Salesforce Buys Social Media Monitoring Company Radian6 For $326 Million - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/salesforce-buys-social-media-monitoring-company-radian6-for-326-million/

<comment><USER2> Good for them! What most people doesn't know is that Radian6 founder, C. Newton, also founded Q1 Labs ( a successful security company ) and was kicked out of it a few years ago by the "board"...

Instead of giving up, he formed a new company and did very well for the second time.

<comment><USER3> Steve Jobs all over again? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> some gems from the TC comment thread:

 _"SCRM comes of age in a big way by connecting inbound social media activity to customer acquisition and retention strategies... Congrats!"_

 _"sf.com validates and values that businesses need to deploy a "listening platform" to monitor all forms of customer conversation."_

marketing people are so cute

<comment><USER5> The first comment is fairly legitimate, if phrased vapidly. Social CRM is a real topic of discussion for anyone playing in the CRM space. If you look at classic customer acquisition and retention strategies, they are based on the data we were able to capture 5-10 years ago. It takes a while for "new" data (social media activity, in-depth demographic and financial information) to work its way into the practices of CRM users. There is a lot of opportunity to improve acquisition strategies by targeting the friends and influencers of customers (ie. Social CRM), but most of the major players have had trouble delivering on that promise in their products. The acquisition is a big deal and other CRM vendors will have to respond. The second quote you posted is indeed meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who has used Radian6 before: Good luck, Salesforce... you'll need it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting earnout structure for the founders, considering the company raised so little. I don't know how $14M over three years on top of $326M creates much incentive to hang around.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wrote some thoughts,. one of the important things from a CDN perspective is that Radian6 was not just built in Canada but funded here as well.

[http://startupnorth.ca/2011/03/30/salesforce-acquires- radian...](http://startupnorth.ca/2011/03/30/salesforce-acquires- radian6-for-326-million/)

<comment><USER8> CDN or canadian?

<comment><USER9> Not content delivery, but CDN as in Canadian.

People use CDN to refer in shorthand to Canada, even though it's not part of any official shortening or abbreviation. The Canadian currency is officially abbreviated as CAD although many folks incorrectly think it's CDN. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm excited to see if any of this money makes it back into the Maritime startup community.

This is an area where Ottawa does extremely poorly. Very little mentorship and money made it from the telecom generation of founders to today's generation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've often found Salesforce software janky and frankenstein-ish. Radian6 is a great acquisition but hopefully they won't try and marry it into some of their other software.

<comment><USER8> Don't you think they'll merge in alot of the functions for social monitoring? Seems inevitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if there will be any more acquisitions in the social media monitoring. I think the best candidate is Visible Technologies.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a good day for New Brunswick!

<comment><USER14> It's a great day for New Brunswick! May it inspire a new generation of Maritime startups.

<comment><USER2> You guys from NB?

<comment><USER15> i live in fredericton. i was amused and delighted to see my hometown mentioned in a tech crunch article. a disconnect i never thought i'd see.

congrats to the radian6 guys, and here's to hoping q1 labs is the next big canadian tech success!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Scam? Chamath Palihapitiya Live 5000 BTC Giveaway - sahin-boydas https://youtu.be/2XSPw5FGOJk <comment> sahin-boydas it has 70k live viewers. it seems it is scam.

The channel has 3 videos, the channel name is Live News but it has a cnbc logo. And the video is old.

</comment><comment> sahin-boydas is this a another hack? i think we will need scam fact check like news fact check :)</comment>


The (media) democracy that never was - <AUTHOR> http://blog.marcellus.tv/2008/10/24/the-media-democracy-that-never-was/ When Time Magazine nominated You as the person of the year in 2006, the notion that resonated was that YouTube had methodically deconstructed every notion we had about content production, consumption and distribution.
We now had the tools to create and express ourselves freely(Blogger/YouTube), the ubiquity that made content accessible(broadband internet/RSS feeds/device independence), and the ability to distribute content at a very micro-level, enabling levels of individualization that has never before been possible.
Lev Grossman aptly said: "It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."
In December 1996, exactly a decade before Time came up with this brilliant feature, Alan Greenspan made a comment in reference to the stock market boom of the 1990s. He said: "But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?"
—-
Fast forward to 2008, skipping through the revolution that YouTube has brought about. Try to ignore the fact that Greenspan was proved right during the dot-com bust, and focus on the fact that he is about to proved right, once again.
In 2001, we didn't really have broadband, there was a player war where even Real Player could hold their ground, and content delivery was expensive. Companies like Vingage could charge you $50,000 for content management, encoding and delivery...AND still call themselves inexpensive. They're dead now, because folks like us can now offer the same at $49 + $10/month.
You see, today, we have broadband, we have Flash, and we have cloud infrastructure.
Effectively, we have the all the basics in place, and in theory, online media business models should be thriving at this point. We should be seeing a truck-load of very imaginative models taking full advantage of this unique position we are in.
In 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2001. There's your demand.
By the time I'm done writing this post, there will be an additional 50 hours of video content, if not more, up on YouTube. There's your supply.
It's obvious that media content production and consumption on the Internet has grown phenomenally, and Lev Grossman was spot on: YOU are responsible for this phenomenon.
—-
But something's obviously gone wrong. Online media business models today are a joke...merely glorified(and fine-tuned for style) versions of old media business models.
Of course, advertisers are seeing declining returns(if I can get a lower-rez, ads-free version of SNL on YouTube, then I'm going to YouTube. Period.) and we're having to choose between charging people money for premium content, or improvising on the placement of ads. Hulu has effectively put to rest the first option: people are now going to think four times before trying to charge their viewers for premium content. And sure...toying with ad formats and placement might help, but that'd only delay the misery.
—-
So what's the problem? The problem is that we've ignored distribution.
We've understood that there's a lot of production, so we need platforms.
We've understood that there's a lot of consumption, so we need infrastructure.
But we've forgotten all about distribution. There are no real answers (or even questions, for that matter) about what next-gen distribution is going to mean.
The way we see it, even the best folks out there building online video platforms(from Jeremy Allaire to Chad Hurley) understand the Internet and they understand video.
But in their quest to get video on the Internet, they have forgotten about the importance of the same people who made LonelyGirl15 an online phenomenon. Yes, they have forgotten about YOU.

    * You form a critical piece in the new media value chain, and your importance has been mis-interpreted...under-rated.

    * Yes, you are the producers, and the consumers, but you are also the new distributors. You are the new medium, not the 480 x 360 Flash player.

    * You drive traffic. Heck, you ARE the traffic.

    * Your interactions and involvement determines how much money an advertiser will pay for an ad spot.

    * You represent the soul of the media democracy- the democracy that never was, because you have been looked upon as audiences, not participants.
 Please don't get all worked up. I'm sure Allaire and Hurley meant well. In fact, I know they meant well. Brightcove and YouTube are products of love, and their success speaks to their intent.
But, if we can set aside our (irrational) exuberance for a second, and look at the business of online video objectively, it's clear that no business can succeed without an effective distribution strategy, no matter how wonderful the surrounding economics are.
My pitch on TechCrunch talked about a $1.75 in infrastructure costs bringing in $4.00 in ad revenues, but I also said that I'm not going to B.S. you..that you'd still have to go out there and distribute your content(.."market your site") for the economics to make any sense.
So here's the challenge we want to tackle: go out there and construct a viable model for new media distribution that places due importance on the distributor:YOU.
—-
Thanks for reading. I'll look forward to your thoughts.
—- <comment><USER2> the only thing that incorporates "You" into advertising/marketing is grassroots community advocacy and word-of-mouth campaigning.

and that only works when you deliver a product that excites people or causes controversy.

people are only going to promote your product when they're inspired to do so.</comment>


Use Firefox Send with Ffsend in Fedora - <AUTHOR> https://fedoramagazine.org/use-firefox-send-with-ffsend-in-fedora/ <comment><USER2> It's a great idea, but the random-characters urls completely spoil ff send.</comment>


Show HN: TenProblems – democratizing academic debates for the 2020s - <AUTHOR> https://www.tenproblems.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Short, text-only booklets democratizing the latest trends and the open questions for 30 subjects, as put forward by leading academicians and practitioners in 2019, hopefully aimed at debunking fake news, sensationalism and outright biased agendas.</comment>


Apple apply for trademark of the term 'startup' in Australia - <AUTHOR> http://tmwatch.net/2013/08/28/apple-hoping-to-trade-mark-the-term-startup/

<comment><USER2> I think "computer" isn't taken yet. Somebody ought to jump on that.</comment>


Novel advice for incoming STEM freshmen - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.us/novel-advice-incoming-stem-freshmen/ <comment><USER2> Also they should read Karl Marx, it's a good overview of real world economics.</comment>


EFF vs. Facebook: Part 2: "Facebook's Connections" - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/things-you-need-know-about-facebook

<comment><USER2> It's akin to the lobster-in-a-boiling-pot scenario.

Put a lobster in already boiling water and it screams, stick it in room-temp water and heat to boiling and the lobster won't notice it's being cooked until it's too late...

<comment><USER3> Thank you for using a lobster instead of a frog, because I went to see if lobsters were mentioned on the wikipedia page for boiling frogs, and there was a reference there to another entry for "creeping normalcy". I like that phrase.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy>

<comment><USER4> The frog one is false

<http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's frustrating that it gets propagated as truth rather than allegory. Some day I'd like it to find a home amongst Aesop's fables. The fox and the grapes, the tortise and the hare, the boiling frog...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've started a status update campaign for all of my Facebook friends to educate themselves on these matters.

I'm leaving my college pictures up there because its not unheard of to be a drunk American college student, plus these years are behind me.

But my Facebook activity is now limited to keeping in touch with my friends by reading _their_ content. Not the other way around.

Next thing we know our inboxes are public. We simply can't trust Mark anymore.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've simply refused... seems to be a dark path they are going down if you're a user... but at the same time I find myself stuck with it as it's an important part of how I manage my life. They know that and that's why they keep screwing us.

</comment><comment><USER7> I haven't been particularly concerned with the privacy implications. I tend to operate under the assumption that stuff I post online is public.

But this latest change has another implication: it decreases the ability for expression on my profile. For example, in the Favorite Music section, I had shared a favorite lyric. Now, I'm limited to just listing bands.

While I understand the monetization reasons for "normalizing" the profiles, ultimately it makes them less interesting. I _want_ to read a free-form description of a friends activities. A normalized bullet-list is much less attractive.

Until now, my take on Facebook has been "I'm not too excited about the way they do things, but it's where I keep up with people who aren't engaged in other platforms." If future changes decrease the utility of the platform like this one does, that argument for staying won't hold much longer.

</comment><comment><USER8> Like some others I assume that anything I put online is public information, but not everyone has this view. For the naive user a site like Facebook appears to be just about you and your small circle of friends. Especially for people who are younger and perhaps not so worldly it would be incredibly easy to post things on Facebook which you might come to regret a few years later - especially if future employers and insurance companies are trawling through your data and looking at your connections.

I don't think it's good enough for the folks at Facebook just to say "Privacy is dead. Get over it". In the real world those people who are not rampant exhibitionists do want and expect to have some level of privacy - some degree of control over what information they give to who. Ultimately it's about the dignity and integrity of the individual.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't help but wonder if this opens up a niche in the marketplace for a social networking site that actually does respect your privacy.

<comment><USER10> The real question is: could such a site be profitable and respect your privacy?

<comment><USER11> The marginal costs are pretty small. It could easily be handled by a site with an emphasis on simplicity like Craigslist.

Personally, I would prefer a non-profit. I can't stand a private company like Facebook being the primary gateway to my social life. I would like to see multiple companies involved, but it would be a lot more difficult to get the network benefits of Facebook with multiple sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most of these points are reasonable for Facebook. They're just saying that if you don't like the idea of the "connections," then don't share any information. At least you've been told that that information will be publicly visible, period. The fact that they keep your data even after you delete it from your profile isn't unreasonable either. Did you really think they would destroy all traces of your data just because you have removed it from your profile? I bet Google keeps your emails after you delete them.

The only thing that bothers me is point 6.

> Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall. If you > use the name of a Connection in a post on your wall, it may show up on the > Connection Page, without you even knowing it.

This is a little sneaky. I wouldn't have a problem if the connections were just behind the scenes (ie: not visible). Then it would be no different from Google checking for keywords in your emails so that they can target ads at you.

<comment><USER13> Point 6 is inaccurate. As far as I know it's not a "Connection" in way they are claiming. It's a search on recent posts that appear in the "related posts" boxes. The "FBI" example is nice and scary, but the same holds true for Puppies and Rainbows.

<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Puppies/108139455886477> <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rainbows/110404012323116>

(disclaimer: I work for Facebook)

<comment><USER14> Who can see it though? It appears that a very extended network can view certain wall posts of mine with select words, even though I've limited all my wall posts to select friends.

[http://facebookiswatchingyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/what- you-s...](http://facebookiswatchingyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-you-say-now- on-facebook-can-go-to.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible to see someone's connections in a systematic way? (i.e. other than randomly appearing in the small box to the left of the connections page).

The only bit that holds a particularly serious concern to me is the global snippets bit which drags your wall posts out into the connections page - I've seen some random and utterly irrelevant messages appear there and that is worrying... (it would, perhaps, be better if they implemented the # tag style system similar to what they've done with @name now)

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like advertisers are getting screwed too:

Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall. If you use the name of a Connection in a post on your wall, it may show up on the Connection Page, without you even knowing it. (For example, if you use the word "FBI" in a post).

Let's say you put "xbox" on your wall. Now you're connected to Xbox. Does an advertiser get the distinction between "this person has visited the xbox website and said they liked it (a good candidate to sell a video game) vs. this person just happened to type xbox on their wall (probably not as good of a candidate).

<comment><USER17> I haven't seen what the EFF is describing. The things that show up in "Related Global Posts" aren't "Connections". They're basically search results from posts that have their privacy set to "Everyone".

The only way to show up as someone who "likes" Xbox is to click a like button somewhere.

<comment><USER14> This article explains how Community pages work. My posts with certain key words are posted in a semi-public community page. My guess is that those in my very extended network can see it: [http://facebookiswatchingyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/what- you-s...](http://facebookiswatchingyou.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-you-say-now- on-facebook-can-go-to.html).

<comment><USER17> Who cares? No posts are being exposed to people who couldn't already see them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenSwiftUI – An Open Source Re-Implementation of SwiftUI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI <comment><USER2> Interesting detail about Square that I learnt on Twitter shortly after SwiftUI was launched...

Square sold iPads with their software on as "appliances", so they can't deprecate them on a schedule like most software. For this reason the Square iOS codebase (which is a single codebase) must support back as far as iOS 9.

Because of this, they're considering an internal implementation of SwiftUI so that they can start using it now, rather than in ~5 years time. I wouldn't be surprised if they open sourced this if they do go ahead with it.

<comment><USER3> The opaque return types are, however, only available in Swift 5.1 and later, which means that the API will have to be different and not directly compatible with the Swift UI.

<comment><USER4> Not just Swift 5.1, but they also require iOS 13 because there's a rather unfortunate stdlib dependency. Technically they only need the dependency when crossing module boundaries, but they're restricting the feature completely anyway, I guess because they don't want to bother explaining "you can use 'some' on internal APIs but you can't use it on a public API without iOS 13+".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Benedikt Terhechte (from XING and the Contravariance podcast) has a similar project called AwfulUI[1] to bring some SwiftUI goodness on previous iOS releases. I don't think it's open source at the moment though.

[1]: [http://contravariance.rocks/episodes/210_show_notes.html](http://contravariance.rocks/episodes/210_show_notes.html)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for mentioning it! There's a plan of open sourcing it. It has different aims than OpenSwiftUI. It is just a back port so that SwiftUI-Like code can be used with iOS < 13\. I hope to open source it very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So many questions OP. I dove into the source and couldn't answer...

1\. Does this use native rendering of the local OS? I.e. On Linux it uses GTK or QT?

2\. Is this meant to be entirely OS Agnostic? Are you going to support Linux, Windows, Kitchen Sink, Etc?

3\. Are you planning on seeing this through to the end and completing the library 100% or is this a proof on concept?

<comment><USER8> In the current state it draws into a pixel buffer array which you can then display on for example an epaper display connected to a Raspi or other embedded device.

1\. No. Neither. It does all the drawing on its own. Right now even fonts.

2\. I think he would like to make it platform agnostic that way (i.e. provide reusable parts), but no, not right now.

3\. His primary goal is/was driving UIs on embedded devices and AFAIK wants to complete it at least for this task.

Disclaimer: In contact with @cosmo in some Slack, due to my SwiftWebUI project (which offloads a load of things to the browser, so his stuff is quite different / more complex in many ways).

<comment><USER9> I will be watching this. We can always use more better tools for making GUI on embedded. Especially ones that do their own rendering.

One of my plans is to play around with using and/or creating a custom flutter engine embedder like flutter-pi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I sincerely wish this kind of project goes far. At best we'll finally escape apple's grip on UI and swift and their awful documentation and no OS support beyond apple, at worst it'll put some pressure for apple to open source the tech and have the community port it to android.

<comment><USER11> What do you mean by Apple's grip on Swift?

<comment><USER10> look at the discussion on swift forum when SwiftUI was announced. They added a huge batch of new features to the language with a huge proposal that got released with xcode eventhough it has never been discussed beforehand publicly (for obvious reasons).

Apple is clearly the main force behind Swift at the moment, which has some good sides (at least the language is evolving), but is pushing the tech toward a certain direction at the detriment of others (IMHO). Apple is mostly building frontend tech, and swift initial goal was to also be a great force for server-side tech (which means great cross-platform experience).

As an example, i don't think apple is ever going to release a server side framework, or a cross-platform GUI framework able to create android app. The only swift/android project i know on github ([https://github.com/readdle/swift-android- toolchain](https://github.com/readdle/swift-android-toolchain)) is using a swift fork to disable objective-c features that don't work well on other platform. That's telling.

<comment><USER12> _"I don 't think apple is ever going to release a server side framework"_

I don't think Apple releasing a server-side framework would help, as nobody would be using it.

Also, there is the Swift Server Work Group ([https://swift.org/server/](https://swift.org/server/)), where two out of six members have an Apple email address. They recently wrote a kind of "state of the union" that, in my view, shows progress is made towards using Swift on servers ([https://swift.org/blog/sswg-update/](https://swift.org/blog/sswg- update/))

As to a cross-platform GUI framework: I don't see them doing that, just as I don't see Microsoft or google doing that.

<comment><USER13> _As to a cross-platform GUI framework: I don't see them doing that, just as I don't see Microsoft or google doing that._

? Flutter and Xamarin already exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My biggest concern about building a huge UI in Swift is that I can't take it anywhere off Apple's platforms. I'm not a fan of platform-specific languages or development paradigms, yet the portable options give up a lot in convenience. It would be great to have a best of both worlds scenario.

<comment><USER7> You can! Swift runs on Linux and Windows. Thanks to IBM and others.

<comment><USER14> We're talking about a specific Swift library, which does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The project's goal is to provide a platform-agnostic interface — without the > generation of the graphical user interface.

As someone who is relatively ignorant about this kind of thing...what does that above quote ^ mean?

<comment><USER16> It means that it implements the logic to determine what needs to be updated from one UI state to another UI state but it leaves the concrete implementation on how to create, delete, move, insert, and update UI interface elements to the users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My fear is that when this is production ready already >80% of all iOS users will be on iOS 13

<comment><USER18> Which is a good thing! (author of this project here) OpenSwiftUI is not meant to run on Apple devices. Quite the opposite :) The project is quite in the early stages but at some point, it should be possible to create graphical interfaces with GTK, Win32 Forms or even ASCII, but written in Swift. "Learn once, apply anywhere."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Half the value of SwiftUI comes from Xcode's GUI builder. Does this plan to support that?

<comment><USER18> Well -- not exactly how someone would imagine. You can build your GUI in any iOS, macOS, etc application within Xcode and add your view as a target of another platform. It's maybe not the best solution, but one that works :)

<comment><USER19> Would be wonderful if you can document it in the README, I think a lot of people would love to be able to use the full power of Xcode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So it is like flutter but in swift?

</comment><comment><USER21> The author is in this thread but his/her account is dead.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maccosmo](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maccosmo)

<comment><USER22> The account was fine but the posts weren't making it past a software filter. We've marked the account legit so this won't happen again. In the meantime, the killed comments were all vouched for by users, which is great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What kind of weird coding style is this?

        public let _content: Content

<comment><USER18> Hey @DagAgren, author auf OpenSwiftUI: Yeah, it's weird. My plan is to stay as close to the SwiftUI API as possible. However, I had to expose some private properties for the platform specific implementation like SwiftUIEmbedded and left the underscore to indicate that this property is not meant to be used by an application developer.

I don't like it either -- but that was the best I could come up with :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I applaud this effort. I really think the UI team that built SwiftUI at Apple really screwed up by

1\. Making it tied to the OS. 2\. Not building it in a way that its Open Source.

Yes I've read comments from Apple engineers that proclaim it relies on new features of UIKit/AppKit. Then, why not open source those UIKit/AppKit changes? Or, don't build the framework in such a tight-coupled way.

v1 should be about getting early adopters by allowing maximum platform reach and incrementally filling in the gaps.

So I'm hopeful this effort or any similar effort becomes the way forward for a lot of projects.

<comment><USER25> For any other project this is probably true, but Apple has never cared about any platform but their own.

<comment><USER26> Apple occasionally releases services for popular platforms that aren't theirs.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Come hear me talk about crypto at BSDCan'10 - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be speaking at BSDCan'10 in Ottawa on May 13th.  The designed-to-infuriate-tptacek title of my talk is "Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour" and the basic premise of the talk is that 99% of the time you can write secure cryptographic code without being an expert cryptographer, as long as you follow a few pieces of basic advice.<p>Come hear me talk!  The conference website is http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/ and you can register at http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/registration.php . <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

Conference website: <http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/>

Registration page: <http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/registration.php></comment>


Meetup Payment Changes - <AUTHOR> https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges?mpId=9038 <comment><USER2> I am an organizer of a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for > 6 years ([https://www.meetup.com/Web-Engineering- Duesseldorf/](https://www.meetup.com/Web-Engineering-Duesseldorf/)). We run the event every month, with 50 up to 90 people. Indeed, our no-show rate is something between 40% and 50%. This is heavy, but we know it and calculate it in.

We run the complete meetup non-profit. Never put a euro in. Never got a euro out — everything based on sponsors. Our motivation is to learn, share knowledge, and have fun together. And we want to make it accessible for everyone to learn about web engineering.

Switching to the new cost model will reduce the no-show rate, but makes it 1000% times less accessible. In my opinion, Meetup.com is creating a higher barrier to enter a community. If we, the organizers, would pay for the attendees, we would pay 100$ up to 180$ every month. We have no interest to afford this.

Furthermore, what I don't get: Meetup is charging a lot of money for thousands of groups. The web platform is stale for>2 years. The last major feature was a facelift in design. But no feature that helps the organizers or users. The iOS app had some releases, but the app is far from a great UX. Flaky everywhere. I ask myself: What is this company doing? Where does all the money go?

Friends who run similar groups are thinking already to move away. Many people from the US think the same.

I think this tweet sums it up: [https://twitter.com/obfuscurity/status/1183831607821656068](https://twitter.com/obfuscurity/status/1183831607821656068)

<comment><USER3> We have a hackathon coming up at work. I smell a project idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's [https://github.com/phoet/on_ruby](https://github.com/phoet/on_ruby) which is the software used by a few ruby meetups in Berlin and other cities. It's a bit bare-bones but relatively simple to host.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While there is definite truth that paying even $1 to RSVP for an event cuts RSVP no-shows significantly, I don't see this flying when members of meetups are accustomed to paying exactly ZERO to attend events.

If there isn't an open source alternative to meetup.com now would be the time to create one, and if you want to create The Winner then have your meetup replacement able to federate with other (using ActivityPub?) to replace the "members of this group also join these groups" network effect that makes meetup.com so popular.

</comment><comment><USER5> I help run a discussion group that meets twice a month and gets about 30 people each time. We have no problem with no-shows (partly because some people turn up without RSVPing!).

Charging attendees a fee will keep people away in droves, not because they can't afford it, but because who can be bothered to go through a payment flow just to go to a meetup?

If we choose the "cover members' fees" option, that's an extra $120 a month in fees. Which makes the "you'll be saving at least 80% annually on subscription fees" particularly insulting.

Probably what we'll do is keep the Meetup page, and just tell people not to bother RSVPing. We can always run a Google form for that if numbers are a problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks to all the people posting alternative / open source solutions!

What is often missed, though, is that Meetup provides more than the software. The real killer feature of Meetup is the audience.

I know of no other place where it is so easy to gather people. Just post a new event and people will notice and sign up.

If you switch to a self-hosted solution you will have to find an audience through other channels. Which, for many Meetups, is quite the challenge. Remember "build it and they will come"? Same applies to events. "Set a date and they will come" \- doesn't work that way unless you have an existing audience.

Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. The old/existing pricing model seemed much smarter for everyone involved though. Organizers pay to get access to the audience. The audience pays nothing so that the audience, the real value, can be maximized. I hope that they won't destroy their value with this move...

</comment><comment><USER7> Buried at the bottom of their FAQ:

"This change won't affect a number of groups such as Pro Networks and Non- Profits."

Assuming this means that most of the small community-driven groups will be unaffected by the change.

Still, this is clearly a communication fail, as well as a cardinal sin for usability:

By charging users to RSVP yes, they are literally putting a tax directly on a key engagement activity for the whole site.

I also agree with the comment that Meetup has done a poor job of improving itself. The "design facelift" they did 2 years ago negatively affected the growth of our group, and they haven't added much value since then.

A better approach would be to take 15% of ticket sales done through the site in a way that could improve engagement and revenue.

Meetup may have a well-deserved PR hailstorm for this.

<comment><USER5> I _think_ "non-profits" means something more specific than "community-driven" \- if i look at what is included locally, it's stuff with a clear charity/social focus:

[https://www.meetup.com/topics/nonprofit/gb/17/london/](https://www.meetup.com/topics/nonprofit/gb/17/london/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I run multiple local meetups.

This is a crazy change, and definitely bad.

The overwhelming majority of members I've spoken to say they are going to stop RSVP'ing, which would basically kill the platform.

I know with WeWork circling the drain, Meetup is desperate for additional revenue, but this seems like a bad move.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm organizing Flutter meetups in Munich, Germany, for almost a year now ([https://www.meetup.com/Flutter-Munich](https://www.meetup.com/Flutter- Munich)). I was so excited about building the largest Flutter community in Germany. We have plenty of upcoming events already in the pipeline. I didn't even think about their organizers' fee, I just paid it and considered it a small investment in my career and a fun experiment.

The events were always free for the attendees. I'd organize the event for free, the hosting companies would provide dinner and free drinks. The speakers talk for free and my co-organizers help me out for free. No money changes hands ever. The hosting companies were never pushy about their team or product.

My biggest fear with corporate moves like this isn't that people wouldn't be able to afford the two dollars. It's less than a coffee in a cheap bakery. _My fear is that users just stop using meetup because of the "micropayments UX", then management decides one day that they shut down in 2 weeks._

It's not the two dollars. It's about potential attendees having to go through the annoying payment process (and based on the current meetup.com user experience and feature set on all platforms, I bet they won't get it right). And no, I'm not going to pay 200 dollars/month from my pocket. Attendees will stop visiting their website soon enough, anyway: I already received emails from other meetup groups that they are shutting down. It's a spiral: fewer groups want to deal with this, fewer users will register, fewer events will get organized, the users who didn't mind paying originally will have less events to choose from, they stop visiting the site and so on...

I'm not interested in running a self-hosted open-source clone. I don't want to handle user data, run servers (even if it's just firing up a container). I'd also miss out completely on the network effect. Nobody would find my clone website.

The no-show rate was never an issue and I organized small study jams with 20 attendees to tech meetups with 80-100 people. You just count the number of people that registered and that actually showed up, and use this number for future events. You've got 100 registrations, you'll have between 50-70 people showing up. Very easy to plan with it.

I also find it dishonest saying that it's going to actually save us money. Yeah, because there will not be a group to lead, so yeah...

</comment><comment><USER10> I've started to collect the open-source alternatives here: [https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup- alternati...](https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-alternatives)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Making members of groups pay may have an unintended side effect on RSVPs: organizers have payment info attached to their accts. However, as a user, even if I'd be willing to pay, entering my CC data will make me much less likely to go through.

</comment><comment><USER11> Exciting, i miss the time when Meetup wasn't so dominant and you had small no show rates there.

The new platforms that come up will bring new people in, always great!

</comment><comment><USER2> A friend of mine posted [https://kommunity.com/](https://kommunity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> So, October 1, 2020? We use "years" here. That will be $2.</comment>


Easy-Type Passwords: A boon to air-gapped credentials - <AUTHOR> https://rights.ninja/passwords/ <comment><AUTHOR> Like many of you out there, I use an encrypted keychain to manage credentials, so remembering all of my passwords is no longer a problem. Unfortunately, those long, secure passwords I like to use are really annoying to read and type in situations where I can't auto-fill them from my keychain. This is a particular annoyance with air-gapped or legacy systems where I have to read stuff like this off of my phone screen:

C5BWVEQRE7BTxmSeNF7n3E8C

Minor annoyance, sure, but easily solved. The Easy-Type password generator uses only grade-6 and under vocabulary words and short numbers to provide a password with a good amount of entropy but one that can be very easily read and typed:

SorryNorthern73RepresentStood

The word list is currently 634 words long and the generator spits out 4 (pseudo)random words and inserts a (pseudo)random number between 1-99 into the mix as well.

</comment><comment><USER2> The animation it does on load is crazy

<comment><AUTHOR> How crazy are we talking? What browser are you using?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you promote your landing page? - <AUTHOR>

I've read a lot about viral landing pages like stripe,milk, forkly and hipster which have no problem at all generating traffic for their landing pages prior to the application launching.
We just published our landing page www.grooovy.me but don't seem to be getting anywhere at all. We're not exactly sure where to begin(we posted on HN, tweeted about it), and don't know exactly how to get the ball rolling.
Any advice? I know it might have to do with the actual product or landing page itself, but I believe I did a good job this time around. <comment><USER2> I promote mine right here: <http://policyanswers.com>. Haha!

In other words, any where I can.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's down? That's not a good start. Try to find your target audience, tweet, try getting some blogs feature your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a terribly stupid mistake on my part. Typo in the domain name. Thanks for the suggestions, those are the ones I'm already currently trying.</comment></comment>


Paul Buchheit: Twas the night before Festivus... - <AUTHOR> http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/twas-night-before-festivus.html <comment><USER2> I looked at it: What does it do exactly? Who is it for? (Maybe I fall outside of the target market?)

<comment><USER3> Festivus is for the rest of us.

<comment><USER2> Ahh, that explains it. I need to be more of a web 2.0 scrooge :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, if only all companies were so small and work environments so humane...</comment>


Top US Military Twitter Feed 'hacked by Islamic State' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/30781377

<comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875353)</comment>


On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/index.html <comment><USER2> It is good to see that the MIT takes the interests of the truly paranoid so serious. What surprises me though about the whole affair is that the government allowed this information to be released.

In our circles the fallibility of the tinfoil hat is well known, which is why those are only used in emergencies (an emergency is a paranoid individual emerging from their den or dwelling).

Personally I prefer the 'whole cage' approach. This is a little more involved than the tin-foil hat, but well worth the investment imho.

To implement it simply coat every surface of your house with chicken wire, make sure to make solid interconnections (preferably soldered) every couple of inches where two sections meet, and do not forget the windows (you'll get used to it quickly enough).

I'm still a little worried about my internet connection being used to inject radiation into my carefully constructed cage of Faraday, so I've put all my computing gear behind grounded chicken wire as well.

The only things protruding are the mouse and the keyboard, since the installation of the cage I sleep much better, feel much better in general and my headaches are gone.

I can recommend it whole heartedly.

<comment><USER3> <humor qualitylevel='poor'>

A fine copper mesh is much better.

I notice that the propeller-head tinfoil hat was not mentioned in the study -- obviously to lead us astray from its powerful abilities. Also the Cowboy model, which as I understand it prevents cows from interfering with your delicate private matters.

I know that only when I finally accepted the fact that aliens were talking to me from my microwave I was able to establish communication with their race and make all this progress. Who'd would have thought? An entire planet led by Orville Redenbacher.

I'm currently working on a SCIF for my X-box. Hope to have that finished by the time the invading spaceships arrive so I can fight them off with Halo, which is NOT a video game. It's actually a battle-control device that remotely controls events on their home planet.

</humor>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Already debunked: [http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200511112730.afdb_effectivene...](http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200511112730.afdb_effectiveness)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hang on, an amplification of 30dB at 2.6GHz? Sounds like someone needs to check if a tinfoil hat can be used to improve Wifi reception! Is it close enough to 2.4GHz to be of any use?

<comment><USER6> Yes it can, that's been done.

<comment><USER5> Cool. Does it work for both receiving and transmitting? If it does, there should be a business opportunity in tinfoil hats for laptops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Excuse us non-technical foreign people, but this says that wearing tin foil hats actually amplifies radio signals instead of blocking them? And paranoid people wear them under the false impression it will block government radio signals?

<comment><USER8> Aaaargh - I don't want to give away the punchline but I also don't like the idea of some people becoming horribly confused.

If only HN has spoiler tags...

<comment><USER9> <http://www.rot13.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Next they should address the spider problem.

[http://www.theonion.com/content/news/meth_addicts_demand_gov...](http://www.theonion.com/content/news/meth_addicts_demand_government)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hahahaahaha :D

</comment><comment> onreact-com This is satire, isn't it?</comment>


How to Get 5 Million People to Read Your Website - Matthew Inman, Oatmeal - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYyJZOHgpco

<comment><USER2> That was disappointing. A nice survey of Oatmeal comics, but there was very little "how to" information in this presentation.</comment>


Are we in a bubble? This company got over 8 million in funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.redux.com/ Source:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/redux <comment><USER2> _I interviewed with Redux_ in July and from what I gathered, they had a pretty good team together.

It's a python shop running either on a custom DB or on Berkeley DB. Their core business asset is the collaborative filtering mechanism that drives the Redux.com site.

I got the impression that the site itself is very much a proof-of-concept application of the underlying technology. They have a BHAG to become the default collaborative filtering mechanism for the internet. If they are successful, I consider it very likely that they will do so by licensing this technology to other companies.

It should also be noted that, as a company, they did not start out in the direction that they're going now. They've gone through several products and switched directions multiple times, eventually settling upon what they're developing now as a result of that process.

If I remember correctly, they are 11 employees, 8 of which are engineers and the CEO is a definite techy.

Smells like win to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Netflix can do collaborative filtering successfully because they have years of data. Amazon can also make recommendations because they know everyone's buying habits. Sounds like Redux is trying to abstract this to social media? It reeks of "technology in search of a problem".

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The collaborative filtering technology & algorithms is the easy part. The hard part is getting mountains of good data to apply it to. And by good, I mean monetizeable.

 _That's_ what Amazon and Netflix have done. They should solve the data problem first, and being yet another "interactive social media mashup web 2.0 social networking thingy" may not be the best way to get lots of data. The companies that have done this best have monetizeable data - Amazon can actually SELL you the book it recommends.

As for being a collaborative filtering platform: "1. If your idea starts with 'We're building a platform to ...' and you don't have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now." (<http://diffle- history.blogspot.com/2008/06/postmortem.html>)

<comment><USER4> No. Vastly more input data does generally allow for better output by these algorithms. BUT this in no way means that todays recommendation algorithms are good AT ALL.

In fact, they completely suck. And in reply to GP, netflix's recommendations suck very much too, to be frank.

Why don't companies care? Simply because it's hard to figure out how to make a lot of money even with very good recommendations.

<comment><USER5> For the record, more than 20% of Amazon's sales are a result of recommendations -- so just in the one case of Amazon, their recommendation system accounts for $3.4 billion in sales a year ... which incidentally is 22 times Facebook's revenue last year. Recommendations do suck, and VCs are throwing money at the problem because there's a market there that actually makes money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Welcome to Redux, our humble endeavor to change the world. Admittedly that does sound a bit cliché, and truth be told, we don't actually think that the world is such a bad place as it is, yet there are a few areas that we have chosen to improve. Namely, allowing you to discover entertainment, people, and products that actually mean something to you."

OW MY BRAIN.

<comment><USER7> I think I just died a little bit inside by reading that.

<comment><USER8> Didn't you read the warning labels that came with your internets?

WARNING: Exposure to large numbers of other people may cause cynicism.

<comment><USER9> "Are we in a bubble? This Company got $8 million in funding"

I dont think this tells us anything about bubbles, this just tells us there are stupid investors out there. Really stupid investors.

<comment><USER10> ...and that's one of the hallmarks of bubbles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These start-ups aren't being acquired and almost no one is IPOing, which means the only ones who will take a hit for any of these weak businesses will be the investors.

There may still be a VC bubble and its about time the kool-aid wore off, but from what I've seen the experianced and high quality VC's are not investing in these types of companies.

*correction, I just read the Crunchbase profile, and there are some good names behind this company. Hopefully the team is strong.

</comment><comment><USER10> The whole US economy was in a bubble. Because of profitable investments in the housing market, made on faulty assumptions, and cash the mortgage owners had, there was a huge amount of cash circulating. It was profitable to invest in startups because investors knew that consumers were spending a sizable chunk of their cash on frivolities; the startup had a higher likelihood of income. Moreover, an increase in domestic demand means a buoyancy in the stock market; investors knew they could in future sell on these shares at a profit. Simply, investing in startups was a great idea.

Now banks issue fewer mortgages, after their faulty reasoning came back to haunt them, and current mortgage owners can't pay back their mortgages. Not only this, but, because banks have had to write off large swathes of their bad debts, they're less willing to lend money full stop. This hits domestic demand badly. Relates to startups, the profitability of startups has taken a hit at their prima facie and stock market value: a decrease in domestic demand means customers purchase fewer frivolities, and a decrease in demand always badly hits the stock market.

Not only are startups less profitable, but VC have less cash. VCs that invested heavily in the stock market, and particularly the housing market, now have much less cash than they had 4 months ago. Perhaps whoever's bought redux has seen some über filtering mechanism that will change the internet. But my point is that whoever's bought them has very likely far less cash to splash out on potentially rewarding, but less so because of a decrease in domestic demand, filtering mechanisms.

This all indicates that we are either at the bubble's apex or we are seeing its deflation. So, will investment dry up? I'd say not completely, but VC are going to be a hell of a lot more discerning in future, especially if they've invested heavily in the housing market, or stock market in general; they have less money to spend, ergo risk on startups.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd argue we're not in a bubble, because this company would have been able to raise 80 million in '99.

</comment><comment><USER13> Aggregators are the new portals.

<comment><USER14> Speaking of which, what's up with popurls? Their traffic is down big the last two months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am almost certain that this site is merely a demo for their backend. Look at their board... a former managing partner at In-Q-Tel is on it. My guess is the US government is a serious potential buyer based on that. But who knows, they have well connected investors who could also help them land deals with bigger content creators.

</comment><comment><USER16> We don't know their business plan. It might be so novel an idea that they can post huge profit margins, but at the face of the website it's very hard to grasp what they could do.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. It is extremely easy to toss a low blow at many companies that are kicking some serious ass on the revenue side of things.

If what they are doing is simple and you better deserve that 8 million to pursue the idea - go after it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes, we're in a bubble. More precisely, what's going on is that the majority of startups, numerically, do _not_ need a lot of money; that is, most of the good ideas out there are best pursued with a small company with few employees, since there is little benefit they could gain from loads of extra cash. That, of course, is the idea behind YC.

But the VCs have loads of money, and they want to be able to use it. And when you have this situation where there are tons of small startups that need a little cash, they get overexcited, and throw too much money at them.

And you get stupidity like this.

<comment><USER19> It's actually a little ironic. The Venture industry exists because big opportunities can be pursued with fraction (maybe 1/10) of their potential worth.

But now opportunities of the same size can be pursued with a much smaller fraction (say 1/100). As an investor, you're still willing to pay the 10th. Economics goes a little fuzzy around the edges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait, what? When I heard about Redux way back when ([http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/redux-discovers- friends...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/redux-discovers-friends-so- you-dont-have-to/)), it was for discovering new friends, which seemed like a good idea. But now it's this? Why the change [in the wrong direction]?

<comment><USER21> The valuation of social networks went down. People out! Charm bracelets in!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source: <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/redux>

<comment><USER22> It's cool how their unique visitors peaked the month they closed their Series A, and looks to hit zero within a month.

<comment><USER23> That's very typical of early startups who are still ramping up. I wouldn't read too much into it.

<comment><USER22> Except that they're a year and a half old. Quite the ramp-up. I think most of the people on this site would agree that a year and a half-old startup with traffic approaching zero and $8 million raised is looking like a failure.

Just for reference, Youtube went from founding to acquisition in the exact same amount of time.

<comment><USER23> Not every site has to be youtube to be successful. Lots of small sites pay for themselves, make their owners money, and handle all their traffic. This isn't bad.

As an example, I've heard my former employer mog.com managed to get a pretty darn sweet deal and continued funding out of the Sony-Gracenote-acquisition. We definitely had a slow ramp-up, and several setbacks during development (before I got there) that made the total dev time for the site startlingly long.

<comment><USER22> You're right, of course, from your perspective. I tend to be a pessimist, and like bootstrapping and sweat equity. Changes of directions, big funding rounds, the assertion that "good names" (a commenter above) mean a lot, those things I'm not really a fan of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Create playlists. Buh. Just use an activity aggregator like friendfeed. I guess something like this would be useful if the actual content is kind of vacuous and you want to wrap it in something more interesting. I try to only show my friends interesting content though.

</comment><comment><USER25> Clicking on their mystery link enough times almost gave me a seizure. Don't even try it.

<comment><USER23> I think it's kind of cute. Not enough sites do whimsical easter eggs anymore. It's one of those goofy things people do on a saturday afternoon that improve team morale.

Seriously, I bet "seizure" goes into their nickname for it too. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 5M, if you read the sources linked from crunchbase.

Does seem pretty derivative, but might be a useful idea. Perhaps the website is mostly intended as a demo for their backend, which some bigger-viewer site could buy them for.

</comment><comment><USER27> I was having so much trouble finding entertaining things on the internet; Thank god these guys have come along to solve that problem.

/sarcasm

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone else think having 30 include files is a bad thing?

</comment><comment><USER29> This is truly one of the worst startups I have ever seen.

Everyone in this forum is stupider for having seen it.

I award its founders no points, and may God have mercy on their miserable souls.</comment>


F-117s had an air-to-air capability with secondary mission to shoot Soviet AWACS - <AUTHOR> https://theaviationist.com/2020/06/03/f-117s-had-an-air-to-air-capability-with-secondary-mission-to-shoot-down-soviet-awacs-former-stealth-pilot-says/ <comment><USER3> I recall this capability existing in the F117A Nighthawk simulator from Microprose in the 90s, you could carry sidewinders but they were close to useless because you needed to open the bay, which made you highly detectable and slower, and you needed to get close which made you detectable. It was more of a last resort thing.

I'm surprised a game that old was accurate about this at the time.

<comment><USER4> Why don't they make these kinds of flight sims anymore? I miss microprose!

<comment><USER5> Microprose is coming back soon. They are building a B-17 simulator for VR where a group of people work together in the bomber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They had the potential to perform this mission, but other pilots have said that A2A missiles (AIM-9 Sidewinders) were never equipped. It would have been hard to launch them from the F-117. If they were mounted on wing rails, it would have messed up their stealth, and launching from a trapeze inside the launch bay would have required some finicky hardware.

Great idea, and definitely considered, but never made it into an actual capability.

<comment><USER7> another option mentioned is to mount the missiles on the bay doors - <USER2> of the door would put the seeker into the air stream as if the missile were on a wing rail. Sounds like a typical quick fix/patch :) Not sure why it is AIM-9, not something more long range. The role of F-117 is just to [stealthily] truck the missile and drop it. The other radars and control would guide it.

<comment><USER8> A longer range missle would require an active radar to lock onto a target. That sort of negates the whole thing. The AIM-9 is a passive IR seeker that can aquire it's own target.

<comment><USER9> Didn't exist at the time, but the AMRAAM doesn't require the launching aircraft to be using (or presumably even have) a radar. The launching aircraft just gives the missile the target's state vector before launch, which it could have gotten from another aircraft. The AMRAAM then flies to intercept the target, receives course updates if they're available, and then turns on its own radar when it gets close.

The state vector could even potentially come from an AWACS, although the angular resolution wouldn't be great. If the launching aircraft had an IRST system though, that is easily solved.

Incidentally, this basic capability is the present/near future of air combat. Modern but non-stealth aircraft hang back with their radars on. 50 miles or so in front of them are the AMRAAM equipped stealth aircraft getting datalinked targeting from the "quarterback" aircraft behind them. Tracks can be refined by having multiple radars observe the same target from different angles, and further augmented by the stealth aircraft's IRST system if it has one. The (stealth) launching aircraft can then immediately turn tail and run while the quarterback aircraft continues to provide midcourse updates to the missile.

<comment><USER10> This sort of datalinked network with aircraft up front with radar off, IRST on and launch capability feels like the future of BVR combat. Also add in an awacs to do IFF interrogation and declaring to the launchers as well.

<comment><USER11> There are a number of variations on this play. The simple ones are:

1\. Stealth (F-35/F-22) squadron keeps taking turns "illuminating" using radar and spot for each other, toggling radar on and off.

2\. AWACS / ground-based radar / MIG-31M provides targets and stealth comes in close to take them out.

3\. There is a concept that flips #2 - stealth comes in and looks for targets, a large transport aircraft is converted into a "missile truck" and ripple fires on target from a distance, WITHOUT having to illuminate - there are missiles called AWACS killers which are pretty dangerous to #2. Note that ripple fires implies missiles with multiple means of targeting.

4\. Drones can play the role of finding targets and recon-by-fire too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tom Clancy mentioned it in "Red Storm Rising"! No one believed then.

It may not have been a very debugged capability, but neither were Soviet AWACS. To this day, A50s are hardly too useful, and in the Soviet times, they were a joke.

<comment><USER13> The problem I had with _Red Storm Rising_ was that the scenario leading to the war was pretty weak - I much prefer _Arc Light_.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. An Azeri muslim radical couldn't probably do what he did to help his "brothers" in Tatarstan, because Clancy overlooked that Azeri, unlike all other Soviet muslims, are Shia, others being Sunni... They'd much rather kill one another than a Commie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it. I don't see how this mission would work. The f-117 was/is slow. Getting one within sidewinder range of a russian mainstay would not have been easy. Mainstays loiter well behind enemy lines. With the F-117's range (1000miles) just getting in and out would not have been easy. And mainstays are moving targets.

<comment><USER15> "Secondary Mission" means that it would only perform the action on its way to/from its primary mission. So if--on the way to or from bombing a target-- the pilot saw a Soviet AWACS aircraft, it would then attack. It wouldn't have been sent out specifically for that mission.

<comment><USER16> Which is another way of saying, this would spend munitions load on the forlorn hope of maybe backshooting a Mainstay out of pure luck and happenstance, instead of spending that mass and volume on ordnance that actually made sense for the mission.

Which is another way of saying, this is something some engineers at Lockheed blue-skyed around a table one day, and the PMO liked it enough to throw it into a stack of viewgraphs as "planned future capability", thus promising absolutely nothing, in case it might help sell the aircraft.

<comment><USER17> I see you have also worked with government procurement.

<comment><USER16> Never directly, but I've spent 20 years adjacent to the defense industry, almost half of that working directly under a salty old engineer of Lockheed pedigree.

Something like that should be a minimum job requirement for covering the defense industry, imo. Without it, they're far too credulous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the Radar Man book I read, he said it's primary mission was to take out a Soviet, radar controlled anti-aircraft gun, which I believe was called the Buzz Saw.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07932Z7WV/ref=nodl_?tag=duckduckg...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07932Z7WV/ref=nodl_?tag=duckduckgo- iphone-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1)

Maybe it was this:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSU-23-4_Shilka](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSU-23-4_Shilka)

<comment><USER11> That is definitely "the Buzz Saw" \- it's also no longer relevant against anything besides helicopters due to low run on gun-based AA (nor is its updated version, the Tunguska, or derivative, The Pantsir).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This was exactly what they did in the novel Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy.

<comment><USER20> yep, except Clancy used the (theoretical) F-19A "Frisbee" stealth attack fighter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kinda off topic but I miss those days when you could go to a drug store and buy fighter plane model kits with all the paints and other supplies. As a kid the one I always wanted was the F-117. This kind of thing got me interested in studying history and building things with my hands.

</comment><comment><USER22> Explains the mysterious "Just like an AMRAAM launchpad on a stealth" line from Independence Day.

<comment><USER20> could have also been referring to the F-22 Raptor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I totally get the appeal of the technology involve in sophisticated weapons, and find it appealing myself (and especially did in my teens), but I wish we would read less about it.

So many cool technologies out there to choose from.

</comment><comment><USER24> So F-19 stealth fighter wasn't totally off base!

</comment><comment><USER25> Did we not have an air-to-air passive anti-radiation missile?

<comment><USER26> The air-to-ground ARM missiles were designed to remember where radar stations were with some precision so when they saw the missile coming and shut down, the missile could still hit them. The concept doesn't apply with an airplane that can shut down its radar and maneuver.

If you design an ARM that also has a backup sensor (IR or radar) to follow the maneuvering aircraft, why not just make that the primary sensor? At which point you've got a standard air-to-air missile, except with some superfluous stuff on it?

<comment><USER27> The benefit to having "home on jam" in this case is that it's passive, (no warning to the target aircraft) and generally has a larger detection range than IR. AMRAAM has this capability now, which would allow for, in theory, long-range shots without the launching aircraft even having to illuminate. The AMRAAM's radar is short range, so you can use a combination of "home on jam" to guide to a range where the jamming is no longer effective, then go active and potentially make the kill.

This is a simplistic example of course; EW being a very complicated subject. But overall, having multiple sensors that you can either correlate or fall back on is the trend in smart weapons right now, and we'll be seeing more of those sorts of combinations.

<comment><USER28> Home on jam also has the benefit that it works when the enemy can jam your radar. You have an incoming enemy raid with heavy jammer support, you lob some missiles at it set for home on jam and their jammers are now calling them in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Пососете

<comment> blaser-waffle "Squeeze"</comment></comment>


Best platform to issue a cryptosecurity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.maxkordek.com/best-platform-to-issue-a-cryptosecurity/

<comment><USER2> Overstock has the chance to be the first big company that takes advantage of the Nxt platform. But even if they don't, it is a matter of time to see a big player joining Nxt. I like the article and i hope we would see more of Nxt soon!</comment>


Supercharging the nervous system with biological, ion-transistor computer chips - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130111-supercharging-the-nervous-system-with-biological-ion-transistor-computer-chips <comment><USER2> The last paragraph of the article (about the chip in one's brain) is quite scary. Force brain chip implants that keep the serotonin levels artificially high to keep the unwashed masses content; some kid at school is too active - put a chip in his brain to keep the hormonal level down; etc. etc. The possibilities are endless.

EDIT: typo

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was fairly low on details and high on futurism hype.

Has anyone found a better one that isn't behind a paywall?

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it quite humorous that humans will end up plugging chips in their brains to make them "better" before even trying to do it without - once again the path of least effort is the way.

<comment><USER5> I'll probably get downvoted for this, but the Nazis had the right idea: eugenics.

This is not something I am opposed to from a scientific point of view.

We do it with livestock, so why not us?

(Before I accidentally invoke Godwin's law, I'm not saying I agree with the other things the Nazis did or that I agree with eliminating non-eugenic friendly individuals).

EDIT: I actually disagree entirely with eugenics - this was an experiment ot see what happens if you apply plain logic and no ethics to the problem. The number of upvotes was slightly worrying!!! For reference, my daughter is disabled and would fall foul of any appropriate eugenics principles which is not right.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, what kind of family policy would you propose, if not that of eliminating non-eugenic individuals? I mean, is there a way eugenics can work without removing human rights? (serious question, no judgement made) I haven't read Francis Galton's original doctrine so apologies if this is obvious to those who have.

<comment><USER7> Strong financial incentives for selected individuals to reproduce; penalties for others.

<comment><USER8> Who forms the selection criteria?

<comment><USER9> Make the "penalty" a "tax" and money becomes the criteria. Add tax exemptions for valuable but not so well paid professionals like researchers, university professors etc. (it's not like the poor that would desperately want kids will suddenly struggle to become medical researchers or university professors just to avoid the tax). Plus, you can use the tax money to improve education and give free university education (some countries already have this). And if you're smart but you're not the "academic type", you'll probably find a well paid profession for yourself anyway so you shouldn't worry.

<comment><USER2> If you want to prevent individuals who are e.g. predisposed to certain disorders from being born, I don't see how money as criteria can help.

<comment><USER9> It's not supposed to do that! It's supposed to have people with "higher levels of" positive traits like intelligence, self-control, imagination to have more children then those with lower levels (and also to improve the chances that children get raised in families that can afford to offer them good education - so it takes care of the "nurture" part too, not just "nature" - and yes, this means that such a social engineering strategy would be more than just eugenics).

People predisposed to certain disorders usually have less offspring anyway... so nature does a pretty good job at this without help (ever seen a person with a severe mental illness having more than a couple of children, even by accident?)

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Well I was thinking in the context proposed by the grand-grand...parent, even though he backtracked:

"...eugenics. This is not something I am opposed to from a scientific point of view. We do it with livestock, so why not us?"

You can be predisposed to a lot of things -- diabetes, heart problems, and so on -- most of those don't necessarily prevent you from reproducing. But being "intelligent, motivated, imaginative" has little to do with having a "disadvantageous" genetic makeup leading to health issues. So you are not taking the whole "nature" part into account, only part of it.

Also note that I am not necessarily supporting eugenics, just thinking aloud. At the same time, I don't see how your proposal is any better than "classical" eugenics from the human rights point of view. We can take it one step further and assign an importance coefficient for voting. Let the professor/researcher vote count for 3 units; as for the proles, .7 will suffice. After all, why shouldn't people with intelligence, self-control, and imagination have more of a say in where the country is headed -- it's mostly their kids who will live in this country in the future, so it's only fair.

<comment><USER9> Ok, the thread is dead and we're off-topic but to clarify: I just don't find important things like good physical health (you can revolutionize theoretical physics before dying of a heart attack at 45... and yes you could be very unhappy knowing that you would die sooner but I don't care about about happiness either). The only worthy purpose for any eugenics-like social engineering strategy for me would be ACCELERATION OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AT ALL/ANY COST, as I believe that in the long run this will lead to better overall health and change everything for "better".

NOTE: Yes, such a measure or anything similar would lead to human rights erosion that might amplify further, and this is why I wouldn't actually promote the proposed soc-eng strategy in any current society, but that's a different thing....

<comment><USER8> I don't understand. Happiness doesnt matter, but the ultimate virtue in your philosophical schema is scientific progress to make things "better", which is presumably aiming towards happiness, no?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Pros and Cons of Taking Investment from Corporate VCs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startups-and-investment/the-pros-and-cons-of-taking-investment-from-corporate-vcs-b8164023a938#.8zjc0f609 <comment><USER2> "Fun" is being a relatively new hire at a startup and, about two months into realizing that the little place is a dysfunctional train-wreck whose core technology is little more than some crappy UI wrapped around an even crappier XML processor (which the company didn't even write!), being called into the offices of a couple of the corporate VCs and being grilled on how things "actually were".

So I told 'em: Disfunctional this, hollow shell of technology that, engineering practices that involved trading floppy disks of source code and doing builds by hand.

I think they knew. There was little shock. Memo: If you're a hardware company with little experience in software, don't invest in software you know nothing about.

I don't know why the funding wasn't yanked. Perhaps it's because it was 1999, the start-up was buzzword compliant, and although there were ominous creaking sounds, the first bubble hadn't popped.

</comment><comment><USER3> Solid post. Echoes many of the things I've been told by very seasoned lawyers in the field.

Tag along clauses for corporate investors are advisable to prevent them from blocking acquisitions etc.

<comment><USER4> "Tag along clauses ... to prevent them from blocking acquisitions ..."

I think you mean 'drag-along' rather than 'tag-along'.

Tag-along clauses give minority shareholders the right (but not the obligation) to join a deal negotiated by majority shareholders. Their intention is to prevent minority shareholders from being screwed.

Drag-along clauses give majority shareholders the right to force minority shareholders to participate in a deal. Their intention is to prevent minority shareholders from blocking a deal.

In practice, many agreements include both tag-along and drag-along. The parties assume that the majority shareholder does the deal on behalf of all the others.

<comment><USER3> Oh right, sorry I got the two mixed up and yes including both would be prudent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some corporate VC are also very detached from the parent company and are actually closer to "regular" VC than you might think.</comment>


Confessions of an Apple Store Employee - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/confessions-of-an-apple-store-employee

<comment><USER2> Wow, working retail means you are pushed to sell inventory and deal with annoying customers? Shocking news.

This is why I don't read CNN.

<comment><USER3> "Laugh, laugh, gentlemen. It'll be the only story everyone reads."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Skip the link-bait CNN article and go straight to the article quoted:

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/conf...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/confessions- of-an-apple-store-employee)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've worked at Circuit City, CompUSA, and Wal Mart. None of these things are unique to Apple Stores.

</comment><comment><USER6> I worked at Apple retail for five years, and of all the things this guy could've talked about _these_ are the things he mentions? o_0

<comment><USER7> For those of us that haven't had the pleasure of working for there, what should he have mentioned?

<comment><USER8> <http://crapplestore.blogspot.com>

<comment><USER9> Apple legal must have taken that down already.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's happened before. It just recently came back online but I guess that was short lived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tell all? Does this kid think they are just paying him to hang out? Retail is retail kid, you either drink the kool-aid or become a customer. It's called a J-O-B.</comment>


React、Redux , Nothing to it - <AUTHOR> React that can't see the jsx.
Redux that can't see connect.
Start that can't see webpack.
A front-end framework that you can understand at a glance, simplicity does not mean simple.
makajs.org, trying it might surprise you. <comment><USER2> Bit of advice to you: I know you what to share your thoughts on this particular package. But this kind of post just looks like an ad and insincere.

(edit) PS: Make sure it is to scale when you enlarge images.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestion, first post , : )

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.makajs.org](https://www.makajs.org)</comment>


The nontrepreneur ("...using the rather unfair example of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.") - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/archetypes/the-nontrepreneur-258466.php <comment><USER3> Now this comment is interesting...<http://valleywag.com/tech/archetypes/the- nontrepreneur-258466.php#c1420280>

<comment><USER4> To reply to it: I'm pretty sure that a) they don't resent Slowe, and b) that it seemed like a good idea at the time. I would trust PG not to do any forcing of any of his startups.

<comment><USER5> I haven't heard anyone mention this aspect: what did Aaron Swartz's "whiz-kid" status contribute to the acquisition? It had to have helped. Four co-founders that includes a genuine "whiz-kid" from Stanford is worth more than two unproven guys from University of Virgina (at least to the suits that do acquisitions for media companies). Wired has even written about Aaron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well I never claim to be good at programming, or much of anything. In fact I've found that trying to improve your skills while thinking of yourself as only marginally capable is great inspiration to keep trying harder, even when you've surpassed the best. Is this not a defining characteristic of some of the most talented?

He can claim not to be a programmer or entrepreneur and that's just fine - <USER2> his actions speak louder than words.

By the way, webpy is great. It will be the foundation of many web products. Who gives a damn if everyone's going to ignore the value that it brought to reddit.

<comment><USER4> What is this, the false modesty one-upmanship Olympics?

<comment><USER6> OK. A "friend" of mine never brags about accomplishments. wtf is the difference?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Easy to understand intro to Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thewhitetulip/build-app-with-python-antitextbook <comment><USER2> Strange to stylize Termux as TermUX here:

[https://github.com/thewhitetulip/build-app-with-python- antit...](https://github.com/thewhitetulip/build-app-with-python- antitextbook/blob/master/01-intro-to-python.md#installation)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are some factual errors in the introduction.

> Python has been around for more than 30 years

The license says that development began in the early 90s.

The factual errors continue in the explanation of the language, such as describing a triple quote string as a multiline comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Python was conceived in the late 1980s[1] and its implementation was started in December 1989[2] by Guido van Rossum at CWI

I might have misstated. The idea was around more than 30yrs albeit the implementation has been for around 27yrs

> triple quote string as a multiline comment.

Don't you use triple quoted string as a multi line comment? Then what do you use for multi line comment? I am curious.

<comment><USER4> String literals without assignment have no side effect, that is why you think of them as comments. They are however, not comments. They are parsed and interpreted just like any other string.

You might be familiar with the concept in Javascript, if you have ever put 'use strict' at the top of a JS file.

<comment><USER5> I think thewhitetulip has GvR's blessing[0]. It makes sense, though:

      There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
      Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

The guy's handle is thewhitetulip, which is the most Dutch thing I can think of.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/112670605505077248](https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/112670605505077248)

<comment><USER3> Funny, I guess he's changed his mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's so funny? I made a mistake and you and the others pointed it out & I fixed it.

Plus, triple quoted strongs are either strings or docstrings not comments, isn't rectifying mistakes good?

<comment><USER3> Hmm? I was talking about Guido changing his mind.

I guess it was an ambiguous pronoun reference. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's clear that this represents a lot of work and it's wonderful that you've done this. My instinctive reaction is to correct minor issues, but please don't take negative comments as a lack of respect for what you've done... this is a tough audience, maybe the toughest. Keep up the great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't take any feedback the wrong way, if you find any mistake, I invite you to send a PR or raise an issue :-)

Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have just started learning Python and I'm referring "Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures using Python". Should I continue with that or refer something else?

<comment><USER8> "Problem Solving" is a good reference for understanding algorithms and data structures. It uses Python but Python language is not its main focus. However, "Problem Solving" is one of the best places where I've learnt programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, problem solving books would teach how to approach problmems but not the language itself.</comment></comment></comment>


Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off - <AUTHOR> https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/ <comment><USER2> So, regardless of any of this, no-one is saying you should avoid getting formal education; for all sorts of reasons, Education benefits the person getting it. Or at least the fact that you don't learn anything isn't a reason for an individual to avoid it, from an economic perspective.

But Bryan Caplan is trying to get to the difficult policy question of "should we be trying to send everyone to college?"

So I listened to the podcast and most of the empirical evidence for this view boils down to this:

If you compare earnings, the first N years of high school/college are far less valuable to people than the actual event of graduating. This makes a pretty strong argument that in terms of employment, the value of education is signaling, rather than actual learning.

But my biggest complaint here is that even if you accept that most of the employment value of education is signaling (which I do), that does not preclude actually learning something from formal education and the signaling effect may be masking the society-wide return to education.

He's also pretty dismissive of the correlation between math/science scores & GDP, which I think support the model of signaling masking real societal return.

They also very briefly touch on the fact that not all majors are the same, and they even suggest that CS is a difficult major more similar to other Engineering courses than Economics, which is probably arguable ;) But I mention this since our experience in CS may not be a good basis on which to base any thinking on the policy, since most STEM graduates outside of engineering disciplines do not actually work in their field of study.

<comment><USER3> I think there is value in school.

The people you meet, the range of ideas you are exposed to, the required work ethic, Ect. These all contribute to the development of the brain.

<comment><USER2> The podcast goes into how there is very little evidence that for the idea of transfer learning, i.e. learning one task helping other tasks. Being exposed to ideas in your chosen profession is probably useful, but there's basically no evidence for the idea that being well rounded helps after you control for intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its just the current mass education system is more of a giant filter test than learning. Actual learning process is deeply personal and transformative. Instead this is a high-stress environment with little actual learning and more of performance show to force feed people with data in factory-like setting.

Those who learn for filter tests and those who learn out of interest for the subject are different people. Turns out the system is geared for the first type of people and their educated knowledge doesn't hold when they lose interest in it, they have to take "refresher courses" and "recertifications" for everything they learn.

</comment><comment><USER5> Education is what you make of it. Make of that what you will.

<comment><USER6> This is personal view. Caplan's work is mostly about social view.

What is claimed is that while you can make good use of education, society as a whole loses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds similar to Peter Thiels views. ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo) )</comment>


Typelevel boycotts LambdaConf over politics - <AUTHOR> http://typelevel.org/blog/2016/03/24/typelevel-boulder.html <comment><USER2> I've attended several conferences and not once have I ever checked into the political advocacy of any of my session's presenters. Nor have any of my presenters ever brought up politics. I go to conferences to discuss programming, frameworks, architectures and technologies. In so doing I don't care what your political views may be, what your religious views may be, what your sexual preferences may be - I don't care about any of it.

I simply enjoy connecting with other people as passionate about programming as me.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you boycott something at the type level, it's a compiler error to buy something from that firm.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thread poster personally does not like Typelevel.

Thread poster editorializes title accusing typelevel of politics.

Thus the circle continues.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I disagree with their decision, but it would be good if a passing mod could make the title less inflammatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A group that's policing who can use their services based on political disagreements is definitely not a group that it's safe to do business with. Who knows what they'll take offense at next?

<comment><USER7> Right, condemning a vocal advocate of white supremacy and racial slavery is a slippery slope to WHO KNOWS WHAT DANGERS.

<comment><USER8> Where's the coming from? The only thing I've seen as evidence of that is [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/underst...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/understanding-racial-idealism.html) \- but I don't read that as an advocacy of white supremacy, it's just saying that Nazis were "utopianist" (as in _they_ believed in a utopian ideology), and it's actually as an analogy to characterize modern liberals.

"Vocal advocate of white supremacy and racial slavery" seems like a bit of a slander, but maybe I'm missing part of the equation.

<comment><USER9> _" maybe I'm missing part of the equation"_

You're not. The main issue is that Moldbug writes in depth about controversial things, without including enough Leftist bromides like "Hitler was the worst" or "slavery is evil". This is very triggering to Leftists in the tech industry and so they want him removed from any conference where he happens to be presenting a talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We're going to take our ball and go home; we don't want to play with you!"

What a bunch of children. They don't agree with a person's personal views, which are totally tangental to the subject of the conference, so they pick up their ball and go home?

Since when did everyone become such cowarda towards people with different ideas? Why not show up with a diverse group of kick ass programmers, and show him he's not so great?

No, we'll run and cry, and make blog posts about it. Stay strong. /s

<comment><USER11> While I am not one to shy away from a political argument, it's pretty easy to put myself into TypeLevel's shoes. As they say in their blog post, due to the notoriety of the speaker it's almost inevitable that an event about programming would become an event about political argument.

If they aren't in the mood to preside over such an event, it's reasonable not to have it at all. They are not obligated to be in the business of public debate, and the results of such debates could easily harm their reputation. It's important in life to pick your battles. Having read about the speaker in question, it's pretty much impossible that TypeLevel employees would be able to magically argue him out of his existing position, and it's probably equally inevitable that he would be unable to argue them into his position.

None of the above seems childish to me. Most people I know, with few exceptions, make such decisions all of the time. Are you going to have a good Thanksgiving, or are you going to get into it with your reactionary relative for the thousandth time?

<comment><USER6> But that's simply victim-blaming.

This is a professional conference about a particular apolitical topic. If the speaker, no matter how controversial or unpopular his unrelated personal views might be, is going to stay on the topic and not bring up politics, then anyone who tries to bring politics into it is being the disruptive force, not the speaker, and _that_ is the person who is creating an unsafe atmosphere and needs to be ejected from the conference.

> it's pretty much impossible that TypeLevel employees would be able to > magically argue him out of his existing position, and it's probably equally > inevitable that he would be unable to argue them into his position.

Why is it necessary for either of them to argue the other into their position?

> Are you going to have a good Thanksgiving, or are you going to get into it > with your reactionary relative for the thousandth time?

I'll tell you what I wouldn't do: I certainly wouldn't demand that my reactionary relative not be permitted to attend, and if she's gracious enough to not start a fight at the dinner table I won't start one myself. If she can be polite, I can be polite.

<comment><USER12> But typelevel has not cancelled lambdaconf, nor asked for it to be cancelled or even change its speakers lineup. They decided not to hold _another_ event that was affiliated with lambdaconf.

If we're going to keep running with this thanksgiving comparison, they're not asking for the relative not be invited. They're having a party the day after, a party to which the crazy relative was never invited, and decided to cancel _that_.

<comment><USER6> > They decided not to hold another event that was affiliated with lambdaconf.

You make it sound like they randomly woke up one day and decided, for no particular reason whatsoever, to not hold an event they had already put enormous effort into planning and scheduling. They are cancelling their event in an attempt to pressure LambdaConf into bowing to their political demands.

> If we're going to keep running with this thanksgiving comparison, they're > not asking for the relative not be invited. They're having a party the day > after, a party to which the crazy relative was never invited, and decided to > cancel that.

How would that behavior make any sense, though, if you're a person who doesn't want to disrupt the Thanksgiving dinner? They already didn't invite the crazy relative to their own party; what more do they want?

<comment><USER12> No, they are cancelling an event because they feel holding it would endorse views they find disgusting. You might not agree that it does, or that the views are disgusting, but that is irrelevant to their decision. The only people truly inconvenienced by this are: \- themselves, because they're throwing away a lot of hard work \- the people that wanted to attend their conf, which makes _typelevel_ look bad, not lambdaconf.

Back to the thanksgiving dinner thing: they don't really want anything other than to make it clear what they're having an issue with. But they're not asking for anything, just saying: this is incompatible with my values, I'm taking myself out.

What else do you want them to do? Compromise their values? Who are you to demand that of them? Or demand the crazy relative be booted, making the whole thing horrible for the host? They took the only reasonable action given their values: take themselves out of the equation, and explain why. Anything else would have been either childish or cowardly (again, given their core values, which you might disagree with or not feel quite as strongly about).

<comment><USER6> > What else do you want them to do? Compromise their values? Who are you to > demand that of them?

If their values are "we cannot interact in a professional manner with people who hold views we dislike," their values are bad and they _should_ compromise them. If we can't get along with those with whom we disagree when necessary to accomplish unrelated things, we might as well disband this country and start arming up for civil war, because that's where this road ends.

<comment><USER12> Has it occurred to you it's entirely possible that some people at typelevel are black? And you're saying that yes, they _should_ interact with and condone the views of someone that would see them enslaved and feels they are inherently inferior and should have fewer rights than him?

Maybe you could. Maybe, if someone had consistently argued that you and your family were of an inferior race and should bow to their will as is your ordained place in the universe, you could shrug it off and say, "let's agree to disagree and get on with things".

I'd guess this has never happened to you though. I'd guess you can have this position because this is not _your_ safety and _your_ rights that are in danger. It's always so much easier to consider hatred acceptable when you're not its target.

<comment><AUTHOR> Should someone very religious refuse to interact with somebody who is pro- choice? Should a gun-afficionado refuse to interact with somebody advocates for gun-control?

In a professional environment we all have to compromise. You can't expect to only run into people who share your values and/or validate and approve your life style, or even what you feel is your identity.

<comment><USER12> There's a fairly obvious distinction between not sharing someone's values and asserting that someone is a sub-human and should have lower rights due to not being of the right color.

I'm fine with working with people whose don't share my values. I wouldn't be with someone who very publicly and very repeatedly advocated me and my family being enslaved. If you are, good for you! just don't expect everybody to share your obvious strength of character and forgiving nature.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>