Myth of the Flat Fee - <AUTHOR> http://www.80beans.com/nl/blog/2011/05/25/myth-of-the-flat-fee

<comment><USER3> Of course this is a good message to send to big clients with big projects who merely "don't get it". On the other hand, there are a _lot_ of small businesses and other clients with very limited means who have maybe $1000-$10000 for a project. Web development is new territory for them, and they have no other way to approach the problem other than to put a fixed- budget stake in the ground, and of course their requirements are going to evolve as they learn.

One of the reasons I joined a startup was because I was sick of working under those conditions, and writing an FU blog post like this is the luxury afforded to those of us who can more or less pick what we want to work on.

That's great, but there is still a pool of small clients who can be profitable, but you have to understand how to work with them:

\- Learn to use off-the-shelf software to build lots of functionality quickly in a predictable fashion (WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine).

\- Charge a flat fee only for something you've done before, and make sure it has padding. It's not unethical (as suggested by another commenter) because this is how you are able to afford a flat fee. You'll be churning out hundreds of these so you need to work the law of averages. This allows you to be a bit accommodating instead of going into conflict mode every single time.

\- Turn your creativity to your own systems. Face it, on a $5000 budget you are not going to do anything revolutionary for a client. You can however build your own systems that you leverage in order to serve a hundred clients better. Do it well enough and you actually build a business that scales better than top creative agencies working on 6-figure budgets.

\- Be customer-service oriented. Face it, someone paying you $1000 a year is just not very important to you and it's easy to let that attitude show. The thing I've found is that small clients actually are more accommodating than big clients as long as treat them with respect. That said...

\- Dump toxic clients. There are always those with unreasonable expectations and no respect for what you do. The worst is when they are sort of borderline stringing you along, but you end up losing time and money over the long haul. How you get rid of them is a matter of tact; maybe you say you are all booked, maybe you raise your rates for them to an exhorbitant level, maybe you just give it to them straight ("I am not profiting from having you as a client"). I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution, but get rid of them you must.

<comment><USER4>
      Learn to use off-the-shelf software to build lots of
      functionality quickly in a predictable fashion
      (WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine)

Bravo. This is the way I look at it: if it has been done before, somebody, somewhere has productized it. If it isn't a full-blown CMS, it's a bundle of Rails plugins and all I'm doing is writing glue code.

If it hasn't been done before, because it's really specific to a client's domain and idiosyncratic processes, it's R&D and we shouldn't pretend we know how to do it with enough rigor to provide a competitive quote.

In many cases, the problem is that it has been done before, buut the client doesn't want to "colour within the lines" and run with the limitations of an existing CMS or other platform, they want a bunch of customizations that have little or no ROI.

The Big Sell in those cases is convincing them to scale back their expectations about customization and live with having the 20% of the features baked into the off-the-shelf system that deliver 80% of the ROI. Even if they want to pay by the hour, it's not a good investment to build what amounts to business chrome.

<comment><USER3> Interesting tangent to this, after doing PHP from 2000 to 2005, I hopped on the Rails bandwagon full-bore and was using it even for small clients. 6 years later I feel that it was a bit self-serving because those old Rails sites are creaky and painful to upgrade—or even to find someone else to work on—compared to my PHP sites from the same era.

Now that I have ample outlet for my creativity I can be a bit more objective and admit that as much as I love Rails, it's a terrible platform for build-it- and-forget-it. Rails shines for core business apps under continuous evolution.

<comment><USER5> What do you consider to be a good "build-it-and-forget-it" platform?

<comment><USER3> PHP, Java, Cobol? It's all relative I suppose.

<comment><USER6> You're recommending COBOL as more maintainable than Rails? I don't know Rails, but I find this very hard to believe.

<comment><USER3> Where did I say maintainable? This is about stability over time.

<comment><USER6> >creaky and painful to upgrade—or even to find someone else to work on

What do you mean by maintenance, if not that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've got myself stuck in a "fixed price" contract, and while the number of features the client's asked for haven't really increased all that much, the depth of interrelation between those features was not at all apparent up front. Throw in agreeing to migrate existing data in to a new data structure without _really_ understanding the nature and complexity of the existing data, and you've got a recipe for a long-overdue project. No one's happy. :/

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah, you can easily bill a month of full-time work for fixing an old app with a busted data model. After that you reach the place where you can sell a change that takes 30 minutes of work for $150 and really do it in 30 minutes, but getting there is expensive...

<comment><USER7> I'm at the point now where the time invested in the project has paid off - <USER2> understand the business problems much better now, and some of the intricate work I did months ago is paying off in spades (basically, having put together a flexible data model up front). Things that might have taken days to do before I can do and redo in minutes or hours. But it's taken way too long to get here, and ultimately this is a one-off - most of the knowledge gained isn't transferable to any other projects directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few large consulting companies in the 90's, Cambridge Technology Partners and Viant, for example, were very successful with this model. They were selling against the $100-200/hr Big 6 type consulting firm so there was plenty of room budget for the "risk" associated with going over the time estimate. The other key to their success was getting the client to agree to pay for an upfront 'spec'ing' phase before bidding on the development work. If you do the spec'ing phase correctly you can give a fairly good bid on development and truly assess what is in scope and what is a change order.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Lies, damned lies, and software development estimates:"

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/06/which-theory-first- evide...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/06/which-theory-first- evidence.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> The flat fee game the OP describes is pretty much standard operating procedure even for big consulting companies like IBM and Accenture. First they agree to a flat fee (sometimes after a bit of requirements exploration) that cuts their margin for error fairly close. Then, after the work has gone down the road a bit, they bury the client under a blizzard of change requests for every last detail that wasn't documented in the initial requirements. The change requests are where the real money is made for consulting companies, especially if they're getting their employees to work unpaid overtime to fulfill the extra requirements.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this statement is extremely poignant, "Because you're looking for a sense of security when you're spending your budget on a web app". I think a big problem is lack of knowledge on the part of the client. Most people just have no idea what it takes to build web apps. $1000 (or even $5000) just doesn't go very far. But without learning and experience on the customer's side, how are they able to bound the project to understand the potential costs?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should maybe have indicated that the clients we're talking to usually have between $20,000 and $70,000 to spend. They employ people who're expected to be experienced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This issue is why I'm not a contractor. I can't deal with estimates because they are always wrong. People claim to understand that, then fly off the handle when it comes up wrong.

Overestimating on purpose isn't the right way either, and not just for ethical reasons. Finishing early makes the client think you cheated them, and actually working the whole time makes you think you cheated yourself. Especially if you end up having underestimated after all.

And changes? Ugh. Clients truly don't understand why X is harder than Y, and they think it should cost the same.

I've been pretty successful in the past at guiding management into solutions that are easy to code and maintain, rather than the nightmare they asked for, but having to explain all that to a new client each time would be too much.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree. It's tiresome to repeat yourself over and over, specially when you know it's also in the clients' best interest to not work with someone who guesses (and therefore often overestimates to be on the safe side). I'm hoping our prospective clients will read this blog post first and then -still- want to contact us. They are the gems you want to work with.

<comment><USER8> To be fair there definitely are people who get burned several times by eLancers and cut-rate web shops in their town and eventually realize that they get what they pay for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazing how often this happens to even large corporations. Sign a very expensive contract with a supplier at a "flat fixed fee", requirements are never detailed enough and always changing. Much better off paying time and materials or create a partnership where both benefit from the outcome</comment>


Ask HN: What should I include in my undergrad software eng course? - <AUTHOR> I musta got a position at my old university in the U.K. Teaching software engineering and id like to ask what HN what you think should be included.<p>It's a team based project course FYI. <comment><USER2> Working with a real software project.

A real job is usually: "here's a pile of code someone else wrote! Have fun!". School homework almost never matches that experience.</comment>


MySpace's Tom Get Hacked? - <AUTHOR> http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=306246670 <comment><AUTHOR> The profile is a fake. It's meant to look like the real one, but it's all human-generated content. All of the top friends links point to MySpace's special link catching program, and if it was a real profile, the links would appear normal because MySpace doesn't block links to or from its own site.

Good fake, though. I should've researched it a little more. The problem is that a lot of people are going to buy it. Oh, well...can't save everyone.

</comment><comment><USER2> tom's real profile is here: <http://myspace.com/tom>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like it... Yikes!</comment>


Microservices Ecosystem Transit Map - <AUTHOR> http://www.nanoscale.io/ecosystem/ <comment><USER2> AWS doesn't do containers? I think that's a mistake.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but they are not so great to use compared to the competition. They also have monitoring through CloudWatch, but again it aint great.

My question is, how did Rancher Labs get on the list, but Hashicorp didn't?

Also, Google deserves a link to specifications with gRPC, IMHO.

<comment><USER4> ECS is _awful_!! Their registry (ECR) is pretty good and painless to set up. But their container service is just beyond atrocious, and not in a "this is a young product" kind of way. I was forced to build on top of ECS earlier this year and absolutely hated it.

<comment><USER5> Any specifics on what was awful? And what did you end up using instead?

<comment><USER4> It not being my project, merely a project that I built, I didn't have the choice to use something else, so I slogged through ECS. So basically, just off the top of my head... AWS sucked all the fun out of Docker. The ECS agent on your ECS nodes has (or had, it might be fixed, but who knows) the nasty habit of randomly becoming unresponsive, and so the ECS agent gets restarted in order to re-establish contact with AWS, which also means that it restarts the Docker daemon. That means all of your containers get restarted. Amazon also funnels you into using a single container type per EC2 instance. It's not impossible to use a single EC2 instance for multiple containers, but if you desire to run multiple instances of one specific kind of container on one node, ECS doesn't make the implementation easy for you at all. ECS also defines entirely new terminology. It's pretty obvious that AWS wanted to add a layer of abstraction so that they can swap out Docker with some other container technology, which is fine, but you're going to be slogging through Amazon's infamously-bad documentation trying to get a handle on their particular wording. Their documentation for ECS is just awful, like it is for almost everything else they make. I am a regular in IRC, and ##aws on Freenode is almost always _totally_ useless. Those are some things I can offer up right now, and I definitely ran into other problems while working with ECS that I can't think of at the moment. It was one blocking problem after another, and I've been doing systems and operations and software engineering for twenty years, and very familiar with Docker's containerization and plenty of other orchestration tools. It was way worse than it should have been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a cute gimmick but I don't think this representation is very useful

<comment><USER7> Yeah - the representation is far from perfect. We had some internal debates on what might be a better visualization, which shows overlap and convergence across the categories, and could also depict related ecosystems and relationships without overwhelming the viewer.

A venn diagram map was one of the alternatives we considered: [https://www.google.com/search?q=venn+diagram+ecosystem+map&e...](https://www.google.com/search?q=venn+diagram+ecosystem+map&espv=2&biw=1292&bih=699&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjego2cjvvPAhUl7IMKHcmLAJ4QsAQIGw#imgrc=R_IGHLPUozpQAM%3A)

We ultimately chose the transit map paradigm based on inspiration from Gartner's implementation of it for the digital marketing ecosystem: [https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/digital- marketin...](https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/digital- marketing/transit-map.jsp)

Would love to know of other visualizations that might work better!</comment></comment>


'Instead of Coronavirus, Hunger Will Kill Us.' A Global Food Crisis Looms - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/world/africa/coronavirus-hunger-crisis.html <comment><USER2> "This hunger crisis, experts say, is global and caused by a multitude of factors [...]: the sudden loss in income for countless millions who were already living hand-to-mouth; the collapse in oil prices;"

Lower oil prices contribute to hunger?

<comment><USER3> From the standpoint of a developing nation which relies on oil as a large chunk of the state's income / portion of the economy, yes</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to design private messaging emoticons? - <AUTHOR>

I have a social networking site that I have coded myself. I have an option there for members to send comments back and forth to each other. I want to enable 'emoticons'; but I am not sure how to do that.. Do I just put some 'special tags' in the comment and then decode while displaying? can someone offer any input on this? <comment><USER2> First off, I heavily advise against emoticons. People are usually perfectly happy with plain-text ones, and some people are avidly against graphical ones. Plus, if you have many triggers for emoticons that aren't immediately obvious, people can become confused when an icon pops up where they weren't expecting one.

That said, implementing said emoticons is a simple task. Assign a list of emoticon codes and image files (eg. ":)" => "smile.gif" and ":D" => "grin.gif") either hardcoded or in a database table depending on your needs, and use a simple search-and-replace function to replace the emoticon code with an image tag of the file. Make sure this is done when the message's body is parsed, and NOT before it gets inserted into the database.

<comment><USER3> sorry but completely wrong: We (geeks on Hacker News) don't like emoticons, the users out there love them

<comment><USER4> Actually I think SomethingAwful's emoticons are awesome, and that place is full of geeks.

<comment><USER5> SomethingAwful is full of geeks in the archaic meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.christian- seiler.de/projekte/php/bbcode/index_en....](http://www.christian- seiler.de/projekte/php/bbcode/index_en.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> look into bbcode or the way msn, yahoo, aim, gmail chat etc. turn character combinations into "emoticons". Depending on your language of choice you will then do a string replace on the character combos for the image it relates to when you display that text.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys. I ended up doing a 'string replace' when displaying the msg content.</comment>


TrueCraft – A free and open-source implementation of Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 - <AUTHOR> https://truecraft.io/ <comment><USER2> Nice to see, I also agree that Minecraft was at its best around this time, the land generation was crazy and interesting, and not so many bells and whistles. If Mojang had not added anything to it, but only polished it at that point, I would have been happy.

I believe I bought Minecraft at beta 1.71 or so, and a second copy shortly after (when it was only $10), one of the best games I have played all-time.

How is this compared to MineTest? MineTest is a bit weird, as they have the same goals, but rely too much on mods and addons, while ignoring the core functionality of the game first.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome</comment>


Show HN: Airlist – A nested outliner with Omnifocus like dates/perspectives - <AUTHOR> https://airlist.app <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm the creator of Airlist.

I think I've tried every todo/task app out there and always had that feeling of "maybe I should make my own". After about a year of tinkering, Airlist is the result.

The website is here: [https://airlist.app](https://airlist.app)

Airlist is a mix between Workflowy (infinite/nested outliner) and Omnifocus (dates, perspectives).

I have always enjoyed using outliners, but they all miss the mark when it comes to dates and filtering/search. Airlist makes it easy add dates (start, due, repeating) and filter with nested AND/OR queries.

Backend is built using Phoenix/Elixir which is an absolute joy to work in. Incredibly fast, and I think I'm in love with functional programming.

Frontend is built with Vue (React never clicked with me).

Just finished a private beta that ran smoothly for several months and is now in public beta. You can easily import OPML and all your data is exportable in OPML, Markdown, or HTML. Right now you need an account to try, but to see it in action you can view a bunch of videos here: [https://airlist.app/features](https://airlist.app/features)

Would love to hear about what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks very interesting, ima always hesitant to try out something like this though bec if I like it and then you decide to go in another direction I feel left in the lurch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely understand, it is very easy to export all your data in multiple formats (markdown, HTML, OPML) if you do decide to try.</comment></comment>


Apple fears the killer app - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2010/06/apple-fears-killer-app.html

<comment><USER2> This seems a well argued point; but when you break it down not so much,.

First off I think it does something of a disservice to Jobs - because if the theory is true I don't think it fits in with the vision he has.

The thing is that Jobs _does_ have a vision for the iOS platform, and I don't think that is: _They want hundreds of thousands of decent or even mediocre or crappy apps._ In fact as far as I can make out that is exactly what they don't want.

Jobs seems to much prefer the idea of a smaller number of really really classy apps. And that seems (to me anyway) to be reflected in their changes to the developer terms.

To claim the reverse is kind of going against years of Apple branding (clean, classy, slick).

<comment><USER3> I agree. I also think Apple is treating the iOS ecosystem like a video game console rather than a computer. If people looked at the console wars between MS, Sony, and Nintendo and compared their developer agreements to Apple's, they probably wouldn't get so bent out of shape over things.

I know Microsoft has literally spent $millions on AAA titles just to get XBox360 exclusive releases. Somehow we don't get bent out of shape so much just because Halo is Xbox only. I don't see pundits wanting to burn Microsoft at the stake because they bought Bungie.

Yet for some reason, when Apple does something similar, they must be evil.

<comment><USER4> This is not true. The concern people had with Apple is that they were attempting to block content based on how it was originally made, across the board.

No one cares if Apple gets exclusive deals. Good for them is they do. The concern is that Apple tells developers, "if you wrote this game originally in Java then you can't submit it to the app store." Or if your team uses in-house code generators with a DSL then you can't submit it, even if the DSL generates provably the most optimized Obj-C code possible.

Neither MS, nor Sony, nor Nintendo ever made such claims.

<comment><USER5> I wish I could upvote this more than once. Everybody who makes the "video games" analogy totally ignores this.

I remember one video game company talking about the cool Lisp dialect they'd invented for their games that they said was really integral to the project's success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the killer app in mobile are the devices themselves. They're all being sold as a package: web, e-mail, music, video, store, camera, etc. The apps are very important too but my guess is most people are mostly looking at the core functionality of the device. You don't really have to sell people with third party apps anymore though a lack of apps can still be a liability just because it weakens the package. It's not like the old days where hardware was somewhat useless to the average person without killer apps. SmartPhones come packed with a ton of functionality before you ever install a third party app.

To that extent I agree with the author of this article. Apple views third party apps as an accessory. They are going to do everything possible to protect what they think really matters: stability, reliability, good end user experience, easy OS upgrades, easy syncing/backup with iTunes, etc. I don't think there's much evidence to suggest Apple wants to play the Microsoft role and attempt to dominate the applications as well. After more than 3 years Apple has released very few paid applications for iOS and they haven't really undercut third party app makers by integrating a lot of additional features into the OS that would be better served as third party apps. They don't even bundle iBooks on their devices so it exists (more or less) on a level playing field with Kindle and the B&N reader.

<comment><USER7> > _"my guess is most people are mostly looking at the core functionality of > the device."_

Once a device has an exclusive killer app, people start to treat that app as part of the device's core functionality.

Apple views apps as an accessory. Would it trouble them to see consumers begin to treat a third party app as a core system component? The author seems to think so. (He has no evidence, though.)

<comment><USER8> What's keeping Skype/Truphone from becoming the primary outbound call mechanism on the iPhone?

<comment><USER9> Apple eliminating them if that happens?

<comment><USER8> I mean by usage, not executing code. The consequences already occurred: AT&T charging Skype for 3G calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _the truth is users don't really want hundreds of apps, they want one or a small number that are really meaningful._

Funny hearing this from a pundit. For Mac users it was the same argument they were trying to use for years, but the Windows market used its superior numbers to bury Apple and even Linux. You could even say you have a choice of which crappy app you want to use today.

I can guarantee one thing. By, intentionally, excluding Flash they have sealed it's fate. As a developer none of my clients are saying, "I'd like 38% of the mobile market not know I exist". All of them know Flash. All of them have asked for a Flash and Flashless site. Most would rather not pay double for the same thing.

<comment><USER11> Those are two different arguments.

It is true that a small number of apps matter to any given person. That was his point.

But a larger number of apps gives coverage to a greater segment of the populations. This is why Windows still locks people in even though we all use very few programs and we all know it sucks.

For example, I only really use about 6 big programs - browser, Word, Excel, Eclipse, a media player, and SolidWorks. There can be a million other programs in the Windows world, and aside from a few utilities, I'm not using them.

But switch to Mac OS X? I can't. Not completely anyway, because I _need_ SolidWorks. I can't do my job without it. I used Ubuntu almost exclusively for a while, but I could never get rid of that pesky Windows install because I need it for Solidworks.

So at that point, why the pay the premium for a Mac if I'm going to be using crappy Windows on it anyway?

It is not quite the same in the mobile world. There are few big programs (exceptions: browser, primary phone functions like dialer, contacts, email etc), and most of the time they are used by everyone. So # of apps really is a long tail thing. I might want a ski trail map app, or a golf app. Those are small apps that can be on any platform, they're not make it or break kind of apps. We have yet to see a big killer platform specific app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Building a killer app generally has nothing to do with using the hardware, a custom programming language, or any other fancy thing that gets engineers excited. Building a killer app usually means that you identified a common problem and solved it for users in a novel and useful way. I fail to see how any of the admittedly draconian policies in the SDK prevent you from building the next killer app for mobile.

<comment><USER13> That's an easy one ... they can reject your application (it says so in the SDK agreement).

See Google Voice for such an example. Or ask any iPhone developer that's been playing this game for a while ... you would be a fool to drop an app in the App Store with lots of functionality, the more there is to use in your app, the more likely it is to get rejected. That's why people are doing incremental upgrades ... at least if a new version gets rejected, your lost investment isn't that much.

<comment><USER14> And the more frequently you drive in your car the more likely you are to have a fatal accident. The more frequently you fly in an airplane the more likely you are to die in a plane crash.

Many people drive in their cars every single day without dying in an accident, and many people fly nearly every single day for business without ever dying in a fiery accident.

No one hears about the companies doing extremely innovative stuff on the iOS platform because they're not complaining. Look at TapTapTap and the apps they've built and how imaginative and beautiful they are. They've made millions of dollars with just a handful of people working on their apps. Take a look at Smule and the Ocarina app they made that lets you blow into the microphone and play your iPhone like a flute. Really innovative and killer apps that are in the App Store, now, available to purchase.

You can build incredible, mind-blowing, futuristic apps for iOS without getting close to any of the provisions in the Terms and Conditions. The article's main premise is that "killer apps" go beyond what Apple allows you to do with iOS but that's bullshit, anyone can build a killer app with what Apple gives you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it can be said a lot more simply: Apple doesn't want a cross-platform killer app that doesn't have a native interface.

example: no Adobe CS that ignores almost all Apple tech and implements sloppy custom interface widgets

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think what language you use to code an app really makes a difference in how killer your app is. Also this makes no sense because I'm pretty sure apple developers use objective-c, c and c++ to code their apps (look at their job descriptions.) They're pretty powerful languages. I'm pretty sure the operating system you're running was written with c. All the music you listen to was produced with an app written in c and c++. How is this going to prevent awesome apps from being created?

<comment><USER17> The programming language directive was targeted directly at Flash, because Flash itself is a potential killer app. They thought they killed it by just not supporting it in the browser, but then Adobe managed to find a way to resurrect it. So they had to kill it again, this time with a stake through the heart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >>The greatest support for my thesis is that there are not yet any third party companies that have made a huge amount of money on the iPhone.<<

That's his "greatest support" for his thesis? Apple claims to have paid out US$1 billion to developers so far, what about Android Marketplace? During Steve Jobs's WWDC keynote speech, he quoted Theo Gray: "I earned more on sales of The Elements for iPad in the first day than from the past 5 years of Google ads on periodictable.com".

So if going by commercial success is the yardstick, then the App Store is ahead by at least 1825 times.

<comment><USER19> His point stands: he's not talking about the total amount of money everyone has made, but the total amount of money any single company has made.

<comment><USER18> And my point is: there are media reports of individuals and small companies that have made a decent amount of money on the App Store, but there is no simply equivalence that I'm aware of on Android.

If these entities are considered "small potatoes" then the situation is even worse on Android. Glass houses, and all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As long as they continue to improve mobile safari I'll be happy. Performance on it still doesn't match its desktop counterpart but it's definitely getting there.

Only issue of course is little or no access to the hardware. On a desktop you'd have flash to fill in that gap currently. Is it plausible that with HTML5 we'll be able to write native-like apps on an iOS device in a year or two? I don't know. Anyone?

<comment><USER21> I'm not expert here, but I believe the answer is: depends on how many extensions Apple decides to make.

I imagine that there will continue to be a significant feature deficit for quite some time, particularly with regard to lower-level stuff like the camera and accelerometer/gyroscope.

Here's a great article on the native code vs web app question: <http://bit.ly/bwPn6J>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't know what Apple is thinking, but it seems more likely they want as many and as diverse a field of apps as they can get. If some small company comes up with a "killer app," they can buy it and make it part of their brand. This would be a strategy by which they effectively out-source the dev risks of killer apps.

I don't know if that is what Apple is thinking, but that is what I would do.

</comment><comment><USER23> This argument makes no sense. Mobile "killer apps" already exist, I'd say they are Maps, Facebook, YouTube, email and Exchange support. The iPhone has all of these, just like every other smartphone. Apple is under some threat from these apps in that Google or Facebook or Microsoft could pull them, but Apple hasn't avoided them.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a cool idea, but I'm skeptical. This strategy does nothing to prevent the creation of a killer app. All it does is prevent the creation of a killer app _on the iphone_. If we assume that someone somewhere is gonna drop an app- bomb, forcing them to other platforms might not be the best idea.

<comment><USER25> In a parallel universe, when Microsoft released Windows 3.1 they also introduced a certification program requiring that they approve all applications. When NCSA developed Mosaic, Microsoft recognized the long-term danger to the Windows platform that it represented, and rejected it on the grounds of security/privacy/instability/resource consumption/whatever. It was available only on Mac and Unix platforms, and never became mainstream.

This gave Microsoft time to develop their own hypertext platform, one that was deliberately tied to Windows. With great fanfare they released it a few years later, and it was widely adopted. Of course, only Windows machines could serve the documents that it used, and they worked best on Windows clients. The inevitable result was an entrenched Microsoft monopoly and technological stagnation, but hardly anyone complained because to most people the very concept of an alternate OS or browser was meaningless.

If this seems absurd, consider South Korea where IE's monopoly is guaranteed by law: [http://www.mobinode.com/2009/01/16/activex-regulations-in- so...](http://www.mobinode.com/2009/01/16/activex-regulations-in-south-korea- revisited/)

<comment><USER26> To make this parallel universe scenario's Windows 3.1 analogous to "real"-universe c.2010's iOS, you'd need to make parallel-Windows 3.1 have about a quarter of the market rather than having a monopoly on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I tried to look for _why_ Apple would be afraid of a Killer App on its platform in this blog post. I couldn't find a justification for why this might be the case. Did I miss it, or does the article just leave us to assume that "shame" is a compelling reason for it?

<comment><USER28> I thought that was very clear.

"If that killer app vendor decides to support Android more effectively than they support Apple, or if for some reason they decided to drop the iPhone, that one vendor could have a devastating effect on Apple's position in the marketplace"

<comment><USER29> Right. But this could have happened at any point once Android became a legitimate competing platform, and that's where the argument loses steam for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is a pretty badly thought out, and badly composed article. The worst case for apple is that someone builds a 'killer app' that compels people to purchase the device, but it then _doesn't_ get released to the iPhone, but the Android instead.

</comment><comment><USER31> I find this theory really hard to discount and of all the dissent against the app store, it is the most damning to me.

The other things - delays, rejections, draconian rules - those were just risks. I can live with risk. I don't think I can live with a glass ceiling.

</comment><comment><USER32> Maybe its just money. Of the 15000 apps, only a handful make money. Apple could just sell those, preinstalled, and be done. Apple may just think there's not much blood left in that turnip, so who cares about new apps.

</comment><comment><USER33> Pushing all my red buttons like using the term "Lifestyle Business", mentioning _Google_ Voice's non approval and the quality vs quantity discussion makes me very skeptical about this article.

</comment><comment><USER34> killer apps on the iphone

* maps = google

* audio = pandora

both were launch apps, both made the iphone plausible, both, were not designed by apple.

<comment><USER11> Those are good apps. They are not paradigm shifting apps. When he is pointing to killer apps of the past, they literally changed the game in a way nobody saw coming before their launch.

<comment><USER14> Paradigm-shifting app for iPhone: Ocarina by Smule. Didn't break any rules and is easily the most innovative mobile application ever developed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If it's a killer app, it will be regardless of its acceptance onto the iOS platform. The notion that Apple is hegemonic enough to restrict the level of innovation on mobile platforms is silly.

</comment><comment><USER36> Everything does suck because someone submits articles what make no sense whatsoever.

<comment><USER36> Ok, then help me to understand. First is how does Apple keep developers from producing the killer app? Does this imply, that the Killer App™ cannot be produced with Objective-C and without built-in interpreters? If it can, what is the evidence, that Apple did reject such an app, and for what stated reasons? (No, google voice is not a killer app).

Next, Jobs did state three reasons why app can be rejected. App does not be great, they just have to work and don't use private APIs.

Now, if majority of apps in App Store is crap, how does this compare to apps in Android Market which does not have those draconian rules. Are they generally higher quality than apps for iOS?

Then it makes even less sense: how does not allowing the Killer App™ help Apple? They sell boatloads of devices without such an app and would sell even more with it. If someone comes with the brilliant idea author talks about, how does Android having that app available and iOS not help Apple in any way? Where is the sense in this claim?

And finally: there will be no killer app for smartphone. Ever. On any platform. When almost no one owns a computer and you make Visicalc and it sells 700 000 that's an killer app. However there are almost 100 000 000 users of iDevices. They already have the killer apps which could appeal to such an wide audience: mail programs, web browsers.

You can have a killer app for the platform which is smaller than niche your app fits in. There is no niche several hundred millions people wide.

Although I can see some sense in the claim that iOS 4 is an killer app for iDevices.

<comment><USER37> The issues of language interpretation are only indirectly related to the core argument here. I think the core argument is that Apple is staying fuzzy in the rules so they can _strangle_ any budding "killer app" in its teenage years, when the trajectory has become clear but it is not yet "THE REASON TO OWN AN iPHONE!".

Apple is afraid of becoming a client to the killer app owner. Microsoft was afraid of the some thing, which is the root reason behind "DOS isn't done until Lotus doesn't run."

You can't prove there won't be a killer app. Network effects mean something could come from the blue. It doesn't even have to be new, just something that already existed but is incrementally better enough to harness the network effects.

<comment><USER26> _Apple is afraid of becoming a client to the killer app owner. Microsoft was afraid of the some thing, which is the root reason behind "DOS isn't done until Lotus doesn't run."_

Surely Microsoft wasn't afraid of DOS having a killer app — they wanted to allow Excel an uneven playing field against 1-2-3.

<comment><USER37> And why is that? Because they didn't want 1-2-3 to be "the" reason to own a DOS computer, leaving them constrained to support 1-2-3 at the expense of their own loftier ambitions. Such as dominating the office automation market. Your objection is merely a smaller part of the whole picture.

If somebody else owned Office, Microsoft would have to dance to their tune.

One could argue that this is hardly a bad thing in the abstract; what company has total independence? I think some of what you're seeing here is the way that the attitude of the leadership filters down the chain and affects the company profoundly. "An abstract company" may be happy to carve out a niche somewhere and be part of a large ecosystem, but Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison need to be _the winners in control_.

<comment><USER26> An interesting point, well stated. I've always just considered the direct competition between Excel and 1-2-3, but platform control via app control certainly could have factored in too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is not the point. The Blog entry is way off.

Steve very clearly wants to create the best platform possible and does not want any thing holding him back.

(rumor) I have heard that Steve requires final say on circuit boards because he wants to make sure the traces are beautiful.

Other companies behave this way too, and Verizon at 1st did not have android phones because they did not meet their quality expectation.

There are many reasons to have a review process, even if you don't actually review all of the apps. Having such a process requires these independent companies to maybe, just maybe work just a bit harder before they submit it for review. On other phones like android and webos, it's easy to provide patches and they might treat it more like a website where you can always fix it later.

Secondly, Apple is trying to stay ahead in a very competitive market place. With the Evo4 coming out at Google I/O do you think think iPhone4, was a leak or not? Knowing that the iPhone4 had a front facing camera kinda stole the wind from the Evo4 showing that off at Google IO.

3rd, I think they are trying to keep a community together, and communities have languages.

If there is one thing to say about all of this, is that Apple could have been much more diplomatic about all of this and created a PR engine from the start about this process. But, then again, it could just be the typical silicon valley approach, ship it, launch it and fix what's broken. Apple just may not have expected this much back lash on 3.3.1.

<comment><USER38> "I have heard that Steve requires final say on circuit boards because he wants to make sure the traces are beautiful."

This may have been true in the Apple I and Apple II days, but he's mellowed out a lot since then. This kind of extravagance caused a lot of problems for him (it crippled the Mac from developing much since Steve didn't like hard drives or fans, it affected the NeXT cube for the same reasons, and he had the entire NeXT factory repainted multiple times because he didn't like the particular shade of grey they chose).</comment></comment>


Code Quarterly's Interview with Rich Hickey - <AUTHOR> http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ <comment><USER2> I loved this:

> When we drop down to the algorithm level, I think OO can seriously thwart > reuse. In particular, the use of objects to represent simple informational > data is almost criminal in its generation of per-piece-of-information micro- > languages, i.e. the class methods, versus far more powerful, declarative, > and generic methods like relational algebra. Inventing a class with its own > interface to hold a piece of information is like inventing a new language to > write every short story. This is anti-reuse, and, I think, results in an > explosion of code in typical OO applications.

<comment><USER3> I think he has a good point, and as someone who really likes functional languages, I agree with him, but I think there really needs to be a better explanation of functional "patterns" and how to structure large functional programs before it will catch on more.

Also, it's easy to say, "object-oriented programming is bad for reuse," but that's not all OO is for (i.e. encapsulation, etc.).

<comment><USER4> I'd have to go back through the literature, but reuse was not something I heard talked about much at all when I first seriously started doing OO in the 90s.

With that said, reuse with OO today is not in a horrible state, no pun intended. Things can certainly be easier, but I think design is the bigger issue. And the problems I see suffer in functional designs as well as OO designs.

<comment><USER5> _I'd have to go back through the literature, but reuse was not something I heard talked about much at all when I first seriously started doing OO in the 90s._

Maybe it was an '80s thing, but I recall "reusable software components" being touted as the industry savior. OO was _all_ about reuse then.

<comment><USER6> See Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet". If I remember correctly that was one of his hopes for OO...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I liked this quote: > A bad design with a complete test suite is still a bad design.

</comment><comment><USER8> `Rich Hickey dubbed his tendency to spend more time thinking about problems than typing code as "Hammock-Driven Development". ` in the foot notes ;-)

<comment><USER9> He actually gave an entire talk on the subject at Clojure Conj

<http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much to spend reading and how much time to spend in programming exercises / programming for yourself? Now I have a daily job and it's hard for me to find the right equilibrium between learning new techniques and stuff and just creating something new with what I already know.

(I read relentlessly, too; English is not my native language though so sorry for the grammar)

<comment><USER11> It's not about reading, it's about doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not here to convince you otherwise if you dislike reading, but for many it's not as black and white as you present. In fact most of the greatest hackers I've ever met were also among the most voracious readers (Rich Hickey included).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why doesn't Code Quarterly have an RSS?

<comment><USER13> Haven't gotten around to it yet. Definitely on the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was expecting to see some reference to fortress, scala and abcl in order to discriminate what's important about Clojure. An important question: Of those books listed, are there any you think every programmer should read?, yes, Fogus, your book should be read by all programmers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone here use clojure in production? Is it useful in a webapp context? With a SQL DB?

<comment><USER16> A list of some people using Clojure in production here, [http://clojure02.managed.contegix.com/display/community/Cloj...](http://clojure02.managed.contegix.com/display/community/Clojure+Success+Stories)</comment></comment>


The Three Ways of XOR - <AUTHOR> http://horia141.com/three-ways-of-xor.html <comment><USER2> > most programming languages don't have an explicit "logical operator" for it

I guess the author never taught of <boolean> != <boolean>. The only thing to be careful with is that it doesn't implicitly convert arguments to boolean, so expressions like "<boolean> != (flags & Flag)" will go wrong without an explicit conversion "bool(flags & Flag)" or equivalent expression like "((flags & Flag) != 0)".

And let's not forget about the friend, ==. I've more than once seen code like "(a && b) || (!a && !b)".

A similar interesting pattern many don't think of is "bool(a1) + ... + bool(aN) == M" (particularly with M==1) and instead we see unreadable monstrosities :)

<comment><USER3> Is "bool(a1) + ... + bool(aN) == M" not just "a1 || a2...||an"?

<comment><USER4> No, it's true when exactly M are true. "a1 || a2 || ... || an" is true when at least one is true.

The latter is the same as "a1 + ... + an == 1 || a1 + ... + an == 2 || ... || a1 + ... + an == n".

<comment><USER5> So your + operator implicitly casts booleans to an integer type, with false=0 and true=1?

<comment><USER4> What you are saying is the only way I can imagine to interpret what I wrote, if one assumes I was intending to make any sense.

By the way, in Python, bool is a subtype of int (i.e., instanceof(True,int) == True), and True + True == 2. C is the same, and in Javascript booleans are converted to integers for arithmetic operations.

<comment><USER6> > _What you are saying is the only way I can imagine to interpret what I > wrote_

One might imagine it (without experience, or not thinking, of any particular programming language) as being a logical OR on Booleans - which in EE at least is frequently written '+'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very early on in my computing career (nearly 40 years ago now), I remember being blown away when an older IBM Systems 360 programmer showed me how you can swap the values of two variables over WITHOUT using a third placeholder variable by using pure XOR.

I didn't believe him until he showed me. Apparently they used to use it all the time to swap out entire segments of RAM in the S/360 without having to page out to disk or clobber other free RAM segments. It is simply:

      a = a xor b
      b = b xor a
      a = a xor b

Three steps, same as using a placeholder 'c' variable. I think he mentioned on most of the processors of the time, 3 XOR instructions actually worked _faster_ than 3 MOV instructions.

Illustration for the non-believers:

      a = 10010110
      b = 01100011

      a = a xor b

      a = 11110101
      b = 01100011 (unchanged)

      b = b xor a

      a = 11110101 (unchanged)
      b = 10010110

      a = a xor b

      a = 01100011
      b = 10010110

Voila!

<comment><USER8> I have a similar memory from my early days of coding.

I was implementing a toy rc4 cipher. One of the steps in the ciphers involves swapping entries in an arrays of 256 elements. I thought "hey, I'm a 1337 coder, I'm going to use the xor trick".

Except it doesn't work if you're trying to swap something with itself. If you do "a[i] ^= a[j]" and i == j then you're just clearing the entry.

Taught me the valuable lesson that I shouldn't try to be a smartass while writing code and the importance of unit tests.

<comment><USER9> This was the basis of an excellent entry [0] in the 2007 Underhanded C Contest. It had a correct implementation of the RC4 encryption algorithm, except it used the XOR swap, so on average one byte of the pseudorandom state was zeroed every 256 iterations. Eventually, the state is all zeroes, and the encryption just outputs pure plaintext. Best of all, the first few kilobytes of output looks random at first glance.

[0] [http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_16.html](http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_16.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another way to look at XOR - it's an adder (the sum, without the carry)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, surprised this wasn't mentioned; XOR as addition mod 2 (note that they're just talking about XOR here, not bitwise XOR) comes up way more often than it being the most complex binary boolean operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I love about xor is an interesting correspondence between bitwise xor and the outer product of the exterior algebra.

Say we have an N=4 dimensional vector space, and we use binary place values to represent units vector in a basis, like this:

w = 1000

x = 0100

y = 0010

z = 0001

Then a multivector basis could be represented e.g.:

xyz = 0111

xy = 0110

wz = 1001

Now, if ^ is the outer product:

xy^yz = xz ↔ 0110 xor 0011 = 0101.

wx^yz = wxyz ↔ 1100 xor 0011 = 1111.

and so on.

If anyone has more information about this, I'd be really interested in seeing it!

<comment><USER13> Unless you mean something different from the usual multilinear algebra meaning of "exterior algebra", xy^yz is zero. (It contains two y's.) I think that you must actually mean Clifford algebras. (But there are also signs when in characteristic ≠ 2.)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I do mean Clifford algebras. Thanks for the catch. I'll have to study up on the distinction between "outer products" in Clifford algebras and exterior algebras.

<comment><USER14> They are isomorphic as vector spaces (again with characteristic != 2), but their products are not preserved by the isomorphism (unless the Clifford algebra is trivial).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Sadly XOR doesn't appear as an equivalent to NOT, AND and OR, as a logical operator on booleans, being relegated to just a bitewise operator in most programming languages."

Well, in C there's just no need. The main raison d'etre for && and || over & and | is that you can exploit their short circuiting behaviour. A hypothetical ^^ operator wouldn't bring anything extra to the table.

<comment><USER16> The real problem is that you can not short circuit with XOR.

<comment><USER17> You have to evaluate both arguments to a XOR op to know its result. Short circuiting it has no natural meaning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also, 3 XOR gates allows a wire crossing in 2D (where you cannot make a wire crossing with a bridge as that would be 3D)

</comment><comment><USER19> Lovely article, in particular the small but deep excursion into AI history and the AI winter after the publication of Minsky/Papert's "Perceptrons" (though it was 70's, not 80's).

Wonder when the current AI summer will come to an end...

<comment><USER20> I posted this on his site but it needed to be approved. Also, there's actually a comment in the book (I just borrowed my gf's copy) in which they speculate that multilayer networks could be built, but since they only computers they had were .15 MIPS KA-10s (and all the figures in the book were hand drawn) they didn't pursue it.

My guess is it's still early days on the AI boom.

My comment on AI Winter:

Minor correction: Marvin and Seymour's Perceptrons book was published around 1969 and nuked neural nets around there. AI winter set in in the 80s as expert systems and similar crude symbolic systems proved not to be scalable (I was at that AAAI in 1984 and remember that panel well).

Moore's law rescued NNs and is about to rescue symbolic AI as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The last statement in the article is technically a hardware decision (the article says: "As an extra treat, XOR can be considered an imparity function. When its input has an even number of zeros, the output is zero. Otherwise it is one.").

While 2-input XOR behaves as "one or the other but not both", a many-input gate is generally implemented by chaining other XORs and the _chaining_ causes even/odd parity instead of a "must be only one" behavior [1].

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

<comment><USER22> It's not "just an implementation decision"[1], it's a reasonable mathematical definition: for a binary operator OP, we define it's n-parameter version whenever a OP (b OP c) == (a OP b) op c, which is true for XOR but not e.g. for XNOR (F == F) == T is F, but F == (F == T) is T.

[1] and sorry if I'm falling victim to the difficulty of interpreting tone on the internet

<comment><USER23> By symmetry it must be true for XNOR also, and:

      (F == F) == T in fact is T

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The analog xor is also the basis for CDMA. Fascinating stuff if you dig into it.

</comment><comment><USER25> it can also be used to generate simple parity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit#RAID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit#RAID)

<comment><USER26> That is mentioned in the penultimate paragraph.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does MySql/Postgresql + Ruby/Python/Groovy solve 80% of IT problems? - <AUTHOR>

There is much talk of scaling, noSql and functional languages.  I wonder if we are just looking at shining new things and not being pragmatists.<p>Does MySql/Postgresql coupled with dynamically typed languages (Ruby/Python/Groovy) solve 80% of IT problems? <comment><USER2> By the time you run out of steam on a fair sized server with a few slave nodes thrown in you're ticking over at 1M uniques daily, with some work you can stretch that quite a bit further (sharding).

Of course this depends on how much of a load your average user generates.

The database is a bottleneck, sure. But usually you hit other roadblocks on the way up that are a lot harder to solve than how to make your database scale.

To put it in very pragmatic terms, on the web there are currently 1,000 companies with more than 1M uniques daily, if you're going to be one of the lucky 1,000 then you will haver a scaling problem some day. But that scaling problem will be a relatively minor problem, plenty of people have solved that and documented it.

Going noSql is one of the ways of getting around that but there are several ways of achieving that.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, because these things are not "solutions." They are technologies. You apply the right technology to the right situation. It is true that there are technology fads, but the fad technologies are often linked to growing awareness within the industry about the concepts they employ.

For example:

C++ -> Class-based object orientation

Java -> Virtual machines

Rails -> Web frameworks

NoSQL -> Scalability strategies

Erlang, Haskell -> Concurrency strategies

So really, the appropriate way to ask this question is, "are these concepts enough to solve 80% of IT problems?" Once the concepts are available to the mainstream, switching the specific technology is not a huge problem.

It's true that in the process of taking on fads, people tend to lose their way and become zealots, getting stuck on one concept as the end-all be-all, but that's true of most human topics.

I would venture to guess that at this point in time we're actually seeing a whole explosion of concepts thrust into the mainstream from many directions - some aged and well-known to academia, and others the result of front-line efforts.

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends what you mean by the terms "solve" and "IT problems". The things you mention address at best 5% of some of the IT research problems of a decade ago[1] and even if you mean IT problems in the more mundane sense then the answer is still no since a) most of those are really organizational problems and b) new IT problems will appear as soon as your older ones are resolved.

However if the question you're really asking is "can those technologies help me reduce my effort or cost by 80% ?" then thanks to advances in hardware, services and open source in many cases the answer is yes.

1- [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/talks/gra...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/talks/gray_turing_fcrc.pdf)</comment>


What people get wrong about the infamous 1994 McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck <comment><USER2> Trying to save a click: she sued because McD coffee per SOP was notoriously hot at 190F(88C), not she was just so dumb

<comment><USER3> Also she got $20k in medical expenses from the burns and McDonald first offered to pay only $800 which is why she sued and got what she got.</comment></comment>


The Fans Are All Right - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/the_fans_are_all_right/

<comment><USER2> "By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock. "

It was a good run English, a solid four centuries at the top but can't really top a sentence like that so it's all downhill from here. Chinese you've got some big shoes to fill, 祝你好运.

<comment><USER3> Web 2.0 jargon really does sound like a parody of itself. "Microshaft Web 2.0" video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmo1ef7tVso>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The really key underlying point here is that to make a web service that expands its audience beyond people would be likely to read Hacker News, one must consider the needs of other groups, especially those who will find the service useful without many changes, and _reach out to those people_. That it's the fandom community in this case is largely pertinent to Pinboard (and anyone else working on services which might benefit that community), but the wider point has relevance for everyone interested in more paying customers than just web nerds.

<comment><USER5> I agree 100%, but maciej has also found something rare and rather special. A technically savvy group that has a non-technical use case and the ability to clearly articulate their need. Further, their needs are widely applicable to other groups. This does not happen very often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was one of the people that was wondering about the slash fic that was showing up on popular. Quite truthfully I don't mind it, as the popular lists on bookmarking sites are dominated by so much link bait as to be unusable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Man, I love everything about this post. Well written, funny title reference, yeah, but in particular it expresses two ideas that I think are extremely important:

* Hypercard was pretty much the high water mark as far as normal people controlling technology is concerned, and we're still trying to make the web that effective.

* When the strange people doing things you don't understand arrive, you must welcome them, and treat them with respect.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is such a great and fascinating post. Really interesting information and a really positive reaction from a developer.

</comment><comment><USER8> The real mistake is that the founder of Pinboard does run a wrong business. I'm saying this as a Delicious user who uses it for 6 years and lost some bookmarks during the recent retooling. It's bad for running a bookmark website for several years and keeping emphasizing that "we're unsocial and will not be."

maciej, I hope you'll read this; bookmarking has a bright future because it's social and has the enough potential to replace all search engines.

an unsocial bookmarking service is a real example of waste. to me, people who buys your unsocial archiving bookmarking service are not able to type 6 lines of bash scripts to keep their bookmarks in a plain text file. this is what I will do when avos kills delicious. I'll not pay for just archiving website who thinks I'm an idiot enough to buy a poor clone of delicious of 2005.

How can you be proud of selling a clone of an old version of a popular website? Come on!

<comment><USER9> I pay for Pinboard. Am I an idiot? I didn't think I was, but I suppose the jury is always out.

Maciej makes a living off Pinboard. Silly Maciej! He could be betting his company on a 100-1 shot of making $4MM if he'd just get off his ass and talk to the VCs! Don't worry, silly Maciej. When you inevitably fail, because 100-1 is bad odds, there's a comfortable job at any of 50 other startups waiting for you in the valley.

<comment><USER8> You pay for the delicious of 2005. No more comment.

<comment><USER9> You think I'd be better off paying for the Delicious of 2011?

<comment><USER8> it's your choice. I'd pick the honest one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Growth is a Bad Thing - <AUTHOR> http://nickfranc.is/blog/growth Why early stage VC is bad for a SaaS company <comment><USER2> This is a pretty poorly crafted argument.

1\. Phish is popular.

2\. I think Phish wouldn't have succeeded if they grew fast but I have no evidence to support that.

3\. Your startup is just like Phish.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The idea is not articulated.

But let's leave aside the way it's crafted, and look at the core proposal : the article seems to suggest that growing too fast reduce how well the company is perceived, or how efficient it may be.

But as you said, no evidence is provided. It could just be a survivor bias.

Also, considering how people keep talking about "the next big thing" and companies with double digits growth rate, there could even be counter evidence to this claim.

Is it necessary for posters to submit messages containing wild speculations not backed with evidence, or even with some counter evidence ?

I wish it was possible to downvote some articles to reclaim the (collectively) lost time - 10 seconds by thousands of people - or to avoid starting a reasoning on false premises.

I for one enjoy it when I'm told how and why some idea is wrong, and where deadends are. Too bad this can't be done yet on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess it's the difference between making music _then_ getting famous as opposed to making music _because_ you want to be famous. Each lead to totally different approaches (working consistently and making a lot of gigs versus getting a big label to launch you early on). Building a business is the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the title of the blog post should have been "Taking VC money too early is a bad thing". Because truly, at that point your focus has to switch from 'product' to 'profitability'. Overall though, I agree with the sentiments.

<comment><USER6> VCs don't necessarily care about profitability either. They're looking for a liquidity event - either M&A or IPO. Profitability is only useful insofar as it helps achieve the desired liquidity event at maximum valuation. More to the point, large investors cause a short-term growth focus, because they're looking for 5-20x returns over the course of a few years. But as others have said, do you want to be rich, or do you want to be king? If you want to make a great product and are willing to take your time to do it, don't take investor money any more than you must, so you aren't beholden to their interests - because "make a great product" isn't their interest.

<comment><USER7> Very well put. I bootstrapped and provided all of the funding for my company. It was worth the slightly slower growth because it can follow my long term vision and not the short term vision of a VC who is looking for a quick return on their investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think your article is spot on. What a company thinks they are when they start is almost always off-target. It is the time, the hundreds of conversations where you have to explain your value to people who were never going to hire you anyway, the dozens and dozens of times when you think about giving up but stick with it that makes a company well tempered and strong. I think your title is a touch misleading maybe you should add the world "rapid" it is that slow long journey to get clients that is valuable to happen slowly as opposed to the sprint pace where you do very little introspection along the way.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like Help Scout, but I hope they are getting more than ten deals! I also am not a fan of bending over for customers with features as that leads to bad code, badly implemented features, and isn't scalable. If customers aren't liking your roadmap, or vision, sure, think of something else, but don't get into the trap of building new features to get or keep individual customers. I don't think growth is a bad thing in the case you describe, the lack of it is just something to overcome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we are getting more than 10 deals. That was a couple years ago. :-)

We've been very judicious about product decisions regarding customers, that's not really the kind of bending I'm referring to. It's more about the effort involved to get them to your site, onboarded, excited and pulling out their wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Too much growth too early on can be bring up so many issues that aren't core to your business. It forces you to scale out systems that you might not actually need. It introduces tons of support issues. It forces you to recruit quickly to take up slack. These all can be managed, but often it's easier to build a stellar product when you're serving a small cadre of very high- caliber, quality users.

</comment><comment><USER11> In both cases the OP presented, growth is still both "good". Anyway, sorry to be pedantic. The ultimate difference is your end-goal. Do you want to be rich or be a king? <http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html>

Just Bieber is rich and Phish are kings. Growth is necessary and needed for both.

</comment><comment><USER12> In medicine excess growth is called cancer</comment>


Light Table a year ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/04/12/light-table-survey-results/

<comment><AUTHOR> The HN community has been especially supportive. Thanks guys - I hope you'll stick with us. There's a lot of awesome stuff coming.

<comment><USER2> I really hope you see this -> Please please create a 10 min screencast showing how to use light table. May be I'm being utterly dumb and can't find this anywhere, but I've looked for a simple tutorial for Light Table and have not found it. I've downloaded Light Table and haven't figured out how to use it. I actually use Lein for clojurescript development because I could find enough documentation on it to get it running, while I am assuming Light Table is supposed to be much easier to use.

<comment><USER3> I support this idea; but I think said cast should be made when light table is more consumer-ready persay. Perhaps when the dev is satisfied with it being a sublime-text legitimate rival.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very impressed with what I've seen from this project, and I'm truly sorry I missed it's Kickstarter. However, I'd still like to contribute; is there a way to still donate? Folding money into paper airplanes and throwing it in your direction doesn't seem like it would be effective.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see the alpha is available.

Can I find a how-to-use video or blog post somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER6> not that is matters, but will say this again: how about making <http://www.lighttable.com/> _readable/usable_ on something else than 1280px+ screens in a room with optimally tweaked ambiental lighting! Lots of peoples read websites on cheap Android tablets, outside, in full sunlight, you know! (The same used to apply to chris-granger.com and thankfully it's been fixed, but the design-mantra for the whole Lighttable project still seems to be "ugly grays, bad contrast and flat-everything to the point of annoying your eyes out"!)

</comment><comment><USER7> Somebody is currently implementing something similar in Emacs for Emacs Lisp: <https://github.com/Fuco1/litable>

</comment><comment> o0-0o FYI, unreadable on a galaxy nexus.

</comment><comment><USER8> What an amazing project that you have. I am blown away watched the video and installed it right away

</comment><comment><USER9> When does Ruby gets supported?

<comment><USER10> I'd like to know when we can expect a documented language plugin API.</comment></comment>


I'm Giving Cable 6 Months To Live - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/18/cutting-the-cord/

<comment><USER2> He's not calling the death of Cable. He's saying he's paying for cable for 6 more months to see if he wants to keep paying for it.

-yawn-

I realized a while back that I could -buy- the DVDs for my shows and save money over a cable bill. That was when I pulled the plug. I'm quite happy to see Amazon selling VOD now, even if it's a bit more expensive than I want to pay. (It's still cheaper to buy the DVDs, but that's not HD.) It means I get to watch the shows when my friends are, instead of waiting 6 months. It's nice to be in on the conversations.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post, like many right now, angles the 'disruption' against the cable providers towards using Hulu/Apple TV/XBox Live (and Bit Torrent _\- there I said it, seeing as no one else is 'fessing up to using it_ ).

I actually anticipate a bigger disruption beginning to emerge: cutting out the TV out completely. It's such a waste of time and brain power. I'm sure the average HN'er watches far less TV than the national average.

Clay Shirky once said that TV is the modern 'opiate of the masses' in a talk "Gin, TV and cognative surplus" (vidoe: <http://blip.tv/file/855937/>) - it's really worth watching.

<comment><USER3> The problem with this argument is that TV is one of the few mediums that is seeing its usage rate increase. There was a recent survey that made news by claiming that TV had dropped ten percent in the "most important gadget/device in your life" list until people actually looked at the data and noticed that over two years "flat-screen TV" (a separate item on the survey) had risen to 10% on the list... It is hard to make a serious claim that TV is not getting better every year and the fragmenting of the market has brought niche programming that would have been unheard of less than a decade ago. The claim that TV was the new opiate of the masses was made long before Shirky came onto the scene and it will continue to be made long after he is dead. The television landscape is in a state of rapid flux, the delivery mechanism will probably be radically different in ten years, but in thirty years when children need to go to a museum to see what a newspaper looked like they will still be watching TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went without television altogether for quite some time. I have since then experienced both cable and broadcast content. Frankly, I find both services lacking in quality content. The broadcasters seem content on offering mostly reality television shows, legal dramas, and medical dramas. The few comedies that are on can be watched on Hulu. (NOTE: PBS still has good stuff, but its shows can be found all over the Internet). As for cable, since the Discovery Channel stopped showing good science stuff and the History Channel stopped showing history stuff, I see no reason to ever return to cable.

<comment><USER5> Many of the good History documentaries are on Netflix streaming.

After again experiencing cable/broadcast, what was your feeling/experience when vieweing commercials?

<comment><USER4> I usually pay zero attention to commercials. I'm not interested in being sold something while I am trying to relax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whether or not the author of this article is able to cut out Comcast, he's going to be at the mercy of one or another video content intermediary until either football stops making exclusive deals with said intermediaries, or until he decides that broadcasts of current football games aren't must-have content.

I'm not holding my breath for either of those to happen.

<comment><USER5> Slingbox at a friend's house for the football stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Couldn't tell if he was sharpening his sword to do battle, or impale himself.

I have had Comcast for about 2 1/2 years now, paying around $70/month, only for internet. I sometimes use an over-the-air ATSC box for some local channels. Recently got the price dropped to $30/month (strange story).

I have an Xbox 360 that is seldom used for games, mostly a dedicated Netflix device.

Not a sports fan, particularly. But, I do find it interesting when watching cable/satellite tv at a friend's house or bar, somebody is paying to have commercials served to them.

I actually do miss commercials, though not interspersed with the content I am viewing.

I was probably the last guy to find out about the 'Old Spice' commercials.

Not sure why satellite is not an option for this guy, though. Dish network has some pretty cheap plans.

Also, he could get a slingbox and a good friend that would let him install it, maybe pay for the extra cablebox rental.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Not sure why satellite is not an option for this guy, though. Dish network has some pretty cheap plans._

I know the building MG used to live in - it is a modern downtown condo and you cannot install satellite very easily in those. If he is living where I believe he is now living, it's the same issue.

I've heard that the FCC says everyone is entitled to erect a satellite dish if they want but that's useless if you live on the wrong side of a condo building or don't have a balcony. And expect flak from the HOA if you do, esp if it's an up-market condo building.

What happens is cable companies do deals with the building developers to have cable run to each condo ("cable ready") and in return the building agrees not to let anyone install a satellite dish on the roof. Or they do have a communal satellite but it doesn't have an HD-ready LMB, which was the issue in my old condo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slow news day.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup (esp. if you file 1099-MISC) - <AUTHOR>

Might be truer to say, review our startup's 3rd attempt at making something people want enough that we can make money on it. If you need to file 1099-MISC this year or you have in the past, we'd love to know if this is appealing to you, and if everything you have occasion to try works well for you. (You pay nothing until you actually schedule for e-filing.)
Track1099.com e-files your 1099-MISC forms with the IRS and e-delivers them to your recipients. We import from Bill.com, Intacct, RealPage (for property managers), Quick Books Online, and anything that you can get a spreadsheet out of.
http://track1099.com/?ref=hn
Note the various obvious referral tag! Our 'business person' believes that posting about this here is a waste of time (I had to explain that I wasn't signing us up to be 'hacked'), but as the putative UX guy on the team, I'd really appreciate your feedback, and if it turns out to be useful to anyone I'd like to be able to show the business person that we generated some revenue out of it, too.
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---
More details for the interested....
This is the work of a 4-person distributed team composed of 3 contractors and a founder (there's an uninvolved co-founder, too). I'm one of the contractors, but we contractors have a material stake in the success of this product as well.
If you do front-end work, view source on any page with a form (inc. the sign-up) for what is AFAIK a pretty novel take on building web forms. </comment><comment><USER2> My first question is, why am I using you rather than my accountant? My second question is, why aren't you contacting my accountant? :)

I like the design, I don't like some of the conversational tone.

\--- You are super important to us. We answer emails at all hours of the day and night. Really. We'll get you up and running in no time

or

Think about it – 88 cents in stamps, about a buck in envelopes, paper and toner cartridge. Not to mention having to resend the 1099s to those who keep losing them. That's $2 in materials alone, plus another $2 in time and effort. At least. Call it $4 total for one 1099-MISC.

A/B test this:

Save Money

No more stamps, no envelopes, no expensive toner cartridges. No more snail- mailing of 1099s that someone lost.

I've always been told (and experience tells me) that using No on the page reduces conversions. Additionally, the people you are trying to attract, may not understand 'snail-mail'.

Fix this: Refunds are not given if recipient refuses e-delivery.

Even if I had to pay more to get it delivered, you now have me going in to the system to figure out who didn't accept, then exporting that data and printing it myself. Notify me a few days in advance rather than the day before.

Other than that, looks like a pretty solid service. What are some of the tech details? I noticed Amazon ECS - what is the backend running?

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks great, but as stated earlier, the about pages would do well with a signup button/link at the bottom. Another random thing: the logo for the homepage seems to be wider than the rest of the pages - I'm guessing there's some CSS stretching going on.

</comment><comment><USER4> This page needs a call to action.

<https://www.track1099.com/info/learnmore>

Looks great!</comment>


How to Recruit a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronstannard.com/post/2011/08/03/technical-cofounders.aspx

<comment><USER2> "Offer me a decent salary" should be on the top of this list.

If you have a solid, established relationship with somebody technical, and he or she is interested in a startup endeavor, raising the possibility of going into business together is one thing. But if you have to "recruit" a technical co-founder because your social circle is void of competent technical people, the number of potential co-founders who will be eager to jump on board your boat without monetary compensation is probably fairly small.

Let's face it: the kind of person who would make for a good technical co- founder probably doesn't have any shortage of opportunities in today's market. So what's the appeal of a jumping in bed with a complete stranger if all that's on the table is equity and "salary upon funding"? There typically is none, which is why so many of the people trying to find a technical co-founder experience so much angst.

<comment><USER3> There is no surplus of good opportunities for technical folks to co-found something they can believe in. There are plenty of other opportunities of course.

I think the article is solid in that you have to sell the potential technical co-founder that you have a great idea and will add value to the relationship. "decent salary" will get you a contractor for hire, not a co-founder.

You don't have a lot of choice than to network and try your pitch.</comment></comment>


MILA and the future of Theano - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/theano-users/7Poq8BZutbY <comment><USER2> I find myself very impressed with the humility of the group taking a bow at the right time.

This is the crux of the matter it would seem: "Even with the increasing support of external contributions from industry and academia, maintaining an older code base and keeping up with competitors has come in the way of innovation."

Very mature move Theano team, you all did a great job and raised the bar at your peak with the solid innovations that became standard as you identified. Best wishes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

<comment><USER4> " by producing a superior and more robust alternative."

In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win.

Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not in others.

But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive.

And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible power - even with 'we HN readers' who should kind of know better.

<comment><USER5> > Chrome isn't really that much better than others.

The point is that it was much better than the others when it came out. It spurred the competition into actually competing. (If you remember, IE had >80% of the market at the time, and was horrendous.)

<comment><USER6> I don't know why this is being downvoted. I moved to chrome because ff performance was abysmal (and moved back when Chrome's v8 jit kept taking 100% cpu and locking my Linux laptop)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious what will happen with PyMC... incorporate another library? Is there an easily swappable library that does what Theano does?

<comment><USER8> Tensorflow does everything Theano does, but with the backing of the big G. That's basically why Theano is being sunsetted.

<comment><USER9> As I understand it Tensorflow does not handle a large number of variables very well[0], which is the killer feature of NUTS in pymc3. This makes it a bit of a non-starter for pymc3.

[0] [https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc3/issues/1650](https://github.com/pymc- devs/pymc3/issues/1650)

<comment><USER10> That comment states that TensorFlow does not handle a large number of _operations_ well, not a large number of variables. There's a large difference between those statements :). But yes, the general point is correct, especially for models that do not use many matrix multiplications.

<comment><USER9> Oops! Right you are. I just recalled that there was some issue with a large number of <insert important item for MCMC here>. I should have reread the threat before linking it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm actually nostalgic despite not using Theano for all that long. Theano really was groundbreaking and excellent, though, like many, I've moved on. Thanks to the developers!

<comment><USER12> EDIT:

Theano inspired TensorFlow, Pytorch, ect ect. That there are so many imitators is a complement to Theano.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't say I'm not sad to hear this... I've always much preferred the Theano API. IMHO, the way you have to explicitly build the graph in Tensorflow is cumbersome, compared to how it automagically happens behind the scenes in Theano. The code to simply multiply a couple of matrices, for example, reads much nicer in th than tf.

Annyywhoo, better brush up on TensorFlow I guess.

<comment><USER14> You should give PyTorch a try

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First time I've looked up what it is, looks like it's quite useful - I'd imagine the community will keep patching it.

</comment><comment><USER16> RIP

</comment><comment><USER17> I originally misread this as Theranos and thought well duh, but oddly enough Theranos seems to have outlived Theano!

</comment><comment><USER18> Please use the original title ("MILA and the future of Theano").

<comment><USER19> Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.

<comment><USER20> I disagree, the original title is too vague. Perhaps "MILA to stop working on Theano".

<comment><USER19> The original title is less precise, but it's not even remotely inaccurate or even "vague" by any reasonable definition of the term.

If you want to know about the future of Theano, that tells you about it.

If a title is misleading clickbait, then sure, fix it. But if you're making subjective judgment calls about whether you think the level of imprecision is appropriate or not, and so on, that's way over the line.

Again, the original title is 100% appropriate for the post, because it describes exactly what the post lays out. It may not be as precise as you personally want it, but this is how the author chose to package it and that should be respected.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Physicists' model proposes evolutionary role for cancer (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-model-proposes-evolutionary-role-for-cancer-1.16068 <comment><AUTHOR> As paraphrased in the article, Davies's claims appear either misleading or lacking substantive content. (When he says "activating ancient genes" does this just mean "activating genes that are inactive in some cell types but have been strongly preserved because they are used in other cell types"? If so, how is this different than the mainstream understanding of cancer?) However, the best criticism I've been able to find keeps getting bogged down in disputes over terminology, e.g., [http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh- physici...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physicists- again/) .</comment>


Marine Corps Bans Public Display of Confederate Flag - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/us/marine-corps-confederate-flag.html <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of the repeal in 2011's of the US military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (despite John McCain's filibuster), as well as President Truman's 1948 directive to integrate the armed services.

The US military has always been remarkably influential, as we see when important issues of public affairs can be moved by a purely military decision. Perhaps we shouldn't rely on a warrior elite so much? (ex-USAF enlisted here)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to imagine that the US military is the only military in the world that has a history of flying a traitors flag after they defeated them. It makes about as much sense as flying the anarchist's flag while serving in a state military.

I'm wondering as well if the branches use any of the conquered peoples' flags, like various Native American nations. I couldn't find anything on the web about it.

<comment><USER4> One of the poorest imaginable ways to frame the subject.

'First Nations' flags are flown in various capacities all over the world, sometimes related to the local national forces.

Totems, elements of the local culture, flags are more common than not even in Colonial regalia.

Of course, castigation 1/2 of a nation as 'traitors' for seceding from a union is so problematic I wouldn't know where to begin with that.

<comment><USER5> We've been calling the Confederates rebels since the Civil War, and we're not going to stop. Though you could make the legal argument that States have the right to secede, since the Constitution does not expressly forbid it, and any rights not forbidden are left to the States. But we didn't care at the time. Lincoln didn't give a damn about their right to secede, he wanted to preserve the Union. Who can blame him? It was expedient to call them traitors, because you couldn't really motivate people to fight for the cause of abolishing slavery back then. Not large armies of ordinary people, anyway.

So yes, we denied them their right to secede because we didn't care to have the country split in half. I'm glad we did, because they were slavers. Fuck them and their 'states' rights'.

<comment><USER4> Holy camole I'm not making an argument about 'states rights' and definitely not for the 'Confederate Flag' or for the 'South' \- I don't care about any of those things - I'm talking about the term 'Traitor' as historically objective terminology.

<comment><USER6> When has it not been considered treason?

<comment><USER4> So the American revolution was just Treason then, right?

Is how we should plainly describe it in the history books?

And since the movement to abolish slavery in the Empire was already afoot, and slavery was abolished outside the US (within the Empire) shortly after the American revolution - and - George Washington & Co. supported slavery, supported the wide expansion of the slave trade to the point wherein the US was the last place in the 'modern world' to abolish slavery nearly a century later ...

Should we commonly refer to Americans as 'Traitors' and Slavers and ban the Stars and Stripes as well? There are definitely a few who would support that.

History is complicated and has many perspectives. Flags mean different things to different people for different reasons at different times.

Obviously, the Confederate flag is complicated and divisive enough that it shouldn't be used relating to public office especially at the federal level. But to simply imply the Southern states were merely 'Traitors' (as some would have it), would be to use too narrow a lens and misrepresent that part of history. I don't think anyone in 2020 is going to miss out on the act it was largely about slavery.

<comment><USER6> Yes.

Yes. Maybe you wouldn't have misunderstood it.

Which version of the Stars and Stripes?

Sure, flags mean different things to different people.

No, that doesn't make it complicated, it didn't stop other flags from being banned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > It was not immediately clear if the ban would apply to clothing and cars > owned by Marines when they are off base and off duty. The Marine Corps did > not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Ha. The one thing I was curious about that wasn't in the title, and the article doesn't have an answer.

Edit: Now that I'm at multiple downvotes, I'm kind of confused, anyone want to explain? I'm quoting a useful part of the article and making a comment directly about its content and the quality of the journalism, so what's so bad?

<comment><USER3> Nobody likes the flippant attitude, that's why you're getting downvoted.

As for questioning the quality of the journalism, they requested the information from the military and the military chose not to respond. What more do you expect out of them?

If they wanted to speculate in an op-ed, they'd probably write something to the effect that it's very unlikely that the military (or government in general) can restrict citizens from displaying whatever they want off-duty. This is 1st amendment but comes with a strong caveat that it's as long as there's no association with the US military. Basically nothing to suggest the military endorses their speech/beliefs or that the message they are transmitting comes from the military in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meanwhile, a minimum of six states still publicly display variations on flags of the Confederacy as their official state flags. [https://extras.denverpost.com/flags/](https://extras.denverpost.com/flags/)

<comment><USER9> Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi certainly do.

North Carolina's is based their own secessionist flag, not the Confederate flag.

Arkansas's flag is not a variation on the Confederate flag; there is a star that represents the Confederacy, but then there are stars that represent France and Spain as well!

Tennessee's flag is not a variation on a Confederate flag. That page says as much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Commandant's rationale makes sense. One nation, united.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good.</comment>


HP Labs: Algorithm predicts sales, manages supply chain - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_25/b4136044140573_page_2.htm

<comment><USER2> I recently spent a year at HP labs. It was a very interesting place, operating more like an academic department than a software development organization. The staff members worked more or less on what interested them. They would vie for sponsorship of their projects, often doing things in two or three different official groups. Every year the projects would be peer reviewed and sponsorship would be based, more or less, on the results. Of course, if lab management or higher ups liked your project, it didnt matter what your peers thought. The pace was very relaxed compared to a startup, except around the individual's deadline for the submission of a paper.

I suppose the Labs suited the corporate need for innovation. It supplied new ideas that could be factored back into the corporation. But the really disruptive ideas seem to come out of nowhere in the startup scene. Sure, AltaVista came out of Digital Labs, but Digital, the corporation didnt seem to know what to do with it. Then Google came out of nowhere and took over the world.

I had been at HP labs a couple of months when I met Jaap for more than a brief introduction. Afterward I asked the lead researcher for the project I was on who Jaap was. He replied, "Oh, he's your boss." It seems I had 4 bosses: the Architect in charge of implementation, the Business Manager who represented the VP outside of Labs, the Researcher who's project it was, and Jaap who paid me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really interesting, thanks for writing. Any other thoughts? Are you doing a startup now?

<comment><USER2> I've been working for a client on a huge (400K lines) sales/inventory/workflow enterprise management system which was orphaned when the original developer walked away. The origin intent when I started was to spin it off as a separate software company, but the recession has hit the client an they are putting every thing on hold. It's really a shame because it is really at the mezzanine level of financing (released, version 3, real customers), but they dont seem to want to try to raise the money. So I've started looking for another gig.</comment></comment></comment>


Catnip-Scented Flyers Turn Felines Into Mailmen - <AUTHOR> http://www.psfk.com/2014/02/catnip-scented-flyers.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but I'm not so sure that I approve of the mass non- consensual drugging of people's cats.

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly. I have a cat and give him catnip every once in a while. I always have mixed feelings when I see him rolling around on the ground. On the one hand he's in pure ecstasy, but on the other I just drugged my cat.

I'd definitely have some words for any company that drugged my cat without consent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd rather have my cat bring me a dead bird (and I love birds) than flyers; if that happened to me, I would not just ignore it, I would do my part to make it backfire as hard as I can. I have to throw enough unread junk mail away each week as is, you could probably build a little house out of the yearly amount, but using animals for this? For shame. But then again we're already decades past exploiting children, and that's even worse.</comment>


The "Sharing Economy" Is Dead, and We Killed It - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it <comment><USER2> The sharing economy never got started, because, when you get down to it, people don't really like other people or their stuff.

The sharecropper economy which many people, and most of the media confused for the sharing economy, is alive and well because people do like letting other people do things for them.</comment>