How to design perfect software products (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://hintjens.com/blog:19 <comment><USER3> One problem with the meme that building products is about "solving problems" is that the biggest successes often come from recognizing very vague "problems" others don't, in the form of seeing fundamentally better ways of doing something -- without being able to grasp up-front the long term concrete benefits. You need to build and ship to learn them. So in those scenarios, people don't recognize what you are doing as a "real" problem, so it ends up being hindsight bias when it's recognized as such. An example in the article cited was Wikipedia: Wikipedia didn't "solve a problem" with existing encyclopedias, it recognized there was just a fundamentally better way to collect objective knowledge and disseminate it -- most people at the time were scratching their heads about what the point was, since from their perspective encyclopedias worked perfectly well within the scope of their design goals.

I think the mental model that you should always be working on software where you have people directly telling you the problem they want to solve is a poor one -- it's great for a variety of domains, but often people want a faster horse or don't even see a problem with their existing horse. Even when you think you are recognizing a problem others don't see yet -- it can require a leap of faith to begin exploring to see if you can iterate and react to discovering something with big promise.

</comment><comment><USER4> The comparison to hill-climbing algorithms is an interesting one, especially because the author ignores the fact that hill-climbing algorithms get stuck in local optima unless there is a way to "restart" the search from a new location. There is a time and place for big, risky changes to advance beyond what this "patch" approach can do.

<comment><USER5> I think this is what happened to Amazon. A series of locally optimized decisions like commingled inventory and 3rd party sellers that has turned the site into a used car dealership in some categories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The rarest skill, even in highly intelligent engineers, is to be able to imagine the world after a thing has been changed, and see what will matter to people then.

Everyone else (including you, most likely) can only see the change itself. Is the change pretty? No awareness at all of whether the product after the change is nicer than the present product.

It is a skill that can be developed, but it takes focused attention. The end result is to see how to alter the change to make the end result better to use, not just a thing with another PITA feature.

</comment><comment><USER7> What people failed to define themselves is "Simplicity". That concept "Simplicity" needs context.

Is it API surface simple ?

Is it data model simple ?

Is it Lines of Code short ?

Is it extensible with small core and huge plugins system ? ...

Is Wordpress simple ? Is MERN simple ? Is Rails simple ?

There's no answer here.

That's it. There's no "absolute simplicity", it depends on context.

<comment><USER8> How many new concepts a new user needs to learn, and how many mental models a new user must develop in order to effectively use your software. Twitter is simple, Git is complex.

<comment><USER9> Git is pretty simple. [https://github.com/git/git/blob/ecbdaf0899161c067986e9d9d564...](https://github.com/git/git/blob/ecbdaf0899161c067986e9d9d564586d4b045d62/ll- merge.c)

<comment><USER10> Git is one of those rare products whose internal implementation is simple but whose user interface is a complicated mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is being described here is very similar if not identical to what can be found in Agile software and lean software development books that gained popularity in the mid 2000's.

<comment><USER12> well, it's definitely not identical

<comment><USER13> No it isn't. Agile _software_ development assumes management knows what it's doing - which is often not the case at all.

Agile is primarily about managing down assuming a coherent goal exists - <USER2> about finding the best coherent goal when it doesn't, or even about being able to tell that it doesn't.

Agile _business_ management doesn't really exist as an established practice. Although you can certainly find books, consultants, and all the usual noise that use the term, the idea that you can recursively define your business strategy - not your implementation - by solving the problems that provide the best customer satisfaction at the lowest implementation cost isn't as common as it should be.

The obvious complication is that the definition of "customer" varies. A bootstrapped startup needs to focus on real income-generating customers.

A VC-funded startup is in a different market. The primary customers are actually the VCs and other investors - not product users, whether they're paying or not.

Pieter Hintjens is always worth reading, even though his "solutions" are wildly oversimplified and contingent. Here he takes it for granted that solving customer pain points should always be the primary value-generating goal - which for better or worse happens not to be true, especially for startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can we get ( 2012 ) tag please</comment>


Ask HN: What business models will replace ads on the web? - <AUTHOR> Most people dislike ads, but want content and apps on the web - therefore some economical model is needed, so what are the options for mass adopted systems? <comment><USER3> >Most people dislike ads, but want content and apps on the web - <USER2> some economical model is needed

When you figure it out let us know. Other than paying for content (which even when you do that you often STILL get ads, hulu for example).

Ads aren't going anywhere. The fact that people dislike them is irrelevant. Ads are here to stay. So to answer your question, nothing. No business model is going to replace ads on the web.

</comment><comment><USER4> Open source, crowdfunding and good old paying for your products.

<comment><AUTHOR> But these already exist, so why no mass adoption?

Edit: online publishing, could use open source projects for the tech, crowd source/fund the content, and ask people to pay for the privilege of reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same like for print.</comment>


MindPoint Group Exposes Red Hat 6 and 7 STIGs Ruining U.S Government Clearances - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cloudstories2017/mindpoint-group-exposes-red-hat-6-and-7-stigs-linked-to-5-1-million-ruined-security-clearances-493245ef1297 <comment><USER2> So, the person behind this page doesn't seem to be a native English speaker/writer.

Indeed, they are bad enough that it's really hard for me to figure out what they're trying to say.

Does anyone have a better translation available?</comment>


Give 100 Percent? - <AUTHOR> http://samanthadouglas.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/give-100-percent/ <comment><USER3> Grading is, psychologically, a special case of gamification.

There's a debate on this point, but many smart people believe that gamification should only be used to provide an extrinsic motivator for things that A) have no intrinsic motivation, or B) have a steep learning curve that is discouraging at first. In the latter case, the game mechanics should be removed once the difficult first step has been conquered so that the intrinsic motivation can supplant the extrinsic ones, leading to a naturally reinforcing cycle of growth (and flow). If it isn't removed—or if it shouldn't have been there in the first place—then the game mechanics can completely overwhelm the intrinsic motivators.

Here we see that learning is intrinsically motivating by itself; no external rewards necessary. As another commenter mentioned, the Montessori method acknowledges this.

<comment><USER4> In Australia, continuous assessment is the fad. Shudder.

I see it as a vicious cycle. One teacher (or lecturer) sets lots of highly weighted assignments. Students work hard in their class, and ignore the ones that "don't matter". So the other teachers (or lecturers) have to also ramp up, or no-one will study for their classes. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the students are the commons.

<comment><USER5> Continuous assessment should happen every time someone's teaching. This is "formative assessment", and is essential for informing teaching practice. That doesn't mean you give the students grades.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. The difference is whether the assessment is seen as feedback or an evaluation/judgement by the students (and the teacher). In the case of marking 100% on homework -- that's bound to be seen as an evaluation and hence an extrinsic motivator -- not good.

Assessing for the sake of gaining feedback on where the students are (for the teacher) and providing feedback to the students on where they are (for the students) is the way to promote intrinsic motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I realized this shortly before I dropped out of high school. Nobody who hired me ever asked for my grades. I appreciated teacher's critique of my work if I thought his own skill was significantly superior to mine. Yet ultimately I did not give a crap about whether I had 2.5 or 4.0 GPA.

I was surrounded by perfectionist people who would retake a class because of A-, but after a while I realized they were just playing a game I wasn't interested in.

I am interested in creating impressive graphics code/designing things that don't suck/creating things of high aesthetic value. I am interested in getting paid because it allows me to have independence and concentrate on creating those things, and not feel like a parasite. That is my game, so to speak.

I did not see a very strong correlation between grades and the above so it ended up low on my list of priorities. Just like a game of chess, it made me smarter at those things I wanted to do, but I couldn't dedicate a lot of time to chess or gaming the teachers, just because I did not give a crap about those things.

I know I'm going against the zeitgeist here but I think grade, SAT scores, or degrees don't mean a lot in life.

I recently had to work with legacy code written by a guy with the highest degree possible in US. The code was hard to read, did not use clearly superior architectures, lacked documentation, and quite frankly, I could've done a lot better. There was no empathy at all to the person who will inherit the project but the "I HAVE PHD" feeling of smugness I felt strongly.

One of the worst math instructors I knew had a graduate degree which she liked to brag about more than everybody thought was appropriate to her skill.

On the other hand, I was in touch with several professors who were clearly brilliant and well-spoken... obviously education doesn't necessarily fuck up your sense of humility and introspective self-critique.

</comment><comment><USER8> From the title I thought "give 100%" meant putting in your full effort, rather than the mark you got. Maybe change it to something less ambiguous?

<comment><USER9> Same here.

Title should be: _How to kill the drive to learn - give grades_

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the title as I originally submitted it. The mods, in their infinite wisdom, changed it.

I think my title gave a better idea of what the article was about. The mods changed it to the article's own title. I do not believe my title was editorializing, I believe it was providing useful information.

<shrug> The mods know best. Well, they have the power, anyway.

Personally, I'm disappointed. I put some time into finding a title that I thought didn't editorialize, but did give better insight into what the article is about, helping people make a decision whether to click on it or not.

It's different when you've already got the article in front of you - <USER2> further clicks required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm torn. I think the post has a point, but in my experience (as a teacher and as a student) the people who complain most vociferously about grades also tend to be the people who _get the lowest grades._ More importantly, the correlation between grades and competence isn't perfect -- but it's also much higher than zero. Most of the people I've met in the valley have earned _fantastic_ grades, at the best universities. You can argue that this is mere correlation or selection bias, but regardless of the reason, the relationship still exists.

To paraphrase Churchill: grades are the worst system of measuring accomplishment, except for all the others we've tried.

<comment><USER11> If you were only interested in _measuring_ accomplishment, you'd keep the grades secret (say, until the end of the year). Instead, grades are used as a stick/carrot for motivating students.

<comment><USER12> And as feedback. Students need to know whether or not they're doing well.

In some subjects it's obvious to the student whether they're doing well, but in others it's not.

<comment><USER13> But the problem is that this feedback turns into a 'grade-based economy', where your value in the eyes of peers and parents becomes determined by the grades you get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder why some people end up being intellectually curious while others are not. I think intellectual curiosity is very important, especially now since the majority of the world's information is available for free online.

The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the other applicants. Plus, I think a lover for knowledge can enrich an individuals life as well.

I don't know exactly how schools and parents can instill intellectual curiosity into their students and children but I think the subject matter should be researched and prioritized.

<comment><USER15> > The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads > up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the > other applicants.

I unfortunately do not agree with you. Despite how much it kills me to admit this, intellectual curiosity (at least in the legal world) is more of a cancer... you don't want people who will bury themselves learning as much as they can about a topic. This mindset is discordant with the concept of deadlines, because it's almost impossible to estimate the duration of something that is by definition factorial in complexity. As such, employers in fields so heavily dictated by deadlines are not looking for people who thrive on learning...they're looking for people who thrive on completing the task that they're assigned--even if it means suppressing their intrinsic desire to learn in favor of an extrinsic motivator: $$$.

<comment><USER16> I mostly agree with this; I think a reasonable degree of intellectual curiosity is necessary to do well, but that the most successful range is "a moderate amount". Read some, but not too much, and get quite skilled at some in-demand skill, while staying flexible enough to adapt it and pick up related skills. Having _too_ much intellectual curiosity can reduce focus (harder to be content with a fairly limited job, even if well-paying), can cause angst if you do too much digging-into-foundations (i.e. don't just excel within the parameters of your task, but try to understand why it exists or is set up the way it is in the first place), etc.

Not that that means intellectual curiosity is bad, I'm just not sure it's income-maximizing or good-employee-maximizing, at least in the normal case.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I'm not at all arguing that intellectual curiosity is _bad_ , just that it's not always _right_ , where what's "right" is parameterized on the inputs: your task, the expected output, the deadline, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unluckily, this is the truth. This develops even further. The aim become how to optimize to get good grades and not actually learn to get them. This develops even further: You don't want to learn unless you get rewarded for it. The result is the decline in the quality of work you do.

This might explain the current economics: The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live. Those who care only to take a job are the jobless (because they create less value and also there are many of them).

<comment><USER18> >>The smart always (most of the time) find a job or a way to live.<<

You're talking about expedience not intelligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a funny way, that's like graduate school: the good parts of it, at least.

It's just you, and striving to learn something, in depth, with understanding. You have access to immense knowledge in the form of the University library and the faculty. You can learn, really learn, in a way that isn't sneaking it or being the disruptive one. It's _okay_ to learn.

(Yeah, there's also advisors, other students, student loans, classes, the U bureaucratic world, and the rest of the bad parts.)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm torn. On the one hand, my understanding is that the concept of a Montessori school is based on the notion of exploratory learning for young children, and there was an article recently that remarked on the unusually high rate of Montessori-schooled individuals in places of power. So there is some sort of lesson to be drawn from this idea, namely: send your kids to a Montessori school.

But I don't like the characterization of the preferred drive for approval in writing from an adult as a "cancer", and I think it obscures the fact that at some point grades and such will become important because society is going to have to sort them, and grades are just the sorting mechanism.

I think that for each socio-economic stratum there is going to be some optimal transition age which puts the students in the best position to succeed, make money, have families, found companies, make great art, heal people better, make scientific discoveries, etc... and ultimately have more kids.

Link: [http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the- montessori-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori- mafia/)

<comment><USER21> It is a cancer and I could care less how useful grades are to society. I treat society like it treats me, a mark on a piece of paper somewhere. I'm not a grade I'm a person. If not having a great means society can't sort me then all the better, I don't want to be anywhere near the people who care to be sorted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Grades have this affect because they become psychologically tied to your self- worth. Where does it start? I don't think small children care or are even aware of the significance of having good grades (what 5-8yr old is gunning for Harvard?), but they can certainly sense which end of the spectrum is desirable if they seek to maximize love, affection, and acceptance from adults and peers.

You take the organic process of knowledge acquisition and now you've added game mechanics to it. For children the prize is acceptance, and for college students its social status, employment prospects, and respect. Now you have scores and outcomes, and critically, the outcomes do not have to be tied to any intrinsic motivation for the thing you are trying to learn.

So children might do things not because they're interested in them, but because it makes them look smart. People will chase lucrative jobs in fields they don't particularly care for, or want to join particular institutions just for the prestige, and a wide range of other behavior thats driven by rewards of performance and not of one's real interests. Learning for learnings sake takes a back seat to all of this.

</comment><comment><USER23> OT: if you are on an iPad, be aware the site uses that broken OnSwipe theme, which has a good chance of running your browser out of memory and crashing it. Might want to wait until you are on your desktop or laptop.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great anecdote; learning and education are often at odds.

</comment><comment><USER25> This blog post echoes what is said in the book MindSet (<http://mindsetonline.com/>). Never praise children because they accomplished a task. Always praise the effort done to do so.

</comment><comment><USER26> For those interested in this subject, Alfie Kohn is a good author to read.

<comment><USER27> I second that. Reading his work has strongly influenced my parenting philosophy for my 3 young boys.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, but how did they turn out? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Check out the book "punished by rewards". Also explains why achievements in video games are such a bad idea.

<comment><USER12> To save me the trouble of reading an entire book just to get the one point I'm interested in, why _does_ the author think that achievements in video games are a bad idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In some sense, I had this feeling when I came to the US for the first time. I was used to study in Universities were the failure % could be easily below 10% for some courses (Calculus, Algebra being an example). In most of the courses the best grades were below a 7 out of 10. And no, there were no A+ to anybody if the grade was not 9+ out of 10.

In the US, though, it is difficult is to fail a course. I really think that failing a course requires big amount of effort.

I think that neither of both systems are really effective. The spanish version can be depressing and the students are not willing to study for the sake of learning but to pass (the average number of years for a engineering undergrad is 7 years back when the engineering was 5 years of study). On the other hand, most students in the US lack passion and are not going to study since most of the time they don't need to study to pass the courses.

<comment><USER31> Japan is even worse - with most tertiary education considered a break between high school and company, and your entry level position mainly determined by the name of your school... Hence the mad situation where your adult life hinges on one year of grueling study for the uni entrance exams!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Or, don't give a '100%' until everything is learned? If they've giving up before the work is done because you told them it was done, don't tell them it's done?

I get the moral of the story. But if there's more words to learn, how could they possibly have mastered the test?

There's more wrong here than just the grades.

<comment><USER33> I think the flaw there is imagining that "everything" can be learned.

<comment><USER32> He obviously has a list to learn from. That's 'everything' in this context.

<comment><USER33> The entire point here is that letting the kids think in terms of "finishing the list" is wrong. You can't "finish" learning English vocabulary, or mathematical theorems, or really anything worth doing in life.

If the kids use up the pre-researched list, then you _go get more_. Or tell the kids how to get more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Isn't this part of the Montessori model -- no grading?

<comment><USER35> The Montessori model is a particular 'no grading' model.

<comment><USER36> So there's more than one way to not grade.

<comment><USER37> More like: not all models of teaching require grades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Back in the second grade, my teacher would offer extra credit math that brought your percentage over 100%. I remember competing with the other kids to get ridiculously inflated scores like 361%.

Of course, everyone who made it to 95% got an A, but the "bonus XP" aspect of going over 100% was a fun incentive to keep you trying harder.

</comment><comment><USER39> This highlights a deeper problem in human psychology. It takes many otherwise intelligent people years to realize that the approval of some abstracted authority is not a useful measure of accomplishment. Many people never get over it.

</comment><comment><USER40> marking their work prepares the children for the next thing which will be even more cooler shower upon their curiosity and enthusiasm - money/salary/financial incentives distribution system in the economy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Grading?!? Wait til they get a budget, a schedule, and major requirements that change weekly...

More seriously though, this is a fascinating glimpse into an aspect of human motivation.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Men will die for colored ribbons" Bonaparte.

</comment><comment><USER43> "In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day- to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

"So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge- motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.

"Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."

\-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

<comment><USER44> Thank you for that. ZatAoMM (whoa acronym) has always been on my list to read, but this little excerpt has helped to propel it near to the top of my list.

So thank you muchly!

<comment><USER45> It's a wonderful book. I read it before I'd been exposed to too much other philosophy and I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been written. Then in college I started reading a lot of other philosophy and didn't ever quite reach the same passionate reaction I had with ZAMM. It's both engaging and deep.

<comment><USER35> As somebody who tried to read it _after_ having read some other philosophy, I found it entirely boring and put it down before 100 pages.

<comment><USER46> I also disliked it and got 3/4 of the way through - I found it very pretentious and not nearly as full of wisdom as the author would like to believe.

<comment><USER47> I recon that Sophie's World is much better than Zen

<comment><USER12> I learned most of what I know about philosophy from "The Bluffer's Guide To Philosophy" when I was about twelve.

It enabled me to win arguments with philosophy undergrads at least up 'til second year uni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> One of the ways in which most grading systems are fucked up is that there's more downside than upside. One failure cancels out 3 or 4 successes, no matter how great. If a teacher decides that any late work gets a zero, then being half a day late on one paper nullifies several great, on-time papers.

I think it's a vicious cycle. This sort of system is designed to produce the sort of risk-averse rule-followers required by old-style industry: people destined for jobs where creativity isn't required but following orders 90% of the time is failure. But for that system's defense, it's good practice for real life. Humans are vindictive and focused more on stigma, gossip and the aversion to failure than in seeking out excellence and creativity. Hence, they create societies (like our society at a macro level, like most corporations, and like many school systems) that punish failure brutally but don't really value (or even fully trust) excellence, and which actively discourage the risk-taking usually required to excel. (And no, our society's outsized reward for economic fortune is not "rewarding success" since most of those people at the top are effective social climbers or hereditarily-placed parasites.) The "vicious cycle" is closed if one believes that the vindictive, punitive nature of people comes from how they are taught. Or is it innate? I'm really not sure.

The way I think grading should be done is an inverse of the current system. Make the problems really, really hard. Some should be so hard that the hardest exam problems go for years without being answered. Make it so hard that 20% is passing and 60% is exceptional-- instead of 70% being passing and 95% being exceptional-- and so that students are used to it (and therefore they don't panic when they take an exam and can't solve half the problems). I argue for this because the reality for the most creative, hardest-to-get-right pursuits is that for 60% of one's efforts to succeed _is_ exceptional.

All that said, I think grading is important, but it shouldn't be started at such a young age, and that grades should generally be internal (for the student's and school's benefit) only. Many business schools actually prohibit their students from disclosing GPA or transcripts, only verifying which courses were taken and passed. If I were running a college, full transcripts would be available only to academic graduate departments-- not to future employers or professional schools. I'm not going to do their job (sorting) for them.

<comment><USER49> So you might be interested to know that universities in Ireland (and I think England, where we inherited our university system from), everyone aims for a 70% grade. That's a "1st class honours" degree, and is basically the best you can come out with.

Below that is "2nd class honours, I" (colloquially 2.1, pronounced "two one")). With a 1st or a 2.1, you're considered a high achiever (like a good job, or grad school, might require a 2.1 or better). A 2.1 is between 60-70%. Pass is 40%, and exams are marked harder to make the numbers work. (I believe harder questions are asked than equivalent US universities, but that's just rumour, unless you really do get multiple choice questions in university).

It leads to interesting dynamics. In the Arts and Humanities, students are basically marked out of 80, with scores above that reserved for truly great work which is seen relatively rarely.

In CS or Mathematics, where you truly can answer perfectly, sometimes you can get close to 100% in a exam, which throws off the marking scheme. For project work though, 70% means "great job", and 80% means you've done something truly excellent. For my undergraduate thesis, a piece of novel research on sorting and branch predictors that I truly poured my heart and soul into for 6 months, I got 94%. The feeling at achieving that grade was truly exhilarating, in a way that it could never be if I people didn't normally get 72% for great work.

<comment><USER50> The American grading system has a severe lack of dynamic headroom. The measurement system saturates at 100% for even mediocre effort and there is no way to measure achievement beyond that.

I once argued in a paper at university that we needed a logarithmic grading system like decibels. I got a C.

<comment><USER51> Brilliant. I hadn't considered the similarity of US grading and grade inflation to the loudness wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Would love to read this if it wasn't for Wordpress using OnSwipe. Why is this awful startup breaking website usability?</comment>


DHI Group Plans to Sell Slashdot and SourceForge - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasdaq.com/article/dhi-group-q2-results-beats-view-plans-to-sell-slashdot-media--quick-facts-20150728-00501 <comment><USER2> I really hope someone can turnaround Slashdot. To this day I find it to have the highest quality discussion threads on average out of any tech news site, largely due to its very mature community and quirky but effective moderation system.

I've moderated on Slashdot for years and watched as the site's original low tech but functional UX has been degraded by half-hearted attempts to make it a modern web application.

There was a time when Slashcode was considered to be one of the best open source comment systems you could set up for your own website. I think above all else, the Slashdot team should start shooting for that again.

Build something with a UI that blows Disqus and reddit out of the water, continue to use the Slashdot-style moderation system (with possibly some tweaks to improve it), open source it, and be relevant again.

<comment><USER3> I also greatly liked the Slashdot moderation system. But I left slash for HN because I was sick of editorializing in the summary, along with completely inaccurate summaries unchecked by the editors. Sometimes I wish HN had support for small summaries under the article titles, but then I realize that at least this way I don't have to deal with the above two problems!

<comment><USER2> I remain active on both (along with reddit and Ars Technica too). I see value in each community's ways of doing things, and it doesn't bother me one bit that Slashdot's editors have bias, so long as they're transparent about it when posting opinions which tends to be the case.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I realize that bias is impossible to completely eliminate. The greater reason for me was consistently coming across summaries that were inaccurate and an editor failed to correct it before posting. This was also a number of years ago, so I don't know what things are like there now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes, I really have to wonder about the exact machanisms involved, whereby one company sells out a thriving community to some other souless marketing goons, and everyone on the outside of the deal knows that the magic is over, and the aftermath will end poorly, but the buyer still seems to believe that " _touching things_ " isn't the exact sort of behavior that will destroy the thing they paid so much for, thus rendering it unprofitable, and unwittingly destroying even their own desired goals.

<comment><USER5> The game industry is like this. There've been multiple occasions where a larger publisher bought a studio, only to find that the top-tier talent leave to found their own studio and the publisher is left with successful (but short-lived) licenses but no talent pool to build new golden eggs.

Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang may be the exception that proves the rule; while Notch is no longer involved in Minecraft, the project itself has reached a critical mass where it very well might make as much on licensing and deals as it does on new users now (and with a healthy modding community on the PC version, it's an open sandbox that children can "grow into" as they learn more about how computers work). I think the way they'd kill that is to close off the avenues to modding the game; time will tell if Microsoft is that foolish, but I sincerely doubt they would be.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft hasn't made any changes to Minecraft yet, have they? The login and authentication servers are still on Amazon, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Visual Studio Online is slowly edging towards feature parity with GitHub, although I'm not sure whether that's intentional or coincidence. If Microsoft did want to compete in that "social coding" space and not just enterprise ALM, purchasing SourceForge to "seed" VSO with a bunch of (semi-)active repositories wouldn't be out of the question, would it?

<comment><USER8> The potential backlash to VSO likely isn't worth it -- but maybe there is a way to politically navigate that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Regarding SF, That's their only chance to save the brand and the site.

At this point, the current owner can't be trusted anymore.

<comment><USER10> The site was lost long ago. Enforcing a brand on it is one of the things that caused it to become lost. It was a developer tool. Developers want things to work, fairly, reliably, transparently and ideally with (technical) elegance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll take both for $9.99.

<comment><USER12> If done right a SourceForge relaunch could be a success. A practical alternative to the GitHub monopoly would be appreciated.

<comment><USER13> Anything you're missing from GitLab.com? We have free private repo's and it is primarily based on open source (like SF).

<comment><USER14> I just found out about GitLab today. I was pleasantly surprised! The only complaints I have: (1) GitHub has IMO a better landing page for projects, showing both files and a readme; (2) Personally, I prefer GitHub's layout (more white space), it's definitely better for reading, although your menu-on- the-right layout is probably better for navigation and management, and (3) I couldn't find an example of a Wiki.

All in all, a great project, I'll probably be using it soon. Good work, and good luck with it! Also, do you clarify anywhere what's your approach to controversial projects - like "retards", PopcornTime and C+= - would they be allowed on site or taken down?

Edit: never mind the last question, apparently you censored the GamergateOP repository, I guess that answers it.

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

1\. The files + readme is something we considered but we choose to show an overview of the project and the readme, we think this is cleaner. You can configure to see the activity feed instead of the readme if you mostly use the same projects (in a company for example). See [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/07/22/gitlab-7-13-released/](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/07/22/gitlab-7-13-released/) But what we learned so far that there are no perfect choices for the homepage.

2\. I think you mean our menu-on-the-left layout?

3\. We do have wiki's, for example see [https://gitlab.maikel.pro/maikeldus/WhatsSpy- Public/wikis/ho...](https://gitlab.maikel.pro/maikeldus/WhatsSpy- Public/wikis/home)

Great to hear you'll be using it soon. We have one button importers for most platforms.

Regarding the controversy please see my comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9967545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9967545)

<comment><USER14> 2 - Yes.

Re: controversy - ok, so the same as GitHub or Reddit, you just arbitrarily choose what to take down and when. In particular, this leaves all repositories open to media-induced attention and controversy, followed by a takedown. IMO, having an explicit, well-defined policy would be much better, even if it's highly restrictive, as long as it's objective (i.e. no "offended" and similar) and changes aren't applied retroactively.

I agree that being open source helps, and I thank you for that, but I still wish there was a hosted site with a large community safe from censorship.

<comment><USER15> >In particular, this leaves all repositories open to media-induced attention and controversy, followed by a takedown.

It should be emphasized that this, rather than the possibility of censorship by GitLab's staff on their own initiative, is the main concern here.

On the other hand, what incentives does GitLab have to host controversial projects? The kind of person who appreciates it is not the exactly the social or technological trendsetter at the moment. It would make a good marketing point for a niche repository hosting service targeting a "red tribe" or "gray tribe" audience* but a mainstream service could rationally choose to not get involved with it.

* [https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/the-rise-of-th...](https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/the-rise-of-the-grey-tribe)

<comment><USER14> > The kind of person who appreciates it is not the exactly the social or > technological trendsetter at the moment.

I'm not so sure about that. Of course, I might be wrong, especially as I'm not really involved with the technological/programming community (especially not the US one), but to me it seems that it's mainly the media driving the politically-correct everything-offends-me culture and igniting scandal after scandal. Many people are quite appalled by these puritan witch-hunts and victimhood competitions, as they realize how chilling the effects are, and what the endgame of the censorship slippery-slope is.

But then again, many just don't care at all. Just like with mass surveillance and mass lies about e.g. weapons of mass destruction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I started with Slashdot, then went to reddit and now hacker news.. Wonder if it can have a redux.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wouldn't give $50 for sourceforge at this point.

They're a liability, not an asset.</comment>


Solving Pokemon Blue with a Single, Huge Regular Expression - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2g9d29UIzk <comment><AUTHOR> An interesting problem, I think. Presented in an amusing tone. The AWS bill was certainly a surprise!

I was able to find some of his repos, but they aren't documented very much yet :)

[https://github.com/hausdorff?tab=repositories&q=pkmn](https://github.com/hausdorff?tab=repositories&q=pkmn)

I kind-of wanted to see the full, final regex!</comment>


Paul Graham's Y Combinator leaves Boston, entrepreneurs dive under the bed - <AUTHOR> http://muckandbrass.com/web/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2752694 <comment><USER2> why is it always "paul graham's Y Combinator" if trevor, robert, jessica, and paul are all equal partners?

<comment><USER3> Very polite of you to point out, but it's clear why.

<comment><USER4> It's the sandals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author of this article unwittingly makes the argument he was trying to oppose, which is that money drives your choice of location.

He acknowledges that his startup was 100% bootstrapped and profitable. In those happy circumstances it doesn't really matter where you are located, unless taking venture capital would help you grow faster (if fast growth is your goal).

However most startups wouldn't exist without some capital, and Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of wealthy tech investors. Those investors like to be able to keep a close eye on their investment, ergo all the entrepreneurs cluster where the money is.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article isn't loading for me, but didn't this happen a few years ago? I have to wonder, why the submission now?

<comment><USER3> Wasn't loading for me either. Went to the homepage of that domain and scrolled down til I found it. Article is 8 months old.

<comment><USER7> Loaded for me just fine at first, site now seems to be a bit slow :)

Anyway, the point he's trying to make is that it doesn't matter much where your start-up is based in today's day and age.

<comment><USER3> Unless of course you need to hire someone who doesn't telecommute 100% of the time.

<comment><USER8> Uh, right, because talented people only ever live in Silicon Valley (or the largest 20 cities, or whatever). Every startup's prospects relate to their geography uniquely, and the herd has nothing to do with where any particular startup should be located.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Otherwise, start your business where you'll be happy and where you'll find like-minded people." Seems this was one of the reason YC left Boston,

<comment><USER10> All of us liked being in Cambridge, We certainly didn't leave because there weren't like-minded people there. But being bi-coastal sucks, so we had to choose.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good Browser Plugins for Dyslexics - <AUTHOR> I'm dyslexic and reading documentation can be a real pain if the lines are long (I'll get lost in the middle of a sentence and loose what line I'm on, in particular the transition between lines is really rough).  In the past, I've been saved by the ability to resize my browser window or the fact that man pages are 80 chars wide.  Unfortunately the docs I've been dealing with at work lately don't re-flow when you change the size of the viewport, they just gain a horizontal scrollbar, which is less than helpful.
Does anyone have any good browser extensions for dyslexics?  Specifically any that help with following a line to the next one down.
I recall seeing an extension in a thread on here about Dyslexia in the past few months that really helped. It would highlight the last word or two of a line and put a matching highlight on the first one or two words of the next lines. <comment><USER2> The extension may be Scroll Reading which highlights a sentence from one line to the next... [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrollreading...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrollreading/?src=search)

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks helpful! I'll try it today! Its not exactly the plugin I recall, that one did all of the lines right away and used different colors per-line.

Thank you none the less for taking your time to find this! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is Immersive Reader from Microsoft which may be helpful.

But you would probably need to used new Edge chromium-base browser, which is available only on Windows and MacOS.

[https://www.onenote.com/learningtools](https://www.onenote.com/learningtools)

</comment><comment><USER4> I use the [OpenDyslexia font][1] which is somewhat helpful but the more I got used to it the less helpful it has become.

The plugin you're describing sounds pretty helpful! I wonder if it could be built just using CSS rules?

[1]: [https://www.opendyslexic.org/](https://www.opendyslexic.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never found the OpenDyslexia font to be particularly helpful, but I'll give it another go!

Right though! I'm super frustrated that I didn't bookmark it! As for building it with just CSS rules, does CSS have a way to detect if something is the last word on a line before a break? or the last n chars on a line before a break? If so it shouldn't be too bad... Add some JS to rotate through some highlight colors per-line and it should work no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's unfortunate that often special formatting is done to documentation. I understand for marketing websites and landing pages why orgs want it but docs need to be consumable by many different parties. I find it very frustrating when orgs add js and css that break accessibility of documentation!</comment>


Why I Hate Frameworks (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite articles of all time.

There is no doubt that people writing Java software loved abstractions.

One of my favorite examples: [https://ptrthomas.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/jtrac- callstac...](https://ptrthomas.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/jtrac- callstack1.png?w=630)

<comment><USER3> To be fair ,aside from a Servlet container and JDBC none of these things are required for Java web development. Java language doesn't help though and could use more features from C# for instance.

<comment><USER4> Well I think the point is that it's a cultural thing. I really like Java, but it takes unconventional approaches to avoid bloat when working with Java tools because the "standard" way of doing things produces 200+ line stack traces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You're going to be using a framework when you work for a company. Whether its a custom in-house framework (pray to the holy death it isn't) or something third-party (cry me a fucking river, you have to learn something new).

Just make sure you don't forget how to not use frameworks.

<comment><USER6> FYI, Angular, React, Backbone, Ruby on rails all started as in-house frameworks.

<comment><USER5> Yeah to clarify: you or your team members MIGHT build something awesome because you and they are awesome, but the chances are the custom framework was built by your boss 10 years ago and the server has already been hacked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think that killing your ex-girlfriend is a funny example in a world where almost 40% of murders of women are committed by their partners.

<comment><USER8> I thinks its up to every persons responsibility to learn to deal with rough language. The world isn't easy, and we need to learn to deal with it contents.

<comment><USER7> i think it's every person's responsibility (& interest) to make the world better, and the words we pick are a good place to start.

<comment><USER8> I don't think "picking on the language of others" is a good start. What about the people starving right now in less developed countries? And the homelessness problem? Companies doing serious damage to the environment? And we both are just sitting here discussing language on the Internet. I think you are not in the Position to talk about a better world as excuse for political over-correctness.

<comment><USER7> what about them really? I don't think these topics would make a great joke either :-/

"picking on the language of others" could so easily be transformed to "picking on the behaviour of others". there are so many things to do with a hammer, and i think we should pick more on the people who use it to kill women, or suggest it as a joke.

sorry for being off topic btw.

<comment><USER8> Language is a different shoe from what we actually do. HN is not a good place for this, drop me a mail on email@example.com if you are further interested in discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Update: Removed the unnecessary and (as noted below) false remark about Joel not understanding Dependency Injection.

The main (but not only) reason we have object factories is to be able to extract code suitable to be unit-tested from the whole application. And unit testing is like testing the tire of a car in a laboratory instead of testing the whole car on a race track. Not that we don't test cars on race tracks - but it is a lot cheaper to test the tires in labs first.

It is not that we sell Object Factories so that people can produce their objects - we use Object Factories in our code - so that the objects are better encapsulated. Once you understand that - the whole satire with hammer factories collapses. But OK frameworks are still yet another subject and I kind of agree that libraries are often better ([http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/2010/02/frameworks-are- frami...](http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/2010/02/frameworks-are-framing- libraries-are.html)).

<comment><USER2> 1\. This was not written by Joel himself. This was written by a guy named Benji Smith on JoS forum.

2\. I understand dependency injection completely but question if it's really required to write quality software OR is it a technique you use because programming languages are lacking.

Let me give you an example. In .NET world, there is a product called, Isolator by a company called TypeMock. It can let you mock any type/method by exploiting CLR.

In .NET, there is a type called System.DateTime with a static property DateTime.Now. I have seen code where people try to write interfaces to inject DateTime.Now. And I think it's an overkill. When I saw their example of how they can mock DateTime.Now without doing DI, I am personally convinced that DI is about addressing limitations of your statically typed language and is not an absolute must.

[http://www.typemock.com/TypemockIsolatorExamples](http://www.typemock.com/TypemockIsolatorExamples)

<comment><USER5> > if it's really required to write quality software

of course it isn't. if your program doesn't require dependency injection and you architect it for dependency injection, that isn't quality software.

<comment><USER2> Here's the current status of .NET software development.

I think there is a broad agreement that unit testing is a very useful tool in developing quality software. Because of the inherent limitation of C#, you can't unit test easily if you don't use DI. This often leads to a situation where you have tons of interfaces + each interface is implemented exactly by one class. This is because product like Isolator is not free. Hyptothetically, if Isolator was provided by Microsoft for free, I am sure that we will see reduced usage of DI.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are other scenarios where DI is a great technique in designing components which are flexible. However, those scenarios are not that many. Using DI to make your software unit testable is an overkill IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very amusing to re-read after a long time.

But still I haven't done with frameworks, mostly because when I build a house and I have nothing to start with, I could very well use a factory factory factory, which could provide me with factories, than to run to a shop every time I need something.

Say for example, what I need is a url routing system, I could very well use a routing framework than to write one myself. A user authentication system is such a common task that I'd rather generate one with a factory than to run myself to a shop to buy one.

Frameworks have their place in my toolkit. Using them only at the right time with the right purpose is what will make the difference.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, frameworks are tools to be used or abused. The main problem with Joel's analogy is really that factories did not replace hammers. Hammers and factories and everything in between are always available to us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frameworks seem to be most useful for churning out a lot of mediocre websites quickly. If you're doing something really original, a framework is less useful.

Another downside of frameworks is maintenance. A company hires an outsourcing company to make a website. They use a framework, and might not even use it correctly. The incentive is for the outsourcing company to use a framework, because that lets them ship a website that sort of mostly works quickly, so they can get paid.

The contract is over and now some other programmer (such as me) is now supporting it. Now, making changes is several of order of magnitudes harder, because you're fighting the framework in addition to the code that was already written (especially when they didn't use the framework correctly).

For example, I was working on a website that used Zend forms. Now I needed to modify the form so that it was pre-populated with the data (an edit page instead of a submit page). I spent a couple days looking at the code and the zend documentation, and I just couldn't figure it out. The form had some javascript on it also, so I couldn't just use value="" to pre-populate the data.

It it was plain HTML/PHP, I could have just used value="" to pre-populate the data and be done in 5 minutes. The framework make a 5 minute task almost impossible.

<comment><USER5> > If you're doing something really original, a framework is less useful.

Waaaait a minute - what kind of frameworks are we talking about here? You can build loads of things with Django. I can build VERY unique sites with backbone... i don't understand the opening comment. Hell, even bootstrap can be tweaked beyond recognition without terrible code.

Edit:

> They use a framework, and might not even use it correctly.

That's a shitty company or developer, not a symptom of the framework.

Surely you would rather work on an established documented framework than a custom undocumented mess from the same shit company?

<comment><USER12> My experience with frameworks has been that, once you go outside the stuff that comes with the framework, they start to hold you back more than they help you.

It's also a nightmare to go into someone else's poorly written framework code and try to maintain it, especially because frameworks have "magic" where functions are not explicitly invoked, so it's almost impossible to trace the control flow.

Every time I've been maintaining someone else's framework code, the project was a mess. I don't see how frameworks are so awesome if so many people use them incorrectly.

For example, at my last job, they were using angular.js. Every 30-60 minutes the website just randomly crashed. There were all sorts of weird "$digest in progress" errors and bizarre errors. I know they weren't using angular correctly, but if a group of average developers are using angular incorrectly, do you blame them or blame angular?

<comment><USER13> Uhhh, you blame them.

<comment><USER12> Why? If a group of average programmers use a tool incorrectly, is it the worker's fault or the tool's fault?

If a group of average people can't use angular correctly, then maybe angular isn't so great.

<comment><USER14> You're assuming your anecdote is the norm. Angular is pretty popular because it makes some people more productive.

The average woodworker probably doesn't know how to properly use a lathe, but they don't go on WoodHacker News saying that lathes suck.

<comment><USER5> > they don't go on WoodHacker News saying that lathes suck

You're assuming the average woodworker knows about WoodHacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love lightweight frameworks that exist mainly to reduce boilerplate code and, for web development, mitigate cross-browser compatibility issues. ExpressJS and jQuery are good JavaScript examples.

I tend to avoid frameworks that attempt to push developers into coding "the framework's way" (cough cough AngularJS). Such frameworks are often great in the beginning, but once you pass the basic application stage, a deep understanding of the framework itself will become necessary and it will stop saving you time. Sometimes you have to adapt special ways of writing tests, debug nonsensical stack trace dumps, etc. Not to mention it increases the overhead of bringing new developers on the project.

tl;dr Don't use heavyweight frameworks unless you have a good reason.

<comment><USER5> jquery is a library not a framework but yeah i agree

edit: sheesh why did i get downvoted for this? it is absolutely a library which is completely different from a framework. even jquery's website says it is a library.

<comment><USER16> Roughly speaking, jQuery is a library for the app developers and a framework for the plugin authors. So it is both a library and framework at once.

<comment><USER5> > framework for the plugin authors

interesting viewpoint, I hadn't thought of jQuery this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While there are a couple of guys still shaving that yak, today it's more or less Jetty micro services all the way. Still Java but a huge step forward from the J2EE abstraction astronaut crap you had to put up with for a while. Configuring factory factories suck on a whole different level from ordinary coding.

<comment><USER6> You understand that you _are_ the saleman of this post by talking about micro services, right?

Unless I oversaw your sarcasm...

<comment><USER17> Wasn't really trying to sell anything and I can't see the connection between micro services and factory factories, except that they were both once the next big thing. I'm just saying at least it's getting better for the Java folks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I disagree with the message here - unless you have exceptional requirements, frameworks can be extremely useful. To give an example of their utility, I am currently building a site for an online community I run - on top of my regular job, exercise, and contract work, free time is hard to come by. I went with Sails.js and Fluxible on top of React to assist me with putting together a good frame since when I start letting the three other developers in the community develop features for the site, they will have an easier time searching for solutions due to existing documentation and Stack Overflow.

The core logic is decoupled from any particular franework though, and only makes use of each framework for their strengths. The important thing is to be judicious in your use of a framework.

</comment><comment><USER19> When I first read this back in 2005 I was skeptical. Turns out Joel was right.

<comment><USER20> It wasn't by Joel, this is a post on his forum.</comment></comment>


Descartes Labs Built a Top Supercomputer from Amazon Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/descartes-labs-built-a-top-500-supercomputer-from-amazon-cloud <comment><USER2> This is notable as all of AWS server are 'commodity', meaning ordinary stuff that's on a rack - the software could be a real breakthrough.</comment>


Show HN: Find the right Radio Stations to play your Ads (prototype) - <AUTHOR> http://ccarpenterg.posterous.com/find-the-right-radio-stations-to-play-your-ad

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find a demo here: <http://220.127.116.11>

</comment><comment><USER2> Did you find out the reason Google bailed on the business? It's entirely possible you will get it built and run into the same obstacle.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason was the economic recession but the radio stations also feared that Google would turn the radio ads into commodities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea - but maybe you could incorporate type of station (urban, jazz, etc.), demo and maybe some other Datran data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The basic idea is to integrate all sort of market information with the geographic radio stations data.

<comment><USER3> add a mailing list so when you add this stuff people can get updated.</comment></comment></comment>


The Paradox of Doping in Mountain Climbing - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-paradox-of-doping-in-mountain-climbing <comment><USER2> What the author doesn't seem to understand is that alpine ascents in general aren't done in the form of organized competitions, so the entire comparison to anti-doping regulations in sports is quite absurd: you can't tell people what not to do when they do it independently, unless oxygen is somehow universally made illegal. Even WADA can't tell you what substances not to use when you are cycling/running/doing-whatever on your own free time. There is no "Paradox of Doping" in mountain climbing: it's the same as in any other activity that is done independently - you can use equipment that will make it easier for you, but then others might not feel as impressed.

<comment><USER3> Another way of looking at what you are saying is, there is no problem with doping in sport.. there is a problem with competition.

Competition is the 'con' which makes most sport worth watching (and hence paying for / advertising in). Without the promise of competition between the local / state / country / world's best, who is watching an average person running a hundred metres? What if we measured not time but technique, or like mountain climbing, preparation?

If the sport is about preparation rather than performance, what does it even matter if they are doping?

<comment><USER4> > Without the promise of competition...who is watching an average person > running a hundred metres?

No one. This is why climbing making it into the 2020 Olympics is going to create a lot more trouble for the sport than good. Generally, climbing (be it alpine mountaineering or more approachable "rock climbing") is horrendously boring to watch, except for other climbers.

Climbing, done well, looks almost effortless. No one wants to watch someone _not_ struggle.

I don't know how it will be monetized. Probably just via gear endorsements, like all the other sports. :(

<comment><USER5> Indoor bouldering is very entertaining, even if you know very little about climbing. You don't need to be an expert to see the challenge posed by a tiny crimp, a massive overhang or a big dyno. The immense difficulty of the problems mean that the struggle is visible, even for the strongest climbers. In a sense, you're watching a battle between the climber and the route-setter.

[https://youtu.be/00nLWbGQJks?t=48m15s](https://youtu.be/00nLWbGQJks?t=48m15s)

<comment><USER4> Indoor bouldering has evolved over the years to "comp-style" indoor bouldering, favoring exciting moves, large, dynamic movement, etc.

I love climbing, know a fair bit about it, and enjoy watching. I just don't think it lends itself to spectating the same way a team sport does (I.E. american football/football).

One thing climbing DOES have going for it is the skill of the athletes is immediately visible. It's not like an endurance sport where, while we all know the athlete is better than we are at the sport, we can all go outside and run a few miles.

In contrast to the one-arm antics required for world-cup bouldering, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Climbing is different. As Hemingway put it, "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

Many performance-enhancing drugs are really bad for you; that is the rationale for banning doping in mere games, while permitting fancy shoes and other expensive performance-enhancing technologies. It doesn't work for mountaineering, because the sport itself is really, really bad for you, to the extent that death is a normal and accepted part of it. It would be obscene to enforce the rules of your game on other people when that posed a risk to their lives. They get to make their own rules, because the mountains are theirs as much as yours.

This is also why climbers are ambivalent about competition. Matching what the other kids are doing is a big part of what motivates many climbers to try harder things. On the other hand, if two climbers start one-upping each other, they had better stop before one of them gets killed, because no pissing contest is worth dying for. Few do.

I'm one of the exceptions, but that lesson involved so much luck that it made the front page of every newspaper in the country.

<comment><USER7> Testosterone isn't "really bad" for you yet is quite banned. It's ridiculous to pretend it's about health. It's just a combo of marketing (so people don't dismiss it as a drug competition) and general anti drug silliness.

<comment><USER8> > and general anti drug silliness.

What happened to the former 1980s GDR athletes (who had broken dozens of records in swimming and athletics while juiced to the max) was not "silly" at all. Got to watch some fragments of a related documentary with included a few interviews and the stories were harrowing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some climber dude (I forget who) said, paraphrased:

"Only chalkless barefoot free soloing[1] is proper free climbing[2], all the rest is just disguised aid climbing [3]"

If you've ever gone climbing, and compared your experience wearing random shoes (or no shoes) with wearing proper climbing shoes, I think you'll agree that the difference is tremendous. If you consider oxygen an unfair advantage, you will need to include many other tools as well.

Also, in alpinism, the stakes are so high that I don't fault anyone for using the tools necessary to make sure they make it safely back down - for their sake, and for their would-be rescuers'

Competition sports climbing is another matter, but its connection to alpinism is as tenuous (or more so) as that of biathlon to hunting in the scandinavian winter.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_solo_climbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_solo_climbing) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_climbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_climbing) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aid_climbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aid_climbing)

</comment><comment><USER10> It isn't the same as doping in other sports. Climbers will often specify if their ascent involved O2 or not. It's still considered a big achievement in mountaineering to summit say K2 or Annapurna with O2.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Perhaps the most controversial course of action, though, is the decision to carry and use supplemental O2. Most climbers consider their supplemental oxygen as equipment—just as much a part of their experience as their Gortex gear, and certainly as foundational as their extensive training."

This article is already self-contradictory. It doesn't need to make it obvious by putting these two sentences right next to each other. If it's just as foundational and normal equipment, then it's obviously not a controversial course of action. Also, not how you spell Gore-Tex.

<comment><USER12> I love Gore-Tex as a material. It's one of the few materials that has a negative Poisson ratio (when you stretch it the material expands in all directions, it doesn't narrow). My Ph.D. supervisor keeps a small sample of it to use for demonstrations to his Mechanics of Deformable Solids course. Only man-made materials can exhibit this property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do the these anti-oxygen purists going to scale Olympus Mons on Mars, when that becomes a thing to do? That sucker rises 26 km above its northern plains.

"No way is that legit; you're bringing Mars down to your level when you use O2. I'd rather train hard and suffer. If I fucking die, which I likely will, then so be it!"

<comment><USER14> For that matter, this would be a very different discussion if Everest were higher - it's geologically possible for a mountain to be significantly higher(1) than Everest, high enough that to get to the top you'd need something akin to a spacesuit.

Equally, no human free diver is ever going to reach the bottom of the marina trench...

1) [https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/174cxr/how_high...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/174cxr/how_high_was_the_highest_mountain_ever_on_earth/c8243c5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Used Diamox for Killimanjaro. Its totally cheating and awesome. A fellow climber was on dex just as a precaution. Also cheating. And o2? over 14k feet its a lifeline. But then so are down jackets, goretex, light alloy axes and light crampons, etc. Its an interesting debate.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Tennis player Novak Djokovic, on the other hand, was definitely not doping when he slept in an egg-shaped barometric chamber._

I believe that actually would be considered doping in Italy (or used to be).

 _it is not allowed in Italy where a rule forbids manipulation of blood values via artificial means._

[http://inrng.com/2012/06/the-altitude-tent/](http://inrng.com/2012/06/the- altitude-tent/)

<comment><USER17> What are "artificial means"?

If he took a helicopter to the peak of midzor, would that be "artificial"?

<comment><USER16> The law is lazy-evaluated. Ask a judge. (But I would imagine it would be unlikely).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >>The World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) prohibits an athlete from using a substance that fulfills two of the following three criteria: 1) It is performance-enhancing; 2) It is harmful to health; 3) It runs counter to the spirit of the sport.

these things are extremely hard to quantify which is why there are explicit lists of "prohibited substances" where the line is drawn more or less arbitrarily. my personal opinion is with the exception of artificial hormones everything else should be allowed.

and when it does come to 'roids and hgh (which btw are demonized beyond any reason) - I like the way powerlifting federations address it - as an athlete you can compete in a tested (which still of course doesn't guarantee the athletes to be "clean") or "untested" federation where anything goes.

<comment><USER19> >as an athlete you can compete in a tested (which still of course doesn't guarantee the athletes to be "clean") or "untested" federation where anything goes.

this is pretty clever, it reminds me of the "cheater pool" solution to cheating in video games. flagged players are placed in a matchmaking pool with other flagged players. I'm not sure of the pros and cons to this being applied to real world competition, but I wouldn't mind it as a spectator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In _No Shortcuts To The Top_,[1] Viesturs gave more treatment to the topic of oxygen - I don't remember the exact quote, but he said something to the tune of:

> I prefer to climb without oxygen, but when guiding groups up Everest, it > would be irresponsible for me to not have oxygen, so I can be most > responsive to any issues that arise.

There's no "paradox". It seems the author noticed that climbing recently got added to the 2020 list of Olympic sports, and is trying to create controversy where there is none.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000MAH5OM/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000MAH5OM/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

</comment><comment><USER20> Here is an argument in favor accelerated acclimatizers and oxygen tanks:

1\. They reduce the high risk of irreversible damage to an especially important organ, the brain. 2\. They reduce the significant risk of death.

Any chemical or equipment that does the above should be considered standard equipment, not doping. This is like arguing that helmets are doping because riders can more safely go faster.

I wouldn't care how much the "community" would look down on me. I'm not voluntarily accepting certain brain damage to climb a mountain.

</comment><comment><USER21> by some of the logic presented here, mountain climbers should climb naked to ensure the legitimacy of (wo)man vs mountain, anything else is cheating.

<comment><USER22> From the article:

      If purists are to be consistent in their argument," says
      Moller, "they should argue that one should not be allowed to
      go to the top of the mountain with one's clothes on—
      alpinists' clothes are incredible technologies in and of
      themselves—or have any kind of gear. That would be a truly
      pure ascent."

The purists sound like (from this article) they're a bit too sensitive to other adventure seekers methods. Guess what, tech exists, these aren't competitive events, people will use what they can to achieve their goals.

<comment><USER23> There are several flavors of "purists" in alpine climbing. Some are curmudgeons who draw lines in the sand about what is and is not acceptable. But other purists fit into the category of minimalists--how much can equipment be pared down, and how quickly can they move on the high peaks. In many ways, speed == safety. The faster you can move, the better chance you have of reaching a summit before bad weather moves in, or the faster you can react to bad weather and get the heck off the mountain. If you are relying on supplemental oxygen, that is a fair bit of extra equipment that often requires stocked camps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do these anti-oxygen climbers cope with using cheat items such as clothes, shoes, tents and all?

"It brings the mountain down to your level."

<comment><USER4> There are no real anti-oxygen climbers. The article is trying to create controversy where there is none.

It all comes down to style. More minimalistic of an approach usually equals more "style points" (which are worth exactly as much as you think they are.)

If you and I were to go try Everest, we'd be aiming for "completion", not "style points", and we'd probably use O2.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really interested to see how Kilian Jornet and his ultra-minimalist approach are going to fare on Everest. He's supposed to be attempting a climb soon (after other summits like Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimandjaro and Mont Blanc in the past few years). If he succeeds in his ways, I bet he's going to shatter the records.

</comment><comment><USER26> >The World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) prohibits an athlete from using a substance that fulfills two of the following three criteria:

>1) It is performance-enhancing; >2) It is harmful to health;

O2 is poisonous and performance enhancing. .: All athletes dope. Q.E.D.

</comment><comment><USER27> In short: "purer than thou" attitude from an elitist minority forming a negative core inside a very small community.

Because their $way is better than your $way.</comment>


Snap telemetry framework by Intel - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/intelsdi-x/snap <comment><USER2> This blog post does a good job of breaking it down. looks pretty good and a nice shift from current metric collectors

[http://nickapedia.com/2015/12/02/what-if-collecting-data- cen...](http://nickapedia.com/2015/12/02/what-if-collecting-data-center- telemetry-was-a-snap/)</comment>


Putting data in a volume in a Dockerfile - <AUTHOR> https://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/01/19/dockerfile-and-data-in-volumes/ <comment><AUTHOR> I tried the recipe and noticed that create with -v also creates a volume and copy the image content. Docker documentation also states that it is the same as VOLUME in Dockerfile. So what is the advantage? The long copy time is still there ...</comment>


Semicolons; So Tricky - <AUTHOR> http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/how-to-use-semicolons.html <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be yet another piece on the Javascript debate (perhaps a little unlikely from the New Yorker, but who knows?), instead of about punctuation in English.

Many here may be disappointed that it was the latter, but personally I found this a refreshing surprise. I've always liked semicolons but been a little afraid I may not be using them right.

</comment><comment><USER3> I usually just put them at the end of sentences;

</comment><comment><USER4> Didn't read the article, but I think of them -- in English prose -- as being used to separate clauses that can stand (grammatically) as independent sentences, but which you choose to bind somewhat more closely together (by use of the semicolon) to identify a closer association within the broader hierarchy of its context. Often, and perhaps preferentially, the one clause leads -- logically, chronologically, etc. -- to the next.

A separate use is to separate list members when those individual members include sublists, subclauses, or other items that in turm use/include commas.

Once you move beyond prose -- poetry, code, etc. -- the "rules" loosen or change, requiring separate consideration of those contexts.

And of course, these latter uses can bleed back into prose; language is always transforming -- some would say, evolving.</comment>


Claim of first Human babies' genome modified by CRISPR - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/crispr-scientist-in-china-claims-his-teams-research-has-resulted-in-the-worlds-first-gene-edited-babies/ <comment><USER2> And I thought for sure it was going to be a glow in the dark baby.</comment>


Using easing for more than just CSS transitions - <AUTHOR> https://kilianvalkhof.com/2020/css-html/using-easing-for-more-than-just-css-transitions/ <comment><USER2> > And the way box shadows are implemented on the web is similar to gradients: > they use a linear transition.

This is wrong. Yes, linear _gradients_ are everywhere, even in nearly every professional graphic design tool, which is unfortunate since they are almost always the wrong choice. Box shadows, on the other hand, tend to be based on Gaussian blurs, which certainly doesn't create a linear transition. This is also the way the CSS box-shadows spec say they should work: [https://drafts.csswg.org/css-backgrounds-3/#shadow- blur](https://drafts.csswg.org/css-backgrounds-3/#shadow-blur)

<comment><USER3> > which is unfortunate since they are almost always the wrong choice

Why?

<comment><USER4> I searched for a source but I couldn't find one. My recollection on the topic has to do with how humans perceive luminance within a gradient. Our eyes are better/worse at determining contrast differences between adjacent colours at different luminance. If you search for "luminance gradient" on Google you'll find a lot of scholarly articles on the subject but I was unable to track down one directly applied to graphic design. There is also a semi-famous demonstration [1] of how our eyes perceive gradients as shadows.

In general this isn't an issue since most designers will either just stretch the gradient out or add additional gradient control points to adjust to fall- off manually.

1\. [http://persci.mit.edu/gallery/checkershadow](http://persci.mit.edu/gallery/checkershadow)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As soon as I scrolled to the "Easing for box shadows" section where the examples were visible, my browser became laggy and dropped from 60Hz framerate to about 15Hz. Use these with caution, and test on a range of devices your visitors are using.

<comment><USER6> What browser are you using, and what specs? I had no problem on my mid-range mobile device

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for featuring my little shadow tool! I'm glad it's useful!

There's a figma plugin out now as well: [https://www.figma.com/c/plugin/788830704169694737/SmoothShad...](https://www.figma.com/c/plugin/788830704169694737/SmoothShadow)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I love it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha ! Now I know why my linear gradients always felt weird !

</comment><comment><USER9> That green overlay stuff isn't the most pleasant while trying to read the page I have to admit.

</comment><comment><USER10> > And the difference between these is pretty big:

Am I the only one who can't tell the different between them (Easing for box shadows)?

<comment><USER11> It is a bit subtle, I think the background of the page and the text below isn't doing it a favor.

Quickly in the browser giving the <p> below a margin-top of 150px and then moving it over a white part of the background (or making it white if you like), the effect becomes more obvious and it does look a bit blockier around the edges to me in the linear example. I would prefer the second as I'm seeing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On Firefox this website lags from the get go. I think you should have all your ducks in a row before offering advice on features related to what you're talking about.

<comment><USER13> Scrolling through it on Firefox I get <1% CPU and <2% GPU without seeing any lag. Curious if you have hardware acceleration working? Or maybe you're hitting a corner case bug?</comment></comment>


CppCon 2016: Bjarne Stroustrup "The Evolution of C++ Past, Present and Future" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wzc7a3McOs <comment><USER2> At 1:03:00 he expresses his disappointment in the progress.

<comment><USER3> He hasn't been hiding his frustration with the committee's progress. However, when asked about that, he also said he values the democracy and committee process more than his own ideas. On the option of being a "Benevolent C++ Dictator for life", he said "Power Corrupts".</comment></comment>


Browserless ClojureScript - <AUTHOR> http://swannodette.github.io/2014/12/21/browserless-clojurescript/

<comment><USER2> I think that this is pretty cool, and nice to see things have progressed as much as it has.

For the most part, I don't use a browser for most of my JS development (I'm all JS, though transpile ES6->ES5). Node has brought in some great things purely as tooling for JS projects, let alone running servers, and processing scripts.

I'm a big fan of node.js and have been for about five years now. It was really the first great general purpose server-side JS implementation. I've used several others (Synchronet, Aptana/Jaxer, GLUEscript, etc) and node continues to be my favorite.

I really like where ES6/7 are going, as soon as async/await are in the runtime it will definitely kickass.</comment>


Senior Software Developer Syndrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.flock3.com/personal/senior-software-developer-syndrome/

<comment><USER2> When I started my job as a fresh-out-of-college SW Engineer, one of the more senior guys there suggested I read The Psychology of Computer Programming (I later went on to find out that this co-worker had some editor credits in it), which talks about ego-less programming. I did adopt a lot of the message in my work style, though I feel it goes a little far by suggesting an engineer not say statements like "I believe that..." or "I think this is better". I think that there's some amount of ownership, excitement, and conviction in an engineer's approach that adds to the project's success. There's definitely the chance that this goes over the line, and then I see examples such as in the article above ("oh, I've been here before so I know why this approach is the best so I don't need to value your opinion). Good read.</comment>


ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux? - <AUTHOR> https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/zfs-and-gpl-terror-how-much-freedom-is-there-in-linux/ <comment><USER2> >Sun deliberately made the CDDL incompatible with the GPL!

>

>This is a claim supported primarily by one former employee of Sun. Others disagree. And even if it was verifiably true: What about Open Source values? Since when is the GPL the only acceptable Open Source license?

Lots of hand-waving and false equivalency here. We're not talking about "Open Source values", we're talking specifically about the _Linux kernel_. And the _Linux kernel_ is GPLv2 licensed. The Software Freedom Conservancy analyzed the situation and determined that a GPL-licensed project cannot legally incorporate CDDL code into the binary[0].

FWIW, Ubuntu has done so anyway via a kernel module and yet has to be sued for it, but the Linux kernel project may still refrain from doing so out of an abundance of caution.

I believe someone else summed it up quite well when they said (paraphrasing), "Solaris intentionally made ZFS difficult to incorporate into Linux by the licensing, so the Linux developers are (understandably) tired of bending over backwards to try to accommodate ZFS."

[0][https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and- linux/](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/)

<comment><USER3> It is worth noting that the GPL2-CDDL license incompatibility is still a theoretical legal issue, and that there are differing learned opinions with respect to the confluence of the CDDL, GPL2, and ZFS. For instance, Eben Moglen, co-author of the GPL3, has indicated that incompatibility is not an issue[0]. Many Sun employees have also disagreed that Sun's intent was to make the CDDL incompatible with the GPL2.

[0] [https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux- kernel-...](https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel- cddl.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No new territory is covered in this article. It's a lot of words that skips over the central question: are CDDL and GPL incompatible and if so what does that mean for the user?

The article addresses this the wrong way: >Sun deliberately made the CDDL incompatible with the GPL!

Doesn't matter whether it's deliberate or not. And it's not merely one opinion, it's GNU, FSF, SFC, Debian, Fedora - quite a lot I'm not going to list them all, who do consider CDDL a free software license, but also consider it incompatible with GPL.

I have yet to read anything from Linux developers or users that they don't like ZFS, quite the contrary. And the solution is distros won't package pre- built binaries, you have to compile it yourself. And it's not that difficult.

The article seems to argue that some Linux people in power hate ZFS (no evidence) and use CDDL GPL incompatibility as an excuse to keep it away from Linux users (again no evidence).

<comment><USER5> Except for the evidence of making calls GPL only, for no legal or technical reason.

All they have to do is allow the calls. (Its a silly restriction anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is ironic that the very same license that tries to prevent greedy companies from stealing open-source code is also preventing code from said (former)greedy company to be contributed back.

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes me wonder how long it will be before a license is codified that is as permissive as BSD/MIT/Apache2 but specifically prohibits using the code in copyleft code bases. The question has been posed elsewhere:

[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6234/is- there...](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6234/is-there-a- generally-accepted-anti-copyleft-clause-or-license)

<comment><USER8> What would be the point?

Copyleft licenses ensure that the code itself remains open source. MIT-style licenses ensures that a developer can use the code without encumbrance. And there are already plenty of licenses out there that are incompatible with the GPL through other conflicting terms - non-commercial licenses come to mind.

What would be the goal of an anti-copyleft license other than to stick it to copyleft projects?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Pessimistic" is a good generalization of the GPL mindset in my opinion: "If I don't make this thing GPL then some greedy-bastard company will make a fortune off of my ideas and never give me a cut, credit, or contribute back."

Maybe, but it's a dim way of looking at other people.

<comment><USER10> Remember that GPL is a product of the realities around the open source ecosystem when Bill Gates and Steve Balmer where CEOs on Microsoft. Moreover the situation with some android OEMs that don't provide source code for their devices shows that this is still happening today.

<comment><USER11> > _Remember that GPL is a product of the realities around the open source > ecosystem when Bill Gates and Steve Balmer where CEOs on Microsoft._

The irony being that formerly FOSS companies are turning to dual licensing, "open core", and similar non-free strategies because it turned out that Gates & Ballmer, y'know, like, actually had a point: you need income in order to keep your business running.

And, by the way, you're wrong anyway: GPLv1 came out in '89 and GPLv2 came out in '91\. Microsoft was a relatively minor player at that time; its meteoric rise to dominance didn't begin until a few years later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not sure why anyone is in "terror". ZFS cannot be legally used with Linux. That's been clear almost from the start.

It's dead. At best it might have a few useful ideas to put into our live filesystems.

</comment><comment><USER13> Of course Linux benefitted from being published under GNU GPL. At that point of time the appearance of a GNU kernel for i386 architecture was inevitable

</comment><comment><USER14> Mir is not GPL. It's GPL+CLA. Tiny, but very important difference.

</comment><comment><USER15> Github deal <\-- bribe or bullet</comment>


What Surgeons Get Paid, and What Patients Think Surgeons Get Paid - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/06/06/what-surgeons-get-paid-and-what-patients-think-surgeons-get-paid/ <comment><USER2> The entire thing to me is a little disingenuous. Apparently, according to an orthopedic surgeon, his study shows that people think orthopedic surgeons should be paid $16,000 or so for a knee replacement. And that Medicare "only" pays $1,400.

Let's clarify: Medicare pays the surgeon "only" $1,400. Medicare payments for the surgery are far higher. Equipment, drugs, in patient stay, therapy, anesthesiologist...

Bear in mind, now, that the typical knee replacement takes 1-3 hours. Those 1-3 hours are what lets the surgeon pocket his $1,400 (from Medicare - more if privately/insurance billing).

Although the study is billed as an example of the disconnect of public knowledge, it seems difficult to imagine it as anything less than an attempt to increase Medicare payments to surgeons, which are already in the realm of $500-$1,000 an hour for this particular procedure.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do the dollar amounts mentioned in the article include pre/post operation work? Or just the actual operation itself? If it is just the time in the operating theatre then 1.4k is not too shabby for a couple of hours work (i am guessing that it doesn't take, on average, a whole day for most hip replacements).

But if the $ mentioned is to cover before and after consultations, prep work etc it seems a bit on the light side.

</comment><comment><USER4> This has to do with Medicare specifically, not out of pocket costs for a self- pay patient or regular insurance.

It is robbery and also probably a large part of the reason procedures are so expensive for the rest of us. Regular insurance reimbursements are much more reasonable but they still don't pay near what you'd pay if you had to pay for a procedure out of pocket.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is what happens when you can't downvote on a news forum.</comment>


C++: Interviews vs. Fieldwork - <AUTHOR> This is probably going to get deleted since it's more of a rant than a question, which I formulate here (and remember, cultural thing learned in EE, I never question something without having an answer to it even though possibly just as wrong as the status quo).
Question: what alternatives do we have to the current disfunctional state of both interviews and fieldwork that follows it? Hint: if I could answer (like actually solve it), that would be worth $B++.
So what interviews ask for: - Automated tests that ask you to implement a random algorithm with optimum execution and all corner cases handled, within a limit of 30 minutes. - If you pass the machine gun barrage automated tests, you get an in person interview where they ask you to be an expert in this sort of code: http://aras-p.info/blog/2018/12/28/Modern-C-Lamentations/
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>== ... // "for_each" creates a new view by applying a // transformation to each element in an input // range, and flattening the resulting range of // ranges. // (This uses one syntax for constrained lambdas // in C++20.) inline constexpr auto for_each = []<Range R, Iterator I = iterator_t<R>, IndirectUnaryInvocable<I> Fun>(R&& r, Fun fun) requires Range<indirect_result_t<Fun, I>> { return std::forward<R>(r) | view::transform(std::move(fun)) | view::join; };
 ... </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>== </comment><comment><AUTHOR> What fieldwork consists of:

1) No abominations like above, which by the way does this:

void printNTriples(int n) { int i = 0; for (int z = 1; ; ++z) for (int x = 1; x <= z; ++x) for (int y = x; y <= z; ++y) if (x _x + y_ y == z _z) { printf( "%d, %d, %d\n", x, y, z); if (++i == n) return; } }

To my experience, any team and project manager that's incompetent enough to allow for such "genius" to unfold themselves in a production and comercially bound project, well they get slaughtered. I haven't yet seen companies incompetent enough to do that but I've seen projects spanning over the course of 3-5 years with dozens of people involved being tossed away and the geniuses (and company) be supported by the humble C level of "mediocrity" of the printNTriples.

2) There are hard algorithms to be implemented and they usually involve hard and horrible domain knowledge that takes a heck lot of effort to aquire, effort of which as wishful you may be you'll never be able to factor out time and lots of it, is plain nasty and entirely non-portable outside of the environment that never pays you enough for dealing with it. Ex: for those who complain on "no documentation", the domain knowledge of the domain last amateur level project yet $500M worth commercially project that I worked on could be described in maybe 5 pages of documentation, the contract we work on that's worth some $5B has 1111 pages of documentation in some 20 chapters and my assigned one leads to some 20 other documents amounting to more complexity.

All the while the greatest challange, in C++21 still remains to compile the damn thing. Not that it takes 2 hours to compile what in Java essentially it's Borland's Pascal 5.0 responsiveness (latency and throughput). We've learned to be so traumatized by C++ that as long as it _compiles*, we're happy.

Not to mention BUILDING the damn system, like setting it up for first time use, with dependencies and all. Everytime I change projects, I cringe and pray from a miracle from God if the process takes less than one week. Not that I complain about that week - see above.</comment>