Ask HN: What's your relationship with coffee? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I make about 16oz of slightly above average strength coffee when I wake up at 9-10am and drink on average about 12oz of it throughout the day until 3pm where I cut it off completely. I've found that this makes my mornings and early afternoons very productive (I think faster and can focus better) but I'm still able to fall asleep at night around 1-2am (as long as I exercise enough and have good sleep hygiene in general). I get a little slow around 4-5pm but overall it's a net positive addiction. I also usually drink much less or no coffee on Sunday and can sleep 9 or 10 hours that night.

I think my genetics mesh well with caffeine. My sister and everyone on my mom's side of the family loves coffee and none of us have any side effects from it. I discovered I liked it in college and it significantly boosted my motivation, grades, and life in general, so I kept with it. I tried going off it for a few months when I thought it was causing me sleep problems, but the cause was something else and I've been happily drinking coffee almost every day since.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like coffee. Mostly because it tastes good, and I kind of like the ritual. In the last few years I've really gotten into it more. I use a coffee press and grind my beans fresh every morning.

However, I don't like being a zombie, unable to function until I've had my first cup, so I moved my "first cup time" back to 9:00 am. That means I keep a coffee grinder at my desk at work. I also limit my intake to about two cups per day for the same reason.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find tea provides a longer, better modulated boost, without the gastrointestinal distress or bad breath.

</comment><comment><USER6> I drink decaf sometimes because coffee does taste good. Caffeinated I only drink rarely, like when traveling and I need to wake up really early.

I remember growing up seeing people brag about how much coffee they drink and how much caffeine they consume and how addicted they are to caffeine - <USER2> seemed like a stupid macho dick-measuring contest. Later in life I learned about caffeine tolerance and addiction, and that confirmed my initial biases about regular caffeine consumption.

</comment><comment><USER7> I quit. I found it gave me digestive upset, and physical stress. (I.e. more likely to tense my muscles in response to a small external stimulus)

It's been about a month, and a number of things sre better without it. Digestion is normal, far more consistent energy than before. Also much faster to get out of the house in the morning, which is nice.

Had been drinking it for years, but only started after college. Note: I quit all caffeine, including tea. Tea had similar effects on me.

<comment><USER8> I gave up for the same reasons, had a migraine for a week although I have coffee at the weekends as a treat...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I usually have one to two cups a day, sometimes three. The latest I usually have a coffee is around four in the afternoon unless I'm drinking socially.

I'll also drink tea a few times a week.

Never drink instant. I grind my beans on demand and usually brew with an aeropress if I'm making one, or the appropriate sized moka pot for making several. (I also have a couple of coffee syphons, which are fun to watch, but too fiddly and too much cleanup for everyday use.)

I had a gastric bypass 1.5 years ago[1], which has made my 'stomach' a little more delicate. Some days everything is fine, other days it'll sit a bit heavy or sour in the tummy. I'm also definitely sensitive to dairy now, and find lactose free milk more tolerable. Have switched from a cappuccino to a long black with just a squirt of cold milk when buying at the shop.

I want to try Death Wish Coffee[2] sometime just for a lark, but the cost of shipping to the Antipodes is ridiculous.

I'm also a big fan of Mr Black[3].

[1] [https://www.michevan.id.au/content/adventures-in- bariatric-s...](https://www.michevan.id.au/content/adventures-in-bariatric- surgery/)

[2] [https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/](https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/)

[3] [http://mrblack.co/](http://mrblack.co/) and [https://www.danmurphys.com.au/product/DM_778190/mr-black- col...](https://www.danmurphys.com.au/product/DM_778190/mr-black-cold-drip- coffee-liqueur-700ml.jsp)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's been an interesting one to say the least.

I started drinking coffee in college when I started smoking. I was dual- majoring and working and tried to have a life too, so burning the candle at 3-ends.

I switched to just black at my first internship where I had to get up at 4:30am

For 6 or so years I was reliant on it, at least two cups and usually 3 a day. When I was burning out I would be at 5 or 6. It would get to the point where I needed it to just function and I didn't know who I was without it.

But for the last month and a half I haven't had a full cup.

I quit coffee (and a few other additive things) really just to exercise my discipline and to not _need_ anything.

The first day I went to a single cup. Then I switched to half a cup for the first week. It was really tough as I went through withdrawals: eye and lip twitches, real bad irritability, and having to have a steel will as it's all I could think about.

Now, I can have it as I please and not miss it if I don't have it. The smell is still wonderful but I don't want to go back.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wasn't a coffee drinker until the past couple of years when I discovered that there's a world beyond starbucks over-roasted sugary crap and awful- tasting pods.

Now, I'm extremely addicted to a perfect vanilla cappuccino as long as it isn't made with nasty sugar-filled syrup.

It has gotten to the point where french press doesn't do it for me at home, so I'm going to invest in an espresso machine and grinder and learn how to make it by hand. I'm also a huge fan of the vanilla powder they use at Better Buzz in San Diego. That stuff is worlds better than the syrup.

While the caffeine helps after lunch, I find the ritual of having a smooth creamy warm drink in the afternoon is incredibly relaxing, and is a good excuse to be "still" and organize my thoughts for the rest of the day.

</comment><comment><USER12> 'have drank coffee every.single.day since about 2000. I'll have 2 in the morning - 1 generic maxwell house or folgers and the 2nd a breakfast blend or something else for a little variety. At home, just using a re-usable K-Cup in a Keurig.

If I need to get out of the house a bit, I'll go work at a Starbucks and have a tall there - never more then a tall as I won't sleep well. Or - wherever. Tim Hortons is fine. Panera's is fine. Spent 3 days at the local convention center last week; their coffee was fine. I'm really not picky.

So, minimum 2, max 4 or 5 a day. Always black. I don't love the taste but I do like Starbucks the most. But I don't hate the taste either. I used to use a ton of sugar and milk - that ended about a decade ago now.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have ~12oz (not a small cup (8oz) but also not a big one) usually every morning, but not usually out of necessity. I could skip it and function mostly the same. Sometimes I can tell that it's actually over-stimulating and prevents me from focusing, especially when I drink it on an empty stomach. I usually try to have it with a bite of food.

I order coffee whenever I'm out for breakfast/brunch, 2 or 3 cups

I also sometimes have a latte or small cup of coffee before going to the gym, especially if I'm trying to go after work. It helps me avoid getting stuck on the couch and relaxing as soon as I get home.

</comment><comment><USER14> "it's complicated"

I kid I kid. No but really, coffee is my fuel. About 3 cups a day.

</comment><comment><USER15> roughly the same as a crack addict's relationship with crack. Writing this while standing in a long line at Philz.

</comment><comment><USER16> I stopped drinking caffeine a couple of months ago, in preparation for another attempt at quitting smoking. I also did not need the extra energy boost in the morning.

Also, it turns out that if you have a cuppa tea or coffee after quitting for a while it makes you feel the effects very strongly. I don't really like it, other than the taste.

My path to quitting caffeine was to first switch to green tea in the morning for a while and then to Tulsi tea which is made from holy basil, which has a lot of very nice health benefits especially for smokers.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the smell of it and in some foods it is great. Only somewhat enjoy drinking it if it's sugared up but I don't like really sugary drinks, so it is a fine line.

I do love me some tea, though.

<comment><USER18> I'm with you. Don't like it if it's bitter, and adding sugar is a big no, so I end up drinking coffee maybe once/twice a month.

Drink a cup of tea almost every day though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All resources I've ever read argue that coffee is super helpful. Probably, I'm a sort of outliner. I drink no more than 1 cup of coffee per day and in 5 years this habit has gifted me with painful heartburns and chronic gastritis.

Initially, I started consuming coffee only because my mom has Parkinson's disease and coffee is supposed to have preventive properties. I'm afraid I will end up with ulcer sooner than I will live to Parkinson's onset.

<comment><USER20> you could always switch to nicotine.

<comment><USER19> Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by 23 factor. Green tea is an alternative, but I hate it.

<comment><USER21> Parent probably means chewable or vaporized nicotine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've cut it out of my life, with some reluctance. I never loved drip coffee much, though it's not bad with milk. But I'm hypersensitive to caffeine and simultaneously hate being caffeine-dependent.

What was really tough to cut out was espresso. Nothing in the world like an iced latte. Decaf after cutting out caffeine. But I developed a mild lactose intolerance, and none of the milk substitutes give nearly the same experience.

Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER23> I drink 12-16oz a day. I avoid drinking more than that to avoid the health risks, like kidney stones. I'm pretty sure I'm addicted to caffeine at this point, but I haven't been curious enough to test that theory.

I don't find much mental effect from it ("I need my morning coffee to function" type thing), but the act of drinking hot coffee is quite comforting.

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to drink two cups every day. I knew the perfect proportions and knew how to brew with those Melita single-cup drip cups.

Now, I usually drink a shot of espresso once or twice per week (either in a latte or before a morning workout in an "Americano") and focus on getting my eight hours of sleep instead.

It's hard for me to drink coffee now.

</comment><comment><USER25> I started drinking coffee in highschool, 7 years ago, but I only drink on the weekdays. I rarely drink coffee on weekends, and if I do it's an afternoon treat. There are obvious mornings where I need coffee to function and kickstart my day, but I really just enjoy the taste of coffee... Oh and it keeps me warm in the cold office.

Edit: ~3-5 cups a day

</comment><comment><USER26> I was drinking a lot (4-5 cups a day, usually crammed into the morning) when we had a Keurig in the office. Caused a bunch of heartburn during any particularly stressful weeks.

I've cut back to a max of two cups a day, and feel a lot better. I also don't feel like I need to drink coffee on the weekends to repel a headache until Mondays now.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like it. I generally only drink coffee or water. I've never gotten a "buzz" from it unless I drink unreasonable amounts, and have no problems drinking it before bed.

I generally only drink a cup at a time, off and on through the day. At home, I have a pour-over. I have a travel press that I take to work or elsewhere.

<comment><USER21> Do you sleep well? I ask because almost every person I talk to who "has no problems drinking coffee before bed" also happens to have chronic sleeping issues, including me, five or so years ago.

<comment><USER28> I was a massive coffee drinker. I have a Starbucks venti sized mug, I'd go through 6-7 a day, easily.

I haven't had more than 2 coffees a week in the last 6 months, and I still have issues sleeping :-p

I don't blame the coffee, although I think it comes down to personal biology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I always have a cup in the morning, and if I have a meetup/workshop/project to get to after work, I'll have a small cup around 5-6pm. It's also nice to have a cup at work around 1-2pm but I just have to hide it from that one coworker who loves to tell everyone how unhealthy it is.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've started drinking coffee just in the last 1 - 1.5 years and I am not really sure how I feel about it. On one hand, I love the boost that it gives me in the morning to get into the zone fast. On the other hand, I am completely useless without it.

I also wonder if it doesn't decrease my attention span.

</comment><comment><USER31> I drink about 12oz of black combined with L-theanine every morning. Caffeine alone tends to induce anxiety.

<comment><USER29> I've recently started adding L-theanine to my morning coffee every day, but I feel like I don't feel the effects after a few days, so I go a day without and then it feels normal again the next day. Have you ever had this?

<comment><USER31> It still does a pretty good job at preventing jitters. However, now that you say it, I think the first few times it had more pronounced effects. I'll have to try resetting my tolerance!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> i have almost no relationship with it, as little or much when i want, whenever or wherever i want

fresh roast 88pt(grade A) usually natural processed 100% Arabica/peaberry, coffees, then immediate cold brew in fruit forward ristretto/espresso/full drip by the gallon, and have it in the fridge with a pump.

a couple seconds to pump the espresso, then add milk, water alcohol vanilla at any temp to taste. takes just seconds

it's naturally sweet black, and has no stomach upset, or jitters...just fades out smoothly.

usually a double shot with breakfast and a other at 11, sometimes one in the pm before a caffeiene nap, and sometimes one in a cockatail ( e..g. irish coffee if i have writing or debugging..helps me get into the zone)

for the road i just put it in a bottle/flask

it's available on etsy under cloud9 brewing systems.

</comment><comment><USER33> For the longest time we had a torrid affair. Pot+ everyday. About 1.5 years ago, I quit cold turkey. What followed was 10 days of horrible headaches, weird sleep, and moods.

Now a days, I have 1 - 3 cups a week. Usually when I am working out of a cafe.

</comment><comment><USER34> I never really got into it.

To me it's the same as alcohol, I'm happy not to have a taste for them.

</comment><comment><USER35> I appreciate caffeine, but coffee and I don't get along - it upsets my stomach. Tea works well.

Most of my caffeine comes from Monster Zero Sunrise at the moment. It's very low carb (~2g net per can) and is fairly inexpensive on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER21> In my disciplined days I used to have coffee/caffeine only on weekdays. Cannot recommend this protocol strongly enough. Mondays are amazing because the two- day detox is enough to resensitize you to caffeine.

</comment><comment><USER36> Every once in a while I'll have a 6oz cup of black. Probably on average 2-3 per week, with l-theanine. I like the taste and process of drinking it but not jitters/anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER37> I drank two six "cup" pots (really about 2.5 cups each) today. I just got a badge from the Dunks app that I've passed 20k points in the three years I've been using the app.

</comment><comment><USER38> Two cups a day. One in the morning when I wake up. The second one somewhere after lunch. Rarely I drink more than two a day.

I drink my coffee black. No milk. No sugar. Yummy...

</comment><comment><USER39> I have a cup in the morning and another 2-3 cups up till around 3-4pm. I usually go to bed at 11:30pm and by that time the caffeine is at a normal level to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER40> Coffee and me have been getting together three or four times a week here lately. We are seriously dating and considering getting engaged.

</comment><comment><USER41> What is a good coffe replacement? (not ilegal!)

ie: For stay alert, focused.

<comment><USER42> Cardio, esp. even a short 10 minute run in the morning does it for me. I do drink coffee though, trying to get off of it lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I drink a cup of black coffee after lunch on weekdays. I don't even remember it on weekends because of two little monsters at home :)

</comment><comment><USER44> After moving to Stockholm, Sweden at least 3 espresso based drinks per day (mostly cappuccino), sometimes up to 5-6 cups. Winter is hard here.

</comment><comment><USER45> I never drink coffee. I don't like the taste.

</comment><comment><USER46> love the smell, can't stand the taste, tried it three times in my life (espresso, cappuccino, in a tiramisu) and could not finish any of them, it's probably the only food item that I have such a huge disconnect between the smell/taste, as other items I hate and never have (say, alcohol) I also cannot stand from a smell perspective...

</comment><comment><USER47> Relationship with coffee? Pair-bonded for life with a healthy sex life, due to constant positive feedback that built trust.

<comment><USER48> This describes my relationship with coffee as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Crossland CC-1 in my office, Aeropress in my office, Chemex, French Press, and Astra Pro at home.

3-4 beverages a day on average.

</comment><comment><USER50> Black. Three to five 12-oz cups per day, when I'm working.

Very rarely, I'll have a cup or two when not working.

</comment><comment><USER51> 4 espressoa day in various forms: 2 lungo or double espresso + cappuccino

</comment><comment><USER52> 1 9-cup moka pot with breakfast. Occasionally an espresso with lunch.

</comment><comment><USER53> It smells like a mixture of skunk and burning rubber to me. The taste is similar. My relationship with it is one of avoidance. I add powdered caffeine to orange juice instead. Also tea.

</comment><comment><USER54> Coffee goes in, code comes out.

</comment><comment><USER55> homemade cold brew only</comment>


We Need More Cameras, and We Need Them Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/boston_bomber_photos_the_marathon_bombing_shows_that_we_need_more_security.html

<comment><USER2> Where there is multiculturalism there must be cameras. Lots and lots of cameras.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Farhad Manjoo, but I deplore this article of his.

If you want to sell me on increasing surveillance, don't bother selling me all the upside based on fear. Any random salesjerk can do that.

Instead, let me know what sort of information you consider needs to be made public, what sort you do agree should be kept private, and what safeguards you think should be put in place to guarantee that information is safeguarded.

</comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed how he brings up and then completely glosses over the fact that:

"Once a city is routinely surveilled, the government can turn every indiscretion into a criminal matter. You used to be able to speed down the street when you were in a hurry. Now, in many places around the world, a speed camera will record your behavior and send you a ticket in the mail. Combine cameras with facial-recognition technology and you've got a recipe for governmental intrusion. Did you just roll a joint or jaywalk or spray-paint a bus stop? Do you owe taxes or child support? Well, prepare to be investigated—if not hassled, fined, or arrested."

An idea also notably absent: the current amount of surveillance we stomach as a nation has helped and continues to help in many criminal investigations.

From what I understand about terrorism, many times the terrorists don't get a chance to leave the scene.

<comment><USER5> Did you just use drug abuse and vandalism to support your argument?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Alpha release of Kinect home automation controller - <AUTHOR> http://nitrogen.posterous.com/depth-controller-product-page <comment><AUTHOR> It all started back in March with <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303395> \-- now I've finally got something ready for quasi-public alpha testing.

I welcome any feedback on possible uses for this, directions to take, etc.

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat project. Good luck with the beta.

(I'll buy one whenever I buy my own house... )

</comment><comment><USER3> You should give me money.

</comment><comment><USER4> Keep up the good work!</comment>


Open Source Investing Guide – Simple Steps to Create Your Intelligent Portfolio - <AUTHOR> https://herget.github.io/investing-guide/ <comment><AUTHOR> I created an open source investing guide to make investing as easy as possible. My goal was to build a one-page tutorial and it should be fast and nicely readable on a mobile device. HTML, CSS and AMP-based. I added sources and links for further information.</comment>


Ask HN: How are you teaching your children programming? - <AUTHOR> What websites, apps, tools, videos have you decided on to teach your children programming? Are you using only online resources, or also traditional classroom setting? What do you like about the apps and tools you are using, and what could be improved? <comment><USER3> This has been an interesting topic for my wife and I. Our kids have very limited screen time, and do not have access to a computer / smart phone / iPad on a regular basis.

Recently, though, my 1st grade son, the oldest, found the book "Coding Projects in Python" ([https://www.dk.com/us/9781465461889-coding-projects-in- pytho...](https://www.dk.com/us/9781465461889-coding-projects-in-python/)), and read through it for about a week before asking if he could use my computer to try some of the projects out. I set him up on an old linux box with no internet access, opened a text editor (gedit), and showed him how to run his scripts in the terminal.

Honestly, I thought he would loose interest after a few days. But he has stuck with it for the last few weeks, working on the projects after school with minimal help from me (I work from home). So far, he learns what he is interested in, skipping around the book to find projects he likes. He has learned a fair amount in that time, and importantly for me, is learning a bit about how the computer works at the same time. Not sure where we will go from here, but the self-directed path is working well so far.

<comment><USER4> Your son is impressive! My daughter is 3 now and I pray she follows a path like this. Obviously I will love her regardless ;)

<comment><USER5> Even if she picks the wrong editor?

<comment><USER6> Even if she mixes spaces and tabs?

<comment><USER7> children were thrown from cliffs in ancient Sparta for less

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Organically, like just about everything else.

Both my sons showed interest in programming at various times. We toyed with Scratch, then Visual Studio Community Edition to try textual input. Then some Python through Khan Academy and "Learn Python the Hard Way." Enthusiasm for it came and went and sometimes came back just like most things kids do.

One son went on to be a fairly competent programmer, using Mathematica in pursuit of his engineering degree. The other still dabbles in it from time to time, but likes other technical subjects more.

The important point is they really don't need a lot of programming when they're young, just like they don't need a lot of any specific technical field. They just need to know it exists and maybe pique their interest.

</comment><comment><USER9> My son is 12 and a half. I have recently handed him a copy of "Learn you a Haskell..." and a laptop running ghci. He has been making his way through the first couple of chapters with only a little help from me, and seems to be understanding everything that's come up so far.

<comment><USER10> I can't tell if this is a joke or real.

<comment><USER11> its a dad joke

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My kid has been to a couple of camp Edmo where he does some programming for Minecraft, etc. He enjoys it, though most of his summer was outdoors stuff. I haven't looked at the actual code produced in these camps, so I couldn't tell you much more.

I actually have started doing some programming with him around his math homework, using python. This doesn't replace doing things by hand, but it's very different from just using a calculator. There's a different thought process that goes into automating a solver through code that I think is a valuable mental exercise, and that can lead to a deeper understanding that repetitive drills.

The downside to this is that it's more homework-ish, but he actually seems to enjoy learning and realizing how much busywork he can automate, and how much this can scale.

Another wrinkle here is that I wouldn't recommend becoming a software developer or programmer as a career path - however, I do think learning to program is a great idea, especially where it comes to analyzing data. Programming and math ability can become something of a super power when you can apply it in a field where most people don't have those skills (law, medicine, digital humanities, etc).

</comment><comment><USER13> When my children were young I wrote them some games using Love2d in which they and their pets were the characters.

It was just intended to be a bit of fun, and it was, but they were actively involved in the game design and the artwork. I also worked through some of the maths and physics with them and they saw how it all came together in the code.

I'm not sure they did any coding per se other than tweaking parameters for gerbil speed etc but I think they got an appreciation of where programming fits in and how it's part of an interconnected whole.

Subsequently they have used Scratch at junior school and they all took to it without any help from me.

None of them have shown a particularly strong interest in pursuing computing either academically or as a profession and I haven't seen any need to push it.

If your children do show an interest though, I do recommend something like Scratch or Love2d (I'm sure there are equivalents for other dynamic languages). It's easy to produce a game that's surprisingly good and the feedback loop is essentially instantaneous.

I particularly liked how, with a game, it naturally brings together art, maths, science, computers and programming without feeling forced.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nuture their curiosity.

After showing my children how a Caesar cipher works(on paper), I left them an encoded message. They decoded it and then left me a message in return :-) While this isn't programming, encryption is a solid CS topic.

We've covered the binary numeral system and logic circuit diagrams(again on paper) and various simple programs on the command line like: output a message 1K times in different patterns. The engagement comes with asking them questions like "what do you want the message to say?" and "what do you think it will look like if we add another space? or another tab?".

We've tried some online resources like hourofcode.com, scratch.mit.edu, tour.golang.org, codecombat.com. Minecraft command blocks allowed them to try code written by other people, that was pretty cool.

As others have mentioned, it was all spontaneous and organic. It felt more like playing then learning, like "check this out" or "here, let me show you something".

All the topics and online resources were short lived. My children(11yrs, 7yrs) are being exposed to logic and programming in a piecewise approach.

</comment><comment><USER15> The best site I'v seen for kids. Is a site I ran across by accident on reddit. [http://silentteacher.toxicode.fr/](http://silentteacher.toxicode.fr/) The simplicity and slow progression of it is really great for kids. My daughter is 7 and she loved it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I do it very haphazardly. I've used hour of code, apple's swift training program on the iPad, scratch, cargobot, sprite-box, the new bbc micro with some ms programming tool. But I've only spent a few minutes on each tool ocassionally. My impression is that you don't necessarily need a concerted effort. My youngest learned reading when he was 5 through a rather lazy approch from me and my wife. We just did stuff ocassionally at the spur of the moment. Some ideas seem to just need time with kids.

</comment><comment><USER17> Currently, in the worst possible way, Roblox. I hate everything about their business model but the environment is perfect for encouraging programming. For starters, developers/hackers are often represented as heroes. Kids know who they are because they're the subject of in-game lore and YouTubers talk about them a lot. Second, Roblox Studio is a mostly complete, easy to work with game making environment, assets are easy to obtain and scripting is in Lua. Most importantly, kids can show off their work immediately to all of their friends in a multi-player world.

The bad parts of Roblox provide an opportunity for me to explain exactly what's bad about proprietary tools, centralization, pay-to-win, spending real money on digital goods, etc. Roblox isn't much worse than AAA games in this regard. My kid is showing forethought about spending his limited supply of Robux and he's parroting some of my rants when he talks himself out of buying something. Hopefully that parroting turns into genuine understanding. Eventually, he'll want to move on from Roblox or they'll disappear and he'll learn first-hand the pain of moving to a new platform and leaving all of your code and digital goods behind; and that the only things that last are libre code/assets, algorithms, concepts, ideas and memories.

</comment><comment><USER18> I change his diaper, hug him, and tell him I look forward to him crawling.

But seriously, I'm probably not going to Teach Programming; it'll be be one of the Things Your Dad Does, and he's welcome to be interested; I'll push him to understand the _computer_ as a building block and change agent of society, but programming, meh.

If he really wants to fart with a tablet, I'll redirect him to a rasppi - <USER2> be a _cocreator_ , not just a _consumer_.

</comment><comment><USER19> I tend to give my kids (3 and 5) verbal logic puzzles to get their conditional down. Something along the lines of "A cat has a tail and four legs and a dog has a tail and four legs, so a cat must be a dog". It normally ends with them pointing out why they are different... Just as an example but there are all kinds of everyday occurrences that can be used to initiate a logic puzzle.

</comment><comment><USER20> First get them hooked on minecraft. They'll use youtube to learn about mods and plugins. And a few years later they're downloading Eclipse and starting to code their own plugins again using youtube to learn how.

True story.

</comment><comment><USER21> I kinda want to teach her the same way I learned, by giving her an old 1979 BASIC programming book at 7, and setting her up with an interpreter. Although, it would be so much easier to learn with the internet....

</comment><comment><USER22> By cultivating interest, not by forcing them into it.

<comment><USER23> And how to do that ?

<comment><USER24> By seeing all the fat stacks that mommy or daddy is bringing home?

<comment><USER25> Ew, on several orthogonal levels.

<comment><USER26> Could you expand on your reaction a bit?

Seems like encouraging children to follow an interest that could lead them to wealth through work isn't a bad thing?

<comment><USER27> You're encouraging a money-grubbing attitude, which is not really a healthy one to have for long-term happiness.

Furthermore, if they only see it as a path to money and not an end in itself to construct great, helpful, beautiful programs, they're gonna burn out real quick.

Also, "having money" as a goal is just somehow repulsive. Seemingly all the sleazeballs of the world are oriented like this, and as a result they tend to be very shady and use people as means to getting money rather than actually people, with whom meaningful relationships can be forged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I try to make sure they understand mathematics, reading, writing, and logical thought. I try to cultivate independence, common sense, and good judgement. Teach them to tie their shoelaces and recognize poison ivy. Whenever they show curiosity about computers, I take them seriously and explain until they're satisfied. If they should decide to write programs, they'll have the background they need. And they'll have my help, if they want it.

</comment><comment><USER29> We're teaching our kids programming by having them on FIRST teams. The youngest is on his second year FIRST LEGO League team, and the oldest is on a FIRST Tech Challenge team. [http://ev3lessons.com](http://ev3lessons.com) is a great resource for introducing robot concepts using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3, which uses a block programming interface derived from LabView.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not.

But they do occasionally come over and ask me what I'm doing. When they do, I explain.

</comment><comment><USER31> I heard that many kids learn some programming to mod Minecraft. So if you want your children learn programming, find a motivation and do not force it.

</comment><comment><USER32> He discovered scratch.mit.edu on his own, and has been getting more sophisticated by the day. I barely have to do more than help him debug things sometimes.

I am pondering when to introduce him to more classical text-based scripting, but I will admit that nothing I can think of at the moment competes with Scratch for sheer ability to create and share games and animations easily.

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

<comment><USER34> +1 for Scratch, especially if they are younger. My son (when he was 8) really loved working through the Super Scratch Programming Adventure book ([https://www.nostarch.com/scratch](https://www.nostarch.com/scratch)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd stick to the stuff actual programmers use.

You'd kind-of be dogging your kids if they didn't get at least a little dose of the messes we have to deal with as developers.

It's like if you got them all excited about writing slick screensavers, and they have a ball, then when it's time to get a job they realize it's all about grinding out the same boring shit everyone else is doing, and having a million little bullshit-meeting-micro-dominance struggles over everything from FP-vs- OOP down to tabs-vs-spaces.

At least they'll have been warned.

<comment><USER36> Programming doesn't necessarily have to be job training. It can be useful, and even joyous, outside of a the modern office setting.

<comment><USER35> Never said it did, and most things can be joyous outside of the modern office setting. Hell, I like cooking, but I wouldn't want to do it in institutional quantities on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I actually picked up this Code & Go Robot mouse activity set from a local Micro Center this past weekend.

Its ages 5+, but a 4 year old can do it. you can command the mouse to go forward, backward, turn right, and turn left. You build your own maze out of the pieces. There are little cards with the action that they can place on the maze to help plan out the steps.

I think this is a great option. Previously I had recommended the board game robot turtles, but I think this is more appealing to a child.

</comment><comment><USER38> My now 13 year old son first started at age 9 through Minecraft hacking away at mods. More recently he moved into creating JavaScript games and creating Raspberry Pi projects with Python. Our latest project is a retro arcade system built with the Pi.

So games and fun projects that we work on together. Also don't try and overly force coding standards at this young age. Let them hack away and have fun.

</comment><comment><USER39> I got my 5yo a Lego EV3 robot for his latest birthday. There's a good combination of building a real thing and then messing about with the visual program editor to make it move, shoot, turn, etc.

Seems to have figured out basics like how to change the number of repeats.

</comment><comment><USER40> Man if I had focused on programming instead of gaming I would do myself such a favor. Even though Im a dev I find it hard to do get much better nowdays, finding time etc.

</comment><comment><USER41> Has anyone ever used [https://www.tynker.com/](https://www.tynker.com/) ?

</comment><comment><USER42> Very hard to teach. How are you guys doing it? I'm trying unix bash shell scripting which I picked up at the age of 29 pretty easily and felt like I could do useful things repeatably in 4 months?

My programming origin was trs-80 and basic, and for the last 20 years C, TCL, python and csh|bash|awk|sed.

</comment><comment><USER43> I would not. Kids should be outside playing and interacting with other kids, not coding.

<comment><USER44> Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

<comment><USER45> Coding, in my experience, tends to consume a lot of time especially for a kid who is getting into it. I think many of us here can recall the long hours or even all-night coding sessions we did when we were young, learning, and everything about programming was new, exciting, and frustrating at the same time.

When I was young (12-15) I spent a lot of time programming and very little interacting with other people outside of school hours.

The same thing can happen with video games or even reading of course.</comment></comment></comment>


Tips for Optimizing C/C++ Code - <AUTHOR> http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~dhouse/courses/405/papers/optimize.pdf

<comment><USER2> There's some good and bad advice here.

Avoiding (or at least thinking about) branches, avoiding mallocs, and simplifying equations out by hand before you code them are all hugely worthwhile. Thinking about the memory usage access patterns of your program is a must if you work in realtime simulations. (Simplifying equations is enormously important, and I'm glad to see it mentioned because most people assume that the compiler can do it for them, which in most cases it cannot).

OTOH much of this advice won't make any difference other than making you code harder to read. Using local variables won't increase register pressure compared to not using a variable for that computation. Very few compilers will actually generate temporary objects for `Vec3 res = Vec3(a, b, c) + Vec3(d, e, f) + Vec3(h, i, j)`. As I understand it, using memset vs letting the compiler zero initialize an array of classes is unnecessary unless you compile with `-fno-strict-aliasing` or similar.

For small programs, rolling your own STL data structures isn't the worst advice, especially given that his target audience seems to be students (I work in gamedev, and I wouldn't want to work with someone who couldn't code up a STL-like templated vector, exception safety aside). Neither is avoiding templates (at least, before you can tell by looking what kind of code a complex template will expand to).

Anyway, for better, more thorough, and more actionable advice, there's always [Agner Fog's excellent guide to optimizing C++ programs]([http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf](http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf)). Not for the faint of heart, certainly, but very worth keeping bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the list goes into too great detail, it feels like half of the points are taken care of by the compiler and may change with the used optimization switches or target CPU. For instance: "use shift instead of mul or div", I remember that this was an issue in the early 90's, but I think every modern compiler should be able to figure this out. Or the general advice to pass by- references instead of by-value, this actually backfired on the early Xbox SDK compilers which had SSE-style vector registers, and where it was better to explicitely pass those by-value, since then the compiler would put them into registers (later compiler version would figure this out by themselves, even if pass-by-ref was used).

In general, there's no way around inspecting the generated assembly code while trying out different optimizer switches and code tweaks, and running the code through a profiler.</comment>


Ready to meditate? Here's a science based, woo woo free course - <AUTHOR> https://www.doyoumeditate.com/ <comment><USER2> You should add OpenGraph data to the frontpage so that a nice picture and a relevant text is shown when people share the link on social media.

[https://dev.twitter.com/cards/overview](https://dev.twitter.com/cards/overview)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome idea! Thanks :)</comment></comment>


VR going mainstream? Yeah, next year, says Facebook, for the third year in a row - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/28/vr_mainstream_facebook/ <comment><USER2> With Oculus's standalone VR unit coming out next year, mainstream adoption is getting closer.</comment>


Was Microsoft Built on Stolen Goods? - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330213& <comment><USER2> This two months old is all suspense and doesn't answer the question.

You can read the promised report here, though: [http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say- what-/4442498/...](http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say- what-/4442498/3/Was-DOS-copied-from-CPM-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Its a shame the article "wont go into details" because it is only the details that are interesting. The rest is known. Tim Patersons wikipedia page mentions he had access to CP/M source and copied at least the "API" for compatibility purposes. Considering this is low level assembler, for 2 fairly small, mininmal operating systems, basically handling interrupts and interacting with the bios etc, even if Paterson didn't have access to the source, (but may have had e.g. read the same books as Kildall) two operating systems will have similarities, especially if they share an API. There are only a couple of ways to set up an interrupt handler, or call a bios function.

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: the article ends with a promo for an in-person talk by Bob Zeidman in which he will reveal the answer to this question. The question is not actually answered in the article.

<comment><USER5> The question is answered here: [http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say- what-/4442498/...](http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say- what-/4442498/1/Was-DOS-copied-from-CPM-). The answer is no, except for the system calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given that we've had the source to both CP\M

[http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html](http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html)

and MS-DOS v1.1

[https://github.com/BlastarIndia/msdos](https://github.com/BlastarIndia/msdos)

available for some time, and given that there's sort of always been bad blood between DR and Microsoft, I'm going to go with 'no' being the answer here. DR would be suing. Hell, if I were Microsoft's legal team and if the answer isn't 'no' I'd be crafting up a scary letter involving libel.

</comment><comment><USER7> A followup article gives the result: code not copied but APIs used.

[http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/zeidman- consulting-...](http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/zeidman-consulting- concludes-that-microsoft-did-not-copy-cp-m-code-but-did-copy- system-2148758.htm)

Whether APIs can be protected is the core of long legal feud between Oracle- Sun and Google over Java APIs used in Android.

</comment><comment><USER8> So, more fluff and unproven conspiracy theories? We're talking about tiny OSes with the same interrupts for some very basic hardware, how are you not going to get some similar code?

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me Antitrust (film).

Oh, and if system calls were copied, MS should be reminded that they supported Oracle's claim that APIs should be copyrightable... Sitting on two chairs much?

<comment><USER10> Microsoft is only sitting on one chair here. Their position on the Oracle case was that APIs should be copyrightable _but_ that copying for interoperability would be covered by doctrines such as fair use or merger.

<comment><USER9> There is no reason to view them copyrightable then. The only reason to use a given API and not some random set of functions is interoperability. So they do sit on two chairs, or they have some logic problems.

<comment><USER10> An argument for viewing them as copyrightable and then making copying for compatibility OK under fair use or merger would be to avoid complicating copyright law.

A good example of this kind of thing can be seen in how copyright law deals with executing programs. Suppose you have a copy of a copyrighted program on your hard disk. You tell your computer to execute it. To do that the computer reads the program from the hard disk and writes it into RAM.

Most people would say that a copy of the program has been made in RAM. That naturally leads to the question of the copyright status of that copy, and what, if any, permissions you should need from the copyright owner in order for making that copy to be legal.

It seemed apparent to most (including the majority of people in charge of writing copyright laws...) that if you are the lawful owner of a copy of a program you should be allowed to make a copy of that program in RAM in order to execute it. The question, then, is how to fit that in with copyright law.

There are at least a couple of ways to approach this.

1\. Define it as not being a copy, and therefore out of scope for copyright law.

2\. Acknowledge that it is a copy, but make an exception to the copyright owner's exclusive right to make or authorize making of copies.

The problem with the first approach is that it adds complexity to a layer of the law that it is really nice to keep simple. In law, like in many other fields, keeping the base simple and putting the complexity in upper layers leads to things being easier to understand, and easier to modify and fix without unintended consequences. It generally works out much better to keep the lower layers simple, especially the definitions of terms in the lower layers.

In the US they went with the second approach. They added an explicit exception to the copyright owner's rights that covered programs (17 USC 117).

A very similar argument could be made for APIs. 17 USC 102, Subject Matter of Copyright, is pretty simple:

      Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this
      title, in original works of authorship fixed in any
      tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed,
      from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise
      communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine
      or device.

It seems like an API would qualify under that. There is another part of 17 USC 102 that does put a limit on the part I quoted above:

      In no case does copyright protection for an original work of
      authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system,
      method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery,
      regardless of the form in which it is described, explained,
      illustrated, or embodied in such work.

One could argue that APIs fall under this, but it is not at all clear what aspects of an API are the ideas, procedures, etc., and what parts are not. We'll end up having to contemplate the difference between a thing and the name of a thing.

It's the same problem as I described with copies on RAM. 17 USC 102 is part of the lowest layer, so should be kept simple, and so one can make the same argument that things are cleaner and safer by keeping an expansive interpretation of 102 and using fair use or something else at a similar level to authorize API copying for compatibility.

One of Microsoft's points in their brief when they asked CAFC to take the appeal was that this was the approach of prior courts that dealt with copying API elements for compatibility. They did not rule that APIs were not copyrightable. They instead found exceptions that limited the copyright owner's rights in the case of APIs and compatibility.

<comment><USER9> For loading to RAM, applying fair use is a good choice. Since usually, copying that program would require permission, but there it's needed for system to function and it's for intended purpose of running said program and not some illegal reason, thus it's fair use.

Argument against copyrightability of APIs is their different, more abstract nature than actual programs. I.e. they are meta information, rather than information itself. It's like abstract function vs function implementation, or idea vs its actualization. EU courts got it right, and they declared APIs explicitly uncopyrightable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER12> No, it wasn't.</comment>


FoundationDB Document Layer - <AUTHOR> https://www.foundationdb.org/blog/announcing-document-layer/ <comment><USER2> Soooo stoked. This should make futzing with it to get started a lot easier.

I've been thinking about going to the FoundationDB summit to hopefully learn more... Does anyone have any good resources for learning about it? I've tried a few times but find the documentation a bit hard to grok. Maybe I'm just slow.

Also if you haven't seen it, this is one of the most amazing talks on distributed systems (because it's about testing them) I've ever seen (by Will Wilson from FoundationDB pre-Apple merger): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc)

Truly mind blowing how good FoundationDB is supposed to be for its use cases, and this Mongo layer is just the business when it comes to helping adoption.

<comment><USER3> That talk was glorious. "We want to build a database, but first we need to build a simulator for the database, but first we need to write a compiler to help us write the simulator." It would be self-parodying engineering hubris if it hadn't worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Document Layer has a familiar API, and is compatible with the MongoDB® > protocol

Was wondering how I would replace MongoDB due to the shift in Licensing become more and more agressive.

Well , I think I found it.

Farewell MongoDB.

<comment><USER5> more like a scaling issue, as mongo is master-slave and a distributed horizontally scaled world can't live with such a bottleneck.

<comment><USER6> Well that's just a ridiculously uninformed statement. Of course mongodb scales horizontally. I can share many success stories of massive scale with mongodb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a little confused. Does the "layers" concept mean the data which is stored in the core can be accessed in any valid manner that the layers allow? Or stated differently: if I've got a dumpster fire of data in a MongoDB that should have been in an RDBMS but moving to SQL would be too risky/slow would this allow me to schlep my Mongo data to FoundationDB and have the app continue to use the Mongo access methods while I start switching APIs over to querying by SQL in batches instead of One Big Volatile Move?

<comment><USER8> foundationdb is just a KV store that doesn't even authenticate clients connecting to it. the idea is you put layers in front of it to take nice structured requests (of some sort) and turn them into transactional KV manipulations, while also doing things like authentication, access control, logging, whatever else you need.

so you could (hypothetically, if such software existed), have this mongo layer, and then another layer off to the side which took SQL queries, and figured out how to turn them into KV queries against the data that the mongo layer has stored.

more realistically, you could have your SQL clients know how to talk to foundationdb directly (making them into the layer; presumably they're a web backend or something already), and they could know how to execute the high level operation they want to perform against the KV data stored by the mongo layer. conveniently skipping all of the SQL translation that there isn't software for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really excited that they were able to release this layer. With the changes to the license of MongoDB it could give people a real alternative.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is massive for adoption. Can't wait to give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any reason to expect fundamental inefficiencies with this approach vs a vertically integrated approach like a conventional document store? Any other downsides? I ask because this seems like to obviously good an idea to be true, so I need to look for the flip side before I get to excited. Otherwise, this laying seems like the obvious approach, and I can only lament that it's taken this long.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the layered approach will always consume more bandwidth unless you just happen to hit the case where your transaction is read-only and the layer process is colocated with the storage server where your data is.

The upsides far outweigh this downside in my opinion. The fact that writes are buffered locally before committing the transaction (improving latency) is probably enough by itself to overcome that downside.

<comment><USER12> Interesting, TiDB also three components [0](KV, DB and PD), I guess this MongoDB layer in FoundationDB is the DB piece of the cluster.

[0] [https://github.com/pingcap/docs#tidb- server](https://github.com/pingcap/docs#tidb-server)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know much about foundationDB, but when they say API compatible, are they referring to the technical TCP/IP connection stack, or ALSO the concepts of collections and the query language of MongoDB (such as aggregations, find, limit, etc..)

In other words can I throw a giant aggregation query with all mongo's various crazy query language syntax and it will.. work the same?

<comment><USER14> It doesn't support the aggregation framework currently.

Here is a list of differences:

[https://foundationdb.github.io/fdb-document-layer/known- diff...](https://foundationdb.github.io/fdb-document-layer/known- differences.html)

<comment><USER9> Can someone who uses MongoDB at scale (many machines, single db) talk about how big gap is between what FDB supports and what their application uses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds kind of "old" tech to have different layers for supporting different data models. Like the native multi-model approach of ArangoDB much better.

Their aggregation framework is pretty neat and the database also has full graph capabilities. Heck, I can even combine joins and graph traversal in the same query.

</comment><comment><USER5> i think we are going to generally see more and more object to key-value mapping layers as the latter are widely available via cloud providers, and one basically needs something in the spirit of persistent-volume-claims from kubernetes land in the database layer that can be fulfilled by some key-value backend...

</comment><comment><USER16> FoundationDB always sounded amazing, BUT, the way they disappeared when it was bought by Apple left a bitter taste in my mouth and I don't think I would ever trust them enough to build my business around their product.

<comment><USER17> It's all open-source and out there now though, so I don't think you really need to trust them, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there any plans to extend the API compatibility of the document layer to be compatible with other APIs, such as, DynamoDB?

</comment><comment><USER5> That's huge. I could have used this a few years ago

</comment><comment><USER18> Just wandering how will foindationDb compare to mongo in terms of the non functional s - performance, scale of a collection, number of collections, queries with and without indexes, aggregated, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone write a Google Datastore layer so that I can finish my appengine/datastore adventure once and for all?

<comment><USER20> Is there anything we could be doing to serve you better?

<comment><USER19> Yes, let me run datastore on my servers. Surely I may use your cloud offer but in certain cases I need to run it on my servers. I can't build/invest in tools/drivers for a proprietary cloud service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wonderful. I just updated the FoundationDB packages in NixOS to 6.0.15 at the release earlier this month. Will try packaging this up soon as well...</comment>


Charisma / Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/pow.html <comment><USER2> Charisma and looks matter.

There are studies that show how CEO's are taller. Height for corresponds to increase in income after controlling for other variables like age and weight. For men it's 1.8 percent per inch.

[http://www.timothy-judge.com/Height%20paper-- JAP%20published...](http://www.timothy-judge.com/Height%20paper-- JAP%20published.pdf)

Height of US presidents

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_pres...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_presidential_candidates_of_the_United_States)</comment>


The Other France - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-other-france <comment><USER2> As interesting as this would be on another occasion, the fact is, its not poverty which leads people to commit terrorism.

The problem of les banlieues is a social problem for France, but ghetto youth are more interested in girls, drugs, and otherwise acting out than in terrorism.

As Osama Bin Laden and others show, you can be given every opportunity in life and still choose terrorism. You can be well educated (many Daesh members are) and choose terrorism.

The elephant in the room that many refuse to address is that terrorism exists anywhere Islam does, there are insurgencies in nearly every country where Muslims are a sizeable minority.

A little anecdote - my wife comes from a very poor country, from a Muslim region. The poor kids aren't the ones growing up wearing hijabs, aren't the ones committing terrorism. Terrorists have been apprehended from her village trying to get into the west - the one thing they had in common - they went to a local madrassa funded by a Gulf state.

A similar comparison can be made in the US. Ghetto youth don't go around committing mass shootings. They don't join Daesh. It's the middle class, outcast white kids that are doing mass shootings, or newly converted/radicalized middle class youth that join Daesh.

Anyhow, it is a brilliantly written piece, but on this occasion I'm not sure its particularly relevant.

<comment><USER3> Terrorism is not the sole property of Muslims. There is terrorism motivated by religion, including Islamic terrorism, but also Christian (the Ku Klux Klan, people blowing up abortion clinics in the US), Hindu (Indian Hindutva nationalists killing Muslims), Jewish (attacks by fundamentalists on Arabs in modern-day Israel), Sikh (the assassination of Indira Gandhi), and so on. Or you have non-religious terrorism such as the nationalism of Anders Behring Breivik, or eco-terrorism.

The reason for terrorism is extremism in all its forms, not Islam.

<comment><USER4> I think you have to be careful when attributing violent action to a religion. Religions are often used to provide a sheen of respectability to otherwise disreputable organizations, such as the KKK.

How to know if a religion is the source of an action or not? One way is to look at the founder of the religion. Would the founder perform the action? Did the founder use violence and coercion to achieve goals? Did the founder encourage their followers to do such things? If not, then it is likely that the claim is not valid.

If we look at the founder of Christianity, there is no advocacy of using violence to achieve ends. So, the claim of that KKK and other violent groups are Christian doesn't hold much water. This is not to say that an individual who espouses a certain belief will not be violent, just that the religion is not the source of it.

If we look at the founder of Islam, we see something else. We see violence and coercion used and advocated by the founder.

<comment><USER5> > there is no advocacy of using violence to achieve ends

Please explain the harrowing of hell. My local cathedral has stained glass (14th century) of Christ in full armour, with big sword, going to hell to release the righteous (but not the damned), conquering hell in the proces.

[http://vidimus.org/issues/issue-04/feature/](http://vidimus.org/issues/issue-04/feature/)

(Possibly not quite hell, but the bit before that.)

There is a long tradition of Christians using their bible to justify violence. There's plenty of violence in the bible. But, when pointed out, Christians start saying that those bits don't count, or those bits have been misinterpreted, or that you need to read that other bit as well.

I have you saying that the quran is violent, and I have hundreds of millions of muslims telling me that it's a book of peace.

<comment><USER6> The Koran is ambiguous, as is the Bible, and the US Constitution. Indeed any meaningful statute passed by a legislature has some measure of ambiguity. Reconciling these ambiguities by means of textual interpretation is a large part of the reason why there are theologians, rabbis, muftis and Supreme Court justices.

Based on what I've read, in the case of Islam there has been a huge amount of exegeses and there are complex rules of interpretation that govern the meaning of texts. Trying to CTRL-F a translation of the Koran for "slay" as someone suggested elsewhere is a bizarre way to try to figure out the meaning of a text which has been pored over by great minds for centuries. I think it is a result of the fact that those of us with technical backgrounds tend to be dismissive of the humanities, uncomfortable with ambiguity and prone to literalism.[1]

The interesting thing is that discarding exegesis is exactly the approach taken by the Salafist/Wahabist tradition of the Saudis, and of ISIS and Al- Qaeda. 1400 years of scholarship is replaced with a literal textualist reading of the Koran and Hadiths, and thus justification is found for the most henious of crimes. There is a Latin phrase that describes this approach of discarding precedent entirety in favor of novel readings of a text, but it escapes me for now.

The Koran, or the Bible are not "violent" books not are they "peaceful", they are merely collections of words that need to be interpreted by their readers. It is unfortunate that the intellectually bankrupt literalist interpretation of the Koran is on the ascendant in the Middle East because of Saudi oil money, and that it presently lends itself to the justification of terrorism (even if the Saudi regime itself opposes terrorism).

[1] This could be a reason why terrorist jihadism, buttressed by literalist readings attracts a disproportionate number of engineering types.

<comment><USER7> > The Koran, or the Bible are not "violent" books not are they "peaceful"

The Koran is directly violent and intolerant. It contains direct instructions that are such. The Sunnah describes the violent actions of the violent person claiming to be prophet of the god (which was invented earlier) and his followers. The Old Testament describes the actions of the violent god (an invented being by his believers) and his believers trying to win and control the Canaan territories. The New Testament describes the violent action of authorities who try to keep the order by crucifying the person claiming to be the prophet that brings the end of the world, then contains a lot of briefs of his followers and then one apocalyptic vision.

And not a single one of these texts holds any scientific truth. All are based on myths and superstition.

At the time of the "last revelations" already 800 years passed since Greeks measured the circumference of Earth, the size and distance of Moon and the size and distance of Sun. But the supposed god of the supposed prophet instead spends the energy to leave the message that the uncle of the supposed prophet will burn in hell. He cares about the priorities, you see. In the Old Testament the god actually comes through the house door to his favorite believer and shares a meal with him. Or strolls through the garden. You know, gods have to eat too. Oh, and god also has rest for one day after making the whole world in six.

Read them all and compare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone interested, La Haine (Hatred) is a fascinating film about a day in the life in the Paris suburbs anno 1995 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/)

This quote has stuck with me ever since I first saw it:

"C'est l'histoire d'un homme qui tombe d'un immeuble de cinquante étages. Le mec, au fur et à mesure de sa chute se répète sans cesse pour se rassurer : jusqu'ici tout va bien, jusqu'ici tout va bien, jusqu'ici tout va bien. Mais l'important n'est pas la chute, c'est l'atterrissage."

Which loosely translates as:

"This is the story of a man falling from a fifty-story building. The guy, during his fall reassures himself by constantly repeating: so far so good, so far so good, so far so good.

But the important thing is not the fall, it's the landing."

<comment><USER9> Good quote, but seems fairly applicable to ... Well, everything.

What's the context if I have not seen the film?

<comment><USER10> It's a way of saying the movie doesn't end well. Great film, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I note that the first indications about who was behind this indicate that at least 3 of the people carrying out the attack were from Belgium (a suburb of Brussels to be precise) and that one entered the EU through Greece somewhere in October. I don't know anything about the rest of the attackers and that does not detract from the points made in the article but it is worth noting that this is not an issue confined to France but pan-European even though France has some unique elements that definitely factor into all this.

<comment><USER12> Even if none of them turn out to be from the banlieue the issues will be conflated, like they always are.

Just as, if none turn out to have been part of the immigrant wave, it will be conflated with that and the open borders issue.

Politics can be irrational even at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times...

<comment><USER13> Already in my Facebook feed I'm quoting information from 'slau because people are saying that the attackers are definitely immigrants because Syrian passport, while carefully ignoring the "French and the fingerprints" angle.

<comment> guard-of-terra Is this french person Muslim? With immigration background?

If both answers are "no", you are right about selective blindness. If not, it is you who are ignoring an angle.

<comment><USER14> Technically, this comment is factually correct and also it is spot on. Some people trying to defend some ethnic groups in this thread are hypocrites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't read the whole article yet, but being close to such places since birth, I'm often thinking about it. From immigration, post-war building efforts, architectural and urban paradigms[1], the new technologies that make these projects possible.

From a distance it can look as governments just wanted to park immigration, and that was part of it, but they also believed, if you look at the ads of the 60s, they were opening the gates of heaven. Which was partly and honestly true since at that time many populations lived in ghettos. The idea of having a place to sleep with a modern electric kitchen even (the average family still had countryside way of life), with parks and services under your window ... isn't far from a dream.

Unfortunately nothing went as planned. Failed integration, failed approach to urban planning[1], ... hard to say what was the real problem.

[1] Often blame has been put onto people like LeCorbusier, but his ideas have also been stretched too thin for socio-political purposes.

</comment><comment><USER16> Social and economic deprivation is not the root cause, otherwise explain why educated students, doctors and engineers are joining IS?

<comment><USER17> > educated students, doctors and engineers are joining IS

How many are? Do we have any good information on this? I doubt IS releases the professinal and educational backgrounds of its hires!

Generally, my impression is that historiclly the middle class has provided the idealogues; the theory is thhat if you're living hand-to-mouth you have more immediate worries and less time to study such things, and if you are illiterate you have other obstacles. That's just one possible but commonly repeated hypothosis: I don't know what basis there is for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article makes an important point. It points out that those drawn to Jihadism in the west tend to be woefully ignorant of the teachings of Islam.

Whenever there is an attack, both the snark about the "religion of peace" as well as the claim that Muslims don't condemn these acts both resurface. The fact is that both terrorism and ISIS have been roundly condemned by large panels of Islamic scholars.

It would not surprise me that, once the religious background of these terrorists is examined, that it is proves to be very flimsy.

The challenge, in my mind, and as a Muslim is that Muslims need to figure out how to prevent the brainwashing of impressionable young people in an era of instant communication.

<comment><USER11> > The fact is that both terrorism and ISIS have been roundly condemned by > large panels of Islamic scholars.

If the media would act as good as a lens for those instances as they do for the terrorist acts themselves it would be splendid.

<comment><USER6> The more fair-minded outlets do seem to try, but even then, they seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis- is-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-is-an- offence-to-islam-says-international-coalition-of-major-islamic- scholars-9756255.html)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/17/saudi- clerics-f...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/17/saudi-clerics- fatwa-declares-terrorism-heinous-crime-sharia-law)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars- isl...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars-islamic- state_n_5878038.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 'Are the suburbs of Paris incubators of terrorism?'

If true then this might be the case for most poor suburbs in many countries. People with nothing to loose who want to make a point.

<comment> guard-of-terra Yet we don't see terribly much christian terrorism, buddhist terrorism or agnostic terrorism.

All kinds of people are impoverished but we only see extreme violence from one background. This rules out poor suburbs as prime cause.

One can argue mass shootings of US of A is another example, but it doesn't seem to exist much outside of USA.

<comment><USER20> That is absolutely false.

[http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/03/25/deadly-violence- betw...](http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/03/25/deadly-violence-between- myanmar-buddhists-muslims-spreads-to-3-more-towns-in/)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other- terror-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other-terror- threat.html)

<comment> guard-of-terra Your second link makes sense, it's actually very similar profile to Charlie Hebdo attack. First one, not so much. Ethnic tensions are not terrorism.

We can add right wing to the list.

<comment><USER11> > Ethnic tensions are not terrorism.

That is a matter of perception for many. When someone attempts to burn down a Mosque or a Synagogue for some that is 'ethnic tensions' for others those are acts of terrorism. It's not clear-cut at all and the whole freedomfighter/terrorist duality makes it even harder to determine which label to apply and when.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As always great content from the New Yorker (one of the few worthy subscription magazines IMHO) but extremely long article.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Battle of Algiers, in French

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7j4WVTgWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7j4WVTgWc)

I watched it in French and I don't speak French. The story is easy to follow.

<comment><USER10> Haven't seen it, but unfortunately, I'm told it was pretty close to reality. That said, it's not particularly relevant.

<comment><USER17> > it's not particularly relevant

I disagree. (If it's the film I'm thinking of) it shows brutal oppression perpetrated by the French on Algiers. It might inform an understanding of current relationships between France and Islam.

<comment><USER10> The French oppression in Algeria was real, and there was a bloody episode right after WWII, and then the Algerian War of Independence was extremely brutal. But this doesn't have much to do with Islam. The Algerian FLN was mostly a nationalist/left-wing group. In fact, Algeria was the theater of a bloody civil war in the 90s between the FLN dictatorship and Islamic extremists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> what a fantastic read, thanks for submitting. I planned to read something on my phone until the kid falls asleep, then stayed in the room for 1.5 hours. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> A suprisingly good and nuanced look at the French situation. Very high quality writing this one!

</comment><comment><USER25> Did the article randomly jump around as you were trying to read it? Incredibly frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER26> It lost me somewhere around paragraph 12.

<comment><USER11> Try harder. It is an excellent piece. The only false note are the cartoons alongside it which do not contribute at all and seem totally out of place.

<comment> valm- New Yorker cartoons aren't meant to comment on the articles they appear with. They are just distributed throughout the magazine (a tradition they have maintained on the web).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder is Charlie Hebdo is going to come up with one of their taseful caricatures this time.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra > ...where the police dare not enter ...

Here, I've pinpointed the precise moment where their troubles began.

<comment><USER27> So we all grew up as law abiding citizens just because police was able to enter our neighbourhoods?

<comment> guard-of-terra Basically, yes. And it's not about us personally, it's about who they take away thus freeing us from being affected by bullying, crime and bad influence.

Maybe they only have to take away one in hundred, the bad seed.

<comment><USER11> > And it's not about us personally, it's about who they take away thus freeing > us from being affected by bullying, crime and bad influence.

Where I grew up the police was free to come and go as they pleased. That did not stop plenty of bullying, lots of crime and a ton of bad influences being readily apparent and I credit my parents (even though they were divorced), the teachers in my school and my interest in technology for not going down some dumb path (most likely not to be a murderer though).

A friend of mine who grew up much the same _did_ in fact end up in a different situation and had none of those advantages that I had, otherwise our situations are mostly interchangeable.

<comment> guard-of-terra Looks like police, walks like police, doesn't scare criminals away? Is not police!

I mean, it is solvable. Firse, you enter the place. Then, you arrest criminals. Then, you rinse and repeat.

There are communities around the world which, while being very poor, only have petty crime. You just avoid nurturing crime tolerance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Need you in Paris, Bruce Wayne.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good read, thanks! I'd like to thank uBlock even more: after finishing the article, it has blocked something I don't like for 221 times.</comment>


Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/used-daily-by-750k-workers-slack-raises-160m-to-value-collaboration-startup-at-2-8b/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty surreal for me. I tried out Slack briefly when they first allowed the public to request accounts. Made a mental note "cool", and moved on.

The next year or so I started to see a lot more teams/companies that were getting on the Slack hype-train, and now this.

Huge props to the team on this valuation but I'm still quite confused.

<comment><USER3> We're in a serious bubble right now, IMHO. This valuation is based purely on the fact that all the other hip companies are using it, along with the fact that it is a good product.

Valuations _should_ be based on actual financials, but when it comes to tech right now they rarely are. Which is the definition of a bubble, IMHO.

<comment><USER2> I feel similarly. Of course there are tons of people saying "no no no, it's not a bubble", but historically, bubbles were never acknowledged until they bursted.

<comment><USER4> "but historically, bubbles were never acknowledged until they bursted."

What does it mean when there are more people shouting bubble than those who deny it?

<comment><USER3> That particular metric means nothing. People like me saying there's a bubble means basically nothing, because no VC is actually listening to my opinion. Just like most commenters on here saying there isn't also means nothing.

But, there may (or may not) be a bubble going on despite this.

Ultimately whether it is viewed as a bubble in 10 or 20 years depends entirely on whether enough investors get burned and burned big enough that they stop investing, just like what happened in the early 00's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click.

Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX philosophy, of anticipating and cleverly solving tiny little annoyances, that make it a really _pleasurable_ product to use.

<comment><USER6> Isn't this a legal requirement?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN- SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscrib...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN- SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscribe_compliance)

Technically the law is only that you have to honor them within 10 days, but I've seen a bunch of sites with one-click unsubscribe nowadays.

<comment><USER5> It's not just unsubscribe. They let you turn off emails for an hour, a day, etc. Really convenient if you're generally interested in notifications, but just need a little break.

Another example: when you change your password, Slack will send you a special link to sign-in on mobile so you don't have to type out your new password on a tiny keyboard.

<comment><USER7> Sadly (though necessarily) that email-a-link thing doesn't work if you turn on 2-factor auth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How did Slack blow up so quickly? I remember when I first read about it on TheVerge, that same morning the head of our sales team messages the CTO and suggests our company try it out. Next thing I know, every other company is using it.

From my perspective, it went from nothing to huge success overnight.

<comment><USER8> I'd certainly find some analysis of this interesting to read. Campfire was popular throughout my more technical social groups up until a couple of years ago but never came close to the intensity around Slack. I imagine having a rather powerful free plan helped a lot, although Hipchat might disprove that.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, but the consensus seems to be that Atlassian ruined HipChat. I'm not sure if that's true, but everyone I know that switch lists that as a top reason.

<comment><USER10> Been using HipChat for almost 3 years (so I believe, pre Atlassian, and post.)

It seems well suited to purpose, and works fine for me. The only gripes I have are minor (for instance, their iOS offering has this infuriating behavior that it will notify you for direct messages, and throw up the old red dot on the app icon, but then provide no ability to see where the message came from when you open the app.)

In light of how well it works, I am mystified as to how slack has managed to come in to the exact same space and carve out such a massive valuation. If there was ever an industry ripe for disruption, the "modern chat client with goofy icons that allows you to post gifs and search your chats without arcane IRC syntax" did not seem like one to me.

<comment><USER9> The search actually feels really nice. I'm mostly indifferent to them on the web, but Slack native and on iOS is a bit nicer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A friend shared the thought that Slack is a little bit of a scary company to invest in because it was very easy to adopt.

"We had no trouble importing our historical message archive and just moving over to this new chat system very quickly. I worry about the long-term stability of this company because if something better comes along, it will be equally fast to switch and never go back," he said.

I wonder about this. Will people move to the new, better thing and ditch their existing product? Is that an existential threat to Slack?

I do know that the product IS pretty great and "team chat with searchable archives" has been tough to get right for a long time. (Internal IRC servers, IRCCloud, Campfire, Hipchat). But being technically excellent and fun to use is no guarantee of success (soft spot in my heart for Zephyr and platforms like Zulip).

<comment><USER12> I agree.

Slack needs to hustle right now and increase the barrier to entry. Not sure how - integrations help. Maybe asynchronous communication as well?

<comment><USER13> Some kind of machine learning based answering system that look like Stack Overflow but answers come from analyzing chats!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone with more experience comment on the terms of the investment itself? Why would people invest in this company if they haven't even begun to spend the $120M of their series D money yet?

For those of us outside of Silicon Valley who don't have the same funding climate, what's it like?

<comment><USER15> There's fear of missing out for the investors...every investor in Silicon Valley wants to get in on the next Facebook or Google, and the investing environment there is intensely competitive. For the entrepreneurs though, I am left scratching my head as to why they would accept this money, given the massive amount of risk and responsibility you take on when you accept this money. If you don't need the money, why would you accept it when it has such a high price?

<comment><USER16> Why do you think there is any more risk/responsibility in raising money in an E-Round versus an IPO?

<comment><USER15> Well, first it depends on the valuation, but that goes for any equity financing round. But also, it depends on the type of investor you are taking on, and their expectations for returns to fit in their profile.

Private investors tend to invest in higher risk/reward equities, meaning you need to achieve higher growth rates to satisfy them. I am guessing many of the companies raising massive private rounds now need to still grow significantly before a liquidity event could justify the investor's investment (once you go public, the pressure isn't as high to achieve 2-3x growth year over year). Publicly traded technology stocks are expected to grow at most 20-30%/year, without further diluting the equity pool. Every new private financing round makes the pool a little smaller, meaning you still need to grow even faster to achieve the returns required by your investors.

In addition, once you IPO, you have access to many other forms of financing that are significantly cheaper than selling equity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those that are confused about the value of Slack – It's not just about text chat. It's about comprehensive search and combatting organizational forgetfulness and knowledge drain. If we put it on Slack, it's archived "forever" and a team member a few years from now can start with a Slack search before re-inventing the wheel.

This is especially evident with the integrations. If just the relevant slice of data is fed into Slack, it's easier to digest than running a full report in another tool. And it's now part of the corporate history. So finding patterns of endemic problems becomes much easier.

<comment><USER18> _> It's about comprehensive search and combatting organizational forgetfulness and knowledge drain._

They are far from achieving that vision. I agree that company-searchable chat (and email) is valuable, but I doubt it will ever replace proper internal documentation--any other approach is far too noisy, and without a lot of context it's impossible to know if correspondence about an issue from two years ago is still relevant today.

<comment><USER17> Ah, but it searches inside files and any connected system as well. So If I search for "Arc Code:500" it will show me any chats, any github pull requests and any Google docs that mention that phrase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business? Maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems that if you had a dysfunctional organisation then this is not a silver bullet, and if you had a well functioning organisation you would manage just fine with old fashioned tools like email and Dropbox.

> Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete > flexibility. Private things stay private, so just the right people see them.

If you haven't managed to work out how to implement this kind of communication with email then aren't there bigger problems at your workplace?

There are other things that bother me, such as

> The "ambient awareness" that comes from increased transparency cuts down on > the need for meetings.

> "We no longer wonder what's happening on the front line, we know. It makes > our relationships deeper because we discover things about each other and > we're in touch with exactly what's happening."

So I now need to scroll through screens of idle chatter to try and figure out what some other team is doing? Is this constantly pinging me while I'm trying to work? Will every conversation descend into bikeshedding as every man and his dog wants to offer his opinion on the new logo or product feature?

I've just never come across Slack in London yet, so maybe I'm yet to understand what it's like in practice.

<comment><USER20> It's just chat. We've had chat services for a long time, although the options for biz/corporate/enterprise have traditionally sucked.

There is a lot of efficiency gained since emails can often be heavy and include lots of extra wording, signatures, greetings, etc. There are plenty of conversations that just move faster through a lightweight chat system.

Lots of companies were using MSN, Skype, Lync, Gmail, IRC, etc to do chat before and now there's finally a better crop of tools like HipChat, FlowDock, Slack and others. They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same place.

Is Slack a nice tool? Yes, it's finally a chat system that works for actual business needs.

Is Slack worth this much and better than everyone else? Not sure, the other ones mentioned are pretty good too and there are still lots of missing features with all of them. $2.8B seems very inflated, but then again this is Silicon Valley at work.

<comment><USER21> >>It's just chat.

No, it is not "just chat." Chat is just one function. Slack basically brings ALL of the information that is relevant to your team in one place. It has out- of-the-box integrations with a TON of services, and all the data they are sending to your team's Slack feed can then be search on, which provides massive productivity advantages.

<comment><USER20> So... it's just chat. With some integrations. I already stated this:

> They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and > integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same > place.

Thanks for the confirmation.

<comment><USER21> Just because the integrations present the data to the user in a chat interface does not make it "just chat."

It's OK though. I know you're just being obtuse.

<comment><USER20> How is that not chat? You didn't have this ability before (although more manual)? What is so utterly amazing about this?

And no it doesn't bring "all the information" together, there's still plenty happening outside of it.

Enjoy using it but we don't need all the abstract hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ignoring the question of "why are they valued so much," I have a more immediate question... what do they need all this money for????

Capital costs are low and slack is probably cash flow positive. Why are they raising a Series E for this much money? That's enough to pay for thousands of employees.

They must have something up their sleeve beyond just chat. My theory is investment is flowing into slack because enterprise was so quick to adopt them, and slack now has its foot in the door at many of the largest companies. This puts them in a position to compete with Dropbox, Box, and other enterprise-focused companies.

Slack is playing in a field much bigger than corporate chat. They are a new entrant into the enterprise platform wars and seemingly more agile than Dropbox et al. I imagine investors are putting money into this advantage position more than the slack product itself.

</comment><comment><USER23> For those wondering how/why Slack took off so fast, read this: [https://qz.com/335321/slack-is-everywhere-growing-fast- and-s...](https://qz.com/335321/slack-is-everywhere-growing-fast-and-still- works-great-heres-how-they-did-it/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I've not used Slack. How does it differ from Yammer and Jive? I ask, because those two work collaboration platforms have their own valuations. Yammer was bought for $1 billion by Microsoft. Jive Software's current market cap is $404 million.

I'm curious what the key differences are that drive a $2.8 billion valuation relative to the lower valuations of those two companies.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a case where I see the outrageously high valuation and really do think it's reasonable. They're allegedly adding $1m in annually recurring revenue every 11 days, which is just phenomenal for this young a product. They'll be in range for an IPO in less than 2 years if they want. Slack has just really nailed it and is moving really quickly.

</comment><comment><USER26> A series E seems fairly late stage of a round for how young the company is...

<comment><USER27> As it says in the article, this was about taking money while the VC market is hot. It's easy to get massive amounts of cash at crazy valuations right now, so companies are raising what they can and putting it in the bank for a rainy day.... or when bubbles burst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How are companies like this valued so much, it's just a fancy chat computer program. I don't understand the economics behind this.

<comment><USER29> Like this: [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press- release-37signals-...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press- release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment)

On a serious note: Remember it is a private financing round. VCs and parties involved calculate based on current metrics future value of company. So, although it may or may not be accurate, it is literally putting a value based on other metrics. For all we know, it could all collapse in a year from now or a lion's share of businesses around the world will be using Slack as their main comms. platform in 10 and thus $2.6B wouldn't sound so bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Huge props to the Team at Slack. They've made a great product. My personal opinion is, tools like slack and others can get quite distracting with the constant notifications. I foresee in the future where startups are doing products that reduce/manage the "noise".

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand why so many businesses use a product with such a weak SLA as their main mode of communication. Both Hipchat and Slack have terrible uptime guarantees, and you should stay away from them.

<comment><USER32> Slack's uptime's been better than 99.995%. Communication failures due to some guy not reading your email are probably much higher. I don't think the SLAs are a big issue.

[https://status.slack.com/calendar](https://status.slack.com/calendar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's a great product. Really enjoy using it. But with this much attention and hype it makes me worried about who is going to come in and buy them and ruin it.

</comment><comment><USER34> A pretty impressive product, good going!

</comment><comment><USER35> Did previous investors participate in this round? I can't tell from the wording in the article.

</comment><comment><USER36> What are they planning to do with the 160M? Didn't they just raise 120M in October?

</comment><comment><USER37> Good for them. I don't use the product but they seem like great folks.

</comment><comment><USER38> who would have thought you could make a chat room in 2013 and become a billionaire

<comment><USER39> IMO, the cool thing about slack is integration with other services for "real- time" notifications. At my previous job, we had this tool built internally in irc chat room to notify whenever client connected/disconnected a session, breached some risk limit, etc. It was super helpful to be on top of stuff in real-time. And once you have something like this it's hard to let go of it.</comment></comment>


Why Facebook Just Eradicated Influencer Marketing as We Know It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattyb123/why-facebook-just-eradicated-influencer-marketing-as-we-know-it-232b0f3733d4 <comment><USER2> What's the point of gathering followers if I can't even reach them now?</comment>


Show HN: I couldn't hire map designers, so I made these procedural worlds - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=615IRYG2nWg

<comment><USER2> Cool project. Unbearable background music. My speakers were pretty low and it still hurt my ears (literally -- not complaining based on taste).</comment>


YouTube Moderator - <AUTHOR> http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=179865 Opinions? <comment><AUTHOR> Here's Google's intro video:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HecQTodMtU&playnext_from...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HecQTodMtU&playnext_from=TL&videos=hB_5AxKxyBY&feature=featured)

The video comments on youtube.com are not very positive, but I am excited to see how this develops.</comment>