Show HN: Soundslice – YouTube + synced guitar tabs + HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.soundslice.com/ <comment><USER2> As a guitar player, I'm at the --- played it in my college dorm room, learned all the Nirvana songs --- level.

That being said, your "demos" on the home page are incredibly awesomely impressive. And..... way way way beyond where I will ever find the time to get to.

And when I clicked the "Play with an example" link I literally LOL'd!!!

I may have no idea who your target audience is, but from this example.... it's not me :/

If you wanted to inspire someone like me to run upstairs, grab my guitar, and come back to your site to try it out really quick - and probably get hooked, I would consider making one of your demos pretty dumb-simple, if you know what I mean. Something fun or well known, not copyrighted of course, but something I could accomplish right now with my guitar.

But maybe I'm not your customer, I don't know.

If I am, maybe consider 2 buttons: Beginner Example and Advanced Example.

Good luck, this looks awesome.

<comment><USER3> I'm in the same skill-level as you are, but I had a completely opposite reaction.

For me, this was amazing because it distilled how something as hard as the example is played and can be learned.

<comment><USER4> A great piece of software in the same space as SoundSlice is Capo:

<http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/>

<comment><USER5> Capo's pretty good but I find it quite labour intensive to put the tabs in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well done! Polished and nice product.

Though as a musician who reads off of sheet music -- is there a way to un- Guitar-Hero-ify the scrolling tabs thing? Maybe my video card is too slow or something, but following the notes is _really_ tiring on my eyes, in addition to dealing with low refresh rate of the visuals.

Edit: d'oh, just noticed the settings to page instead. Would be nice to have more measures before it pages though (again, stone age sheet reader here -- as a musician I probably cache 1-4 measures ahead of what I need to play, when sight reading).

Edit 2: Aha, found the features once I logged in; spoke too soon. :) I think if you make the benefits of creating an account and signing in apparent you'd get even better signup... I guess I'm just missing things all over the place but it definitely would have gotten me to sign up sooner when I realized I could unlock more features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you found the scroll type preferences. For more, check out the tutorial (annotated on Soundslice, naturally): <http://www.soundslice.com/yt/8zgsQ9qgA7s/>

(Edit) You might also try zooming out a wee bit so that the notes don't go by as quickly. That's helped me a lot as I've used it.

<comment><USER6> Aha! There they are -- fantastic! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dude this rules awesome job!

Only issue for me is that even in 1/2 speed its moving to fast for my eyes to focus on the numbers. So what I need is to have the lines separated like musical notation so that I can look down and read ahead and see the next line coming, without the numbers moving, so my eyes can focus.

Pretty much everyone that reads music/tabs reads ahead of where they are actually playing its probably something you do subconsciously without realizing it but being unable to do so makes reading tabs much harder.

Other then that this is really really cool!

<comment><USER8> I was going to comment something very similar. I think perhaps the scrolling should default to "Paged" instead of "Autoscroll".

It's hard to focus on a moving target and "Paged" feels more natural to me since that is how sheet music works. It allows you to look ahead without worrying about the upcoming notes moving.

<comment><USER9> Completely agree. My 2 cents:

Since an individual can only play one part at a time, rather than showing two scrolling parts, two pages of the same part should be shown. Initially, page 1 can be shown above page 2. The playhead is the only thing that moves, from the left of the screen to the right. Initially it moves across page 1. When it reaches the right side of the screen, it moves to the start of page 2, below and to the left. At that time, page 1 is replaced with page 3. This way the pages remain still, while allowing the user to progress through the song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is beautifully designed, huge improvement to the current tabs market available for guitarists. Congrats on a great product!

edit: I am curious about one thing -- how do you plan on handling copyright down the road?

2nd edit: Feature request, if you hover over chords, it'd be cool if it showed the finger placement

<comment><USER11> Copyright: YouTube is the host and already has well-formed copyright/takedown/safe harbor policies.

The transcription/tab output itself can not be copyright - sweat of the brow.

There is the question of whether a useful user resource can be maintained if/when the host video is taken down - can the tab stand alone without the original audio?

I think so - reduced utility, of course, but legally on solid ground and still better than tabs alone.

<comment><USER12> Sweat of the brow is not currently and never has been a defense to copyright. Otherwise, copyright on books could be evaded by simply copying a book word for word.

The original composer owns the copyright on the arrangement itself. Your imperfect transcription is a separate derivative work but is still subject to the copyright of the original.

So the question remains: how do you plan on dealing with the copyright issues?

But if you can survive the copyright issues, the site itself is impressive.

<comment><USER11> I'm not the poster/site author, and we're saying the same thing. My claim is that since YouTube ultimately is responding to copyright complaints, SoundSlice is no worse than a tab-sharing site with regard to infringement. I don't see how they can be liable.

<comment><USER13> I'm not following this thread; Are you suggesting that him sharing tabs isn't subject to copyright? Tabs sharing websites have to pay royalties, and have had to for several years:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature#Legal_issues>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome. One bit of feedback: It'd be cool to have some fixed area on the screen where you are showing the current chord (in a big font), while the video is playing. In the Super Mario example:

<http://www.soundslice.com/yt/Y6ti5f-LHp4/>

It's tough for me to follow the tab while it's scrolling rapidly by... so I'd like to see a big A7 / B / etc. on the top right corner of the screen, so I can follow along with my guitar.

<comment><USER15> Yeah I get a bit of a blur which makes it difficult to follow. Not sure how you'd fix this without making it too jarring. Your idea would definitely help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome! I coded this exact same concept about 4 years ago (livetabber.com... your name is better). I was really hoping somebody would do it for real.

Do you plan on adding functionality to help people create SoundSlices? I'll just list the features I put in the concept maybe you will find some useful.

* Ability to slow down the track to let the musician hear the notes more easily while transcribing. * Import existing ASCII tabs and input a BPM to create a base annotation that the user can then tweak. -2-4-7- gets imported differently than -247-. Does this by stretching the tab to fit the time of the song. This was very useful. * Attempted to do pitch detection and bpm detection... didn't work so well maybe tech has changed. * Show guitar fingerings. * Allow the user to "highlight" a portion of the song so that it will loop only that portion. This is useful for both annotating and learning. E.g. highlight the solo and slow it down to "hear" the notes better while annotating while looping it, or slowing it down to practice it repeatedly. * Use arbitrary formats as input (spotify, pandora, mp3 file, etc.)

Please kill GuitarPro and ASCII tabs for me :)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is really cool, when I was starting with web development you made Django. Now I'm learning guitar and you start Soundslide, thanks a lot Adrian, good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad I could help! :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really amazing and wonderful.

I hope it doesn't come into the cross hairs of sheet music / copyright industry the way most of the tabs and lyrics sites seem to have.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a solution to a problem I didn't even know I had until I played with it. Well done!

<comment><USER20> Same here. Long gone are the days of me queuing up the song I want to attempt to jam to, then having to find the tabs somewhere (I just play once in a while for fun, I can't read chords), and struggle through it...

This seems like an intuitive and logical approach to learning both how to play particular songs, as well as improving tempo comprehension. Well done, I'm quite impressed with my Soundslice experience thus far!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow - this is awesome. Well done!

Any plans to add lyrics to the annotations? It would be cool to be able to follow other contributors as well because some people are great at tabbing things out and others are terrible. Some sort of star rating on the quality of the tab (similar to UltimateGuitar) would be nice as well.

Also, small usability suggestion - I signed up and went looking for a way to start making annotations, but couldn't find it. It took me a while to realize I had to verify my email address before I could use the full capabilities of the site. It may be worth calling that out earlier on (or even skipping the email verification if you can).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! There's nothing stopping people from adding lyrics as "basic track" annotations, aside from the awkward question of "do I annotate each word separately, or phrases?"

The site doesn't require email verification to start using it... What was it you couldn't find -- the "Add track" plus button?

<comment><USER21> Yeah - I couldn't find the "Add track" button. I guess I didn't initially get the concept that you had to search for a video before you could annotate it, but now it makes perfect sense...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Adrian: as you are one of the only people on YouTube I've ever subscribed to, I felt the need to say that this is fantastic not only for the features of the software itself, but also because you've provided a wealth of tabulature for your own arrangements. And it's intuitive to use and GREAT for practicing. The ability to scope out which part of the track I need to loop for practice is invaluable!

This is really remarkable stuff, and I hope to see more in the future!

Also, if you could please get back tor recording a little ditty here or there for public enjoyment, it'd be much appreciated :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for subscribing, and for the kind words! I've transcribed a bunch of my own stuff and plan on doing more in the coming weeks (it's a win/win -- good marketing for Soundslice _and_ people get to learn the arrangements).

And, yes, I need to get back on a regular YouTube posting schedule... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So _that_ is why Django is called Django! Awesome ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> Amazing for what it allows and also for what it illustrates.

In Yesterday [1], shouldn't the song structure appear at the bottom instead of at the top? The layers correspond to decreasing levels of granularity, and I cannot thing of any good reason why they should not be in that order.

[1] <http://www.soundslice.com/yt/lBWra6snX-g/>

</comment><comment><USER25> This is so awesome, great job you two! Any plans for a keyboard version in the future or will this always strictly be guitar tabs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I definitely plan to add sheet music as a track type. It's significantly more complicated than tabs, so it didn't make it for launch -- but I'd love to serve all my musician brothers instead of just guitarists. :-)

<comment><USER26> This is great to hear. I've been thinking of picking up the guitar to try and learn again, but for the second coming try to ditch my tabs habit.

Thanks for the awesome tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is great. Would love to see tab support for 4 and 5 stringed instruments as well (5 st banjo, tenor banjo, mandolin etc)!

<comment><USER5> Ukulele player here, I would also like this (though I suppose I could just tab out the bottom 4 strings) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow -- amazing! My #1 feature request: annotate chords. I'm looking at Honey Pie, and trying to figure out how to play Eb9 by looking at your fingers.

Possible bug report: I couldn't figure out how to exit looping mode, and had to refresh the page.

Not sure if you can fix this: two-fingered left scrolling in the tab area activates my browser's "back" function.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, a few of the videos have chords marked on tab tracks (e.g., "Chord fingering" on <http://www.soundslice.com/yt/Y6ti5f-LHp4/>) but I'm planning to add a first-class chord track type.

To exit looping mode, just press Pause? Or were you just trying to clear a selection? (If the latter, just click anywhere in the timeline canvas.)

I have searched high and low for a fix to that two-fingered left scrolling in Chrome, and there doesn't appear to be a way to fix it. :-( If anybody knows, please tell me!

<comment><USER29> Calling preventDefault on the mousewheel event stops swipe navigation in Chrome. You may want to restrict this to when the tab pane's scroll position is 0.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a preventDefault in there already, and it's still happening. :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome product. I tried to play a little, but the things are moving way too fast even on half the speed (on AutoScroll). I suggest that besides tab numbers that are moving fast, you also make the last one sticky on the edge. PageScroll is OK. I hope you make 5 string version for Banjo soon :) Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER31> Awesome!

I'm sure someone else has already said it elsewhere in the comments, but I find myself wanting to share the different demos with people and I'm sure it would improve the viral coefficient. Toss some share buttons on there, perhaps?

In any case, I'm going to take this for a spin next time I sit down with my guitar. Nicely done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :-)

How much does the lack of a share button prevent you from "manually" sending the link to friends via Twitter/Facebook by copying and pasting? (I'm asking honestly -- and I'd like to prevent the site from getting gunked up with share links.)

<comment><USER31> I guess it's sort of a "don't make me think" sort of thing. If I see a share button, I think "oh, I should share this!" or if I think "hey, I should share this" but don't see a share link, there's just a little more friction to actually sharing it (sounds super lazy, but it's true).

So, I might not think of sharing it without seeing a button, and if I do think of sharing something, but requires me to copy, go to Facebook, write a note, paste, go to Twitter and do the same thing, I'll just be like "oh, forget it." (unless I'm really excited... I shared the general link on Facebook, but not any individual song).

I would think of sharing as a feature, rather than clutter. Here's my user story - "As a user, I want to share this tasty jam with my bandmate so we can shred together" (decided to have fun with that one).

It may be going to far, but you might even want to make sharing a song a call to action ("Did you enjoy this song? Share it with friends!" [followed by big fat Facebook & Twitter buttons])

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's cool, but it's got some usability issues for "playing along" unless you already know the chords, etc. The 1/2 time was also pretty choppy for me.

Rocksmith [1], which can be described as Guitar Hero for real guitars and basses, does a pretty nice job with the UI, difficulty levels and such. It would be cool to see a more open version of Rocksmith where you could load up tabs/songs on demand.

For reference, I wouldn't pay for Soundslice, but I have already shelled out $100+ on Rocksmith (Game, Bass expansion, songs, cords, guitars, etc) and am willing to shell out more (Ex: A Rush Pack just came out I believe.)

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kUXcLfe8LQ4#t=48s)

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been teaching myself the guitar ove the past few months with a similar method. I go on dylanchords.info, open up a tab, play the song on google Play, then play along with my guitar. Dylan's songs have simple chords, so its ideal for beginners. I've been at it for the past 4 or 5 months, and Im already almost at the intermediary level, so this method of practice does work.

My suggestion: the interface for entering the tabs is not ideal. You should invent a srt-like file format for entering chords. For instance a sing thats the same three chords over and over again is tedious to enter through your interface.

</comment><comment><USER34> Aha! I remember Holovaty using a very cool interface (now part of soundslice) showing up the parts and chords of a song on his talk at Pycon earlier this year. It's good to see that it became this really cool project.

</comment><comment><USER35> Awesome. I am your target. I often troll YouTube for "[song name] + acoustic cover" then find myself navigating the spammy chord/tab sites for the music. Bringing it together is incredibly helpful for me. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER36> You can learn more about how Adrian extracted musical information from sound.. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGWytn-Ff9E>

</comment><comment><USER37> This is just fantastic. Wish you guys were around while i was trying to learn how to play guitar. Seems like i m going to have to buy a acoustic guitar and give it a second shot. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER38> Holy cow! I'm blown away on so many levels. This is an amazing thing.

</comment><comment><USER39> Adrian: You should update your HN profile with links to Soundslice

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks -- done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Awesome awesome idea, one of the best projects I've seen on HN recently. Congrats, and keep it going, as a guitar player myself I would pay for something like this

</comment><comment><USER41> This is very cool.

I usually don't see so much innovation in this market, but this is a very big step forward if compared to the printed tabs spread in my house.

Congrats and keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER42> From one guitarist to another, this is absolutely amazing. It would be great if numbers would scale down when zooming out—otherwise they overlap one another.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is very cool!

Have you seen vextab? <http://vexflow.com/vextab/>

It's a javascript library for displaying tablature and musical notation. It uses its own text format for describing tablature, but it is pretty easy to work with. I noticed that your tab doesn't have any slide/bend information, which vextab does. It may not be as necessary because the audio is well synchronized.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wish there were a way to see only completed annotations instead of all of them.

(It looks like the "latest by others" section is almost entirely incomplete ones)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great point. There's a (low) threshold on how many annotations need to be in a song before it shows up in "Latest by others" -- maybe a good quick fix would be to raise that.

<comment><USER44> How about letting users mark their annotations as complete/in progress or letting them estimate, e.g. 50% complete, 80% complete, 100% complete; something I could filter against.

(btw, awesome site)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nothing happens for me (only the youtube video plays). Firefox 16.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.6.8). JS Error:

[08:42:30,567] TypeError: this.yt_player.playVideo is not a function @ [http://media.soundslice.com/scripts/soundslice.min-f58020e4a...](http://media.soundslice.com/scripts/soundslice.min-f58020e4af284a830f36ea5da581a066.js:73)

</comment><comment><USER46> Was just playing around with the YouTube JavaScript API myself, it's really not that complicated. You can do some pretty cool things with it. Looks like you're using the HTML5 YouTube player too, I haven't tried that.

I'm surprised by how rarely people integrate a YouTube player into sites, does anyone have any other good examples?

</comment><comment><USER47> Great stuff. I just played 20 minutes of guitar in a row. That did not happen to me since years. Thank you very much for this tool.

The one thing I miss: if I search I don't get any video with already made soundslice tabs. Even a search on 'nirvana' returns no result with soundslice annotation even though there are some.

</comment><comment><USER48> I didn't expect this to work nearly as well as it does. Wow. Very nice! Half speed is an excellent touch, too.

</comment><comment><USER49> That's an awesome application you have. The demos are really quite amazing, but I am like dpcan, it would be nice to see a demo of a simpler song (say - Rush - Limelight or something similar).

The guitar playing is amazing though and the application has a nice layout to it and good use of HTML5. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER50> A killer feature would be auto-generation of the tab from the audio. Then you'd instantly have tons of content.

Does anyone know if this is remotely possible? I messed around briefly with this a while back, and I remember it being very difficult to get a note (much less a chord) from a noisy signal.

<comment><USER51> Monophonic pitch estimation isn't too hard these days (see e.g. the YIN frequency estimator). Polyphonic pitch detection of even a single instrument is a hard problem. Real music, with multiple instruments, becomes a very challenging unsolved AI problem with current technology.

<comment><USER52> Translating pitch to a playable guitar tab would even more difficult than the pitch detection. Unlike the piano, the same note can be played in multiple places on the guitar neck. Auto-generating guitar tablature would require not only pitch detection, but some kind of logic that would pick the most appropriate string/fret depending on the surrounding notes/chords.

<comment><USER53> In the example Django Reinhardt song, there's a bit where he plays the same pitch a few times fretted, then a few times on the neighboring open string.

I can imagine software that would analyze fret noise, vibrato, timbre, hand positions, etc. to get a decent shot at reproducing a performance -- basically, what a real player listens for when transcribing -- but right, this is a really hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I don't know anything about guitars or tabs... but as a developer I think this site is beautiful!

</comment><comment><USER54> Great work! Some things I'd like to see:

       - Ability to loop sections of a song.
       - An easy way to restart the current song from beginning.
       - And, because I'm not great... Slower than half-speed playback.

Thanks for providing a great service!

<comment><USER55> Looping is in there already, i believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is great. I would suggest one thing: try to make the scroll speed independent of screen size. I can't read the notes with a fully maximized window. Edit: found the zoom, but still, I shouldn't have to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Yes, coming up with the optimal initial zoom level is a tricky compromise. Still need to tweak it.

<comment><USER57> This is awesome on so many levels, being a youtube-taught guitar player, this is right up my alley.

Two suggestions: Definitely make scroll speed a setting (similar to how Rockband 'difficulty' is just them spacing things out further to make it harder) and maybe a slower example? A slower example might be friendlier to new players / more welcoming?

Edit: Also, when I signed up and checked out all the tabs... I ended up getting 'Video not available'. Not sure if that's regional settings kicking in (i.e Canada gets nothing)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Great idea but, even on half speed on the Super Mario example, the thing is so jerky that the numbers on the tabs just blend together, I can't read a single one of them.

MacBook Pro 2012, Chrome, 20/20 vision

<comment><USER59> Same problem here. I wouldnt say that the animation is jerky but just that everything blends into a long motion blur. MacbookPro 2012. Tested in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that -- try changing "scrolling" from Autoscroll to Paged, and that should fix it.

<comment><USER59> Ah cool, didn't notice that first time around. I'd suggest paged be the default.

Looks great!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> On Chrome 25.0.1323.1 dev on OSX the Youtube video is completely broken, just slightly off horizontal stripes of colour.

I doubt anyone else is getting that, but you might get bug reports about it.

<comment><USER61> My nexus 7 didn't play video at all. The rest of it worked though, and looked awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This looks awesome. As a guitar player, I really hope you guys are successful with this this. Is there a way to browse through all annotated videos, rather that just recent ones?

</comment><comment><USER63> Looks great. Definitely needs a copy/paste functionality. I tried to tab "blitzkrieg bop" (for the obvious reasons), and without copy/paste it's not so fun.

But great site overall!

<comment><USER63> Also, I'm constantly clicking to add multiple notes in one section, but clicking just moves the time in the editor, until magically i convince it that i want to add another note in the tab... I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

<comment><USER64> PJ here, Soundslice designer. I'm pretty sure your issue is that to add a note, you have to hover over the particular string you want to add the note to while you have a selection. You can also press 'A' to add a note to the next available string. Does that help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is really great, I was going to post to ask for just 4 strings, but I suppose people can just reuse the bottom 4 guitar ones for bass?

Hope this takes off, really well done!

<comment><USER66> I asked Adrian via twitter, and bass (as well as standard notation) tracks are planned for the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Wow, that is cool for sure. One comment: set the default scrolling behavior to "paged". I found that real-time movement was too blurry. Otherwise, great job!

</comment><comment><USER68> This is wonderful. Can't wait to get home and try playing along.

Top work!

</comment><comment><USER69> So awesome. Perfect example of "scratch your own itch" done really well

Like others said, perhaps I should take my guitar out of its case and get my caluses back.

</comment><comment><USER70> Hmm, somehow it doesn't work for me. When I hit the Play button, nothing happens. What's up with that?

Using Chrome Version 23.0.1271.64 m @ Windows 8 btw.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is the coolest thing I have seen in an year.

</comment><comment><USER72> This is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER73> Awesome app. One suggestion: Make the tab numbers WAY bigger. Really hard to read at the default settings.

Future feature: Lyrics with chords.

</comment><comment><USER74> This is awesome. Any plans to add a speed slider vs 50%/Full? It would be super helpful to slow down to 25% on some songs.

</comment><comment><USER75> Incredible work Adrian. +1 across the board.

</comment><comment><USER76> great idea and approach.

might be worth adding way to have the community mark a tab as complete. the couple i checked other than the tutorial ones weren't finished.. made the experience frustrating. i know its early and coverage will only improve, but that might help smooth out that process.

</comment><comment><USER77> i have been playing guitar for 10+ years, learned most of what i know via tabs (but took some lessons). if this app takes off it would change the way people learn guitar. i think it is awesome, but i might be hard to get people to spend time annotating the songs.

</comment><comment><USER78> Amazing.

It will be interesting if you can share the implementation of this system in a blog post. :)

</comment><comment><USER79> For some reason it doesn't work on Chrome with AdBlock on. Just letting you know

</comment><comment><USER80> adding myself to the list of people who think this is absolutely amazing.

the last time i got excited about something like this there were rumors of HTML tags for various chords and tablature signs.

super excited to see this in development!

</comment><comment><USER81> Looping the selected chords I click... reactor grade win.

</comment><comment><USER82> Man that's really cool - nice job!

</comment><comment><USER83> No sound on Safari 6 Mountain Lion

</comment><comment><USER84> everything about this is awesome. No critique just praise - great job!

</comment><comment><USER85> This is incredible. Really interesting concept, fantastic execution. Great level of polish. You should be incredibly proud of this because it's really well done.

I love the Beatles and Yesterday is one of the few songs of theirs I just can't play. This app helped me finally get it.

</comment><comment><USER86> I press the round play button, and nothing happens.

Chrome 23, Win7 here.

Here's the JS error:

        Uncaught TypeError: Object #<V> has no method 'playVideo' soundslice.min-f58020e4af284a830f36ea5da581a066.js:73

<comment><USER87> I think something got changed in the last 30 minutes or so. I had it loaded fine, let it run forever because Mario is hypnotic, then went to look at some of the others and got this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Great! The ability to repeat the selected Chords is really nice. I would suggest adding real musical notation in another timeline (to help people that are learning it).

BTW, I'm getting a console error in some few videos: Cannot read property 'player' of undefined

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, standard notation is on the to-do list. It's obviously much more complicated than tabs, so I opted not to do it for launch.

Is the console error happening consistently for certain videos, or is it sporadic?

<comment><USER88> After retry the error seems to have gone away; I guess that it was a problem with YouTube not responding petitions but I'm not sure; I am using extension- less Chrome in Windows 7.</comment></comment></comment>


Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting - <AUTHOR> https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ <comment><USER2> It can't be mentioned enough that Approval Voting works with existing voting machines. One of the unfortunate difficulties with IRV is that it often requires a wholesale replacement of the voting infrastructure. The Center for Election Science is a big supporter of IRV as a better system than our current "Choose One" voting method, but we've found that Approval Voting is both more descriptive and less prone to strategy, as well as being significantly easier to implement and use.

NB: I'm the Chair of the Board for The Center for Election Science. AMA.

<comment> incog-neato Is there any real momentum for any kind of change at the US Federal level? Do politicians talk to you? What's the buzz?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Article makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous.

Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be filled in. However it's a lot easier to _corrupt_ a ballot undetected. Just fill in more bubbles for your candidate.

<comment><USER4> The argument for "Ballot Simplicity" is misleading too

They seem to have tried to intentionally tried to create a much more complicated ballot paper for IRV

Here's a sample of an Australian IRV voting form:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/20...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/2016-ballot- paper-Higgins.png/220px-2016-ballot-paper-Higgins.png)

<comment><USER5> It's also misleading because the simplicity of the appearance ballot paper disguises the complexity of the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you. (Am I better picking my favourite candidate only or both the candidates I don't find entirely unacceptable in a tight three way race?)

<comment><USER6> > the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you

With approval voting, you should consider each candidate independently: "Am I okay with this person winning the election?" The number of circles you fill in doesn't matter.

<comment><USER5> But the number of circles filled in by large segments of the electorate matter hugely, and most people's level of "am I OK with this person winning the election?" varies hugely, especially when there's a candidate they'd be really unhappy with on the ballot paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a bit silly to argue that candidates take up too much space on a IRV ballot when it would suffice to duplicate only the box and not their name, as in

                       1st  2nd  3rd  choice
        John Adams     [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
        Ben Franklin   [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
        Tom Jefferson  [ ]  [ ]  [ ]
        Betsy Ross     [ ]  [ ]  [ ]

<comment><USER8> Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

<comment><USER9> >Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

What do you do when some moron voter can't count and reuses the same number, or skips a number? This kind of voting scheme seems like it would much too complicated and confusing to the average American voter.

<comment><USER10> Throw the ballot out. People mis-fill ballots now. People will always mis-fill ballots. The column of numbers thing seems extremely intuitive and wouldn't baffle a significant number of American voters; certainly it wouldn't lead to hanging-chad type situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like Wikipedia's page comparing voting systems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons)

No voting system is perfect but Approval Voting is my favorite. Still, most schemes that people have put forward are far better than the First Past the Post and there's been some momentum for IRV in Mass, where I live, so I've been helping with canvassing and it looks like our efforts might be paying off.

</comment><comment> incog-neato I think this would have a much more dramatic benefit toward US politics than the elimination of the electoral college, adding new US states, or fighting gerrymandering would.

</comment><comment><USER12> What the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH approval or IRV. I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. I will always find IRV to be dumb because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy. [https://bolson.org/irv/](https://bolson.org/irv/)

<comment><USER13> "I want to say I like A more than I like B"

You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV). Conversely, you can vote everyone BUT the one you wish to harm. And by default you can vote NOTA. While it may be that Approval Voting is not the "perfect" answer, it is far better than most and comes with the added benefit of easy adoption/implementation and simple explanation.

<comment><USER9> >You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV)

Yeah, but then you run the risk of a Trump getting elected in an election between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where you really want Bernie, and you really don't like Hillary at all, but you'll still take her any day over the utter disaster that is Trump.

This is why AV isn't that great: all they have to do is put up a truly revolting candidate to scare voters into voting for the not-as-revolting candidate, and she gets elected because there's no way for voters to express a clear preference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does Approval Voting really pass the "favourite betrayal criterion"?

There are scenarios where if you don't vote for both Good and Ideal, bad will win, and scenarios where if you do vote for both Good and Ideal, Good will win (over Ideal)

You obviously don't know which scenario you're in when you vote, so you don't know whether you should vote for both good+ideal or just ideal - both options can cause a worse result

I suppose the idea is that you use polling to decide which scenario is more likely and vote accordingly

<comment><USER15> Yes, approval voting leaves the door open for some tactical voting.

So if candidate #1 would win a simple majority (50.01% of voters), but is absolutely hated by everyone else, but #2 is "acceptable" or second best to 100% of the voters, should #1 win?

We are used to the binary "simple majority takes all" in elections, but maybe the compromise "everybody is pretty OK with this one" _should_ win.

If it were a group of friends going to a restaurant, or playing a game, #2 sounds like a much better option.

<comment><USER16> I'm not totally convinced that particular compromise should win. The issue I have with it is whether political candidates should have to please everyone. Using that strategy would likely lead to a lot of charismatic but ineffective people getting elected. None of big issues would get any sort of resolution, because the candidates that the most people are ok with are the ones with the fewest controversial stances.

<comment><USER17> But, the alternative is the dysfunctional partisan mess we have in the US. If parties split government, nothing gets done (save a lot of finger-pointing and chest-thumping). If a single party controls government, "progress" is made, but that progress is likely to be extreme and to the displeasure of a massive portion of the electorate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If only we could use approval voting to vote for a new voting system. Free elections are not always fair.

<comment><USER19> People hate change.

A few of us have been sneaking approval voting in wherever it makes sense. Familiarize people with the process.

One example is we use approval voting for prioritorizing our motions during membership meetings. Previously, our endorsement process was a major food fight, was way too dependent on the order which motions (from the floor) were recognized (unfair, yielding results not representative of the membership) and took way too long.

Now, using approval voting to pre-rank the motions, everyone sees the process is open, fair, accountable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Approval Voting is the best balance between fairness and simplicity.

I switched from IRV (RCV) to Approval Voting once I better understood the challenges of election administration.

That said, FPTP is just about the worst. For election administration, it's the most brittle, where the margin of error too often exceeds the margin for winning. So I'd happily support IRV, RCV, score voting, approval voting as a replacement.

<comment> dj-wonk I appreciate your opinion, but I want to point out that our definitions of fairness and simplicity may vary. Much of scholarly work around elections systems strives to ground itself on particular formal criteria.

<comment><USER19> _" opinion"_

Comparative fairness is well documented. This graph is a good appromixation:

[https://www.electionscience.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/c...](https://www.electionscience.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/comparing_voting_methods_simplicity_group_satisfaction-1.png)

[https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting- vers...](https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/)

Simplicity also accounts for election integrity concerns (ease of tabulation and auditing).

<comment> dj-wonk Can you share the context for the graph?

Do you have a formal definition for how you are using 'fairness'?

<comment><USER19> The second link is the article featuring that graph.

Start with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. You have the maths to better understand this stuff than me.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem)

[https://www.math.wisc.edu/~meyer/math141/voting2.html](https://www.math.wisc.edu/~meyer/math141/voting2.html)

I have focused on election integrity. For me, arguing the relative merits ranked choice voting strategies is (unforgivable) bikeshedding and ultimately results in no action. Like getting stuck arguing 4.5x vs 4.75x better than FPTP while the world burns.

For election integrity, other real world concerns also must be factored. Like voter education, verifying the hardware & software, ease of tabulation & auditing, feasibility of doing a manual recount, etc.

In conclusion, Approval Voting is almost as fair as the ideal Score Voting but much easier to implement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> CGP Grey talking about approval voting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA)

</comment><comment><USER21> Sortition is the most democratic way of electing representatives.

<comment><USER22> Sortition (that is, random selection) is a system for roughly-proportional representation; that is, for choosing multiple winners for a legislature so as to represent a population.

Approval voting is a way of picking a single winner.

They solve entirely separate problems.

(Sortition is nearly optimal if your only goal is to match the distribution of voters by a subset of equally-weighted representatives. Technically, it's possible to improve on it slightly by allowing voters to cluster themselves into a hierarchical structure of parties and factions, then performing sortition under the constraint that each party and/or faction must come within 1 seat of its correct proportional representation. This kind of technique is called "reduced-variance sampling" when used in sequential monte carlo sampling.

But sortition, or party-clustered sortition, pays no attention to candidate quality. Most people would agree that if there are two candidates that hold the same ideology, but the only difference is that one of the two has a medical problem that only allows them to work for 1 hour a week, the other one would make a better representative. Sortition cannot be fixed to take this kind of factor into account, which is a big part of why many people prefer more traditional voting methods.)

<comment><USER21> One can most certainly pick even a single winner at random.

Equal chance to represent, there is no fairer way than that.

Voting inherently leads to a money/campaign/popularity contest (and parties, more often than not 2), it is very good at keeping the status quo by feeding back to itself.

I'm not aware of any large scale studies of election method preferences, but keep in mind 1. people are used to voting 2. even if they are aware fairer methods exist their self interest is to keep voting if they think they will benefit from the resulting unfair system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yep, IRV sends you right into the jaws of Arrow's Theorem which is not a nice place to be.

<comment> dj-wonk Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, as I understand it, applies quite broadly to voting systems. To put it simply, you can't avoid it. You just decide what trade offs you want to live with.

<comment><USER22> Arrow's theorem applies only to ordinal voting methods. Approval is not actually subject to Arrow's theorem; it's not even well-defined whether it passes the criteria.

However, there are various voting impossibility theorems inspired by Arrow which do apply to approval. Most notably, Gibbard-Satterthwaite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a libertarian anything that increases the ability of a 3rd party go gain traction interest me but something smells very off about the recent uptick in discussion of alternatives. If these changes were actually beneficial to the underdog in the general case you'd see them being pushed by the left or the right on a state by state basis depending on the political make up of any given state. The parties aren't run by idiots. They've crunched the numbers. They know whether the alternatives would benefit them or not. Likewise it makes me very uneasy that we mostly only see people who align with one party pushing for alternate systems.

I'm not opposed to alternate voting systems but I'd like to see one actually increase the power of the underdog(s) in a one party state (the only kind of state where the powers that be feel secure enough to make this kind of change) in the US before I support one. I don't want something that sounds good but furthers the status quo. Political diversity is one of the US's strengths and anything that furthers the status quo is bad for that.

Edit: why is this opinion unacceptable?

<comment><USER25> The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate for FPTP.

Of course, the simple and well-tested solution is to reduce the power of the Executive, move power to Parliament, and assign power proportionally to parties.

<comment> barry-cotter > The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack > elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest > ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts > their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate > for FPTP.

This isn't true in the U.K., the only country where a third party recently tried electoral reform in a country with FPTP. The Liberal Democrats wanted to get rid of FPTP.

<comment><USER5> True, but then the Lib Dems were succeeded by UKIP as the third party and the electoral threat they posed to the Conservative Party was a significant factor in putting moves to leave the EU onto the Conservative Party's agenda despite its leadership's reluctance.

Of course, without skewed vote shares due to FPTP and with a limited choice of realistic coalition partners for a future government, that third party can achieve exactly the same thing through coalition bargaining anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate, since you do not rank your choices nor are you limited to how many you can choose. Unfortunately, many voters would not give a second thought to ticking "Mickey Mouse" or similar in addition to their main choice and alternates, since there is no tradeoff involved. Under IRV or Ranked Choice, few voters would likely rank the joke candidate high.

<comment> dj-wonk But there is a downside, by your own logic. If you vote for a candidate that you disapprove of (don't want to elect), you run the risk of increasing their support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Surely this disenfranchises those most willing to compromise, who are probably going to end up being those who support small parties?

Let's say you a Right and Left party, and breakout Far Left which is actually very popular but has previously lacked electoral support due to its 'outsider' status.

People's favourites might look like this:

Right: 30% Left: 30% Far left: 40%

However, 75% of Far Left favourites actually vote for Left too, because they prefer them to right. This ends up with the following result:

Right: 30% Left: 60% Far left: 40%

So we are left with 'establishment' mediocrity instead of the most popular result.

Is this OK because a majority of people don't actually want 'far left'? Maybe. Intuitively though, I think taking preferences away will freak people out, particularly in situations where there might be different levels - what if there was a Far Right party that Far Left voters _really_ don't want in - would some end up voting for Right to avoid that happening? They might win despite having 70% unpopularity!

I'd prefer difficult counting processes over a blunting of people's democratic will.

<comment> incog-neato "Left" and "Right" are nearly meaningless when people can have stances on an issue-by-issue basis. As someone who has important disagreements with both big US parties, some would call me a moderate, and I feel disenfranchised by the current system, which doesn't let me pick the person whom I agree with most.

<comment><USER27> They're merely labels. You can imagine 'far left' as 'centrist'. I was going to name them A, B and Z but wanted to get across that Far Left voters might prefer to compromise on Left than Right, but might prefer Right to Far Right. Clearly this is going to be a more nuanced decision in real life.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should my first smartphone be? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, at last I could be able to collect some money around 850$. Now, I want to buy a smartphone. I am biased for Android since I don't have a Mac and I want to develop on it. Which phone do you suggest? Currently, I am between Samsung Note, Galaxy 2 and Nexus. <comment><USER2> You (supposedly, I haven't looked into it) can develop for iOS on a windows or linux machine. (I believe the Unreal dev kit works like that - you must develop from a windows machine.) If you're willing to figure out how to do that, I'd suggest an iphone.

If you're set on android, then my recommendation is to get a Nexus.

<comment><USER3> While it's probably possible, it's far from ideal. You'd certainly have to put in more effort, and you'd likely end up with an inferior product.

I am a diehard Apple fan, but in this case I have to recommend a nexus.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also think it is far from ideal and I permanently switched into Linux, want to stay and develop on Linux.

If I do a contract for 24 months, I will pay 99$ for Galaxy 2, and 49$ for Note, and 599$ for Nexus. Do you think it is worth of this much difference?

<comment><USER4> The Nexus is 599 with a 24 month contract? That is definitely not worth it. The Galaxy II is supposed to get the 4.0 upgrade, the not will most likely get it as well. I'd say if you don't want a gigantic phone, go with the $99 Galaxy 2. If you want a phone so large that it doubles as a tablet, go for the Note. If it is $599, I wouldn't recommend the Galaxy Nexus unless it is off contract.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree on you. I have some concerns about the update issue so for resolution, I am planning to wait the start of January. Today, there was news about update is very likely. If it is the case, I will go for Galaxy II. Moreover, I have already asked Nexus, it wasn't on the stock now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about a refurbished macbook and iphone, or ipod touch and dumbphone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion but I have a pretty good machine and don't think changing it in a very short time.

<comment><USER4> I understand that you like your computer, but you should determine what platform you want to develop for, and then make your decision based on that. If you want to develop for the iPhone, having a cheap second computer is a viable option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm deeply in love with my Samsung Focus, which runs WP7.

<comment><AUTHOR> My operator(Orange) doesn't present this option.

<comment><USER7> I think Orange offers the Nokia Lumia 800. It might be worth a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Orange offers Lumia 800 but it is in pre-order and since I have money, I want to buy the phone as soon as possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top Economists See Some Echoes of Depression in U.S. Sudden Stop - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-22/top-economists-see-some-echoes-of-depression-in-u-s-sudden-stop <comment><USER2> Its going to be biblical.</comment>


What Will the Crisis Mean for Venture Capital? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2008/tc2008108_881287_page_2.htm <comment><USER2> It should be good for them.

IIRC Nassim Nicholas Taleb speaks of VC startups as good "Black Swans" {in contrast to the bad Black Swans visiting the mortgage market, stock exchanges, and financial investing in general today). He also compares bankers (who wear suits and ties) with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and concludes that investment in the entrepreneur is safer. Aside: Taleb says not to trust any expert who wears a suit and tie. It sounds funny but he wasn't joking.

It's a good time to read "The Black Swan": it will help people re-align their investments and make better future judgements in their work and play.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Many will turn to emerging markets such as India and China."

</comment><comment><USER3> the smart firms and angels will realize that startups are still where the market is strong. 700 billion in bailout is going to be the ultimate "throw good money after bad" and it's going to be up to new ventures to fix the market after this downturn.

if there ever was a time to invest heavily and wisely, this would be it. not just to profit, but to repair morale and inspire confidence.</comment>


China Detains Former U.S. Air Force Pilot Flying for FedEx - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/fedex-pilot-detained-by-police-in-southern-china-sources-11568906801?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> And at a minimum they knew he is former military thanks to that huge OPM hack several years ago. As he would have shown up on the list along with having a security clearance.

<comment><USER3> Very likely. They needed a pawn for the economic war against the US and took the first opportunity; the arrest for carrying airsoft pellets seems the only pretext they could find.

<comment><USER4> A billion people is a lot. Does literally every action taken by anybody in China have to be part of a government plot? Do you honestly think that this tiny, random event is going to have any bearing on trade negotiations, or are you just looking to ascribe any sinister motive you can?

<comment><USER5> Yes it is calculated. Arbitrary arrests of foreign nationals in China usually ramp up in direct proportion to escalations in political disputes between China and their country of nationality.

<comment><USER4> Do you have actual statistics on that, or is this another one of those claims supported entirely by one-off cherry picked examples? Have you considered that it is instead the _reporting_ of detentions, thousands of which occur worldwide daily, that is skewed to match current tensions?

<comment><USER3> Just to be clear, I'm not an US citizen, I've never been in the US nor plan to go there anytime soon and have no reasons to defend their government interests. So why do I think that arrest was part of a plot to gain a pawn to be used in exchange of something wrt the economic war between US and China? Because the weapon motivation is utter ridiculous! I can buy knives, steel balls, nunchakus, shurikens and swords any day from Chinese eShops, but apparently a bag of plastic balls (airsoft pellets are nothing more than small plastic balls) represents some national security issue for them. Seriously folks, am I supposed to believe that the same people who identified, followed and arrested a former US military pilot are so dumb to think a bag of plastic balls represent a national security issue? I'm not either defending the US nor bashing China here, just pointing the obvious as this happens everywhere: powers make the laws then bend them according to their needs. It's common people who is getting screwed, everywhere and everytime. That's just how power works: the Chinese govt will leverage that capture to gain something from Trump, Trump will lower the tariffs to get the poor ex pilot back home and that's it; corporations which outsourced to China will cheer Trump for helping their business and people will do the same for bringing back the hero home. Seen a million times.

<comment><USER4> > So why do I think that arrest was part of a plot to gain a pawn to be used > in exchange of something wrt the economic war between US and China? Because > the weapon motivation is utter ridiculous!

You are a new hire at the US-Mexico border control. One day a suspicious looking guy passes through, and you find a ton of white powder in his suitcase. You look him up in a database and find he has previously been charged with drug possession. You have been warned by your higher-ups that many people have recently trying to get through precisely your station smuggling drugs. So you detain him out of caution, but it turns out, for some weird reason, he just wanted to ship a suitcase full of baking soda to the US!

So since baking soda is totally harmless, this obviously means that your action must have been part of a plot on the US's part to put pressure on Mexico to fund the wall, right? What other explanation could there possibly be?

I have, of course, just gone through the article paragraph by paragraph and changed the subject to America. (Also, I am a US citizen.) No doubt, events like this happen constantly, and nobody cares, because mistakes happen. Only when the subject is China is everything a grand conspiracy.

> That's just how power works: the Chinese govt will leverage that capture to > gain something from Trump

It doesn't actually work like this. Detentions happen constantly on all sides. One detention does not do anything to affect policy. I would bet that after a week this guy will be back home, to absolutely no consequence in the trade war, and you'll never hear about it in the news because it doesn't cause enough fear.

Ascribing the most sinister possible motives to everything a foreigner does is something that _feels_ sophisticated and intellectual. But it's not. It's the oldest cognitive bias that exists. It is from the stone age and it will take us back.

<comment><USER6> Baking soda:Cocaine::plastic pellets:???

<comment><USER7> Liquid or solid explosive. (Very unlikely but possible.)

It's of course totally dumb. Might as well arrest anyone carrying rice in their pockets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just so we're clear, HN users find a story about China temporarily detaining a US pilot to be top-of-front-page relevant, but the story about the US bombing 30 innocent farmers in Afghanistan gets flagged to death.

<comment><USER9> Because there are many HN users that work in China or do business in China. This might be a good warning to US citizens to stay out of China.

<comment><USER4> Most such stories fall apart after a little prodding. Almost always, detentions are either dumb mistakes, quickly reversed, or the result of actual lawbreaking. Often you read a little further and it's like, "well yes, the drugs I was selling were technically against Chinese law, but..."

However, that is not as fun a conclusion as joining in on bashing the outgroup.

<comment><USER10> This may be that, and is most likely that for most other countries, but the PRC has a history of disappearances and detainment under false charges, along with elements of the whole Stalin theater. This is why many are immediately more concerned when something like this happens in China than in say, Switzerland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> By "nonmetallic pellets used in low-power replica air guns" are they referring to airsoft BB's?

<comment><USER12> Yeah that is absolutely what it sounds like to me, these are toys that many people played with as children or would be willing to give to children to play with. Pretty harmless unless it catches you in the eye. They are specifically designed to not be dangerous. I've never heard of any other type of air-fired plastic pellets at least. Pretty enraging and hopefully Mr. Hohn is able to make it back to American soil very soon

<comment><USER11> I can totally understand some repercussions if he had been attempting to fly with an airsoft gun, but small plastic balls? This is just absurd.

<comment><USER13> He was transporting the IN to Hong Kong, I can understand that being a sensitive topic right now

<comment><USER14> The what now?

<comment><USER15> Accroding to Chinese law, airsoft BB is illegal, that might sound absurd, but it is the law. And it is selectively enforced. There are stories that people get penalty just for selling toy guns, [http://news.sina.com.cn/pl/2016-12-31/doc- ifxzczfc6640913.sh...](http://news.sina.com.cn/pl/2016-12-31/doc- ifxzczfc6640913.shtml\(2016) in Chinese). It cause some discussion and debate on the internet and within the law realm, but by 2018 the supreme court gave some guidance for such case. [https://www.spp.gov.cn/xwfbh/wsfbt/201803/t20180328_372604.s...](https://www.spp.gov.cn/xwfbh/wsfbt/201803/t20180328_372604.shtml#1) Personally I don't think it is a leverage for the trade war, the laws in China is not so mature as in US, and tend to be more tough when it involves guns. edited for spelling error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is definitely politically motivated. I was with a (Chinese citizen) friend when airport security found a few rounds of ammunition in her baggage, and the guards just shrugged and confiscated it. No further issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is what you can do when you have all the background investigations for the US government. You don't need any evidence of wrongdoing. You have prima facia evidence the person could be a military operative. Military on foreign soil is _big_ deal and US may find themselves with little recourse other than routine diplomatic channels.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a Canadian I can't really justify vacationing in the PRC at the moment, given I'd like to avoid mining minerals for the rest of my life. I mean, I'm sure I'd look great when (if?) I got out.

Seriously between this and the other exit bans, it's not looking great.

<comment><USER19> Why would anyone vacation in China? There are so many better options in Asia.

<comment><USER20> There's a long cultural history to China. Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Terra Cotta Army, Hutongs, Yangtze River, Three Gorges, authentic Chinese cuisine that will probably make you sick to your stomach, Guilin, Pearl River, Hong Kong, and many other places.

I'm really glad I went back in 2006 before national governments started getting snippy with each other and their citizens. I wouldn't go _now_ because I don't really like the idea of being imprisoned without trial, but if you ignore the politics there's a lot to experience in China.

<comment><USER21> >There's a long cultural history to China. Great Wall, Tiananmen Square,

Congrats, mentioning that last bit got you arrested and the consulate can't help since you technically broke PRC law.

<comment><USER22> Tiananmen Square is a major tourist destination in China. It's on the subway signs. No one is pretending the square doesn't exist.

<comment><USER21> >Tiananmen Square is a major tourist destination in China. It's on the subway signs. No one is pretending the square doesn't exist.

Parent mentioned the "cultural history" of the square, which is edging to the no go zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is the kind of stuff better foreign relations would smooth out nicely. You'd never see a news headline. There'd be zero drama.

How do you have better foreign relations? Better compatibility between legal systems would be a start. What sense is their putting a westerner up against a socialist legal system? They're not citizens. I can only imagine how much this man is being traumatized by this.

Reading material on China's criminal justice system (pdf): [https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...](https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1161&context=jj_pubs)

China has different types of detainment. It doesn't specify if he's in the administrative kind or the one facing much more serious repercussions.

This is just one area where China's incompatibility is going to end up costing it. You don't see the intellectual property stolen / royalties, and people who would potential bring wealth _to_ China if they weren't so stubbornly insistent on maintaining an oligarchy.

Who is China's gov really working for? Nobody knows, it's so opaque. But if their system - which they subject their own citizens and foreigners alike to - was so humane and just, why not show the innards of it to demonstrate the virtuosity and benevolence of it?

</comment><comment><USER24> When I was in China back in the day, a friend bought a realistic-looking bb pistol and probably a few hundred rounds from a crap market. We probably could have robbed a store with it. I'm rather skeptical that this stuff is actually illegal.

<comment><USER25> It depends. For example in Beijing (and probably in other big cities) you can't carry a knife, but in a small town you can.

The laws are a jungle everywhere :/

The detainment is the worrying part here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> what percentage of FedEx pilots are ex-military?

<comment><USER27> I don't know if it's a majority, it may be, but it's at least a large minority.

Airlines (both passenger and freight) don't want to pay to train their own pilots, so their staffing pipelines rely heavily on ex-military pilots.

Many military and passenger aircraft share a basic airframe, for example the KC-135 is a 707 configured as a tanker for aerial refueling. Even the instances that are not - it would be relatively straightforward to transition from, say, a C-17 to a 767 or something like that.

So pilots tend to retire from the USAF and fly the friendly skies with civilian airliners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "HONG KONG—Chinese authorities have detained a FedEx Corp. pilot in the southern city of Guangzhou, elevating pressure on the express shipping giant that is already in Beijing's crosshairs amid a U.S.-China trade war.

The pilot, a former U.S. Air Force colonel named Todd A. Hohn, was detained a week ago while waiting for a commercial flight to his home in Hong Kong after flying deliveries throughout Asia from the FedEx regional hub in Guangzhou, people familiar with the matter said.

A lawyer for the Hohn family in Niceville, Fla., confirmed that Mr. Hohn had been detained in China. He was a wing commander at the Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma until 2017.

Reached briefly at his hotel room Thursday, Mr. Hohn identified himself to a reporter and then referred all questions to a family lawyer and discontinued the phone call. He is married and a father, the people familiar with the matter said.

When he was detained, Mr. Hohn was carrying nonmetallic pellets used in low- power replica air guns in a checked bag, the people said. Chinese authorities have alleged that Mr. Hohn was illegally transporting ammunition and have begun a criminal investigation, the people said."

<comment><USER29> So they detained him and then found a reason: plastic BBs in a checked bag. Less dangerous than the plastic knives they serve with food in the cabin.

China strictly controls ammunition inside China. There is no way plastic BBs are considered ammunition.

... But if China does they better stop the illegal export of BBs and airsoft guns to the USA. Taiwan will happily increase production.

<comment><USER30> If only they cared that much about the illicit fentanyl production in their country. Oh wait, it isn't illicit, it is state-sanctioned.

<comment><USER31> Fuck fentanyl. It is a huge problem in America. I'm sick of hearing about people overdosing from this drug.

<comment><USER32> >Fuck fentanyl

the perspective that somehow it's the drugs fault is both damaging to the recovery effort, the effort to reduce harm to the general public, and damaging to those of us with chronic pain that find fentanyl to be a solution to their woes.

Point the blame where it belongs.

Fuck under-regulation, over-prescription, greedy doctors, broken medical systems, for-profit care, and systematic government abuse.

<comment><USER33> That line of thinking is also used to argue against gun control. "Don't blame the guns"

But whether or not you subscribe to that thinking, most people can agree that it would be great if China stepped in to do something to control the illicit export of Fentanyl (keyword: illicit, as in not fentanyl used for legitimate medical purposes).

<comment><USER34> Why isn't there a Fentanyl problem in China, Europe, Africa ?

Are you SURE China has the ability to save america from under-regulation, expensive healthcare, for profit doctors etc ?

<comment><USER33> I'm not sure what you're implying.

No, China controlling their fentanyl output won't solve the problem in America. Making health insurance less expensive won't solve the problem. Regulating more won't solve the problem. Eliminating profit doctors won't solve the problem.

But all of them would -help- contribute toward improving the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> ITT: People got angry over a passenger got detained in a third-world country for bullshit reasons</comment>


Ask HN: Where is the next Xerox PARC? - <AUTHOR>

PARC invented much of today's technologies - from desktop computers to networking and even iPads. While the company didn't manage to bring much of that into market, it has shaped the whole world of computing we do today.<p>The question is, what is today's Xerox PARC? Is there a well-funded research lab somewhere that is doing such radical research that it will bring us the computing of next thirty years? Or is everybody doing just short-term applied stuff now? <comment><USER2> I would say it's Google in terms of the energy and caliber of people working there, but there's a fundamental difference between Google and Xerox PARC. Research is tightly integrated with production at Google; Ph.D's are expected to code to the production infrastructure, and their work tends get released within 6 months to a year instead of 30 years later. That means that there isn't a huge store of undiscovered prototypes to be discovered by Steve Jobs in 10 years.

There are some advantages to this, though. Personally, I like being able to visit a foreign website and have Chrome automatically translate it. Or talk (!) to my mobile phone (!) and have it automatically use my location (!) to make sense of my query and answer it (!). I like being able to virtually visit any place on earth and walk around on the streets. My e-mail inbox knows which messages are important and which are spam. I think it's wonderful that Google Search can give me straight answers to most of the queries I throw at it.

Most of these were virtually unimaginable just over 5 years ago.

<comment><USER3> No, the cool new use of existing technology, while fantastic, is not transformational; it will eventually run out. In my opinion: they have some cool Crazy Ivan projects but nothing really serious, and while it may run counter to what feels like common sense, Google is not like PARC at all.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I agree with the premise of your comment, in particular that this is all "existing technology". The problem is that once something is productionized and available to the masses, _of course_ it's "existing technology". That does not make it any less innovative when developed.

Ask yourself: if all Google products, in their current incarnations, were still a research project at Stanford that nobody was using, and we all still used AltaVista to search, and Hotmail for webmail, and MapQuest for maps, and then suddenly the Google project was unveiled to the public and commercialized by another company (let's call it "Gapple"), would the accomplishment be any less than how we view Xerox PARC today?

As Steve Jobs says, "real artists ship".

<comment><USER3> _would the accomplishment be any less than how we view Xerox PARC today?_

Most certainly. Remember, PARC never shipped. Instead they created the foundation upon what we ship with today. AltaVista and Hotmail weren't horrible experiences. Google provided an incremental boost to these that made them, yes, much more powerful. But it was evolution, not revolution. PARC was all about Revolution.

Of course Steve Jobs says, "real artists ship." He took what PARC created and shipped it and made money. He advanced the state of the market. PARC advanced the state of technology. That's the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, judging by such mythical stuff as the "Courrier Tablet", that cool "Surface" whathchaisit, and a host of other theoretical stuff i hear all the time, i would venture, as weird as it might sound, Microsoft Research...

<comment><USER5> There's Microsoft's problem right there, they can't ship innovative, risky products, due to their overdependence on the twin Windows/Office franchise. Classic case of Innovator's Dilemma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Along the same lines people in physics ask all the time: where is the next Bell Labs?

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the question is better stated as: Where are the next Xerox PARC _people_?

<comment><USER3> You have it exactly right. Most of the transformative research being done right now is outside of major companies and outside America.

<comment><USER6> Can you give us some statistics on that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like to think of the startup world as a distributed version of PARC. Not sure how accurate it is--but still a neat thought.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my new learning website: Crunch Course - <AUTHOR>

I've created a website to help people who want to take advantage of the free educational content already online (like OCW).
You can join a class or create a new one.  Each class has publicly viewable homework submissions with comments so you can give and receive feedback.
The site is brand new so there isn't much content on it yet, but I'm starting an SICP class here: http://www.crunchcourse.com/class/structure-and-interpretation-of-comp/2010/jan/
Your feedback on the concept and on the website are appreciated.  Thanks in advance!
http://www.crunchcourse.com/ <comment><USER2> One of the first things I would think about is charging.

I am sure there is a definition for it - but the act of paying some money - whether it is incentivised by returning a percentage of the money dependent on commitment/progress etc, or is taken as a running cost, has the effect of increasing dedication/loyalty and filtering out the people who like the idea of learning it but aren't willing to actually learn (or so i hypothesize...)

If you haven't - have a look at Clayton Christensen's "Disrupting Class", "The Online Learning Idea Book" - Patti Shank and "New Designs for Early Education" - by IDEO (its aimed at early childhood but some of the ideas revolving around increasing user involvement are really interesting). They delve into some extremely interesting ideas, not all relevant but theres some gold in them.

And I have not done nearly enough research into it, but I believe an understanding of Game Mechanics and how effective Social Interactions work on web would probably paramount to the effectiveness of this web app (theres a tonne of this info out there - think zynga/gowalla for learning).

Just my 2cents

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Charging is something I'm considering adding at some point. Maybe I'll do that sooner rather than later. I haven't read either of those books yet. Thanks for the suggestions.

<comment><USER2> Just a note - that third title by IDEO is a free dl from their site, <http://www.ideo.com/work/featured/kellogg>

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks. I'm checking it out now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One thought I just thought about. You say you should "self grade" your homework. It makes sense, but this means someone needs an answer key.

What if I decide to use a textbook to structure my class. E.g. each week we go through a chapter and do the exercises. We may not have the answers. Is there any way to add some "social" grading? I realize this may be tough with trick/tough questions in textbooks, but still, I think requiring an answer key will make this tough.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good idea. Social grading would be useful in that case. There's no support for that right now, but it could be added in the future. There is a way to comment on individual homework assignments, so that could make due for now. I'm wondering if people would want to grade anonymously or have the grades be public.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.crunchcourse.com/>

[http://www.crunchcourse.com/class/structure-and- interpretati...](http://www.crunchcourse.com/class/structure-and- interpretation-of-comp/2010/jan/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat idea. I've been meaning to learn economics, maybe I'll use this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was planning on doing something similar (but go waylaid). Have you considered Amazon affiliate links?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm considering affiliate links. I think there could be a good connection there. Once traffic picks up I'll probably add them in some form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anything "Crunch____" for a website might put you in a trademark dispute. Or it might not.</comment>


How to avoid 4 mistakes every engineer makes while giving software estimates - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/estimates-in-software-development-projects-b221e9dc4431 <comment><USER2>
        Tasks are further broken down into granular tasks until we
        have small chunks that do not take more than 2 hours. From
        here, the final estimate was simply the addition of these
        2-hour tasks. At the end of this exercise, I not only arrived
        at an accurate estimate but also had all minute details about
        the project figured out.

LOL pull the other one it's got bells on</comment>


Ask YC: what would you show a newcomer to the internet? - <AUTHOR>

My granny will get a new PC next week, that will be capable of doing all the fancy stuff, movies, music,... So far she has only been emailing and doing some surfing and online banking (her old computer had 32MB of RAM - ouch!).<p>Any advice for other nice things to show her? Google Earth is a nobrainer, and I will show her YouTube. Other than that? I myself only visit three sites regularly in my daily surfing: news.yc, a friend's community page and a "normal" news page, so I don't have that many ideas for getting entertained on the internet. <comment><USER2> I might get laughed at here, but here goes....

1) Find out what she already does with her spare time. Her hobbies and interests in particular.

2) See in what areas she wants to grow. One thing older people tend to do is become set in their ways. You need to show her how the internet will bring value to her current interests instead of turning her on to things that younger people find cool. It MIGHT alienate her from the internet if she sees too many 2girls1cup reaction videos (sorry, I couldn't resist!!) on YouTube.

3) Show her some sites that are small enough that she doesn't get overwhelmed with information. I think the overwhelming factor is something that turns seniors off.

Depending on your granny's sensitivities, I would recommend putting a "safe browsing" application on your computer. You tend to forget how easy it was to stumble onto a site with flashing banner advertisements for Viagra during the late 90s.

I think as a first application, Google Earth (as you said a no-brainer) would be the place to start. The level of control over her own experience she would have as far as how much information she would access depends on her level of comfort; and hopefully over the course of a few days this should increase such that she is more comfortable absorbing new information. The metaphor of exploring the world in a virtual sense might help ease the transition to exploring the internet directly through a browser. Also, the gliding effect is calming in the sense that it's not a sudden jump: there are nice transitions between flying from one place to another and zooming in and out. The one problem you might face, however, is convincing her to use Google Earth over and over again; one way to do this is to provide her with a "travel itinerary" such that she can visit famous places to which she has never been.

I would recommend familiarizing her with one application per month.

</comment><comment><USER3> All your family's blogs, and picassa and flickr pages, how to use bookmarks and how to make a page a desktop shortcut.

After that, I'd send her straight to PGs tutorial on arc, I mean, it's a logical next step ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> First I have to get my family started on blogging ;-)

<comment><USER4> If they take digital photos it's easy to get them started on blogging. Just have them upload photos of their doings to <http://ourdoings.com/> where they'll be automatically organized by date. They click on a date, click Edit, and type something about that day's doings. Instant photo blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apart from wikipedia, I'm in the U.S. so I would show:

\- The American Fact Finder: <http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en>

\- The national debt clock: <http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock>

Just curious: anyone know of any good equivalents for other countries?

<comment><USER6> Dont think any other country has a debt of $9,295,497,285,361.38 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My father is amazingly computer illiterate. My mom and I have tried to show him the way, but he's pretty stubborn. He can type about 3 words per minute (btw, learning to type correctly is a huge huge huge factor for getting people to explore the internet - imagine searching for something using one finger), but he understands Amazon.

This can be dangerous, but try walking your grandma through one-click shopping. I say it's dangerous because it can lead to impulsive buying, but Amazon introduces new users to search, user comments/reviews, and ecommerce. I think it is a good starting point to being introduced to the web.

side question - My mom is getting better and better using the internet/computer, but I can't figure out how to explain the concept of iTunes/big music library to her. Does anyone have any advice?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess skip iTunes and go directly to online music?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd assume since you're thinking Google Earth Google is in the mix too. Wikipedia would be a good stop on the tour, as would a good non-social networked news aggregator, or just a good news site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> By now I have some hopes for StumbleUpon. Maybe they have some nice things in their collection for my granny.

</comment><comment><USER9> 419eater.com

</comment><comment><USER10> Turn her on to something like hotsheet.com so she can explore and pick what she wants.

<comment><AUTHOR> But what would be a good starting point? I looked at hotsheet, but at first glance it sucks. Who needs a category "search engines" prominently among the picks, for example?

<comment><USER10> "Who needs a category "search engines" prominently among the picks, for example?"

A newbie. You and I already know what's good and bad on hotsheet. But she doesn't. Let her find out for herself.

Also, a lot of newbies have no idea what's possible on-line outside of email. Hotsheet has a lot of variety on one page that Granny might find easy to use. Things will probably be different for her in a month or two.

Edit: I just realized that I'm replying to the OP. Tichy, one of the surest ways to reduce responses to your questions is to say that they suck.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies, I didn't mean it as a personal thing. I am genuinely interested in finding good pages to start out with.

<comment><USER10> No apology needed and I didn't take it personally. As a fellow hacker, I'm guessing that we both make the same 2 mistakes alot (at least I do): rushing to judgement when seeing something new and expecting non-hackers to think like we do.

Enjoy orientation with Granny. Let us know what you decided and how it went.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> www.twittervision.com</comment>


Show HN: A Library for Spark DataFrame Using MinIO Select API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/minio/spark-select <comment><USER2> A link to the MinIO project would be handy!

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/minio/minio](https://github.com/minio/minio) is here</comment></comment>


Hacking Mountain Lion: Bringing the old Web Inspector back - <AUTHOR> http://thomasst.ch/webinspector/ <comment><USER2> You can't create new style rules with the new inspector.

It's also buggy and skow to the point of being unusable.

Who ever thought that was ready for release must be out of his mind.

Also, if you chose "use webkit inspector" you're no longer able to view source.

I'm left with no alternative. Chrome is hideous on OS X and I hate that omnibar that Safari now shares. I'm using Safari for browsing and chrome for developing but it's a terrible experience.

<comment><USER3> May I ask what's so bad about Chrome on OSX?

<comment><USER4> Answering because I also think it's hideous: the tool bar style and color are different from the rest of the OS. The new icon is way flatter than anything else in the dock (save the new Messages icon, maybe; see [1]). Even though I found a nice-looking skin on my one Mac, there doesn't seem to be any way to find out the theme's name and install it on my other Mac. The right-click menu is different than in all other web views on the system (at least in the German localization). The built-in dictionary lookup support (what is triple tap nowadays) is getting there, but still worse than Safari in my experience.

[1] <http://maururu.net/2011/old-chrome-icons/>

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's mostly it. Ugly toolbar and address bar, can't use built-in dictionary, slightly worse text rendering, etc.

Oh yes, and if you want to grab the window, you have exactly 11px for that. Try it after lot's of coffee.

I find Chrome beautiful on Windows. In full screen, it's a natural fit, one of the best Windows apps. But on the Mac, it annoys me and hurts my eyes.

And I know it's old fashion, but if you are among the 0.5% of the population that can actually distinguish a URL from a search query, you are out of luck.

PS: if you do find out the theme's name please post it here, thanks.

<comment><USER5> The thing that I hate about these "omnibars" is that I _used_ to be able to type a URL into the search box and get information about it directly _without going there_. It now takes two steps (google.com, enter URL).

<comment><USER6> I type something like "amazon.com q" then quickly erase the q and let instant search change the results.

I just now realized that I _should_ be typing "!g amazon.com", because I have duckduckgoog installed. (google search with DDG shortcodes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> By replacing your system frameworks with those from a WebKit nightly you're going to see trouble with OS X software updates, system-wide instability due to running bleeding-edge code, and a test environment which isn't representative of what your users will see.

If for some reason you need to use the frameworks from a WebKit nightly with your application, use DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH to point your app at the WebKit nightly's frameworks. This has the same benefit without any of the downsides mentioned above.

</comment><comment><USER8> The new inspector is totally unusable. It doesn't seem to solve any of the normal workflows that you run into doing front end dev work. Like inspecting source, looking at the console, looking at network traffic, request/response headers and contents, etc. The console lags unbearably. Even printing an object, it gives you a nice view of the contents but opening it might take 10 seconds. The list goes on. Fortunately I don't have to debug much js at the moment but I switch to Chrome when I need to. Very glad to be able to switch back now with just WebKit because I do prefer it as a browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> A couple reasons not to do this:

1\. Your frameworks are out of sync with the the rest of the system, could cause problems updating.

2\. You're now running super-buggy development WebKit. The code you're using was written a few hours ago, remember that.

3\. The old WebKit inspector doesn't have retina support. If you've got a rMBP and care about how it looks, don't do this.

4\. The article gives no information on how to go "back" after you've done it.

<comment> jarek-foksa It's developement version, but I wouldn't call it super-buggy. WebKit project has strict development process, each commit is rigourously reviewed and tested before merging.

You will likely run into problems if you enable experimental flags though.

<comment><USER7> While the WebKit project has a strict review process and a substantial amount of regression testing, code reviews can't catch all issues and WebKit doesn't have complete test coverage for all aspects of web technology. Changes can, and often do, introduces regressions from subtle rendering errors to all-out crashes.

These sorts of temporary issues aren't that a big deal if it's in a separate application that you use only for testing, but they're a darn sight more painful when you replace your system WebKit frameworks and they start impacting things like your email client or the system installer stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Repost of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440198>

I didn't think reposts were possible?

<comment><USER10> downvote, really?

</comment></comment><comment> jarek-foksa Replacing WebKit, WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks is a bit risky because many system components depend on them. I would replace only inspector files (mostly JavaScript) instead as described in <https://gist.github.com/3898054>

</comment><comment><USER11> I love how you can't even see POST data in the new inspector

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, I had no idea the Safari Inspector was so bad. Because I've stopped using Safari at all..it's performance even on my brand new MBP is atrocious...maybe it's because of how the loading bar painfully crawls across the browser, accentuating the load times. Or maybe it's just the crashing.

I'm glad I didn't try the inspector...it would've driven me crazy but I wouldn't have guessed that they just killed the inspector

</comment><comment><USER13> Want the old Activity Viewer back so much</comment>