Ask HN: What do I need to do/know to start a profitable blog? - <AUTHOR>

Background: I am based in Australia and want to start a blog focused on reviewing and recommending products and/or services to a global, English-speaking audience in a particular niche.
I hope to secure revenues from both advertising (e.g. Adsense, AdBrite, Chitika, etc.) and affiliate links (e.g. Amazon.com affiliate program).
O learned HN gurus, please provide relevant advice, links, tips and suggestions for a novice blogger.
Essentially, I am looking for tips, tricks and things you wish you had known before you started out.
Thanks in advance - Your help is greatly appreciated.
P.S. Should I register a company name (LLC or Australian Pty. Ltd.)? OR Should I operate the site personally under my own name? <comment><USER4> First things first - ignore the Daniel Lyons article in Newsweek - <http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666>. Taking advice from him when it comes to blogging is like taking advice from Dubya on astrophysics. He doesn't have the first clue about running a successful blog and generating revenue. Making money blogging is not easy, but it's definitely not impossible like he makes it sound.

Second, spend a couple hours doing a dedicated search for the major blogs ON blogging. Off the top of my head - problogger.com, shoemoney.com etc. They have blogged about their blogging experience extensively - what worked, what didn't etc. Then spend a few days reading through all their popular posts - <USER2> caveat here is that there's going to be blizzard of information, be prepared to absorb it. Take copious notes regarding blog traffic/SEO/security and figure out ways to implement their strategies into your own niche. (Note - their OLDER posts are a lot more meatier than their recent ones - a common problem with becoming successful bloggers)

If you're still conscious after all the reading, register a domain name, find a good hosting company and launch your blog

Generating revenue - whole books can be written on this subject (and they have been). But it can broadly be broken down into five categories -

1\. Advertisements - the magic word here is CPM (read up on that). The higher the CPM, higher the payout for you. A word of advice in this matter - <USER3> is complete horseshit when it comes to CPM. Don't buy into the hype, it's absolutely pathetic (which is exactly why Dan Lyons made peanuts). Same goes for Adbrite, Chitika etc. The real money is in PRIVATE ads. Take a look at the prominent blogs - like techcrunch.com for example - do you see any adsense or other types of nonsense on their blogs? It's mainly used as a placeholder in case any private ad spots weren't bought by advertisers. NEVER rely on adsense for your primary ad revenue. Having said that, you won't have private advertisers till you have good traffic, so it's ok to start with adsense. But as soon as traffic spikes up, dump adsense like it's the plague.

2\. Affiliate - this is a bit trickier than ads being that it's not completely straightforward. Amazon is a good start, but they're not the best. The key is finding a good affiliate that fits YOUR blog audience the best. Start reading shoemoney.com for this.

3\. Merchandising - you can sell your own stuff on your blog. This can be as complicated as actually creating your own product or as simple as setting up a cafe press store and selling related merchandise (INSANELY easy! Just go to cafepress.com and set up a store for your blog, and they will handle the rest, by taking a commission of your sales.)

4\. Job Board - a specific section on your blog where ppl can post or look for jobs. Charge based on traffic. You can either set up your own job board from scratch (check out the problogger job boards on the bottom right of problogger.com) or do some research on alternatives - [http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2008/04/29/make-money-with- you...](http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2008/04/29/make-money-with-your-own-job- board/) (Job-A-Matic has a good premise). Read up on this.

5\. Donations - Bloggers like Steve Pavlina and Leo Babauta use this method and it works out great for them. But it's not for everyone. Your audience has to LOVE you, or at least really appreciate you, for this.

Bottom line - If you're serious about blogging as a living, don't be like Dan Lyons. He thought ife he simply wrote a few articles each day, the money would automatically flow in. It doesn't. It takes hard work, and more importantly, a LOT of time before you start seeing any meaningful revenue. You have to be constantly reading to see all the different angles and soak up as much info as you possibly can before you find the right combo for your particular blog. So don't get into if you're just in it for the short haul.

Other than that, just start blogging. Spend a couple hours each day reading up on what's new in the blogopshere and incorporate the changes as you go along. Within a few weeks, you'll get the hang of it.

Good Luck!

P.S.I don't know how things work in Australia but in the US, you don't have to register a company, not in the beginning anyway. Just register a domain name and start blogging. For any revenue/expenses, save the receipts and file your taxes appropriately. Ask Darren Rowse (problogger.com), who is one of most popular australian bloggers about this.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is like asking "How do I start a profitable truck?", yes lot's of businesses are built around trucks and lots of profitable businesses use trucks heavily, but the trucking aspect is somewhat orthogonal to the business aspect.

</comment><comment><USER6> You have to put effort into creating good content and in promoting yourself.

Writing good posts is a no brainer, but it's easy to underestimate the importance of marketing yourself. It can take a lot more time than you'd think.

If you look at the most successful bloggers, they write stuff people want to read, but they're also good at networking and self-promotion.

If you're an incredibly good writer, than maybe all you'll need to do is post articles and let word of mouth do the rest. Otherwise, you need to put effort into getting the word out to make up for the slack.

</comment><comment><USER7> You are not starting a blog, you're starting a business. You need to figure out what niche that business is in, who are its customers, how it distinguishes itself from other competing businesses, etc.

You will probably find that a "thin affiliate" site providing nothing but reviews of products which happen to pay you money does not provide people with an incentive to link to your site, join your community, revisit, or otherwise do things that produce long-term business value.

</comment><comment><USER8> This may not be the best forum for this type of advice. You might want to try: <http://www.reddit.com/r/Blogging/>

Also, before you quit your day job, read lots of stories like this one:

"Time to Hang Up the Pajamas: I learned the hard way: while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn't one of them."

<http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666></comment>


Is AlphaZero really a scientific breakthrough in AI? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@josecamachocollados/is-alphazero-really-a-scientific-breakthrough-in-ai-bf66ae1c84f2 <comment><USER2> I obviously took the original press release and breathless articles at face value when I should have been a little more careful as this article clearly shows. I hate it when that happens.</comment>


I wrote the original blue screen of death, sort of - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/09/10/10556421.aspx

<comment><USER2> I miss BSoDs telling you which kernel driver it was. It was super useful, even without research, to tell just from the name that the e.g. Nvidia driver had done it. It was removed in Windows NT 5.1-2/XP/Server 2003 (2000/NT 5.0 told you, as did Windows ME).

Now, assuming a crash dump was successful (they can and do fail), you have to download the "Debugging Tools for Windows" package and then run WinDbg. Load up the crash dump and only then will it give you the same basic information that 2000 and prior gave you at the BSoD.

If the crash dump didn't save (e.g. it was an issue in a storage subsystem, not enough space on the drive, etc) then you're just shit out of luck. No useful information for you, bonus points if it couldn't even store anything in the event log (that happens too, funzies!).

Even for less serious issues, having that driver name was amazingly useful for doing phone support:

         User: A blue screen has come up!
         Tech: At the end of the second line do you see something ending in .sys?
         User: Yes! It says scanner.sys
         Tech: Ah! Can you restart and install your scanner's latest software? That will solve it!
         ... etc etc...

Seriously was a step backwards when they removed that.

<comment><USER3> I'd had one just last night in 8.1, it displayed the driver. Do you have the memory dump turned off, maybe?

<comment><USER2> > Do you have the memory dump turned off, maybe?

I don't know what that question relates to?

I am talking about lack of information in the BSoD and that the alternative has limitations (e.g. that memory dumps fail sometimes). It wasn't a technical support request.

As to Windows 8, last time I had a BSoD it looked more like this: [https://i.imgur.com/OFkIvBT.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/OFkIvBT.jpg)

Which has as little diagnostic information as XP and later.

<comment><USER4> If it's a driver that caused the crash, where it says CRITICAL_STRUCTURE_CORRUPTION, it will say the name of the driver that crashed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my earliest memories of using computers was seeing messages like this, and wishing I knew what the numbers meant.

My dream was to someday understand computers deeply enough that I could see numbers like that any know exactly what was going on. Like reading the matrix.

I know enough now to know what an address is, and while I may not be able to see an address and know what happened, at least I know how to use a crash address to debug a binary. So mission accomplished, I guess. :)

</comment><comment><USER6>
        > Imagine if you did that today. "Press any key to ignore this kernel panic."

Linux still does this today. Not for kernel panics, but for kernel oops, which is the error you will usually get when doing something bad (say a null pointer dereference in a kernel module). The thread that causes a kernel oops is killed and a stack trace is written to dmesg but the rest of the system attempts to continue chugging on.

<comment><USER7> >> ...the kernel oopsies :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Impressive that he is able to remember so many minor details about things he worked on some 20 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Raymond Chen is amazing. His HTML table-based "screen shots" (really, view source!) are pretty cool as well.

<comment><USER8> Saw your comment, thought "no way", went and checked source, and now my jaw's on the floor! I had assumed they were images all this while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone remember that there was a URL you could go to on Windows 95 that would trigger the blue screen of death? It was a great way to piss off your friends. I think it involved trying to access C:\con\con, and some websites took advantage of that through img src.

<comment><USER2> [https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms00-017](https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms00-017)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Technically, what happened was that the virtual machine manager abandoned the event currently in progress and returned to the event dispatcher. It's the kernel-mode equivalent to swallowing exceptions in window procedures and returning to the message loop. If there was no event in progress, then the current application was terminated."

Can anybody explain how Windows 95 and beyond use a virtual machine manager? Is it just referring to the separation of kernel and user space (the virtual machine being the application/"window procedure" and the virtual machine manager watching for exceptions from kernel space)?

</comment><comment><USER11> I read here that Steve Ballmer wrote part of it too. [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Tech/Tech-News/Steve- Ball...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Tech/Tech-News/Steve-Ballmer- apparently-wrote-the-Blue-Screen-of-Death/articleshow/41801284.cms)

<comment><USER12> Seriously? [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/09/09/10556...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/09/09/10556049.aspx)

<comment><USER11> LOL! so far only MSDN has been refuting the claim

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2603531/why-steve-ballmer- wro...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2603531/why-steve-ballmer-wrote- windows-classic-crtlaltdelete-text-himself.html)

(even the Verge)

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/4/6105203/steve-ballmer- blue-...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/4/6105203/steve-ballmer-blue-screen- of-death)

<comment><USER13> The articles you link to are all just misquoting the original blog post by Raymond Chen (who is not "MSDN", they just host the blog).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was hoping to learn why blue was chosen as the background color for that screen. This article doesn't mention that. Does anyone know why blue was used?

<comment><USER15> It's the best choice of the colors available in text mode. You can't use the 8 high-intensity colors, that would be nuts. Black wouldn't work, neither would gray. Brown? Red would be obtuse. Green would be odd. Cyan would work as well, I guess. VMware uses purple.

It might also be worth noting that the same color blue was used for the MS-DOS and Windows installers, edit.com, and others.

<comment><USER16> Why wouldn't black work? Should give visible messages with white text unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER17> You want something that is immediately visually recognizable -- even on a machine you are just walking by -- from any other normal operation, including "sitting displaying something in a full-screen DOS box".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


On 81st birthday, Oregon man gives company to employees (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/on-81st-birthday-oregon-man-gives-company-to-employees/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a similar story told by E.F. Schumacher in his 1979 book "Good Work." Quoting from the chapter "A viable future visible in the present":

      The second link of my little chain is this company called Scott Bader,
      a plastics company founded by Ernest Bader, a Swiss Quaker immigrant to
      England before the First World War.  He's now about eighty-five.  Ernest
      Bader was penniless when he started in England.  He said, All my life I
      will have to work for others.  What a dreadful system.  Well, it didn't
      work out like that.  He was an entrepreneur and he had a business and in
      1951 he suddenly woke up and said, I am now doing to all these people what
      I suffered from when it was done to me.  I am not going to go out of this
      life with this feeling.  No, I must do something.  So he got in touch with
      various people, including myself, and said, I want to put this on a basis
      that I as a Quaker and a pacifist believe in.  I don't believe in what I
      am doing.  And so we worked very hard and hammered out a constitution for
      this firm.  Ernest Bader said, No, I don't want to have ownership of this
      company, and so all the capital, except 10 percent, was vested in the
      commonwealth, which was set up for this purpose as a limited company.  The
      equity doesn't lie anymore with Ernest Bader, it lies with that
      commonwealth, and everybody who works for a certain length of time becomes
      a member of the commonwealth.  Legally speaking, the commonwealth is the
      owner of the operating company.  At first the family retained 10 percent
      founder's share, so arranged that they had a majority, not with the
      intention of using it but as a last resort.  Because it is jolly difficult
      to build something up but it is very easy to ruin it.

      [...]

      It was not until 1963, that is, twelve years later, that we felt it worked.
      The founder's shares were also put into the general pocket of the
      commonwealth, so it is the administration of the commonwealth that owns
      the thing.

Schumacher goes on to describe how this created a radical realignment of incentives for the company and to list some of the effects created by this realignment. For example, they put a cap on the maximum spread between the highest paid and lowest paid employees, committed to staying small (spinning off new companies when they needed to grow), and required that a significant portion of all profits be invested in the local community.

Scott Bader still exists and is still owned and run by the employees:

<http://www.scottbader.com/governance.html>

<comment><USER3> And there are significantly larger examples too:

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

<comment><USER4> A related cool example - worker owned from the start, 90k employees: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation>

<comment><USER5> But mondragon worked so well for situational and cultural reasons Basque culture is very cooperative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have actually recently been doing a lot of research on ESOPS. Back in the 90's congress passed a law that makes it possible for a company that is 100% owned by an ESOP to pay ZERO corporate income tax!

If you have a startup that is cashflow positive and generating taxable income you should look into this. I am still leraning a lot about it myself. This link was useful (I have no affiliation with the law firm, just thought they did a good job describing the details)...

<http://www.seethebenefits.com/showarticle.aspx?Show=687>

</comment><comment><USER7> Not to sound like a cynic here, but: <http://www2.gtlaw.com/pub/alerts/2003/kahnj_03.asp>

What Are the Tax Advantages of an ESOP to the Shareholder?

If the corporation is a C corporation and the shareholder sells 30% percent or more of his or her stock, the owner can defer indefinitely the taxation of his or her gains on the sale of the stock. The additional liquidity for the shareholder presents vast investment opportunities and increases his or her estate and charitable planning options.

<comment><USER8> He's giving away the stock, so the gains are 0. There's no tax to be deferred.

<comment><USER7> Not correct. Even if you are _giving_ the stock to the employees, there are significant tax advantages.

"Uses for ESOPs:

To buy the shares of a departing owner: Owners of privately held companies can use an ESOP to create a ready market for their shares. Under this approach, the company can make tax-deductible cash contributions to the ESOP to buy out an owner's shares, or it can have the ESOP borrow money to buy the shares (see below)."[1]

[1][https://www.nceo.org/articles/esop-employee-stock- ownership-...](https://www.nceo.org/articles/esop-employee-stock-ownership- plan)

<comment><USER9> Isn't that still about buying?

<comment><USER7> The article is light on details, but one way you can "give" ownership to your employees but still get paid for it is for the company to borrow money to purchase the shares for the employees.

That had the added advantage that both the interest AND the principal on the loan are tax deductible.

<comment><USER10> The timing of the transaction is also interesting given the impending change in the estate tax laws with the "fiscal cliff". Reminds me of: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/business/economy/early- div...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/business/economy/early-dividend-for- wal-mart-is-latest-move-in-tax-scramble.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of Chuck Feeney - who made billions and then gave it all away/set up a foundation, including giving $26 million to long term employees.

Great book on him called `The Billionaire Who Wasn't`

<comment><USER12> I agree. This was an 'accidental' book for me and whilst I'm sure that the story told was a little biased the ultimate message was very good. Recommend it to anyone who is interested in business. What I like is that this is also a book about building something huge, from an idea. Many times on HN its about someone who's created something that brings in a few hundred or a few thousand dollars a month. Its good to read about people who really build large businesses, employing a lot of people

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> All companies should be employee-owned.

<comment><USER14> Wrong. Anyone forming a business should be free to own it themselves, invite employee ownership, donate the entire thing to their dog, invite the government to nationalise it - in short, anyone who creates a company should be free to dispose and rearrange the ownership as they see fit. Within this spectrum there will be optimal, sub-optimal, and plainly idiotic arrangements. And that's the way things should be.

As soon as you start using language like 'should' or 'must' then you imply regulatory impositions, which will always create a set of winners and losers, but more importantly, erect a wall making it that much more difficult for the losers to get back into the winners column

<comment><USER15> The difference between "should" and "must" is significant. If I said: "people should not be hypocrites" and "people should be free to say what they want", my statements would not be incompatible or contradictory.

In the same way, simultaneously holding the beliefs "companies should be employee owned" and "anyone forming a business should be free to own it themselves" is possible without cognitive dissonance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article is from 2010...

</comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome. I buy his grains all the time.

<comment><USER18> Their steel-cut oats make excellent oatmeal. I'm not surprised they won the competition.

<comment><USER19> I eat their Scottish oatmeal nearly every morning. I get 12 lbs delivered every 3 months. Love it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've used his product which I would rate as phenomenally good. Especially their Guar Gum.

</comment><comment><USER21> That's a really neat birthday present! Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER22> How are shares allotted to new employees? Do existing shares get diluted?

</comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like a great guy and boss! Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER24> This is amazing

</comment><comment><USER25> It is a great story but it happened almost 3 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER26> Beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is so unamerican. Giving stuff away for free is really bad. Teach a man to fish instead. Or rather, the man should be trying to learn to fish. It just feels so bad. Like spoiling a child.

If you really want to help somebody you must really make them work for it with blood and sweat. Otherwise they will not appreciate it. And they will teach their children (sub-consciously) to just wait for the next billionaire to give them something.

<comment><USER28> He's giving it to his employees who presumably have worked for it with "blood and sweat". An alternative would be passing it down through inheritance or selling to a bidder, neither of whom invest blood or sweat. So, to your point, he's doing exactly what you say he should

<comment><USER27> >>He's giving it to his employees who presumably have worked for it with "blood and sweat"

No they didn't. They were getting paid already for the value they provided to the company. Do not delude yourself, this is nothing more than a handout.

>>An alternative would be passing it down through inheritance or selling to a bidder, neither of whom invest blood or sweat.

So you are OK with some employees receiving a gift and you oppose the heirs receiving that same gift. Of course I'm opposed to just giving stuff away, but if you have to then leaving it to your heirs makes more sense from an evolutionary point of view.

Another option, if you really want to give away your money, is to create jobs for people with nothing to do. This way they will earn that money instead of just receiving a gift. For example, fund public works and pay people who you want to help to do that job. Pay them reasonably even. Maybe even include education benefits. Isn't this a better option than just handing somebody free money?

If those people do not want to do these jobs then they do not deserve the money. I'm really curious why would anybody disagree with me.

Of course, there are always exceptions. There are people in the world that truly need free money. Example orphans, the elderly, disabled people. People who even if they wanted to work they simply can't. My logic is undeniable, how can you oppose anything I say?

At the end of the day though we are all free to do with our money what we want. Still, I cannot help but hurt when I see money just being wasted away by giving it to people who have not earned it (heirs excluded of course).

Edit: Thanks for answering. I really do believe I'm right so it is nice to have somebody explain why that may not be so instead of just getting down voted (which I don't mind). If more people could try explaining why they disagree with me that'd be great. I really want to hear why anybody thinks I'm wrong. Maybe I am wrong. I'm willing to change my mind if there is a good reason.

<comment><USER29> Why "heirs excluded"?

I don't understand the logic by which it's only ok to give money to your descendants... wouldn't that hurt them just the same in your worldview?

<comment><USER30> It's almost certainly a troll, just downvote it till it gets hellbanned and move on.

<comment><USER29> Yea yea, but trying to give the benefit of the doubt... the last statement in their comment _did_ indicate that they were open to changing their mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forget your MVP, build a MCP. - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevoyoung.com/post/32933259890/forget-your-mvp-build-a-mcp

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. With HN having a heavy developer base, it would be great to get your feedback on if you think MCP paints a different picture than MVP.</comment>


Tesla: "Anyone riding a UFO out of Area 51 today can recharge at our nearby " - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/Tesla/status/1175048579829944320 <comment><USER2> Twitter has been failing at displaying single tweets for the last two weeks or so, is it just me or other people have observed this behaviour too?</comment>


Alternatives to Firing - <AUTHOR> http://www.askamanager.org/2007/09/alternatives-to-firing.html <comment><USER2>
        I told him that I knew he was frustrated by these particular things but that
        they simply weren't going to change, that they were inherent parts of the
        job, and that I didn't want us to be constantly battling over them … and
        that rather than trying to force himself into a job that obviously was
        making him frustrated and stressed, I wanted to see him figure out if he
        could really be happy in the position, knowing that the things he was
        complaining about weren't going to change.

        A couple of days later, he told me that he had thought about it and realized
        he should move on.

So, in other words, you fired him. You made it clear that the job wasn't going to change, and that he didn't have a place in your organization. The fact that he submitted the resignation, rather than you submitting the paperwork is immaterial to the fact that you fired him. This is as much of a firing as a government minister "submitting his resignation" in order to "spend more time with his family" after a particularly embarrassing political scandal or gaffe.

Now, granted, I agree that the firing was handled well, and was done with a minimum of pain to both parties. But you still fired him. I'm worried that OP is trying to sidestep that fact and make it seem like this was some kind of voluntary meeting of the minds when, in my reading of the situation, it clearly wasn't.

<comment><USER3> Yep, it's passive-aggressive firing.

She's rationalizing away her avoidance of her discomfort and making it sound like a favor to the people she's letting go.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it is a favor.

The employee is effectively being asked to leave and they're doing a controlled transition. In many cases, this is the best way to go.

This is _similar_ to firing people by putting them on a "performance plan"\-- which as almost everyone knows is the "nice way" to fire someone in a corporate environment. Anyone who is put on a "performance plan" had better start searching for a new job immediately. It is definitely better than being fired outright, but there's a phony aspect to calling it a "performance plan".

The approach in the article, I think, is more honest and instead of beating around the bush, gives an opportunity for the employer and employee to transition. For example, the employee would then be free to get out of work and go to interviews and the employer could have the employee train their replacement, all with minimal hard-feelings.

<comment><USER5> > In many cases, this is the best way to go.

Except, without severance and ineligible for unemployment benefits.

<comment><USER6> If the employer even offers severance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had a young dev in my team many years ago. We agreed it wasn't working out, so I helped find him a totally different type of role in another part of the same company. It worked out great. I have no idea why this doesn't happen more often, it's not difficult to do in any reasonably sized company.

<comment><USER8> Just my two cents, as someone completely oblivious about management: maybe because previous performance, while not great a indicator, is the best predictor of future performance?

To put it more obviously, as a manager of "another part" of the same company, wouldn't you rather have the opportunity to recruit and hire, instead of being handed someone (which you know already _failed_ )?

<comment><USER9> Failed _at that job_ , and _within that particular combination of people, job requirements and roles to be fulfilled_.

Both Lebron James and Cristiano Ronaldo are top players at their sports, and known for their high athleticism. You wouldn't expect them to switch and still be performing at the level they do.

Heck, you wouldn't even expect them to be performing at a high capacity if you just switched positions _inside their own team!_.

<comment><USER8> I'm not really a fan of such comparisons, and I don't think yours fares well, mostly because you are talking "top of the top" performance when you talk about those two. :) That's not the reality in most jobs and positions. We're certainly not talking about the Cristiano Ronaldo of software development most of the times.

As I said in other comments, I agree with the general premise of what you say. I also do, on the other hand, have some experience of the common workplace to know that sometimes, low performance is low commitment or carelessness. And both will very possibly transfer to other position. Again, previous performance is not a great indicator; I understand, however, that people might have to resort to it sometimes.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't even have to be at the top. I just used names that are recognizable. We could be talking about high-school track & field and the point would still stand.

In any case, what I am trying to say is that you seem too quick to pin the lack of performance in the "common workplace" on the individual, when there are so many other parts on the system that can and should be analyzed. What the others and I are saying is "no, we can't say that poor performance 'will very possible transfer to the other position". Especially if you have access to the people that worked with them and can have a deeper look at the context, it makes no sense to be looking at past performance to judge potential.

<comment><USER8> > In any case, what I am trying to say is that you seem too quick to pin the > lack of performance in the "common workplace" on the individual,

Sorry, but no, not at all. I explicitly said "sometimes": "sometimes, low performance is low commitment or carelessness". My message since the beginning has been that, while not a great indicator, previous performance will at least have some correlation with future performance. Again, it's not great, but it's also not a random relationship.

I hope it goest without saying, you can and should try to have a deeper look at the context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Choose your jurisdiction carefully, especially if "the transition out" mechanism is a resignation rather than an extended notice to an amicable firing, and the resignation means the employee misses out on a severance payout.

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

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Here in the UK you would have to be very careful not to find yourself in an Industrial Tribunal.

That said, I personally think anyone should be able to be bought out of a contract with, say, 3-6 months pay.

<comment><USER12> The average payout for unfair dismissal is 6 months pay and constructive dismissal is hard to prove unless the company is particularly dumb - e.g. having recordings of discussing firing some one for being gay.

<comment><USER11> From my experience companies likely to be found guilty are advised to make an out-of-court settlement and often take that route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> German here; whenever I read workplace stories from the US I can usually follow along just fine, just at the end, it seems like someone HAS to be fired, always leaving me a little confused. Why no reconciliation? Why immediately resort to such a drastic measure?

In my professional life I've come across a handful of colleagues who were demoted when they couldn't handle a certain role, or who have committed various kinds of misconduct, yet remained at their companies just fine.

<comment><USER8> I work at a German company, currently, and have been dealing with someone which - IMO - should be fired. I can understand what you say about not resorting immediately to drastic measures, and my company is actually trying (too hard, again IMO) to do that.

However, you have to consider the downsides of this: is it fair that my workload is increased, because someone is underperforming? I'm not talking about occasional spikes, this is systematic. What does the company communicate to its associates, when "accepting" someone like this? What about quality, how am I supposed to champion quality if the company accepts the low quality output (let's forget "low quantity" for a moment) from someone else?

There's always a downside, and the workplace is an open system. You can't just "target" the low-performer, everything you do will target everyone on the team. If you try to "reconciliation" measures (other roles, extra training, coaching, easing of tasks), you're implicitly communicating something to the other team members. If you do it repeatedly and long enough, you'll eventually get: a) frustration, resentment and feelings of unfairness in other associates; and b) diminishing commitment and quality standards (i.e. "why should I care for quality if it is not demanded from others?").

P.S. I also feel a kind of shock every time I hear/read someone talking "lightheartedly" about firing someone. I'm just trying to highlight the potential downside of "not firing".

<comment><USER14> I think this has more to do with European employment regulations then what is 'fair', and your company doesn't have much choice in the matter. Think of it from another perspective, if someone isn't culpable of flagrant misconduct then whatever issue management have with them could be for a number of reasons including sexual or racial bias, I think forcing the company to enact due process is needed to help eliminate some of the ugly politics in firing someone.

<comment><USER8> You're right, generally. In this case, though, I'm talking about someone hired with a temporary (1 year) but automatically renewable contract. Where I live, it's just a matter of not renewing it (giving notice one month before the deadline).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some firms use the principal of making life at work downright unpleasant, in the hope the member(s) of staff will take the hint and jump before being pushed. A classic example is the usage of 'PIP's - most of the time unrelated to actual performance, just an HR approved tool to effect removal of staff.

A lot of the time conflicts arise due personality clashes rather than technical differences, basically your face no longer fits/the manager wants someone else in your place.

Best advice on those circumstances is to be polite, absolutely do the work asked, keep records of everything, look for a new job, but also retain an employment lawyer, so if they move onto stage two - aka "really fucking over the staff", you have options.

I have a colleague who followed this process in the UK, took them to tribunal, they bottled it, and settled when it became apparent how much evidence the staff had collected to support their position.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm sad that this seems like such a novel idea.

The only time a "firing" should come as a surprise to an employee is when they are being laid off as part of a restructuring (this is unfortunately the only practical way to do it).

Any time an employee is not meeting performance expectations, their manager should be communicating the gap to them early and often. At some point, these discussions should be getting more and more explicit to make it clear that their continued employment is at risk. Some people will change their behavior and make a turn-around. Some will see the writing on the wall and leave of their own accord (usually those with more maturity/perspective, and those who have other options). Some people will hang on to the last and leave fingernail marks on the door frame -- but they should never be able to say that it was a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some people look at career advancement like it's a race along the highway -- you pull over and put your career on hold, I keep going faster and staying ahead of you. That kind of thing.

I think it would be prudent to look at it like trying to build your own sandcastle, and everybody does it in different ways and at different speeds. There is no reason my progress should impede yours.

That said, I think the article is spot on. Firing can be a positive experience and it need not imply a negative progression, but simply a lateral adjustment.

</comment><comment><USER18> Being encouraged to resign is the same as being fired by a passive-aggressive manager. Typically if you resign of your own volition you are ineligible for unemployment, so this is a card managers should play carefully if at all.

<comment><USER19> They didn't encourage them to resign. They encouraged them to decide if they wanted to be there enough to change. It's a very different thing. In this case the employee has choice and control. It's possible for someone to put in the required work to change, it's not easy and it may well not be worth it to the employee but that's up to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If someone talks to you like this hold out for the day that actually fire you and offer you a significant severance package. Accept it (in writing) before telling them about the great new job you are starting soon.

<comment><USER21> Great idea, you get some money, and no good will and no reference. If money is more important to you than ethics and connections, this a great way to go. But know that connections will get you way farther than being an arrogant but skilled individual.

<comment><USER22> Depending on your industry, you may not get any reference anyway.

My references for the last 3 jobs over 6 years has been "Yes, he was employed here from $startdate to $enddate as $jobtitle"

And that's it, to avoid any risk of there being any liability issue.

It's gone from "you're not allowed to give a negative reference" to "why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum" in a number of industries I've been in.

<comment><USER23> That's the official policy at a lot of places.

IMO, as a manager, you're an AH if you aren't willing to give more information than that in a reference check, regardless of company policy.

<comment><USER24> The negative PR for you and your company when it's found out and publicly exposed that you're out making disparaging remarks about former employees? No matter how true, good luck.

<comment><USER23> No one says I make disparaging remarks about former employees.

Ask me for a reference on a good former employee: you get a lot more than dates and titles. This is where I'd be an ass to not talk about them more. I don't walk around afraid of my own shadow.

Ask me for a reference on a poor former employee: you get dates and titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious about the actual job at hand and the piece which was so tangential and awful for the person. I've seen many jobs with pieces that simply don't make sense / may have made sense when the company was smaller. I've also seen people become very defensive when you try to break that job up to make more sense.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting, I'm in a similar situation, where I don't really fit, but I really can't envision a company that would be better. I'm just feeling that I'm not made for this business world.

</comment><comment><USER27> I believe this is called "Making them someone else's problem". Difficult employees get bounced around from manager to manager because that's easier than actually firing them. It's probably most common in very large companies, of course, since they offer the most opportunities to work for other managers.

</comment><comment><USER28> well, this is firing too, but in a polite way.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good god I would never want to work for a manager like the one who wrote the article.

What a lack of self-awareness.

</comment><comment><USER30> IMO He got the hint and left willingly -- I might be cynical but that's probably what the manager wanted. If I get the vibe or direct message I'm at risk of getting fired, I'd be prompted to immediately find a new position.

</comment><comment><USER31> > bad hires often aren't bad employees because they're stupid, obstinate, or > insubordinate but rather because they are "miscast."

I dare you to find a product manager who can actually put this into practice without losing his/her job. The entire means of production and bureaucracy are founded on excluding the "mad" and "unreasonable."

If you want to treat people fairly, we'll have to go through our prisons with a fine-toothed comb.</comment>


IBM Announces Major Blockchain Solution to Speed Global Payments - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-announces-major-blockchain-solution-040100816.html <comment><AUTHOR> And people thought 30-40% for internet stocks during their prime was crazy [https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC- XLM](https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-XLM)</comment>


Occupy founder calls on Obama to appoint Eric Schmidt 'CEO of America' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/20/occupy-founder-obama-eric-schmidt-ceo-america

<comment><USER2> The petition is here:

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/transfer-all- feder...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/transfer-all-federal- administrative-authority-tech-industry/0P6HwQq8)

Current number of votes: 2.

</comment><comment><USER3> Justine Tunney is not the founder of the Occupy movement.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is no "Occupy founder", and in fact the movement went to extraordinary lengths not to have any leaders or anyone in any position of authority to "speak for" it, which proved to limit its ability to succeed.

This is an example of the hasty generalization fallacy: falsely declaring a single individual/event to be representative of an entire movement/all events.

<comment><USER5> Yes, some wonder if Tunney, and the others controlling occupywallst.org, are some kind of performance art/joke. They run a "Boutique Activist Consultancy" which "serves a hand-picked international clientele of people's parties, political celebrities, and emergent social movements." ([http://occupywallst.org/about/](http://occupywallst.org/about/))

On @OccupyWallSt, one of the tweets when she started using that platform is "I think Weev is one of the most brilliant people of our generation." Yes, Weev: ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Trolling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Trolling))

Graeber claimed, "oh she was involved in the early comms team. Quickly stopped going to big meetings as she disliked democracy, esp consensus" ([https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/438688288313212928](https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/438688288313212928))

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't surprise me. She talks in circles with ideologies. Her political philosophy is....spaghetti code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A story about a petition with 2 signatures (2!) created by someone who's main qualification doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Slow news day huh?

<comment><USER8> There's nothing wrong with a little bit of comedy every now and then to lighten things up.</comment></comment>


Hardware Floating Point - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenmarz.com/2020/06/14/hardware-floating-point/ <comment><USER2> Cool stuff! I just learned that the Kernel does not have floating point on by default (although as the article describes, can run in floating point mode). This means TCP/IP algorithms, like TCP Cubic congestion control, are on their own to figure out floating point: [https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall16/cos561/p...](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall16/cos561/papers/Cubic08.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That depends on the hardware and the kernel, of course.

I believe Linux has always required wrapping in-kernel FPU operations in calls to kernel_fpu_begin()/kernel_fpu_end(). As I remember, when Itanium first came out, some floating point algorithms in the Linux kernel were changed to fixed- point, because the (at least early) Itanium FPU handled some corner cases (presumably, denormalized) by trapping to the kernel ("floating point assist fault") and requiring the kernel to emulate the faulting instruction in software. The function to enable in-kernel FPU disabled interrupts, which would have caused issues if the FPU needed assist.

The other option (I think) for Itanium would have been to throw out IEEE-754 conformance for in-kernel floating point and have kernel_fpu_begin set the FPU mode bit that just truncated all denormals to zero. I'm not sure the arguments for not doing this, other than fixed point being faster on most architectures and available everywhere, so supporting Itanium was a good excuse to banish a few more uses of kernel_fpu_begin().

<comment><USER4> Given the existence of kernel_fpu_begin(), any idea why that TCP paper says this?

> Since it requires a floating point operation, implementing it in the kernel > requires some integer approximation

This line seems to be ignoring both kernel_fpu_begin(), and software floating point, unless I'm just missing something.

<comment><USER3> Portably and efficiently implementing it in the kernel still requires a fixed point (integer operations) approximation. I'm sure the authors were using "necessary" in the sense of practicality, not in the sense of "impossible otherwise".

If they used fp in the kernel, it wouldn't work on some hardware that is supported on Linux (requiring conditional compilation). If they emulated floating point, even single precision IEEE-754 multiplication would require 24bit x 24bit -> 48bit multiplies, and supporting denormals would require 48-bit bit scans and variable-width shifts. It all gets very slow in a hurry (oxymoron intended) on hardware with 32-bit integer hardware and no hw fp. They could choose to emulate some non-IEEE-754 fp format that's slightly more efficient... but that sounds needlessly complex for little to no benefit.

So, their remaining option is to use fixed point operations. It's all noisy approximations with TCP in the real world anyway, so I doubt that there's a measurable difference in throughput when using the fixed-point approximation models vs. using the floating point approximation models.

As an added bonus, they get consistent results across architectures. Though I think that all supported hardware that has hw fp uses that hardware in a mode that at least close to IEEE-754 compliance, so differences would be tiny. Some hardware supports both IBM format floating point and IEEE-754. As far as I know, the Linux VAX port was never completed. IBM and VAX are the main non- IEEE-754 floating point formats encountered outside of GPUs/TPUs.

Edit: or maybe they meant "necessary" in the "Linus will ban me for life if I submit such a silly patch" sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scalable computer programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/scalable_computer_programming_languages.html <comment><USER2> He is exactly right with respect to the language concepts. The language analysis is hit-or-miss; but nobody uses every programming language, so it's hard to be informative here.

I can read Perl programs that are more than 100 lines long. It is all a matter of learning Perl first. The same applies to every other programming language.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, that covers storage-class and precision. I'd add lifetime, volatility, value dependencies, reference dependencies... I'd like to see that and more, not because I want arcane syntax but because the compiler/runtime could then fold code, ensure correctness, optimize, track dataflow, and generally cover my butt so I could get from here to there using fewer critically-scarce braincells. The slowest component of any software is the programmers brain.

</comment><comment><USER4> Much clearer than: [http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-03-0...](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-03-07/surreal.md#readme)

</comment><comment><USER5> He says that garbage collection makes languages more scalable and lack of it makes them less scalable. That flies in the face of reality. In practice garbage collection bogs down huge applications. Microsoft tried to rewrite major portions of Windows with GC and it was a dog and they killed it. It seems that most of the biggest applications and systems use a classic memory management scheme, directly or indirectly.

"An experiment is worth a thousand opinions."

<comment><USER6> He's talking about the cognitive overhead of programming in the large, not the computational overhead.

I'm into OCaml but I think he's wrong to recommend it so highly in this specific niche - OCaml's namespacing mechanism is weak compared to C++ and Java's for example. Probably the most serious commercial users of OCaml are Jane Street Capital, and their Yaron Minsky has complained about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has HN just discovered the awesomeness of Mike Vanier? He's the best /teacher/ in the CS department because he can speak to those of us who aren't programmers at heart. He's also a brilliant programmer, from what I understand, but his best skill is that he can operate on a scale of abstractions to reach a range of audiences.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what this guy thinks about Scala, which was named after this concept of a Scala(ble) language...

<comment><USER9> No macros; otherwise it fits his bill fairly well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would like to have a language with a scalable type system. That means the type system should accommodate everything from dynamic typing for quick hacks, all the way to finely-grained static typing suitable for safety-critical systems.

For example, a particular variable's typed might be refined over time in stages like this.

1\. dynamically typed

2\. number

3\. floating-point number

4\. floating-point number between 0.0 - 100.0

5\. floating-point number between 0.0 - 100.0, with a minimum of 40 bits in the fractional part

6\. floating-point number between 0.0 - 100.0, with a minimum of 40 bits in the fractional part, and tell the execution environment to optimize for memory use instead of performance

The languages in use today can cover parts of that spectrum, but nothing allows the whole range.

<comment><USER11> Type systems that are concerned with representation and range of primitive values aren't very useful. Replacing representation/structure with type names doesn't improve things.

If I'm adding 3.5 oz of OJ to 6.7 oz of vodka, that's either a programming mistake or a strong drink (represented programatically). (Yes, the correct answer depends on context.) A type system that helps me in that situation is worth something.

A type system that only addresses representation and range of primitive values can't even begin to help in that situation.

Yes, units are a partial solution. (They also reduce programmer work - you can add feet to furlongs and get something sensible.)

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I just used that floating-point variable as a simple example. It would certainly be useful to have some concept of units built into the language. I'm actually working on handling units in Java right now, as part of a larger library for healthcare data. [http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes/da...](http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes/datatypes.htm#prop- PQ.unit)</comment></comment></comment>


Russia's Federation spacecraft 3.5 times cheaper than NASA's SpaceX Dragon - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/329949-federation-spacecraft-cheaper-dragon/ <comment><USER2> And how many time more likely to kill everyone on board due to failure?

<comment><USER3> We'll see. According to Wikipedia, the Soyuz spacecraft used by Russians so far lost no crew since 1971.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_missions)</comment></comment>


The State of Probabilistic Programming - <AUTHOR> https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/the-state-of-probabilistic-programming/ <comment><USER2> I've tried to use probabilistic programming for building a model of real data, and it seems that there is a long way to go before it's practical and fast.

On one hand, there are the Monte Carlo-based methods that will support modeling almost any distributions, but are slow to use for large amounts of data.

On the other hand, there are interesting cases like Infer.NET that use a completely different technique (approximate, deterministic inference) but are brittle for many real-world use cases.

Then, there is the general issue that one has to be familiar with probabilistic models and the inner workings of the inference algorithms to have any hope of debugging the inevitable errors and convergence issues that arise. That seems to realistically require a machine learning or statistics PhD and the population of those is very small.

<comment><USER3> Well, MCMC is pretty close to brute force so it's never going to be very fast.

But the diagnostic tools are really quite good these days – tools like Stan and PyMC make it easy to see diagnostic plots that allow you to check for convergence and such. Additionally, more and more fine-tuning is happening automatically, like setting the right jump sizes and a plausible initial value for the random walk.

Note that traditional statistics, like regression, requires similar diagnostic steps: qqplots to check for the normality of your data, the Levene test for heteroskedasticity and so on. They often get ignored, but they're generally not hard to teach or learn.

We're really not that far from having this stuff be usable by the broader public. Maybe not "build any model you like and it will just work out of the box" but definitely as a replacement for much frequentist statistics. See "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis" by Kruschke, for example.

<comment><USER4> I'm more pessimistic. My experience has been that inferring often benefits from reparameterization or analytic marginalizing, plus a bag of tricks that many people don't know.

It's unfortunately still a long way from being a technology that you can pretty blindly use like ols or logistic regression. Particularly if you only care about prediction, not parameter inference, lr with a penalty search is pretty straightforward.

May I ask what / if you use bayesian stats for professionally in your news work?

Also, the link to your github from your site goes to stdbrouw instead of debrouwere

<comment><USER3> So do you feel the pitfalls of probabilistic programming / Bayesian data analysis are potentially more severe than those of traditional methods?

I don't get to use that much Bayesian analysis in my work, but I've been toying around with a hierarchical model of content popularity recently: are some topics / authors / genres more popular than others? Frankly finding it hard to separate the signal ("this is what people actually like to read") from the noise ("this is what just happened to be trending and will not be reproducible").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's interesting about most complaints of these systems is people talk about their poor performance or scalability? That is usually more a consequence of using MCMC or other inference algorithm than the language itself.

MCMC is a very slow inference algorithm. Its primary advantage was that for well-known models it could be coded up much more simply than a fancier inference technique. When you consider variational methods and newer streaming methods based on things like Assumed Density Filtering you can get really great scalable performance. The point of probabilistic programming is write inference algorithms once for a large class of models and be done. So the advantage of using a fancier method is amplified.

This means paradoxically probabilistic programming should eventually be faster than existing methods rather than slower, since you can reuse these fancier inference methods for new models. This is a very active field so this progress is only starting to be appear in the existing systems.

<comment><USER4> Ease of coding is not the primary advantage of mcmc. The (giant) disadvantage of variational inference is the user needs to derive equations and understand quite a bit of math, where gibbs or other samplers like those in bugs/openbugs/jags/stan can work with the factored distributions and require much less mathematical sophistication from users.

<comment><USER6> I know they've traditionally been quite fiddly, but I'm pretty sure computers can be persuaded to help derive the maths for variational methods these days.

Perhaps a more important difference is that MCMC, while slow, is exact in the limit. Variational methods won't converge to the true posterior no matter how long you run them. You'll converge to an approximate answer which depends on the particular variational form you choose to use.

<comment><USER4> Are you aware of any work (or researchers) working on that? I would be very interested.

And I think your second sentence reinforces my point -- it makes variational methods either more fiddly, or require more understanding to use well.

edit: here's one such (limited but nice) effort: [http://ebonilla.github.io/papers/nguyen-bonilla- nips-2014.pd...](http://ebonilla.github.io/papers/nguyen-bonilla- nips-2014.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Microsoft's Infer.NET is essentially an automated system for variational (/expectation-propagation) inference. It implements primitives for common operations and distributions, and then uses the local structure of mean-field inference ("variational message passing": [http://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume6/winn05a/winn05a.pdf](http://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume6/winn05a/winn05a.pdf)) to build up variational inference algorithms for arbitrary factor graphs. It's not infinitely flexible and doesn't solve all problems related to variational inference, but once you get used to it you can iterate quite quickly on model refinements, inference tweaks, etc. without any tedious derivations.

<comment><USER4> thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> DrBayes ([https://github.com/ntoronto/drbayes](https://github.com/ntoronto/drbayes)) is another interesting probabilistic programming language. It implements measure-theoretic probability in Racket, so it's not limited to what you can express with probability density functions and standard distributions -- you can condition a random variable on any measurable subset of the probability space, for example, so you could condition Y on 0 < X < 3, which wouldn't be possible to evaluate with density functions. Or you can construct random variables which have no density function.

I'm not sure this has great practical use, but it's a very interesting system.

</comment><comment><USER9> This strikes me as a perfect application for quantum computers---but I'm just an amateur, so I'd love to hear an expert opinion. My understanding is this 1982 talk by Feynman [1] more or less launched the study of quantum computers, and it's all about how they can carry a probabilistic value through their computations rather than a definite one. And one of the lessons from that paper (if I'm reading & remembering right---maybe it's another paper) is that simulating quantum behavior with a non-quantum computer turns a lot of polynomial-time problems into exponential-time problems, so that having a real quantum computer would be very helpful for solving the performance & scalability issues described in the OP. Thoughts?

[1] [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman.pdf](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman.pdf)

<comment><USER10> You have to take into account that quantum processes are governed by a kind of "randomness" that is different from the one in stochastic processes. Scott Aaronson explains the basics of quantum mechanics very succinctly in one of his lectures [1].

The exponential->polynomial speedup we might get from a quantum computer doesn't really apply to stochastic processes, because we can already execute them in polynomial time on a classical computer (just use a random number generator).

Having a quantum computer would still be truly amazing, though. Even just being able to simulate quantum mechanics efficiently would be revolutionary.

[1] - [http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html)

<comment><USER9> I upvoted this comment as soon as I read it, but just to follow up: that link is amazing. I read lecture 9, then 10, 10.5, 11, . . . Eventually I bought the book and am reading it from the beginning. Godel and the Halting Problem has been a pet interest for ~17 years, and I've often wondered about implications similar to Penrose's argument. The recent death of a young promising friend has made me want to research these things more seriously, and Aaronson seems like a wonderful guide. Thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems Markov Logic nets can scale to really big problems:

* [https://code.google.com/p/rockit/](https://code.google.com/p/rockit/)

* [http://i.stanford.edu/hazy/hazy/tuffy/](http://i.stanford.edu/hazy/hazy/tuffy/)

But they seem to be getting less and less coverage in probabilistic programming. Perhaps they are considered too inexpressive?

</comment><comment><USER12> Probabilistic programming in Common Lisp:

[https://github.com/nikodemus/screamer](https://github.com/nikodemus/screamer)

<comment><USER13> Not really. Screamer gives you "nondeterministic" programming. It can be used for example to solve sudokus: [http://nikodemus.github.io/screamer/sudoku.lisp.html](http://nikodemus.github.io/screamer/sudoku.lisp.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" Having been rescued from the clutches of object-orientation by early exposure to Mathematica"_

I kind of laughed at this line, because this seems like a situation where the author came to the correct conclusion for all the wrong reasons.

Maybe things have changed, but the Mathematica programming language never struck me as useful for anything over a couple thousand lines.

edit: this is completely beside the purpose and message of this article, but it's worth noting that modularity is a pretty significant design criteria that none of these languages have a particularly strong story about.

<comment><USER15> Mathematica itself and Wolfram | Alpha have quite substantial code-bases written in Mathematica (now the Wolfram Language). Also, there was an article recently about probabilistic programming with WL:

[http://www.mathematica- journal.com/data/uploads/2013/11/Cass...](http://www.mathematica- journal.com/data/uploads/2013/11/Cassel.pdf)

My guess is that WL would be an interesting and powerful starting point for probabilistic programming at some point down the line (if not already).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if kids 30y from now look upon this as the new Prolog.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I was pretty much thinking about logic programming throughout most of the article. Seems like PPS is a continuation of these ideas, in many ways.

<comment><USER16> In more ways than one, [http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/](http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/)</comment></comment></comment>


In France, School Lessons Ask: Which Twitter Post Should You Trust? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/technology/france-internet-literacy-school.html <comment><USER2> Nothing on twitter carries any implicit trust. Certainly not a checkmark or even the professional standing of the individual. You might as well evaluate the truthiness of 4chan posts.</comment>


Proposed CO2 capture system can reduce emissions by 90 percent - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/23/epfl-truck-carbon-dioxide-capture-system/ <comment><USER2> Source, which is a bit better than engadget: [https://actu.epfl.ch/news/capturing-co2-from-trucks-and- redu...](https://actu.epfl.ch/news/capturing-co2-from-trucks-and-reducing- their-emiss/)

> Researchers at EPFL have patented a new concept that could cut trucks' CO2 > emissions by almost 90%. It involves capturing CO2 within the exhaust > system, converting it into a liquid and storing it on the vehicle. The > liquid CO2 would then be delivered to a service station and where it will be > turned back into fuel using renewable energy.

This all sounds a bit energy intensive to me and that it would significantly reduce efficiency.

> The whole process takes place within a capsule measuring 2 m x 0.9 m x 1.2 > m, placed above the driver's cabin. "The weight of the capsule and the tank > is only 7% of the vehicle's payload," adds Maréchal. "The process itself > uses little energy, because all of its stages have been optimized."

> The researchers' calculations show that a truck using 1 kg of conventional > fuel could produce 3kg of liquid CO2, and that the conversion does not > involve any energy penalty.</comment>


Less than zero: six months working in low-wage Britain - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/03/less-zero-six-months-working-low-wage-britain <comment><USER2> It's a bit surprising to me to read about the '50s through the '70s as if they were some kind of golden age in Britain. My U.S. impression of industrial Britain during that era is that it was quite bleak and squalid. Perhaps I've gotten the wrong idea?</comment>


What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/what-we-lose-by-reading-100000-words-every-day/2018/10/04/72dea000-b212-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html <comment><USER3> > _"My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my > day's ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my > reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less > satisfying," she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start > with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her "former reading self."_

Translation: I stopped reading novels and then found it difficult to start again.

The problem isn't the fluff we read online. The problem is that _when you go long periods without reading novels, it's harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it_. Reading fluff online doesn't make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It's entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone's time is limited. But there's nothing about browsing online that intrinsically makes it hard to read novels.

<comment><USER4> This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading.

To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/story alive in my head) and if I don't pick up a book for 7 days I move on to another book.

Using this method I'm at 27 books for the year and I've moved on from 2.

<comment><USER5> I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up _way_ too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

<comment><USER6> Someone should create a book that helps us manage this harmful technology! We should, at least, keep novels out of the reach of children.

<comment><USER7> Indeed "Is It a Book That You Would Even Wish Your Wife or Your Servants to Read?"

This is a Quote from the LadyChatterley'sLover Trial in the 60's

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_. Many people believe the story to be about censorship, but Bradbury himself (in his later years) publicly claimed it was about peoples' increasingly short attention spans. In _Fahrenheit 451_ , people were afraid of books because the stories, thoughts, and concepts were more than mere sound-bytes and were thus unintelligible to the masses with shortened attention spans.

 _Radio has contributed to our 'growing lack of attention.' .?.?. This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people._ ~Bradbury

Source: [https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury- fahrenheit-451-mi...](https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury- fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125)

[Edit] Punctuation & typos.

<comment><USER9> I tried reading 451 once, since it seemed up my alley. I got about a chapter in, put it down and never picked it up again. It wasn't that I didn't like the book (I don't remember if I did), but I just happened to get really busy right after that and just forgot that I ever started reading.

Maybe if I had read it I would understand the importance of having an attention long enough to finish the book. Thing is if I had that attention span the lesson would be lost on me since I'm already reading the book.

In other words, a book teaching the importance of reading books is teaching a pointless lesson.

<comment><USER8> Good point. I enjoyed it, but never picked up on the attention-span lesson at all; I read it thinking it was about censorship. I know now that the author's intent was to write a story about attention-span. I now take it to be a social commentary. Side-note: after reading the book, I rented the movie on DVD. The DVD had a scratch on it -- a scene faded out, the player hit the scratch and skipped ahead... it landed on a fade in scene. I didn't even notice. The movie _I watched_ was only about 20 minutes and I thought " _man, they left out a lot of stuff_ ".

<comment><USER10> bradbury's stance on _Fahrenheit 451_ is what convinced me that authorial intent is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully, some aspiring psychologist or neuroscientist will be able to quantify the effect. My hypothesis is that this is driven by an information seeking dopamine reward cycle and that for some reason we lose the capacity in our executive function to regulate it. Much like an addiction. There is so much digital distraction. Similar to ADD perhaps? You can also see this in modern movies, shows and cartoons where the pace has quickened. It's hard to watch old movies or older cartoons etc... Watch old episodes of Sesame St vs new episodes and you can see the shift. And even then kids get bored of new episodes with the ultimate addiction being youtube. I actually don't find youtube too bad in moderation because kids do take ideas and try to play with them in the real world. You just have to be sure they aren't overexposed and exposed to ideas that are not healthy. What I am saying is that I do see imaginative play despite youtube or that incorporates youtube.

So in this hyper digital world it feels like we have less time. Even though time remains the same. There is always something seeking our attention and for the most part it is unimportant but we can't ignore it.

</comment><comment><USER12> After the 2016 election, during which I spent an inordinate time online, constantly searching for some 'new' piece of information like a smoker lighting up a cigarette before the last one had finished burning, I realized that I was having a harder time than usual getting through the books I was reading. The effect was two-fold: not only was I spending more time online, I was fragmenting my attention; when I sat down to read a book, I found my brain was pausing for interruptions. I was training myself to self-interrupt. The book, "The Distracted Mind" goes deep into the science behind this phenomena, and is really worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER13> It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven't encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

<comment><USER14> I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of very-short-form content on a daily basis. On HN and elsewhere on the internet you can consume a huge number of distinct ideas in a very short time. This causes me to now be impatient with long-form pieces where I find myself wanting to just "get to the point already". It's a quantity vs. quality problem. The internet tends to favor quantity.

It's something I'm trying to work on because there's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads (and a lot you get out of them that you can't get out of little snippets and quick articles).

<comment><USER15> " _there 's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads_"

Is there? Or are you just saying that because it's expected and you'd feel embarrassed if you said otherwise?

Humans are pattern matchers, what if we see patterns more easily from many examples, rather than one? What if we extract patterns more easily seeing them from many points of view instead of just one author?

Is a neural network better trained on one high detail photo, or a dataset of many photos?

<comment><USER15> Someone's got to have a better comeback than a downvote. You know where there's "obviously immense value"? Oil fields. People literally kill to control them.

Nobody kills to take control of a library.

At best you could say people get into massive debt for education. But at the same time, education is clamouring for online courses, videos, conferencing, teachers, interaction, and textbooks are widely considered a problem - <USER2> priority, low quality, a racket, going back years since Richard Feynman's famous story about reviewing them at least.

Books, especially academic books, are increasingly given away for free online - when people will pay for entertainment.

How many people learn from a teacher, a course, or learn by doing, vs how many actually learn from books?

People don't treat books the way they treat things they value. There may be immense value in books, it's not "obvious".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First off, I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research on "deep reading" and its claimed benefits. But, as a person who has read most of the major thick books like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Middlemarch, Proust, and reading _cover-to-cover_ the old computer books like the 3-ring binders of C Language[1], my lifetime reading experience could offer counterpoint to why "deep reading" seems to be a lost activity:

 _Most of the text out there is just not good quality that deserves or rewards deep reading._

My pet theory is that the rampant skimming or "shallow reading" is basically the brain performing a hidden Bayesian probability that any random text put in front of us isn't worth the effort of deep reading.[2] This is why many of us go to HN comments first instead of reading the actual article. The Bayesian priors told us that the "tldr" in the comments got to the point where the article all-too-often had a self-indulgent author that meandered all over the place and wasted our time. Therefore, "shallow reading" isn't bad for us... it's our way of optimizing against "information overload".

Even college professors who are used to heavy reading workloads skim new work. I'd argue this is another manifestation of Bayesian priors.

To back to my C Language example. I didn't really learn C by reading those binders cover to cover. (Deep reading.) I _really_ learned it when I did _shallow reading_ across fragmented sources like USENET comp.lang.c forum and playing around with toy programs. So maybe deep reading isn't the answer but the attention restriction from not being distracted with Twitter and Instagram notifications. In other words, maybe we're conflating benefits "uninterrupted study" with "deep reading".

[1] [https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33794](https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33794)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

<comment><USER17> For anyone who found the above too long, basically she means that deep reading often wastes too much time and you don't know ahead of time what to read. She didn't mention that you can check other shorter sources before you commit to reading, like reading this comment before hers.

<comment><USER16> _> , basically she means that deep reading often wastes too much time _

I apologize that you found my text length was too long but I thought the extra background was necessary to state _why_ deep reading is often a waste of time.

If I _only_ state a 1 sentence punchline in my original post, it can seem like a cheap hit-and-run comment and therefore not really engaging with the article's arguments. (Or the extreme brevity would just invite snark such as _" you probably don't have deep reading skill"_. Therefore, a writer's reflex is to defensively preempt that with extra words that try to establish street cred.)

I thought it would be interesting to share that many of us can do "deep reading" and yet we don't bother with the effort -- _and that behavior is not a contradiction_. Instead, it's an optimization of limited reading time. This tradeoff doesn't seem to be reflected in Maryanne Wolf's research.

 _> She didn't mention that you can check other shorter sources before you commit to reading,_

I actually did and I specifically used "HN comments" as an example of readers trying to find a tldr summary and why it's a rational strategy.

<comment><USER18> > _I apologize that you found my text length was too long but I thought the > extra background was necessary to get state why deep reading is often a > waste of time._

I read @EGreg as poking a bit of fun, rather than raising a legitimate complaint: simultaneously supporting your point, but also gently pushing at the limits of shallow reading.

<comment><USER19> <sarcasm> We need a digest of HN comments for people don't have _time_ to read the comments about an article regarding people not having time to read everything that they come across </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> answer is: time :)

<comment><USER21> It's more like 'thinkjuice'. The act of making all the perceptual discriminations required to consume 100,000 words cuts into the cognitive budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Also might just be easier and more convenient to read the articles online. We have laptops, phones, tablets, emails as mediums to read "100,000" words but a novel (preferably on canvas) is physical and limited by nature. I can read hacker news at work but I cannot just whip out Oliver Twist when I'm 'sneaking' a break.

</comment><comment><USER23> _the average person "consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day" — some 100,000 words' worth of information_ \- seems like an odd and misleading statistic.

<comment><USER24> The precise number doesn't really matter. The strongman interpretation is that we just read and skim too much each day.

<comment><USER25> If so, the title of the article is meaningless clickbait. From reading the article it seems to me the author takes the phrase at face value as they imagine skim reading a third of Middlemarch in a day. I'm surprised they describe different modes of reading as a skill future people will have, since afaik it's normal for most people to approach different types of texts at different speeds and paying attention in different ways. I can skim quickly over comments and articles just building an understanding of the context and basic information and conclusions people are using, while I will read a scientific article anywhere between ½ and 3 pages per hour if I'm actually trying to understand a difficult concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reading that "online content destroys the old way we used to consume information" kind of observation always remind me of that : [https://xkcd.com/1601/](https://xkcd.com/1601/)

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://outline.com/HRfAnU](https://outline.com/HRfAnU)

<comment><USER28> I was just thinking a service like this would be useful, and the large sum I would pay to not be inundated with animated ads when reading articles.

<comment><USER29> If it's just the articles, ad blockers work, as does reader mode(s). Even AMP would if they offer it, but AMP is an evil hostile takeover attempt from Google.

If it's the subscription paywall, just get the subscription. Else, don't read it on a site infringing on copyright - you're not entitled to the content.

<comment><USER30> How about illegally charging more if you don't want to consent to their tracking regime?

<comment><USER31> How is it illegal to charge?

<comment><USER30> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199132) .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


More, better, faster: UX design for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.cooper.com/journal/2011/03/more_better_faster_ux_design.html For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment? <comment><USER2> This comes from the firm saying that programmers are lunatics. The founder wrote a book called "the lunatics are running the asylum"!

Lean is the opposite of what they preach. They are very much the big up front design. That is what pays their bills.

<comment><USER3> Cooper wrote a book called "The inmates are running the asylum" Not lunatics. And he is a former developer himself.

Plus he is as much aiming at designers as he is at developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The proposed Thompson cycle -- learn > build > measure -- discounts the difficulty of leaving the _learn_ node and entering the _build_ node when you first start.

Perhaps it's different for designers, but my experience with people in other areas is that people get trapped in a learn > learn infinite loop.

So one of the advantages of the Ries cycle -- build > measure > learn -- is that you gain a critical bit of forward momentum right at the start.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have used pair designing for years and it just works.

But it's very important to understand that it's not enough to divide and conquer you will have to put together the right kind of personalities.

I don't agree with their 3 day cycles it's still problematic because it keeps the design from the actual end customers.

You need to get to launch before you start to seriously think about iterating.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this advice is practical for majority of startups. However, this design methodology is interesting. It seems by introducing regimented cycles and clearly defined design roles that both designers and non-designers (ie, engineers) could add more value and consistency to what is typically a highly qualitative design process.</comment>


Show HN: Find out if your account is included in Adobe's breached user data. - <AUTHOR> http://adobe.breach.il.ly/

<comment><USER2> thanks for this. i tried to download the list a while back, but it timed out half-way through. this satisfied my idle curiousity...</comment>


A System to Cut City Traffic That Just Might Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/a-new-system-to-make-congestion-pricing-more-flexible-and-useful/

<comment><USER2> This is a stupid article, in the "Gee Whizz!" vein of science and engineering reporting. You know, the kind of reporting that we mostly associate with newsreels and "Popular Science" magazine.

The system to cut city traffic relies on a central authority taxing cars for driving in ever-shifting penalty zones. The article's authors even advocate putting the comms with a central authority into cell phones. They neglect to consider any of the easy-to-envision side effects: explicitly tracking every car (and soon every cell phone) every where. Certainly that's an easy to abuse centralization, no? Can't imagine cops and NSA agents tracking their LOVINTs or exes around, no? Yeah, neither can I. "Wired" needs to do better than "Popular Science" did in 1955.

<comment><USER3> I had the same reaction, a central authority having full knowledge about your whereabouts in a post Snowden era is unlikely to achieve success outside of Singapore.

Here's one thing to ponder, we use apps like Waze (now owned by Google IIRC) voluntarily without so much of a backlash. I don't know how Waze uses my collected data, what makes a elected government any worse?

<comment><USER2> Google doesn't run the police, the courts and the prison system. Nor can Google draft you to fight in wars. That's what makes Google a little easier to tolerate collecting data.</comment></comment></comment>