Elixir Release v1.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/commit/52ff7e96867c027745d29f5d3feb77f546f22c4f

<comment><USER2> Really happy to see the 1.0 milestone reached. I've enjoyed my time with Elixir. It's really approachable, and made a lot of Erlang/OTP concepts start to click for me in ways that they just hadn't, before.

Syntactically, it's a pleasure to use as a long-time Ruby guy, which I suppose is no surprise given José's presence in the Ruby community.

However, all of this aside, what makes me the most excited about Elixir is José, himself. It's been my experience that when a language/framework has a BDFL, something of that person gets infused into its community. Anyone who's interacted with José will tell you he's an incredibly friendly, humble, and downright _thankful_ person.

Elixir is set up for success in so many ways, but the community aspect is the one we just can't afford to ignore.

<comment><USER3> Lack of jobs is a problem :( It is a nice language but has stiff competition from Go.

<comment><USER4> I envision Erlang shops moving to Elixir.

<comment><USER5> Hah, yeah, let's port everything for no obvious reason.

<comment><USER6> Erlang and Elixir play very well together. I imagine Erlang shops "moving to Elixir" will be in the form of Erlang shops hiring people with Ruby experience and letting them use Elixir so they can get up to speed faster.

<comment><USER7> I knew Ruby pretty well before trying Erlang and used Erlang before trying Elixir -- I still find Erlang _easier_ to write in that Elixir.

Elixir is more visually similar to Ruby, sure, buts its substantively not very similar, so the visual similarity is, if anything, a detriment, IMO.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps the problem is you used Erlang before trying Elixir.

For the typical programmer coming outside the Erlang/Elixir environment, Elixir is by far the more familiar and easier to pick up.

<comment><USER7> May be. It also may be that I have a lot less attachment to superficial syntactical similarity than lots of other people seem to -- I see lots of objections to languages not based on substance but based on the lack of familiar superficial structure, and that's not something that's really bothered me (one advantage, perhaps, of having learned -- even if only at a fairly superficial level in some cases -- several languages with radically different syntax in grade school), so "it superficially looks familiar" isn't bypassing, for me, a stumbling block lots of people seem to have.

In any case, yeah, I'm not saying that my personal Erlang vs. Elixir response is anything _more_ than my personal response (or that Elixir isn't valuable; its certainly something I'd like to find time to explore more deeply and I think it has a lot to offer.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the uninitiated, there was a fairly positive critique[1] of Elixir by Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang, last year (at least that's what got me hooked to Elixir).

[1] [http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with- elixir.html](http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html)

<comment><USER10> That's a great read! Were the warts he pointed out ever addressed?

<comment><USER9> I'll try to cover couple of them. Hopefully, others can fill in:

\- funs have an extra dot in the name: not fixed because that will lead to inconsistency [1]

\- send operator: removed earlier this year and the operator is reincarnated as comprehension operator (comprehension being more ubiquitous [2]); although, the proposed syntax wasn't adopted

Not sure about funs and def. It appears that not much was discussed about versions in source file and docstrings inside function definition (module doc is already inside); the later one can be dismissed being a common bikeshed in PL design.

So, yeah, most of the proposals couldn't make it because of complications.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/elixir-lang- core/_kEBXO0NR...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/elixir-lang- core/_kEBXO0NRDY/discussion)

[2] [http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/18.html](http://elixir- lang.org/getting_started/18.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone wanting to know more about Elixir, all the videos from this year's ElixirConf are available on the web [1]. The opening keynote by Dave Thomas is an eye opening "must watch" [2].

[1] [http://confreaks.com/events/elixirconf2014](http://confreaks.com/events/elixirconf2014)

[2] [http://confreaks.com/videos/4119-elixirconf2014-opening- keyn...](http://confreaks.com/videos/4119-elixirconf2014-opening-keynote- think-different)

</comment><comment><USER12> Jose Valim is a pretty incredible person. Ships top-tier code at a high level consistently, thinks thoughtfully and strategically, and engages with the world in such a calm and positive way. The BEAM ecosystem is richer for his presence.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Always pleasant to see his name attached to projects. Gives me reason to look into them further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Required self-promotion: If you're interested, I have produced over 12 hours of content across 106+ videos around Elixir, at [http://www.elixirsips.com](http://www.elixirsips.com)

I started when I was first learning Elixir. Was already a pro with Ruby and had around 3 months of Erlang experience at the time. The first video was nearly my first experience with Elixir ever. Some of the more fun projects I've built with it have included synthesizers, API clients, and websites.

The release of 1.0 gives me goosebumps. José's done great work, and always does.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congratulations! Great job getting to 1.0!

The Erlang VM is a beautiful piece of engineering - anything that brings people into its orbit is good for programming.

</comment><comment><USER16> In case you are wonder why the excitement about Exilir ... Exilir allows you to easily create DSL in Erlang.

Phoenix is a great example that has used Exilir to create a DSL that is similar to Ruby on Rails.

[http://www.littlelines.com/blog/2014/07/08/elixir-vs-ruby- sh...](http://www.littlelines.com/blog/2014/07/08/elixir-vs-ruby-showdown- phoenix-vs-rails/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This release is doubly exciting for me because it means my copy of the Programming Elixir book should be shipping very soon!

I think I can very closely relate to Dave Thomas when he expressed his excitement about Elixir and how similar it was to what he felt when he first encountered Ruby. Early last summer I took a fairly deep dive into Elixir and discovered that it left me with the same feelings as when I started to explore Ruby at the suggestion of my then boss many years ago. It just made sense. From the structure of an application to the way pattern matching works and even the larger ecosystem. I know a lot of people compare Ruby and Elixir because of the superficial syntactical similarities but there's something deeper there that makes me almost giddy: once you know the basics a lot of the rest just sort of seems to fall into place. Unlike a lot of other languages the learning process isn't filled with head-tilting moments of confusion, just lots of nodding up and down while thinking "Of course that's how it works!"

</comment><comment><USER18> A genuine non-flamebait question - if one were to write a Whatsapp-like messaging system _today_ , would you use Erlang, Elixir,Scala,Java 8 or Go?

I'm kind of wondering whether Go is not already eating into Erlang (and Scala). I am not an expert, but I understand that Go is not at par with Erlang _today_ , but I am wondering about a 3-year bet for a startup.

<comment><USER19> I (personally) would bet on Elixir, particularly if the team writing it would be learning an alternative like Go anyway.

Go can try to reach parity with Erlang one day...but Elixir already _is_ Erlang...That combined with the fact that Elixir's package management already feels light years ahead of Go's disaster and I think it's a winner. I'm sure I'm wrong and the flames of Go lovers will engulf me in the responses, so take this with a mountain of salt.

<comment><USER18> Are you taking into account the recent efforts in the Go ecosystem to fix the pkg management issue [1]

I may be short sighted, but I seeing the ecosystem around Go to be much more ... accelerated than Erlang.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956078)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Awesome power and maturity of the Erlang VM + modern syntax and hygienic macros... such beauty.

</comment><comment><USER21> Elixir is an amazing language on top of a time-tested VM and incredible concurrency model. It's been a while since I've been so excited about a language.

It's an incredibly cohesive language that doesn't appear to have any serious flaws, as far as I can see. It's impressive that it's come so far along in such a short amount of time.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great work Valim, Eric and everyone else!

I was following their progress and there was a constant and steady stream of changes over the last years.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am very happy, I can not wait to get my hands on

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it recommended that you learn Erlang before you learn Elixir, or can you jump straight into Elixir without Erlang knowledge?

<comment><USER25> Erlang knowledge is not a requirement to start learning Elixir. You will end up learning about Erlang programming model anyway because Elixir builds on top of it.

By "programming model" I mean things like immutability, concurrency, fault- tolerance, and the way you design systems with OTP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well done, guys.</comment>


Google's hiring regime is tough and long, but Twitter's is hell - <AUTHOR> https://thestack.com/world/2016/01/14/google-is-the-toughest-job-interview-in-town-for-developers-but-not-the-worst/ <comment><USER2> > The Google hiring process emerges as the most difficult, while you can > apparently just walk into IBM and take a desk, since the difficulty factor > at Big Blue is less than half that of its nearest stablemate, Yelp.

That's not at all what the graph says (although with the ranges chosen, that's what it _looks_ like). IBM shows a difficulty of 2.7, and Yelp shows a difficulty of 2.9.

</comment><comment> nevi-me Would have been nice to know why Twitter's is hell. This article felt like some words made up around 2 charts, with little context.</comment>


The Invigorating Strangeness of Friedrich Nietzsche - <AUTHOR> https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-invigorating-strangeness-of-friedrich-nietzsche <comment><USER3> Reading Nietzsche is like breathing in cold mountain air. Some people can handle the cold, others can't. He's not for everyone, as he makes it intentionally clear.

He was a stark individualist that put into question a lot of the building blocks of liberal democracy, such as the notion that all men are equal. I don't agree with all of what he puts forth but he is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and influential thinkers of the 19th century and still relevant to read even today.

If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

<comment><USER4> _He was a stark individualist_

Nietzsche is by no means an individualist. He had no interest in any current of thought talking of "individualism". Moreover, while he was no doubt interested in certain individuals, he made it clear that the individuals he was interested were the product of entire cultures - the most refined possible people.

Nietzsche also essentially produced a position that was impossible to realize. Indeed, no one can practically agree with Nietzsche on everything. He wanted an elite but wanted that elite to be aesthetic and removed from ugly character of politics as usual. He hated antisemites and militarists yet these were the most common type to take up his name.

Still, I'd certainly agree Nietzsche is interesting and worth reading.

Edit: Also important is the way Nietzsche refuted the certainties of philosophy yet did not consider himself a philosopher. He called himself a "psychologist" early on and his discussion of philosophy was often "what character would cause a person to believe such a thing".

<comment><USER3> Yes sorry when I say individualist, I didn't mean in the philosophical sense but more referring to a person who is independent and self-reliant (something that he advocates others become as well with the whole self-overcoming)

<comment><USER4> Nietzsche formed his ideas independently. "Self-reliant" is relative - <USER2> spent most of his life disabled, living on a pension in Italy.

Moreover, I don't think Nietzsche advocated that everyone think independently. Following the "order of rank" logic, he _might_ advocate that those of a higher order think for themselves (but even he's concerned with what is healthy for the individual, not what opens the person's mind the most). He'd not want free thinking for those of a lower order of rank (something that indeed doesn't paint ole Fred in the best light).

<comment><USER5> "He'd not want free thinking for those of a lower order of rank "

Do you recall where he wrote that? I only read Zarathustra and I do not recall those thoughts in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's hard not to see Nietzche's "slave morality" in today's successful backlash against "toxic masculinity" and the "white man".

<comment><USER7> Can you explain what you mean by this?

<comment><USER8> Seems to me the OP is claiming that people who attack white men are weak willed and only seek to subvert the strong willed white man. Not sure how else one would read that as only white men are strong willed and think like masters and everyone else is a weak willed slave.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality)

<comment><USER6> What a fantastic misrepresentation of my comment and it shows very little understanding of Nietzche. Maybe try reading his work rather than relying on Wikipedia and throwing up a straw man argument. Ironically your response is exactly what Nietzche would have predicted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite."

Ecce Homo

<comment><USER10> Fairly prophetic that. He (and his anti semitic sister) were kind of popular with the Nazis. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Fri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche#Nietzsche_and_fascism)

<comment><USER9> Some read this quote as a harbinger of WW2. I think it fits the current zeitgeist much better and is part of what Nietzsche called the age of the last man: The destruction of religion and the complete lack of meaning in modern western societies, leading to consumerism, surrogate activities and finally nihilism [1]. Before the cyberpunk dystopias described by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, before Aldous Huxley, before George Orwell, there was Nietzsche.

A true genius and like Schopenhauer before him, a powerful initiator in the human condition.

[1] [https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/nietzsches-...](https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/nietzsches- message-beyond-nihilism/)

<comment><USER11> In what sense did other societies have meaning, that modern societies lack?

<comment><USER12> They believed in meaning, we don't.

(please, take that in the spirit of "a little imprecision saves tons of explanation")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those into Nietzsche, it's worth reading The Ego and its Own by Max Stirner:

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

<comment><USER14> Interesting recommendation. Looking forward to checking this out. I usually hear Schopenhauer or Zapffe as a similar recommendation.

<comment><USER15> You can read everything of Zapffe's that's ever been translated into English tonight[1]! If you want more pure pessimism you shouldn't leave out Ligotti's "Conspiracy Against the Human Race", which also cover's Zapffe a bit. Ligotti is not a traditional philosopher but he makes some great observations about the relative rarity of true pessimism in Western philosophy.

It's worth noting that Nietzsche's real work was to find a solution to the inevitable pessimism and nihilism that he feared would inevitably threaten Western culture. Schopenhauer and Zapffe go straight off into pessimistic view of human existence (Schopenhauer deriving some humanistic "we're all in this together" ethics at moments and Zapffe saying we should stop breeding and let the flame burn out). Nietzsche still ultimately rejects nihilism.

[1] [https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah](https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rv-de Nietzsche is probably the most overrated philosopher who ever lived. He was a manic who instead of learning from the world withdrew into a fantasy version built from well-phrased sound bites (or "aphorisms" \- which sounds nicer). His ideas primarily serve the purpose of confirming elitist and Darwinian perspectives predominantly popular among people who hold a grudge against society because they didn't get a large enough chunk from the big cake.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Andreas- Salom%C3%A9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Andreas-Salom%C3%A9)

I wonder if there ever have been prolific male philosophers that had a fully satisfying sexual and romantic life ..

<comment><USER17> Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard all died unmarried and childless

<comment><USER16> Aristotle, ever practical, however tied the knot on the Isle of Lesbos.

[left something for you here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597916)]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't this all common knowledge? I don't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time. I certainly didn't learn anything new and I have only a cursory familiarity with Nietzsche and his works. This review(?) doesn't even mention some of the more interesting aspects of his life, and the snide comment about Zarathustra was just... strange. I'm sure the biography is great, this review doesn't sell it very well at all.

<comment><USER12> _I don 't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time._

He was hated by all my high school teachers, both the communists and the religion teacher. I bet that he will be called a nazi while there are communists and christians.

I think what they hated most about him is that he likened both groups.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. Nietzsche provided powerful arguments to explain the origin of religion (particularly Christianity) and even attempted to write his own Bible-style text with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His explanations include brilliant insights on human psychology, and do a pretty good number on faith. I can understand why the religion teacher didn't like him :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That Nietzsche's public life ended with him sobbing in empathy for a horse who he saw whipped always felt to me to nullify all his previous philosophical argument.

In other words; His worldview builds until it breaks through recognition of the Other.

<comment><USER21> It's interesting that this is a scene from Dostoevsky's novel _Crime and Punishment_. I always wondered if it's a bizarre coincidence or some sort of influence went into the novel, or reports about Nietzche's life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've always thought Nietzsche was the only funny (hilarious more than strange) modern philosopher. Compared to dullards like Kierkegaard, he's a barrel of laughs. I also think he's also the perfect example of the old saw "all modern philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle."

One of my professors gave a very learned exposition of Nietzsche as the philosophical forbear of Nazism. It was pretty convincing, frankly, and I still think of Nietzsche as fundamentally evil. Funny, but evil. The exposition took days of his lecture time, so I won't try to recreate it here, but lightly dismissing that charge by laying it all at the feet of his sister is a mistake. The playful disassembling of Western philosophy that Nietzsche indulged in had real consequences in the actions of those who studied his works.

<comment><USER23> He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us understood his lessons, we would be less susceptible to being manipulated and used for evil. I think he was so far ahead of his time that he's even ahead of us in the present. Have we gone beyond good and evil yet? Have we learned how weak those concepts make us? How easily they permit us to be controlled? Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." How could such a modern people be so ignorant of the forces that shape their lives, even when we have such great teachers?

<comment><USER24> Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real "delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to escape.

<comment><USER23> Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.

<comment><USER24> As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that anyone else read something else into him.

Now consider quotes like these:

"The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?"

Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.

<comment><USER23> I mean, he was a poetic philosopher. Do you read poetry literally? Also, you can't just pluck quotes out of their context. Notice how he talks about pain, but doesn't say things like "you should kill the weak." Inflicting pain in order to improve things is a necessity. Ever heard things like "pain is weakness leaving the body?" That's how he meant it.

I'd like to remind you that even Jesus has been used to justify atrocities. It's not the words of men that justify things, it's the authority others give them and those who distort their words for their own purposes. Don't blame the messengers, blame yourself, blame us, blame our weaknesses for falling for the same thing over and over again.

<comment><USER24> In other words, "Anyone who reads something into him that I don't like, doesn't understand him properly."

Which is a well-known logical fallacy. Look up, "No true Scotsman."

Back in the real world, people who read him, thought they understood him, and didn't agree with your interpretation, proceeded to literally kill people by the millions. Justifying it by what they understood him to be saying.

I have no particular reason to trust your interpretation over theirs. And when it comes to my best judgment, I find him wrong again and again. So I don't really care which interpretation I'd find more palatable.

<comment><USER23> My good fellow, I am merely suggesting that if you wish to critique his work, you should study it yourself -- which would be almost impossible now because you will just look for excuses to mold these works to your expectations of them. If you had told me you read his work and rejected it, then this would be a different discussion. We'd have to get into our conflicting interpretations. Right now, however, it just seems like you are dismissing him because the actions and critiques of others. Also, I don't really think this is an issue of "wrong" or "right." A philosophy of life is more in the domain of art than logic or the sciences. Is a painting wrong? Upon what ground do you critique a painting from? How one judges a philosophy of life is more a matter of the aesthetics of the vision than the correctness of it. I know you mean "wrong" in the sense that it disagrees with your view of life, but this obscures the fact that we are talking about aesthetics, not logical conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaXigSu72A4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaXigSu72A4)</comment>


Automatic Security Updates for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/10/guide-automatic-security-updates-for-php-developers <comment><USER2> Automatic updates of of large custom applications built with componentized open source software suffer from the problem that unless you control all of the software, and all of the components and dependencies, you cannot guarantee that the update you are deploying is going to succeed.

Best practices have tended to evolve towards Continuous Integration/Continuous delivery for those sorts of deployments (i.e dev/test/staging/deploy to prod), and its generally a very bad idea to automatically update your production software without running it through your own localized battery of tests so that you can verify that the application will continue to function. Frameworks and CMSs that encourage extensibility have no way of knowing whether an update is going to conflict with some locally developed custom code.

In the composer based world of php, it would also mean relying on every library that your application is dependent upon to follow strict semantic versioning, which is merely a handshake agreement that is reliant upon the library author's judgement.

Even if everything is architected such that you can guarantee the _security_ of the process, I don't see how one could guarantee the _correctness_ of the process.

<comment><USER3> > its generally a very bad idea to automatically update your production > software without running it through your own localized battery of tests

To me, this begs the question: How do we enable clients to react quickly to releases?

The most easily available solution would seem to be webhooks. It's standard practice for them to be used to trigger things internally, but is it time to turn them outwards?

Side note: It's always seemed a bit of a waste to me that sites like Github will only allow the owner of a repository to create web hooks. My personal use-case for that is automating Docker builds of various projects, but I'm sure others exist.</comment></comment>


Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.rankscience.com <comment><AUTHOR> RankScience automates split-testing for SEO to grow organic search traffic for businesses. 80% of clicks from Google go to organic results and yet most companies don't know how to improve their SEO, or can't effectively measure their efforts to do so. Because of the scale of SEO and the constant change of both Google's ranking algorithm and your competitors' SEO campaigns, the only way to succeed in the long-run is with software and continuous testing.

We've built a CDN that enables our software to provide tactical SEO execution and run A/B testing experiments for SEO across millions of pages. Experiments typically take 14-21 days for Google to index and react to changes, and we use Bayesian Structural Time Series and Negative Binomial Regression models to determine the statistical significance of our experiments.

Our software is 100% technical SEO, and doesn't do anything black-hat, spammy, or anything related to link-building. One of our goals is to bring transparency and shed light on what is largely considered a shady industry, but is so important to so many companies' revenue and growth. In fact, If SEO didn't have such a bad reputation, we think someone else would have built this a long time ago.

SEO as an industry earned itself a stigma for being spammy: between buying links, creating low-quality pages stuffed with keywords and text intended for Google rather than humans, and the used car salesmen attitude that many SEOs have, many people have been conditioned to dismiss SEO as an invalid or illegitimate growth channel.

We're software engineers-turned-SEO's, who have previously consulted for dozens of companies on SEO, from YC startups to Fortune 500 companies like Pfizer. We previously shared our case study with HN, where we increased search traffic to Coderwall with one A/B test: [https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split- test](https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test)

Ask us anything! We'd love to answer any questions you have about SEO, A/B testing, and RankScience.

<comment><USER2> Can you explain a bit more about the technical details of what the platform can do?

Does it integrate with web master tools and google analytics?

Does it help identify page populations that are stable and similar enough to be compared?

How are the different test versions sent to you guys?

Can we use our own CDN on top of your CDN?

What about dynamic pages that change over time?

How big of a sample size is needed to get statistically significant results?

<comment><USER3> Howdy etler!

> Does it integrate with web master tools and google analytics?

Yep!

> Does it help identify page populations that are stable and similar enough to > be compared?

Yep!

> How are the different test versions sent to you guys?

For the most part, we own the design of treatments. Some of our customers have their own experiments, but that's a small minority of our customers. Happy to talk more in depth about this if you're interested! email@example.com

> Can we use our own CDN on top of your CDN?

Yes, we encourage this too!

> What about dynamic pages that change over time?

We address this on a case-by-case basis, but our software is designed to be as un-invasive as possible in use cases that we do not expect.

> How big of a sample size is needed to get statistically significant results?

We have to consider several variables here. Sample size is a function of Google's crawl rate on your site, the number of pages you have, and the amount of traffic you receive.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the response! I know the sample size question is hard to answer because of the number of variables involved, but the reason I ask is that the CoderWall blog post example mentioned 20,000 pages, which is more than we have so I was curious about what a rough rule of thumb range might be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few questions about your product (I run SEO and digital marketing at LendUp - YCW12). This is very, very cool.

* What types of optimizations does it do/do you test?

* I assume tests take a while to run, waiting for Google to re-index etc. Do you essentially monitor rank changes, assume that Google has re-indexed at that point, and use that as the data to optimize on? Or do you have some smart way to monitor for when Google re-indexes?

* I'm again assuming here - that a user will plug in a few variations of things to test, and let your software test them? Or are there automatic optimizations the software tries to make?

* How many tests can one do in a given time period, without confounding test & control variants? It seems like they would take a while to run?

* Is there a good way to control for non-technical/non-content-based changes (e.g. external, links)? For example we get hundreds of negative links pointed at us per week. Do we just hope/assume that's not the cause of rank changes?

<comment><USER3> Hey there!

We test everything on-page. This usually includes CTR stuff, like titles and meta descriptions and paragraph text that Google extracts for the meta descript, headers, images, calls to action, even conversion rates.

Correct, we continually iterate based on feedback like rankings and clicks, and we're working on smarter ways to monitor Google's crawler too!

Users are as hands-on or hands-off as they'd like. We usually own the experiments, but some of our customers design their own too.

The number of tests depends on the number of pages and your traffic. Our largest customers have full factorial experiments with thousands of concurrent split tests every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Guys, The idea looks great. Congrats on the launch.

2 SEO questions:

1) a CDN means "thousands of websites on one IP address". Google doesn't like it _UNTIL_ it knows, the IP belongs to a well-known CDN like cloundfront/cloudflare etc. Please comment?

2) An A/B test might look like "cloaking" to googles. How exactly do you run it? I assume, not in parallel, but "variation A _then_ variation B" \- correct? If yes, does it mean I have to leave the website UNTOUCHED for 21 days so the test results are not distorted by my other activities? (adding new content, internal links etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Great questions

1) We actually work with CloudFlare/CloudFront etc if companies are already using them. In that case, we sit in between CloudFlare and your origin webserver. But if you don't already have a CDN in front of your website, our SEO CDN goes in front of your origin webserver, and we use AWS so as far as Google is concerned it looks like AWS. We also use different IPs for every customer.

2) We don't do cloaking - we're essentially testing somewhat small tweaks across groups of similar pages, and seeing if they have any impact on clicks or rankings. It is preferred if the pages remain largely the same, but they don't have to be totally untouched.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the answer.

PS. whoa, exciting (the 'in-between cloudflare and your server' bit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks great, congrats on the launch!

Two points of feedback:

(1) The idea of the product is clearly conveyed, but I'm confused on exactly how it works. The landing page mentions that title tags, headlines, meta-tags, etc get tweaked - exactly how is this done? Do I have to manually enter a bunch of alternative text, or are you using a big fancy thesaurus to switch out some key terms?

(2) How do you evaluate performance of the product? Solely through click rates, or by search rankings? How often do google search results get updated? In short, how do I know the product is working?

<comment><USER3> Thanks sgslo!

(1) We use both humans and software to generate experiments. For customers, it's completely automated.

(2) We look at all primary search metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR, and rankings), with clicks being our main metric. Search results get updated at a pace determined by Google's crawl rate, which varies per site depending on multiple factors including domain authority. We use bayesian structural time series and negative binomial regression models to measure impact and statistical significance to power our data-driven SEO recommendations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As somebody who wrote an article about A/B testing title tags in 2011 before it was cool [1], this is an awesome idea. I've talked about SEO with many companies and coming up with the proper title tags and meta descriptions alone is often worth so much traffic for such little effort (once you get past the upfront cost of running the tests).

However, I think a critical aspect of SEO is thinking about an entire site holistically. Not only because certain signals are site-wide, but because a key aspect of SEO is deciding what pages of your website are "good" for SEO and which ones aren't, and then focusing on making the "good" pages better and not worrying about the "bad" pages. Good and bad in quotes because it is often quite a bit of an art and not a science.

How does RankScience play into this? You've nailed the on-page stuff but is there any world in which RankScience is able to talk about a site holistically and recommend which types of pages and content seem to be working most effectively (and maybe even suggesting pages that could be removed/de- indexed)? Or do you leave that to SEO consultants and you just nail the hell out of the on-page stuff.

1: [https://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/seo-tip-titles- matter-...](https://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/seo-tip-titles-matter- probably-more-than-you-think/)

<comment><USER3> It's a true honor to speak with an SEO A/B testing OG! :)

> How does RankScience play into this?

That's a really great point. Right now, our software either focuses on only pages which are good for SEO, or it runs less frequent experiments on the "bad" pages. We've had a few success stories of turning "bad" pages into good ones and having them become big revenue generators for our customers, but that's not common as I'm sure you can imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Though using A/B testing to improve user experience or conversion rates is fine, I thought using A/B testing to reverse engineer the ranking algorithm was against the guidelines. Has this been updated?

From [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7238431?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7238431?hl=en)

> Best practices for website testing with Google Search

> The amount of time required for a reliable test will vary depending on > factors like your conversion rates, and how much traffic your website gets; > a good testing tool should tell you when you've gathered enough data to draw > a reliable conclusion. Once you've concluded the test, you should update > your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all elements of > the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and > markup. If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily > long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and > take action accordingly. This is especially true if you're serving one > content variant to a large percentage of your users.

Next to this, the advice is to use rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate issues with Googlebot crawling your variations. When using rel="canonical" this should not show you how a variation influences ranking.

> If you're running an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the > rel="canonical" link attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate > that the original URL is the preferred version. We recommend using > rel="canonical" rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely > matches your intent in this situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is link is related to Conversation Rate Optimization testing (like Optimizely). We don't do A/B testing on single pages, or do cloaking or anything of the sort, but we run experiments across groups of URLs, and then we sum up the results and run our analysis.

Also, our goal is not to deceive Google in anyway - a lot of our tests are related to increasing CTR (which is testing humans) and on-page times. (again testing humans) Overall we're trying to make pages better according to Google guidelines -- which leads to a better experience for users.

Some more explanation of how it works here: [https://www.rankscience.com/how- it-works](https://www.rankscience.com/how-it-works)

<comment><USER8> My post was in response to the homepage copy:

> RankScience sits next to your website, making thousands of experiments to > tweak your HTML in order to improve your page rankings.

This seems to me an attempt at reverse engineering the ranking algorithm. Is my interpretation correct? And if so, is this allowed / in scope of the guidelines?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not reverse engineering Google's ranking algorithm, so no. : ) Good luck to anyone trying to do that! (I'd recommend against it) Yes, you're allowed to make changes to your pages.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Though my (dated?) concern is probably not all that common, you could think of adding something like "Split-testing to improve SEO is a perfectly legitimate marketing technique" in your FAQ/technical copy.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your feedback! That's a pretty good idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just want to chime in here and share that I'm a very happy customer. Ryan, Dillon, and Chad are some super smart guys who deeply understand SEO. I use RankScience for 7 Cups and Edvance360 and I've seen a huge ROI. They always find time to meet with me and my other team members. The advice and feedback they provide is worth the cost of the service alone. Highly, highly, highly recommended!

<comment><USER3> Thanks Glen!! :)

<comment><USER10> yaya, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've been using RankScience for months at Suiteness. They've given our indexed pages a consistent boost every week.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Kyle! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Co-founder/CTO here. Please share any SEO questions!

<comment><USER12> Why have you taken this approach to monetizing this SEO optimization method, instead of other options, for example PPC arbitrage?

Why A/B testing and not a more complex statistical hypothesis testing method?

<comment><AUTHOR> The biggest reason is that there's so much more volume in organic search (80% of all clicks) vs paid search (20%), and the ROI on SEO is so high. There's also so many companies in the PPC space -- it's quite saturated. SEO is appealing to us because we think it's overlooked due to stigma.

SEO and PPC are really two very different games overall, but I have a ton of respect for people who are really good at PPC.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, just to be clear, I mean you generate the clicks via SEO and selling them on a PPC, lead, etc. basis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I misunderstood. Good question. A lot of people have suggested this. The main reason we've avoided it is complexity, but it's something we might revisit. I'd also be concerned about customers not having an easy way to understand our pricing.

<comment><USER12> >> "I'd also be concerned about customers not having an easy way to understand our pricing."

That would likely to be best expressed relative to major PPC players like Google.

For example, "clicks are 20% cheaper than Google for the same keywords."

Anyway, just nitpicking, awesome solution to a big problem. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a super compelling idea. : ) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats on the launch.

How do you check the effectiness of a SEO change? You check for Google rankings or traffic?

<comment><AUTHOR> We look at Clicks, Rankings and Impressions. We use Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and another third party data source.

More clicks is obviously the ultimate goal, but sometimes we also have significant experiments where rankings or impressions going up are the key metric

<comment><USER13> by curiosity, what's the thrid party data source?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's part of our secret sauce. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I consult with startups and tech companies (recently: SurveyMonkey) on SEO, so this is super-interesting... especially the automated aspect, which is pretty novel in this space.

What are some of the specific types of automated tests that you run?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a case study with a simple example of a test: [https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split- test](https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test)

* CTR on titles/meta descriptions * Any HTML changes * Design changes * Time on site

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the reply. Would you mind being more specific about what specific aspects of the "automated" tests are "automated"?

E.g., in the CoderWall example, is it propagating of the title tag change to all the pages in the test group that's "automated"?

At least to my ears, "automated" suggests that there are tests that are selected and run completely without human intervention. (Which is hard to imagine in the SEO space.) Is that in any way accurate?

<comment><USER3> Correct! Our customers don't have to lift a finger, and our software continually iterates on their SEO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like you integrate with the likes of Google (Webmaster Tools) and Cloudflare in ways not done before, so my assumptions here are probably a bit outdated.

Let's say you want to test a new title. You collect stats for a week, change the title, collect stats for another week. The two datasets are then compared. Am I close?

Does it mean that you can't AB test in parallel? If so, it's not optimal for time sensitive stuff like breaking news.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't run experiments on a single page, but instead run them across groups of similar pages. The easiest way to think about this is running a test across a "product" template on an e-commerce site. A site could have thousands of product pages, but they're all on the same template. We would grab a set of a few thousand product pages, and split them into control and variant groups, execute the change on the variant group, and monitor how Google reacts to the groups in aggregate over a period of time.

Depending on how many pages you have, we can run many tests in parallel.

<comment><USER15> Gotcha

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for the AMA! What's the best way to deal with Google algorithm changes? Also, at what point does site performance actually impact my SEO?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only way to deal with Google algorithm updates is through experimentation. A data-driven approach is the only approach. : ) Staying abreast of what both Google is saying publicly and what the SEO community is saying also helps (ie Google announced they're cracking down on intrusive pop-ups for mobile sites)

Site performance is always relative to your competitors. Optimal server response time is around 200ms, and that's what folks should strive for, but I've seen sites have really slow pages and still get lots of traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You guys mention < 25ms as the performance hit of having you guys in front of the client's application. Is there a more concrete SLA you guys provide? Do you have a sense of what that hit might cost in page rank (there's some theories out there that time to first byte is one of the features that search engines reward)?

<comment><USER3> Hey 0bfus, we're working on a fancy performance metrics dashboard and status page to answer these questions! Also, we've done extensive research on pageload speed's effect on page rank, and we found that <25ms of incremental latency does not have any impact. We're working on a case study for the latter!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am bit wary of the idea, despite the fair intentions, but Google in particular tends to view anything remotely close to 'improving' search ranking using 3rd party 'software', as a threat to their own Ego-rithms.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish I could use a tool like this and know that it won't affect my rankings negatively, but I feel that Google will eventually punish sites that do a lot of A/B testing.

</comment><comment><USER20> How does this compare with the other offerings in the space?

<comment><USER3> We focus on being automated! Our software never stops working to grow your search traffic, even when you're asleep or if you don't want to think about SEO at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's the minimum amount of traffic to benefit from this offering. At what point should a startup seriously consider working with you

<comment><AUTHOR> No real minimum - it's all case by case.

<comment><USER21> Would you consider donating some services to Zidisha (YC W14)? If yes, please email me – email@example.com. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When you are just starting out with a website, what is the 20% of effort that leads to 80% of the results in regard to SEO?

<comment><USER3> Hey there! I know we just chatted on facebook about this, but just in case anybody else is wondering: we're working on this post. Stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> That looks great! How do you automate google's rank checking? Do you use proxies/swarm of VPS's?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and third party services to supplement keyword rankings data -- we don't crawl Google SERPs. :) Plenty of other companies do, though. Moz has great keyword ranking data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How does your pricing work?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's based on how much traffic goes through our CDN. If you signup on our site or send me a note directly email@example.com I can give you more details

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hey guys! Congratulations on the launch! Very exciting!

We've been seeing some great results with SEO testing, and have recently had our biggest test result (in terms of revenue impact). Looking forward to hearing more of what you guys are up to. :)

I think the fact that DistilledODN, RankScience, Etsy, and Pinterest have all published SEO split-test results recently demonstrates the importance of this type of data-driven approach to SEO!

Best of luck with everything!

Tom, Distilled (Disclaimer: I run the [https://www.distilledodn.com/](https://www.distilledodn.com/) team)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Tom. Would love to buy you guys a beer sometime. : )</comment></comment>


El Fuego Viviente Chili Sauce - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aweijnitz/recipe-el_fuego_viviente <comment><USER2> A recipe without 10 pages of useless, boilerplate SEO content?

<comment><USER3> I have recently purchased an instant pot the SEO content on recipes searched for drive me mad

<comment><USER4> I feel your pain. My best IP recipes are adaptations I've made from old recipes of my family's.

Here's my Cajun mother-in-law's red beans and rice recipe. She's from Chauvin, LA and this recipe is my favorite for when my wife is away and I'm cooking for the kids.

You'll need:

1 pound red kidney beans

1 link of Hillshire Farms smoked sausage (like polish style)

1-2 bay leaves

Brown rice or long-grain white rice

Crystal brand hot sauce

Rinse 1 pound of red kidney beans, then cover with 3-4" of water and soak overnight. The next morning, dump the water and rinse them thoroughly.

Chop one medium-sized yellow onion and one celery stalk.

In your pressure cooker, go a few times around the pot with olive oil and heat until shimmering.

Add the onion and just brown the shit out of it. Seriously, I always stop too soon. My mother in law gets it all nice and browned, like chocolate. Use sauté mode on your IP and turn it up to the high heat setting. When it's about halfway browned, I add the celery to the pot for the rest of the browning.

Once the onions brown, cut the heat and add 5 cups of water. If I was doing this in the crock or regular pot, I'd add way more but since we're not losing any to steam, give is perfect.

Scrape all of the burnt crap off the bottom of the pan.

Add the beans to the pot along with a bay leaf or two and one link of smoke sausage (like Hillshire Farms polish sausage style) cut into circular slices about 1/4" thick.

Bring to pressure and then cook for 15 minutes. This is how long I did it in my Instant Pot, which may not be the same as your cookers. The IP brings it to 15 PSI and then lowers it and cycles between 10 and 11.5 PSI.

After 15 minutes of cooking, remove from fire and allow the pressure to release naturally. At about 15-20 minutes, I just manually dumped what little pressure there was left.

Salt to taste. Refrigerate overnight before reheating and serving because it just tastes better that way.

Serve over brown rice or regular long-grain white rice if you prefer.

The Cajuns put Crystal brand hot sauce on top. The regular kind (not the extra-hot). It's very tangy. I've never seen a bottle of Tabasco in a Cajun pantry.

[https://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Hot-Sauce-Louisianas- Pure/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Hot-Sauce-Louisianas- Pure/dp/B0005ZHPFI/)

Louisiana Brand is also okay if that's all you can get

<comment><USER5> I notice that it's not uncommon for American recipes to be tied to a specific brand of sauce or similar. I don't see this as often in "European" recepies, here usually the recipe is broken down further or listing a generic ingredients, this makes the recipe more useful in contexts where it is hard to get "Trademark brand sauce", but of course you lose some precision in the flavor..

Modular cooking vs roll your own :)

<comment><USER6> Branded products having recipes on the label has been a marketing staple in America for a long time. Sometimes you could mail them for a little book of recipes all using that specific brand of oil/chocolate/flour/etc.. Quite a few "old family recipes" are something that Grandma got off of a Crisco tin.

<comment><USER7> _> something that Grandma got off of a Crisco tin_

Related – "The Dirty Secret of 'Secret Family Recipes'" on HN a few months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The idea of open source recipes on GitHub is so charming to me.

<comment><USER9> I agree. I especially like the idea of branching recipes, being able to find spicier, sweeter, etc. versions of the main branch.

<comment><USER10> Also pull requests for pork! SCNR.

<comment><USER11> Pulled pork?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to see a salsas repo. There are hundreds (thousands?) of salsas in the Americas. It would be awesome to have them catalogued and to have recipes written. awesome-salsa?

</comment><comment><USER12> Hey everyone! I made the sauce and put it online on Github. I am a fan of fermented food and love cooking. Nice to see all the comments!

</comment><comment><USER13> I visited the Marie Sharp's factory in Belize ~a decade ago, that was a really cool experience. It's an impressively sized business and something of a national pride.

Not to mention, all the sauces are super delicious.

</comment><comment><USER14> Habanero chili is extremely hot but has a sweet, fruity flavor. I haven't tasted piri piri chili, but I'm sure this sauce is delicious. I'm kinda upset the chilis are deseeded, though.

<comment><USER15> I make craft hot sauces, and I stand by deseeding and depithing. If I want heat, I'll use a hotter pepper. Thai birds in particular carry most of the heat in the flesh, for example. The flavor difference from using flesh only is huge.

<comment><USER16> Can you explain this ? Do seeds produce a bad flavour ?

<comment><USER17> It's commonly thought that the seeds are the spiciest part of a chili, which is the impression Matticus_Rex seems to be under. In fact, the heat comes from the white pith (which they mentioned) and ridges around the seeds.

<comment><USER18> The seeds are definitely coated in a sticky juice that is spicy (I've seperated them out and eaten them individually. It's the bitterness that really sucks, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A year ago Cinc was posted as a Show HN [1]. I'm surprised this concept isn't more popular / common.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799111)

</comment><comment><USER20> Need an open source for Cholula sauce :D I replaced my ketchup with that to reduce my calorie count, and save a few $

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting use of github

How do you know Microsoft won't steal your secret sauce?

<comment><USER22> There's nothing to steal, it's open sauce.

<comment> whitexn--g28h Comment of the day!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Aquaself strips are a water hardness test for those who are curious (I had to google it)

<comment><USER24> Water hardness isn't measured from 0-14. Those are pH testing strips (aquaself pH Teststreifen).

<comment><USER23> Yeah, you're probably right.

Most pH strips I've used have only 1 color, I guess you need 4 to measure across the whole range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting to see Github used as a recipe repository. Git does make a lot of sense I guess for recipes.

Personally, I like my chilli sauce to be vinegar based. Kaitaia Fire [1] is my favourite. I'm not sure if you can buy it anywhere outside of Australia and New Zealand though.

[1] [https://kaitaia-fire-ltd.myshopify.com/](https://kaitaia-fire- ltd.myshopify.com/)

<comment><USER26> If you like vinegar-based, try Cholula. I'm really enjoying it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The best foods are fermented. :9

<comment><USER28> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum) ?

Strange how such a wildly popular sauce vanished from the face of the Earth.

<comment><USER29> They still have fermented fish sauce in some parts of Southern Italy. Also, I understand the Thai and other Asian fish sauces are somewhat similar.

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

<comment><USER30> And not just "fish sauces". Fermented fish paste adds richness and body. Even if the fishiness isn't obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For the fermentation aficionados.

People's Republic of Fermentation.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDfUp9XK6kA176NN76_4v...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDfUp9XK6kA176NN76_4vxx983PEGK9q_)

</comment><comment><USER32> This hot sauce looks delicious.

I know some people think it's heavy on the vinegar, but there's nothing wrong with original Tabasco – peppers, vinegar, salt. No modern food additives.

</comment><comment><USER33> Always scared about fermenting things like this. How do I know it has the right culture in it and I won't die?

<comment><USER34> It's really hard to get wrong. The salt kills most of the bad things and the capsaicin and garlic have potent anti-fungal properties which make it especially difficult to mess up. If you remember to turn your ferment once a day or so it'll go very well. (By turn I mean physically mixing the material at the top of the jar down into the depths of the jar and dredging up the stuff at the bottom for a while to sit at the top. This keeps "scum" from forming, but the scum won't kill you and can be safely scraped away without spoiling the batch if it does form.)

<comment><USER34> You could also look at it this way: This technology is thousands of years old and predates refrigeration and most basic sanitation. It's that easy.

<comment><USER35> The pH test reads 6 however, which is out of the safe range afaik.

<comment><USER36> If you look at the color of the top block, it's matching somewhere between 3 and 4. Botulism is avoided if the pH is under 4.6.

The test strip is sitting on 6 but it would have to be darker to have that high a pH.

<comment><USER12> This is the correct reading. I had it at 3-4 as well. The camera also saturates the colors a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Marie Sharp's is the best all around hot sauce I've ever tried, absolutely love this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Newbie question: Are Marie Sharps's sauces fermented? Or is this a variation of the recipe? I was in Belize a few months ago and these sauces are the only things I brought back. Wish I bought more.

<comment><USER12> I am not sure. The reason I mentioned it was more about the ingredients. I really like the use of carrots etc for the mild and earthy sweetness and not having added sugar. Fermentation brings a mild and round acidity, which is not as sharp on the tongue as vinegar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Do you think you'd lose any flavor/goodness if you strained it prior to bottling? If you have made a strained or more finely blended version of this were there any key learnings?

<comment><USER40> A big part of this style of sauce is the chunkiness. We used to make tons of these types of sauces growing up, and some things changed the flavor more than others. Leaving it a bit chunky is best for this style (with carrots/etc), i.m.o.

Straining it changes the flavor the most, in my experience. It filters out the pepper skins, seeds, carrot bits, etc which add a significant portion of the flavor. I find it more astringent and less sweet after straining. At that point, I'd prefer to make "sport peppers" (fermented peppers and garlic left whole while the vinegar solution is used as a sauce).

Blending it to a fine paste seems to have less of an effect on the flavor, but it makes it a lot hotter. I'd assume that's because it releases more of the capsicum in the seeds. It also removes the variability you get with a chunky sauce (e.g. sweet bit, then hot bit). Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion, but I rather like the variability.

<comment><USER40> Hmm... And on a side note, I just realized that the rest of the world does not use the term "sport peppers" the way I do (the exception being a couple of regional brands). I never thought of them as the peppers on a Chicago style hot dog... Today I learned!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Also... With fermented sauces, once you store it, should/could you pasteurize it?

<comment><USER41> You could, but there's really no need. The salt used in the brine brings the PH to a spot which is really inhospitable to bad bugs.

<comment><USER42> Salt doesn't change the PH.

The fermentation produces acid though.

<comment><USER43> True, salinity !== alkalinity

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Very cool. First time I read a recipe on GitHub, too, and it's incredibily efficient without 2 pages of introduction.

</comment><comment><USER45>
       git clone https://github.com/allrecipes/awesome-sauces

Obligatory as I have ADD.

</comment><comment><USER46> How does this taste? Sweet? Sour? I'm a big fan of gochujang because it isn't so tangy.

<comment><USER36> Probably a nice tang from the lactic acid and the only sweetness would be residual from the vegetables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why github? You couldn't just use pastebin? It's a recipe! How much collaboration are you expecting to happen? Are you expecting people to file issues about your chili sauce?

<comment><USER48> I don't know why this is flagged. I'm honestly interested. Why not a bunch of other things, like Dropbox Paper or Google Docs?

<comment><USER47> I flagged the original submission because I honestly thought it was spam or a joke or something. Perhaps it's a vindictive flag in return.

But yeah, there's not much else to say about a recipe on GitHub aside from the fact _that it is on GitHub_. Am I the only one that finds it strange? Am I taking crazy pills?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Chiles are the vegetable. Chili is the meat and bean stew-like concoction.

<comment><USER50> Possibly in your particular corner of the world - but preferred spellings for Chili/Chilli/Chile vary all over the place.

In fact I imagine the reason you spell the vegetable one way and the recipe the other is that they're both regional variations of the same word from different places too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> That recipe crates the conditions for Botulism which is fatal. You can't store low acid vegetables in air tight containers without boiling them or adding an acid.

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

<comment><USER34> This is incorrect, and why the recipe emphasizes a brine of 5% salt. Botulism cannot survive in saline conditions.

Lacto-fermentation is the oldest means of food preservation aside from cooking and drying. It is used throughout the world for preserving everything from sauerkraut to pickles to kimchi to capers to fish. The garlic and the capsaicin also have antimicrobial properties that prevent especially molds from growing, making this a very easy ferment.

<comment><USER35> The test shows a pH of 6 however.</comment></comment></comment>


Approximating the Sine Function with Quadratics - <AUTHOR> http://datagenetics.com/blog/july12019/index.html <comment><USER3> Nit: modern computers don't have efficient trig functions anymore - <USER2> understanding is that the complexity is so high that the overhead of instruction dispatch isn't significant (which is a big part of the cost for things like sqrt).

It is true that chips do have them: x87 hardware is still present on x86 hardware, even in 64 bit. But x87 is essentially considered completely legacy (Windows-64bit doesn't use it for long double) - no meaningful perf changes in a decade or more (beyond clock improvements I assume)

Then loading the values takes a while as you have to load them onto the x87 stack, which requires conversion to the x87 ieee formats (it is ieee just different bit sizes), which isn't cheap.

And that gets you all the way to being able to use: fcos, fsin, fsincos, ftan, fatan, fexp, fexpm1, and a few other transcendental functions (there's also fprem and fprem1, two slightly different floating point partial remainder functions)

After you've run those instructions, you then have to copy them off the x87 stack, which is also only through memory.

What do you have at that point? Incorrect values. Why? Because the algorithms used in the x87 unit weren't as accurate as they were thought to be, but by that point intel realized that continuing to invest in x87 was no in anyone's interest - using SSE directly was already faster, and accuracy could be corrected without changing hardware.</comment>


EA now has the most downvoted comment of Reddit history - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/ <comment><USER2> In response to:

      Seriously? I paid 80$ to have Vader locked?

The comment is:

> The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment > for unlocking different heroes.

> As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta > and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other > things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily > basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have > challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via > gameplay.

> We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put > forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across > numerous social media outlets.

> Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and > update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was another post which "did the math" a few days ago: unlocking a hero would take around 40 hours of play, modulo a few challenges and other purchases. There was concern about loot boxes and micro transactions affecting gameplay; I feel it's safe to say those concerns were justified.

<comment><USER4> Just ran some very approximate numbers for League of Legends. That's also ~40 hours of play to unlock one new hero, except League gives large bonuses for the first win of the day and lowers prices for old characters as new ones are released. And offers a rotating lineup of free characters to try them out. And frequent missions that speed things up.

So... this $80 game is slightly less accessible than a free game where "access to all characters" was never part of the expectation. That's rough.

<comment><USER5> To make an even harsher comparison, Dota 2 is free, all characters and gamemodes, sans cosmetics.

Since Disney / Starwars is probably in control of cosmetics (No green lightsaber for Vader allowed) the only way for these microtransactions is via these unlocks.

They bundled up the microtransactions / unlocks and built a game around it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off topic but I swore off EA games in the mid-2000s due to customer hostile behaviour. A few years later it was Rockstar due to GTA4 DRM.

It's been really difficult not playing some of the big games, especially GTA5, but I just don't need that kind of stress in my life. Games are supposed to be fun.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Sadly, the big-name publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Zenimax) are all pretty hostile and they've bought the majority of studios, so its _reeeeeally_ hard to avoid them. I try, but sometimes I fail. Sometimes I don't even realise I failed until later. I did buy exclusively indie games for a while, though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here you have the direct link to the post with Downvotes counters: [https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/)

207K when writing this! What a day to be alive!

<comment><USER8> It couldn't matter less, people will still buy the game (and other EA products).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Here another interesting post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cji8a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cji8a/i_work_in_electronic_media_pr_ill_tell_you_what/)

<comment><USER9> > To clarify, you shouldn't feel like EA is "ignoring" you. They aren't. It's > actually worse than them ignoring you.

Impressive. The whole thing is worth reading!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am reminded of _I don 't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right._

[https://www.nku.edu/~turney/prclass/readings/3eras1x.html](https://www.nku.edu/~turney/prclass/readings/3eras1x.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems Reddit is taking measures about?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7cddyo/whats_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7cddyo/whats_going_on_with_ea_and_star_wars_battlefront/dpr49tw/)

<comment><USER11> I went straight to _the_ comment without seeing this one. It seems that they are threatening to ban people for brigading, even though they may never see the warning, and even if they are truly voting accordingly because they agree or disagree with it. That's a bit messed up to me, especially considering they can just lock it. Although, I suppose a reddit ban wouldn't be the worst thing for productivity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood, thanks you for the clarifications. I'm not a Reddit user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does the account have positive karma at this point?

<comment><USER13> It's been years since I've been active on Reddit, but I believe that, unlike HN, comment scores don't affect karma, only submissions.

<comment><USER14> Comment scores do affect karma, but the amount is softcapped. The more downvotes you get, the less each individual downvote counts towards your karma. It doesn't kick in until you're past a handful of downvotes, so a score of -5 will still drop your karma by 5, but a score of -50 won't drop your karma by the full 50.

If a comment is controversial (i.e. it gets both a lot of upvotes and a lot of downvotes) but still negative (e.g. you got 300 downvotes and 200 upvotes), you can even end up gaining karma overall because upvotes aren't softcapped the same way.</comment></comment></comment>


IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers? - <AUTHOR> http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html <comment><USER2> This is why I canceled my membership in IEEE (and ACM). I believe these organizations have gone beyond their stated purpose, and now exist purely to sustain themselves and their monopolies on conferences.

If we just started boycotting them, they'd crumble in no time.

<comment><USER3> _If we just started boycotting them, they'd crumble in no time._

Would that be a good thing? I haven't seen much evidence that IEEE is a no- good parasite. It's a huge leap to go from "gone beyond their stated purpose" and "exist purely to sustain themselves".

Don't forget- the last time your computer performed a floating point op, you benefited from the existence of IEEE (IEEE 754). The last time you used a network adapter, you benefited from the IEEE (IEEE 802.3 & 802.11), and I'm guessing it hasn't been long since you last used said adapter.

<comment><USER4> > Don't forget- the last time your computer performed a floating point op, you > benefited from the existence of IEEE (IEEE 754)

>The last time you used a network adapter, you benefited from the IEEE (IEEE 802.3 & 802.11),

All IEEE is doing here is acting as a standardization committee. IEEE didn't invent floating points or ethernet adapters.

Not everything is standardized by IEEE(in fact very little, if you are talking computers), and stuff will work fine if IEEE is vaporized today. IEEE didn't invent anything, new stuff will keep getting invented, and if need be, some other label will be stuck on them.

<comment><USER3> I know they didn't invent them, but standards are a good thing.

<comment><USER5> We have other standardization entities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So no papers from Princeton?[1]

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3046651>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is ancient (Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005), everyone knows this already, why was it posted suddenly?

<comment><USER8> How are you determining the date?

The page itself has no date which I think is unhelpful and I was going to ask if anyone knew when this was posted.

<comment><USER9> It's in the HTTP headers. Some browsers (such as Firefox) show it in a "page info" dialog.

<comment><USER10> All browsers except Chrome, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is, I think, misleading. There is nothing unusual about IEEE copyright policies. Requiring copyright assignment is standard procedure for academic journals, with exceptions made for U.S. govt. works. As noted in the last paragraph, the American Mathematical Society bucks the trend (they "suggest", rather than require, copyright assignment), but they are a rarity.

Other than that, we have one person (the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager) who misunderstands the law and does not behave in a very friendly manner.

The above do not strike me as sufficient reasons for singling out the IEEE for blacklisting. If you want, blacklist everyone who puts publicly funded research behind paywalls. Or blacklist no one. But just the IEEE? That doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER12> Blacklist anyone who stands up for an exploitative policy. If the others wise up soon enough they may never get called on it.

<comment> loup-vaillant In other words, hit the nail that stands out. This feels a bit totalitarian, but it might just work.

<comment><USER12> You need to know why "they" are doing "it". But yeah, if "it" is something "they" can afford to stop, then yes.

IEEE is famous enough it would survive even if this was a small market negative.

It's more problematic with low-end products made by child labor for instance. If they couldn't compete with other child-labor products they'd go out of business. There you need to do a more comprehensive blacklist or you're just swapping the devil you know for the ones you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a very interesting post.

I did not know that authors who are not with the government had tried to put works in the public domain, that are submitted to IEEE. I didn't know this was possible.

I know it certainly is standard policy for government researchers and labs to retain copyright when work is submitted to IEEE (or anywhere).

Sometimes publishers say tough words about how this isn't possible, and you have to sign their copyright form, and you're holding up publication of the work. It's BS. The government copyright people will talk sense into them, and retain copyright so that the work can be distributed openly.

<comment><USER14> Federally commissioned works do not 'retain copyright'. They don't have copyright _at all_ (by law). As such, there is no legal basis for restricting copying of such works. Of course, this includes the IEEE - they can republish all they want, they just can't stop anyone else from republishing, because the copyright never existed in the first place.

<comment><USER13> I produce work as part of an FFRDC. The lawyer-derived boilerplate I must put on my work says (in part) "Copyright 2011".

But, it's OK to republish the work in any way, including as part of a public web site or government report.

I interpreted this as meaning that the government retains copyright, but that may be the wrong legal phrasing. The point is that the work is freely available.

<comment><USER15> Lawyers can make mistakes, however, it might have to do with non-U.S. rights or the rights of incorporated material: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_sta...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government)

<comment><USER13> Thanks, this clears it up. The discrepancy is that I'm a researcher at a national lab, but not an employee of the US government. There are lots of such people.

Thus, copyright does seem to apply to work done by me.

I know from experience that the publication people at my lab will arm-twist to ensure copyright is not retained by an external publisher, like Springer or IEEE, and that the work remains openly available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I applied this logic.. ! My Original paper is with IEEE copyright. But I made that Paper public on my blog with IEEE copyright.

<http://dndcaptcha.blogspot.com/2010/04/textareaid.html>

If a person wants to buy a paper he can buy from IEEE, but a person just want to refer the paper with all details he can freely do so from my Blog website.

I don't know whether its a right approach or not? But I didn't wanted my research to just sit in some Publishers Library.

If we publish more work in public , we get more people involve in to those research work. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is disappointing. It has been hard to find the soft copy of IEEE papers. Now it will be even harder. IEEE is losing it's value among CS people.

Good that most of CS papers are published in ACM conferences, and most of the authors publish a soft copy on their homepages.

Also, more and more CS people are posting their papers on arxiv.org.

</comment><comment><USER18> The ACM recently published an editorial in the CACM explaining the reasons behind this policy.

Here is a brief excerpt:

 _By owning exclusive publication rights to articles, ACM is able to develop salable publication products that sustain its top-quality publishing programs and services; ensure access to organized collections by current and future generations of readers; and invest continuously in new titles and in services like referrer-linking, profiling, and metrics, which serve the community. Furthermore, it allows ACM to efficiently clear rights for the creation, dissemination, and translation of collections of articles that benefit the computing community that would be impossible if individual authors or their heirs had to be contacted for permission. Ownership of copyright allows ACM to pursue cases of plagiarism. The number of these handled has been steadily growing; some 20 cases were handled by ACM in the last year. Having ACM investigate and take action removes this burden from our authors, and ACM is more likely to obtain a satisfactory outcome (for example, having the offending material removed from a repository) than an individual._

Personally, I gladly pay money every year to the ACM and the IEEE, as I feel I get excellent value for it. I don't begrudge them their business model, and I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)

<comment><USER19> Valuable point. I'm not sure if I agree with the "excellent value". However, at least ACM tries to be reasonably fair. Recently they seem to have introduced a clause in the copyright transfer from which allows you to retain copyright for specific figures in your paper. Still a far way from Open Access but way better than all other major publishers. What I really hate about publishers like Elsevier or Springer is that they claim to add value by ensuring only high-quality papers get published. In reality, every major publisher, except ACM, seems to be perfectly happy with publishing a lot of rubbish research.

(My favorite: El Naschie's photo gallery in Elsevier's _Chaos, Solitons and Fractals_ : www.el-naschie.net/bilder/file/Photo-Gallery.pdf)

<comment><USER18> When I look at the quality and quantity of journals in the archives that I get access to for a couple hundred bucks a year, I'm flabbergasted. I only wish there was something similar for the Humanities-- I'd pay in a heartbeat for that.

Elsevier and Springer's pricing, in contrast, is extortionate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seriously can you please answer me, why someone who is so smart to have a Dr. degree or other title would be willing to work for free, or even pay for it??

I really don't understand it, what is special about IEEE. Why do Scientists send their papers or findings to IEEE etc. instead of just publishing it? Seriously, can someone please give me an insightfull answer to this?

If you answer with, nobody has been able to to code system x, that makes IEEE so special and unique, then it's not valid point I think. Because there are enough developers who could pull out a P2P Scientific Document store in a matter of days.

Heck, if someone writes text that he think is valuable and is willing to share it with the public domain, why doesn't he just upload it to say: P2P Networks, Cloudstorages or anything else that helps in this matter?

<comment><USER21> The majority of university research depends on external funding. In order to get funding, you as many published papers in high ranking journals.

You get zero credit for self-published papers, or papers in non-ranked journals.

So a researchers will always look after the highest ranked journal that is likely to publish a particular result. Issues of copyright get no regard and accessibility gets very little. Copyright ownership won't get you funding. Accessibility might get you more citations (which also affects ranking), but most citations come from other University researchers, who have access anyway through their libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Though news to me, be aware this is old news - page published 21 November 2005. Has anything changed since then?

</comment><comment><USER23> I just struggle to understand how IEEE's publication policy contributes to "advancing technological innovation [..] for the benefit of humanity".

IEEE publication policy is nothing but a barrier to innovation.

Shame WikiLeaks / anonymous / whoever couldn't help us all out here.

</comment><comment><USER24> It will take reputable referees from some journal to volunteer their time to judge papers submitted in the public domain.

<comment><USER25> They volunteer their time anyway. They might as well do so for open access journals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This was published 5 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm beginning to doubt the "IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager" has the authority to do what he's doing, and I'm beginning to think this will blow over with an official response from the IEEE saying as much and rescinding this joker's fake 'policy'.

<comment><USER28> What would be the "IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager"'s incentive to act in this manner if not under official order from IEEE to minimize the amount of public domain content?

<comment><USER29> Not everyone acts rationally you know. He could just be an idiot...

<comment><USER30> Somehow, that reminds me of the IEEE-USA amicus brief on software patents:

[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090922030639...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090922030639824)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's obvious that IEEE wouldn't accept such papers. Like any publisher, its business model is based on ownership of copyright. So this is a bit of a tempest in a teacup.

Instead, let me offer a more interesting factoid: to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.

Documents fall in public domain when the owners' copyrights have expired. For the federal government, the expiration is immediate. For everyone else, there is no legal mechanism for hastening a document's copyright expiration. [This is why it's foolish to "put software in the public domain". You haven't actually done anything at all.]

<comment><USER32> 1\. re: Public Domain

Let's see:

a) random person on the internet (SeanLuke) says you can't dedicate your work to Public Domain

b) Creative Commons, which has a staff of lawyers, including very prominent and respected Lawrance Lessig: <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Public_domain>, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain>

2\. re: "obviousness". There's nothing "obvious" about IEEE's greed. The stated goal of IEEE is <http://www.ieee.org/about/index.html>:

"IEEE is the world's largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through IEEE's highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities."

The "obvious" thing, consistent with their stated mission would be to try to disseminate useful information to the largest number of people, like, say, Wikipedia or Khan Academy.

It's sad and shameful that they put profits above "advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity".

<comment><USER33> Bringing up the Creative Commons in this respect is sort of undermining your own argument. CC0[1] is a license acknowledging that, while it may be legally impossible to voluntarily and irrevocably extinguish copyright in works in which copyright naturally subsumes (putting a work into the public domain proper), as is the case in Canada under the _Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42)_ , to the extent possible under law, you make a grant of license _equivalent_ to usage rights for works in the public domain. The results are similar, but the universal grant of license is revocable within the lifetime of the copyright (that is, the license may be withdrawn, and use after the withdrawal that is not ongoing from the period of the license would be subject to explicit grants of license).</comment></comment></comment>


How can we improve our startup? TallStreet.com - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The first thing I wonder when I see sites similar to yours is "How can you stop gaming?" I don't want to invest my time in yet another site like yours when I am fairly confident a competent programmer could write a script in ten minutes that would ruin its reliability.

Other thoughts:

it is a bit overwhelming with all its options

why is network in cents?

Shouldn't results be ordered by score? Why is something with -20% above something with 20%? but below something with 2%? Confusing.

The navigation links (blog/books/etc) should be available everywhere, as it is the navigation options available once you leave the front page are barren.

Think you should have a bit of an explanation about what the trusting you to impact a user's google results means, rather than just doing it if they happen to click there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the concept, but perhaps it could be even clearer somehow.

As willarson says, it seems vulnerable to spam (I'm happy to see that 'squeezed books' is what comes up when you put 'business book summaries' in, though:-)

I'm having trouble signing up, it keeps saying this:

"You have specified an incorrect or inactive email, or an invalid password."

</comment><comment><USER4> I just tried to submit my own page, but then I did not want to register...</comment>


1 month ago I asked HN why you could not like Twitter statuses...now you can - <AUTHOR> http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/now-you-can-%60like%60-stufftwitter_501371.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Here was the original thread - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794196>

There was some great discussion around it from HN members, I wonder if the person who created the plugin read the comments?</comment>


Finlay, Lowe Standing By FAN's Record - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrevestor.com/blog/finlay-lowe-standing-by-fans-record

<comment><USER2> What a brutal deal for startups. The government has got to be able to find a better way to funnel money to startups than through these guys, who charge cash-strapped startups $3k to pitch (!!!) and then take 8% for themselves personally.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some items of note:

1) They tout 2 successful exits out of 22, and feel compelled to say that one of those exits was "1.5 times the organization's initial investment". Seems like lackluster result rather than shining success.

2) They mention Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (a government agency?), that has "contributed $1 million to our organization". If it is a contribution, can this be viewed as another 11% (of the total $9M fund) on top of the 8% fee?</comment>


Nancy Pelosi will net $130K on Facebook call options expiring this week [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2018/20010631.pdf <comment><USER2> I don't get this. I do not think she is being corrupt in any way by why invest/trade on such a high-profile stock (or allow your investment team to trade on such a high-profile stock) when you are arguably the most powerful Democrat in the country? She (and her team) must know that it would create a headline at some point so why not just invest in index funds or general tech index funds?

<comment><AUTHOR> Her husband is a prolific investor so I assume this is all directed by him. Either way I agree, which is why I posted this since it's a pretty bold move for someone so high profile, especially on the progressive side

<comment><USER3> The $FB call buy looks to have done very well, I was more surprised at how much they had put into the $AMZN ones, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah those will be losses...If it closes at $1900 then will have $900k in gains from exercising but it looks like it cost at least $1M

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least it is being reported instead of her using mules!</comment>


Google in Talks to Acquire Fitbit - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-google-owner-alphabet-bid-155004119.html <comment><USER2> I wish Google would stop buying things I'm trying to use. I picked Fitbit as an independent, multiplatform product with great Windows support.

I sold my Nest when Google bought them, and I'm very glad I went that way.

If anyone's curious where I might look next: The makers of Pinebook and the upcoming PinePhone are going to make a $25 Linux smartwatch called PineTime.

</comment><comment><USER3> Time to get a new fitness band; it's only a matter of time before Google turns the service off.</comment>


Over 199,500 Websites Are Still Vulnerable to Heartbleed OpenSSL Bug - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/VulnersCom/status/823799895316463617 <comment><USER2> Don't forget the honeypots out there!</comment>