Primer – CSS toolkit and guidelines that power GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://primercss.io/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I hate web development. Comparing the buttons ([http://primercss.io/buttons/](http://primercss.io/buttons/)) between Chrome and Safari on my Mac, the text is a pixel further up in Chrome and thus looks slightly wonky to me.

Here's a screenshot of the two side-by-side (Chrome left, Safari right), zoomed to 500% in Photoshop with a 1px grid: [http://imgur.com/dhZrxFH](http://imgur.com/dhZrxFH)

<comment><USER3> This is due to a Chrome bug with how they render Helvetica. We could hack it ourselves, but it's a regression on their end and it'd just be more work for us.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure it is a bug, and not just a difference in the way the vertical spacing is calculated? Apple changed the way Helvetica's height is calculated in iOS 3.x and for a while had a "legacy font metrics" that were available for their apps, which included MobileSafari until they pulled the trigger in iOS 4.x. I have found every browser and operating system and often different versions of each to calculate these metrics differently, even for a specific given font. I talked to some people at WebKit and on Safari about this, and they absolutely do not consider it a bug.

<comment><USER3> Yup, see my comment above or below this. I'd find the tweets about it, but blah, Twitter search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised at the lack of semantic meaning in most popular grid frameworks.

Years ago, we moved away from layout with tables because

 is a horrible way to separate presentation from content but
 is just as bad.

<comment><USER6> What exactly do you mean by "semantic meaning"? Meaning to who? For what purpose?

Classes on elements exist for the purpose of styling via CSS, not for users to see or screen readers to read or googlebots to classify. So if you want your css classes to "mean something" (which is what "being semantic" is), you want them to mean something to the STYLE of your page! Hence, using class="two- thirds columns" is perfectly semantic towards the purpose of visually styling the page.

Did you have some other interpretation of "semantic" that you think should apply instead? Perhaps you mean "the structure of the content"? That's not what classes are for -- that's what the elements themselves are for. Or perhaps you mean for visually-impaired folks to be able to easily navigate the content? That's not what classes are for either -- that's what ARIA roles are for. SEO perhaps? It's possible that google uses class names for this, but that's just black magic voodoo that us mere mortals can have no knowledge about (and even if we did, it could change tomorrow).

Here's the thing about using tables for layout... the table element actually has a defined meaning in HTML... it is for tabular data. The div element however does not imply any meaning (other than "arbitrary division of the page"). So using a div here with the classes that imply meaning to the CSS is quite "semantic" in this case.

<comment><USER7> "Semantic" in the sense he's complaining about means, roughly, "what the thing _is_ " rather than "how the thing _looks_ ". So instead of 'class="one-third column left"' you would write 'class="left-navigation"' or, if you want to be more pure 'class="category-navigation"', which acknowledges that being on the left or right is itself a presentation choice that should be controlled in CSS. Behind the scenes, of course, you can use SASS or similar to apply the styles of left, one-third width, etc, to your semantically-named class, without changing the name "category-navigation" or your markup at all.

Markup written this way is, imo, indeed more readable, maintainable, and less likely to change. Whether you agree with that or not, that's the meaning of "semantic" in CSS arguments.

The argument here is similar to the argument for writing declarative code, or, in OO, for ensuring that your objects, and their names, match natural domain concepts. The rates of change of such concepts are generally much slower than the rates of change of their concrete manifestations in views.

<comment><USER6> I respectfully / slightly disagree. The "thing" we're referring to here is a div whose _sole purpose_ is for the grid layout.

The way I see it, that thing __is __a boundary for the grid. In fact, I bet if you narrow your screen, that "thing" changes the way it looks entirely and is no longer a "column" but rather stacks above or below its counterparts within the same grid "row". If you used the class "left-navigation", to me that's describing how it looks even _more_ than saying it's a "grid column" (because the navigation won't be on the "left" on narrow screens)!

Of course your example of class="category-navigation" does not suffer from this problem, but again my point is that sure it's more "pure" from the perspective of describing the element's place in the overall structure of the page, but this is not the purpose of the 'class' attribute! The HTML5 elements are for structuring the content... but classes are hooks for styling the content. As long as the styles themselves are not intermingled within the HTML, I think it's no more or less "semantic" to use words that imply meaning to the css versus the content itself.

Finally, in my experience building tons and tons of CMS-based sites over the years, the "meaning" of the content that exists in a particular location of the page changes a lot more frequently than the visual layout of the page. So I'd argue that it's more likely (in my experience, for the kinds of sites I tend to build) that using "column" as a class name will keep its intended meaning for much longer than using something like "category-navigation" (because one day someone in marketing is going to want to put a CTA button or more social links in that spot that you originally intended to be for "category navigation").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related blog post: [http://markdotto.com/2015/03/23/introducing- primer/](http://markdotto.com/2015/03/23/introducing-primer/)

</comment><comment><USER8> > Primer is the basecoat...

That's an interesting confusion within the analogy.

<comment><USER9> "Primer is the primer" is accurate but unclear. I wonder if most people even know what primer is, especially considering most paints are now supposedly "self-priming".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> @mdo is one of the maintainers. Is this a spiritual successor to Bootstrap?

<comment><USER11> It looks to be pretty tied to git terms:

[http://primercss.io/states/](http://primercss.io/states/)

<comment><USER12> Indeed. From the announcement blog post: "It will always be GitHub's internal toolkit first, designed to help build GitHubby things. That said, we love to share." [1]

[1]: [http://markdotto.com/2015/03/23/introducing- primer/](http://markdotto.com/2015/03/23/introducing-primer/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like it, as it's much more semantically oriented than Bootstrap. But why do the buttons still need the "BTN class?

<comment><USER14> mdo mentions this in his recent talk: [http://jqueryuk.com/2015/videos.php?s=mdo-ular- css](http://jqueryuk.com/2015/videos.php?s=mdo-ular-css)

tl;dr; It makes for cleaner grep results.

<comment><USER15> Without having watched the video, that sounds like a weak justification at best. I'm sure best practises could be ignored in many scenarios with the effect of slightly more greppable source, but that would normally be counterproductive. I guess we need better command-line search tools, really, ones that understand the structure of the file they're inspecting beyond a line-by-line representation.

<comment><USER3> That is one of the reasons—you can view the slides also at [https://speakerdeck.com/mdo/at-mdo-ular-css](https://speakerdeck.com/mdo/at- mdo-ular-css) if you don't want to watch the video.

I like to use prefixes and base classes. It's faster for browsers to paint, leads to fewer rules overall, reduces selectors, and helps prevent unnecessary overrides.

<comment><USER15> My aesthetic senses have always led me to a preference for button {} over .btn {}, class="foo bar" over class="foo-bar", etc. But I realise I'm in the minority and I need to get pragmatic. The slides have convinced me to check out the video tomorrow, which will be a start.

codeguide.co also looks well worth checking out. At the risk of derailing the conversation further, what's the reason for leaving a trailing slash out of self-closing elements? I recognise it's optional, but including it gives you the option of XML-parsing your HTML; is there a non-aesthetic advantage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the "Pixels vs ems" was a bit short. Anyone?[http://primercss.io/guidelines/](http://primercss.io/guidelines/)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I thought rems were the new thing?

<comment><USER3> All of GitHub is basically in pixels, save for our Markdown styles—for easy modification across devices, we use `em`s. It'd be a huge project to update that to `rem`s anytime soon.

<comment><USER16> If you'd make it from scratch today, what technique would you use? html {font- size:62.5% } with REM?

<comment><USER3> Set an HTML font-size—likely 16px—and use body { font-size: 1rem; }. Allows for easy media query scaling of type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> why would i want a css toolkit from a site that can't even show usable scroll bars in a text area?

it is simply impossible to see diffs with slightly longer lines without scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page, away from the line you want to read, so you can reach the horizontal scroll bar.

meh.

<comment><USER19> Say what?

<comment><USER18> i take you don't use github for code review...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I loved the tooltips implementation. I'd like to grab just that.

<comment><USER21> What did you love? I was checking it and the text seems strangely positioned on OSX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love this. What other companies have released their CSS/HTML guidelines?

I much prefer to read guidelines like this, than using a full framework.

<comment><USER22> It's not down to the code style level, but Atlassian has the Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG) and Atlassian UI (AUI).

ADG is the general patterns and UX stuff, AUI is a UI library which covers both CSS and JS components and implements the patterns in the ADG.

ADG: [https://design.atlassian.com/latest/](https://design.atlassian.com/latest/) AUI: [https://docs.atlassian.com/aui/latest/](https://docs.atlassian.com/aui/latest/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm looking forward to seeing their GFM styles... that's probably the most compelling to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why do I have to put 3 divs in order to make work the grid?

<comment><USER6> How else would you do it (assuming you wanted to use floats)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Terrific and very useful.

</comment><comment><USER26> This just seems kinda boring - visually and technically. Do we really need another CSS toolkit with an almost replicated feature set.

Every year, I think github is going to somehow release a long awaited product that blows me away with all the talent they have. Every year, I'm surprised at how little they change, and how all the opportunities that seem obvious slip to the wayside.

<comment><USER3> Might be boring to you, but it isn't to us. This is (part of) our job :).

When I stopped to think about it, there was honestly no reason to _not_ open source Primer. If the goal of open source is the share and learn and improve, then what does it matter what we release? Especially as open source?

<comment><USER27> Not to piss on the pie BUT: The GitHub CSS breaks when one sets a minimum font-size (as required for high DPI screens). Heck every web page based on bootstrap or most "modern" CSS frameworks breaks the same way.

How about you "CSS experts" get your shit together and start respecting the fucking standard. Assuming being able to force a font size (other than relative) is UNPORTABLE. It always has been and (hopefully) it WILL ALWAYS BE. I am NO GOD DAMN DESIGNER. I just know CSS because its fucking 2015. I knew this bug since fucking 2010. Only because I fucking PLAYED WITH CSS.

Why is that the GitHub (successful company, right?) CSS team makes mistakes I stopped making when I was in high school and CSS based layouts were a new thing?

Now wait for it: "But minimum font size is not a default setting in any browser. You're less than 1% of out userbase. We don't care."

/end unforgivable vulgar rant. No harm intended. Consider it comedy. But seriously: CSS people are so wrong right now. I should be the pope of web design and I don't even care about it.

mdo: It's not your fault. I am barking at the wrong tree. In fact there are more pressing issues I have that GitHub ignores. It just vulcanoed out of me. If you have any influence in the CSS scene, please try to address this common mistake.

<comment><USER28> Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by minimum font-size? You've got me curious.

<comment><USER29> At first glance I'd assume the idea is that a browser can choose to ignore author stylesheet font sizes if they are smaller than a certain size, ensuring text is always a minimum size of say, 16px. This is in contrast to approaches that vary the text size consistently -- either by scaling text alone to larger, constant sizes, or by using a "zoom" property. I can imagine that without JavaScript, a minimum font size would be harder to support and still maintain compatibility. This is why for most retina screen use cases, scaling is employed instead of font-size changes.

Getting back to minimum font size, I assume the point is that we shouldn't use em or rem to base our designs solely on font sizes, but instead on a combination of those and percentage-based units. Also, I imagine all layouts must "flow" to accommodate larger font sizes. Really, the biggest issue is that every browser and device supports "zoom" for text in different ways -- look at Android, for example -- and it's hard enough accommodating screen readers and multiple platforms to then take into account how browsers can change the page. To some extent, it's like complaining that your websites don't fit on my 800x600 CRT unless I make the text really tiny. Yes, it's a legitimate complaint, but maybe there's another browser out there or extension that can handle it -- e.g. "Readability" or Safari and how it can pull body text from a page. Or the ability to "zoom in" on sections of a page, e.g. with a magnifier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> With this, the updated rankings are in:

new JavaScript frameworks this month: 24

new CSS frameworks this month: 21

Will front-end developers be able to catch up to JavaScript's score or is it going to be the third month in row JavaScript gets more frameworks out there than CSS? With less than 10 days left on the clock, avid front-enders will have to give everything they have to release at least 3 more frameworks. And as you know, unless it is a MAJOR update according to the semver standard, current framework updates don't count!

.satire {}

<comment><USER3> The number of frameworks of any kind has no bearing on the willingness of more people to share their knowledge and experience with the open source community. I'd write 10 more CSS frameworks if it helped just one more person make something they loved on the web.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you describe the market of Computer Vision? - <AUTHOR> I'm running a Computer Vision consulting company quite successfully. Basically, my job is to implement "where's Waldo" IRL for my customers (B2B).
However, I'm surprised at how it seems difficult to focus on ONE specific kind of customer: most of my customers come from different backgrounds, the stakeholders are quite different... making the sales process sometimes slow and complex, with a high CAC. In my path to have a streamlined (read: move from service to a more general product), I struggle with finding common traits to the Computer Vision needs.
Some customers have a programmer background, some do not. Some customers come from marketing, others from manufacturing/operations, others run SMBs.
The do-all-do-nothing approach of platforms like Sagemaker or Azure Custom Vision overwhelm them. These platforms usually address people who: - already have a data science background - integrate into a broader and generally complex environment
Easier to use platforms like Clarifai do not seem to be very common (not even mentioning the lay-offs) and ends up in a vendor lock-in situation where you HAVE to contract them if you want to go further with models tuning.
What is your take on the computer vision market? Do you think there's a need for an in-between platform (ease of use of Clarifai but with Sagemaker's flexibility and tweakability)?
If so, would you imagine an obvious and ever-present use case?
And as a side question: if you compared current Computer Vision market value chain to another industry, what would it be?
Thanks :) <comment><USER2> Hardest part of building computer vision models these days is collecting and annotating data. A self serve tool like sagemaker doesn't solve that problem.

As a computer vision company your best bet is to focus on a specific industry or a narrow problem and build fully featured products. This could be medical imaging, satelite imagery, face recognition, fashion, adult content filtering, face recognition, etc.

We're doing this for food. We built a consumer food logging app that's a great source of data to keep improving our recognition model. At this point we have millions of labeled images, something that would take most of our API customers years to do. To make integration easier we couple the recognition model with a food "knowledge graph" that includes nutrition facts, ingredients and dietary categorizations. It turns out that this is useful to a lot of healthcare, fitness, nutrition and CPG companies.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm working on a computer vision product, and the dtaa collection is a nightmare. Not just collecting alot, but getting enought samples for each class and each type of situation that might arise. It makes me want to pull my hair out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tricky question: how do you define "enough"? :) (I usually answer my clients as a joke: "thing about the MAXIMUM number of images you can provide me. Well 'enough', for us, is twice more!")

<comment><USER3> When I've tuned my models a million ways and they still overfit? I'm suspecting I don't have enough

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean, the tricky part is to have an estimation of the number of images _before_ you even train your model :) (usually for budgeting reasons)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you're right that product-market fit isn't there, yet, except for the organization that hires a real CV expert. So far vendors have wishful thinking about what makes a "mimimum viable" platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, my feeling is that we're in an "in between" situation:

\- the promise of AWS et al. is that deep learning is available to every developer ; this is true on a purely technical basis, but without appropriate knowledge and experience, constituting a curated database is _really_ hard.

\- CV expertise is a little bit overrated nowadays, as I believe key success factors for a CV project is not the technical expertise of the algorithm wizard, but rather the rigorousness of the project management (data science is 20%, the rest is 80%).

I may be wrong, but both approaches lack the same thing: a way to curate the image dataset — and get those 80% of the work done without hassle. Once these 80% of data management is done, the main difference between the "CV amateur" and "CV expert" is the ability to push the performance of the algorithm.

But maybe we just lack a "Postgres for images" that would make these 80% easier, after all :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened to Winamp? - <AUTHOR>

I was avid user of Winamp 12 years back when I was in high school. I am trying to figure why people really stopped using it? Shifted to different Mp3 players? or online audio/video? <comment><USER2> AOL bought Nullsoft. After that, it was pretty much all downhill. It went from an mp3 player to a mp3 player / video player / web browser / digital media library / online radio / toolbar / etc...

<comment><USER3> This.

Along with no innovation on what it was suppose to do, which is play music easier/better. Instead of doing one thing simply and better, it tried to be the jack of all things multimedia and related. It bloated it's way to failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its interface did not really scale with peoples' music collections. Software with better library management eventually replaced it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I still used winamp classic/lite right up until I accidentally switched over to vlc. I installed vlc to play videos and noticed that it was playing mp3's and rtsp's as well, and it was good enough that I didn't bother to switch it back.

</comment><comment><USER6> Same here. I think the reason why we used Winamp was because it was the fucking cool edgy underdog. After it was sold to AOL (which is as uncool as can possibly get) and got loaded up on corporate features, we moved on.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bloated, yeah, but I still use it. Straightforward, categorized, text-based music library management and the ability to play cut/continuous tracks without a hiccup even with other disk IO going on(which is why I rejected the other simple players I've tried) keep it on my machine. (I should mention that I use FLAC almost exclusively, so the seamless prefetch makes more of a difference to me than it would to somebody playing MP3s.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think Napster happened, and frankly had a great music player interface (for it's day). Then iTunes came later and (at least back then) it was light and fast.

</comment><comment><USER9> Zinf ne Freeamp <http://www.zinf.org/> also showed up as an open source player after all the degradation others already discuss, I'm using Rhythmbox right now just out of laziness basically. I dunno what is going on in the lands of windows these days.

</comment><comment><USER10> I heard that llamas everywhere joined into a class action lawsuit and filed suit for being whipped repeatedly. AOL, having newly acquired the company, decided to remove the llama whipping features, instead opting for non-llama- whipping ones.

</comment><comment><USER11> Most colleagues at work listen to music from their iPod, not their workstation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Switched to Foobar2000. Easier to manage your library if it has more than 10K songs, and really light on memory.

</comment><comment><USER13> Still use winamp with the enhancer DSP plugin.

<comment><AUTHOR> DFX?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for input guys!</comment>


Startup: Development on Handhelds - <AUTHOR> http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/cpg/2887057672.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
So everyone's seen AIDE: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aide.ui
I'd like to found a startup centered on this idea, but in a much more enterprise-oriented fashion.  My solution will work nicely, but not ideally on an iPhone or equivalent Android device. <comment><AUTHOR> What I want to do is develop an enterprise-oriented IDE that doesn't suck on handhelds. I already took the first step and developed on an iPhone for a month. It sucked and I know how to fix it.

UPDATE: So, I've already got at least one prospective team member. That was fast.</comment>


There's a reason they're called "encodings" - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/368805/python-unicodedecodeerror-am-i-misunderstanding-encode/370199#370199 <comment><USER3> I wrote a potted history of the precursors to Unicode.[1] Mainly because I was dealing with Oracle and Unicode far, far too much.

Might be useful to someone...

1\. [http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unic...](http://www.randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unicode- and-oracle.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> This should be a mandatory read before anyone asks questions about Unicode:

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

<comment><USER5> This reminds me of kids buying surrogate books with short description of "Peace and War" and other lengthy literature pieces because they don't want or don't have time to read the original.

I personally think the first and the only mandatory thing one should read about Unicode is the Standard itself.

Don't read "UTF-8 is cool!!!" blog posts.

Don't read RFC 3629.

Read original.

[http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/UnicodeStandard...](http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/UnicodeStandard-6.1.pdf)

It is nicely written, it has normative definitions (code points, glyphs et al).

It describes BOM (which Joel On Software apparently has failed to understand).

It describes UTF-8 error handling and normalization and many necessarily non- trivial things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I made a little practical demo about using Unicode with Ruby for a presentation a while back, perhaps of interest to some people:

<https://github.com/norman/enc/blob/master/equivalence.rb>

</comment><comment><USER7> There is an explanation missing in that answer about how python 2 goofed up and python 3 strings fixed things. Without that explanation, showing how the Python 2 strings must be "decoded" is just terribly confusing.

It doesn't really make sense to "decode" a proper string type. Ideally the language should never reveal how it represents strings internally in memory, so you can think of strings as a sequence of abstract unicode codepoints with no specific encoding at all. And Python 3 strings are like that.

<comment><USER8> Python 3's string type is simply Python 2's unicode. Python 3's bytes type is 2's string. Python 3 didn't fixed anything, they just cleared up the semantics because way too many people expect a type called "string" to hold "text" - <USER2> often what they really mean is "unicode".</comment></comment>


Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/01/manage-amazon-ec2-with-new-webbased-console.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, this console is actually really awesome. It's the first non-command line based tool package that I'll actually be using. I was surprised when they launched AWS that they didn't have something like this in the beginning. The service seems complete now.

The learning curve is now reduced to a level where normal people can figure out how to use AWS in under an hour.

<comment><USER3> If you like this, you probably want to check out Rightscale's free package:

<http://www.rightscale.com/>

It's not as ajaxy, but RightScale's stuff can do a good bit more than Amazon's EC2 dashboard. Honestly, I was hoping Amazon would create something at least as good as free RightScale when I read this-- but it feels a bit worse than what most of us have been using for a good while.

This interface does look slick, though-- if they get it caught up in functionality I'd probably use it over RS. The release of this tool might reduce RightScale's valuation a tad since it does kind of indicate that Amazon's not in the market to buy someone like them.

<comment><USER2> Rightscale's UI is horrendous. It is so bad that I would rather use the command line tools.

<comment><USER3> ? Are we seeing the same UI? I'm not the world's biggest fan of the UI, but I've worked with much worse. It's a very deep web app, so it'd be a shame if startups dismiss a free tool because of a comment like that.

Maybe I've just been using it for so long that I've gotten used to it? At the time we started using it, it was the only dashboard that interfaced with all of the core AWS services. We happen to use a good bit of SQS and S3, so being able to browse those from time to time has been handy and prevented our team from having to write some of those tools ourselves.

Hopefully we'll all win and Amazon will upgrade their tool to have lots more features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One major highlight: "The console provides access via your Amazon username and password. No more certificates or public/secret keys to manage"

<comment><USER4> This seems like a really bad idea to me.

<comment><USER5> I'd be inclined to agree except that anyone with your Amazon email/pass already has access to your public/secret keys. So, it's not much of a security hole since a person with your account details could simply log in and grab your keys.

Still, it would be nice if Amazon offered a "high security" option that didn't trust password authentication and couldn't re-give you your secret key. I probably wouldn't use it, but it's still a good thing to offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> > " _a "high security" option that didn't trust password authentication and > couldn't re-give you your secret key_ "

And no way to reset it? What if you have VMs currently running that need to be stopped ($$)? And if there's a reset then it's the same thing as your point, anyone with your password has access (unless you're thinking email but that's worse than the current https delivery of secret keys IMO).

I like the idea in spirit.

I also think they would do well with a delegation of rights model (that included limited delegation). Any of these portals (Rightscale etc.) need you to upload your full credentials for anything to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the next few days we'll see comparisons from all the external EC2 portal efforts, forced now to highlight only their 'value add'.

It's always interesting to see where AWS is willing to step on the toes of all of the 3rd parties building enabling tools. And who they let in to their private betas (with EBS, some people were publicly feeling dissed).

<comment><USER6> Look at it the other way: What if Amazon was planning a Web console all along? Should they give up because someone beat them to it? If a third party implements a feature (persistent storage, load balancing, HA, auto-scaling), should Amazon be blocked from building that feature?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it's not indecent of them or anything (unless maybe they outright lied to someone about it; it's very hard to speculate about these things from the outside anyhow).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tips the scale more in favor of AWS in my decision ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419460> ), though it already seemed to be in favor of them anyway...

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great for occasional users to check anywhere that they haven't left a stray instance running, especially if they start them via scripts. I, of course, have totally discovered that only after getting the bill a week and a half later...

</comment><comment><USER9> i've been a big proponent of aws in general and ec2 in specific. this move by amazon just underlines their willingness to broaden their products appeal. and broaden ec2's appeal it will. frankly, a majority of people who read this site know how to get ec2 running via a command line. however, if for no other reason than showing your non-tech clients how ec2 functions graphically, this is an obvious win to the non tech among us.

go amazon! great job. (yaya ec2 web gui exists already - but its not directly from amazon so you lose a bunch of people in translation)

</comment><comment><USER10> Their interface is YUI + jQuery: <https://aws- portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/css/all.js>

<comment><USER11> Is that really necessary?

Aren't there plugins to cover the gaps between the two frameworks?

<comment><USER12> It actually makes a lot of sense.

JQuery is a pleasure to use for general UI manipulation, but (to my mind) it just doesn't have the consistency and quality of YUI when it comes to UI widgets / framework. And honestly, it will always be hard for a framework developed as plugins by a diverse group of people to compete in this regard with a full stack framework where every single widget is developed by a crowd of people under the same roof - you get the same look and feel to exacting standards with features most of us don't even want to think about built in (eg: ARIA etc.).

Why not use YUI for doing general ajax work? Well, it's API is horribly verbose, to borrow a term from Zed Shaw, it's "autistic". I can't imagine why they really thought it was a good idea to make it that way but they did. So combining the two makes a lot of sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't wait to use this. Elastic Fox is solid, but definitely feels clunky.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> video tour: <http://media.amazonwebservices.com/console/AwsConsole.html>

<comment><USER10> The tour assumes you've never heard of EC2 before. It is astonishingly painful to watch.

<comment><USER14> Speaking of painful, most of the video is about using PuTTY. Egads.</comment></comment></comment>


More Sex Talk from the Love Scientist - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/more-sex-talk-from-the-love-scientist

<comment><USER2> >I've taken testosterone just to see what happens, and I understand the problems of teenage boys

I'm impressed. Reminds me of a female neuroscientist on TED who had to take a hormone cocktail designed for men as she was incapable of making her own and there were no cocktail designed for women. I remember her saying she was angry and sex-obsessed all the time. Probably a slightly exaggerated effect because she's not a man, but still pretty illuminating. Chemistry can change us so much, and there's plenty we can not understand with just empathy.

Similarly about depression I've heard Paul Gilmartin say that "thinking you understand depression because you've experienced sadness is like thinking you understand Italy because you've been to Olive Garden".

<comment><USER3> Did the TED speaker attempt any sort of blinding to avoid the placebo effect and biased reporting?

<comment><USER2> No, she was a patient and would die after a couple of hours without the hormones. It was not an experiment and it was highly involuntary. She eventually made a mixture more to her liking, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> About casual sex: I interpret the phrasing "because they wanted to get to know the person better" a lot differently than the people in this interview seem to. I've said it myself, actually. What I meant, at least, was that being romantically interested in someone you turn out to be _sexually incompatible_ with happens so often, that often it's best to put the sexual compatibility filter _before_ the romantic interest filter.

<comment><USER5> It's probably good to not put too much of a gap between them, independent of order. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >. A most amazing moment for us was a study of people who were epileptics. They had the brain open, and every single time that they had an electrode stimulation to a very certain region of the cardiac nucleuses, which is part of this wanting system, the patient would turn around and say that he loved the doctor.

Anyone else see this and get really curious to read the manuscript from this study? Google has failed me, but if anyone else managed to locate it, please post!

</comment><comment><USER7> Quite often, she didn't answer the question he asked.

<comment><USER8> and she asked her own! It would be nice to parody this article, which starts as an interview with a sex researcher, who starts asking questions back, and by the end she's picking him up. :) The last line could be their dating plans. I should write that...

<comment><USER9> Nautil.us fanfic. I like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot about casual sex and no mention of STDs. These people still think it's the 60s and antibiotics work great. The CDC stat informed reality is that massive numbers of people are picking up infections and parasites that cause them problems for the rest of their lives. The sexual revolution was the fifteen year period when effective antibiotics and contraception were cheap and widely available.</comment>


Introduction to Bayesian Filter - <AUTHOR> https://leimao.github.io/article/Introduction-to-Bayesian-Filter/ <comment><USER2> Ah, I read introduction and thought "finally, something for me". I'll have to find something a little more introductory.

<comment><USER3> here you go

[https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in- Pyt...](https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python)

<comment><USER4> That's the best introductory material on the subject that I know!

<comment><USER3> it's alright. a little too idiosyncratic (and nm the "object oriented" code). but the intuition around bayes filtering is nice and clear.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I wrote an introductory guide to graph tech - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/traversing-the-land-of-graph-computing-and-databases-5cbf8e8ad66b <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

Graph theory had fascinated me as a student. On my first job, I'd briefly worked with Neo4j, a graph database, as part of a proof-of-concept project. At my current gig, I've had the opportunity to delve deep into the world of graph tech, especially databases, over the last one year.

Graph-like data models have been around since forever but their mainstream promise is relatively new. A resource which helped me understand the historical as well as fundamental aspects when starting out was the amazing book, "Designing Data Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann. There also exist various resources academic and industry resources around graph tech. But piecing them together to get a holistic picture to evaluate potential use- cases has been an arduous process, to say the least. Hence, I wrote this introductory piece to help anyone interested get started. I'd given a talk on the same topic at PyCon Italy ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0Ra8G8gD-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0Ra8G8gD-w)). I plan to write more on related topics.</comment>


Show HN: Buy and sell icons, illustrations and backgrounds for just $1 - <AUTHOR> http://onedollargraphics.market <comment><USER2> It is a cool project, but the one thing, that might limit your reach greatly is domain name (if you end up using long name, use ".com", otherwise the domain wont get much type-ins).

Also, the title of the website should be, what URL is, so instead of "$1 graphics" it should be "One Dollar Graphics". You can add a logo with "$1" to reinforce the name in people minds. Until you get traction and many users, you should stick to coining your name, not using shortcuts, that will confuse users and may reduce return rate for visitors.</comment>


Tribute to Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/danielpyon/full/NWqgbKz <comment><USER2> Nice! Part of freeCodeCamp projects I assume?

I started to learn to code with freeCodeCamp and I see that today it is even better. It worked pretty well for me. I wish you all the luck and don't get too discouraged when you get stuck. It is normal and eventually you will figure it out.

Take the time to make the page better following feedback here (make it look good on mobile, fix typos, factual error on content). It will be worth the learning for your future.

Great choice for the tribute too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it's the first project of the responsive web design part.

> I started to learn to code with freeCodeCamp and I see today that it is even > better.

I actually knew how to program before starting fCC, but never really tried web development. fCC has been great so far!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Since the creator of the site's here, just FYI that Highland Park is a suburb about 25-30 miles north of Chicago and isn't actually in Chicago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the correction, I will update that.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the first sentence, too :)

<comment><AUTHOR> ...and that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "His exact motive is not known, but knowing Aaron..."

@danielpyon you knew him?

</comment><comment><USER5> s/Profressor/Professor/

might want to run spell-check, otherwise good.

<comment><USER6> Also, technically, Aaron didn't cofound Reddit. He founded Infogami which was later merged into Reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> He didn't technically found it, but did a significant amount of work porting their 1.0 lisp code into python... Also he had an equal share of their parent company, I believe.

<comment><USER7> pg says he was a co-founder of reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why on codepen?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was just the most convenient for me.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't work on mobile at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry about that. I made the minimum width around 1000 pixels (you can check the body selector in the CSS). I might try fixing that soon, although I'm still a beginner so I might not be able to just yet. You can probably tell that the CSS isn't very well written: there are unused variables, constants everywhere, and the animation is very hacky. This is because I made this page to mainly to practice my CSS skills.

<comment><USER2> Already mentioned it above, but practice to the point of making it look good on mobile. It will be a worthy learning experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find if there are third party trackers in browser extensions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Examine the source code; browser extensions are mostly javascript.</comment>


Photography is changing - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/06/19/apple-doesnt-understand-photography/ <comment><USER2> "Apple doesn't support my personal use case well, therefore they dont understand photography"

Lots of people _DO_ want to organise photos from trips and events, and evidence shows that those people (who are probably a much larger sample than the author) are happy.

Anecdotally, I have several relatives who are extremely happy - to the extent of regularly making photo books from trips.

Everyone else I know who do "Serious" photography use Lightroom, and don't touch Apple's Photo organiser. The history of browsing on my phone is enough.

<comment><USER3> The point was not that events shouldn't be organized, more that they are occasional and other camera use are as important.

You are right that some people don't care about better intelligence, but the response to Google Photos is big enough to also show that having a huge engine to work with one's photo is valuable.

Being able to do searches like 'receipt' or 'ikea' or 'parking' and have actually relevant results is both mind blowing and extremely convenient, and I haven't heard of anyone who didn't wish Apple would have even half of the feature Google photos have after trying it for a few days. I also made the jump and the device's photo library has become a mere backup of my photos.

Going further, I agree with the author that if quick (or even auto) tagging of photo was easier it would help a lot.

Btw, I don't know how much Lightroom improved on iOS, but it always felt like a hassle to get photos into it. The same could be said for desktop version. I'd select a few important shots and do whatever it takes to have them in Lightroom, but there's no way I'd use that as my primary photo manager, and I feel that those "serious" people also have a different managing system that doesn't rely on Lightroom (I remember articles about pros manually filtering in folders and backups before even starting lightroom)

<comment><USER4> > _The point was not that events shouldn 't be organized, more that they are > occasional and other camera use are as important._

Which is wrong. Far more people take vacations photos, selfies, events (birthdays, out with friends), kids, pets and food shots, than shoot their receipts or use their camera as a magnifying glass (taking a picture and zooming in to read something).

And yet, he puts those outlier usages at 99% of camera use, saying that the regular selfie/vacation/kids/etc photos are "1% of photography. On which I call BS.

<comment><USER5> How often do you get a receipt, and hope often do you go on trips?

Really it seems like the camera app should feed out new photos to other apps, like the receipt organizing app, to decide whether it's a relevant image or not, and act accordingly. Put the smarts in there downstream apps, not there cameras app...

<comment><USER6> Photos is a downstream app. It is different from the camera app.

<comment><USER7> I suspect he means that the logic should live in domain-specific apps which are subscribed to the device wide photostream. It sounds like a nice idea to me.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Then you install the receipts app if you're there type of person who photographs lots of receipts, and no one else suffers bloat in their upstream photo app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that both major mobile platforms need to revamp their photo flows to adapt to all the buckets mentioned in this article, along with a "private" bucket for things like naked photos and other pictures not everyone would want automatically "shared" onto a feed (Apple has dipped a toe in this water with the "hidden" flag on photos, but there is still a long way to go). And while I'm wishing, I would hope that they do all this while still allowing for automatic cloud storage and backup without compromising privacy.

It seems one of the main reasons Snapchat is so successful is that it provides a flow for photos and other communication that isn't the traditional "single stream that also doubles a permanent and mostly public record" style of organization. It seems inevitable that iOS & Android will both have to eventually adjust their built-in camera & photo handling apps to acknowledge the realties of how people actually use their devices in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER9> > A year from now nobody will care about what I did at 9:06 AM while waiting > in line at the coffee bar.

In 15 years you might, though! When I read chat logs from 15 years ago, a lot is mundane, but a lot either serves as a wonderful memory trigger or is a completely alien artifact from a person I don't remember being, and I don't believe I could have guessed in advance which chats would end up in which category. I expect the same will be true of photography.

<comment><USER10> That a great point which is missed by so many technologists. It's impossible to know if what you created today will be important later, be it a photo, a blog post, a voice recording, or an email. I've found invaluable emails in my Gmail inbox written a decade ago.

Maybe that silly snapchat pic you took today with your cousin is the last picture you'll have of her. Who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I get what he's saying. My phone has a whole whack of note-pictures of addresses, price tags, and slides from other people's presentations. However, I'm not sure auto detecting them does any good. Context (context that my phone doesn't know) really matters. A photo of a street sign might be a reminder of where I parked, or it might be a more traditional memorabilia photo because the street had an amusing name.

If the street sign picture is categorized and behaves in the same way as the rest of my photos it's easy for me to find and manage. If pictures of street signs all of a sudden gain a new set of rules different from the rest of my pictures they're suddenly harder to manage. Worse still is if a memorabilia- picture is miscategorized as a note-picture or vice versa. I feel that this would be very confusing for many people.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's some hubris in declaring that one company's disinterest in your wacky unproven unimplemented camera app idea results in them not understanding photography.

</comment><comment><USER13> _" I showed my girlfriend some tiny text on the back of a credit card. Without hesitating she pulled out her camera, took a photo, and then zoomed in on the photo to read the text."_

Not the best example of not understanding it users. iOS 10 will have a magnifier that handles exactly this use case ([http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos- app...](http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos-appletv- watch/))

<comment><USER14> A photo is still better because the object doesn't need to be kept still while the phone is pointed at it for the entire time the small details are being examined.

<comment><USER13> "The magnifier UI gives you access to the camera flash, and the ability to lock focus _and grab a freeze frame._ "

And yes, the freeze frame is at full camera resolution, so that you can zoom in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Too bad Flickr never came out with a camera app. Tied in to their original uploader that would have been a pretty nice combination.

<comment><USER16> I suspect a lot of it was the result of Flickr having always been more oriented toward users with actual cameras who would do processing on their photos prior to uploading them. Not sure the degree to which that use case mirrored the actual one but Flickr was probably never all that focused on having users upload directly from their cameras.

<comment><USER17> This. Flickr was always closer to deviantART / 500px and going after the 'carefully composed photo for its own merits' market than the casual photo sharing space.

<comment><USER15> Yes, there were and are many groups like that with curated content. But the great majority are photo buckets with no curation.

That said, it was always "social". People made do with the tools Flickr gave them. But the tools were left to wither and were never updated or given finesse knobs.

Then, when "good" phone cameras became mainstream[1] Flickr didn't take that and run with it to accommodate its users who were now using their camera phones as either their main cameras or at least took a good chunk of their pictures.

One reason Flickr continues is it has a core of dedicated users, some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use (by tools I mean ways to organize, comment, tag, favorite, curate, groups, galleries, pool, moderate, etc.

[1] The NYT's Damon Winter's getting recognition on photos taken with an iPhone in 2010 should have been the aha moment, but it wasn't: See [http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the- right-t...](http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool- to-tell-a-war-story/)

<comment><USER16> >some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use

I guess the evidence suggests that "social site for prosumer photographers" is probably rather a niche and therefore hard to make a great business out of it --at least at scale. There are certainly flickr alternatives like SmugMug but none are SV unicorn-like businesses.

You're right that flickr largely missed the boat to appeal to casual shooters although I expect a focus on those would have tended to drive their core audience away. I do post photos on Facebook but I use it in a complete different way than flickr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Speaking of photography, I haven't seen much in terms of new services or opportunities for photographers made available through technology in the past few years. Where's all the innovation in this field? Is the medium dying out?

Instagram gave photographers a hugely popular new avenue to show their work, although it does shrink your 50mb asset to a crappy thumbnail. It's hard to stand out, very similarly to the App Store. 500px is pretty neat, but it's mostly an echo chamber for photographers, the public is elsewhere. Cameras are mostly the same over the years, just better and faster. Mirrorless is cool, but not necessarily game changing. Seems like a very static industry. We've all done the same HDR shots thousands of times from every conceivable angle of every conceivable object and person, it's getting stale.

I suspect that most photographers will have to move into video sooner or later, as that is a lot more engaging for the masses, and still photos will be like black and white photography, mostly relegated to high art and academia.

One avenue I can see happening down the line is that all of our assets and editing will eventually be in the cloud, a la Google Docs. Right now the only issue is the size and quantity of assets, which is orders of magnitude higher than text files, but we'll get there.

<comment><USER16> >I suspect that most photographers will have to move into video sooner or later, as that is a lot more engaging for the masses, and still photos will be like black and white photography, mostly relegated to high art and academia.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "photographers will have to move." The tools for creating decent video today are so good and so relatively cheap. But creating video that is in any real sense professional (including the professional of 20 years ago) takes an amount of time and effort that just isn't justified in most circumstances.

By contrast, very high-quality stills are ubiquitous.

Sure, the sweet spots could shift and handheld video with ambient lighting will beat quality stills for most uses but that hasn't happened yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > A year from now nobody will care about what I did at 9:06 AM while waiting > in line at the coffee bar.

I care what I did a year ago. I'm unlikely to look back at it, realistically, but throwing away little bits of history about myself doesn't appeal to me.

<comment><USER2> This, and an "Automatically delete photos after X time" is simply a massive recipe for disaster, even if you layer it behind several explicit tagging actions. Even _assuming_ it is bug free, how long before the first massively popular "Apple deleted all my [super important event X] shots".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Strange they haven't mentioned the abundance of 'mobile scanner' apps, of which my favourite (and slightly affiliated) app is Smart PDF/A Scanner [0], which can work with any aspect ratio and has auto-normalization that makes text readable and printable. It also can be configured to send PDF as e-mail only to avoid cluttering the photo stream.

[0] [http://smartengines.biz/products/smart-pdfa- scanner/](http://smartengines.biz/products/smart-pdfa-scanner/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Hopefully somebody from Google Photos team will read that (because I don't have an iPhone)

</comment><comment><USER22> Those are all really good ideas.

</comment><comment><USER2> As an aside I'd be interested in hearing why the article title was changed here - I thought it was explicit policy to almost always have the actual article titles?

<comment><USER23> Please see the HN guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)):

 _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait._

This one was both, so the guidelines mandated changing it. We changed it to a phrase from the article that seemed to more accurately and neutral describe its point.

<comment><USER2> Interesting; although it appears as linkbait on initially reading the title, I'd argue that the articles central thrust is accurately represented by its original title - therefore counting as neither (using a definition of linkbait as a title to drive clicks that is _not_ representative of the article).

The article isn't arguing just that photography is changing, but that Apple is stuck in "The past".

<comment><USER23> We don't always pick the best replacement titles; "Apple doesn't understand photography" is such outrageous clickbait that perhaps we overcompensated.

I don't think "Apple is stuck in the past" would be much better, but if you want to suggest an accurate, neutral title, we'd be happy to change it again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: We built a site but got beaten to the launch by another site. What next? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
10 days ago my friend and I built a site - www.makeusdate.com. We saw the great coverage that breakup notifier had got and were discussing it 10 days ago.
I said to my friend that I really liked a girl called Molly, who was one of my Facebook friends, but that I was too scared to ask her for fear of rejection. At this point we had a lightbulb moment and thought we could build a site whereby a person could select the Facebook friends they would like to go on a date with and these people never have to find out. If however they used our site and liked you back then the two of you were sent an email telling each other you liked each other.
The idea was simple, the idea was great fun. I told my football team about it who loved it! A group of non techies, understanding and liking the idea meant we had to crack on and do it!
We discussed it, designed it, my friend slaved away and coded it and we were ready to launch by Saturday afternoon. However I woke to a text message from my brother 'Bad news, sorry mate - http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/25/crushnotifier/'.
We were devastated. We had been beaten to the idea by a matter of hours. Techcrunch had picked it up and so had a load of other sources.
We tried in vain to send these sources our site, our idea but we heard nothing back. Our site is different to Dan's in that you don't need to provide the email address of the person you crush, we also were focused on the date and planned on giving people good ideas for dates based on their shared interests.
I appreciate the idea is not for everyone and I know it met a pretty tough response on here. However we were proud of turning an idea into a site in 10 days and we really enjoyed doing it. We don't want to give up and we would love for people to use the site. The only way that will happen is if we can get the site and idea out there but in a completely unique way.
This is where you guys come in! We were hoping you could suggest untapped sources that we could pitch the site to, people we could tell who could get us some traffic. Basically we are looking for help in trying to get our site out there!
Thanks in advance for help you guys give us. Hopefully if we get the site out there and enough people use it, maybe Molly will sign up and like me back! <comment><USER2> If having a single competitor who happened to get press coverage before you is enough to deter you from pursuing your idea, you aren't cut out for start ups.

Iphone wasn't the first phone, Kindle wasn't the first ebook reader, google wasn't the first search engine.

You get the picture. Go fight for your customers.

<comment><USER2> Alright, that concludes the motivational part of my speel :)

For actionable ways to increase your visibility, social media is your best friend. Spread the word on facebook, leverage your friends and family to start talking about your web site on people's walls. Use twitter if at all possible. Tweet celebrities that you have a crush on them on your web site. Put that url every where. Social media is all about shameless self promotion. The idea is good, people won't think of it as spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are 500M+ people on facebook. I doubt even 1% have even heard of crush notifier. Stop the pity party and get to marketing!

<comment><USER4> More to the point, there are 500M+ people on Facebook, even though Facebook got beaten to launch by _several years_ by Friendster and MySpace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would still pursue your idea and target a younger audience since you are focusing on crushes and not dealing with internet addresses. I would contact people on youtube who have demographics in a younger age range who don't have social skills yet 13-20 and ask them to help promote your site and try using it. They will think it is funny and will help you out. You might contact the Hank and John Green and explain that you are trying to help young people find love....

Also, you don't have to worry if someone got their product out before you. The initial media coverage will not make the product.

Also share your idea with school and parent groups.. they will like your idea (I am a parent)

Also, contact teen magazines etc. The would find your application interesting and applicable cause teen girls are always having crushes on guys...

Hope that helps a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is amazing, thanks so much for this - will definitely follow up on all of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The idea isn't original by any count (you can find hundreds of existing versions of it). The real thing CrushNotifier had going for it was that it brought with it the attention that BreakupNotifier had.

You're still definitely in the running but you will need a cunning plan to get to critical mass in such a crowded place. Afaik the reason CrushNotifier asks for email addresses is to email the crushes you select letting them know they were selected by someone (viral growth); without that you're going to have a hard time getting anyone on dates.

If you set it up to email Molly and let her know one of her friends crushed on her, theres a much, much (much!) higher change she'll sign up and like you back.

</comment><comment><USER7> 50% of it is having a better app. If you believe in your idea, invest your time to make the best app you possibly can.

50% of it is having better marketing. Just because there is an app with a head start doesn't mean you can't start marketing in your social networks (both real and virtual) and online (not necessarily paid for either)

Quality, will often win out, if you have the better app.

If.

Corollary - it's all about the execution, not the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree - we think we have the better product and we have loads of ideas as to how make the site better. We eventually want to change the way people date online

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Our AgileTask (<http://agiletask.me/> , shameless plug!) team just had a giant brainstorming session on how to try and get more traction.

We did the simple rule of "no but's, just and's" (every idea someone has to say "and" to, no shooting down ideas, saying "but" or debating them at all until you are done brainstorming) and came up with a giant whiteboard of possibilities for us to try out.

Our next focus is going to be community engagement. Look at the people using your app and try to be a genuine member of that community. Things like commenting on hackernews (weee!), writing blog posts about productivity, commenting on similar blogs, etc. Just be genuinely helpful, honest, and don't spam.

Also look at generating content for related projects. Try and find podcasts to be a guest on, ask a blogger if you could write a guest blog post, etc.

Either way keep your chin up and keep on trying. Don't let one competitor burst your bubble.

</comment><comment><USER9> Excuse me for offtopic. I understand why some would need services like that, but I think they are actually detrimental, not beneficial to your ability to get laid.

See, one of the qualities women appreciate in men more than anything else is self-confidence. If you are not self-confident enough to approach a girl and ask her out or at least start flirting, you are out of luck, most of the time, plain and simple.

So, instead of doing that, create some service that allows guys to build self- confidence. You may use rejection therapy, gamification (points for telling random girls on the street that they look beautiful or whatever), anonymous group support... you name it!

Call it "pivoting" if you want.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think you should launch any ways. Just because TC featured them (or anyone for that matter) doesn't mean they are better than you.It just means they will get a spike of traffic early on.

HN is one resource to tap into and next are your non-techie friend. They are the real-users and they don't read TC. I am just trying to say that TC and all the "techie" sources put together just equals a SXSW maybe? But there is a whole wide world out there - try with high school teens? I bet they can get it viral!

Text one of them!

</comment><comment><USER11> If you don't have a competitor, chances are you don't have a good idea.

Just keep working on your site, keep telling people about it, and stop worrying about what "the other guys" are doing.

</comment><comment><USER12> "We built a site but got beaten to the launch by another site."

So what!?!? Get out there and find users anyway. You've mentioned a few benefits to using your app over CrushNotifier, keep going.

If you are not familiar with the story, Google Mint vs. Webabe and look at articles from the past year. Yes, the scale is very different but get some inspiration for yourself.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> I completely agree with the other comments, spread it around you; The market is huge ! Try to have article on teenagers blogs and news sources. There's also that for techcrunch-like coverage : [http://blog.traindom.com/places- where-to-submit-your-startup...](http://blog.traindom.com/places-where-to- submit-your-startup-for-coverage/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Find a different lane to be in with your product. When we launched our app, the only players in that space were the big ones. Since launching it, we've been focusing more on the factors which makes us different than the same. But don't get persuaded by competition as it helps to see what others are doing wrong, to do it better.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not to be critical of your idea, but Orkut the social network from Google had this as an inbuilt feature from start. So my take is that you have done a good job of turning an idea into a live product. So definitely try marketing it, but if it doesnt pan out, dont lose heart since this is just the beginning !

</comment><comment><USER16> Success of a business depends on how you execute it. Paul Graham has once said if your idea is a good one, you'll have not just one competitor but hundreds of them. Don't give up with just one adversary. Plus i just tweeted and facebook shared your website for my support to your marketing journey.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much - greatly appreciated

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are other search engines than Google, other car manufacturers than Ford, other operating systems than Windows, other phones than the iPhone.

Just because there is already one of something doesn't mean it has to be the only thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> if doing startups, talking with other founders, hearing the stories that are never published, and reflecting on my own experiences has taught me anything, it's that you can't predict how the cards fall. Nothing _ever_ goes 100% to plan, and if it does... something's wrong and you better start worrying.

here's an example, maybe up your alley - [http://www.inc.com/articles/201102/a-dating-site-thrives- in-...](http://www.inc.com/articles/201102/a-dating-site-thrives-in- delhi.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Target a different set of users, who heard of crushnotifier? The majority of _tech_ people. Who hasn't heard of crushnotifier? The rest of Facebook!

Aim at those people, be creative.

</comment><comment><USER20> out execute, and out market the competition. I bet most people on Facebook don't read techcrunch, so you have plenty of market reach potential.

Get people to talk about it on Facebook, use your circle of friends and people you just know. Get a youtube video of it in action and get people to share it. Spend some money and pay for a real marketing team.

The internet is huge, it's not about who has the idea first. It's who can build the most usable product and make people aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Until you've been fighting the good fight for years you haven't even tried to win. Winners are decided over _years_.

</comment><comment><USER22> Find a differentiator and dedicate all your resources (marketing, development, evangelism) to it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable <http://www.makeusdate.com>

</comment><comment><USER23> sw007 - there are hundreds of millions of people on FB - plenty of market share to work with. The app itself is viral in nature - get your friends using it. IF it is GOOD, it will spread naturally. No reason to give up.

<comment><USER3> your comment posted simultaneously with mine. completely agree. looks like there is a consensus sw007! get to it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers guys. I have been hammering Facebook - I have sent a message to 268 people, including my ex (brave move!) and around 40 of my friends have updated their status with it. I guess my concern is when they stop updating their status how do I reach out to the rest of the 500 million on facebook! I will continue to annoy my friends though and keep hammering them until all of them are on it

<comment><USER24> I've only looked at the landing page and haven't (and won't due to the Facebook integration) used the site.

From what I see (and this was mentioned elsewhere in the thread), you're going to have trouble building that viral aspect without the self-propagating behavior. If you're not emailing, contacting, or posting on the wall until there's an actual match, there's no reason why the matchee might end up on your site.

Apps that have some amazingly useful quality get talked about. Something like this probably won't be mentioned, even by the users, as much, because it's more of a short-term fascination than a must-recommend tool. At the very least, do you ask the person with the interest if they want to post a status update / wall notification about the site?

<comment><USER25> At the moment we allow the user to post hints to their wall that they like some of their friends. We have a list of approximately 20 other ideas for improving the viral aspect which we are shortlisting as we speak. I'll take the opportunity here to thank you all for your input. Greatly appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Use crushnotifier. See what it lacks, and include that in your own site.</comment>


What If Scientists Didn't Compete? - <AUTHOR> http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/what-if-scientists-didnt-compete/

<comment><USER2> The implication that scientists compete due to their egos is not totally accurate. Yes, some do have egos, but like the programming world many are just geeky types who want to find out the answers and are happy to co-operate if that helps.

What forces them to compete is the money. When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most competitive.

I agree with the point of the article that sometimes better science would get done with more openness and co-operation (I have seen numerous examples of that in my field), but absent an infinite supply of money I don't see how it can be done. I'd love to know though!

<comment><USER3> _When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most competitive._

This seems ridiculously inefficient. The belief that two people spending money and effort to keep at odds with one another is beneficial and furthers advancement more rapidly than collaboration seems broken. With all of that waste, I can't understand how anyone at the funding agency can say they are getting the most return on investment following this strategy. A more collaborative model would give them the dual benefit of not having all of this in-fighting waste, while at the same time benefiting from the super-linear growth in results by having two people bang heads together. I sense a sacred cow here.

As for how it can be done, what about allowing funding agencies to grant money to something akin to a research project trusts or foundations; something that spans multiple individuals and even multiple institutions, so the lines don't have to be drawn so sharply on who can participate and who can't. Something like the foundation model several OSS projects have adopted, perhaps.

<comment><USER4> There are many examples of competition between in the OSS world. Desktop environments, database engines, programming languages, text editors.

The author of vim told me that at one point he felt pretty content with the program and had not been changing much for a number of years. Then some other guy took on a very active development of another vi clone (forgot the name, sorry) and this gave Bram the incentive to speed up and add many new features to vim. So in this case the competition was beneficial, and I expect that it usually is.

And BTW I don't think competition in science is primarily driven by funding. You need little or no funding for theoretical physics, and yet they're as competitive as anyone or more. The main reason for the very fierce competition in science IMO is that the number of tenured positions is very small compared to the number of PhD graduates. You have to be better than the other guy or else you can kiss your academic career goodbye.

<comment><USER2> But the reason the number of tenured positions is very small _IS_ because of funding.

Everything comes down to money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the old times, young faculty members who collaborated rather than did original work didn't get tenure and so left "in failure". Graduate students can't collaborate as that's not the purpose of the exercise (as others here have written). Post-docs CAN collaborate, but they're trying to make a name for themselves which is somewhat anti-collaboration.

This leaves the tenured profs, but they're off chasing money to fund their groups. Not a great system, which is why I left it.

<comment><USER6> I'd refine that second statement: it's not usually in a graduate student's _best interest_ to collaborate on a project, but the student's PI typically has a competing interest (and a longer time horizon), and so collaborations still happen. The smart PI just _manages_ the risk by assigning collaborative projects to his students -- he gets to reap the rewards of the rare good collaborations, whereas the bad collaborations merely crush the unfortunate grad student to whom they are assigned... _and nothing of value is lost._

Part of the game of grad school is recognizing and fending off the "collaborators" who will do nothing but slow you down and/or take credit for your work, while still remaining open to that rare collaboration that can make your career -- the two most successful graduate students I know basically walked into career-defining projects as a result of collaborations that were handed to them in their first year.

Of course, you can be torpedoed by a bad collaboration at any stage of your career, so this isn't a dilemma unique to graduate students. Collaborations are useful only so long as you're getting more than you're putting in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Academia tries to give you some freedom as if you were managing your own company. But unlike a standard company, you seek funding by submitting proposals to your competition (!).

And unlike a standard company, you have grad students instead of employees who may do what you want and then again may just ignore you.

To top it off, you have to teach as well.

Given all this, do you really think scientists would be open to have whatever remaining freedom they have taken away through greater collaboration?

<comment><AUTHOR> The empirical finding here is that scientists can sometimes be persuaded to cooperate. How general that could be across how many disciplines, and whether the interesting institutional constraints you mention could be modified to increase cooperation, remains to be seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author impresses upon us that the scientific community is competitive. And that collaboration is rare. These are contradictory ideas.

In competitive environments, collaboration is far from unusual.

In competive environments, it is usual for collaboration to break out between competing individuals. This is especially true in the most cut-throat competitive environments.

In a truly competitive environment, survival depends on the individual gaining a competitive edge. The most effective way for the individual to capture a gain is by joining forces with competitors for mutual gain.

In a truly competitive environment its: collaborate or perish.

In conclusion, the scientific community is not nearly as competitive as the author is inclined to believe.

</comment><comment><USER9> While I have nothing against collaboration, there is a place for "competition" if you by competition mean "independently confirmed results".

In the specific case I'm most familiar with, there are several research groups making software that does the same thing (n-body simulations, hydrodynamics, radiation transfer) and it _is_ a massive duplicated effort. However, I don't think it's necessarily wasted. In my mind, having everyone collaborate on one code would vastly increase the risk of results being incorrect due to bugs or simply unjustified approximations. When several independent groups perform the same calculation, with different pieces of software using different approximation methods, you can have more faith in that the result is correct.

It's the fact that the academic "system" values being the _first_ to publish a result that pushes everyone towards a competition at all costs approach, but that's only one of the things about incentives for scientists that can be criticized.

I spent my PhD thesis writing a piece of software that I then released under the GPL. It's possible I could get more papers by close-sourcing it and only working with people that would collaborate with me, but I made the calculated gamble that giving the community a free tool in the end would boost my recognition faster due to a wider adoption and more citations.

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps we just need to put strings on public funding so that study/experiment data is made publicly available (after a short period of exclusivity).

It wouldn't be too different from the Patent system. In that, in exchange for a limited-time monopoly, you agree to publish the details of your invention to further the state of the art.

It might also help scientists learn from each others mistakes, as it would also catalog -failed- projects. Something journals don't do and which doubtlessly results in redundant efforts.

</comment><comment><USER11> It sounds to me like they need to adopt an open source model of operation. That may not be possible with the current funding system so someone would need to figure out a better way to distribute funding.

Wouldn't it be better for them to be sharing information and results with each other? They would be able to catch mistakes sooner (ie. before publication) and build on and verify each other's work more quickly.

Imagine what it would have been like if the 'cold fusion' fiasco had ben share between more scientists sooner?

</comment><comment><USER9> Actually, the article is mislabeled, I think. It seems to not so much argue against competition, but rather for the public dissemination of data. Writing papers but withholding the data so that no-one can reproduce your results is very different from simply trying to be the first to complete a study but then publish all data so it's available to others.

In my mind, writing papers but withholding the data that your results are based on is a highly dubious practice.

</comment><comment><USER12> for a scientist, he doesn't make a very scientific argument:

>His experiment in cooperation with four other laboratories, he said, yielded "a very compelling body of data validated by many labs," and has inspired the researchers to go on freely sharing with one another."<

Would competition have produced a _more compelling body of data? Very likely if you ask me.

<comment><USER13> I doubt it. Competing research teams involves a lot of duplicated effort. Novelty is usually required for work to be published, and if you're scooped, there's two options: drop the project, or find some way to differentiate yourself from prior work. In theory, the difference you come up with should make your publication still a worthwhile addition, but in practice, I don't think it usually is.

<comment><USER14> > Competing research teams involves a lot of duplicated effort.

Competing _anything_ involves massive duplication of effort and wasted talent. One day people will realize this.

[http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...](http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_02_13/caredit.a0900021)

 _"Tournament markets... discard huge amounts of very high-quality talent, training, and skill. In the mythic version, science rewards effort and ability... In the real world, casting off large numbers of extremely capable people is simply how a tournament market works."_

For as long as everyone believes that the only alternative to cutthroat competition is sclerotic dictatorship, much human effort will continue to be thrown away in this manner. I give you Be, its patents bought up by patent trolls to prevent its technologies from ever being used:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS>

I give you Symbolics Genera, languishing in obscurity forever because of our society's obsession with property rights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure I agree with this approach. I would rather have the waste of competition than 20 mediocre scientists coming together and putting out dubious research simply to protect reputations. Failure of an individual is much easier to stomach and forget.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I would rather have the waste of competition than 20 mediocre scientists coming together and putting out dubious research simply to protect reputations._

I would rather have neither waste nor dubious research. In the case reported in the submitted article, there is (considering the journal that has agreed to publish the research) an important research finding that had not been achieved under the former system of dueling research labs. In this case, it appears that getting the various labs to collaborate both reduced wastage of research resources and improved the quality of the research result. I have no idea how generalizable this happy result might be in other fields of science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't science already work like a gift economy, at least in parts?

</comment><comment><USER17> If they didn't compete there wouldn't be any evolution.</comment>


Show HN: Aical – food photo calories counter - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aical-photo-calories-counter/id1484771102 <comment><USER2> I'd love to use this on Android. I could never get into habit of using food tracking apps, this looks very fast and elegant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Calories are meaningless [https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the- calorie](https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie)

<comment><USER4> Agreed. There's also little chance this app is meaningfully accurate.

<comment><USER5> > There's also little chance this app is meaningfully accurate.

There is 0 chance of that. Unless you only eat raw things like apples or bananas.</comment></comment></comment>


How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/ <comment><USER2> I completely agree with the developer here, I also think npm crossed the line by republishing the module.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, though I'm curious what the proper solution would have been.

It seems to me that once published to NPM there should be some process for deprecating a module that is then "unpublished"... rather than just breaking every module that uses it as a dependency instantly.

They could spawn automatic emails to all dependent module owners about the hard deprecation and give them 7-30 days to replace the module before it's removed from the package ecosystem.

<comment><USER2> I think it is also a reflection on the state of the node ecosystem, including an external dependency for a few lines of simple code. Note this isn't only nodes issue, ruby has a similar issue with gems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is gold...

A module for padding the left of a string?!

Used by big projects like Babel?!

NPM takes down a modules without asking the dev

NPM republishes another module without asking the dev.

Then the whole NPM3 mess (unrelated to this article)

If have the feeling those people there have no clue whats on.

<comment><USER5> it's not one module at question here. it's 250 modules with thousands of installs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like it was less the developer than the package system.

<comment><USER4> "When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he [...] unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules"

<comment><USER7> Which was his right as the publisher of the modules. Open Source < > Public Domain.

<comment><USER8> Which should make anybody depending on such "publishers" think carefully about the effects of such dependencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had problems with NPM where a deep dependency was wrong for my system, and was tempted to solve it in the following way: fix the deep dependency in a cloned-project, and create github clones of every dependency in the chain that refers to it using the new package address in their package.json. That sounded wrong so I didn't do it.

One mechanism that could fix that problem, and the left-pad problem is to allow defining a package substitute in your root package.json file. Then you could swap out the dependencies of your dependencies.

packageReplace : [{source_name: 'left-pad', source_version: '1.0.1', target: '[https://github.com/foo/bar'](https://github.com/foo/bar') }]

...something like that

</comment><comment><USER9> If the old left-pad is open-source, is it perfectly valid for an arbitrary entity to continue publishing left-pad from an abandoned URL?

</comment><comment><USER10> There was a heated debate last week when someone choose to distribute a 100 lines css framework via npm... I've chosen my side.</comment>


Google did not disclose security breach because it feared regulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/08/google-reportedly-exposed-private-data-of-at-least-hundreds-of-thousands-of-plus-users.html <comment><USER2> One day these companies are going to learn that not disclosing creates more problems than it solves. Disclose then and they would control the narrative, ideally getting largely lost in what Facebook was doing (a much larger breach) and nothing really came from that anyway. Hide it, get scooped by the WSJ and it costs you an entire product and 100% of the media coverage about it is now about the cover-up instead of how you're addressing it.</comment>


Io language - <AUTHOR> http://iolanguage.com/ <comment><USER2> At the RubyConf in 2003, I asked Matz (the creator of Ruby) what languages he was impressed with these days.

He said only one: Io

<comment><USER3> I guess that shows how much taste he has, then.

<comment><USER4> Well, he also mentioned that he'd recommend people look at Io, Haskell, and some others IIRC. But Derek's question was a separate instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cannot get over how beautiful that site design is.

<comment><USER6> Yes I also find it very aesthetically pleasing. And it's also very functional as well. For eg, see the search on the Reference page: <http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/reference/index.html>

Steve Dekorte, the creator of Io, also uses same site design on his on website/blog: <http://dekorte.com/>

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the tutorial, which is a work of art: succint, clear, informative and easy to follow (for a programmer anyway).

<http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoTutorial.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Io is not very fast, even slower than Ruby.

<comment><USER9> I wonder why this is downvoted.

Io is beautiful, elegant and slow. The fact that it's slow doesn't mean it's not worth learning or even using in production. Commenter could have put it in other words, well he didn't, but downvoters: you will not change the fact that it's slow by giving -1.

Do we have an era of wishful-thinking driven comment voting?

<comment><USER10> Depending on what you want to do, Io can be really fast. It has SIMD support built in so for some structures it can be faster than unoptimized C.

<comment><USER9> That's what I didn't know, relying on my previous encounters and specific tests. Thank you for pointing this!

<comment><USER6> And here is a blog post which shows that a 200 times increase in speed is possible when using SIMD: [http://www.iolanguage.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=92](http://www.iolanguage.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=92)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, seriously? We're getting to the point of submitting decade-old programming languages (that i'd bet 99% of programmers on here are aware of) as news, without even some kind of news related to them!? Cmon, at least write up a short blog post or a tweet or something.

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Io>

Everything is better with code samples! One of the FizzBuzz implementations is particularly cool:

        for (n, 1, 100,
            fb := list (
                if (n % 3 == 0, "Fizz"),
                if (n % 5 == 0, "Buzz")) select (isTrue)

            if (fb isEmpty, n, fb join) println
        )

<comment><USER6> Blush! I contributed that bit of Io FizzBuzz to Rosettacode :)

I originally posted that here on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1539295>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems to me that there are tonnes of new languages being developed all over the place, I wish they'd have a short list of intended uses/features... but not just all the features, rather the ones that are the selling point, why should I investigate this language further.

<comment><USER14> while I second your feeling, Io is at least 8 years old, so not so new :)

<comment><USER13> yeah I wasn't aware that Io was as old as it is, which makes my rash judgment all the more rash, but I still feel that way about many of the (relatively) new languages mentioned on HN every now and then

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750830>

I don't get the "link to some long-existing home page with no comment" thing, but that's what voting/flagging is for.

</comment><comment><USER16> What a satisfying language to read. I hooe it gains more traction.

</comment><comment><USER17> and there is Ioke (<http://ioke.org/>) programming language. its not currently developing i think.he implement io (and some plus points) on jvm. I really like io's design, prototype based++, clean syntax, dynamic, macros...

</comment><comment><USER18> it's down

<comment><USER19> IIRC, Steve, the designer of the langauge, hosts the site on his home connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Definitely not interested in another dynamically typed language, no matter how elegant.

<comment><USER21> Io is worth learning just to see what a clean prototype-based language feels like. It'll probably improve your understanding of Javascript.

<comment><USER22> I wish JavaScript's prototypal features were more like io's, or even Lua's. io was the first language I had seen where I really grocked prototypal inheritance.

<comment><USER23> I miss NewtonScript for its version of prototype inheritance, but was never fond of the syntax.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dusk, Dawn, and High Noon - The coming New World - <AUTHOR> http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/2011/winter/dusk-dawn.html <comment><USER2> Strange that they are projecting 38 years ahead and assuming there are no large paradigm shifts that change the figures. Even though one of the biggest game changers ever (China's 1 child policy) directly influenced what they are talking about.

They are not considering possible global wars or plagues, new energy or food sources, AI, robotics or dramatic changes to global national boundaries.

I guess this kind of report is accurate given it's assumptions but I think it's only interesting as a "this is what might might happen if nothing interesting happens for the next 38 years".

</comment><comment><USER3> Key takeaway from article: Working age population vs. dependents has a huge bearing on the national economies in the following decades.

* Education & quality of it will have a huge bearing on each of these nations. \- In my view this is where India has the biggest risk. Quality of education, not just in schools but what we are teaching the kids (what they learn by observing this generation as well). \- The thing I wish & yearn to teach (show) my kid & several others who grow up with him is to put the interests of "whole" before "self". This I believe is something seriously lacking in our society and could hurt us badly.

The more I think of it the more I am convinced that every other societal problem starts from the individual and the nation begets the leaders it deserves (in a democracy!).

And at a macro level decision making there are few issues that will drive it. \- Self-sufficiency in energy sector will be the key driver on which way these nations go. In India there is HUGE dependency on energy outside India and yet there is not much being done (compared to others there is not even much awareness).

It is wishful thinking to believe the numbers alone could help the nations move forward and as the OP summarized it is for these developing nations to gain or lose the most while for US to protect and defend and (hopefully) not at each other's expense.

In my opinion it will be measured by how much progress is there in standard of living for each of these nations from the current standards.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised at the fertility rate figures for the US, as I expected to see a downward trend there.

Among lower middle class and immigrants (especially those that are Hispanic), I expect fertility rates to remain higher. However, with the current anti- immigration climate in Washington, I suspect a steep drop off as these groups start to shrink with the decline in immigration to the US.

As you get into upper middle class and higher class families, fertility rates appear low. Two kid families are the norm that I'm seeing in people in my age group (30 years+) and I see a lot of one kid and no kid families too.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article reminds us that you can't just look at historic growth rates and extrapolate economic prospects. Environmental sustainability, the effectiveness of political institutions, and demographics start to matter more and more once you get to a certain level of prosperity.

Also interesting is the effect of demographics on technological development. For example, one of the factors driving robotics technology in Japan is probably the size of their aging population and the need to take care of them. Another case of 'necessity is the mother of invention'?

<comment><USER6> Kingsley Davis spoke of a "multiphasic response" that each society does to keep its population balanced (it doesn't always work, but it does happen). Right now, Japan and Europe don't feel they are so close to crisis that they are willing to really do what is necessary to increase fertility -- lots of government support for mothers, lots of propaganda, negative sanctions against those people who don't have families. "Traditional" (high mortality high fertility -- "pre-transition" -- societies have always had these pushes in place). Right now there is a little bit of govt support and a little bit of propaganada. But they will when they feel like they are in a crisis (esp Japan -- you watch...), and it may or may not be too late.

Low fertility is a dynamic that nobody has had widespread experience with, so we don't really know what to expect. We also still have plenty of people on the planet, so a population decrease of 50% might actually be a good thing at the bigger scale.

I am surprised at Rand, if it is as simplistic a report as the comments say (sorry, not reading -- I live and breathe this stuff). Demographers should start doing scenario work, besides trend extrapolation, especially at a place that is crawling with military types like Rand.</comment></comment>