When Nobody Shows Up to My Conference Talk - <AUTHOR> http://davidbisset.com/when-nobody-shows-up-to-my-conference-talk/ <comment><USER3> Not a conference, but once, I wrote a book. The local bookstore, bless them, staged a meet-the-authors, tech talk. I showed up two hours early, lugging a suitcase with extra books. Cookies and lemonade were laid out, along with pristine pens and pads, chairs in perfect alignment. A very nice, gentle old lady showed up early. I was hopeful. I soon discovered she was retired and occupied her time by going to these library things. We gamely began our prepared talk. Half an hour later another person wandered in. He was probably homeless and was there for the lemonade and cookies. This very kind pair stayed until the end and even asked some questions -- that had nothing to do with the subject, and I doubt they understood a thing I said.

<comment><USER4> It's great that you can talk about this with humor (I actually laughed out loud and had to explain to my wife what it was about). I hope you can see that the event had nothing to do with the quality of your work, and more than that, it shouldn't make you question writing it in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've given talks where I think at the time that we'd have been better off giving everyone in the audience a cheque for $500 to read our blog post rather than fly me to the US for a week.

But then one person in the audience likes what they hear or asks a really insightful question, and then next year they're giving their own talk about your work because they're using it and you realise it was worth it.

And I think a counterpoint to this, as a conference attendee, is that if you walk by a room and it's embarrassingly empty, then jump in, make eye contact with the speaker while they're talking, and ask a good question afterward, to help them out.

<comment><USER6> There must be a better format than conference talks. They are a significant commitment for both the presenter and the audience. Both must make the choice to attend before knowing details of the content, and it reaches a relatively small audience.

I'd much rather see a format where talks can be viewed or subscribed to individually, rated, and open to feedback/discussion.

<comment><USER7> This is basically life in general. We often don't know if an outcome is going to be worth it, so we either take chances or do nothing reasoning that it probably would have been a waste of time.

One of those approaches is guaranteed to never get anything.

<comment><USER8> You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Especially when you get into multi-day conferences with multiple tracks and things like evening events, it's easy to create "death slots." The slot right before the party on the last day of the conference, a morning slot after the party on the final half-day, a breakout slot before the keynote, or a breakout at the same time as one or two hugely popular speakers. I've sometimes been surprised by how _many_ people have attended sessions of mine in clearly pretty awful time slots.

I'd argue that there are some practices that are sub-optimal but it's really hard to avoid some time slots being inherently better than other. And TBH to the degree that having sub-optimal time slots means there can be more speaker slots, that's not necessarily a bad tradeoff for a lot of speakers.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget "at the same time as the big keynote" for example.

<comment><USER9> Fortunately, I haven't seen that too often given that conferences typically want to fill up their keynote seats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the early 80s I got an, at the time, revolutionary new, inexpensive home computer and brought it along to the local university computer club monthly meetup. It created an awful lot of interest and I was asked to give a "short informal talk to a few people" at the next event. I declined countless times but eventually I was persuaded to do it - after all, How Hard Could It Be? I turned up the next month and got asked to report to LT2 whatever that was.. LECTURE THEATER 2!! must have been 400 people in there. I'd like to say I gave an insightful, detailed presentation on the hardware and software aspects of the device. I did not. I was so nervous that I don't even remember most of it but I am sure it was simply awful. Since then, I've never been able to speak in public in any shape or form. Getting help or training is on my bucket list of things to do one day but as much as I want to improve, the idea of it literally makes me quake.

<comment><USER12> Check out Toastmasters then - it helped me a lot. [https://www.toastmasters.org/](https://www.toastmasters.org/)

<comment><USER13> A book "confessions of a public speaker" has quite a few very nice and useful anecdotes and tips.

And a random personal anecdote:

I had a really difficult time even at toastmasters dealing with my Uhms and Umms. Having someone count them somewhat works, but I decided to experiment by just watching my daily speech to be the same "quality" as public speech, and try to suppress the garbage words even during no-stress moments.

It took maybe half a year of practice, but as a result I started to speak slower and (probably :) clearer in the day to day life, and this during the public speaking too, with zero effort.

Edit-append: the most useful exercise is taking the projector, presenting in an empty room as if for the crowd, recording this "from a seat" and watching yourself. Extremely weird at first, but you very quickly see the areas to focus on. And since you must rehearse any talk anyway several times (at least that is the case for me), it is a zero-cost and high return activity.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like great advice - thanks. I did have to give a (kind of) public talk recently and it wasn't great but one of the things you mentioned helped me a lot - namely, slow down. I felt like I was talking much too slowly at first but slowly realized it was okay.

<comment><USER13> Happy if it will be of use!

There are two things at play with being too fast:

first, you know what you are talking about (thus are giving a talk) - and tend to want to give as much info as possible.

the second, and more important one, is the adrenaline rush that every performance gives.

It probably is this:

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

Consequently rehearsals help (they remove the worry about what to say)

Also one thing that helped me a lot is taking "dominant" poses five minutes before getting on stage. I can't find the study that claimed it to work - <USER2> it did.

Later I have read the research that had claimed it didn't work - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28946020/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28946020/) is one of the studies I could find quickly, but for me this technique still works, so maybe it's the power of the placebo :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was a good collection of speaking tips.

"I was the last talk of the last day. Only about a dozen people attended that talk."

From the title I thought literally NOBODY showed up. I've done talks at 8am on Saturday in a room built for several hundred people where only about a dozen showed up and it didn't even occur to me to be upset. I was surprised & happy that many people showed up! I guess my expectations are low.

<comment><USER9> I once had a talk where literally one person showed up. (Years ago, for a sponsor talk I got stuck with that had very little to do with the event.) We had a nice conversation though :-)

Dozen people or so? So long as at least a few of them are paying attention, I'm fine with that. I've had small audiences where I've ended up chatting with people for 30 minutes afterwards. I'm fine with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In case the site gets overwhelmed: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisse...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisset.com/when- nobody-shows-up-to-my-conference-talk/)

<comment><USER16> Good call, database couldn't keep up

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm the author of this post. I just wanted to say even with the embarrassment of my site going down (the blog was on a $5/month Digital Ocean plan, never figured I would write something only my mother would read).

I'm reading through your comments. Thank you for sharing your insights and stories. Would love to do a follow up post at some point.

<comment><USER18> A small point: "weigh" on them.

<comment><USER17> Thank you! There's a billion typos in there, you just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When you are hustling to raise a seed round, you end up at some strange conferences.

I was invited to speak at a VR conference last minute a few years back. It was a good opportunity so I flew out to SF (from LA) for the day. My company had just finished research that would be interesting to the attendees and, frankly, positioned my startup in a strong light in front of the niche investors who I hoped would be there.

This was so last minute that I didn't even have a deck completed. Instead of going to the first half of the conference I holed up in a coffee shop and worked on the presentation. When I get to the conference it is the end of the day so I don't bother checking in.

I head to the room where I'm to speak and watch the second half of that prevention. He leaves. It's 5pm. The room clears out and I setup. I never like that small conference, self-service mad-dash to hook into HDMI and hope the connectors work, but all is well and I'm ready to go on time.

No one enters.

Literally not one person.

I poke my head out and people are milling about, you can tell it's time to go home. I notice the sign in front of the room that lists the presentations. I'm not on it. The one prior was the last of the night.

So I wheel the TV out into the hallway and present to everyone and no one all at once. I'm good at projecting my voice and actually drew in 10 or so people for the entire presentation. I carnival barked at investors I recognized (from their LinkedIn. I made flash cards of them, we'd never actually met) and sort of captured their attention. Security thinks about saying something. I run through my talk, someone even asks a question and that was that.

Somehow the organizers never actually booked me. They said they did, it just never made its way to the program. Had I gone to registration to get a badge I would have learned that fact earlier. It's probably for the best that I didn't.

This story would have been awesome if I found a lead investor from it, but in the end that company didnt work out. It is my favorite conference story though, with my presentation to an entirely Chinese-speaking audience coming in second. Good times.

<comment><USER20> Haha very cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In another life, I was in a hip hop group. We did shows up and down New England. Once in a while, we did shows for 100 - 200 people. Often we did shows for 20 - 30 people.

One time, we booked a show in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We asked a few other acts to play, and they all came in from 50 - 100 miles away. We promoted the show beforehand using all the normal channels we used, and even handed out fliers at other local shows.

The acts all show up. The bartender shows up. The sound person shows up. No one else rolls in. We wait, but nothing. Not a single paying entrant after a couple hours.

All the acts performed anyway. And nobody ended up showing up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Even if the room's near empty, you never can tell how many people will watch a recorded conference talk online.

I don't know about other folks, but I can rarely get out to conferences for time/money/family reasons, but I'll often watch the talks online.

If you give a good talk and it's recorded and online, with luck you'll eventually find an audience.

</comment><comment><USER23> I speak publicly a bit more than monthly from groups of 50 to over 400. When I have the last slot, I make sure do a few things:

1) make the title salacious as I can; 2) engage those "survivors" more. In the past when in Vegas I've ordered a tray of drinks and offered them up as prizes for participating (this also works during early morning session of the last day of a big conference... Highest rated session lol); 3) depending on size (like less than 50) give them things I wouldn't necessarily give to a captive huge group, like templates, checklists, etc. 4) make damn sure my content is exciting. This means making especially not boring slides. Give them a progress bar at the bottom. 5) be more conversational, especially if it's less than 50.

Anyway, my few cents ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> The best way for a conference to address this is to put a headline level general talk in place to close out the conference. It gets people to hang around specifically for that big talk which will keep people from leaving early if the last day is only track talks.

<comment><USER9> At least for a single day conference, it can work pretty well to have a "name" close out a conference because, as you say, people who might have been inclined to skip the last breakout or two otherwise to beat the traffic will end up sticking around.

The challenge at multi-day conferences is that it's just a reality that many people will take off early for travel and other reasons. So any big talk you put in the end may get some more people in seats at breakout but is also going to attract fewer people, less coverage, etc. than it would earlier in the event.

<comment><USER24> The last Elixir Conf I went to pulled this off on a multi day and it was very effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was scheduled to talk at an InfiniBand conference. The day arrived - and my talk was cancelled. By the sponsoring organization Microsoft. Because I was going to talk about deficits in interface specifications. Microsoft hadn't fleshed out their plans in that regard, and didn't want anybody talking about it without their marketing message being foremost. They were paying for the conference, after all.

But it left a bad taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER9> At least from the surface, that's just really poor event management. Sometimes "stuff" does indeed happen but, in general, whoever was choosing talks should have been aware of potential landmines. Disinviting people has a pretty high bar if it's from a change of strategy on my end.

<comment><USER25> To be honest I was aware they were reluctant to talk app-layer interfaces. They were hoping to 'capture' InfiniBand similar to how video was captured with DirectX.

Once I submit and paper and was accepted, I assumed they'd relented. But day one of conference I was gone from the schedule - the session time slot was blank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Also realize that many WordCamps and conferences record talks and those are > usually available to the public web, where many others can discover and view > them.

This. I've only given one real conference talk—a lightning talk at Globus World 2019—but I do wish I had a recording of it.

<comment><USER9> It can be a bit hard without talking to an audience (at least it is for me) but consider just recording a talk at home--if only with your phone--and putting it on YouTube, etc. I'd actually argue that if you can make a 10 minute or so version that's probably better for online than an hour talk recorded at an event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not exactly the same thing but we have a family band and play at various low- key events, we've been on stage where there have been maybe 10 people in the audience and they were probably all organizers or vendors who had booths at the event. We still try to give it our best each time but it can be awkward.

</comment><comment><USER27> Talks to smaller groups can be more fulfilling. Lots of 1-1 engagement, and the audience is much more engaged and truly cares about the topic. Real relationships are formed.

Sometimes to an audience with 100s half the people are on their laptop or phone. And can't give you feedback as they listen to your talk.

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://archive.is/AnPhc](http://archive.is/AnPhc)

</comment><comment><USER29> Better title: "When everyone shows up on my website"

<comment><USER17> "When someone outside of my mother and children show up on my website" would be more like it (i'm the author, trust me on that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Error establishing a database connection"

Well, maybe most people can't even access what his events are about?

<comment><USER31> The server probably went over capacity ...

<comment><USER32> the wayback machine and google search cache are also empty as well...

<comment> frosted-flakes Here's a link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisse...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisset.com/when- nobody-shows-up-to-my-conference-talk/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mewse-hn "Error establishing a database connection"

When Nobody Can Read My Essay About Nobody Showing Up to My Conference Talk

<comment><USER33> Wordpress is like seatbelts that appear normal, but fail open in a crash.

<comment><USER34> Every time I get "Error establishing a database connection", it's a WordPress server. The worst part is that there's usually hardly any interactivity on these sites, they could have just as easily been statically served.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Error establishing a database connection.

</comment><comment><USER36> Error establishing database connection.</comment>


iminlikewithyou invite in exchange for site feedback - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> EDIT: Turns out it's one invite. See reply.

If you haven't seen iminlikewithyou.com, you're missing out. Their AJAX-rich interface is definitely slick. Lucky for you kind souls post here offering invites for nothing. Unlucky for you I'm not one of them. This time you have to work for it.

I want you to go through the demo on ourdoings.com and give useful feedback. If more than five people give feedback I'll pick the five most useful. "Useful" is defined as matching the feedback I'm getting from my actively- posting users, or that I imagine would help them.

The target market for ourdoings.com is people who have a lot of photos but little time to share/organize. Parents with lots of kid photos is one example. Travlers are another. This isn't a social networking site for photography enthusiasts; it's designed for speed and simplicity.

I know there are people who frequent news.yc and are in the child-rearing phase of life. You know exactly what this is about, and I really hope that both of you give feedback. For the rest of you who see this as a boring site for old people, just think of all the fun you'll have with your iminlikewithyou invite.

<http://ourdoings.com/>

<comment><USER2> I think a vertical for child-rearing parents is a great idea. These days verticals rule. There is alot of reading to do on your site. This might be good for people that are not used to technology, but I still believe that your site should be intuitive, so that you don't need lots of text to explain things to people. I mean even my grandma knows what publishing is...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just opened up my first photo account with flickr and it was amazingly easy to upload several hundred photos from a trip to the botanical gardens and then email the series to friends. It's so simple even my grandmother can use it.

I'd advise you to work on your copywriting. With all the free photo hosting sites out there already I don't think people care about average number of photos times x number of cents to host per year. They just want to know how easy it is and that it's free or that they are getting an incredible deal by paying a subscription fee.

If you're targeting people who are new to the web, talking about zip archives will likely scare them away. Keep it simple.

<comment><USER3> I'd give away more invites here as well, but the last time I did, two people I invited didn't even bother to sign up. You guys suck.

<comment><USER4> I would appreciate one. Their front page is gorgeous and I would like to see what AJAX I can learn/rip off the rest.

falsestprophet at g mail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good idea. I have a bunch of iilwy invites that could use good homes. Problem is my site hasn't launched yet. but ahh... check out my splash page and tell me if you like the logo/color scheme :)

www.omnisio.com

First 3 replies get invites.

R

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if you're joking, but I'll tell you anyway. The orange trim around the cloud edge is OK. But the orange for the bottom two-thirds of the page is way too over-powering and I'd leave the site just to give my eyes a rest.

Hey, I think I'm third -- firstname.lastname@example.com -- thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also have an iilwy invite, which will go to the first person to reply to this message.

If you give brlewis site feedback as well, then I'll even throw in an upvote :)

<comment><USER4> Too late dawie, the invite is mine! Thanks Sam.</comment></comment>


Ruin You Google Image Search History - <AUTHOR> http://screwmyhistory.com <comment><AUTHOR> THS IS NSFW so ya know!</comment>


Our Problem Is Gullibility, Not Disinformation - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/our-real-weakness-is-gullibility-not-disinformation/ <comment><USER2> I disagree.

Taking the religion example. If you look around the world, most people follow their parents faith.

It seems likely that many have been exposed to other faiths. Do we think that those other faiths seem less credible and so people are seeing through them on some logical basis? Or has their parents/local community's faith simply spent a lot longer on convincing them it's true.

Similarly, the ideas that the author seems to consider dangerous didn't grow in vaccum. I dont think a russian agent could bet his colleagues that he'd get Americans to believe anything they named, like George Washington invented the grilled cheese sandwich.

Buy they don't need to convince people of anything specific, just amplify existing messages like:

Scientists are lying to you about covid.

Which feeds off extensive prep work from "scientists are lying to you about climate change" which is probably the best funded disinformation campaign in history.

And is further reinforced by authority positions in their communities, repeating the disinformation.

The GOP in it's current incarnation can't exist without disinformation, and so they'll fight any attempt to educate their base, and if they fail they'll just disenfranchise the ones that wise up.

<comment><USER3> Are you saying, "Scientists are lying to you about covid" is a false statement and has always been false?

Because I'm pretty sure that when "scientists" (not all of them but those in power) suddenly flipped from saying masks did nothing to masks are essential, the justification given was that they had previously been lying but now didn't need to anymore. So the statement is unambiguously true, if taken over the entire course of events.

Moreover, I think most people are too smart to believe that whether COVID-19 is spread at protests depends on the views of those who are protesting, but plenty of scientists have made exactly that claim too. They were quite clearly lying.

The idea that scientists never lie is the biggest lie of all. Of course they lie. They routinely write fraudulent papers and hope nobody tries to replicate them, but there's also the issue that lying isn't binary. There's a big spectrum between full honesty and lying, with a big area of murky intellectual practices in the middle, practices like woeful exaggeration, cherry picking, abusive citations (e.g. citing a document in support of a statement that doesn't actually support that statement) and all the other problems that meta- science writers complain about.

If society accepted that scientists don't actually have better souls than politicians, business owners or journalists then we'd already be a long way towards solving the gullibility problem.

As for climate change, well, the whole ClimateGate thing did involve destruction of emails by researchers and then lying about it: to the British Parliament, no less! Even the Guardian bailed out at that point. Again, the idea that scientists can and do lie isn't some disinformation campaign. It's obvious and true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The patch to gullibility is critical thinking. Rudimentary critical thinking in any field requires general knowledge of it. Citizens of democracies need to think critically on many topics, hence they need to know a lot in many fields, and to learn ongoingly throughout their lives. Education becomes important. But Education costs a lot...

Maybe the solution is to gradually make learning as accessible, inexpensive and beneficial as possible.

<comment><USER5> I think you're spot-on with making learning as accessible as possible to have a more informed populace, but making the information available is only half of getting people to take it in. Trauma blocks critical thinking and internal honesty, and we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem, to the point where poverty and food insecurity meaningfully reduces effective IQ. Thankfully MAPS is working on treating PTSD at scale. I have set up a recurring monthly donation and I encourage anyone who values intellectualism to do the same, so that we may swell our ranks with those who are currently too hurt to think clearly.

<comment><USER4> Helping those in need overcome their difficulties and become ready to learn is a part of accessibility to Education. It's a part of offering equal opportunity to all.

<comment><USER4> Pro-democracy votes also go a long way, for your distantly involved citizen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Most examples cited in this article seem like problems of faith, in that they concern matters that individual Deplorables cannot (practically) observe themselves. Or of "misplaced" faith, in the case of Jesus, demons and ghosts.

Which is not too surprising - people have gotten screwed by faith forever: Uncritical belief of the Church, the State, the salesman or prophet, etc. often leads to the believers' exploitation for the basest of ends.

Which is not to say that killing bullshit once and for all is impossible or an unworthy goal, but it's high effort and messy.

<comment><USER6> > matters that individual Deplorables cannot (practically) observe themselves.

During this pandemic, the deplorables continued to farm and deliver food, keeping us alive while the elites burned our cities down. (Dr. VDH.)

The deplorables voted in Trump because the elites couldn't be bothered enforcing immigration (the wall) or maintaining factory jobs in the USA (outsourcing to China.) (Dr. VDH.)

So I would suggest you develop an understanding of how our country was hollowed out before criticizing the very people the elites destroyed financially.

Regarding religion, at the moment, our young people worship Tinder hookups and Instagram selfies, the twin gods of narcissism, instead of Jesus, resulting in the total destruction of the family unit. How's that working out? (RPMH)

FYI: you sound exactly like the coastal elites that got us into this mess. The California HSR is a perfect example of how worthless they are - all hot air, no rail.

When Trump wins his second election by a landslide, you can refer to this post for the reasons why.

<comment><USER7> You present a lot of opinions but not really anything to back them up. Furthermore, this is incredibly US-centric in a way that's just not relatable at all if you're not mired in all the tv drama there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately, if you have a subconscious, you have some degree of gullibility / susceptibility to propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't we all just trust Snopes though? /s

</comment><comment><USER10> Education? A non-gullible student would not graduate high school. What most people, seemingly author included, consider to be 'knowledge' is no better than rote. Consider that one person can have the exact same experience, and come out of it with exact opposite beliefs. The difference is whether they are told to believe it, movie versus news, novel versus history book. Just try to verify you kids' history lessons with observable non-narrative evidence. If you do have evidence, does it actually prove the entire narrative, or does it simply bolster a tiny piece within a mosaic of myth? In science and law, the standard of proof is massively greater than the standard of disproof. Any 'knowledge' tested by a different standard is at best a guess, most likely dogma, and at worst, propaganda, intentional disinformation. High school teachers assign Orwell, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past.", and somehow believe that this is a warning about somebody else, that they are not the primary agents of the second statement, and that they are themselves immune to such manipulation. Has a student ever been asked who controls and manipulates them and received a passing grade by pointing the finger right back at the teacher themselves? No; it's always some boogeyman that they have never met, but must girder themselves against with the dogma taught within these walls. And if you don't believe it, not only will the boogeyman get you, but we will fail you and destroy your life. It's for your own good; you'll understand someday.

I will choose the most basic fact on his list. I want to see the author prove that the earth is a sphere by his own observations. I can almost guarantee that no mandated high school curriculum teaches even how to do this, nonetheless asks students to do so. The standard of belief is 'rational' narrative, as in, a story that contains no major contradictions within itself, and for expediency, is not subject to cross-examination. Dogma. If I recall correctly, this question was asked in an astronomy PhD seminar at MIT, and nobody knew how to do it.

So smug is the author in his ignorance. 'Not believing' should be the default. Narratives should be understood as culture, good to know, possibly true, and likely imperfect, but ultimately just a story that may be learned from just like religion or myth, whether true or not. I have a sense that ancient people understood this better than we do today.

His criticism of others is nothing but tribalism. He's not educating in the sense of providing evidence toward a rational conclusion, or even bolstering his own narrative. He's simply labeling other people as lesser than himself. And, to head off any accusations of hypocrisy, to some extent, so am I with him. The point here is that so-called 'knowledge' is an ancient battleground rooted in disparate sets of values. People should know that they are being indoctrinated, and also that it's nearly impossible to survive among other humans without choosing some flavor of that. But it does have implications for your life, whether your own beliefs serve you, harm you, or shames you into serving someone else.

</comment><comment><USER11> This feels like a rehash of "guns don't kill people, people kill people".

<comment><USER12> The major difference is that your own brain can stop disinformation, but it can't stop a bullet.

<comment><USER11> Why does propaganda work if it's so simple then?

<comment><USER12> Who said it's simple?

It's simpler than literally dodging a bullet, but that doesn't make it simple.

<comment><USER11> Right so you can't really stop it right?

<comment><USER12> Heh, right. Because there's no degree of difficulty that exists between simple and Neo from The Matrix.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Constructing the Sacred: Visibility and Ritual Landscape in Ancient Egypt - <AUTHOR> https://constructingthesacred.org <comment><USER2> Don't know why this is getting no attention. It is excellent! I woke up at 4:30AM, did my things, let cold air at 2°C in, watered my plants, nibbled some nuts and berries, drank some green tea, and thouroghly enjoyed this for about two hours while the first birds began to sing.

I wish i could start every day with something so far out of my field, presented in innovative ways like this.

I am floored. Really.

<comment><USER3> For me, it's a pretty interesting article on a topic I very much enjoy and they did some very impressive work, but it's ruined by some pretty bad UX.

Reading this felt like a chore. I would greatly prefer a PDF file or flat website with the text and a separate viewer.

<comment><USER2> Hm, the site seemed a little slow at times, but i wasn't sure if it was my old laptop. The UI was a little bit unusal at times, especially that _< <_ backarrow-thing, which looked like it would be for going back, instead of moving on along some path. But it was obvious from context for me. I really enjoyed the 3D-inserts where you could zoom, pan, rotate, and the changes, rising and disappearing buildings across the timeline. Though i had to click on reload sometimes to have them appear at all. Besides that you could always click on the drop down menu in the upper left and use the TOC to jump around, or skip something.

<comment><USER3> >Besides that you could always click on the drop down menu in the upper left and use the TOC to jump around, or skip something.

I think that was kinda the main problem for me, actually. When you have a PDF article or book or a plain webpage, you can jump around without much penalty, and you can skip ahead then go back and so on, you can skim parts and can check if something relevant appears ahead. At least, that's how I read scientific articles: read the introduction, skim through the text, go back to read the more interesting parts and jump around until you grasp it and so on. Any supplementary data or figures provided I usually have open in another window for quick reference as I'm reading the text.

The best UX for scientific articles for how I read them is still paper for the text and a computer for anything else. Second best would be a good PDF reader.

Thus, for this kind of interactive visualization, I would have preferred it if they had made a good visualizer and an accompanying article, instead of mixing the two into a single thing. Feels like they added unnecessary friction to both sides of the presentation and overall the effect would be better if split. For example, an apparent problem is if I want to jump back to a piece of text I read before I have to remember where in the TOC it was (can't just scroll back up) and then wait for all the 3D inserts to load when what I want is just the text.

A project that I think did this mostly right is GeaCron (geacron.com), at least the visualization part. It's not really comparable since GeaCron is a world map, but with it I can visualize a particular point of interest and then read up the information at my own leisure. I've wasted hours with that map this way.

I don't want to diminish the effort of these authors, for it is impressive and the 3D-inserts are great and I still enjoyed it despite the UX problems, but as someone who is a bit passionate about visualization in academic environments, I often see projects like this that I feel could be so much better if they didn't try to reinvent certain wheels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spent 5 min. Did not see any landscape or structure. Read big words. Left.</comment>


Try an iPhone-optimized Web app: Simple Shopping List.  (Best viewed with Safari.) - <AUTHOR> http://onetrip.org/index.php <comment><USER2> Ug, this is like the bad old days of 1995 when people made sites that said "Best Viewed with Netscape." I thought that was gone forever, along with splash pages and "under construction" gifs.

<comment><USER3> Safari is the same web browser that the iPhone uses. Because the site is optimized for the iPhone, it only needs to work on Safari.

Anyhow, I tried the app out, and I can't decide if it's really useful.

<comment><USER2> Really, it only needs to work on Safari? What if someone, say, posted it to a site that links to newly launched applications? Might it not then be convenient if the app worked for whatever browser the users following those links were using?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't anyone with enough money for an iphone just "send the help to pop 'round to the grocer's and fetch me a few things" ?

Kidding aside, I still think my shopping list app is better in that you don't use the phone to input the list:

<http://shoplist.dedasys.com></comment>


My favorite question to the programming language expert - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140616044428-1804358-my-favorite-question-to-the-programming-language-expert

<comment><USER2> I feel like "my favorite interpreted language is slow" is a bit of a cop-out. Granted, it's the first thing that comes to mind when I try to enumerate the things I dislike about working in Ruby, but it's not really an interesting answer.

I might point to simple aesthetic things like JSON-style hashes of symbols looking funny:

        example = { a: :b }
        => { a: :b }
        example[:a]
        => :b

Or maybe "the way it imports things mean I wind up grepping code / googling docs rather than just looking at the top of the calling file to see the origin of an imported object, and then sometimes I find myself over-stating the namespace for an object just so Ruby won't get it wrong". Compare to python:

       from big_library import named_method

I suppose it's a pretty good question and a reasonable proxy for "so you have actually worked in this language for many, many hours, right?"

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great question as long as the interviewer is prepared that the reply might not necessarily match his/her opinion. Otherwise, the interview might end up in a ugly discussion of two opinionated people.

EDIT: fixed stupid typo

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. There's nothing wrong with differing from the interviewer so long as you can clearly articulate the issue.</comment></comment>


Seeing at the Speed of Sound - <AUTHOR> http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=59977

<comment><USER2> This is one of the most brilliant articles I've read. As someone who worked with deaf people in the past, I am blown away by the proficiency of the author's ability to communicate through writing, lip reading, and speech to the point where she says when a conversation with a hearing person clicks, they might not even know she is deaf. I also found some of the material of the article (specifically regarding the author's attempts to understand speech through the movements of the speaker's mouth) similar to what I am learning in the Natural Language Processing class I am taking through Coursera currently</comment>


IOS Icons made in Pure CSS - <AUTHOR> http://graphicpeel.com/cssiosicons

<comment><USER2> Impressive in Chrome, but seriously they couldn't get them to work in Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER3> While this looks really awesome in webkit browsers, why not add the -moz-box- shadow and other -moz CSS3 properties also? (non-mozilla browsers should ignore them)

Great work, they look very nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> These are no icons whatsoever. These are high resolution images with way too much detail to be ever used as icons.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it just CSS?, I am on an iPad, can't look at source.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes just CSS</comment></comment>


How Do Committees Invent? (1968) - <AUTHOR> http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html <comment><USER2> Discussed in 2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458471)</comment>


Microsoft's Keyser Söze Opportunity - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/microsoft-bing-iphone/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Really... no shortage of people who think Bing, Google, and Yahoo are equal? I haven't met any of these people, and that includes my relatives in Oklahoma and Texas.

There are no shortage of people who think Yahoo is the best search engine, but most of those people can't spell Google. They get their search bundled with their Windows, and that's a wrap.

Maybe this was satire and I missed it.

<comment><USER3> The thing is that the bulk of the market is remarkably non-tech-savvy. If Bing became the default search engine on Firefox it wouldn't alter my searching habits at all, as I'd just set it to Google instead.

However for the nontechnical majority, if it still returned the results they wanted there's a good chance they'd never get around to solving the hard problem of switching default search engines.</comment></comment>


Facebook's Zuckerberg Says the Age of Privacy Is Over (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/01/10/10readwriteweb-facebooks-zuckerberg-says-the-age-of-privac-82963.html <comment><USER2> Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, 2009

> Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric > Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine > users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the > Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information > with Google as if it were a "trusted friend," Schmidt responded, "If you > have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be > doing it in the first place."

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric- schmid...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt- dismisses-privacy)

<comment><USER3> Funny how they managed to turn around and rebrand themselves as privacy- conscious. The reality is probably very very very far away from that.

I will give it to them, they are extremely good in PR and Marketing.

<comment><USER4> Not sure why this is down voted. Google is the single greatest aggregation of individuals' personal data there is.

<comment><USER5> It might be because Google isn't seen as privacy-conscious at all, especially here :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mark Zuckerberg Just Spent More Than $30 Million Buying 4 Neighboring Houses For Privacy (2013)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg- buys-4-homes-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes- for-privacy-2013-10)

<comment><USER7> I find this part interesting:

> Zuckerberg reportedly took action after he learned that a developer wanted > to purchase one of his neighbor's homes and use the fact that Zuckerberg > lived close by as a marketing tactic. He started purchasing the homes last > December. Zuckerberg will lease the four homes he just bought back to its > current residents.

I honestly believe I would do the same. That developer sounds like a jerk.

Edit: Assuming I had the millions to do it, that is.

<comment><USER8> In other words, he was uncomfortable about someone using his personal information for advertising purposes.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I completely get the point, I'm just saying I'd do it, too. My family, my house, heck yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In general, if an executive says "The future is X", a good first translation is "My life will get a whole lot easier if X is true."

<comment><USER10> Yes indeed. So many influential people use their influence to sow the seeds of the future _they want_ in the public's mind. They do this by prophecising the future, and their followers do their best to make the prophecy a reality (often subconsciously).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google is no better. Eric Schmidt, while was Google's CEO suggested that young people should change their name upon reaching adulthood (as opposed to something like a "right to be forgotten" that EU citizens enjoy today): [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young- will-have-to-change-names-to-escape-cyber-past-warns-Googles-Eric- Schmidt.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> >Facebook's Zuckerberg Says the Age of Privacy Is Over

Awesome. So he's going to give everyone his e-mail login and password, right? Because nobody gets privacy anymore and he's going to lead by example, for sure.

Oh, wait. He means the age of privacy is over, except for hypocrites and rich people who can afford to pay for it.

<comment><USER13> That's an extremely uncharitable reading of this article - he says nothing that suggests he wants everyone to publicly post their email logins and passwords.

This kind of hyperbole is not conducive to productive conversation about Facebook or privacy in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Zuckerberg changed his mind on this in an interview in 2014:

"I don't know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we're at the point where we don't need to keep on only doing real identity things," he says. "If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden."

[https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226288/microsoft- subnet/a...](https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226288/microsoft-subnet/as- facebook-turns-10--zuckerberg-changes-his-mind-about-anonymity.html)

<comment><USER15> He still wants all public-facing identities tied to a real identity he can track and analyze. That encourages even greater abandon of one's privacy, as you worry less about tying your real name to still-monetizable private thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could this be used against Facebook in court eventually? Like showing this as evidence that Facebook has been _maliciously_ trying to abuse its users' privacy?

Zuckerberg said that because that would have benefited Facebook if it became true. It's like IBM now saying "forget Intel and transistors, quantum computers are the future!" (because we happen to make them and be ahead of everyone else in this).

<comment><USER17> The FTC investigation regarding default privacy settings and privacy settings attributable to past posts has been settled [https://www.ftc.gov/news- events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2011/11/facebook-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-failing- keep) so very unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are things about Facebook's privacy policies and respect for its users that are perpetually in the news that it seems like they could easily nip in the bud to garner some goodwill.

Their dark patterns around deleting your account is one example. Why not just allow people to quickly and easily delete their accounts? Not "deactivate" while they send you photos of your friends, telling you how much they'll miss you. Not soft delete. Hard delete. Commit to allowing users to just leave if they aren't finding value in the platform.

Why do they resist dealing with that kind of low hanging fruit? Do they view offering easy opt-out functionality to present a major risk to the business?

<comment><USER19> As a company why would you prioritize your developer's time on that? At best it sits low on the backlog. Your performance reviews aren't based on how much you make it easy for people to leave. The only way that stakeholders can drive behavior is if they actually had any power, but Facebook users don't sit on the board.

<comment><USER18> > As a company why would you prioritize your developer's time on that?

Because as a leader within the org you're watching the company's reputation and share value erode, and having them spend some time on those items would gesture to the community and world that you take the public's concerns seriously.

I'm sure they are _already_ prioritizing developer time on many different privacy fronts, including auditing old apps to see what data they siphoned off. (As was implied by Zuckerberg's interview on CNN)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Says the guy who bought the houses around his house.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not to beat a dead horse too much but ultimately I would believe that he was swayed by the amount of money the company could make by sharing it. A sad thing to see happening to all too many aspects of life!

The clip starts at around 2:30 if you want to see it: [https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU](https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU)

</comment><comment><USER22> It sounds a lot less Orwellian if we summarize it as "Zuckerberg says Facebook should've been more like Twitter."

</comment><comment><USER23> Let's assume the age of privacy IS over.

How might we go about deweaponizing information? Does it require anarchical self governance and radical transparency or is there another way?

I propose one key: teaching the world to be emotionally responsible at an individual level. Nonviolent communication provides a clear structure and set of principles to practice to this end.

<comment><USER24> How is information anything but the most powerful weapon. Consider the quote "All warfare is deception". In other terms, all warfare is about information asymmetry. To get around this, you'd need the opposing side of the deal to share much more. The end result is a world with a lot more openness. This only works if we turn of the outrage and shame, but that seems like it can't work with human nature.

Really, we either accept that facebook and similar have this advantage, or we do something to keep our information from them.

The other alternative is to run a misinformation campaign against them. Something tor-like but with likes. That'd break the core monetization concept of these kinds of sites though.

<comment><USER23> Nonviolent communication is all about hacking shame, anger, blame, judgment, criticism, etc. out of our language and minds. It sounds like teaching this to people may be a longer, yet more sustainable path.

Hack the culture.

<comment><USER24> In the end, people are going to judge, if only to see who is most suitable to some task or best given something. Politics is also an invariant, people are going to lobby to get things themselves, given scarcity, this is at the expense of others.

These things combine to mean that it will always be problematic for everyone to be completely open. The only way to make this a non-issue is to have all judgements made be completely accurate, but that seems like it takes way too much information.

<comment><USER23> I think we have to deprogram scarcity mindsets, too. Establishing an upper bound of minimally necessary judgment based on what is sustainable and meets the needs of all involved over an agreed upon time might be useful, too. NVC is founded on assumptions of abundance of resources for life. I'm not sure what research there is on the validity of the claim, but I have found adopting the belief biases my mind toward seeing ways to accomplish my goals with available resources or uncommon ways to get my hands on what I need.

This reminds me of this article about using landfills for raw materials.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180323090958.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180323090958.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One way or another, bad or good, right or wrong, he's probably right. Even if you decide to go "off the grid", you'll probably never find work in a society that considers lack of social media footprint evidence that you're "hiding" something.

</comment><comment><USER19> It has been known forever that Zuckerberg advocates for radical unprivacy, i.e. technological breakdown of the barriers guarding human internals. Sort of alluded to in dramatized fashion in the movie and given a psychological background, but that aside, it is public knowledge.

<comment><USER26> > It has been known forever that Zuckerberg advocates for radical unprivacy...

Well, for everyone but him (see the other thread regarding his house)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Remember when influential people and institutions _encouraged_ (or outright _required_ ) the use of a platform made by the man who said the age of privacy is over?

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone get the feeling that Facebook friendlies are monitoring posts like this one and steering the conversation?

Yes, other CEOs may have made similar statements, but they didn't volunteerily give millions of customers data to unscrupulous partners because that's clearly wrong to do. It's the statement with the action that's enlightening, not just the statement.

The lack of any sense of right and wrong within FB's leadership is astounding.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not if you are a government.

</comment><comment><USER29> "privacy is over" was cool until it got Trump elected.

</comment><comment><USER30> Zuckerberg is a grimy one. Reading his FB posts make me want to throw up. He's so full of shit.

Edit: Before this is censored. Do you honestly believe he is on a mission to make the world more open and connected?

</comment><comment><USER31> "Facebook Inc. faces a massive uphill task to win back the general public's trust, results from two separate opinion polls, reported on by Reuters, have shown.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday, just 41 percent of Americans now trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information. In contrast, of the 2,237 respondents to the poll, which ran from Wednesday through Friday, 66 percent, 62 percent and 60 percent, respectively, believe that Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp. will do a better job of respecting their privacy.

A separate survey released the same day by Germany's largest-selling Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, delivered a much more damaging assessment, revealing that 60 percent of Germans believe that Facebook and other social networks have a negative impact on democracy."

Source: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge- analyt...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica- apology/americans-less-likely-to-trust-facebook-than-rivals-on-personal-data- idUSKBN1H10AF)

Zuck: They "trust me"

Source: [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg)

<comment><USER3> Happy to see that the greater public understands what Facebook really is.

But we still have work to do regarding Google. They are even worse IMO. For those two, you are the product.

Amazon and Microsoft don't have business selling your data (or at least it is not central), you are not the product.

<comment><USER32> Bullshit.

Google doesn't have a social graph of 2.2 billion people, with all their posts and likes.

And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away. If you don't trust Facebook, there are no real alternatives.

Yes, there are issues with Google. But they're not in the same universe as Facebook.

To suggest otherwise is false equivalence.

<comment><USER12> > And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away

I really really really really want to like DuckDuckGo, but it simply doesn't work compared with Big G.

I switched my default search engine to DDG once again last week, and after a frustrating week of rarely finding what i want, had to switch back go Google.

Last night was the final straw. I was trying to find out the delivery area for a particular newspaper. All DDG gave me was irrelevant ads, links to the newspaper's home page, outdated links to newspaper pages that are 404 now, and links to Wikipedia and other articles about the city.

Same search query on Google gave me as the first result a link to a page at the newspaper where I could put in a ZIP code to see if delivery was available.

I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.

<comment><USER33> I agree, it would almost be nice if you could allow Duck Duck Go to track some of your searches. Google knows I am after the web framework when I type Django. Duck Duck Go doesn't.

<comment><USER34> To be fair, time spent watching Django unchained again is time well spent.

<comment><USER33> I haven't watched it, but usually those searches are done at work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not so fast, Zucc. It was a very hypocritical and self-serving claim.</comment>


Ask HN: Current YC applicants, what's your plan if you're not accepted? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Continue development.

Website: [http://synaptitude.me/](http://synaptitude.me/)

Blog: [http://synaptitude.me/blog/](http://synaptitude.me/blog/) (Our YC app is on the blog)

Related Work: [http://easy-a.net/](http://easy-a.net/)

I've set aside the summer to work on my project/startup. It's something I really believe in, and something I'd like to have for myself anyways. Further, some people have already offered me a few hundred for my product (when it's done), so I feel pretty confident about it.

Whether or not I get to YC on the other hand... It's difficult to imagine myself getting in. I've applied three times (including this time). I have a good team, we play board games nightly, and are moving out to California in May.

Honestly, I don't think my plans will change if I make it into YC or not. Y Combinator would just accelerate the process significantly, and help us meet more people just like us.

<comment><USER3> Congrats, saw on your blog that you got in! :)</comment></comment>


Inspired by Srinivasa Ramanujan : How a Mathematician Found His Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inspired-by-genius-how-a-mathematician-found-his-way/ <comment><AUTHOR> The original Qaunta Magazine story is at [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160519-ken-ono- mathematicia...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160519-ken-ono- mathematician-inspired-by-ramanujan/)

Ken Ono's memoir is published by Springer at [http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319255668](http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319255668)

</comment><comment><USER2> >[Srinivasa Ramanujan] anticipated mathematical structures that would be important to all of these more contemporary works. He lived 80 years before his time.

Isn't it fascinating to hear such impactful math from an unknown South Indian clerk who died at 32 years? Wondering what would've been possible if he had lived a full life.</comment>


Event Driven Programming in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Event-Driven-Programming-in-Clojure

<comment><USER2> Do you have an overview of how the async macro works? The presentation wasn't long enough to fit in but I'm hoping you have a written explanation somewhere. Cursory search didn't turn up anything.

I've seen flows of roughly the same complexity from a variety of abstractions: monadic (F# async), generator/coroutine (Python gevent, node fibers), futures/promises (twisted, mochikit, commonjs q), and callbacks (a million node async flow helpers) but they always involve more code. This looks like auto-transformed futures with error bubbling instead of error callback but I'd like to know how it's actually working. The lack of ceremony/annotation is commendable but I'm concerned it's fragile magic.

<comment><USER3> I haven't really written about this anywhere, and the code in its current state is far from self-documenting, so I'll give it a shot here.

The code transformation is pretty much all local. Since everything in Clojure is an expression (this is not true of Python or JS, I'm not sure about F#), I don't need to perform much analysis, I just need to make sure that each expression doesn't care about the difference between a future and a realized value.

Let's assume three primitives:

* an asynchronous future [1]

* something which merges a list of futures and realized values into a single future representing a list of values

* something which takes a function and a future, and returns a future representing '(apply fn value-of-future)', that will be realized once the future is realized

All we need to do is take every expression where a function is called, merge the arguments together, and apply the final primitive to the expression. The expression will return a future, which can then be picked up by the parent expression, and so on.

This glosses over how special forms are handled, and how the 'force' functionality works. Also, as I mentioned in the presentation, how the code executes is pretty opaque, and some sort of higher-order analysis would be nice so that it could be visualized using graphviz or something.

This is still an experimental feature, and will probably remain so until the 1.0.0 release of Lamina (I'm working on 0.5.0 right now). I'm not aware of any other macro that rips apart normal Clojure code quite as completely, which means that this is sort of uncharted territory. I want to make sure I've avoided all the pitfalls before calling it ready for production usage.

[1] <https://github.com/ztellman/lamina/wiki/Introduction>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, I'm the guy in the video. If anyone has questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Any questions regarding odd numbers will have to wait for my upcoming presentation.

<comment><USER4> i just had time to watch this; it's very nice work.

i guess this is either obvious or wrong, but your async macro reminded me of logic variables (eg in oz) (ie you appear to be rewriting the system so that, effectively, the variables in your dataflow are logic variables, and then adding concurrency to match). that suggests that the debugging issues you have are similar to ones that they have to deal with. i don't know what solutions they have, but if this makes sense, and you haven't talked to van roy et al, it might be worth doing so.

(and i guess other parallel logic program(mer)s too - oz is just what i am most familiar with. mercury?).

<comment><USER3> From now on, I'm going to start all my questions with "this is either obvious or wrong, but ...".

I hadn't made the connection between dataflow and logic programming. I'm not sure if the programming practices surrounding logic programming would be useful in this context, but I'll certainly look into it. Thanks for the suggestion.

<comment><USER4> "logic programming" is a bit misleading. oz (at least) doesn't have built-in DFS like prolog. but it does keep the idea of logic variables, which it uses to make concurrent programming "easy" (in the sense that what you are doing is deadlock free), so it is more similar than you may think...

<comment><USER3> Okay, I've only ever skimmed CTM before, I'll give it a closer look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The odds don't get to drive?

<comment><USER6> Have you ever seen an odd drive? Horrible! HORRIBLE!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Learney – knowledge aggregator for developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.learney.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hello! My name is Przemek - I'm 25-year-old software developer, Learney founder and its first user. If you want to learn more about the motivation behind this project please visit Learney Blog - [https://blog.learney.io/post/learney-hello- world/](https://blog.learney.io/post/learney-hello-world/)</comment>


Why literature is the ultimate big-data challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/03/revenge-maths-mob <comment><USER2> Can't really agree, literature is literature because of form not content, every literary work is its own separate world with references to other similarly separate worlds from the past. Data analysis can help finding invariants, like in Meter in Poetry from Prof Nigel Fabb [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meter-Poetry-Theory-Nigel- Fabb/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meter-Poetry-Theory-Nigel- Fabb/dp/0521713250) , but not the reason why literature is literary at all, which comes from social sciences. Mythopoesis as the cumulative sum of the real and imaginary worlds thought by humans is another possible result but it would not be literature, languages and theory of language instead.

<comment><USER3> > every literary work is its own separate world with references to other > similarly separate worlds from the past.

This sounds like the basis of hypertext fiction ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction)) which has of course existed for much longer than big-data as a concept.

As for what characterizes literature, I'm inclined to agree with you. However, is there not inherent value in another (albeit computational in nature) reading, so to speak? If we take Barthes to be correct, what does it say when a well-trained NLP model draws similar conclusions to humans with regard to imagery, analogy, irony, metaphor, etc. when reading major literary works? Different conclusions? Or no conclusions? What if some works "compute" and some don't? What if some works's features are culture-independent, i.e., a model trained on an Eastern literary corpus computes similar features as a model trained on a Western literary corpus, while some features aren't?

Perhaps these questions are more superficial than I'm making them out to be, but it seems presumptuous to assume that methods that look at this problem from this angle won't get at _any_ literary features.

<comment><USER2> You're right, of course. My point is literary grade is not an invariant, it changes with time and culture and the historical events of a given community. There are so many cases of artists being considered shit one period, good another century, then shit again, indifferent or even canonic for a while. What exactly should data science train for a universal literary / not literary classifier then? Or unsupervised learning for clustering what? HN is full of bright minds, so I'm sure a formula might be reasonably suggested, but that's not the point of literature as a form of its own, like maths or music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We often start with the null hypothesis of artistic "exceptionalism, which imagines him [or her] as a freak of isolated genius", i.e., we assume that the credited creator worked alone.

I think that's wrong and few serious human endeavors are accomplished alone. In the arts, look at stories about how works were really created. Pop music is an easy example because it's well known: Songs are written with a suggestion from a friend, input from the producer, are based on something the performer heard on the train, are created when someone uncredited sits in on the session and provides the key hook, etc. A friend is writing a book, and I spent hours reading it and offering suggestions; I'll receive no credit (and I don't want or deserve it). In the code people write, how much is done without any help from others, without using existing code and ideas? As the saying goes, _good artists borrow; great artists steal._

<comment><USER5> Howard Becker's Art Worlds book looks at this very issue - it's a very interesting read.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. What does he say about it?

<comment><USER5> It's specifically focused on the domain of Art and argues that Art is essentially a cooperative networked activity - a network of producers, suppliers, distributers, influencers etc who all contribute to a final piece of Art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although the field had its crackpots it was never as off-the-rails as the Economist writer makes it out to be. Mosteller and Wallace's analysis of the _Federalist Papers_ is a well-known early effort ([https://priceonomics.com/how-statistics-solved-a-175-year- ol...](https://priceonomics.com/how-statistics-solved-a-175-year-old-mystery- about/)).

Part of my MA covered this topic (stylometry), you can take a look ([https://www.dropbox.com/s/3q9ljrgnntgs6ee/t.pdf](https://www.dropbox.com/s/3q9ljrgnntgs6ee/t.pdf)). It lists some of the references up until that time (c. 2004).

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would be interested in reading some technical papers on the subject, could someone post a few? Whether about Shakespeare or other literature analysis?

That said, this is SO not big data. It is small data, but potentially interesting analysis.

<comment><USER8> I think it depends on what you mean. I don't think that just the number of bytes of data should be used to measure the size of your dataset. For example, if I have 1TB of all 1's, this is a lot of data, but not very interesting.

I think a more nuanced notion of size is the /information content/ of the datasets. I haven't thought about it carefully, but I'm sure you can quantify this more explicitly in terms of information theory or other non-bit-based complexity measures.

From this point of view, literature may not be large (in terms of the number of bytes), but in terms of information content, it is incredibly dense. A large portion of human knowledge is written somewhere. From this point of view, it is in fact big data.

<comment><USER7> Maybe you would find the theory of information interesting:

[http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...](http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf)

Here in his famous tour de force Claude Shannon lays out the way we can estimate the amount of actual information in an act of communication (e.g. a literary work) and relates it to system entropy.

To your point, !TB of all 1's compresses to a just few bits of actual information.

But I suspect you are not actually speaking about the information contained in a literary work. You are probably thinking: how much expansive commentary and explanation could a literary work spawn? That is another question. The answer is always: unbounded.

<comment><USER9> > The answer is always: unbounded.

But after initial perturbations die out, the growth rate will likely look something like O(log n) or less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of my first ever blog post...

[https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_un...](https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_unexceptional_vocabulary/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm interested in this subject, as I've studied it before. Was really nice to see how many techniques are used, with those functional words being just one (with good results, it must be said). Even reducing words to n-grams is interesting, since it catches the radix of the words (leaving those prefixes and suffixes out of the question).

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting talk about Authorship Detection from 28c3: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E)

</comment><comment> awinter-py interesting they use romeo & juliet as the first example and attribute to marlowe.

most of romeo & juliet is copied scene-for-scene from the english translation of an italian play by the same name. Most of the lines you remember from the play were added in shakespeare's version.

In the example in this article, I'm getting chills from how much better the shakespeare line is vs the marlowe line he stole.

If you read R&J side by side with its italian source, start with the 'if I profane' scene ('let lips do what hands do').</comment>


Search Engine Art: Internet Imperialism and the image in context (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ewic.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_eva18_de_paper1.pdf <comment><USER2> > Because the female body has a history of being productised it, like the > Cherokee or Amazon, will always surface within search results as a product > before as a person.

This sentence summarizes my opinion of that document: It starts with an assertion without any kind of supporting argument and then goes on to make a factually incorrect generalization. While it is easy to see what the author probably meant, it just seems unprofessional and unscientific. The missing comma makes it even more awkward to read.

In conclusion, this is a blog post turned PDF. An amusing read and certainly not completely wrong, but nothing to be taken too seriously.

<comment><AUTHOR> >it just seems unprofessional and unscientific

The author is an artist and not a scientist. It is from a multidisciplinary conference where "artists, designers, researchers, technologists from all over the world [...] discuss electronic visualisation technologies in art, design, music, dance, theatre, the sciences and more".[0]

[0] www.eva-london.org/eva-london-2018/

<comment><USER2> > The author is an artist and not a scientist

Unless that somehow implies that the document is to be seen as a piece of art, my opinion stands, that it reads like a low-quality blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is definetly more art than science.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) - <AUTHOR> http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/ <comment><USER2> Lauer and Needham are to events and threads what Popek and Goldberg are to virtualization: a distraction. The theoretical equivalence in expressiveness between the two models has very little to do with the practical systems programming reality of implementing them.

This paper also handwaves around the difference between preemptive and cooperative threads, as if to suggest that event-scheduled I/O implementers are naturally opposed to cooperative threading. In fact, I/O loads seem to be a motivating driver for coop thread libraries. In that sense, this paper seems to be an attempt to manufacture a controversy where none exists.

Finally, the notion that cooperatively-schedule concurrent I/O is automatically synchronized only on uniprocessors is true but irrelevant. Anybody that builds a cooperative system that needs to run on multiple processors knows they need to synchronize. The point is that coop systems are explicitly synchronized and have stated that is unshared _by default_ , which eliminates large classes of errors (not just straightforward stuff, but also thread serialization and performance issues).

<comment><USER3> s/Popov/Popek/

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Did what I said make sense otherwise?

<comment><USER3> What you write always makes sense, Thomas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Latency is impossible to guarantee with both threads and events, so neither is very good from that perspective. They don't talk about dead lock either or thread pool exhaustion. Meaningfully assigning thread priorities is nearly impossible as well. Neither is a good abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be interesting to revisit this using Go.</comment>


An ingredient in olive oil that appears to kill cancer cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/an-ingredient-in-olive-oil-that-appears-to-kill-cancer-cells?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e9053d449d-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-e9053d449d-281895037 <comment><USER2> I'm happy to see the authors have posted in the first paragraph something to preempt my posting of the "X kills cancer" XKCD : [http://xkcd.com/1217/](http://xkcd.com/1217/)

> A Rutgers nutritional scientist and two cancer biologists at New York City's > Hunter College have found that an ingredient in extra-virgin olive oil kills > a variety of human cancer cells without harming healthy cells.

<comment><USER3> The alt text of that XKCD is:

 _Now, if it selectively kills cancer cells in a petri dish, you can be sure it 's at least a great breakthrough for everyone suffering from petri dish cancer._

so it's still relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A headline that might prolong my life!

Thank you internet..

</comment><comment><USER5> Just like cannabis cures cancer

</comment><comment><USER6> In vitro. There are many substances that do that. When they can do it in vivo, on a lab rat, it will be news.

<comment><USER7> Wikipedia: Oleocanthal is capable of killing a variety of human cancer cells in vivo while leaving healthy cells unharmed. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleocanthal#Cell_death](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleocanthal#Cell_death)

<comment><USER6> Here's the scientific article quoted by the pop-science article used as a Wikipedia reference: [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23723556.2015.100...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23723556.2015.1006077#.VOamdrCUfQF)

The abstract says nothing about in vivo tests.</comment></comment></comment>


Delta flights grounded after systems outage - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37007908 <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12246490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12246490)</comment>


EFF now accepting Bitcoin again - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/eff-will-accept-bitcoins-support-digital-liberty <comment><USER2> EFF taking Bitcoin is good for Bitcoin but they won't get a single satoshi from me. I joined EFF not long after the Steve Jackson days and supported them until relatively recently.

I didn't believe their original "we don't want to be the story" explanation for not wanting to accept bitcoins. The EFF didn't want to get tagged as 'fringe' in their DC circles by accepting bitcoins in the wake of the Wikileaks/bitcoin story. Now that Bitcoin is being backed by startup money, EFF sees Bitcoin as socially safe again.

EFF alienated me by letting go of principle when it was more important to hang onto it.

<comment><USER3> Not just that, but they gave away all their previously donated bitcoins (which is a very large amount of money at current prices) to some borderline scam "Receive 0.0001 BTC free" operation instead of refunding them.

My friend personally donated 20000 BTC to them, luckily he has the disposition of a Buddhist monk.

EDIT: Trying to get this story confirmed, as comments below have pointed out, there is clearly a discrepancy.

<comment><USER4> I am going to have to call bull on that.

Here is the original EFF donation page: [http://web.archive.org/web/20110514012705/https://www.eff.or...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110514012705/https://www.eff.org/helpout)

It contains the bitcoin address.

Here is the history for that address: [https://blockchain.info/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2...](https://blockchain.info/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt)

Which as you can see received a total of 3,515.077 BTC. This is still a lot and is worth over $400k today, but way short of your 20,000.

FYI, here is the original discussion: <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20185.0>

edit: That discussion was right after the first bitcoin bubble and at the time it was trading for around $17 so the total donations that they were talking about was about $60k. Still a lot of money to be going to the faucet (and down the drain?).

<comment><USER3> Cannot edit or delete the old post, i was wrong by several orders of magnitude, please down vote and ignore. it was 20k USD worth of bitcoin at the time he donated.

Apologies.

<comment><USER4> Don't apologize too much. I was having fun demonstrating how to track this stuff down. That said I would have been really upset if I had donated a significant amount of money to the EFF and then they decided to give all of it away.

BTW it is probably possible to verify that the money donated was REALLY send to the bitcoin faucet.

Oh and yeah I got my first bitcoins from the faucet like many of these other people. It was an important service, however given how bitcoins can be split up it didn't need to be giving out large amounts at all.

<comment><USER5> An excellent demonstration of why Bitcoin is awesome: complete transparency on the block-chain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hacker News, two years ago: "God, I can't believe EFF stopped taking bitcoin! I'm not donating to them again until they do."

Hackner News today: "I can't believe EFF had the gall to start taking bitcoin again! Definitely not giving them a cent."

<comment><USER7> Two people said it. I'm not quite sure that's representative for whole community. I myself might actually donate to them in Bitcoin.

<comment><USER8> I'm confident there is a non-vocal majority that doesn't care much either way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I donated. It's possible to enter the amount you want to donate, unclick "Be an EFF Member", skip all the "Donor Information" fields, click "donate to EFF" and you are presented with a bitcoin payment address. I wish they would just list an address that I could send a payment to rather than go through that rigmarole. But good to see that EFF are accepting bitcoin again.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ironic timing following the shut down [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155933-homeland- security-...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155933-homeland-security- seizes-account-of-largest-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox)</comment>


Sweden's unmanned convenience store: all you need is a phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/in-swedens-first-unmanned-food-store-all-you-need-is-a-phone-1282466 <comment><USER2> I'm really surprised theft is not an issue. Maybe the town is small enough that everyone is recognizable.

> All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They > get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

I wonder if he's aggregating to pay the fixed part of credit card fee just once a month per person. In that case, this is a great idea.

> Ilijason is considering other ways to unlock the door that wouldn't require > using an app. He's ruled out face-recognition or fingerprint scanners, but > is thinking of installing a credit card reader like some banks use.

Some banks use credit card scanners to let you in the door... what?</comment>


Google+ Fails Because It Makes You Feel Like A Loser - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkhard-ly.com/1/post/2012/04/google-fails-because-it-makes-you-feel-like-a-loser.html

<comment><USER2> isn't there a similar article on the net where people said facebook should get out of this social networking space because it's effectively competing with myspace and orkut?

How many times will people rehash the same arguments?</comment>


Show HN: Tile38 – Realtime geofencing and geospatial index - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tidwall/tile38 <comment><USER2> One thing I've found hard to find in Go is a library equivalent to GEOS/JTS; looks like there are some nice geometric operations bundled under [https://github.com/tidwall/geojson](https://github.com/tidwall/geojson)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is definitely a cool product. I've been thinking of building something like this for use in a game server backend.

Do you plan on adding height-support? I'm sure some clients in the professional space would like to know "what room/floor in this building are you in?"

<comment><USER4> I'm curious to know where one gets such "heigh-support" data from?

<comment><USER5> GPS gives you a 3D fix (lat/lon/height). A common use case in aviation, particularly drones, is avoiding controlled airspace. The height of controlled airspace varies with location - for example a rural area might be 7500ft while near an airport traffic zone it might be only 1000ft or lower.

<comment><USER3> GPS isn't too great in skyscrapers. In most current gen smartphones GPS can only really pin you to a 16ft resolution on a current gen smartphone in ideal conditions [0]. This gets worse indoors and if the target is moving.

[0] - [https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/](https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/)

<comment><USER6> It wouldn't necessarily need to come from GPS. You could use beacons (ble) or similar to augment the raw dataset.

[https://estimote.com](https://estimote.com) (etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am just now digging a bit into IFTTT like event driven api pipelines (OS of course) and so the "Automated Events" section on tile38.com hit my attention - niiice!

I just today found this interesting project:

[http://www.flogo.io/](http://www.flogo.io/)

and this seems to be a great fit! Very nice toolset!

NO, I am not affiliated, I just liked it. I tried several different things, Flogo seems to have hit a nice spot between "general, but not too generic tool" with easy extensibility but still good usability for gui experiences.

Adding an event capable mapping server to the toolbox triggers exciting ideas!

Thank you very much for making this fantastic project a present to the world! Great!

</comment><comment><USER8> This is an amazing piece of software and thanks for creating this. We heavily use Tile38 for all our Geospatial needs in production.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome and thanks so much for kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi ! Thanks for creating this project. This looks extremely usefu l for the current project I am working on.

Question : is it possible to do a Nearby query on a geohash ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I recommend converting the target geohash to a lat lon first and then using the NEARBY command.

      NEARBY fleet HASH POINT lat lon

This will return back all points as geohashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tile38 is a great product, we've been using it in production to track, and manage geofences for a large amount of asphalt and cement trucks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet! I'd love to hear more about your implementation.

<comment><USER10> It's nothing too special, we collect positional information from several devices and feed it into Tile38 which then processes the geofences and delivers the enter/exit/inside notifications trough webhooks.

It's been rock-solid and easy to work with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> @tidwall: the link to maptiler.org in the readme is broken (it has bad certificate + asks for login & password)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh thanks! I just fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how much work it would be to integrate with Owntracks. It looks like Tile38 supports MQTT.

</comment><comment><USER13> What does this give you beyond what nearest neighbor libraries like flannel already do?</comment>


Explanation of PostgreSQL PgAdmin Interface - <AUTHOR> https://www.yogeshchauhan.com/164/postgres/explanation-of-postgresql-pgadmin-interface <comment><USER2> I've switched entirely to Dbeaver for postgres management/exploration and writing SQL.

[https://dbeaver.io/](https://dbeaver.io/)

Really well-built tool.

<comment><USER3> It may be well-built, but my recent experience with DBeaver was a database server that went down due to aggressive background column option fetching on a table with some 4 * 10^9 entries, soaking up all available IO. Partly the fault of the dba using the tool of course, but dbeaver has these 'small' features that suddenly become very costly to use when administrating production datasets.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, good point. I've unwittingly done something similar.

I have to caution co-workers against trying to sort an entire 300mm row table in the GUI.

Some guardrails around that would certainly be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was going to be an article explaining why the UI is so bad...

<comment><USER5> I had already prepared my pitchfork...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pgadmin4 is amazing</comment>


True Kilts: Debunking the Myths About Highlanders and Clan Tartans - <AUTHOR> https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/debunking-the-myths-about-kilts/ <comment><USER3>
       > these tartan traditions are
       > nearly 200 years old

These are pretty old by American standards, albeit not by Scottish.

<comment><USER4> We seem to be pretty good at re-inventing traditions for a bit of fun - <USER2> Helly Aa_ in Shetland and the more recent Beltane fire festival in Edinburgh being good examples.

[http://www.uphellyaa.org/](http://www.uphellyaa.org/)

[https://beltane.org/about/about-beltane/](https://beltane.org/about/about- beltane/)

<comment><USER3> Scots in "will capitalise on credulous foreigners" shocker.

<comment><USER5> In practice, it's actually quite common for parts of countries' culture to be deliberately created. A lot of the US's patriotic customs only go back to the early 20th century, for instance.

<comment><USER6> There's a post on the AskHistorians subreddit right now which discusses that very phenomenon. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7egibb/comme...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7egibb/comment/dq4z0o7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This just gave me a case of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. I saw a reddit comment on /r/AskHistorians just yesterday[0]. Many of these "traditions" in Europe were fabricated, mostly in the late 19th century to foster a sense of nationalist unity.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5aocbl/is_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5aocbl/is_there_a_traditional_french_dress_how_about/d9i68ks/)

</comment><comment><USER8> And no true Scotsman will be caught outside doing construction work without his Utilikilt! [1]

[1] [http://www.utilikilts.com/accessories/switchback.html](http://www.utilikilts.com/accessories/switchback.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Build vs. Buy: What is the true cost of hiring a new software developer? - <AUTHOR> I am stuck in a build vs. buy decision. I will provide hypothetical numbers in this post to ask my question. Let us assume I am paying $300,000 in licensing fees per year to use a commercial product. I know that I can build that commercial product internally if I hire one more software developer. This developer can build and maintain the internally developed product. Let us assume I can pay this new developer $200,000 annual compensation (base pay + bonus + benefits + perks). Can I assume that I would be then saving $100,000 per year?<p>For some reason, I think this simple calculation is too naive. Surely it can't be that simple, could it? Perhaps, the cost to the company for hiring this new developer is going to be much more than $200,000? What other hidden monetary costs do I need to take care of before deciding the true effective cost of hiring a new developer? <comment><USER2> 1) Development time cost, how long will it take the software developer to actually meet feature parity with the commercial product? If it takes > 6 months, then in your first year you are net negative.

2) How complex is the application and how specialized will the knowledge of building it be...or in other words what is your plan when that developers leaves the following year? Can you easily hire someone to take over or will it be difficult for someone to pick up on the work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. Thanks! Definitely need to take care (1) and (2).

I am also concerned about the true $-value of the developer. Say I hire one for $200,000 per year, is that all the money my company would spend on him? Or is it going to be more than that? Are there any other hidden costs I am not seeing right now?

For example, one thing that came up in my mind is team offsite events which we have. That's not part of the compensation package on paper but our company does have to bear some extra expenses for every new developer. Fortunately, it is not a large amount to worry about. But I am worried if there is any large amount that I need to worry about and I am missing out in my analysis.

<comment><USER3> Does the commercial package have any competitors? If not I'd be asking why not. Either it isn't as simple to rebuild the product as you are assuming, or maybe someone hasn't tried it yet. If it turns out to be feasible you could sell your developer's work cheaper than the commercial package and then open source it once you have made back the development costs.</comment></comment></comment>