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YNAB releases an API - darkpicnic
https://api.youneedabudget.com/
======
cremp
I used to love YNAB, until they went to the web-based, and threw away their
fat client.
This only proves that they have had your financial data since they moved to
the web client, and probably sell that juicy data.
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Show HN: Five promising Evernote alternatives - nicolaspr
https://medium.com/@attilaorosz/five-evernote-alternatives-to-suit-any-workflow-714be108e2d9#.gzw5y5dxp
======
arca_vorago
Even better, see all the alternatives:
[http://alternativeto.net/software/evernote/?license=opensour...](http://alternativeto.net/software/evernote/?license=opensource)
To be fair though, TagSpaces isn't listed, and I think it's really
interesting. Another one not listed is
[http://elephant.mine.nu/](http://elephant.mine.nu/)
Personally, I favor emacs org files with version control, but I admit sync
across devices might be an issue for many on that front. I also live in the
terminal more than most.
~~~
russianhun
Nah, people don't like too much choice. That's why articles like 5 this, 7
that are popular, but if you do something like "247 alternatives", or "All the
things that are like...", nobody will read it. Also, to go to that site and do
an actual search requires doing something for it, rather than having results
delivered without having to search for it. Or even think about searching for
it.
Emacs, oh gawd. I don1t see many people using it in place of something with
fancy flat design and a bloated UI (aka Evernote) ;)
(I'm the author btw.)
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How should our kids play at recess? Alameda schools offer lessons - JamilD
http://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/How-should-our-kids-play-at-recess-Alameda-10995385.php
======
rl3
When I was a kid, both the local park and elementary school playgrounds had
climbable constructs made out of widely-spaced wooden logs, with many sections
partially hollowed out. That meant you'd have bees, hornets and wasps nesting
in there frequently. Add to that the risk of splinters.
To make matters even more interesting, these things were tall. Probably 20ft
at the very top. If you fell, you'd either fall from that height into the
stones and probably be fine, or you'd get unlucky and break your fall on
protruding wood from the equipment on the way down. There were no rules
governing how you could or couldn't play on the stuff, just common sense.
Of course, it was fairly easy to see how something like a bee sting, splinter
or just plain bad luck could have resulted in a kid losing their balance,
falling from a decent height, and ending up paralyzed (or worse) in the
process. I knew of no serious incidents, but in the mid 90s all of that
equipment was replaced with un-fun plastic stuff that was maybe a third of the
height and impossible to fall from. I can only imagine how the earlier
equipment would be received today.
~~~
Nition
Everything here got replaced with super safe stuff in the late 90s/early
2000s, but recently the _new_ new stuff going in seems to be getting more
dangerous again!
A park just went in nearby and it's got a bridge of swinging pendulum things
that you could easily fall off, all suspended about 2m off the ground. There's
bark underneath but still, you could easily break your arm falling off it and
it's prety much designed to tip you off. 15 years ago I feel like they'd be
30cm off the ground max.
~~~
Faaak
Well, if you break your arm, what's the big deal ?
No, seriously ? Yes, you did break your arm, but I'm sure you can learn plenty
of things in the process.
~~~
sanderjd
Generally I agree, but one problem is that most families can't easily absorb
the cost of a trip to the emergency, X-RAYs, and a cast. It may be a good
lesson, but it's also an expensive one.
~~~
khedoros1
That sounds like a healthcare problem, not a playground problem.
~~~
sanderjd
I agree, but the healthcare system is the reality we live in.
------
wersplectior
Parents don't want their kids to die so they place some reasonable
restrictions on activities in order to reduce risk. After all, they only have
1 or 2 kids so they can't afford to lose one. Historically families had many
more children and it was perfectly normal to lose 1 or 2 (usually to
infectious disease).
With school bureaucrats the story is different. They place _unhealthily_
stringent limits on risk. They can't afford to lose a single child even though
they have 200,000 of them. Because they might get sued or have their careers
damaged.
~~~
typetypetype
I'm trying to imagine all the fortunes that schools are giving up by keeping
kids safe.
~~~
wersplectior
I don't understand what you mean. Explain?
------
chrismealy
Don't have citations handy, but the first generation of playground equipment
actually was incredibly lethal (1930-1940s).
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Forget the Goggles: Chlorophyll Eye Drops Give Night Vision (2009) - DocFeind
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/04-forget-goggles-chlorophyll-eye-drops-give-night-vision
======
ColinCera
Interesting. It says it doubles night vision ability, but night vision
goggles/scopes give 10000x - 50000x amplification. If the scales are
comparable and doubles means 2x, then these eye drops seem nearly useless —
but of course the scales may not be at all comparable.
~~~
lutusp
The comparison needs perspective. The fact that night vision goggles amplify
light levels by a factor of 1 * 10^4 to 5 * 10^4, isn't relevant to the issue
of doubling night vision in an unaided eye. That would be like saying the
existence of the Hubble space telescope means binoculars serve no purpose.
One might instead compare the cost of a night vision scope versus the cost of
the described chlorophyll approach. Or compare the fields of view, or the
required weight to be carried in the field.
~~~
bornabox
Definitely. But it might make you more vulnerable to light - getting light
into your night vision goggles will make you shortly blinded. With eyes
altered due to drops or pills, it would make you vulnerable for the duration
of the effect. Goggles you can take off quickly. But for non-military
applications, not to have to use goggles to see (better) at night, would be so
much more comfortable.
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Show HN: Who Is Hiring Android App That Pulls Listing from HN, Angel, Lever, SE - symisc_devel
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.symisc.whois.hiring
======
symisc_devel
Author Here: Basically, we pull listing from HN, StackExchange, Angel, Lever,
etc. We index them by types (Remote, Fulltime, Freelance, etc.), Langaugaes
(Ruby, Node, etc.), Frameworks, database, location, etc. so that you can
filter & search for what you want. We also translate the location to GPS
position (lat, lng) so that you got the listing nearby.
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Probability as Space - jballanc
http://thebitfarm.blogspot.com/2009/01/probability-as-space.html
======
psyklic
The real point of confusion is that people don't realize that BG/GB are two
separate states. Like many of the recent blog articles, this one also doesn't
clearly explain why you need to consider both BG and GB. Consider:
"A person has two kids, and his first-born is a boy. What is the probability
the other is a boy?"
There are two possibilities, each equally likely -- (first-born, second-born):
(B,B) and (B,G). Hence, 1/2.
"A person has two kids, and one is a boy. What is the probability the other is
a boy?"
In other words: "The first-born is a boy AND/OR the second-born is a boy."
There are three possibilities, each equally likely -- (first-born, second-
born): (B,B), (B,G), and (G,B). Hence, 1/3.
~~~
psyklic
To be more clear: When hearing this problem, some people imagine -- (one-kid,
other-kid): (B,G) and (B,B), hence 1/2.
Others imagine -- (first-born, second-born): (B,B), (B,G), (G,B), hence 1/3.
Someone needs to write a blog post explaining why the latter method is
superior, not just a blog post that automatically enumerates the four states.
People need a REASON for not combining BG/GB, and considering the children as
(first-born, second-born) provides much of that reason, since it is a logical
way of ordering children. A (one-child, other-child) ordering appears a bit
absurd, even to the layperson.
~~~
jballanc
The reason is that the two children are different dimensions in the
probability space. Both (one-kid, other-kid), and (first-born, second-born)
yield the same space, and both will give a 1/3 answer.
~~~
psyklic
People interpret "one kid is a boy" as "first-born is a boy" in my example
above (i.e. they selectively choose which kid is the "one kid" -- the one
which is a boy), which yields 1/2.
People seem to be good at enumerating the "probability space" quite well. They
just don't understand why the dimensions are what they are.
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Peter Cooper's "Beginning Ruby" ebook for $10 on Apress - raju
http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal
======
raju
Reviews on Amazon for the same <http://tinyurl.com/5c65xg>
~~~
icey
Non-tinied URL: [http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-
Professional/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-
Professional/dp/1590597664)
|
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FundersClub (YC S12) helps Soldsie recruit Chief Scientist - mittal
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/09/value-add-of-crowdfunding-fundersclub-soldsie/
======
jeffwass
Nice one, FundersClub.
Good to see the benefits FC brings to their startup clients extending beyond
just capital sourcing.
There's also a great quote from the TechCrunch author, affirming FC's
investment model and clarifying doubts he had just 3 months ago : "I raised
questions about whether FundersClub was operating illegally as an unregistered
broker-dealer, but after speaking with its legal team, I’m convinced it’s in
the clear."
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Gifs (in your terminal) - kwl
https://github.com/levthedev/gif
======
_will
I've always thought it would be cool if I could have the option to run more
rich apps in my terminal - ncurses and lynx come to mind as examples.
~~~
51582
I wish more websites were readable with Lynx. A lot of sites use a ton of
crazy JavaScript, CSS, and god knows what else. I always appreciate simplicity
when I find it.
|
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Show HN: A first look at what we’re building - srn_
http://blog.buildingthetool.com/post/107414350736/a-first-look-at-what-were-building
======
xyby
please tell me in one sentence. not in one vieeo.
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Modula-2 Reloaded – A Modern Typesafe and Literate Programming Language - networked
http://modula-2.info/m2r10/
======
zokier
The problem with Pascal/Wirthian family of languages in my opinon is that they
are really scattered and it is somewhat difficult for an outsider to discover
what is the currently alive variation. It doesn't help that the languages have
been called Pascal, Modula, and Oberon with various prefixes and (version)
numbers. Of course there are also various implementations of the different
languages that also kinda live their own lives.
Does anyone know some comperehensive and up to date resource illustrating the
whole language family?
~~~
pjmlp
> Does anyone know some comperehensive and up to date resource illustrating
> the whole language family?
I am not an expert, but as someone that started coding in the 80's I have some
of the knowledge myself. Some of these facts might be wrong.
Pascal:
Wirth created Pascal, the educational version, which was the target of the
famous rant from Kernigan.
All Pascal vendors extended the language, the most common extensions for
professional coding became the ISO Extended Pascal standard.
UCSD Pascal, Turbo Pascal, MacPascal and Quick Pascal were the most famous
dialects.
Wirth collaborated with Apple in the design of Object Pascal, the original
systems programming language for Mac OS. Those extensions were later on
adopted by Borland for Turbo Pascal.
Given the influence of Turbo Pascal in the PC world, most Pascal vendors
ignored the ISO Extended Pascal and tried to follow Turbo Pascal instead.
Object Pascal eventually became a synonym with Delphi.
Modula-2:
Wirth spends some time at Xerox PARC and gets to learn Mesa. When he returns
to Zurich, he creates a systems programing language based on Mesa, without the
issues that plagued Pascal and writes the Lillith OS in it.
Oberon:
Wirth returns to Xerox PARC, meanwhile Mesa has evolved into Cedar, a systems
programming language with RC/GC, interactive debugger (REPL) among other
features.
Again, when returning to Zurich, he creates Oberon (the language) and Oberon
(the OS), following the features of Cedar.
Oberon gets used as workstation environment at ETHZ and as a means to teach OS
programming at several european universities.
Wirth collaborates in the design of Oberon-2.
Other ETHZ collaborators create a startup to explore Oberon commerically and
extend Oberon-2 further, thus creating Component Pascal.
Meanwhile the OS projects at ETHZ evolve the Oberon OS into Oberon System 3
with its gadgets systems, and evolve Oberon-2 into Active Oberon, which uses
active objects as construct for parallel/concurrency programming.
Wirth already retired, decides to pursue his goals for a minimalist type safe
systems programming language and designs Oberon-07.
Modula-3
The Xerox PARC designers behind Mesa and Cedar eventually join DEC when all
falls apart and start designing Modula-2+, based on Modula-2.
With their learnings, they eventually create Modula-3 and the SPIN OS.
Unfortunately DEC gets bought by Compaq and Modula-3 related projects get
canned.
~~~
lobster_johnson
Good summary. It's worth pointing out that Borland's Pascal had already
diverged from other dialects, including Apple's, and when they tacked on the
OO extensions from Wirth's ObjectPascal/MacApp, they diverged further.
MacApp is interesting in itself, but I'm not sure how much involvement Wirth
had in its development. Delphi certainly owes a lot of its design to it, but
nailed the visual UI builder in ways that MacApp didn't (and in a way that
Interface Builder never has). Apple actually kept supporting and updating
MacApp as late as 2002 (Photoshop was famously written in it) [1]; it's one of
those beautiful niche things that eventually die, but keep a lot of people
magically productive for a while (just like Delphi, coincidentally).
[1]
[http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...](http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/5/28_MacApp_-
_evolution.html)
------
brakmic
Don't want to be off-topic but just wanted to share the info about a Modula-3
project hosted at
[https://modula3.elegosoft.com/cm3/](https://modula3.elegosoft.com/cm3/)
They've also moved their sources to GitHub:
[https://github.com/modula3/cm3](https://github.com/modula3/cm3)
~~~
amyjess
I would dearly love to see a full-blown Modula-3 revival. It's one of these
old, moribund languages that I have a huge soft spot for, especially since I'm
a Pythonista and large parts of Python were lifted directly from Modula-3.
I also kind of have a thing for innovative languages that never really took
off. Not just M3, but I'm also deeply fascinated by Algol 68.
~~~
brakmic
I'm currently trying to compile the Modula-3 sources from GitHub. It's been a
long time since I have done this.
I'm fighting with the compiler because it refuses to compile under x64 arch.
Also, one must use an older m3-compiler to compile the newer sources. _sigh_
I think I should write a little tutorial for us, 80/90es kids (and older) ...
you know, nostalgia, mid-life-crisis etc. ;)
Regards,
------
11thEarlOfMar
Dr. Dobb's Modula-2 article, ca. 1991 (I worked for Multiscope at the time):
[http://www.drdobbs.com/whats-new-with-
modula-2/184408565](http://www.drdobbs.com/whats-new-with-modula-2/184408565)
------
frik
What's about the recent wave of Wirth's almost forgotten languages on HN?
Pascal, Modula and Oberon and its silbings/etc were pretty niche last time I
checked and most of their maintainer moved on.
~~~
clouddrover
I don't think Pascal is almost forgotten. Free Pascal
([http://www.freepascal.org](http://www.freepascal.org)) and Delphi
([http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi](http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi))
are both strong Object Pascal implementations. There's also Lazarus
([http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)) which is a
Delphi-like IDE and libraries for Free Pascal.
------
Animats
It's a good idea, 20 years too late. We should have had this in 1995. At this
point, just getting programmers to write BEGIN and END will be a struggle.
Memory allocation needs to be addressed better. There seems to be a NEW, but
no mechanism for deletion. (Wirth did that in Pascal. It didn't work out
well.) Is this language garbage-collected?
For memory allocation, these are the known options:
\- Garbage collection (scripting languages, Go, LISP, etc.) - safe, but causes
stalls.
\- Reference counting - (Python) safe, but can leak if you have loops. Usually
adds overhead. May need a GC as a backup.
\- Single-ownership without borrow checking (C++11) - partially safe, errors
can be detected at run time, but this is not guaranteed.
\- Single-ownership with borrow checking (Rust) - safe, complicated at compile
time, but works.
\- Region allocation (Ada) - used in some real-time systems. Rare.
\- Manual deletion (C) - unsafe, leads to many bugs.
The manual option is probably unacceptable at this late date.
~~~
cbd1984
> Region allocation (Ada) - used in some real-time systems. Rare.
Equivalent to solving the halting problem unless you're writing toy software
with extremely well-defined inputs and outputs. Good for device drivers,
maybe, but not in the general case.
------
incepted
Whenever I read a Modula 2 source, I get the feeling the programmer is yelling
at me.
~~~
Animats
The upper case keyword thing is annoying. In ALGOL-60, the keywords were
supposed to be in lower case bold type. When algorithms were published in
Comm. ACM, they were, but computers printers and displays of the time couldn't
do that.
Displaying keywords in bold, and string constants in italics, would be a nice
editor feature today. It would look better than syntax coloring. If you had an
editor with enough smarts to line up the comments, you could even use
variable-width fonts.
------
mhd
Can someone point me to the documentation for their cweb-equivalent
(weave/tangle etc.)? Just interested if their definition of literate includes
"macros", or just the semi-literate stuff you see more commonly these days
(i.e. inverted comments, without restructuring).
Might also be just a fancy word for "we use begin/end, not braces".
------
woah
I wish they would show us some code.
~~~
jksmith
Very generally, think pascalish golang. Eschews heavy abstraction, lower
keyword count, green threads built in, modules instead of packages, no
implicit type casts, copious compile errors. It did not have garbage
collection, but I'm sure M2R10 will offer something in that area.
Topspeed made an awesome compiler and libraries for M2 back in the DOS days.
The package came with a cute traffic simulator demo showing off the
multitasking capabilities of M2. Logitech (yes, the mouse and keyboard guys)
was another vendor back in the day, along with Stonybrook (sweet
optimizations) and XDS, a Russian company which I believe wrote some M2 code
for the Russian space program.
------
eukgoekoko
> [http://modula-2.info](http://modula-2.info)
> Warning:
> include_once(/home/m2info/public_html/m2info/cookbook/rowspan55.php): failed
> to open stream: No such file or directory in
> /home/m2info/public_html/m2info/local/config.php on line 181
Looks really nice! Not to mention PASCAL-like semicolon-infected syntax with
mindblowing features like dynamic memory allocation and CASE OF. Who would
bother with this fossil crap?
~~~
jksmith
Yeah, no generics either.
~~~
jksmith
And no sense of humor either.
|
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Top Mistakes in Behavior Change - gnufied
http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/personal-development/top-10-mistakes-in-behavior-change.html
======
rednum
Previous discussion on HN concerning the same slides (minus the guys
comments): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106553>
tldr: start small, don't set bullshit goals, it acually is hard. much harder
than you think
~~~
praptak
_"it acually is hard. much harder than you think"_
Actually "assuming that behavior change is difficult" is listed as the tenth
mistake.
~~~
joe_the_user
Ah, "It's hard but it can't be difficult"...
Paradoxes like this always frustrated me so I worked-out a more concrete model
for these change systems:
You've got "area of behavior" which you've got good conscious control over and
where you can plan and work hard. You've got another "another area of
behavior" where you don't have much conscious control and you tend to screw-up
in.
You want to work hard _within the area you do control_ to create a framework
where things are _relatively easy_ for you in the area you _don't control_.
You don't want to just throw a lot of effort at the area you don't control,
you don't want to discourage yourself concerning the area you don't control.
You want to have clearly understandable goals in the area you don't control.
And so you want the "heavy lifting" to be within the area you do control.
Now, "hard" is for the work in creating your framework. "not difficult" is for
the experience you have within the framework.
Make sense?
~~~
praptak
Definitely. I think that it applies to their method too - setting up the
triggers and making the behaviour easier is the "hard" part within your
control.
------
ericlavigne
The best part is the link to captology at the end. I especially like this
video. (I replace "simple" with "easy", because I think it's a better
description of what he's talking about.)
<http://vimeo.com/2094487>
The difficulty/easiness of an action has six components: time, money, physical
effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routine.
Thus, the overall difficulty/easiness of an action depends on the resource
profile of the person performing that action. That profile varies wildly from
person to person, as well as according to context. Awareness of your own
resource profile is important for self-control, and awareness of other
people's resource profiles is important for persuasion.
The captology site also discusses using triggers to tilt the odds in your
favor. The most effective variety of trigger depends on both difficulty and
motivation level.
<http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html>
------
dmethvin
A related BJ Fogg post from 2004 that would be useful for startups, "Ten Ways
Computers Manipulate People." The only place I could find it was at
archive.org:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20041204095306/http://captology.s...](http://web.archive.org/web/20041204095306/http://captology.stanford.edu/notebook/archives/000078.html)
------
code_duck
I was hoping this was going to be about UI behavior change.
------
TheSOB88
If anyone wants to read a book on behavioral change, try "Switch" by Chip
Heath and Dan Heath. It's _sooooo goooood_.
~~~
bobf
Indeed. For me, one of the key takeaways was that to successfully implement
lasting change, you must appeal to emotion. Logic is not enough.
|
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Tesla's Cybertruck would not get regulatory approval in Europe - bakuninsbart
https://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/tesla-cybertruck-bekaeme-in-europa-keine-zulassung-a-1301086.html
======
mtmail
95 comments two days ago at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788668)
------
bakuninsbart
Translation by DeepL:
Cybertruck would not get approval in Europe
In the US the Tesla Cybertruck was pre-ordered a hundred thousand times. It is
still unclear when the electric off-road vehicle will come onto the market in
this country. However, a TÜV expert now explains that approval in Germany
would not be possible at the moment.
Stefan Teller, an expert from SGS-TÜV Saar GmbH, told the "Automobilwoche"
that "major modifications to the basic structure" would be necessary
beforehand. "Tesla's basic concept contradicts the current European safety
philosophy". With regard to the Cybertruck, the expert sees major
shortcomings: "The occupants feel safe, but are not," says Teller. Because
there is a big difference in the type approval of vehicles between the USA and
Europe.
In the US, car manufacturers have the option of certifying the roadworthiness
of their vehicles themselves, known as self-certification. In Germany, on the
other hand, a type approval procedure applies in which both the manufacturers
and the authorities and independent technical services such as TÜV are
involved. "For vehicles, 50 to 60 regulations must be complied with," says
Teller.
In addition, the Cybertruck is one of the so-called light duty trucks in the
USA. Vehicles of this class are exempt from many regulations regarding the
passive safety of the occupants. In Europe, on the other hand, passive safety
and pedestrian protection are of great importance. "The front of the vehicle
must not become as stiff as it likes," says Teller. "Bumpers and bonnets must
be able to absorb energy in order to protect pedestrians. This means that the
body is designed to deform in a targeted manner in the event of an accident
and to absorb the energy of the impact in order to minimise injuries.
"Enormous forces act on the occupants".
This targeted deformation is not possible with Tesla, however, because the
cybertruck uses highly rigid sheet metal. "Nothing deforms in the event of an
impact, instead enormous forces act on the occupants. Airbags won't help any
more," says Teller. If the Tesla Cybertruck is to receive approval in Europe,
it would have to be heavily modified.
As the Tesla Cybertruck is currently designed, the expert does not give the
E-Pick-up a chance. In its current design, "it will not be possible to sell
this truck in Germany as a mass production vehicle on the basis of a type
approval," says Teller. "This is still a big task for Mr. Musk."
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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How to remotely debug Java and JSP with Eclipse - jvmhost
http://www.jvmhost.com/articles/remotely-debug-java-jsp-eclipse
======
llcoolv
ive been doing it for at least 8 years - how is this news?
~~~
EdSharkey
I learned what jwdp stands for. Never bothered to research that.
As for remote debugging a hosted JVM, I would worry about opening a debug port
like that to the interwebs. Doesn't this create another attack surface with
which to undermine the JVM?
~~~
jtheory
We use this most often to connect to a development environment which is
running locally anyway, but you can achieve the same effect (without opening
ports to the general internet!) with port forwarding over SSH; then you just
connect to "localhost" on your selected port, which forwards to selected port
on "localhost" on the remote server.
It probably goes without saying that you wouldn't enable this on production,
in any case -- hitting a breakpoint wouldn't be nice to whoever hits it!
|
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Jeff Pulver opens up on Silicon Valley’s scorn for old entrepreneurs - Libertatea
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/10/09/jeff-pulver-opens-up-on-silicon-valleys-scorn-for-old-entrepreneurs-and-why-every-start-up-needs-a-lead-singer/
======
dreamweapon
_I was in Silicon Valley two years ago meeting a partner of one of the most
famous VCs in the world and when he told me to my face, told me “Jeff, look,
you’re not 25 years old having just left Facebook as a product manager,
because if you were I have $5 million for you.” He looked at me and said I was
worthless._
Facebook actually has 25 year-old "product managers"?
~~~
yid
> Facebook actually has 25 year-old "product managers"?
Yup. Also: engineering managers of the same age.
Edit: I don't work there. I happen to know someone who is 27 and a PM at
Facebook, who has been there for 4 years (as a PM).
------
dalke
> "When I meet a start-up I always ask them who is the lead singer. Because in
> a band the lead singer doesn’t have to play an instrument. They just have to
> lead."
Who was the lead singer of Peter, Paul, and Mary? Of The Beatles? David Lee
Roth and Sammy Hagar were lead singers of Van Halen, but were not the leaders
of the band.
It seems a bit odd, in an article about ageism, that the topic should veer so
quickly to trying to fit a startup into a certain model of rock band, given
that several extremely successful rock bands don't follow that model.
|
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The Basic Layout of the Google User Data Empire - makimaki
http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/googles-user-data-empire/
======
jodrellblank
This article does miss out quite a lot of Google information gathering sites
(Hosted gmail for business use, default search on the iphone, maps+GPS on the
iphone, Picasa, youtube, ...), many are mentioned in the comments.
Still, it's not so much that I think Google is doing evil right now, but the
more they gather, the more potential they have to do bad things with it. And
since they're pushing into unprecedented data gathering, it's not limited to
"bad things that have happened before that I can enumerate specifically",
either. Who can predict what pessimistic delights lie in wait over the next
decade?
And the more they gather, the more of a target they become for crackers,
internal leaks, legistlation, and the more room there is for plain old
mistakes. Maybe they really don't want to do evil, but on their way from
virtue to virtue, some quantity of people will be barged out of the way,
trampled upon and mistreated, just because Goog are huge.
Also consider that if you regularly use Google maps for directions, then you
will tend to do home->place or work->place, focusing in on your main
locations.
If you search Google for names, then the chances are you're looking for
friends/relatives, or famous people. Google can tell famous people, because
other people are searching for them.
------
debt
He left out one of the most important Google acquisitions: DoubleClick. Ugh,
this article poorly researched and written.
------
azharcs
Everyday I am using less and less of Google products, My default search is
Yahoo now and Image Search is MSN Live, they are perfect. I somehow see Google
as the evil empire of the future and by giving free lunch and letting
employees bring puppies inside office won't change that.
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Ask YC: What do you think of Apple's SDK vs. Open Tool Chain from a business perspective? - kcy
So several people seem to agree that the Open Tool Chain allows everything Apple's SDK does and more. But, if you want to start a company based on the iPhone do you think it's preferrable to use Apple's SDK to remain "offical"?
======
jgrahamc
Yes, use the official SDK. The problem with the "Open Tool Chain" is that
there's no guarantee of backward compatibility and hence you'll always be at
risk that Apple breaks your application. If I was doing an app. for business
reasons I'd go with the official SDK.
Sure, you appear to have lost a few things (perhaps the most significant is
that ability to run in the background). I suspect that the biggest benefit of
the Open Tool Chain is that it will provide a way for Apple to see what people
want in the real SDK and they can cherry pick official additions as necessary.
The essentially did that with the entire SDK idea in the first place.
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Is Windows improving, and MacOs failing? - tabulatouch
Ever since Windows 7 I was able to get better performances on older PCs, Windows 8 made me resuscitate 6 years old machines, Windows 10 seems to improve it even more.
On the other hand my Macs are stuck on ancient Os releases, cannot install majority of apps, and slow as hell.
Ubuntu won't rejuvenate the same PCs as Windows does, unless LUbuntu is used.
So, can we tell Microsoft is doing s good job? Or is Apple cheating... à la Volkswagen?
======
smt88
Microsoft makes a lot more money on Windows than Apple does on OS X, so they
spend more money improving it. A lot of that money comes from corporations
with expensive, legacy software, so Microsoft has to maintain backward
compatibility. That's a lot of extra work that Apple doesn't usually seem
bothered to do.
Slimming an OS down as it gets older is also not something that's done quickly
or cheaply. I also noticed that OS X became more and more bloated since Lion.
Mavericks was the last really usable version to me, although I always did have
to install a bunch of third-party tools to get the UI to behave in an
efficient way.
I think you're totally right, but there are some people who have an almost
religious, fact-free hatred of all Windows versions. I don't see too many OS X
fanboy posts anymore, though.
------
Rannath
There were significant performance improvements in windows 7 & 8\. (Maybe 8.1
& 10 too)
You have to understand Mac controls their entire product chain. Each OS has
always been more or less locked to similar era hardware. Windows has always
had to deal with very, very weak and very, very strong hardware without
knowing what that hardware is before hand.
So yes, Apple "cheats," by being both a hardware company and a software
company. (Everything that made Microsoft scary in the 80s and 90s is now true
about Apple).
~~~
tabulatouch
Yes, that's what i think. I think MS is just forced to optimize, and i like
it, it is what every hardware owner deserves.
------
Albright
The recently-released, Mac OS X 10.11, El Capitan, will run on systems up to
eight years old [1]. Maybe it won't run well, particularly if the RAM is
skimpy, but for any machine made in the current decade, it shouldn't be much
of a problem.
If your Macs are "stuck on ancient OS releases," it's likely because you have
ancient Macs, or you just aren't upgrading for some reason.
I don't really understand your Ubuntu comment, but if you really find OS X to
be too much of a dog, you can install Linux variants on Apple hardware as
well.
1: [http://osxdaily.com/2015/06/09/os-x-el-capitan-system-
requir...](http://osxdaily.com/2015/06/09/os-x-el-capitan-system-requirements-
compatible-mac/)
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Show HN: Brit/Euro version of Threadless tee design competition- Facebook App - NiceGuyJimmy
======
NiceGuyJimmy
Hello fellow HN pals- Jay and I were sick of waiting for shipping from
threadless over in the states and paying a premium for delivery, so we hacked
together this MVP as a Facebook app. We are London based so hoping to attract
a more Brit/Euro community that should reflect in the designs that win too.
Let us know what you think of the alpha site (note you have to be logged into
Facebook as it brings up a Facebook app)- we thought this would be easier to
share stuff/promote to pals for voting, etc.
www.facebook.com/designoff/
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Is Facebook Innovative? - shivkapoor
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/12/20/is-facebook-innovative/
======
rayhano
Of course: for one, Facebook has pushed the boundaries of what we accept in
terms of privacy. They have changed the behaviour of the whole world (not
single-handed, but they have really pushed). Their 3 steps forward, 1 step
back approach to pushing new features works because they create products
people want but don't necessarily understand straight off the bat.
Facebook surely would not be attracting the best developers, when Google
offers more money, if they weren't at the cutting edge.
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How Easy and Cheap It Is to Manipulate Reddit Discussions - coinmall
https://medium.com/@coinmallio/how-easy-and-cheap-it-is-to-manipulate-reddit-discussions-4139a488542
======
minimaxir
This post is being vote manipulated.
It’s not working.
~~~
coinmall
LPT: Don't share a social media link with sources who earn their money by
manipulating votes. Not sure why they'd want to do that since they wanted to
remain anonymous.
It is however good to see that Hackernews has a better detection system than
Reddit :)
------
bdz
Reddit for Sale: How we bought the top spot for $200 (2016)
[https://youtu.be/FxNvUWN3vYk](https://youtu.be/FxNvUWN3vYk)
------
motiw
I am experimenting with Postwaves to eliminate vote manipulation by randomly
assigning who can vote
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Airbus electric passenger drone makes first flight at Pendleton UAS range - walrus01
http://nwnewsnetwork.org/post/robo-air-taxi-makes-first-flight-pendleton-airport
======
walrus01
more info: [https://www.fastcompany.com/40518081/inside-airbuss-mad-
dash...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40518081/inside-airbuss-mad-dash-to-get-
a-robo-air-taxi-off-the-ground)
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Why does HipChat client 2.2.1080 flash my webcam on startup? - dm03514
I'm running HipChat client 2.2.1080 on ubuntu 64bit and whenever I start the application the webcam flashes. I have just asked hipchat help directly and have posted on superuser.stackexchange but was hoping we could get to the truth of this. I am def concerned about privacy because skype doesn't flash the webcam on startup<p>http://superuser.com/questions/758053/hipchat-2-2-1080-on-ubuntu-64bit-12-04-flashes-webcam-on-startup
======
nattaylor
I've always figured it was a diagnostic... so that it can determine your
eligibility for video during the rest of the session or something.
|
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Foursquare Now Six Million Users Strong, Hit 381M Total Check-Ins In 2010 - obilgic
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/foursquare-now-six-million-users-strong-hit-381m-total-check-ins-in-2010/
======
brk
"Strong"?
381 / 6 = 63.5 checkins/user. Or, about 5 per month.
Doesn't seem like a high-engagement app to me.
I toyed with Foursquare for a while but then deleted the app. I'm past the
"it's Saturday night, where are all my friends at" stage of my life, and
battling some other schmuck for a mayorship so I can get $1.00 off at
Starbucks or a free appetizer some place wasn't worth the effort, and leads to
an increased spend that far outweighs the mayorship "benefit" (when there is
one).
I'm kinda feeling like foursquare is best done as a feature to a larger app or
business model.
~~~
mariust
Yes brk, but I really doubt that half of the 6 million users are active. Then
we end up with more then 100 checkins/user. It's like one check in for each
working day of the month.
~~~
brk
I doubt that 1/4 of them are active, and even with the adjusted active user
base it doesn't seem like a highly lucrative platform.
~~~
mariust
I think that we will see a big shift in they're marketing strategy in order to
bring in more users. I don't have the link but I remember reading something a
chat they wanted to add based on location, that would really scale up the
numbers. So, you could chat with someone near you, e.g. in the same
restaurant. The potential in something like that is huge, and if they don't
build it, let's built it :)
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Sonny – Fast single page app engine - develix
https://github.com/felixmaier/sonnyJS
======
RussianCow
You know how to make an incredibly fast single page app? Pre-render it on the
server. I'm tired of waiting several seconds while the JS framework gets
initialized.
~~~
huula
You are right, [http://huu.la](http://huu.la) is using server rendering and
prefetching technique, which makes the ux x00% better than this one.
~~~
thomasfl
Yes, huu.la is smooth.
------
denzquix
Went to [http://www.sonnyjs.org/](http://www.sonnyjs.org/) (latest Chrome,
Windows 7) - there doesn't seem to be any way to scroll the left-hand menu (it
cuts off at "StorageManager" sub-heading for me at default zoom level, I can
see there are more by zooming out though) and of the ones I can see, the menu
items "render" and "kill" don't seem to do anything.
------
igvadaimon
similar to meteor, page needs second or two to load, presenting user a blank
screen.
~~~
aaronem
Just over 7s here, and /demo takes 12s and ends up with a blank page.
Not ready for prime time.
------
tthayer
Can anyone get the docs page at
[http://www.sonnyjs.org/?home](http://www.sonnyjs.org/?home) to scroll
correctly? I have to zoom it way out to see everything. OSX 10.10.2/Safari on
a 13" Retina display.
------
jakejake
Not sure if the config file is intended to contain any sensitive info or not?
If so it should probably be protected:
[http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/config.json](http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/config.json)
------
indubitably
It's trying to load a public.html that isn't there?
------
Nux
[http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/](http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/) is a blank page
:/
------
supporting
Why are people upvoting this broken trash? Because the author put "Incredibly
fast" in the title? Is that all it takes?
~~~
Kiro
Why is it trash?
~~~
aaronem
Because it's a slow, broken reimplementation of things which Angular already
does better and which only work well in any case when you're on a blazing-fast
low-latency Internet connection, or better yet browsing localhost -- did I
mention those times I posted earlier were on _desktop_? I shudder to think
what'd happen if I tried loading it on my phone.
And it also appears to be implemented entirely in a single 1300-line-long
Javascript file, which, okay, I guess? There are no tests -- yes, there are
examples in a directory called "tests", but there are no _tests_ , which is to
say there's no way to get any confidence that modifications in that 1300-line
Javascript blob haven't produced regressions or new bugs.
Presumably the author has learned something in the process of writing it,
although I can't imagine what that may be. I don't know why he'd spend his
time on this, though; from the looks of his Github account, he's also written
an in-browser Pokemon game engine which looks pretty cool, so I don't know
what value he sees in hacking up a half-baked me-too web framework.
------
dangerlibrary
[http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/](http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/) appears to be
down?
~~~
tommy23
I'm able to load it in Chrome and Opera but not in IE or Firefox
~~~
tux1968
And it's a pretty unfortunate failure mode. IMHO, it should at least render a
basic failure message that is removed by a working site.
------
teapowered
Demo site looks to be down? At least not rendering for me, FF nightly on
android
------
sz4kerto
Only on WebKit/Blink. I disapprove. :)
~~~
waitingkuo
I approve you.
|
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LABjs - Loading And Blocking Javascript - mshafrir
http://labjs.com/
======
akaGOMEZ
I like it.
|
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That guy who called the big one? Don’t listen to him. - aaronbrethorst
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/09/that_guy_who_called_the_big_one_dont_listen_to_him/?page=full
======
d2viant
I had a professor that told me it's actually a good strategy to make wild
predictions far in the future. If you're right, you look like an oracle. If
you're wrong, nobody remembers to go back and dig up "he predicted this on
this date", primarily because they're already focused on the next predictions.
Most of the time it's a win-win; the farther out in the future the better.
~~~
car387
Seth Godin makes a similar point to be unafraid of "claim chowder" - what
happens when you make a prediction about the future and you end up being
totally and tragically wrong. No one remembers!
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/unwarranted-...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/unwarranted-
fear-of-claim-chowder.html)
~~~
comex
Unless John Gruber doesn't like you.
~~~
car387
Yes, there's that of course :)
------
aothman
A lot of this has to do with the way we "score" forecasts. Applying some kind
of uniform weighting over forecasts is the natural, and wrong, way to think
about things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (black swan, fooled by randomness) has written about his
trading strategy. At his fund, he consistently takes positions that predict
extreme events, and he's wrong almost all the time, consistently producing
grinding, negative returns. He's only been right a couple times, but when he's
right he's _really_ right, making enough money that he doesn't need to make
money anymore.
~~~
borism
_he's wrong almost all the time, consistently producing grinding, negative
returns. He's only been right a couple times, but when he's right he's really
right, making enough money that he doesn't need to make money anymore_
AFAIK his hedge fund haven't been right "big" even once so far and clients are
only withdrawing money with a loss after few years...
~~~
patrickgzill
20 seconds of search engine gets me:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Taleb#Finance_career>
Perhaps you should invest the extra 19 seconds between typing "AFAIK" and
actually, you know, Knowing.
==== "founder of Empirica Capital, after which Taleb retired from trading and
became a full-time author and scholar in 2004.[33] Taleb is currently
Principal/Senior Scientific Adviser at Universa Investments in Santa Monica,
California, a tail protection firm owned and managed by former Empirica
partner Mark Spitznagel.
Taleb reportedly made a multi-million dollar fortune during the financial
crisis that began in 2007, a development which he attributed to the failure of
statistical methods in finance.[34]
Universa is a fund which is based on the "black swan" idea and to which Taleb
is a principal adviser. Separate funds belonging to Universa made returns of
65% to 115% in October 2008.[20][35] In the wake of the economic crisis that
started in 2008, Taleb has become an activist for a "black swan robust
society"" ===
~~~
_debug_
> Taleb reportedly made a multi-million dollar fortune during the financial
> crisis that began in 2007
"Reportedly". Also, "multi-million dollar fortune" is really vague.
Sorry to spoil a good story, but the entire Taleb thesis is just a very
entertaining way to say : "Shit happens". There is absolutely nothing new that
he has to add, other than the entertainment and sheer drama. If there was, he
would be able to publish it as a paper in a journal, not merely as a popular
paperback. As an analogy, Taleb's position is akin to a religious zealot
shouting, "Science dosen't know everything". Science's response is : "Sure, we
know that. Why don't you help push the border by proposing and publishing a
better model?". No, he is content to just shout from the rooftops and make a
living out of it. Even his recent attempt to publish an academic paper in 2010
is full of negativity: it's just a way to say, "You're wrong, you're wrong,
you're wrong. Here are citations to show you're wrong."
Also, note that Taleb is merely an adviser to Universa. Any credit for
profitability at Universa goes to their founder, traders and portfolio
managers. When he was the trader (at Empirica), they had to fold the fund.
That's when he wrote the books.
What fans of Taleb probably don't realize is that the enemy is not the models
or the quants who published the models, who clearly stated their simplifying
assumptions in order to make approximate models, (because Newton's laws are a
good-enough intermediate model compared to _nothing_ even though they may be
wrong at extreme points, and that's where relativity comes in,) but
overleveraging (trading with money that you don't have), and good old greed
(using a model that states clearly on the label that it is only an
approximation, 90% correct, as if it were 100% correct).
Taleb's recent arguments with Scholes (who was awarded a Nobel Prize for the
Black-Scholes model) is like a dolt shouting a Newton, saying, "But you didn't
consider relativity! You must be jailed for that!". So what, at least he DID
something concrete!
~~~
naradaellis
Are you not allowed to call bullshit on something unless you can do better? I
believe the contrary; I think that reading around and saying "You're wrong,
you're wrong, you're wrong. Here are citations to show you're wrong" is
actually a very valuable contribution to science and society -- what are the
point of such models if they don't work?
The difference between Newton and the securities traders that Taleb dislikes
is that Newton actually managed to predict things with certainty. A large part
of the Black Swan is Taleb pointing out that barely any retrospective review
is done on predictive models.
~~~
_debug_
> is actually a very valuable contribution to science and society -- what are
> the point of such models if they don't work
Agreed. Some papers just say, "We tried this and it doesn't work", and that's
a contribution, too.
I would just like to point out that there is a good amount of unwarranted
drama that overemphasizes his contribution and unnecessarily attacks
fundamental contributions like the Black-Scholes model. It's especially
appealing to the larger public who are looking for a black & white "us vs.
them" simplified explanation for the financial crisis.
------
mixmax
_"when people study success stories exclusively — as many avid devourers of
business self-help books do — they come away with a vastly oversimplified idea
of what it takes to succeed. This is because success is what economists refer
to as a “noisy signal.” It’s chancy, fickle, and composed of so many moving
parts that any one is basically meaningless in the context of the real world.
By studying what successful ventures have in common (persistence, for
instance), people miss the invaluable lessons contained in the far more common
experience of failure. They ignore the high likelihood that a company will
flop the base rate and wind up wildly overestimating the chances of success."_
As an entrepreneur this is worth taking note of.
~~~
iamwil
So then I wonder if that makes a case for Jessica Livingston writing a book
called "Founders that Failed", rather than "Founders at Work 2"?
~~~
michael_dorfman
I would love a book like that, if there was sufficient analysis of the
failures, and the interview subjects were as interesting as the crowd in
"Founders at Work".
------
noelchurchill
To me it seems that hardest part about predictions is the timing. It's not too
hard to understand the macro economic trends and to see which way the wind is
blowing, but it's very hard to know when it will happen and how quickly it
will happen.
That's why day trading is gambling. The long term buy and hold, and the
averaging down strategies will make you money, as long as you understand mid
to long term direction of the economy and invest accordingly.
~~~
tygorius
Actually if there's any one lesson to be learned from the last dozen years of
the stock market's swings, it is that "buy and hold" is dead as a useful
investment strategy.
As to gambling vs. trading, there's a whole industry of people who train
traders in eliminating the gambling psychology that can destroy equity so
quickly. A short time frame only exacerbates the psychological weakness.
Oddly enough successful day traders, that is, those who hold their positions
for mere minutes and close out all positions by the close of the trading day,
are about as far from gamblers (in a psychological sense) as you can get.
~~~
noelchurchill
_Actually if there's any one lesson to be learned from the last dozen years of
the stock market's swings, it is that "buy and hold" is dead as a useful
investment strategy._
I might have misused the term buy and hold. I meant to ignore the intraday
swings and keep your eyes on the overlying trends. I certainly don't think you
can blindly hold an index fund these days and plan on retiring on it.
~~~
me_again
My 401K's in a 'LifePath' fund- more-or-less an index tracker which shifts
more weight from a stock index funds into bonds as your nominal retirement day
approaches. It's quite possible I'll come to regret it, but I can't think of a
safer approach.
------
pwnguin
Personally, I like Schiller (<http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/>) more than
Roubini. His record: he wrote a book called Irrational Exuberance, and the
.com market promptly crashed. He wrote papers from 2003 to 2007 suggesting the
housing bubble was real, what it's effects were and how it might be mitigated
/ avoided.
Where Roubini simply says we're all walking in the dark, Schiller is the rare
critical eye who offers, in public, insight about where and how things are
going wrong.
~~~
igravious
Personally, I like Mike Whitney (most recent article
<http://counterpunch.org/whitney01062011.html>) more than Roubini. He's not so
famous as Schiller but he's not afraid to connect the dots politically as well
and call a wealth-based transfer from poor to rich class warfare when that is
what it is.
He called the Great Recession many times from 2006 onwards, just dig through
that site for his articles, like this way for instance
([https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22by+mike+w...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22by+mike+whitney%22+site:counterpunch.org))
- really, the guy is super cynical but nothing macroeconomic-wise escapes his
beady eye.
~~~
borism
ugh, this guy seems to be nuts!
does he have any economic education at all?
also, his blog host seems to be unreachable.
~~~
igravious
Please don't be crude :) Yes, like a fine malt whiskey Mr. Whitney can go
straight to your head. I never said that he was an economist mind you, just
that his economic analysis is spot on and he was yelling "housing bubble!",
"credit bubble!" as the regular economists were ignoring Roubini et al.
Whitney is pessimistic but if you hadn't noticed there has been a lot to be
pessimistic about for the last 5 years of irrational exuberance and
recessionary times. Besides, he's an accessible and engaging writer. Take the
time to go back to a few of his articles from years gone by to get a feeling
about his track record and insight.
------
iwwr
_In October 2008, he predicted that hundreds of hedge funds were on the verge
of failure and that the government would have to close the markets for a week
or two in the coming days to cope with the shock._
Most hedge funds would have been bankrupt if not for the bailouts, so he was
technically correct.
~~~
gwern
So you're saying Nouriel's prophetic vision includes the entire economic world
_except_ the government?
Wow, what a flaw. Almost as bad as kryptonite.
~~~
Misha_B
It actually makes sense. To predict the economy without government you need to
predict trends and the behavior of many people. To predict the government
moves you need to predict the whims and arbitrary actions of individuals, and
do that according to their perceived political gains.
------
dschobel
_We want to believe success is more probable than it is, that it’s the result
of a process we can wrap our heads around. That’s why we’re drawn to prophets,
especially the ones who get one big thing right. We want to believe that
someone, somewhere can foresee surprising and disruptive change. It means that
there is a method to the madness of not just business, but human existence,
and that it’s perceptible if you look at it from the right angle. It’s why we
take lucky rabbits’ feet into casinos instead of putting our money in a CD,
why we quit steady jobs to start risky small businesses. On paper, these too
may indeed resemble sucker bets placed by people with bad judgment. But cast
in a certain light, they begin to look a lot like hope._
That sound you hear is the sound of a thousand VCs crying out en masse.
~~~
Dn_Ab
_> It’s why we take lucky rabbits’ feet into casinos instead of putting our
money in a CD, why we quit steady jobs to start risky small businesses. _
Again, I am probably biased but I think this indirect comparison is nonsense.
While one action is unequivocally irrational the other could be rational if
you take into account situation, tolerance to risk and expected value -
expected utility of the action.
------
humj
A much simpler explanation. Even though the prophet is usually wrong, we
believe him when he's right because that's the only time we notice he has even
made a prediction.
------
mshron
I would buy this argument if it wasn't for the fact that he managed to not
only correctly call the timing but also the cause of the recession.
It sounds to me like he's a good person to listen to for potential trouble
spots. The economy is very path-dependent; just because someone is good at
pointing out potential issues doesn't mean they're going to know how it turns
out.
------
bcl
Read "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives"
[http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-
ebook/...](http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-
ebook/dp/B001NXK1XO/)
and everything will become clear.
------
localhost3000
Hasn't Taleb been making this argument for the last 15 years? He and Dr. Doom
are both NYU faculty...that must be awkward.
------
patrickgzill
To write about Roubini's misses and not mention:
1\. quantitative easing [which had the effect of propping up the stock
market], and
2\. the creation of a backdoor funding initiative to subsidize the investment
banks on the backs of all USD savers, by pretending they are regular banks,
allowing them to borrow at the nonsensical rate of 0% (or nearly that)
[allowing banks to make billions per year nearly risk-free, thus keeping them
from going under]
betrays either the article writer's dishonesty, or lack of knowledge on the
subject.
~~~
narrator
Mainstream Economics assumes the monetary system and government policy are
some abstract and perfect continuous function. As perfect example the IS/LM
curve. They aren't though, they can radically change the rules anytime they
want to throwing years of equations out the window. Imagine the utter
theoretical chaos that would be caused if the U.S defaulted on its bonds
because Treasuries represent the "Risk free rate of interests" variable
present in perhaps thousands of economic models.
------
mike_esspe
Idea for a small startup: service, which collects predictions from experts and
politicians, and have a number showing percent of predictions, which came
true.
Anyone knows a service like this?
~~~
mds
<http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements> is pretty close.
------
talbina
Does anyone know how well the averaged forecasts turned out? I didn't see that
in the article.
------
forensic
This article is propaganda written by a shill.
Based on the author's logic you might as well throw up your hands and stop
trying to predict anything.
Roubini didn't get his message from God, he made it based on a public,
replicable analysis using standard economic theory from his economic school.
Other people from his economic school also made the same predictions that
followed logically from their premises and the indicators.
This is like saying when a doctor tells a patient that if he keeps smoking he
will get cancer, and the patient gets cancer, he just did it by luck.
It's not by luck. He is not making wild speculations. He's doing it
systematically based on logic and facts and a respected system that has a
level of credibility behind it.
All the austrians predicted the housing bubble.
This article is a hit piece, pure and simple. It is teaching the reader to be
stupid.
~~~
tsiki
The austrians also predicted 20 of the last 3 recessions.
~~~
borism
the Austrian school is not scientific, but religious branch of Economics
though:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Criticism_of_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Criticism_of_the_Austrian_School)
~~~
iwwr
Forecasting the economy is trickier than the weather, even with the advanced
quantitative tools available to Economists today. Standard economic models
were totally blind to the collapse. In fact, following standard models was
worse than having no model at all, it created false security and hid risk from
the markets.
Austrians don't concern themselves too much with quantitative models because
they are inherently unreliable. The main idea is that interfering in prices
produces negative consequences in the same manner that any control of prices
does. The Austrians are simply extending the theory of price controls to
interest rates.
|
{
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|
Ford recalls 1.5M Focuses for faulty fuel tank purge valves - extraterra
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1400149
======
hector_ka
Just bought one from 2014. Has horrible transmission that has a recall, and I
was just thinking about taking it to the dealer.Why not go for 2 recalls
instead of 1.
|
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The Hacker Way, an alternative to Agile - tosh
http://www.vimeo.com/110554082
======
tosh
An incredibly polemic delivery. Erik Meijer is a manifestation of the 10th man
here.
If you look beyond the surface/delivery of the talk you will see some profound
truth about the industry we're in.
I also see some parallels between what he is recommending and the way
YCombinator and many Valley companies are set up (in stark contrast to the
rest of the industry).
Great talk. Thought provoking.
|
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Why You Need to be in Silicon Valley - prakash
http://startupboy.com/2010/01/17/why-you-need-to-be-in-silicon-valley/
======
toddml
Tell that to foursquare, tumblr, bit.ly, etsy, gilt, drop.io, aviary, boxee,
meetup, gdgt, hunch, betaworks, hot potato, kickstarter, challengepost, etc,
etc, etc. All New York startups.
~~~
breck
Interesting list.
But, if you summed the market caps of all these companies, what would you get?
My guess is $2-5 billion.
Now Google alone is worth ~$200B.
I agree that you can start a really successful Internet company in NYC. I'd
say any city in the U.S. would do. However, if you have some pathological urge
to build a gigantic Internet company, you absolutely _need_ to be in Silicon
Valley.
~~~
wheels
Like Amazon, Microsoft and Activision Blizard?
Being in the valley is definitely a boon, but calling it a _must_ is silly.
Those guys combined have a market cap of $343 billion. The other end of the
bullshit-spectrum is people pretending that it doesn't make a difference
because they don't want to move.
~~~
nostrademons
Part of the guy's argument (and one I've heard from a few YC founders) is that
with all the other odds that are stacked against you in a startup, do you
really want to take a chance on location too? If it gives you a few percentage
points better chance of success, why not take it? If your startup failed, how
would you feel if it was only because you didn't move to Silicon Valley? Tech
markets are often winner-take-all - if you're a couple percentage points
better than the other guy, you win.
~~~
wheels
That uhm, wasn't _part_ of his argument, that _was_ his argument. And it's a
fair one.
That said, all startup successes are statistical anomalies. The implicit
irrational assumption is that you can beat the odds. Some companies beat
harder odds than others, and being outside the valley does set them up for
that.
There are lots of reasons one might not want or be able to move -- visas,
family, other attachment to a particular place -- and that just has to become
part of the calculation, "This makes it x% more likely that I'm just wasting
my time, but I'm still [irrationally] convinced I can beat those odds."
We know that this works because there are examples of it. We also know that
it's harder because of how relatively few there are.
------
jasonlbaptiste
You can succeed ANYWHERE, just like you can succeed regardless of what college
you go to. Silicon Valley is a lot like Harvard in the sense that you afford
yourself with the best possible resources (education, peers, network,
opportunities,etc.), except it's open to everyone. Why not give yourself the
best possible opportunity if you can have it?
~~~
patio11
_Silicon Valley is a lot like Harvard... Why not give yourself the best
possible opportunity if you can have it?_
Crikey, you are nearly giving me flashbacks to high school. I was speaking to
an admissions officer from Harvard and, after answering his questions about
myself, he asked me whether I had a question for him. I asked "Well, you know,
I probably have a bit of ability to pick where I go to school. Why should I go
to Harvard?" I remember his response _exactly_ : "If you can get into Harvard,
why would you go anywhere else?"
That line convinced me not to apply, on the theory I'd have to spend four
years of my life with people who thought like that. (Which, come to think of
it, is one reason I would not love to live in Silicon Valley.)
~~~
paulbaumgart
I see your point, but I don't entirely agree with the analogy; the types of
people who think like the admissions officer you quote are influenced a lot by
the prestige that comes from saying "I went to Harvard." Saying "I live in
Silicon Valley" isn't nearly as impressive to most folks. :-)
------
mcav
Living in Silicon Valley can be advantageous.
Never mistake advantage for necessity.
Startups thrive and wither in the Valley, just as they do anywhere else.
Silicon Valley can be a useful card in your hand, but the flop is more
important.
~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Pretty much what I was saying above. As a startup, you need to give yourself
as many possible advantages as you can. Silicon Valley lets you do that over
any other geo, hence why it makes the most sense.
~~~
Estragon
Silicon Valley lets you do that over any other geo, hence
why it makes the most sense.
Other things being equal, of course.
------
gamble
What most distinguishes Silicon Valley from elsewhere is how much easier it is
to find investors - not just VC, but angels who are comfortable putting their
money into tech startups.
Startups in the Valley are never more than a couple degrees of separation from
someone who's made money in tech, or has friends who did. There's a level of
comfort with tech startups that doesn't exist elsewhere. Though there may be
plenty of rich people in other areas, they don't have the familiarity with
tech to risk their money on a startup when they could buy real estate or
whatever.
------
profquail
I've given this a lot of thought recently, and I _don't_ think you need to be
in Silicon Valley. Rather, I think you need to be surrounded by a lively
startup community, so that you have opportunities to interact with other
startup founders and to learn from each other. The chances of that are much
greater in Silicon Valley, but now that there's little pockets of startup
activity springing up all around the US (and the world, it seems), it's not a
necessity.
------
yankeeracer73
It's advantageous to be in Silicon Valley if you're going the VC route. If
you're going to bootstrap for awhile, SV is quite expensive to live and work
in and other cities may actually be a better fit. Agreed though that most
other cities outside NY and Boston, and maybe Austin you're going to feel much
more isolated.
------
tptacek
Just think about how much more successful you could have been as an _early
adopter_ of Twitter and Nexus One.
~~~
helwr
think about how much more successful you could have been as a _creator_ of
Twitter or Nexus One
------
brown9-2
Caterina Fake on how there are great engineers everywhere:
<http://www.caterina.net/archive/001215.html>
she also touches on some cultural differences between NYC and CA:
_But what NYC is actually missing is not engineers. In NYC you can find lots
of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to
social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills -
engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but
also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack
together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various
avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups. It is these hybrid
people that we are always looking for at Hunch and for whatever reason find
them much more often in CA than NYC._
~~~
rdouble
Her article is wrong. NYC actually is missing engineers, or more accurately,
missing internet-software-company-potential-employees. There are quantifiably
more of these people in the Bay Area than there are in NYC. I don't have any
numbers to back this up, but I actually think there are a higher percentage of
"jack of all trades" programmers in NYC. In the Bay Area there are enough
software engineers so that people can get much more specific about their areas
of expertise. In NYC, there are fewer engineers, so people are forced to do a
bit of everything.
Caterina Fake's real complaint is that she can't find one person to do three
jobs at once for her at Hunch, which isn't surprising.
~~~
brown9-2
Are you basing this opinion on experience of working in NYC?
~~~
rdouble
I worked in the Bay Area (SF, Cupertino) for 5 years and now work in
Manhattan.
------
marltod
I don't get what makes "startups" different from other businesses. Why is a
"cloud social network" business different from a new innovative retailer. Why
is Wal-mart (started in Alabama), less financially successful than Google
(started in CA).
------
helwr
take a look at facebook, a bostonian startup, i’ve heard they are pretty
successful
~~~
jackowayed
Yes, they _started_ in Boston. But they moved to Palo Alto very, very early on
because that's where their first investor was from.
~~~
helwr
i see 3 underlying assumptions here (both in your reply and in the original
post) 1) You need investors to scale 2) It is easier to find VC money in the
Valley 3) Being an early adopter is a critical factor in startup success. I
would disagree with all of these, i think you need a good product and loyal
customers, everything else including the "networking edge" of being in the
center of the startup universe is secondary in my opinion. Paying customers
will let you scale. It is bad to be an "adopter", make your own thing. And its
easy to find an investor if you have a good product, no matter where you are.
I'd move from Boston to CA just for the sake of windsurfing.
~~~
sreitshamer
Boston's great for windsurfing! Pleasure Bay is convenient. And Kalmus beach
in Hyannis is statistically the windiest place on the east coast.
~~~
helwr
nice! didn't know that. I need to get out of New York more often
|
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Jaquard Loom - colund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
======
chestnut-tree
There's a short (3 min) video of how a Jacquard Loom works on the V&A website
(V&A = Victoria & Albert Museum, London). There's no sound in the video but it
shows, using animation, how patterns are woven into the fabric.
[http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/j/video-jacquard-
weaving...](http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/j/video-jacquard-weaving/)
~~~
ZenoArrow
Thank you so much! I've been hoping to see something like that video for
months, now I have a much better understanding of how the Jacquard Loom works.
My initial interest was driven by the osloom project (an open-source Jacquard
Loom)...
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbenitez/osloom-an-
open...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbenitez/osloom-an-open-source-
jacquard-loom-diy-electrom)
[http://www.osloom.org/](http://www.osloom.org/)
Sadly the project appears to have stalled, hopefully it'll restart at some
point.
------
saidajigumi
I had a chance to visit the Macclesfield Silk Museums[1] a couple of years
ago, part of which is the Paradise Mill. Macclesfield was the "end of the silk
road", and its silk mills were quite renowned in their day. The mill has rows
of large Jacquard Looms that are built into the structure of the building, at
least some of which are still operational at demonstration capacities. These
were some of the earliest era of Jacquard looms, which accepted massive racked
loops of industrial scale punch cards to drive the weaving patterns. The mill
includes a look into the tools and processes which started with paper-drafted
designs, vetted and turned into punch cards, then woven on the mills. There's
a good selection of sample woven works as well, all of which highlight the
nigh-photographic level of detail these looms were capable of.
On a more modern take, I'll plug the OSLOOM project[2], which aims to create
"an open source electromechanical thread-controlled floor loom that will be
computer controlled." It's been slowly ticking along for some time now;
hopefully it'll eventually achieve its goals of enabling much cheaper access
to a modern Jacquard loom.
[1] [http://www.silkmacclesfield.org.uk/museums/silk-
museums](http://www.silkmacclesfield.org.uk/museums/silk-museums)
[2] [http://osloom.org/](http://osloom.org/)
------
Adaptive
I taught a raspberry pi intro to computing class last year and was hunting
around for some jacquard loom demos for the students when I found something
that blew my mind:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78opvFR-
VsU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78opvFR-VsU)
These are antique looking jacquard looms in current use in Hanoi. I bet they
are still there right now, operating. I know that some crafters use them and
there are still specialty mills that make use of modern jacquards, but this is
a factory and these look like they are straight out of the 1800s. Amazing.
I wonder still how old some of those looms are...
~~~
gumby
I took some shots of Jaquard looms in operation outside Beijing in 1984.
Everybody was supposed to marvel at the silk fabric but I was fascinated by
the belts of cards. Everybody treated me like a loon (not loom) for
appreciating the ancient hardware. The looms had clearly been shipped from
Europe by the French labeling on the metal parts.
I wonder if the equipment you saw in Hanoi passed through China on its way.
------
viksit
Of course I'm curious why this is on the front page of HN today - but to speed
things along, a simulation of the loom using Jacquard floppies (loaded from
disk) and patterns : [http://www.arahne.si/how-to-make-a-
fabric.html](http://www.arahne.si/how-to-make-a-fabric.html)
~~~
jacquesm
> Of course I'm curious why this is on the front page of HN today
The Jacquard loom contains a distant forerunner of the punchcard used in large
numbers to emulate a ROM with a program, making it the first programmable
piece of industrial machinery.
------
joshkpeterson
There was a best paper at CHI 2012 about this subject, wish I could find pdf
but here's ACM link:
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208280&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208280&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=444339793&CFTOKEN=65648187)
Here's a review by Stuart Reeves:
[http://notesonresearch.tumblr.com/post/26870630666/confusing...](http://notesonresearch.tumblr.com/post/26870630666/confusing-
computations)
~~~
monk_e_boy
Looms and the history of looms were featured on 'How do they do that' (or a
similarly titled) TV Programme that is shown here on channel Dave. Looms are
pretty well known in the history of computing and we learned about them during
our A Level and Degree (UK) ... but I love to see rather odd historical
'computers' or programmable devices.
It'd be neat to see a loom take either punch card or textile as input. So you
could write to the textile, use it as memory and instructions. Then when the
program is finished just cut it up and make a rather fetching cardigan from it
(the textile, not the punch cards - silly!)
~~~
Ollinson
Also featured on Connections (BBC James Burke). A particularly memorable
episode.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI)
------
jdimov
Not sure why this is suddenly trending on HN... Perhaps many people have never
heard of it.
If you're in the UK and want to see a real Jaquard Loom, there's currently one
on display at the Science Museum in London.
~~~
grimman
Old tech is certainly tech too, and this definitely manages to impress and
fascinate even me, 200 years later.
|
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Show HN: Write blog in Emacs with hexo/org-page - codefalling
https://github.com/CodeFalling/blog-admin
======
gravypod
What does the generated blog look like?
~~~
pachydermic
Looks like it uses [https://github.com/kelvinh/org-
page](https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page)
You can see an example and more info there
~~~
Infernal
From the link above, here is a site generated by org-page:
[http://kelvinh.github.io](http://kelvinh.github.io)
|
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Devs have eaten the world (and still have room for dessert) - r0dms
https://medium.com/quine/devs-have-eaten-the-world-523c8a1d1da2
======
r0dms
An essay on open-source, the future-of-work, and new interfaces between devs
and the labour markets.
|
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Ask HN: I don't know how to raise money. How should I? - zmkahn
Throwaway.<p>I don't know how to raise money.<p>What's a first time entrepreneur with a solid technical & business background, tons of experience, a working product in the hands of soon-to-be-paying B2B customers supposed to do to get started raising money?<p>I have a MVP plus product, a handful of beta B2B customers--some decent brand names--and some that will probably convert to paying customers in the next few month--talking about a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month per customer.<p>I've read Paul Graham's "How to Raise Money" [0]. I read the same from others' blogs: Don't raise unless you know you need the money. I know I need it to scale and grow quickly.
Still, I don't know how to go about raising it!<p>I've spent years as a developer and product manager. I have a solid MBA. Something a little different? I'm in my late 30's, have a spouse and kids and am leaving a cushy corporate job.<p>How do I go about raising money? Cold-call angles/VC's and ask to meet over a coffee? Go to start-up competitions? Apply to an incubator? I thought about applying to YC but think I don't fit the demographic (age and family) and I don't have a co-founder.<p>How do I start? Are there specific advisers out there that help with this? Some book or blog post I haven't come across yet?<p>When should I start raising money? I've heard I should give myself a 6-month run-way, but I can't put my business on hold while I do that. BTW, having a co-founder is starting to make sense for this one reason now.<p>How much should I raise? I've heard an estimate of (monthly need x 18 months) and I've also read that I should just guess [1].<p>How do I start? And then what do I do next?<p>0 - bit.ly/1iSAUvB<p>1 - http://read.bi/1dqtJcD<p>EDIT: Fixed formatting
======
pedalpete
Where are you based? This will have a large impact on your next steps. Don't
cold call VCs, that isn't the way to go. Go through your network. Maybe even
leveraging the network of your clients, if you have a good enough relationship
with them.
Do a bit of research into the VCs/Angels in your area. Find out who they are,
what sorts of businesses they like. Get on angellist. Build a network there.
Talk to people. Keep working. If you've got B2B customers and money coming in,
focus on that. For most companies, that is more important than raising a first
round of funding, assuming you can continue to bootstrap. The more money you
have coming in and the longer you go without, the better leverage you'll have
with investors, and possibly an easier conversation.
You say you need the money to scale and grow quickly, but are you sure you
need to scale and grow quickly? There are definitely some businesses that do
need this, but not all. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement and think
'I need money to scale', but what specifically do you need the money to do?
Hardware is so cheap at the moment, and you're a developer, so those costs are
minor. If you think you need money to scale with marketing, you don't at this
stage. Wait a month, or two.
I've started the fundraising dance, and worked for a VC on a few of their
start-ups, and I can tell you that it is very time consuming.
As far as getting a co-founder, everybody says to do it, but that isn't so
easy either. Start looking.
Basically, my advice would be to network as much as possible, and get as much
advice and help as you can. See what you can do with favours and such, without
going for funding right away.
See if you can build your business to 10,000 a month. That may mean getting
somebody to help you out, and that may mean sharing equity with that person.
It doesn't necessarily mean they are a co-founder. Co-founders and employees
are very different animals.
Congrats on taking the first promising steps with your new venture. Best of
luck.
~~~
soneca
Great advice!
What worked for me is to contact friends who are now in a very good finantial
position. I have a high school friend and 3 years ago, when I was starting
with this startup thing, he told me that he would like to listen to my ideas
if one day I needed investment. So, now I need, I am ready to make an
investment worthy, so I went to him, he liked the idea and he said yes!
He is not "smart money", and not connected at all with the rest of the market
or the VCs. But is someone I can trust, smart and have the money (he is
investment banking). Good enough for me.
But even if this works, by all means keep creating this network with VCs,
successfull founders and mentors.
Also, you didn't apply to YC because you thought you didn't fit the
demographics?!?! WTF?!?! You are quiting a job to do something with very low
chances of success and is influenced by stupid myth? C'mon! Apply first, raise
doubts later!
------
rms
Move to the Bay Area. The actual financial EVs are strongly in your favor
starting here over anywhere else. Your family might be far more open to the
idea of moving here than you think. Ask them. A lot of people, including kids,
have been properly convinced by the media that California is kind of awesome.
I think Oakland is the best place to actually build a company while raising a
family here right now, by a long shot. The Oakland hills are fantastically
livable, and the city of Oakland desperately wants you to start a successful
company that will eventually want a waterfront corporate campus in the
redeveloped area around 5th Avenue east of Jack London Square. However, your
initial fundraising will happen in San Francisco and Mountain View, so San
Mateo is the cheap, nice, developed, delicious, urban core halfway between San
Francisco and Mountain View.
Befriend the leaders of companies that are leading angel and venture funded
companies. Instead of asking for money, ask for advice.
Sign up for [https://angel.co](https://angel.co), fill it out, follow your
friends and people you're a fan of.
Apply to incubators, including YC, for the experience of getting rejected from
incubators while psyching yourself up for the experience of getting rejected
by angel investors and honing your short form pitch.
Does your business school ever invest directly in companies founded by
startups, or is there a group of alumni investors? Ask.
Do any of your well-paid coworkers and bosses from your previous job want to
invest and live vicariously through you?
I like 1.5 million as a totally arbitrary amount you should raise.
~~~
pedalpete
You're assuming he is even American. Not everybody can move to California.
Also, 'liking' 1.5 million isn't the way to go about raising funds. you need
to know what the money is for and how it will be used. I suspect anybody who
went to an angel/vc and said '1.5 million will do as an arbitrary amount'
would get laughed out of the room.
------
GFischer
You have an MBA, can't you leverage that network? maybe some of your
classmates has some insight, or maybe there's a university service that helps
new companies (there is one at the university where I did mine).
I would definitely try to network as much as I could, go to startup events,
meetups, demos, etc. though your product isn't at the demo stage.
I think pedalpete's advice is good as well.
~~~
zmkahn
"...though your product isn't at the demo stage"
You mean demo even though it's in advanced stage?
~~~
GFischer
To be honest, I don't know if you should. But it seems that to raise money you
have to put yourself out there and get contacts. I think PG mentioned
referrals are a good thing.
Here's Steve Blank's (tongue-in-cheek) flowchart on how to get a VC meeting:
[http://steveblank.com/2012/10/17/how-to-get-a-vc-meeting-
the...](http://steveblank.com/2012/10/17/how-to-get-a-vc-meeting-the-
flowchart/)
I've never been in your place so I don't know if my advice is applicable and I
live outside the U.S.
The other advice posted seems good.
Edit: other links, from Fred Wilson on how to pitch them
[http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/fred-wilson-on-pitching-
un...](http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/fred-wilson-on-pitching-union-square-
ventures.html)
From Wired, how to get a meeting with a VC:
www.wired.com/business/2007/07/how-to-get-a-me/
Another interesting link (european-centric):
[http://venturevillage.eu/12-things-you-need-to-know-to-
get-v...](http://venturevillage.eu/12-things-you-need-to-know-to-get-vc-
funding)
hope they help :) and good luck !!! Do tell us if you succeed! (or not, but
let's think you will :) ).
------
brudgers
Why do you need to raise money if you already have customers lining up to pay?
It sounds a bit like you are on the verge of making money from what you know
how to do and instead of just doing that, you're trying to do something you
don't know how to do first.
What is wrong with bootstrapping for now, focusing on delivery, and
fundraising (or not) later?
The end goal of any business is not fundraising, but cashflow.
~~~
zmkahn
I need to raise money for a few different reasons.
Right now, though I have an MVP-plus, a lot of the work that's being done is
being done manually (e.g, analysis, report creation/generation, etc.). If I
want to scale and get beyond a handful of beta-customers, I need to automate
those processes. I've analyzed what it would take, and it's something that's
out of my range to boot-strap. If I don't automate, or even partially
automate, I'm going to be stuck with a handful of customers. With automation,
I can add dozens, if not hundreds of customers.
Secondly, not only are some of my customers asking for a whole new incremental
feature set, but I see the market ripe for the picking. In order to develop
these new features, it'll require a new wave of development (for mobile) that
I also can't self-fund.
Outside money would help in both of these, allowing me to move beyond
perpetually having a few customers to growing this venture into a growing
business.
~~~
brudgers
All that makes sense over the medium term.
I still don't see a clear short term advantage in chasing funding _right now_
rather than converting a handful of potential customers into actual customers.
That's not to say that there isn't one.
A potential customer who says "I would buy this if you added mobile" is a poor
prospect at this point. They are a poor fit for your product [and in many
cultures "maybe" is a less confrontational way of saying "no."].
Focusing on your strengths - design and delivery lead to validating or failing
to validate your ideas more quickly and should your ideas validate, then
attracting funding will be easier and it is more likely that you will do so on
favorable terms.
If your ideas validate, then it will probably only be partially, and having
that information before spending capital will allow you to spend capital more
efficiently. For some people raising capital in your circumstances makes sense
- particularly if they are good at it. By your admission, you are not.
Bootstrapping into perpetuity is one extreme. Slowing down right now to raise
capital is the other. It is not an either or. There is a middle way, wherein
you do not have to jump an additional hurdle before validating. All I've got
to go on, is what you have said. It seems pretty well thought out, and my
$0.02 investment in your business is based on your description and my gut
feeling about human nature.
Good luck.
|
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A Short Fuse For Fusion As Ignition Misses Deadline - rdamico
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/28/166095618/a-short-fuse-for-fusion-as-ignition-misses-deadline
======
mtgx
If they do gut it, can we at least get all the science they've done in open
source, especially since they've used $5 billion in tax payer's money to do
it? At the very least, that research could be a start point for someone else's
fusion research 10 years later.
|
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Baydin Closes Its $375,000 Funding Round (In An UberCab, Per Our Suggestion) - migmartri
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/05/baydin-closes-its-375000-funding-round-in-an-ubercab-per-our-suggestion/
======
pclark
Did it take from October to raise $375,000? was that with a single guy on it
dedicated or part time fund raising?
~~~
baydinalex
nope, the uber just took a _really_ long time to show up. :)
we moved out to silicon valley (from Boston) in December, and had the round
spoken for within a month. we just took our time doing the paperwork and
announcement.
------
tom
This is a great example of 2 keys to success for startupts. 1. Hustle. Many
people told Alex no before he got that first check, but he kept at it. Hit
this milestone, get these sales, blah, blah, blah. He kept improving, kept
serving customers and kept hustling. 2. He did what he had to do to get his co
to the next step. When it was evident that SF was the place they had to be,
the picked up and moved - and fast!
------
cloudwalking
A good start for 500 startups' first class. Will be fun to see what happens
after demo day this week.
------
jonhendry
Congrats, Moah and Alex!
------
rgrieselhuber
Congrats guys!
------
albemuth
no seatbelts?
------
thegoleffect
Yay, congrats guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
------
yogiprerna
Congrats guys! Very exciting.
|
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Dwolla Gets Into Government With Iowa Tax-Paying Plan - mjshampine
http://www.fastcompany.com/3004961/who-needs-starbucks-dwolla-gets-govt-iowa-tax-paying-plan
======
JimWillTri
Not sure why you would use Dwolla to pay state taxes. Most states allow ACH
transfers.
------
venomsnake
Is there any reason for the lack of IBAN style bank-bank transfers in the US,
that make this kind of startups possible and needed?
~~~
fluidcruft
We have bank transfers. Generally, either or both sides of the transfer take
the opportunity to inject an insultingly generous processing/service fee.
These startups/services are only possible because they undercut these fees.
Trust is another big reason to be judicious with bank transfers in the US (and
where these services add value--I think they convert what the other party sees
from being account-based to transaction-based). I'm not familiar with IBAN,
but can someone drain your account if they get your IBAN?
~~~
gst
Yes - with your account number someone could theoretically drain your account
using direct debit. In practice that never happens (and most people don't keep
their account number a secret). In addition, even if it would happen you have
more than plenty of time to reverse the transaction at your bank (which
shouldn't involve any discussion or so with the bank).
As for transactions themselves, unlike in the US where you can conduct ACH
transactions in both directions (i.e., debiting another account) IBAN
transactions are "sending only" (like email). And you typically also don't
need to whitelist/add another account first (as in the case of ACH
transactions), but just type the senders account number into the recipient
field (again, like email).
In Europe I never used any third party services, as IBAN transactions are
usually free and the easiest thing to do. In the US it's usually easier to use
something like Dwolla (or even checks!) if you want to send money to someone.
------
jusben1369
Great news for Dwolla. Really impressed with Iowa too. When many of today's
headlines are how dysfunctional and at odds CA state government is with their
people here's a state going out if it's way to help advance local tech. The
best way to create a competitive hub is to focus in on one vertical first and
payments is a super large and smart one.
------
killahpriest
Starbucks? I guess because you won't need the extra caffeine to get your taxes
done?
~~~
Ataub24
I think it was a pun and shot at Square and SBux deal. Not sure though...
~~~
jusben1369
Yes my sense was "SB is the onramp to payments acceptance by newer methods.
But we have Iowa!"
|
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Can we feed a future population of 10B people a healthy diet? - open-source-ux
https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/
======
open-source-ux
Related BBC report:
_The diet to save lives, the planet and feed us all?_
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46865204](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46865204)
|
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Intel Goes for 48-Cores: Cascade-AP with Multi-Chip Package Coming Soon - dmmalam
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13535/intel-goes-for-48cores-cascade-ap
======
drewg123
I wonder if it doubles the PCIe lanes as well as the core count and memory
channels.
It is .. interesting that they are only at 1.3x EPYC for Stream. I guess it is
a mix of their lower core count (48 vs 64) mixed with their likely higher
memory bandwidth (12 channel vs 8 channel).
I'm looking forward to AMD's New Horizon announcements tomorrow.
|
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Are Aliens Trying to Contact Earth? - wmat
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4061990/Are-aliens-trying-contact-Earth-Six-new-mysterious-blasts-radio-energy-detected-deep-space.html
======
gus_massa
The Alien part is a ... totally unsupported speculation. Can we change the
title? A good candidate is: "Six new mysterious blasts of radio energy are
detected from deep space"
From the article:
> _Instead, they [the researchers] say that flares from a young neutron star –
> the dense core left behind where a star explodes – are a promising
> candidate._
------
Insanity
Jesus, why do people even bother reading the dailymail
|
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Import.io – Structured Web Data Scraping - steeples
https://import.io/
======
mlandauer
If you're concerned about using a hosted scraping platform because it might
disappear check out [https://morph.io](https://morph.io) \- it's open source
as well
[https://github.com/openaustralia/morph](https://github.com/openaustralia/morph)
------
uuid_to_string
As a PoC, I would be willing to "turn the web into data", i.e., produce one of
the formats offered by these "services": CSV.
I will use only standard UNIX utilities, no Python, etc. As such, you "own"
the code. No SaaS. The result will be portable and run on any UNIX.
I believe I can deliver in fewer words of code and that the result will be
easier to modify when sites change.
You pay nothing. Post your scraping "challenges" to HN.
I enjoy turning web into data.
Some people enjoy working with HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. I prefer working
with raw data.
It is interesting to hear that some people are willing to pay to have the
HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. stripped out.
~~~
kevin_morrill
For anyone that wants to do this full time and work with a really cool team,
shoot me an email: kevin@mattermark.com
------
ycmike
HN,
So who do you guys use more? Import.io or Kimono? I have heard good things
about both.
~~~
thejosh
I prefer to rely on code that doesn't rely on an API that could just vanish
the next day or cost a bucket to run.
~~~
ejstronge
What do you use for scraping? I may have a scraping project later this year
and would love recommendations.
~~~
PuerkitoBio
I've written a couple "polite" crawlers in Go (i.e. obeys robots.txt, delays
between requests to the same host).
\- Fetchbot:
[https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/fetchbot](https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/fetchbot)
Flexible, similar API to net/http (uses a Handler interface with a simple mux
provided, supports middleware, etc.)
\- gocrawl:
[https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/gocrawl](https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/gocrawl)
Higher-level, more framework than library.
Coupled with goquery
([https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery](https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery)
) to scrape the dom (well, the net/html nodes), this makes custom scrapers
trivial to write.
(sorry for the self-promoting comment, but this is quite on topic)
edit: polite crawlers, not scrapers.
------
RaphiePS
There are a bunch of comments about rolling your own scraper instead of
relying upon a possibly unreliable SaaS app.
That makes me think -- would it be viable to run a service that, instead of
running the scraping on their own servers, simply gave you a custom binary to
run?
Assuming that you trusted the executable, you would never have to worry about
the company failing. It'd just be a one-time fee, and yours to use in
perpetuity. Presumably updates would be free.
~~~
caio1982
That's a really neat idea I'd pay for. Not sure about the sustainability of
the model though.
------
robotfelix
Great to see these guys are now out of Beta!
While their real-time Extractors aren't quite as quick as doing it yourself,
we've found them to be particularly useful for sites requiring JavaScript
and/or cookies to use.
It's also worth mentioning that it's quick to get started. You can start
playing around with real data without having to dig into a site's URL
structure, and then write your own scraper later if needed.
------
chrisherring
Isn't it illegal to scrape without permission? How would import.io handle the
case when a large site comes back with legal threats when a user of their site
has used scraped the wrong site? Can they claim non-responsibility?
Also what happens when sites start blocking their IPs due to repeated scraping
or is this unlikely to happen?
------
seivan
Heads up, the application is placed in ~/Desktop and not /Applications
------
th0br0
They presented last year at Yahoo!'s Hack Europe: London hackathon. It's an
interesting concept, they've come far since their initial presentation and
while the app has its quirks I have come to use it occasionally for some
tasks.
I hope that they'll manage to properly monetize on this - I don't see why I
should pay for using a scraping rule if I can just write the scraper myself
which doesn't cost me that much more time.
------
fibertera
What kind of legitimate uses are there for something like this? This is not a
sarcastic question. It seems like an obvious spam magnet, but if people are
using it legitimately wouldn't their sources already be providing an API or
RSS key?
~~~
antjanus
I've my own use case for it and it will probably mirror other sites. I run my
own blog and thus have ads and affiliate links there. The thing is, as good as
Google Adsense is, it's shitty for my site and my topic (Web Dev).
What am I left with? Great affiliates like Team Treehouse, Lynda.com,
framework themes, and Udemy. The problem is that none of those offer any kind
of a good API. All they have is a link and possibly an image that they
provide.
By using Kimono, I can scrape (but I don't) all of Udemy's programs,
categorize them with custom categories, build a full-text search engine around
it and serve relevant ads per post. For instance, my "Best Bootstrap Themes"
post would yield "Learn bootstrap" udemy course and an on-the-fly-but-cached
image for it thus serving relevant ads to my users.
Same goes for Lynda. If someone lands on "Why C# is a great language to learn"
(one of my unreleased articles), my custom API built on top of scraped data
could serve them with a "ASP.NET Essentials" course.
So why use something like this for framework themes? Take Wrapbootstrap.com,
they have a great affiliate program. Using Kimono, you can easily get daily
refreshes of their main page which usually has: sales priced themes, featured
themes, and new rising themes. This way, you can serve users with an ad that
has up-to-date prices and themes that are hot right now.
What about non-ad uses? You can create custom search, weighted according to
YOUR metrics and build your own marketplace front and aggregate several
sources in order to serve users with better content.
------
thom
I suspect the real, top-secret business behind import.io is in either training
a system to crawl the web and see structured data, and/or gathering over time
a very rich crowd-sourced database of structured data.
------
jmethvin
We've posted answers to some of your questions on our blog:
[http://blog.import.io/post/you-ask-we-answer](http://blog.import.io/post/you-
ask-we-answer)
------
pmtarantino
Can someone tell me more about the law and scrapping websites?
~~~
frabcus
See my blog post about this on the ScraperWiki blog
[https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2012/04/is-scraping-
legal/](https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2012/04/is-scraping-legal/)
------
late2part
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work too well on my mac. And, why do you
want to know who my friends on Facebook are?
------
notduncansmith
Reminds me of [https://www.kimonolabs.com/](https://www.kimonolabs.com/)
------
notastartup
I wrote [http://scrape.ly](http://scrape.ly) if you wanna have a look, it's a
url-based API for web scraping.
|
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Where Have All the Bold VCs Gone? - redorb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/15/where-have-all-the-bold-vcs-gone/
======
hooande
It seems like news.yc really influences the conversation on tech blogs. I see
a lot of blog posts on techmeme that seem to be in response to "Ask YC"
submissions. Has any one else been noticing this?
~~~
dcurtis
Yeah. So has Michael Arrington, which is why he calls news.yc "small but
influential."
------
aneesh
I used to think VCs were in the "encouraging & profiting from innovation"
business. They're not. They're really in the "let's find the least risky deals
and put money in them" business.
I used to think good VCs were those who identified the huge successes before
everyone else did. Instead, good VCs are just the ones who get access to deals
before the ordinary VCs.
------
wumi
all the press must be a boon for both YC and its founders/start-ups
------
sanj
This is becoming a house of mirrors.
------
pius
Good article, but why that title?
~~~
redorb
Because of all the mentions between the (2) parties
[http://www.google.com/search?q=techcrunch+site%3Anews.ycombi...](http://www.google.com/search?q=techcrunch+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&client=firefox-a)
specifically this post
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145316>
and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=146604>
~~~
pius
That's cool . . . wasn't trying to be a jerk, just genuinely curious.
~~~
redorb
PG; Did you modify my title for me......? its better anyways..
------
edw519
scathing?
------
freax
Gone? That presupposes they used to be there, but left.
No, it's always been like this, modulo the foolhardy dot-com bubble.
The thing is, there are two types of potentially successful start-ups. The
first kind is start-ups that have the talent and capability but who, if they
don't get a helping hand, will quietly fizzle out.
My impression is a lot of YC groups are like this; getting into YC determines
whether they _go for it_ or just stay in school, for example. If Reddit didn't
get in, would they be millionaires now? The risk here isn't YC missing the
boat, but the boat never departing in the first place.
The second type is the start-up where they are _going_ and you had better get
on board or get out of the way. Steve Jobs personifies this approach. Jobs
would beguile, needle, browbeat, or otherwise force the issue or pressure
anyone he needed to get things done.
Ironically some VC successes aren't based on their BOLD choices so much as
being strong-armed into getting over their risk aversion by someone like Jobs.
|
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KONG: open-source, centralized management layer for microservices and APIs - tilt
https://github.com/Mashape/kong
======
detaro
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9451947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9451947)
|
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Ask HN: Raspberry Pi Server Farm with Load Balancing - robwgibbons
Hey HN,<p>I am a Web developer with only rudimentary knowledge of how a server farm is physically designed and maintained. Nevertheless I would like to build a tiny rack filled with about a dozen Raspberry Pi computers (when suppliers allow buying that many at once.) I would like to use each as its own modest server instance, akin to Webfaction, and use another to manage the load balancing across them.<p>I know this has been considered before, but I would like to ask HN about advice and resources. I have never had to run an application distributed on more than one server so any materials on horizontal scaling, building and managing a small farm would be appreciated. Also, it will need to account for more storage than just a small SD card in each RPi. What's the best way to mount a harddrive RAID into this setup for shared storage?
======
aespinoza
I recommend starting from reading the HAProxy site. <http://haproxy.1wt.eu/>
It has a ton of information about building a load balanced infrastructure
using HAProxy.
This article helped me too: <http://horms.net/projects/has/html/node6.html>
Read some architecture articles from this site: <http://highscalability.com>
I am also planning on doing that, so once suppliers allow multiple machines
I'll write a blog post about I had to do.
------
JoachimSchipper
Aside from the Raspberry Pi being cool, what would this buy you over AWS, a
server running some VMs, or some old spare boxes? Getting some experience with
load-balanced systems isn't necessarily a bad idea, but the Pi doesn't seem
like the best hardware for the job.
Assuming you do want to do this, consider getting one more capable box, and
using it as a firewall, load balancer, NFS server and database server. Your
Pis can then talk to this machine and do the webby things. (If you want to
avoid a single point of failure, use CARP/VRRP, some sensible load balancer,
DRBD and database replication. Reboot all Pis on failover, failing over NFS
mounts is very painful.)
------
ariejan
What should the server do? Server static files? Ruby? Python? I think with the
latter you'll get into trouble quickly (at least Ruby) in the memory-usage
area.
But, given you can run your stack on a single RasPi. Use one to run HaProxy in
front of it.
------
lumberjack
I thought of this before myself. From a purely economical point of view, you'd
be better of if you grab a couple laptops or thin clients off Ebay. This after
considering the power consumption too.
|
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Idiots rule the AT&T Yahoo worlds - ramiyer21a
Some idiots decided that I need to see full page news items and should really click (four time) to get to my email. My email home page suddenly changed to a new and shiney "AT&T Powered by Yahoo" page. Thus forcing me to go to an email client like thunderbird (or merge it into my outlook) - losing precious ad monies.<p>Pathetic - they should be fired immediately.<p>Have others seen something similar?
======
stephengillie
You seem like the type of person who should have a personal blogspot page.
|
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Show HN: Squirrel feeder based on Raspberry Pi - ulf
http://blog.ulfster.com/post/114938394419/diy-automated-squirrel-feeder
======
yareally
I've been mulling about doing something like that for blue jays and peanuts to
ration out their allotment in a sustainable manner. A family of blue jays (or
most birds in the Crow [Corvidae] family) will rapidly hoard whatever you give
them and finish off a large pile of peanuts within hours. Unlike other birds
that also visit the pile of peanuts I leave out, they have no intentions of
eating most of those peanuts as they take them and just stash them for later
(similar to a squirrel).
The other problem is allocating peanuts to other birds (chickadees,
nuthatches, cardinals, etc) while not giving too many to the blue jays.
However, there's a project I ran across from CalTech that can determine the
type of bird in front of a camera via computer vision[1][2][3]. Not sure why
the creator of the squirrel project used a camera though when a cheaper, more
robust sensor would work unless he was eventually thinking of extending its
usage for more than simple motion detection.
[1]
[http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/20q.html](http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/20q.html)
[2]
[http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/ipadapp.html](http://vision.caltech.edu/visipedia/ipadapp.html)
[3] [https://github.com/welinder/cubam](https://github.com/welinder/cubam)
~~~
ulf
Creator here, I used a camera so that I would have video of everything that is
happening. As seen in the follow-up post [1], I rebuilt the system so that the
nut-release is triggered by a proximity sensor. The camera only records now.
[1] [http://blog.ulfster.com/post/114942851719/squirrel-
feeder-v2...](http://blog.ulfster.com/post/114942851719/squirrel-feeder-v2-0)
------
mattgmg
Awesome work, that squirrel looks happy!
If anyone else has used motion on a Raspberry Pi, have you have any issues
staying connected to wi-fi? I was running motion on my Raspberry Pi, trying to
do something similar, and found that within 24 hours the wifi module would
disconnect and stay down. I would have to reboot.
Without having motion running, I can stay connected to wifi for weeks at a
time with the same pi/router/network. I haven't found a solution for this yet.
~~~
fnordfnordfnord
#!/bin/bash sudo reboot
#put this in cron daily? #2:10 am sound okay? #10 2 * * *
A better solution might be to check the wifi status periodically and take some
action based on the status.
Even better, find out why it is happening and fix that.
Even better-er, add some sort of anti-squirrel weapon.
~~~
callesgg
[https://xkcd.com/1495/](https://xkcd.com/1495/)
~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I was almost embarrassed to post that simple minded solution. So thanks for
posting that one. I am prone to forget that sometimes, stupidly simple is
best.
PS to OP. You might need to fiddle with /etc/sudoers in order that cron can be
allowed to reboot the machine.
------
deutronium
Cool :)
I wonder how hard it'd be to do 'squirrel recognition' with the camera
|
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City Lights – suite of gorgeous dark theme goodies for Atom and Visual Studio Code - saoudy
http://citylights.xyz/
======
jmnicolas
Found my new theme, thanks HN !
Spoke too fast, I can't download it for VS Code and I don't have git on my
work computer :-(
|
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Ask HN: Is there an equivalent of lean or agile for recruiting? - dlf
This is more or less a random thought, but I've noticed that recruiting has basically continued to do business the same way for decades with no major disruptions to their business process.<p>Everyone says that recruiting is broken, so is a fundamental change to the way recruiting is done be appropriate? If so, what would it look like?
======
merinid
Work with people in a freelance capacity first. It's kind of tricky because it
can be perceived as dishonest. But as long as you're open and serious about
it, and convey that to the candidate, it can work.
~~~
dlf
That's definitely interesting, but I was thinking more recruiting as an
industry. That feels more like a recruiting hack, which may be where industry
disruption starts.
|
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}
|
Android 4.4 KitKat Targets Google's Next Billion Users - hackhackhack
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/android-4-4-kitkat-google/
======
sheikhimran01
Does the new Chromium WebView has WebRTC? Its says it is included in the
4.4SDK
|
{
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|
The FCC could ask you to pay to complain - josefresco
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fcc-could-ask-pay-complain-132200240.html
======
poster123
The $225 fee seems high, but nowadays it is easy to start a social media
campaign encouraging people to complain, and I don't want the government to
spend a lot of money responding to every single complaint. Ultimately the most
effective way to constrain the executive branch is to vote out a president
whose appointees you dislike.
|
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}
|
HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell - snowmaker
Starting at 11 am PST today, Trevor Blackwell and I are going to do online office hours. If you'd like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with a one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you'd like to talk about.<p>Update: We've gotta run, but this was great. Thanks so much and enjoy the weekend.
======
yurivish
Hi Trevor and Jared,
[http://weavesilk.com](http://weavesilk.com) is a side project of mine for
many years. I put out a brand new version of the iOS app this month and am
thinking about developing it further but find it very hard to decide what
direction to go.
The website is popular, and people love Silk, but for different reasons: some
find it relaxing and meditative, others like that it closes the gap between
their artistic ability and taste.
It's been used as an inspirational sketching tool for artists
([http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA](http://bit.ly/1Qlm1kA)), to make album art, and has
been on exhibit at the Children's Creativity Museum. Some teachers use it to
teach kids about symmetry.
I've made something compelling but don't know what to do next, or how to
figure it out.
~~~
snowmaker
I actually really think you have something here. I spent some time playing
with it, and it's quite addictive.
What I like best is that it allows someone with zero artistic ability (like
me) to make a piece of artwork that they'd be proud of. That's quite a trick.
What are some things you've thought about building on top of it? What have
your users been asking for?
~~~
yurivish
Thanks, Jared!
Some of the things I've thought about:
\- Expanding the expressive range. The new app has a "silk eraser" and I have
ideas for at least one new type of brush.
\- Continuous undo (as if it's a movie), or at least more undo levels.
\- Making a better Alchemy: [http://al.chemy.org/](http://al.chemy.org/)
\- Unifying the experience of the website (2013; JS/Canvas) and the new app
(Swift/Metal)
\- The website lets you share replays of your drawings that play back on the
site. What's the best way to do something similar with the app?
\- A gallery would be great but requires figuring out the previous two points
to some extent. There's a lot of potential but it feels like a lot to navigate
through.
Long-term I'd love Silk to be a Bret Victor-inspired environment for visually
exploring computation: Compute with color and time, explore the system, make
your own brushes. You can think of a brush as a function from input history to
pixels on the canvas. I think there's a lot of potential here.
Some of the common things people ask for:
\- More colors. The new app has more palettes, which is a start.
\- More undo levels.
\- High-resolution export. This will be coming to the app, potentially inside
a bundle of "pro" features.
\- Plugins for Photoshop and other professional design tools.
\- Prints. I've experimented with prints before but found that the art doesn't
come out nearly as well in print. My bar for quality here is this piece made
by a talented designer friend (Anand Sharma) many years ago:
[http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz](http://bit.ly/1TDS2sz). Maybe the right answer here is
something more ephemeral like greeting cards.
~~~
snowmaker
It sounds like you have engaged users who are giving you useful feedback.
I like the idea of a gallery - that will help you grow as people show off
their work. You don't necessarily need live replays to do it - you could start
with static and add those later.
One thing to think about is how you can make it grow more. Your users won't
generally bring you growth ideas, but it's important to always be thinking
about how to get more users.
~~~
yurivish
Good feedback. Thank you so much.
------
alantrrs
Hi! I'm building a platform for scientists to run and share their experiments
(anything computable) including their whole research environment. I want to
make scientific research easily discoverable and replicable.
First, what are your thoughts on this market?
Also, some advice: I'm currently building the prototype based on my own
experience as I'm my own user. That's the only thing I've been focusing on, I
haven't looked for external feedback yet and haven't spent much time looking
for people to join me. I figured both of those things will be much easier once
I have the prototype ready. Am I on the right track or should I be doing
everything at once?
~~~
snowmaker
I think that's a great market. The lack of reproducibility in scientific
experiments is an elephant-in-the-room problem. I feel like I read a new story
about it every week.
Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full
prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that
what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually
want.
Do you have mockups or screenshots of the tool? I would recommend lining up
some research scientists who can serve as product advisors. Tell them about
your idea and ask them what they would want in this kind of tool. Try to get a
commitment from them to use it after you build it - that will force clarity on
their side.
Not only will that prevent you from potentially throwing away code, it will
get you started building the kind of deep advocates in the science community
that you will need to get a movement like this started.
~~~
alantrrs
Jared, appreciate the feedback!. Any chance you could introduce me to some
people in the Open AI team? I think this would be a great fit and I'm very
interested in their thoughts.
------
srikieonline
Hi Jared & Trevor, Thank you for giving us this opportunity to discuss our
ideas with you.
I am the founder of [http://www.pnyxter.com](http://www.pnyxter.com) \- a
video (only) based debate and discussion app.
My question is about product-market fit.
A user can create topic and upload a video selfie talking on the topic or
respond to other topics via video selfie. The app does not have provision of
text comments at all - only video responses.
I've invited several friends and family for private beta, and its been 10 days
now and only 1 of my friend dared to create a video.
I also shared the link on FB and linked in and got several views, but no one
created a topic. I also did a FB ad for 2 days - no luck here too. Is this a
clear indication of product - market misfit? Or is it too early to conclude?
Or should I shift my focus only on professional and amateur debaters of
various debate clubs in cities, universities, schools etc.
I do understand the privacy issues of showing video selfie - but I've given
provision of a good privacy control (or at least I think its good).
Video based opinions are already being posted by users in Facebook and youtube
- but do not have this consolidated grouping of all video discussions on a
topic in one place. Youtube tried video response feature and closed it in 2013
due to low engagement - but of course youtube is a very generic video site -
not all videos needs video responses/discusisons/debates.
Thanks!!
~~~
huac
Your product makes me think immediately towards high school/college debate
([https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461](https://youtu.be/HGyFBRu5F8o?t=1461)).
Policy debate in particular has the added benefit of being untranscrible
(listen for a couple minutes).
Couple ideas: (1) Analysis tool like Krossover, by cutting out prep time from
videos like the above, segmenting by speech, and allowing people to annotate,
search by annotation, etc. (2) a response platform for people to practice
debates outside of tournaments. Right now, if you want to practice, you either
debate with a teammember, or email speech docs to others, which doesn't really
capture the energy or spirit of a debate. I could see this being useful esp
for debaters at small schools without large teams, or rural areas without
nearby partner schools, etc...
~~~
srikieonline
Thank you for your advice! I've started reaching out to debate clubs in
schools and colleges already on FB. Will keep working towards that. However, I
have still not given up on general user segment.
One advantage of video is (hopefully) reduce abuse. Twitter is plagued with
the problem of anonymous abuse. However, its not easy to show your face in
video and abuse!
------
edibleEnergy
Hey Jared and Trevor,
BugReplay ([http://www.bugreplay.com](http://www.bugreplay.com)) is a bug
reporting tool in the form of a browser extension that captures a screencast
of the user’s actions synced with network traffic, javascript errors and other
browser data.
What's the best way to grow your early user base? Ideally we'd like people who
are going to use BugReplay at their jobs and open source endeavors, but we
want to keep it relatively small until we feel like it's ready for the widest
possible audience.
~~~
tlb
This kind of tool has the classic agent problem. There are two kinds of users:
people filing bug reports and people receiving bug reports. The people
receiving bug reports get the benefits, but the people filing the bug reports
decide which tool to use and have to install something to use yours.
My guess is that the developers will have to encourage or require bug
reporters to use it. Their site will have to say “Here’s how to report a bug:
Step 1: install BugReplay. Step 2: …” So find out whether they’re willing to
do that, and how to make it as painless as possible.
It’s reasonable to want to keep the initial user base small, but usually that
happens by default. The important thing is to keep the initial user base
smart, and on a path to the eventual large user base. Don’t make the mistake
of pursuing users that aren't your eventual target market in order to keep
things small at first.
PS, if you're appealing to web devs, you need first-rate website design. It
currently has formatting problems:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hethogee0d7zgt/Screenshot%202016-02-26%2011.02.16.png?dl=0)
~~~
edibleEnergy
The kind of user you’re describing isn’t our focus right now and I agree it
would be hard to get a user of a website such as Facebook or Twitter to go
through all those steps.
We think potential users can be broken down into different groups. The first
group would be people within the same organization (testers, design, other
devs, marketing, support, etc). In that scenario, the company would subscribe
to our service and everyone would use it internally, especially once they see
how much easier it is.
The second group would be people who have a vested interest in a website
working properly. For example, my friend has a clothing company and they sell
online through Shopify. If she encountered a bug on Shopify and they told her
this is the tool she should use, she would do that. I do agree however that
for a casual user on a website, it would take a lot to get them to use our
service. That’s why we are not focusing on that.
Thanks for pointing out that formatting problem. We use Instapage to make the
marketing site (we’re bootstrapping) and it seems fine when I logged in- I’ll
forward the screenshot to them to take a look.
As for the small user base, even if they’re really into it, it’s the kind of
tool that someone uses only when they need it. So even if we have a committed
user base, unless they have tons of buggy sites, we can’t expect to see tons
of activity. That’s why we aren’t sure how to handle it.
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify and for the feedback! It’s
really appreciated.
~~~
tlb
It'd be worth trying to sell to website testing/QA as a service companies,
like [https://www.usertesting.com/](https://www.usertesting.com/). If they saw
value in offering your better bug reports to their customers, it'd get you a
lot of business fast.
~~~
edibleEnergy
We were contacted by a company like that with thousands of users and they
expressed some interest in using or licensing our product. Initially I thought
that would be too big of an undertaking for beta testing since we aren’t
certain of our costs but now I’m rethinking it. I'm also not sure how we'd
transition from free beta testing to a paid service in a situation like that.
Thanks for the idea though, I’m definitely going to explore that further.
------
tedmiston
My app is a way for sneakerheads to follow, discover, and ultimately purchase
new sneakers online from first announcement until they're available for
purchase with minimal interaction. Today everyone does this by following blogs
that make hundreds of posts per week with tons of repetition and very low
signal to noise.
I've built a prototype for myself, but would like to now connect with the
right industry people to help guide the product and be trusted early users. In
another reply you mentioned finding users to serve as product advisors
similarly
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183572))
. I'm having a hard time discovering who the "right" people are and reaching
them in a compelling way. If I were further along [read: post private beta] I
would reach out to someone like Phin Barnes @ First Round, but I feel at this
stage it's too early for him to really give interest.
~~~
snowmaker
Sneakerheads are the right people! The good news is that you are going after a
very well-defined segment. The ones online are easy to reach - the read the
same blogs, hang out in the same online forums.
What if you went to the bloggers who are writing these posts? They might find
the app even more useful than normal consumers, and they have large audiences
they could advertise it to.
Phin Barnes might be a good investor someday, but he won't do the work for
you, which is to get sneakerheads using the app. Once you've got passionate
fans in the sneakerhead community, you should go talk to him.
------
nopinsight
Hi Trevor and Jared,
My startup is developing technology for natural language understanding (in
contrast to NLP). We believe we can approach human-level understanding for
standard texts (email, blogs, online articles) in 2.5-4 years.
We are currently self-funded and can comfortably do so for about a year--by
the end of which, we believe we can develop a fairly advanced demo that
surpasses existing techs in some, but not all, areas.
What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits/investors
to join our team? The current options we have in mind are:
1) Solving a subset of Winograd schema (commonsense reasoning challenge) with
a general approach (i.e., easily extensible with additional investment in
knowledge acquisition/data sources). No systems known to public can currently
solve all of them (or even a subset generally).
[http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html](http://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html)
2) A conversational agent capable of conversing with humans at the level of a
4- or 5-year-old (without resorting to typical chatbot tricks).
3) Surpassing the state-of-the-art systems in a couple of standard AI
conference tasks or on datasets released by leading companies (Google,
Facebook, etc).
4) Other tasks we have not thought of...
Because of resource and time limitations, we likely need to focus the initial
efforts on one, or at most two, of the options above. (A mature system should
be able to do all those and beyond, but this is only for about one year from
now.)
A couple extra questions if you have the time:
\- Given the startup's long-term timescale before monetization and its
technical nature, what sorts of investors should we focus on talking with?
\- Are there chances of IP leaking and causing problems with patenting our
tech later on? What should we do to prevent that?
Sincerely appreciate your time to answer these questions.
\-- Ken Noppadon
~~~
tlb
_What kind of demos do you think would impress best-in-class recruits
/investors to join our team_
All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for
recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a
huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having
a near-monopoly in a huge market.
There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP
isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains
(getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that
general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space
will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the
customer's IT stack.
I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that
failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow
execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.
------
spicavigo
Hi Jared and Trevor,
I created [https://codebunk.com](https://codebunk.com). Its an Online
Interviewing Tool for developers. Its the best tool out there. It provides
code execution in 23 languages, collaborative editor, REPL shells, AV Text
chat, Teams, Question banks and a lot more.
Its cash flow positive and has some of the coolest clients.
However, the rate at which it acquires new customers is pretty low (~3/month).
I have exhausted (or nearly exhausted) avenues of generating buzz (PH, HN,
Reddit, some tech publications). As a developer without any help, how do I
promote CodeBunk further? What's the best way to reach my audience (Hiring
Mangers, CTOs)?
~~~
snowmaker
It sounds like you've tried PR and social media, but haven't tried any other
channels.
If you've made something people want, and it sounds like you have, it's time
to invest in getting customers. A good rule of thumb is that you should spend
50% of your time working on your product and 50% of your time getting
customers. I have a feeling that's higher than what you're currently doing.
There are a number of distribution channels you can try. Here are a few ideas:
1) It sounds like you have some great customers (pebble, flipboard). Do you
know them personally? Get to know them, in person or over the phone ideally,
and then ask them for referrals. CTOs / hiring managers all know each other.
2) You guys don't seem to have a blog. Content marketing is great for your
space because engineers love to read posts about how much hiring sucks -
there's practically a daily thread on this on HN. There is so much you could
write about the best way to do technical interviews. Each time you get a post
like that to go viral, you'll pick up some customers.
3) There are lots of recruiting conferences and events. Those are good places
to meet customers.
4) It might be possible to negotiate distribution partnerships with other
companies in the hiring space. ATS's, job boards, and new models like hiring
networks (i.e., Hired) are all upstream of an online interviewing tool. Maybe
they should integrate with one directly.
5) There are a bunch of standard techniques that rarely work amazingly well
but usually work to a certain extent that you can start with: everything from
adwords and facebook ads to email campaigns to hiring managers.
Overall, you need to be very experimental to find good distribution channels.
A good book to get your creative juices going is "Traction: how any startup
can achieve explosive growth"
~~~
spicavigo
Thanks! That seems like a good playbook. I will start simultaneously on a
couple of those.
------
zeeshanm
I am founder and CEO of Exivest [[http://exivest.com/](http://exivest.com/)].
We help startup employees value their equity, help match them with direct
buyers or arrange synthetic liquidity.
We've talked to many startup employees and they all have given positive
feedback. One concern that comes up is that startups are not OK with changing
the cap table for tiny transactions. In that case, we have plans to offer
synthetic liquidity solutions via derivative transactions.
We'd like to hire your thoughts on the problem we are solving and our approach
so far.
~~~
thinkdevcode
I click on the "Value Now" button under Equity Value Calculator and I go to
Heroku Welcome page...
Edit: all three buttons go to same page
[https://exivest.herokuapp.com/](https://exivest.herokuapp.com/)
------
lpaone
Hi Jared and Trevor,
[http://www.stroomnews.com](http://www.stroomnews.com) is a bootstrapped
breaking news and events focused sharing platform, that allows live-streaming
and pre-captured video and image sharing through our mobile app and website.
We are also working on an enterprise solution for the news industry that ties
into our platform. Our B2C app was released this past Fall, but has shown
little traction and we have had discussions with a major news media company
about our enterprise product. We believe that signing up users for our
enterprise solution will also help grow our B2C platform.
We also have an idea in the area of video compression (both founders have
experience in this industry) that we believe could be huge in the streaming
video industry. Our initial tests have shown very promising results, but we
have not had much time to work on this due to focusing on our platform and
enterprise product. The success of this tech does not only provide a large
advantage for our business, but opens us up to many other industries and
opportunities.
As our ability to bootstrap dwindles (due to amount of savings), do we
continue along our path and try to get revenue as soon as we can by working on
our enterprise product or do we spend time trying to raise money so we can
focus on our tech, which may not produce anything product worthy for a much
longer time (or ever as it is still in the research stage)?
Thanks for your time!
~~~
snowmaker
What would the enterprise solution do? How long would it take to build the
product to the part where it can generate revenue?
For the video compression technology, it's hard to say without knowing more.
What does it do, and who would want it?
As cool as video compression tech is, trying to raise money for pure
technology, without demonstrating market demand, is almost impossible. So if
you go down the video compression route, you'll need to think hard about
exactly what products people could build with it, and how you could show that
people would buy them even before you can build them.
Getting to revenue and selling the enterprise product is the safer path.
~~~
lpaone
Thanks for the advice.
The enterprise product provides a dashboard that allows a news room to manage
past and present media content created through our platform. It allows live
modification of stream quality (full bit stream quality control) and
description, remote control of the camera, live communication with the
reporter/camera person, and some other features we are working on that bring
us closer to parity and beyond with other companies in this field. A huge
benefit over our competitors is our significantly lower cost and no need to
carry around expensive specialized hardware, as we do not require it.
We are probably 2-3 months away from having a revenue generating product.
Although we are in conversations with one major news organization, we have
found it very difficult getting in the door with other companies.
As for the compression tech, it provides an opportunity to delivery adaptive
bit rate video in a single stream. It would significantly decrease bandwidth,
storage and compression costs. Anyone who has large libraries of variable
bitrate video and is streaming it (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) would be very
interested in this.
~~~
snowmaker
The news room product sounds interesting, but I'm concerned that you've only
got one potential customer. Maybe you could build out your network of news
organizations, rather than "selling" a product directly. You could try to meet
individual employees (even low level, or former ones) to learn more about how
their individual news room works. You could even get a part-time job in one!
If you knew you had several customers lined up, you'd (1) have more confidence
going down that route and (2) be more confident that you were designing the
product right.
~~~
lpaone
Thanks for the ideas and taking the time to give advice. It has sparked some
ideas for getting in contact with more potential customers and getting more
feedback on the product.
------
plehoux
Hi Jared and Trevor,
I'm a co-founder at [https://www.missiveapp.com](https://www.missiveapp.com),
a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta
last January and are actively recruiting beta users.
We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were
able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we
launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1].
My question is, do you think it's a mistake to run two businesses in parallel?
Right now 85% of our time is invested in Missive even though it's bringing $0
in revenue.
Our philosophy is that if we were to look for funding, we would have to invest
at least 15% of our time on fundraising and investor relationships.
We also believe that looking for investment before market fit is a recipe for
disaster (need not to forget that we are not from/in the valley).
[1] [https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-
prod...](https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-product-then-
what-b4483276fd14)).
[2] What are chat conversations doing in an email client? Here are few
examples of cool possibilities they enable:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620)
~~~
tlb
First some product advice: You're trying to replace various more specialized
tools with a general purpose tool. For example, I use Slack, Front, and Lever
in addition to gmail, for internal, external, and recruiting-related
conversations respectively. You should explain clearly how your one tool will
be better than a combination of the many special-purpose tools.
If you can support yourselves with only 15% time on the old project, that's
pretty good. You can probably get Missive off the ground with 85%. Once it's
off the ground, it should be easy to get investment to focus on it full-time.
I like to think that investors aren't just a time sink, but can give useful
advice about the parts of the business that are common to the other businesses
they work with, like customer acquisition, hiring, and managing teams.
~~~
rafBM
Co-founder here, we indeed thought of crafting our tagline in such a way:
“With all these carefully thought collaborative features baked within an email
client, Missive might very well replace your help desk, CRM, and messaging
app.”
We do think there is a cost to always switch between multiple apps, but as new
kids in a crowd full of big players, we’ve been wondering whether we should
expect / try to catch users by “playing well with others” or be bolder and
encourage them to ditch other apps?
------
boxerab
Hi Jared and Trevor,
I have developed a high-speed image encoder that runs on off-the-shelf
graphics cards:
[http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/](http://grokimagecompression.github.io/GrokImage/)
I am working on my marketing strategy: need to decide whether to focus on
selling to end-users, or licensing the software to other businesses. Second
option requires more $$, and a sales team, but seems to have more potential
for growing the business.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
~~~
tlb
For most image compression tasks, speed isn't the metric that users care
about. Since compressing images parallelizes very well, they care about total
system cost for a given throughput. So your value proposition is more like
"Use 1 GPU box running our code instead of 10 CPU boxes".
Saving 9 boxes isn't worth an engineer spending much time hacking. You should
target people with 1000 CPU boxes to switch to 100 GPU boxes (or whatever the
ratio is.) Are enough customers like this to justify building a business
around it?
~~~
boxerab
Thanks, Trevor, that makes a lot of sense.
With the rise of streaming video, there are new players entering the broadcast
market, so there is an opportunity to sell an inexpensive
compression/decompression system for integration into these new systems. The
time to develop a JPEG 2000 codec from scratch is quite large, so decreasing
time to market is another part of my value proposition.
On the server side, it looks like my focus should be on total cost.
On the client side, for example digital cinema post-production, a user
typically has only a single box, so speed is important in this case.
Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback.
Aaron
------
feedbackhotline
Jared and Trevor,
Feedback Hotline (feedbackhotline.com) is the easiest way for businesses to
collect feedback. We provide the hotline for free. We intend to make money
through data.
We think we need to prove three things to succeed:
1\. Businesses/organizations will join 2\. People will send a lot of feedback
3\. We can monetize this feedback
We are currently optimizing for 1, focusing on small businesses. We believe
for i, everything before i needs to be true before i can be true. We want to
speak about this framework for optimization.
FBH
~~~
snowmaker
That's right. Your customers are the businesses who will adopt this. The
people who send feedback are also important, but they're not your direct
customers, and you have to start with businesses before you get them.
I see some businesses on your site. Are these all actual customers? How are
they using it, and what do they think of it so far?
------
dcole2929
Hey Jared & Trevor
I'm working on a few different projects all of which I think could become
viable companies but having a hard time deciding which to focus on. I've
already seen interest from relevant parties in each of the separate projects.
I think the hardest one but also the one with the most growth potential would
be a project I'm working on to provide management tools (similar to the stuff
a ceo might use) to high level government officials. However, with the way
that government contracts are handled I wonder if this is even a reasonable
industry to target.
Secondly I have two different projects that focus on College Students, where I
would be selling solutions to the Colleges themselves. The first project is an
art application that allows users to upload art in any medium and be seen by
other students. This would allow them to easily build fan bases by taking
advantage of pre-existing school connections.
The other idea is similar but focuses on user generated events. It tackles the
question of how does one find interesting things to do, in a new area, when
you don't know anyone. And has certain measures in place to help alleviate the
awkwardness of trying to join pre-existing groups.
Thanks
~~~
tlb
College art students vs gov’t officials. It’s hard to think of two more
different kinds of customers.
Selling to gov’t is hard, because they have a slow and heavyweight purchasing
process. Selling to colleges is hard for the same reasons, and also they have
small budgets. Selling management tools is very hard, because you have to get
people to change the way they work. It’s very very hard to get senior
officials to change their process.
If your business works, you’ll spend 1/3 of your waking hours for 10+ years
talking to your customers. You can only sustain this if you sincerely like
working with them. Whom would you rather spend that much time with?
~~~
dcole2929
These are very good points and kind of why I'm debating which way to go. I
have a few ways to pivot out of the college market even if I start there so I
may explore that some more. As far as management tools go, I'd largely be
competing with Excel spreadsheets, and meetings. Anyway thanks, I appreciate
the insights.
------
sharemywin
Hi Jared & Trevor,
Do you think that marketplaces for services is too mature of a market? I'm
working on a site called bid2mow.com to help new lawn care companies find
work. It seems like everyone is focused on come to my app/website and I'll get
you a price versus an ebay model. I know task rabbit had that model and went
away from it. Ebay may not be amazon but it's no business to sneeze at either.
~~~
tlb
I don't think there's a general answer: different services are very different.
The lawn industry is very different from other home services, and we've seen
different things work in those two businesses.
Usually, marketplaces get started around the margins. Today, eBay sells
everything but at first it was obscure collectibles. For lawn care, weather
and seasonality drive the short-term market dynamics. So when there's rain or
drought, the supply-demand curve shifts rapidly and that's when lawn care
providers might look for work to fill up their schedules. You should look into
how your marketplace might work on different kinds of days, to see if will be
a useful part of the ecosystem.
~~~
sharemywin
Thanks for doing this and answering,
All this is assuming minimal outside funding.(as a solo founder I doubt I can
get funding)
I guess my plan is to play $50-$100 million game of "moneyball." Lawn care was
the lowest hanging fruit to get 10k-50k/mo fees with in a year or two. Next
was probably to try and go after cleaning and maybe even do a little cross
selling. I'm also looking at launching www.bid2flyer.com which will help with
a channel to feed businesses looking for marketing. The code is about the same
for each of these and the marketing channel is what I have experience in.
Obviously not a traditional way to do things.
------
cddotdotslash
Hi, thank you both for doing this. I've been working on a project on and off
for about two years now which I finally launched as a beta last year. It's
called CloudSploit ([https://cloudsploit.com](https://cloudsploit.com)) and is
a service designed to allow users to continuously scan their AWS accounts for
vulnerabilities (account-level risks that could lead to a compromise). AWS has
some security products, and their are certainly competitors in the space, but
we've heard from countless customers that our price point and features are
ideal for them. My goal is to now move this out of beta and to actually
advertise it.
My question for you is: what challenges are there around marketing for
security-focused products? Of course, trust is a key factor, but are there
other things I should consider? I'm thinking of Twitter ads, but I'm sure
there are better options between that and cold emailing. Thanks again!
~~~
tlb
Don't buy ads. Your product should spread by word of mouth, since developers
know lots of other developers. The viral message (from current customer to
potential customer) would be something like: "I got a scan from Cloudsploit
and they found like 4 remote exploits in my AWS. You should have them check
your infrastructure." Hearing that from a friend would be more powerful than
any number of Twitter ads.
------
BinaryResult
Hey Guys,
I am one of the Co-founders of Disco Melee
([https://beta.discomelee.com/hub](https://beta.discomelee.com/hub)). We are a
live streaming social network designed around the needs of gamers. You could
think of us like if Twitch and Facebook had a baby who liked to party and was
eyeing up Reddit for a future fling.
The gamers that find us tend to rave about our overall vision, low latency and
other base features like IM system, streamer storefronts, and free donate/sub
buttons for all. The problem however is that (except for our hardcore
believers) they don't seem stick around very long due to the pull of network
effects from the established players. What strategies could you recommend for
overcoming network effects to the point where we can start generating our own?
Thanks!
~~~
tlb
Social networks are all about network effects. It's nearly impossible to
compete head-to-head with an established social network (which is why
established social network companies are so valuable).
Usually, the answer is to focus on a niche where you can do something special
to be dramatically better than the incumbents, so you can dominate the niche.
On your site I see Street Fighter V, which is pretty mainstream and works fine
on Twitch. Is there some game you can support 10x better than Twitch?
------
RyM21
Hi Trevor and Jared,
WordBrewery ([http://wordbrewery.com](http://wordbrewery.com)) teaches
languages by scraping real sentences from news sites around world, then
processing each sentence with an algorithm that estimates (on the basis of
word frequency and other variables) how likely the sentence is to be useful to
learners at different levels.
We are now a member of 1776 and participating in Microsoft BizSpark, so we are
on the right track. But I am new to the startup world, and I am funding the
website entirely by myself at this point using money from my day-job paycheck.
What is the best way to pursue seed funding at this early stage while we are
developing core features? Do I need to organize it as an LLC or corporation to
get funding?
Thank you, Ryan
~~~
snowmaker
I like the idea for WordBrewery! That's a clever model for optimizing language
learning.
Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really
easy way is using Stripe Atlas:
[https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas) \- they will do all the
paperwork for you to get a company legal structure.
You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators.
Any major accelerator program will help you with the legal structure as well
as providing funding.
~~~
RyM21
Excellent, thank you! We will be adding many features in the next few months,
but my favorite is individualized but automatically generated language
courses. We will use the technology you see on the site's front page to
present users with sentences on an individualized basis depending on what
words they already know. If a user knows the 500 most common Spanish words,
for example, we will show them an authentic sentence that uses one or more of
those 500 words plus the 501st most common word. As the user demonstrates
knowledge of more words, the set of possible sentences for that user will
gradually increase. This will reinforce existing vocabulary while building new
vocabulary as efficiently as possible.
------
aarzee
Hi Trevor and Jared,
I'm in the idea stages of creating a website, and I have no previous
experience with startups or other business; I'm only a senior in high school.
The idea is that there are people who would like to own the same game on
multiple platforms, and so the website would offer a discount on a game that
you already own, for another platform. So, for example, if you have the Xbox
One version of Rocket League, the website would offer a discount on the Steam
version.
My question is: how should I gauge interest in such an idea? I don't have any
real budget to speak of, and I don't know where I should go looking for people
to ask.
~~~
tlb
Talk to your friends. The advantage you, as a young person, have over game
studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees is that you and
your friends _are_ the customer for this sort of thing. So you should work on
understanding what you and your friends want.
Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every
game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on
games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game
studios, which might be hard to get. But
[https://www.humblebundle.com/](https://www.humblebundle.com/) built a good
business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there
are probably more possibilities.
The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they
think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy
something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy
a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two
together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.
------
braderhart
Hello and thank you for taking the time to help other entrepreneurs. I am
working on creating a new cross-platform premier Linux distribution that uses
containers as the core init process. The goal is automatic cross-compilation
between multiple targets and using the built-in kernel sandboxing for
applications instead of what XDG App and others are trying to do. I'd like to
also target a new window manager built on Wayland with eventual Vulkan
support. Would love to get some feedback on how to handle the contention that
already exists within this space and how to get the funding I need to make
something like this successful.
~~~
tlb
That sounds like a lot of stuff to take on for a first product. Because
existing players already have long feature lists, you can't compete at first
by having a longer list. It'd be better to start with one single, simple,
useful thing and expand from there.
Cross-platform is interesting. Are there large installations that need to
migrate between Intel and ARM boxes seamlessly? That's the sort of feature
that might make someone switch distros.
------
parisi
Hey Trevor and Jared,
I am in the midst of creating a new platform as a service product while
working at a large tech company. I am not quite willing to reveal the platform
to the world yet, but it is a new take on backend-as-a-service platforms that
I think will be very intriguing to developers.
My question is not specific to my product and instead pertains to the
situation of trying to develop a startup while working full time at a large
company. I have done 0 work on the product on my employers time and am not
concerned with that aspect. I am more interested in your thoughts on when
would be the ideal time to leave my current post to work full time on the
startup? My biggest concern is leaving the financial stability of my current
job when I have no capital lined up to support a startup. I have already
launched a closed beta of the platform and am getting feedback from a small
set of users and plan to open the beta up to the world in the coming months.
In your experience have you ever seen VC's or Angel's be willing to make a
deal with a startup founded by a full time employee of a different company. If
I were able to secure funding, I would be absolutely be willing to move on and
work full time on the startup but making that leap without funding would be a
difficult decision. Any words of wisdom you can offer here would be greatly
appreciated!
Thanks!
------
publicator
Hello Jared and Trevor,
We're developing a publishing network. Individuals and groups can start
magazines. Users can read on a timeline and interact like in a social network.
What's new? Now anyone can get publishing infrastructure as good as a well
funded online magazine. That means lots of unique publications in verticals
that well-funded magazines & newspapers cannot do.
What's the best strategy to lure in people to use the service? How do we make
money?
~~~
snowmaker
So to start a new publishing network, you have to start with writers / content
creators. You can't get readers before you have content. The thing to do is to
get people who want to create a magazine to use your software.
Have you started talking to users yet? Is the software usable?
------
chejazi
Hi YC partners,
We're a link shortener called Credhot and our business model is to syndicate
(potentially sponsored) content on an interstitial page. We also rev-share
with our users based on the number of visits. The biggest hurdle to this
strategy has been building an interstitial people want to share with their
friends. Here is an example of our latest attempt at that, leading to
"coinmarketcap.com": [https://crd.ht/H7TLMpn](https://crd.ht/H7TLMpn).
Our volume is low enough that we haven't tested syndicating sponsored content
on that page. Right now we're mostly focused on "building a product that users
love" but at some point we will need to strike a deal with a publisher. When
should those conversations start happening? We're currently bootstrapping but
will want to raise capital in the next few months as we're growing (we've
doubled since the last HN office hours ~34 days ago). Should we wait until
after securing funding?
~~~
snowmaker
Why do people use this versus bit.ly or a non-paid link shortener? Are they
actually interested in sharing the interstitial page's content, or is this
primarily a way to make money?
What's the nature of the publisher deal you are thinking about? Generally, you
should start talking to publishers when you can pay them a meaningful amount
of revenue. How much is meaningful? Depends on the publisher. For a small
blog, it might be a hundred dollars. For the New York Times, it's probably a
million dollars.
~~~
chejazi
People use us over Bitly because they earn rewards. What we know from the
feedback we've received is users don't like seeing blatant ads (ex. banners)
on the page. Our response has been to syndicate other content the user has
shared; so far the design has received a some praise and nobody has complained
(whereas w/ ads we received complaints), but the change hasn't been live for
long (less than a month ago we were showing ads).
The money in a publisher deal flows opposite of the direction you described.
They would pay us to get their content syndicated on the interstitial. From my
limited knowledge, ad sales for bigger publishers start from 10k and go up,
which means we need to guarantee (at $1 CPM) 10M impressions. Currently the
service does about 3M monthly impressions, so we're not quite there yet.
~~~
snowmaker
I see. OK, so the goal is to get publisher content because it's less intrusive
than blatant ads.
What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems
to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs
out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to
think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to
spend their ad dollars with you. Perhaps it's something to do with the full-
page sized ad format. It reminds me (from the advertiser standpoint) of the
StumbleUpon model, which is very successful for certain kinds of sites.
~~~
chejazi
Ok. Our takeaway is to start going after customers now instead of punting on
it. Thank you!
------
bsims
Hi Trevor and Jared, we have been building financial predictions on data from
marketplace lending platforms. Curious to talk to you about where you see the
business models of prediction going, examples other YC companies who are
selling prediction and ML as a service, pricing strategies etc.
~~~
snowmaker
We have some experience with companies like this. We worked with Framed Data
([http://framed.io](http://framed.io)), which predicts churn, among others.
I don't know that it's particularly useful to think about business models and
pricing strategies disembodied from a specific business. What is it that you
predict exactly? Who is the customer and what is the value you bring them?
------
abrie
Hello,
I've developed a custom toolchain while writing an electronic book[0]. The
toolchain automates the conversion of markdown and media into a scrollable
"app-novel". Initially I'd hoped to earn income from the book itself, but the
naiveness of that idea is quickly becoming apparent.
As a pivot, I am developing a public interface for the toolchain, with the
idea of permitting others to write books in the same style. Unfortunately it
is not ready to be demonstrated. Nonetheless, this feels like a untapped
industry to me, and I wonder what your opinions or suggestions might be.
Thank you.
[0][https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.m...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.goeiebook.montreal.preview)
------
masudhossain
Hey, Trevor and Jared. Thanks a lot for doing this!
WHAT WE DO: www.wiredhere.com
We integrate every social activity (university created or student created)
happening within an university into a mobile app. The students can attend and
provide feedback through the app; we than take the analytics that's created
and provide it to universities so they can assess and compare themselves to
other universities.
QUESTION:
Do you think it's more optimal approach this as a SAAS for the university
since we provide them a brand new web platform to make event creation easier
and so they can reach students in a faster way? OR be a non-saas and introduce
this to the students first and let the universities catch on afterwards, and
than work with the university so they can use our web platform and mobile app?
Also, what is your opinion on our concept?
~~~
tlb
Definitely start by getting students to love it first, then sell something to
the university. Universities take a long time to make decisions, and they
don't have a budget item for "help students find parties to go to". But as
Facebook showed, the right thing can spread through a campus in a couple
weeks.
There have been a lot of failures in this space. The big problem is getting
quality listings. It's a fair bit of work for event organizers to post their
event on multiple platforms, and they're probably already posting on Facebook
and a campus mailing list, so it's a hard battle to make them list on yours
too. And if you don't have most of the listings, users will just check
Facebook instead of you.
------
downandout
Hi Jared and Trevor,
I am working on a marketplace through which publishers and journalists can
sell the ability to be quoted and linked to in an article to the highest
bidder. A realtor, for example, might be willing to pay to be quoted and
linked to in an article about how a city's real estate market has been
accelerating.
My question is how to get started with marketing it. While the growth hacking
crowd would say to simply spam a bunch of reporters to get inventory, I have
found in other ventures that people absolutely hate receiving any form of
unsolicited email with any kind of pitch.
~~~
snowmaker
One challenge with this business that you didn't mention is the difficulty
getting to critical mass. Reporters, broadly, write such varied articles that
if you have a handful of reporters and a handful of businesses on the
platform, the chance that any of them actually match for a given article is
miniscule.
To solve that, I would consider starting in a very small vertical. You could
pick one small town and their local businesses (geographical vertical), or
pick one industry and go deep into that industry. If you start in a small
vertical, the marketing becomes easier because you have a very targeted pitch
that doesn't feel spammy.
About your original question on marketing, though, there is no alternative to
talking to users. Before you start pitching people, though, you could go talk
to journalists and ask them for feedback on the idea. You can ask them if they
would value this service, and what else they wish someone would build. Rather
than just selling them, you should try to build a relationship so you can get
feedback from them over time.
~~~
downandout
Thank you very much for responding. I definitely see your point about starting
in a small vertical. I already have a couple of potential solutions in mind to
solve the critical mass problem, but the fact that you saw it immediately as
my number one issue makes me want to revisit them. Re: marketing, I will try
the relationship building route rather than an outright pitch. Thanks again.
------
ForrestN
I founded a small nonprofit (~$250k budget this year for underpaid staff of
me+3 art types) that serves an annual audience of 1 million unique visitors
for the last few years with hi-res documentation of contemporary art; we are
nearly ubiquitous within our field, academics have hailed our project as
transformative, but we suck at fundraising and are tiny.
Problem: in the midst of running everything, I do all the coding slowly by
myself, and the urgent coding todo list has exploded while some of our sites
age. What should I do?
Thank you!
~~~
tlb
You need a great developer. You can't offer more salary than Google or
Facebook, so you have to offer a mission that they believe in. I think your
mission would be really exciting for the right person -- you just have to find
them.
Tip: if you're in the Bay Area, there'll be a lot of developer/artists here
this weekend: [http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-
networ...](http://grayarea.org/event/deepdream-the-art-of-neural-networks/)
~~~
ForrestN
Thanks— I suspected as much. I'm in LA but even the prospect of finding events
like this is very smart. Cheers.
~~~
gnat
(You could also put an ad on your own site/s for your job -- "Love
Contemporary Art? Want to Help Us Bring it to the Masses?) Your next developer
might already be a reader.
------
sbashyal
Hi Trevor and Jared, thanks for doing this.
We have been working on [http://growthzilla.com](http://growthzilla.com) \- a
data driven growth solution for salons for a little more than a year now. We
have paying customers since launch and have zero cancellations. Our customers
love the product for 3 reasons (1) ease of use (2) effectiveness in driving
growth and (3) customer service
The problem: we are growing slower than we would want. Is there anything you'd
like to suggest?
~~~
snowmaker
How are you growing right now? Specifically, how do users find out about
Growthzilla? How many users do you have and how many did you add last month?
~~~
sbashyal
We started with selling to people in our network. Now we have some online ad
campaigns, referral and just went to a trade show. We currently have 50
customers. Added 10 last month.
~~~
snowmaker
If you're growing 25% / month, you're not doing too badly.
How well are online ads and referral working? How does the referral program
work?
It sounds like there are a bunch of channels you haven't tried yet. Here are a
few ideas.
Standard channels: 1) Sales. Yes, you call up the all the salons and ask them
if they need Growthzilla. This is still the way most things are sold to local
businesses like salons. You can try email, phone, even in person.
2) Content marketing. My guess is that there are a lot of salons, and not a
whole lot people writing about how to run them. Maybe you can become the go-to
place not just for software, but for the knowledge salon owners need to run
their business well.
3) Improve your website. It looks like there's no way to just try the
software, and there isn't much info about it on the site. Having something
other than "request demo" may improve conversions.
Wackier ideas: 1) There are lots of software options for salons that do
something similar. It's not clear from your site what makes you unique. What
is it? If there's nothing truly special, maybe you need to change the product.
2) Channel partnerships. Who are the big companies selling products to hair
salons? Could you get them to resell Growthzilla and split the revenue?
3) Affiliate sales. Are there affiliate sales people who sell other products
to salons (scissors, hair product, etc)? If so, can you have them sell
Growthzilla too?
4) Organize free conferences / meetups for salon owners to learn about how
they can tech-enable their business.
------
zodiac
Hi Jared and Trevor,
I'm building games and tools for language learning. While talking to users, I
asked them what language learning tools they wished existed when they were
studying in the past. A lot of them talked about a tool that lets them talk to
native speakers of their target language online.
I know I should build something users want, but there are plenty of tools that
let you do this (including a YC company, cambly) and I don't want to build
another one. So what do I do with their answer to my question?
~~~
snowmaker
If there are plenty of tools which do this (and you're right, I think there
are), but there are still a lot of people who want them but aren't using them,
then the existing companies are missing something. It could be that the
existing products don't work in quite the right way; sometimes small
differences are important. Or it could be that the companies haven't figured
out the right way to reach customers.
When users tell you this, do you show them the existing products you know of?
If your hypothesis is right that the space is saturated, then they should
start using them right away. But I suspect that they won't, which means that
there's more left to be done.
------
wootcamp
Hi Jared and Trevor,
I'm cofounder of a start up within the beauty space. We have small but active
group of users that love creating and consuming a unique type of content only
available on our platform. The revenue stream is to eventually sell tangible
products so we would like to make use of all this content to convert
purchases.
Is there a way we can test out how well the conversion rate could work without
shipping tangible products? We don't yet have capital to stockpile.
~~~
tlb
Why not start with affiliate links to Amazon? It's minimal effort on your
part, and you can see what your users are interesting in purchasing.
Even when you eventually have your own inventory, it's worth throwing in
affiliate links in case you discover that people watching your beauty content
actually buy something else more often than your own products.
~~~
wootcamp
Hi Trevor, thanks for the reply.
We had that thought as well but we're from Southeast Asia with most of our
traffic originating from here. Only some of the products related to our site
actually ship here from Amazon and incurs international shipping costs so it
might hinder orders. We'll still give it a shot since it can give us an idea
of how the conversions do.
Would you happen to have any further insights on if affiliate marketing really
works especially when it comes to visual content?
~~~
tlb
Or instead of Amazon, whomever your customers currently buy from. The
affiliate revenue isn't the most important thing: the important thing is to
find out what your users will buy. Once you know that, you can invest in
inventory.
For beauty products, affiliate marketing works great. That is how the
e-commerce world should work: you show users the results they can get with
such-and-such product, and you get a percentage of sales.
~~~
wootcamp
If its not by affiliate then maybe we can find a way to accept pre-orders for
a bulk purchase. We notice there are lot of products used by our audience that
are not carried by local distributors so they find ways to import it
themselves.
Right, didn't think about sales for the sake of getting data. Currently we
have a way to map out the products our users use most and made an assumption
that these are the ones that they will buy. Would be interesting to compare
the data and see if it matches. Hope the conversion works out well once we
activate it.
Also just to share that showing users the results they can get with these
products is exactly what we do and its in a visual manner, especially since
this industry is driven by imagery.
Would love to continue this conversation in a private space if there’s any
chance for it. Anyhow thanks for your input and we’ll be sending in an
application for YC!
------
thekonqueror
Hi Jared and Trevor,
[http://nestify.io](http://nestify.io) founder here. We're improving PHP CMS
hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better
security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really
sad / lose revenues if we shut down.
Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel
and API services and partner with hosting providers?
~~~
snowmaker
I remember reading your YC app :).
About your question on whitelabeling: I wouldn't be too dogmatic about this
either way. It's easy to make it a question about your company's mission, but
it's more of an ROI decision. If you're seeing strong demand from companies
who will pay you well for a white-label version, and your software is written
in a way that makes it easy to build one, you should do that. Otherwise, it
may just be a distraction.
The other thing that jumps out to me about your business is that the economics
don't seem to match with the usage. You're serving a lot of traffic but not
making as much revenue as I would expect, especially considering that you have
"die-hard users" that love the service. Perhaps you can find a way to get them
to pay more money, or find other customers that can afford to pay more?
~~~
thekonqueror
Thanks for your insights. Our early customers also mention that prices are too
low.
We are now adding tiered pricing plans and charging for based on usage. I'll
make sure to add that in our current YC application too.
------
workerdee
Hello, I have a little Etsy shop and was wondering how to get technical
people’s attention. How do you find gifts for female family and friends (when
they don’t already have something in mind)?
As for the shop itself, the photographs need improvement – I set up a small
lighted space on my kitchen counter and am working on this. Shop:
[http://zebbles.etsy.com](http://zebbles.etsy.com)
~~~
snowmaker
I never know what to get female family and friends! Particularly when it comes
to things like jewelry, and I'm pretty sure many guys have the same problem.
Maybe you could start a blog offering gift advice for clueless techies, or
even become a gift concierge, offering to help individuals find the perfect
gift for a small fee.
~~~
workerdee
Thanks! The blog and gift concierge suggestions are interesting. Most of the
technical people I know don't like spending their time looking into sparkly,
girly things.
------
rsdce
Hi Jared/Trevor, my partner and I are working on developing an app for
wardrobe cataloging, which to our surprise (or not ) has already has been
implemented by lots of ppl in the apple android store. However the advanced
features that we thought of aren't implemented yet. How should we decide the
path to go : implement the app or just make the advanced features and license
them to the existing apps?
~~~
petervandijck
Licensing them to the existing apps sounds like a tiny business.
Could your R1 be significantly better than what's out there somehow?
------
mariobyn
Hey, I want to present [http://grobyk.com](http://grobyk.com), a platform that
wants to help teams to grow by engaging the team's members to
find/create/share useful articles. In this way they will build a knowledge
base and grow as a team. We want some feedback regarding the idea and how we
can attract customers.
~~~
snowmaker
Is there a question here?
~~~
mariobyn
Sorry, let me try one. Do you think is still a good market to introduce
another tool for teams? Our approach is a little bit different, i think, we
saw a lack of distributing useful content between team members.
~~~
snowmaker
I think the market of "tools for teams" is virtually limitless. The question
you should be asking is whether people want your tool in particular.
I spent some time on your site and it took me a _long_ time to understand what
your tool does. You need to make it a lot clearer. Here's a good exercise for
this. 1) Find someone you haven't told your idea to 2) Show them your home
page. Let them read it for 30 seconds. 3) Close your laptop. Then, have them
explain what Grobyk is in their own words.
If they can't do that, you need to improve your home page.
~~~
mariobyn
We spoke with teams about the idea and they said that also they had this
problem. We started from our problem and then we decided to make it a platform
for teams. We will work on the first page, we know that is not so friendly but
thank you for your advice, we will try to see the results. Another quick
question is that if is a good approach to attract customers by searching
developers/bloggers from different companies and direct email them with our
idea or is it to forced? We are now focused only on
technology/business/startups fields. We want to attract teams from these
fields.
------
FraserGreenlee
Hi Trevor and Jared,
I'm the founder of WebArcs ([http://webarcs.com](http://webarcs.com)) an RSS
aggregate for discovering and subscribing to websites. I'm just starting out
and I want to see this be the way people surf the web in the future.
I was wondering which demographics I ought to target too too help build a
strong user base?
~~~
snowmaker
Thinking of demographics is kind of a big company way of looking at things;
you're not ready for that.
For now you should focus on finding any users that want to use it. The way to
do that is to try to distill the value proposition. Why would people use
WebArcs instead of going to an aggregator (Reddit, HN), another news reader
(Pulse, flipboard), or content sites directly?
Then, show it some people and get some feedback. See if you can get people to
use it as their default way to surf the web. If you can get even one person to
do that (other than yourself), you've made some progress.
~~~
FraserGreenlee
Thank you that really helps =D
I'll try and find the value proposition and see if I can get that one user.
------
rosidisulamalis
Searching for eyebrow embroidery styler please visit us at
[http://rosidisulamalis.com](http://rosidisulamalis.com) and if Sulam Alis
Jakarta Bagus you can visit us at [http://rosidisulamalis.com/sulam-alis-
jakarta](http://rosidisulamalis.com/sulam-alis-jakarta)
|
{
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|
Masterji: Coventry's secret 94-year-old photographer – in pictures - prismatic
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/nov/10/masterji-coventry-photographer-maganbhai-patel-immigration-in-pictures
======
olivermarks
[https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-
news/tribute...](https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-
news/tributes-legendary-photographer-masterji-who-14282749)
|
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|
Gordon Brown apologises to Alan Turing - sharpn
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/6170112/Gordon-Brown-Im-proud-to-say-sorry-to-a-real-war-hero.html
======
slackenerny
Congratulations jgrahamc!
(It was his campaign to effectiveness of which many, including me, were
sceptical.)
Further discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=816217>
------
prawn
Shame that some of the comments on the Telegraph article are so bitter and
irrelevant. Glass half full, people!
~~~
sharpn
wow, yes - they weren't there when I posted the link. Swivel-eyed loons :o
~~~
barrkel
Labour, the party in government, is a pretty bad lot, but the Tories, whose
supporters traditionally read the Torygraph, are no better.
I have to live in this country, but I fear for its future. About the only
party I can stomach voting for is the LibDems, but it's been a long time since
they had a hand in government (assuming continuity with Liberal Party).
------
vixen99
We know that Gordon Brown has no personal moral responsibility for the
prosecution of Alan Turing but has nevertheless apologized to Turing, a person
who no longer exists. But now everyone feels better and at no cost to
themselves. This is a great bargain whereby one can score brownie points to
promote one’s moral stature. The urge to prepare a list (it'll be a long one)
of suitable future recipients of our moral largesse.will be irresistible.
~~~
jacquesm
Wow. That's got to be a record for cynicism. I see where you're coming from,
but don't you think that it might actually be helping people that are
discriminated against for their sexuality, race, gender or whatever people use
to identify others by some irrelevant characteristic in order to prosecute
them ?
The fact that there is 'no cost' is great, that means that it got done. The
church took 400 years in some cases to recognize their wrongs, the British
Government (at the prodding of John Graham-Cumming) took 'only' 50 years and
change.
I'm all for pressing governments to admit their wrongdoings, and I'm all for
shortening the time it takes them. The great news here is IT WORKED. They took
notice, and within a fairly short time.
They stopped short of what was asked, but they didn't exactly do nothing
either, that's the prime minister speaking in person there, not some two bit
flunky.
Gordon Brown personifies the British government, in this case that could have
gone only one step higher (the Queen) but apparently she couldn't be bothered,
or Brown decided that it might help his re-election chances if he did it
himself.
Whatever the truth of it is a cause for rejoicing.
Now let's hope some of this rubs off on his underlings, some of who are in a
perfect position to show that they too understand that discrimination is
wrong.
------
jacoblyles
What did Gordon Brown do to Alan Turing?
~~~
catzaa
That is my point exactly. Did Gordon Brown kill him or condoned his killing?
Furthermore, if he apologised on behalf of the government, is it the same
government that killed him (seeing as how the parties/people in power
changed).
If the latter is true, aren’t there bigger things he can apologise about? The
UK government did quite a few dastardly things during its long rule (as most
governments did). It would be nice if they start apologising to every country
and group that they oppressed during the colonial period.
~~~
StrawberryFrog
_That is my point exactly. Did Gordon Brown kill him or condoned his killing?_
No, and if you read the statement, Gordon Brown took the opportunity to blow
his own trumpet - "my how far we've come, things are so much better now" (I
paraphrase). Quite a politically astute response, actually, since it makes
them look good from a number of angles.
~~~
jacquesm
Brown is a very smooth operator, and for sure he would try to do everything to
spin this to his own benefit.
That does not mean that nothing was achieved however.
In my opinion, now it is time to press on and demand a formal pardon in light
of this apology I don't see how it could be refused. He's pretty much admitted
they got it wrong, a pardon is the next logical step.
~~~
StrawberryFrog
_He's pretty much admitted they got it wrong_
The language is ambiguous: If by "he" and "they" you are referring to the same
entity, then no, no such admission has been made. And it's not clear that it
should be.
More like "thousands of other gay men who were convicted under homophobic laws
were treated terribly ... I am proud that those days are gone ... " In other
words "they got it wrong in the 1950s. We're better."
~~~
jacquesm
'He' refers to Brown today, the head of the current government, 'they' refers
to the British Government in the past.
Apologies for being ambiguous. Not sure what the downvote was all about,
whether that was because of Brown being a smooth operator (he is), him trying
to spin this in such a way that he benefits from it (he did, especially some
of the words could have been a lot better chosen for an apology), whether they
disagree that nothing was achieved (it was, there is an apology where there
was none before) or whether they disagree with that this in my opinion is a
first step (it is, it's my opinion, I should know ;) ).
------
sharpn
Political gimmick, but I remember the petition for this was posted here & I
guess this apology was prompted by that campaign.
~~~
kenver
The guy can't win! If he hadn't he would have been done for not apologising,
and now that he has it's a political gimmick.
When I read it I just thought it was a nice thing to do.
~~~
sharpn
Well perhaps 'gimmick' is a loaded word; what I meant was that a full pardon
would have been more fitting, and also that he's apologising for something
done by someone else long ago - I can't think of a better word, but I do take
your point.
~~~
potatolicious
A full pardon IMHO is more of a gimmick than an apology. The guy is dead -
pardoning him won't do him any good. On the other hand, a heartfelt apology
communicates something explicitly, and might do some good for people who are
facing similar discrimination today.
~~~
sharpn
Not to split hairs, but a pardon is an action & implies regret - ie
communicates something tangible explicitly. Whereas an apology without pardon
is 'just words' & implicitly declines the opportunity to pardon. I can't speak
for those who are facing similar discrimination, but my guess is that a pardon
would be a more tangible comfort.
Either way, due credit for making the statement.
------
Hexstream
No mention of his contributions to computing at all :/
------
DanielBMarkham
Congratulations to all of us who bravely rallied around the cause of a dead
man, persuading the British government to do something that has no real
meaning to it and then celebrating our common victory over, er, something-or-
another. I'm not sure what we defeated or cause we moved forward, but it sure
felt great!
Let's keep up the good work! We have a long list of horrible deeds done in the
past to dead people by other dead people, and there's no limit to the amount
of patting ourselves on the back we can achieve. After all, we are so morally
superior to all of those folk, and it's time we told ourselves that.
Never mind that slavery still exists in the world, or imprisonment for gays,
or genocide, or female genital mutilation. No point in addressing or doing
something about actual, real evils that we can make an impact on. Nope! When
you can score easy symbolic points, all of that real action seems kind of
silly. Let's hear it for symbolism over substance! </sarcasm>
As a person of European descent, I would like to take this opportunity to
request that the Italian government apologize for the Romans keeping so many
of our ancestors as slaves. This is a wrong that's gone on way too long, and
something superficial and symbolic must immediately be done so that I can feel
better about it.
------
jokull
He should apologise for using the terrorist law against Iceland (I'm
Icelandic).
|
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Bribing users for iPhone app installs - msencenb
http://www.alexcurylo.com/blog/2010/09/05/bribe-for-install/
======
michael_dorfman
_However, we’d have to really, seriously, question whether people you get this
way are going to stay engaged with your app long enough for there to
conceivably be any positive value proposition attached to their acquisition._
That's been my response the last few times AdsReloaded has come up here.
I still can't for the life of me figure out a plausible scenario where a
business would pay a user to install an iPhone app.
------
msencenb
Full disclosure: I'm the owner of AdsReloaded.com but thought the article was
A) Funny and B) provided some insight.
For iPhone developers out there... what have been your most successful/worst
marketing campaigns? Would love to hear stories about cpc campaigns, blog
posts, social media, or other unique strategies (both for other developers
looking for advice and out of curiosity)
|
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|
Free real time rendering resources - allending
http://www.realtimerendering.com
======
allending
Look for some gems in the 'free' section.
|
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|
Breaking the rules of video game design with a collection of free strategy games - scorecard
Design principles for the eSports for engineers game collection are:<p>1. target audience is people who enjoy reading dense technical material<p>2. designed to accompany your daily exercise bike workout, for 30 min to one hour a day total. The collection includes a different game for each day, providing for a varied mind/body workout. Scoring formulas are provided to track your daily and weekly performance.<p>3. Sample different game domains, from deep learning chess and Go to realistic sims. Spar with a world-champion level AI first to train, then play online vs other humans if desired.<p>4. realistic physics, re-creation of historical events and strategy, not fantasy, are the themes that draw you in.<p>5. free on linux, no advertising.<p>6. you'll need to read a book and a game manual for each game to get the most out it<p>7. differentiate with breadth, depth, and richness of content, reflecting a wide range of volunteer contributors from all over the world, and over a long period of time.<p>8. unpack one tar file on linux to play all the games. No payment infrastructure or internet is needed to play.<p>more information here:<p>https://alternativeto.net/software/esports-for-engineers/
======
scorecard
Free, world champion Chess, Go and Bridge were a big find, and were added for
version 3. All functionality of Mig Alley's well-known unscripted campaign has
been restored. The daily and weekly score mechanism has been added. And last
but not least, QA has been done to improve the user experience.
------
fifteenth
What's new in the 3.0 release of esports for engineers?
------
audition
Does this game package run on Manjaro linux?
~~~
scorecard
The recommended linux distro for eSports for engineers is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS,
and wine 5.0 or higher. That way you just follow the instructions in the
documentation and everything runs with no hassle.
Most of the games will probably run out-of-the-box on any linux distro, but
the sims and GPU-accelerated deep learning engine might require some
additional work loading needed libraries, etc.
|
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Help American Workers. Pass TPP. – Michael Bloomberg and Thomas Donohue - soroushjp
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-16/help-american-workers-pass-tpp
======
dalke
"Charter schools are pubic even though their books are not open for audit"
Bloomberg? "Raising minimum wage is 'one of the most misguided things we can
do'" Bloomberg? "Tax breaks to big corporations" Bloomberg?
Why should I trust what he says about what's good for american workers?
|
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Ask HN: Why Shouldn’t I Use Lisp? - nicholas-cc
I’ve been following people like Jonathan Blow, as well as Paul Graham. I’ve learned Lisp and kind of like it, but I’ve heard Jonathan Blow say that A) GC is bad, and B) not to use Lisp and other similar languages. Could you explain these reasons not to use Lisp/higher-level languages with more features?
======
mimixco
To paraphrase Ansel Adams (who was speaking of cameras), there is no one best
language only the best language for the project you're doing. It may very well
be that Lisp is the right language for your project. That depends largely on
what the project is and what advantage you are seeking from Lisp (or another
choice) that helps complete your project and, most importantly, reduces
debugging time later since that's where you'll spend 60% of your coding
effort.
We are building our product with a Lisp back end because it deals with NLP and
large bodies of text where Lisp is ideal. The user interface, however, is
HTML/JS (Angular) because that language offers much more flexibility for UI
design.
~~~
kazinator
> _because that language offers much more flexibility for UI design_
Sure, for values of "flexibility" approaching "the only darn way to make UI
run in the browser".
~~~
SamReidHughes
You could use TypeScript, like VSCode does.
------
fulafel
Jonathan Blow is an opinionated game programmer/language creator who is eg
concerned about memory management eating into his 360 Hz display frametime[1].
GC is still used in many games, eg Unity engine, so it's not a universally
held view in the field of games. You should probably tell us more about what
domain you are working in and/or read his opinions in the contex of his
domain.
As for your (B), besides the "is it bad" essay question you probably want to
look at languages specifically. As you know there are many Lisp style
languages and they have big differences. Eg Clojure, Scheme and Common Lisp
are all very different and have different kinds of communities. It's a
language family of more internal variety than eg modern Algol style imperative
managed statically typed languages (Java/C#/Go).
[1] A topic of some of his tweets recently
------
auganov
Sounds like your question is about high-level GCed languages in general. The
person you're referencing appears to be in the gaming industry where GC is
especially problematic.
If we're talking about Lisp specifically vs similar languages, people probably
end up not using it for non-technical reason. Community, hire-ability and so
forth.
------
karmakaze
I've read a lot about Lisps with an open mind, worked through SICP in Racket,
and worked on some personal projects in Clojure. It was all fine, but at no
point did I feel like there wasn't another language that would have done as
well, possibly better. The one area where I was never fully comfortable was
the lack of static type checking. I've also dabbled with Haskell and though it
it is the most clean and consistent language I've used. I never got to the
point where I could wield higher kinded types to my advantage, I felt like I
was doing extra work to satisfy the language requirements without necessarily
getting the benefits back from it. I realize there's benefits of doing so, but
it's unclear when/if I'll even break even.
Recently I tried F# having seen OCaml in the past but not really using it. F#
seems to have progressed quite a bit since it was just OCaml on .NET. I'm able
to work rather fluently with it having already been exposed to
Java/Kotlin/Scala/Elixir which seemed close to what I want but seeming to fall
short in ways I couldn't quite describe. F# came the closest to what I've
always hoped to find in a language. It too has its quirks, some within itself
and partly from interoperating within .NET Core. I've yet to use it on larger
projects and on a team but the static type checking has already helped me save
so much time on iterating design that I wont look at any Lisp for generic
work. If I had a need for some specific DSL task it may come in handy as I've
often baked minimally expressive configuration languages in the past for no
good reason.
~~~
abrax3141
Right. Lisp totally outshines every other language at building DSLs, so if you
reconceptualize your project as a bunch of DSLs that utilize one another, you
win big with lisp.
~~~
karmakaze
What I'm finding is that I can effectively do the same with a statically-typed
functional language. The worst are DSLs with poor grammar and concept-fit
which add-to rather than solve problems. The ways in which Lisp doesn't scale
(people-wise) are well known and relate to each application essentially being
its own programming language.
~~~
kazinator
> _The ways in which Lisp doesn 't scale (people-wise) are well known_
Well, _memes_ about Lisp not scaling people-wise are well-known on forums like
HN.
The actual data on this is lacking, like reports about someone having
_actually_ gathered five hundred Lisp developers onto one project and failed.
> _each application essentially being its own programming language_
Meme-fueled nonsense, I'm afraid.
Every complex application in any language is its own programming language.
New types and functions introduce new syntax, just like macros, along with new
semantics.
So you know C? Okay, what's this, from the Linux kernel?
struct usb_host_endpoint {
struct usb_endpoint_descriptor desc;
struct usb_ss_ep_comp_descriptor ss_ep_comp;
struct usb_ssp_isoc_ep_comp_descriptor ssp_isoc_ep_comp;
struct list_head urb_list;
void *hcpriv;
struct ep_device *ep_dev;
unsigned char *extra;
int extralen;
int enabled;
int streams;
};
When and where is this allocated? What does it represent? How do you use it?
Guess what, this is new syntax. No, wait, what, it's just using the regular C
grammar, right? How can it be new syntax? The same way that a Lisp program
have new syntax if continues to be made out of parentheses, symbols, strings,
numbers that conform to a rigid grammar.
The new syntax is in the _schemas_ built with the definition abilities
provided in the underlying fixed grammar.
~~~
karmakaze
Perhaps less well known are the well-meaning explorations into why isn't Lisp
more popular. The absence of a 500 Lisp developers on one project is itself
the datapoint being discussed.
~~~
kazinator
The absence of that is because it would require a substantial global
recruitment and relocation effort to get that many Lispers into one
organization. It speaks nothing to their ability or inability to co-operate on
a project.
The vast majority of all software tech ever invented is unpopular today. If we
just pick a tech stack, language, editor, OS or anything from the last 70
years at random, it's almost certainly unpopular. That's our first-order
effect that forms the bulk of the rational explanation for why anything is
unpopular. By definition, not everything can be popular: popularity is the
selection of a very small number of artifacts (almost always chronologically
recent) to the exclusion of everything else.
~~~
bordercases
The challenge to that prior is that there is substantial overlap in the
features and capabilities that were in, say Commmon Lisp a long time ago and
yet there was a substantial delay in those features being accumulated in other
languages with vastly greater adoption to this point (like Java, although that
example might be disingenuous since the releases of Java and CLOS were only a
year apart...)
Likewise during the last seventy years some languages saw wild uptakes in
popularity for some languages much later in their life-cycle. Who would have
expected the modern successes of Ruby?
------
CyberFonic
Depends on what you are implementing and how.
I find Lisp good if you have a rough top-down design and lots of bottom-up
implementation details to suss-out. You can test each bit as you build and in
passing you might implement a DSL for your domain. There are many compiled
Lisps (both CL and Scheme) so performance can be quite good.
Generally, it is hard to deploy Lisp on client systems (if that is a
requirement) without introducing many dependencies. Loko Scheme being an
exception, since it (like Golang) compiles to a single executable with no
dependencies.
GC and VMs are common in many alternative environments so that's not a point
of difference.
If you like Lisp and your dev and target environments are suitable and you are
a solo developer or have a team of Lispers then why not use it? In most
general terms Lisp is no better nor worse than the alternatives.
~~~
kazinator
Loko Scheme is certainly not an exception in producing a single executable
with no dependencies. All major Common Lisp implementations do this. I shipped
a program for Windows quite easily using Clozure Common Lisp ("CCL").
~~~
lispm
Generally that's true. Loko Scheme is interesting, though - but probably not
widely used. Check the documentation.
Probably he meant 'zero' dependencies. Like not depending on C libs. I see
that Loko Scheme depends on running on Linux (unclear, which versions) and
AMD64 cpu - it seems to be able to run on bare metal, too - but the
dependencies on the hardware are unclear. To bootstrap, it might need another
Scheme implementation.
Many Lisp systems can generate executables, some of which then may depend on
some external libraries (maybe in specific versions), specific OS versions or
even specific CPU variants (not unknown on ARM hardware which has a lot of CPU
variants).
~~~
kazinator
A language implementation that depends on no C libraries, on a platform whose
documented interfaces are C libraries, still has a platform dependency, and
that platform dependency is worse.
------
_bxg1
Assuming performance isn't a problem (which it may well not be), this does a
good job of laying out all the other arguments against Lisp:
[http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html](http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html)
Basically: Lisp projects have trouble scaling to larger teams (and
communities) because of how fluid it is. That said, for a solo project or a
small team, no language has more expressive power.
That said, Jonathan Blow has the occasional good opinion and a lot of really
bad ones. His anti-abstraction zealotry is the basis of most of the bad ones.
As another commenter here said, there are no universal truths when choosing a
technology; it's always about using the right tool for the job.
~~~
fulafel
But: 99% of software projects are made by solo devs or small teams, and
shooting for scalability in its many dimensions from the outset has doomed
many a project from making it out of the door. (Or hobbled them enough that
the "happy problem" of scaling is never encountered)
------
sdfjkl
((
------
SamReidHughes
Because static typing is important for working productively with medium-to-
large programs, because the Lisps have decrepit ecosystems, and because they
aren't even good dynamically typed languages either, with the possible
exception of Clojure. There is nothing that Common Lisp has, that other
languages don't have, that makes it necessary.
~~~
veddox
That‘s a pretty opinionated statement... Could you elaborate on why you think
the Lisps aren‘t „good dynamically typed languages?“
And I don‘t think „necessary“ is a good metric when comparing programming
languages; „pleasant to use“ or „efficient to write“ strike me as more
pertinent (as well as the obvious runtime efficiency questions).
~~~
SamReidHughes
Use of a bad language like C or Java or Emacs Lisp (if that can be called bad)
can be necessary -- the best choice.
I don't have a novel explanation of what makes Common Lisp and Scheme bad
dynamically typed languages, just the ordinary obvious reasons, so there's no
point in writing it out.
~~~
veddox
Unfortunately, my CS background isn‘t strong enough to see the „ordinary,
obvious reasons“. But I do like Common Lisp, so I am rather interested in
discovering what bothers you about it?
And as an aside: what makes you call C and Java „bad languages“? (Especially
since you are so much in favour of static typing?)
~~~
SamReidHughes
The short version is,
In C it's easy to make mistakes with gotchas like implicit conversions, and
nowadays it's archaic, lacking in basic features it could have, e.g. something
akin to D's scope(exit) statements.
In Java it's very expensive, in effort and code bloat, to define new types; in
general the language actively fights against making well-organized program, or
even just moving data around.
With Scheme or Common Lisp, you might look at Clojure or Oz for some
inspiration (as well as features we take for granted in
Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP/JavaScript) in regard to what sort of features might make
a dynamically typed language, even a Lisp, "not bad." Part of it is that
statement-based function bodies are actually a good thing, and infix syntax is
a good thing. Scheme is just lacking in basic stuff you need, and it relies on
tail calls without explicit tail call syntax. And it has call/cc. Common Lisp
is bad in detail -- it has all sorts of clever little features, like setf,
that don't solve real problems, they solve Lisp problems. And they handle
defining and using new types badly, even simple ones like plain record types.
Back in the day, CL's advantage was that the competition was so weak. If you
gave CL the Python or JS ecosystem today, it would be usable, but that's the
nicest thing you can say about it.
|
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Entrepreneurs Will Save America - breck
http://www.linkrap.com/Entrep
======
known
Reminds me of Ronald Reagan quote. "Entrepreneurs have built America."
~~~
nazgulnarsil
entrepreneurs built modern civilization.
|
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|
Multi-Service Local Development Environment with Vagrant and Docker - cbrantley
http://devbandit.com/2015/05/29/vagrant-and-docker.html
======
lioeters
Love the clear, concise example repo and informative explanation. Perfect
introduction to start exploring this concept. Thank you for sharing, looking
forward to more articles like this.
|
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Ask HN: A good book on Calculus? - mannicken
Hi,<p>After a year-long break I'll continue studying math this fall.<p>What I want is some refreshment on calculus. Does anyone know something similar to Feynman's Lectures on Physics, just on calculus? Feynman's books were really fucking awesome and I would like a similar fun read for calculus: derivation/integration, series, and multivar (and beyond, if possible but for now this will suffice).<p>I'm not really looking for "here's a bunch of formulas for derivation: And here's what Taylor serie looks like:". I already know that. I want to know what goes on under the hood, proofs, dissections, analogies.<p>Similar question goes for chemistry/biology but I think HN is much more math-oriented.<p>Suggestions?
======
jeffcoat
You may be having trouble finding things because calculus done with full rigor
is called "analysis". The classic introductory-but-extremely-dense text is
Rudin's _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_. If you're reading on your own,
though, I expect you'll get a lot more out of a friendlier book; my first
analysis course was taught out of Strichartz's _The Way of Analysis_.
N.B.: Most everything in either book will be completely new to you. 1st-year
calculus courses have absolutely no interest in teaching you what goes on
under the hood; there's just no time. But I think the analogy to Feynman's
lectures holds up pretty well.
~~~
mannicken
Looks like The Way of Analysis is what I need, thank you :)
------
billswift
Apostol's Calculus texts (2 volumes) are the best with the supporting theory.
I'm more from an engineering perspective, for readers looking for a book from
that direction is Kline's "Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach".
Introductory general biology texts have a lot more variation in how the
material is presented, but have to cover such an incredible amount of facts
that there is actually less effective difference. Some biology texts tend to
be more ecologically oriented (Campbell), where others are more cellular and
chemically oriented (Curtis), but the difference tends to get lost somewhat
with the need to cover everything, and the sheer mass of material each HAS to
cover.
You might try Pauling's "General Chemistry" text for a more theoretical
treatment in chemistry.
Both Kline's calculus and Pauling's chemistry texts were from the 1960s and
reprinted by Dover in the 1990s; you might try checking the Dover catalog to
see if there are any more similar reprints out.
------
enum
Michael Spivak's Calculus text:
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0914098918>
------
jpwagner
volume 1 of the best series out there...
[http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-
Introduction...](http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction-
Algebra/dp/0471000051)
------
splat
If you'd like to read a refresher on the calculus of multiple variables, I
think you'd enjoy Div, Grad, Curl and All That. It's in the same sort of
informal style of Feynman's Lectures. It's not rigorous like Rudin, but it
gives you a good intuitive understanding of the subject.
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The Alternative Facts of Cable Companies - ccdd4
https://backchannel.com/the-alternate-facts-of-cable-companies-f0cd1e10e66#.fwht3dxix
======
webmaven
We have all seen this pattern in the past few years:
_Although the FCC in 2015 relabeled high-speed internet access as a regulated
product, neither it nor state commissions have actually required particular
levels of consumer service or reasonable prices._
_But in order to avoid anyone getting the idea that oversight might be a good
idea, Charter and Comcast have to uphold the fiction that their service is
getting better and better in response to trumpeted “competition”—even if there
isn’t any actual rival anywhere around. If everyone believes that services are
improving, then there’s no need for government intervention._
_That’s why Spectrum’s marketing and management teams let loose with ads
claiming that consumers would get new X internet data speeds — “fast, reliable
internet speeds.” The branding people went nuts, using adjectives like Turbo,
Extreme, and Ultimate for the company’s highest-speed 200 or 300 Mbps download
offerings._
_But no one, or very few people, could actually experience those speeds._
The NY AG is calling Charter/TWC/Spectrum out on their fraudulent BS:
_As the New York attorney general’s office puts it, “Spectrum relentlessly
touted consistently fast internet speeds and reliable access to online content
to solicit and retain subscribers. However, in reality, Spectrum-TWC knowingly
failed to deliver on such promises.”_
Hold their feet to the fire, Eric Schneiderman!
And all you other state AG's out there, take note and follow suit.
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HTML/XML Parsing with Node & jQuery - mjijackson
http://alexmaccaw.co.uk/posts/node_jquery_xml_parsing
======
pshc
I was scraping with jQuery for a while but it felt like an awful lot of
overhead. In the case of simpler scraping tasks that happen a lot I've
actually gone back to nuts and bolts with HTML5[1]'s tokenizer and a custom
state machine that only accumulates the data I want. At no time is any DOM
node actually created in memory, let alone the entire DOM tree. It means I
feel safer running many of these in parallel on a VPS. It also means I can
write a nice streaming API where you start emitting data the moment you get
enough input. Buffering input just feels wrong in node.js.
But jQuery is a great scraper if your transformation is complex and non-
streamable. [1] <https://github.com/aredridel/html5>
------
ricardobeat
doc.find('h2:gt(0)').before('<hr />')
------
peteretep
Actually, I'm doing this for my SUPER SECRET startup at the moment. Originally
the front-end would just send the back-end the whole HTML of a user's page
when they executed the browser plugin, and the back-end would intercept it and
knock it up in Perl.
Wasn't sure how well that was going to scale, and was worried people would get
weird about sending the entire contents of the page they're on - I have a 90%
working solution now where it's all done in-browser, with a bunch of classes
I've been working on with a node.js set of testing tools
------
bialecki
One of my biggest pet peeves with crawling the web is using XPath. Not because
I have strong feelings about XPath, just that I use css selector syntax so
much, it's a pain I can't leverage that knowledge in this domain as well.
Something like this is really awesome and going to make crawling the web more
accessible.
~~~
cosmic_shame
if you're using python, lxml has a cssselect module that makes this a breeze.
~~~
bialecki
Very interesting, I'll definitely look into that. Thanks!
------
orc
Wow, I was just thinking this morning how awesome it would be to make a
desktop app that could crawl websites with jquery. And since node.js has a
windows installer, it sounds like a much better solution than the C#
HtmlAgilityPack I've been using.
~~~
orc
Hm.. I tried doing this on windows but it turned out to be a lot of work to
get it setup correctly. npm is hard to install on windows, and the jquery
project depends on contextify, which has a binary. It does have a windows
build though: <https://github.com/Benvie/contextify>
------
slashclee
Apparently node.js doesn't implement the DOMParser object, which means that
you can't actually use jquery's parseXML method. That's a bummer :(
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The Actual Science of James Damore’s Google Memo - Simon321
https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/
======
unityByFreedom
Was Damore referencing race when he brought up IQ in the memo?
"the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between
people (e.g., IQ[8] and sex differences)"
IQ has no relevance to a discussion on gender gaps [1], so, why mention it?
Damore mentions politics here. In that context, IQ has recently been used in
discussions over racial differences [2].
[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-
bio...](https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-
claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-
August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin)
[2] [https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-
bla...](https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-
iq-response-critics)
------
doubleshame
> So what? Which is to say, what are we to do with not just the conclusions of
> the memo but also its implications?
Two things:
1\. You can detect asymmetries in the nurturing part of the equation and
correct for them by changing the upbringing and exposure in the environment
(example: provide girls with building toys in addition to dolls)
2\. You can update the environment to accommodate for peoples' differences,
regardless of cause
By analogy, because there are people with only one leg
The correct response is: let's build ramps and elevators to be wheelchair
accessible!
The incorrect responses I've seen floating around are:
1\. You must hop on one leg while talking to such a person, because equality!
2\. Legs are a social construction! I can identify as a person with how many
ever legs I want. (/looks the other way while the one legged person hops up a
staircase)
Acknowledge differences, they make us all stronger.
~~~
plandis
Well in this case someone acknowledged differences and was fired for it.
------
unityByFreedom
This article cites an evolutionary biologist responding to Damore's essay
point-by-point [1]
Here's one highlight,
> His implicit model is that cognitive traits must be either biological (i.e.
> innate, natural, and unchangeable) or non-biological (i.e., learned by a
> blank slate). This nature versus nurture dichotomy is completely outdated
> and nobody in the field takes it seriously. Rather, modern research is based
> on the much more biologically reasonable view that neurological traits
> develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic, genetic
> and environmental influences. Everything about humans involves both nature
> and nurture.
[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-
bio...](https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-
claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-
August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin)
[1-archive] [http://archive.is/h5abO](http://archive.is/h5abO)
~~~
mpweiher
Yeah, except that is exactly what he did not say, one of the many straw-men in
the criticism of the memo.
From the memo:
" _Possible_ non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech"
and
"the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ _in
part_ due to biological causes and that these differences _may_ explain why we
don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership"
So "could", "in part", "may". None of this either-or dichotomy that the critic
somehow inserts.
Similar for the wired article.
'But trying to use that data to explain gender disparities in the workplace is
irrelevant at best. “I would assume that women in technical positions at
Google are more thing-oriented than the average woman,” '
No shit, Sherlock! This is about explaining the gender _gap_ , so the people
_not_ at Google.
"forecloses the possibility of changing sex roles and representation at
Google"
No, he does the reverse. He proposes changes to increase representation.
Whether these proposals are any good is a different story (I don't know), but
the claim is a simple lie.
And so on and so forth in tedious repetitiveness.
~~~
unityByFreedom
Saying _" in part"_ is still making a judgement in arguing biology _is_ a
factor.
I agree he does say "possible" and "may" in a few places, but he's
inconsistent. Overwhelmingly, he makes deterministic statements, including
when he gives interviews (for example at 5:32 in one with CNN [1])
As the evolutionary biologist notes,
1\. There are conflicting results with the research showing gender differences
in personality traits
2\. The research doesn't actually show that these trait differences are
biological
3\. "It is a massive leap to conclude that a slight difference in average
personality must undermine women's professional abilities in software
engineering"
> And so on and so forth in tedious repetitiveness.
The full response [2] is well worth a read. It is the most comprehensive
point-by-point reply by a scientist to Damore to date.
[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/15/technology/culture/james-
dam...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/15/technology/culture/james-damore-
interview/index.html)
[2] [https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-
bio...](https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-
claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-
August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin)
~~~
mpweiher
> Saying "in part" is still making a judgement in arguing biology is a factor.
No it is not saying "is" a factor when it actually says _could be_ a factor
(in the outcomes).
This is elementary school english.
That biology "is" a factor in the differences between men and women is not
really debatable at this point. If you believe different, read _The Blank
Slate_ by Stephen Pinker.
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Show HN: ParisHilton.js - knowbody
https://github.com/knowbody/ParisHilton.js
======
ColinWright
So how many people are going to clone this repo and then submit it here?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7686054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7686054)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7686077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7686077)
~~~
LeslieOA
This looks like a very different implementation. Plus: pink! :-D
------
dewey
Making fun of Paris Hilton is still a thing? Come on...
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Woz: Microsoft might be more creative than Apple - aynlaplant
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57550839-71/woz-microsoft-might-be-more-creative-than-apple/
======
jacquesm
Imagine if Bill Gates were to give interviews like this commenting on
Microsoft. Woz is one of my heroes, but I can easily see that the Apple PR
department cringes every time he gives an interview.
And they can't do anything about it either, they're damned if they're quiet
and they're even more damned if they would speak up because they could never
meet him at his level, straight to the point and with an honesty that is
probably disturbing them greatly, and responding would likely result in
something akin to the Streisand effect, further increasing the visibility of
his words.
For those that wish to belittle Steve Wozniaks' contribution to computing: you
likely would not be on this forum right now if not for him, the IBM pc only
happened after early Apple validated the market.
Steve Wozniak is more of a tinkerer and an engineer, which makes him one of
the hacker crowd, something that most business guys have very little empathy
with (engineers are tools in their toolbox). As such I listen to what he says
because he speaks my language more than the marketing and sales guys and I'm
happy I don't have to parse it, all the meaning is there in plain sight, no
hidden agendas.
Such transparency, even a sense of naivety is quite rare in the business
world, where spindoctors will twist words until they have a meaning far
removed from what I would normally get out of them.
~~~
WalterBright
> you likely would not be on this forum right now if not for him, the IBM pc
> only happened after early Apple validated the market.
Years before the IBM PC came out, I had a Heathkit H11 (a version of the
PDP-11) and was writing and selling software for it. I'm fairly confident that
the PC revolution would have happened with or without Woz. I had been working
with 11's, 6502's and 6800's for years before that, and it was pretty clear
that there was a revolution in the works.
The students at Caltech (75-79) I was with were all excited about
microcomputers and quite a few designed and built their own systems from
scratch (it wasn't very hard, the chips pretty much just plugged together).
Hell even I made one around a 6800. None had an Apple II, mainly because a
PDP-11 was the preferred system used to dev the software for the microcomputer
boards.
Woz certainly made enormous contributions, and nobody can say what the shape
of it would have been without him, but it would have happened anyway.
~~~
jacquesm
The H11 was released a year after the Apple I.
I had a KIM-1 at the time and the Apple was lightyears ahead of it, even
though they shared the same processor.
Most other 'personal computers' were still stuck in hexadecimal keyboard
territory.
I've rolled my own (6800, '09 and 6502 based boards) and learned a lot doing
that but the Apple I and later the Apple II (neither of which I ever owned but
an uncle of mine had an Apple II that I played a lot with) was a _real_
computer rather than something more akin to a large embedded system,
programmed with paper tape and terminal interface using current loop. The
Apple stuff rocked the world of personal computing.
The difference was huge, and I'm pretty sure that the design elements present
in the Apple II raised the bar considerably for the competition and had a
direct effect on the PC lineage.
It would be nice to interview the designers of the original IBM PC to ask them
where they got their input.
~~~
WalterBright
The H11 was just a repackaging of the PDP-11 which had been around for years,
at steadily dropping prices. It was far, far more powerful than the Apple II.
Apple had many firsts, but it's an awful stretch to say the PC revolution
wouldn't have happened without them. It's like saying we wouldn't have
airliners today if the Wrights never existed.
~~~
jacquesm
You'd have airliners today. But likely they'd be the airliners of a decade or
two ago.
The Wrights are an excellent example because they did what they did when they
did it, and there were still people talking about whether powered flight was
even possible. Kitty Hawk was a milestone for exactly the same reasons the
Apple I was a milestone: huge improvement over the status quo, accelerating
development and validating a market.
That's worth a lot in my opinion, it moves the needle with a large jump rather
than a tiny increment.
~~~
rickdangerous1
There's is quite a list of inventors from around the world who independently
invented powered flight at about the same time as the Wright brothers. Flight
being invented in 1903 actually has more to do with the evolution of petrol
motor power to weight ratios than it did discovering the principles of flight.
It would have happened within 1 year of 1903 with or without the Wright bros.
~~~
shasta
And even if it had taken a decade, that almost certainly wouldn't have set us
back a decade today.
------
bravura
Serious question: I know he's the Woz, but is there any other reason that we
care about his opinion?
He hasn't been involved with Apple since 1987.
Has Woz ever demonstrated any expertise in design or UX?
[edit: For anyone that has accused me of bias or fanboi-ism, let me disclose
where I stand. I have run Linux on PC hardware almost exclusively from roughly
1996 through October 2012. I bought my first Mac computer a few weeks ago,
being frustrated by occasional hardware compatibility issues running Linux on
laptops. I think Apple has good design, but would be happy with a slim Linux
laptop that works without issues.]
~~~
lutze
Are you fucking kidding?
Woz CREATED Apple... Job's single defining contribution to the Apple I was
"hey we should sell this!", he did literally NOTHING else.
~~~
SquareWheel
Let's turn down the hyperbole. Jobs still marketed the company, even if Woz
was the technical genius. Selling your product is just as essential as having
a product.
~~~
lutze
In the context of the question being asked, I think a little indignation is
entirely in order.
Has Woz ever shown any expertise in design? I mean really, it's like asking if
Michelangelo knew his way around a fucking paint brush.
~~~
larrys
You are talking about hardware and/or engineering design. Important for sure
but only one part of "design" and of a product having success in the
marketplace. Without that appeal all the engineering genius in the world means
nothing (and vice versa of course..)
------
jammur
Saying that "Improving is not Apple-style innovation," seems kinda wrong. Yes,
they've had a few brand new product launches, but most of their time has been
spent improving existing products. The progression from the original iPod to
the current version has been a series of incremental improvements over the
course of the last 11 years. Same goes for all the Mac computers. If anything
I think the opposite is true, that Apple-style innovation tends to be
improvement, with a few big leaps once in a while.
Also, new isn't necessarily better. I think Microsoft is in a position right
now where they have the choice of duplicating the iOS/Android experience, or
trying something completely different. Since they've shown a willingness to
spend tons of money on new projects and play the long game, I think their
strategy of trying new things is good for them. Products don't generally start
out great, but rather get there over time and over multiple incremental
iterations. I think Microsoft is essentially still searching for v1. Apple on
the other hand already has a product that people love and buy in huge numbers.
They have their good v1 and are now trying to make it great through
incremental improvements.
~~~
tsahyt
> they've had a few brand new product launches
They haven't really done anything truly new for decades now. The iPod was what
made their comeback. It was an MP3 player. Those have been around for a while
at that time. Then there was the iPhone which was a really good effort but
didn't really invent the smartphone. It evolved what we already had (Nokia and
Sony Ericcson had Smartphones on Symbian that did most things the iPhone did,
only worse. They played MP3s, you could use them to browse the web and you
could install Apps on them). Don't get me wrong, the iPhone was like a
catalyst to the smartphone world, accelerating the development of mobile
platforms, but it was not a true innovation. In fact, Android was already in
development for quite a while at the time the iPhone was released. And to me,
the iPad is basically a big smartphone that can't make phone calls. I don't
really see much innovation there either. Did it create markets? Yes. Was it
really innovative? No.
On the software side there's not really any innovation either. OSX is really a
polished BSD. Sure, Apple seems to know what they're doing in terms of UX but
again, no real innovation - just one of the few companies that knows how to do
it properly.
So yes, I agree with the Woz quote in the title. Microsoft Research has some
pretty staggering projects going (both for developers as well as consumers)
and Apple seems to be milking tried and tested cows lately. It works for them
but it's neither creative nor innovative. This is exactly where Microsoft
_has_ to shine these days because people got incredibly bored with MS. Windows
8 is pretty much a disaster on the desktop and the Surface tablet seems to be
too slow to handle proper loads. I hope some of those research projects make
it into applications even if just for the sake of competition.
~~~
ricardobeat
> Then there was the iPhone which was a really good effort but didn't really
> invent the smartphone
There was _nothing_ like the iPhone in the market. Not even close. It was like
alien technology at the time. You must be joking about Symbian. My brother's
Palm from 2003 could play MP3s, 'browse the web' and install apps too, yet it
looks as sophisticated as a wristwatch today.
The development version of Android before iOS still had physical keyboards and
a trackwheel, running on 240x160 screens. I'm not even going to comment on OSX
or iPad because that's starting to sound like a troll.
By your standards, Tesla isn't doing any innovation either. Batteries and cars
have been around for centuries, in fact the first cars at the beginning of the
20th century were battery-powered. It's just a really polished electric car.
------
netcan
If you take a step back in perspective I think you find that both companies
are _incredibly_ innovative... compared to other big companies or by any fair
standard.
Microsoft sat on huge market influence and a captive market for 15 years with
Windows. Even with the recent changes in the consumer OS market, they still
have a incredible market power. Yet, You can't really honestly say that they
haven't advanced the product with innovation. Apart from Windows they also
went into new product categories. They've been developing genuinely futuristic
technologies.
Compare the innovation at MS to the innovation at Sony or Panosnic, IBM or
SAP. There is (was?) a lot of hype around companies of more recent
generations. Take Salesforce. They were applauded for being innovative and
pioneering SAAS for enterprise. Forbes most innovative company. They _are_
innovative, but not more that Microsoft. Nt over the long term.
Compare MS (or Apple) to companies considered creative _outside_ of the tech
industry and it's Mike Tyson vs a skinny 14 year old. Ikea? Toyota? The Prius
is creative and innovative. Toyotas quality system is one of the big
innovations in manufacturing. Ikea really has had a cultural impact with their
designs. Their way of setting up stores is innovative and creative. But these
companies do not compare to MS or Apple. If you take 3-5 year blocks
individually you will find big-to-huge innovations from Apple or MS in every
block. If you look at Ikea or Toyota, you won't.
------
JuDue
This guy knows how to seed his interviews with one liners that will rate in
the press.
"Even hardware from Apple is a subscription, in a couple of years it isn't
going to work with the newer stuff".
Well... duh, but goodluck finding a company with a much better record on this
front.
And how is Apple non-innovative for "pumping out the iPhone" compared the
Android world with hundreds of failed models, or Windows with its reluctant
shape shifting on what constitutes a good smart phone.
I like Woz, and he did a good job fielding some very biased wording in the
questions - but really, it's been a long time since he was at Apple.
~~~
stcredzero
_> Even hardware from Apple is a subscription, in a couple of years it isn't
going to work with the newer stuff_
Historically, Apple hardware has kept its value very well. I could just as
well still be using my 2008 Unibody Macbook. Equipped with an SSD, it's still
plenty fast enough for my work.
~~~
beloch
Try putting a bigger SSD in your Air sometime. It's possible, but far from
easy. Even the Macbook Pro's are becoming more difficult to upgrade with each
new generation. The Retina Pro is rather similar to the Air in terms of
ability (or lack thereof) to upgrade.
Also, your 2008 macbook probably isn't worth as much as you think it is. Over
the last few years Apple has done an excellent job of driving their prices
down. A typical macbook pro from 2012 is more than 25% cheaper than one from
2008, if you're okay with a smaller screen an Air would be lighter, faster,
and even cheaper.
What is true is that hardware requirements, in general for all OS's and
software, have been stuck in neutral for the last few years. Whether your
computer is a desktop Dell, a home-brew gaming rig, or a Mac, you probably
haven't _really_ needed to upgrade for a period of more than twice as long as
you would have even just five years ago. That's why your 2008 Macbook doesn't
seem like a hunk of junk, not because it's particularly powerful. While other
manufacturers are being bitten by the slowing obsolescence cycle of computer
hardware, Apple is very deliberately speeding the obsolescence cycle of their
hardware up with a combination of marketing, reduced ability to upgrade, and
price reduction.
~~~
stcredzero
_> Try putting a bigger SSD in your Air sometime_
There are aftermarket Air SSDs.
<http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/>
Note that they even sell IDE drive upgrades.
------
nicholassmith
Last time Woz did an interview I said pretty much the same thing, and I say it
pretty much any time he pontificates on Apple (good or bad), his opinion on
Apple is the same as anyone with the history in the industry he has. Useful,
but not as relevant as it gets turned out to be. His involvement with Apple
ended decades ago, so he's an observer from the sidelines.
He makes an interesting point about Microsoft's creative development for sure,
but because it's 'Apple cofounder disses Apple for Microsoft!' it has column
inches galore thrown at it. Plus it ignores the fact that Apple's development
cycle for it's products (release, iterate, 5 years in, release new product,
iterate, repeat) has been ongoing for at least 10 years. Apple does innovate,
they just do it on a much slower cycle than we'd all like, but it's good for
business.
I mostly like Woz because of his honesty and straightforward manner, but it's
telling from the article: " _He seemed to almost decry the iPad as something
that's easy, for normal people, but not for the true nerdy geek._ ". Apple
shouldn't be building products for the true nerdy geek, we're a small
percentage of a small percentage. It'd be lovely if they made an Apple Macbook
Pro developer edition with all sorts of random additional tools and ports and
so on, but it'd sell poorly and be waste of time. We're not their core market.
That's okay.
------
tluyben2
If it's your taste the WP8 interface might be more pretty; I find it annoying
to work with and the jury is out on 'normal people' (non tech crowd); I still
know zero non-tech people in my vicinity who actually like metro (or whatever
it's called now). And as far as the phones go; non-tech people downright
_hate_ them. Not sure if it's the interface, but in the local pub it's clear;
people get passionate about their hate for the devices. And these are people
who never heard of HN, so they are not just trolling. I'm talking about
lawyers, builders etc; most brought them back and have S2/S3s now.
MS has the one of the best (or the best when it comes to language research)
R&D department; there are too many brilliant people doing brilliant stuff
there. And they are only just starting to use that power. That should give
them their edge (besides a monopoly on the desktop and billions in the bank
ofcourse), about their design skills i'm not so sure.
~~~
potatolicious
I'm convinced that Microsoft is an amazing _technology_ company that's utterly
and truly terrible at _product_. They have a tremendous amount of impressive
R&D and capability that seem to fall flat every time they try to ship it for,
well, actual users.
I'll believe Woz when he says MS is more innovative than Apple, but I think
Woz makes the classical geek fallacy that more innovation is the end goal. The
end goal is innovation that people actually benefit from, and that involves
more than paying a lot of people a lot of money to conjure up new amazing
technology and then ship them in boring, poorly implemented products.
I believe that at some level MS realizes what it needs to do, but corporately
it has trouble getting there. The core problem here is that the company simply
doesn't sweat the details, and continually, severely underestimates how
critical details are in today's market. They developed a no-frills, cheap-plan
device that taps directly into our social network addictions, and then failed
to actually ship the "cheap plan" part.
They released a new, innovative smartphone OS where performance was a critical
differentiator from the competition (Android 2.x), and then failed to ensure
that 3rd party apps had access to the same performance abilities.
And now they've released an innovative new desktop OS that bets the farm on
touch interactions being the wave of the future - and their own first-party
apps are in many places poorly designed for touch interaction. Major parts of
the core OS are also not touch-ready.
The details matter, and MS never, ever gets the details right.
~~~
stcredzero
_> MS never, ever gets the details right._
What about Windows 7?
~~~
nxn
Isn't Windows 7 in a large way a refinement of Vista where they did get the
"details" right? It's probably overkill to say that Microsoft never gets the
details right, but I do agree that their first version product which
introduces their inovations is generally rough and unpolished to say the
least.
I loved metro when I first saw the build videos in 2011, but that's because I
looked at the demo apps as early and unfinished examples of the direction they
were taking. Now over a year later I see almost nothing has changed and the
same level of quality I saw back then is what is being released now. A lot of
things are unintuitive, apps have awkward layouts, the icons are downright
awful, etc.
There was a lot of promise for Windows 8 back then, and to some extent I still
expect them to refine the UI and make it into a better user experience by the
next version of Windows -- but by then the feeling of "innovation" will be
gone and they will have missed their chance to make the big impact that they
needed and would have otherwise gotten.
------
bitcartel
Woz:
"I don't believe Steve [Jobs] had to be as much of a real rugged bastard, put
people down and make them feel demeaned."
"I don't think that was necessary for Apple to have great products"
~~~
zalzane
I had no idea that delivering a great product and not being a shithead to your
employees was mutually exclusive.
~~~
tluyben2
Can we have a list? Delivering something 'great' should be subjective here; it
means that someone sustained a profitable multi-billion company with products
for many (>10) years. Not if YOU like the product. I see a lot of bastards
(Gates, Ellison, Jobs); where are the _nice_ guys?
Edit: Google? I don't know if he is?
~~~
Apocryphon
Zuckerberg, too. And this isn't even limited to tech companies, but any
business.
------
Tloewald
Sounds like what actually happened is Woz had a long friendly open far-
reaching conversation with a guy from Tech Crunch and then got quoted out of
context.
I would imagine that any intelligent Apple exec (presumably a tautology) would
also worry about Microsoft, they just wouldn't chat amiably about it with
someone from TechChrunch.
------
heymishy
Without hating on apple, Woz does make an interesting point (regardless of
whether or not you think he's relevant). Sure apple have been innovative and
have released some really ground-breaking advances in product design and
standards, but he's commenting on the fact they have been stagnate of late.
I'm not suggesting that what Microsoft is putting up is any good (I'm really
not), they have been experimenting releasing a more varied range of products
than apple has lately. That's the point Woz is making..
~~~
pretoriusB
> _Sure apple have been innovative and have released some really ground-
> breaking advances in product design and standards, but he's commenting on
> the fact they have been stagnate of late._
The iPhone was released 5 years ago. The iPad, 2 years ago.
It actually took _more time_ to go from the first iPod to the iPhone, than the
whole period the iPhone exists.
What exactly has the competition (MS, Google) produced at the same time that
is innovating (not in some "groundbreaking tech" sense -- in the "a new
product category/market" sense)?
Nothing at all. Google's innovating thing was search and maybe mail. Android
is a me-too, first sold one whole year after the iPhone. MS innovating was
mostly Windows and Office and the .NET ecosystem. Surface is a me-too going
after the iPad and Metro is just a UI (and not a very good at that). So what's
the point of comparison here? Vaporware like the Google glasses thing?
Plus, Apple brought to mass market (or, more precisely, brought to market,
because only like 10 guys had those before) stuff like hi-dpi displays,
unibody construction, and thunderbolt. And that "ultraportable" thing (as
opposed to the dying netbooks), mostly inspired by Air? Introduced merely 4
years ago, again by Apple.
~~~
wutbrodo
That's an extremely narrow (and imo incorrect) definition of "innovation".
Ignoring things (for the purposes of measuring innovation) from the last 5
years like Google Chrome, self-driving cars, street view, knowledge graph,
instant search, public transit directions (for which a whole standard for
encoding transit directions was created and implemented) etc, simply because
they're not new product categories (with the exception of the cars) just seems
silly, especially since that measure implies that Apple did one thing 5 years
ago and one thing 2 years ago and has spent the rest of their time since doing
nothing innovative whatsoever. Choosing a measure that arbitrarily narrow not
only undersells Google's achievements, but also Apple's (and Microsoft's), by
ignoring all the improvements to products (or new products in existing
categories) that are technical and product feats in and of themselves. The
parent post was talking about the fact that (in his opinion) Apple has
stagnated recently by coasting on the success of their initial product, rather
than constantly striving to improve everything they do and come up with new
things.
Note that your definition (and even my response) ignores a massive amount of
innovation that goes on under the hood; If Google Search (e.g.) used the same
algorithm and had the same performance as it did ten years ago, it would be
_horrible_ by today's standards, and that's precisely because we've been
spoiled (in a good way) by the fact that the algorithm and the infrastructure
is constantly improving, not only through small iterative improvements but
also through occasional leaps which undeniably fit under the definition of
innovation.
I've largely left Microsoft out of my counterexample, but that's only because
saying "Google hasn't innovated at all in the last 5 years" is just such
incredibly low-hanging fruit. Most of what I said applies to Microsoft as
well, albeit perhaps a little less so, given that they were on the tail end of
their "lost decade".
~~~
pretoriusB
> _That's an extremely narrow (and imo incorrect) definition of "innovation".
> Ignoring things (for the purposes of measuring innovation) from the last 5
> years like Google Chrome, self-driving cars, street view, knowledge graph,
> instant search, public transit directions (for which a whole standard for
> encoding transit directions was created and implemented) etc, simply because
> they're not new product categories (with the exception of the cars) just
> seems silly_
Well, true I have to count Maps (Earth/Street View) to Google's innovations.
It's an important thing that millions use everyday, and that rules it's field.
Chrome, OTOH, is just Apple's webkit work with a sandbox. Not substantially
better than either Firefox or Safari. If we count that as innovation, then
sure, Apple put out 2 versions of it's OS and several iOS versions with
hundreds of new features, the new iMac, etc etc.
As for the glasses and the self-driving cars, when we actually see them in the
market I'll count them as innovations. Heck, I'll count them as innovations
for Google even if someone else brings them to the market. As it is, they
don't amount to much better than vapor(hard)ware. Plus, we know that behind
the secrecy veil Apple also has dozens of prototypes and testing products most
of which will never see the light of day. If they did a Google or Microsoft,
they would have saturated the media with vaporware too.
------
agumonkey
The interesting thing in Microsoft slight awakening is that we all know they
have loads of 'hidden' resources R&D wise. For years they used almost none,
let's see what happens when they do.
------
dakrisht
Hmmm. This is an interesting one here.
On the one hand, we simply can't dismiss Woz by stating nonsense such as "he
hasn't designed UI", "hasn't been involved with Apple since 1987", and "Jobs
is the reason for Apple's success." Because that's all simply bullshit. UI,
UX, Steve Jobs, him not being involved with Apple since the plane crash - has
zero to do with this post and our discussion of it. So some of you need to cut
out the Apple fanboy bullshit.
Now, to his thoughts. But first, let's define "creative" because reading some
posts in here, I'm alerted to many of you not knowing what that even means.
"Creative" is defined as "Relating to or involving the imagination or original
ideas, esp. in the production of an artistic work"
Does Apple have any more original ideas? Of course it does. Perhaps there are
some still left in the pipeline from the Jobs era (these companies have long
roadmaps). Jony Ive is still there and he's quite creative unless I'm
mistaken. So creativity will flow. Albeit from different sources and no, Tim
Cook is not creative. He's simply the supply chain guru. Are these "original
ideas" good? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they'll fail. They can still, however, be
creative.
Has Apple released any "original ideas" in the past 3-4 years - I'd say no,
they haven't. The iPad might have been the last really "original" concept (if
you can even call it that, but hell with it, they can have it). The iPod, the
iPhone - what else? The GUI, no. They didn't inven the laptop. See - not much
originality here. I digress.
Microsoft. They might be considered more "creative" (by Woz) because of their
departure from the desktop with Windows 8 - so in essence, they're being more
"creative" because the ideas are more original than iOS4>5>6, iPhone
2>3>4>5>5S and iPad 1>2>3>4 (all refreshes). We also have the new voice
recognition initiative which, if successful, will be a big game changer for
Microsoft. WAY more "creative" than Siri or anything from Cupertino. Can
Microsoft's "creative" ideas fail? Of course. And from what I've been reading
and personally have experienced, Windows 8 RT is not that good, and confusing.
So, yeah, seems Woz is right so far, doesn't it?
It's a multi-dimensional issue here of creativity and innovation. Apple simply
isn't innovating, whether you want to admit it or not. They appeal to the
consumer, they're a solid company, huge margins, and that's fine. I've owned
most every product they've ever made from XServes to Mac Pro's to Newtons to
Powerbooks to the IIe and Peformas, list goes on. I love the company. I wrote
my first program in BASIC on a IIe.
Will a flat-screen TV from Apple be considered "innovative" or "creative"
maybe a little creative but it's certainly NOT what Woz is talking about.
Remember, Woz is an engineer, so he's not here to market consumer products and
sell 5 million of them in a quarter. He's speaking purely on innovation and
creativity in technology. He loves technology. You can tell. From the CL9
remote to devices and what not - he loves the craft. So he's right, Apple
isn't being creative, they're just constantly refreshing products to stay
competitive in an insanely competitive market. They sort of have to. The
iPhone 5S is already slated for June! What in the hell will be different about
than the current 5?! An A6X and... Unless that phone charges wirelessly, is
1mm thin, and has a new cutting-edge battery for 40 hours of talk time -
there's NOTHING creative or innovative about it.
So, maybe Woz is right. Microsoft is taking bolder steps, they're breaking
from the norm of Windows desktops, getting into a different space, taking
risks, trying innovative concepts such as voice translation. To me and
apparently Woz, that's more innovative than "the new iPad"
~~~
tareqak
Once I looked up the word "innovation" it made sense. I understood "invention"
and "improvement", but "innovation" always sounded like marketing-speak to me,
so I turned off my brain on that one.
The page at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation> compares all three.
------
mcpie
Woz: Strawberry is more banana than apple
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Assange: US rule of law suffering 'calamitous collapse' - stfu
http://www.france24.com/en/20130608-assange-us-rule-law-suffering-calamitous-collapse
======
ihsw
One has to wonder how the world's governments will react to this, especially
since they won't be publishing blog posts in a similar manner to Google et al.
There are two major trade agreements[1][2] that are written and negotiated in
absolute secrecy, and we can only speculate what will be on them. The world's
governments may quietly support the surveillance systems the USG operates, and
the USG may use it to appease her opponents by adding stipulations to the
trade agreements that will grant them unfettered access (putting an end to any
and all state-sponsored opposition) just as the UK receives access.
[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAFTA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAFTA)
[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-
Pacific_Strategic_Economi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-
Pacific_Strategic_Economic_Partnership)
~~~
b0rsuk
Probably the same way governments all over the world do to inconvenient facts:
be silent and pretend it doesn't exist.
------
tptacek
All three branches of government agreed that the surveillance we found out
about this week was lawful. "Rule of law" is a feature of a just society, but
does not define it. "Rule of law" is also the vehicle we use to course-correct
society back towards justice.
~~~
jivatmanx
By all three branches, do you mean:
1\. A handful of the most senior (see also: most gerrymandered) members of the
intelligence committee informed of this.
2\. A secret ruling from a secret FISA court.
3\. Obama.
~~~
tptacek
There is no such thing as a gerrymandered Senator.
~~~
jivatmanx
And there are no senators in the House intelligence committee.
~~~
tptacek
But there obviously are on the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence.
------
GregBuchholz
I liked _THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW_
"I believe that, much as Orwell suggested, it is the public's ability to
engage in this type of doublethink, to be aware that the law is inherently
political in character and yet believe it to be an objective embodiment of
justice, that accounts for the amazing degree to which the federal government
is able to exert its control over a supposedly free people. I would argue that
this ability to maintain the belief that the law is a body of consistent,
politically neutral rules that can be objectively applied by judges in the
face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, goes a long way toward
explaining citizens' acquiescence in the steady erosion of their fundamental
freedoms. To show that this is, in fact, the case, I would like to direct your
attention to the fiction which resides at the heart of this incongruity and
allows the public to engage in the requisite doublethink without cognitive
discomfort: the myth of the rule of law."
[http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm](http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm)
~~~
cinquemb
And the crux of it all…
"Our long-standing love affair with the myth of the rule of law has made us
blind to the latter possibility (We can continue the ideological power
struggle for control of the law in which the group that gains dominance is
empowered to impose its will on the rest of society, or we can end the
monopoly.). Like the Monosizeans, who after centuries of state control cannot
imagine a society in which people can buy whatever size shoes they wish, we
cannot conceive of a society in which individuals may purchase the legal
services they desire. The very idea of a free market in law makes us
uncomfortable. But it is time for us to overcome this discomfort and consider
adopting Socrates' approach. We must recognize that our love for the rule of
law is unrequited, and that, as so often happens in such cases, we have become
enslaved to the object of our desire. No clearer example of this exists than
the legal process by which our Constitution was transformed from a document
creating a government of limited powers and guaranteed rights into one which
provides the justification for the activities of the all-encompassing super-
state of today. However heart-wrenching it may be, we must break off this one-
sided affair. The time has come for those committed to individual liberty to
realize that the establishment of a truly free society requires the
abandonment of the myth of the rule of law."
------
GabrielF00
I don't think that Assange has much credibility on this issue. He's shown
repeatedly that he believes himself to be above scrutiny in both his personal
behavior and in the way that he operates WikiLeaks. I don't see how he can
demand that other people in power behave transparently when he refuses to be
transparent about how he uses his own power.
~~~
markdown
> I don't see how he can demand that other people in power behave
> transparently when he refuses to be transparent about how he uses his own
> power.
You don't know how he uses his power?
Here is how it works: People anonymously send him information, and he releases
it.
> I don't think that Assange has much credibility on this issue.
As I see it, he has more credibility than most on the issue. It's one he has
being fighting for all of his adult life, and what he and his sources have
risked their lives for.
~~~
FireBeyond
How has Assange, credibly, risked his life for this issue? There hasn't been
any documented attempt upon his life, and very few on his livelihood (what
serious attempts have been made to shut down Wikileaks)?
Hyperbole does nothing to help someone who, in the eyes of many, appears to be
increasingly a victim of his own ego.
~~~
naasking
> (what serious attempts have been made to shut down Wikileaks)?
Shutting down payments was a serious attempt [1]
[1] [http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-lieberman-king-mastercard-
visa-...](http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-lieberman-king-mastercard-visa-709/)
------
einhverfr
I think the fundamental problem is that "rule of law" is a convenient fiction,
which is basically a way of encouraging people to believe that we have more
limits on governmental abuses than we do. The problem though is that all
decisions have to be made by individuals, not laws, and laws are subject to
selective enforcement and so forth.
For example, mandatory sentencing takes power out of the hands of judges to
adjust sentences. It is argued that this makes the system more predictable and
fair, but what it really does is transfers that power to the hands of
prosecutors, and thus makes the system less predictable and fair.
What is happening right now is that this illusion is being ripped apart.
~~~
ealloc
I wouldn't say the rule of law is an illusion - it's a social construct or a
social tradition. The rule of law has had real power in the past, and has
often given the minority power over the majority.
The problem is that as a social construct, it will break down if too few
people believe in it. And that's what is starting to happen here.
The rule of law is pretty similar to money actually - it only has power if
people believe it has power.
~~~
einhverfr
I don't think it merely a social construct, or that the problem is that too
few people believe in it. My point is that sometimes efforts to fulfil its
promises have resulted in the promises being further out of reach.
The thing about a convenient fiction or illusion of this sort is that the duty
to preserve it constrains abuses. In this way it is very different from, say,
the value of a US dollar. So I think you are discussing the rhetorical norm
(which is a social construct) while I am discussing the promise which is
forever out of reach.
------
yekko
The Democratic-Republican party rules the US, there are no other parties to
oppose them.
------
cletus
There are a couple of points worth highlighting here.
The first is that yes, the rule of law is illusory. It exists only because
people believe in it.
This is the major problem with imposing democracy on any other country and why
it seems doomed to failure: other countries don't have a citizenry that
believe in the rule of law. Many such countries are dictatorships and/or
corrupt so "democracy" means nothing. Elections only mean something if the
officials in charge of them respect the process and the outcome. Otherwise
they're just a charade.
There are actually two problems with the US that I see and they're probably
inter-related.
The first is that historically the US citizenry has distrusted its (or any)
government. It's why things like the Second Amendment exist (debate how you
like the exact meaning of "militia"; it's irrelevant to this point). It's why
the Constitution is enshrined in a form hard to modify. It's why there is a
dual-sovereignty system to hopefully balance the Federal government
(originally limited with enumerated powers) and the states. It's why there are
three branches of government.
But increasingly the government of the US has grown to distrust its citizens.
Perhaps this was always the way. Perhaps because I'm a foreigner here but I
feel the presumption of guilt in almost everything government related (eg just
look at ill-defined laws with potentially huge penalties like FBAR).
I see that same distrust behind mass surveillance efforts like these (whatever
form PRISM, etc ultimately takes).
But there's another aspect: politically and culturally the US is two nations
under one roof. That division seems to grow wider and more bitter with each
passing day. Nothing seems sacred in these scorched earth partisan battles to
the point where the belief has set in that the ends justify the means.
This is what I see as so dangerous about the "living document" judicial
philosophy in constitutional law. The idea is that the Constitution basically
says whatever you want it to say if you twist it far enough under the guise of
"the founders if they were here today would've intended..."
As important as, say, the right to privacy is there is no such right
enumerated in the Constitution. If you want one, there is a legislative
process for getting one (ie a constitutional amendment) but deciding one was
intended (by a judge or panel of judges) seems like a slippery slope no matter
how well-intended. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Take elections as an example of this. In the US elections are largely
organized by the states. Redistricting is a politically driven fiasco based on
maps of household political views.
The Republicans seem intent of disqualifying likely Democrat voters in the
guise of scrubbing electoral rolls of "felons".
The Democrats aren't above bribing the homeless to vote.
Both sides seek to make voting difficult in areas that traditionally vote the
other way by limiting polling places and times.
Now compare this to Australia, which has the AEC (Australian Electoral
Commission). The AEC is a Federal agency that doesn't seem subject to the same
partisan politics that US election agencies are.
Part of this I'm sure is because voting in Australia is (technically)
mandatory. This system means the AEC's ambit is how to give everyone access to
the ability to vote (a process that has never taken me more than 5-10 minutes)
rather than the partisan pull of getting the "right" people to vote (depending
on the particular leaning of its appointed leadership).
But part of it is that culturally the election process itself is not something
you politicize. That's simply way too dangerous.
So I see Assange's point: the rule of law is on shaky ground in the US.
I remember seeing an interview with Dick Morris (Clinton-era strategist) who
allegedly asked Clinton at one point (regarding the then upcoming 1996
election) "what's the point of winning if you don't have a mandate?" to which
Clinton replied "what's the point of having a mandate if you don't win?"
True or not, I think that sums up the problem: the ends now justify the means
in the bitter battle between left and right.
The scary part is I don't know how you turn this around at this point with the
citizenry largely complacent. If you gain enough support, the least you could
do is have a "vote against the incumbent" strategy since getting booted out of
office seems to be the only things politicians fear.
Obama I think should be a wake up call for many: there is a vast gulf between
Obama the candidate (eloquent and compelling) and Obama the president (who
seems to have doubled down on Bush-era policies and launched a war on "theft"
at the behest of the intellectual property industry).
~~~
einhverfr
> But there's another aspect: politically and culturally the US is two nations
> under one roof. That division seems to grow wider and more bitter with each
> passing day. Nothing seems sacred in these scorched earth partisan battles
> to the point where the belief has set in that the ends justify the means.
The partisanship though is largely manufactured. The financial sector and a
few others have bought off both parties. The Occupy Wall St and Tea Party
groups have more in common than they do with the established parties. The
people are remarkably united as to the huge issues but we are distracted by
issues like SSM and abortion so the financial sector can take it all.
~~~
rdtsc
> The Occupy Wall St and Tea Party groups have more in common than they do
> with the established parties.
That maybe true objectively, but either camp would swear up and down and fight
tooth and nail against any such comparisons. And propaganda is a science of
perceptions. If people on either side believe they are on two different sides
and the other side is evil then mission is accomplished.
Chomsky I believe made this point and used an example of how sports are a
proxy or an instance of such mentality. The sports fans of opposing teams hate
each other with passion but it turns out they have more in common between
themselves than they have in common with the players they are rooting for.
Players probably all like to gather in expensive country clubs and talk about
yachts and sports cars they are planning on buying.
~~~
einhverfr
> Chomsky I believe made this point and used an example of how sports are a
> proxy or an instance of such mentality.
Yep. But Chomsky's points go further, in that this is a way of ensuring that
any arguments over policy are remarkably narrow. This also makes the cultural
variations remarkably narrow. We really have two nations, rural and urban, but
this division strikes perhaps deeper within the Republican Party itself than
it does so between higher levels of the two parties.
------
Symmetry
I'd say that rule of law has mostly been damaged by the increasing number of
every vaguer federal statutes that let prosecutors find a felony for any
person they set their sites on. And all the tools prosecutors have to force
persuade defendants to plea bargain, meaning that criminal cases very seldom
come to trial any more.
------
anuraj
Nation states have grown bigger for anybody's comfort. It is time to rethink
the organization of states and go for alternate arrangements that will 1)
Ensure individual freedom 2) Human Dignity 3) Sustainable Development - This
is the big human challenge for the 21st century to solve.
------
lizzard
I felt that was happening during the Bush election and recall Al Gore's voice
cracking a little as he gave his speech about the rule of law.
------
ktd
Does anyone else find it darkly funny that an international fugitive hiding in
a South American embassy to prevent his arrest and extradition thinks he can
lecture people on the rule of law?
~~~
davidjairala
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem)
~~~
ktd
One thing that many people don't realize about the Hierarchy of Disagreement
is that going up the hierarchy takes more and more effort. If someone makes
claims that are so hypocritical that they instantly fail the laugh test,
there's no need to move up the hierarchy and develop more sophisticated
arguments against their main points.
Now, the obvious rebuttal to this would be to claim that I'm only saying this
because I can't rebut Assange's points on their own merits, so I have to
attack his character. This is an appealing but dangerous line of reasoning,
because it forces you to engage with trolls. The appropriate response to a
troll is not to examine their argument and point out its weaknesses, but to
classify them as a troll and ignore them. Is this ad hominem reasoning? Sure,
but _ad hominem reasoning isn 't necessarily bad._
I _can_ rebut Assange's points on their own merits, but I choose not to
because I think doing so gives Assange attention and credibility that he does
not deserve. Don't feed the trolls.
~~~
skore
> I _can_ rebut Assange's points on their own merits, but I choose not to
Yes. Instead, you chose an ad hominem attack, which is pretty much the
definition of feeding the trolls.
> Is this ad hominem reasoning? Sure, but _ad hominem reasoning isn 't
> necessarily bad_.
No, ad hominem reasoning is simply _meritless_. The opposite of engaging in a
discussion is remaining silent, not scoffing and walking off stage.
~~~
ktd
>Yes. Instead, you chose an ad hominem attack, which is pretty much the
definition of feeding the trolls.
Are you _really_ claiming that saying "don't feed the trolls" is feeding the
trolls?
~~~
skore
And where did I say that?
------
mpyne
Is Assange claiming this is a bad thing? He doesn't seem very fond of the the
'rule of law' himself, just ask Sweden.
~~~
PavlovsCat
Okay, I'll humour you and assume he's totally a rapist on the run. _Yes, and?_
How is this relevant to adults talking about something that affects billions
of people?
~~~
pekk
Whether Assange is legally a rapist depends on two things. First, which
country's legal definition of rape is relevant (e.g., Sweden's might not be
the same as yours, e.g. if you think that it is not rape to get sex on some
false premise but Sweden does). Second, what the facts of the case are - but
Assange does not submit to the legal process in Sweden so this really hasn't
been evaluated.
The issue isn't that people are assuming "he's totally a rapist on the run"
but rather that he refuses to allow a legitimate judicial process to evaluate
that. Well, OK, but simply avoiding judicial process does not mean you are
already proven innocent.
~~~
PavlovsCat
That is not "the issue", that is "an issue". And to bring it up in this
context is a red herring. Oh yeah, it technically has to do with the law so
blah blah blah.... NO.
Oh, and I actually do think that was kind of fucked up, if the allegiations
are true, I don't shrug that off at all; but this matters only for drinking
beer or giving him the hand of my daughter in marriage or something, not for
talking politics, where, to me, he clearly has "the heart in the right spot".
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
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In a First, Square Tops $100M in US Sales in One Day - jonastern
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/square-100m-sales/
======
kitbrennan
_noting that this kind of sales volume ranks it as the 13th largest U.S.
retailer by annual sales_
Statements like this are very misleading. Square isn't a retailer, it is a
payment processor. The real question is how Square compares against other card
processors, both terminal POS based and mobile reader based?
Alternatively, how much of the market has Square actually taken, and what is
their current growth rate? Without knowing pertinent numbers, Square topping
$100m after 5 years of operations could be evidence of a damning failure (I'm
not saying it is, but rather that we do not have nearly enough data to know).
Edit: grammar
------
djloche
I wish I were an insider so I could see the breakdown of how longtail their
business is.
What was the largest contributing business' amount for the day?
I got an email from Square because I bought chocolate at a coffee shop via
square.
------
paul_f
For comparison, the market leader, First Data, processes about 50x that. $5B
per day. Still, not bad.
~~~
Axsuul
Furthermore, First Data owns Clover, the other POS system you've been seeing
at your local coffee shop.
|
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Show HN: I am currently.... - lostirc
http://francisaltomare.com/upvotes/
======
binarymax
Interesting.
One small usability tip if you can be bothered...might want to have the count
on the left side of the text, so you don't have to scroll when long entries
have been submitted.
~~~
lostirc
great idea, thanks
------
dpapathanasiou
A poor man's anonymous twitter?
------
mrgoldenbrown
It should replace anything with script tags in it with "I am currently trying
to break this page"
------
lostirc
I'm not really concerned about spam or usefulness :)
Just throwing a link out there
------
fredley
Bad decision to not have any anti-spamming measures. Or good decision.
------
iworkforthem
great way to beta test a product!
------
elb0w
The future
------
lazywithclass
Why 828?
~~~
lostirc
no real reason
------
JoeAltmaier
broken?
~~~
lostirc
what did you find that is not working?
~~~
JoeAltmaier
Kept flashing but not changing; my entry never appeared; had to hit 'back'
multiple times to get out.
~~~
lostirc
Hmm weird, looks to be (still, not sure how) working on this end. The back
button is annoyingly cycling you through the scroll positions.
New submissions will show up as the first 0 entry
------
visua
:D
------
Raphael
Make the entries buttons!
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Ask HN: What makes your product unique? - mickyvicky
1- What is your product?<p>2- In one sentence (just one) explain what makes your product unique from the rest of the market.<p>3- In one more sentence (just one more) explain how you got to find the niche you're building the product for.<p>4- Are you pre or post-revenue (any revenue). Just say Pre or Post.
======
anoncoward111
1\. I used to sell retro video games on Amazon and through my own site.
2\. I'm not a dick, so I was hoping people would choose to buy my stuff
because they liked me and trusted me more than some random seller on Amazon.
Didn't work.
3\. This niche is pretty crowded now and there is a lot of turnover and
consolidation and competition between vendors. There are less people though
who tried to make a personality out of it.
4\. Post, because revenue is easy, profit is not
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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The “Google banned our entire company” story was likely a fake - askvictor
In the interests of correcting potentially misleading news, a couple of responses from Googlers on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 and Reddit (same content as on HN: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banned_an_entire_company_gsuite_accounts/dzcw5vg/) suggest the original post was fake (as some had guessed).
======
modbait
Regardless, having lost access to my first Google account, it's still a good
cautionary tale.
In my case, for whatever reason, Google stopped believing that I was the owner
of the account, even though I knew my password and secret questions, and was
coming from the same IP I had been for years. In addition, a friend inside the
company who personally vouched for me was still unable to fix the problem.
Google is a point of failure. Be sure you're prepared for the day your account
disappears.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Townscaper - doener
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/
======
simonebrunozzi
This is so fascinating in many ways.
This little indie game is having a blast, and reviews are raving about it.
I draw two main conclusions:
1) There is enormous interest in how we build cities, how we live in them, and
how badly designed most of our cities are. It also happens to be a passion of
mine.
2) Games don't need to have the best graphics, the biggest budgets, to be
engaging.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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|
Scott Adams’ Financial Advice (2014) - arikr
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/
======
nattaylor
Reminds me of
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171023045242/http://www.samefa...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171023045242/http://www.samefacts.com/2013/04/everything-
else/advice-to-alex-m/)
"What _is_ this simple free best personal finance advice that fits on a 3×5
card? "
* Max your 401k (or equivalent)
* Buy low fee, diversified whole market funds
* Never buy or sell individual stocks
* Save 20% of your money
* Pay your credit card balance in full every month
* Maximize tax-advantaged savings vehicles like Roth, SEP & 529
* Pay attention to fees and avoid active management
* Make financial advisors commit to a fiduciary standard (or fee-only!)
* Promote social insurance programs to help people when things go wrong
~~~
taneq
Translation: Earn at least 30% more than all your expenses combined, after
tax.
~~~
war1025
Curious where you got the 30% from out of that? Where does the extra 10% come
from on top of the "Save 20%" bit?
~~~
taneq
If you're saving 20% of your earnings, then that's 25% of the remaining 80%
(which is assumed to be expenses). I estimated another 5% for the
miscellaneous other stuff like buying shares, maxing 401(k), paying financial
advisers etc. If all of that was meant to come out of the original "save 20%"
then call it 25% (of expenses) rather than 30%.
~~~
war1025
Ah. You're just flipping around what the percentages are based off. Makes
sense I suppose. Neat.
------
hkmurakami
This kind of simple list reminds me of a simple gym workout or simple cardio.
For 95% of Americans, doing any kind of exercise is better than what they're
doing (or nothing), and similarly, for 95% of Americans, a simple proscription
like this that is easy to follow will be better than whatever they're doing
currently.
Complexity can lead to paralysis and inaction, and any positive action, even
if technically imperfect, is better.
------
sseagull
Maybe I am missing something but how can this advice work for 95% of people?
Maxing out the 401k and IRA would take $25,000 a year [0]. The median personal
income in the US is only about $30,000 a year [1].
[0] [https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/401k-contribution-limit-
increas...](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/401k-contribution-limit-increases-
to-19000-for-2019-ira-limit-increases-to-6000)
[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States)
~~~
HarryHirsch
It doesn't. Depending on where you look, 40 - 80 % of Americans live paycheck-
to-paycheck. (The Guardian says it's 80 %:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-
eco...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-economy-
workers-paycheck-robert-reich))
Matt Cutt is just talking because he doesn't know any better, tech is booming,
and he became wealthy because he joined a very successful company early on.
------
njarboe
"Pay off your credit card balance"
Most Americans will never be able to get past this one. If you can, you
already know how to spend less than you earn and are way ahead of the game.
This advice is sort of like telling a society of overweight people to "eat
less calories than you burn". True, but not very helpful.
~~~
smsm42
I am fascinated at how credit cards are both quite a good deal and a very bad
deal at the same time. If you use them right - which is mostly pay off each
month - you can get nice sign-up bonuses (up to $600 is not unheard of if
you're lucky), you can get 1.5-2% back on every purchase and 5-6% on selected
categories, and if you're careful, you can also take zero APR longer-term
loans with some credit cards (provided you pay them off properly) which helps
structure unexpected spending like major appliance breaking down.
On the other hand, you get unbelievably bad deal with 20+% APR if you don't
use them right, and on top of that various fines for not paying on time, so if
you get the wrong end of the deal, you can pay 2x-3x of the original amount.
One of many things on the credit market which makes your life much easier if
only you can prove you don't really _need_ their service.
------
thaumaturgy
I might quibble with one of the points:
> Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
This is presumably supposed to be the "oh crap" emergency fund ... i.e., for
major, unexpected expenses which can't or shouldn't be covered by credit card.
Putting this in a money market account can make it just a little bit too
inconvenient to withdraw for emergencies, and it's subject to market
fluctuations.
My equivalent account currently has several hundred less dollars than I've
paid in to it. I know it'll be better later on, but if I needed it right now,
that would be a loss I'd hate to take.
You can now get 2.25% APY on savings accounts at legit banks (example:
[https://www.mymoneyblog.com/cit-bank-savings-builder-
account...](https://www.mymoneyblog.com/cit-bank-savings-builder-account-
review.html)). Two and a quarter sucks way worse than a healthy market, but
it's about on pace with inflation and it's a lot better than a crappy market.
It's also a lot more liquid: if I needed the cash right now, I could do it
with a bank-to-bank transfer and I should have the funds in my checking
account pretty quickly. If I wanted to liquidate my market account, there's a
couple-day waiting period while things are sold and transferred around.
I've found it helpful to break things down into:
\- cash-on-hand: what I could walk into any business and spend right now;
\- emergency fund: a modest stash that I could access in about one business
day;
\- near-term investments: market accounts and the like;
\- long-term investments: IRA.
But as other folks have pointed out, if you're saving anything at all then
you're doing better than most Americans.
~~~
kelnos
Money market account != money market fund. For example, I have a MM account
over at Capital One. It's FDIC insured. The only material difference (from the
customer's perspective) between it and their traditional savings account is
that you only get the 2% rate once you've met the minimum balance (otherwise
the rate is lower than for the savings account). Transfers from the MM account
to my checking account work in exactly the same way (and are just as fast) as
savings to checking, even down to the 6-withdrawals-per-month limit.
Agreed that there are other options with higher rates and are considered
regular savings accounts, but for most people the distinction doesn't matter.
For me, the hassle of switching banks wasn't worth a quarter percent. YMMV.
------
awinder
The 70/30 split on stocks to bonds is a little suspect. Traditionally what you
want to do is start your career with high (probably 100%) stock allocation and
slowly move towards more more bond allocation with time. There’s no right
single number there so maybe that’s where 70/30 came from, but yeah, don’t do
that for your entire career.
~~~
fredophile
A 70/30 or 60/40 split with regular rebalancing can smooth out market
fluctuations. When stocks do well this pulls money out and locks in the gains
at a time when psychologically you want to let it rise. When stocks are doing
badly this also forces you to buy at a discount when you might be inclined to
keep the money on the sidelines out of fear of future losses.
------
aresant
I read a really interesting thread recently, can't find it but the gist of it
was Index Funds appreciating isn't guaranteed (as they're pitched) and
localizing at a country level is a mistake for the future w/giant "emerging"
economies in China / India.
The counter "example"used was the Nikkei index which peaked in ~1990 and still
hasn't recovered:
[https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-
historical...](https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-historical-
chart-data)
The argument was to leverage index funds as a component of portfolio along
with real estate, etc.
Would be curious the HN view.
~~~
sgustard
An index fund by definition just tracks an indicator. You don't have leave the
USA to see a long-term decline; the Nasdaq is currently below its Feb 2000
peak. All index-fund investing advice includes diversification across several
asset clases. (Insert plug for
[https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/investment-
meth...](https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/investment-methodology))
~~~
rfinney
Nasdaq composite was 4698 in Feb 2000. Currently it is 6584. ( see here :
[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EIXIC/history?period1=9467...](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EIXIC/history?period1=946702800&period2=1546059600&interval=1mo&filter=history&frequency=1mo)
)
~~~
sgustard
You're correct, but its inflation-adjusted Feb 2000 peak was 6970.
Source: [https://www.macrotrends.net/1320/nasdaq-historical-
chart](https://www.macrotrends.net/1320/nasdaq-historical-chart)
------
derblitzmann
As a first commenter, I think I can say this is at least decent advice.
Especially around paying off debts (he specifically mentions credit card
debit, but it applies to most forms, Imo). Ignoring the other stuff around
Scott Adams, I think this is decent for most, but of course depends on the
individual.
~~~
Cyclone_
What other stuff around Scott Adams, and what's the relevance to this?
~~~
lazyasciiart
He's a lunatic narcissist with questionable critical thinking skills
[http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-
sockpuppe...](http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppet/)
~~~
war1025
I believe his response to that was that people were purposely misinterpreting
what he said. I haven't looked into it in detail for a while, but last time I
did, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable defense.
~~~
lazyasciiart
How do you misinterpret him going around the internet anonymously praising
himself?
------
RickJWagner
Great advice. (Not so easy to stick with all of it, but it is very sound
advice.)
------
mey
Please add 2014 to the title
------
txt
I would add investing in precious metals to that list. Especially silver and
gold right now. Its been extremely undervalued, and steadily moving sideways.
When this stock market tanks even more then it has the last few weeks, we are
going to see metals sky rocket like it has in the past. Gold and silver are an
indispensable long-term inflation hedge. Look at jpmorgan, they were shorting
silver for how long, now they are going long buying almost 2million ozs a day,
i think they are up to over 750million ozs. All the central banks are buying
up as much as they can get there hands on, so id say its a safe move to use a
% of your savings and buy physical silver and gold. Im staying away from the
paper precious metals investments, because if we do have a financial melt
down, at least i know ill have some of my savings in my physical possession.
;]
~~~
duskwuff
No, that's very poor advice. Precious metals are comparable to individual
stocks -- by making a purchase, you are not "investing"; you are
_speculating_. There is no guarantee of long-term gains.
|
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Your Ignorance Does Not Make a Programming Language Suck - edw519
http://coffeeghost.net/2008/03/19/your-ignorance-does-not-make-a-programming-language-suck/
======
astine
I disagree with this. The argument seems to be that the only valid reasons to
discredit a language are extrinsic to the language itself. Granted, one should
always take into account the language's problem domain and design principles
before criticizing for lacking X or having X, but this doesn't mean that the
language itself can be poorly designed or have issues.
Java really is verbose. Perl really does have an inconsistent syntax. C++
really does lend itself to memory errors.
Do each of these languages solve the problem that they were meant to solve? I
think so. Do each of them still have issues that deserve criticism? Of course.
I think that there is nothing wrong with criticizing a language. If we didn't
criticize nothing would improve and there's always room for improvement.
~~~
sah
The author seems to want to say that _language features_ are invalid criteria
on which to judge the quality of a language (instead, he suggests that you
should look at the quality of the documentation, the libraries, the community,
and perhaps the syntax).
It's true that there are some language features, like type checking and memory
management, on which reasonable people disagree. I think that those represent
opportunities for innovation. Type inference, for example, seems to be
changing the terms of the debate about static vs. dynamic typing.
~~~
derefr
I think of it more like this: a programming language's features are like its
genetic code. A dog is not a "bad" cat, it is just a dog. Nothing more,
nothing less. A cat is badly suited for some dog-like tasks (dogsled racing),
while a dog is likewise badly suited for some cat-like tasks (hairball
production).
However, there are some ways in which a dog can be badly designed. It can be
prone to cancer or congenital diseases. It may be blind from birth. Such
things are not features of dogs, but rather extrinsic properties, just as the
ones listed in the article.
Or, to put it simply: it is not what you do, but how you do it.
~~~
sah
I think it's fair to look at language features as benefits and drawbacks in
languages, as long as you're aware of what those features have to offer, and
what the costs are.
It makes sense to want a way to judge languages not on the presence or absence
of particular features, but on their ability to achieve some goal. But what
should the goal be? Popularity? Lowest time required to write programs, or to
read them? Approachability for new users, or convenience for experts? Utility
for writing fast programs, or for writing programs fast?
You can specialize languages down to the point where there's a different best
answer for every possible goal, but because I don't want to maintain fluency
in 50 different languages, I'm most interested in languages that do very well
in a wide variety of ways. If you want to get down to figuring out where the
trade-offs really are, and which goals can be achieved simultaneously, you
can't take the attitude that every language is just great at being itself. You
have to allow for the possibility that some languages really would be better
all around with the addition or alteration of certain features.
------
dreish
Lack of closures is hardly an "invalid" reason to dislike a language,
especially if the reason for lacking closures is that they're too confusing
for less-skilled programmers.
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Ask HN: How do you get into mental flow? - elamje
I think many of us here are software people or in a job that requires holding complex ideas in your head for long periods of time. I’m curious what you all use to get into the zone and stay there.<p>Do you have a mental hack, a playlist, white noise, etc?<p>I personally use a hand crafted Spotify playlist that works well, but I’m always looking for another trick to hold the flow for longer.
======
kody
Turn off my phone completely. Put it in a desk drawer. Clean my desk
completely. Flip my notebook to a new page. Close all chat/email apps. Open my
IDE. Write down the most important thing to do today (check Jira if I'm
unsure). Open Spotify and play a lyricless music playlist (jazz or metal).
Work.
So far, this is the ONLY way I've been able to _reliably_ get in the zone.
It's crucial that I avoid Slack, email, or the web until well into the
afternoon. Sometimes I feel mentally "fragile" for struggling to multitask or
return to work after being interrupted, but if it works, it works. I'm lucky
to be part of a team that isn't too keen on frequent meetings and doesn't
expect instant Slack responses.
~~~
elamje
That’s awesome. It’s crazy how much small distractions that are normal for
other occupations hinder software development productivity. I wish I knew how
to leave the zone for a minute, then step back into it and instantly be
productive again.
~~~
kody
No kidding! I envy people who can pop off their headphones, talk for a few
minutes, and (seemingly) get right back into the groove.
------
octosphere
> but I’m always looking for another trick to hold the flow for longer.
Flow is usually something not to be sustained for long periods, because
sustained flow is actually not practical - there must be an intermittent ebb
to every flow state (usually in the form of breaks).
I noticed you mentioned Spotify and I commend that. Music makes everything
seem epic even though you are doing very mundane tasks.
My only tip for making a flow state last longer is getting natural nootropics
in your system like coffee, walnuts, omega-3 fish oil, MCT oil, and
blueberries, which are all brain-boosting foods.
------
GoToRO
Breaks. Lots of meaningful breaks. Things that are not really breaks:
documentaries, games, tv (they use your mind power). Things that are: sleep,
nature, walks.
You do not get into a flow, you get into a rhythm of break - work - break -
work.
~~~
elamje
I definitely agree. Many days I need brakes and they help me accomplish my
goals. Other days however, I’m able to focus for 6-10 hours without breaking
for anything really.
~~~
elamje
*breaks.
------
elamje
Here is the playlist FWIW:
[https://open.spotify.com/playlist/61RNVG9yeQpFBRi8OAVC9I?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/61RNVG9yeQpFBRi8OAVC9I?si=7KGbaccBQLio_Em_TbKHRQ)
There is a section of albums by “The New Law” which is a good place to start.
The list is made to be listened to album by album so there aren’t many
distracting transitions.
------
jascii
Somewhat "tongue in cheek" however: I find I get a lot of work done trying to
avoid working on another unrelated task..
See also:
[http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/](http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/)
------
soul4krsna
I get into it by telling my self its time to get it done and then continue to
do it. Everything else people use is a crutch of some sort. HN is turning into
a cesspool.
------
probinso
I find and listen to a long recording from this YouTube channel.
[https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJX4OkEJMVGanPPGoydFEeg](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJX4OkEJMVGanPPGoydFEeg)
------
wiseleo
I play songs with lyrics in a foreign language or abstract electronica.
------
andrefuchs
I'm listening on noise cancelling headphones to instrumental music.
\+ turn off all notifications
\+ block enough time for uninterrupted work
\+ write down all steps and goals before starting to work
------
pryelluw
I do a little meditation. Flow for me is about being in the present.
|
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What-the-pack: ultra-fast messagepack in JavaScript for Node.js and browsers - davalapar
https://github.com/davalapar/what-the-pack
======
davalapar
Lol damn this should've been in show tab. Fuck
|
{
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Never send email marketing campaigns on a Friday - cpursley
The title pretty much says it all.<p>Much lower open and click rates. Higher unsubscribes.<p>The Mail Chimp does not lie.
======
dirktheman
I've been heavily involved with direct marketing and email marketing for
years, I can tell you this is not a rule that is set in stone. Yes, generally
spoken, the opening rate is lower on Fridays. But that doesn't mean conversion
is lower, too. I've sent mass emails on Saturday evenings that converted like
crazy, only to fail miserably the next week at the exact same time.
Plus, if nobody sends emails on Friday because they 'don't open well', you're
the only one sending them.
Keep your content quality, relevance and value to the subscriber as high as
possible, and the time won't matter.
~~~
cpursley
Hum, I would imagine Saturday would convert better. My best guess is people
are super rushed on Friday and thinking about the weekend.
------
Avalaxy
More people opening mails doesn't mean a higher conversion. Everyone sends out
their press messages on Wednesday (or 1 day earlier or later). People are
overwhelmed with e-mails and other types of contents on these days so they
will just quickly scan through it whereas in the weekends people have a lot
more time to actually read the stuff, try it out, etc.
------
orangethirty
Depends on the market. Your results do not translate universally. Plus, who
know if your headline sucked. What did you test?
~~~
cpursley
Using the same subject line Monday - Thursday - my open rates were 20% higher
than industry average.
~~~
orangethirty
Dot compare to industry averges. The control has to be one of your own
mailings. Was this your first mailing?
To give you perspective on mail chimps industry average, I never get any less
than 60% higher than the average. It's an useless metric.
------
jole
My experience says that the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
~~~
orangethirty
I've had mailings work best on Saturday at 10pm. Go figure.
~~~
cpursley
People do a lot of catch up emails and reading on Saturday. Like I'm doing
today : )
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Cross-browser collection of nice looking CSS box-shadows - madeas
https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/8pafjn/crossbrowser_collection_of_nice_looking_css/
======
laurent123456
Direct link - [https://github.com/madeas/box-
shadows.css](https://github.com/madeas/box-shadows.css)
|
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|
99% code coverage (2017) - fagnerbrack
https://rachelcarmena.github.io/2017/09/01/do-we-have-a-good-safety-net-to-change-this-legacy-code.html
======
cryptica
The industry is obsessed with getting 100% unit test code coverage even though
it doesn't mean anything to the project. The purpose of unit tests is to lock
down the project's source code once it's essentially completed; to avoid
regressions when making minor changes.
If you start writing unit tests too early in the project, you're effecively
locking down units of code which haven't yet proved themseves to be useful to
your project. If you build square wheels for example, you may not realize that
they're not designed correctly until you attach them to the car and realize
that the car doesn't function well with them. It makes no sense to preemtively
write unit tests for a component which has a very high likelihood of not being
in its final desired state; you're just giving yourself more work to refactor
the unit tests over and over; or worse, you're afraid of refactoring the tests
and so you lie to yourself thinking that square wheels are fine.
Integration tests are by far the most useful tests to have at the beginning
and middle stages of the project; integration tests allow you to keep your
focus on the real goals of the project and not get stuck on designing the
perfect square wheel.
~~~
austincheney
It drives me nuts during interviews talking about test automation because
people are very particular about the type of testing whether its unit testing,
integration testing, acceptance testing, or whatever.
In my mind you only need 1 kind of testing: feature tests. Does the
application provide the expected output for a given input and/or
configuration. The application does all that it claims to do in a very precise
way or it doesn't. Everything else is extraneous, though you may have to test
the application in wildly different ways with wildly different means of
automation to validate all feature support.
Feature tests are executed by running the application with a given input and
configuration and comparing the result against a known expected output.
Provided sufficient feature coverage this is enough to test for regression.
While the feature tests are running each test runs against a clock so that
dramatic swings in performance can be qualified with numbers. When that is not
enough, as in the case of accessibility, have people (actual users) perform
feature tests.
Other problems like bad design, redundant features, or poor code quality are
qualified using code reviews and validation tools, like a linter.
~~~
jeffasinger
I think your argument is missing the "cost" of feature tests, which is that
they necessarily must run much slower than tests that are only testing a small
unit of code.
For example, I worked on payroll software at some point. After finding a bug,
we'd want to ensure that could never happen again, and would want to add a
test for it going forward. So for example, I may have needed to write a test
around someone who worked in one city in Ohio, lived in another, previous
income above some amount, and with certain tax advantaged benefits. Setting up
this test via feature testing is certainly possible, but it's likely the test
itself will take a significant amount of wall time to execute. It's way faster
to just test the payroll calculation code, which means you can run the tests
more often, and with less developer inconvenience.
~~~
austincheney
> but it's likely the test itself will take a significant amount of wall time
> to execute.
Why? What about your application changed so that it is slower when testing
compared to real world use? If anything it should be dramatically faster
because people don't provide microsecond accurate automated responses. If the
application naturally executes very quickly I would imagine it would take far
long to set up the test scenario than to execute against it.
In my own applications if they take more than two seconds to deliver a
response (even for 5mb input) then at the very least I have a critical
performance defect. There are not many administrative tasks I can complete
from start to finish in that frame of time.
~~~
jeffasinger
Sure, let's go back to my payroll example.
I need to make 8 HTTP requests to properly setup my test from a clean slate,
including setting up the deductions, previous earnings, company location and
employee home address. If each of those requests takes 50ms, and then I need
to make a request to actually execute my test, and verify everything went
well, that could easily be 500ms.
And that's just what needs to happen to run one end to end test of the payroll
calculation feature. It's absolutely valuable to have a few such tests, but
I'm not going to run tests for all the weird one off scenarios (like what
happens if someone lives in NJ, and works in Yonkers, and the company has a
location in NJ as well?) because they'd take minutes to run. I could run that
entire test as a unit test in 2ms for the payroll calculation. That lets me
run all of the tests I need very quickly.
~~~
dnautics
can't you run these feature tests in parallel? I'm runnning a system where it
full on downloads and mounts containers, and executes them (in a loopback,
they get hosted by transient webservers on the test host aka my laptop, but
possibly also travis), about 50 of them in parallel with tons of database
calls, and it usually takes around 10-20s to complete.
~~~
Macha
It only takes you 20s to start up 50 containers? I doubt I could start 50
alpine containers in that time on my company issue 2015 MBP (Edit: A quick
test reveals my personal desktop can in fact accomplish this, but it's much
more powerful than my work MBP and has no virtualization overhead since it's
running native docker instead of docker for mac).
I don't know about jeffasinger's company, but in optimal circumstances, a test
instance of our app running against a in memory h2 DB takes 3 minutes to
start. The app internally already performs heavy lifting in parallel, so it's
also not clear that running multiple instances of the app will make it that
much faster...
~~~
dnautics
Singularity containers, my dev laptop is Linux, way less overhead than docker
on mac. I'm simulating request load on a scheduler for compute jobs. In
principle those jobs are not generally local, but it helps to stresstest the
scheduler.
------
peterwaller
Mutation testing is a neat idea I'd not heard of. Wonder how well it works in
practice.
Someone's implemented a package for doing it with Go which looks good:
[https://github.com/zimmski/go-mutesting](https://github.com/zimmski/go-
mutesting)
~~~
jesusmg
Me neither, I liked the concept of mutation testing. (I was using this
performing changes manually, without knowing this technique has a nice name).
I would appreciate if somebody points out a mutation framework /tools for .net
~~~
purity_resigns
[https://github.com/fscheck/FsCheck](https://github.com/fscheck/FsCheck) is
something I've used very briefly in the past. I did more work with this sort
of thing in Scala.
In my experience, you usually end up with much more coverage than you want or
need.
------
sethammons
I hadn't realized this mutation testing existed as automated tooling. I'll be
looking more into it. Traditionally, I've gone with "sabotaging" the code when
writing unit tests; altering the code to verify a test goes from red to green
or vise versa. Never trust a test that has never failed.
~~~
josteink
> Traditionally, I've gone with "sabotaging" the code when writing unit tests;
> altering the code to verify a test goes from red to green or vise versa.
> Never trust a test that has never failed.
That's completely backwards compared to how you should be doing things.
You either write the test:
1\. to verify the existence of a bug by reproducing it, or
2\. to formalize the spec for yet-to-be implemented code/feature.
And then you make the test green. Retroactively writing tests for working
code, only to sabotage the code... Seems like an odd way of doing things.
~~~
paulriddle
Some people feel more comfortable writing code without tests first, gradually
shaping final design of the interface. Especially if the tests involve a lot
of stubbing and mocking of things like Redis and Sphinx Search, or messing
with crypto tokens, parsing HTML, freezing time, setting up global config
attributes like support emails, interaction between 2 different databases,
etc. Tests are code as well and oftentimes might feel heavier than production
code. You can of course say that there is a way things should be no matter
what but that might lead to negative emotions, toxicity and complaining
instead of getting stuff done.
~~~
crispyporkbites
Agree, actually designing & implementing good tests requires a lot of effort.
It's rarely wasted effort but if you really need something out the door now it
can distract from short term delivery.
e.g. I'm using a 3rd party transpiler / build tool, which I don't know all the
details of, my test runner wouldn't do exactly the same transpliation of code
this build tool, it took me about an hour to figure out where the build tool's
config file was and how to get it working with the test runner.
Did I learn more about my tooling and code base? Yes. Was it useful? well
maybe not as I might kill this project shortly anyway.
------
pedro1976
I had a similar experience, you always get what you measure.
IMO the best a approach is to first integrate the test coverage in the code
reviews, cause there is no hard rule [0] and second write property-based tests
[1].
[0] [http://www.se-radio.net/2018/05/se-radio-episode-324-marc-
ho...](http://www.se-radio.net/2018/05/se-radio-episode-324-marc-hoffmann-on-
code-test-coverage-analysis-and-tools/)
[1] Sample framework for JavaScript
[https://github.com/jsverify/jsverify](https://github.com/jsverify/jsverify)
~~~
Vinnl
I prefer just setting coverage requirements to 100%, and give developers the
freedom to mark code as ignored for coverage (e.g. /* istanbul ignore next */
for many Javascript applications). That way, the annotation is something that
can be brought up during code reviews in case the reviewer does not agree with
that not being covered, and it doesn't depend on the reviewer having to
remember to run or look at a separate coverage report.
(I wrote more about this here: [https://vincenttunru.com/100-percent-
coverage/](https://vincenttunru.com/100-percent-coverage/))
------
dankohn1
Does anyone have experience with [https://github.com/stryker-
mutator/stryker](https://github.com/stryker-mutator/stryker) for code mutation
testing?
------
Radle
The author suggests to add mutations to the code, like replacing '<' with '<='
in order to "test the tests". He assumes that tests should fail due to such
small differences.
I think this might apply when you write your own algorithms and want to test
them. But if you are, like most of us, working on Business Logic, then you are
probably writing the wrong tests.
We usually want to know whether a workflow or a customer story works as
intended and as such we should write more Integration tests.
The idea itself has merit though and draws parallels to writing tests with
variable or random input parameters, I am pretty sure there already was
something on this.
~~~
adrianN
You think customers aren't affected if you mistakenly replace a < with a <= in
your code?
~~~
majewsky
while (car.wheels < 4)
car.attach(new Wheel);
------
luord
I can't imagine, as a developer, writing tests without assertions. Any
developer who does that is actively making the situation worse for the team
and the application.
Conversely, I've worked in teams whose managers encouraged the developers to
forgo tests for the sake of delivering faster. Never again.
------
blueyed
Some tools for mutation testing in Python:
\- [https://github.com/boxed/mutmut](https://github.com/boxed/mutmut)
\- [https://github.com/sixty-north/cosmic-ray](https://github.com/sixty-
north/cosmic-ray)
------
_pmf_
You can do that, or you can let priority of business requirements drive your
testing efforts. For each project, I have a certain set of hard requirements
that will never be used in the field. We deliver these half-assed and fix bugs
if 2 years later someone uses the feature by accident.
------
simplecomplex
Use a language that doesn’t allow incorrect code and you get 100% code
coverage without writing tests.
Smart compilers and precise language (ala Haskell) obviate the need for
writing unit tests.
------
iamleppert
Who is going to test that the mutators are doing the right kind of mutations?
lol I’ve worked on code that has 1000’s of tests and is still a bug ridden
hell.
~~~
blueyed
Those tools also have tests.. :)
------
snidane
I always achieve 100% relevant code coverage. I just set up a test with one
input which tests my main(), which then obviously calls all the relevant parts
of the code.
Or am I missing something in the definition of code coverage?
I don't see anyone using exhaustive-input tests, which is usually impossible
anyway, or splitting up each branch of conditionals into separate functions so
as to make them unit testable.
I only see people splitting up the code into arbitrary function blocks, having
at least one unit test for such function and then declaring all lines of code
of that function as test-covered.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Getting into the tech scene when you have no skills - kevin_morrill
http://josephwalla.com/getting-into-the-tech-scene-when-you-have-no-skills
======
ryen
I think the first thing people should ask themselves is: Why are you trying to
get into this scene without any skills?
In the last 10 years Silicon Valley and startups in general have attracted a
mush of people who bring little or no value to the table. I'm not talking
about business/product types or MBAs that might at least have some experience
and maybe some contacts and financial know-how. No, its the kind of people who
for no other reason are thrilled by the celebrity-esque world of high-flying
startups that might come with free lunch/dinner/beer, parties, and items found
in The Social Network.
People should learn some product and marketing skills at larger, non-startup
companies first before taking sweat equity or low/no pay at a startup. Also
make contacts at meetups and learn the finance side of things. THEN you will
have less of a problem "Getting into the tech scene", skills in hand.
~~~
freework
These people are called "startup groupies" and they are a huge problem in
Silicon Valley, because that place is infested with them. I thought it funny
too that "learn to program" (which the entire article should have been written
about) was only given three sentences at the very end of the article.
------
obstacle1
I don't mean to be a dick but this is completely devoid of content. It boils
down to IF you don't have technical skills, THEN develop them OR meet people
who don't care that you don't have technical skills that will hire you.
Further I fail to see how someone wanting into tech would be better reading a
bunch of PG essays than actually, y'know, learning to code. Unless I'm not
taking the title seriously enough, and the goal is only to get into the tech
SCENE (as in social), not a technical job.
~~~
pdenya
Seemed to me like the goal was to land a non technical job in the tech scene.
So for people who don't want to learn to code, here's a quick start guide for
getting the skills you need to get into BD, QA, etc at a tech startup.
~~~
obstacle1
Right. But out of curiosity... If you want a non-technical job, why must it be
in the tech scene? And if you want a job in tech, why aren't you willing to
learn the requisite skills. Paradox, I say.
------
edraferi
If you don't have skills, can you bring experience? Many start-ups try to
disrupt existing industries. If you understand how an industry works and why
it's vulnerable to disruption, you can join forces with technical people to
become that disruption.
You should still learn to code though :-)
~~~
hayksaakian
This is the only valid answer I see other than getting skills.
------
32bitkid
"Do work for free" is the worst suggestion I've heard in a long time. Your
time is valuable; it should be to you and it should be to the person you are
working for. Even if you aren't getting a monetary remuneration for your
services there should be some kind of compensation, and you should be clear –
at least in your head – what it is. Never – ever –work for free. It may seem
like a good idea but its not.
~~~
pdenya
> The problem with having no skills or track record is that it's not worth
> paying you
Required experience for paid work is a fact of life. If you don't have the
skills to work for pay in a certain area you work for free. You can do that by
putting in the time on your own side projects or you can accomplish it some
other way. Like doing free work in exchange for experience.
~~~
32bitkid
That's not for free. Doing work for free means "I will do this for you and get
_nothing_ in return." All I'm saying is don't run around willy-nilly doing
work for free, thinking that will somehow magically lead to success; be
cognizant of what you will actually get in return. And I'm not saying that
money is the only type of payment, not at all.
~~~
duggan
Frankly, I think you are deliberately misinterpreting the spirit of the
suggestion. Your interpretation reduces the original point to absurdity: "do
something for no reward."
------
callmeed
I have to give the author credit–I like his approach much better than poseurs
who drop into the scene and start running workshops or being mentors, all
while never having actually built anything or attempted a startup.
~~~
jknightco
Ugh, a 'friend' of mine is doing this. No skills, never worked at a startup.
He's put up three landing pages over the course of the past 6 months and now
blogs about his experiences 'starting' 3 companies. Its incredibly obnoxious.
------
eksith
Adam Savage of the Mythbusters once gave a talk on problem solving and how he
went about acquiring the skills he has :
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhAt-7i36G8>
While the talk was about a different industry, the lessons are still
applicable to tech and pretty much most other fields.
------
banachtarski
My gut answer to the title of this post was "acquire skills." I don't know
that this really deserved a post all on its own.
Personally, I really disliked the "crash conferences" part.
~~~
rms
One could update the "crash conferences" advice to "volunteer at conferences".
Being behind the desk giving out badges is a powerful place to be in terms of
developing connections or fitting into a scene.
------
barce
A list of people who got into the tech scene without tech skills:
1\. Julia Allison - she tried to cheat her way into a fundraiser and despite
that ended up on the cover of WiReD: [http://gawker.com/284123/an-east-coast-
hustler-tries-to-chea...](http://gawker.com/284123/an-east-coast-hustler-
tries-to-cheat-a-fundraiser)
2\. Nick Starr - my cousin who is a cop is still interested in talking to you
for laptops that were stolen that you are selling.
3\. Hermione Way - I honestly wanted to work for you as a coder because you
had entrée into all these "cool" parties, but despite _now_ having an app that
gets 100,000 photo uploads a day (Via.Me) I'm still not cool enough to work
for you? WTF?
There isn't a scene to get into. Instead there is a long standing list of
problems that have existed since the beginning of computer science. Read Knuth
or something similar if you don't know which these are. Either you are on
board for solving those problems or your real interests lie elsewhere. Decide
which you are.
------
FailMore
I don't think this article gets it quite right.
I think non-technical people that do best stumble into the tech scene - rather
than want to get in. By this I mean if you want to make it anywhere -
especially in a world where you have none of the technical skills needed to
actually build anything - you have to LOVE it. And that love comes from a deep
and not-too-well-understood place within us. The kind of place which is not
very easy to access with the cognitive part of your brain that lets you create
the sentence 'I want to get into the tech scene now - but I know nothing -
what steps can I take?'.
I am (sadly) non-technical (for now (but learning!)) - an Economics graduate
who was on the path to investment-bankdem - but I couldn't help myself but be
part of the tech scene. Some old colleagues from a hedge fund I interned at
wanted to start a community for motorcyclists and, as I was young and more
tech savie than them, they asked if I wanted to help out. It was (and still
is) SO much fun thinking about how someone could use things - have an
enjoyable experience, gain value, and try to find a way for us to extract a
little value too. That is such a beautifully complex challenge to think
through.
Our budget for the build was £25,000 - which is how much I thought it cost to
build a website - so my plans for my own ideas had to go on hold - as I didn't
have that kind of cash. Then a friend told me he got a website built in
Romania for £2,000 - I can afford that!!! I designed my first website in
microsoft word - from top to bottom - and sent my files over to Romania,
greatly confusing the web agency who had never received 30 microsoft word
files as the basis to build off. I was learning Spanish in Spain at the time
and happened to meet an awesome German graphic designer. He took me through my
designs and showed me why they sucked, and he told me about a program called
InDesign. I came back to England and learnt that.
Since then I've won prizes for tech entrepreneurship, worked in a company that
existed to build other tech companies, built a team of 6 around one of my core
ideas, and learnt a little front end code myself. I would love to say - the
rest is history - but now I am learning how to execute on ideas. Something
which I have not yet done well enough.
But the point is I couldn't help any of this. And I think if you have to force
yourself to read PG, or it is a 'I want a job', not a 'I want to build what's
in my head!' mentality that makes you write your first piece of code - then
maybe the tech world is not the place you really want to be.
------
Zenst
Well one strength you have already would be in user testing as your mind is
infetted by the `how would a computer do this best` approach towards
interfacing with users.
You could start by looking and reviewing and spotting bugs in many programs
out there, will help build a resume and also at the same time perk your
interest into what tech scene angle you wish to start heading down. Be it
codeing, design, testing, support, managing, selling, testing, providing. That
is without even looking at the market area's within those feilds which could
be anything from games, web, plant, automation, planes trains and automobiles,
or washing machine spin cycle control systems. Many area's within area's. Tech
is such a large feild and this is just the basic computing stuff. Designing
new solar panels, specialist clothing, you see what I mean, such an open
subject.
Two things I would advise keeping in mind. What are you good at and what do
you like. It is a fine balance and to do the things you like you might not
earn as much and work all hours bluring the lines between hobby and work. You
could focus on what you are good at and treat it as work, have more time and
money to focus on those hobbies and pet projects and get better quality time
doing them how you enjoy them. It is extremly rare to fully combine the two,
even then it will not be all the time. You can spend a long time chasing that
end-goal and end up becoming disenjanted with what you enjoy. So a fine
balance is advisable and by all means learn your own balance. Being mindful of
that will help you be more objective and happier in the long run. Dreams can
become nightmares, don't spoil the dream. So tread slowly, but firmly and you
will know what you are good at and what your are not, so even if you descide
to go another direction all together. You would of learned good foundations
for any path forward.
So my suggestion in short - levridge your skill you have now and that is you
are the perfect user, so testing/QA would be a great start and one you can
define. You will then know which area of tech you wish to focus upon, though
will gain the eye for detail early on which is handy in all walks of life.
------
naner
Step #1 for how to get into the tech scene is read a boatload of nontechnical
articles?
~~~
mikeg8
I still think this point is valid because there is a lot more to the tech
"scene" than just technical advice. reading about VCs, startups etc will still
help you understand the system as a whole and can help you find better places
to start learning more.
~~~
potatolicious
At the end of the day that's still massively putting the cart before the
horse. At the core of it startups are about building products - if you have
nothing to contribute to _any_ part of the product building process (whether
dev, design, bizdev, marketing, etc), you are literally of no use to anyone
whatsoever.
------
seivan
It's easy, just tell them you're into "UX".
------
31reasons
I think if you have no skills the best way to get into startup is to get rich
first and become an angel investor! I believe there are more high probability
ways to get rich than starting a startup.
------
shazzdeeds
I agree everybody should know the basics of HTML/CSS to become what I call
"semi-technical", even if you're not attempting a startup. You might find you
have an artistic flare for digital design, and suddenly become that much more
marketable.
That being said, why would you want to found a startup if not to build
something cool and get people interested in it? If that's not your natural
passion, it's no coincidence you don't already have skills a technical company
would find valuable.
------
DamnYuppie
Since when was having skill a prerequisite to being in IT? I have interviewed,
and sadly worked with, way too many people who had no clue how to do their
job.
~~~
n00b101
This. Just get a job in IT at any large corporation. You will fit right in.
------
auctiontheory
The OP mentions hustle - probably the most important skill of all. One good
way to get into the startup scene is to actually start something, yourself.
------
mehrzad
I've always been wary of the online programming sites like codecademy and the
like, because when I did Rails for Zombies I realized it never shows you how
to set up an actual Rails application nor how Git and Heroku work. Are all the
tutorials similar in that they baby you?
~~~
kaoD
Yes they are.
I had a couple friends who wanted to learn JavaScript and went to
CodeAcademy's course[1] only to find it was more like Programming 101. Not a
single mention of what is a closure, how you can modularize your code, how
prototypes actually work, etc.
[1] <http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript>
~~~
mattmanser
That's because for 99% of javascript written today in the Real World you still
need not know a single thing about those things.
You simply can't cater for every ability level in a single course.
~~~
kaoD
I don't agree.
Modules and closures are needed in any serious JS development out there.
Believe me. I worked in a codebase where they thought they "still need not
know a single thing about those things" and boy was that a mess.
No wonder JS devs are considered crappy coders with that kind of mindset.
~~~
mattmanser
Most sites are not one page apps. Their js is silo'd per page.
You misinterpret my personal skill level, I don't believe you as I've worked
on more than one codebase of both kinds. Most javascript today is still
employed as the _scripting_ language it was originally introduced for. It does
very little apart from open a lightbox or get something via ajax or something
trivial like that.
There is a tiny % of javascript coders like us that use it to write programs
and an even tinier percentage that use coffeescript. It is worth keeping that
in mind at all times when discussing coding.
You don't have to be an architect in order to make a wall.
I also spent time running courses for non-coders in basic coding in a previous
job to allow them to _slightly_ customize their own product. Going in with
advanced and abstract concepts like closures is a sure fire way to frustrate a
student, not enlighten them.
~~~
kaoD
> You misinterpret my personal skill level
What made you think that? My point is not that you suck as a developer.
Even when building tiny apps global variables are EVIL and they will
eventually make you shoot yourself in the foot. Closures and modules are basic
concepts in JavaScript because, well, the language is inherently flawed and
you have to work around it.
> You don't have to be an architect in order to make a wall.
But you shouldn't bind bricks with gum either. If you do and the wall
collapses, who's to blame? Would you teach bricklayers to bind with gum
because using cement is hard for beginners?
This is not an architectural issue. This is about basic skills.
> Going in with advanced and abstract concepts like closures is a sure fire
> way to frustrate a student, not enlighten them.
I agree there, but my simile about the bricklayers and the gum stands. Sure,
you'll frustrate beginners, but what about a last chapter about _advanced
techniques_ or at least mentioning it? Specially since closures are a core
concept in JS.
Avoiding the issue will never turn beginners into advanced beginners/competent
coders. Lack of information in key areas does more damage than excessive
information because it creates a false sense of security that eventually leads
to sore feet :)
------
abeh
I would categorize user testing under 'Design Skills' (UX Design), as well as
CSS and HTML (Web Design). Design might be a third type of role, that is
neither technical, nor business.
------
return0
Surprised they didn't add "start dating startup people" to the list. After
all, technology is all about learning to be a good groupie.
------
hildolfr
No technical skills? Read hacker news.
Brilliant.
~~~
shoopy
Circular reference. You'll follow links until you die.
------
nishithfrrole
I would add understanding of social media too. It has become a must since past
few years to have a substantial online presence. Personal branding is
something that will take you a long way ahead. You can crash parties only once
in a while, but in social media space, you can have real-time one-on-one
interactions with almost anybody anytime!
------
hugbox
No skills? No problem.
If you flunk the interview, try challenging the interviewer to a dance-off. If
you win, the job is yours!
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers - zappan
http://theothersideofcode.com/renaming-backend-frontend-to-application-ui-developers
======
zacharyvoase
I tried calling myself an 'Application Developer' once before, and it lasted
about 5 minutes, because I suddenly started receiving requests to build
people's iOS/Android app ideas.
I never called myself a back-end developer anyway; if people ask me what I do
I just say 'I program computers—and yes, it really is that general'.
------
kapowaz
No.
“The border between the server and the client has faded”
So why continue to use distinct job titles? I think ‘web developer’ suffices;
the specific skills you can bring will vary from person to person, but you
should be fighting _against_ being pigeon-holed, not embracing it by
voluntarily saying you belong in one category and not another.
~~~
androtheos
I agree with you here. You almost have to be a generalist anymore but I would
add that it's important to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie. For
example I can build a passable UI, I know the rules for creating friendly user
interfaces but I know it would be much better to have someone with strengths
in design do it. They're attention to the details will always make my work
look like what it is, a server side developer playing at being a UI developer.
------
t4nkd
Yeah, I'm not really feeling the persuasion here. I really don't know many
"frontend developers" or "backend developers" to begin with. I know plenty of
people struggle writing maintainable, well structured applications or who
don't grasp front end concepts/technology enough to really produce anything
production worthy. Those people are still "my peers" first and I typically
consider their title to be "software engineer" or possibly "web developer".
The individuals lacking a grasp on front end technology probably need to
_learn_ just as well as an individual with great front end skills needs to
learn the rest of the stack. We're so heavily coupled now, in terms of
squeezing performance out of an application and the ability to iterate
rapidly, that throwing a bunch of backend logic and/or API's over the wall to
"UI Developers" is probably not only a waste of time, but detrimental to the
process. Throwing code over a wall is usually what happens when two distinctly
different types of engineers are in the same product and avoiding it is
tricky.
All this opinion of course is coming from someone who has managed to develop
design, UI/UX, and a programming skill set and I'm probably pretty biased when
it comes to pidgin holing people into a single role. Having said that, this
proposal really smells like an easy way to "be lazy" out of a responsibility
in the project. Dismissing a UI issue by surrendering, "But I'm the
Application Developer, I don't really do UI" sounds like the more common
scenario in the roles you're proposing. The reality is, if you want to keep
working on web-oriented applications, you might need to grasp a bit of both,
or at least some of each and a lot more experience in either direction(e.g.
learning the full stack and then taking a deep interest in hardware
performance WRT application profiling).
Good luck with your ambition though, I'm sure if you can make it popular the
industry won't care about how I feel .
~~~
davedx
> We're so heavily coupled now
I think if anything we're less tightly coupled than we used to be. So many
projects now have a clearly defined backend API and a separate front-end
project. The problem though is that these front-end projects that used to be
HTML/CSS with some JavaScript are now becoming almost full-stack applications
themselves, with all the nuts and bolts you'd associate with backend projects
(routing, controllers, application logic, complicated event handling) now also
in the frontend.
In terms of how we describe roles in software, as long as it's from a genuine
specific need (e.g. "frontend JavaScript developer") and not just some mix of
buzzwords, I don't really see the problem.
------
atirip
Nope. OP proposal corresponds with nothing i have done last 3 years. I'm and
was a front-end developer and i code everything in browser - UI, logic,
architecture, everything to the last drop. The other's in team are back-end
developers and they code everything at the server, whatever the server then
outputs, also to the last drop. There was and is a very clear line between of
us and the titles explain exaclty the roles we play in team.
------
michaelochurch
Zed Shaw already solved this problem: <http://programming-motherfucker.com> .
What made programming great (before the Douchebag Invasion came in and we were
divided into these stupid warring camps) is now what makes "data science"
attractive: the generalist flair and the ability to pick your projects and
move around the economy by your own sail.
By the way, I personally hate the term "software engineer", at least as
commonly used. It sounds Corporate and I feel like I need a shower after I say
it. Genuine software _engineering_ (like, what people who build rockets do,
where attention to code quality is _critical_ and people actually consider
_proving_ code) is actually very important, but you're only an engineer if you
have professional autonomy. If you answer to managers and build CRUD apps to
support their careers rather than your own, then you're not a professional.
Right now, most of us live under a worst-of-both-worlds regime where it's not
clear whether we're genuine professionals, entre- or "intra"preneurs, or
glorified labor. Of course, this allows management to frame-change freely
among all of the possibilities depending on the specific negotiation, leaving
us with the bottom of each possibility.
~~~
codegeek
"If you answer to managers.."
I know you usually have good comments on HN, but is it just me or you really
have something against "management". Anyway, the fact is that everyone answers
to someone in some ways when it comes to _money_ which we need to make to
survive in this world unless you have family inheritance. Having said that, I
am not saying that managers are necessarily the best thing in this world but i
don't understand how you can get away without answering to someone. Even if
you are a superstar entrepreneur who is his own boss, I have one word for you:
customers.
"people who build rockets do, where attention to code quality is critical "
So are you saying that code quality is not critical elsewhere ? I agree in
general that many companies have shitty code but there are many places which
actually do care about code quality and code reviews are actually important.
"build CRUD apps to support their careers rather than your own, then you're
not a professional."
Just think about what you said here.
~~~
michaelochurch
I wrote about my views on management, here:
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/gervais-
macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/gervais-
macleod-23-managers-mentors-executives-cops-and-thugs/)
Essentially, "manager" is a conflation of several corporate needs: (a)
mentoring junior hires, (b) protecting the company from bad-faith employees,
(c) protecting good employees from bad ones, (d) setting project priorities,
and (e) putting a public face on the company (e.g. CEOs). Some of these jobs
are more fun than others. There are huge conflicts of interest within what is
called a "manager" and ultimately, employees get shafted.
Managers ultimately end up as the internal police force, because they're the
ones who make firing and promotion decisions. However, there are a huge number
of dirty cops. Most of them, in fact, are dirty. There are a few sadists who
enjoy using the badge-and-gun just to fuck with people. There are others (much
more common) who go full-on extortionist and use their power to build an image
of outsized performance so they can hop out of cop work and into an executive
or high-level strategic position. Rare is what police are supposed to be:
principled public servants.
I don't have a problem with police. Society needs them. However, if the police
started acting like the mob (with them making most of their income "on the
economy") then I would. Corporate management is mostly dirty cops.
~~~
samatman
Perhaps you don't have much experience with the modern police force? Much of
their budget comes from asset forfeiture, which is your basic perverse
incentive.
------
greghinch
I personally would prefer to see this divide:
\- Product developer - implements the functionality, from the database to the
functional UI. Lives in Ruby/Python/PHP/etc. AND Javascript
\- UI designer - creates and implements visual designs. Lives in Photoshop and
HTML/CSS
\- Dev Ops - maintains the infrastructure, optimizes resources, manages
deployment. Lives on the command line
Of course, all these rolls have crossover. And hopefully that's a good thing,
your team shouldn't be segregated by knowledge barriers.
A big problem I see is that "front-end" is right now defined as "HTML/CSS/JS".
Being good at the first two is a completely separate skill from being able to
write and design software in a programming language like JS. I see much better
results from designers who can deliver built templates than I do from those
who can just deliver photoshop files
~~~
mnicole
My problem as a designer living in code is that by calling myself "UI
Designer" (or "Web Designer" for that matter), I'm putting myself in the same
boat as people who don't know _any_ code (I'm basing this off of seeing what
people on Dribbble's titles/"skills" are). I much prefer "UI Developer" to
"Designer" because that implies I am actually able to build what I've designed
while acknowledging the design/interface aspect.
~~~
greghinch
I would take a similar stance but say that anyone who has the title "UI
Desginer" or "Web Designer" _should have to know HTML/CSS_. If you are
designing UIs for the web, HTML and CSS are your medium, Photoshop not, that
is just where you formulate your ideas.
~~~
mnicole
I absolutely agree with you there; but people have taken unkindly to my saying
so :)
~~~
greghinch
I think (hope) we are in a transitional period. There is an "old guard" in the
design crowd who came up in the era where web and print design were still
pretty mixed, and so the idea of knowing code seems unfathomable. I know and
have worked with designers who, while I know they are perfectly capable of
learning HTML/CSS, just put up a wall when you try and talk to them about code
of any kind. It's a shame, and I see the trend changing in younger folks, so
hopefully that continues and companies will adjust their orgs appropriately.
I certainly know if/when this project I'm on gets some legs and money behind
it and we are hiring, the designers I hire will be writing HTML/CSS ;)
------
darren0
I feel so many articles on hn have a myopic view of software architecture. You
see this with "full stack" engineer job postings. The desired skills are
usually something like RoR, ember, and backbone. I'm sorry, but from my
perspective, that is all frontend development. This article refers to backend
developers as "sending only a HTML document as a result to the browser."
Again, in my world, if your sending HTML, mostl likely that is frontend.
Backend has nothing to do with HTML or any presentation logic. Backend is
services.
I know this is a rather unfair judgement but so many articles seem to indicate
RoR+JS/CSS+DB is the "full" picture of software architecture. But really,
that's frontend. There is a whole beautiful world of backend distributed
services missing.
------
girvo
Eh. I just say "developer". I don't just work on back-end stuff; I don't just
work on web stuff either. Nowadays you end up being "full-stack" (or "jack-of-
all-trades-master-of-one-facet") for the most part, at least here in Brisbane.
~~~
hispanic
Likewise, although I prefer "software developer", since "developer" connotes
land and real estate development in many people's minds.
~~~
girvo
Yeah, I like and agree with that. Doesn't help that my parents are real estate
and commercial developers :P
------
jimktrains2
I don't think that "UI developer" is actually all of what the front end people
do. There is often a good bit of application code going on that they take care
of.
------
brandon_wirtz
If only it were so simple. And if you think it is that's probably because you
don't understand.
Frontend often is WAY more than UI. When you are building a client/server
application frontend can be far more than UI. Take Call Of Duty for an
example. UI is not appropriate for all of the Client side development.
Take Google Now as an example. While most the heavy lifting is on the server,
the Frontend is also doing data gathering, and calls to the Database on the
phone that stores contacts. So a lot of the frontend is not UI.
For our TLDR Plugin for chrome we started out using Readability.JS and when
that needed tweaks we ended up moving to server side readability. But before
that, much of the Backend logic that we had been using for our search engine
was being put in to the client ported from Python to JavaScript. That was not
UI, but was very much frontend.
I think the people who want to name Frontend developers UI Developers tend to
be the people that think that Building HTML is development rather than Design
and Implementation.
True Frontend is about making appropriate decisions about which things live on
Client and which live on server.
------
dr3daemon
My own opinion - If you can't write code for the frontend OR the backend then
it's not the frontend / backend part that is a problem with your title, it's
the developer bit....
And that's not meant to be a criticism of anyone - if you are a good
programmer you _can_ write frontend OR backend code in any language - maybe
you just haven't done it yet. So why is it part of your job title? At best it
should be in the prior experience section of your CV.
Code is code. At the end of the day it's all 1s and 0s. Don't limit yourself.
------
susi22
I propose: Stop over thinking things
------
dutchbrit
I hate titles, sure, it does look more fancy. Besides, you can have frontend
only applications written in javascript. Would that make me just a 'UI
Developer'? I can go on and on, but just stick with a title that explains your
skills the best. I can't stick a label on myself. I dabble in a lot of fields.
I don't disagree with all of your points however. People should just make up
their own title that fit them best.
~~~
zappan
I'm afraid you're missing it a bit - just making only javascript applications
is the reason to make a different distinction - some people are better at
doing MVC, and they do it in the browser now; while some people are great in
making great looking UIs, but not really digging into application
architecture. And, of course, there are people doing both, being full-stack
devs, but still they're usually more efficient in some areas than the others -
I am such an example, still I know UI devs that are way more efficient and
know neat tricks on the UI, as well as some great UI libraries to do their
work faster (and usually better, relying on the know-how built into the lib)
because they specialize in that.
Thanks for your comment regarding labeling, though... I agree that sometimes
it's inappropriate, still sometimes it's useful to figure out the kind of work
being done under such a label
~~~
k__
I'm an UI-developer, but I still have to think about software architecture,
because we have a multi-tier System.
There is a data-gathering (tier-1) and -mutation (tier-2) backend and a HTTP-
front-end to gather this data (tier-3).
And then there is the GUI (tier-4), which is an application itself, with the
HTTP-frontend as backend.
The back-end developers work in tier-1/2 The front-end evelopers work in
tier-3/4
------
jh3
How about Software Developer?
~~~
rufeeooo
And the software developers work on everything, not just front end or back
end.
------
woah
What about the terms "Markup Designer" and "Software Developer"? These would
seem to fit the bill perfectly.
~~~
tg3
What he describes in the article as a UI Developer is much more than markup,
it frequently has javascript flavor for interaction with the user.
Also, interfaces are designed in Markup for the time being only, not as a rule
for eternity.
------
joshuacc
My employer uses the term "UI Developer" for front end roles, and I've seen
that become increasingly common. But I think there are a different set of
expectations that come with that title than "Front End Developer." The most
prominent being greater facility with JavaScript.
------
roncohen
UI is an extremely important part of applications. In that sense, frontend
developers are building the application as much as backenders.
Also, UI seems to exclude UX, which is typically also something frontend
developers do.
~~~
akacs
I agree with you. It's nonsense to separate UI from application development
these days.
What comes first is "Web App Developer", "Android Native App Developer", and
so on.
------
figital
Learn them both ... otherwise you're either tasting electrons with C or you're
a graphic designer.
{{ <http://i.imgur.com/pG3q7.jpg> }}
------
liquidise
With the increasing popularity of structured front-end libraries (backbone,
meteor, etc) this seems completely out of place?
------
qntmfred
while we're renaming things, let's stop talking about html/css/js and just
call it webstack
------
ebbv
An application is not what most people consider an application without its UI.
~~~
craigching
My comment was going to be "Disagree, the UI is part of the application.
Next?" but since you said it first, I'll piggyback on your comment ;)
The post talks about "application logic" as being the backend, but we have
plenty of "application logic" in our rich web UIs, so I just don't see it.
EDIT: Changed "rich UIs" to "rich web UIs" to clarify that I actually am
talking about the article's domain. Not that the comment isn't relevant in
other domains too, though.
------
rbosinger
I'm down. I also hate saying "frontend" and "backend" too much. It sounds kind
of dirty. "She's working hard on the frontend while I try to find these holes
in the backend!". I always have to pause before using these terms to see if
the sentence will be funny.
------
braum
I like this, makes for a much better business card and resume line!
------
wambotron
I do a good deal of both, can I be an Appliui Develotion?
------
calinet6
Eh, just be both. Problem solved.
------
Zigurd
In some cases all the intelligence is behind the RESTful interface, and, so,
that's what you could call "the app." In other cases, like synthesizing
traffic and bus location data to predict when the bus will arrive, the "app"
can be in the device, especially when there is no Web interface presenting the
same synthesis. Games can be entirely in an endpoint device, as can any
complex application that cannot depend on pervasive connectivity.
Needs more thought.
------
mifchip
New kind of renaming servers in server room architecture to cloud :)
|
{
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}
|
Yahoo to Replace PHP with JavaScript on Server Side (Node.js) - mlemos
http://www.jsclasses.org/blog/post/14-Is-JavaScript-going-to-replace-PHP--Lately-in-JavaScript-podcast-episode-7.html
======
farrel
Headline is incorrect.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Linux vs. Bullshit - Mithrandir
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-vs-bullshit
======
dap
I found this article confusing because the introduction -- the title, the
SunOS history, the Longfellow quote, and Morton's quote -- all suggest a self-
righteous position around technical integrity and engineering choices. (Such a
position would be poorly-founded anyway, since economics are a crucial part of
engineering, even engineering that starts from a principle of technical
integrity above all else. Besides that, various sources peg the percentage of
Linux kernel contributions coming from commercial entities upwards of 75% --
which is a great thing, but can hardly be said to be free of commercial
influence.)
The meat outlines some good points about modern advertising, but I don't get
what it has to do with Linux. (Which "Linux" is this? The system? The
community? Something else?)
It's also wrong to say that software systems don't lie: that's what virtual
memory _is_ , for example. Obviously educated people know the truth, but
there's a real sense in which the system is presenting one thing as though
it's really another, when the system is actually just going through great
pains to make things look that way. This is often a good thing in software,
unless the system gets caught in the lie (e.g., when it has to page things out
or deploy the OOM killer), at which point real people are often surprised at
what was going on all along.
~~~
brownbat
Yeah, the organization's a mess, but there are some gems in there, like:
> Trader Joe's [in avoiding loyalty programs, coupons, and retailer trade
> fairs] spares itself the cognitive overhead required to rationalize
> complicating the living shit out of everything
Should have maybe been broken into a series of two paragraph articles.
~~~
radley
This was a really bad example. Trader Joe's repackages (almost) everything
under their own brand so you can't recognize and buy the product elsewhere. So
technically it's (almost) all BS.
~~~
coolgeek
You've got this backwards. TJ sells name brand products at a discount that can
be fairly steep. The product manufacturers are incentivized to camouflage this
(via the TJ label) so as not to cannibalize their higher margin brand name
sales.
~~~
snowwrestler
This is what Trade Joe's says, but our experience is that the bill is higher
at TJ's than at, say, Walmart or Safeway, for the same shopping list.
------
Amadou
I really appreciate this article. Searls has put to words a concept that has
long bothered me on an intuitive level. Namely that all of these bullshit
marketing techniques create a cognitive load that is not in proportion to any
value that I as a customer receive from them.
I think it is self-evident that when it comes to matters of taste there is no
really "right" answer, but these middle-men are all about muddying the waters
for the (short term) benefit of their clients at my personal expense. That is
really in contradiction to the premise of a market-based economy - that every
transaction benefits both sides. These techniques are all about shifting as
much of the benefit to the seller rather than improving the outcomes for both
participants.
~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> Namely that all of these bullshit marketing techniques create a cognitive
> load that is not in proportion to any value that I as a customer receive
> from them.
The problem is that companies don't exist in a vacuum, and soon as one adopts
these marketing techniques, everybody has to adopt to "stay competitive", even
though they end up wasting money _and_ bullshitting the customer. It's a
prisoner's dilemma.
That's one reason why advertising makes so much money. Advertising is one of
the rare industries that generates demand for itself.
~~~
gingerlime
> The problem is that companies don't exist in a vacuum, and soon as one
> adopts these marketing techniques, everybody has to adopt to "stay
> competitive"
I was wondering the same thing, although Searls takes an example of Trader
Joe's and tries to illustrate how avoiding marketing actually helps this
business. I'm not from the US, so have never heard of Trader Joe's. I can't
help but wonder how competitive it is compared to other businesses who do
employ those huge marketing / big data operations. I am also curious how the
customer experience itself differs between companies in this market.
~~~
jbarham
> I'm not from the US, so have never heard of Trader Joe's.
Probably most Americans haven't heard of Trader Joe's since most of its stores
are in Southern California.
But it's a really cool grocery chain, and I say that as someone who generally
hates shopping. Still one of the things we miss most about California since we
moved to Australia.
~~~
nkurz
_Probably most Americans haven 't heard of Trader Joe's since most of its
stores are in Southern California._
You must have blinked! They started there, but have expanded rapidly across
the US in recent years. They now have 400+ stores in 35 states:
[http://www.traderjoes.com/pdf/locations/all-
llocations.pdf](http://www.traderjoes.com/pdf/locations/all-llocations.pdf)
------
javert
I read the article, and I don't see what the thesis is.
The article is disorganized. You can't tell where it's going, and when it gets
there, you can't tell where you are.
It also seems to contain a lot of pretentious pseudo-intellectual posturing.
Maybe I'm missing something, though. Someone feel free to enlighten me.
EDIT: Also, I should state that I find the scatalogical references to be
vulgar, juvenile, and a big turn-off.
~~~
TelmoMenezes
The thesis is that things like Linux belong to a category of human endeavours
that are opposite in nature to most of what regular consumers are exposed to
nowadays. Furthermore, it analyses the increasingly strong "economy of
bullshit" that we live under.
It's hard to avoid the scatological references without diluting the message.
When I read "bullshit" for the first time, I knew immediately what the author
meant. Had he said "intentional misrepresentation and/or exaggeration of facts
for the purpose of personal gain", the whole thing would be harder to read.
And the author even bothered to explain the analogy.
I don't think pseudo-intellectual posturing is a problem here. The author is
quoting philosophers, but he does that in a way that is relevant to the main
thesis. I understand that a lot of people groan the moment they see a
reference to Philosophy. Philosophers might be to blame for that, but let's
not throw away the baby with the bath water.
I would make the opposite accusation towards many articles we see on HN these
days: they are too simplistic, too conformist and lack deep thinking.
~~~
aquayellow
>The thesis is that things like Linux belong to a category of >human
endeavours that are opposite in nature to most of what >regular consumers are
exposed to nowadays
But this is true for any open source project, why just Linux ? That said, I
feel Linux too can't escape the "economy of bullshit" \- commercial companies
have interest and contribute to different parts of the Linux kernel for a
reason. Heck even MS works on the hyper-v code base, not for the betterment of
Linux but for the good of their own product. The "enterprise focus" of LKML
activity is proof enough.
~~~
TelmoMenezes
> But this is true for any open source project
Not in my opinion. In my opinion, Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu and many others are self-
destructing in an effort to imitate Apple's design without understanding it,
and generating a good amount of bullshit in the process.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that companies==bullshit. There's
nothing wrong with smart employees of big companies contributing to the
kernel. In many cases it's mutually beneficial so it's the rational thing to
do. On the other hand, it seems to be very hard to create a big corporation
without letting bullshit fester. Linux is not controlled by the sort of people
that thrive on bullshit. But could it fall under their control in the future?
Sure.
~~~
educating
> Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu and many others are self-destructing in an effort to
> imitate Apple's design without understanding it
I'd go so far to say that the desktop App Store is a BAD idea.
1\. It was meant to make mobile _more_ free, and now makes desktops _less_
free.
It was born out of things like Brew on the old, old cellular market. Mobile
content used to be as free as a concentration camp, and in order to appease
them, Apple said "we'll do your content management for you". That was a huge
deal step forward, but it obviously wasn't enough or people wouldn't jailbreak
their phones.
2\. It is not sustainable over the long haul.
Centralized app management is not a long-sustainable model for the desktop, or
anything for that matter. You cannot continue to micromanage that much
software without things eventually deteriorating. Apps require maintenance or
removed as hardware and the OS changes.
3\. The user experience sucks.
It puts all the installed apps in its own area (LaunchPad) in addition to the
AppStore app where you see what you bought, and both in addition to the
previously widely known Applications directory/folder. That's just stupid. Why
do people want to emulate that mess?
3\. But it survives for now because it is profitable.
I've bought more apps in OS X using the App Store than I would have in a store
or via some other online delivery mechanism or Amazon, etc.
But, _none_ of all of that would have been as terrible, if it hadn't spread to
Ubuntu. Seeing similar there was a huge WTF moment.
------
keithpeter
_" We now know that the Feds and marketing mills are both harvesting massive
amounts of personal data without revealing to us what they know, and that the
two are actually in cahoots, at least some of the time. This is especially
vexing, because the feds should be the ones protecting us from bad actors,
rather than bad actors themselves."_
This quote nails it for me. The _waste_ involved with universal surveillance.
Further down this discussion, some participants are arguing about terminology
('Linux' or 'GNU/Linux') which is the other side of the free software/open
source process...
I was previously unaware of the work of Harry Frankfurt, and the original
journal version of the _On Bullshit_ essay is available online as a .pdf.
There goes the morning...
------
GhotiFish
"To be fair, both the DAA and the IAB would like
advertising to be as wrought as possible, and for
consumers to appreciate the good intentions and effects
of their business. I know that because I've talked to
them about it. Those organizations see themselves,
correctly, as advocates for good behavior in a business
rife with the opposite. "
this paragraph stuck with me. I rigorously ad block, on everything. I make
sure my relatives have PVR's and I train them to pause and skip effectively so
that they never see advertisements. I install ad block on not just my
computer, but my families as well. I actively avoid content that has
advertisements in it (I don't play free to play games, for example).
I do all this for two reasons.
1\. I don't trust them. I honestly believe that if an advertisement ever
states anything, the opposite is likely to be true. eg. "Our product helps you
lose weight!" I am now convinced this product makes you gain weight.
2\. I fear that advertisements really alter the way I perceive the world. part
of that fear discussed here:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y695/el...](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y695/eli5_why_does_cocacola_still_advertise/)
I worry that advertisements gradually change the people that watch them.
but the paragraph mentioned above gave me pause. I can't help but feel, if
there were advertisements that didn't lie or actively mislead, that didn't
have a terrible and dishonest history, that didn't exist purely as a form of
mass manipulation, that I would be more amenable to them.
Of course, that will NEVER happen _EVER_.
so I will continue to block them at every vector. Maybe when the advertising
industry is completely squeltched, desperate, and trying to claw itself from
its own dug grave, will they play by the users rules. I wouldn't hold your
breath.
~~~
droidist2
I don't like ads and prefer content without them, however I've never thought
that the act of avoiding them was taking a stand or anything like that. It's
interesting though to hear someone's justification for it. What are your
thoughts on pirating content? I would guess you also hold some strong views on
the righteousness of that.
~~~
GhotiFish
pirating content really helps to prevent free software from being adopted.
So... I guess that would be considered pretty righteous, right?
*edit: clarity.
or were you thinking along the lines media piracy?
I have no justifications or rationalizations there. There's a giant
bureaucracy that will never move, and never let me watch their content. So
more or less, I don't.
------
millstone
> Linux doesn't lie
Until you ask it to allocate some memory.
~~~
Qantourisc
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
But be warned, a lot of applications also lie on how much memory they need.
~~~
andreasvc
It's mostly about copy-on-write memory due to forks.
------
hcarvalhoalves
Great article. It can expand further than Linux and turn into a piece of it's
own. Bullshitting is the disease of the decade.
------
liveoneggs
linux development is majorly funded by those same old school (with some new
entries) companies with the same agenda of pushing linux in a friendly
direction.
the "community" has long since ceased to be what most people think it is.
~~~
Roboprog
Absolutely, most of the work being done is for self serving reasons, which
happen to be shared by a number of organizations.
Due to the GPL "infection", though, the bullshit can only go so far. If it
went _too_ far, somebody would make a "ReDoIx" fork/distribution from the
unbroken parts, and build something that people could tolerate.
I started with Slackware Linux in the mid 90s, jumped to RedHat for a while,
couldn't figure out what to make of "Fedora", so I jumped to Ubuntu. While
both my current and previous employer use RedHat in production (the previous
employer _was_ on Debian until being acquired by BigCo), I have no problem
with jumping again when something better comes around.
I guess business-to-business supported software has to come with a certain
level of bullshit or FUD.
------
educating
Things I think are bullshit:
1\. Ubuntu's decision to include ads
Linux got a real black eye from that imo, and turned me off of the normal
Ubuntu distro for the forseeable future. Even for my lightweight distro I use
Mint XCFE now just to stay the hell away from an organization that would do
that.
2\. Corporate Linux
I liked RedHat in 1997-98, but they went corporate quickly, and since then I
personally don't like paying anyone for Linux. I want to support the hacker
ethos that made Linux great, not some big corporate head.
------
jhspaybar
I don't use Adblock. I could, obviously. All my friends and coworkers seem to.
Honestly, the main reason I don't is because I want to support Google. Sure,
they're only a large portion if ads, not all of them, but given the insane
amount of value they provide to me, I'd feel downright guilty not allowing
them to make money off of me.
~~~
barking
Do you click them?
If not then google aren't making money.
If yes then you might have to feel guilty about robbing small businesses to
make money for google.
------
quadrangle
Yup, I use the Trader Joe's analogy too. I love them. There's no contrived
nonsense. It's so refreshing. It's so obvious how all the rest are
manipulative bullshitters. Hooray for integrity. Why they hell do 70% of
GNU/Linux users still not use AdBlock????
------
gibbitz
I am a developer who works in advertising and I can say this article is
bullshit (different agenda, but bullshit just the same).
Most of the literature out there makes the marketing world out to be the NSA.
The truth is there are some very easy ways to control the ads you see on your
screen if you take the time to understand how it works. Basically, not logging
into Google while searching and periodically clearing your cookies will keep
your searches for sex toys from showing you ads for butt-plugs. Most of this
information is stored in cookies, except for when dealing with companies with
large stakes in advertising that have user accounts where they can store your
history with their service (Google). I find storing search information
connected to a user in a database to be invasive so I don't log into Google. I
have little reason to log into Google and do so very infrequently. If your
argument for logging in is gmail, just don't use the web client. Cookies are
protected by domain so the only visibility into the ads you're delivered via a
cookied ad network is via your eyeballs.
Many of the technologies listed in the article are hair splitting variants and
some are not advertising at all (Web Analytics are used mainly to determine
where people go and what they are interested in in your website to drive
changes that benefit users and keep your website profitable, whether that be
through ad placement or order form flow). Additionally, ad buying for
newspapers and television are only slightly less complicated and involve only
slightly fewer middle men than internet advertising and these days those are
considered "traditional" advertising media. CRM is listed here as well, which
is basically the online equivalent of leaving your business card at someone's
office and is mostly used by companies as an alternative to cold calling.
Much of the diversity listed here is about monetization. IE, does the
publisher get paid for impressions (views of the ad) or clicks, or completed
tasks (sign-ups, orders, etc). This is better for the advertisers because they
can pay only for effective ad placements, and puts a lot of focus then on how
the ads are placed effectively (so those who display them can make money from
those who traffic them). Without going into it too deeply, this is how money
from a company (like Aspen Solutions, who's ads I see on the article page for
example) trickles down to linuxjournal.com to pay their staff and hosting
bills. If you prefer paywalls on your news outlets and blogs or are willing to
pay Google for access to their search database (or worse need to log in so
they can collect data about your searches to sell to parties undisclosed), I'm
sure that could be arranged, but I will go on avoiding traps and diverting my
eyes because I understand that this is the middle-ground. At some point you
have to accept that the services we enjoy on the internet are built by people
with families that like to eat and your selfish desire for public search
privacy and screens uncluttered by advertising are secondary to their well
being. Are there people making a lot of money off of advertising? Yes, but
much fewer than make money off of professional sports which is also funded by
advertising and gets a hell of a lot less negative press.
~~~
ChuckMcM
And this: _" The truth is there are some very easy ways to control the ads you
see on your screen if you take the time to understand how it works."_
Is the entire problem. One of Searl's points is that cognitive overload
results in abuse. Let me create a straw man and see if it works as
illustration.
I've got a restaurant and on a white board I write a word, then when the
waitstaff says that word, customers merely have to lay their heads on the
table, because those that don't will be slapped. Periodically, and without
sound, I will erase the word on the board and replace it with a new one.
Now eating at this restaurant is a lot harder because while I'm eating I have
to keep an eye on the white board and duck when I hear the word that is
written on it, and still eat.
You've increased the "cognitive load" of eating artificially. So something
that I would give my whole attention too now only gets 80% or less because
this other distraction. The alternative is to eat while being slapped. Which
ruins the entire experience.
As more and more of our activities involve tools or products that can be
remotely controlled, people exploiting that control to inject advertising
impute a tax on our usage which is not appreciated.
~~~
marshray
I like the way he makes it sound like the issue here is that I want to easily
"control the ads you see on your screen" in order to hide my perversions from
family members and shoulder-surfers.
Yes, I believe this person is in advertising.
------
BruceIV
Minor point: could the prevalence of ad-blocking on Linux be mostly because
ad-blocking makes the Web significantly faster because Flash is dog-slow on
Linux, rather than any particular philosophical objection to ads?
~~~
WildUtah
Could be, but careful observation and personal research has revealed that
Flash runs dog slow in OS/X and Windows also.
------
chatman
"GNU/Linux" is the OS, "Linux" is just the kernel. The GNU project is
responsible for many of the crucial parts responsible for making a complete
OS, save for the kernel. Abbreviating the OS with "Linux", for the sake of
convenience, should be avoided in order to give the GNU project its due
credit.
~~~
tzs
That's not how OS naming works.
Historically, naming rights for an OS go to whoever actually puts together and
distributes the complete system. For instance, if a workstation company
licensed Unix from AT&T and ported it to their workstation, they got to name
that OS whatever they wanted. A couple examples of this were Uniplus+, which
was UniSoft's Unix, and 386/ix, which was Interactive System Corporation's
Unix. Both were Unix systems--they used a Unix kernel and Unix utilities--but
that wasn't their names. Half the fun working at a Unix workstation company in
the early '80s was thinking of a neat name for your Unix port. :-)
For the complete systems distributed by Canonical, Red Hat, and the like, they
are the ones who get to name the operating systems that they distribute.
Ubuntu calls their OS the "Ubuntu operating system". Red Hat calls their OS
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux".
Yes, they are _also_ GNU systems, but if we want to be historically accurate,
the most correct way to view this would be to view "GNU system" and
"GNU/Linux" as specifications for a specific Unix-like userspace and for an OS
that runs the GNU system on a Linux kernel, respectively. The Ubuntu operating
system complies with the GNU system specification and is a GNU/Linux system,
but it is _named_ Ubuntu operating system.
~~~
aninhumer
While this inversion of the usual prescriptivist argument for "GNU/Linux" is
amusing and interesting, I feel it's worth stating the more general objection
as well:
It's called Linux because we call it Linux. That is how language works. It
doesn't matter about the official name or the etymology, if the population
typically uses a certain term for something, that is the "correct" term.
Now there are lots of arguments for preferring an atypical term in some
situations. Official names in more formal contexts, genderless nouns to avoid
excluding people, and indeed "GNU/Linux" to promote the GNU project. But these
are _choices_ we make, and are not something to be forced on people who don't
necessarily agree with the reasoning behind them.
~~~
chatman
No one is forcing anyone. It is just a courtesy, not a binding, to acknowledge
the group who built the OS ground up.
The GNU project had built all pieces of the OS, before convincing Linus
Torvalds to release his proprietary kernel code in the GPL license.
~~~
tzs
The Linux kernel was never proprietary.
~~~
chatman
From
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux),
here is the relevant part:
"Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a
small number of C files under _a license prohibiting commercial distribution_
to its state in 2009 of over 370 megabytes of source under the GNU General
Public License."
~~~
Shamanmuni
OK, technically correct, but access to source code and a restriction on
commercial distribution is not what people usually associate with propietary
software. When you say propietary what most of us think is Linus releasing
binary-only versions of Linux in 1991, which is false. I think "almost free
software" is a much more accurate description, and a lot less flamey.
And by the way, the GPL was first written in 1989, so you could hardly argue
that in 1991 many people understood how free software should work or which are
the longterm consequences of using a certain license for your hobby project.
Cut Linus some slack, he released source code and eventually used the GPL,
right?
------
kulinilesh456
Linux doesn't lie, any more than gravity lies, or geology lies, or atmosphere
lies. Like those other natural things, Linux has no guile, no agenda beyond
supporting the entirety of use-space.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Startup Quote: Marissa Mayer, vice president, Google - raychancc
http://startupquote.com/post/3087317670
======
raychancc
If you need the user to tell you what you’re selling, then you don’t know what
you’re selling, and it’s probably not going to be a good experience.
\- Marissa Mayer (@marissamayer)
<http://startupquote.com/post/3087317670>
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio - tiburon
https://websitevoice.com
======
mindwork
If this is not a wake up call for me, I don't know what it should be. I had
this same exact idea for 9 months now but never moved to execute. Reading
through site it even has the same wording as in my head.
As a developer I wanted to build something like this and it looks easy(without
AI part). But following the startup gurus and podcasts I figured that idea
should be validated first and to find actual customers is more important than
building technology. Here started troubles. I have no skills in marketing and
when diving deeper it looked cumbersome for me. I spend free credits on
AdSense but it only brought 8 emails for empty newsletter.
I'm interested did you do the research on user base? What would be a market
for this?
Where are you planning to grow the site? Do you have monetization plan?
p.s. found a link in comments for read2me.online, and just from demo they
sound really good for ears
~~~
bbody
Likewise, I spent a day building a proof of concept but lost interest after.
------
SeaDude
Hello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot
more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while
working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy
Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise
monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is
incorrect, or you don't have an obvious income stream for the service you are
rendering.
So the questions: Who are you? and How are you doing this for free?
Thank you,
~~~
tiburon
why it really matters on who I am? I'm a developer with passion to help people
listen to podcasts and the idea was simple. How can I offer it for free? I do
a lot of work to make it happen, there will be a premium version with more
features which are being cooked with the help of many developers who loved the
idea too.
~~~
timClicks
It matters because one of your potential customers thinks it matters. And
presumably because services without a business model don't have a long future.
~~~
tiburon
timClicks that is not true, there are many products out there that do not rely
on capitals, It does not matter who I am personally. The service is free of
charge until we cannot make it free of charge anymore for whatever reason. We
are focusing now on user's feedbacks who already added the widget. you can
find more answers on our business model there.
[https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-
blog...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/finished-mvp-to-turn-blogs-to-
podcasts-with-ai-what-do-you-think-06553ca565)
------
sebastienrocks
There are some UI issues from what I noticed:
At small breakpoints, the UI (especially the "try it now" button) can overlap
some text. Sizing also seems off.
Another issue I noticed is the play button itself, the entire circle area is
clickable, however only the play/pause icon can actually be clicked.
There are also numerous accessibility issues. If you're going to advertise
this as something to improve accessibility, it might be good to actually
concentrate on that for your landing page.
I do hope the UI can be improved, as the product looks solid.
------
tiburon
I'm not here to pitch the idea to make people like it, if you do not like it,
be constructive on a given problem. To get a feeling more on how it feels on a
blog here is an example: [https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-
dyslexia-and-re...](https://websitevoice.com/blog/text-to-speech-dyslexia-and-
reading-disabilities/)
if the solution does not appeal to you, it surely appeals to others.
~~~
suyash
Couldn't listen to it for more than 20 seconds, got quite robotic and monotone
for me. This would be like flash and auto play videos, cool at first then most
annoying thing ever created.
~~~
princess445
monotone? hahaha you should try the default text to speech from the operating
system to see what is monotone
------
t3ra
[https://read2me.online](https://read2me.online) Another similar service
~~~
mindwork
Pricing looks expensive, but quality is top notch. Do you know which TTS
engine it is?
------
skilled
This looks -- and sounds! -- awesome. I'm not sure if this can compete with
Schema's 'Speakable' [1] property (for smart speakers), but for mobile/web
browsing this looks amazing.
Looking forward to seeing new developments and also the pricing plan
eventually.
1: [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-
types/speakab...](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-
types/speakable)
------
tiburon
We created this free web app to convert articles to high-quality audio. Our
mission is to help people with learning disabilities, those who prefer
listening over reading, and who are always on the go to enjoy consuming your
content online. Please give it a try and let us now what you think. Your
feedback is highly appreciated :)
~~~
jamil7
I'm working on a project that overlaps slightly (only with this feature).
Would you be open to offering programmatic access in the future via an API?.
~~~
mindwork
@jamil7 what are you working on? I wrote here that I've had pretty similar
idea, wonder what's your take on that?
~~~
jamil7
@mindwork DM me if you feel like it be cool to hear what you're working on.
------
nzealand
I added it to an old unused part of my website.
[https://www.folj.com/lateral-solutions/](https://www.folj.com/lateral-
solutions/)
Apparently my javascript doesn't play nicely with programmatically injected
elements. The Show All Solutions button still works.
~~~
tiburon
good, at least you powered your blog with voice. happy to see it useful for
you.
------
superfrank
Just some hopefully constructive criticism, I found the voice used on the
"Smart Natural Voice" section to be the most robotic sounding of them all.
Specifically, the "Say goodbye to robotic voice, this is nothing like you ever
heard before." line sounded very robotic and a bit awkward.
I'm not sure if maybe the content of the copy is a little clunky or if it's
the voice itself, but that section sounded worse than the other ones, IMO. If
possible, I would think about toying with that. The girl's voice in the "Voice
Pitch and Speed Control" section sounded far more natural and impressive.
------
voltagex_
Can I use this to convert other articles? Could I pay to get 32kbit Opus?
------
jamieweb
Do you have plans to publish a versioned release with support for Subresource
Integrity?
Also, is there somewhere that the following is documented?
\- Required origins for each type of content so that this can be compatible
with a Content-Security-Policy
\- Required use of browser features so that this can be made compatible with a
Feature-Policy
\- Commitments from yourself that the lists of required origins/features will
not be added to without prior notice, in order to give time for blog operators
to update their headers accordingly
Thanks
------
tibbon
I’ve wondered for a while with NPR doesn’t have both audio and text of all of
their programs.
Sometimes I can listen, but not read (driving). Sometimes, I can read but not
listen (work, or just when I’m without headphones). I realize they want high
quality voice, but if at the moment all they have is text that’s ok with me.
Not having both of these often means I just skip that article and never come
back to it
~~~
ramblerman
radio ambulante (NPR's spanish podcast) has full transcripts in english and
spanish of all their content. The quality of the journalism and topics are
outstanding as well.
Super useful for learning Spanish.
------
andy_ppp
Amazon Polly [1] and Google Text to Speech [2] are unfortunately far superior.
[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/polly/](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/)
[2] [https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-
to-speech/)
~~~
hellojason
I have to agree, plus they’re free for what most users would need.
Also noteworthy is the official Amazon Polly for WordPress plugin -
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-
polly/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-polly/)
------
baroffoos
Don't have time to test it now. How does it sound? Is it better than the
robotic text to speech voice we all know? Wonder if you can run this offline
so you can save the files when you build your static site and no scripts are
required on the frontend.
~~~
txtme
The actual text to voice synthesis isn't acutally bad, but the audio quality
is terrible. The audio artifacts are so bad I could barely listen to the demo
snippets. It's too bad they ruined a quite good product by skimping on the
most important quality, audio quality.
I wonder how OP missed this? Audio quality has to be flawless when using
headphones for extended times. It's not like you need a lot of bits for audio,
so it's not something you save on.
Please fix!
~~~
mholt
Sounds good on my speakers
~~~
txtme
Headphones.
------
txtme
You should showcase your product better.
Add a text input box so that prospective users can try it themselves.
------
PapaSlug
Typo: "We use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to constantly
improve our voice algorithms to make your website text-to-speech is as
realistic as possible."
~~~
tiburon
Thanks PapaSlug, i like your username. The Typo is fixed now.
------
dbetteridge
Constructive criticism , I could not find any samples of the audio on your
site.
Recommendation, add the plugin to your own homepage for potential users to
test it out before having to signup.
~~~
tiburon
thanks for the input:
there is a demo button here on this page where you enable your website. You
can even test the feature without signup.
[https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-
free](https://websitevoice.com/convert-text-to-audio-free)
~~~
dbetteridge
Apologies, looks like your widget domain is being blocked by my work and was
preventing the demo button from doing anything.
------
meetbryce
What's the catch? How are you providing this for free.
~~~
kseo3l
according to what he said on another thread it will be free and it will have
some paid features on top
------
edent
Is there a demo of the UK voice anywhere? I could only find the American one.
Very impressed with the audio quality. What's the revenue model?
~~~
krackers
>Very impressed with the audio quality
To me it sounds not much better than Google's standard wavenet TTS (seen here:
[https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-
speech/)) which is admittedly pretty state of the art but nowhere as good as
actual human dictation.
------
kentich
I use Read Aloud Firefox extension to listen to blog posts.
|
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"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Advanced Git Tutorial - r11t
http://thesharps.us/~sarah/advanced-git.pdf
======
gruseom
Don't waste your time. This is a 4MB pdf consisting of slides that say things
like this:
_git commit – commits added changes to the local repo_
~~~
limmeau
although it points to useful things like
git add --patch
which not all tutorials teach. But all in all, there is better "advanced git"
material out there.
------
metanoize
Very useless!
|
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Dwarf Fortress update 2 years in making to be released next week. - bobjordan
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139852.0
======
bobjordan
This post got 4 votes in the first 2 hours, on 2nd page, then quickly
disappeared. Obviously the HN mods put the high decay rate mojo on it. Not
sure why.
|
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"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Italian Supreme Court: News "expires", online archives would need to be deleted - eagerToLearn
http://espresso.repubblica.it/attualita/2016/07/01/news/a-ruling-by-the-italian-supreme-court-news-do-expire-online-archives-would-need-to-be-deleted-1.275720
======
tehwalrus
"Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of
Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the
constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper
articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons," people who
have fallen foul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of
rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its
monopoly on truth."
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith)
~~~
nickff
Thanks for posting this.
Many are also persistently pushing to change what is 'acceptable' vocabulary
to change how people think, as Orwell described in the Newspeak appendix.[1]
[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-
Four#The_Newsp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-
Four#The_Newspeak_appendix)
~~~
joeframbach
[http://alexjs.com/](http://alexjs.com/) for example.
~~~
sqeaky
In 1984 they weren't trying to adjust the vocabulary to be more inclusive and
make every feel more comfortable about open discourse in a fully optional way.
They wanted to erase words that could denigrate the party, change the meanings
of words that could be used against the party or add new words that could only
say good thing about the party.
Things libel laws that stop free speech, how many politicians wiggle through
the truth or how people who try to mandate political correct speech like
extreme SJWs seem like the problems indicated here.
------
ythl
We should just pass a new law called "The right to scrub your public image",
which allows you to control how the public perceives you or your company
online. If someone says something unflattering about you, you can force them
to delete it.
That's basically what all these European "privacy" laws are amounting to.
~~~
CaptSpify
I've always kind of thought a better system would be one that lets you assume
a new identity. This is a war that laws won't win. Data will get out, and once
it's out, it's near impossible to get back. And people do make mistakes that
shouldn't haunt them for the rest of their lives. A better system is one that
lets you disassociate with that data.
~~~
peeters
A restaurant could do exactly that. If the negative publicity for something
they did only a couple of years ago is too much for them, they could change
their name in a heartbeat.
Instead, what they want is to selectively groom what the internet "remembers"
about them. Remove the bad, keep the good.
~~~
a_humean
There is a local upmarket curry house near me that is quite good and has been
around for nearly 5 years winning plenty of local awards for food and service,
but on TripAdvisor about 1/5 of the reviews refer to a steak house that was at
the same address before this curry house opened. They did not get good reviews
and didn't pass health inspections. Even though the curry house changed the
owner, name, management, waiting staff, chefs, food sourcing, decor, and menu
the reviews are still tied to the address.
Fortunately their newer reviews are so glowing that they still get over 4
stars average and their front window is covered in plaques of their awards and
their most recent 5/5 health inspection (in the UK its quite common for
restaurants to flaunt their 4/5 or 5/5 health report on their front door as
advertising - there is no legal requirement to show it except in the city of
Hull where now almost every restaurant now has at least 4/5 rating as a
consequence given the death sentence that a something below 3/5 represents).
------
anexprogrammer
Counter View. I don't expect this to sit well with HN. Is everything to be a
sentence for life? I, and the law in many places, don't think that's fair.
Whilst I don't think 2.5 yrs is the right balance, I do think much reporting
should expire to an archive. If a restaurant did something wrong 10 years ago,
but clean since (that's in the context of the UK with regular, visible,
standards checks), who cares about the old offence? If they're still doing
wrong they would probably have other, non-expired, offences in the last 10
years.
Here in Europe we have the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. Whilst the
UK has a poor reputation for reform (we go for a more US lock 'em up
approach), and Gove leaving Justice looks to have put paid to reform for
another decade, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act since early 70s.
After a varying period past record is considered spent - 2 yrs prison or more
is never spent, the rest expire after a period depending on sentence. Fines
expire after 7 years I think.
So the stupidity your child gets into at 18, whilst out drinking, doesn't pop
up in searches when 30 and applying for jobs. Legally you don't need to
mention it again apart from some exceptions like applying to be a judge or
joining police.
The internet is starting to make a mockery of that reasonable intent. The law
thinks you can become clean, you have been legally for 15 years, but your
potential employer finds a BBC page from 1998, and decides to not extend the
offer. That's not reasonable either.
Perhaps news should archive in step with laws such as that. Trivia and public
order offences expire quickly, 10 year sentences never. Somehow make it a bit
less available behind a paywall, or some credentials. I'm talking of _intent_
not practicality. I realise a mirror elsewhere would render that void.
In the 80s and 90s it was only the exceptional who got background searches.
Manually by searching through archives. Reporters would dig into some suspect
politician only when it was something major. That's _also_ the wrong balance
and meant many things that should have been known in the public interest
didn't come to light simply because it was difficult to check.
~~~
danso
It's a tough thing in some cases. When I was in college, it was very normal to
print the names of students in the police blotter (e.g. "John Smith, sophomore
in engineering, was booked on charges of public nudity on Friday"). The
internet existed but Googling things was not a mainstream habit. Nowadays, I
think many college blotters anonymize the names, and that feels right to me.
We have a right to know what's on campus, but fucking up as a drunk college
student shouldn't affect your post-college life.
But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial
processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the
students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or
older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily
to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to
challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture.
Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification
and self-absorption of society.
~~~
anexprogrammer
The legal expiry timer starts at date of sentence.
A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila
shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine.
Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's
not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it
never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but
if you have a rare name...
In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche
archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps.
There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim,
can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The
adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that.
I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to
archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or
something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist,
just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance,
regardless of practicality.
A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit
report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?
~~~
ivan_gammel
It's much more difficult problem, because reputation damage happens not only
as a result of court decision. A politician could say very dumb and offensive
things when he was young - should it really affect his political career?
~~~
sqeaky
Hasn't hurt Trump and he says "very dumb and offensive things" now.
People generally don't care what you did in the ancient past. The only time it
matters is when it is a big deal. Like that Republican in the primaries who
fabricated an incident involving a knife. Without a public record we wouldn't
know.
We need an uncensored public record so we can verify what people say and guide
our future decisions.
~~~
sqeaky
I think people are downvoting me because they don't like the idea that Trump
and Hillary are neck and neck in the polls.
I am fairly certain his saying "dumb and offensive things" is a huge part of
his success. Where I am Trump has about 60% of the voters. When I talk to
people they say they like the idea of the wall or that they do want muslims
banned. These are each dumb and offensive and as far as I can tell the reason
people in my area support Trump.
Whether or not you support Trump, if you understand what he is saying, they
are objectively (or at least not much room for subjectivity) dumb and
offensive.
------
a_humean
This appears to be an overzealous extension of the right to be forgotten.
The right to be forgotten is a debate worth having as there are individuals
that may have historical public records that may be false or no longer in the
public interest to be so widely available.
E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press
reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report
detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or
start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years
ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the
first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or
credit near impossible.
These seem like people who need protection from a age when its far far too
easy to get access to the historical public record, but removing a factually
true report that is just two years old seems a bit extreme; without knowing
the full context.
What the right to be forgotten should be is some kind of mechanism of adding
friction back to the process of getting certain kinds of information when it
is in the public interest that this information shouldn't be so easy to get
at. It should not be about removing public records altogether. How you do that
without inadvertently harming the public interest or allowing abuse seems like
a pretty hard or impossible problem.
~~~
hx87
I think the "right to be forgotten" should be replaced with the "right to not
have old information considered", which is a much better compromise between
the public interest and privacy. In your example, a person false accused of a
crime wouldn't have the record expunged, but the record would be heavily
tagged with notices that it was a false accusation, and it would be illegal to
use that information in considering him for a job and it would be a severe
breach of social norms to use that information turn him down for a
relationship.
~~~
Analemma_
Considering old information, whether it's relevant or not, is something human
psychology does automatically and inexorably. So when you talk about a "right
to not have old information considered", you might as well speak of your right
to jump off a cliff and soar through the air instead of hitting the ground.
These European laws are doing their best to account for the unfair tendencies
of human nature, while your counter-proposal isn't really an improvement over
the situation we had before.
> "... but the record would be heavily tagged with notices that it was a false
> accusation ..."
There's been some literature lately about people trusting their
doctors/lawyers/etc. _more_ when that person reveals that they have a conflict
of interest. A similar backfire effect could well occur here.
> " ... it would be a severe breach of social norms to use that information
> turn him down for a relationship ..."
Oh good. Approximately when can we expect the social norms to change? And are
you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
~~~
hx87
/Noticing/ old information is automatic, but assigning valence to it and
having it influence a decision to a significant extent isn't. I might not be
able to notice that a person is left-handed, but that doesn't mean I will
favor or disfavor them because of it.
> There's been some literature lately about people trusting their
> doctors/lawyers/etc. more when that person reveals that they have a conflict
> of interest. A similar backfire effect could well occur here.
A file stating that an accusation was false isn't admitting doubts or
uncertainty, though, and it's that admission that leads people to trust
advisors more when they reveal conflicts of interest. That file is flatly and
loudly stating that the accusation was false.
> Oh good. Approximately when can we expect the social norms to change? And
> are you accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
Oh good. Approximately when can we expect law to change? And are you
accounting for the fact that it may happen never?
------
tofu_ink
Be sure to burn all the archived articles in libraries. We wouldn't want pesky
expired history changing our minds.
... wait aren't online archives identical to hardcopy archives.... Silly me,
they are totally different.
~~~
andybak
I'm not defending the ruling but speed of access does make a qualitative
difference with genuine implications.
~~~
hx87
So...make them available only at certain hours and only over a 56k modem?
~~~
ythl
Make it only available to the government. Your average citizen shouldn't have
access to so much information; only the government should.
------
tzakrajs
So basically, the world is much more peachy and less vile to read about in
Italy after 2.5 years. Any economist or business analyst studying the market
in Italy now has even less perfect information. Their studies will be based on
an alternate, unrealistically positive data and lead to worse outcomes.
------
placebo
Would this also include deleting records that this ruling ever took place,
thereby nullifying it?
------
kylecordes
Current historians understand the past by, among many other things, reading
old preserved documents including old news. Future historians are going to be
real irritated if we get in the habit of purging "expired" news. Well maybe
not, maybe if we purge it completely enough we won't even have historians in
the future :-)
------
vincnetas
When todays news turn into history? Should history also expire then?
------
rm_-rf_slash
Hilarious, coming from a country where you can't dig a hole without meticulous
verification that you aren't going to damage unbeknownst Ancient
Greek/Roman/Renaissance artifacts.
------
MrPatan
Also printed ones? Burn all the old newspapers?
------
cmdrfred
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present
controls the past."
~~~
taneq
But we've always been at war with the Middle East!
------
aaron695
People make mistakes.
We have never had the chance to genetically deal with or lived in societies
where people don't forget.
And worse, now can in seconds find about your worst. Do you think in 50 years
of life you won't make a mistake (Then 30+ years of people knowing about it)
Your small business can be your entire life.
We might not be currently solving this issue properly. But it is still an
issue we are going to have to deal with.
~~~
ggreer
Complete freedom of communication harms some individuals, but the harms of
"right to be forgotten" laws are far greater. No matter how they're tweaked,
they must by their very nature punish people for:
1\. …conveying public information…
2\. …that is true…
3\. …to someone who requested it.
Any law of that sort is inimical to free expression and ripe for abuse.
------
NoGravitas
Old newspapers don't (generally) disappear completely, they just get scarcer
and harder to access. I would expect major newspapers to have complete
microfilm/microfiche archives of their entire 20th century runs. I would think
major libraries would, too. So getting access to a particular newspaper for an
arbitrary date generally involves, worst case, a special trip to the offices
of the newspaper or a library in the same city as it.
What would be needed to do something comparable for online papers? Keep them
online, but de-list them from search engines? Take them offline, but keep them
in offline storage at newspaper offices and libraries?
~~~
panzagl
So basically make this information only available to the privileged?
~~~
lloyd-christmas
I suffer from the "privilege" of uniqueness. I'm the only person in the world
with my first/last combination. There are 12 living people with my last name,
none of us share a first name. A few pages into a google search of me returns
high school newspaper clippings from 15-20 years ago. An employer doing a
background check on me gets my high jump results from 1999 within 5 minutes.
Who's privileged, the 100 people who share the same name, myself, or the
person trying to find information about one of those 101 people?
I would hope you wouldn't need a golden key to try to track down information,
but it would be nice to have my history equally (in)accessible as someone
else's.
------
tzakrajs
Instead of being delusional about people forgetting our past mistakes, why
dont we become a more open society that is less judgemental about past
mistakes but conscious in this reality.
------
ramblenode
They should consider going through and cleaning out the libraries every three
years since those tend to accumulate a great deal of historical information.
------
dogma1138
What was the case about?
Overall I have some different views about this, and I'm not sure how to react
to some of the cognitive dissonance I notice.
On one hand people claim that privacy is paramount, on the other hand they
seem to not question what and how becomes a public record, how it is kept and
how easily it is accessible.
Overall the tone here seems to be that the "right to know" is as important or
even more important than privacy which is a huge cognitive dissonance in my
book.
What's worse is that this seem to be a case where privilege prevails, if you
are wealthy you can expunge your record the old fashion way - PR and control
the news cycle.
If you are not then you are screwed because the 15min of fame are the only
thing that the "internet" as a collective seem to care about.
I don't know what happened at the restaurant nor do I know if it was important
at the time or if it is still now but relevance can be assigned an expiration
date.
The problem is that you can't "update" the internet, a newspaper isn't going
to report that everything is nominal and that nothing happens, news by
definition are a record of an abnormal event.
I can understand not wanting to have the top result of your restaurant being
"4 puppies and a cat found dead, drugs and sign of sexual activity were
discovered at the scene" being the top result in Google simply because there
has been no "worse" news for the past 2-3 years about the same place.
For the most part I can agree with the concept of having to reevaluate the
worth of information at a given time and evaluate does it deem the information
"newsworthy" and within the public's right to know, anything else is a matter
of historic record and gossip and it can still have effect on you today since
no one is looking at the date.
What happens if some one else buys the restaurant? If the case was due to the
misconduct of the previous owner should they be forced to change the name?
Should the original owner be forced to rebrand just because something shitty
happened at the place outside of their control that has no relevance to the
performance of the restaurant or the safety of it's patrons today?
Not everything is an important record, saying "you don't know what is
important to history" is silly, we can all agree that a war, a presidential
election, a huge economic event, a scientific discovery etc. are more
important to history than a random local crime or some other misconduct, we
can also agree that not having everything available for immediate public
access does not equate rewriting history.
Overall the 1984 comments are a bit silly, and are a false equivalency no one
is claiming that historic public record should be rewritten, no one is
claiming that some information should always be accessible, but claiming that
information should be accessible regardless of how much damage vs benefit it
does at any given time, and stripping all agency from the individual to
control how information is published does not bode well for privacy.
Maybe Facebook should make everything accessible including things you delete,
and if you say well Facebook isn't a newspaper then that argument holds less
water every day since Facebook is now aggregating and generating news, and if
you claim that you as an individual are not a public figure well how famous do
you need to be to count as one? own a business? be a mayor? a celebrity? a
government official? rich enough?
This is an argument that we desperately need to have and is is a very good
sign that this case has been brought up (not necessarily the outcome) because
we do need new rules. Being able to effectively "dox" anyone at a push of a
button is going to be a big problem, and if you can about privacy and the real
definition of it not the current confusion of privacy and secrecy; which is
the agency you have to control what and whom you share information with you
should care about this, as much if not more than you care about encryption and
other technical controls.
|
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A material that shrinks when warm - Mz
Http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151008173511.htm
======
hcrisp
Perhaps not related, but doesn't water shrink when it transitions from ice to
liquid water? I know it increases in density (thus ice floats).
~~~
zaphar
I think the more interesting thing about the Scandium Triflouride is that it
appears not to undergo a phase transition even at extreme temperatures.
Water changes density and I believe size also when it undergoes the phase
transition from liquid to solid but I think the within the phases it behaves
like most regular materials. I could be wrong about that.
~~~
tbrownaw
Liquid water is densest at about 4C. Any colder than that and it starts
expanding, even before freezing.
------
kazinator
Let's imagine a lattice like, say, this:
O--x--O--x--O ...
| |
x x
| |
O--x--O--x ...
|
x
If the x's start jigging around, we get brief manifestations of this
configuration (exaggerated):
x
/ \
O O
the average length of the O--x--O bond shrinks as the x's pull away from dead
center.
------
dnautics
Ice?
------
jeremysmyth
Stretched rubber shrinks when heated, and expands when cooled. It's unusual,
but not _that_ unusual.
~~~
kazinator
I think this is about materials which shrink _in all directions_ when heated.
As in that a cube of the material will lose width, height and depth. I don't
think that's the case with rubber or the "heat shrink" elastomers used for
encasing wires.
------
pervycreeper
Dihydrogen Monoxide. The potential uses of this material are vast, but it is
one of the most hazardous substances on the planet, and is responsible for a
tremendous loss of human life every year.
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Show HN: Neeto, a secure code box for developers - mobitar
https://neeto.io/
======
mobitar
Neeto is a place for developers to store their commonly used commands and
useful code snippets. It has a high emphasis on privacy while also making it
easy to publish your content.
Snippets are encrypted server side before being stored. In addition, local
encryption can be enabled so that snippets are encrypted before being sent
over the wire. I also don't use Google Analytics, which tracks your web usage
to serve you better advertisements.
You can share groups of snippets or an individual one. I've created a "blog"
group and am using this to publish my blog currently:
[https://neeto.io/mo/blog](https://neeto.io/mo/blog)
You can also publish individual snippets anonymously:
[https://neeto.io/JGefSCx9](https://neeto.io/JGefSCx9)
~~~
rossy
This is just a style nitpick, but there a are a lot of extraneous scrollbars
([https://0x0.st/LT1.png](https://0x0.st/LT1.png)). It looks like this was
designed on a Mac, where overflow: scroll works the same as overflow: auto and
scrollbars take up no extra space in the layout, however on non-Mac, overflow:
scroll always draws a scrollbar, even when it isn't needed.
~~~
mobitar
Ah interesting, thanks for pointing that out. It was indeed designed on a Mac.
Will get that fixed.
------
pacmanche
Your nginx is serving default webpage on port 80
------
lajuin
This is a great idea. If you'd like some help with branding or UI, let me
know.
~~~
mobitar
How can I contact you?
------
teacup
Any chance this is open source? Neeto seems super awesome, and, well, neeto!
It's not that I don't trust you, it's just that I trust me more.
~~~
mobitar
You shouldn't trust anyone ;) Which is why Neeto has local encryption. But I
would like to make it open source, I'm just not sure how that would play out,
especially if I want to monetize it.
~~~
teacup
IMO, release a version that doesn't do as much. Don't include the account
system, and the local encryption.
I've shown it to a few friends and they said they would pay, even if it was
open source.
~~~
mobitar
I'm assuming you'd like it open source to verify its security? But in that
case, how would you know the live neeto.io site is running the same code you
see on Github?
~~~
teacup
Actually, no. For security, I assume your using something like SJCL (please
correct me if I'm wrong). I'd just want to run my own version.
I would trust you to use the same code in both places because I'd be paying
you so I guess there'd be some sort of accountability?
~~~
mobitar
I've went a step further and decided to build this as an open protocol. See
[https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org).
|
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Leaked Docs Show Spyware Used to Snoop on U.S. Computers - erkose
https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-docs-show-spyware-used-to-snoop-on-u.s.-computers
======
dthal
This is a serious question: why isn't this illegal?
|
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Everything I Know About Startup Marketing I Learned From Punk Rock - francoismathieu
http://blog.francoismathieu.ca/punk-rock-marketing?hn
======
designieure
sounds very logical - many thanks for sharing this article
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GPD Win is a pocket-sized Windows 10 laptop - modinfo
http://www.gpdwin.com/
======
sevensor
We're back to netbooks now? Resolution has improved since I had a 1024x600
eeepc, although 1280x720 is still not much.
~~~
qbrass
It's more of a Windows version of a Pandora than a netbook.
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Ask HN: Create your own open-source stack for product usage analytics and BI? - kochhar
Hi everyone,<p>I'm an architect for a small team trying to put together an analysis and reporting tool for our usage data (500GB/mo). Googling around for a week plus and considering a bunch of open-source tools (Pentaho Suite, BiRT, JasperSoft, Spagobi) left me underwhelmed.<p>Can't get anything more than OLAP queries. No dynamic cohorts or retention analysis. No data mining or modelling. We could even live with just OLAP but like this guy the interfaces and the reports make me think I got time warped back to 2005.<p>So now we want to glue together existing tools. I haven’t really come across anything that really made me sit up and go wow. At present the best options I’ve found are:
- Talend or Kettle for ETL,
- Pentaho Mondrian or Druid for OLAP processing, and
- nada for reporting<p>So my question is, if you had to choose the best of breed open-source components for an analytics stack, what would you pick? The stack should be able to<p><pre><code> - integrate data from 3-5 sources (click-stream, metadata, pii)
- join across keys from each source (about 10-15 total)
- post joining, Xform from normalised to denormalised form to speed up queries
- place this into a DB which provides
- OLAP style queries through Java, Python, Ruby (multi-dimensional aggregation, slice/dice)
- API access via standard query language to extract data in XML/JSON/RDD format (use in R/Jupyter)
- dynamic cohort creation & analysis
- retention analysis
- drill-down into individual rows of the incoming data
- From here I’d like to integrate reporting tools for
- damn sexy visualisation out of the box
- interactive charts
- easy to use report and dashboard builders (don't have to be drag-drop)
- scheduled report email
- export reports and dashboards to PDF and JPG
- export tabular data to CSV
</code></pre>
Am I just dreaming? Or is this even remotely possible? Thanks in advance!
======
ramiamar
You're not dreaming, perhaps you might just be underestimating the complexity
of building an analytics stack.
Here's my suggestion:
\- Start with picking you data warehouse. 500 GB/mo can exceed regular SQL
databases' performance, so the next cheapest option is to choose a cloud based
analytical datastore: BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Athena.
\- Next, work on your ETL. There are some open source tools, they all require
a large amount of maintenance:
- https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow
- Talend
- https://www.singer.io
- http://www.fluentd.org/
- Kafka & Kafka Connect
\- Retention, cohorts, and other analysis - you would probably need to write
your own queries, and schedule them with a cron like tool:
- cron ( :) )
- airflow
- luigi
\- For visualization and charting, I know of two good open source tools:
- Redash.io
- http://airbnb.io/superset/
One thing you mentioned which might be hard to do is to join across keys from
each source. Analytical datastores are not very good at that, as tables are
partitioned, and joining tables requires that you plan ahead what you are
joining on, and partition your tables accordingly. To support joining records
in your ETL process, I'm not sure there are easy ways to implement this (let
me know if you find one, we are working on it too :) ). You can look at Kafka
Streams or Apache Storm, as a starting point
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GTK+ 3.0.0 released - junkbit
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2011-February/msg00020.html
======
kjksf
I think GTK+ shows how an open-source community can paint itself into a corner
by becoming "too big to fail".
Gtk+ 1.0 was released in in 1998. Here's a list of vastly superior UI toolkits
that were developed from scratch before Gtk+ 3.0 release:
* Microsoft's WPF (first release in 2006) * Android's Java-based UI framework * Palm's webOS UI framework * Cocoa in Mac OS X (first release in 2001 - and before you nitpick, I know it was based on earlier tech from NeXT) * iPhone UI (granted, based on Mac OS X UI but a lot of it was new)
The technology behind Gtk+ (C, even when written in a disciplined, object-
oriented fashion) makes it painful to program against. It was fine when the
alternative was Win32 but the above mentioned toolkits use higher-level
languages (java, c#, javascript, objective-c) making them not only easier to
program against but also easier to improve the toolkits themselves.
I don't follow Gnome development but my outsider perspective is that Gtk+ is a
huge technical debt and there are no signs that the community is planning to
ditch it for something that can go head-to-head with those other technologies
(mono is the only initiative trying to move the state of the art of
implementation technologies on unix but it doesn't have UI component (other
than silverlight implementation, which is WPF-lite)).
~~~
nyellin
I would not call Gtk+ a "huge technical debt", but there is some truth in what
you say.
Gtk+ development has been badly under-sponsored by the companies that sponsor
GNOME development. In recent years, Cairo and then Clutter were the hot new
toolkits that many people used to supplement Gtk. (Clutter provides a 2.5D
canvas that can be used in Gtk+ applications and Cairo is used by Gtk+ to draw
widgets.)
Qt, on the other hand, is backed by Nokia and has been undergoing constant
development. The difference is noticeable.
There was a time when people spoke excitedly about creating new GNOME
applications using Clutter, because Gtk+ itself didn't support what they
wanted to do. Clutter was (and still is) blessed by GNOME. Among other
programs, many GNOME games have been rewritten to use Clutter with a small
Gtk+ wrapper.
I am no longer involved in GNOME, so I can't say for sure how people feel
right now. I would guess that the attitude is what it has always has been:
Gtk+ might not be amazing, but it is good enough for what we need. Use Clutter
if you need a canvas. It would be insane to switch to another toolkit, as that
would kill the GNOME project.
Edit: I want to add a few points I forgot to mention:
1\. Gtk+ 3.0's support for CSS theming will level the playing field with other
toolkits, and especially with Qt. This is the most exciting addition to Gtk+
3.0. To be honest, it is long due.
2\. Qt is my personal choice for a cross platform toolkit in high-level
languages. Qt Designer, QLayouts, and Qt's language bindings are very good,
and have all been present for years. Gtk+ has good language bindings, but it
is lacking in all of the other areas. Furthermore, Qt's last few releases
bring many new features that Gtk+ is missing and wont implement soon.
3\. Despite my preference for Qt, I still use Gtk+ for small small C programs
because Qt is written in C++. Gtk+ isn't as fun as Qt, but being forced to use
C++ is plain out painful.
~~~
seltzered
"Gtk+ isn't as fun as Qt, but being forced to use C++ is plain out painful."
just curious, have you considered qt jambi (now open source) or qt4dotnet?
~~~
nyellin
Yes, I used QtJambi for a large project in the past. (I was including Java
when I said that I prefer Qt for high-level languages.)
QtJambi is great, but I do not know if I would use it for a new project. Since
Qt 4.5, QtJambi is no longer supported by Nokia.
Source: [http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/preview-of-final-qt-jambi-
rel...](http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/preview-of-final-qt-jambi-release-
available/)
------
ecoffey
GTK+ was my first foray into GUI programming when I was a kid, and I still
think it's pretty slick. I really liked the concept of boxes and nesting
stuff, and how it would figure out how to lay it out. And that it could all be
done in code and be understandable! Not some wonky OLE2 / Swing "Form
Designer" that I was doomed to never understand.
~~~
randrews
Actually Swing works pretty much the same way, which is why I liked it. What I
couldn't stand was stuff like Qt, which wants to generate / pre-process a lot
of code.
I've decided my rule is, I want to either do everything in code (like GTK) or
nothing in code (like Cocoa), but none of this "here's a utility that
generates code for you" like Windows Forms.
~~~
jdub
You can go down the "nothing in code" route with GTK+ as well, using Glade to
generate UI description files. :-)
------
zokier
Seems like the changes are more behind the scenes -stuff, rather than
developer or user visible stuff. While GTK is not my toolkit of choice, grats
for evolving and getting a major version out.
------
windsurfer
Multiple pointer support is huge. It now means GTK+ can be used on mobile
applications and support gestures.
CSS themeing means themes can be created by designers more readily. This
should mean more and better themes in the future.
------
malkia
I've tried compiling it for Windows (using msvc, instead of mingw), but
failed.
Anyone knowns precompiled binaries for windows (even mingw should be fine,
they link to KERNEL32.lib, and are binary compatible with MS).
~~~
endgame
Looks like the gtk.org all-in-one bundle hasn't yet been updated. If you're
feeling bold, you could try and get a build going with MinGW+MSYS.
------
tobylane
Does this have anything to do with Ubuntu release schedules? It's either two
months after this, or after X.org which came out on 20th Dec.
~~~
windsurfer
Ubuntu's releases are a month after Gnome, which is a month after X.org. GTK+
is related to Gnome, but does not follow Gnome's release schedule.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
ISIS Kills Norwegian, Chinese Captives – What Do They Really Want? - mengjiang
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/isis-kills-norwegian-chinese-captives-dabiq-propaganda-magazine-n465536
======
mengjiang
ISIS is really trying to become enemy of the world, terrorizing everyone with
no countries left behind..
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Airbnb, My $1B Lesson - rvcamo
https://arenavc.com/2015/07/airbnb-my-1-billion-lesson/
======
pitchups
It is interesting and a bit ironic that AirBnb accepted funding from YC - who
did not believe in their idea [1], and rejected the only investor that not
only believed in their crazy idea, but actively sought them out and tried to
woo them. Did they go with YC because of its brand, name recognition, or
because it offered them better terms?
Of course, it is all counterfactual, but could Airbnb have been as successful
had they _not_ joined YC? Recall that PG told them to do things that do not
scale - by taking professional photos of rentals in NY - which may have been
critical to their early success.
And although PG was initially skeptical of their idea, he quickly changed his
thinking about how big Airbnb could become. Revealed in another interesting
trail of emails exchanged between PG and Fred Wilson (who also passed on
Airbnb). [2]
[1] _" In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we thought it was too crazy. We
couldn't believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people's
places"_
[http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html)
[2]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html)
[http://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/](http://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/)
Edit: spelling
~~~
forgetsusername
> _" but could Airbnb have been as successful had they not joined YC?"_
These guys had a good idea, some luck, and were able to execute. I doubt that
the "brand" of their money or broad aphorisms from VCs had much to do with any
of it.
For all intents and purposes, money is money. There's an element of "tech
celebrity" in the Valley, and big-name VCs are part of that. In reality,
successful businesses around the country are built, every day, by hard-working
entrepreneurs who bootstrap it (because their business is making money) or get
funding my more traditional means. I don't think VCs have any "secret sauce"
for success.
~~~
eonw
frbo.com had been up and operating for many years before airbnb came around.
"good idea" in this case wasn't original, so that would leave luck or
connections. maybe it wasnt the YC money that helped as much as YC's
connections.
in the end we will never really know, but it wasnt the "good idea" part that
made them successful.
~~~
dear
It's not the idea. It's the execution.
The world is more than just about idea, luck, and connections.
Just by looking at the websites of airbnb and frbo will tell you a ton.
------
beambot
If it's bad form for a VC to break a handshake deal, it's equally-bad for a
startup too... no? Doesn't that reflect poorly upon the founders?
It's so important that YC went through the effort to codify the process:
[http://www.ycombinator.com/handshake/](http://www.ycombinator.com/handshake/)
~~~
paigecraig0231
You guys are missing the point. AirBnB didn't screw me over - this wa any
first deal and I screwed around debating stupid points. I was disappointed
they didn't do the deal but this whole post is about lessons learned. And one
of the biggest ones was move fast once you have conviction. At the time of
this Airbnb event I was just learning. I thought an investor had to worry
about all these little details, negotiate tons of clauses, etc. but post
Airbnb I realized all that detail was stupid. After that event I learned to
move fast.
Example: When I met Peter (Contextlogic now known as Wish) I wrote him a
physical check within a day (pretty sure it was his first) as I planned to
take whatever terms he ended up negotiating. And then I immediately started
brining in other investors, introductions to engineers, etc
So don't take this post as a "Brian screwed me" / the screwing was all self
inflicted and a very important lesson
~~~
jsprogrammer
Well, if it did fall apart at the literal last hour and you were going to sign
the formal paper work (which only reiterates the terms already negotiated and
agreed to at dinner) the next day, but didn't because YC came in overnight and
took the entire round...then it does sound like you got screwed.
~~~
Beltiras
His general approach does indicate that belief in the product is paramount,
his trust in the team second. The takeaway is not to yank the chain too hard
negotiating when these two criteria are met. He could have closed a week
before.
~~~
gargarplex
Those who aren't willing to walk away make bad deals.
~~~
frogpelt
This is generally true. "Today and today only" is usually a red flag.
But those who aren't willing to pull the trigger quick enough miss the great
deals.
~~~
AnimalMuppet
It seems to boil down to "How fast can you be mostly right?"
~~~
jsprogrammer
Pretty close to what was found here:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3798](http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3798)
It also sounds fairly intuitive when you verbalize it: the faster you can
update your (presumably sound) strategy to new information, the "better" you
are likely to do compared to someone who responds to changing information at a
slower rate.
~~~
AnimalMuppet
Even if your initial strategy is less sound, if you can (and are willing to)
update it faster, you can still win (so long as your initial strategy wasn't
too horrible).
~~~
gargarplex
Thats why comments on Hacker News are editable :)
~~~
jsprogrammer
Happened to my OP :) Pushed down to -1 early, made some edits and now +10
------
napoleond
Let me get this straight: in June 2008, Airbnb got intro'd to a bunch of
investors, who all said no [1]. In September of 2008, Airbnb had a $250k round
on the table that valued them at 2.5M[2]. And then, also in September 2008
(before YC usually does interviews) they rejected that offer for YC, who ended
up giving them $20k[3], with a valuation presumably around $250k?? (Although
Brian Chesky says that didn't happen until November, it sounds like they got
some kind of verbal confirmation earlier?)
The timeline is weird.
1\.
[https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084](https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084)
2\. [https://arenavc.com/2015/07/airbnb-my-1-billion-
lesson/](https://arenavc.com/2015/07/airbnb-my-1-billion-lesson/)
3\. [http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-did-Airbnb-raise-What-
is...](http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-did-Airbnb-raise-What-is-the-
companys-financing-history)
~~~
paigecraig0231
It's not weird at all. Brian talked to a ton of people over many months. He
was raising many months before I met him. And then I came in. I then spent too
long negotiating but then we finally worked out a deal end of Sep and then my
lawyers and their lawyers negotiated the agreement Sep 26th and then we did
our dinner. But then YC smartly moved in after this closing dinner and booted
me out. Funny enough Justin Kan and I ended up in Vegas a few years later at a
tech party at Caesars hotel and had a good laugh about it. He remembered me as
the crazy Marine who was writing a huge check into Airbnb before they elbowed
me out. This isn't unusual - they probably googled me at the time (back then
all of the results would have been stories about iraq, Syria, afghanistan,
Pakistan operations; black operations and crazy shit). They probably thought
they were protecting Airbnb and keeping dumb money out of the cap table. It's
quite common for good investors to strongly advise you not to take dumb money
and I agree with the practice.
And that goes back to one of the lessons from my post. I realized that for
founders and investors to take me seriously and not lose deals I had to prove
myself, build a positive brand by helping founders and getting smarter about
this new world I was operating in.
~~~
jackgavigan
_> ..YC smartly moved in after this closing dinner and booted me out._
Do you think YC told AirBnB "We won't accept you on our programme if you take
investment from Paige", or do you reckon it was AirBnB's decision to join the
YC programme instead of taking your investment?
~~~
paigecraig0231
Pure speculation here: But objectively I think my money was perceived as "dumb
money" and YC had a great rep even back then. When you compare the offers the
YC money is clearly the best deal and smarter move.
------
therealarmen
Deck: $2.1B in revenue by 2011
Reality: $500M in revenue in 2014
Moral: Even the most successful startups don't hit their seed-stage revenue
projections :)
------
pjy04
What bugs me is that the founders went back on the deal that was agreed upon
in person.
~~~
sjtgraham
Docs were finished, a "closing dinner" was had, a handshake was made on the
deal, and then AirBnb backed out. If an investor pulled that on a YC company
I'm sure they would be blackballed rather quickly.
~~~
harryjo
AirBnB has never been one to follow the rules, from the earliest days of
Craigslist spamming and flouting lease agreements and hotel regulations.
You don't do handshake deals with people whose fundamental business model is
"cutting corners wherever you can sneak away with it"
~~~
philwelch
One thing we can all learn from AirBnB: if any group of people you hire for
any reason, even on a contract basis, do one bad thing on the Internet one
time, haters on the Internet will never let you live it down. Hire carefully.
~~~
j_s
Yes, because no one ever passes the buck entirely. I believe this
accountability is a good thing; see for example this discussion:
_This is how Visa works_
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396414)
_(900+ points 3 years ago)_
------
Leszek
It's very interesting hearing a story from the VC's side. One always reads
about the trials and tribulations of startups trying to raise capital, but
I've never considered that there might be similar issues and competition on
the investors' side.
~~~
hkmurakami
Sequoia arguably strongarming its way to owning 100% of the Whatsapp series A
instead of allowing other funds to join would be a prime example of this is
recent history.
~~~
wooderson
How on Earth did they strongarm anybody? Whatsapp didn't want to meet with any
investors. Sequoia put in a lot of effort to be allowed to invest at all.
------
mangeletti
The most interesting takeaway for me is the spreadsheet of stats. I find it
highly motivating to see how meager their start was. You hear all the time
from startups, "We weren't an overnight success. We worked hard for years...",
but seeing stats like these in hindsight really sends that message.
------
martin_
If there's one thing I've learned since working at startups and rounds of
funding it's definitely:
The deal isn't done until the money is in the bank
------
sokoloff
Does it strike anyone else as unseemly to share the pitch deck? I get that
it's 7 years ago, but still seems like something a little out of bounds to me.
~~~
presty
[http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-a-13-billion-dollar-
st...](http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-a-13-billion-dollar-startups-
first-ever-pitch-deck-2011-9?op=1)
edit: actually arenavc posted the deck [https://arenavc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/airbnb-origin...](https://arenavc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/airbnb-original-deck-2008.pdf) and much more
[https://arenavc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/AirbnbEventSc...](https://arenavc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/AirbnbEventScheduleFinal.doc.pdf)
[https://arenavc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Airbnb-
Events...](https://arenavc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Airbnb-Events-and-
Growth-Projections.jpg)
------
ashleyblackmore
"Over the last seven years, I’ve discovered and invested very early in a
handful of highly valuable companies (Wish, Lyft, Zenpayroll, Postmates,
AngelList, Plated, Styleseat, Klout, etc.) as well as plenty of disasters."
Any middle ground between "highly valuable" and "disaster"?
~~~
infinite8s
I think in most VCs minds, there is no middle ground (ie everything not highly
valuable is effectively written off as a disaster).
------
loahou04
Its an interesting read to hear about other investors who have missed out on
deals. I actually tried investing into a startup this year and completely
failed due to governmental regulations. Even though i worked my ass off saving
for 2 years to have discretionary income in order to invest as i wanted to I
did not meet the requirements of being an "accredited investor" and so i
missed out on the funding round. I spent at least a month getting everything
ready and going back and forth with the founders meeting with them emailing
them back and forth to find out from a newsletter that they had closed without
me. I guess until the SEC opens it up i'm shit out of luck and am better off
going to a roulette table at a casino...
~~~
quadrature
Why would you want to invest in a startup ?, VCs can pull it off because they
are playing with a lot of money and can eat the (completely inevitable)
losses. It sounds like you only have enough to invest into one startup, thats
an incredible amount of risk to take.
~~~
jkarneges
People also start companies, which is even riskier. Angeling into one startup
may be better than never trying anything at all.
~~~
quadrature
Yes but picking between investment opportunities is a bit different than
starting a company. If you have enough money to buy a significant chunk in an
angel round then you also have enough money to open yourself up to other less
risky investment opportunities.
~~~
jkarneges
Some people like living on the edge. Angels are a certain kind of crazy.
Also high risk -> high reward, right? 10x in 7 years can be game changing.
~~~
ska
That's lottery style thinking, and will get you the predictable results -
almost certainly.
Maybe turning this around will help you see how ineffectual this is:
If you are a naive investor desperate to put all of your small stake into one
company and I am an early stage startup, why would I want your money if I can
have smart money with a good network instead?
And if I can't have that, if I'm desperate for the investment, well your odds
just got much, much worse.
------
free2rhyme214
I'm not sure what the big fuss is over this.
Here's the story in one sentence: an angel recognized Airbnb's potential but
never got the deal in writing so they used it as leverage for a better offer.
Paige invested in Lyft, Twitter and Postmates. He's doing fine and learned
from this.
------
jmtame
I think the fundamental lesson here is speed. What took Paige 3 weeks or more
to accomplish took YC 10 minutes, and then they said yes and signed the
paperwork. Remember, this was unheard of before YC came along (granted,
there's more money involved in Paige's side of things, but even that doesn't
matter). Founders recognize this and respect it, and it's going to be what
distinguishes the good future dealmakers from the bad ones.
Thanks for sharing this Paige. Excellent write up and valuable lessons
learned.
------
arasmussen
Thanks so much for writing this, I love learning about cases where seemingly
concrete rules can be bent. Take a look at Uber who is constantly being told
that what they're doing is illegal and their response is essentially "but it's
better so the laws need to be fixed". I think that's the same attitude you
want when doing everything you can to get back in the deal. Always be
optimistic and don't give up to soon.
------
damonpace
If I remember correctly, Airbnb struggled to raise after YC as well. Sequoia
came in and gave them $600k quietly after Greg McAdoo synthesized and reframed
the Airbnb vision (See Nathan's Startup school speech from 2013). Why didn't
Paige participate in funding after demo day?
------
andreasklinger
Why are those metrics considered to be bad? I am obviously judging with
hindsight and without daily deal noise here but if i look at them:
* Within the first weeks first revenue
* Within 4 months numbers that by themselves each look promising (40-60% response rate although crap product, good revenue per night, good nights booked, etc)
Personally i dont expect any of those metrics nowadays to be further away than
1.5-2x better
The "only" big q's left is:
* is the market big enough it's worth scaling the quantity
* is that team capable of doing it
I feel like i am missing something here (obviously i judge from hindsight) but
what about this numbers is "bad metrics"?
------
taylorhou
This happens the other way around as well for founders. Cheers to Paige for
the insight and thoughtful conversations we've had. He's most likely got a
nice investment in a few future unicorns.
------
codeshaman
> After 6 weeks of work, I didn’t get to invest.
That's supposed to be considered a bummer :).
Hey, at least you still have your money !
In fact, who knows, maybe with your investment, Airbnb wouldn't have turned
out that great after all.
Maybe you would have lost your money, which would have reduced your reputation
and you would have ruminated over it, got depressed, separated, started using
drugs and drinking, get arrested for a drunk mishap, resisting arrest and
attacking an officer with a tennis ball, then jail time... the wheel of
misfortune once set in motion is hard to stop :).
------
jongraehl
Some grist for Silicon Valley (Mike Judge's show):
> On a tactical level, I repeat this creative destruction almost weekly as I
> analyze an individual deal; on an operational level I do it every few months
> (re-evaluating my deal flow, co-investor network, deal structures, etc.); at
> a strategic level I sit down almost every year and question my overall
> philosophy on founders, theses, markets, etc.
[shorter: I don't only regret my mistakes but also try to learn from them.]
Otherwise a well-told story. Thanks.
------
late2part
Hey Paige - If I negotiate a potential financing with Arena, and it doesn't
work out, will you take all of my emails and publish them as well?
~~~
paigecraig0231
If your emails had anything hurtful, embarrassing, proprietary or damaging to
yourself or your company I wouldn't publish them.
In this case these emails and documents make ME look like a novice investor
and speak highly of the Airbnb founders. I have no problem exposing my own
failures and mistakes but I'd never expose yours unless you were cool with it.
This event was a very important lesson for me and made me a better investor.
Most people commenting here are thinking short-term; but the consequence of
this Airbnb deal was critical to my development. I learned to move fast and
invested a great deal of time and energy into becoming a better investor.
~~~
sown
I think it's actually makes you look secure in your self, maybe even a bit
gutsy. I'm not sure what the right word would be here, but it I like it.
Someday, I hope to join the ranks of VCs but I figure I need to figure things
out first.
------
jondubois
If YC hadn't invested, nobody would have ever heard of AirBnb. This is a case
where the investor added a great deal of value to the business.
YC is at the center of a large network of investors, startups and bloggers and
somehow its investment decisions ultimately influence the habits of technology
consumers in general.
I think it was a lose-lose situation for the author.
~~~
jsprogrammer
Is every successful company from YC?
Is every YC company successful?
You must answer yes to both to believe:
>If YC hadn't invested, nobody would have ever heard of AirBnb.
~~~
jondubois
I'm exaggerating of course. But I'm sure it did make a massive difference.
------
ARolek
Time kills all deals.
------
philliphaydon
Interesting to know you look for startups to invest in. I've always wounded
how start ups find investors and approach them. I'm working on a personal
project that I would love to do full time but with no savings and living in
Singapore so have to have a job to stay here. Also scared to look for
investors because I don't want them to try change my ideas since I believe in
what I'm building.
------
AndrewKemendo
Jesus. I didn't know any VC/Angels worked that hard to get into a deal. Hell,
in my experience it's like they actively try NOT to fund companies.
|
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|
Free Automated Cross-Browser JavaScript Testing - jamesjyu
http://blog.parse.com/2012/06/28/free-automated-cross-browser-javascript-testing/
======
yesbabyyes
Good advice! Another alternative, if you don't need mobile browser tests, is
Testling, which runs your tests on Browserling's servers. It's not free, but
way easier to get started.
~~~
defied
Or consider using TestingBot.com which provides mobile testing with Selenium.
Easier than setting up/maintaining everything yourself.
------
mkmcdonald
The browser versions here are never mentioned, which means this is "multi-
browser", and not "cross-browser" (a large difference).
Furthermore, the following snippets are simply false:
> But Internet Explorer is the black sheep of the browser world. If your tests
> fail in just one browser, well, you get the picture.
Funny how older versions of browsers such as Opera are never mentioned. IE
versions 6-8 seem to be the only "old" browsers that exist. Which of course is
because they're still in use. Myopia reigns supreme.
I've often found that IE versions 4-9 will point out errors I've made in my
code, as the IE platform is far more strict than browsers such as Firefox,
which scramble to protect bad code.
> Accordingly, automating testing in Internet Explorer is much more involved
> than any other browser.
As someone that tests in 20+ browsers, I spend a lot more time on Firefox
versions 1-13 than I do with IE versions 4-9, especially with scripting.
Nevermind Google Chrome, which makes testing incremental versions nearly
impossible (and no, auto-upgrades are no guarantee).
> Getting automatic cross-browser JavaScript testing working is a complex
> affair, and bound to involve some amount of trial and error.
Conclusion: test manually. There are no guarantees.
~~~
frew
What product are you working on that it's possibly worth your time to test
with FF 1? It's got like 0.01% marketshare at most. People mention IE 6-8
because large numbers of people are still on it due to corporate IT policies.
------
mleonhard
<http://saucelabs.com/> provides this setup as a service. And theirs is much
more sophisticated, with screenshots and videos of failed tests.
------
ahrjay
I built a simple cli tool to do cross browser unit testing.
bunyip: <http://ryanseddon.github.com/bunyip/>
------
heretohelp
If you don't actually care about cross-browser testing you can use phantomjs
which is considerably nicer.
|
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Hackers make money from your stolen medical data - LinuxBender
https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-is-how-hackers-make-money-from-your-stolen-medical-data/
======
bastijn
The title would not misfit a public newspaper shouting for attention at the
kiosk.
Most of the article goes on about stolen MD identities used to pose as a
doctor, making false claims. Your stolen data is only worth pocket money it
seems. Not to say the danger is real and your data should be protected and in
your control at all times.
The interesting part is I suspect older systems pose a greater threat than new
systems centrally storing information in cloud-on-premise or cloud
environments. The lengths we go these days to separate actual observations or
data from the PII bits in fear of a hack make it so the hacker has to hack at
least two, but more likely three or more separate systems these days. Two of
which typically should not be exposed outside the VPC/DMZ. I sure hope this
article, or similar ones, will not be used by parlements and countries to slow
down innovations even further. There is already enough trouble slowing down
innovation in Healthcare as it is today.
Let's not fear this but see it as motivation to do our utmost best to protect
your data forcing innovation to get rid of all the legacy systems that still
live in the world. And while we are at it, use your anonimized data (with
consent) to improve the quality of care, lower cost of care and improve
patient experience and outcomes.
|
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|
Ask PG: How do you stay focused while reviewing YC Applications? - 6thSigma
I recall reading that YC partners read around 100 applications a day over a 10 day period. That seems incredibly draining.<p>How do you stay as focused for the 100th application vs. the first? How many hours a day are you working? Do you take multiple breaks? Do you have a set schedule?<p>If other YC application reviewers are reading this, I'd love to hear your response as well.
======
aashaykumar92
I went back to read this portion[1] and it actually says, "If we get 1000
applications and have 10 days to read them, we have to read about 100 a day."
So take it in context: PG is really trying to encourage applicants to put
effort into their applications so that they stand out. And that doesn't mean
to write a ton in your application but instead write concisely enough to
answer the question well.
I'd also go out on a limb and say that this is a subtle message to applicants
to apply as early as possible. PG is admitting that it is indeed difficult for
the partners to keep their focus on so many applications throughout this
period. Applying earlier gives the partners more time to review our
applications and hence, our applications get reviewed thoroughly and they have
more time to engage with the applicants (if interested, of course).
Essentially, a win-win. Now that I briefly inferred/annotated this part, I
definitely wish I had read this section more carefully. I resubmitted my
application several times all the way until the day it was due.
Anyway, as a follow up to the posted question, how do you manage to continue
advising YC alumni while reviewing so many applications? Especially the recent
class (YC W13) that is probably meeting with tons of investors right now and
needs the partners' guidance.
[1] How to Apply to Y Combinator: <http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html>
------
PAULHANNA84
They surely don't read the entire application unless it's appealing. Some
applications scream "fail" within the first minute. I read an article from one
of the partners stating what they look for and they did mention that if an
application doesn't look appealing, they won't finish reading it. I mean...why
would they? You should be clean and concise while not over saturating them
with detail.
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AbhishekBiswal
No, wait. He's busy going through the applications, don't try to disturb him.
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narayankpl
Ivy League application reviewers should be able to answer this well...
------
akproxy
He keeps is left leg on a 27cm high stool and right on 31cm high stool. He
drinks water from a copper glass pained in green colour and he drinks 1 litre
each 2 hours. Exactly.
Damn it. That next question would be how does Travolta stay focussed white
shitting on a Monday through Sunday.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
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