May Sky Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://mayskychallenge.com/ <comment><USER2> Lately I've been wondering if an upcoming generation is going to be more anti- technology, or at least anti-smartphone. I've got a 2.5 year old who will occasionally say, "put your phone down, daddy", or even swipe it from my hand (though we of course try to discourage that, hah) when I'm not paying enough attention to him. As he has grown up and started doing this, it has made me much more aware of my phone time and generally decreased my usage. He clearly notices when I do use it and doesn't like it if he's expecting me to engage more with him. I'm curious if this will lead to him seeing smartphone use as some sort of uncool adult thing.

<comment><USER3> I don't think smartphones will stay with us for very long. They'll probably be replaced by future technologies less clunky (and yes, I am calling smarthphones clunky) in favor of things like glasses, contacts and implants.

I think our children won't be "anti-smartphone" in the same vain as we are not "anti-mainframe"

<comment><USER4> I don't buy your vision of the future because interacting with things with our hands is the most intuitive interface.

And the idea that we will jump to having our devices being able to read our mind seems like a stretch.

<comment><USER3> I don't think we'll jump straight to mind-controlled (that sounds weird) devices, but I'm pretty confident we'll be there by 2040.

As VR and AR progresses there are great new features like hand tracking, which allows for even higher precision than swiping on your phone. I agree with you, interacting with things through your hands is really intuitive, but I don't think we have unlocked it's full potential.

<comment><USER5> I remain dubious about VR/AR, because the use cases have remained incredibly narrow. VR has remained a more or less video gaming only niche, and AR is something I interact with once a year or so, mostly to see if furniture would fit.

It's possible that future technology will make it more useful, but on the current trend it doesn't seem likely that AR/VR would surpass even my Apple Watch usage, let alone iPhone.

<comment><USER6> Me too. People forget that the technology they're supposedly replacing is something we use in public. So any replacement technology needs to not erase the context of being in public around other humans, and it also needs to be discrete. VR and AR are not particularly discrete, and they also erase a lot of context so they're non-starters outside of very specific technological environments like CAD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone and I don't think that's unhealthy. Quite the contrary I believe.

It is a slow start to the day and I feel connected to friends and family. I am living abroad, a few hours behind my native country where most of my friends live. So when I wake up, there is already a lot of activity in the WhatsApp groups I am part of. I don't use WhatsApp professionally, so it's just personal stuff. I love to read trivial chatting from my friends and family first thing in the morning. Specially living abroad. Specially these days of Covid.

I also check Twitter and HN, but just a quick look, not the reason I pick up my phone. I spend about 20min on WhatsApp, 5min elsewhere.

It also wakes me up, so I don't oversleep. Then I am ready to go the bathroom, prepare my breakfast and when I get to work, I am ready and sharp.

I believe people use the idea of picking your phone first thing in the morning as an image and a proxy for phone addiction, I don't think it is. I believe I would be less healthy if I had my phone locked away from me in the morning.

<comment><USER8> Please understand that what I'm about to say isn't to be taken personally. I don't know you, and I'm taking your word for it that you have a healthy relationship with your phone.

Something functional alcoholics will often say is "I don't have a problem, I just like a beer with dinner, nothing wrong with that", and a usual response is "okay, then how about you take a week off? If it's just something you like, then that should be no problem".

Of course, that's where the excuses start!

This May challenge is conceptually similar. Nothing in your morning routine would be disrupted by more than 120 seconds, if you took the time to look at the sky and appreciate it before starting in with the phone.

Again, I'm mentioning this on behalf of _other people_ who might be a bit in denial about how they start their day.

My personal routine starts with plugging the laptop into the monitor and brewing coffee, and browsing Twitter and HN while my brain wakes up. I'm not big on my phone in general, especially not lately.

But I'm intending to add looking at the sky for the month of May (although not joining a Facebook group, yuck!).

It sounds nice.

<comment><USER7> Makes sense. I've been considering letting to check the phone in the living room (currently my office too) just because sometimes there are videos/audios that I want to check, but my wife is still sleeping.

The watching the sky thing is more of a marketing device that I might skip though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I cannot see the sky from my apartment. So If have to wait until I leave for work or other reasons.

I don't remember my parents having this problem with their newspaper. They did look at the newspaper before the sky every morning.

<comment><USER10> > I don't remember my parents having this problem with their newspaper. They > did look at the newspaper before the sky every morning.

This seems to be a pretty common comparison, especially as a reply to older generations remarking on everyone always being on their phones. Kind of a meme at this point[1][2].

It really makes me think that not a lot of thought/concern is given to the major difference between print media and modern technology/social media: print media is a one-way relationship. There is no interaction between the reader and the newspaper - it's a passive information source.

Social media on the other hand is a two-way, highly interactive, highly curated information source/communication tool and that is where the comparison falls flat on it's face. To compare the two in the context of mental health/anti-social behavior/distraction etc. is missing the point.

And for anyone interested in some research on the subjects of technology and social media as it related to kids, I will always plug the non-profit I work for:

[https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research](https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research)

1\. [https://memeworld.funnyjunk.com/pictures/Kids+these+days+alw...](https://memeworld.funnyjunk.com/pictures/Kids+these+days+always+on+their+phones_9a6937_6005297.jpg)

2\. [https://miro.medium.com/max/1080/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4MP2HQ.jp...](https://miro.medium.com/max/1080/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4MP2HQ.jpeg)

<comment><USER11> Especially considering, that the printed old-fashioned Newspaper (at least if you select the right one!!!) has a professional writers and a more calm perspective on the world than social media and everything what we consume as media nowadays.

<comment><USER12> Historically old-fashioned newspapers haven't had a calm perspective. Their headlines were the original clickbait.

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

<comment><USER13> In a number of countries, yellow journalism was a feature of the _evening_ newspapers, not the morning ones which represented more reasoned, respectable journalism. So, people at least didn't start their day with yellow journalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love this idea but I found this part hilarious:

"You can join the event on facebook, so we can keep in touch, and see how popular this gets! Invite your friends, spread the word!"

The reason people look at their screens first thing in the morning is to see what everybody else is doing.

<comment><USER15> Speak for yourself, I look to see how much money I lost that morning with bad option bets

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Look at the sky especially now during the lockdown. It's beautiful. I couldn't have imagined how distracting planes were until now that I have seen the sky without them.

<comment><USER17> Two nights ago a series of 40-50 satellites flew over. It was genuinely disturbing to see. I live where the night sky is dark, and full of stars. It was already pretty out here, but the lockdown, with less air travel, has really helped the sky.

And then this line of SUPER bright satellites came over. I think they were part of the Spacex system of satellites. I'm hoping there aren't more coming. They were brighter than the moon, really, just smaller.

<comment><USER18> FYI there is a known issue with the brightness of recent SpaceX satellites, that is being worked on.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1252986968058802177](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1252986968058802177)

The important bits:

 _Everyday Astronaut @Erdayastronaut Apr 23_

Is there a reason they've been brighter and more noticeable lately? I feel like tons of people are spotting them all of a sudden and they went fairly unnoticed before.

 _Elon Musk @elonmusk Replying to @Erdayastronaut_

Solar panel angle during orbit raise / park. We're fixing it now.

<comment><USER19> Definitely a "living in the future" moment: you can just ask the satellite owner and get a personal response immediately. (Also, the satellite owner then rolls out bug fixes to the satellite constellation.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For everyone concerned about your alarm, try existing without one!

I gave up alarms over a decade ago, and I never wake up late. You have a great internal clock in your own head and the subtle stress of knowing an alarm is pending is horrible for actually getting restful sleep.

Don't believe me? Try it on a weekend or two, or if you have a week with few early events, set a resolve to do some task by a specific time and remind yourself to wake for it before going to bed. It's amazingly simple once you get used to it.

<comment><USER21> My experience is that if I have an event that I need to be ready for and don't set an alarm my brain switches into panic "Oh shit, I overslept mode!" and I wake up way too early, repeatedly, and end up with a terrible night's sleep. In fact, I get that whenever I travel for work even though I _do_ set an alarm because the disruption to my routine makes me afraid I failed to set it correctly.

What I find helps the most for getting restful sleep is to do this at night:

1\. Set an alarm for when I want to wake up.

2\. Go to bed at a time that makes my sleep duration an integer multiple of my sleep cycle. For me, that's around 3.5 hours. I'll feel more rested with 7 hours of sleep than 9 because at 9 hours I'm woken from deep sleep.

3\. When I get in bed, mentally how much time between there is between now and my alarm going off. Deliberately tell myself, "My alarm is going off in X hours."

Setting an alarm cures my "I overslept!" anxiety. The other two points help align my alarm to my sleep cycle so I'm in shallow sleep when it goes off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A few thoughts:

* Comparing newspaper to infinite social media feeds and online resources is a very incomplete model

* There are clearly people who see the value in this, so don't be so quick to dismiss it. I feel the same as /u/convolvatron in that the quarantine has really screwed up my routine, and has worsened my addiction to social media/internet/interacting somehow with the digital world. The days where I wake up and make coffee/have a pre-Internet routine are better on the whole.

* Don't assume this post thinks _everyone_ needs this - it is a recommendation for those who do, or those who simply like trying different habits.

* Finally, as a compromise, if you insist on some usage in the morning: Consider only using your alarm, and getting an email subscription or podcast of the morning's news. Though it dilutes the utility of this exercise, I believe the worst part of electronics addiction is the unbounded nature of it. Having a clear boundary of "one five minute podcast" or "only check email / SMS of friends" is much better than "Load up the times, post, reddit, HN, Facebook, messenger, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Slack, Signal, and the city paper".

</comment><comment><USER23> The first thing I do in the morning is look outside and try to guess the clock time from the shadows and the position of the sun to test my sense of time and to check how fucked my sleeping schedule is. So I guess I've already done this? (If you don't count the days when I've set an alarm because my phone doesn't have the "shake to shut up" feature and it wouldn't make sense to guess the time if you've just woken up to an alarm.)

Except for that, I generally don't use my phone a lot. I don't trust most mobile apps because I have no good way of isolating and limiting an app's capabilities on my phone (compared to the web where things like uMatrix and related tech are commonplace) and the few apps I do have are more of the information-pull rather than the information-push type (although that's unintentional).

Maybe a bit off-topic but I think mobile operating systems are generally more a burden than a help for me. Android's design decisions make a lot of sense for a lot of people's needs but for me it's just too limiting compared to PC operating systems so I simply don't do a lot on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER24> i have no clock in my bedroom, the first thing i do in the morning is looking out of the window to see where the sun is at currently...

<comment><USER25> Just answer: do you use vi?

<comment><USER24> no way, emacs only ;)

<comment><USER26> So you look out of the window and at the modeline :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I did this last night. It was awesome. I'm in the city, so I can't see much, but did see the beautiful crescent Moon (and the dark, barely-visible Earthshine-illuminated portion), very bright Venus nearby, Orion (with a red Betelgeuse whose brightness has now recovered after waning for months), and then I saw a spectacular stream of just-launched, orbit-raising Starlink satellites emit from the North Star and fly past the handle of the Big Dipper. (Plus a couple other non-Starlink satellites earlier.)

(On a side note, it seems that SpaceX has made really good progress on solving the in-service brightness problem of Starlink, and hopes to launch all their satellites—starting with two launches from now—with low enough in-service brightness to be invisible to the naked eye once on-station.) [https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-test-starlink-sun-visor- to-r...](https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-test-starlink-sun-visor-to-reduce- brightness/)

<comment><USER28> My family just finally learned where Venus is a month or two ago. It's so obvious once you know, but I always assumed it was just another star or something. I get an unreasonable amount of joy out of seeing it up there each night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Even before the lockdown I made a habit of going out and looking at the sky and the farthest/highest thing I could find every morning right after I wake up.

Before it was just nice, now I feel like it's keeping me sane.

</comment><comment><USER30> One of the best small changes I made was sleeping in a different room to my phone. We now have a charging station in the study where all our phones and other devices charge. When I wake up I often go through breakfast etc. before going to get my phone.

If you're stil sleeping near your phone, stop it. Alarm clocks are very cheap. You don't need any of the fancy features of your phone's alarm - you'll adapt.

<comment> yoz-y I like the idea in theory but I always use my phone to actually fall asleep by listening to some monotonous audio. Before doing this I had extremely hard time falling asleep.

<comment><USER31> One option if you really want to sleep in a separate room from your phone is to get a dedicated audio player for your bedroom. Depending on the features you need (Bluetooth, streaming support from Spotify, etc.) you can get one for around $70 to $300. You could also get a Raspberry Pi and automate playing your monotonous audio at your bedtime each night. That would be cheap and a neat quarantine project.

<comment> yoz-y This can help. I use my old phone that I otherwise use for dev. It does not have games and social networks on it so it's harder to just spend time on something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The idea is nice, great even, but...

No but seriously.

Who, in 2020, grabs their phone first thing before hitting a drink, or bathroom, or wash your face or whatever you do when you wake up?

I (37M) find it weird. In 2010, sure, it was all new and I was younger maybe. Nowadays I just don't even have to refrain myself, it could be 10, 20 minutes before I look at any screen. It would usually be my laptop actually.

Am I the exception? I'd think a technologically mature crowd to be much less... dependent, less hooked to their phone. I would think of this being an actual _challenge_ for the mainstream Facebooking / Instagramming / Twittering, but not people like us...

[work notwithstanding, evidently, sometimes we need to grab the phone but that's irrelevant to my observations]

<comment><USER33> Same. I keep my phone face down and on do not disturb, on my nightstand, and only pick it up once I'm ready to start the work day.

I find even seeing the app icons for notifications on my lock screen can lead me down a nonstop work path where you end up in you PJ's at 11h30 with zero caffeine in you and a feeling of a day already passed.

<comment><USER32> > even seeing the app icons for notifications on my lock screen can lead me > down a nonstop work path

I totally know the feeling! I think it's really biological, low-level:

\- dopamine! It's like a shot, the brain gets triggered.

\- familiarity: "feels like home", habits take us to our comfort zone.

> you end up in you PJ's at 11h30 with zero caffeine in you and a feeling of a > day already passed.

Haha, yeah... I've been there so often in my teens / twenties.

I think it was self-love + discipline that let me exit that loop. Treating myself like a (inner) child and their parent all-in-one person: forces one to think about well-being first, it gives a feeling it's the "right thing to do" to let yourself chill and avoid that kind of time vortex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I need to turn off the alarm though :(

<comment><USER32> That doesn't count IMHO, it's just a couple taps most likely, you're not engaging with the device (it's merely an overkill alarm clock at that point).

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is a great opportunity for a LookAtTheSky app.

Personally, I like to combine both modes by using moon tracking apps to watch my favorite sky object.

<comment><USER36> Ha! So like an AR type app that lets me see my social media feed overlaid on the live views of the sky on my screen? ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You had me there until Facebook was mentioned. Though I'm typing this in bed at 5:26 AM as I can't sleep.

<comment><USER38> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Excellent, I'll be doing this. We can never build enough awareness about our subconscious behaviors.

</comment><comment><USER40> So I though this is about some nice astronomic phenomena one can see in the sky during May (like the spectacular post launch Starlink satellite "trains") but it is just some weird anti smartphone addiction campaign. I am disappointed. :P

</comment><comment><USER41> Every day I look up at the sky and landscape before looking down at my phone. It doesn't make any significant difference in my day.

But whatever that makes people lives more varied in this isolation is fine, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER42> .

<comment><USER43> I've been doing a similar routine. But walking instead of reading. I wake at 6:30, take a short walk around the block, eat breakfast, then start work by 7:30. Take a break around noon for lunch and another 2-3 mile walk, then call it quits at 3:30 to 4:00, and either go out and do some wood working or another walk. Then shower before bed at 9:00-ish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does anyone know what the background picture is?

<comment><USER45> I guess it's a Maypole: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Well, just do it! You can join the event on facebook,

Fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> i believe that the main audience of this campaign are hardcore fb users, it's easier to target them there. but any suggestions are welcome, how to reach people nowadays?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Bonus if you do a Sun salutation (yoga).

<comment><USER48> Extra bonus if you praise the sun

<comment><USER49> [praising intensifies]

<comment><USER50> What a fitting username lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Or both by using the camera.

</comment><comment><USER52> y'all need to do shabbath

<comment><USER53> Why?

What is it with pushing religious stuff into peoples faces? I believe it is offensive to people who either have a different religion or none at all.

One could just say: "You should do a day of digital detox every week. Like for example people do on Shabbat. Or in other ways."

<comment><USER54> _One could just say_

Or you could just give people the benefit of the doubt, read it that way to begin with, and save us all a lot of grief. Regardless...

 _I believe it is offensive to people..._

If you have a personal beef, say it clearly. The rest of us don't need you to run interference for us. I'm of a "different religion" and I think it is an outstanding idea.

<comment><USER53> > If you have a personal beef, say it clearly

I have no beef. I just stated my personal opinion. And I even stated a way how it could be framed with religious content in the text.

I still feel I did a reasonable critique with an idea of how to communicate in a less offensive way towards others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I always would like to participate in these but end up taking advantage of the rules, without fail. My guess is I'd get up, walk over to the window, pull down the blinds to ensure light enters my pupils for five seconds, then go back to bed and promptly read HN for half an hour. It would still count. I wouldn't even be able to see it since I'd probably not even bother to put on my eyewear just to see five seconds of sky.

I'm trying to work out my intended goals if I'm going to attempt such a thing. I do believe cellphone usage in bed is a negative. But if that's what I'm trying to combat, I'm not sure just "looking at the sky first thing in the morning" is going to help me accomplish reducing phone usage in bed. Because once I've looked at the sky for the morning, I'm free to do whatever, and there's only one other thing I'm going to do first thing in the morning.

The same happened when I tried to follow a course on building self esteem. It consists of writing three positive experiences and three things you're grateful for each morning. The author noted: if you're skeptical at staying on track, try it for 30 days. You'd be surprised at yourself.

All that happened was that I did this for exactly the 30 days, stopped cold, and haven't found the motivation to start again. Rereading what I wrote during that time on the occasion, I fail to see what I accomplished.

Same with a 30-day morning exercise routine. My thoughts: I'm no longer indebted to follow this person's advice. I've tried it. I've forced myself through it. I don't feel any different, except perpetually exhausted throughout the rest of the day. Now what?

I still want to do these things, because there's clearly _some_ benefit to be had if someone went out of their way to host an entire webpage for this concept, and stating that it "sounds easy" as opposed to "it _is_ easy". Exercise leads to better health. Writing some words supposedly leads to better mental health.

Yet it always feels compulsory, like someone on the Internet has the power to control my behavior against my will, and if I "fail" the "challenge" I'll think less of myself for it. The only reason I'm doing this is because someone I don't know suggested it, and the whole point is once you start, you _have_ to follow through. So essentially, I feel like no matter what happens I'm roping myself into something I will not stick through to the end. Then I end up dreading every moment of it, eventually forgetting why I even bothered to try it in the first place amongst how forced and tiresome it is, and inevitably go back to my usual habits.

Ultimately it comes down to consciously not trying and staying the course in equilibrium, or trying, failing, and managing to convince myself I didn't have it in me, or that I see no benefit. For something as simple as scribbling some notes in a journal.

I noticed that my desire to exercise disappeared entirely the moment I bought myself an exercise bike and put it two feet away from my desk at home.

I also tried sleeping for a week with my phone in a separate room. Cue not being able to fall asleep outright until 3-4 AM for the entire week. At least 12 AM with my phone on night mode was better for my health before.

I don't get it. Maybe when next month comes around I'll just have to try harder, as they say. For $DIETY_NAME's sake, it's just _looking at the sky_.

</comment><comment><USER56> I looked at the sky this morning. It was cloudy. There wasn't really much there.

This is literal boomer newspaper comic type stuff at 75 upvotes.

</comment><comment><USER57> phone bad

</comment><comment><USER4> Stop telling me what to do.

Seriously.

I can look at the phone and the sky in one day. I enjoy both of those things.

<comment><USER58> This is a suggestion made to ease the habit of deferring to our phones for everything, starting with the first action. I welcome this initiative for decreasing how often I reach for my phone by at least one, and digging up my old alarm clock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Or not look at the sky, instead make sure to ask for your rights so that looking at the sky is something that just happens. No need to blame and shame people.

<comment><USER60> I really can't tell if your comment is some an anti-lockdown statement, or I'm completely missing what you are trying to get at.

<comment><USER59> Not related at all. I was referring to how people would cram in a town that provides nothing except a job. No parks, no common spaces, no joy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> My two cents, I don't care about your addiction don't assume it is mine too. I wake up at 4:30 am and hit the "gym". So yes my first screens are an alarm, then the ipad to keep my mind distracted. around 7 I enjoy watching the sun come up while I have a cup of coffee to make the most of SIP. When life was normal I would walk to work and enjoyed that a lot. I also make it a point to go outside for 1-2 sort walks each day.

I don't see much difference between my use of tv,cpu compared to my parents tv/paper/magazine or grand parents tv/radio/paper and magazines. Every generation has new socialization norms and every one has to fight for attention.</comment>


Yahoo announces plans to kill off Games, Livetext, Boss, and more regional sites - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/11/yahoo-announces-plans-to-kill-off-games-livetext-boss-and-more-regional-sites/ <comment><USER2> I've got some nostalgia for Yahoo Games. Here's an anecdote I've posted elsewhere:

I was on a phone interview to be a software engineer for a web game company in ~2013. The interview went very well. At the end I asked what I'd be working on, and they said blackjack.

I said, "Didn't Yahoo solve that problem in the 90s?"

I didn't get a call back.

<comment><USER3> I particularly enjoyed this tetris-style game called Yahoo! Towers, which had powerups and a great multiplayer. I would bug my friends to learn to play it so we could all play it together. It was great.

Edit: Just found a video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwdLR-9bky4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwdLR-9bky4)

<comment><USER4> I played another game like this when I was younger, it was multi player tetris with powerups, but not this.

It was so enjoyable to play, was hoping your link would be it but alas I don't think so. I remember it being a game client as well.

Edit: found it, Tetrinet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone complaining when google shuts down bum projects need to remember this. Yahoo let divisions fester along leaching resources from the company with no clear path to anything. When google cuts a project, even if you _super seriously love it_ , they prevent an announcement like this.

<comment><USER6> Not sure I understand your point. Shutting things down early prevents them from being shut down later?

<comment><USER7> Shutting things down early prevents a drain on company resources and preventing future layoffs. . . hopefully

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Without analyzing any of the specific cuts, it is a brave move to cut divisions as well as people. Too often companies just say "Everyone bears their share of the 15% cuts" without changing priorities. It's rare to say, "Let's stop doing certain things" and make the cuts that way.

<comment><USER9> An aside, but I wonder how much of that behavior, particularly in the 2008ish period, has contributed to wages stagnating.

If you are getting paid peanuts, and not getting raises because "you should be lucky to have a job" and then you get forced to do even more work, and they don't hire more people because you're gritting your teeth and taking it, wage stagnation seems a pretty obvious outcome.

<comment><USER8> Wages generally stagnate in bad economies as a result of what you've said.

Even when I haven't been on the market, I've been paid the best when multiple firms are potentially competing for my services. When I'm in the market, having 2 offers in hand increases the value of both.

<comment><USER9> And wages don't exactly catch up enough to make up the gap in good economies.

I wish there were better wage information out there for people. Glassdoor is just a start, but there's such an advantage to be had by companies maintaining the information asymmetry that I doubt it will change anytime soon.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. I was listening to a podcast this morning [0] on the topic. They highlight that salaries should be public, with clear paths to more money. I'm not sure if that would work, but your point is valid.

Glassdoor is ok, but not great because it generally only contains base salaries, and doesn't have enough data on smaller companies. I know that investment banking and consulting salaries are dramatically under-represented on it.

H1-B filing databases are another data point, but suffer the same limitations.

The only sure thing is to test the market. If you get multiple offers, eventually they will close in on your true worth. It's a very delicate game to play, because you have to make sure people know you are interested without appearing disingenuous.

[0] [https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/03/your-coworkers-should- know-...](https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/03/your-coworkers-should-know-your- salary)

<comment><USER9> Weird--HN didn't give me the option to reply directly to this before so I assumed it was the thread limit.

In any event, here's what I wrote a level up: \</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>-

I found it ironic that you cited the investment banking and legal industries not being well represented on Glassdoor. I'm actually not sure where they get the data from, but my brother is an ibanker, and I have several friends and family members that are lawyers. Salaries across banks and firms seem to be VERY well known across the industry at all levels, even for entry-level roles, and seem to be openly discussed.

I wonder what sort of unique dynamics led to that vs. other industries and how we can capture some of it to level the playing field. It definitely leads to a more level playing field for employees since they know they are either signing up for better pay or something else, and it forces companies to compete on pay and/or some other aspect, and then make that publicly known.

<comment><USER10> I know when my lawyer friend goes to get a new lawyer job he has to submit transcripts and pay proof from at least his last two jobs. Then they offer current job pay + x.

As a dev I have never had to submit past wages. Never felt the need to lie about past wages, but I know of people who have. Little bit different for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> End of an era regarding Yahoo Games. I remember many long hours playing Yahoo Chess and Yahoo Pool when I was in school.

<comment><USER12> I think Facebook was to blame for it's loss in popularity, then it became cell phone Apps. Those who didn't adapt their web based games into the mobile market missed out. Flappy Bird got really popular, but there was always that flash game about the helicopter that was more or less very similar.

<comment><USER13> Oh no, Games lost its traction long before that. I went on blogging, going to forum, playing flash games, GTA, myspace, youtube, etc. Pool was really fun. Games allows you to talk to players and to me that was a game changer back then. simple interface and very stable gaming experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yahoo Games was one of the best. I used to play games there when I was in elementary school (I am the 90s kid). Pool, poker, etc. But when I clicked on Yahoo Games the catalog reminds me of the hundreds of smartphone games in Android / iOS store that I don't want to play. What happened to the simple pool game graphic? Chess game?

What else? Those Flash games out there!

</comment><comment><USER14> Limb amputation will not save the body I'm afraid. Interesting that they can't find buyers at any price for those resources.

<comment><USER15> They could. But it wouldn't look good in a headline that reads: "Yahoo sold off Games division for $200,000" Cause I wouldn't imagine someone paying more than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yahoo! Store has been rebranded to [https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/ecommerce](https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/ecommerce) which I assume means it is for sale or will be, but I haven't read any news to that effect.

<comment><USER17> AABACO SMALL BUSINESS. That's just perfect branding.

All aboard the SpinCo!

See [http://yahoosmallbusiness.tumblr.com/post/109624934574/yahoo...](http://yahoosmallbusiness.tumblr.com/post/109624934574/yahoo- small-business-update) \- the deal/transaction that fell through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will the Boss shutdown affect Duck Duck Go?

<comment><USER19> I sure hope they took their investment money to build their own crawler - there's really no excuse not to. Much cheaper smaller companies with smaller budgets have written one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The fact that I have no idea what any of these are probably explains their kill off. Sad times now and sadder times coming for Yahoo.

<comment><USER12> I did, they were active before Facebook had games, then when cell phone Apps dominated the market it all changed. Microsoft has similar services, if they still do. Microsoft shifted their focus completely towards developers recently and they will benefit from it, not sure what I would do if I were Yahoo other than close down anything not worth it's dollar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yahoo games seems like an odd choice. I think that lies of older people frequent that.

My parents for example spend lots of time after checking their Yahoo Email playing mahjong and various other games on there.

Now I'll get asked where they can turn to next to get their games fix!

</comment><comment><USER22> This is one of the key requests made by advocate investors last year, although they wanted much deeper pruning. It seems like a good plan to me. I'm curious what's next.

</comment><comment><USER23> Any idea what will happen to the games? From the posts here it seems it would be a good idea to archive them somehow

</comment><comment><USER24> "Bye Marissa" is the new "Bye Felicia."</comment>


Show HN: UnderExpress 2.0 – A free, ready to use website UI kit for hustlers - <AUTHOR> https://underexpress.com/free-website-kit?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone,

I made underexpress to help people make beautiful websites quickly at lower costs. UE is a responsive website kit, with 8 sample pages and over 100+ components. You can get components for almost every case you can imagine. The kit is based on Bootstrap 4 and comes with SASS which makes it easy to customize. Please help me with feedback and suggestions on how can i improve this and take this forward. Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER2> Might want to consider updating the mobile view, it's not completely responsive</comment></comment>


The Future of HTML 5 - <AUTHOR> http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/the-future-of-html-5/ <comment><USER2> Without solidarity of video format across browsers, Flash will still hold the embedded video market in browsers. Not to mention like all the other open standards, until Microsoft works out a way to get users to their most current browsers _AND_ makes them fully HTML5 compatible, Flash (and Silverlight) will have a non-replaceable happy home in a majority of the browsers.

<comment><USER3> I don't see solidarity of video format coming. People with deep pockets are uncomfortable with the Ogg family and the unknown risks of litigation. People who do not wish to open their pockets won't license the MPEG portfolio.

My solution: The MPEG group should license their portfolio for free for HTML5 browsers. That will cement them as "the" format and they can recover their research costs and make their profit on licenses for devices and nonbrowser software.

(Thought I can only imagine how many lawyer hours it will take to arrive at a suitable definition of an "HTML5 browser".)

<comment><USER4> _The MPEG group should license their portfolio for free for HTML5 browsers. That will cement them as "the" format_

This is akin to the faux pas of asking someone to work for free because it would look good on their resume or in their portfolio. It would only be plausible if h.264 weren't already very successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hello HTML...& goodbye Flash?

"HTML5 is expected to be a game-changer in Web application development, making obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX..." [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5>]

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't plan on saying Goodbye anytime soon. Right now about 20% of users still use a browser that's 8 years old. So if we add that to the roughly 2 or so years it will take for the HTML 5 standard to be finalized and implemented in browsers you're looking at about a decade or more before we have a widespread HTML 5 user base.

There is one potential savior and ironically its a plug in. Namely Chrome Frame. If Google continues to update it and aggresively push it we might see HTML 5 use much earlier. But that still depends on the success of Chrome Frame eclipsing that of Flash.

Otherwise Flash is still the most widespread solution for RIA based pages and will be for a long time to come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was one of the best talks at the Future of Web Apps. Well worth a watch.

I found the HTML5 forms demos much more interesting than the canvas (Flash killer) demos.</comment>


IPhone was first, but so was Motorola - <AUTHOR> http://ries.typepad.com/ries_blog/2013/09/iphone-was-first-but-so-was-motorola.html

<comment><USER2> I still have no idea why they went with this C thing. Why would you not just release a 5 and a 5S at the same time? It would have the same effect without all the negative connotations. Nobody wants to be cheap - but everybody wants a deal. If they really just need a new second gen letter they could have just gone with almost any other letter. "i" perhaps..

<comment><USER3> I think they were going for 'color' from what I understand, it's pretty similar to the 5, but with color. Is the price really much different from the 5.

Essentially, they've stuck with the same model they had previously, of discounting the older model, and introducing a new model at the same price point the older model had, but this time they gave the older model a colored back.

So they really should have stuck with iPhone 5 (which is now available in colors) and iPhone5s, might have been less confusing than the idea of a now 'cheap' iPhone, and 'c' I think is being recognized as 'cheap' rather than 'color'.</comment></comment>


Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books - <AUTHOR> http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html <comment><USER2> When you spin up a fresh pharo VM, you are greeted by "Prof. Stef Tutorial". It's this guy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is anybody using Pharo? I'm interested.

<comment><USER4> [https://pharo.org/success](https://pharo.org/success)

<comment><USER5>
        Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

<comment><USER4> And did you try again later? Works fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Might be worth noting that the author seems to be firmly in the Pharo camp, while Squeak enthusiasts might insist they have the true Smalltalk successor.</comment>


I got compensated by British Airways, and why it isn't enough - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@helplicit/how-i-got-compensated-by-british-airways-and-why-it-isnt-enough-97d428f4bc18 <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the mistaken duplicate post!</comment>


Samsung cites '2001: A Space Odyssey' movie as prior art against iPad design - <AUTHOR> http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/samsung-cites-stanley-kubricks-2001.html

<comment><USER2> I'm no lawyer, but this smells of desperation. It doesn't seem to be the kind of thing one would do unless one really had no other choice in making a case. Are there really no good, real examples of the iphone/ipad form factor prior to the launch of the iphone?

<comment><USER3> Please at least read the link. The 2001 movie still is one of numerous examples cited in the Samsung filing and the "patent" in question is a relatively general and vague "design patent."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: For those who overcame long-term procrastination, how did you do it? - <AUTHOR> Any behaviours, tools or other that helped you?  Trying to make some positive changes in the new year <comment><USER2> Just realizing that stuff won't get done automagically.

Some problems will actually solve themselves if you ignore them long enough, but some other will come back and bite your ass really really hard. Since you can't usually predict what case will it be, it's better to handle stuff yourself.

Long story short: there's no easy magical solution, life is hard and work expands to fill al the available time. You have to sit down and get shit done.

Corollary: I've also learnt not to take commitments that I'm not 100% sure I want to (or can) go through till the very end. You don't have to delay stuff you don't have to do.

Corollary (2): it's fine to drop stuff, especially stuff like side project or personal stuff. In a work setting things are a bit more difficult, but saying "I am having trouble meeting this deadlines, please let's re-discuss it" or "I am overloaded, you'll have to assign this task to somebody else" is generally better than delivering two months late. Good managers appreciate this.</comment>


Google's internal spy system was Chinese hacker target (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/googles-internal-spy-system-was-chinese-hacker-target/1047

<comment><USER2> This is 3.5-year-old random-guy-on-zdnet commentary on a single quote from an unnamed source taken from this article[1], and the quote doesn't remotely support the conclusions he makes.

Here is a much more recent report on what likely actually went down: [http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/chinese-hackers- who-...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/chinese-hackers-who-breached- google-reportedly-targeted-classified-data/)

tl;dr: it's speculated that they were interested in _who_ the US government was watching as any overlap with their own operatives meant that they were likely compromised.

[1] [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9144221/Google_attack...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9144221/Google_attack_part_of_widespread_spying_effort)?

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was 2 year ago. I guess the poster of this thread aims to compare this article blaming China with our great peace loving US government when Snowden event is still hot.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, who would have ever guessed this??? (Well, my 9 year old son for one.)

<comment><USER5> Well, of course it was unexpected. There was hardly any documented precedent.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%932005)</comment></comment>


Cool Science Behind Motivation - <AUTHOR> http://www.futureoncoming.com/the-surprising-science-of-motivation-are-some-rewards-demotivating/

<comment><USER2> I can put the word "science" in an article's text too, but real science requires more than a word.

The linked article contains the word science (more than once), but no science and none of the usual indicators of science -- like the statement of a hypothesis to be tested, a basis for falsification, and ... wait for it ... evidence in support of the hypothesis.

It's contentless pop psychology, a pastiche of words that primarily convey emotions and that have no clear definition.</comment>


Chartbeat is to Blogs as Google Analytics is to Print Newspapers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/18/charbeat-is-to-blogs-as-google-analytics-is-to-print-newspapers/ <comment><USER2> Shouldn't that title be "Chartbeat is to Google Analytics as Blogs are to Print Newspapers"

As in, Chartbeat is a more up-to-the-minute version of Google Analytics in the same way blogs are a more up-to-the-minute version of newspapers?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, after seeing the post I thought the title didn't make sense either. I thought it was going to be _critical_ of Chartbeat and the title was implying it's as irrelevant to blogs as GA would be to newspapers.. :-)

(But I might be biased as I tried Chartbeat twice - forgetting about it in the gap - and didn't like it either time.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that the 30-day trial is free ONLY if you give them your credit card number. Why should I worry about them having that information if I decide not to do it? Why shouldn't they do the work on their end of just killing my trial account if I don't sign up after 30 days? "Free" should be FREE. Not provisionally so.

<comment><USER5> This would be a very interesting statistic to gather. I could see it going both ways. Requiring a CC up front might eliminate a lot of "dead weight" who will never pay, but might also eliminate some people who would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sensei taught me two things about web analytics, when it comes to making money online:

(1) Checking your stats too much is a disease: if looking at stats isn't going to changbe your behavior, it's a waste of time (2) Monthly revenue is the one web statistic that matters

</comment><comment><USER7> That analogy not only works for speed, but for depth of content. Google Analytics isn't used so you can stroke your ego during your lunch break, it's used to optimize your site over the long haul. Conversion/goal tracking is pretty much the entire reason it exists. It would be nice if they had a real time component so you can see spikes in traffic (and more importantly where they are coming from), but GA is all about maximizing your sales and thus making you spend more on AdWords.

Alos, using spammers like Mahalo as a use case isn't a great sales pitch. They have to react in real time because their phony content doesn't have lasting impact.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is Chartbeat a drop-in replacement for Google Analytics, or are people using it as a supplement for real-time data?

<comment><USER9> We're using both on certain sites. It's certainly not a replacement for Analytics.

The most useful for us has been the page load time analysis, it's a great way to see exactly how long pages are taking to load for a user as opposed to measuring server response time.</comment></comment>


Ask HK: Why isnt there a cloud connected printer startup? - <AUTHOR> Consumers have been struggling with scammy practices of printer manufacturers regarding cartridge refills and annoying driver issues as well as never working wireless features.
why isnt there a startup that sells a chromebook of printers or a tesla of printers, if you will, that offers a  reliable high quality printer that just works, for low upfront cost (say $49) and comes with optional cloud subscription model (for say $5/mo) where a copy everything you printed/scanned is kept and you can print from anywhere and if you are away from your printer but have to print and mail out something urgently, the startup will do it for you, using one of their partner printing stations located near your destination address to ensure quickest delivery. <comment><USER2> I say go for it. Sounds like you've got an itch to scratch :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not a cloud facsimile machine startup? Or telegraph?

Printers are ancient technology.

</comment><comment><USER4> lob.com?</comment>


Partial Application and Lambda Parameter Syntax for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@citycide/partial-application-lambda-parameters-for-js-aa16f4d94df4 <comment><USER2> If you really like the idea of syntactic partial application in your JavaScript, you should check out the stage 1 tc39 proposal for exactly that: [https://github.com/rbuckton/proposal-partial- application](https://github.com/rbuckton/proposal-partial-application) It's slowly being worked through the committee, so if you care enough about the feature, you should consider voicing your support.

<comment><USER3> I agree! It's not as powerful as this macro but I really want this in the standard.

</comment></comment><comment> a-saleh Funny, I already kinda use partial application in Javascript, just by using curried functions a lot. I.e.

const add = x => y => x + y

This is definitely non-idiomatic, but the definition syntax itself doesn't look that bad, if you can stomach writing add(1)(2) to use it.

I do agree that using _ would probably be a better solution :-)

<comment><USER4> Am I missing something? Why not just

const add = (a,b)=>a+b?

<comment><USER5> You can not use partial application with that. for example const add = x=>y=>x+y

can be partialy applied like the following const add3 = add(3) // this is also a function

<comment><USER6> > You can not use partial application with that.

You can:

        const add3 = add.bind(null, 3)

<comment> a-saleh I still like currying better, but I just might be weird like that :-)

<comment><USER6> I only asserted that you could partially apply regular functions. But I don't think currying looks or feels nice in Javascript.

Proper curried languages are definitely better suited for partial application though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In Kotlin specifically, this is a shorthand for anonymous functions where, > if you don't specify an argument, one will automatically exist with the name > _it_

I'm pretty sure Kotlin borrowed this idea from Groovy.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that's correct but Kotlin is a more recent reference so I chose it instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi everyone, I'm the author. Looks like I'm a little late to the party (this post snuck by me) but I'll try to answer any questions you might have.

I'd also like to point out the online playground [0] which allows you to use this directly in your browser and see what it compiles to.

[0]: [https://citycide.github.io/param.macro](https://citycide.github.io/param.macro)

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice article. I still prefer arrow functions over positional arguments though, because this approach trades some clarity for syntactic sugar. Until partial application becomes part of JavaScript, the import statement will probably outweigh the informative "boilerplate" it helps obscure anyway (there's rarely more than one use case for partial application inside a well-factored component).

<comment><USER9> Partial application is a technique, not a language construct. Plus, you can already use partial application in JavaScript and have been able to for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't javascript have enough magic in it to make code difficult to follow? What is the benefit to adding more?

<comment><USER3> I think the fact that this (and all macros with `babel-plugin-macros`) requires an explicit import helps keep it out of magic territory. You do have to become aware that the symbols transform the function/argument they're a part of, but this is only really new to JS devs. It's familiar in a bunch of other languages.

I documented how they work in this part[0] of the readme.

[0]: [https://github.com/citycide/param.macro#differences- between-...](https://github.com/citycide/param.macro#differences-between-_- and-it)

<comment><USER11> The import tells you that some of the expressions in a file might be functions, but not which ones. For each definition, you have to read the entire expression to tell whether it's a function or evaluated immediately, and what its arity is. No thanks! Reading the entire file just to find out its API is no fun.

I like the direction typescript is going, where you can easily see not only the arity but the type of each parameter, without reading the function body. This is more skimmable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are babel plugins the new C preprocessor? and have all the problems associated with that.

<comment><USER12> babel-plugin-macros allow hygienic macros ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienic_macro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienic_macro)) so they don't have the problems associated with C macros.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Key things to know before hiring a PR agency? - <AUTHOR> Our collaboration tool started getting traction in education,  so I'm thinking of hiring professional PR for the first time to speed up adoption an attract more users.
Getting good reviews by notable web sites had the most significant impact for bumping up active users in the past, but we've not been able to get any new significant reviews for a while, despite a lot of interesting development. I blame this mostly on me not knowing how to manage the relationship with journalists or not knowing how to package/sell the news to them, hence the idea to experiment with a professional service. Education as a market is particularly challenging as it's outside our area of expertise, so we lack contacts and knowing how to tell a good story, but seems to be an area of a lot of promising potential for growth according to our user stats.
I've never hired a PR agency before, so I wouldn't know what to look for/what are the most common tricks and pitfalls. If you've had success using a PR agency before to generate buzz around your product, what are the key things to look for? <comment><USER2> Read "the burned out bloggers guide to pr" by Jason Kincaid.</comment>


Show HN: Scaffold App for Node.js, Express, Jade, Passport, MongoDB, Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rodrigogs/nodejs-web-jade-scaffold <comment><USER2> I have a scaffold for Node + Koa (microframework) + Postgres + Twitter Bootstrap + Nunjucks (templating):

\- Demo: [https://koa-skeleton.danneu.com/](https://koa-skeleton.danneu.com/)

\- Source: [https://github.com/danneu/koa- skeleton](https://github.com/danneu/koa-skeleton)

<comment><USER3> Curious to see why you recommend Koa vs Express?. Looks simpler at first but if you can elaborate that would be great.

<comment><USER4> Koa is the successor of Express, written by Express creator, TJ. I like it because generator workflow makes writing apps better since we can yield promises. Code is much cleaner.

      app.get('/', function * () {
        this.body = yield User.all()
      })

vs

      app.get('/', function (req, res) {
        User.all(function (err, users) {
          if (err) throw err
          res.end(users)
        })
      })

<comment><USER5> You can use promises in Express just fine, though. Especially with `express- promise-router`. Not really fair to compare it to nodeback code in Express :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People are still using MongoDB for new projects after all the negative articles and comments about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok then... Install your heavy SQL database on your super fast machine and use it for everything till your memory screams.

I'm not saying SQL databases are bad. It's just... They are not the only choice! You should be happy that now we have tons of alternatives to choose.

<comment><USER7> 1\. SQLite isn't heavy. There are probably even lighter-weight relational solutions, but I haven't needed one, so I haven't looked.

2\. Even among non-relational document storage solutions, Mongo has a poor reputation. As someone else says elsewhere in the comments, it's hard to trust a team that let so many ridiculously dangerous bugs (and a basically unreliable design) out into production for so long.

<comment><USER8> No SQLite isn't heavy but I hope you mean for use in development only.

The issue isn't MongoDB is bad and relational DBs are awesome. The real issue is new developers being taught that Mongo and NoSQL in general are the databases you should be using with Node. The problem secondary to that is devs not knowing when each is appropriate.

<comment><USER9> SQLite is the most widely deployed database engine out there.

<comment><USER10> Not in production it isn't.

<comment><USER11> It's actually commonly used in production for certain types of databases. SQLite is not a replacement for something such as postgresql but it certainly has it's use cases.

<comment><USER10> Do you mean for public facing sites? If so, what are the use cases?

<comment><USER11> The use case for SQLite isn't high traffic public facing webpages. Here is their own list of 'famous' users: [https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html](https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html)

Every iPhone, and Android phone have SQLite running on them, which easily makes it the most used production database. It's use case is typically very low traffic websites or as client side storage.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I'm missing something but is Mongo in use on the client side in that same way? If not then SQLlite is being shoehorned into the discussion and the context in which production was used should be clear. I feel like people are trying to be technically right instead of following the actual discussion. I never meant client side software and definitely didn't mean someone's micro traffic blog, where a toy database could be used.

It is interesting how much penetration SQLlite has on the client, though.

At any rate, I know better than to not be extremely specific so I brought this on myself.

<comment><USER11> The only reason I brought it up is that there is a myth that many developers believe SQLlite is only useful as a dev enviroment database

<comment><USER12> On a multiuser system, that's a reasonable assumption.

<comment><USER11> That's partially true, but it does seem to find it's way in production on lots of low traffic sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You might enjoy the Hackathon Starter: [https://github.com/sahat/hackathon- starter](https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter)

It has much more middleware, but is easy to strip down, based on what you're building. It also has a CLI tool for some basic config.

<comment><USER14> Funny, I was just using the same thing for django here - [https://github.com/DrkSephy/django-hackathon- starter](https://github.com/DrkSephy/django-hackathon-starter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would make a good "Show HN". Reposting with "Show HN: " in the title will make it appear there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, dude!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A word of advice on passport. Don't just throw it in there and not learn anything about it. It's a really crafty middleware/library that is intended to be customized/extended. If you write your own strategies (after looking up the mainstream ones for reference) it'll give you a lot more power in terms of you authentication/authorization schemes.

I think that can be said about most products of scaffolds. If you intend to use this you should learn at least a little about node/express/jade/mongo/bootstrap as well. I feel a lot of people don't I know I didn't when I started web dev (I'm looking at you RoR).

</comment><comment><USER17> Take a look at [https://github.com/bahmutov/PE-N- starter](https://github.com/bahmutov/PE-N-starter) \- PouchDB (which later can proxy to CouchDB), Express and Node. Much better DB and no locking you to any rendering framework. Comes with GitHub integration plugin. Demo at [http://pe- n-starter.herokuapp.com/](http://pe-n-starter.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm trying to remember the WTF moment I had with working with MongoDB, there were a few. I think it was not being able to do an atomic create or update operation across a collection of documents.

</comment><comment><USER19> One minor critique. You don't appear to have any tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to TODO list. Although you guys are free to fork and do it :P</comment></comment>


How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm <comment><USER2> An interesting essay from 1910 about making the best use of one's time on earth. Taking from it a single self-referential idea:

"I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.

Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow."

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of the book Ecclesiastes <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes>

_"While Qoheleth clearly endorses wisdom as a means for a well-lived earthly life, he is unable to ascribe eternal meaning to it. In light of this perceived senselessness, he suggests that one should enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life, such as eating, drinking, and taking enjoyment in one's work, which are gifts from the hand of God."_

<comment><USER4> Why? That seems to be making a very different point (and not a very valuable one, in my opinion).

<comment><USER3> Gaining knowledge (or wisdom if you like) can be "vain" if you forget to live ;)

Imho that is a very valuable lesson.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't say that, though -- he perceives "wisdom" as senselessness and something with no "eternal meaning", in contrast to the simple pleasures of daily life, which (apparently unlike wisdom) have supernatural approval and eternal value.

That's not helpful. True wisdom doesn't ignore physical reality. It doesn't deny basic pleasures; it illuminates them. And it's the only way to find sense in the world -- directly, not just mouthing the words provided by a human authority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussion from LessWrong a couple of years ago, the first comment is a condensed tl;dr summary:

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/37y/how_to_live_on_24_hours_a_day/>

<comment><USER6> I recommend reading the original; the summary doesn't capture its style (and may not capture its substance, for all I know). This is interesting as a piece of rhetoric as well as advice.

<comment><USER7> At a glance, this is a book about productivity and time management. Any self- respecting productive manager of time would not waste an entire day reading such outdated and overly verbose prose.

TL;DR FTW

[EDIT]

I'm back, I just read the tl;dr version and I'm absolutely pumped! That really hit the spot. Going to listen to some of these film scores: <http://songza.com/listen/action-movie-scores-songza/> and do what I thought would take a day in 4 hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think Bennett would approve of the tl;dr's lol.

Not only should you take the time to read it, you should be spending another 45 minutes reflecting.

</comment><comment><USER9> I translated the Spanish version:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Como-Vivir-Veinticuatro-Horas- melusi...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Como-Vivir-Veinticuatro-Horas- melusina/dp/8496614905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363609399&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have this book on my bookshelf! It's a small volume with very large margins. Seeing it laid out on a single web page made me check if the Gutenberg version really is the whole thing. It is.

IIRC, it's pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is one of the best pieces of writing in English I have ever read. While it doesn't completely qualify as a self-help book (it discusses mainly the philosophy of life), it is miles ahead anything available today.

<comment><USER4> You should sample the work of writers who take pride in the quality of their writing & ideas, not just the latest "100 tips to success in business" book.

So much of the writing we read is written by amateur writers who are professionals in some other realm.

I should probably offer suggestions, which is hard; but try this recent nonfiction essay by novelist & essayist Hilary Mantel:

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies>

Or read the first few pages of The End by Salvatore Scibona (click "look inside the book" on Amazon):

[http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Salvatore- Scibona/dp/B0035G02D...](http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Salvatore- Scibona/dp/B0035G02DQ)

These are both fiction-writers; I'm struggling to think of really high-quality non-fiction writing, but that's just because I haven't read any recently... An example, at least -- Christopher Hitchens covers some of the same territory as Richard Dawkins, but his writing is head & shoulders above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I liked this a lot, though I disagree with his position on fiction (i.e. "if it's difficult it's not worth reading"). I get his point though.

And speaking of difficult literature, many points in this little book reminded me of David Foster Wallace's awesome commencement speech from some years back, which you can listen to (un-idly!) in two parts, here:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET9cvlGJQw>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjVnB7AeBQ>

</comment><comment><USER13> I feel like I'm reading about the time cube and I'm educated stupid.

</comment><comment><USER14> I help run a leadership conference where there is a significant portion of the time devoted to small group reflection. I find personal reflection greatly rewarding and practice it weekly now, this has made me consider a daily practice. There is something to be said for a led reflection with someone you trust. They will ask the questions that you know you should ask yourself and it really kickstarts the process.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to read his opinion on sleep. tldr: most people sleep too much because they don't have enough to do, and most people would be healthier if they slept less.

I'm curious what has changed, I've heard you should sleep as much as your body wants (and to consult a doctor if that's more than 8-9 hours a day). Is it just that people sleep less today and the advice is relative?

<comment><USER4> The advice is relative to the sleeping habits of the target audience.

The author talks about servants as if they are assumed, and in his example case of an average day, the person gets up at 9am, and goes to sleep by midnight.

That's NINE hours of sleep that he's saying is too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> TL;DR please

<comment><USER17> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Live_on_24_Hours_a_Day>

<comment><USER16> cheers, this was also posted - a summary of each chapter <http://lesswrong.com/lw/37y/how_to_live_on_24_hours_a_day/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can get it on your Kindle for free: [http://www.amazon.com/How-Live-Hours- Day-ebook/dp/B0084AHN6C...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Live-Hours-Day- ebook/dp/B0084AHN6C/)

Interesting that there's no original publication date on public domain works in the Amazon store.

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one that thinks 90 minutes a day is horribly inadequate? Personally, I aim for something like 8 hours... Is this just because the book was written a hundred years ago and there wasn't that much to learn back then?

<comment><USER20> How do you have time for anything else?

<comment><USER19> Eight hours for work, eight hours for reading and learning, eight hours for sleep and commute. I relax on the weekends - sleep a bit more, play some games, go out with friends, etc. I guess I'm just a boring person...

<comment><USER21> It's only boring if it's boring to you. But if you're spending eight hours on reading without any time spent reflecting on it, it's just words in your head.

<comment><USER19> "Boring" would be the last thing I'd call it, but you have to admit - it's a pretty short list.

It depends mostly on what I'm reading, if I'm reading a math textbook I usually do more "reflecting" than actual reading, I create small programs like imaginary number calculators, function plotters, etc. that let me play with the thing I'm reading about. With programming books I always try to write something, but make it something different than the examples in the book. Sometimes I wander off to Google and then find out the thing I needed was covered in the next chapter, but you get the idea :)

I usually read fiction only before I go to bed, so when I'm finished reading I have some quiet time. Your brain gets really weird right before you fall asleep, but I guess at least it's something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Librivox recording (audiobook) here:

[http://librivox.org/how-to-live-on-twenty-four-hours-a- day-b...](http://librivox.org/how-to-live-on-twenty-four-hours-a-day-by- arnold-bennett/)</comment>


Not fundable - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sriramk.com/not-fundable/

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite anti-portfolio is the one from bessemer: <http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio>

I remember when I advised my friends to work for Google in 2002 and people were looking at me like I wanted something bad for their career. It's always easy to dismiss opportunities that are one of a kind... even YC, with more data than anybody, makes "hiring mistakes".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is inspired by BVP's antiportfolio. I love their humor about a topic that stings all VCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree with the premise. But were they really not fundable? :-) I believe investors were running after them (funny thing is 5 of them had Sequoia as institutional investor, in fact first VC for 4). Also all of them worked like a charm. In fact, when you used Google and YouTube for first time I bet your reaction must be "wow, this just works". At least, that's how I felt.</comment>


Go-benchmark: Golang benchmarks used for optimizing code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cornelk/go-benchmark <comment><USER2> I personally wouldn't do any of these for an average project. They seem like micro-optimizations. But this is Missing the largest Go optimizations I can think of and I would do. String vs byte[] and memory allocation.

A lot of Go programs spend a lot of time converting between byte[] and string. But the conversion is actually really slow and keeping your string data as byte arrays is much faster and since many go libraries can work with either, the conversation is not necessary.

Also, memory allocations and garbage collection are not free. If you have a hot path that gets hit every request or in a loop, it can save a lot of time reusing the same slices assuming you can do so without introducing bugs and/or multi-threading issues.

<comment><USER3> Dumb question, but can you give an example of using []byte over string?

I've got a project where strings aren't exactly crucial, but we're storing a ton of them in memory. We store them as string and, frankly, rarely access most of them - though we do do some compares of strings on the hot path.

Using []byte sounds interesting, but troublesome at the same time. Namely the fact that byte is useless for reading characters from, as you'd eventually have to get runes from it anyway no?

Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> []byte is crucial if you need to frequently modify the contents. The classic example is building a string with a loop that appends a new character on each iteration. Using += to concatenate strings inside such a loop will be slow; the Right Thing To Do is to preallocate a []byte with sufficient capacity, append to it in a loop, and then (if necessary) convert to a string only at the end.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't Go have a mutable char/rune array?

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's just []rune, which has just a bit of special sauce in the runtime that allows you to convert it directly to a string [1], and some functions that convert UTF-8 to and from it. However rune is a 32-bit number sufficient for storing a Unicode code point. Generally you're dealing in UTF-8 and prefer to just pass that through code. I think I've only ever use a []rune once, for when I was doing some very heavy-duty Unicode-aware code, and I still ended up refactoring it into using UTF-8 directly in the end.

[1]: [https://play.golang.org/p/5DEzw85J5Ob](https://play.golang.org/p/5DEzw85J5Ob) Note this is a _conversion_ ; the string is UTF-8 and the runes are 32-bit ints, so this creates a new string.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's some context missing here. AFAIK the author of the repositories was specifically doing micro-benchmarks here to inform the design of his [https://github.com/cornelk/hashmap](https://github.com/cornelk/hashmap) library. I think for that use case (designing a high-performance lock-free data structure), that kind of micro-benchmarking makes a lot of sense.

That hash map looks good and I'm thinking we'd probably benefit from using it on the hot path of some code we have that needs to be highly scalable.

(Both links were submitted to HN, but only this one seems to have landed on the front page.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Somewhat related; I was building a game a few years ago and passing 4x4 matrices (128 bytes) by value was faster than pass by reference. I don't know exactly how many bytes can be passed by value before it becomes slower, but please don't read this and mindlessly assume pass by value is slower.

<comment><USER9> Also, take GC pressure into consideration; pass by value is 'free' in that it does not put data onto the heap and thus does not cause any GC overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not a very good example of benchmarking. First, all of the benchmarks need to be run multiple times e.g. -count=5 at least to get reliable results. Second, benchmarking like this is really meant for analyzing a single operation. It confuses the analysis when a repetition of 1024 operations is benchmarked so that the numbers have to be divided by 1024 to get comparable numbers. The golang benchmarking library can reliably measure operations of a few instructions long, so no need to repeat them N times for measurement. Sometimes you will want to see how an operation changes based on something like length, e.g. hashing 8 versus 128 characters, but in those cases the operation is "hashing" and you should have separate benchmarks to measure performance versus different lengths, which is a great use case for sub- benchmarks r.Run(). Finally, as others have mentioned, most of these are micro-optimizations that make your code less maintainable, e.g. you should always iterate over a slice with range unless you have some logical reason not to.

</comment><comment><USER11> >>Writing and reading an int atomic

>>BenchmarkAtomicInt64-8 5000 354907 ns/op

that ns/op looks too big to be only for an int64 ..

<comment> dis-sys Almost all those ns/op numbers were measured by repeating BenchMarkSizeLong or BenchMarkSize iterations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Each op must be around 1000 iterations, because that's how much they seem the ns/op seem to be off.

<comment><USER13> Yep! 1024. Good eye! Some tests, like the atomic ones, use an even larger constant (which explains the crazy 355971 nsec/op result for an atomic increment):

        BenchMarkSize     = 1 << 10 // 1024
        BenchMarkSizeLong = BenchMarkSize << 5

<comment><USER6> Yes, that one really caught my eye because if an atomic int increment took 35 microseconds, I have some code that would have exploded a long time ago.

I'm not sure what the idea is there, the benchmark system can accommodate small operations, I've used it before on things like single increments or single interface calls and gotten reasonable answers.

Also benchmarking atomic int increment without any contention is not necessarily "useless", but certainly not a full picture if one is investigating using it in a contended data structure. (My usage of it is mostly just counters, where I expect thousands upon thousands of instructions to be between the increment of any given one of them, meaning there's probably no contention to speak of even on production multi-core servers, so I have no idea how they perform under serious contention. But AFAIK it's just the hardware-supported atomic instructions, so what I don't know about is the hardware, not really Go per se.)

<comment><USER14> > I'm not sure what the idea is there, the benchmark system can accommodate > small operations, I've used it before on things like single increments or > single interface calls and gotten reasonable answers.

Yeah, I've been wondering if I'm missing something, because adding a second redundant loop to b.N is common in go repos, but seems pointless and needlessly obscuring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These results should be taken with a big grain of salt. A lot of stuff true in this code will not be true at all in YOUR code. This benchmarking code, for instance, is trivial and many parts will get optimized by the compiler. This likely won't be true in your more complex code.

<comment><USER16> That can be a real pitfall for benchmarking. I recall looking at some promotional material touting the performance advantages of Rust against some other language (C?) It involved a loop so I kept increasing the loop count to try to get the Rust execution to take the same time as the other language. It took me a while but I finally figured out that the way the code was structured, the Rust compiler could see that the results of the computation were never used and the loop was simply optimized away.

Benchmarks can measure execution time of algorithms or if not careful, the ability of the ability of the compiler to optimize away unnecessary code.

(IMO the 'performance comparison' that was vastly in favor of Rust was a bit disingenuous.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So we should avoid defeR?

<comment><USER18> I was wondering too. Does anybody know what makes defer so expensive?

<comment> dis-sys 5300+ ns/op is for BenchMarkSize (1024) defer operations, so we are actually paying about 5ns/op for defer. Not sure why the author chose to report the ns/op number in its current way.

<comment><USER6> "so we are actually paying about 5ns/op for defer"

Yeah, it's in the class of "things you should know about when optimizing tight loops", but not "things you should always be worrying about"; remember 5ns is on the order of a branch mispredict or an L2 cache miss [1]. If you haven't already squeezed out all the main memory accesses you can from your algorithm at 100ns a pop, or if you're in code dealing with networks (routinely _micro_ seconds, even within datacenters; _milli_ seconds if you have to leave), or files, or anything else like that, micro-optimizing defers is not going to have any visible results to your speed but can very badly damage your code's correctness and ease of writing and modifying.

The other thing to know about defers is that they are not declarations, they are instructions; every time the program counter moves past one, another defer call is added to the stack of calls to make while exiting the function. So you do have to be careful about deferring in a loop, not so much because it's "dangerous" but just because it's easy to be unaware that the defers are not declarations. If you intend to do it, it's fine, it can just bite you if you do it accidentally.

[1]: [https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832](https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That repo encourages mindless microoptimization. Don't waste your time worrying how to iterate a slice. Most of the time it makes no difference.

<comment><USER20> That repo doesn't encourage anything. It's presenting data that the author found useful for another project they were working on, which presumably did benefit from micro-optimization. You are right that micro-optimization is usually not needed, but the repo and its author never claimed otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This should also show that append is really, really heavy when the slice is not pre-allocated and should be avoided whenever possible!

</comment><comment><USER22> Sure, "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and so on. But what I find much worse, is that hashing algorithms are put side-by-side without any context, making it look like MD5 is better than SHA-2. That's downright irresponsible.</comment>


Slack Is Going Public Without an IPO – How a Direct Listing Works - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2019/06/20/slack-stock-ipo-dpo-direct-listing/ <comment><USER2> > In an IPO, SEC rules typically restrict shareholders from selling shares > until six months after the offering. A direct offering makes it much easier > for employees and early investors to cash out as soon as the first day of > trading. This can be a big help for investors in companies that have waited > to go public, which many of the best-known tech companies have been doing > for years

Is it wrong to interpret this as other people expecting the bubble to pop soon and wanting to pass the bag sooner rather than later?

<comment><USER3> That is possible, but in theory there has been due diligence to verify the company as an on-going concern. Normally the goal of going public is to let those who took the risk in the beginning to get a payout, given that they have had their funds locked up all this time. Those who choose to invest now are taking the risks for access to future returns.

<comment><USER4> Normally the point of an IPO is to raise cash.

<comment><USER5> No, it used to be the point. Now a large portion of the point is to cash out existing investors. I do not claim it is the _sole_ purpose, and this is largely true among unicorns, but it is certainly a shift. Look at Facebook: they kept raising huge series of private equity.

<comment><USER6> That is only true with a very small, very richly valued group of technology stocks. You're talking about a few dozen companies max per year. Using that small group to extrapolate a claim that therefore IPOs are now primarily used to exit shareholders, is clearly a dramatic overreach.

Pharma & biotech companies as one example (the market has seen far more IPOs in that sector over the last year than it has large tech companies using their IPO as an exit), are still very frequently doing IPOs so they can raise operational cash to burn and to use their public stock for funding and acquisitions later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know this is an apples and oranges comparison, but I just find it fascinating how value is derived in society.

The current stock price, Slack's market cap is half of Tesla's. And, a lot of people think that Tesla is overvalued.

<comment><USER8> It is really hard to make a financial argument for the value of a stock that makes no profits and is has a low to negative book value. Clearly there are valuable companies in this category such as Amazon and Facebook early in their days as public companies. But trying to figure out what they might be worth someday is an exercise in predicting what the future of the world might be. It is not like making a calculation on the back of an envelope.

So to the OP, yeah I totally agree. It's fascinating.

<comment><USER9> Hypothetically, a companies value should be a sum of it's expected infinite cash flows divided by the discount rate.

If a company lost $10 one year, $5 another, and broke even the third a guess of making money the fourth year is probably more reasonable than a guess of making the average, even with a marginal book value.

Therefore, I don't think it's that surprising that companies losing money are still worth a lot.

This isn't always a reasonable way to think of things, though. It's important to consider the actual realities of the business. For Slack, I think it's largely fine. There really shouldn't be a hard constraint preventing them from making shit tons of money.

Uber and Lyft are a different story. I have a hard time imagining a situation in which those companies will ever be profitable, even with self-driving cars, save one buying out the other.

<comment><USER8> Discounted cash flow analysis is not what is going on here. Looking at it historically, FB went public with a valuation that its web business at the time could never justify. If you assume people who bought at the price were making a rational calculation, they weren't valuing the business cash flow, they were valuing something else Facebook had. A technical capability, the management, a brand, the things that let them extend their business to mobile messaging and acquire WhatsApp and Instagram. What happened wasn't just cash flow growth. Ditto for Amazon and Google.

I think that is what is going on with Uber. Their current core business will never earn enough to justify their valuations. Investors assume it will add new divisions and capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The ticker symbol? WORK.

I'm curious how symbols are assigned. Most companies have symbols that are similar to their names. Can companies just choose anything they want? Or do you have to be a big player with connections to score a vanity symbol like this one?

<comment><USER11> [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/09/how-do- companies...](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/09/how-do-companies- pick-ticker-symbols.html)

> "The ball's pretty much in the company's court, as long as its choice isn't > already in use and won't offend anyone's delicate sensibilities. The NYSE > requires that companies submit their symbol requests at least 20 days before > they mail out notification to shareholders and that they list a first, > second, and third choice. The exchange rarely gives a thumbs-down to the > preferred option. One notable rejection occurred in 1992 and involved > Furr's/Bishop's Inc., a Texas-based cafeteria operator that wanted to > disassociate itself from its floundering holding company, Cavalcade Holdings > Inc. But the NYSE denied the company's application for the symbol FBI, on > the grounds that it might cause confusion with a well-known law-enforcement > agency, and Furr's/Bishop's was forced to remain CHI on the board. (The > beleaguered company, later delisted from the NYSE, eventually changed its > name to Furr's Restaurant Group—FRRG on the ignominious pink sheets—and has > since filed for bankruptcy.)

Some companies select cheeky symbols, rather than mere acronyms. The father of the trend may be Southwest Airlines, which was first listed as LUV in 1971—a nod to its origins at Dallas' Love Field. Other semi-clever tags include BID for auctioneer Sotheby's, FUN for amusement park operator Cedar Fair, and BUNZ for deli chain Schlotzsky's. It's a lot easier to come up with something witty if you're listed on the Nasdaq, as that exchange allows symbols to be up to five letters long; the NYSE sticks with a 3-letter limit."

<comment><USER12> Another example of a name and symbol being different is Salesforce with a symbol of CRM

<comment><USER13> Sun changed their identifier from SUNW to JAVA near the end.

<comment><USER14> @track_me_now: you seem to be shadowbanned even though your comments seem reasonable to me. You might want to message the mods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The primary reason for doing a direct listing is because you don't need to raise capital. It's mostly reserved for the case where you want your pre- existing shareholders to access the liquidity of the public markets.

In contrast, if you're actually going public to raise more capital, direct listings are a lot riskier. Basically the point of the IPO, and paying investment banks huge fees, is to select and handhold the new investors.

The investment bankers perform a lot of work around actually getting supply to meet demand. They're doing roadshows in front of potential investors, getting feedback on the best way to present the company, trying to determine what the market would price the company, etc. They're also making some effort to curate a higher-quality investor base, i.e. those who actually believe in the company's vision and aren't likely to flip the shares for easy money or sell out at the first sign of trouble.

The reason for the traditional IPO pop mostly has to do with compensating these types of investors for making a commitment and taking a risk on an unproven stock.

Now if it's definitely debatable whether what the company pays in the form of investment banking fees and systematic underpricing is actually worth it. But the point is that for a company like Slack, which isn't raising capital, it's almost certainly not worth it. On the flip side the success of this particular doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how much value a traditional IPO does or doesn't add.

</comment><comment><USER16> 50% pop, not bad. Underwriters got $0 of that pop, very nice for whoever pounced early.

<comment><USER17> Sure it's up 50% from the "reference price", but publicly for you and me retail investors we had NO chance at that gain.

You'd have been super lucky to get some shares at where it opened at $38.88 (12:08 EST). It immediately shot up to daily high of $41.95 which is most likely where retail trades would have executed at (assuming you used a market order, which you never should). Always buy with limit orders. See the following screenshot of the graph of today[1] of $WORK for reference.

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/ULlMHMl](https://imgur.com/a/ULlMHMl)

<comment><USER18> > assuming you used a market order, which you never should).

Yeah I don't get why market orders even _exist_. If you're doing something that usually costs thousands to millions, is it ever a meaningful benefit to saving a click or two and a few keystrokes?

If my broker had an option to remove my ability to do market orders (sell or buy) I would immediately enable that.

<comment><USER19> Would it still be called a market order if you were denominating the order in dollars-converted-at-moment-of-sale? I.e. "buy however many shares I would get for $500, I don't care how many or few that is at the time." That seems more useful, and still caps your losses, while offering something limit orders don't.

<comment><USER20> This is still a market order (ignoring rounding).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's strange that a site like Fortune (in 2019) still doesn't support or enforce HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER22> *went

</comment><comment><USER23> [deleted - was incorrect]

<comment><USER24> It's not raising any money in this offering; it's just letting existing investors sell their shares to the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is each slack user really worth $1,600 USD ?

<comment><USER26> As a counterpoint, do you think Slack has a growth rate of zero?</comment></comment>


A History of Flavoring Food with Castoreum - <AUTHOR> https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/a3m885/a-history-of-flavoring-food-with-beaver-butt-juice <comment><USER2> People like Food Babe are this era's snake oil salesmen. As a scientist, I'm constantly appalled at the amount of sheer ignorance and provably wrong facts that are out there concerning food and chemistry and believed by nearly everyone in those food and health circles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Britain is tentatively reintroducing beavers after wiping out the last ones in the 16 century. They might be handy for controlling rain run off - trials are on going. I'm sure it wont be long before someone decides to lick an arse by accident or something ...</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do today that you wish was taught in your CS course? - <AUTHOR> Could be a specific technology, inter-personal skills, or a tool <comment><USER2> What I wish wasn't taught is Calculus. I suspect many people are drawn away from Computer Science because of all the Math that's required. In my opinion, people can comprehend Discrete Mathematics without having to pass four or five advanced courses beforehand.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I had a better math background, and I wish I was taught both the importance of testing and how to write useful tests.

</comment><comment><USER4> Linear algebra and numerical methods.

</comment><comment><USER5> Start a project from scratch (more of the architecture side of things).

</comment><comment><USER6> CI/CD</comment>


Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture - <AUTHOR> http://inside-bigdata.com/2014/03/23/richard-feynman-computer-heuristics-lecture/ <comment><USER2> This is a classic lecture that only spurs me to learn more about Feynman's work.

What struck me last time I watched this, was Feynman citing computer aided medical diagnosis as low-hanging-fruit - a problem just _waiting_ to be tackled. It's sobering to consider this lecture is now almost 30 years old.

<comment><USER3> Here's a little discussion about some of the issues in computer-aided diagnosis:

 _Historical attempts at decision support include Mycin for diagnosing infectious blood diseases, which contained assertions and rules in the form if IF-THEN clauses:_

        IF
           the site of the culture is blood, AND the organism gram +, AND
           the original infectious site was the GI tract, AND
           the abdomen is the locus of infection, OR
           the pelvis is the locus of infection
        THEN
           therapy should cover Enterobacteriaceae

_Rules structured in this manner are brittle, and don't use unification. Such a system, for example, would not robustly provide answers to queries for all flora that would be likely found in a pelvic infection. The narrow domains and lack of some of what we might call "common sense" knowledge can be problematic: H.R. Ekbia [1] humorously notes that querying a medical inference engine for suggestions on what could be causing the reddish-brown spots on the chassis and body of your Jeep, you'd get "measles". Another medical support program, asked to suggest treatment for bacterial infection in the kidney, suggested boiling the kidney in hot water._

[http://apps.keithflower.org/?p=238](http://apps.keithflower.org/?p=238)

<comment><USER4> > _Another medical support program, asked to suggest treatment for bacterial > infection in the kidney, suggested boiling the kidney in hot water._

Well, it would get rid of the bacteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anybody know the context in which this lecture was given? It looks like some kind of spa or new-age retreat to me.

<comment><USER3> Probably it was given at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, where Feynman regularly gave lectures:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=j42RD66g72oC&pg=PT384&lpg=P...](http://books.google.com/books?id=j42RD66g72oC&pg=PT384&lpg=PT384&dq=richard+feynman+esalen+institute&source=bl&ots=fCtf90wL2p&sig=X-KBbC1fvtm5pA2BcAH63i-1qzo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=C0gwU9mVB9L5oASxyIKoBA&ved=0CCcQ6AEwATgK)</comment></comment>


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[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coin- monkey/lfgkhh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coin- monkey/lfgkhhaddbpnggmkihijkmbnjanmdepm)</comment>