Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit? - <AUTHOR>

Hi. I am a sophomore with a start-up that builds sentiment analysis technologies. We currently work on sentiment summarization and classification. Using papers and patents as a starting point, we try to create our own algorithm that we hope will outperform state-of-the-art approaches. We have been working on it for the past 2 months. Call it an irrational mindset, but we're adamant on building something that is not only tedious to copy but also fundamentally hard to duplicate.
We have concerns regarding what we are doing, namely: technology and market risks.
1) Technology risk We are worried that we would hit a dead-end and not be able to build what we set out to build. AI is a hard technical problem, and Marc Andreessen has described AI as an "equivalent" of rocket science. We are making progress but our chances of technologically outperforming Google or other AI-based companies are inherently not good. We fear that we might have picked the wrong beast to mess with but we're a little too involved right now to switch paths.
2) Market risk Other than social media monitoring tools, I haven't come across any solution that deals with sentiment analytics. The social media monitoring scene is crowded, so we hope to apply what we build in other unexplored areas. Our vision for now is to tackle the problem of information overload within consumer review platforms: think Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, IMDb reviews, etc. We hope to offer an on-site (within-the-page-itself) dashboard that categorises raw data by mentioned concepts and their frequencies, the sentiments (positive/negative) with regard to said concepts and selected quotes that incorporate said aspects, along with sentiment insights in visualised forms (e.g. pie charts). End-users can interact with the dashboard and use any variable as an anchor to obtain insights (e.g. give me the raw data that mention concepts 1 and 2 in a positive light). This, we hope, would help people consume content more representatively and faster, without having to read through every single review from top-left to bottom-right. Hopefully, this would increase user engagement and shorten sales cycles. Naturally, the fear is that nobody wants our product, much less pay for it. Personally, as an end-user, I would find something like that useful, but I'm obviously biased.
Looking forward to some input for my current situation. <comment><USER2> I don't think NLP and AI are dead-ends, however, I agree with you that sentiment analysis is a crowded area.

Personally I find I need sophisticated domain-specific heuristics to evaluate consumer reviews in particular spaces. For instance, when I buy a lens for my camera, I'm going to look at reviews, but it's tricky because there are always good and bad reviews for any lens. Some of the people who get bad reviews had a camera with a screwed up AF or they never really understood how to use the lens or what its limitations were. Then you look at say, a Sigma lens for the Canon platform and you'll see that different people are having wildly different results and you'd better just forget about it.

Dashboards and stuff like that is a waste of time. What I really want is something that creates a super-expert opinion that's maybe 3 sentences to a paragraph wrong. A bit beyond the state of the art.

\----

More generally, I think Doug Lenat had the right idea with Cyc, but he went about it the wrong way. Had Doug not been able to make a comfortable living doing work for the government, he would have been forced to produce a revolutionary product, but he wasn't.

I think that the linked data space around the semantic web is going to explode and ultimately produce the "commonsense" knowledgebase that it takes to build real NLP systems.

Most of the people I know in the knowledge-management space are trying to develop expensive projects for government, pharma, legal discovery and such. I think, however, they are in the "pay a lot, get a little" businesses that are going to be disrupted by the next wave. On one hand you've got Google, Microsoft and a few biggies that are going to develop large-scale but low- margin products. The other side is going to be a vast, largely low-margin market of operators who pull from and add to the great linked data pool... which is going to grow like a Katamari ball until we reach the Singularity, maybe around 2025 or so.

</comment><comment><USER3> We got rocket science pretty much right 50 years ago. Don't let the fact that it sounds hard discourage you. Somebody's going to get this right eventually - why not you?

There have been a great many successes in the AI field. It's easy for people to forget though; once something works, nobody calls it AI anymore.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi,

I have decades of experience with old style AI and a decade of the new kind :-). I specialize in language understanding algorithms and near-pefect sentiment analysis is something I expect we'll be able to do eventually using the methods I've invented.

The top level bit to worry about is whether you are attempting to re-do something that is already known not to work. Litmus tests: Are you using models of language such as grammars that are explicitly programmed in? Is your system specific to a single language so that switching to another would require complete re-coding? Do you employ linguists? If you answer yes to these, then you are in trouble.

I discussed how to get a modern AI education in an early blog entry at <http://monicasmind.com>

I propose a shift in direction of AI research in the second video at <http://videos.syntience.com> and explain why that's needed in the first one. Three more videos discuss details.

I have a theory/motivational site (6 pages or so) at <http://artificial- intuition.com>

I'm available for high level consultation on these issues. I worked at Google (I quit 2006) and although I cannot talk about what they do, I certainly will have an idea about what will be required to outperform them, both short term and long term.

If anyone wants to support Syntience Inc. in our effort to get true understanding to computers, please get in touch.

      - Monica Anderson
      http://syntience.com

<comment><USER5> As a non-specialist, I enjoyed your blog and site writing, thanks for sharing. In particular, your classification of problems and problem domains is compelling, and another confirmation that reductionist approaches seem to be hitting diminishing returns in understanding the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The fundamental problem with AI is the lack of parallelization. There are more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe.

I am sure someone can write an AI program that is comparable with human intelligence on paper at this moment in time. But, the complexity of the algorithm would probably be exponential, hence massive parallelization is necessary.

I think the ibm blue brain project has the right approach for AI. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project>

<comment><USER7> Uh. Wouldn't those connections need to be made of atoms?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Though I'm still sure that he's right in that there are many, many connections in the human brain.

<comment><USER8> There are more potential connections in between neurons in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe.

Or at least that is the way I heard it.

<comment><USER9> There are more potential connections between my cat and your dog than there are atoms in the universe. It's meaningless; just exponentiate something big enough and you get over the atom count :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work on NLP for Chinese text with the Adso project (<http://popupchinese.com/tools/downloads>). This is a natural language processing engine that handles segmentation, sense analysis and semantic regexp for Chinese text.

In my experience, the complexity of most NLP applications work against them in the sense that they're competing with simpler approaches that are less computationally intensive. Good technology will let you do things other people can't do, but if you want to make it a business you'll need to know how to compete against Google doing 80% of what you can do with simple pattern matching. Your results will need to be orders of magnitude better before you have something people will use, let alone for which they'll pay. And be careful not to get trapped in a field where you'll be competing against companies paying serious cash for commercial databases to which you do not have access.

I'm personally skeptical there is much of a market for sentiment analysis incidentally, but the same tools are pretty useful for search (preprocessing, etc.). I think you'll find it difficult to get third-party adoption unless your product drives direct revenue for someone or can very visibly improve their product. But the problems are important and worth solving!

</comment><comment><USER11> 1) Trying to solve any hard problem bears the risk of failure. But as you already mentioned, if you succeed, you might have a competitive advantage, because it can't be easily duplicated. I think the risk of Google entering your market affects every internet-related venture. But at the same time, the fear is often unjustified. How often has that happened? Orkut did not kill Facebook, Buzz did not kill Twitter, etc.

2) I would build the technology and a cool showcase, but I would not directly target the consumer, but rather someone who can use your technology to make money.

Your technology might be interesting for advertisers to ensure that ads are only displayed next to articles with a positive sentiment towards to product. E.g. to avoid Toyota ad next to the latest news on stuck gas pedals. Maybe show a Volvo ad instead. I don't know if something like this is done at present.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi danielh,

Yes, there are already advertising networks that do semantic-targeted contextual advertising, e.g. peer39.com, collective.com. Not sure how they are doing though. Either way, it is something that we will look into. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cupitor impossibilium.

I've been working on alternative pricing algorithms for 8 years. Most people call this a waste of time. Recently, one of my algorithms started showing great promise. (I'll know within two months.) Do what fascinates you.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it's more than quite a leap to go from worrying about the marketability of your specific idea to asking about the futility of two very broad fields of research.

I work in NLP, my company has a sentiment analysis product. It's a very small part of what we do, and it's focused on a particular application. NLP itself has a very wide range of applications, some theoretical, some practical, some already in use all day long at very popular websites. Two months is a very short time for complex problems in NLP, believe me.

Regarding tech risk, I think you're taking your particular product niche and casting it to something unnecessarily broad. Polarity detection is just one possible task in NLP, which is itself a sub-domain of AI. It can be done reasonably well without using any real NLP techniques even (hence the crowded social media monitoring scene). That paragraph made it sound to me like you are stressing yourself out unnecessarily about 'solving AI'. It's sentiment analysis (which can be a challenge to get right), focus on that.

Regarding market risk, marketing new technology is a challenge for any new technology, and any given startup will have the same questions that must be asked and answered. The application of your idea may be marketable or it may not be, that has little bearing on the viability of AI/NLP. The best you can do is make sure the company has done due diligence and has a plan, hopefully with some market research to back it up.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd start by trying to validate your business model.

1) You need to find out who the paying customers are in this space and what features they really want. It seems very possible that average consumers would have no interest in your service but that power users, marketers or some other segment might. Once you know where the interest is you can make better feature decisions. For example, you might find that reporting, not AI, is what drives marketing sales.

2) Fundemental improvements in AI are really hard. Look at the results of the first Netflix prize. Lots of world class teams worked on that problem and the winning solution only produced something like a 10% improvement in the results. If that's the only edge your business has over the competition I doubt consumers would even notice. On the other hand, AI has matured to the point where it's pretty easy to produce good results. I'd rather bet my business on predicatble, good results and treat it as a pleasant surprise if we make a fundemental breakthrough.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> "We are worried that we would hit a dead-end and not be able to build what we set out to build."

Listen attentively to your intuition. Your "worry" can stop you faster than any statistical or third opinion about whether AI is a hard problem. Doesn't mean you should stop worrying and continue. Spend time imagining your ideal solution in great detail --- touch, smell and taste it if you can. Judge based on how you feel about that end point.

I heard someone said "AI is what hasn't been done yet." You don't need to prove your worthiness to anyone or any community by "solving a hard problem". Instead, as chasingsparks put it, "do what fascinates you".

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't worry about the technology risk. People already do this, so it isn't impossible. They probably don't do it well, but you only have to do better than random to provide benefit.

Market risk is more of a concern to me. If you're presenting results directly to users they'll probably care greatly about the quality of your algorithm. If you're just using aggregated data to drive, for example, marketing campaigns then the noise will be washed out given enough data.

</comment><comment><USER17> No, it's not futile! Finding ways to get good information fast with the data explosion is one of the challenges we face in computer science. Anyway, the good folks at GATE are building a great set of tools for NLP for several years. The tools are similar to what you are doing. You are not crazy and we need more people like you to advance computer science! <http://gate.ac.uk/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was probably careless when I did my research, but I just found a company that does the exact type of sentiment analysis on Amazon reviews (as I have independently envisioned):

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/pluribo-is-cliffsnotes- for-...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/pluribo-is-cliffsnotes-for-amazon- reviews/)

Not sure how to react to this but sigh.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like to address the market risks:

Did you know, that large retail sites increasingly employ people to post merited positive, and no-merit negative reviews to funnel consumers into a buying decision? And, by economy of scale, they do this in volume -usually massively overwhelming genuine on-site reviews. Working out the impact is left as an exercise for the reader.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hmm. you should probably look at <http://adaptivesemantics.com/> . I just heard their founder present at SXSW, who was introduced as a "machine learning guru". they do machine learning for sentiment analysis

</comment><comment><USER20> Certainly they're not futile to pursue in limited domains.

There's a paper I'm trying to find for you about analyzing affect in news articles for the purpose of trading stocks - I think they got things working fairly well.

</comment><comment><USER21> You need a catchy application that lets people understand the benefits of this technique, why not use it to rank the in real-time what things celebrities on Twitter are talking about... or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER22> This sounds like a really neat product and you sound really smart. I would love to chat with you because I have some (hopefully) unique ideas about how to tackle this problem, and would love to share. My email is zackster@gmåil.com</comment>


The new VirginAmerica.com - <AUTHOR> http://static.virginamerica.com/Web3/newlookvx/vx-redesign-9/7/index.html <comment><USER2> Would have been great, except for it suffers from the same problem the existing VA site suffers from. Almost every time I use the VA site, "something goes wrong". I just tried to book tickets for next week, got all the way to the end to pay, hit submit and "something went wrong". They just put a pretty front end on a broken booking system that breaks almost every time I use the site. The only thing I care about is that it works and the VA site consistently fails, this upgrade doesn't fix the core problem I've always had with it.

<comment><USER3> I've been very frustrated by this as well. I tried changing a booking with Virgin Australia earlier today and got a popup message: "Important information: an unknown error occurred. Try again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The new boarding pass design is fantastic. Every airline needs to do at least that part immediately.

<comment><USER5> There was a post a few years ago that detailed many of the archaic and somewhat obscure requirements that boarding passes must have: [http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical- boarding-p...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding- pass-redesign)

It seems as though Virgin America can bypass many of these because there are no (?) international flights.

The original boarding pass redesign post, to which the above was a rebuttal: [http://passfail.squarespace.com/](http://passfail.squarespace.com/)

Edit: wrong links.

<comment><USER6> No, they bypassed it because that is the print-at-home boarding pass design...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?

<comment><USER8> Well we're seeing it more often in UI/UX because "forced creative vision" aka "design dictatorship" is more popular and acceptable for designers these days. Especially new designers who don't want to stick to the tried and true rules of design (nor learn them), nor base their designs off of some kind of metrics or best practices statistics. Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his "I'll tell the user what they want" philosophy.

<comment><USER9> Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.

Clients like it because they think the cool kids are doing it.

Clients also like gimmicky scroll effects and parallax.

<comment><USER10> > Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.

How does that happen?

<comment><USER9> Because they're the ones hiring agencies, deciding mood and content based on presented ideas, and then approving and revising design throughout the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really don't like this new UI. Instead of having a sorted drop down, now there's a bunch of boxes I have to look through to find the one I'm searching for. Takes a lot longer than it used to.

Example: [http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y](http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y)

<comment><USER12> I disagree. I prefer the new bigger box UI. It took a mere moment to understand everything is in alphabetical order, and scanning through them was much quicker than trying to pick from a dropdown list.

<comment><USER13> One advantage of a drop-down is that you can tab into the control and just start typing the city name.

With this _mobile-first_ grid layout, there's no shortcut. You have to read each and every entry and then haul the cursor over to select one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone else was wondering if this was a parody, I think they might be right. There is so much funky with this, it does feel only half serious.

For me it started with 'Book from San Francisco'. I clicked on the 'Boston' button, and it shows this weird top status-bar drop down thing which flashes the message: 'Going to "Hahvahd," perchance?'. What?

Then the browser starts, a little bit too slowly, scrolling itself down automatically... Off putting.

A moment later, the mocking message slides up and away, and the top nav has been replaced by mostly broken status bar. Try clicking on some of those links in the status bar if you want to get totally lost.

Then that calendar view... I mean, if it showed 'From $199...' or whatever under each date, I could understand taking up so much space. I thought it was a lot harder to find the right date this way than with their standard date picker.

After picking a date, the flights table is significantly worse than their current design. No way to step forward/backward in dates, no weekly overview, super low contrast, overly spaced out, scroll down forever trying to see all the flights, no sorting,...

Even the seat map is weird, I don't know if it's just due to the super-low contrast, or the weird icons they put in place of seat numbers for the seats which are taken, or maybe the weird way they show the pricing for each seating area, but there was a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to understand what I was looking at.

What it comes down to is an interface which was trying to make things simpler actually introducing a huge amount of cognitive load where there didn't need to be any.

In the end, I zoomed out to 33% to get a birds eye view and while it's interesting to see everything on one page like that, I think they have a LOT of work ahead of them making it actually flow properly, fixing the contrast and layout, removing all the weird and distracting gimmicks, and bring back some of the core functionality that's missing.

<comment><USER15> I think they took "mobile first" to the extreme, and disregarded desktop. I imagine that giant calendar is pretty cool on an iPad. It's not really responsive design if you optimize only for devices and not for desktop as well.

<comment><USER16> Except it is just as awful, if not even worse, on Safari on iPad. At least for me, scrolling is broken and it crashes constantly.

I honestly don't understand how website trends can _devolve_ so rapidly and radically. This blunder may well end up costing them millions of dollars in missed sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's very linear and seems to work well only if you have all the dates completely locked down. I really prefer the designs that make it easy to see if travelling a day earlier or later would be much cheaper. I think the other Virgin sites do this.

</comment><comment><USER18> When I saw their new boarding pass I just had to laugh. Someone awhile back went and redesigned Delta's boarding pass[1] and got a lot of crap over it for not taking into account why the boarding pass was the way it was.[2][3] But apparently someone at Virgin was taking notes.

[1] [http://passfail.squarespace.com/](http://passfail.squarespace.com/)

[2] [http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical- boarding-p...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding- pass-redesign)

[3] [http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis- looks-...](http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-like/)

<comment><USER19> There's a critical difference here; those redesigns are for boarding passes issued at the airport, while Virgin's are printed at home. You can get away with a lot when your common target equipment is an inkjet rather than a thermal printer.

<comment><USER20> Why would you need to print them at all? Does Virgin not support electronic boarding passes?

<comment><USER19> There are still millions of people who don't have smartphones [1], for one. I'd imagine that there's a nontrivial overlap between that group and people who fly.

1\. [https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comS...](https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comScore_Reports_December_2013_US_Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is horrible and broken. Real information replaced with "flat" design and stupid hip made up words like "fun-erer".

      No javascript:  http://i.imgur.com/8HkKyZx.png

There is a delay of at least 100ms scrolling up and down between pages. I would guess 150ms. I do not see any obvious way of changing this, and the scroll bars are hidden. What if I need to change something at the top of the page? I also managed to break scrolling ending up halfway between pages somehow. The only way to fix this was to painfully scroll all the way to one end to reset things.

      No CSS:  http://i.imgur.com/u5g0eaS.png

The site appears to scale horribly, and it looks like they are using javascript to generate styles. IANA web developer and have not studied modern web stuff in a long time, but this seems like A Bad Idea.

      No CSS or javascript:  http://i.imgur.com/Kb2JZAH.png

I do not even want to think about the accessibility issues.

All in all it seems like they are just following the flat design trend, for the sake of following it. I am sure they have good intentions, but just from analyzing this page I am underwhelmed.

<comment><USER22> Accessible browsers run Javascript, and have for some time. You may have a point about CSS though.

<comment><USER23> I'd argue the other way.

Accessible _websites_ are _usable_ without JS. Maybe not _pretty_ , but at least _usable_.

<comment><USER22> I don't think you understood my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is super slick. Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website.

I love how they put "life" into their brand with those avatars and make it fun in this all too boring process of buying tickets. To be honest, I would be jealous of how innovative Virgin is lately when I'm another airline.

UX wise there are some things I would do differently. There are some rough edges but it's an iterative process and they'll probably track tons of things now. For example, changing prior steps will reset the date selection.

Deep respect for their team, I also love their new logo. Awesome!

<comment><USER25> >Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website.

Huh - did we look at the same site? Just the same old minimal bootstrap3core aesthetic that's everywhere nowadays. Found it pleasant to use, though.

<comment><USER24> With most flat design sites I have the feeling I've seen them before. With the new Virgin site I don't have this feeling. Although it didn't work for you haha.

Most flat design websites currently all use the same flat colors and the Flat UI template.

Flat design websites that are created by excellent designers begin to use gradients with specific color combinations. Like Stripe.

There's also an ongoing trend by using more thin fonts and thin graphs in charts. Looks more elegant. I really like this, but UX wise I hear a lot of signals that people find it hard to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> VirginAmerica, you can't brag about your site's responsive design and then tell me I have to turn my phone to Portrait mode when I'm in Landscape.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks slick, but felt like the actual booking process was extraordinarily disorienting. Too much movement and jumping around.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. Maybe it's better on a touchscreen than existing interfaces, but changing the dates for my flight to check price difference was a huge pain. I'll be sticking with google's flight search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love this. The boarding pass design is a nice touch, although I still feel like I'm going to fold it in a hurry to get it out of my hands and not in the way they intend.

</comment><comment><USER30> It looks like I can't book a flight. "BUMMER. NO FLIGHTS ARE AVAILABLE FOR THIS DATE. PLEASE TRY ANOTHER DATE." Am I supposed to keep clicking around until I get something? Can I see a listing of "Available flights on the calendar." I tried booking DCA to SAN.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is _slick_.

Virgin has been my favorite airline for some time, but now just went up 3.14 notches.

<comment><USER32> Now if they could make some more money and expand to other airports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In terms of implementation, it's interesting that they chose ugly URLs which encode _everything_

/book/rt/a1c1i1/sfo_bos/20140524_20140528

Note the a1c1i1: that's "1 Adult 1 Child 1 Infant" and it changes as you adjust the widgets (without a page refresh).

Also, minor detail, but I'm interested to see that they use PUT as well as POST to update the server with the selections. So that's following modern "REST" guidelines (use verbs properly) but the URLs are anything but!

EDIT: I put "REST" in quotes to refer vaguely to modern API practices. I know REST is strictly something else, please let's not talk about that it's really boring.

<comment><USER34> It's gotten to the point that whenever I want to post a URL in an article or email a URL to someone, I need to sanitize it. I don't know what information I might be leaking.

If the URL looks like it might have some hidden information, what I usually do nowadays is to navigate to that location from a separate browser (in which I have no passwords, logins, cookies, history), and cut and paste the URL from there.

<comment><USER33> > what I usually do nowadays is to navigate to that location from a separate > browser (in which I have no passwords, logins, cookies, history)

incognito/porn mode should work for that too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 1\. Click show more dates

2\. See more dates, but not enough

3\. Click show more dates

4\. See more dates, but not enough

5\. Click show more dates

6\. Nothing happens

7\. Click show more dates

8\. Nothing happens

9\. Give up

</comment><comment><USER36> Fantastic. [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYFJleIMAAmgMH.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYFJleIMAAmgMH.png:large)

beta.virginamerica.com is, of course, a blank white void.

Filling out a form and clicking some buttons is such futuristic technology that we can no longer figure out how to make it work without JavaScript.

<comment><USER37> I don't know... maybe because it's 2014?

<comment><USER36> Oh, you're right. It should definitely be built in Shockwave Flash instead, which is even newer and shinier than JavaScript.

<comment><USER38> Flash as a technology is a caveman compared to modern Javascript-based technologies. There is no audience that does not have JS enabled -- other than the fringe who would probably be better off using wget to browse the internet.

<comment><USER36> We said exactly the same things about Flash not so many years ago, including the pretentious dismissal of anyone who would dare not support the technology we wanted to use. Before that (and to some extent even now) it was operating systems: what kind of hippie doesn't run Windows, after all? It's pretty easy to justify technical decisions by pigeonholing anyone not using our same platform as The Kind Of People who we don't want giving us money anyway.

There are quite a few comments here complaining about the gaudy unusable interface produced by "modern JavaScript-based techniques", which in this case appear to provide virtually nothing that static HTML and CSS can't do. The dev team was lazy and wanted to show off, and screw anyone who doesn't think running gobs of arbitrary code should be a necessity for _buying a ticket_.

And for what it's worth my non-developer artist girlfriend has been using noscript for longer than I have. I'll let her know what modern devs think of her, though I don't think she's heard of wget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Very well done. Beautiful and simple to use. Most importantly, everything is kept on the same page and it loads quickly. I can't begin tell you how frustrating it can be using something like Expedia or Continental and having to wait so long for the next page to load.... Sometimes it takes too long and I click 'back' and have to start the process all over (resubmit the form). By keeping it on one page that expands downwards, it easy to tell when the next widget is loading and prevents all of this from happening.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is really nice, but they haven't solved the following problem: sometimes you need more information from further on in the process in order to choose your dates. For some types of trip, the most important thing is a combination of departure time and price; you want the lowest price as long as the departure/arrival is within your acceptable range, and then you want to work 'backwards' to pick dates based on that. I don't know of any airline booking process that accommodates that use-case well.

<comment><USER41> Hipmunk lets you search for flights with a certain date range and pick the best flights from that, and there's also a "pricegraph" that sounds like it does exactly what you want by showing you the cheapest prices within the next 90 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I really hate scrolling hijacking...

<comment><USER43> You are not alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This ui is ridiculous. It honestly feels like a parody.

</comment><comment><USER45> Cartoon characters everywhere? "cagillion"? "fun-erer"?

I'm not sure if the average customer will enjoy being treated as if they're five years old. I find this unbearably corny and unprofessional.

<comment><USER46> Seems to fit with their image, just like how they make fun of people who don't know how seatbelts work in their pre-flight safety video.

I like it. It's fun and refreshing to see such an output from a 'giant' corporation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's pretty but it's missing the one feature I love from the old site which is to quickly scrub through dates to figure out if there's a cheaper flight earlier or later than my planned date. My travel plans are usually somewhat flexible so I'm often willing to shift by a day or two to save $100.

</comment><comment><USER48> From a design perspective this is one of the most beautiful airline booking designs I've ever seen, but from a usability perspective it might just be the worst (save for maybe RyanAir).

The cities being laid out in a grid looks nice but is ultimately far more difficult to understand then just looking at an alphabetical list in a dropdown. Auto-picking your departure city based on your current location is admittedly a nice detail, but it wasn't immediately obvious how I change where I'm starting as the "link" was different than anything else on the page.

The "Who's Flying" section is massive for having so little real information. And why are that the font is 120px (or 12rem) but the "+/-" controls are faded out and tiny by comparison?

The calendar is again completely oversized, low contrast, and difficult to understand. My laptop has a 1440x900 resolution screen and I can barely fit a single full month in the window. If I happen to want to buy a ticket more than a month or so in advance, I need to repeatedly click "More Dates" which then appends another two months to the already crazy long page? Also, the low contrast purple highlight for all the dates inbetween departure/return isn't immediately noticeable.

When I click on a ticket price another window slides up over it - took a few moments to figure out what actually happened there. Overall the "ticket selection" again looks pretty, but when I can only see a few in the window at any given time it's far less usable than a standard clean list. Also, the "Continue" button looks identical to the other addon options, and it isn't immediately obvious how to progress if you don't want to upgrade your ticket.

The seat selection admittedly is admittedly fun looking though why are half the faces looking upset? Also, versions of the seat selection where they actually place the seat INSIDE the plane in it's real physical location are more readable than this abstracted version, though I do like how they clearly broke it up into sections that show the different cabin/seat types. Again though, I can only fit about half the plane on my screen at any given time.

Having the form adjacent to the seat selection is a nice touch as you can then easily track who's sitting where as you enter their information (especially if you're a family with kids), but for some reason they neglected to highlight the seat on the visual map. Also, the form is again overly tall and I can only fit about 2/3 of it at any time.

Overall I think it's a good start but hardly production ready. My gut instinct is that most people will be impressed by how "pretty" it is, but that the overall conversion rates will decrease significantly. The one really well done idea is the fixed header, though realistically it should progressively fill out with information and not show/hide ticket info at different stages in the process (for instance, it did show my takeoff/landing times and price which was extremely useful, but now hiding that to ask me who's sitting in seat 4B, which is already emphasized at the top of the form).

<comment><USER34> Having tried the new virginamerica.com site just now, I don't really see a big difference between their site and anyone else's. Having booked through a lot of different airline sites over the last 15 years, I want to say that the differences between airline sites were much greater in the early web years.

All the airline sites seemed to have converged to a common model. They all follow exactly the same flow: pick cities and dates, then pricing, then sign in, etc. There was far greater variation in the flow in the early years.

> _but from a usability perspective it might just be the worst_

Oh, I can cite major airline websites that are _much_ worse from a usability perspective. Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is _impossible_ unless you're Brazilian. That's because every airline in Brazil has inexplicably decided that they want you to enter your Brazilian identity number -- explained in more detail here:

[http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_fl...](http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_flight_within_Brazil#Difficulties_of_airline_booking_for_visitors_to_Brazil)

If you're not Brazilian, you don't have such a number of course. Note that this is not any sort of legal requirement; it's just thoughtlessness about usability by the airlines.

I expect a lot of indignation this summer when visitors try to arrange flights inside of Brazil during the World Cup.

<comment><USER49> "Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is impossible unless you're Brazilian"

I'm a UK citizen and recently booked and flew on an internal Brazilian flight. I used my UK passport number in the slot for the Brazilian identity number, there were no problems at all.

<comment><USER50> There may have been updates to the airline sites due to the World Cup but the sentiment many people have expressed as to the difficulty of getting a flight as a foreigner is long-standing.

What airline did you use, btw?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I may be just an old curmudgeon but I will choose functional over pretty every single time. By trying too hard to look hip it becomes a caricature of itself.

</comment><comment><USER52> Lost me at date picking, and then got even more confused when choosing "flights" \-- incredibly hard to read the flight table.

Not a fan of this refresh.

</comment><comment> Dorian-Marie It's pretty but I think they need to do some user testing, booking flight is actually harder:

* Choosing departure / arrival is hard

* Choosing the date is hard

* The "Continue" button is hidden

* I see avatars but I don't know what it means, and then I see that I can choose my avatar.

* ...

</comment><comment><USER53> When I clicked that I wanted to go from Austin TX to Portland, OR it said "pack your plaid". This is just a poorly done rip-off of hipmonk's messaging. It's just going to confuse people who aren't familiar with silly internet-meme based stereotypes about whatever city it is they're choosing. It's just a bad idea. Portland's message should have said something about roses, or Mount hood, or even make reference to the fact that it rains a lot there, but not some fuzzy stereotype about how a certain age group tend to dress.

</comment><comment><USER54> I thought the option to select an avatar in the seating layout was an interesting feature: so the gregarious can sit with the gregarious, the droolers with the droolers, and the taciturn with the taciturn. Selecting a female gender would probably guarantee you don't get an empty seat next to you however...

But of course most of these booking sites actually hide pricing information until you tell them exactly when and where you want to fly. You won't find out that you can save some money by taking a two leg obscure routing or flying the day before.

</comment><comment><USER55> Yet another "made for mobile" site. I hate these. Huge font sizes, massive images, wide margins surrounding all elements, wasted space everywhere, floating header obscuring the content. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER56> As a developer myself, I've seen first hand this new trend of scroll-jacking, parallax, animated, full-screen sections come in quicker than a rain storm. I am just glad the whole horizontal layout thing isn't a thing any more, horizontal sites were way worse in my opinion than this new trend of turning websites into Powerpoint presentations.

I do like the aesthetic this new trend has, but accessibility wise, it's a no- go. I feel bad for anyone with eyesight problems in particular who comes across this site and has to read text on rainbow coloured backgrounds. These kinds of sites are not very well accommodating to colour blind visitors and that's no way to run a business.

Then there are screen height issues with the design. People on net-books and iPad's in landscape orientation are probably not going to enjoy this site very much as nothing really fits on the screen properly. The result is undeniably beautiful though, and from an investor/board member perspective, I can definitely feel the enthusiasm from here. This is the kind of site that gets everyone on board, except the developers who have to build it (in most cases).

</comment><comment><USER44> This is good time to mention that scrolling is the bane of all things usable, and the person who invented it should be shot. If I wanted to lose context of my operations I would hire some guy to scream in my ear every few seconds, it would be less annoying.

Scrolling uis clearly tailored to touch devices like this one really should be an available alternative, not the only interface.

<comment><USER57> Wow. Are you kidding?

"Scrolling" is the bane of all things usable? Short of clicking on things, scrolling is probably the single most familiar and universal interaction on any computer of any form factor.

Not sure how scrolling necessitates loss of context nor how not-scrolling maintains context. The two are causally unrelated.

<comment><USER58> I think he/she is referring to the fact that the site scrolls for you (i.e. scroll hijacking), not the action of scrolling (by users).

When a site scrolls for you, it can cause you to lose context (as what you just did is no longer on the page). I feel like a more apt term might be slideshow design?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Link to the new version: [https://beta.virginamerica.com/](https://beta.virginamerica.com/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Somewhat unrelated: I spent the majority of the day on a VA flight and I feel like I'm still recovering from sitting under those colored lights. Really, seriously, what is the benefit? At first I just felt nauseous, and after a while it just turned in to a dull headache.

Usually air travel is great and productive, but that "club" lighting has got to go.

</comment><comment><USER61> Something is broken. I get grey backgrounds and grey text when scrolling down. Selecting text makes the correct colors show up. The background images further down the site are missing.

After reloading the page, I now get text in the same color as the background. And the down arrows are missing.

This all happens in Safari. WFM in Firefox and even in IE8 it degrades acceptably.

</comment><comment><USER62> Sucks on iPad. There's a weird too fast scroll acceleration.

</comment><comment><USER63> Why is the password limited to 16 characters long? I don't understand this limitation on any of the sites.

<comment><USER23> The password length should be limited to _something_. 16 characters is rather short, though. (Still better than my old webmail, at exactly 6 characters, only uppercase and numbers)

<comment><USER36> I don't see any reason to ever limit passwords to less than 100 characters.

<comment><USER23> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Just booked a flight I'd been putting off; the new experience is worlds better than other airlines, though it still has its issues.

My favorite airline is still United; their website will let you get to the final billing page, and submit your cc, only to find that "that flight isn't available".

</comment><comment><USER22> Tried to scroll down, nothing happened, then it scrolled way too far, then my browser was unresponsive and I had to kill it. iPad, iOS 7.

Edit: tried a second time and slowed down my scrolling to get the site to work. 'get Booking' doesn't work.

Like the folding boarding pass though.

</comment><comment><USER65> Lol. On my mobile out flashes between showing that yellow face an that laptop. Absolutely zero usability. They could show fail or 404 as well. Customer leaves the site in three seconds not even knowing or caring about what this s@@t is.

</comment><comment><USER66> I think it looks nice, but find certain parts of the UX to be difficult / confusing. I found selecting prices particularly confusing, was not sure where i was supposed to be looking. Sure they will refine and iterate on it tho.

</comment><comment><USER67> Scrolling becomes is really buggy if you Cmd + f to search for something.

But overall, nice UI.

</comment><comment><USER68> Just one quirk with the home page. Read down to the bottom, and then I tried to scroll back up, and it would stop at each "Section" and would not let me just continue scrolling up.

OSX Firefox 29.0.1

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm glad it's finally compatible with LastPass! That alone increases usability quite a lot.

The cartoon characters strike me as misguided though. Their target demographic is not children.

</comment><comment><USER70> Page Down key doesn't scroll.

</comment><comment><USER71> Best scrolling experience I've seen in sites like this. It might not be right for all sites, but I would like to see it almost everywhere from now on.

<comment><USER72> Why? I find it absolutely horrendous personally and would avoid any webpage that used it (got to the end of the presentation on my second try as I literally rage quit the first time).

Some reasons as to why I severely dislike it: 1) When it scrolls the background changes color. There's multiple transitions going on. It's sort of like going to a different website. I lose my entire concentration and interest. 2) No scroll bar. I can't get to the final slide without painfully going slide by slide. 3) When scrolling with the mouse, I lose control of the webpage for about a second. I can keep spinning the mouse wheel but nothing is happening. It's infuriating.

<comment><USER71> I should have clarified what I meant by "sites like this". I was referring to sites which have multiple pages that are presented as a scrollable single page. Without a way to jump pages at proper page boundaries it becomes a pain to read through them. I still hope that this becomes the norm for scrolling through sites like this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> "Playful avatars", a "cheeky sense of humor". How is that a benefit to us? It's like they left in copy from the agency pitch.

</comment><comment><USER74> Just did a sample booking, and was very impressed. Some notes:

1) Some elements seem too far apart on a wider screen. Usual victim of responsive design without a max width.

2) The loading between steps is damn snappy, but feels slow sometimes due to the lack of an activity indicator. Slow is a relative term, but I instantly felt like I had done something wrong or the page wasn't responding.

</comment><comment><USER75> The new site is not accessible unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER76> Everything looks great, until the "Get Booking" link didn't work on the final slide (in Chrome on iPad)

<comment><USER77> Same here on a Nexus 5 with Chrome.

Oh the irony...

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Still can't change my login email ID.

</comment><comment><USER79> Consider the alternative:

[http://www.united.com/](http://www.united.com/)

</comment><comment><USER80> What is the name of this new website design that is just one page that you scroll through.

<comment><USER16> "Multi-page slideshow with vertical transitions", apparently[1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7792585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7792585)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Text doesn't look right in the latest stable Chrome/Windows 7.

</comment><comment><USER82> Well, on stock Android browser, there's just a redirect loop.

</comment><comment><USER83> Can anyone tell me the company(ies) that designed and implemented this website? They seem to have negotiated a much freer hand with the client wrt design than is typical.

</comment><comment><USER84> On a meta note: it seems that design-related posts on HN tend to be pretty controversial. Has there ever been a redesign posted here that garnered universal praise?

</comment><comment><USER85> I am really liking this design and HTML is so clean. Anyone know what the breakdown of this stack is? A lot of the illustrations are SVG how are they animated?

</comment><comment><USER86> Late to the party but this is stunning. If any of the devs are reading this I'd love to chat about your Angular implementation.

</comment><comment><USER87> Any idea how they are doing financially lately? I remember reading last fall they were struggling financially.

</comment><comment><USER88> Looks sexy I dig it. Good use of Vine embedding, and the pocket pass is something I would use.

</comment><comment><USER89> The boarding pass redesign reminded me of this (and my snarky side is wondering whether they just stole some of the ideas): [http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding- pass/](http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/)

</comment><comment><USER90> Worked terribly in Safari on iPhone 4s. No excuse for that at this late day.

</comment><comment><USER91> Try the keyboard navigation

</comment><comment><USER92> Bug Go to [https://beta.virginamerica.com/cms/fly-with- us](https://beta.virginamerica.com/cms/fly-with-us) Scroll down, click on the 'learn more' underneath the Internet section - link is 'fpo'

Now, how do I report it? :)

</comment><comment><USER93> this site is beautiful. UX could be better but I don't understand why the comments are so woefully negative. It's still very easy to book a flight

</comment><comment><USER94> I appreciated the humor, and the cool colors helped.

</comment><comment><USER95> I think this is imperfect but pretty wonderful. Great job. Feel proud for all the detail work you put into it, designers and engineers!

</comment><comment><USER96> Pretty incredible how much better this is than every single competitor.

</comment><comment><USER97> I love that the default city is based on location.

<comment><USER17> I'm in Connecticut and it defaults to Orlando instead of Boston.

Odd that other people are seeing a different default.

<comment><USER98> I'm in New York and it defaulted to New York.

<comment><USER99> I'm in the Netherlands, it defaults to freezing the firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Pretty cool to see it's using AngularJS.

</comment><comment><USER101> I should fly somewhere

</comment><comment><USER102> Did anyone else notice the adult humour on the first slide. Ha! Well done.

</comment><comment><USER103> First thing I noticed is the san fransisco bridge and the gay community rainbow.</comment>


Tesla's Smart Summon feature is already causing chaos in parking lots - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/30/20891343/tesla-smart-summon-feature-videos-parking-accidents <comment><USER2> Tesla is quite irresponsible launching these kinds of features... I fear that people are going to get hurt eventually. Simply claiming owners are responsible for pushing the buttons is not enough. Tesla is not considering that people can also be malicious and reckless with these types of features. Roads are not ready for self driving technology, these systems also are not covered properly by insurance and by fail safes. It will likely only take a few more terrible accidents before this gets reigned in by laws, so I hope Musk starts being more careful with gimmicky launches before automated driving gets regulated out of the biz.</comment>


Ask HN: A photoshop for fashion ecommerce - <AUTHOR> Last year, I worked on a photoshop like tool for ecommerce, where we can fit garments on models - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUJizLU6ALo . Forgive me for the poor video, it was quickly prepared with some old data and I did not spend time improving the output.
I want to pitch this product to adobe / on1 / etc; it can become a cool image processing tool, specially meant for ecommerce catalog generation, etc. Can you suggest me the companies that would be interested in hiring me to build this?
PS... internal details of the implementation and techniques are left out in the video (because they are learnings over months of experimentation). <comment><USER2> First off, great work. This is impressive stuff. You should definitely put up a page describing some of the technical details, this is hacker news after all and a lot of us would be interested.

I think you have something and here's why.

Awhile back I started to devise a new kind of advertisement system based on this same concept. My starting point was the research done by Kota Yamaguchi. [http://vision.is.tohoku.ac.jp/~kyamagu/research/clothing_par...](http://vision.is.tohoku.ac.jp/~kyamagu/research/clothing_parsing/)

Although most of that work was done in matlab, I was able to translate and extend the core ideas into something practical. In this type of domain, clothing segmentation and pose estimation is key.

I don't know how your images and data are set up, but with my software you could feed it a random facebook image, feed it some images of different types of clothing and the output would be that person wearing an entirely different outfit. Hopefully you can see how this can easily become a big business.

Anyways, I never released anything publicly because the distortion and displacement algorithms were never perfected (Albeit with hilarious results... Jeans became capris, shorts became miniskirts that kind of thing). Given the time I'd love to jump back into this.

In any case, I'm interested in the technical details and the approach you took.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. I did not know about these papers until now.

My effort was mostly towards breaking down the processing steps for fitting the garment on a model. The steps were (1) preprocessing/normalization of input images, (2) application of algorithms on the image (and human inputs for artistic decisions) and (3) post processing of the fitted image to make it look realistic). Its a little difficult to find time to write in detail (mostly because I worked on it last year), maybe I can do so one of the coming days.

Also, I was using separate grids for models, garments and the mannequin (on which the garment was placed in photoshoot); and fitting the garment in a 2d plane. This worked decently well, given the input images were normalized, scaled, etc to match each other.

I just posted to see if someone sees this and an interesting opportunity comes along. I can be reached at navalnovel at gmail com .</comment></comment>


What elements should I consider while designing a game - <AUTHOR> I have an itch to design a game. I have got the basic idea behind the game but I don't want to just start coding without thinking of monetization. Any advice from gaming experts here?<p>Thanks, <comment><USER2> Not an expert, but here's a pragmatic thought for you. You probably aren't the next Notch, there's a good chance no one will pay for your game before it's done. You can put off monetization, once you have a good idea what your game will be you can look for similar games then price similarly, or use similar pricing models.</comment>


Show HN: Bullet – A simple email script to help your team track daily work done - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/digedu/bullet

<comment><USER2> "Motivate your team with Bullets!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it! Very funny, lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Should you not feel like running this yourself, I Done This is a commercial version of the same idea: [https://idonethis.com/](https://idonethis.com/)

I've used it for a few years now and I am a fan. It helps me keep track of what I've accomplished each day and lets me look back over it.</comment>


GG App: Figure out what game to play next - <AUTHOR> https://ggapp.io/ <comment><USER2> As someone who plays games, I am having a hard time imagining myself spending this money to your service.

I mean no disrespect, I'm sure it took some time to build, but the alternatives are popular and they are free (Steam/Discord). The only part that I would consider is finding new games, but there is usually enough media coverage that I don't have to look for.

I'm sorry, just that's my opinion. I thought it would be helpful to share.</comment>


Why Emacs is great - SLIME repl for developing in-browser javascript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ivan4th/swank-js

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of reason I switched from vi/vim for code editing. There is so much available power and flexibility in emacs, and it really makes things fun.

<comment><USER3> Would a SLIME-like frontend for vim have kept you on vim, or is it the extensibility of EMACS in general that caused you to switch?

<comment><USER4> I switched from VIM to emacs. While a lot of the nice things in emacs can eventually be backported into vim, I think the extensibility and apples all/most of the way down approach of emacs is superior. Even after using it for 6 years, I'm continually astounded by the things people do with it.

I've just discovered pabbrev-mode for js and ruby editing. It's off the hook.

Also once you've coded with a repl in an inferior shell buffer, you won't know how you ever did without it

<comment><USER5> While the extensibility of Emacs _could_ be ported to vi, it isn't fitting with the culture/design. The best summary I've heard is that vi is an editor, Emacs is an _environment_. (I prefer vi as an editor, but use Emacs. Go figure.)

pabbrev rocks! The fact that you can just add that sort of functionality to Emacs is telling.

<comment><USER4> yeah, I think a lot of the frustration with the emacs editing experience comes down to its standard keybindings. While on a level they do make sense, there's far too much cruft and history in them. Having to type multiple keystrokes to do things like save files, switch buffers, split windows etc is pretty poor in this day and age. I used to use vimpulse until I discovered ergo-emacs. It provides a really good set of alt keybindings for the most common emacs commands. Makes using emacs so much nicer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related: <https://github.com/3b/slime-proxy>

</comment><comment><USER7> This and js2-mode make Emacs a ridiculously good JS editor.

<comment><USER8> The last time I tried js2-mode, its indentation rules really drove me crazy. So now I use espresso-mode (which reliably indents the way I expect it to) to write my JS and turn on js2-mode to have it lint my JS.

Do you know if that has changed, or if maybe I'm missing some easy .emacs magic to make it work?

<comment><USER9> [https://github.com/mitchellh/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/mo...](https://github.com/mitchellh/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/modes.el)

You can steal the hooks at the bottom of the file to use the indentation of espresso mode. This was driving me insane too.

Thanks to mitchellh for publishing his dotfile :D

<comment><USER8> This looks like it's exactly what I was looking for. Many, many thanks to you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I worked on Facebook's Trending team - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/facebook-trending-news-team-curators-toxic-work-environment <comment><USER2> > "Working at Facebook, even as a contractor, was supposed to be the > opportunity of a lifetime."

Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?

I have had multiple friends who worked at Google on AdSense sales, and it certainly didn't do anything for their careers. I can't imagine it did much for their savings, either.

<comment><USER3> Google is a powerful name, no matter what you did there. It got Google on your friends' resumes, so certainly that has some impact to some recruiters.

<comment><USER4> Is it really? I'm thinking about the reverse case with a Software Engineer at a bulge bracket bank, which isn't seen as a resume boost at all.

<comment><USER5> I think it depends what you do there. If you're a quant developer, or actually working in the investment bank (rather than retail) it's a really good thing to have on your CV. Especially if you actually want to work in fintech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The majority of this sounds like low grade managerial issues. Not much here sounds like a big deal IMO. The type of stuff you hear people complain about often when they work at big corporate machines. Even more so when they're stuck in non-core business units, staffed with contractors.

I have a feeling the curators were seen as a necessary evil until the machines were good enough to replace them. So they were treated as such and their work wasn't well planned/prioritized from the top.

The lack of direct guidelines and hand-holding from management indicates that there wasn't much interest in establishing long-term processes. Which high- turnover contractor worker bees usually require, compared to leaving them alone where they are required to make their own decisions (with potential consequences).

<comment><USER7> Well, maybe so, but it's hardly surprising that people feel a little resentful about this when they're working at one of the world's premiere workplaces and can see people right in front of them doing much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >"Every day, I sifted through hundreds of topics (or "keywords") that Facebook told me were trending on the platform. Then I'd choose a story about the keyword(...)"

>"Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority."

>"Several times curators were penalized for using Twitter in descriptions."

It seems that Facebook is likely to manipulate the news by selecting the "right" sources. If there's bias it most likely come from the selection, I wonder what are the source titles. Also, penalizing for mentioning Twitter shows that they put their own intrest over their users. It is understandable to some degree from the economic point of view, but it also shows the danger of having one company dominating the market. Facebook is not that benign, even now.

<comment><USER9> Even if you have the score and sources, I still think you'd need good guidelines. The problem is, nobody seems to know what these guidelines are _in_ Facebook, and nobody outside of Facebook can review them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most disturbing to me is not even favoritism and sexism conditions at work (which is ironic given Sheryl Sandberg's book and official line), but the fact that Facebook: 1. uses humans to pick the trending topics, which are inherently biased in one way or another; 2. the trending sources are very limited and curated (e.g. no Twitter), which is clearly anti-competitive practices.

<comment><USER11> What obligations does Facebook have to include Twitter sources, or to ensure trending topics are unbiased?

<comment><USER12> Wikipedia doesn't consider Twitter a reliable source. Why should Facebook?

<comment><USER13> Facebook uses Facebook as a source, which is as reliable as Twitter.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps that obviates the need to include Twitter

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Off-topic, but The Guardian's article landing page really needs to be cleaned up: [http://i.imgur.com/3LGXU7g.png](http://i.imgur.com/3LGXU7g.png)

I can't make heads or tails of what I'm supposed to pay attention to.

<comment><USER15> Sadly that seems to be a trend. Sites started to assume that your screen is taller than it is wide a while back.

It might be a combination of designers and writers working on large monitors, having multiple tall narrow windows open, and people using iPads in portrait mode.

Users of 11" and 13" laptops seems to have been forgotten in this new design trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The broader conversation is very interesting on a number of levels, but I have a specific question for this audience... do you actually pay attention to the trending topics on Facebook? They're not prominently displayed and if FB really wanted to influence the conversation on X, they could be doing so much more IMO. I feel like they're still trying to test their way into this experience.

<comment><USER7> Once in a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >"A former contractor says that while the social media company did not impose political bias upon news 'curators', she and other employees were subject to poor management, intimidation and sexism that left them feeling voiceless"

That's quite disturbing

</comment><comment><USER18> Contractors are second-class citizens at best, at any places so what was she expecting exactly? I don't mean to deride the writer but I'm honestly not sure if the janitors would think that working at FB is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I place more values at keeping places clean and tidy than curating news with an obvious bias (hint - I don't read them). There is nothing world-changing about picking out articles as a stepping stone for being replaced by algorithms. If you can't speak up, it means you are weak, the environment is toxic or both. So do something about it, or walk away like what the men do.

<comment><USER19> Depends in what you do for the company.

If they just need you to get more work done, you may be right.

But if you got a skill no one else at the company has, they are rather nice to you.

<comment><USER18> When you have the unique skill, you're better off being labelled as 'consultant'. The terms might be used interchangeably yet I've seen the power dynamics being consultant > full-timer > part-timer > contractor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was eerily similar to The Circle, by Dave Eggers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_%28Eggers_novel%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_%28Eggers_novel%29)

</comment><comment><USER21> Reading her comments it made me wonder if women might be disposed to scar more easily (or men are more defiant) from this kind of treatment, creating a negative feedback loop in subsequent jobs and roles which negatively affects their careers. This is not intended to be a criticism of women, but rather it's question which may have important implications. Men may externalize this kind of sandbagging and stonewalling while women may tend to internalize it. If so it may be a much bigger deal than it may appear to a man because we're damaging our talent pool.

<comment><USER22> That's a whole lot of hypothetical generalizing about women and men, based on absolutely no evidence. Try swapping "men" for "women" (and vice versa) in your comment to see how obnoxious it sounds.

<comment><USER23> Let's see:

"Reading his comments it made me wonder if men might be disposed to scar more easily (or women are more defiant) from this kind of treatment, creating a negative feedback loop in subsequent jobs and roles which negatively affects their careers. This is not intended to be a criticism of men, but rather it's question which may have important implications. Women may externalize this kind of sandbagging and stonewalling while men may tend to internalize it. If so it may be a much bigger deal than it may appear to a woman because we're damaging our talent pool."

Could have maybe used a couple more "tend to" statements, but doesn't seem horribly unreasonable to me.

(And looks, in many ways, equally valid as a hypothesis. Not in all elements, but there is a culture of the "strong man" who simply internalises stress and conflict in a lot of places.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately, the article provides no insight about the recent allegations regarding political bias in "trending" topics.

<comment><USER25> I disagree. The article states:

> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress > conservative news.

But then later goes on to say:

> "Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a > trending news story has editorial authority." The problem is, even after > repeated questions and requests for guidance, no one ever explained what > that meant. Much of it was left to interpretation for curators and copy > editors. Topics are treated differently depending on who you are working > with.

Which leads to a fairly obvious observation: providing insufficient editorial guidelines leaves room for unconscious bias to take over.

Of course, qualified journalists should be aware of their own biases and be able to compensate for them. Unfortunately, journalism in the US is becoming increasingly less valued and more partisan.

I wouldn't be surprised if this whole bias fiasco was an unexpected side- effect of Facebook hiring largely left-leaning editorial staff.

<comment><USER26> > I wouldn't be surprised if this whole bias fiasco was an unexpected side- > effect of Facebook hiring largely left-leaning editorial staff.

I always assumed that this was exactly what's going on. You don't need a handbook that says "stifle conversative stuff", you just need vague rules, managers playing the world's worst game of corporate telephone, and a bunch of disorganization.

Life at large companies...

<comment><USER27> The left never think they are biased.

If you are unable to see through the looking glass, then why would you ever come to the conclusion that you're biased?

<comment><USER28> Wouldn't that statement be just as correct for the "right"?

<comment><USER29> Platitudes are true for everyone, the comment you replied to was without value.

Why do people seem to think all journalists are left-leaning?

<comment><USER30> The data seems to back it up pretty clearly. There is other data out there on overwhelmingly Democrat political donations.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2014/05/06/just-7-percent-of-journalists-are-republicans-thats-far- less-than-even-a-decade-ago)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> FB in my view can pretty much dictate what it wants news wise which doesn't affect me because I don't get my news from once source but I wonder whom the people that sort of the stories are after they are spit out by the algorithm ?

</comment><comment><USER32> The Trending Team seem to be treated as if they are a tool of the engineers. A very good piece of software that the engineering can make use of and integrate into their systems. They mustn't forget that they are actually people!

</comment><comment><USER33> When people at large start to notice that a given publication or platform -- reddit for instance -- has been compromised by certain left-wing ideologies, you will inevitably see a narrative about its behind-the-scenes/"subtle" sexism/discrimination in very short order.

It's becoming a very predictable trick. I can't imagine I'm the only one who sees this.

<comment><USER34> Reddit appears to have been taken over by Trump supporters for a while now.

<comment><USER35> The_Donald has 130000 subs ... that is peanuts. It is on par with fatlogic.

<comment><USER34> Can't say I've seen it. Donald routinely has spam-like levels of highest ranking post. To me it appears to be the most active sub by far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress > conservative news. There is an extraordinary amount of talent on the team...

I don't use Facebook, but over the last several years I kept hearing from a number of non-PC type news outlets (that I subscribe to) that even as their media platform grew and doubled and tripled, at the same time their Facebook engagement became a small fraction of what it used to be.

I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.

This article IMO is a way to hide the real story with another story.

<comment><USER37> Do you have any evidence of this beyond what you have heard? I believe the down votes are a result of your lack of evidence.

I'm not defending Facebook but I have yet to see any substance to the argument that they are manipulating the conversation on their platform.

<comment><USER36> Only anecdotal. And you can see some of it if you google 'facebook censorship'.

But here is one about Germany - [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mark- zuck...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mark-zuckerberg- hate-speech-germany-facebook-refugee-crisis)

Though to understand what it is really talking about, you have to understand the redefinition of "hate speech" that has happened through-out the EU.

<comment><USER37> Can you elaborate on the redefinition of "hate-speech"? How was it previously defined and how has that definition changed? Who changed it?

As an American this is especially interesting to me because we place such value on our freedom of speech but also pay a high price in the hate speech that is viewed as a necessary evil. It seems that the EU has made an attempt to manage this hateful speech but I'm not familiar with the specifics.

<comment><USER38> AFAIK there has been no "redefinition of hate speech" throughout the EU. It's just that in Germany, Facebook started removing posts that are illegal under German law (libel, incitement of violence...) after they were reminded that they were legally required to do so.

German blog post about it: [http://www.internet-law.de/2015/09/muss-facebook- staerker-ge...](http://www.internet-law.de/2015/09/muss-facebook-staerker- gegen-rassistische-postings-vorgehen.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have tons of friends at Facebook and have gone to the Holiday parties for the last 7 years. I have heard a few similar stories, but the vast majority seem to love it. I think if someone is willing to publicly shame a company so big because of their bad experience, it really shows their lack of intelligence. Certainly experiences vary and if it was really a toxic environment for women, why do so any women love it?

</comment><comment><USER40> > _" I still carry the fear of speaking up with me. I find myself holding back > when I see a problem or afraid to speak up when I have an idea."_

This sounds a bit drama-queeny. She manages to seamlessly blend workplace sexism with product failures and other complaints all in a few sentences. To me that sounds like a broad swipe at her employer, the details and truth of which are far from conclusive based on her words alone.

It's not an easy topic to sum up neatly, but sexist allegations often have an unjustified momentum. Joining dots and drawing conclusions about co-worker and manager intent, when often the explanation is quite different.

For example, the first time someone complains about a discrepancy, it may be ignored not because the complainer was a woman, but that it was the _first complaint_. When others start to complain about the same thing, action is more likely to happen. A woman seeking evidence of sexism in the workplace will ignore the sensible explanation, and hurry to point the finger: "you ignored my complaint because I'm a woman".

Cognitive bias in the workplace is unfortunately the more likely story, less interesting as it may be. I enjoy a good "what did FB do wrong now" article, but I can't swallow this one.</comment>


Top-tier this (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3045-top-tier-this

<comment><USER2> _I didn't want those grapes anyway_.

There are many schools out there who produce CS students who haven't the foggiest notion of how to code in anything other than Java or maybe Python. They don't understand algorithmic analysis. They wouldn't recognize O(n^2) behavior in quicksort if it bit them in the quadratics. And what the heck is that radix sort thingy? And hey, if I need a backprop network, I can just Google for it, right?

That's _perfectly okay_ when they're hacking together a RoR app and earning plenty of money for their clients, but there's also a fair chunk of work out there that they can't do. Most programmers probably couldn't cut at, say, SpaceX, though I daresay many of us would love to work there. What's worse, they tell themselves "I can just Google that", but if you've never even been exposed to an idea, it's awfully tough to Google for.

I remember when a university explained to me that they no longer teach C because it's "obsolete and OO is the future". I can't say if the list of schools that DHH provided are good or not, but if you have a company that needs CS graduates that are more than a McProgrammers, then yes, the school can make a huge difference.

<comment><USER3> Assuming that anybody coming from non-elite universities are "McProgrammers" is insulting. You learn how to _learn_ at a good university. Rarely do you ever hit the ground running with every skill perfectly matched to the job you're hired for at any given company. That's why people, y'know, learn on the job. I very much doubt any programmer working on SpaceX had ever launched a craft into space before getting hired there. Stop being elitist.

<comment><USER2> > Assuming that anybody coming from non-elite universities are "McProgrammers" > is insulting.

Fortunately, I didn't say that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> DHH is so mouthy it actually is really beginning to give the impression of massive insincerity.

</comment><comment><USER5> Uh-oh. Is 37 signals being sexist because they said "this" like that? I envisioned a jock-grab when I read it.</comment>


We want to take craigslist out while their weak ;) Swappel - Seed funded $50k - <AUTHOR> http://swpl.me/NMfBLm

<comment><USER2> I am in Dallas, so this is interesting. Is the signup just for the Beta? If not, first thing, cut the cutesy landing page and let me find things. Craigslist might be dated and spam bloated, but I can find/price things quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> The sign up page is indeed just for Beta. You should sign up and give us your feedback when we start testing. :)

Are you connected to the Dallas startup community at all? We have won some local events in the past

<comment><USER2> Not really. Go to a couple of the meetups like Startup Happy Hour occasionally. I am a developer ("Chief Architect") for a local experiential marketing company and do mostly system design and iOS, Python development.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Legal Options for a H1B founder to participate in Y Combinator - <AUTHOR>

What are some of the legal hacks for H1B founders to participate in YCombinator program or similar Accelerator/Incubator?<p>- Both Founders are on H1B. - Established a LLC (Online forum responses seems divided on whether some on H1B can open a LLC or not. Responses were more inclined toward H1B person legally cannot open LLC, but never the less we decided to jump and create one.) - LLC is not generating any revenue, very less capital mainly to support server expenses and cannot afford to pay to hire full time employee. - Willingness to leave the job and work full time on developing the product if got selected for an Accelerator/Incubator program. (Willing to risk it to get the biscuit)<p>What are some of the legal options to support H1B employee staying in USA and work full time on startup. (I understand Incubator/Accelerators don't provide enough funding to support H1B, but some should have hacked the legal system and found a way to workaround the system.) Help would be appreciate. <comment><USER2> I think the act of opening an LLC on H1B is not the issue, but if you show any income/profit on it, that's when you will run into legal issues, this will also be vitally important if and when you are applying for your Green Card as you could be in muddy waters regarding your eligibility status during the time you were operating the LLC.

Also if you have even a single founder who is a US citizen or Green Card holder, you could get a relative of yours who is not in the US to be an additional founder for the LLC. This way you (your family) retains control of the company. They will need to apply for an ITIN number in this case. I can vouch for the legality of this option as we had hired a lawyer and I got my dad (non US citizen) to be a part legal owner of the US based LLC that was formed.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I spoke with the lawyer, he mentioned we can open it but being on H1B, founders cannot work on it unless LLC sponsors H1B visa. We have hired some unpaid interns to work on the product and a director to manage our company. We are kind of Non Managing founders

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As suggested by a Quora user, you can search for answer at Quora.com, having a friend who is citizen or greenholder opens the company for you, you join as a stack holder. (Disclaimer: getting your own attorney). Some guys I know applied O-1 visa successfully to creat their own business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response, I did a lot of digging but couldn't find a proper answer. B1 might be a better option compared to O1. For O1, company needs an investment from an investor or group of investor plus there are lot of other complications to get approval (Good lawyers can get around those complication). Do you happen to know any one else using any VISA's other then O1 and B1 to come on YCombinator?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you happen to be Australian: [http://www.geoffmcqueen.com/2011/09/28/e-3-visa-for- australi...](http://www.geoffmcqueen.com/2011/09/28/e-3-visa-for-australians- how-to/)

</comment><comment><USER5> AFAIK you can establish an LLC on H1B, but you cannot be employed by it, unless your H1B is sponsored by that LLC...

<comment><USER6> This is the right answer. You can establish (own) a US LLC irrespective of any Visa you hold (or don't hold) in US or live in another country. You just can't work for LLC in US if you don't have a Visa that authorizes you to work in US and/or for that LLC. But you can work for LLC in a different country.

Once your LLC has employees/revenue and can convince INS of LLC being legitimate ongoing business and not a shell to get you work authorization, you can have your LLC sponsor you for a work authorization.

Potential workaround: Don't draw a salary from your LLC. Hire contractors to do most of the work and pay them from LLC. Travel to foreign destinations time to time and classify them as business trips for 'working for LLC'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with you. We do have some unpaid interns who are getting good learning experience. We are in process of getting a contractor on board to help us take our coding responsibilities. I do like the idea of travelling to foreign destination for business trip.</comment></comment></comment>