Walmart in Early-Stage Acquisition Talks with Humana - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-in-early-stage-acquisition-talks-with-humana-1522365618 <comment><USER3> If any company is capable of stopping the trend to progressively more expensive US health insurance that gets progressively shittier in quality, I will support it. I don't care what company, what monopoly, honestly it doesn't matter. The situation is so horribly fucked that I automatically support any change whatsoever.

<comment><USER4> Problem is, Walmart basically _invented_ the idea of making a product substantially worse in order to sell it at a lower price. Items in Walmart often aren't "the same product but cheaper" but many times are "a substantially reduced quality version of an item, sold at a cheaper price than the original". So you might get cheaper health plans... but it's likely going to come at a reduced quality, too.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal- mart](https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart)

<comment><USER5> For many things, this is exactly what I want. Walmart has great prices for the same as their competitors and their service is ok.

They aren't Costco, but they deliver exactly what they promise - <USER2> quality for the best price.

But I'd never buy non-consumables from them.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you. Walmart already revolutionized pharma once by offering a huge list of drugs for $4/30-day and $10/-90 day. Even if no one reading this buys those drugs from Wal-Mart, you get them cheaply because Wal-Mart forced everyone else to drop prices to compete. I wonder if it could be calculated how many lives have been saved by doing this. Anecdotally I know a lot of people whose lives have been improved by being able to take those cheap options. And I know a couple of doctors who say they point their patients in that direction to help them save money.

>But I'd never buy non-consumables from them.

I'm curious, would you get a Wal-Mart xray or MRI? Depending on the issue, I think I might.

<comment><USER7> > Walmart already revolutionized pharma once by offering a huge list of drugs > for $4/30-day and $10/-90 day

I was shocked to find that some of my prescriptions that were costing me $20 out of pocket _with_ _insurance_ at Rite Aid where $4 cash price at Walmart. I've moved everything I can to cash at Walmart, even in some cases where the Walmart cash price is a little higher than my with-insurance price elsewhere, just on the general principle that I don't want my insurance company to know what drugs I take [1].

[1] This stems from a time once when a condition I had improved to the point that I could stop taking drugs for it. A few months later it returned, and I asked my doctor to renew my prescription. He did so...and the insurance company rejected it. They were treating it like I was a brand new patient, and they no longer allowed that drug unless you had first tried a couple other newer drugs and they were not acceptable. I'd never had those drugs, but I'd had others in their families and they were either not very effective or had annoying side effects. I was willing to try the new drugs eventually, if this relapse turned out to not be temporary, but in the short term I wanted what we already knew worked well.

<comment><USER8> You might look up the company IMS and the states with mandatory prescription surveillance. When I was in the "biz" we could get prescription data at least by county, in some places by pharmacy and/or prescriber and, of course, for some drugs the patient.

Wait, you thought that info was confidential? Ha, this is the USA!

<comment><USER9> It's still confidential as patient identify is hidden.

<comment><USER8> Did you read my comment? It ended with, "and, of course, for some drugs the patient." Sometime we could connect directly with patients. Sorry.

Knowing this changed my use of pharmacies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see we're moving along steadily towards corporation as nation-state. Hello, Snow Crash!

<comment><USER11> If corporations become nation-states it is simply because our government is drastically ineffective. Sad stuff, but it does seem to be happening.

<comment> fake-name The problem with that is that it places a fiscal incentive on the companies to _make_ the government as ineffective as possible, in hopes of exploiting regulations and quashing competitors.

The solution to corporations breaking the government isn't to just say "well, it was ineffective anyways".

<comment><USER11> I think you're correct. It does place that fiscal incentive. But can you honestly look at the last 20/30 years and say that private companies haven't tried to make the government as ineffective as possible?

Lobbying is huge. There are innumerable ways for incumbents to secure rents. Healthcare companies keep cashing blank checks from the government. Amazon also basically eliminated a huge chunk of tax revenue by turning retail into a profitless endeavor.

The solution is to make our government respected, effective, and intelligent. That's hard.

<comment><USER12> The solution seems like it should just be a given, yet at the same time is really asking a lot of America.

It's pretty crazy that the combined market cap of 5 companies: Walmart, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple [0] are essentially equal to the entire GDP of Africa [1].

[0] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-market-cap- falls-b...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-market-cap-falls-behind- microsofts-into-4th-place-2018-03-29)

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

<comment><USER13> It's a meaningless comparison. GDP is annual. Market cap is supposed to represent all future income in perpetuity at a discount. It's like comparing the annual income of person A to the net worth of person B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it's smart for Walmart to diversify it's business into something other than retail. They need to grow revenue for shareholders, I don't think there's any more large-growth opportunities for Walmart in that sector.

I do think this move is rather unoriginal, and is a 'me too' effort vs CVS & Aetna.

Walmart is the #3 largest Pharmacy in the US, so there are potential savings and efficiencies to be had with a health insurance merger.

<comment><USER15> _I do think this move is rather unoriginal, and is a 'me too' effort vs CVS & Aetna._

There's probably a little CVS/Aetna in their decision making, but I'm pretty confident this is much more an "Oh crap!" response to the Amazon / Berkshire Hathaway / Chase Healthcare venture announced earlier this year.

Walmart sees Amazon already looking at its core markets: cheap Chinese crap, groceries, pharmacy. Its choices are to compete or to watch Amazon do to it what it did to downtown shops over the last 40 years.

<comment><USER16> It feels like everything Walmart does is in part a response to Bezos. And given Buffett's exit last year, maybe him too.

It's not a totally crazy response, though. Even considering Berkshire and Amazon haven't announced any real details and could basically just be self- insuring their workers through a nonprofit they fund to reduce administrative costs and taxes.

But it's like corporate Go. You so much as signal interest in a corner and the other side has to reposition itself so it could defend the possibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm assuming this might be a move to diversify knowing they will eventually be losing substantial market share to amazon. Kind of terrifying really, to think if they are going to apply the same business practices they've used in their retail stores to healthcare.

</comment><comment><USER18> This really is an excellent addition to the horror show that we in America call a health system.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU I bet this is an answer to the JPM + Amazon + Berkshire initiative

</comment><comment><USER19> It's worth noting that Walmart already has some sales agreements with Humana. My in-laws, for instance, have a Walmart-Humana Medicare part D drug plan.

</comment><comment><USER20> archive.is version [https://archive.fo/5g19p](https://archive.fo/5g19p)

</comment><comment><USER21> Why does people keep posting articles behind paywalls here on HN?

<comment><USER22> From the FAQ:

> _" Are paywalls ok?"_

> _" It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds."_

> _" In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other > users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off > topic."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

The mods have commented extensively on this as well. Here's a Tell HN where 'dang explains:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

And more comments, if you're interested:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20paywall&sort=byD...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you really don't like about status/stand-up meetings? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering what people really don't like about these meetings. Is it just about the time spend or is it about something else? What would you do to keep in sync with your peers if stand-ups had never been invented? <comment><USER2> A few major problems I face:

1\. They stretch way longer than necessary

2\. Everyone is interested in everything that is being done and that results in endless questions over trivial matters

3\. If the team has people from different roles (design, product, frontend etc.), it is a huge waste of time to stand through discussions regarding issues that do not concern you

</comment><comment><USER3> They're often run really badly. 20 minutes of "I did a thing yesterday", boring and pointless.

</comment><comment><USER4> If these meetings were actually "standups", it wouldn't be bad. But for me, sadly, they rarely have been shorter than 20-25 minutes, which makes them just another time waster.</comment>


The Differential Analyser Explained (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://amg.nzfmm.co.nz/differential_analyser_explained.html <comment><USER2> This submission should be removed and resubmitted with a title and url.

<comment><USER3> It seems fine now?

<comment><USER2> All good dang. The url was originally in the text field.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to build a profitable SaaS app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> By asking the question, What problem can I solve for you, for which you will give me a fair exchange of money?</comment>


Development at the Speed and Scale of Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Development-at-Google

<comment><AUTHOR> Some things I did not expect:

\- 50% of the codebase changes every month;

\- Single code tree;

\- All of the development happens in HEAD (ditto for dependencies);

\- It seems to be (relatively) usual to touch multiple components in a single changeset.

And all of this in the first 10 minutes.

Edit: formatting.</comment>


How to make Firefox lightning fast on linux - <AUTHOR> http://karamatli.com/pages/tips/3_Tips_For_a_Lightning_Fast_Firefox_on_Linux/

<comment><USER2> What to you think about vmtouch'ing the ~/.mozilla dir periodically in order to keep it in a fs cache, instead of artificially having it on a shm fs?

Btw, vmtouch: <http://hoytech.com/vmtouch/>

<comment><AUTHOR> vmtouch seems like a nice tool. I will try it to see if it makes any difference. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your Google+ Account - <AUTHOR>

Of course theres some very interesting people on HN who might have Google+ accounts, I'd be interested in following some fellow hackers and I'd think others would be too. To that end, post your account!<p>Self: https://plus.google.com/105503159085383028265/posts <comment><USER2> Here's the google doc from the other thread, which has an aggregated list of all the emails in there: <http://bit.ly/ktOYnj>

Anyway, mine's <https://plus.google.com/108579573899435547873/>

</comment><comment><USER3> <https://plus.google.com/104295594194021811139/posts>

I have not yet been invited on G+, but interestingly the link seems to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please see this earlier article...many of us have got together already <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2722742>

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to but this redirects to this very page!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a splendid idea.

<https://plus.google.com/106651712615283153604/posts>

</comment><comment><USER6> <https://plus.google.com/102021670972797895172/>

Though you don't know me that well.

</comment><comment><USER7> <https://plus.google.com/102192676881340889110/posts>

</comment><comment><USER8> <https://plus.google.com/104525582399824348398/posts>

</comment><comment><USER9> <https://plus.google.com/115440827534646207947/posts>

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a thread about this here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2717503>

But mine's <https://plus.google.com/103751700830951345605/>

</comment><comment><USER11> <https://plus.google.com/101691699586696356555/posts></comment>


Ask HN: What are you thankful for? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Some really great friends,a functional cerebrum, and internet :-)</comment>


The Senate has forced a vote to restore net neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17333108/net-neutrality-congressional-review-act-cra-resolution-vote-senate <comment><USER2> > Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy and other sites have put up Red Alert banners as part > of a day of action to drive petitions in support of the resolution.

This is being seriously mismanaged, and that may actually cause long term harm to the chances of saving (or restoring) net neutrality.

The big mistake being made is not explaining where the Congressional Review Act (CRA) approach fits into the bigger picture. There are several places along the timeline of net neutrality repeal where it in theory could be saved. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) approach is just one of them.

The CRA approach has almost no chance of actually passing both houses (it has a pretty good chance in the Senate, but because of the way the House is structured it would take a miracle there).

When you consider it in the context of the bigger picture, that's not a problem. Its role in the overall effort is to get members of Congress on the record, which might be useful later in campaigns for office. The public is broadly in favor of net neutrality and this support is very high even among Republicans.

That's probably not enough to get Republican voters to vote Democrat, because it is not high on the list of important issues for them, but it could be enough to get them to vote for more moderate Republicans in the Republican primaries or caucuses.

In sports terms, this is not a play to score a goal. It is an attempt to get better position to set up a later scoring play. But the people running these campaigns treat everything like it is a scoring attempt...and then when it doesn't score the people who participated feel like they failed.

That can discourage them, making them less likely to respond to later calls to action. Then they might not be there when it is time to actually go for a goal (e.g., get out and vote).

<comment><USER3> In what sport do you hold back from scoring a goal in order to set yourself up to score a goal later though?

That is to say, what you're saying is true, but typically (as long as the net is in sight) the best way to set yourself up to score a goal later is to try to score a goal now.

The approach is prone to local maxima, but I'm not convinced there can be another approach here. If you're not trying to win it all, then you're setting yourself up to lose.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much every sport? You don't go all out every opportunity you have the instant you have priority. Nearly every sport has some concept of setting up plays: American football, soccer, basketball, boxing, MMA.

They can't even score a goal now. The purpose of this within the US legal system is a pure intermediate play. And the when net neutrality doesn't get overturned as a result of this instance people will feel demoralized and hopeless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "would need a bare majority in both the Senate and the House, as well as the president's signature"

"We don't know how this is going to end...."

They know very well how it will end. This is an effort to get ammo for the primaries.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy and other sites have put up Red Alert banners as part > of a day of action to drive petitions in support of the resolution.

I get the feeling that these sites are just 'preaching to the choir' (i.e. their customers already support these things, and most likely have let their 'representative' know).

Is anyone doing anything to give the 50 senators who are against this a taste of what is to come? I recall cloudflare or someome along those lines threatenning to throttle traffic from government IPs, or maybe that just happened in my dream..

<comment><USER7> Not to introduce flame bait but one of the reasons the NRA is powerful is the ability to quickly motivate their very vocal members.

<comment><USER8> It would be amazing if someone could figure out a way to measure constituent opinion that didn't involve people showing up at or calling in to an office.

<comment><USER9> Well, that's kind of the thing. Everyone's willing to kill and die for their beliefs on the internet; a lot fewer will actually campaign and canvas and march and _vote_ for their beliefs. The inconvenience of calling or mailing your politician tells them that you have passed a rock bottom threshold of willingness to act, and might conceivably have an effect on their vote totals next election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an almost meaningless bill, only going to a vote so various politicians can claim to support net neutrality on the campaign trail.

Not only is it unlikely to pass both chambers and be signed by the president, passing the bill doesn't change the broader status of net neutrality. Currently, the legality of the FCC enforcing net neutrality is unclear, with the matter destined to be decided in the courts either way.

A law explicitly giving the FCC control has been necessary for over a decade, but both parties have refused to pass one or even consider passing a future one.

</comment><comment><USER11> I find it funny that some people still see Net Neutrality as 'government controlling the internet'. They should take a look at FOSTA if they want to know what government controlling the internet really looks like.

<comment><USER12> It is government controlling the internet. It's the _extent_ and _who_ that is different. In this case, it's only forcing a fair playing field. Kinda like highways being public vs. toll instead of telling you what cars you are and are not allowed to drive. I'd like a "free" internet, but I still have to admit it's going to cost someone else's "freedom".

<comment><USER13> So we can summarize saying it's customers freedom against ISP freedom.

<comment><USER14> No, that implies companies have the same rights as individual people. They do not and should not as they don't have the same legal constraints as people. There's no human equivalent to many of the abilities enjoyed by corporations and corporations don't die and cannot be imprisoned. They're also able to raise funds in ways humans may not. The list goes on from there.

<comment><USER13> What I said doesn't imply this at all. I'm just stating that there's a trade- off between the freedom of corporations and the freedom of the people (but different kind of freedoms, ofc)

<comment><USER14> I'm thinking it over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still can't believe that the movement to kill net neutrality was (is?) called "restoring internet freedom". I guess it's a shortening of "restoring internet service providers' freedom"? But the longer form isn't as catchy.

<comment><USER16> Well, it _is_ about "restoring internet freedom". It's just that, except in a few large cities, Americans have very little choice about ISP. So there's no way for ISPs to compete for users who care about net neutrality.

Edit: Actually, we'd have _even more_ freedom with an Internet version of the FERC rule for open access to electrical transmission lines.[0]

> The legal and policy cornerstone of these rules is to remedy undue > discrimination in access to the monopoly owned transmission wires that > control whether and to whom electricity can be transported in interstate > commerce.

0) [https://www.ferc.gov/legal/maj-ord-reg/land- docs/rm95-8-00w....](https://www.ferc.gov/legal/maj-ord-reg/land- docs/rm95-8-00w.txt)

<comment><USER8> What's your definition of freedom?

<comment><USER16> Being unconstrained.

<comment><USER17> So you'd obviously want to ensure net neutrality then?

<comment><USER18> Net neutrality is literally constraint on how data passing through networks can be routed and shaped. It's exactly "constraining the Internet". It's not "freedom" in any shape or matter. Freedom is never constraint on others. It's a popular constraint, and people just happen to confuse and conflate "things I like/feel positivity about" and "freedom".

It's controversial to say here but I don't think it gets discussed enough: Net neutrality only really __helps __established players. That is not to say it hurts others, but it certainly helps established players.

That's why they all love it. Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, GitHub, Tumblr, Microsoft. Unestablished unpopular players are not the ones getting throttled. It's the ones already using tons of bandwidth getting throttled and odds are good most new players bandwidth usage is hardly even noticeable to the ISP. They wouldn't be touting the joys of something that had the potential to displace them.

The one who would be getting throttled is primarily Netflix, who literally uses over half of the bandwidth of the Internet. Literally slows everything else on the Internet down. Netflix doesn't want to be throttled, so of course they love net neutrality.

I'm not saying net neutrality is inherently bad, I just don't think it's as innately good as a lot of the cheerleaders attest.

<comment><USER10> This doesn't make sense. Why would the ISP's want to throttle the websites that their customers are using? Even with the lack of ISP competition, pissing off your users that much seems like a bad strategy. And they can already throttle users based on bandwidth used, how would eliminating net neutrality help them achieve this goal.

I predict the ISP's selling a default throttled connection to everything, and then for $10 more you can unthrottle Netflix or YouTube. Competitors would need to convince ISPs to allow unthrottled access to even have a chance.

<comment><USER19> Your prediction is exactly what you said doesn't make sense. Your prediction also doesn't match history. In 2014 Netflix was the one that had to pay Comcast to end its throttling.

<comment><USER10> In 2014, my prediction was illegal due to net neutrality regulations, while limiting Netflix based on usage was possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you live in Arkansas, Louisiana, or Ohio, call your senators and urge them to vote in favor of net neutrality!

</comment><comment><USER21> Wishful thinking, the president would not sign the bill and there's not a supermajority in the Senate and the house to overrule him. This is going nowhere.

<comment><USER22> To Trump's credit, I believe he would sign the bill. He mostly cares about winning and looking good. Also, he gives people what they want. If both houses pass the bill; "You wanted net neutrality? We now have the best net neutrality in the history of the internet. We rolled back Obama's sick and dying internet, Obama _killed_ the internet did you know that folks?, and now we have the best most free internet EVER. Period."

We may actually have the opposite problem; Trump may not veto anything that comes across his desk.

<comment><USER23> What? He is literally the person who appointed the guy who made this happen. While Trump is erratic, so no one can rule out a complete 180 at any moment, to say that is "to his credit" is ridiculous.

<comment><USER6> I get your point, but he is also the guy to fire multiple people in his cabinet for arbitrary/popularity reasons, so don't put it past him to throw ajit under the bus because it would make him 'look good'

<comment><USER22> Exactly. He is fine with seeing if ideas or people will float or sink; it's his modus operandi.

Plus, Trump is a master at walking stuff back and saving face with his party and base. Net neutrality comes back? Well it's Trump net neutrality now, way better than broken Obama net neutrality. Obama job numbers fake, Trump job numbers great. Trump economy(which has basically not deviated from the Obama economy trajectory) doing great, Obama economy was broken. Etc, etc. All that matters is if it floats, and he can brand it Trump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why do we need NN? I have yet to hear any valid argument for it. Everything that people complain about is already illegal under multiple laws.

<comment><USER10> Without it, ISPs can stop offering internet access and start offering YouTube access. Here's an example of a plan in a country with weak net neutrality.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot-2017-10-28_MEO...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot-2017-10-28_MEO_- _Televis%C3%A3o,_Internet,_Telefone_e_Telem%C3%B3vel.png)

If you believe some other law already prohibits this, please tell me.

<comment><USER25> Just to be 100% clear with the packages shown, they offer the benefit that those apps don't count towards your mobile data, rather than just being available.

Still not great though, since it just increases the moat for existing companies. Also companies in the states have tried exactly the same thing before with _their_ video streaming service not counting towards you data cap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is about the USA. Perhaps the title could be updated to say "The US Senate..."?

</comment><comment><USER27> Why are people here so pro-net neutrality? I don't have NN in Europe and I'm happy: because of it, I enjoy zero-rated services at a fair price.

<comment><USER28> The USA is big. Like, really fucking big. As a result running an ISP, wired or cellular, has an extremely high cost to entry. As a result of that, most people's choices for internet provider is precisely limited to one choice, the local telco monopoly. No net neutrality means that ISP ca. Do whatever they want and get away with it because what are you going to do? Send a sternly written letter?

<comment><USER29> > The USA is big. Like, really fucking big.

So? Most of that is empty space nobody is trying to serve. The key metric is population density, which is comparable between urban areas in Europe and the US. The size of the US has nothing to do with lack of ISP choice, as evidenced by the fact that the same problem doesn't occur in countries with lower population densities than the US (33.8 people per km²) such as Sweden (21.5), Finland (16.2), Norway (13.4) or Australia (3.1).

<comment><USER28> ISPs serve more than just downtown urban areas.

<comment><USER30> They don't have to when they start. Google Fiber hasn't gone into any rural areas AFAIK.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trolls Among Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?ei=5058&partner=IWON&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> The founder of 4Chan said:

"My personal private life is very separate from my Internet life ... There's a firewall in between." [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/20/internet.go...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/20/internet.google)

and here in this article Jason Fortuny calls himself "a normal person who does insane things on the Internet."

In both cases, they separate their screen lives with their non-screen lives. But, the mind is the same that moves between the two, except that there are two separate levels of morality that habituate according to the mind's sensory context.

So what lies in the mind at the border between the two moralities: shame, fear, hate and intolerance.

<comment><USER3> I find it clarifies things to filter statements like "My personal private life is very separate from my Internet life" and "a normal person who does insane things on the Internet" through the rule: "Judge talent at its best and character at its worst."

<comment><USER2> In that case would you say Weev has lots of talent and seriously bad character, in which case his "destroy others around him to build himself up" philosophy is the result?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember kids like that from junior high, they push the line until someone punches them in the face, then they have borders. The internet removes that whole punch in the face part, it's a shame.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I is funny that the majority of these 'trolls' would not dare provoke an individual in the real world as they will online. I knew a guy in high school who was extremely passive and timid in the real world, but got the biggest kick out of being an aggressive ass to strangers online - I never understood him, but feel that he knew in the real world, there were consequences for his actions, where online he could get away with it with no recourse. Really cowardice in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> Do you not feel that the ability to do things online without fear of some of the recriminations you would receive in real life is also one of the great things about the internet?

<comment><USER7> If you mean blogging about political issues from within China, then yes.

If you mean forgoing any semblance of social decency for the sole purpose of antagonizing people and destroying positive discourse or social interaction, then no.

<comment><USER5> Exactly.

I guess it can be argued that you cannot partially support freedom, as it is only sold as the whole, but I also feel that there are laws that can mediate this middle ground.

Although I am not always the biggest fan of 'Johny Law', I do feel that at least the law can step in when harassment or threatening behavior is occurring to reduce its presence. Most of these participating in trolling behaviors would not continue their actions after a couple of rounds in the courts and after paying the associated fines...

<comment><USER8> And the troll communities are aware of this. The only problem is that, as the article points out, no objective standard of "cyberbullying" can be established. Most of it does not even fall into the ethically debatable category of hate speech, despite the meaningless spam of ethnic slurs these groups use.

The troll groups will push the law a lot more softly than they'll push private citizens -- they crack down on child pornography in their own ranks to avoid being "v&" ("vanned", or "sent for a ride in the party van" -- the FBI). So if we extend the van-hammer to mere insults, we might get them to back down... but do you want to live in a country where calling someone names on the internet, even horrible hateful names with full intent to hurt feelings and disrupt mental equanimity, gets you arrested?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such articles prepare a ground for laws which will hurt everyone. Exaggerating trolls influence leads to a cure that is worse then the disease.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I don't see anything exaggerated about intentionaly trying to hurt epileptics to "make them aware of the precautions they need to take."

<comment><USER11> I kind of hope the father of an epileptic shoots one of these griefers with a deer rifle in order to "make them aware that they should be wearing ballistic vests".

<comment><USER12> Oh I'm sorry, it would seem you got confused on your way to YouTube and ended up here. For the record, the solution to every problem or disagreement isn't "shoot the offender."

It is a quality YouTube-style comment, however; you've even gotten specific as to the type of rifle, suggesting you've given more than a moment's thought to this punishment.

Needs more capital letters and cussing, though.

<comment><USER13> No, in context it's clear that this post isn't a real death threat. It's a _Guns-and-Ammo_ -flavored riff designed to subtly point out that attempting to cause seizures in epileptics is, in fact, reckless endangerment with a hint of manslaughter.

The fact that it takes careful literary judgement to tell the difference between this wry comment and a death threat illustrates the central fact of Internet life: software can't prevent trolls. Human beings - editors and mods - are needed to prevent trolls.

<comment><USER12> Well obviously it's not a real death threat; I've been using the Interwebs a long time and I've never seen a single legit threat of any sort.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the entire comment, but if so it's only because it seems to be common now to threaten or recommend death upon anyone who does anything one doesn't approve of. I've seen enough of that in the real world and I've grown tired of seeing it on the Internet, where most people have no understanding of what they're saying and nobody seems to get that killing the opposing viewpoint is not the solution since their viewpoint is what creates the contrast necessary for you to have one in the first place.

So, to conclude, I apologize to noonespecial for the flame; my patience with an increasingly intelligence-diluted Web wanes.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, dude. For my part, in the future, I will use "bonk them over the head with a large wooden mallet to make them aware that they should be wearing helmets."

This will both avoid the use of the firearm image (and its strong, overused, negative connotations), and more directly imply that its a humorous post.

Sorry to stir the pot folks, but I am a bit tired of the "I was trying to _help_ them by showing them their weakness" line of BS use to justify violence, destruction, and other blatantly antisocial behavior. I feel quite strongly that they wouldn't be such good sports if someone else were to point out some of their weaknesses in like manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder...how many wall street journal and (now) new york times readers will, for the first time in their sheltered lives, head on over to the darkest [1] corner of the internet and see its inevitable bounty of child pron and mutilation pron and cartoonishly extreme racism?

[1] Maybe. There's probably worse... Keep your wsj subscription up, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER15> All I can say is: A Clockwork Orange was prescient, it just didn't predict the roving bands of violent hooligans would be on the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER16> > As we walked through Fullerton's downtown, Weev told me about his day — he'd > lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his > philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a Malthusian crisis," he > said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are > dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in > 30-odd years." He paused. "The question we have to answer is: How do we kill > four of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible?" He > seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Wait, is this article about reddit users?

<comment><USER17> Weev is mad that they didn't include his entire philosophy:

<http://weev.livejournal.com/305600.html>

<comment><USER18> Fortunately most of us have already seen The Matrix, so we didn't need the refresher.

<comment><USER17> I had no idea that The One referred to being number one in the MarHedge rankings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A symptom of the web being the lawless frontier. Eventually, the law will begin to close in on this frontier as it has on every other.

<comment><USER3> Or customs, at least. The reason trolling doesn't work in the real world is that there are long evolved customs for neutralizing such people, like the idea of private buildings. The first generation of online communities had no protection against them. But these tend to evolve quickly in response to abuses.

<comment><USER19> My experience with Justin.tv has shown me there is a more dangerous kind of troll who will call the police on you, prank call at all hours of the night, make prank deliveries, etc. These more dangerous trolls are mostly enabled by the weak security in our phone system, rather than the internet.

Actually, as I write this, I realize that the solution will not be laws (although I would certainly derive pleasure from seeing these people jailed). The real solution will be VOIP; turning phones into the internet. When you can turn your phone into accept-whitelist-only with a click, mass prank calling will be stopped. When identity can be cryptographically determined, fake calls to pizza places or the police will be stopped.

So we don't actually need laws; we just need a secure phone system.

<comment><USER20> Wow, it would be fantastic to have your phone controlled by software. For one thing, you could apply the same kind of anti-spam techniques, and since there is a canonical phone number distributor, they would be even more effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After reading this article, I am concluding that there are small percentage of trolls who are literally terrorists - impacting other people's lives in a dangerous way. No remorse, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the real world we call them "douche bags"...

<comment><USER6> I honestly don't understand why this is getting modded up as much as it is.

<comment><USER22> Because it seems too obvious, or because you disagree?

<comment><USER23> Because it's crass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I was in college eons ago I used an IRC channel that was taken over by trolls. Taken over might be an exaggeration... they showed up, took channel ops, and never left. The original regulars just kept chatting as usual.

Anyway, the thing I find most bizarre is that the trolls who took over my IRC channel only talked about weird anti-semitic conspiracy theories. The stuff they discussed was exactly the same as what the "Weev" character from this article talks about on his livejournal page. I also had never looked at encyclopedia dramatica before... i guess internet troll culture is heavily intertwined with the white supremacy movement? Or is all the jewish conspiracy stuff part of the joke?

<comment><USER25> It's part of the joke. Several friends of mine are active trolls, and in person they're pretty well-balanced. Their saying things like that is entirely because they know it'll offend people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow - what a great article- I never thought characters like Weev actually existed. Definitely makes the sound of cars passing by more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER27> I actually found moot's new robot9000 banning algorithm to be interesting. I'd like to hear more about it. Banning people for progressively larger periods of time seems to be a decent idea.

<comment><USER6> Actually, it's Randall Munroe's: [http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal- at...](http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking- noise-in-chat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The leading photo is hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER29> As I was reading this article, a song called "Most Terrible Archer" by Joy Electric came on. While it was probably not written about trolls, I couldn't help seeing the connections:

      Separate your chief anxieties
      Cut the cord, but you won't
      Excommunicate from our society
      Are you bold? You are not

      Oh no
      The most terrible, terrible
      Archer

      You among the league of militants
      How little you have learned
      Tried and failed to be one of the innocents
      Little left of yourself

      Little left of myself
      Little right of yourself

</comment><comment><USER6> It's kind of funny how mean/trollish a lot of the comments to this article are here.

<comment><USER30> Actually, it makes perfect sense. Agression is the natural reaction to hurt.

<comment><USER6> Oh, it's certainly understandable. Showing hurt is how the trolls win, because that's what they feed off of. And especially responding with aggression, you're going down to the level of the troll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ED was having serious bandwidth/funding issues already. Looks like it's down again now; getting this kind of publicity was probably the surest way to kill it dead.

<comment><USER31> Oh no! Where would people find documentation of underage girls and their webcam pics?!

<comment><USER8> jj.am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What's with all the MSM coverage of 4chan lately? Why, of all Internet communities, does the New York Times write about its filthiest cesspool?

<comment><USER27> It makes for good TV and sells. That's why the press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _said one ex-troll_

Once a troll, always a troll.

<comment><USER34> There are many different kinds and levels of trolling. Most trolls are reasonable people who refuse to post racism or affect others IRL, but get a kick out of stimulating controversial discussion or "pwning" others (Rickroll, etc.) in harmless ways online. One of my best trolls, in 2000, was when I hit a Magic: the Gathering forum and started the rumor that the ink on old Magic cards has a 10-year lifespan and that valuable cards would soon become illegible. It's obnoxious and hilarious, but no one is harmed or harassed by this.

The fringe, though, is clearly getting out of hand. For 95% of trolls, it's an embarrassing hobby held by a small set of neurotic, but otherwise normal and upstanding, individuals. It's like a video game, in terms of its addictive nature, and also the ease with which the practice can absorb an unreasonable proportion of one's time. Unfortunately, the truly rotten 5% is giving the rest of the trolls a terrible name by doing things that are unacceptable by any standard, internet or "IRL".

<comment><USER35> There are really two types of trolls and they're completely different things. One type is the person who does rickrolls, feigns ignorance in technical forums, and generally is more of a prankster than anything else.

And then there are people who would be best described as terrorists. These are the people who drive teens to suicide. These are the people who send death threats to Kathy Sierra. These are the ones who need to be arrested for harassment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder how this story is doing on reddit...

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a wide spectrum of behavior that is categorized as "trolling", from the obnoxious but harmless to the outright criminal. Rickrolling people on message boards and harassing people IRL don't deserve the same word.

Anyone who affects others' real lives has no right to use the "trolling" excuse. It's just unacceptable.

Also, the people claiming, in that article, to have made large sums of money from their trolling activities are lying. Trolls always exaggerate their "accomplishments" to absurd degrees, taking credit for others' "work" and blowing the external effects/importance of their trolling way out of proportion.

</comment><comment><USER37> I just had an idea for how to turn the trolling phenomenon into potentially very lucrative profits for a startup. Anybody interested?

On the one hand, I don't want to give away my idea. On the other hand, implementing it might take several people working on it for a few months. What should I do?

<comment><USER33> Give away the idea to several people in the hopes that they hear the idea and want to work on it.

<comment><USER37> I think there is value in the idea itself. If I just give it away for free, whoever implements it has no incentive to share the profits with me.

If I share the idea, I make no money from it. If I don't share, I might one day have enough time to implement it myself, or run into people I can trust 100%. If these are the only options, I HAVE TO choose the latter, and not share it for now :-(

<comment><USER33> But you have to ask yourself, what are you doing currently that is more valuable than the idea, and if that is the case, then how valuable is the idea to you at all?

If what you are doing right now isn't as valuable as the idea, then why not work on it (right now, with someone you trust) instead?

<comment><USER37> Good point. I'll try to explore how trolling can be converted into cash flow more closely. Thanks.

<comment><USER38> Troll? At least I thought at first. But the last commment was too reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Well its obvious what this article wants, for the government to step in and regulate people from hurting your feelings.

Seriously when have we become a country of pussies?

<comment><USER40> Yes, the parents of Mitchell Henderson are indeed pussies. It's unbelievable that they could be so thin skinned about a few harmless prank calls... come on, it's only the suicide of their child we're talking about!

Being outraged by a problem is not synonymous with wanting the government to fix it. Bringing attention to a problem is not synonymous with begging for new laws.

<comment><USER30> I've been on the receiving end of prank calls. When I first reported it to the police, the officer assigned to my case seemed to have the attitude that I was just thin skinned. That changed the moment I played him a recording I made of the callers. After that, he was just as motivated to track them down as I was.

They turned out to be a bunch of teenage boys of low socioeconomic status. Their only reason for singling me out was my name which they had run across in the phone book. (The listing was in error -- it was supposed to be unlisted.) I suspect that their delight in the cruelty was enhanced by their conclusion that I was a poor immigrant who couldn't afford advanced features on his phone line. I suspect that they were happy to finally find someone "lower" than themselves to pick on.

If you've never been the subject of arbitrary cruelty by some kind of mob, then you don't really know what it's like. And if you don't know what it's like to grow up in a society that brands you as somehow inferior, such that cruelty to you constitutes some kind of "joke" then there's something else you don't really know.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sparkline.email – a quick graph of your email inbox size - <AUTHOR> http://sparkline.email/

<comment><USER2> I see a line with a decreasing slope (decreasing because it 'ends' at the red dot... ?), but I have no context. Does a negative slope mean my inbox situation is getting better, or worse? Some sort of context would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> The general idea is that the graph is of your inbox size, so a reduction in quantity (decreasing slope) would represent a "better" inbox situation. How might you suggest providing that context while keeping the ensuing image lightweight and clutter-free?

<comment><USER2> Be specific about that when describing the graph. I don't see anything about inbox size on the page. Graph is clean, informative, and immediately understandable given that crucial bit of information...

<comment><USER2> Full disclosure - i've never heard of a sparkline graph, and i'm guessing I am not unique in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Heads up: I'm getting an application error. ("An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.")

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be working now

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A screenshot or any preview would be nice. Asking for full access to my emails without an imprint, contact address plus hidden whois information is too risky.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, Google doesn't make it possible to get a count of your inbox size, as far as I know, without requesting full permissions :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> got an application error when trying to connect my friend

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be working now</comment></comment>


The soul-destroying effect of an elite education - <AUTHOR> http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/views/story.html?id=21065ebc-a2d2-4145-ae15-b5ce54245c82 <comment><USER2> Why is this rubbish being linked by hacker news? This is a barely- comprehensible, illogical rant. There's nothing wrong with being self-taught, but I'm getting sick of this anti-intellectualism. There's nothing wrong with learning how to teach yourself more efficiently, either, which is precisely what modern liberal education proscribes. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education>)

<comment><USER3> Practice and principle are often to very different things.

<comment><USER2> And..? Please state what you're trying to insinuate, so the rest of us can learn from your knowledge.

<comment><USER3> I'm saying that the strict definition of liberal education is not of much use when discussing the actual state of higher education because we can't assume an absolute corollary between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...What is this? It's illogical, offers no evidence to support its thesis, and is more pretentious than anything I've read in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER5> _"There are students who can't be stopped, and there are students who can't be started. The latter have always been more numerous."_

Best thing I've read so far this week.

<comment><USER6> I agree wholeheartedly with this and it is a problem I face 3 times a week in the class I teach. At a fancy elite university most students tend to do very well and study a lot. Here, not so much. I'm grading exams, and 1 student out of forty got the "harder" problem correct.

I study a lot for grad classes and its been one of most satisfying experiences I've had. Studying what you really love lights such a fire inside, i hardly believe it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could also be titled, "Why I stopped reading newspapers".

</comment><comment><USER8> Am I to understand that this article's point is that Barack Obama is dumber than Sarah Palin because she's self taught and he went to an Ivy League school?

This is still HN right?

<comment><USER9> The article says nothing about Palin or Obama, why bring that up? In any case, Sarah Palin graduated from the University of Idaho (after transferring around a few different schools).

All of which proves... well, nothing.

<comment><USER8> From the article's conclusion:

The preceding rant is to be taken merely as a preface to something shorter and more aphoristic I wanted to say about commentary on the U.S. election. It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

<comment><USER10> "to be taken .. as a preface.."

When he gets to trashing one of the candidates, make your objections then. How about that?

Or you could complain that if he _had_ written the other article, and if it _had_ appeared on HN, how inappropriate it would be (and I would agree)

Geesh. Looking for any fights lately?

<comment><USER2> Actually, the writer is saying that the entire article is to be taken as a preface to that last statement, which is clearly about politics.

<comment><USER10> And prefaces are not content. One can agree with the preface and not the body of the argument.

I'm not going to argue. I give up. Logically the preface is part of the rest of the text. Problem is, there is no rest of the text. But I guess that doesn't matter. If the preface is supposed to lead to a political discussion, even if the preface is non-political, that makes the entire preface political.

I just wish I had such keen eyes. Without the author's last graph, who could have known the rest of his text was so political in nature?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This finish ruined an otherwise B-minus curmudgeon-y article:

 _It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin._

Few people really care that Obama went to better schools than Sarah Palin. I certainly don't. We care about the fact that Obama is significantly smarter than Palin, and accomplished a lot more with the opportunities he had, rather than washing out of four undergraduate colleges.

In what is Sarah Palin self-taught, anyway? Shooting wolves from helicopters? She's obviously uncomfortable with ideas that challenge her narrow worldview, as her anti-library crusade illustrates.</comment>


US regulators grant DMCA exemption legalizing vehicle software tinkering - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/us-regulators-grant-dmca-exemption-legalizing-vehicle-software-tinkering/ <comment><USER2> One of the issues that are continually brought up by 'regulation' is that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations in the Federal Register that are not enacted by Congress, but enacted by the agency that does the regulation. Congress usually says, "And Agency such and such will be responsible for crafting regulations surrounding this power we just gave them" and then we're at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats.

This is done for a few reasons:

1\. If Congress had to actually pass laws that would include an implementation, they'd have to pass a lot less laws and they'd be politically responsible for stupid regulations. Right now, Republicans can rail against regulation and still enable it, all at the same time!

2\. At some point, all bureaucracies become enamored with sustaining the bureaucracy. There is a lot of political pressure involved in letting unelected bureaucrats make law.

So while the change in this regulation may be a net win for us; it can be changed back at any time, as long as they warn the public and give us a chance to 'comment' on it.

The deeper question is why we're letting unelected bureaucrats make law in the first place?

<comment><USER3> Regulations are often extremely complex and cover deep technical minutia.

There are 535 congresspeople. Counting staffers and organizations like CRS and you're looking at single-digit thousands of people to form the whole body of expertise around US lawmaking. They can reasonably be expected to pass general laws, but they have neither the staff nor expertise to work out the NOTAM that gives the exact 3D coordinates of every no-fly zone in the country, the ppm and molecular makeup of contaminants allowed in factory water runoff, the labeling rules for prescription painkillers, and a million other details that are needed to effectively manage 320MM people.

If you shifted the burden for getting those details right from agencies to congress, you'd just have to have a vastly larger congressional apparatus, and then you'd be decoupling rule making from enforcement (which isn't always a terrible idea, but would be incredibly difficult to change now.)

There's plenty of disagreement to be had over what should and shouldn't be regulated, but a system where the regulations are made by experts, who are responsible for enforcing those rules, and not totally subject to the political will of current congress isn't a bad idea.</comment></comment>


Is i=i++ the same as i++? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@glyif/nightmare-of-operations-708dd0a67dc6#.6a3owqe30 <comment><USER2> You can't answer this sort of question by testing it in a C compiler.

It might help but you'll often be compiling "undefined behavior" and getting results that you can't rely on.

What would help settle this definitively is researching "sequence points" in the C standard.</comment>


Prettier 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://jlongster.com/prettier-1.0 <comment><USER2> Prettier is a code formatter for JavaScript, like the hugely popular "gofmt".

Highlights of the 1.0 announcement:

\- production-ready (and used, eg; React, Oculus, Cloudflare, etc)

\- --no-semi option

\- --use-tabs option

\- parens that help indicate precedence

\- many formatting improvements

There are a ton of edge cases in this work that really matter (read through the announcement for a few). Speaking as a contributor, this is some of the hardest stuff I've ever done (beats building a JS superset, [http://lightscript.org](http://lightscript.org)). I've been super impressed by the prettier team.

<comment><USER3> We had configurability in early versions of gofmt but realized it was a mistake and kinda missed the whole point of having a code formatter, so we removed them.

<comment><USER4> While I understand the reasons for this (especially with the culture, for lack of a better word, around Go), I feel like this is a step backward in general. The "standard" Haskell formatter, hindent, did something similar. I found the maintainer's behavior admirable -- the style that was agreed on was very different from his own, but it was what he saw after analyzing publicly available code -- but what's the problem with custom formats if they're consistent across a whole codebase?

<comment><USER5> What's the advantage of project specific, custom formats?

<comment><USER6> It allows everyone in your company's dev organization share a common `standard` of JS style, which you have agreed on, even if it differs slightly in the way it bikesheds things like single-vs-double quotes or the presence of semicolons. (I mention `standard` because we use it as the basis for our linting rules, and would LOVE to use prettier to reformat our code.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Prettier goes such a long way to enforcing standards on a language and ecosystem which otherwise has none or few. What standards do exist are frequently arbitrary, or enforced by legacy code at random companies. For example, the Airbnb JS style guide [1] recommends single quotes in JS, but double quotes for JSX properties. Why the difference? Why not stick with double quotes everywhere, as they are required in JSX blocks? Answer: legacy code at Airbnb [2]

I'm hoping to see similar efforts on project file/folder structure at some point. How often do two node projects created by different engineering teams end up with the same folder/file structure? There's nearly no strong community convention, unlike many other languages/frameworks. Rails, for example, famously touts that any engineer can walk onto another Rails project and have a reasonable suspicion of where to find a particular piece of code.

1: [https://github.com/airbnb/javascript](https://github.com/airbnb/javascript) 2: [https://twitter.com/hshoff/status/784205839347232768](https://twitter.com/hshoff/status/784205839347232768)

<comment><USER8> One of the Airbnb style guide authors here.

The point about quotes comes up often. The important part for us is consistency at Airbnb. We use eslint to enforce and maintain the consistency. Would it be more consistent to treat strings the same everywhere? For some projects sure. We diverge from the community a bit in the sense that we treat JSX as not JS and we aim to be consistent about that. If your project treats JSX and JS the same then yes, we've certainly seen folks do this. As always, please do what works best for your team or project [1]. Forks encouraged.

I will say an added benefit of including a style guide in a project for large teams that may get lost jumping straight into prettier, has been helping our engineers become stronger javascript programmers in the process of learning our style guide. That's largely anecdotal evidence from my time at Airbnb and of course your mileage my vary.

Personally, I support the Prettier mission 100%. Easier consistency is huge. Removing barriers to contributing to open source projects is huge. PR reviews focused on what the code is doing vs painful style nits is huge. It's been great to see this come from the community and I look forward to seeing where the community takes it. Congrats to all of the contributors on the 1.0!

[1] [https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/issues/102](https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/issues/102)

<comment><USER9> Pretty Diff contains an option to convert string quotes to either double quotes or single quotes. This was a trivial update and I would be amazed if its absent in other beautifiers.

<comment><USER2> Yes, prettier has a `--single-quote` option (default false).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The amazing thing, for me, is:

1\. Announced 2 months ago

2\. Already adopted by, it seems, every major JS project. ([https://twitter.com/jlongster/status/852532847252566017](https://twitter.com/jlongster/status/852532847252566017))

3\. 7000 stars, 100,000 npm downloads/mo

Now some people will say it is a better mousetrap, but even now I can't tell you what the difference is between it and all the other linters. I can tell you that, based on the popularity, I would just default to this one and assume all this famous projects and people have worked it out.

How did it get it so popular? What made people want to try it out? Just word of mouth?

<comment><USER11> Speaking for myself, I've been waiting for 1.0 before using it, but I've been very excited for this project since its announcement. I've personally experienced how much time can be wasted bikeshedding over stylistic issues. In most cases, just picking a consistent standard is far more important than whatever the choice happens to be. Prettier will make almost all that bikeshedding unnecessary.

Even with ESLint having autofix capabilities, Prettier seems far more comprehensive in that regard. It also isn't doing exactly the same things as linters. They check for programming errors as well, not just stylistic issues. With those linters, you also need to decide how to configure the rules (though picking a preset can make that easier).

I have always loved that Python has an "official" style guide ([https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)), and gofmt ([https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/](https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/)) is one of the reasons I want to try out Go, so Prettier is a great development in my opinion. I am optimistic that the community will keep on adopting it, helping make our code more readable and allowing us to focus on actually building libraries, tools, applications, etc. rather than arguing over where we should and shouldn't have spaces in our code.

Edit: my TL;DR answer would be that it's a virtually zero configuration way to guarantee stylistic consistency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really looking forward to TypeScript support [0] as that's blocking me from using this in most of my work-related projects. Congrats to the team on 1.0!

0: [https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/13](https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/13)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, that's what I thought when I saw this project for the first time today. And here I just started moving everything to typescript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recall the React team were discussing at what part of the build step they should include Prettier.

I believe there was an idea of adding it as a pre-commit hook, a second one as a manual step and another one as a post-commit amend.

Have we reached a consensus on that? Not up to date what they went with, what seems to be the best way to do this?

<comment><USER15> We currently do the same thing Jest does: no hooks, but we offer it as `npm run prettier`, and we also run the comparison on CI (so if the prettier output is different, the PR fails). This means the code is always checked in formatted, but people need to remember to run `npm run prettier` or CI will fail.

<comment><USER14> Interesting, thanks Dan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is getting closer to my dream setup of being able to open files in my formatting, and saving them in the team's formatting.

Formatting source code feels like a complete waste of developer time and energy, especially when they don't agree with how the team has decided to format the code. I almost wish source code files could be just serialized ASTs and that a VCS could understand them making merges etc. even easier.

<comment><USER17> I'm surprised that doesn't exist. When I did a lot of Perl in a team environment, we used perltidy. Helpful since Perl does little to encourage uniformity.

It could take any sort of style in, and produce any sort of style out. Things like K&R blocks vs Allman-style blocks, tabs vs spaces, line wrapping, cuddled/not-cuddled else, etc.

[http://perltidy.sourceforge.net/stylekey.html](http://perltidy.sourceforge.net/stylekey.html)

Edit: this looks pretty close to the same thing for JavaScript. Missing some style options, and not command line driven, but the general idea seems close: [https://github.com/benjamn/recast/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/benjamn/recast/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> People here seem to approve it, but I feel unsure. Example with the matrix shows pretty well, why exceptions are always possible, no matter how detailed your styleguide is. And using comments to hold your auto-formatter back always baffles me. It seems so misaligned with the original purpose of writing the code (which comments are a part of).

It might be useful to re-format a completely messed up piece of code coming from the external world, but on the team I always prefer styleguides in the mood of "recommended, never enforced", which "prettier" is exact opposite of. That is, try to write like everyone else on the team does, but avoid re- formatting the code written by someone else, if there's no real need to do so. Obvious, strictly formal things like spaces instead of tabs, spaces outside of brackets (not inside of them), etc — this is one thing. But aligning pieces code to match some meta-pattern, or using longer/shorter lines than usual for some specific, "artistic" purpose — come on, this is not such a big deal. Consistency is overrated.

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel like you have to give Go credit for exposing this type of productivity hack. Once you gofmt/goimports on save you will never go back.

Edit: If I had to program in JS I would definitely use this coming from Go.

<comment><USER2> gofmt helped drive the demand and popularity for prettier, but people have been trying to build something like it for JS since before Go existed [0].

Prettier has succeeded largely due to a better algorithm, which actually came from the haskell community, via Wadler's paper A Prettier Printer [1] (with an implementation available at [2]).

[0] js-beautify had its first commit in 2007: [https://github.com/beautify- web/js-beautify/commit/e1ddc28b2...](https://github.com/beautify-web/js- beautify/commit/e1ddc28b2ac8140047269562e375f018c58e3a7e)

[1] [https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/prettier/pretti...](https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/prettier/prettier.pdf) [PDF]

[2] [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/wl- pprint](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/wl-pprint)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll never understand code formatters. For me the idea of my code passing through a formatter, is like if accidentally I lost part of it: there is a lot of care in the way you write your code, even in the part that the compiler does not care about: spaces. Spaces are the rhythm of the code... not sure why one would write code without rhythm and later add a synthetic one.

<comment><USER21> You might be surprised at the quality of the output (obviously I'm biased). We've tried to choose what most people consider to be the best way to style code, and many times prettier ends up formatting complex code better than I would have manually. Also, the biggest benefit that a lot of people don't realize is it allows you to quickly restructure your code easily: [http://jlongster.com/s/refactor.gif](http://jlongster.com/s/refactor.gif)

I understand if the way prettier formats your code is not the way you would like, and is more of a hindrance than helpful. But I hope the above gif shows why it is freeing for a lot of people.

Also, note that prettier does keep the original blank lines in your code. That's where most of the rhythm comes from, and we allows authors to group code however they want. The rest of it is basically choosing whether to insert a space here or there or not.

I respect your work, antirez, and I hope you at least try it once! It's totally fine if it's not useful for you though.

<comment><USER20> Hello! Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that code formatters are not useful, they are _massively_ useful in order to turn badly formatted code into more readable code, and also when there is to integrate some code from a code base to another and needs to be re-formatted and so forth. What I find odd is that there are people using it as a "to go" solution for code indentation. The fact btw that it keeps the original blank lines is a great feature that saves a lot of semantics. Thanks for your comment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was waiting the --no-semi option to start using Prettier. Thanks to the team!

<comment><USER23> The option seems to put semicolons at the front of your code instead of at the end. Am I wrong? Why is this attractive?

<comment><USER24> They specifically demonstrated a case where that's necessary [1], it doesn't always do that.

[1] [https://github.com/feross/standard/blob/master/RULES.md#semi...](https://github.com/feross/standard/blob/master/RULES.md#semicolons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't overstate how freeing coding with prettier has been -- often I'd find myself quickly grokking something and once I finally got it to "work," make sure it was all styled properly. Since using prettier, these things are one- and-the-same, which is a tremendous gain.

<comment><USER26> Something that's kind of tricky for me and my team is that we disagree on things like indentation and spacing in/around brackets and parens. The disagreement isn't just a "I think it should be done this way..." but "I actually understand code better when it's written this way..."

If we were to implement prettier, and chose to use 2-space indents, for a simple example, how would a 4-space developer fare when they pulled down the Prettified code? Would they just set up their own config locally based on their own standards?

<comment><USER2> That doesn't sound like a good idea (after all, there can only be one codebase in source control) but I believe it actually would be possible – and in fact, prettier would be a vital component to making it happen.

If you have a pair of particularly persnickety peers, you could theoretically:

1) run prettier with the company-wide config as a precommit hook ([https://github.com/prettier/prettier#pre-commit-hook-for- cha...](https://github.com/prettier/prettier#pre-commit-hook-for-changed- files))

2) instruct your colleagues to have their editor run prettier with their own preferences on save.

This way, your colleagues can simply open a file locally and save it to see things their way – and the code will be back to company-normal when they commit. They'll still have to see that unbearable bracket-spacing during code review, of course.

Prettier doesn't have many configuration options (intentionally!) so they'd probably opt to use prettier-eslint or similar, which allows more configuration (at the cost of speed).

Hopefully, after trying this, they would come to the conclusion that life is better just using the defaults, two-space-indents be damned. Bikesheds are great places for compromise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How does Prettier compare to [https://github.com/millermedeiros/esformatter](https://github.com/millermedeiros/esformatter), [https://github.com/beautify-web/js-beautify](https://github.com/beautify- web/js-beautify), [https://github.com/jedmao/codepainter](https://github.com/jedmao/codepainter), [https://github.com/rdio/jsfmt](https://github.com/rdio/jsfmt), etc.?

Personally, I use TSLint with the tslint.autoFixOnSave VSCode setting, and couldn't be happier.

<comment><USER28> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14110204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14110204)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be useful to compare with "eslint --fix" given Eslint can already reformat (on top of linting non-style things, and projects usually already have Eslint settings).

<comment><USER2> From the readme:

Unlike ESLint ... __everything is fixable __. This works because Prettier never "checks" anything; it ... parses your JavaScript into an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and pretty-prints the AST, completely ignoring any of the original formatting.

There's an extremely important piece missing from existing styling tools: the maximum line length ... (ESLint never knows how to fix it).

[https://github.com/prettier/prettier](https://github.com/prettier/prettier)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's the best way to add this to an existing project?

Going through all code at once would destroy all relevant vcs history and git blame. Maybe before each substantial edit on a file first run it through prettier and then make your real changes in a separate commit?

<comment><USER31> You can have git diff/blame/etc ignore stylistic changes by configuring prettier as a textconv [1]. I'm building a `git diff` wrapper that does this for you [2].

[1]: [https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Textconv](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Textconv)

[2]: [https://github.com/josephfrazier/prettier- diff](https://github.com/josephfrazier/prettier-diff)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of those tools that you don't realize how much you need it until you use it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love this thing, have it on auto save. It saves so much time. Now I can write remove a nesting, leave dangling commas and I don't have to even waste a second to clean it up. Just hit save and everything slips into place.

</comment><comment><USER34> Prettier is like rainbow sprinkels on top of my code.

I write vastly different JS as Prettier formats (single quotes, no semicolons, etc.), but after I hit save everything just looks 'normalised'

</comment><comment><USER35> I really like it for personal stuff.

I'd like to hear how people are using it on teams. With some effort I got it working on save in emacs, but asking other people to please install more tooling is not always easy.

I do have some authority over package.json though. How would you make it just work for everyone (using atom, vim, etc...)

<comment><USER2> One option is to add prettier as a precommit hook, eg; [https://github.com/prettier/prettier#pre-commit-hook-for- cha...](https://github.com/prettier/prettier#pre-commit-hook-for-changed- files) which doesn't require editor integrations at all.

There are integrations for most editors (Atoms, Emacs, Vim, Neovim, VSCode, VS, Sublime Text, JetBrains):

[https://github.com/prettier/prettier#editor- integration](https://github.com/prettier/prettier#editor-integration)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> How can I use this on file save within Atom?

Edit: Oh here we go: [https://github.com/prettier/prettier- atom](https://github.com/prettier/prettier-atom)

</comment><comment><USER37> How is prettier compared to vscode autoformat feature?

</comment><comment><USER38> What is the Prettier equivalent for SCSS and HTML?

<comment><USER23> I don't know that there is one. From the repository README:

> Prettier bans all custom styling by parsing it away and re-printing the > parsed AST with its own rules that take the maximum line width into account, > wrapping code when necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is this basically clang-format for JS?</comment>


5 Best MP3 Player for Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.techming.com/best-mp3-player-for-android/ <comment><USER2> I prefer MortPlayer Music

1\. it is directory/file based.

2\. it supports global random playback(When I hit next, it grabs a random song from under the base dir and plays it.

3\. Allows me to specify the next song to play. (it would be cool if I could built a queue like in the desktop version of Winamp.)

Other thoughts: The search works, and I like it, but it could be better. (Also, I haven't used the latest version, so things might have changed)</comment>


Show HN: Javadoc Rewritten from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sebkur/javadoc-ng <comment><AUTHOR> This project is really in early stage, but I would like to get feedback on this early to see if it is worth to keep working on it. Thank you for any feedback!

<comment><USER2> It looks great! I never really used Javadoc so please see this as a total outside feedback. I like the modern look, lighthouse is almost perfect in accessibility which is great (the only point lighthouse complains about it the contrast of links). It's also good on performance (80/100).

I have one confusion about the name, I'm used to the web frontend world where "ng" is usually something related to angular but it seems that it isn't the case here. I'm curious to know what's the origin of the name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, your feedback is nevertheless appreciated. Lighthouse points out some things that can be easily addressed and some of those things certainly should be fixed. I did not use such a tool on the site before and now it seems obvious to do it!

"ng" is short for "next generation". Not sure if this is a good name for the project after all.</comment></comment></comment>


Make Something 40% of Your Customers Must Have - <AUTHOR> http://breckyunits.com/make_something_40_of_your_customers_must_have

<comment><USER2> Nice ideas,but he conflates 'must have' with 'wants'. I learned many years ago, working for 7-11, that selling what people wants is way better than selling necessities. People will nickel and dime you for every percent of margin on necessities, but will happily pay silly margins on wants.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think I prefer "make something at least someone loves". That's more accurate because if 1 or more users love your product, you can get to 40% by getting rid of enough users who don't love it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't 100% of your customers be disappointed if your product went away? Otherwise, why are they customers in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER5> "make something lots of people want to pay money for"

<comment><USER6> or "make something not that many people want to pay lots of money for"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Only when you hit that 40% number(or something in that range)_

93.5% of bloggers make up bullshit statistics. 84.8% of people use statistics to obfuscate and distract people from the fact that they don't know wtf they're talking about.

<comment><USER8> Read the Sean Ellis article.

Although he says it's a ballpark number, he based it on hard data from many companies(I believe ~150) that's he worked with.

Just curious, are you an actuary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> just curious, what was the site you sold?

<comment><USER10> I too would like to hear more about the aforementioned site. I skimmed the article but section #3 caught my eye as I was hoping for more details on your success.</comment></comment>


Herbalife shares slide: Bill Ackman calls it a pyramid scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/herbalife-shares-slide-on-allegations-by-hedge-fund-manager-william-ackman-of-pyramid-scheme/2012/12/20/c29244c4-4ad7-11e2-8758-b64a2997a921_story.html

<comment><USER2> > Herbalife shares slide: Bill Ackman calls it a pyramid scheme

Translation: "Bill Ackman calls it a pyramid scheme, then Herbalife shares slide."

Not taking a position on the truth of the claim, only on the sequence of events.</comment>


Android passes BlackBerry in the US  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/43105-android-passes-blackberry-in-the-us.html

<comment><USER2> I don't quite understand why people obsess over numbers when it comes to consumerism. Just because McDonalds sell the most burgers in the world, doesn't mean they are the best.</comment>


The Mozart of Mathematics, Niels Henrik Abel - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-mozart-of-mathematics-niels-henrik-abel-303f850139e0 <comment><USER2> "Study the masters, not the pupils." — Abel

Abel evidently had a peripatetic career. For example, going from Oslo to Berlin to meet Crelle was quite the commute.</comment>


The Inner-platform effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

<comment><USER2> Pluginitis is the most terrifying disease of large software systems.</comment>


Report: RIM May Abandon BB10, Adopt Windows Phone to Survive - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=25066

<comment><USER2> Seeing as BB10 shipping date keeps slipping, does anybody believe that RIM could get Windows working on their devices earlier than they could get BB10 working?</comment>