Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging-startup-slack-said-to-draw-interest-from-amazon-com <comment><USER3> Serious question..... but also more me fleshing out my thoughts on messaging apps....

What is the point in buying a messaging app?

\- instant messenger

\- ICQ

\- Skype

\- Yammer

\- WhatsApp

They all seem to be popular for a short time and then fad away.

What does owing one of these get a company?

The case against owning them is that they all go out of favour and you only have a small window, say up to 5 years, where your platform is dominate before everyone moves onto another solution.

At one point the theory was it got people to use a companies proprietary login, when companies thought there was value in having people use their login.

At this point, if I said Slack would be a shell of its former self in 5 - <USER2> years would anyone put up an argument , if so what's the argument that this time its different.

I'm a happy slack user, but i"ll move to a new platform tomorrow if a better one comes along, there is almost no network effect or lock with these apps so switching has almost zero cost.

Plugins might provide a slight lockin but time has shown again and again the same plugins will move to the next popular messaging app, which seems to negate any benefit.

<comment><USER4> We all asked the same question about Facebook. All social networks before Facebook had faded away. But, Facebook didn't. Potential Slack buyers think that Slack is also here to stay in a similar manner. EDIT: I'm not saying Slack is Facebook.

One reason why I think Slack may survive longer than ICQ, Skype etc is how well integrated it is with all other services. For a tool to replace Slack, it should also provide the same level of seamless integration with GitHub, Google Docs, and a hundred other services. That's much harder to do than just building a messaging app.

<comment><USER5> Facebook isn't just about the people on it at this instant, it is about the accumulated history people build up on it.

Exporting your Facebook profile is a labyrinthian effort few would consider.

Switching chat providers is as simple as getting everyone to use the new thing and going from there, there is little to no baggage to bring with you.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's true. Switching to another messaging service means you lose all past messages. It also means you need to integrate all other services (like Github, Google Doc, Travis, and many others) to this new messaging service. That is a lot of friction!

<comment><USER6> Chat services usually have an import service. At least for their more famous competitors. Doesn't Slack allow you to export your message history?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really believe that Microsoft should have bought Slack. It makes perfect sense for them and aligns with their vision to be the productivity center of everyone's workflow.

Microsoft doesnt understand this space at all. Look what they are doing to Skype by making it more like Snapchat when their main use case is business related. Teams also feels so unfinished.

<comment><USER8> Skypes main use case isn't business related, and you can tell because they still use freaking Lync on macs

<comment> vertex-four Skype for Business is Lync, and has little to do with Skype proper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Selling Slack seems like a mistake. It's so ubiquitous. I'd be interested in buying stock in Slack if they IPO.

Snapchat was in a similar situation, and four or so years ago when they turned down Zuck's ~$5B offer everyone was saying what a silly mistake it was not to sell. How could Snapchat possibly make money? And think of all the disheartened employees whose shares would've been worth something.

Turns out there's a market for ubiquitous software. Slack seems similar.

Another datapoint: Look how well the acquisition of Oculus turned out. Palmer now has money, which would've come eventually. He no longer controls Oculus, and hence can't impact the world. And in a twist of fate, Palmer has attracted public annoyance due to some political decisions, so he went from favorite underdog to just another wealthy person.

For ambitious people, this can sometimes be a worse fate than not being rich. Ideas require opportunity and timing, and opportunities like Oculus, Snapchat, and Slack are rare.

$9B is nice. But are you sure you wouldn't rather affect the world?

<comment><USER10> Except Slack doesn't have any new ideas behind it. It's just another chat app. And just like other popular chat apps of yesteryear, it's a fad that will pass.

<comment><USER11> IRC was just a chat app, yet even though it didn't age nicely, was still seeing massive usage for professional communication up until lately. Is it only because of legacy? Hardly, new blood was pouring in constantly, the only hit it took was skype.

Slack is simply disrupting this area by offering product which is up to date and doesn't need bouncer running (+ hundreds of other useful nice to have features).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazon's been a prudent steward of its cash and shareholder value. I'd be really surprised if it spent this sum over Slack & encourage Bezos to go get his head checked. Messaging platforms come and go. Many better ways to spend $9B for Amazon.

<comment><USER13> They might be less interested in the app itself, and more interested in the giant corpus of conversation stored therein.

<comment><USER14> Which brings the point, who would ever sign on to use Slack/continue to use Slack when Bezos & Co. could be scouring through your sensitive company conversations?

<comment><USER15> Is it very different from running all your sensitive company code on Bezos & Co servers?

<comment><USER16> Do the AWS Master Service Agreements really not preclude Amazon from searching through your data for their own purposes?

<comment><USER17> Isn't the only entity that could conclusively determine if the agreement has been violated the very one who would violate it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would think Discord was a better fit for Amazon.

1\. Great fit with twitch.

2\. Seems like it could be "forked internally" and reskinned to compete with slack in the business space too.

<comment><USER19> Discord is the better app at this point. Even for business use. But Slack from an acquisition POV must be different. They have revenue, traction, and that all important paying subscriber base. It's like everyone has always said. Slack is just a chat app. It's not about the app, but rather, what they achieved with it.

I love discord so much part of me wants Amazon to buy Slack just so it would kill it (or MS or Verizon or anyone who tends to not know what to do with things).

<comment><USER20> Having not really used Discord, what about it is better to you?

<comment><USER19> _Faster_. Discord is lighter and faster.

 _Simpler_. I don't need comments and threads and snippets and posts at the expense of simple communications. These features are also inconsistent and incompatible across devices.

 _Search /Cost_. Search doesn't search contents of snippets which was a gotcha. And with a 10000 message limit, anyone using it for free reaches a point where search breaks. I was deleting messages for a while because at the end of the day all the 50/mo would have gotten us is unbroken search. It's like 99% of the product is free and they ask to pay 50/mo for the last 1%.

 _Web Hooks_. Integrating anything is as simple as a single line cUrl command. So for business use, if you already have a server doing a bunch of stuff with various APIs, adding notifications to discord is a one liner.

Also Discord has a more intuitive server list on the side bar. With slack you have to register with every team and "switch". In Discord it's just another tab.

A business on Slack is one that 1) can't see a superior chat program when they see one, 2) are willing to pay for an inferior product, and 3) can't look past the "gamer" origins of a platform.

But to Slack's credit, they built a business out of just chat, which is miraculous. And though I've arrived at Discord, they deserve all the credit and respect in the world for achieving what they have achieved through a mere chat subscription service. And I'm sure their philosophy and business direction is what got them to where they are, so standing up and challenging exactly that would admittedly be naive on my part. However I still do not believe any of the points that I have made are incorrect either, which just tells you more about this industry (chat industry?).

They just need a "Discord for Business". They would kill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Of the so-called big-five tech companies in the US, Amazon is the only one without a messaging platform." [https://chime.aws/](https://chime.aws/)

<comment><USER22> Chime is for video. Slack is for text.

<comment><USER23> Chime is for both, it's just not very good at text.

<comment><USER24> This is not true. We use Chime for text every day. It doesn't have all the 3rd party integrations that Slack does, but it give you the same basic functionality.

Disclaimer: Work for AWS.

<comment><USER23> I use Chime in CDO ;)

Chime is definitely better than Lync, but I stand by my statement that it's not _very good_ at text. It's missing basic UI features like threading or merged comments, profile pictures/icons, not to mention more advanced integrations.

I love using it for meetings... but text functionality is still lagging behind Slack, or even Mattermost (also used within Amzn)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As somebody who happily advocates Matrix[1], I'd be ecstatic if Slack would be bought by some giant and thus slowly made obsolete :)

[1] [http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org)

<comment><USER26> You're not a very good advocate. You didn't even give a single reason someone should look into Matrix.

<comment><USER25> Does reasoning ever work in marketing, though?

<comment><USER26> I'd love to say it's the only kind that's effective on me, but obviously that's not true. I do believe it's the most effective on me though. If nothing else it's the only kind I intentionally engage with on a regular basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Starting off at a new company this past week, and realize a lot of commerce happens on Slack. Whether it's deciding what monitor to order, the best shows to watch on TV or what live events are happening that weekend. Amazon could see this as a way to capture some value generated there.

Also, an easy way to get companies signed up w/ Amazon Prime!

<comment><USER28> This is an interesting take on the motivation. Amazon has shown that they're interested in building their own private labels in certain verticals. That trend coupled with the talk about "social shopping" and I can start to buy into the idea that this deal could possibly originate from somewhere other than AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One article yesterday suggested that the Amazon non compete lawsuit agaimay their former AWS employee might indicate that they're planning on getting into the business productivity market. With this news that might have credibility

<comment><USER30> They're already in that market to some extent.

[https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/](https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/) [https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/](https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/)

<comment><USER31> Throw chime in there to which is really good: [https://chime.aws/](https://chime.aws/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Too late to buy, Slack is such old news now and their market is super saturated. This could have been a decent decision several years ago, but not now.

<comment><USER33> [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack)

Although the search data would indicate Slack is still super hot - I tend to agree (anecdotally) that the market is saturated, first movers have already ... moved, and most likely growth will be slow.

<comment><USER34> [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack,discord](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack,discord)

So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord usage among consumers (on Reddit especially).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope they do not buy it but I am afraid they will. I am somehow sick of these companies that do not generate enough profit to sustain themselves and have to be bought by oligopolies like Amazon.

<comment><USER36> Is Slack actually unsustainable? They take in more than $150m in revenue a year at this point.

<comment><USER35> Well this is what I do not know. I am not an investor nor a shareholder but I suspect a single niche product is not that appealing.

How long will it take for Facebook/Google/Microsoft to get a good enough product and release it for "free" ? I am not sure but I think it will be hard for slack to diversify its portfolio.

Would Twitch survive against Google's YouTube gaming if it would not get acquired by Amazon ?

<comment><USER37> Both Google and Microsoft have already done the "release it for free" part, but it's unclear if / when the market will think the products are "good enough":

[https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group- chat...](https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat- software)

[https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new- enterprise...](https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise- focused-hangouts/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I was the person that first brought Slack into our company. I worked hard to get people to start using it and now it's used a great deal.

So now, I find myself using email more again. Slack seems to bring with it expectations of instant replies and lately I find myself preferring the more asynchronous nature of email. I do like that the Slack archive is generally open and searchable to all, but the interruptions suck. If the Slack client was silent unless it had focus, I think it would work better for me.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I hate hangouts/gchat for that reason as it is inside gmail. So annoying. Same with Facebook messenger. If I want you to get in touch with me you can send me an SMS/iMessage.

<comment><USER40> Just because the chat sends instantly doesn't mean you have to reply instantly. I think that's a poor reason to stay away from a service like Slack

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Fascinating. Amazon generally only does acquisitions of small companies for core technologies or teams; they've historically been great champions of the "not invented here" philosophy.

This would be a radical departure from that pattern.

<comment><USER42> What's also interesting is that they have a product that is somewhat of a Slack competitor:

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified- commun...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-chime-unified- communications-service/)

It was launched only 4 months ago. I wonder how it's doing today and how important Amazon thinks this space is for them and their platform. It's AWS branded too which is a bit odd.

<comment><USER43> Amazon teams and products often compete against each other. It's like how they have both Prime Now and AmazonFresh as grocery delivery services.

<comment><USER44> PrimeNow doesn't do groceries does it? How is this cross-competition?

<comment><USER45> They certainly do groceries in my Zip code. Fresh produce, cheese, dairy, eggs, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing. There have been a thousand IRC clones. Few have gained any traction at all. I suspect under new management it will falter, but at the same time I also think that it's a terrible idea not to sell if the opportunity arises.

<comment><USER47> > The power of slack isn't in their technology, it's in their marketing.

Exactly, because their technology is complete crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> There isn't a lot here to read in to. I worked at a very small company that was going to be bought by amazon. We were "left at the alter" by amazon.

I would be very surprised to see a slack deal go through, knowing what I know about our acquisition process, but they are a little different than we were. If AMazon buys them they have better be sure they can quickly integrate them, unlike twitch that's unique enough to hang around.

<comment><USER44> There are so many Amazon purchases that just "hang around" for better or for worse: Audible, Goodreads, IMDB... the list is large.

I like they don't necessarily have to vertically integrate all their acquisitions.

<comment><USER49> In some ways, Goodreads suffers for its integration. List a book that's on Leanpub and not Amazon and you're left with an Amazon button that's worse than useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is it true that Slack can't scale to companies with thousands of people? I've heard that Uber uses HipChat instead for that reason.

<comment><USER51> I don't think that's true. I've worked w/ GA and they use slack and they have thousands of employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think it would make much more sense for Apple to acquire Slack. Both companies are known for their emphasis on good design and UX.

Slack and Amazon appear to have very difficult cultures, so that would be a very interesting acquisition. If I was an engineer at Slack, I would really, really hope that the company could continue to operate independently, as a subsidiary. I would not be happy if I was forced to work for Amazon for the next x months before I could cash out and leave.

<comment><USER53> Slack was known for that, but they compromised very quickly with threaded conversations and the mess that is "slack enterprise grid"

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Microsoft will counter with $12b. Makes sense to sit with Microsoft. The new culture at Microsoft will allow for the caring and feeding of Slack.

<comment><USER55> As someone who pays for Slack and uses it throughout the working day, I hope nobody acquires them, especially Microsoft.

I don't have anything against Microsoft per se, but in my opinion, they ruined Skype.

<comment><USER54> I mean they are clearly looking to sell and Stewart is trying to create a bidding war to get the most money out of this deal. How many companies can afford to create new enterprise contracts with Amazon for enterprise software? They are either Google customers or Microsoft customers for employee productivity software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Could they legally buy slack and then use all the conversational data to teach their Alexa AI on how to talk more like humans?

<comment><USER57> Slack would be the wrong dataset, it's all text after all which has its own colloquialisms and whatnot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wonder if the price/valuation will be so high if they have a large and growing _paying_ customer base or if they assume to monetize the customer data in the long term via other means (e.g. selling aggregate data for ad purposes).

</comment><comment><USER59> 9 billion to purchase the service to push ads for AWS. Hmm.

</comment><comment><USER60> It would be an interesting acquisition given Amazon recently launched its own AWS-hosted competitor to Slack, called Chime.

</comment><comment><USER37> No one expects the Amazon slackquisition.

</comment><comment><USER61> Observation: The only successful messaging apps that are still around are the ones who sold to big co.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm assuming the idea would be to onboard existing Slack clients to Amazon Chime.

<comment><USER63> Most likely the opposite. Slack will keep its own brand like twitch or audible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> How did they mistake Slack for Whole Foods?

</comment><comment><USER65> This is inaccurate: "Of the so-called big-five tech companies in the US, Amazon is the only one without a messaging platform. Apple has iMessage, Facebook has Messenger, Microsoft has Outlook and Teams, and Google has Hangouts."

Amazon has Chime.

</comment><comment><USER66> Should just buy AIM.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'd only do an acquire. Slack is on the ropes.

</comment><comment><USER68> How much revenue does slack generate?

<comment><USER69> "The company reportedly has about 5 million daily active users, with 1.5 million of those paying for the service." * [https://slack.com/pricing](https://slack.com/pricing)

At least 10 million a month, I assume?

Edit: "Slack has 5 million daily active users -- 1.5 million of whom pay to use the service -- and had $150 million in annual recurring revenue as of Jan. 31." from [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/messaging- startup-slack-said-to-draw-interest-from-amazon-com)

<comment><USER70> Interesting that they derive $100 per paid user per month. I The Enterprise level pricing must be 6-10x the top team level.

<comment><USER71> Pretty sure that's $100 per paid user per _year_ \- which fits with the fact they have $7/mo and $12/mo tiers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Whatsapp: 500 million users for $18b.

Slack: ~10 million users for $9b?

This doesn't make much sense to me. What's the rationale behind this?

<comment><USER52> The business models are completely different. Whatsapp users were paying something like $2 per year, while businesses are paying $8 per user per month.

<comment><USER73> I think most whatsapp users were paying $0. I know I was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> ... why?</comment>


Is the FTC being used to marginalize independent bloggers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inquisitr.com/41069/is-the-ftc-being-used-to-marginalize-independent-bloggers/

<comment><USER2> While I think this is an interesting move, and that there's probably a problem worth addressing somewhere in there, I don't think the FTC has the right angle with this move.

Specifically, I think this regulation is intended to target the "little guys" who are getting big enough to get real attention.

I would rather the target were the "big guys" who are astroturfing (i.e. acting like little guys) for commercial purposes, if there's going to be any regulation at all. For one, this is going to be easier to enforce (since there are fewer big companies engaging in astroturfing) and it's more likely to cause legitimate harm to consumers.

I recognize, though, that this is a slippery slope, and that by regulating big-time astroturfers, you could well have unintended consequences for small- time bloggers.

I can imagine the current move as a slippery slope too, and it sounds ripe for abuse... As others have said, it's unenforceable, so it really is just selectively enforceable.

So, all told, it would be better to not regulate this at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even if the rules aren't applied to traditional media -- that seems to be more a bug than a feature. Quit your whining. This isn't some grand plot to put the blogger down.

The net result is that the FTC seems to have made a very good call, and we (the blog consumers) should all be the better for it: We'll now know up front if/when and what incentives a blogger has received to write a post. That seems like good progress to me.

If you're a blogger and you're really upset about this, you're telling me that you're now pissed that you have to now disclose all of your back-room dealings, and that doesn't instill much confidence in your reporting.

<comment><USER4> "If you're a blogger and you're really upset about this, you're telling me that you're now pissed that you have to now disclose all of your back-room dealings, and that doesn't instill much confidence in your reporting."

Sure, it may require that bloggers report gifts and incentives. But the law is basically unenforceable. There are millions of blogs in existence and the FTC cannot police them all. While I'm sure that the FTC is only intending to go after the extremely successful blogs, it would be preferable to see some kinds of limits built into the guidelines so we actually know where the FTC is intending to enforce these guidelines.

Second of all, this is the internet. So if someone seriously wanted to get around this, they would just have to host their blog someplace where the FTC doesn't have authority.

Edit: changed FCC to FTC

<comment><USER5> It's not possible to police millions of bloggers, but IIUC if some company with deep pockets enlists thousands of bloggers in a stealth "social marketing" campaign, and the ruse is discovered, the company can now be fined for deceptive trading practices.

<comment><USER4> While this would be a good use for the guidelines, <http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm> seems to imply that the onus is on the blogger to declare material connections. So while it might help with astroturfing, I don't see it really stopping a company with deep pockets from sending out cash and items to review to bloggers.I also would not see the guidelines increasing liability for the company if the ftc is holding bloggers responsible for declaring endorsements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From [http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/10/ftc-going-after- blogger...](http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/10/ftc-going-after-bloggers-and- social.html) (Althouse is a law professor)

"The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they've deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we're supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined. No, no, no. Overbreath itself is a problem. And so is selective enforcement."

</comment><comment><USER7> Wonder what happens if (when?) the FTC disclosure requirements collide with non-disclosure agreements? NDAs can certainly steer public discussions and opinions, though in a more subtle fashion than "blogola."

<comment><USER8> Maybe you can give an example (hypothetical would be fine). Should bloggers disclose what they _aren't_ writing about because of NDAs? Or are you talking about embargoes where some bloggers have been briefed ahead of time?</comment></comment>


#GamerGate's Detractors Aren't Doing Themselves Any Favors - <AUTHOR> http://www.exitevent.com/article/gamergates-detractors-arent-doing-themselves-any-favors-101014

<comment><USER2> Except, though, this has been going on for -decades- and there was no organised campaign until the sudden miraculous pivot of the gamergaters when people started noting and calling out their harassment bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure FIFA is a massive example of this. Pretty much anything by, EA, come to that.</comment>


Preforking echo server in Python, inspired by Unicorn-is-Unix - <AUTHOR> http://jacobian.org/writing/python-is-unix/

<comment><USER2> RyanMcGreal must not have taken too much time reading the linked article, because this is NOT Unicorn ported to Python. It is a port of the very simple example server written in Ruby in Ryan Tomayko's article about Unicorn.

See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865306>

At the end of Jacob's post he states that he'll be spending his evening _reading_ Unicorn's source. Not porting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're quite right. I've corrected the title to reflect this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm mostly commenting on this article's linked article, but...

Prefork is great if you have about two or three concurrent connections, and if you aren't using a dynamic language like Perl, Python, or Ruby. Otherwise, lightweight threads will serve you better.

One problem that people have (had?) with persistent preforked mod_perl apps is that copy-on-write also copies on reads for certain Perl structures. Say you have "my $foo = 42" and then you fork. The Sv associated with $foo is shared. But when the child says "if($foo eq ...)", the Sv is no longer the same; it's changed from an SvIV to a SvPVIV. No more sharing. (Maybe Python and Ruby are more clever here, but they pay a speed price on non-forked applications for this.)

Eventually you end up with two completely different memory images for the same app instead of the 1 copy of the parent shared with the child.

As for the "about two or three concurrent connections" part, I think you will find that "select" exists for a reason. ("select" is just as much a part of UNIX as "fork", BTW.) If you have a bunch of mostly idle filehandles to read from, select (or rather, its modern replacements) will perform much better than a bunch of forked processes. Imagine you are writing a push messaging server; do you really want one process for each of your 1 million users? No; you want a lightweight thread for each.

(Try this sometime; create 1,000,000 lightweight threads. Then create 1,000,000 processes that do nothing. Then note which one requires you to reboot your computer by yanking the power cable.)

<comment><USER4> Um, no. Your advice is completely backwards.

Perl does NOT have a lightweight threading model. Period. Literally every time you spawn a thread, Perl copies all of its data structures to avoid sharing stuff that is not threadsafe. If your Perl developers try to tell you otherwise, they are incompetent. The standard way to build a high performance website in Perl is to use prefork and then put a reverse proxy in front of them in httpd accelerator mode. See <http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/strategy.html> for an old, but still accurate, description of httpd accelerator mode if you don't know what it is.

Please note that Windows does not have good support for forking. Therefore I have never heard of a competent team of Perl developers choosing to try to deploy a high volume website on Windows.

To the best of my knowledge both Ruby and Python do support lightweight threading, unlike Perl, but both have a global interpreter lock that synchronizes very frequently, and severely limits scalability. I don't know what strategies are common in those languages, but personally I suspect that the right strategy on Unix with those languages is, like Perl, to use pre-fork with a reverse proxy in httpd accelerator mode.

However both Python and Ruby have implementations on other platforms, such as the JVM. I _believe_ (verify this before relying on it) that those implementations support lightweight threads without the drawbacks of the C implementation. Therefore if you want to use lightweight threading with that class of scripting language, use one of those implementations.

<comment><USER3> Perl's lightweight threading is provided by Coro.

<comment><USER4> Coro is just a cooperative asynchronous framework on par with, say, POE. You do _not_ get to use multiple CPUs. You do _not_ get to use a database. You do _not_ get to use a normal multi-threaded webserver.

I would be suspicious of anyone seriously trying to create a high volume Perl website using Coro.

<comment><USER3> You are right about multiple CPUs. For that, fork and load-balance. Instead of each forked process handling one connection, it handles a few thousand.

If your app is CPU intensive, I have to wonder why you'd use Perl for that. You get a 2x speedup by using multiple cores, but a 50x speedup by switching to Haskell or Common Lisp for the critical section. (You could also use C or C++ or Java, but that's just being crazy.)

As for databases, most real databases have non-blocking interfaces; this means database queries won't stall your threads. (Postgres and BDB are known to work well. MySQL requires hacks.)

And yes, you don't get to use a normal multi-threaded webserver. I am not sure how that works.

This all scales quite well.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you can use some databases. But I don't think you can use the classic DBI interface.

More problematic, though, is that a single poorly coded function call on a seldom hit page can seriously impact responsiveness for a large fraction of your website. With real threads or processes you can protect against a function with a memory leak with resource limits. (You can set that up BSD::Resource with Perl on Unix systems.) If you try that with Coro you risk taking down a large fraction of your website each time a bad function runs.

If you have a small team and absolutely trust their work, this works. But as you scale up in complexity, mistakes will happen. You will have problems. And your choice of cooperative multitasking will look worse and worse.

Cooperative multitasking is not a new idea. In fact it is usually the _first_ thing people try. Windows through 3.1 (continued under the hood in the 9x line). Apple did it through OS 9. Ruby did it through the 2.8 line. Yet in every case people run into the same problems over and over again and conclude that they are better off with preemptive multitasking. Even badly done preemptive multitasking such as Windows 95 or Ruby 2.9.

Again. I would be suspicious of anyone trying to create a high volume website these days in Perl relying heavily on cooperative multitasking. I'm not going to say that they won't succeed. But they are setting themselves up for problems down the road.

Furthermore it isn't as if there is a real problem that needs solving here. A single decent server properly set up can serve enough dynamic content from a single machine to put you in the top few thousand sites. Buy more machines and you can scale as far as you want.

<comment><USER3> We have preemptive scheduling in Coro. See:

<http://github.com/nothingmuch/coro>

Also available from CPAN is EV::Loop::Async, which allows events to be handled even when Perl is busy. (It uses a POSIX thread for this.)

(The key to success with Coro is using the right libraries. You write what looks like blocking code, but the libraries make it non-blocking.)

Anyway, the end result is that you use a lot less memory to handle a lot more clients. This may not be an issue if every request is CPU-bound, but you'd be suprised how often your process is blocking on IO, and how many resources a process-per-connection model consumes.

Don't let this become another lecture on functional programming: <http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=34786>

<comment><USER4> That looks cool, but it looks like that patch is not in the CPAN version. I'm not sure how much I'd trust it. Particularly if you'd loaded some badly behaved XS code. Or run a disaster RE. For instance I ran into one last week which took down Perl 5.8. Losing one mod_perl process occasionally was only an annoyance. Losing a good fraction of my site capacity would be much worse.

EV::Loop::Async lets you handle events, but won't solve the problem of, "I loaded an external library, and it didn't return control for 10 seconds."

Neither addresses the problem of protecting yourself against badly behaved functions that have a fast memory leak.

BTW you're assuming wrong when you assume that I'd be surprised at how often my processes are blocked on IO or how much resources they take. I am painfully aware of both factors. However it is easy to plan for that. I've personally seen 2 servers pump out a million dynamic pages/hour with real traffic on a website with only obvious optimizations. I know for a fact that the application code had memory leaks, bugs, and the occasional segfault. I'm happy to buy 4x the RAM to go with an architecture that makes those non-issues to the overall function of the website.

<comment><USER3> Maintaining a hacked-up-piece-of-shit is a different problem from starting from scratch and Doing Things Right. In the situation that you're in, you probably made the right decision -- throw RAM at the problem so you never have to think about it again.

When writing an app from scratch, though, you have some control over the quality of the code, and can aim to serve more users with less hardware. System administration is hard, and the less systems to administer, the better.

<comment><USER4> Assuming that your codebase will continue to be a work of elegance is challenging. Particularly if you're loading CPAN modules that are written and maintained by other people to a different standard. Of course if you reject those CPAN modules, then what's the point of writing Perl?

But, you say, we'll just limit ourselves to high quality CPAN modules? The real standard ones that everyone uses? Surely nothing will go wrong?

Fine. Last week I ran into a segfault coming from the Template Toolkit triggering a regular expression bug in Perl. (I am waiting on the bug report until I get official permission to submit the patch with the bug. I'm careful about copyright these days...) That's about as standard as you can get. Assume that an extremely popular pure Perl text manipulation module on top of Perl works as documented and enjoy the core dump.

The moral is that unless you are personally writing the whole software stack you're using, you never know what will trigger a bug somewhere. And no sane web company is going to rewrite their whole software stack. (For the record the most painful bugs in the application I described previously were at the C level, and none of that code was touched by anyone in that organization.) However there are architectures that let you mitigate classes of problems before they come up. What is that protection worth to you? Given how much traffic you can get per server, what lengths do you need to go to to optimize?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to know more about forking processes vs threading. You should look at TCPServer.py in the standard libary. You can look at the ForkingMixin class and the ThreadingMixin class.

A good Python server source code to read is the CherryPY WSGI server. You can read it in the web.py git directory here.

[http://github.com/webpy/webpy/blob/master/web/wsgiserver/__i...](http://github.com/webpy/webpy/blob/master/web/wsgiserver/__init__.py)

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who knows the standard libraries could do this in a few minutes, this post is clutter. :(</comment>


Some Call it Concatenation - Worse Than Failure - <AUTHOR> http://worsethanfailure.com/Comments/Some_Call_it_Concatenation.aspx <comment><USER2> Funny. But funnier is that this is a pretty Schemey way to solve the problem-- iteratively walk down the string to be concatenated and append characters onto the target string.

But it'd look prettier with parentheses...</comment>


Automatically Blackballed - <AUTHOR> http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed

<comment><USER2> Just to be clear, this article is about why a wordpress theme maker is not allowed to participate at a wordpress conference because they are (through a proxy site ThemeForest) selling their themes with licensing that wordpress doesn't like.

The main issue for the author is that they do not have control over the license used when selling on ThemeForest, and _not_ selling on ThemeForest is not a viable option for them as sales through that platform account for most of their monthly income.

The author states:

"""The only license available to authors on ThemeForest is a split license[0]. The PHP in our themes is covered under the GPL, but the images, CSS, and JavaScript are not. There's nothing wrong with this, and I also have no problem with this; But it doesn't meet those guidelines for WordCamps that I mentioned earlier."""

So users of the THemeForest platform are unable to license their themes in any way they wish, but must split license their themes. Wordpress has a problem with this, hence the hard line being drawn.

Not sure what the resolution might be, but I think ThemeForest should allow fully GPL themes if authors so desire. Maybe there are implications to this I am not aware of?

[0] [http://support.envato.com/index.php?/Live/Knowledgebase/Arti...](http://support.envato.com/index.php?/Live/Knowledgebase/Article/View/428/0/split- licensing-and-the-gpl---what-does-it-all-mean)

<comment><USER3> The author can post a notice on his website: "Despite what it says on ThemeForest" all the files in my themes are actually GPL."

Or just the simple notice: "All files in theme xxxx are licensed under the GPL."

Don't themes come with a readme? Just put the GPL notification in there. Why do you have to pick your license using a ThemeForest tool?

<comment><USER4> There's an explanation transcribed in the post from a podcast:

 _So the idea behind the split license is to protect authors in terms of their designs and things like that. The parts that have to be GPL are GPL, the parts that don't have to be, we're happy to provide that license to help you protect them. The other thing is that on the [Envato] marketplaces there are smaller component style items, so you could buy the extended license on the marketplace, and use that in your WordPress theme. And if you then make your WordPress theme 100% GPL, you just disregarded the license of the item you put into the theme._

So it seems like they specifically discourage bypassing the split license.

<comment><USER3> > So it seems like they specifically discourage bypassing the split license.

Who asked them?

The author of the theme can do whatever he wants, ThemeForest doesn't get a say in the matter.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever submitted a theme to ThemeForest? They require you to place the two licenses in your submission and will reject your submission if they're missing or altered.

Author certainly can do whatever they want; Themeforest will just reject the submission until the author does what they want.

<comment><USER3> No, I have never submitted anything there. But it makes little difference: You can say whatever you want on your website, and give any license you like.

They have no say in the matter - they aren't getting an exclusive license after all. The author is free to provide a second license to anyone they like.

<comment><USER5> That is true, sort of. If you don't sell exclusively on Themeforest, the payout rate is approximately half what it would be otherwise. Its a very similar rock-and-hard-place situation that this article is about. You're throwing away significant revenue by selling on your own site and generally not accepting their license agreement because they are the king in the market.

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize they had an exclusivity clause.

If that's the case then, yah, the author is kinda stuck.

<comment><USER5> Its not quite a standard clause -- you do have the choice to sell exclusively or non-exclusively. Non-exclusive cut for the author is 33% and exclusive cut is 50-70%. Its a pretty substantial difference, especially if you make a lot more sales on Themeforest than you do on your own site.

You have a choice, you just don't _really_ have a choice IF you're trying to make your living on selling themes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is pretty reasonable behavior by wp.org.

Their position has been entirely clear for years. No-one's forcing the OP to sell WP themes. No-one's required to find a way to let the OP profit from selling WP themes incompatibly with how the WP developers want their code to be used; much less to find a way to let the OP keep using _one particular_ infringing WP theme site to sell his work when there are plenty of other theme sites out there that are successfully following the rules.

<comment><USER7> There is no evidence that the author is selling infringing WP themes.

Even if you accept that all clients of a library are inherently derivative works of that library (a stance I strongly oppose), there is no reasonable way to conclude that non-code theme assets must also be derivative. Trying to enforce additional restrictions on the author's own work is asinine.

<comment><USER6> I tried to use the awkward phrase "incompatibly with how the WP developers want their code to be used" to cover your viewpoint; regardless of the meaning of the legal code, their intent is clear and has been for a long time.

In those circumstances, blogging a complaint that you want to use GPL code but not in the way that the authors have very publicly stated that they think is reasonable doesn't get my sympathy -- go take someone else's code instead.

<comment><USER8> The authors are not just Automattic though, everyone who has contributed code has done so under the assumption that the code is GPL.

Automattic have just as much responsibility to respect the wishes of everyone who contributed to the source code, and by changing the effective terms of the license they are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For more context, the GPL/WordPress debate got a lot of attention in the summer of 2010 when WordPress.org was bumping heads with the Thesis Theme.

<http://nacin.com/2010/07/15/thesis-gpl/>

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Gpl+Wordpre...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Gpl+Wordpress+)

Edit: Changed Automattic to WordPress.org

</comment><comment><USER10> So, if I have this right. In order to speak at this wordpress conference one must not distribute _anything_ related to wordpress that isn't 100% GPL? That's pretty hardcore.

</comment><comment><USER11> "The PHP in our themes is covered under the GPL, but the images, CSS, and JavaScript are not."

I know a lot of companies do this. Heck, even ID software provided free source of their engines, but didn't give away their WADs. But is the PhP in this case of any value without the rest? Can anything be done with it?

If the PhP is of no value on its own and it specific to the CSS, JS, and images, then imo that totally would violate the spirit of GPL'ing the other. If that is the case and you want to have it be proprietary, don't provide the source/files for any of it (for the new stuff). If you want it to be GPL, then sell it, but make all of it free source, including the images, JS, and CSS. Note: I believe that Stallman's view (if you care) is that not providing images is ok if it is art and not source/required for the source, but I think that is a loophole that can be exploited, so I say make it all free.

However, if the PhP provides some value on its own and is usable (like one of ID's engines), it's all good and do what you want.

There is nothing in GPL that says that you can't get paid for it. Just because you have to provide the source for free doesn't mean people can't pay you for the work, it just means they can't pay you for the source. They could pay you for the bundle (which they could create on their own if they wanted for free, but some may not be savvy enough to do that). GPL is not anti-capitalist.

<comment><USER12> That's entirely true. But you're likely to sell very few copies, because all another company has to do is buy it for the price you ask, and redistribute en mass. All they have to do is make up the price they paid, you have to worry about the time you put into it.

So what ends up happening is reduced quality or higher prices. (Basically, everything being a bespoke solution, because you aren't going to be selling too many.) The GPL is a poor model for something like a wordpress theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this not unlike Apple's App Store? Developers aren't shy about their disdain for Apple's control, but in the end, it doesn't matter. If you want to make money, you need to play by Apple's rules. Likewise ThemeForest is the dominant marketplace for WordPress themes, with +2MM users. It sounds like ThemeForest can call the shots (for now) if the ultimate goal is profits.

</comment><comment><USER13> This whole story has gone on for a week now, and has been discussed a great deal.

This post does a nice job summarizing the story, with links to many blog posts that came from Jake's original [http://www.philerb.com/2013/01/wordpress- community-contribut...](http://www.philerb.com/2013/01/wordpress-community- contributors-and-the-spirit-of-the-gpl/)

Jake also discussed in on his PleaseAdvise podcast, as well as another podcast: <http://pleaseadvise.fm/> [http://wpcandy.com/podcasts/035-with- special-guest-jake-capu...](http://wpcandy.com/podcasts/035-with-special- guest-jake-caputo/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is no one talking about the motives behind why Wordpress is doing this?

<comment><USER8> It's interesting that the themes available on Wordpress.com aren't GPL licensed. This does seem a little hypocritical.

<comment><USER15> That's incorrect. <https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/>

<comment><USER8> We were told by one of their support team that we were not allowed to alter the theme to hide the link to wordpress.com. This is on a paid account.

So they may _say_ it is GPL, but in practice it's not.

<comment><USER16> you mean the link in the Footer?

It may be in the terms of the Hosting contract?

<comment><USER8> Yes that's it. But if the terms of the hosting contract limit what you can do with the code then in it's not GPL.

They distribute the css, in that they let us edit it, but they limit what we can do with it. Not GPL.

<comment><USER17> Yeah and I bet they don't let you edit /etc/passwd either. Restrictions on their server have nothing to do with copyleft.

<comment><USER8> Right, because it's a security issue to restrict how you edit the css.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there some legal or other reason why you can't dual license the things in question under both licenses? Or would that just not satisfy anyone?

</comment><comment><USER9> Just adding some additional background. I happened on a related post earlier today on ThemeShaper ("Home of the Automattic Theme Team)...

<http://themeshaper.com/2013/01/24/envato-license/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Odd - I submitted this story, with the same URL, 5 days ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098033>

<comment><USER20> Your URL had a double t. It (now) leads to the same URL and page as this submission.

(Possibly someone changed their mind about the wordplay verbing the "Automattic" noun.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I feel like WP and that Matt guy are just trolling everyone. I'm waiting for the punchline: punked!

"Why would we ban someone for how they sell some themes through a 3rd party provider? That would be crazy! You actually believed us??"

</comment><comment><USER22> What is the source of the GPL virus in all this? What bits of technology are built upon GPL code? Would be feasible to re-write that code or theme such that it could be released in a less freedom restricting manner?

<comment><USER23> WordPress itself is GPL licensed, and its creator, Automattic, contends that all themes and plugins for the CMS are derivative works, and must therefore be GPL licensed as well. Which is probably true, since in addition to being nonfunctional without WordPress to provide the functions themes and plugins hook into, they commonly copy large bits of code from the main codebase and make minor changes to them.

Envato allows you to list WordPress themes and plugins for sale in their marketplace, ThemeForest. They make these products available under a split license: the PHP code that interfaces with WordPress is made available under the GPL. CSS, JavaScript and binary assets are made available under a commercial license.

WordPress does not argue that the above scenario is illegal, only that if you split-license works like that, you're not welcome to present at conferences that use their name.

<comment><USER24> If you do "copy large bits of code from the main codebase" this is moot, but I've wondered about the other point. If I don't copy any bits, I'm not really sure why my PHP code would necessarily fall under the GPL.

What if I made NotGPLPress that had API compatibility with WP's theme API, but was otherwise my implementation and released under a BSD license. That seems to be the exact same battle Google and Oracle just fought over Java, with Google essentially winning the APIs are not copyrightable battle. At that point couldn't every theme author just say that their theme is built for NotGPLPress and license it however they want? It seems odd that the existence or non-existence of another implementation should affect an author's licensing obligations.

<comment><USER25> Heh - I wonder of NotGPLPress would even have to work? ThemeForest could start selling NotGPLPress themes, with a note that NotGPLPress happens to be 100% API compatible with Wordpress. You'd need to ensure your themes weren't cut-n- pastes from code that is copyright Wordpress, but apart from that…

Of course, the bigger problem seems to be that (some) theme authors want to be "part of the Wordpress community", presumably largely for professional and monetary reasons, while ignoring that "the Wordpress community" is strongly reliant on (and fundamentally beholden too) Automatic, and they can (and do) place expectations on the behaviours of participants in "the community", and they can (and now are) requiring that participants at events they run comply with those expectations. If you want to be "part of a community" which is reliant on one company, you probably need to play by their rules, even if you can whip out your rules-lawyer hat and claim "but those rules aren't strict interpretations of 'the law'".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is someone down-voting all my comments because they don't like me? - <AUTHOR> Perhaps a good feature to add to HN would be some check on down-voting that watches out for when a single person down-votes another persons comments in mass in a short period of time, or on a sustained basis. Revenge down-voting, that is. <comment><USER2> I was under the impression that voting rings and whatnot are already something that dang and the other mods watch out for; we as users don't need to see who downvotes us. If we could see identifiable information about downvotes, it would be too tempting to downvote THEM out of revenge.

I don't think I would do such a thing, but I don't even want to have such knowledge color my reading of future comments. Part of the intention of HN is that we read and vote on comments for their merits and contribution to a discussion -- even if we don't always agree with the author -- and I would not want to discount someone's writing just because they downvoted something I wrote.

Maybe if there were a one-way hash of usernames we could see for who downvotes, we could have public insight into the insight of voter rings ("____ has downvoted my comments 3000% more than anyone else ...") without the chance of contaminating our perception of others' discourse, but I doubt that we have better info than the mods already have about posters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you care at all? Seneca said that if you publish something you have to bear the critics.

<comment><USER4> they are talking about revenge downvoting. Not just a critic. But a critic that down votes one person..

<comment><USER3> \- Revenge downvoting is childish. Caring about it is too.

\- There is no real difference, only in your head.

Pick the answer that makes you feel better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems to be an issue with any type of site. I had a similar problem with Reddit. I found that eventually people lose interest. At the end of the day losing internet points isnt the end of the world.

</comment><comment><USER6> … would the overall "economics" of HN make sense if a down-vote cost 1 point of reputation, or some fraction thereof?

</comment><comment><USER7> Suggestion: create a new profile and test if downvoting happens due to you or the article you post?

</comment><comment><USER8> What if all of your comments are terrible? I mean I'm not saying they are, but if your comments are regularly not very productive you'll see down voting but there's no individual actor doing it.

</comment><comment><USER9> >. when a single person down-votes another persons comments in mass in a short period of time, or on a sustained basis. Revenge down-voting, that is.

You are assuming a person's motives based only on behavior.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had an opposite problem once, somebody was blindly upvoting my silly comments. Luckily, it didn't last long so I didn't have to post an Ask HN

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds as if you have alternative motives to know who down-votes you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't have proof but I believe there is a limit to how many times you can up/downvote each account.

</comment><comment><USER13> In a very rare exception to Betteridge's Law, I'd say the answer to your question is probably yes. The more interesting question is how long they'll be able to get away with it. As others point out, the mods already try to detect and prevent abuse of the upvote/downvote mechanisms. OTOH it's not clear how well automated that process is, or how effective their efforts are. It certainly seems to me that coordinated upvoting and downvoting are still pretty much par for the course on this and any other similar site.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if it's because of your username?</comment>


Politicians exempt themselves from new wide-ranging spying laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/investigatory-powers-bill-a7447781.html <comment><USER2> All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

<comment><USER3> Lions > Sheeple</comment></comment>


Participating in Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/btford/participating-in-open-source <comment><USER2> Do not read it - this guy broke Chrome Angular Batarang extension and refuses to fix it:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs- batarang...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs- batarang/ighdmehidhipcmcojjgiloacoafjmpfk/reviews)

However you participate in Open Source, don't handle your community like they do:

[https://github.com/angular/batarang/issues/207](https://github.com/angular/batarang/issues/207)</comment>


Why are Europeans White? - <AUTHOR> http://essays.backintyme.com/item/332 <comment><USER2> I'm definitely no expert, but it seems to me that the two pieces of evidence he uses to date the creation of "whiteness" aren't very reliable. As one commenter on his blog pointed out, cave painting may be dark simply because that was the color they had available. And in terms of the Egyptians, the woman may simply have been portrayed as wearing make-up...not as being white. And even if his hypothesis is correct, I don't see how a white person in the Baltic would end up marrying the Pharaoh.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's another school of thought that attributes the variety of hair, skin, and eye color in Europe to sexual selection rather than the brightness of the sun. In brief, Europe during the last glacial period offered very little food for women to gather, so women were almost completely dependent upon men for hunted meat. As a result of this imbalance, women developed striking looks to attract men.

For an example of this line of thinking in the evolutionary literature see: "European hair and eye color: A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection?" (Frost 2006) [1]

 _Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe. The many alleles involved (at least seven for hair color) and their independent origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favor color traits and color polymorphisms. In addition, hair and eye color is most diverse in what used to be, when first peopled by hunter-gatherers, a unique ecozone of low-latitude continental tundra. This type of environment skews the operational sex ratio (OSR) of hunter-gatherers toward a male shortage in two ways: (1) men have to hunt highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores over longer distances, with no alternate food sources in case of failure, the result being more deaths among young men; (2) women have fewer opportunities for food gathering and thus require more male provisioning, the result being less polygyny. These two factors combine to leave more women than men unmated at any one time. Such an OSR imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits: hair- and eye-color diversity and, possibly, extreme skin depigmentation._

[1]: [http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(05)00059-0/abstr...](http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138\(05\)00059-0/abstract)

<comment><USER4> So the way to look more sexy was to start looking weird? That sounds rather arbitrary to me. Why not grow three boobs or develop wings or whatever? Anything can be explained like that.

<comment><USER3> A peacock's plumage is rather arbitrary and weird, as well. But for whatever reason, vibrant plumage worked to attract the attention of peahens, so it was selected for.

I've heard it argued that the existence of decorative traits indicates fitness because it shows that an organism has a enough extra energy to devote to decoration.

But that's speculative. Sexual selection isn't really a logical proces. It's just an accumulating response to stimuli, over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nitpick: That heat ferried by the gulf stream is what warns the Baltic is a quasi-religious supposition from the father of oceanography. The thermal ballast of the Atlantic ocean that develops in the summer is primarily responsible for most of Europe's uncommonly warm winters.

<comment><USER6> The Baltic isn't all that warm either - half of it freezes over in winter.

<comment><USER7> I'm from small town called Liminka, it's next to Oulu in Finland. The sea freezes in the winter but that doesn't keep Liminka from being a legendary farming area because of high crop yield. It's just warm enough to have good crops in the summer.

The crops are of course not nearly as good as in Germany, but you cant find similar area from the same latitude in Russia or Canada.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Liminka....](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Liminka.sijainti.suomi.2008.svg)

<comment><USER6> I don't question that cereals are grown there, but I do question the hypothesis that the gulf stream is responsible for making cereals viable via warming the Baltic.

The author may be spot on with his cereal theory, but I'm not convinced by the suggested mechanism. The nascent fluid dynamicist in me doesn't see how a sea with only one tight opening can exchange enough water for a significant thermal exchange, one which would have to be pretty sizeable given the freezing. I could be wrong, but I do note that the 'gulf stream' graphic barely gets past Newfoundland, let alone showing the North Sea or the Baltic...

<comment><USER7> I can't really say that I would have deep knowledge of this stuff. I do know however that Golf current does not come to the Baltic sea. It cannot, as it would just rise to water-level, no way to run through.

But usually wind and weather comes from west. So as golf current warms up the coast of Norway, some of that warmth comes here. It's a weather pattern, but I don't seem to find a good picture now, sorry. [http://www.weatherwise.org/sebin/x/a/russian-inferno- photo6....](http://www.weatherwise.org/sebin/x/a/russian-inferno-photo6.jpg)

I remember from geography class that we are in this climate zone and it's called a Hadley cell. And inside that cell air circulates, but it cannot really break away. So kind of Golf course breaks into that cell from below. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell>

EDIT: sorry, lost in translation, I meant a Ferrel cell [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation#Ferrel_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation#Ferrel_cell) Ans that's not very accurate as Finland seems to be in polar front.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This essay is from 2002 (and most of the citations in the longer cited version were quite old even then), and a great deal has been learned through DNA studies since then. And some of his points of evidence such as the coloration on a piece of cave art are obviously flimsy. (And not to rely on an appeal to authority but he doesn't convincingly overcome being a non-expert commenting on an active scientific field, and I'm calling crackpot on the website.)

There's good evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens first arrived in Europe during a warm period sometime around 45,000 years ago, then lived through the last glaciation maximum covering most of the continent with a peak around 18,000 years ago, driving the population through a harsh bottleneck that strongly selected for traits that aided survival in the cold climate. The population rebounded in numbers and in latitude from that bottleneck as the climate warmed again. A higher initial population under greater selective pressure for a longer period of time than elsewhere suffices to explain the resulting traits.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good thing you can't actually click on the images to make them larger. I didn't really want to look at those maps anyway.

<comment><USER10> That's odd, I can rightclick-> open image or zoom just fine. Is something wrong with your (or my!) browser?

<comment><USER6> Even then, they're not a great size for examination. The whole format of the page looks like it was made by Crackpots-R-Us, which doesn't contribute well to his argument.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough, I see :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a _hypothesis_. IIRC, there is considerable variation in pigmentation in other parts of the world too. There isn't a direct mapping because other factors, like sexual selection (something not mentioned in the article), affect the phenotype of populations.

</comment><comment><USER12> "In fact, it happened after 13 KYA. Cave art from that time always shows normally pigmented people. Notice that in this painting from 13 KYA, the hunters are the same color as the deer."

Notice how the painting is monochrome. Maybe they just didn't have the artistic skill required?

</comment><comment><USER13> "Children around the world are often blonde, but their hair darkens at puberty. So it is not just northern European adult skin that lacks pigment. It is also adult European hair."

The pictures posted by the author about child blondness look suspiciously like cases of malnutrition [1][2].

[1][http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(...](http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(09\)61314-3/fulltext) (search for "vitamin")

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color#Medical_condit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color#Medical_conditions)

<comment><USER14> Those pictures were probably from melanesia where blonde hair is native to the population (more striking in children)

<comment><USER13> I've never heard of that population before, it's quite an impressive thing to see [1]. On the other hand, the author's statement makes it sound like it's a common phenomenon around the world when it's not.

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=melanesian+blonde&hl=en&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=melanesian+blonde&hl=en&sa=X&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=mbXnT- OEH4aa9gSLovWtAQ&ved=0CFgQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=662)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally."

I felt this is a bit of a loose statement. I would think, like light skin, there would be a reason a recessive genes became so prevalent.

Edit: spelling

<comment><USER16> This happens a lot though. For example, the alleles that keep domestic cats and dogs friendly are from juvenilizing mutations. These mutations also make the ears floppy. It's called "neoteny". The same thing happened when the Russians domesticated silver foxes[1][2].

Humans are subject to a lot of these effects. Our head shape is very similar to the head shape of a baby chimp or gorilla, which obviously changes later in the ape's life. We have much smaller teeth and jaws than other apes our size.

Anyways, the point is that many alleles can be linked to a specific gene, so the fact that blue eyes and blond hair become more prevalent when less skin tone is selected for makes sense.

That said, I don't agree with some of the points made. He's kind of jumping to conclusions. You really can't rely on _art_ to guide your research on skin tone. I draw art where humans are #FFFFFF because that's the color of the paper. Nobody in their right mind would trust something as symbolic as art.

I think the theory as a whole makes sense, though. Grains can grow, need moar vitamin D, lighter skin, other alleles come along for the ride. Now that's a pretty valid theory IMO.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Domestication> [2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1G2yZMUNUQ>

<comment><USER17> > _Nobody in their right mind would trust something as symbolic as art._

So your conjecture is that the author is insane?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I see that as daylight has reached my multi-ethnic neighborhood near the 45th parallel of north latitude in the middle of North America, this article about settlement patterns of Homo sapiens has received a lot of upvotes. I'll reply based on the more than fifty replies already posted, based on background reading I've done on the subject, and based on my "natural experiment" of living all over the United States (I have been to all states) and living near the Tropic of Cancer in east Asia.

Essential background reading on this topic can be found in a user bibliography on Wikipedia.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations)

Any hypothesis about the origin, in deep prehistoric time, of a human characteristic will be just that, a hypothesis, now that we are remote in time from when our ancestors settled the earth. Tracing geographic patterns of gene distribution for genes that are under WEAK selection pressure helps suggest where the founder populations of different regions of the world most likely came from, and there is no longer any serious doubt that species H. sapiens originated in Africa and settled first the Old World (including Australia, which required sea-crossing canoes to cross the Wallace Line) and then the New World, with islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand being some of the last places on earth to be settled.

My ancestors are known to have lived in recent historic times in the region the author of the submitted article mentions the most, the shores of the Baltic and North seas. People in my family line are quite pale-skinned although not invariably blond or blue-eyed. My wife's family are known to have lived in recent historic times in the region spanning both sides of the Taiwan Strait at the edge of the tropics. There is a large difference in annual sunlight exposure between those two regions, but my wife's family is like many families from east Asia in also being quite pale-skinned as a baseline, although always black-haired and dark-eyed. As several of the previous comments have correctly pointed out, there is LARGE variation of skin color in all geographic populations anywhere on earth. Moreover, there is large individual variation in skin color in most individuals subject to lifestyle variations (more or less outdoor activity) and seasonal variations (sunny summers contrasted with cloudy winters). My children's skin color varies over a wide range, with my son who plays the most travel soccer becoming the most dark during the summer and my son who is a hacker staying the most pale year- round.

The deep ancestral condition of all hominins was pale skin. Beneath their black hair, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have pale skin at birth and in youth.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/text_pop/l_07...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/text_pop/l_073_04.html)

<http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color>

The hominin line of descent that branched into H. sapiens had to develop skin that began dark and persisted as dark as humans lost body hair and began living in savannah environments with less shade than forests, according to the currently accepted hypothesis. As population bottlenecks in Africa formed the species H. sapiens, presumptively the typical skin color of all modern humans was dark (within a pattern of continued variation among individuals and a continued capacity for individual skin color to vary over the course of seasons). Then as different founder populations settled in Europe (high latitude) and east Asia (cloudy even when not at high latitude in many coastal areas), the local populations were under selection pressure for selective sweeps of mutations that increased the gene frequency of paler skin. Generally, both Europeans and east Asians are pale, but they aren't usually pale because of the same novel gene patterns.

By the way, the "race" categories that are used in the United States are arbitrary, subject to rewriting from time to time for political considerations, and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical populations. In any event, it is clear that human beings have been traveling back and forth and exchanging genes from one local population to another from the earliest days of human settlement of the earth. For more on the specific "race" categories in United States law and how they are applied to specific situations (especially college and university admission), see

[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college- admissions/12282...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college- admissions/1228264-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-9-a.html)

for FAQ links to many official websites with governmental regulations and definitions and statistics.

<comment><USER19> > By the way, the "race" categories that are used in the United States are > arbitrary, subject to rewriting from time to time for political > considerations, and do not correspond to any scientific view of geographical > populations.

These categories are hardly arbitrary, they are political. We separate people into republicans and democrats, too, but just because this separation is not based on genetics or geography does not make it arbitrary or even bad.

<comment><USER20> That's his point. Political categorizations seem arbitrary from a scientific perspective.

<comment><USER19> He doesn't say "arbitrary from a scientific perspective", he says "arbitrary". The former would be a silly point anyways. Would it make sense to point out how arbitrary it is that the houses of congress are divided up by party because party appears arbitrary from a (genetic) scientific viewpoint?

Don't confuse genetic/geographic science with science as a whole. Anywhere you can do experiments you can do science, and politics is no exception (although everything is much noisier). Certainly, the groups of people described by the census are meaningful in a scientifically confirm-able way: they identify with each other, forming clearly discernible self-selecting cliques, neighborhoods, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is just plain wrong, if you watch the documentary "the human family tree" the first people with less pigment were southeast asians as in towards China, and there is genetic evidence for it.

I think it is sad the more I watch these genetic documentaries the more I see the mixing of gene pools the more you know humans are very much the same but we also have a massive innate disposition to see people with different physical traits or culture as different from ourselves.

<comment><USER21> I wish White Europeans and American etc. Could get over it, you owe your white skin to Africans becoming light skin asians It has almost nothing to do with Europe except that is where the settlements ended up. The genetic trace has all been done. Yes we are all as much Asian as African believe it or not.

This is why I wish more scientists would speak up because of debates like this where the evidence is out there but no scientist to presents it, instead just random blog posts faking the science behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it just me or do some Asians not seem nearly as white as caucasians? It seems especially Japanese can be fairly pale, I think its fairly subjective to say people of European ancestry are universally the most pale on earth.

<comment><USER23> Of course they do not. Malaysians for example are dark colored, as are Indonesians etc. Also Indians are far from pale.

<comment><USER22> I work with many Indians and they themselves refer to "Asian" as a different race (meaning East Asian), so I didn't mean Indian people by this, rather East Asian, obviously many East Asians are much darker skinned than whites, however I personally know Asians that are fairly pale and I am sure at times I have been more tan than they are (when I would spend more time outside) and I primarily of German-Irish ancestry.

<comment><USER24> For whatever reason, pale skin is highly coveted by many Asian cultures and some will avoid the sun almost entirely to avoid darkening their skin. As well as using (potentially dangerous) skin lightening products which is a huge market in Asia: <http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v35/naacr_vol35_273.pdf>

<comment><USER23> > _For whatever reason, pale skin is highly coveted by many Asian cultures and > some will avoid the sun almost entirely to avoid darkening their skin._

Isn't the opposite also true in Western cultures? In Europe, where I live, people want to look darker, and go sunbathing. And in the US there's also this "fake tan" thing.

<comment><USER25> Here in Southeastern Europe, there's definitely a strong preference towards white in folklore; 150 years ago, only rich folks' daughters could afford to avoid crop work and stay indoors long enough to stay white.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I smell BS. He suggests that these people around the coast gave up eating fish in favour of grains. I doubt it. Even today fish and shellfish feature heavily in the region's cuisine.

<comment><USER7> Heard of Viking crusades? It happened partly because there was too many people living in Scandinavia. That happened because Scandinavian farming had gotten the population to get too big. You run out of reliable fishing sources long before you hit the grains maximum. You don't have to replace fish with grains, just introducing grains to the diet can increase risk of malnutrition.

On the contrary this explains nicely how Sami people can be darker than Germans. They lived of reindeer, bird trapping and fishing, even like hundred years ago. It explains why Finnish are somewhat darker than swedes, we relied on hunting and fishing far longer than Swedes did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The UV map doesn't match the color skin distribution that well (there is a distribution map at the end). Natives all over America had reddish-brown skin instead of black, despite receiving similar amounts of UV to Africa. Maybe related to dense forests vs desert/savana?

<comment><USER28> Well, American natives are supposedly Russian in origin (?), and if they came from a group that had developed the paleness trait, it's feasible that in re- developing darker skin their bodies wouldn't come up with the exact same solution as the original Africans.

<comment><USER29> Native Americans are Mongoloid in decent, not Caucasian Russians.

<comment><USER28> Ah, there we go. Well, either way, Mongols are not black.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Q&A section of the animated video is also interesting:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3eUP4-BlXI#t=08m24s>

It addresses other competing theories, in particular sexual selection and genetic drift.

</comment><comment><USER31> i wonder whether depigmentation happened fast enough for people to be cognissant of the advantages.

well into the processes, would people know that dark skinned atavisms would have nutritional problems?

<comment><USER32> I think that the most visible advantage/disadvantage of having different skin colors, are the frequency and severity of sunburns. Black people are more resistant to sunburns than white people. And given that they would need to move hundreds or thousands of kilometers, to be exposed to lower latitudes and heavier solar radiation, and that it was a loooong trip in those prehistoric times, maybe they didn't get to see the advantages/disadvantages.

But then again... who knows?!

<comment><USER33> How common were sunburns before indoor lighting and industrialization though? If you spent at least an hour outdoors every day from early spring through late fall would you ever get sunburned?

<comment><USER7> People have used protective clothing for a long time now. Farmers used to use big hats. I can't prove anything from 5000 years ago, but there was a kind of cowboy hat in Finnish farmer culture about hundred years back.

[http://rautu.fi/Tallenne/EntinenRautu/Maanviljely/Jurtin- har...](http://rautu.fi/Tallenne/EntinenRautu/Maanviljely/Jurtin- harvennuskurssi.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Uh, light skin, blue eyes and blonde hair is just 6000 year old?! Sounds really weird to get so common so quickly.

This should already be well known, by the mutation speed of the relevant genes?

What about an alternative hypothesis, like sexual evolution?

Edit: From the wikipedia page, this theory seems to be quite recent. Interesting. (Sigh, I liked the idea of blonde neanderthals. :-) )

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#Evolution_of_skin_color)

" _This theory is supported by a study into the SLC24A5 gene which found that the allelle associated with light skin in Europe may have originated as recently as 6,000–10,000 years ago[23] which is in line with the earliest evidence of farming.[47]_ "

<comment><USER35> Peter Frost has been writing about this for years. He comes down on the side of the sexual selection theory, so if you're interested in that, check him out.

[http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-europeans- wh...](http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-europeans-white.html)

[http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/04/puzzle-of- european-h...](http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/04/puzzle-of-european- hair-and-eye-color.html)

<comment><USER36> But he even contradicts himself in that post. He has an example of a modern experiment where people select brunettes over blondes because of rarity.

So if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes, why didn't it swing the other way when the majority of the population were blonde? In some parts of Sweden and Finland, 85% of the adults are blonde, how could it ever go way above 50%? If the hypothesis was true, then people in those areas would have strongly selected brunettes and reversed it?

<comment><USER35> Here's what I understand of Frost's opinions:

> if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes

It isn't. European whiteness (of skin) is a product of women being more heavily selected than men, since paleness of skin is a sex characteristic of females. (For example, african boys are born light, and darken over time. African girls are born light, darken until puberty, and then lighten.)

European variation in hair and eye color (but not skin color) is a color polymorphism typical of sexual selection. On this theory, 85% of adults sharing the identical hair color is unexpected.

\-----

Here are some of my own thoughts on your question (I claim no qualification at all to pontificate here):

\- What size are these "some parts of Sweden and Finland"? The smaller they are, the less interesting it is that they might appear uniform.

\- Do 85% of adults share the identical hair color, or is variation being binned into the category "blonde"? Compare the internal variation of african or chinese hair color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Of course, there's another reason that's been kicking around for decades. A pair suddenly shows up in Mesopotamia around 6000 years ago. Their descendants taken captive by Assyria, and their eventual migration into Northern Europe as the Anglo Saxons / Celtic peoples.

[http://www.livescience.com/9578-common-ancestor-blue- eyes.ht...](http://www.livescience.com/9578-common-ancestor-blue-eyes.html)

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

<comment><USER37> "Hine's work The British Nation Identified with Lost Israel (1871) sold up to 250,000 copies"

<comment><USER37> "It has been claimed that by the early 20th century there were more than two million British Israelites in Britain and the United States"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interesting theory. Pity though for the author that it is well know that white people migrated into Europe from Iran and Northern India.

</comment><comment><USER39> How does this explain blue grass? Is grass the same colour all over the World? Just a thought.

Also white people look white as they reflect that light so there skin is the opposite, same for people who are black in that there skin is obsorbing the other light frequencies and so reflecting back not alot and as such appearing black.

Now if you got all the populations and used transport like planes and mixed them all about over the World then stopped having any movement, would the people in the northern and southern climates away from the equator become paler skinned and would those in the equator become darker skinned! Its like that eggs/drugs analogy - this your skin and this is your skin on sun :-).

Still, I would like to know what is the average shade of green per country and how much effect does its lattitude have upon that shade of green. Plants tended not to move as much and as humans have.

So to answear to original question:

Why are Europeans White? Because none of them are Wong :-) and there not actualy white.

<comment><USER40> Why was this downvoted?

<comment><USER39> No idea, shortcommings in others eludes me as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Norway's Prime Minister works as a secret taxi driver - chestnut-tree http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23655675

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean it's a stunt, but it's a pretty good stunt.

</comment><comment><USER2> at least a politician who wants to know what his folk has to say. If it was a marketing gag, well done!

</comment><comment><USER3> Henry V, with a camera pointed at him... also in a cab.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good way to get a random opinion, why did he blow it up? Now everybody will be expecting PM taxi driver :-).

<comment><USER5> That is actually the fun part here in Norway. It isnt really unthinkable.</comment></comment>