Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/how-to-turn-a-job-opening-into-a-dream-job-for-top-talent-14b63f03146d <comment><USER4> What this doesn't talk about enough is work impact -- mentioned yes but doesn't emphasize it. These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better place. I mean, sure, it pays and challenging and whatnot but I miss NowPublic dearly because we made a god damn difference. We ran one of the biggest Katrina missing person boards. We were one of the first "citizen journalism" sites and had photos and reports from places where noone else had. It was amazing. I miss it so badly.

And you know what, I would be open to changing, I am still doing Drupal and I need the money but ... if you are doing something meaningful with Drupal, Elixir or Go and have some part time opening? Let's talk :) Click my username for email address.

<comment><USER5> > These are shitty years and it eats me I am working for an enterprise > gardening their websites instead of literally making the world a better > place.

It's a peculiar quirk of the tech industry that "changing the world through X" is a reasonable expectation. Bus drivers don't wonder how they can make a difference through bus driving. They do their shifts and then go volunteer at the hospital, food bank, homeless shelter, etc.

Point being, you have an urge to help people. Then help people.

Now, you'll obviously add the most value to organizations that need Drupal, but free technical help is usually not "free as in beer" as much as "free as in puppies". Setting up someone with a slick technical solution almost always comes with some required maintenance fees, organizational knowledge, operational costs, etc. That is, it's hard to give away tech in a way that's sustainable. Even tech training has limited use if you're not prepared with next steps for the trainees (college applications, concrete job prospects, immediate personal benefit, etc.).

 _That_ being said, information _can_ be given away effectively, as you learned after Katrina. Maybe some community is just missing certain information presented well. Drupal is great there. Other people are great at writing middleware for CAN buses. They probably have fewer opportunities to apply tech to help humanity than you do. They'd be better off pitching in at Habitat for Humanity, and maybe you would be too, just to start.

<comment><USER6> I worked in a ad agency and people had the same gripes about their role in the society. Helping brand X to get market share from brand Y can feel like a huge waste of one's life .

I'd expect it to be the same for a lot of media industries.

BTW a bus driver physicaly helps people by moving them from A to B. Isn't it one of the most useful job of our society, until driveless cars come along ?

<comment><USER5> I didn't mean to degrade or single out bus drivers. I tried to pick a normal blue collar job. I don't think there's anything wrong, and a lot right, in people just doing a great job with the job they have, whatever it is. I don't really know how to compare:

* getting people to work

* keeping the web pages for N businesses all up and running

...but I do know that if it doesn't feel like enough, there are lots of organizations that need volunteers and donations, often both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People who espouse remote work seem convinced that it's the end-all way to work.

I don't care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don't mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it's okay for me to leave early or come late.

<comment><USER8> My opinion as an employer: Sure, feel free to take your work hours as you like and WFH every once in a while.

Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the employment contract.

<comment><USER5> > Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the > employment contract.

What's the justification for monitoring total hours and not something more directly tied to business success? End users and profit margins (assuming your engineers are salaried) don't care about whether your engineers had consistent 40+ hour work weeks.

<comment><USER9> In my previous company, they has a name to distinguish these two kinds of metrics.

\- Inputs are the things employees can act on easily, like the number of LoC written or the number of features developped.

\- Outputs are related to business success, for example the number of customers, or the revenue.

The key here is to consider the external business environment as a complex machine, in which you put some effort, measured by inputs, and you observe the outputs as a result (reward). Because you don't know how the environment is going to respond, running the activity consists in adjusting the measures of inputs according to previous results, and trying to maximize those.

This is sane for business because executives can focus on maximizing the input metrics, without caring too much about the outputs, and evaluate separately the assumptions they made about the business (e.g. that x number of features requested by customers developped within 1 month increase the userbase).

It kind of looks like a reinforcement learning process actually.

<comment><USER5> > This is sane for business because executives can focus on maximizing the > input metrics, without caring too much about the outputs, and evaluate > separately the assumptions they made about the business...

That's basically the problem right there. If you treat the employees as a giant black box, you don't observe when workplace policies (that might not even work!) get in the way of human decency, let alone helping a diverse group of employees each flourish in their own way.

Employers instead sit around wondering why there aren't enough Latino engineers without even considering a remote work policy that would let engineers live in El Paso, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Miami.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I usually hate posts about top job, top tech talent, etc.

This post was a lot of great stuff. The idea of pairing talented people of different levels is crucial. A senior lead with shit backup can only do so much. The right balance I think can turn two mythical 10x devs into 100x total instead of 20x. Of course, make sure those people are also compatible, as half the 10x devs I know are loners who don't mix well and work best when left alone.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, this post gets a lot of things right IMO.

An idea I've had on 10x developers (or whatever the multiplier..) is not that they can code and solve problems this much faster, but in the _long term_ they steer the code base as a whole in a direction such that the impact is that large. (But of course recognizing this, or being able to compare it to the other would-be ways the code could have gone, is a non-trivial matter :).

<comment><USER5> > An idea I've had on 10x developers... in the long term they steer the code > base...

Agreed. And on the flip side, you can have -10x developers that make all the _wrong_ choices, like inventing and entrenching their own language or crappy framework for reasons of boredom or ego.

I suspect that junior developers are less likely to be net-negative to that degree. Perhaps it's one unarticulated reason employers tend to prefer inexperienced engineers. If the employer can't tell the difference between a 10X and a -10X developer (the guy pitching the UML-based python code generator or the guy who really likes cucumber?), it's typically easier to hire smart people who are still learning and trust your existing technical leaders can get value out of them.

<comment><USER12> And sometimes they invent a framework that hits all the right design points, but junior engineers can't read a book about them or take a class about them, so don't understand and badmouth them as crappy and a result of boredom or ego.

Its hard to invent something, and have it get no traction because nobody else wants to move forward.

I've been at two startups that had frameworks that solved all the problems in the product space, efficiently and nearly perfectly. And failed because as the company grew, new Engineers all clamored for something simpler or something they already knew. They outnumbered the designer with their voices and management steered the company off the rails. It's tragic.

<comment><USER13> This is an incentive alignment problem. Developers want to maximize their human capital since they usually don't have significant capital in the business itself. With experience in all the latest buzzword technologies, they can get good offers elsewhere, or use the leverage to increase their pay. Whereas sinking all their effort into an in-house framework is fantastic for the business in multiple dimensions: it's a custom fit so it's more productive, but it also locks in the employees, reducing their employability elsewhere and BATNA.

I do wonder if incentives can be aligned for things like this, or if it's just a structural problem we need to live with.

<comment><USER5> > Whereas sinking all their effort into an in-house framework is fantastic for > the business in multiple dimensions

Well, it's fantastic until it isn't anyway. Companies _do_ fail, at least fail to own new markets, by being tied down into legacy architectures.

<comment><USER13> I think that's orthogonal. You can fall behind just as easily by not addressing technical debt. Consider how easily it is, particularly in the JS world, to accrue multiple different bits of UI written in different frameworks du jour.

Rewriting stuff is very seldom in the business' interest, but stuff gets out of date at a rate controlled by the ecosystem, not the company.

<comment><USER5> That's a lot to unpack.

Generally speaking, the worst kind of legacy code is the kind that cannot be easily rewritten. That's why I particularly called out custom frameworks and custom languages. Replacing custom service implementations, in comparison, doesn't even count as "replacing stuff" since it's so trivial.

It's not in the company's best interest, generally, to write business-critical things in ways that are hard to replace and/or pivot on. This means that a company needs to account for the whims of "the ecosystem" in both its business plan and in its technical strategy. If it's a huge concern, the profit margins need to stay high enough and customer expectations need to stay flexible enough to mitigate the concern. Also, if "the ecosystem" is a huge concern, technical strategies also need to help mitigate. For example, if you're running the same JS code both client and server side and you're worried about changes in the client-side ecosystem, you might want to think about implementing the backend in something more boring and stable just to mitigate ecosystem risk.

<comment><USER13> The code that you can't afford to rewrite is the code that is hairy with details. The details are some mix of essential and incidental complexity. The ratio is dependent on the degree of fit between your business logic and the framework, the primitives it's built out of, whether it's third-party, custom framework, custom language, whatever. And of course any custom component has its own complexity; it should be additive, but it may still be large. A good fit - an excellent fit - means your business logic is clear, concise, and is operating over abstractions that map directly to the business concepts. A poor fit is speaking haltingly in unidiomatic language, too verbose, aggregating globs of ugly code, losing track of the forest for the trees, etc. But it'll be easier to find average devs who are familiar with the particular style of thicket that ends up coming out. We even have names for the scar tissues that grow around each glob, helping them interface - we call them design patterns.

There's no hard and fast rules, it seems to me. Use a small fraction of lots of different third party bits and pieces and you get a recipe for pain. I'm fairly certain there's no more productive way for engineers to code than to raise the level of their language into their business domain - [http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html) \- but this is the custom framework / language approach. I'm also fairly sure that it's hard to scale an organization around this approach because of the incentive problem when hiring developers. I think it only really works for startups that are composed of a bunch of hackers with decent equity stakes. It doesn't work out for employees, unless the company ends up moving the needle industry wide, like Java or Rust or React, and that's really rare, too rare to bet on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is missing in the article is the word "freelance".

Most of the time within a startup you can see developers stay in the company for ~1 year. Usually they are more willing to find another job than negotiating a salary bump ( which happens to be also mentally easier, since the first action is passive - just reply to a recruiter ).

When I completely switched to freelance gigs, I discovered that I stay in a company for far longer time. It is easier for me to index my price per hour with the market, since I have less bureaucracy with my client ( removes FOMO ). I had the best offers ( company shares + bonuses ) to join various companies than being an employee ( because of the FOMO of the employer that you might leave soon ). And finally I improved my code quality, since you always write your code with having your mind that sooner or later you will be not the code-owner.

Of course having 3 months off to enjoy the summer also makes it more appealing than the 22 vacation days you usually receive ( in Europe ).

Disclaimer - all of this won't work if you are a junior developer. Usually the stronger hands are in your employer then, since your contract can be terminated any day, without any notice.

But hiring a senior developer as a freelancer in your team ( IMHO ) will definitely mean that you will work with a highly motivated person, being there to do the job.

<comment><USER15> "Freelance" has very negative connotations I my book. It brings to mind sites like odesk or whatever it is called now where low quality companies look to find 99 cent an hour talent.

<comment><USER16> Freelance is a desperate student who is working for free to create his portfolio.

You want to call yourself a "contractor", or better "a "consultant"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find the most important thing is the "deal" with the manager. "Here is what I can give you, Here is what I want in return."

Some people want promotability. Some want remote work. Some want new technical challenges. Some flexibility. A manager can't give everything to everyone but they can say, "I can give you all the flexibility you need as long as the servers never go down" or "I can work to promote you in a year if you hit every deadline and do three or four side projects"

That conversation is more important than any perk.

<comment><USER18> I agree 100% EXCEPT for the huge asymmetry in information that exists during that phase of an interview. "Hit every deadline", you would then need to know how aggressive and how frequent those deadlines are. You would have to know how stable the team(s) are because if a team has a deadline and loses the head engineer, well shit.

Negotiating and accepting an offer letter is way too much like gambling. Whether its start-up equity, growth/lifestyle promises of a manager, or hope that office politics won't grind your soul to dust within 3 months, its a huge risk even saying "yes".

<comment><USER17> True. I find this is easier as part of a longer term relationship. There is a gamble, and trust is involved. The one recourse is if they violate your trust, you can leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Senior developer salaries in my local area (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK) are £30k-£40k which is about $42k - $56k USD. On a £40k salary you pay roughly £9,500 in tax. Ive no idea what the tax rate is in America but the difference in salaries between the UK and the US is astounding.

<comment><USER20> The UK mostly pays developers a derisory salary.

Australia seems to pay roughly on a par with the US, or did when I lived there. But most of the UK is dreadful - software folks are paid poorly and treated like drones.

Unfortunately there are enough people that will take the bad salary, have mediocre performance and deliver mediocre software slowly, that a lot of British companies now expect to pay peanuts and get monkeys.

I've found the only way to replicate the money you can get elsewhere is to be a contractor. You can make about double your quoted figure outside London (my experience in the Hampshire/Wiltshire/Dorset region), or triple or more if you land something bank related in London. No idea what might be available in Edinburgh.

<comment><USER21> The contractor premium will get dragged down in a year or two as well - <USER2> Tories are planning on kicking up taxes for them in order to bring in an extra £200 mil.

That will probably lead to an exodus of the experienced developers from the UK. This will not only have a negative effect on UK software houses it will also exacerbate the existing problems with UK government IT projects, which have already have a multibillion-pound problem with failure to deliver and cost overruns as it is.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs are still paying peanuts for their empty central London mansions and big companies are barely paying any corporation taxes.

<comment><USER16> Not so sure. People who've been living here often can't just go back to where they come from. They wouldn't have moved to the UK if the situation in their countries was better.

The effect so far of Brexit is to stop the flood of newcomers, not making establishing people leave. It's good as a developer, less competitors for the same amount of jobs.

<comment><USER21> I get what you're saying, but contractors by their nature tend to be mobile and motivated by pay. This strongly increases the likelihood of an outflow, especially if companies don't react to the extra taxes by raising pay.

The effect is compounded because a) good techies _really_ like to work with other good techies and b) losing most of the good ones also means losing all of the people who can _recognize_ other good techies and hire competently and c) there's a scarcity of mentors too, impeding the ability of junior techies to develop.

The UK is still a tech center in spite of Brexit. For now.

I've worked in markets before where there's a scarcity of high end talent because it all got sucked away elsewhere and software-wise, these environments produced mediocre crap.

<comment><USER16> Contractors are mobile in the sense that they can change company every 3 months.

They stay in the same area. They are not mobile to move themselves and their family across the border periodically.

<comment><USER21> _shrug_ half the ones I know have done precisely that already and I've done it too.

I don't doubt that there will always be _some_ that won't or can't cross a border though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The top thing on the StackOverflow survey was vacation time, but the article hardly touched on it.

We have a 45 days holidays policy for all full time employees. Mind you, this includes public holidays, because we're also 100% remote and it's more fair for everyone if we don't align public holidays to one spot. This also means that if you prefer working over Christmas, and then take time off another time - you can. We also heavily encourage everyone to take their holidays, and you can only transfer up to 5 days from one year to the next, so people use it.

<comment><USER23> Who's "we"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Lots of good ideas in the article - the key is to really stand out.

I take 10 weeks off a year to go travelling - true vacation time, not remote work. I know I can get a 20% raise if I switched companies (I know that because I got an offer), but I stay where I am because i can't imagine going back down to 3 weeks of vacation a year.

<comment><USER21> It's weird that more companies don't offer more vacation as a perk. Offering 40 days instead of 25 means 15 days of foregone work for the company - 6% fewer days worked a year. But, it looks a _lot_ better than a 6% increase in pay on paper.

Moreover, you probably lose much less than that because you'll have better rested, less stressed, probably more productive employees and it will help cut down on employees making themselves critical choke points.

Something to think about the next time you read the phrase "war for talent".

<comment><USER25> From me experience at least in the US there is a moral component to more vacation. The managers I have dealt with acted a little as if wanting more vacation is a moral failing of the person.

<comment><USER26> That's just because the manager is then responsible for the work when people take vacation, so dissuading it as much as possible saves them time and stress personally.

Vacation is a big problem of you're running with just enough people to operate the business, which most are people are one of the most expensive parts of the business. Unless you're not doing anything time sensitive, mission critical, or customer facing, then being on vacation means someone is stretched to cover you.

<comment><USER25> Thinking that everything is time sensitive is often an illusion or management failure in my view. You can't be constantly on the critical path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I loved remote work and did a lot of effort to ensure that we adopt a remote- friendly culture.

However I will never get over the fact that we found some of our engineers ended up doing freelancing work, over-estimating work and basically just slacking around in the freedom of their homes.

I would love to hear if anyone had similar experiences or how they prevent such in remote environments.

<comment><USER28> That is an interesting point. Personally, I think remote work should be freelance work.

<comment><USER29> Are you saying that remote employees should be deprived of full-timer benefits and legal protections, however meager? All because of trust issues that grew out of experience with a bad apple which isn't representative of remote workers in general?

Empirically speaking, effective remote employees are more trustworthy and less prone to organizational politics. I can even tell you why: these people have a system of values outside of work that in turn values their professional activities as something that helps enable this desirable lifestyle. In return, work is treated with diligence and virtue.

I'm sorry that you or the person you're replying to have had a negative experience with remote workers. As usual, a few bad apples don't spoil the whole bunch.

<comment><USER28> I didn't have any bad experiences with remote workers, and I can definitely see how that can work for non-freelancers. Personally, I just think remote and freelance are an ideal combination for independent creatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are people really making these salaries? I mean like mid-level, not god-tier type people.

I don't know if I am stupid or just don't say the right things but are there really mid-level devs not at huge companies making $160k a year? I mostly hang out at startups and it is normally around like 130k for a senior dev.

<comment><USER31> "startups" is the keyword here

<comment><USER16> Emphasis. One MUST stop working for startups to make a living.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really wish we'd start using a term like journeyman to talk about what people insist on calling "senior developers". A person with 3-6 years of experience isn't senior. That's preposterous on its face. Nor is a 3-6 year developer a junior, but we are woefully inept at using meaningful terms for developers.

<comment><USER33> This always makes me sad. 3-6 years of experience, and you are senior. 20 years of experience, and you are too old for the "young and dynamic team". I'm slowly hitting 20 years soon... and even now I have troubles with getting a job. I didn't have the problem when I had 3-6 years of experience.

A surgeon with 3-6 years of experience is usually too inexperienced to operate on her own. 20 years of experience, and you can lead a team of surgeons.

In IT we have some strange cult of inexperience. And this makes me sad.

<comment><USER34> Because you might not fit in "culturally". Which is BS. I've noticed that going to work for many, primarily younger, people is more a social thing than a professional one. I see lots of time spent talking about and focusing on what people did in the 16 or so hours since they last saw each other at work. Mondays are the worst as sometimes an hour or more is blown catching up on what everyone did over the weekend. People and teams are lacking direction and focus. These younger teams need stronger leaders able to focus and re focus the culture and discussions on achieving organizational goals. These "work is social" folks fear those who might make them look bad by focusing on Getting Shit Done rather than focusing on people's personal lives. This isn't to say we shouldn't care about people and their lives outside of work, we should be empathetic, but it shouldn't be what the team gels around.

<comment><USER35> "This should always be a normal Monday" or "This should never be a normal Monday" are both wrong. What matters is that the team is productive.

There's always a give and take, especially with the labor market being tight. All a balance between value_of_happy_employees : value_of_more_work. Because the only thing worse than the current team pissing away time is having to hire a new team...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Most companies don't provide a work environment even half as good as an average home office.

I think remote working may be the first killer app for VR but it would probably require a $3k HMD today to be viable. Most tech companies could easily afford one per worker.

<comment><USER37> Your brain's going to melt if you're going to play VR all day

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Honestly I kind of feel like any company that is offering market rates for remote workers has a bigger problem filtering developer applications than they do finding great engineers. Complete opposite from the hiree perspective vs in a big tech town where everyone is desperate for talent.

Between my last 2 positions I tried looking around at fully remote jobs - <USER3> hours, good pay, good (virtual) environment including codebase - pick 1, maybe 2 if lucky.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder about recommending both remote work _and_ spending quite some time mentoring. How well does remote mentoring actually work?

I was positively influenced by people giving me advice remotely (I don't know if I'd really call it mentoring), but my feeling is that face-to-face works much better.

Any experiences?

<comment><USER40> I had a number of very positive remote only mentors when I was younger and I give them all a large amount of credit for who and where I am now.

Mentorship is important,but I don't think face to face is particularly important. Although I wouldn't rule it out if it was convenient to both parties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _That awkward time when you finish reading the article and you realize with the ad at the last paragraph that it was all just advertising for the author 's service._

<comment><USER41> Most, if not all, of Eric Elliot's writing is just an advertisement for himself. Notice also how most of the references he links are his own articles.</comment></comment>


Charlie Stross, Vernor Vinge and others discuss The Singularity - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/what-i-did-this-weekend.html

<comment><USER2> Also see the following:

<http://hanson.gmu.edu/vc.html>

Featuring:

* Gregory Benford

* David Brin

* Damien Broderick

* Nick Bostrom

* Alexander Chislenko

* Robin Hanson

* Peter McCluskey

* Max More

* Michael Nielsen

* Mitchell Porter

* Anders Sandberg

* Damien Sullivan

* Eliezer Yudkowsky

<comment><USER3> Just a warning since it's not obvious at first glance: That link is over a decade old, and might no longer represent the views of the authors listed. Yudkowsky's contribution notes that it was specifically repudiated in 2001.

<comment><USER4> I was actually a teenager when I wrote my contribution to that. Okay, not an ordinary teenager, but I didn't exactly grow up into an ordinary adult either.

Remember folks, growing up on the Internet is like walking around for the rest of your life with your baby pictures stapled to your forehead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I watched the first bit to find out how Vernor pronounces his last name--turns out the 'e' isn't silent.

</comment><comment><USER6> The sound is really quiet, except for the audience, which is really loud. The audio needs to be run through a compressor, and probably a noise reducer.

<comment><USER7> (Alas: I was trying to record it myself, for podcasting, but due to brain fail my voice recorder was set on "pause" the whole time.)

There was no sound system in that room, hence the poor audio quality.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also Alastair Reynolds and Karl Schroeder - but I ran out of space in the title.</comment>


Show HN: 4chan on the Ethereum blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://davidwong.fr/FiveMedium/ <comment> aaron-lebo I thought it was a mirror of 4chan or something, but it's apparently a (4chan inspired) imageboard. Title is confusing.

Blog link at the bottom of the page is interesting:

[https://cryptologie.net/article/424/writing-a-dapp-for- the-e...](https://cryptologie.net/article/424/writing-a-dapp-for-the-ethereum- block-chain/)

<comment><USER2> They missed a golden opportunity to call it blockchan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I built something similar to this - but as a Twitter clone - at ETHWaterloo a couple of weekends ago. Posting messages this way is relatively expensive - storage on Ethereum isn't cheap. Using contract event logs saves you ~10x the gas cost. Here's the project for anyone interested: [https://github.com/jdjkelly/transponder](https://github.com/jdjkelly/transponder)

The contract itself is simple:

        pragma solidity ^0.4.15;

        contract Transponder {
            address public owner;

            event Squawk(address indexed _author, string _text);

            function Transponder() {
                owner = msg.sender;
        	}

            function squawk(string _text) {
                Squawk(msg.sender, _text);
            }
        }

Others in the thread are questioning why you'd do this in the first place when the alternatives are so much cheaper. Well, censorship resistance for one. All of the major social media platforms openly engage in political censorship.

<comment><USER4> There's a microblogging clone, twister, which works pretty well, but its not on the Eth blockchain

[http://twister.net.co/](http://twister.net.co/)

<comment><USER3> There's actually a full fledged Twitter clone on Ethereum - [http://leeroy.io](http://leeroy.io). The difference is that it uses full- fledged contract storage, so the cost-per-post is ~10x the gas.

My attention has re-oriented towards Whisper instead, which ultimately is the right place for this in the web3 stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Fee to post: 0.001 ethers (0.30 USD)

>Fee to reply: 0.0005 ethers (0.15 USD)

DOA

Blockchain apps are too expensive to operate vs paying for traditional bandwidth and hdd space.

<comment><USER6> This statement is too broad.

Current state of software is only appropriate for some use cases. Email/text messaging (like 4chan) are not practical uses. Financial business logic handling is a great use case.

<comment><USER5> Financial business logic is not a great use case, approximately no one uses it for that. Almost all of the interest in BTC/ETH is driven by speculation and greed, which is a shame as it's a whole new computing paradigm.

<comment><USER7> Speculation and greed is the foundation of all new technology.

      Entrepreneur: 'Hey, look if we boil water it moves this piston'
      Investors: 'We speculate that this may be important in the future, here's money'
      Entrepreneurs: 'I made a steam engine'
      Investors: 'We speculate that this may be important in the future, here's money'
      Entrepreneurs: 'I made a railway system'
      Investors: 'We speculate that this may be important in the future, here's money'

...

<comment><USER8> I do not see greed anywhere in this exchange. Also there's a difference between what people normally describe as investment vs speculation. The first being assuming a growth of value of something useful. The second is making money on the difference in a value, completely ignoring what the value represents. (yeah, the line is a bit fuzzy in practice)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Came across the thread earlier on Reddit and tried it. Pretty much fun. I used real money ($0.30) per post but you can get some Testnet Eth from the Rinkleby faucet(0), switch to Rinkleby on your Metamask plugin(1) and you're good to go. Also with Eth you can lower the gas(fee) all the way down to 0.1 gwei($0.01) and you'd still have impressive confirmation times. Far better than bitcoin at the moment in my modest opinion and Eth isn't even a currency.

(0)[https://faucet.rinkeby.io/](https://faucet.rinkeby.io/)

(1)[https://metamask.io/](https://metamask.io/)

</comment><comment><USER10> So what happens if someone post illegal content to this? As it's on the blockchain it cannot ever be deleted. Plus anyone what stores the Ethereum blockchain (for example to mine or run a node) now has illegal content on their hard drive as well. How will this play out?

<comment><USER11> It calls into question the very idea of "illegal content."

If you think about it, what does it mean that content is illegal? How can you forbid a set of ones and zeroes?

It's a fake idea we've invented, and new technology has a way of forcing us to realize that.

That said, practically, the world will adapt however it adapts. If we can survive the advent of unbreakable encryption, a little trolling won't matter much.

<comment><USER12> > How can you forbid a set of ones and zeroes?

This is like asking, "How can you forbid a set of iron atoms?" in reference to guns.

<comment><USER11> Yes. And that leads straight to the question of morals and ethics, which the courts of every country are built around.

Guns can cause harm. Does information?

If someone photographs your private life and makes it public, that could be called information. But it's not quite the same: That's an action that goes against your will, and it seems quite ethical to let you enforce it.

Yet even still, how do you propose to do that? What happens when a service literally cannot delete the information? And when that service becomes crucial infrastructure, what then?

These are questions that technology is going to force us to address. Pretending that it's naive won't change that. Decentralization is coming.

<comment><USER12> Like information, guns _may_ cause harm. It sounds like you're looking for an absolute definition of illegal. I don't believe that exists given the evolving nature of law and society. Bottom line: information, content, or whatever you want to call it can be illegal, regardless of the elements that make up its physical form. Who is liable in the chain of creation and distribution of the content may be debated.

<comment><USER11> Fine; corrected. I grew up with guns, so I didn't mean anything by it.

To your edit, you're just punting the question. What do you do when the information cannot be removed, and the service is critical infrastructure? What happens when the content is in a decentralized internet that everyone uses, and that everyone receives automatically?

You can punish the uploader, sure. But do you ban the service? You'll take part of your population with it. Most countries seem to agree that banning Bitcoin is a bad idea, for example.

So what do you propose?

<comment><USER12> > So what do you propose?

I'd do what we do with every advancement that challenges are existing paradigms: study it, debate it, and seek out creative and equitable ways to deter the negative externalities. That may involve banning, restricting or regulating services.

> What do you do when the information cannot be removed, and the service is > critical infrastructure? What happens when the content is in a decentralized > internet that everyone uses, and that everyone receives automatically?

Even in this scenario, there is still going to be a common denominator that can be regulated to control illegal content (ISPs for example).

<comment><USER11> _Even in this scenario, there is still going to be a common denominator that can be regulated to control illegal content (ISPs for example)._

Imagine that Bitcoin's genesis block contained an encrypted image. Satoshi today releases the key, and it turns out to be the worst image imaginable. BTC doesn't drop; the price keeps going up over time. What do you do?

If you have an answer, it would be an important one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting!

I think this is the contract: [https://etherchain.org/account/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d140...](https://etherchain.org/account/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c393Dab09ccF#txreceived)

If you look at a transaction hash that transferred nozero ETH to the account, you can see the ASCII encoded post.

<comment><USER14> Etherscan is nice for this: [https://etherscan.io/address/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c...](https://etherscan.io/address/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c393Dab09ccF#code)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if the contract supports a way to pull posts when some shitlord posts CP

<comment><AUTHOR> author here, I posted about publishing the smart contract[1] which might be interesting to some people as I had no idea how much it would cost prior to doing this.

The source code is on etherscan.io[2] so you can check it for yourself, there are no functions that allow me to remove a post by someone. Whatever ends up there will stay there. Images and videos are not hosted on the blockchain though (thank humanity it's already large enough), so there are always ways to get rid of CP. Right now most of the images there are from imgur.

[1]: [https://cryptologie.net/article/425/publishing-my-smart- cont...](https://cryptologie.net/article/425/publishing-my-smart-contract-on- the-main-ethereum-network/)

[2]: [https://etherscan.io/address/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c...](https://etherscan.io/address/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c393Dab09ccF#code)

<comment><USER16> > so there are always ways to get rid of CP

What if the images are hosted in another blockchain-like, censorship-resistant service like IPFS instead of imgur?

<comment><USER17> Then the FBI gets involved, if anyone is willing to host it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> perhaps it would be better to advertise as an "imageboard" or "futaba-style imageboard", or even "4chan clone" etc? since 4chan is not the original website of that style. sure, it is the most popular but to say "4chan on" something gives off a very different message

</comment><comment><USER19> Be aware of goatse in the OP link

<comment><USER20> The internet exists for surprise goatse and cats.

I wonder what the goatse guy is doing right now?

<comment><USER21> Running an ICO.

I'm not kidding.

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne78vd/goatse- cry...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne78vd/goatse- cryptocurrency-launch-dank-memes-ethereum-token-ico)

(Unless you're asking about the guy in the photo, no idea about him. I hope he remains happily married, and ... limber.)

<comment><USER20> Jeez that's a niche currency.

I was wondering about the guy in the photo though.

I imagine he's probably "relaxing" on a yacht from all that internet fame money.

Edit: had to quote "relaxing" because, yeah it's the guy in the pic so who knows.

<comment><USER22> Pretty sure he's still posting new content to one of the more modern porn hosting sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> p-h Hadn't seen Goatse in quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it would make sense (in a lulz way) to run the 4chan clone on one of the Ethereum testnets, instead of the mainnet. It's a lot cheaper, because you're not paying for permanence!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can run it on the Rinkeby test network, just switch to it via your wallet (metamask, mist, ...) and reload the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's a nice proof of concept, but $0.3 for posting seems extremely expensive. In addition, there's no guaranteed visibility unlike creating an ad on any platform, so why would I want to post here? (I'm not trying to complain, I'm curious if I'm missing anything)

<comment><USER25> Could you elaborate on how you mean there's no guaranteed visibility?

<comment><USER24> Why would you pay x > 0$ for posting an image? I think the only reason is if you're somehow advertising something and you expect somehow a return > x.

Block chain could be great, but you also need somehow to guarantee me a level of visibility, like an ad provider does. For example, even the job posts on HN decay slowly in the homepage, guaranteeing a pretty good visibility.

Otherwise the risk is that I post an image, paying, and suddenly other people post and mine disappears immediately.

Again, I'm not 1. complaining about 4chan, and 2. complaining about this as a proof of concept. But this as a real product has no incentive for me to really pay for posting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought that a big appeal to 4chan is that the content will disappear after a few days at most? By using this surely the content will be around forever?

</comment><comment><USER27> Give me the ability to create the contract via a GUI, fund it in real-time, hedge it for me, and transfer funds to USD as the contract executes. Do all that for me and I'll never use another bank or payment processor again.

<comment><USER5> >transfer funds to USD as the contract executes

this can't be done in a contract, you'll need some kind of payment processor to do that

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Free decentralized social networking: Rotonde [https://louis.center/p2p-social-networking/](https://louis.center/p2p-social- networking/)

</comment><comment><USER29> nfsw tag please, just clicked on the link ended up looking at a dudes asshole. :sad_face:</comment>


"I went undercover with a border militia. Here is what I saw." (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer <comment><USER2> Great article. It's pretty obvious to me that 90% of what is happening here is guys who are missing the military structure, adventure and comradeship of serving in the Middle East are meeting up and trying to recreate what they are missing by finding an excuse to be needed. Modern isolated life of sitting alone in houses consuming media is shit for everyone. I'm not saying I endorse what they are about but it's good to build a real understanding of what's happening.

<comment><USER3> You're spot on. It's a weird response to missing that feeling of community, having something bigger than yourself, being with others (in real life) who share your perspectives and speak the same language. I think this will be the disruptive trend of this century: a surprising and profound reorientation to what is real. I think we're all finding that Social Media is not truly social, and that we hate that our devices addict us and have left us feeling strangely empty. Militias are just the more bizarre first wave of what is to come. Fortunes will be made helping people reconnect with what it means to be alive.

<comment><USER4> "Fortunes will be made helping people reconnect with what it means to be alive."

That sends a chill down my spine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have mixed feelings reading an article like this. On the one hand I find it fascinating, and worthwhile to tell the story that these people are out here doing this, in many ways it's crazy, it and people should know about it.

On the other hand I feel like in a lot of ways this story is about confirming people's already entrenched views. Part of that is Mother Jones is hardly agenda-less. The other part is it's problematic to emphasize fringe groups support or dislike of mainstream politicians.</comment>


FBI and NSA Poised to Gain New Surveillance Powers Under Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-29/fbi-and-nsa-poised-to-gain-new-surveillance-powers-under-trump <comment><USER2> I might be way off base in saying this, but I don't find it is simply convenient that FBI played what appears to have been a significant role in getting Trump elected, and will subsequently benefit greatly because of it.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you're too far off base. Seems as though it's politics as usual these days.

However, I do believe surveillance would have continued to expand under HRC, also.

<comment><USER2> What I think they fail to see is their short-sightedness (for short-term gain) is exactly the kind of mindset that appears to have caused the country to be on the cusp of an extremely turbulent time in history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain expanded > surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican- > controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates and some > lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition.

Why didn't these arsehats do anything the past EIGHT YEARS as Obama expanded surveillance!!!???

<comment><USER4> I think they tried quite a few times and partially succeeded with the USA Freedom Act of 2015.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading title. Nothing has actually happened yet, the author is just speculating on what might possibly happen.

<comment><USER6> Are they not "poised" to get new powers?

<comment><USER7> No. The article says Trump's nominees probably want more powers. The only bill under consideration is S.3475 which is being delayed to allow more debate. A more honest title would be "We Hypothesize How Trump Will Be Awful But The Only Evidence We Provide Suggests Spying Powers Might Actually Grow Slower Than Under Obama"

<comment><USER4> Surveillance is run by the executive branch. Without whistleblowers we wouldnt even know it exists. No one is going to say "we are now expanding surveillance on you." I think it's completely fair for journalists to speculate what will be done "poised" based on politicians past statements.

<comment><USER7> Poised doesn't mean "here's some wild ass speculation". Trump Derangement Syndrome doesn't make things true

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Between the UK and US governments, its 'game over' without extraordinary attempts, the type of thing the average person would be unlikely to do you can assume they've penetrated or can penetrate every aspect of your digital life.</comment>


Older Programmers are Faster Programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.webfoot.com/blog/category/programmer-productivity/ <comment><USER2> It does not surprise me that the research is in conflict.

It makes sense that as programmers age they either become better programmers (through experience) OR they stop programming (the bad programmers flux out of the field with time). These two factors combined will tend to make older programmers as a group look better than younger ones.

But there are hypothetical factors that can work against older programmers as well. For example, if the older programmer has not bothered to keep learning new things he will be locked into one domain where his expert skills are useful. This will cause trouble if he ever needs to work on different types of systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Permalink:

<http://www.webfoot.com/blog/2007/06/12/productivity-factors/>

</comment><comment><USER4> hrm. Perhaps someone should send the paper referenced in this post to Zuckerberg, though I doubt it would change his mind.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems correct to me. I am a much better and faster programmer at 32 than I was at 22,

<comment><USER5> I actually have the opposite experience - I'm slower at 26 than I was at 19. Or so it seems, at least - perhaps I'm just taking on more ambitious projects (though if you believe tx, the desktop apps I did at 19 must be much harder than the webapps I'm doing now).

In my experience, raw speed starts out slow when you first learn a language/platform and quickly accelerates as you memorize & internalize the details of your platform. Every master programmer will tell you that the secret to high productivity is being able to keep the whole program in your head at once. I can program as fast as I type as long as I've got all the language syntax, API details, previously-written functions in my head. If I have to look anything up, it slows me down significantly.

But it only takes me about a month or two to reach that level of fluency. After that, it's downhill as new knowledge crowds out working knowledge you need for your day-to-day programming.

I found that my Java productivity took a _major_ hit after I learned Lisp, for instance. Why? Because I kept wanting to use closures every time I had my IDE auto-generate a new Runnable. Because I kept wanting to use closures every time I created a new private class that was only used in one place. Because I kept wishing I had CLOS accessors every time I had my IDE autogenerate getters and setters. I think I spent far more time angsting over how much Java sucked than actually programming Java.

The real benefits of experience seems to be in knowing when _not_ to program something. At my first job, I spent a week rolling my own encryption algorithm for passwords (why oh why did the experienced programmers I was working with not tell me this was a bad idea when I asked?). Now, I'd just reach for a SHA-1 library and one-way hash the passwords instead of trying to bake a reversible algorithm myself. I spent a long time typing up getters and setters for my classes then - now I'd autogenerate them with my IDE, or rearrange my methods so they aren't necessary at all. If I were in a position to use Lisp, I'd use it instead of worrying about how much Java sucked (okay, I use Python for my startup, but the point stands - no Java).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree, grand pas club performs very well :)</comment>


Ask HN: What online sales sites do you use to sell your digital products? - <AUTHOR> Interested to hear what your experience has been with such sites, in terms of convenience (for both seller and buyer), features, plans, payment facilities (for both seller and buyer), integrations with other online services, etc. <comment><AUTHOR> P.S. I can of course search for appropriate phrases, and did, one result was this:

[https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/services-sell-digital- products...](https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/services-sell-digital-products/)

but I am more looking to hear personal experiences of users of such sales sites (mainly as sellers, but also interested in feedback of buyers - <USER2> that either the seller has got feedback from the buyer, or that the seller is also a buyer on the same site).</comment>


A Challenge from Freeman Dyson - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/a-challenge-from-dyson

<comment><USER2> The question Dyson was responding to (What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?) is similar to this very interesting thread:

What's the craziest or weirdest thing in your field that you suspect is true but is not yet supported fully by data?

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1kqtgy/serious_sc...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1kqtgy/serious_scientists_of_reddit_whats_craziest_or/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing. Also worth a read: the other 119 answers to the original EDGE question in 2005.

[http://edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html](http://edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html)

<comment><USER4> I remembered Eric Raymond answering this. (Confession: I remember it because his response struck me as very odd.)

But I don't see his answer on the site any more.

The answer is still on Raymond's site, though. [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" But the assumption that digits in a big power of two occur at random"_

That may not be the best of assumptions, but it doesn't hurt his argument. Benson's law learns us that the initial digits of 2^n tend to be low (empirically, but in this case, also mathematically. See [http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Diaries/Puzzles/2004-...](http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Diaries/Puzzles/2004-09.html)). Less than 8% of powers of two begins with the digit '5'. Also, fewer powers of five begin with an even digit than with an odd digit.

The argument that there _is_ no deep mathematical reason why it has to be true, though, I find more belief than math. We don't know such a reason, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER6> "Benford" not "Benson". :-)

If I were to approach this from the point of view of actual proof, I'd note that the problem is one of representation. In base 2, the result is trivially true since the reverse of all powers of 2 is 1. In base 5, likewise, the reverse of all powers of 5 is 1. Base 10 = 2*5, which may or may not be significant...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about Holacracy? - <AUTHOR>

With companies like Medium and Zappos trying to adopt this type of organization structure (http://holacracy.org/), I'm curious to know what the HN community thinks about this approach. <comment><USER2> The markets doing well so anything will probably look good. Not sure if groups are willing to RIF 10% of their own in a bad econemy.</comment>


The Good Times for Airlines Are Over - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-good-times-for-airlines-are-over <comment><AUTHOR> The best quote from the article:

When humanity comes to the end, as the asteroid hurtles toward the earth, someone will be like "we can put the asteroid on the blockchain with a smart contract, thanks to the power of immutable code." "The last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die," says Chesterton, but that sounds pretty aspirational these days; odds are that the last man left alive will be talking about storing hashed data on the blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER2> "No one is making air travel decisions today based on legroom or free snacks."

I'd like to see numbers on that, if you're traveling now (and buying the ticket) then I guess it is because you have to travel. How does having to travel in the time of coronavirus affect your buying decision? I might think, hey let's pay for the best flight possible.

<comment><USER3> >"No one is making air travel decisions today based on legroom or free snacks."

This is exactly how I make my travel decisions, but I acknowledge that I'm probably in a very small minority.</comment></comment>


PHP: Single Quotes versus Double Quotes - <AUTHOR> http://www.endyourif.com/php-single-quotes-versus-double-quotes/ <comment><USER2> Although I understand that you want something to run faster, preemptive optimization is not always the best solution. It can lead to bad code and to weird behaviour. For example, arrays and especially associative arrays should not go inside double quotes, most of the times (I'm not sure if it's even possible). That way, double quotes are only useful with single variables, meaning that sometimes, even with double quotes, you would need to use concatenation.

And that's not even taking into account sanitation, because with double quotes it's easier to avoid it, and harder to notice.

I prefer choosing one of those types of quotes and sticking to it throughout the code. It makes code more readable and makes it easier to notice bugs and optimization problems.

<comment><USER3> For double quotes you can use curly braces instead of concatenation. $foo = "I like {$hacker['news']}"; depending on how you want it evaluated you can drop the dollar sign on the outside of the curly brackets as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of speed, I tend to use single quotes for keys and double quotes for text. E.g.

'key' => "Hello world"

Sometimes text needs escape characters such as \n or you want to include a variable. Double quotes just make that easier.</comment>


'IBM Is the World's Biggest Patent Troll' - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2493155,00.asp <comment><USER2> IBM has been at it for a long time. It has been notorious for earning through licensing of it's patents [http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2012/01/11/ibms-formula- for-succes...](http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2012/01/11/ibms-formula-for-success- patents-patents-and-more-patents/id=21722/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Tangentially related: my day job involves cleaning up patent data, and IBM can't spell its own name consistently: there are _thousands_ of unique variations of IBM as an assignee name, far dominating all other US and european patent holders.</comment>


Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification - T-A https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01759 <comment><USER2> For anyone who is interested in efficiently classifying text, I can't recommend Vowpal Wabbit[1] (VW) enough. It's blazingly fast and has been used in both production and research. It also has a billion options out of the box for various different set-ups.

Other researchers have noted[2] that with a set of command line flags that vw is almost the same as the system described in the paper, specifically, "vw --ngrams 2 --log_multi [K] --nn 10".

Behind the speed of both methods is use of ngrams^, the feature hashing trick (think Bloom filter except for features) that has been the basis of VW since it began, hierarchical softmax (think finding an item in O(log n) using a balanced binary tree instead of an O(n) array traversal) and using a shallow instead of deep model.

I am still interested in the more detailed insights the team from Facebook AI Research may provide but the initial paper is a little light and they're still in the process of releasing the source code.

^ Illustrating ngrams: "the cat sat on the mat" => "the cat", "cat sat", "sat on", "on the", "the mat" \- you lose complex positional and ordering information but for many text classification tasks that's fine.

[1]: [https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki](https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki)

[2]: [https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/751208719145328640](https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/751208719145328640)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the detailed comment! It's interesting that simple and classical techniques are so competitive for text, but not for images. What do you think is different about text that makes simple methods so effective, or equivalently what is different about images that yields such massive improvements from using convolutional deep neural nets?

<comment><USER4> Imagine looking at an image as a "bag of pixels": shuffle them all up, and look at the resulting image. What do you see? Nothing useful, right?

Now look at a bag-of-words view of a movie review:

        set(['and', 'predecessor,', 'immersive;', 'script,', 'is', 'an', 'engaging', 'as', 'home', 'still', 'its', 'film', 'identity.', 'puts', 'dazzling', 'issues', 'visually', 'colorful', 'While', 'not', 'spin', 'on', 'of', 'while', 'the', 'predictable,'])

It's not certain, but there's definitely a lot more information there.

The predict loop of a linear model works like this (written with sparse vectors, implemented as dictionaries):

        def predict(classes, weights, features):
            scores = {clas: 0 for clas in classes}
            for feature in features:
                for clas, weight in weights[feature].items():
                    scores[clas] += weight
            return max(scores, key=lambda clas: scores[clas])

This function is the same for Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy, linear-kernel SVM, Averaged Perceptron...etc.

All you get to do is attach a weight to each feature, which you'll sum. You can make the features larger or smaller slices of the input, but that's all the structure you get.

Note that linear models have massive disadvantages for speech recognition, too. Linear models don't work very well if you have an analog signal.

<comment><USER5> I think bag of pixels would be more analogous to a bag of characters. A bag of words is more like a bag of SIFT features.

<comment><USER6> Sure but n-gram feature extraction is what, five lines of code? It's a trivial transform compared to SIFT.

If you don't do SIFT manually prior to classification then your NN has to evolve something "similar" in order to work. Which is why it needs to be deep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand why they're doing this on the Yelp/IMDB datasets. Here's the paper they're citing that is doing the same thing with gated neural nets: [http://www.emnlp2015.org/proceedings/EMNLP/pdf/EMNLP167.pdf](http://www.emnlp2015.org/proceedings/EMNLP/pdf/EMNLP167.pdf)

However that paper also has the polar score which is a 2-class classifier - <AUTHOR> star + 2 star vs 3 star + 4 star.

Basically, the rating scores are clearly ordinal, but they're completely disregarding that information as if a 4 is a completely different star review than a 5 in a yelp restaurant review or a 9/10 is different from 8/10 for IMDB review.

More useful estimate of success would be how close they got to real rating and possibly penalize disproportionately when a model gets the rating completely wrong. Something like mean squared error of the final score vs predicted score.

I understand that these are just used to benchmark the algorithms against each other, but why not use something more relevant like a topic classification? That is a real n-classes problem.

General disregard for domain-specific information is very prevalent in machine learning papers and it makes real world applications difficult because real world evaluation metrics are different so classifiers that are marked as inferior in such evaluation might actually be better.

In both of their evaluations, why not try

        F(y) = exp(yj) / sum(exp(yi) for i in range(1, n+1))
        p1 = F(y1)
        pj = F(yj) - F(yj-1), for j ≥ 2

for softmax? In other words, subtract cum prob of previous category.

Or use kappa function?

At least the naive bag of words comparison classifier should have used ordinal logistic regression instead of n-class logistic classifier.

</comment><comment><USER8> How a sequence of words is feeded to non-recurrent network?

<comment><USER9> They represent the sequence as a bag of n-grams, and feed that into the classifier, rather than feeding the sequence directly. The paper basically combines variants on a few old techniques (although a few of the variants are significant and recent), but the interesting result is that they show that put together in the right way and tweaked a little, they're competitive in accuracy with state-of-the-art deep neural network models, at least on some problems, while being much faster to train. Section 2 of the paper, although pretty brief, is where this info is.

<comment><USER10> Specifically the bag of n-grams can be viewed as a very sparse vector with non-zero entries corresponding to the n-grams in the bag. As a result, n-grams not seen during training need to be ignored.</comment></comment></comment>


FJCore source available: Client-side JPEG resizing for Silverlight 2 Beta 2  - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2008/07/13/fjcore-source/ <comment><USER2> A couple of examples of this library being used:

Dynamic raindrops: <http://www.nokola.com/RainDrops/> Image resize & email: <http://fluxcapacity.net/fluxtools/></comment>


FSJ: Why Dell will not bounce back - <AUTHOR> http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-dell-will-not-bounce-back.html

<comment><USER2> Apple's computer business may or may not thrive over the next decade, but beware the false dichotomy where the choice is between Apple thriving or Dell thriving. Dell is in the no-man's land where it actually isn't the cheapest supplier, as FSJ explains so sweetly, it has burned its customer loyalty, and it certainly doesn't have any cachet. And finally, they are at Microsoft's mercy, and the Vista debacle hurt them terribly. They needed an OS that would be a killer app: something that would drive customers to upgrade their hardware just to run Vista.

Without that, where are they going to find explosive growth? Music players? Anybody remember the Bic Lighter^H^H Dell DJ? Flat screen TVs? Selling American PCs to the growing Chinese market?

I can't tell you whether to go long AAPL. But I admire the balls of anyone going long on DELL.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The real genius and power of China lies in its armies of low-cost and brilliant engineers. Seen a Lenovo box lately? Heck of a lot nicer than anything Dell is pooping out from its factory in Round Rock._

Yeah, right. AFAIK all Lenovo engineering and design is done in the same ex- IBM engineering US-based campus and I am personally get scared every time new Thinkpads come out, because when Lenovo transfers engineering to China or/and turns into Dell, there won't be any usable laptops anymore and I'll have to go back to a self-made desktop PC.

Sorry Apple, but your keyboards and touchpads aren't in the same league with <http://kontsevoy.com/ultranav.png> and Dell... let's just say they'll never bounce back.

<comment><USER4> Lenovo is already making the Thinkpads suck. For example, they use shitty LCDs because they have some pride issue buying components from Japan and Korea, and therefore get second-rate LCDs instead. On my T61, there is a slot for an xD card (which my camera uses), but for some reason Lenovo has disabled that reader in hardware. It shows up in Linux, but can't read the media. What the _fuck_?

Anyway, the hardware is solid, but Lenovo is pulling a lot of crap that will probably prevent me from buying another Thinkpad. Dell and Apple both suck for other reasons, unfortunately, making it impossible to get an acceptable laptop. sigh.

<comment><USER5> I've been really pleased with the quality on the Dell XPS line. Comparing it to the new T61 I got for work, the Dell seems better in every way with the exception of the lack of a force mouse in the middle of the keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does it astound anyone else that FSJs analysis is better than 99% of the actual "analysts" out there?

</comment><comment><USER7> "Which brings me to the real difference between Dell and Apple -- simply put, it's me."

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between FSJ and RSJ.

</comment><comment><USER8> they need a hot UMPC or Android Phone to jumpstart the company.

<comment><USER9> Android? Does that even exist? I know I downloaded the SDK like months ago. "Vaporware" comes to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> if you can't beat them, join them?

</comment><comment><USER11> Dell makes cheap functional machines. Apple makes expensive consumerist lifestyle fashion. In the current economic environment Apple is a better short than Dell.

<comment><USER12> apple's "expensive consumerist lifestyle fashion," as you call it, is now the de facto standard hacker machine, used by dhh, the inventor of ruby on rails, by pg himself, and too many others to mention.

<comment><USER3> You're confusing Macs-the-hardware with UNIX they run. Yes, all hackers work on UNIX of some sort. And even then, OSX requires a quite a bit of work to get it up to Linux levels of hacker friendliness.

<comment><USER12> dhh recently switched from a macbook pro to a macbook air. does that sound like somebody who's in it just for the unix underpinnings? i think not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CVE-2019-14899 - Inferring and hijacking VPN-tunneled TCP connections - <AUTHOR> https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q4/122 <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I work at AWS, on Amazon Linux and our VPN products; those aren't impacted by this issue.

The attack that the researchers describe is very impressive, and using traffic analysis and error messages to find the details of an open TCP connection is extremely clever.

Unfortunately a similar approach can be used even more practically to target DNS on the VPN:

[https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2019/12/05/3](https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2019/12/05/3)

Encrypted DNS queries and replies can be profiled by traffic analysis, and the reply "paused", making it easier to ensure that a DNS spoofing attempt will succeed. This is a good reminder that cryptographic protections are best done end to end; DNSSEC does not help with this attack, because it does not protect traffic between the stub resolver and the resolver. It's also a good reminder that traffic analysis is still the most effective threat against network encryption.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712280) got more traction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. I posted it too soon! haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shitty systemd breaking your computer again...</comment>


Fukime - The Mobile Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> http://fukime.com/ <comment><USER2> We now have a serious challenger in the race to one-up MunchOnMe for most face-palmingly bad start-up name.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention the typography choice on the home page even obscures the i.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure they did that on purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The name is hilarious. Probably the only reason I checked out the website. Starting to think that it was done intentionally.

<comment><USER6> It has the same vowel and consonant positions as heroku, too. I wonder how long it will take them to get to the top of a google search for "fukime". Right now it's a deviantART profile. :)

<comment><USER7> The names are Japanese (I don't know if they're actual Japanese words, but they're certainly composed of Japanese characters).

Japanese words/sounds follow a consonant->vowel pattern: FU KI ME (fhoo-key- meh) and HE RO KU (heh-roh-koo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Parse is definitely more versatile and targeted to power-users that don't have time to implement server side ORM, user management, pushes & such. Very high- tech.

Fukime might be more like candy machine for prototyping and developers who want to make things happen quickly and just focus on client development.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looking at the example code :-

      Fukime f = new Fukime("your_app_id","your_app_secret");

      // Count stuff across all your apps.
      f.teller.global.increase("farms");
      f.teller.global.count("farms"); // get global farm counter

How secure is this? Wouldn't the "secret" be stored as plain text in the binary?

<comment><USER10> EDIT: Nevermind, I misunderstood the nature of Fukime. Fukimailife.

<comment><USER9> Even then you could just put a breakpoint in the Fukime constructor and read the raw string?

Heck, even if the authentication step was 100% secure, what's stopping a malicious user from calling _increase("farms")_ on a previously authenticated Fukime object? The Fukime instance is shown to have direct access to "global" variables, so the user wouldn't be limited to screwing with their own data.

This kind of logic belongs server-side (and this obviously isn't a server-side API, because the examples provided are for Android and iOS.)

<comment><USER10> To what end? I guess they could troll your "mobile app installation counter" if they really want to, but so what?

If someone wants to misrepresent how many times they've installed your app, there's nothing you can do about it. (They could just uninstall then reinstall over and over.)

Though... obviously they should only be able to mess with their _own_ statistics, not the global statistics.

<comment><USER9> True that there's nothing terrible they can do when it's just statistics. The obvious solution would be to remove the global variables altogether, so that each user only has their own (from which the global versions are calculated).

That way, if the user was to do stupid things to their own variables, they could just be removed when calculating the global ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like these new hosted services for mobile apps, and believe this niche has huge potential for growth and monetization.

First these services need to convince users to be able to trust them -- to be in for the long run, and to do their job well. For me this assurance is missing on fukime.com -- who are they, why can I trust them and the quality of their product? Which is where I feel parse.com is one big step ahead -- being in the YC batch and having raised more than $1M makes me believe they are all in for it, and that they actually what they are doing!

Sidenote: I find it annoying to be asked to social share in order to get three others to sign up, as a prerequesite for getting into the beta (after entering my email).

</comment><comment><USER12> Great name, uhm...

<comment><USER13> Is it pronounced "fuk eye me" or "fuk eee me"???

<comment><USER14> Following Japanese pronunciation rules, it would be fu-key-may (though like Heroku, it isn't a real Japanese word).

<comment><USER15> Heroku is a Glaswegian-Bovine greeting. Strickly speaking it should be Arighku.

<comment><USER16> Who the heck is _Glaswegian-Bovine_?

<comment><USER15> It's when the fine people of Glasgow (in Scotland) talk to cows.

<comment><USER16> I see. Thanks for educating me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the third mobile cloud platform I've heard about in the last several hours (Parse, Kinvey, Fukime) and it is something that I could definitely use. I am wondering, anyone know which one is the best to use? It may be early since they are all still in beta.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting. The name doesn't bother me at all. At least, it's not as bad as this guy who named his business Comtaste:

<http://www.comtaste.com>

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sure some folks are getting lots of yucks from the name. Can you imagine being in a corporate IT job and trying to justify to management that the next project should be built on their platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fairly certain the corporate version of this product would/will have a different name.

It's actually aimed at script kiddies who want to make cool things ... definitely not the product/branding/anything for people with an IT department.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fukime in the Parse -- it's so Kinvey!

</comment><comment><USER21> The page for Screamer <http://fukime.com/#screamer> says -

With _Sister_ you can:

It was to be s/Sister/Screamer I suppose

<comment><AUTHOR> Oooh, thanks for noticing that. Getting fixed ASAP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder, who's playing with the post title :D he must like fukime, and I bet it's not just because of the cool name :)

</comment><comment><USER22> The name will hold them back.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is so awesome.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is so funny. I like it. +1 for humor. Parse.com just sounds so ordinary.

<comment><USER25> I am literally holding my stomach in laughter. Great name and nice to see founders with a sense of humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> lol I was afraid I had just clicked on a hentai link at first.</comment>


Rovio's new franchise - <AUTHOR> http://teaser.amazingalex.com/

<comment><USER2> The incredible machine redux. Awesome. (TIM was angry birds for the early 90's)</comment>


How to visually organize knowledge and thoughts with webjets.io - <AUTHOR> https://blog.webjets.io/the-best-way-to-organize-your-knowledge-and-thoughts-visually-88cd3c80a1d5 <comment><AUTHOR> Note: I've changed the title in favor of something less clickbaity. I hope this title is reasonable close to the original one.</comment>


Today's Date - <AUTHOR> https://q.ht/todays_date/ <comment><AUTHOR> Plain and simple page that shows just today's date and day-of-week.

I could not find one that was as plain as this; others have ads, weather, other links and whatnot.

I use it as the first tab in my morning-chores group of tabs. This way it is the first tab I see in the morning.

<comment><USER2> So many browsers offer a blank tab with all this kind of information on it already. When you open the browser or open a new tab, you see that information anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you search for "today's date" [1] you'd see that there are many webpages trying to serve this particular need. So I guess this is just one more in the noise. Besides, this serves my needs accurately, and hopefully it might help someone else as well.

[1]: [https://www.google.com/search?q=today's+date](https://www.google.com/search?q=today's+date)</comment></comment></comment>


Three types of online attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack.html "This is not a question between privacy against security. It's a question of freedom against control" <comment><AUTHOR> "Now when we think deeper about things like these, the obvious response from people should be that, "Okay, that sounds bad, but that doesn't really affect me because I'm a legal citizen. Why should I worry? Because I have nothing to hide." And this is an argument, which doesn't make sense. Privacy is implied. Privacy is not up for discussion. This is not a question between privacy against security. It's a question of freedom against control. And while we might trust our governments right now, right here in 2011, any right we give away will be given away for good. And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now? And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years."</comment>


Free online courses - by category - <AUTHOR>

http://www.class-central.com/ provides a complete list of free online courses offered by Stanford's Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity

  Course counts by category:

  Category                                                NN %%
  Computer Science                                        81 38%
  Healthcare, Medicine, and Biology                       29 14%
  Physical & Earth Sciences                               16  7%
  Humanities and Social Sciences                          16  7%
  Economics & Finance                                     13  6%
  Mathematics and Statistics                              10  5%
  Statistics, Data Analysis, and Scientific Computing      9  4%
  Entrepreneurship                                         9  4%
  Society, Networks and Information                        8  4%
  Electrical and Materials Engineering                     7  3%
  Business & Management                                    5  2%
  Education                                                4  2%
  Complex Systems                                          3  1%
  Chemistry                                                1  0%
  Civil Engineering                                        1  0%
  Physics                                                  1  0%
  Design                                                   1  0%
 <comment><USER2> clickable link: <http://www.class-central.com/></comment>


What the Heck Google? My Pixel 2 and Project Fi Woes - <AUTHOR> http://www.netinstructions.com/what-the-heck-google-my-project-fi-and-pixel-2-woes/ <comment><USER2> Seems like you should be (and Google) should be riding FedEx a bit harder than they are. Otherwise Google just gave away a phone to someone else that you could pay for? I hope not.

As far as FedEx UPS is by far worse than FedEx here. Every shipping company has problems; and I'd like to say it's less than 5% of the packages but there's times you just wonder if the driver is stupid drunk or both.

\----

I've had UPS deliver one package; and drive off with the other still in the truck because the driver was too much in a hurry to get everything.

It's a horrible experience and the lack of customer service from these companies only make your stress worse because you can't get an answer.</comment>


Metascala – A JVM written in Scala - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lihaoyi/Metascala <comment><USER2> Never thought I'd see this up here. I wrote this, if anyone wants to ask anything about it

<comment><USER3> Not related to the project, but have you got any suggestions on good materials for Scala learning?

Materials I've read / watched / done so far:

      - Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Coursera course
      - `Scala in Action`
      - 47 Degrees' Scala Koans

I'm currently reading `Scala in Depth`.

<comment><USER4> Likewise, any tips for learning Scala without knowing/learning Java first?

<comment><USER5> Have you used any imperative, statically typed language that's compiled, such as C#, C++ or Swift? Previous knowledge of a purely functional language would be useful as well, but not required. Knowing Java helps with debugging and working with libraries built from Java, which depending on what one is doing (Android for example or using JSoup for scraping), is inescapable. You'll end up having to semi learn Java along the way, at least from what a friend told me (I already knew Java previously, so cannot comment on that). Scala, like C#, has extension methods to make dealing with Java libraries easier though, but it still doesn't solve things like JDK annoyances (type erasure).

If you're only familiar with scripting languages, it's going to be sort of a leap into learning Scala and could be done I think, though probably not the language I would recommend starting with since it's easy to abuse. The syntax is nowhere the same, but Scala sort of reminds me of the "Perl of statically compiled languages" in that you can write some really obtuse code without even trying if you're not careful. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, because it's a language that gives you a lot of flexibility (and more than enough rope to hang yourself). If you work with someone else, be sure to discuss some sort of agreed upon standard to using Scala, else you'll end up with some messy code.

Scala looks a bit like Python in parts as well as Swift, but I consider it more closer to a progressive version of C# with F# mixed into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So now, your Scala can be both slow to compile and also slow to run!

Seriously though, that's a pretty cool project.

<comment><USER7> Writing something in scala feels like a waste to me. If they were to narrow the grammar of the language down, compiler time would decrease and the code rot situation would be much better.

Instead, teams that want to grow big in scala have to come up with their own agreements on which features not to use.

The deeper concern I see is the lack of introspection and defensiveness in the community when the critique is brought up. I've never seen programmers before take such offense and have to resort to banning programmers criticizing feature bloat.

It's not a personal attack or trying to kill Scala. There's a legitimate feeling the language tacked on way too much, too soon.

When it comes to a programming language, negative comments won't kill it. All languages grow their warts over time. Look at all the critique C absorbed.

<comment><USER8> The grammar isn't a problem (at lest not for the compiler). Scalac is pretty fast at giving you error messages. It's when your code is legal that you really have to wait. I'd speculate that it's the code generator that's the problem.

<comment><USER7> Grammar ends up becoming a problem on a few fronts. I highly recommend _Principles of Compiler Design_ [1].

One safe rule of thumb is, as grammar and rules expand, the performance and simplicity of the compiler begin to deteriorate, particularly if features aren't added carefully.

The second is in practice, the additional grammar gives you far more ways to tackle the same problem. The is the conundrum that metaprogramming gives in languages like Ruby. Teams begin the phase of coding to the domain before letting other things fall into place.

Thinking ahead is good, but I think the issue is Scala's grammatical flexibility makes it too tempting to dig ourselves into a DSL before we're really ready. This is why we'd get so grumpy when PM's came to us asking for new features that'd require a refactor. We _bought in_ to our own idioms, if we programmed things _without_ the DSL, we'd be more nimble.

And we're not dumbasses. We're experienced programmers with experience programming in that domain before, but the target always ends up moving for reason's outside of engineering's control. From experience we know, DSL has no place until you're very secure in what the needs of the business is.

That said, no codebase is future proof to the rest of the team needing last minute changes - but I feel scala forces you into design decisions too early, and we thought that was an _advantage_.

Actually, I liked scala for not having Java's boilerplate. Then I began to miss those old things java forced you into.

It was painful, because the ego investment the team had in scala was huge. A lot was on the line. Crow had to be eaten.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Compiler_Design](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Compiler_Design)

<comment><USER9> It's worth pointing out that it's a case of YMMV. There are clearly those who haven't had success adopting Scala. I've seen Scala used successfully by multiple teams, but I suspect a strong culture of code reviews may have been a significant factor in our successful adoption of Scala. I would be disappointed if they tried to remove features from Scala, the extra features really do come in useful when used selectively.

<comment><USER7> If a good team nails the guidelines down _before hand_ on which idioms they plan to use and stick to them, yeah.

That is a rare qualifier to meet in my experience, many teams will be ecstatic about scala. Many times we'd be hiring java programmers who felt that scala would make them more relevant in the startup world.

Next is the situation where it would be, "Just hold keep holding on..." until a. the language finally _clicks_ b. the whole system is in scala. c. Both.

Scala did just click. And there never was a best solution to solve a problem. Python programmers were canned, we had the floor - those "distractions" were eliminated. We just got in this vicious cycle while we burned away our runway.

Now we look back, bitter, and make excuses. What hurts my pride to say is, Why didn't we just pick the safe bet - the Python or the Java.

I upvoted you. If you got a smart team and can make scala work somehow, all the power to you. I think you should make a story about how you scaled your code so the rest of us can learn

<comment><USER6> > If a good team nails the guidelines down before hand on which idioms they > plan to use and stick to them, yeah.

So, like we used to do with C++? Anyone old enough to remember "C++ is fine as long as you define a well specified subset and stay away from certain features"? Even today, this is still what Google does about C++.

Hopefully we learned that this is never a good sign about a language.

<comment><USER9> In our case it wasn't about enforcing the use of a subset of the language, but rather being selective about when to use more advanced features. Having the advanced features of Scala available has proven to be very useful for us, but we don't go to town looking for a place to use every feature we can at every opportunity. It's a lot like chrome on a car - selectively and tastefully used it looks good, but making the car doors and roof out of chrome isn't a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> println(println("inception"))</comment>


Ask HN: How to drive non-paid traffic to an app landing page? - <AUTHOR>

This question has probably been asked in other ways or answered in part in other threads, but I thought it would be useful to have a definite thread.
Scenario:
You have an SaaS app that isn't inherently sexy by nature.  You have a good conversion rate on your landing page, but you have a top-of-funnel problem; not enough people are seeing your landing page.
You could pay for some CPC ads, but you're more interested in somehow getting 50,000 organic/free prospects into the top of the funnel, rather than a trickle of (albeit more qualified) prospects from expensive CPC campaigns.
How can you do this?  Lets pool ideas.
- Get dugg or redditted.  Thus, write some content that provokes or excites that demographic.
- Get blogged by big blogs.  This could be done with some hustle, by cold-emailing bloggers and presenting an interesting story.
- Make a landing page with such an interesting design that people just want to pass it round for the hell of it, e.g. http://www.mailchimp.com/v5-2/
- Launch a new feature, tweet it and get others to retweet it.
- SEO that mofo
- Offer a downloadable freebie (PDF etc) and hope that others will link to you because of it.
- Promote your site on relevant forums (thin line between this and spamming)
- Put something helpful up on Slideshare.net and put your link in each slide (not sure if this will work, but a presentation I put up a while back seems to get a ton of traffic)
- Offer free accounts to blogs to give away in competitions.
There's tons more ideas than this - I'm just brain dumping right now.  I'll come back to this and submit more later.
But for now... over to you! <comment><USER2> This (old) HN post is for you: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=341138>

<comment><AUTHOR> nice. almost 2 years old! I hope there are some new ideas we can think of :) This point was really good from the top-voted answer:

"Build ancillary "fun" services that tie into your main web app. Something fun, free, perhaps something that you can relate to sites people find interesting, such as Twitter. Let's say your main service is an online graphics editor. Perhaps you could create a separate site where people can create avatars for Twitter / Facebook from a small set of templates.. separate project but promoting the first."

I love that idea - and I see it all the time. In fact I just saw one yesterday: <http://everytimezone.com>

<comment><USER2> _nice. almost 2 years old! I hope there are some new ideas we can think of :)_

I'm sure! I wrote that top comment, btw ;-) I was tempted to copy and paste it here for the karma but thought I'd be good. As you highlight, some of the things I mentioned have become mainstream rather than the edgy ideas they were at the time.

If I had to extend the list based on my gut feelings now, I'd add video, in- person "touring", tumblelogging, and guest posting on third party blogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You could piggyback off a popular meme doing the rounds and turn it into a one-off mini-site. For your product GoodGecko (I assume this is why you are asking) you could put up a one-page site and ask which old-spice guy video they liked the most. Then once they vote, you can break down the results and show them which country prefers which video.

Or setup a time-waster site where each questionaire is like a Trivial Pursuit/Pub quiz question and people can gain points and then they post their score to twitter or something.

That was a brainfart - may not make much sense outside my head.

edit: and its already been suggested - 2 years ago - D'oh

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe. it's a good point though.

I think for me, one big way to virally spread would be to make it so survey results get shown after someone responds, make sure the design of those public results looks awesome, and then piggy back on some meme like you said.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps a Wordpress/Drupal plugin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Youtube videos...not sure how well they work with SaaS apps though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would imagine the friction level is too high. Getting people out of watching a video and into your app is a big hurdle.

It could have some nice viral potential for awareness, but then again "making a kick ass viral video" is probably easier said than done!

<comment><USER4> Might just take some creative thinking. Ie. promoting videos to sell blenders = Blendtech!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> bingo. "but you're more interested in somehow getting 50,000 organic/free prospects into the top of the funnel"

who isn't?!

that's the million(10s or 100s even) dollar business question, depending on your interval. Go build that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Befriend a superconnector. A superconnector is someone who knows everyone.

You can identify a superconnector from a mile away. They are the ones who are usually talking on their Blackberrys - talking with contacts and setting up deals. They love playing the role of connector and introducing people to other people. It's their raison d'être.

When I first started my business, I was lucky enough to find a superconnector client. He was very happy with the results of my marketing work and proceeded to talk up my book and introduce me to influencial people and business owners in his network. Years later, I'm still benefiting from it.

Find a superconnector. Befriend him or her (and be a good friend) and deploy the "first, ten" marketing strategy by Seth Godin as your newly expanded network unfolds: <http://3.ly/firstten>

I promise you that the exposure you get this way will be a lot more salient than anything an online strategy can give you.

</comment><comment><USER7> You need to start collecting leads and driving them down a path to convert. Convert them through teleseminars, webinars, online videos, email marketing, and more. If your just reliant on "hoping" someone signs up and then finally gives you money - you fail.</comment>


Tell HN: VC totally falls for april fools article - <AUTHOR>

I was a judge at a business case competition yesterday and was talking to a junior VC who was also a judge. We were talking about accelerators and he mentioned the battle between east and west coast accelerators. He specifically referred to the start fund and the end fund.
I said, umm I think that was an april fools article. He was like really? I said, I thought the part about giving funding on a first come first served basis may have been a good tip off. He was like, please dont tell anyone I said this. I laughed and said I couldnt commit to that, but I wouldnt use his name. :)
I let him off the hook a little by saying I generally try not to read news on April 1 because it is a hassle having to sift through fake articles.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/01/angel-investors-counter-y-combinator-start-fund-with-new-100-million-early-stage-end-fund/ <comment><USER2> I admit I fell for that one for a few seconds. I think Techcrunch went overboard in the # of fake articles... There was a bubble in april fools stories...</comment>


Electrically stimulating the tongue may help repair neural damage - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tongue-shocks-hasten-healing/ <comment><USER2> Keep licking those PP3 batteries, kids!</comment>