The Magic Leap Con - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/the-magic-leap-con-1829716266 <comment><USER2> Originally I found the Magic Leap extremely exciting, because in contrast to phones or tablets, whose touchscreens limit what sort of applications are feasible, AR could allow for arbitrary interfaces. These interfaces could be present alongside the real world, making them both more convenient and maybe less of an attention-vortex.

This is (among other things) what Magic Leap pitched, and comparing the actual product to their press releases is to note a vast discrepancy. Still, hope springs eternal, so while I wasn't impressed, I know how hard AR is and I wasn't inclined to judge too harshly-- maybe it will get better as technology improves.

After having read the article, I find myself rooting for them to fail. This is a company that has taken (and arguably squandered) _billions_ of dollars to release a slightly cheaper HoloLens. Instead of feeling abashed, they continue blithely on, even having the temerity to invite developers to their platform because the rest of the world (and in particular, other platforms) has so much "baggage" and "negativity".

As the article notes, this is a company that is propped up by oligarchs, settles sex discrimination lawsuits, and is pursuing military contracts with repressive regimes. Although to be fair, improving soldiers' lethality is the only use case they've articulated that justifies the price. Now that the missed expectations and general shadiness are starting to catch up with them, they're moving to attract developers. Somehow, despite all the money, they haven't been able to pay for an idea to justify the hype-- what else _could_ you call it but a con?

<comment><USER3> I generally agree with everything you've said except for the act of _settling_ a sex discrimination lawsuit being a negative signal. The existence of a sex discrimination lawsuit is certainly not a positive signal for any prospective employer, but it takes both parties to come to an agreement to settle. Settlement is also the overwhelmingly likely outcome of most lawsuits (> 90% chance).

The prospect of going to trial concentrates the mind wonderfully. A clarity descends. Sometimes you learn things about your own case that you didn't know before. (that it sucks - maybe) Trials can be unpredictable, better to come to an agreement that both parties can live with than to roll the dice.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that the harasser is most likely in a position of power and can afford to live comfortably with quite a few such agreements.

<comment><USER5> Is discrimination the same thing as harassment?

<comment><USER6> Would you consider this discrimination or harassment?

[https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex- discriminat...](https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex- discrimination.pdf)

>Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women, how to use Magic Leap's IT equipment and resources. One woman asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson responded, "Yeah, women always have trouble with computers." The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, "In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries."

<comment><USER7> Putting aside the rest of that trainwreck, asians (pardon me "orientals") are bad at computers now? I missed the memo on that

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's why I am immediately skeptical.

People think games are easy. People think entertainment is a solution. That is almost always a sign of someone in trouble.

In reality, entertainment is the reddest of red markets. It is incredibly difficult to make a compelling experience. Even more difficult to sell it. Include risk in the calculation and you are literally better off working for minimum wage than writing a game.

It is absolutely no coincidence that this conference mostly showed off games. And - by all reports - very crappy ones, with game play you would expect from a game jam (albeit dressed up in million-dollar graphics). It is no coincidence they haven't got a proven game studio on board: their flagship game is created _under contract_ by a VFX company.

Games are not your Trojan horse use case. Figure out what your product is for. Get it in consumers hands. And you can bet your ass game devs will exploit it (iPhone anyone?). Otherwise you are a novel gaming peripheral. And you are going to have to work _a lot harder_ to show games worth playing. Even VR is struggling (and, I would say, failing) there.

So far, Google glass is still the most compelling AR tool I've seen.

<comment><USER9> Google glass doesn't even qualify as AR, it's just a HUD. And it had a _huge_ amount of disadvantages, even hololens, for certain use-cases, was destroying it for AR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not by any stretch an expert in VR/AR, but a couple of weeks ago I finally tried Magic Leap.

My first reaction was: "What a piece of crap!! This is it?"

And yes... that it was. If you have never tried it, is 100X (and I'm being generous) less impressive than the super fake demo video they posted.

<comment><USER11> That was pretty much my experience with HoloLens. Uncomfortable headset, awkward and inaccurate hand gestures, and like a postage-stamp-size viewport. You couldn't see _anything_ functional in the least due to viewport alone, and the low resolution killed any hope you may have had left. Tracking was mostly alright about 95% of the time, in an office setting which is probably borderline ideal (lots of high-contrast edges and corners all over), but even while relatively still it made plenty of mistakes.

All of which I gather the Magic Leap is better on... by less than 50%. In two years.

AR has unbelievably misleading advertising. To enough of a degree that I think they should be fined rather significantly. Remember the HoloLens Minecraft "demo" videos? Or the full 3D models on the user's desk, nearly the size of the screen or keyboard? You couldn't even cover a coffee mug at that distance.

<comment><USER12> The technology hype cycle over the last decade has been pretty disappointing. I was promised by now, I'd be 3D printing my sneakers, spend my time killing zombies in VR, and paying for DLC with crypto

Of these, only VR seems even remotely close to reaching its original promise

<comment><USER13> About those sneakers: [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:285404](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:285404) ;) But yeah, I agree that there's much too much hype around a lot of stuff...

<comment><USER6> Space Invaders sneakers leave 3D printed footprints worth 01 point each!

[https://www.newarteditions.com/invader-sneakers-speed- balls/](https://www.newarteditions.com/invader-sneakers-speed-balls/)

(Sorry, all sold out -- I mean GAME OVER!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Magic Leap is almost entirely built on the visions of grown men wanting to > immerse themselves in fantasy worlds. Its chief focus is entertainment, > games, diversions—cinematic reality, sure; pushing the frontiers of > computing? Not as much.

I'll repeat my half-baked idea: the future of VR and AR is digital workplaces for better teleconferencing. Make it truly seamless to talk to colleagues while working remote. Disrupt office work as we know it and fix the externalities of commuting and being tied to a physical workplace. Why escape into fantasy worlds when you can make living in the real world more bearable?

<comment><USER15> I remember one of the first hololens trailers featured someone trying to fix their own sink plumbing, and an expert skyping in and highlighting exactly what to do.

Making AR even slightly accessible is going to drastically change all of the trade skill industries. Any kind of simple job with something like plumbing, electrician, or car problems, you could call up a remote expert (or knowledgable friend/relative) and have them guide you through the job without forcing them to drive to your house. This would probably lead to training AIs to help with those same simple jobs, and eventually more complicated ones, but probably not for a good many years(?).

Maybe it's a lot easier said than done, but I feel like there are tons of more physical "remote work" opportunities that Magic Leap can open up, and they're not focusing on them nearly enough. Microsoft is pushing hard with using the hololens in industrial environments for training or collaborating, but even for just personal use, I could see myself buying AR goggles if it made learning basic handyman chores around the house easier to get started with, and hopefully feel less like a chore.

<comment><USER16> I love this idea but I can't see a mass market for it.

Many people use youtube for this. My experience is, it works well for almost any kind of repair or trade work you can think of.

You could "remote in" an expert, but now we're talking $10-$100 an hour as opposed to free. If you're doing the work yourself I think it's safe to assume you're not valuing your own time outside work at a high dollar value.

<comment><USER17> I don't know about a mass market - but I live in rural Oregon, and booking an appointment with a local tradesperson results in them showing up 4 to 6 months out - there just aren't enough of them. Sometimes you can convince someone to drive the 2-3 hours each way from one of the nearby cities - but most these guys don't relish 6 hours driving to install a fan.

So I use YouTube A Lot, and boy would I like to be able to pay someone to walk me through things. And I suspect there a a fair number of people in spots like me (if not so extreme). And I suspect there are a lot of Urban DIYers that occasionally get in over their heads and would use this service.

But quantifying this market would be hard.

I do think the ability to recreate the 3d environment, from the sensors on a device in the house would be pretty critical to this working. And the ability to show the customers in AR exactly what needs doing could be a difference that matters.

Still I'm not quitting my day job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel that if AR finally gets to work in form of glasses, it'll have a bifurcated market - one will be entertainment for masses, the second one will be support tool for things like manufacturing. Which is kind of sad, because genpops will get toys, and the tools will go to corps. But I guess that's supply and demand. I just hope the entertainment glasses will be open enough to support a cottage industry of small software shops & open source coders doing tools for individual productivity.

Now I hope one day we'll get AR contact lenses or some other form of inconspicuous AR. I'd love to have the ability to switch it on and do some compute at a whim, without fumbling with special glasses, and having to mind the social situation in which I'm in.

As for Magic Leap - I get that AR is hard, but this level of hype is inexcusable. They're burning through general interest in the field and trust towards everyone working in it for sake of some quick buck. The sooner they get forced to realign with reality, the better.

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks like that conference had two completely different audiences.

As a developer, I tend to look at things and wonder about the future: "what can I build with this?"

I'm getting the realization that the equivalent for journalists is something like: "what controversies can I write about this?"

<comment><USER20> I don't get the hate; I played around with the Hololens for a bit and while the FOV issues are hard to ignore, both devices are steps forward into an interesting and likely THE interface for future computing.

One can hope that if MagicLeap fails at least someone will pick up the IP and continue to develop it.

<comment><USER6> Like the way Magic Leap picked up so many other people's literal designs and IP in their patent applications?

[https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap- augmen...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmented- reality-patent-art-copied-designers)

>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs

>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...

>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.

>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."

>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.

[https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome- ui-c...](https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui- concepts-1682716916)

>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts

>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.

>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.

>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:

>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design- student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?

>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":

>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"

>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.

>This might also look familiar: [...]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >"You know that weird sensation when it feels like everyone around you is participating in some mild mass hallucination, and you missed the dosing?"

Yeah, Stanislaw Lem wrote a book about that, which Ari Folman made into a movie.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_\(2013_film\))

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc)

>An EPIC scene from "The Congress" (2014)

>A short but entirely mesmerizing drug come-down, reality dissolving scene from the film "The Congress" (2014) based on the 1971 novel "The Futurological Congress" by Stanisław Lem. All rights to the makers.

Such a great movie. Quite different than the book, but they both stand on their own and deal with fascinating issues, and it's well worth reading and watching both, like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner.

>The Congress Official US Release Trailer (2014) - Robin Wright Fantasy Movie HD

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE)

<comment><USER21> One of my favorte films of all time. Practically nobody has seen it, and for many that do they fixate on trivial points. The film and book are monumental intellectual works, and are being missed by many who would dearly love them.

<comment><USER6> Speaking on fixating on trivial points -- ;) -- I really love the emotionally stunning and deeply self referential scene at the crux of the movie, between Robin Wright and Harvey Keitel, in Paul Debevec's Light Stage studio at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies.

[http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/3d-bo...](http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/3d-body- scan-and-emotion-capture-in-the-congress)

[http://gl.ict.usc.edu/LightStages/](http://gl.ict.usc.edu/LightStages/)

<comment><USER21> Great scene. Thanks for linking it. So many layers in this film...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Key stats:

 _Caraeff says that 50,000 user accounts have been created there. He wouldn't tell me the number of times the software developer kit has actually been downloaded, though he said it was fewer than that, or the number of Leap headsets shipped, which was fewer still._

</comment><comment><USER23> This iPhone analogy is full of crap. Apple delivered the fisrt iPhone with the software it needed to be, in itself, very usefull! The app developers came after, when a user base had already been created.

<comment><USER22> It's most misused analogy. If you have crappy product that no one is buying, compare it to iPhone v1.

<comment><USER24> Well, the writer compared Magic Leap to Apple Newton, which was... too early for the aims?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the early days of Segway. There's some cool tech there somewhere, but the hype vastly exceeds the reality.

Build up expectations too high and you're going to leave everyone disappointed.

<comment><USER6> And then South Park does an episode on "it".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OACjYGw6BkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OACjYGw6BkA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can't help but feel the world jumped into "the future is here" mode way too early. AI, AR, VR -- these have all promised sci-fi-esque experiences that simply can't be delivered with current technology.

I suspect it's to do with the fact that innovation is slowing down across the globe, yet the public expects it to continue at the same pace it's been running for the past 50 years. The market wants the next computer, the next internet, the next iPhone. What happens when it doesn't show up?

<comment><USER27> I've had amazing "sci-fi" experiences in VR.

Lone Echo on Oculus, Farpoint on PSVR, and others. So blown away that certain geners of non-VR games are not completely non-compelling to me. Those 2 games, while not the best games ever, gave me the feeling of "being there".

The difference between playing games on a monitor and games in VR, the good ones, is like the difference between a picture of the grand canyon and being and the grand canyon. The picture does no justice. Sure it might be pretty but it gives no sense of the scale and presence. You don't feel that there's a mile deep canyon that's 20 miles to the other side. You just see a pretty picture. In VR though you do get that sense of scale. That volcano in the distance in Farpoint actually feels 3 miles high with a 20 mile high plum of ash. Hiding behind a piece of rock actually feels like hiding and not "pressing the hide button".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> We are at the point where the most gripping experience is contextual browsing. What if instead of just showing you the recipe it actually used ar to demonstrate how to do each action of the thing it was showing. It seems absurd that this kind of thing is the first thing you can think of but companies that have billions of dollars invested in to them are unable to come up with any compelling idea of what they have all the money in the world to throw at a dartboard and still none of it even hits.

</comment><comment><USER29> One note.

There were at least 10 startups that failed to produce LCD projector displays, which are now ubiquitous and cheap.

There were at least 20 startups that failed at non-piercing blood glucose measurement, which is now accessible and not outrageously expensive.

So something will come of this. But Magic Leap is going down.

</comment><comment><USER30> Billions of dollars and still charging a pretty penny for the hardware? Should have put several million into making free headsets available to developers vetted to some basic degree, and see what happens

</comment><comment><USER31> What is AR supposed to be good for anyways? I see all those fancy demo videos (which are of course fake) and still ask myself what problem AR could solve. Magic Leap as well as the HoloLens require much computing power sitting next to you under the table, so you are not mobile with those headsets. So what real problem could this solve?

<comment><USER27> What is AR good for today? Almost nothing. What is it's potential? HUGE

Why do you need monitors if you have AR contact lens. Project as many monitors as you want where ever you want them. Sit in cafe and make it appear as if you have a 60 inch monitor on the table in front of you and a few tablets on the table.

In a conference room show a 3D model of building, bridge, or physical project and discuss it with the team pointing directly at parts of the model that appear simulated in the shared projection. Basically imagine any hologram scene in a Sci-fi movie like say showing the 2nd Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Those scenes assume some kind of magic 3D projector. Maybe that will be possible someday but it's nearly possible today if everyone is wearing AR glasses or contacts

Project data about people at a conference next to each person. Just like people at a conference wear badges except with AR badges they can be much larger with more info.

Have the AR point out the person you're looking for by putting a marker over their head or draw navigation prompts as you walk around.

Show virtual drawing surfaces allowing you to draw or annotate anything.

just a few ideas

<comment><USER27> A few links

Here's something you should be able to do with AR

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYhDu59UmSs#t=15m52s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYhDu59UmSs#t=15m52s)

And here's some actual work on it

[https://vimeo.com/232230096](https://vimeo.com/232230096)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The cell phone analogy is appropriate. This is first generation tech. Within 30 years it will be amazing and unobtrusive. Think eyeglasses or contact lenses with photo realistic rendering. I think it will be as important as the radio and TV was in shaping society both commercially and privately.

<comment><USER3> "Within 30 years... it will be as important as the radio and TV was in shaping society both commercially and privately"

Care to make your prediction interesting? I'd be willing to take the opposite side of that bet.

<comment><USER33> [http://longbets.org](http://longbets.org)

<comment><USER3> I'd be willing to wager $500, if anyone wants to take the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >You know that weird sensation when it feels like everyone around you is participating in some mild mass hallucination, and you missed the dosing?

Google Glass was a different (but related) product and I remember going to one of their "come try Glass" events and feeling the same way.

</comment><comment><USER35> You can watch the full conference keynote here:

Magic Leap L.E.A.P. Conference Keynote | Live from Los Angeles, October 10

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV8oGahOSgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV8oGahOSgc)

</comment><comment><USER36> This is what you get when CEOs are overly optimistic while the tech isn't just there yet.

</comment><comment><USER37> _cough_ hydrogen one _cough_

</comment><comment><USER38> This article confirms a lot of the suspicions I had about Magic Leap's product, which is unfortunate. Had the company not overhyped the product and shipped with expectations so high, perhaps they could have had something which would actually impress the general public.

Unrelated, this weird aside is my least favorite part of the article:

> Magic Leap is almost entirely built on the visions of grown men wanting to > immerse themselves in fantasy worlds ...

> It is telling that the most compelling glimpse of a possible future with > Magic Leap was relayed to me by nonwhite, non-male product manager

There's this implication that the white male leadership is only interested in the frilly escapist aspect of the product, and it's those in minority groups who are actually going to be pushing the boundaries of tech. Why include this in the article? Does the author honestly believe that's true? Do jabs at white men get clicks and heads nodding.now?

<comment><USER39> Interesting that you see that as a "jab against white men" \- I read it as a jab against monoculture. That the company's monoculture is middle aged white cis dudes is kind of beside the point.

A company this big needs to address most, if not all, people. The need for escapist leisure activity is something only relatively privileged people have. You only have to look at Google Glass to see what that limited appeal does to a product. It's a valid commercial consideration.

<comment><USER40> > It is telling that the most compelling glimpse of a possible future with > Magic Leap was relayed to me by nonwhite, non-male product manager

Yeah but the language used here makes it seem like white male product managers can't relay compelling visions for Magic Leap's future which isn't necessarily a correct statement.

<comment><USER41> They could have, but didn't.

The implication is that the PM in question was trying to advance their career on meritocracy grounds, while the other PMs get by on connections. I'm reminded of Theranos' extremely well-connected board.

I don't think there would be anything wrong with trying to market Leap as a gaming peripheral, but that implies a much smaller valuation, so ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > "Today, our world feels divided." Rony Abovitz, CEO of the infamous mixed > reality startup Magic Leap stood awkwardly on a circular stage

first sentence. holy negativity batman.</comment>


The meaning of open - <AUTHOR> http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

<comment><USER2> Thoughtful article by Jonathan. For those who don't know him, he's the head of all product at Google and is accountable to Eric, Larry and Sergey. He's Marissa Mayer's boss.</comment>


The Y Combinator Database - <AUTHOR> https://www.ycdb.co/ <comment><USER2> Infogami didn't die, it merged with reddit. I know because I had to figure out how to make that code actually run.

</comment><comment><USER3> The footer reads:

"Search experience powered by Algolia (W14). Icons powered by Font Awesome (S15). Hosted on Heroku (W08).

The original (v1.0) YCDB was rated #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, Sept 27, 2017. The original YCDB was made with Webflow (S13)."

I suppose you can no make an entire website/product only using YC company tech. ha.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, TIL that the ACLU was in YC W17 thanks to the "top 100 tweet count" page. I was kind of surprised by that, are there other well-established organizations that have joined YC at a (very) late stage or are they unique?

<comment><USER2> Quora joined after they were at a nine figure valuation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Guessed this site was made by them when the third metric was:

"The Most Photogenic Based on Snappr Photo Quality Score"

Interesting site regardless

</comment><comment><USER6> "Most photogenic"... Really??

EDIT: And here come the downvotes, so let me clarify my stance. I haven't a clue what Snappr does, or what their definition of 'photogenic' is. But here is the dictionary definition of 'photogenic':

        (adjective) (especially of a person) looking attractive in photographs or on film.

So my impression was that this metric was to do with how attractive perhaps the founders were. The overall impression here is YC somehow rates the aesthetic qualities of people in order to select who is 'in'. That sort of impression can do untold damage to their brand, and I am surprised that they let this be a thing.

<comment><USER7> According to the page ([https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/photo-quality- score](https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/photo-quality-score)), it is:

"Score between one and 100 based on an analysis of all photos on the company's homepage. Source: Snappr."

<comment><USER8> I wonder which one's the top scoring one!

[https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/photo-quality- score](https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/photo-quality-score)

OH BOY IT'S SNAPPR! This is probably not biased.

<comment><USER9> Of course it is. The whole site is made by them[1]. Clever marketing move!

[1] YCDB is made in San Francisco by the team at Snappr, which is a YC company (W17). Why? Because we love YC companies and discovering new ones! Edited by Matt Schiller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "search" seems more like autocomplete than search. Try entering "banana" and the search button is disabled

</comment><comment><USER11> They're missing the YC13 company I work at (Lob).

<comment><USER12> Matt from Snappr here. This is the source we used for the base list of companies: [https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/) For some reason Lob doesn't appear.

<comment><USER13> YC's list has a surprising number of errors. Lob is on Seed-DB, though - [https://seed-db.com/accelerators/view?acceleratorid=1011](https://seed- db.com/accelerators/view?acceleratorid=1011)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking at the top 100 funded companies: it's interesting that the majority are in the "Consumer", "Dev Tools" or "Healthcare" categories, and hardly any are in the "AI and ML" category.

<comment><USER15> AI is an approach, not a market, so I suggest those who make bank from AI will be companies like consumer, healthcare etc..

<comment><USER16> It's a tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is also [https://yclist.com](https://yclist.com) which is not as polished but has some interesting information.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very nice! Is the raw data publicly available? Or is it just scraped from Crunchbase?

<comment><USER19> It has become very tough to scrape crunchbase off late. I cant do any scripting around it using headless chrome. It instantly recognizes you are not a human

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> you should make detailed ( already public, not suggesting nefarious data snooping ) info available on founder profiles. This would allow mining what kind of founders tend to do well vs average vs poorly

<comment><USER21> That information would likely be useless because of survivorship bias.

<comment><USER20> no, it wouldn't be useless. Firstly, bias alone doesn't make information useless. Secondly, how is it survivor bias if the dataset also includes failed ycombinator companies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the marketing angle for Snappr here?

<comment><USER23> It's classic side-project marketing to increase brand visibility, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of the big hits from quite a while ago. I wonder if there is a trend?

How long as it been since a big, recognizable brand hit?

</comment><comment><USER24> it'd be interesting to see companies by investment size vs. exit value. I noticed when clicking around that one of the companies with the highest investment (Cruise) exited for less than its total investment and it got me thinking about which companies might exit for a profit/loss.

</comment><comment><USER25> YC's portfolio is staggering. Whatever they use to pick who to fund, they're doing it right.

<comment><USER26> I wonder if it would be reasonable to match their investments albeit on a much smaller scale</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/technology/silicon-valley-teachers-tech.html <comment><USER2> Glad to see this issue discussed. I work in edtech and have been somewhat uncomfortable with the way things work. There's a lot of paid-but-undisclosed promotion going on, and some people feel that "it's just the way business gets done."

As an entrepreneur, I feel that companies bear the primary responsibility for keeping their noses clean. If you're paying someone to promote your product, and it's not clear to others that there's a quid pro quo, that should set off warning bells that there may be an ethical problem.

I've actually had long discussions with other entrepreneurs who insisted — even after seeing the FTC regulations on undisclosed promotions — that it was ok to do. Why? Because they'd seen kickbacks in other industries, so it must be ok here. And after all, we're helping kids, right?

But teachers bear some of the responsibility as well — especially the ones who heavily monetize their social media presence. I've been approached by teacher bloggers who allegedly write both product reviews and sponsored posts. When I replied asking about their product review process (and noting the many awards that my company's products had won), they sent back only a rate card. In reality, there were no unpaid product reviews — every post was bought and paid for. This particular teacher actually added a disclaimer to her site, indicating that some posts might be paid for. But there was no indication of which posts those were — probably because then it would be obvious that they were all sponsored.

I hope this article sparks a conversation in edtech and education circles. In the context of the recent NYT article on the lack of efficacy of many edtech tools, the rampant quid pro quo is even more disturbing.</comment>


Protected Branches Improvements - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2137-protected-branches-improvements <comment><USER2> This is huge. We've wanted to use protected branches ever since they were announced but haven't been able to because we have hundreds of contributors merging to our primary branch every day.

</comment><comment><USER3> AAAARRRHGGHGRHRRRHGHGH FINALLY

I was _crushed_ when they added support for protected branches but didn't include per-user permissions.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great! We've been using protected branches with 100+ developers contributing and often face the out of date branch issue as our GIT implementors didn't realize this would be an issue until it was too late.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't wait for this to land in the enterprise edition. We go through some pretty convoluted steps to maintain branch protection while still allowing issues to be edited.

<comment><USER6> Any idea when this will be available in the enterprise edition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Strange you can't disallow pushing directly to master still.

<comment><USER8> You can protect master; it disallows pushes.

<comment><USER9> I want people to be able to merge via the Github PR flow, just not push directly without going through a PR. That doesn't seem possible from the blog post?

<comment><USER10> I want this too. It's possible to make it happen, but it's not easy like basic protection.

The protected branch behavior has two components to it. The primary protection is to prevent force-push to a branch, usually master. That one is a no- brainer.

The secondary behavior (AFAIK) is to enforce exactly what you are looking for, where you have to push to a branch before merging to master. The only way to make that happen is to integrate tests - if your branch passes tests, it can be merged. In my "copious free time" I plan to build a test hook that always reports "OK" so that I can enable that behavior on all of my repos, and it should end up as two or three clicks to set it up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone combining hackerism with being musically creative? - <AUTHOR>

It is my experience that hackers often have a great interest in music, both consuming and creating. So, please link to your songs for the rest of us to enjoy! (my recent ventures into music can be found here: http://soundcloud.com/gamma-gamma ) <comment><USER2> The coolest musical creation ever seen on HN was overtone: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3089010>

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out YouTube videos on Controllerism. The user Moldover has some great stuff.</comment>


Cord drill and Pump drill [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEl-Y1NvBVI <comment><USER2> My other favorite of his videos is the sling one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDMCVdPwnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDMCVdPwnE)

I like how he shows the repeated fails and how it take a long time to practice to get better at it.

<comment><USER3> That was also my favorite part of that video. How he cuts all of his videos is very well done. And how he doesn't say anything and only demonstrates, it's very effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just imagine the increments of time...years, decades, centuries, or more that likely passed between the individual advances in technique demonstrated...

Fascinating...thanks for posting.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious where bow drills fit into this progression? They appear easier to make because you don't need to drill a hole through a rock; you just need a dimpled rock as top bearing. Also, isn't pressing down with a bow drill making more friction so faster fires?

<comment><USER6> You can even use wood as the top bearing in a bow drill, as long as you lubricate it slightly. It's sufficient to rub it with leaves, or rub your thumb on the side of your nose and then on the bearing. I've gone to primitive survival classes, and gotten fire this way; my first, making all the pieces and learning the technique, took about three days, off and on. My second one with the same rig took five minutes.

With practice they're fast to make. In one class we divided into groups of half a dozen, and competed to get the first bow drill fire without using any pre-made tools. No knives or axes, just whatever rocks we could find. The winners took less than an hour.

Hand drills are a lot more difficult to use, and I've never gotten the hang of it. But I've seen some people get hand drill fires pretty reliably in a couple minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course now would be a good time to watch [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082484/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082484/)

There's nothing primitive about the things demonstrated in his videos. The self-made / nature friendly / survival ratio is high in my view. But I have a passion with old and simple but effective and life critical. Also the importance of geometry, you see how curves and dents will result in sub- optimal energy conversion. I'd love to find videos about gradual precision increasing and scale changes (assembling large and or small things in smart and subtles ways).

Chatting with people on #emacs, I learned that with long weed and time you could craft fat ropes long enough to build rope bridges. That too was fascinating.

There's also a few topic on the web about bootstrapping the tech stack from scratch. Which is a fun thing to imagine too. Which leads to what alternative path could technology take, maybe there's no need to replay history, one could quickly go into ceramics, lenses, metals and rapidly assemble radio emitters, various sensors, and (maybe?) avoid large scale agriculture, oil based devices etc etc

ps: this [https://youtu.be/kiHojsMTBeA?t=166](https://youtu.be/kiHojsMTBeA?t=166) is also pretty smart, how a few cross "sticks" leads to a natural frame for a basket. How to derive structure and strength from weak bits of plants and trees.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some history on the drills he's using (and others) [http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/12/hand-powered- drilling...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/12/hand-powered-drilling- tools-and-machines.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't wait when he reaches the bronze age.</comment>


Fardon issues fiery letter on exit as U.S. attorney in Chicago - <AUTHOR> https://archive.fo/203tP <comment><AUTHOR> US Attorney for Chicago offers a five page letter as he resigns. Claims gun violence is an epidemic spread by social media, particularly Facebook and Snapchat.

Chicago Tribune employs adblock blockers, archive link substituted.

Full text of letter: [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3516525-03132017-Unt...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3516525-03132017-Untitled- NOTSET.html#document/p1)</comment>


Ask HN: Have You Tried Wake Therapy? - <AUTHOR> This comes up on HN with relative frequency in comments. There's more on it recently and I've personally found it to be potentially helpful as an anti-depressant <i>and</i> potentially nootropic treatment, but with also obviously significant side effects. <comment><USER2> I wouldn't try it unless my doctor recommended it. This is the first time I am hearing about this, but it looks like some kind of fad treatment. Is it backed by studies?

Sleep seems to be super needed by our bodies, so I don't see any mechanism of how it can be helpful</comment>


I don't want a hustler - <AUTHOR> http://andrewacove.posterous.com/i-dont-want-a-hustler <comment><USER2> _I will readily take a business-minded, action-oriented cofounder who gets shit done. I have absolutely no interest in a hustler._

In my mind, that is the absolute definition of a hustler, someone who will get shit done. Predicating that hustlers are sleazy, or have questionable ethics, or don't value technical skill sets is the same as assuming that "hackers" are people who break into computers.

Sure there are probably a lot of sleazy "hustlers", just as their are malicious "hackers", but in my mind the definition of a hustler is someone who comes at the same problem as a good hacker would - with the same tenacity and willingness to try new things and the inability to quit in solving a problem.

In which case I absolutely want a hustler on my team, just not a shitty one.

 _Admittedly, I've done Micah some disservice by referencing his article. The Hustlers he describes aren't the sleezeballs I keep encountering, but unfortunately they share the same space and a more literal interpretation of the term includes them._

So it sounds like the summary is that good hustlers are hard to come by, just as good hackers are, not that they aren't good to have. The title seems to suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Hustler both describes enterprising go getters and sleaze ball unscrupulous jerks. The problem is which meaning is more prevalent. I can't think of a single person I would describe with the word hustler and mean it in a positive way. I also wouldn't use the word hacker to refer to myself or any of my respected peers outside of technical circles due to its very negative connotations with non technical folk. While the premise of the hackers and hustlers essay was good the word choice may be poor for the average person. In my experience you end up spending as much time describing the intended use of the words hacker and hustler as you do making the point about determined and talented people. The end result is the point is lost in technicalities.

<comment><USER2> I agree with the assessment that both terms come with such differing meanings, that they should probably be avoided in the mainstream for the fear of losing the point in the technicalities.

What I took issue with is that the post was in direct response to a piece that outlined _exactly_ what the term hustler meant in the positive sense, then went on to say that they wouldn't want one based on the negative meaning, when in reality they just couldn't find a good one to work with.

As the original article from Micah said: _A Hustler on the other other hand is a relationship builder. Someone who can build direct relationships with their customers. They arent really promoters, although they do a lot of promotion. They arent salespeople, although they do a lot of selling. They are passion people. They have the ability to articulate their passion clearly and in a way that gets other people equally passionate._

As a technical person who has worked on several projects with someone who I consider to be an "enterprising go getter" and in my mind a hustler, I think that they can often be greatly under appreciated - especially good ones, and this article didn't do anything to convey that respect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I may not have been clear enough in explaining it, but my blog post isn't a direct response to Micah's, though I use his post for context. Mine is a response to the people who think they are hustlers (by Micah's definition), promote themselves as such, and are in actuality the type of people I describe. Unfortunately, they significantly outnumber hustlers who hew to the intended definition.

The post is also tinged with some additional dismay at my discovery that some of the hustlers held up in the valley as prime examples of the form have proven themselves to be sleazy as well. One of those people is who I refer to in the sentences about lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've known a couple of examples. There was the hustler who was booted from his own startup because he was a shallow jerk that no-one wanted to work for. The company is doing very well without him.

Then there was the founder/hustler who made promises to customers without even consulting his development team, despite this repeatedly coming back to bite the company in the rear-end. He's still doing it today.

I think it's great if someone is willing to do whatever it takes to make a deal... but the deal isn't over until the product is in the hands of the customer. When promises are made that can't be kept, it lowers everyone's morale (customers, developers, hustlers, etc). Hustlers need to look at the big picture and understand what the real cost of closing a deal is.

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that there no hustlers in Bay Area/Nor Cali. The culture's home is New York, and more along East Coast (Miami).

A lot of my friends (in Brooklyn, NY) are hustlers.

Nor Cali and New York basically two opposing cultures.

Hipsters will never be hustlers.

Make no mistake, hustlers may not know how to setup an EC2 instance but they know how to make bank.

(I'm using my definition of hustler, which is someone along the lines of "Naughty" per pg's essays, especially someone who operates in "grey" areas (not illegal).)

</comment><comment><USER6> In my experience, hustlers (the 'naughty' kind) are good for making everyone think you're making real progress while your company is actually going sideways. We had a couple hustler-types who spent a lot of time blowing smoke simultaneously up engineering, BD and customer's asses.

It was only after they were gone that we were able to disentangle an elaborate web of false expectations and outright lies and start making actual progress again. Particularly mischievous was the way that these guys often created constant panics for engineering due to the unrealistic promises that they'd made to customers - they would then regard this as 'good management' (look how hard we're making everyone work).

Bonus points for the fact that these guys were working on their own startup "on their own time" (sort of).

</comment><comment><USER7> Edit title: I don't want a hustler, I just want someone with hustle.

</comment><comment><USER8> My proposal: stop using the word "hustler". While many people in the startup community have gotten used to the "aggressively active or enterprising person" definition, for most people, the first definition that comes to mind is "a person who lives by stealing or other dishonest means; a thief, pimp, etc."

<http://www.answers.com/topic/hustler-slang-term>

<comment><USER9> We should also stop using the word hacker because most people think it's someone who lives by stealing or breaking into peoples computers; a thief, a criminal etc.

</probably unneccessary sarcasm>

<comment><USER8> As far as I'm aware, hacker had a positive meaning before some people started using it negatively, while hustler seems to have mainly been used negatively before some people starting using it positively.

<comment><USER9> While that may be true the comment refers to current perceptions rather than etymology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Edit title: I want a hustler but can't find one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Upvoted. As I've often heard people say about good UX designers, "I'd also like a unicorn."

Honestly, though, I'm more interested in Hacker/Humanist than Hacker/Hustler. I think a UX person would be a much more valuable partner for me.

<comment><USER11> I sent you an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Larry Ellison (Co-Founder of Oracle) was/is a hustler. It's served him well.

<comment><USER13> "So, Larry, why are you calling the first version of your software 'release 2.0'?".

"Because no one ever buys the first version of anything."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tomato, tomato.

Just splitting hairs about what people call a hustler. this post is just as easily titled "I've met a bunch of shitty hustlers".

Plenty of good "business guy"/"hustler"/"business-minded, action-oriented cofounder"s have just as much trouble finding good engineering talent.

Yes, finding quality people is hard. That's part of the game.

</comment><comment><USER15> For what it's worth, the term "hustler" is used pretty frequently as a colloquialism for pro-actively selling in a range of industries. I've heard it used in reference to musicians, writers, actors and artists.

In the Ricky Gervais series "Extras" in the episode with Patrick Stewart when Ricky accosts him to look through his script Patrick says "I know I know, you're hustling".

There's also the popularisation of the term in the hip-hop culture (gotta hustle y'all, we gotta hustle) where the term represents achieving despite extreme adversity.

</comment><comment><USER16> I actually think I could fill either the hacker or hustler role in most teams, but would prefer to work with one or more other people so I can focus on one or the other role.

"Sales engineers", consultants, and hackers who enjoy building/promoting their own products are probably all some combination of these roles.

</comment><comment><USER17> The author's definition of hustler seems to be different from mine. <http://joeyroth.com/poster/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely true. Yours is more in line with the intent of Micah's original blog post.

Mine is based on my experiences with the people I meet who intend to fill the role. In theory, your definition should be correct - in practice, the scene is full of people who represent mine. They might be making an unfounded claim to the title, but filtering the network to just the real ones is a nightmare.

<comment><USER17> Ah. Well put. Semantics aside then, that's a bummer. Good luck with your search!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would imagine what you need is someone who is able to comprehend and convey effectively.

A geek with useable social skills and self-confidence.

</comment><comment><USER19> When I think of "hustler" in this sense, I think of someone who is constantly involved in relationship-building work (although I've never heard the word used in this way, but let's run with it). He may be a scam artist or unethical; he may not be. They're not all bad (but most are). The hustler's social and work lives have fused into one more-than-full-time job, and he chooses his friends based on how useful they are. He usually started out fairly well-connected, and has the huge leg-up of an MBA from one of the big three (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton) business schools, and now has a huge network of contacts. This is only a marginal advantage for entrepreneurs (mid- level investment bankers are useless "connections" for startups) but it lets the hustler feel full of himself because he has other options (i.e. his connections can get him a $250,000 job, so you should feel privileged that he is taking the time to talk to you) than whatever project he's doing at the time.

When it becomes insufferable is when the hustler thinks his social connections deserve to trade at a ridiculously high rate against more evenly allocated (and therefore more common) assets like talent and drive. As he sees it, he knows all the important people, but any idiot can code. So he tends to offer terms like 5% equity for writing all of the code to implement his idea. They get what they deserve when only idiots want to code for them.

</comment><comment><USER20> hackers are hustlers.</comment>


How robust is C#'s pseudo-random number generator?  - <AUTHOR>

Anyone have a reference for a robust analysis of C#'s uniform pseudo-random number generator? I am writing something that uses the Random class and want to make sure it satisfies marsaglia / bruce schmeiser's criteria for RNGs. I don't even know if it uses mersenne twister, for example; I was hoping since C# is popular enough I might save some time using the legwork of others. If nothing is out there, I might put together an analysis myself.<p>Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Myles <comment><USER2> The standard one in System.Random uses Donald E. Knuth's subtractive random number generator algorithm according to the documentation. Which shouldn't be too hard to find an anlysis on. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/system.random(v=vs.1...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/system.random\(v=vs.110\).aspx)

Then there is the Cryptographically secure one over in System.Security.Cryptography.RandomNumberGenerator I believe it uses CryptGenRandom under the hood, so I believe it has been analysed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much, that's enough for me to sink my teeth into for now. I appreciate the feedback.</comment></comment>


Gitlab deletes then opens account to others without warning - <AUTHOR> . <comment><USER2> The historical nature of or convention on the web has been first come first served on names. Most well designed systems will never change a username due to inactivity or for any reason other than the owner requesting it (even that's not allowed on most systems). Usernames that aren't actively used, after a known period of inactivity, may be deleted along with content associated with that username.

Look at email addresses: platforms like Gmail and Yahoo will delete your account for inactivity with adequate advance warning, but they will not release your email address for someone else to claim in the future (on the other hand, paid platforms like Fastmail and Posteo will allow your deleted addresses on their domains to be grabbed by anyone).

With GitLab's policy of renaming inactive accounts without any warning or notice, any links that someone has shared could later point to a different person. A "404 Not Found" error or an "email address does not exist" error is far better, IMO, than redirecting someone to a totally different person.

If an inactive username is to be released back for use by someone else, there should be a significant duration from the time the username is disabled to the time when it's available for someone else.

<comment><USER3> We clearly outline what we consider dormant here: [https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace- requests](https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace-requests)

It's to prevent name-squatting, GitHub has a similar policy: [https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github- usernam...](https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-username- policy)

<comment><USER4> That's not a similar policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm from GitLab support. We do have a dormant namespace release policy which your account may have been eligible under:

[https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace- requests](https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace-requests)

If your account was released under this policy, it's likely your username was renamed to <username>_idle, as documented here:

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/workflows/dormant_...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/workflows/dormant_username_policy.html#request- successful)

I don't know what happened with your account specifically as you haven't mentioned your username. You can always drop us a support request regarding your account here:

[https://support.gitlab.com/hc/en-us](https://support.gitlab.com/hc/en-us)

</comment><comment><USER6> That's crazy! Moved to Gitlab for some projects because of Github horror stories, and now this? The only "safe" way to do anything is to self host everything, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a pathetic policy, Gitlab. For this reason alone, I'll stick to GitHub.

What if I'm hospitalized or away on an extended trip? You just going to let someone else take my account username?

No thanks.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't worry about that, we have clear conditions that need to be met before we release a username [1]. It's meant to prevent name-squatting, not take usernames away from actual users. Although I do want to point out that GitHub also has this [2], it's just worded differently and doesn't outline what they consider "inactive".

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace- requests](https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace-requests)

[2] [https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github- usernam...](https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-username- policy)

<comment><USER4> What's an "active project"? OP says they discovered that their account had been renamed by having their workflow break. What kind of activity was OP regularly engaging in that depended on OP's account existing with the original name but did not flag OP's account as active?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like we're missing part of the story here. Are we?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a low volume and boring user. I also have <no> messaging from GitLab, so there isn't much to say.

Also, what kind of poor user behavior on my part means opening up my account for registration? Let's say that Rush Limbaugh is kicked off of Twitter for bad behavior — should I be able to claim his account?

And shouldn't the hypothetical Twitter user get an email warning them that their account is about to be opened up for public registration? I only tried to register under my own account to test whether my account had been disabled.

<comment><USER9> This is about Gitlab's dormant policy which is similar to Github's name squatting policy.

Only happens to long inactive accounts and both platforms will not notify the owner since it's about name squatting. They just rename the handle and you still have your account.

Why anyone should be concerned if his account has been inactive for a long time?

<comment><USER10> Yes. I am sure there are many, but here's one stupid reason:

      pip install git+https://gitlab.com/me/lib

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had a similar experience: Gitlab renamed my account after a period of inactivity without any warning, and someone else took my username :(

<comment><USER3> For future reference, you can see what we consider dormant here: [https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace- requests](https://about.gitlab.com/support/#dormant-namespace-requests)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't this a considerable security issue?

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like someone broke the URL and description. Is this being buried?</comment>


Free temporary email, disposable e-mail address - <AUTHOR> http://die.life?x=4 <comment><USER2> Is it really necessary to repost this every few days?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=die.life&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=die.life&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story)</comment>


Ask HN: Fraction of Y-Comb companies raise funding during cycle? - <AUTHOR>

Anon, for obvious reasons.
Ok, so we have an investor who wants to invest. For reasons [1] we do not want to take the money. We have no other investors lined up. And we are running out of money.
We applied to Y Comb and like to think that we have a good shot.
What I am thinking of is turning down the investor and taking my chances with raising money after (if) we get into Y combinator.
Since we are running out of money so this is playing it close. Anyways, question time:
_What fraction of Y Combinator companies raise funding before the end of the cycle?_
--
1. I know this is risky.
2. Investor is not bad or terrible. He has a geographic focus and insists on us moving to suburban places. We are hipsters.
3. I know about DST etc. I am talking about other sources. <comment><USER2> Simply not wanting to live in a suburb seems like kind of a short-sighted reason (unless you have house/kids or something) to turn down an otherwise good investment. Especially with no alternatives.

There's probably a very large random element involved in getting accepted into YC. If that's you're only backup plan you should make sure you won't be kicking yourself for passing up the current offer.

</comment><comment><USER3> In summer 2010 about 40% did.

It's no problem to raise money before YC if you do it on a convertible note that YC's investment doesn't trigger.

</comment><comment><USER4> This winter, all got a 150'000 USD convertible note with interest at IRS's AFR, with a 2 years maturity date.</comment>


Natural Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.princeton.edu/~bbukh/natural.html

<comment><USER2> Shameless plug, but I enjoy writing natural, intuitive explanations of math & programming topics. Try this intuitive guide to e if the true meaning of that constant has eluded you:

[http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-guide-to- ex...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-guide-to-exponential- functions-e/)

Sometimes you need to "forget" what you know and come at things with a beginner's mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my experience, the biggest hurdle in math is understanding what the notation is saying. Usually the ideas are pretty straight forward, though clever.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the worst career advice you ever received? - <AUTHOR> What are some well meaning but completely wrong career advice you have ever received? <comment><USER2> Dropping out of university will look bad on your résumé, no one will hire you.

There are a ton of jobs, even high profile jobs, that can be reached even without a degree, at least in it. Fields experience, attitude and willing to learn (kinda ironically) will get you very far.

I still believe that getting a degree is worth it and plan to go back to studying once some things are settled though.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Spend the next 40 years working for THE MAN and if you're lucky you'll save enough to spend the last few years of your life living at 50% of the lifestyle you had while you were scraping by to save for retirement. If you're lucky." The point is, you need to work your ass off anyway, so why not start a successful business?

</comment><comment><USER2> That you need to be close to graduating to go look for an internship.

Go and look for an internship as soon as you have a vague idea about how stuff work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your boss/mentor has a plan for you. Trust them.</comment>


Your clothes are killing us - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/22/news/economy/true-cost-clothing/index.html

<comment><USER2> If it's not ethical to buy a t-shirt for $5, it's possibly not ethical to buy it at any higher price either - easy enough for a retailer to sell the same $5 shirt at a higher price. There isn't really a structure which allows me to know by inspecting a shirt what was involved in its overseas production.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can thank the media for contributing to this too. Constant stoking of greed and vanity and materialism leading to an endless cycle of throwaway consumerism.</comment>


On the origins of serial communications and data encoding - <AUTHOR> http://www.compkarori.com/dbase/bu07sh.htm <comment><USER2> This is a nice article about early communications using electrical circuits, but doesn't deliver on the promise of the title. For that I recommend "The Early History of Data Networks" by Gerard Holzmann (<http://spinroot.com/gerard/hist.html>) or the short paper "Data Communications: The First 2500 Years" (<http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/hamburg94b.pdf>).</comment>


Waymo to Buy Up to 62,000 Chrysler Minivans for Ride-Hailing Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysler-minivans.html <comment><USER2> Really, Chrysler? They must've gotten a deep discount.</comment>


Does it really take 10000 hours to master programming? - <AUTHOR> I am a programmer who wants to pick up a new language and become better at programming. I am trying to realize if 10000 hours is a good estimate of the dedicated practice on needs to do in order to become good? Else what are the hacks? I want to learn the MEAN stack. <comment><USER2> Actually those 10k hours are a (semi) myth: it may take a bit less to get started [1] and it's all about deliberate practice, not _just_ practice.

The "secret" is hid in plain sight: just do stuff. The more - and diverse! - you do, the more you learn. You know more, you can do more, so you can learn more.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY)

</comment><comment><USER3> Judging by the quantity of crapware in existence, the answer is: yes.</comment>


Awesome blackfriday - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/smayzes/awesome-blackfriday <comment><USER2> I'm participating in the Black Friday online deals. I think it's a great time to shop for deals on beneficial terms. I saw some good offers on [http://www.templatemonster.com/blog/black- friday-2016-deals-...](http://www.templatemonster.com/blog/black- friday-2016-deals-tech/) . This source is well worth checking.</comment>


The Legal Rationale for Killing an Enemy Hacker - <AUTHOR> http://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-legal-rationale-for-killing-enemy.html

<comment><USER2> People involved with hacking die mysteriously in Europe all the time, like the British guy who made the first Java decompiler and got hit by a car or the German Student who committed "suicide" just after he thwarted the goals of major European electronic conglomerates by writing a paper about how you can unpot a smart card with nitric acid then look at the chip with an electron or scanning microscope, attach probes and otherwise get any secrets the device has in it.</comment>


Classical mechanics worked problems book - <AUTHOR> http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/book.html <comment><AUTHOR> I am currently about to finish Chap 6 on momentum, and working through this book has been one of the high points of this year for me. I have done all the problems but one, and I always try first, then look a little bit, then (often) throw my hands up and just try to memorize the answer. I also makes me tear my hair and think I am infernally stupid, but hey, it's physics.

<comment><USER2> You're not stupid, it's just that some of the most intelligent people in the world have been drawn to the subject, most of which is actually quite new (consider that the atom was really only discovered in the 20th century!). The chains of inference are brilliant, and the amazing thing is how teachers treat the subject as a mundane set of tools to get through problem sets (not that David Morin does this).

There's this air of understanding that isn't justified. As Feynman famously pointed out, forget about not understanding quantum mechanics - no-one really understands _Maxwell 's equations_ because to do so would be to somehow have an intuition for a function that maps each point in a volume of space to 6 numbers (the 3 components of the E and B vectors at each point). This intuition is impossible in the general case, but we fool ourselves into thinking we have that intuition because the pedagogy focuses on special cases.

Anyway, don't be too hard on yourself. You are walking in the footsteps of some of the greatest minds in human history, and even though they've cleared a path, the going is still rather steep.

<comment><USER3> Logged in just to praise that last sentence... very well put.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These are books I would have liked to have when I studied Mechanics. Just a couple of very nice point spotted on chapter 1 of Introduction to Classical Mechanic: the dimensional analysis example and the linearization of ODEs are worth the reading.</comment>


Momentum Isn't Magic–Vindicating the Hot Hand with the Mathematics of Streaks - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-isnt-magic-vindicating-the-hot-hand-with-the-mathematics-of-streaks/ <comment><AUTHOR> > Even Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman affirmed this consensus: "The hot > hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion." > > Nevertheless, > recent work has uncovered critical flaws in the research which underlies > this consensus. In fact, these flaws are sufficient to not only invalidate > the most compelling evidence against the hot hand, but even to vindicate the > belief in streakiness.

The difficulty involves subtle misunderstanding of the probabilities involved in random sequences: an error that is nearly "nearly equivalent to the famous Monty Hall problem".</comment>


Ask HN: How many countries have you been to? Which ones were your favorite? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Not many. Aside from the US, where I was born, Canada, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Jamaica.

Of those, Mexico is my favorite. I spent almost no time in Canada so I can't say much about it, except Vancouver was nice.

Belize was ok, but I've no desire to return. It felt too tense there. Guatemalans were very friendly and I really enjoyed my short time there, but the border patrol there were just assholes for no reason. Jamaica is beautiful, but I felt like nothing but a target for hustlers there and made no "friends" there.

Growing up in the US we get the idea that Mexico is full of poor people who are all banditos but I could live there and be happy.</comment>


Year in Review 2018: GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13735/anandtech-2018-in-review-gpus <comment><USER2> Why quad data rate? The fundamental advantage of double data rate is that the clock signal has the same maximum frequency - and the same signal integriry requirements - as the data lines, whereas in single data rate it runs at twice the frequency making it the limiting factor. I can't see much obvious advantage to going above that though.

<comment><USER3> The quad data rate trick is reading on differentiated and level gated clock. Actual clock signal is still same rate. Works when clock rates are high as the transition time gets close to clock pulse time - the clock is no longer considered square but exponential trapezoid.

It is 2x bandwidth compared to just using clock edges, but requires nice bypassing to get nice clock transitions and is obviously quite a bit higher transistor count for stabilization. It is similar to clock doubling but much simpler and thus faster.

Of course you get some latency benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing of relevance happened.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, still waiting for a ray-tracing quantum-differential-tensor-kanren GPU...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are any of these cards supported by FLOSS drivers? If not, then they're essentially useless for anyone that wants a stable system.

<comment><USER6> To answer my own question, looks like the mentioned AMD RX580 has a non-Free EULA: [https://www.amd.com/en/support/gpu-pro- eula](https://www.amd.com/en/support/gpu-pro-eula)

They can keep it.</comment></comment>


Common Mistakes in Firebase Security Rules - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/noless/common-mistakes-in-firebase-security-rules-part-1-fd8cdd8bc8a6 <comment><USER2> This was a different way of thinking about security rules for us. But basically you have to make everything not readable and not writable at the root and then open up access farther down. And the way you need to structure your data will be affected. You might have a "user" level in the tree but you make a child level "private" readable by the actual user and no one else, like /users/$userId/private. Then you might have a /users/$userId/public that anyone can read, etc.

We also don't allow any writing directly to the data nodes but rather have a separate level in the tree where "requests" are written, then a privileged process reads, processes, and writes to the main data nodes, then notifies the client it's done by writing to a "response" node that only the client can read. This helps us make the security rules a little simpler and less error prone to mistakes, but primarily it's so we have a hook to run business processes and validation that doesn't need to be in the client which is unsafe.

I'd recommend using the bolt compiler ([https://github.com/firebase/bolt](https://github.com/firebase/bolt)) so that you can write rules using repeatable logic and so that you can actually read complex rules.

<comment><USER3> _This was a different way of thinking about security rules for us. But basically you have to make everything not readable and not writable at the root and then open up access farther down. And the way you need to structure your data will be affected. You might have a "user" level in the tree but you make a child level "private" readable by the actual user and no one else, like /users/$userId/private. Then you might have a /users/$userId/public that anyone can read, etc._

How were you thinking of it before? This reads to me how Apache servers have been configured for 20 years.

<comment><USER2> Like some other commenters here. Like the rules would cascade down similar to css. You might think that a read rule on a parent node would apply to a child unless that child overrode the that rule. But it doesn't. So you keep having to read the rules up the hierarchy to see who could ever read the node.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like the functionality we see configured in e.g. .htaccess files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is fantastic for people that are more new to Firebase and make these common mistakes. I know when I first started using Firebase for side projects (for fun), as just a front-end dev using Firebase, I found the security aspect of Firebase very overwhelming and scary. I ended up having to pull in some dev friends to help me dial them in properly. The Firebase security docs may be way better now but even as little as a year ago, I found them to just gloss over the topic too casually, personally. It did not make me feel super confident in the security rules I had. I really appreciate the author here taking the time to outline some of these and expand their thoughts more! It really helps a ton!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not familiar with firebase, but am I reading correctly that rules cascade but without specificity rules?

How does cascading make sense at all if lower-down rules don't supersede higher rules?

<comment><USER6> Agreed - this doesn't seem to make sense to me. And the docs seem to corroborate this:

> Note that .read and .write rules shallower in the database override deeper > rules, so read access to /foo/bar/baz would still be granted in this example > even if a rule at the path /foo/bar/baz evaluated to false.

[https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security/)

This seems unreasonable at first glance. Does anyone know the rationale for it?

<comment><USER7> I dont speak for the firebase team but this is my rationale: its "just" nested JSON. if you request one node in the JSON and it passes a security rule it gives you the entire node. Having to traverse all children for additional rules would be less performant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to use Firebase. I was ecstatic about the fact that I didn't need a server.

Then I spent months where Whenever I needed to solve a use case I'd spend more time thinking about how to structure my data, how to secure it. I'd spend a lot less time actually building features and more time twisting myself into knots figuring out how to make it work with security rules. It feels backwards to me to have security dictacte the structure of my data rather than the business needs.

I switched to Azure functions front ending my data, which resides in Cosmos DB. Now I can structure my data in a way that suits the business need. Security is incomparably easier now and more flexible.

<comment><USER7> have you tried Firestore? meant to solve exactly this complaint about firebase. but of coure not gonna beat a more customizable solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does this apply to data store though?</comment>


Pluggable Storage Committed in Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/tableam.html <comment><USER2> context:

"PLUGGABLE STORAGE IN POSTGRESQL" (2018 PGCONF.EU ; Andres Freund)

pdf: [https://anarazel.de/talks/2018-10-25-pgconfeu-pluggable- stor...](https://anarazel.de/talks/2018-10-25-pgconfeu-pluggable- storage/pluggable.pdf)

 _" "Why?

● ZHeap – UNDO based storage, address bloat and write amplification problems

● Columnar Storage

● Experiments

""_

 _" PostgreSQL has long prided itself in being extensible. But for a number of years people have wished for the ability to not only introduce new datatypes and functions, but also to add new forms of storing data. The introduction of foreign data wrappers (FDWs) allowed to satisfy some of those use-cases. They however are not fully suitable for native data storage, quite fundamentally they don't allow for index creation, foreign keys, etc.

Over the last years people have on and off worked on making table storage pluggable. It looks like PostgreSQL 12 might finally get builtin support for that, based on work of Haribabu Kommi, myself and others.

This talk will go over the reasons why it is useful to make storage pluggable (my personal reason is to allow the introduction of zheap, a new undo based table storage that is nearly free of table bloat) and how the new APIs work, and what further use-cases the pluggable storage APIs have."_

<comment><USER3> Thank for the context, this is great! I'm looking into this now to see if I can use it with my project pggraphblas, i was hoping to make an FDW where each column is backed by a matrix, making essentially a "property graph" that can be queries with straight SQL, but this looks much more interesting and also easier to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, in hindsight, this never should have been called pluggable storage, but rather pluggable table access methods, or at least pluggable table storage. But it was was in the subject on the first thread this patchset originated in (by Alvaro Herrera), and stuck...

At least the code doesn't call it pluggable storage...

</comment><comment><USER5> Is that a good thing?

Instead of a single postgres this there will be a lot of subtle or very different variants, all needing completely different tuning, like it happened with MySQL. May well fragment the ecosystem significantly.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a _significant_ danger.

But on the other hand our current table storage has some architectural issues that are hard to fix in an upward compatible manner (causing a number of issues around vacuum and write amplification due to hint bits etc). And even if there were an easy-ish incremental upgrade path, it's hard to e.g. move to an UNDO based MVCC implementation without regressing some workload (& introduce bugs) - allowing that development to happen in parallel and the adoption be by choice, that's much more realistic.

Additionally, the best type of table storage is also very workload dependent. E.g. for some analytics (or even just long term storage) it's quite useful to have a columnar store, but for lots of transactional workloads that's not appropriate. (Note that the current tableam interface would allow for some simple columnar store, but that'd still need a good bit of planner and executor smarts to be useful for anything but higher storage density.)

So I think on balance it's _probably_ worth it.

<comment><USER6> From my perspective, columnar storage is an enormous win. One of the best things I've been able to do for clients on MSSQL has been to tell them simply to create a clustered columnstore index on their large tables for analytical workloads.

At one point we had a need to perform a diff between a yesterday-snapshot and a today-snapshot of a billion row table. If I recall correctly, this took 1 or 2 minutes with clustered columnstore vs nearly an hour for rowstore. The order of magnitude is certainly correct, even if my specific numbers are wrong.

If you're curious _why_ we had to do a full diff between two billion-row tables, that is a story for a different time, but there were good reasons and we also removed those good reasons through other design decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sqlite has a concept called virtual tables, which sit somewhere between "pluggable storage" and postgres foreign-data-wappers. They are fairly easy to implement and can be incrementally improved by providing more sophisticated hints to the planner. I think the folks at tarantool have done some work hooking deeply into sqlite's pager/wal, presumably others (the folks who connected sqlite to lmdb?). And of course Oracle, who ripped out the sqlite btree and replaced it with BerkeleyDB.

I think sqlite4 (defunct) was going to have pluggable storage, but they ended up scrapping it. Presumably over performance concerns, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, interested to see how this feature is adopted and to learn more.

</comment><comment><USER8> huh. on one hand, this is awesome! something like this should be fantastic for things like citus's columnar storage - a pluggable storage system can be a huge boon. on the other hand there have been some bugs popping up on pg-bugs like the parallel queries that look a little questionable. hopefully no negative impact for anyone upstream while everything gets hammered out. context: i'm The maintainer of a fairly popular pg extension

editing to note that the bugs popping up have nothing to do with this, just the hope that it doesn't become ... overwhelming

<comment><USER9> Hi Jerry, Yeah, parallelism is hard... but speaking as someone involved in several bug fixes in that area, I can tell you that we put a _lot_ of effort into chasing those bugs down, and even made changes to allow extensions that were doing illegal things in _PG_init() to keep working under parallelism. Bugs are inevitable, and in complicated code it can take someone else's workload to uncover them. IMHO the important question is how well you deal with them, and I think we do a good job at providing work-arounds (primarily by providing GUCs so you can turn new stuff off it it's causing problems), and getting fixes into the tree ASAP. I think the worse recent case was the "DSM handle collision" one, which was hiding in code committed years ago but only discoverable with very particular timing and newer query plans. All currently known problems fixed in that department, but unfortunately those patches missed the February cut-off for 11.2 and will have to wait until May.

<comment><USER8> > but speaking as someone involved in several bug fixes in that area, I can > tell you that we put a lot of effort into chasing those bugs down,

yup! i've definitely seen the efforts, and really appreciate the work that everyone is doing to solve them - it's great seeing that kind of commitment.

> IMHO the important question is how well you deal with them

you are absolutely correct! and i can't fault how quickly bugs in parallelism have been triaged and fixed. but that wasn't what i was getting at - just that there have been a lot of fairly large changes (i guess you can call it a big increase in velocity?) that still seem to have (or uncovered as you said) a lot more to do - parallelism was just an example of a big change that seems to have some pretty big impacts on stability and planning and adding another big change makes me wary since that has direct impact on code that i maintain. it wasn't an attack, and i hope that it didn't come across that way, just an observation ... the more major changes the more balls in the air (to borrow a juggling metaphor), and pg has a ton of them in the air right now.

> I think we do a good job at providing work-arounds (primarily by providing > GUCs so you can turn new stuff off it it's causing problems)

GUC's are helpful, but there are times when direct access to postgresql.conf isn't really feasible ... and setting GUC's at the beginning of every session can become cumbersome/untenable.

also, GUC's aren't always feasible when some major changes have negative impact across whole stacks (the major changes in CTE's and how they impacted planning is one that i can think of off the top of my head).

> illegal things in _PG_init()

just curious, can you point to some of these? i want to do my own extension audits and considering that plv8 does/did a lot of things based on postgres/src/pl/* it would be good to make sure it's not doing any of those as well.

regardless, thanks for the response - it is appreciated.

<comment><USER9> >> illegal things in _PG_init()

> just curious, can you point to some of these? i want to do my own extension > audits and considering that plv8 does/did a lot of things based on > postgres/src/pl/* it would be good to make sure it's not doing any of those > as well.

[https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...](https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=6c3c9d418918373a9535ad3d3bd357f652a367e3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, congrats PG devs! This has been a dream for Postgres for like 8 year now.</comment>


Sniffing Browser History without CSS or JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://code.eligrey.com/visited.php?uri=http://news.ycombinator.com/news

<comment><USER2> It does use CSS. See [http://code.eligrey.com/visited.php?css&uri=http://news....](http://code.eligrey.com/visited.php?css&uri=http://news.ycombinator.com/news).

You are quickly redirected away from that page, so you don't see it (unless you look at Firebug's Net tab, sniff packets, or equiv).

Edit: acutally, it's just included as a stylesheet (with a HTTP link header)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not the redirect that hides it. View the page source before redirect and you will see there are no <link rel="stylesheet"> or <style> tags.

<comment><USER2> header('Link: </visited.php?css&uri='.$_GET["uri"].'>; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css";');

It's in your source, look.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant the source the client-side sees. I know the `Link` header is sent in the application-end source.

<comment><USER2> And what do you think the client does with this? It downloads the file and implements the CSS rules.

Whether or not it is "hidden" from an average user, doesn't mean you are not using CSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> WebKit and IE users: This will only work in Opera and Gecko-based browsers.

<comment><USER3> How do you do that?</comment></comment>


The Process: Transforming SpaCy's Docs (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://increment.com/documentation/transforming-spacys-docs/ <comment><USER2> The documentation of _spaCy_ (with a lowercase 's') is what made me fall in love with this library. It is clear, concise, there is a left panel showing exactly the context of what you're looking at, examples and remarks are shown on the right.

I highly encourage you to see for yourself. [1][2]

[1] [https://spacy.io/usage/rule-based-matching#adding- patterns-a...](https://spacy.io/usage/rule-based-matching#adding-patterns- attributes-extended)

[2] [https://spacy.io/api/entityrecognizer#init](https://spacy.io/api/entityrecognizer#init)</comment>


Ask HN: How is clojure doing? - <AUTHOR>

Throughout my life I have been programming heavily in dynamic languages. Primarily Python and Perl with a little Java now and then. I'm not too deep into Java and haven't plumbed to deep into it.
However now I've been told that I need to learn a 'real language'(whatever that means). I don't want to go the OO path learning Java. The problem is here in India the Java and in general the OO market is full of low price developers. And being a part of that crowd means difficulty in finding a niche and expertise. So far I've done well with Perl and Python to retain that niche. Surprisingly not many have gone deep in Python/Perl in the Indian job scene.
I want to learn a functional programming language. Something in which I can develop large scalable systems. I've read Mark Jason Dominus's Higher order Perl and used many functional techniques in Perl. I've watched SICP-MIT videos a while back and I'm completely convinced of the technical merits of lisp.
So my question on learning lisp is more on 'making a living' reasons. I want to give sufficient time and learn clojure as a primary language in which I want to spend time working on in the future. So the questions are.

    1. How will learning clojure help me in job/career areas?
    2. Will learning clojure be helpful to switching to other Lisp dialect if they come up in the future.
    3. How is the entire Lisp hiring scenario look in the industry.
    4. Is anybody working on Lisp/Clojure currently and what are your experiences?
 <comment><USER2> I've been programming in Clojure for 2 years and still consider myself a beginner.

(Re. #2) Because of Clojure's immutability, you program differently than you would in a state-based language (most mainstream languages). So learning Clojure is not that helpful in preparing you for Common Lisp or Scheme. Just learn Common Lisp or Scheme, if that's your final goal.

(Re. #3) I've seen web pages detailing jobs in Common Lisp. Search, and you'll find them. Short answer: I don't think there are that many. Some independent programmers who have (or take) the liberty of using whatever language they want, get to use Lisps that way.

Re. "I'm not too deep into Java" and similar statements: FYI, Clojure is built on top of Java and _depends_ on Java being used to get things done. Clojure doesn't implement various things because of this; the language assumes that you know Java well enough to "drop into" Java when Clojure itself doesn't provide. (Clojure makes it very easy to do this, most _but not all_ of the time--and the exceptions aren't documented.)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have to find a job two years down the lane. Will you advertise yourself as a Lisp programmer or a Clojure programmer?

I am asking this as, Do Lisp programmers in one dialect generally get hired to program in another dialect?

<comment><USER3> I think the problem with Clojure is that it does not translate to Lisp 1 for 1 or rather the other way, Clojure relies on many of the Java libs and therefore requires some mastery of the Java API's this does not translate over to other lisps. That being said, the Clojure market is small but healthy, I have received several job offers for Clojure development in the past few months which would have been unheard of a year ago. Clojure is growing rapidly from my perspective and will continue to do so. Among it practitioners it is well regarded which means that it will be adopted by others given the relatively positive opinion that is held about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, my $.02:

1\. In terms of employability? Not much immediately, but perhaps more in the future as Clojure matures, more places use it, multicore languages become "hot", etc. I have no idea what the demand for Clojure is like in India, though. It will certainly make you a better programmer, however.

2\. Yes. The biggest hurdle is learning _a_ Lisp, not in switching between Lisps. The actual keywords used may vary, but the underlying concepts will be quite similar.

3\. Here in New York, I rarely see Clojure jobs advertised for, but there's definitely people interested. I suspect it's mostly being used personally, and for some small in-house projects at the moment. I expect I'll hear of some startups using it as their language of choice in the next year.

4\. I love it, but I'm only using it at the personal level. I think it's an extremely well thought-out language.</comment>


The Art of the Landing Page – Tips for Increasing Conversions - <AUTHOR> https://beta.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article?postguid=1166f6e6-96a7-4033-976d-d0af99aff286

<comment><USER2> I do a lot of landing page designs for clients. Here are some successful pages I can show:

<http://www.codedpreview.com/previews/68ce03ad/>

<http://www.codedpreview.com/previews/78709ad6/>

<http://www.codedpreview.com/previews/f2658514/>

<http://www.codedpreview.com/previews/96728435/>

It's important to keep in mind that the most important thing about your landing page is that you send qualified leads to them. Some of the requests I get seem very silly or odd, but my clients are AdWords magicians and can get the right people to go to them and convert very well.

Many clients optimize the pages I deliver to bring in $500 a day, net. I've been in the affiliate marketing service industry for long enough to have some insights for anyone just starting with online marketing.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply and ask!

</comment><comment><USER3> Good advise

</comment><comment><USER4> Very educational

</comment><comment><USER5> Rule #1: Test, test and test.

That's one thing I've learned from my experience with landing pages. You should assume little. Test a lot.

<comment><USER6> Yep, testing is essential for landing pages. But successful tests require good amount of traffic which might not be possible for smaller campaigns. So, best approach would be to follow best practices in landing page design and then tweak one thing at a time to really optimize conversions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> heres a site Im working on landing page for local company - Please look it over and give first impressions ... on the landing page only...

<http://okcgranite.com/redorb/index.html>

<comment><USER8> in general, simplify.

my 2 cents. take or leave:

* severely cut down the copy up top. e.g.: Athenian Marble has specialized in cultured marble since 1969. We have 50 employees in a 67,000 sq ft facility to serve your needs!

* add the A+ BBB rating as a very simple graphic--instant credibility (even I know what that is!)

* 3 calls to action below:

1) Call (phone number only)

2) Visit (address only; map seems extraneous; maybe include the photo form the "About us" with the building facade so people can find it easily when they drive there)

3) Email (deprioritize this--I assume most people pick up the phone for info on marble; maybe even get rid of the form and just have an email address)

I would refrain from using phrases like "Are You Ready?" and "Let us help you." In particular, "Are You Ready" could turn off someone who's just looking for info.

BTW, the "see all photos" page should feature photos more prominently. It has a ton of text up top. I imagine photos are very important for engaging customers.

<comment><USER7> Thank you very much I will - be A/b testing your exact idea (as far as I can get from the text) with google site optimizer thanks a lot that is great feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> By the way, what are good landing pages you can recommend to study? Ideally, with proved above average conversions.

<comment><USER10> supposedly those huge 1 page landing pages convert like gold.

<comment><USER7> one of the better reads I've found on landing pages - [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-the-seomoz-landing- pag...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-the-seomoz-landing-page- competition-winner) and yeah they say they do work like gold I could just never bring myself to be so sleezy

 __sleezy cause I think the reason they work is that they get you to read for 30 minutes, then you don't want to feel like you are wasting that 30 minutes by not buying.

<comment><USER11> Writing a long-form sales letter that fully and narratively explains the benefits (especially emotional) that will accrue from the purchase and use of the product is not sleazy, it's smart.

Lying about those benefits is sleazy.

<comment><USER10> a huge portion of those pages is the customer testimonials, all of them are made up on the spot. I'd call that sleazy, wouldn't you?

<comment><USER11> The ones I've read aren't mostly testimonials -- but yes, making testimonials up is sleazy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>