Twitter And Y Combinator Team Up For Startup Stream Access  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/twitter-and-y-combinator-team-up-for-startup-stream-access/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I wonder if Techcrunch has one guy/gal dedicated to HN.

If you want to pitch to Techcrunch, just Ask Hackers News to review your startup.

<comment><USER3> Not sure about HN, but they definitely have people dedicated to (smile)Twitter(/smile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do we need this here? PG posted the announcement directly. What makes this better than a duplicate?</comment>


Ask HN: Blogs or sites for hardware, cpu design, low level optimization? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any sites/blogs you follow for hardware, cpu design, low level optimization tricks, embedded systems design, compilers etc? <comment><USER2> <http://www.azulsystems.com/blogs/cliff>

Read it all.</comment>


AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/scoop-att-to-terminate-service-over-piracy-for-first-time-1541465187-749442e3-7b71-4cc7-a694-865779b6fb96.html <comment><USER2> The podcast Reply-All had a good episode about why this is problematic earlier this year.

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/118](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply- all/118)

Excerpt:

 _ALEX: So finally, I find this website that is called the Center for Copyright information.

PJ: And what's that?

ALEX: It's a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs, they're working together. And the deal is, if you feel that you have wrongly received a DMCA notice, you can go to this website, pay $35, and you can appeal it. And if you're successful, then they will tell your ISP they were wrong, and they retract it, and you shouldn't have any strikes on your account.

PJ: You found internet court.

ALEX: Yeah, I found internet court.

PJ: So are you taking this case to internet court?

ALEX: I sent them an email and said, hey this person Cayden was wrongfully accused.

PJ: And what did they say?

ALEX: They didn't say anything, they never got back to me!

PJ: (laughs) Got it.

ALEX: So basically what I found was a completely unaccountable system that was frustratingly opaque. It was maddening. So I decided to try something else._

<comment><USER3> > _It's a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs, > they're working together_

The entertainment industry wants takedowns eagerly enforced. The ISPs don't want to do work. Ignoring complaints is the predictable outcome. (As is AT&T becoming stricter about copyright enforcement after buying a content company.)

<comment><USER4> Anymore, the ISPs and the entertainment industry are the same entities.

AT&T owns WarnerMedia, formerly Time Warner, which owns cable networks, movie & music studios. Most of the entertainment Americans consume are owned or produced by AT&T or a subsidiary.

<comment><USER5> Which is why the next multi-billion dollar company is a simple ISP, the one charging $$ for delivering IP packets. Unfortunately, it is not sexy enough for VCs to fund.

<comment><USER4> I doubt it. Google couldn't break into this market with all of their money, influence, and incentive. I see nothing to suggest any other company could.

Regulatory capture has turned the internet into a de facto monopoly. There won't be any new players because they can be sued or acquired long before they become a threat. Our only hope is for regulations that prevent ISPs and media companies from being under the same umbrella.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think the source of that discomfort is - what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process?

Competition in the form of space internet can't come soon enough, not to enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reasonable service levels and alternatives to unfair decisions.

<comment><USER7> > what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a > fair, easy appeals process?

This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even _less_ accountable to the average person than the government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to advantage themselves.

Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's been totally captured by that corporation.

<comment><USER8> But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a competitor!

<comment><USER9> > But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a > competitor!

If we pretend geographic monopolies don't exist, maybe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder when this will spread to other industries? Say someone doesn't pay their newspaper bill. Maybe contact their water company and ask them to shut off their water, to encourage them to pay. It's worth a try, right?

I get why content rights owners go to the ISP to get at the ISP's customers who are doing things they don't like. I don't get why ISPs play along. It's extra work, and it makes the customer hate the ISP for being the bearer of bad news.

<comment><USER11> In this particular case, the answer is rather obvious--the ISP _is_ a content rights owner. Vertical integration FTW!

<comment><USER12> How is it different from when Time Warner media business and Time Warner Cable (ISP) were the same company?

<comment><USER13> I don't think they're saying it is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's taken a while to sort out in the industry, but I think the finding against Cox last year has ISPs running scared. [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/02/cox-must-pay-8m-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/02/cox-must-pay-8m-in-fees-on-top-of-25m-jury-verdict-for- violating-dmca/)

Edit: I thought there was something more recent, and sure enough there's a new lawsuit from August this year. [https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2018/08/sensing-blood-in- wat...](https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2018/08/sensing-blood-in-water-major- labels-sue-isp-cox-for-ignoring-their-dmca-notices.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> But remember, it would impinge AT&T's corporate "free speech" to have their service be a dumb pipe like any other utility. Corporations should always be free to do whatever at the expense of flesh and blood humans.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some of you might be wondering why "a little over a dozen" people being booted from their ISP is newsworthy. This is figuratively the beginning of a very, very slippery slope.

<comment><USER17> and I bet those "over a dozen" people are also their highest in terms of bandwidth use.

Smart pirates use vpns anyways.

<comment><USER18> ISP sees high amounts of traffic over a public VPN and kicks you off their network for suspicious activity. You go to appeal it in one of their 'courts' and since there aren't really any rules the burden of proof is on you.

You really were pirating so such positive proof doesn't really exist and you're off the internet for good.

<comment><USER19> There are perfectly legitimate reasons for 'consuming' a large amount of bandwidth. For example, I help seed a number of Linux distro ISOs over bittorrent, and once got a letter from my absolute shit of an ISP (Frontier, if you are reading this, it's you).

<comment><USER18> Plenty of legitimate usage, I'm talking about the fact that masking your traffic with a VPN isn't really protection when these 'courts' can demand you prove you weren't pirating content in order to restore your service.

So getting away with piracy by way of plausible deniability is much harder.

<comment><USER17> They're not real courts so no they can't demand you to prove anything. I don't know where you're coming from but it's nothing but unsubstantiated fear.

<comment><USER18> Forget the term courts. An ISP is within their rights to refuse to do business with you on the suspicion that you are a suspected pirate. If you then decide to go through their process they are also within their rights to continue not doing business with you until you voluntarily turn over evidence that you were in-fact not pirating content.

And since, for me at least, if I got my internet shut off I would pretty much have to move that's plenty of coercive power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you are fortunate enough to live somewhere with a choice of ISPs please vote with your dollars and choose an independent ISP.

Or, start your own: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394)

</comment><comment><USER21> > The bottom line: Very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their > broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number > of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before > they are cut off from AT&T's service. Copyright infringers are often > illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two > from their favorite band.

Its far more likely AT&T cares now because they own content now instead of it somehow pointing to the "severity of these cases", a point the article itself makes several times before walking it back? Also nothing to back up the out- of-nowhere claim that infringers "often illegally pirate hundreds of hours"?

</comment><comment><USER22> How does this differ from the deplatforming we've recently seen with Twitter, Apple app store, Gab from hosting providers, facebook, youtube, etc?

<comment><USER23> People actually are accused of doing something illegal by law.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, "illegal" versus "legal" in America is determined by the courts, not by private corporations.

<comment><USER25> Didn't you get the memo (2016)? Corporations now write the law, and they don't even prevent for impartiality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The irony is that AT&T's agents have to pirate the content in order to track down the pirates. Pirate Party is the answer, and VPN in the interim.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Don't violate the law over our network" is not an unreasonable expectation, and "we will shut off service to people that violate the law using our network" is not an unreasonable penalty. It's hard to imagine any business of any kind taking the position "feel free to violate the law over our network" or deciding that they just won't do anything about it if people do. Imagine a restaurant that could see you operating an illegal handgun market out of the corner booth and just decided that was fine as long as you tipped your server alright.

This is the most softball approach possible, they're giving you nine warnings before they just stop doing business with you, which is quite a bit nicer than them handing out your info specifically to enable the entertainment industry to take you to court for hundreds of thousands of dollars or reporting you to the FBI.

<comment><USER24> The law in America is enforced by the courts, not by private corporations.

<comment><USER27> They aren't enforcing the law. They're managing their risk as a business, by not doing business with people who could put them at legal risk. If they were "enforcing the law", they'd send you a fine for tens of thousands of dollars and throw you in jail if you didn't pay it.

If a gun store owner knew a guy was buying a gun to shoot up a school, wouldn't you want him to refuse to sell it? Wouldn't you want to hold the gun store responsible for knowingly enabling illegal activity?

(Note that I am using gun analogies in my comments because I feel the positions here are oddly tied to a specific issue, and hypocritical when applied to others. I'm aware these aren't really similar in severity by any means.)

<comment><USER24> You wrote "don't _violate_ the _law_ over our network". Who determines in this case whether the law is violated? If you changed your statement that this is a precaution to manage legal risk, then we get into an entirely different realm.

What if AT&T's risk management software scores that its customer is "likely" to commit a petty crime by analyzing his traffic? Turn him off as well?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AWS Lambda – Python psycopg2 module (PostgreSQL) - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/psyhomb/aws-psycopg2 <comment><AUTHOR> Build psycopg2 python module inside of docker container with statically linked libpq library. It's a perfect solution if you're developing AWS Lambda function that communicates with PostgreSQL (RDS) database.</comment>


Possible Lessnesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.random.org/lessness/ <comment><USER2> This looks great, but somebody's going to have to obtain the password so people can try it.

<comment><USER3> Or I suppose you could get your own copy of Lessness and randomize it. [http://www.samuel-beckett.net/lessness.html](http://www.samuel- beckett.net/lessness.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good project, nice tease, bad frustration!</comment>


HP subdivides the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1635733/hp-subdivides-world

<comment><USER2> Region coding for ink cartridges....

Does this company realize that all these sleazy tricks upset people who might be buying their big iron in the future, as well as everyone who will be needing a new low life expectancy ink-jet printer within not too long a time?

The last thing I bought from HP was a big for the time SCSI hard disk, a business they've exited. Before that was the RPN calculator I'm still using, and I'm pretty sure calculators are the only things I might be buying from them in the future. Even my parents have switched from HP to Brother all-in- one-devices (after my good experiences with a Brother laser printer and good on-line recommendations).</comment>


The Mighty Mathematician You've Never Heard Of - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/science/emmy-noether-the-most-significant-mathematician-youve-never-heard-of.html

<comment><USER2> If anything, the article probably understates her importance (and doesn't really explain why she is so important). You do get an idea when you start at her bibliography; not many scientists have their papers subdivided into epochs [1].

To begin with, Einstein didn't describe Emmy Noether (in his obituary of her, sent to the New York Times) as "the most 'significant and 'creative' female mathematician of all time". The exact quote is instead: "In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began." [2]

In essence, he is describing her as the greatest mathematician of the past decades, male or female. That may have been a slight exaggeration (she was a friend of his and visited frequently at Princeton during her time at Bryn Mawr), but not much: she was definitely one of the most influential mathematicians of the 1920s and early 1930s. Many mathematicians and physicists visited Göttingen specifically to interact with her.

What made her so important were not just her contributions to abstract algebra (groundbreaking as they were, essentially redefining the field), but probably most of all her axiomatic "method of abstraction", pioneered in several papers starting with 1921's "Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen". For non-mathematicians, it is roughly the same concept as abstract data types; instead of proving theorems about very specific mathematical constructs (such as integers and polynomials), you prove them for more general constructs, abstractly defined through operations over them and axioms connecting those operations. It is one of those things that seem blindingly obvious in retrospect, but the approach was actually hotly debated in the 1920s; these days, it's foundational for much of mathematics.

A good example of this is the so-called Lasker-Noether theorem, which was initially proven by Emanuel Lasker for a couple of specific rings, a result that Emmy Noether later generalized for a wide class of rings (rings that we now call, for other reasons, Noetherian rings).

Another reason why she is little known these days even among mathematicians is probably that she didn't care much about getting credit for her ideas (even though she was painstakingly careful about giving others credit in her own papers). Her own publications, numerous as they were [1], are probably only the tip of the iceberg; it is known, for example, that volume 2 of van der Waerden's "Modern Algebra" (the standard textbook for abstract algebra for decades) was essentially her work (van der Waerden never made a secret of it). A lot of her other work was likewise published under the name of her students and colleagues. (Unlike what the article states, she never published under a man's name.)

This is the final way in which she influenced mathematics -- as a teacher. She never was a very good teacher when it came to actual lecturing (being too much of an absent-minded professor), but she was generous with sharing her ideas and an inspiring influence for her students on colleagues (her first Ph.D. student, Grete Hermann, went on to lay the foundations for Computer Algebra, for example).

As van der Waerden wrote, "Each of her lecture series was a paper. And nobody was happier than herself when such a paper was completed by her students. Completely unegotistical and free of vanity, she never claimed anything for herself, but promoted the works of her students above all."

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether_bibliography>

[2] [http://www-history.mcs.st- andrews.ac.uk/Obits2/Noether_Emmy_...](http://www-history.mcs.st- andrews.ac.uk/Obits2/Noether_Emmy_Einstein.html)

<comment><USER3> No doubt she is a very signifigant figure, but (Although you do qualify your statement later) I have to disagree with:

"If anything, the article probably understates her importance ..."

In the second paragraph of the first page the author subtly suggests that she is the greatest mathematician as well as the greatest physcicist (at least a bunch of her contemporaries, who are smarter than you, the reader, thought so).

Also, in my personal experience, she is quite well known.

I would add to your list of her accomplishments: I've been told that she was one of the first to push for Homology to be treated as groups and not simply just betti numbers.

<comment><USER2> > In the second paragraph of the first page the author subtly suggests that > she is the greatest mathematician as well as the greatest physcicist (at > least a bunch of her contemporaries, who are smarter than you, the reader, > thought so).

This isn't quite what it says. That paragraphs talks about her being the most significant and creative _female_ mathematician of all time, and attributes it to Einstein. That's a significant weaker statement, given how few women mathematicians there were before modern times.

Conversely, if the article had described her as the greatest mathematician and greatest physicist of all time, that would be a massive overstatement, of course.

What I was trying to get at here (and what Einstein probably was trying to convey to a lay audience, too) was that she was very (probably critically) important for the development of early 20th century mathematics, when many of the foundations of how we do mathematics today were laid, and that this was the case regardless of her gender.

<comment><USER3> I get what you are saying, one has to read between the lines a little, but if you read carefully I think that is what is implied:

"Albert Einstein called her the most "significant" and "creative" female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex."

If you drop the female from that sentence then it reads "most significant and creative mathematician of all time."

Another point that, which I think you pointed out as well, was that this is a misquote of Einstein. The original statement included the clause 'since the education of women...' which would make the dropping of gender much more reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The simplest way I've seen to explain Noether's theorem comes from Feynman's Messenger Lectures.

Suppose -- as we have in modern physics -- that the laws of physics can be phrased in a certain way. Namely:

(1) There is some number we can calculate for all of the possible paths that an object could take from point A to point B. We call this number the "action" of the path.

(2) Of all of the paths that an object _can_ take, the one which it _does_ has a stationary action -- meaning that if you wiggle the path a little bit, the action remains the same. This can happen for example if the action is at a minimum for that path -- if you're at a minimum then you can't go any lower, and so there cannot be a proportionate response to any slight change in path.

This work was already done before Noether -- the observation, I mean, that there is a definition of "action" for all known laws in physics such that you can phrase those laws as a stationary-action principle. An example is light. All of these complicated rules of lenses and light bending when it enters water can be phrased as the much simpler rule that "light always takes the least-time path." The action of the path is then the time it takes for light to travel along that path from A to B.

Now, suppose the action has a continuous symmetry. For example, it might be the case that if A and B were moved a centimeter to the right, to two new points A' and B', then the actions on the corresponding paths between them would remain the same.

Now construct a new path: We go from A to B like so: we go from A to A', follow the physical path to B', then go to B, rather than following the physical path from A to B.

Call these two paths:

(1) A → B

(2) A : A' → B' : B

You have two competing facts. First off:

(1) the symmetry: action(A' → B') = action(A → B)

(2) stationary action: action(A : A' → B' : B) = action(A → B).

In other words, as long as the little wiggles described by ":" are very small, the stationary action principle holds and we don't change the action when we move from a physical path.

It must then be the case that action(A : A') = - action(B : B') in some sense. In other words, there is some quantity local to both A and B which is exactly the same -- it is the susceptibility of the action to changes if you shifted in one direction or another. The big symmetry also forces some little number to be constant while this thing is taking whatever path it takes.

Whenever you have a stationary-action principle -- which we have for gravity and electromagnetism -- then Noether's principle holds and symmetries in the action become conserved quantities of the physics.

We can also calculate some of these susceptibilities for the most common action principles: we find that symmetry with respect to space-translation (moving 1cm to the side) conserves momentum in that direction. We find that symmetry with respect to rotations about a point conserves angular momentum about that point. We find that if the action remains the same from from one second to another, then the energy is conserved -- literally if someone tells you they've got a "free energy device," they're saying "the laws of physics that this thing uses won't be the same tomorrow as they are today."

But it can get even more interesting. For example, wavefunctions have a phase, but shifting the phase does not change any observables. This shift turns out to have relativistic consequences, and can be associated with conservation of charge. (That's as I understand it, but I only saw a half-sketch of the proof and I haven't worked it out myself, as I have for these other examples.)

<comment><USER5> Indeed, phase symmetry provides conservation of charge. In fact and this is one of the most amazing things in physics, if you demand the system to be invariant under a change of phase everywhere, a symmetry called U(1), you will automatically find electromagnetism! A fundamental force of nature is a consequence of symmetry.

This is the unifying principle of physics as we know it: the Standard Model. Except of course for gravity on one hand and the fact that everything has mass on the other hand (which these symmetries forbid). That is why the search for Higgs boson is so important. It provides a way of breaking symmetries so particles can have mass but still interact with various forces. (The reasons why symmetry forbids massive particles are complicated).

<comment><USER6> You've piqued my interest here with the linking of symmetry to the fundamental forces and symmetry breaking to the existence of the Higgs boson. Thanks to you and drostie for your intriguing posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Her contributions are core foundations of a theory of commutative rings -- one of the most important properties we usually want from a ring we study is for it to be Noetherian, which means that it satisfies certain finiteness condition, which lets one apply finite and computational methods to study it. Many important theorems in abstract algebra state properties of Noetherian rings, for instance famous Hilbert' basis theorem states that the ring of polynomials over Noetherian rings is Noetherian itself. Other important theorem, Hilbert's Nullstellensatz is frequently proved using a tool called Noether normalisation lemma. Because of that, Noetherian rings, algebras and modules are crucial to many subfields of algebra and algebraic geometry.

One of her other insights, which is especially important in the field I'm interested in, was to notice that homology forms a group -- this led to explosion of new results and marked the beginning of one of the most important and influential field in XX century math, algebraic topology, as we see it today.

</comment><comment><USER8> The title "mighty mathematician you've never heard of" is odd. Aren't most "mighty mathematicians" people we've never heard of?

It isn't surprising people in the mainstream have never heard of her. Virtually everything she did was abstract algebra and the only connection her work had to real life was studying some invariants of relativity (read: very high level, very specialized). Similarly, how many people have heard of Sierpinski, Voronoy or even Hilbert?

While important, the sort of work she did doesn't lead you to fame. As an applied mathematician I never directly used any of her theorems. The word "ring" (let alone "noetherian") doesn't even appear in my thesis.

There is only one famous mathematician in the world. His name is "that crazy guy played by Russel Crowe".

<comment><USER9> There is at least one more famous mathematician: Isaac Newton. But that proves your point. How many average people could identify anyone else, even Euclid?

<comment><USER10> Newton a famous mathematician? I know he was, but the general public will only know him as a physicist.

I guess most who do know him as a mathematician also know Leibniz.

As a mathematician, Pythagoras probably is way better known than Newton.

<comment><USER11> Newton is a famous mathematician in the same way that Jesus is a famous Jew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting: "being female in Germany at a time when most German universities didn't accept female students or hire female professors"

I'm currently reading "The Poincare Conjecture", which suggested that Erlangen and Gottingen were very open to women, but reading the Wikipedia article it's clear that the quote is correct and the book (or my memory of it) is incorrect; she was one of only 2 women in a class of 986 at Erlangen, and she was actively blocked entrance to Gottingen. It sounds like if it wasn't for Gordan, Klein and Hilbert she might not have been allowed to attend at all.

<comment><USER13> Yes, even Lise Meitner, who discovered Nuclear Fission, faced similarly difficult circumstances, and never got the recognition that she deserved (her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize but she wasn't)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the interesting thing is that i knew who noether was because of her theorem, but i got all the way through grad school without knowing she was a woman

<comment><USER15> Was it relevant? Maybe not.

<comment><USER14> it was relevant in that it'd help break people of the unconscious assumption that all the great mathematicians they learn about are male.

<comment><USER15> Fine, but worthy of an aside at best; mathematics lies before, above, and beyond society and politics and I rather like it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's an _Emmy Noether Programme_ from the _German Research Foundation_ [0] promoting young researchers:

 _The Emmy Noether Programme supports young researchers in achieving independence at an early stage of their scientific careers. Young postdocs gain the qualifications required for a university teaching career during a DFG-funded period, usually lasting five years, in which they lead their own independent junior research group._

[0] [http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual/...](http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual/emmy_noether/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I will blow my own horn, here, and say that every one of my students has heard of Emmy Noether, and a bit about her story.

I made it a point- following something like Eugene Hecht's lead in his (brilliant) Physics Algebra/Trig text.

</comment><comment><USER18> Noether is quite famous. My university in New Mexico has a giant picture of her in the "math TA room" ( this is the room where I spent my years as a grad student solving the homeworks of undergraduates ..I mean, helping them solve it :) For the non-math guys, the simplest example of a Noetherian is a Galois Field GFpn - take p prime, n integer, then GFpn is a Galois Field with elements from 0 to pow(p,n)-1. Example let p = 2, n = 2, you get the Galois Field with elements {0,1,2,3}, with the Cayley addition table given by the usual

           def add(a,b) = (a+b)%4

and the Cayley multiplication table given by the regular multiplication except for

             2 times 2 is 3
             2 times 3 is 1
             3 times 3 is 2
             3 times 2 is 2 times 3

That's a _trivial_ Noetherian.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Prime Obsession" and "Unknown Quantity", both by John Derbyshire, contain significant sections on her (more so in "Unknown Quantity", as it is a popular history of algebra). Both are excellent books, though I'd have to give "Prime Obsession" the edge.

<comment><USER2> I can second this recommendation. These books are excellent popular primers on the history of mathematics; "Prime Obsession" is the story of the Riemann hypothesis, "Unknown Quantity" is the story of modern algebra.

Also, if anyone has concerns because they don't agree with Derbyshire on his political views, rest assured that both books are entirely apolitical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The shadow-sister of Paul Erdos I guess</comment>


Solitude and Leadership - <AUTHOR> http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/#hide <comment><USER2> This essay is moving, but its subject is hard to really grasp. It's filled with things that seem like platitudes, but are not. They seem like platitudes because we think we already get them, but we don't. We live by convention, by others' opinions, and solitude in the sense the author means - finding one's own way, whether or not others approve - is frightening. The technological distractions he decries are not what's causing our fervent avoidance of ourselves, they just facilitate it.</comment>


Microsoft's Windows 8 Plan B: Bring back the Start button, boot to desktop - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-windows-8-plan-blue-bring-back-the-start-button-boot-to-desktop-7000014075/ Microsoft may be moving toward bringing back the Start Button and allowing users to boot straight to the desktop with its coming Windows 8.1 release later this year. <comment><USER2> If you're a keyboard and mouse user working primarily in the desktop, it is very jarring to jump into the full-screen metro interface every single time you want to do something start-menu related. Metro isn't well optimized for keyboard & mouse users either. e.g. With the Win7 start menu, you could type in "computer management" hit enter and get that panel. In Win8 you must additionally mouse over and select the settings search category (I'm on a Win7 machine, so I'm not sure that computer management even shows up properly in metro without tweaking!). Effectively, for desktop users Metro is less efficient in addition to being jarring.

Install classic shell (classicshell.net) and your problems are over. It puts a start menu back into Win8, and it works pretty well. There are no search categories, and the cheese metro hides from you is in plain sight! Once this is on your machine Win8 is basically Win7, only better. Highly recommended!

If you're setting up a new Win8 box, classic shell is available through ninite as well, which is pretty handy.

<comment><USER3> Windows key + X is your friend.

<comment><USER2> It is a nice shortcut, but I think they added it mostly because they belatedly realized how much metro sucks for accessing settings from the desktop.</comment></comment></comment>


What football will look like in the future - <AUTHOR> https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed this, it reminded me of early experimental sites like what hell dot com used to be...</comment>


Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/c72ae0f0-c036-11e9-b350-db00d509634e <comment><USER2> As someone who worked developing Shopify apps (NOT a Shopifyt employee to be clear), I can attest to the incredibly high percentage of shops that evaporate from the platform on a nonstop basis.

Something like 80% of the people that would install our apps in their shops would be gone or in limbo after a couple months. (Not an app uninstall, their shops actually no longer existed.)

The charts we see from Shopify like this always say "Number of merchants" and the number climbs up towards a million, but at what point do they start excluding their delinquent/disappearing merchants? I'm not convinced they're factoring in churn.

<comment><USER3> This explains how I got scammed on Shopify last summer. I'm not talking about a missing product label or receiving a counterfeit item. I paid $1200 for a Shopify product (drone) and received a box with a poster tube inside of it that said "the world is yours". Nothing else. The merchant was gone that day. The real scammers live on Shopify.

<comment><USER4> Da fuq? Did you manage to get anything back?

<comment><USER5> Credit card chargeback would bring everything back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just want to make a note that Tobi (Shopify's CEO) has made great contributions to Rails open source ecosystem with projects like Liquid and ActiveMerchant, which he started:

\- [https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/commits?author=tobi](https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/commits?author=tobi)

\- [https://github.com/activemerchant/active_merchant/commits?au...](https://github.com/activemerchant/active_merchant/commits?author=tobi)

We leverage these projects daily, so it's awesome to see his company doing so well. In addition, we're on Shopify's platform as a app developer, so his company has added a lot of value, both commercially and non-commercially to developers, not just e-commerce merchants.

Kudos to them.

<comment><USER7> Liquid is awesome and documentation first rate.

I was pretty much able to dive straight into Shopify templating and leverage the docs as I went without even having a background in Rails or Ruby.

<comment><USER8> I can't agree more with this comment, for anybody using Jekyll, it's worth noting it is the templating language it uses, and my experience pretty much resembles this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know that a lot of activity on Shopify is from ambitious but deluded people setting up dropshipping businesses. Shopify is just selling picks and shovels to a lot of prospectors in a particularly unfruitful gold rush. I'm wondering whether they'll see a contraction as the enthusiasm wears off.

<comment><USER10> Your point is accurate, but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops.

Their biggest investments are for their subscribers that ACTUALLY sell stuff. Dropship-dreamers are super scared of actually subscribing but they are the vocal majority because of guru's and such.

Its all about growing GMV / PLUS / CAPITAL / FULFILLMENT and those are all hitting +50% YOY

<comment><USER11> > but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of > enterprise shops.

This makes no sense. Why would any company that starts making serious money continue to give SquareSpace money for a template. There's nothing you can do in SquareSpace that you can't do better in a custom app running on one of the many free software CMS's out there. I don't get this.

<comment><USER12> For lots of brands, the core competency is marketing and every other aspect of the company is outsourced. E.g. Kylie Cosmetics which has 360M+/yr in revenue and uses Shopify.

<comment><USER13> A more provocative example is Tesla. Literally their whole car buying experience is powered by Shopify.

They did ~$21B in sales last year.

<comment><USER14> I don't think this is true - I believe it's only their merchandise store that's on Shopify. Car purchases are done through their own, custom platform.

That said, there are definitely plenty of huge merchants running on Shopify turning over hundreds of millions of dollars through the platform - we work with quite a few of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I might be drinking the amazon koolaid but Shopify's online service and physical product distribution can't even come close to what amazon has developed. They're not a real threat. Amazon is really at least 15 years ahead in distribution and operations. We're using robotics to automate a ton of processes. Jeff Wilke revolutionized the fulfillment centers. Shopify's platform mainly sells niche things at low throughputs. Amazon is about how can we sell more in the same amount of time so we can continue lowering prices to get more customers and keep selling more.

<comment><USER16> Third-party sellers at Amazon don't have robots, and I suppose they fulfill a considerable amount of the volume.

<comment><USER17> Sure they do, Amazon fulfillment is a giant business.

[https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by- amazon/benefits.h...](https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by- amazon/benefits.html)

<comment><USER16> Well most of the time when I order something from a third-party vendor, it doesn't come in an Amazon box, so I suppose it is handled by the vendor, not Amazon.

<comment><USER18> More than half of the items bought on Amazon and from a 3rd party seller but fulfilled by amazon. It arrives in an Amazon box in 2 days and most people don't realize it was from a 3rd party seller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been working with Shopify for close to 10 years as an owner of multiple profitable stores and as a full stack developer. If you work on the custom development side you'll see a lot more successful businesses run on Shopify.

I don't see the churn rate as a big problem for Shopify. Their revenue is pretty tied into the customer's revenue and expenses, not the amount of unique subscriptions. On top of subscription revenue, they have credit card processing and shipping labels which would be higher than the subscription cost for shops with high revenue.

IMO I don't really see Shopify and Amazon as really being in the same space unless Amazon makes a real push into curation and I think that would require a radical change in how Amazon works with sellers. I see Amazon as more of a competitor to Walmart, Target, etc.

<comment><USER20> What if Shopify created a centralized e-commerce platform for every merchant to make their inventory available through?

<comment><USER21> They did that early on and I'm pretty sure the takeaway was: let Amazon do that, we're minting money with seller tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://archive.is/TyStn](http://archive.is/TyStn)

<comment><USER23> Or click "web" and go via Google to not be paywalled

<comment><USER24> what do you mean "go via Google"? I still get paywalled if I click the search result.

<comment><USER25> clear cookies or go incognito

<comment><USER26> Still not working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Related: Shopify and the power of platforms [https://stratechery.com/2019/shopify-and-the-power-of- platfo...](https://stratechery.com/2019/shopify-and-the-power-of-platforms/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Shopify is so expensive and for a small-time shop hosting and paying the shop fee eat up your first 2-10 sales easily, where is the free platform that only charges per sale?

<comment><USER29> Wordpress + WooCommerce

You can say all you want about bad the platform is, but the fact of the matter is that you can setup and start selling on a proven platform for almost nothing.

<comment><USER7> I would say not. You have hosting and you have to deal with maintenance, security and backups. Your Shopify fees cover that and the payment processing fees are comparable.

Unless there is some feature that WooCommerce can throw in for free that would require paying a Shopify developer an ongoing fee (wishlist functionality is probably one) your monthly fees are going to be similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bigger than eBay by market cap, but much smaller by revenue.

<comment><USER31> Shopify grew revenue by 50% in Q2, eBay by 2%.

<comment><USER32> Yeah. 50% of a small number vs 2% of a much MUCH bigger number. It's a classic mistake that the statically-blind make.

<comment><USER33> So that means Shopify grew by 500M and EBay grew by 200M. Is that right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This title is very misleading. Shopify has surpassed eBay in market cap, but is in a very different business. Same wrt amazon. Conflating market cap with market ownership is just confusing.

However, I really hope Shopify can figure out a way to make it easy to find quality sellers and replace Amazon's dumpster fire of a third party marketplace. Trying to buy electronics or household products on amazon is a complete crapshoot these days.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't get it at all. In my model, Shopify spends 75% of Gross Profit on sales to simply maintain existing customer levels. It doesn't seem like customers are very sticky, so they constantly have to pay huge amounts for sales to get new customers.

So, what's the best case scenario? They go from $800m in revenue now to $5bn? Even if they don't increase R&D, that means they're profiting $500m a year. That's an 80 P/E for what I consider to be a very optimistic 6x revenue growth extrapolation. Is there some other huge business (like Facebook's untapped user data in 2012) that isn't making itself known in their financials?

<comment><USER10> \- logistics (shopify shipping)

\- shopify PLUS memberships (+$2K/month)

\- enterprise level products (handshake, etc)

I think the fact that their enterprise sales are growing is a huge indicator. Its replacing legacy ERP systems in sales organizations because of the flexibility and value add.

I run a consulting company[0] for Amazon suppliers, and about 90% of our clients don't have "real time" inventory counts. 50% are someone automated but 100% have to enter at least 1 order MANUALLY each month because outdated technology. ORders with hundreds/thousands of line items entered manually will seriously mess up your day.

\- [0] [https://www.andersonassociates.net](https://www.andersonassociates.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> eBay started out as a tool to connect you between a seller and a buyer, evolved to empower merchants, because of competition they became a landlord mall operator. Their DNA has always been to drive traffic for growth.

Amazon started out as a store to sell you a book, grew selling you other that can be stocked and packed like a book, evolved to ask others to sell too, because of competition they became a landlord mall operator. Their DNA has always been to drive traffic for growth.

Shopify gives you a dumbed down version of a selling tool. It was easy enough, paired up with Alibaba's rise, a subculture of dropshipping dropsurfing gurus selling you on how easy it is, they've now convinced most people to give it a try.

But their DNA has never been to drive traffic for growth. There's been no indication that's their strategy as they've only unveiled more tooling for owner operators.

Eventually they'll peak, run out of people wanting to give it a try and the whole thing collapses.

Shopify is more like Rovio having a hit with Angry Birds, growing rapidly, then watching sales drop 40% shortly thereafter.

Also, having down Shopify dev back in 2014-2016, their app ecosystem is a mess, more akin to a medium sized POS company's third party ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER37> This interview with Shopify's CEO about how the company grew / his mindset was interesting [1]. He said a lot of things that sounds similar to the author's quotes in the article.

[1] [https://fs.blog/tobi-lutke/](https://fs.blog/tobi-lutke/)

<comment><USER38> +1 to the podcast. He seems to be a calm guy and it is good to hear about his thought process and the vision he has. Interestingly he loved playing video games and he owes playing video game to help him in critical thinking.

<comment><USER39> > he owes playing video game to help him in critical thinking.

I often hear people attribute part of their success to things they already did, and I think it's usually just a combination of survivorship bias and other similar effects. I've heard people say similar things of nearly every substance or activity: "I am successful and doing X is part of the reason" where X can be anything from illegal substances to something mundane like coffee. Usually when X is something one likes, one tends to find it interesting.

This has been on my mind after recently debating with friends whether some substances like weed or shrooms should be legal and them basically saying they shouldn't because they know people who have taken them and turned their lives for the worse. Then I brought up how you can say similar things about video games (which IMO they are addicted to) and they quickly said it's different and you need to perform some impossibly complex studies to determine anything.

This is likely part of the reason echo chambers form everywhere. If ideas confirm our own beliefs, we hold them to much lower standards than when they don't.

<comment><USER40> Yup. Everything is ex-post-facto rationalization chock full of survivorship bias with no way for you to accurately calibrate for the difference in personal and temporal circumstances and accurately map what outcome you would have if you do X.

It's not worth listening to anyone's advice. Only experiment with your own life and find what works for you or die trying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not everything - sometimes you can filter useful data when things are clear cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Bigger" as in higher market cap.

How big are Amazon and eBay these days in terms of dollar value sold via their market places?

If eBay is anywhere near Amazon and Shopify stores outsell eBay, that would be pretty spectacularely.

Shopify stores live on their own domains, right? No reviews, no central discoverability, no nothing, correct?

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't know why they don't support 3rd party payment tokenization.

<comment><USER43> You don't? They charge a premium over the CC processor as a big part of their revenue. Why would they give that up?

<comment><USER44> Yeah, but for challenging Amazon, the reason people choose Shopify Payments shouldn't be raw power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is all the money at sellers like Amazon, and not where the real work is, i.e. shipping?

<comment><USER45> Value is captured at the point of sale for everything, not just ecommerce. Also, there's a number of successful publicly traded logistics companies in the $20b to $70b range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Subscription only.

Try getting my interest again when there's a publicly-viewable link.

</comment><comment><USER47> I wish people would stop linking to paywall sites. What's the point if most of use here are probably not subscribers?

<comment><USER48> Click the "web" link underneath. FT lets you read if your referer is Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm kicking myself for not investing in Shopify when I saw it in the 100s this year. Given the size of my average investment I could have made a good $20k in profit. Wondering if I'm making the same mistake again. Could this be another $1000 stock?

<comment><USER44> Yes

<comment><USER44> My creds:

Worked in a german shopify partnered agency for ~3 months beginning this year (latori.com)

<comment><USER50> So... no creds. Got it.

<comment><USER51> lol Blair

<comment><USER50> :) I don't disagree, but ... crazy experience to draw conclusions from!

<comment><USER44> Everything would be crazy when analyzing how people come to conclusions in trading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Paywall; site wants a subscription to read the article.

</comment><comment><USER53> But Rails doesn't scale.

<comment><USER54> I can't think of many (any?) other large tech companies that stuck with Rails at scale. The CEO being a core Rails member makes this an edge case, like Basecamp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> A lot of people seem to be able to read the article which is behind a paywall for me! (Quite often the case on hn)

<comment><USER56> If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread, and there are some in this one.

This is in the FAQ at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Your pocket guide to the world's urban jungles - <AUTHOR> https://www.kompasapp.com <comment><USER2> I dont see the point Im afraid. Any service that gets popular then by default will send you to tourist traps due to popularity or effort by the trappers. Its self defeating at its root.</comment>


Udemy raises $50M at a $2B valuation from Japanese publisher Benesse - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/19/online-learning-marketplace-udemy-raises-50m-at-a-2b-valuation-from-japanese-publisher-benesse/ <comment><USER3> My issue with Udemy isn't their constant "sales" or the way they treat their tutors.

It's the 95% amount of crap on the platform. It's genuinely difficult to sort the good quality courses from the tons of bad courses. Especially the ones that have got tons of 5 star ratings but only because the tutor promised them another free course if they rate 5 stars.

Just because everyone can upload a course to Udemy, doesn't mean that they should and the platform suffers for it

<comment><USER4> I've bought ~20 courses on Udemy; variety of software engineering; music lessons; language lessons; and random; not a single one had reasonable "information density" \- i.e., I'm sure if I watched all 20 hours I'd pick up some useful information, but probably only an hour's worth.

I've since moved to mostly either using free Youtube videos and just picking specific knowledge I need, or paying much more for targeted professional courses.

Mostly though, I've gone back to my preferred method of learning - books - where I can control the speed and repetition as it suits the moment :-/

<comment><USER5> I'm friends with a top course creator on Udemy and the info density issue is caused by the buying habits of users.

\- Most buy based on sales (at a crazy discount), ASP is ~$10 off his ostensibly several hundred dollar course

\- Most 95%+ never even _open_ the course

\- Of the remainder it's about .25% that "finish" the course in any meaningful way

\- Most people buying the courses are aspirational about it ("Yeah I should know about that") and aren't making a detailed analysis of the materials

\- Most people buy on _length_ - that they'll look at two courses on the same topic and take the one that is longer and/or has more modules or chapters

\- Udemy has a new program for enterprises that pays based on minutes/month of content consumed.

Should be noted this is a highly technical course aimed at developers/devops (situation might be different for guitar lessons).

<comment><USER6> >Udemy has a new program for enterprises that pays based on minutes/month of content consumed.

LinkedIn has something similar with what used to be Lynda. (Not sure what the payment scheme looks like.) I imagine this sort of thing is fairly common. Corporations have a relatively modest set of online courses they create (or have created) on topics specifically relevant to their products/market and they want to fill out their training catalog with a lot of general and relatively low cost material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Udemy is selling a dream, more so, than an education.

They mostly target lower income internet natives, who have heard of coding, not enough to do anything dangerous but certainly enough to long for the good money and great perks.

You are not _really_ committed to switching up your life, but a "premium product" at 90% off down to 20$, how could you not give it a try? It's an affordable dream and makes for an easy sale.

<comment><USER8> I don't have a ton of experience with Udemy. But I took an introduction to Autodesk Inventor class there in January and I thought it was quite good. Was only something like €10 and I was able to do quite complex drawings (at least for what I need) after two days. Much cheaper and probably almost as effective as one of those expensive corporate training classes that are often a €1000,- for just two days.

<comment><USER9> How many managers would give you time off to study a udemy course though, vs a £1000 professionally run one?

It's frustrating that the main advantage of paying a lot for a course, is having some proper time to do it.

<comment><USER10> My team which manages our company's ecommerce website inherited maintaining an iOS app that was being developed by a contracting firm. No one on my team had much experience in iOS. My company is extremely frugal. I bought an intro to iOS course on Udemy for the five of us for about fifty dollars total. It was excellent. Was definitely blown away by the quality and the price. It got us quickly up to speed on xcode, debugging, swift, view creation and publishing to the app store among other things. I am sure there is junk content on udemy, but there is also really good content that is worth more than the price.

<comment><USER11> We as a team also did a four hour course on TLS and PKI and it was a game changer. It was much better than reading up stuff.

<comment><USER12> Oh nice! Whats the name? I dont need it. But i try to teach this stuff to newcomer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I prefer Coursera because I'd rather shell out 40 euros and get a high-quality course from say, Roughgarden at Stanford than pay 15 euros and get something worse than just scanning Youtube.

Also Coursera has the whole system of problem sets and programming assignments etc.

That said - I'd be happy if someone could show me some decent Udemy courses?

<comment><USER14> I have a PhD in CS but am a huge udemy fan/user. The itch it scratches when I want to learn about a brand new topic. You asked for good courses .. Andrew LeMoth's course in electronics is absolutely brilliant. He does the lecture in a very unconventional style .. almost like he stayed awake for 40 hours and recorded the whole thing. It isn't college level .. I.e. no differential equations but it is brilliant. I have also gotten my money's worth from FPGA courses and those on arm/rtos programming. Oh .. once I got a course on wireless charging just to support a a blogger who goes by afrotechmod. It was short but great content, and let me say thanks to someone I admire.

The ai lectures on udemy are a bit weaker in my opinion. YouTube and university content is better.

In contrast, I have never paid for coursera, edx or audacity. A key thing is the price point of 15 bucks .. I don't feel bad at all blowing cash on the udemy courses .. it is like a movie ticket. A 100 usd course feels like real money.

<comment><USER15> The great thing about Coursera and edX are, the certificate is optional and auditing is free. I took courses on Algorithms by Sedgewick from Princeton, courses from MIT and Harvard, and so on without ever spending a cent. In fact, this is how I self-taught CS and programming (and eventually switched careers from law).

As far as practical skills go, a Pluralsight subscription was by far the thing that helped me the most. As long as you stay with the well-reviewed courses, the information density tends to be extremely high. It's how I learned enough about desktop GUI dev via WPF to score a volunteer 'consulting'-type gig with a nonprofit, and that combined with what I learned from there about Angular got me my first job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I take a lot of Udemy courses. When I want to learn something new I generally buy a course (look for at least 4 stars and a minimum 500 votes, though popular topics will have thousands of ratings) and binge-watch the entire thing in a couple of days. It gives me an idea of what's possible with this particular technology. Later when I really need to use that technology I spend futher time doing code examples etc. Has worked really well for me to keep abreast of multiple technologies in my CTO job.

One main issue is that most of the courses only cover bigginner and intermediate level tasks only. I think the reason for this is that an instructor needs thousands of sales to be profitable on Udemy. Even for relatively popular topics like Magento and Salesforce development, one sees very less enrollment numbers. Only core popular techonolgies like Python, Node.js, AI/ML, etc see thousands of sales.

<comment><USER17> I've found this person's courses [0] to be very high quality, and they go through pretty advanced topics, such as convolutional neural networks for natural language processing, which might be to your point.

[0] [https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order](https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've never taken an Udemy class, but am sure there's quality content on the website. However, I've always felt that the way they show their prices is a little fishy.

Looking at their offering now, all of the courses are priced between 10 - <USER2> euros, but each one seems to be "on sale" with the actual price being in the hundreds of euros.

<comment><USER19> I noticed a course this weekend I was a bit interested in. And they said it was 94% off. 150 NOK ($16) instead of 2350 NOK ($250). It was some kind of offer that would expire this weekend, and I had "9 hours left" or something to get it at that price. I actually wrote it down because I had the same feeling of being manipulated.

You made me check, it's still 94% off at the 150 NOK price. Now it's some kind of offer that lasts until Feb 21. Will be interesting to see what the price is in two days..

<comment><USER19> An update to this: The offer expired yesterday. Then I however was prompted that the normal price was 2350 NOK, but as a new user I could get it for 150 NOK for the next X hours. So just a new offer with the same price lined up after the first expired.

Earlier today I checked, and then the price was back at 2350 NOK. However, checking again now a few hours later, it's again a new offer for 150 NOK as a new user. And if I log in, it's 250 NOK without any mention about why, just a "90% off!" tag.

So yeah, the full price is a fake one.

<comment><USER19> Update again: The last 150NOK offer is now over. There is however a new campaign where I can buy it for 163NOK for the next 4 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I sell a course on Udemy for 189 Euros. They constantly sell it at around 9 Euronand keep a big chunk of it. The only way to make money is to bring in your leads but at that point it's just better to sell directly.

Classic rent extracting platforms.

<comment><USER21> I always wondered who gets to decide what's on sale! How does your agreement work with them?

<comment><USER20> I am not sure as the Udemy account is managed by a friend. I'm pretty sure we have no saying on the price. With 100 students we cashed $329. So, there it is: 3,29 $ per course.

Basically a tip.

I sell the Italian version of this course directly for 200 €.

<comment><USER22> What delivery platform do you use?

<comment><USER20> Do you mean for the Italian version? Own Wordpress website with s2member plugin

<comment><USER22> OK. I just set up a LearnDash site trying to focus on content and not the engineering for an MVP. Thinking maybe Moodle when it's time to migrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone recommend any Udemy courses, on any topic? My experience is that there are very few where both delivery and content are good.

My own recommendations would be Stephen Grider's React courses, and Chris Croft's management courses.

<comment><USER23> I studied Vue and Nuxt through Maximilian Schwarzmüller's courses, which I liked. He has a very beginner-friendly teaching style, which was right for me at the time but might not work for everyone.

<comment><USER16> Yes can vouch for Maximilian Schwarzmüller. I have gone through many of his courses. He tends to cover everything from basic to advanced topics. The courses are generally longer also.

This is his YouTube Channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJbGtTlrDami- tDGPUV9-w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJbGtTlrDami-tDGPUV9-w)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should send them $5M and claim they saw they were on sale at a 90% discount on the website. That would give them a taste of their own medicine, it is exactly how they treat their authors.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hi guys! I hope I'm able to contribute by bringing some of my own experience and real data to this discussion. I'm the founder of Classpert ([https://classpert.com](https://classpert.com)), a search and comparison site for online courses. In the last 6 months, we've managed to sell over 2000 courses, in 8 different languages and across 80 different countries (Udemy alone is selling around 200 courses each month through Classpert). So while it is true that price has an impact on low-income customers (especially from developing countries), even for developed countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Japan) Udemy still is leading the race in number of sales (at least if we use our database as a proxy of the market)

Much of their success stems from the fact that Udemy has by far the largest catalog of online courses on the web (something around 110k courses). And while some people may argue that this comes at a cost of providing low-quality courses it also naturally provides an extremely aggressive long-tail SEO strategy. The majority of potential customers don't correlate e-learning platforms and quality (most of their customers are not high-profile HN users), so if you are googling for an online course chances are that Udemy will be ranked at the top (and on a global scale). This also explains why they have 10x more traffic than Pluralsight or 3x more than Coursera.

On top of that (an here is much more my personal intuition than data-based analysis), Udemy not only offers cheaper courses but also has not yet adhered to "subscription models". Subscription models target specific users. Subscription models are awkward and feel totally unnatural to most "normal users". Why on earth a normal user, seeking for a specific bit of knowledge will lock himself on a subscription? The subscription business model seems to work much better on B2B than B2C.

<comment><USER26> I liked the site. Congrats! Very useful. Is it Bootstrapped?

<comment><USER25> Nice! We're open for feedbacks too! We received a seed from Quero Education(YC S16). Last year, we've made our ways to the finals but eventually got rejected by YC (S19). Not sure if we are trying a second time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Udemy is one of the most corrupt / worst marketplaces I've ever encountered in the world -- for the folks who make courses at least.

For reference I've had some of my courses on their platform for years and it's not like I'm bitter because no one bought my courses. I've made a solid amount of money there over the years (6 figures).

The problem is they constantly sell your course for $10 and then take 50%+. Any traffic coming from Google results in them taking 50%+ too. If you opt out of their controlled pricing then your course will be hidden from all search results, in which case you'll make nothing because no one will be able to find you and that defeats the entire purpose of using a marketplace.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Udemy heavily hand tunes search results and cuts behind the scenes deals with instructors in certain niches, and when those deals happen, other people in the same niche get completely fucked over night.

For example, I was selling close to 50+ courses a day, then Udemy signed a contract with another person in the same niche (they told me directly). A few days after their course went live, the traffic to my course dropped by over an order of magnitude and my sales dropped by 20x. My graphs literally looks like a nose dive and I went from being able to sustain myself to having to stop creating courses.

The hilarious thing is my course is even higher rated than theirs and I've had people message me privately saying they took both courses and much preferred mine, yet it sits barely on the first page with a 4.7 average rating and like 1 sale a day with little to no traffic.

Every time I email Udemy asking about this they say they don't modify search results, but then every time I show them screenshots of very strange ranking behavior they change what they say and usually I get in a bump in sales for a day and then it drops off.

For the last few years I've spent a lot of time (and a lot of hard work) attempting to build my own audience instead of making new courses so I can drop Udemy all together. I'm not there yet, but one day I hope I'll never have to deal with that platform again and I wouldn't recommend using Udemy for both buying or selling courses to my worst enemy.

Oh, and one fun thing about being on Udemy too is, you can expect people to black mail you for unreasonable things. I've had more than 1 person on the platform email me saying things like I "MUST" help them with their custom project for free and if I don't then they they are going to give my course a 1 star review. I think due to Udemy's low prices, it attracts a certain type of person.

<comment><USER22> You should totally branch out on your own. Maybe put some "teaser" courses on Udemy with good content, but not premium, and do premium on your own. I want to take your letsencrypt course but would rather pay you directly. So as an example of my suggestion in this case, your Udemy course would maybe explain SSL, explain LetsEncrypt, and show how to get around, but the best, most usable scripts and info would only be available in your course.

It's like all the other platform stuff: You're basically a contractor for Udemy. Their rules, their terms, and you're ditched when somebody makes them a "better" deal.

<comment><USER27> I tried many different strategies over the years. The only real move is to never use Udemy for anything.

If you put a watered down version of a course on Udemy and then try to sell your premium course at the end, then a ton of people who go through the course will just slam you with 1 star reviews saying things like "this idiot gave us a 5 hour course where I learned a lot but now he wants us to buy the premium course on his own platform".

If you put a free course on Udemy, with intent to move people to your platform by gently mentioning a premium version of the course, you'll get the same type of negative reviews no matter how good the course is.

This is especially bad too because Udemy students are trained by the platform to only ever pay $10-15 for a course, even if it has 20+ hours of content, full time support and life time free updates. Suggesting a price that isn't $10 results in hostility and practically 0% conversions.

If you go the other route and create some type Udemy-specific mini course where you don't even talk about the "better" version of the course, and you really make it the best it can be then you end up hurting yourself because Google is going to rank the Udemy version higher than your own version, so organic traffic will be driven to the Udemy version.

You're waaaaay better off never to even step foot on Udemy's platform and just build your own audience with your own platform. Most successful courses are successful due to word of mouth, not the marketplace. That's the whole idea behind the "1,000 true fans" concept.

<comment><USER28> Well your $59 flask course looks awesome, you're definitely on the right track and I see the value over having a direct connection to the creator rather than through Udemy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Udemy's business model is, as far as I can tell, identical to Valve's: get digital pack-rats like me to buy a ton of stuff we'll never even open when it's on sale. Can't fault them for doing what works, though. Of the courses I've actually gotten around to taking, I thought they were pretty good.

<comment><USER30> Udemy stuff is always on sale for ~2 years now. Maybe 5-10% of the time they aren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I dont know what you guys expect. Its an opportunity to learn at $10-$20 a course. Yeah a course can be bad, but so can a book.

The sales part is definitely dishonest, but as far as people who make content, if they get more $$ on youtube, why dont they post on youtube?

</comment><comment><USER32> Did Udemy get around to putting controls in place to stop course stealing? I remember Troy Hunt in particular had issues with people taking his material, narrating over the top of it, and selling it on their Udemy channels.

<comment><USER33> Even sentdex had to deal with the same issue - [https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8sl76u/sentdex_on_u...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8sl76u/sentdex_on_udemys_awful_business_practices/)

<comment><USER34> I wonder why he made the video private. It was a really good video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Udemy is a great platform for beginners who want to try different field or a niche without shelling lot of money (hey 90% off). They also have refund policy which is great too. I had purchased courses for photography, aws and newer javascript frameworks (e.g vue.js) in the past. There are many courses out there for the same topic, have to be careful in selecting quality course with good feedback.

</comment><comment><USER36> It makes a lot of sense for Benesse to get into online education, let's see if they can do something that works with Udemy. It might help Udemy as well to get Berlitz co-branding on some content on the platform and start a path that's almost like Masterclass but instead of curated around industry legends, it's brands and institutions.

Also, having visited Benesse House museum this winter, I'd be really excited to see content come out of this that covers more of the art on Naoshima in a highly accessible way.

</comment><comment><USER26> The change in Udemy's pricing policy after 2016 - applying aggressive discounts and setting maximum prices for courses - has affected many instructors in a bad way. This is directly related to the perceived low quality of their courses (obviously with exceptions). Many instructors today use Udemy to try to attract traffic to their own websites where they sell the "best versions" of their courses.

</comment><comment><USER37> Content quality and personal goals do make the difference in continuing education, but people really need to be clear with themselves before purchasing courses, summaries or hands-on tutorials: none of these is a shortcut to a degree if you want accreditation, none of these is a shortcut to a portfolio if you want original case studies.

</comment><comment><USER28> Don't know if it's a reaction to their new raise and they want to try to get full price signups with the new traffic, or what, but I'm seeing all courses full price at the moment.

<comment><USER31> Check on a private window

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've always wondered how japanese companies (looking at Softbank especially) had so much cash to invest? Why do they want to invest that money abroad?

</comment><comment><USER39> My issue with Udemy is they stole my Python videos from YouTube and sold them to 12,000+ students at $199.99 listed price .

<comment><USER40> There is no way that is true.

First of all, Udemy doesn't "steal" anything. They're a platform for people to post videos. Like if a Udemy course appears on YouTube, you cannot say "YouTube stole videos from Udemy."

If someone stole videos, that's on the thief. It's called piracy and it's been a thing on the internet since the beginning.

Second of all, people who steal other people's videos often given them away for free. Post them to black hat sites, etc. So most of those 12,000+ are probably free.

And finally, Udemy holds the money for like 45-60 days, so if a course is found to be pirated, all students get refunds and the instructor gets banned. And doesn't make a dime.

Find me a real example of a pirated course in 2019 where the pirate made money. Go on. You can't find it, because it doesn't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love Udemy. I've learned so much from their courses, including React and Flutter most recently. Our employer has an unlimited subscription which is great for checking out a lot of these courses, I definitely don't watch every single one available however, but enrolling in a few courses of the same topic shows me what's possible with some technology and which teacher is the best.

I personally prefer Andrew Mead's courses as he actually waits for you to complete a part by yourself before moving on, which I don't see as concretely with other teachers like Girder or Schwarzmüller, who sometimes say to try it on your own, but Mead actually has a moment where you can pause the video and try it, built into the course.

With regards to not having informational density, I've solved this problem by downloading the courses locally [0] and watching them at 4x speed. In a browser, you could set `querySelector("video").playbackRate = 4`, but since the video changes every few minutes, especially at high speed, this isn't too useful. I've actually made a Chromium extension that changes the video/audio playback speed globally since I watch a lot of YouTube at 4x speed as well [1], but again it isn't smart enough to detect when an underlying video source has changed.

Therefore, I use a local player, SMPlayer in specific [2], which is an mpv- based player. The problem, however, is that Chrome is very good at allowing you to understand voices at high speed, and nearly every other player, such as Firefox [3] and others, do not. This seems to be because they saccade the audio, where they skip parts of it, so that it sounds tinny or not understandable (edit: looks like it's fixed in Firefox!). Chrome does not use this approach. I've tried loading playlists into Chrome for this exact purpose, to simply use it as a video player, but the tab crashes because the video files are too large. Now, we return to the local player, SMPlayer.

SMPlayer, as it uses mpv, is able to pass any command line options to mpv. In this case, we are able to change the time-stretching amount by ourselves instead of waiting for Firefox or another player to do so. To do so, go to Options -> General -> Multimedia Engine: mpv, and then Options -> Advanced -> MPlayer/mpv tab -> Options: --speed=4, Audio filters: scaletempo=stride=10. You can play around with the speed and stride, but for the stride, around 8-20 sounds good [4]. It's still not as good as Chrome but it's usable and understandable. I wonder if there's a full way to solve this bug.

Edit: Looks like from [3], someone figured out that you can use the following filters with mpv as well. This just adds the overlap and search arguments in the audio filters. This sounds significantly better than without the overlap and search arguments as above, Chrome level basically.

      mpv --af=scaletempo=stride=8:overlap=1:search=10 --speed=4 test.mp3

Anyway, hopefully this helps others move through content faster. You might balk at 4x, but you need to start at something smaller, like 2x, before gradually moving up in speed. I like experiencing content at high speeds personally, and I use similar hacks for other media as well, such as audiobooks and podcasts. For audiobooks (on Android), I use a fork of the Voice Audiobook player [5] which supports speeds up to 6x because the original author did not seem to want to raise the maximum listening rate, citing simplicity concerns for most people. As well, it also seems like only AntennaPod goes up to 4x for podcasts, most podcast players I've seen only go to 3x [6].

[0] Udeler - [https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader- gui](https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui)

[1] Speed - [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed-global- video...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed-global- videoaudio-s/ncaighkkcbkmhiiljbjfjpkkgelpgkab?hl=en)

[2] SMPlayer - [https://www.smplayer.info/](https://www.smplayer.info/)

[3] Firefox bug with time-stretching - [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267)

[4] SMPlayer solution for time-stretching - [https://forum.smplayer.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9069](https://forum.smplayer.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9069)

[5] Voice Audiobook Player fork - [https://github.com/brandonocasey/Voice](https://github.com/brandonocasey/Voice)

[6] AntennaPod - [https://antennapod.org/](https://antennapod.org/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Udemy is just like all sorts of things in the economy: it's a stupid-people tax. You can learn the same information from free videos or just a book.

<comment><USER42> Actually we are trying to create a platform called Jooseph, which is basically playlists for learning. You can follow modules curated from different resources.

We are trying create a platform that you can gather those kind of resources for someone to learn that topic easily.

So at Jooseph you can follow curated list of resources from different channels such as medium, youtube or podcasts anything valuable. Also, any user can create his/her own list for share or just to store it.

We are at Public Beta right Now you can try free from; [https://jooseph.com](https://jooseph.com)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Fastest/easiest framework to build a web application in 2017? - <AUTHOR> What are the current recommendations for rapidly building a web application? Back in the day it used to be Rails. It seems like Phoenix is picking up steam.<p>Are there any other full-stack frameworks that take you from nothing to something fairly robust in a few hours? <comment><USER2> A similar question was asked just 3 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15685905)

For full stack opinionated frameworks, there are a few like Laravel (PHP), Django (Python), Rails (Ruby), Phoenix (Elixir). They all come with batteries included for the most part. Then there is node/expressjs ecosystem if you are into that.

Then you have micro backend frameworks like lumen (PHP), Flask (Python), Sinatra (Ruby) which can be used to build APIs etc.

For front end javascript, you have react, vuejs and angular as the top 3. You also have elm (compiles to js) and then some other players like mithril etc. Good old jquery is still out there.

For more realtime stuff, you can use websockets (socket.io library etc), google firebase, pusher etc

<comment><USER3> The shell of a web app/website can be built with white background on black text without any viewing library at first, right? So, would it make sense for a beginner to just pick one of the few frameworks you listed above Note+Express/Laravel/Django/etc. and just get to work on what it means to have a CRUD?

I feel like most tutorials always complicated things by trying to add too much at once -- to a fault, I've never been able to learn Node/Express and build a working app where I could add a record, delete it, update it, etc. Once it gets to "ROUTING" I kind of lose it, unfortunately. Haha.

I would probably be better off with Wordpress for most website needs, anyway...

<comment><USER4> The core WordPress software is amazing. The plugin developers and community are another story. I've had cases where WordPress plugins have unlisted dependencies, bundled plugins that completely alter the WordPress Dashboard, build systems that go against established WordPress software patterns, etc etc etc. The majority of the community seems to be fine with this as they treat it like self-hosted Squarespace (set it, forget it, don't need to learn programming, contract any programming that does need to happen as cheaply as possible).

<comment><USER5> > The core WordPress software is amazing

In that outsiders who see the code are amazed people still _proudly_ ship this glorp?

<comment><USER4> I meant in the sense of creating a small self-hosted blog. I wouldn't dare use it in a setting where money is on the line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rails, without a doubt. Don't waste your time on Django and all the Node stuff is just a mountain of distractions.

(I've been doing this for over a decade. At one point I was a Django zealot and avoided Rails like the plague. Boy was I wrong)

<comment><USER7> Can you explain why a python developer should make the switch to rails for web apps?

The difference between Django and rails is pretty small from my oberservation. They have similar ease of use and performance characteristics.

<comment><USER8> Been in the same boat. Started with Python but transitioned to Ruby / Rails for web dev.

Django is a good framework. Ultimately why people choose it or something else is about your own taste. The reason I didn't choose it is that Django give users more freedom i.e. configuration over convention which for me leads to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice) (Maybe things have changed?) It's strange because Python is the opposite in terms of philosophy. Rails goes the other direction and is very opinionated which is also strange considering Ruby's philosophy is the opposite i.e. 10 million ways to do the same thing.

The next issue is community consensus. Python doesn't seem to have it. (Again things may have changed.) You can see this with packaging and the 2x vs 3x war. Not sure if Python has finally standardized packaging yet but it's hard not having a good package system everyone uses once you get exposed to ruby gems, npm modules, and even maven.

For the record, I'm not saying Python is bad. Just giving reasons for why I personally do not use it unless I'm forced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would still recommend Rails or Laravel(PHP).

Both are similar so choose the one you know/fits you best.

nothing to something:

Laravel you can go from zero to auth + dashboard in like 5 minutes. There are lots of packages to speed things along.

Some of the items I'm recommending are paid, but they are well worth the value they provide and support the creator of Laravel and has enabled him to work on Laravel full time and hire another full time developer to work on Laravel and these products.

There is also Laravel Spark that's basically SaaS in a box, it's $99/site but worth it for a head start.

Laravel has a really great community and great tools that make it super nice/fun to use.

Laravel Valet, quick and easy local dev env. for OSX.

Laravel Forge, it's a SaaS that will spin up servers on (Digital Ocean, AWS, +others) and allow quick deployments plus easy SSL setup through LetsEncrypt. (There is also envoyer.io for zero downtime deployments.

Laracasts.com for learning.

<comment><USER10> But Laravel documentation is really bad, isn't it? Or is it the same for other frameworks as well? I mean the official textual documentation.

<comment><USER9> Laravel documentation is excellent.

They spend a lot of time on the documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You mean an app in a weekend? This works for me Vuejs/Bootstrap/Rails/Docker. Thanks to Rails's Webpacker you can keep all project code in single git repo. Everything is nicely integrated like Rails test framework compiles JS/ES6 on the fly before integration tests are run. DB migrations are a must in potentially evolving app. Other elements of my stack: bootstrap-vue, Devise (RoR), PostgreSQL, Guard(test loop), Ansible (for general server tasks).

</comment><comment><USER12> There's no real answer to this question. Use a stack a few times in a row from scratch and it's now the most prudent stack for you to use on your next project hands down.

Also, focusing on "rapidly building" possibly over-fixates on Day 1 when it's Day 60+ where your stack choice is really going to matter once you need to respond to changes in business requirements.

However, there are a few high level decisions I'd consider pretty uncontroversial:

1\. Relational databases like Postgres tend to be ideal for fast development since you can respond to requirement changes by atomically migrating your entire data layer to a different schema. This is pretty hard in NoSQL databases for example. You can also encode constraints in the data layer and then the application layer can just depend on them always being true instead of trying to encode them into the application layer.

2\. Keep the application server as stateless as possible. For example, use something like S3 instead of going the tempting route of saving to the filesystem. A filesystem dependency is convenient on Day 1 but now you cannot spin up more than one server nor launch an application off of that machine. For similar reasons, it's also nice to host your database in the cloud like on RDS.

</comment><comment> ng-user What are you good at? It'll be tremendously faster to build a web application using a technology or framework you're already familiar with than it will be to LEARN and then build. It sounds like you're looking for something like a MEAN stack generator or the like, check out Yeoman if you're into JS development.

</comment><comment><USER13> Depends on what kind of web app you want to build. If you want a single page app, then React + a rest framework (like Django Rest Framework) seems to be popular. If you want a normal server rendered CRUD app, Rails or Django might be fine.

Also depends on who will maintain this app in the future. The more esoteric a stack, the harder it is to find other devs(or they're expensive).

The ecosystem of pre-built modules(eg FB integration) so you don't have to re- invent the wheel. Python seem to have a really good ecosystem of libraries ranging from datascience to crypto.

What are you performance requirements? Do you need sockets? Django now has channels that provide you with some of that.

The answer as always is "it depends". I personally recommend sticking to what you know best(unless you're using this as a learning opportunity) and work with whatever the community prefers in that language.

</comment><comment><USER14> Since you are asking about "rapidly building a web application" I think you also need to consider your hosting platform.

If you use a framework that has full support on one of the big PaaS services, you can save a lot of time configuring and maintaining your production and development environments.

For my most recent web app, I chose Python/Django on Google's App Engine. I spent less than 15 minutes configuring the development environment and new deploys take almost no time. I also spend very little time maintaining the production environment. GAE also has a lot of built-in debug tools (logging, stackdriver) that have made managing my application simpler.

There are a lot of such services now, including on AWS and in Azure.

<comment><USER15> That is, IMO, one of the big areas that Phoenix falls flat on. Sure there are buildpacks that you can use for Heroku deploys but AFAIK there is only one hosting service that delivers a truly easy PaaS deploy process for Phoenix apps and that is Gigalixir (and from what I hear they aren't cheap).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For speed of development, you want the most normal/boring stack there is, in combination with what you're familiar with.

Note that if there is more than 1 engineer, it is absolutely worth it to work with common technologies. Elm/Elixir are not common technologies (though people love talking about them).

Node + Express for the backend is super simple. Mongo or MySQL/PostgreSQL you will have no problems with (though I am biased towards relational databases) React for the front-end is also simple, very well known and easy to hire for.

If your application is more basic or more CRUD-oriented (as most apps are), Ruby on Rails has always been a solid choice and will continue to be a solid choice for years to come. There is also a very large pool of people who are very well-versed with it.

</comment><comment><USER17> If your goal is fastest to get a production ready MVP built, go with Rails or another similar mature stack in a different language. Chances are the majority of problems you encounter will have been solved by someone.

If you want to learn something new or want to be on the hype curve, don't expect to have something production ready fast. Expect to have challenges learning how things work beyond a blog/to-do list tutorial for new-to-you tech.

</comment><comment><USER18> It really depends on what you already know and your level of interest in learning something new.

I can still crank out a pretty neat Web App in Code Igniter over lunch!

But, nowadays, I use Meteor which makes things very efficient while making an old hag look cool too :-) (Meteor allows you to leverage the great work available in the node community quite seamlessly)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd be interested in views on fastest to develop with - and not relative to what you are most experienced at

<comment><USER20> I think your expierence in a system/framework or programming language is a key factor in "fast" development and to be honest, the question for the "easiest and fastest" framework is totally wrong and you won't get nothing out of this question. All answers will come from people with different expierence levels in programming, frameworks, projects and many other things - all answers are biased towards the expierence of the person who answers your question.

<comment><USER19> I disagree.

Im primarily a Java monkey, but used django and django REST in a few side projects and was developing much faster. This includes picking up python3 as i went along. The end result was i wished Java had its own version of django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On the front end: Choo is really solid and very little to learn.

[https://github.com/choojs/choo](https://github.com/choojs/choo)

</comment><comment><USER22> Flask (python) very minimalistic but quick and nice documentation .

</comment><comment><USER10> One thing to consider - which one has a superb documentation?

</comment><comment><USER23> Frontend: VueJS (Javascript)

Backend: Laravel (PHP)

</comment><comment><USER24> Next.js/react/postgraphql/postgres/beanstalk.

<comment><USER25> My stack of choice as well. The graphql part definitely adds to the learning curve for new devs but I think it's the future. Checkout github.com/apex/up. Now you won't even need the beanstalk part. All you need are RDS instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Elm or Eve

</comment><comment><USER27> MeteorJS</comment>