Build versus Buy - <AUTHOR> https://lethain.com/build-vs-buy/ <comment><USER2> My preference in these situations is always to start with buy, and then try to justify build. Unless it's a core competency to your own business, which it almost always isn't, it makes sense to let someone else do it better.

Their profit margin is usually in their efficiency in doing it better than you, and at the same time you get the benefit of all the features they add for other customers.

Oftentimes the decision to build usually came down to the difficulty in integration of a commercial product, not the cost. In most cases the cost is set to be competitive against building yourself.

Except in the case of Splunk. Their pricing is ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> > _Except in the case of Splunk. Their pricing is ridiculous._

Their pricing is ridiculous and what is even stranger is that with the ELK stack there is a good and free alternative. Now Splunk is good, no doubt, but I still wonder how they can be that successful with that pricing.

<comment><USER4> We ran the largest elastic search cluster on the west coast some number of years ago. If you are small enough, elastic search can go a long way. Our data teams and operations folks celebrated the day that that system was turned off. Elastic search does not even hold a candle to the way we leverage splunk at our org, but that could be because we are bigger than some and deal with scale that few others deal with. Splunk costs us a fortune but enables amazing data analysis. It is easily our most expensive service we pay for and worth it. It would be great for our bottom line if it were cheaper, but they can charge what they do because the do it so well.

<comment><USER5> Can you give us a sense of scale and what issues you faced by elastic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the core of the whole debate, in my experience:

"When it comes to build versus buy, the frequently repeated but rarely followed wisdom is good advice: if you're a technology company, vendors usually generate significant value if they're outside your company's core competency; within your core competency, they generally slow you down."

Every startup I've ever worked with has had engineers who advocated "build" for tooling that fell both outside the eng team's workflow and our company's core competencies.

I think part of it is that things like marketing automation or customer support software—things that are vital for most teams past a certain scale—don't seem technically "hard" enough to justify the price-tags, particularly to engineers who've been isolated from other parts of the business.

Without fail, every time I've been part of a team building an internal tool that we/another engineering team won't use, it goes poorly. I've spent way too long learning about the ins and outs of email deliverability so that I could fix a bug in a hacky email platform, when we could have just bought a platform that works.

<comment><USER7> > I think part of it is that things like marketing automation or customer > support software, don't seem technically "hard" enough to justify the price- > tags

As someone who's built far too many of those because "Buying is just too expensive" ... good god do I never want to do that ever again. Ever. It's so fucking hard. You _will_ shoot yourself in the foot. You _will_ suffer. And 3 years later you still won't have something half as good as the purpose-built SaaS.

If you do that and enjoy it, just spin it off into its own product. Who knows, you might even get more customers with more expensive problems than the original startup.

<comment><USER8> This only makes sense if you have a significant equity stake in the company you're working for. For the vast majority of engineers, they really don't care about the long-term profitability/success of whatever company they're working for. They just want to get paid, and hopefully grow as a dev in the process.

They'll learn more by building something in-house than by bringing in a saas and just writing glue for a living. If you want your engineers to make the decisions a founder would make, give them a significant equity stake.

<comment><USER7> It depends. Significant stake helps of course and despite that, I'd prefer solving problems that need solving than spending a bunch of time on problems that don't :)

There's a balance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "If it's a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what."

— Joel Spolsky, _In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome_ : [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of- not-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented- here-syndrome/)

<comment><USER10> I've worked at Not-Invented-Here shops and it was annoying that the Powers That Be didn't want to use a COTS solution. As much fun as it would be to reinvent DynamoDB, that's not actually going to help our business.

However, even more annoying is working at a Never-Invented-Here organization. I've been at a place which hired brilliant people, but then didn't let them innovate on pretty much anything. Write a simple TCP listener in Python to read a stream of data and then reply to it? That's crazy talk! We need to write a full Django app and deploy it behind Nginx behind a load balancer so that we can pretend it's highly available!

Don't get me wrong: the off the shelf approach is _usually_ the right thing, but sometimes it just adds complication where it didn't need to be. It's insulting to be told you were hired for your expertise, but then not be allowed to actually use it.

<comment><USER11> "Write a simple TCP listener in Python to read a stream of data and then reply to it? That's crazy talk!"

This has infected my company quite a bit. People get really nervous as soon as you write something that's little novel. Writing everything from scratch is bad but you also need room for people to innovate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's good to buy something if you can use it immediately without much customization. If you have to do a lot of customization it's not that clear. For example we have bought a system that requires extensive customization and a lot of people are starting to wonder if the total effort of building from scratch that does wha we need and not more would have been less than the never ending customizations of a system that can do way more than we need.

There is also the question of brain drain. The IT department in my company has outsourced a lot of the tech work to the point that there aren't many people left who are capable of making informed purchasing decisions. They mostly read sales presentations, white papers and Gardner reports but they have no ability to really assess things. This shows in them repeatedly buying expensive systems that never get really used.

<comment><USER12> Would these decision makers have produced better outcomes if they were managing software teams?

<comment><USER11> I think they would produce better outcomes if they understood or used the the systems they are buying or at least listened to actual users. I bet healthcare.gov would have gone better if some high level people had actually have tried to sign up for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who helps software vendors overhaul their messaging to attract and convert buyers, I've noticed the following things about the "build vs buy" dilemma (or, from the vendor's point of view: the "build vs buy" objection):

\- More senior buyers (CTOs, VPs) are less likely to pit the vendor against a DIY option. I suspect it's because they've been through too many failed DIY projects, or they have great clarity on what is and isn't a good use of their people's time, or they are better at estimating the (usually huge) amount of effort that would go into DIY.

\- As the OP points out, a company with huge engineering resources is more likely to consider the DIY option, because, hey, they have all these engineers that need something to do. So if you're a software vendor and are tired of the "build vs buy" conversation, stop trying to sell to other software vendors or VC-backed tech companies.

\- If someone chooses the DIY route, just set a calendar reminder to check in two months from now. Chances are they'll be underwhelmed with their progress, and an out-of-the-box solution might sound pretty good by then. (Don't assume they'd reach out on their own in that scenario--they've probably spoken with dozens of other vendors since your last conversation, and forgot about you.)

===

Separately, the part about vendor management is gold:

> To get the full value from vendors, you have to invest in managing vendors > well.

I've spent _so_ much time helping evaluate and implement different vendors (usually marketing platforms and similar), only to find out three months later that the software barely gets used.

On the flip side, if you're a software vendor, don't wait until renewal periods to check in on your customers and make sure they're getting the maximum value from your product.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised "pricing transparency" isn't included here. A vender that requires you to call a salesperson and do the sort of negotiation on price that is mentioned here is always going to take advantage of you.

My policy is: no pricing on the website, requirement to call a salesperson to talk price? No buy. I'm even willing to pay more to a company with transparent pricing that doesn't require negotiation. It gives me predictability, rather than have to worry that once they've "locked me in" they're going to jack the price and crank all the gears.

<comment><USER15> If the product fits the bill, giving them a call is no big deal. But they best be flexible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tangent:

We had the same issue with splunk. We were blowing through our licenses like a champ.

However the thing that managed to reduce our dependency on splunk wasnt ELK or greylog (they are all poor comparisons to splunk in terms of speed or chopping and changing data) it was grafana(with cloudwatch and graphite, later promethius)

What we realised was that the primary way we were consuming splunk was in graphs. Why spend millions of pounds on generating graphs indirectly, when we could make them directly, in near real time!

Not Tangent:

I think like platform choice, it depends on your company. The company that I was with was utterly incompetent, and unable to see a project through to completion. Therefore if we build a logging system inhouse, we'd get 40% of the way there and rebuild it. Leaving two incomplete systems.

Migrating to splunk cloud was done to save costs, and it actually worked. Had we tried to go inhouse, we'd still have expensive local splunk _and_ a shitty splunk replacement used by two team on a legacy critical system with no dev hours.

</comment><comment><USER17> Article felt more like "not buy", not "build vs buy".

I just spent an afternoon helping someone to get us to run on-prem. Phone calls! Installs! Vendor management! We didn't even setup TLS b/c gov stuff is complicated! Working with vendor software is so painful!

Except they were originally thinking they'd have to build what we've spent years not only building, but building as GPU / data / etc. specialists, and we've already adopted many best practices for stuff like TLS and navigated other gov systems for them. (It can still be way better, but imagine if you had _none_ of that stuff, and then had to support it!). Even ignore how we're special -- GPUs are magical if you use them right -- just that we have basic stuff built in and with on-going support. That's so key and adds up over the years. We do it for our graph investigation niche, but same deal for almost everything.

As software has matured, and I see more and more orgs dealing with the reality that they're not Google nor Stripe with thousands of the best-paid software engineers, I'm convinced articles should be explaining from the default of "not build".

<comment><USER18> In my less charitable moods, I'm inclined to say that you're unlikely to find a whole lot of software developers saying you should build less software for the same reason I've never met a real estate agent who's really on board with my desire to stick to a more modest living situation.

Besides, building in house is inherently more fun. What would you rather do, write new software, or pore over manuals for software that someone else wrote? For my part, there's a reason I became a programmer and not a tech writer.

<comment><USER17> Yep! I find that working with management involves planning through outcomes and general resourcing, while working with developers and engineering managers involves planning through the cooler stuff they get to do. ("Instead of reimplmenting some JavaScript UI and Python backend thing for the nth+1 time, we'll zip ahead to the GPU era and focus more time on the data engineering and data science and visual analytics side...")

Folks don't get recognized as heroes for not doing anything, but when they drive the greater story, everyone wins. Understanding the individuals involved in successful software delivery is so important!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm super surprised to see this article not mention the phrase "opportunity cost".

That's what someone pays to save with something like Splunk. Pay cash to make SWEs more effective towards solving the problems that make up the business's value prop. Cash is much easier to get than the opportunity to grow the business with the people already there. That time never comes back.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is it really buy? Or is it "rent"?

I'm guessing for most people, it's actually "rent".

<comment><USER21> My assumption when reading it was that buy means both rent and purchase licenses/hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To me the primary thing that matters is how strategic the software is to your core business. This may sound like just evaluating whether it's your core business or not, but it's a nuance on that which is important.

It's easiest described by an example: we use open source Gitlab extensively. Numerous times it has been proposed that we migrate to $expensive alternative because they all have advanced functionality that we don't get from Gitlab (in many cases, even the enterprise version). Yet we are sticking with Gitlab, and making extensive customisations (mostly using the API) and workflows adapted to it.

Is our core business developing software for CI/CD/Issue tracking/source code management? Absolutely not. But is that _critical to us_? Absolutely. Because Gitlab is open source and because it has an extensive API, we can eek out efficiencies all over the place that aren't possible with closed source software.

So I think it's really important that people use the right frame of mind when evaluating "core business" or not. You don't have to be in the business of a selling particular type of software for it to be worth doing "in-house". You _do_ have to be _good at it_ though.

</comment><comment><USER23> When you are looking at paying for an expiring license or SaaS product, it is build versus Rent. And one cost of renting a product is that your vendor's business may change. Perhaps they get bought by Apple and the product is shut down, or maybe they just decide to go in a different direction. Or they raise their prices. Or the service isn't as good as you thought it was going to be. If you have done a lot of integration work (either in software or organizationally) you are either locked in or all that work is wasted.

This is addressed in the article as "risk".

The best way to balance this is to prefer buying/renting Open Source software. That way, if your vendor changes direction, or their service level drops unacceptably, you can choose a new vendor without losing your integrations. Or even switch to a self-supported model.

And any improvements you need, you can contribute to the project so that others can take advantage of them and share the maintenance burden.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice article. I had published my thoughts from a CTOs perspectives on this topic a while ago. Maybe it's a good addition to your article for anyone:

[https://blog.photoeditorsdk.com/build-or- buy-f09785ce1138](https://blog.photoeditorsdk.com/build-or-buy-f09785ce1138)

</comment><comment><USER25> Personally, I (as a software engineer who loves to write software) would advocate buy anywhere and everywhere you can. Even your core business. In my personal experience it's rarely code that's giving you an advantage, it's more likely to be your data, your connections, your efficiency, etc.

Also, try to use the product as off-the-shelf as possible. Little or no customisation. If people in your business are unable to work with a product without customisation consider firing them and replacing them with people who can before you get involved in customisations.

For me the dominating factor here is human resource pool. For whatever we build there are no experts on the system except the ones who already work for us. So aside from all the build, maintenance, etc. costs associated with build, I also can't find any employees on the market who are experts or even competent in the software.

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing overlooked here (or not explicitly called out) is talent pool. My last boss didn't want to use anything that he couldn't plug into Dice Or Similar and get dozens of hits for.

If it's not part of your core business/core competency, and you're just reinventing the wheel so you don't have to pay a vendor, you have to weigh against the cost of the off-the-shelf solution NOT just the cost of developing it yourself, but developing it, maintaining it, documenting it, replacing your "irreplaceable engineer" when s/he quits, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> The debate as old as tech.

Sometimes, you don't get a choice. In most large enterprises, it is almost a given that you're going to buy instead of build, and that thing you bought better come with enterprise support.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think it's all about focus. There is a limit to how many goals/projects you can focus on at once. Every new thing you build distracts your focus. You should minimize what you build in-house to just the things that make you unique. I like Unsplash' blogpost about this: [https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small- te...](https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small-team- fbdd55571906)

</comment><comment><USER28> One thing that's commonly overlooked is the risk/vendor lock in associated with building things in-house. Sure external vendors sometimes raise prices or shutdown their product. Those events are pretty rare though and you can typically move to a competing solution. The real risk is building in-house and having the people that create the in-house solution leaving.

<comment><USER29> > raise prices

Many SaaS have 10x'd their prices over the last few years and it is a significant risk for any tool that you are "renting".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess the real question is how to correctly distinguish between a commodity vs a potential lock-in. For example, if you stick EC, S3 and SES, it feels more like a commodity. However, with more services in the basket you will probably end up in a lock-in situation and your company will hardly survive if e.g. your AWS account gets suspended.

</comment><comment><USER30> "A company that does this extraordinarily well is Amazon, who issue their vendors quarterly report cards grading their performance against the contract and expectations. Getting great results from vendors requires managing them. If you neglect them and get bad results, that's on you."

\- Gives JIRA a report card on them as a vendor to your business.

\- Is largely ignored because my business is not Amazon scale with all the power that holds.

tldr; this only really works if you're one of the whales for a vendor.

</comment><comment><USER31> You have an idea, you think it is a good idea based on your early validation.

You start the basic design of how it should work, maybe even based on that early feedback.

If you have no money, and you can build stuff, it doesn't matter if buying is the best advice.

Should you build or should you buy?

Neither. You should survive.

</comment><comment><USER32> When your core existence depends on being the only people able to do a thing, being able to do it with off-the-shelf product begs questions which go to the axium of you being the only people able to do it.

If you understand the role, this doesn't have to be a problem. Hence registry/registrar/delegate separation: the registry is not the delegate. the registrar is not the delegate, and has to meet the demands of systems boundaries implemented by the registry. The delegate has no software limitation and no need to own software because its a role divorced from software. Anything can be out or in source.

Or the CA/RA functional divide in a PKI. Better not to be an amateur implementing crypto, buy off the shelf because your role is to adjudicate what happens, not write systems.

</comment><comment><USER33> Build, buy, and engage if it's part of a larger project that involves any innovation. Engagement falls under "vendor management," but that seems like a very reduced description.

</comment><comment><USER34> You are fundamentally buying your time, so buy as much as you can and stay focused on your own business?</comment>


Priceline is buying OpenTable for 2.6 billion - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/06/13/priceline-is-buying-opentable-for-2-6-billion/

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this amusing after spending yesterday discussing Resy. This merger sounds like the opposite service. Bizarro Resy!</comment>


Why C++ Member Function Pointers Are 16 Bytes Wide (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://741mhz.com/wide-pointers/

<comment><USER2> Summary: the cost of multiple inheritance.

Things get quite a bit more interesting when you have virtual inheritance in the mix. The most expensive call in C++ is a call through a member function pointer that points to a virtual member function declared in a virtual base class. The full assembly of such a call can be seen here on Godbolt:

[http://goo.gl/wql5Db](http://goo.gl/wql5Db)

Here vtable slot 1 and an adjustment of 16 bytes (Derived -> BaseV) is returned, but the virtual call could (if not derived further) actually end up calling the thunk, which does a secondary adjustment (BaseV -> the Base2 in Derived), using an offset from Deriveds vtable, before finally jumping to the actual target.</comment>


Macropy: Syntactic Macros for Python - <AUTHOR> https://macropy3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ <comment><USER2> Macropy transforms Python's AST. So it doesn't allow anything that Python can't parse.

I spent some time earlier this year looking at tapping into the Python compilation process before the AST is generated, in order to allow statements that are not legal Python syntax.

It's definitely possible using the `tokenize` module, but doing it right was turning into more work than the quick hack I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author here, funny to see this up here again after so many years. Happy to answer questions

<comment><USER4> I don't know much about macros and it revived my interest for this topic, thanks. I wonder if it could be used to embed SQL statements directly in Python code? (not sure it would be a good idea, but it would make for an interesting experiment maybe).

<comment><USER3> As implemented, we do not change the superficial python syntax. That has a number of advantages around compatibility, but it means embedding raw SQL outside string literals isn't possible. We could do things like validating/transforming SQL strings at compile time, like what we do with string interpolators or pyxl strings

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Other than `@case`, are there other examples of macropy macros?? @case means nothing to me.

<comment><USER3> The page has links to a dozen different examples, with code snippets and discussion of the motivations and potential use cases for each

<comment><USER6> Totally off topic, but I was wondering if you have looked at Coconut, a kind of ML Lite that compiles to Python? And if so, what do you think?

[http://coconut-lang.org/](http://coconut-lang.org/)

Are you still mainly programming in Scala? Do you see yourself programming in your current language in 5 years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. Was this inspired by Hy?

<comment><USER3> Pretty sure we MacroPy predates Hy by about a year

<comment><USER8> Not unless there was an older repo that is now gone:

[https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy/graphs/contributors)

[https://github.com/hylang/hy/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/hylang/hy/graphs/contributors)

It looks like macropy started around 6 months after Hy, around a time when Hy had multiple contributors going.

Perhaps Hy hadn't really been heard about yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome extension replaces baby pictures with awesome stuff. - <AUTHOR> http://www.unbaby.me/

<comment><USER2> Kids are awesome stuff.</comment>


How I gained access to TMobile's national network for free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jacobajit/how-i-gained-access-to-tmobiles-national-network-for-free-f9aaf9273dea#.ue45dffzz <comment><USER2> tl;dr: TMobile's prepaid cards, once their quota expired, go to a captive portal but whitelists URLs with speedtest/ in their paths, to allow people to test connection speed. The guy made a proxy with "speedtest/" in the URL.</comment>


Royal Navy submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/24/hms_trenchant_bbq_brouhaha/ <comment><AUTHOR> As a Reg commenter points out, having been sealed up together in the confines of a submarine for nine months, these sailors are to all intents and purposes members of the same household - so perfectly entitled to associate freely and without distancing.</comment>


Australia Burns Again, and Now Its Biggest City Is Choking - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/world/australia/sydney-fires.html <comment><USER2> It's bad. I've lived in Sydney 21 years and there's been nothing like this before. We were on the harbour this summer afternoon staring directly at the sun at 5pm - it was a barely visible red dot in the smoke haze - and ash was raining down on us.

The current drought is so tough on December 10 Sydney starts Level 2 water restrictions for all residents and businesses.

There's an increasing sense among my friends of all political persuasions that we're heading into this future faster than anyone anticipated - and that our government is asleep at the wheel.

<comment><USER3> > and that our government is asleep at the wheel

No, they are deliberately misleading the public while attempting to shore up as much capital as possible for themselves, before the real crisis actually happens. It just so happens that more people are starting to catch on to their bullshit.

Don't make the mistake of thinking Morrison et al are incompetent. They are highly accomplished politicians who know exactly what to say and do to keep their jobs, and so far it is working.

<comment><USER4> Morrison won the election in a direct democracy with mandatory voting. Recently they increased their approval in the latest poll.

Countries get the leaders they deserve.

<comment><USER5> Australia is not a direct democracy, it's a representative democracy. The only element of direct democracy we have are constitutional referendums.

<comment><USER4> Semi-direct, yes. But at some point majority of the people have elected him? And still approve of him. Anything else are excuses. fwiw, I didn't vote for him and am equally disappointed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stop replanting eucalyptus trees. They are highly flammable and don't biodegrade, and instead litter the ground with kindling in the form of oil- rich non-roting leaves.

People have to find a balance between climate solutions and retaining biodiversity. Looking at Australia, and California, where Eucalyptus trees were introduced a common thread behind these massive bush fires is these highly flammable trees.

It's unknown why eucalypts thrive and promote bush fires, but the evidence is there.

We should be planting high growth European deciduous trees that have strong roots and give back to the soil.

Instead, environmentalists take a hardline "only native plants" view. In the coming years, if Australia is going to combat this we're going to have to rethink our love of Eucalypts and start looking at less bushfire promoting plants.

<comment><USER5> Eucalypts are native to Australia (and most forests are full of naturally- occurring Eucalyptus), and evolved to not only survive bushfires but also replentish themselves as a result of bushfires. That's almost certainly why they promote and thrive in bushfires -- it's part of their lifecycle. There is plenty of other Australian fauna which depends on bushfires for reproduction.

But to your main point -- Australia has had eucalypts for tens of millions of years. It seems unlikely that eucalyptus is the cause of these extreme and very unusual bushfires. It's much more likely that the recent drought, reduced forest management, and similar factors are at play.

Environmentalists are right to be concerned about introduction of non-native species. The entire history of European colonisation in Australia has proven categorically that introduced species almost always cause unforseen and irreparable damage to the local ecosystem. For God's sake, we built _three_ fences in the middle of the outback to try to stop rabbits from spreading. This is something that is so well known and simple that you learn about in primary school history classes.

But I do agree that California should probably stop planting non-local fauna in large numbers. Australia's biosphere has evolved with bushfires for millions of years, and California's has not.

<comment><USER4> Eucalyptus also evolved to be more flammable due to human intervention and they are spreading faster than other native trees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Smaller scale effects are visible way further than mentioned in the article. With the wind blowing just the right direction, my town 600km away from Sydney (and over 700km from the fires at the time) experienced a haze over two days. Not a dense/coloured one, but the sky still disappeared and there was the "it's bright from every direction" feeling during the day.

<comment><USER8> See this article, New Zealand's Glaciers have turned red from the fires: [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/05/australia/australia- bushf...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/05/australia/australia-bushfires- new-zealand-glaciers-scn-scli-intl/index.html)</comment></comment>


Google Home is playing audio ads for Beauty and the Beast - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/3/16/14948696/google-home-assistant-advertising-beauty-and-the-beast <comment><USER2> I don't get why this haven't made it to the main page.

This device is starting to look like free tv Chanel's in the USA, constantly interrupted by ads. This is freaky.</comment>


Show HN: Online design feedback tool - <AUTHOR> https://visualtip.com/?hn <comment><AUTHOR> This is how a feedback page looks like: [https://visualtip.com/3c5090a169f6b9e955d3b57b9401497b](https://visualtip.com/3c5090a169f6b9e955d3b57b9401497b)

<comment><USER2> "Browser not Supported" with the latest Chromium version.

And then an insulting "Try a modern, up to date browser".

You should not discriminate by user agent. Do feature detection instead:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=user+agent+vs+feature+detection&t=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=user+agent+vs+feature+detection&t=h_&ia=web)

<comment><AUTHOR> I will look into that. In the meantime I think now it should work.

<comment><USER2> Yup, it lets me in now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The world of UX has grown to use and love InVision over the past few years — [https://www.invisionapp.com/](https://www.invisionapp.com/) — an app that allows the same visual feedback, with far more powerful features.

Have you given it a try before, @jkeat? They tend to market themselves to designers first and foremost.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not aimed to become an Invision competitor. There are however people for which Invision is too much and only need a simple way to share and collect a quick feedback one something they've been working on.

<comment><USER4> Agreed Invision can be way too feature rich. Redpen ([https://redpen.io/](https://redpen.io/)) does an amazing job of filling that void. They boast tens of thousands of paying users, how are you planning to market based on Invision and Redpen as incumbents?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now there is this Show HN submission :D If you have any suggestions about how I should approach this I would love to hear them.

<comment><USER5> Verticalise (I know, I know, give me sh*t for creating jargon...).

Don't go after the generalist approach, focus on a niche where UX or design thinking is a growing area, own the marketing for it, and then you can move to another niche. Perhaps aim at social media agencies looking for creative approval from their clients etc, own a smaller market and grow out from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> the popup modals nearly made me instantly close it. I don't want to fill in any information till I know what I'm dealing with ( even if it has a skip button ). Just kind of feels rude.

<comment><USER6> oh, but the actual visual review looks cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. the usecase is that you would receive this link from your designer / client - that is why your name is relevant...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > During the private beta period we will only support the Google Chrome > browser. Rest assured however, we will open support for other browsers in a > couple of weeks.

Come on, Opera 46 is the same as latest Chrome. Fix your UA detection to be feature based not UA name based.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it should have worked. I will look into it. Thanks for bringing that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lame, on Chromium 59, it says "Browser not Supported You're using an web browser we don't support. Try a modern, up to date browser".

No thanks, I like open-source.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. It should work fine now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The demo looks messy and gave me the idea that the tool itself will get messy if I'm part of a team. It's cool it's collaborative but what else? Would suggest to improve how you demo the tool.

Personally, I liked how the tool solves the problem and the simple design.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting solution, 1\. How do you plan to work out with others providing the same solution ? (InVision, RedPen, etc) 2\. Suggestion: Allow visitors to experiment quickly to know what tool does, ask for signup later (when user tries to leave)

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of the now-defunct design feedback site ocean.ink: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ocean](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ocean)

</comment><comment><USER12> looks nice :D.</comment>


Amber Smalltalk 0.10 released - <AUTHOR> http://amber-lang.net/

<comment><USER2> Totally awesome!

Some time ago there was a Smalltalk for Java announced - I wasn't particularly thrilled, because I have nothing to do with Java. This time, however, I'm more than excited - I'm starting to play with Amber right now!

EDIT: this is getting better with every page I read. It's compiled to JS, so I expect it to be fast. It supports seamless integration with JS libraries - it's IDE is written in Amber but with jQuery. It's class library is simplified, but based on Pharo. It has a Canvas implementation - and I don't mean <canvas>, but a HTMLCanvas known from Seaside. It's a live, interactive, clean Smalltalk environment in a browser.

My life just got a bit better and more enjoyable :)

<comment><USER3> A sentence I never though I'd see 10 (or even 5) years ago: "It's compiled to JS, so I expect it to be fast."

<comment><USER2> Haha :) I was thinking "fast in comparison with a Smalltalk virtual machine implemented in JS" - but you're right in that JS got ridiculously fast compared to how it was a few years back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some example code snippets on the front page couldn't hurt, and please, please have a downloadable ebook or pdf of your documentation, so I can sit back with my tablet / e-reader in non-connected situations. Doing a little bit of targeting to iOS developers given Objective-C's ancestry couldn't hurt.

[edit: Objective-C is a decedent of Smalltalk - I was emphasizing the connection to be able to draw Objective-C programmers to its roots]

<comment><USER2> > given Objective-C's ancestry

Wait, what? You mean that Smalltalk is a descendant of Obj-C? That's... interesting... [EDIT: ok, I misread the parent statement, my bad.]

> Some example code snippets on the front page couldn't hurt

You have a whole system source right there before your eyes. Click on "try in browser" button, then select a package in the left-most pane, then a class name in second pane and then method name in rightmost pane. Voila, what you're reading now is a Smalltalk source for this method.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe, and hope, he meant the opposite :)

<comment><USER4> Yes, I meant the opposite and looking at it am not real sure how someone would turn that around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That is very cool. I played with Amber a few years ago and it seems like the in-browser experience is better.

Off topic, but I just had some pain moving a small example Ember.js app to the most recent 1.0rc1, with lots of pain. I have to at least consider that Amber might be good for writing a fat browser client.</comment>


An equation for happiness - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@h_liyan/an-equation-for-happiness-71f5b9a22836 <comment><USER2> There's also other things that tie into this like knowing what to want. Many people will find that most of the things they think they want do not bring them happiness once they have them. They had some work left to do on solving for the denominator as well</comment>


Benedictus XVI - <AUTHOR> http://www.vatican.va/bxvi/omaggio/index_en.html <comment><USER2> The use of Comic Sans really makes the tribute look like an amateur's first try at a home-made photo book. It's already featured on <http://bancomicsans.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the use of Comic Sans is actually one of the lesser crimes on that site.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the nonstandard link structure (page numbers for navigation, with no ability to use a URL for a link to a specific page) is at least as bad a crime against Web standards as the Comic Sans font on the site. And the copy (text) on the site reads like a Sunday school lesson for little children much more than like a communication for adults about the leader of a multinational organization.

<comment><USER5> Move your cursor to the edges of the book for easier page turning, not very obvious but it is there. At first the page numbering at the bottom threw me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >99.9% of people see comic sans as a nice-looking, casual font.

<0.1% of people hate it and feel better about themselves for that.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Most internet folks fail to realize that the average joe doesn't, in fact, care the slightest about design, as long as the object in question does the job.

<comment><USER8> The average Joe doesn't know he cares about design. Sure, with comic sans, he'll think nothing of it.

However, Comic Sans is totally overused. Anyone can appreciate that a unique (or "solemn") font will make this piece stand out for the better. I'd love to see some A/B testing here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like it's been changed to Times New Roman already

edit: Or actually I guess I don't have comic sans on my system

<comment><USER10> You mean you have the good taste to not actually have Comic Sans on your system. That, my good sire, is something to be proud of. :)

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure OS X or Android (4.2.2 in my case) doesn't include Comic Sans? Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER10> If so, I wonder how it got on my system. I can't remember myself ever voluntarily installing Comic Sans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a Vatican site I found it to be actually quite constrained and subdued.

What "hip" designers don't get is something very simple: Modernism is Protestant, Baroque is Catholic.

Do you want simplicity, cleanness and functionality? Go look for Bauhaus, Ikea and industrial revolution in Northern Europe. Catholicism belongs to another world. It belongs to the aesthetics of excess, over decoration, big European cathedrals, ostentation, Michelangelo and Handel. In case of doubt look at the pictures on that site: gold, purples, reds, churches full of Carrara marble. Like Hindus and Muslims, Catholics preach humbleness but what they find beautiful is actually excess and ostentation.

There is a reason why Italy succeeds on luxury goods (Armani, Ferrari, Murano crystals, etc): they know that bling sparkles and that sparkles fascinate people.

<comment><USER13> <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vatican_latin_atm.jpg>

Their atms apparently use the same or a similar font.

And have latin as a language option.

So yeah, a self-conscious attempt at maintaining brand identity through pre- industrial skeuomorphic design or the priest in charge of the committee that decides what fonts to use is a 90 year old man who just thinks it looks nice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone in the Vatican's technology team is either very stupid or very, very smart.

I'm coming to wonder if Comic Sans might actually be a valuable tool of propaganda in the hands of a group beset by controversy. It helps endear you to a beleaguered base while distracting your opposition: classic plain-folks and derailing tactics in one neat package. As a bonus, bickering over the choice of a font makes the opposition look ridiculous, which poisons the well against them just a little bit more when they stop being distracted, AND gets them to do all of this work for you.

A part of me likes making up conspiracy theories for fun. Maybe this is just that part of me talking. But it's still fun, and I wonder how feasible it would really be to use Comic Sans this way.

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one who thinks that a world-wide presence like the Vatican needs a new website?...

<comment><USER15> I agree that it needs some work now, but I think it was pretty good for the time when it first came out: [http://web.archive.org/web/19980130005011/http://www.vatican...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980130005011/http://www.vatican.va/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> First observations? Lots of photos of babies & kids. Looks almost like a political campaign scrapbook.

Wondering if the use of sans was meant to similarly imply some sort of warmth. The conversational tone of the text, the babies, the font choice. The very idea of having an interactive photo book in the first place. I mean...I can understand people finding it a bit ridiculous. In fact, I self-identify as Catholic and I find myself chuckling, but at least every part of this site feels like a choice.

Oh, also? Looks like there is some sort of catholic analytics service run out of Vatican City? <http://analytics.catholica.va/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Let's all give up Comic Sans for Lent.

<comment><USER18> You're supposed to make it a sacrifice; something difficult.

Give up everything _except_ Comic Sans for Lent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> God recommends using Comic Sans. Both the discovery of the "God particle" and the tribute to his official spokesman are published in it. Do not ignore this and use it for everything from now on!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised given the background that they didn't go with papyrus.

<comment><USER20> They did, check out the watermarks on every image haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Also note that all the watermarks on the images are papyrus

</comment><comment><USER21> "Grace, lavished upon us by God and communicated through the Mystery of Comic Sans, is an absolutely free gift with which nature is healed"

</comment><comment><USER22> Not loading here</comment>


Lawyer attacking The Oatmeal shocked by big mean Internet's reaction - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/lawyer-attacking-the-oatmeal-shocked-by-big-mean-internets-reaction/ <comment><USER2> _Lawyer attacking The Oatmeal shocked by big mean Internet's reaction_

The reaction of the lawyer is understandable, it being the sole prerogative of lawyers to bully hapless victims into submission and, if not bully, at least to trick and cajole them into giving them what they want and, if not that, _in extremis_ , to get a true day in court for their client in which the victim can finally speak up, and might even win, but then the client on whose behalf the bullying is done pays in spades for the privilege of financing a futile process in which everyone loses except, of course, the lawyers who invented a system dating back at least to _Jarndyce v. Jarndyce_ (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarndyce_and_Jarndyce>) for the betterment of society and only incidentally for those who might take a modest profit from their humble efforts in the service of humanity.

<comment><USER3> Holy hell, that was one sentence.

<comment><USER4> Try German, I hear sentences can go on for pages and pages.

<comment><USER5> It's Bloomsday on Saturday - the last two sentences in _Ulysses_ are 11,282 and 12,931 words long, respectively.

<comment><USER3> That's only because there's no punctuation. The sentences end, sort of, but the full stops have been omitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh Jesus. The dumbass is trying to get IndieGoGo to shut down the fundraiser for a supposed TOS violation. I can't imagine what world you live on where, after the reaction that he's gotten from the legal threats, going after a $100k charity fundraiser seems like a good course of action.

<comment><USER7> Lawyers bill by the hour and by the action (eg writing a letter). How exactly does the lawyer lose out?

<comment><USER8> Is the fundraiser a billable event to FunnyJunk? If I were FunnyJunk's accounts receivables department, I would not want to be paying for him going after something that isn't involved my case. The fundraiser is just a spite, it isn't tortuous towards FunnyJunk.

<comment><USER9> I guess you mean tortious (wrongful) rather than tortuous (winding, full of obstacles).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This lawsuit may be the first piece of original comedy to have been produced by funnyjunk.

</comment><comment><USER11> While in some senses it's pretty clear, in other's it's a tough one . I'm not wild about mob rule (which this is getting elements of) but I'm not wild about law suits by arseholes who in a reasonable world shouldn't have a leg to stand on, and a legal system which will drown Inman in red tape and legal bills.

The best course of action is probably for funny junk to get try and wring some minor concession out of Inman (that he'll inform them of any issues directly before publishing them on his website or something similarly trivial) and drop the whole thing.

Right now they've got some publicity and the cost of some of their (basically crappy) reputation. I don't think it gets any better for them from her so they'd be wise to cut and run. Whatever they may win if they did continue is unlikely to be worth the grief.

<comment><USER12> >The best course of action is probably for funny junk to get try and wring some minor concession out of Inman (that he'll inform them of any issues directly before publishing them on his website or something similarly trivial) and drop the whole thing.

Why should Inman concede anything? He's in the business of making fun of people, so why should he give funnyjunk a pass? IMO, what he should do is have their safe harbor protection invalidated because they don't conform to DMCA takedown requirements and go after them in court, but he's indicated that he wants to focus on his work. Funnyjunk should take that as the biggest gift ever and slink off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > [...] threatening to sue The Oatmeal for $20,000 for defamation [...]

This is incorrect. As everyone here probably knows, they demanded $20k to _refrain_ from suing, they did not file a lawsuit asking for $20k.

<comment><USER14> What I'm curious about if anyone here is a lawyer is this: wasn't that demand -- from a legal standpoint -- extortion?

<comment><USER15> I'd imagine it's essentially a settlement offer.

<comment><USER16> Naively, it seems like a settlement offer should only be legal if you have actually filed suit. Filing requires you to put your cards on the table, and opens you up to countersuits for wasting everyone's time. Otherwise, you're essentially trying to claim support from the legal system without _involving_ the legal system.

Is there a reason that wouldn't work out well?

<comment><USER17> Because it would be nothing other than a subsidy for lawyers and a further drain on the court system. There are many thousands of disputes every day that are settled with informal settlement offers, and many hundreds that are settled with formal settlement offers. Most of these never make it to court.

For example, if a tree from your yard falls into your neighbor's yard, they might have a claim against you. Instead of forcing them to file a lawsuit, you offer to pay for a new fence and landscaping to replace the stuff that got squished. (Or, the neighbor demands that you pay for the fence and landscaping instead of filing suit.) There's no reason for the neighbor to have to actually file a lawsuit against you in order for you to work out the issues. The threat of a lawsuit is always there, but making a lawyer actually fill out the paperwork and pay the filing fees is a pure subsidy to lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hi internet vigilantes lets have a chat,

I know this lawyer has done something we think is both morally wrong, legally dubious, and unintelligent. However the real life harassing of this individual is not something a civil society should condone. I would hope that at least the mob of individuals who frequent this web site would be a little classier then both Matthew Inman ,and the internet at larges response.

Why does it appear the internet only has two modes, Blind Adoration and Violent Lynch Mob ?

<comment><USER19> Lynch mobs are real things and have a real history. Lynch mobs as defined, always results in the death of a person or persons at the hands of a mob. An attorney who bit off more than he can chew and as a result received a number of nasty emails is not the victim of a lynch mob.

<comment><USER20> Though it could be argued that a digital lynch mob could be defined as a group who "kills" someone online. If this gets any more out of hand, how much business or reputation do you think this lawyer would have left?

A digital lynch mob killed HB Gary Federal. It's happened before.

++edit++ guys, I wasn't arguing that this guy deserves reputation or has a right to do whatever he wants. I was arguing that a "lynch mob" can and does exist on the Internet. Like the parent said, lynch mobs harass and sometimes kill people. Digital equivalents to lynch mobs exist.

<comment><USER21> > A digital lynch mob killed HB Gary Federal. It's happened before.

It hasn't happened before because HB Gary Federal is not a person and thus cannot be killed.

No one can be "killed online." Killing is the ending of a human life. It is a word with a very specific meaning. Even if Internet action somehow led to someone's death, they still would not be "killed online" – they would be killed. In reality. By a person or group of persons. Not by "online."

Is this conversation really happening? This needs to be explained?

<comment><USER20> _No one can be "killed online." Killing is the ending of a human life. It is a word with a very specific meaning._

Nonsense. All the time I go into Task Manager and kill processes. I was working on a project that went over budget and it got killed. When I get out of my car, I kill the engine.

Kill does not only mean the ending of human life. It's possible to kill ideas or even non-biological physical processes.

<comment><USER21> A very splendid example of deliberate obtuseness, sir/madam. I hereby grant you the degree of Doctor of Internet Trolling, with all the rights, privileges and honors thereto pertaining. A very nice parchment is coming in the mail – you can display it proudly beside your many collected downvotes.

<comment><USER20> Trolling? I put "kill" in scare quotes for a reason... the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention.

<comment><USER21> It's all good, homie. Don't gild the lily. You've already hit the home run by comparing the very real, very brutal killings of blacks, gays, and other minorities at the hands of actual, real lynch mobs to silly Internet jerkoffery. And car engines!

Let your masterpiece speak for itself.

<comment><USER22> Sorry to intrude, but <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kill> makes the OP's a valid observation. Digital lynch mobs certainly can defeat or in extreme cases put an end to an organization.

Now, OP's edit comparing the digital killing to the actual, life ending, killing is indeed unfortunate.

<comment><USER20> Is it any worse than calling an argument a "flame war"? Or arguments saying that if corporations are people, there should be a corporate death penalty?

I wasn't comparing digital death to real life death. Those words we put into my mouth; I never made that argument. I even used scare quotes to hint that it's a word being used out of traditional context. It's possible to have real- life terms translate into digital concepts without necessarily implying the 1:1 correlation that some have assumed. When my mouse dies it doesn't mean I've committed animal abuse, it just means I need to recharge the batteries.

I just like to have interesting discussions. That's why we're all here.

<comment><USER22> > I was arguing that a "lynch mob" can and does exist on the Internet. Like > the parent said, lynch mobs harass and sometimes kill people.

This is what I mean for a bit unfortunate, because it obviously refers to actual death.

The argument, of digital lynch mobs being able to heavily damage (which is one definition of kill) corporations or people, I agree with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> People need to stop applauding the internet retaliation mobs. Flaming this lawyer's email won't have any positive effect. If you want to show your support, donate to the charity, don't engage in anti-social behaviour. Generally speaking vigilantism and mob-vigilantism are negative.

Whether or not the target in this reddit / 4chan / whatever pile-on deserves it, taking part isn't good internet citizenry.

<comment><USER24> > If you want to show your support, donate to the charity

That doesn't affect the way this shitbag lawyer goes about conducting his chosen profession. This actually might.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> While the response by oatmeal in form of blog post and fund raising campaign was funny and comical in nature, he has got a legal counsel in Venkat Balasubramani and here is the legal response :

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/96850920/FunnyJunk-The-Oatmeal- Res...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/96850920/FunnyJunk-The-Oatmeal-Response)

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe this is just me, and is taking things too far... but it would seem that perhaps, just perhaps, we should consider de-barring lawyers who make too many frivolous claims against others and fail in court? Currently, it takes you getting to a Jack Thompson level to get booted from being able to sue and threaten others.

The net effect of this is that fewer lawyers would be willing to take on frivolous claims and there would be less litigation overall. Of course this would only apply to plaintiffs, as everyone needs to be able to defend themselves against as many claims as needed.

</comment><comment><USER27> For some lawyers, lawsuits are just "business transactions".

They move in an eviroment where lawsuits are just amuniton in a game. They believe it's ok to use them, so they get suprised with this kind of response.

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting that in a conflict involving only men, somehow there's still a cheap image of an unattractive woman being tossed around by the Oatmeal. Feels kind of mysoginistic. Would the image have the same effect if it was a man? Doubt it.

<comment> jack-r-abbit While it probably would have carried the same emotional sting if he'd said, "Here's a picture of your dad trying to get some dolphin love", there is a time honored set of jokes entirely devoted to disparaging another person's mother... many of which involve some over exaggerated take on their mother being fat and/or ugly. Although I am not aware of any that involve bear love. For more information you might check if Google has any suggestions for "yo' mama jokes".

<comment><USER28> I know it exists, but my point is that it's mysoginistic.

<comment> jack-r-abbit _Misogyny: The hatred or dislike of women or girls_

I know it exists, but I don't see it here.

<comment><USER29> No, it's there. It's just so ingrained most people don't notice it. Insults like that are almost always targeted at the target directly or the women around them. That's because society places women on a weaker level. Also notice the emphasis on fat and ugly. It implies that if a woman isn't pretty she isn't to be valued. In terms of misogyny in our society, it fairly mild. However, it still qualifies because it exploits the general power imbalance.

<comment> jack-r-abbit No, it's not. People fought hard for women to be treated equal. You can't pick and choose what you want to be treated equal on and what you want special treatment on. Either everyone is fair game for jokes or nobody is. Which is it?

edit: also, misogyny is about a hate or dislike of women (which would imply all women... or it would have said _a woman_ ). So while it does exist in ways that some assholes have a messed up view against all women... a cartoon depicting a fat woman chasing a bear is not making any sort of statement of hate of women... or even just hate of fat women. This cartoon is a fat woman chasing a bear. If it was a fat man chasing a bear... then it would be a cartoon of a fat man chasing a bear. If it was a skinny man with a mohawk chasing a purple bear on roller skates then it would be a cartoon about a skinny man with a mohawk chasing a purple bear on roller skates. But the second there is a woman involved... holy crap that cartoonist is being misogynistic? I don't buy it.

<comment><USER28> >You can't pick and choose what you want to be treated equal on and what you want special treatment on. Either everyone is fair game for jokes or nobody is. Which is it?

This is a very optimistic world view. If people tend to continuously harrass black people, even for something that is obviously in the nature of the insult, racist (e.g. calling them stupid athletes or something), would you have that same stance? Either everyone is fair game or no one is, so it's okay to keep making fun of that black guy, cause he's allowed to make fun of us as well?

The point is that it's not fair game. This is a conflict involving no women. Yet we still see one being attacked, in a way that you can't really attack a man. You can call a man unattractive, but insults along those lines don't have the same punch, because men aren't defined by the way they look, they're not being objectified. Even when you are using it negatively, it's still objectification.

And the other point is that it's always women. I don't hear very many "your daddy" jokes.

<comment> jack-r-abbit There is a difference between making fun of someone that is a woman and making fun of some one _because_ they are a woman. But logic fails when emotions get involved. I'm done with this stupid argument.

<comment><USER28> You will find it's not just the why, but also the how. Again, to put it in terms of a racial equivalent to make the point more clear, if I use a racial slur against somebody because they're pissing me off, I'm not insulting them/making fun of them because they are of that race. That does not make it okay, however. Motif isn't the only thing that matters, and that's the point.

<comment> jack-r-abbit We are still talking about the same thing right? The picture of a fat woman chasing a bear? There is no possible way that we will ever be on the same page if you think a drawing of a fat woman chasing a bear is anywhere near the same as using a racial slur. You can continue to spout such absurdity all you want but that doesn't make you right. Good day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I do enjoy watching the lawyer who drafted the letter squirm. Hopefully other lawyers will take note.

<comment><USER31> Are you kidding? He's laughing all the way to the bank.

Let's say Inman sent the $20,000 check. The lawyer would get _at the most_ $10,000. Now, he's known as the "lawyer whose mother loves bears," appears on MSNBC, and has his station elevated to an "legal expert on matters of the internet."

You can't pay for that kind of publicity. His indignation is probably tempered with a good dose of gratitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's disappointing that our legal system accepts obvious abuse like this (the underlying case). I do hope that this idiot lawyer doesn't try and do something with "inciting mob action" simply by posting the details of this case to a loyal fanbase.

Time to enact significant penalties for those who engage the legal system for frivolous lawsuits.

<comment><USER33> The legal system is probably not even involved at this point. The lawyer simply asked for $20K under the threat of a further lawsuit.

<comment><USER34> Exactly, it's not like lawyers have to run their aggressive threatening letters past judges before they go out.

Most "law" doesn't really touch the legal system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> First of all I think the lawyer is clearly wrong to take such a foolish case, yet I don't think it is right that so many people chose to attack him personally. Ultimately he's just doing the job he was hired to do.

If he can make some money off FunnyJunk pushing obviously doomed-from-the- start legal action, then the only loser is FunnyJunk. And realistically FunnyJunk probably did it for the press coverage and extra traffic that will result.

The Oatmeal wins reputation and traffic, FunnyJunk gets lots of traffic (and more bad reputation as a troll), the lawyer gets money.

Welcome to how the internet works.

<comment><USER36> "Ultimately he's just doing the job he was hired to do."

"I was just following orders" never makes a good excuse for doing something that is patently wrong. It is even less so for an independent lawyer who has tremendous discretion to refuse to take a case.*

*Just to be clear, once a lawyer begins working on a case for a client there are ethical rules that (within limits) require him/her to follow the client's directives and work for the clients best interests. The lawyer also may not be always be free to cease representation once it has begun. But an independent lawyer can generally freely refuse to accept a case.

<comment><USER37> What about the case if a lawyer is being paid a retainer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just wait for Anonymous to get involved if FunnyJunk's lawyer tries stopping the charity fundraiser, whoa. Then he'll witness an army being marshalled.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, they'll DDOS his site for, like, a whole week or so.

 _shrug_

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> _Lawyer attacking The Oatmeal shocked by big mean Internet's reaction_

He's just playing dumb.

</comment><comment><USER41> Isn't this actually libel: "I really did not expect that [The Oatmeal] would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene e-mails,"

</comment><comment><USER42> When you come out with someone with a knife, you make certain assumptions that can prove to be _brutally_ wrong when your opposition whips out a shotgun.

</comment><comment><USER43> I personally thought the illustration was in very poor taste, and I can't comprehend someone finding it entertaining. (If anyone wants to talk about how Americans don't get humor, please just spare me.)

</comment><comment><USER44> This guy should really be sued for malpractice.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder what the hacker community and Inman's fan base collective reaction would have been if FunnyJunk downloaded Inman's work off of Pirate Bay instead.

<comment><USER46> "Damn, FunnyJunk is stupid. Couldn't they have just grabbed the image files off Inman's site?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Internet vigilantes do seem to have a somewhat confused reaction to copyright law.

The Oatmeal trying to get its content taken down from FunnyJunk: good.

Most other copyright holders trying to get their content taken down from almost anywhere else on the internet: bad.

It isn't even about the legal niceties of the situation, it's about the _vibe_ , man.

<comment><USER48> The only distinction I can think of is that in this case, copyright claimant is the original artist, and not a corporation.

In cases of movie & music piracy, the copyright claimant is a corporation. I suspect that copyright violators will rationalize the act as something that has negligible effect on the artist.

<comment><USER34> So, the distinction is self-serving and intellectually dishonest rationalization? Not exactly surprising.

<comment><USER49> I believe this is the same distinction the movie/music industry uses between what they rip off and what their potential customers use.

I mean I'm sure right now the RIAA is taking down most of their electronic back catalog until they figure out how to compensate the original artists behind the Amen Break sample.

<comment><USER48> For anyone with 20 minutes to spare, here is a great video explaining the prevalence of the "Amen Break" sample.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Buddy you haven't seen anything yet.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's hard to understand and celebrate the glories of the Internet as a vehicle for "freedom and free speech" and all that good stuff, when all too often large communities within it participate in acts that are all too banal and primitive as is mob vigilanteism.

So is the Internet truly a pinnacle of a civilized and free society, or the regression into a barbaric state? Cause this seems pretty barbaric to me...

(I am not condoning the lawyer's or FunkyJunk's actions. I think they are wrong. I just think there are better and more civilized ways of reacting to and handling this).

<comment><USER52> Alternatively, there's no higher proportion of mobbish vigilantes now than there has been in the past, they can just form into fewer, larger groups thanks to instant global telecommunication, and you can come across them more easily for the same reason.

Just like there aren't any more natural disasters than there were 100 years ago, we just hear about more of them because it's so much easier to send the news now; and there aren't any more... say... underwater-basket-weavers now than then, they're just easier to find now because they're gathering on facebook and etsy.

<comment><USER53> I don't think you properly take into account some of the internet factors that actually make a higher proportion of mobbish vigilantes:

1 - Visibility, which you yourself mention. We get to see injustices that we would never see before. Also, like you say, we get to see mob reactions that we would never see before and so we have many more chances to join mobs in a day. 2 - Ease of response. It's easy to post vitriol. It hardly takes any time at all, and you don't even have to walk to someone's house or disrupt your plans for the day. This is a direct result of internet tools that make communication easy, which didn't exist before. 3 - Anonymity, and lack of physical presence. People say things anonymously on the internet that they would never in a million years say to someone in person.

Basically, it's just easier to be in a mob these days...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit FunkyJunk and this lawyer are the types that Anonymous needs to be bringing down. What a bunch of waste of space douche-wagons.

<comment><USER54> "Space douche-wagons" is now officially in my vocabulary. Thank you.

<comment><USER55> > "Space douche-wagons" is now officially in my vocabulary. Thank you.

I think it was supposed to be grouped the other way, i.e. "What a (bunch of (waste of space) douche-wagons)"

but hey, "space douche-wagons" is a nice phrase too :).

<comment><USER6> Is the reanalyzed version parsed as [[space douche] wagons] or [space [douche wagons]]?

<comment><USER55> I'd say the latter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/21/what-is-the-world-to-do-about-gene-editing/ <comment><USER2> The main thing* holding back this is that we don't understand the human genome enough to make really useful edits. It's very rare that there's a change that would be better done with germline engineering than somatic cell engineering or gene therapy. One day that won't be true however, and that's when the problems will really begin.

To me the strongest non-religious argument against doing this is that it will further accelerate wealth benefits, eg if you could make your kids smarter. One of the problems with that however is that this technique is so cheap and easy that banning it will just create a black market, or a single country decides to allow it for economic or political reasons and people travel there to get pregnant.

That impossibility of controlling this is why I think we have no choice but to proceed slowly, cautiously, but under full transparency.

* there are also uncertainties about off-target effects and overall safety of the technique but I'm confident those issues will eventually be fixed too.

<comment><USER3> I think the strongest argument against gene editing is the tendency for societal biases to be taken to the extreme. Gene editing is drastic and has the potential to greatly reduce genetic diversity in a population since people tend to want to become "normal", or meme certain popular traits. If you gave minorities the ability to become a white males in America, would they? Certainly many would and it would mean losing the benefits of such diversity we currently have, even if it's tougher for many people to be non-white male.

See "Chinese footbinding", "injecting cement into posteriors for beauty", "plastic surgery" for examples of the absuridty people will go to to fit in.

<comment><USER4> I can't help but find this incredibly condescending.

You would take away a technological advantage from majorities and minorities alike because their choices might not lead to your ideal of diversity utopia.

<comment><USER5> Here's a different take, on a different sort of diversity:

Suppose it turns out that extremely high-achievers are gambles on the part of nature, which have some chance of going wrong. For example, suppose that every birth of a potential future Nobelist comes with a 10% chance of serious disabling autism. (I stress, I'm not claiming that this is true, just setting up a thought experiment.) Many parents would decline this gamble: 10% is quite a high chance of devoting the rest of your life to care, for a tiny chance of having a world-class star in the family, who will anyway have very little personal gain from his contributions. But if the whole society decides never to gamble, we will (in my scenario!) miss out on major advances.

<comment><USER6> If we get to the point where we can distinguish genes that cause autism to be able to remove them, we'll also be able to distinguish 10% Nobelist case.

But even if that was not the case, with gene editing some parents who did not have a chance to make that gamble, will be able to make it intentionally.

<comment><USER5> The point of my thought experiment is to imagine that these are the _same_ genes. Remember that about half of population variation is "unshared environment" meaning noise in the translation of DNA into an adult: genes will never allow perfect prediction.

I guess I believe that very few parents would make this gamble, because the risks are very personal and the benefits are mostly to others. But I could be wrong. One real live example is that there's been very little push-back against eliminating Tay-Sachs via testing.

<comment><USER6> In your thought experiment, even if very few parents made the gamble, it would be enough to keep the gene around until we figured out what in the environment caused autism, after which the many more would want to have it.

For the Tay-Sachs example what would be the reason to push-back against eliminating it? And who should have pushed back? people who had that gene, or people who didn't?

IMO the solution is to simply have more people, if we have 1000 billions on earth (which is possible with seasteading and terraforming deserts), 10 billion on moon 100 billion on mars we'll have enough place to try out all kinds of solutions, for people to decide how much to edit or not to edit their own genes, and many new random mutations arising simply because there are more new people than were in all of the history combined.

<comment><USER5> Other thought experiments are certainly possible, but mine is about the stated gamble, in which you cannot predict. That's what's meant by "unshared environment", it's poorly named, the environment you talk of is "shared environment". As I said, I don't know that this is true in the real world, but I don't think it wildly implausible. (Maybe tortured mad artists are a better example than nerds.)

Tay-Sachs is the first example I know about, of some genetic strain of humans being deliberately bred out of existence. Phrased like that I think the idea would alarm many people. But it has not. (I should remind myself more of the details of this story.)

Thought experiments aside, note that it's not obvious we need a single new mutation to make much smarter people. We just need the shuffling of the deck to place more of the existing + variants into one body. This will obviously be the goal of embryo selection, and I think would also be the goal of explicit editing. I'd wager that many more of the Nobel-sized brains alive at the end of this century (and the next) will owe their existence to one of these kinds of engineering, than to population growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's say that we accept the "my body, my choice" argument for legal abortion on demand. It applies to eggs, sperm, unimplanted zygotes and preterm fetuses.

So why doesn't it also apply to CRISPR editing of our somatic and germline cells? I suppose that we could carve an exception, in the interest of the public good. As we have for the War on Drugs. But that's a dangerous path, if one cares about personal freedom.

<comment><USER8> Germline editing has consequences far beyond "my body, my choice". If your offspring have genetic defects from gene editing, and their offspring also have the same genetic defects, then "your choice" has consequences far beyond just you that "personal freedom" can't cover.

If you choose to abort, only your offspring is affected: far less consequential than possibly ruining generations to come.

I don't know what the War on Drugs has to do with anything here.

<comment><USER9> > If your offspring have genetic defects [..], and their offspring [..]

> If you choose to abort, only your offspring is affected

By aborting, you're not merely potentially saddling your offspring with genetic defects - you're denying them the most basic right to exist in the first place! And their offspring, too. You're shutting down that whole line before it can even start.

I'm pro choice, but this line of argument makes no sense to me. Hard to see how anything could have consequences "far beyond" depriving a germline of existence itself.

<comment><USER10> You may be pro-choice, but you would probably oppose the right of mothers to end the lives of their children (and descendents of those children) _after_ pregnancy. So I don't see what is strange about the argument; you are allowed to terminate a pregnancy, but you do not necessarily have the right to inflict arbitrary other life changing modifications on your children. Like, no doctor would agree to amputate the legs of an unborn child without medical necessity (when asked by the mother), and I think 'my body, my choice' does not apply there.

I will admit there is a bit of a grey zone; few (if any?) places outright prohibit pregnant women from smoking and drinking, despite the possible negative consequences, but such behavior is still generally frowned upon.

<comment><USER6> > but you would probably oppose the right of mothers to end the lives of their > children after pregnancy

Unfortunately the distinction is not that clear cut. When we have technology to raise several weeks old fetus to maturity in an artificial womb (which we'll have soon), what will be the difference between 'after pregnancy' and 'during pregnancy'? In both cases it will be something that can become a human if someone wants to spend resources to keep it alive.

> Like, no doctor would agree to amputate the legs of an unborn child

Situation with gene editing is the opposite. Is it moral to allow your child to be born with one leg, if there is an way to cure her to have both legs?

And the point about 'affecting all descendandts' is wrong because if we have a technology to make a change we can easily reverse it too.

<comment><USER5> > the point about 'affecting all descendandts' is wrong because if we have a > technology to make a change we can easily reverse it too

If we had perfect editing technology (even without perfect knowledge of effects) then as you say we could easily Ctrl-Z the next generation.

But we don't have this yet, so I think it's not unreasonably to worry a bit about inflicting changes (including unintended off-target edits) on grandkids too.

<comment><USER6> Sure worrying a bit is reasonable, and that's the reason most people would not use gene editing now. (Unless they are trying to correct some well understood life threatening condition).

If we talk about so many people using it that it can change genetic composition of humanity, it means we already have a reliable way of making changes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: rate our shady start up idea - <AUTHOR>

Flaws in online sports betting operation opens an opportunity for arbitrage.
We are working on a crawler which browses bookmakers sites in order to find sure bets.
Also, we have a program which can back using found results.
According to our estimations it's very profitable.
We are looking for a way to make a service out of it e.g. provide gamblers with betting automation to some extent using our software.
Using such advantageous situations across several bookmakers is prohibited according to the rules of some of bookies.
What are the chances for us to find an investor?
If you look at Betfair sport events usually gather millions of dollars at stake.
Our technology stack includes Lisp, Chrome and other smaller open source libraries at the moment. <comment><USER2> If your system works, you have minted (at least in the short term) a license to print money. Why sell it now?

<comment><AUTHOR> To effectively bootstrap the system so we can quit our day jobs it's needed from ten to twenty thousands.

The system does work but at a small scale taking into accoung our financial capabilities</comment></comment>


University study finds Fitbit's heart rate data out by 20 BPM - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/23/fitbit_heart_rate_data_wrong/ <comment><USER2> Anecdotally I've found my Charge HR's measurements to be most accurate when I'm stationary, but querying several months' of data via Fitbit's API showed a few instances where my heart rate was supposedly 200 while I was sitting at my desk, which I feel like I would have noticed. (I know what task I was working on because I correlated my heart rate with RescueTime activity logs. It's interesting that my average heart rate is highest during Kerbal Space Program.)

I'm most interested in monitoring my resting heart rate anyway, because I take that as a good measure of my overall health. If it increases by 10-15% I'm generally getting ill.</comment>


Columbia students told job prospects harmed if they access WikiLeaks cables - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/05/columbia-students-wikileaks-cables

<comment><USER2> Out of date: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/columbia- wikileaks-...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/columbia-wikileaks- policy/)</comment>


Everything that is wrong with sudo and how I fixed it - <AUTHOR> https://oded.blog/2017/10/21/doas-linux/ <comment><USER2> submission from the author:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519894)</comment>


The perfect job offer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@steviebuckley/the-perfect-job-offer-9c3dd8855876

<comment><USER2> Hey folks. Author here. Happy to expand on anything in the post or answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> I really like your very human approach to things.

Do you have any theories on why companies end up doing the opposite of what you've laid out and end up wasting time chasing purple squirrels?

I mean, the obvious answer is risk aversion, but I think there might be more to it than that.

I'd also be curious if you do anything to reach out to under-represented groups who may not even bother sending in a resume to begin with but could still be great talent.

<comment><USER2> >I really like your very human approach to things.

Thanks! We genuinely go out of our way to ensure we treat people as people, not just another statistic to add to our machine.

>Do you have any theories on why companies end up doing the opposite of what you've laid out and end up wasting time chasing purple squirrels?

Laziness is a key reason. If their current process works then the motivation to improve it is relatively low. As for chasing purple squirrels, I honestly have no idea. I could spend the next few months searching for someone who, on paper at least, is a superstar but the fact is, in the meantime I could hire two or three mediocre people (that's not intended to be derogatory), who could do just as well and ultimately end up being better hires in the long run.

>I'd also be curious if you do anything to reach out to under-represented groups who may not even bother sending in a resume to begin with but could still be great talent.

Loads. For example, we helped PyLadies London get started by providing them with a venue, covering their logistical costs and promoting them. We recently starting (financially) supporting Django Girls who are an incredible bunch of people and we often host codebar.io who provide introductory programming classes to under-represented groups. The fact is, we have to work really hard to make under-represented groups aware of the fact that we're not another meat processor and instead we're a diverse group of people who are trying to hire more good people.</comment></comment></comment>


Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-anything-would-be-better-critics-warn-ottawas-family-reunification/ <comment><USER2> All the other points about the unfairness makes sense, but the complaint about the poor random number generator does not make sense.

This isn't a multistep process that the "adversary" has access to. It doesn't matter how bad the random number generator is or even if it is predictable. Sure you could bribe the person putting it into excel I suppose, but you could do that anyway and just have them switch numbers around.

This is a silly complaint. Yes it is a bad random number generator, but predicability of the sequence isn't an attack surface in this use case.

<comment><USER3> So much this. In order to 'attack' this, how would you go about that? Somehow control who applies for the program so you wind up with an expected number?

And the gambling comparison is particularly bad. Excel is presumably not picking the same seed every day, no matter how bad it is. It's probably using time() when it's loaded, which is not great but also not visible to an 'attacker' and not consistent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, people are picky today. This isn't a public webapp, this is a spreadsheet that is controlled by a trusted party. Yeah, it isn't the state-of-the-art RNG, but given that it is only picking 10000 numbers, I would say it doesn't need to be all that good.

</comment><comment><USER5> The complexity of random-number generation is well-known to programmers, but the inability to generate random numbers for "real-life" selection algorithms has had major life-or-death implications:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_lottery_(1969)https://en...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_lottery_\(1969\)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_lottery_\(1969\))

> _People soon noticed that the lottery numbers were not distributed uniformly > over the year. In particular, November and December births, or dates 306 to > 366, were assigned mainly to lower draft numbers representing earlier calls > to serve...Analysis of the procedure suggested that mixing 366 capsules in > the shoe box did not mix them sufficiently before dumping them into the > jar._

</comment><comment><USER6> I went ahead and flagged this. It is not HN quality. It is not even Globe and Mail quality.

The other comments have already expressed why that is the case - but in summary, there is no security flaw coherently expressed here, Excel is possibly the _right_ tool for the job (it saves tens of thousands of dollars of custom software development through government acquisition programs) and the editorialism in the title was unnecessary and further hurt the credibility of the "point."

</comment><comment><USER7> Since Office 2007, Excel's random number generator has been implemented using a Mersenne Twister.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would a lottery be used at all for picking "winners" for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.

<comment><USER3> If they were actually accepting all applications that meet the criteria, that would make first come first serve more fair, but there are quotas so they _have_ to reject N-1 applications regardless of their application.

Lottery systems are generally considered fairer than first come first serve because they don't advantage people who apply early. Especially in an immigration-related process where circumstances are likely to dictate when you can apply, not everyone will have an opportunity to 'get in early'.

If you have a way to make the process simultaneously non-random, fair, and not have a cap (which I personally would probably be fine with eliminating but is presumably a non-starter for various political reasons), I'm sure some people would love to hear about it.

<comment><USER9> Sure, just make the process much more restrictive. The idea is to take in the best, not help the most vulnerable.

<comment><USER10> > The idea is to take in the best

Is that really the purpose of the _family-reunification program_?

<comment><USER9> That's a typo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is plenty Random Enough(TM).

TFA makes it sound like spending $10M on consulting for a "true" random source here is more appetising; that it would be any different, objectively better. It's nonsense.

Be happy your government is using the tools it has rather than putting every function out to tender (as seems to happen in the UK).

</comment><comment><USER12> This is more of an amusing statement of how much of the world runs on Excel.

<comment><USER13> I used to use Excel's RNG to determine random winners for various drawings at work, including such momentous things as shift bid winners when there were more otherwise equally positioned people than available slots for a specific shift.

Excel is far and away the best product Microsoft has ever produced, and definitely one of the top five applications ever developed by anyone. It's one of the most useful and flexible tools for all kinds of practical analysis involving just about anything mathematical. Another example is that handful of us once used it, quite successfully, to manage a particular $500MM book of business for a very large insurance company.

In fact, the only people I've met who really hate Excel are developers who find they're not as necessary as they wish they were because regular managers are able to figure things out and make reasonably good decisions without their help or input because they have a good grasp of Excel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "We stand by this randomized selection process as a sufficient means of equal opportunity for all who look to express an interest in sponsoring their parents and grandparents."

Ignorance is bliss. Math class is tough.

<comment> white-flame Random selection is literally equal opportunity.

<comment><USER14> The selection isn't random. Cargo culting the magic number machine is the crux of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The Liberals introduced a lottery in 2017 in an effort to make the system fairer – previously, applications were accepted on a first-come, first-served basis."

What's not fair about first-come, first-served? Why would a lottery be fairer than that?</comment>


Show HN: Secure chat on Twitter using steganography - <AUTHOR> https://realproven.com/chatseal/

<comment><USER2> Is source code for the encryption available? If not, nothing is proven.

Either way, its a nice idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree, please provide the source code ...

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you can appreciate that open-sourcing my app has a number of implications for its viability in the App Store. A devil's advocate might even argue that wide publication doesn't always guarantee security, as was the case with Heartbleed.

If it helps, internally I used the iOS framework APIs for AES/RSA directly. I didn't attempt to implement them on my own. What I built was simply an abstraction on top of that. Granted, I understand that there are still ways to go astray, but certainly less if I fundamentally rely on what the crypto experts implemented.

So, to address your concerns, what if I got a commercial security audit? Can you recommend any places you would trust?</comment></comment>


Math Prof writes to cat food company - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mathematicsprof/status/1066828297319968770 <comment><USER2> "dear industrial nincompoop: please explain why your design is suboptimal"

"dear professor nincompoop: your model is wrong and we need calculus that you don't teach undergrads"

</comment><comment><USER3> "In calc when teaching the 'min surface area of a can with given vol, of which soln is diameter = ht, I wrote a cat food company telling them how much they'd save by making their cans taller. Got a letter from the marketing dept telling me a million reasons for the cans' design." \- original tweet

twitter reply: so he's guilty of "cansplaining"

\- very funny stuff.</comment>


How is it possible that guns are less regulated than startups? - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/10/2/16405168/guns-less-regulated-than-startups <comment><AUTHOR> Am I the only one who finds this editorial morally repugnant, especially considering it was written by a VC who runs a fund that specifically invests in startups facing "regulatory challenges?"</comment>


Are speed limiters the best way to reduce road deaths? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49090755 <comment><AUTHOR> > "We don't want to overrule the driver. He must always have the last word"

If only Boeing's MCAS had been designed with that in mind.</comment>


When do I need to use GC.KeepAlive? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/13/10049634.aspx <comment><USER2> 2010</comment>