You hardly ever fail because of your CTO - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/you-hardly-ever-fail-because-of-your-cto-2009-11

<comment><USER2> OP is right, and people would see that if they weren't reading it as if he were specifically talking about YC startups.

He says: Of companies designed around the sales plan, they rarely fail because of a bad CTO. That's true. It might not seem true looking at student-run startups, but that's because most of them are starting with a product they think people want and then looking for ways to sell it, rather than starting with a sales strategy and then finding a product to match it.

The former strategy is very risky, so it only makes sense to start a business this way if you're sure of a huge exit; after all, sales-centric companies still have the option of a huge exit, but they also have the option to become billion dollar businesses without an exit. What's more, being sales-centric isn't mutually exclusive with having a great product. It's true that some great products don't lend themselves to being sales centric, but the point is that if you have the option to choose either a great product that's sales centric or a great product that's not, choose the one that is.

Now the technical co-founder is absolutely essential to starting a business where the product isn't sales-centric; the point is you shouldn't start these businesses in the first place, because given a universe with infinite number of projects you should choose the one that's both a great product and also allows for immediate sales. IMHO this is the #1 thing that's currently missing from YCs advice to startups, albeit the present advice generally works because YC specializes in a very specific type of startup operating in a very specific environment and time period. It's kind of analogous to how in the 60s they designed the product around the TV commercial, in that you could imagine people giving similar advice at the time that was too narrow but often worked anyway.

edit: And I hope I'm not offending anyone by saying this, IIRC pg actually hinted that they may have to rethink their customer acquisition advice in a recent essay.

edit2: What I am trying to say is that the YC advice is incomplete because it doesn't account for the hidden disjunction, which is the same reason most people get the Wason Selection Task wrong: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task>

So the best business is one that 1) starts with a great sales strategy 2) is something people want 3) does not need time or money to invent 4) still has a good barrier to entry. Once you fully map out the disjunction, it's easy to see why selecting startups based mostly on their ability to make something people want may have worked great five years ago, and may still work decently today, but is ultimately flawed and will probably continue to perform less and less well over time. Now it's still perfectly fine to select startups good at MSPWing if that's who YC likes working with, but making that the most important factor for predicting success is probably a mistake; ability to MSPW as a predictor of success is a shortcut, and there's nothing wrong with using a shortcut in some cases, but what that shortcut should be changes over time.

<comment><USER3> As I understand things, a technical inability to keep up with growth in the userbase is what caused Friendster to fall behind while Myspace took over its market.

Being sales-oriented works poorly[0] unless you actually have a product people want. To win, you have to make something people want, and make sure they know they want it.

[0]I suspect this may not hold up for big corporate and government sales.

<comment><USER2> "Being sales-oriented works poorly unless you actually have a product people want."

That's completely correct, however you're still missing the hidden disjunction. The point is that you should have a product people want AND be sales oriented.

Are there times when it's rational to start a business that's not sales oriented? Absolutely. But you better have a damn good reason.

For example, let's say your product is a search engine that returns results structured in the way people learn. And what's more, it's so obvious that your search engine is better that a huge percentage of people who use it instantly switch their default homepage. Now this is a good example of when you might want to start a business without a sales plan. But starting a business like this is like planning a breech birth, so you better have a good reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like an over-simplification. The CTO (or technical cofounder) is a key piece of the machine that enables you to iterate quickly to find product/market fit, and thus get the sales. This article almost seems to advocate not bothering with a good CTO and getting a good sales guy instead... but if you do that, you'll have a whole different set of problems.

So the boring, but correct, take-away, is: You need a great CTO - and you need a great CEO who can sell the product too.

</comment><comment><USER5> This isn't correct at least from my personal experience.

I've talked with a few startups that have been burning through cash because they thought they could outsource their entire technical operation to India. Some of them even tried doing it a 2nd time after failing the first time. All of them were on the verge of collapse.

I think there are even more of them that never even get to the VC stage because they often times don't have any demo to show.

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this guy not contradicting himself? First he says:

 _Convince [me] that you first know who your customer is. Second, make clear that you know how to address these customers. Finally, show that these customers will spend their hard-earned cash on your product. [..I]f I don't hear the business case, it all becomes "blah, blah, blah"._

Then he says:

 _I believe Foursquare is on to something. Sure, it's like Twitter in that it hasn't yet figured out it's business model but I can already see there's money there. Same is the case for Twitter. Give me this feeling when I am listening to your pitch. I don't need to see the break-even point. I need to see the huge exit down the road thereafter._

<comment><USER7> Yep, that jumped out at me as well, it was like the article was written by two completely different people. Plus it barely qualifies as an article, more of a quick blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seen a really bad CTO hurt a company by keeping MS Outlook running smoothly, but starving engineering resources with gimpy bandwidth and horrendous latency. Then, when engineering would complain about the network, he would attack their credibility in front of the rest of the company. The resulting talent drain was epic!

And no, this wasn't a startup. It was a 30 year old company.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now let me see if I got this right...OP is a venture capitalist who is complaining that he regularly sees pitches where the business is not focusing enough on their market and customers.

Did it ever occur to OP that this is just selection bias? How can he comment on all of the pitches he _doesn't_ see?

Start-ups focused on revenue have many more options before they'll pitch him. Perhaps they're self-funded. Or now that they have a presence in the marketplace, they have more investor opportunities: customers, vendors, angels, strategic partners, even banks.

Customer focused start-ups are out there. OP has just positioned himself to see less of them.

</comment><comment><USER10> maybe you won't outright fail because of it, but brilliant technical leadership is half of the difference between a mediocre company and an enormously successful one.</comment>


What we're *really* afraid of - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amirkhella.com/2011/12/28/what-were-really-afraid-of/

<comment><USER3> One way I think to mitigate this mind game of fear of failure/rejection is work on what you're "passionate" about. The word "passionate" is abused a lot but in this context I mean work on something you know you want to work on and genuinely enjoy doing. As a result hopefully you won't give a flying F about what others think or whether you've achieved some artificial benchmark of success. Consequently, the lack of self doubt that passion affords you will likely give you a greater chance of achieving great things as a side-effect but again thats not the goal.

Its the living up to rubrics, expectations, and some mold that really can put a damper on life and make you susceptible to these mind games. If your doing it, give yourself a break and recenter - life is too short.

<comment><USER4> I dont think being passionate about something helps in this context. You could be passionate about something but as soon as people eyes on your product, you'll still go back into fear-of-rejection mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It might be far-fetched in this context, but I find that meditation helps with this kind of tricks of the mind. Spend some time a day trying not to be lost in idle considerations about yourself, success and failure, and you end up having a feel of the difference between reality and your mind's works.

Humor and detachment also help, as they make much easier to have actual friends. And, after all, if you are around forty and not hungry you are a huge success by the standards of the specie.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have found that being afraid of failure or rejection can both be only a symptom of something else - fear of success.

Striving for any type of accomplishment may carry the dread of not getting there or being laughed at _for_ getting there. It also, however, carries the dread of not being up to the challenges that follow said success. We are comfortable doing things that we are prepared for and accustomed to, but not so much being out in the open and certainly not investing a lot of energy into being out in the open.

Put differently, I think that we often are afraid of failing our challenges; But actual anxiety, the one that sits below the surface and sabotages you against your will, often stems from the dread of failing future challenges. A known and anticipated failure now is less painful than an unknown, but certainly bigger failure in the future.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to unpack that concept of "fear of success".

No one is likely to fear the commonly visualized trappings of success - <USER2> and material wealth, adoring fans, love pouring in from everywhere.

If people fear some aspects of success, they are likely to be things associated with visibility. Like the responsibility to keep executing and following up, the scrutiny, the potential for being a one hit wonder, the detractors and "haters".

But generally, "fear of failure" can be explained simply by ... fear of failure.

<comment><USER6> Then let me rephrase it as "fear of the merely postponed, but now possibly more destructive failure".

I think calling it "fear of success" is valuable because it helps shift your viewpoint on it - instead of fearing defeat, it opens up what you should actually care about - what happens after you either win or lose the thing you are anxious about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Failed ideas or products do not make you a failed entrepreneur.

If you look back on every failure and can honestly say (a) I didn't repeat the mistakes of the last effort and (b) I am learning what to do for next time, then you are probably on the right track. Though this is the naive, altruistic view of things. But sometimes people need to be reminded.

The problem arises when people aren't being just absolutely brutally honest with themselves. It's not just execution that needs to be fixed, sometimes it's the people or it maybe the market doesn't truly exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> The challenge is that we live in a culture that defines us by what we do and have. I get asked about what I do a few times a day. I spent a couple of weeks in Paris last Fall, and not once did anyone ask me that question. It's actually impolite to ask such question in France :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fears are a strange bunch. I have only recently really become aware of my own fears, and now that I see them for what they are (most of the time). Even being aware of your fears seems to be quite rare. Let alone be commited to facing them instead of making up alibis and creating their own state of limbo.

Recently, I have starting 'fighting' my fears by noticing them in the first place ("Why dont I call X/do Y/commit to Z"), then by asking myself: "Why am I fearing X?". Most of the times it is some irrational thought about rejection, failure, lack of money, even success ("If I do it, I'm commited and dont have time for all the other things I'm afraid to do"). It's all bullcrap. 9 out of 10 times, when you do the thing you fear, it does not pan out the way you imagined, and the other time it teaches you something invaluable. I'm starting to think that by framing every thought you have in the most positive way and by closing your mind from negative influences from others AND YOURSELF, you can conquer any fear. I think this is closely related to the authors point: your self-worth should have nothing to do with what other people think of you and/or how your enterprises turn out. You and you alone control your mind/thoughts, and therefor your happiness. If you fearlessly and with 'passion' do the things that you think are right, make and learn from mistakes, truly believe in and commit to your goal, then congratulate yourself. You're already doing more than almost all of the people I know.

</comment><comment><USER10> A great product will bring confidence. I will not spend much on marketing with a bad product. Especially if it looks shitty then I'll be really afraid because customers will always judge the book by its cover.

</comment><comment><USER11> He makes a really good point and a bad one. I know that I for one am definitely more afraid of rejection than failure. Whenever I comment around here I usually take great care not to reveal what I do for a living. I don't make it hard for people to find out but I usually don't admit what my business is and most of my side projects too. I'm in the suburbs of Chicago and out here I'm a big fish in a little pond. There's not too much rejection around here. People are easier to impress. Once I get out of that comfort zone and into the wider world I become a much smaller fish in a much bigger pond and I fear rejection _a lot_ in such waters. It's funny that I'm fearless about failure but am far more fearful of being laughed at or considered some sort of amateur. So the fear of rejection part I ink he's right on about.

Now I don't agree that you should distance yourself from what you do. I think it's vital that you become your business. I think it's one way to ensure success. Distancing yourself from your business seems, well cowardly to me. Maybe cowardly ismt the right word but I don't feel that's right.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps the word you're looking for is half-hearted? That's how I felt as well after reading this. I was nodding along in agreement until I reached the end. I live and breath what I do and love every minute of it. And my level of devotion doesn't make me fear failure nor link myself to it. Failure is a moment. You've only failed when you've stopped trying. Until then, you're just continuing on the winding road to success and experiencing every stop along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Velociraptors?

<comment><USER14> I was thinking zombies. But, velociraptors are probably scarier. ... Maybe zombie velociraptors for the scariest? ... Also, what happens if a zombie bites a vampire?

<comment><USER14> So, sci-fi/horror/dinosaur themed jokes are no longer appropriate for HN?</comment></comment></comment>


Saxophones with Linear Fingering System - <AUTHOR> http://jsengineering.net/saxes.asp

<comment><USER2> As a long-time mediocre sax-player, this is pretty interesting. Also, incredibly beautiful work and I would love to play around on it. However, I'm not sure that making the saxophone more logical in terms of fingering results in a better instrument. It's not the possibilities that inspire me when I play saxophone (or these days guitar) but rather the limitations. Each musical key has its own character and there are licks that I will play in G that I won't play in Bb.

Has anyone played one of these? I'd be curious to know how standard jazz saxophone phrases (Parker, Coltrane, etc) feel on this instrument.</comment>


Google's DeepMind and Oxford are working on a lip-reading system - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/deepmind-and-oxford-reads-lips-2016-11?IR=T&r=US&IR=T <comment><USER2> Actual paper:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05358](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05358)

</comment><comment><USER3> that would be a good system to add to google glasses...or tiny drones with cameras...</comment>


Ask HN: Why is applying for jobs such a pain? - <AUTHOR> As someone neither in SV nor a programming wizard being constantly headhunted with good offers i wonder why applying for jobs is such a pain.
There are multiple job boards where you have to create email alerts. The same jobs are posted on multiple sites and reposted by recruiters. Some jobs don't even exist in reality or are just published for policy reasons. Some are never posted publicly as it would be a sign of weakness in certain roles to apply to job posts.
When you finally find something interesting and want to apply you have enter all your data in a custom form on a custom website and upload a PDF motivation letter.
Then you wait... and wait... no indication or transparency on status. After 3 months a standard rejection mail might come in after the position was removed or filled. Likely not with you because some intern or algorithm decided you don't fit the profile based on missing keywords.
I'm based in Europe, so maybe we suffer from increased bureaucracy here, but from what i hear it's not much different around the world.
Can someone explain why this is such a broken process?
Why didn't LinkedIn fill this role?
Why does every HR department re-invent the wheel?
I'm ranting but i'm also intrigued.
If this is solvable, anyone interested to work on a mobile-first lightweight solution? <comment><USER2> Because hiring is akin to dating and therefore it suffers from the same problems:

1) It's mostly about subjective impressions and often weird ideas of what a suitable date/candidate must be. There are no official rule books or guidelines about how to proceed. It's not about hard skills and efficiency, it very much revolves around soft skills, presentation abilities and invisible chemistry.

2) More often than not both parties in dating/hiring aren't serious about conducting a transaction and getting to a serious business. It's about meeting new people, hanging out, checking the pulse of the job market but no more. Misrepresenting oneself, one's abilities/features and intentions is the norm with both dates/candidates(companies), which leads to a lot of frustration and bad feelings, keeping the success rate of activities in the both fields rather low.

Different industries, similar problems. And for the both of them no technological/software solution in sight.

P.S. See how "candi-date" is linguistically just a particular case or subset of "date". Just another validation of the point.

<comment><USER3> > P.S.

I expect this is a joke, but even if this were true, I don't think it'd be a valid 'validation of the point.'

Incidentally, "candidate" is not a subset of "date." It's from Latin candidatus, "white-robed." Date is ultimately from Latin datus/dare, "to give."

<comment><USER2> It's not that much of a joke, more of a curiosity, if you choose to look at both words from a certain angle. I realize that their etymology might be different, but in the end of the day their spelling has become close and the concepts they denote have also developed certain commonalities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is you're waiting for an advert to be released before you apply to a job.

If a job is being advertised on a job board or by a recruiter that is a signal that they are out of options and struggling to hire.

Paid advertising is the last port of call when trying to find candidates. Good companies get sent speculative applications directly - even before there is an open post.

Jobs are then advertised internally, existing staff speak to their network and make direct recommendations as soon as it goes external.

If they have to, companies often advertise (for free) on industry specific sites to cut straight to those people with the right skills (like the Jobs page here).

If that fails then it makes its way down to the general pool of jobs. That opens companies up to a huge volume of applications which makes filtering the best candidates out a very difficult task so it frequently gets poorly automated.

Start looking higher up the chain. Circumventing this process is actually part of the application.

Think about who you want to work for and apply before they are looking.

<comment><USER5> > _Start looking higher up the chain. Circumventing this process is actually > part of the application._

Any tips on doing this?

<comment><USER4> Pick a handful of companies you're curious or interested in. Look at what jobs they are currently hiring for on their own website and search to see what other sites their adverts are syndicated on. Learn about the culture, get to know current staff and their work through conference talks, social media, industry meetups etc.

See if it seems like somewhere you would like to work. Think about what problems they are solving and consider how you can help them.

Potentially improve your skills in areas or technologies you know they are after. Make something that is complementary to the product or service they deliver to put you on their radar.

Contact them directly to start a conversation, share what you can offer and learn when they might be hiring next for your kind of role, stay friendly and keep in touch.

You will be surprised how easy it is for things to progress based on being genuinely interested in working for a company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Why does every HR department re-invent the wheel?

HR must justify its importance and value by making things hard.

It's frequently observed that HR is the bottleneck in the process. If line managers (as they often do with smaller, more nimble companies) took on the actual responsibility for recruiting & hiring-- you would find process much more amenable. Avoid HR, focus your job search efforts on speaking with the senior executive(s) who you can help.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a tech recruiter in Chicago. Due to a lot of the reasons you listed my advice for developers is to reach out to senior developer/leads/architects/managers/cto's at companies they are interested in working for.

I work with 85% of the bigger name tech companies in Chicago and they don't always have their roles posted online. Most of then have urgent roles with no roles posted online because they rarely get any good resumes from it and instead rely on recruiters.

Cold email/linkedin message someone at the company you may be interested in working for and I bet they would at least get back to you. At least you wont have to fill out a job application.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm convinced that most companies have the application processes they have because it gives them the candidates they want. The reason the application process at some companies is so one-sided, non-transparent and makes you jump through arbitrary and ever changing hoops is because that's a skill they value. Most likely, that's going to be a daily requirement of the job.

Startup companies want to think they're hiring the best and brightest, so they follow the interview practices of companies or people they think are the best and the brightest. People who can pass those interviews are the candidates they want because, in their minds at least, they're Google quality programmers.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're applying through a company's website / job portal, you've already lost the game.

You need to network and get your foot in the door through a personal reference.

Try angel list and hired.com (although I don't know if they service the EU).

<comment><USER5> > _Try angel list and hired.com_

how is this different than applying on a site?

<comment><USER9> Angel List is nice because salaries and equity are visible. Hired.com, you can specify what salary you want as well as other things to use as filters. On hired.com, companies contact you, instead of you having to apply. You have 24 hours to make an initial response. If you don't, the contact disappears.

<comment><USER5> thanks for clarifying, but how is this different than applying at bottom of the ladder since the jobs are posted externally already?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know about mobile-first and I am not sure it really matters in the jobhunting space. But I'd suggest looking at StackOverflow Jobs for a developer oriented resource:

[https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?t=c&r=home](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?t=c&r=home)

</comment><comment><USER11> What sort of work and where specifically are you in Europe? For instance if you are in London and have some skills from the last 10 years and work experience I would think getting contracts or permanent would be fairly straightforward.

If you can build up a contact network you'll have a greater chance of finding something interesting with people you like. This is where LinkedIn comes in handy.

Yes you may have to wait a long time if you are focussed on a particular company or work area.

</comment><comment><USER12> So far it felt as i would choose my job. It was always easy and straight forward. I also have several friends that see it similar. I honestly have no idea what is broken, so i wouldn't be a help fixing it. If you dont like the hustle of doing this yourself, there are several agencies that do exactly that for you (usually even better). Europe too btw, Switzerland tho

</comment><comment><USER13> job hunting is not fair game, you can't wait for the job to come on a newspaper or job website to apply for it. many times it happens that the job is posted for policy purposes but the hiring is already done in the background. this sounds unfair, but it is the truth. job is something that helps you get on with your life and places the food on your table. so its only common sense that people who are already in power of recruitment would give the job to someone they already know and call in the favor afterwards, instead of posting it publicly and hiring a complete stranger.</comment>


Amazing IE9 domination checklist - <AUTHOR> http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/compare-browsers

<comment><USER2> Checkmark comparison charts are notoriously full of 'features' that either don't matter, are vaguely measured at best, or listed solely for the creator's benefit.

"Jump Lists and thumbnail preview controls for pinned sites" just doesn't seem to be the differentiator that will make me switch to IE9.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This list is so amazingly curated. Everything nobody needs and IE implements is in. Everything developers need to provide better experience and IE doesn't implement is out.

The absolute best feature: "Tools that show pages in different rendering engines to let developers understand and debug browser differences" .. I wish this actually referred to Chrome Frame :-D

Also peculiar: The top table doesn't align with the rest in Gecko and Webkit. Being the longest of three, I'd imagine the Firefox table header would expand it's column, not compress it. And shouldn't those tables be tbodies according to semantics?</comment>


IOT: The economy of things - <AUTHOR> http://iota.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Github: [https://github.com/iotaledger](https://github.com/iotaledger)

Whitepaper: [https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf](https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> The website is unusable on mobile - too much animation pretty much killed Chrome and scrolling resulted in very gradual stuttering down through the pages segments.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any issue on mobile phone and I use chrome as well. Anyway... In the comment section is link to the whitepaper about technical details.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What is IOTA (Short Introduction)?

[https://youtu.be/3edaYjvIMUs](https://youtu.be/3edaYjvIMUs)</comment>


Brilliant marketing testimonial method you need to test . . . from MSFT? - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/windows/social/ I just noticed on Microsoft's site that they are using a novel idea I haven't seen before in mass marketing - sticking twitter / feed comments from real users tagged with today's date onto the homepage, then linking into a full social queue.
EG - Check their landing page http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
I have managed hundreds of A/B and multivariate tests and i have a feeling that this strategy would be a BIG winner - relevant, recent, 3rd party, and pulling in a buzz brand.
Any other good examples of this? <comment><USER2> Interesting how _everybody_ is positive about something they haven't really had a week to use. No hey, my scanner won't work, or how much did you spend on your memory upgrade ?

Let's wait three months, when the inevitable clamoring for service packs and the first complaints about slowdowns happen.

second evdawg, it's as fake as a $3 bill. The tweets are real but they've definitely been selected to give an impression, and you don't know whether the authors of the tweets are 'real' people either, or just legends.

<comment><USER3> _...they haven't really had a week to use._

Windows 7 was available via MSDN for the last 2 months. The October 22 release date was for consumers. I've been using Windows 7 since Mid-August.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That page is faked; I just see the same entries come up again and again after I refresh.

Brilliant marketing technique, indeed.

<comment><USER5> They aren't fake entries. If you click on the actual entry you can click "View on Twitter" and it goes to the actual tweet that said it.

They're probably just caching the tweets and updating them every so often.

<comment><USER6> They might be real entries, that doens't mean they're randomly chosen. MS probably selected a bunch that made them look good, and then threw in a few that were somewhat neutral to make it look fair (I'm thinking the downloading, what are the new features one)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this technique, I use Shannon Whitley's free Chatterbox widget to display an unfiltered list of tweets mentioning Mailana on my front page. <http://www.realtimechatterbox.com/>

<comment><USER8> What if your competitor floods it with "Mailana sucks, use XYZ" and variations on this theme?

<comment><USER7> Shannon's widget filters out obvious obscenities, but otherwise I just make sure I've got a reply to any negative comments. Seeing that dialog in there demonstrates a bit of authenticity.

Also, nobody's heard of my startup, so I feel fairly safe. Security through obscurity. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL - great self effacing comment.

Thanks for sending that filter idea, I have never "understood" how to integrate twitter for marketing but that's a heck of a start - I'm planning to run some A/B tests on that . . .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It moves too quickly for my tired eyes to read anything.</comment>


Slingcode - <AUTHOR> https://slingcode.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> Slingcode is a personal computing platform in a single html file.

<comment><USER2> Can you edit the title to say "Slingcode: personal computing platform in a single html file". I think that would make the purpose of Slingcode clearer to more people.</comment></comment>


Judge Throws Out Craigslist Copyright Lawsuit, But It Can Still Sue Over Data - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/30/craigslist-3taps-lawsuit-decision/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know what "gaining unauthorized access to data on its Web site" means in this case?

If you're posting links to the content on your site (I roll my eyes at this condition, but there's the AT&T case, so I added it), and there's no login screen in front of the data, is there any expectation of privacy for the data?

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing scraping was a no-no. Unlike a search engine, which shows excerpts pertaining to the block of searched text, a lot of these services displayed the entire content of the listing.

What was ruled here is that they don't have an exclusive right to user- generated content, however other sites simply can't spider and re-list all the entries. That's essentially a mirror of Craigslist not on Craigslist.

<comment><USER4> technically google shows both a cache of your pages and a visual representation of your site directly on google.com without explicit permission.

<comment><USER5> It is implicit though, since robots.txt is a well known standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Craigslist's advantage is that it's one of the most well known; not that it came up with the listings idea by itself (papers have had these ads for ages). Their lawsuit angle was that this was a question of "method" which isn't unique.

Aggregation, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely since that's essentially scraping the listings data.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just start charging for an API and everyone's happy

<comment><USER7> No kidding, they could probably make so much more money this way.</comment></comment>


Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/doc-content/images/japanese-relocation-order.pdf <comment><USER2> This only seems to be the first page of the document. The full text can be found here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066#Transcrip...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066#Transcript_of_Executive_Order_9066)

For more historical context, see:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans)</comment>


How to remain calm, despite what's about to happen to your Chrome notebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo

<comment><USER2> Very entertaining, but it doesn't really alleviate my concerns about putting Google in control of all of my data... It's not Google specifically, it's more the fact that it's not really in _my_ control...

</comment><comment><USER3> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1989738></comment>


Nerd TV Archives  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was just going to point to the Max Levchin interview, which I rewatched last night and thoroughly enjoyed, but there are far too many great interviews there to just do that. Bill Joy, Bob Kahn, Dan Bricklin, Dan Drake, Tim O'Reilly, Brewster Kahle, Andy Hertzfeld, all well worth watching (the shows come in .ogg as well).

</comment><comment><USER2> the max levchin interview is fantastic, and probably among the top entrepreneurship-related things i've seen/read in a long time. i haven't seen the others, but seriously, go watch or read max's interview (he co-founded paypal and slide); there are a variety of gems about vetting startup ideas, working hard, catching "waves"/emerging markets, understanding business issues as an engineer, and lots of other things the news.yc should appreciate.

<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/002.html></comment>


Is Handwriting History? - <AUTHOR> http://www.publicbooks.org/is-handwriting-history/ <comment><USER3> I always carry a pocket sized notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. It's still the fastest method to write something down, it always works and it's socially acceptable to use in all situations. Most people whom I meet, even in private, will see me take out my notebook at the beging of the meeting, taking notes occasionally while we interact. I don't think you could do that with a computer or phone and it allows me to remember important details and action points that I (and the person I'm talking to) would forget otherwise. At work I have larger, A4-sized notebooks that I use similarly.

One of the features that I appreciate most is that everything I write down is in chronological order and can be accessed very quickly. In seconds, I can go through last weeks notes and check if I forgot to do something, or even go back a year or more to revisit my thoughts on something that happened back then. Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.

I've seen and tried some of the new epaper notepads and they're definitely getting closer, but for now they're still to slow, clumsy & fragile to replace paper for me.

<comment><USER4> >Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.

I think this is the killer advantage of handwriting over typing text in a computer/phone/similar. You have much more expressiveness: you can underline, highlight, cross out, circle, draw, make arrows, organize in lists, different indentation levels, different sizes and fonts lay things out along the page as best represents your mental pictures. And it's all simple and frictionless. I'm very very skeptical any computer program can ever be as natural as jotting stuff down with pen and paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find that the more time I spend around computers, the more I actually want to hand write things. I've recently gotten into the habit of keeping notebooks for various things, I even wrote a letter by hand to someone (something I haven't done since I was a child).

There's something so permanent about handwriting, compared to an ephemeral computer file. There's also the fact that notebooks don't run out of battery, or need signal.

As far as actual penmanship goes though, I have pretty terrible handwriting, it's getting better. For some reason, buying a fountain pen has markedly improved my handwriting.

<comment><USER6> I've spent many hours attempting to transcribe my grandparents' handwritten letters. It's very difficult to decipher. Ironically, even the letters they'd mash out on a typewriter are difficult to decipher, but it's a lot easier than the handwriting.

It's not just my grandparents. Their relatives also all had wretched handwriting. I've shown them to many people, and they can hardly make it out, either.

I don't think good penmanship was commonplace :-)

<comment><USER7> This isn't the first time I've said this, but I believe doing serious genealogy will 'cure' most people of their love of cursive, and maybe writing things by hand in general.

You get better at reading it, but there is much more bad handwriting out there than good.

<comment><USER8> I harp on and on about this, but the looped cursive of the 19th and 20th centuries is horrible for legibility. Many of the common letterforms blur together, especially when written quickly. There were reasons for adopting it at the time, but it really shouldn't be taught anymore. Today we should be teaching cursive italic, for several reasons (legibility, ease of teaching).

<comment><USER9> I think as you do on this matter. I wish I knew how to get in touch with you. Meanwhile, there's always the Society for Italic Handwriting, to shic( I belong: italic-handwriting.org

Kate Gladstone CEO, HandwritingThatWorks.com DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If only... I recently had to take a standardized business knowledge test and I had to write a disclaimer (eg: "I hereby certify that...") in CURSIVE.

When I asked if we really had to write in 19th century writing, she replied that this was the "writing of the business world".

No words.

<comment><USER11> Historically, block letters were taught to young children first because they were seen as less difficult to form, and therefore writing by someone with little fine motor control would be somewhat legible. Cursive was how adults wrote. In that sense, she was correct.

That said, "the writing of the business world" today is Times New Roman (or maybe Helvetica Neue). It replaced the Palmer Method of Business Writing[1], which is quite distinct from the the cursive that is taught in schools today (Zaner-Bloser[2] or D'Nealian[3]).

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method)

2: [http://content.yudu.com/web/y5b2/0A3vbrb/16Grade6Student/htm...](http://content.yudu.com/web/y5b2/0A3vbrb/16Grade6Student/html/index.html?page=4)

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian)

<comment><USER12> As someone who was forced to learn Palmer style in school, I must say I always hated the capital Q. I don't know if I just couldn't get it right, or I never really saw it as legible, but it annoyed me that it looked too much like a 2. I went back to block letters in college and never thought much of penmanship.

Until college, when I learned a bit of LaTeX and became fascinated with fonts. Still hate that Q though. Thank goodness for computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always carry a pen.

I prefer handwriting to taking electronic notes and have never found a touch device I'd rather write on than paper.

Aside: Teaching kids cursive also still has value in teaching fine motor skills.

<comment><USER14> > Aside: Teaching kids cursive also still has value in teaching fine motor > skills.

IMO, it's the most important thing, we have to teach fine motor skills very early to little humans if we want them to be full humans.

<comment><USER15> > _if we want them to be full humans_

This is a circular argument. You just punted the discussion to "what does it mean to be a full human and why is handwriting a necessary part of that." I ride horses, as people have for millennia; I would never claim nonriders are less than human.

<comment><USER16> It's not a circular argument because it wasn't an argument at all. It was a fairly conservative opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's history the way Fortran is history. Most people in most situations do not use it. Specific people in specific situations still use it, and it's still the best tool for that job.

</comment><comment><USER18> Taking note is still faster in with a pen and paper. Thinking as well. And I'm on the very upper scale of computer skills.

Lately I even removed some part of my project management tooling to replace it with paper. Very short term actionable data is more productive on paper for me.

<comment><USER19> You must be a very slow typist :). I can write on a keyboard _much_ faster than on paper, and I'll bet I can outpace any regular person in this way. One could try and compete by employing some stenography shenanigans, but at that point I'll just enable abbrev mode in my Emacs and beat them again.

Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text. The moment I expect needing to write a lot of math formulas, or drawing any kind of diagram, I get my paper and pens. Writing by hand is amazingly flexible.

<comment><USER20> > Writing by hand is amazingly flexible

Once, as an exercise I attempted to transcribe my Statistics notes into LaTeX. I was perfectly capable of inserting the proper math notation, but I never realized how versatile layouts can be so easily made on paper. Things like alternating writing sizes (doable in digital, but usually ends up looking horrible), varying levels of indentation and line height, margin notes, asides, ease of diagrams (again, doable digitally, but time-consuming), notation (crossing things out, circling, arrows, etc), and so many other things. Typesetting for print or digital requires a complete change of layout and even approaches to presentation. You don't realize how much freedom the blank paper gives you until you try translating it to the digital document.

<comment><USER21> > but I never realized how versatile layouts can be so easily made on paper.

Until you need to change them.

It's significantly easier to change formatting on a typed document than handwritten.

<comment><USER22> Yes but I feel that changes when you have something like a diagram. For example, drawing Organic Chemistry mechanisms. Yes you can do them on the computer with ChemDraw and if you need to change something you can, but in practice it feels so slow it's just quicker to cross out your mistake on paper and try again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd say it's as much history as cooking food over a fire. Modern cooking appliances make it easier/more practical but there's nothing quite like a good BBQ...

:)

Have you got a BBQ? My answer to such a question, following some clumsy digging in my kitchen and backyard, is increasingly no. Sometimes, embarrassment giving way to defensiveness, I wonder why anyone bothers to ask. For years a "fire" has sufficed for my cooking of food; it's months since I chargrilled some meat. Presented with a gas hob, more and more super markets point me to ready meals to cook with my microwave. (I worry that the content of my burger bears no resemblance to real ingredients, but on the flip side—ha! flip!—I've begun losing all sense of what that indication of my insides might look like.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I recently got a tablet for use as a home entertainment controller and newspaper and the first thing I wanted was a pen or a stylus with the tactile feedback of a pen. My cursive is far from Declaration of Independence level but as a personal project I've been practicing and it's remarkable how fast writing anything becomes. I'd go so far as the argue children should be taught cursive first and then learn to recognize block letters later. Watch your waitress sometime if she takes notes on a pad and you'll see what I mean. I'd love to see an app that can be trained on my own handwriting and used to fill in fields and create custom gestures to execute complicated commands. I don't know if I'd like to program on something like that, but as far as my day to day living it would be incredibly convenient.

<comment><USER9> Such an app exists, for the iPad and (as I recall) the iPhone; its called WritePad Pro.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the tip. I'm using Android, unfortunately, but I'm sure I can find an equivalent with some google-fu and WritePad as a keyword.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not sure if it bothered anyone else enough to look, but I tracked down the missing source for the header image [1]. The U.S. Declaration of Independence [2] is another nice example of handwriting, but unlike a random, faded (and potential non-English?) recipe, it seems very legible and might not have helped the author's argument.

[1]: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/5094055919/in/gallery...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/5094055919/in/gallery- lorisrizzi-72157631900632635/)

[2]: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/United_S...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence.jpg)

edit: Phrasing

</comment><comment><USER26> The Summer Institute of Linguistics site outside Tucson keeps many of the many languages spoken in Mexico in a room with no vents. The fear is that if a fire occurs, the documents with the writing kept within will be lost. I would include those in history, but I am not a purist so much that I consider that language doesn't evolve.

</comment><comment><USER27> I carry a pen, and a neatly, uniformed folded piece of paper in my wallet. Folded to open like a book, accordion like. When I'm done with it, I open it up and file that sheet of paper for a while just In case I need it. My pen is a G2 0.7 in a machined brass body.

<comment><USER28> The G2 is absolutely amazing as a product in that it's far superior to the competition (for my needs at least) and still reasonably priced.

<comment><USER8> I have had trouble with G2s clogging after a bit of use, so that they stop and start unevenly. I've found the Uniball Signo 207 and Vision Elite to be much better, depending on whether you want a gel or liquid ink.

<comment><USER27> I've gone between both - for a while. The G2 is more "scratchy" on paper - <USER2> I like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My brother (43yo) had to take a full day writing test for a new job last week.

He, as most people, have not wrote long text for years.

He told me that his hand was really painful at the end of the day. I can understand that !

</comment><comment><USER30> Not until I stop writing out poetry drafts. I find a mix of writing, typing, reading aloud and recording my verse helps take a rough draft into something more coherent and whole.

Each of these methods must use varying parts of my brain as I find they often find improvements that others miss, but I always start with pen and paper, often getting a good 9/10s of it made that way.

</comment><comment><USER31> TL;DR: No

(personally, 'no' as well. I sometimes work places where electronic devices aren't allowed)

</comment><comment><USER32> Is this headline the first exception to Betteridge's law of headlines?

<comment><USER33> No.

And if your comment was a headline, that wouldn't be either.

:)

<comment><USER32> :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Mine is. I had better handwriting in primary school. It can be quite embarrassing on the odd occasion where I need to fill out a paper form (which itself is rarer these days).

<comment><USER30> I found that once I was writing frequent love letters and, more recently, writing poetry, my handwriting improved quite quickly.

Being left-handed, my handwriting is now merely bad. :-)</comment></comment>


Erotic plasticity - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_plasticity <comment><USER2> "The female erotic plasticity hypothesis states that women have higher erotic plasticity than men, and therefore their sex drives are more socially flexible and responsive than those of men (factors such as religion, culture and education have a greater affect on women's sexual behaviors)."

In other words factors over which men exert control.</comment>


Importance of YC - <AUTHOR>

Lately I am seeing more and more articles about getting YC interview and tips to ace it. I really don't understand why you guys are giving huge importance in getting through YC. I understand it would be good, Its not like you are finished if you don't get through. I think if your product is good, your startup will become something even if you don't get through YC. Applying to YC should be one of the steps and not the only step. I have seen articles, if they are rejected by YC, you guys behave as though you are at the bottom pit.<p>R <comment><USER2> I don't have that sense, rajeshamara.

YC seems important to me for a few reasons:

One, they do a better job than many investment firms at teaching some basics about start-ups. In that way, I think they encourage a lot of people to try who might not otherwise have tried. People often like to impress their teachers.

Two, as angel / early-stage investors go, YC is the closest thing there is to a top-tier firm. We don't know much about their financials but we do know their first big raise came from Sequoia, itself a top-tier firm. Top-tier funding comes with perks. You get YC's participation and connections. You get to say you got money from YC. $N from YC is worth a lot more than $N from your uncle.

Finally, for many, a YC interview will be their first big pitch and so there is a damaged goods concern: if YC turns you down, your odds with others are diminished. (That's not exclusive to YC: if X turns you down your future odds are diminished, for many values of X.)

Being turned down by YC doesn't mean that you are at the bottom of the pit. I'm sure there are many good firms they would pass on for reasons that say nothing bad at all about the firm. It is, however, a big obstacle you'll need to get around.

-t

<comment><AUTHOR> Raising money especially from VC works in a strange fashion. As in medical practice a doctor believes other doctor. Similary VC firms believer or trust previous entreprenuers whether its a good idea or bad idea. I am not saying YC idea is bad. PG is a very smart individual who succesfully sold his company to Yahoo (I have lot of respect for him). I am talking in general. If you see all the CEO's get shuffled around even if they are bad. Similary all the previous succesfull founders and enterprenuers get their funding from VC's easily. You cannot pin on a single point that they got 2 million funding from a top notch VC firm, it should be good idea. Rather I will say Sequoia trusted PG easily then you or me because he already proved himself.

<comment><USER2> Heh. Suppose a CEO pretty much single-handedly runs a company into the ground and ensures its failure shortly after he leaves - but he also wins the investors a tidy exit. Is he a good CEO? :-)

-t

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a natural thing, after all HN is also the 'breedingground' for a lot of YC startups, and some of the emotions around applying for, acceptance and rejection are expected to spill over into the forum.

The tips by those that 'got in' serve mainly to reassure those that are about to make their pitch, which, if you've never done it before can be absolutely terrifying.

Whether or not you get in, you always learn something.

I think because the barrier to entry is so low at YC that you'll see a lot more of this emotion than you'd expect in a more seasoned environment, for many people this is the first time ever they apply anywhere, and given the number of applications vs the number of available slots it's logical that a bunch of people with an excellent plan and team are not going to be funded.

That can be quite frustrating. Give it a few days everybody will have picked up the pieces and moved on, and they'll start realizing (if they haven't already) that not being accepted by YC is not the end of the world.</comment>


Stupid Patent of the Month: Solocron Education Trolls with Password Patent - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/stupid-patent-month-solocron-education-trolls-password-patent <comment><USER2> I was going to jump on this one then I looked at the patent...

It is actually a patent for confirming your identity while doing online learning and the password part is just a way to quickly verify once you already verified via the longer form recently (so you don't have to type all the fields every time).

I'm not a lawyer but can someone explain to me how a patent like this can be used to enforce just the password part? It seems the password part was cherry- picked from the larger patent and is completely irrelevant without the supporting claims.

<comment><USER3> Well, here are the lawsuits--

[https://search.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/11791287](https://search.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/11791287)

[https://search.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/12070574](https://search.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/12070574)

take a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the authors of these patents should write resumes for a living.</comment>


Techcrunch misleading about dangers of using "tweet" in names - <AUTHOR> http://www.fwd2tweet.com/18/

<comment><USER2> Just read the linked article. Yes it might be number 1. But having looked at tweetknots, I'm surprised that twitter haven't thrown the book at them considering that their site is pretty much IDENTICAL to twitter. That really is quite shocking. There's using their logo or similar colours (to show that the site is something to do with twitter) and there's stealing the whole layout (which is what tweetknot seems to have done).

I think tweetknot got off lightly.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

Not to justify anything but I really don't think they have any qualifications for any type of graphical design, look at their logo its as if someone went into mspaint with a mouse.

<http://tweetknot.com/images/logo4.gif>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm totally confused - the story as written by TechCrunch, from what I recall, was as follows: "Please stop using "tweet" and other UI elements in your website"

Two things came out of this story for me:

o Twitter is defending the trademark 'tweet'

o Twitter is defending their UI elements.

I found both to be interesting. I'm much less interested in some website called "tweetknot", that indeed does look like a total rip off of twitter.

I have no issues with TechCrunch protecting their source, and found the story to be interesting.

<comment><USER5> After Amit's post, I'm now left wondering if Twitter is actually protecting their trademarks and design, or if they just targeted an egregious offender and TechCrunch is trying to gin up a trend story. In other words, I currently know nothing more about Twitter's policies and tactics than I did prior to the TechCrunch story.

<comment><USER6> That's what I got from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I were in Techcrunch's shoes, I wouldn't link to tweetknots because I wouldn't want to give press exposure to a site that brazenly copied its design, css & images from Twitter.

I'm a pretty big Techcrunch hater (and the idea of TC refusing to let someone else benefit from drama-mongering is funny), but I think not linking to tweetknots is a defensible decision.

<comment><USER8> Twitter did buy their images from a stock photo site and they didn't buy the exclusive rights to the image. Everybody can buy the start site image and can run his own site with the same image as background!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Until people stop voting up techcrunch crap it won't stop.

<comment><USER10> We were protecting a source. End of story. The majority of the time tipsters do not want to be named when there's a possibility they could be retaliated against (as is the case on platforms like Twitter, iPhone, etc).

<comment><USER11> What a cop out. This wasn't just a "source" who gave you a tip. The source _was the story_.

Without identifying the source, you end up with a crappy one-sided post. And without even bothering to critically examine the source's claim (that they were being hassled specifically for using the word "tweet") you end up with a post that isn't even accurate and that you've now had to add two update update to bring it back in line with reality. End of story.

Having seen the site, I think it's obvious to everyone that using the word "tweet" was the least of its IP transgressions.

I'm no big defended of "old media," but there's a reason you don't see newspaper stories mysteriously missing the "Who?" of the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see the part where they "stole" it. They just didn't mention tweetknot by name. I'm not a TC fan at all, but I think you need to back up your accusations a little better.

<comment><USER13> How is not mentioning both the primary source AND the site in question, not stealing?

<comment><USER12> Show me where I can see this story on Tweetknot's site, and then I'll agree with you that it's stealing.

Otherwise, it's just a lack of attribution which is pretty normal when writing stories.

<comment><USER14> You're missing the point entirely. The story wasn't STOLEN. It doesn't exist at all.

TC wants a dramatic story. And the only way to make it credible is to hide what they are talking about. Once the site in question was revealed, their article became laughable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just noticed that the title of this thread has now been changed from one that accuses Techcrunch of stealing a story to the one that blame it of misleading. Unfortunately, it's still not the Techcrunch post but the title of this thread that is misleading.

As much as I dislike Techcrunch, it didn't mislead anyone in the story. It just didn't disclose the name of a website owner that shamelessly ripped the hell off Twitter and instead chose to refer him as a 'third party developer'.

In a way, Techcrunch is doing you a favor by maintaining anonymity.

Edit: The title of this thread seems to be a work-in-progress. changing every other while. The original title was: Techcrunch steals story from tweetknot

</comment><comment><USER10> This is just stupid. I'm usually fine with the TechCrunch criticism — frankly, we deserve it sometimes. But this was about protecting a source.

Oftentimes when we receive information like this we won't reveal the source unless we're given explicit permission to do so. This is especially important when an application or service is running on a platform they don't control, like the iPhone or Twitter, because the informant stands the risk of retaliation.

I agree that the Tweetknot site design is derivative, but that wasn't the point of the story in the first place. What is important is the fact that Twitter is changing its stance with regard to the use of words like 'Twitter' and 'Tweet'. In fact, Twitter just wrote a blog post about it: <http://blog.twitter.com/2009/07/may-tweets-be-with-you.html>

<comment><USER16> The fact that Tweetknot is extremely derivative is crucial to the story.

If Twitter had pressured a more unique, independent product about using "Tweet" or "Twitter", one might reasonably draw the conclusion that their goal is really to protect the terms "Tweet" and "Twitter."

But when Twitter attacks Tweetknot through this charge, the most obvious explanation is that they have a particular problem with Tweetknot's general (in my opinion) rip-off of Twitter's aesthetic, and they're using "Tweet" as an initial concrete and legally solid means by which to force Tweetknot to stop copying Twitter. I do _not_ see any evidence that Twitter is going to start going after people who are using their trademarks with unique and useful products and services.

The blog post you linked delineates this policy from the horse's mouth. Your original article, on the other hand, obscured Twitter's intentions in order to present a more compelling and alarming story. In retrospect, given how derivative Tweetknot was, Twitter's email looks absolutely reasonable and makes their intentions totally clear.

(Reference: original TC story -- [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/twitter-grows- uncomfort...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/twitter-grows- uncomfortable-with-the-use-of-the-word-tweet-in-applications/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're also trying to drum up traffic for fwd2tweet.com, which is an interesting idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> :-)

I considered blogging it, and well my blog runs on gitology (<http://www.amitu.com/gitology/>) that I developed, required me to create a new post, git commit it, git push it, the git pull it on my webserver.

fwd2tweet.com does help you write a quick "long" tweet as easily as writing a mail to a friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> TechCrunch spews forth a non-story on a non-issue and folks act as if this isn't business as usual. Next.

</comment><comment><USER19> Amitu, is it possible that tweetknots is more than just your 'friends'?

Not saying that you are, mind you. Simply asking for clarification. Because if you're part of the team that founded the site and you don't disclose it, that would be _really_ unethical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nopes, just friends. Used to work with me in a company I worked two years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> stealing? seriously? Just because they didn't link to the site they were reporting about? looks like someone is hopelessly desperate for publicity.

</comment><comment><USER20> The way I look at this story is: there are so many websites which have 'tweet' in their domains on the web.

Techcrunch may not get the story from tweetknot. But, from somewhere else maybe. So, we should not think that this story is true until someone could actually prove this.

</comment><comment><USER21> TC is slow-playing the story. By being incomplete, they get one trumped-up story (with inlinks and comment thread) that makes it looks like Twitter is being aggressive.

A day or two later, they reveal the startup that got the letter, and get a second storyline about how that startup went over the line in its mimicry of Twitter.

Commentary like this in the meantime only heightens the number of contentious angles they can play. Maybe they'll get a third story out of it: "defending our honor!"

</comment><comment><USER22> Twitter does not need to throw the book at them. It will _never_ take off

</comment><comment><USER23> _If you go see tweetknot.com, it resembles twitter a lot_

So, if you are a short messaging service, you can only use certain colors as your background?</comment>


ExtReact: 115+ React Components - <AUTHOR> https://www.sencha.com/products/extreact/ <comment><USER2> Be VERY aware that if you intend to use the GPL version of this, Sencha's official view is that you must release your _BACKEND_ code under the GPL as well, if that backend is required for the frontend software to function. See [https://www.sencha.com/legal/open-source- faq/](https://www.sencha.com/legal/open-source-faq/) :

> Let's say that the application has a front-end (that generates web pages > linked to Ext JS JavaScript) that communicates over JSON/HTTP with a backend > service. This backend service contains approval and validation logic for > this application alone. Even if only the front-end uses Ext JS code, you > should consider that the combination of front and back ends constitutes the > application, and the source code for both back and front end would need to > be provided to the application's end users under GPLv3 if the application is > used by an end-user who is not part of the same legal entity that holds the > GPLv3 license to the Ext JS code.

<insert spit take> I'd LOVE to see this taken to court; either way it falls, it would be needed clarity on how the GPL works in the modern world. Personally, though, I wouldn't touch anything containing the word Sencha with a 30 foot pole.

(I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.)

<comment><USER3> IANAL, but AFAIK the GPLv3 has only the requirement that all software that is built upon the licenced software (and couldn't work without the licenced software) musto be released under that license. Likely, your backend will be REST/GraphQL/some well-known alternative-enabled, meaning you could reasonably use [relevant request debugging tool] as the only endpoint for your APIs, which makes your backend loosely coupled to the frontend and therefore it does not have to be released under GPL. Maybe when your backend e.g. is going to send implementation-specific data for the frontend, it can be considered for a licence-lock. Again, IANAL, but this is what I think read while checking the GPL-FAQ

<comment><USER2> My interpretation of Sencha's reading is that because the user-facing web application overall is built upon GPL software, and _it_ requires the backend to function, the backend is part of that application, regardless of whether it has other merits. Again, IANAL but presumably Sencha hired some to advise that FAQ.

<comment><USER3> then they'd basically saying "because you depend on software X and our GPL- software, you need to make software X GPL as well. That probably won't hold in court.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker than 2 years ago - at-fates-hands http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2738653/Stunning-satellite-images-summer-ice-cap-thicker-covers-1-7million-square-kilometres-MORE-2-years-ago-despite-Al-Gore-s-prediction-ICE-FREE-now.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Can be flickering between two equilibriums, that happens when we're close to a phase transition:

[http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2009/scheffer...](http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2009/scheffer2009a.pdf)</comment>


Porn is not the worst thing on Musical.ly - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@anastasiabasilcunningham/porn-is-not-the-worst-thing-on-musical-ly-5df07ab842af?curator=MediaREDEF <comment><USER2> I plan to monitor my kids' internet usage and heavily filter it as well.

Their phones and apps will be restricted until mature enough to make their own decisions.

<comment><USER3> As a young teen, the filtering drove me mental as it blocked development tools websites. But it was a lot of fun working out how to corrupt the filtering process so it "appeared" to work when my parents looked at it, but actually did nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is literally no reason for anyone under the age of 18 to own a smartphone or have unsupervised use of any internet-connected device. Literally none.

<comment><USER5> Under 18? Are you serious? You think a 15 year old doesn't deserve a single ounce of independence?

Teens should be educated on proper use of the internet, not prohibited from it without trading away their privacy to parents.

<comment><USER6> My 16 years old will be pretty independent. He'll have a car and a motorbike. He'll be able to go out by himself, experience real people. He'll be able to work odd jobs, manage his own money, read whatever books and learn whatever things he wants.

But he won't have a smartphone or unsupervised internet access. Neither provide independence, but shackles to kilotons of the worst quality content humanity has ever created.

<comment><USER7> Not knowing about your 16 year old; but it will be significantly difficult to deal with the peer pressure and peer influences unless you live in a different culture.

The studied reason millenials were less likely to drive is not because cars got harder to afford or high school jobs harder to come by, but because of lack of interest (thanks to smart phones)

Even if you don't give your children a smart phone, they're going to be exposed to this behavior from their friends. And there are already articles of children who buy "burners" to keep their privacy from their parents.

<comment><USER8> Owned a burner in 2006 when I realized my parents were going through my call logs. Thankfully, back then they weren't clever enough to realize they could download my text logs.

Considering a smart phone can be bought for the equivalent of a month's lunch money today, good luck to anyone trying to keep one out of a kid's hands in ~2030.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> All the sick shit on the internet was there 20 years ago. It might have been a little more pixellated and lower-resolution, and getting it on a 56kbp modem that gurgled and screamed and tied up the phone line was perhaps a bit tricky to do surreptitiously, but it was there. We turned out fine.

If I did ever put some sort of parental blockers on my children's devices, I'd try to find some half-assed thing like the blockers I learned to go around and through, to give them a challenge.

<comment><USER10> Have you read the piece? It's not about sick shit on the internet, but the negative sides of social media.

And Social Media wasn't the same 20 years ago.

Furthermore, the sick shit 20 years ago was harder to find and a lot slower to download as well.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I read it. It's a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching, and worrying that children might be talking in codes...

There were forums, there was AIM. People were shitty to each other in person. The twelve-year olds that are yelling racial slurs at you and calling you a noob in Battlefield were doing the same to their friends on the couch playing Mortal Kombat.

Every generation needs its existential threat to the wholesomeness of children. Comic books, jazz, rock and roll, hippy counter-culture, rap, and video games are mostly played out. Now it's social media.

<comment><USER11> The difference being that you're not engulfed in all of that for hours/days at a time like you are with today's technology. It doesn't constantly follow you around to the dinner table, to your school, to the toilet. 15 years ago, most people had a family computer and you'd go on it and if there was something you weren't supposed to see, you'd still do it but with the added fear of looking back over your shoulder hoping your parents wouldn't catch you.

Suicide/cutting forums for 12 year olds weren't a thing, and if they were, it was nothing like the hashtags that exist today and only the more techy kids would end up on /b/ or something of that nature. Regardless, kids being exposed to awful things will always happen, and seeing gore or whatever isn't the worst thing that can happen. I think what's worse is the overabundance of information that exists today, most of which is absolute trash that I wouldn't even recommend a 40 year old to consume let alone a 12 year old.

I don't think the writer of the article is being ludicrous by taking away access to certain apps from the poison of the internet. You literally get dumber consuming that stuff. Being called a noob in battlefield is a poor example with what the author is trying to convey</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google misleadingly shows Clinton 350 delegates ahead in 'Delegates Won' - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=2016+primary+delegates <comment><AUTHOR> Note that so called 'superdelegates' are not included for the republican portion of this widget.

While this may well be an oversight, it paints an absurdly unbalanced portrait of the status of the democratic primary.</comment>


Show HN: Vooza - <AUTHOR> http://vooza.com/

<comment><USER2> Did you think this was a real startup?

This is a parody site representing just about every mobile or web-based startup.

It's fairly accurate (and hilarious!), isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Stopped after the second video. Still don't know what is vooza.com about</comment>


Sailing into the Wind, or Faster than the Wind - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/sailing-into-the-wind-or-faster-than-the-wind/ <comment><USER2> Is the geek sailing trend recent, or just something I'm only noticing being out in San Francisco right now? It's coming up in almost every group I hang out with; they've got time shares, they're going to sailing class. Is this what "we" do now?

<comment><USER3> I thought kitesurfing was the new geek trend. Read a bunch of articles about a bunch of Google bigwigs taking that up a couple years ago. I'm still too chicken to try it, alas.

Where do people go for sailing class in SF? I sailed in college and am looking to pick it up again...

<comment><USER4> Skiff sailing is the new trend ! Small, fast and fun boats, that's the future :)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to get into that, but given that my only sailing experience is 420s and FJs on a lake that never had any wind, I think I should probably start with something a little less hard to handle. ;-) Know of any dinghy sailing schools in the South Bay?

<comment><USER4> I live in France, so... I don't have any idea :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LLVM 6.0.0 Release - <AUTHOR> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/121675.html <comment><USER2> Would love to see better transparency from Apple with regards to their adoption/flavour of Clang. The current and next versions of Xcode (9.2 and 9.3) still do not support std::variant/std::optional in Cpp17 for example…

<comment><USER3> Apple's LLVM and Clang from Xcode 9 are based on version 4.0 of the main LLVM/Clang. You'll need at least LLVM/Clang 5.0 for more C++17 compatibility.

To be fair, modern C++ support is not a priority for Apple, their efforts are more toward Swift.

<comment><USER4> It's fine if it's not a priority, but why ship a crippled compiler when they could ship the upstream compiler? ABI issues maybe? (I've heard from OS X users that XCode updates have broken the string ABI multiple times anyway...).

I don't really care too much since I'm not an OS X user, but some people insist on trying to compile/run some of the software I work on on OS X...

<comment><USER5> Talking of Apple Clang as a crippled compiler comes across as very uneducated opinion to me. It goes through an extensive validation / stabilization for many months before being released. So yes it adds some delay in getting new shiny features, but calling it "crippled" seems like a very much uneducated opinion here.

You can have an idea about the integration exactly what version from upstream Apple is integrating by looking at Swift (they somehow have to be in sync). I guess the last Xcode update was: [https://github.com/apple/swift- clang/commits/swift-4.1-branc...](https://github.com/apple/swift- clang/commits/swift-4.1-branch) The next minor update will likely be this one: [https://github.com/apple/swift- clang/commits/swift-4.2-branc...](https://github.com/apple/swift- clang/commits/swift-4.2-branch) ; so judging at the history I bet you'll get a version of clang that is based of clang-5.0 upstream. And likely the next major Xcode (10?) would be based of this: [https://github.com/apple/swift- llvm/tree/swift-5.0-branch](https://github.com/apple/swift- llvm/tree/swift-5.0-branch) ; which is based off clang-6.0. Note that this branch will very likely get many bug fixes in the next ~6 months. (the above are only guesses based on past release, I don't know anything about their current plan or schedule).

The Apple engineers will try to build all variants of the Apple OS for all the HW they ship with this new clang-6.0 based branch. The usual process is to fix upstream the development of clang-7.0 and cherry-pick in these branches.

So the compiler that you'll get with the next major Xcode, even if based of clang-6.0 will have many/most of the bug-fixes that will be in clang-7.0 (release in July), but not most of the new features (and new bugs!). Caveat: this apply only to ARM64 and X86, of course Apple does not try to backport bugfixes for platform they don't support.

(Note that libc++ is handled a bit differently.)

Disclaimer: I was part of the Apple clang team until ~1y ago.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure a lot of work goes into it, but often features that are present in upstream clang seem to be removed or heavily delayed. Fom the perspective of a Linux "developer" whose software (C++ scientific tools) sometimes gets compiled with the Xcode clang++, I've seen (i.e. been told of by Apple users) all sorts of problems that don't happen with upstream clang or modern gcc. The fact that the versioning isn't coherent with upstream clang makes things even more confusing.

<comment><USER6> What features?

<comment><USER4> Well the one I'm familiar with is Apple's explicit disabling of thread-local storage for a long time. See e.g. [https://stackoverflow.com/a/23850891](https://stackoverflow.com/a/23850891), which thankfully has been fixed since then (but it took something like 2 years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did I miss something big, or did this seem like a small changelog for a major release? Its been a few years since I have been a daily user of llvm, but all the changes seemed very small reading their description.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Apple LLVM 9.0 still does not support LeakSanitizer, but document in [https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerLe...](https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerLeakSanitizer) show it supports x86 OSX, holy shit!

<comment><USER8> I'm kinda newbie, after brew install llvm, LeakSanitizer found...

<comment><USER8> I googled, and can't find any link which can tell me what the difference between llvm and Apple llvm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any benchmarks yet?</comment>


Transit: JSON Data Interchange Format - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format <comment><USER2> I couldn't get the why of the project from the Github page alone. Rich Hickey's post introducing it a year ago is clearer:

[http://blog.cognitect.com/blog/2014/7/22/transit](http://blog.cognitect.com/blog/2014/7/22/transit)

JSON has become the go-to schemaless format between languages, despite being verbose and having problems with typing. Transit aims to be a general-purpose successor to JSON here.

Stronger typing allows the optional use of a more compact binary format (using MessagePack). Otherwise it too uses JSON on the wire.

Anyone who knows more, please correct me.

<comment><USER3> > JSON has become the go-to schemaless format between languages, despite being > verbose and having problems with typing. Transit aims to be a general- > purpose successor to JSON here.

XML has become the go-to schemaless format between languages, despite being verbose and having problems with typing. JSON aims to be a general-purpose successor to XML here.

<comment><USER4> Yes, except that XML has a schema (XSD).

<comment><USER5> Ahem. [http://json-schema.org/](http://json-schema.org/)

<comment><USER6> Quoting [http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-core.html](http://json- schema.org/latest/json-schema-core.html): "This Internet-Draft will expire on August 3, 2013."

<comment><USER6> ... which, by the way, does not mean that JSON Schema is bad or unusable. I actually quite like it, it has certaint elegance. Just not _really_ standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only one amazed by what the Clojure community and core team are conjuring up?

Doing client-side programming with things like CLJS, Figwheel, Reagent and core.async feels miles ahead of what we have in moden-js-land (es6/7, babel, webpack, React, promises).

If you were to start a startup today, would you be comfortable going with something like Clojure/script?

<comment><USER8> The Clojurescript community are ahead but not by that much. To list specifics, cljs->babel+and immutable lib, figwheel->react-hot-loader, reagent->react 0.14 pure components, core.async->js-csp (or async/await).

In terms of non-component organization, I believe re-frame is a significant improvement over redux. Reactions are good when you don't control the endpoints, splitting out the reducers into pure functions is good, but adding middleware on them is the real win. On the other hand, it wouldn't be that hard to adapt the model to redux.

The next phase of organization is integrating Relay/Falcor concepts. David Nolan gave a talk about this in Om Next at NYC Clojure last month and there is a video. Om Next as presented is very compelling if you're on Datomic and less so otherwise.

As to your startup question:

I've been a full time cljs dev on a b2b app at Reuters for the past 9 months. I took up the job specifically because I wanted to write cljs. I had been involved with the Clojure community (I care about state) but only working on toy projects for the previous ~4 years.

My experience with Clojurescript is that it was less of an improvement on modern js than I was expecting. The biggest advantages are protocols and the standard library being both rich and standard. Nice to haves but non-critical are native syntax for immutable maps and multimethods. I guesstimate I write ~10% less code in cljs versus js but you're ultimately writing the same stuff.

Problems I've run into:

Full build time for this app is long. Our app is in the 15k LoC range across ~150 files and cold compile is 140s on a 2012 MBA. It's annoying but incremental compilation times are sub-second after some build config tweaking.

We have one component in particular that tends to get lost when switching branches and the missing namespace forces a fresh compile. Our cljs version is from June so this may be fixed. I've also spent a number of hours debugging problems that turned out to be stale build issues.

I tried a couple times unsuccessfully to get Emacs (cider) to connect to a figwheel repl. After a few evals things simply become unresponsive. Just using figwheel is good enough but I miss the in-editor repl. Haven't tracked down the reason, could be my lack of emacs knowledge.

If you're using core.async, the main loop has a try/catch/rethrow. This causes Chrome Dev Tools to break in the outer loop instead of actually at the problem. You have to explicitly err.stack in the console (which is not source mapped) and don't have access to the locals unless you manually set a breakpoint at the error and reload. You also get to learn to read the JS representation of Clojure literals. None of this is impossible and if you're working in a tight loop you tend to have a pretty good idea of what the error is without jumping through debugger hoops but if you're doing something like switching branches or refactoring it's annoying.

I like Reagent but I've had a number of times where its behavior doesn't match my expectations. In particular, figuring out what part of the vdom is invalidated on a ratom change caused me problems. There's a gotcha that sequences must be forced with doall or you'll get weird behavior. At the moment I have a very expensive reaction (list processing ~6k items) that's getting run 8 times in response to a single key change in the source ratom so I'll be tracking that down tomorrow.

I don't consider this list a reason to not adopt Clojurescript. I can make a similar list for the Babel stack.

As for the question of would I be comfortable, I like writing clojurescript but I'd only really recommend it if you're committed to full stack Clojure. It takes a number of weeks for a new frontend hire to ramp up on the language. I've discussed this with the other frontend specialist on the team and our consensus is that cljs is a better language but we're not that much more productive in the language compared to ES2015 so I'm not really convinced the weeks of ramp up time are worth it. Our experience with hiring has been that we've had very few candidates but they've all been skilled.

<comment><USER9> _The Clojurescript community are ahead but not by that much. To list specifics, cljs- >babel+and immutable lib, figwheel->react-hot-loader, reagent->react 0.14 pure components, core.async->js-csp (or async/await)._

Immutable, js-csp, etc... were all inspired by Clojurescript, I guess that's the point the grandparent was trying to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reinventing XML, one data type at a time.

<comment><USER11> My thoughts exactly. JSON is great for Javascript clients, but if you're dealing with clients written in multiple languages then there is already a good language-neutral serialisation format: XML. Just because it's not fashionable (with some) doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Edit: So why the downvotes? How about a conversation instead?

<comment><USER12> I used to agree, but I've lately come over to the JSON side, I think. It's easier to read by a human, and it doesn't have this weird "should it be a node or an attribute" thing. Single things are properties, many things are arrays.

And now with Schemas and editor support for them, I think it is an acceptable replacement personally.

<comment><USER11> Nodes for data, attributes for metadata.

I think you made a good argument, although I personally prefer the more mature XML tooling and metadata support for versioning.

<comment><USER13> > Nodes for data, attributes for metadata.

Its a nice soundbite, but it ends up being less than useful in practice, because all metadata is data, and almost any data can be viewed as metadata, a distinction which is both subjective and strongly influenced by the use to which a consumer is putting the data rather than being determined on the basis solely of the inherent nature of the data.

<comment><USER11> Its a rule of thumb (heuristic). Judgement is still required.

(A soundbite is something altogether different.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The most novel use of transit is in the Sente [1] library for clojure/script. It is an abstraction over long-polling / websockets that lets us treat it as a core.async channel (which is like a go-block in Go).

It's worked awesome for updates, and using Transit to keep the transmissions minimal has let us focus on the API for a realtime system.

[1] - [https://github.com/ptaoussanis/sente#sente-channel- sockets-f...](https://github.com/ptaoussanis/sente#sente-channel-sockets-for- clojure)

<comment><USER15> In a project I tried both chord and sente and settled on chord. Chord was much simpler.

It was a point to point system. Sente seemed to have better support for point to multipoint (like a chat app). It was overkill for what we were doing and chord fit the bill nicely.

[https://github.com/jarohen/chord](https://github.com/jarohen/chord)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why choose this over Google's Protocol buffers? [https://github.com/google/protobuf](https://github.com/google/protobuf)

<comment><USER17> One reason is compatibility - it can be encoded to json and thus is handled by http proxies, etc. It is also human readable in encoded form.

<comment><USER18> Protobuf is just a serialization format; you can send it over HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure I like the idea of cramming ASCII type tags in to the encoded JSON.

I'm more partial to the way Avro does it, where the encoded JSON remains type- tag and cruft free, and a separate schema (also JSON) is used (and required) to interpret the types, or encode to the correct binary encoding.

<comment><USER20> Transit also allows you to use msgpack, but JSON is more performant on the web.

Another feature Transit has is that it caches identical keys (can also cache values with some additional code), giving you a smaller footprint.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but all that comes at the huge disadvantage of throwing away the ability for someone to just grab a JSON library and access your data adhoc. Now you have to fiddle with stripping away tildes and cache references and such.

At the same time, I don't see how you can do anything sensible with Transit except throw it in to a hashmap/dict alongside runtime type information. This is natural for dynamic languages, but, without a schema, you're left to write you're still left to write your own error-prone structural validation, and can't fully leverage the efficiency of static languages. MsgPack has this problem as well.

Optimising the JSON representation just doesn't seem worth it to me. Avro for example encodes enums by exposing the type names as JSON keys. It sucks, and it's something I'd change, but at the end of the day you're building on a poor transport. Caching reminds me a lot of DNS label compression, or a poor mans preset zlib dictionary.

<comment><USER20> The great thing about Transit is that I can extend the data layer with new types (like JodaTime). Even without that, I really like Transit's builtin support for sets, keywords, symbols, lists and vectors (which really helps in a clojure environment).

Another great thing (again, for someone using functional languages) is that Transit can ensure identity for equal values.

When it comes to structural validation, that is something I use prismatic.schema for. Of course, it helps that I can share the validation code between backend and server (using Clojure and ClojureScript).

When using plain JSON, I had to convert types myself after decoding/encoding, which was error-prone and gave a surprising amount of bugs (especially regarding dates).

Transit solves a big problem for me, while still retaining the easy to read syntax which JSON has, and also has great tooling in browsers.

Also, caching isn't only about smaller size. It allows for faster parsing of the initial data, allowing Transit to be just as fast as plain JSON for certain payloads, even considering that it has to expand from cache and decode values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> These posts by the author of transit-js clear up some things and go in depth about performance:

[http://swannodette.github.io/2014/07/23/a-closer-look-at- tra...](http://swannodette.github.io/2014/07/23/a-closer-look-at-transit/) [http://swannodette.github.io/2014/07/26/transit-- clojurescri...](http://swannodette.github.io/2014/07/26/transit-- clojurescript/) [http://swannodette.github.io/2014/07/30/hijacking- json/](http://swannodette.github.io/2014/07/30/hijacking-json/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I recently used this in a project where I simply wanted a typing guarantee that JSON can't provide (i.e., that a timestamp really is a timestamp when it arrives on the other side, not a string like in JSON). It's very easy to use, more or less just a drop-in middleware.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't help but wonder if it isn't simpler just to use gzipped JSON. I'd be interested to see a size comparison of the two. It seems like they're going to an awful lot of work to hand-roll a suboptimal text compression scheme here.

<comment><USER24> It's the whole FAST/FIX clusterfuck all over again. Use a binary format and stop cocking around. You can't serialise/deserialise it faster and JSON is a string based mess. No low latency path can absorb it. Even influxdb have removed JSON support because it was their slowest part of their critical path that could not be optimised. Complete lack of mechanical sympathy + laziness is why JSON is popular outside of the web world

<comment><USER25> I don't think I would enjoy debugging a service that talks in a binary format.

<comment><USER26> I've never done it with JS. It's not really a problem in C, though. If there's a lot of data, you're no better off with text; if there's not much, reading binary data isn't too bad. You've usually got other problems on top of decoding the actual data - like, why is this data coming in the first place? Why isn't the code accepting it properly? Why isn't the other end listening? The data encoding is just the tip of the iceberg.

Either way, the advantages of binary often outweigh the difficulty of having a human read the data. As the saying goes, code is executed far more often than it's read.

(Most binary formats have some fairly obvious possible text representations, at least for key fields (they're just encoding ints, floats, strings, bitfields, etc.). When you're having difficulty, or you're simply curious, you can print them out. If the format is any good, malformed messages are easy to check for in code - this code is not harder to debug than any other. If anything it's actually easier than with some kind of text format.)

<comment><USER25> Sure, but it's not very convenient.

I regularly MITM a connection between a mobile app and a HTTP server, when something isn't going quite right. A look at the JSON they exchange exposes the problem in under a minute more often than not. If I want to test something out quickly, I simply modify the incoming / outgoing JSON by hand. It's rare to get the syntax wrong and involves no context switches. I can then go back to the code, find the relevant section and make the changes I need to make. I find this a very convenient way of debugging and I don't think it would be as nice to do this with a binary format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The extension mechanism is open, allowing programs using Transit to add new > elements specific to their needs. Users of data formats without such > facilities must rely on either schemas, convention, or context to convey > elements not included in the base set,

The extension mechanism is writing handlers in all languages communicated with, since its stated purpose is cross language value conveyance.

In contrast, a schema language allows extensions to be described once, in one language.

I was expecting this to be a sort of macros for data notation (an inline schema language), but it seems more like an extendible serialization library.

<comment><USER13> > In contrast, a schema language allows extensions to be described once, in > one language.

No, it doesn't. A schema language allows that to be done for the syntax, but requires the semantics to be implemented for each language. Schema languages often _include_ , as part of their specifications, core types which must be supported; when an application restricts itself to these core types and types whose only important semantics are derived from them (e.g., restricted subsets of core types in most cases), then the fact that every full implementation that supports the core types will already have this work done for every language means no additional work is necessary. But that's not a product of a schema language preventing types to be implemented for all host languages, that's a result of the fact that a predefined set of core types accompanying the schema language means that all implementations are required to have already done the work of implementing the core types for all languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Previous HN discussion from when it was announced last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069346)

</comment><comment><USER29> The main advantage it seems for Transit is that JSON is fast for many different clients. Otherwise I'm not sure I would ever use it for internal services considering there are so many other probably faster options (Protobuf,Avro,SBE ... etc).

Are folks using it for internal services?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think i saw it before:

[http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_dh....](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_dh.htm)

</comment><comment><USER31> So it's basically a set of libraries used to marshal/unmarshal objects without using a schema or can it also be used as an RPC library?

</comment><comment><USER32> So the python implementation is 2.7 only...

</comment><comment><USER33> Very interesting (just commenting to read it later)

<comment><USER18> You can just upvote it, then go to [https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=latenightcoding](https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=latenightcoding)

Or use bookmarks :)</comment></comment>


Bankrupt OneWeb seeks license for 48,000 satellites - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/spacex-and-oneweb-seek-licenses-to-launch-78000-broadband-satellites/ <comment><AUTHOR> > "It's important to understand that the reason OneWeb filed for so many > satellites is that it will make others' efforts more difficult, especially > [for Amazon subsidiary] Kuiper, and thereby potentially enhance the value of > OneWeb's first gen license. ..."</comment>