Ask HN - Real life work makes me dumb; Recommend algorithm learning resources - <AUTHOR>

I've been building non-complex real-world apps for a very long time.
I am becoming dumb.
Can anybody recommend good algorithm resources, tuts, books, and problems.
I am aware of http://projecteuler.net/ and am getting started on that! <comment><USER2> "Introduction to Algorithms" by T Cormen ,C Leiserson, R Rivest and C Stein.

This book covers both basic and advance topics in a well written manner. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe this book is used in some MIT courses.

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Algorithms-T- Cormen/dp/...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Algorithms-T- Cormen/dp/0262533057/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326274026&sr=1-1)

<comment><USER3> I came here to recommend this exact book. Great reference text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice that I'm not the only one :)

My preferences are now search engines and graph theory. For the latter one you can even get a bad paid job (pockettaxi.de) but where you can hack on nice algorithms!

Here are some nonefree and free graph theorie books:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510758/can-you- suggest-a-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510758/can-you-suggest-a- good-book-on-graphs-and-graph-algorithms)

<comment><USER4> BTW:

[http://www.mat.unb.br/clausahm/area/AnAlg-07.2d/Referencias/...](http://www.mat.unb.br/clausahm/area/AnAlg-07.2d/Referencias/HowToThinkAboutAlgorithms- Edmonds.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://learnyouahaskell.com/starting-out#ready-set-go>

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting .. thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pick up a copy of Steven Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual"

It will take you through the vast majority of data structures and algorithms you might ever need to know - it's recommended reading for CS heavy interviews.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://mathalon.in/> Similar to Project Euler.</comment>


Apple TV Short Review: Analysis of a New A5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/6834/apple-tv-2013-a1469-short-review-analysis-of-a-new-a5

<comment><USER2> If you de-focus your eyes from the TV part of AppleTV, Apple is developing an interesting competency in making "pucks" to bring devices around your house into the fold of computer management/interaction:

With AppleTV they've done TVs. With AirPort they've done printers and speakers. With TimeMachine they've done remote storage devices.. As the size of the devices shrink, I imagine there will eventually just be a small Apple hockey puck that will endow any device it's connected to with the ability to be managed by your computer.

<comment><USER3> Consider Nest too, made my ex-Apple'rs.

I wonder if Nest does well, if Apple would ever acquire them and/or consider branching out into general appliance design. I wouldn't mind a washing machine I could program with my phone and monitor progress of a laundry load remotely. ;)

Rumor seems to imply that some type of watch-replacement is next up though.</comment></comment>


No Moore? A golden rule of microchips appears to be coming to an end - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-appears-be-coming-end-no-moore <comment><USER2> This has been pretty evident to systems folks since 2005. And the key here is the insight that Moore's "Law" was really powered by the fact that the cost of a wafer start[1] was constant. So double the transistors and you can make the same chip for half the money, or as most people did, a chip that was 50% "better" for 75% of the same money.

Now that the cost of wafers are going up, making a chip that is 50% better costs 50% more money. That means that this years computer is more powerful than last years computer, except it costs 15% more (chipset cost is often 1/3 the cost of parts for a machine) And if your current laptop is 'good enough' in terms of power such that you aren't willing to pay 15% more. You don't buy it. And _that_ is what is going to really be interesting here.

The new device costs more than the old device and isn't any more capable from a feature perspective.

30 years of PC marketing "lore" goes "Poof!" Now the only way to make your machine faster and cost less is to write more efficient software. Think about that carefully. It will define success in this next decade.

[1] In the chip business a wafer start is the process of sending 1 or more wafers through the process of being made into chips. It is the smallest unit of manufacturing.

<comment><USER3> >Now the only way to make your machine faster and cost less is to write more efficient software.

Were still a long way away from that. Switching over to SSDs represents a huge speed boost, and given how young SSDs are, I suspect that there is still room for improvement in their speed. Also, there is likely improvements to be made in CPU architecture. We are still using x86, which has been improving incrementally with backwards compatible changes since the 70s. I'm not fammiliar with CPU architecture, but I suspect this means that there is room for significant improvements in terms of per transistor efficiency with the use of a novel CPU architecture. We could also see a drop in prices due to economical, not technological forces. For example, the price of a CPU is significantly higher than the cost to produce one. This is because you are paying for the development of the CPU. Without continuing fundamental improvements, we would expect to see the cost of CPUs fall to their marginal cost as development would no longer be necessary.

<comment><USER4> With the rise of iOS, Android, and ChromeOS which hide the CPU architecture completely from the user (especially when running Java or JavaScript applications), there are opportunities to change CPU architectures in more radical ways in the future.

But then again, the gains possible may be more limited that you suggest because the transition from x86 to x86-64 did involve a number of major efficiency gains from changing register counts and how FP calculations where done. There may not be huge efficiency gains left that are easy.

With LLVM basically being a new runtime in some cases, we can do more complex compilation strategies such as was attempted with the Itanium architecture: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word)

Who knows... I'm just brainstorming today. Happy New Years!

<comment><USER3> The transition from x86 to x86-64 did not seem like a radical redesign of the architecture. The x86-64 bit chips are still capable of running code written for x86 chips without modification (even the 16 bit code I believe). Furthermore, the programming model (as exposed to assembly) did not seem to change between the two architectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This Moore's Law coming to an end meme reminds me of Voyager 1 leaving the solar system. You could just replace the text in the xkcd and it would be just as funny: [http://xkcd.com/1189/](http://xkcd.com/1189/)

<comment><USER6> This is the only valid response! Classical scaling (aka Moore's law) ended with the 130nm node more than 10 years ago. The business model has been slowly changing since then.

<comment><USER7> Can you expand on this? What happened after 130nm that was different than the previous scaling?

<comment><USER6> Companies started to introduce new technological features starting with the 90nm node. This slide is a nice top level summary:

[http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_5_6/Intel- Manufact...](http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_5_6/Intel- Manufacturing-Event-in-Munich-22nm-Breakthrough- Analyzed/Intel_Transistor_Leadership.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This piece from 2011 is still, to me, the definitive discussion of the end of Moore's "law" as we know it: [http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the- jungle/](http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/)

<comment><USER9> Nice piece--and, I suppose, ultimately hopeful in the sense that it suggests there are a variety of paths to increased throughput even if we're close to losing Moore's Law (at least as it comes largely from CMOS scaling). Ones does wonder though what the ultimate effect of losing the CMOS scaling lever will be on IT economics. Certainly, not all computing innovation has been about continued CMOS process shrinks. But those have been the foundation for an awful lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like the biggest killer of Moore's Law is how much emphasis has been put on lowering/maintaining power consumption in recent years, similar to airplane performance/cost in the 1970s.

<comment><USER11> Should that matter for Moore's Law as it was defined, for number of transistors on a die? I thought that smaller transistors required less current to operate, so the incentives for lowering power consumption and upping transistor count are aligned.

<comment><USER12> Dennard's Laws (which say that smaller transistors use less power) are also ending.

<comment><USER6> This is actually the same as Moores law. Dennard was the one to define scaling law in respect to the physical properties of the transistors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing against the article because it doesn't falsify any of the conclusions, but Moore's Law is often mis-stated. Moore said that we could double the number of components in an integrated circuit every 18-24 months, nothing more. It had nothing to do with cost or power, although he did dismiss the thermal energy argument in a sentence or two in the original paper.

The interesting issue has to do with Dennard's Law for power scaling, which said that power density would remain constant as we increased component density. This isn't true any more and that's part of the reason why multicore designs are the future (2 processors at 500MHz use less than one at 1GHz for a fully parallel workload).

<comment><USER9> It did have to do with cost as well. From the original paper: "That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer."

In other words, it was the number of transistors that could _economically_ be included in a single unit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Required reading for anyone who didn't see the paper last week:

The Slow Winter by James Mickens [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Some day they are going to have to get this guy (James Mickens) on Dara O Briains science club show and/or the infinite monkey cage radio show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it will come back to needing new and smarter software. Perhaps more efficient software is a better word. Magnetic disk Storage is now at silly levels, and will not hit the theoretical maximum of 20TB but even so extracting all (randomly fragmented) data off a 4tb disk will take days to weeks. So we shall head for a time not unlike the 60/70s when you arranged storage on your tape drive based on the speed of the tape passing under the head.

whatever architectures we come up with I think humanity will see increasing growth in computing power (perhaps not as insanely fast but fast) - but to use that effectively will no longer be a free ride for the developers

one last thing - More or Less podcast quoted this stat: a one billion FlOP/s chip today costs 19cents. In 1961 it did not exist but had we tried to build one machine to perform one billion operations a second it would have cost 1.1 trillion - or about the entire world GDP.

just puts Moore's law in perspective for me

</comment><comment><USER17> Its on life support, and pivoting to newer technologies. The turning point is towards integrated optical and quantum effects. Even switching from Silicon to Gallium Arsenide. Manufacturing processes are changing and there is no need to create anything smaller than the 10nm.

<comment><USER18> Why not Gallium Nitride?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was quite disappointed to discover this recently. I went out and bought a new machine; I looked at all the specs, bought a sensible machine, put it together. It ran horribly. I looked everywhere... and finally checked Tom's Hardware. My processor, which had cost me $300 at the beginning of 2012, outperformed the one that I'd just bought for $200. This was... pretty much unthinkable to me. Every other two-year gap in my life was incredible; Even cheap machines were way better than their counterparts. Now I've wasted a bunch of money, a bunch of time, and gotten a worse machine.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes but there are a few problem that haven;t quote mapped out. While what it said there are true, it is build on the fact that previous node and growth were driven by PC market. Now that maths dont add up well because the market is shirking or not growing fast enough to keep up with the pace of node invention and wafer cost. The more wafer used, i.e the larger scale it is produced the lower the cost per transistor. With Tablet, wearable computing and Mobile Phones, these blooming market could drive the cost economics of Moore at least to 10nm or 7nm.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been hearing about the end of Moore's law ever since I was in college (late 80's). There are indeed some hard limits for Silicon, but there is still a lot of space for other materials, major improvements in interconnects and better software.

<comment><USER22> Don't confuse the end of Moore's Law with the end of computer technology progress. Moore's Law is actually a pretty specific law. It says the amount of transistors in the same amount of space doubles every 2 years. We're reaching the "end of Moore's Law", because we're getting to the point where we're close to making a transistor the size of an atom, which I think is pretty much the end of "doubling the number of transistors in the same amount of space every 2 years".

That doesn't mean that after we reach this limit we won't be making quantum computers, or use other materials like graphene transistors that can probably reach TerraHertz clock speeds, which may even improve at a rate of 2x every 2 years, too. But it wouldn't be "Moore's Law".

We're also working on "brain-like" computers, but I think these and quantum computers will become "mainstream", in a general-purpose way (not just for very specific tasks), in a few decades, which should be quite a while after Moore's Law dies (in the 2020's).

So the most likely thing is that we'll use other kind of materials for the same type of "classical computers" for the next few decades, even after the end of Moore's Law, but they will improve through increasing their clock speed or through other ways, rather than getting that extra performance from adding more transistors.

<comment><USER21> Originally, it stated the number of transistors _per component_ will double every year. If the defect density (or susceptibility to defects) goes down, it's possible to manufacture larger, more complex, components for the same price. This sort-of applies for stacked dies, with the denser interconnects and added bandwidth between layers adding to effectively higher density than single-chip (but that would be kind of cheating on Moore's Law).

A looser formulation talks about computing power. In that, we have been ahead of Moore's law with GPGPUs and vector units for quite some time. This formulation is more detached from physical process details and looks more like what the market can absorb.

In the end, what the market can absorb may prove the ultimate limit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While it's true that we're approaching the deceleration of shrinking chip size, there are still plenty of ways micro and nano computing will be optimized. Some of the more interesting developments are happening in the world of graphene R&D. This article is a little dated for such a fast-moving industry, but it's semi-relevant:

[http://graphenewire.blogspot.com/2012/10/extending-memory- be...](http://graphenewire.blogspot.com/2012/10/extending-memory-beyond- moores-law.html)

<comment><USER6> Graphene is interesting, but nobody in the industry believes that it will be the holy grail:

[http://www.techdesignforums.com/blog/2013/12/10/graphene- get...](http://www.techdesignforums.com/blog/2013/12/10/graphene-gets-reality- check/)

(This is pretty different from what academia tells you...)

<comment><USER24> The critique you link to comes from an academic.

<comment><USER6> This does not mean that he is not able to present the things in proper context. However, the general situation with graphene in acedemia right now is that it is a good source of grant money. Hence you see wildy exaggerated claims of its capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 3D processors

memristors

improved parallel processing

graphene

quantum

spintronics

optical

Did I miss any?

<comment><USER6> Sure, you missed all the real stuff that is going on:

\- II-VI channel materials on silicon

\- Finfet, Nanowire FETS (the top down variant, not the academic bottom up version.)

\- RRAM (Memristors are a sub-class of these devices. Memristors mainly exist in the PR department of HP)

\- TSV integration

\- 3D Flash

\- Memory integrated processers (see Microns Automata)

<comment><USER4> It would be cool to write an article explaining this stuff and its expected impact in terms that most software developers could understand. I love reading this stuff but putting it into context would be useful. Your response suggests you know what you are talking about but it is fairly incomprehensible to most everyone else not deep into semiconductor technologies without just looking up each term in Wikipedia.

<comment><USER6> IEEE spectrum has a good and accurate general coverage of these topics.

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors](http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not being an EECS person and having only taken a couple of Intro to Circuits survey courses, can someone fill in my ignorance?

EECS people make math convenient for themselves by pretending that voltage numbers and current numbers cancel out in certain ways. Otherwise they'd have to do really messy calculus. The problem is that this convenience is only true for circuits that are up to a certain speed. Past that speed, that way of calculating and engineering circuits starts to break down. We've hit those speed limits.

The field has chosen to react by instead switching to multi-core computers. The problem from a programmer perspective is that parallelism is difficult to write for. The reason it is difficult to write for is because of mutable variables, which are common in imperative languages. So that's driving the popularity of functional languages. However, not as many people are good at functional languages, since they tend to be more mature in academic circles, less mature for industry purposes, and generally more difficult to learn for people that are more used to procedural thinking than mathematical thinking.

So, if all those premises and implications are true that would mean that maybe if the EECS people stopped pretending that EECS circuits are simple and started doing the messy calculus, maybe we could start shrinking single-core chips again. But I'm sure I've messed up some of those premises. Anyone?

<comment><USER3> I'm also not an EECS person, so I do not know if we are here yet, but at some point you will have to deal with quantum effects.

<comment><USER27> We already do have to worry about quantum effects. Electron tunneling is a real concern and one of the causes of chip degradation over operating lifetime. Essentially, an excited electron can jump across the transistor gate oxide and get trapped in the gate metal. If this happens enough, the threshhold voltage of the transistor increases, making it slower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought Moore's law had been replaced by Amdahl's law a decade ago. Moore's law is only about the number of transistors in a chip rather than the theoretical speed improvement limits of multicore chips.

</comment><comment><USER29> What's the law for how many stories there are per month about this obvious- for-close-to-ten-years-and-was-only-ever-a-marketing-meme-anyway "fact"?

</comment><comment><USER30> I hope this happens soon. The ability to run current software on a 10-year-old computer (regardless of form factor) would be a great equalizer.

</comment><comment><USER31> We were aware of this in 2005 when the Pentium 4 could not transform into another Pentium 5.

</comment><comment><USER32> Please don't link to articles behind paywalls.

</comment><comment><USER33> Or a pause.

</comment><comment><USER34> Water has been found on Mars, again?

</comment><comment><USER35> Okay, seriously, isn't it only cared by non-technicians?</comment>


Ask HN: 2 karma minimum to lock out spam bots - <AUTHOR>

I just flagged two submissions that were blatant spam, both submitted by accounts created two seconds before the post.
Wouldn't a 2 point karma minimum to url submission and voting fix a lot of spam posts? For legitimate users it's pretty easy to get one upvote on a comment and as a nice bonus it would raise the chance that the user has a basic grasp of community values.
For spam bots OTOH it's impossible to submit links before they get one upvote and it's impossible to upvote themselves before they get one upvote. I think that it effectively locks them out. <comment><USER2> That would encourage them to try to generate spam comments in the slim hope that they'd get upvoted.... which would lead to a much worse spam situation.

For instance, they'd employ Markov Chains to re-hash comments in a post, or from older posts, or from the text of the article.

One thing I've learned: spammers don't give up. If you give them an easy way to submit that's even easier for you to clean up, that's better than starting an all-out war that'll just increase the spam content and make it more difficult to filter out.

<comment><USER3> Very true.

The best you can do is allow the post to go thru and make it appear to the spammer that they have succeeded. Let them view their post on the homepage and go away with a nice warm feeling of satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that they don't need to improve their algorithm at all for this site.

It's pretty straightforward to modify your display mechanism to include spam posts if and only if they originate from the same IP address as the viewing client.

I implemented this on Blogabond, and it had two positive effects: My Spam corpus is growing at a faster rate (thus making it more effective), and the sophistication level of the average attack has dropped sharply.

<comment><USER4> The problem is detecting the spam posts in the first place. Your idea would be incompatible with the proposed method, because you don't want to do the same thing to legitimate new users.

<comment><USER3> Certainly, HN must have a bayesian classifier looking at the content of its submissions and deciding whether they are "Hacker Newsworthy". By now, the site must have sizeable corpi (corpuses?) of good articles and spam links to use in such an assessment.

Since this site was built by Mr Bayesian himself, it never occurred to me that it might have weak spam filtering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suggest we just add a recaptcha for people posting links below a certain karma threshold.

<comment><USER6> Instead of a captcha, what about something that is like a puzzle to complete, that way you can also avoid low quality submissions which might come from people not intelligent enough to solve said puzzles and would also be a delightful little game for the rest of us who like to solve puzzles/problems?

<comment><USER7> First, I don't think I would be delighted by an automated puzzle on HN.

Second, the idea that puzzle-solving-ability is somehow closely related to interesting/insightful writing is specious. People are smart in different ways, and as a programmer myself, the kind of smart that I want most is the kind I don't have, which is often not the problem-solving kind.

All that having been said, I'm not against a captcha. I just don't think it'd be delightful and I don't believe that it'd somehow raise the quality of posts around here (beyond from removing some spam).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw an interesting method used by spambots on the Doom9 forum: they would take old threads and repost them (with a link to their ad in their signature or such).

Some variant of this method might work to circumvent such a policy; find a similar thread, pick a comment from it, and post it, perhaps? It might only work 20% of the time, but that's good enough to get some spam accounts with URLs approved.

Of course this would all take effort, and might be enough to lock out a lot of would-be spammers, or at least convince them to go somewhere else.

<comment><USER9> Reminds me of what I see on my Wordpress Blog: lot's of 0-content comments like "this is a cool article". At first they didn't make sense (blocked them anyway), but then I remembered the Wordpress settings for comments. By default, it is set to "commentors must have been approved at least once". So I guess if I would let one of those innocent comments through, they would be back with more serious stuff.

Spammers are crafty...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good idea; though I'd argue 2 is too low, if these aren't "bots" but real humans, it wouldn't be hard for them to adapt by commenting and then upvoting each other.

10+ would be nicer, anyone truly interested in HN would understand why! :)

<comment><USER11> It's a good point that some spam "bots" could be human. I was running a free email site when we saw a lot of strange account creation. We had recaptcha enabled and knew it hand't been cracked.

It turned out (based on IP address analysis) that the accounts were being created by humans in the Philippines and then handed over to spammers in Dubai. Ah globalization...

If you have an efficient spam vector, it's not unusual to see low-wage humans manipulating the system to get around captcha.

<comment><USER3> This is a lot bigger than you'd expect. Nearly all the spam that makes it into the database on my sites is human-powered. It's maybe only 1% of the total attack volume, but because simple checks knock out nearly all the noise, it becomes the most significant fraction that you have to deal with.

<comment><USER12> limit it to 1 account creation per IP per hour :)

Yeh they can use a ton of proxies to get round that but I bet it cuts the account creation _right_ down.

And it shouldnt affect 99.999999% of "real" users.

<comment><USER3> Ah, but there's the rub. Extrapolating from my comment above, your number one job is to make spammers feel successful when they fail. If you reject new accounts like this, you'll force them to write those little proxies to get around your system.

The better thing to do is to simply notice what they're doing and flip the IsSpammer bit on all those new accounts (including the first one.) That way you can correctly classify any content they may post from those accounts in the future.

<comment><USER12> There's the age old argument of which system to go for: Passive (my suggestion) or Active (yours).

Probably both have merits but I am inclined to agree yours is the better way :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about we keep with the intellectual stuff around here, and make 'em answer math captchas. Using latin numerals.

eg, what's LV + IV? Answer has to be given in latin numerals, too.

<comment><USER14> We'd have to agree on how to write II + II

We could ask for a basic derivative (for example, of a polynomial), or the value of 'x' in a simple algebraic equation x+5 = 2x + 10

<comment><USER15> Problems like that are far too easy for computer programs to solve. Clearly the right solution here is to present new users with a set of Turing machines and ask them which of the specified machines halt.

This would probably be very effective at limiting the growth rate of HN, too.

<comment><USER14> I've never written a bot. I thought perhaps that the process of parsing instructions (we could put more than one variable in the equation), then writing code to solve, might be more effort than it's worth to them. Especially if we're doing something that is somewhat unique so their reward would only be one page. However, phildawes is apparently implying that once the bots have parsed the problem and know what to solve for they could go to a page that implements Mathematica and submit the problem to be solved, therefore saving the time required to write problem-solving code. I didn't realize they worked like that.

<comment><USER16> agreed, computers are good at solving math problems or running Turing machines (since they are them). You would be better off with a turing test (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test>) that only a human can answer - and if any does get a computer to solve it you get them to start a company because they have solved a fundamental computing problem.

<comment><USER15> Computers are good at simulating Turing machines. Computers aren't good at determining whether Turing machines halt; in fact, it is impossible for a computer to determine in the general case whether a Turing machine will halt.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough, though it might have the effect of not letting humans in either ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is an article on slate.com about CAPTCHAs <http://www.slate.com/id/2216837/> (submitted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579051> )

</comment><comment><USER17> Hope HN won't introduce anything similar to the burying system on digg which the powerful users on the site use for their advantage.</comment>


OpenShift Commons Gathering Amsterdam 2020 Update: Shifts to Digital Conference - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openshift.com/important-openshift-commons-gathering-amsterdam-2020-update-shifts-to-digital-conference/ <comment><AUTHOR> Expect more of this, while Coronavirus is still on the move.</comment>


Show HN: Canvas based bug tracking and co-browsing with debug log (testers welcome) - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/190353521 <comment><AUTHOR> btw. as it is in german: coview allows to cobrowse websites but besides that, it transfers the full state of the website (incl. debug log etc.) which makes debugging of issues quite easy.

<comment><USER2> Wheres a link to the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's coview.com - still in early days, generally interested in feedback on the idea of having all logs and errors included for better debugging purposes</comment></comment></comment>


Systems Thinking and Quality - <AUTHOR> https://www.ufried.com/blog/systems_thinking_and_quality/ <comment><USER2> One area where this becomes apparent is that in complex and layered system at least some of the bahaviours of a single layer do not make sense in terms of the system as a whole. Often it is wrong to attempt to let a layer on its own do the thing that seems most logical because actually the output of that layer is the input of another one and the total result is an interplay between the two. Attempting to make each one separately more logical would make both layers a lot more complex and would essentially be duplicating the relevant concerns into multiple layers, if not outright introducing bugs by introducing speculative logic that often turns out to be wrong in yet unforeseen cases.

<comment><USER3> Communication between its elements is the source of a system's emergent behaviour.

So yes, input/output streams (and where they originate and end up) are at least as important to the system as its discrete elements, if not more so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very insightful, and as usual with systems thinking, I think that we don't understand the field well.

I once found a comment on HN to read "The Systems Bible" by John Gall, this is a great occasion to relay the proverbial baton. If tou like this article I strongly recommend reading this book.

</comment><comment><USER5> _> He says, that you should imagine having all cars available in a room and then ask a group of experts to identify the best engine, the best battery, the best transmission, and so on. Afterwards, you take all the parts identified and put them together. While we would expect to get the best car possible (we only use the best parts available), we do not even get an automobile because the parts do not fit.

> This leads Ackoff to the conclusion:

> | The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not how they act > taken separately._

Isn't it how we hire talent nowadays?

<comment><USER6> Not at the entry level. A grad with a 3.5 GPA and one with a 4.0 GPA are applying to the same job, guess who gets hired every single time. Not always the best fitting part!

<comment><USER5> Same thing: greedy algorithms. Mostly imposed by companies "living by algorithms".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > No part of the system or a collection of parts of the system has an > independent effect on it. Therefore a system as a whole cannot be divided > into independent parts.

</comment><comment><USER7> I worked with Ackoff. Brilliant man. An extremely important video to watch: [https://vimeo.com/148192220](https://vimeo.com/148192220) 29 minutes is a tiny investment for the returns.

</comment><comment><USER8> I recommend watching the actual video. In fact, I wish that it had been shared instead of the article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is systems thinking the same epistemological BS that's heaped onto the industry like design patterns and all these acronyms I hear being thrown everywhere? Is there formal axiomatic basis for any of this stuff or is it just mumbo jumbo.

This is the definition of quality:

>The definition of quality has to do with meeting or exceeding the expectations of the customer or the consumer. Therefore, if their expectations are not met, it's a failure.

How is this a definition? It's a vague comparison. It tells me you don't really have clear definition in your own brain.

Take a look at the definition of system:

>A system is a whole that consists of parts each of which can affect its behavior or its properties. Each part of the system when it affects the system is dependent for its effect on some other part. In other words: The parts are interdependent.

Is this for real? What is a whole and what is a part? No rigor and it's all mumbo jumbo that's obvious. Yes a system can be made up of modules and yes things can be interdependent. How is this new and innovative? Thanks for telling me something everybody on the face of the earth already knows.

>The essential property of an automobile is that it can carry you from one place to another. No part of an automobile can do that.

Mind blown. Just kidding. If you take the wheel of the car and balance on top of it like a circus artist then walk the wheel will carry you from one place to another. Boom. Guess what a car is not a system because one of the "parts" works independently. I guess I just blew apart what this persons' definition of a system because a car is obviously a system but under the articles' flawed definition it is not.

>If we have a system of improvement that's directed at improving the parts taken separately you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved.

Have you heard of the term "bottleneck"? It's when one "component" of the "system" slows the overall system down.

>It's a wrong concept of quality. Quality ought to contain a notion of value, not merely efficiency. That's a difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Quality ought to be directed at effectiveness.

You know what? "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get." Clever right? Makes sense right? Two things most people miss when they read the quote above. First thing: it was said by someone who is mentally disabled. Second thing: The message is obvious. Life is spontaneous who doesn't know this? It's pointless wrapping this concept up in an analogy. Same with the "concept of quality" Quality ought to be directed at effectiveness? Who on the face of the earth isn't aware of this fact?

In conclusion, this is not a good way to think. If you want a good systematic way to analyze the world and "systems" the way to do it is to have a very clear notion about the difference between science, logic and intuition. Know the strength of each pillar and know the weaknesses.

The above article above is all just intuition with logical flaws due to lack of rigor or science to back up its points. Additionally, the main point is incredibly obvious.

<comment><USER10> There is a more formal description of systems thinking (see 'Thinking in Systems', Donella H. Meadows, for examples) that describe systems as components driving feedback loops and how they generate equilibrium or degenerate states, and where the best leverage is to alter the states of those systems. But I have a feeling it's yet another topic that's been diluted by consult-speak.

<comment><USER9> Yes signals and systems is a theoretical thing which is not what the person is describing here. ME and EE's learn it, but it's largely absent from CS.

Type theory or Category theory is probably closer to a formal description of the "intuition" behind the article.

<comment><USER11> Then there is this field called ... Cybernetics ... which is actually a field that studies systems! _gasp_

<comment><USER9> gasp! another word for control theory! gasp!

<comment><USER12> Pronounce it in Greek though and add it to your resume.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DHTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://dhtml5.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite webpage on the Citadel.

Seriously though, this is perfect. It's exactly what we need to dispel the idea that HTML5 is some magical new technology that is going to make every website on the internet instantly amazing.

<comment><USER3> What's so terrible about labeling a set of technologies? Is it also wrong to call smartphones smartphones because the underlying technology isn't magical new technology?

<comment><USER2> There's not a problem with labeling technologies. The problem is that those labels get hijacked by marketing and management types who see a well-done website and assume that it looks pretty because it's that magic HTML5 thing they read about last week, then they start advertising for HTML5 devs and touting their HTML5 products and blathering on about things they really have no idea about and just confuse the whole field and practice.

It's "DHTML" all over again.

<comment><USER4> And what prevent marketing and management type from advertising for "DHTML5"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In terms of stylistics, the initial page sure looks old-school, but I really do love that wormy dhtml5.com effect that follows the pointer.

<comment><USER6> My favourite bit is the <title> of the page scrolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The guy sitting next to me thought it was a virus.

<comment><USER8> Haha I thought it was a virus too at first!!

<comment><USER9> A virus? What do viruses look like? What made you think that?

<comment><USER10> Apparently they look like <http://dhtml5.com/>

_shrug_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hahahaha this is brilliant! I remember there used to be a popular central site for finding DHTML widgets back when that was a thing - anyone remember what it was called? (Sorry, I know that is vague, it's all I can remember. I think it was quite popular at the time, though.) I'd be curious to find out if it's still around and still as kitchy as it once was.

<comment><USER12> <http://dynamicdrive.com/> perhaps?

<comment><USER11> Yes! Thank you! I can't believe it's still in operation... crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Finally a memorable page with links to subsections of the spec.

Did anyone notice it eats less CPU than the official one? :-D

<comment><USER14> Are you comparing the official multipage version? Also, the official one has a lot of extra JS features like side-boxes, inline comments, commit messages, etc...

<comment><USER15> That kind of bloat should never be loaded by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There looks like a lot of content on there, but I'd go crazy before gleaning any of it with that pointer. Please make it stop! Was this a joke post, an example of poor design, or a serious link to some beefy content?

<comment><USER17> It's a joke page, just < <http://www.whatwg.org/html> > with ugly CSS/JS. The point's to make fun of marketing weasels trying to confuse HTML 5, CSS 3, JS 1.8.5 , and other related technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> (You need to enable JS to get the joke.)</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone put thought into the degradation of online communities? - <AUTHOR>

We've all seen this happen before. You discover this nice new website where there's interesting content and people (let's say slashdot). As more and more people join in, the quality of content/comments gradually starts to decline. Now there's people cracking the same tired jokes/memes over and over again. The people because of whom you signed up there in the first place lose interest and start to leave and that's the end of that. Another ex: Google+ just a few months ago was a place where everyone put an honest effort into making a comment that would be of some value to the reader. The amount of noise there too is quickly catching up to the signal.
I think if you've been on the internet long enough, you've probably seen at least one small online community grow rapidly and then blow up. Has anybody put any thought into how this may be avoided?
HN's is by far the best system[1] I have seen this far but I haven't been here long enough to know if things have changed significantly with time.
[1]write down super specific "guidelines" so everybody's clear as to exactly what is expected here. <comment><USER2> What you're desribing is the Eternal September[0].

There are strategies to mitigate the degridation of discourse, such as Hellbanning[1]. Are you asking if there is a way to prevent a small community from blowing up? Or are you asking if there is a way to prevent a small community from blowing up and being bogged down by crappy content?

I would say the best strategy would be to have good moderators, and be sure that you do your part to post quality content to the community. Be the change you want to see online. The more quality content, comments, etc. are on a site, the more it will be socially unacceptable to RickRoll[2].

Many sites implement a karma-type system to reward good content and punish bad conent (Reddit, HN, StackOverflow, etc).

However, two online communities come to mind that don't seem to have suffered in quality of content since their inception: 4Chan and C2Wiki[3]. I think this is due to their obscurity from the mainstream and also anarchist nature of their moderation system. On 4Chan, anyone can post, and there are so many posts, anything untasteful to the community is quickly buried in newer or more popular posts. On C2Wiki, anyone can edit, and edits that degrade the quality of the content are replaced just as painlessly with better content. Interestingly, both communities are anonymous.

How can you prevent people from cracking the same tired jokes again and again? Answer coming in 3... 2...[4]

I think first you must create an online community that caters to a specific niche, so users can already relate to one another because they share the same interests. Once people relate to one another, they want to share and converse[5].

Then, if the community grows in popularity, you must figure out how heavily you're going to moderate. Will you agressivley close off-topic posts and potentially turn away quality contributors (like programmers.stackexchange.com)? Or will you let everyone in, and create specific areas for new interests the community develops as it grows (like 4chan.org/sci)?

I see this a spectrum from razor-focused discussion to organic free-for-all. A mistake I belive one mistake that Slashdot made (and is still trying to rectify) is to straddle both ends of this spectrum. They have ended up alienating both the razor-focused users and the free-for-all users and all that is left is the snark.

So, I think, to prevent the degradation of online communities, you must chose which end of this spectrum your community is on, and moderate (or don't) accordingly.

[0]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September>

[1][http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban- or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or- hellban.html)

[2]Was going to be a YouTube link, but resisted the temptation to RickRoll HN because I might get downvoted.

[3]<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki>

[4]I'm really tired of this joke on HN, FYI

[5]<http://www.browncafe.com/forum/> (one of my favorite niche online communities)

<comment><USER3> Very good. I do a lot of thinking about this too. I wrote this snippet a few days ago:

I think the core tri-state here is

1 users

2 restrictions

3 structure

The users are the target demographic of the sites content. They can be tween girls or seasoned engineers or perhaps people in certain moods (e.g. pornography, games)

The restrictions are the limitations from being say "admin" or "god" on the site. Can someone delete other's content without any recourse, record or undo? Can they masquerade themselves as someone else? Just what are they permitted to get away with?

The structure is the purpose and intent of the usage of the site. Is there a forum for user contribution? Is there a place, say on think geek for user photos of products?

I think a model with retention and growth must somehow balance the users it's attracting, the restrictions they are given, and the structures of creation they can employ. Together these form a social product.

I don't think it's necessarily important to get these right at first blush as much as it is important to know what part you are lacking and what direction you need to turn to based on whats going on.

It has to be reactive (or perhaps, adaptive). When you get the formula unbalanced, it may look good for a while (large growth accompanied by a decrease in quality is the common one), but then it will collapse under it's own disarray.

Metafilter is a nice one. They simply charge $5 to sign up. That's it. Keep (2) open, never have a low barrier with (1) and have it be a, I'm not going to say social aggregator, but a collaborative blogging platform for (3).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you know the Myers-Briggs personality indicators? The relevant one here in my mind is Judgemental/Perceptive: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers- Briggs_Type_Indicator#Lif...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers- Briggs_Type_Indicator#Lifestyle:_judging.2Fperception_.28J.2FP.29)

Good online communities start with a lot of Perceptives, which are often interesting to listen to. At some point the Judgementals start appearing, and the discussion moves, to use a current example, from the structure and potential future implications of Stuxnet to whether Stuxnet is legal or America is hypocrite etc.

The problem is that the arrival of the Judgementals is a positive feedback loop. Judgemental comments breed judgemental counter comments (pro/con) and soon the Perceptives are drowned out in the noise, leaving the discussion and further increasing the share of Judgemental comments.

BTW I think the same happens everywhere where you cannot measure the actual worth of someone's contribution. Politics take over and intelligent people leave.

<comment><USER5> "The world is made out of two kinds of people..."

Some discussion formats encourage this (Amazon Forums, LinkedIn) and other publishers encourage the battle of the judgementals... The New York Times invented a new section of commentary designed specifically to encourage knock- down drag-out discussions that go nowhere. It's good for the numbers.

Other phenomena contribute to heat death too. Forums on LinkedIn tend to be awful, particularly in the A.I. area. That's because anybody who knows anything has this neural net they're tending that works some miracle, and everything about it is a trade secret. The people who do talk want to rehash, over and over, unproductive questions like "What is intelligence?" ahd "Why has A.I. failed?" while the rest of us are quietly building systems that can do some of the things you do better than you can do it.

<comment><USER4> Yep, it's always hard to find the place where the builders converge as opposed to those who have opinions. That's what HN used to be, once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stack Exchange

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky used to run a podcast where they described exactly the techniques they had discovered.

\- Communities are segmented according to specialty so as to concentrate expert-level talent. Compare the kinds of questions listed on an SE site to what's asked on any other Q&A site out there. The math questions are asked by actual mathematicians, the photography questions are asked by actual photographers, etc. (You'll also notice that---beyond the gaming site---most of the silos are dedicated to a profession.)

\- Many of the professional sites are dedicated exclusively to _people in that profession_. The Theoretical Computer Science silo explicitly requires PhD- level material. The Quantitative Finance site opens the FAQ with "if you aren't earning a living at this, it's probably off topic".

\- Most SE sites explicitly prohibit subjective questions. Something like, "What's better, Ruby or Python?" will be closed immediately.

\- Any post can be edited by another user, just as with Wikipedia. So grammar and spelling tend to be pretty decent.

\- Moderators are given broad powers to close questions, delete posts, suspend users, and even delete accounts.

\- There is a separate Meta site for questions about the site. That segregates questions about the silo's topic from questions about the silo.

Reddit has some siloing as well, but they don't prohibit memes, which is why the content looks the way it does. They also don't have user editing or strong moderation. It shows.

<comment><USER7> _Reddit has some siloing as well, but they don't prohibit memes, which is why the content looks the way it does._

Reddit hardly prohibits anything. Individual subreddits do filter a lot of content, including memes.

This doesn't really fix everything, though. Problems still arise, and things still get out of hand from time to time. There was some community drama on the front page today...

And it goes the other direction, too. One of the most strictly moderated subreddits, AskScience[1], is about as dry as it gets. I don't know if I'd call that group a "community".

1: <http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Clay Shirky has studied this extensively and is probably the best resource. "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" [0] is perhaps the best single piece on what you're thinking about.

He offers several design guidelines toward the end of the piece, which I suspect informed the design of HN (and the posting guidelines therein).

Another technique he mentions is that of MetaFilter, which disables their new user page when they feel the effects of scale.

[0] - <http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know how to _solve_ the problem, but I have thought about it; some thoughts:

The computing industry seems to keep repeating cycles with local and remote processing - thin terminals and mainframes, then the desktop PC, now "The Cloud" is mainframes 2.0, then mobile apps are starting to bring native code back to the user again (although many are tied into the cloud) - similarly, online communities keep alternating between distributed (BBSes + IRC), centralised (myspace, AOL), distributed (forums + IRC again), centralised (facebook + twitter). As such, the churn of users from one system to another is pretty much constant. (There are many reasons for users to move from one system to another, but this is the one that I've seen as an inevitable constant since the internet began, and other reasons are different each time).

How does users moving around relate to quality of community though? Perhaps I'm being subjective and biased, but it seems to me that the highest signal to noise ratio happens at the front of the wave, the masses with the pop culture are the middle, and the ocean of spam trails behind. As such, if we assume that users will move from one system to another no matter what, the degredation of community at a given location is inevitable.

Taking slashdot as an example - the technical side of it, while not perfect, was fairly good and did a fine job back when a handful of technically-inclined people used it; but when it became overwhelmed with average people, there's nothing the system could do to stop it (I don't think HN is immune to this either, it just happens to be at the front of the wave right now). Also in the case of slashdot, the editors started treating the average people as their target audience, which accelerated the decline...

Also, thanks to things like Ubuntu, slashdot's niche of "linux users" stopped being a niche, thus opening the floodgates - I find that communities are generally better when you need to put effort into finding them, rather than them being the default that the lazy people go to for a popular subject (note that this isn't quite hipster sentiment - that would be to say the subject _itself_ becomes worse when it gets popular).

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes. I flirted with the idea of an online community with a half life. For example, every 6 months the URL would completely change and only the top 1% of members would be notified of the new location. It would be in their hands to repopulate the community.

I haven't figured out how to determine the top 1% but this was more a pipe dream a than serious potential project. Anyone is free to take the idea and run with it.

<comment><USER11> I think this is a fun idea. People who run sites like reddit or HN or fark are attempting to make themselves middlemen to advance various of their interests. As a user I don't lose very much by finding one cool link on reddit and another on HN. To me it is just another url. But if a prolific respected user of HN migrates fo a new place, that probably causes the proprietor of HN more pain than the users of HN. Because unless you are for some reason confining yourself to the ghetto that is HN, you most likely are looking in a few different places for your enlightenment. A community with a fuse, as it were, would be quite healthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The NewsWelcome page is excellent.

(<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>)

Meatball Wiki has many people talking about creating and controlling online communities. It's focused on wikis, but is applicable to other types of communities.

(<http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/>)

The Japanese origin of anonymous posting (leading into the chan culture) is interesting and is very different to the western use (where "anonymous == arsehole".)

(<http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php>)

> _Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user > name?_

> _A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. > There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel > 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. > Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each > other._

> _If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a > criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though > your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be > upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long > time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree > with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," > if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an > accurate argument will work._

</comment><comment><USER13> Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" from 2003 is a bit of a classic.

<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> I think a community's approach to moderation can also accelerate its degradation.

Consider a site where rules are overly broad, moderators are chosen by their ability to assert rules blindly and are actively dissuaded from using their own judgement, and meta discussion is not allowed (i.e. about the site and its rules). Furthermore, people who disagree with each other often enough are silently (shadow) blocked from each other.

We've read a lot of stories here about the importance of seeing things you disagree with and not creating an echo chamber for yourself; consider why a community would actually impose that on users.

These are symptoms of a community, IMO, chasing the lowest common denominator: sanitize the site as much as possible to sell ads, because disagreement debate drive eyeballs away. A good CPM can certainly be established in a place where everything is awesome and people are never wrong. Dictatorships-with-secret- police generate ad revenue, but not any real discussion.

</comment><comment><USER11> I find many of the posts on this thread to be interesting, but I personally do not think that this entropic process is a problem. I like decay and I am attached to the plasticity of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER15> Xianhang Zhang has written a lot about social experience design (what you're talking about he touched on a little in the post about the Evaporative Cooling Effect): [http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's tough.

The site I feel worst about is Tvtropes. A few years ago they had the great idea of basing a universal theory of culture derived from Japanese animation. Brilliant!

Then they get in trouble with AdSense because of drivel about sexual fetishes in tv and comics written by virgins, and it's just overrun by so many people that are completely incoherent that anybody who knows anything about writing or directing or acting just can't stand it.

Wikipedia avoids this fate by being aggressive about deleting stuff. Wikipedia is one of the least friendly web communities out there. But, it really has managed to go mainstream without falling apart.

</comment><comment><USER16> pg has written at length on the dilution of online communities: <http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

Seems obvious, but surely there are some who haven't come across it yet.

</comment><comment><USER17> I just want to chime in and say that I've been thinking about and researching solutions to this for years. Only recently have I been pushed towards creating a real product that does solve this problem (due to enough people liking the idea at a Lean Startup Machine competition for us to win). The idea is relatively simple...we prioritize content by segregating people into dynamic communities consisting of users who are highly similar behaviorally. The goal is to create a million little hacker newses behind the scenes.

Practical implementation is more of a nightmare, but at this point we're in limited beta and you can sign up to receive an invite at <http://foldr.co> (just go to launch in the upper right and put in your email for the invite).

This project is my personal crusade, primarily because I have watched so many great communities die. I can't say for sure whether or not the solution will ultimately work, but it won't do any good if nobody tries.

</comment><comment><USER18> Paul Graham thought about this as HN grew. <http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

Also, the phenomenon where the people who are most invested in a community are the first to bail when it changes is often called "evaporative cooling".

</comment><comment><USER19> I run one of the largest current internet forums, there are multiple problems (which I could talk about for hours) but ultimately the only solution is exclusivity. People are affected by their surroundings; as soon as you make a site public it will start to change.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been working on a Reddit / HN like site that uses a different ranking system meant to avoid this problem, see this if you're interested:

<http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/dilution>

<comment><USER21> It looks interesting, but why is a sequence of users that vouch for the final user detrimental? User(1) would vouch for user(2), which should make user(2) more trustworthy, and therefor have greater voting power. Wouldn't this phenomenon simply stack as user(3) becomes more trustworthy because of the trustworthiness of user2? So that the final user, user(n) would be more trustworthy then a similar user who only had a sequence of two users, with the final one vouching for him? Besides that, however, it looks like a good idea, and i personally am interested in the final product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Spolsky has an old article on how the UI of the software used affects the community: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's because of Dunbar's number <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number>

Communities are meant to be 150 people or less, where everyone knows everyone else.

<comment><USER24> I think the potential relationship between Dunbar's number and online communities is interesting - I had never thought about it that way before. But certainly online communities don't break down after a few hundred people. Why must everyone know everyone else for a community to remain high quality? Or closer to the original question, why do you think communities degrade after everyone doesn't know everyone else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The only way to avoid it is to have an invite-only site where new invites are interviewed and voted on by a committee/small group of members.

The problem is that as a site gets bigger, more and more people join that have views that are opposed to the original intentions of the site (and owners) and the site degrades over time.

The other problem is that you don't know the age of the person posting. Reddit is now filled with high school/younger kids posting.

It parallels a true democracy. If we had a true democracy, eventually the extremes would rule.

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing I've seen done that it interesting is a virtual basement. My favorite online forum is advrider.com. It a vbulletin for adventure motorcycle enthusiasts with over 200k users, 500k threads, and 17m posts. It works surprisingly well because it has a "basement" where anything goes. The understanding is upstairs is for constructive conversation, and the basement, especially "Jo mamma" is for time wasting, vitriolic, political/religious/Etc, posts. If you start a pointless thread, it gets banished to jo mamma.

</comment><comment><USER27> I know of a few online communities that have blown up and survived. The key was a set of sardonic admins and a site owner that paid for the hosting himself.

I think that an ad supported online community is incongruous with a quality online community.

</comment><comment><USER28> This happens everywhere and all the time. As the community gets more popular and attention, more and more people will sign up and pollute everything. From what I've seen, most of the time, redditors are blamed for that here on HN :P

</comment><comment><USER29> Tragedy of the Commons. What we really need is more incentive for people to maintain the quality of discussion, like if they were economically invested in the site.

<comment><USER12> See, for example, griefers on Medal of Warfare on Xbox Live.

They've paid for the game, and they're paying for the xbox live account, and there is reputation and reporting.

That does nothing to stop people like "General Minus" from trolling the heck out of other players.

Dedicated trolls / griefers will have many alternate accounts. Team AVO (Minecraft griefers) apparently had several _thousand_ alt accounts. Or trolls will use other means. Grawp (wikipedia troll) posts disguised links that perform a wikipedia action. Lots of people click the links.

The other problem is that customers feel entitled. SuicideGirls, a NSFW site with a set of forums, had severe problems with awful posts. They implemented "spring cleaning" to sort it out, many customers expressed unhappiness, a few people were banned and a new board was introduced and low quality posting was tolerated in the other boards. A lot of drama for a tiny increase in quality on most boards.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Comroads – Mapping what's happening on the roads through video - <AUTHOR> http://comroads.com <comment><AUTHOR> Comroads is a geolocation based video platform that maps the entire roads, wordwide, with footage take from various sources. These videos also contain so much information that's just waiting to be used. Well, comroads makes all this information readily available. Want to know if a certain intersection is dangerous and has a lot of red light runners? Simply filter out the red light runners and immediately identify probelamtic areas. Want to know what's happening in your neighborhood?

You can scroll the map on the right and navigate to different videos, and view them straight from there. The thumbnails on the left display videos that appear in the current map view.

We're still in BETA hardening the site and adding features / fixing bugs, but I'd really appreciate any input/feedback we could get from the community. More than happy to answer any questions as well :)</comment>


Apple Suddenly Catches TikTok Secretly Spying on Millions of iPhone Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/06/26/warning-apple-suddenly-catches-tiktok-secretly-spying-on-millions-of-iphone-users/#61a487d034ef <comment><USER2> And this is why I have not enabled Handoff ([https://support.apple.com/en- in/guide/mac-help/mchl732d3c0a/...](https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac- help/mchl732d3c0a/mac)) through Continuity. They are designed to leech of more of our personal data from macos, through ios. (It's harder for Apple and others to leech our personal data from macOS if you use an application firewall.)</comment>


Police Using Paintballs to Tag Iranian Protestors  - <AUTHOR> http://keepingthechange.blogspot.com/2009/07/paint-ball-police-targeting-irans.html

<comment><USER2> _According to this person, the security forces use these paint balls to single out protestors, who they believe should be arrested. Sharp shooters are positioned in nearby locations (where they cannot be seen by the demonstrators) and launch paint balls at selected targets,_

If anyone else has played Paintball here, sharp-shooting to that sort of needed level of accuracy is pretty much impossible. Just looking at that picture makes me laugh at how a sharp-shooter would "snipe" a select person in that crowd. It's possible to jack up the FPS on a gun to shoot hot (and shoot further), but even then it's not really possible to guarantee a hit, given how a paintball is aerodynamically pitiful compared to an actual bullet.

Anyone else who has played paintball here can confirm that paint can easily fly several feet off its intended trajectory in as short as 40 yards. In a crowd, just 6 inches would be enough to mark the wrong person.

So if they're trying to target a unique person in a crowd who is supposedly going to be arrested? Highly unlikely. I could definitely seem them shooting hot to disperse crowds though, paintballs sting quite nicely without a good layer of clothing.

<comment><USER3> It's probably almost as effective to hit random people and make them think that they're are being singled out as a ringleader. Bad things happen to political detainees in Iranian jails ([http://thesop.org/journalism/2008/02/05/cries-within- iranian...](http://thesop.org/journalism/2008/02/05/cries-within-iranian- prison-still-haunt-canadian-filmmaker)) It would certainly scare the crap out of me to be tagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My boss used to live in communist poland, and this was a very common tactic. Instead of shooting paintballs, they squirted people with liquid that would only show up under a black light. Police would later hold checkpoints with black lights to scan potential protesters.

</comment><comment><USER5> So protesters should all smear themselves with a similar paintball colored ink. If everyone has the ink on them, police would need a new way to separate the fakes.

<comment><USER6> The very act of doing that would make them a protester who is more subversive than average, and worthy of taking. And with such an inaccurate weapon, they aren't actually looking for specific targets; they're trying to intimidate.

Getting random people even benefits the leaders. If the population knows that bad things happen to political prisoners, and that the mildest of protesters are being marked as leaders, then some will lose their nerve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not a good UI for tagging.</comment>


The Seven Dangerous Western Values (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Number_Nine <comment><USER2> I went through a Wikipedia rabbit hole of articles on the political history of China, and was reading about Deng Xiaoping's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_charact...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_characteristics)

Then I found this line:

> _"According to writer and researcher Yasheng Huang and many others, the > economic theory in China is not socialism with Chinese characteristics, but > the opposite—capitalism with Chinese characteristics."_

This is an interesting point because it's hard to imagine China would be in their present economic position without embracing "capitalist tendencies" in conducting trade domestically and internationally. Capitalism and privatization seem counterintuitive to Communist socioeconomic principles, yet have yeilded "good economic times" for many millions of Chinese since the late-1980s.

The successive point is how committed is China to the ideals of Socialism? Will the left hand do one thing while the right hand does another, so to speak? Could socialism and capitalism work together symbiotically? Will socialism and capitalism bring out the problems with each other? Will a new "Chinese system" emerge? I don't know the answers, but it's an intriguing thought process with far reaching ramifications in a country as large as China.

<comment><USER3> In Europe, the capitalism is working symbiotically together with socialized healthcare and education. In other areas like agriculture it's hard to discern whether it's more "socialistic" or "capitalist" due to heavy subsidies and other policies.

Even the "real socialism" as implemented in USSR and whole Eastern Bloc is considered to be actually state capitalism by some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is not accurate. It's better to be called seven ideological threats. Number 6 and 7 are not "western values". Especially number 7 is targeted on far-left. What the CCP really wants is keeping the market economy while maintaining its authoritarian rulings, i.e. money and power.

</comment><comment><USER5> Xi Jinping's political philosophy is a rather inconsistent mix of ideas from Confucianism, liberalism, and Marxism. It is hard to see how it could work in the long term.

<comment><USER6> What's wrong with creating a new political philosophy? Plenty of old named ones have proven themselves not to work - Confucianism impedes technological growth, Marxism is Marxism, and liberalism doesn't have a long history of steady state to prove itself. Authoritarianism does seem to last, as long as the chain of leaders keep on maintaining it unbroken. Considering China's leaders are selected competitively, not by hereditary, it might have a better chance than old kingdoms.</comment></comment>


Raptor: a radically new Ruby web server - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyraptor.org/ <comment><USER2> At this stage, irrespective of how well intentioned the project is, this is vapor ware. Please don't treat software releases like some Justin Beiber concert with hype and and a countdown.

Is there a solid explanation about what exactly is different and how it's better?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet as far as I can find. I saw Laurent Sansonetti (of RubyMotion fame) tweet about it, but whether he's had a play or not I don't know. Fabio Akita's apparently run some benchmarks against the beta ( [http://www.akitaonrails.com/2014/10/19/the-new-kid-on-the- bl...](http://www.akitaonrails.com/2014/10/19/the-new-kid-on-the-block-for- ruby-servers-raptor) ) but seems almost too excited so maybe take that recommendation with a pinch of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looking at the single review they link to on the site[1], it looks like the major speedup is due to internal response caching, high concurrency comes from non-thread-bound connection pooling, and there are a few other niceties relating to Nginx integration.

[1] [http://www.akitaonrails.com/2014/10/19/the-new-kid-on-the- bl...](http://www.akitaonrails.com/2014/10/19/the-new-kid-on-the-block-for- ruby-servers-raptor)

</comment><comment><USER3> At the moment (for the next 36 days?) we can't evaluate it on anything but the name and a bar chart.

Sweet bar chart.

<comment><USER4> That gradient, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a relevant Twitter conversation on Raptor from last night:

[https://twitter.com/brixen/status/523988304627499008](https://twitter.com/brixen/status/523988304627499008)

Interesting tidbit is that the DNS may show that Raptor is being developed by Phusion.

<comment><USER6> Passenger is conspicuously absent from the comparison graph as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hah, I was about to give everybody crap for being ultra-negative when they have a link to their github repo...but that "fork me on github" takes you to some other page asking for an email address or something. That is pretty bad. That bar chart looks great though. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Are these related? [https://github.com/garybernhardt/raptor](https://github.com/garybernhardt/raptor)

<comment><USER3> In that the new Raptor team has 36 days to convince Gary Bernhardt to yank his 'raptor' gem, yes.

<comment><USER9> Clearly they will call their gem rubyraptor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone else find it strange that there was no benchmark comparison with Rails?

<comment><USER11> No, Rails isn't a web server, its a web framework.

All these are servers that you'd use to run apps built on Rails or other frameworks, not alternatives to Rails.

Of course, Torquebox is a lot more than a web server, so it may be odd that it is included in the comparison. Once we know more about "Raptor", we can discuss the appropriateness of the comparison more intelligently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This site communicates absolutely nothing.</comment>


LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom - <AUTHOR> https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ <comment><USER2> Soo, from looking through everything in their repos, this looks like just a rebranded custom build of Firefox.. without any actual changes to the source. They grab a tarball of the FF source from mozilla.org and then build it with custom options and some minor patching to makefiles/etc.

You can see (I believe) everything that happens to build LibreWolf in their Arch repo: [https://gitlab.com/librewolf- community/browser/arch/-/blob/m...](https://gitlab.com/librewolf- community/browser/arch/-/blob/master/librewolf/PKGBUILD)

Not exactly what I'd call a fork

</comment><comment><USER3> If Firefox didn't phone home for crashes and useful telemetry it would have died along time ago.

</comment><comment><USER4> Besides branding, are these the changes? [https://gitlab.com/librewolf- community/settings](https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/settings)

Can't tell if that's all of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is security never first...

<comment><USER6> Feel free to lead a fork with your priorities at any time.</comment></comment>