Humorless "North Face" Sues "South Butt" For Trademark Infringement - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202437826267&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=Law.com&pt=LAWCOM%20Newswire&cn=NW_20100112&kw=South%20Butt%20Creator%20Fires%20Back%20at%20North%20Face <comment><USER2> Trademarks must be aggressively defended if you want to keep them.

The South Butt logo is very similar to The North Face logo. The design is almost identical except the curves are upside down and one is missing. This is hilarious. But, it's not subtle at all and it would be easy to assume clothes bearing that logo are actually a North Face brand.

On the other hand, I probably never would have heard of South Butt if it weren't for the lawsuit.

<comment><USER3> What does "aggressively" mean? And who judges if you've been "aggressively" defending your trademark?

In this case it's pretty obvious that the best thing North Face could have done was to completely ignore South Butt, because their actions have only led to South Butt selling more of their stuff. It's a perfect example of the Streisand effect. Shouldn't that amount to something if they later have to defend their North Face trademark?

<comment><USER2> You should probably ask a lawyer, but as I understand as a layman if it can be demonstrated that you knew about an infringing trademark but ignored it, it is a lot harder to win a lawsuit.

I think the basic idea is that trademark rights are valid for as long as you need them, however you lose those rights if you abandon the mark. I think that ignoring infringement is a piece of evidence that the mark is not useful for you anymore. It may not be absolutely critical, but certainly doesn't help.

Suppose some other company markets the brand "The Fourth Ace" using the South Butt logo, and they get successful and start stealing business. The North Face sues them, but have trouble in the case because North Place points out that their logo is a variation on South Butt, which doesn't seem to bother them.

<comment><USER4> The correct solution in this situation is to contact South Butt, and offer them a license for a nominal amount. Now presto "The Fourth Ace" issue stops being an issue because you raised the issue with South Butt and made them get a valid license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He has a funny disclaimer too, calling North Face's customers stupid:

 _We are not in any fashion related to nor do we want to be confused with The North Face Apparel Corp. or its products sold under "The North Face" brand. If you are unable to discern the difference between a face and a butt, we encourage you to buy North Face products._

</comment><comment><USER6> _North Face says Winkelmann, a biomedical engineering student, has caused it "irreparable harm" by producing his parody clothing line, The South Butt (motto: "Never Stop Relaxing")_

The student didn't cause North Face irreparable harm, suing the student and attracting the attention of the media did. Big companies need to learn when to step down, because a victory in a court of law is not necessarily a victory in the court of public opinion. And it's the public that buys your products, not the Law.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is especially funny if you're a climber, because South Butt is actually meaningful (in context, it's common to abbreviate "buttress" to "butt"). Many of the world's great climbing and mountaineering routes are on S facing buttresses.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note trademark isn't copyright so the rules are different. <http://www.wptn.com/trademark_vol5is1/insight.htm>

<comment><USER2> Another resource: [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm...](http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm#6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> dear grellas: you are now the _de facto_ news.yc lawyer. i am continually impressed with your clear, level-headed explanations of legal things which laymen just guess at, poorly. so i am a little surprised that you've added the word 'humorless' to the title, which doesn't exist in the original. editorializing in titles is frowned on here.

how about instead putting your own reactions into a comment here under the article. i'm sure it will be great and i'll read all of it, regardless of the length.

<comment><AUTHOR> Frail is the human condition and each of us, no matter what our other strengths, is prone to succumb to temptation. I confess, the editorializing was done with _mens rea_ in order to help capture the flavor of the dispute. _Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea magna culpa._

On a more serious note, this case does highlight the tremendous dilemma faced by companies that invest large marketing dollars in a distinctive mark and brand only to see it suddenly subjected to ridicule in the public's mind. The real risk for North Face is not so much the direct competitive threat as it is the risk that future customers will no longer be able think of "north face" without immediately associating it with "south butt." Parody is a highly compelling way of grabbing our imagination and, if this type of association sticks, it will very likely do great damage to the mark.

At the same time, when a company files suit over the issue, this clearly exacerbates the risk highlighted above. Lawsuits are no longer a localized matter. When they are filed today, they clearly carry the risk of garnering a lot of publicity if their subject matter is otherwise such as to grab people's fancy, and this one certainly does by dint of its subject matter alone.

This must have been a tough one for North Face, and they probably had no choice but to sue to deal with it, in spite of the risks of enhancing the potentially bad association of its mark with the parody. It is a classic case of "no-win" for them.

On a final, unrelated note, law (whatever its notoriously humorless aspects) does serve as a gathering place for all the foibles of the human condition and whatever humor may derive from it lies largely in the subject matter of the disputes over which people choose to fight. I remember once, while clerking for the federal court, a notorious lawsuit that stretched for years over a guy who claimed that an airline owed him millions because it allegedly lost his rare dime in transit. Along such lines, the "south butt" case is one for the case books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surprisingly, the South Butt is not selling butts, so tarnishment is not a serious claim. (Unless, of course, butts are "unsavory" in the jurisdiction - had a sufficiently rude word been used, tarnishment would be likely). In fact, they are selling clothing. So the standard interpretation of trademark blurring is also not quite applicable. Using a parody of a famous brand as your own brand even for commercial purposes is... apparently ok, in many cases.

I think they have a great case for infringement, though. From a reasonable distance (a few feet), I can't tell the difference. Oh, right - the south butt logo is on the left. Except, of course, when the item in question (say, a bag) is lying on the floor. Or maybe I don't care that much to remember details, relying more on crass pattern-recognition.

If you think that the text of a logo has all that much to do with the logo, then you're missing the point of having a logo. A "South Butt" logo could have been made that infringed on pepsi, or on mcdonalds. But we'll see how this goes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks to the Streisand effect South Butt now has the marketeers wet dream come true.

Even if they lose the lawsuit and will be forced to change their brand they _still_ come out ahead, because the news of the name change will get a lot of airplay too.

And if they prevail they should send the North Face execs a bunch of flowers and thank them profusely.

<comment><USER12> IMHO, The North Face also gains no matter what the end of the lawsuit is. That's a lot of advertisement, and wouldn't make me think less of their products.

It can be also a reputation boost for TNF. After all the parody is on them because they make the best equipment.

<comment><USER13> > and wouldn't make me think less of their products.

I'm sure their clothing woulsd be the same quality. Nevertheless, I choose not to buy from arseholes; otherwise you cause there to be more arseholeness in the world than would otherwise be the case.

North Face (and all other corporations) should make money by making things people want. When they choose the route of legal shenanigans instead, they are not conducive to the public good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Humourless maybe, but if North Face didn't exist, the guy wouldn't be making money right now.

I don't see a problem with being satirical, but surely after making $5,000 and receiving the notice from North Face you should be prepared to stop trading?

<comment><USER15> >> but surely after making $5,000 and receiving the notice from North Face you should be prepared to stop trading

It's somewhat puzzling to see this opinion posted on a news site that caters to entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER14> Isn't a valuable part of being an entrepreneur knowing when to quit?

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure that "when you've just received a huge amount of free publicity" constitutes a good time to quit.

<comment><USER16> No - but it might be a clever time to change the logo, make money off the back of the publicity and side step the litigation.

<comment><USER17> The brand is the entire point of the company. How many cheap knockoffs of North Face fleeces are there? Any competitive advantage he has is that his brand is poking fun at The North Face's brand.

If he wants to stay in business, changing his brand to something vanilla is probably the worst thing he could do.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. However Im sure a smart entrepeneur could come up with a logo that rides off the back of the "infamy"/publicity but doesn't leave him in court.

I cant see that the smart approach is to let them litigate... the comparative size of the companies means it is incredibly risky.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. If I'd been him, I'd have changed the logo to be more obviously a parody (maybe made it pink or something), and changed the font or something so that it's clearly distinguishable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem here is that large companies face little cost in launching unfounded lawsuits against individuals or small companies. And it's often in the interest of the smaller side to back down, because if they don't they'll be ruined, and even if they win they won't get anything.

I think this could be remedied by requiring that if the big company loses the lawsuit, it has to pay substancial sums to the smaller entity (maybe an amount could be decided by the jury based on how outrageous their claim was).

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice to see the Streisand Effect is still at work.

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

</comment><comment><USER19> How much can he lose? What kind of business would he need to register to limit his risk? For ex, if this was an LLC, could he pay himself a sweet salary during the next few months, and then just declare the business bankrupt if he loses the suit?

</comment><comment><USER20> This actually makes me like North Face a lot less if anything.</comment>


The Invention of Nature:  Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-invention-of-nature-the-adventures-of-alexander-von-humboldt-andrea-wulf-review <comment><USER2> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10373074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10373074).</comment>


Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira - <AUTHOR> https://tara.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lack visibility at the release level. This only gets worse with distributed teams across different time zones, and as teams outside of engineering rely on product to meet customer milestones and release dates.

Currently- the tool helps run and manage tasks, requirements and sprints. With team level insights and a smart indicator for sprint planning.

This is our open beta. RN Github integration is live for PRs and commits tied to sprints- we're still working on Bitbucket and Gitlab.

<comment><USER3> I've never worked in a place that had 'release cycles'.

Maybe it's just me, but maybe not.

So I'm glad that Jira doesn't force its 'release cycle' shenanigans on me. Like with git, not being opinionated is the road to success.

<comment><USER4> I work at a place with mobile apps. You can't continuously release a new app update every day so a release cycle is useful for structuring when we're going to ship, when qa starts to test, and having deliverable dates in anticipation of app store/play store approvers (couple days)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a nice looking tool, but the marketing feels oh so very Enterprise Agile(tm) in ethos.

"Run your weekly sprints on time" — as opposed to them taking two weeks?

To achieve predictability, something has to give. It's usually "learning" which is never on the plan.

The next release will be done when the right top priorities are met well enough. When's that? You decide by prioritizing how many priorities are in the release and your bar on quality.

Focus on execution? Why not on building the right thing, and building the thing right?

The thing to manage isn't tasks, requirements, and sprints. The thing to manage is: "Is this team effective, enough to be trusted?"

Meanwhile, a week takes a week.

<comment><USER6> As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint.

First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected.

Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimate for the former is more reliable. Likewise the estimate of what you can achieve is more reliable in a one week sprint than a two week sprint. Being able to break fully deployable commits into smaller chunks (up to three days coding time) is a skill that gets better with practice. But sometimes you just don't know how long something will take because it needs breaking down and investigating. One week sprints are ideal for timeboxing investigations; here the output isn't software but discrete software tasks that fit in a one week sprint.

Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability and predictability. Sprint planning tools when used appropriately don't constrain engineers, but rather highlight the truth of how things are going.

<comment><USER7> > every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two

You forgot about quality. It can blow the other 3 out of the water.

<comment><USER8> _...if you consider quality a lever, you 're not the kind of person anyone should want to work with!_

You agree on quality standards before you begin, and you deliver the quality level that you agreed beforehand, not more, not less (you deliver _sooner_ if it goes better than expected giving the product-owner ability to add features or redirect effort _actually using your "superpowers" if any to give the business a real advantage_), at a profit or at a loss. Otherwise you're not a professional, you're either an amateur or maliciously dishonest/exploitative!

<comment><USER9> You could just as easily say that you agree on the feature set beforehand, and you deliver that feature set, not more, not less (you deliver sooner if you finish the features early).

"The quality level you agreed beforehand" is meaningless without some infrastructure and processes in place to verify it. And in practice, those infrastructure and processes are compromised at least as often as the feature set, the budget, or the timeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this industry. We make things far more complicated than they need be. It's all just ticketing software with labels changed and I just want a list of _all_ the tickets for me to manually filter. I'm tired of companies thinking I don't know the best way to see the tickets I want to see.

<comment><USER11> I made this for Jira. It just ingests all the issues in the project, and displays them in a big list, sorted by a variety of factors (is it assigned to me? Is it in progress?). It generally allows me to just go down the list of issues until there's nothing left unfinished.

At some point I realized that there's just no stopping enterprise from going to use Jira, so it's better to work around it.

<comment><USER12> Can you show us what you made?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my decision to make.

Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to make me mad.

Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts, like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new editor! This new editor has none of the markdown-ish shortcuts the old editor had.

Confluence is also changing it's editor and the old wiki pages do not have a 1:1 match to the new wiki pages. This means you have to go through each page, convert it, and edit it to fix the broken things - because depending on what you use, it will be broken. For example, there is no longer a note, warning, or error macro - instead it gets turned into a info macro that you have to go in and edit it to the style you previously had. Code blocks no longer let you pick the color scheme you had, instead they're all generic. There's even more here I'm not listing.

Confluence has also just been wonky lately. It's supposed to automatically format a link into something nice (e.g. [https://confluence/page- name](https://confluence/page-name) -> Page Name or [https://jira/AAA-1234](https://jira/AAA-1234) -> AAA->1234) and this only happens sometimes. Other times I'm finding the page frozen or slow and the only thing that fixes it is refreshing the page or publishing the page and going back to edit it.

Of course with BitBucket I dislike that they're dropping Mercurial. I understand why, but I am really going to miss it. Git is way more powerful but Mercurial is (at least to me) way easier to use and pick up. The infuriating part is that they offer no tool for converting existing repositories whatsoever. Github has a tool that will turn your BitBucket Mercurial repo into a Github repo!

For any tool that aims to be an alternative to Jira / Confluence / BitBucket, please don't do what Atlassian does. If you are going to make any transitions or any major change - please make it as easy and seamless as possible for your users.

<comment><USER14> it seems to me that often the people who decide whether to use Atlassian products aren't actually using them personally...

<comment><USER15> Definitely. From a buyer's perspective, Atlassian is awesome. It checks every single box of requirements a development team could give to an "IT department".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We've been using Tara for a while now.

As a smaller team, we never had good luck with the hyper-complexities of JIRA, we were stuck with Trello (and/or a simple Notion Kanban board) for a while. But Tara's really worked the best for us.

I personally, really like the personal dashboard for every developer on the team, flagging all your main tickets, PR's, and your teammates commits. I'm hoping for awesome things here.

<comment><USER17> That sounds like a more realistic description than "alternative to Jira".

Jira is an Enterprise product which means it is designed to tick every feature checkbox any company could ever wish for. It integrates with whatever (Enterprise) ecosystem is around it.

Tara sounds like "once you have outgrown Trello".

<comment><USER18> I think it's kinda the opposite. It seems like Jira/Confluence doesn't really do much on its own. Anything semi complex you need plugins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Literal quote from the privacy policy:

> With your permission, we will collect location information from your mobile > device to [insert purpose]. You may turn off this feature through the > location settings on your mobile device.

Maybe fix that?

<comment><AUTHOR> On it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Kudos for the release! This comment might seem counterintuitive, but I think Tara's adoption would grow a lot if you offer a way to sync or import from JIRA.

JIRA sprint planning is painful. In my current company, we use it, and its shortcomings shape our way of working. I.e., not able to link histories' subtasks to a sprint, causing that the backlog is full of long histories, and you need to go looking around to see how the histories are going.

If we were able to sync epics and histories (JIRA <-> Tara), we could probably have the better of both worlds. I see Tara very focused on devs, but not all JIRA users are devs. For instance, how would critical bugs - reported by users - be handled in Tara?

I imagine this synchronization as bidirectional, where you write the specs as a list in JIRA's issue description, but they are actionable in Tara. So no more subtasks in JIRA and Tara become a complementary tool that, once you are used to it, you can go with entirely standalone.

Just writing this quickly, with no deep thought, but it was my very first thought after checking your website.

I hope this feedback can be useful to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! A few quick thoughts:

\- We've done exactly this for Github <> Tara. We have a bi-directional sync with Github issues, and active issues are converted into tasks in Tara. Basically, if a user wanted to, they could just use Tara as a Github issue tracker.

\- We wanted to start with Github, then work our way through more git/source control platforms, and then move to Jira. Interestingly, structuring incoming data from Jira requires a few months of work on data models IF we don't want the user to spend a ton of time labelling. Jira's data structure can be a hot mess to deal with.

\- If the sync took a day or even a week of configuration, would you find it worth your time to invest and go through that? Or would yo expect the sync to work instantaneously (like Github <> Tara).

\- What would be your expectations on mapping for histories?

<comment><USER20> It makes sense that you started with Github. I agree too that Jira's data structure is a mess. I've managed one instance for years and any update was a whole mess on itself.

I think the sync configuration should be quick, something that can be bootstrapped like Trello integration with an export artifact.

About mapping for histories, it should be 1-to-1 and each spec to be a list point or a subtask. Nothing fancy nor complex if Tara is the main source of truth, leaving Jira as a way for non-tech users to report issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well done for getting your project out there ! I'm sure its great. I've commented on this in the past. This is what I want from my "ticketing- software":

-I don't want 100 ways todo things or configure a ticketing tool...

-Sell me the BEST "Software Development PROCESS" with a tool.

-Don't give me a "Great Ticketing-System" !

I want to know what is the fastest, best process to develop software and track it.

All of "these ticketing software" starts with "track , manage , assign tickets" but leave the process up to you... I want to buy an EXPERT PROCESS not a REALLY GREAT TICKET TOOL with x10 options.

I always use the example of the "ultra high-end amplifiers" they don't come with a "Tone-Control" because these companies are THE BEST... my ears can never be better than their in-house "mozart-prodigy-tuning-expert".

Why would I soil my ears by thinking I can better adjust the "tone" of the amplifier that cost $500k :/ I'm buy FANTASTIC SOUND... not a great amplifier with 100 ways to get good sound.

Sorry rant over.. So... Sell me a GREAT SOFTWARE PROCESS - if it comes with software and a ticketing system... so be it. But make sure the software supports the process and I don't want to configure anything but user accounts :)

Sorry for all the caps... don't flame me :)

<comment><USER22> That was the fogbugz approach, I hated fogbugz as it was too prescriptive

<comment><USER23> Also pivotal....but pivotal is nice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never really integrate with the _true_ workflow of developers. Once you have a development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be nice to be able to encode it into the

What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on.

Every place has a different workflow and they are usually very complex, but these tools (Jira, YouTrack, GitHub issues, Azure DevOps, ...) _are_ complex. They _are_ often configurable, yet they still (as far as I'm aware) fail to integrate the process part of things with the code part of things. At best you have some loose integration between version control and process e.g. "this ticket has these changes" but they don't integrate the two processes so that the state-machine that is a ticket (is it done? why is it not? is it because a PR build failed? Is it because an approval that must be done after merge has failed? is it because the issue has several pull requests associated with it and not all are merged yet?).

I absolutely don't mind complexity in these tools. Having an extremely simple post-it process is good. This is the second best. The process complexity in big enterprises and distributed teams _will always be there_. If I can configure a tool to make it go away I'm glad. The worst situation is when you have a hyper complicated process and no tools to help. That's the situation many businesses are in. "You didn't mark the two fields and change the state to Y and then send the email to the translation person and notify the regional development person about the change! You have to do that".

<comment><USER25> We use JIRA to track our product development with a fairly large team (including 17 engineers) and while JIRA has its pain points, it does have integrations with development workflow.

In our setup, after a PR is merged in Github, the ticket automatically moves to the next "step", in our case "Ready for QA".

Beyond that there are automation workflows that accomplish much of what you are asking for here, the issue is that these are complex tools/flows that require a lot of up-front work and continuous maintenance which might not be worthwhile for all teams.

<comment><AUTHOR> So internally, we're calling it the "task lifecycle". It's going to be a big feature, and the idea is to figure out the true development workflow (that works for 80% of users) and have statuses that update automatically based on Git. We're working on figuring out how to do this well enough, where the user doesn't have to go through complex configuration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA".

What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is?

We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just get on with actual work.

But I must be missing something - some market research, some user research where there is a big unmet need or problem that none of these tools are currently solving and not just in "missing a feature" way, but at a fundamental level where it justifies an entrepreneur to jump in and create an entire software from scratch.

I'm not in the domain, so I obviously don't have the data. I know lots of people complain about JIRA (including me), but my complaints don't warrant me to move.

Maybe these companies are targeting "new" users? New companies, new teams, people who are starting projects anew and looking for project management software?

<comment><USER27> They keep popping up because ticket/todo-list software is a perfect medium for people to project their aspirations for success. People believe if they use that software they will accomplish their goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> great tool - congrats on the open beta!

it wasn't immediately clear to me that the product is still in beta, and was unable to find any pricing information which threw me off.

another question - is there a reason why Github isn't a support authentication method, considering that Github integration is a big part of the product?

But the tool looks super interesting - going to try it out and intro it to our team!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we believe teams shouldn't have to be limited by user counts when deciding which project management system to use. Most are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free accounts- planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users (much like Gitlab).

Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams, full fledged integrations and/or smart features such as automated sprint management.

As for Github auth- that's coming!

<comment><USER29> Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users.

I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project.

Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! We definitely need a pricing page to highlight the free forever plan.

<comment><USER30> Another recommendation is that I see task states are To Do, Doing, and Done. It'd be nice to have a Review state as well which could be used to say it's ready for either code review or QA. This could also end up being a runaway train so it may be better invest time in allowing the user to specify up to x (3?) amount of additional custom states.

<comment><USER23> And this is how Jira started with it's complexity. Welcome to the club.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks awesome and I would love to try it out.

Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.

<comment><USER32> Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company.

In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better or worse tool than most others out there.

If you're at an org where it feels like Jira is holding you back, and you don't see the org changing tools in the near future, the best thing I can recommend is to bring in an external team to show the org how to clean it up.

Feel free to ping me if you need help (info in profile)

<comment><USER33> Or maybe the problem with Jira is that bringing in an external consultant is the best recommendation.

<comment><USER32> Depends on what your timeline is for changes, but you can also learn how to use it and do it yourself.

My experience is that if an org decides to use <HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE TOOL> then they will do it wrong the first time without external assistance. This holds true even for popular tools like Postgres, AWS, Terraform, or even Git.

Anecdotally, I don't know of any tool that is highly configurable that makes it easy for users to set it up and then scale it over time without learning the specific domain knowledge. Jira is no different in that sense. If you have an example of a tool that bucks this trend, please share it, I would love to play with it and see what I can learn about how to better serve users in this type of use case.

<comment><USER33> I feel that Jira first adds a lot of restraints and red tape, and then makes those highly configurable. I prefer tools that don't have the constraints in the first place.

Ie if in the middle of the sprint a developer finds that some tickets are stuck waiting for some other team and he wants a column on the board to make that visible, he should just be able to add the column.

In Jira if I accidentally put the wrong issue in Done, I have no idea how to get it out... It's the complete opposite.

A physical whiteboard with post-its is rather good. You can use different colors, if each team member has one magnet with his/her name then it can't be on multiple tickets at once, you can draw lines and write words wherever, it's very flexible.

What an online tool should add, besides corona compatibility, is being a good issue tracker. Jira doesn't seem much different on that front compared to almost everything else I've used.

What Jira adds is lots of rules and constraints and imposed structure that gets in the way.

We are in the process of leaving it in favour of Github projects.

<comment><USER32> Re: the board thing, Jira has actually been trying to solve this problem for years now with a concept called Simplified Workflows. [1] This allows the project admin to create Statuses and adjust their workflow without needing to get a Jira admin involved. The problem with this approach is that every project does something completely different (often times even multiple teams within a project use different processes) and the people working to do higher level planning can't grok what is going on.

The rules get in your way, but as an entire org, they provide value. A lot of what we do is work with large orgs to actually enforce those rules top down on devs. The difference between our approach and most others is that while we agree with the idea of governance and top down rules, we drive the creation of those rules as a bottom up process. This way the devs get to agree on how they want to work, and as long as there is a degree of consistency, we get to tell management that this is the way forward, and we can now report on things while ensuring we're not getting in the way of the devs.

1\. [https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software- cloud/docs/use-t...](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software- cloud/docs/use-the-simplified-workflow/)

<comment><USER33> That's what we tried (our teams are self-organizing, as they are in Scrum, so we couldn't do it another way) but the things the teams wanted had hardly any consistency (partly because the products and projects are very different, partly because of the people).

<comment><USER32> This is where an experienced consultant can help. We often start with what you're describing here as the baseline, and then work to find a middle ground. I would say that 3/4 times we can find something that works for everyone. And it's ok that sometimes people need different workflows. Some Jira admins or managers trying to pull reports will be upset about this but they can be handled once you demonstrate why doing it this way provides more value to the org as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How closely is it coupled with Github / Github issues? Would it work as a replacement for something like Zenhub, which is mostly just a facade over Github's own interface? Can you still add replies to issues directly in Github or do you have to do it in Tara?

I would love to replace Zenhub, but almost every other tool would require us moving some key functionality out of Github. We still want to keep all of our issues, estimates, labels, and planning in Github's native issues, while also having some advanced planning and sprint features.

<comment><USER35> Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can import any open GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you update the corresponding the Tara task, the corresponding GitHub issues are also updated, so you can certainly keep using the GitHub issues.

The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a much better way of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate any blindspots on PRs getting stale.

I'd encourage you to give it a go and try it out to see if it works with your teams workflows.

<comment><USER36> So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?

<comment><USER37> A link for us lazy folks [https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/](https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/)

I've been wanting set this up to play with, but not much free time. We use Kira and Bitbucket cloud at work and they suck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hi. I worry that this sort of tool does not benefit engineering very much; in my experience, Jira and other time-management tools are used to allow product ownership and management to request ever-sillier features, while penalizing engineers who do not make themselves legible with constant status updates.

When designing Tara, how did you account for the power differential between the employees who will be using Tara to record their daily work and the managers who will be using Tara to supervise said employees?

<comment><USER39> I hope you've at least read the first page. It doesn't sound "like" Jira at all.

<comment><USER38> Could you explain more? Tara sounds extremely like Jira, both in form and function. The original poster (who is pointedly not answering my question, probably because it is painful and embarrassing) used "alternative to Jira" in the original submission. Other top-level comment threads are directly comparing Tara to Jira. How would you distinguish them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Painful and embarrassing is whenever I try to ride a bike.

A few quick thoughts on this:

\- Jira started out as an issue tracker to monitor issues and tasks - <USER2> really wasn't built to handle software projects or the SDLC from the get go.

-Setting up insights and reporting can be a pain. And you need to be familiar with all the jargon (epics, stories, burn-down charts). Overall, it's a ton of cognitive overload.

-I used to just manage my issues on Github vs spending time configuring Jira. I only used Jira when the corporate overloads demanded it.

Here's the take on Tara vs Jira.

\- We're zero to low config. There are entire 60 minute videos on youtube on how to setup sprints on Jira. On Tara, it's one click. We're really focusing on minimal functionality maximum impact in terms of matrix, and seeing how we can continue to be low config as we make the platform more powerful.

\- Insights are ready and built- in with no setup. Once your github is connected, you can view commits and PRs by sprints

\- We shipped our first smart indicator- it basically looks at your past few sprints (x>1 when x is no. of sprints) and tells you if your sprint has been overloaded. We're planning on shipping more smart indicators that make suggestions around effort, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I couldn't find the pricing anywhere in the site.

<comment><USER41> It says "free" twice, in colored CTA buttons, in the first ~150px or so.

<comment><USER42> Well it doesn't look like there is a non-profit organization behind it, so someone has to pay for that somehow.

Is it support, ads or information?

<comment><USER16> Saw this earlier[1], looks like they are working on enterprise features for larger teams, which will be paid.

[1] [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara- ai#comment-1029087](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-ai#comment-1029087)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have just tried it and after planning a small sprint for my team I loved it immediately.

I'd absolutely love to give it a go at my company. I want an on-premise version.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would be your biggest hurdle for adoption for a web-based version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> On premise option?

<comment><USER45> This is key for us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet - we're focusing on delivering other features related to task lifecycle, teams and integrations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does it allow to export all the user entered data in structured format? So that moving out of it is easier if we don't like whatever pricing you guys decide later?

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm getting double flickers on some pages like [https://tara.ai/about/](https://tara.ai/about/). I'd totally switch over if there was a JIRA importer tool. I've used JIRA for years and would love something similar with a faster and less confusing UI.

</comment><comment><USER48> Your Jira alternative is currently a better replacement for a limited but important part of Jira features: clearly only an initial, promising feature set that will be expanded and improved. But in what direction? The more technical side of software development (e.g. configuration, building and deployment of the releases)? Generic ticket handling and time tracking/accounting to expand the product's usefulness beyond specialized software product development teams? Integration with other software and processes?

<comment><AUTHOR> The key for our platform will always be simplicity. For now, the plan is to head into the technical side of software dev (Gitlab, Bitbucket and integrations with CI/CD tooling), without alienating business teams.

One of the biggest issues with existing PM software is that it's purpose built for singular teams, vs providing utility to cross-functional teams (e.g. engineering and growth). And it's usually overly complex with significant configuration required.

We're seeing early signs of this with requests from teams/orgs to add in marketing, growth and design teams as they need to be in the loop of releases and the overall SDLC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Would love to get off JIRA but the leverage jira has over alternatives is that there are integrations for _everything_. Slack, PagerDuty, Freshdesk, etc. I wonder how long it will take Tara to get up to speed

<comment><AUTHOR> We're releasing about two integrations per month (April was trello import and Github bi-directional sync) so we should get there soon! Our speed of shipping integrations is getting faster with time however.

<comment><USER49> Awesome..is there anywhere I can track the integrations, like a public roadmap or something along those lines?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh that's a cool idea- we really need to work on public sprint boards and actually show our weekly sprints and releases. We typically just discuss them on our twitter and our blog. Here's today's release: [https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-may-1/](https://blog.tara.ai/release-log- may-1/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Performance for me is very poor; the app is very unresponsive - you should consider optimistic UI updates. Im based out in Asia at the moment so its the server latency im assuming?

<comment><USER51> It's a mix of both latency and lack of optimistic updates. We're working on improving our front-end at the moment and some of those improvements relate to optimistic loads and improvements on redux that go in every week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hey Tara team. Ben here from Armory (YC W17). Love that you are tackling this very important problem for product and eng teams. We use JIRA (surprise!) as do all of customers. I've long wished I had the time and energy to think about and maybe even tackle the challenge you are facing - building a JIRA-killer. Go forth and conquer! I would be very happy to help in any way I can!

</comment><comment><USER53> What is the business model?

<comment><USER54> What else can it be? Per-user/month subscription. Probably free initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Oh, "free" means "free to use", not "free software". Would've been a cool feature. It also looks pretty cool otherwise, but ... does it contain "AI"? The TLD and title seem to point towards it.

</comment><comment><USER56> Cool idea. We would like to feature your startup in our website, submit here: [https://www.startupjohn.com/submit- startup](https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-startup)

</comment><comment><USER57> Congrats the on beta! Just a quick question though. Seems like in the about page, you guys mention that the "platform leverages machine learning". How do Tara leverage ML? From the landing page, it was hard to see any features relevant to ML.

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually need to update our about page - it still shows copy from our older version which was a predictions only product (I also talk about this below) with ref to a question asked about our .ai TLD.

We will be bringing our ML models back into the product for predictions over time. For now, we're really focusing on workflow and design as a platform.

<comment><USER57> Ah gotcha. Yeah, the same situation for us over at [http://getmosaic.io/](http://getmosaic.io/)

Initially, we were worried that people would think we're putting "AI/ML" in the name/description just for the hype. But hopefully if the workflow/design is good enough, and the AI/ML features follow, customers should be satisfied.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mosaic looks cool! Will give it a spin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Unless you are going open source, you might not want to ship your typescript sourceMaps in production. [https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png](https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png)

<comment><USER51> I agree sourceMaps shouldn't be exposed and they also bloat up production code. The reason we have them exposed for the time being is for debugging purposes in open beta and we intend to remove it out of production in our upcoming weekly release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Tara looks great, trying it out. Also, I love the clarity of the landing page. I apologize if it is off-topic: what product/tool did you use for creating the main video in landing page? Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ol' camtasia from my video editing days! Side hustled as a Udemy instructor in 2012, and camtasia is just as good now as it was back then.

<comment><USER59> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Not sure if it's only me. But there's some funky funky things happening on that frontend. There's a white modal that covers that whole screen that pops out at every page load.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any chance you can share a link to a screenshot and the console log? Appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> why the ai tld?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our first version (which failed miserably) was a prediction-only product with no workflow and a minimal interface. Here's what happened:

\- Initially our hypothesis was we could build data models that automatically suggested a specification or tasks based on certain criteria the user identified (for e.g. iOS app for video based calling). \- The system would suggest programming languages, frameworks and a set of tasks based on the criteria \- User would immediately reject the suggestions/predictions outright (even if they were based collectively on data from stack overflow and other platforms). This would be due to a number of reasons: 1) Didn't trust the ML models to make the right predictions 2) The predictions were their first interaction with the platform.

As a result- we went back to the drawing board- and realized that to build a true "smart" project management system, we would need to start with intuitive workflows, and pepper in predictions over time based on usage and a team's actual stats. The AI tld stuck, plus we're planning on bringing the ML models to our public version soon. TBD.

We also plan on using NLP for automatic task connect to Git repos/PRs/commits and ML for predictions around effort estimates. But - we're still some time away from the open beta on making that a reality.

P.S. We recently acquired the tara.com domain which took 2 years of negotiations. A story for another time.

<comment><USER62> Do tell us the story of the tara.com domain negotiation some time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y Congrats on shipping the beta.

One thing that strikes me is that while you present your product as alternative to Jira, both the name and the logo (bluish form looking like an A) hint at Atlassian and Jira.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is just what I was looking for!

But.. How can this be free?

</comment><comment><USER64> congrats on the release! I tried a little bit and this looks nice. I like the focus on agile workflow so that people can quickly evaluate whether this is suitable for them. Liking it so far!

although I seem to have a problem searching for task inside my requirement details

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear! Can you elaborate on the issue?

<comment><USER64> creating several tasks -> creating requirement -> go to requirement details -> search task -> no loading progress and/or result visible

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Is this self-hosted? or can custom domain be added?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's web-based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This looks great! Any plans for Gitlab integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Next on our roadmap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> >> Tara, a smart [...] alternative to Jira

If someone there were smart, they would have named it Tira.</comment>


A Peek at Emacs 24.4: Auto-indentation by Default - <AUTHOR> http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/19/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot-4-auto-indentation-by-default/

<comment><USER2> It's great that the Emacs team sees the need for more modern defaults. Emacs's great power, of course, is its ability to change to fit the user. But many new-comers are, I think, turned off by its rather basic default state. Thrusting every user into Emacs Lisp, while educational, does not hold the new user's hand very well.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Although the flexibility of configuration is nice, it's sometimes I big turn-off. Personally, I've had a time where loved to configure Vim and Emacs (I've used both extensively). These days I'm using Sublime because I'm overwhelmed and couldn't find the right Emacs plugin equivalent.

By the way, I was using Emacs with vim-mode, obviously ;-)

<comment><USER4> What plugin are you referring to?

<comment><USER5> Probably evil?

[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil)

<comment><USER4> I was asking about the plugin in sublime text that doesn't have a equivalent in emacs.

BTW: Evil-mode is awesome!.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like where Emacs is going recently. The speed with which new features move upstream has increased. There is a push by some developers for git to make contributions easier and even some progress towards modernizing or replacing good ol' info. That makes me confident that GNU Emacs is going to be around and that the eco-system is going to stay healthy for some time.

<comment><USER7> It appears a wholesale switch to git is already in the works: [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5211](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5211)

<comment><USER6> This is what I was alluding to but just because someone is working on something in an open source project doesn't mean it is ever going to happen. Particularly something as controversial as switching to another VCS. If you don't think this is controversial I encourage you to try it yourself with some project that is dear to you.

<comment><USER8> It's also evident if you go through any big project's mailing list in the past few years and search for git/mercurial/svn/cvs/dvcs or the like. I followed Pidgin's devel mailing list for a while. For some reason, when they switched away from SVN several years ago they switched to a very niche DVCS called monotone which, among other oddities, had such a large data format/slow clone process that they had a tarball of the database for download that you had to then use to initialize your local checkout, because actually cloning the database the normal way would take too long. I assume they chose it due to some core developers' familiarity with it or something. Later, they eventually realized this was a huge barrier to entry for new developers and there was a protracted discussion/flame war about the replacement. One guy in particular, felipec, seemed to spend days writing up long detailed posts about how hg was inferior to git, which were more or less factual, but written in a snarky/condescending tone, and the core developers never took him seriously and made it clear that his input was not welcome. It's kind of funny, that guy ended up writing a bunch of hg to git interoperability scripts ostensibly for the sake of proving git's superiority, and those are now included in git- contrib.

So, yeah, (D)VCS choice is probably a bigger holy war than editor, and getting a project to switch is quite nontrivial. Especially a lot of the projects you'd want to switch away from some poor DVCS, because they often stick to it for some non-technical reason (eg. bzr seems to be largely a GNU thing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Emacs' indentation system is notoriously difficult to configure, so it's good to see some work being done in that area. However, the particular point described in the article is less exciting. I think every serious Emacs user who wants this behavior (binding RET to newline-and-indent) has it set up this way already anyway.

Some may consider it a good default behavior (though a matter of taste) for _some_ modes (such as, e.g., programming language modes) but not for others (e.g. text-mode). The default behavior so far has been "no automatic indent" while now it will be "automatic indent". But since it will still be necessary for the user to maintain a list of modes s/he wants it enabled it for, therefore this change is really not such a big deal.

IMHO, the most pressing issue with indentation in Emacs is to make it easy for the user to adapt it, and especially to adjust certain edge cases. Given the mode-centered architecture of Emacs, this is a big challenge. But questions about very specific indentation preferences pop up on sites like stackoverflow all the time: people want to be able to say "I want a continuation of a line be indented by four spaces, except when the line break is in the middle of the argument list of a function definition -- then the arguments should all indent to the same column."

Coming up with a configurable indentation system that works for every mode would be very cool and thought-after feature.

<comment><USER10> I don't know if you were thinking about that, but Emacs provides smie (simple minded indentation engine) [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/SM...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/SMIE.html)

used by tuareg-mode and sml-mode (AFAIK) with good results. I never used it personally but I felt it should be mentioned if someone else wants to dig into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most of the time you should use C-j to insert a new line, not RET. If you press ctrl with your left hand and j with your right it is much more efficient than RET because you dont have to move your hands from the home row.

<comment><USER12> Maybe it depends on how big your hands are, but reaching RET doesn't require a move off home for me?

Although it does use a pinkie, it's a nice hand-opening gesture, like when playing piano. As opposed to the left-pinkie hand-scrunching gestures that give some folks trouble.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps it does. I can't press RET while my three other fingertips rests on j, k, l. But I can press Ctrl (or Caps-Lock which I've remapped) comfortably with resting fingers on s, d, f.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love emacs and vim, but this days i am using emacs with evil-mode because IMHO emacs plugins have a higher quality than vim ones.

<comment><USER13> This is by no coincidence. Vim has a crippled plugin architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why do people like auto-indentation? It's just extra work undoing it when it decides I need indents when I don't, plus the mental overhead of "will it autoindent here?" all the time. Pasting is the worst, especially when it decides that as some config starts with a comment, it should turn it all into comments.

:set formatoptions-=ro and :set noautoindent are the first lines in my vimrc.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've had to revert back to emacs 23, because it seems emacs 24 has had a huge performance regression in its c-mode.

Does anyone have any information about whether c-mode breakage in emacs 24 is a known/fixed issue?

<comment><USER16> Which OS? Is this just c-mode?

<comment><USER15> As far as I noticed it's just c-mode on Linux Mint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So Emacs innovation is basically at a halt, then.</comment>


Ultra-rare kaon decay could lead to evidence of new physics - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-09-ultra-rare-kaon-evidence-physics.html <comment><USER2> It's a pity that the Feynman diagram at the top is not the diagram of the disintegration they are discussing. IIUC this are the correct diagram [https://www.caen.it/na62-spots-two-potential-instances-of- ra...](https://www.caen.it/na62-spots-two-potential-instances-of-rare- particle-decay/) .

The Kaon disintegrates into a Pion, a neutrino and an antineutrino. This process is rare because you need two virtual Z or W particles in the intermediate steps of the decay.

</comment><comment><USER3> > This combined result is compatible with the Standard Model prediction

Ok they haven't found anything yet..

<comment><USER4> Right. Read the article twice and I still don't know what they mean by "new physics".

<comment><USER5> It's more that they've set up a marker that says "We're getting good at measuring the K+ decay, which is super-rare, and we are trying to establish a good frequency for it. Anything new physics proposed has to be within a certain error range of this result." It's more of a way to quickly rule out "new physics" models that do not pass the test than anything else.

In some sense, many of these measurements are ways to provide more points in some kind of line-fitting we have going on. "Sure, your new idea waves away dark matter buuuuuut there's this little matter of its predicted K+ decays. They would be way off. Either come up with a way to explain _that_ or try again."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (2019)</comment>


Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures - <AUTHOR> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/group/datamining/ReadingGroup/papers/breiman2001.pdf

<comment><USER2> I thought this would be about Bayesian vs. Frequentist, but it really isn't.

The sort of statistical problems he is talking about are basically predictive: what is the distribution of variable y if we know the values of variables x_i? How high can we expect ozone levels to be, given the previous weeks meteorological data?

His claim is that statistics is dominated by people who begin with a data model already decided upon. These models tend to be simplistic, but can be tuned to fit any data set by including enough parameters. His suggested replacement seems to involve decision trees and neural nets, what he calls "algorithmic modeling" (on the other hand, he doesn't seem to like MCMC, which is usually based on a data model, albeit a more sophisticated one.) This is not exactly a frequentist position, since it assumes that data can be modeled by an NN.

Anyways, the article is from 2001, and I don't think statistics people have abandoned data models because such models are quite in vogue among AI people.</comment>


I Watched Hackers Pull Off a Real Life Ocean's 11 Heist - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/i-watched-hackers-pull-off-a-real-life-oceans-11-heist-1723108296

<comment><AUTHOR> For those interested, there's a (poor quality) video[0] as well as source code[1] available.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTV6jxT9oA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTV6jxT9oA)

[1] [https://github.com/ervanalb/lens](https://github.com/ervanalb/lens)</comment>


Vox Media to Cut 200 Freelancers, Citing California Gig-Worker Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/business/media/vox-media-california-job-cuts.html <comment><USER2> This law won't result in more people with full-time employment. It will result in more job loss.

<comment> this-ali Agreed. It's difficult to get on a full-time job after working on high paying gigs.

Any idea of how much is paid to content writes?</comment></comment>


What the Hell Liskov Substitution Principle Does in SOLID? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/liskov-substitution-principle-a982551d584a <comment><AUTHOR> Really, where is "E" (for "encapsulation") in SOLID then?</comment>


In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160324-in-newly-created-life-form-a-major-mystery/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Venter and his collaborators originally set out to design a stripped- down genome based on what scientists knew about biology. ... With the right tools finally in hand, the researchers designed a set of genetic blueprints for their minimal cell and then tried to build them. Yet "not one design worked," ... So the team took a different and more labor-intensive tack, replacing the design approach with trial and error. They disrupted M. mycoides' genes, determining which were essential for the bacteria to survive. ... Venter is careful to avoid calling syn3.0 a universal minimal cell. If he had done the same set of experiments with a different microbe, he points out, he would have ended up with a different set of genes. ... In fact, there's no single set of genes that all living things need in order to exist. ... They found that not a single gene is shared across all of life. "There are different ways to have a core set of instructions," ... Venter's minimal cell is a product not just of its environment, but of the entirety of the history of life on Earth. ... He and others are trying to make more basic life-forms that are representative of these earlier stages of evolution. ... Some scientists say that this type of bottom-up approach is necessary in order to truly understand life's essence. "If we are ever to understand even the simplest living organism, we have to be able to design and synthesize one from scratch," ... "We are still far from this goal."

As @sixQuarks has already written, finding the minimal amount of genes when there are 175 unknown ones and you don't know anything about their dependencies and relationships seems to be pretty much impossible.

> In fact, there's no single set of genes that all living things need in order > to exist. ... They found that not a single gene is shared across all of > life.

That's the most interesting point to me, I deeply believed that organisms share the same basic set of genes.

<comment><USER3> I worked in the synthetic biology lab (on a different project) while the early stages of the Syn3.0 was being done, and also have paid several visits to chat with them in the meantime. [Proof: first author on [http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms16012020](http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms16012020)] I was a fly on the wall for most of the group meetings and even contributed some unpublished results (there were transposons that were causing problems by shuffling the the DNA in the yeast and I hypothesized the orientation that causes the issue and discovered the yeast genes responsible for this process)

Firstly what constitutes "minimal" depends on what you feed the organism. There's a set of bacteria called phytoplasma which are plant parasites that are missing genes to make nucleotides (even mycoplasmas have those) and they've adapted by sucking nucleotides from their hosts.

Some insider information: Most of the mystery essential genes are vague cell wall proteins. Probably what is going on is that if you knock out too many of these genes, you lose cell wall turgidity and the cell becomes nonviable. So what is important is not so much which of these genes you have, but how many of them you have.

Second insider information, for fun: The "hypothetical minimal genome" (syn2.0 is referred to as HMG in the paper) was actually a backronym because we called it the "hail mary genome" but decided that was inappropriate for publication.

<comment><USER4> > Most of the mystery essential genes are vague cell wall proteins. Probably > what is going on is that if you knock out too many of these genes, you lose > cell wall turgidity and the cell becomes nonviable. So what is important is > not so much which of these genes you have, but how many of them you have.

Sounds like dependency hell. Gene A only works in the presence of Gene B which only works when there's Gene C which needs Gene A. Knock any one of them out and everything breaks.

<comment><USER5> > _Sounds like dependency hell._

Random mutations are like that. It's almost like no-one was planning out how these things should work, and whatever did work stuck.

Weird, huh?

<comment><USER6> In other words, God writes spaghetti code.

<comment><USER7> Praise his noodly appendage!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting work, but it reminds me of the famous "Could a biologist fix a radio?" paper [1]. The paper imagines biologists trying to determine what parts of a radio are essential using a similar trial and error technique. As you can imagine, this technique would lead to many erroneous conclusions, especially when paired with the "publish or perish" and "gold rush" mentalities so prevalent in academia. It makes you wonder if we are trying to understand biological systems with a fundamentally wrong approach.

[1] [https://www.cmu.edu/biolphys/deserno/pdf/can_a_biologist_fix...](https://www.cmu.edu/biolphys/deserno/pdf/can_a_biologist_fix_a_radio.pdf)

<comment><USER9> > It makes you wonder if we are trying to understand biological systems with a > fundamentally wrong approach.

Got a better idea?

<comment><USER8> The last couple pages of the aforementioned paper give some thoughts on that. The author suggests an approach more like engineering that is focused on formalized mathematical descriptions of biological systems.

<comment><USER10> The submitted article talks about attempts to _design_ a minimal set of genes, but they kept failing. The difficulty with your comment is it sounds like you're dismissing the work; I'm sure they are aware of that paper and its lessons. They tried working in that direction and failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm afraid it's not the individual genes themselves that are important to life, but a specific combination of those genes. Further complicating the problem is that we have no idea how many genes comprise an "essential group". Is it a combination of 2 genes? 3, 5, 10?

When you're talking about 175 unknown genes, the combination of all of these is a huge number. It's like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the solar system.

I don't think this brute force approach is going to work, we need a different way to figure this out, but I'm confident that once figured out, it will seem simple looking back on it.

<comment><USER12> > I don't think this brute force approach is going to work, we need a > different way to figure this out, but I'm confident that once figured out, > it will seem simple looking back on it.

Why not? Couldn't we use machines to automate this and analyze the results?

<comment><USER13> They got it down to 473 genes, but let's say that minimal life is some 20 of those genes. A brute force approach would require trying 10^34 combinations[1]. And that's already with the simplifying assumption that 20 genes is the minimal set rather than 19 or 106 or some other subset.

[1] [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=473+choose+20](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=473+choose+20)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how they removed the genes? I am not an expert in microbiology. I work with mainly eukaryotes, but I am guessing intergenic distances are not a huge factor here? What about spatial arrangement of the genes? Did they generally leave that alone?

Genes are not independent functional modules. Their placement and arrangement on the genome matters. Did they only mess with coding features (genes)? Or did they also mess with other genomic features? Or do such things just not matter with bacteria?

<comment><USER15> If I understand correctly, they built the technology to synthesize arbitrary genomes. So they remove genes by omitting them from the synthesis.

<comment><USER16> The article says they tried the additive/synthesis approach first, which didn't work. And then they tried the subtractive approach, starting with M. Mycoides. And in that case they were left with a lot of "unexplained" genes.

But he reminds us that the subtractive process entirely depends on the starting cell.

I would like to hear more about the difference between additive and subtractive methods -- it wasn't entirely clear from the article.

<comment><USER17> Additive method: Synthesize genomes with the genes you expect to be necessary, pretty much an optimization problem on the number of genes where you continually try to remove genes that were in previous iterations.

Subtraction method: After reading a bit of the paper, they utilized Tn5, which causes a DNA sequence to be arbitrarily inserted into the DNA (Random locations). This randomly disrupts genes, causing them to likely not function correctly.

Here's the logic: If all genes were necessary we would expect no cells to live that had mutations.

If no genes were necessary we would expect all cells to have mutations at about an equal rate relative to the space they occupy. (Assuming no bias by the Tn5, but that's a nuance)

What they instead found was that some cells grew, but there were certain genes that were not mutated, meaning that they are likely necessary.

They also classified a few things like studying the growth of the cell (Slow growing, but still viable was classified as "quasi-essential") and implanting their minimal genome in another species, which failed giving evidence that a subset of genes that are sufficient for survival are not necessarily sufficient in all cells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's like forking someone's program, but not understanding two thirds of the code. (What's the big deal? It happens!)

If you take someone's 4000-5000 line program and whittle it down to 473 lines which are still somehow useful, "newly created" doesn't apply in full honesty, let alone if you don't know what a third of those lines do.

<comment><USER19> In this analogy, they're not looking for the code to "work". They simply want it to compile.

<comment><USER20> That is wrong analogy. Compiling the code doesn't mean it will run.

<comment><USER21> Maybe life is written in Haskell

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great. This is the proper engineering approach to understanding life. Whittle it down to the minimal reproducing test-case, and poke it with a stick until you understand what all the parts do.

This is just excellent science. It seems like it should be very easy to get these unknown genes to reveal their function now. Very exciting times.

</comment><comment><USER23> I find it fascinating we still don't really know how life works. I have a hunch we are going to find the large scale 3D structure of the chromosome is a big deal, and these genes regulate it. There aren't many good tools to study chromosome structure and it's quite possible there's a whole layer of information we've missed so far.

<comment><USER24> Actually there are new approaches to study exactly that, and they are developing rapidly, cf: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_conformation_captur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_conformation_capture) Basically, this problem, along with a long list of other applications is being attacked by deep sequencing. The way it works is that you apply a treatment to DNA that 'glues' 3D contacts in place and covers the glued segment, apply restriction enzymes to cut out what's not covered by glue, get rid of the glue, sequence all that's left, and then map the remaining sequenced fragments to the reference genome. The output is the relative tendency of different regions to come into contact with each other.

<comment><USER23> > The 3-D organization of the genome can also be analyzed via > eigendecomposition of the contact matrix.

Love it when linear algebra pops up in unexpected places!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Forgive my complete ignorance, but how do they even count genes? Given a very long string of base pairs, how is it possible to know where one gene ends and the next one begins? Do genes overlap?

<comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_codon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_codon) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_codon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_codon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How much information is 473 genes? How many bytes does this represent, in a compact but "raw" encoding? What about if you compressed it with gzip?

Also what are the raw/compressed sizes for a human genome?

I have wondered this for a long time but never seem to find a concrete answer.

<comment><USER28> From [1], "Mycoplasma genitalium: it has only about 480 genes in its genome of 580 070 nucleotide pairs." So in average, each gene is 1200 nucleotide pairs.

A nucleotide is one of [A,T,C,G]. So that means it encodes 2 bits of information.

473 * 1200 * 2 = 1 135 200 bits, or 141.9 kilobyte.

Of course, this is coming from a software developer using numbers from Google, so I might be wildly wrong.

[1] "Molecular biology of the cell" by Bruce Alberts

<comment><USER27> That's a great start at least! Posting something that is wildly wrong is the best way to get someone who knows more to interject with corrected information, so hopefully someone with expertise can confirm or deny.

<comment><USER28> Cunningham's Law

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Article summary and Article [http://www.cba.mit.edu/docs/papers/16.04.minimal.pdf](http://www.cba.mit.edu/docs/papers/16.04.minimal.pdf)

edit: appears to be the full article (scroll down past summary)

<comment><USER30> I encourage people to read the one-page summary and at least the section headings in the full article.

To answer a few question that have come up:

How did they synthesize the genome? By creating short sequences of DNA and joining them together step by step to make larger sequences. They chemically synthesized short DNA sequences and assembled them into 1.4 thousand base pair (kbp) fragments. Five fragments were assembled into 7 kbp cassettes, which were assembled in yeast to generate 1/8 chunks of the genome, and these chunks were assembled in yeast to create the full genome. (See figure 2.) To try out deletions, they could replace a 1/8 chunk, rather than synthesizing the whole genome.

Why can't they delete all the non-essential genes? Bacterial have a lot of redundant genes, where two different genes provide the same essential function. Just like redundant disks, you can remove one, but not all of them. And you'll get different of minimal genomes depending on which gene you keep.

One interesting thing is that because the growth medium provides almost all the necessary nutrients, they could remove a lot of the metabolic genes, but needed to keep a lot of genes to transport molecules across the cell membrane. You can imagine a minimal cell constructed the opposite way.

The article doesn't mention that in their first synthetic bacterium (2010), they encoded text (actually HTML!) in the DNA to provide a secret watermark. See [http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters- se...](http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters-secret- dna.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Has anyone else here read Nick Lane's new book - The Vital Question - I just finished it and this article really seems like a continuation of some of his theories he talks about.

I found about the book from HN, and have since bought every single other book by him, almost done with Life Ascending now, which is also amazing

<comment><USER30> Yes. I read The Vital Question after hearing about it on HN a few weeks ago and found it very interesting (although less so nearer the end, as it seemed to get more speculative). To oversimplify, mitochondria are the key to understanding life and eukaryotes. (I should study electron transport more closely.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If I were a biology/biochem/genetics/etc type of student today this is exactly what I would love to work on. Perhaps someday we will actually understand how life works. That's both exciting and incredibly scary.

<comment><USER33> I don't know. The definition of "life" seems so arbitrary and nebulous. It seems really more like we're trying to attribute properties based on a wishful interpretation of emergent behaviour that ultimately boils down to extremely convoluted chemical reactions.

Trying to produce genuinely novel and distinct biological lifeforms sounds cool enough on its own though.

<comment><USER23> Yes, the boundary between life and non-life is not sharp, but to claim it follows that life is hard to define would be the continuum fallacy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy))

Manufacturing a living cell from purely chemical ingredients is a concrete enough goal.

And almost certainly it lies far, far off in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If the cell had a log it would be filled to the brink with warnings and errors :)

Thinking if it like: Just remove files from the OS until it wont start :)

</comment><comment><USER35> "The function of 79 genes is a complete mystery.'We don't know what they provide or why they are essential for life — maybe they are doing something more subtle, something obviously not appreciated yet in biology' "

It is the activation key God puts on each living being... Ain't gonna work without it. =P

<comment><USER33> So you're proposing the creation of the Church of Genuine Advantage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> My take-away: Work like this is somewhat akin to attempting to determine the specification of Intercal through reverse engineering given a working program and a compiler.

<comment><USER37> One of the things that originally attracted me to biology was the idea that it was like reverse engineering a computer system with no manual.

After a while that got old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So it's like a unikernel of life?

<comment><USER39> It's closer to a microkernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Anybody else find it suspicious that 2 quanta magazine stories were the top two stories on HN today?

</comment><comment><USER41> That should be us.

</comment><comment><USER42> The actual study can be accessed for free on "The Pirate-Bay of Science publications" Sci-Hub:

[http://science.sciencemag.org.sci- hub.cc/content/351/6280/aa...](http://science.sciencemag.org.sci- hub.cc/content/351/6280/aad6253)

About Sci-Hub: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci- Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

</comment><comment><USER43> Four months old news. I will Dr Venter in Aspen Saturday.</comment>


Introducing Paper (FiftyThree Parody) - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/127749826

<comment><AUTHOR> We love the Paper concept, but we couldn't resist poking a little fun...

Original here - www.fiftythree.com/think

</comment><comment><USER2> Also Farmlogs (YC S12) is hiring designers – [https://farmlogs.com/jobs/](https://farmlogs.com/jobs/)</comment>


What is difference between scripter and developer? - <AUTHOR>

    Recently I went to an interview for python developer. I didn't get the job and when I asked for feedback, they said it seems I am more like scripter.
    I can write codes under framework and abstract business logic on top of libraries. When I look at my works, They seem to solve a lot of things but design is a bit flat. Usually I am alone doing project. It makes me quite hands on. However the bad part is I think I know it but each time I just take easy path which might not be best practice.
    I think really hope to leap from scripter to developer. maybe working in a team helps. any advice is welcomed. Thanks!
 <comment><USER2> I just see this as a lame non answer. When being asked for why I'm passing on someone I can give some fairly clear and concrete reasons. What someone could have done differently or what skills they could have had that would have pushed them over the top.

My questions for you: do you know more than one language? Can you design a database "from scratch" \- do you understand the rest of the technology in the stack of your domain - (servers/network and so on)?

> Recently I went to an interview for python developer.

This tells me a lot because the python community is, for lack of a better word, weird. There are plenty of (ab)users of python who get shit done without being programers by trade. I can point to plenty of data, EE and systems admin folks who see python as a swiss army knife. Their code is ugly but functional, it isn't code that is going to scale or be elegant, rather it serves a purpose. Python on the web/api side is a different beast, it is easy to turn your python code into a big ball of mud without a fair bit of discipline - Exactly what that takes is up for some debate and can be domain dependent.

If your the sort of python dev who focuses more on "get shit done" rather than "long view" I could see how someone might make the comment they did. The get it done mentality is not something you need to drop all together (it happens to be how I use python myself) but it doesn't preclude you taking the long view as well.

Lastly you can run into some very odd camps/elements in the python community - the fact that were 9 or 10 years into the 2.x to 3.x should tell you where some of the lines might fall.

<comment><AUTHOR> I belongs to get-shit-done camp. It is so easy to check if someone has packaged a module for you. like if mongo call is blocking in tornado, i don't wrap it with coroutine. simple search i found motor/tornado redis/etc. only during debug, occasionally I jump in their codes and get idea how they do it. but that is only out of curiosity.

my work doesn't have collaboration other than users. if they want realtime feed, i do quick meteor app just a bit more complex than quick starter tutorial. I really want to break into serious development

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The very short version:

Probably ignore that person.

The short version:

Reading charitably, what they meant is that they're looking for people with open-ended problem-solving skills. They're confident in your ability to, as you say, solve specific problems whose form is well understood: writing a controller, connecting APIs, and so on. What they're more concerned about is whether, if you had to, you could reproduce that API or write that framework from scratch, design and all.

In other words, they're looking for a person whose skill is "fix a broken car," not "fix the power steering on a 2015 Honda Civic." Maybe they don't have a Honda Civic. :)

The oops-not-long version:

Though it's possible to make a technical distinction between programming and "scripting," people who insist on making it are often doing that for social reasons (which is why I jumped to probably ignore them). I don't know if going into detail would be helpful, so I'll actually stop there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see people who has CS background like to talk about performance, go deep into the subject. the common question asked how python list implemented. I reply variable array and interviewer is happy. To be honest i haven't noticed list has to resize when appending more items. probably i haven't seen real world problem.

I think there is some special code unknown to outside developer league that they can test and know you are real developer

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't agree with the scripter vs developer differentiation.

But my interpretation of the difference is that

Some developers can read the documentation, put together what some devs might deem easy like build REST API, put on a rate limit, add authorization, integration with payment APIs, scrape website or parse CSV file etc... This is what 80% of the job involves.

Some jobs include requirements like this

Build a distributed key-value store for storing counters, it must work for 1200 RPS, the counts must be available in both EU and US region (150ms) apart. Counters should be consistent in both the regions.

Can you think through such problem? Do you know what it takes? Do you know updating counter is not a single operation but:

1\. Read the original value 2\. Increment the value 3\. Save the new value

Do you know how latency the between the region affects the throughput of the service? How can you make counters reflect consistent count in both regions consistent?

What if one of the servers goes down? How do you make it highly available?

Customers might increase and we end up needing more nodes. When are more nodes added how is the data rebalanced, what effect does it have on throughput and latency?

<comment><AUTHOR> I met one asking are you package users or know the underhood.

Your interpretation is well said. I am doing that 80% stuff. it seems to deliver a lot and feel like developers currently I am writing very defensive codes which not addressing problem directly. I just want to get it done quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The main difference is whether they think that you'll write maintainable code and extensible code. Will teammates be able to work with your code easily? Will others be able to maintain or extend the code when you're gone? Is it easy to debug? Does your code use the right abstractions when appropriate? Is your code efficient? The response probably indicates that they saw something in your code that they felt wasn't up to par.

In general, this is something that you'll improve at naturally when you work on teams or maintain legacy code (assuming a relatively good codebase). One thing that can be super-helpful is to review a good codebase and see how features are implemented and think about why it was done this way and how you would have done it (for python, take a look at the flask or django codebase and see how they use abstractions). And honestly keep interviewing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your advice. The problem with my current job is I am one man team building tools for less than 20 users. I am not using Jenkins. usually I check out codes from servers and simply copied in share drive. They only saw code snippets in codepad. I think the way I talked doesn't seem like I am working in a professional team.

I have never worked in a team, doing peer coding/review. It is good to have this practice so people feel you are in their league. and usually through teamwork you get questioned and spot your area for improvement. I am kind of doing this through interview but that is really waste of opportunity this way.</comment></comment>


Comcast Protests "Shake Down" of Alleged BitTorrent Pirates - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/comcast-protests-shake-down-of-alleged-bittorrent-pirates-120612/ <comment><USER2> I'm... confused. I've been under the clear impression for years that Comcast, my service provider, was doing everything in its power to quash bittorrent users. Its been accused of everything from packet shaping to cooperating with the NSA to "spy" on its customers. I've been living under the assumption that at any point my service could be interrupted, slowed, or disconnected because of my occasional torrent use (linux iso's, game of thrones, etc).

While I'm not entirely sure how to take this news, it is certainly food for thought.

It makes sense that Comcast is fighting back primarily for financial reasons, more than trying to protect their customers. The sheer volume of subpoenas must be costing them a lot of money and does nothing to endear us to them.

<comment><USER3> Comcast cares about the issue because these requests are costing it money. But if the government should compensate them (as they do for phone tapping), no further protests would occur.

<comment><USER4> They are also worried about reputation. A bad reputation costs them users. Standing up for users gets more customers.

If they could do these things in secret you might be right, but the subpoenas are public. And their objection is even more public.

I love that the reaction of their customers drives their policies, that's exactly what I want in a company.

<comment><USER3> Reputation counts for little in their virtual local monopolies. Many places it's either them or 3g or satellite. Then again, the public at large doesn't care about these issues.

<comment><USER4> No, they usually compete with Verizon, AT&T and other local telco's.

<comment><USER5> Only in metro areas and suburbs. In most other places, it's a single provider and you're _lucky_ if that provider decides to offer service to your house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If Comcast only held the IP address currently assigned to its cable modems, they could argue that they don't know who had that IP address six months ago. Its true that most people leave their cable modems on-line full-time and that the lease period keeps changes to a minimum, but why keep logs. And it could all be done "in an effort to store less customer data" ... there are obviously privacy issues with customer data ;)

<comment><USER7> At the moment they would be able to do that, but there are bills constantly being introduced (and so far, luckily, shot down) to Congress calling for mandatory data retention. The current bill calling for this is HR 1981:Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr1981>), introduced by Rep Lamar Smith of SOPA acclaim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Comcast is a content owner by virtue of owning NBC. I wonder if Comcast is treating NBC differently or not in this process.

<comment><USER9> The article specifically mentioned that they were resisting subpoenas from pornographers. I don't know if the author was intentionally implying that Comcast is ok with other content owners making requests, or if currently the only people making these mass subpoenas happen to be pornographers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flagged as a duplicate. Please stop sneaking duplicates past the filter through tricks such as replacing "http" with "https".

Previous submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106269>

<comment><USER11> from the faq

 _Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did._

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html></comment></comment>


Docker Enterprise and Community Editions - <AUTHOR> https://store-stage.docker.com/search?offering=enterprise&type=edition <comment><USER2> Docker Enterprise: [https://www.docker.com/enterprise](https://www.docker.com/enterprise)

What really trigger this is that their beta versions for mac and windows now have a changlog reading like this:

"Introduce Docker Community Edition"

It seems that they would be releasing the current tools as a separate but related product now. Just to clarify, Docker for Mac or Windows is not open- sourced (although it includes docker which is open-sourced).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For clarification, the Docker Community Edition appeared in the Docker for Mac beta channel, but it looks there is no official announcement yet of the upcoming editions.

The link leads to a staging version of the store.docker.com site that is indexed in google.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, doesnt work - Im surprised the staging site isnt restricted. but at least the new site looks good</comment>


Write Modern Asynchronous JavaScript Using Promises, Generators, and Coroutines - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/4wbdnx/write_modern_asynchronous_javascript_using/ <comment><USER2> This should probably point to the original article at [http://blog.originate.com/blog/2016/06/29/write-modern- async...](http://blog.originate.com/blog/2016/06/29/write-modern-asynchronous- javascript-using-promises-generators-and-coroutines/) rather than the (currently empty) reddit discussion?</comment>