Ask HN: What is broken with job hiring processes? - <AUTHOR> It seems like the job recruitment is convoluted and difficult for both job-posters and job-seekers, but nothing has been done about it. Why? <comment><USER2> (US East Coast)

1\. Recruiters are scraping the same job boards applicants use.

2\. Salary Surveys are always wrong, and many go underpaid because they don't know how to negotiate.

3\. Companies write contracts poorly, with little consideration for things that keep employees engaged and on a contract.

4\. There are way too many technology stacks, too many people focus on saying theirs is the best rather than accurately evaluating solutions based on available skills and right fit to the business need.

5\. Way too many inexperienced and untrained people in management positions. I can't tell you how often I've heard IT managers say that they're "Not really a technical person". Stop hiring your unqualified friends.

6\. Government has no idea about tech either. They need to be educated in order to protect consumers, employees, and the economy from bad tech.

7\. Not enough consumer protection enforcement. When companies do bad things the consequences should set an example for everyone else, not just be 10% of the profit as a penalty.

8\. Employees need better vacation, and more options for flexible work days. 40 hour weeks are a lot, the standard for industry leave is usually 15 days a year now. The entire stat of Virginia has an "At Will" employment policy. No wonder why really productive projects suffer from attrition and buron out. You only get out of that trap if you have the power to negotiate, but companies need to create better policies and stick to them for all employees.

9\. Recruiters need to educate themselves on technology. Stop lying to candidates about positions, you should know the difference between Angular and Python. You should also always be up front about where the work location is, and stop sending me text messages you vultures... Email works just fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would argue that two major factors are really affecting the market on both sides-- one is that cost of living in many places is extremely high, and the other is that businesses are demanding people with deep understanding of complex technology from day 1.

Decades ago, cost of living was lower, and apprenticeships or "learning on the job" was tolerated.

These days the landlord wants 30k a year, and the employer wants to pay bargain basement for "10+ years of reactjs experience" :)

</comment><comment><USER4> My comment is going to cover some of the answers given by others but here is my view of the situation.

Management/HR: 1\. They don't know programming (to them it's magic). 2\. They are afraid of paying for people who are less than rockstar. If they can't keep up with the Googles and Facebooks then they can't succeed they hear. 3\. Technology/market has been moving faster than developers can develop. Need it yesterday is the theme management dances to and they don't care about paying you 30 hours of overtime if they can get something to market this week instead 2 weeks later under a relaxed deadline. 4\. All computers work like Star Trek because Siri can tell them the weather according to their logic.

Programmers: 1\. Starting your own framework or library just to advertise/divide the mindshare of other programmers instead of collaborating. 2\. Not knowing how to interview candidates correctly (talk about programming? nah, just come up with a programming whiteboard then nickpick them to death to find one good enough to play sidekick.). 3\. Working for less/putting in too many hours. Working for less brings the profession down and putting in too many hours reinforces the idea that only good programmers put in loads of overtime.

Of course this isn't 100% spot on for every company, market and country but it is what I see most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is just one of the many side-effects of money-oriented society. People work to earn money. Not because they love work.

1\. Business owner just want paying customers, they don't care about product.

2\. Your tech-lead/manager/solution-architect has stop coding for last 15 years (or never did it). So s/he choose the most hyped stack (or js-framework- of-week). Now to justify his decision, he needs team with that skill or he put blame on HR

3\. HR doesn't understand damn thing neither they care for HUMANS. Their job is finding RESOURCE. So they just look for keywords in resume and contact each and every single candidate having keywords in resume.

4\. Candidate deeply hate computer science fundamentals. And believe that being hacker is cool and can learn lot of money/girl/boys/fame. So he tries to show off himself by somehow adding hyped keywords in resume ( or most of time copy-pasting resume).

Now after all this, if product succeeds believe me amigo, you're very lucky or someone just robbed by your product.

<comment><USER6> 1\. is not always true nor is it germane to the question at hand.

2\. is a highly unlikely scenario. Ecosystems are complex beasts at face value. Generally speaking the decision-makers stick close to the trajectory of their comfort zones. You've packed a lot of opinionated assumptions here that I'll pass on biting.

3\. HR has dissolved in the past decade or so. You are lucky if there is a HUMAN aspect to HR (it can be, far too often, a keyword parsing exercise) AND when there is a HUMAN involved it may be someone poorly paid from an outsourcing country that has NO IDEA of what the two puzzle pieces should look like to match them.

4.) Candidates are more likely to never have encountered computer science, software, design, or tooling fundamentals. Non-exposure is different from belligerence.

Job descriptions are often riddled with 50 to 100 keyword requirements - full- stack can always be trumped by entire global ecosystem requirements. So why is it surprising that candidates must list EVERYTHING they've encountered?

Given that sweeping employer wishlist survey of technology, it is then cruel and unusual to expect candidates to be able to 'test' well against those oceans of domain knowledge. And let's be honest. Candidates are tested against a mountain of brain-teasing trivia and nuances gleaned from innumerable web resources dedicated to "weeding out" \- cough - unqualified candidates.

We need to get back to hiring based on mutual interest, mutual technology skillsets, and behavioral stability. If a candidate has everything then they won't grow in the job - bad fit. If they express interest in your direction - you have a candidate worth considering.

Limit the total number of interviews to seven - no bullshit, pare down to three, pick your best. Give it six months. Rinse and repeat if necessary.

<comment> non-entity > Candidates are more likely to never have encountered computer science

I remember reading a comment somewhere a while back that said something along the lines of "computer science has been mostly completed since the 80s".

Now, I'm not sure how true that is, and I'm smart enough not to believe it literally, but I do understand the sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (Europe / Tech)

1\. HR is not tech-savy and most of the time does look for distinguished engineers at the price of an intern

2\. Salary is always on the low side, and salary range is almost never included in the job posting

3\. Companies are not considering their employees an asset, but a liability

</comment><comment><USER8> > for both job-posters and job-seekers...

Chiefly, that Hiring Managers & Executives are almost completely divorced from the actual process of identifying, assessing, and attracting people.

They leave this grunt work to Human Resource Flunkies and Recruiter Bozos (wrongly believing that's HR job).

Yet, executives who get this right-- take an intensely methodical, personal, hands-on approach.

THE ELUSIVE FORMULA FOR GREAT HIRING > [https://mastersofscale.com/#/aneel- bhusri-the-elusive-formul...](https://mastersofscale.com/#/aneel-bhusri-the- elusive-formula-for-great-hiring)

</comment><comment><USER9> Non-technical people doing the hiring. Keyword bingo and thinking Java and JavaScript are the same thing. The endless search for a unicorn or Goldilocks hiring (not unqualified, but not too good either). HR lacking EQ when they reject with weak white lies – this reflects badly on the company when the candidate is more qualified in the future.

</comment><comment><USER10> Job-posters lie, job-seekers lie.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Wanting to hire people that can scale to millions of users when you only have less than 10,000 users

2\. Agism

</comment><comment><USER12> For software engineering, whiteboard tests/leetcode questions.</comment>


Show HN: Taskulu, Next-gen role based project management platform - <AUTHOR> https://taskulu.com

<comment><USER2> Another Task management app... I think it's fine as far as it goes, but I'd like to see a protocol based implementation of this stuff that is simple enough to work as human readable extensions to email (one of the transports, obviously a rest central server being another).

Then you can use whichever interface you want or build one yourself.

Meh, maybe I'm crazy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice. The guys took a good look at trello, that's obvious. But I think they tackled some of the problems we're having with trello and some of the workflows we sortof patched on top of trello.

<comment><USER4> Yep, of course we got ideas from Trello! We love Trello, but it lacked some features which made it hard to use for us - Most importantly we were creating multiple boards on Trello to keep track of a single project (clients/remote teams/local teams/etc) and that's why we added in-project roles and permissions!

<comment><USER3> One thing that trello has on you is that I can make waaay more than 4 lists in trello. We usually have around 8-15 lists on a board.

<comment><USER4> You're not limited to 4 lists on Taskulu! You can have as many lists as you want (and Sheets/Boards within your projects). But To make it easier to follow the process, each list can have up to 4 sections (i.e. todo/doing/testing/done - You can change the section titles.) - if you change it so that each list has only one section it'll act exactly like Trello :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On first glance, it looks like a clone of Trello ([https://trello.com](https://trello.com)).

<comment><USER4> We've got other features, including realtime communications, time tracking, and more importantly, the ability to define roles and dynamic permissions (so two users with two different roles see two different views of the the same project!)

<comment><USER6> Do dynamic permissions really make sense for projects of this size? (I guess a single project is aimed at a size of =< 8 people)

<comment><USER4> Our target is teams of 10-20 people, and companies doing client projects and outsourcing parts of the work (they usually want to keep the client(s) in the loop without them getting in direct contact with the developers and the remote teams).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man, if someone builds something like this with github issue board support, I'm won over. Currently I use zenhub but it annoys me that it's so simplistic (e.g. dragging something to the last column won't close the issue, and closing the issue makes it disappear) and doesn't really allow non-github tasks, so I have to pollute my issue list. I'm torn whether to switch to their paid plan or not.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback, Github support is actually on our todo list and is under development! follow @taskulu on twitter, we'll post about new features there!

<comment><USER8> Good to hear! Any gitlab support in your todo list, too? :P

<comment><USER4> Probably yes, but it'll definitely come after Github (We're using Gitlab to manage Taskulu repositories!)

<comment><USER8> Now that's good news!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Theres a little bit of a annoyance/bug during the sign up process. I signed in with Google so you populated the email field for me (awesome) and the username field (also awesome). However, since you copied my email name for the username I have a "." in the username which the form didn't like when I actually went to submit.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback! Fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Everyone in a real world project has roles and depending on his roles can see/do a specific set of tasks/actions.

Right now you're probably creating multiple projects for handling this (a separate project for keeping your client up to date without them getting involved with your development team?)

Taskulu makes it all easier by letting you define roles and permissions for the people involved with your project with a really simple interface so you as the project manager can spend less time on the management process and get better results.

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks really slick - I like it a lot!

However, from my brief look, there are two things that would prevent me from moving from trello:

1\. The in-task checklists that trello has

2\. I use the trello app on my phone a lot while I commute. I especially like the "quick add card" feature. I don't think I can switch to another tool until it has a decent (Android) app... (maybe this has one and I overlooked, but I wouldn't expect a brand new web app to also have mobile apps)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! We do have in-task checklists, try editing the task description, you can add checklists to the task description using a Github-style markup. Also, Android and iOS apps are coming soon! :)

<comment><USER10> Fantastic, I'll keep an eye on it. This is a definite contender as a Trello replacement for me once the apps are ready :)

I feel a little dumb missing the checklist now - there's a big button right in front of me! Nice!

One last thing that would prevent me from switching: I don't see any terms of service or privacy policy on your site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't see anything without signing up? How as a user should I know whether it's worth signing up for ? Or indeed what I am signing up for. A simple 'About' or 'Features' section is much needed IMHO.

Aside from this, once you're in it looks awesome. Like someone added all the great features that a project manager would want added to trello!

<comment><USER4> We had a features page before (actually, our homepage talked a lot about the features too), but we decided to simplify everything and just focus on our UVP - Roles and Permissions. But depending on the results and feedback we get we might just put the features page back!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks very polished, congrats!

Is there ever going to be an on-premise / self-hosted version (e.g. [https://www.taskfort.com](https://www.taskfort.com))?

/shameless plug

<comment><USER4> Yes, once we're out of beta (hopefully in 3-4 months) we'll have a solution for you to set up Taskulu on your servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The product is very neat. I already love it so much. It has more features than Trello and a lot less heavy than Asana.

Will try to have the team to switch to Taskulu.

</comment><comment><USER14> I need only 2 reasons to use this instead of others. Which do you think should be those?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure how this should be used, pre-filled example project would definitely get my attention before thinking 'meh' and closing the tab.

<comment><USER4> There are in app tutorials once you create a new project and there should be a "Welcome to Taskulu" sample project for new users! I'll check to see if it's not being created... Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Typo on landing page:

> Same project as viewed by two peoeple having different roles

I know... It's niggly!

<comment><USER4> Haha! thanks, fixed! :)

<comment><USER17> A couple other typos under Project Settings -> Integrations: Google Drive / Github "comming" soon

<comment><USER4> Ah, yes, thanks! This one needs a coffee script recompile, we'll take care of it in tomorrow's build! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately I can't create a new project. It constantly gives error. And the error message is 'error'.

<comment><USER4> I can't reproduce this error, can you please give me your user name so I can take a look and see if there's something wrong with your account specifically? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do you have plan for integrating a version control system like git into Taskulu ?

<comment><USER4> Yes, we're working on Github integration :)

<comment><USER19> I mean a git system inside taskulu not connection with github or bitbucket

<comment><USER4> Nope, sorry, we're not planning to host any kind of version control system inside Taskulu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there anything open source like this? I don't want another basecamp experience.

</comment><comment><USER21> It has been 30 minutes or so, and I haven't received any confirmation email?

<comment><USER4> So sorry, Mandrill limited our account but it's fixed now, Can you try logging in with Google/Github?

<comment><USER4> Btw, If you're using a corporate email it might be the spam filter that's preventing the email from being delivered to your inbox :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> neat. looks like it could be more robust than trello, but simpler than asana.

one thought: Remove the Logout from the sidebar and just keep it up there with on/near the profile. already misclicked it :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback! We're thinking about changing the sidebar actions on that page and making it simpler/less confusing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great product. Looking forward to your future updates.

</comment><comment><USER24> Good job :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> very good project managment

</comment><comment><USER26> Great</comment>


Google has banned 200 publishers since it passed a new policy against fake news - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2017/1/25/14375750/google-adsense-advertisers-publishers-fake-news <comment><USER2> I'd love to see the list of banned publishers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it's any of these sites? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13208906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13208906)

<comment> angry-hacker What kind of bs is that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not show a statement like they do with copyright removal requests and indicate to the user that there are flagged results in the search query, but give the option to view the results anyway? At least in that respect, they don't re-enforce the notion that news is being censored at the request of some third party or that Google is taking the vigilante route to culling fake news.

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel like the title is fake news and should be banned. They are removing publishers from their ad network not baned from Google

<comment><USER6> If you think the submission is not appropriate for HN, flag and move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is that going to include Trump's Press Secretary?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure I want Google to tell me what's fake and what's not fake.

This also means they're transitioning from being a neutral part to being curators.

<comment><USER9> _This also means they 're transitioning from being a neutral part to being curators._

So you think Google shows you a list of sites sorted alphabetically by URL or something?

Google is famous specifically for PageRank, which is curation.

<comment><USER8> But it is not manual curation, at least not officially. That's why the algorithm is so (in)famous, because it's an algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It shouldn't be an ad network's job to adjudicate truth, especially given Google's monopolistic position. They should stick to selling and reselling eyeballs and clicks, and regulating things directly material to that, e.g. deceitful ad placement.

<comment><USER11> So they should be banned from providing their customers (the people buying ads) assurances about the sorts of content their ads will appear next to? Seems like that forces them to leave a lot of value on the table.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't sound like ad purchasers have much of a choice here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All of a sudden they care about fake news... after their billionaire homie gets into office

<comment><USER13> You mean after their "homie" lost.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fak...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fake%20news)</comment></comment>


Docker to Donate Containerd to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://blog.docker.com/2017/03/docker-donates-containerd-to-cncf/?d=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Their proposal to the TOC: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZazSXwYWp_DVNjOArbvt...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZazSXwYWp_DVNjOArbvtSKj0qwtP16z0NgtmtiH4Nt8/edit#slide=id.g1b3d449036_0_0)

Interestingly, a few slides later, rkt is proposed also. There's a slide as to "why both": "Standards are most effective when there are multiple, independent implementations with different architectures"</comment>


15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=15-answers-to-creationist&print=true <comment><USER2> Don't waste your time on your average religious nutjob. They're just not worth it.

Pull these arguments out for things like schoolboard meetings and the local PTA/PTO. As long as we can keep evolution in schools, we can always hope that children will end up smarter than their parents.

<comment><USER3> Mind that _your average religious nutjob_ is in its way to a Black Swan: they are breeding at a faster pace than the rest of us. They will outnumber us, and at some point quite dramatically (growth is exponential, but one doesn't feel it until it's too late and the new _nutjob_ majority too sudden).

<comment><USER4> Yeah but this assumes that children will believe just like their parents. It ain't necessarily so!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I vote for religion vs atheism topics not to be discussed here in HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know man.. if the mods want to remove it, its up to them. I'm just following the submission guidelines.. submitting what 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.' This goes beyond hacking and start-ups, from what I've read.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I get your point and I also do not feel strongly against this submission. If it climbed to the frontpage, so be it, I am fine.

What I am against is to regularly have such topics here on HN, since except of intellectual curiosity, there is also a wide range of very personal issues involved. People have different perceptions about what is a fact, proof or superstition, they went through different experiences etc. And, when those topics are discussed on the internet, it usually leads to nowhere, because it is very hard to even agree on basic assumptions.

It is fine to discuss this stuff in general, but I just think that the Internet is not a good medium for it. In my experience, it's usually better just to respect everyones right to ones own belief and focus on other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually didn't realize that I was this misinformed about evolution. Even the first example they bring up about "theory" not meaning what Creationists purport it to mean was enlightening.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good article. Though I actually don't like their answer to objection #2 -

2\. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

My response would be that this is a mischaracterization of the theory of evolution. My knowledge is grade-school level, unfortunately, but I always thought that the theory of evolution was that random mutation, filtered by natural selection, let to speciation.

That _is_ a refutable hypothesis - ie., something that can be supported or refuted by the evidence. To me, the circular thing seems true, but irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER8> Science says X, and creationists sat 2+2=5, they also say that X is wrong, even if it is, 2+2 is not 5, even if big brother says it is, its not! We have nothing to prove or disprove, there is no creationist theory, 2+2=5 is not a theory! And if god exists(we can't be sure) isn't it possible that he created the universe, so that life can spontaneously emerge and evolve? Im not religious at all, but evolution doesn't disprove god(nothing does, and nothing proves it either), it just disproofs creationism. And here is a good question: Who created god?

</comment><comment><USER9> I have flaged this, it does not belong on Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> So what do you think belongs on Hacker News? Would love to hear your opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've flagged this as well. In my opinion, it's inflammatory.

My personal philosophical problem with it is that you can be an ID'er without being a religious creationist. But we all get lumped in together. I don't like that.

A second problem is that religious creationists are going to be emotionally moved to respond, and the other side is already prompted to give the religious guys a pounding. Everybody will be talking past one another.

So nothing gets accomplished except for a bunch of posturin and noise.

Thanks but no thanks.</comment>


Keep Tabs On Your Favorite Startups With StartupFollower - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/startupfollower/ <comment><USER2> I just follow them on Twitter and/or subscribe to their blogs. Unless there are acquisition rumors or other things the startup wouldn't talk about publicly, Twitter and blogs get me the same info as TechCrunch stories, and I'd rather hear it straight from the startup than from TC.

<comment><USER3> To me this seemed easier than scanning through a bunch of primary sources all the time, and I also don't think a lot of the interesting news necessarily ends up coming from official blogs. However, future versions of StartupFollower may include official company blogs as sources if you prefer that.

<comment><USER4> Interesting idea - Any sense for how many startups on TC get more than 1 article?

<comment><USER3> In the last 16 days, TechCrunch stories have been tagged with 284 unique companies a total of 482 times. 50 of these companies were tagged in more than one story, with the most popular being Facebook (tagged in 32 stories), Google (28), Twitter (18), Apple (16), Amazon (10), Groupon (9), Microsoft (8), and digg (7).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea for aggregating TC-specific news about selected companies. Though for more in-depth notifications I'll be continuing to use Google Alerts.

</comment><comment><USER6> cool concept, but does the techcrunch data link mean what i get is the same content as the techcrunch tag?

<http://techcrunch.com/tag/hackernews/></comment>


Show HN: Rei – Process lists easily - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kerkomen/rei/blob/master/README.md

<comment><USER2> I'll just mention fsql[1] here as my favorite of the multiple programs available to query and manipulate different data formats. While more complex, as it requires SQL, that's also the reason I like it. In all the cases where I've had moderately sized lists of items and was tempted to stick them into a DB, fsql makes the job easier.

I want to check out rei though, as it looks like for some common tasks it could be much easier to use. It might make a good addition to my toolkit for the simpler cases.

1: [https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/App- fsql/bin/fsql](https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/App-fsql/bin/fsql)

<comment><USER3> I hadn't heard of fsql, but I did recently find q[1]. If anyone has experience with both, I'd be interested to hear if one does its job better than the other.

1: [http://harelba.github.io/q/](http://harelba.github.io/q/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it, thanks for building it! So far I've used csvkit ([https://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/0.9.1/](https://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/0.9.1/)), which is quite powerful. Can `rei` also parse the header row of CSV files to automatically assign names to columns?

</comment><comment><USER5> Just FYI, as your README.md starts with naming considerations, "rei" means king in portuguese. :)

<comment><USER6> It has a ton of meanings in Japanese and Hebrew, too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei)

<comment><USER7> Does anyone know which of the Japanese characters is commonly used for the character Rei Ayanami? I know anime names tend to be chosen to convey extra meanings, would be interested to know what GAINAX/Anno intended.

<comment><USER8> 波, which is "wave".

<comment><USER7> Thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A/B Testing for Rails - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ankane/field_test <comment><USER2> This is a very nice implementation. I like hosted solutions like Optimizely, but sometimes it is important to be able to do this in our own environment.

I love the view helpers and the ability to keep the winner without having to modify everything again to implement it. Very nice mailer support. Also, you sold it to me with the configuration approach, way to go!

Few questions:

\- What about route A/B test support: Use case will be I want to show a totally different experience based on routes (2 landing pages) and be able to track it.

\- If I want to condition block A & B on a view (or render partials), can I use the apporach based on the value the helper is going to return?

\- What do I need to do to extend the dashboard and library? Maybe some documentation about this could be handy. Maybe decorators or some view helpers to build my own?

Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks great. The documentation looks good as well as the feature set. I'm surprised there aren't more popular gems like this. I'm guessing because of products already in the field?</comment>


A cloud with a silver lining [Icelandic volcano] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiddeneurope.co.uk/a-cloud-with-a-silver-lining

<comment><USER3> What a misery some people are. I think that cheap air travel is wonderful - <USER2> brings all sorts of freedoms and new experiences to so many. For the author of this post - the "silver lining" is that people who have taken advantage of this modern convenience have been inconvenienced and shown the error of their ways in some manner. How silly.

I find that fact that it is far cheaper to fly than it is to travel by car/ferry or train is very telling. It gives some strong clues as to the true cost in world resources of the different modes of transport. If flying is dramatically cheaper then how can it be inefficient in comparison to alternate transport systems? The idea that the train is better in some way is not supported by the market price - there is clearly a massive hidden (well obscured) energy/resource cost associated with rail travel.</comment>


Adobe confirms major Flash vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://bgr.com/2015/10/15/adobe-flash-player-security-vulnerability-warning/ <comment><USER2> The security bulletin has now been updated, and says the update will be available on Oct 16 (today).

</comment><comment><USER3>
      Just one day after Adobe released its monthly security patches
      for various software including Flash Player, the company confirmed
      a major security vulnerability that affects all versions of Flash
      for Windows, Mac and Linux computers. You read that correctly…
      all versions.

Just uninstall this clusterfuck and be done with it.

<comment><USER4> Although I agree with your negative assessment of Flash in general, the quoted bit "You read that correctly... all versions" is meaningless hyperbolic bluster. I would _hope_ a cross-platform product is using a unified codebase to maximize compatibility and minimize development and test surface. That, of course, will tend to mean that bugs exhibit the same behavior cross-platform. (And to the extent that by "all versions", it is including past versions, that's even worse, as it implies that staying on an old version is ever advisable.) It's irresponsible journalism to mislead about the nature of software products like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does vulnerability also affect Google Chrome's builtin Flash player?

EDIT: Answer is YES. The link provided by 0x0 says it also affects Google Chrome's Flash and there's an update for it.

<comment><USER6> It seems likely. 1\. Go to URL chrome://plugins 2\. Click Disable

<comment><USER7> Or block flash on all except whitelisted sites using flashcontrol, free in the chrome web store:

[https://goo.gl/Q0hLm](https://goo.gl/Q0hLm)

<comment><USER8> An extension isn't needed for that. Make it click-to-play ("Let me choose when to run plugin content") and then you can add any site you want to the exceptions list. An icon displays in the address bar when a plugin is on the page, click it and you can easily add the site to your exceptions list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Patches available: [https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash- player/apsb1...](https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash- player/apsb15-27.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> It'd be interesting to know (and the article doesn't seem to make it clear either) whether or not they're going to update the Linux flash player. If not then flash on linux is instantly dead, which would break quite a few websites.

<comment><USER11> It's patched:

[https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash- player/apsb1...](https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash- player/apsb15-27.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I uninstalled flash completely from all my systems upon the last major vulnerability news. My biggest loss? No videos in Facebook, which seems to have been fixed recently anyway. I'm chillin.

</comment><comment><USER13> Getting rid of Flash on iOS was the best decision Apple had ever taken. It is a fact that Flash is a pretty unsecure platform. Companies should stop using flash and put an end to it mess.

</comment><comment><USER14> Flash is still a thing?</comment>


Autism as a Disorder of High Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00300/full <comment><USER2> One popular anecdote or perhaps paraphrased statistical tidbit in the last few years was that incidences of autism were unusually high in Silicon Valley and particularly children of developers. Not that all developers have "high" intelligence--but higher than average on the whole? Just wondering if there might be any strengthening arguments to be made from connected studies. Of course, could be a red herring that masks the critical factors, but if we had to bet on the likelihood of a connection...maybe something there.

<comment><USER3> you might as well check a sample of developers for this disease and check against a sample of the general population. its not just the children, you know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is confusing genetic markers for intelligence with intelligence. Building half a bridge is not useful, and individual markers don't stand alone.

<comment><USER5> He mentions that a: autists are dumber (i.e. do not express some or most of the markers for high intelligence) but posess the genetic markers, and b: the expression of intelligence markers of siblings/parents/higher-order relatives of autists (specifically) is understudied and recommends it for further study. [As far as I read it anyway]

I do believe that the "imbalance"-hypothesis he presents is a bit vague and proposes several imbalances according to different (and possibly orthogonal) models for intelligence, making it seem a bit unfalsifiable to me. Who knows. Behavioral neuroscience based on MRI(or similar modalities) is a giant sandcastle anyway, best not stack those results too high.

<comment><USER6> I agree that the details in some areas were vague, but this is a broad overview and could lead to something testable if the research is followed through.

The short version, to me, was that general intelligence is based on several cognitive axes working together. I believe the paper lists 3-4 most of which were separable, like verbal scores, mental rotation tests, etc. And with Autism, you have 1-2 of those axes working above average but the rest not. To falsify, you could break down IQ tests for individuals with autism and compare some areas with the general population and also with each other. If they match the expected pattern, they may be onto something, otherwise the theory is incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some background on this particular journal: [http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers- journals...](http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals- added-to-list-of-questionable-publishers-1.18639)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am not at all an expert on autism, but my understanding is that one of its features is a strong deficiency in the ability to read human nonverbal communication.

</comment><comment><USER9> All of their markers for intelligence are suspect.

> including full-scale IQ and a PCA-based measure of g (Clarke et al., 2015), > childhood IQ, college attendance, and years of education (Bulik-Sullivan et > al., 2015), cognitive function in childhood and educational attainment (Hill > et al., 2015), and verbal-numerical reasoning and educational level reached > (Hagenaars et al., 2016)

I bet all those markers are more closely correlated with income levels in childhood than with occurrence of autism (or anything else).

<comment><USER10> Knowing, in isolation, that IQ is more closely correlated with income levels in childhood than IQ is with thing X, does not imply that IQ is not a causal contributor of X.

It could just be the case that IQ is partly genetic (in fact, it is) and that IQ may be a causal factor in income levels to a stronger degree than it is for autism or other things.

<comment><USER11> Hasn't IQ been proven to be not just partly, but mostly genetic? Barring exposure to outright toxic environmental conditions.

<comment><USER12> IQ has the highest genetic correlation out of any trait we've observed in Psychology - r ~ 0.7 if I recall correctly from my college days.

<comment><USER13> This is actually interesting in terms of GWAS - there used to be a large difference between "heritability" (~the measurable variance offspring shares with their parents, like height in cm, which can be influenced by a ton of parameters if you don't know about them/don't control them [like nutrition]). In the age of genome-wide association studies the linked SNPs often correlate much weaker than the heritability predicts (example: you could explain 10% of variance with SNPs, but heritability says it should be 70%) - this was called the problem of "missing heritability".

Some more complex models recover some of that missing heritability, these slides are a nice summary: [http://jvanderw.une.edu.au/Mod9Lecture_SNP_Her.pdf](http://jvanderw.une.edu.au/Mod9Lecture_SNP_Her.pdf)

There is a paper from 2011 looking at human intelligence ([http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/full/mp201185a.html](http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/full/mp201185a.html)) and using a little bit of modeling they got the correlation up high:

>We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers and unknown causal variants.

However, look at that "unknown", because the same abstract says:

>Finally, using just SNP data we predicted ~1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample.

Using their SNPs alone it's only 1%. I assume the "true" genetic variability (<comment>heritability) is somewhere in between those two values, since the 40/50% number seems to assume that these unknown variants will be discovered (they haven't yet AFAIK, maybe they don't exist, maybe they do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, I know I'm definitely too weird to get a date. It's nice to think that means I'm intelligent.

</comment><comment><USER15> Eric Raymond's take :

"Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and status-maintainance activity."

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060#more-7060](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060#more-7060)

</comment><comment><USER16> It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny, especially given how many people are autistic.

<comment><USER17> An estimated 1% of the population currently (including those estimated as not diagnosed). Subject to rise as the DM-4/5 diagnostic criteria adapts. Why does this fact of 1% of the population, mean the article is not viable?

<comment><USER18> I'd think the amount dropped significantly once Asperger's was removed from the spectrum in DSM-5 (although this article seems to ignore that fact).

<comment><USER19> That's not my understanding of what happened in DSM-5. My understanding is that Asperger's was removed as a separate diagnoses, as it now falls under Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The Wikipedia article seems to match my prior understanding ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum)), "The DSM-5 redefined the autism spectrum to encompass the previous (DSM-IV-TR) diagnoses of autism, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and childhood disintegrative disorder."

<comment><USER20> >The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been "reliability" – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity.

[http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming- dia...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming- diagnosis.shtml)

Time for a new book.

<comment><USER19> I like Steven Novella's nuanced take on this issue: [https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight- for...](https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-the- heart-of-psychiatry/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Starting a startup but not for money?? - <AUTHOR> I have had pleasure to watch videos "How to start a startup" from Sam and others.
One thing that quite struck me though is that it was repeatedly mentioned that don't start a startup for money.  PG repeated it couple of times and also one early employee of facebook ( employee #100 ? ) also said it in lecture 2 ?
I find it though hard to believe from mindset prospective that people don' t start a startup for money.
Entire concept of capatalism in US and with almost every act from birth to death is tied with money.
How can someone then think of start-up and not think of money ?  One example often repeated is of Mr. Zuckerberg.  But Zuck was already rich even before facebook. He attended Phillips Academy in NH ( I read it , I dont know for sure ) which has fees of $47k / year.  Both Mr. Page and Brin were already wealthy well before google. How many people here can send their kids to school paying $50k just in fees ? I saw many interviews of Zuck. In one notably, he specifically mentions that he does not need money when someone offered him $1MM check. He says look at my apartment in Palo Alto.
So my question is  ---
1.  Do you believe in making money by starting a start-up and think of your idea from that prospective ?
2.  Everyone has lot of ideas. Heck, some are leaving school/ college to make quick bucks. So do you write off ideas because there is no chance of making money by implementing that idea ?
3. A lot is talked about market fit in these start-up videos. If you are not thinking of making money why consider market fit in that case ?
I am sort of confused on making money from start-up, its relation to product market fit and what is being said ( or written or spoken ) in general by prominent people ( not just PG ). Help me correct my confusion if I am getting wrong something ? or give me some pep talk. <comment><USER2> I think what they mean is:

1\. Don't do it for money because you will hate your life if there is no other meaning for you.

2\. You are more likely to have blind spots if you are chasing the money, and thus fail.

3\. Chances of failure are high regardless, but if you like what you do you at least build skills that will lead your career in a happier direction. If it was just for money you are back at square one.

</comment><comment><USER3> This question ties into what Chamath said in one of the required background videos for the growth lecture.He talked about how the primary focus should be on creating substantial impact as a result of which your company lies further along on the value chain , which in turn results in the company making more money.

I think what PG meant was that given the odds, one is more more likely to get rich if you go work for a google or Facebook than starting your own firm. Besides revenue coming in from a startup can hardly be "counted" as your own.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really don't think you can go wrong, so long as you're building something. If you're not building something, then nothing will get built.

If nothing gets built, then nothing will be sold (or enjoyed or utilized, if you prefer not to consider the monetary aspect).

I realize we seek inspiration, but this can become its own source of diversion and brain-juice addiction, resulting in lost years spent idly.

When I see successful people, it seems that they've charted their own courses, heads-down and "laser focused."

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not Zuck and won't pretend like I know what he meant by rejecting that million dollar check but if it was me, I would take it to mean I live modestly, that million dollar doesn't do much to impact me.

That said, money should not be the focus. There is a difference between focusing on money as the reason vs money is the byproduct of what you care about doing. In this regard I can relate.

</comment><comment><USER6> AFAIK they're mostly talking about money making being the main focus of the founder/s (especially on a personal level). It might make them over-optimize short-term outcomes, effectively building a profitable lifestyle business. It's rare to have both early profitability and high growth.

</comment><comment><USER7> Its about Wealth not Money.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think one of the main problems with startups today is that founders don't think of making money at all..and the company folds within a year.

Money is the life-blood of any company. Any investor, including PG will invest based on a good chance that they will get an ROI. It's silly to pretend otherwise.

If a startup has "no chance of making money", it's not a startup. It's a hobby project..and it should be treated as such.

I only start companies that I know can make money. In fact, I find the profit model first..and then build my idea around the profit model. There are challenges and fun in almost anything.

<comment><USER9> Except YC also funds nonprofits[0].

[0] [https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/](https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/)</comment></comment>


Movies on Vinyl – VHD the Forgotten 1980s Videodisc - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCWLaAwr3sM <comment><USER2> wow, funny to see how much experimentation there was before we arrived where we went. Wonder how we will look back at current technology - like Google, Facebbok, Amazon and Apple.</comment>


Huxley, an app that helps fight CSS and UI regression - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/huxley <comment><USER2> For anyone looking for a non-Python way of doing this, PhantomCSS will achieve nearly all of this. The main difference between the two is that Huxley seems to listen and re-perform actions, instead of needing them to be scripted.

We've had PhantomCSS running on a living style-guide/style tile on check in and can even fail the build on TeamCity. It's resemble.js under the hood to do the pixel-by-pixel comparison and will spit out a percentage difference, fail screenshots etc.

EDIT: Link added [https://github.com/Huddle/PhantomCSS](https://github.com/Huddle/PhantomCSS)

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify, it's written in Python but you don't have to write any Python code to use it. Just a teeny config file that contains a test name and a URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nifty project. It'd be nice to add in automated analysis and make it a full Web Consistency Testing tool (disclaimer: a project I work on a lot): [http://webconsistencytesting.com/](http://webconsistencytesting.com/)

The three major problems with screenshot based tools are: 1) hard to adapt to acceptable levels of element shifting; 2) hard to extract semantic understanding of what broke; and 3) if it's not automated and you test a lot of pages in a lot of browsers, they simply won't get compared. But adapting this shouldn't be too hard.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why Resemble.js instead of [http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/](http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/) ? Here's a presentation from a Google team using pdiff for front-end continuous deployment: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMnZiTL0tUc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMnZiTL0tUc)

<comment><USER6> The project for that is here: [https://github.com/bslatkin/dpxdt](https://github.com/bslatkin/dpxdt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Totally thought this would be named after Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, but the answer was quite cool anyways:

 _So we named it after the guy who coined the term "agnostic", Thomas Henry Huxley._

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks quite awesome! It would be helpful to include some installation instructions for those of us unfamiliar with python libraries... do I use pip? do I use easy_install? do I git clone and then do something with setup.py?

<comment><USER3> I fixed this and actually put it on PyPI :) pip install huxley should do the trick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would anyone pay for this as a service? i.e. you enter a bunch of urls and screen sizes, then get sent nice emails with request stats, screenshots and pdiffs with easy integration into your deployment workflow.

<comment><USER10> You could try to address "non-dev people" with this kind of tool.

"Alerts when your shop breaks" Basically CI but on the live system (with a testuser) and daily report emails and instant alerts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty awesome. I could definitely see myself using this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is a project that gathers all available solutions around CSS testing: [http://csste.st](http://csste.st)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a way to test responsive designs with this? Can you set the device metrics?

<comment><USER3> Like window size? You can from the Python API, I just didn't include the option in the Huxleyfile. I've opened an issue here [https://github.com/facebook/huxley/issues/2](https://github.com/facebook/huxley/issues/2)

Pixel ratio, I'm afraid, would be quite difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a visual output? I'm not sure i understand this project

<comment><USER3> It writes a .huxley dir that contains screenshots and a log of user actions. It can replay these user actions programmatically and if the screen shots have changed it will save new ones to disk. You can use a tool like Kaleidoscope to compare the old ones with the new ones (we use git to keep the old ones around).

When you commit, the tests will be updated and the new screenshots will be part of the code review.

Additionally, you can run it in continuous integration mode which will break the build if screenshots are out of date.

<comment><USER13> Just to clarify, if I want to run this as part of travis then I should have the screenshots under source control and when I intentionally change the UI I should run it locally and push the new screenshot as part of the commit but when I don't intend to change the UI it will fail the build if something changes.

<comment><USER3> Yep!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Have Balloons and Ice Broken the Standard Model? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/have-balloons-and-ice-broken-the-standard-model <comment><USER2> Lengthy discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18081920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18081920)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know enough on this topic, so kindly pardon my ignorance, but while I'm aware that neutrino detectors can pick up particles punching through the ground, that's a few dozen meters of ground tops, is it not?

For a particle to survive tens of thousands of miles through dense rock and come out the other side _and register with the detector_ makes me ask:

1\. Just how many particles are discharged by the event and/or passing through the earth at the time of the reading?

2\. What's so special about the composition of the detector that it's able to pick up particles that have not been stopped by the entirety of the Earth?

I'm not asking these questions dismissively. I'm keen to learn. I'm also aware I'm making many assumptions here. Please question or contradict all of my assumptions if possible.

<comment><USER4> Neutrinos are weird little things, and pass clean through any sort of matter almost every time. The famous statistic is that you'd need a light-year of solid lead just to block _half_ of all neutrinos.

What surprises me about this article is that catching neutrinos tunneling up through the earth is considered surprising. I had thought that neutrino detectors generally caught just as many neutrinos from below as from above; the earth is essentially transparent to them.

To answer your question #2: the detector is no better than anything else at stopping neutrinos (just as detecting their stoppage), but--even though the chance of any given neutrino stopping anywhere in the earth is almost nil-- there are so very very many of them that the probabilities add up to a decent number impacting within the detector.

<comment><USER5> Neutrino detectors are mainly looking for (neutrino) events coming from below in order to avoid noise from cosmic rays coming from above.

The surprising part is if other particles are observed coming in from below.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems plausible to me. It's something that has been hypothesized for a while, it's not proposing anything implausible like ftl neutrinos, and the effect seems small enough to explain why we haven't seen them before. It's very exciting.</comment>


Raising the Minimum Wage by $1 May Prevent Thousands of Suicides, Study Shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/08/794568118/raising-the-minimum-wage-by-1-may-prevent-thousands-of-suicides-study-shows <comment><USER2> "Why a $15 minimum wage would hurt employees" [https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/474979-why-a-15-minimum-...](https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/474979-why-a-15-minimum- wage-would-hurt-employees) discusses a "recent National Bureau of Economic Research study that concluded that minimum wage increases from 1989 to 2013 resulted in "lower bank credit, higher loan defaults, lower employment, a lower entry and a higher exit rate" for small businesses." The underlying paper "Does A One-Size-Fits-All Minimum Wage Cause Financial Stress For Small Businesses?" is at [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3417840](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3417840) .</comment>


Ask HN: How to retrain tongue/mouth muscles for foreign language pronunciation? - <AUTHOR> Everyone is born with the ability to speak any language accent-free, so biomechanically, it seems possible for someone to learn a foreign language and eventually speak with minimal accent or no accent.
To draw a sports analogy, everyone is born with the ability to play at least one sport perfectly. We spend childhood training our mouth and throat muscles for this one sport and eventually become very adept.
For example, individuals may perfect hitting a baseball but struggle hitting a golf ball. The differences between baseball and golf swings are large enough that it requires tremendous talent and dedication to translate expertise from one to the other.
Assuming this sports analogy holds, a key step in developing accent-free pronunciation requires defining and learning the biomechanical fundamentals of the language "swing" -- similar to how beginners learn the fundamentals of a golf swing.
The second step is transferring this knowledge from the mind to the body. With golf, this is achieved by visiting the driving range or golf course and repeatedly training our muscles to swing a golf club instead of a baseball bat.
Questions:
1. How do you learn the "swing" (e.g., tongue and mouth movements) of a language? Most language resources are rich in grammar and vocabulary but sparse on pronunciation.
2. What is the language equivalent of the driving range, meaning what are the most effective ways to retrain mouth and tongue muscles on your own? (Immersive learning or speaking with natives may be ideal, but they are also more difficult to arrange.) <comment><USER2> This advice will sound like a joke, but getting drunk in your target language goes a long way. I studied Spanish for years but didn't feel like I had it "in flow", and couldn't quite nail down feeling comfortable communicating. A blurry month of partying in Spain fixed that. Within that month, I noticed the largest improvements after nights I had gotten pretty wasted talking to people in Spanish at local bars. My theory is that when you drink, you stop speaking from your pre-frontal cortex. You are forced to make connections to the language from deeper parts of the brain. Same thing goes for experiencing strong emotions and situations in a target language. Of course, you have to have enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to communicate if you try, this practice just seems to make it "click" more.

<comment><USER3> +1 on this

The most fluent conversation I've ever had in German while still learning it happened when I got drunk with an Austrian friend of mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used 2 techniques when learning Japanese. However, keep in mind that there are very few sounds in Japanese that aren't in English, so my experience has been relatively easy.

When I say 2 techniques, it's actually just one: shadowing. Essentially you take a recording of a piece of speech and memorise it. You then practice saying it at the same time as the recording. When you feel like you are able to say it, play the recording in headphones and record your voice. Then compare your recording to the original recording.

I used news casts to practice because it was easier to find audio clips that also had transcripts I could read -- however an audio book would be ideal if you can get your hands on it. I ran into a problem just having facility with the succession of sounds, timing and tones. My "second" technique was to do this with music. I memorised a variety of popular music and then went to karaoke 3 times a week :-) Probably this helped me the most.

I still struggle quite a bit with tones. Japanese does not have accents on words, but it has 2 tones -- either rising or falling. Getting the tones right is often the difference between being understood or not. At first I could not hear the tones but practicing example sentences that used homonyms with different tones helped me quite a bit.

As I said, I never really had to struggle with learning how to pronounce a sounds -- it was much more in selecting the correct sound, or refraining from using English dipthongs, etc. However, I've taught English to Japanese students who have real difficulty learning how to make certain sounds. I have found that being very specific about how the mouth moves, where you put your tongue, how to use your breath, etc makes all the difference. Probably the best reference are textbooks meant for people who were deaf from birth. After that it's just practice and shadowing is the best technique I know about.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, I've had a lot of luck by first analytically learning about J語 pronunciation. It's a lot subtler than just "2 tones" and it's even reasonable to develope the ability to _predict_ the tonal contour of an unfamiliar word.

The main source I've used is 日本語アクセント入門 by 松森晶子. It's primary focus is on Standard Pronunciation, but there are lots of good illustrative tidbits that incorporate examples from other dialects as well.

Highly recommended!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since you did not mention IPA above:

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

[http://www.nativlang.com/linguistics/ipa-pronunciation- lesso...](http://www.nativlang.com/linguistics/ipa-pronunciation-lessons.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> Question 1: The key is usually long hours in a language lab where you hear words and phrases, repeat them and then listen to yourself. This, along with class, works well enough for most people.

Some people cannot, at first, hear certain sounds in a new language. Usually a language teacher makes them aware of these sounds. If that fails, one could hire a phonetician (like Henry Higgins in the movie "My Fair Lady"), a linguist skilled in the way one shapes ones vocal apparatus to make sounds in a particular language or languages. Some language textbooks provide descriptions of how to do this.

Question 2: A language lab.

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

</comment><comment><USER8> _" it seems possible for someone to learn a foreign language and eventually speak with minimal accent or no accent"_

The jury is still out on that. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Linguistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Linguistics).

<comment><USER4> 2% of adult learners of second languages learn to speak without an accent. This happens even if the person was not exposed to the target language as a child. If accent can only be learned in the critical period, then we need to have an exception for those 2%.

My experience has been that people get to a "good enough" level in a second language and their motivation for working hard goes down dramatically. Children, on the other hand, have a lot of incentive to work hard on their language every day. If you've ever known a child with a speech impediment, you can see how tortuous it is to speak differently than your peers.

The other thing that colours my judgement is that every person I've ever met that has tried consistently to remove their accent has succeeded. However it's a 365-day per year, multi-year project. I've met very few people willing to undergo that experience.

<comment><USER9> _2% of adult learners of second languages learn to speak without an accent_

Citation?

This doesn't match my experience: I have heard at least a few hundred non- native speakers of my native language (Russian), and every single one of them had an accent, obvious after just a few words. The few exceptions were be native speakers of other slavic languages, but even then I suspect they learned Russian as kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Time will do it for some people, but not for everyone. For instance I come from the north-east of England and had a very strong accent which people outside of the area struggle to understand. I then lived in other parts of England for several years and the accent slowly went away. I now have a fairly standard English accent that everyone can understand.

I know other people from the area that have lived away from home for 20 years and still sound exactly how they used to!

Also my accent comes back when I speak to people from "home".

My Spanish also improved with alcohol and a few months travelling around south america, where people are far less picky about the language than they would be in Spain and not too many local people speak English.

</comment><comment><USER11> Repetition.

It's really that simple.

(1) Get an understanding of how to make the sounds from native speakers.

(2) Make a list of all the words you know you don't have a good pronunciation of.

(3) Repeat the words to yourself regularly.

That's it.

Some words will come easier than others, and ones you have mastered can be removed from the list.

I find it's best to do them in small blocks. Five at a time, or whatever you can easily hold in memory.

</comment><comment><USER12> You have to practice. And listen to native speakers making that sound.

You have to watch their mouth shape and tongue position.

In the end it comes down to practice with specific intent of improving your pronunciation. Hiring a voice coach would be the next step.</comment>


Even a genius has to sell himself… the remarkable resume of Leonardo da Vinci - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/even-a-genius-has-to-sell-himself-the-remarkable-resume-of-leonardo-da-vinci-453fb6d53efd#.y004f4gbu <comment><USER2> Yes but good how is he at whiteboarding? Oh, and does his psychological profile meet our requirements?</comment>


Applying Mypy to real-world projects - <AUTHOR> http://calpaterson.com/mypy-hints.html <comment><USER2> > Two very common initial problems I've seen are ... mypy is not running as > part of the build ...

If MyPy isn't running in your build/CI, it's possibly worse than useless.

Until recently typed-annotated Python code wasn't checked in the build. The only time you'd be able to notice a problem was when the IDE's MyPy plugin showed a red squiggly.

One I got MyPy integrated with Bazel we could run it over our codebase, and lo and behold there were at least a dozen errors which were actively misleading developers about the code they were reading.

If something (MyPy, Pyre) isn't checking the type-annotations all the time, they're going to decay into something worse than untyped Python.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've been running mypy on our project for about a year now and it's one of the best decisions we've made. Code is easier to read and write.

We implemented it progressively. At first I added it as a make target but didn't make it mandatory in CI so I could learn how to use it. Then I made it mandatory for a few files that I was the only active contributor to. Then I slowly added more and more files across the project, sometimes as I touched them for other reason and other times as independent changes. Eventually as mypy caught more and more bugs in other contributor's changes they started getting on board and adding type hints as well, until the vast majority of the project was hinted (we'll be getting to 100% within a few weeks).

<comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing your experience. In the project you're talking about, what role do automated (unit or integration) tests play? Was it part of your project policy to include tests for fixed bugs/new features? How did that change when you introduced mypy? What role do tests play today where you're using mypy widely now?

<comment><USER3> We also use unit and integration tests heavily, although neither test suite has enforced type checks. Some parts of the code have enforced unit and integration tests for changes, but others are things that are very difficult to unit test because they interact with systems outside of our control that don't document their low level API responses or have bugs/behaviors that we only observe when running integration tests against the real thing (and subsequently have to report issues or contribute fixes for).

We also use flake8, shellcheck, yamllint and black in our automated tests, as well as a couple of custom scripts (e.g. one that makes sure if you change the documentation you also remembered to regenerate and commit an updated index)

We also still write our tests to assume no type checking in parts dealing with external data, because we can still get badly typed data at runtime. But we also use valdation code to assert those types at the edges of the system so internal modules can assume types are correct.

<comment><USER4> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a good read. I did not know about typing.cast and was just putting # type: ignore on things.

So far, we've had a pretty positive experience with mypy and it's helped prevent a few bugs. Do be prepared to find weird edges you can cut yourself on along the way, but all-in-all I think it's a positive value add.

<comment><USER6> I would advise to be cautious with cast. It can be powerful and mask bugs if you arent careful (ie, type checker said it's ok, so it must be ok!). You may also want to drop a comment if you use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good call on the ingore_missing_imports. I just moved that from the [mypy] section into a [mypy-pyspark.*] and found 4 errors that I didn't notice before.

The first result in Google for this error points here [https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/3905](https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/3905) which explains the issue. I'm ashamed to say I probably just read the first reply, added it to my config and carried on with my day without actually reading what it did.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good writeup. A couple points.

`zope.interface` is more explicit and scalable than `typing.Protocol`s, and more flexible than `abc.ABC`. There's a mypy plugin for it: [https://github.com/Shoobx/mypy-zope](https://github.com/Shoobx/mypy-zope)

> The drawback is that code that changes the representation of its data a lot > tends not to be fast code.

That's not a very convincing reason to avoid dataclasses except in the most performance-constrained environments -- and even then I'm doubtful it'd help. Especially with `slots=True`, dataclasses can take less resources.

<comment><USER9> > Especially with `slots=True`, dataclasses can take less resources.

`slots=True` doesn't exist, though there's an experimental implementation at [https://github.com/ericvsmith/dataclasses/blob/master/datacl...](https://github.com/ericvsmith/dataclasses/blob/master/dataclass_tools.py) .

The main issue is that slots have to exist at class definition, and @dataclass takes an already defined class, so you'd have to create a clone of the class, which is nasty.

On top of that you can't always add __slots__ manually, because it conflicts with default field values (and field()s). __slots__ wants to add a descriptor as a class attribute but it can't do that if the default value is already an attribute.

<comment><USER10> The GP is probably referring to the attrs library, which is another (older) way of creating dataclasses than the stdlib way. It has an easy way to create slotted dataclasses.

[http://www.attrs.org/en/stable/examples.html#slots](http://www.attrs.org/en/stable/examples.html#slots)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know performance is not an explicit goal of Mypy, but I've been curious whether or not this project could lead to something much faster in the future (compiled Mypy with Nim-like speed, something else?). Any thoughts?

Also, does anybody know of any benchmarks of typical programs in Mypy vs cPython?

<comment><USER12> The types are ignored at runtime; they're annotations. I guess they could still theoretically have some impact, but it should be negligible.

Compiled mypy is a stated potential goal - but outside the scope of this project itself. Read more here: [https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#will- static-t...](https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#will-static- typing-make-my-programs-run-faster)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just wish they'd get recursive types working

(I know they're working on it, but I seem to hit this on nearly every project, would be the number one missing feature ATM IMHO)

</comment><comment><USER14> Zulip ([https://zulip.com/](https://zulip.com/)) has been doing this for a long time.

See this interesting blog post on how it was done: [https://blog.zulip.org/2016/10/13/static-types-in-python- oh-...](https://blog.zulip.org/2016/10/13/static-types-in-python-oh-mypy/)

</comment><comment><USER15> > Try not to lose sight of the fact that type checking is supposed to be an > aid to correctness and not an intellectually satisfying end in itself.

Indeed, loved that closing sentence.

</comment><comment><USER16> I recently discovered the Dropbox PyCharm plugin doesn't follow imports by default (dmypy doesn't support it apparently \- there's github issues raised). Spent an unnecessary amount of time figuring out why TypedDict was raising mypy errors.</comment>


HTTP 308 Incompetence Expected - <AUTHOR> http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2014/02/http-308-incompetence-expected.html

<comment><USER3> I think the author of this blogpost has a few things off:

\- HTTP2 != httpbis. Both work is being done by the same working group "httpbis". [http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/charter/](http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/charter/) covers this. httpbis ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9105639/httpbis- what-does...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9105639/httpbis-what-does- bis-mean)) was originally chartered to revise HTTP/1.1 (RFC2616) The working group will refine RFC2616 to: * Incorporate errata and updates (e.g., references, IANA registries, ABNF) * Fix editorial problems which have led to misunderstandings of the specification * Clarify conformance requirements * Remove known ambiguities where they affect interoperability * Clarify existing methods of extensibility * Remove or deprecate those features that are not widely implemented and also unduly affect interoperability * Where necessary, add implementation advice * Document the security properties of HTTP and its associated mechanisms (e.g., Basic and Digest authentication, cookies, TLS) for common applications

As for the HTTP/2 work, here's a snippet from the charter on that: The Working Group will produce a specification of a new expression of HTTP's current semantics in ordered, bi-directional streams. As with HTTP/1.x, the primary target transport is TCP, but it should be possible to use other transports.

\- He seems to think the httpbis folks gratuitously redefined 301. It should be noted that RFC2616 (which, by definition, predates the httpbis work since httpbis is defined to _revise_ RFC2616) had already noted the issue with 301 ([http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.3.2](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.3.2)): Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0 user agents will erroneously change it into a GET request.

\- It's unclear to me whether or not the author acknowledges the existence of buggy implementations as noted in section 10.3.2. It's an open question as to what to do in the presence of buggy implementations. From a server standpoint, if the client is buggy, and you don't want to break the client (willingness to break clients probably depends on how many of the server's users use that client), then you will attempt to work around it, irrespective of what the standard says. Therefore, it's simply pragmatic to ignore the spec if it doesn't mirror reality, and pragmatic spec editors may update the spec to acknowledge this difference.

\- As far as current status of the various 308 usages, Julian (author of the 308 draft) is lobbying major user agents to adopt this, and has written up a status update on the Chromium bug tracker: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=109012#c...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=109012#c28).

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you're well-marinated in standards bodies, and that's a good thing -- it's tough, often thankless work that someone needs to do.

For the rest of us, the language from OP sure _sounds_ like it's saying, "yeah do whatevs with 301, we give up".

People often read RFCs in a hurry. Wouldn't this be a great place to use the a "SHOULD NOT" (change the request method)?

If you're saying "MUST NOT" would be bad because the horse is out of the barn, I understand. But the draft language now sure sounds like "MAY", and the OP has a good point that it's likely to encourage more wrong behavior, not less.

At least IMHO. Again, I am not a standards lawyer, so please take this feedback accordingly.

<comment><USER3> I guess I should out myself as a Chromium HTTP stack maintainer (since 2009, so this behavior predates me). One might consider me a domain expert here. I participate in IETF HTTPbis for the HTTP/2 work as the primary Chromium representative. I am not involved with the RFC 2616 revision work as that's tough, thankless work, that thank god we have Julian Reschke and Roy Fielding working on. As far as I'm concerned, I owe them a drink everytime I see them. They do an awful lot of legwork talking to various implementations and trying to build consensus on actually conforming with the standard and all its edge cases. It's really quite unfortunate to see this blog post author treat them so unfairly, although I can see how one might easily jump to his conclusion.

Now, as far as "SHOULD NOT", that's a reasonable thought for people not aware of what popular user agents currently do. The thing is, the majority of major browsers rewrite POST to GET on a 301. Here's my browser's code for it: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/n...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/net/url_request/url_request.cc&q=ComputeMethodForRedirect&sq=package:chromium&l=570). Here's Firefox's code for it: [http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/netwerk/protoc...](http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/netwerk/protocol/http/nsHttp.cpp#301). To my knowledge, all browsers implement this behavior. We basically copied IE's behavior, because, IE did it and websites expected all user agents to do what IE did. Story of the web, sound familiar? :P

So, as you can see, Julian was merely acknowledging the pragmatic reality of the situation when he updated the httpbis specs to reflect this behavior: [http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/changeset/1428](http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/changeset/1428). And this reasoning behind it is covered in the introduction to the relevant section in the httpbis docs: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf- httpbis-p2-semantics-2...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf- httpbis-p2-semantics-26#section-6.4).

"SHOULD NOT" implies that our implementations are behaving badly. Now, it's true, our implementations may not be behaving ideally from a spec cleanliness point of view, but interop trumps spec cleanliness, at least from the perspective of anyone who actually deploys real software on the internet. So it's probably best for the spec to acknowledge this and officially allow this. Specs that don't mirror reality are...probably not just useless, but actively harmful.

I hope that explains things, cheers.

<comment><USER5> So basically the entire premise of the article, that

> existing practice today is that 301, 303, and 307 are used correctly pretty > much everywhere

is flat out wrong. I guess that's a nicer and more probable resolution than "standards people suck!".

<comment><USER6> From the rest of the article, I can only assume it means 'correctly' in the sense of the reality arrived at by both user agents and servers after years of standards-flouting, which is now 'correct' if unspecified behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone here provide any explanation of how the changes in HTTP2 might not be idiotic?

The changes discussed in the post just seem dumb to me, but I assume there has to be some reasoning behind them.

<comment><USER8> Alright, think of it this way.

People use HTTP for two things these days:

1\. Its originally-stated purpose--an _application-layer protocol_ that allows web browsers to retrive hypermedia documents from web servers. In this usage, HTTP replaced Gopher+FTP.

2\. A _transport-layer protocol_ , with features such as identified sub-flows (requests in a pipelined keepalive connection, websockets, etc.), several usefully-different varieties of caching, protocol feature autonegotiation, presentation-layer autonegotiation (Accept headers), automatic redirection semantics, optional encryption (TLS+HSTS+CORS = probably the most well- thought-out security-boundary semantics of any protocol we've got), etc. In this usage, HTTP basically supercedes TCP.

There's a vicious circle here: as HTTP gains traction in sense #2, businesses become increasingly unwilling to allow anything _other_ than HTTP-in-sense-#2 through their firewalls. Eventually, HTTP may be the _only_ transport-layer protocol.

And, _given that_ , on a stance of complete pragmatism where we can't _prevent_ this from happening, only try to make the best of the situation... we need an HTTP-in-sense-#2 that can actually support being used as a universal transport-layer protocol for all of the Internet's traffic.

What does that mean? Well, it means, for one thing, making HTTP lower-overhead (i.e. binary.) It means making HTTP not only work in situations we'd previously have used TCP (e.g. websockets), but also situations where we'd have used _UDP_ (e.g. VoIP streaming.) It means, well, doing pretty much everything HTTP2 does.

Note, though, that HTTP _in sense #1_ will likely always be around. Nobody who uses HTTP to transfer hypermedia documents between web browsers and web servers needs to switch to HTTP2. HTTP2 can _do_ that, but it isn't _for_ that. (Though, practically, doing HTTP-type stuff over HTTP2 _will_ likely be both faster and more secure.)

<comment><USER9> > Eventually, HTTP may be the only transport-layer protocol.

Worse is better strikes again!

No, seriously; this is terrifying.

<comment><USER8> That it's terrifying is true, but it's always been happening, and HTTP is just the next step in it. See here (the comments especially):

[http://250bpm.com/blog:22](http://250bpm.com/blog:22)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While browsers can probably "do anything" with a 301 or 302, I think in practice it's simpler.

I think the issue here is that 301 and 302 were originally intended to preserve the HTTP method but they became permanent and temporary versions of "issue a new request with a GET". So to try and fix that they provided 307 (and now 308) as temporary and permanent versions of "this resource changed location, so reissue this request at the new URL".

I actually wrote a post about this a couple of days before RFC 2616 got marked for official deprecation: [https://aprescott.com/posts/http- redirects](https://aprescott.com/posts/http-redirects)

I plan on updating that with more information once a proper RFC deprecates 2616 and 308 makes its way into something other than a referenced alternative, as it is in the current draft last time I checked.

Also, for fun, try pointing curl at a server returning various response codes and see what it does with `-X [method]` and compare it with the latest Chrome and Firefox.

<comment><USER4> I thought OP said the situation with 301, while not perfect, is much much better than 302. Even if clean-slate 307 and 308 codes is a great idea, I think OP is concerned that redefining 301 to be excessively permissive will make things worse not better -- in that 301 will go from _fairly_ reliable to being as bad as 302.

<comment><USER10> 302 is already bad, and 301 is already wrongly implement as RFC 2616 itself notes. Ultimately I doubt either is going to see a "fixed" implementation from a buggy one that's lasted as long as it has.

<comment><USER11> That doesn't answer the question, namely, "will loosening the definition for 301 make things _worse_ than not changing it?". In this thread I've not seen a solid argument that it won't make things worse, only long redirections (ha!) from the point. Are you saying that 301 is so widely, badly implemented as to be a lost cause, as the author concedes 302 is?

<comment><USER10> I don't know enough about client implementations to say whether it is unsaveable, but let's say it is: why would 308 exist? That suggests the HTTP spec folks believe it's fundamentally changed meaning. With new-301, new-302/303, 307 and 308, we'd cover each of the 4 cases. Seems to strongly suggested that's necessary.

<comment><USER11> You can't just "let's say" 301 is unsaveable, because that's the only outside fact that determines whether TFA's argument is correct. You seem to be assuming that the committee's decision is evidence that it's a good idea, which is exactly what TFA is trying to determine.

Meanwhile, hobohacker got around to answering the real question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Side note: don't use serif fonts such as Georgia with small characters. I changed the font to Helvetica and the readability was much better.

<comment><USER13> Both the font size and colour scheme on that page hurt my eyes.

<comment><USER14> On the plus side, it gave you something to complain about.

<comment><USER15> Pointing out flaws is a perfectly valid and useful activity, especially when there is significant room for improvement, like in this case.

<comment><USER14> When it's not clear that someone who can do something about it is even present, it's usually just an "in" to post a low-value comment. Zap all the thousands of aggregator comments complaining about fonts/background-colours and nothing of value would be lost.

<comment><USER16> > Zap all the thousands of aggregator comments complaining about > fonts/background-colours and nothing of value would be lost.

Sure, if you don't have a visual impairment. I do, and even though it's a very mild one, if one in 100 blog posts submitted to HN consider changing their colour scheme due to people complaining about it I would say it is worth it. And frequently I _do_ see people changing their colour schemes based on HN feedback.

<comment><USER14> The point is: take it to the author, not those standing around you on the bus.

<comment><USER15> Nonsense. The message is a good one for everyone to hear. It's not a mistake specific to one specific author. It's a mistake commonly made by lots of people, and so the more awareness there is of how to avoid the mistake, the better.

<comment><USER14> I simply disagree. Internet commenters in general are on red alert looking for any little thing to complain about. So many of these complaints are not worth clogging the tubes with or necessarily even valid at all.

(depth of this thread and meta-meta-meta acknowledged and ceased)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One quibble: in re "So now you can use a new status code which older browsers won't know what to do with", I feel pretty confident in saying that "older browsers" won't be talking HTTP2...

<comment><USER15> I feel pretty confident in saying that at least some poorly-written web apps will end up sending new status codes to user agents that are not expecting them.

I also feel pretty confident in saying that it will be the browsers that will be perceived to be "in the wrong" when they reject or ignore such responses, even though it's solely the fault of bad web apps. (See how browsers today need to accept and try to correctly handle totally broken and incorrect markup, for instance.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> side note: reminded me of some of these 7XX HTTP Status codes - <USER2> Errors [https://github.com/joho/7XX-rfc](https://github.com/joho/7XX-rfc)

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently attempted to redirect a POST request being made by Apple's NSURLConnection. I say "attempted" because I could not find any status code that didn't make it revert to a GET for the subsequent request. 301, 302, 303, and even 307 didn't work. I finally ended up telling Apache to proxy the request to the real URL rather than trying to redirect the client.

(It is possible to override this behavior in the client with a bit of code, but I was trying to make this work with software that had already shipped.)</comment>


Deals Landlords Cut with Internet Providers - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/the-new-payola-deals-landlords-cut-with-internet-providers-cf60200aa9e9#.yi8aa6tks <comment><USER2> I moved into an apartment last year and soon found out that AT&T was the only provider. This was quite disappointing to me as there are faster options for the same price. I wish this was illegal.</comment>


Do people think it would be helpful if YC gave a rating to rejected startups? - <AUTHOR>

It's very understandable that YC can't give individualized feedback for people who are rejected, that would be an incredibly expensive job; however, I'm sure that YC has an internal rating system of some sort for the applications, people need to communicate, right? I was just thinking that I would really appreciate something simple like a 1-10 rating (or an estimated 0-1 probability of success?) of what they thought of the idea. It's really hard to get an honest and experienced opinion on how likely your startup is to be successful, and if I knew I was scoring straight 1s-3s on my applications, I'd stop applying until I had more experience/traction/etc..., it could even reduce the load of applications that YC has to process.
Obviously there are a lot of complications that I'm not addressing, and that could totally derail this whole idea if not properly addressed, but I figure that's why it's worth bringing up for discussion.
Also, please don't take this as me telling what YC should do with their business, they can do whatever (reasonable/legal/etc...) thing they like with it. It just seems like an open culture, so I thought I'd bring this question to the table. <comment><USER2> Your YC application is a snapshot of your idea at the time you applied. The assumptions you make in that snapshot will be proven wrong and tossed out faster than the ink dries, and they have much less data to work from.

I don't think it would be very helpful for that reason, as well as a general inability to quantify success and failure even amongst the startups they do fund.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. Still, I think even some really coarse feedback would be helpful. For example, just a three tiered system where a 1 means you get an interview, a 2 means your startup is interesting, and a 3 meaning that it's totally off-base would be helpful, cause if I keep throwing 3's YC's way, I'd rather just not waste their (or my) time.

<comment><USER2> They explicitly want people to try again, some of their biggest successes were accepted "eventually".

        Many of our successful founders applied multiple times
        before we funded them (including Drew Houston of Dropbox).

[http://blog.samaltman.com/applying-to-yc](http://blog.samaltman.com/applying- to-yc)

I think they would be very hesitant to call any ideas terrible - recently they instigated changes here in comments outlawing "gratuitous negativity" and one of the stated reasons was they don't want to risk people abandoning ideas because of criticism -

        New work and new ideas are fragile. Too much gratuitous
        negativity might be the difference between someone giving
        up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb.

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news- guideline](http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline)

Rejections won't always be actionable reasons or even you/your idea/your team, you're also being measured against everyone else's applications and YC's collective experience and knowledge of ~700 other startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If a score out of 10 from someone who likely spent <15 min considering your pitch is going to influence you, you're probably not committed enough to see it through anyway.</comment>


Stimulus 1.0: A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/stimulus-1-0-a-modest-javascript-framework-for-the-html-you-already-have-f04307009130 <comment><USER2> Very cool! How does Stimulus compare to something like Unpoly?: [https://unpoly.com/](https://unpoly.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems good, but I'm afraid the ruby community always ends up having their "own" version/ecosystem of javascript :/

</comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to Vue?

<comment><USER5> This is a much simpler proposition than Vue. If you want a cleaner, more modern take on the "sprinkle jQuery on HTML for some dynamic behavior" style approach, Stimulus is a fantastic option. However, if you want the DOM to simply be a "render destination" and prefer to use Javascript to handle data, state, and behavior entirely (using a component-based architecture and JSON data from APIs), then Vue (or React, etc.) is still the way to go.

My belief is the vast majority of web apps that are Basecamp-like (essentially tools that let you edit stuff and post stuff in document-type contexts) will greatly benefit from the simple, straightforward approach that Stimulus provides. I'm already using it on a new Rails 5.1 project, and I'm absolutely loving it. (And this is coming from someone who's quite a fan of Vue and have used it on projects as well.)</comment></comment>


11,000-year-old mine in underwater cave surprises archaeologists - <AUTHOR> https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/history/2020/07/11000-year-old-mine-underwater-cave-surprises-archaeologists <comment><USER2> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/07/11000-yea...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/07/11000-year- old-mine-underwater-cave-surprises-archaeologists/)</comment>


Show HN: Mobile browser with different browsing mechanism - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jump-browser/id1459089057 <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to get feedback/suggestions for this mobile browser that we built with a different browsing mechanism - jumping down/up pages as an alternative to scrolling! Initially built as a project to help folks who can get dizzy (or eye fatigue) with scrolling, Jump Browser's feature of jumping down/up pages feels more visually comfortable for many users. As an equally strong benefit, this method is much faster for browsing/reading through an article than traditional scrolling. So it's a faster and more comfortable browser experience overall. We also incorporated a built-in ad blocker. Would love you get your ideas regarding improving the browser and overall promotion of it! Thank you.</comment>


Brain connectivity starts off promiscuously - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-brain_1.html <comment><AUTHOR> original paper: <http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(11)00002-X></comment>