Creator - <AUTHOR> https://www.magicleap.com/creator <comment><USER2> Lots of really interesting details in the [developer documentation][1]. Quick summary of the hardware:

* 6-DOF tracked controller

* Eye tracking

* Multiple depth of field display

* Persistent location tracking across multiple rooms

* Processor/GPU power comparable to "high end mobile hardware"

And software:

* Custom operating system based on Android (but heavily modified)

* Multiple apps can run at once and be displayed in the same physical space

And a few limitations:

* FOV is going to be rather small

* Variable depth-of-field display doesn't work well with objects less than a foot (30 cm) from your face

* Takes a few seconds for the system to adjust when you move real objects around (so if you move your couch, it won't notice instantly)

* The display can't draw darkness or black (virtual objects can't cast shadows on real ones)

[1]: [https://creator.magicleap.com/](https://creator.magicleap.com/) (Requires login)

<comment><USER3> We still have to wait for the exact FoV, and the eye tracking seems interesting but it doesn't seems to be better than the Hololens, and won't be from the 2018-2019 Hololens.

<comment><USER2> Wait, the Hololens has eye tracking? That's interesting, I'd never heard that before.

Anyway, I think the main innovation Magic Leap seems to be pushing over its competitors is its multiple depth of field display. It'll be interesting to see how big of a difference that actually makes in practice.

<comment><USER4> No HoloLens doesn't have eye tracking. I think they're saying the device as a whole doesn't seem to be better than HoloLens. Which I might agree with. The form factor may be stranger though, which would be an accomplishment.

<comment><USER5> Accurate eye tracking UI/UX might be the game changer that puts the ML over the HoloLens, despite its other shortcomings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does everyone make of perpetual license to content agreement? Is this just so they can operate the service, or are they able to sell and use your content without cutting you in?

> Specifically, you grant Magic Leap a worldwide, irrevocable (except as set > forth below), perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully > sublicensable right and license to use, copy, display, store, adapt, > publicly perform and distribute Your Content so that Magic Leap can operate, > deliver, and improve our Services.

<comment><USER7> When lawyers set these things up, they tend to keep things as broad as possible. In practice this means that they can show how cool their technology is in a commercial, while showcasing your app without necessarily your approval. Obviously it would be absurd to make money of your content and not cut you in, since those types of actions ripple very quickly in dev communities.

<comment><USER8> You can't excuse a bad agreement by just arguing "it's so ridiculously in Magic Leap's favor that it's against their interest to actually enforce it."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's nice that we can start building with the SDK, but I'm more interesting in experiencing what I've made. I'd rather have the device and build a simple hello world demo that inspires me to build more vs spend a bunch of time diving deep into an sdk and while having no idea how the end user will experience the stuff I create. With iOS for example, you could develop a majority of apps by just using the simulator, since the experience is (mostly) 2d. But I remember when starting out, the more fun projects to work on were using the accelerometer. The only way to experience the magic in that case, was with an actual device. With Magic Leap, the entire experience is spatial. So it's probably the other way around where the device is mostly the only way to really understand what it is that you're building.

<comment><USER9> Yea very strange that they released the SDK and tools without the hardware. How r u supposed to know the ins and outs, quirks, user experience to expect on the glasses without playing around a bit with them first, maybe with a few pre supplied apps by magic leap. I can think of a few reasons, none of them good, to release tools before the platform

<comment><USER10> I think releasing the developer hardware too early can ruin the whole product launch. People will form their opinion based on the reviews of the devkit hardware and sample apps.

Launching the consumer product without apps is not good either. By launching the SDK early, developers can play around with it. Maybe they can even pick serious and promising apps to some "insider" program and provide access to real hardware.

<comment><USER11> This is a modern thing which I don't think applies to technology that is (ostensibly) category setting. In the early days of consumer computing, the hardware was released with a handful of supported software that the hardware maker teamed up on, then MAYBE a devkit would come out.

The most hardcore would create their own DevKits.

[http://devkits.handheldmuseum.com/](http://devkits.handheldmuseum.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks like Magic Leap is running a heavily modified version of Android.

For a project to take pure Linux Desktop to VR, see SimulaVR: [https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula](https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula)

If you are interested in seeing Linux Desktop go from 1% of Desktops worldwide to competing with Windows/Apple, show this project some love.

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/graphs/contributors)

I love seeing open source projects with multiple active developers. Georgeswinger has 47 commits on the project now, and is the third most prolific developer when ranked by commits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone comment on what are some compelling use cases for Magic Leap that can be developed using these APIs ? Still seems to me that they are constrained by a device that you need to carry

<comment><USER15> For me, a completely virtual desktop for work.

<comment><USER16> Highly limited field of view means that even if everything else lines up for this (which is unlikely), it won't work for you.

EDIT: Also, this seems like a better use case for VR than AR.

EDIT2: Also, it can't draw black.

<comment><USER15> I tried VR, way too immersive.

<comment><USER17> Maybe a better way to implement AR would be by combining real-world images (through cameras) with CGI into a VR goggle. One problem though: focusing your eyes doesn't work as expected. But at least you can get better black pixels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So... Can we buy the product?

<comment><USER19> The product doesn't exist. The only image of the device on that Creator page is a 3D render:

[https://www.magicleap.com/_next/images/e14acd33a1d6136786b0b...](https://www.magicleap.com/_next/images/e14acd33a1d6136786b0bc78feecddca.jpg)

Ask yourself why a company would only release a 3D render when it's meant to be finished before the end of the year ("Shipping in 2018").

<comment><USER20> I'm a bit fed up of the childish negativity that always seems to be sent in Magic Leap's general direction.

Instead of putting energy into this I'd suggest pointing the energy towards creating something yourself.

To the Magic Leap Team - I am a believer :-) especially if you nail the stuff that others don't focus on like smooth interaction models (i.e. voice, gesture, 6DOF mobile controller etc.)

<comment><USER21> And I'm a bit fed up with the fanboyism over vaporware and the lack of perspective while simultaneously accusing those who /have/ perspective as being lazy.

I, for one, /did/ try creating something at that company. Instead all I got was a cut in pay, overwork, and a lack of career prospects while still being required to play roles with rediculous levels of responsibility under working conditions even OSHA would find intolerable.

Mind you, this was all happening while being told that my many years of experience actually shipping consumer products at other companies was worthless and that the failed leadership forklifted from Nokia would save the day as they proceeded to continue making short-sighted decisions and ignoring the experience they hired.

No, I will /happily/ sit back and watch and heckle. And why am I not starting my own thing? Because when they fail to deliver the ill-defined "magic" they so heartily promise, they will destroy an entire field I used to have faith in actually taking off. Funding will dry up and VCs will turn away after this fiasco.

Believe what you want, but keep your accusations of lack of trying to yourself.

<comment><USER22> Interesting. I'd certainly love to hear more about the inside scoop (but obviously don't say more than you legally can).

What's your take on the current push with the SDK coming out? Do you think this signals that they're really getting ready to ship something, or do you feel that they're still unready based on what you saw there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel like a site shouldn't have to assume that you're familiar with their product to understand what they're trying to push. This single page is useless to actually explain what this is in context, you need to click back to the main site (which is at the bottom of the page) to find out, and even then it's very sparse.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some years ago I saw (here on HN?) a video of an iPad app that showed kids drawing lines on blank paper, then tooking a picture of the drawings with the app. After that, they would be able to run nice games with those same lines serving as the scenario.

Does anyone know what was this?

<comment><USER25> There is [https://attractive.se/games/papergame/](https://attractive.se/games/papergame/) and then [http://www.quivervision.com/](http://www.quivervision.com/) does something similar with drawings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it unrealistic to hope for a linux SDK? They have Unity and Unreal SDKs (both of which engines support Linux in my understanding), and their custom OS is based on Android.

<comment><USER20> Would love this too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The front page should tell us exactly what this is and who/what it's for. Those with knowledge of this industry might be able to jump on board quickly, while everybody else is left scratching their heads.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm getting SO SICK of random websites pausing my podcast because they have some 'video' on their page that screws it up.

I couldn't even see a video or animation on the page. But I was already pissed off before I started reading.

<comment><USER28> IMO this is less a fault of websites that contain media, and more the fault of the OS that mediates what media is playing.

In other words, there should be a toggle to "default mute the web and keep spotify running".

<comment><USER27> I disagree. How is the OS supposed to know the difference?

If you want to make a nice animation, how about not including an audio track? Or using the attributes to specify it should be played muted so it won't cut my audio by default (what YouTube and others do).

<comment><USER29> The OS (or browser, rather) probably shouldn't allow autoplaying sounds at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Will it help me find my keys?

</comment><comment><USER31> Are there good 3D/depth cameras that work with Linux?

<comment><USER32> I've been using the intel realsense D415 recently on linux/windows and it works quite well.

<comment><USER33> Can concur. I'm running a pair of D435 under Linux. Still some teething issues, see the SDK and issues at [0], but the quality of the data out of these things is amazing compared to previous generation sensors.

[0]: [https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense](https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense) [1]: [https://github.com/intel-ros/realsense/](https://github.com/intel- ros/realsense/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I still wont be convinced the magic leap isn't vaporware until I see a demo that isn't an obviously prerendered mockup.

</comment><comment><USER35> I had to go half way down the page to get a hint as to what this software is. I did not find anywhere on that page that describes it for anyone who doesn't already know what it is.

<comment><USER36> To be fair, the early-adopter audience for this SDK product is definitely one who already knows what Magic Leap is, and what this would be for.

I would assume once the project is generally available, more time/effort will be spent marketing the creator tools to a wider developer audience.

<comment><USER35> If one wants to promote anything, explaining what it is on the front page would be essential. I see these omissions in abundance on tech web sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Timing? It feels like VR is old news and there's no killer use-case for AR.

<comment><USER38> Welcome to the bleeding edge. If that's how you think then tech may not be for you.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what do you think about "signin without logging in" for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to get people to sign in seems to be a big obstacle to getting user takeup.<p>Do you think it is an acceptable idea to allow people to sign in by sending them a link with a random string linked to that user? i.e. if someone has that link then they are trusted to log in.  What do you think? <comment><USER2> I hate signing it when I'm first exploring an app. See DJ Patil's talks on building data driven apps. Our (user + application) first interaction is like a first date. I'm not giving you access to my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Google account on our first date.

I'm sure there are levels of access that can be granted to slowly introduce users to your app.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have a way to build in guest accounts that will expire after X hours / days?

Hearing 'sign in without logging in' makes me cringe, but I can see why you would want to do this. I hear what Joachim said that it really is no worse that being able to recover password via email, but it seems there might be more opportunity for a single email to go astray (or accidentally forwarded) than an entire account to be hijacked.

</comment><comment><USER4> Security-wise, this is not worse than having a "recover password" link that, given an e-mail, will send you your username and a new random password (and much better than such a link that sends you your chosen password.) For bonus pointw, implement HTTPS and SMTP STARTTLS.

I expect that some people won't be too happy about having to dig the link out of their mail, but that's fixable by allowing user/password as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Its capability-style authentication. If the capability gets loose, so does the authentication.

Usually capabilities have a time-limit and sometimes a blacklist.</comment>


Show HN: Coffee2D – A simple HTML5 game engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LanJian/coffee2d

<comment><USER2> As someone who played around with building Isomorphic games in HTML5, well done. The API is fairly clean, and the examples are solid (although the examples link in the README is broken).

Quick question though, as someone who might use / submit a pull request to this project...

Why coffeescript over ES6? As someone who used to use coffeescript for everything, and has since switched to ES6/7, I see coffeescript heading out the door. Not to mention that compilation to ES5 gets quite convoluted with coffeescript, which could lead to performance issues / weird bugs that force you to drop into raw ES5 anyways.

Awesome project, great work!

<comment><USER3> In regards to Coffeescript over ES6, I still turn to CF for these:

1) postfix conditionals 2) list comprehensions (will probably be in ES7) 3) the .litcoffee format 4) use of -> or => for defining functions unbound/bound to `this` 5) python-escue whitespace (i love it) 6) array slicing (some_array[3 .. 8]) 7) regular expresions defined on several lines (expanded for readability) 8) friendly "item in some_array" that translates to .indexOf() condition 9) @value becomes this.value 10) The existential operator? is awesome. 11) () -> a = 1 b = 2 return { a, b } # becomes: { a: a, b: b }

There are others... I very much enjoy the syntax coffeescript has for its for loops. for value in some_array for value, key in some_array for key of some_object for key, value of some_object for own key of some_object for own key, value of some_object # for-of uses Object.hasOwnProperty()

Coffeescript just needs a for loop form that works with iterators, then I will be happier. I can write in Coffeescript and distribute both that and the compiled JS, no problem. This feels comfortable to me. I hope was ES6 becomes common that Coffeescript's class syntax will "fall through" to the same ES6 way underneath.

<comment><USER4> You can get ES7+ with babel. [http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/experimental/](http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/experimental/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds interesting. Is there a demo somewhere so that we can see it in action?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you can clone the repo or just download the examples folder and open the index.html from each example.

<comment><USER5> Yup, got it. Was just wondering if there was a hosted example somewhere. But maybe I'm the only person who is that lazy?

Either way, looks great so far. CoffeeScript is still my fave.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just remembered I actually do have a hosted example -> [http://gamehack.herokuapp.com/](http://gamehack.herokuapp.com/). This was a game I did for a hackathon with an earlier version of the engine. It also uses websockets. You need to open the game in two different tabs to play(open them in Chrome, for some reason inputs are not working in Firefox)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Care.com Puts Onus on Families to Check Backgrounds – With Tragic Outcomes - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/care-com-puts-onus-on-families-to-check-caregivers-backgroundswith-sometimes-tragic-outcomes-11552088138 <comment><USER2> I checked my state (CO) and it took all of 1 minute to find a nice list of all of the licensed non-24 hour Child Care facilities. I'm baffled that in liue of validating licences themselves, cannot just link the list of licensed facilites for the appropriate state or county.

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/Vw9JT3](https://outline.com/Vw9JT3)

I'm really suprised outline.com still works considering not only does it bypass paywalls but also strips out all the ads. I suppose only a small percentage of users are going to use this to bypass the paywall.</comment>


Canada's ex-defense minister: Aliens would give us more tech if we'd stop wars - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57616630-71/canadas-ex-defense-minister-aliens-would-give-us-more-tech-if-wed-stop-wars/?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TechnicallyIncorrect&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hacker-news-feed+%28Hacker+News%29 <comment><USER2> I guess I look at things differently.... I was actually expecting.... hoping for someone suggesting that if we focused our technological development on defending against hypothetical aliens, but more realistically start with something to deal with potential Earth colliding asteroids, we'd make some useful technological gains.

Ho hum...

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel sorry for the guy. Really. To make such a fool of himself in such a public forum...

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds too good to be true.</comment>


Quora and the Quest to Answer Every Question - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattlynley/quora-and-the-quest-to-answer-every-question <comment><USER2> I wonder how much Quora paid for that fluff piece. The real question is: why is Quora not making money _now_? Quora has been going since 2009 with zero revenues, and has over 100 staff burning through investment money. If they could be making money already they would, and the lack of proper metrics is extremely suspicious.

It's highly likely that answers are not as monetizable as the company thinks. If they were, they'd be doing it already. I also think that founders that try to get rich off of the free labor of contributors have no future. I wrote an analysis of this company a while back, but it still stands: [http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y- combinator/](http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y-combinator/)

</comment><comment><USER3> "That's because Quora needs at least a few data points if it's going to offer a good set of content to new users and keep them interested, instead of confused, as to what the purpose of the site is."

Oh, I think the "you must log in or else we'll hide the answers" establishes quite clearly what the purpose of the site is - and since that purpose is "monetize the ever-loving bejeebus out of people writing answers for free", that's why I close the tab when I hit a Quora result...

<comment><USER4> It's also what's going to kill the site. Which is a pitty, because it fits a good niche, between Stack Exchange which needlessly restricts the questions that can be asked, and Yahoo Answers which is just too low quality.

Personnal message to the HN crowd: if you start a Quora clone that is more open, quite a few people might switch. I think I would, if the site works well enough.

<comment><USER5> What will kill the site exactly? I don't see that many problems with advertisement as a monetization strategy. That has worked well for Google, Facebook, etc.

I struggle to think of an alternative method of scaling something like this, other than donations (Wikipedia). If you want to target everyone, ads are your best bet.

edit: the point is having to log in, rather than the advertisement, that'll kill the site.

I'm not sure about that choice either, but similar arguments apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am guessing the reason they aren't putting ads on Quora yet it would limit their ability to raise money. Uncertainty drives the theoretical value higher because while the average CPM on ads might be say $10, they can project because of their higher quality content that they will be able to charge $25 or $50 CPM or something like that. So, they can sell projections and vanity metrics instead of actual revenue to investors.

Also, not having ads means they are totally product focused, not focused on ad sales and driving up their ad rates. That helps them keep their team small so they don't burn through money hiring to build up and sell their own advertising system.

Last, not putting ads on their site insulates them from the ups and downs of the advertising market. If ad prices drop one quarter, their future projections have to change a lot because of the real numbers.

Long story short, I don't think if Quora put AdSense on their site that they would have been able to raise $161 million dollars.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does Quora generate any revenue at all?

<comment><USER7> Nil, but ads are pretty much guaranteed to arrive during 2015.</comment></comment>


U.S. Considers Open-Source Software for Cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/cybersecurity-open-source-2014/

<comment><AUTHOR> Bruce Schneier has a short post on this [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/open- source_so...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/open- source_sof.html)

The best line is from one of his commenters : _Something I told a customer just yesterday - "Real security is not compromised when people become aware of it."_</comment>


Who is the better coder, the one who hand codes or relies on the IDE help - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> False dichotomy.

I've known coders who would be lost without using a sophisticated IDE and who get stuff done, producing code that is clean, clear, easy to maintain, is well documented, passes all tests, and is generally superb.

On the other hand I've known coders who write code in vim and who _also_ get stuff done, producing code that is clean, clear, easy to maintain, is well documented, passes all tests, and is generally superb.

The measure is in the work, not in the tools. The skills are not in how you produce the code, but in the code you produce.

Having said that, the very best coders I know don't use complex IDEs. But that's anecdote, not data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked someone to hand code. This guy was so used to Dreamweaver, that he could not just remember certain code, like mysql query. But on the DMW, he was fine, clicking away, getting stuffs done.

So the best coders are hand coders?

<comment><USER3> No. The best coders are the coders who produce the best code.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm...even if they cannot code or remember the syntax without the help of the IDE?

<comment><USER3> In that case it is their manager's responsibility to ensure they have access to the IDE. The important thing is how effective the combination of programmer + hardware + software + other working conditions is. I don't see that considering a coder in isolation is terribly useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it is the testing process for an interview then?

<comment><USER2> It's the interviewer's job to decide what they're testing for. Some developers need an IDE - that does not make them bad developers.

An interviewer should ask

        How can we help you show us why
        you'd be good for this job?

Stupid tricks don't help you determine if someone can do a job. Tiny, trivial programming tasks don't tell you if someone _can_ do the job, but can (sometimes) tell you if someone _can't_ do the job.

Interviewing is hard, there are no short cuts. You need someone who is smart, will get things done, can interact usefully with others, and adds value. Sometimes using an IDE is the best way to accomplish that - why ignore someone just because they don't work the way you do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IDE's tend to be used as a crutch. Every so-called developer I've ever met that relied on an IDE spent more time goofing around with IDE features than writing anything useful. And any code they produced ended up being junk that barely worked.

The best coders I've ever known use a simple file structure as their IDE. Those same coders tend to write all of their code in a plain text editor. Only for personal preference, the best developers usually prefer a text editor with syntax coloring and various matching/highlighting features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct..Using an IDE for coloring, matching, highlighting okay. But using an IDE such as DreamWeaver and rely on its coding structure and when asked to hand code, wonder what the syntax of the mysql query statement should be, is not very welcoming. If this is the case, they cannot properly debug a code written by someone.

what is your opinion?

<comment><USER4> You either generally know the syntax of a particular programming language or you don't. There's nothing wrong with looking up the details of a particular function. Sometimes when I'm really busy, I find its easier to look up the details of a function than change my mental focus or train of thought. When that happens, I usually have a favorite book or website that details the language. Also, you don't need a fancy IDE for syntax coloring/matching/highlighting. A very simple text editor tends to be alot faster and easier to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is sometimes, assuming the scenario for an interview.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to gain webapp exposure from a generation notorious for hating advertising? - <AUTHOR>

In building web applications, I keep running up against an issue: How do I gain exposure without pissing people off by telling them about my product?
Users are numb to advertising. Scoping Twitter updates for potential users looking for a solution you offer seems wasteful, and a bit creepy, and seems like the wrong context to reach out to users. Being featured on sites that deal in what your web app offers seems like a shot in the dark at best.
I don't want to shove apps down people's throats. I want them to want to use it. How does one go about that? <comment><USER2> Make it good enough for it to not be a shot in the dark. Telling us is a good start, a Showing HN is one of those things that gets good exposure to users who don't mind that sort of self-advertising.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it a consumer or business app?

<comment><AUTHOR> I build mostly consumer apps. I suppose I hadn't thought about there being multiple approaches.</comment></comment>


Empty a file with a "touch" like alias ( on *nix systems) - <AUTHOR> http://coderwall.com/p/hvvi9w

<comment><USER2> Do you know there is better way than what has been described in the article !!

Its dead simple , on a shell prompt just execute :>filename

<comment><AUTHOR> didn't know that. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Show HN: PokeDex TF – image classifier for pokemon - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hk.com.martiansapp.androidapp.tfpokedex&hl=zh_HK <comment><AUTHOR> By using the embedding TFLite, I build an image classifier is built to identify the first generation of Pokemon.</comment>


Russian meteor largest in a century - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/russian-meteor-largest-in-a-century-1.12438 <comment><USER2> Living in the country, there are lots of long boring drives where you mind wanders and you grow up very familiar with what a "shooting star" looks like streaking against the night sky.

One day, driving home I happened to look out at something I thought was a plane and nearly drove off the road as I saw a meteroid falling silently through the sky. There was absolutely no sound and it moved much slower than I expected. After I regained control of my car and pulled it over to get out and watch, I saw small pieces silently broke away and the light show continued until it went over the horizon. It was totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before or since. It's dreamlike and beautiful.

I waited a few minutes after it went below the horizon since the angle it went on made me think it might have made it to the ground, but I never heard anything. It was never in the news, and nobody talked about it afterwards, for all I know I'm the only one who ever saw it. It was both terrifying and amazing. I had no idea what I was looking at since it didn't look like any picture of this phenomenon I'd ever seen.

One thing I'm sure of, is that I've never seen a video that ever does such a spectacle justice. There's so many subtle details that get completely obliterated on video.

Here's some video that do a pretty good job of showing what they look like.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWhrW7lpqZM> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyW0g1SIyxI>

The videos of the one in Russia are on an entirely different scale. The sonic boom was tremendous, the amount of light being thrown off of that thing was unbelievable. Extrapolating from what I saw and how I now know video changes things, this must have been an unbelievable beautiful and terrifying sight.

<comment><USER3> Wow, those videos (and your story) are mindblowing.

I wonder what must have gone through the minds of our ancestors when, hundreds or thousands of years ago, they'd witness such events (let alone ones similar to the Russian meteor). A lot of old creation myths etc. make a lot more sense now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice coverage. I especially like the infrasound analysis. The estimate of 100kT explosion suggests this thing was an order of magnitude scarier in person than it was on video, and it was pretty damn scary on video.

<comment><USER5> So Fat Man and Little Boy were approx 15-20 kT. Is that apples to apples? If so, holy crap.

<comment><USER6> Ground Zero allows you to pick a place and a bomb and nuke an area.

Unfortunately it hops from 21 kT to 400 kT, but still.

(<http://www.carloslabs.com/projects/200712B/GroundZero.html>)

<comment><USER7> This is actually completely useless since these explosions are far closer to the earth -- probably between 100 meters and 1 km altitude [1], vs. 10-30 km estimates for this meteor. Also, it only shows thermal radiation effects, which are insignificant here.

This is an appropriate calculator for meteors [2-3], including the effects of the actual blast (overpressure), not just heat. The documentation says windows are shattered at about 6,900 Pa (1 psi).

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions>

[2] <http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/>

[3] <http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth> (Flash)

<comment><USER8> Here's what it's like to be 10,000 feet below a 2kt nuke (1957).

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlE1BdOAfVc>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Disregarding the 1000 tons meteor that blasted in the Amazon in 1930: <http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html>

<comment><USER7> This one was 7,000 tonnes (mass).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now.we.know why we need meteor defense. If this rock ( that is.actually small ) ended hitting a 10 millions people city filled with glassy skyscrapers, what would happen? How many people.dead or in hospitals?

<comment><USER11> No, meteor defense can get in line behind heart disease, automobiles, suicide, gun violence, war, police, and all the other things astronomically (heh) more likely to kill people, therefore more deserving of our attention.

<comment><USER12> Always love how people throw out "gun violence" as if "gun violence"(as if there is such a thing) is so distinguishable that it should be focused on above "violence".

<comment><USER13> Indeed. The fact that guns save lives around the country on a regular basis is almost completely ignored by the media:

Guns Save Lives [http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/guns_save_...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/guns_save_lives.html)

 _"If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."_

<http://gunssavelives.net/> has a huge collection of articles like these:

Son Uses Dad's AR-15 To Defend Home [http://gunssavelives.net/self- defense/video/son-uses-dads-ar...](http://gunssavelives.net/self- defense/video/son-uses-dads-ar-15-to-defend-home/)

Armed Citizen in TX Stops Shooting Spree and Saves Cop [http://gunssavelives.net/self-defense/armed-citizen-in-tx- st...](http://gunssavelives.net/self-defense/armed-citizen-in-tx-stops- shooting-spree-and-saves-cop-by-making-150-yard-shot-with-a-pistol/)

GA Woman Kills Would Be Rapist With .22 Pistol [http://gunssavelives.net/self- defense/video/ga-woman-kills-w...](http://gunssavelives.net/self- defense/video/ga-woman-kills-would-be-rapist/)

<comment><USER14> _"If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."_

I'm really curious about how this is meant to work in large cities, where there are often lots of people living in a small amount of space, with very flimsy walls between them and so on.

Surely firing a gun in such an environment is likely to cause yet more harm (with bullets flying through windows/walls), even if you do manage to hit the intruder?

<comment><USER15> There are types of ammunition that deal better with this. Lower loads, softer bullets, etc.

<comment><USER14> Genuine question: with such ammunition, is there a even a tiny chance it will go through a plasterboard wall and kill my flatmate?

Would a taser be a safer-yet-effective option when living in such an apartment?

<comment><USER15> Here[1] is an example of said ammunition. The corrolary, of course, is that if something won't go through an inch wall material (most of walls are hollow, after all), penetrating inches of skin, fat, and muscle are also unlikely. I've read of some people who put the first couple of rounds using the safety slugs and then hollow-points for the rest, figuring if somebody isn't going to stop with a couple, fairly large, relatively surface wounds, then they aren't going to stop without something more serious and house mates are in danger in that situation anyway.

Regardless, before I would ever keep a gun for personal protection[2], I would make sure I have enough experience shooting it and hitting my target that my likelihood of missing at short range is exceedingly low. Stress and all that will impact your abilities, of course, but enough training can significantly reduce that risk.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaser_Safety_Slug>

2\. I love shooting and have a couple, small caliber rifles locked up in the basement, but I don't currently own a gun for "personal protection".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's pretty fortuitous that so many folks in Russia have dashboard cams. I've got to think this is a meteor impact that has the most independent, distributed points of view that were dutifully recorded.

<comment><USER17> Fortuitous for this, yes, but the reason why is somewhat unfortunate for Russia.

[http://jalopnik.com/why-russians-are-obsessed-with-dash- cams...](http://jalopnik.com/why-russians-are-obsessed-with-dash-cams-5918159)

EDIT: Just realized this was posted as a HN news item, probably from the original source.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227182>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They keep saying "explosion" but was there actually one? There was a sonic boom, and the rock disintegrated in the atmosphere, but I've not seen any evidence that it exploded all at once.

EDIT: well, lots of news agencies are using the word "exploded", so maybe it did. I see somebody else mentioned claims that Russians shot at it, but I'm skeptical that they'd be able to notice and react to this thing in time.

EDIT EDIT: OK so it looks like space rocks "airbursting" is not unheard of: [0]. Really curious what the physics of that involves.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_blast#Asteroid_airburs...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_blast#Asteroid_airburst)

<comment><USER19> EDIT: Just saw Bill Nye explain this on the DA14 webcast from planetary.org. When the meteor hits the atmosphere at such a high velocity, it's like hitting a brick wall and it explodes on impact. Then the shock wave propagates to the ground as the fragments fall and oxidize.

<comment><USER20> I think Randall Munroe did a decent job explaining the physics of things dropping from space here: <http://what-if.xkcd.com/28/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed. >>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, that we've noticed, at least.

<comment><USER4> That is an interesting point, If this had travelled over one of the poles would we have noticed? I tend to think that someone would have seen it, but we wouldn't have a dozen dash cam videos of it.

<comment><USER7> The infrasound detectors mentioned in the article can supposedly detect a 1-kiloton blast anywhere on earth [1] (page 15). This meteor was "hundreds of kilotons".

[http://www.ctbto.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ISS_Publicati...](http://www.ctbto.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ISS_Publication/Infrasound_11-16.pdf)

<comment><USER22> It also would show up on satellites that monitor for rocket launches and nuclear explosions. But whether or not the details would be released to the public is not entirely certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Its interesting coincidence i suppose that there is going to be a close flyby of a near earth asteroid on Feb 15th. Even google changed their doodle to remind that (but the doodle is gone now!)

Edit: Ah, its also in the news [http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/02/asteroid-2012...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/02/asteroid-2012-da14-google- doodle-removed-after-russian-meteor-shower-injuries/)

<comment><USER24> Heh. I would've loved to see the article: 'Google Trolls Injured Russians with Doodle'

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thought I needed to mention the Tunguska event in 1908. It turned out it was already mentioned in the Nature article.

Anyway, here is the wiki link to that event <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event>

When I was a kid who was fascinated by UFO stuffs, that one was always speculated to be an explosion of an Alien spaceship.

<comment><USER26> Or Tesla's weird experiments! There's speculation he somehow anticipated the event anyway.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the tip. Didn't know that. Tesla was very likely an alien or time- traveler anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can anyone comment on why we don't have a handful satellites sprinkled with cameras pointing at all directions orbiting the Earth and feeding data down for analysis? Perhaps it's not much, but something is better than nothing. The excuse that this meteor wasn't spotted because it came from the sun side is laughable.

<comment><USER28> Sounds like a wonderful Kickstarter project. Seriously though, the cost/benefit ratio isn't worth it for detecting stuff this small. "Worst in 100 years" and there was virtually no damage.

<comment><USER19> True. There are programs actively looking for larger objects though, that you can donate to if you're interested. This is the one that found 2012 DA14 which will be passing us shortly:

<http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/neo-grants/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Russian guy suffers the most"

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RussianGuySuffers...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RussianGuySuffersMost)

Universe agrees with it: Tunguska and "УФО" are both in Russia.

I suppose that all other world can relax: something bad or REALLY BAD will go on head of "russkie"

(It was a joke)

</comment><comment><USER30> And there was no link to the other meteor that passed earth today ??. Or did Nasa coverup that it didnt knew what trajectory it would take. It seams unlikely to me that those two events are not related.

I mean recently Nasa found some anomaly on Mars too, and then they say "no its not interesting its just erosion; (mars has next to none atmospheric pressure btw) i mean if i where a geologist, then any curious shape even if it was made by erosion would attract my attention i would take samples; and most likely such samples would be more interesting then dust-hole digging. What has become from NASA i wonder. Once they where explorers curious.. now they only call their device curiosity

</comment><comment><USER31> Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these incidents than others? Countries in northern hemispheres for example?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patomskiy_crater> (Debatable meteorite origins)

<comment><USER32> > Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these > incidents than others?

No. An incoming meteor or asteroid is perfectly ecumenical with respect to location, therefore the vast majority of meteors fall into the oceans.

On a related note, the best time to see meteors is between midnight and dawn in whatever location you find yourself. The reason? At dawn, if you look straight up, you're looking in the direction Earth is moving in its orbit at thirty kilometers per second. By contrast, if you look straight up at sunset, you're looking at where Earth has just been and is receding from at thirty kilometers per second. Earth's velocity is added to that of the wandering space rocks near dawn, but is subtracted at sunset.

The Russian meteor even happened at dawn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _We just have to live with it_

Or, alternatively, not.

<comment><USER34> _"So, humans, how's that space program coming along?"_ \- a large rock

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's unfortunate this event is a wake up call. 99% of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are unknown. We at the B612 Foundation (<http://b612foundation.org>) are building a telescope for early warning detection. Everyone can get involved. Please visit our site to learn more... you can help!

</comment><comment><USER36> The CTBTO has a small release on the infrasound detection: [http://newsroom.ctbto.org/2013/02/15/ctbto-infrasound- statio...](http://newsroom.ctbto.org/2013/02/15/ctbto-infrasound-stations- detect-russian-meteorite-blast/)

</comment><comment><USER37> They keep saying explosion, I was under the impression that the sound was the sonic boom?

<comment><USER38> Russian state TV claims that the meteor was intercepted by an anti-ballistic missile system, which (if true) means the meteor was struck by a 10kt nuclear warhead.

<comment><USER18> Source?

<comment><USER37> [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia-m...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia- meteorite/1921991/)

USA Today has a decently balanced assessment of the incident. Apparently Russia Today was "informed" of that. However the deputy prime minister has countered that by stating that "Russia does not have the capability to shoot down meteors."

<http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/>

Russia Today claims that it was printed in the local paper.

<comment><USER7> _Russia Today_ also describes the Tungaska meteor as "one of the most mysterious events in history" and suggests it was caused by space aliens [1].

[1] <http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/>

(today's <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5224616>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Isn't it quite a coincidence that the largest meteor impact since 1908 occurs just hours before the closest fly-by of a large asteroid in 100 years? Yet, NASA claims these two are unrelated.

<comment><USER40> Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening? How many other chunks of rock could be heading our way right now that are too small to be spotted?

<comment><USER41> > Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening?

About '1' apparently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Nasa TV link for those who want to watch as they report. <http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER43> Those videos look like space junk re entering the atmosphere, unless they are very much slowed down. Meteors tend move much quicker than that.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm reminded of scenes from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where rebelling Loonies plan to "throw rocks" at oppressive Earth.

</comment><comment><USER44> Does every car in Russia have a dashcam?

<comment><USER45> quite a few, in case of accidents/fights, they serve as proof. The police is apparently quite corrupt too so it might be an insurance...</comment></comment>


Snowden's contribution - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/surveillance-state/12bfc739c627

<comment><USER2> > And that is far more important than any damaging information Snowden could > have leaked.

I doubt it. Although the chance of having a debate about what Snowden revealed seems increasingly remote.

My conclusion is that most people aren't that bothered by living in a panopticon. I find that depressing, but I seem to be in a minority.</comment>


Ask HN: Received an incubator term sheet, should I get a lawyer? - <AUTHOR>

I was accepted into an inaugural startup incubator that offers $20,000, mentorship, and office space (the usual benefits) in exchange for a percentage of the company. I am happy with the terms at a high level, but I honestly don't understand everything on the term sheet.<p>Is it worth it to hire a lawyer to look for anything that may inhibit future funding? Has anyone gone through this process? Specifically, I'd love to know what most startups do in this situation. I think most startups just trust the program, but since this is a brand new incubator, I think we are all learning together. <comment><USER2> Yes you should get a lawyer to help you understand it. However, try to get a recommendation from someone you trust and then give specific instructions to the lawyer. Tell the lawyer you want to have them review the contract with you in the room and explain what the various terms mean. This will help you learn about some of the topics and see if it is a lawyer with which you might want to build a relationship with for future business dealings. Spending a few hundred dollars on this type of activity will greatly benefit you in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't help but think that anytime you think you _might_ need a lawyer, you probably do. Personally, I'd get a lawyer to review the contract just so I understood exactly what I'm getting myself into, even if the incubator had been around for ages.

I'll also toss out a personal recommendation for Gabe Levine, who has a blog online about lawyering for makers: <http://mylawyergabe.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> If there are multiple start-ups being accepted at once into the incubator, and if the terms are identical then maybe you can pool resources to talk to a lawyer and amortize the cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very helpful idea, I didn't think to discuss it with the others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this Rock Health? They stated in the original application, that the 20K was a grant and not for equity... if this is Rock Health, then it looks like they changed that term.</comment>


Generative Models - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/generative-models/ <comment><USER2> This is so cool and I can't help but feel like I'm missing something important that's taking place and has huge potential.

As a busy programmer who gets exhausted at night from the mental effort required at my day job, I have a feeling like I will never be able to catch up at this rate.

Are there any introductory materials to this field? Something I can read slowly during the weekends, that gives an overview of the fundamental concepts (primarily) and basic techniques (secondarily) without overwhelming the reader in the more advanced/complicated techniques (at least during the beginning).

I'd really appreciate any recommendations.

<comment> T-A For reinforcement learning, one of OpenAI's focus areas, the book by Sutton & Barto is still the standard reference: [https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the- book.html](https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html)

Improved algorithms have been devised since it was written, see

[http://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/](http://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/)

and, in particular,

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05477](https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05477)

<comment><USER3> I personally found Andrew Ng's videos on Reinforcement Learning from cs229@stanford + inverted pole balancing programming assignment to be great intro's on the topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brief summary: a nice intro about what generative models are and the current popular approaches/papers, followed by descriptions of recent work by OpenAI in the space. Quick links to papers mentioned:

Improving GANs [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03498](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03498)

Improving VAEs [http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04934](http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04934)

InfoGAN [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03657](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03657)

Curiosity-driven Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning via Bayesian Neural Networks [http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.09674](http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.09674)

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning [http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03476](http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03476)

I think the last one seems very exciting, I expect Imitation Learning would be a great approach for many robotics tasks.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very cool. As you're thinking about unsupervised or semi-supervised deep learning, consider medical data sets as a potential domain.

ImageNet has 1,034,908 labeled images. In a hospital setting, you'd be lucky to get 1000 participants.

That means those datasets really show off the power of unsupervised, semi- supervised, or one-shot learning algorithms. And if you set up the problem well, each increment of ROC translates into a life saved.

Happy to point you in the right direction when the time comes—my email is in my HN profile.

<comment><USER6> Most top Hospitals in USA have high quality data on Millions of patients the legal and bureaucratic challenges to sharing those datasets are insurmountable. However if you are affiliated a university hospital its not difficult to get 690,000 CT scans or time series data with 400+ signals from 450,000 Operations.

Even outcomes data procedures performed and diagnosis across multiple visits can be easily obtained for millions of patients on national scale. My research involves applying deep learning to these datasets.

<comment><USER7> Isn't the labeling really tricky, though?

In my limited experience, EHRs aren't usually setup to handle structured labeling of something like an image. There are lots of different fields for text entry that can be unstructured. Then the only label left is the billing code, which ends up being a poor choice of label since the hospital often bills for what it can get reimbursed for, not what you actually had.

<comment><USER8> You don't need labels for the image if you can get them from other patient information, in particular, the diagnosis.

E.g. you know from image metadata that it's a chest x-ray of patient #1234 at 2012/03/04\. Then you automatically check patient EHR near that date - do they have lung cancer Y/N; do they have broken ribs Y/N; do they have TB Y/N, etc, and make your image labels based on that. How diagnosis are codified, though, differs significantly between various medical systems, I have no idea how it's in USA EHR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have these techniques been used to generate realistic looking test data for testing software? I have had ideas along these lines but people think I'm talking about fuzz testing when I try and describe it.

I'm imagining something where you take a corporate db and reduce it down to a model. Then that can be shared with third parties and used to generate unlimited amounts of test data that looks like real data w/o revealing any actual user info.

<comment><USER10> That depends on the nature of the data, I think. If the data has a lot of sequential, sparse, hierarchical statistical dependencies (like source code, text or data streams), they might be better modeled by an LSTM. If you have high-dimensional dependencies (like images, where each pixel tends to spatially depends on many other pixels), then an autoencoder or some undirected model might be the right choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like fake accounts on Facebook will have real unique userpics soon

<comment><USER12> And games will have more variety in NPCs faces!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really like that they used TensorFlow and published their code in GitHub. It will help a lot of people like me, that are new in the field and want to learn more about generative models. Amazing work by the OpenAI team!

<comment><USER14> In theory everything OpenAI does will be available on GitHub or in some comparable form: that's the point of the organization. That's why it's called _Open_ AI. So that we can all share the benefits, instead of just Google having it for themselves. Because we all know that's who's hording the AI progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks like they are using both TensorFlow and Theano. Is there a reason to use both?

<comment><USER16> The VAE code and the semi-supervised part of the GAN code build on code that was developed about half a year ago, when Tensorflow was less developed and was lacking in speed and functionality compared to Theano. It has since caught up and most new projects at OpenAI are now done using Tensorflow, which is what we used for the newer additions.

<comment><USER17> Could you mention a bit about why you're using Tensorflow?

I'm glad you are since I'm using it myself, but I haven't used any other frameworks so I'm wondering if I should expect more people to head in this direction, or spend time learning others.

<comment><USER16> There are currently many excellent frameworks to choose from: TensorFlow, Theano, Torch, MXNet are all great. The comparative advantage of TensorFlow is mostly its support in the community (e.g. most stars on GitHub, most new projects being developed, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The actual outputs look grotesque. Disembodied dog torsos with seven eyeballs and such. It's cool, but to me this is clearly showing the local nature of convolutional nets; it's a limitation that one has to overcome if one is to truly generate lifelike images from scratch.

<comment><USER19> Those weren't the best images. Current best results don't have disembodied dog torsos. I remember a paper that was about generating plausible bedroom images. Not only did they look real, but they could interpolate between two bedrooms generating a transformation sequence.

<comment><USER20> Yup, that was the original DCGAN paper:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06434](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06434)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The generated images look like the stuff nightmares are made out of. Which is to say they're extremely aesthetically unpleasant. So what exactly have these networks learned?

<comment><USER22> They've learned an approximation of what stuff looks like projected into 2D.

My guess is that your brain is creeped out by an uncanny-valley-like effect. The images are plausible in their structure so part of your visual system is happy, but the causality is not there, so your brain is thrashing around looking for meaning that is missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can we see somewhere the generated images with higher resolution ?

<comment><USER24> No, that's how they come out of the model.

Using larger images means your code runs much (exponentially) slower, and gives you only slightly (asymptotically) better results so people usually use tiny images. All their outputs are 32*32.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why do I constantly feel like I'm missing out with all this stuff?

</comment><comment><USER26> What a beautifully presented research.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting topic, tedious article. Paraphrasing:

Q: What's a generative model?

A: Well, we have these neural nets and...

Ugh. I understand the excitement for one's own research but if the point is to make these results accessible to a wider audience then it's important not to get lost in the details, at least not right away. IMO, there's very little here in the way of high-level intuition. If I did not already have a PhD, and some exposure to ML (not my area), I would probably find this article entirely indecipherable. Again, paraphrasing:

Q: OK, so I understand you want to create pictures that resemble real photos. And you really like this DCGAN method, right?

A: Yes! See, it takes 100 random numbers and...

Come on guys. You can do better.

<comment><USER28> FWIW, I found this comment pretty indecipherable. I have no idea how your examples illustrate your point.

Maybe you can do better as well? Which is to say, effectively communicating something technical to a diverse audience is difficult, let's not be unnecessarily derisive.

<comment><USER27> >Which is to say, effectively communicating something technical to a diverse audience is difficult, let's not be unnecessarily derisive.

There's nothing especially derisive in my assessment. I don't think the content is bad, just boring. I also think it's too technical for a non- specialist audience.

> Maybe you can do better as well?

My first criticism is that generative models are not something specific to neural nets but that's not obvious from the article.

My second criticism is that their explanations are overly mechanical. In the case of DCGAN the article begins by talking about parameters and magic numbers; i.e. they explain how the thing works rather than what it does, at an intuitive level.

Clear enough?

<comment><USER29> Listen to gradstudent, he knows what he's talking about.. this article presents generative models as a grab bag of NN algorithms that came out this quarter.

<comment><USER19> Most papers are migrating from plain classification to variational methods. This is the new trend. That means, instead of just predicting labels, they know also predict a probability for each label, a degree of confidence. And they work both ways, they can generate, as well as classify. And they are unsupervised, which means they can benefit from tons of data laying around.

<comment><USER29> Your definition of "variational methods" is actually a definition of generative models. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_model). variational methods is a much more specific concept, and your answer speaks more to the general and high-level concept of generative models.

Notice on the wikipedia page for generative models, there is a _lot_ more than variational methods.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms - <AUTHOR> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/facebooks_move.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn't want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he'll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it'll spread, he'll tell her not to tell anyone.

... Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob's trust because it knows that Bob can't totally run away from it. They're still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook _WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it'll spread to everyone ..."*

The most articulate version of what kinds of problems your average facebook users now faces. A slime-bag move, but what do you expect for nothing?

 _"... The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public ..."_

Damn, somebody is on to me.

<comment><USER2> yea, that's why I "always" use my name as my internet handle.

<comment><USER3> I just stay in touch with my friends via phone calls. Keeps things between me, them and the NSA.

<comment><USER4> And AT&T and possibly China...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone who can't read the "x-small" font in the main body, Readability is your friend (<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability>)

</comment><comment><USER6> Since it seems like the writer's first language is English, I feel comfortable pointing out that this is poorly written to the point of incoherence.</comment>


The Answer to Terrorism Is Resilience - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-answer-to-terrorism-is-resilience/ <comment><USER2> The primary problem with this approach is "suffering accountability". When 85,000 people die of car accidents, there's typically no singular group or individual to blame for _all_ the accidents, in total.

With a terrorist act, there is a singular group or individual who is responsible for the suffering of multiple individuals, plus all the suffering of those who view the news around the attack and become fearful as a result.

If we collectively perceive this group or individual could have reasonably been stopped, might we be likely tend to underestimate the costs of stopping them completely? When we underestimate the costs of "perfect" crime prevention, perhaps our expectations in those who need to stop crimes goes up.

And maybe, just maybe, when law enforcement has high expectations placed on them, and their budget is limited, they might be more susceptible to fall into cognitive dissonance - literally believing they must stop all crime on a tight budget.

I'd say, if these assumptions are true, mass surveillance becomes an option at that point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, resilience if it is a fringe group. What if they are products of the state sponsorship?

For instance, Pakistan uses terrorism as a state policy; the end result is, terrorists end up blowing the very hands that feed them.

What if the terrorism is a result of the indirect state sponsorship? For instance, Saudi and the US have played a role in Sunni Terrorism. ISIL, Taliban and Al queda are sunni terorism groups. Some or another have sponsored them in the past.

Even Hamas is a sunni group, but their main sponsor is Shiites of Iran.

</comment><comment><USER4> What should India, Iraq, Afghanistan do answer terrorism, become more resilient? How do they do that? What have they failed to do?

<comment><USER5> I think he's only refering to the western world.</comment></comment>


Programming in the Black Communities. - <AUTHOR>

To Lukeas14, if you are still around you have now meet (in a way) another  black Programmer and proud of it. I have been programming since 1988. The tow reasons you give for "met no more than 3 other black programmers" are both right but I will add a little more to the mix. I have been looking at this problem for many years. The reasons as I see them over the years are two large for me to go into here, so I will only speak briefly about one of them.
Programming in the Black Communities.
Let's face it, programming to many people is a kind of black art, a thing that few people understand and appreciate. Programming is seen by many as geeky thing, a none glamorous tech thing. It is seen as a type of profession made up of very smart people who look like Opie. Our so called Black leaders do not understand programming (technology) they think it's only about the math, best done by brain boys hacks. The Power of programming has not been completely realized in your communities, what it can do and what it is! The power of programming is still seen as a type of science fiction by many in our  communities. Something done by only geniuses that do not look like us.  Most of the programming clubs won't little to no black people in their world of silicon dreams. The level of mental discipline and the combination of critical Engineering and Artistic thinking skills necessary to get into the "Programming Club of Jobs" are generally not taught in our inter city schools. Such skills are manly taught at Ivy League schools. Mean while,  the bases of good jobs are disappearing as more American companies appear to be moving away from American programming.  Programming is being left to other countries to do, as a form of out sourced digital labor. This fact is further leaving our communities abandoned and lost to the mastery of technology.  In the real world, to few people put stock in the black minds in America (or in the rest of the African world for that matter), except when such people are to be exploited. The old running joke; "a Mind is a terrible thing to waist" really should read "a Black Mind's is a good thing to waist".
If the real power of programming was unleashed in black communities it would be a force to be reckoned with. But as long the black communities are fighting daily to just survive and too busy having self-hate and self-doubt, only looking for the positive in Hollywood glory, fame and fortune, then programming will be another set of lost skills and lost Art that our communities will not master. <comment><USER2> I don't think that race is the problem here.

I distinctly remember a news reporter twisting someone's words to make silicon valley look racist before. It seemed quite silly then as it does now.

This entire post is also riddled with....errors, is this a joke of sorts?</comment>


Emerging Technologies Conference 07 news around the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/21860/

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some seriously awesome links on the front page blog. <http://www.technologyreview.com/>

If anybody is hanging around the area, speak up :)</comment>


Ask HN: Find a PR person for our press release - <AUTHOR>

We're a European bootstrapped start-up and we'll announce big news on August 22. How do I find a PR agency or a freelancer that will help us reach out beforehand. The budget is a few thousand dollars. <comment><USER2> I would love to help you with PR. Can you give me an email address so I can contact you directly?

<comment><USER3> We're in a similar situation, from a quick googling I think we'd prefer to work with someone like you over an agency, do you mind being contacted at the address in your profile?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I would be happy to help.</comment></comment></comment>


Standard Notes Extended is now pay-as-you-feel - <AUTHOR> https://standardnotes.org/extended <comment><USER2> Wonder if a histogram of the pay as-you-feel option would foster adoption. If every site did this I'd starting sending small amounts of money to a number of sites. When will built-in micropayment support come to browsers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean showing a histogram of what other users have paid? That would be interesting.

<comment><USER2> Yes, exactly</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startup CEO wants to improve people skills, but how? - <AUTHOR>

I need your help. My new years resolution is to improve my people skills, but not sure how to go about it in an effective and authentic way.
Some background. I'm founder of a startup of 6 people (not profitable yet but getting there)  Apart from team I have to pitch with investors, deal with customers, recruit folks, network with press and partners etc
I'm naturally introverted, and while I'm confident and proactive (eg I organize some groups for activities) I just can't seem to relax or establish natural friendships or relationships with people.  I view that small talk stuff as difficult and sometimes seems fake, like a chore.
You could say I'm the sort of guy who's happiest at home playing Skyrim alone rather than out at drinks with friends.
My co-workers respect me but I doubt they like me nor do I really motivate them in their jobs (I see bored faces when I talk).  Personal wise I don't have many close friends apart from my girlfriend.  To be honest, it all brings me down sometimes.
I know they say focus on your strengths, but this year I genuinely want to make a change for the better in this area - to improve my personal happiness and relationships in social and work.
I'm a practical guy, any practical tips HNers? <comment><USER2> Okay, I know this is going to sound really stupid/silly, but /r/seduction (<http://www.reddit.com/r/seduction>) has some interesting ideas on becoming more confident and stuff. Yea it's primarily focused on the whole 'pickup game' or whatever, but I think a lot of the things they talk about could help getting over any anxiety. Like one thing being to talk to everyone you can, like if you were in line waiting to checkout, in an elevator with random people, etc, the theory being that the more you do this the less awkward and nervous you'll feel about the whole experience. I've been trying to do this more lately (my anxiety is pretty bad) and i'm already finding it a bit easier to just strike up a conversation with people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Find a meetup group (<http://www.meetup.com>) in your area. I did this a couple of years ago and made tons of new friends and brought myself out of my comfort zone.

I've met such a diverse group of people over the years that small talk has become much easier. This was always a problem for me in the past. I'm much more relaxed now when confronted with situations where I have to interact with people I don't know.

Like anything, it's just going to take practice. You can't read it in a book. You just need to go out there and do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, actually i run a meetup group on unrelated topic. but still find it hard to relax and have natural friendships with people (feedback i get is that i am too serious, but its hard to just "lighten up")

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An improv class is a good start. See:

[http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/02/18/improvisation.busines...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/02/18/improvisation.business.skills/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> If youd like I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about it. People are my specialty. I have a good set of engineering like tricks to keep up with folks and have a good conversation.

<comment><USER6> I would like to hear your tricks as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be yourself. You will grow as a leader over time regardless of your personality. Your success will, ultimately, be in your abilities to hire great people.

Groups of people make amazing things, not individuals.

</comment><comment><USER8> Try "how to win friends and influence people". It's a cliche but it really works.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, read the book a long time ago but guess time to brush up and try and put into practice..</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you do QA at your startup? - <AUTHOR> I'm an entry-level software eng. and I need to build our QA Process for both a B2B web application and and consumer web application.<p>We use a full-javascript stack on mySql. We also have to ensure a robust data integrity (ie. the data we report in our apps are accurate) since much of our functionality is fueled by large amounts of data. <comment><USER2> Code level: Unit tests, peer-reviews.

Integration: Automated UI testing.

Functional: Humans, lots of them.

Startups usually have very small teams. Take advantage of tools that do stuff for you. Also, having other members of the team take part in testing is a means to get to know the team better and learn something new.

</comment><comment><USER3> For external purposes - use stackoverflow For internal purposes - you may need to deploy your own - phpBB used to be popular a few years back [https://www.phpbb.com/](https://www.phpbb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's your technology stack? What will you QA exactly?</comment>


Badoo switched to PHP7 and saved $ 1M - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.fr/translate?hl=fr&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fcompany%2Fbadoo%2Fblog%2F279047%2F <comment><USER2> Hey, we will publish English article early next week, but you can just scroll down to the usage graphs. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been excited for PHP7 for the speed, never even thought what that would save in server costs!</comment>


Show HN: Cinch – We make business transactions simpler - <AUTHOR>

We make business transactions simpler ! We all know that time is money. Wouldn't it be awesome if your business transactions from your bank account are categorized for you automatically? All it requires will be Snap, Pay , Manage !<p>We love to hear your feedback and suggestion on how to improve! For more information , visit our website http://cinch.strikingly.com <comment><USER2> does this service support Indonesia? i want to sell digital good i need payment system that use just only bankaccount</comment>


The Top JavaScript Trends to Watch in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-top-javascript-trends-to-watch-in-2018-a8437dd94425 <comment><USER2> The author seems to think that React users choose Flow and Angular users choose TypeScript.

However, TypeScript works really well with React and has for a long time. I have an example[0] boilerplate for isomorphic web app with React server-side rendering in TypeScript.

The code should be pretty easy to follow if you have some React experience. I chose to use the bare Node.js APIs so there is no favoritism in express, koa, hapi, etc.

[0]: [https://github.com/styfle/react-server-example- tsx](https://github.com/styfle/react-server-example-tsx)

<comment><USER3> > The author seems to think that React users choose Flow and Angular users > choose TypeScript. > However, TypeScript works really well with React and > has for a long time.

I don't believe the two statements above contradict each other. React users can prefer Flow even though TypeScript works with React. In truth, I believe it's only natural to choose Flow if one is working with React. After all both are FB creations and are meant to work together out of the box. TypeScript on the other hand is promoted in Angular documentation. Considering the above, it's really hard not to get an impression that most devs would choose to work on well supported pairs: React+Flow and Angular+TypeScript.</comment></comment>


A US ally shot down a $200 drone with a $3M Patriot missile - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14944256/patriot-missile-shot-down-consumer-drone-us-military <comment><USER2> This article misses the larger point. A drone costs $200. Why do missles cost $3 million? Yes, this is a cold war era missile. But with drones, the last thing we need is more cold-war era kit.

Imagine a theater of war with $100 million worth of $200 drones in it. That's 500,000 drones.

Or 1 f-35 joint strike fighter.

I think I'd rather have the drones.</comment>


Implementing a CNN for Text Classification in Tensorflow - <AUTHOR> http://www.wildml.com/2015/12/implementing-a-cnn-for-text-classification-in-tensorflow/ <comment><USER2> Great tutorial - Well written and good patterns for TensorFlow usage, e.g. checkpointing, name scopes for cleaning up the graph visualization, and using summaries/TensorBoard, and also nice explanations of the concepts.

Though I'm curious why you used VALID padding not SAME for the conv layers? It seems like it would be simpler to use SAME.

Also, minor nit: TensorFlow and TensorBoard should both have two letters capitalized

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think VALID and SAME are probably giving the same results. The reason I used VALID is only because the original paper seems to be doing that as well.

I will fix the capitalization!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks neat. Why did you bother using <PAD> words to have sentences be the same length, when you're using a bag-of-words (document-term matrix) model anyway?

Each sentence vector ends up being the length of the vocabulary, so they're already the same length. You can probably drop step #3 in this case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! It is not using a BoW model. Each input sentence is a vector of size [sentence_length] (or, in theory, a matrix of size [vocab_size, sentence_length] with one-hot vectors) so the padding is required.

There is a way to do it without padding, but it's less efficient from a training point of view. You could instantiate a new network for each possible sentence length then share the paramaters between them, and then batch based on your sentence length.

Also, the padding isn't striclty necessary in theory. The feature vector will always end up being the same length, regardless of sentence length, due to the pooling layer. However, Tensorflow forces you to specify the exact size of the pooling operation (you can't just say "pool over the full input"), so you need it if you're using TF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks pretty nice. It's worth pointing to the seq2seq TensorFlow example which covers a lot of similar topics.

Is there an example anywhere of how to initilize from the word2vec embeddings?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if there is an example somewhere in the TF docs, but initializing a variable is pretty easy. All you need to do is:

session.run(W.assign(numpy_word2_vec_matrix)). W would the embedding matrix created in first layer of the code. [1]

Of course you'd first need to load word2vec and filter its vocabulary to match your own vocabulary. That's most of the code and not specific to TensorFlow. You could use gensim [2] for that.

[1] [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/master/api_docs/python/s...](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/master/api_docs/python/state_ops.html#Variable)

[2] [https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/index.html](https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/index.html)

<comment><USER4> BTW, your CNN for NLP post is interesting too. You might find _LSTM-BASED DEEP LEARNING MODELS FOR NON- FACTOID ANSWER SELECTION_ [1] (from the IBM Watson team) interesting.

They combine a CNN with a LSTM for question answering on complex, non-factoid questions. Their LSTM+Attention model performs slightly better, but it's a pretty interesting approach.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.04108](http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.04108)</comment></comment></comment>


The Dribbble Generation is Ruining My Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sprawsm.com/post/1478029969/the-dribbble-generation-is-ruining-my-web-design

<comment><USER2> Great title, but the rant itself is fairly incoherent. What's the main beef? That designers mimic Apple? Good shit always get copied and, on occasion, improved upon. That's how it all evolves.

<comment><AUTHOR> To quote myself from another thread:

My main concern is reducing interface design as a craft (I view it as an artsy craft, not crafty art) to stitching together elements other people have designed that have proven to work well and thus are popular. It is not what we do and we are in trouble if people start perceiving it that way, and unfortunately that is exactly the kind of behavior that is encouraged on Dribble — show as much eye–candy as possible in a 400 × 300 rectangle so you get to hang out with the popular kids. Sorry, but I won't have it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "This unfortunate situation actually made good design a commodity --"

Ah, I love sarcasm.

<comment><AUTHOR> It initially said "These assholes actually made good design a commodity", but that was too harsh.</comment></comment>


We sell your kids pictures! - <AUTHOR> http://www.koppie-koppie.biz/

<comment><USER2> Pretty good awareness project but have people actually sold any mugs? And why actually allow the sales? Why not just have a "Sorry, we don't actually sell mugs - order one with your own child here: ..." instead of actually selling them. Quite a touchy subject...

<comment><USER3> "..We're actually selling these mugs and are making money from their sale; around 90 cents per item. Moreover, by doing so, we are not breaking any laws. The photographers have made their work freely available on Flickr under a Creative Commons license, which allows for their commercial reuse, so we are free to use these pictures in any way we want."

In the "About Us" Section.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this, but what if it has the opposite of the intended effect? "Someone made this awesome mug of Jimmy, all I had to do was put his picture on Flickr!"</comment>


Is your website doing his job?: Get your "Sections Examine" report - <AUTHOR> https://sections.io/examine/ <comment><AUTHOR> Grow your online business in a new direction: I will pick apart every aspect of your online marketing efforts, and report to you things you can do to take your business to the next level!

Sections Examine is an in-depth report that gives you a second, fresh opinion on your online marketing efforts, with a practical, actionable roadmap on how to improve it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> show some support guys, what you think about it!</comment>