Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar tower for AZ - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/enviromission-solar-tower-arizona-clean-energy-renewable/19287/ <comment><USER2> Really? Very cool idea, but some of the claims sound downright ridiculous.

First, the zero maintenance claim that is touted at least 3 times by the article seems suspicious. You can't really leave anything out in the desert sun and not have to maintain or replace it. Sun will disintegrate a lot of material, not to mention wind and sand. Anybody have any info or insight into what material they are using to create the "greenhouse"?

Additionally, the claim that _"In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there."_ does not seem to jibe at all with the claimed temperatures ("add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F)"). I'm not sure I'm familiar with any vegetation that grows in near 200 degree temperatures.

Does anyone have any actual experience with this kind of tech?

<comment><USER3> Desert environments are _extremely_ good at preserving things, particularly technological devices.

[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Mojave,+CA&hl=en&ll=35...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Mojave,+CA&hl=en&ll=35.063795,-118.145009&spn=0.005067,0.009581&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=40.052282,78.486328&t=h&z=17)

The above link shows an aircraft storage facility in Mojave, California. There are a number of such facilities in the US, and many more worldwide. It was discovered some decades ago that you can leave a plane in the desert for years at a time, and when you come back to it there's very little maintenance that has to be done to make them airworthy again.

There was a story that I read a few months ago that I sadly can't find a link to at the moment. Some years back during one war or another, there was a plane that had engine problems. If I remember correctly, this was in northern Africa. The crew radioed that they were coming back to base, but they never made it. They were flying over a desert area.

A lot of years went by, and some prospectors working for an oil company were driving around the desert looking for places to drill and they came across the wreck of the plane.

The tail of the plane had broken off during the crash, but otherwise the plane was in excellent condition. There was still fuel in the tanks and the batteries were still charged. The oil guys were even able to turn on the lights and get the engines to turn over (might be wrong about that, but I think I remember that). If the tail hadn't broken, they likely could have been able to fly it out of there with not so much work.

So anyway, putting stuff in the desert isn't _no_ maintenance, but it is _low_ maintenance.

I do agree with your assessment about the greenhouse. Deserts are already pretty hot and plants don't grow well there. I don't think 2-3x the temp will be a big improvement.

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure that was part of the plot from The Mummy? :)

In any case, desert is great for preserving stuff in terms of low humidity (ie things don't rot). Not so good for preserving stuff in terms of them getting sand blasted. Especially in AZ where winds routinely hit 100mph+ during gusts and 60mph during windstorms. Not to mention the haboobs.

Also, the prototype of this tower in Spain figured out that the plastics they were using were "not durable enough". I would imagine that means they disintegrated? I'm wondering what they're planning on building this thing out of.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower#First_Proto...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower#First_Prototype_in_Spain)

<comment><USER4>
      > I'm pretty sure that was part of the plot
      > from The Mummy? :)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Be_Good_(aircraft)>

<comment><USER2> Ah thanks! Flight of the Phoenix was the movie I was thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        The Arizona tower will be a staggering 800 metres or so tall - just 30 meters
        shorter than the colossal Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest
        man-made structure.

Is there any reason why this can't be constructed to be 831 meters tall to edge out the Burj Dubai?

<comment><USER6> I think that Burj Khalifa (formerly known as Burj Dubai) _should_ be the tallest for economic reasons. The Arizona tower is simply infrastructure, so its goals are to produce the most energy for the least cost. Adding 31 meters may upset the cost/benefit ratio. Dubai, on the other hand, is a tourist destination, and having the tallest building in the world is good marketing.

<comment><USER7> I'm willing to bet Burj Khalifa wasn't built tallest for purely economic reasons. I have a suspicion ego was at least a tiny factor.

<comment><USER8> and then that ego was bruised when they had to change the name to the guy who runs the city next door because he bailed you out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For any other Aussies that, like me, vaguely remember the plans for building this near Mildura but can't be bothered watching the video to find out why it didn't happen, the reason cited is a "complete lack of incentives".

Sad that something like this couldn't get a dime from the Australian government while the US "welcomed them with open arms" (and, presumably, truckloads of cash).

<comment><USER10> That's not a good sign. I mean, ideally, you'd want the incentive to be, "It produces power cheaper than coal!"

<comment><USER11> Presumably it could if you factor in coal's carbon externalities.

<comment><USER12> What makes you think that?

<comment><USER12> Not sure why I can't edit my post. Anyway - downvoted for asking for clarification on an unsupported assertion. HN at its most scientifically rigorous!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love this technology _a whole lot_ , but this is Hacker News so it is worthwhile to think critically about this kind of "press release"-style news posting. This article does a bit of hand waving with the numbers, and, while this is an amazingly cool project, I think that they are overselling its benefits.

First, let's get the terminology right. This plant has a capacity of 200 MW. That does not mean that it produces 200 MWh. The formula for converting MW into (annual) MWh is the following:

MWh = MWx365x24xCF

In the above formula, CF is the capacity factor. Capacity factor is basically the amount of energy that a plant is actually able to produce over the course of a year divided by the total capacity of the plant. Here are some common capacity factors for various industries (taken from a private document, so no sources but this stuff is easy enough to google):

* Coal - 65-95%

* Natural Gas - 35-65%

* Hydro - 25-65%

* Solar - 20-35%

* Wind - 20-35%

* Nuclear - 80%+

Capacity factors are never 100% for various reasons:

* Plants may need to be taken offline for refueling, maintenance, or inspection

* For renewables, the wind isn't always going at full speed and the sun isn't always shining

* A whole bunch of other things that I am too tired to list (read the references below, they have some more in them)

Now, let's look at this new project, and one of the claims made in this article.

According to the article, this plant will be able to provide power for 150,000 homes. According to the EIA, the average household annual energy usage is 10,896 KWh. Given this information and using a more generous solar capacity factor (35%):

Number of Homes Powered = (200x365x24x.35) / 10.896 = 56,278 homes

Hmm, well that's just a bit less than what the article claimed, so they must be assuming a really amazing capacity factor for this estimate. Let's solve the below for cf and see what we get....

(200x365x24xcf)/10.896=150000

cf = approx. 93%

Look, I'm all for scientific advancement and alternative energy, but can we try to be more sensible than this? This is a highly improbable capacity factor.

Documents available from Enviro Mission says that the simulated capacity factor will be more like 50%. When we plug that number into the equation we get about 80,397 homes, which is pretty sensible. However, we have to remember that these are only simulated numbers. There are no similar projects currently available that can be compared to this one, so the actual capacity factor may be either more or less.

Note: Please keep in mind that efficiency is a totally different concept from capacity factor. Efficiency is typically used to describe how well a plant transfers from its energy source into electricity^. The capacity of a plant is a number that already incorporates the plant's efficiency. The capacity factor is simply a measure of how much of that capacity is actually used on an annual basis on average.

^ I am not an electrical engineer. I am an economist, that is the best definition I can come up with.

Disclaimer: I am incredibly tired right now, so if any errors appear in the above posting please send me some coffee so that I can correct them before falling asleep.

References:

\+ [http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3)

\+ [http://www.solarpaces.org/CSP_Technology/docs/solar_tower.pd...](http://www.solarpaces.org/CSP_Technology/docs/solar_tower.pdf)

\+ [http://www.enviromission.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CP...](http://www.enviromission.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CPID=1090)

 _Edit: Formatting was all messed up the first time. Forgot to include some additional information. Added clarification on efficiency._

<comment><USER14> Appreciate the analysis, however I believe you made a fairly significant error with the solar capacity percentage. Unlike other solar power, the cool thing about this structure is that it doesn't specifically require constant sunshine to work effectively being that it works off the temperature differential through the tower, rather than pulling energy strictly from solar panels. Because of this, I would imagine capacity to be much nearer to 100% than the opposite.

"for every hundred metres you go up from the surface, the ambient temperature drops by about 1 degree. The greater the temperature differential, the harder the tower sucks up that hot air at the bottom - and the more energy you can generate through the turbines... Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;"

As for how the difference in temperature between the surface and 100s of meters in the air changes throughout the day/night, I don't know.

So according to your equation, at 80% capacity, it could cover 128k homes. At 93.3% capacity it'd reach 150k.

<comment><USER15> It still needs a temperature differential to run, which will not be there at night, so the best you could get is about 50%. This is the number that Enviro Mission uses.

<comment><USER16> The article claims, "Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a regret that I'm late to the commenting party. This comment won't get seen, so I won't get any feedback.

However ...

I haven't been able to find out what the upflow airspeed will be. If it's large enough one could wear a winged suit and freefall in the funnel. That would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is just so cool. I'm curious about the local weather impact of something like this. Basically, what these guys are doing is creating a continuous, artificial thermal, the same type you use for flying hang gliders and sailplanes. I'm certain the guys have done the math, but I'm wondering if you won't get cloud formation above the tower due to condensation of the hot air rising through the tower.

Meteorological theory suggests that you would definitely get this if the airflow was not contained by the turbines, and cloud formation with the release of condensation heat would cause even more cloud formation which would basically result in a giant, permanent thundercloud above the power plant. This would obviously decrease insolation a lot.

Anyone in here who has done any theory on these kinds of projects? I'm just guessing based on my knowledge of gliding that a considerable amount of the energy collected from this power plant actually comes from the temperature differential between not just the solar energy collected directly underneath the tower. It isn't just the fact that hot air rises. Due to decreasing pressure, the air temperature of a mass of air decreases approximately one degree per hundred meters of altitude gained. But if the atmospheric temperature distribution due to meteorological conditions is such that the actual temperature in the atmosphere drops _more_ than one degree per hundred meters of altitude, you have an untapped energy source; any air mass set in motion upwards will actually accelerate instead of slowing down.

That we are making large-scale technology to exploit this is so ridiculously cool I have problems expressing it.

<comment><USER19> It's a desert. The air near the ground is usually pretty dry. That's why radiation cooling makes things cool off so much at night (instead of making clouds and fog).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Big toy.

For one, maintenance will _not_ be low. Wind turbines (and nothing else is used here) do have quite some maintenance costs, and additionally, you need to keep the greenhouse clean.

The main problem I see is the capacity. 200 MW peak capacity at 60% efficiency translates to 120 MW peak electric energy. If we assume 50% capacity factor (which I suspect is _very_ generous), we arrive at 60 MWe average output. You would need 15 of these to substitute for a single 1 GW nuclear plant.

Big toy.

<comment><USER21> Wish I could downvote your post for repetition and for just making up stuff.

'200 MW peak capacity at 60% efficiency translates to 120 MW peak electric energy'. This sentence makes no sense. They are building a 200MW plant. That is the amount of electricity it will put out at peak.

You made up the number for 50% capacity figure just then didn't you? You did. I just saw you. So your final figure is wrong.

<comment><USER15> I agree the 200MW is output, so no efficient factor should be added, but Enviromission says the capacity factor is 50%:

[http://www.enviromission.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CP...](http://www.enviromission.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CPID=1090)

Makes sense, since half of the time it's night...

<comment><USER21> Absolutely correct. Thanks for that link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 60%? Darn. I was hoping for better after the hype earlier in the article. Don't large steam plants approach 99%?

 _150,000 US Homes_

Is that a lot? I hate to (continue to) be a cynic, but it doesn't sound like a lot.

<comment><USER23> The Census says there are 110,692,000 occupied homes in the US, so 150k is 0.136% of that.[1] That means that there would need to be 738 of them to meet demand.

Now, the EIA says there are about 5700 power plants currently operating in the US [2]. Continuing with the back of the envelope math, that's almost 8 times as many as would be necessary if they all produced as much as this one. Pick whatever factor you want for "non-home" energy, but we're dealing with the right order of magnitude.

Combine that with the clean energy aspect of it, and I don't see a lot of reason to be cynical.

[1] <http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahsfaq.html> [2] [http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=65&t=2](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=65&t=2)

<comment><USER24> So at $750 million a pop, that's a little over $550 billion to power US homes. Or, roughly 50% of the annual budget of the military to power all US homes for 80 years!

Clearly back of the envelope numbers, but definitely something to be excited about.

<comment><USER25> Well, you can't only have these things powering US homes because I can't imagine they work that well at night.

<comment><USER26> They do actually.

<comment><USER27> Truth be told, the article doesn't say how well they work at night. I don't think that it'll work just as good, but that doesn't mean it won't work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't see it mentioned in the article, but the greenhouse must be colossal. These updraft towers use land far less efficiently than concentrated solar and those don't use land efficiently either.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower>

_A 200 MW power plant with the same 1000-metre-high tower would need a collector 7 kilometres in diameter (total area of about 38 km²). The 38 km² collecting area is expected to extract about 0.5 percent, or 5 W/m² of 1 kW/m², of the solar power that falls upon it. Note that in comparison, concentrating thermal (CSP) or photovoltaic (CPV) solar power plants have an efficiency ranging between 20% to 31.25%_

38 square kilometers, these things don't make sense if you don't use the greenhouse for something. Hopefully the wiki is outdated and they have a higher efficiency.

<comment><USER29> When you have an almost comedic overabundance of uninhabited desert, a less efficient but cheaper technology may prove more economically effective. If, one day, the costs of more efficient technologies fall, or if suitable land becomes scarce, then efficiency will become a greater concern.

<comment><USER28> The whole point of these renewable energy projects is to be considerate to the environment. Covering up the desert, inhabited by tons of species (this is not the Sahara) in a greenhouse is an environmental disaster in a new skin.

Land use efficiency is a concern now for the environment. If renewable technologies have to cover up 60,000+ square miles of land not inhabited by humans, then coal and nuclear are the environmentally friendlier options.

<comment><USER29> From a strictly pragmatic perspective, I would argue that the loss of some desert habitat in an ecosystem that is not significantly linked with those used by humans for habitation, carbon sequestration, or agriculture is acceptable compared to the damage to higher-value ecosystems caused by air pollution from coal power. This assumes that environmental damage that causes long-term consequences for humans is considered more egregious than environmental damage that has no negative consequences for humans.

Personally, I think a thorium nuclear power plant in an isolated desert is a much more environmentally preferable approach than most renewable power sources.

<comment><USER28> It's better to make coal powerplants run cleaner too. Thorium will require serious effort to develop, a decade perhaps, but sure would be nice to have. Modern uranium is not that bad either.

There was some solar thermal project in California that ran into a lot of problems trying to use the desert land. Old power companies are paying environmental groups to protest those sprawling projects. Divide and conquer those hippies!

High altitude wind is the best source of renewable energy. It's concentrated and takes up airspace instead of land. They're taking their time though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I see two insurmountable problems with this solar tower, in this age of rising environmental concerns and increasing influence of environmental pressure groups:

\- The base of the tower covers a huge piece of land, which is now home to various desert creatures. Changing their habitat is unacceptable from the environmental protectionists' viewpoint. The precious creatures (probably some endangered species too) would probably die.

\- Visual pollution. Nobody wants to have ugly structures in his backyard, let alone a half-a-mile-high tower which will be visible from a huge area. It detonates with the natural desert views of Arizona.

Because of these two reasons, this solar tower project will face years of litigation from environmental pressure groups, and in the end the project will probably stall.

<comment><USER31> On the other hand, this is probably precisely why this is being built in Arizona and not in California.

<comment><USER32> I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If anyone was curious about the funding for this (I was), EnviroMission has a press release on their site [1]. _"The Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA) has taken a call option to purchase the first of two EnviroMission 200MW Solar Tower power stations planned for development in La Paz County, Arizona."_ It does seem odd, though, that they are building these in Arizona when California has its own deserts.

[1] [http://www.enviromission.com.au/EVM/Company/ShowPage.aspx/PD...](http://www.enviromission.com.au/EVM/Company/ShowPage.aspx/PDFs/1281-79414176/USPowerAuthorityTakesCallOptiononSolarTower)

<comment><USER31> If I were to guess, the regulatory burden of putting something up like this in Arizona is probably way lower than putting it up in California. So, not that odd given that both sides are plugged into the grid and California already buys power from far away (like the Pacific NW.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Even if this type of project only provides a small fraction of the energy we need, it is great to see funding and construction because experience building systems like the one in the article will lead to more effective systems in the future.

My wife and I live in Arizona (in the mountains) and we are having solar panels installed on our roof in 2 weeks that will furnish 100% or more of our electricity needs for about 10 months a year (and we will often make a little money back selling back power to our utility company) and cover about 50% of our needs the two months a year that we run our air conditioning.

A few friends have been critical of our decision for monetary reasons, and they may be right, but it is something we wanted to do. Also, if prices for energy, food, etc. increase dramatically, then we will break even on costs sooner rather than the anticipated 6 or 7 year time frame.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wonderful if it works as described! That's quite a bit of power. I'd be very interested to know comparisons in terms of how long a traditional power plant takes to become profitable, and also how much initial investment this project is requiring.

<comment><USER36> 750 million, payback in 11 years.

for comparison, hydro electric costs about $2 million per megawatt so a 200MW hydro plant would be $400 million, but with associated environmental concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You mean they're actually going through with it? Awesome! I hope it works as well as planned.

I'm _extremely_ interested in the aftermath of all this. The building itself is clever and all, but what will the ecological impact be? Wind farms kill birds and bats and there's evidence the sound drives many more off, concentrated solar has a nasty habit of significantly heating the air around the plant and hydro-dams are _enormously_ destructive no matter how you look at it. What's a 1/2-mile-tall heat pump going to do?

</comment><comment><USER7> Since this seems to work on temperature differentials, could you run it up the side of a mountain? Seems you could get height differences of 5-7k feet in a lot of places with that approach...

<comment><USER36> unless you had a perfectly vertical mountain your tower would end up being longer and costing more. if you did have a perfectly vertical mountain it would still be somewhat difficult to build on the side of a cliff.

I suppose you'd need a mountain in the desert as well.

<comment><USER6> The mountain would also provide unwanted shade.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily. Depends on directional facing. A south facing spur up the mountain may provide no shade at all to the base.

And longer, yes, but not in need of vertical support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is a question out of pure curiosity, I'm not very well read on these subjects, so please forgive me if this is a dumb one.

Is there any reason why this can't be built as an underground structure? If it's working on temperature differentials, shouldn't you be able to achieve a more constant capacity by plugging it into earth where temperatures change less?

<comment><USER30> The sun doesn't shine underground...

<comment><USER38> But it shines on the ground, so instead of putting the heat source at the bottom of the cylinder, you put it on top and see temperatures drop as you go further down underground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The article insists on the plant's low maintenance costs, so this may be a stupid question, but won't the greenhouse* have to be washed regularly of dust? I imagine the accumulation of detritus would significantly impact power production.

Edit: I previously had written mirrors. The concept art looked misleadingly shiny.

<comment><USER40> Compared to the cost of buying coal or natural gas and keeping all the machinery that moves and burns that clean, cleaning out the dust and debris this building takes in should cost relatively little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wonder what effect this could have on the local climate. Pumping out hot air into cool air at height of 800 metres has got to have some affect.

Now if the base is used area is used for growing plants then the air emitted at the top would be moist, which I imagine would cause cloud formation as it meets the cold air.

<comment><USER42> I'm having lots of thoughts about climates within the rings.

I'd expect the temperature ranges to change at different distances frmo the centre. It may be that you could do agriculture at some points underneath.

On the other hand, it's likely that for best efficiency they'll need to create as much momentum as possible from the device.

But - the venturi effect will be significant underneath and they might need to shape the land in sections under the rings. Is it possible you could hide crops within glass casings that improve that effect?

Will water vapour collect at any point in particular?

I'm considering a science fiction plot based around people who live in housing built around energy towers like this.

When this is built, I'd be interested to do a roadtrip to see it.

</comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn This brings up an interesting possibility. What's stopping us from engineering these towers on to buildings once the technology is proven?

<comment><USER43> The huge area of glass enclosed space that needs to spread out from around the tower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been following Enviromission for quite a while now (maybe since 2001?). I check out their website once a year or so to see how they are going. They have been championing this technology for quite a while.

I think it's sad that there are so many people doing back of the envelope calculations and wasting time typing them into Hacker News. There are 100s of millions of dollars involved people. Someone qualified will check the figures. And really it's not rocket science.

<comment><USER29> _I think it's sad that there are so many people doing back of the envelope calculations and wasting time typing them into Hacker News. There are 100s of millions of dollars involved people. Someone qualified will check the figures._

I think it's sad that you think that. One of the fundamental qualities of science is that it can be independently verified, and one of the fundamental qualities of hackers is that they don't typically trust "someone qualified" with "100s of millions of dollars" to do the verification when they can get a rough idea themselves. Hackers aren't here to let the "qualified" people just do their thing. We're here to learn, inspect, disassemble, discover, and most importantly, to create.

<comment><USER21> You're absolutely correct and I should have chosen my words more carefully.

So I'll change my words to say: I think it's sad that there are so many educated and capable people doing back of the envelope calculations on Hacker News. Half of us are capable of hunting down the original papers on solar towers and running the numbers through the proper calculations.

Also why are we just typing out the equations using text. It's the 21st century! We need a better way to discuss technical matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Surely building the tower is going to offset a non-insignificant amount of it's CO2 'savings' vs Fossils?

</comment><comment><USER45> Why does it have to be that tall ? is it because the top end becomes much cooler with more height ?

<comment><USER45> Looks like that is the case from the article..

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> For just $2trillion, we could build enough of these to supply power for 300m homes!

</comment><comment><USER47> After I saw this story, I posted it to Facebook and my friend whose a journalist at Arizona's local news station picked it up and did a full blown story. [http://www.azfamily.com/news/Massive-solar-tower-in- Arizona-...](http://www.azfamily.com/news/Massive-solar-tower-in-Arizona-to- be-worlds-second-largest-building-126157183.html)

</comment><comment><USER48> The Empire State is New York State: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State>

Or did the article headline really mean the empire state BUILDING? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building>

<comment><USER48> Lovely, downvotes. Guess we don't have too many New Yorkers in the readership here. FYI, you can't shorten the Chrysler Building to 'Chrysler' either. That's a corporation.

<comment><USER49> No, it's because you're splitting hairs when the message was obvious. They used 'height' not 'elevation', and it is common knowledge that the Empire State (Building) was once the tallest building in the world.

<comment><USER48> 'building' is not optional.

<comment><USER50> Your burning karma thinks otherwise. Go find another hill to die on.

<comment><USER51> From <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> :

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Picplum Tech Stack - Backbone, Async Uploads, Prints API - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/u/dodeja/p/picplum-tech-stack

<comment><AUTHOR> I am presenting the Picplum Tech stack at the O'Reilly Fluent Conference (Javascript) in SF today. [http://fluentconf.com/fluent2012/public/schedule/detail/2538...](http://fluentconf.com/fluent2012/public/schedule/detail/25389)

It will be streamed live <http://fluentconf.com/fluent2012/public/content/video>

Oh and hey, send some free prints on us :)

<https://www.picplum.com/signup/ycprints>

</comment><comment><USER2> Other Picplum cofounder here -- hope to write an in-depth post about the particulars of our Backbone usage. We've been working on something that was quite a big app refactor. Complete with require.js modules (require 2.0 just came out, had to fork requirejs-rails to get it working <https://github.com/stammy/requirejs-rails>)

Anything in particular you guys would like to know about our Backbone usage?

<comment><USER3> How did you guys where to place the cutoff between having a single application "page" vs having normal server-side rendered pages? It seems like you guys have somewhat of a mix here I'm just curious what percentage of the rendering is done server side vs client side. What are the relative tradeoffs between the two?

Perhaps not related to backbone but how are you encoding the different "views" in your single page application? Does the client download all of the templates upfront or how does that work? Also does the client know which template to render for a given api call or is that passed down from the server as well?

I'd be very interested in reading a blog post demonstrating how you strung all of this together! Pretty cool!

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Client side vs server side rendering is pretty straight forward for us. Anything that is static, like the homepage, pricing, about is rendered server side. These pages don't change that often. Almost anything that is dynamic is client side. I would say 80% of the rendering is client side. Although the server does all the JSON handling and template rendering (handlebar pre- compiled templates).

Initially we had inline handlebar.js views wrapped around script tags. Now we precompile all templates into JS objects (<http://handlebarsjs.com/precompilation.html>). These templates are compressed and Gziped into one file and downloaded on page load. We will have two sets of templates now (common views used across the site and application specific views like account profile).

Blog post coming soon :)

<comment><USER4> Were there any issues with swapping out Backbone's built in templating for handlebarjs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Backbone does not have built in templates. Underscore templates are very basic for our needs.

<comment><USER5> He mean't to say "No problems!" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> * why did you choose Heroku and MongoHQ rather than EC2? Isn't Heroku super expensive once you get past the weekend project scale?

* why do you choose to extend views rather than using mixins?

* what was your experience with requireJS aside from your rails problems? Did you find it helped development or not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good questions.

 _Heroku vs EC2._

Honestly, going through YC you get a bunch of Heroku credits. You also get AWS credits but getting a production app on Heroku is very simple, especially with rails. I also have to build and manage fewer parts of the infrastructure/deployment when you are trying to scale up and down. I don't think it's that expensive if you have optimized parts of your stack. Use web for only serving API, single page app, optimized assets via CDN etc.

 _Extend vs Mixins._

For Picplum we are building multiple front end's that use the same models and view logic with slight modifications. For example on our new homepage (coming soon), you can upload photos, add recipients and send out photos without having to goto the app. This is our new on-boarding process. Extending makes a lot more sense her. Homepage Batch view vs App batch view, Homepage Recipients vs App Recipients.

 _Require.js_

We are still in the middle of figuring out a stable production setup with require. It helps you structure your Backbone app more efficiently. The tough part is to figure out how to bundle your js files effectively. You probably don't want every single JS file loading asynchronously since there can be 20+ files just for the homepage.

<comment><USER7> Re: Require.js - it is possible to build one JS file using the r.js build tool:

<http://requirejs.org/docs/optimization.html#onejs>

<comment><USER2> That's what we do (albeit through requirejs-rails that is a layer on top r.js)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mind elaborating about your image upload solution? What uploader did you use in the front end? transloadit vs cloudinary vs blitline vs hosting your own ?

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you talk a bit about why you use Transloadit?

<comment><USER2> When we first launched we ran into the 30 second heroku timeout issue that was affecting us with some users and larger uploads. The easiest option was just dropping in the Transloadit endpoint. We have a dedicated EC2 instance that we have been planning on converting to our upload box with nginx and its upload module.

<comment><USER10> Interesting reading that and after reading: <http://icelab.com.au/articles/money-stress-and-the-cloud/> (tl;dr: Credit card processing was breaking because of the 30 second limit).

Sounds like it would make sense for heroku to have a configurable timeout.</comment></comment></comment>


Jeffrey Immelt: How I Remade GE - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/09/inside-ges-transformation#how-i-remade-ge <comment><USER2> Last week WSJ reported Jeffrey Immelt is the frontrunner for Uber's next CEO. Out of the blue this article pops up. With sections about "Transformation", his connections to Silicon Valley, how he's hip and watches Netflix;

with quotes like

>"We were a classic conglomerate. Now people are calling us a 125-year-old start-up."

>"The two things that influenced me the most were Marc Andreessen's 2011 Wall Street Journal article, "Why Software Is Eating the World," and The Lean Startup—Eric Ries's book, which I literally read in a day."

The PR spin machines are already churning.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds a lot like a classic "submarine PR piece", with all the right references and even one spicy one (Mike Tyson quote).

"At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically."

I thought HBR was also relatively immune from printing such vanity pieces, evidently not.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article may as well be titled "Why I should be CEO of Uber."

Is a ghostwritten 6000+ word tome about Immelt's tenure at GE effective PR? Perhaps this is effective for advancing his goal of becoming the CEO of Uber, but it feels very dated.

I'm curious what would be an effective strategy for him today. Personally I think my title for his article would be more authentic. Just come out and say what you want. Declare that you are the best qualified person and aggressively state your case. No one will fault you for wanting this job.

The first thing people smell when they see this article is the PR effort that created it. The indirect approach creates suspicion and skepticism because of the cynicism tied to traditional PR.

Anyone else feel like being an armchair advisor to Immelt? What would you do?

</comment><comment><USER5> This reflects very poorly on Uber's future prospects. This candidate seems like a professional fail-upward person. There are plenty of these people in big businesses, but most are just barely better than leaving the job I filled.

For example, he says the CEO's job is to tie together all of a company's initiatives, and then he offers this:

"All the major initiatives we implemented during my tenure as CEO were aimed at making GE one of the 21st century's most valuable technology-driven industrial companies—one that can grow; one that can generate greater productivity for ourselves and our customers."

<comment><USER5> "leaving the job I filled" -> "leaving the job unfilled"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that amazes me most about all of this is that apparently, going from CEO of GE to CEO of Uber is considered an _upgrade_.

</comment><comment><USER7> this post would be much better if treated like the Satire it is ...

</comment><comment><USER8> For people that don't know what 'digital industrial' is: Basically you put sensors on all your products and then gather all that data to predict/prevent failures or problems.

But why does GE constantly use the term to showcase how they are drastically changing their company (the term was used 12 times in this article alone)? Their main products are still engines and trains right? The only difference is now they have trains with sensors on them. This seems like just the next move forward, using the computer/internet for more productivity. Why would you have to name it something and then write articles about how your entire company is changing?

</comment><comment><USER9> God, I despise this culture.

</comment><comment><USER10> This might sound petty, but the number of "I" in the writing was a bit overbearing.

</comment><comment><USER11> GE share prices have mostly been in decline since Immelt took over from Welch. Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER12> This firmly points to his imminent appointment as the next CEO of Uber.</comment>


Filtrbox acquired by Jive Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/07/jive-software-acquires-social-media-monitoring-startup-filtrbox/

<comment><USER2> I read (somewhere else) that this is the _4th_ of the TechStars class of 10 to be acquired. Obviously, "acquired" can mean that the founders got a fat signing bonus and an unusually large options plan at the acquiring company, but I still think that's impressive for TechStars. It's still early to judge, but the % of TechStars companies that get Series A funding and the % that have been acquired is starting to look pretty impressive, especially considering that it's in Boulder.

/respect to Filtrbox and TechStars both.

<comment><USER3> The "especially considering that it's in Boulder" statement really rubbed me wrong. The rate at which the Techstars founders are succeeding isn't surprising, if you look at the caliber of mentorship that's available in the area.

I'm originally from the SV, and am currently fairly active in the Boulder startup and tech community. I've been very impressed with the accessibility of prominent investors and successful founders in Boulder. There's the same type of geek magic here that the SV has. There's the same communal desire to help other startups succeed and grow, but with a tight-knit small-town feel.

If you haven't tried Boulder's tech community on for size, you really should. Hit <http://boulder.me> for more.

<comment><USER2> You read it wrong (or I was unclear in what I meant, more likely).

YC and PG (and thus news.yc) has a STRONG valley bias. I personally think the Valley's importance is overblown (and that the domination of the Valley is fading). So the remark was more of a jab at valley purists than a statement that "secondary" cities like Boulder (and Seattle, where I am) are less solid. That said, of course, statistically more startups get funded and sold in the valley than anywhere else (by raw # and percentage, near as I can tell). So yeah, I guess these numbers would be remarkable in the valley and are slightly more remarkable in a non-valley town.

I have a few posts (with some data) talking about how I think the Valley is losing dominance-- and I'd think TechStars' success is yet another data point here.

(search for "valley" and see 1st, 2nd, and 5th post on my blog if you'd like to see some interest data: <http://www.tonywright.com/> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who first read this headline as:

"Firefox acquired by Jive Software" ?

I just had to click on it after thinking "how is that possible?".

<comment><USER5> I read it as Flirtbox. Jive Software makes "enterprise" blogs and wikis; I wondered if they were getting into the business of dating sites for the enterprise?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do the financials of an exit like this work out?

<comment><USER2> Pretty hard to know without knowing the landscape.

Scenario #1: FiltrBox was almost out of money and wasn't doing well enough to justify additional investment. They had no compelling IP/patents. Investors make a few phone calls and get a CEO to "buy" the company, which really means $50k signing bonuses for the founders and a nice options package.

Scenario #2: FiltrBox was killing it, growing like wildfire. They had a great IP attorney and some really impressive tech. Jive wanted the team and the IP bad and put together a $5m offer (stock heavy, likely).

Or anything in between....

(or anything in between).

<comment><USER6> I do wonder how they were doing. I tried out FiltrBox and after the trial they wanted $1k/yr for the service. Suffice to say we weren't their target market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats to Ari and Tom!

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats, guys!</comment>


HackerNode: Free iOS HackerNews Client I made - <AUTHOR> http://install.nodemesh.net/r/Fxfj

<comment><USER2> I would say HackerNode both on iPhone and iPad are the best HN apps I've found. I use them multiple times per day. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish it supported logins and comments natively... Unless it does and I'm not seeing it...

<comment><USER4> Give Hackerful a try [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackerful-ycombinators- hacke...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackerful-ycombinators- hacker/id578256868?mt=8) . It's free and it supports voting as well as submitting comments and stories.

Disclaimer: I'm the developer

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks pretty good and works really smoothly! Still, I prefer the HN RSS feed and Mr. Reader. For some reason, I like to see what I've read already...

<comment><USER6> One of the things I added to Hacker News Padreader was to mark what's been read. Give it a shot: [http://itunes.apple.com/app/hacker-news- padreader/id42833141...](http://itunes.apple.com/app/hacker-news- padreader/id428331410?mt=8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like others I also use HackerNode daily....thanks for building it!

I think my only feature request would be to have it support landscape mode, at least for the embedded browser.

Thanks again for the great app!

</comment><comment><USER8> Used for a bit and appreciate the effort. Always felt the navigation wasn't a good fit because of the way it pulls up the pages (non full screen). I prefer just heading directly over to HN via my iPads browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is my preferred client, though mostly on iPhone, as using the browser on my iPad isn't nearly as much of a problem. Great work.

I would love if there was a "hide visited" option somehow. Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER6> Neat, You and I had similar things in mind when building our HN apps. What prompted you to build one too? In my case, it was the lack of login and vote support in every other app I'd tried.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I just wanted to build a network of apps, and since I read HN everyday I thought I might as well start with HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using this app for a while and feel this is the best iphone app for HN. great job.

</comment><comment><USER11> Also been using it for a while too. Solid app. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER12> Not really a criticism, but wow- that's a lot of orange!

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you for having a "add to pocket" option.

</comment><comment><USER14> Been using it for a while, works great.</comment>


Finite state machines as data structures (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/#finite-state-machines-as-data-structures <comment><USER2> (with proper formatting this time)

Note that it is perfectly possible to have more complicated values associated with FST keys, just not in the [https://docs.rs/fst/0.3.3/fst/map/index.html](https://docs.rs/fst/0.3.3/fst/map/index.html) implementation. FST's _can also be cyclic_ – this lets you represent things you couldn't with just a hash table.

\-----

Anyone who wants to play around with this should try the HFST[1] library, which lets you create compact and possibly cyclic string-to-string maps, which are closed under union, intersection, reversal, inversion, difference, composition. HFST makes it quite easy to do different operations on FST's:

        $ echo 'c a t 0:%+N 0:%+Sg' | hfst-regexp2fst > cat.fst
        $ echo cat |hfst-lookup -q cat.fst
        cat     cat+N+Sg        0,000000

(the default is for each arc to have input-equals-output, but you can use : to map inputs to outputs, and use % to escape special characters; 0 is epsilon/"nothing")

        $ echo cats |hfst-lookup -q cat.fst
        cats    cats+?  inf

only singular, so let's make one for the plural:

        $ echo 'c a t 0:%+N s:%+Pl' | hfst-regexp2fst > cats.fst
        $ echo cats |hfst-lookup -q cats.fst
        cats    cat+N+Pl        0,000000

and combine them:

        $ hfst-union -1 cat.fst -2 cats.fst >feline.fst
        $ hfst-fst2strings feline.fst
        cat:cat+N+Sg
        cats:cat+N+Pl

and make it go from analysis to form:

        $ hfst-invert feline.fst > ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst
        $ echo 'cat+N+Pl' | hfst-lookup -q ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst
        cat+N+Pl        cats    0,000000
        $ hfst-fst2strings ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst
        cat+N+Sg:cat
        cat+N+Pl:cats

this is what the states look like:

        $ hfst-fst2txt feline.fst
        0       1       c       c       0.000000
        0       6       @0@     @0@     0.000000
        1       2       a       a       0.000000
        2       3       t       t       0.000000
        3       4       @0@     +N      0.000000
        4       5       @0@     +Sg     0.000000
        5       0.000000
        6       7       c       c       0.000000
        7       8       a       a       0.000000
        8       9       t       t       0.000000
        9       10      @0@     +N      0.000000
        10      11      s       +Pl     0.000000
        11      0.000000

there's some redundancy, so we should minimize it:

        $ hfst-minimize feline.fst  >min.fst
        $ hfst-fst2txt min.fst
        0       1       c       c       0.000000
        1       2       a       a       0.000000
        2       3       t       t       0.000000
        3       4       @0@     +N      0.000000
        4       5       @0@     +Sg     0.000000
        4       5       s       +Pl     0.000000
        5       0.000000

Now let's make an FST that turns slashes into +-es and increases the weight for every slash we see (~$[ a ] means anything-but-a):

        $ echo '%/:%+ ~$[ %/ ]' | hfst-regexp2fst | hfst-reweight --end-states-only --addition=1 |hfst-fst2txt
        0       1       /       +       0.000000
        1       1       +       +       0.000000
        1       1       @_IDENTITY_SYMBOL_@     @_IDENTITY_SYMBOL_@     0.000000
        1       1.000000

        $ echo '%/:%+ ~$[ %/ ]' | hfst-regexp2fst | hfst-reweight --end-states-only --addition=1 | hfst-repeat > dir.fst
        $ echo /a | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst
        /a      +a      1,000000

        $ echo /ab/c | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst
        /ab/c   +ab+c   2,000000

        $ echo /ab/c/d//e | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst
        /ab/c/d//e      +ab+c+d++e      5,000000

– that's not something you can do with (just) a hash table.

\-----

On Debians you can install the package `giella-sme` which gives you a 37M cyclic FST of 587060 states and 1101943 arcs which turns North Sámi word forms into analyses. North Sámi has productive compounding, so e.g. "school bus coffee" is a word that I suppose someone might say:

        $ echo 'skuvlabussegáfe' | hfst-lookup -q /usr/share/giella/sme/analyser-disamb-gt-desc.hfstol |head -1
        skuvlabussegáfe	skuvlabusse+G3+Sem/Veh+N+Err/Orth+SgNomCmp+Cmp#gáfe+Sem/Plant+N+Sg+Nom	10,000000

and there's a bit of ambiguity in the analysis:

        $ echo 'skuvlabussegáfe' | hfst-lookup -q /usr/share/giella/sme/analyser-disamb-gt-desc.hfstol |wc -l
        64

[1] [https://github.com/hfst/hfst/](https://github.com/hfst/hfst/) , using among others [http://openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome](http://openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome) under the hood. `sudo apt install hfst` on Debians

<comment><USER3> Can you say more about the trade offs? In your cyclic formulation, can you still build nearly minimal FSTs in a streaming linear fashion with constant heap memory?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Note that it is perfectly possible to have more complicated values associated with FST keys, just not in the [https://docs.rs/fst/0.3.3/fst/map/index.html](https://docs.rs/fst/0.3.3/fst/map/index.html) implementation. FST's can also be cyclic – this lets you represent things you couldn't with just a hash table.

Anyone who wants to play around with this should try the HFST[1] library, which lets you create compact and possibly cyclic string-to-string maps, which are closed under union, intersection, reversal, inversion, difference, composition. HFST makes it quite easy to do different operations on FST's:

$ echo 'c a t 0:%+N 0:%+Sg' | hfst-regexp2fst > cat.fst $ echo cat |hfst- lookup -q cat.fst cat cat+N+Sg 0,000000

(the default is for each arc to have input-equals-output, but you can use : to map inputs to outputs, and use % to escape special characters; 0 is epsilon/"nothing")

$ echo cats |hfst-lookup -q cat.fst cats cats+? inf

$ echo 'c a t 0:%+N s:%+Pl' | hfst-regexp2fst > cats.fst $ echo cats |hfst- lookup -q cats.fst cats cat+N+Pl 0,000000

$ hfst-union -1 cat.fst -2 cats.fst >feline.fst $ hfst-fst2strings feline.fst cat:cat+N+Sg cats:cat+N+Pl

$ hfst-invert feline.fst > ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst $ echo 'cat+N+Pl' | hfst-lookup -q ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst cat+N+Pl cats 0,000000 $ hfst-fst2strings ɟǝlᴉuǝ.fst cat+N+Sg:cat cat+N+Pl:cats

$ hfst-fst2txt feline.fst 0 1 c c 0.000000 0 6 @0@ @0@ 0.000000 1 2 a a 0.000000 2 3 t t 0.000000 3 4 @0@ +N 0.000000 4 5 @0@ +Sg 0.000000 5 0.000000 6 7 c c 0.000000 7 8 a a 0.000000 8 9 t t 0.000000 9 10 @0@ +N 0.000000 10 11 s +Pl 0.000000 11 0.000000

$ hfst-minimize feline.fst >min.fst $ hfst-fst2txt min.fst 0 1 c c 0.000000 1 2 a a 0.000000 2 3 t t 0.000000 3 4 @0@ +N 0.000000 4 5 @0@ +Sg 0.000000 4 5 s +Pl 0.000000 5 0.000000

Now let's make an FST that turns slashes into +-es and increases the weight for every slash we see (~$[ a ] means anything-but-a):

$ echo '%/:%+ ~$[ %/ ]' | hfst-regexp2fst | hfst-reweight --end-states-only --addition=1 |hfst-fst2txt 0 1 / \+ 0.000000 1 1 + + 0.000000 1 1 @_IDENTITY_SYMBOL_@ @_IDENTITY_SYMBOL_@ 0.000000 1 1.000000

$ echo '%/:%+ ~$[ %/ ]' | hfst-regexp2fst | hfst-reweight --end-states-only --addition=1 | hfst-repeat > dir.fst $ echo /a | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst /a +a 1,000000

$ echo /ab/c | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst /ab/c +ab+c 2,000000

$ echo /ab/c/d//e | hfst-lookup -q dir.fst /ab/c/d//e +ab+c+d++e 5,000000

On Debians you can install the package `giella-sme` which gives you a 37M cyclic FST of 587060 states and 1101943 arcs which turns North Sámi word forms into analyses. North Sámi has productive compounding, so e.g. "school bus coffee" is a word that I suppose someone might say:

$ echo 'skuvlabussegáfe' | hfst-lookup -q /usr/share/giella/sme/analyser- disamb-gt-desc.hfstol |head -1 skuvlabussegáfe skuvlabusse+G3+Sem/Veh+N+Err/Orth+SgNomCmp+Cmp#gáfe+Sem/Plant+N+Sg+Nom 10,000000

and there's a bit of ambiguity in the analysis:

$ echo 'skuvlabussegáfe' | hfst-lookup -q /usr/share/giella/sme/analyser- disamb-gt-desc.hfstol |wc -l 64

[1] [https://github.com/hfst/hfst/](https://github.com/hfst/hfst/) , using among others [http://openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome](http://openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome) under the hood. `sudo apt install hfst` on Debians</comment>


Altran Technologies had a cyber attack - <AUTHOR> https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/28/1705841/0/en/ALTRAN-TECHNOLOGIES-Information-on-a-cyber-attack.html <comment><USER2> Yeap. I collaborate with them and it was crazy.</comment>


Another Cloudflare Shortage? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Their status page shows no incidents just like last week, very disappointing given this situation: [https://i.imgur.com/qHBM2JW.png](https://i.imgur.com/qHBM2JW.png)

Twitter seems to be the most reliable status page for CF these days: [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=cloudflare](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=cloudflare)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/](https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/)

> Network Performance Issues Investigating - Cloudflare is observing network > performance issues. Customers may be experiencing 502 errors while accessing > sites on Cloudflare.

> We are working to mitigate impact to Internet users in this region. Jul 2, > 13:52 UTC

</comment><comment><USER4> Woah a few big ones are down, anyone see any others?

502 - [https://www.npmjs.com/](https://www.npmjs.com/)

502 - [https://medium.com/](https://medium.com/)

502 - [https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)

502 - [https://blog.cloudflare.com/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/)

502 - [https://cdnjs.com/](https://cdnjs.com/)

Can't wait to here about this one!

</comment><comment><USER5> All my favorite website are down

[https://site-de-streaming.com](https://site-de-streaming.com)

[https://emule-island.eu](https://emule-island.eu)

[https://informagenie.com](https://informagenie.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah seems like it [https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/) returns a 502 because of cloudflare, at least it looks like that. No incidents reported on the status page yet though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nothing to worry boys. All systems are operational according to Cloudflare.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks like it. We are experiencing 502 Bad Gateway on [https://taskade.com](https://taskade.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> Getting 502s our end from London too into AWS. Status page seems to be flipping between "minor" and "all good".

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems to be regional. I see no difference in BW (1.9gbps currently) on our peering with CF and everything works fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can confirm seeing 502s here, all our alerts just started going off

</comment><comment><USER11> Also getting 502s on my site and many others near Amsterdam.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm seeing this all over the web currrently.

</comment><comment><USER13> my sites are down as well.

ironically the first thing I did was check downforeveryoneorjustme.com

but they're showing a 502 cloudflare page too

</comment><comment><USER14> linustechtips.com too Funnily enough, isitdownrightnow.com just stopped loading for me, not even 502!

</comment><comment><USER15> Same here; all sites down with a 502.

</comment><comment> the-dude Seeing issues in NL. Intermittent.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like it, Medium is down too.

</comment><comment><USER17> A shortage of availability.

</comment><comment><USER18> Lots of 502s for me as well

</comment><comment><USER19> #CloudflareDown

</comment><comment><USER20> medium.com is down because of it</comment>


If you're at the Rio Olympics, you've probably already been hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/debug/rio-olympics-fake-apps-wifi/ <comment><AUTHOR> > _" SSL decrypting Wi-Fi networks break encryption to look into the encrypted > data," Varun Kohli, vice president of marketing at Skycure_

Anyone have any idea what's he's talking about? Sounds like BS to me unless you've deliberately configured your browser to trust their proxy or something like that.

<comment><USER2> And nowadays, if it were based on misissued certificates, Google would have (a lot of) real-time reports about it from pinning violations. Although maybe an attacker could be selective about never attacking something with a pin, and trying to block any kind of pinning violation report.</comment></comment>


Working with Facebook f8: you are not in control of your access - <AUTHOR> http://www.vecosys.com/2007/05/28/working-with-facebook-f8-you-are-not-in-control-of-your-access/ <comment><USER2> Pretty much any service has these same terms. What do you expect them to do? Promise to not do anything similar to any app people happen to build? Promise to provide free access forever? No responsible business would do that.

Any time you're building your business on top of something that isn't in your control, you should be cautious. This isn't any different.</comment>


Pay a laywer or use Termly.io (a privacy policy/terms of use generator)? - <AUTHOR> We're going to launch our mobile app in a couple weeks, and I wondered if we need to hire a lawyer OR if we can just use Termly.io .
They generate your privacy policy/terms of user automatically and are a lot cheaper than a lawyer.
Does anyone have experience using them? Or advice? <comment><USER2> Can't comment on Termly specifically, but I have used services to generate basic templates for me to get moving with and then as we had resources we had attorney's review the T&C etc. Two things I usually do when I use a template, one make sure there is some statement about the right to update at any time, and two I compare it to other similar services to see if there are any key sections missing which I might be concerned about.

IANAL, but this has worked for me in the past and when I had enough resources I had an attorney go over it all for me. The only time I can think of right now where I'd not launch without a legal review first would be if my software/solution was in a high liability area. e.g. if it managed peoples bank information, or health care data etc.

*edit fixed a word

<comment><USER3> When you had attorneys review the documents did they find a lot of issues or was it mostly OK?

<comment><USER2> Generally good, with only a few corrections that were pretty specialized to our situation, or in one place our home State. To be clear, the one I had reviewed by an attorney in Texas, his office pointed out to me that they used a service to generate them too and just modified those to save time.

Every time I've used attorney's where we had to produce documentation they either took a prior case pleading and copied it, or they used one of the services that produces the template pleading and then just modified it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We got ours through our insurance provider. It was a template of sort and I had to pour to tonnes of pages, but they provided helpful guides and also had templates for everything from Privacy Policy, T&Cs, Cookies, GDPR, to (separate) Acceptable Use, Sales... and other documents I didn't even think we needed.

They also happen to be a legal services provider, so I don't know if it's standard practice, but it's maybe one other alternative to think about.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I get involved with Linux/OpenSSL/GnuPG/etc - <AUTHOR> What would it take to be involved in $bigScaryOpenSourceProject? I'm passionate about cryptography, security, and privacy so projects like Linux, Firefox, OpenSSL, etc... might be perfect for me to get more involved with. Outside learning C or possibly Rust (for Firefox development in future) I have no idea how I'd start with any of these projects, partly as my day job is all web based so it's what I've been focused on for years.<p>Are there valuable contributions I can make outside writing code? For example, SSL can be tricky to setup but tools like SSL Test and the Mozilla Server Side TLS wiki page are invaluable in making us all safer. What's something in security that's too difficult or time consuming that I could work to automate or make easier? <comment><USER2> Subscribe to the mailing lists of one of these projects and try to build the project from source. Check the bug trackers for things that are not very interesting but need fixing anyway. Then prepare a patch and try to upstream it (the method depends on the project).

As you work on the little things you will slowly gain a better understanding of how the code base is organised and how you could contribute more significant changes.

Valuable contributions outside of writing code differ across projects, but most lack current or understandable documentation. As you learn about the project and read whatever documentation might already be there you will certainly find things that can be clarified.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've contributed to open source software, and done a little maintenance work too. The number one thing I recommend is that you email the project mailing list _before_ you start work. Tell them that you're new, but you want to help. People are usually happy to help newcomers find an appropriate project and answer questions along the way.

What I've seen going wrong in the past is where people decide that they want to contribute to a project and don't tell anyone else about it until they've written hundreds or thousands of lines of code that are never going to be accepted, because the maintainers don't like their overall design (or the maintainers don't agree with the direction of the patch, or something else that could have been caught early but is way too late now).

Communicate early, communicate often. And if a community doesn't like that, leave and find a different one. Your time is more valuable than that.

P.S. and be sure you're contributing to a project that you are passionate about, not just one that sounds cool. Having your own intrinsic motivation will make a huge difference.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should consider working on some of the PyCA projects, including any of cryptography, PyNaCl, PyOpenSSL. They are smart people with solid engineering practices and a lot of experience.

The reason you should consider it is twofold:

\- Code is only good if it's used, and ideally, usable. \- This gives you a great opportunity to learn a lot about OpenSSL in an environment that has more (resources for) mentorship and unit tests.

[https://www.github.com/pyca](https://www.github.com/pyca)

Disclaimer: While I was around when it was founded and am still officially its resident cryptographer, I don't really do much of the work. I just occasionally show up and say "Frobenius" a lot.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mozilla has documentation on this, see [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Introduction)

For the other projects you listed I'm not aware of such documentation, but I'd recommend you just go ahead and ask them directly :).

<comment><USER7> Very nice, lots of documentation and for different skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You could help open source projects get their code into Coverity, a static analysis tool. It helps if they have a github repo, and it's even better if they use Travis-CI. Using Coverity will help identify some security issues that can be mitigated right away.

Secondly, you can fuzz FLOSS software, using something like afl-fuzz, American Fuzzy Lop. The following tutorial has some pointers to get started, and obviously software written in C is easier to get started with. If you need help with something, feel free to ask on the afl-users mailing list. You can fuzz on a CPU-heavy VM somewhere, like DigitalOcean, an Amazon spot instance, or a Google preemptible instance.

[https://fuzzing-project.org/tutorials.html](https://fuzzing- project.org/tutorials.html)

In fuzzing, once you get the hang of it, you'll find that your keyboard time is the limiting factor. You'll set up a test case in 15-20 minutes, leave it fuzzing for a day, and come back to spend at least 1-2 hours working through crashes and reporting the bugs through their channels.

You may be saying "Wait I don't know anything about C," but honestly, I don't know anything about C either, and I've found hundreds of bugs with fuzzing. There are some crash dump investigation tools that give you an idea of the nature of the crash (gdb's exploitable.py) and that's usually enough to report to the maintainer. When the maintainer has a fix released, you can send an email to the oss-security mailing list detailing what you know about it. MITRE can assign a CVE on the mailing list if you describe the bug appropriately when you ask for one.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to recommend Raymond Hettinger's talk from last month, Where he talks about how to contribute to the Python project. I think it's a great talk even if you're not coming from the Python world and can serve as general tips for contributing to a large open source project.

[https://youtu.be/-TdrFjDJn5E](https://youtu.be/-TdrFjDJn5E)

</comment><comment><USER10> $bigScaryOpenSourceProjects are very picky about how contributions are made and are unfriendly to newbies. Most of your time will be spent arguing over one or two lines of code. If you haven't contributed to open source before, your best bet is to start on smaller open source projects who have forgiving maintainers.

<comment><USER11> For instance, Rust. They're the friendliest community around.

<comment><USER12> Seconded. Try reading the last couple of issues of This Week in Rust, and then look at the most recent "Call for Participation" section.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My $0.02:

* Pick a project you use and like. This way you will already be familiar with some aspects of the projects and you will have an idea for what works and what doesn't. You will be able to use your improvements for yourself.

* It's easier to contribute to a small project than a larger one. Larger projects are usually more complex and require understanding more code. If a smaller project has less people involved with it, it will be easier for you to get to know everyone and for everyone to get to know you.

* It's also easier to contribute to newer projects. Older projects usually have strict guidelines that can take a while to get used to. They often have internal politics that come into play. Finally newer projects have a lot of "low hanging fruits", simple things that anybody can fix.

You can start with commits that fix docs or clarify the code with additional comments. Contribute some unit tests, etc. As you familiarize yourself with the code and the process, you will be able to fix larger bugs and even implement new features.

</comment><comment><USER14> It would probably take two years of coding in C to do real work for those projects. If you want to make an impact, fill in the gaps in their man-power to do the things that are not writing software features.

Go to their bug trackers and start working on the smallest bugs. Or write extensions for the most popular new languages to use their libraries or apps, so new programmers can take advantage of the existing crypto. Or write or update documentation. Or write user-friendly guides on what people need to use and how. Or fill the holes in their test routines to find new bugs faster, and build new test platforms for wider platform coverage. Or track down performance bugs.

</comment><comment><USER15> The number one thing you can do is regularly use and exercise the piece of software of interest. Want to contribute to OpenSSL? Use it! Use it in a way beyond that of a "how-to" tutorial on a first Google hit.

Second, I would say start reading the manual, or at least skimming it. Get a better understanding of what the software actually intends to do, not what you _think_ it intends to do. Remember that documentation is a part of software, so improvements are always welcome here!

Then, after, you can learn how to build the software. Make an easy modification (like changing a title, or changing something that gets printed out), and recompile and observe the change. From here you can look at a high level what gets built in what order, and what's important in the project.

Finally, you can start thinking about bugs that have been recorded in a bug tracker, or attempting to implement a neat improvement or feature. Look/ask for guidance, so you don't spend time doing something that ultimately no one will want or care about (which isn't to say it wasn't appreciated, but many projects have specific guidelines/goals/etc. and it's important your changes fit with those).

</comment><comment><USER16> Linux — [http://eudyptula-challenge.org/](http://eudyptula-challenge.org/) is a good place to start.

OpenSSL and GPG — subscribe to relevant mailing lists, find something wrong with them and discuss with upstream / fix it. This could be missing tests/docs or a bug.

Adding new functionality is harder to do as an outsider, but these other areas are somewhat easier to contribute to (in general).

</comment><comment><USER17> I have contributed to Firefox and Servo and found both communities to be incredibly patient, tolerant and friendly.

You can find bugs in bugzilla (firefox) or github (servo) that are labelled as suitable for newbies, my advice is to try and build it first then pick one up and go for it!

</comment><comment><USER18> I managed an open source project (OSSEC) for many years and this was a common question I would hear.

I gave some hints here: [http://dcid.me/notes/2013-may-12](http://dcid.me/notes/2013-may-12)

That I hope can be useful for you.

thanks,

</comment><comment><USER19> For the Linux kernel specifically, I think the "aspiring new developer" entry point is [https://kernelnewbies.org/](https://kernelnewbies.org/) .

 _Are there valuable contributions I can make outside writing code?_

Traditionally, documentation has always been rather lacking for the bulk of projects.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone for your comments and ideas!

</comment><comment><USER20> For OpenSSL, we wrote this: [https://www.openssl.org/community/getting- started.html](https://www.openssl.org/community/getting-started.html) Please send feedback :)

</comment><comment><USER21> "Write and submit your first Kernel patch" by Greg Kroah-Hartman:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLBrBBImJt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLBrBBImJt4)

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't worry about working with an important project.

Look for something you care about, and are willing to put the work into improving. Software you use is a good start.

Less popular software is more likely to be happy for help.

</comment><comment><USER23> Start small (fixing typos for eg), read code and fix issues you notice in the process.

Also, check out Kernelnewbies:

[http://kernelnewbies.org/](http://kernelnewbies.org/)</comment>


Check out my startup :) - <AUTHOR> http://www.getswapp.me/ <comment><USER2> This has potential to be hilarious. Great idea.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thank you!</comment>


Should I use a girl or guy to sell a product/service? - <AUTHOR>

I am starting a search engine marketing start up and I need help from someone to make me a professional video about my service.
Something like: http://www.pepperjam.com/
Do anyone know where I can get someone to make it. Any web 2.0 out there offer this type of service?
Where do I get someone to make me a professional video? <comment><USER2> I like how the details of this guy's business are unfolding. Take a look at his profile for some good reading:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=youyap>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=youyap>

<comment><USER3> Wow, this guy is pathetic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I assume you're also looking for lower cost? Post an ad at a local school with a film program. Those kids want to augment their resumes and are often more than happy to share their talent for very little cost.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wasn't particularly impressed by her screencasts, but I'm pretty sure you're looking for something like <http://demogirl.com/>. You could also do it yourself <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screencasting_software>. If you're looking for an actual video (like the one you linked to) as opposed to a screencast, you might want to look into some of your local advertising agencies.

</comment><comment> mark-t All things equal, I would rather see a girl, and I'd wager about 90% of the people here are in the same boat. My guess is that your audience is pretty similar to this one.

But note the first three words: all things equal. You should choose the best person for the job.

</comment><comment><USER6> Go for Morgan Webb.

</comment><comment><USER7> Far better you look at the behavioral competencies that will make a good sales person - start from there.

Try Googleing BBI (Behavioral Based Interviews)

</comment><comment><USER8> How about you just choose someone based on their talents and not what they have between their legs?

<comment><USER9> Or don't have....

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> lonelygirl15

<comment><USER10> Also, more seriously, here is a video highlighting a professional ad service you can use: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Starting from your question, you seem to prefer girls.

Anyway, girls are better, and guys are better, too.

If you start to prefer a specific gender, you always exclude the other 50% of talented people.

<comment><USER12> _Starting from your question, you seem to prefer girls._

You know, the letter 'i' is before the letter 'u'. He could just be used to giving the alphabetical order of things.

<comment><USER11> The real difficulty here is the fact that you can't say it _absolutely_ _neutrally_.

<comment><USER13> What gender should I ... ?

<comment><USER11> ...and you have already 3 (including hermaphrodites).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you ask whether you should use somebodies service at all? or which gender you should prefer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Somebodies and Gender</comment></comment>


Godwin's Law of Internet Discussions - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

<comment><USER2> You're worse than Hitler for posting this.</comment>


Nintendo is the Bad Guy - <AUTHOR> http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/14662-Nintendo-is-the-Bad-Guy <comment><USER2> These might possibly be the worst analogies I've ever heard. This isn't the equivalent of folding up paper airplanes of Harry Potter and throwing them around the room.

This is the equivalent of making a youtube video of you reading through each chapter one-by-one using an e-reader that only works with pirated copies of the book. Nintendo is absolutely NOT the bad guy.

<comment><USER3> Except games are an interactive medium, and watching someone else play isn't the same as listening to someone else read a book.

<comment><USER4> The final product would not exist with either part missing.

<comment><USER3> Now comes the argument about derivative vs transformative works.

This is not as black and white as you guys are making it out to be.

<comment><USER4> Transformative works is a bandaid because we have no better solution to apportion how much value each party brings to the table.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Milo Criterion - <AUTHOR> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/09/23/the-milo-criterion

<comment><USER2> I was rather let down by this.

The author does a fantastic job of establishing that, through metaphorical thinking, he has hit upon some good wisdom for marketing and development of new products. Good, good. That this wisdom invalidates Lean Startup theory, MVP, etcetera. Ok, controversial, but I can dig it. He alludes to the process he went through to nurture this wisdom, and how it has been subconsciously applied by many, to great success. Getting inspirational, I love it. Then he says that he won't be sharing what he's come up with. The end. Excuse me?

Sure, given the premise, I can do my own musing on the subject and come to my own conclusions. But I don't have the same degree of experience as this author. I don't blog about "refactored perception", I don't think about these sorts of things very often (I work in a _very_ different industry), so I would love the insight of someone who does.

I'm interested in seeing the arc of his thinking, going from the initial abstract musing with calves and cows, to a fascinating new approach to practical process. That sounds like a great arc to see, even if I won't be following it myself.

In hindsight, this just feels a bit like Article Bait or Concept Bait (as opposed to link bait). It promises a "refactored perception", and delivers a "redacted prescription".

ADDENDUM: Yes, it's a great read. I really enjoyed reading it. It'll give me some good things to think about. But the ending is a complete cop-out, only conceding the tiniest hint that he might follow up on this in the future. I agree, better to not have the last section at all. Better still, to say that he will indeed write more if people show interest. I would love to read more about this.

<comment><USER3> One thing that emphasizes the effect (as is the case with most blogs recently) is that the scroll bar shows a lengthy page but the content only makes a small part at the top.

End result: Unbeknownst to me, the page is comment-filled, so I was happily reading and scrolling down expecting content that up till now was really enjoyable, and was suddenly struck by The End. What a let down.

I really like the Ars Technica approach of initially hiding the comments. It really helps not raising expectations length-wise.

<comment><USER4> You didnt read the comments then? Including the one where he says "Oh well, I said I wouldn't post my actual critique, but looks like I've gotten sucked into doing so in the comments." they are laregly an extension of the article, all high quality...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me, or was the point of this meandering ditty that "You should introduce adaptations at the same rate that people want to adapt"?

I mean, that's not very helpful. I can figure that out myself.

Even the analogy of Milo is broken, given what we know about strength gains (Olympic weightlifting is my hobby). In particular, strength gains are non- linear. Any developmental curve is the consequence not of some given simple multiplicative factor but of a complex set of feedback loops that govern adaptation.

And so it is with technological advancement. I'd be amazed to see a single number governing adaptation to novelty (which is what we're discussing here).

If anything it's going to depend on who is adapting, what they've seen in the past, what they're adapting to and so on. If it seems like a smooth, linear process, that's because we're looking at it from an overly compressed time frame. Lots of phenomena look smooth if you squish them up.

<comment><USER6> I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce something to obviousness and then say it's too simple.

The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog- meets-I'm-on-acid?

Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative. Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it. That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the order of growth curves.

What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting those limits.

I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer tolerance for change.

My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that limit.

However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!

<comment><USER5> A thoughtful reply, thankyou.

> Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter > succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid?

It so happens I recently wrote an essay on essentially this topic. Email me and I'll be happy to forward it to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man.

Calves grow for a year or so.

      A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 lb.

Also freakish since he had the maturation rate of a cow, or had a knack for breeding cows with the maturation rate of a man.

      The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

No, it didn't.

      I have been pondering this story for a couple of years...

Have you really been pondering this story for a couple years? Maybe not that closely.

Your metaphor is broken. Milo lifted lots of different calves.

<comment><USER8> It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up together.

Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew up at about the same rate? Really?

<comment><USER9> Milo of Croton was a real guy, so it's not a "Greek Myth" in the usual sense. Almost certainly most of the exaggerated stories told about him are apocryphal, though.

 _Legends say he carried his own bronze statue to its place at Olympia, and once carried a four-year-old bull on his shoulders before slaughtering, roasting, and devouring it in one day._</comment></comment></comment>


On Valid Government - <AUTHOR> http://technocracynow.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> It'd be nice to have a civic entity to be apart of with pride and conviction.

If the defeat of SOPA is any indication, it appears that "The Children of the Internet" could be influential rather quickly and effectively.</comment>


An open letter to members of the New Jersey District Court, FBI, and DOJ - <AUTHOR> http://weev.livejournal.com/405848.html

<comment> jack-r-abbit Previously discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7774603)</comment>


Hack Your Speaking Skills - <AUTHOR> http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/volume_10/v10i4_yaffe.html <comment><USER2> Tips for hacking your speaking skills:

1) Most importantly, practice it out loud. Do it about 20 times and you'll be comfortable enough to deliver it with only glances at note cards. 90% of being nervous comes from not knowing what you're going to do or say.

2) Second most important, make it relevant to your audience. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone you knew wasn't interested in what you had to say? It's the only thing that to this day still makes me nervous. I've given network neutrality speeches to college students in liberal arts programs, and the thing that works here is heavy use of metaphors. I had the single most attractive girl from class walk up to me at a bar later that week and she told me that she told all her friends how serious network neutrality is. I was baffled.

3) There are actually a set of rules you can follow, giving presentations can be seen as more of a science now (even the part about making your presentations entertaining is written in there). Take a class in school, or two. You really need to learn how to get up in front of large crowds and talk confidently about something. Don't let fear be your reason not to do it.

<comment><USER3> _the single most attractive girl from class_

Apropos of nothing, I started doing competitive forensics in 8th grade to get over a speech impediment and generic social anxiety, and continued doing it through college. It worked like a charm.

I never considered using the same techniques for, e.g., chatting up young ladies until about this year. Works like a charm. _Effity_ I wish I had realized that ten years ago. (Some of the techniques, anyhow. The whole play- to-crush ethos, not so much. Eye contact? Sounding confident of what you are saying? Intently listening and coming back to things you've both said later in the conversation for emphasis? They work great.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of toastmasters (it gets mentioned towards the bottom). First they get you to deal with nervousness. Then they train you. It's amazingly painless. All with an organization that very much resembles open-source, UGC, etc.

<comment><USER2> The ONE thing I never liked was the corny part where they did joke of the day. It's not funny when you're there trying to give a joke. It's like asking someone to tickle you.

Other than that, Toastmasters is really good. Don't need it if your school gives classes, but it never hurts.

By the way, I can vouch for Owen's speaking abilities =)

<comment><USER4> Owen blushes and is curious of where you saw me. Given the geography, I'm guessing Reflections/Projections. I was weak then!

Coincidentally I did joke of the day for the first time last week and mostly concur with your opinion.

Probably the best speaking experience I gained was when I stood up in front of 57 students twice a week for a full semester. With the power of life or death (aka A-F) comes responsiblity.

<comment><USER2> Yep, R|P. It was a good talk from what I remember, although they conveniently make videos of those that you can watch again later.

<comment><USER4> Also I should mention, since it's been part of the whole toastmasters motivation and stuff, and since everyone here seems to enjoy me talking about digg, I'm giving a _keynote_ at dpc (Dutch PHP Conference) in June entitled "Digg: The First Two Years": <http://www.phpconference.nl/>

It should be pretty good, because I'm totally beyond the control of Digg PR. Though I will try to be fair and balanced about what actually was a great experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bizarre article. I'm British and in analyzing my speaking recently discovered I um and ah a lot and have been trying to conquer it. I hear it a lot in speakers over here too, as much as in American speakers. Not sure about all this British vs American forming words "on the lips" or "in the throat" malarkey..

<comment><USER6> It's a generalization, but he's on to something. I've heard it described as Americans having "lazy lips." We do tend to slur our words, and we're so used to it, that it sounds normal.

For example, most Americans leave out the "a" in orange, so it sounds like we're saying "ornge." Another example would be that I tend to say the word hospital as "hos-pit-al" which sounds strange to a lot of other Midwesterners who are used to the "hos-pittle" pronunciation.

But having said that, it seems like stretch to say that it affects the speech patterns he's talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you _know_ the content you are going to talk about, and _believe_ in it... public speaking becomes that much easier.

<comment><USER8> I've given talks on things I thought were of technical interest, but then realized that my heart was not really in it.

World of difference from when I'm stoked about something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The experience of teaching improved my public speaking significantly. I think most people hate public speaking because the initial experiences they have are for short periods of time when they're nervous and full of adrenaline.

That adrenaline surge burns off pretty fast though. Physiologically you just can't sustain it and (at worst) within about 15-20 minutes you relax. When you teach a class that may be several hours or days long, that means you're relaxed for the vast majority of the time. I think that experience conditioned me to be more relaxed for public speaking in general.

</comment><comment><USER10> "First, put the fingers of one hand on your throat when you speak. If you can feel your vocal cords vibrating, then you are definitely a throat speaker."

This is utter gibberish. Your vocal cords vibrate when you articulate voiced consonants and vowels. It doesn't matter what language or dialect you speak, it's a fundamental element of all human speech.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been speaking publicly since I was little kid. And at university my CS program required exactly one theater class, not any theater class but... you guessed it, public speaking.

There are a lot of great ways to learn how to be a good public speaker and everyone should try to improve, however I have never heard of this throat vs mouth thing.

I am not saying it's not true, I've never tried it. All I am saying is, there is a plethora of resources on public speaking and this is just one of them. If it doesn't work for you, don't get discouraged.

Another possible explanation for British vs American speaking might be cultural.

I am not sure about British school but in a lot of European schools, oral exams are just as much part of the daily curriculum as pop quizzes are in American.

Add to that a difference is how positively or negative a culture views "aahs" and "uhhms", and that can explain a lot.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article seems to boil down to the idea that you need to enunciate clearly. I find some of the explanations of throat speaking VS. Mouth speaking to be suspect. The sound originates in the vocal chords and is shaped by the mouth no matter how you speak.

</comment><comment><USER13> A really nice read. But, I really have no experience on public speaking at all. But, I am sure that this is one of the skills that every programmer needs.

Only programmer who can express his idea properly can be considered as good programmer.

</comment><comment><USER14> The big problem for me had always been speaking anxiety. I was terrified to get up in front of people and talk. And then, suddenly, I was not. I have no idea how to induce this change in others, but I assure you that it made a far bigger improvement in my speaking style than any change in intonation.

If you want to do what the article says, just listen to someone British for a while and then try reading some words aloud, enunciating carefully. Try to be as "accentless" as possible, whatever what may mean in your area. This becomes habit after a little while.

<comment><USER4> It's entirely about experience, and the threshold for each person is different. And as experience goes, there's always new challenges. You might not be nervous now, but I bet if you got put in front of a large enough crowd (think Obama-sized) it would come back. But even then it's about experience, you learn to make it work for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article seems to be saying that you can improve your speaking by moving your lips more. Although a lot of people could stand to speak more slowly, this advice will really only take you so far. Rehearsing and using hand gestures freely will take you farther.

</comment><comment><USER16> we don't even know the meaning of our words, we are just using patterns and popular memes to express ourselves. first we should reflect on the meaning of words, then the speaking itself will become poetry.

</comment><comment><USER17> As for "aahs" and "uhhms," these happen to be Obama's worst verbal tick.</comment>


The Fastest Growing Areas of Startup Investment in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/fastest-growing-areas-investment-2015/

<comment><USER2> As the article even points out, "fastest growing" in % means almost nothing. I funded this niche market for $1 last year, now I'm funding it for $100. Look at that 10000% growth! And yet it still doesn't provide the absolute values, or even numbers of funding from other categories for comparison. In short, not a useful presentation of data.

<comment><USER3> [https://xkcd.com/1102/](https://xkcd.com/1102/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to the article, investment in 'Photo Sharing' is growing by 150%.

Leaving aside the ambiguity in that statement, is there a list of 'photo sharing' startups that have received investment recently?

<comment><USER5> It's also weird - my gut feel is that photo sharing is done. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, Dropbox, Apple iCloud stuff, Google+ stuff, Smugmug... etc.

If the investments are going to those companies (and if they are considered "startups" still), I'd understand. But small companies trying to "disrupt" this space!?!?

I'm suspicious of the data on this one. Or that the investors are not very good at investing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you for this article, the data is great. Since you've speculated as to the causes of the declines in the markets with large declines could you speculate on the reasons for the fastest markets to be growing as quickly as they have? Or on markets which you would think should be growing more quickly but aren't?

</comment><comment><USER7> Totally missed agtech. The food and agriculture sector is the third largest market in the world, it employs $1.3b people, and the tech is in the earliest days.

<comment><USER8> Here's the data for ag tech. For 2012 - 2015 (ytd).

167, 561, 456, 108.

Pretty big drop-off in 2015. On an annualized basis, if the trend continues, we should expect a 50% decline.

<comment><USER8> Those figures are in $M

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Url changed from [http://qz.com/457818/bitcoin-space-travel-venture-capital- fu...](http://qz.com/457818/bitcoin-space-travel-venture-capital-funding/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Both are worthless, and will not be used to try to attempt passing the beginner stuff.

;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting data:

Banking - 65%

Bitcoin - 151%

</comment><comment><USER12> The fact that the time horizon is spread over 3-4 years makes the analysis misleading.

Case in point, Bitcoin was a nonfactor in 2012 (hence the high "growth"), but VC for Bitcoin firms has dried up in 2015, with most Bitcoin startups either dying or pivoting to more generic financial instruments/blockchain tech.

<comment><USER8> Hey, I'm the author. Actually, the data doesn't support this statement. Here's financing by year for BTC companies in $M (non inflation adj). Note 2015 is only through June, so BTC investment should grow 45% y/y, if the pace holds.

year industry amount($M) 2012 Bitcoin 4.75000 2013 Bitcoin 54.47459 2014 Bitcoin 259.57000 2015 Bitcoin 189.40000

<comment><USER13> I'd be interested where you're getting your numbers - there was a popular article floating aroudn a couple of days ago about VC capital invested into Bitcoin already passing the 2014 total: [http://cointelegraph.com/news/114862/bitcoin-capital- investm...](http://cointelegraph.com/news/114862/bitcoin-capital-investment- in-2015-quickly-passes-2014-totals)

189m seems low considering 21, inc. alone raised over $110m.

<comment><USER8> it's mattermark data.</comment></comment></comment></comment>