Ask HN: Predictions on what will be the most surprising technology in 10 years? - <AUTHOR> I often read articles talking about the next big thing in the short term (2-4 years), but thinking about the Bill Gates 2-year-10-year quote* has me wondering about 10 years from now: Will the most surprising thing be an expansion of an already rising technology? (AI, blockchain, biotech, nanotech, AR,...)<p>Or will it be something most people have never heard of yet? Thoughts/ predictions?<p>* "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." <comment><USER3> First, the negatives:

       Another AI winter
       Another VR winter
       Another hype-cycle of home automation
       Another hype-cycle of growing teeth

There _will_ be tech progress, but behind the scenes, doing the same things as before, just better. As prosaic as more modular manufactured goods, in the sense of prefab home construction, automobile components, FPGA's for electronic goods. Some may revolutionize the value-chain in an industry - <USER2> you won't see it unless you're in it.

Fundamentally new tech takes 20-30 years to come to market - especially if it really does change things (government regulatory regimes, infrastructure, how we live).

Now Moore's Law isn't giving us shallow victories any more, there is opportunity for deeper changes, that properly absorb and apply its past advances.

Right now, we are undergoing a re-orientation of our political systems, in the sense of how democracy operates without a traditional press; the continuing march of multi-nationals being more powerful than sovereign states; the hyper- concentration of wealth (due to the means of production no longer being land, nor labour, but technology). Social systems are a kind of "technology".

The central question of this technological change will be: why do the hyper- wealthy need people?

The most surprising technology will be new mathematics - not TB machine proofs, but quite simple and basic ones, akin to the positional number system, algebra, calculus. They will analyse complex systems, like Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics; the operation of deep learning networks; internet and traffic congestion; and cortical organization. They won't give magical results, but they will offer a new point of view, that some will experience as magical.

<comment><USER4> > The central question of this technological change will be: why do the hyper- > wealthy need people?

This is what concerns me. They already apply their wealth and organizations to treating the general public as a farm they cultivate. They shape the educational, tax, media, and legal structure in their favor quite successfully today. With the technological advancements in media development and their hold over education policy, tomorrow has a terrifying forecast unless some educational miracle of critical thought occurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Genetic / biotech stuff, driven by CRISPR. All the ones you mentioned, except nanotech maybe, are pretty locked in to create massive changes. I think the bio stuff will be the most "surprising", not least because it's harder to to write believable breathless hype about it. Not to say there won't be plenty of attempts, but I feel like the public is a little more inoculated against wild health/medical claims than "killer AI" or "$100k bitcoin", which is both a good thing and more likely to create surprise when a few of them turn out to be true.

AR a really close second, but I think people will be a little bit more ready for it given prevalence in sci-fi and experience of rapid computer & graphics progress in our lifetime. So it's easier to "expect" a world of Pokemon Go on steroids in your AR glasses than it is, say, one where a boutique offshore firm is offering to give your baby the ability to see into the infrared spectrum or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> Solar power, wireless service, remote working and transportation advances might change where we live. You can have a house powered by the sun without an electric grid, connect to LTE+++ with 100gbps, work remotely, and have food automatically delivered with self-driving trucks or drones. You could live anywhere you'd want.

<comment><USER7> I like the way you think. That would be my dream. Time to start investing in property out in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER6> With the way population is growing, owning land anywhere (that's not going to be swallowed by the sea) sounds like a good idea to me. If you have some disposable income and don't mind a possibly long wait (and the taxes too), I'd say go for it.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean by 'the way population is growing'? The global population growth rate has been slowing significantly over the past century (it's roughly half of what it was in the 60's). The growth rate in developed countries is pretty much universally <1% (and in many cases, negative).

Yeah, we're going to see continued growth in developing nations, but those rates will slow as well as those nations... develop.

<comment><USER6> I was referring to the sheer number of people being born. Even if the growth rate is declining, it's still a lot of ever growing number of people looking for housing.

<comment><USER8> The sheer number of people being born also has to be compared to the sheer number of people dying. The growth curve is leveling off quickly, and there is still a lot of space left.

<comment><USER6> You have bigger fish to fry if growth goes negative. If you think that's going to be the case soon in your country, maybe retirement homes would be a wiser investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I heard something recently about how terrible we are at predicting the future inherently.

I can't find the source, but I heard on a manager tools podcast that ~50 years ago they surveyed professionals about the future of flight. There was a ton of predictions about crazy concepts, but the winner was "bigger planes going more places"

This is also kind of a fun read: [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions)

</comment><comment><USER10> Re the Gates quote: Unless you're Ray Kurzweil, in which case you always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and wildly, ludicrously overestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

I'm old enough to have lived through the Drexlerian nanotechnology mania, and the Kurzweilian exponentialism mania, so I've learned to be extremely skeptical about anyone predicting earth-shattering advances in _any_ field of technology in a mere decade's time. (The Singularity is _not_ just over the horizon. Stop. You're _not_ going to live for a thousand years or upload your mind to a computer. Just _stop_.)

My prediction is 2027 will be almost indistinguishable from 2017, _if_ we're lucky, i.e., barring nuclear war or some CRISPR-crafted super-virus. However, if I had to choose a technology surprise for ten years from now it would involve being unlucky, i.e., the Loss of Everything Good due to an overwhelming tide of cyberterrorists and cybercriminals. I think few people (including me) fully appreciate how much destruction and chaos could be wrought, and how difficult it could be to protect our vital systems, so in that sense it would catch a lot of people by surprise.

The _optimistic_ technology outlook for 2027 is petabyte thumb drives, 16K televisions, 8G wireless, cheaper solar cells, and marginally better medical scanners. It's a pretty uninspiring list, and none of it is surprising.

That's my hope. Please let there be _no_ surprising technology in 10 years. Because the chances of a good surprise are vastly outweighed by the odds of bad ones.

<comment><USER11> Hey, are you gonna drink that half-empty beer or can I have it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, it's like guessing which number is least likely to be guessed in the same game. If you could predict it right, it's probably not that surprising :)

<comment><USER13> Sadly this is all too true. By their nature, surprises are unexpected. That said, I would be surprised if we had an operating fusion power plant, a workable age reversing treatment, or a recreational space station.

10 years ago in 2007 I would have been surprised if we had a car that could drive itself, or a way to edit fairly specific genes.

<comment><USER14> > a workable age reversing treatment

Is that really a thing though? I keep hearing about it, articles saying that the first human to reach 300 years of age is already born etc. But is all this true? Of all things mentioned so far (AI, VR, AR, fusion power..), this is the one I have the hardest time imagining. Going from ~90 to 300 in 10 years is a huge leap compared to even the ~40 to 90 years leap of 200 years ago and today.

Do you have some trustworthy reading material on the subject?

<comment><USER13> Remember, the theme "unexpected and surprising" :-) I would be surprised if we got there in 10 years.

That said, the reasoning on aging/health goes like this:

       * We understand cells at a chemical level.
       * We can dump out DNA and RNA
       * We understand some of the enzyme reactions involved in cellular biology.

When those become;

       * We understand cells at a chemical and functional level.
       * We can change DNA and RNA precisely of our choosing
       * We understand all of the enzyme reactions involved in cellular biology.

Then we would be in a position to tell our cells to do what ever we want. Fight cancer, sure program a t-cell that can identify it and kill it. Cure a cold? sequence the rhino virus and flood the immune system to target all cells with that signature for death. Auto-immune disease? Turn off the triggers that are generating the immune response. Etc, etc.

We cannot do all these things today but we're working on being able to. Just as we cannot maintain a stable fusion reaction with net energy output but we're working on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some sort of inexpensive, portable neuro-imaging device could be huge. It would allow us to interact with technology almost seamlessly, and solve a lot of problems. If it becomes ubiquitous, it also solves almost all out security problems. Brain-based biometrics that work by measuring your brain activity while you look at a particular image. Unlike other biometrics, it's easily cancelable and extremely secure. You can change your "password" by selecting a different image.

It would also grant us the ability to much more effectively monitor our mental state. I bet it could be extremely helpful in combating anxiety and promoting mindfulness.

</comment><comment><USER16> VR. Next two years are going to be pretty stagnant. The resolutions, etc. just are still enthusiast tier.

But 10 years time? We could be seeing the beginning of the end of TVs, smartphones, cinema, social media, etc. as we know it today. VR arcade warehouses popping up in many places. Perhaps even starting to impact the layouts of newly architected houses to have less walls, focus more on wide one-story dwellings (but stacked on top of each other) and more open space to roam wide in virtual reality.

</comment><comment><USER17> Surveillance will not only be pervasive (it already is) but normalized on a global scale. Read up on China's "Social Credit System" for a glimpse of where we're headed.

<comment><USER18> A system like the one you mentioned not only encourages surveillance but also paves way for more corruption at the top level (assuming the government goes ahead with rating businesses as well). I sincerely hope this system is abolished before other countries begin implementing it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of my predictions is that the AI pendulum will swing again at the other direction and people will wake up again to the reality that AI is far from achieving the romanticised stuff that the so called experts and book authors want the public to believe.

We will see gradual incremental improvement in specialised AIs for things like voice, face and character recognition. We will see an increased usage of AI and AI based technologies to improve efficiency and assist the humans in decision making. But it will not put nearly as many people out of jobs as some people suggest.

<comment><USER20> Yes and no.

I agree the effects on number of jobs will be smaller than people are predicting. It won't be mass unemployment.

On the other hand, people need to realize how sensitive the job market really is. Typical unemployment in the US is 4-5% in the last 10 years. If 1% of the workforce is put out of work by new technology, something I feel is _very_ likely, that's a 20% increase in unemployment. If it gets much larger, even maybe 8-9%, there could absolutely be mass riots and outrage.

The point is, job markets are like marriage/dating markets. They aren't smooth, they're something almost everyone wants, so even tiny little changes (like NYC's surplus of women) have dramatic, nonlinear effects. I don't think people appreciate what a "butterfly effect" this will have if, say, 10-20% of truckers (the most popular occupation in many states) are put out of work. That's an instant, large-scale political event.

EDIT Source: [https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/unemployment-rate- and-u-6-...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/unemployment-rate- and-u-6-measure-in-january-2015.htm)

<comment><USER19> Yes I agree that it is sensitive.

The part that annoys me is this backdrop of "machines are going to be doing everything and no one is going to have anything to do".

When in reality it's going to be an assistant next to the existing people, increasing efficiency. Like farming tools for a farmer, or auto-pilot for a pilot, or robo-equipment for a surgeon.

I often hear from non-programmers and non-technical people who somehow seem convinced that AI is some kind of dark magic that is going to kick in at some point and everything is going to be magically solved by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> New materials. The search space in materials science is so impossibly huge that it's an endless source of surprises. The last ceramics hype cycle was about 20 years ago, so we're due for another one. Maybe room-temperature ceramic superconductors?

<comment><USER22> I'm biased as I studied MSE but I think this is the best one. All the other answers - electric cars, AI, robotics, etc. - are already dominating headlines; they aren't surprising. A new material could be very surprising. This is a common saying in materials science - notice how the major ages of human development (bronze age, iron age, even arguably the silicon age) are named after materials? Who would have predicted them before they occurred?

Unfortunately, from my experience, the turnaround from finding an innovative new material to actually using it in real products is absurdly long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd vote for by CRISPR and the rest of bio-technology, e.g., as in Eric Lander and his MIT lectures at YouTube, for, my guesses, better crops, healthier farm animals, attacking insects, e.g., mosquitoes, attacking causes of infections, for curing some of the remaining difficult diseases, especially cancer.

A second guess, or a guess for second place, would be _artificial general intelligence_ (AGI) if and only if someone or some team or project gets going on that problem and has some good, basic, enabling ideas.

I have some ideas, but since they really are just _architectural_ or _heuristic_ and not mathematical and not in code I can make only wild guesses for how good the ideas are.

A third guess, or a guess for third place, is my startup and its crucial core enabling technology, i.e., some original applied math I derived based on some advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Why? In broad terms the core technology of the startup makes some powerful progress on _meaning_. Is this progress full AGI? Nope. Does the progress fully solve the problem of meaning? Nope. To repeat, IMHO the progress is "powerful".

Is the technology widely applicable? The range of applications should be somewhat wider than the application of my startup, e.g., as some core technology in some infrastructure for some more applications, but for now my original applied math is proprietary and in my startup is locked up and invisible in my server farm.

Why third in this list? Because it doesn't deserve first or second, but, if people like the results of my applied math and what I've programmed, then my startup can well become a big thing, big enough to be third on this list in a few years.

Gee, today I'm wrestling with Microsoft's NTBACKUP. So, today it's grunt work!

<comment><USER24> We already have the possibility to change genes, CRISPR is just making it easier.

The problem is the lack of understanding and ability to engineer non-trivial things. (Most GMOs are just Glyphosate resistant or have the BT gene).

I guess we will deepen our understanding but still not be able to change big things for the next decades

<comment><USER23> Yes, but my guess is that with CRISPR we will be able to do DNA editing and experiments much faster. Then slowly, but much faster than in the past, we will be able to figure out, first cut, what some segment of DNA does what and, second-cut, some of the more complicated ways DNA works.

Then applications to agriculture, medicine, etc. might come along in a nice stream.

Still, of course, it stands to be a very long line of work to figure out much about how DNA causes a human actually to "work".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the transition to self-driving electric cars as a service will be in full force by then, and it will only be slowed down by the sheer number of interlocked changes and requirements to finish that process. The sheer scale of the numbers will ensure significant palpable changes, and for once, it's a change occurring in the physical world of atoms.

</comment><comment><USER25> Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, I'd go with a volume knob for children, simply because it would be quite surprising if someone was able to get that working...

</comment><comment><USER26> Automated driving plus Uber style infrastructure plus electric vehicles and improved batteries will start to change the way people use them significantly. Private car ownership will have peaked and begun falling, people will just order one on an app and let it drive off after they've arrived to the next job. Cars will spend much more of the day on the road instead of parked outside houses or offices rather like aeroplanes. Perhaps not a revolutionary or surprising idea in itself but I think the speed of this change will be surprising in hindsight.

<comment><USER27> I think with automated cars we don't even need that much improvement in Batteries. We simply could use self driving battery packs that wait at the street corner and follow you and dock on, if you need extended Battery- Mileage. Also since Electric Energy is very expensive for private Consumers in Germany. Why not order Batteries that can be delivered per self driving car. Garbage disposal is also very expensive and you can not opt out but you can order a smaller Bin and maybe order and self driving car to get rid of the rest cheaper. I actually wonder if this is why the Investor/Trade Agreements (TTIP) where pushed that hard. Because with these, Investors would have to be paid compensation if regulation would outlaw these Businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Blockchain, decentralized apps - perhaps based on Ethereum, perhaps not. They have the potential to enhance capitalism in equivalent ways as the current wave of "sharing economy" startups (Uber, Airbnb) has done, or even surpass that.

\- it's much easier for more people to become investors, since buying coins/tokens will become increasingly easier and common.

\- you won't need to be located at a specific startup hub to launch successful business, because it's so much easier to get investment from around the world.

\- it has a great approach for solving the "network effect", where no one can challenge the major players with strong networks, by providing strong incentives for early adopters to join and grow their networks (either by buying very cheap tokens, or producing content that will render them "free money").

\- it enables the creation of new business models that might disrupt (ugh, sorry) several existing industries, due to how they solve the trust issue between parties that have no reason to trust each other without a central controller entity. Some are calling this next wave of startups the "Web 3.0".

Sure, it looks like the wild west now, and there are all sorts of problems from scams to scalability issues, but maturity might be only a matter of time.

</comment><comment><USER29> 3d printing. My buddy works at a major American industrial manufacturer and the work he describes is fascinating. They're slowly starting to take on bigger and bigger chunks of the overall business as their capabilities grow and different business units discover them. I can only begin to imagine the host of fields that will be affected by the ability to do really nifty agile experimentation with physical products.

</comment><comment><USER30> Most _surprising_? I'm thinking AR, mostly because it's much less discussed today than similarly positioned tech, but no less viable.

Also, it seems about time for another psychedelic revival / breakthrough, so don't count out research on psychoactive plants and compounds (if that counts as tech per your metric).

</comment><comment><USER31> Industry 4.0 and the rise of intelligent manufacturing. A marriage of 3D printing, AI, and IoT technology will change what consumers can order and how quickly it arrives to them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0)

<comment><USER32> I agree with this one. Given the advances in 3D printing, distributed applications and IoT this concept is inevitable and there will be a big shift in manufacturing.

Are you working in this field?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In the U.S.A.

10 years from now will look surprisingly similar to present day. Political lobbying will continue (and worsen) to stifle innovation and even iteration. We'll still have a single choice in ISP. Broadband speeds will still be ridiculously slow in most parts of the country. Driverless trucks will only just be getting a foothold, and people will still be wondering where the driverless cars are. Managers will still expect "butts in chairs", so WFH will still not be an option for most. We were talking about encryption backdoors in the 90's (clipper chip), we're still talking about them now and we'll be talking about them in 10 years.

It will be hotter outside.

10 years, is... just not that far away.

</comment><comment><USER24> The most surprising thing will be that most things will stay the same as now.

</comment><comment><USER34> AR headsets.

There were MP3 players before the iPod, but they weren't taking off quite yet. Then Jobs came, and the iPod changed the music market. And then changed the smartphone market. Google Glass was a good first mass market prototype, Microsoft seems to be going in the right direction with Hololens, but we all know it's not _quite there_ yet. Whoever manages to figure out what the magic combination is for an AR headset that gets massive adoption, will usher in the next UI/portable computing revolution.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Internet of things". It's one of the few things that is already here, economically viable, but not organized or "distributed" as Gibson would say. There's simply no reason not to have connectivity in everything if you do it well with electronics and it provides value. Maybe not surprising as such, so you have to figure out the implications which is usually what tends to be the surprising part.

</comment><comment><USER36> Small satellite and generally small spacecraft will drastically change the affordability of space, which will drive a lot of new development in space. It's already creating a lot of demand on market for new, small launchers as well to actually get significant numbers of sats up there, and it will become an accelerating loop between nanosat launch providers and small spacecraft getting more affordable quickly

</comment><comment><USER37> usable and realistic holography will be the next big step forward in visualization and interactivity.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Plastics!"

</comment><comment><USER38> China cleans up their air and Shenzhen disrupts Silicon Valley, creating a semi-totalitarian, technocratic city that is somehow more free and libertarian than Silicon Valley has become.

<comment><USER39> _checks library_ Yup, that's how I have it in all my cyberpunk books. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm kinda surprised noone mentioned teleportation.

Also, what about human-computer interfaces? (communicating with your smartphone and receiving responses using only thoughts)

</comment><comment><USER41> AI. Nobody knows what will happen, or if/what roadblocks await. If it continues to scale in the best case, we are in for strange times ahead.

</comment><comment><USER42> One more is the automation of distributed computing. "Big data" will be completely encapsulated and hidden to the end user.

</comment><comment><USER43> Laptops will be replaced by phone-powered VR goggles with wireless keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER44> Software will eat programming jobs.

</comment><comment><USER45> Honestly I think with the mass availability of escapist devices innovation is largely over.

</comment><comment><USER46> Insect-sized mini-drones that will create ubiquitous surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER42> cryptocurrencies, whole new asset class, wild west

<comment><USER23> If cryptocurrencies get very "wild" as an "asset class", then the US SEC, etc. will make regulations and/or Congress will pass laws to calm it down.

The powerful governments in the world won't let _crypto_ be means for money laundering, tax evasion, moving lots of money across country boundaries secretly, undisclosed assets, inheritance and gifts without taxes, etc.

It may be that the important, remaining, applications will be for cases of contracts, secure communications, etc.

<comment><USER47> It is one thing to make regulations and the other to enforce.

<comment><USER23> There is an _international system of finance, banking, and money_. There are rules: If some person, company, or country doesn't play by the rules, then they are not in the system, and that means that they are limited to at most very small things.

We know a lot about this system because it got a lot stronger trying to stop the money flows for terrorism, drugs, and tax evasion.

Well, for the "regulations", one can be that the system will not exchange with _crypto_ and will not work with people who do. There are already, call it _reviews_ , of any relatively large transactions. If something smells like drug money, terrorism, large scale tax evasion, etc., then law enforcement can get involved, crash into a house or office a 3 AM, grab all the papers and computers, grab phone tap data, grab Internet traffic data, etc. and put together a case of violation of _crypto_ laws and regulations.

There's a fundamental point here: Sure, on a small scale, the regulations are tough to enforce, e.g., cost more to enforce than get from the enforcement. BUT the fundamental point is, for any illegal activity to make or spend much money, a LOT of people need to know about it and, then, sure, law enforcement also knows about it and can take action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Sticks and Stones as high tech weapons of war.

</comment><comment><USER46> Tomatoes will taste great again.

</comment><comment><USER49> Bioweapons.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think Robotics will be big.

</comment><comment><USER51> crystal balls, teleportation and time travel</comment>


DEVY.IO Unlimited Web and App Development for a small fixed monthly fee - <AUTHOR> https://devy.io/ <comment><USER2> This is more of an ad than a Show HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello, founder here! I'm available to answer any questions you might have about our service :)</comment>


History of Lisp by John McCarthy (1979) - <AUTHOR> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html <comment><USER2> There's a version of this interspersed with commentary by a history of computing person (a German I think). If anyone has that link I'd be much obliged.</comment>


Sarah Silverman is brilliant - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/14/ted-organizer-trashes-speaker-fails-social-iq-test/ I so wish I could have seen this talk @ TED. <comment><USER2> Personally, I can't really stand Silverman. She seems like more of a "female shock jock" than a "brilliant comedian" to me. Maybe I don't know enough about her, but I really have to wonder: (a) why was she even invited to TED to speak? and (b) what on earth did people _think_ she was going to talk about–world hunger and infant mortality?

Furthermore, was Silverman _really_ making a statement about political correctness and free speech–or was she just going after Palin?

On the actual issue, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it bothers me when kids use "retarded" or "gay" or "fag" as an insult. On the other hand, everyone is way too sensitive about language and being a victim any time someone else says something careless.

<comment><USER3> > Furthermore, was Silverman really making a statement about political > correctness and free speech–or was she just going after Palin?

Both. So, here's the events in not-quite-chronological order:

1\. Rahm Emanuel calls recalcitrant liberal democrats "retarded."

1.5. Palin is outraged.

2\. Rush Limbaugh mentions the "retard conference."

2.5. Palin is not outraged, because "satire" is okay.

3\. Sarah Silverman accepts this bet and makes a comedy routine that is incredibly outrageous, but obviously satirical.

Is it okay? Of course it's not okay, because Palin is a hypocrite and only cares about the issue as far as it is political leverage; she's been accused of using "the r-word" on multiple occasions from multiple sources.

So then Silverman's satire is a political joke of high caliber and razor wit. But, it's also highlighting a larger issue that people have with doing generous things for selfish and calculated reasons. The actual substance of her talk is basically that she wants a special needs kid because this makes her an awesome person.

<comment><USER4> I just don't see how this kind of passing, topical crap that goes on at the shallowest level of politics is worth discussing somewhere like TED. This is the kind of crap that blows over in a couple weeks--and if you want to make a statement about how useless this surface level political dialogue is, there are better ways of doing it.

<comment><USER3> This "shallowest level of politics" is the shape of our entire cultural landscape being formed, man. Comics just tell it like it is.

Is it worth talking about at TED? I dunno. What really is? Some dude leaping around going "BAAAM" while the crowd figures out how to sing along? Leaders of influential companies talking about products? Why don't we discuss how very much against slavery we really are?

Sarah's commentary on politics and how people with unfortunate genetics people are unwitting pawns in a disingenuous political dialog that has the potential to deadlock our government? Seems fine to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's very interesting. It reminds me that here in Spain, we use 'f-words' constantly. We say "negro" (black) to our black friends and is nothing bad. Why would I say the ultra-political-correct "african" or "afroamerican"?

Same with gay, homosexual, etc. Doesn't mean anything bad.

I'm quite surprised with all the videoclips/songs, tv shows and videogames that avoid f-words or are edited (with noises).

People sometimes want to harm with words, words themselves mean nothing.

<comment><USER6> I end up having an if-by-whiskey argument with myself about this, especially regarding the "n-word."

If by saying the n-word casually, you mean removing the hatred and power behind a word which has divided our people for centuries by giving it a new and friendly connotation, then of course I am for it.

If by saying the n-word casually, you mean flippantly dismissing decades of institutionalized enslavement and murder, and a constant reminder that for all our progress we are still very much two nations, then I despise it.

Its clear to me though that the n-word still causes a great deal of pain to many of my brothers and sisters, and I want no part of that. So even though I hope that someday the n-word will lose this meaning, you're not going to hear it coming out of my mouth.

<comment><USER7> I don't think being offended by any word is rational. Be offended by actions and events.

The list of outlawed words is growing by the day which is just ridiculous.

Nigger is used in rap music all the time.

You'd hear it come out of my mouth:

      1. If singing along to R&B Rap etc
      2. If quoting some comedy or trying to be funny

Certainly wouldn't use it in an aggressive/hateful way, and that's what you have to always bear in mind - context.

<comment><USER4> Watch out. White people saying the word "nigger" because they're trying to be funny end up being this guy: [http://www.tmz.com/2006/11/20/kramers-racist- tirade-caught-o...](http://www.tmz.com/2006/11/20/kramers-racist-tirade- caught-on-tape/)

<comment><USER8> I am offended at people using it even on this board.

Yes, I am a rational person and words shouldn't affect me, but the fact of the matter is that there are deep seeded emotions behind the usage.

Whats so wrong with saying n-word when referring to it?

<comment><USER9> _Whats so wrong with saying n-word when referring to it?_

Because to matter how much lipstick you slap on a pig, it's still a pig.

(Apologies to my sus brethren.)((Oh, and just be clear, we're talking about the word and the word only.))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting question is: will the TED video of Silverman's talk be made equally available as other talks?

There's a spectrum of things the organizers might do to try to distance themselves. Most extreme would be to not put Silverman's video up at all, or bleep it. Milder options would be hiding her talk from indexes, demoting it in search results, or wrapping it in disclaimers.

(I hope they treat her talk exactly the same as every other TED talk, but they may not be able to resist the strong social pressure to show 'sensitivity' and thus shun Silverman at some level.)

<comment><USER11> Well I read an interview with the founder guy and he indicated that only 66%-75% of the talks ever make to videos on the site. Given that 25% to 33% of talks never make it up then even if Silverman's doesn't appear it's not necessarily been "singled out" or treated specially.

<comment><USER12> Given the amount of press around this particular talk, I'd say it's too late to claim that it's not being singled out. But there is a delay, and they might be able to give it a soft veto if all this blows over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone needs to lighten up. I like Sarah, I think part of her standup is funny. The joke isn't that she's using the word retarded, the joke is the utter ridiculousness of her approaching an adoption agency and saying, "please give me your most retarded baby, but I also want them to be terminally ill."

Maybe I'm insensitive or too immature, but that makes me laugh like crazy. Just imaging the look on the adoption agency person's face is hilarious.

Here's a similar clip of Evil Dave Letterman from the Howard Stern show calling an adoption agency asking for a black kid: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXrhI2q-EeI>

</comment><comment><USER14> IMO, Silverman had less of a chance of getting away with this at a TED talk because she's really not that clever. Her schtick is: cute innocent jewish girl + naughty words = hilarity.

I cringed when the article compared her use of the word 'retard' to Colbert's routine where he calls Palin a 'fucking retard'. Here's the difference: Colbert spent about 10 minutes building up to the slur. The political allusions, the searing sarcasm, and the final shockingly unsubtle slur was brilliant. And made me cry from laughing.

Silverman, OTOH, has reached the level of humor that I got bored with in 7th grade. If her routine actually had some intelligence to it, she probably could have gotten away with much worse.

</comment><comment><USER15> It doesn't matter if you're a fundamentalist Christian or a liberal progressive, the temptation to take something at face value and act morally superior is stronger than the one to interpret the intent behind what's being said.

</comment><comment><USER16> The claim about Sarah Silverman's 'brilliance' seems to be this:

 _"Saying the word 'retarded' can only have extreme negative power if you let it and Sarah Silverman is brave, because she got on stage in front of some global minds and dropped it over and over and over."_

To call Sarah Silverman 'brave' for repeating this naughty word in front of a TED audience really is retarded. If this is what it means to be a subversive comedian in 2010, Richard Pryor must be turning in his grave.

<comment><USER17> What's subversive about it is that if she'd not used the word "retarded" her routine would not have had impact.

There is a sense in which PC language suppresses the real struggle that comes with difficult social issues, sterilizes them for us, and makes them into abstract problems that everyone can claim to care about but do nothing about.

Silverman's insight was that by breaking out of the PC mold she was able to shine the spotlight on a difficult social issue.

Is it the highest level of subversive comedy? Probably not, but it's certainly a courageous form of activism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was this a joke or did someone earnestly write this: <http://twitter.com/gaberivera/status/8976199410>

I find Sarah Silverman to be hilarious.

<comment><USER19> Gabe is the founder of Techmeme and, from what I've read of his, both heavy on the sarcasm and a little anti-Valley. I'm sure that was how this was intended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amazing comment from original post (BenT):

"

Oh for pete's sake it's Sara Silverman! She's a shock and insult comic! WTF did they expect!? Had they never seen a show of hers?

"Oh my god I bought this grenade pulled out the pin and it totally blew up my house! This grenade sucks!"

"

</comment><comment><USER21> Best line in article: "The world needs to take many things seriously and many things less seriously. The world needs to get its sense of humor back. It needs to allow people to express themselves without feeling the overwhelming pressures of society bearing down and being a social pariah."

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish I could see her performance for myself, as I find her hilarious, but the description of Sarah's performance made me cringe.

Not because of the word "retarded," but because she said she would adopt a terminally ill person. I struggle to see how she could make light of something like that...

<comment><USER10> She makes light of everything. The things that make you cringe are her favorite topics. You can get a sense from her movie, 'Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic', or Comedy Central TV series, 'The Sarah Silverman Program'.

If TED organizers didn't expect as much, their planning was _performed in an intellectually-disabled manner_. (Is that phrasing R-Word-campaign-approved?)

<comment><USER23> TED has special needs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Season 1 - Episode 4 of Dinner for Five has Sarah Silverman as one of the guests. One of the "segments" has a discussion of a similar incident with Sarah Silverman and another word. Kevin Pollak and Ron Livingston's commentary is pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER25> While I agree with the headline, the word "brilliant" isn't used in the article.

</comment><comment><USER26> retard, v. To slow the progress of; impede or delay

retarded, adj. Slow or backward in mental or emotional development

Those sound innocuous enough to me, but "challenged" is the vogue and should be safe for 20 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER27> Based on the reaction Sarah Silverman got, I'm pretty sure the TED audience would have lynched Bill Hicks.

</comment><comment><USER28> >It pisses me off to no end that I can't use that word out of fear for my own life

This is easily the most offensive sentence in the article. Black people are not mythical stabby monsters.

</comment><comment> joe-mccann There are essentially two types of comedians: "intelligent humor" and "dick and fart jokes". Silverman falls into the latter; Bill Hicks in the former...

</comment><comment><USER29> disagree.

words have power, and that aint going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER30> Now I'm just plain confused. I had finally figured out that the tooth fairy, bigfoot, jimmy carter, and women with a genuine sense of humor were all just made up by my parents. And now you tell me that at least some of them are real?

</comment><comment><USER31> Making fun of mentally retarded people isn't funny. They are victims of circumstance, and its sad that they'll never be productive, self-supporting individuals.

Making fun of people like Sarah Palin, who believe that they are virtuous because they choose to bring mentally retarded people into this world, is funny. In this case, the comedian attacks a cruel ideology that puts pain and suffering on a pedestal.

Sarah Silverman should have made it more clear who she was making fun of. Her audience was uncomfortable because they thought that she was making fun of retarded people.

<comment><USER31> To anyone who down-voted, I'm curious to know why. There have been at least 5 down-votes, but no replies.

<comment><USER32> My guess, no one thinks she was making fun of retarded people and everyone _knows_ she was making fun of Sarah Palin and her campaign to neuter the english language.

<comment><USER22> I'm not from North America and as such wasn't aware of Sarah Palin's campaign against the word "retard."

In fact, we happen to find Sarah Palin a bit of a comedian herself... And don't take her seriously.

<comment><USER33> Yes, she's a joke.

But you won't be laughing when/if someday she ends up President with the nuke codes on her desk.

<comment><USER34> In a poll taken earlier this month, 55 percent of the people surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Palin, and 71 percent said she was not qualified to be President. I don't know why the media still treats her every tweet as newsworthy, because as a national political figure, she's a joke.

And I'm not sure she _wants_ to become President. She can continue to have a lucrative career on the lecture/pundit circuit, playing to that sliver of the population that does consider her to speak for Real True American Common-Sense Values. Why ruin such a good thing by seeking votes from more moderate voters or, heck, actually trying to run a country?

<comment><USER33> Turn those statistics around,

The disturbing thing is that some 30% of the electorate think she's so great she should run the country, 45% think she's pretty swell and some similar number didn't think she wasn't an automatic disqualification for the McCain campaign. More amazing is that these numbers are the numbers _after_ the election, when she was revealed to be a dimwitted, incurious, manipulative, unethical and generally dishonest person of the highest caliber.

She's had the traditional upward trajectory of a shooting-star politician: local council, mayor, governor, and VP candidate (notice mostly executive positions, not legislative). At each stage she could have backed out and gone to the simple life of fishing and hunting while her husband ran snowmobile races or whatever in between trying to get Alaska to succeed from the Union. But she didn't, she kept stepping up and up and up, demonstrating a near limitless ambition. This is not the kind of thing one can indefinitely keep at bay with a few speaking gigs and some TV time on Fox.

She's not an ideals person (she can't even get through an interview without reading notes off of her hand), or somebody of a unifying or consistent internal vision, what she has is limitless ambition.

Considering that most people had never even heard of her before the election, and she still has this kind of following afterwards (despite these obvious shortcomings) would make me want to get her out on speaking engagements and doing favorable TV spots as much as possible for the next couple of years.

 _Mark my words, she will be a candidate for President in the next election cycle starting in a year or two._

<comment><USER34> Sorry, I forgot to post the link to the poll numbers themselves:

<http://www.pollingreport.com/p.htm#Palin>

Observe how her unfavorable ratings have been going almost monotonically upward since the election. The more people hear about Palin, the less they like her.

<comment><USER33> Thank you. You've singlehandedly renewed my faith in humanity.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Easy API Simulation with Hoverfly JUnit Rule - <AUTHOR> https://specto.io/blog/hoverfly-junit-api-simulation.html <comment><USER2> > What if when building a service, the pipeline also created a virtualized > version of the service as an artefact?

Yes, interesting idea! I guess it does mean that there is a "testing contract" with the consumers? ie. the consumers need to know what example cases they can depend on in _their_ tests?

<comment><USER3> Hi, I am the author of the blog post. The theory would be that your service is well tested enough for the produced simulation to give the majority of scenarios that you would need for tests in the consumers. I agree that perhaps there is a missing link in the consumers not knowing in advance what to call to produce certain outcomes - perhaps Hoverfly could interpret the JSON and display a contract with possible requests responses in the UI. This would be something easily understandable for a developer so they can quickly write their tests against it. Another choice would be to use something like swagger as a source for JSON rather than the service itself. This would be good for contract driven development.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, mogronalol. I agree that visualisations would be useful and I think using tests to create a virtualised service definitely has merit, because it kills two birds with one stone. I like the fact that I can give my consumers/clients something that they can use to test with without having to set up or give away the real thing.

In terms of process there's a big difference with tools like Swagger though in that you have to create the tests and corresponding implementation _before_ you can start integration testing consumers, which might be tricky if you have multiple teams working on new services. I guess this is only really a problem when you're starting out as the tests and implementation should be ready soon after.

If we just use this for testing I was also wondering if you would use this at the beginning of your project or would you add it when the test suite start slowing down?</comment></comment></comment>


Information flow reveals prediction limits in online social activity - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/26/information-flow-reveals-prediction-limits-in-online-social-activity/ <comment><USER2> I wish authors of papers like this would publish an online tool to demonstrate their findings. I think a demonstration of this particular paper would be much less impressive then their misleading charts[1] try and make it out to be.

For example, they excluded retweets but what about replies? When your friend asks you about [TOPIC] in a tweet, of course your reply is going to be related to [TOPIC].

What about Twitter users who mostly use it to comment on breaking news? Of course 90% of the words are going to be predictable, but it's the 10% that are different and important.

[1] - None of their charts have y-axis starting at 0, leading to a much more extreme-looking difference in results. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.04575.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.04575.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> That paper was published on Arxiv in August 2017. Has it been published anywhere else since? In other words- has it passed muster (a.k.a. peer review)?</comment>


Women in Elite Jobs Face Stubborn Pay Gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/women-in-elite-jobs-face-stubborn-pay-gap-1463502938 <comment><USER2> Hard to say anything, as it's paywalled.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok, so I was a skeptic. However, some of the results here are shocking. There is no good reason for it at all.

Blatant sexism.. which appears to be the only explanation.

(I am a white dude that believes that the workplace should be based on a meritocracy.. though this is rare thing)</comment>


Ask HN: Could we have Vim key bindings in HN? - <AUTHOR> Especially on smartphones it would much easier to edit text and navigate with Vim bindings. I think the Ace Editor and Codemirror support Vim bindings. <comment><USER2> Could you open an issue here ( [https://github.com/AntouanK/hni- ui/issues](https://github.com/AntouanK/hni-ui/issues) ) with a small proposal of how that would work? I'm re-writing in Elm the front-end for my HN app, so that would be an interesting feature to add.

Edit: I thought you meant navigating the site. You only meant the text editing part though, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. To navigate the site you can use browser extensions like Vimium.

There is even an extension for using Vim bindings in HTML text areas but this one doesn't work on mobile and also on desktop it's a bit clumsy.

I would just exchange the current HN text area with some HTML editor with Vim bindings such as Codemirror.

<comment><USER2> I'm rewriting it in Elm right now, so I want to avoid any js library. Also, the HN API doesn't allow auth, so you cannot submit or edit posts from any other app.

But why would you want this? I mean do you write lengthy posts? Or do you post that often? I can imagine a very small percentage of users would use that feature.</comment></comment></comment>


The Folder of God - <AUTHOR> https://www.excelsiorjet.com/blog/support-stories/the-folder-of-god/ <comment><USER2> The poster does not give any blame to who ever came up with this:

> 1\. Right-click on your desktop and select New Folder 2\. Type in or copy > and paste the following as the name: > GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} 3\. Hit Enter and the folder > icon will change to GodMode 4\. Enjoy easy access to all Windows 10 > settings!

I know that the exception came from GetDisplayNameOf handling it incorrectly, but this whole thing begs the question:

Why is this a good way to do shortcuts?

<comment><USER3> the godmode feature is undocumented probably _because_ it's a terrible way to do shortcuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice write up, I really enjoy these types of postmortems. Also, the best issues are always ones you can blame upstream for :D

Side note, does anyone have experience using Excelsior Jet to deploy natively compiled applications or services?

<comment><USER5> Was about to ask the same. Also wondering how excelsiorjet's business is going, now that Java has AOT compilation out of the box. Or hasn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Excelsior guy here.

Overall, I would say that AOT suddenly becoming kosher helps our business way more than competition hurts it.

Then, "JDK9 has AOT out of the box" is a bit of exaggeration. Oracle AOT is only available for Linux/x64 ATM, yields huge binaries and may be a bit cumbersome to use: [http://mjg123.github.io/2017/10/04/AppCDS-and- Clojure.html](http://mjg123.github.io/2017/10/04/AppCDS-and-Clojure.html)

The main difference however is that a binary produced by Oracle AOT is to a big extent just a pre-populated HotSpot cache, whereas Excelsior JET has been AOT-centric since day one. In practice that means that with Oracle AOT you have to ship both the native binary and the original class files to your customers, and with Excelsior JET you only ship the native binary, which makes reverse engineering your application more difficult.

I recall us being quite surprised when a customer survey had shown that IP protection is more important than application performance for many of our customers, even though it was just a byproduct of our optimization efforts.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, appreciate the response. I guess Oracle's AOT is only addressing slow startup times in eg. command-line/batch apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Deleting the God Mode folder fixes the problem, because that is the only > filesystem object for which GetDisplayNameOf() returns a malformed > structure.

I wouldn't call it "malformed" \-- the OS simply returned a null pointer: "the field that is supposed to point to the buffer containing the resulting string is NULL." Which in C means "nothing there." And the Java native interface code didn't check for that (it could have returned an empty Java string in that case), but dereferenced the null pointer instead. "Fail fast" indeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Problem is, the God Folder dates back to Vista and it is the Windows 10 Creators Update that began setting that field to NULL. Apparently the author of that change did not foresee any backward compatibility issues.

<comment><USER6> See my other comment for the details, I believe now that the field was actually not set to null, the returned structure has a union which is documented to be able to be of different types. It's surely the type STRRET_CSTR that wasn't covered by Java, the API is then valid before and after the update, returning the structure with STRRET_CSTR and zeroes in the union is valid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At the risk of sounding trite, this reminds me an awful lot of the "Missingno" glitches in the Red and Blue Pokemon Gameboy games.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who the hell thought it was a good idea to let _people_ write operating systems. Asking for trouble if you ask me.

<comment><USER9> "Let"? Given the limited intelligence of other Earth species, I'm unsure how else operating systems would've been developed.

<comment><USER10> > "Let"? Given the limited intelligence of other Earth species, I'm unsure how > else operating systems would've been developed.

I suspect that you missed fhood's joke, or else I missed yours.

(It is not unreasonable to suppose that another path to the existence of operating systems would be the, perhaps human-guided, evolution of progressively less primitive programs. I am not sure that I'd want to use the result, but it's at least a conceiveable way for history to have developed.)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Chaskiq – an open source alternative to Intercom, Drift and others - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chaskiq/chaskiq <comment><USER2> I read the whole readme part and was still not sure exactly what this is.. so I searched for drift and intercom - and still didn't know from the search results..

clicked over to intercom and did not know what they are.. scroll down a few panes and got a clue with the graphics. then a a couple more panes of scrolling down finally graphics are putting it more into perspective..

yet the heading on the section "Move deals through your funnel – fast" \- just jargon that doesn't really tell me what the heck this thing is.

then the smaller text has "Our chatbots and live chat capture more of your best leads and convert them while they're hot." \- and I'm like okay - now I see - why didn't they just say that at the top.

and, I've been in and out of business and marketing and internet for years.. so how are any other customers supposed to get a grasp on what this is and the benefits when none of the 4 listed here seem to present it in an easy to understand spiel at the top on the main page.

All the jargon meant nothing - a couple of graphics helped - simple words would help more.

<comment><USER2> Apologies if the tone of my frustration came out as negative towards your project - not intended to be negative at this - in fact I am really glad that there is an open source option(?) for this kind of thing, as I normally only use things that are self hostable.

I am more disappointed in the jargon surrounding these chat systems in general and the other web page that I surfed. Perhaps take this as a suggestion if you make a web page for a different audience perhaps make it easier to understand that the others from the get go.

Of course that may not matter - getting direct hits to a site these days are not so easy even if you try and have something good.. a project like this may get hits to the project pages 99% from clicking on links of other sites that are using it - in that case the people would already know what it is and then would be more interested in how much, what's different - and not care if it's called bot or chat or 'business communicator better than the whatever widget'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, no need to apologize Steve, I've seen similar feedbacks like this, some people just does not get what is this about, and I had to explain to them that this app is for chat support, and only then they get the picture. But, I've not seen this kind of comment of people from Tech. Anyways, I'm going to take this as a constructive comment and I will rework the Jargon to be more straight to the point.

thanks for taking the time to comment on this project

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well done! Congrats on shipping, you guys should meet up with folks from [https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot](https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks sansnomme. Yeah, we definitely should, I'm quite aware of the project, luckly both projects are implementing slightly different aproaches. so the community will benefit on both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the UX is as good as intercom, this would sell like hot cakes. I just hope there's a flat price for it. All the best!</comment>


Show HN: Meet Sid, our Raspberry-Pi-powered office robot - <AUTHOR> http://sidg.tl/sid

<comment><USER2> God damn Si Digital. It's like the second time I've seen your website but I'm in love with the kind of philosophy you guys seem to have around developing lab projects.

If you're ever in stockholm, hit me up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Did you have fun shocking us for Halloween? We've put the lab notes up for that now [http://sidigital.co/blog/lab- halloween](http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-halloween)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I managed to hit 160. The reason 240 is the max score is that you only have enough time to get a maximum of 3 drops (2 is more likely) so you have to aim for the 80 with all 3 drops.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think a cool spin-off of this would be to create two robots that can duel each other. Either some sort of Rock 'Em Soc 'Em setup ([http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Em-Sock-ROBOTS- Game/dp/B00005BY8V](http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Em-Sock-ROBOTS- Game/dp/B00005BY8V)) or maybe something like a tamer version of BattleBots.

<comment><USER5> I made this for a senior design project at UIUC. No web interface though. You controlled the robots via wireless sensors I designed to be worn on your arms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow that's cool, what robot are you guys using? Did you build the robots yourselves? If so, where did you get parts etc.? And how does the system know when a ball is dropped through a specific hole, which then displays an animation with amount of points?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a Lynxmotion AL5A you have to assemble it yourself. We have 8 lever switches under the staging area we built connected to the GPIO pins on the Pi. When the Pi recognises a switch push it tells the nodejs server which passes it on to everyone.

We will post full lab notes explaining everything in detail like we did for our Halloween experiment soon!

<comment><USER7> Is the control code written in Python (which seems to be the favored language on the Pi)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yer the code to control the arm, listen for the lever switches and talk to socket.io is all in Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That was fun! I'm surprised how responsive and easy it was to pick up the controls.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We worked hard to get the delay under a second. That is of course quite dependant on the speed of your connection as there are 2 streams while you are in control (front cam and ball cam)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very nice, cool build! Pretty cool that Bryan Cranston (Walter White from Breaking Bad) is in the top 10 as well (shared first place).

Edit - Oh, you can just enter any twitter username without validation, my bad :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yer we are pretty popular in the White House and the Vatican

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks man, that was really fun! I should try it again, i only got 30 points the first time. I only had time to drop one ball after getting used to the controls, and i missed 80 by about 1/8th of an inch.

<comment><USER8> I saw that! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We want Sid back, bring him back to us! :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Fighting off a DDOS attack at the moment :(

<comment><USER11> He is back and I am 45th in the queue, thanks and congrats for this cool project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really cool and great execution

</comment><comment><USER13> I got kicked out of the queue twice just before my turn. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry someone was trying to flood the server so things went wonky for a while

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> #freesid2013

Right, guys? ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: Can we please keep all of the April Fools pranks to one thread? - <AUTHOR>

Just so we don't clutter up the front page! I can add a comment to this thread that has a running list of all the April Fools jokes we all see! <comment><USER2> There's no chance of this actually happening, but I definitely agree.

</comment><comment><USER3> Atlassian's BitBand - [https://www.atlassian.com/bitband/](https://www.atlassian.com/bitband/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Running List:

1\. Virgin and Nest team up for personalized climate control at 35,000 feet. [http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/personalised- climate-c...](http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/personalised-climate- control-at-35000-feet)

</comment><comment><USER4> How I despise April Fools in the post internet world, but that said this was funny since it did actually bother to go to the effort of actually pissing people off, old school -

[school sms system hacked]

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-01/april-fools-joke- fails...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-01/april-fools-joke-fails-to- humour-parents-of-castle-hill-high/5358546)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think you can edit a comment after a certain period of time.</comment>


Dyeing the cheese orange – Beware of benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/12/dyeing-cheese-orange-beware-of.html

<comment><USER2> The name for this is a "false proxy", and its confounding effects are pervasive just about anywhere you look. The problem is that any time you use a proxy to make decisions, you create an incentive to falsify that proxy.

The worst version of the trap is when one manipulates a proxy and honestly believes that they are helping.

<comment><USER3> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This analogy does not work. He's trying to make the point that we don't know what caused PayPal's application to speed-up and Node.js may not be the root cause at all. The cheese analogy is not correct since he's claiming their benchmark is like the orange color - a false proxy for what you really want: good tasting cheese. You do really want your application to go faster, though. It's not a false proxy - it's what this team was optimizing for. They had a measurable increase in success - they made better cheese.

<comment><USER5> Yes!

There are two blog posts here, both interesting, but not deeply connected. One is about false proxies, which is specifically about people manipulating perceptions.

The other is about getting "measurably better cheese" but not understanding why it's measurably better. Speed is not a proxy for speed, it's just speed. The meme here is that correlation does not equal causation.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is speed is a false proxy for the quality of Node.js. The results don't necessarily justify using it for everything going forward.

<comment><USER6> > The point is speed is a false proxy for the quality of Node.js.

Well, no, speed is the actual measure of interest. The point is that reimplementations that change language _also_ often change other design features, and that without knowing what else changed one cannot validate the attribution of the post-change speed improvement to Node.js.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we're saying the same thing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of the nodejs success stories I've read have taken a serial, blocking system and made it parallel and non-blocking. The wins in this context are hardly surprising, and say little about the value of nodejs specifically.

<comment><USER8> That the latter is idiomatic use of nodejs may itself be of value.

<comment><USER7> It's idiomatic in a bunch of languages. There are also good ways to do blocking IO. "We remove the capability to use an entire category of IO" is probably the weakest feature claim of any language out there.

<comment><USER8> Sure. I never made any claim that it unique, or that nodejs is great generally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good point. Any benchmark can be co-opted, that's why it's useful to have multiple benchmarks. There's a Dilbert that tells the story on it well. [1] This is true for a lot of fields. If you over-optimize on individual player scoring in basketball, your team might play worse even if there is a correlation between individual scoring and team scoring.

[1] [http://search.dilbert.com/comic/10%20Dollars%20Bug%20Fix](http://search.dilbert.com/comic/10%20Dollars%20Bug%20Fix)

<comment><USER10> [http://dilbert.com/fast/1995-11-13/](http://dilbert.com/fast/1995-11-13/)

[http://dilbert.com/fast/1995-11-14/](http://dilbert.com/fast/1995-11-14/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We run a number of compute servers, and we mostly run just a couple of different types of jobs. (Sort of a traditional 80/20 split: 80% of computes are spent on a couple types of jobs, 20% is spent on a very large variety of jobs.)

We benchmark our two important loads whenever we're buying new servers. Surprisingly, some machines perform significantly better on one load, and others perform better on the other. To us, it's non-obvious why that would be so, given what we know about the software running (this software is not written by us, ours falls in the 20% bin).

In any case, this very simplistic try-the-actual-load benchmarking serves us very well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have never known Paypal to be a company that improves their software. This may be the first rewrite since the 90s for all I know. Yes they have a business, but as a consumer and merchant on Paypal the overriding feeling I have always gotten is that they are on cruise control as far as engineering.

So when they say they changed to node and things got better, I just take it as, OMG, paypal tried to improved something and it improved.

Im sure it has nothing to do with node.</comment>


Twitter Is Banning Multiple Alt-Right Accounts - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2016/11/16/twitter-banning-multiple-alt-right-accounts/ <comment><USER2> You can't judge a man's principles by how he acts when he's in a position of strength, only when he's afraid and in a position of weakness.

I remember Twitter claiming it was a supporter of free speech. Oh how quickly that principle was flushed away the moment enough people started equating "opinions I don't like" with "abuse".

Does Twitter stand for anything at all any more? I don't think so.

<comment><USER3> _You can 't judge a man's principles by how he acts when he's in a position of strength_

If someone in a position of power uses that power poorly, it's probably okay to judge their principles based on those actions.

Here's an alternate take: don't reward a _business_ for taking any stand for a short period of time. Businesses are prone to convenience in their actions. I don't feel betrayed by Twitter doing this because it is utterly predictable.

</comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel The fact the BOD of Twitter has been trying to sell the company for the last few months and the response from potential buyers has been negative (specifically, the user base being untamed and just a mess) means these moves are just part a larger attempt to sanitize the company. The fact people call this some sort of Great Purge or whatever is a joke. Do you really think you're the only ones that're going to be either banned or heavily filtered from the larger public user base? I'll put good money on the next move the Twitter devs do is set all accounts who flag themselves as adult/pornographic content as non-public or at least shadowbanned to non-following users. Why? Because porn may sell but it doesn't sell like Starbucks. So, don't think this some sort of mere hissy fit by SV liberals who lost the election. This is purely driven by the need to make good on investments. And the sooner the alt- right and "non-normie" kids realize that the better they'll be off (i.e. hosting their own damn sites and quit expecting everyone to subsidize them on their platforms).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd go ahead and call this a purge, when a few dozen accounts with a considerable amount of followers have been suspended for no apparent reason. Twitter saying they don't comment on individual accounts being suspended is really pathetic, when there's a more than obvious coordinated effort.

I'm not a fan of the so-called alt right, but this is starting to bother me, because it doesn't look like it's going to end well—where are they going to draw the line? Would they ban people such as Alex Jones? After all, under a strict definition of "hate speech", only a hippie would be innocent. Can I use the Twitter search feature and get the accounts of everybody posting "kill all whiteys" suspended?

Does Jack think there's hope for Twitter if he doesn't fucking leave already? It's in the nature of the platform; users will keep receiving insults and rape threats nonstop anyway. By upsetting users they can only accelerate it.

Sorry if I sound aggressive, but I couldn't ever imagine Twitter doing something like this. It really is something I could only imagine the zuck doing.

<comment><USER5> Agree. This demonstrates the political direction that Twitter is moving towards. When I was more naive I used to believe that papers reported the news - now I realize that they apply their political bias to spin news. This has now happened with Twitter.

Newspeak is happening before our eyes but not in the direct way Orwell imagined.

<comment><USER6> >When I was more naive I used to believe that papers reported the news - now I realize that they apply their political bias to spin news. This has now happened with Twitter.

Papers never reported the news. They exist to create the news.</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub Dark 2.0 – Browse GitHub in nighttime mode - <AUTHOR> https://cquanu.github.io/github-dark/?ref=hackernewsv2 <comment><AUTHOR> \- Much more polished \- Every single element rewrite \- Fresh new coat of paint based on WWDC 2016 \- Fresh new code structure</comment>


Python for Feature Film: Programming Images to Life - <AUTHOR> http://dgovil.com/blog/2016/11/30/python-for-feature-film/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just sharing a series of posts I wrote recently about how Python is used in the film industry. The post linked outlines the pipeline in general, and there are individual case study posts for films I've worked on. They're less technical and more of an overview but I thought it would be of interest nonetheless.

<comment><USER2> This is greag content. Thanks for sharing. Where else in the fil industry do you see python being used in the next 3 years?

<comment><AUTHOR> I could see it maybe being used to develop on set controllers. Things like programming of lights etc could potentially use it.

I also see it being commonly used for web servers that are also used by the film industry. Django is quite common so I suspect that's another area.

Unfortunately I think that's about it. The de facto tools that are used outside of VFX and animation each have their own APIs on other languages and I don't see them converging on any particular language.

<comment><USER2> As a Django consultant its nice to know about this info. Do you happen to know the name of companies using Django? Id like to approach them for work :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well my company does for certain projects: [http://www.imageworks.com/jobs.php?p=job- postings&s=vancouve...](http://www.imageworks.com/jobs.php?p=job- postings&s=vancouver&a=8)

I believe Disney Animation do as well for certain projects too, and probably Pixar too. ILM also have a web department though I don't know if they use django but I suspect they would.

It's not really front and center on any of the job listings I see, even on ours but we do definitely use it for some of our backend.

<comment><USER2> Thanks thats really useful info.:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Should be back up now. Reddit hugged my RAM to death. Set up a cacher and upgraded my VPS for the time being

Sorry about the site going down. How embarrassing. Mirror here: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QEt3EVS...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QEt3EVSuYnYJ:dgovil.com/blog/2016/11/30/python- for-feature-film/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

I was totally not expecting that much traffic in such a short period of time and failed to set up a cacher properly.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Additionally, it's important to note that the film industry uses Python 2.7 > and not Python 3. There has been significant code developed with Python 2 > and it's not easy to switch forward yet,

It's worth mentioning that Blender has adopted Python 3 as its scripting language since 2.5 (2011), but maybe represents a small set of 'the industry', with smaller studios.

<comment><USER4> While I'm guilty of staying with an "aging" 2.7 codebase (due to lack of time, and my employer not being really sure about Py3), with 3.6 I've been looking more and more into porting and it doesn't look _that_ complicated. Am I missing something when people say that "it's not easy to switch"?

<comment><USER5> How much unicode do you work with? If your answer is "none", then the answer to "is it easy to switch" is "not that hard".

I would start by taking your 2.7 code, adding "from __future__ import print_function" and fixing any SyntaxErrors. This is trivial by byte compiling all the files.

Then, add "from __future__ import division". Now, run all your tests (you have tests right?). If none fail, and you're sure your tests actually test your division code locations, then proceed.

Next step: you're done.

<comment><USER4> I can think of a few spots where we've used filter or map which should require a bit of work too. Other than that, your Hitchikers Guide to Python 3 seems about as easy as it can be.

<comment><USER5> map and filter return iterators. This is easy to fix (list(map(...)). reduce is at functools.reduce.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm I knew there were some changes in both map and filter but didn't dig into them. If the only change is that they return iterators instead of lists, it would even help on some parts of a few projects I maintain. I still have to check it up though, can't be certain until I see what happens and if it breaks anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing, my favorite part wasn't even the one about Python. It's that you included a step by step list of the Animated feature film pipeline, I had no idea how it worked =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you found the breakdown of the stages interesting. It's a lot of moving pieces at one time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QEt3EVS...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QEt3EVSuYnYJ:dgovil.com/blog/2016/11/30/python- for-feature-film/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing that. It seems I got reddit hugged to death. I was totally not expecting that many concurrent hits and failed to setup proper caching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> this is very cool.

what are some of the names of the jobs that are programming based (as opposed to 3d artist based)?

I am also very curious about what the breakdown is between people who write the pipeline code and those who write the stuff being put into and out of these pipelines- is the difference very big? (i.e. how deep in the stack does each role go?)

And what kinds of experience do they look for, and how would you say a regular old web dev programmer would go about getting that experience?

<comment><USER9> Vfx companies need web devs too! I'm a lead for a team which delivers web based tools for vfx production management. Quite a few bits of our apps and back ends have to integrate with pipeline tools and asset management systems, so there is an interesting cross over. Also for that reason we have python services and web stacks.

<comment><USER9> That is to say, you could join a vfx company using your existing web dev skills and once you are familiarized with the vfx environment and pipeline, transfer onto a pipeline team.</comment></comment></comment>


Entrepreneurship is not about changing the world - <AUTHOR> http://smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com/2009/01/enough-about-passion-and-changing-world.html

<comment><USER2> Passion isnt part of the definition of entrepreneur, but I do think its a facet that precedes it.

just like becoming a professional swimmer, being the best (swimmer) and not failing (starting a company) both require extremely hard work, and its hard to sustain that level of work required without some(a lot of) passion

<comment><USER3> Exactly. People will work harder to do something that improves the world as well as making money. If we were just trying to make money, we probably wouldn't have started YC, for example. We _hope_ to make money, but that alone wouldn't have provided sufficient activation energy.

<comment><USER4> This post irks me!

What does the author consider Thomas Edison's work? Did Edison innovate early for the sole purpose of making money? I think rather he did because of passion, interest and possibly the thought of changing the world. Obviously he succeeded in the above and in turn created industries that fed and feeds millions of people each year.

I can't imagine starting up a business where I had no passion and interest in doing, rather only for the money. Ummm i had that type of situation before and it was called a job!

<comment><USER5> Edison certainly had passion and interest, but he also had a giant ego. He cut down Tesla, knowing full well that AC was a better option. Maybe he wasn't just thinking about the money (he did stand to lose his patent royalties), but certainly his legacy came before "changing the world." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents> [http://media.www.thetriangle.org/media/storage/paper689/news...](http://media.www.thetriangle.org/media/storage/paper689/news/2004/10/15/SciTech/Edison.Tesla.Competed.For.Acdc.Current.Monopoly-754734.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hello everyone!

Thanks so much for your comments both here and on the original blog. I will try to reply to a few points raised here which I think misunderstand my argument.

1\. "This thinking caused the economic crisis" ... I am having a hard time following the logic here. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs ... how did they cause this economic crisis again? I believe the poster is conflating my argument with a view I never made, which is that people should focus on short term versus long term. I never stated this, and no one would claim that a person who only tries to maximize the profits for one day to the detriment of the company for ever would be a successful entrepreneur.

2\. As for the bankers in this world, according to my view, they would be complete failures ... as they LOST money by the bucket loads.

3\. As for the question of starting a company to change the world, I applaud you. You may be very successful in helping many people. But this would not put you in the same league as Bill Gates, Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs UNLESS your company can consistently make money.

To make my point perhaps a bit clearer, take for example another profession ... brain surgeon. You can be the nicest brain surgeon in the world. You can set up a company that offers free books to children. But if my father needs brain surgery, all of these are side considerations. What matters is whether you can perform the brain surgery successfully or not. That is it.

The same point applies to competitive athletes. They can be fine people, but if they come in 8th in a footrace, they have not succeeded in their job, which is to run faster than their competitors.

4\. As for the point about twitter and other non-moneymaking companies, that is exactly my point ... they need to find viable business models. Linkedin is a company that makes money and one I consider to be an entrepreneurial success ... twitter, no (at least not yet).

5\. As for Vincent Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, they are all successful scientists. They are NOT successful entrepreneurs, unless you stretch the definition of entrepreneur to a point where the term becomes meaningless. (e.g. "My mom is an entrepreneur because she gave me the wonderful gift of life," etc.)

If you change the definition of a word, you can prove any nonsense. For example I can prove that camels have wings and can fly ... just by stretching the definition of camel to also include all animals with two eyes. This is a logical fallacy.

So in sum, you can respect people like Jimmy Wales or Tim Berners Lee or Linus Torvalds or my mother. I certainly do. But they have not won the entrepreneur game. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin ... Yes. My mom ... no.

Love,

Anjali Sen <http://smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com>

<comment><USER7> How true.

I am in music school studying viola, and these comments really hit home.

Not everyone can be successful, not everyone can be above average, and these attempts to stretch the definition seem to me to be a way of just making people feel better when they are not successful.

If being an entrepreneur is all about passion, GREAT, I can be a successfull entreprenuer, and so can everyone else! Wow!

But this is nonsense. In any human endeavor, not everyone can win. Not everyone can be Yo Yo Ma, even though it may make you feel good and touchy feely to say that you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This strikes me as very close minded. The measure of success depends on the metric. How innovative I am does not always manifest itself in money. Does that make my endeavor any less entrepreneurial? I think not.

If all you care about it money, than obviously not having it will mean you have failed. If you define your entrepreneurial spirit as something more, you are successful when you achieve that something, whatever it may be.

<comment><USER9> Classically, the definition of entrepreneurs has been the former. People who set out to make companies and get rich. Just try google: define:entrepreneur.

When we use a language, we should respect its definitions or pretty soon people start saying something and meaning something entirely else. Maybe instead of entrepreneur, we need another word like doer...

<comment><USER2> founder?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Cross-posted from the blog's comments..._

OK, let's say I want to change the world and I decide starting a company is the best way to do that. I guess that means I'm not an entrepreneur, huh?

"But the sooner an entrepreneur and young budding CEOs realise that there really is only one metric that counts in this game, the sooner we will get beyond the recent Web 2.0 silliness and thereby give birth to a revitalised start up environment where some truly amazing, long lasting companies will be created."

To the contrary, the Web 2.0 silliness is a result of people thinking like you. Most Web 2.0 companies (reddit, twitter, youtube) are time-wasters. If entrepreneurs were looking to change the world, they'd be working on something real like online education.

<comment><USER11> The parent of this comment calls Reddit a time-wasters and contrasts it with online education.

Probably the most valuable online education available today for a sufficiently smart person wanting to become a scientific generalist is provided by Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Since 2001 I for example have learned more science from Eliezer's online writings than from all other sources combined.) The software for Eliezer's latest project, Less Wrong, is . . . Reddit.

(Clarification on what I mean by "education": Eliezer provides _education_ , not _credentialing_.)

<comment><USER12> Honestly, I don't think Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings at all compare with what you can get by seriously working through the MIT OpenCourseware site and/or buying textbooks off Amazon.com and working through all the problems in them. Don't confuse feeling smart with being smart.

<comment><USER13> I freely admit, and sometimes explicitly warn, that I can't compete with doing the problems in textbooks.

But I'll compete with anything short of that; and there are some things today's textbooks don't seem to mention, maybe because it's not formal- sounding enough or universally agreed-upon enough. You can read through a whole physics textbook without understanding MWI; reading about heuristics and biases will leave out a lot that would be helpful in applying it to your everyday life (important exceptions: Robyn Dawes, Cialdini)... but reading standard evolutionary psychology actually _will_ get you all the extras, oddly enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> entrepreneur: _n_ one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. <http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/entrepreneur>

"Enterprise" makes it pretty broad, from Broadway musicals to journeys of discovery. There's nothing about "lasting companies" that make "lots" of money.

The article is really suggesting that _entrepreneur_ should be defined as it has defined it. Unfortunately, it presents no arguments for this, but merely proclaims an opinion.

<comment><USER14> Even for the pure capitalist, there are well documented benefits to having a non-momentary cause or purpose [1]. Your workers work better; your community supports you; your customers favour you. It's good PR, and every _lasting company that makes lots of money_ does PR.

But apart from the ideal capitalist (who doesn't exist, sorry), the human species has an instinct for cooperation and for belonging (not always requited). It's not intellectual or calculated, it's just part and parcel of the animal that is homo sapiens, as much as being bipedal. It's why sacrifice is at the centre of popular films (e.g. Titanic), and why members choose to hang out with each other, and to devote themselves to something. I surmise that the reason why humans evolved this instinct is because cooperation and unity are very effective at promoting survival and growth - which today is largely handled through _a business or enterprise._

[1] for example, see _Built to Last_ and _Good to Great_

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some examples of entrepreneurs who are truly amazing and long-lasting:

\- patent trolls

\- domain squatters

\- spammers

<comment><USER16> I don't think the blogger is referring to unethical business practices any more than the blogger would endorse organised crime and steroids in sports. He is referring to people like Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin and Bill Gates .. not Bernie Madoff or Jeff Skilling.

<comment><USER17> Uh, "Bill Gates" = "unethical business practices".

Where have you been?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it's better to phrase this in terms of instrumental vs. inherent goals. The _inherent_ goal of an entrepreneur is to build lasting companies that generate large profits. That's what they're there for, and that's the yardstick for success.

Some _instrumental_ goals of this are being passionate about the product, changing the world, doing what you love, etc. Because if you do what you love, you're likely passionate about the product. If you're passionate about the product, you'll likely change the world. If you change the world, you'll likely (though not always) have a built a lasting company that generates large profits.

Similarly, for most people, generating large profits is an instrumental goal to being happy, and then being happy is the inherent goal. Some people find they can be happy by doing a not-so-profitable small business that happens to let them do what they want, skipping the make-lots-of-profits step. These people fail at entrepreneurship but win at life.

</comment><comment><USER18> > An entrepreneur's job is to build lasting companies that make lots of money. > Period.

This is one of those arguments that starts falling apart as soon as you start looking at it closely. What if I build a company that makes lots of money for a short period of time? Am I not an entrepreneur? Or what if I don't respect laws and ethics while making said money, and I'm smart enough to not get caught, or smart enough to quit when I have a reasonable value of "lots of money"?

</comment><comment><USER19> Entrepreneurship is about changing one little small part of my world.

</comment><comment><USER15> "But the sooner an entrepreneur and young budding CEOs realise that there really is only one metric that counts in this game, the sooner we will get beyond the recent Web 2.0 silliness and thereby give birth to a revitalised start up environment where some truly amazing, long lasting companies will be created."

"truly amazing" - a little bit of hyperbole perhaps? Oh boy, I can't wait for the Golden Era of Entrepreneurship to arrive!!!

</comment><comment> bjelkeman-again Old fashioned thinking. Only money counts. I disagree.

<comment><USER20> To me, entrepreneur meant trying something new. By the way, it's a French word, so I should be qualified to comment on its meaning beyond what your thesaurus says :-)

So I agree with your disagreement.

<comment><USER16> The french origins come from the words for undertake and business (entreprise). Yes, so it means to star a business.

<comment><USER21> Disclaimer: engineering undergrad here, half-learnt book knowledge lies ahead.

All of this discussion boils down to how you define the word 'enterprise'. A definition I was taught, of the concept of 'empresa' (meaning, literally in Spanish, 'enterprise'), is

 _socio-economical unit in which capital, work and direction are coordinated to achieve production that responds to the requirements of the human medium in which it acts_ ,

which is indeed a broad definition, and one that accepts Microsoft, Apple, the Wikimedia Foundation and your local soup kitchen as enterprises, even if not all are for-profit organizations.

Now, sustainability is desirable trait all such organizations, but it is not required, obviously ;)

You say that making a definition as general as that to be useless, but I disagree. When someone tells you that he is an entrepreneur, and nothing else, all you know is that he runs an organization that does _something_ for _someone_. You don't know anything about his profits, whether he seeks them or not, and that is something that, for an outsider, doesn't matter. The definition of 'entrepreneur', profit seeking or not, does not help you to know about the finances of the organization, and thus the generality isn't harmful to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a stupid and pointless blog post. His argument is completely unfounded. For example; in the comments, someone asks where Jimbo Wales would be considered an entrepreneur and the author of the blog says that Jimbo Wales is _not_ an entrepreneur, because WikiPedia is not a for profit business.

This a rather arbitrary definition of an entrepreneur. I checked both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com, and both of their definitions for entrepreneur _do_ include room for entrepreneur who found non-profits. See for yourself: <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entrepreneur> <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/entrepreneur>

Clearly the authors argument and conclusion is unfounded crap. Creating a long lasting and profitable commercial business is certainly a valid motivation for entrepreneurship, but so is changing the world, or even something as modest as looking to establish a second income stream, or looking for a different time/income tradeoff (4HWW, etc).

<comment><USER23> Jimbo has tried many times to start businesses to make money, and he has failed in all of them.

It is one thing to start a nonprofit foundation and have people donated their time to building it.

It is a completely different thing to own a P&L, have to pay suppliers, pay employees, get customers, pay taxes, and still make money.

Jimbo is many things, but he is NOT a successful entrepreneur. Wikia anyone?

<comment><USER22> Look up the definition of an enterprise in your dictionary. A non-profit like Wikipedia _is_ an enterprise. Therefore, Jimbo is a successful entrepreneur.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's a lot easier to hire passionate engineers as employees if you're trying to change the world, however.

</comment><comment><USER25> How can one create a long lasting company if that person isn't passionate about what he is creating? How long one work on something he doesn't love? I think his statements are contradicting or at least nearly impossible to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER26> this sporty hot-shot, who jumps on the roof every day / he knows how it works / but entirely missed the point. =)</comment>


Choosing A Minimally Viable Co-Founder - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/68846/Choosing-A-Minimally-Viable-Co-Founder.aspx <comment><USER2> Dharmesh, thank you for the exceptional post. I find this post to the hit the nail on the head and wish I had this information earlier on in the process. I agree with every single one of your points based on my own experience. I suppose some could argue you set the bar high for the minimum requirements, but I can already tell you that in a short amount of time, I've had problems because former co-founders lacked some of the essential ingredients you mentioned, especially those who are committed to an idea and not the company or those who think much more than they do.

I think the African proverb is perfect too. I couldn't have said it better. Despite being an extrovert, I've always preferred doing it alone, mainly because I was weary that people wouldn't be as committed or work as hard as I did on a given idea. But like the proverb says, if you want to go far, go together, and I know how that going together is extremely useful and fun, especially for a startup!

</comment><comment><USER3> The expression is "minimum viable", not "minimally viable". They mean very different things.

</comment><comment><USER4> More like a minimally viable blogpost.

<comment><USER5> This actually comes back to something I have been thinking about for a long time. One can build a minimum viable product because it is then easier to change and one can reasonably expect to improve it, if it is a good market fit.

On the other hand, blog posts are seldom changed once they have been written. Why not combine blogpost with a wiki style editing process? That way those who read it will be able to read the most uptodate version of whatever advice your post contains (even if it just "this article is very old and you should use version 4.8 for $PRODUCT instead")? It seems to me that blogs are written under then assumption that they were supposed to host a diary of sorts (where you would never have to update it once it has been written).

<comment><USER6> That's a really good point. I've actually considered going back through some old articles that were popular, and updating them -- based on things I've learned since then, and some of the comments from readers. Will have to try that out.</comment></comment></comment>


Convicted U.S. spy Christopher Boyce: 'Snowden is doomed' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/asia/hong-kong-boyce-snowden/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

<comment><USER2> > Former spy, fugitive and convicted traitor, Christopher Boyce sold U.S. > secrets to the former Soviet Union and dodged U.S. authorities for almost > two years until his arrest in 1977 at the age of just 22.

Christopher Boyce was convicted of espionage, not treason.</comment>