Intellectual Humility increases tolerance, improves decision-making - <AUTHOR> https://today.duke.edu/2017/03/modest-personality-trait-intellectual-humility-packs-punch <comment><USER3> The "intellectual humility doesn't get grants" and "loses elections" comments lead me to believe that people aren't understanding the concept of intellectual humility as presented in this article.

It does _not_ mean that you give the outward appearance of being humble in any way.

It is defined in the article as "an awareness that one's beliefs may be wrong" and "intellectually humble people can have strong beliefs, but recognize their fallibility and are willing to be proven wrong on matters large and small."

This was tested with a study in which "participants read essays arguing for and against religion, and were then asked about each author's personality", and evidence that "people who displayed intellectual humility also did a better job evaluating the quality of evidence."

There is a distinction between an individual's internal mental processes (as tested in this study) and the way they present themselves externally. Being outwardly assertive and confident absolutely wins elections and grants, but this is _not_ at odds with an ability to internally re-evaluate one's beliefs.

I particularly enjoy this quote from the article, as it reveals that the authors may have missed a subtlety:

 _"If you're sitting around a table at a meeting and the boss is very low in intellectual humility, he or she isn't going to listen to other people's suggestions," Leary said. "Yet we know that good leadership requires broadness of perspective and taking as many perspectives into account as possible."_

I absolutely agree that good leadership requires broadness of perspective, but this does _not_ imply that every suggestion should get an audience at meetings -- capable leaders often have a much broader range of experience than their reports, and dismiss suggestions _not_ out of arrogance or closed-mindedness, but simply because they have already evaluated and discounted that path, and have elected not to spend their limited time bringing everyone else up to speed. (Which can have its own issues, but that's a digression.)

<comment><USER4> I really don't see how being that assertive is compatible with intellectual humility, short of actively lying. There will come a time where people expect you to state something firmly, and you will have to either say "the evidence isn't definitive" or be dishonest.

Edit: of course you can often be assertive about some things while being intellectually humble. But what I mean to say is that the level of assurance that is expected of a CEO is not compatible with that humility.

<comment><USER5> An assertive person could easily say, firmly and with confidence, that "I don't have an opinion on this topic, because the evidence isn't definitive." If you can't do that, then there _is_ something in your scenario that's incompatible with intellectual honesty, but it's not assertiveness -- more likely, it's a feeling of needing to satisfy the expectations of others that you will have an opinion. That feeling is like antimatter for intellectual honesty, but it's totally different from assertiveness.

<comment><USER6> They can do that, but my observation is that they will loose to some who says: "I know this is better choice and the other choice is shitty". The latter is more likely to be promoted and will be assumed to be more competent - <USER2> his opinions will be taken more seriously and will get more interesting tasks.

<comment><USER7> You can be intellectually humble, assertive AND have a opinion. They are not at all mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER6> I was talking about situation when available evidence is not conclusive. Confidently stating opinion and then insisting on it makes people look more skilled then those who assertively state that we need to research more. Having and pushing opinion in that situation is opposite of being "intellectually humble", but still good for your career.

Intellectually humble people have disadvantage in competition, although they may make better technical decisions.

<comment><USER7> That is not the definition that I perceived from the article. Maybe you are thinking of "Intellectually honest"? What I read was basically that Intellectually humble people are non-dogmatic; they will change their opinions and evaluation if and when new facts show their opinion as being incorrect; but they aren't restricted from forming an opinion in the absence of concrete facts, as you seem to be assuming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't this notion pretty much be summed with the Bertrand Russell quote, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt"?

<comment><USER9> Yes, but couldn't you argue it's preferable to be in group one? Imagine how great life would be running around with no doubt, full of confidence, and never having to deal with being wrong. Sounds like bliss.

<comment><USER10> I think there is almost always a part of you that knows, deep down, that you fallible. That is just from my personal experience contrasting myself as a younger person filled with hubris to my current self, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh my god the dawning realization that I have absolutely no intellectual humility absolutely terrorizes and embarrasses me. I can change.

<comment><USER12> Young people everywhere think they know everything. A big part of the thing we know as "wisdom" is acquiring enough experience and metacognitive skills to realize how little one knows, and to act accordingly.

<comment><USER13> Metacognition should be the main focus of K-5. Everything else follows.

<comment><USER14> I mean, for that timescale, I personally would prioritize making sure the kids know not to poop on their desks and not to scream indoors, but sure, metacognition, that's good too.

<comment><USER11> Early childhood is very formative as a time-period and even at this age young humans can have a strong sense of propriety. There are some character traits that are exceedingly positive and simply need nurturing to blossom. Our system positively filters for obedience, what we really need is more creative minds.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely agree that the emphasis on obedience is anachronistic. We need a lot more creative minds; the education system that was originally designed for churning out soldiers and factory workers needs to be realigned for the new economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is some related material in the written lore of Buddhism. Interestingly and perhaps tellingly the material is largely phrased on classifying the motivations and appropriate responses to questions in general, rather than the explicit act of decision-making: [http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index- subject.html#questions](http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index- subject.html#questions)

 _There are questions that should be answered categorically [straightforwardly yes, no, this, that]. There are questions that should be answered with an analytical (qualified) answer [defining or redefining the terms]. There are questions that should be answered with a counter-question. There are questions that should be put aside. These are the four ways of answering questions._

</comment><comment><USER16> Heres a model i though of: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus- and-the-wea...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the- weasel/)

The core is a 2x2 with strength of views on one axis and holding strength on the other.

A fox is someone who knows many things and a hedgehog is someone who knows one big thing.

The degenerate versions are the cactus, which stubbornly knows one thing, and the weasel, whose views ate too two-faced.

The weasal does double-think while the fox can hold contradictory models in mind and create a new one or use the one that better fits the situation. (e.g particle wave theory)

The fox has better perspective, but because energy is spread out among too many things, has trouble implementing. The hedgehogs energy is directed and more focused with more momentum, but still has the ability to steer, unlike a cactus.

Intellectual humility IMO is about flexibility of mental models. In terms of real world success, hedgehogs have the most while foxes are more armchair philosophers.

The article is telling cactuses to be more like hedgehogs, but the 1 dimensional terminology ropes in foxes as well, who despite having intellectual humility as well, don't usually have as much direct impact on the world.

</comment><comment><USER17> > aimed at promoting qualities such as intellectual humility.

Did the paper conclude that changing a person to be more intellectually humble causes the benefits described? If not, any promotion or changing of behavior seems premature.

</comment><comment><USER18> The one thing I would have liked to see in this article would have been the benefits and downsides of both qualities. Intellectual Egotism, and Intellectual Modesty. That would have been a balanced approach.

There are people who know that they are intellectually modest that read this article, and it may reinforce their belief that being intellectually modest is the one true path! There are people who know that they are intellectually arrogant and may feel that they are destined for hell by reading this article. There are some advantages to being an egotist as well and disadvantages being modest.

The other subtle incoherence I wanted to point out is, at some point the author claims intellectually modest people are in both classes of people, conservative and liberals. But he does say that republicans by and far are more likely to not accept a person who has "flip flopped" [may or may not be for good reasons] than a democrat. So assuming most conservative people are republicans, and most liberal people are democrats there is some intellectual quality that differentiates their bases. This probably needed more analysis in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is the very googley concept of psychological safety right ?

Google Rework has some great stuff about it [https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-to-foster- psychologic...](https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-to-foster- psychological-safety/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Didn't Socrates have this figured out ~2500 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER21> You could also add "Loses Elections"

<comment><USER22> Last US elections were strange because it seems both parties chose their worst candidates. Any Democrat other than Hilary would beat Trump hands down, and also any Republican would win with Clinton by even higher margin.

<comment><USER23> Trump isnt any republican he successfully recreated the reagan coalition.

Its really mindboggling, how he took over the party.

<comment><USER24> It is mind boggling that he took over the GOP but take over it he did. And dismissing Trump as _not any republican_ is as _No True Scotsman_ as it gets. In particular, if Republicans wanted him gone, Trump would be gone _tomorrow_.

<comment><USER23> Except the fact hes not a normal republican. He ran left of even clinton on some issues.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump- is-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-is-running- to-the-left-of-hillary- clinton/2016/05/09/ebde82da-147c-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html)

<comment><USER24> Maybe what you meant to say is that normal Republicans aren't normal Republicans. Or perhaps that this is what normal Republicans actually are. Because any which way, Trump remains popular with these whatever Republicans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Summary: one unfalsifiable study, not replicated, with no theoretical basis or reference to other theories; a study unable to establish whether the measured trait (intellectual humility) and the measured effect (more effective functioning) are in fact related as cause and effect, or the reverse, or are both related to some third unstudied property.

In a recent ambitious and well-funded replication project, only 39% of published psychology studies could be replicated at all, and of the successful minority, the average measured effect size was half that of the original study, in some cases falling below generally accepted standards for statistical significance. The take-away from the replication project is that, when reading a random psychology study, the reader must remember that the study's probability of having any relation to reality is less than 50%.

More on this topic: [http://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy](http://arachnoid.com/psychology_and_alchemy)

<comment><USER26> Your hundreds of comments on this, all saying the same thing and replicating themselves like weeds in any remotely related context, have become so excessive that I need to ask you to stop using HN this way.

We all respect your fabulous software work, but HN threads are for conversation. Nothing spoils good conversation like obsessive repetition. Taken as a whole, your comments on this matter are not conversation, they are a harangue—apparently an interminable one. Harangue is off-topic here, regardless of whether you're right or not.

<comment><USER25> > Your hundreds of comments on this ...

You know, starting out with a wild exaggeration, an "alternative fact," undermines your otherwise meritorious point.

> ... I need to ask you to stop using HN this way.

In what way -- conversations about psychology? On what basis? HN regulars often post links to psychology articles -- people don't complain about that (and IMHO they shouldn't, because most are newsworthy). And by definition, comments about those articles are as topical as the articles themselves.

Also, I never originate exchanges about psychology, I only respond to threads introduced/posted by others. If psychology were never an established topic here, I would never address it. This means you're objecting to a particular viewpoint on the topic, not the topic itself.

> We all respect your fabulous software work, but HN threads are for > conversation.

Indeed they are. Case in point -- this conversation.

Solely for balance you might consider objecting to the large number of psychology articles posted here. I'm not recommending this -- I only say this to try to get you to examine your position.

<comment><USER27> > You know, starting out with a wild exaggeration,

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:lutusp%20psychology&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:lutusp%20psychology&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

Over 300 results, all saying pretty much the same thing.

<comment><USER25> > all saying pretty much the same thing.

The number is higher than I would have guessed, but they're certainly not saying "the same thing." In many cases they're included in the search results only because of the presence of the word "psychology" without any discussion of the topic at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This isn't a study, this is an essay about an activity that some people did.

<comment><USER29> So? Have essays and thinking outside of formal studies gone out of style now?

<comment><USER23> If you are trying to make wide general conclusions from it, Yes.

Its probably due from once trusted institutions getting so much wrong from the health pyramid, replication crisis, even election polling.

Nasim Taleb has a good series on why distrust is increasing.

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211e...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211e2d0577)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Psychology is rubbish, that's already established, so there is no need to read this particular study before forming an opinion, or criticizing the study bases on it's merits. /s

On the other hand, published psychological studies are probably better than opinion articles, essays etc. So maybe there is some value in it that.

I myself find these four studies in the paper interesting in the context of ambiguity tolerance and critical thinking. Studies in personality and social psychology like these are usually best understood as some sort of cluster analysis.

Most interesting points form the discussion chapter that draws from many other studies:

1\. Many of the effect sizes for intellectual humility were relatively small

2\. High IH might come together with epistemic curiosity, cognitive ability and ambiguity tolerance.

3\. Most personality characteristics display substantial within-person variability across situations. So the studies probably reflected domain specific intellectual humility (IH).

4\. Intellectual humility did not correlate with religiosity or political orientation.

5\. Indicators for stubbornness, rigidity, narcissism, or defensiveness are not central aspects of low intellectual humility.

<comment> angry-hacker Maybe not rubbish, but it sure isn't science. Nice opinion article -- probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Intellectual humility doesnt get grants though.

<comment><USER31> > _Intellectual humility doesnt get grants though._

Amen. In industry, intellectual humility doesn't help get promotions or get hired either.

<comment><USER32> It does if you work for people with the trait.

<comment><USER28> so it's dynamically unstable :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is one of those articles and studies we've been warned about. It doesn't mean anything, and you will be no better off reading it. It is interesting point but it can't be taken as a scientific pointer you should apply for your life.

As a newspaper article, I actually like it.

<comment><USER34> It is a captive venue news article / press release _about_ a paper at DOI: 10.1177/0146167217697695\. I've only skimmed so far, but seems interesting and meaningful. What fraction of papers can be directly applied to your life? When I read the paper more closely I'll be looking for some kind of apology for religion since it was funded by the Templeton Foundation.

<comment><USER25> > I've only skimmed so far, but seems interesting and meaningful.

Any meaning the study might have would have to be validated by (a) a successful replication, and (b) construction of a falsifiable theory based on it, one that predicts behaviors and corollaries not yet seen. I won't hold my breath for that.

Much of published psychology consists of taking a common belief that "everyone knows," crafting a study that seems to support it, then publishing the result without bothering to conduct a replication or suggesting a reliable, falsifiable theoretical basis.

The thesis seems sound -- many people see humility as a positive trait. But that's why the study exists -- it's an example of confirmation bias in print.

An equally plausible study could be crafted to prove the opposite point, but that study wouldn't be published. Psychology journals publish articles their readers like, and aggressively reject articles their readers don't like.

<comment><USER3> Richard Feynman: "A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CoffeeScript Under Pressure - <AUTHOR> http://mattdw.github.com/2012/rapid-coffee-postmortem.html

<comment><USER2>
        > It wasn't just fancy HTML we had to build; it was a port of a
        > graphic- and animation-intensive Flash app, with the polish
        > intact,1 and it had to work on iOS. It had to work on IE7.
        > It had to work on Android 2.1 on one of the clients' phones.
        > And we had six weeks. We did the maths and figured that at
        > twelve hours a day, six days a week for six weeks, we might
        > just sneak in.
        > [...]
        > There were also three levels of stakeholders above us, with
        > different priorities, and constantly shifting (and always
        > growing) specs cascading down from above as the site took shape.
        >
        > After some discussion with my 'if I get hit by a truck' backup
        > developer, I decided to add CoffeeScript to this, despite no
        > real experience with it.

Then you're a brave, brave man. After this intro, I fully expected to hear a disaster story of missed deadlines and feature cuts ... not a successful project and a Super Bowl launch.

I think it goes without saying that "on deadline" is probably _not_ the best time to learn a brand new JavaScript dialect. I'm relieved to hear that it all turned out for the best.

You mention that you're thinking of adding an explicit validation step -- great idea. For CS & JS (which can be compiled and validated quickly), even better than having it run when you build is having it run every time you save the file in your text editor...

<comment><USER3> "Brave" is far too kind. This is the kind of project nightmares are made of. Unless the pay was completely off the charts or I needed the work badly I wouldn't go anywhere near this type of project.

<comment><USER4> To reply to you and jashkenas, we weren't completely delusional. Sure, the project was big and tight, but we were pretty confident that we could nail it; none of the particulars were new, just the scale and the timeframe.

There was never any question of "can we actually do this?", just "can we do this in time?" Hence picking a tool that looked like it might offer some shortcuts. Yeah, it was a hell of a lot of work, but that was always going to be the case, and I accepted the project on those terms.

(My post perhaps came across as more extreme than the reality. We delivered. The site works. The code never got to 'unmanageable'. Given the opportunity to refactor this particular site, I'd leave it in Coffee, although I'd rework the build and deployment process.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article gives a perfect example of why you would want to take advantage of the git index: the author was talking about different versions of coffee sometimes producing different output which lead to commits going back and forth between the two versions.

The author is right: this is annoying.

Now, the correct way to solve this would probably be to either not check in generated files, to leave the JS out of the repo, or, if that's not possible due to politics, then use the same version of coffee which I would highly recommend anyways because it gets rid of really bad WTFy issues if one version of the compiler has a bug which manifests itself in an application bug which will then only be seen if the last commit was done by the person with the broken compiler.

Anyways. Let's say you can't use the same compiler and you have to check in JS in addition to coffee (you are not trying to sneak in coffee by ONLY committing the JS, are you?)

Now we have the perfect oportunity to show off the git index:

Instead of committing the whole file, you would use add -p to only select the changes which are actual code changes and not changes in compiler output.

Then you would only commit those changes and then undo the unneeded stuff and test again, to ensure that you added the right lines to the index (commit --amend or rebase -i if not).

This will give you a much cleaner history, which will be a huge help when blaming or reviewing the code. No more annoying flip-flopping between compiler output styles. No more meaningless changes in a commit. All the changed lines in the diff are the lines that count. The lines you should look at when reviewing. No risk of missing the trees in the forest.

But, you might say, history rewriting is bad. I don't want to commit something I haven't tested.

Remember though: you haven't pushed yet. You haven't altered public history yet. Nobody knows about those commits yet. You have all the time for testing, patching and massaging commits. Only once you pushed, your changes (should) become set in stone. Only then, history gets written. Only then it can't be changed any more.

This is why I love rebase and I'm really glad I finally found a good real- world example to show why.

<comment><USER6> When I heard about that I just wondered who could possibly see a diff that changed every line in a file (unnecessarily) and actually commit it.

<comment><USER4> Let me readily acknowledge that our process wasn't optimal. The CoffeeScript version-change happened while I was completely offline for a week, having dumped the next dev right in the middle of things with insufficient handover, so we caught that a bit late.

In hindsight (1) I should have used something other than Make for my build process and (2) I should have figured out a way to move some of the build upstream.

Things to get right next time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aside from being a good read, the author comes off as the kind of person I would like to work with.

<comment><USER8> What an interesting thing for a highly-regarded founder/angel to say in public. I hope to hear about this on his blog too!

<comment><USER7> It's just an aside. There's nothing pending.

Thinking about it further, I think the tone is due to the level of humility you get from someone who is really experienced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For what it's worth, facing a client-side project of similar magnitude, we chose Google Web Toolkit and learned Java.

Two years and 60k LOC later, (www.activityinfo.org) I'm not entirely satisfied with the tool -- sometimes more abstraction introduces new problems to be solved, and it's hard to find good, affordable java devs to work on the project here in NL, but it does IMHO bring tremendous advantages in terms of modularity, dependency management, and generally keeping the code base maintainable. And the optimizing compiler is nothing short of amazing.

I realize the idea of Java-to-Javascript is sacrilege for many, but if you've looking at building a large, single-page javascript application, I think it's worth taking a look at.

<comment><USER4> I've been seriously considering ClojureScript (which is on top of Google Closure) for exactly those reasons. The extra toolchain complexity is still an issue though.

<comment><USER10> Google Closure (JS optimizing compiler and library) has nothing to do with the Google Web Toolkit which compiles Java to JS (GWT). ClojureScript is awesome in any case though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We recently have switched over to using CoffeeScript in production and haven't looked back. One thing we found out real fast was to not compile the CS until you go to staging or QA. The way we get around this is using RequireJS (<http://requirejs.org/>) and the CoffeeScript Plugin(<https://github.com/jrburke/require-cs>). This buys you the ability to compile at runtime in the browser, so you don't have this mess of CoffeeScript files and compiled JS files in your source. When you are ready to build for production or QA you use RequireJS' optimization tools to concatenate, minify, obfuscate and compile the code. Hope that helps.

<comment><USER12> Found out the same thing. Developed mostly via TDD/QUnit in FF with Firebug only and occasionally running the entire suite with multiple browers. Even IE6 (via IETester) would compile several thousand lines in a few seconds or so.

Used tdd for almost everything even clicking ui widgets to populate from a rest resource and then validating the result. CS rocks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A very well written article.

I've considered learning CoffeeScript but have decided for now to let things play out and focus on learning JavaScript better. There are a ton of frameworks for javascript (backbone/spine) that make it more bearable. Also JS for all its quirks is ridiculously powerful.

To me maintainability is huge in a project. There needs to be a really strong reason to choose CoffeeScript over plain javascript. Catching all syntax errors seems okay but not entirely justified. I usually catch those in a staging environment on a console.

<comment><USER14> I am now on my third project using coffeescript together with BackboneJS.

On the second and third project, I am also teaching coffeescript to 3 people who had never written any coffeescript OR BackboneJS before.

Granted, there is a fair amount of coaching involved, but the quality of the code produced is top notch, and the maintainability is _vastly_ improved compared to anything we've done in plain javascript before.

This may be due to Coffeescript, and it may be due to Backbone adding some much needed structure, but I'd like to believe it's a combination of both and even using one in isolation should yield an improvement.

If you are familiar with Javascript, picking up Coffeescript should be a breeze, and in my opinion, the benefits are there.

On a closing note, you say that JS is ridiculously powerful which leads me to believe that you feel using CS means sacrificing some of that power. Since CS translates directly into JS, I think you'll find this fear is unwarranted.

<comment><USER15> > On a closing note, you say that JS is ridiculously powerful which leads me > to believe that you feel using CS means sacrificing some of that power. > Since CS translates directly into JS, I think you'll find this fear is > unwarranted.

That alone is really not any evidence that CoffeeScript is as powerful as Javascript. Just because the target language exposes a particular feature does not mean that source language does.

<comment><USER14> That's so obviously correct that I'm going to stop making HN comments so early in the morning and see if that stops me from saying stupid shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Due to our deployment requiring the generated Javascript to be checked into > the repository, this made for incredibly noisy diffs.

Add `// Generated by' to surpress JS diffs on Github.

> I really like for x in xs. I don't really use the list comprehensions (which > Andrew Brehaut had some things to say about), because I tend to use map and > filter anyway.

CoffeeScript's list comprehensions can be used for `map' and `filter' too.

> I was a bit surprised to discover that CoffeeScript has no more opinions on > code structure than does Javascript (short a class syntax which I barely > used.)

One cannot be saved sola gratia.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I'm just feeling cynical this morning but I don't understand why the OP came to his conclusion. I read it as him making a bunch of mistakes which led him to conclude he shouldn't use CoffeeScript.

He took on a large project on short notice with a tight deadline, browser compatibility issues, and growing requirements (client is a big company after all) using a language he's "not terribly confident with". This alone is a really Bad Idea. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he recognizes this in hindsight and felt he could handle it at the time.

Then he decides to do it in CoffeeScript, something he has never used before. It seems he had expectations that CS was much more heavy handed, providing library-like code structure and compensating for his lack of JS knowledge. Mistake #2.

He finds a bug and some other small annoyances. This is understandable. There are some things about CS that annoy me too. Every language has its problems. I suppose this alone could be enough to drive someone away from a language. Personally I find the trade offs worth it for increased productivity, but that's just my opinion.

His conclusion about CoffeeScript is that "it just doesn't feel quite robust enough (as a language or as a tool) that I'm confident in it at this sort of scale, and at smaller scales it doesn't confer enough benefit to be worth the added complexity." Again, problems with confidence.

My suggestion? Be confident with JavaScript first, then use CoffeeScript. Not understanding the underlying language is just going to lead to problems like this.

</comment><comment><USER17> "You may have seen it advertised during the 2012 Super Bowl."

For those of us not in the US - anyone have any idea what site he is talking about?

Edit: Just saw the link in a previous comment. Seems the site is: <http://toyota.com/camryeffect/>

</comment><comment><USER18> I've posted this before, but it's relevant again here, as the author mentions the dangling comma issue. Discussion on preferred syntax for a parameter spanning multiple lines followed by another parameter: <https://gist.github.com/1215863>

</comment><comment><USER12> You have got to be kidding.

Paraphrasing: We were under massive time constraints and by our own estimation, already barely able to meet the deadline, so we decided to add a language which compiles Javascript even though I am not that well versed in Javascript.

There are so mnay things wrong with this approach I really don't know where to begin.

</comment><comment><USER19> > CoffeeScript was a godsend here, simply as an explicit compile and > validation step. > Automatic local scoping (no var necessary) is a sane > choice, and safe loop scoping with for x in y do (x) -> erases a whole > category of errors. > indentation

Thought it might be useful to others seeking these advantages that passing your JS through JSHint in the build process could provide these benefits. It's not a cure-all, of course--the author cites other benefits that linting can't achieve. But if you're a like-minded developer looking for assurances along these lines in JavaScript, check out <http://jshint.com> and <https://github.com/jshint/jshint/>

</comment><comment><USER20> A very interesting read, although from this line I couldn't quite stop thinking "there's no silver bullet":

> I decided to add CoffeeScript to this, despite no real experience with it.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The lack of a strong set of standard control and data structures [in > JavaScript] means that you end up typing many of the same patterns > repeatedly

Care to elaborate? I'm not saying I don't have my own notions of what's missing in JS, but I'd like to hear your take, given your experience.

<comment><USER4> Particularly I'm thinking of the inescapable async-all-the-way down, which necessitates endless lambdas. In other languages it's possible to pick a point at which to invert control back to blocking-style; JS's single-thread model makes that impossible. So for instance all calls to the server API have to be callback style; if you have to make serial calls, you can't avoid nested callbacks.

I miss a set type, I miss solid iteration (although coffescript mitigates that), and immutable datatypes would be nice (I've got used to them in Clojure.) I miss a solid FP stdlib, although jQuery has map and filter, which goes a long way.

That's the ones I can immediately think of :).

<comment><USER21> > inescapable async-all-the-way down, which necessitates endless lambdas. In > other languages it's possible to pick a point at which to invert control > back to blocking-style

I hear you. Have you heard of iced coffee script ?(<http://maxtaco.github.com/coffee-script/>) I didn't sleep well the night after I read that.

<comment><USER4> Looks much like <http://tamejs.org/> in the semantics. I guess if you're pre- processing anyway, you may as well pre-process all the way.

<comment><USER4> Oh, same guy. That'd be why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > I don't think CoffeeScript adds quite enough benefit to outweigh the costs

Those "costs" were the cost of learning, not development/efficiency costs.

If you are already comfortable with Javascript _and_ know coffeescript beforehand, the cost is zero and the benefits far outweigh that.

</comment><comment><USER23> If JS/CS typing is an issue for you, you may want to take a look at CoffeeScript Contracts, a fork of CoffeeScript that implements contracts: <http://disnetdev.com/contracts.coffee/>

I've not used them in production yet but it looks like a very cool way to ensure code quality. The syntax of the Contracts resembles Haskell type definitions. Contracts are very flexible -- for example, you could create and enforce a "Prime Number" type (or whatever type you wish).

Also, you don't have to include the contracts in your production code -- you can compile to JS for production and omit the contracts once you've validated the code against them.

Actually, the more I look at this, the more I think I'll use it for my next CoffeeScript project.

</comment><comment><USER24> would like to see the app. it seems like it would have been a hard task.

now, trying to think of which apps were featured during the super bowl. the GM one? anyone have any guesses?

<comment><USER4> My link was apparently not obvious enough :).

<http://toyota.com/camryeffect/>

</comment></comment><comment> no-espam It shouldn't matter what the generated code is. Use gitattributes to ignore diffs on generated folders.

<comment><USER4> Could you explain this further?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Uhm, I don't think CoffeeScript is meant to be used on production mission critical projects. It's a research language, not a "fix javascript" language. That so many people are going ahead and using it in production anyway really raises some serious questions about how technology choices get made.

<comment><USER26> I'm a bit bemused by your comment. Given the conversations that jashkenas and Brendan Eich have had... I think it's pretty clear that CoffeeScript is an "improve on javascript" language quite explicitly.

Interestingly, I think that quality is entirely orthogonal to production worthiness and any implied or explicitly stated guarantees about utility and unbreakiness.

I've personally thrown my weight behind up and coming technologies in the past (Merb to be specific, back in the Merb vs Rails insurgency), and ended up supporting a technology stack that was left abandoned. In spite of that, my company continued running happily on Merb for 3 years after that (until a move to Scala).

That jashkenas warns people with a "caveat emptor" doesn't mean a tool shouldn't be used in production. It means that you should carefully evaluate how you use your tools in production, make sure you write modular testable code, be willing to dive down into the weeds, and most importantly always have a backup plan.

The interesting part about CoffeeScript is that the backup plan (again if you have properly factored code) can just be "use more Javascript". :P

(my own caveat is that I do not CoffeeScript in production. At least, not yet.)</comment></comment>


Big Data: principles and best practices (new book) - <AUTHOR> http://manning.com/marz/

<comment><USER3> Tangent: has someone done the startup to do technical books this way (serialized subscriptions to books in progress, on-demand print-and-ship at completion for the small subset of customers that want that)?

Now that giant book stores are on their way out, it seems like we should be ready to end the pretense of retail channel relationships and marketing as being worth virtually all the money in the tech book production value chain.

<comment><USER4> <http://safaribooksonline.com/> ?

<comment><USER3> What's the split between author/"publisher"? I know Safari does more than ORA books now, but don't you need a relationship with a real publisher to post books there? I'm talking about replacing the publisher altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the authors of the book. If you have any questions about the book, I'm happy to answer them here.

<comment><USER5> I just ordered a copy of the EAP. Looks like it's just PDF now. Do you know if they plan on offering kindle/epub versions later in the MEAP or on release? Some manning books seem to have them and some don't. Device specific formats are often much easier to read than PDFs are.

<comment><USER6> I asked Manning about this for another EAP book, and this was their response:

 _At present all of our books are released as pdfs. Once the meaps are published they will be converted to mobile format epub and mobi. We understand the desire for mobile formats and we are looking to in the future, hopefully near future, to have all books available in mobile formats, meaps included. You can find all titles we have available in mobile format here:<http://www.manning.com/catalog/mobile>

Each book is converted manually to ensure that everything transfers to the new format as the Author intended it to appear. This is a painstaking process and does take time. Since each book is different in number of pages and images we do not have a set time frame for when each book will be available but know that as soon as the final ebook is complete it is sent to be converted._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think anyone has mentioned the discount code yet; it might still be active (bd50 for 50% off; it worked for me about 6 hours ago): <https://twitter.com/#!/nathanmarz/status/156459481864220672>

<comment><USER8> Just worked for me (at 2:43AM PST). Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As much as I'm a huge fan of Nathan Marz and his work with Clojure and Cascalog... I am hoping this book is about how to make Big Data accessible to programmers across multiple languages.

Nathan, do you think you'll be including pseudo-code, or will one need to be a clojure programmer to best leverage your book?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no Clojure in the book (we don't think Clojure should be a prerequisite to learning this important subject). Most of the examples will be in Java.

There is a big emphasis in the book on using multiple languages together. This is reflective of how I myself have architected systems, with our team using Ruby, Python, Clojure, and Java for the same product. Chapter 2 is about creating a schema for your data using Thrift, for example.

<comment><USER10> Being someone who have never got into this field and stats and only tackled with RDBMS, would it be useful for beginners?

<comment><AUTHOR> The material in the book is most useful when you're working at very large scale (where the RDBMS breaks down). You won't necessarily need the techniques if you're working at smaller scale, but the material will certainly expand your mind on ways to manage and work with data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How well does a system like this work for bootstrappers on a tight budget? It seems like by nature of the system design, you're going to need quite a few more servers than a simple LAMP-like setup. Between Hadoop, Cassandra, Storm, Web Servers and the like, you're looking at ~10'ish server instances right out of the gate.

I ask because I'm intrigued by this kind of design, but not the server cost that seems to be associated with it for a newly launched (and potentially unproven) product.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have big data, you're going to need lots of servers anyway, and I think there's no better way to manage that data than with the techniques I talk about in the book.

While I think these techniques can scale down, the current crop of Big Data technologies (esp. Hadoop) don't scale down very well. That is, they have a lot of overhead for small amounts of data. So while these techniques can work for "small data", it's going to be relatively more costly. For big data, the overhead is amortized. In the future, I do see scaling down as an important evolution for these technologies.

<comment><USER12> Can you recommend some tools for someone starting down this path? I'm comfortable with apt-get and mildly capable with the AWS console, but I'm a bit daunted by the idea of attempting to automatically spin up 2-3 servers, have them configure themselves, and then have them form up a little Hadoop cluster. The "set up your own single-node Hadoop cluster on Ubuntu" guides I've skimmed have a sizeable amount of configuration details that are completely opaque to an outsider.

Not being huge into Java isn't helping either. Would I be better served by biting the bullet and doing things in Java initially or can I skip right to jython or jruby or clojure or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a big fan of Pallet for infrastructure management ( <https://github.com/pallet/pallet> ). That's what we used for all our infrastructure on AWS at BackType, and my team has continued to use it to manage our machines within the Twitter datacenter. Pallet has a high learning curve, but it's worth it.

Sam wrote the pallet-hadoop tool which can spin up Hadoop clusters at the click of a button ( <https://github.com/pallet/pallet-hadoop> ). Although if you're on AWS you're better off just using EMR.

You don't need to use Java. I do everything in Clojure (using Cascalog and Storm's Clojure DSL).

<comment><USER13> The one thing that makes me mildly uncomfortable about pallet is that, in the end, it's just another "run these shell scripts to set up your server" system. I find I prefer tools like puppet or chef and then extending them to deal with AWS (cluster-chef, for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the first paragraph:

"In the past decade the amount of data being created has skyrocketed. More than 30000 gigabytes of data are generated every second, and the rate of data creation is only accelerating"

How could you even hope to put a number on the rate at which data is being generated? What does it even mean to generate data?

Would make for a fun (& meaningless) interview question!

<comment><USER15> I agree. Where I work, we run weather and climate models, and These models generate 100's of gigabytes of output in a short amount of time. Regarding "data being generated", these models output 3D data sets of weather/atmospheric related variables (4D if you include time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're in San Francisco this Thursday, come check out Nathan give a talk on Storm & realtime processing at Airbnb HQ.

Free food and drinks.

Signup here: [http://www.airbnb.com/meetups/zjw9ks5q9-nathan-marz-of- twitt...](http://www.airbnb.com/meetups/zjw9ks5q9-nathan-marz-of-twitter-on- storm-and-realtime-processing)

<comment><USER17> thanks but there are too many meetups this Thursday in the bay area, curious why don't airbnb use meetup.com?

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the comment Suyash.

We needed a meetup tool for all of the awesome Community Meetups that we throw around the world, so two of our engineers (Raph: <https://github.com/Raphomet> & Horace: <https://github.com/warpdude>) built an Airbnb Meetup tool. We like to dogfood, so we use it for our nerd meetups as well.

As for the meetup being on a busy Thursday, it just happened to be a time that worked for everybody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're interested in this subject and are looking for training in Cascalog, one of the authors (Sam Ritchie) is teaching a 3 day class prior to the Clojure/West conference - more info here: <http://clojurewest.org/training- cascalog>

</comment><comment><USER20> I am looking forward to this book.

One of the things I would like is recommended naming conventions for the various objects in STORM. For example, what's the best way to name a StreamID? Should it include information about the spout/bolt it originates from and the bolt it is going to? I spend a lot of time fretting these names and I still feel like I'm not getting it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> I make my stream ids descriptive enough so that I understand what it is in the context of that spout or bolt. For wrapper bolts (like CoordinatedBolt) that add streams in addition to the wrapped bolt, I'll prepend the stream id with the name of the wrapper class to avoid naming conflicts (essentially namespacing the stream).

In general I think of streams as not going to a particular bolt, but something that is provided that anyone can subscribe to. So in the WordCountTopology, the stream of words isn't "intended" for the word counting bolt, it's just data that can be used by anyone else in the topology. This is a consumer- focused way of looking at it (consumers know their inputs) rather than producer-focused (producers know their outputs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Beware if you plan to buy electronic books from Manning. Unlike O'Reilly and Pragmatic one may only download purchased electronic books from Manning for a short period of time.

<http://manning.com/about/ebook_support.html#downloadtime>

<comment><USER22> That made me extremely hesitant to order from them, but it turns out that I can download all my Manning books without time restrictions. (Clearly inconsistent with the policy you point out; dunno what it all means.)

<comment><USER21> Are you using the original links that were emailed to you? I no longer had the download message and I see no way to login on their site.

<comment><USER7> That is a definitely usability flaw IMO. I forget the exact dance I did, but I think in the end it was simply to create an account, and they associate all books you've previously ordered with that email address with your new account.

The emailed links expire, but the accounts page is permanent as far as I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I keep hoping that the next Big Data book I see will serve as a relatively gentle introduction for us non-DB types. I work in incident response and SIEM, and log analysis (for things other than web analytics) seems like a natural fit for this approach.

</comment><comment><USER24> Will there be a chapter about how your preferred architecture compares to in- memory databases technologies? SAP has been creating a lot of marketing hype on this in the last years. Indeed I think a lot of business problems can be solved by cramming more RAM into centralized servers. Yesterday's big-data problems are now routine if you have a dozens-of gigabytes of RAM machine available.

Or is this question not applicable at all (because the architecture makes no assumptions on the type of data storage); the requirements and usage scenarios are completely different?

<comment><AUTHOR> The architecture described in the book is fully distributed and horizontally scalable, and I won't be looking at scale-up techniques. The chapters on Storm and distributed RPC does have an emphasis on using lots of RAM for certain tasks though by partitioning data appropriately across the nodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In chapter 2, you describe writing the master dataset to a distributed filesystem (presumably HDFS). If you create a new file with a new record for each update to the dataset, wouldn't this result in lots of small files on the filesystem, resulting of fragmentation. HDFS seems well suited for large files, not small ([http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/r1.0.0/hdfs_design.html...](http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/r1.0.0/hdfs_design.html#Data+Organization)).

</comment><comment><USER26> Radical. Just ordered the MEAP of this. Looks like great stuff, and I - <USER2> one - can't wait for the full book.

MEAP, btw, is a great program... for any of you guys who haven't ever bought a book this way, it's pretty cool. Getting updates as they're delivered and being able to provide feedback as the book is being developed, is pretty gnarly.

</comment><comment><USER24> What do you think about "grid computing" concepts? Are they too academic? outdated? more/less general? Is your architecture a different approach or just a variation on the theme, a special case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Technically, the architecture promoted in the book is "grid computing" -- that is, a fully distributed set of resources that work together to accomplish a common task.

Many commercial grid computing products try to be all in one -- that is, handle storage and computation. They don't apply to every problem because they only have one kind of storage meant for certain kinds of tasks.

The architecture in Big Data is a general-purpose way to compute arbitrary functions on arbitrary data, at scale and in realtime. Every data problem you'd ever want to do can be described as a function on data, which is why this architecture is so general-purpose. I recommend reading Chapter 1 in the book (which is free to download from the webpage for the book) where we explain these ideas much further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a way to get a notification when the full book is released?

<comment><AUTHOR> You certainly will if you buy the MEAP. I'm getting a clarification on this from Manning to see if there's a way to get a notification without buying the book.

I'll also be making announcements about the book on Twitter, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got clarification from Manning. Currently there's no way to get notification without buying the MEAP. However, they think this is an interesting idea and there might be a way to do this in the future.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for checking on that. Bookmarked the book instead :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How has working at Twitter changed your perspective on big data? Has it been more challenging working within an existing framework or starting from scratch (at BackType)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it's reinforced my beliefs of the proper way to build these systems. We've actually continued using all the tools and technologies we were using at BackType (Cascalog, ElephantDB, Storm, our schema, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Really enjoyed the first chapter. Quick question: how do you deal with filtering out duplicate records (e.g. blog posts/comments) when saving to the batch layer ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Chapter 2 talks about forming a data model for the master dataset. The core idea is that each record should be a "fact" that stands on its own as something true at a moment in time. When you write your batch computations, you should make them work on any set of valid facts. There's nothing wrong with saying the same record twice, as logically "A and A" is the same as "A". So by formulating batch computations to work on any valid set of facts, it doesn't matter if facts are duplicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How was the work split up between you and the co-author?

<comment><AUTHOR> I brought Sam on as a co-author at the 1/3 mark of the book (when Manning does the first round of reviews). So far Sam has helped with the revisions necessary to go from review -> MEAP, and we'll be splitting up the future chapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Will this be available as a well formatted pdf?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Check out the first chapter to see what it looks like: <http://manning.com/marz/BD_meap_ch01.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When do you expect to complete the book?

<comment><AUTHOR> End of this year. We'll be releasing chapters to the MEAP as we go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This past week I'd been looking all over Amazon/Apress/PragProg for a good data-practices book and couldn't find one. I skimmed over the summary page for Big Data and decided that this was what I was looking for. Bye bye $40.</comment>


US woman used Bitcoin to move cash to Islamic State, police say - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42362478 <comment><USER2> yes we need a few more stories like this, or else the ban will be too blatant

(btw i m sure some woman used USD to move cash to ISIS, but it was never news)

<comment><USER3> Says right in the article that they also caught her trying to sneak $9,500 USD in cash out of the country on her person. This is a non-story not sure why it was even worth reporting. Perhaps it was notable because it is one of the few instances where someone actually used a crypto currency to send money to alleged terrorists as opposed to the thousands of known cases where they used EUR or USD.

She probably had to fly the cash to them because her BTC transaction was stuck in the mempool.

<comment><USER4> Do you remember this story:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation- into-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-missing- iraqi-cash-ended-in-lebanon-bunker.html)

US Gov sent $14B in cash, on pallets, shrink wrapped. All went missing...whoops. Nothing was done, nobody cared.

<comment><USER5> I do remember that. I did care. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is more of a fault of the citizen than a fault of the currency.

A US woman could of used paypal to move cash to Islamic State and it wouldn't be nearly as buzzy, but since it's bitcoin it's easy to scapegoat

<comment><USER7> If anything will be done by the US government to try and serve a deadly blow to cryptocurrencies, it will be them using a terror attack "funded by Bitcoin" as pretext to raid a large US exchanger and seize assets. There is a greater than zero chance this is something we will see play out in the next 24 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a shame the transaction and subsequent flow of money can't be traced on a tamper-proof decentralized public ledger the way it could be with cash...

</comment><comment><USER9> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15930073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15930073)

</comment><comment><USER10> propaganda There again, I find the BBC journalists themselves try to do a good job, against sometimes quite obvious manipulations from above. The headline here is of course blatant propaganda or at best "click bait", but the content is perhaps attempting subterfuge?</comment>


MacBook Air Refresh and 2020 BBP to Reportedly Use a New Scissor Switch Keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://wccftech.com/macbook-air-pro-scissor-switch-keyboard/ <comment><USER2> this is at the top of the front page right now!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353148](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353148)

<comment><AUTHOR> When I realized it, it was too late to delete the post :-(</comment></comment>


People who change your life and how I landed my remote jobs and contracts - <AUTHOR> http://jipiboily.com/people-who-change-your-life-and-how-I-landed-my-remote-jobs-and-contracts/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author, curious to know what you think! :)</comment>


Intersex patients routinely had diagnoses withheld by doctors - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39979186 <comment><USER2> The article is about the treatment of intersex children in the UK, but the same is true for them in the US.

See these links for more regarding treatment in the US:

[0] Long Atlantic article - [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/should- we...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/should-we-fix- intersex-children/373536/)

[1] Brief NBC article with a couple interviews - [http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6994580/ns/health- childrens_health...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6994580/ns/health- childrens_health/t/new-guidelines-treating-intersex-babies/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So she was lied not only by doctors, but also by her parents. She was underage so doctors didn't have to tell her, and couldn't tell her if parents prohibited them... soo... yeah doctors lie.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, and at the time when this was done to her, and for most of her life, she had no legal right to see her own medical records. IIRC That was only introduced sometime in the 80s in the UK.

<comment><USER4> Of course, because doctors knew that patients couldn't see their records, they wrote stuff in them with the expectation that it would never be read by a patient. When the law changed, this was a major point of contention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not a new thing, it has been known since before the 2000s, and was written extensively about by Fausto-Sterling in her book Sexing The Body. Doctors -- even today -- routinely withhold this information from intersex children, believing that it is for their own good. Unlike the article's suggestion, it is a widespread practice not limited to the UK.

A fun fact about the idea that you can ask for your medical records, is that the staff may redact any information they think would be harmful to you.

</comment><comment><USER6> How do doctors, parents, anybody think this is a good idea? Hiding things from kids that are guaranteed to become a problem later in life is rather a guarantee that the person will be traumatized when they do find out, and have major trust problems from there on out.</comment>


Ask HN: Is my landing page too technical? - <AUTHOR>

I would love some help with my landing page. My target audience is small to medium sized businesses that don't want to deal with their website problems...so non-technical people. I'm afraid it's too technical but I am not sure how to improve the copy.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
http://ninenineteen.co <comment><USER2> I don't necessarily think it is too technical, you are just offering managed WordPress hosting. So you are targeting a niche market within the larger small/medium sized business. Now granted many of them use WordPress, but not all of them.

The problem I see is that the site doesn't convey to me why I should choose your service over a company like WPEngine, Pagely, or even something like Media Temple Managed WordPress, or GoDaddy's managed WordPress product. Outside of Media Temple, these are the "big players" in this space and comparatively I get a lot more bang for the buck with their services. I do think there is room to play in the market, but in order to do so, you need to have something that makes you competitive.

If you already have customers or someone that you have done work for, get some testimonials on the site. Look at the pricing for the other players and figure out how you can make your pricing competitive or offer something they don't.

<comment><USER2> I was going to edit my original post, but I will add this separately instead. One thing you may want to consider is building relationships with WordPress developers. They are going to be your target market most likely. The small/medium sized businesses are most likely contracting out their sites to developers and could care less how it gets done, just that it is done and works correctly. Maybe consider offering some kind of affiliate program to get developers in. Or reach out to a few developers and offer to work with them directly until you get started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Possibly. I mean, what is this "wordpress" thing? And what kind of website do I get? Isn't wordpress a blog thing? We don't want a blog! How does it look like? Who designs it? Maybe people asking some of these questions are not your target group, but then it should be clearer somehow what you offer and what you DON'T offer.

Giving the technical details is probably fine, they should be somewhere easy to find, but some basics seem to be missing.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is a little technical, I think. I don't think folks that know what DDoS is, are like "hey let's shop around for WordPress hosting" They've probably already have a site, with a provider or some technical people.

For the folks that don't know, well, they don't know, so they're just going to sign up to WordPress hosting with GoDaddy or elsewhere for 1/4 the monthly cost.

<comment><USER5> ddos is a pretty mainstream term by now imo

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the page is quite nice.

Perhaps in the FAQ part of the landing page use some bullets and make it less texty - break up each sub-point.

Something I think you should change: The maths captcha at the bottom of the page. There's no indication that it's a captcha, the type of captcha and expected result, and is useless as bots can do these captchas instantly. Just remove it.

Perhaps also add a slogan under your Nine_Nineteen on the navbar. Some text underwards with re-assuring words "Simple, Secure Website Management for Your Business" or whatever similar.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should add a period after the word "maintenance" near the top of your page.

</comment><comment><USER8> Couple of things I would suggest.

1\. Your FAQs have to brief 2\. Have social proof</comment>