Project 'Gaydar': An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=full <comment><USER2> This is perhaps less impressive than you would think. Watch some mathematical slight of hand: suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Facebook has Dark Secret X and you have a DSXdar program which is 99% accurate.

Your program will, out of a sample of 100,000 Facebookers, identify 1,980 people as being DSX. Half of them (99% of 1,000 = 990) have DSX. Half of them (1% of 99,000 = 990) are not actually DSX.

The math is much more favorable for oracle programs which look for traits which are evenly split in the population. This is one reason why "An AI which reads your work and guesses your gender" works so amazingly well as a tech demo. (That program exists, incidentally, and is better than 80% accurate.) However, even supposing there were sufficient cues in a person's writing to tell whether they were e.g. left handed or not in the same fashion, a similar Oracle Of Lefties would be almost useless because you'd get too many misclassified righties in with your identified lefties.

On a related note, this is why a) you are not particularly recommended to get an HIV test if you're not at risk for AIDS and b) the first thing that will happen after an HIV+ result is scheduling another test.

On a totally different note, much of the worries of privacy experts with regards to Gaydar and similar programs _don't require the AI to be functional_ to come to pass. "My sophisticated computer analysis says you're 83% likely to be a child molester." If you're already under suspicion, folks will not ordinarily say "Wait a second, lets see the study showing that this, in fact, actually works." They'll simply take the "expert"'s word at face value.

(See, for example, computer models of global warming. The big black box will spit out any answer you want from it -- want the answer that global warming is no problem at all? Turn off the "Assume that water vapor evaporation causes a vicious warming cycle" and, bam, you can crank your smokestack slider to the max and not have any problems. Yet folks don't routinely consider that prior to saying that "Global warming is a fact -- the UN reported that the scientists proved it.")

<comment><USER3> To be clear, there's no checkbox associated with water vapor causing a runaway warming cycle. The ipcc radiative forcing metric pegs the contribution at less than 5% of the total positive warming, and cloud alebedo effect, spurred on by the increased humidity, is more strongly negative. The largest anthropogenic contributors are still greenhouse gases, directly.

<comment><USER4> The IPCC features 4 feedback scenarios, and 6 original scenarios which are 'equally-likely', and the discussion is always around the worst case of them.

6 models ::

[http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate...](http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/150.htm)

[http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate...](http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/146.htm)

4 Economic Response Models ::

<http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/ipcc-scenarios.htm>

[http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/ipcc-sres- scenario...](http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/ipcc-sres-scenarios- consequences.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person's friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction._

Gay people have _gay friends_? Brilliant! Or did they mean the gender and _sex_ of a persons friends. There's a big fat whopping difference here. One is much more impressive than the other.

<comment><USER6> Gender and sex are the same 99+% of the time. The rest of the time, it's impossible to tell from Facebook alone. It's not like Facebook has an "I'm a transsexual" checkbox on your profile.

Identifying a closeted gay person from the proportion of openly gay friends they have is indeed an obvious approach. The surprise is how well it works.

<comment><USER7> He's not distinguishing gender and sex, he's distinguishing gender and _sexuality_ , meaning sexual orientation.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that _was_ my point. Were you intending to respond to noonespecial?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >they used their private knowledge of 10 people in the network who were gay but did not declare it on their Facebook page as a simple check. They found all 10 people were predicted to be gay by the program.

Does the author care to give a false positive error rate? how many were predicted gay and were not. without that statistic this argument is bogus.

</comment><comment><USER9> _The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said._

So basically they didn't prove anything, they have anecdotal evidence.

<comment><USER10> And a healthy dose of selective memory and bias, let's not forget.

It's depressing that this is news. Also mews: my friend thinks people who drink Coors are gay and may not realize it yet. Why not, right? It's just as testable as this nonsense story is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hmm. No paper to be found on the web; no actual data in the article (apart from the totally bogus 'we checked 10 gay people and they were all marked as gay' analysis); no false negative or false positive data.

Absolutely no way to evaluate whether this has any value whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am so sick to death about these constant "privacy concerns".

If you have some deep dark secret that you don't want the world to know, then don't go around posting it on a system that bills itself as a way of providing ubiquitous access to everything posted to it!

These people who get concerned about privacy are the digital equivalent of somebody posting a billboard with their contact information, then claiming a violation of their privacy when people use that to contact them!

You posted it online. On a public forum. You cannot expect even a modicum of privacy when you do that. If you have a problem with people reading what you write, don't write it!

<comment><USER13> These are things that people _aren't posting_ , though. This program doesn't look at a field on people's profiles which states their sexuality. It guesses from the information which they make available. You may well conceal the information you want to keep hidden, but then the information you post as public lets people make inferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would have been more impressive if the authors had used other profile data to infer sexual preference.

As an example, consider those Facebook profiles that are relatively complete yet leave the "interested in" field blank. People not inclined to advertise their homosexuality might feel compelled to be honest and leave the field blank as opposed to outing themselves or posting a lie. Thus, one might infer that a person with a conspicuously absent "interested in" preference is actually gay. (Of course, there's also the chance that the profile owner simply feels that the idea of the "interested in" field seems a bit juvenile, so this particular example might be misleading.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I can attest that it is very easy to identify who is gay on Facebook, even if their profile does not say so. If you have a lot of gay friends, then Facebook tells you how many mutual friends you have with new people. If you know the mutual friends are gay, then it is likely that the unknown person is also gay. Very easy, so I'm not surprised.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not even wrong.</comment>


Every site with a comment mechanism also needs a auto-cache mechanism - <AUTHOR> There are far too many times where I have been caught in the situation where I have written out a sophisticated and lengthy comment on sites like facebook and gmail, and before I could submit some act of random chaos, whether it be an accidental touchpad click or random browser crash, has rendered my contribution to an important discussion moot.
I very rarely take the time to say something, but I ensure that when I do it is,
A. Important to a discussion. B. Articulate and well written. C. Contributes a worthy point to the debate.
While I realize, as a developer, that said caching behavior would add heavy load to a web service's servers; the benefit is WORTH it.
Hell even having a feature in all web browsers that are smart enough to realize that a user is likely typing out a comment and should ask the user if we are really sure they want to reload or "the page is about to crash do we want to cache the input text?" would go a long way toward ameliorating this fact.
Can we please make this happen? <comment><USER2> > While I realize, as a developer, that said caching behavior would add heavy > load to a web service's servers; the benefit is WORTH it.

FYI: you can almost certainly get away with stuffing the comment-in-progress in localStorage on most modern browsers/devices. I believe this is what Discourse uses, which shines on this and many other someone-really-cared- about-the-details details, but haven't checked my understanding against their actual code.</comment>


Need to do a perfect investment pitch? - <AUTHOR> http://rethink.unspace.ca/2010/8/3/buzzword-laden-socialist-hippie-bullshit

<comment><USER2> Good read, and right to the point.

 _Our idea is great but our first presentation was loaded down with "buzzword- laden socialist hippie kumbaya bullshit" and we failed to explain the core business value proposition on the first slide._

If you want _my_ money, I need to know what you can do for me, and how.</comment>


Tesla Fremont to Soon Activate World's Largest Unibody Casting Machine - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-model-y-from-fremont-will-soon-use-the-biggest-casting-machine-for-mass-production <comment><USER3> Just curious, not to go all-in on the "fake news" stuff, but does anyone take this article or this entire site seriously and if so, why? The "author" is a fake persona using a photograph from a hair salon advertisement as their avatar. All of the photos are from Tesla's own materials. The lead photo is from their Q2 investor letter, and it depicts a machine in China, not California. The site is just weird clickbait and, if not deliberately misleading, at least seems to lack any reason to exist.

This article from the SAE (you know, the industry group of car building) is way more interesting.

[https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big- castings](https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big-castings)

<comment><USER4> This website also apparently sells a cooler with branding that matches Tesla's, and some planet-shaped lamps.

Putting the 'hack' in hackernews, I suppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For everyone concerned about repairs-- this isn't exactly a new concept.

The BMW i3 has a carbon fiber frame that, as far as I know, they do not sell in sections ([https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/crash-your-carbon- fiber-i...](https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/crash-your-carbon-fiber-i3-ev- heres-how-bmw-will-fix-it/)). This means during an accident, the damaged portion is cut out and a new section is glued in, though the repair would likely involve purchasing an entirely new frame unless the shop has one leftover from a previous repair.

With the Y, it'd be the same thing-- the shop would either have a spare, partial casting from a previous repair or need to order a new one, and it would be cut and welded into place.

The repair itself shouldn't be any more difficult than any other car, it's just purchasing the part that becomes more expensive if you have to purchase a new entire casting for damage in one area of the car. That, however, is entirely fixable through some clever supply chain fixes and may be something Tesla can support through savings on the single casting.

<comment><USER6> It seems to me that cutting out, and welding or glueing in a new part had a serious effect on the structural integrity of the vehicle.

<comment><USER7> From the internet: "assuming your joint is designed properly and you have an experienced welder performing the work, your welded joint will be as strong as the base materials it is joining."

Welds are key to most bicycle frames and they are not known as the part that's likely to fail.

<comment><USER8> The "weld is stronger than the base metal" argument is often repeated on the internet, but it's overly simplistic. Welded joints don't usually fail at the seam (a.k.a the weld). Instead, they fail near the seam where the base metal has been stressed due to thermal expansion/contraction and heat treating. It is correct that when done properly, everything should be fine, but I wouldn't trust the vast majority of body shops to have access to welders who would do it "properly."

<comment><USER9> This doesn't make it any more clear whether weld repair poses a practical danger for most people in most circumstances. If it's the case that metal stress near the point of welding is the where it's more likely to fail, that still doesn't tell me how much more likely to fail. For all I know it could be the weakest part but still such a trivial difference as to pose no concern.

And the point about welders leaves a dangling, open ended implication that invites anyone reading the sentence to just go ahead and assume that poor weld jobs leading to immenent danger are happening all the time. But are they? Or is that just being noted as a hypothetical possibility? I'm having a hard time telling whether a possible or probable danger is being asserted here.

<comment><USER10> Welding is like programming. Everybody with half a brain and some skills can weld. But _proper_ welding is an art form, and the difference between the two levels is many years of work and study.

So for most people welding like that is not in the cards, but a trained and meticulous professional can do miracles (or close to miracles). It starts to get really interesting when you start hanging stuff from your welds, for instance when building an overhead crane.

<comment><USER11> Welding is just practice, practice, practice. Like everything else.

Welding lifting rings onto stuff is not really a high bar. High quality welds are easy if the materials you're dealing with are easy. Stuff that is exotic, expensive and hard to work with is the stuff that takes real skill because it's really hard to get a ton of practice at those things (there's only so much magnesium alloy that needs welded) so you need a lot of skill and experience in varied circumstances to do a high quality job from the get go.

I can weld and I can dick around in a bash shell but I'm much better at the one that is my current day job that I do for ~40hr a week.

<comment><USER10> You only know how good your welds are once you've seen them destructively tested. What _looks_ good may not be all that good. A really good welder will be able lay bead after bead after bead with very consistent quality and material characteristics.

<comment><USER11> It's hard to look at someone else's weld and know if it's good because lord knows what they did under there (if it's externally bad there's some pretty obvious signs). It's easy to lay a weld and know that it's good from a combination of how you did it and how it came out. If you know what you're doing then a bend test just confirms what you already knew. X-rays keep honest welders honest.

For "easy" material combinations you can get away with a surprising amount of corner cutting and still pass a bend test. Good welds aren't hard. A community college will have you passing a bend test on an overhead weld in a semester and doing the same for pipe in two but it will all be in steel and a limited variety of consumables and processes. Those kids might be masters of 7018 but hand them some aluminum electrodes and they'll be lost. Good welds the first or nearly the first time on material + consumable combo on which you only burn say 10lb a year is what really takes practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's exciting, and at the same time it makes clear that even small accidents may cause a complete write off of the vehicle due to the unrepairability of cars manufactured with this technique.

<comment><USER13> It is disappointing that Tesla uses much of its engineering prowess to design products that are inherently difficult for owners or small shops to modify, maintain, or repair. Taken directly from Apple's playbook.

<comment><USER14> They are now in the insurance business and Musk has already stated this will drive them to produce cars that can be repaired more cheaply. I cited his statement on the earnings call elsewhere in this thread.

<comment><USER15> Musk says many things

<comment><USER16> he says many things and his timelines are completely off but IMO he delivers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am fascinated by their attempts to simplify manufacturing but this does bring up the question, how easy is it to change what this casting machine produces? Will they make similar changes to the 3? One question is will the heat pump design make its way to the 3 or are changes to the 3 just on hold.

I am curious how long they will go without changing the outward design of the 3 or Y. Most manufacturers find it necessary to iterate every few years to keep customers interested and show progress while Tesla shows progress mostly through features added OTA. They already have range numbers down for a significant lead covering a few years so they are not under the same pressure.

edit: This all goes back to Musk's question to engineers why can't a car be in as few pieces as possible using a matchbox/hot wheels car as example

<comment><USER18> > This all goes back to Musk's question to engineers why can't a car be in as > few pieces as possible using a matchbox/hot wheels car as example

Because then trivial accidents become major costly repairs and/or result in totaling of the vehicle.

There is an advantage of having separate body panels, support pillars, bumpers, etc. It can all be replaced separately.

<comment><USER14> Since they are now in the insurance business as well they will soon figure this out. Even was mentioned at the last conference call, they've admitted to making a lot of mistakes in the past about manufacturing for repairability.

The transcript is not great but you get the point:

" It's like if you want to pay more for insurance, you can. But if you want to pay less, then please don't drive so crazy. Then people can make a choice. Like, OK, they want to drive aggressively.

In that case, it'll be higher insurance. Or they want more capital enter driving and pay less. This was actually very helpful for us to have a feedback loop to see what is driving insurance expense. A lot of it is just -- it's like a little fender bender and the net fender bender because of the way that the body collision repair is being done.

It costs like $15,000 or something crazy and like -- and then we can actually adjust the design of the car and adjust how the repair is done to actually have the fundamental cost of solving that problem would be less.So this has helped us under a whole bunch of facility things that we were doing basically without realizing it. But this is a problem with -- in general, with insurance is like if the insurance is, like, all you can eat, then the feedback loop for improvement is sweet. So this gives us a great feedback for improvement because it's basically a fundamentally better insurance product. I'd also like to say, I'm inspired of recruiting because if there's one thing I'd like to come out of this call, it's that a lot of great people want to join Tesla."

[https://www.fool.com/earnings/call- transcripts/2020/07/23/te...](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call- transcripts/2020/07/23/tesla-tsla-q2-2020-earnings-call-transcript.aspx)

<comment><USER18> From my understanding, Tesla has been offered help by many major automotive manufacturers such as VW, and rejected it.

Perhaps that was foolish in hindsight, since most of their quality, workmanship and repairability problems stem directly from having to learn (through trail-and-error) all the same things the other manufactures learned long ago.

The parallels with McDonalds taking Chipotle under their wing to teach supply chain management, distribution, food safety and more are undeniable. Chipotle's founders famously scoffed at learning _anything_ from McDonalds... which may have resulted in the numerous food safety handling issues they had a few years back (not washing raw produce that was transported through multiple handling facilities and then into stores), and legendary portion control variance (totally depends who makes your burrito... it may weigh a 1/2 lb, or 2lbs... a total coin flip).

It's difficult to scale these complex organizations - why make it harder on yourself? Learn from other people's mistakes and try not to repeat them.

foisting large insurance bills onto Tesla customers because Tesla couldn't design their car to be repairable, even by Tesla themselves - doesn't seem fair either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find hard to believe that no one has thought about this before, so it makes me wonder what are the disadvantages and if the conditions changed enough that those disadvantages are not a problem anymore.

I don't buy that the only disadvantage is the increase repair cost of the car in case if accident.

<comment><USER20> Tesla had to do the R+D on a new alloy of aluminum to make this work. None of the carmakers do R+D on basic materials and are limited by the commercially available alloy formulas. They have been doing aluminum castings but they are much smaller than Tesla's.

<comment><USER15> > Tesla had to do the R+D on a new alloy of aluminum to make this work.

Teslas RD budget is tiny, given for much stuff they do in-house - <USER2> cars, autopilot, seats, batteries, robots, solar panel, solar roof, and many others. Their RD is roughly on the level of Mazda, which does much less stuff in-house.

> None of the carmakers do R+D on basic materials and are limited by the > commercially available alloy formulas

You really believe that companies that spend billions of dollars per year on basic materials, that are some of the most important for their products, just look at the prodcut catalogue from suppliers and order from there?

<comment><USER20> Obviously Tesla is getting a much larger bang for their R+D buck. That comes from the incredible amount of talent they are able to attract vs. legacy automakers.

That is pretty close to what they do. Modern car companies mostly do integration and final assembly along with some marketing and finance. Vertical integration in the American auto industry died with Henry Ford until Tesla revived it. You could argue that Toyota is somewhat vertically integrated with the cross holdings they have in some of their Japanese suppliers.

<comment><USER21> _Obviously Tesla is getting a much larger bang for their R+D buck._

Citation needed. What has Tesla been able to accomplish with its inhouse R&D that nobody else has? Other than battery design (using cells developed and manufactured by Panasonic), pretty much everything Tesla does is subpar compared to automobile industry standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a little reminder that Tesla isn't _just_ about battery tech/ electrification. They have a lot of engineering talent pushing most all aspects of the auto industry forward. Companies like Lucid and Rivian can nail a lot of the basics, but Tesla is pushing hard on all fronts. Likewise GM, Ford, and Chrysler are going to have trouble attracting engineering and management talent. VW, Honda, and Toyota are Tesla's big competitors. Them and perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, Chinese manufacturers who crank out tiny, super cheap cars more people can afford. Though in the US those don't seem to take hold.

<comment><USER23> > Chinese manufacturers who crank out tiny, super cheap cars more people can > afford. Though in the US those don't seem to take hold.

Those cars aren't generally sold outside of China due to their failure to meet international safety standards.

<comment><USER22> Mostly true, but then -> [https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/08/03/this- chinese-ev-make...](https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/08/03/this-chinese-ev- maker-is-bringing-its-small-affordable-cars-to-truck-loving-texas/)

Also, I'm not convinced the reason smaller cars don't come to the US is due to safety issues since they exist in Europe where there are similar safety standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if there are likely to be any metallurgical differences (e.g., strength, flexibility, likelihood to crack, etc.) between cast and stamped parts? My sense is that it's generally understood that 3D printing methods for metal produce weaker parts than casting, but I'm not sure how different non-3D printing methods compare.

<comment><USER20> Tesla is using a proprietary alloy to make this part be strong enough and cost effective to do.

<comment><USER24> Neat. Do you have a link with more info about this? I guess I'm curious if they needed to switch alloys when they switched from stamping to casting, and if so, how the properties of the new material differ from the properties of the old one.

<comment><USER20> [https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-aluminum-alloys-die- cas...](https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-aluminum-alloys-die-casting-in- electric-car-parts/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just out of curiosity - is there an explanation of how you can handle a fender bender that happens to affect the frame? Does the entire unibody frame need to be swapped out in that case? Is this the equivalent to soldering RAM to the motherboard.

<comment><USER26> A normal fender-bender shouldn't affect the frame, especially if it as rigid as this cast one. If it does, the car is a write-off anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Long time coming, long over due.

Sandy Munro (and others) have advocated larger castings for ages. Watch munrolive, autoline and other youtube podcast interviews for ongoing analysis and discussion.

The community interest in unibottle, multivalve (name?), simplified wiring harnesses, large form unicasting, and all the other deepdive innovations is really gratifying. There's been such a huge backlog and now the dam is bursting.

Whatever else I think about Tesla and Elon Musk, this really feels like a sea change.

<comment><USER28> _" multivalve (name?)"_

Octovalve, here's a good video on it:

[https://youtu.be/rgmBpEQtJ1s](https://youtu.be/rgmBpEQtJ1s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not sure... ensuring quality of cast parts that complicated is going to be a huge ongoing issue. Any local temperature difference or fill problem might cause the body to fail to perform when it is needed the most. Stamping from uniform material is much morw repeatable and predictable.

</comment><comment><USER30> It already costs absurd amounts to repair a fender bender or some smartphone zombie driving into the back of a full aluminum Tesla, so if they make the whole chassis some unibody they'll just total the cars for the slightest damage?

No wonder insurance rates are that high.

<comment><USER31> The insurance on my brand new model 3 is around $80/mo? Not that high. On the other hand my friend who has a Lexus RX had some pretty minor damage from a fender bender and still it somehow cost $8,000 to repair so I don't think this problem is unique to Tesla.

<comment><USER32> A big part of the fender bender cost in my experience is the paint.

I got hit in my old Corolla, bill (for insurance) was $4500. $3000 of that was the paint job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is impressive engineering. I wonder what the turnaround time will be on this casting process (assuming the ideal 1 part casting approach)?

<comment><USER14> Estimated at around 500,000 units/yr per machine based on their production capacity and the number of machines on order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What does MBH mean?

How would it compare with a few laser sinterers? I expect the initial investment would be bigger, especially as these machines are slower, so more would be required. But then, sinterers are probably a lot more versatile, could produce the whole 70 parts plus the rivets holding them _at once_ , or a few single replacement parts. Probably with less wasted material?

<comment><USER35> It was a mistake in the article s/MBH/NVH -> Noise, Vibration, Harshness

<comment><USER36> is this an assumption or is there an actual source for the original statement - just curious as all I can find is a tweet from a suspended twitter account

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This really isn't a reputable news source - this blog literally exists to pump the share price.

<comment><USER16> [https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big- castings](https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big-castings)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So wpuld I save enough money on this new car because Tesla saved money building it, and therefore have enough money for a car insurance that would cover any damage to the frame so that this is a non-issue? Or is Tesla just passing this problem on to the consumer?

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder how this affects repairability and insurance costs? Steel is seemingly repair able by bending and welding, I can't imagine stamped aluminum let alone cast is ever repairable? Doesn't that make insurance insanely expensive?

</comment><comment><USER40> How much money does this save per vehicle?

</comment><comment><USER41> What is a cast unibody?

<comment><USER42> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_casting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_casting) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody)

<comment><USER41> Trying to picture a whole unibody being cast was difficult. Turns out its a "small" sub-assembly.

Curios -- could the whole body be cast?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> How long before we're hearing reports of Model Y unibody cracks?</comment>


The Origin of the Term Siamese Twins - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_and_Eng_Bunker <comment><USER2> Please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Such a weird condition existentially .. sharing tissue and probably death too.</comment>


Investors aren't noticing Apple's long, slow decline - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/investors-arent-noticing-apples-long-slow-decline-2019-10-29?mod=opinion <comment><USER2> They notice:

-The share buybacks

-The dividend yield

-How it's Warren Buffett's largest position

-The exposure to China (for better or for worse)

-The compelling new iPhones

-Apple Credit Card

-AirPods

Etc.

But #1 and #2 are the most important in my opinion as an investor in Apple. They effectively form a 9% net payout yield.

<comment><USER3> I saw a news article that said something about Buffett running Berkshire Hathaway "for the foreseeable future". I mean, come on! He's 90! At this point, you shouldn't draw any conclusions about anything from what BRK does. Buffett has nothing whatsoever to lose or gain at this point.</comment></comment>


Show HN: CloudQuery – Turn any website to serverless API with SPA support - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cloudfetch/cloudquery <comment><USER2> Nice. I've been toying with the same idea, but with optional RSS formatting to be able to generate an RSS feed from _any_ website.

What's stopping me though is the EUs Article 13, and I can't see this avoiding that either.

<comment><USER3> I was able to do this 10 years ago with Yahoo!Pipes :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Yahoo also have a similar tool nowadays called YQL, I tried it but faild to make a query..

<comment><USER4> YQL is dead since 3rd of Jan. 2019 [https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/?guccounter=1](https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/?guccounter=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks good!

* _Shameless plug_ *: Our little startup, Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), helps create XML/RSS feeds for any public webpage, even JS/XHR/SPAs and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), via a visual feed builder and REST API.

</comment><comment><USER6> Where's Yahoo! Pipes when you need them...

<comment><USER7> dead. so sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very neat idea! I like do this locally in Emacs (by scraping `M-x eww` output!), but having an API is a great idea! How would you go about using it on sites that require login (for prototyping private apis for example)?

Also, it says it uses serverless-chrome for running chrome on AWS lambda... is that "expensive"?

<comment><AUTHOR> For pages require login, it is not implemented yet as this is a little complicated , but it is not impossible, the tool need to record actions user do and replay it in the remote browser.

About pricing, AWS lambda provide 10 million free invoke and the billed invoke is cheap too($0.2 for 10 million invoke) you can check the pricing detail here [https://aws.amazon.com/cn/lambda/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/cn/lambda/pricing/)

<comment><USER9> *1 million

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone remember the Kimonify extension? It reminds me of that! Cool!

<comment><USER11> LOVED Kimonify, especially how it (somehow!) figured out the pattern of data after clicking on a few different items. This is very close to that, minus the pattern recognition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the correct keywords for this would be "tool assisted continuous scrapping"

</comment><comment><USER13> So people are starting to miss YQL

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks great, reminds me of Kimono labs.

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the use case of this tool?

<comment><USER16> My guess: Rapid prototyping of tools that use scraping as a source of data.

We actually have multiple tools that do realtime scraping as the primary data source. Many of these tools act as a simplified interface to features from another service.

For example, there is some webapp we've been using that we were using for a single feature, and that app doesnt have an API available. Using the app required many clicks, and page-loads were slow. By inspecting the HTTP requests, we figured out the minimum amount of HTTP requests required to perform our common task.

Using a simple GUI that focusses on that simple task, the user can initiate the task from a single form, and the server will perform the correct HTTP requests and notify the user whether the process was successful or not.

We have plenty of these "micro tools" that encapsulate / wrap around web apps to simplify the usage of that tool. Usually our micro tools are easier to use (because its focused around our use-case), add integrations with other tools and commonly are significantly faster as well.

They are easy to build (usually within 40 hours) and are a real time-saver, because the users don't have to keep track of all the logins, don't have to load slow web apps, and don't have to have a guide with screenshots where they need to click.

These web-apps sometimes change their request/response structure but after building a few of these tools, but it doesn't happen that often and the tools are updated within hours.</comment></comment>


The Internet of Things and Humans - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/04/ioth-the-internet-of-things-and-humans.html <comment><USER2> About 30 years ago, two French sociologists named Michel Callon and Bruno Latour developed a method called Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It tries to explain social phenomena in terms of how "actors" \-- both humans and nonhumans -- interact in networks.

ANT is a popular approach among sociologists who study scientific and technological developments, but it's also highly controversial because it sees nonhuman things as being just as integral to the network as humans are. Instead of humans _using_ phones to produce various social phenomena, for example, humans and phones act together according to ANT. As if phones had a volition of their own. Critics of ANT argue that this is nonsense. Proponents of ANT reply that you don't need to have your own will in order to participate meaningfully in a social network.

For most of human history, it seemed that people simply _used_ things to get what they want. The things in question were too simple, often no more than a chunk of rock. Surely the interaction between ancient populations was much more interesting than their interaction with rocks? But even in the stone age, those simple tools had a tremendous effect on the fate of the humans who wielded them, so it's often useful for historians and anthropologists to ask how things _interacted with_ people, instead of just asking how people _used_ them _in_ their interaction with one another. It's a useful change of perspectives, a different algorithm perhaps, that yields interesting theorerical insights.

But now it seems like ANT might be more than a novelty method. It could actually be a _substantially better_ perspective than the traditional alternatives. More and more "things" are becoming "smart". They are no longer being unilaterally used by us; they use us too, and are in turn used by others. They get a life of their own and adapt to completely unforseen uses. They are reused and abused; in turn, they reuse and abuse the information we feed them. As long as you have an IP address, it doesn't matter whether you have a brain or a CPU. You exchange information as equals, you process them, and you propagate your results to the rest of the network.

Perhaps the fundamental relationship between us and our tools hasn't changed at all. But if so, the emergence of the Internet of Things and Humans makes it much easier for us to _recognize_ that we never really unilaterally used anything after all. Nothing in nature unilaterally uses anything else. It's always a two-way interaction, whether it's between a Neanderthal and his rock or between you and your self-driving car.

All French sociologists are crazy, but some of them are geniuses.

</comment><comment><USER3> SFHN + Techendo are throwing an IoT Hackathon on the 25th: [http://hackendo- integrate-2014.eventbrite.com](http://hackendo-integrate-2014.eventbrite.com)

Come out if you're interested!

<comment><USER4> don't know why you're getting downvoted. I'm glad I saw that link.</comment></comment>


Is Microsoft Suddenly Cool? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/elizabethwoyke/2010/12/15/is-microsoft-suddenly-cool/

<comment><USER2> No.

This is an idiotic puff piece, I assume triggered by a nice phone call from someone at Microsoft to someone at Forbes.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, Microsoft will be 'cool' when it loses 90% of its users, actually becomes a leader in developing new innovative products and gains a resurgence through that.

Cool generally requires standing apart from the norm. When you're the biggest company in your market by a huge margin, you're the norm.

<comment><USER4> And those markets (desktop OSs and desktop Office software) aren't growth areas anymore.

<comment><USER3> They aren't huge growth areas in the anglosphere anymore, Ed: although smartphones and tablets may change this, they're still growing in the west somewhat, but are exploding colossally in the developing areas of the world like India and China.

These places still have huge piracy 'problems', but these will likely be resolved in the coming decade as these countries develop stronger intellectual property enforcement and will force all corporations to purchase legitimate licenses.

<comment><USER4> > They aren't huge growth areas in the anglosphere anymore, Ed: although > smartphones and tablets may change this,

These don't run desktop OSs.

<comment><USER3> Yet. Given that smartphones and tablets are now being produced with more powerful CPU's than netbooks, it's really only a matter of time.

<comment><USER4> If the desktop kernels still remain (which they may not due to realtime needs) the userspaces still need to change for touch UI. So if it happens, I don't expect the current desktop champions to suddenly get good at mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It depends of your definition of cool.

Microsoft still host some very cool projects and I think many programmers would be very happy to work on stuff such as Kinect, Bing and Seadragon to only name those.

However, if you're talking about general perception toward the company, then the answer is a big fat NO. I think too many people have been burnt with their tactics over the years and those stigmas take time to heal.

For all things that microsoft has contributed to the advancement of computing and its vulgarization, they are also responsible for stalling in many areas where they couldn't catchup fast enough, using their influence in oft- questionable ways. Lots of bad karma there and very uncool.

They managed to mess up the single most important application, the browser, and did nothing to fix it for years, just because they could. Web developers are only now coming out of this nightmare.

Today, I'm very reluctant to even use something like Bing, that admittedly works quite well, just because the thought of what microsoft could pull, once it gets back into a position of power in the search market, makes me shudder.

I know most people have a notorious short memory span when it comes to such things, but count on people like me, with the ability to hold a grudge, to remind them what hell felt like.

Microsoft isn't cool and it won't be for a while.</comment>


Why did Apple drop ZFS? - <AUTHOR> http://storagemojo.com/2009/08/31/why-did-apple-drop-zfs/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps the reason is that ZFS is actually not a big win for Apple's core product market(1): laptops and single user workstations (even that is grudging). From the original article:

 _Manage storage, not disks. You can put all your disks in a pool and specify the redundancy level. ZFS takes care of the rest._

Essentially all of Apple's products are single disk. There is virtually no win there.

 _No more silent data corruption._

The checksumming is a nice feature and desperately needed as disk capacity continues to explode but bit errors remain the same, but in practice probably the biggest risk is bugs in FS code:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/joyent-suffers-major- do...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/joyent-suffers-major-downtime-due- to-zfs-bug/)

 _Easy snapshots._

This is slick and gives the UNIX guy in me happy dreams but Time Machine really stole the thunder on this for regular users. It's just easier to explain to an end user "go to your backup and drag the files back" instead of the way that snapshots work in ZFS.

 _High performance software RAID built-in._

Again, one disk devices can't benefit from this

 _Transparent compression on the fly._

I challenge anyone to come up with a big win for this for the common Mac case. Most common or data-intensive file formats are compressed because it's just easier for any computer to deal with.

(1) Considering Apple's server products, xSAN is actually very slick, and in a lot of cases the flexibility of SAN storage outweighs the benefits you would get from ZFS's multi-device integration. The JBOD model demonstrated by Thumper + ZFS can be incredibly inexpensive but doesn't align practically with many workloads, including (I would expect) the video processing business, which is probably Apple's biggest server market.

<comment><USER3> _Essentially all of Apple's products are single disk. There is virtually no win there._

Well, if you're data-paranoid, like me, you can set your ZFS filesystem to keep 2 copies of every file on different parts of the disk. Then if your single disk has a sector or two go kaput, ZFS will notice the bad CRC on read and get the other copy.

I've also heard of other improvements for single-disk, and SSD specifically, but alas, I can't find citations right now.

 _Time Machine really stole the thunder on this for regular users._

Time Machine's "snapshots" suck. Entirely new file every time a bit changes? Really? My 500 gig external disk just filled up. And it's only backing up a 250 GB drive. And I only started using Time Machine a few months ago. Virtual machines & TrueCrypt volumes that change often are a royal pain with TM. ZFS, on the other hand, can store 4 months worth of backups of a 1TB RAID array on my fileserver in way south of a gig.

Also, ZFS send and ZFS recv are awesome ways to stream a filesystem snapshot over a network to, say, a Time Capsule. If you were so inclined.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's worse than that. Time machine's "snapshots" aren't snapshots - they don't represent a point in time at all. A time machine backup can complete and nevertheless be unrestorable. On filesystems that support snapshots - including Windows' - you can actually do a reliable backup, but not on OSX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple just announced a press event on 9/9/9. Which is 6/6/6 upside down. This is an important number in UNIX filesystem design. I feel something ZFS will happen on that date.

<comment><USER6> Don't give the analysts any ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Simplest explanation: couldn't be finished in time to a sufficient level of quality, therefore it was deferred for a later release.

Second simplest explanation: licensing issues.

Both of these explanations are very very boring, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that any other plausible explanation is very interesting.

<comment><USER8> The simplest explanation doesn't hold much water. I never heard of someone losing data on ZFS but there are whole businesses based on the certainty people will lose data on HFS+. It could be because all the people using ZFS today know very well what they are doing and the same can't be said about the average Mac user, but, still, ZFS seems rock solid.

<comment><USER7> ZFS the file system, probably. Putting a reliable and fast implementation of ZFS in the OS X codebase may be a different story, as is working out a good UI for migrating users. ZFS is pretty complex, I wouldn't shrug off the challenge of implementing it well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, the BSD port of ZFS has the reputation of being less reliable and difficult to administer due to lack of certain features and tool support, so possibly Apple ran into similar problems. The NetApp lawsuit can't help, either.

<comment><USER10> Really? I hadn't heard that. What are the problems (especially reliability ones) with ZFS outside Solaris? I always assumed it was more or less a straight port. ZFS doing its own RAID implies to me that it sits relatively tightly on top of a simple block device layer.

The NetApp issue, though, does seem plausible to me. At the very least, you'd want to see some level of indemnity from either NetApp or Oracle before shipping this on millions of devices.

<comment><USER2> For a while my FreeBSD 7 ZFS FS would be empty every time I rebooted -- as if it was reformatted in the boot scripts. That was a pretty big bummer and put me off of using it seriously for a few years. The Solaris ZFS bug was enough FUD for me to wrap it up entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple tends to stay away from half baked ideas. It probably just wasn't ready and the microscopic marketshare of OSX Server would have made a major shift in priorities hard to justify. They never planned to bring ZFS to OSX client in 10.6 so this doesn't really effect many people. I would expect an updated SL compatible ZFS read/write beta on ADC at some point before 10.7</comment>


Richard Stallman is the new Chuck Norris - <AUTHOR> http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/675jj/comments/ <comment><USER2> Alright, this is a great release after a long week.

I will add:

Lisp contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of RMS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Richard Stallman's left and right hands are named "(" and ")"

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill The shaven beard of Richard Stallman can be used to cure cancer. But RMS has never shaved, even once.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please don't tell me he's supporting Huckabee now too.

<comment><USER5> no, he supports kuchinich. The democrat version of huckabee

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seriously, how do I meet Richard Stallman? Does he just hang out at MIT?

<comment><USER7> Yep.

<comment><USER8> Well, sometimes, yeah. He travels a whole lot.

You might check his speaking schedule (linked somewhere on www.fsf.org) to see if he'll be in your area.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.fsf.org/events/20080201santaclara>

Oh hey! That's tomorrow!

<comment><USER6> Boo.... I should have went to this one :(

<http://www.chtlj.org/stallman/stallmansignup.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Richard Stallman scared the Unicode support out of Arc (because he doesn't use a browser?)

</comment><comment><USER10> RMS doubles the exponential base in Moore's Law every two years.

edit: the one about the ad-hoc bug-ridden implementation of RMS wins.

</comment><comment><USER11> The last capitalist we hack shall be the one who sold Richard Stallman the computer.

</comment><comment><USER12> "When Richard Stallman makes a sudo command, he loses permissions."

oh man, this is better than bash

</comment><comment><USER13> This Matrix we live in is the chroot jail which RMS created.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think that this thread is great.

But the last time there was a similar thread, there was a harshly negative reaction. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60433> Have we as a community grown to accept lightweight, funny stuff?

I hope we have. It seems unlikely to ever take over the front page, so let's try and avoid taking over threads with complaints.

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's one of my own.

Richard Stallman is Root. The only root. We only have the illusion of root.

</comment><comment><USER16> Stallman is Soulja Boy.</comment>


Twitter Beta-Tests a Spine - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/twitter-beta-tests-a-spine/69301/

<comment><USER2> Original article: <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/twitter/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Call me an idealist, but I'd like to believe they did it out of principle.

<comment><USER4> Twitter's still small enough that they can make decisions out of principle, without them being diluted by a corporate structure. This strikes me as something Google might have done a few years ago.

<comment><USER5> Challenging the gag order was a win-win for them. Were they to lose, they'd have to comply with the gag order, but they could at least benefit from having put up a fight. Because they won, they get to be the champion of the people.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they did, and I'm extremely proud of them on principle, but it was the logical way to respond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any guesses as to why they did this? I don't believe the "they're principled" tripe for one second. They must've had something to gain.

Edit: for those saying "good PR", why doesn't that apply to Amazon, Paypal, or any of the other companies that refused to work with Wikileaks? Is Twitter in a more precarious position in its market than they are in theirs? I don't think so, because even if you can replicate Twitter's software, you can't clone their community.

<comment><USER7> so you don't believe people are ever principled, or are very rarely pricipled? Or do you believe that the people at twitter specifically aren't principled; and if so why?

<comment><USER6> I have nothing against the Twitter folks. I don't know anything about them, and have no opinion of them either way. I'm just saying that going from how other companies have responded to the American government's attempt to bully Wikileaks (by giving in to their demands), Twitter appears to be an anomaly. I'd like to know why.</comment></comment></comment>


Decentralization of _why's Projects - <AUTHOR> http://whymirror.github.com/

<comment><USER2> He was code factory. Look at the number of projects he's created single- handedly.

<comment><USER3> It is indubitable that people should be judged by the totality of their actions, yet it is rarely so. I think at least some communities judge _why by the way he exited stage right in the middle of the play.

(Full disclosure: I don't like him)

<comment><USER4> so it would be better if he never left the stage but didn't produce half of the excellent material (both written and in code) that he did?

Thankfully I don't belong to 'communities' that consider things that way...

<comment><USER3> Of course not.

However, you are equating his choice of ending his online presence with the quality and quantity of his work, or at least implying that they are related.

Can you offer any arguments to prove that point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's just hope that github doesn't remove its online presence too (they are all centralized there now ;)

<comment><USER6> Not really. A Git repo isn't really beholden to any other repo. Some are considered definitive, but truly they can all stand on equal footing.

<comment><USER7> While this is true, look at the difficulty people had in reconstructing his work from github. People may have clones of the repo, but maybe not with all of his latest commits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> andrewl-hn Hi, I have a pdf version of "Nobody Knows Shoes" which was available as a free download from _why's website. I'm not really sure what kind of license it has, though - can't find it in the book itself and website is down, obviously.

What should I do with it? Should I put it online somewhere?

<comment> andrewl-hn Nevermind. It turned out the pdf is already available at <http://shoes.heroku.com></comment></comment>


The Mac Inventor's Gift Before Dying: An Immortal Design Lesson For His Son  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663156/the-macs-inventor-gives-a-deathbed-gift-an-immortal-lesson-in-design

<comment><USER2> A nice blog entry on the emotional level, a fond remembrance of a father who's passed away.

And yet... even as someone who knew (slightly) and liked (muchly) Jef Raskin, I find myself grinding my teeth every time Aza refers to his father as "the man who invented the Macintosh." Because, well, no, he didn't. What Raskin thought the Macintosh should be was a low-cost, non-bitmapped computer designed along the lines of his later computer, the Canon Cat. And as nifty as that computer with Forth in ROM might have been, it's not an accident that it sank like a stone in the market. In contrast, what Jobs thought the Mac should be is what we got, and frankly I think the world is much richer for Jobs' vision prevailing over Raskin's.

One of the key points about Jef Raskin was that he was creative and inventive, but could become fixated on ideas to the point of not noticing how the market had responded. An example that springs to mind was his adding special "leap" keys to the Canon Cat's keyboard and patenting the layout. Because he just knew his interface design was superior and therefore customers should (would!) adapt themselves to his way of doing things.

Perhaps more telling is the example his son chooses to close his post, where he describes the gift of a vintage safety razor: "It's the kind of clear insight for which all designers and inventors strive: beauty in turning constraints into advantages." A more detached assessment might have been, "a beautiful design from a time that is thankfully well behind us."</comment>


Ask HN: What is/are the best documentation(s) you have ever read? - <AUTHOR>

It can be for a tool or language or OS or software etc.
My favourite is for an ETL tool called Informatica (It has got awesome help and documentation that comes with the tool, which made learning such a complex tool lot easier)
I also like Python's documentation. <comment><USER2> Java's documentation is pretty good, and it's usually the first place I look if I need to see how something in the Java world works.

Sencha's Ext-JS has interesting documentation. It seems comprehensive, but I've run into undocumented properties and undocumented interactions between documented properties before, and that makes me very wary of what I read there. Further, they only offer documentation for the most current version of their libraries. Unless you are always using the cutting edge, you're not guaranteed that the documentation will adequately describe what you need to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> PHP's is fairly good. <http://www.php.net/docs.php> There are probably better docs out there though.

I really like the Github browse code format, although that's not technically "documentation" :)

</comment><comment><USER4> OpenBSD's manpages are fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find a lot of the stuff in the Scheme sphere well-written, clear, concise, comprehensive, and eye opening (from the "lambda papers" onward...although the early history of Scheme is probably not exactly the kind of documentation you're asking about). I've learned an enormous amount from the Dr. Scheme documentation (I guess it's all "Racket" now). As another example, the documentation for Gambit-C is a real pleasure to read:

<http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/doc/gambit-c.pdf></comment>


The Dozenal Society of America: Promoting Base Twelve Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://www.dozenal.org/ <comment><USER2> This will be great when I grow 2 more fingers. Until then, maybe not so much.

<comment><USER3> Count the segments of your fingers using your thumb. Use both hands and you can do two (base 12) digit sums.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Shall we use Coffeescript or ES6? - <AUTHOR> we build a new project with nodejs. we love the coffeescript syntax but seams like ES6 has a lot to offer as well.
what should we use? <comment><USER2> Honestly, ES6 offers many of the advantages of Coffeescript (arrow functions, destructuring, etc.) and has the advantage of being a standard that will soon be natively understood by browsers, is fully backwards-compatible with ES5 (and therefore widely understood by developers), and also has a lot of IDE support and tooling available.

</comment><comment><USER3> ES6 is quickly becoming the norm and now with Babel there is no reason not to embrace the future. [https://babeljs.io/](https://babeljs.io/)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you love coffeescript syntax, ISTM you'll be happier in coffeescript. That isn't to take anything away from ES6, but coffeescript is just as capable, and your aesthetic preferences are more valid for you than anyone else's would be.

</comment><comment><USER5> With Babel you can always be sure you're on top of things, with experimental stages being available to the user for testing future language proposals (ES7, ES8, ES20) and a to-die-for plugin architecture. ES6 has become pretty minimal --not as minimal as CoffeeScript, but getting there, with things like:

let { destructured, vars } = myObject

let foo = (num) => num * 2

class Foo extends Bar {

      constructor() {
        this.callFoo()
      }

      callFoo() {
         // Note the simple syntax
      }

}

Also, remember: no need for semicolons, but be aware when they can hang you up! (IIFE's, etc).

</comment><comment><USER6> Livescript - [http://livescript.net](http://livescript.net)

<comment><USER7> +1 your microscopically sized comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Use CoffeeScript.

Even after all the work that TC39 put into ES6/ES2015, it's still not nearly as well done or helpful as CoffeeScript is. You'll be going against all of the "cool kids" by rejecting ES6, but you'll also be much more productive and happier.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is more than a way to do it. Coffeescript is a nice language, it can be a good choice, depending on the task (for example, atom is written with CoffeeSCript). And don't forget it "is simple JavaScript", you can mix both. ES6 on the other hand will be a great improvement. I am sure CoffeScript will evolve the transpiler to target ES6 too.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another vote for ES6 - it covers the most important fixes from coffeescript and is the next standard, so you're not writing in a DSL (don't have to worry about it going out of fashion, wider talent-pool in the future, etc.). And with Babel you can use it now and just transpile back to ES5.

</comment><comment><USER11> My team uses ES6, today, with Babel. Recommended.

</comment><comment><USER12> ES6 and compile with Babel (I've tried every possible combination that you can name, and settled with that as the best choice)

</comment><comment><USER13> Are there plans to make coffeescript ES6 compatible?

<comment><USER4> It already is, in that any ES6 interpreter can run the javascript that coffeescript produces. Perhaps you mean to ask whether there are plans for generated code to use ES6 features? Before ES6 is universal, that would set up a more complicated build chain (before we used coffeescript; now we have to use both coffeescript and babel). Also there is no point. Everything ES6 can do, can already be done in coffeescript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You 'shell' choose for yourselves?

</comment><comment><USER15> Answer is simple: ES6

</comment><comment><USER16> ES6.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would say ES6 for anything that will be worked on by more than 2 people. CoffeeScript for one man show projects.

But honestly...ES6 will be the norm and you should know it anyway. So the question is..If you already know CoffeeScript should you keep using it ? The answer is YES ! If that makes you happy why not. But keep an eye on ES6 and learn it.

More delicate question would be. If i start with JS should i learn ES6 or CoffeeScript first ?

<comment><AUTHOR> _CoffeeScript for one man show projects._

what? why? we are a team of 8 working with it and it's great.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use any IDE add-ons / plugins? - <AUTHOR> I was looking today at marketplaces for IDE's I use daily (VS Code & IntelliJ) and saw massive amount of different addons, some of them with hundreds of thousands of downloads.
I was interested how many people use those and actively browse that marketplace like you would maybe browse app store on your phone. I don't really use any addons that i don't need to have my apps building and running ( e.i. Lombok plugin). <comment><USER2> Lots of syntax highlighting and linting/checking tools. JSON prettifier and such. But I can't remember ever paying for a plugin. I paid for the IDE (Textmate, Sublime).</comment>


Why bet365 made the switch to Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2398561/why-bet365-made-the-switch-to-erlang

<comment><USER2> Tried to check it out, but:

> Register FREE to continue reading

> Access to this premium content is for registered users only.

Sorry. Not doing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems they changed it. I can't get to it now either.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is software priced the same around the World? - <AUTHOR> Do software companies realize that if they were to offer localized prices for poorer countries (read: not in the top 10 of global income) tons of people from India or even poorer european countries might buy it instead of pirating/ignoring it? If they are why don't they do anything about it?
It seems to me like companies are ignoring the fact that 20 000$ + annual incomes and salaries are common only in America and a few other countries in the World. As soon as you reach Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East the median income changes a lot. Yet almost all software is sold for exactly the same price in all of these regions, often for prices that make sense for American or highly developed European nations but become prohibitive in slightly poorer nations. Even in Europe and the EU, there are disparities in median income that would justify changing the price according to the country you're selling it in, take a look at this map - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_median_wage
What are the major costs to simply localizing prices according to median income, considering distribution is free and manufacturing is already (I assume) paid for by the main markets? Aren't companies just leaving money on the table in the form of income from poorer countries by pricing themselves out of the market? The only thing  can think of that keeps them from doing this is customer support, in that having enough people to maintain proper support in those regions is more expensive than actually selling the product at 50% off. <comment><USER2> Quite a bit of software is priced differently in different parts of the world.

Managing that and preventing people from just buying it in cheaper countries needs complicated DRM systems, which probably is why only big companies that have those do it (Adobe, games on Steam, Microsoft, ...)

\+ all the usual arguments why an expensive product with fewer customers might be better than a cheap product with many customers (support costs, image, ...)

<comment><AUTHOR> They're generally not priced down.

European countries get more expensive versions of software because the price is often converted into the same amount in euros, which ignores the fact the euro is priced higher than the US dollar. And it's not about VAT either - often you pay for VAT outside of the marked price anyway.

<comment><USER2> Office 365 is ~40-50% cheaper in e.g. India than it is in the US or EU. Same for Adobe Acrobat. I remember Office 2007 had African pricing at ~50% of US. Steam game prices are all over the map for US/EU/UK (often vast differences, but no clear "winner"), but are very often cheaper in e.g. Russia (which is why Steam stopped people from outside Russia buying steam games there).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The cost of supporting a customer is typically fixed for a vendor regardless of what price the software is sold at. Supporting customers who paid less relative to the costs can be hard to justify. It could even lead to a net loss, so it's understandable that we don't see that much differentiation in the price for different countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are software profit margins really that slim?

How big is customer support in the final bill per consumer ?

<comment><USER3> Depends on the software but its easy to overlook. I'm just a solo dev, so every hour I spend on customer support is an hour I'm not doing product development, marketing or generally something that is a leveraged use of my time. For customers who pay less, that time is even less leveraged.

Also, for customers who don't have a strong command of english there's translation work, misunderstandings in customer service communications that are more likely to happen, pressure to provide documentation in multiple languages...all very time consuming and thus disproportionately more costly if you are doing that work with less margin flowing back.</comment></comment></comment>


Phone trips 1960s-1980s (audio recording archive) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/ <comment><AUTHOR> The answer to your venerable question, "what was it like to make calls in Europe in the 1960s", is here: [http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/mbseurope.mp3](http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/mbseurope.mp3)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some absolute gems on this page.

> The modern telephone system is the same thing that created the universe, > that our ancients talked about from their scriptural works. This is why my > friend, you must not play with your telephone. It will anger the Mother if > you do. > [http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/strike.mp3](http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/strike.mp3)</comment>


My Billion Dollar Mistake - <AUTHOR> https://producthabits.com/my-billion-dollar-mistake/ <comment><USER2> There are several good lessons learned presented that are generally applicable:

"We should have spent more time figuring out what the problems were with existing solutions and who specifically had those problems."

"The customers we targeted needed to be willing to pay for our solution."

"We hadn't been committed to learning as much as possible about the market and the customer. We were making educated guesses instead of coming to well researched conclusions. This led us down the wrong path twice."

In his fourth point he correctly decides to benchmark against the status quo but does not talk to people who are paying for an analytics solution but are using Google Analytics, which was free at the time they were conducting interviews.

"We needed to stop building what we thought the market wanted and get back to basics. Instead of writing code, we went out and talked to customers. We spoke with people who used our largest competitor, Google Analytics. We asked them questions to better understand their needs and the current problems they were having with analytics software. They had a lot to say, so we listened."

But they do find a pain point people are willing to pay to solve: funnel design and management. So far so good.

But the next mistake is instead of focusing team execution purely on requests from customers and prospects who match their target, Hiten Shah tries to move faster by coming up with a stream of ideas (called "Hiten bombs" in the text). He was slow to switch focus from exploration / discovery to execution / delivery. Which is understandable because it was exploration that uncovered the "billion dollar opportunity."

His summary is good and also points out a painful reality about "product- market fit." It's not a one time winner take all event. Your early traction invites competition that copies your success, building on it to raise the bar against you.

"You can't just capture the market once and expect to keep it. You have to do it over and over again and faster than everyone else if you want to keep distance from competitors coming up behind you and disrupting you. That's how you get ahead of the market.

We forgot the process that helped us deliver that initial amazing product [listening to prospects and customers]."

<comment><USER3> I've been working on a project recently. Review after review with the president of the company. He's a good dude but new ideas are frequent, and he is almost too focused on what the thing should be / look like / etc. Same with our customer paying for it (but who doesn't use it) who has strong feelings about "if it does X, Y will happen".

They're all more experienced with the industry than I, but their explanations didn't quite jive. I'm no user expert but I'm fairly sure some of their ideas won't make the user make Y happen....

Finally last week I got to talk to someone who will USE THE THING on a daily basis. In a 15 minute conversation with that dude I cleared up months of confusion / questions and I feel like that would have saved us a lot of time.

Thankfully it happened and everyone was on the call and now is on board (and I have direct contact with the dude), but man, I wanted to talk to that dude a month ago....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like they stumbled upon a great idea, built it quickly and then slowed down. But that is natural when your team and product grows. There is nothing to blame.

Also claiming you believe you lost out on a billion dollar opportunity is a bit egotistical to say. Its the same attitude that makes one say you know better than your customers/competitors and dont need no validation for your ideas.

<comment><USER5> > Also claiming you believe you lost out on a billion dollar opportunity is a > bit egotistical to say.

It's the failure brag. Pretty common ego saving device in the start-up world. The first rule of a failure brag, is to make it really over the top. Something like:

It was a trillion dollar opportunity. We were the first to invent [thing that wasn't very important]. We could have easily smited every one of our competitors, all we had to do is this one thing and poof, weaklings destroyed. I merely needed to wave my hand at them, and I forgot to wave. That's how powerful my wave is. Did I mention we invented [thing that wasn't very important]? It changed the world, a world that was ours to own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your head of product would rather write an internal memo addressed to the entire company instead of coming to you and telling you to shut up you have to wonder how you assume you could ever get to a billion dollars.

"I myself didn't know what to do and which inputs to pay attention to. After months of this and because of the memo, I found out that this was exactly how the team felt too."

Can someone explain this to me? I genuinely don't understand this attitude. I mean maybe a week of introspection and pondering is acceptable, but months?

At no point does it seem he truly understands that his leadership failed completely. The only thing he tells you is "I've learned that the key to driving growth on product is to create product processes that produce repeatable wins."

This dude literally was so bad at management he tanked what he considered to be a billion dollar company and doesn't even admit to it after the fact?

<comment><USER3> I think he does say his lack of leadership failed, but like his description of the company it is a bit unfocused and all over the map.

<comment><USER6> It just seems odd when he is one of the people who founded this blog it is posted on. I'm sure he has great stories to tell and things in hindsight do seem more clear even if I find it odd in the first place. Like you said it is unfocused and that disappoints me when this is his own blog.

I'd really like to hear the story of what running a startup is like when your main competitor is Google.

<comment><USER7> Its seems bad writing. Good writing is quite hard actually, and he may not have even realized that what he wrote is unfocused or may not really convey what he wants to convey. That's the charitable interpretation.

The not so charitable interpretation, which to me seems likely, is that he's using this "blog" as part of a campaign to create a new identity for himself, the "almost-billionare startup founder", who has great stories to tell and advice to give so can you please hire him on your company board because he's so well known in the community right?

He also seems to suffer from a profound lack of the ability to listen. Literally all the issues seem to be one of him being unable to comprehend reality because he's not listening to the customers,or to the industry trends; he's focused only on creating some mythical product which will be so amazing. Every little success he has buttresses his idea of himself as a visionary, but after that instead of continuing with the good ideas, he goes off on a tangent trying to fulfill this myth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yep. I'm consulting for a company that has this ailment. Everyone is trying to do 10 things at the same time, none of them matter worth a damn, and they're failing at it. Everyone is overworked and demoralized, revenues slipping, the company is not building product equity, just trying to churn butter out of bullshit by thrashing wildly.

Worse yet, I'm not in a position to tell them they need to change, so I take their money and do what they ask me to do, even though I know full well it's basically a waste of time and resources for them.

<comment><USER7> How does an organization like that continue to exist in today's competitive environment? i.e. won't they lose clients and business to competitors that are cheaper and more nimble?

<comment><USER8> Hot field, lots of froth, clueless investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> KISSMetrics was the poster child for a lot of people on the SaaS marketing front. Their content marketing game was the best in the business and they tested landing pages aggressively.

But I guess there was a mismatch between the product and the marketing

<comment><USER10> Yes, very slick. We almost went with them, but this was around the time their evercookie was exposed. After that, we went with GA and Mixpanel.

[https://www.wired.com/2012/10/kissmetrics- tracking/](https://www.wired.com/2012/10/kissmetrics-tracking/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824318)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696441)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It took me a while to figure it out, but a "Hiten Bomb" is a reference to the name of the founder of KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah. Oddly enough this website doesn't have a by-line to indicate who the author is.

</comment><comment><USER12> Tbh it sounds like he never understood his customers. He should work on a product he is the customer of instead of looking at competition and worry about their features.

<comment><USER13> Or just spent more time taking to customers and less time innovating.

<comment><USER14> Spending more time talking to customers is usually good. But at the end of the day, talking to customers isn't a sure way to understand their needs.

<comment><USER15> Giving a customer a base product and understanding their needs _in practice_ is the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What happened to kissmetrics.com? On their twitter they claim to have sold it to neilpatel.com.

Instead it's now kissmetricshq.com. Also there doesn't seem to be a way to get new customers. Looks like they only service old ones?

Did they secede from the market entirely? And this guy is offering coaching the kissmetrics way? Amazing...

Their twitter is also all over the place, lots of retweets and content from other SaaS providers, looks like they are shilling based on whatever reputation is left on the brand.

Starting to get the idea why they went under as that's what it looks like from an observer.

<comment><USER17> [https://neilpatel.com/blog/buying- websites/](https://neilpatel.com/blog/buying-websites/) Looks like this link explains it a bit. Neil Patel bought the blog for 500k

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now I understand the reason behind why Kissmetrics died: egoism and not listening to customers. It is the same way this article is written with such a headline.

</comment><comment><USER19> I remember when KISSmetrics was much better than MixPanel, they really were fantastic. It's too bad that they squandered the opportunity, they were the best by some margin.

Great article, thanks for posting it!

<comment><USER20> They were also _way_ more expensive.

We used Kiss for a while, but Mixpanel was free for the same volume and just as good if not better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I found this post really curious because he points to some competitors that have _also_ been out-competed, but neglects to mention that and seems to act like they just beat KM and it was game over. Also uses funding raised as a proxy for success which I know he knows does not tell the full story.

However, there was something in here that I think a lot of companies struggle with: how do you keep evolving when you start to calcify around a product and use case, without throwing the company into disarray? Tech markets are brutal and the competing need to stay the course but also continuously evolve and even reinvent yourself is really hard to navigate for all but the most obvious of rocket ship companies.

<comment><USER22> Who has outcompeted mixpanel and heap?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can see that most of the examples presented here is a various flavor of a typical mistake:

Building "solution that is looking for a problem".

</comment><comment><USER24> A solution seeking a problem has little chance of becoming a billion dollar solution.

<comment><USER25> This might look true in retrospect because you'll always be able to point to the problem that a successful solution solved. Lots of solutions have been successful after being created with an ambiguous or only just emerging problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why has this been posted 8 times?

</comment><comment><USER27> Sometimes I wonder about what exactly is the line when it comes to listening to customers or looking at your competitors, for ideas?

As the Hiten Shah puts it he got ideas or Hiten Bombs by watching _competitors_ , investors, advisers and some which he thought of himself. And he also notes later in the article, they saw Mixpanel doing mobile apps, they saw the freemium option etc. So, the feature generation process was correct.

What went wrong was Kissmetric's estimation of the success of different ideas. They decided to pass on building mobile apps or giving freemium because they thought it would cost them too much. The question is - What kind of intuition was at play to make those decisions? IMO there aren't many ways to intuitively know when something will work or not.

</comment><comment><USER28> An interesting read!

Who is the author?

<comment><USER29> As implied in the article, Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics. [https://hitenism.com/](https://hitenism.com/)

<comment><USER30> It's implied, but this site doesn't have a byline on posts, or a publication date. It's very annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ugh. I've worked for, and with, people like this. Never again. It's clear from this article that he still has no idea why he "failed". Apparently his failure was too many ideas, and yet later on in the article he says they failed because execution slowed. Finally he admits it was magic lost, ie. he has no idea.

The best solution he comes up with amounts to better planning and "Decide where to focus limited resources." Duh.

This guy is ernest, but clueless. If you meet someone like this, run for the hills. They should not be in charge of anything apart from the excel spreadsheet in front of them.

<comment><USER32> """ I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief. """

<comment><USER33> This is true except for the "clever and lazy" part. In reality this should be "intelligent but with no skills, let more accomplished people do the work but take the credit".

<comment><USER34> Someone has a job that makes them push a button every 5 minutes. They write a script so they never have to push a butten again. That person is clever and lazy. That is who you want.

<comment><USER35> I would say that person is clever and resourceful. Usually the task is still manual because of potential gotchas and you'll need a diligent approach to automation to take those into account.

Most lazy people I know will stick to manual action rather than take the time to script it out, mostly due to that initial overhead or having to potentially iterate on the logic due to future unknowns.

<comment><USER36> No, that would be stupid and lazy. The cumulative effort of pushing the button is far more than the initial overhead and they just can't realize that because they are too stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I thought based on the title that this was about null—[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The- Bill...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion- Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare)</comment>