Name It, and They Will Come - <AUTHOR> https://overreacted.io/name-it-and-they-will-come/ <comment><USER3> Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate description of what happens 90% of the time:

= = = =

The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief history of how different programming languages approached formatting. There are obligatory mentions of gofmt and Python. Have you tried Prettier?

Somebody mentions that open source projects shouldn't have beautiful landing pages because it's misleading marketing. What if a junior developer falls for it without fully understanding the fundamentals?

In a response, somebody argues the landing page design is boring. Additionally, it's broken in Firefox. Clearly, this means the project author doesn't care about the open web. Is the web as we know it dying? It's time for some game theory…

The next comment is a generic observation about the nature of abstractions, and how they can lead to too much "boilerplate" (or, alternatively, "magic"). The top reply explains that one shouldn't confuse "simple" with "easy". Actually, Rich Hickey gave a very good talk about this. Have you watched it?

Finally, why do we need libraries at all? Some languages do well with a built- in standard library. Is npm a mistake? The leftpad accident could happen again. Should we build npm right into the browser? What about the standards?

Confused, you close the tab.

<comment><USER4> The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators.

Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page.

I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen made people - often busy people - spend time to write very thoughtful comments, which could then raise to the top. A positive, self reinforcing loop. Which is getting slowly, but surely, less effective with the years.

I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not.

/rant

<comment><USER5> There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guys are the _real_ geeks" a few said, "Wow. These guys are amazing" and joined the group. Eventually there was a small club of highly dedicated model railway enthusiasts who knew practically everything about model railways.

One day there was a person who like model railways, but wasn't really _that_ into it. However, he noticed the model railway club and realised right away that _these people are amazing_. He would go to the meetings just to bask in the glory of the incredible things that these people built. Eventually, he couldn't keep it to himself. He told a whole bunch of his friends and they all showed up too.

The model train club started to get bigger and the original members couldn't be happier. When they first started most people looked down their noses at them. Now they were downright _popular_. One day some of the members said, "This really amazing stuff is really amazing, but I wonder if there is a way for me to approach this without being _quite_ so geeky. I have a family and I don't have so much time. I want my train setup to be super awesome, but I don't really care that much about the details".

Lots of the other members were in the same boat and so they worked hard to have a kind of "scaled down" setup that would appeal to people who didn't have the time or energy to devote themselves completely to model railways. The club became even more popular due to this and lots of people who really liked trains, but weren't that interested in model railways started to show up.

Eventually several of the members started to have outings to visit train museums and to have photo competitions on train themes. To raise money they even made a calendar with pictures of trains. The model side of the club was a little bit less accessible to most of the membership because the core group of enthusiasts were interested in highly technical details that most other members were not interested in.

Eventually, it was decided that the model railway club should change it's name and purpose in order to be more accessible and welcoming to new members. It would now be the train enthusiasts club. Of course model train enthusiasts would have a place, but it would be appreciated if they refrained from having heated discussions about highly technical and inaccessible topics like programming train simulations and the like.

Eventually, the original model railway enthusiast stopped going to the club. He liked the people. They were great and friendly, but he was, after all a model railway enthusiast.

If you take something that appeals to 1% of the population and scale it to include 20% of the population, it morphs into a thing that the 20% group likes, not the 1% group. Can't be helped. It's just a matter of numbers. It happens everywhere.

<comment><USER6> This is a fantastic way of describing the CS "culture" of my school. So many people who like talking about tech without ever bothering to learn the actual underlying skills. And yet they're nominally CS majors...

<comment><USER7> And he didnt even start to talk about the people showing up because it became lucrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples)), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.

<comment><USER3> > _I honestly don 't understand what this post is trying to say._

It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread.

(It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).

<comment><USER8> Okay, but what does that _mean_ in practice? Almost every project posted on HN already has a name and at least a short description of why it exists or what it's trying to do (often in the title itself). They still get bikeshedded to hell, so obviously the name and story alone aren't enough. I see a ton of posts where people bicker specifically _about_ the name or the story (half the comments are "is this actually an issue?").

The linked post spends the entire time describing the problem but only 4 tiny sentences on the solution. It's really not self-explanatory even though it treats it like it is. Was writing it this way intended to be some kind of meta-commentary that's just going over my head?

<comment><USER9> I wish Dan (the OP) had gone into more detail on exactly _what techniques_ one can use to tell a story, because this is exactly what he does - very well! - as one of the most prolific voices in the React (and perhaps all of frontend) community.

My personal take:

(1) Marketing shouldn't be an afterthought; it must be considered in the same way one would write code. Take a page from the folks who designed a custom website and icon for Heartbleed. To put it another way, think of "things that would distract someone from the main message" as "bugs" in your code. Certainly, some bugs need to be triaged before any launch. But they should all be triaged with open eyes and respect for the user experience.

(2) Don't assume people know acronyms or even the basics of your niche. Talk about potential use cases. Walk someone through the naive way of doing things, a less naive way of doing things, and why your thing naturally evolves/iterates on those. Make separate "background" pages if you want. Then take all of that as you would an essay you're writing for a class, and reshape it - find a thesis statement, tie everything back to it. Your launch post/README is a persuasive essay on why your thing is good. Even the "getting started" details are part of that persuasion - if it's easy to use, that's part of what makes it good.

Well-written technical documentation can be a joy when you are immersed in the excitement of the person who built it. And with any immersive experience, there are things that can take you out of it. Immerse people quickly and keep them there, and maybe, just maybe, they'll be curious enough to do background research on their own and engage with you on the merits of the project with context :)

<comment><USER10> > To put it another way, think of "things that would distract someone from the > main message" as "bugs" in your code.

This is the PR/communications industry. Once I understood this, and that a main message is one sentence at most -- a short phrase is even better -- interviews of people in politics made a lot more sense!

<comment><USER9> Yep, the same way we write code and think "what are the implications of this function were called from a weird context," so too do PR/communications folks "engineer" statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty much summarises comment threads here on news.yc much like this blog post: [https://danluu.com/hn-comments/](https://danluu.com/hn-comments/)

One way to avoid the pitfall of folks resorting to talk abt 'universally shared experiences' is to take control of the conversation: One way to do that is to offer AMA, or ask a question yourself.

I've seen the keybase founders (esp malgorithms) and to an extent the Cloudflare founders (esp jgrahamc) do it pretty successfully here.

An example of an independent developer (browsh) shaping the conversation to their benefit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552)

<comment><USER12> For clarity... I wasn't a founder of Cloudflare, but I was an early employee.

I try to answer questions about Cloudflare, or comments about the company, here when I have the time. I do the same on Twitter (and to a certain extent on Reddit). I have code that monitors HN for mentions of "Cloudflare" and emails me within a couple of minutes.

</comment></comment><comment> munk-a That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? Perhaps a less fleeting writing style could have set up a more concrete thesis that would deliver a conclusion to their statement.

That last bit is actually quite relevant - due to law of triviality and such there will always be bikeshedding, but the way to cut through that (in my opinion) is to clearly set a scenario, set an agenda, open with a problem and set the dialog up to resolve the problem. This is why I have begun (usually) refusing any meetings without a clearly outlined agenda, and when agendaless meetings get an agenda sometimes I'll duck out of the meeting and submit feedback in writing _to_ the agenda. This is also why I have a bit of an issue with this article, it is titled in such an irrelevant manner that it can't help but generate bikeshedding around it - the title is good and catchy sure, but I really don't understand how it relates to the actual meat of the article (which does raise some relevant points).

If the suggestion is that naming (adding a short descriptor) to... "stuff" makes it easier to keep discussions about that stuff on topic then please back it up with an example, provide some justification, instead the article reaches ~95% then doing a hard right to inject a catchy quote that seems unrelated to the rest of the verbiage.

<comment><USER13> I love the meta-ness of this comment. Not sure if it was intentional :-)

One concrete example of naming a problem is "callback hell". Example of "telling a story" to explain it: [https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html](https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html)

Once you have a few articles like this, the quality of discussions on the topic rapidly goes up.

For React, David Nolen's and James Long's early posts did the same thing.

<comment> munk-a It was, to my knowledge there isn't a great way to flag that sort of thing on the web (short of * WINK *)... I thought the fact that I apologized for having "overreacted" when discussing the blog post hosted on overreacted.io would be a bit of a give away.

That callback hell story differs from the one above in that I think it delivers a much better summary statement at the end and way forward - I have some opinions on it's aim as I think it is eschewing power in terms of a more comfortable expression for imperative programmers - but the article is well sized, clear, humorous and suggests a solid remediation for the perceived problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My problem with open sourcing my code is I always feel like someone else must have done it already and done it better.

On the subject of irrelevant comments: I see HN more as a place to discuss topics relating to the OP link rather than discussing the OP link itself. A lot of the value of HN for me comes from learning how other people see a subject or what related ideas/libraries there are. For me as a commenter, the threads I like are exactly the ones that a submitter might not like: threads filled with many semi-related comments.

I do think we absolutely have a problem with overly negative and discouraging comments on HN (and the programming community in general) though. The worst kinds of comments are comments like the "yet another js framework..." on someone's show HN. You're discouraging someone's work on their specific library by bringing up some larger problem you see in the industry. So I absolutely agree that those sorts of semi-related comments belong in a separate post on that specific issue.

<comment><USER15> About the 'someone else must have done it better already' if I can't find it then others might have not been able to do that either, that is where my solution could help. And even if not then just having a alternative implementation from which others can learn is pretty neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about._

AJAX (as it was at the time) is a prime example of what Dan's talking about, I think. As a term that enveloped the whole idea of having JavaScript dynamically load content from a server, it really brought developers together in _discussing_ and experimenting, and even resulted in naming a publication on the topic (Ajaxian). Did it matter that almost no-one was really fetching XML (the X in AJAX)? No.

"HTML5" played a similar role for a bunch of technologies 7-8 years ago, even including technologies that were nothing to do with the HTML5 spec (such as WebGL). Or DHTML 15-18 years ago.

We now see something similar with "serverless" which a lot of people criticize as a pointless term _except_ it _is_ bringing together discussion around a group of related concepts and is valuable in that role alone.

Other such terms that are ultimately ambiguous under close scrutiny but which allow discussion and communities to organize around them: IaaS, SaaS, NoSQL, devops..

<comment><USER17> Ajaxian - I can remember that. For a while it was a must read. Like 'Byte' in a generation before or 'Scientific American' a generation before that, 'Ajaxian' enabled you to learn about the future in a way where you felt quite privileged to be in on the story.

HTML5 also came with some publications that made you feel inspired. HTML5Rocks existed once. HTML5Doctor limps on with no content and someone paying the hosting much like Ajaxian does.

As per the model railway example given in this thread these are the leftovers from the original geeks that created the scene.

HTML5 became all about how you could embed video without a Flash player. The geeks thought it was all about semantic markup. But for the people that see words as just shapes on a page the 'video without Flash' bit was all they could relate to.

Absolutely nobody apart from a few HN people are using HTML5. That is no exaggeration. Go to any of those billion dollar web companies, check out the code and it is just Div Soup.

Go onto Wordpress. It is all Div Soup. There are no themes that use HTML5 beyond chucking in a 'header' and 'footer' tag here and there. Yet a third of the web is supposed to be powered by Wordpress.

Go onto a website builder service like Wix. Same story, yet more Div Soup.

We never got the XML bit of AJAX. It ended up 'AJAJ' if anything as it is just some JSON object that is what gets worked with.

With HTML5 we never got the semantic elements apart from the 'video' one. We got rounded buttons from CSS3 though.

I think the whole semantic thing was a mistake. The likes of Google have AI robots that can see pages and work out what is going on. So if you have a visually well designed page their robot is fine with that. Unless you are writing a page for the government's site on special needs then to hell with accessibility. That is how it seems.

The geeks that enthused about semantic HTML5 elements left the party a long time ago. The people who think HTML5 means you don't need flash took over and thought that was all there was to it.

The denial is an important thing though. People can keep working as they were before but believe they have new skills, adapted and changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always liked Dan Abramov's posts. He is very real, if that makes sense. This one really helps me mentally. Showing new work the world is hard, and people will always have something negative to say. There's also the issue of timing. When is it "too early" to show off a project? I always wanna post my projects to HN but then I remember how my documentation isn't done, or how I haven't written any tutorials or articles, and I figure I'd better wait, otherwise people will just bounce because they didn't find anything. I think the fraction of people who look at source code because they didn't find any docs is very small.

</comment><comment><USER19> "By now, you're convinced: This idea deserves to be heard."

This week my first public project got 7 git stars. The feeling is fantastic. I don't have homepage or story, but I have a nice diagram :)

The question for me is why I'm releasing this, to feed the ego monster or because I really beleive it's worth it? I hope it's not the first, but not sure, tbh.

<comment><USER20> It might as well be a combination of the two, but to be honest I don't think it's an issue. If those ego boosts are what keeps you building something useful, that's great and you probably deserve them.

It's a bit like social networks for exercise (Strava etc) - the whole thing is just people looking to show off because they've exercised, but if that's what's keeping them in shape, then great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for the writeup, Dan. This is how I feel about most code reviews. It's difficult to comprehend all the code and focus on the _actual_ problem being solved rather than naming conventions and syntax. And yes, I realize the irony by posting a tangentially-related comment on HN.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, most of the comments in this thread completely miss the point, which... is the point. So meta.

We suffered this exact same issue for years, but it isn't only in git, readme or marketing pages that the problem exists. When pitching or telling people what we do, because what we are doing is new, we struggled to find the right words and therefore, got blank stares about what we were doing.

The same thing happens with the introduction of many new products and systems.

We have gone through many iterations of how to describe our product and the industry moves making it the next big thing. From "3d visualizations" to "interactive 3d scenes" and currently settling in on "spatial media". Each version gets successively better, but until you give someone a hook to hang your product on, they don't know what to do with it. That is the shared vocabulary.

For us, it goes like this. "The future of media is spatial,viewers expect to be able to control their perspective in a 3d scene. We've seen this with VR, 360 video, and gaming. We are another type of spatial media. We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective, and we create the scene without a camera."

<comment><USER20> With that description I still have no idea about what you actually do. Maybe that's not actually the pitch and you're just giving an example, or maybe not, just wanted you to give you my feedback :)

<comment><USER22> Thanks, we've found this to be significantly better than what we were saying before, it's still a work in progress.

"We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective"

Most people get that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [on the subject of HN negativity raised in other posts—sorry for hijacking this post about post hijacking!]

One problem with HN, which I would love to hear others' opinion about, is: the HN Guidelines incentivise negative colour in threads. You get 10 upvotes, and 1 critical comment: to anyone reading the entire thread now looks negative. Noone sees the silent "+1"s, which, I feel, do add a lot of positivity and encouragement!

I honestly don't know what to change, or how. Hiding scores is great: it avoids the asinine karma peacocking, endemic in most similar forums. Allowing "+1" comments would probably be worse.

But the result is there. I think HN has a lot more positivity than we can see. But it remains hidden in the database.

Positivity on HN is write-only. Negativity is world readable.

<comment><USER24> My take on that issue is it doesn't matter in any regard. It couldn't be any more meaningless.

A scenario: a show HN post gets ~60 upvotes reasonably quickly and gets to the front page. Inside the post you have ten or so comments, three of which are negative or quasi negative (sometimes merely skeptical, sometimes overtly harsh). Two people really liked it and said so, five comments are mostly off topic. The negative comments are at the top in the thread (posted by members with higher default ranking scores); the positive comments are short on content and are near the bottom of the thread (posted by weaker ranking members).

That setup doesn't seem like it would be great. In fact it's spectacular. The post is going to end up with 100+ upvotes over time and it's getting a wave of traffic to it. It's the huge number of readers that never comment, and or never even sign up for an account, that are by far the most valuable part of the equation. The typical negative/cynical/skeptical comments are mostly _meaningless_ \- so long as you actually have a good product. I can't emphasize that enough, I need a far stronger word than meaningless here. You have a chance, with that wave of traffic, to convert people that want to believe in what you're doing - that's where all of your focus must be, those are the people you must not fail.

If it worked any other way in actuality, no product launch on HN would ever succeed. They'd all be buried by skepticism. It's the unseen angelic adopters on HN that matter more than anything else. Focus on delighting them and everything else will flow from it.

My advice on negative comments (unless they're definitely well earned, in which case you better act on them): put them in your mouth and eat them. Negative HN comments are like eating plain rice cakes. In the scheme of life, they're about the least concerning - most benign - things you're going to run into in the list of negatives when trying to build something, launch a product, run a business, and so on. Every other real problem with business or a product/project is drastically harder to push down and digest. At a minimum let the negative HN comments be a gentle introduction to how hard doing something successfully actually is (gentle because, again, negative HN comments are the easiest thing to mentally deal with - among negatives - <USER2> you will ever run into).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I find this to be spot on. I've frequently seen internal projects in companies called "Data Event System" or "Progam Manipulator" or some other nonsense. Sometimes giving a name to a project will dramatically change the way people talk about it.

</comment><comment><USER26> The author's understanding is that these pepole would be discussing the project proper if they weren't discussing other things instead. I don't think he's right there. People love to talk and tend to flock to wherever conversation is happening. These people were never partciularly interested in discussing the project anyways; they were just browsing and saw an opportunity to jump into the discussion with something they do really care about, such as indentation styles or the nature of abstraction or what have you.

Also, the conclusion is a typical case of something that _sounds_ insightful, but doesn't make any actual sense. I don't have even the slightest clue as to what the author is trying to say.

</comment><comment><USER27> And what happens when you tell the story and everybody just completely ignores you?

TBH I find that a lot more frustrating than ppl missing the point on what you were trying to say. That is exactly is what happened to me a week ago... I will keep on trying, though :-)

</comment><comment><USER28> I like it that you can change day/night mode in the top right corner of his page. Although this should probably be the part of the browser.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well if the thing you're trying to create is really new (let alone zero to one), then it'll probably be difficult to explain concisely without ending up with several sentences full of "trivial" details.

I think Dan's example about irrelevant comments and the reasons behind it are clear, but the ending about naming and telling a story does not provide a good enough solution.

Not sure if his intention was to offer any solutions at all but I wonder if anyone anyone has found some great techniques that guides launching "completely new" ideas to market. (if you do please let me know)

When I look at the first ride-hailing companies or other zero to one companies it seems like they started out by:

1\. Coining a definition. 2\. Telling a story. 3\. Ignoring irrelevant feedback. 4\. A wide spread of calculated trial and error marketing, eventually one will do the magic.

Is there a better way?

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder to what extent this is determined by the platform? There is a kind of response that occurs on HN and every other platform I know that seems reflexive. I've tried at times and utterly failed to move from "commenting on" to "doing something" or "further discussion" and it just does not seem to work. Perhaps it is me but perhaps there is some other style or format that would provide a better vehicle. I find the concept of "name it and they will come" funny and interesting and would like to explore it more, but how?

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel like it doesn't apply to just software projects, but it's a phenomenon that affects life more generally.

It's so much easier to bring our focus on and talk about what we understand that we might just dismiss what's truly important but requires effortful thinking.

        Universal shared experiences are easy to talk about. That includes topics like code formatting, verbosity vs magic, configuration vs convention, differences in the community cultures, scandals, tech interviews, industry gossip, macro trends and design opinions.

</comment><comment><USER32> This kind of thing is very frustrating for creators.

It'd be cool if comments could be sorted based on their relevance to the article, post, project, or idea as a default, rather than just by time or popularity.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is very accurate as of my recent experience on doing a Show HN here[1][2]. I did get very good feedback but many of the comments were just stupid. Still, posting here did help the project as the broader audience doesn't care about a random's HN opinion.

1\. [https://zeroserver.io/](https://zeroserver.io/) 2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828)

<comment><USER34> Weird, I actually thought of your Show HN post while reading this. I think this was because the response on HN seemed very negative, but then I saw the project was trending on Github for days after the HN post.

<comment><USER33> The post did help project take off. It's just a little annoying to read negative comments when we can easily convey the same point in a constructive way.

I still love this place and am a big lurker for a long time. I am pretty sure if we were a bit more humane, many many lurker will actively participate, which would be a win-win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Its relevant, its concrete, I agree with everything he said. But mostly I just got caught up in his writing-style which is incredibly enticing. Well done man!

</comment><comment><USER36> The title of the article is the best part. Naming your new thing and owning the meaning of that name is valuable. The rest of the article is much weaker.

</comment><comment><USER37> I find the authors choice of font to be sub-optimal.

</comment><comment><USER38> >> Usually, you feel like you're creating something. But this time, it feels like you are discovering something as if it already existed.

I can relate to this.

>> It's not that people didn't like the project. You know it has tradeoffs and expected people to talk about them. But that's not what happened.

>> Instead, the comments are largely irrelevant to your idea.

I can't relate to this part. I authored a somewhat popular open source server/framework project (over 5k stars on GitHub now) and my main problem for years was that there weren't enough people using or commenting on it.

The few people who were commenting on it over the years were consistently and exclusively giving positive feedback. Someone even wrote their master degree thesis about my project's scalability and performance. Developers started writing many clients libraries for it (there are now clients in pretty much every major language including more obscure ones such as Unity and one is currently being written for Unreal Engine).

For 5 years, I was constantly searching for criticisms and problems to justify why my project wasn't more popular (so that I could fix the problems) but nobody offered any criticism. Instead people kept telling me that the project was underrated and deserved more attention.

It's pretty heavily used now; it gets a lot of downloads on npm, for some reason, it just got steady linear growth and still it doesn't get talked about much. Now I'm thinking that maybe the problem is simply that I'm not active on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER39> As a researcher you will notice that simple and catchy title for your paper will give you far more citations than a paper that has more descriptive titles.

If you are publishing a paper about new way to optimize a problem, just give it a fancy name first.

</comment><comment><USER40> > Finally, it's the launch day. You publish the project on GitHub. You tweet > about it and submit the landing page to the popular open source news > aggregators.

What are some popular open source news aggregators oter than HN?

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm not really seeing what you would gain with a story in this context. If your project "hit the front page of a popular news aggregator" I would say is because you already have the story.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you toggle the dark/bright mode enough time, your eyes will hurt. You will come to the conclusion that only the dark mode is enjoyable and readable.

Sorry, if it's true.

</comment><comment><USER43> I would love for my project to get on the home page and be filled up with irrelevant comments. Normally anything I try to share is completely ignored.

<comment><USER44> I can see why. HN is not for very divergent submissions, they rarely take off here. Your submissions are kinda not-so-familiar to the great masses so they don't fly. People just being curious without being familiar with the subject won't check them out because the number of upvotes haven't reached a critical level.

Try something more populistic, and especially deriving from an established trend, and I think you'll appeal to the mob. How about: "ReactJS rewritten in Go in 24hrs"

That was a jest, by the way...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> am i the only one who was expecting him to say, after he had posted his project to HN, he would got no upvotes and sadly his project remained invisible to the public?

because getting to front page on news site like HN/Reddit, there is some luck factor too, kind of like winning a lottery, unless you learned to gamify it.

</comment><comment><USER46> This made sense until the last line. If the conclusion was "focus on telling your story well so that people understand the point of your work," I would understand that. But he concludes with "name it, and they will come." So... he's saying that your product needs a good name? I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm waiting for a comment about why the author chose to Write the fictional project in JavaScript to take the top comment spot and the language wars to begin....

</comment><comment><USER48> Your site is broken on firefox

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not sure if those fonts work together, and those pinks are clashing as well.

Also, what's with the newsletter?

And why is this on a _private_ blog, not something truly open? I can't even pull this using git?

</comment><comment><USER50> I have an issue with the formatting</comment>


From the "you call this agile?" department - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/15.html

<comment><USER2> I feel like I have a malware that randomly inserts "Agile" into every 10th item of my Hacker News stream. Help.</comment>


The Expedient, Desirable Product - <AUTHOR> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/03/01/the-expedient-desirable-product/

<comment><USER2> Everybody too busy with their YC applications to discuss this? ;)

Venkat

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently. I've been talking to Dorian about this stuff for the last year or so, and I think he's got some real insight in places. Especially around figuring out what to build and how long that might take.

<comment><USER2> well, hopefully there'll be a good crop of young startups coming out of this round. YC is always an interesting spectator sport.</comment></comment></comment>


Stop using bad passwords. Start using Vault. - <AUTHOR> https://getvau.lt/

<comment><USER2> A couple of things:

1\. add an "avoid ambiguous characters" option (is that an "l" or a "1", an "O" or an "0", etc.).

2\. encouraging people to type or generate passwords into/from random web sites is a bad idea -- perhaps even making the problem worse instead of solving it.

3\. who's your target audience? The tech community already understands this. Is it my mother, the average user? She'd use this exactly once and then forget it. Why? "getvau.lt". While that's "cute" and us techies love crap like that, all Joe User knows is .com. When he tries to come back to the site tomorrow, he'll type in "getvault.com" or (more likely) "get vault" or "getvault", end up somewhere else, and never use your service again.

HTH.

</comment><comment><USER3> KeyPassX and MiniKeyPass are working well enough here, plus they are open source software that one can install on his or her computer or iPhone.

I keep my database on Dropbox for availability on multiple devices.

<comment><USER2> Yep, I started using KeePassX years ago and love it. About a year ago I switched to LastPass because it is just so damn convenient, even though I know I probably shouldn't be using a password manager that stores my passwords "in the cloud" (again, it's so damn convenient). I am, however, trying to switch back to KeePassX but it's harder to use since I've stopped using Dropbox, et al., as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat, but SuperGenPass does this better- has a bookmarklet with configurable salt, and it's based off the domain name, not the service, so you can't get into ambiguities (Gmail, GMail, gmail?)

[http://supergenpass.com/](http://supergenpass.com/)

That said, the options for disallowed characters is nice.

<comment><USER5> "The SuperGenPass UI is rendered within the DOM of the current page when you click the bookmarklet. The UI is where you enter your master password. And because the UI is part of the current page, any script running in the page can read your master password. Remember that script can be external too, as in advertisements or widgets of some kind." \- [http://akibjorklund.com/2009/supergenpass-is-not-that- secure](http://akibjorklund.com/2009/supergenpass-is-not-that-secure)

There are even a couple of demos:

[http://akibjorklund.com/files/2009/10/supergenpass- vulnerabi...](http://akibjorklund.com/files/2009/10/supergenpass- vulnerability-demo.html)

[http://akibjorklund.com/files/2009/10/supergenpass- vulnerabi...](http://akibjorklund.com/files/2009/10/supergenpass- vulnerability-demo-2.html)

I tested both demos with the latest version of SuperGenPass (2.01) from [http://supergenpass.com/](http://supergenpass.com/)</comment></comment>


Outsmarting Go Dependencies in Testing Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/outsmarting-go-dependencies-testing-code/# <comment><USER2> I don't get it: why would they need/want to set up a server to test the sql module in the first place? The behaviour of the sql module doesn't depend on server, so logically I would assume the tests shouldn't either... And if some tests really need a server, then they are not testing the sql layer anymore, and shouldn't need access to internals of the sql module.

<comment><USER3> The sql module needs other aspects of the server set up to function (e.g. the KV layer). You are free to browse the code at [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach) if you want a more in-depth look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess my question is: what is the level of test?

If it's a feature or integration test, why is it a problem to pull in the other packages?

If it's a unit test, why not mock out the other dependencies to focus on the narrow behaviour?

Go makes the latter both easier (implicit interface typing) and harder (lots of libraries only providing physical structs).

I have to admit I've grown nervous about tests that require you to crack open an object to inspect its internal state. I've often seen designs that "need" private variable inspection recomposed into a more functional style or broken into smaller, cooperating modules/objects.

Put another way: if the module's behaviour is so complex that you _must_ inspect private state to assure behaviour, perhaps the module is too complex overall.

Of course YMMV, consult a doctor etc etc

<comment><USER3> The relevant tests fall somewhere between unit tests and integration tests. Many are intended as unit tests, but we prefer to test them on top of the "real" implementations of the layers underneath (instead of mocks) so they are integration tests as well.

> If it's a feature or integration test, why is it a problem to pull in the > other packages?

The compiler does not allow the cyclic dependency (even if it's only caused by testing code).

<comment><USER4> It's been a while since I touched golang, so I don't recall the nitty-gritty of the cyclic problem.

And to pick a nit, to _me_ , if there are several units of your system pulled in, it's arguably not a unit test. It's an integration test.

I don't love mocks, but I don't hate them either. They have their place as part of an overall testing pyramid.

<comment><USER5> I write a lot of these tests in my code as well. They are not exactly unit tests, because they test code at multiple levels of abstraction at once, but they are written in exactly the same way as a unit test and are intended for the same purpose: to make sure that some unit of your code functions as it should and does not stop functioning.

To me, mocks are useful for one thing only: there is some expensive or flaky dependency of your code that you may have poor visibility into, and you want to write a test that does not rely on its availability. Mocks for databases, file systems, REST APIs, externally maintained libraries, etc. all make sense to me. But if some library is developed locally (or in the extreme case, by you) and you can easily depend on its existence and stability, then I see no reason not to write code that depends on that library and test against that library. This is a testing strategy for a pragmatist, not a purist.

Go in particular makes it easy to separate a single codebase into separate logical packages, and if you do so, it often makes sense to test them together. That's why this is a pretty Go-specific issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very clever, and I wish I had figured this out when I ran into the same problem last summer. A _little_ "smelly" but better than being forced to publically export implementation details.

That said, to play devil's argument, why not just make all implementation details public? I will say I remember being pissed off by Go packages that don't publicize all of their types and interfaces, which made writing tests against their behavior (usually requiring mocking, hence the need for the publicized types/interfaces) to be painful/impossible.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

Making everything public runs the risk of other modules using internal implementation details, and that entanglement makes changing things a lot harder.

For a small project where you can easily control this, it's likely not an issue. But we are big enough that no one person knows all the code changes that are going on in all modules.

Exported vs non exported also serves as implicit documentation, it makes understanding things easier when you can tell right away what is internal and what is not.</comment></comment>


15x better Neo4j write throughput on Linux ext4 - <AUTHOR> https://structr.org/blog/neo4j-performance-on-ext4 Hi,
maybe some of you have experienced poor write performance on their Linux boxes as I did, esp. with small transactions.
In my tests I was able to increase the throughput by a factor of 15! Here's a blog post about my findings:
http://structr.org/blog/neo4j-performance-on-ext4
Comments?
Best Axel <comment><AUTHOR> Further discussion here: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/neo4j/nflUyBsRKyY](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/neo4j/nflUyBsRKyY)</comment>


Please review my friend's life mapping tool startup, Map Our Lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.mapourlives.com

<comment><USER2> The first sentence caught my attention - this looks like an interesting product.

What technology stack did he use? (Just out of curiousity).

The preview should be on-site instead of a downloadable document and it's far too verbose. Use pictures instead.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. The site is running on .NET 4, SQL Server 2008 back end and Amazon S3 for the image storage.

Good idea about the document - I will include it in site as HTML with links from the relevant section.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi Guys,

My friends been hacking away on his first version of the site for some time. Given the knowledge here he asked me to gather some feedback, any would appreciated.

Thanks for your time.</comment>


What is my public IP? - <AUTHOR> https://public-ip.info/ <comment><USER2> I normally use [http://icanhazip.com/](http://icanhazip.com/) which does support ipv6. This could be useful though, as it provides the Geo-location.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+my+public+ip](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+my+public+ip)

</comment><comment><USER4> No IPv6, no support for Unicode in city names. This site needs some major improvement. The geo location is nice though.

</comment><comment><USER5> No IPv6 support - 2016. :(

</comment><comment><USER6> curl -s whatismyip.akamai.com

</comment><comment><USER7> dig +short myip.opendns.com @220.127.116.11</comment>


Houston's Mayor Was Right to Not Evacuate - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/opinion/harvey-flooding-mayor-evacuation.html <comment><USER2> Houston's a very large place, and while there's bad stuff going on in places, there are also large parts of the city--probably most of it--with no particular damage. I'm in the middle of it right now and know people and organizations all over and most have had little or no problem (though sadly I don't have to go too far in my social graph to find people who left their house via boat).

The concept of a city-wide evacuation is, well, I'll be charitable and call it ignorant. Flooding here is nowhere near systematic enough for that to make sense. This is important to understand: the city remains largely intact and functional. The water's good, the power's on, the internet is on, two thirds of the grocery stores are open, emergency services are doing a great job, and some very large percentage of the city is just waiting for the damned rain to stop and the roads to clear to get back to normal.

It's just not a wide-scale evacuation scenario. And I know what those look like. And so does the Mayor.

<comment><USER3> In hindsight, it worked out OK for most people. Most of the time it does. The problem is that sometimes it turns out really really bad. I'm from Florida and I worked in construction during college. I was down in South Florida after Andrew. Ground zero was like a warzone. No street signs, traffic lights, etc. Almost every single house was missing a roof. There was no place to buy fuel, food, and water. I saw a lot of human misery. Especially among the poorer population. It was like this for months because of the scale of devastation. We still feel the effects of Andrew in FL. We probably have the most stringent building codes in the country and the highest insurance rates.

Major catastrophes like Andrew and Katrina are black swans. Nobody predicts the level of devastation ahead of time. It's usually hindisght, like "it was so obvious!". Therefore, I think it's ignorant to not at least advise people to evacuate at some point. Maybe not 2 hours before the storm hits. Days maybe? They always do advise evacuation of coastal regions here in FL. I always listen too.

<comment><USER4> Katrina was not a poor prediction of the _storm_ , it was the levee that broke combined with a depressed geometry that made it so disastrous.

And we could not have advised people to evacuate days ahead. Thursday morning, it was just a tropical storm. Suddenly, around lunchtime, it was a category 3 and my business launched business continuity planning procedures. By the end of the day, it was a cat 4. It made landfall the next day. Evacuation would have only put those people outdoors when the storm hit.

<comment><USER3> You have made my point twice. Nobody predicted the levee was going to break. Nobody predicted Harvey would be a Cat 4 by the time it made landfall. There is no way to know which storm is going to be the "big one" until the aftermath. Therefore, we shouldn't assume there is no need to evacuate.

Related news: a levee south of Houston was just breached. [https://twitter.com/BrazoriaCounty/status/902539081841827842](https://twitter.com/BrazoriaCounty/status/902539081841827842)

<comment><USER4> Nobody assumed there was no need to evacuate - the problem is that evacuations make things worse unless you have time. And declaring an evacuation over every tropical storm would just desensitize people.

<comment><USER5> To expand on that point slightly: Houston uses interstates as extra storm water collection areas. That is, the interstates are at lower elevation than the surrounding area, so the water collects there rather than (or at least before) flooding other areas. If you have an evacuation ordered, where the people don't have enough time to get out, you have huge numbers of people in cars sitting on those interstates as the water starts rising. That is _not_ a healthy scenario.

Of course, you now get the opposite problem. My brother-in-law's neighborhood now has a mandatory evacuation. But now nobody can get out, because the roads are already covered...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was stuck in traffic for 11 hours driving home to Chicago from the solar eclipse in Carbondale, IL. And I only made it half way home and had to stay overnight. That was the eclipse, not a massive natural disaster. I can't even imagine the secondary disaster a mass exodus might have been, with a million cars running out of gas.

<comment><USER7> In Florida it is standard procedure to order evacuation of ANY city facing direct impact by hurricane. Florida, unlike Texas, is a heavily populated peninsula with only two or three major interstates leading out of the state. Do not tell me Houston is incapable of evacuation. It's no bigger than Miami and Houston residents have many more directions to disperse than Floridians.

<comment><USER8> Houston is over six times larger than Miami.

<comment><USER7> Don't know where you're getting your numbers.

Miami Metro pop: [https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+metro+population&rlz=1...](https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+metro+population&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS755US755&oq=miami+metro+population&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.5213j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+metro+pop&rlz=1C1CHB...](https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+metro+pop&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS755US755&oq=houston+metro+pop&aqs=chrome..69i57.3605j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

5.5 million vs. 6.5 million. Quite comparable. (can't just look at city limits for pop numbers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Imagine a train with 100 cars that can hold 50 people in each car. Imagine that train traveling from Houston to Austin in 3 hours, making three round trips every 24 hours.

That train could evacuate 15K people a day.

Imagine if each state maintained one of those trains. In a crisis, Texas could borrow trains from NM, OK, KS, LA, AR, MS, and AL. They could move a combined ~120K people per day (no pets).

Planning ahead a week and beginning the evacuation 3 days before the storm, you could move 360K people. That would leave only 4.6 million in Houston.

<comment><USER10> > making three round trips every 24 hours

This is the problem with the transportation infrastructure here in the US. In Japan those trains could _easily_ make 100-200 round trips a day. And there would be a bajillion other train routes to other cities as well.

Seriously, trains? Between two neighboring major cities? Three times a day? That's laughable at best in most parts of the world.

<comment><USER11> To make 100 round trips between Houston and Austin, a total of about 33,000 miles, in 24 hours, the train would have to average 1,375 MPH.

<comment><USER10> That's assuming you only have 1 train. Trains leave between Osaka and Tokyo every few minutes at rush hours, and travel at speeds upto 300 km/h. They are timed to nearly 1 second accuracy, monitored precisely by computers, and each station has multiple tracks to buffer the traffic.

Tokyo's station serves 3000 trains daily and some 415K passengers per day as of 2013.

The Chinese high-speed rail system also deals with similar levels of passenger traffic. Shanghai's Hongqiao station for instance has no less than 30 tracks, can hold 10K passengers at the same time, and comfortably serves an _average_ of 210K passengers per day (much more on holidays), and it is only one of a few railway stations serving the area.

Trains scale well if you do them right. Technology has come a long way.

<comment><USER12> Tokyo and Shanghai has MUCH more people compared to Houston and it makes more economical sense to have more train infrastructure

<comment><USER10> Tokyo's population is about 4 times that of Houston. So fine, instead of running 3000 trains a day from the central station, you can run at least 750?

That's what life would look like if people in the US actually used trains on a regular basis.

In any case, all I'm saying is that if a massive number of people need to be moved, trains _can_ scale well, additional reserve capacity can be deployed during evacuations, and it's also a lot safer than having hundreds of thousands of people taking to the roads in bad weather.

<comment><USER13> Googling Houston metropolitan population gives 6.5 million. For Tokyo you get over 37 million. So Tokyo is 5.7 times Houston. Having been both places, Houston is much smaller. Houston also can't build subways, they'd always be flooding.

<comment><USER10> If you include the entire metropolitan area, then there are many, many more train stations to factor in than just the central stations. But in any case, order-of-magnitude wise you get the idea. Houston isn't that small and many cities around the world with even 1 million people have excellent public transportation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago they did call for an evacuation caused massive jams with thousands of cars stuck on highways. Many of these highways are underwater today an evacuation would have made the situation worse.

<comment><USER15> Why didn't they use trains or buses? That seems like a more obvious approach IMO.

<comment><USER16> There are no trains. The nearest Amtrak station is in San Antonio. If you made it that far, you are probably already out of danger. As for buses, how do you coordinate bus plans for 6.5 million people across a 50 mile by 50 mile area? And then, assuming you could get even a million people onto buses, where do you take them that can handle even a hundred thousand refugees on 24-48 hours notice?

For most of the US, and especially a city built like Houston, there are no good options.

Edit: I underestimated the size of the Houston Metro Area. It's closer to 100 miles by 100 miles.

<comment><USER5> You don't need a _station_ , you just need a _track_. You can load at any point where there's a track with a flat area beside it.

The tricks are getting people to that loading point (without their cars, because you don't have enough parking for what you're trying to do), and getting the trains from that point to out of town without having to cross a flooded area.

Houston has plenty of tracks. I presume it has flat areas next to tracks. Getting out of town without having to cross flooding? I don't know. _Enough_ tracks to hold the traffic that would be needed? Probably not.

<comment><USER17> Forgot tracks, what about actual _trains_. The passenger rail system in Texas is tiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's the back story that the author mentions on the election. Great to see that partisanship still can be put aside at times. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_mayoral_election,_2015)

</comment><comment><USER19> I definitely see that an emergency evacuation for ~6.5 million people would have resulted in a similar result as the evacuation for Rita. I feel uncomfortable just scaling up for the rescue mission while people hang around. It seems way too reactive. I don't know if there's a more progressive evacuation model that works. I assume it's been tried and has possibly failed.

<comment><USER20> Don't live in a flood plane, leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.

Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.

If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.

<comment><USER21> >leave early when there's even a small chance of getting hit.

This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations; unless your plan is based on the _you_ leaving, while most of the population stays.

>Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.

Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address: human life. Unless your plan is for flood insurance to drive down the population in the region; which might work long term, but we still need to figure out how to handle the situation until then.

>If the bad half of global warming predictions happen.

This is the bad half of global warming predictions. The only question left is how bad the even worse half will be.'\

>If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.

Why wouldn't people have motivation to fix it? Aid is not going to be enough to compensate for all the damages (not event counting indirect economic damage). Everyone, from individuals, to municipalities, to the state, to the federal government, will come out of this in the red.

<comment><USER22> >Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address

It does if legally required - the point isn't to finance the evacuation, it's to make living in a flood plain financially unattractive. It's the "let the market decide" approach to disaster planning, by pricing in the cost of disaster instead of externalizing it to FEMA and the Red Cross.

<comment><USER23> The risk of death is already priced in; FEMA and the Red Cross aren't helping with it.

<comment><USER24> It's not priced in. People are more likely to just hope it doesn't happen to them. If you force both insurance and evacuations then the risks are actually priced in, with deaths minimized and a constant cost of living bump instead of tons of people gambling their lives and livelihood.

<comment><USER23> > It's not priced in. People are more likely to just hope it doesn't happen to > them.

That doesn't establish that it isn't priced in. It establishes that the value people place on their own lives isn't as high as you think it should be.

<comment><USER24> This applies to things like houses with objective values too. People don't treat risks rationally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish Indian politicians were like this. The writer is the mayor's political opponent and yet he wrote an article supporting the mayor.

had this been India, the opponent of the Mayor would have politicized the situation and asked for resignation of the mayor and claimed that it was a mistake to not evacuate.

<comment><USER26> More of a former opponent. I don't think he's running for anything anymore.

There's plenty of nasty stuff in US politics as well. This article is refreshing.

<comment><USER25> Yes, but your political system isn't like ours. In Indian system outsiders can't get elected. There are four parties which dominate everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yeah I dunno if I like the false choice between "evacuate incompetently" and "don't evacuate at all." Could there maybe be a third option of evacuating only the relevant areas (low-lying ones near the bayous), safely and efficiently, via a well-thought-out plan?

<comment><USER28> If I read the article correctly, most of the flooding is due to heavy rains, not storm surge. Even in Singapore, predicting which areas will be flooded due to heavy rains isn't easy, judging from the number of local reports of floods after heavy rains. This will make it difficult to judge which areas to evacuate.

This is the relevant part of the article: "Attempting to evacuate areas that might be affected by localized flooding because of rainfall is an entirely different problem from evacuating areas in danger of flooding by storm surge, the rise in seawater level caused by a storm's winds pushing water onshore. We can predict with reasonable accuracy what areas will be flooded by storm surge based on the forecast and elevations. But flooding from rainfall is highly unpredictable and variable based on the dynamics of each particular rain event. Rarely will we know days in advance which areas will be flooded."

<comment><USER27> Yeah but, hydrologists have a joke: What's the first law of hydrology? Water runs downhill. Which is funny when you're a PhD accustomed to wrangling ridiculously complex multidimensional partial differential equations from fluid dynamics, to say the same thing.

But I suppose what ruins any ability to rely on "the first law of hydrology" here is the fact that the whole area is so flat, and so low, and so paved.

<comment><USER27> [https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding- ma...](https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-made-worse- by-unchecked-urban-development-and-wetland-destruction/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The decision of not to evacuate seems justifiable. But the deeper problem is mass evacuation is not even an option.

What happens when a disaster that's 10x or 100x bigger comes?

<comment><USER7> I'm still, as a Floridian, having a hard time understanding why evacuation is not an option. We have evacuated large cities in Florida many times over the past decades. We have no trains either and more distance to travel to get to total safety than Texans. This comes down to preparation and Houston & Texas dropped the ball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There must be a lot of 'preppers' in Houston. Maybe it's too early, but does anyone know of any honest 'post mortems' of strategies that people choose beforehand and how it worked out?

</comment><comment><USER31> What I heard is that residents started evacuation by themselves a couple days in advance.

</comment><comment><USER32> The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety.

Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the cornerstones of the president of the USA's campaign. Texas voted for him in a big way.

None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled.

Trump just announced the feds are sending federal aid and support to Texas. The governor and president are both fighting to expand these disasters, then we the taxpayers have to bail them out.

<comment><USER33> Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?

Is it not the fact that too much building occurred in FEMA-designated flood zones? That too much paving substantially reduced the amount of available land to absorb flood waters? That draining of wetlands seriously harmed the ability of flood waters to subside?

Let's not water down the risk of climate change by attributing disasters to it when the primary causes were unrelated.

<comment><USER34> It's not either/or, it's both/and: climate change and city planning are orthogonal to one another.

> Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?

That's highly odd way to phrase the question.

Climate change is responsible for more energy in the oceans, which is responsible for more, bigger, storms. Bigger storms mean more damage per storm. Climate and weather are different. The climate changing in a manner that makes the weather more extreme will always contribute to damage, but will never be "responsible" for it as it will always be the weather causing the damage...

So: this is the third "once in 500 years" event in 3 years. That is what "climate change" looks like. These storms "suddenly" popping up? Climate change means more of that, as we have been seeing and can demonstrate statistically. The long term prognosis? Thanks to climate change it's worse, with these rare events becoming ever more frequent, and the extent of damages growing over time.

Our climate is provably changing, from human activity. This is very clear. Barring holodecks there are no primary causes for weather than climate... Change that climate away from what our society is adapted for and expect pain.

<comment><USER7> What other "once in 500 years" event occurred? Having a hard time coming up with a storm this disastrous since Katrina, which was a mere Cat 3 hurricane that happened to break a bunch of levies protecting a sub sea level city. That was an engineering failure. Nothing extraordinary about Katrina as a hurricane. Hurricanes are naturally occurring disasters that have pummeled coast lines for billions of years. Climate change is surely occurring but it hasn't had a dramatic effect on hurricanes as of yet. We've got catostrophic storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Harvey...none of this is new.

<comment><USER34> [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/8/28/16211392/10...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/8/28/16211392/100-500-year-flood-meaning)

This story has also been in the NYT, as I recall:

> Tomball, Texas, Public Works director David Esquivel told a local paper > there this year that the Houston area had "two 500-year storms back to > back": over Memorial Day weekend of 2015 and early April 2016. That means > that Hurricane Harvey constitutes the third "500-year" flood in three years.

Rare meteorological events do not correlate to large scale disasters, per se. They only reflect the probability of the underlying event happening in any given year. Imagine that your nearest creek "flooding" by 2 inches should only happen every thousand years, for example.

> We've got catostrophic storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew, > Katrina, Harvey...none of this is new.

Aaaaand here's the fundamental confusion with those kinds of summaries: what is the difference between speed and acceleration?

We have always had bad weather. Having more bad weather than before, more frequently, is the issue. Climate change did not invent the hurricane. Climate change ensures our hurricanes will be bigger, more frequent, and more likely to combine with other larger, more frequent, weather systems. See Sandy, for example.

<comment><USER7> Take a look: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/one- hundred...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/one-hundred- years-of-hurricanes/)

The past decade has been pretty lull as far as hurricanes go in the Atlantic and Caribbean. We haven't seen closer to the activity that they saw in the 50s and 60s in my lifetime.

<comment><USER34> You have failed to read and/or grok my post :(

The "number of hurricanes" is irrelevant. Arguably it is misleading: many small hurricanes is much more human friendly than a few monster hurricanes. Climate predictions are solid on more intense hurricanes that last longer, have more rainfall in the short term, and additionally increase with (mild) frequency in the decades to come.

At the same time, hurricanes are a specific weather incident with no reflection on the broader climate (monsoons, tropical storms, cyclones, Pacific/atlantic differences, el ninos, etc etc).

At the same same time changing the goalposts of the conversation from number of "once in 500 years" to "how many hurricanes" is in-congruent. As I pointed out: rare events do not directly correlate to extreme events.

TBH: climate trolls and sceptics on the net really need to up their game. This stuff was played out in the 90s. Any information anyone is honestly missing on this topic is readily available in google, so at this point one has to assume that ignorance is willful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Chicken and egg problem: Ideas on beating it? - <AUTHOR>

I just launched a site that aims to solve a two-sided market problem with a simple newsletter-style solution (a similar approach is found in HARO). In this case, it's product placement.
The site: http://productplaceme.com
I've gotten some modest coverage so far but I'd like to build up the list more before I send the first one out (Tuesday).
I've seen some clever solutions to the chicken-and-egg problem here on HN. What did you do? Or what would you do for PPM? <comment><USER2> Brian Chesky, of AirBnB, gave a talk at startup school that touched on this topic: <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383>

His advice was that "you always focus on supply first... then you shift to demand." Here that would mean to try to grab producers before promoters.

The idea is that producers are more willing to list their movies on your site, no harm done, but promoters won't be interested unless you have some movies for them to choose from.

<comment><USER3> From Startup School as well, Adam D'Angelo said they answered a lot of questions themselves at first, Mark Zuckerberg said they had interns scrape the course info manually, Brian Chesky talked about how they recruited the first people themselves by door-to-door basically.

Summed up by D'Angelo: "it doesn't matter if it doesn't scale if it strengthens your position". Though I don't know how that applies to your case, if there's anything you can do to get things started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In addition to the two other Chris Dixon blog posts other commentators have linked to, Chris Dixon also has a great post on this topic: [http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for- overcoming-c...](http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for-overcoming- chicken-and-egg-problems/)

Here are his six suggestions:

1\. Signal long-term commitment to platform success and competitive pricing.

2\. Use backwards and sideways compatibility to benefit from existing complements.

3\. Exploit irregular network topologies.

4\. Influence the firms that produce vital complements.

5\. Provide standalone value for the base product.

6\. Integrate vertically into critical complements when supply is not certain.

This has also been discussed on answers.onstartups.com:

[http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/9332/how-do-you- solv...](http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/9332/how-do-you-solve-the- chicken-and-the-egg-problem)

[http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/3623/solving-the- chi...](http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/3623/solving-the-chicken-and- egg-problem)

There are some conflicting answers:

* Joel Spolsky says: "When faced with a chicken & egg problem, you have to find a way to sell simultaneously to both sides of the equation."

* Hendro Wijaya says: "Focus on satisfying one side of the equation first. Pick the chicken, or the egg. Make sure they can see the value early in time."

Nonetheless, the discussion includes useful advice like: Low risk buy-in for one party, Partner with an existing business, and Scaffold (Greg Belote).

</comment><comment><USER5> A few links that might be useful:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799565>

<http://hbr.org/2006/10/strategies-for-two-sided-markets/ar/1>

<http://blog.asmartbear.com/marketplace-business-model.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> I would choose a very small niche. The chicken-and-egg problem disappears almost complete if you choose the niche small enough. This can be a movie category or a region, maybe the movie category is better in your case.

Because, if the niche is small enough, you will always be able to handle the short coming of the other (supply/demand) side in a realistic way, be it by cold calling or adwords or whatever.

I would stick with this niche for a while. You will have some first successful transactions, some success stories, some data you can use for statistics and pr, generate modest earnings, build up some ranking positions on google, etc... and you start understanding the numbers of your business, the conversion rate, etc..

And you will provide traction for your current users. Promoters that have signed up for the newsletter will regular receive some opportunities, and this is what counts to make your useres happy in a marketplace.

When your first niche is doing well, you can risk the next step, expand two other segements (categories). And repeat.

From my point of view, the critical thing is that you will loose a lot of ressources everytime you start acquiring new customers/segments. There will always be a mismatch of the demand-side and the supply-side. To be successfull, you needed to cover one segment by segment, otherwise you may run out of time and money before you get significant traction.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing I've found is that potential customers can visualize _hypothetical_ products nicely, and can be quite responsive, especially if you are solving a pain point for them. So, for example, you're already underway with your project, but I'd scale that mental impression back in any sales pitch. Call producers/product advertisers and describe what your _potential_ product (now nothing more than an ambitious idea) could be like and ask their advice for further tailoring it to them. This allows them to see their benefit, and past your real world start up difficulties. Next, ask if you may contact them once you've got something solid going. Do this with both sides. Build up a list of contacts over a month or so, then tell everyone how many people you've got interested and that you're opening the initial sign-up page now! :)

Edit: Also, your homepage looks great, but I'd take off any solicitation for ads for yourself. I know that's what _you_ get out of it, but you don't want to do anything which might scare away those first crucial users. One step at a time. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Marco Zappacosta, founder of Thumbtack, addressed this issue at some length in his interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups. (Sorry, I have no idea where it is in the interview. I believe Marco starts talking generally about the topic about 30 minutes in, and calls it Network Independent Value.) [http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in- start...](http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in- startups-68-with-marco-zappacosta/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Check out these 2 posts

<http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/>

<http://cdixon.org/2010/10/16/the-ladies-night-strategy/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Another approach is build a community that either producers or promoters would want to be a part of. I'm not sure how that would look, but basically, you get one side to show up and then pitch to the other saying, you need to see what these guys are doing and that's your newsletter-style solution.

</comment><comment><USER11> Eggs, beating -- I see what you did there.

<comment><USER12> reddit much?

<comment><USER11> Hardly. Probably IRC too much.</comment></comment></comment>


Caller ID App Truecaller Is Raising $100M at a $1B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/29/truecaller-calling/?ncid=rss <comment><USER2> Nice to see Swedish startups getting traction. Godspeed!</comment>


Objective-C++: Deliver Us from Swift - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/objective-c-deliver-us-from-swift-3a44d3ac00e7 <comment><USER2> Was it Stroustroup or Malmsteen who said: "I have a philosophy: More is more!" ?</comment>