Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing - <AUTHOR> https://siftery.com/alternatives?src=hn <comment><USER2> Siftery has repeatedly engaged in Twitter spam. Here's one example account, @SifteryHello that exists solely to mention other companies and individuals: [https://twitter.com/SifteryHello](https://twitter.com/SifteryHello)

Check out the tweet history to see what I mean. They sent thousands of tweets from this account (and very possibly others), solely to get visibility for Siftery from the customers/others who search for the company's Twitter handle.

They take the same approach to other mediums. Regarding mholt's comment, here's another one: [https://twitter.com/guusdk/status/909773952561696769](https://twitter.com/guusdk/status/909773952561696769)

I can't imagine ever trusting a company or person/team who does this.

Update: Here's another medium that Siftery spams, albeit at a lower volume - HN itself: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ggiaco](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ggiaco). ggiaco, an employee, submitted ~100 low-value Siftery pages about companies (rather than, say, the companies themselves, or sites he actually liked).

Update 2: Here's a second Twitter account, @SifteryFeed, which does the same thing as @SifteryHello: [https://twitter.com/sifteryfeed](https://twitter.com/sifteryfeed). Example tweet:

> "Are you using Apache Hive (@TheASF) and recommend them? You can do it here > [http://siftery.com/some-landing-page](http://siftery.com/some-landing-page) > … "

<comment><USER3> The posts to HN that you're mentioning are interviews with founders/creators of the products. They're actually similar in nature to interviews posted from other sources (e.g. Indie Hackers). Here's an example: [https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of- your-...](https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of-your-brand- in-real-time)

I know when we post new ones, so I can add them here first. It's not the only type of content I post, and the HN community can decide if they're worthy of attention or not.

<comment><USER2> Okay. That addresses one update; how about the main focus of my comment, the thousands of low-value tweets that @ mention companies and people?

<comment><USER3> Troy, We don't believe we're running afoul of TOS and have good reason to believe this. We want to add value by mentioning _product_ handles once to generate awareness about their profile and their ability to curate their presence in front of a large buyer community.

Of course, Twitter is free to change its mind and decide we're treading on the wrong side of the line and then ban the account or ask us to stop; we would immediately comply.

FWIW - we were already thinking of cutting back since it doesn't convert that well anyway. Feel free to report the account though. I kind of wish you'd done that instead of letting the mob loose. It's probably for the best that you're not actually a journalist.

<comment><USER4> Strawman. He's not accusing Siftery of violating the ToS. He's accusing your company of spamming (even if within Twitter's ToS) low-value tweets.

<comment><USER2> I'd even generalize it to "Doing anything you can to get attention, even when the overall impact is obviously negative."

A ToS is the absolute minimum (well, other than the penal code). That someone needs to consider whether or not something violates policies is a strong sign that it's probably not helping people. A malware/adware company may not mind that, but if Siftery's goal is actually to help product consumers and creators, their bar should be way higher than whether it can slide past a ToS. Find positive-sum ways to get attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Search for the top alternatives for over 40k B2B software products.

We're doing a couple of things here that this community might find interesting: A) Actually tracking when companies start and stop using a piece of software B) Using this "switch" data to calculate a probability that the switches are a true substitution and then rank the top substitutes for each product - based on actual switching behavior. We use a weighted average where the switches are weighted according to how much the product's categories overlap (every product is tagged with 1-5 tags). For example, Intercom and Drift are closely related so when a company stops using Intercom and starts using Drift that's heavily weighted. However, a percentage of the companies who stop using Intercom and then start using Zendesk are effectively substituting Intercom with Zendesk.

\- You can use search to find a product, or start with the ones below:

[https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives](https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives](https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives](https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives](https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives](https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives) [https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives ](https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives

)

Note: There's switch data for roughly 1k products (out of a total of 40k)

<comment><USER5> >"When companies stop using WordPress, its most frequent substitutes are HubSpot Website Platform (32.6% of the time), followed by Drupal (21.9%), and by EPi Ektron CMS (6.9%)" ([https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives](https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives)) //

I don't understand why the first listing Craft CMS isn't one of the hot alternatives that people switch to as mentioned in the prose? Why is it even in there? Why is the third hot substitute not even in the list below of alternatives?

I'm clearly missing something major here?

<comment><USER3> What we're doing with Substitutes is to complement the NPS ranking with a mapping of actual switch behavior. It's entirely possible that a lower-rated product is a much more popular substitute for a product if it's a better fit (e.g. targeting SMBs or Enterprise).

An example: In the Recruiting/ATS space, Greenhouse and Lever are each other's most significant competitor. Meanwhile, companies looking to replace iCIMS by far most frequently end up using Oracle Taleo (and vice versa)

We generally see company size and employee count is highly predictive of which products they'll consider and we can see a progression as companies grow out of services catering to SMBs to more fully-featured alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of my pet peeves on the new products launched on HN has been a missing "About" page. If people are asking for personally identifiable information like emails etc, they should be open about who they are and what their competencies are in storing this kind of data.

Secondly, I don't see an explanation for what exactly the promoter score is?

Lastly, the source of data. While I am sure that is the secret sauce here, some of my personal fields have thrown up results which are far off the mark.

<comment><USER7> Net promoter score is a extremely common and very valuable gauge of customer loyalty to a product. It sounds dumb when you look into it but sometimes the simplest thing works and this is one such case.

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

<comment><USER6> Yes I found the wikipedia page later but it was confusing the first time around. The second data point on customers is intuitive though.

I just wish there was a "what is this?" explanation somewhere. Maybe a hover over text like the one showing - promoters vs detractors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> did a search on React.js, got some results that I expected, and some that I did not.

did a search on Vue.js, and the top 'alternative' is Bootstrap......

Yeah. Bootstrap isn't an alternative to Vue.js. They aren't even in the same wheel-house.

[https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives](https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives)

<comment><USER9> That was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative' pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical.

For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over the past 2 years.

Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for Intercom. Some were product walk through demo apps (not really in app support chat and knowledgebase at all). Other suggestions, while being great front end web chat systems, were nowhere near the functionality of Intercom as far as back end app support chat systems and shared help desk features go.

I know this from personal experience jumping from system to system over the past 24 months, looking for a viable alternative.

(BTW - No affiliation with Intercom, apart from being a paying user 2 years ago, then a period of not using them, then back to using Intercom a couple of months ago due to not being able to find a good alternative).

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case, the primary category for Intercom is `User onboarding and Engagement` which can be broken down separately to `User Onboarding` and `In- app Support` or `In-app Chat`. That will suddenly spike up the sanity of both categories (maybe we can even normalize further - siftery has more than 700 categories/tags, a first for any such platform).

Categorisation of a data set like this can be non-trivial and will false positives. We can cherry-pick such a false positive and ignore all the actual positives. That said, thanks for this feedback - this is exactly what is needed to improve status quo. We are on it and will report back in a few hours with the category split I suggested in the previous paragraph. Do let me know if you think it can be broken down into a different type of granularity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Siftery kind of annoyingly added my OSS project to it and started emailing me about it without me signing up for it... (months ago)

<comment><AUTHOR> Inclusions usually come from the community - users tend to add products to their stack, a lot of them obviously being OSS. We have tried to reach out to creators/admins in the past to understand if they'd like to represent themselves in the right way in front of a large buyer group.

Apologies Matt - we'd love it if you gave the platform a try, but will not include you in any future email-campaign, going forward.

<comment><USER11> How about not emailing like that from the start without an opt-in?

<comment><USER12> Yup, it's not just a dick move, but is also illegal in some countries (e.g. Germany) and can get you sued.

<comment><USER13> IANAL, but I think cold emails are still legal in Germany, provided they're not just advertisements (e.g. "someone added you as maintainer of [super awesome project]" is probably OK) and you offer a clearly visible option to unsubscribe (i.e. it shouldn't require posting on a random internet forum to get the attention of a company representative).

In essence, the law prohibits business practices that are an "unacceptable nuisance". While advertising via email spam is clearly called out as such, not all cases are so clear cut and will depend on the judge's opinion of acceptable behavior.

[http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html](http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html)

EDIT:

English translation of the law: [http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg....](http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg.html#p0100)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This strikes me as the business version of AlternativeTo.net, a stupendous website to help find alternative (consumer) software.

[https://alternativeto.net/](https://alternativeto.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Alternativeto is great. _Siftery_Product_Substitutes_ is an attempt to analyze the migration of one product to another, across companies to begin with, and later across several other segments and industries. Where we don't have any switch data, we are only showing vanilla alternatives (sorted by NPS).

This is merely v1 and we intend to iterate quickly on this dataset and provide more intelligence/decision support for buyers when they are looking for alternatives to switch to for a specific product or across a category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Microsoft Word's primary category is PDF Readers and Editors_

I did not expect MS Word to be listed as a PDF Reader (and editor).

Does this mean that (according to your data) when a company switches away from MS Word, it's because they just wanted a PDF Reader? Perhaps that implies that those who don't switch away from it simply find that there is no substitute software for their principal use case.

<comment><USER16> I can believe this to a certain extent; certainly the only reason most at our labs use Word on a week-to-week basis is to download and print forms distributed by the HR department, which should just be PDF.

Where this data would come from/how this categorisation would be made, I have no idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Websites like this are completely useless once you know where to get real comparisons.

Just go to Google and type in "<product> vs " and let Google's autocomplete suggest the top competitors.

No need for sites like these.

<comment><USER18> except how do you think google mines that data. if those sites go away so does google's free loading....

<comment><USER12> Google mines that data by other people searching for that, not (only) by scraping it off sites. Yes, they also do that, but AFAIK search trends have a higher relevance than scraped suggestions.

As long as people want to know how their existing product stacks up against another product they have heard of before, "<existing product> vs <other products>", will be searched and appear in the autocomplete.

This approach breaks down tough for newer products, ot if you want to find the best product by quality, not just popularity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How does a new entrant into a category get listed?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can submit products through this form - [https://siftery.com/submit- product](https://siftery.com/submit-product), our team will do a quick review, and push the product through if it's legitimate and live.

We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is so cool, thanks guys :)!

</comment><comment><USER21> Is this similar to stackshare?

<comment><USER3> Does Stackshare programmatically track when companies start and stop using software products and run some calculations on top of that to predict the most likely substitutes?</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Tops $50USD on MtGox - <AUTHOR> https://mtgox.com <comment><USER2> Don't listen to the "it's out of control" or "is very due for a crash because it's rising so quickly" stuff. It comes down to a very simple test: do you think that there are significant reasons Bitcoin would or would not gain acceptance as a mainstream currency?

A few reasons I can think of why it would:

* The current banking system is inherently insecure. If you have an account number and a routing number (written on the bottom of every check), you can pull money. Bitcoin is potentially much more secure.

* It's way too difficult to send money today, especially internationally, and fraud is a huge issue. We shouldn't need something like PayPal. Bitcoin solves this.

* If you don't have faith in banks or central governments, Bitcoin doesn't require trust in any third party to function. You aren't dependent on any bank.

A few reasons it might not:

* It requires too much technical knowledge to use and is unapproachable for mainstream users.

* It's too tied up with illicit interests and won't break out of that image, leading it to an untimely demise in culture. A fax machine is no use if no one else has one.

* There are lurking fatal flaws in the underlying technology. Maybe a blockchain fork is much more possible than currently assumed, or there's found to be an error in the cryptographic scheme.

* Mining power ends up concentrated in the hands of few when ASICs are in full swing and transaction fees aren't enough to keep individuals at it, giving power over the blockchain to a few (potentially malicious) actors. There's no guarantee transaction fees will actually pick up the incentive slack.

If you think that Bitcoin will ultimately be widely adopted, buy now. $50 / btc is very cheap in that world. If you think Bitcoin will fail, then any price is too much. Any mumbling that "it's doubled in a month and therefore is set up to come back down to earth" is just hand waving.

<comment><USER3> > The current banking system is inherently insecure. If you have an account > number and a routing number (written on the bottom of every check), you can > pull money. Bitcoin is potentially much more secure.

If the company you store your wallet with is hacked you lose everything, if your laptop is stolen or your dropbox account is hacked... it's as safe as keeping cash in your apartment. If your bank fucks up your money is (almost always) insured.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/hacker- steals-250...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/hacker- steals-250k-in-bitcoins-from-online-exchange-bitfloor/) [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins- worth-22800...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins- worth-228000-stolen-from-customers-of-hacked-webhost/) [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/bitcoin-price- plu...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/bitcoin-price-plummets-on- compromised-exchange/)

> It's way too difficult to send money today, especially internationally, and > fraud is a huge issue. We shouldn't need something like PayPal. Bitcoin > solves this.

Fraud is a huge issue that Bitcoin does not solve. Send your money over bitcoin and it's gone, _forever_. Paypal etc. offer protections, they're not bulletproof but they're better than nothing.

<comment><USER4> _"If the company you store your wallet with is hacked you lose everything"_

Which is why it is not recommended to store Bitcoin wallets with third parties. Store it and secure it yourself.

 _"if your laptop is stolen or your dropbox account is hacked... it's as safe as keeping cash in your apartment."_

Which is why it is recommended to encrypt your wallet, so that if your laptop is stolen, the attacker has no access to it.

 _"If your bank fucks up your money is (almost always) insured."_

Eventually, if the Bitcoin economy continues to grow, an insurance market will develop itself.

 _"Fraud is a huge issue that Bitcoin does not solve"_

Actually it does solve the biggest fraud issue of today: fraud during purchases. Merchants receiving bitcoins are guaranteed that transactions are irreversible and cannot be charged back.

What you mean, is not that Bitcoin does not solve fraud, it is that Bitcoin is hard to "secure". It _is_ a hassle for a user to encrypt his local Bitcoin wallet with a secure passphrase and to ensure that his computer is not infected by keyloggers/malware attempting to steal the passphrase.

Fortunately, there are efforts from different groups to develop credit-card sized tamper-proof hardware Bitcoin wallets (think about typing a pin code on a small device, which sends a Bitcoin transaction via NFC or via showing a QR code on an e-paper display).

<comment><USER5> BTC may solve buyer-side fraud, but it creates a giant seller-side fraud problem.

<comment><USER6> I basically see advantages for the seller (lower fees, fraud protection), but none for the buyer (seller-side fraud potential, no cash-back).

Therefore, why would I, a buyer use this vs a credit card?

<comment><USER7> Since transactions are irreversible, buyers need to fill less forms and have lower prices. Coindl.com sells you stuff with no registration/forms/emails - it shows a QR code and gives you a download button within two seconds after you sent a transaction. And buyer does not need to trust his CC details to new merchants. He only risks the amount to be paid, not the whole bank account.

<comment><USER8> But a compromised credit card doesn't mean you risk your whole bank account. First, at least in the US, there are limits to what you are liable if you are card is compromised -- report within 48 hours, the limit is $50, report within 60 days, the limit is $500. Second, credit cards have a credit limit -- so, worst case scenario, you'd be out to whatever your limit is (which is unlikely to happen as any weird use of your card would probably trigger it for a security review, which wouldn't allow any transactions until someone talks to you). Finally, credit cards (unlike debit cards), are not linked to your bank account.

<comment><USER7> Compromised credit card adds significant hassle while Bitcoin transaction adds zero hassle. So CC is worse than Bitcoin for both parties: merchant can lose money and have to insure against it with paper work and higher prices, customer has to worry about reputation of a merchant and check his balance regularly, call the bank quickly etc.

Yes, if the merchant steals from the buyer, the raw BTC transaction is not reversible. But normally merchant has much more to lose than you if he is not nice (and merchants show their commitment by investing a lot in marketing and development) and in rare cases when you transact more money, you can use escrow and extra paperwork. But that's totally optional and is not needed when paying for a coffee, a book, or some inexpensive service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If 500 million people were to embrace Bitcoin to the point where they own on average $100 worth, then it would represent $50 Billion in value (500 Million x $100). With only 20 Million Bitcoins in circulation, each Bitcoin would be worth $2500.

That's discounting other deflationary factors.

I think it would be nuts to put all your savings in Bitcoin, but as a hedge against fiat currencies and interesting place to put play money: time to buy!

<comment><USER10> I Speculate on Bitcoin by holding a few, but be-careful! First if you read the forums a lot there are a lot of scaling issues happening at the moment (Max block size) that mean Bitcoin cannot handle a large amount of transactions and this will put a big dampener on the BTC being worth thousands of dollars.

Second, time to buy is never when the price is sky-rocketing. Bitcoin is not perfect and we need to see what the devs do over the next year to decide if Bitcoin will ever be allowed to scale because at the moment Bitcoin cannot scale up beyond 2-4 times its current usage and adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This recent spike may have a lot of do with this just-issued repot from the Treasury department.

[http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G...](http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html)

<comment><USER12> This 100%. The U.S. Government just effectively legalized Bitcoins and other virtual currencies in the document posted above. This is a huge development, much more important than Bitcoin going over $50.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there any exchange where I can short sell bitcoins? Besides the fact that this will almost definitely be a profitable strategy in the near future, it would seem that allowing both short and long positions would create market stability. Most securities exchanges allow both short and long positions.

<comment><USER14> Short selling Bitcoins would be an incredibly risky move on your part. There are no financial regulations in place to prevent market manipulation. You used to be able to short sell on Bitcoinica and there were some really questionable margin calls that took place.

<comment><USER13> Can you elaborate? I'm not too familiar with the bitcoin market, just viewing it from a normal (amateur) financial perspective.

<comment><USER15> Read up on the hunt brothers and the silver markets. Essentially, they would buy up contracts with brokers to buy 1lb of silver on july 1st for $10 (or whatever the specifics happen to be). Then, in June they bought all the silver, like some ridiculously huge fraction of all the silver in the world. When it comes time for that broker to find that pound of silver he owes the hunt brothers, the hunt brothers get to set the price, because they're the only ones with silver. So this broker, he has to come up with how ever much the Hunt brothers demand, he is really over a barrel.

Just one memorable example of market manipulation and unlimited exposure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are bitcoins in a position to have a crash as tumultuous as last time, or is the currency more stable now overall?

<comment><USER17> It will probably crash. Obviously it has had greater accessibility and hype lately. Coupled with profitable mining becoming impossible for most people riding the boom looks more and more attractive. At some point in the future the buying volume will taper off due to less new speculators getting into the game.

If BTC had anything actually underpinning its value we could work out the ratio of how overvalued it is. Unfortunately it doesn't - even the fact that real transactions are made with BTC doesn't change anything, as the value is so elastic that a T-shirt selling for 1 BTC 6 months ago would sell for a fraction of the BTC now.

If the currency is stable now, what exactly is making it stable? Where does the equilibrium come from? Isn't it unstable by definition anyway since it's rising uncontrollably?

<comment><USER4> _"Coupled with profitable mining becoming impossible"_

Well it is incorrect to state that. Obviously, as the exchange rate increases, mining becomes more and more profitable. In fact, as of today ($50/BTC, difficulty factor around 4.9M, 25BTC/block) mining has never been so profitable in over a year(!) since January 2011 ($6/BTC, diff=1.1M, 50BTC/block)!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's literally doubled in a month. This is out of control.

<comment><USER19> Facebook's market cap is $63,000,000,000. If the market cap of Bitcoin were just _10%_ of Facebook, each Bitcoin would be worth about $500. 1% and it's about $50.

Can a global financial system conceivably give the world just 10% of the value of Facebook? Because just ten percent ... and one BTC is $500.

Oh, but clearly society demands Farmville, you say? Clearly we don't need a new financial system ... more than we need to know who Joe Bob hooked up with this weekend.

As if there's no pain being solved here by Bitcoin. As if there are no problems with USD or the EUR. As if Cypriots are just pissed off over spilled milk right now. After all it's only a "haircut".

It's so funny to see how most people on HN are here to make businesses that scale infinitely. What could possibly, POSSIBLY, scale faster and more widely than an open source global currency? The price increase in the last month represents a trickle of people around the globe exchanging fiat for BTC. Just a trickle. Whereas most people are obviously hesitant to invest. That would include most people on HN.

The supply of Bitcoin is ridiculously tiny. Only 11,000,000 in total are in circulation today, let alone available for purchase on the market.

Sellers wanted. I acquired enough BTC to make me happy without being over the top - and I'm not ever exchanging it back into any other ass backwards asset class, gold and silver (and USD) included. Early adopters of BTC are from what I can tell mostly the same way, if crazier than I am.

Bitcoin is valuable because the world desperately needs to escape the current financial system. Individual sovereignty and financial privacy are the most scarce resources on the planet, bar none. It's not too late to acquire BTC, put it in a brainwallet and carry around $10k at all times. Now let's all go back to flinging monkey poop at consumers over the Internet.

<comment><USER20> _The supply of Bitcoin is ridiculously tiny. Only 11,000,000 in total are in circulation today, let alone available for purchase on the market._

Bitcoins can be divided to 8 decimal places at the moment (it could be expanded). So instead of 1.1e7 units, isn't it 1.1e15 units?

<comment><USER21> Yes, but the exchange rate is quoted in BTC.

<comment><USER20> So? Everyone knows how to do the necessary math.

One Japanese Yen currently costs $0.0104715 USD. The price fluctuates down into the lower decimals. People deal with this every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> unix-dude Really interesting stuff. I was expecting a crash or at least "return to normal" in that period where the price jumped to around $25 (before a mini- crash to like $16, and then the subsequent takeoff to the 40s).

Personally, I dont think they're worth $50, but heck, thats a horrible reason for you not to buy them. A more objective reason not to buy now is that there are people holding thousands of bitcoins. If a few of them (or maybe even one big player) sells tons of them, it could cause a crash like last time, when the price fell from $33ish to almost 0.

Interesting times for bitcoin either way.

<comment><USER4> You are incorrect. When the "price fell to zero" in June 2011, it was the result of bogus trades from a hacker: <http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=55> No one had enough bitcoins to crash the price that low for real.

As of today there are so many bids on MtGox alone that selling 100k bitcoins is barely sufficient to crash the price to the low $30s. Anybody owning that much is obviously long on bitcoin. It will take a _lot_ more than a "few large holders" to crash the price to $30 or below. It would take a massive market panic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I originally put about $500 dollars into Bitcoin to play with. Have withdrawn about $2000 cash and still have about 35 BTC worth left. Would have loved to get in on this back in the early days...

</comment><comment><USER23> What is the proportion of BTC volume due to speculation vs. due to buying transactions?

</comment><comment><USER24> Time to sell

<comment><USER25> It seems funny to assume that. I mean I haven't been tracking the underlying fundamentals, but the nature of most currencies today is that because they are managed, they tend to go up and down. If the fundamentals are solid for Bitcoins, as in there is actually increasing demand (which seems feasible given all the new services advertising their acceptance) and the supply is increasing in tune with expectations (which seems feasible given that it can be forecast with a fair amount of accuracy), this may just as well be the time to buy as it is to sell.

I guess human psychology could also play a part in thinking this is the time to sell, but do the fundamentals actually seem questionable to you?

<comment><USER26> I don't believe that you actually have any understanding of the supply/demand economics of booms/busts necessary to be skeptical of parent.

Increasing demand of a finite resource drives the price up. This drives the demand up even more.

The real value of a Bitcoin is still in USD, of course, so at some point it's going to cross over a line where the people holding Bitcoins want to get rid of it.

Decreasing demand of a finite resource drives the price down. This drives the demand down even more.

The fact that the price is accelerating so quickly indicates a runaway effect.

What, do you _really_ think the real-world USD value of all the Bitcoins in the world has doubled in two weeks?

<comment><USER25> Your analysis holds true if you are treating bitcoins as purely speculative.

You are correct that I don't fully understand supply/demand economics, because as an Austrian theorist, my concepts relating to booms and busts use dynamic models and not the statics you are using to prove your point. In a static situation, increasing demand of a finite resource does drive the price up, which can drive up demand even more, but thats if you ignore the effect of substitutes, which for both the exchange and speculative value of bitcoins, there are several.

Do I really think that it has doubled? No. But I don't think that people expecting a large crash like before are doing so because they understand the fundamentals. I think, as in any market, you do have speculators, but I also think that the legitimate demand for bitcoins as a means for exchange has gone up since the previous crash providing a more solid basis for the higher price.

<comment><USER26> >Do I really think that it has doubled? No.

Then it sounds like the speculative bits are driving, even if there are other passengers in the car.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When you plug an iPhone into Ubuntu you can access the app folders on the phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWB8N_acdm8

<comment><AUTHOR> ... surely this isn't meant to happen, right?</comment>


Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/computers-beating-humans-at-advanced-chess-2013-11 <comment><USER2> > 'what are humans still good for?'

To take this from chess is rather silly.

Chess is a discrete game on 64 squares with a handful of possibilities in a given position, and a result of three different outcomes. It's right next to long division in the spectrum of problems that are amenable to computer analysis.

If anything, the surprise isn't that humans have been surpassed by computers in calculating chess positions, it's that humans are as good as we are at such a discrete and mechanical game of perfect information and logic.

Further the techniques to improve computer chess programs are brilliant, but they aren't techniques that lend themselves to domains of intelligence beyond chess.

<comment><USER3> > Further the techniques to improve computer chess programs are brilliant, but > they aren't techniques that lend themselves to domains of intelligence > beyond chess.

I beg to differ. MiniMax for instance is a technique that has wide application outside of chess, as do alpha/beta pruning and other optimization strategies.

Chess as a game has advanced computer science considerably. Did you know that the first computer program was a chess program? It was played by having rooms full of people work through the code in order to compute the next move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article ends like this: "As Cowen puts it, 'what are humans still good for?'"

For the most part, programmers program better than programs. It's amazing to think about the possibilities as this statement becomes less true.

<comment><USER5> Programmers are not better than programs if the program it is competing against is a black-scholes estmator, compiler, interpreter, or assembler, and time is an input to the cost function.

<comment><USER6> Compiler, interpreter or an assembler is basically a translator. It doesn't have to think, it is simple computation following a set of rules, of course a computer would win in that case.

But can a computer write code from scratch as good as a human? No(t yet).

<comment><USER5> Human minds are nothing more than computers running on unoptimized substrates. It's only a short matter of time on an evolutionary scale before machines surpass.

<comment><USER7> unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations.

That part of your sentence is wrong, the rest (minds are nothing more than computers running on substrate) is wrong or meaningless, too. It just so happens that computation of the Turing model is one of the things human minds do, and badly. It's very much not the only thing. (Unless you mean computer in a sufficiently vague and abstract way as for the statement to be vacuous.)

<comment><USER5> _unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations._

The biological method of information processing, calcium ion transfer, is demonstrably orders of magnitude slower than artificially devised methods by semiconductors. So this is physically not optimal and easily proved. So that part of my sentence is correct.

The rest of your comment is too ill-defined to refute, unless you hold that there is some non-material, extra-physical quantity of mental process that cannot be duplicated by engineering.

<comment><USER3> Having slower individual components running at ridiculously low power _is_ a valid optimization because it allows very close packing of those components and levels of interconnection that we can only dream of in our designed systems.

The optimization is a subtle one but extremely powerful, and it will be a while before we can pack equivalent computational power in something of similar size and power requirements.

Think about the amount of hardware required to simulate a cat brain at reduced speed, then think about the amount of hardware in a cat brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Computers may win at chess but they don't _enjoy_ chess. It may very well be possible to automate most or all of the games that people play and having computer win the games. But people don't just play to win, they play for fun.

<comment><USER8> I don't really see how that's relevant. We make computer AIs to play games because humans enjoy playing against smart opponents, and not all games lend themselves to a player vs player setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remember that the computer chess AI is actually a snapshot of the intelligence of a human being. I don't see this distinction made enough. If you are struggling against a game, you are struggling against the one who made it.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure how true that is, the algorithm for the chess engine could be relatively simple but easily outweigh the abilities of the creator.

Or the engine could make use of techniques such as genetic algorithms to improve itself. Meaning its abilities wouldn't necessarily relate to its creator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This title should be changed to "Computers AREN'T beating humans at advanced chess". Here's the key excerpt from the blog post that the Business Insider article links to:

"Computer chess expert Kenneth W. Regan has compiled extensive data on this question, and you will see that a striking percentage of the best or most accurate chess games of all time have been played by man-machine pairs."

[http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/FreestyleSt...](http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/FreestyleStudy.html)

<comment><USER12> > This title should be changed to "Computers AREN'T beating humans at advanced > chess"

How would anyone know? The OP is just linking to the same 2012 thread filled with speculation which you see pop up every so often. There's nothing hard in it establishing that centaurs are still useful/no longer useful, and in any case, 3 years is a long time.

> > [http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/FreestyleSt...](http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/FreestyleSt..).

Which will be a lagging indicator (if computer chess AIs had just squeaked over the threshold where a grandmaster's contribution declined to the level of noise, how many years would it take for unaided chess programs to accumulate 'a striking percentage') and in any case, has just a few games post-2010 and none at all post-2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's fascinating how far computers have come. I remember Kasparov being pissed off at Deep Blue because it wasn't a "computer move."

I do think there is a down side for games being solved with computers. Mostly because games become highly calculated and right moves become computer moves.

Take a look at Paul Morphy's games. They are elegant and exciting to watch and analyze. I just don't see the same play happening today with human or computer players. Murphy would lose today but his games were beautiful, maybe even "incorrect" by today's standards.

<comment><USER14> While it is true that Morphy's games were beautiful, one should note that his opponents usually were significantly weaker players than him. You could also read this as: Morphy was levels ahead of the other players at the time. He could get away with 'risky' plays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Despite growth of Monte Carlo Based programs - Computers play Go(Baduk) only at roughly the level of a very good amateur player. I am very much looking forward to the advances in Go that will come in the next 25 years when computers start to challenge professional players in my preferred game. Until then, there is another useless pure information skill that humans are better than computers at.

</comment><comment><USER16> a bit off topic but i'm a bit surprised by all the comments on this thread dismissing human feelings and emotions as something reductible to their biochemicals components.

Games and many other human activities are _social_ activities.Only analysing them the way you would analyse a stone falling on the ground is just silly. you're missing a big chunk of the reasons the phenomenon is taking place in the first place.

<comment><USER17> The fact that this position is not even discussed but taken as an obviously true first premise by so many people in tech/engineering is rather troubling; I think it is the root cause of many very dysfunctional worldviews/failures to comprehend essential parts of life: over-application of economic thinking in all areas of discourse, libertarianism, stress upon efficiency at all costs in all cases, dismissal of the humanities, art, etc.

It is all driven from a simpler and more fundamental notion, that sometimes people who work on computers all day can begin to believe humans and computers are identical; a human that doesn't consistently optimize its actions with respect to certain metrics is just buggy/poorly executed software, hence, the poor deserve to be poor, action without potential utility gain/profit is wasted and valueless, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > 'what are humans still good for?'

 __Enjoying __playing chess.

<comment><USER19> Humans are still good at releasing chemicals that reward neural circuit and strengthen connections at a certain task. Process whose purpose is to slowly get better at that task. Wow, we really have an edge over a machine that is already better at the task and possibly getting better with every game without that particular reward mechanism you know as "enjoyment".

<comment><USER18> Ha! Thanks for the chuckle. Yeah, I agree with you on the the fact that "enjoyment" can be seen as a tool evolved for improving our fitness function's scores.

The only problem I see with this line of thought is that if we keep following it, we get into the absurd. "Why even play chess?", "Why even bother doing anything a computer is better at doing?", "What to do then?". And, this is my personal answer: do things because you enjoy them.

I don't know if we will ever reach a point where a computer can decide if it wants to play chess, but I hope that if we do, then the computer chooses to play on the basis that it wants to play and not on the fact that it has to optimize some external parameter. (Although as I write this, I realize that "do things because you enjoy them" practically means maximizing your utility function.)

Ok, you win. Haha. I just stopped enjoying analyzing this issue. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm still waiting for the day when a computer defeats a 9-dan professional Go player in an even game with the same time limits used in a normal professional games.

<comment><USER19> It's a matter of time.

<comment><USER3> Without specifying the amount of time that is not a contribution, it could be a few years or it could be untold millennia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guessed this was Tyler Cowen from the headline. He goes on and on about chess in his book, Average is Over.</comment>


Stephen King, John Grisham, 900 other authors oppose Amazon's Hachette tactics - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/25/5937247/nearly-900-authors-sign-letter-against-amazon-in-hachette-dispute

<comment><USER2> Having personally experienced nothing but excellent service from Amazon, I'm inclined to think Bezos _does_ have the customers best interest at heart.</comment>


How to run a team focused on crisis prevention - <AUTHOR> https://www.hadardor.com/crisis-prevention-team <comment><AUTHOR> It's really hard to measure the impact of preventing crises from happening. Even harder to prioritize this work against growth

I helped build a team at Lyft focused on this. Wrote up my learnings</comment>


Mixergy interviewing cofounder of Wufoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.justin.tv/clip/dabec5eb458421a8

<comment><USER2> Wow, Kevin is amazingly good at articulating what makes YC work. In particular, most people forget the "forced 3-month move" to Mountain View which, among many other things, frees you from obligations (girlfriends, side gigs, friends in the area, etc).

I'm curious whether YC founders who did not have to relocate to participate end up statistically less productive...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll post a clear version tomorrow for anyone who missed it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Great interview Andrew! Sorry for not linking directly to mixergy.com btw - I couldn't find the content there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> good interview but the sound was horrible.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I just edited it and I heard what you meant. It'll sound better when I post it tomorrow. And I'll make some adjustments for tomorrow's live interview too. Thanks for telling me.

<comment><USER4> cool...btw did you end up getting any of the domains I emailed you?(don't need to be specific about which one, since I know you want to keep it secret for now)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> mixergy.com's usability needs work -- I can never find the link to the text transcript.

<comment><AUTHOR> The video isn't on mixergy.com yet. When it gets posted there I would assume it will have a transcript as usual.</comment></comment>


Current and Future Bridge Health Monitoring Systems in Hong Kong (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.samco.org/download/ws5/wash.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Related paper that also mentions the SGI workstations in this PDF: [https://w3.leica- geosystems.com/downloads123/zz/general/gene...](https://w3.leica- geosystems.com/downloads123/zz/general/general/TruStories/GPS%20World%20Hong%20Kong%20TRU_en.pdf)

They used / use SGI Visual Workstation 540s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation)</comment>


Stop using AdBlock - <AUTHOR> http://alandofrohan.blogspot.com/2011/11/stop-using-adblock.html

<comment><USER2> Fun moments in driving a demo for the engineering team at my last company, which was in the advertising space, was spending several minutes trying to debug a problem with the demo before the CTO informed me that my toolbar indicated that AdBlock was still turned on and Ghostery was probably eating my company's tracking cookies so the demo was unlikely to work...

Did I stop using those tools? Not a chance. Advertising is for suckers. If your site or service uses it then I wish you success, but I will not feel one iota of remorse for taking every opportunity to reduce the clutter and distraction of advertising from my life. If you want _my_ money have the balls to ask me for it rather than trying to sell me as your secondary product.

<comment><USER3> I get your point. But it's faulty.

My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem.

This you take for granted. This you don't pay for.

It's _my_ website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using _my_ website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website.

A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog?

How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional.

Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.

<comment><USER4> You deserve to monetize your website if you convince me to pay to access it. Else, not.

If you leave 50,000 hot dogs on your porch every day, marked "Free hotdogs! Come early, come often, and tell your friends!" and each has some nasty sauce on it I dislike, I'm going to take a hotdog and make an effort to remove the sauce. If I carry a sauce-removal machine, so much the better for me.

You're claiming a right to follow me down the block screaming "STOP THIEF! I ONLY GET PAID IF YOU EAT THE SAUCE!"

See the problem? If I'm not a party to any of the agreements under which you get paid, you don't get to bitch to me if my behavior fails to generate cash for you.

<comment><USER3> Simply by you stepping onto my ground, you're now under my house rules. With a website, it's called a Terms of Service.

<comment><USER5> Then enforce those rules and block people using AdBlock. Problem solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Time, effort, and concentration are limited resources. You only get so much of each of them in your lifetime. If you wish to spend your limited resources experiencing advertising, it's your choice. If you'd prefer to spend your limited resources elsewise, again, it's your choice.

If Google and Facebook curled up and died tomorrow due to no one being willing to spend their lives experiencing advertising, something would take their place. Whether said "something" turns out to be better or worse is subject to debate. There are plenty of possible business models, yet relying on revenues from advertising has a proven track record of profitability due to most people not being savvy enough to make advertising ineffective.

Personally, I've got better things to do with my life.

<comment><USER7> The OP reminds me of O'Reillys 2003 piece (buy where you shop) <http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/buy_where_shop.html>

In his piece Tim OReilly warned against people who browsed at bookstores, but only shopped online.

I suspect the same is true here.. if you use $service regularly, and $service exists through advertising, then maybe whitelisting their ads is a reasonable trade-off to make..

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is your argument : "I used AdBlock and was happy with it. Then I worked for someone who lived from advertising, so I'm not happy with it anymore."

I call that being a slave of the one who feeds you. From a Marxist point of view, you're only becoming servant of the interests of your exploiter, and now are trying to share this point of view with the world.

Without even thinking one instant that maybe living off advertising has no moral justification. Being exposed to advertising, as you say it yourself (when acknowledging that you don't have to click on the ads), is being unconsciously manipulated by them, and that's exactly what they are trying to do.

Advertising is not work, it is not producing anything useful for the society. It is only trying to either create needs or direct customer's attention to a particular vendor without any objective comparison between products, often creating value out of thin air just by gregarious feeling (so called "brands" making people happy to buy something not for what it brings to them but because they'll be happy to show their mates how cool they are to possess something with a particular logo on it).

So well, I recently installed AdBlock because I was tired of having my speakers start to shout silly songs when browsing the web at night, surprising me and making my heart rate jump sky high. Otherwise I've trained to filter visually the ads and completely ignore them. I don't feel any guilt of having less noise in the pages I visit.

For the ones who feel like they deserve some money for the time they put into their blog, just put a donation button somewhere, be transparent with how much money you make from it, and I won't mind a popup asking to click on it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't appreciate the assumption that my time and attention are commodities that others inherently deserve to profit from. When I want to find a product that fits a particular need, I'll go looking for it intentionally; when I have other purposes for being online, I want that to be respected. Websites aren't free to run, but depending on your actual costs you have other options that respect your readers, from making your content a paid service (for larger enterprises) to asking for donations (for small blogs).

AdBlock disrupted the advertisement-based revenue system. Are you going to defend the old ways or embrace new ideas?

</comment><comment><USER10> I think maybe I'll turn my adblock off when advertisers quit blasting me with loud auto-playing video/audio ads that start automatically.

It really blows to open a dozen tabs and then suddenly have one start playing some goofy "nerd saves the day with MAGIC TECHNOLOGY" ad that I can't find and shut off. On a loop.

Advertising _could_ have been unobtrusive like the author claims but advertisers chose otherwise trying to one-up each other. This is why you can't have nice things.

<comment><USER11> I haven't seen such ads in 5 years or more. I use NoScript to prevent most Flash from running without my permission, and that's the primary way that such ads blast things without your permission, but the only annoying music/auto- play video I've encountered typically is just a poorly designed web site, not an ad on a site. And 99% of the time, it's a TED talk video that's auto- playing when I restore Firefox...sigh...

I agree with the article. If you don't like a site, don't go there. Don't steal their bandwidth and try to justify it.

<comment><USER10> _I agree with the article. If you don't like a site, don't go there. Don't steal their bandwidth and try to justify it._

It sure would be nice to be able do decide that in advance.

<comment><USER11> Umm....and it's a terrible, terrible tragedy to accidentally see an awful web page once.

With something that blocks scripting, you don't need to worry about a site infecting your browser/computer. If the site is covered with ads, then close the window, and it's gone. Then downvote it on HN or Reddit or where ever you found it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If you are a software engineer, stop fucking using AdBlock now. We ALL have at least one friend who works at Google, or Yelp, or Facebook, or somebody. Even if the company doesn't rely on advertising as a revenue source, I'm sure they use it as a source of getting new customers."

Commence fucking that static this instant, and do not stop until I put "pad Google's EBITDA" on my todo list somewhere above "have a less bullshit-laden experience on the Internet."

I mean honestly...making it convenient for marketers to monetize my web browsing is about the last thing on Earth for which I feel a shred of personal responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER12> I simply deactivated flash by default, and only activate it when I want (on both Chrome and Firefox). This way I still see ads, but not those which eat my cpu, hog all my memory, and distract me to death. I think this is a good compromise.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty much what I do, flash ads get blocked but I would imagine many ad sites will start having fallbacks for mobile browsers. No data on that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TiVo is a set-top box that blocks advertisements. I know a lot of people who use it, and even I used to use it. I thought it was a necessary part of the watching experience.

There are two main reasons why I stopped using it: I started to use a HD TV. This was quite a while back and TiVo didn't work on HD then. So I decided to go without it.

The second reason was when I worked at NBC and an employee noticed that TiVo started blocking NBC ads. It felt hypocritical that I blocked ads but worked at a company that relied on advertising.

At first I thought I could just whitelist shows, but then what about one time programs that have good segments? Why deny them advertising revenue. Think about how many shows rely on advertising that you watch. Lost, Fringe, Futurama, News, Seinfeld, Adult Swim (Questionable Content I've always noted specifically).

So I stopped using TiVo and honestly the experience hasn't been that bad. There are a few shows that show annoying ads like 10 minute Shake-Weight commercials. But for the most part, ads aren't that bad. The age of the really really obnoxious ones have been stopped or perhaps I watch different channels than I used to? Either way, I haven't had too much trouble or annoyance.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'll stop using AdBlock and FlashBlock as soon as advertisers stop using animated GIFs or even flash with _sound_. Thank you very much.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is advertising on the Internet? I almost forgot.

Advertising got a really bad reputation with a lot of people, and they are unlikely to turn off their armor for anyone. If you are having a problem with the relatively small community who uses ad blocking software, you are paying the price for years of annoying animated gifs, flash, and ridiculous punch- the-monkey win ipod scams.

I whitelist a few sites I use regularly and that I'd like to "support", after an article on arstechnica awhile ago. But it's a short list.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ads are one issue. Sending information about (almost) every website you visit to Google is another issue. That's my main reason for blocking pests such as AdWords, +1 buttons, and Facebook buttons.

</comment><comment><USER17> Speak for yourself. I use other computers in my household that don't have AdBlock installed, and every time I do, I am reminded why I use AdBlock on my main work computer (this one).

</comment><comment><USER18> I refreshed his page (with Adblock on) a few extra times. Just out of spite I think.. I'm an asshole sometimes.

But in my defense: every website I've made and still have up has never had a single advertisement on it. I don't like them, so I don't push them on people. However, I do whitelist sites I use daily for free such as Reddit and Imgur.

</comment><comment><USER19> This will probably offend some startup people here (who probably rely on advertisement to run their otherwise unprofitable websites), but advertisement is evil. How can you believe in the power of capitalism and the invisible hand and still think it's ok that people are all the time being led into buying stuff they do not need because marketers study specifically how to psychologically manipulate people into associating good emotions with material crap?

I'm not saying there aren't other factors involved, but do you really think the most popular brands are so due to merit? Don't you think the world would be different if not so many people would just stop consuming products from the very corporations they are protesting against?

This could be a very long rant, I just hope you can see where I'm going with this, that the really unethical thing to do is to allow advertisement to continue to exist.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't offend me, but the concept that all advertising is evil is very, very misguided. Just because big brands often use evil techniques to advertise doesn't mean that it's all bad.

If I'm selling something used on Craigslist, that's advertising. If I'm looking for a product to fill a need, and I don't know what to buy, the paid links on Google have more than once led me to the perfect product. Every single thing on Amazon's site (fill in ANY e-commerce site online here -- even most of Craigslist, with things like apartments for rent), right down to the product page, is, fundamentally, advertising.

You'd pretty much have to restrict the web to a highly edited version of Wikipedia if you were going to outlaw advertising. And if you succeeded in banning all advertising you'd just prevent new entries into any market, or the creations of new markets, because everyone would tend to buy the products at the stores they knew about already.

What's evil is not educating people in logical thinking, and in not inoculating them at a young age against the kinds of psychological tricks you're talking about.

<comment><USER19> I'm sorry, english is not my first language, so I maybe that's why I thought the word advertising didn't include craigslist postings. In portuguese we have a very specific word to the advertising I'm referring to, "propaganda" (which also has the same meaning as in english).

Craigslist/Ebay are exactly the kind of things we need more, especially ebay, where you can see different offerings side by side and compare them on objective grounds, then decide which one better fits your needs. And that's the key, if I'm on ebay it's because I'm looking for something, people are not trying to convince me to buy groupons when I'm actually looking to read a fine article from HN.

If "I" succeeded in banning the advertisement I'm talking about (basically impossible without censorship, and that's the last thing I'd want), more sites would spring up to help people who are looking for something. You wouldn't always buy from the same brand/store because you would have these tools to help you make sure (with the least amount of effort possible) you are making the best buy you can.

Furthermore, I think it's the existence of advertisement that is reducing the incentives to create alternate business models (for content websites, for example), like micro-payments (think very small subscription fee for a site like salon.com), and basically tips, which could be considered donations but would be too small to be worth it with the current payment processors.

<comment><USER11> I read an article recently that pointed out that an episode of a TV show is effectively an advertisement for the next TV show in the series. Propaganda certainly has the connotations that you're looking for, but in English it's typically used to refer to a certain class of political ads. I get what you're saying, though, and I think the proper response is education.

Craigslist is great, and _I_ might consider a subscription to Salon.com if it were inexpensive enough, but I think you're overestimating humanity's willingness to part with cash. All you have to do is look at just about ANY paid app on an iPhone or (especially) Android, and you'll find people complaining that it should be free.

Just a few years ago, buying a small game for your computer would cost from $7-$20. Now people complain if a game costs $1, even if the game contains dozens of hours of entertainment value. It's not like it costs less to make a polished game now than it did a few years ago.

And if a game is fun enough and has enough replay value, I can actually make more than the $0.70 I make from a $1 sale by showing the users ads (considering I get 200x as many downloads of a free version). Other models do exist -- in-app payments for buying "coins" to play a game more, for example -- but some of those end up feeling more evil than the advertising you're decrying.

What you'd need to fight is the sense of entitlement that people have around web content, which is what game developers have to fight on Android. I mean, just look at the comments on this very article! We're talking HN readers who feel entitled to get everything for free. People who have no connection with web site creation or running a business will typically have even less of a personal connection to the companies that they're hurting when disabling ads.

Micropayments for news sites could happen if you got the right sites to buy in, but it's been tried again and again, so I suspect that it's the lack of customers rather than the lack of site support that's the problem. If you got the New York Times, Salon.com, and a half dozen other high-profile sites to join a micropayment network, so I could sign up ONCE and go to a lot of different news sites ad free, I'd like that as a customer. But I suspect that you'd see the same ratio of 200x as many people sticking with the "free" ad- supported sites.

But then again, it would be a hard sell for the New York Times, at least: They want $35/month for a full digital subscription. That's off by at least a factor of ten from what I'd be willing to pay, possibly more. I think I'd be willing to pay $8/month to a micropayment network that included unlimited access to at least a dozen or so sites ad-free, but the NYT is demanding a much higher payment for unlimited access, so it's hard to believe they'd take a much lower amount.

Finally, I wouldn't want the micropayments service to charge me every time I looked at a site. I don't want to think about using the web; I want to browse freely, without worrying that I'm spending money every time I click a link. So those micropayments would need to come out of a monthly flat rate, to be divvied up among the various sites I'd actually visited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The amount of entitlement on both sides of this debate is always pretty amazing/amusing to me.

1) Publishers (and I am a publisher with an ad-supported site): Nobody owes you an audience or a payday. If advertising is so annoying that people are going out of their way to block it, then you're in trouble.

2) Readers: Nobody owes you professional-grade writing/video/whatever. If it's impossible to make a living doing this stuff -- and in the first decade or two of the web, the way to make a living doing this stuff has been advertising -- then most people will stop doing it and your life will be worse for it.

I don't know what the solution is, but pretending that the other side of what ought to be a mutually beneficial relationship is your prisoner and that you have the right to demand they do things to meet your needs and your needs only won't get you far.

</comment><comment><USER21> A couple of years ago, I remember Ars Technica ran an experiment for a day or so when they blocked end users who run Ad Blocker. ([http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad- blocking...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is- devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars))

I recall it generated a lot of negative feedback, but at the same time, I'm surprised it hasn't been copied more widely: If you're the kind of person who's willing to use Ad Block on a site that's providing content financed solely by advertising, I would imagine you're also the kind of "customer" that at least some of those sites would prefer not to have.

<comment><USER22> No, it generated a lot of people writing Ars Technica off. You notice they stopped? They didn't like their analytics taking the plunge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Group think and excusing things because you don't think your contribution > matters is not an argument.

Sure it is -- it's a damn good argument. it's just very selfish, and breaks the spirit of Kant's Categorical Imperative.

<comment><AUTHOR> you have a point, I'll update the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hadn't installed AdBlock on my most recent laptop until I was using free wifi at a hotel that loaded an ad underneath my mouse cursor every time a webpage loaded. So if you clicked on anything within the first 10 seconds or so of loading a page, you actually clicked on the ad. It's always something egregious that pushes me over the edge, and I never uninstall it.

</comment><comment><USER25> How about someone creates a new AdBlock EasyList-based filterset that doesn't blacklist sites that don't have obscene ads while blocking the major offenders?

Or does AdBlock allow for (allow,deny) type rules like httpd.conf where you can specify a whitelist? If so, a whitelist for certain sites may be the best approach.

</comment><comment><USER26> I control my own web experience, and until I don't, well...

I can't control highway advertising but boy would I love an ad free city.

I search for what I want, let the mindless sheep get 'served'

</comment><comment><USER27> One really good reason for blocking ads is that there have been many cases where ad networks have been hacked to serve up drive-by malware.

</comment><comment><USER28> Thanks for the reminder, I forgot to install it on a new machine...

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah stop using it, selfish people.</comment>


Using Erlang in real-world projects? - <AUTHOR>

I'm playing with Erlang right now and I really enjoy it, but being it so different than usual imperative and OOP that are now widely accepted anywhere I fear it may be difficult to adopt it in some context (even when it's the perfect tool for the context). I'd like to hear your opinion about that.<p>Are you using Erlang for any significant project at work? What kind of system are you building? Was it difficult to persuade your boss/company to allow you to use that? Did you have any difficulty because of the choice you made (e.g. staffing skilled people, needing more time to build the skills your team needs)? <comment><USER2>
        I'm playing with Erlang right
        now and I really it, ...

This sentence no verb.

Well, obviously it does, but I thought it was funny. You might want to edit your first sentence while you have time.

And I don't, and haven't used Erlang, although I'd like to and am trying to create the opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for pointing it out!

I started working on Dinosaur Island (<http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php?puzzle_id=19>) just to build that opportunity, actually. It is kind of a "toy" example, though, so I was interested in hearing from people working on "real" applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just saw this. We use Erlang extensively within T-Mobile UK - have been doing so for the past 11 years. A lot of our core network systems are built using this and it is rock solid. Can't recommend it enough!

</comment><comment><USER4> I like Erlang... by the way Elixir 0.3 has been released.

What I don't like is that the erlang community criticizes Node.js it's like they feel threatened.</comment>


Grid Style Sheets (GSS) - <AUTHOR> http://gridstylesheets.org

<comment><USER2> Very interesting css preprocessor/layout engine combination, kudos 1999. Many people annoyed with css might love this quite a bit.

I wonder about the performance implications. The layout engine obviously has to run in javascript and thus it will result in a slower startup time (gss has to parse the logic) and the layout itself will be obviously slower than "native css".</comment>


What makes programming languages easy and why you want one that isn't - <AUTHOR> http://fiedzia.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-makes-programming-languages-easy.html <comment><USER2> So the author has a great point, that languages are suited to different things. I like this.

What I don't like is the implied "only people doing stuff that _I_ think is hard are _real_ programmers." The author seems to believe that people chose "easy" languages because they are less skilled as a programmer (see the bit at the end). Which is forgetting the original point, which is that languages all have their strong points.

While it's true that I wouldn't trust someone trying to write an OS kernel in Javascript, I also wouldn't trust someone writing a web page in Fortran. There's a difference between hiding complexity when you need access to it (what the post is complaining about) and unnecessarily inviting complexity. Being able to understand when to choose between them is the real desirable trait.

Edit: I'm also not sure how relying on the language to guarantee safety is much different from relying on a complex beastie like a c++ compiler to be correct.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What I don't like is the implied "only people doing stuff that I think is > hard are real programmers.

That's not exactly my what I want to say. My point is more like "You may not see a point in becoming a soldier and its not a career for you, but be glad that those who defend you have big guns, so stop complaining that they are heavy".

> I'm also not sure how relying on the language to guarantee safety is much > different from relying on a complex beastie like a c++ compiler to be > correct.

Compiler are way more likely to be correct then people who use them. Problem with C++ (that Rust is trying to solve) is that the correctness of the compiler does not translate to correctness of compiled code, just as correctness of your text editor does not guarantee that you won't make typos, if it doesn't provide spellchecker. (I really like this analogy)

<comment><USER3> > You may not see a point in becoming a soldier

You might want to try saying that a different way; this metaphor is a problem.

It comes across as a slightly more colorful way of putting down people who use other languages as not "real" programmers - you're saying they should find another career. Or at best, maybe they are real programmers but they should be using harder languages?

In practice, most of the important code that everyone relies on to defend us (assuming here you mean security-critical or safety-critical code) is not written in Rust. So who are the real "soldiers"?

There's certainly a case to be made for using safer languages for critical code. On the other hand, using stricter static analysis for existing languages (and other kinds of testing like fuzz testing) will find bugs quicker and avoids boiling a few oceans.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It comes across as a slightly more colorful way of putting down people who > use other languages as not "real" programmers

This is not my intention.

> In practice, most of the important code that everyone relies on to defend us > (assuming here you mean security-critical or safety-critical code) is not > written in Rust. So who are the real "soldiers"?

Rust is relatively new. The real soldiers who use C bravely fight with of-by- one errors and buffer overruns and I really don't want them to do that.

> There's certainly a case to be made for using safer languages for critical > code.

We can afford using safer languages for a lot of code.

> On the other hand, using stricter static analysis for existing languages > (and other kinds of testing like fuzz testing) will find bugs quicker and > avoids boiling a few oceans.

No, it will not. It may find few bugs here and there, but will leave whole classes of problems untouched. You can't bolt security onto a language. And we do not want to find few bugs, we want to be sure they are not there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why can't we accept that programming languages are just tools and we should pick the best one for the job?

If I'm only going to run a script every few months and high performance isn't necessary, why should I pick a "hard" language like C rather than a scripting language like Python? The same holds true conversely; I don't want to use Python for code that has to run close to the metal.

Furthermore, if I need to iterate quickly, I wouldn't use something like C where there are too few abstractions for me to program at a quick-enough rate. If I work at a company like Google I presumably have enough money to buy all the computing power I should need, so performance of the code isn't as important as developer time. Or, if I'm prototyping some software and I want to work out the kinks in the architecture, why should I spend more time programming in C than just throwing together a quick solution in Python?

Something else:

>If you do _anything_ I am relying on, I do not want to hear that you use such "easy" language, period. If you are careless enough to rely on people not making mistakes, I do not want to deal with you.

Most mature, high level ("easy") languages are relatively bug free for most use cases. Even if you're using a "hard" language, you're still relying on other people not making mistakes---whoever made your compiler, whoever made the processor and hardware your machine code is running on. Are you to say that you don't even want to deal with yourself?

<comment><USER5> > If I work at a company like Google I presumably have enough money to buy all > the computing power I should need, so performance of the code isn't as > important as developer time.

Google and other big cloud shops care a lot about energy usage actually, and contrary to popular belief many server-side applications are CPU and memory- usage bound.

Energy consumption is important on mobile as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Google and other big cloud shops care a lot about energy usage actually,

Indeed they do. If you have one server, or a 100, doubling that is not a problem. If you are Google, doubling your energy use requires finding new country to provide it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that for small projects you want a permissive language. For big projects you want a restrictive one. Since projects are generally written according to the "worse is better" school of thought it's better for a language to make it quick to get going with a small project than easy to maintain a huge one.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The problem is that for small projects you want a permissive language. For > big projects you want a restrictive one.

I'd say that the important factor is the cost of a bug, not project size. There are many small project that absolutely crucial to get right, as well as some large ones that are not. I do not have a problem with people choosing what they need, only with the fact that (sometimes superficial) simplicity becomes the only factor in this decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If one of the bins has criteria like 'performance' and 'complexity, how do Java and Python both end up in it? This seems in the 'not even wrong' category to me but perhaps I wasn't able to follow the argument.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both hide memory management from you. Which works great until it doesn't.

<comment><USER7> Yeah but you tie it to performance which, other than in specialized cases, is not really a limiting factor - i.e. the performance spectrum of python, js, go, Java. And why aren't js and go in that category? Having read the comments here, was this post intended as some kind of veiled bit of Rust advocacy? Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, I'm just trying to understand what you're on about to better inform you how you are wrong on the internet :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not advocacy per se, but undeserved bashing (and not just Rust - you may replace it anything that's non trivial for beginners). This is some response for posts saying "Rust is bad because I'cant get past compiler errors, while some other language will not complain at all, and that should be fixed".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If you do _anything_ I am relying on, I do not want to hear that you use > such "easy" language, period. If you are careless enough to rely on people > not making mistakes, I do not want to deal with you. And if I am working on > ensuring high reliability, I will choose tools that provide as much > guarantees as possible, artificial simplicity be damned.

This to me is a bit absurd. First of all, the "easy" language he's referring to here is C, and if I read this correctly it sounds like he's saying any software written in C is not worth using, which is patently absurd.

Regardless of whether that's actually his viewpoint, programs and libraries which are well-written, in any language, are simply tools which one can use without needing to worry about what language they're implemented in or whether or not the author used generics or pointers or whatever. Language matters if you're writing the code, reading it, or linking against it, and otherwise it's not worth worrying about (as a general rule). Of course, if the tool or library in question is slow or resource intensive, this might be due to language choice, but poorly written, buggy, and underfeatured code can be written in any language. Choose the language that suits you, suits your team, and suits your project.

<comment><AUTHOR> > he's saying any software written in C is not worth using, which is patently > absurd.

I'm saying that choosing C guarantees a lot of problems for users. You will have such amount of bugs, that as a user, I refuse to be your beta-tester.

> programs and libraries which are well-written, in any language, are simply > tools

Some languages make creating well-written program much harder than others. There is strong correlation between "its written in C" and "it exposes your ssh keys".

> Language matters if you're writing the code, reading it, or linking against > it, and otherwise it's not worth worrying about

It also matters when you estimate code quality and likelihood of your data being exposed or corrupted or a time from "it compiles" to "we feel safe to use it in production". Its not the only factor, and perhaps not the most important one in many cases, but I believe in value of formal verification more then I believe in humans ability to get millions of malloc/free pairs right.

> poorly written, buggy, and underfeatured code can be written in any language

Again, in theory yes, in practice some languages make it much easier than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is it with all the language picking and language wars? Maybe I just grew up in a good learning environment because I had to, computers were simply not fast and had very little memory; on my first home computer it only had built- in Basic so I started with that, but it was slow, so went to assembly but that was annoying for anything but games so went to Pascal and later C but that was annoying for business software, so I went to DBase/Clipper etc etc. I would say that 'a good programmer' is not that bothered by switching languages when it is the right thing to do for the job at hand. Whatever language that is, easy or hard is not very interesting in my opinion and experience.

Like I said in another thread; I picked C# for a project because the software needs to run in banks and deal with bank IT departments. That's Java/.NET and, because we needed apps as well and we were already proficient in Xamarin, we chose C#.NET. Not because I like the language (I do, especially for later versions) or think it is hard or easy, but because it fitted.

We wrote a prototype in Python before that and the first bank we worked with had the CTO looking very puzzled and then, after some research on their side, said they cannot have that in their infrastructure; Windows servers with Java/.NET they had. And the IT staff to manage that, not other 'esoteric' stuff. However, already before that, we started rewriting that prototype to C#, this was just an extra sign we did the right thing.

I do a lot of coding in PHP ; not because I particularly like it, but my clients ask for it, I have 100s of 1000s of lines of legacy code in it going back the end 90s. For my embedded work I would not (and cannot) use either C#/PHP so I would not try; assembly or C/C++ (or a Java subset).

Programming languages are tools; they are fun to play around with, but when doing real work (which includes side project), just pick something you can get shit done with the fastest/best (some balance between those) (that can be Haskell, Coq or Prolog as well; they do not have to be 'traditional' languages).

<comment><AUTHOR> > but when doing real work (which includes side project), just pick something > you can get shit done with the fastest/best (some balance between those).

This is where I disagree. If you do that, you are trading quality for your convenience, and as (potentially) your user, I do want you to work harder.

<comment><USER10> But users almost _never_ care about the underlying technology. In my experience they care about usability above all else. Most the time they have no clue what's powering the other side and that's by design.

I think the GP and yourself have different values. I don't want to speak for him/her but I think I can relate: don't allow perfect to be the enemy of good.

<comment><AUTHOR> > But users almost never care about the underlying technology.

I guess it heavily depends on who are you working with. If your users don't understand and don't require security, it will not be provided. My users often have customers who care about those things, so it goes back to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have a lot of experience with a ton of different languages. But it seems bizarre to me that he lists Javascript as an example of a language that is restricted and unable to do various things.

I have never once run into a problem that isn't easily solvable with Javascript. If anything I find it has the opposite problem, there's too many different ways to do particular things and unless others are using the same "subset" of the language that you are, their code becomes extraordinarily difficult to grok.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it seems bizarre to me that he lists Javascript as an example of a language > that is restricted and unable to do various things.

* No exceptions (practically) * no built-on ways of providing abstractions * No concurrency at all for a very long time * No way of dealing with binary data

Those things were added later (classes, webworkers, arrays) when they became absolutely necessary. But it started and lived for a very long time as very minimal language.

> I have never once run into a problem that isn't easily solvable with > Javascript.

Swallowing errors. Code quality. Solvable with typescript and others, but I wouldn't call it "easily sovlable".

<comment><USER12> If you think JavaScript didn't have ways of providing abstractions until classes were added, you don't know JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > 1\. Restrict what language can do. Without pointers, you won't have to > explain what pointers are and won't have to introduce complex mechanism to > deal with them.

Pointers are not complex, and pointer operations are not complicated. They are difficult for human to understand, but pointers are a most basic thing to CPU.

If your language doesn't have pointers, it almost certainly has references. At least for machines, pointers are simpler.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Pointers are not complex, and pointer operations are not complicated.

That's the understanding of simplicity I am fighting with. Yes, concept is simple. Getting it right in any non-trivial code is nearly impossible (without some form of verification).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Programming languages are hard based on how many independent concerns they want the programmer to juggle in their communication with the compiler.

Hopefully every single burden the language has its user juggle is one which provides good tradeoff, but generally people value performance, safety, ergonomics, and maintainability.

</comment><comment><USER15> > 3\. Give the developers ultimate freedom and let them do whatever they want. > If the compiler never complains, beginners are happy... Example: C.

This leaves me wondering how the author would classify assembly or machine code.

<comment><AUTHOR> > This leaves me wondering how the author would classify assembly or machine > code.

If you want to go in this direction, I'd suggest writing 1's and 0's. Can't go wrong there :-)

Btw, I actually am writing some assembly. So far I've found it very permissive (and that bit me hard).

<comment><USER8> > I actually am writing some assembly. So far I've found it very permissive

Were you expecting otherwise?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't have much expectations, as I am doing it first time. But yes, I was hoping for a bit more hand-holding from asm utils. I've set wrong asm dialect and nothing detected that. Not the kind of friendliness I like.

<comment><USER16> I think assemblers won't have that sort of protection because they don't assume you're going to run on the same arch as your build.

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't different then the one I was running on, it was different then I had code for. And it compiled. So either asm dialects have subtle differences that change semantics but not form, or asm silently ignores errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just one thing: consistency. It's a shame that the author didn't mention Smalltalk.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have experience with it. I see a point in consistency as an important factor here though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your post had three spelling errors in it before the end of #1, so that's where I stopped reading.

<comment><USER19> Please don't post rude, unsubstantive comments to HN.

This is an international site. We're fortunate that non-native English speakers take the trouble to share their thoughts with us here. How many of us could read them if they didn't?

<comment><USER18> My apologies to fiedzia. I did not realize you were a non-native English speaker.</comment></comment></comment>


Want to enjoy fast web without ads, popups and tracking? Just Disable JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/want-to-enjoy-fast-web-browsing-without-ads-popups-tracking-just-disable-javascript-3b62dc11036c <comment><AUTHOR> I've written this short post because I really enjoy browsing the web without JS enabled on my mobile : it's a serious lesson about how we ruined the web UX by putting JS everywhere</comment>