In Defense of Inclusionism - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism <comment><USER2> This is a long but excellent article - well worth reading.

By coincidence, I became aware of this bizarre "deletionist" culture at Wikipedia recently when I was searching for information about a particular musician. This is someone who has a handful of popular-ish songs on streaming sites, all from television soundtracks, but hasn't really charted as far as I can tell - in other words, an artist I would peg at about 50/50 odds to have had someone bother to write a Wikipedia entry for them.

Lo and behold, I found that someone _had_ written a Wikipedia entry for them, and that it had been deleted because they weren't deemed famous enough to have an entry! I was dumbfounded... This is someone that _millions of people_ have probably heard in the background of primetime television, and information about them was _actively_ deemed unworthy of Wikipedia!

It was a strange, depressing, and disturbing moment of realization about how Wikipedia had evolved from the early days when I was consistently delighted to find information on all manner of obscure topics, lovingly curated by people who cared deeply enough about them to invest their time in informing the world about them. Thanks to this article I now know that it wasn't just an isolated incident.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps Wikipedia should approach this from another angle: loosen their baseline criteria, and then treat "notability" like Twitter's "verified" tag. Let the debate be whether or not an article should have the notability checkmark, not whether or not it should exist at all (within reason).

<comment><USER4> Because of the way Google prefers Wikipedia articles over other sources in its SERPs, this would ultimately have the effect of turning Wikipedia into a UGC version of AOL: it would be overrun with crud (because the Internet incentivizes Wikipedia articles), and the project would have to expend significant effort at retraining the Internet to look for "verified" stickers on the things that actually were encyclopedia articles. For what benefit?

Wikipedia's response to this problem is the right one: there's a whole big wide Internet out there, and if Wikipedia isn't the appropriate place for your article, surely there are many other places that are. UGC sites are falling over themselves to get people to write on them. Why force them on the one Internet project that doesn't want them?

<comment><USER3> Good point on SERPs, and certainly nobody should force Wikipedia to act against what they believe is their strategic best interest. But isn't "the way Google prefers Wikipedia articles over other sources in its SERPs" an epiphenomenon? In an alternate universe where Wikipedia was more inclusive and used some kind of "notability" flag, Google could just as easily prefer those "notable" articles the way it prefers Wikipedia articles more generally in this universe.

Edit: clarity.

<comment><USER4> I think it is indeed the case that if Wikipedia was subjected to less entropy, so that its editors could work on building up the encyclopedia in a sort of secluded peace, the project would be far less itchy about notability.

But remember that minimizing error is only half the argument for notability. The other half is, again, definitional: an article about a non-notable topic is almost by definition original research, and "no original research" is one of Wikipedia's oldest rules. The project's charter is to be a tertiary source.

<comment><USER5> > an article about a non-notable topic is almost by definition original > research, and "no original research" is one of Wikipedia's oldest rules

While I understand it as a means to keep random cranks out of the science pages, all it has ever incentivized is to have people 'launder' their research via some 'reliable source'.

But which sources are 'reliable' is quite often purely a matter of editorial bias and there are other wiki projects with a very different take on the matter, for example:

[https://infogalactic.com/info/Infogalactic:Reliability](https://infogalactic.com/info/Infogalactic:Reliability)

<comment><USER4> Could you be more specific about this "laundering" of research through reliable sources?

I definitely saw savvy Wikipedia spammers lawyering their way into the encyclopedia, sometimes successfully, for instance by citing marginal trade press cites as evidence of notability ("my client is notable because one time a trade press writer got a quote from them on the importance of FCIP products for disaster recovery programs").

What I don't see is a lot of bogus research hiding in the secondary sources of major articles.

Whatever you might think about WP's policies on what does or doesn't constitute a "reliable" source, I think it's difficult to argue that any community outside of Wikipedia has spent more time thinking about this problem.

<comment><USER5> It's simple, you put it on your web page with some puffed-up credentials and then have a friend link to it. This works better for things that aren't commonly challenged as it often doesn't stand up to more than casual scrutiny as you do have to pass yourself off as somehow 'reliable'.

<comment><USER4> My experience editing Wikipedia suggests to me that this is a dubious tactic. Anything I cited on my own web pages, for topics I feel pretty comfortable asserting expertise on (like, for instance, the presence of a lisp interpreter embedded in the Seatbelt ACL system in OSX) was immediately sniped by other editors.

<comment><USER5> You made the mistake of citing yourself instead of getting a friend to do it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can folks link to the best defense of deletionism they know? Here is an OK one I've found:

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

To me personally, _verifiability_ seems a vastly better criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. It's (a) a much less subjective standard than notability, (b) well-justified by the limitations of the medium (i.e., no original research), and (c) still prevents Wikipedia from being a "dumping ground" for everything on the internet.

The only general argument for deletionism I've seen that survives is that the editor resources of Wikipedia will be stretched so thin that the checking of _verifiability itself_ is imperiled. But (1) Wikipedia survived fine back when it had vastly fewer editors and random people were writing on a bajillion then-empty topics and (2) there are much better ways to handle this minor problem, e.g., pages are hidden from non-registered users until they reach a critical mass of contributing editors.

Measured by pure prevalence, the dominant argument seems to be about status: that non-notable items just don't _deserve_ to be in Wikipedia. It's very hard to argue against an emotional appeal like this.

<comment><USER7> Is this one of those situations where someone uses a proxy metric for something that is itself easily measured? "We must protect verifiability, non- notable articles aren't easily verified, therefore non-notable articles should be banned"?

Is there a name for this? I've been noticing (and being frustrated by) it a lot.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand how this is a "proxy metric".

I'll give you the shortest defense of deletionism I can write:

There are two problems with non-notable articles in Wikipedia.

The first is definitional. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source: a roadmap and synopsis of existing sources. Non-notable sources are by definition those for which existing reliable sources are absent. All such articles are, in a very simple sense, "original research". One of the most basic founding principles of Wikipedia, as old as NPOV, is "no original research".

The second is pragmatic. Wikipedia is committed to minimizing error. Entropy exerts tremendous force on the project, which occupies extremely valuable Internet real estate. Every article on Wikipedia is in a sense a commitment by the Wikipedia community to mount a defense against bias, advertisement, promotion, vandalism, and basic inaccuracy. The notability requirement, which is at bottom based not on "fame" but on _the quality of sources available for a topic_ , is an extremely reasonable boundary to put on the expectations Wikipedia can have of its unpaid editors to combat that entropy: to wit, that we will do so only when available sources make the job possible to do in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Wikipedia is committed to minimizing error.

Try to tell that to the guys who feel like they own the /dev/random article on Wiki-DE:

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:/dev/random#.2Fdev....](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:/dev/random#.2Fdev.2Furandom)

An "IP" (which is basically a kind of online racism, because ostensibly "IPs" are not addresses but a certain kind of people) tried to correct the usual /dev/urandom misinformation. It was reverted, called vandalism and the user bakunin finally stated that he reverted because "the discussion was getting on his nerves" and "even if the change was factually correct", it was obviously vandalism.

I know why I don't try to contribute to Wikipedia. When the half-time of _donations_ to the project can be measured in minutes, it's just not worth it.

<comment><USER4> It will probably not surprise you that this is also the reason I no longer contribute to Wikipedia. When you're an expert in a subject, writing an encyclopedia article about it is very tedious. It's easy for me to write an explanation of how the LRNG works, or what its faults are, or what the urban mythology is about it. It's much more painful for me to do so while backing every point I make up with some secondary source --- none of which can be related to me in any way, lest I be accused of injecting my own bias into the encyclopedia.

But while I'm not going to say that the way Wikipedia deals with expertise is perfect (it is deeply imperfect), there's a sense in which this is the way it's supposed to be.

If I have important things to say about the LRNG, why would I write them in Wikipedia? Should I not write my own articles, or a chapter of a book, or an academic paper, and let people who _want_ to write encyclopedia articles cite them? In my own work, I can obey whatever guidelines I want to, and write in whatever fashion is most gratifying and effective for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone else pointed out, this is a long, detailed critique of Wikipedia by someone whose main objection is that _" by 2007 the water had become hot enough to be felt by devotees of modern fiction (that is, anime & manga franchises, video games, novels, etc.)"_ There are legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia, but that it now discourages "fancruft" isn't much of one. There are many other popular culture forums. If you want to write about anime, get an account on MyAnimeList or Daisuki or Wikia. (Daisuki, incidentally, is a project of the Cool Japan Fund, a VC fund to export Japanese culture, funded by the government of Japan and some big banks.) There's Pottermore and Wookiepedia and the Marvel Universe Wiki. There are places for that stuff, and they're big and active.

"Deletionism" is mostly pushback against the incoming tide of promotional articles. Here's an essay I wrote on dealing with conflict of interest editing.[1] Without considerable pushback, Wikipedia would read like PR Newswire. Too often, it still does. As I note in my essay, on Wikipedia, it's not what you have to say about yourself, it's what other reliable sources say about you. Wikipedia is one of the very few resources on the Web that's not choked with advertising and promotion. That's valuable.

Editor retention is a problem. Editing Wikipedia is hard. It's not like writing on a blog or forum. It's like submitting a pull request to a major open source project. It's not difficult for anyone who has published in a refereed journal, but that's under 1% of the population. It's painful for someone who's never had their writing tightly edited. So is submitting code to a successful project. It's one way to get better at writing.

Despite this, Wikipedia is dealing well with the hard problems. As the Trump administration takes power, many articles needed to be updated, and, despite controversies, that process is going reasonably well. The Washington Post comments that, over time, Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects approach a neutral point of view.[2] Few other places on the Web achieve that, or even try.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_wit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_with_conflict_of_interest_problems) [2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/25/somet...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/25/somethings- terribly-wrong-with-the-internet-and-wikipedia-might-be-able-to-fix- it/?utm_term=.ff6f591f51f9)

<comment><USER9> Good, someone's making this point!

I'd argue that it's specifically "modern fiction" that made Wikipedia hard to take seriously in the early years (was it that they had a biography of Pikachu but not of Charles XII of Sweden?), and that a hard line on fancruft but lenience in other areas would make sense.

On the other hand, I hadn't known about the PR issue, and I think I now understand why Wikipedia is so unforgiving towards _Mittelstand_ businesses. If the only information you can get about the second-largest sprocket-maker in Topeka was written by the second-largest sproket-maker in Topeka, it might indeed be better to leave them off the site entirely...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > We talked idealistically about how Wikipedia could become an encyclopedia of > specialist encyclopedias, the superset of encyclopedias. "would you expect > to see a Bulbasaur article in a Pokemon encyclopedia? yes? then let's have a > Bulbasaur article". The potential was that Wikipedia would be the summary of > the Internet and books/media. Instead of punching in a keyword to a search > engine and getting 100 pages dealing with tiny fragments of the topic (in > however much detail), you would get a coherent overview summarizing > everything worth knowing about the topic, for almost all topics.

That sounds much cooler than what we've actually ended up with.

<comment><USER4> The single most ambitious and effective single resource in perhaps the history of recorded human knowledge?

It's not cool enough for you because _there isn 't a totally separate independent article about whatever the fuck a Bulbasaurus is?_

<comment><USER11> You don't know what a Bulbasaur is? Maybe look it up on Wikipedia because as has been mentioned here already there IS an article on Bulbasaur! It is not a stub either.

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

Wikipedia has righted the wrong eventually.

<comment><USER4> Yeah it turns out that Bulbasaurus is a very bad example. Sorry. I literally know Pokemon principally as a thing people use to complain about Wikipedia with. I Googled "obscure Pokemon" and will henceforth be using "Kingler" as my example of how unreasonably demanding the Internet is of Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think everybody who isn't highly involved in Wikipedia has always hated the whole "notability" thing. Drives me crazy. If there's something more than a dozen people care about and they're not a family give them the benefit of the doubt.

And I think the author is right on point with the barriers to contribution thing.

My brother, for example, says he created the Wikipedia page for Cheescake (~2004) because he noticed there wasn't one so he started it by creating a sentence that defined what he thought cheesecake was. And he didn't register, sign up or even make a good article. He just saw something he thought was missing and created it with a single sentence.

And now there's an actual "proper" article.

Not sure if he could do that today. I imagine most people find a missing article, discover there are hoops, and don't bother.

<comment><USER4> He couldn't do it today because there is a Wikipedia article already for pretty much every conceivable pastry, from Stroopwafels to Cronuts to Fudgie the Whale.

To me, this _strongly_ suggests that if you just today realized that Wikipedia was lacking an article for, let's say, Red Velvet Cake, you would have very little trouble creating that article.

<comment><USER13> Red velvet cake is simply a variation of chocolate cake, and not notable enough to have its own article. Also this article is low-quality and contains several non-encyclopedic/non-verifiable statements. Propose merging into a passing note in [[Chocolate cake]].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Deleting links from Wikipedia to your competitors is a famous black hat tactic. You can get away with almost anything on Wikipedia if you are deleting.

I think the world needs a list of web pages categorized by Wikipedia topics, but the people who will appreciate it most are spammers and there lies the rub.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, a decade and a bit ago one could share a bit of knowledge on wikipedia fairly informally and be sure it would feed into the article and help the project.

Fast forward to recent years and you can write a decent article with references and have someone come along from one of the 'patrol' teams and nominate it for swift deletion in under 5 minutes, regardless of whether they know anything about the subject area.

New users are unlikely to try twice, when the initial reaction is so hostile.

<comment><USER16> FWIW wikipedia seems to be aware that those patrol teams are more harmful than useful.

Vandal Patrol got shut down; new page patrol is now a user right and it's getting a lot more scrutiny and discussion - and the discussion is all focused on preventing the newbie-biting harms. Twinkle and rollback got a lot of scrutiny.

I hate wikipedia, but I'm glad to see some movement in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every year something in my brain breaks and I think "I know, I'll finally get rsync.net a wikipedia entry".

This is somewhat important because the little-hitler that owns (yes, owns) the "cloud storage" wikipedia page refuses all additions of cloud storage providers that "aren't notable". So therefore, rsync.net has to have a wikipedia page.

This shouldn't be a problem - rsync.net has been mentioned in the press widely over the course of over 10 years - everything from articles about our warrant canary to articles about our ZFS support. In fact, _other wikipedia pages_ mention and discuss rsync.net.

You know where this is going.

A perfectly well written article, well cited with 15+ citations from "respectable" journalist sources is _nearly insta-deleted_ due to notability.

Every single time. I've tried 4-5 times over the past few years. Every time it's a different little-hitler that swoops in to bravely defend wikipedia.

<comment><USER18> Add it to [https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page](https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page)

They started by forking wikipedia and have expanded the notability guidelines.

<comment><USER19> wow a wiki fork is amazing. its been needed for a while too.

<comment><USER20> Out of curiousity, have there been any other forks that have focused on editing the content? I mean, I know there's a bajillion wikipedia _mirrors_ that are just trying to get page views for cheap, but have there been any other forks that are actually trying to bootstrap from Wikipedia and make _changes_ to the underlying content?

As I sometimes mention, informally studying the effects of code structure on community creation is a bit of a long-running hobby of mine, and I'd be intrigued to see any other extant examples of a wikipedia fork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think that the notability clause is doing a ton of damage, especially because it is enforced in a way that discourages any new users. My one and only try to create an article was shot down over it and I simply stopped trying after that.

</comment><comment><USER22> > "by (...) using software that makes undoing most vandalism far easier than > doing it, the participation goes through the roof"

The bitter irony is that this cause of wikipedia's early success is the seed of its current rot: one person's contribution is another person's vandalism; if undoing a contribution is always less effort than making it, participation must decrease.

Ah, well; everyone who's ever sneered at the list of fictional starfish back in the day have what they wanted now, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon, where a small group emerge from a userbase, gain control of the platform and start applying their preferences to the detriment of the average user. It strikes me as very similar to the problems stack overflow faces.

<comment><USER24> Plutocracy? You have to have a decent amount of free time and resources initially to value spending time working on Wikipedia articles enough to gain working knowledge and social connections in the system to advance enough to advance broader agendas, or enforce narrower biases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's not just wikipedia that does this; it's not even specifically a problem of open communities. Organisations all over do this. People underestimate complexity and think that they can assign permissions and control access beforehand, and they invariably end up making things hugely complicated in some vain endeavor to solve largely imaginary problems.

Wikipedia, stackoverflow - but also companies with their crazy policies, and governments (which kind of inspired the word kafkaesque). Clearly, this is human nature.

Oh, it doesn't actually _work_ , so any successful organization also develops an unofficial way to get stuff done, and those facing real risks need to develop an audit culture too. But the lure of just that slightly more detailed access control system stays, and rules proliferate.

Heck, our entire system of human self-organisation is one big cruft of rapidly growing rules, contracts, laws and treaties. It's _everywhere_. They only ever really shrink at any meaningful rate when the parties involved cease to exist.

</comment><comment><USER26> It hurts to be reminded of this. I quit wikipedia because of that.

Having your page deleted is an absolute slap to the face. It's like bringing a home-baked cake to a charity cake sale and having the other bakers take your cake, throw it to the ground and stomp on it while cackling maniacally and shouting "not notable" and other stock phrases.

I refuse to accept their excuses.

<comment><USER27> Seems to me it's more like bringing your home-baked cake to Wal-mart and being horribly offended that they don't just put it on the shelves. I think Animats' analogy in a sibling comment of making a pull request against a major open- source is very apt. Wikipedia is a huge and hard to manage project with extremely high standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I did an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia, Includipedia, a few years ago, which failed due to inadequate execution on my part.

I still think the underlying idea of an inclusionist fork is sound, and I'm surprised one hasn't been successful.

<comment><USER29> Wikipedia is "good enough"; they have the funding and it's too much effort for most people to switch (particularly now that e.g. Google integrates wikipedia directly into search results). It's a shame.

<comment><USER30> As a deletionist organization they certainly won't get my money, meanwhile as more articles are deleted, there is less for google to link to. They're narrowcasting to an ever smaller group, and that can't end well. Eventually they have to close or change course. They won't change course, so ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Even aside from a biased editor wanting to control a subject, reputation, edit history, and voting on administrative decisions are all important parts of a Wikipedia editor's account and experience of Wikipedia. Enough 'good' participation can get you an administrator account and further privileges.

This turns Wikipedia into a game for these people which, inevitably, to arcane rules-lawyering. Creating content is hard, and when you want to increase your metrics and contribute to the community _because_ it is the community and not because you have a passion for Subject X, creating content is not a sustainable strategy in the long-term. You can't know everything, you can't be an expert on everything. It's much easier to revert, to rules-laywer, to delete. So that's what happens.

</comment><comment><USER32> I used to contribute a lot to Wikipedia back around 2004-2005 (I did a rather large rewrite of the article on photon mapping). But in the following years, almost every edit I made or article I wrote was reverted or deleted, so I just gave up. Maybe a better version of Wikipedia will come along at some point, but until then I am no longer making any contributions.

</comment><comment><USER33> The key insight here is that you cannot drive quality in a project like Wikipedia at the expense of driving contributors away. When people leave, who will watch an maintain the articles? You can try to lock down even harder, but then nobody new will join, and the existing contributors will eventually churn and leave.

<comment><USER34> > who will watch and maintain the articles?

Exactly the people you don't want - powerhungry, fiefdom building diehards.

The whole point of Wikipedia was to be a repository of our knowledge, even if there are flaws, but it just seems so pointless to contribute. I know I stopped bothering years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't know how true it is that niche topics are unwelcome. I wrote this article about a year ago in hopes of getting this implemented in Python's statsmodels, and so far nobody has told me that this very niche topic shouldn't be in Wikipedia:

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

I've gotten a number of helpful edits for it too.

I also referenced it from the much more mainstream Boxplot article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot#Variations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot#Variations)

So, my experience has been positive so far.

(Btw, I'm still hoping someone will implement this in statsmodels.)

<comment><USER21> I think it depends a bit on the topic and area how easy and/or hard it is to add anything. I also think that it is a bit easier to add something than to start a new article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sometimes I wonder if the solution to this isn't just to add a second tier of pages to Wikipedia, alpha (canonical) and beta (non-canonical): with pages starting in the alpha Wikipedia, then being moved to the beta Wikipedia if they're not considered sufficiently notable, where they can be worked on and eventually promoted back to the alpha Wikipedia once they've reached a certain level and combination of quality and notability. Deletions could happen for straight-up junk pages, but at least 'notability' would be removed as a qualification for inclusion.

</comment><comment><USER37> Could Wikipedia ever be forked by a group that wanted to compete by trying to win with a better culture and/or technology?

It's such a hostile culture it'd be nice to get rid of persnickety behavior, and indulgence of unproductive obsessive personality traits (like deletion binging, worrying more about rules than the spirit of the rules).

<comment><USER27> Everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA or free-er, and the software that runs it is GPL. If you think you can do better, feel free to try. I'm fairly certain several people have already tried. I personally find the "hostile culture" to be not too different from a culture with high standards, and high standards are exactly why Wikipedia is popular - you see exactly the same criticisms leveled against StackOverflow and other essentially "canonical" resources on the web. I would not be surprised if anyone who cares at all about quality will get a lot of people complaining that their contributions were ignored or that it's impossible to add anything to these resources.

<comment><USER37> There is a real difference between pursuing quality and being unproductively persnickety. One doesn't require the other.

Take your example of SO, the issue became so bad in 2013 they had to revamp the way moderation worked. They wouldn't have done that if it were just a bunch of people wanting to lower quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's becoming a fairly common occurrence where a person whose personal contribution isn't accepted as-is by a community writes an emotional, novel- length post about why the community is failing and will die soon. Someone did this recently with Stack Overflow.

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe because I grew up reading HHGTTG I've always thought that of course a freely editable internet encyclopedia should be as inclusive as possible. No, I won't buy the deletionist argument. Personally, I wouldn't mind if people started to cite other sources than WP again. The WWW as a whole will be the ultimate Guide.

<comment><USER40> But HHGTTG was far from inclusive. It was only edited by staff writers, and they had a team of central editors that would cut down long, detailed articles to their bare necessities ("Mostly Harmless").

<comment><USER39> Oh, true, true. The core idea stuck, still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> iso-8859-1 It is fun to see how AfD debates that are closed with "merge", just never get merged, deletionists will not bother. Too much work.

For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_\(software\))

</comment><comment><USER41> Great article. Sad to hear there is a cultural shift...

Worth noting that there is definitely a Bulbasaur article on Wikipedia though. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur)</comment>


Quantum Bayesianism Explained by Its Founder - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/ <comment><USER2> >>>"At the other end of the spectrum is Bruno de Finetti. He says there's no reason whatsoever for my probabilities and yours to match, because mine are based on my experience and yours are based on your experience. "

That doesn't deny an objective reality out there, it's just saying that we have different information about what it's out there and, therefore, we arrive to different conclusions.

I don't understand how that perspective is different from just "objective Bayesianism" with different priors.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It feels like he is just combining normal Bayesianism with normal quantum mechanics. Which is seems fine, but I'm annoyed he dodged the question about nonconscious things also having a personalized set of priors.

I'd like to hear him explain the single particle double slit experiment from this QBism perspective.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like the wave model describes the statistical properties of a population of photons.

Eg, a coin flip is deterministic if you know all the forces involved (airflow, force of flip, exact distribution of mass of the coin, etc). But since we are usually ignorant of all that, instead we model it as a bernoulli trial.

<comment><USER5> But that's not what qbism is about: a wave function (pure state) doesn't represent ignorance about a true underlying physical state, it's a maximally sharp state of belief.

<comment><USER4> > Regarding quantum states as degrees of belief implies that the event of a > quantum state changing when a measurement occurs—the "collapse of the wave > function"—is simply the agent updating her beliefs in response to a new > experience. > [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism)

You could be right, That is what this sounds like to me though. According to the model there is a 50% chance the coin will land on heads, until you flip it.

<comment><USER5> For a pure state a measurement doesn't improve our knowledge about the state of the physical system, it changes it (and we get information about the new state). The Bayesian updating applies to mixed states, where there exists "classical" uncertainty while for a pure state the uncertainty is purely "quantum".

"Quantum measurement is nothing more, and nothing less, than a refinement and a readjustment of one's initial state of belief. [...] Let us look at two limiting cases of efficient measurements. In the first, we imagine an observer whose initial belief structure ρ = |ψ⟩⟨ψ| is a maximally sharp state of belief. By this account, no measurement whatsoever can refine it. [...] The only state change that can come about from a measurement must be purely of the mental-readjustment sort: We learn nothing new; we just change what we can predict as a consequence of the side effects of our experimental intervention. That is to say, there is a sense in which the measurement is solely disturbance."

[https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/cfuchs/Oviedo.pdf](https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/cfuchs/Oviedo.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, not what I was thinking it sounds like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Eventually my colleague Rüdiger Schack and I felt that to be consistent we > had to break the ties with Jaynes and move more in the direction of de > Finetti.

For those who are curious, here's Jaynes' view on the subject:

[https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prob.in.qm.pdf](https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prob.in.qm.pdf)

<comment><USER5> The entropic dynamics approach from Caticha is closer to Jaynes' ideas (and more interesting than qbism in my opinion, as it's quite different from standard QM instead of just giving a Bayesian interpretation to it): [https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04693](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04693)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I missing something here? A wave function is NOT a probability distribution! Wave functions have phase! The double slit experiment and bells paradox both clearly show that quantum effects can be created that cannot be explained in terms of classical trajectories that are simply unknown. Phase can cause wave functions to interfere with themselves, and so forth ... I can only imagine that Fuchs must deal with this in his thousands of pages, but the article makes it seem like his interpretation was one dismissed at the beginning because quantum mechanics demonstrably involves effects that cannot just be a due to a lack of classical state information.

</comment><comment><USER8> From the post 5 years ago, this blog post summarizes the article well: [https://motls.blogspot.com/2015/06/is-quantum-reality- person...](https://motls.blogspot.com/2015/06/is-quantum-reality- personal.html)

Edit: Going through recent posts of this guy, I would also like to state that anything non physics related on his blog is crazy right-wing babble.

</comment><comment><USER9> See the discussion from 2015:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714618)

Same article but published by Wired.

</comment><comment><USER10> Too many people, including physicists, confuse theories with reality. Quantum mechanics is a very powerful theory that correctly predicts a lot of observed phenomena. But while QM talks about a wavefunction, it doesn't mean the wavefunction actually exists. I myself particularly like the Everett interpretation, which some believe implies a multiverse, but I don't think the actual existence of a multiverse is necessary.

<comment><USER11> What other definition is there for saying that something exists, than that it correctly predicts observed phenomena? If you say that the table in front of me exists, surely that's nothing more or less than saying that the concept of a table correctly predicts the table-like sensations you see and feel.

<comment><USER12> To me, "exists" is stronger than "predicts observation", although I can't entirely describe how, except by example.

Let's say you're in a game. You can create a physics of the game world based on how that game behaves. However, the game world doesn't exist, as such. It's the result of a pattern produced by a computer, interpreted by our minds, which fills in the blanks and makes the game world feel more real than it is.

It makes sense that an account of existence should either include the substructure (in this case, the computer) or the observer (in this case, the mind doing the filling-in), or possibly both. On the other hand, a description of the behavior of the system is much simpler.

Another example: simulation hypothesis people sometimes talk about the possibility of "breaking out" of the simulation, as if the simulation is less somehow less true than whatever is behind it.

But from a predicting-observed-phenomenon perspective, what you describe by physics exists. So the distinction between the rules of physics that apply in a certain domain because you're in a simulation, and the rules of physics that apply in another domain once you find a way to break out, is entirely artificial. That people don't see it that way seems to indicate that they mean something else by existence.

<comment><USER13> Without relying on a thing that actually exists - a computer running the game - you can't properly describe the behavior of the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >As QBism understands a quantum measurement outcome, it's personal. No one else can see it. I see it or you see it. There's no transformation that takes the one personal experience to the other personal experience. William James was just wrong when he tried to argue that "two minds can know one thing."

EPR paradox demonstrates that observers can know each other experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> If the wavefunction is assumed to only encode epistemic uncertainty of the observer, then how are phenomena like tunneling explained?

<comment><USER4> From my reading, they would say some particles are just much more energetic than usual (for some reason we are ignorant of). See the post above about flipping a coin. According to the statistical model we use for coin flips, it is really unlikely to flip 100 heads in a row but not impossible.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't it be possible to see this experimentally? You'd find particles jumping out of a "potential energy well" which they shouldn't be able to escape via tunneling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST_

That's what Bayesianists think, but not frequentists. (As a frequency, probability is very much real. And, what would be the point of talking about something that "does not exist," anyway?)

</comment><comment><USER16> (2015)

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes ... you add Bayesian to the thing and it becomes new, principled and superior. It's been a trend for about 3 decades now.

<comment><USER18> Read the article, you can learn something :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm struggling to see how this anything more than Bohm's theory with a dubious interpretation of the guiding wave (which, to be honest, Bohm himself was guilty of). Like Bell without the 'Beables'.</comment>


Government-backed egg lobby tried to crack food startup, emails show - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/02/usda-american-egg-board-hampton-creek-just-mayo

<comment><USER2> Hampton Creek's plant based egg replacement is supposedly 18% cheaper than real eggs. A major advance if true.</comment>


Ask HN: How do SpaceX/NASA/other maintain high code quality? - <AUTHOR> What is the state of the art test frameworks and/or patterns that mission critical companies follow nowadays? It seems that SpaceX uses C++ for most everything, but I haven't been able to find anything about how they or other modern mission-critical software companies maintain, what I assume is, well-tested, near bug-free code? <comment><USER2> Here's the JPL Java Coding Standard. [http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/jpl-java- standard.pdf](http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/jpl-java-standard.pdf)

"The primary purpose of the standard is to help Java programmers reduce the probability of run-time errors in their programs."

</comment><comment><USER3> As a former software engineer at SpaceX I'm rather interested in why you think the solution is a "state of the art test framework and/or pattern".

<comment><AUTHOR> I am lead to believe that the hiring process at SpaceX is tough and that therefore the caliber of recruits is high. Couple that with SpaceX accomplishing major space breakthroughs in, what when compared to NASA, is a fraction of the time, would lead me to assume their processes must have some state-of-the-art procedures.

<comment><USER4> Just because a company has a tough hiring process and some accomplishments does not mean they have state of the art processes or bug free code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't speak about SpaceX, but with a number of prior/current NASA contractors it is pretty mundane. The key isn't some awesome framework or "new" technology. In fact, you'd probably be dumbfounded with the technology restrictions and how little they are using current technology. Overall their success comes from process, methodology and time. In addition, most of the time you are engineering for failure, so when failure happens recovery is possible. You can read about the flight computers aboard the shuttle (and Apollo) and how they handled things with them, there are some really interesting articles about it.

In more specific, I'd say 80% of the success comes from fairly rigid processes, including the coding standards and testing methodology. Like with C/C++ standards, you'll find a lot of restrictions on what you can use in the language, how you can use it etc. Here is the JPL's C standards, around flight and embedded type projects (they happen to publish most of their standards) [http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf](http://lars- lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf)

And traditionally there has been significant separation of teams, e.g. System Engineering doing requirements analysis and development, Software Engineers building the software and Testing Engineers writing software and procedures to make sure software hits all the requirements and it doesn't fail.

At least from what I know and have experienced you also will not see flight or "critical" software changed and flown (or actively utilized) within any short period of time. As time is a major factor in the testing/simulation regime to make sure things work properly.

My guess is that even at SpaceX, critical software components in flight today have been completed and tested for months and months before it hits a real flight. Doesn't mean they may not fly it in a passive mode to see what decisions it would make, but it wouldn't be in control. I am sure non-critical components and ground based software has a slightly less rigid process, but probably still fairly tough.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was reading about the new horizons project, and for the spacecraft it seems they tested using simulation. The mission was thought about for years before the software was made. Then the spacecraft flew for a few years which gave ample time to simulate. Other mission critical projects simply have a room full of people scrutinizing ever line of code.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've heard that it's a common strategy for mission critical software to have a "bad" dev team of similar or equal size that works against the "good" team to break what ever they're building.

<comment><USER8> I don't know whether it is common to have one, but the original was IBM's black team: [http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html](http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not directly on topic, but close, the simulation and environment is touched on:

[http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what- computer-...](http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer-and- software-is-used-by-the-falcon-9)

The above link references the AMA done by SpaceX engineers too: [https://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap](https://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here you go: [http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right- stuff](http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)

</comment><comment><USER8> Required reading: [http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right- stuff](http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff) ("the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups.")

</comment><comment><USER10> It's the process, not the frameworks.</comment>


Apple Was Slow to Act on FaceTime Bug That Allows Spying on iPhones - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/technology/facetime-glitch-apple.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19029573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19029573).</comment>


High-Speed Rail's Central Valley Segment Is Not Stranded - <AUTHOR> https://sf.streetsblog.org/2019/02/14/high-speed-rails-central-valley-segment-is-not-stranded/ <comment><USER2> It is absolutely stranded and "train to nowhere" is a wonderful phrase I wish I'd thought of myself.

No one is going to take Amtrak's poor, slow trains to Merced, then ride high speed rail to Bakersfield, then get back on a slow Amtrak train to reach their final destination. Nor will they drive to those stranded stations just to connect by HSR. People will just drive (or fly!) the entire way.

What this author fails to point out is that America's Interstate Highway system is unique in the world and has led us to a road-based transportation system like no other. That's not a bad thing. Europe and Asia never had an interstate and trains make a lot more sense there.

The other factor is that airline travel is cheap and readily available in California. No one is going to goof around connecting through the "train to nowhere" when you could take a point-to-point trip on any airline between several airports. In LA, you've got LAX, Glendale, Burbank, and Ontario. In Silicon Valley, you've got SFO, Oakland, Sacramento, and SJC. If you look at the timetables for those connections, you could choose flights on 30 minute increments. If you took the "high speed" train to nowhere, who knows when the heck you'd arrive.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Now here's the same type of train as in the above photo, but on a dedicated HSR line in Germany, where it goes nearly 200 mph."

A train with diesel locomotives running at 50MPH is not "the same type of train" as an electric train running at 200MPH. Using even nearly-identical rolling stock is not what defines the "train".

"They'll feel a slight bump during the Merced stop as a diesel locomotive is coupled to the front."

Well, that, plus the 30+ minute delay each way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Always thought streetsblog was a bit daft, but they've outdone themselves here.</comment>


Safer, smarter blockchain contracts with Pact - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/kadena-io/safer-smarter-contracts-with-pact-e86b9ccaca9f <comment><AUTHOR> What strikes me is how carefully they've thought about the problems with Ethereum, and other blockchain technologies. They deliberately make sure that Pact is NOT Turing complete, so they can avoid some of the hacks that took place with Ethereum. They emphasize a declarative style. And yet they also make it so the contracts can be fairly upgraded.

And they've also solved the bandwidth problems that technologies like Bitcoin were facing.

I knew nothing about these people, at all, I'd never even heard of them, till Sunday, when the CEO came to a party I was having at my place in NYC. But then I got interested, so I've been reading their blog posts. The more I read about them the more I think this might be the startup that's come up with the answers to some of the problems that other blockchain technologies were facing.</comment>


Import Holes as ho - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lordgrilo/Holes/issues/1#issuecomment-72352343

<comment><USER2> It's nice to see that kind of obvious issue to be just fixed. With just constructive ideas. Without any ignorance, sexism or grief against the requester.

If all software projects acted like this, our subculture might finally overcome its bad reputation among women.

BTW, as a non-native speaker I wasn't even aware that "ho" is any meaningful word. If I had coded the Holes library, I'd probably have made the same embarrassing mistake and, too, would be more than happy to be notified in an early project stage.

<comment><AUTHOR> > as a non-native speaker I wasn't even aware that "ho" is any meaningful word

same here, and for sure also the author of the library wasn't aware ;)</comment></comment>


If George Washington Were Alive, He'd be Reading Your Email - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/29/if_george_washington_were_alive_he_d_be_reading_your_email_founding_fathers_nsa

<comment><USER2> Doubt it. Writs of Assitance ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_assistance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_assistance)) were widely abused by the Crown in Colonial North America, no?

This is the worst kind of "Originalism".

How about we get away from what Madison may or may not have thought about a technology 200 years in the future, and look at what mass surveilance inevitably does, namely become an instrument of repression. At the very best, mass surveillance is going to become an instrument of stasis, maintaing the status quo in a war on the unexpected, but that's really the best we can hope for. Thank your lucky stars if you don't have _anything_ to hide (like a dissident religion or Arab ancestors or you didn't make it into CxO level position) because the rest of us are going to be in trouble.</comment>


Where is your startup located? - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupwarrior.com Startup Warrior visualizes startup hubs around the globe.  Are you in a large hub like NYC, Boston, or San Francisco, or in one of the many new and growing hubs?  Does this map match your expectations of where companies are? <comment><AUTHOR> Startup Warrior visualizes startup hubs around the globe. Are you in a large hub like NYC, Boston, or San Francisco, or in one of the many new and growing hubs? Does this map match your expectations of where companies are?

<comment><USER2> Well, I was disappointed to see how few startups there are in France and generally around Europe outside England. But happy to see AF83, as I am considering a job offer from them :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Whoa - there's a startup here in Portland, ME that I didn't even know about! I thought this town was dead... maybe I'll drop them a line!

</comment><comment><USER4> i love the idea.. interesting to see all those markers when the map loads. makes me feel special that I'm in Atlanta and there are only ~30 tech startups here.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see something like this with other axes represented somehow: number of employees, years in business, programming language, average employee age.

</comment><comment><USER6> A heatmap approach would've been better to depict the data I think. Or use different sized bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am glad to see that Vodafone, a public company with a market cap of around $1,500,000,000,000, are considered a startup (data courtesy of CrunchNotes).

Is the site very slow for other people? (I suspect this is the google maps element).

</comment><comment><USER8> It found one of my company's new subsidiaries, a very small branch of our existing work. Very nice Google Maps interface, which is the map "standard" I've become used to.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can only imagine how much more robust (and maybe unmanageable) this might be if it didn't rely solely on information from CrunchBase.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think my commute is about to get a lot shorter.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.crunchbase.com/maps> was released the other day.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that Startup Warrior has a better interface. Do you agree?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://startuphubs.com> \- This site gives you a graphical representation of Startup Hubs around the globe! It lets you easily locate all the major hubs where most of the startups are happening.</comment>


Ask HN: Why hasn't free software been able to compete with proprietary software? - <AUTHOR>

Geniuses like Richard Stallman have evangelized free software, arguing that it should be a basic human right, and often they argue that it is monetizable, but free software has largely failed in that regard.<p>Why has free software failed to be a commercial success? <comment><USER2> _Why has free software failed to be a commercial success?_

Your premise is flawed, and this entire question is nonsensical. F/OSS _has_ been able to compete with proprietary software, and - in many cases - has won. Just because it hasn't won _every_ segment doesn't mean that it's been a failure.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on your definition of success really. Linux beats the living snot out of windows in high performance computing and supercomputers. It also beats the snot out of windows in embedded and mobile / tablets because it is so much easier for manufacturers to adapt it for their own needs. What is your definition of success? Linux never tried hard enough with desktops I think. Canonical's Ubuntu is trying awful hard to make Linux desktops relevant (which is cool) but even they have mostly ceded that fight and are going after the more viable mobile.

Ever bought a smart tv like the Sony Bravia or basically any of the nice Samsung TVs? Linux as well. How about a home router? Many of those are Linux. I'll go out on a limb and say there are a lot more Linux devices than Windows total (primarily due to the plethora of embedded and mobile).

</comment><comment><USER4> Server software and programming languages have succeeded, but general desktop software has mostly failed.

I feel it's because the time and effort isn't put into actually making it user-friendly. Look at any apple product, for instance. It's so easy and intuitive and I don't need to play around with the command line to get something to work.

I use Linux and tons of open source software every day for running my business. I've tried to use pretty much every desktop version of Linux..but I always switch back to windows or mac. Why? It never feels finished to me. Random crashing, error messages that don't make sense, a horrible UI (that looks like a programming just threw it together with no thought).

There needs to be a movement of Open source UI and graphic designers.

</comment><comment><USER5> You're likely talking about desktop software and OS, because open-source and free dev platforms are successful. I myself, after being a .NET guru a couple of years now creating more and more stuff in PHP5 and node.js and I'm totally happy with them. But for OS yes, for average user those free ones really suck. I remember trying to setup XBMC on ZBox with Ubuntu - every single feature caused issues. To get proper sound I spent half of a day sitting with command line. After 2 days of fight, I gave up and installed Windows XP where I did not have to do anything - it just started working out f the box. So, for average user or for person that does not want to waste time with command line (like me) free OS is not an option. I need a complete product, not a DIY Lego parts.

</comment><comment><USER6> Free software was on the path to success, then SaaS and the internet and mobile computing exploded in popularity which revived proprietary platforms in spite of heavily/fundamentally exploiting free software.

</comment><comment><USER7> RedHat and a sizeable number of companies will disagree with you there. Open source is perfectly profitable and competitive.</comment>


100 Ways to Get More Done - <AUTHOR> http://regardingwork.com/2011/09/01/100-ways-to-get-more-done/ From having a focused, attaining flow, optimizing your work environment, plateau busting, using a task list and working on the right thing. A rich list of hacks. <comment><USER2> #1 should be stop reading articles like this and work</comment>


Girls can learn to code with the help of this new smart keychain - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/girls-can-learn-to-code-with-the-help-of-this-new-smart-keychain/ <comment><USER2> Cool point in the article:

"Palfi said users don't need to have to have a Charm to use the app, which is free. In addition, she said the company is working on hosting coding competitions where users can try and win a Charm. imagiLabs is also exploring working with companies to sponsor Charms for girls who might not be able to afford them."

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to admit, I was a bit under-whelmed to learn the 'smart keychain' is basically a few addressable LEDs. Haven't Arduino and ras-pi had stuff like this for ages? A quick google search turns up tons of ras-pi stuff for kids, that seems more interesting...

<comment><USER4> The form factor looks interesting. Is this device easy to use? Is it compatible with Arduino? (I guess no, but it would be a good idea.) Does it has any sensors/buttons?

We bought our daughter an Arduino kit when she was young, and she played with it for a while. It has a few sensors, like a photo resistor for light, buttons to press and IIRC a temperature sensor.

We bough in the local store a 7-segment display and other small stuff that was not included. She made a few small projects, for example sensing the illumination and showing the number in 7-segment display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK but why does this even exist. Why would girls need something that costs $80 when they can an Ardiuino for $10 and learn how to solder at the same time. This just seems like pointless sexism to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sexism.</comment>


Silicon Valley Startup Funding Map - <AUTHOR> http://fundmap.vc Is the startup scene actually moving to SF? I put together some actual (SEC) data on this. The answer is yes. But contrary to popular opinion, the startup scene in Palo Alto is not declining, it's just flat (measured by funding dollars). <comment><USER2> Very cool!</comment>


Show HN: Simple football league tables, both "classic" and "alternative" - <AUTHOR> http://footballtabl.es/ <comment><USER2> Nice work. I like this a lot.

From where do you get the data?

</comment><comment><USER3> Mobile version doesn't have ads. Great work, I'm bookmarking this :) Congrats on making it.

<comment><USER4> there is an ad.

<comment><USER3> Ah, just saw it. Great work regardless, let's give him that!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you validate your startup idea? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Before I even do any real-world validation I like to score my idea based on four criteria -

1\. how much time is needed to get this idea off the ground, 2\. how much money is needed to get this idea off the ground, 3\. how many new skills are needed to get this idea off the ground, 4\. How much will I still enjoy building this a year from now?

Sometimes an idea is just too big or ambitious at first and this helps me sanity check it.

After that I like to validate my idea - for that I need to learn if people are:

1\. interested in the idea 2\. willing to pay/use it

I always recommend keeping it simple, fast, and cheap - customer interviews, landing pages, mock ups, etc.

This example from buffer - [https://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying- customers-in-7-wee...](https://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers- in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it) has been around for a while but I still like to point it out as a good way to test a concept and see if people are willing to pay for it.

I'd love to hear what you are working on, I'm a business coach and do a lot of free coaching for new startups ping me if interested firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll tell you what not to do: spend $10-30,000 on letting a MVP company build and support your MVP for you. (Enterprise variant: spending $x00,000's on a proof-of-concept or "MVP" of some product without any consumer data or analytics backing it up.) Fool's errand. I haven't met a company that succeeded this way. (I never used such a company, but I've known one or two.)

MVPs should be "easy", dirt cheap and highly accessible. If shit breaks because too many people want in, then that might be an idea worth building on. If the app is too hard to build and isn't getting traction quickly, it might be too hard or the wrong thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would highly recommend getting a copy of the book Will It Fly by Pat Flynn. His method of building a market map will help to validate the idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> Setup a landing page and ask for money. If someone signs up, you are onto something. Try to get a few customers, preferably to offset your monthly costs and then start building. This only works on a smaller projects without physical costs.

I.e. I posted a website with a basic concept of what I could provide. After the first person signed up, I started building out the infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just create something for your personal benefit that doesn't yet exist. Something new or for a lower cost. Once you've built it, others are likely to find it useful as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I highly suggest reading "The Mom Test"</comment>


Ask HN: Do coding boot camps get people jobs/careers without a degree? - <AUTHOR> What if you didn't go to a boot camp and learned on your own? Would you still have a similar career as long as you're skilled? Is there something magical about a boot camp vs learning on your own? <comment><USER2> The only benefit I can see in comparison to self-learning is access to a human being that can answer most questions. Given most bootcamps' focus on specific stacks, I'd imagine they produce somewhat decent junior engineers (as long there's a stack match) but poor senior engineers.

The employability of certain stacks (Swift + iOS, Java + Android, Node) is very high at the moment, so immediate employment issues are likely well taken care of, but long-term career prospects are somewhat dubious - I mean, there's still market for stacks such as Visual Basic + SQL Server, or Perl, but it's not red-hot.

<comment><USER3> >but poor senior engineers

By the time the bootcamp junior reaches the senior level he/she would have already accumulated 5+ years of experience. That experience surely negates most benefits gained from a degree.

it's not like the bootcamp grad will still only know one specific stack by the time they reach senior. Any CS knowledge initially lacking should be acquired through experience and self-teaching by then..

<comment><USER2> > Any CS knowledge initially lacking should be acquired through experience and > self-teaching by then

Sure, but how many people involved in a day-to-day job of (let's say) supporting a Rails application in their spare time read up on (let's say) data structures, algorithm design, operating systems, game design, database management systems or functional programming?

In an ideal world everyone does this, in reality I found that professional experience is more conducive to growing as a specialist vs growing as a generalist - conversations with coworkers, dealing with bug reports, browsing StackOverflow and attending conferences are all centered around getting deeper, not broader.

<comment><USER4> I would say thats a fair criticism of any programmer though. Unless you are using data structures and algorithm design (etc.) on a relatively frequent basis at work, you aren't going to remember much of your CS degree 3-4 years down the road.

<comment><USER5> I was going to say the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suggest you take a look at groups like skillsfund. they audit boot camps and provide scholarships.

the risk in going to a bootcamp, is that most people who would like to go to a boot camp are very easy to take advantage of. career transition often means that you are not in a position to be diligent or picky in your selection. many boot camps will make claims like their average graduate make $x per year. You want to make sure that you understand what percentage of their students graduate, what percentage of their students get placed in the field, and how they actually gather their averages.

unless your boot camp offers placement, and has transparent means of gathering incomes , you are much more likely to make $(y < x) at your first company out of a boot camp. This should not necessarily be a deterrent, but should be kept in mind.

I have known graduates of boot camps to be exceptional developers, that will likely do very well in the field. Their biggest challenge is placing their first job.

others, who are likely without prior expirience, graduate with skills that are just below industry needs. those need to find companies that are interested in growing them actively, which is very difficult. if you can go into a program with at least some proof of knowledge , you will be far better off.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depending on the bootcamp, or school that you attend, it might come with some industry recognition. For example, if a company has had success with hires from hack reactor[1], 42[2], or Holberton[3], then they are generally more likely to hire grads from that bootcamp. If you are simply self educated, then you don't have the references for companies to go by.

[1] [http://www.hackreactor.com](http://www.hackreactor.com) [2] [https://www.42.us.org](https://www.42.us.org) [3] [https://www.holbertonschool.com](https://www.holbertonschool.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> The most successful bootcamp graduates that I know had previous experience, and attended the bootcamp as either a final step towards a career, or as a way to brush up on a new technology. Bootcamps are not designed to give you all the computer science training that is required to be successful in a tech career, it's just simply too short of a time to search such a wide breath of information. If you utilize bootcamps properly, they will yield great results.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a bootcamp graduate, I found that going to the bootcamp allowed me to learn in 2 months what would've otherwise taken me (at least) a year to learn by myself. I like to think I could have gotten a job self-learning, but I essentially paid my tuition to save myself (at least) 10 months of time. Worth every cent in that regard.

So yes, you could do it on your own, but I don't recommend it if you had the choice.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've interviewed a few people who have gone to coding bootcamps. Some of them have used it as spring board for learning more, some seem like they thought it would just land them a job. One in particular said he learned more in 2 coding bootcamps than throughout his entire CS degree.

They're just a tool, like a textbook or a tutorial website or anything else. Most of what you get out of them is what you put into them.

</comment><comment><USER10> We hired a couple guys from a code bootcamp after attending the camp's graduation / final project presentations. While I can't speak towards what effect it had on their overall skills, it clearly gave them great exposure.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone able to help a startup colo a couple gigabits *inside* China? - <AUTHOR>

I see occasional HN users posting from China, and thought this might be a more interesting place to ask than webhostingtalk.com.
We have a startup looking for somewhere to put about 1/2 rack of servers with 2 - 4 well peered gigabit links or a partial 10 GbE link.
If any entrepreneurs here have an idea on this, we'd love to work with you. Email me at my username via gmail. <comment><USER2> Sent you an email, Silent Partner should be able to help you out...

<comment><AUTHOR> Much obliged.</comment></comment>


Of "Bomb Clocks," Engineers and the $70M High School Football Stadium - <AUTHOR> http://frumped.org/2015/09/16/of-bomb-clocks-engineers-and-the-70-million-high-school-football-stadium/ <comment><USER2> In North Texas some (< 10%) of these large high school football stadiums generate positive revenue.

[http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/high-schools/football- news/...](http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/high-schools/football- news/headlines/20111117-special-report-an-inside-look-at-the-finances-behind- hs-football-in-the-dallas-area.ece)

<comment><USER3> How long does a net revenue of <$1M (and that's just the handful that report a profit at all, at least in your linked article - many are losing millions) take to pay off a $70M stadium? The expenses listed don't appear to include repayments on the stadium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well written and entertaining.

But also completely off target.

The reason football stadiums in Texas have to be fixed is the same reason that $6 Billion airports in Germany have to be fixed. It's not because engineers are hard to find.

And it's not because lowly school teachers are scared of funny looking suitcases with wires coming out of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a problem understanding his writing style, that's besides the point.

What he says is true, football is high school in the south...especially a place like Texas. Just goes to show the disparity in US education between states.</comment>