](https://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge_2013)

[2] [http://www.m-ailabs.bayern/en/the-mailabs-speech- dataset/](http://www.m-ailabs.bayern/en/the-mailabs-speech-dataset/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This type of concatenation I first saw in Alex Graves' work on "Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks", including his unpublished TTS demo [1]. Biasing with part of another sentence (as in handwriting) can possibly improve style in TTS as well.

We followed this approach in char2wav [2], but "voice cloning" has come much farther in my opinion [3][4][5]. There's a lot of relevant research on techniques for this beyond concatenating indicators or embeddings, if people are interested in the research side of this technology.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850](https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m30s)

[2] [http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/](http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/)

[3] [https://twitter.com/Jeanne_Heo/status/972089715225542657](https://twitter.com/Jeanne_Heo/status/972089715225542657) (lyrebird.ai)

[4] [https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/gmvae_control...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/gmvae_controllable_tts/#multispk_en.sample)

[5] [https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adapt...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it Alexa only feature? When it will be available? Should we expect this feature in Polly? Is Amazon going to provide other styles? I'm curious.

<comment><USER7> Yes I too was hoping this would be available for polly like wavenet is from Google

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Totally looks like Tacotron. I heard there was interest in Amazon in buying the project, now it looks like they copied it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting stuff. I noticed a few weeks ago that Google Translate will sometimes vary the pronunciation of words when you hit the audio playback button repeatedly, I wonder if they're already doing something similar.</comment>


But I know that he knows that I know - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/rock-paper-scissors.html

<comment><USER2> RPS is one of those games that is so nuanced and complex even though the rules are so simple.

I wonder if it's a game that a computer could reliably win (and not that one that cheats).</comment>


Building an English Auction With MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://artsy.github.io/blog/2014/04/17/building-an-english-auction-with-mongodb/

<comment><USER2> So why would SQL not have been a good enough solution to this?

Not trolling, I'm genuinely asking.

I've been trying to gather objective information from people who have actually been successful with mongo about exactly why mongo was the best tool for that job.

[http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/when-is-mongodb-the-right- tool](http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/when-is-mongodb-the-right-tool)

<comment><USER2> just so we're clear. I did read the article, but not the linked paper.

> I spent a fair amount of time visiting engineering teams that have built > internet auctions, most of which were transactional systems where taking a > position on an item involved starting a transaction, running an auction > round and committing the changes.

That sounds pretty straight forward, where are the pain points?

>In contrast, we chose to deliver a simpler, eventually consistent system on top of MongoDB, in which all data is immutable and where some level of serialization occurs within a single background process.

why was that simpler? what was stopping you from just inserting records instead of updating them? and why did it matter that serialization occurs in a single background process?

<comment><USER3> The most common pain point of a transaction-based system was that under heavy load (think stock market load, not @artsy) opening a position would hit a single bottleneck, which eventually becomes too slow given the amount of logic that needs to go into executing a single round.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the perspective of iOS bidding we copied all the data models and had to do no hard thinking other then being responsive to API changes.</comment>