What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011? - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976 <comment><USER2> The current copyright law is a prime example of the impotence of the electorate in the face of the power of Big Money. It is in the public interest to have works move into the public domain, so that others can build upon them (I'll refrain from linking to the myriad talks by Lessig and others about how the current copyright system is broken).

And yet Hollywood keeps buying the legislators and perpetuates this broken system.

<comment><USER3> There is a compelling natural rights justification for intellectual property. It typically gets ignored (e.g. by people like Lessig).

Basically: The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property; that's part and parcel of living in a civilized society. Doesn't matter if that work is entirely "intellectual" or not. The fact that it's physically easy to steal intellectual property does not make it right.

People who make arguments about natural rights typically also think that if people's natural rights are not respected, that is going to ultimately be a net loss for society. I agree with that in the case of intellectual property. If people's intellectual property rights are not respected, it will not be profitable to develop intellectual property.

Although we shouldn't shun abstractions, it's also important not to shun concretes. In this case: you claim that it's important for the public good to move works into the public domain. Well, how is it good for the public to move Horton Hears a Who or Sports Illustrated into the public domain? Much less Waiting for Godot.

<comment><USER4> _The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property; that's part and parcel of living in a civilized society._

This argument is only considering one side of the equation. The other side:

Pretty much all products of a human being's work in a civilized society are built on top of previous products of other people's works, in both a material and especially in an intellectual sense.

Giving such an unreasonably long time for copyright protection is breaking the chain. It argues, wrongly, that it is ok to build on the previous products of civilization while effectively locking up anyone from building on yours for 100-200 years.

<comment><USER3> You're correct that we build upon the previous efforts of others, but I don't think that's a counterpoint to what I've said. For one thing, copyright doesn't prevent you from building upon previous intellectual and material gains made by civilization; it just prevents you from, for example, making a movie of Lord of the Flies without permission from the owner of the copyright.

Separately:

There's a legitimate discourse to be had about how long copyright protection should last. But I disagree totally with people who claim that it should be nonexistant.

<comment><USER5> But copyright can prevent you from accessing less-famous works. Some of these works are out-of-print, so you can't get them and the copyright owners are nowhere to be found. These lost copyrighted works are essentially lost.

<comment><USER6> IANAL. If a copyright holder doesn't effectively exist like in this scenario, how can they charge you with copyright infringement?

If a work is out of print and not findable, and the copyright holder is gone, how would you know that the work existed, and how would anybody go about printing said work again?

I also think that your statement implies that society is somehow entitled to peoples' copy written works at some point. I think it might be the prerogative of the copyright holder to discontinue (and possibly destroy) his or her work before the copyright's lifetime ended. What then?

<comment><USER7> Just because you can't find the copyright holder doesn't mean they don't exist. If your derived work is a big hit, some corporate lawyer somewhere might realized they acquired the rights two generations ago, and bankrupt you with an infringement suit. This is why projects go through the whole clearance-of-rights licensing nightmare, and whenever clearance fails, society loses because those projects never see the light of day.

<comment><USER6> "If a copyright holder doesn't effectively exist like in this scenario"

I was surmising a scenario where one did not exist to point out an issue with the parent post. Of course this situation would almost never occur in reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Copyright law is really disappointing here. How do such long terms contribute to the progress of sciences or the arts? The writers and main contributors to most of the pieces named are dead. The publishers have made their cash time and time again and now most of these pieces are by no means "hot sellers", though they may be of cultural or historical interest. And, there's 40 years left before the copyright expires.

All this does is allow two extra generations to leech off of the creativity of their fathers without actually contributing anything themselves. Same goes for the two subsequent generations that fill the publishing houses that originally print these works.

Do we really believe that Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies would not have been written or published if the copyright term was only 28 years (in fact, they _were_ published when the copyright term was 28 years)? It should be evident that cultural experiences will be generated even if the money doesn't flow down for 100-200 years (not that there won't be money anyway -- they'll just have to do something useful with the property, just like anyone else).

The whole thing is just patently ridiculous. What do we gain by refusing to allow free commentary or contribution on Lord of the Rings? Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. If he was concerned with ensuring his posterity and publisher would have money from his work, he could have taken various measures to do so, like divesting large amounts of money to them in his will.

It is ridiculous that all of society and culture has to suffer because of corporate lobbyists that don't want Disney et al to lose money. It's not like the publishers are being robbed here, they've made more than enough money on these properties and now it's time to share. Intellectual property was never meant to trap ideas -- it was meant to make their sharing plausible and reasonable (before the internet, there was significant overhead involved with publication and wide dissemination of such material). Now we just have leeches looking to ensure their own fat paycheck at the expense of free culture.

I would be very happy to see a copyright law of 28 years since publication or less with no extensions, applied retroactively to all works under copyright in the United States. I don't see why life of the author should be considered -- if someone writes a good story, that's great, but 28 years of unlimited monopoly on that is quite enough. And note that public domain doesn't mean the copyright holder can't make money anymore -- it just means he has to provide something that the market deems valuable, instead of standing as a gatekeeper and profiting off of everyone else's imagination.

<comment><USER9> Why having Lord of the Rings in public domain is so important?

<comment><USER10> This is a _good question_. LOTR is being actively commercially exploited and the commercial exploitations are _darn good_. Meanwhile, it's cultural impact hasn't been noticeably blunted by copyright -- that novel launched at least one _industry_ , to say nothing of being repurposed by virtually every book in adjacent genres.

<comment><USER11> I don't see what that has to do with anything. Public domain works can still be commercially exploited. The only difference is that LOTR wouldn't have sat in preproduction hell for years because of squabbles over the rights. Peter Jackson could have gone ahead and made his very fine movies — instead, copyright almost got him forced out of The Hobbit.

<comment><USER12> Another possibility: Instead of squabbling with the publisher/Tolkien Trust, Michael Bay could have simultaneously made a movie as well to compete with Jackson's vision of the movie.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand your point. If you mean he could have made a LOTR movie, I still don't see how that's relevant, given that:

1\. That wouldn't happen, for a large number of reasons.

2\. That happens even in the current system (see "The Exorcist: The Beginning" for an example in the movie world).

3\. Michael Bay already had movies in competition with the LOTR franchise — copyright does nothing to prevent that. It just requires that some people distantly related to people who paid some money to Tolkien get paid if you want to use the LOTR names and characters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The deal between copyright holders and society was changed retroactively in favor of the former. Why then should the latter uphold their end of the deal, i.e. not pirate?

<comment><USER14> The issue isn't getting a copy of the original work for free. Of greater concern is the penalty for creating derivative works - so we can't have <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies>

<comment><USER15> Actually, I would believe you could have had that even if it was in copyright, as it would be considered parody. Would it not?

<comment><USER16> It probably depends on how much of the original text and plot were used in the parody. It would certainly be considered illegal to write Harry Potter and the Zombie Hallows now, just by virtue of using the same characters as the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> About copyright in general: Micky Mouse is still in active use. Can anyone tell me some reason that Warner Brothers should be allowed to make a Mickey Mouse movie just because it's old now?

One other example: sales of Ayn Rand's books currently help fund the spreading of the ideas from the books, after her death. That seems fair enough to me. Why shouldn't books sales be able to fund promotion of the book's ideas as long as people keep buying the book?

<comment><USER18> I'll bite. I don't care if WB makes a Mickey Mouse movie. Walt is dead. We're not talking about the state stealing "Rearden Metal" shortly after its invention. Generations have grown up with this character and it seems just as outrageous as state-based exploitation to hold this character captive forever.

How does inifinite copyright extension do anything but favor the sad corporatism you oppose? Entire generations will never re-sow the seeds of these cultural works. If you're on this planet to tell the next great Mickey Mouse story then you better be lucky enough to get the right spot inside Disney.

So I don't see any compelling Randsian arguments here. Each generation should get a shot at profiting (or simply engaging publicly) with the _cultural_ fruits of a prior generation. Creators will be fine.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't even consider Mickey Mouse to be a character - he hasn't been used that way by Disney for at least 50 years, and never had much character development to begin with even when he 'starred' in minstrel cartoons.

Mickey Mouse is a logo, deserving of trademark protection and nothing more.

<comment><USER20> Mickey is an actively used character in European-drawn Disney comics. He's usually either a serious detective protagonist, or just a friend of Donald or Goofy.

For all his detective skills, he somehow has never figured out that Goofy is the same person as Super-Goofy (there is a peanut plant in Goofy's backyard that turns him into a Superman-style hero).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to know what DID enter the public domain, more than getting sorry for what did not.

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately, because of discontinous extensions, no published works are entering the US public domain again until 2019:

<http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday>

Of course, whether any actually enter the public domain then depends on Congress not retroactively extending copyright terms again. Perhaps Congress will choose a term of 'heat death of the universe, plus one day' — which the courts could still uphold as technically 'limited' per the Constitution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7-10 were first published in 1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community theater."

As far as I know, you can teach a class using Toynbee or Kissinger; the students just have to find copies. As for community theater, they put on works far more recent--one friend appeared several years ago in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1995), another in "Lips together, Teeth Apart" (1991; or whichever MacNally play gave him a chance to shed his clothes--"Love! Valor! Etc" of 1994 maybe). What the terms are, I can't say; but it doesn't seem to run anyone broke.

I do agree that the copyright extension gone beyond reasonable bounds. The critic Hugh Kenner made an interesting case that the extension of copyright in the United Kingdom about 100 years ago had a dramatic effect on the public's impression of what literature was, creating a discontinuity in perception that made the modernists' work appear to have come about without its actual context.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if anyone has ever considered that existing copyright legislation puts authors' lives at risk by making the term: date of death + N years? There's a short story in that at least but now I'm too afraid for my life to write it. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> According to Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University, the optimal copyright length is 14 years.

[http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research- optimal-...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal- copyright-term-is-14-years.ars)

[http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyrig...](http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> Why was Eldred v. Ashcroft argued on 1st Amendment grounds? There seems like a relatively straightforward argument from the Takings Clause.

<comment><USER26> Lawrence Lessig explains how he "lost the big one" here: [http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March- April-2004/story_le...](http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March- April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> <http://publicdomainday.org/node/37/>

<http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011>

Edit: Oops, meant that to be a comment to mrleinad

</comment><comment><USER28> How do international books fit into this?

Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if they are still copyrighted in the US?

<comment><USER29> That's an interesting question. My [minimal] understanding of copyright law suggests that whether the book's in public domain in Britain has no bearing on the rights granted to Americans to use it.

If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.)

I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post back here, since now I'm curious.

(these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways, along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)

<comment><USER30> This "interesting question" is, as I understand it, the basis for the usual ratcheting up of copyright terms. One side says "we must harmonize with the other side", but they go a little further, and then harmonization happens on the other side, and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The 'public domain' hasn't been what's acceptable to share according to lawyers for quite some time now.

</comment><comment><USER32> I might be mis-remembering, but doesn't (L)GPL rely on copyright law for its status? If so, then there's at least one bit of IP that's "properly protected" by copyright law.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you remember correctly (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft>) but GNU would have an issue with the term "IP". :)

I don't have a link but my impression is that part of the need for the GPL to exist in the first place is due to restrictions of copyright and the GPL uses copyright to enforce itself as a way of reacting against the system which it would rather not exist.

<comment><USER33> I have a couple links:

<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html> (Why IP is a bad term.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At least our dark lord Cthulhu is public domain.</comment>


Groupon Responds: Too much of a good thing? - <AUTHOR> http://groublogpon.com/cities/too-much-of-a-good-thing/ <comment><USER2> Smart of them to respond quickly and swiftly, but the core issue of this specific case wasn't addressed. A naive business owner was aggressively sold into a plan that wasn't sustainable for their business, and by all accounts wasn't aware of the cap system which Andrew says "has always been Groupon policy to allow merchants" to have.

So the PR responses read wells to people who have already decided Groupon did no wrong here, re-enforces to businesses that there is a model that could work for them, but does nothing to address people who found the whole thing unsettling/distasteful.

<comment><USER3> "A naive business owner was aggressively sold into a plan that wasn't sustainable for their business"

I agree with you here. However, as someone who has been on the ad sales side of the equation, I can tell you that all sales are emotional and the more time you spend explaining to people how to properly price out the product the less likely they are to buy. Literally the more rational you make it for the person to buy your product the less likely they are to actually buy it, because the rational part of the brain isn't the part of the brain that buys stuff.

In addition, I'd argue that what makes advertising not-unethical is that the vast majority of businesses lose money on any given ad buy. If advertising was just a license to print money for all businesses instead of, say, the best 5% of businesses then it would be pretty hard to argue that advertising was making the world a better place. While Groupon may well have been at fault here, the small business owner does have some responsibility to understand how advertising works, what the best practices are, what asset they are trying to build, etc. If the business owner in question understood this then it wouldn't really matter that they didn't understand every last feature on the site. It sounds like her real problem was that the people coming into her store didn't like her stuff; the fact that she was losing money on every sale would have been a non-issue to begin with if this weren't true.

<comment><USER4> > _because the rational part of the brain isn't the part of the brain that > buys stuff._

i think you might also be admitting that most stuff isn't worth buying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People who are blaming the coffee shop owner are missing why this incident is bad for Groupon.

First of all, she acknowledges that it was her fault for not doing the math.

However, what she learned from the experience (besides losing $8,000) is that Groupon customers are worthless. They are cheap (duh) and they don't come back -- probably off to the next Groupon deal. [1]

These are not people you want in your restaurant. You want people who will pay full price and come back. Especially at a coffee shop, where there is not a lot of room to upsell someone who has $13 worth of store credit!

This is going to make it clear to small restaurants that Groupon works for places with fixed costs that can use price discrimination to get people in the door, but not well for them.

In fact, it gives me a startup idea: the OPPOSITE of Groupon. People pay extra for a limited number of guaranteed spots at exclusive establishments. Want dinner on Friday night at the hottest restaurant in town? We've got it, but it's going to cost you 25% more.

[1] I attended an event where 4 people bought $30 Groupons to a local bar for $10. They invited everyone they knew for Sunday Happy Hour and bought 120 $1 mimosas and bloody marys. We all ordered food, but those $1 drinks were already loss leaders. Assuming a 50% Groupon cut, the bar made $0.15 on each one. Did the food orders make up for that? <http://www.flickr.com/photos/lukefrancl/4897720841/>

<comment><USER6> >In fact, it gives me a startup idea: the OPPOSITE of Groupon. People pay extra for a limited number of guaranteed spots at exclusive establishments.

If exclusive restaurants wanted to do this, they could easily do it themselves. (The fact that they largely don't is interesting and much-studied by economists.) What value would your hypothetical startup provide them that they couldn't attain simply by raising their prices or charging extra 'table fees' for popular times?

<comment><USER7> Interestingly enough, Aviary (Grant Achatz's new restaurant in Chicago) will be charing more $ for more highly desirable reservation times. Curious to see how this will work out for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From PosiesCafe blog: "When I talked to Lucinda today, she asked if there was a cap on how many were sold to help protect the business from too much loss, and the simple answer is, no. When you sign up for Groupon, you are agreeing to sell as many as get sold… and why would Groupon want it any other way? They get half of the earnings."

From Groublogpon: "Also, to clarify one important point: it has always been Groupon policy to allow merchants to cap deals. If a merchant sells too many Groupons, they'll have a bad experience, the customer will have a bad experience, and therefore, Groupon loses."

<comment><USER9> Must be some kind of miscommunication . . . I doubt either are lying about their perception of the situation.

<comment><USER10> I'm gonna sound cynical here, but why do you think that? People in business lie all the time to cover their butts or prevent embarrassment.

<comment><USER11> Well for one thing, it would be easy to verify whether or not Groupon is lying here, by talking to other companies that have used Groupon. If they are caught lying, it will hurt their reputation, especially when they are in reputation- protecting mode. They could be lying, but it would be a very bad business decision.

<comment><USER12> The lying one was probably the salesman, if my past experience is any guide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do not get it. So groupon responds with some marketing spiel about how their offering have worked for a number of businesses, and like he say some corporate BS about win-win.

Nothing about speaking to the specific small business owners that got it wrong by using groupon and what groupon has done to prevent other small business owners from failing in the same manner. How groupon has extended or enhanced their offering to protect against a bad experience for all parties involved?

And since he was writing in response to the Posie cafe story, something about the specifics about the case making it a bad experience for Posie's would have been so much more interesting.

I have not used groupon and probably will not after this response.

<comment><USER14> >Nothing about speaking to the specific small business owners that got it wrong by using groupon and what groupon has done to prevent other small business owners from failing in the same manner. How groupon has extended or enhanced their offering to protect against a bad experience for all parties involved?

Well, here's some things you apparently missed:

>Of course, we have heard from merchants who felt Groupon sent them too many customers. We responded to those concerns by creating merchant preparation materials, including this video featuring a Groupon merchant who sold 10,000 bagel Groupons in a day:

and

>Also, to clarify one important point: it has always been Groupon policy to allow merchants to cap deals. If a merchant sells too many Groupons, they'll have a bad experience, the customer will have a bad experience, and therefore, Groupon loses. We're longer-term thinkers than that. In fact, we have the opposite problem more often – where merchants protest a cap we recommend, convinced they can handle more customers than we think they can.

and

>Now that we know Posie's had a problem, we have reached out to them so we can help.

So they didn't specifically mention talking to the 3% that didn't want to do it again, but they most certainly did address the other concerns you raised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wait a minute. The email from a satisfied customer that Groupon features in this blog post is quite misleading.

It was sent only a few days after the advertisement, and the writer is gushing about web stats. Given that Posie's didn't seem to realize the mistake they made until the Groupons coming in started to drain at their finances, this doesn't really prove anything.

The writer is excited about the spike in traffic and assumes that the "web- savvy" customer will be good for business, speculating about viral, positive word of mouth. But none of that could possibly have happened in three days.

This customer hasn't been satisfied by the effects of Groupon. They've bought into the marketing of Groupon. Now, maybe they'll be satisfied once they see how those 505 coupons they sold turn out, but theres no way to know at the time of writing.

</comment><comment><USER16> They're right. Where this went off the rails was whatever process that convinced a coffee shop to invest in Groupons when they were so close to the edge that missing their number by a couple thousand dollars caused them to miss payroll.

<comment><USER17> I'm not a believer in any press is good press, but I don't think this will be bad for groupon. The story made me say, wow, look at the numbers of people they get through the door. So many that it nearly sunk a little business - it's so successful that it's actually scary for a business. Groupon's excellent response here helps make the message positive as well.

<comment><USER18> Also, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I can imagine Posie's will get a lot of support from their new customers by complaining to the press. And these customers will buy meals, be model customers, offer their condolences....and tip nicely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They did a nice job of trying to frame the problem, but they are dead wrong.

"Traditionally, the biggest problem for most small businesses is getting customers in the door."

Actually, the primary concern of most small businesses is keeping the doors open.

Once the doors are open retailers have two things they need to maintain:

      1. The number of customers
      2. The amount of money the average customer spends

Groupon is a bad deal for retailers because it puts all of the emphasis on #1 at the expense of #2. Obviously that is what happens with any discount promotion, but when is the last time you saw a "75% off everything in the store" promotion?

Groupon's terms are too greedy and it will be their downfall unless they change it. It is way too easy for someone to come behind them and just offer better terms to the businesses and run Groupon out of town (without businesses Groupon has no benefit).

The company offering the best deals from the most desirable places will win the daily coupon market.

</comment><comment><USER20> How many thousands of companies have spent a combined hundreds of millions of dollars on Google AdWords and not ever made their money back?

That isn't Google's fault and this isn't Groupon's.

<comment><USER21> It certainly isn't Groupon's fault - but if merchants regularly have negative ROI on this sort of scheme Groupon's days would be numbered...

<comment><USER14> If it's true that 97% of businesses want to do it again - it seems that Groupon really isn't in much danger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> and _thats_ how you respond to a PR crisis. wp groupon, wp.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just out of curiosity: what do you think the actual usage rate is for these groupon/coupons?

I'm sure it's way way higher than a coupon printed in a paper or offered online, but there has to be a certain % that don't get (or forget) to use the coupon before the expiration date and the business benefits outright.

<comment><USER11> Don't most of the groupons have a policy that if you don't use it by the expiration date, you can still redeem it at the price you originally paid for it?

<comment><USER23> Good point. I guess that means it's a wash for the business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think more emphasis should now be but on training the shops that use Groupon how to get the best value out of it. It is really no one's fault but it is Groupons responsibility to make sure as many campaigns turn out well.

</comment><comment><USER25> Excuse me, but this post just doesn't cut it. He seems mystified by the bad experience although such stories are too often heard to be a rare, mystifying occurrence.

Actually, this is a very good opportunity for Groupon to create a new revenue stream. For a (small( fee they can offer consulting services for small business. Say, for $250, before you invoke the Groupon horde, you have Groupon prepare a brief case study on your with expected numbers of customers, expected revenue, etc. It's easy for Groupon to create this, since they have all the data. Not only this will stop the bad publicity ("Hey, you had a chance to get consulting, but chose not to"), then they can turn around and _sell_ these reports to larger consulting firms, too.

</comment><comment><USER26> Haha. It's impossible to hate on Groupon when Andrew Mason writes so well and so sincerely. Good luck haters. That's a good blog response.

<comment><USER27> I thought this bit was a bit condescending, and starts the response off on a sarcastic note:

        There have been a handful of stories lately documenting the struggles of cupcake
        shops running out of batter or sushi restaurants who don't have enough rice to
        meet the demand brought on by their Groupon feature.

I possibly missed a Groupon story or two, but I don't remember any where stores ran out of ingredients - the problem is not so much that they can't satisfy the demand (though there is some of that in some cases) but that it's a cost sink that didn't generate the promised increase in "regular" customers.

<comment><USER28> > I thought this bit was a bit condescending, and starts the response off on a > sarcastic note:

I didn't read that as sarcastic or condescending, but maybe it's because I already spent time watching all the Groupon site videos? There vibe is pretty friendly, lighthearted, and helpful - I bet there actually was a cupcake place that ran out as a notable experience, and that's why they write about it.

> he problem is not so much that they can't satisfy the demand (though there > is some of that in some cases) but that it's a cost sink that didn't > generate the promised increase in "regular" customers.

This is true, yes. I think a business owner should look at their desired customer base - the bagel shop it's a great play, because everyone buys quick food, and maybe Groupon users can shift to buying their bagels. For a slightly formal upscale cafe like Posies, you're trying to capture people's "sit down at an expensive environment" [1] time, which seems like it wouldn't convert as well long term. Groupon users might do it once for the experience, but people generally budget much less time and money for formal relaxing experiences, so you'd have a harder time displacing it.

[1] <http://posiescafe.com/wp/?page_id=76> \- Their coffee is compares reasonably to Starbucks at $2 to $3 a cup, their sandwiches around $9... they've got wines and beers from $3 to $7 per glass. I think this puts them in a tough spot where they're both upmarket/a slight luxury in most people's eyes, but still don't have crazy profit margins like an ultra-premium place.

My analysis:

I think Groupon is good for businesses that do high volume that want to replace people's regular common routine (a sandwich, hot dog, drink, whatever), low cost businesses that the Groupon demographic would keep using (inexpensive nail salons), and for places with no marginal cost (Chelsea Piers for instance, museums, other places where all the expenses are operating the place and there's no significant space constraints). I think slightly upmarket, not quick places would be one of the worst performers in Groupon if they couldn't at least break even on the Groupons.</comment></comment></comment>


Friends aren't really friends in social networking - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/02/that-guy-who-sa.html

<comment><USER2> Some of my very best friends never signed my high school yearbook--it's filled with signatures of people I guessed I'd never see again after graduation.

You don't really need records (digital or otherwise) to know who your real friends are.

</comment><comment><USER3> More acquaintances than friends... A point well established in Malcolm Gladwell classic "The Tipping Point"... Here's an interesting read on tipping point in social networks. <http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/tipping_point.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one with a Facebook account that has a total of fifteen people on it, all of which I speak to every day?</comment>


Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://do-better.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see if a similar visualization for nurses and primary education teachers would show a similar pattern (with the gender reversed, of course) or if the gap would have different characteristics and distribution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. That would be interesting. I haven't looked, but I wonder if the data is readily available...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry for being so blunt, but I think I'm missing the message here. What exactly is the purpose of naming and shaming employers for exhibiting symptoms of such a lopsided talent pool?

Presumably the target audience is not unfamiliar with the gender disparity in tech. If they are unfamiliar there exists data about the industry in general that would be better suited to making a point to them. So, this is aimed at some subset of the industry, but it seems a bit nebulous because...

Is it a call to action? "We Can Do Better"? OK, so who are the "we"? What are the actions to take towards doing better? (I mean, more specific the obvious end goal of gender equality in our industry.)

With or without specific calls to actions, why is this broken down on a per- employer basis? Should deviations from industry average be celebrated and booed? Is it an attempt to put pressure on the employers, if so to what end? Or is this just a novel way of reiterating a statistic that the target audience already knows?

</comment><comment><USER4> No idea where the 37Signals number came from... this is the Basecamp team today: [https://basecamp.com/team](https://basecamp.com/team)

The Basecamp team is 8/43 women - NONE of whom are accounted for here. That's a huge factual miss on the very first company I recognized & fact-checked. Doesn't fill me with confidence.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like this is specifically regarding the engineering teams. The graphic shows only twenty people at all at 37Signals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

<comment><USER7> I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth.

If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor.

Unless your product aims to solve a problem that only affects white guys in the city (which, to be fair, is certainly a non-negligible number of products), then you're going to have a hard time expanding your base beyond white guys in the city if your team consists of only white guys in the city.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that is necessarily true; it implies that we cannot empathize with people that do not share at least racial and location characteristics with us.

I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of every racial and socio-economic variable you aim to market to.

<comment><USER7> I do not disagree with that at all, and clearly, we've seen monocultures succeed at doing exactly that. I wasn't attempting to decry the methodology of every company with a monoculture, as much as to point out that it's just easier with actual diversity.

As Vezzy-Fnord points out, a single individual is able to empathize with other types of people, but that empathy is finite, and also, empathy does not equal understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder just how long this discussion is going to go on. To me looking at who has jobs in tech broken down by gender is flawed from the beginning.

The more interesting sociological question is whether there is a nurture thing happening here, or just a natural tendency for women to not be as interested in computers and technology at a young age.

Boxing and MMX have way more men than women - why isn't there a "we can do better" campaign for these disciplines?

By the way my co-founder CEO is a woman and she's an amazing technologist and leader.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't follow this chart. If the right (male) side is further to the right of 50%, shouldn't the left (female) side be proportionally to the left of the 50% too? The average line doesn't line up either.

It's a real issue, but the chart doesn't work well on my browser.

<comment> jack-r-abbit The center point of the chart is 0%. As a dot moves to either the left or the right, it shows some number greater than 0% until it reaches 100%. No company is going to have a dot at each of the edges... as you can not be both 100% male AND 100% female. The chart made more sense to me when I selected the "Sort By: Most Equal" option. The top few companies have a 50/50 split by gender. As you scroll down you will see those shift to the right for a more male-heavy company (mostly... some are female-heavy as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We can do better" translated to: Let us join the feminist bandwagon please.

What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc.

Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they _will_ continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club.

I am seeing this stupid trend recently. GE shared an article on their LinkedIn page, to which I replied with this [0].

Some company is paying teachers to teach girls to code, but they're not paid when they teach boys.

This is absurd. This is stupid. There's a reason most jobs in tech are taken by men:

\- Most tech _students_ are male. (So women start to get filtered out way before there's even a job involved - They pursue other stuff like marketing, arts, design, etc). There are few girls in Engineering. That's why Engineering students frequent girls who are not in Engineering.

\- Once they graduate, there are still more men than women applying for jobs in tech. A lot of women will do something else. There is less an urge for a woman to achieve something, and less drive, than there is for a man. If you disagree with me, you are dellusional since you are basically contradictin History and Biology and Now: How many Fortune 500 companies were started and are run by women. Thank you.

It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime.

However, let's not start writing crap. Heroku ? James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, Orion Henry. Three guys. Why isn't there a woman with you ? Is it that _maybe_ you didn't know _any_ woman who could fill in ?

I ask those guys: When you were in Engineering ? How many girls were there, and from those girls, how many could hack it.

I'm tired of this stupidity. I'm tired of this leveling from bottom.

Soldiering isn't for everyone. Soon I'll make a petition asking the special forces to let me in: Why is it a problem for you to let me in, even if I can't lift a dude and run with him, even if I need a pillow to sleep !? Intolerant bastards ! Make a rule to lower your standards to suit _me_.

And soon, people who don't bear the sight of blood will lobby to take blood out of surgery. Would you trust such a surgeon with your life ! Eww, blood !

[0][http://bitly.com/1oKeYZJ](http://bitly.com/1oKeYZJ)

<comment><USER12> I'm tired of tech missing out on so much potential from those with two X chromosomes. If tech was more inclusive, there would be far more great engineers to hire from.

>It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime.

Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.

<comment><USER11> >I'm tired of tech missing out on so much potential from those with two X chromosomes. If tech was more inclusive, there would be far more great engineers to hire from.

I trust female engineers who rock will not have difficulty finding a job, and if they do, I'm sure they have the drive to start their own company.

>Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.

I'm 26, quote me on a marble rock if you wish.

PS: I don't like your idea implying that being intimate with women is stupid and reckless. It's insulting to me, and to the female gender.

Oh, and I upvoted you. Because you voiced your opinion.</comment></comment></comment>


Delta has banned nearly 250 passengers for refusing to wear masks - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-airlines-no-fly-list-tops-240/index.html <comment><USER2> As long as they made it crystal clear that masks were required from the booking process, I see nothing wrong with this.</comment>


Scientists Use Smartphone to Control Drug Delivery to Brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-future-brain/201908/scientists-use-smartphone-control-drug-delivery-brain <comment><USER2> Wild</comment>


How great programmers learned their craft (interview)  - <AUTHOR> http://usmanahmad.wordpress.com/2006/08/02/great-programmers-answersinterview-with-steve-yegge-linus-torvalds-dave-thomas-david-heinemeier-peter-norvig-james-gosling-guido-van-tim-bray/

<comment><USER2> [http://www.stifflog.com/2006/10/16/stiff-asks-great- programm...](http://www.stifflog.com/2006/10/16/stiff-asks-great-programmers- answer/)

I think this is the original article, no broken text and Bjarne Stroustrup's answers as a bonus.

news.YC has editors, right?

<comment><USER3> Very odd, indeed. If you're going to engage in shameless wholesale scraping as appears to have occurred here (and the site does appear to be a scraper site), why not pick content on a topic that you can monetize (porn/gambling/pharmaceuticals/mortgages/etc) easily?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Guido is awesome. He clearly does not take himself too seriously. :) Linus'es answers were the ones I most agreed with.

</comment><comment><USER5> David Heinemeier Hansson listens to _Jewel_?!

<comment><USER6> This might get a rise out of some people, but I believe that DHH is completely out of place in that list of hackers, and his response to the question about mathematics makes it painfully obvious.

So many things he says make me ashamed to admit I use Rails for most of my coding these days.

<comment><USER2> He is different, sure. But no "true hacker" made a better web framework. Perhaps there is something in his mentality we can all learn from.

<comment><USER5> i agree with both of you, but i agree with tyler more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is very old, why are you posting it again?

<comment><AUTHOR> Simple. I didn't know it had been submitted. I did a search before I submitted, but the article didn't come up in the first page or two.

One solution would be for news.yc to improve its matching algorithm (perhaps looking at the body of html text, not just the title/url) - most people won't even search for previous articles before submitting.

<comment><USER8> They actually have search? I was trying to find an article the other day and looked all over for a search box. I finally had to resort to a Google site search.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have been more clear - I meant I used Google to do a site: search.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Not as rich as you think… - <AUTHOR> http://gavinandresen.ninja/not-as-many-as-you-think <comment><USER2> The EFF received quite a few bitcoins early on, which it redistributed.

On the one hand, they'd be worth quite a bit today. On the other, without ways of getting more people interested in bitcoin, they might have just stayed an interesting experiment and be worth nothing.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/thank-you-bitcoin- comm...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/thank-you-bitcoin-community)</comment>


The Second Amendment solution to gun violence - <AUTHOR> https://lite.cnn.io/en/article/h_dc68cbc361f1ff8e9ddc92010ec99cf9 <comment><USER2> The 2A, like all rights in the Bill of Rights, is an individual right and not contingent on people forming a collective group to be realized. Pining for the 2A to be contingent on militia service is a common wish for gun control advocates but was simply not the intent of the founders (corroborated by many supporting documents of the period, and solidified in the _Heller_ SCOTUS decision).

Therefore the foundation of this article is both moot and asinine.

<comment><USER3> This is wrong. Also, the constitution says whatever the majority of the court says it does.

<comment><USER4> Do you care to explain _how_ "this is wrong", especially in light of the well- researched and authoritative reasoning in the _Heller_ decision?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > a handgun license would simultaneously and automatically register you to > serve as a reservist in the Armed Forces branch of your choice — it's that > simple

Allow me to point to a simple loophole that would probably be discovered and exploited in 24 hours after the law were passed. The Armed Forces currently consist in 5 branches, but starting next year a new branch, the US Space Force, may be established [1]. Then millions of gun owners would register with this branch as reservists, and the inconvenience for them would be minimal to nil.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> But what if I want to own a gun and I am not interested in killing people? Why do I have to sign up for murdering people in other countries just to geek out on engineering and target shooting? Maybe he should modify this dumb idea to make it so only the people who want to murder have to go play army. Put a "is this gun for human killing?" on the order form. If checked yes you have to Army.

<comment><USER7> So the US Military is just a bunch of murders? You should not throw around the word "dumb" (which this CNN clown and his proposal are!) when you make a completely insane and very disrespectful statement like this. It's because of the US Military and the freedoms protected by same that you can say whatever dumb things you wish.

<comment><USER6> I've thought about whether I should respond to this or not. I think we got some wires crossed. This is a hot button issue and I don't want to kick off a flame war.

I was being glib, but I was not calling the US military a bunch of murderers. I was pointing out that it is extremely problematic to force military conscription to get permission to own a gun because gun ownership does not mean a person wants to or is capable to go to war and is willing or capable to take a life in a combat situation. Hell, some people that might want/need a gun may not even be fit for service. Like my grandmother living on her farm alone before she passed.

What I was calling dumb was the proposal that OP posted. I feel like maybe you got the opposite read of my intention because of the flip nature of my post and I think it's a good idea to clarify. Many apologies.

I support and respect military service people for being willing to take risks and sacrifice in ways I could not, but I do not think that should be mixed into being a qualifier for ownership of a firearm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm one of the freaks who believes that the 2nd Amendment exists in part to allow the citizenry to defend ourselves from federal tyranny.

However.

I've recently been wondering how we might maintain this bulwark while eliminating individual firearm possession, except in extraordinary and limited cases.

I wonder if incorporating the 2nd at the _municipal_ level rather than at the individual level might be the answer.

Individuals could "own" guns, but would be required to store them at their local police station, and could check them out on a time-limited basis for recreational purposes, or for self-defense against a specified threat (using a similar process as getting a restraining order). Periodic psych evaluations would also be required to maintain check-out privileges.

And, if the federal government goes berserk, there still exists a massive arsenal outside of their immediate control. Even 5-10% of municipalities refusing to go along with federal orders would be enough to sustain an armed resistance that would make Afghanistan look like a tea party.

<comment><USER9> Seems like consolidated stockpiles of weapons would make for easy targets of destruction if there was to be a type of civil conflict. Plus if there is a civil conflict, guerrilla warfare is a huge strategic capability for the side that doesn't have all of the money and technology to utilize. Having to go check out guns at a local municipality not only puts that strategy at risk during the checkout period, but I would imagine surveillance technology would then quickly identify "dissidents" and allow the federal government to target those dissidents quickly and easily.

<comment><USER8> Think of it more as an emergency extralegal escape hatch. Once we hit the point of civil conflict, I'd imagine that many firearms in anti-government municipalities would "go missing" and end up distributed back to resistance fighters off the record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is one of the dumbest things I've read in awhile, even for CNN.

The second wasn't too form a militia FOR the government, it was too form a militia AGAINST the government in case it became tyrannical.

Now, maybe you can figure out why efforts to remove firearms by the government are a non-starter for most people. This separates us from China and others who would remove our essential rights and liberties.

<comment><USER10> i can't edit my comment but my phone apparently competes to to too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think that's a very questionable interpretation of the word militia. By definition a militia is separate from a country's military.

<comment><USER12> > By definition a militia is separate from a country's military.

No, it's not, a militia is a way of providing a military. (The second amendment is grounded in the idea, alluded to but not explicitly stated in its preamble, that it is essential to freedom for a militia mobilized at need to be _the exclusive way_ for providing a military, including armed domestic security services, beyond a minimal peacetime cadre for training and continuity; it isn't to guarantee freedom by providing a competing armed force to professional ones but instead by preventing the government from adopting professional forces in the first place. It, to be sure, has failed entirely in that goal.)

<comment><USER11> I don't buy it. The Continental Army and regional militias existed independently, both predate the Bill of Rights. It's debatable by the dictionary definition of the word, but definitely wrong in the context of the US Constitution.

<comment><USER13> The Continental Army was (mostly) formed under a "Cincinnatus agreement" that they would return swords to plowshares after the Revolutionary War. At least _some_ of the founding fathers (and it is said even George Washington) were under the assumption that the country would not have a Standing/Permanent Army. There certainly were founding fathers that hoped the Second Amendment to be an attempt to prevent anything larger than regional/state militias from forming outside of defensive emergencies as similar "Cincinattus style" formations of farmers expecting to return home to farming once the war is over. America even named an entire (semi-)major city Cincinnati to try not to forget that war shouldn't be an industry, and warriors should stand down in times of peace. It's strange how remote an ideal that seems today in modern America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The second amendment was a compromise to allow a federal, standing army. Requiring enlistment in such is absurd, and goes against the reason it was written.

<comment><USER15> This is what I took away too. Its just so against the "spirit" of why the 2a was put in. Assuming every history teacher I've ever had wasn't lying to me. If that's the case, I've got bigger issues to deal with lol.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Modern approach to web application development with Common Lisp - kung-fu-master Recently, we have started developing web application with Django. Everything is wonderful, but Python is not Lisp and I feel uncomfortable with Python. In the sense that with Python & Django I am restricted. I can't build eDSL to describe application workflows, eDSL for DB access, etc.
I want to try rewrite it from scratch in Common Lisp. What web technologies stack to use?
SproutCore + Hunchentoot + MongoDB is it right choice? <comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I'd leverage on PostgreSQL rather than MongoDB, because I think relational databases are still the best fit for the majority of modern web applications.

Unless, of course, you have a really simple schema so that you want to use the DB as a mere persistence layer. Or you know from the beginning that you'll have to scale really huge. But then, you'd need a highly customized framework anyway, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of writing a general purpose framework in the spirit of Django.

Also, PostgreSQL is allows to be _extended from inside_ , thus working much in the spirit of Lisp. It can be extended with plain C code, but has also language support for pgSQL, Perl, Python and Tcl:

[http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/server- program...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/server- programming.html)

Unfortunately, language support for Lisp languages is missing yet, but this might be only a matter of time (and would be really great).

<comment><USER2> Following the above, if you're looking for an object store you'd find interesting cl-prevalence which is entirely written in CL.

About web frameworks others have mentioned AllegroServe, which looks quite good with the logic and view separation in templates and actions, similar to Django. Other people prefer to code the HTML inline with cl-who i.e.

If you're developing an application in the web you may find worth a continuation based framework like weblocks or UCW. Cliki contains a fair amount of libraries categorized. Here you have the database libraries: <http://www.cliki.net/database>

<comment><USER3> bknr-datastore works on the same principle as cl-prevalence, but is actively developed: <http://www.cliki.net/bknr-datastore>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> With any luck, mahmud will be here to talk about real-world CL web development. He's been using CL for web stuff in his startup for a couple years, I think.

Another approach for people who are just trying to get something done rather than write a framework to consider is to use CL to do the interesting bits and something else for the web frontend. I've built a couple webapps in CL that would simply have been easier in Rails.

<comment><USER5> Mahmud's traveling and offline for a few weeks (<http://twitter.com/#!/BigThingist/status/1947382564519936>), but he's answered variants of this question before - try searching the HN archives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hunchentoot is a bit odd, but works well. In particular, the fact that handlers (think, like prefix-matching dispatch functions) are global, rather than per-listener. There is, in general, an apparent tendency to use _var_ globals for expediency's sake, but they tend to infiltrate code, and make things harder to debug.

I concur with other commentators that PostgreSQL is worth looking at. I wrote the postgres bindings for what is now CL-SQL many years ago (hi stringbot!), and postgres is fast and reliable (aside from SBCL having interrupt hander sensitivities during ffi calls), though again, the CL-SQL interface is littered with globals, the connection pooling is a bit .. unusual .. and the reader macro syntax probably a pretty bad idea, all in all. If hunchentoot and cl-sql were mildly rewritten with an eye towards looking more like, for example, Java's JDBC and Servlet interfaces, you would have a simple base environment where you could reap most of the big CL wins immediately (DSLs, CLOS, coding closer to the speed of thought, etc.)

The 'IMHO' sources are kicking around here: they suffered a bit from WebObjects envy (hey, it was the 90's..) and do somewhat suboptimal handling of session state. It's still not clear to me how OO you really want to get with the server-side representation of a page, especially in light of all the nice JS client-side component kits that are around.

Mull.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about going 3/4 of the way to Common Lisp and try Clojure instead. Great lightweight web + mongo libs + all the java libs.

<comment><USER8> Yes, taking a serious look at clojure is worth it, the language is awesome, the libraries are maturing and growing in numbers, and the community is awesome. But i wouldn't bet against common lisp either, im currently learning it, and im amazed, clojure programmers can only gain by learning it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back in the day (around the turn of the century) I worked for a startup building a web application using Common Lisp. We used a framework called IMHO, which was developed in-house by a couple of the lead developers. IMHO seems to have been deprecated, per <http://www.cliki.net/IMHO> and the source code is nowhere to be found. I am still in touch with the authors, so maybe I can encourage them to make it more available.

Using Lisp for a web dev platform was pretty nice. I was a support engineer in those days and I always found it useful to be able to pull up a console and inspect the actual running sessions to debug problems in production.

</comment><comment><USER10> We've been using Portable Allegroserve + mysql (running on SBCL on EC2) with very good results.

<comment><USER11> I second the Portable Allegroserve advice. It is an older project, but John Foderaro really put a lot of good functionality in Portable Allegroserve. That said, Edi's Hunchentoot project is very popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd hesitate about MongoDB - I'm not aware of a mature Mongo-backed ORM, for starters. Personally, I like <http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/postmodern/>.

<comment><USER13> Since you directly pull JSON objects out of MongoDB (i.e. usable data structures), MongoDB lends itself to a slightly different programming style than you'd have with a relational database and an ORM. I'd hesitate to call either one more idiomatic in a lisp-ish programming style.

EDIT: That said, MongoDB's reliability model (you have to have a synchronized pair of DB servers to get the reliability you get from a single PostgreSQL instance), PostgreSQL may be the safer choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How about tpd2? If you're comfortable rewriting everything from scratch, at least you'll be working from a high performance foundation -- <http://github.com/vii/teepeedee2/tree/master>

Weblocks is a very good concept if you're willing to get your head round it, and work within its worldview (which is about displaying widgets rather than manually generating HTML).

Everybody uses parenscript, which is a great concept.

<comment><USER3> Both TPD2 and Weblocks rewrite your code using a continuation-passing style transformer, which makes web apps written in them harder to debug than they need to be. It also makes testing your apps or doing any kind of automated HTTP client scripting much harder than it needs to be. There's no upside to managing app state with continuations if you are able to use AJAX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _SproutCore + Hunchentoot + MongoDB is it right choice?_

Even then you're not yet off to the races. In particular, Hunchentoot's session management capabilities are anemic out of the box.

I haven't seen any drop-in replacements, so you're looking at reinventing at the very least this extremely core part of any web development stack.

Hunchentoot also doesn't have any built-in capabilities for handling updates to the website's source code.

<comment><USER3> "In particular, Hunchentoot's session management capabilities are anemic out of the box."

Do you mean user authentication? What would be really nice to have is a user authentication library that offered a generic protocol that could be used with several web servers and persistence mechanisms.

"Hunchentoot also doesn't have any built-in capabilities for handling updates to the website's source code."

You just load the new code and it works.

<comment><USER15> _Do you mean user authentication?_

No, I mean session management. Example of anemia: it offers no way to back sessions by persistent storage.

 _You just load the new code and it works._

Really? What about threads that are busy processing requests when you load the new code, which may have different assumptions?

It seems like a better approach would be to queue up incoming requests, wait for existing requests to be handled, reload the code, and then resume processing requests.

<comment><USER3> "No, I mean session management. Example of anemia: it offers no way to back sessions by persistent storage."

The session protocol is a bit awkward in that you need to implement all of it if you want to change only a small part, but it's there to be hooked into, which is what the frameworks built on top of Hunchentoot do. The support is there to have persistent session objects, you just need to find something that does that (I agree it would be great to have libraries independent of frameworks but built for specific DBs for this) or do it yourself (all that Hunchentoot requires for this to work is to implement two methods).

A lot of the time what you'd really want to do is subclass the session class to make it persistent through an ORM or prevalence, but the problem is that you can't just drop in arbitrary metaclasses into arbitrary subclasses in CLOS.

"Really? What about threads that are busy processing requests when you load the new code, which may have different assumptions? It seems like a better approach would be to queue up incoming requests, wait for existing requests to be handled, reload the code, and then resume processing requests."

You're talking about atomic change management. Queueing up requests works on a per-request basis, but what happens when your code changes affect existing sessions (for example, people in the middle of a multi-step order confirmation form)? The easiest way to do this is have multiple servers and switch them over one by one. In the more general case you need to think in terms of protocols and protocol versioning ([http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2009/03/p-cos-blew-my- mind.htm...](http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2009/03/p-cos-blew-my-mind.html))

<comment><USER15> _Queueing up requests works on a per-request basis, but what happens when your code changes affect existing sessions_

Good point.

 _The session protocol is a bit awkward in that you need to implement all of it if you want to change only a small part, but it's there to be hooked into, which is what the frameworks built on top of Hunchentoot do._

I notice you used the plural "framework _s_ " built on top of Hunchentoot. Are there any aside from Weblocks?

<comment><USER3> RESTAS (<http://restas.lisper.ru/en/>) and web4r (<http://web4r.org/en/>) are both built on top of Hunchentoot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at RESTAS, I think it has some good ideas, and doesn't try to force you to do too many things in certain ways, unlike many other CL web frameworks: <http://restas.lisper.ru/en/>

</comment><comment><USER16> as someone who has written webapps in both lisp and python, I would recommend sticking with python. you have to choose the right tool for the job and get comfortable working with different languages. I am a huge fan of CL, but if you go down that road for a webapp, you will spend a lot of time filling in gaps in the framework instead of focusing on the functionality of your app.

Django may be the wrong tool for the job in your case. If so, I recommend exploring some of the more flexible python frameworks like pylons before making the switch to common lisp.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you're building web apps in CL you should take a close look at Parenscript.</comment>


Patrick McKenzie (patio11) interviewed for an hour on SEO & AdWords - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/patrick-mckenzie-on-seo-adwords-for-bingo-card-creator.html <comment><USER2> Thanks to Gabe for the interview and, in particular, for letting me write and edit a transcript of it. I have always preferred reading to listening myself.

If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask.

<comment><USER3> What I'd like to know is what frame of mind allowed you to slog through that for the last 4 years (losing money early-on). Did you believe in the idea? Were you just constantly tinkering (mental auto-pilot)? Were you doing other startup activities in addition? Did you sometimes take a break from the Bingo Card Creator to try other things?

I find that even ideas that I believe strongly in, I eventually get distracted and wind up doing other ideas... until distracted again. Rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER2> _losing money early-on_

The business put more money in my pocket than it took out since, hmm, about 30 days after I threw the doors open. (I think I know how you came to this misconception, so sorry for the unclear phrasing in the interview: I had a few hundred a month in sales from SEO/etc when I was burning $1 a day trying to figure out how AdWords worked.)

 _Did you sometimes take a break from the Bingo Card Creator to try other things?_

I put it on the backburner to focus on either the day job or on living rather frequently.

As to the frame of mind, I always say that business is a lot like WoW. People express huge skepticism that you could play WoW for 30 solid days of your life and not feel bored out of your mind... but you don't get 30 days of /played all at once. You smash a goblin here and complete a quest there and organize a raid for your next weekend and maybe think about offing that dragon eventually and then collect some mushrooms and kill the dragon and then... whoa, 30 days.

I passed the last four years on a thousand and one intellectually engrossing mini-projects. They never got to the point where they'd lose my interest -- after all, if I just hold out until Saturday, I'll have A/B test results to look at. If I just put in another hour, I'll have a new feature. If I just write this email, I'll have a happy customer and maybe get another postcard for my fridge. etc, etc.

The loot is a bit better than WoW's, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was one of the best hours of my life I've spent all year. I've been researching adwords and online advertising for about six months now and I've learned more in that sixty minutes. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER5> Question for Patrick (or any other SEO experts, I suppose): You mention the SEO benefits of exact domain name matching (easterbingocards.com for a query for "easter bingo cards") -- is it also useful to have a partial match (patrickseasterbingocards.com for the same query)?

Right now I have tarsnap.(com|net|org), and I'm wondering if I should consider buying tarsnap<foo>.*, for appropriate values of <foo>, and just making them redirect to tarsnap.com.

<comment><USER6> There is a similar "Gray hat" SEO strategy, which involves buying domain names that include keywords you want, and then 301-redirecting them to your site-- without updating their whois information. I wouldn't do this kind of thing unless you can devote a lot of attention to it.

You can create content-light pages like the ones Patrick does, for, e.g., encryptedbackupsonline.com--each page on the site would have another title from the same keyword cluster, and each one would end with a call-to-action like "Tarsnap offers [encrypted backups online] for security-conscious power users." (Where the brackets indicate a hyperlink.

Bonus points for having a landing page on your own site that targets those keywords.

(As is probably clear from the above, I do SEO. Patrick's advice is _extremely_ good, so if you have the time, you'll probably do best by just doing what he says. However, if you'd like to know what you might pay to outsource that process to a third party, well, my email address is in the profile.)

<comment><USER7> Do those shadow domains need to have anything link to them for them to be useful?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hadn't seen <http://tractionbook.com/> before... glad that I have now though, looks like a lot of great interviews.

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome! 2 of my favorite HN startups, both of them got the _"Make something users want"_ part right.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very helpful. Thanks. Just wondering, why you decided on going with RoR and if you considered any other frameworks such as Django?

<comment><USER2> It is what all the cool kids were using. No, seriously, there was that "try Ruby right in your browser" site and I fell in love with the language in a matter of minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> MP3 feed: <http://traction.blip.tv/rss/mp3/>

(Posted as I can't see it linked anywhere)

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone please explain that scalable links stuff? I tried searching for it, but I guess the term "scalable links" is very insider lingo.

<comment><USER2> Which part of it? Why you would want to get them, or why Google does not want you to get them?

Links are the primary determinant of rankings in competitive searches. (Competitive searches are high value ones with lots of savvy folks angling to win, or ones where there are other players for the search term with built in advantages: for example, [credit cards], [buy viagra online], or [facebook] are competitive searches, [patio11], [elementary reading bingo cards] or [how do i sort an array in ruby] are not.) Thus, you want links.

Most methods of actively acquiring links are extraordinarily labor intensive: they boil down to sending emails to folks asking for them to link to you, possibly with a sweetener to the deal (such as money, content, a reciprocal link, etc etc). Google likes this state of affairs, because as long as links are hard to get, then the number of links you have is a good proxy for either quality or prodigious effort expended in ranking. Either works for Google -- it makes spam less cost-effective than buying AdWords ads, and there might be gains to the user experience, too. (A less jaded individual might flip that sentence.)

If you're on a campaign to get links, ideally you'd want that to scale out of proportion to the time invested, for the same reason you want users, sales, etc etc to scale out of proportion to the time invested. Google wants exactly the opposite, for the above reason. Accordingly, virtually any tactic which repeatedly results in scalable link generation will eventually be discounted, regardless of whether it improves the user experience or conforms with Google's guidelines, which they enforce in an arbitrary and capricious fashion.

One example of this is widgets, which do result in scalable link acquisition. See the video for what I think of them.

<comment><USER12> Thank you Patrick for the explanation. I'm trying to think of the ways in which a widget can create a link on a site where it's installed. I'm thinking:

1) Javascript, buy making a GET back to the widget server, and then inserting the link into the DOM of the widget host page.

2) Iframe.

3) Flash or something like that.

What am I missing? Can't Google easily ignore a part of a page that's generated by Javascript (their bot doesn't process it anyhow, right), and also ignore Iframes or Flash?

<comment><USER2> Copy this magic spell to put my widget in your page:

 <a href = <http://www.example.com> >Anchor Text Here

Empirically, most people do not strip the link.

<comment><USER13> You can add my 'empirical' confirmation of your datapoint. We did the same thing with a webcam-in-a-frame using the webcam component, the link was left in-tact in almost all cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for the interview, Patrick. I am also curious about what led you to switch from the Java Swing app to the web app. If you could do it over again would you start with the desktop app and move to the web or start with the web?

<comment><USER2> I have a blog post titled "Why I Am Done Making Desktop Apps" and it answers this at length:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus- web-a...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/)

Short version: web kicks desktop's booty from perspective of developer in conversion rates, support burden, maintainability, and ability to extract data. My next app will be a web app, no question. (If it were a do-over, would I be knocked back to my programming competences as of mid-2006? Because that was Java desktop apps, only -- I couldn't write Ruby and couldn't even _spell_ SQL at that point.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Patrick - is Google Analytics or Google Conversion Tracker able to track conversions that may occur across many sessions/days apart.

For example, tracking the conversion from landing page to registered user is easy. But what about the conversion from registered user to paying user. That conversion might occur a week later. Do you know if that is tracked, or does google only count a conversion within the same session.

</comment><comment><USER16> good interview, but the format just looks weird to me. i.e. when the guest isn't talking, you are just watching someone listening.

With both people on the screen, you can change focus between each person, as they speak.

</comment><comment><USER17> well you got me to sign up for mixpanel.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is all mildly interesting and nice, but honestly $30K _projected_ for this year is nothing. And that number shows to me more limitations of this particular method of SEO & AdWords than anything else, i.e. it is not a way to build company.

My first crappy product made $8K a year in profit 0 advertisement. My second made $72K a year no advertisement no SEO. My third product is making over $500k a year (not projected) no advertisement no SEO.

<comment><USER2> By that logic, doesn't your lack of success with no advertisement or SEO on the first product prove your second and third products don't exist?

<comment><USER18> I don't know what are you talking about... Sorry.

<comment><USER19> If you take your first experience: "My first crappy product made $8K a year in profit 0 advertisement" You might draw the conclusion that '0 advertising is no way to build a company'. In which case you'd have never bothered trying the others.

Adwords and SEO are extremely valuable and profitable when done well. Bear in mind that Bingo Card Creation is a relatively small niche. There are people doing finance related things with adwords who make millions.

<comment> PG-13 That's not really true. You would be encouraged if you made 8K off a crappy product with no advertising. You would think that making money is easy and that you could do much better with a less crappy product. True or not, that's how I'd read that statement and feel about that situation (which is actually pretty similar to my actual situation).

<comment><USER19> OP "This is all mildly interesting and nice, but honestly $30K projected for this year is nothing."

I was suggesting that if the OP applied his own logic...

Personally I think making any amount of money is cool and something to build on.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why we used Buffer's code, to copy their blog - M-S-B http://blog.mailcloud.com/startups/used-buffers-code-copy-blog/

<comment> M-S-B What's the best blog you've seen/used for data capture?</comment>


8-bit computer from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://ciernioo.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER2> Hint: when posting images of schematics, make them big enough that readers can zoom in and read the numbers.

It's interesting to see this done with so few ICs. Early Z80 machines had a much higher part count, because a lot of external support was needed to talk to anything. Today we have the "system on a chip", with lots of onboard peripherals, but a Z80 is just a CPU.

The predecessor to the "system on a chip" was the semi-custom "junk chip", which contained unrelated stuff the standard chips didn't have. He may be using some of those to get the parts count down. Can't tell; schematic too small.

<comment><USER3> One of the features of the Z80 was built-in memory refresh, so it needed a lot less glue logic than most processors, which had to have external registers and latches to handle the refresh cycles.

Way back I used to hand solder Z80 embedded controller board prototypes, and they never needed much in the way of chippery.

In an S100 system the biggest extras were the video (formerly VDU) cards, and the memory cards.

Both were limited by the RAM of the day, because RAM came in tiny sizes like 1 bit x 16k dynamic or 2k x 8 static. So you needed a lot of chips on a separate board for what was really not much RAM at all.

Also, money. 64k boards cost over $1000, which is > $3k in modern money.

Now you can get 8 bit x 256k static RAM on a single chip, so you can park that next to the processor without a separate card. With a bit of glue you can even share it with the graphics hardware, eliminating any need for separate graphics RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the title, I assumed "from scratch" meant logic gate, or even transistor level. It's still very cool though.

<comment><USER5> Why stop there? From scratch should involve extracting the materials from the Earth.

<comment><USER6> Because that's the point where you take things that don't compute, and make something that computes.

<comment><USER7> >>Because that's the point where you take things that don't compute, and make something that computes.

Good point but I didn't get it quite right. What is your definition of "things that compute"? I am curious.

<comment><USER6> A device that can use a mathematical process to figure something out.

A single transistor definitely doesn't compute. A single gate? Eh, not really.

A design with a couple latches and an adder that can perform SUBLEQ? Yeah that computes if you attach a ram.

A non-turing-complete pipeline of math functions? Yes, that computes, though why make that when it takes more gates than a microprocessor needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am currently building my own Z80 based computer. It's been a great experience building up my electronics lab and I wish I had done it years ago. I recently received a Russian made Z80 that I ordered off ebay. Probably the only product of Russia I've ever owned.

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't know why, but the CatChurn game jumped out at me as being written by Yahoo Software in 1982 (the year I was born). There does not seem to be a Wikipedia entry for this company, but the address appears to be a residential condo as per Google Maps - [https://www.google.com/maps/place/10970+Ashton+Ave,+Los+Ange...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/10970+Ashton+Ave,+Los+Angeles,+email@example.com,-118.4461462,18z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x80c2bb7ddefe82d1:0xb69d54b9167a2522!8m2!3d34.056877!4d-118.445713).

Interesting to see a little bit of history and how game writers really were working from home on an idea even in the early days.

</comment><comment><USER10> Specially like the wooden case and keyboard. Wish the schematics were a bit easier to read, though. :)</comment>


SolarCity Lowers Share Price, Then Postpones IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/SolarCity-Lowers-Share-Price-Postpones-IPO

<comment><AUTHOR> This news seems to be just breaking. [http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22171556/solarcity- de...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22171556/solarcity-delays-ipo- likely-lower-price-sources-say)</comment>


Ask HN: Can anyone explain space-time crystal for dummies? - <AUTHOR> Ask HN: Can anyone explain space-time crystal for dummies? <comment><USER2> A space-time crystal is a "microscopic" object that breaks the time symmetry. Time symmetry means "if you inverted time, the process would look the same". Imagine this is as if you were going back in time. Literally.

First, an analogy in macroscopic physics. Assume an Engine, like in your car. As each piston moves through time, it goes through 3 phases. Injection, Compression, Ignition.

If you inverted this process, going from ignition, to compression, to injection, your engine would not work. It would probably destroy itself, but it would at least not work. Therefore, your engine breaks time symmetry. Obviously. Most macroscopic processes are not time invariant.

On the microscopic scale, most quantum systems are believed to be time invariant. If you invert time on a hydrogen atom, nothing would change about it.

But a spacetime crystal is a system that exerts state transitions, like your engine does. If you were to "record" its behaviour and then play the recording backwards, you would observe a physical process that is impossible. Therefore, it is not time invariant.

Disclaimer: This explanation is, as requested, for "dummies". It is wildly inaccurate at best, but seeks to explain the problem without introducing any of the necessary physics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the explanation. At least now I have a vague idea about the topic. Highly appreciated.</comment></comment>