Hit Charade - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-charade/403192/hn-repost?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Incredibly fascinating article. The article mentioned both the 'sameness' of pop music as well as blatant copying, but what I find the most interesting is how they pop industry has somehow found some magical rate of evolution to keep most people interested while not changing too fast to alienate certain demographics.

A few years ago, when dubstep was still fairly new, a build up and shift as dramatic as the typical dubstep 'drop' would have been fairly jarring for most pop music. Fast forward to today and you hear elements of it almost everywhere, but it all happened gradually enough to make it feel familiar but different enough to be exciting.

<comment><USER3> > A few years ago, when dubstep was still fairly new, a build up and shift as > dramatic as the typical dubstep 'drop' would have been fairly jarring for > most pop music. Fast forward to today and you hear elements of it almost > everywhere, but it all happened gradually enough to make it feel familiar > but different enough to be exciting.

Agreed, and that's what's bugging me: I missed a bit in the article the following: how do they get massive groups of people buying into the products they are selling, every time? If you look at the whole pipeline, from writing the 'hit' to recording / mixing / mastering to getting it on iTunes (record store?) and the shows live in the halls / stadiums, where and more importantly: how, are they getting the people that far that they part with their money to 'own' a copy of these, often dreadful (music wise), songs?

It is, IMHO, that part of the whole pipeline that they have mastered, not the song writing/recording: the product isn't the music, the product is something else, the front person ('artist') + the whole entourage around it, but it's fascinating how they manage to construct _that_ entourage that is sought after by people with money to burn. they must know an answer (which is sold in the form of the artist+entourage+shows+music) to an unknown question / benefit sought a lot of people have.

<comment><USER4> The piece you're not quite mentioning is that for a very long time now, mainstream pop culture has been mostly about getting adolescent kids to lust after the celebrities or musicians or whoever. That segment of the market sells (images of) people as sex objects, not any particular creative media on its own merit. It's a bit disturbing but there you go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great article, but I don't understand the undercurrent of judgement and the overt judgement here on HN. Yes, songs are produced by teams of people behind the scenes who adopt common formulas and churn out hit after hit. So what? They're a product just like anything else.

My enjoyment of the latest movie isn't lessened by the fact that the actors didn't write the script. I don't dislike my iPhone just because it's a mass- produced item which is just a small tweak from its previous iterations.

Just because music is a product doesn't mean it's not enjoyable (or worthy of enjoyment).

<comment><USER6> I think the difference is that the actors in movies aren't trying to give the impression that they wrote the script, whereas musicians talk about "their" songs like they conceived them in a process of true artistic expression. Revealing that they are actually manufactured in a formulaic manner by the same people who wrote all the other hit songs can leave a sour taste in the mouth of a fan who is perhaps emotionally invested in a song or artist...

<comment><USER5> I agree that _some_ fans might have a negative reaction to realizing that the performers don't write their own music, but it's hardly a secret. Songwriting credits exist for a reason.

Even if they do find that out, the music is still enjoyable. I'm literally listening to mass-produced music as I write this comment, fully aware that it's produced but still enjoying it.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, I think that the benefit of good songwriting outweighs the downside of knowing how songs are written. I'm a pretty good musician, and the one skill that I really envy is songwriting, which I just don't know how to do.

It'd have been a shame if Sinatra had tried to write his own songs, or if the Beach Boys had tried to record their own instrumental parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can highly recommend "The Manual" by The KLF. It cynically documents how they wrote and produced one of their many hit singles. It was written in 1988, but proved to be remarkably prophetic.

[http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the- klf/](http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/)

<comment> david-given It's a great read.

For reference, here is the video in question: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdTELokKfCk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdTELokKfCk)

And, simply because it's awesome, even though it's totally unrelated to the conversation, here's... a thing... with the KLF, Daleks, George Bush, and Green Day in it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAzzhJeTp-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAzzhJeTp-I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The previous story about Max Martin (Martin Karl Sandberg):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127488) [600 days ago] _One Man Has Written Virtually Every Major Pop Song Of The Last 20 Years_

<comment><USER10> How meta would it be if both articles were ghost written by the same person?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Check out how similar Tik Tok and California Gurls are when they're mixed together: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dPA2dCRNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dPA2dCRNY) The similarity is striking.

Both are written by Lukasz Gottwald, one of the songwriters mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER12> Here's another one, Part of Me by Katy Perry and Till The World Ends by Britney Spears: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXC0ihxJQAQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXC0ihxJQAQ) (This is a mix of the two, but you can also clearly hearing it just by listening to one and then the other).

Both songs by Dr. Luke and Max Martin

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This five minute excerpt from Before the Music Dies is one of the most amazing, illuminating things I've ever seen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irk3_p15RJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irk3_p15RJY)

<comment><USER14> I think that's almost like the "uncanny valley" of pop stars. For all of the skills and tools that have to "make" her a star, she doesn't have that something that, say Rihanna or Katy Perry have, and it seems apparent that she doesn't within seconds of the video playing. Certainly, Katy Perry has a bigger budget behind her, but, I think there is an undefinable something else. The industry would love to be able to create a Katy Perry on demand, because Katy Perry commands significant money and has much more control over her career than a new artist.

I'm not suggesting Katy Perry or Rihanna are better, musically, than the next skinny hot teenager that comes along. But, evidence indicates they are better at being the face of the musical machine than the dozens of others that have come along with the same producers, same studios, same music execs, etc. backing them.

So, it's simplistic to suggest anybody hot could be a star like Katy Perry, because I don't think it's actually true. Anybody could sing on key, because there's a plugin for that. But, that's not all there is. I feel like this video (which I've watched before, and had the same sort of reaction to it) wants to present a story of the masses being bamboozled by these "made" artists. I think plenty of people want a manufactured product. Just like people don't buy laptops made in a garage, and instead choose a laptop designed and manufactured by thousands of people.

I don't like it (I'm a musician myself, and a huge music snob with a huge music collection), but I can't help but acknowledge that it is so. I want to listen to art, but many people just want an escapist product; the same could be said of film, television, etc.

<comment><USER15> Rihanna is an interesting one though; yes she's a mass-produced pop star, but she also has a really interesting reputation and is considered "real". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejRwLJcXjGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejRwLJcXjGQ) \-- unless you're aware of who "Charlamagne Tha God" is, the video might be a bit lost on the viewer, but it's worth watching. I find it fascinating when some of the pop stars apparently are living the lives they sing about.

<comment><USER14> I think that's part of what makes an "it" person work. It is manufactured, but it is also "true" (by some definition of the word). I'm not criticizing Rihanna (or even Katy Perry, though I think musically Rihanna is occasionally more ambitious) in stating that they are building a manufactured product, anymore than I am criticizing friends who work for Apple or Google. It is a product, and they're good at helping build a product that people want to buy. I'm also not generally envious of them, despite being a lifelong musician and occasionally thinking, "it'd be nice to make a good living making music". The lives they lead, while extraordinarily privileged, are also demanding in ways that most non-famous folks never experience. Staying "real" through that experience probably is an admirable trait...and maybe why Rihanna being "real" is such a big deal to musicians who are less obscenely popular and rich. He's likely interacted with enough primadonas to know famous people become sheltered, surrounding themselves with buffer layers of assistants and staff to protect their privacy/ego/time/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What a good article. Given the bits about how related popular songs are, I can't believe we're far off from algorithmically generated songs being fed to a variety of meat-puppet stars. Or can we skip that and go right to CGI anime pop stars?

<comment><USER17> Japan did. [http://youtu.be/YSyWtESoeOc](http://youtu.be/YSyWtESoeOc)

<comment><USER16> Neat. More for the curious:

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

It mentions she has over 100,000 released songs, which I presume are mostly fan created.

I guess I was thinking more like a virtual pop star in the sense of the pop stars mentioned in the article: meticulously controlled, always-on-brand industrial product. Sort of like the way a virtual Tupac appeared at Coachella, but made from scratch so that the money all flows to the puppeteers.

<comment><USER18> > _more like a virtual pop star in the sense of the pop stars mentioned in the > article: meticulously controlled, always-on-brand industrial product_

Well, that's kind of what a group like Gorrilaz is, I think, although maybe not quite as industrial/mass-produced a product as you're suggesting.

<comment><USER19> I think this trend started with The Archies or perhaps Alvin and the Chipmunks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The more years I live on this planet the more I realise how smoke and mirrors a lot of things are. Its all an illusion??

<comment><USER21> Yeah, it's mostly all an illusion and mostly it works for most people. The standard script our rulers provide gratifies our emotions, giving us just enough safety to raise our children and just enough of a glimpse into the fearful world (think: police shows) to make us never question them while the billionaire rulers fly from house to house, from beach to beach, with a short stop at the schools to make sure as few as possible of us learn how to self- govern (hint: by emphasizing answers rather than questions).

If you look, at least at American music culture since the beginning of the industrial age, you'll see cycles of people seeking authenticity (the beats, hippies, hip-hop, grunge, etc). Generally, that authenticity gives birth to some consumable form, such as the stuff that passes for hip-hop nowadays, as well as the "corporate grundge" of the 90s. I'm not as familiar with other eras, but I understand authenticity to be a huge point of critique w/r/t 60s pop culture.

My favorite (ironically-meant) part of this article was when they pointed out the music was engineered for shopping malls, as opposed to home stereos and that it is "more captivating than virtuoso musicians." The fact that a cybernetic artifact (pop-by-committee) can supplant the intimacy of a live performance by a master is astonishing and disturbing. I hope it's not true... but if you think about it, even the concept of a virtuoso is an economic artifact of a ruler/leader with excess capital to support the specialization of a lifelong performer. I believe the same or more authenticity can be had from amateurs or mid-level players, although that's probably my own bias.

<comment><USER22> > If you look, at least at American music culture since the beginning of the > industrial age, you'll see cycles of people seeking authenticity (the beats, > hippies, hip-hop, grunge, etc). Generally, that authenticity gives birth to > some consumable form, such as the stuff that passes for hip-hop nowadays, as > well as the "corporate grundge" of the 90s. I'm not as familiar with other > eras, but I understand authenticity to be a huge point of critique w/r/t 60s > pop culture.

I think this is the beginning of understanding what is so loathsome about hipsters. Hipsters are some awful Hegelian synthesis of the impulse towards authenticity and the culture of irony. Hipsters mostly express the urge for authenticity as a type of consumerism, but then immediately undermine authenticity through their commitment to irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A lot of the reactions in this thread remind me of Bourdieu's book La Distinction.

It's one thing to say that these songs are algorithmic and not deeply creative which is objective fact, it's another thing to say the songs are crappy, not good to listen to and indicative of poor taste. It's these latter statements - that I came across in this thread - that La Distinction touches on in a very interesting way, I can recommend everyone to read it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Adorno was talking about this back in the 1940s in "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/cultu...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture- industry.htm)

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems incredibly hard to "discover" an artist these days. There are so many musicians out there that aren't quite good enough. To be able to pick out the good ones pretty much requires dedicating your life to it: [http://www.npr.org/people/2100252/bob- boilen](http://www.npr.org/people/2100252/bob-boilen)

Its much easier just putting together a dream team of writers and musicians that have made hits in the past.

That being said there is still an amazing amount of great music out there that doesn't hit the charts. Live music seems to be the best place to discover and contribute to those artists. Too bad its mostly focused in a few major cities.

<comment><USER26>
         There are so many musicians out there that aren't quite good enough.

I disagree with you. There are more good enough artists than ever. Pop music orchestrates the transition from childhood to adulthood. It helps structure sexuality, make it more predictable. In order to fulfil this function, the musical quality is not too important, as long as a certain standard is met. And modern production technology can help just about everybody to achieve these minimal standards. What is much more important is achieving a critical mass of fans, which is to a substantial degree a question of marketing, and hence access to capital. Even though modern production outfits like Max Martin's are highly skilled, most of their artists fail. But the 1 in 10 who make it big recoup the loss by the 9 others. The music industry's main business model is thus this: find 10 young (hence cheap) musicians, try to make all of them a star, live on 1 of 10 unicorns.

As you can see, that's the Y Combinator business model. The music industry got there first. I would not at all be surprised if Y Combinator were consciously following in the music industry's footsteps.

<comment><USER27> "There are more good enough artists than ever."

also more bad ones.

<comment><USER26> Maybe. So what? Even bad musicians are better these days, because of improved music technology. In terms of recording, production, distribution, learning music you can do with a laptop today what Beethoven and James Brown couldn't dream of.

<comment><USER27> I was supporting the claim that there are many artists out there who are not quite good enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even more succinctly, funny, and cynically: "Four Chords Song" by Axis of Awesome: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I)

</comment><comment><USER29> In freshman Psychology, I happen to have an Instructor at a community college that worshiped B.F. Skinner. Mr Goddard, worked part time as a landscaper. He wasen't a tenured teacher yet. He definitely tried to help us understand the world, and knew the majority of us--never had anyone one who really cared about our education, or future. He wanted to prepare us for a deceptive, complicated world. A world we would be forced into very soon. (Hell, most of us were already working adult jobs at the time, trying to just get through school, and get a four year degree somewhere?)

Well, my take on B.F. Skinner was we all copy in one way or another? There are few original ideas, or thought in B.F. skinner's world? When I read an new author, listen to a new artist, look at a new website; I always see a lot of copying. Be it subconscious, or conscious the results are the same; the work looks similar?

I don't know why we act so suprised when someone points out similarities in an artist's/inventor's/scientist's work?

When I do find anything remotely original, I'm honestly impressed, until I find they stole someone's idea. I don't think seen, or heard anything truly original. I didn't know it was even debatable? I sometimes think we need to go to sheltered communities in order to get anything related to originality? Maybe the indigenous people of the rain forests? Let's not though? The last thing they need is our diseases, and white men stealing their original ideas?

</comment><comment><USER30> Hmmph. Maybe this explains why I keep going back to music from before 1990. Or maybe I'm just old :-)

<comment><USER30> It also explains why David Cassidy never had another hit after leaving the Partridge Family, and the Monkees never had one after deciding that they were real musicians and could write their own music :-)

<comment><USER31> That was my thought too, yeah. We all have a tendency to romanticize the stuff that came before us, but manufactured pop was a thing long before 1990.

EDIT: To provide an example, here's a very good 2001 article by British journalist Jon Ronson about the culture of child sex abuse that surrounded the UK's hitmakers of the '70s: [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/dec/01/weekend....](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/dec/01/weekend.jonronson)

<comment><USER32> _manufactured pop was a thing long before 1990_

Here's a short snippet from Wikipedia that illustrates it[1]:

       Bubblegum pop is a genre of pop music with
       an upbeat sound contrived and marketed to
       appeal to pre-teens and teenagers, that may
       be produced in an assembly-line process,
       driven by producers and often using unknown
       singers. Bubblegum's classic period ran from
       1967 to 1972. A second wave of bubblegum
       started two years later and ran until 1977

Hmmm... Seem familiar?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There's a great Planet Money piece about which touches upon this process of pop song creation: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-m...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how- much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song)

</comment><comment><USER34> This also reminds me of Carol Kaye, a female bass player who, because she is a woman and too old for the industrie, remained unknown while playing a lot of songs for the famous.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Kaye](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Kaye)

</comment><comment><USER35> A couple of points.

Boy band (and girl band) often seem to conflate the word 'band' with an entity that produces / creates / makes their own music ... with a group of people that can sing or mime to a song someone else made, without needing to play any instruments.

In 2002 there was a story about Carly Hennessy[1] (who later made at least one somewhat contentious 'comeback' on a pop TV show in the US) who'd basically been financially destroyed by a wager the music industry had placed on her at our (and her) expense.

We don't seem to be making much progress on this front.

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1014678641479060480](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1014678641479060480)

</comment><comment><USER36> The charade is so well covered up that you have to go all the way to wikipedia to learn who wrote the single songs.

<comment><USER37> In the age of noise you don't have to keep somethings secret to cover it up. You just have to avoid drawing attention to it.

<comment><USER36> Calling that a charade makes it sound like there is some sort of conspiracy though.

<comment><USER38> A "charade" isn't a conspiracy, it's a pretense - people going through the motions as if something was true when they know it isn't.

Perfect word choice for the article, in my opinion.

<comment><USER39> Where's the pretence, though? I don't see anything in that article about anyone pretending anything; just some details about pop music production which the author - presumably because he isn't very interested in pop music - didn't know.

<comment><USER36> Charade means pretense or deception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I always give a two months quarantine to an article about some theory which is nice to hear (celebrities are fake), groundbreaking (they're doing it so long and are bald swedish vikings!), and on the verge of conspiracy theory (the're hiding), WHILE THE ARTICLE IS BASED ON THE BOOK "INCIDENTALLY" ;-) JUST TO BE RELEASED (AND BOUGHT BY US ;-).

Two months it's a great time to wait and decide if it was book promotion or worth read.

</comment><comment><USER41> _there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated._

There really aren't vocalists either. In pop music today, the vocals are processed through an Auto-Tune[1] device resulting in perfectly on-pitch vocals.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto- Tune)

<comment><USER42> It's not true to say there are no singers, since the existence of Beyoncé and Ariana Grande contradict you. Recordings might be fine-tuned to remove imperfections but there are plenty of legit singers at the top of the pop charts, and probably not any less than previous eras.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> No mention of the Brill Building [1]? Pop music has always been factory- produced.

Also, multiple hooks per song is a better song. We like pop music for the hooks. If we don't like the hooks, we don't like pop music.

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

<comment><USER44> > _Pop music has always been factory-produced._

Correction: pop music has always had factory-produced hits. It also had other hits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There has been crap pop music churned out by modest talents for decades. 90% of commercial music is completely devoid of any redeeming artistic merit.

Great music is produced by every generation. All you have to do iisten for it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Country pop is not spared by this formula:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o)

</comment><comment><USER47> This is no different from a car company using the same chassis for multiple cars. They've got a money making formula so why change it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Doesn't really seem a bad thing.

It seems natural that picking the best performer and the best song writer would give a better result than having the same person do it all.

It's a bit like complaining that in a videogame, the programming, game design and graphics are often done by different people.

</comment><comment><USER49> For what it's worth, Taylor Swift is a songwriter.

<comment><USER50> Is or was? The article explicitly mentions several of her tracks as having come from the pop production machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> What is sad is how critics, like the Times Jon Caramanica, are complicit in this system.

</comment><comment><USER52> Dude, what the hell, Atlantic. This article lifted a bunch of quotes straight from The New Yorker article on this a few years ago. [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/26/the-song- machin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/26/the-song-machine)

The quotes about needing a hook every seven seconds, and the magic that makes someone an artist and not a performer, were stolen.

Edit: guys stop upvoting me, I jumped on the plagiarism wagon way too quickly.

<comment><USER53> The author probably took those quotes from an upcoming book by the same author as that New Yorker piece[0]. The book's linked in this (Atlantic) article.

0: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Song-Machine-Inside- Factory/dp/039...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Song-Machine-Inside- Factory/dp/0393241920)

<comment><USER52> Ah, you're probably right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm sorry, and I guess I'll probably get downvoted for this, but why the heck is this #1 on HN?

Edit: I'm not saying the article is not interesting, but it is hardly related to tech.

<comment><USER55> I think it's interesting that even after two decades of very intense and traumatic disruption, the pop music business is still essentially controlled by a handful of men.

<comment><USER56> someone already suggested ML generated pop. All we need is an overfunded startup from sv to do it.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: WorkOS – APIs for enterprise features like SSO/SAML - <AUTHOR> https://workos.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I'm the founder of WorkOS ([https://workos.com](https://workos.com)) We provide a developer API for making your app enterprise-ready. You can quickly add features including SSO/SAML, Director Sync (SCIM), Audit Logs, and more.

WorkOS is "Plaid for enterprise IT systems."

I learned about these enterprise requirements the hard way. Previously, I founded Nylas where we built an email app called Nylas Mail. We couldn't monetize that app and shut it down (RIP) and the main reason was that we couldn't sell it to enterprise because it was missing features.

Here's a short Twitter thread with more info about WorkOS: [https://twitter.com/grinich/status/1239943470271188992](https://twitter.com/grinich/status/1239943470271188992)

Best place to start is with the docs: [http://docs.workos.com/](http://docs.workos.com/)

Would love to get your feedback, questions, and ideas. Thanks! :)

<comment><USER2> Just want to clarify - is this different from Monday.com? I saw a bunch of billboards on 101 advertising Monday as your new Work OS.

<comment><USER3> Monday.com is the worst product I have ever had the experience of working with.

Spreadsheet with 200 rows and 20 columns? Your browser will be laggy as all hell thanks to their wonderful UI.

Try to tell support? The entire page jitters up and down as you type every single character in the support box on Chrome.

Reload the page? Well now the page isn't laggy at all, but literally it is not rendering rows that _are definitely there_.

I really wanted to like it -- beautiful user interface -- but it's an absolutely terrible product. And it was ~15 people on my team reporting the same exact behavior as we tried it.

I would consider recommending Monday.com to my worst enemy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly off-topic complaint: I really wish these features weren't considered "Enterprise" by so many people. Do you have a company that uses third party tools and has employees that leave? Congrats, you're an "enterprise" and need the "enterprise" plan.

I dream of the day that these features (SSO, Sync/SCIM, auditing) are considered table stakes.

I hope WorkOS takes off and drives that.

P.S. RIP Nylus

<comment><USER5> I wish people would stop using 'OS' when naming things, when it's not an Operating System.

<comment><AUTHOR> So there used to be a platform that gave you all the things you needed to build an app...

It handled stuff like authentication, user management, provisioning, security, compliance, etc. It had a fantastic developer experience and was beloved by developers and at the _same time_ loved by IT. It allowed developers to focus exclusively on product features, and it seamlessly took care of administrative needs of corporate IT.

It was called Microsoft Windows. :)

But in today's era, everything has moved to the cloud and that's made the situation fragmented. There's over a dozen IdP and even more directory systems and logging systems. There's no source of truth! In order to build an app for enterprise, you have to write all of this boilerplate integration code. And right now every company does it themselves in-house.

The goal for WorkOS is to handle all the complicated undifferentiated complexity that every workplace app needs. It runs "under the hood" and lets you focus on building unique product features. It's a standard set of interfaces and features shared across applications.

That's the role of the operating system and that's why we call it an OS. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had the same thought/idea myself. There's so much more this can branch into if you want.

It looks like this is very targeted towards the SMB space. I'm wondering if you could adjust your pricing and features to help modernize & consolidate some of the overlap at larger businesses in general.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep we can help with those needs too and have custom pricing for large enterprise deployments. (If you need that, get in touch.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks nice indeed @grinich ! Excuse the naive question but : what's the difference between workOS and software such as amplitude or mixpanel for audit trail logs ?

From what I understand, you have to declare events as you would do with analytics software. And your docs doesn't say how you make the audit trail available to the customers. If I have to do the proxy myself, then I really do not see the difference with an analytics software.

</comment><comment><USER8> Realy nice and clean website, I love the simplicity. It's a small thing but I would avoid black CTA in the project. Using colors could increase interaction with design ;) Maybe you would like to also introduce your tool to our audience on Owwly ([https://owwly.com](https://owwly.com))? I think you can find there some potential users.

</comment><comment><USER9> A slightly offtopic question. Besides older systems/older systems integration is there any reason to have SAML based SSO?

It always seemed to me that if you do not have to support SAML for some older systems the get to go solution is to use a OAuth2 based solution like OpenId Connect.

<comment><USER10> I think you answered your own question. If the client/partner/customer supports SAML, now you do, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like RBAC isn't out yet, any timeline on that? This seems like a very useful product!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully a beta in a few months. It will integrate closely with the Directory/SCIM services so we want to get that part right first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note: Not related to Workplace OS: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS)

</comment><comment><USER13> Since this is enterprise tool, what's your security posture like? Are you compliant/certified with framework's like ISO27001?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're currently in the middle of our SOC-2 Type 2 observation period and should have that certification in Q2.

The company is barely 1 year old and the process of certification can be a bit slow. Other attestations including ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, and 27018 will come later.

We also have a lot of internal practices and policy for how we secure WorkOS while still allowing our engineering team to ship code incredibly fast. It involves separation of duties, hardware security keys (YubiKey), and lots of automation with alerting.

Hopefully we can write something public about it later this year. Many of the ideas came from Stripe's security team. (Thanks Angie! <3)

<comment><USER14> Will you be supporting HIPAA/PIPEDA as well? I'm just teeing up all of this work for a healthcare SaaS offering, non-trivial. We're presently deployed as a "per-customer" model as some require enterprise options, others not so much. Would be great to have a tool that fills those gaps simply when/as required.

Looks great, I'll definitely be going through it in more detail after work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - everything in WorkOS already pipes into our Audit Log so it's quite close.

Would love to learn more about your app. Send me a note and we can chat? firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER15> This is extremely impressive. The value prop, the product, all of it. It resonates.

I was at a startup 5 or so years ago, and now am at a very large company. The world of pain you enter as a small shop when the Large Co. takes you through their third-party compliance and enterprise IT requirements are mind boggling. WorkOS seems to be that critical and much overdue on-ramp between startups and the FT500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does this compare / contrast to Auth0?

<comment><AUTHOR> Similar and different in some ways. Our SSO is free, which makes it a lot more accessible to startups and companies just beginning to go up-market.

We also provide a more generic abstraction than Auth0. They essentially "take over" your auth screens and show Auth0 UI. If you use WorkOS, it's not visible to your end-users and you can customize the sign-in experience how ever you want.

<comment><USER17> You can do this with the Auth0 APIs as well, no? By hitting the `/authorize` endpoint for saml-typed Auth0 connections? In that case Auth0 then acts as a SAML-to-OpenID Connect translation layer.

<comment><USER18> there is a couple ways to do and handle this. It seems like the best practices change every 6 months. There is a similar way to do this with azure AD also. I'm curious how workos differs. Seeing this field evolve over the last 2-3 years has been interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds very cool. For the purposes of pricing, what are "enterprise users"?

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish I would have found this 3 month ago ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Oof sorry you had to go through it! What did you end up building?

<comment><USER20> We just build our own SCIM endpoint and are now trying to integrate it into OKTA. I'll never get that time back that I spend reading the SCIM spec. Could have used it to build something that adds value to our customers.

<comment><USER21> How would this solution have helped you? You'd have to integrate WorkOS in your app instead of standardised SCIM?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep but our directory APIs are a lot simpler than SCIM. Plus we normalize user attributes across non-SCIM directories like G Suite and Azure.

WorkOS also has webhooks, which makes integrating a breeze: [https://docs.workos.com/directory- sync/webhooks](https://docs.workos.com/directory-sync/webhooks)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The future of media? Bet on events - <AUTHOR> http://snarkmarket.com/2009/4056 <comment><USER2> Most of the videos I watch online are related to events such as TED, conferences, talks,etc. There's a lot of opportunity to organize around events. Not sure what the end result looks like, but it could be damn useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> So how do you make $$$ from these media/events?

<comment><USER4> 1\. Sell tickets to the events! 2\. Sell advertising around the media they generate.

But #1 is the foundation, I think. Event attendance is rival & excludable in a way digital media isn't, and people's willingness to pay to attend a cool event seems undiminished these days. Or maybe even increased!</comment></comment>


The 1000 most-visited sites on the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/? <comment><USER2> If this is the same list that showed up a few months ago, I had extracted some header information from all of the sites and placed it in a usable format for some analysis:

<http://openmymind.net/top1000data.txt>

<comment><USER3> I used your file back then to graph the web servers these sites run: [http://lazyant.com/post/642248858/web-servers-of-the-most- vi...](http://lazyant.com/post/642248858/web-servers-of-the-most-visited- sites-in-the-internet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised that Yahoo is doing as well as they are.

It's easy to attribute the high scores of Live.com, Bing, and MSN to the power of web browser default settings, but Yahoo doesn't make a web browser so people have to consciously choose to go there.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.chandlernguyen.com/2009/08/search-engine- market-s...](http://www.chandlernguyen.com/2009/08/search-engine-market-share- around-world.html)

Indeed, Yahoo still have a few holdouts around the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised by some entries in the list:

Adobe 13, Slideshare 192, Macromedia(!) 199.

And where's Reddit?

Also:

microsoft.com: Software apple.com: Mac OS

Oh really?

<comment><USER7> For both Adobe and Macromedia the requirements for updating software can be used to explain a large portion of their traffic, 96% (I think that was the figure) of web browsers have Flash, the majority don't come with it installed _and_ sometimes require updates, so it's not that _out there_ to suggest maybe 90% of the internet visit their sites at least once... macromedia from out of date "update @ macromedia.com..." links maybe?

As an un-related side note, two of the sites I started have higher traffic (uniques and page views) that some of these sites (when the sites traffic is combined, as they cater to the same audience, I count them as a single site in stats anyway :p) -- awesome :-)

<comment><USER6> Ah, of course. Silly me - thanks for bothering to enlighten me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites."

This list may be less interesting / useful than you might think. It is tailored toward (non-adult) advertisers, and will be most relevant to them.

<comment><USER7> It's also wildly inaccurate, about 2 months ago Joel (I think? I always forget his name...) said that Stackoverflow does ~>60,000,000 page views per month, this claims 40,000,000 for Stackoverflow. I guess nobody should expect it to be accurate anyway, but this is an example of it. It also doesn't include a site I know of that doesn't a lot more than Stackoverflow...

<comment><USER9> If you know much about web stats (and comparing them from different providers) you'd realize that a 30% discrepancy is actually pretty accurate (sad but true!).

There are lots of reasons for this, not least the definition of a "Page View". Most publishers count a page view as anytime a page is served (because they are concerned about keeping the site alive, and load on it), whereas advertisers count it as everytime a page is seen by a human. Notably, this means advertisers exclude search engine bots from their page view counts, while publishers count them. (Although obviously this depends on the publisher and the context they are talking)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting how Google.com isn't on that list...

<comment><USER11> Done by Google, are they still #1 above Facebook?

<comment><USER12> According to Alexa, yes. However about 1/3 more sites link to Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i guess nobody knows what myspace is for anymore.

</comment><comment><USER14> So, even Google may be excluded from that list, what is their position? Do they win FB?

</comment><comment><USER15> Quantcast has a similar list too: <http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1>

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like many of the top pages are just what browsers default to when they start up.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone can explain Yahoo in #3? Is it because of their search engine? Yahoo Mail?

<comment><USER18> Yahoo still has a few monster properties with metrics that competitors would kill to have: Mail, Sports, News, and Finance are the biggest ones.

This data is 18 months old but is still directionally correct. [http://gigaom.com/2009/07/16/yahoos-number-ones-so-much- more...](http://gigaom.com/2009/07/16/yahoos-number-ones-so-much-more-than- search/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who the fuck goes to adobe.com?</comment>


Not So Anonymous: A Computational Approach to PRivacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/not-so-anonymous

<comment><USER2> Quoting Sweeney in the article, "One experiment after another has shown that people will make poor decisions about anything that involves their privacy. They want the new utility, they want the new shiny thing, because we tend to discount that any harm is going to happen to us, even when we're told that it could."

I'm very much a privacy advocate, but if the user is willing to trade their privacy for some added-value, then so be it.</comment>


Wood wide web: Trees' social networks are mapped (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48257315 <comment><USER2> Great to see an article on mycorrhizal fungi! They're an essential and under appreciated part of our ecosystem.

Admittedly though this article is a very skimmed over purview of mycorrhizae's roles. Their contention that EM fungi store more carbon than AM fungi, for example, is dubious, but I'll have to dig into the source paper to see their citations.

The realty is both AMF and EMF will sequester carbon. AMF for example produce a substance called glomalin which is a carbon store and soil glue basically, but in soils where mycorrhizal fungi are present, glomalin alone can make up up to 30% of the soil carbon. And glomalin effectively only comes from AMF (from the genus Glomus). Hence my hesitation to accept that EMF are responsible for more carbon sequestration than AMF.

Besides that nitpicking, it's great to hear this dataset is now available tho because, amongst other things, it'll be incredibly useful for helping predict good matches between mycorrhizal inoculant and any particular ecosystem of interest. Or for example, in my case, when hunting for new wild sources of mycorrhizal strains I can now make more educated decisions on where to collect samples.

</comment><comment><USER3> Strange dream the other day... Green lettuce levitates out off the French dressing, shakes it off like a dog, bends spacetime and is gone.

I belive putting walls/stone/steel around tree roots is cruelty :(</comment>


Show HN: Breezy – Develop Rails React Redux Apps the Rails Way - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jho406/Breezy <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Been working on this for a while now, figured it was time to show hn. Love to hear some feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> It's a pretty interesting project, love to see if it can integrate with GraphQL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, I don't have plans to integrate with GraphQL. I wanted to keep it closer to Turbolink's approach by loading the next page's props into the store instead of firing off a bunch of API requests.

Great thing is, aside from the way it loads data, its just mostly plain Redux and React. Feel free to add your own functionality.</comment></comment>


Informed analysis of today's healthcare ruling - mkr-hn http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/06/menu-of-todays-coverage/

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: The mandate is constitutional because the result of noncompliance is a fine, which basically amounts to a tax, which congress can generally impose all willy-nilly.</comment>


Italian Clothing Company Wins the Right to Use Steve Jobs' Name - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/28/italian-clothing-company-steve-jobs/ <comment><USER2> Something similar happened with my alma mater (Franklin & Marshall College) when an Italian designer gave a clothing line the same name. Students started coming home from travel abroad with tales of bootleg college gear. IIRC the college and clothing company worked out some licensing deal.</comment>


Fix your hunchback posture - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTV6UCh-yhs <comment><USER2> I believe it was first posted on Lifehacker.

The "hunchback posture" is not just a matter of aesthetics : in my case it affects my cervical and it leads to migraines. My physiotherapist showed me a similar exercise that seems to help (plus of course the massages).</comment>


Custom Machine Types goes GA, saving you up to 50% on compute costs - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Custom-Machine-Types-goes-GA-saving-you-up-to-50-percent-on-compute-costs.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm super pleased that we finally offer customers the ability to match their VMs to both their physical infrastructure (32 vCPUs and 64 GiB has a nice ring to it). It also opens up the fantastic world of finer-grained "workload" tuning: instead of forcing people to jump from 16 vCPUs to 32, you can go up to just 18 when all you need is a bit more compute.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.</comment>


Heretical Confessions of an Emacs Addict – Joy of the Vim Text Editor « /usr - <AUTHOR> http://slashusr.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/heretical-confessions-of-an-emacs-addict-joy-of-the-vim-text-editor/ <comment><USER2> I apologize in advance for this ode to Vim, but I feel I should get it off my chest.

I admit, the main reason for me to develop in Vim these days is to simply minimize the number of keystrokes I have to press (and the number of times I have to reach for the mouse), because, due to RSI, I experience a mild, but constant, and noticeable discomfort in my wrists (...and triceps, and shoulder) whenever I type (I distinctly remember I developed it in Eclipse during my Symbian C++ development internship). I honestly tried Emacs a few times because of superior Lisp editing, but it just didn't stick, I just can't bring myself to press _more_ keys than I use to in Vim. Force of habit? Maybe.

I have never expected to be "hooked up" on Vim, but I was. In my first job out of the university I was writing Linux-based embedded software almost exclusively. I could never get used to Linux GUI editors after Visual Studio: the lack of any built-in IDE features and constant switching from the editor to the shell made me switch away to something closer to the shell. The initial discomfort of modal editing was less annoying than the lack of features and the accessibility of shell in Linux GUI editors (Eclipse CDT was a pain to set up and use back in these days). Then the discovery of split windows, regex replacement, folds, macros, ex-mode commands, and extensions made my experience what I then thought tolerable.

The mechanical memory had set in, and, upon moving on to my next job, I discovered that I could no longer use Visual Studio with as much comfort as I used Vim! It was curious, since I've "grown up" as a programmer with Visual Studio in the 4 years at the university.

It has snowballed further since then: remapping ';' to ':', ZQ and ZZ shortcuts, quickfix window, copy-paste registers, more motions with text objects ("delete between {}", "move to next ','", replace "()" with "[]", indent 4 line with "4>>"), sorting selected lines, coming up simple with ad- hoc refactoring functions and macros on the fly, marks, buffer greps, jumping between files with LustyExplorer an NERDTree, plugins (VimScript must die, but while it's there, it does the job), and falling back to the shell where Vim falls short. A few vimgolf (there is a site for this) challenges also added some tricks into my toolbox.

Right now I use Vim whenever I can. It does show its age, especially in areas like REPL, IDE features and code completion (it'll get there, eventually, I hope), but I just don't feel at home using anything else at the moment. I'm always on the lookout on the future of Vim or its next successor.

PS: Disclaimer: I don't necessarily advocate for everyone to learn Vim, it really requires a non-trivial investment of time to establish the necessary mechanical memory, but it was worth it for _me_ personally (I do C, C++ and Python almost exclusively). Depending on your domain and the technology you use, you may be better off using Emacs (Lisp) or VS with Resharper (C#).

<comment><USER3> Then you'll love <http://www.viemu.com/> .... There are so many good things to say about ViEmu that it's hard to know where to begin. I've been a happy ViEmu customer for about three years now. Best $99 I've ever spent, hands-down.

Maybe it will suffice to say: "VisualAssist + ViEmu = <3". They synergize so incredibly well together.

Someday I should record a video of me coding C++ in Visual Studio. In the last 4 days alone, I've written 8,700 lines of C++. No way could I have done that without my precious ViEmu / VAX templates / custom hotkeys. (It's rare to ever need to touch the mouse, which is pretty fabulous.)

At this point, I write systems as fast as I can think, not type.

<comment><USER4> >Someday I should record a video of me coding C++ in Visual Studio.

Please do. It's should not be that difficult to just switch on the recording software and upload it into Youtube. If you could also verbally describe what you're doing and how, would be appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just can't get vim's modes - I'm constantly unintentionally entering keystrokes in the wrong mode, especially when I'm concentrating on what I'm doing. Of course emacs also has annoying modes, e.g. if you change your mind half way through a key combination, you are stuck in a mode. Ctrl+G gets you out of it with the result that I'm constantly pressing Ctrl+G in emacs before I do anything to avoid the sting of keystrokes being thrown away.

I'm still waiting for Jef Raskin's modeless editor (there was a project called Archy which is now abandoned).

<comment><USER6> The solution to this is that when using Vim properly you're _always_ in normal mode except for short bursts of typing. Don't hang around in insert mode. Need to think for a second about what to type next? Get out of insert mode, think, and then enter insert mode again.

The result of this is that "insert mode" stops being so much like a separate mode and starts feeling more like a command itself! It's the difference between:

        move over a word
        enter insert mode
        type "foo"
        exit insert mode
        move back a word

and

        move over a word
        insert the word "foo"
        move back a word

<comment><USER7> I totally agree with you for myself, but in order to make a more general point I'm going to have to to point out that people not destined to use vim as their primary editor can get away with doing the exact opposite. That is, they're almost always in insert mode and only briefly go to normal mode to change something.

The really important thing with any modal interface is that you have one primary mode which you only leave to accomplish a task and to which you return as soon as the task is done. Even emacs has modes in that you're sometimes, say, doing an incremental search. The important thing is that when you're done you're dropped back to the usual mode by default.

For more on the theory of modal interfaces, see here: <http://www.osnews.com/story/18904/pt_V_Modes>

<comment><USER8> I'd honestly go so far as to say that people who feel they _must_ stay in Insert Mode most of the time should not be using Vim. They're _not_ using Vim; they're pounding a square peg into a circular hole. They should stop pretending that they're using Vim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I went the other way around.

I was a long-time Vim user (around 10 years or so) and switched to Emacs in order to use Lisp + Slime in order to win an argument about Lisp. What's important is that I lost that argument, like Lisp, and use Emacs as my primary editor now.

However, the Vim keybindings are still etched upon my soul so I still find myself popping it open for quick-and-dirty edits.

They're both good editors and I like the conclusion of this article.

<comment><USER10> I'm also an Emacs user, but I've been curious about Vi. Have you tried using Viper? As somebody with experience in both, do you think it's something worth trying?

<comment><USER9> I'm not going to bother asking why Vim/Vi is interesting to you, but in answer to your question: No.

I immediately went for the Viper-mode Vi emulation and it's not good. Go whole-hog. Just dive into the deep end and start swimming.

The reason for that is that the emulation layer lives in a limbo that is half- emacs-half-vi. The modes don't work the same way. And I'd be wary of falling back on Emacs instead of learning the Vi way.

If you really want to try to transition to a new editor, I would open up a fresh install of Vim and start with the in-editor tutorial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I use emacs with viper and it's great. I have no idea how to really edit text in emacs without vi mode and I can't open a file in vim without :q and running it again with a different argument. Yet I can edit text vi style and use superior (to vim) and convenient emacs features like modes, tramp, buffer management, org-mode…

<comment><AUTHOR> You can try elvis. I havent tried it myself, but I heard it being a continuation of viper and vimpulse efforts.

<comment><USER12> I've been using it for only few days, but I think evil and Emacs makes a really nice enviroment. I finally managed to get capslock to be the key for evil-normal-state (default is ESC) and the world is a better place now. I recommend giving it a shot :-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These "I've used vim/emacs and decided to try switching..." articles always leave me cold.

I mean, both are insanely powerful editors. It's not as if there is something one can do that the other cannot, and if there is, it's doubtful that a user would _want to_ \-- for example, I don't think vim has a built in email client, but the vim users I've talked to laugh at the idea of an email client in their editor.

As a result, all of these "I've switched" articles begin with a comparison of modal and non-modal editing, discuss some pros and cons of both, and end with the same conclusion: both are great editors!

Where's the beef?

<comment><USER14> While I generally agree with your sentiment, I will say that I use <http://danielchoi.com/software/vmail.html> Vmail (vim-gmail) daily and quite like it. Some of us don't mind Vim throwing in the proverbial kitchen sink :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any discussion of Vim that lacks mention of text objects is under serving the editor. Text objects and repeat are by far the best features of the editor.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have the same feeling, that both worlds are appealing. Vim being "Just focus, don't go meta improving your tools your filthy procrastinator" and Emacs being an "comfortable playground". "How is that algorithm again? Let me try something in elisp on the _scratch_ buffer."

I'm trying to use Sublime Text these days (won't ever have Slime to develop Clojure, though).

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious if the speed difference between counting how many times to repeat a command versus using movement/visual block/etc. is big enough?

I find the "repeat-n-times" modifiers require a lot of thought before I know what number to put before the command. I do consider myself very fast with Vim, but the repeat commands haven't done much for me.

<comment><USER18> There's a great deal of power in '.', which repeats the last command. So if you have to do something 12 times, your steps could look something like this;

\- Run the command once

\- Think "Hmm, looks like I have to do this about ten more times"

\- Type '10.', repeating the last command 10 times

\- See that there's only one left to do, since you guessed 10 and it was 11

\- Press '.' one more time to do the last one

You won't win any vim golf competitions like that, but it's very easy to do.

<comment><USER19> Actually, 10. doesn't necessarily repeat the last command 10 times, it just runs it again with an argument of 10. For example ">>10." will indent the current line and then indent it and the following 9 lines.

I still haven't found an easy way to indent a line N times without pressing ">" 2N times...

<comment><USER20> Activate visual mode first. In visual mode, the argument is used for the number of indents (because the lines to indent are selected visually). So to indent the current line 4 times, type: "V4>". Happy vimming! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been a vim user for about 10 years now. I've recently started using emacs for lisp/SLIME dev. The number one feature I miss when I'm in emacs land is vim's "i" and "a" commands.

di" deletes everything between the double quotes. da" deletes everything between including the double quotes themselves

It works with other matching pairs as well (ie di(, di[ di'). I use it constantly. I've searched and search, and have not been able to find an emacs equivalent.

<comment><USER22> In Emacs you have kill-sexp, that works for balanced expressions [1]. Despite the lispy name, it works for any mode.

[1] <http://www.gnu.org/s/libtool/manual/emacs/Expressions.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I noticed recently that you can use the ex commands in Emacs without converting the whole editor over to Viper. This is really the part of vi that I find attractive. Notes:

<http://www.advogato.org/person/chalst/diary/277.html>

That said, vim's command set is a superset of ex, and includes some nice things that the above misses.

</comment><comment><USER24> I used emacs for a while, but fairly recently I switched to vim for one simple reason: opening speed. Emacs always takes a while to launch, but no matter how many plugins and whatnot I install in Vim it always launches instantly. And that, to me, is worth learning a new editor.

<comment><USER25> Launch it in server mode at startup then use emacsclient: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient>

<comment><USER24> I don't like that because it forces all of my editing into one terminal window (or into GUI emacs if I use that as the server). I want to be able to pop open emacs in other terminal windows quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone here use Dvorak + Vim? I've wanted to try out Vim really bad but not sure if the key bindings will make sense to my Dvorak fingers.

<comment><USER21> I used it without any problems for a number of years. Once the keystrokes make it into your muscle memory, you're off to the races.

<comment><USER27> Seconded. The direction keys (j, l, I think, and I forget which the other two were; I just kept the mapping from movement-of-fingers to movement-of-cursor) may not be as intuitive as they are in qwerty, but after a short while you just ingrain them in your muscle memory and it doesn't matter anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Aren't Emacs and Vim basically the same editor at this point?

There are some stylistic differences, which can be surprisingly subtle, like the differences between acoustic and electric guitar.

But pretty much every other editor these days wants to be an MP3 player.

Today's editor war is between (a.) technical people who expect to spend many hours a day manipulating text for the next few decades, and (b.) people who don't ever want to think about text editing because it seems low-level and boring.

<comment><USER29> Your understanding is very much flawed. (FYI, Emacs has been my primary editor for 5 years and Vim has been my over-ssh editor for 6)

Your guitar analogy is more applicable not between Emacs and Vim but between something like pico/nano and vim/emacs. It's hard to find a good analogy between Emacs and Vim because they are both awesome editors for many different reasons.

Emacs (due to its LISP origins) is highly configurable, probably the _most_ configurable piece of software you will ever use that has a large mindshare and presence in the community. Vim is configurable, but Vim's intention from the beginning was to be an efficient editor over SSH; it just so happens people are now using it as their primary editor of choice on their desktops.

With Vim you can't just start editing text right away (like Emacs, Word, TextEdit &c...) you have to switch from the Console Mode into Editing Mode (by pressing "i" on most installs). Then if you want to delete a few words you have to switch back to the Console Mode (by pressing "esc" usually) position your cursor, and enter "wq" until the words you wanted deleted are deleted. This has the benefit of separating commands from text editing so there are no "control" keys as you will see with Emacs.

With Emacs you can edit text right away and there are no "modes" to change. Emacs instead has control keys (the two main ones are "C" and "M" - on your keyboard that's "Control" and "Alt" - I've remapped my control key to be the Caps Lock key since it makes my pinky finger less angry). So if while I'm editing I wanted to delete a few words, I would position my cursor then hold down Alt and press "d" until the words I wanted deleted are deleted (in emacs lingo: "M-d"). This has the benefit of not "context" switching into other modes but it means you now have to be very clever with your key combinations so you don't end up playing Twister! on your keyboard for more complicated tasks (that's why some people prefer Vim because it negates that problem with "modes").

Emacs doesn't _want_ to be an MP3 player - Emacs wants to be whatever the _person using it_ wants it to be. To me that's what wins me over to Emacs; if I need my editor to do something that it doesn't do stock, I have the full power to add/change/remove whatever it is I want it to do. Additionally there's an enormous community of people with far more knowledge and experience in doing that to tap into, plus, if you want it do something it's most likely someone already has done (and done it better).

Vim also doesn't want to be an MP3 player - matter of fact, you would get stoned by the Vim community for saying that, those guys are all about efficiency. I love Vim because of its efficiency - I actually really hate Emacs over SSH (to all those saying "use TRAMP!" I have, and it's not nearly as cool as using Vim over SSH). My editor of choice when working directly on a server editing code is Vim, it's fast, concise, and very powerful.

There is no editor war today - there's the never ending jihad between annoying emacs users and vim users that think their editor of choice is better than the other (I think those people are stupid, because BOTH EDITORS ARE AMAZING and EVERYONE HAS A DIFFERENT PREFERENCE). Technical people use editors that empower them to write software; people who don't want to think about text editing are still keyboard pecking when writing their emails.

<comment><USER28> You're acting like I've never heard of either Emacs or Vim before, and you shouldn't do that. The net effect is to make HN less fun and less useful for everyone.

Because the next time I think about starting a conversation on, say, similarities and differences between successful, competing software packages and the cognitive models they encourage...

I'll remember that this time, when I tried to keep my opening post friendly, informal, and solicitous, you assumed I was an idiot.

I'll be sure not to make jokes when I think someone else is getting too uptight, because jokes are _emotional_ and text editors are serious business.

And most importantly, next time I'll establish my credentials up front, by prepending everything in my .emacs.d to all my posts. It's a little verbose, but it means nobody gets insulted by being mistaken for a n00b.

Plus, in Conkeror, it's really easy to write a regex that will detect 30,000 lines of custom elisp and set it to {display:none;}.

<comment><USER29> Is this in response to my other comment or this direct comment? Nothing about the comment you are responding to here is attacking you. Your understanding (or writing, as I said) is flawed. Maybe you aren't a noob and you just aren't expressing yourself well enough.

Your comment wasn't "unfriendly" it just wasn't enlightening. I did not assume you were an idiot and no where in my comment did I insinuate that.

Nothing about an .emacs.d proves you are a competent emacs user - I've seen some hideous init files come from Emacs noobs and hideous init files come from power users!

Depends on what you mean by jokes - Hacker News (less so now than a few years ago) tends to be a serious forum for discussion; reddit-esque joking around is both frowned upon and discouraged. Although, TBH I didn't see any "jokes" coming from you at all. I wasn't responding to your jokes (unless you're talking about my other comment in response to you).

<comment><USER28> First, phrases like "your understanding is flawed" and "maybe you just aren't expressing yourself well enough" are way outside the bounds of civil conversation.

Second, how would you unpack this sentence?

 _"Aren't black and white basically the same color these days?"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's up with the angle quote /usr in the title?

<comment><USER31> /usr is the name of the blog, and the title of the HN item was pulled from the title of the page (likely by the submit-to-HN bookmarklet).</comment></comment>


Searching the Internet is correlated with increased brain function in older adults - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-finds-that-searching-64348.aspx <comment><USER2> With increased clutter on the web, I guess this would be true for any one, not just old people. However this complex reasoning instead of getting credit to trigger grey cells is taking away the time and effort which can be better used elsewhere.

The way data is presented and is spread needs to get more structured. Certain semantic data integration engines are doing a decent job, but its very hard. Something innovative has to happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Older adults that learn to use PCs + net etc. are more likely to have increased brain function?</comment>


Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/media-websites-battle-falteringad-revenue-and-traffic.html <comment><USER2> What a sad state of affairs... I used to discount the pessimists, but it appears that large segments of the population are indeed completely lost for any media that doesn't involve moving images.

From what I read (even on HN) these people aren't just happy they can currently get most content for free – they actively loathe the so-called 'traditional media', to the point where they'd welcome the bankruptcy of the NYT or WSJ. It's going to be a dark future if we're to rely on tumblr to keep us informed. Donald Trump may one day represent the index case for the plague that killed the US's civil society.

I'm still hoping for media to find sustainability online. I don't quite get why there's no Spotify for publishers yet. I feel like I'm grossly underpaying for my media consumption – yet I'm not going to pay >250$-800$/yr to any single publication for the 4 or 5 articles I read per month. There must be millions of people who'd gladly pay 500$/yr for universal access.

<comment><USER3> I won't pay anything in advance. I'd pay 1 cent per article but I want a preview first.

If 1 cent looks too low, divide the price of a newspaper by the number of articles it contains.

And I want the privilege to read with an adblocker, to be fairly sure not to be tracked and spied.

And if pay per read will ever happen I'm quite sure we'll read less than now and we'll privilege free (as beer) information. After all I used to read only one newspaper and watch one or two tv news programs. Having to pay will make many people go back to that. That was sad too and people were easy to exploit by scarcity of information.

<comment><USER2> That's the idea of a subscription model: you'd pay about the same as now (or, let's say, 10 years ago). But you get to read whatever you want because it doesn't cost anything to give you the extra content, knowing that you wouldn't pay for it anyway. Everybody wins: readers get more diversity, publishers stand to actually increase revenue because it's a much better offer than in the past and could attract more readers and the society profits when people are better informed.

It won't be at <price of newspaper>/<articles per issue> because nobody reads every single article. There's also the slight complication that newspapers used to get about half their revenue from ads and classifieds and that's pretty much gone. We should find out in the next decade if there's an econmic model for journalism. If it turns out that there isn't, and if some sort of disruption hits TV as well... It's at least going to be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The writing is on the wall, websites are in decline, NYT lost 50% of home page traffic in just 2 years: [http://blog.naytev.com/publishers-must- adapt/](http://blog.naytev.com/publishers-must-adapt/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Any site online providing news will be behind a Paywall at some point in the future, its inevitable.</comment>


UberTAXI in NYC Shutting Down for Now - <AUTHOR> http://blog.uber.com/2012/10/16/ubertaxi-in-nyc-shutting-down-for-now-no-changes-to-ubernyc-black-car-service/

<comment><USER2> Sorry to see that this did not gain traction! ("traction", get it? :)

Minor quibble with blog post (or really, its marketing spin...) there are tons of car services in the city that you can call to have someone pick you up! They are arguably less efficient - you have to call them, etc - but it isn't _quite_ true that yellow cabs are your only option if you're stuck in the bronx!</comment>


Data Engineer Study Guide - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GOO4s1NcxCR8a44F0XnsErz5rYDxNbHAHznu4pJMRkw/edit#gid=0 <comment><USER2> Ooooh going to see how this matches up with my personal list/the one my company uses for data engineers.

Will definitely submit feedback if I feel like something huge is missing.

Thanks for posting this! Hugely helpful since I've gone from software person who did a lot of data work to full on data engineer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks, I've been looking for something like this! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope it helps!

Also we are working on a software engineering, data science and hadoop focused one!

Let us know if there are specific topics you would like to see!

<comment><USER3> I work as a data scientist but want to learn more about data engineering and software engineering as I prefer those aspects of the work.

Hadoop seems outdated now though as we have moved to the Cloud whereas we used to have Hadoop on-site and it seems most of my friends companies have done the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Then we will work on that. Yes, Hadoop is kind of weird. Like most companies use it through the abstraction of hive or presto. So..it's just SQL again.

<comment><USER4> My two cents is there's still a lot of design patterns and methodologies to pick up on in MapReduce and distributed data architecture.

If we're including movement and integration, ETL/ELT, sharding, partitioning, etc in data engineering...?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Is Reportedly Working On A $250-$300 "iPad Mini" - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-mini-2011-10

<comment><USER2> Nonsense. They don't need to. There's no reason for them to add another screen size... it would be a poorer experience.

They would sacrifice battery life, screen real-estate, other stuff would have to go too. It would be a step backwards technologically when Apple have a history of pushing forward the status quo... not fighting to compete.</comment>


How to get on TechCrunch - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/user/speakhumanbook#p/u/0/dhQ48A_yql0

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd just like to quickly make note of something.

I'm a big fan and regular reader here, and as a result, I'm very careful about what I post on HN. Lately, though, I've posted a few times with links to this video channel.

Each time I do so, I feel a twinge of hesitation. I don't want to pollute the site, but, at the same time, I think there are stories here that might be helpful to the HN community.

If any of you feel that the content isn't appropriate (or that I'm linking to it too frequently), please let me know. I certainly don't want to overextend my welcome here!

Happy Saturday!

<comment><USER2> I really thought the topic was okay and fine but personally it was impossible to watch the spliced upped video being shown so I just switched to another tab and listened.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still working on sorting out how these are edited. Most are linear and shot in one take with no editing. In order to get longer stories into a tighter time frame, though, I've been playing with compressing the gaps.

So far I'm unsure of how to approach this. I've been casually asking friends on Twitter and Facebook to view and comment on their thoughts. Most seem split right down the middle, with half preferring them without edits, and the other half liking the ones with.

But, this is very much the way we've urged others to approach such things. Put something out, test it, augment, refine, repeat. (Perhaps it's "agile" storytelling.) With each one I think I'm figuring some things out. Hopefully in videos to come they feel more natural.

Thanks for giving it a listen!

<comment><USER3> Perhaps you could post an unedited version and a version where you compress the gaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not a bad idea, but then I'd have to spend even more time on these videos, and my wife would really hate that. (I'm home far too little these days as it stands.)

<comment><USER4> "I'm home far too little these days as it stands."

Well, the solution there is to be sure to have a complete development setup at _home_ as well.

Who could possibly complain then?

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think a better title for this is: "What to do when a larger company infringes your trademark", since it was more about having a clever response to the name similarity than being featured on techcrunch per se.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had contemplated that as well, but in other instances I don't think it would have played out the same way. (If the same thing were repeated, it might not work--this one just timed out nicely.) So, for many in a trademark dispute, lawyers may still be the way to go.

My reason for referencing TechCrunch (specifically here) is that we tried doggedly to get on it with one of our startups. It proved to be very difficult to do, regardless of who we approached or how. We finally did get on for that project, but it took an awful lot of prodding and wrangling.

This one, however, was done in a pretty casual way, and I just tossed Michael an email (on what was probably a rather slow day). It did strike me as notable that no matter what I said regarding the startup, none of it was as easy to get his attention with as this was.

And I suppose that's the whole point. People like stories, not feature lists or pitches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> These guys _really_ didn't have a legal case against Discovery? Sure, Discovery has a lot of lawyers. But they also have a lot of money. Where's 'grellas when you need him?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our trademark is a Canadian one, not an American one. We could have opted to get one in the US when we first registered, but cash was limited, so it wasn't really an option. Plus, trademarks are like country domains--getting one everywhere just becomes impractical (unless you're MS).

The second aspect of the challenge was that they weren't in a directly competing area. We build websites and create little startup projects; we make no television content. As such, we would have had a pretty weak case on our hands.

And besides, this was much more fun. ;-)

BTW: Who's 'grellas?

<comment><USER6> Bay area tech lawyer; one of the people on HN who I read via RSS on their SearchYC comments; invariably awesome.

I am sorry about what happened to you guys. We're a small-ish firm too and I can only imagine how pissed I'd be if our name got Smashlabbed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that--I appreciate it!

We were pretty "choked" about the situation initially. Honestly, though, it all worked out pretty well, and the whole "smash lab sucks" thing proved to be a rather interesting experiment.

And in the meanwhile, we receive some pretty interesting mail and phone calls. (Even a letter from an inmate who had an "idea" for the show.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> karjaluoto already sorta mentioned it in a comment on here, but a key aspect of this is that _usually_ (but not always!) trademarks only cover names for a certain type of product or within a certain area of industry - the main goal of trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. (For example, for many years in the UK there used to be both a lemon juice and a kitchen cleaner called Jif. The kitchen cleaner only became Cif to match the European brand name.)

If you created a fabric conditioner called "Microsoft" with a radically unique logo, then Microsoft _probably_ wouldn't have a good trademark case, but they could cause one hell of a fuss and most likely bankrupt the defendant from legal costs alone. This guy and his company almost certainly couldn't do that to Discovery and since they're not using the trademark in the same line of business, the chances of them winning and getting any costs back would be low.

<comment><AUTHOR> Precisely.

In fact, on the day of the video, we had started with the discussion, "do we change the name of our company?" This, however, turned out to be a much more enjoyable option.

It's a little like the "Michael Bolton" bit in the movie Office Space. Although the singer (in this fictional setting) knew little of the inconvenience caused to the fellow who he shared a name with, it became a nuisance nevertheless.

That was the spot we were in. We didn't feel that Discovery had done anything deliberate here. They likely just came up with a name (or the producers of the program did) and used it. They may have seen that someone had the URL and was operating with it, but didn't think much more of it.

In a way, I'm quite happy that the program is so bad. (Well, from what I hear at least--I've only watched a brief snippet.) Being so poorly received means that the program will likely not be renewed. Sure, it will live on in syndication for another few years, but we'll likely outlive it.

If we would have been called Mythbusters... we would have been completely screwed. ;-)

<comment><USER8> Maybe Discovery chose the name SmashLab in order to (subconsciously?) piggy back on the popularity of their other show, CashCab. I mean, they rhyme.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be. It sure will make the next round of programs tricky, though, won't it?

\- TrashFlab \- BrashGrab \- GashBlab

Oh... it's going to be ugly. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Example of a small error on YouTube's part: "more info" and "less info" shows exactly the same info text.

That is something they might want to detect.

</comment><comment><USER10> or you can just pay for it... [http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/04/an- apology-to-our-reade...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/04/an-apology-to- our-readers/)</comment>


A new spot market makes cloud computing a commodity - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18185752?story_id=18185752 <comment><USER2> I think that compute power moving towards commodity status would be a great thing, however, I also think there's one big problem that needs to be surmounted at present: bandwidth isn't free.

Practically speaking, to be properly fungible, it should be possible to move compute workloads across the 'Net into whatever environment happens to be cheapest. But for anything being done with large amounts of data, there's a non-negligible cost to moving that data across the Internet, and this in turn can lead to things like lock-in. In fact one could argue that it's almost the only form of lock-in practiced by AWS.

On the other hand, if compute power DOES become a commodity, that would be great, because then Jevons paradox would probably kick in, which could itself lead to true ubicomp etc. One can dream :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Instead of buying an electric heater, I'd like to buy a server that automatically sells its power on a market like this to subsidise my electricity bill.

If all electric heaters in the world provided CPU power for us as well, where would we be?

<comment><USER4> The CPU time on a server located in a data center is worth money, but CPU time on a server in your house is worthless due to bandwidth and other issues.

<comment><USER5> That's not true. It depends on the kind of workload, which can be CPU-bound, IO-bound, network-bound, etc...

If a workload is truly distributed, simply fetches data blocks to process then goes computing for a while (Example: folding@home), the amount of bandwidth doesn't matter.

Also, some people have substantial amounts of bandwidth to their house :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _offered capacity on 4,000 servers that would otherwise sit unused (probably in a lull between making animated movies)_

Not much detail on this. The computers are "probably" doing something part of the time? Really? So when the animation crew goes to use their machines they have to disable them from the commodity network first? What happens if scientists are in the middle of using them? Are the hard drives sometimes unexpectedly full of porno and pirated Mp3s? Is the phone company going to notice the 10000x increase in the data coming in and out of these machines? Are any companies storing personal data on these XYZ random machines?

This is a cuter equivilent though:

<http://www.pluraprocessing.com/>

It steals cpu cycles from people playing online games.

<comment><USER7> It's probably running as a low-priority process, so that if any normal process needs CPU time, it get it. I'm currently running Enigma@home and Milkyway@home on my computer, so all of my cores are always at 100%, except when my other programs start to use more than 25%, and then the @home's instantly suspend processing. The only time my system seems to slow down is when starting virtual machines.

I imagine this software is similar, which is why it's not meant for people that need reliable access. If somebody starts rendering in the middle of a SpotCloud job, then the SpotCloud job doesn't continue until the rendering is done. And if the rendering doesn't finish until after the job expires, then the job is restarted on a different computer. The worst thing you could do (from SpotCloud's perspective) would be to have your computer available for 99% of the time it takes to do the job, and then become unavailable until after the deadline, but I imagine that doesn't happen very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. I heard the other day that Enron implemented a somewhat similar concept in 1999: a market for bandwidth.

<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48732>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting parallel. Are you shouting "bubble!" then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _The service is technically surprising. Enomaly did not build a big central > infrastructure, because the bandwidth demands "would have killed us", says > Reuven Cohen, the firm's founder. Instead, it works with Google App Engine, > another cloud-computing provider, which gives Enomaly access to a > decentralised global system._

This doesn't make much sense to me. Google App Engine is not very "global" and its bandwidth prices are pretty standard unless you're small enough to fit in the free tiers.</comment>


Persistent Data Structures for Objective-C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/astashov/persistent.objc

<comment><USER2> Objective-C data structures are already immutable by default. What do these persistent data structures bring to the table that the default immutable NSDictionary, NSArray, NSSet, etc., don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are immutable by default, but it's expensive to get a new data structure with some changes in it. That's what persistent data structures for. I personally like this explanation - [https://github.com/vacuumlabs/persistent#what-are- persistent...](https://github.com/vacuumlabs/persistent#what-are-persistent- data-structures)

<comment><USER3> Expensive how?

Your classes are 10-20x slower in every other way, which definitely would offset any imaginary expense you think calling `mutableCopy` costs.

I have to tell you in 10+ years of writing Objective-C where I was like [myArray mutableCopy] is super slow, I need a replacement. I've wished for an NSOrderedDictionary though.

<comment><AUTHOR> 10-20x slower means it makes sense to use a persistent map when the size of your Dictionary is > 20 records.

Then,

      // yourDictionary is NSMutableDictionary, [yourDictionary count] > 20
      NSMutableDictionary *mutable = [yourDictionary mutableCopy];
      mutable[@"old_key"] = @"new_value";
      NSDictionary *changedDict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithDictionary:mutable];

will be slower than

      // yourDictionary is AAPersistentHashMap, [yourDictionary count] > 20
      AAPersistentHashMap *changedDict = [yourDictionary setObject:@"new_value" forKey:@"old_key"];

Remember, you need to get another immutable map, which is a modified version of the original, preferably memory-efficient, which means we want to reuse the unchanged keys/values of the original map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anybody know if there is anything similar for golang?

<comment><USER5> The underlying datastructure is a Hash Array Mapped Trie. Searching for "golang hamt" and "golang immutable" turns up a number of results but I didn't look into any of them but they're generally clones of Clojure's version.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are computers not good at? - <AUTHOR> Many things can be automated with computers. What are the things that they do not do well and still need that human touch?<p>Bonus. How long before they don't suck at said things? <comment><USER2> 1\. I believe, computers will probably never match human capacity for empathy.

2\. What in philosophy is described as soul or consciousness, it could probably never evolve to have it.

3\. Computers may become adept at meta-stuff, and self-awareness but they would probably still lack the said soul.

4\. Even if they ever evolve their consciousness, it would never match ours, since humans live in a perception dimension which almost never matches reality ( reality itself is evolving, or so it seems ). With that, if we tried to feed in rules or algorithms to model learning so consciousness could evolve, it would still be off mark from the feeling of consciousness which we so profoundly seek to understand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Photo 1: A man drinking water. Photo 2: An elephant drinking water. Photo 3: A small bird drinking water from a water pipe.

A computer cannot figure out that the three photos contains the same verb.

(Ref: [http://www.quora.com/How-intelligent-is-AI- now](http://www.quora.com/How-intelligent-is-AI-now))

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, the thing they absolutely do not do is "that human touch". The more things get computerized, the more we miss real people. ("For a list of the ways that technology has failed to improve our lives, press 2.")

When will computers do that well? Never.

</comment><comment><USER5> Guessing, seeing (well, understanding what they see), creativity.

Being intuitive about the world.

Learning.

<comment><USER6> Computers are actually pretty good at creativity if you instill it into them. One approach that I have found to work is first to create a bunch of random combinations using smaller pieces and then to apply curious filters to the output. In many ways, the human brain works using brute force too, but the process is usually filtered out from conscious awareness. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have something of a creativity framework that simplified the process.

<comment><USER2> > In many ways, the human brain works using brute force too

I strongly disagree. It doesn't always do brute force. It mostly works on assumptions and testing the scenario against the assumptions made. Validating and refining the assumptions to closely model reality. This is also correlated with why superstitions were very much prevalent in primitive societies. They worked as a rule of thumb.

If it mostly worked by brute force, we would be extinct by now. I know that's a little far stretched to say, but i strongly feel that's how dangerous it could get if the brain always did brute force.</comment></comment></comment>


LI2: Lego Institute for Lego Investigation (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/LI2/ <comment><USER2> Wow 20,000,000.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the Norvig minifig :)</comment>


Travis Kalanick reportedly sought to reassert control at Uber after ouster - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/05/travis-kalanick-reportedly-sought-to-reassert-control-at-uber-after-ouster/ <comment><USER2> For better or worse I think there are quote a few Uber employees that will support this move if it happens. The number of employees publicly speaking out for Travis is just the tip of the iceberg.

Case in point - a female friend just completed a round of interviews there and was shocked to find that multiple interviewers openly commented about how badly they wanted Travis back, and how the sexism scandal was overblown. All male employees I should point out.

<comment><USER3> I work at Uber. This behavior is totally inappropriate and I'm really sorry to hear your friend had this experience. My Twitter DMs are open (@codebutler) if you would like to share any more detail.

<comment><USER2> I appreciate that and I'll ping my friend to see if she wants to reach out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've found this video from 2011 to be kind of interesting in terms of illuminating how his history as an entrepreneur has shaped his attitude running Uber today (TL;DR - he failed and got screwed over a lot).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QrX5jsiico](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QrX5jsiico)

<comment><USER5> video summary

       Scout
       * preyed on by predatory vcs (sued by first vc to improve terms even after LOI expired;
         vc leaked lawsuit to WSJ to scare off other investors)

       Red Swoosh
       * cofounder tried to sell team behind his back;
       * team went without pay for multiple months
       * cofounder fucked up and didn't pay witholding taxes to IRS (NB: IRS can and will
         personally pursue officers of the company)
       * nearly went out of business multiple times
       * last eng quit via twitter / AOL saw this and spiked a deal
       * got a 4-way deal (worth watching at about 25:00 or so)
       * acquired by akamai for $23m

It's worth watching

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uber essentially was illegal and still is in many places, cab license and all. It needed to get so big, so fast to make it a fact. A typical Harvard MBA with a suit and tie would have failed. IMO they still need a guy willing to break the rules

</comment><comment><USER7> Uber needs a CEO who can maintain the reality-distortion field. Otherwise, the valuation will collapse and they'll have trouble getting new investors.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there any evidence that kicking Kalanick helped Uber?

<comment><USER9> I am trying to determine what evidence I would expect to find after 47 days to either support or oppose this hypothesis.

Since it's a privately owned company, we don't have a lot of detail about either stock performance or revenue / profit, and even so, I'm not sure that you'd be able to attribute changes on this timeframe (either for the better or for the worse) to Kalanick leaving.

On the other hand, since it's privately held, arguably what helps Uber is that its investors (owners) are happy with it, and they requested that he leave. So, yes?

<comment><USER8> Kalanick is the majority owner, so maybe he'll come back on board.

The reason I ask is because I've heard that companies that kick their founders generally fail. I'm not sure how true that is, but people on HN said it was common during the bubble.

It could be true that 2017 is different, that times have changed and that to win Uber needs to move forward without Kalanick. But the employees generally felt that he was doing a good job. All in all, it's a confusing situation.

<comment><USER10> > The reason I ask is because I've heard that companies that kick their > founders generally fail.

Possibly because that companies that are so screwed up internally that they have to kick their founder out are destined to fail. And kicking the founder out doesn't change their course enough to fix it.

<comment><USER11>
      companies that kick their founders generally fail

Don't companies "generally fail" on average, period? (>50%)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Uber will be a very interesting company to look back in 20 years I feel. There are a lot of lessons in there, but not sure which ones yet.

</comment><comment><USER13> Like it or not, only the founder cares about the company. So the founders attitude should be forced to change and not change the founder itself. If Uber brings Meg Whitman then she will do the same what she did to HP. Split in to multiple pieces (HPE, e.t.c) and then sell em all, because only the founder cares.

</comment><comment> happy-go-lucky Uber must be his brainchild. Let him take care of it. Give him one more chance.

<comment><USER10> How many chances do you think he should be given?"

Frequently implied answer: "I don't really know but i feel it should be one more than the number of chances he's already been given and blown."

Not necessarily saying that's your opinion - it just aligns with other conversations I've had.

<comment><USER14> It's his company (literally, he owns the majority of stock), so I think the answer is "as many chances as he damn well pleases."

<comment><USER15> The majority as in 12%? It's not his company.

<comment><USER16> He owns shares with 10x votes, and thus the majority of the voting rights.

<comment><USER15> But that is not exactly the same as owning the majority of the shares or owning the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't he have the majority of stock? Can't he just make it so?

</comment><comment><USER18> you can't keep a good man down</comment>


The Kale Affect - <AUTHOR> http://blog.postmates.com/post/66226128927/evidence-of-the-kale-affect

<comment><USER2> I'm currently on a juice diet and consume(drink) kale everyday 3 times a day. Tastes awful on its own, but in a juice its not that bad.

First time I tried this whole juice diet thing I lost 38lbs in 2 months.</comment>


Two Sisters Bought DNA Kits. The Results Blew Apart Their Family - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-sisters-bought-dna-kits-the-results-blew-apart-their-family-11549037904 <comment><AUTHOR> Outline link: [https://outline.com/qqSvjm](https://outline.com/qqSvjm)</comment>


US is looking at banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, Pompeo says - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/tech/us-tiktok-ban/index.html <comment><USER2> Zoomer TikTok shenanigans (reserving Trump rally tickets for Phoenix rally with no intention of going) went so viral it seemingly crushed Trump's approval ratings 5-points.

I suspect hurt Feelings rather than human rights violations or otherwise!</comment>