Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer - <AUTHOR> http://didyougogo.com/blog/didyougogo.html <comment><USER2> The index is super tiny. A search for "the" got 112 results. Seems like a quick way to explore the entire index. Also it indexes pages twice if you submit them twice, so that needs to be fixed.

But for some crazy reason, I kinda like this. It feels like the 90s internet. The links included so far have that same random mix of lots of nerdy links, homepages & personal blogs, a few religious sites, and the occasional big news website. Because there's no crawler yet, it's limited to the _specific_ pages people thought were noteworthy. And because the index is so limited, I'm stumbling on interesting things.

It's so weird looking at this and thinking "Y'know, maybe this could also work if the links were curated into yet another hierarchical officious oracle", or "if this site let me pay to show a small text ad on the side when someone searched for a relevant keyword, I might spend a few dollars here".

Someone submitted the "Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches" page, which is one of my earliest internet memories. Whoever submitted that, thank you for the nostalgia!

<comment><USER3> I was really confused by this too. I searched a Steam, Twitch and a bunch of other sites and it didn't find any of them. Then I did Youtube and it took 12 seconds (following queries were fast, I guess I was the first to search Youtube).

This thing isn't slaying anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wait until I get a real sword. My current is one virtual CPU and 1 GB RAM. Last I looked there was 2 GB space on the HDD. I'm on an entry level B1S Azure VM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I searched for "Cnn" and got 0 results. I searched for "Amazon" and got a five random results, including the IMDB page for "Rambo, Part 2."

If this were really like AltaVista, I'd get 3 trillion results and have to use advanced Boolean logic to cut that down to the most useful 7,000 - so I guess having no results is sort of easier...

<comment><AUTHOR> My boolean logic is here: [1] I'm sure it has flaws.

Since the index had only five or six entries a couple of hours ago I set the matching to be wide instead of narrow. I'm also experimenting with loading the model with phrases, phrases and words or words only. I might have f-ed up the query parsing because of that. Remember, this is 0.1, fresh out of the press.

Searching the tree is here: [2]

Tokenization is here: [3]

[1] [https://github.com/kreeben/resin/blob/master/src/Sir.Store/R...](https://github.com/kreeben/resin/blob/master/src/Sir.Store/ReadSession.cs#L68)

[2] [https://github.com/kreeben/resin/blob/master/src/Sir.Store/V...](https://github.com/kreeben/resin/blob/master/src/Sir.Store/VectorNode.cs#L209)

[3] [https://github.com/kreeben/resin/blob/master/src/Sir.Store/L...](https://github.com/kreeben/resin/blob/master/src/Sir.Store/LatinTokenizer.cs#L24)

<comment><USER5> Major search engines test every release against a list of search queries. You could start with [https://trends.google.com/trends/topcharts](https://trends.google.com/trends/topcharts). You should have an automated test script with a list of (query, good URL) pairs and make sure the good URL appears in the top few results.

<comment><AUTHOR> As preparation for this demo, yes I absolutely should have run such a test. Eagerness won.

Thanks for the link.

<comment><USER5> Not just for demos, but to help you hack. You can make a small change to the algorithm and re-run the test and see if the score goes up or down. It's very convenient for testing changes deep inside the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> oh-moses Awesome, but man, that name really needs some work. It sounds like I'm asking a two-year-old whether he's been on the potty.

<comment><USER6> I agree—naming is deeply underrated, and it's not at all too late! Just choose something abstract and appealing, or a simple noun without any weird associations.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Just choose something"

Did you see that South Park episode where they try to pick a name for their startup but all names are taken? It's very, very funny.

So yeah, I want the perfect name for this. What _is_ the perfect name?

<comment><USER6> What about "unheavy search" ? Synonym for light, but very uncommon as far as I can tell. It's not beautiful or elegant, but it's also not confusing and making me think of gogo dancers. Best I could come up with in 5 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kudos for your courage to make your great ambitions public from the start.

1\. Does the site do any crawling on its own, or is the public index only fed from submissions?

2\. It appears Umlaut/Unicode handling needs some work: When I search for "Käse" (German for 'cheese'), I get the response "0 results for 'Käse' in 'www' (0 ms)".

At this point I'm not sure if there's actually 0 results or if it was actually searching for the escaped string.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

1\. You may submit a page. When I have a little more capacity that just 1 CPU/1 GB RAM I will also crawl.

2\. I'll look into it. Thank you.

<comment><USER8> Would the common crawl dataset be useful to you starting out?

[http://commoncrawl.org](http://commoncrawl.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes absolutely. I have been holding off crawling because I have no server capacity yet. That will probably sort itself out pretty soon from the looks of it. When I have the disk space I'll start using their data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this supposed to be a joke? I can't tell. The index is certainly extremely limited.

<comment><USER10> The challenge is not building the search engine, it's in building the index.

That's why google wants every drop of data

<comment><USER11> I've sometimes wondered whether it would work for a search engine to reduce the indexing problem by focusing more on quality than quantity. Rather than indexing everything in the universe and then trying to rank it, focus on maximizing ROI and keeping the aggregate quality of the corpus up by aggressively pruning low-quality paths up-front. In practice this might require splitting the difference between classic Yahoo and modern search engines, with manual maintenance of various black/white/greylists and rules to assign different quality metrics for different users on social media sites, which might reduce the effectiveness of this approach. Anyone know if something like this has been tried?

<comment><USER12> You can sort of simulate this by searching discussion sites like Hacker News or Reddit. There's no pruning, but users do vote on what's most interesting or relevant to them. I find searching HN is useful when I'm looking for tools designed in the way HN readers tend to like: command-line, open source, and using a standard format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As others have commented, love the ambitiousness of this! However, Unicode searches do not seem to work at all -- not just "中文" but also even "français" gives an error. Unicode support is something you definitely want to build in from the very beginning in order to avoid headaches (for you and users) in the future. Even if there is no content in the index, the presence of non-ASCII characters in the search term should not lead to a server error. Suggest you make Unicode the default encoding for everything even if you are not planning on supporting non-English search results for the moment, just to avoid unexpected errors when people search for things like "café" for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> The database has Unicode support but apparently my normalization and tokenization does not. I will have a look at that ASAP. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _I 'm Marcus, founder of Didyougogo and author of the software behind it. For the past ten years I've been trying to improve my programming and math skills to get to a level where I could write a proper web search engine for the written word using absolute cutting-edge IR methods. The final result is something I have not seen or read about: a language represented as a 65K wide vector-space, serialized into a binary tree that is balanced according to node's cosine angle between them and their closest neighbours. Querying is very fast, even for long phrases. Fuzzy, prefix, suffix and wildcard type queries comes for free with the vector-space model. The system uses relatively little resources and can run on as little as 1 CPU and 1GB RAM._

Is there any further technical documentation than this (besides the source code)?

I tried searching some of the terms in this description on Google, but found little specific information. One search turned up k-d trees. Is this related?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-d_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-d_tree)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad I could make you curious about this. I will gladly expand on the documentation around the language model and querying as soon as I can.

In broad terms: its a 16-bit vector space in which you can encode anything you like. I have chosen to encode phrases and words as bags-of-characters. This separates terms from each other enough that they can be searched for reliably (in almost all cases).

Terms that share a character have vectors that intersect one another and we can measure the cos angle between them. That's the score.

That is represented as a binary tree.

A scan in the tree gives you the closest match and an address into a file on disk; a list of document IDs.

At query time boolean logic is used on the result (document ID list) from each query clause (AND/OR/NOT key:value).

I'll write something up.

<comment><USER15> Could the bags-of-characters approach cause issues with anagrams having the same vector?

It would be surprising (to me) to get the same results for e.g. "strange" and "garnets".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes this model could cause issues such as the one you describe. With phrase queries/multi-token queries this becomes less of a problem. Phrases aren't anagrams that often.

A secondary index might become needed with the most popular terms, to resolve which anagram is the right one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Got zero relevant results. Not even sure how the results came back, as the words weren't in there. Tried "Taoist tai chi," then "Taoism".

Love the ambition, but a long way to go go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you and sorry about that. Feel free to submit a suitable page about taoism.

<comment><USER16> I'm the wrong one to submit as I'm trying to learn more myself. Wikipedia entries are an easy place to start, and that should be straightforward to add to your index.

I think it's problematic to have random people submit to the index with no incentive. I'm just becoming interested in tai chi, but I run no such webpage (who usually submits). There might be a way to gamify or otherwise incentivize people, but that's a very non-scalable approach. Really only automated crawling can be done to significantly widen your index. It's just very resource intensive... but good luck! I hope you can go far!

<comment><AUTHOR> "I think it's problematic to have random people submit to the index with no incentive."

"There might be a way to gamify"

I hear you. First of all, you guys aren't random people to me. You're my favorite internet people.

There are already some hundred entries in the index, all from you guys. If I analyzed the contents right now it would probably tell me something about us, as a group.

One of the entries is pornhub.com. We have at least one male in the group.

Maybe organic growth of the index has already started. And once I teach you how to use the public HTTP API and not just the web GUI, perhaps you will all start to see how useful this service already is. And it will grow even more.

We'll see.

Someone just donated 5 huge servers, big ones. Didyougogo will be around a while at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting idea. Isn't it a little late to slay Alta Vista though? :)

I searched for apple. Top result was the archive.org macos that showed up here on HN recently, 2nd and 3rd were apple.com indexed 10s apart.

Then some odd results - though they do include the word apple on page just once. The imdb page for 12 Monkeys appears 3 times.

I guess you're not trimming duplicates? Seems like you need some way to weight rankings too.

I wish you every success - search definitely needs some competition.

<comment><USER18> I "googled" Google using Did yougogo, and Google.com didn't appear once on the first page. Funny.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you submit Google to the "gogo" index it should start to appear when you query.

Did you submit both a query and a URL?

Did you go go?

[http://didyougogo.com/add](http://didyougogo.com/add)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like this idea, and the very simple implementation - big things start small. We need more search engines, including ones which are not supported by advertising.

Thanks for submitting.

<comment><USER20> What alternatives do Search Engines have for revenue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Please put a license on the source code. Right now, by default, it's "all rights reserved" so no one can use it or do anything with it.

<comment><USER22> i second this idea, though I disagree with the idea that someone can't do anything with it. there's nothing, say, physically stopping me, and since the intent is expressed on the page as open source, i really doubt the author would do anything to stop me either. beyond that, i doubt there are any other parties interested enough to prevent anyone from using it, so at this point i don't think it matters too much, especially when it's purposefully marketed as open source and such.

still, all that being said, i agree with the idea of erring on the side of safety. but either way, what you do in the privacy of your own device isn't really constrained by licenses, so of course there's no reason you couldn't just start working on it now if such were your desire and then worry about distribution and such when the license itself changes. sort of a "fair use" type thing imo

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm all about fair use and I would want you to draw exactly those conclusions about me and about using my code.

I just added a MIT license. Not sure that was the right one, but to be clear, I want anyone to be able to fork it, run a business/do whatever with it, without me being able to sue them. At no time can I sue them.

The more forks the better. As long as they adhere to certain principles, like not detroying the current HTTP API's, they will all be able to talk to each other, which is how I would like this to scale.

By having many people running search services, load and storage will be distributed.

Why would they run a search service? Well, they might need one for their site and once it's up and loaded with your content, you can now start to query it for data that you don't host. Others host it. I host a "www" index. You might host a "my_data" index. So you can create queries that span those two indexes.

Is the (business) idea.

<comment><USER23> > Well, they might need one for their site and once it's up and loaded with > your content, you can now start to query it for data that you don't host.

That's a very interesting idea that I hadn't considered. So basically site owners could host their own nodes that only index their own website. But since the nodes can communicate the end result is an index of many different websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Definitely some ambitious goals. There's nothing bad about that, but this has an awfully long way to go - e.g. searching for "hacker news" works fine, searching for almost anything else didn't find anything relevant. So while it's nice to say it can run in 1CPU / 1GB, I'm not sure it's very useful at that size (but I don't know how big it'd have to get to "break even" there).

Anyway, noted that it's a very early version, so good luck with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

Yep, I have probably messed up the relevancy a bit because of constantly experimenting with how to load the model/index. Right now I'm using phrases (sentences) as well as words, both extracted during the tokenization process. Initially I used only phrases because using the current 65K vector-space model that would match any word to any phrase containing that word. There are perhaps sideeffects of reinforcing each word like that.

"long way to go"

I don't think so. The real bitch was to figure out how to maintain a good representation of the language model on disk. How to update it. Remove data from it. Now I anticipate a couple of months fine-tuning the balancing of the tree and testing relevance. From what I have heard so far, relevance is a little sub-par.

Scaling is the next thing. I have a great plan for that of course, mentioned somewhere in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "If you are willing and able to offer sponsorship, reach out to me at marcuslager at the biggest email provider in the world * dot com."

Is that _still_ yahoo.com?

<comment><USER26> I'm too lazy to look that up - so I guess that filters out timewasters like me from emailing him...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of [http://wiby.me](http://wiby.me)

<comment><USER2> I tried Wiby and also got that same "90s internet" feeling, especially since it prefers sites without CSS & Javascript.

I like the "Surprise Me" button, where it takes you to a random page from the index. (I got a 90s era Babylon 5 fan page.) It could be interesting if didyougogo added that, but it would need to add a NSFW filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A search engine without https, I think I'll stick with Google for now.

<comment><USER29> I think it's a trade off. I think I'd rather have all my searches and traffic visible than all of my searches and traffic only visible to the company best in the world capable of storing forever and marketing to me.

I'm not quite sure the exact privacy trade-off but for things that I consider non-sensitive, I certainly prefer non-https web.

<comment><USER28> https isn't just about something being sensitive or not. If there's no https then everyone can just inject stuff in the page and do whatever like your ISP showing ads and siphoning out your search history, a random person in a coffeeshop adding a malicious site to your search results,...

<comment><USER29> That's what I mean by non-sensitive stuff. I don't care if someone inserts ads or changes stuff. I'll switch ISPs if they do that. If some intermediate network does it, I'll route around them. For stuff like this, I don't care.

There's a whole class of traffic I don't care about, like this guy's prototype or your mom's blog or whatever.

And I like segregating stuff I care about vs stuff I don't.

Also note that with SSL, google can still do all this, but they have the same pressure my ISP does if they ever try it.

<comment><USER30> I don't totally understand your reasoning. There is no downside to using SSL encryption and its completely free for websites to install it.

On the other hand, there are downsides to not using it (which have been previously mentioned).

<comment><USER29> There are downsides, but I don't think any massive. I don't know OP's hosting situation, but there may be limitations there. Although even the most basic hosts use letsencrypt nowadays.

But I think the most obvious downside is that OP is the only one working on this and any time spent working out ssl is time away from feature development. SSL is not a key feature of OP's product so there may be other features more important.

Simplicity is an important design principle. There are many things that have "no downside [other than cost to set up and maintain]." but have no clear value driver.

It's quite possible that all the important stuff gets built out before users make the value of ssl really clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Going on another vertical, this reminds me how useful early usenet was. Reddit is too general and way less nerdy and mainstream to be a worthy usenet replacement. Wishlist: a usenet killer

<comment><USER32> I don't think you're wishing for a Usenet killer. We've already had plenty of those, we're just wishing for one that didn't suck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > has a ranking model that encourages a good ratio between content and markup > (less markup/script is better)

Well, I'm sold!

</comment><comment><USER34> Searched for "warez"... didn't return anything... I want to live in the old days again :'(

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm getting 502 right now. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:O9c79dJ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:O9c79dJYOcoJ:didyougogo.com/blog/didyougogo.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1)

Or archive.org: [http://web.archive.org/web/20180813020050/http://didyougogo....](http://web.archive.org/web/20180813020050/http://didyougogo.com/blog/didyougogo.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> The minimalistic layout is a pleasure to use compared to AltaVista's bloated UI.

<comment><USER37> Altavista was great when its raison d'etre was to show off the Alpha.

(I still miss proper boolean queries.)

<comment><USER38> There is a hack to have the desktop Altavista search tool index gopher...

[https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/building-a-search-engine- for...](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/building-a-search-engine-for-gopher)

I've done it with a static set of data, the UTZoo Usenet data...

[http://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com](http://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com)

Shame it died on the vine, distributed, and curated search was a powerful tool in the days of Veronica and Archie

<comment><USER39> _istributed, and curated search was a powerful tool in the days of Veronica and Archie_

No it wasn't. I'm old enough to have (tried to) use it, and it was terrible.

It was usually quicker and got better results to manually connect to FTP sites, and run directory listing on likely directories untily ou found what you were looking for.

<comment><USER38> I'm old enough to have used it as well, and was able to find things with it..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I like that we are now seeing this market of pro privacy and less tracking type services like duckduckgo and this. Odd throw back to say altavista slayer. Now we need an ask jeeves slayer and we've covered most bases.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting project. Run this blog entry through a spellchecker, btw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Hmm, I really thought my perfect was English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What just happened? I search for a park I visited just yesterday. "186" hits(?) and two of those were two top page HN sites I just visited!? I'm spooked.

</comment><comment><USER43> I tried my favorite test search "android studio missing symbol r" and was pretty disappointed by the randomness of the results, but that is a tough one. Tried "newest iphone" but didn't come up with anything relevant until about 6 results down that found apple.com [edit didn't realize how small the index was]

</comment><comment><USER43> I think what could be cool is applying this as a personal search engine and marrying it somehow to a personal dns server or squid/proxy server so that you can have a way of harvesting your own browsing data. By using the squid or dnsmasq logs you could spider out urls from it, and build your index automatically.

<comment><USER20> You can already search your browsing history.

Non-centralized personal search engines have a few challenges to solve before they're feasible. 1) The web cannot support thousands or even millions of spiders/crawlers.

2) Search indexes are (probably?) too huge to distribute. See the commoncrawl project. It's TB for a few Billion pages.

3) Assuming a single crawler collects the necessary data, indexes can be easily distributed, and the search engine software is simple to set-up, who is going to subsidise this effort?

<comment><USER43> Shared browsing search could be a thing maybe as a hobby only though. Probably the only way to make it work is if "you want the privilage to search you must serve too" kind of motto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is neat & impressive!

Why would I use this over duckduckgo? (Assuming that we're some time on and the index is comparable?)

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought of something similar has a holiday project. A small search engine using SQLite FTS5 for a small set of websites crawled with Scrapy.

I made it public yesterday on [https://fts.fail/](https://fts.fail/)

Good luck slaying that dragon though.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hmm. I tried to add a page for "duck", but it doesn't seem to work, and very time I search for "duck", I still see a bunch of anime websites. Why are those anime websites even on there?

Also, plans to add HTTPS?

This looks cool, though, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER46> This is really cool. I love the feel of it and the ideas of running both on prem as well as oublic instances, letting them cooperate and teaming up with companies.

I know (almost) nothing about search engines but I hope something like this succeeds.

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't understand what it's referring to when you say submit a URL AND a search term. They're two separate forms. I submitted some URLs and they never show up with relevant searches.

</comment><comment><USER48> Who are you using for hosting? Amazon offers a free tier that could probably host this to start out with if you're currently using a computer in your bedroom or something. ;)

</comment><comment><USER49> Name makes it sound like it's related to DDG.

Definetely need a better one.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was a nice homage to DuckDuckGo. What it really means is "Did you submit both a query and a URL?"

<comment><USER50> I think you have to provide a URL and some keyword.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The "submit a URL" seems to need the URL scheme added (e.g. [https://](https://)) or it silently fails.

</comment><comment><USER52>
        91 results for 'hello world' in 'www' (32615 ms)

Not sure it can "slay" Google, but interesting project!

</comment><comment><USER53> Most of the goals can be already achieved using the Yacy project. Also it's already got an existing, massive, distributed index.

</comment><comment><USER54> I love it - well done.

As always, the question is how it scales.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was just talking to someone about scaling so I'm reusing what I said:

Scaling out technically and socially seems a little bit related. I want to scale out like this: a public search server (node) knows about other public nodes and the semantic topics their data carries. When a node cannot sufficiently answer a query it can reach out to other nodes by looking up a map of topic/list of nodes. Sharding by table/collection can also be solved the same way. That way, people owning public nodes can create queries that span tables they don't even host. They can build analytics using _their_ data _and_ the world's data. That's super-powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I get no results

</comment><comment><USER56> It's fast! I like the technical detail - index too limited.

Searched Red Dead Redemption 2 - no game info

Searched "bobs" \- no bobs

</comment><comment><USER57> One of colleagues argues that search has become infrastructure and thus there should be an offering from the state which is also responsible for other infrastructure.

There was a (failed) attempt by the EU I know about. And I don't see that happening in the near future.

<comment><USER58> The state spending money to provide you a search engine to select the information they want to show you? Just sounds like a terrible idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I tried emailing you at hotmail, but you are over the 1MB limit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try my gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> when i submit something to the search engine, it produces a result that doesn't have anything to do with the search term.

it's unclear to me how i am supposed to help improve this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll make sure the right people understand how to fix things like that ASAP because I love that you got the feeling you wanted to fix it.

There is something wrong currently with relevance, probably because of query parsing errors but perhaps also in how text is tokenized. This whole idea revolves around relevance so this is of course embarrassing. But it's 0.1 alpha. And it _did_ work on my machine.

Thanks for trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I like that didyougogo isn't in the index! Added!

</comment><comment><USER62> > marcuslager at the biggest email provider in the world * dot com.

?

<comment><USER23> I think he means gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?

<comment><AUTHOR> The catch is: this is 0.1 alpha software. I need a small team and some server capacity to get rolling. I need people to submit URLs. And a few hundred queries per second. That would scare the living shit out of big league search engines and might wake up some investor wanting to throw money at this.

<comment><USER64> In addition to users submitting articles, is there a reason this doesn't have a spider of its own based off something like the Google zeitgeist to seed some topics?

This project looks neat, I think first experiences with it would be much more improved if you could seed it with some content.

Maybe this could run my search with other search engines to compare and gain insights.

<comment><AUTHOR> "is there a reason this doesn't have a spider"

Yes, server capacity. Once I have a better hosting situation I'll start crawling.

Thank you, I've tried to be neat this time around.

With regards to full-text search, the didyougogo search engine should be able to replace elasticsearch (which is laughable relevance-wise in my eyes) or solr, once the alpha-bugs are gone.

<comment><USER65> Why not let volunteers run the crawler on their own machines?

Perhaps HN members might offer some spare cpu cycles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Is there a way to be notified of product updates?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love to notify you of the progress this project makes. As of now there is no email list and I'm not sure there should be one. How about if I announce these things on the home page and you come back to it, say in a week and do one query and one URL submission after having read a blog post about the progress?

Please? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Direct spike on Google hearth.</comment>


The rise of the corporate colossus is a giant problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21707210-rise-corporate-colossus-threatens-both-competition-and-legitimacy-business <comment><USER3> Blame "too big to fail" and negative interest rates.

When big banks had problems, the solution was to make even bigger banks and giving them free money in order to look good.

They take savers money with negative interest rates and give it free to big banks and companies like Google, Microsoft or Deutsche Bank.

Given that if you(as a person or small company) ask a bank for money you will have to pay 20% interest rates or so, this is a tremendous advantage for them.

Big companies have free money because they can ask for a loan and give back later less that what they took after inflation!!!

This means big companies could buy the competition instead of competing with them , like facebook with wassapp, with stock, being cheaper than having their overvalued stock go down with competition.

It also means big companies could buy their own stock in the market and pump up their value, making the stock acquisition cheaper and increasing board bonus(from stock owners) look reasonable.

Central banks and politicians are obliterating middle class and business owners. This is a terrible thing because History teach us this always happens before a (violent)revolution.

<comment><USER4> This argument doesn't make any sense to me. Neither Google or Facebook or Apple have been using cheap loans to fuel growth. They have more cash flow from operations than they know what to do with, they don't need loans.

<comment><USER5> They also can't borrow at negative real interest rates. Only some governments can. And you can't blame the governments for low interest rates. At least in the medium term, interest rates are mostly set by the market, supply and demand for loans. There's not a lot of demand.

<comment><USER6> Sure they can. AAPL issued bonds in 2015.

<comment><USER5> I didn't say they can't issue bonds. I said they can't borrow at negative interest rates, or even negative real interest rates.

Here's what they sold in February 2016, for example (annual inflation was 1.0%):

\- $500 million in 1.3% two-year notes issued at a spread of 60 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

\- $500 million in three-year FRNs (floating rate notes) issued at three-month LIBOR + 82 basis points

\- $1.0 billion in 1.3% three-year notes issued at a spread of 60 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

\- $500 million in five-year FRNs issued at three-month LIBOR + 113 basis points

\- $2.25 billion in 1.7% five-year notes issued at a spread of 80 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

\- $1.5 billion in 2.25% seven-year green notes issued at a spread of 105 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

\- $2.0 billion in 2.85% ten-year notes issued at a spread of 135 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

\- $1.25 billion in 3.25% 20-year bonds issued at a spread of 150 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

\- $2.5 billion in 4.5% 30-year bonds issued at a spread of 190 basis points over similar-maturity Treasuries

[http://marketrealist.com/2016/02/investment-grade- corporate-...](http://marketrealist.com/2016/02/investment-grade-corporate- bond-issuance-gained-traction/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In 1990 the top three carmakers in Detroit had a market capitalisation of $36 billion and 1.2m employees.

In 2014 the top three firms in Silicon Valley, with a market capitalisation of over $1 trillion, had only 137,000 employees.

<comment><USER8> Gvien the forum we're on, it's worth pointing out that today's white collar laborers are capturing one or two orders of magnitude less of the value they're creating than the blue collar workers of 1990's detroit.

360 billion* divided by 1.2 million = 300000 "per employee". Typical salary to 40,000ish-100,00ish range for laborers/engineers. The disparity in those numbers isn't so bad at all.

Conversely, 1 trillion divided by 137000 = 7,299,270 "per employee". Typical salary of engineers in those firms is closer to 100,000 to 200,000, and that's just for the golden child software engineers. And without accounting for massive cost of living differences between 1990 Detroit and modern day SV.

Which wouldn't be so bad if there were some engineers earning close to or more than the "per employee" numbers, but I've never heard of anyone making even close to 7 figures as an engineer at a big firm...

* I think you meant 360 bn, not 36 bn, right?

<comment><USER9> Not only that, but in US salaried status is routinely used to avoid paying overtime, when overtime is a tacit requirement of many jobs.

<comment><USER10> Even as a contractor with an hourly rate. The assumption is the rate given is for 40 hours a week. I've had a number of hourly contracts where I was told either work the over time or find a new contract. The lack of care to employees is appalling at times.

<comment><USER11> I've been on contracts that are flat billed based upon 40 hours / week but no overtime is chargeable. The problems start when more than 40 hours / week is regularly expected to perform assigned tasks to standards of the contract and there's little control you have over the client putting barriers in place that make you less productive making the true hourly rate at least 25% lower.

<comment><USER10> I've only had two types of contracts. One is absolutely nothing to do, what I'm hired to do is not feasible and shelved. The second is so busy, so much overtime you can't breathe.

So many jobs now, over work and expect over 40 hours. With no additional compensation. A majority of my contracts are flat rate. I had one role that paid half of my rate for over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IMO, this problem is mostly a factor of the consolidation of finance.

The roll up of banking makes it impossible for smaller enterprises to get traditional capital. We moved away from the old, boom/bust distributed banking model towards a weird form of command economy with a cartel of mega-banks, which are really just proxies for the government.

People blame technology for the post-recession economy, but I think the billions/trillions of capital the flooded the market never made it into the economy. No wonder little is happening outside of businesses that work with a venture model.

<comment><USER13> Sarbanes-Oxley probably played a role as well. Successful startups now chase acquisition over IPO, which leads to the creation of huge empires (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft) and few medium-sized players.

<comment><USER14> No, that's because the overvalued market caps wouldn't fly in an IPO. If Uber went public, they'd have to disclose real numbers, which probably indicate they're unprofitable. They're only worth $68 billion when the market doesn't have to pay out $68 billion.

It's today's very low interest rates that fuel "private equity", which is usually debt at some level.

<comment><USER15> How much investment is actually done based on such fundamental analysis?

<comment><USER14> Everything Berkshire Hathaway does.

<comment><USER16> Berkshire Hathaway is successful because they invest in monopolies/duopolies

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> * The share of GDP generated by America's 100 biggest companies rose from about 33% in 1994 to 46% in 2013.

* The five largest banks account for 45% of banking assets, up from 25% in 2000.

* About 30% of global foreign direct investment (FDI) flows through tax havens; big companies routinely use "transfer pricing" to pretend that profits generated in one part of the world are in fact made in another.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article did a good job of staying relatively neutral for such a controversial subject. It seems as though an oligopoly of multinational conglomerates will be the only choice for essential consumer products in a short 10/20 years. Without competition from smaller open-minded businesses, only innovation in rent seeking will take place. The companies that end up in control of the infrastructure and hardware will end up having more power than most of the world's governments. The cynic in me feels like we're in for some turbulent times.

<comment><USER19> It's not so strange that we get fewer "smaller open-minded business(es)" though, considering the increasing regulatory burden. Of course, they are maintainable - but they do consume a lot of resources to tick them all off.

Most of the regulations doesn't actually directly cost to comply with, but you'd need more staff or dedicate more time to things that are not your core business - that's money out of the pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > But better the grind of multilateral negotiation than moves such as the > European Commission's recent attempt to impose retrospective taxes on Apple > in Ireland.

Uh, isn't that "move" _enforcement_ of the results of multilateral negotiation (the EU and its rules)? What exactly will or should happen when parties of these multilateral negotiations and agreements the column champions violate the rules? I'm guessing it'll resemble a "retrospective tax" so closely that it'd be hard to tell the two apart.

<comment><USER21> > Uh, isn't that "move" enforcement of the results of multilateral negotiation > (the EU and its rules)?

Well in that case, shouldn't it actually be Ireland that got fined instead of retroactively taxing Apple?

<comment><USER22> Because Apple didn't pay the tax it owed to Ireland, Ireland should pay something? To whom, Apple? What could justify that?

<comment><USER23> Ireland set the tax rate that Apple complied with. Ireland is accused of providing a state funding to Apple by setting that low rate.

(I didn't downvote you).

<comment><USER24> This isn't specific to Apple or Ireland (or even taxes) fwiw. Ordering the company to pay back the subsidy is a normal part of the remedy for subsidies found to violate EU anti-subsidy regulations. The intent is to make it ineffective for a country to pay out subsidies, because they will in the end not have the intended effect, as the company won't get to keep the money. If the remedy were a fine levied on the subsidizing state, but without required repayment, illegal subsidies would have their intended effect of actually subsidizing the target firm (they'd just become more expensive, because the fine would become part of the cost of the subsidy).

For example, when Real Madrid was found to have been unlawfully subsidized by a local Spanish government earlier this year (they were given €18.4m as compensation for a land transfer that fell through), they were ordered to repay the €18.4m [1].

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- europe-36706262](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36706262)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A libertarian explanation is that in the age of the Regulatory State, it's often more important to be the biggest lobbyist than to make the best product.

"In the Game of Crony Capitalism, you lobby or you die."

<comment><USER26> The problem with the libertarian explanation is that it contradicts the actual facts. The "age of the Regulatory" state started in the 1930's. It has been in decline for decades--with major sectors of the economy being deregulated in the 1980's and 1990's. In the 1950's and 1960's, regulatory agencies often had the power to directly exclude potential competition and set prices for goods. They have a fraction of those power today. Surely, that decrease in regulatory authority would be linked to a decrease in consolidation. But consolidation has _increased_ during that time.

Moreover, there is a difference between a plausible theory and showing actual causation. How is lobbying helping Amazon and Wal-Mart to replace smaller retailers? Point to something concrete. Because it looks like the real explanation is the massive efficiency advantages those big firms possess.

Looking at other sectors of the economy: why are Apple and Samsung taking almost all of the profits in the smartphone industry? Are they better at lobbying the "Regulatory State" than HTC or Nokia?

<comment><USER25> > _It has been in decline for decades_

I don't have time to put together a great convincing case, so I'll just say that this is _very_ different from my view. Some high level regulations have been removed, sure, but meanwhile almost every corner of life now has regulations and regulators that have to be obeyed and asked for permission.

It would be nice to have some kind of objective measure(s) of the overall level of state regulation, rather than trade anecdotes/gut feels. Some economist has probably done that already.

<comment><USER26> I would guess your view derives from the fact that the parts of the regulatory state that have grown since the 1970's have more direct effects on individuals and small businesses: environmental, workplace safety, anti-discrimination, anti-money laundering. But there isn't much money in gaming those. The big- money sectors of the economy: telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing, and finance have been deregulated. And software has become a big-money sector of the economy and has remained almost completely unregulated.

I handle appeals in regulatory cases, so I have occasion to research historical regulatory treatment of different areas. It's really eye-opening to go read ICC, FCC, or FERC opinions from the 1940s and 1950s and compare them to ones from today. Agencies back then had vast powers: they could deny entry of a competitor into a market if they felt it would harm the revenues of incumbents. If you were an air carrier, you had to publish your prices, and if the agency did not like them it could impose prices on you. Those agencies are a shell of their former selves. Agencies used to have to power to structure industries top-down as they saw fit. Today, they might have thousands of pages more regulations covering various minutia, but nobody is going to build a "corporate colossus" lobbying to influence agency treatment of minutia.

<comment><USER27> I am unclear how that's an argument for thousands of pages of regulations covering minutia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > It means making it easier for consumers to move their data from one company > to another

I think this would be absolutely brilliant. The ability to readily move data from one service provider to another would provide a much-needed boost for competition in the digital space.

I don't know how common it is, but at least in Finland one can move their mortgage from one bank to another if they get a better deal elsewhere [1]. Or, one can move their mobile phone subscription and keep the old number. I find these kinds of service transfer entitlements essential for efficient competition.

[1] Or technically: one can always pay their Euribor bound mortgage off without extra cost, and take a new mortgage from another bank.

<comment><USER29> What type of data are you wanting to move? Would you just want a huge movable block of space that you could mount somewhere?

<comment><USER28> All data associated with my user account, perhaps with some kind of a schema if applicable. Other services could then implement data import features for this, or for just the part of the data that concerns the service they are providing.

Basically, it should be clear that all data connected to a person is irrevocably theirs. Any provider can build services for taking advantage of the data -- but it'd be the user's right to migrate it at their pleasure.

<comment><USER30> Standards happen so slowly. By the time people agreed on what should be in this, that agreement would be antiquated.

We need something like what happened with OpenID and Oauth. OpenID may be gone, but one company made a few bucks on it and OAuth is largely inspired by it. Someone needs to find a way to make a buck moving profile data around in a meaningful way then that becomes a de-facto standard that gets copied and used all over.

Then the government can regulate something that already exists rather than regulate something shitty into existence.

<comment><USER28> What standards? For sure there can't be any standard that would lend itself to all of the various ways your data is used and stored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > None of this helps the image of big business. Paying tax seems to be > unavoidable for individuals but optional for firms

This kind of grinds me. There are tons of tax breaks for individuals: mortgage interest deduction, tax-free health care, etc. In fact, the exclusion of health care benefits from taxation costs the government _more_ than all corporate tax avoidance schemes put together.

<comment><USER31> There are a few tax breaks for individuals, but many more for companies. They're called "business expenses" :). I wish I could deduct everything I required as an individual (notably, there is no rent deduction for individuals).

<comment><USER32> There are enormous tax breaks for individuals. The mortgage interest deduction (which is an abomination), for instance, costs $70bn.

<comment><USER19> I'd flip that around and say that's $70bn saved for people. It's not called a tax break for nothing.

Why do you consider the mortgage interest deduction an abomination?

<comment><USER32> Because it's hugely regressive.

<comment><USER33> Also, high home ownership causes NIMBYism and high leverage causes bubbles. It's hard to come up with a worse idea than mortgage interest deduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe it doesn't confuse others, but the removal of the word 'the' before "corporate colossus" (as it appears in the subtitle of the linked article) makes this title hard for me to parse.

EDIT: It's since been restored; thanks!

</comment><comment><USER35> See urban dictionary entry for technopoly.

Centralization is a big problem whether you have a mainly cooperative system like communism or a competitive one as in capitalism.

Decentralizing technologies can help us get systems that are distributed, diverse, and free to evolve but also capable of holistic measurement and operation.

Such as bitcoin, ethereum, NDN, swarm, Namecoin, 3d printing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> Growth is globalized. Global companies get a disproportionate share of growth. Therefore giants will become increasingly large relative to non-global entities.

I'm not sure what the specific problems are. Which makes prescribing a fix impossible.

<comment><USER37> In my (uneducated) opinion, the specific problem is that the people, through their governments, lose control over these large, global entities that affect their daily lives. When they get this big, there's no way to tax them and no way to punish them for wrongdoing - they could just move to a friendlier country, use loopholes, etc. Of course, thanks to various trade agreements, they will still have access to our markets...

And the consumer can't always go elsewhere - there may be no viable competition, or that competition gets bought by the larger company for what is essentially pocket change.

Too big to fail = too big to control

<comment><USER19> I know it's not an too popular opinion here on HackerNews and I'd say you're sort of right, but you got it in reverse. The problem is not that it's hard to control or tax companies, the problem is that it's not as easy for you or me to do the same.

You have to have significant resources to break free from local restraints, which is really unfortunate. It's also a lot of resources that gets spent, just so people or companies can do whatever they want with their own resources. In other words, it's possibly a loss of production - <USER2> resources could have gone elsewhere.

Please be gentle, I'm open for discussing these things.

<comment><USER38> It's not that you cant get there,

but indeed that they are out of control: they can remove money from an arbitrary economy and not necessarily put it back (see apple that sitting in an incredible amount of cache) => (they dont need to hire people locally.. at least not as much) => they -at the moment are- making poor countries/people even poorer, rich ones even richer => they have more and more power in less and less hands</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg: "Spotify Is So Good" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/25/mark-zuckerberg-spotify-is-so-good/

<comment><USER2> If they are so good, why don't they launch already? It's a fast moving world. My feeling is that by the time they launch, there will already loads of cooler things elsewhere.

In fact aren't there several music related YC companies that are probably way cooler than spotify? There was at least one where you put your music collection online and used a flash player to access it from anywhere from then on.

The only thing that could make spotify better than the rest would be some magic new formula for sharing with friends. I have not heard any details about that yet, though.

Sorry for the rant, but it gets a bit tiresome to hear "spotify is so cool" all the time without any details.

<comment><USER3> they have launched, I have been using spotify every day for a year now.

"your music collection online" - well, thats 90% of the reason spotify is so good, your music collection is all the music they have, which is a lot.

and streamed to flash? I have a hooky wireless connection, I can barely watch youtube without stuttering, but I can play spotify all day without a skip, its actually faster starting a track than itunes is.

as for sharing with friends, problem solved, collaborative playlists, and the fact you can play any music, completely solves this problem.

it hasnt launched in the us yet, its working on it, thats no reason to talk about how much cooler X is when you dont know what Y even is, I could complain about how hulu hasnt launched yet and how much it sucks, but I wont :)

<comment><USER4> _its actually faster starting a track than itunes is._

iTunes sucks. You should try a less bloated player.

<comment><USER5> _iTunes sucks. You should try a less bloated player._

He is... he's using Spotify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Spotify is cool. It's not available in my country. Happy with grooveshark.com

</comment><comment><USER7> It is. But that doesn't mean that Facebook is gonna buy it.

<comment><USER8> It always amazes me what passes for news on Techcrunch.</comment></comment>


All Web Developers Should Stop Doing This Immediately - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27581/

<comment><USER2> Submitted earlier - large amounts of discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597707></comment>


The coming era of unlimited – and free – clean energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/09/19/the-coming-era-of-unlimited-and-free-clean-energy/?tid=trending_strip_4 <comment><USER2> As much as I'd love it if things turn out as rosy as depicted in TFA, I'm not totally convinced.

I've read enough arch druid report articles and listened to enough peak prosperity podcasts to be rather cynical about claims that technological progress will deliver us from overpopulation and resource shortages.

[http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.de/](http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.de/) [http://www.peakprosperity.com/featuredvoice](http://www.peakprosperity.com/featuredvoice)

</comment><comment><USER3> "First, there will be disruption of the entire fossil-fuel industry, starting with utility companies — which will face declining demand and then bankruptcy. Several of them see the writing on the wall. The smart ones are embracing solar and wind power. Others are lobbying to stop the progress of solar power — at all costs."

And so, the fight begins... A repeat of what happened when Edison fought the gas lighting companies.

It may be that the only way to win against the utility companies is to go completely off-grid. Their lobbying will be intense as their livelihood is at stake.</comment>


New-less JavaScript (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://jfire.io/blog/2013/03/20/newless-javascript/

<comment><USER2> I use `delete object[key]` all the time to unset a property. I do think in the JS world the use of `new` is inconsistent, but avoiding the keyword does not rid of that fact. Your new-less libraries may be consistent with each other, but not the rest of the JS world that do it their own way. ([http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/))

This seems like a problem the language should solve incrementally. Especially with ES6 classes and modules!

<comment><USER3> `delete` is harmful, consider setting property to `undefined` or `null` instead.

<comment><USER4> Why is it harmful to delete a property that disappears forever?

<comment><USER5> It is going to depend partly on the internals of your JIT. Since JS objects are so mutable it's common to use their shape as the basic check for fast method dispatch. So if you take a Foo and add a property x then it will become a Foo(x). If you make lots of calls on objects of this shape then the method lookups will make it into inline caches and be very quick, calls against an object of shape Foo() or Foo(y) or Foo(x,y) will be treated separately. Inline caches for method dispatch are generally very small, so you'll omly get really fast dispatch for a few different shapes at any particular call site so the more consistent the shapes the more likely you are to keep the JIT happy.

<comment><USER6> So your argument is that we should currently and in the future constraint our usage of language-features based on the current state of language-runtimes?

How are we going to keep pushing the boundaries then? Had JS started with that sentiment, we would have a V8 JS runtime running about 100th the speed it does now for general purpose code, written with the aim of being as clear and reusable as possible.

Personally I prefer good, clear and concise code, over code written trying to appease some secondary affects on the inside of a black box which is not guaranteed to stay the same.

This is clearly an optimization, and I'm not saying all optimization is bad per se, but all optimization should be justified if it affects code-clarity. Are you sure these optimizations are warranted? Have you profiled your code and identified that this is a bottleneck for performance-critical sections of your code?

A former Nvidia-engineer had a really good rant about what sort of things your thinking leads to:

[http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your- opinions-o...](http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on- dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019)

Key quote: "So the game is guessing what the driver is doing, the driver is guessing what the game is doing, and the whole mess could be avoided if the drivers just wouldn't work so hard trying to protect us."

I agree it's not a direct analogue, but the same line of thinking still applies.

<comment><USER5> My argument is that you should be aware of what is required to implement a language (at least to some extent), and what may go against implementation assumptions. These things are always a tradeoff, and if you mutate objects enough through their lifespan then maybe implementations will move more towards looking at the methods attached to an object, and ignore the shape of the data except when accessing a property (the methods are already normally stored off to one side on the assumption that you won't change them), but that will either make objects larger (need to store a ref to the shape and to the methods per object) or require an extra indirection (need to follow from the shape to the methods) so may incur a slight overall performance penalty.

Yes, we are all in the same game as GL driver developers and game devs, and that goes for all language implementations. The fine details of what gets optimised best may change from VM to VM, and from release to release, but it's important to understand the general assumptions that these systems are built around, because they don't change quickly.

In general dynamic languages that allow properties to be created and deleted on individual objects are a complete PITA to optimise, and more generally mutability of classes makes stuff harder, so in general even though you have these abilities in JS and other languages your code will often perform better if you limit your use of them, especially in areas where performance is critical. This doesn't mean you shouldn't use those mutability features, but you should have some notion of the cost you might be incurring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the greatest things about preprocessing languages is that they usually use optimized and hard-tested features of the specific language.

Let's examine CoffeeScript ( which is one of the most popular ) :

        class Foo
          constructor: -> return 'bar';

        foo = new Foo();

will compile to :

        var Foo, foo;

        Foo = (function() {
          function Foo() {
            return 'bar';
          }

          return Foo;

        })();

        foo = new Foo();

Which IMHO, follows the very best practices of javascript. Since JS is such a flexible language if you don't have any coding standards, your code could become hell and unmaintainable very quickly.

I would advise not to use the proposed "New-less JS", because it breaks the general coding style guides that a lot of libraries use and yes it would be possible to write it that way, but keep in mind that your code would be one step less readable from random developers.

<comment><USER8> Is that really optimized/optimal? I'd be curious to see jsperf benchmarks of this method of constructor vs the straighforward approach.

The JS VMs tend to kind of finnicky and optimized towards certain types of idiomatic Javascript and it's my guess that the further off the common path you stray, the more likely you are to hit performance gotchas.

Your best bet is to transpile code that looks much like the benchmark suites they run. :)

<comment><USER7> I also agree with what you are saying. JS in terms of usage is so big that I guess developers behind JS compilers will have to optimize for "the most popular way of solving that problem".

In any case, why I mentioned preprocessors is that there is a lot of history behind every feature. As of this there are a couple of github issues [1] that explain why this approach has been used.

For the performance. Seems that "new" is way faster. [2]

[1] : [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues/912](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues/912) [2] : [https://jsperf.com/obj-create-vs-new/4](https://jsperf.com/obj-create- vs-new/4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "JavaScript borrowed the new and delete keywords from its less-dynamic predecessor languages. They feel a bit out of place in a garbage collected language and are a source of confusion for newbies "

They are? Delete maybe, due to language symantics - but not new. I think it's unfair to bundle them together in terms of newbie confusion.

Also every time I see one of these type of blog post, discussions in a book the work arounds are even worse.

JS is easy to understand, by the time you need 'new' it is not that difficult an extension of your current knowledge. As far as 'delete' even an advanced JS developer could go a year without calling it

<comment><USER10> 'new' is a source of confusion for newbies and experienced devs alike, sufficiently enough for them to ask questions on SO: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9468055/what-does-new- in-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9468055/what-does-new-in- javascript-do-anyway)

Even I have to refresh my memory on these ambiguous parts of the language from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The nice thing about JS is that it has so many "religions". But some people think there should only be ONE religion. While One religion would be easier for newbies, destroying all other religions would kill the language.

So can we just agree that many religions are nice. It's OK to try and convert people, but it's Not OK to force someone by changing the language itself.

With that said, I'm a bit worried about more and more religions entering the JS language. Like classes and block scope (ES6). And how some, both good and bad new features are forever changing the language.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think a good complement tothis concept is that of "this"-less Javascript, relegating it only to things like mixins.

So many headaches are to be had if you're not careful and using some decent functional things.

<comment><USER13> I don't think there's anything inherently evil, bad, or even particularly confusing about this. As long as you understand how it's being attached to a running function there's very little confusion to be had. The problem is that most of the resources for learning completely gloss over this incredibly important aspect of the language.

<comment><USER14> ...and too few of the posts complaining about it mention strict mode or ES6 fat arrow syntax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The library StampIt uses factory methods instead of new to allow some extra features. Works a lot like .extend() in other libraries but with some extra options.

[https://github.com/ericelliott/stampit](https://github.com/ericelliott/stampit)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's a movement in wrong direction. It's artifact that we can call class name without "new" and method name, because before ES6 there wasn't such thing as classes. Now we should just deprecate this artifact.

</comment><comment><USER17> The best reason to have new-less constructors is because it's now possible to use them as higher-order functions.

        [1,2,3].map(User)

<comment><USER14> As long as the constructor doesn't take multiple arguments [1], otherwise:

        [1, 2, 3].map(id => User(id))

[1] [http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch15.html#_pitfall_unexpected_opti...](http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch15.html#_pitfall_unexpected_optional_parameters)

<comment><USER18> I find it useful to have `unary` and `apply` around:

      [1,2,3].map(unary(User))
      [[1,2],[3,4],[5,6]].map(apply(User))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is this news? It says 2013 in the title ...

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel like being bullied for having to learn Javascript to do web programming. I wish there was a push towards supporting arbitrary languages for doing web development.

<comment><USER21> Well, that's possible with compile-to-JavaScript languages. Also you have the option of plugins like Unity, if you're going for something graphically adventurous.

That being said, JavaScript is a powerful tool, if wielded correctly. It's so flexible. In a lot of ways, it's like a pizza. One man orders a pizza with anchovies, another with green peppers. And on and on. Eventually it's like they've got two completely different dinners.

<comment><USER20> > Well, that's possible with compile-to-JavaScript languages.

I have tried to read code that was translated to Javascript using some source- to-source compilers and they are very hard to understand. On the other hand for a language like C, it is very easy to understand the output ( assembly ). Don't get me wrong, understanding the intricacies of assembly for each processor architecture is a difficult process, but the rules that define assembly language itself are not so, there is an opcode and some operands and each instruction performs an action on the operands or stored state in various registers. Javascript ( at least for me ) is too high-level to attempt to read a machine translated output. Programmers need to know at least _one_ level below the abstraction to which they are programming to.

<comment><USER15> I would say the output of most of the compile-to-js languages are easy or at least non-hard to read. It is usually the minification that causes problems and you don't have to do that in a development environment where you usually attach your debugger. It's usually also hard to debug a running application written in a static and compiled language (unless you have symbol tables and similar).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New York is making the U.S.' coronavirus trends look better than they are - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/us-coronavirus-new-cases-second-wave-new-york-b6eda2dc-ef39-4b61-9385-d02a2fd3c494.html <comment><USER2> Excluding CT gets you another 500 avg less. It can be argued to exclude the close by Philly metro area too that overlaps with NYC metro. That would be another 500 dropped cases on avg (all of PA is a few hundred more but I'm not counting all of it).

That makes the divide 2K vs 1K.

It's embarrassing that this hasn't been talked about more since it became evident weeks ago.

Nor has it been talked about enough that the tri-State NY area never should've been lumped in with the rest of the US. When one region a month ago accounted for double digit percent of cases and deaths for the world, it should be its own distinct thing.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's using XMPP? - <AUTHOR> What companies are using XMPP as a message bus, for instant messaging, push notifications, microservices, IoT, etc. and what does the rest of their messaging stack look like? <comment><USER2> OpenContrail uses XMPP for communicating between the control plane and vRouters. It has a modest userbase in the SDN/NFV areas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh nifty, that's a good one; I haven't heard of this before, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Facebook.com, talk.google.com. A well engineered messaging protocol. I also believe it's used by automatic toll collection machines.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was a lot of publicity a while back about Facebook and Google shutting down their XMPP endpoints. I'm reasonably sure Facebook is MQTT internally and just used XMPP as the public interface, but I don't know about Google Talk (or Hangouts, or whatever the new thing is called): Are they still using XMPP internally? Also I'd love to know about the toll machines if you have a reference!

<comment><USER4> Google is still using XMPP, but not officially for IM.

Goodle Cloud Messaging (GCM)[0] comes to my mind, where you use XMPP to send notifications to your Android/ChromeOS/... clients.

There is also Google Cloud Print [1], where XMPP is used internally by printers (my HP MFP M277dw supports it) to receive print jobs.

[0] [https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud- messaging/server#impl...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud- messaging/server#implementing-the-xmpp-connection-server-protocol)

[1] [https://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/](https://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Companies I know about off the top of my head who participate in the standards process somewhat: Isode (M-Link/C++), Surevine (Openfire/Java), Tigase (Tigase Server/Java), ProcessOne (Ejabberd/Erlang), ChatID (Prosody/Lua), Cisco (Cisco Jabber). Looking forward to hearing about others though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whatsapp!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use as your personal CRM? - <AUTHOR> I am seeking a personal CRM that I can use to keep up with friends, family and business relationships. I just started using Monica (monicahq.com) which covers everything I'm looking for. The glaring deficiency is the lack of any CardDAV syncing for Google Contacts. There is an API but a) there are undocumented required fields that break POSTs and PUTs and b) I don't want to roll my own syncing. I've been mucking with Zapier which can trigger a web hook at a new Google Contact but again, the Monica API is a bit rough.<p>What do you use as your personal CRM? If you use a few tools, what is your workflow? <comment><USER2> I pay for Monica, and use it heavily for managing personal relationships. Have an issue or PR open for the API docs deficiency you mention?

Also, keep in mind there are some pitfalls when using CardDav with Google Contacts.

[https://evertpot.com/google-carddav-issues/](https://evertpot.com/google- carddav-issues/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I just discovered this API issue this morning which prompted this note to HN. s far as syncing, I would be happy with a push from Google to Monica to begin. Here's the issue: [https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/2596](https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/2596)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sidenote: does anyone know of good books, blog posts, or videos on how to use a personal CRM effectively? What I'm really asking is: How can I learn to be better at the administrivia involved in maintaining personal relationships?

</comment><comment><USER4> I always wanted a personal CRM that reminded me when it was a good time to reach out to someone, and where I could read about past conversations.

At that time there weren't a lot of these apps/services, so I created a simple app that did just that. Keep notes of conversations per day per contact, set a (recurring) reminder, organize with tags and have birthdays reminders and suggestions.

Since I use iOS it's currently for iOS only. And most focus went to iPhone. The iPad version is a bit rough.

I'll be monitoring this thread for most requested features, and learn more about what people look for in such an app/service. And of course reach out to me of you'd like to talk more!

Feel free to give it a try if you're on iOS. Social Contact Journal: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/social-contact- journal/id118...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/social-contact- journal/id1186696582?mt=8)

<comment><AUTHOR> For me, monicahq.com has all the features I would ever need in a personal CRM _except_ syncing with a living contact registry (Contacts.app, Google etc.). Have a look at their feature list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sidenote: What would someone think if I used personal CRM to record down small details. I have heard some found it touching, that you actually spend time to do this with CRM or Pen and Paper. Some found it gross, as if you were tracking them.

Other than that, most of people uses are simply Contract Apps, which I wouldn't really call it a CRM.

<comment><USER6> I think your intention behind recording the notes and the relationship between you and the other person is important when determining if it is creepy. Also if you have a natural deficiency in memory or attention or meet a lot of people it might be particularly useful.

Full disclosure, I take notes on the people I meet so I can better interact with them. Or that's the hope anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had been using Google Contacts with a minor "hack" of using the "file as" field as a three digit priority field, but still with the person's name and leading zeros. So a contact record looks like this "095\. John Smith". Then when I come across a contact record I change that number, almost whimsically which makes it kind of like a bubble sort. As the same time, I made effective use of labels (tags). I have, however, recently switched to Nimble which I like, but am still getting used to. Syncing with Google Contacts is a mandatory feature for me, and Nimble allows 2000 syncs without additional charge via a third party.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for mentioning Monica. It looks a lot more polished than the last time I took a look at it.

I've been toying with the idea of making my own crm, but always put it off hoping someone else will do it better.

Other than syncing contacts, are you happy with Monicahq?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Monica is great. Specifically I like that it has a journal, notes, tags, conversation history, repeat (scheduled) events. The import from vcf works well too. I'm happy enough with it to pay the $5/month. If it had syncing, it would literally cover 100% of my requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Google Contacts, which syncs with the Contacts apps on my macOS and iOS. There are fields for contact info, and important dates. If there is any other important info, I add a note.

</comment><comment><USER10> Having some structure and more than anything, intention and persistence is key.

IMO most people blame the lack of the Personal CRM, but really the bottleneck is they're not recording information they want to remember about people.

I personally just use Google Keep to store notes I want to remember on people close to me. As for acquaintances, I just respond to Facebook updates and prompts as they happen.

</comment><comment><USER11> I put birthdays, other important dates, and short notes in a contact in Contacts.app.

But, I can't help but think if I'm looking for a CRM for personal use, I'm doing something wrong.

</comment><comment><USER12> Monica user here as well. Would be nice to get some syncing. Though as you said. It seems like it'll take quite a bit of work and isn't on the road map.</comment>


Java is the slowest of all - <AUTHOR> http://onlyjob.blogspot.com/2011/03/perl5-python-ruby-php-c-c-lua-tcl.html

<comment><USER2> Well they didn't use StringBuffer in java...

[http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2000/jw-0324-javape...](http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2000/jw-0324-javaperf.html)</comment>


How an RC airplane buzzed the Statue of Liberty, with no arrests - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/how-a-rc-airplane-buzzed-the-statue-of-liberty-with-no-arrests.ars

<comment><USER2> A few months ago, the idea that my [hacker] roomate and I were spitballing around was a drone that could fly from my house in Phoenix, to MIT's campus in Massachusetts.

The joke was that we both daydreamed about being able to go to school there, and building a drone that could go across the country would be cool enough to get their attention. They'd _have_ to admit us!

This was the type of thing that we would probably never, ever do, but sitting around drinking beer and talking about _how_ you could do it was still a fun time.

Then the joke got smaller. My mom makes the _best_ chocolate chip cookies in the world. Trouble is that she lives an hour away. How cool would it be to have a cookie delivery robot? Build a plane that can fly across Phoenix to my Mom's house, pick up some cookies, then fly back? Cookie robot sounds _almost_ feasible.

The most discouraging thing was to learn that if we even tried this, we would probably end up in jail. Flying an unmanned model plane like that is very, very, very, very illegal.

There are safety concerns, you see. It's _possible_ to get drones certified as legal by the FAA, but it requires either sponsorship by a University (Roomate graduated, I dropped out, so that is out of the question), or sponsorship by a defense-contractor.

I understand the safety concerns. The reason that the FAA calls this illegal is because they don't want unmanned model planes wandering into controlled airspace, or crashing and starting a fire or something. I get that.

But I _understand_ the safety concerns. Over half of the beers were consumed while having conversations about failsafe mechanisms to SCRAM the thing if it lost radio contact. This is very immature of me, I know, but it's still frustrating.

It's frustrating that this [TFA] is newsworthy _because_ the person who built it wasn't arrested. _Arrested_? How did we get to this point where, if you tell me a story about somebody flying a model plane around the statue of liberty, my first reaction is that he is probably locked in an interrogation room somewhere being "questioned"?

Does stuff like this put people at danger? Yes. Having a 10-20 pound chunk of couregated plastic and balsa wood crash into the street is _dangerous_.

Should the person be thrown in jail? I don't know, should the people who drive 4000 guided hunks of steel around populated areas while texting and adjusting their radio knobs be thrown in jail? Is my cookie robot really more dangerous than my 4200 low-speed, guided battering-ram called "Jeep"?

<comment><USER3> _Is my cookie robot really more dangerous than my [...] Jeep?_

I think so. This cookie robot would have to fly at least 500 ft AGL, and other aircraft do fly at that altitude-- crop dusters, traffic helicopters, aircraft landing or taking off, etc. If your cookie drone were sucked into an aircraft engine or hit a helicopter rotor, it could be catastrophic for those aboard that aircraft not to mention those on the ground near the crash, which could include hundreds of people. So I'd say yes, the cookie drone is more dangerous than your Jeep, especially if the cookie drone were as popular and numerous as automobiles.

 _...conversations about failsafe mechanisms..._

Personally, I think we'll eventually be able to build your cookie drone. And I think it has a chance of being very popular. But I think it will require a lot of coordination with the existing (legacy?) flying community, including things like new flight rules (maybe AFR for _automated_ flight rules, to go along with the existing VFR and IFR?), standard and well-tested automated guidance systems that are good enough for this use case but not able to be weaponized (existing GPS + accelerometers w/ Kalman filters don't meet this criteria), and new ground systems for takeoff and recovery.

Yup, I've had the same thought experiment. ;)

<comment><USER4> there are other objects flying 500ft AGL and much much higher you know. Every now and then they too hit aircraft and are sucked into engines. How many people have died due to them during last century of flight? As many as car crash deaths in 1-2 hours, few days at most?

And is it because they have some incredibly efficient TCAS module installed?

<comment><USER2> Griffon Vultures have been seen up north of to 36,000ft (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCppells_Vulture>)

Nature really, really is amazing. Part of the motivation for "The MIT drone" as it was lovingly called among my friends was trying to beat nature :).

There is a bird called the Arctic Tern which performs a polar migration (44k Miles/yr). The fact that there is an autonomous flying machine capable of refueling itself using its surroundings, and flying _that far_ is really daunting.

<comment><USER5> Bar-tailed godwits can do a crossing of the Pacific Ocean - Alaska to New Zealand - 10000km in 8 days non-stop.

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2664343/> has all the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Art Vanden Berg launched an autonomous glider up to where the sky is black in the daytime, six [edit: five] times, back in 2002: <http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/>

He wrote all the software (avionics, telemetry, and ground support) himself. It maintained a telemetry link during most of each flight, and landed successfully five [edit: four] times, I think most of them on autopilot.

Around that time, Jef Raskin wrote a thought-provoking piece on the security implications of UAVs such as Laima. I can't find it on Raskin's site anymore, but here's a mirror: [http://allnurses-central.com/world-news-current/next- time-ca...](http://allnurses-central.com/world-news-current/next-time- can-37112.html)

There's a site about building amateur autonomous UAVs run by a Wired editor, which nevertheless seems to have relatively reliable information. Disturbingly, it has a diagram of a Predator on the front page: <http://diydrones.com/>

These guys are doing a bunch of stuff with kites and balloons as well, specifically to make maps available. Although some jurisdictions (like China) place restrictions on such activities, they seem to be doing a lot of good, and so far nobody's ended up in jail: <http://grassrootsmapping.org/>

In 2008, someone used a small flying dildo helicopter to make a political statement against Garry Kasparov (warning, includes photos of a flying dildo): [http://hackaday.com/2008/05/19/flying-rc-penis-violates- ches...](http://hackaday.com/2008/05/19/flying-rc-penis-violates-chessmasters- airspace/)

The first writing I recall reading about this issue was "Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy", published in 1974; it mostly discussed the use of teleoperated UAVs for spying, not violence: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Invisible_Boy>

I think the concerns about terrorism are overblown. The world will never be perfectly safe, and people will keep on using violence against each other for quite a while yet, but fragile UAVs don't seem like they'll be a particularly big force multiplier as weapons. The concerns about privacy are probably much more significant.

</comment><comment><USER7> These people need to get into a LOT of trouble. This is not legal, and for good reason. I say this from the perspective of having designed, built and flown RC fixed-wing and helicopters for well over twenty years. As neat and sophisticated as they might look, these things are still toys.

They are not built to the same standards as real aircraft. Single failure modes abound and they are, in most cases, catastrophic.

I have seen model airplanes loose a horizontal stabilizer in flight for no apparent good reason. Or simply fall out of the sky like a brick when one of the cheap electronic parts inside fails. Figure out the kinetic energy of a 8 to 10 pound object travelling at 100+ miles per hour to understand the lethality potential.

The airspace he covered is flown by full-scale aircraft. Imagine being a tourist taking one of those NYC helicopter flights (done that) only to plummet to your death because some a-hole decided it was OK to take his $300 toy on a joy flight.

Beyond, that, imagine if this was, in fact, legal. Would you like to see 100 of these things flying without control around an airspace such as NYC? Bad idea.

They need to get into a LOT of trouble. This is definitely not something anyone should emulate or replicate. It will ruin the model aircraft hobby in the US forever.

<comment><USER8> I've not seen anything that said RC flight is illegal in controlled airspace, do you have a link showing this?

<comment><USER7> Operation of UAV's is most definitely regulated by the FAA, and for good reason. Per FAA rules, the fellow in question needed to follow full-scale airframe and operator certification (UAV operator), carry appropriate insurance and observe airspace restrictions per the FAA. If you are interested search the FAA site and regs.

As far as him having checked for flights before launching: What a lame joke! I have flown in a full scale helicopter in that airspace, around the Statute of Liberty, etc.. The pilots are in constant communication and visually scan the airspace for potential danger. They can't and don't do whatever the heck they want.

I am one of those people who doesn't need a law to understand that something should not be done just 'cause you can. It is dumb, stupid, moronic and dangerous to fly an RC plane over, around, close to people, buildings, bridges and small farm animals. You could kill people. No law needed in order to understand the reasons this is so. But they are there for those who lack common sense.

This guy is a moron. Certifiable. Sorry, no other way to put it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This guy's Vimeo account has a bunch of these videos. Most of them look like they're shot up mountains in western Europe (Austria?).

<http://vimeo.com/trappy/videos>

If you're going to watch one:

<http://vimeo.com/16604842>

In the downhill sections he is turning off the motor and gliding at about 150 km/h.

<comment><USER10> So having watched the video you suggested, and remembered the music on the original video I immediately recalled this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4U6T_BB1N8>

These guys do the same close-proximity flying in Alps, but in wingsuits. If you only watch a bit of it, skip to 3:05 and compare to the vimeo video!

<comment><USER9> That is quite beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is the guy thanking the TSA? What could they do and why would he even think they could be involved with something like that?

<comment><USER12> So many acronyms, should be thanking the FAA I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see a lot of comments here about (autonomous) drones, but this video was made with old-fashioned remote control. The laws are different. I think the only novel aspects of attaching a camera to an RC vehicle are (1) the fact that cameras are now cheap enough that you don't care if it gets destroyed in a crash, and (2) OMG terrorism.

</comment><comment><USER14> When the cost of these kinds of robot drops by another factor of ten, they're going to have the biggest impact on military security since the invention of nuclear weapons.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's the _cost of the plane_ that is the limiting factor here.

You might be underestimating the difference between this type of R/C plane and a military-class drone like a Predator. One of the more difficult challenges to overcome is the range of the communication link between the pilot and the plane. This guy demonstrated a range of mile or so. For many of the kinds of military uses that would have the "big impact" you're talking about, the plane would need over-the-horizon range-- which as a practical matter would mean satellite-based comm. So basically you need satellite launch capability to support this kind of project. The cost of _that_ would be a limiting factor.

<comment><USER15> I wonder how technically difficult it would be to utilise 3G mobile phone networks for cheaper remote control?

<comment><USER16> Probably not TOO hard, but the main issue there is the communication would not be reliable enough for something real time that had a low failure tolerance, like controlling a plane. If some packets got dropped and had to be re-sent, it could mean that the plane crashes if the communication was some sort of emergency time-critical maneuver.

<comment><USER17> The plane would have to be programmable and would have to support a semi- automated flying mode. Then there won't be a need for a high-capacity realtime data stream.

But then the plane would have to have obstable avoidance, auto-pilot, and it must return back to within radio range if it flies too far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The video is missing how the plane itself looks like. Otherwise, amazing!!

</comment><comment><USER19> RC planes (drones): soon the staple of any serious paparazzi.

<comment><USER20> Thus, no doubt, spoiling it for everybody as it suddenly becomes illegal to fly a remote-controlled plane without a licence.

<comment><USER19> If those things have enough range, you can just stay indoors, safe from police interference. It would be very difficult to trace unless the cops ran around in triangulation squads.

Other ways to do it could be by wireless internet.

<comment><USER20> Or they just wait until it lands. Either they catch you picking it up or they confiscate it from you; either way the flight becomes unworthwhile.

<comment><USER19> If the contraptions are cheap enough, or the footage valuable enough, there'd be no need to recover it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know how the police found him? (The Ars post mentions the police visited him while he was doing it, and you can see the police at the end of the video)

Someone phones in to 911 an RC Plane buzzing buildings, etc... but with the tools at the police's disposal, how would they have found where he was?

<comment><USER21> They probably took the address from the caller and looked for the plane near there. Once finding it, they likely looked around the area for a guy with an RC remote.

Of course they could have also used a radio direction finder.

<comment><USER10> Hmm but he was flying over a huge area - from Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, apartment buildings on the waters-edge, etc.

I'm wondering if they used radio direction finder - but a) would they have that equipment to hand and b) how would they know what frequency to be looking on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> About two years ago I lived in Long Island City, around Vernon Boulevard and 44th Drive. At least a couple times a week I'd see an RC plane doing circles around the neighborhood and I always wondered who was controlling it and for what purpose.

Now I know.

</comment><comment><USER23> My immediate thought: filming POV shots for superhero movies just got a whole lot cheaper.

Thought #2: it's only a matter of time before someone tries to use such a setup to kill someone using a small anti-personnel explosive delivered by such a device.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great. One more way to strike fear and add to the regulatory glut.

<comment><USER25> No. This is the wrong response. Just as the general public shouldn't be afraid of things like this, we shouldn't be afraid of the regulatory response. It is our responsibility to fight that response and preserve fun. If _hacker news's_ response to this video is "great, here comes more regulation", then we have truly lost.

<comment><USER24> Referring to the suggestive title of the article, which seems to cultivate a negative knee jerk reaction to those outside of Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> it was also featured on msnbc: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/40492187#40492187>

</comment><comment><USER27> These sorts of unauthorized flights, combined with model rockets from hobby stores and household cleaners could have created a terrorist nightmare. Where are the feds?

<comment><USER28> Even worse, the New York City authorities missed the opportunity to tax the filming:

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/film/html/news/070108_moftb_adopts_r...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/film/html/news/070108_moftb_adopts_rules.shtml)

<comment><USER29> Ha!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How Twitter users responded to gun control debate - <AUTHOR> http://twithinks.mit.edu/gun <comment><USER2> The US map is somewhat useless unless you normalize it for population (at the least, total population, although population of Internet or Twitter users would be better). It's not interesting that California has a lot more people with Twitter opinions on gun control than Idaho, given that California has a lot more people, period.

<comment><USER3> Also, time of day. It turns out people talk about guns a lot more when they are not sleeping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally, it looks as if the nation is breathing (i kinda like that for aesthetic reasons). If we bin the counts by day, a lot of the temporal resolution will be lost. What do you suggest?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just wanted to point out that searching on the term 'gun' probably skews towards those who beleive in stricter legislation.

<comment><AUTHOR> We mainly want to filter this keyword to see how the discussion of "gun" is affected by the events following Sandy Hook tragedy. The opinions classification is not done over the same dataset.</comment></comment>