Am I missing out by only knowing C# and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> All peripheral knowledge and technologies aside I really only know C# and JavaScript.
People on Hacker News seem to know a lot of different languages and it has me wondering if I am not as good of a developer because I only know those two languages.
I do need to take a second to point out the obvious. I've had exposure to a lot of different languages and technologies but I only consider myself proficient in C# and JavaScript. <comment><USER2> Sounds a lot like me a year ago.

For the past eight years I've been mostly working as a .NET developer, with my last two roles being senior roles with some form of leadership. If I stuck with my last job I would've probably been in a leadership role at a large agency, but I wanted a change.

I, too, would read HN most days, and would feel a hint of "imposter syndrome". It was great enough that I decided to teach myself Python and Django. Working in another language when my life was strong-typed compiled languages felt odd, so instead of fighting the urge I decided to work somewhere that would hire me as something other than a C# dev.

So, I joined a software house that does a bit of everything. Since joining I've worked on a mixture of Ruby, Java, Python, and Node projects in the last six months, and there's opportunities to pick up pretty much anything that I feel I can roll with for a project.

It's been tricky going from being experienced in one language to being a newbie in another. When things work the way you expect, new languages are fairly easy to pick up, but the pain points or differences will bring you back to the days when you were struggling with C#.

I think imposter syndrome is more common in .NET developers than other groups, mainly because the community is so secluded from others due to its heavy use of Windows and its own tool set. Also, there's the stigma of it being a big- business language, even though many .NET devs will go their entire careers without working in an enterprise setting. From my experience, a .NET developer is no less a developer than those in other languages, but I will say that it's very easy to be comfortable in a single stack. Giving something else a try will reduce that comfort, and you might learn a few things that help in both stacks.

So, in terms of missing it, it depends on what you feel like you're missing?

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on what your goals are. I'm a C#/Javascript developer myself and I have tried to start a few side projects using new technologies in the past, but I noticed that I spent a lot of time fighting with the new framework/platform instead of solving whatever problem I was trying to solve. So I decided to double down on C#/Javascript and put my efforts into building products using what I already knew. I'm glad I did because one of these side projects turned into a healthy business, which will likely enable me to "retire" in a couple of years.

I think that if your goal is to solve problems, leverage what you already know. If your goal is to be more employable and improve at your craft, learning new languages should help you.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you learn enough languages and their features, then aside from syntax, you can consider yourself language-agnostic. A syntax without its edge cases is the easiest part about learning a language. Your exposure puts you a step ahead.

How can only knowing a small number of languages make someone a bad developer? As a _developer_ , it's about the things you can _develop_. You might be limited by your language and the language implementations but this is why being rounded with a good variety of languages puts you at an advantage.

My first programming language was PHP 15 years ago, but I keep myself proficient with a systems language (e.g. C or C++), a server application language (like Go), and a web client side language (like JavaScript). I have chosen to work with C++, Go, and TypeScript as much as possible for now.

I hope this helps in any way.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a C# + Javascripter too. I learn a few languages on the side, plus some exposure in jobs. Java, Haskell, Ruby, Elm being the main ones.

I think it is worth dabbling to see how things are done on the other side. Learning Haskell makes dealing with Rx / Linq a bit easier - not directly but by flexing that functional-thinking brain muscle.

Having said that I still think of C# as my go-to language and enjoy programming in it, I think it is a great general purpose language and I am glad I am doing my production code in that. It's a nice mix of type safety (so prefer that to Ruby) but with plenty of escape hatches and meta-programming options (prefer that to the strictness of Haskell).

As a C#/JS-er the most useful languages might be Powershell and Typescript, and the most eye opening might be Lisp and Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends what you mean by "knowing" C# and JavaScript. I also know C# and JavaScript, I'm definitely not an expert in either or even an intermediate (probably). I also know C, Java, Ruby, Python, HTML, CSS, Databases, networking, web apps, mobile apps, web services. I'd only class myself as above intermediate in a couple of areas and that is after 20 years experience working in software teams.

You can build virtually any web app, client app, mobile app or service with these 2 languages, so ask yourself what you can do with these tools and probably whether you can earn a living using them. If you want to learn a bit about some other areas just do it...

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been looking say more than usual resumes and interviewing candidates. I would now not interview a candidate for an intermediate position who only has Microsoft experience. This is a proxy for operating in a corporate environment with little exposure to a narrow range of responsibility. Having too few languages/tech also indicates a lack of curiosity/passion.

That's not to say you can't be an excellent programmer but less likely a well rounded software engineer, if that makes sense. The opposite can also be true, those of that dabble in everything with no depth or appreciation of each.

<comment><USER8> >Having too few languages/tech also indicates a lack of curiosity/passion.

As a noob trying to start a career I ask.... at what point do you list things on your resume?

So I messed around on my own time with Python, PHP, and some other things but feel like I don't know them well. Do you still list it on your resume? At this point I don't because I feel like my knowledge isn't very strong in those areas.

<comment><USER9> Like anything else, GP's advice is context-sensitive. In this case, it scales with experience.

If you just came out of a bootcamp and claim to know 3 backend languages, or have less than 3 years experience and list more than a half dozen languages, I'll assume you've worked with each of them so little that you don't know any of them in a meaningful sense.

If you have more than 10 years experience and know only 2 languages, your exposure is very limited, and I'll wonder whether you've learned by rote rather than knowing how to learn concepts and reapply them elsewhere.

For me as a hiring manager, it's not about curiosity or passion so much as flexibility and ability to learn and grow in both depth and breadth.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for the feedback!

I've dabbled in a number of languages but I'm focused on just a few areas and I haven't listed my dabbling as ... well exactly what you said. As a noob listing half a dozen languages seems sort of absurd when in actuality I know just one (and still need to work on it).

<comment><USER9> Yup, sounds like you've got the right mindset in that regard. Pick something to focus on and learn to be highly productive with it at a professional level.

Once you have expertise in one thing, you'll find it transfers well to other languages and to some degree to other domains. You can start picking up secondary languages, or choose one other language to deep-dive into.

At the junior level, most employers are looking for moderate depth in at least one language and area, and an awareness of what the other technologies are that the developers around you will be integrating your work with. The degree of depth and the number of different technologies they'll want you to know _well_ will also scale with experience level.

Too many new programmers undermine themselves by trying to learn every single technology they can get their hands on. I blame the bootcamps, which by nature have to expose you to at least a handful of different skills and don't have time to teach any of them in meaningful depth. They send an incorrect message that a few hours with a new technology, tool, or framework is as much as is worth learning before moving on to the next shiny thing.

<comment><USER8> Sounds about right.

Accordingly one of my feedbacks to the camp I attended was to drop like four things, add one (minor thing), and spend more time on the rest. Rather than sort of shotgun it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think you are a bad developer just because your focus is on two languages. Othe devs might enjoy the possibility to learn more. With more languages, you may have better job opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you are good in one mainstream language you will be good in any of them. And by good I mean, can you think about a complex problem and implement an algorithm to solve it. Don't listen to the haters that say Microsoft tech users must have no curiosity or other such nonsense. Like you think there aren't people working at Microsoft solving crazy problems at scale and that other companies aren't drooling over them?

</comment><comment><USER12> Can you really put peripheral knowledge and technologies aside when all you know are pretty much garbage collected scripting languages? This is a very isolated and safe world to live in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do you build software systems in C#/JavaScript that are useful, correct, efficient and simple? If yes then you are a good developer.

</comment><comment><USER14> You will become a better developer if you study more languages.

You will become a better developer if you study more mathematics or statistics.

You will become a better developer if you study psychology and interpersonal relationships.

You will become a better developer in many, many ways.

Keep studying. Keep growing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate and upvoted everyones comments but I agree the most with you.

Don't get me wrong, I can see a huge difference in my skill based on how I solve problems now vs a few years ago and while that change came from new things in the C#/JavaScript landscape it was still caused by learning how to code differently.

But I feel like I'm at a level where if I have 10 energy points to spend they will go a lot farther if I spend them on something other than programming.</comment></comment>


Building a Scalable Postgres Metrics Backend Using the Citus Extension - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/08/30/citus-clouds-usage-of-citus-cloud/ <comment><USER2> If you haven't already seen it, Dan from Heap Analytics has a great talk about how they use Postgres and Citus.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVl9_6J1G60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVl9_6J1G60)

</comment><comment><USER3> We[0] just recently moved from Hbase to Postgres w/ Citus. Still not fully settled in, but got incredible support from the Citus team (seriously amazing guys) and things are looking much brighter than before.

On a 8 worker nodes (16 cores, 80GB ram, 3TB SSD), we're at around 20k inserts/second, while most of the selects are running at around 100ms (besides some counts and complex queries).

If you have a lot of data and know Postgres, give it a chance.

[0] [https://pexe.so](https://pexe.so)

<comment><USER4> > On a 8 worker nodes (16 cores, 80GB ram, 3TB SSD), we're at around 20k > inserts/second, while most of the selects are running at around 100ms > (besides some counts and complex queries).

Is that 20K separate transactions or are some of the 20K inserts grouped together?

<comment><USER3> Separate (going through the master).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're looking for a metrics backend built on traditional Postgres, check out Tgres.

[http://grisha.org/blog/2016/07/29/state-of- tgres-2016/](http://grisha.org/blog/2016/07/29/state-of-tgres-2016/)

<comment><USER6> +1 for tgres [https://github.com/tgres/tgres](https://github.com/tgres/tgres) On an aside, I found his posts on holt-winters very informative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone with questions about how to properly shard a table, how to fit a problem to a distribution strategy, or general questions about deployment, Citus has a Slack channel which is active and extremely welcoming. You can request an invite here: [https://slack.citusdata.com/](https://slack.citusdata.com/)

Disclaimer: don't work there, but on the Slack and the Citus team is nothing short of awesome.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had a look at Citus when evaluating time series databases and the documents said that work was still under way on masterless setup for faster ingestion (up to 500k metrics /sec).

[https://docs.citusdata.com/en/v5.2/performance/scaling_data_...](https://docs.citusdata.com/en/v5.2/performance/scaling_data_ingestion.html#masterless- citus-50k-s-500k-s)

If that has changed I'd add it to my table.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMQe9oOKhMhIVw9WmuCE...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMQe9oOKhMhIVw9WmuCEWdPtAoccJ4a-IuZv4fXDHxM/edit#gid=0)</comment>


Ask HN: What article submission has accumulated the most points to date? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> "Steve Jobs Passed Away", 4,271 points -> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128)

If you're interested in exploring, play around with the URL parameters for the API. Here's the one which gets you the right answer to this specific question with the minimum amount of work:

[http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=&so...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=&sortby=points%20desc&pretty_print=true)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you :)

<comment><USER3> You could also check out [https://www.hnsearch.com/](https://www.hnsearch.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: App Store developers -- do you prefer Paid or Free+IAP? - <AUTHOR>

I'm creating a simple app for an under-addressed App Store niche (more as a way to learn iOS development than anything else) and I've spent the past few weeks going back and forth between going paid (likely $2.99) or free+IAP (it's essentially modular content, so I'd be giving around half the content away for free and then groups of additional content for $.99-$1.99).  I've read a lot about free+IAP being the way to go but a surprising amount of top-grossing Apps that aren't Games/Social are paid-up-front. <comment><USER2> One idea is it might not necessarily be either/or -- I'd suggest that you first release one version, whichever payment model your gut is pulling you toward. Wait until you have some data, maybe 4-6 months of sales history. If sales are gangbusters, maybe you'll feel that you've already got the right sales model. If you have a hunch that sales could be better and that a different sales model may be a major driver of additional revenue, you can release another version under the opposite payment model, and observe what happens to overall sales.

Personally I've preferred the Paid model. I have one app in the store, and the main driver of revenue increase has come from delivering updates which give more value to the user, and increasing the price accordingly (monthly revenue is up 8x on average since a major update & a price increase from 2.99 to 8.99). I haven't taken my own advice above yet, though I have built the IAP version -- I haven't released it yet because so far other experiments have been effective in increasing sales and less risky. I recall Marco Arment mentioned a major source of revenue increase for Instapaper was when he killed the free version. [1]

[1] [http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper- free](http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're making an app for a niche audience (ie. Bird Watching Enthusiasts), make it paid. These are people that are very excited about their interest and would be happy to give you $2.99 for an app that supports it. I would even consider raising the price to $4.99+.

If your niche is something that helps people save or make money, charge a lot more.

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel like it depends on the niche. IAP is the way to go for games or something with a broad audience that will deal with lots of pirating. If its more for a certain community who will gladly pay for it then I'd go with paid.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't like the bait-and-switch games, but I recently downloaded Avia for free and paid for the Chromecast feature. That seemed like a good use of IAP.</comment>


Design Techniques to Simplify and De-clutter Your Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/02/7-interface-design-techniques-to-simplify-and-de-clutter-your-interfaces/

<comment><USER2> Would be a lot better with some sample javascript.</comment>


The Greatest Web Site of All Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/arts/15morr.html

<comment><USER2> For those of you who would like to skip directly to the web site "<http://www.scaruffi.com/>.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The site itself is a huge time sink. I've spent days in the music section as a teenager.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a co-founder for my startup - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am attempting to start a school/league that teaches web development in ROR, UI Design and CSS/HTML. I am looking for a co-founder in Mumbai which is where the school is based.
I was deeply unhappy with the options available to teach web development in India so I thought of opening a school to change that fact.
To gauge the interest, I have put up a simple landing page 2 days ago and with some Google Adwords spend, have managed to sign up 30 people who are interested in knowing more.
http://geek-league.kickoffpages.com/
If you are interested, do leave a comment below. My email is firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> There groups on Linkedin which are started to find co-founders based out of India. one of them is called : Co-Founder wanted - India and Find Co-Founders. Advise Startups. Work for Equity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will do

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You might also like to post here: <http://hackerstreet.in/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks, will do.</comment></comment>


John Lilly: Altered States (1983) - <AUTHOR> https://erowid.org/culture/characters/lilly_john/lilly_john_interview1.shtml <comment><USER2> beautiful article. this connects the dots for me when I read Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas which is arguably fiction but takes a lot of the material mentioned here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Asleep_in_Frog_Pajamas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Asleep_in_Frog_Pajamas)</comment>


The power of the amateurs, from Mendel to Lovecraft, Crick and beyond - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@soufron/the-power-of-the-amateurs-6753be4f7536 <comment><USER2> Decent idea, but unfortunately unconvincing examples.

Mendel has been the subject of controversy regarding whether his results were fraudulent. Hardly a great choice for an exemplar, whatever the truth is.

Linus Pauling (described as an "amateur biologist" in a caption) was hardly an amateur interested in the structure of DNA, having written his PhD on x-ray diffraction. In addition, he is introduced in the text as "Linus Pauli," a Nobel-prize winning physicist. This seems to be a Mendelian cross between Linus Pauling, the Nobel-prize winning chemist, and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel- prize winning physicist.

Francis Crick, who made the title as an example of the power of amateurs, was pursuing a PhD in the field of x-ray crystallography, which sort of disqualifies him an "amateur" in my mind. Those "careful biology experiments" were studies of x-ray diffraction images of DNA, making Crick's physics background entirely relevant.

<comment><USER3> Michael Faraday.

"Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena.[1][2] He similarly discovered the principles of electromagnetic induction and diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.

As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised terminology such as "anode", "cathode", "electrode" and "ion". Faraday ultimately became the first and foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a lifetime position.

Faraday was an excellent experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in clear and simple language; his mathematical abilities, however, did not extend as far as trigonometry and were limited to the simplest algebra."

Tesla never graduated university, and was homeless for a while. Ended up basically creating everything we needed to make and use AC power.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I did not know about these two. I'll note it for later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an oddly structured argument, which collapses upon itself based on the examples the author chose-and the vocabulary he uses to segment them.

An amateur does a thing because they love it, while a professional does it because they are paid to do so. Once an amateur is paid, they become professional.

Perhaps this would be more compelling if the author segmented his examples based on whether they were members of the scientific establishment, or of the scientific avant garde instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll not defend the structuration of the argument. This a small medium post only intended to put a few ideas together. As it's supposed part of a more complete book, I'll keep your critics in mind though, and try formulate things more completely and clearly then - I'll have more space and more time.

Also, I think I'll add new posts on this topic in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Crick was a professional scientist i.e., that's how he earned his living.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, but he was not a professional biologist. Watson was though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The power of the expert is to limit public access to knowledge and scare amateurs of, thus raising his value by means of artificial scarcity.

And that is how it worked in the past. Todays problem is, that to become a expert, one has to sacrifice years of life, just to gather all knowledge necessary to understand and contribute to a field. Thus barriers are not only no longer needed, the sheer mass of knowledge works as a paywall against amateurs. This ocassionally lowers, when a completely new field is discovered, but in general this principle holds.

To allow amateurs to contribute something usefull again, they would have to study in there spare time, spend a lot of time on the subject - in there free time and then they- will become experts without titles. Thank you for those, internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what many amateur researchers reproach to Big Science. That it's less a way to discover new ideas, than to control access to knowledge.</comment></comment>


AI vs. MD: what happens when the diagnosis is automated - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that humans completely suck at almost any task even simple statistics can be applied to. Even world class experts will typically be beat by simple linear regression. See here for many examples: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_out...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_outperform_expert/) And this is very old research with methods that are very primitive compared to modern machine learning (most of this was done on pencil and paper!):

>Wittman (1941) constructed an SPR that predicted the success of electroshock therapy for patients more reliably than the medical or psychological staff.

>Carroll et. al. (1988) found an SPR that predicts criminal recidivism better than expert criminologists.

>An SPR constructed by Goldberg (1968) did a better job of diagnosing patients as neurotic or psychotic than did trained clinical psychologists.

It's completely amazing we allow human doctors to make diagnoses at all. At the very least algorithms should always be part of the process (but note that humans given the results of an algorithm still do worse than just the algorithm on it's own.)

The problem is there has been enormous resistance to the use of algorithms in medicine. People irrationally distrust algorithms and strongly prefer human judgement. Even when they know the algorithms are superior. Psychologists have actually studied this phenomenon and have named it "Algorithm Aversion": [http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-Algort...](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-AlgorthimAversion- Dietvorst-Simmons-Massey.pdf) This isn't even getting into the institutional resistance to change or having people lose their jobs to robots.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that you mention the criminology scenario. Courts are starting to use software algorithms to predict recidivism rates for purposes of setting bond amounts. The reports are even given to judges to inform sentencing. However, there is an enormous backlash against them, because _e.g._ they predict higher rates for racial minorities: [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing).

<comment><USER2> The propublica study has been shown to be a lie, see [https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html)

Anyway all I'm claiming is that statistical methods are much more accurate than humans. Nothing there disputes that claim. If you want the most accurate predictions possible, you should use an algorithm.

That article implies that humans are somehow fair or unbiased. That is a completely ridiculous claim that has been proven false many times. Human judges give ugly people twice the sentences of attractive people. Judges have been shown to give significantly harsher sentences just before lunch, when they are hungry. Not to mention all the classic biases against gender/race/political affiliation/etc. Studies have shown interviews are worse than useless at assessing how good someone will be as an employee. Instead employers are biased by how much they like the candidate. We should hardly expect traditional parole interviews to be any different.

But almost no one cares about these results. Yet when an algorithm is shown to have a (not statistically significant) bias, people freak out. This, if anything, proves my point that algorithm aversion is a serious problem.

<comment><USER4> > Human judges give ugly people twice the sentences of attractive people. > Judges have been shown to give significantly harsher sentences just before > lunch, when they are hungry.

It would be nice if you could provide sources for these claims.

<comment><USER5> The lunch statistic probably came from this study: [http://www.economist.com/node/18557594](http://www.economist.com/node/18557594) [http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889](http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889)

(To be fair, the study size was small).

There's a study on attractiveness and juror bias here (it's more complicated than just "ugly people get worse sentences" but some bias does show up for certain juror personality types): [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bsl.939/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bsl.939/abstract)

<comment><USER6> If there is ever a dress for success time it is when you are in court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Instead of reading the usual hacker news echo chamber, probably good to read what doctors thought about the article too.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/61sgfw/ai_versus_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/61sgfw/ai_versus_md/)

<comment><USER8> Thank you for posting this.

The article and some of the people quoted in it, like Hinton, seem to think MDs need so much help for diagnosis. Real life isn't House MD. The answer is very often obvious from the history/physical exam and the most basic labs.

Anyways, I don't like the fact that Hinton and others seem perfectly OK with not knowing how the machine is diagnosing. It's machine clinical gestalt.

I also think this diagnosis by machine would be very frustrating. Imagine, as a patient, asking the diagnostic robot: "why do you think this happened to me?" or "Why do you think the diagnosis is x?"

And then not having an answer other than "the imaging and tests are consistent with imaging and tests of previous patients with x disease" \- this sounds like a bad answer. That wouldn't be good enough for me, but maybe it would be for plenty of other non-curious parties. Maybe there is this huge group of people who want healthcare from robots with robotic bedside manners. But I doubt it. Hinton is wrong, doctors are going to be augmented by helpful diagnostic applications. We will still have to learn to diagnose on our own but we will have help too. Maybe a robot to help triage cases into "serious/less serious" categories (and with working initial diagnosis) with good accuracy.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, when I ask my doctors why I'm having XYZ issues, they usually give me an unsatisfactory answer like "maybe your diet", "maybe you're stressed", "hard to say exactly", or some slightly more tactful variant of "it's all in your head". At least with a machine, I'd feel less looked-down-upon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a lot of interesting things going on at the intersection of medicine and AI. That said, it's important to understand some of the limitations:

1.) Medical data is often quite sparse and quite poor quality

You may only get a few years here and there for a patient, and a lot of the things mentioned in the article ("cough is raspy", "I have a feeling it might be pneumonia") aren't always in the medical record, and even if they are they aren't in a form that's easily accessible to a computer.

2.) Interaction matters

Seeking medical care is an extremely vulnerable state to be in. A good doctor isn't doing just diagnosis, but teasing out the right bits of information. It's unclear how a computer will handle, "I feel I'm not getting the full story from this patient" situations. A good doctor (not all of them are) will have the interpersonal skills to get the full story.

Finally, even if you solve diagnosis, then what? You have to take action. For a lot of expensive chronic conditions, it's not like the answer isn't obvious or even particularly needs diagnosis. If you're overweight, you probably already know you should eat less and maybe be more active. Many times even people with certifiable diabetes diagnoses do not change their lifestyle appropriately. How you handle putting the diagnosis into action is a tough problem, and it's not entirely clear how things like AI will fix it. Convincing people to change habits is damn hard.

Disclosure: I work as a data scientist at a medical AI startup (www.lumiata.com)

<comment><USER11> > Interaction matters

really, just following your lead here, but i guess we should then ask: do patients respond better to a doctor they have a good relationship with?

i mean, there are some patients who might say, "Well, I made a deal with my doctor that I'd reduce my sugar intake and try to keep my blood glucose levels down below X, on average" (or whatever) and maybe they're motivated by a desire to please their doctor or not disappoint their doctor.

but, could that work as well for a robot doctor?

what would happen if there were a robot doctor that patients liked _more_ than any of their human doctors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tech communities hold a common opinion regarding ML and medicine: "bring machines to the clinics! Research shows them to be superior". Everyone always takes great care in forgetting that the ML research for medicine and diagnosis assesses those systems in a well-defined setting. I.e, you have to feed the system the appropriate info for it to work. From personal experience, I can say that obtaining this info can be exceptionally difficult for a multitude of reasons, and trying to fully automate that is currently not economically doable. The medical system currently does not have the information-retrieval capability to make ML really useful.

I am sorry to say that anyone thinking that we could "ML all the things" in a hospital or office practice on this here day clearly has no idea what a mess our hospitals really are. Some things are amenable to ML though, and most of us welcome any help we can get. Even from machines.

</comment><comment><USER13> Doctors are terrible. The sooner they're out of the diagnostic loop the better. Every time I go to see one I get a different diagnosis or something generic. It's basically a crapshoot based on the experiences of the doctor.

I'd much rather have a machine do all the pattern matching without any human bias.

<comment><USER14> The problem with human pattern recognition is not the accuracy itself. A big problem is that 1. human experts are not consistent between themselves and worse 2. not even consistent if they have to evaluate a case repeatedly. One would expect an AI error to be systematic and not changing between predictions. In the short term, an AI (as in Augmented Intelligence) approach would be a good intermediate. Another advantage of AI diagnostics could be its availability in smartphones, especially with skin cancer that could be useful to quickly check marks and spots. Already doctors are advising people to self- check for unusual marks etc., and usually a very big problem is that people wait too long before seeing a doctor.

<comment><USER15> The problem with that last bit is that there's also the issue of convincing doctors that you suspect something's wrong. Sometimes, doctors don't take patients seriously when they're concerned about something, or don't make more than a cursory glance at the situation before figuring that the patient is overreacting or something. I've been dealing with some breath/lung related problems for a few months now, and I still have to tell my doctors that yes, I have issues breathing sometimes, and yes there's something going on.

Doctor-patient trust is a big issue, especially when the former doesn't take the latter seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I care a lot about outcomes at the individual level. I worry that with these systems, generally health will improve because there will be a level of standardization, but specifically it will get worse. An analogy for me is with furniture, but you could also substitute financial advice. In furniture we can get a 'quality' table from Ikea for a couple hundred bucks, and we can make 10s of thousands of them. But it's much much harder to get a reasonably priced custom table. 200 years ago when a lot more people spent time building wooden ships, it was much easier to get a carpenter to build a table/furniture at a relatively affordable price point. Now that comparatively orders of magnitude of fewer people are in the practice, the price for that furniture, or custom cabinets, etc. at the same quality level has skyrocketed. In financial advice, the rise of algorithms doing things like asset allocation has caused an entire generation of financial planners to never be hired, and therefore never trained. The old financial planners who do much more than asset allocation are becoming rarer and rarer and no one is replacing them. In 20 years, I firmly believe the specifics of my tax situation, etc will be more difficult to solve than today because I will have a harder time finding this kind of specialized expertise. I see the same in medicine and every other field which low-end machines doing the low-end work. We're not training the future high-level practitioners because they need those 10,000 hours or whatever to become super experts. How long will it take before the machine catches up with the best humans is really the question here.

<comment><USER17> > 200 years ago when a lot more people spent time building wooden ships, it > was much easier to get a carpenter to build a table/furniture at a > relatively affordable price point.

I'm going to make a call on that claim. Keep in mind that 200 years ago was 1817, well before the rise of the middle class. I bet that far fewer people could afford the luxury of getting a table even approaching the quality of an Ikea table, let alone what a few $100 extra will get you for a custom table today.

<comment><USER15> The Industrial Revolution was sometime from 1760 to 1820, I thought?

<comment><USER17> Yes. I realized the same thing a few minutes after posting, and edited that part out. The middle class part is what matters most: I think more people now have significantly more purchasing power than 200 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My Uncle worked in this field. He told me that when given suggestions from AI, residents would make more incorrect diagnosises. I believe the theory was that most of medicine is probability based, but sometimes you can see someone and get a feeling that you may have a lower probability illness. However, when receiving suggestions from the AI, residents were second guessing themselves and performing worse.

I believe that in cancer research, ML will be crucial. Finding similarities among mutations of cancerous cells. I am really hoping cancer treatment can benefit from this.

</comment><comment><USER19> My not-yet-expert* response whenever my classmates joke about me building some AI robot-doc to replace them:

"AI will become just another tool in a physician's toolkit."

AI will not replace the role of a doctor. However, the role of a doctor might shift to overseeing the AI in very specific scenarios. Furthermore, I'll add that there's a lot more to medicine than making diagnoses.

As it stands right now we have no limit of promising applications of AI in healthcare. The bigger issue is getting these applications into the clinic. Very few of these boundless applications are actually implemented in a real- life setting that can affect patient outcomes. I can't tell you how many studies are published proclaiming, "HEY AI CAN DO X BETTER THAN DOCS." Cool study, bro. Now can you actually get that into clinic and start saving lives?

Suchi Saria at JHU is one of the few people I know that has bridged that gap. Other resources for those that are interested:

\- [http://mucmd.org/](http://mucmd.org/) \- Baxt, William G. "Application of artificial neural networks to clinical medicine." The Lancet 346.8983 (1995): 1135-1138.

*Programmer MD student about to start my PhD in comp sci specifically machine learning + healthcare.

</comment><comment><USER20> 20 years ago, as student, I took Expert Systems (rule-based) and "Bioinformatics" (neural networks, backpropagation stuff, now called "deep learning") courses, and it was like Expert Systems based on rules -with or without fuzzy logic- would be the future. While neural networks were in the same "box" as other techniques like genetic algorithms (evaluation function driven partially random guesses, with greedy/non-greedy "evolution", etc.). Back then it was like imminent being able to put the knowledge of an expert e.g. a medicine doctor so the artificial expert system could make decisions as good as the one made by the human. After years, it seems that human experts in some areas were not so easy to replace, not because not being able to mimic the rules related to medical diagnosis, but because the inability to filter "bullshit-input" (creative hypochondriac people, multiple patterns recognized at once, etc.).

The "deep learning" (backpropagation stuff) reminds me the euphoria of the expert systems in the nineties, but with palpable results, i.e. despite requiring crazy amounts of computer power, you can see some difficult problems solved. What scares me is that instead of the "clean and understandable" modeling of the rule-based expert systems, the "deep learning" (neural networks backpropagation stuff) is hardly understandable, even by experts (learn how to train a model is one thing, and knowing why it works, is another -e.g. you can correlate success for N training cases, guess that you're covering the model, and then, discovering for the N+1 that there was a correlation/causality issue -e.g. discovering you trained for learning blue things instead of square things, just because the square things were blue, and when a red square appears, it does not get identified-).

</comment><comment><USER21> These articles are always way overhyped. A lot more development is needed before it can even be safely used as a tool alongside radiologists. The dermatology example is an excellent one. It would be great to have a simple image classifier that can help the diagnosis before the clinical appointment.

Software on its own can't even tackle a 'simple' task as reliable 6 lead EKG (electric heart film) analysis yet. A chest x-ray has a lot more variables. Plus clinical variables as patient history etc can make a big difference in diagnosis on a similar image.

<comment><USER22> But there have been successful commercial applications of ML/AI working alongside radiologists safely as a tool for at least a couple decades.

With all the current interest in "AI" it's easy to forget that this is an old problem area, and current techniques don't fundamentally change anything. In most applications the biggest issues remain access to and quality of the data. For the right application though, you can do useful things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a layman, it seems to me that the biggest advantage that humans have over machine learning is flexibility.

While machine learning performance frequently rivals or exceeds humans at many individual tasks once sufficiently constructed and trained, only humans excel at dynamically choosing which tasks to pursue, switching levels of analysis, and when to break the rules for the win (losing at GO? unplug the computer).

To speculate heavily, animal based cognition may be composed of just such a multitude of specialized trained modules, akin to machine learning algos of today: object recognition, emotion recognition, language recognition, typical script/structure of a given scenario, etc. But above that will be classifiers that interpret internal and external environmental signals to choose which of those specialized modules to engage and suppress. In lower animals lacking a heavily recurrent prefrontal cortex, the higher order modules are probably directed by mid brain structures to engage basic fight flight fuck behaviors needed for survival (e.g. pattern recognition module sees snake, freeze or run modules are engaged). In animals with prefrontal cortex, goal and context driven suppression of prepotent responses becomes possible.

Anyway, it seems to me that for machine learning to become a general intelligence, there will need to hierarchies of specialized machine learning classifiers, some specialized in sensory classification, but others in that are meta..classifying those classifiers into scripts, scenarios, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's funny to see how the HN crowd reacts to this. If AI was a magical bullet, don't you think doctors would already be replaced by machines? Also, most people don't think rationally when it comes to diseases... You might be able to self-diagnose using google, but that's not something most people can do without ending up thinking they have cancer.

<comment><USER25> There's a huge gap between demonstrating an effective algorithm and bringing an appliance to market which uses that algorithm. The vast majority of development work on any product goes, not into the basic science, but into making it simple, user-friendly, reliable and safe. This goes tenfold when you're talking about anything related to health or safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how long it will take machines to get good at the 2nd part mentioned in the article, the 20 questions part where they try to figure out causes using only the conversation. For neurological disorders you also need an agent that can actually do a manipulative exam to figure out what is wrong. Machines are still far from having the full spectrum of agency needed to preform exams to find the underlying source of a problem. Of course it is extremely rare to find a human being who can do those as well...

<comment><USER27> [https://www.buoyhealth.com/visit/](https://www.buoyhealth.com/visit/)

There's some pretty good, interesting work in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good luck to AI with procedures that require a doctor to search/find/diagnose a small(0.4cm) breast tumor in a ultrasound exam that could actually save the patient's life. AI can be applied(it is actually) in computer tomography scans but in exams like X-ray, ultrasound etc you cannot make it work( at least now). Also there is legal issue: who is responsible for the diagnose? The computer? The institution ? A doctor? AI in medicine will help us a lot but it's too early!

<comment><USER29> > _but in exams like X-ray, ultrasound etc you cannot make it work( at least > now)_

Why not? An image is an image.

<comment><USER28> Believe me it's not the same, especially at ultrasound where everything it's not clear due external factors an body types. I do this for a living (radiologist)plus I love programming and would like to see those two come together but the reality is different. Ai could assist doctors and suggest possible findings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it odd that the article seems to downplay the potential benefits machine learning provides by emphasizing a lack of explanatory power from classification algorithms.

At the very least it would seem that a machine-based classifier provides human physicians and researchers with more examples to base their inquiries on (possibly even illuminating some features they may have previously missed as important portions of theoretical models).

<comment><USER31> But more opinions (from AIs) that differ from the advice of the 'responsible health professional' will surely add confusion to the doctor's life, and in the US medical space, legal liability. In general, doctors are understandably reluctant to invite more oversight, especially if it doesn't clearly add value and if it's not independently and certifiably trustworthy.

Past AI apps, like 1980s expert-systems, generally relied on brittle binary criteria that were hard to match with certainty. Too often they produced results that were either obvious or implausible, but at least they could explain themselves. They were also poor at matching against fuzzy clues from patients (and doctors) who are notoriously inconsistent and nonquantitative at describing symptoms. No doubt a greater emphasis on quantitation lies at the heart of today's AI systems. But if the classifications and recommendations of tomorrow's AIs lack explicability, there's no way in hell they'll be trusted or given authority by risk-averse practitioners.

A middle ground is needed, where the 'advice' from the AI is grounded in clear statistically significant bases and adds value to the process, rather than competing with humans. In some spaces like suggesting cancer therapies, that are more likely to succeed using quanta, I think AI will be adopted and appreciated first. Primary care medicine will probably see it last, though it probably is already employed invisibly behind the scenes by insurers for validation and quality control (like prescription drug contraindication).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm pretty confident the role of a doctor will be relegated to the role of a calculator at some point. Nobody will do it anymore, rather, medical research will be the focus and providing data to AI, then less skilled/cheaper work can be done for the human care portion. IMO it is abuse to have someone work into their 30's to eventually get paid after all the sacrifice and long hours.

<comment><USER29> The way many countries treat their doctors is indeed pretty abusive, but that's orthogonal to the fact that effective medical care right now requires _a shit ton_ of training. This is not artificial complexity. I hope one day soon machines will surpass MDs and we'll all have access to an autodoc, but until then - and since you brought abuse up - I think it's worth considering what conditions we create for medical care people to work in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The start-up I work for, GYANT[0], is actually working on this problem. The author of the article, Siddhartha Mukherjee, also wrote The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The book is very good, and so is this article.

0: [http://gyant.com/](http://gyant.com/)

</comment><comment><USER34> after reading this article it made me think about and episode of Scrubs I was watching the other day, where Dr. Cox made a decision that led to 3 deaths of his patients and after he was afraid to make decisions during the episode. I thought to myself it must be difficult to make a decisions that could affect peoples lives, would having a machine help make those decisions easier an more accurate?

I mean sure you have doctors that have 20 years of experience but still get the diagnosis wrong even it if it's close, but still it seems that compared to machines that get feed large amounts of data still come up short to. I think saying machines will replace doctors is the wrong approach, in the article one of the doctors interviewed said "If it helps me make decisions with greater accuracy, I'd welcome it". Thats we need more tools that enable doctors to make more accurate decision than going on an experienced hunch.

I think it's great this subject is being explored it will help more people, and doctors do their jobs even better.

</comment><comment><USER35> Our family doctor jokes that people come lately with: oh I googled what's wrong with me, I'm here just for a second opinion. :)

<comment><USER36> I find it's a good sign that he jokes about it. I've encountered many doctors who were bitter and insecure about patients who researched their symptoms online, and reacted with a knee jerk, passive aggressive "you're a hypochondriac" prejudice that pervaded the diagnostic process.

<comment><USER37> It's definitely a good sign that he jokes about it, on the other hand, I would prefer a doctor that acts as a consultant, there to give proper advice.

When I go to the doctor, I have Googled the symptoms I'm experiencing before I go. Once I've been given a diagnosis by the doctor, I Google the diagnosis to verify that I have the symptoms one would expect from such a diagnosis.

Having had and heard too many experiences where Doctors got it wrong to huge detrimental effects, I want to double check what I've been told and not just blindly accept what one Doctor has judged in 30 seconds based on an initial perception of me without really knowing anything about me.

I think if I've correlated what I thought was a possibility along with what the Doctor has diagnosed and the expected symptoms of that diagnosis, at least I can be confident to a degree that I can trust the diagnosis, prognosis and the course of action provided.

If I am experiencing symptoms vastly different than I would expect from the diagnosis, I want to be asking questions as to how and why the doctor feels they are correct and I am incorrect. I realize I'm not a doctor, but in this day and age, for us all to have the world's information at our fingertips, to be blindly believing anyone whose advice could have catastrophic consequences on our health and lifespan is shortsighted at best and plane idiocy at worst.

That doesn't make someone a hypochondriac, that makes someone cautious about misdiagnosis. Unfortunately, there are many hypochondriacs out there.

<comment><USER36> I have the exact same views as you on this. I've also experienced many, many years of consistent medical malpractice, to deleterious, life-ruining effects, so I had no choice but to take my health into my own hands and make rigorous determinations as to whether the doctors I would see were right or wrong.

While most people may start off as hypochondriacs (who hasn't been spooked by the prospect of cancer after reading about it), the more research you do, the more accurate you become and in recent years I've finally managed to become effective at discerning good doctors vs bad ones.

<comment><USER37> I never tended towards hypochondria. I do however have trust issues given the malpractice that I've witnessed over the years. I thank my lucky stars that I've never been directly on the receiving end of it. I'm firmly of the belief that we should treat our medical professionals as consultants and advisors, but we should be fully cognizant of our own health requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Don't be ridiculous.

Machines can't replace doctors. You can't sue a machine for chance occurrence poor medical outcome.

</comment><comment><USER39> Amusing trivia from the article: Geoffrey Hinton is the great-great-grandson of George Boole.</comment>


You're only getting the nice feedback - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/youre-getting-nice-feedback/ <comment><USER3> Saying something more critical has some downsides and upsides.

Downsides:

* You could burn a bridge if you are not careful. It is a small world after all in certain domains.

* Open yourself back to criticism, person starts defending themselves, worse they go on twitter about it.

* You help them too much so now they compete better with someone you invested with. Telling someone they screwed up would be giving them an edge. Sometimes investors might not want that. It is better to provide dismissive or false feedback ("you guys are awesome, it is me not you, I just don't have time, keep working hard on this"). Basically give them false feedback so they don't realize how badly they are fucking up.

* It creates a negative social vibe. Some people are just averse to negative public display of emotions. It rattles their nerves too much, regardless of how it starts or who causes it.

Upsides:

* You get to feel better (this is the most important but people forget). You are a teacher giving feedback to an inexperienced person. It makes you feel good and smart. This is an egotistical reason to do it.

* You like the person so you want to help them. Maybe you hope they accept the feedback, fix the issues and you come back to you. Note this involves believing in them to start with. This is an altruistic reason.

In general the downsides are more risky than the upsides. So people will choose not to give negative feedback.

<comment><USER4> I think this is really spot on. When my startup in 1997 started selling things to a Japanese partner one of our investors remarked that 'we will consider it' was Japanese for 'no' and 'we will seriously consider it' was Japanese for 'as long as I draw breath this won't happen.' But navigating that positive based feedback could be very useful. Discussions in hypotheticals become more common and with our partner a very popular technique for providing negative feedback was to discuss this other person they were working with who was having issues (sort of like telling the doctor your "friend" has these symptoms but is too shy to come in and talk about them.) By keeping the conversation very firmly and plausibly directed elsewhere, the downsides were mitigated.

<comment><USER5> I think that's great advice and great way of giving feedback.

<comment><USER6> I'm actually not sure how to apply that advice in real world situations. Giving negative feedback usually triggers aggression, and group reprisal, while switching to "hypotheticals" and "friends" makes it sound as if i'm talking down to them, which also triggers aggression and group reprisal. So, I normally look for the socially anonymous outlet for my opinion, like downmoding the "me too" and "thanks" comments, and then move on with my life. Because, while the comments are not hateful or disruptive, they don't add anything to a discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Some VCs said, "We like you, but we need to do some more due diligence on the space." Then they asked us for a bunch of hard-to-get stuff – market research, traction metrics, and better proof of growth. But even when we got them this information they still didn't say yes.

That one is the classic "weak leader" no. I had this happen to me while I was still in college. Where I went everyone had specific rules for each class, where the seniors had the most leniency, but were still not given real freedoms.

As part of a negotiations class, myself and three others had to create a topic and then negotiate a deal with someone. I chose to negotiate more freedoms for the seniors with one of our top officials. We did a ton of background research on why and how and implications etc... We gave our pitch, answered lots of "tough" questions and afterwards asked "So are you willing to make the change?"

The response was a fantastic display of political wriggling but ended up with basically this response: "I think this is great you guys, but here is what I need you to do so we can make this happen. I need a legal review from 4 different legal disciplines, then I need to see a study of expected outcome effectiveness for your proposal, then you will need to do a poll of the student body to see if they would accept it. Only then, will we be able to make a truly INFORMED decision."

I saw the NO from a mile off that day, so I said thank you, got my A in the class (Despite not getting to any BATNA) and went on with my life having seen what a disguised NO really looks like. I am confident even if I had done all that work the answer would have still been no, I just would have put hundreds of hours into getting a firmer no.

<comment><USER8> (n.b.: BATNA is 'best alternative to a negotiated agreement', which is exactly what it sounds like. Think of it as the negotiating equivalent of the 9-5 you can always go back to if your startup fails.)

<comment><USER7> Yep, in this case there was no negotiated agreement and no alternative so it was just a hail mary "negotiation." In contrast, other groups negotiated things like the cleaning of a microwave between roommates, so we were given a little slack for formal technique because of who we were pitching to.

<comment><USER9> In that case the BATNA was for things to stay as they were. There's always a BATNA, the point is to know what that is beforehand just so you don't end up doing a deal that actually has a worse value than no deal.

You may be mistaking BATNA with ZOPA (zone of potential agreement). There wasn't any ZOPA here apparently.

<comment><USER10> There's another reason to know your BATNA, understanding the leverage you have, if any. If the only BATNA you can think of is no more and no less than the continuance of the status quo, then there's a good chance you have none.

<comment><USER9> I think we're saying the same thing. If the status quo is 100 your BATNA is by definition >= 100. It may be 120 though, if there's some other thing you can do that improves your situation if you can't get the deal done. So if the deal is worth 150 to you and the other party tries to negotiate for 110 claiming "it's still better for you than the status quo", knowing your BATNA allows you to say "nope, I'll do X and get 120 without the deal".

<comment><USER10> Sure, it's the same principle, but I was thinking more in the sense of knowing whether you're wasting your time or not. Asking for a raise, for instance. If your job is commoditized and there's no difference between you and someone else doing it, that means the balance of power in the exchange lies with your employer and your BATNA is to just keep working there at your current salary. You have no leverage.

The CFO at the company I work for tried to jerk me around by saying they wanted to put off bringing me on permanent, a $400 a week difference, for months. The company's BATNA in this situation was even worse than the status quo. It took them four months to find me and I've been doing great. I made some token efforts at negotiating, then started playing hardball by calling the staffing agency and threatening to leave. They folded practically instantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How true. Also, most people, in my experience, are unable or unwilling to accept frank feedback. They will get their feelings hurt, argue, get angry, or just block out what you're saying. (At least this is true in my experience in the US - perhaps some other countries have a more direct culture, e.g. Germany/Israel/Russia?)

So if you can project your ability to calmly receive frank feedback, others may be more likely to tell you what they really think.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just about everything in this post seems to assume that investors are the center of the entrepreneur's world when it comes to feedback and validation. That's a real problem because if you have domain expertise (which you should), there's a very good chance that you will know more about your market than 9 out of 10 investors you meet.

Once you recognize that most investors will be capable of offering little in the way of meaningful (read: specific) feedback, it isn't hard to identify the source of the most valuable feedback: target customers.

The good news: more often than not, it's fairly easy to locate potential customers who will be eager to look at what you have and give you an ear-full of honest, informed feedback at no cost. Some might even go on to become your first customers, but even if none do, I can guarantee you that you won't walk away from 52 meetings with potential customers wanting for real feedback.

<comment><USER13> I believe this was regarding feedback about why they were choosing not to invest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I'd like to know is how to get 52 meetings.

* Can you get 52 VC meetings in the valley, cold? Is that possible without being part of an accelerator, or knowing influential people?

* If your personal network doesn't flower into a bunch of meetings, then where do you get more?

* Is it events and meetups, cold emails, making noise online, some combination of these?

<comment><USER15> What I'd like to also know is:

Would you rather get 52 meetings with VC's or 52 meetings with potential customers who are willing to tell you their pains, frustrations and problems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even outside of the VCs, it's true that startups generally don't get to hear negative feedback on their idea from _anyone_. On the whole, people are really nice. No one wants to say "I don't think that'll work because X" as, in other other sphere, it's just a really horrible thing to say to someone. Startups actually need to hear that stuff though. It's not horrible to tell a startup you think there's a barrier to their success; it's _damn_ useful information.

It's a shame too, because I'm sure there's a lot of startups that could have used some honesty from the people around them early on to modify and pivot and consequently not fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, entrepreneurs receive tons of negative feedback on their ideas. Regardless of the industry, most senior leaders in that industry will proclaim that some innovation won't work (otherwise, it would've already been tried). At FlightCaster, we received loads of strategic feedback--all of which was fairly wild speculation.

Challenging an entrepreneur on the validity of an idea is actually a form of nice feedback. It seems like it's saying, "I believe in you but I have found some concrete roadblock that will cause this to fail." That's almost always bullshit, because startups change forms throughout their life, shifting strategies and tactics to avoid such roadblocks.

Really, that feedback is saying "I don't think you have what it takes to get around roadblocks."

<comment><USER17> Maybe its just lazy. You ask for feedback; they think of challenges and tell you. Who wants to spend the time digging into YOUR space to figure out detailed analysis? Easier to say "Competition, IP required, time-to-market too long" because they're always an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> loved the piece, just one part kind of got me:

 _You simply need to become more formidable._

I think VCs may be good at judging confidence, but a wide array of stereotypes and predispositions come to mind when picking whether someone with no track record will make it. I really don't get the feeling that VCs in general are good at picking the formidable founders, and in the end, really just place bets on the guys who someone else already bet on. I think YC does a great job of picking founders who have the potential to be formidable and allowing them to raise after the program.

<comment><USER11> _I really don 't get the feeling that VCs in general are good at picking the formidable founders_

The sentence you are responding to is the whole point of the article. VCs don't have to be good at picking formidable founders. (I don't know whether they are or aren't.) They just have to believe that they are good at it - <USER2> they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently moved to the VC side from software engineering. I was sure that the biggest value that I'd have for startups would be my engineering experience, but what founders seem to appreciate most is direct feedback. Even when saying 'no', I try to add some useful bullet points about what my fund's concerns are, what we'd like to see in order to invest in a latter round, any oddities that I noticed on the website or mobile app, etc. Founders seem to really like that -- especially product feedback.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is also true in romance and friendships. It's a fairly severe faux pas to actually tell someone why you rejected them - very, very few people take this sort of honesty well.

</comment><comment><USER21> Recently read "The Mom Test" which had some good advice about how to avoid the positive feedback that people only give you because they want to spare your ego or whatever. Not exactly applicable to this post, but still some pretty relevant ideas in there which I've made good use of.

</comment><comment><USER22> Jason is absolutely crushing it with these posts. I wouldn't be surprised if he's made partner at YC; either imminently on a part-time basis, or otherwise once he's exited 42floors.

</comment><comment><USER23> So what are the real check points:

* Track record?

* Strong verbal presentation? (Confidence, ex-football lineman, what?)

* Connections?

* What else??

* Something else?</comment>


Show HN: TradeSketch – Sketch custom indicators to scan stocks daily - <AUTHOR> https://www.tradesketch.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello guys, we are working on TradeSketch, a tool to build highly customizable trading indicators without coding, and use it to scan the stock market. We have just started to work on the concept, and even if it's not yet functionnal (it is not plugged to a backend), we would like to have your feedback already. What we showcase here is an example of how to create a custom indicator with our interface, and use it to screen stocks daily. What we would like to know is: Would you use this tool to implement your strategies? How can we make this tool more useful/easy to use? What kind of products (Stocks, FX, Crypto) are you interested in? What do you use currently to scan automatically the products to find opportunities? Thanks a lot

</comment><comment><USER2> What a great idea !</comment>


Should We Be Scared of AI? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cognilytica.com/2017/09/13/ai-today-podcast-002-should-we-be-scared-of-ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> The back and forth between Elon Musk and Rodney Brooks is interesting - <USER2> has the most sway? Is it long-term experience in AI or is it someone spend a lot of money and building businesses in this space?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to think I can side with Rodney Brooks and think that AGI is far far away but I see an immediate threat of bad actors doing bad things with AI in its current form.</comment>


FBI captures man accused of sending a seizure-inducing tweet - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-arrested-for-allegedly-sending-newsweek-writer-a-seizure-inducing-tweet/ <comment><USER2> A lot of comments about this on Ars Technica are about debating whether flashing lights or an image can ever be an assault or not. I think it probably can be, and examples like "shining a laser into a pilot's eyes" are some things that most people would probably agree are an assault. Seizures are serious business and can cause death, so I don't think people should be doing that.

I have sympathy for Kurt if he was actually harmed. However, based on seeing how often this guy lies about things and how extremely shady he acts, I wouldn't be too surprised if he didn't actually have a seizure, and was just happy at an opportunity to claim victim status and cash in with a big time court case and possible lawsuit.

The court case here might end being very interesting on many levels.</comment>


Retrieve All website Colors - <AUTHOR> http://www.artviper.net/colorfinder/

<comment><USER2> you can do this on www.colr.org too

<comment><USER3> there's also <http://www.todotoh.com/rgb/rgbanalysis.aspx> which takes a screen cap and returns a list of hex codes sorted by most frequently used. It doesn't work on every site, but it does for most. I use it to quickly get the color palette for a site I think looks good.</comment></comment>


Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/whitehousegov-has-a-new-face/ <comment><USER2> Whitehouse.gov also has a new robots.txt file ( <http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt> )

If you search google for 'whitehouse' and 'robots' then you can still see the cache of the robots.txt file of the Bush Administration ([http://184.108.40.206/search?q=cache:tCfemw3M-aUJ:www.whiteho...](http://18.104.22.168/search?q=cache:tCfemw3M-aUJ:www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt+whitehouse+robots))

<comment><USER3> All the URLs in the former robots.txt seem to end in "/text". It's likely that they just didn't want the text versions of the articles to be indexed.

<comment><USER4> You are correct. The text versions were present for screen readers.

<comment><USER5> Instead of just using good markup in the first place?

<comment><USER4> Good markup can't handle it all, text-only mode allows for stuff like having a transcript instead of a video with a link to a transcript. Text-only mode is even available on the new site:

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/>

"In addition to the features that make the graphics version of the site more accessible, a text-only version provides added convenience for users."

I'm not sure how to access it though, maybe that feature hasn't launched yet.

<comment><USER5> I'm going to disagree. Let me share some background, I spent several years helping to write the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 spec. The original WCAG 1.0 as well as Section 508 specify an alternate text only site as a viable method.

Real world experience shows us those sites quickly fall behind. Text- alternatives are necessary for multimedia content, text-only sites as an alternative to good markup aren't.

<comment><USER6> Fall behind in what sense? Obviously, if the multimedia content isn't transcribed quickly enough, then that makes sense, but I would also guess less consequential than if a given page weren't transformed from 'marked up' to 'text', but in the latter case, if the backend is dynamic, and just changing the output format, why would it fall behind?

<comment><USER5> People just don't want to maintain 2 sites. Extra features and sections often don't get updated to the text only rendering.

I guess my point is that screen readers like (even prefer) well written markup. A text-only site is a kickback from when they couldn't and the accessibility guidelines were written to deal with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's also built using jQuery as tweeted by jResig. I was hoping Obama would begin using twitter immediately after taking the Presidency. We'll see if the twitter account falls into the history books and is not utilized.

<comment><USER8> I think I'm prepared to forgive the President for not having the time to post on Twitter.

<comment><USER9> What? No. He has to spend 15 hours a day checking email and tweeting like Gary Vaynerchuk says! Social media!!

<comment><USER10>
      dm @joeyb Bleh, this Gordon guy is boring me to tears. Your turn next time. Bar ltr?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Check out <http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/>

"Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License."

<comment><USER12> This doesn't mean much. I believe all works produced by the federal government are in the public domain and you don't need permission to reproduce them.

<comment><USER11> True, and covered in the first of the three paragraphs at that link:

"Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."

The news is that they're defaulting to Creative Commons for all "third-party content" on the site, including user submissions. That's the part that got me. Even if they're not producing it, they're trying to keep information open (as opposed to just requiring copyright assignment, for instance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even better, it's valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional: [http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehous...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F&charset=\(detect+automatically\)&doctype=Inline&group=0)

<comment><USER14> //<![CDATA[ Why is this good? & why is it better than HTML4.01 Strict? XHTML is not beautiful. //]]>

<comment><USER15> XHTML is also pointless when it's served up at text/html

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main big block of text next to the picture is a jpg, and looks like it has a ton of compression artifacts. tsk tsk! =)

Other than that it's an awesome site, definitely the best government agency site I've ever seen.

<comment><USER17> Those aren't compress... wait.. yessss that's exactly what they are. Compression artifacts. Move along. You didn't see nuthin'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Who's going to add the Whitehouse blog to their feedreader?

<comment><USER19> I'm sure a ton of people will. In fact, I would bet that the whitehouse blog may introduce lots of people to RSS for the first time ever. The concept of a more transparent government where citizens are informed about the happenings inside the white house will be heavily at play here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The President of the United States now has a blog.

Unbelievable only a year ago, really.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but one must wonder if he uses "The Google"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> But why are they using some external commercial company for visitor analytics? (webtrendslive.com)

<comment><USER23> probably because of government contract, but also because in the DC region WebTrends is well-known as an analytics tool

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't know what to think that the site has a blog.

<comment><USER24> doesn't have comments (to avoid trolls and spam) - and its basically a "hip" way of saying a press release in a conversational tone. I think its ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> ok, am I the only fool who got a bit teary eyed when going through whitehouse.gov? Whether you agree with his politics or not, you have to admit that he is going to change the way we interact with our government.

"President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause"

</comment><comment><USER26> I want to know who did the new design/site work?

<comment><USER16> I don't have any idea, but Blue State Digital did his campaign site and a bunch of other dem 08 work, so perhaps it was them.

<comment><USER27> Blue State Digital built CHANGE.GOV, and this is pretty clearly a continuation, although the impression I get is that they've brought a lot of it in-house.

<comment><USER28> Macon Phillips, who is listed on LinkedIn as a "Director of Strategy and Communications for Blue State Digital" is now the Director of New Media for the Executive Office of the President: [http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse- gov/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems pretty slow - I guess that's a good sign (many people looking at it?)

</comment><comment><USER30> And so does <http://whitehouse.net>

<comment><USER30> Screenshot

<http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7974/chinahousehd8.png></comment></comment>


Enemy in the Mirror: Heiner Müller–poet, playwright, and informant - <AUTHOR> https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/153403/enemy-in-the-mirror <comment><USER2> "There is a human right to cowardice" seems a fair statement, but the counter point is that a Poet (cap P) can not be a coward.

<comment><USER3> Both Horace and Archilochos have poems about running away from (lost) battles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A modern, German, Christopher Marlowe!</comment>


CVPR 2016 Tutorial on the Mathematics of Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.vision.jhu.edu/tutorials/CVPR16-Tutorial-Math-Deep-Learning.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Tutorial description:

 _" The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the performance of recognition systems due to the introduction of deep architectures for feature learning and classification. However, the mathematical reasons for this success remain elusive. This tutorial will review recent work that aims to provide a mathematical justification for properties of special classes of deep networks, such as global optimality, invariance, and stability of the learned representations."_</comment>


Twitter is now flagging the use of 'oxygen' and 'frequency' in the same tweet - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ltthompso/status/1276546698932817923 <comment><USER2> It didn't work when I tweeted "frequency oxygen" and waited a few minutes. I suspect it needs a few extra words to trigger the alarm.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seem to work with those two words only

[https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1276546801898668033?s=20](https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1276546801898668033?s=20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this related to the 5G stuff? Supposedly 5G operates at a frequency that causes oxygen molecules to break down thereby starving your brain.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any idea what they were trying to flag? A Google search didn't seem to bring anything up.

<comment><USER5> They have linked it to the 5G Covid-19 conspiracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a practicer of high frequency breathing to ensure I get enough oxygen for my bulbous muscles, I'm offended.</comment>


Facebook Has Competition: MySpace Platform To Launch Next Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/09/myspace-platform-to-launch-next-week/ <comment><USER2> In this corner: Facebook is a pre-IPO tech company with a hacker at the helm and Silicon Valley's finest backing him up.

And in this corner: MySpace has slick executives and a horde of Windows developers who are stuck in LA.

Let's get ready to rumble.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could we call it something other than a platform? Especially since, for average developer, you already had basically free reign on MySpace's pages? Somebody in the comments there pointed out that Rockyou and Slide got their _start_ on MySpace. Nothin' new...

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting shift for myspace. Going from randomly blocking third party applications from profiles to opening up their platform. I wonder if the developers that got burned in the past will trust MySpace this time.</comment>


The cronjob that generates $4 million a year - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/4540b0cde584 <comment><USER2> Wow! 4 mill/year? I'd like to hear more about the story behind Buffer.</comment>


Implementing a programming language in C, part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.vnev.me/implementing-a-programming-language-in-c-part-2/

<comment><USER2> Part 1: [http://vnev.me/implementing-a-programming-language-in-c- part...](http://vnev.me/implementing-a-programming-language-in-c-part-1/)

And previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555972)

<comment><USER3> OP should put a link to part 1 in the article.

<comment><USER4> I told him to do that, but he thought he already did! I'll bug him so he does this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From my experience, implementing a programming language can be easier to grasp when doing it _backwards_ , that is: back end -> front end. I can recommend The BNF Converter ([http://bnfc.digitalgrammars.com/](http://bnfc.digitalgrammars.com/)), which is a tool that generates the front end (C, C++, C#, Haskell, Java, or OCaml) from BNF grammar. Writing a back end gives you pretty clear big picture of how different parts work and relate to each other. When you have that you can write the front end with this vision.

Obviously, this is only my experience, but I thought of sharing, since in almost every compiler course I've seen everything starts with writing the front end. I still have a very, very limited experience and knowledge, but after I learn more about implementing PL/writing compilers, I see it everywhere.

<comment><USER6> I recommend [http://www.hokstad.com/compiler](http://www.hokstad.com/compiler) , which covers the process of writing a compiler in the way that makes sense to me, the way you'd write any other program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The link is broken: [http://i.imgur.com/0qc3wf8.png](http://i.imgur.com/0qc3wf8.png) I got this error: Heroku | No such app There is no app configured at that hostname. Perhaps the app owner has renamed it, or you mistyped the URL.

<comment><USER4> Hi, the author is my friend. He hosted his Ghost blog on Heroku, but after a certain threshold (traffic-wise) it got deleted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Parts 1 and 2 cached links:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://vnev.me/implementing- a-programming-language-in-c-part-1/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.vnev.me/implementing- a-programming-language-in-c-part-2/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari)

</comment><comment><USER9> I must have missed the first part, but this is a topic that always interests me, especially when starting from fundamentals.

Writing a lexer in C, while simple, is non-trivial mainly due to the tasks of pointer arithmetic and string manipulation. If the author continues on to the task of writing a completely customizable LR parser or something of the sort in C or another high-level language, it might be useful to take a look at the source code for an LR(1) and SLR parser-generator here: [https://github.com/gregtour/duck-lang/tree/master/parser- gen...](https://github.com/gregtour/duck-lang/tree/master/parser-generator)

I may fork this branch from the main duck programming language trunk because it could be useful to other programming languages.

My focus in studying programming languages has been concentrated on frontends for languages. One drawback of my parser's implementation is that it can be slow for generating complete canonical parsers for any deterministic context free grammar and the tables can be quite large. However, there must be ways to improve the code base to provide better features and performance. Also, once you have a parse table, it really is a fast parser.

The benefit to using a ground-up approach like this is not only having a complete understanding of all of the technology involved but also in having complete control.

Although I haven't used GNU tools like LEX or YACC in practice, I dislike the idea of generating code in a macro form or really breaking the paradigms of C and C++ to create auto-generated code. For me, it is much easier to have programs that take an input, like a BNF grammar, and provide an output, the parse table. That can then be applied to create a syntax tree from source code. For me, this makes more sense in creating code that operates on data and data structures rather than having code generated around templates or macros.

Having control over the data structures in use is helpful because then a programmer knows exactly where all of the data is going and where it is being stored, somewhat useful in designing a programming language and something you lose in using someone else's libraries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just posted part 1 to HN as well. Here it is: [http://vnev.me/implementing-a- programming-language-in-c-part...](http://vnev.me/implementing-a-programming- language-in-c-part-1/). Part 2 is definitely more interesting (to me, at least). Great articles overall

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Links broken guys, but the cache is up so you can still read it. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.v...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.vnev.me%2Fimplementing- a-programming-language-in-c-part-2%2F&oq=cache%3Awww.vnev.me%2Fimplementing-a- programming-language-in-c- part-2%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.764j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi, I'm a friend of the author. We're currently migrating his blog to one of my servers, wont be long :)</comment>


Quartz sold by atlantic media to uzabase of japan - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1319054/quartz-sold-by-atlantic-media-to-uzabase-of-japan/ <comment><USER2> Very glad to see this partnership! Should be a great addition to the NewsPicks family.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I sell these charity shirts? - <AUTHOR>

I work for a sustainabke denim start-up, and our company is selling shirts on our site with profits going to charity that helps builds sustainable nutrition in African schools, + we're adding a $5 donation from ourselves for each shirt. We misjudged how popular they would be and havn't sold many. Any ideas for how to move some shirts? <comment><USER2> What kind of advertising have you done for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Email blast, facebook awareness, a retweet contest using a pair of sustainable designer jeans (our main product) as the prize. None of these led to sales, though, sales came from somewhat randomly from visitors.</comment></comment>


25,000 Passwords Leaked in Plaintext from CDC, WHO, NIH, Gates Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/21/nearly-25000-email-addresses-passwords-allegedly-nih-who-gates-foundation-are-dumped-online/ <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/PzpMq](http://archive.is/PzpMq)</comment>


R Package to Test Personality - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flujoo/personr <comment><AUTHOR> This package generates a science-based personality test in your browser, and a report after you finish the test.</comment>


The Secret Facebook War for Mormon Hearts and Minds - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war-for-mormon-hearts-and-minds?via=twitter_page <comment><USER2> > About 1,000 people who saw the Facebook ad clicked on it and were taken to a > page deep within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' website > that expounded on the "revelation on plural marriage," the order from God > that was used to sanction polygamy for decades.

Worth pointing out that they did not link to "anti mormon" literature, but the church's own website about polygamy.

Probably this article:

[https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-in-kirtland- and-n...](https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and- nauvoo?lang=eng)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Ex-Mormons responded in droves to dump their contact lists of current Mormons. By the end of the first day his ad target list had grown from 30 to 397"

So now people get doxxed by friends and family. Imagine someone pretending to do this to influence someone in one direction, but then using it for any other reason. Who can say none of their friends would be tricked?

<comment><USER4> In my observation, ex-Mormons are particularly vindictive, even by normal Christian atheist standards.

<comment><USER5> Similar to how current Mormons are?

<comment><USER4> Maybe? It might also depend on whether or not they are from Utah/Southern Idaho, because the California mormons I know are pretty laid back. In any event defining one's identity in terms of a negation observably warps one's outlook, and I've never seen it be positive.

Mormons obviously believe some pretty strange things, but they also tend to live pretty admirable lives, with a strong focus on community, family, charitable giving, and more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I've tried to be as educated as possible about the controversial/anti-mormon stuff (for example I've read the CES letter). But this is the first time I've come across this claim:

"During that time [when plural marriage was part of the doctrine] some male followers of the Latter Day Saint movement took dozens of wives each, disproportionately favoring girls between 14 and 16 years old."

There's no reference, does anyone have a source for that?

<comment><USER7> The founder Joseph Smith had 14, 16, 17 year old brides. If it was allowed for Joseph Smith why should anyone else be different?

<comment><USER8> No reason at all. It was generally allowed in the U.S. Age of consent was typically 10 years old until 1885 [https://discover-the- truth.com/2013/09/09/age-of-consent-in-...](https://discover-the- truth.com/2013/09/09/age-of-consent-in-european-american-history/)

"After 1885, age of consent laws changed around the country, reaching 16 in New York in 1889 and 18 in 1895. Prior to these changes the age of consent in most places in the United States was 10 or 12 years."

There's a very strong trend to criticize historical figures for not conforming to modern standards, but it's not usually very useful in understanding their character.

<comment><USER9> This is a common rationalization taught to educated true-believing mormons. While it is true that the age of consent was lower than today, according to the contemporary census (1890s is what I have records for, Smith's relationships were 1830s-40s) age of marriage was about the same it is now ([http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png](http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png)).

Whats more, looking at comparable relationships contemporary or even before Smith's time, let's say Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson (15 and 45 respectively) in the late 18th century and you can clearly find plenty of condemnation of the age disparity between the two.

I'm sure there were others who were fine with men like Jefferson and Smith preying on teenagers, but it does not mean it was considered ok then.

<comment><USER8> 1890s/1900 was actually a local maximum in women's marriage age that would not be equalled until about 1980. [http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggle...](http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggles.pdf) shows 10% of native-born, white US women were married by age 17 in 1850 (first year of data), and that 10% threshold rose rapidly through the latter half of the century, so it may have been more common to have very young brides earlier in the century. Though at 10% even in 1850, it was not unusual. Add confounding factors like immigration and poverty, and young brides may have been even more common (and vulnerable to be protected or taken advantage of depending on your perspective)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting read but I'd have to say that the ExMormon subreddit mods made the right decision to ban this guy. Using under-handed and manipulative means to 'rescue' people from a religion or cult is not good.

</comment><comment><USER11> A perspective on how it was to be a Mormon wife (specifically, one of Brigham Young's wives) is available in a book "Wife no. 19" by Ann Eliza Young, self- described as "Brigham Young's apostate wife". Published in 1876, readable at [1].

It's been the focal point of quite a few spirited discussions between the Mormon members of my family and (non-Mormon) me.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/wifenoorstoryofl00youniala/page/...](https://archive.org/details/wifenoorstoryofl00youniala/page/n4)

</comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't seem much different than how christian groups will advertise "pregnancy options counseling"

</comment><comment><USER13> It is an interesting thing where neighbors could Target neighbors, spouses even, from behind social media?</comment>


A 1-800 number for data plans? - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/1-800-number-data-plans

<comment><AUTHOR> There's one simple thing that the FCC could do to put a stop to all this mess: reclassify wireless broadband and cable companies from an "information" to a "telecommunication" service.

Then, they would fall under common carrier regulations that require allowing other companies to offer ISP services on their infrastructure. I know that the FCC is so corrupt that it will never happen, but it is still a one word fix.</comment>


Don't Mess with the Birds - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/dont-mess-with-the-birds <comment><USER2> The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is very interesting from a legal standpoint. Regulating wild birds is not one of the enumerated powers of Congress, but the federal government entered a treaty with Canada to protect migratory birds and successfully argued in the Supreme Court that it could enter such a treaty despite not having the power to enforce it, and that by entering the treaty it gained the power to enforce it. This is vaguely reminiscent of the Five Eyes reciprocal spying arrangement.

During the 1930s there were some other interesting attempts at regulating things through complicated "taxation" systems, including marijuana and machine-guns (only the latter law survives today).

Creative legislative techniques like this don't seem to occur as often now that Congress has settled on just declaring everything to be "interstate commerce" (which is how the modern drug laws work, and if a migratory bird law were passed today I'm sure they would consider birds that cross state lines to be involved in interstate commerce).

<comment><USER3> The most recent episode of the "More Perfect" podcast (which discusses Supreme Court cases) is about the commerce clause:

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/one-nation-under- money/](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/one-nation-under-money/)

(No transcript unfortunately.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone curious, here are the birds in the US covered by the Migratory Bird Treat Act [1]. A good first approximation is that if you see a wild bird, and it is not a European Starling, House Sparrow, Pigeon, or a bird that you can get a hunting license for, it is probably covered.

There are some curious state laws regarding birds. For instance, California Penal Code, § 598:

> Every person who, within any public cemetery or burying ground, kills, > wounds, or traps any bird, or destroys any bird's nest other than swallows' > nests, or removes any eggs or young birds from any nest, is guilty of a > misdemeanor.

Why an exception for swallows' nests?

[1] [https://www.fws.gov/birds/management/managed- species/migrato...](https://www.fws.gov/birds/management/managed- species/migratory-bird-treaty-act-protected-species.php)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's ruffed grouse, not ruffled grouse!

</comment><comment><USER6> Good old Cheney family. Degenerates top to bottom (RTFA).

<comment><USER7> I would say that family has an extreme selfish gene. While I have extreme dislike for all of them, I don't know I would call them _degenerates_.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to correct incorrect reporting from traffic counters? - <AUTHOR>

I imagine a lot of lurkers (myself included) tend to use compete, quantcast & alexa for tracking other sites. When it comes to your personal site not being reporting correctly, have you ever tried to correct any holes in their data? We're offering  to send them private info on our growth at http://gorankem.com , but compete says they have their own methodology for computing (??)
I'd hate to hear that prospective investors or the like are going off of those charts when their samples are often not fully accurate.
Anybody had issues in the past? Gotten them resolved? <comment><USER2> Quantcast you can just embed their beacon to be directly measured, the rest I think you're SOL _but_ you can just rely on Quantcast - "We use their tracker so their measurements are accurate".

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the heads up. i just wish influential sites like crunchbase were not reliant on compete...</comment></comment>