Hackpad goes open source - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bryanlanders/status/586235797571002368/photo/1 <comment><USER2> Transcription:

"Hi Hackpad admin!

We have some exciting news — Hackpad will be released as open source software in the next few weeks!

As you may know, Hackpad started as a fork of an existing open source project. We're incredibly proud to give back to this community and excited to make the Hackpad codebase available to anyone, especially our customers.

As the open source release approaches, we'll send you instructions on how to download your Hackpads in case you want to move your data somewhere else. (Don't worry; you'll still be able to keep your data on hackpad.com.)

If you have questions or just want to chat, drop us a line at hackpad- email@example.com.

-Alex, Igor, Mime, Julia and the Hackpad Team"

<comment><USER3> never heard of it before, which project was it a fork of?

<comment><USER4> Etherpad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same team @ Dropbox is developing the conceptual successor, [https://composer.dropbox.com](https://composer.dropbox.com)

As a (paid) Hackpad user, I was offered the chance to migrate to Composer and try it out. It was clear that Hackpad.com is not getting sunsetted too quickly.

Now that there'll be an open source option, we'll also have the ability to just migrate to that. This is very considerate of users IMO.

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember trying Hackpad when it first popped up here on HN. I signed in with my Google account and was surprised to find that it had pulled a photo of me to use as my avatar—a photo that I had never knowingly put online. Nothing bad, just a Christmas photo, but it was personal and not meant to be plastered on the web. Being privacy-conscious, I had always tried to keep photos of me off of the internet.

At this time there wasn't any way to change your profile picture through the web interface. I tried to get in touch but never received any replies. My face was stuck there on my profile, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Just checked and the picture was still there. There's a "Change profile picture" link now, but it seems to be broken: uploading a new picture does nothing. At least you can delete your account now, which I've done.

Hackpad is a great tool, and I wish them the best with the open source release, but this is the experience that has stuck in my mind. Don't pull photos from people's accounts without asking for permission, _especially_ not for public display.

(I'm still not sure where the photo came from, as I could never find it on my Google account. I suspect some misconfigured Windows Phone privacy / contact syncing setting was the culprit.)

<comment><USER7> Not to be a cracked record, or anything, but this is why I don't use cloud services.

What else is hanging around on profiles you don't know about and didn't ask for? You don't know! It's all hidden in ~the cloud~ where you can't see it or do anything about it.

The answer is not to have a go at the hackpad guys, it's to not centralise everything on google.

<comment><USER6> Well, yeah, I never even asked (intentionally) for this photo to be sent to Google in the first place. Like you say, I don't store this stuff on "the cloud". So Windows Phone holds the blame for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't visit hackpad.com it has a backdoor php/rst.ac

<comment><USER9> MSE notified me that it had quarantined a threat. I didn't realize it was this website -_-

<comment><USER8> Same here. But I deleted the quarantined file and reloaded the site to verify. MSE notified me again. 0_0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this a link to a tweet?

I don't see any mention of this on their site, so that's probably why... Looks they did get acquired by dropbox: [https://hackpad.com/Hackpad-is-teaming-up- with-Dropbox-m1Fne...](https://hackpad.com/Hackpad-is-teaming-up-with- Dropbox-m1Fne5A6Lzn)

So yay! More open source code, but it will probably be unmaintained.

<comment><USER11> They got acquired a long time ago. This was announced in an email to current members, with more information coming soon regarding the specifics. The email was posted on hn yesterday, but it didn't get as much attention as the tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guess the code will live here: [https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad](https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad)

</comment><comment><USER13> So what separates this from Trello (which is an amazing (and also free) project? I don't really see anything that sets it apart, right off.

<comment><USER14> I haven't tried hackpad, but if hackpad can (now) be described as an open- source Trello, that would be great. That opens up the option for self hosting, even if it's on a VM like a Digital Ocean droplet.

<comment><USER15> I have tried both (kind of, only etherpad not hackpad).

They are not the same.

Seems [http://libreboard.com/](http://libreboard.com/) is trying to be an open source alternative to Trello. (Found it as one of the first apps available on sandstorm.io)

<comment><USER16> Did libreboard ever quit ganking Trello's graphical assets? That was a real issue when I first saw it announced a couple of months ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I generally think open sourcing software is a good thing. But what does it me to the project in this case? Is Hackpad droped by Dropbox?

</comment><comment><USER18> "Hackpad has been acquired by Dropbox."

 _closes tab_

<comment><USER19> well, the news is they are going open source. Does it matter they were acquired by Dropbox one year ago? Maybe that's exactly why now they are going open source.

<comment><USER20> Well the issue that is unsaid right now is this: "We are shutting down development and are dumping this onto Github if anyone wants to use the code or the community needs to maintain it."

This could just mean it's a dead project.

<comment><USER19> and that there are a great opportunity for open source community to make it better. It's a great piece of software in terms of usability.

<comment><USER20> Without a active maintainer unfortunately it is just dead bits. I haven't officially heard anything that this is the case but "usually" these kind of announcements mean that development has stopped.

It is still better to do this than just close the door and hide the code, but ...

<comment><USER6> See: Google Wave. It's still in the Apache Incubator and doesn't look much different.

[https://incubator.apache.org/wave/](https://incubator.apache.org/wave/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh, ok, so Hackpad which is a fork of an open source software is now open source (again)? Wanna cookie for this?</comment>


Might Google Buy the New York Times? - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/01/might_google_buy_the_new_york.html

<comment><USER2> I hope not. I agree that this would be a good exit for the NYT, and I love the NYT, but I don't get the feeling this is a good idea for either party. Google and the NYT are in pretty separate businesses, and I think it could be bad for Google's individual businesses if Google turned into a GM-style conglomerate.

On the other hand, if Google has some clever ideas to make the #1 American news source of the 20th century into a pioneer of news in the 21st century then I'll support it 100%. But this article is just some random guy speculating that it'd be a good fit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The New York Times, on the other hand, is about _creating_ information. They also maintain a big archive, but that's not their first priority. Doesn't sound like a good fit to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can tell you for sure that the big publishing companies are scrambling to find other ways to build up their online presence. I recently left a company that was catering to those publishers by building vertical social network communities for them. I feel like we may end up seeing an RIAA-type scramble of the big publishers (news corp, dow jones, reed reed elsevier) to stay relevant. Perhaps we already are, actually...

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill I can't see that it would work. Too different a culture, and really what would Google get out of it?</comment>


Live screencasting solution - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN. What cost-effective tools would you use to broadcast your screen in real-time to paying viewers and a (configurable) delayed transmission to non-paying viewers? <comment><USER2> What is "cost effective" to you in terms of dollars?

<comment><AUTHOR> the minimum amount to get this functional.</comment></comment>


Will That Be Trash or Credit? - <AUTHOR> http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_06_29/caredit.a1200072 <comment><USER4> One of the linked stories is much more interesting:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed- lig...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-light-on-an- antibiotic-discovery-and-a-mentors-betrayal.html?pagewanted=all)

Apparently Selman Waksman's 1952 Nobel in medicine is fraudulent, and it was his grad student who made the discovery (isolation of the antibiotic streptomycin -- first treatment for tuberculosis). He falsely claimed to have done it himself and slandered his student to discredit him.

<comment><USER5> Here is Schatz's side of the story, which based on my readings about the case seems entirely true (and thus motivated my username selection): [http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=stre...](http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=streptomycin&itemnum=001)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't have these trust issues with my professor over my research project... we understand that we will post to ArXiv when the research is done. I think you should try to pick not just good research projects but also good people.

I started off knowing this professor by going to his office hours. I would ask questions and he would answer. As I got to know him I realize that he was very nice.

Paranoia is a part of research though. You have to realize that what you are working on you don't really want to get scooped though. You do want to keep your research projects "secret" until they are done. This means until you have figured out whats unique you shouldn't post to arxiv. But, you are free to tell others.

Due to the fact that we hear about events like this in news sources it shows that plagarism and issues of who gets credit are relatively rare. For the most part science does give credit where its due.

That doesn't mean it could be better. There is a stark disconnect between grad students and professors. Why don't we value grad students more anyways? Aren't they creating the future? Shouldn't they make at least $30k? I guess we just want them to live a bohemian lifestyle until they graduate. Or they must have rich parents to support them until they are self sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the things that struck me while I was reading the article (besides the subliminal implication that go-getter graduate students all read Science!) is that while I new of all the discoveries mentioned, I didn't know any of the discoverers. I use MRI, but I know the company that makes the machines and the software, not which obscure dude in some corner of the world first published the technique.

This is something that is common to all human existence. Enjoy your work and your own accomplishments. Don't worry too much about the adulation from others, especially strangers. It is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is that six month rule about adapting to whatever new level of fame/wealth you attain, so that you keep wanting more.

PS. Another point, PhDs in the UK and Germany often take 3 years. It's only in the US that the concept of keeping graduate students on leash for more that six years has been honed to an art.

<comment><USER8> I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program (whereas in the US they usually don't), so it isn't quite comparable.

<comment><USER9> "I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program"

Definitely not true - unless this has changed recently. I went pretty much directly from a 4 year BSc(Hons) to working as an Research Associate while attempting a PhD.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. My only source for this is the book "How to Get a PhD" by Phillips and Pugh.

<comment><USER9> From looking around it appears that the research councils now require a Masters degree before they will fund you for a full-time PhD studentship - <USER2> that's the funding body, not the entrance requirement for a particular university/department. I'm pretty sure that didn't used to be the case (I considered doing a PhD via a research council studentship before I got offered an RA post).

Note my knowledge is probably wildly out of date - my experience in academia was from '89-'95.

There might also be other sources of funding that don't have this requirement - unless you are converting from another area and need the Masters to get up to speed I'm not sure what it would achieve. All of the people I knew who did have an MSc before doing a PhD had done a "conversion" MSc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an academic in math (perhaps the lab sciences are different, I speak only for what I know), I find this absurd. Perhaps mathematicians are nicer than other academics, but within math I have never heard firsthand of any story of this kind.

The advice given is breathtakingly cynical. You take risks by sharing your accomplishment, yes, but if you don't describe your accomplishment to others then you are depriving yourself of oxygen. Communication is the lifeblood of science, and in math at least, others are 1000x more likely to help you than to screw you over.

I would recommend, to anyone pursuing a Ph.D. in math at least, that they categorically ignore this advice. Hell, I'm confused as to why anyone prepared to believe this would want to get a Ph.D. at all.

<comment><USER11> It's an article about biology, where it's actually understating the behavior, as others have noticed. The subtext that no one has pointed out yet is how provincial biology is. Biologists fervently ignore other fields. I think it's partially because they're not as bright as physicists, chemists, or other scientists, partially because they are poorly trained, and partially because it would be so embarrassing to have their culture contrasted with a healthier one.

<comment><USER12> Yes, yes, and yes, however I believe one of the primary reasons why the academic culture in the field of biology became toxic is that it had become a common practice to have multiple authors in a publication. Initially the practice was quite benign because many experiments indeed require expensive instruments and knowledge of some quite specialized skills, however, this practice was kept unchecked (there is no real penalty of any sort how many authors you add to the paper, except that some authors themselves may object to having to share credit), which allowed for cliques to become established where you basically have a few "friends", and you try to add those friends to every paper you publish for some very minor help/advice they offer, and your friends in turn try to add you to every paper they publish for very minor help/advice from you. This has become an effective method to boost publication count and thus ability to obtain funding without doing any real hard work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sucks to be this guy, but that's academia for you and the described situation is not surprising at all. Academia has all the petty jealousy and small town politics of rural hick towns populated by the Hatfields and McCoys.

Given that it's a total wash out, this guy should name and shame.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is one of the worst articles I've ever seen posted at HN. All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv. The author seems to have a tinfoil-hat-tier view of science, and has absolutely no business selling a book to grad students. The seventh tip in the article ("be male") makes me wonder whether this writer has any experience at all doing science in the past twenty years (he mentions Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958, way to be contemporary!)

<comment><USER5> > All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips > could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv.

That's incredibly naive. If you make a breakthrough discovery in biology and you unilaterally post it on arXiv (or wherever) before submitting it to a journal, your advisor will probably strangle you, at best.

<comment><USER15> I'm a professor. If my student unilaterally posted something on arXiv, I would strangle him/her, at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Credit and recommendation are fundamental to any human endeavor - <USER3> applied to Ph.D candidates, poverty and access to capital, patents, or a plethora of other complex societal issues. If nothing else, I always find it interesting to learn how different sections of the society deal with these issues.

Though, I did like the other PhD article(<http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD- memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf>) on HN better as it provides a more balanced story.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if Ph.D candidates in Psychology whose dissertations are on credit and recommendation ever have these issues?

<comment><USER16> Just cuz you understand the system, doesn't mean you are free from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> First of all, the link's title is misleading, a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student, the text doesn't say anything about that.

Second, is the story supposed to be true or just a story? "Yet my friend, whom we'll call Ben, was set to do just that." - the whole thing reads more like a setup to the book the article is trying to push.

<comment><USER19> ... _a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student_...

This is actually not true. PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam; this usually takes 1-2 years. Therefore, most first-year PhD students are not yet PhD candidates.

<comment><USER20> > PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set > amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam

This varies from university to university. Some of them do not have the qualifier exams and you are working towards your PhD from day one. Although there is usually some amount of course work still involved as overall requirements for graduating.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough. Every program I was accepted to, though, did not grant you candidacy from the start as you first had to complete your courses and pass one or more exams.

<comment><USER20> I went to CMU LTI and they don't have a candidacy exam. As per this link: <http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm> UTA and UMD don't have one. I checked Univ of Edinburgh and INRIA across the pond and they also don't seem to have one. All this is for the computer science PhD programs only. Things may be different for pure sciences.

<comment> excuse-me A few British universities did have candidacy. There was a financial penalty from the research council if a certain percentage of your students didn't finish in 3 or 4 years - so the university would make everyone a candidate and only count them as a PhD student for the stats once it looked like they would do OK. Eventually this evolved to being a candidate right up to when you submitted so there was a 100% completion rate but the research councils wised up to the scam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The conclusion of the article is sad - the great scientist is becoming a lawyer. There are already too many lawyers [http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers- in-...](http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers-in-america/)

</comment><comment><USER22> "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." -Sayre

</comment><comment><USER23> Franklin didn't share in the 1962 Nobel for the simple reason that she was dead.</comment>


Apple's New Design Ethos: Making Gadgets Easy to Sell, Hard to Use - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90168094/apples-new-design-ethos-making-gadgets-easy-to-sell-hard-to-use <comment><USER2> Apple has been living on their reputation for design for years now, rather than actually producing good designs. The #$&@^ headphone adaptors I constantly attach when I want to use my iPhone and detach when I want to use my MacBook Pro are the obvious case in point. Who really cared that the phone was ever so slightly thinner? And all the times I can't use my headphones at all because I'm in one place and the damn adapter is somewhere else. I have three adapters and it still happens.

When I finally go over to Android, it will be because of Apple's designs, not in spite of them.

<comment><USER3> How can that be a case in point? Apple has been aggressively removing ports for years. See the floppy drive, non-USB ports in the iMac, CD drive in the MacBook Air, 30 pin connector...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Calling this a "new design ethos" ignores Apple's history. They've had their share of hard-to-use duds in the past, such as the puck mouse. And they have their share of extraordinarily well designed devices today: who would dare say that AirPods are "hard to use?"

One thing that never changes is articles like this.

</comment><comment><USER4> The MacBook Pro's key stick issue is extremely annoying when it happens, but it's easy to remove a key to blow dust out by using a guitar pick to pry on the side nearest the screen:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yZsc6JnFcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yZsc6JnFcQ)

<comment><USER5> Don't do this to the space bar! I used the same trick as the video to fix/clean several keys out and had a pretty good feel for what I was doing.

However the stress/weak points on the spacebar are quite different and you're more likely, as I did, to lift the entire butterfly mechanism out. You will not get this back in again. It's $700 to get the thing fixed at Apple but you can buy replacement keys for $100 per shot online.</comment></comment>


The Struggle to Save Heirloom Rice in India (2019) - happy-go-lucky https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-struggle-to-save-heirloom-rice-in-india/ <comment> happy-go-lucky Here's the article, halfway through. Search for "The Struggle to Save Heirloom Rice in India"

[http://riceplusmagazine.blogspot.com/2019_10_17_archive.html](http://riceplusmagazine.blogspot.com/2019_10_17_archive.html)</comment>


Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups?  And any regrets? - <AUTHOR> Over the last few days I've seen people post their lists of failed startups.  What is not clear, however, is how many man-hours (or man-months or man-years), that were spent on these failed startups: were they working full-time on them, burning their own finances, or were these side-projects while working in full-time employment?<p>So I was wondering: how many man-hours (man-months, man-years etc) have you spent on your "failed" projects?  And do you have any regrets?<p>(NB: I use the terms "wasted" and "failed" loosely). <comment><USER2> I've spent most of my adult life in failed startups in some form or another. Some were funded, most were bootstrapped. Probably 6-8 man-years if I subtract my dances with full-time employment (I'm doing contract work now and working on another startup on the side with a partner).

I have no regrets. I've asked myself a couple of times if it was worth it, and to be honest I can't think of anything else I would have rather been doing at the time. It's not like playing slot machines, hoping someday to hit the jackpot. It's more like an obscure artist trying to find his niche—you do it because this is who you are.

If I never have a big success, I'll die satisfied knowing I was doing what I felt I should be doing. I read a quote from a post on this list some years ago, I wish I could remember the source. But it was something like, "When I look back on my career, I want to say, 'Boy, that was a fun ride!' not 'Boy, I sure felt safe!'"

<comment><USER3> I think the quote is from Tom Preston-Werner's post "How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub" [http://tom.preston- werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...](http://tom.preston- werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html)

<comment><USER2> And how's that for serendipity: the original was posted exactly two years ago to the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends how you define 'failed' -- I spent about 20 months (and all my money, and some other people's) on a startup that has ultimately gone nowhere, but has taken me to some fantastic places and will undoubtedly be part of the reason I succeed.

It'll take me another year or so to pay back all that I owe, and to get to financial break-even; and another year or two to save enough to start my next big project, at worst, but that's not stopping me doing stuff on the side, oh no.

Lessons:

Build a product. I turned out to be awesome at selling an idea, and myself, but got too caught up in that to actually execute on a product. I'm only now turning the work I did over that time into something useful to hopefully recoup some of the money, sweat and tears I poured in.

Follow your instinct. (YMMV. I've learnt over the last two years that my instinct is usually spot on, and spending months convincing myself otherwise is entirely fruitless.)

No experiences are ever wasted. Coming to YC to interview (we didn't get in) was absolutely worth it and was part of the reason I've ended up in the Valley.

Pick a landlord who won't mind if you pay your rent a little late.

Pick advisors who understand your business and who understand business itself. Running a web platform startup I had an advisor who had never started his own company and who didn't understand Twitter (a core part of my technology).

People will evangelise you if you impress them. Do it.

</comment><comment><USER5> First startup was a consulting firm when I was 21. I turned freelance clients into a business with a partner. I left my job to focus full time on it for about 6 months burning through savings (I did have a mortgage).

Second startup was a photo sharing startup 3 years later in 2004. We both left our jobs at ClearChannel before we got funding but secured an angel round about 3 months later. That lasted a year and a half before we ran out of money. We made the mistake of rebranding and rewriting the product with the funding (won't do that again). By the time we were ready to market 9 months had gone by and we didn't have a lot of money left.

Currently bootstrapping and looking for when I can leave my day job. We don't have traction yet but I spent 4 weeks hitting the streets and talk to customers (students).

I'm 32 now and after every startup I swear I'm done but I can't not do this. It's in my blood. I apologise to my wife on a regular basis for it. Thankfully she's always been supportive. Two times since we got married 3 years ago and I've looked her in the eyes and said "I think I need to quit my job" twice already.

Hoping the third time is a charm :)

</comment><comment><USER6> You can't think about things like this. You are, at the core, composed of your history of things that you tried and what you learned doing them.

As I learned here, you cannot give in to regret. You have to pick yourself up and resolve not to make the same mistakes.

</comment><comment> DanI-S No matter how many precious post-work hacking hours are burned on things that turn out to be a dead end, it probably adds up to less than the average person spends watching TV...

<comment><USER7> That's what I keep telling myself :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I spent 7 years, full time in failed startups, I would declare 3-4 of that "wasted".

For the first 2-3 years, we were reasonably well funded (by both Investors and customers) and doing interesting work. I was drawing a reasonable but not optimal salary, and getting paid each month.

After about 3 years, the money was getting tight, on paper, salaries had remained flat, but they weren't being paid regularly or in full. However, we were targeted for acquisition by a major software company, who pulled out (due to having made a different, but unrelated major acquisition). At this point, one of my colleagues had the good sense to call it a day, and go work at a bank.

We spent the next year keeping our heads above water, drawing reduced salary when cash flow allowed, looking for that major company to come back and buy us.

Here is where, in hindsight, the wasted years kicked in. I stuck around looking for the jackpot like a bad gambler, as, I think, did my colleagues. The company was making just enough income that the downfall was a slow bleed, rather than a haemorrhage. We stagnated, I stopped doing anything interesting, and stopped caring. Eventually I left for something more stable. I was not alone in my egress.

Some of my former colleagues are still at it, I believe that with fewer mouths to feed, they are profitable enough, even though they are even more stagnant than before.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've burned perhaps a hundred hours on projects which did not go anywhere in the last five years. Actually, I don't like that phrasing. Let me try again: I have spent a hundred hours learning that I have better options than two ideas which seemed like winners until I had done some work on them.

<comment><USER10> You have only wasted 100 hours in the last five years?!? Holy crap that is awesome efficiency. That is only about 2.5 weeks of going down a fruitless path.

<comment><USER9> Closer to four months, given how many hours I had to work on my business at the time. It is still cheap at the price, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 2-3 years on Searching.com/Searching.ca. I definitely regret a wide swath of it, mostly not being more daring and trying out more things. They had me (a junior programmer albeit with a College degree) building out large parts of their infrastructure, then switching things at the drop of a dime. (picked up some good skills in the aftermath)

There were so many opportunities for me to have left.

\- When I realized the business plan basically was formulated around a domain name.

\- When a superior said "We don't have to build anything new, what people want is one place to get everything and we'll provide it to them". (Basically a "Don't innovate" directive)

\- When the investors sued because they contended they company was trying to steal corporate resources (mostly domain names). (I don't think my boss was, but clearly there was a lack of trust on both sides)

\- When a superior asked us to all go onto Digg and "digg down" people who had taken issue with him for trying to purchase wiki.com for 2 million dollars.

Eventually, even the depressed shadow-of-myself left after my boss said "I'm going to make Bittorrent legal! The labels will have to accept it because it will be the same as a swap meet". I realized the writing was on the wall and I had to get out. (This was... after 6 months of not getting paid)

I left about a month after and had a more interesting startup experience at Soundpedia (didn't work out either, but I have zero regrets and loved every minute of it)

I regret that I let my early start on RoR waste away while I was building stuff in PHP and Perl/Mason for them. (ouch) I regret that I didn't have the courage to try to do something on my own, or to go to the states to try working for a more properly managed startup. I regret that I didn't have a more social environment (since I was working remotely). Finally, I regret that I let myself get carried away. It was a classic story of manipulation of a green wild-eyed college kid. Someone posted a while back about the classic pattern of manipulation in an open source project and my experience fit that to a T.

Now when I look back, I can kinda laugh about it all. I learned, moved on, and I gained a lot of skills after doing so. Was I stupid? Hell yes; but it's the kind of stupid you can get away with once in your life.

Would I work for a startup again? Absolutely, even if I had no stake in the business. However, no more remote working, and I won't accept a job where I can't perform excellently.

</comment><comment><USER12> You are an artist. You think of ideas, and you turn them into software others can interact with. You are always in the process of creation. There is not one second wasted, so long as your goal is to create. Painters do not look back at the last 100 canvases and ask "How many hours have I wasted?". They just paint. So paint, or should I say "Code".

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm one of the people who posted a list of failed startups ("10 web start-ups (all mine) ... and why they failed").

I've been fortunate to always have a day job that I enjoy, and I've never really sunk big money into any of my side projects, so I'm not in debt.

I look at much of the time I've spent on my projects as time that I would have "wasted" some other way, if I weren't working on them.

Although none of my projects brought me fortune or fame, here's what I got out of them:

* Better coding skills, which has certainly helped me in my day job.

* An assortment of functions and classes that I can re-use in future projects.

* A lot of fun.

<comment><USER14> Link please? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I spent probably 6 months to an entire year working on failed or unreleased projects. Some were just little things to learn the language, like a trojan written in VB6 that would do various annoying to the user (like "earthquake" their windows), to a couple of sites I've recently launched that are currently too complicated and/or just not valuable to anybody except me. My outlook at this point is admittedly pessimistic.

Lessons learned, in no particular order, except for the last:

\- If you need to explain your app to customers in more than one sentence, or if that sentence contains any four-or-more syllable words, or if any of those words' definitions fail the above two criteria, it will probably fail.

\- If you are working on a project to scratch your own itch, confirm that other people have a rash.

\- Do not give in to feature creep, unless that feature presents itself immediately and without intervention. For example: Back-end features to improve search results: good. Sliders, filters, color coding, additional search options, menus, extra words, animations, hover effects, etc, will probably only confuse people, unless you are a UX genius, in which case those features will merely go unused.

\- People trust their gut instinct on what something does, rather than read instructions, or discover, or wander into unfamiliar territory. Find the design for your product that mimics something people have used to solve a similar problem.

\- People are generally incapable of abstraction. If you are the "x of y", that means people need to thoroughly understand x, y, and what it means to abstract one to the other.

\- People will exert very little effort into learning something unless the rewards are immediate, have been stated to them by a trusted source, or are made extremely enticing.

\- Ideas that require a critical mass of users to be useful are easy to come by, nearly impossible to execute.

\- Hope for the best, expect failure.

\- Stay the fuck away from anything "meta," or anything involving variables. People like being served things that they pick from a menu, or that people suggest. The most complicated task the average person has to deal with, on any regular basis, is probably choosing multiple toppings for a pizza.

\- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy. Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the implementation.

\- Presentation is much more important than you'd like to believe.

\- It is far better to be lucky than any of the above. Yes, you can slightly increase your chances of being "lucky," but don't kid yourself.

<comment><USER16> _\- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy. Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the implementation._

Doesn't this conflict with the general sentiment that ideas are near-worthless unless implemented well? Can you elaborate? Are you referring to rapid iterations (i.e. have a 'good idea' for feature x, and launch a crappy implementation, AND THEN iterate until the implementation has evolved to maturity)?

<comment><USER15> In terms of a product's success, ideas without implementation are as worthless as implementation of a shit idea. Granted, at least by implementing something you practice your craft and personally get something out of it, but if the idea isn't good to begin with, you're not likely to achieve success.

The awesomeness of your idea is like a multiplier. You can easily come up with an idea 10 times as awesome, and any implementation of that will be presumably be 10 times as successful. You can't as easily implement something 10 times better. This is all voodoo mathematics, anyway. You don't have to believe it if you don't want to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I spent two and a half years in 2000 to 2002 developing some sort of global cloud computing platform 10 years too soon :) -see below.

Then I've spent another couple of years on and off, (re)developing an archive management system that may finally become a reality soon, at its 4th iteration and rewrite :)

Anyway these were years well spent; I've learnt a lot.

The first startup story: it ran out of cash, utter failure and sad ending. Basically we had glorious plans of world domination :) but we never had the money to actually make it. The CEO (who brought us 90% of the funding) ended completely broke after burning through € 15 millions in a couple of years. We went through quite a spectacular series of failures :

      * we started the project 6 months to 1 year late. Real work started in
      March 2000, just before the dotcom bust (Doh).
      * we weren't actually technically qualified to make it through, though we
      tried hard. The project was too complex and too ambitious from the start,
      would have needed literally 100s of millions to build.
      * our main partner and support (SGI) wasn't doing too well.
      * our CEO never managed to get any additional funding. Instead of calling
      a quit after the first year, he kept the sinking boat running, without
      enough resources and people.
      * he literally burnt money : we bought a huge stack of hardware, worth
      more than half a million euros, without having any resources to even *turn
      it on*, simply because he *promised to*. We had a huge colo with big iron
      hardware not even in a runnable state. Sigh...

</comment><comment><USER18> Sometimes I wonder whether I'd have be better off if I had a low paying second job rather than _wasting_ countless hours outside of my 9-5 trying to boot strap start ups.

I'm lucky I just love hacking.

</comment><comment><USER19> Have been doings tons and tons of side-projects hoping them to fly. I will tell you a story. When I was in college, I got an offer from Cambridge University for paid internship (800 pounds per month + travel -- that's a lot for a student). But I was so enthusiastic about startups (thanks to HN!) that I declined that offer and started a _so-called_ startup of recruiting people through social networks. We had a fancy tag-line "infiltrating social networks' and I distinctly remember having day-dreams of dominating the recruiting space with that idea. Needless to say, two months of summer and lot of naivety doesn't translate into success.

No, I don't regret having dropped Cambridge Univ. internship for a failed startup because at that time it seemed perfectly rational thing to do. I'm happy about the lessons I learnt from that stint and it made for a great groundwork for my future startups.

</comment><comment><USER10> My only regrets are the ones I didn't fully launch.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't think anything I ever did was wasted, because I never let it fully consume me and take away all my life. If you're out there having fun and enjoying yourself, even if one part fails you'll remember the rest. If all you had was your business and it fails, then you'll have regrets.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've always gravitated towards startups and small companies, and have, over the years, not made the money I would have if I'd worked for some BigCo year in, year out. I do have some regrets there, as it'd be nice to have more money.

</comment><comment><USER22> Something that's kicked around here a lot: fail quickly.

If a project doesn't fit success criteria I give it about a month before it's pivoted or done.

<comment><USER23> A month, really? Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I started a PC tutoring business in high school that was 100% profitable and then a web design/development firm in college that was also profitable from day one. The only reason why they "failed" was because I wanted someone else to pay me a good salary and benefits when I graduated college. I'm working on a side project at the moment and that may be my first foray into running a business with people I hire.

Regardless, I would never consider these failures, and here's why:

Any venture you do on your own shows initiative and is practice for your programming and business skills - that already places you in the top 1% of software devs. What's the worst that could happen? You build your skills and work for a great company, because any company that fosters entrepreneurial innovation (e.g. Google, Facebook) would LOVE to have you if you built something significant.

So...build a successful business or boost your resume to work for Google/Facebook? Sounds like a win to me.

</comment><comment><USER25> Things I regret: \- Not getting more involved in startups earlier (I should have gotten started in the early 1990s somehow when I first got on the Internet) \- MIT vs. Stanford; being closer to startup ground-zero would have been worth it \- Sticking around various jobs (vs. startups) longer than absolutely necessary; I could have spent maybe 4 years more from 2002-now working on startups vs. contracting and consulting, if I had been more willing to take risks.

I think I've spent maybe 12 months total on startups after I should have left them; sometimes it is clear that for team/market (vs. product) reasons, a given startup is doomed. Until that point, it's still a worthwhile experience, as there is a lot to learn, and it's impossible to know it won't be successful -- after, it is a lot harder to stay motivated, even if the day to day tasks can still be educational.

</comment><comment><USER26> Failed projects don't necessarily mean projects that failed to provide money, fun, and/or experience. If your getting at least one of those factors you are turning a "profit"

</comment><comment><USER27> Many years, and no more wasted than the smaller amount of time I've spent working for big companies.

I guess I'd rather produce a technical success that fails for other reasons (unconnected to me, of course :-) than do work that frequently is a failure for reasons much closer to what I do (e.g. impossible projects that are mandated nonetheless because of politics).

I dislike bureaucracy and _loathe_ office politics, so despite their downsides most startups are a better match for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> 5 years. No Regrets. After 3 years at a multinational and 4 patents later, I quit and learnt a lot. Tried many startups. Burned out. Joined same company again and quit again after a year... and still exploring the landscape. I guess I am addicted. :). I wouldn't trade doing this for another 5 years even if someone offered me a job at a Goog or an FB. 5 years later my responsibilities may take precedence :).

</comment><comment><USER29> I "wasted" a year working on projects in a big company that didn't launch. What I realized at the end of it is that doing anything new is doing research. Null results are useful in the sciences, even if they don't make you famous, and null results are useful in product development even if they don't make you rich. You learn from the experience, and if you share your knowledge, the world learns.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's not a "waste", just a learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER31> How many of your guys' startups didn't get off the ground? Because of project creep/funding/lose of interest/other

</comment><comment><USER32> Spent: a few years on a bevy of projects (some ambitious, some lame) Wasted: not a second</comment>


Let's Stop Talking About the Sexism in Venture - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-stop-talking-sexism-venture-claudia-iannazzo <comment><USER2> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." \- Goodhart's Law

Hiring a minority individual because they are a minority individual and it makes you look better, marginalizes everything else that person is. Which only serves to exacerbate the issue that this action is supposed to be solving.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great observation. So if we have to choose between diversity as a target and as a measure, which would be better ?

I wouldn't take the comparison to affirmative action too far here. Our startup / VC ecosystem exists to drive radical progress and to achieve success where it seems unlikely. So let's go for it and get creative.</comment></comment>


Review of the "Ring" doorbell - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/11/25/ring-is-the-doorbell-i-nev.html <comment><USER2> That reads like an advertisement, but I have one myself and it works pretty well.

Downsides:

\- Hooking it up to the existing wiring wasn't possible in our case, because of electrical incompatibility. Definitely research this ahead of time. Charging is every few months it seems if you turn on motion detection.

\- It makes just one sound, and it's rather annoying. I really wish I could upload a different sound.

\- Prior to the last recharge, but before receiving a battery alert, we had a few cases where you had to press the button a few times before it worked. But that was a few months ago, and it has been working reliably since.

Upsides: everything mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds neat, but: I'd prefer not to send all this video into the cloud, and I don't want the expensive brick this will become if the manufacturer goes out of business or decides to add a monthly fee.

We really need a clean way to self-host or distribute hosting of the cloud part of the IoT. Maybe Sandstorm will serve this purpose some day.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article read at first like a spoof of unnecessarily internet-connected gadgets with one-word names.

Like Wash, a smartphone-operated wifi washing machine (actually that's not a bad idea, let's get onto Kickstarter).

It was only halfway through did I realise it was a serious article about an actual product...</comment>


Kate 19.08.1 released in the Windows Store - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NWMW7BB59HW <comment><USER2> "Kate ships with network transparency". Is that a clumsy way to say it can edit files over ssh & ftp?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes ;=) The store description/feature list needs still tuning.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I need to refactor bootstrap, where do i start - <AUTHOR>

I'm a novice front end developer and I'm fairly new to using frameworks like bootstrap. I have a lot unused code that i would like to remove before building this into a wordpress theme. Any clue as to how i can tackle the task of refactoring in a "safe way".<p>thanks plenty
PS: first post on HN :) <comment><USER2> To start you can go to:

[http://getbootstrap.com/customize](http://getbootstrap.com/customize)

and only select the components you will need. This will provide you with a customized download of Bootstrap.

The only other way is to cut out the individual elements you don't need, but I wouldn't recommend this method as if you ever choose to upgrade or need to modify your theme you will need to go back through and add/remove whatever you need or don't need.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jeff, I appreciate it. I'm also looking into flipping my html and css into a workable wordpress theme so im on the hunt of a quick html/css to PHP tutorial.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh i should also mention that I have uploaded my code on GitHub on my public repo</comment>


College will kill your entrepreneurial spirit: A 9 year old's foray into startups. - <AUTHOR> http://www.violentacres.com/archives/235/college-will-kill-your-entrepreneurial-spirit-while-simultaneously-turning-you-into-a-worker-bee

<comment><USER2> There's merit to the idea that college typically does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, as the prevailing assumption is that you'll go on to apply for a job. Still, I think the author is seriously underestimating the value of going to college, which Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address addresses nicely:

[http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...](http://news- service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html)

Of course, whether or not to stick around until you get your degree is another matter. But I'd argue that much of what you learn about the world, culturally, historically, theoretically, can be invaluable to entrepreurship.

<comment><USER3> If you count dropping out of college, and then attending only classes that interest you -- without being enrolled or paying -- as going to college, then sure. Of course that model of self-directed learning is quite opposite the usual cookie-cutter process where you are told which classes to attend and how many "units" of them you "need".

If everyone did things Steve Jobs's way, college administrators would have heart attacks. For the most part, going to college means jumping through the hoops they tell you to jump through, and they send you home if you don't take the prescribed courses in the prescribed timeframe and pay the prescribed fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I finished high school I spent a few years working then I started my own business. I ran the business for 10 years before selling it two years ago. Recently I joined the worker bees/cubicle side of things ~ from my perspective working as a cubicle slave sucks! I can't wait till my new business can support my life! At any rate the other slaves (almost all college educated) really do live their lives for that two week vacation. But I know the unedamkaed bees (like me) live for that vacation too. So was it college or just a case of the pareto principle in action ~ 80% of the people are worker bees and 20% are entrepreneurs?

<comment><USER5> Why did you sell?

<comment><USER4> Wife got a job offer in VA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article depressed me.

First, 'bad' college will make you despair of life, much less the entreprenurial spirit.

Second, education in this country is so sorely lacking that to crusade AGAINST getting educated is profoundly depressing.

Third, you get what you give. If you go to college and take a bunch of crap courses and cruise your way through, you are not going to learn anything. You can go to Hicksville State and come out with a deep and profound understanding of mathematics, if you put your back into it, and you can go to Harvard and come out a total loser -- which should really shock no one.

Fourth, and most importantly, I found at college I was surrounded with impassioned people who desperately wanted to make a change in the world and to chase their dreams. The depression sunk in when I entered the working world and got a cube job and watched those hopes and dreams shrivel. So I quit, and I decided to start programming this service. Hopefully, something will come of it, and I'll be able to get a private beta going in the next few weeks before law school starts (which I am attending in the hopes it will help me understand my business better...)

Basically, this makes me sad about whatever college this poor guy went to, obviously it was not very good.

<comment><USER3> > to crusade AGAINST getting educated is profoundly depressing.

That's pretty much the opposite interpretation of what was intended, I think.

Learning is always encouraged. The point was not to throw away your life by joining the cookie-cutter brigade where you get molded to be like everyone else and your originality is stamped out of you so you can be a cubicle drone working for The Man (tm).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It probably depends a lot on which college you go to. MIT? No question - that'll do good things for your entrepreneurial spirit.

However, I agree with the idea in two situations:

1\. It does not really FOSTER entrepreneurial spirit - you must cultivate a seed of that elsewhere, and

2\. Only a very limited set of colleges do NOT completely kill it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The piece kept me reading, but I couldn't disagree more with this part:

"...College does not turn people into free thinking individuals who will someday have the whole world at their feet. It turns them into worker bees that will spend their lives in cubicles just so long as they get 2 weeks paid vacation time per year."

<comment><USER8> What about it do you disagree with?

<comment><USER7> Just that college, for me, was the opposite of this vocational training ground. It was this beautiful, theoretical, pure learning environment that discouraged placing limits on what you could do with your life.

Now, sure, some people enter the cube farm (and stay there) right after college, but I don't think it was college that made those people do that. I think it was everything else (e.g., family, the desire to have material things, the need to be "normal", etc).

<comment><USER9> It depends where you go. My school wasn't like that either, but from what I've heard about a lot of places, it seems pretty accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I suspect a lot of the disagreement expressed here is due to the nature of the people who read ycnews (and the colleges they went to).

Entrepreneurially-minded people view college as this wonderful opportunity to learn, experiment, develop... while, most students are there for a few years of leisure followed by a lifetime of wagework, and as far as I can see most universities do little to dissuade them of this notion

</comment><comment><USER11> College may not be the one actually killing your entrepreneurial spirit. Most colleges just put a contract out on you. Societal hivemind thinking (which begins when you're a child) and the face-time-driven workplace are the actual hitmen that take you out.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Right now, 6 of the 10 richest people in America are proud college dropouts. The other 4 inherited their wealth. Hell, Dakota Fanning has made more money than most people will make in a lifetime and she's still in middle school."

Source?

<comment><USER3> Probably Forbes. The 4 are the Waltons, of WalMart fame. As for the others: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Sheldon Adelson. Warren Buffet did get a degree, so actually of the top 10 (2006 list) it's 1 degree, 4 inherited, and 5 drop-outs. Buffett was already an entrepreneur with several revenue streams and felt college would be a waste of time, but he went because his father wanted him to.

And of course Steve Jobs dropped out (and started attending only the classes that piqued his interest), and Woz didn't get his degree until after Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great blog and a fascinating literary experiment.

</comment><comment><USER14> If this person actually had a good college education they'd understand the concept of opportunity cost. The more well educated you are, the higher your opportunity cost.

Having a top college in your pocket can also help build your network if you use it right. The author also misinterprets causation and correlation. Just because X% of the richest people in America are dropouts is meaningless. What % of the total population has a college degree? Probably something like 30%. That just shows this guy's article is poorly thought out.

It's a nice sensational headline but it falls flat on its face in terms of logic.</comment>


Rapgenius Uniques Fall 90% - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantcast.com/rapgenius.com? <comment><USER2> Ok, how can Rap Genius recover from this? They're one of the best (and least shady) lyrics sites on the net. They acted immorally, yes, but is justifiable to summarily execute their company?

Google has a domineering position in the market, and it's a bit ironic that people were quick to call for Microsoft to be split into multiple companies about a decade ago, yet nobody bats an eye when Google exercises their power. (I personally don't believe either company should be split; just pointing out an interesting parallel.)

So what can Rapgenius do? Are they screwed?

EDIT: Also, how long does the penalty last for? I think people are assuming 30 days, but is that really the case?

Even still, 30 days is a _long_ time. They may not be okay afterwards. Whereas, say, a week-long ban would've had the same deterrent effect.

<comment><USER3> There is no execution going on. They knowingly engaged in blackhat SEO. Now they are paying the rather well-known penalty. They need to wait it out while that penalty is active (likely slimming down their burn rate) and focus on gaining customers through other avenues.

Or kill their brand and reboot as a different one with a different URL on a different IP.

<comment><USER4> Do not underestimate domain age/link age in calculation of pr. Moving to a brand new domain would forfeit all of that.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention all inbound links.

<comment><USER6> HTTP 301 ?

<comment><USER5> A penalized site is unlikely to be allowed to pass on its PR.

<comment><USER6> Right. But the inbound links can still get to the new site. What I got from your comment was concern for other websites who linked to RapGenius, and the users of those websites...

<comment><USER5> Well, 301ing them is probably going to apply the penalty to the new brand, making the technique useless for getting back in search results. _Not_ 301ing them means you're starting out with PR0 all over again, in which case you might as well just wait out the penalty period. In either situation, the rebrand on a new domain solution sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not only is this bad for RapGenius, it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users. Yes, RapGenius screwed up, and they've paid the price. But they've publicly recognized what they did and apologized. Google really should reinstate their ranking, because people searching for lyrics right now are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites from days of yore.

<comment><USER8> >it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users

BS.

What's _good_ for Google is showing people that if you engage in bad practices _your shit will get nuked from orbit_ , even if your site is better than the competitors.

You'd better believe that companies are going to avoid blackhat SEO in the future after this, and that's absolutely in Google's interests.

<comment><USER9> More specifically, companies are going to avoid entering markets (e.g. online lyrics databases) where Google has demonstrated an unwillingness to appropriately punish established players who use the same black hat practices, since it's impossible to compete in the organic rankings against them.

<comment><USER8> >an unwillingness to appropriately punish established players

Can you find another example of the other lyrics sites pushing a quid pro quo scheme on _Twitter_?

The other lyrics sites might be scummy and Google doesn't care -- or they might just cover their tracks enough to avoid giving Google enough proof to hang them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Luckily their revenue has remained unchanged... $0. This could have been a financial disaster if Rap Genius was a real business, but you need to have revenue for that.

<comment><USER11> Many people would kill to have a site with millions and millions of uniques. If monetization HAD to be the primary focus, they could make money. Growth and product is the top priority. Unfortunately for them one of those is suffering right now.

<comment><USER3> A site with millions of uniques doesn't = revenue. Nor does it equal success, interest from investors, etc. Source: running a ~2m unique site right now.

<comment><USER12> I have used your site quite often and was wondering why did you decide to make the downloaded program be wrapped with your executable? Why not just have a .rar/.zip of the actual program.

<comment><USER3> Quite a few reasons: [http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf](http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app#whypaf)

<comment><USER12> There are sound arguments towards it. But _Better Upgrading_ scares me.

<comment><USER3> It shouldn't :) Back with Firefox 1.x I think, we were using ZIP files and always supported unzip over the old one. But we ran into a situation where if a file was there from the previous version, it would remain since the new version no longer had that file. Oddly, the new version would try to use the old file and crash. That was back when I was only doing Firefox and Thunderbird, I think. As we added in apps like OpenOffice and GIMP it became much more of an issue.

So, we have the PA.c Installer able to take directives like whether or not to preserve everything in App, whether to preserve or remove specific files, whether to preserver or remove specific directories, etc. In addition to overwriting the existing files with the new ones, of course. This made life a lot easier on everyone. And users didn't need to worry about manually deleting specific directories but keeping others when updating. You just point the new version to the same X:\PortableApps\AppNamePortable directory and it intelligently upgrades. It even supports custom code for things that fall outside those simple keep/preserve so we can specifically remove certain settings on an upgrade where a given app breaks its own settings and doesn't support the old ones, etc.

For example, I just wrote the package for FreeCommander XE Portable for the publisher to release. The new one doesn't support the old settings and will break if they remain, so I have the installer back them up within Data (just in case the user wants to revert manually later). I then had it read the preferred language from the old settings and write them into the new ones for the user for convenience. I could get more explicit and read/write other settings as well if I had the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To recap. Google's algorithm is terrible, and despite having more PhDs on board than my uni, can be played by anyone with two brain cells and a mildly popular Twitter account.

To rectify this, they crippled my search results by penalizing Rapgenius and instead pushing some AZlyrics junk that not only lacks annotations but is inaccurate.

Seems like an easy fix, for the end user at least, add a keyword search for 'lyrics' to go directly to Rapgenius, right? No. Here's a search for smoke on the water

[http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water](http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water)

First result? Pro Era – Like Water. Second? Childish Gambino – I. The Worst Guys. Third? Smoke DZA – Diamond.

Arguably the most popular song in the history of rock and roll? Sixth.

Those are some of the smartest people on the planet. I'm not being sarcastic. How depressing.

<comment><USER6> They didn't really push AZLyrics, or any other lyrics site up. Those rankings haven't changed. Their position relative in the list you see based on your search terms has, but that's _relative_.

Why should Google give special dispensation to RapGenius? Why should putting in something like "lyrics" or related content to someone being penalized get them to show up higher in the results?

Why should Google be RapGenius' search engine? Why shouldn't RapGenius make their search better?

<comment><USER13> RapGenius should have a better search. And Google shouldn't give special dispensation to RapGenius, it should return best possible results.

Which they don't after excluding RapGenius. They purposefully broke their search results to protect their broken ranking method.

<comment><USER6> How is their ranking method broke? Most searches you make probably give you what you want within the top five results (excluding lyrics, as you've shown a weird need to have RapGenius be the source of your lyrics).

How can you _prove_ RapGenius is the "best result"? Especially considering that courts have ruled that ranking algorithms are just opinions. You can be of the opinion that RapGenius is better, but that's your _opinion_. Multiple people can also be of the same opinion, which is a huge factor involved in Google's ranking algorithm. Another huge factor involved in their ranking algorithm is dissuading blackhat SEO techniques, which can make it appear like lots of people are of the opinion something is good.

So, again, while you are of the opinion RapGenius is the best lyrics site, I'm not, even before all this brouhaha started I didn't really like their site, especially the annotations, which to me seemed like a bunch of bored English majors who didn't really have any insights on the annotations they were making, but wanted you to think they were really smart. I also don't listen to rap music, which might also affect my view on the annotations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's pretty scary how much Google controls the internet. I wish Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo weren't so much worse than Google, or I'd happily use them.

<comment><USER15> Give me just 20-30 million dollars, legal protection from any patent claims, and (providing my search engine works well technically) make it the default in a small percentage of all Firefox installs.

What I'm trying to say is, Google doesn't have the monopoly because they're the only ones who can build a good search engine. The have the monopoly because they _do_ have good technology, but also because of path dependence, and because there is no political effort to build up a competitor.

I already posted a couple of days ago, there are a bunch of ways governments could support competitors when one search engine controls a large fraction of the market, say more than 2/3\. For example a special monopoly tax, subsidies for competitors, etc.

One thing I think would be nice is to make search engines offer a free/very cheap API (as long as they have > XX % market share). Anybody can come along and build a Google + Bing + Pokemon-Wiki meta search engine. If you tune it to be profitable, you'll have a lot of competing search engine frontends spring up. But you'll also have a lot of search engine backends (and not just Bing, Google, and Yandex), because its suddenly profitable to build verticals (e.g. indexing just tech news or recipies), which require less resources technically - because the vertical backends get traffic through the competing frontends.

And I could choose a frontend that gives me Google-like searches, or one that interprets terms more literal (like when you use +"term" in Google), which would be great for programming related stuff. There could be another one focussing on social media, or local stuff, etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems somewhat unreasonable to manually penalize a website like this. If you can't figure it out algorithmically then it can't be that bad. Major companies (much bigger than Rap Genius) buy links all the time. How do I know? They have asked me for them. I used to run a financial blog and I know a certain company that bought links from pretty much every personal finance blog that would sell one to them, and I know this for a fact because I was in a network of blogs and talked about this on forums as a way to make money. I also have the emails to prove it.

Why doesn't this company get penalized? I have no idea. I guess nobody decided to write a blog post about it, it didn't get picked up on Hacker News, and Matt Cutts hasn't noticed it yet. Seems like if this is possible there should be a reverse black hat market springing up soon. Do some really bad black hat SEO for your competitors and then get them killed by Google.

</comment><comment><USER17> It wasn't so genius to be expository to random people via email, about a link- back scam. Sorry RapDingus, it's over; maybe next go around you'll have less hubris and daringness in using unethical practices.

[http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack- exposed](http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed)

<comment><USER18> If you think this isn't happening all the time, everywhere -- you're mistaken.

<comment><USER17> Not many funded startups are dumb enough to publicly email folk asking for links in return for tweets/linkbacks. That's pure stupidity; might as well upload a video on a bad political stance with your brand overlayed, because the worms don't stay in the can with any kind of public communication. They should have been more clock-and-dagger with their scheming -- their hubris was their downfall.

Of course many spammy sites use this practice but they don't have the respect from the tech community that Rap Genius warrants as a Y-Combinator funded entity. They lost that, and it's going to be a steep climb for them to find talented folk that want to be part of a seedy operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's interesting is that the number of uniques is on a downward linear trend after the initial penalty.

</comment><comment><USER20> SEO is such a fickle beast.

To everyone here who's saying they brought this upon themselves, when rules are unenforced and all your competition breaks them, you've already hamstrung yourself if you don't break them too.

If everyone in the MLB is juicing and a rookie gets caught, you don't say "what an idiot", you look at either 1) enforcing the rules on everyone and broadly changing the culture or 2) question whether the rules make sense in the first place.

<comment><USER21> No. They broke the terms of service. They got banned. End of story.

<comment><USER20> What's it like seeing the world in black and white?

<comment><USER21> Not sure. I'm too busy seeing all the gray lines that would be created by Google giving preferential treatment to those deemed more "important" when they could have stayed black and white.

<comment><USER20> My point is that punishing RapGenius despite the blatant use of the same tactics by hundreds of other big internet brands IS preferential treatment. The fact that RapGenius' competitors weren't punished is giving THEM preferential treatment.

Either punish everyone or punish no one.

<comment><USER21> You know I think you are right. We should also apply this to murderers.

Find and punish all the murders or let them all go free!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What should Google do in this situation? I fully understand them murdering Rap Genius in their indexes, but it also hurts Google since Rap Genius actually has the best content.

First result for "jay-z holy grail lyrics" Google: [http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/holygrail.html](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/holygrail.html) Bing: [http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-holy-grail-lyrics](http://rapgenius.com/Jay- z-holy-grail-lyrics)

The Bing result is better (though both are valid).

I would suspect that most sites pulling these sort of SEO scams are going to have lousy content, so the rule makes sense, but perhaps there should be some sort of human element to it as well? That's not scalable, though, so I'm not really sure what the best answer for Google is on this one.

<comment><USER6> Is the Bing result really "better"? Lots of people would rather not have the annotations...

Additionally, with AdBlock on, AZLyrics makes only 21 requests and takes 1.03 seconds to load completely on my machine. RapGenius (still with AdBlock on) takes 27 seconds to load, with 208 requests. Based solely on that I'd rather use AZLyrics than RapGenius.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I suppose it's subjective. I personally think the RapGenius result is better, but you make a valid point about the performance and simplicity of the AZLyrics result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hypothetical question: if we ("we" being nebulous) were to unveil that every other major lyrics site (azlyrics, metrolyrics, stlyrics, lyricsfreak, lyrics365, etc. etc.) uses the same SEO tactics, would they receive the same attention and punishment?

<comment><USER15> Someone should just do blackhat SEO for a bunch of those sites, and then Google would have to punish them too (because who could proove that they didn't do it themselves?)

Or taking it one step further, use these tactics to promote a controversial institution or politician (without them knowing). Then "leak" it to Google, so they get punished. Then claim Google is censoring them. Finally enjoy the outrage :-)

<comment><USER24> Domain and page authority weigh in on how much you can get away with link tactics imo. Sites that have been around for a few more years would likely withstand any blackhat tactics a third-party would shoot at them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They'll recover. As much as I dislike their PR attitude (whether an act or not), they have a good product. I still listen to rap music, and I still want to know the meaning of the lyrics, so I'll go directly to the site if I have to. Google made it one click easier, but whatever, I have time.

Companies have survived much worse blows. I worked for a music company that was not only being sued by every major record company, they were also taken out of all app stores. They persisted, and today I still listen to music from their site, even almost a decade later.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's quite painful to watch these guys take this beating. What they've done wasn't nice, but the consequences are extreme. What is most concerning is the monopoly Google Search has over driving traffic/revenue for most sites.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've missed some news lately with Christmas and all. Any context on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The title of this post has annoyed me.

</comment><comment><USER29> damn, they got CUTT

</comment><comment><USER18> "Don't be evil"

Rapgenius got punished for playing the game better than anyone else.

Who's to say this couldn't happen to highly relevant sources of information? Wikipedia? Underground sites?

This is the equivalent of censorship.

<comment><USER3> First, you don't understand what censorship is.

Second, RapGenius cheated the system. They knew they were cheating the system. They violated the public guidelines that tell you not to cheat the system. And now they are paying the price.

Why is that so difficult to grasp?

<comment><USER17> In addition, they had no furtiveness; it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment. I'm guessing they don't have a media relations employee, because any decent quality control would have said direct emails from @rapgenius to random folk about a seedy scheme aren't the best idea. At least a proxy should have been used..

Their emails were wanton risk, the wording had no stealth; they got what they deserved.

<comment><USER30> > it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment.

Exactly so. It seems they were doing it in the open because they didn't understand that anyone would object.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> what if... rapgenius is a beautiful pr stunt cooked by google to show everyone how valuable it is for websites/startups?</comment>


Prynt – Smartphone case printing pictures instantly - <AUTHOR> http://www.pryntcases.com/

<comment><USER2> awesome project. just wonder why any serious prototype has been release for the public?

<comment><USER3> Hello Simon. You can follow our Instagram account to see live pictures and more of our product!</comment></comment>


Scott Adams: I credit MBA program for my success with Dilbert - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/top_mba_schools/ <comment><USER2> I understand OP's sentiment. I place very high value on my MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, but for reasons one wouldn't expect.

I remember almost nothing from the course material itself. You can get that from almost any book. The time value of money, how to read financial statements, the 4 P's of marketing (or was it the 4 B's?), different management theories, etc., etc., etc.

What I remember vividly are the interactions with other people, professors and other students, some of whom already had many years of experience. I'm not sure how else I could have had this experience. Some of my most vivid memories:

"A degree in business is a degree in nothing." - management professor

"What is the correct answer to the question 'How much money did you make?' It's always, 'Who wants to know'?" - managerial accounting professor

A professor of Organizational Behavior told us that a survey of Yale MBA's 25 years after graduation said that Organizational Behavior was their most important course. I couldn't believe it. Years later, I believe it.

A case study had our team pick the next CEO from 4 managers. We were wrong. The actual result: They went outside, for reasons well explained.

Our group made a recommendation to a local business to restructure, letting a key person go. We got an "F" on the project, with the opportunity to go back and redo it without letting anyone go. We got the message.

A marketing professor was picking on stupid products, like Heinz gravy, when a student in the back offered, "I was the product manager for gravy at Heinz. It made us $60 million last quarter. If you'd like to use it for a case study some day, I'd be glad to help you with it."

I don't remember many specifics from class, but I know that I "think differently" because of that experience. Along with a technical background, this has been a great combination.

<comment><USER3> _A marketing professor was picking on stupid products, like Heinz gravy, when a student in the back offered, "I was the product manager for gravy at Heinz. It made us $60 million last quarter. If you'd like to use it for a case study some day, I'd be glad to help you with it."_

This particular story is a great synopsis of business school. You are encountering people who may not know what they're talking about, opening yourself up to new data and new thinking, and being polite and constructive about it. Note who is playing each role in this case, too.

And for the cynics in this thread: you only get to complain about MBA's if you can do their job better than they can. I'm not saying you can't, I'm just trying to be fair.

<comment><USER4> _And for the cynics in this thread: you only get to complain about MBA's if you can do their job better than they can. I'm not saying you can't, I'm just trying to be fair._

I don't think that's fair. Someone definitely has the right to complain if I write a shoddy program, even if they can't program to save their life.

<comment><USER3> That is fair; I suppose I'm trying to draw a line separating general complaining, vs. criticism with an appreciation for the challenges. One is annoying and a waste of time, another has the potential for constructive change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My initial thought was that MBA produces pointy-haired managers -> source of Dilbert cartoon ideas -> MBA gets credit for Dilbert cartoons success.

<comment><USER6> Oh, the irony. That he went to business school is one thing, but I would have expected a different set of benefits, like knowing ones subject (professional managers). And the examples he did give, like listening to his audience, do not seem particularly obtuse. Strange fellow, Mr. Adams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a student at Berkeley, I'm honestly shocked to see that we're ranked higher than Harvard as having the best business school in America. And it's great to learn that at least someone found tremendous value from their business education! (but a perspective we've seen way too little of)

</comment><comment><USER8> I always thought that Dilbert is a source of consolation for beaten down engineers.

Now I understand that in reality Dilbert is meant as MBA HOWTO on managing engineers :)

<comment><USER9> Maybe, for the first few years, but really, when you think about it - isn't Dilbert just a loser? He never improves his lot, he either has no desire to, or no ability to. If no desire to, he is a loser. If no ability to, he is under the mistaken impression he is far smarter and more capable then he is, which means he is also a deluded loser.

(and yes, I know its a cartoon !).

But it does bug me a bit - instead of people feeling sorry for themselves (as the cartoon seems to help people who are coping with grey corporate existence) why not encourage people to change their environment (either bit by bit, or just improving yourself, starting something, finding something, anything).

Dilbert is a loser, feel sorry for him but don't relate to him or else become him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Geez, his readers are downright hostile.

Question: why so much hostility towards MBAs (especially from top schools) in non-MBA-heavy industries, but so much love for them in MBA-heavy industries? One would assume that industry has found them useful, as they continue to hire them.

Bonus question: if you have a startup and someone applies for a job as a product manager and they have the right background, experience, passion, etc, would the fact that they got an MBA from Harvard or Stanford make you more or less likely to hire them?

<comment><USER11> MBAs are strongly associated with the theory that managers can "manage" competently with no domain knowledge whatsoever. This is unpopular conceptually with people who do have domain knowledge, and those folks can point to scads of examples of situations where a newly minted MBA decided he understood something important and fucked everything up.

I think your "industry has found them useful" argument is undermined by the realization that MBAs tend to hire other MBAs, rather like a virus spreading.

<comment><USER12> That's relatively recent thing. In the early days of the MBA, in the 1950s, the point of them was to teach real actual engineers the skills they would need to move up the organization (e.g. if you were a civil engineer who knew all about concrete, the MBA would teach you about the commercial aspects of dam construction so you could manage the whole project).

The modern MBA is a rite of entry into a club and not much more.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I've heard this comment quite a few times on here before, but the MBA was created around the turn of the century, not in the 1950s, and it was created because more companies wanted a scientific approach to management, not to teach "real actual engineers" management skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently looked up Berkeley (Haas), Stanford (GSB) and Harvard (HBS) and was really surprised by the statistics.

I think the most shocking of all was enrollment. My gut said that Harvard would be the most selective but when comparing metrics like pre-enrollment salary & GMAT, Haas and Stanford were more selective. I wouldn't expect such a big difference in enrollment percentage and class size but there is.

Haas '10: 6.3% Applicants: 3779 Enrolled: 240

GSB: 6.7% Applicants: ~5400 Enrolled: 360

HBS '10: 10.3% Applicants: 8661 Enrolled: 900

</comment><comment><USER14> _But on the face of it, I don't see any problem with asking students if they made (cough, cognitive dissonance, cough) wise decisions..._

 _I joke about getting an MBA so I could become a cartoonist, but business school was literally the competitive advantage that made Dilbert a success._

</comment><comment><USER15> Now the question is: apply to an MBA program or continue preparing for my startup?

<comment><USER16> Preparing in what way?

(Saving up seed capital? Cutting down expenditures? Courting co-founders? Market research? Product development?)</comment></comment>


What is the cutoff between "a few" and several? - <AUTHOR> "It will take a few weeks" vs "It will take several weeks".
Just had an argument about setting up incorrect expectations by using "a few".
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Why not consult a domain expert?

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/couple-few- sev...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/couple-few-several-use)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did, and that's exactly why I felt the need to ask, since there doesn't seem to be a proper definition.

It also depends on the context, as is explained in the example given for the usage of few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A few < 10

Several >= 10</comment>


Ask HN: Is it time for official ethical AI regulation? - <AUTHOR> With the big advancements in AI and machine learning, I started to had this thought especially when AI starting to take place in jobs replacing people. So the two questions are: Is it time for such regulation? And who might found such regulation? <comment><USER2> > I started to had this thought especially when AI starting to take place in > jobs replacing people.

At the moment this worries me less.

This week it became clear that tens of people here in Norway have been punished for crimes that didn't exist (the laws use where overriden by EU laws).

Except one or two managers leaving their positions nobody is likely to see any consequences it seems and it is hard for me to see how accountability should be implemented in such a system in a fair way.

What seems clear however is that a faceless AI has a real chance to make things _extremely_ much worse, _especially if most of its decisions are great_. (If it mostly makes idiotic decisions it will be thrown out in a few months or years.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Layoffs has been a trend lately so I can't preclude a possibility where layoffs due to AI taking place. But my concern is not only in taking jobs instead of people, look for how companies are advancing in AI in a somehow creepy way (Boston Dynamics for example) and that deep fake AI (probably developed by NVIDIA) where it created fake and realistic images of humans of different. Those are some real creepy applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A good resource from the EU: The Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence

[https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/ai-alliance- consultation](https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/ai-alliance-consultation)</comment>


The F# Path to Relaxation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-D6W7EA8gw

<comment><USER2> F# is amazing.

Computation expression and type provider are awesome features, and the language itself is really fun and easy to write/refactor/understand (this mean code work as expected at first run usually) and help you write correct code

an good "why f#' [http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/why-use- fsharp/](http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/why-use-fsharp/)

More info

\- user groups list [http://c4fsharp.net/groups.html](http://c4fsharp.net/groups.html)

\- browser [http://www.tryfsharp.org/](http://www.tryfsharp.org/)

\- more info fsharp.org

\- open source [http://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp](http://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp) (vs stuff) or [http://github.com/fsharp/fsharp](http://github.com/fsharp/fsharp) (cross plat)

</comment><comment><USER3> F# is awesome, I wish I had jumped on it sooner. I find myself spending a lot less time writing code and a lot more time thinking.

The .Net ecosystem is great. I hope more shops adopt F# in the future.

<comment><USER4> I code to think. The only thing working against F# a bit is that C# isn't that bad of a language.

<comment><USER5> And being sold as library only language on Visual Studio tooling, but I when I look around the enterprise environments I work on, I do get the point why Microsoft tries to push it that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who is wanting to learn a functional language, it seems to me that F# is a good place to start. I've heard people disparage the lack of HKTs, but some of the other features like Type Providers seem too compelling to pass up.

<comment><USER7> I've just really started using F#, but the first time I used the Type Providers in FSharp.Data, I was blown away. That and F# interactive make prototyping a REST API client something I can do in minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anybody is interested in F#, look for a nearby meetup group to join. The SF F# group is pretty active and Mathias Brandewinder's hacker dojos are absolutely awesome!

[0] [http://www.meetup.com/sfsharp/](http://www.meetup.com/sfsharp/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Could someone briefly sum up the differences between F# and OCaml? Are there any reasons to switch from OCaml to F# in a Unix environment?

<comment><USER10> OCaml can compile to native. That makes it faster than F# running in a VM. OCaml can compile to bytecode as well. Also, if you ever need interfacing with C/CPP, OCaml is better suited (faster) to the task than, say, Ruby or JVM based languages.

Apart from that, multithreading in OCaml is a bit like on its on Python, IIRC, with GIL taking the sting out of it. But I am sure the researchers in France and elsewhere would bring true multithreading / multicore support to OCaml sooner rather than later.

More on what OCaml gets right: [https://realworldocaml.org/](https://realworldocaml.org/) (which seems to be down right now).

<comment><USER11> There is a multicore runtime in the works, with an ETA of "when it's done". That said, you have a couple of full-featured monadic concurrency libraries (Lwt and Async).

It also has functors (they let you parametrize a module over other modules), which F# doesn't, and you can do AST rewriting at compile-time via PPX (don't know if F# has anything like that). On the other hand, F# has access to the .NET ecosystem (which is admittedly larger than the OCaml one, though it suffers from enterprisitis), and has some nice goodies like type providers.

<comment><USER12> FYI, my Hopac library ([https://github.com/Hopac/Hopac](https://github.com/Hopac/Hopac)) is also a full-featured monadic concurrency library, inspired by Concurrent ML, for F# that is optimized for parallel programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How is F# for the web (both front and back end)? tx

<comment><USER14> Excellent. F# is fully supported by ASP.MVC / WebApi and there are a number of F# specific frameworks/components available.

There are two "Javascript transpilers" available, WebSharper and FunScript, both capable of compiling a large subset of F# to JavaScript. WebSharper offers a very attractive "server mode" as well. And the new - soon to be released - version 3.0 of WebSharper makes that into a very large subset and supports features like source maps as well.

[http://fsharp.org/guides/web/](http://fsharp.org/guides/web/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't F# a ripoff of OCAML?

<comment><USER16> What do you mean by "ripoff"? F# is not OCaml, but it indeed is closely related. They share some syntax and basic language features like tail call optimization, records and variants or pattern matching. On the other hand F# object system is completely different from OCaml's as it needs to work with other .NET languages. F# introduces active patterns and operator overloading which is absent from OCaml. OCaml features a very sophisticated module system, which in turn is absent from F#.

In short, F# and OCaml are similar but distinct languages. Both are interesting and worth looking into, each in its own right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like there is a cat on that blue chair.</comment>


New Game: Oculus Foosball - <AUTHOR> http://www.spaceapegames.com

<comment><USER2> I really hope this isn't another April Fool's joke because that actually looks like a lot of fun.</comment>


Y Combinator Startup News (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see how HN has grown so far beyond these initial goals. I'm sure it's still useful to YC for their purposes, but it's also an important part of the internet in its own right. Despite growing massively in scope, the moderators do a remarkably good job of running the site true to its potential, rather than optimizing it to service the YC startup pipeline. No doubt this makes it more useful for YC's purposes, too, but I imagine that the cost/reward ratio is exponentially skewed against YC's favor (i.e. the bigger this community becomes, it provides diminishing returns to YC but requires ever more moderation effort to keep in order). The fact that we can be openly critical of YC or YC-funded companies here, and our open criticisms circulated throughout the community of people who might become YC founders or customers of their companies, says a lot about the integrity of the moderation.

It's not perfect, but the mods strike a great balance and are receptive to feedback. Anyway, thanks to dang, scb, et al for keeping this community a good place to be.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have zero desire to be a founder, but I think it's fascinating to talk to founders, or more entrepreneurial people. That said, I think nowadays, I'd estimate at least half of Hacker News is software engineers, or people in position adjacent to SWEs (like QEs, tech support engineers, agile coaches, managers of all the previous jobs, etc.).

I greatly appreciate the crowd here. While still wasteful at times, I feel like hacker news is one of the least wasteful of my online reading habits.

Thank you, HN community.

</comment><comment><USER4> That was the day I signed up. My first post was asking for Arc to be released!

We're only a handful of years away from the first person being accepted in to YC that wasn't born yet. Time flies.

<comment><USER5> Would be curious to know the youngest founder accepted into YC. I know John Collison was about 17 (maybe 16.5) when founding Auctomatic in YCW07. Has there been anyone younger?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm so glad to have discovered HN when I did at 21. It motivated me enough to work for two startups and also start my own now at 25. HN is in my top five daily visited sites.

</comment><comment><USER7> Six months later: [https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)</comment>