Cross framework web development: bottle, flask, pyramid, tornado, web2py - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mdipierro/gluino

<comment><USER2> I am missing the purpose of this library. When I use Flask, I use Flask- SQLAlchemy for Data Access and ORM, Flask-WTForm for forms and Jinja2 for templates. I don't see what I gain by using the web2py components in Flask.

<comment><USER3> I actually moved from web2py to Flask and Flask-SQLAlchemy as my framework of choice because of the limitations imposed by the web2py DAL (try modeling a school, for example, with the relationships between teachers, students, parents, and classes. It's very difficult in practice on the DAL).

The rest of the web2py framework is excellent, and support is very good. I wish Massimo had spent some of the time he spent adapting web2py to other frameworks on adapting web2py to SQLAlchemy instead. I'd be back in a second.

<comment><USER4> > The rest of the web2py framework is excellent, and support is very good.

Which parts? IMO, the web2py framework is not excellent.

It sounds like you hit some limitations with the DAL and switched away, but those type of limitations are peppered throughout the framework.

Web2py is not well designed, not standard python (look at the source), and it tricks newbies into bad practices.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like FUD. Care to share some examples? Note, in most cases, the DAL has fewer, not more limitations than a typical ORM. web2py does use standard Python. What bad practices? Have you seen this: [http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/24605/infoworlds-2012-tec...](http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/24605/infoworlds-2012-technology- of-the-year-award-winners-183313#slide23)?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Is Crashing - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/Bitcoin-Is-Crashing/articleshow/26979339.cms

<comment><USER2> Anything with that kind of growth is eventually going to crash. Human behavior is extremely predictable.

Is this "THE" crash? Maybe, maybe not. Will it go back up? Probably.</comment>


Why The Intercept closed the Snowden archive - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@barrettbrown/why-the-intercept-really-closed-the-snowden-archive-e99f46bbfbbc <comment><USER2> Greenwald's response: [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1106195880393297920](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1106195880393297920)

</comment><comment><USER3> The author has published a follow-up article: "The Intercept's editors couldn't figure out why these leaked emails are important. Can you?". [1]

[1] [https://medium.com/@barrettbrown/the-intercepts-editors- coul...](https://medium.com/@barrettbrown/the-intercepts-editors-couldn-t- figure-out-why-these-leaked-emails-are-important-can-you-5268556bedd)

<comment><USER4> I wonder if he's physically unable to write without being condescending. It really hurts the message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone explain this with context? I am not informed enough about this to understand, I assume others are experiencing something similar.

<comment><USER6> This article would be a lot better if it started with the introduction: TI decides to end funding for work on the Snowden archive to cut expenditures. Laura Poitras is very angry about this, here are her thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone have a copy of the full archive? Will it live on at a torrent file somewhere?

<comment><USER8> No, it's supposed to stay secret. A lot of the documents could literally get people killed if released. That's why Snowden gave it to journalists he trusts, not the open internet.

<comment><USER9> Why put so much effort into protecting the privacy of people dead set on killing it for everyone else?

<comment><USER8> How about: because Snowden isn't interested in murder.

What if the documents contained the identity of an American mole in ISIS, would you release that? Would you watch the execution video when they chop off his head because you blew his cover?

What if the documents contained details of a terrorist plot that the NSA has been tracking, would you release that? Would you apologize to the families of the dead because you tipped off the terrorists on how to avoid law enforcement?

That's why Snowden entrusted the documents to journalists that he drilled in security practices, and that's why he gives the Feds an opportunity to comment on or object to each new document release: there is some stuff that rightly deserves to be kept secret.

Just because the classification system is regularly abused doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was nonsense. thanks for correcting me.

<comment><USER11> >Just kidding! It's only me, Barrett Brown

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My opinion of the whole Intercept operation/Snowden affair: "…When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."</comment>


Ask HN: A kind request please about the use of acronyms? - <AUTHOR> Fellow Hacker News' readers,
I need to confess something: as a non-English speaker, most of the time I'm embarrassed to ask what that 'X' or 'Y' acronym means.
To give an example, NLP.
Is it
 * Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
 * Natural Language Processing?
 * Network Layer Protocol?
 * Natural Language Paradigm?
...and so on.
9 out of 10 times, I have to patiently look for the comments and pray to find an answer somewhere in thread(s) to save myself from embarrassingly asking.
Now I have decided to take the risk to do so, as I have accumulated countless of acronyms, thanks to Web Development, and not only lol!
Are we getting lazier than ever to type a whole word, let alone a normal sentence, or is it my idea?
Can you English-speaking people help us understand your language better?
Thank you very much and please accept my apologies in advance if I have offended anyone. <comment><USER2> Even as a monolingual native English speaker I absolutely prefer that acronyms and initialisms are defined before use, at least once.

</comment><comment><USER3> If an acronym isn't defined previous to use, or at first use, I consider it a typo.

</comment><comment><USER4> I second that! Considering how crap Google results are these days, even usual methods to decode acronyms often turn futile</comment>


Robot dog tries to herd sheep - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-52762929/robot-dog-tries-to-herd-sheep <comment><AUTHOR> Seems effective, despite bringing to mind a robotically efficient recreation of the senile dog and the poor sheep in Far From The Madding Crowd!</comment>


HackrTrackr now has area based forums for Y Combinator Readers - <AUTHOR> http://hackrtrackr.com/blog3.php

<comment><USER2> I feel kinda alone in my forum, do you think you could maybe fold Mississippi, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho, and South Dakota into the Wisconsin forum so I can have someone to talk to?

<comment><USER3> Maybe there should be "virtual" forums, so you can define an area with all the selected state forums combined. Seems like it would be easy to do that, actually.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a meta-forum. Or a virtual-virtual-forum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What language are you using? How many lines of code did this take? How long? Who are you hosting with and what plan? Just curious...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm simply using PHP for now. I just wanted to get something done and I think its the fastest for small projects like this is. If the site continues to grow I will probably rebuild it in ROR or Python, whichever one seems more interesting that week. As for how long it took I would say I have a total of 12 - 16 in the project. I didn't bother doing a design, because I didn't think anyone would use it so I designed on the fly with just solid color divs. I did take 5 minutes to do the logo though. The majority of the time went into reading through the Google Maps API documentation. Any other questions just let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Idea: if we've already specified our location, give us a link to our "home area" forum on the homepage, rather than making us browse the map (which is starting to get crowded!).

Also, is it possible to enable mousewheel zoom on the google map? I find that a really convenient way to zero in on an area of the map.

also, byrneseyeview and I are both listed twice in NY..

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I thought about that already. I'm going to be altering the code to center and zoom in on your location based upon your location once you log in, but I'll be sure to add a button too. I'll take care of the listing twice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well played dottertrotter, thank you. Myself and a number of others have duplicate location entries. One where you determined my location by IP and one by zipcode. The zipcode one is right. How can I delete the IP one? It seems many others have the same problem...

</comment><comment><USER8> Any Virginia, DC, or Maryland YC users out there please check out a potential meetup here, thanks to HackrTrackr:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001>

</comment><comment><USER9> I posted a bug to brad. Anyone having the same trouble? ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1264094177/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Two more feature requests:

\-- show news.yc karma in the popup and on the forum page

\-- have an area or a email link for feature requests :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I get silent failure when I try to create a forum in MA.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been taken care of. Simply create your forum again and it should work. If it doesn't let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about forums by language?</comment>


Responsive web design is missing the point - <AUTHOR> http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/web/responsive-web-design-missing-the-point/

<comment><USER2> I was a late convert to responsive, I kind of came down the path of build a separate mobile site as everyone was thinking that the web was going to be supplanted by the mobile web but that did not happen, what happened was that people are using everything to access the web, and the list of devices are growing after doing a few responsive site I can say that I am sold. It is the only way that I can see that we can support the array of devices coming online with a single integrated solution.</comment>


Breast cancer detection in mammography using deep learning approach - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11027 <comment><USER2> There are several key points that get left out in AI radiology conversations such as this one:

1) Mammograms are not interpreted in a vacuum. In fact mammograms are usually the first in a long line of tests before a breast cancer or other diagnosis is ultimately made. In fact, it's probably more accurate to refer to mammography as a screening exam for which patients need a biopsy rather than a diagnostic test for cancer (there are rare exceptions, but overall this point holds).

2) Speaking frankly as a radiologist myself, tests like mammograms aren't even that good in terms of overall diagnosis. Thats why ultrasound, tomosynthesis and MRI are often used as supporting evidence and/or alternative exams.

3) There is controversy over the overall utility of mammograms, particularly in the screening context. Radiologists more than anyone would like the sensitivity and specificity of these studies to be higher.

It strikes me that the people that push these "radiology is ripe for disruption" or "AI outperforms radiologists" hyperbolic arguments are clearly people that have never seen the inside of a clinic. I'm sure they love this rhetoric though when pitching to VCs or sitting around the conference table coming up with 'breakthrough ideas' to turn into power-points for the other administrators.

<comment><USER3> It could be useful as a tool to help a radiologist do their job better though. I think many of these techniques described in ML papers will be used to enable people to be better at their jobs rather than replace them. At least until there is AGI at least.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't dispute this (if they finally put something together that isn't horrendously cumbersome, time-consuming and hard to use) but this doesn't justify the 'AI is about to replace radiology' crap I seam to see every time some academic group publishes an AI/ML paper.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this paper makes that claim, you might be thinking of media interpretations of papers which is usually the one making bogus claims. It says that it outperforms 5 out of 5 people, but that is in this specific context. They aren't necessarily claims meant to be generalized that much.

<comment><USER2> I see that type of hyperbolic claim several times in the comments.

I wasn't just commenting on the abstract presented. I was commenting on the comments I see here, as well as comments I see related to similar papers all the time.

I also interact with AI/ML researchers all the time. Most of them are typically some combination of: 1\. Poorly informed about the appropriate context and utility of medical imaging. 2\. Trying as hard as they can to push AI/ML as the most important technology in medicine today. 3\. Pursuing a very task-specific project which they claim is massively generalizable in some (incorrect) way.

<comment><USER4> Usually they do not understand that your workflow if not revolving around pattern recognition on pictures. The best use of ML in pattern recognition for radiology is ordering images. You would get the the images sorted by the likeliness of having something unusual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of the major specialties, it seems that radiology is the most in danger of significant disruption. First of all, it can be done remotely, so there is risk if the regulation is lightened that foreign radiologists will be allowed to read studies at much less cost. The other issue is that this is something that deep learning can rapidly progress in given there are already a plethora of labeled data sets. For example, every mammogram that is taken has already been labeled normal or abnormal.

<comment><USER6> I don't know anywhere that has a surfeit of radiologists just sitting around chewing gum. The types of tools described in the paper will enter the market as radiologist assisting devices, if for no other reason that the regulatory burden for this is dramatically less than a total radiologist replacement. Their introduction will make radiologist's jobs easier, and improve scan throughput and reduce waiting times for results. This will free up radiologists to deal with more complex cases. But I doubt it will materially reduce the number of radiology jobs, at least in the next generation.

<comment><USER7> Is this different than any other illness that became easily testable? Wouldn't this eventually move into something a technician would perform, like a blood test?

<comment><USER8> Technicians don't interpret blood tests, and radiologists don't perform most imaging procedures, so I don't understand the comparison.

<comment><USER7> Well my thinking is more that the results would be read by your GP and not a specialist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I imagine this is just scratching the surface and before long we'll be doing full-body, 3D scans every few years and everything from cancers (all of them) to heart disease, to gastero-intestinal issues, to things even as mundane as acne and dandruff will be diagnosed by algorithms pulling on a cumulative database of images of healthy and diseased body parts. The real hope is to be able to see into the brain and pick up things like CTE and Alzheimers __years __before symptoms manifest.

<comment><USER6> This is the wrong idea. Detecting pathology early and then treating it is going to be complicated and expensive, and available to only a few people for a long time. We don't actually want some kind of constant AI body surveillance (for CTE?? So an NFL player can take just enough knocks before they retire?).

What we want is prevention, not early detection. Bear in mind that prevention is a proven outcome, because some people never get Alzheimers, and some people never get cancer. Detecting cancer or Alzheimers early and then intervening to cure the condition is actually not something that is definitely possible.

<comment><USER10> While I think I know what you're getting at, there are of course examples of "detecting pathology early and then treating it" preventing morbidity, mortality, and saving money. This is the basis of all (good) public health cancer screening practices. Think of a screening colonoscopy identifying a local pre-invasive adenocarcinoma and cutting it out (cure).

<comment><USER6> There are specific examples for high prevalence conditions as you cite, but the original comment was not talking about that, it was talking about a broader approach.

Even taking your example, getting to the point of removing a pre-invasive adenocarcinoma is actually very complicated. You need a motivated patient, you need a healthcare team of specialist doctors or nurse practitioners, pathologists, radiologists, anaesthesiologists, nurses, an endoscopy suite, a recovery area, you need a system to follow up and track these cases etc. The full embedded cost of this undertaking is huge, I don't think it is scalable, and at the same time, will never capture everyone. Randomised studies usually just barely show that these screening approaches are better than not screening, once false positives are accounted for. Furthermore, you have chosen an example where there is a useful pre-screening test (fecal blood tests), a relatively non-invasive diagnostic test (colonoscopy) and a relatively painless intervention (removing a polyp with the scope). This is not broadly applicable. A pancreatic lesion for example is very hard to diagnose for sure, and the intervention is a massive and life changing operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Instead of trying to squeeze blood from the mammography stone that has failed to improve longevity in breast cancer patients despite enormous investment over many years, AI/ML need to take a broader perspective and look at modalities like circulating tumor DNA and 3-D ultrasound

<comment><USER12> Why those two in particular?

Especially 3D US - so far it's mostly been used for "cosmetic" purposes of getting a 3D picture of your baby. There hasn't been much clinical evidence to its usefulness from what I can tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As the authors rightly call out in the abstract _obtaining large amounts of annotated data poses a challenge for training deep learning models for this purpose_ But doesn't appear that the data they've collected and annotated is made available from my read of the paper, I get that this is from a company (DeepHealth) but it seems like an opportunity for NIH to push for more broadly available data sets.

Anyone have a good reference point for the reader selection of 5 specialists with 5.6yrs avg experience? That population seems small. Another opportunity for licensing bodies or national institutions to grow a publicly available dataset -- including annotations from a wider selection of imaging specialists.

<comment> 1e-9 The radiologists in this study had read 6,969 mammograms on average over the preceding year. That's about 15X the certification requirement and 4X the average for U.S. doctors. Reading volume is one of the main predictors of performance[1], which suggests that these doctors were probably above-average readers. It would have been nice to see more readers involved, but reader studies are a major effort. Even with the small sample size of readers, these results were statistically significant as well as clinically significant.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21343539](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21343539)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see a lot of machine learning work on medical imagery, which is great, but it seems like this is solving a problem that the human brain is already pretty good at (image recognition). I wish I saw more work being done on finding patterns in medical data in numeric formats which the human brain is terrible at. Is there much of that going on?

<comment><USER15> You're absolutely correct but from what I can see there's going to need to be a lot more work done in collecting and standardizing that data before it's available in sufficient quantity and quality to do anything with. I think a more aggressive approach to normalizing externalities (primarily regulated diet/nutrition) would help as well.

There's another completely (to me) unintuitive angle as well. Andrew Lo and some folks from MIT Sloan have published a paper about using clinical trial data to predict which medicines will be approved by the FDA in order to help reduce investment risk and unlock dollars. He does a pretty good talk about it here - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzELyaVf0v8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzELyaVf0v8)

He's on a recent episode of Linear Digressions discussing this as well. [http://lineardigressions.com/episodes/2019/12/8/using- data-s...](http://lineardigressions.com/episodes/2019/12/8/using-data-science- to-make-hard-prioritization-decisions-behind-the-scenes-of-an-analysis-to- predict-drug-approvals)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Got me thinking... How long till AWS DeepPhysician? They don't seem to have a clear cut on the limit of the scope of their services. Joke apart, what would be the implications and responsibilities of big tech entering the medical field?

</comment><comment> 1e-9 Excellent results with good generalization. The study appears to be well designed and executed. This was a significant effort. Clearly, there are commercial intentions.

</comment><comment><USER17> Computer assisted screening for mammo has been around for years... like icad I am sure some of the vendors in this space are using some form of deep learning already

</comment><comment><USER18> Everyone swooning with optimism over this result should the machine learning reddit comments on it first.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ehpllt/dee...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ehpllt/deep_learning_model_for_breast_cancer_detection/)

And also linked blog[edit]:

[https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/do- machine...](https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/do-machines- actually-beat-doctors-roc-curves-and-performance-metrics/)

TL;DR; There are sooo many subtlties to stuff like this that this things really shouldn't be taken at face value. This is far from replacing doctors in anything.

<comment> 1e-9 1) I see no credible criticism on reddit.

2) I see nothing in the Luke Oakden-Rayner blog that calls this study into question. This study actually _avoids_ the pitfalls that he mentions.

3) This paper said nothing about replacing doctors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is simply amazing. Great job to anyone involved in that project!

</comment><comment><USER20> Dr Sausage has had this technology for decades

</comment><comment><USER21> If you find this kind work interesting, our AI group at Siemens Healthineers is hiring interns to carry out projects like this. We typically target machine learning or medical imaging PhD students, but are open to a variety of backgrounds. Please feel free to reach out via email.

<comment><USER22> Physics PhDs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Clincal Center for Data Science at Massachusetts General Hospital (one of the top hospitals in the world) is hiring for a variety of positions. We have access to tons of medical data (imaging, NLP, time series), clinical domain expertise, and one of the largest GPU computing clusters. [https://www.ccds.io/careers/](https://www.ccds.io/careers/)

<comment><USER24> I'm curious, how is the compensation, e.g. compared to the lowest levels at [https://www.levels.fyi/](https://www.levels.fyi/) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It will be a great day for individuals everywhere when we automate away 75% of MD/DO jobs. It won't be a great day for the AAMC, and I also look forward to seeing how they respond.

<comment><USER26> The cotton gin increased demand for labor to use the tool. You have to think very carefully and subtly to even have a chance at predicting second order effects from more complex forms of automation.

<comment><USER25> I worked for a surgical robotics company as well as other medical device companies, and procedure lengths and surgical wait times both decreased in facilities with the device. Based on my experience the danger is in areas like "will we over-prescribe imaging tests even more than now?" but as to whether we'd need less doctors to treat the same number of patients, the answer is yes.

<comment><USER26> If imaging tests become higher quality and cheaper would the concept of over- prescription of them still make sense? (Asking sincerely, I don't work in medicine)

<comment><USER25> It is still dangerous, as x-rays are carcinogenic, and also the chance of false positives can adversely affect patient health.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And as my MD will tell you, voodoo! No one can ever replace me. No "robot." :-)</comment>


The Year in Math and Computer Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantas-year-in-math-and-computer-science-2018-20181221/ <comment><USER2> I love the way this is presented and how it makes it appealing for the common person

</comment><comment><USER3> Would be interested to hear the state of the art with quantum computing if anyone on HN can speak to it. Seems strange that people are getting recognized for using cryptography to ensure that some degree of "quantum ness" is being used in (quasi?) quantum computations?

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a gap between a programmer and a mathematician. In future, new generation of programmers are also mathematicians, i think.

</comment><comment><USER5> > But at times in 2018, even 30 could feel old

Thanks for rubbing it in. I don't know what he means here though?

Edit: Next paragraph clears it. Nevermind</comment>


Apple's Secret Star Project Revealed - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/25/apple-project-star-arm-details/ <comment><USER2> Very little actual information here - no sourcing, no specs, nothing. Is this all conjecture, or is any of this legit rumor?

</comment><comment><USER3> Everybody loves the Microsoft Surface, so it does make sense. Using the ARM like the Chromebook might turn the price down, so it might be at the 1000 USD range (with the 3x apple price tag applied to the Chromebook). The water resistant feature will be used to justify that price. The keyboard will be suboptimal.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's a computer?</comment>


U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers - <AUTHOR> http://beta-congress-colleges-fun.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ <comment><USER2> The title is incorrect. This is a ranking of the US news top-25 universities, with an additional tag noting the number of congressmembers associated with the school.

If actually ordered by congressional representation the top-3 would be:

1) Harvard

2) Yale

3) Georgetown

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, the priority of U.S. News and World Report reflects not just the popularity of that particular list, but that most of those schools have fairly canonical names that are easy to text-mine against ("text-mine" in the most crudest form, string matching and some regexing)...this project started out as an attempt to find out how many Congressmembers had reached various levels of higher education (e.g. B.A.,B.S.,MBA, etc) but the descriptions of educational events is too inconsistent in the Congress bioguide (that's even before considering how school names changed over the centuries).

So I decided to make the text-mining easier by just searching for well-known schools. It's possible that a few of the big public prestigious schools, such as University of Michigan, would be near the top. The raw text from each Congressmember's biography can be found in the repo:

[https://github.com/dannguyen/congress- colleges/tree/master/d...](https://github.com/dannguyen/congress- colleges/tree/master/data/raw/bioguide/text)

It's probably possible to (easily) automate the classification of how many Congressmembers served in the military or passed the bar...but I can save that for another day.

<comment><USER3> Instead of mining the bio guide, I would mine Wikipedia. There is a page listing all members of the current U.S. Congress [0], and that page links to each member's own Wikipedia page. Almost without exception, each current member's personal page names the universities the member graduated from in the info box.

So mine the membership list for the members' names and the URLs of their personal Wikipedia pages, then mine the info box on each personal page for university affiliations. The links will allow you to disambiguate universities with similar names.

Pages also exist listing the membership of almost all former U.S. Congresses, so you could repeat the process going back in time; it would be interesting to see how affiliations have changed and diversified (or not) over the years. A similar process would work for finding the academic affiliations of members of the U.S. Supreme Court and the president's cabinet, as well as of state governors; it might even work to find comparable information for some sets of foreign poliicians (e.g., British MPs or members of European Parliament).

(And I agree with arcanus; you should change your page to sort by the count of affiliated members of Congress, not U.S. News rank, as it's the former that is the information being presented, not the latter.)

0\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/114th_United_States_Congress](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/114th_United_States_Congress)

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't looked at extreme edge cases, but you're right, Wikipedia tends to have the right alma mater, included situations in which someone has only attended classes but isn't reported as actually matriculating.

It wouldn't require a big traversal of Wikipedia (though I imagine that would be easy enough)...the unitedstates Github repo, which is a semi-automated crowdsourced repo of Congress data, has all the historical Congressmembers as structured YAML, including their Wikipedia page (though I haven't counted to see how many have that attribute filled):

[https://github.com/unitedstates/congress- legislators](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators)

<comment><USER4> I was going to suggest looking at [http://everypolitician.org](http://everypolitician.org) but it seems like the US is ahead of the game in releasing this info. People from other countries that want to do similar might find it useful though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's interesting (and somewhat saddening) how the engineering schools on the list tend to be outliers in their rank to legislator ratio.

I would assume it's due to the general breakdown of majors at those schools, but it's still unfortunate that STEM majors don't seem to have a good pathway into political activism.

<comment><USER6> > it's still unfortunate that STEM majors don't seem to have a good pathway > into political activism.

How many STEM majors want to be involved in politics? That's a complete field/industry change (not the case for law majors).

<comment><USER7> This is true only in the United States. Not so in China

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this has some issues. For example I live in Ohio, so I noticed "Oberlin College" in the liberal arts section. But one of them is from Oberlin College in N.Y., where as the other two are from Ohio (Two different cities named Oberlin). I feel like they shouldn't be listed together - as far as I know, there is no association, and with such low numbers of people this seems like a bit of an issue.

<comment><USER9> > attended Oberlin College, Oberlin, N.Y., 1982-1986

[http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C00...](http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C001067)

I think that's a typo. There's no such city as "Oberlin, New York"

Wikipedia says Yvette Clarke went to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, just one of many examples of where the BioGuide text is inconsistent. It's only luck that Oberlin is a unique enough name that we can be relatively sure that the naive string matching refers to the one and only Oberlin College...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can think of reasons for a lot of the colleges that produce many more congress members than their rank might lead one to guess (Georgetown is in DC, the military academies seem to make sense).

But why is Wesleyan such an outlier? It is a fine school, of course, but so are many of the others. Do they have some powerhouse poli sci program I am unaware of?

<comment><USER11> Looks like there are many different Wesleyan Universities lumped into one?

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

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

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

<comment><USER10> Oh you think it is an error in that the algorithm was not able to tell them apart from "the" Wesleyan?

[http://www.wesleyan.edu/](http://www.wesleyan.edu/)

<comment><USER12> As a Wesleyan alumn I was very surprised to see it so high, but I think it's likely a scraping error—searching for "Wesleyan University" shows many hits for Ohio Wesleyan, Kentucky Wesleyan, Texas Wesleyan, and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Needs some error checking. John Hine didn't go to Rice, he went to Luther Rice which is a seminary in Georgia.

</comment><comment><USER14> So many fascinating possibilities to this data.

It would be interesting to see the next hundred schools. Places like Michigan State or Minnesota have so many students that it'd be interesting to see how many congress members they've produced.

It would also be interesting to see trends over time as well. Congress is more heavily tilted toward lawyers than it used to be 100 years ago. I wonder if that's part of the reason why the ivy league schools seem over-represented.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to see how well Georgetown does. Figure it's lots of children of legislators following in their parent's footsteps.

<comment><USER2> I think it is far more than just legacies. The proximity to capital hill and other government internships opens up many opportunities. Being regarded as the best school in D.C. means it is a natural talent feeder for government agencies.

It also has an extremely well regarded foreign service program.

<comment><USER16> Georgetown alum here and I can definitely vouch for this. While most students across the country would have to take an entire summer for an unpaid internship on The Hill while living in a very expensive city, our students can do this as an extra curricular during the academic year while living out of their dorm.

Plus if you're already doing political stuff in the city as a professional, the law school is not only the best in the area but one of the best in the country, which makes it a common choice for those in that line of work.

And let's not forget that this is just people affiliated with the university, which could include members of congress who teach classes at the school, not sure what the congressional roster is like right now but for example Madeline Albright teaches a very popular foreign service course.

<comment><USER2> Hoya Saxa ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Always great to not see your school listed :/

</comment><comment><USER18> Would be good to normalize by student population.

</comment><comment><USER19> No real surprises there. Except, personally, I didn't know the military academies were considered liberal arts schools.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sigh. USN&WR rankings are commonly gamed by the institutions.

It would be interesting to see fraternity / secret society affiliations. For example, in 2004 both major party candidates for POTUS were members of the same secret society (Skull and Bones of Yale). Now there's a choice for ya.

It's also odd to see the armed forces service academies listed as "liberal arts" colleges.

</comment><comment><USER21> Congressmen. Congressmen! Members of Congress, if you must. "Congressmembers" is an abomination. I suspect that most female members of Congress would agree.

Edit: I agree with Michael. If we're going to use a neologism, let's use "congresscritter", because it correctly implies that they are slimy and disgusting creatures.

<comment><USER22> Why do you care so much? Why not err on the side of making non-males feel welcome? Isn't that more important than nice-sounding words?

<comment><USER23> "Why not err on the side of making non-males feel welcome? Isn't that more important than nice-sounding words?"

That's a false dichotomy. "Members of congress" is also gender neutral and doesn't require making a ridiculous new word.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favourite podcasts? - <AUTHOR> What are the daily/weekly podcasts you listen? <comment><USER2> A Way with Words, Q&A language and linguistics [https://waywordradio.org](https://waywordradio.org)

BBC From Our Own Correspondent [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qjlq](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qjlq)

Motherfoclóir, Irish linguistics and language [https://www.headstuff.org/motherfocloir/](https://www.headstuff.org/motherfocloir/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The John Batchellor Show - I whish I knew about this show earlier Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - History EconTalk - Haykian economist Freakonomics - Economics popsci Reason Podcast - Libertanian take on news, WSJ opinion: Potomac Watch - Very sound and succinct take on things This American Life - Excellent when focusing on 'everyday' situations/stories without. Gilbert Gottfrieds Amazing Podcast - Gilbert.. Delingpole - Quirky serial thought criminal in the new UK. Spycast - From the International Spy Museum Security Now - Computer security

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to listen to fewer podcasts. In my work day I have a few hours most days that don't require much concentration and it's easy to feel that I could "fill" the time with podcasts. But after going through a whole bunch of podcasts from all over the political spectrum, science, history, entertainment, music, drama and comedy I've determined that podcasts generally just detract from my life more than they give to it.

I find podcasts like Radiolab and Serial to be particularly egregious examples of time sinks. They're produced with a narrative arc much like Netflix shows; they keep you "on the edge of your seat" but at the end I'm left with one less hour in my day and not much else to show for it. The same is true for news podcasts. I can listen to new podcasts all day and know exactly what different budget proposals or farm bills contain but what do I really _do_ with that information, how does it really impact my life? In short, I think the vast majority of podcasts are useful as fleeting entertainment and arn't much use beyond that, regardless of content. Maybe it's just my learning style though.

That said, Podcasts I regularly listen to:

Chapo Trap House - cynical news coverage + comedy from socialists

Intercepted - Top notch journalism

Deconstructed - Also top notch journalism

Vox's The Weeds - deep dive policy wonk stuff from neoliberals

NYT The Daily - Coverage of one timely news topic each day

Democracy Now - More Top notch liberal journalism

<comment><USER5> What playback speed do you listen to your podcasts on? 1.1x saves you 12 minutes on the hour.

I use PocketCasts on Android, which handles the variable playspeed well and also has a neat silence trimming feature that can accumulate hours of saved time.

<comment><USER6> I think playback speed can mask the problem the OP is describing. There are effectively an unlimited number of these programs. Someone cutting the time by 10-40% is often just going to fill up the remaining time with more of the same.

The other consequence of compressing time is the podcast requires more concentration. If it's not too valuable it might be less of a waste of time to listen slowly enough that another activity can be done without missing much.

The best solution is to only listen to great shows that your future self will approve of, which isn't easily done. :)

(And yes, Pocket Casts is great at saving time - I've shaved off weeks at this point.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Working Songwriter with Joe Pug.

A series of interviews with touring singer/songwriters.

Parallels to software and business: hustle and grinding for a desired way of life, cultivating a skill over time, building a product that people will pay for in an increasingly saturated market, dealing with imposter syndrome and the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Anyone with interests in both songwriting and software will enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1\. Tim Ferriss Show 2\. Exponent (Stratechery's podcast) 3\. Ezra Klein Show 4\. Recode / Decode 5\. a16z's podcast 6\. Dear Sugar 7\. Techmeme's new daily podcast

</comment><comment><USER9> How I Built This - [https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built- this](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this)

The Tim Ferriss Show - [https://tim.blog/podcast/](https://tim.blog/podcast/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I' ve recently discovered Radiotopia and expanded my podcasts list from here ( Criminal - 99% invisible - Modern love ) it's a bit of fresh air

</comment><comment><USER11> Tim Ferries, James Altucher, NPR: How I built this?, NPR: TED radio hour. I listen to them while travelling to and from work.

</comment><comment><USER12> Freakonomics Planet Money Fresh Air Tim Feriss

</comment><comment><USER13> \- No Such Thing As Fish

\- Philosophy Bites

\- Radiolab

\- HBR Ideacast

\- Intelligence Squared

</comment><comment><USER14> Indiehackers, Inside The Hive (the tech episodes, not the Trump-bashing ones), Recode Decode with Kara Swisher</comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations for website monitoring tools - <AUTHOR>

Having been burnt this week by portions of our website going dark, and us not noticing for several hours, I'm after a service to do periodic health checks of our website; check various pages are up & serving appropriate content; then email/SMS me if not.
A quick google offers no end of people offering such services, but I can't find any useful comparisons of features or reliability, so I thought I'd try the combined wisdom of HN.
From my brief review http://siteimprove.co.uk look fairly reputable, but a touch more expensive than I'd expected.
Personally, UK-based sites are preferred, but I'm interested in all recommendations. <comment><USER2> You could try something like Nagios: <http://www.nagios.org/>. It's not a remote service, you have to install and configure it, but it's wonderful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly want to work up to something like that, but at the moment I have enough on my plate!

I really want something reliable where I can just pay someone to do this for me, so I don't have to worry about it.</comment></comment>


Library of Congress Twitter Archive White Paper [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/files/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> >> The Library has not yet provided researchers access to the archive. Currently, executing a single search of just the fixed 2006-2010 archive on the Library's systems could take 24 hours. This is an inadequate situation in which to begin offering access to researchers, as it so severely limits the number of possible searches.</comment>


Advice for First Time Founders - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/advice-for-first-time-founders/ <comment><USER2> The one thing I have learnt is it is never too early to fire. The only exception is if you haven't been clear with your expectations.

The one counterintuitive piece of advice is don't overpay (I made this mistake in version 1 of my company). Pay above the average the employee could earn elsewhere, but not too much over.

You want to pay enough that no one leaves to get a pay rise, but not so much that they can't get a similar salary elsewhere. A smart unhappy employee that feels they can't leave can cause a lot of damage in ways that are hard to identify and fix.

Edit. I think I was unclear about what I meant by average pay - it is not the average for the job title, but the average the employee could earn in the industry. These two numbers are close most of the time, but with high performers they will be significantly different.

<comment><USER3> I hope that your philosophy of compensation is well understood by your employees. I would hate to be an employee who goes over and above work wise in such a setup.

<comment><USER4> Pay in bonuses rather than salary, then. It's fairly common for top performers in both finance and big-tech for performance bonuses to equal or surpass one's base salary. That connects compensation to results, and makes it clear that you're being paid _because_ you went over and above rather than because your employer doesn't know what market rate is.

<comment><USER2> The problem with bonuses is people just concentrate on whatever earns the bonus, not on what is best for the business. Bonuses work well when the metrics are able to be measured accurately, but if not they can create a lot of unproductive behaviour (like sucking up to the boss).

<comment><USER5> But isn't that a symptom of not being able to correctly identify what those metrics should be?

I imagine that even actions that are somewhat indirectly associated with benefitting the entire business should be enumerable in some way and prioritized.

I'm not saying it's easy (how do you prioritize community engagement vs new product development vs how those impact the business short and long term).

But at the end of the day, you'll know best how you value those for your org, and how you want to rank them (along with the employee's actual execution of said goal), but sorting by a percentage of income instead of fixed amounts is probably the best course.

Of course, my armchair quarterbacking is a lot easier than actually doing it :)

<comment><USER6> I recommend _Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations_ [0] to anyone who decides to start tinkering with bonus schemes.

It's a short, sharp, quite readable explanation of why tying reward & punishment to metrics of difficult-to-observe work tends to quickly become destructive.

[0] [http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html](http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A good way to gauge a founder's (first-time founder) likelihood of success is to see how receptive they are to this list of advice. As a contract developer, I find that many many founders consider themselves the exception to the points listed in the original article which is a huge red flag. The biggest exception is probably listening to customers - I find a lot of founders insist they have to 'educate' customers which basically never works. I wrote about it at length here: [https://www.turbo360.co/blog/startup-red-flags- syzdan](https://www.turbo360.co/blog/startup-red-flags-syzdan)

<comment><USER8> Is the link supposed to be to a specific post? I just see a list of posts so I'm not sure where to read more about what you mean to share.

<comment><USER9> On mobile you only see the menu, the responsive layout hides the actual article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I want to echo the advice about interns from David Wind. I have hired a few interns. While relatively cheap, which is attractive at an early stage, they took up a lot of my time and most of their work couldn't be used in the end. The latter was probably my fault, but the reality is that I didn't have the time to properly train/mentor them. It is better to go without interns at least in the early stages in my experience.

<comment><USER11> Interns are great for practicing how to manage, but I agree, as anything beyond that, don't expect much.

<comment><USER12> I think internships should be about both giving and taking. Not just simply objects to practice on. If a startup doesn't have the time and money to invest in interns no matter what the payoff is, they probably shouldn't as it is wasting time on both sides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Aesthetics really matter in the early stage. Spend time and /or money early on nailing a cool logo and beautiful slide template. It really matters. Even copying other beautiful stuff is fine. For getting our first 3/10/100 clients, the fact that we looked and sounded totally pro meant a lot. We seemed like a larger more innovative company because of it._

Great advice all round but the above really spoke to me. Most advice talks about failing fast, getting to market asap etc. It's just as important to make sure what you DO ship / put out there is polished.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Venture investors want to hear crazy ideas, not pragmatic plans. When I first pitched investors, I was talking about how we would add customers slowly at first, because that's how enterprise SaaS works. Honesty is always a good policy. But those pitches did not go well._

I'd love to hear investors' thoughts on this one. lpolovets, are you around?

<comment><USER15> Each investor is different, but I personally think the ideal pitch is a big vision combined with a pragmatic plan for the first couple of years. If the vision is not that big, then that won't excite most (Silicon Valley) investors.

However, "big vision" is not the same as "crazy vision." A big vision could be "we're going to replace an old incumbent in a $5b industry." A crazy vision could be "we're going to build an amazing piece of technology that very few people think is possible." The crazy vision only works if you have _a lot_ of credibility. One of the only personal examples I have of backing a crazy vision is with Rigetti Quantum Computing (a YC company). The founder, Chad Rigetti, set out to build a quantum computer from the ground up. This is an extremely ambitious goal, but when I spoke to a few Caltech quantum physicists, they said that Chad was one of the 2-3 best people in the world for building a QC. That was a very strong testimonial.

On the planning side, I prefer pragmatic plans and start rolling my eyes if someone's plans sound completely unrealistic. I've seen so many pitch decks with a predicted revenue ramp up that looks like: "$500k sales this year, $4m next year, and $50m in year 3." I've been investing for five years and I've never personally seen a company ramp up that quickly.

What I do want to see though is that if customer acquisition is slow/deliberate, then there's a good reason for that.

Example of a good reason: "I'm working with 3 pilot customers for the next 6 months and focusing on learning and iteration and understanding exactly where their biggest pain points are. I'm intentionally not focused on getting new customers."

Example of a poor reason: "I'm not good at sales but don't want to hire anyone because I think salespeople are overrated. I expect to get 3 pilot customers by myself in the next 6 months, and I think that should be enough to make investors happy."

On an unrelated note, I'm happy to answer any other questions folks have. My background is that I was a sw engineer for 10 years, then moved to seed stage investing about 5 years ago.

<comment><USER16> Hi lpolovets,

In the world of massive, multi 100 million exits where does a more 'humble' single digit Million exit's it with you and investors?

<comment><USER15> TLDR: if you aim for 100x and achieve a 3x, that won't affect my fund much financially but I'll be very happy for you and your team. But if you initially aim for a 3x then I can't invest in the first place based on my portfolio model.

For a good VC fund, a typical portfolio might look something like 30 investments -> 11 fail, 10 return 1x, 6 return 5x, 2 return 15x, and 1 returns 50x. That's a 4x return overall, but most of that return is concentrated in the top 10% of companies. So the investing model only works if a VC fund keeps swinging for the 50x return and occasionally succeeds.

The way I would frame exits from my perspective is that I need to keep investing in companies with 50x potential so that hopefully at least one will reach that level during a fund's lifecycle. But along that path, a lot of companies will predictably exit for 5x or 1x or 0x. Those exits don't have a huge impact on my fund's financial returns, but the companies are still run by people who I like and believe in, and the ideas those people worked on are ones that we (and their employees) believed in. So if a company exits for 0x everyone is bummed on behalf of the founders and their team who went all-in. But if the founders aimed at 50x and came out with 2x I am very happy for them personally. I don't get upset at all that not every exit is a 50x because that would be like always betting on 17 in roulette and being upset every time a different number pops up. That's not how the statistical distribution works. What would bum me out is if someone is clearly on track for a 10x or 50x outcome, but then sells at 2x or 4x because that's good enough for them.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the detailed reply. Really clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a lot of really good advice in there... perhaps almost too much in the sense that it's easy to skip the ones you should pay attention to, and nod along to the ones that reinforce your existing idea of what advice you need. Putting myself in my wife's shoes for a moment, I'm pretty sure she'd say I need to listen to the advice on getting more sleep (I'm typing this at 1am in the UK). In fact, thinking about it, I am going to call it a night now!

I'm a first-time founder, and lucky enough that our company (Overleaf [1]) has been going for five years now. If you haven't had enough of the advice for one evening, you can read my take on it here: [https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting- on-t...](https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-the- founding-growth-and-maturing-of-overleaf/)

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)

<comment><USER8> My wife also added to the list the need to make love with her more often ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > I thought I should be like Elon Musk and tried working 100h a week and > sleeping under my desk. I learned that in fact I'm not Elon Musk and found > myself on the brink of a burnout a couple times.

Not even Elon Musk is Elon Musk. He is doing a lot of things right, very few entrepreneurs in the world are as good as him.

However, checking and writing emails at all times while playing with your kids and doing things in parallel isn't smart.

As a great entepreneur you also need to be excellent in mindfulness, not being that manifests in poor private life quality (women, kids, friends), not to mention exercise. Musk mentioned himself that he doesn't know much about these things.

I wonder what he came up with if became an expert in these things.

> Learning how to create FOMO is the most important negotiating dynamic you > can learn. FOMO = fear of missing out.

Needs to be added that you need traction or big social proof to create fomo, otherwise you'll see founders running around trying to create fomo with a few hundred users, no term sheets, no revenue.

<comment><USER19> > As a great entepreneur you also need to be excellent in mindfulness, not > being that manifests in poor private life quality (women, kids, friends)

Women can be great entrepreneurs as well.

<comment><USER20> Women can also be great friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _A. The importance of good communication with potential and existing investors. Done effectively it significantly increases your chances of keeping the company funded, and therefore of success. Done terribly it makes you borderline un-fundable.

I learned it through being lashed by PG.

It helped by creating an open dialogue between our investors and us, and drove our focus and prioritization on the right things at the right time._

What does good communication look like? How about bad communication?

<comment><USER22> (I wrote that answer)

A few principles that may be useful:

\- have a regular cadence of communicating, usually monthly, usually he last day of the month

\- have a standard format and stick to it

\- numbers are better than words

\- preview the updates where you uncover scary stuff over the phone / in person before sending an update

\- always include an ask

<comment><USER23> What do you mean by 'always include an ask'? Is that to keep them engaged by having some information out of them?

<comment><USER24> You should always think about how your investors can help you, and ask them for it.

It's about engagement, sure. But it's also about realizing that you need to better leverage your network and supporters. Investors can't help you if they don't know what you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My only advice to anyone founding a company

Learn from the mistakes of others. Your startup won't live long enough to make them all.

</comment><comment><USER26> While reading the article on the back of my mind I'm thinking that 99% of founders that read & follow those advices will still fail. But why? Why is the failure rate for startups so high?

and why is the failure rate for starting a bootstrapped revenue generating business much lower?

<comment><USER27> > Why is the failure rate for startups so high?

\- product market fit

\- timing

\- founder conflicts

\- better funded competition

\- bad management

<comment><USER28> You forgot a very important factor many people fail to account for: a major inflection point or what Bill Gates characterizes as "eventually, the market will turn left".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Fire quickly but take responsibility!

Don't spend months torturing an employee that you know is very unlikely to work out. Fire them quickly and compensate them for the situation you find yourselves in.

New hires should be be given 3 months of severance. Old hires should be given 6-18 months, depending on how long they've worked at the company.

Take all that time, energy, and money you were going to spend on the Performance Improvement Plan and hand it to the employee on their way out. They will thank you for it.

It's not just a gentler and kinder way to behave, it's also saves money and improves productivity.

<comment><USER30> How is that supposed to help team morale?

Perhaps it's just me talking, but I _like_ my work. I _like_ my co-workers. I have no kids nor debt, and I would be pretty sad working at a place that _says_ that they want to fire quickly.

The hiring process sucks, and employees are _human beings_. Perhaps you mean to say that you should be fully transparent when someone underperforms? If that's the case, I would agree with you. No need to beat around the bushes, just be honest.

<comment><USER31> Not firing quickly means you fire slow. Which means the person who should be let go continues to stick around and potentially cause problems for the rest of the people. This can be just as sad, if not more so, for the other employees who are impacted by what the person who should be fired continues to do.

Firing quickly doesn't mean not to offer regular feedback, or not letting people improve, or not setting expectations well, or not being transparent. It means that it's better to rip the bandaid off instead of picking at it weeks or month ignoring the employee with the hope that things will turn around.

<comment><USER30> Oh well, in that case it kinds of makes sense, as long as you are also transparent during the hiring process that this is the state of affairs in your company.

I guess I jumped to conclusions too quickly, but I can see how firing fast could _maybe_ work paired with regular feedback to avoid surprises. I don't think it could work for everyone (particularly parents with young children), but under certain circumstances what you say probably makes sense.

<comment><USER31> If you are concerned about the impact of firing an employee with other financial responsibilities (not sure why specifically having young children factors into it anymore than any other responsibility), that is solved with a severance package, which is often still cheaper than keeping an underperforming or toxic employee around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I liked the advice by Garros Li – Edusight (IK12)

> 1\. If you plan on having cofounders, you need to determine how decisions > will be made before starting a company together. Titles and vague > "roles/responsibilities" won't be enough. Play out scenarios to hash out > decisions and set the right expectations, ask tough questions, and don't let > ego get in the way.

It got me thinking of something like the 'Co-founder compatibility test'

I wonder if anyone already has a good set of example scenarios and questions to reveal this compatibility/incompatibility between people in decision making / expectations / virtues. Many questions could come from challenging moments with co-founders and teammates in one's own experience. I can think of a few already.

If we compiled a list of these types of questions and scenarios, could they be used as a good test of compatibility, useful to at least some initial degree to assess potential partnerships in real life and over the internet.

</comment><comment><USER33> > [...] we thought paying more to get experienced people wasn't worth it.

> we thought because we knew how to code that we didn't need senior

> engineers [...] Shouldn't we just be able to teach ourselves?

> The answer was maybe, but with a lot of wasted time along the way.

A lot of startups make this mistake from what I can see

</comment><comment><USER34> >A cofounder who compliments you was a saving grace for me.

I am sure he meant "complements you"

<comment><USER35> It's also nice when the compliment you :)

<comment><USER34> I am sure you meant when "they" compliment you ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Many founders talking about hiring or firing employees. I'm not from US, so I wanna ask How long trial period do startups offer? Do they pay severance package during/after trial and how much?

<comment><USER33> It is very uncommon in US to have trial periods. Alternate interpretation: since in most states employment is at-will and the company can fire you anytime for any or no reason, basically your entire employment can be considered a trial period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> From the article: "The biggest responsibility of a founder is making the right decisions."

No shit?

</comment><comment><USER38> Wonder when we'll stop hyping the stupid startup culture

<comment><USER39> That will never happen on hacker news, certainly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thanks! Some great advice in there. Bookface, very clever ;)</comment>


Windows 10 Starts Charging for Missing Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/08/05/windows-10-charging/

<comment><USER2> I was under the impression that DVD playback was removed back when Windows 8 came out. If so, why is this just getting noticed now?

<comment><USER3> Was is it being charged for to download and use though?

<comment><USER4> looks like it:

[http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/04/1557239/windows-8-wo...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/04/1557239/windows-8-wont- play-dvds-unless-you-pay-for-the-media-center-pack)

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dvd-playback- help](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dvd-playback-help)</comment></comment></comment>


Drowning in Light (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/drowning-in-light <comment><USER2> The article talks about technological solutions (e.g. smart grids that determine where light is actually needed) as well as legislation. I have to say that I'm not confident that the lighting industry will self-police, except in the sense of offering improved energy efficiencies (I think there are analogies with internet-of-things and security here).

> If nothing else, communities may take the matter into their own hands

A good UK example of community-driven efforts is the Campaign for Dark Skies [1]. This is a force multiplier for individual community efforts, offering resources and support for local initiatives. As a sometimes amateur star- gazer, I support their efforts whenever I can. Because it is something special to see the non-augmented Milky Way, even if it is less colourful and detailed than the long-exposure shots that crop up everywhere

[1] [http://www.cpre.org.uk/what-we-do/countryside/dark- skies](http://www.cpre.org.uk/what-we-do/countryside/dark-skies)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is nothing better than being at a place with low light pollution and seeing something like this: [http://theartofnight.com/](http://theartofnight.com/)

If you're interested in finding places with low light pollution, check here: [https://www.lightpollutionmap.info](https://www.lightpollutionmap.info)

<comment><USER4> > There is nothing better than being at a place with low light pollution and > seeing something like this.

As far I understand, you can never see with the naked eyes something similar to a long exposure photo. Sure you can get a better outline of the Milky way but you'll never see something that is the result of collecting photons during minutes or hours.

<comment><USER3> Yes, absolutely, but just reducing the amount of light pollution around you and looking up in the sky is a wildly different experience than, say, looking up somewhere close to a city.

<comment><USER5> And I would posit that laying on your back with open attention to the night sky in a place free from light pollution is orders of magnitude more moving than any long-exposure photograph. It's not just the visuals, but the grander sense of being witness to the majesty of where we actually are on this planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of you may be in a position to come compare and contrast

[http://oregonstarparty.org/](http://oregonstarparty.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> When did inset quotes of the article itself begin to be placed after the text quoted? I feel like this is a change from what I expect: that inset quotes are optional, interesting asides that add value to the article. Not word-for-word copy-pastes of what I just read.

Has this changed? I feel like the approach taken in this article is becoming more common and I kind of hate it. But I also wonder if it's just my mind playing tricks on me. If it is a change, is it due to digital publishing constraints or does it serve some purpose or audience that I can't envision?

<comment><USER8> When? Well for one, I remember seeing this in desktop publishing projects in the 1990s :-)

<comment><USER7> Ok, then it's purely my aging brain playing tricks on me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been thinking about light a lot lately. I've been working on a photonic computer, however I've been realizing the importance of light for our existence. Your perception is largely light based and strangely enough all religions draw a parallel between light and their respective God/s.

I'm a religious person but I found this Bible quote to be a good summary of the book in John 5

"This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all."

TL;DR "We spoke to Jesus and he said the same thing: God is light".

This makes sense considering how light or heat was the thing that turned inorganic chemistry into organic chemistry.

<comment><USER10> I know what you meant, but organic chemistry is distinguished by a carbon nucleus. The chemistry of life is called biochemistry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _the average citizen of Babylon would have had to work a total of 41 hours > to buy enough lamp oil to equal a 75-watt light bulb burning for one hour. > At the time of the American Revolution, a colonial would have been able to > purchase the same amount of light, in the form of candles, for about five > hour's worth of work_

Or either of them could have found a tree, broken off some wood, and set it on fire?

<comment><USER12> That works the first time. Then the tree is gone.</comment></comment>


Google to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/google-wants-to-phase-out-support-for-third-party-cookies-in-chrome-within-two-years/ <comment><USER2> Good, as far as those cookies go, but also, as usual from Google, extremely self-serving, because the tech giant itself will just keep tracking us more than ever before while trying to restrict how much others can do the same. They keep building their moats against "external bad guys", but the bad king that is Google just keeps expanding its power. I wonder when a backlash by other major internet companies against chrome itself will start being the case.

<comment><USER3> They will make Microsoft look saintly

<comment><USER2> I think they almost already do. Google is still coasting off a well built reputation for simple, good, user-friendly web services (search and email mainly) that for most internet users is all they ever see of Google,, thus thinking there isn't anything else that's a problem. Most of these same users don't even really appreciate just how much tracking of their lives the company does behind the scenes. They might read about it or glimpse parts of it here and there and frown a bit, but the completeness of the surveillance doesn't fully register I think. And besides, convenience, which always makes uncomfortable things easier to forget.

Thus, its uglier side doesn't gain as much of the attention it deserves. Microsoft never had quite that same good and simple reputation and enough people had enough problems with Windows platforms right from the beginning to really hate the company as soon as they had enough of a reason to from the media. Microsoft can be shitty too, but Google is much more involved in most people's daily lives in some dangerous ways.

<comment><USER4> Recently Microsoft forced millions of github users to either deanonymize using 2fa or get annoyed by their forced device verification. It was pure trolling for some: evil hackers can lock you out of your accounts with unaccessible email1!!!, so we'll lock you out first __* MS-trollface.jpg __*. So MS is worse at the moment, they add palpable damage.

Google at least just continues their thing which already have simple countermeasures like not using their search, blocking their web-trackers with extensions and disabling location-tracking in options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> so they'll just track users via Chrome, Android, Google DNS, etc

reducing third party cookies is welcome but this just seems like a move to protect their ad revenue

<comment><USER6> Yup... also, it rules out competition.

They're very good lately at PR. the pr released about not using the double Irish Dutch sandwich tax route read like something good. In reality the route is not a valid route anymore since this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is already a setting in Chrome that allows you to disable third party cookies, but it's buried pretty deep and a bit tricky to find.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read the article, I don't understand if session tokens are included in this. If so, how will things like logged in UX work?

<comment><USER9> Those are usually first party. Their blog post is a better source and talks about use cases they're addressing with other tech including SSO</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Command-line JavaScript beautifiers? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any javascript beautifiers that don't themselves javascript to run and can be run from the command line? <comment><USER2> The textmate editor executes a small python script when you select the 'reformat Javascript' menu item.

[https://github.com/beautify-web/js-beautify](https://github.com/beautify- web/js-beautify)

test only [http://jsbeautifier.org/](http://jsbeautifier.org/)</comment>


Jack Welch has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/02/jack-welch-obit-ge.html <comment><USER2> My old boss, before he retired a year ago, was heavily invested in G.E. stock throughout his career at the recommendation of his Edward Jones financial advisor. I am pretty sad about his financial situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Champion of "Rank & Yank"

</comment><comment><USER4> Wikipedia:

Welch identifies politically as a Republican.He has stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis".Yet, he has said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not...because the world wants these products".

<comment><USER5> Although it was long after Jack left GE (and there is evidence most of GEs success was a facade [1], with poor management decisions abound), GE's gas turbine business (for electrical generation, not aircraft) was slaughtered by the rapid decline in cost for renewables along with the firm wagering on the gas business versus their renewables division [2] [3].

Regarding the beliefs of climate change: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-general-electric- ris...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-general-electric-rise-and- downfall/) (Charting GE's Historic Rise and Tortured Downfall)

[2] [https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2019/07/ge- multi-...](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2019/07/ge-multi- billion-dollar-mistake/) (How slow action on clean energy cost GE billions of dollars)

[3] [https://ieefa.org/ieefa-report-ge-made-a-massive-bet-on- the-...](https://ieefa.org/ieefa-report-ge-made-a-massive-bet-on-the-future- of-natural-gas-and-thermal-coal-and-lost/) (IEEFA report: GE made a massive bet on the future of natural gas and thermal coal, and lost: Investors lost hundreds of billions by GE's misreading of the energy transition)</comment></comment>


The way GitHub helped Erlang and the way Erlang helped GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/erlang-and-github

<comment><USER2> Sort of a misleading title, as it's actually a fairly wide-ranging interview with one of the Github guys, and an Erlang guy from Ericsson.

<comment><USER3> If you search the page for "You mentioned you used Erlang in GitHub." and click the link, it'll fast-forward the video right to where they they talk about what's mentioned in the title.

<comment><USER2> I thought the whole thing was interesting, and read it all. I don't have time for videos, generally.</comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-elite-discuss-journalists-having-too-much-power-in-private-app <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718317)

</comment><comment><USER3> If ever there was a one sided article, it was this. Doesn't even talk about the nuances of the problems. Journalists are like how dare tech people are criticizing us - but it is totally ok to do it the other way round. The difference now though is, because of social media, prominent tech personalities have much bigger audiences.

Sometimes I am thankful like services like Twitter and Facebook exists since these types of biases are for everyone to see and make independent calls on. Before, it would have been like whatever NYTimes said would be taken as the truth as there would have been no platform available to present your pov.

<comment><USER4> If I took what Facebook presents to me through my feed as a news source to influence my POV, I might believe that Obama is a secret Muslim, or that Trump was done away with years ago, and is instead an alien, or that Helen Hunt, the actress, is involved in international child trafficking, or perhaps that COVID-19 was put in place to control the world's population. In my experience, all Facebook does is reveal and feed upon people's worst needs, desires, fears. I'll take the NY Times over this any day of the week.

<comment><USER5> It's not like the NYTs doesn't have a history of spreading unfounded 'conspiracy theories' too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September_2002_claims)

In terms of damage done to society, I think all the examples you list combined still pale in comparison to that single example.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps. The NYT is one source published daily. Facebook has millions of conversations happening among friends and loose connections happening daily about supposed conspiracy theories. I propose that the scale that results from the viral nature of this distribution dwarfs what the NYT could possibly do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > On Wednesday night, the topic of conversation was Lorenz herself, who had > been listening earlier in the conversation but left partway through. After > she left, the participants began discussing whether Lorenz was playing "the > woman card" when speaking out about her harassment following a Twitter > altercation with Srinivasan.

> "You can't fucking hit somebody, attack them and just say, 'Hey, I have > ovaries and therefore, you can't fight back,'" Felicia Horowitz, founder of > the Horowitz Family Foundation and wife of Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben > Horowitz, said.

[...]

> "Is Taylor afraid of a brown man on the street? Then she shouldn't be afraid > of a brown man in Clubhouse," Srinivasan said. "I have literally done > nothing other than one previous tweet. Number one, right? So the whole, you > know, talking about tweeting as you know, harassment—completely > illegitimate, completely wrong, completely fabricated and just false."

[...]

> "When it comes to our industry, there's a really, really toxic dynamic that > exists right now," Nait Jones, an Andreessen Horowitz VC, said on the call > while speaking about recent reports about abuse in the tech industry. > "Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also > created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many > reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing > tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially > around protecting vulnerable people."

1\. The lack of self awareness is incredible.

2\. What happened to us? Were people always this nasty and identitarian?

<comment><USER7> I fail to see how any of the quotes you provided are nasty or lack self- awareness.

<comment><USER8> (capital M, T) Me Too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is missing some of the critical context that lead to this from Twitter.

Summarized here: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat- bet...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-between- Taylor-Lorenz-and-Balaji-S-Srinivasan-really-about)

I think Taylor comes across extremely negatively here and the spin in this Vice article just makes it worse.

Basically Taylor puts up a mean tweet about the Away CEO's comments on the media (without actually engaging in the content of those comments).

Balaji responds to the tweet with the same wording Taylor used, but directed at Taylor herself (to point out the meanness).

Taylor tweets a cropped response image of only Balaji's response and plays victim, rallying media people behind her (things escalate) - eventually they surreptitiously record this clubhouse conversation and write a hit piece without taking any responsibility for anything.

It's all very high school and the journalists come across extremely negatively to me. If anything this proves Balaji's point.

I should spend less time on Twitter.

<comment><USER10> The Quora piece contains a lot of conjecture on the part of the author, who clearly has an ax to grind with the media. If you don't believe the conspiracy that "the Verge media outlet is specifically targeting female founders" the argument completely falls apart.

If you read the original Away article, Korey clearly crossed multiple lines and was creating a toxic work environment. As a tech worker, I think its right and good for people covering tech to "call out" this sort of revisionist history.

<comment><USER9> I don't disagree that the original Away article showed bad behavior.

Both things can be true though, the slack messages/toxic environment from Korey in that first article can be bad _and_ it can be wrong for Taylor to mean tweet without addressing the content of any of Korey's points about the media (which are valid), and everything Lorenz did to escalate and mislead from there can be wrong too.

For clarity the media comments Korey wrote that kicked this recent thing off are separate from that original article.

I have even less confidence that the original Away article is entirely true now given the journalist behavior around this second issue.

<comment><USER10> I'm unsure how the supposed bad behavior on Taylor's part reduces your confidence in the original Away article, which was written by a completely separate journalist, but I'm sure you have a good reason to make such an inference.

I fundamentally believe we are approaching this incident from fundamentally different perspectives. I saw Taylor's original tweet as a form of "correcting the record" in response to Korey's obvious spin on the whole thing, rather than trying to open a debate on media-tech relations (which is what it became ultimately due to Balaji's derailment). It's unfortunate that Taylor's tweet contained incorrect information on Korey's current job status, but that appeared to be a minor issue to me, but in other contexts could be construed as "misleading". You seem to be of the perspective that this incident is a symptom of a larger, systemic issue in journalism, an issue I have a lot of sympathy towards, so by all means go off.

<comment><USER9> I think Taylor could have engaged directly on the content of what Steph said, as well as point out the context from the previous article that could be a potential cause of motivated reasoning to keep in mind when considering Steph's arguments.

That would have been professional and reasonable.

The tweet Taylor wrote was neither of those things and proved Korey's point more than if Taylor had said nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is a great example of the phenomenon being discussed. The article intentionally misleads the reader and distorts statements. For example, look at the selective omission from Nait Jones statement. They were clearly trying to portray him as categorically opposed to journalists reporting on abuse.

>"When it comes to our industry, there's a really, really toxic dynamic that exists right now,"

 _Next sentence omitted: There were very very impactfull stories about abuse inside fast growing tech companies, that proved to be very valuable stories, that stopped that abuse from happening._

>"Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around protecting vulnerable people."

</comment><comment><USER12> Every VC nerd tweeting about Clubhouse reminds me of the Robert Scoble influencer strategy for the Google Glass.

<comment><USER13> This is one of the best takes I've seen. Ahh....Scoble....I remember those days.

<comment><USER14> I think the peek was an episode essentially about cut-and-paste and on the web which had something to do with Ray Ozzie on the Gilmore Gang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The writer of this article is a _journalist_ , so the portrayal may be less than fair.

That being said, and speaking generally (not about VCs or rich people in particular), something is going terribly wrong when a private person can be publicly shamed in the press 15 years from now for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable _today_ , and lose their job as a result.

<comment><USER8> So as long as you do bad shit and get away with it for 15 years no one should judge you for it?

<comment><USER16> Not what the OP said. Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto laws are bad and specifically prohibits their passage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States)

<comment><USER17> > Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto laws are bad and > specifically prohibits their passage.

 _Ex post facto_ is a term of art in criminal law; and the prohibition has everything to do with the type of consequences that are uniquely applied in the criminal context.

It does not reflect a general rule that there is no liability for wrongs determined after-the-fact, but is a special exception to the general rule that such liability is acceptable.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but it is a recognition that there is a certain general unfairness to holding someone to account for something which society found perfectly fine at the time it took place only to be made wrong after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet. It is an entertainment business and behaves like an entertainment business, which means that the participants are incentivized to create buzz, etc.

If your news sources are primarily these, then you're missing out on a lot of actionable information. All that stuff is now in private conversations because the general audience is gotcha-obsessed. P

<comment><USER19> > The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional > information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers > since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet.

Eh, not so much. That's not much different than saying that journalism has been out-competed by the Facebook News Feed. It might be true that they've "outcompeted" journalism by pulling the rug out from under its revenue model, but they certainly _haven 't_ out-competed it from an information-delivery perspective.

Blogs/social media is full of grossly unreliable information, for the most part due to the lack of professional journalistic standards. If they're amateur, then they have greatly reduced coverage due to lack of time and experience. If they're professional, then they've either recreated traditional journalism (with all the same difficulties) or they exist explicitly as PR to push some agenda. I'm reminded of the hordes or mattress review blogs that are mostly owned by or tacking kickbacks from some mattress company or other (see [https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper- blogg...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers- lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars)).

The idea that blogs could replace journalism is a dated, idealistic, early-00s idea. The best they ever managed to consistently do was to was replicate the hot air of the opinion pages. Sure, occasionally amateur blog gets a scoop, but they're relatively few and far between, separated by chasms of noise.

<comment><USER18> In the following sentence from my original post, I intended for the (now) highlighted section to have semantic significance:

> he kind of journalism _that these people do_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing I noticed when browsing the twitter thread where Taylor Lorenz tweeted about Balaji Srinivasan was the consistency of responses. Every single response from a verified journalist defended Lorenz and condemned the Srinivasan tweet, and every single response from a tech person defended Srinivasan and pointed to Lorenzs own tweet about Stephanie Korey.

As far as I saw, neither side engaged with the other's arguments, and the battle lines were drawn with remarkable consistency.

<comment><USER10> I didn't really see that. For example, DHH was extremely critical of Balaji's shenanigans. It seemed like rationalist twitter (most likely due to the anti- NYT sentiment relating to the SSC drama) + some VCs vs the rest of Online Twitter. Taylor's beat is usually of the more liminal variety rather than red meat, culture war content, so this whole situation feels like the result of misplaced animosity.

<comment><USER21> DHH has always been against the VC culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is just people having conversations about protecting their interest. I'm sure if we spied on the "non-elite" people talking to their spouses or friends, there will be some controversial stuff.

I don't even think there's anything controversial here. This is just a fluff article.

</comment><comment><USER23> Meh.

 _" Powerful people complain about journalists. –News at 11"_

This has been going on since the day the first broadsheets were written in cuneiform.

What matters, is what people _do_ , when it comes to stuff like this. I'd say the Ebay folks, sending the bloggers pig's head masks was more alarming.

 _"Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel."_ –Mark Twain

</comment><comment><USER24> Flagged for petty bickering. I don't understand why people post and upvote chatter they would be downvoted to oblivion if it were posted as comments on HN. We can do better.

</comment><comment><USER25> This article employs the same malicious cropping Taylor Lorenz did that made people so mad. I think the origin story is not that she complained about the CEO of Away, it was that when Balaji copied her exact wording, she cropped out the origin picture that showed this and claimed harassment.

Journalists seem incredibly tone deaf -- do they ever wonder why people dislike them? It's because they employ so many subtle lies like this all the time.

Journalists really need to get off twitter - it ruins their credibility. If this is how they act for some crap drama, it calls into question all sorts of 'important' articles and op-eds

</comment><comment><USER26> Dumb piece about a dumb conversation. But for the record, journalists gain trust & responsibility by keeping their opinions out of it. If you give free rein to your silly opinions, all you do is gain the blind obedience of those who already agree with you, which is easy. Easy. And is the default mode on Twitter, i.e. the "mooks and knights" model - [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of- beefs/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/)

Those who want to be treated with respect like real grown-up journalists need to act like real grown-up journalists and not just common Twitter trash. What am I supposed to do with something like "Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled..."? If I'm looking to be outraged and join a mob, I'm all good, I've reached my destination. If on the other hand I'm looking for facts/journalism, what should I do at this point? Ask for a source? Where was the coddling? Who did the coddling? What kind of coddling? When did this coddling take place? Just asking the usual 5-6 journalistic questions about it makes you realize how fucking tedious this particular bit of "news" is. It's actually not news, not a fact. It's a mean-spirited, trashy little aside. (Does this automatically mean I support "millionaires" exploiting and demeaning others? No, you idiot.)

Want a grim laugh? Picture Hitler ranting & raving at a podium, and that sentence appearing as the subtitle. "THEY HAVE BEEN CODDLED AND WILL BE CODDLED NO MORE!!!" crowd: "Heeeiiill!" Hitler was not a journalist.

All the little side commentary (I'm already too bored to cite other examples but it does get worse from there) sounds like something out of Idiocracy. Flagging this for being intellectually beneath us.

</comment><comment><USER27> This aside from the author of the article made me laugh:

(In 2020, the idea that fishing for "clicks" to drive ad revenue is a successful or even common business model is a fallacy. Publications that rely exclusively on advertising are failing at an astonishing rate; financially, many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead focus on live events, subscriptions, optioning their articles to movie studios, and other models that rely on having a dedicated readership that trusts the publication).

Yes, clickbait is a really uncommon business model, and loads of Vice articles are being made into movies. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe they can use some of the excess power to secure the app

</comment><comment><USER29> 2020 in a headline

<comment><USER30> HN in a headline

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> too long to read ;

balaji has a beef with mainstream journalists since many months ago, and probably rightly so. I can't help but feel however that this whole outrage is covert advertising for Clubhouse which (even though i am not famous enough to use) seems basically a repackaging of the decades-old concept of phone hotlines.

That said, balaji is right, the media overplayed their role as arbiters of truth and are now losing. I d trust my twitter feed better than any paper.

</comment><comment><USER32> Legal Analysis: "You really Shouldn't Record Clubhouse Calls"

[https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/07/02/you-really-shouldnt- reco...](https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/07/02/you-really-shouldnt-record- clubhouse-calls/)

</comment><comment><USER33> >The call shows how Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled by the press and lauded as innovators and disruptors, fundamentally misunderstand the role of journalism the moment it turns a critical eye to their industry.

No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires objectivity, and that the whole industry is broken because it has been completely dominated by ideologues, top to bottom, who are blatantly pushing politics onto the masses.

Don't support BLM? Have legitimate criticism? Be prepared to be called out by "journalists" until you fall in line, if you don't get cancelled first. And let's be real, this has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for at least a decade.

Edit: would you all be downvoting if the same journalists were adding pro Trump spin to a sizable proportion (or majority, depending on the outlet) of non-editorial (but editorialized) media? I'm not going to support blatantly partisan writing by ostensibly neutral platforms simply because they represent my politics. We need objective news and the fact that it is impossible to be purely objective is not an excuse to deliberately pollute news articles and headlines with consistent agenda.

<comment><USER34> > No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires > objectivity

Based on what? Objectivity hasn't been required since the printing press was invented

<comment><USER35> It's required because a democratic society relies on a healthy press. These are supposed to be scholars, with a code of ethics, dedicated to documentation. Journalists are not supposed to actually interfere in the system they are observing (e.g. by calling for de-platforming) because then they go from being journalists to being activists.

Edit: To be clear, I have no problem with newspapers including opinion articles about de-platforming, but there must be an acknowledgement that there's a difference between journalists and activists/thought leaders. We cannot go on mixing both.

<comment><USER36> You're asking for a state of affairs that had never existed.

De-platforming/cancelling is the hip word at the moment, and powerful people are getting nervous, because it is the rabble instead of the powerful doing the canceling.

I have two responses: (1) The amount of self-awareness demonstrated by the elites tends to be related to how they fair in peasant revolts. (2) People have short memories, the class-driven state of affairs you prefer will be back soon enough.

<comment><USER35> > People have short memories, the class-driven state of affairs you prefer > will be back soon enough.

Are you sure? Can anyone be sure of this? The internet has fundamentally altered the dynamic with the new Gutenberg revolution. Now the angry mobs have louder voices than even the largest institutions. Worse, people at these institutions are encouraging the mob for clickbait driven profit.

The incentives are perverse and it's why a strong code of ethics is essential.

<comment><USER33> With unprecedented power comes unprecedented responsibility.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>