GitHub donates private repositories to women learning open source software - <AUTHOR> http://adainitiative.org/2013/04/github-donates-private-repositories-to-women-learning-open-source-software/ <comment><USER2> You know this makes me sick. Time and time again, articles pop up here on HN talking about some organization trying to promote and encourage women in technology and the comments explode with privileged boys whining about about how "it's not fair"

You know what's not fair? A Teacher telling a 12 year old girl that she needs a backup plan because girls getting an engineering degree, well, that's hard. Getting one from MIT, girls just don't do that. With the very next breath telling the boy standing next to the girl that she (the teacher) knows he can get into MIT if he works hard.

I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of my little girl coming home crying because some idiot crushed her dream of an engineering degree from MIT because girls don't do that. I'm sick of the privileged idiots here, complaining that women are getting some kind of advantage because they get a free github account. I'm sick of cluelessness.

The barriers for women in the workplace are difficult enough, it's worse in tech. The sooner we accept that, and accept that some organizations really are try to make a difference, the better off we'll be. How many times have we read stories about women who are alienated by their peers because their interests align with something that isn't "girlie." Please!

I've fought hard to teach my girls that society's barriers are there to be knocked down, that they shouldn't get discouraged and that they can do what ever they want. 18 years later, I'm proud that my oldest has ignored the criticism, the "you can't do that, it's a man's job" BS and is on her way to the Coast Guard where she will train as a rescue swimmer (there's only 7 women rescue swimmers now). I'm proud that my youngest stood up to that teacher and told her: well, perhaps MIT isn't the place for her. After all, MIT engineers ask UIUC engineers for help of the real difficult problems, though MIT will make a fine backup plan.

My point is, boys, get over it. I'm sorry you didn't get something for free. Oh wait, you did. You got to be male, a much bigger advantage than a free private github repository.

 __Edit: Spelling/grammer

<comment><USER3> That last paragraph is exactly the reason i hate this sexist talks, it doesn't matter if its the boys or girls that are complaining..

I don't know if that's the case in the place you are living right now but, if you think that being a boy or a girl its an advantage then you are part of that problem..

Boys will always be boys, ignore them and move on.

<comment><USER4> If you can't recognize that men have a vast amount of privilege compared to women, then I don't really know what to say.

Last year a man named Geordie Tait posted an article called "To My Someday Daughter"[1]. It's quite long, but definitely worth reading. The context is gaming, but the central thesis is sexism. One quote from the article that really opened my eyes to how radically different men and women view the world comes from section 7 of the article. It's a quote by Gavin de Becker, and it says

"Men and women live in different worlds. At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them."

And according to my girlfriend, this is not even the slightest bit exaggerated.

[1]: [http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22786_To_My_Someday_...](http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22786_To_My_Someday_Daughter.html)

<comment><USER5> > _If you can't recognize that men have a vast amount of privilege compared to > women, then I don't really know what to say._

The locally-defined concept of "male privilege" is quite possibly the least productive gender generalization to use in a conversation about gender equality.

This -- along with redefinitions of vocabulary to justify offense (see the comment about 'female' being offensive), and truisms that assert that any opposition to preferred policy is opposition to gender equality (see the reference to Lewis's law, or your own murder quote), are why these conversations are so pointlessly and ridiculously laden in rhetorical nonsense as to be useless.

> _"Men and women live in different worlds. At core, men are afraid women will > laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." And > according to my girlfriend, this is not even the slightest bit exaggerated._

According to my wife, this is ridiculous and your girlfriend should adopt a more fact-based view of the world.

I looked it up. From 2000 to 2010, there were 128,971 _male_ victims of murder in the US. There were 35,777 _female_ victims.

<http://projects.wsj.com/murderdata>

To use your own rhetorical approach: if you disagree with me, "then I don't really know what to say". (sarcasm intended).

<comment><USER2> > The locally-defined concept of "male privilege" is quite possibly the least > productive gender generalization to use in a conversation about gender > equality.

Well, let's clear it up then: "Male privilege refers to the social theory that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women."

It's actually a fairly useful generalization, and most understand what's implied by the use of the term. Of course the real problem isn't the use of rhetoric, it's the outright dismissal of the argument because rhetoric or faux outrage was used to make a point (or, as in my original comment, _real_ outrage).

I'm sorry to say, but we're past the time to be calm, cool, and collected. It's time to get angry, and it's time to put and end to gender inequality. Especially in tech, where we claim to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard.

<comment><USER5> > _Well, let's clear it up then: "Male privilege refers to the social theory > that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights > that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are > usually denied to women."_

The useful part is "... which are usually denied to women". The rest is just divisive stereotyping.

> _It's actually a fairly useful generalization, and most understand what's > implied by the use of the term._

Useful how, exactly? Other than stoking the flames of online discourse, and writing off viewpoints by using "privilege" as a rhetorical bat, I don't see much that can be usefully garnered by pulling the trigger on that particular weapon.

> _It's time to get angry, and it's time to put and end to gender inequality. > Especially in tech, where we claim to hold ourselves to a higher moral > standard._

As far as I can tell, you're getting angry at the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

You really think the tech industry is responsible for clueless mouth breathers telling your daughters that technology is 'boy stuff'?

I'd look at the educational system and the magazine rack at the supermarket. By the time someone gets to the technology industry, they've already been subjected to a lifetime of indoctrination and have missed out on critical educational opportunities. We're not paid to be educators or social crusaders; we're here to write software, design hardware, and ship products.

We _do_ need to have access to better candidates, and one way to do that is by broadening the pool to draw from, but divisive adults playing at identity politics won't help with that problem.

<comment><USER2> >Useful how, exactly?

As a two word phrase which everyone understands to mean the social theory that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women.

> As far as I can tell, you're getting angry at the wrong people, for the > wrong reasons.

>You really think the tech industry is responsible for clueless mouth breathers telling your daughters that technology is 'boy stuff'?

Directly no, but by saying it's not our job to deal with the problem, you're just as culpable. So long as there are people in this industry, or any other, who refuse to address gender issues because it's not our job, or there's nothing I can do about it, then those are the people I should be getting angry at. By refusing to acknowledge the problem and addressing it directly, we allow the problem to continue.

As an industry that embrases diversity (gender; racial; social) but suffers from a lack of it, regardless of blame, it's on us to stand up to society and find solutions. We should be social crusaders. By being a members of the society in which the problem exists, it _is_ our responsibility to work to correct it.

My job is not "to write software, design hardware, and ship products," from the moment my daughters were born my job is educator, and social advocate. Shipping products: That's just what I do to pay the bills. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do for a living. I still get excited about new toys (we have new equipment showing up next week), cool projects, being involved in cutting-edge research, but at the end of the day, it's all meaningless. None of it compares to the glow in my daughters eyes two years ago when she opened the Mindtorms kit she got for christmas, or the excitement _she_ has when she pulls out the erector set with some grand new idea.

So, yeah, _my_ job is to educate and crusade.

<comment><USER5> > _As a two word phrase which everyone understands to mean the social theory > that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights > that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are > usually denied to women._

How do you think people react to hearing that what they perceive (often rightfully) as hard-earned success was, in your eyes, unearned?

It's not a productive line of discussion.

> _So, yeah, _my_ job is to educate and crusade._

Using divisive and emotional rhetoric just makes people stop listening.

I'd be interested in sponsoring, hosting, or otherwise contributing to _non- gendered_ youth programs that were _welcoming_ to girls _and_ boys.

I don't even know where to start, but I do know that the Ada Initiative's divisive identity politics and concern-trolling aren't something I agree with, and disagreement with their organization doesn't make me a "male privileged" moral bankrupt individual.

<comment><USER2> > How do you think people react to hearing that what they perceive (often > rightfully) as hard-earned success was, in your eyes, unearned?

Ahh, but that's the guts of male privilege isn't it. Their hard-earned success was much easier to come by than a women whose achieved the same level of success. That's what privilege means. It was easier for man to gain that success than their women counterpart. Perhaps not so rhetorical after all. It just stings. Sometimes the truth does that. And sometimes, the only way to break through the denial of an issue is to take a hard stance.

This _is_ an emotional issue. It's people's lives we're talking about. As young women, it's emotional for my daughters. As a father, it's emotional for me. As developers who want to "expand the talent pool", it's emotional for the industry. As people who wish to be blind to gender, it's emotional for society.

> I'd be interested in sponsoring, hosting, or otherwise contributing to non- > gendered youth programs

That's great. I'm involved in several myself, including the STEM outreach program at our schools. That doesn't mean that programs targeted at young girls aren't necessary. These "gendered" programs are as much about counter- acting the social pressure the keeps them out of STEM as they are about introducing and developing interest in STEM generally.

Now, I don't know anything about the Ada Initiative, so I'll leave that alone, but will say this, as I said before, ignoring the problem may not make you morally bankrupt, but it does make you complicit in others bankruptcy.

<comment><USER5> > _Ahh, but that's the guts of male privilege isn't it. Their hard-earned > success was much easier to come by than a women whose achieved the same > level of success. That's what privilege means. It was easier for man to gain > that success than their women counterpart. Perhaps not so rhetorical after > all. It just stings. Sometimes the truth does that. And sometimes, the only > way to break through the denial of an issue is to take a hard stance._

Do you want to be right, or do you want to be heard?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > This reluctance has good reasons behind it: fear of being told they are bad > programmers, fear of being publicly mocked or harassed, and even fear of > losing job opportunities. All of these are greater risks for women on > average than men.

[Citation needed]

Edit, to expand on the kneejerk reaction: I find it difficult to accept the premise that this is a female-only problem. I've been reluctant to post my code before as well, and I'm male. The sometimes ruthless mockery of code isn't confined to code written by females.

<comment><USER7> Females as a noun is used to refer to lower animals, I believe you mean women.

<comment><USER8> Source?

Right now that's just reading like a baseless claim and it sounds ridiculous to me that "females" is derogatory. I've never heard of such a claim before in my entire life.

<comment><USER9> There are two reasons why "female" is problematic:

1\. It refers to sex, not gender. I know many women who do not possess a vagina. 2\. It sounds very clinical and sterile. It's appropriate for, say, a scientific survey, but not for addressing other humans with the respect they deserve.

I don't refer to 'men' as 'males,' either.

<comment><USER5> > _There are two reasons why "female" is problematic: .._

Your reply demonstrates some standard rhetorical landmines used by fringe groups:

1) Redefine words within your subculture (in this case: 'gender', 'sex', 'male', and 'female') and then use the new definitions to claim externally inconsiderate use of those words.

2) Assume that whether or not someone was offended ultimately defines ethical norms (especially when tied to #1, redefining vocabulary to create reasons for offense).

<comment><USER9> I don't care whatsoever about 'offense.' I do care about causing actual harm to human beings. De-humanizing others causes actual harm, through things like wage gaps, (in this case) rape culture, lack of equal rights, etc.

1) There's no 'redefinition' going on here. Sex is a biological thing, a scientific term. If you say "male" and "female," I'd argue you're being a bit clinical, but if you say "man" and "female," you're obviously demonstrating something. It may not be conscious, but you are.

2) You're free to have whatever ethical norms you want, but just like 'free speech,' that doesn't mean you're free from criticism. You can call anyone whatever you like, doesn't mean that I (and others) won't think you're a shitty person, _especially_ after having an explicit conversation about it.

"Hey, this thing hurts me." / "I don't care, I can say whatever I want."

<comment><USER5> > _1) There's no 'redefinition' going on here._

"However, Money's meaning of the word [gender] did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[5][6] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[4] However, in most other contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has undergone a usage shift to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word."

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

That's just 'gender' and 'sex'. The first responder proceeded to redefine 'female' and 'male':

       "Females as a noun is used to refer to lower animals, I believe you mean women."

No reputable dictionary or colloquial usage defines 'female' as a noun to refer to " _lower animals_."

> _2) You're free to have whatever ethical norms you want, but just like 'free > speech,' that doesn't mean you're free from criticism. You can call anyone > whatever you like, doesn't mean that I (and others) won't think you're a > shitty person, _especially_ after having an explicit conversation about it._

Which one of us gets to tell the other how to behave on the basis of how we _feel_ about it? I find it offensive how you use rhetoric to label those you disagree with as 'shitty' people; it doesn't leave any room for discourse.

I'm reminded of the Stephen Fry quote:

 _"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."_

Indeed, being offended provides no insight into understanding _why_ you're offended, and without explaining _why_ , there's no basis to make a rational evaluation of whether the behavior that offends you is actually ethically wrong.

<comment><USER9> 1, I totally disagree 100% with the 'lower animals' statement, so you know. I think that's pretty ridiculous.

Let's put it this way: words change over time, and if the word changed in the 70s (that was before I was even alive), then it's changed, and the words we use _now_ matter _now_. Language is _never_ static.

2, You keep going back to that 'offense' bit, and referring to 'feelings.' I am not offended. That doesn't come into this at all, as I'm not a liberal. Please read my part about wage gaps, rape culture, and equal rights again.

> Indeed, being offended provides no insight into understanding why you're > offended, and without explaining why, there's no basis to make a rational > evaluation of whether the behavior that offends you is actually ethically > wrong.

As I said before and above, there has been endless explanation of material harm caused by the cultural situation that women (and other minority groups) face today. If you don't know why, at this point, you're just being willfully ignorant.

<comment><USER5> > _Let's put it this way: words change over time, and if the word changed in > the 70s (that was before I was even alive), then it's changed, and the words > we use _now_ matter _now_. Language is _never_ static._

I wholly agree. But the usage is not universal (by far), and the reworked definitions _are_ used to hit people over the head.

I call a trans person by their preferred gender because it's the polite thing to do, and I try to be a polite and respectful person. However, bringing it up in this context to hit someone over the head for their word choices is _not_ polite.

> _As I said before and above, there has been endless explanation of material > harm caused by the cultural situation that women (and other minority groups) > face today. If you don't know why, at this point, you're just being > willfully ignorant._

Which is why using logic-defying rhetorical anvils is just so counter- productively _trite_ and trivial. It leaves me wondering whether these forms of divisive identity politics are really about the equality they claim to be trying to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm actually pretty angry about this. A much better plan would have been to offer free private repositories to any not-for-profit entity. Offering exclusively to women seems, to me, discriminatory.

Edit: Reading the article more closely, I'm not as bothered as as I was. Technically, Github granted unlimited private repositories to the Ada organization, who (I suppose) delegates their use to its members. It's not as though you can go to github.com and say, "I'm a woman, give me free private repositories."

<comment><USER11> well since Ada is paying the sponsorship, I guess they can distribute them however they like, yes?

<comment><USER10> The way I see it, ADA is not paying -- Github is donating. This is, actually, much less incendiary than the headline would lead us to believe...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or you know, use BitBucket that offers free private repositories for everyone and anyone.

<comment><USER13> I think you're missing the point.

<comment><USER14> I think github's missing the point. To encourage a group to do open source we provide them with private repositories?

I get how this group may feel hesitant to post something in the open source world, but so was I, and I'm a guy.

Here's an analogy that maybe fits: Consider you meet someone that's afraid of flying. Do you say "come with me, I'll show you its safe" or do you say "here's a bunch of train and bus passes"

<comment><USER13> Writing code in an open source environment can be extremely intimidating. There is an unfortunate element of elitism around writing code and this can be very off putting for many people. Being able to code, learn, and get criticism in the privacy of a private repository is a big step toward open sourcing your code

<comment><USER15> I'm pro-elitism. It seems to me that only the most dedicated and obsessed have even a small chance of ever doing decent work, and I'm all for dissuading everyone else from adding to the mountain of poorly understood and unreliable garbage holding back our profession. I don't think anyone knows how to give (inflict?) that obsession to any child who didn't already have it, but luring the timid into a field at this stage so lacking in rigor is a waste of the useful talents they could offer to other fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> IANAW, but this almost seems sexist in and of itself. Is Github shielding the delicate female programmers from the merciless wrath of internet trolls? I guess the assumption is that big strong male programmers don't need this kind of coddling.

<comment><USER17> This reply is exactly why this initiative is needed. Can't you just say 'hey, more people contributing to open source!'

<comment><USER18> How is pushing code to a private repository 'contributing to open source'?

<comment><USER19> This makes it easier for people to clean up their code before letting the world see it. I wouldn't be surprised if it made some people more willing to contribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't believe the whining comments here so far. GitHub can contribute to any organization it wants to.

<comment><USER5> People are also free to criticize Github for any reason they want to.

Personally, I think the Ada Initiative is doing far more harm than good. They're pushing a strange brand of coddling and gender privilege.

<comment><USER17> It's fine you think that. I think that hundreds of girls don't really care about that initial help, will get some seriously good programming done, release some fantastic code and not read your comment at all except with a passing glance at someone who feels slighted for something that doesn't affect him at all.

<comment><USER5> > _... except with a passing glance at someone who feels slighted for > something that doesn't affect him at all._

If the Ada Initiative didn't affect the rest of the industry at all, then they wouldn't be considered effective at their mission.

Whether or not you agree with the way they approach their mission is another question.

<comment><USER17> Is this a zero sum game? Are there only 1000 jobs ever in the world and men are worried for their positions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The fact that they partnered with the destructive and notorious Ada Initiative is disappointing. They are little more than concern-trolls, and they are doing far more to hinder equality than promote it.

GitHub is full of great people and poor choices like this are incongruent.

PS: This isn't male privilege speaking - The Ada Initiative is disliked (for very good reason) by feminists of both genders.

<comment><USER22> Do substantiate.

<comment><USER21> They have a history of drama-generation and concern-trolling related to conference organizers and speakers over things that have absolutely nothing to do with womens' rights, equality, or discrimination, which are then dressed up as feminism and used to censor and attack others (who are not participating in discrimination or furthering discriminatory ideas) based on the personal sex- negative agendas of those running the Ada Initiative.

[http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/03/01/stigmatizin...](http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/03/01/stigmatizing- censoring-talk-of-sexuality-in-technology/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I fully support GitHub's right to do whatever they want, but I can't help but find this slightly distasteful. This is affirmative action, which I disagree with in principle.

</comment><comment><USER24> FWIW, it seems like this will not give you private repos under your own Github Account, but just a private repo under the Github "organization" for the Ada Initiative.

</comment><comment><USER25> Private repository for learning open source software. Makes perfect sense.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those crying sexism, go take a look at the amount of women in the business, now THAT's what sexism looks like.

<comment><USER26> Go take a look at the amount of men in the business of midwifing, it's even worse.

Is there anything that prevent a men to work in this field ? I know a guy who did, so I can tell you: Nothing.

If we lack of women in CS it's mostly because women themselves thinks it's not attractive, just like they don't see trucker, or construction worker as attractive jobs. For the same reason teaching, widwifing, etc lack of mens.

IHMO: It's the culture that drive the inbalance in a given field, and the inbalance that create some macho mens, not the other way.

<comment><USER27> GitHub is not a company involved in the business of midwifing. They are a company involved in the business of software development.

Is it not possible that the cultural imbalance in all of these fields is due to sexism?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I get five free private repos for being a university student (for as long as I'm a student) - I don't see why we can't just extend something like this to people who are learning how to program / use github, and not just women/students

<comment><USER9> They could, but they're not. Obviously they have a reason to do so, are you aware of what that is and why they might choose that reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm really starting to wonder if The Ada Initiative is making more enemies than progress. Are they trying to promote equality, or female privilege?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a paying github user, and I love github but I can't believe github allowed this. Firstly they are not helping open source if the code is private and secondly it should be for everyone. We hear a lot of people women nowadays complain about inequality and shit, if they are honest they should know this is utterly wrong and should do something to change it, else it's a bit hypocritical. no?

</comment><comment><USER31> All in all, I think (well, hope) this is a Good Thing. To the extent that (some?) women face different (or more severe) problems in getting started in programming and contributing to F/OSS projects, if this helps ease that process, then it's a win for the world.

Now, I can understand some of the reactions, from both men and women. On the one hand, I can see why guys might say "isn't this just a different form of sexism?" and I can see how even some women might be offended (the same kind of women who freak out if a man holds a door open for them, probably). But despite all that, this has a chance to get more people involved in, and contributing to, the F/OSS world. For that, I think we can accept a small measure of "reverse sexism", given the context, and I think the radfem types can like it or leave it, while their female peers are busy writing code.

Yeah, it would be nice to live in a world which is more or less totally gender-blind, but we're not there yet and this move may at least help level the playing field a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER32> To those saying, "Why is this necessary? This isn't fair!", Well, here's your answer: <http://xkcd.com/385/> (XKCD nailed it, as usual.)

<comment><USER33> And here's my answer: Are you a girl?

We are on the internet, I can't see you, I have no idea who you are.

<comment><USER32> Why does that matter?

EDIT: Oh, do you mean that women should hide the fact that they are women online when contributing to OSS? I imagine many do.

<comment><USER14> I think what dwild is after is that online identities don't always have a gender attached to them, whether it be intentional or not.

If the gender is not apparent, then there's no real way to discriminate is there?

This especially goes for HN. I have no idea who is man and who isn't, as most use some sort of username/alias instead of their real name.

<comment><USER32> If the gender is not apparent, then there is no way to discriminate. I'm not sure what this has to do with the main article though. Many people like to connect their online accounts to their real identity (and thus gender), especially their GitHub accounts. Some don't. Is the suggestion that if women don't want to be discriminated against, they should hide their identities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> IANAL, but this appears to be a breach of the Equality Act 2010. Are they offering this in the UK?

<comment><USER17> If you'd like to get your local Scouts group to work on code within the safe measures of private repos, I'm sure you'd also find sponsors. It's not a breach of Equality when you aren't stopping other people from doing something. I'm sure Github would love sponsorship from all over the place.

A benefit of this is clever on Ada and Github's part: a lot of women don't participate in code sharing because of reasons that are discussed here enough. So women will get to find each other and work on code together and hey, the world gets software, and Github makes some happy new customers. I, for one, am signing up even though I barely have the time - I'm eager to meet other women coders in a working environment and I'd like to find a small way to pay back the massive debt I have to the open source community.

<comment><USER35> There is often a disjoint set of expectations between F/LOSS culture and women (besides occasional outright misogyny). Providing a system where women can be eased into the coding experience is, IMO, a very kind thing to do.

I visited a church recently and some college students spoke about why they chose that church. Uniformly, the kindness of the church community was a common thread through their comments. It's a human thing: we lean towards people who show kindness to us, especially in forms we can relate to. These bridging activities such as what Github and the Ada Initiative are doing provide a great deal of value in my opinion.

<comment><USER36> What you say makes a lot of sense. In another comment on this, I mentioned that the leaders of the open source world seem to be famously aggressive, prickly, and concerned only with the truth, not with feelings or being polite [1].

Changing the culture to something "kind", if that is what the community truly wants, will take more than a few donated repos. It will be interesting to see the impact it happens.

[1] One of many examples <http://www.muktware.com/3703/linus-torvalds-nvidia- fuck-you>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How do female programmers differ from male programmers? I find this offensive. There are better ways to help promote programming among women. Equal salaries for starters could be a real equaliser.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I too am offended that an organization would dare donate anything to the Ada Initiative. Since we obviously live in a post-sexist egalitarian society, any sort of donation to one organization is clearly discriminatory against those not part of or benefitting from the organization!

</sarcasm>

I'm pretty damn sure GitHub can't affect the salaries of women that aren't direct employees of them. In what way does GitHub doing what it can do, which is donate to an organization like the Ada Initiative, cause offense?

<comment><USER38> Agreed with you about the donations. Tangentially, it would be cool if GitHub had more diversity in their software engineering staff - that is something they have control over.

<comment><USER17> A really good way to increase the diversity of your staff is to encourage education for minority groups.

<comment><USER38> Definitely. I'm excited they're doing this, and I think it is useful. :)

The comment about hiring was mostly an aside as something else I wish they were taking more active efforts with in addition to efforts like this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been answering emails along with other Ada Initiative folks all afternoon!! A lot of women all over the world are _very_ happy and excited to get to try things out on github. The Systers list was so helpful in distributing the link to a diverse worldwide group of women in the field and students just starting out. I think this will have a very positive result and bring many more women into fully contributing to F/LOSS.

Since so many times, people in open source projects wonder what they can do to help, and given the incredibly positive response I've seen so far today from women who've read the blog post and who say it is going to help them, I'm feeling hopeful -- and proud to be part of TAI's efforts to contribute.

I love supporting anyone's learning, especially in free/open tech and culture, and spend a lot of my time trying to do exactly that. Some of that time, I make sure to focus on supporting other women. Taking the time to support other women is often something that has to be a deliberate act, because it is all too easy to just pay more attention to men, who expect and to some degree demand it, so, I have tried for many years to make that an essential part of my life.

Cheers, HN.

<comment><USER40> REALLY? I'm a subscriber of a few lists for women in tech (Systers included), only one posted the link (followed by no comments). Systers tech talk posted nothing. Systers-dev and -foss, neither. Although, I'm probably subscribed to wrong groups... such as women working in tech (including learners), mostly programming. Not lists for people having problems with programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about LGBTQ, what about transgendered? Does this only apply to cis- females?

So if this is a demographic Github wants to see an increase in, does this mean they don't care enough about others?

<comment><USER42> An advocacy group for other minorities in tech probably just got a great idea of something they can lobby for themselves, and are very thankful to the Ada Initiative for the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> 1st class gender discrimination. In fact, this would be illegal in many European countries.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why not just create a github account under a nickname ?

<comment><USER39> We do, and I think the right & ability to work under pseudonymity is very important. But at some point having a career means that people want to hook their identities together. A bunch of the CS students coming into this only have an inkling of the crap they are about to face in the field. Hopefully more of us will stick around to find out all the awesome stuff and will believe in the philosophy and idealism of F/LOSS's potential to make the world better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why?

<comment><USER17> From the article: "In working with women in open source, the Ada Initiative found that many women are reluctant to post their code publicly when they are first getting started in open source software. This reluctance has good reasons behind it: fear of being told they are bad programmers, fear of being publicly mocked or harassed, and even fear of losing job opportunities. All of these are greater risks for women on average than men. But the best way to get better at programming is to collaborate with and get review from other programmers, which is far easier to do with a shared repository like those provided by GitHub. Unfortunately, private repositories are too expensive for most women just getting started in open source software."

<comment><USER36> _Unfortunately, private repositories are too expensive for most women just getting started in open source software._

If $7-12 / month (github's two lowest cost paid plans) is 'too expensive' for a person getting started in open source software, that person might want to rethink how interested and/or committed they actually are.

It's fine if Ada / github want to give female programmers a leg up to accomplish some social goal. But don't pretend it's due to some insurmountable financial cost.

<comment><USER17> I didn't write the article, but I agree with the premise. Women earn less, have children who come first. If you have small kids at home the best possible job is programming but you don't have a credit card or saving up for the winter power bill comes first.

<comment><USER36> Fair point. Although it would seem in that case like time or social connection are bigger barriers. I guess people and orgs will do what they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I can give private repos, too. Now put me on HN first page!</comment>


Pharo Smalltalk 2.0 Progress - <AUTHOR> http://astares.blogspot.fr/2012/07/pharo-20-progress.html

<comment><USER2> I blogged about Pharo 2 yesterday [http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/07/shoutout-and-thanks-to- ph...](http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/07/shoutout-and-thanks-to-pharo- smalltalk.html)

Pretty gutsy of the developers to be willing to toss old code and some backwards compatibility in order to have a modern Smalltalk.

Pharo is very cool, and well worth the time to experiment with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, Pharo Smalltalk seems to be leading the charge in a Smalltalk revival: lots of contributions, lots of active collaborators, constantly improving.

It is a great community to be part of.</comment>


Why use NancyFX? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jonathanchannon.com/2012/12/19/why-use-nancyfx/

<comment><USER2> If this seems interesting to you, I'd also highly recommend checking out ServiceStack (<http://servicestack.net/>). I've been using it for all my .NET API and web work lately and it's been awesome. It definitely helps that mythz is incredibly responsive to questions, no matter how mundane.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a .NET dev by day and do a lot of Ruby/Rails/Sinatra by night. I would seem a natural target audience for NancyFX since I've enjoyed exploring both ends of the Ruby web framework world.

But, I am resistant to invest much in NancyFX. I can't see where it fits in the enterprise world where most .NET devs live. With 4 choices already (WebForms, MVC, Web API, WCF) for developing sites/apps/services, I just don't have a good story for inserting Nancy into the mix.

My primary goal, in developing for enterprise, after meeting customer requirements, is to build things that are simple to maintain and can be picked up easily by any other .NET developer. I loathe custom/in-house frameworks for that reason and while NancyFX has a strong community as far as I can tell, there's no guarantee that community won't tire and move along.

I'll keep an eye on it, but for now, skipping over it.

<comment><USER4> Devil's advocate here: WCF was never a real choice.

<comment><USER5> Who even uses WCF? It's one of those MS technologies that even MS employees can't help but talk derisively about, like Sharepoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Our company recently switched to Nancy and we've never been happier. So much easier to get up and running than ASP.NET MVC or Web API. Very testable, especially with a built-in IOC container. The ability to easily test the full request/response cycle is huge because it uncovers HTTP and serialisation bugs, instead of just testing logic in the class library.

The various hosting options also means that we can easily host Nancy from inside a console app or Windows services. Now anything can have a REST API. Who needs WCF?

Bonus point: We followed Nancy's example of using rake on Windows and now we're _doubly_ happy. Rake and Albacore have revolutionised our Windows build process.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm using NancyFX for a decently sized project. We are using Razor as our view engine, it has nice IOC integration, the testing framework works better than I've found for anything with MVC. And for basic work all of the developers were able to pick it up rather quickly.

The bad: getting a consistent convention for setting up your response methods has been some work, as there are so many ways to make one. Routes are EXTREMELY extensible, so you end up trying to do things you probably shouldn't. Lots of dynamics (at least the way we use it), and the dynamic type has a lot of side effects.</comment>


Show HN: Get organisations to erase your personal data (automated GDPR requests) - <AUTHOR> https://opt-out.eu/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the creators of Opt Out. I'd love to get your honest feedback and answer any questions. I'd also appreciate ideas on how to promote it further. We created this service because we believe that privacy matters, and that exercising your right to privacy should be easy. I personally use it all the time.</comment>


Dell releases new tool to detect BIOS attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-releases-new-tool-to-detect-bios-attacks/ <comment><USER2> It is really frustrating that they do not ship checksums for immutable sections of the UEFI image, as this would require almost no effort on their part [1]. Of course enterprise out of the extreme HAP universe doesn't care because it won't invest the effort to image their chips.

[1] [https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool](https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool)</comment>


Ask HN: Is "Show HN" replaced with "Ask HN" and not popular any more? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> When submitters forget the 'Show HN' in the submission title it ends up in the 'Ask HN' category. Usually new users, example [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21450381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21450381)</comment>


Show HN: Twilio plays Pokemon - Play pokemon via SMS using twilio - <AUTHOR> http://pokemon.winrar.io

<comment><USER2> Its cool, but the bar to enter is a bit higher than twitch. Ill give it a shot though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! Good thing I have unlimited texts!</comment>


'Dumb Starbucks' coffee shop opens in Los Feliz - <AUTHOR> http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/02/08/42085/dumb-starbucks-coffee-shop-opens-in-los-feliz/

<comment><USER2> Who else hates the ignorance inherent in phrases like "the fair use law." They got it right in the very next sentence of their FAQ ("doctrine of fair use"). And then they made the same mistake again later with "the parody law" instead of "the concept of parody" or something similar.

If you're going to attempt to make an argument about the law, you'd best at least try not to sound like an idiot. It's like the people in software who confuse copyright, trademark, and patent: Your business is IP, have at least the most cursory understanding of the concepts damn it!

<comment><USER3> This company is obviously _trying_ to lose a lawsuit. Someone is trying to move the goalposts of "fair use". That Web page is not written by someone who believes what they're saying, and the ignorance is probably part of the plan.

Dumb Starbucks will get sued, and they'll hire a dumb lawyer, who will take the very dumb approach of fighting the case to the end, and then the company will get forcefully shut down for trademark violations.

And the smart company that's bankrolling this, whoever they are, will point to the precedent of Starbucks v. Dumb Starbucks the next time they want to silence some _actual_ fair use.

<comment><USER4> Woah, that is some epic speculation, and it actually seems plausible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ...so, Starbucks paid some guerrilla marketing company millions of dollars to stage an absurd publicity stunt.

Supporting Facts:

      1. All publicity is good publicity.
      2. All branding is identical, verbatim, (e.g. no
         use of small, medium, large; instead branded sizing
         parlance is used) forcing the customer to closely
         inspect the imitation for flaws. This forces a level of
         psychological engagement in the customer that would not
         occur in regular, legitimate establishments.
      3. Starbucks, for all it's popularity, rarely experiences
         negative press. Thus, their brand can easily tolerate
         examples of light trolling.
      4. Dubious "news" coverage offers vectors for market
         penetration into sectors that represent the Lowest
         Common Denominator, without cheapening Starbucks'
         brand. In other words, they can speak to an audience
         that they'd rather not be associated with, without
         having to directly engage them. They can inject their
         brand's presence into the daily lives of people who
         would not ordinarily pay attention to their usual modes
         of advertising.
      5. Without an entity to claim credit for this activity,
         this parody only serves to provide increased exposure
         to Starbucks. A well executed parody without an author
         will provide no alternate context to the premise of the
         joke. If there is any meaning or theme to the parody,
         the audience can barely guess at what it should be, if
         the intent of the performer cannot be discerned.

      6. Hypothesis: The "Dumb" shop will only stay open for as
         long as the minor local news publicity lasts. It's
         there only to make people use the word "Starbucks" as
         frequently as possible, in as many sound bites as
         possible, trigger some water cooler conversation for
         about a week (word of mouth buzz), and then die.

</comment><comment><USER6> Given the location of this particular business, in the middle a neighborhood densely populated by hip and wealthy show-business professionals, it's quite possible that the whoever is running it knows _exactly_ what they're doing legally.

Odds are quite heavy it's some sort of art project / prank.</comment>


Does AI make strong tech companies stronger? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/12/19/does-ai-make-strong-tech-companies-stronger/ <comment><USER2> So basically yes despite this author's claim it will decentralize. It will make market leaders in any field stronger / less threatened as they have the relevant proprietary data.

<comment><USER3> This is why I vehemently disagree with anyone that claims creating a startup is easier today than in the past.

Not only are the low hanging ideas saturated (ie website monitoring, brand monitoring, fitness apps), but the bigger ideas require a lot of data, and the big tech companies have the clear advantage.

<comment><USER4> I think creating a small/lifestyle startup is easier than ever since distribution/globalization is much easier but creating the next big thing is much more difficult.

<comment><USER5> That's the best phrasing I've read that reconciles these two beliefs (easier to build + saturation). Nicely and simply put.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Ben Evans is a lot more optimistic than I am about about how feasible to train good models from data. By the time you have considered all the caveats, the number of candidates for applying ML greatly decreases.

<comment><USER7> I don't disagree that the number of applications of ML/AI is not as universal as the hype would lead one to believe at present.

However, don't underestimate that AI/ML could be a secular growth over twenty+ years. From that perspective, marginal (but constant) growth could result from widespread adoption of these methods (with tweaks) to new markets.

A VC should necessarily take a relatively long perspective,so your two viewpoints are not necessarily irreconcilable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of good, accessible points here, but I think it's easy to overestimate the moat around [business] data. [Google] data includes pretty much every aspect of human activity, since they keep their platform in your pocket, in smart home devices, and somewhere in the path of so many online intents. Chinese surveillance and shared platform data is a similar asset - both are everything-adjacent for a massive population.

And that's the big guys. A couple of years ago, this article might have said that MasterCard and Visa have all the spending data... But then Paribus proved that a scrappy startup with a free service could get tens of millions of people to share all their online receipts in record time, and give Capital One a great way of catching up through acquisition. That's not an equivalent dataset, but it's good enough for a lot of applications.

I definitely think proprietary data exists, and that companies will benefit be exploiting it with ML. But they should be very careful about assuming their data will uniquely cover an industry, or even a wide swathe of applications, for long. And they might not have to simply leverage ML, but actually reorganize their business around what can remain unique about their data (like they do about every other asset).

And for VCs evaluating new data-oriented startups, I wonder if they will need new thinking about the time horizon on which investment pays off. Once an application for a new data asset proves valuable, it may turn out to be much more replicable than expected.

<comment><USER9> >>> but actually reorganize their business around what can remain unique about their data (like they do about every other asset).

this.

I am advocating the idea of a "programmable company" that is the end point of automation - where once you find product market fit the rest is automated - perhaps a better phrase is market / data fit

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not AI itself but data and hardware tech they don't share (freely or commercially).

<comment><USER11> That's what they're saying, just like sql, ML will be accessible to everyone and it's having the data to make use of it that will differentiates companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I enjoyed the article but I see two overlooked aspects that significantly weaken the author's argument:

1\. Statisticians are substitutes for data. You don't necessarily need new / more data if you have a statistician.

2\. Data often contains a lot of redundant information. Big data may simply be duplicative.

<comment><USER13> Could you elaborate more on the first point? I don't really get it

<comment><USER14> Humans can often learn new things from many fewer data points than current ML algorithms. Sometimes a single data point suffices.

Human statisticians can apply a variety of mathematical tools to fit different situations. ML systems tend to be more like one-trick ponies.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure I could agree with that statistician can "learning new things" with smaller data points. Statisticans might come and see the pattern with "better" prior than ML models, that allow them to come up with better conclusion. However, given the same dataset, there is a maximum to thee information that can be extracted from the dataset. Ideally, Any human(think of human brain as a pattern recognizer) or appropirate statistical method would come up with the same information from the datast, given no prior

<comment><USER12> Amazingly there is no upper limit on information that can be extracted. :-) Also, by applying increasingly sophisticated techniques, statisticians can extract increasing amounts of information from the same data. Don't have data? Just add a statistician.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, cus there is definitely an upper limit to how information can be encoded in data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It will be interesting to see if the strong tech companies are willing to sell their data via API or just safe guard it for their own use.</comment>


LA to use Open Source for transportation management - <AUTHOR> https://www.tfir.io/2019/08/29/city-led-open-mobility-foundation-uses-open-source-to-manage-transportation/ <comment><USER2> Good to hear, though I wish any sort of public money required public code nationwide.</comment>


South Korea's 16-Year Fight for a Green Onion Breakfast Cereal - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/06/30/world/asia/30reuters-southkorea-cereal.html <comment><USER2> I have nothing valuable to add, except for this gif which cracks me up to no end:

[https://ww.namu.la/s/831e5f6df658f2287a30f051ba958b39b6299fd...](https://ww.namu.la/s/831e5f6df658f2287a30f051ba958b39b6299fd92f027fa682bd2511dacedb7cec41048ff06756d5f72fd2a7a7f7d1c3d8596b03862ad979b6afe2df064079608b5638f886a0e0b553670b3a24b5dbd425d49d0fee483a983daffc852b352eccbbd7fd425c9dc610c59954cd4581eefb)

</comment><comment> Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 > Her verdict on the long-awaited cereal?

> "The green onion flavour is too mild."

The whole concept of a spicy cereal seems incomprehensible to me, but I _am_ curious now... I've never had anything close. Has anyone here tried this, and would you recommend it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Breakfasts are savory around the world. I think a cereal that is savory is viable but the problem is the combination with milk. Perhaps a different liquid (water? Vegetable broth?) would make such flavors viable?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to sort comments by date? - <AUTHOR> Is it possible to sort comments by date so you can easily find the most recent ones?<p>I can't be the only person who has had this issue. You click on a comment thread and read it all the way through, then come back to it a day later. There are 50 new comments, but they are scattered across several dozen threads, and trying to find the new ones is a huge pain. <comment><USER2> Well, this site provides some links to interesting websites and articles. However, this site is terrible in terms of usability. TERRIBLE! I won't come back until this has changed. Good bye.

</comment><comment><USER3> Within a single submission, no. Globally, yes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments>

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean within a single submission, of course. :)

The global comments kind of works but can be incredibly disorienting to read since it jumps from topic to topic.</comment></comment>


TECO-GAN Video Upscaling [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/MwCgvYtOLS0 <comment><AUTHOR> From one of my all-time favorite YouTube channels, Two Minute Papers. I highly recommend it to anyone who's into very well made summaries of academic literature on machine learning and simulation</comment>


Redefining the Architecture of Memory - New York Times - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/technology/11storage.html?em&ex=1189656000&en=b645d89ec5cae691&ei=5087%0A <comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=53326>

Again with the non-unique times urls. This should be killed if it gets noticed before it falls off the new page.</comment>


Outlawry, Supervillians, and Modern Law (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2010/12/09/outlawry-supervillians-and-modern-law/ <comment><USER2> _Second, declaring someone to be an outlaw would make it illegal to transact basically any business with them. ... In this sense, outlawry could be considered an absolute economic embargo targeted at a person or persons rather than a state or government._

Governments, and even political pressure groups, are re-inventing this aspect of outlawry when they freeze bank accounts and use more informal kinds of pressure to make 3rd parties punish people.

Partly they do this for the same reason as medieval courts: it's a work-around for the fact that people are hard to reach because they live overseas. But also note, these new methods can be used _without_ a court order. Which raises the suspicion that the real limitations being worked around are tedious matters like the presumption of innocence and due process of law.

<comment><USER3> >> ...tedious matters like the presumption of innocence and due process of law.

As the OP states, outlawry was generally used where people refused to submit to a court. They have chosen not to exercise their due process rights and we therefore presume them guilty (the other option being to presume them innocent and therefore encourage everyone to abscond). In the modern context, economic sanctions on individuals or organizations are used where the person is outside the court's jurisdiction but their assets are not.

<comment><USER2> AFAIK, you don't have to be outside a courts to have your accounts frozen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm,

Ianal but it seems like the controversial opinions of John Yoo [1] written[2] in justification of torture in support of the War on Terror seems like they are referencing the concept of Outlawry[3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis)

<comment><USER5> The strongest argument against torture is efficacy; torture is a shoddy tool with devastating personal and organizational consequences. You don't even need to examine the moral or legal framework, it just doesn't work. Arguing for torture in extreme cases is like arguing for withcraft or prayer in the same circumstances, plus the inhumanity of it.

<comment><USER6> >The strongest argument against torture is efficacy;

not even close. Efficacy is a very weak argument at best. A torture efficient enough for a given situation easily breaks that argument in that situation.

Discussing torture efficiency is basically a torturers' shop talk. That was a masterpiece act of political spin back then decade ago when the societal moral outrage toward torture was basically defused by converting it into a discussion on whether torture is efficient and whether the specific applied torture methods fit legal torture definition. And it basically continues that way since then (with your comment being pretty typical of that). Instead of asserting the morally right choice of non-acceptance of torture, the society has basically walked into the trap of waiting for invention of efficient torture methods.

<comment><USER5> _Discussing torture efficiency is basically a torturers ' shop talk._

In the same way that discussing the total lack of efficacy of magic makes you a sorcerer, sure.

<comment><USER6> There is no "same way" here. Sorcerers don't exist. Torturers do.

<comment><USER5> Sorcerers do exist, it's just that their methodology is based on faulty premises, and what they do doesn't work because magic isn't real.

Just like torturers, who do all kinds of things according to supposed art/science, but in reality it's just bullshit for show.

Edit: If you're claiming that it works, I'll still keep asking, "Prove it."

Cite those many, "Many times in history..."

<comment><USER6> > torturers, who do all kinds of things according to supposed art/science, but > in reality it's just bullshit for show.

sounds like you flat out dismiss all the human history with myriad of cases where torture (or even just a plausible threat of torture) did work. It may have worked not up to your taste of torture efficiency ... well ... that would be a torturers' shop talk and i'm not interested in it.

<comment><USER7> Yep. Those witches convincingly confessed when tortured.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can we pivot our startup? - <AUTHOR>

I have submitted a previous thread on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711585), basically describing our no-traction situation. Our idea mixes social with ecommerce, and we work with retailers to introduce social throughout the buying process. However, we're not seeing adoption because -- and we guess -- people just don't want to shop that way. But we don't know for sure, as we don't know if it's a "marketing" problem.
We are in public Beta, but it's been one month. We have an okay number of sign-ups but actual adoption and usage have been very poor. We have repositioned and reiterated the product multiple times and have not seen much improvement.
HN has always been my go-to source for inspiration and good ideas, so I was wondering if anyone has a pivot suggestion for us. We don't know if this idea has legs, but our experience so far has been discouraging. Any feedback/quick thoughts would be tremendously helpful. <comment><USER2> Some quick thoughts:

1\. I went to the demo page and even though I read the instructions, it still took me longer than it should have to notice the FB stuff. Without instructions and specifically looking for it, I would have never noticed it was there. I guess placement can vary by store design, but the demo would leave me with that worry.

2\. From the merchants perspective, I could see the benefits of having users talk about my products on Facebook, but I don't know if distracting a shopper when they are closer to making a decision is worth the trade off. In other words, is the expected value of the links worth the diminished likelihood of purchase? I can't see this increasing the possibility of a sale to the current user. I could be completely wrong and in that case, any data/statistics you could provide merchants would go a long way to convincing them to use Zuupy.

3\. To combine 1 & 2 and suggest a potential pivot: As a guy, I am highly unlikely to ever talk about or seek out advice for a general run of the mill purchase. I may seek out the help of, for example, a photographer friend if I'm going to buy a camera, but that may be the extent of it. Maybe I'm just more introverted than others, but going by my FB feed, I've haven't seen it happen much. Judging by the background graphic on you widget, you seem to agree that the target users are women. From my highly unscientific observations of my wife and her friends, they like to show off purchases they are proud of (say they discovered some new fashion and got it at a huge sale). So, what if instead of allowing users to chat with friends before making a purchase and possibly deterring it from occurring, users are presented with a big widget right after the purchase to share and discuss with their friends. You still get the free links plus a stronger social endorsement (this person has just made a purchase) and you don't ruin the conversion funnel. If I was a merchant, I could definitely see myself signing up for something like that (bonus points if it just plugged in to existing shopping carts).

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. That was actually the result of one of the changes we made. Quite a number of retailers have expressed concerns about how the widget was too "obvious." As per the placement in the demo, we are trying to mimic exactly how it would be shown in their own stores.

2\. Our hypothesis has always been that we optimize the sales funnel by giving buying confidence, reassurance, social proof, etc. But having tested it out with several retailers, we don't think that's very much the case. We thought that getting numbers to prove an inaccurate hypothesis would be difficult, thus we are looking for pivot ideas.

3\. I think that's a great idea, and I have seen many of my female friends parading their purchases to garner comments. We are afraid, however, that something like that might be too replicable. We aren't sure if retailers would be willing to pay $30/mth (our current price point) vs. pay a one-off however- many-hundred dollars to hire a consultant to build it.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point on #3. Just to toss out an idea- what if the service offered tracking of the referral and could provide some sort of analytics to help retailers optimize their social campaigns.

For example- I complete a purchase on Retailer A and I am presented with your widget and: maybe I get a rebate on my purchase, or a coupon for next time if I share on Facebook, or maybe the rebate goes into effect if a referral completes a transaction. You could use something like bit.ly to track the links. Ultimately, one of my friends sees this on his feed and goes to Retailer A and makes a purchase.

The retailer would be: 1. incentivizing the user to share and 2. be able to see some sort of stats analyzing which campaign is preforming better.

I think I would definitely be tempted to pay for something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disclosure: I am a director of one of Japan's largest luxury ecommerce sites, so I feel fairly qualified to give feedback about this :)

Firstly, ecommerce + social is a really attractive combination for us. In that respect, don't give up on the problem you're trying to solve - I think there is tons of value there.

Secondly, I will echo the comments of the poster "secret" - from the merchant's point of view the risk of distraction is not one that I take lightly. I'm very unlikely to pull the trigger on implementing something like this without a lot of data to back it up. You need to work on building case studies that I can see, with statistics that show an increase in some kind of metric I can get behind - facebook activity, sales, etc. Work with some ecommerce partners or even start selling stuff yourself as an experiment, then you'll really start to understand the pain-points that you can concretely help with.

Thirdly...

I don't think the current implementation adds enough obvious value. A stream of Facebook comments is very difficult to derive ROI from. If I were to pivot, and had to keep the overall theme of ecommerce + social + facebook, I would build a set of plugins with _specific use-cases_ that work with my store and facebook. For example:

1) a plugin that allows a user to create a "shopping list" on facebook from the products in my store. Make it fun, like a game - perhaps I set myself a budget on facebook and then my friends can vote up or down on the things in my wishlist that they think I should get.

2) a plugin that facilitates a "buy me this" feature. A user picks a product on my store and can send it to their boyfriend / girlfriend / mum / dad on facebook (maybe with a nicely formatted letter-style message) asking them to buy it for me. Maybe the purchase is incentivised somehow, with a discount if you get someone to buy it for you.

Make a set of these types of plugins, then I think you have a business. Give the most viral one away for free, and charge shop owners a monthly fee to use the whole set.

Boom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the elaborate reply.

We clearly have had feedback from retailers that they are concerned that our widget may be too "obtrusive" or "distracting" when they were test-driving it. We are keen on building up case studies, but I think some small pivoting in the product focus is needed or the marketing/sales process is going to be tough.

About your suggestions for pivot, I honestly like both ideas, this is what I set this thread up for. We have trouble focusing on creating experiences that shoppers would enjoy because, frankly, we are not online shoppers ourselves. Perhaps we will come up with one or two plug-ins, as suggested, and we will do some customer development from there.

Thank you for your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you talked to your users about this? Try it. Also, prospects other than your users.

<comment><USER3> I 2nd talking to your users about it.

sorry to plug my app, but I just added the free plan back to my survey app - use it for free to gather some feedback :)

<http://goodgecko.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing that complicates your situation is that your customers are not the users; your customers are the e-commerce sites you sell to-- the end-users are _their_ customers.

This makes "Have you talked to your users?" a bit more complicated.

My pivot suggestion: "e-commerce mixed with social" is a great niche, but I don't think your MVP has nailed it, yet. I'd move away from the emphasis on real-time, and think, rather, about "How can I leverage social networks to support the sales process?" Note that one of the tough nuts to crack is the chicken-egg problem; the more content that's produced by end-users, the more valuable the service is-- but you need to prime the pump somehow.

As I mentioned (via email), I'd love to talk to you in more detail about possible ways to do this in my particular sub-niche (online bookstores), but I imagine that a lot of the stuff can generalize.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Michael,

We are also starting to think that the "real-time" factor may not really appeal to both the retailer and the end-user. We are therefore still hunting for a specific use case or experience that we can focus our product on. We have been seriously considering game mechanics, for example.

I'm keen to learn about your sub-niche suggestions via email.</comment></comment>


A Journey Through Web 2.0 Hell - <AUTHOR> http://www.jaguarmarketingrevealed.com/2008/02/18/a-journey-through-web-20-hell/ My tale of New School Marketing and its amazing potential. If you haven't jumped face first into Web 2.0, you're robbing your own business. <comment><USER2> The only way to make money on get rich quick schemes is to sell them. Personally I wouldn't buy a web 2.0 SEO scheme system from someone who has no follows on their own internal links.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been in this business for a few years and pride myself in running a professional program that helps anyone learn how to properly market on the Internet.

No one is selling a "get rich quick scheme" nor a "web 2.0 SEO scheme system." Just trading money for what any business owner needs... knowledge.

Now about my "no-follows." Although I appreciate you attempt at analyzing my internal link structure, I got a handle on it. Any experienced SEO knows that this prevents PageRank leaks to unimportant pages.</comment>


YouTube to limit default video quality around the world for a month - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/youtube-to-limit-video-quality-around-the-world-for-a-month <comment><USER2> I'm still confused by all of this. Surely most video services are capable of adapting to lower bandwidth (and congested) links very easily. I personally have a fibre line directly to my house, and whilst the peering isn't great with my provider (Frontier), the network is more than capable of doing basically any video task. Why should the video bitrate be dropped because some second rate ISPs are oversubscribing super badly? Isn't all of this totally against the principles of net neutrality?

<comment><USER3> The unplanned for surge has been in videoconferencing (for work and for school), and while yes they adapt in theory to lower bandwidth, they're terribly affected particularly by the higher latency that tends to come with it.

The problem isn't that your videoconferencing goes from 1080p to 360p -- it's that it stutters and stops working for seconds at a time, so students completely miss content, and introduces a lag that makes it impossible to have conversations because people are always talking over each other.

While YouTube buffers ahead, so playback tends to be smooth regardless.

And clearly this has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is about ISP's throttling types of content. This is the content provider itself. And they're giving you the option to manually go back to hi-def.

So I hardly see what there is to complain about. YouTube is just trying to make sure kids are more likely to have usable online classes.

<comment><USER4> > _The problem isn 't that your videoconferencing goes from 1080p to 360p -- > it's that it stutters and stops working for seconds at a time, so students > completely miss content, and introduces a lag_

Bufferbloat.

Ideally, at least for TCP applications, with perfect network congestion control, reduced bandwidth due to streaming should only degrade data rate, but never massively increase the latency. A slight increase is normal, but a huge increase is not. Unfortunately, in real life, it's often the case, and this aspect is often overlooked by vendors, developers, and sysadmins, making things even worse than it should be.

Network hardware or software is optimized for throughput, and its performance under heavy traffic is often not tested. One common practice is using a buffer that is as large as possible, so that you can push the data rate to the maximum and avoid dropping packets at all cost. This is called Bufferbloat and it's a latency disaster. When the upstream bandwidth is saturated, the downstream buffer keeps accepting more bytes/packets, effectively breaks the proper feedback signal used by congestion control algorithms, so it never kicks in in a timely manner, and the FIFO nature of the buffer means the latency of a saturated link is always as high as the buffer size. As long as something is using the bandwidth, the network will always be slow like a snail. When people start having this problem, they simply blame the bandwidth- intensive application, and set a QoS up to prioritize things like DNS and VoIP, and to punish downloaders (and big networks usually have incrediblely complex and elaborate rules), This appeared to "fix" the problem, but it does not solve the underlying problem, all it does is moving the problem to the low priority queue. Another trouble is unwanted buffer can exist everywhere, in applications, operation systems, and underlying hardware, and since there's a conflict between throughput and latency, and some buffers are even technically necessary (Wireless networks are the worst offender), there's still a long way to do to fix everything.

I am only speaking from my experience of managing small LANs, but I got most of the information from Dave Täht and Jim Gettys, who have been working on this issue in the last 10 years. Gettys writes extensively on bufferbloat in his blog that states similar issues exist at a much larger scale, including the ISP edge and backbone. Perhaps the vast majority of the case we are seeing here is caused by a lack of bandwidth and not related to bufferbloat, but I guess bufferbloat is still here to blame for at least 20% of the cases.

Here is a talk Dave Täht recently made: [https://blog.apnic.net/2020/01/22/bufferbloat-may-be- solved-...](https://blog.apnic.net/2020/01/22/bufferbloat-may-be-solved-but- its-not-over-yet/)

And here is Gettys' blogpost: [https://gettys.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/the- blind-men-and-th...](https://gettys.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/the-blind-men- and-the-elephant/)

<comment><USER5> > Ideally, at least for TCP applications, with perfect network congestion > control, reduced bandwidth due to streaming should only degrade data rate, > but never massively increase the latency

Fundamentally, TCP is designed to get _all the bits_ to their destination. That's great for file transfer, but not ideal for streaming video— at the transport level, there's no way to decouple data rate from latency because it's not allowed to drop anything.

UDP is the latency-prioritized transport protocol for the internet. It drops packets that it can't handle because they are expected to contain out-of-date information anyway. It's generally mote complicated to use because all of the flow control needs to happen at the application layer.

<comment><USER6> This is the best explanation I've read about TCP vs UDP in more than two decades!

I like that it describes them in terms of goals ("If you prioritise X over Y, then use..."), not mechanics like stream-oriented.

I wish more technology choices were presented in terms of the fundamental tradeoffs in high-level goals rather than mechanics of the particular abstraction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the reason to lower quality is really because of being generous to the rest of the world. That's just not Google. I am quite into the online advertising world and I know that the current cpm/rpm ad revenue in many premium countries went down by 30-60%. This means a way lower margin for Google. One way to decrease the loss is lowering the total bandwidth

<comment><USER8> I'm all for calling out Google where it's warranted, but come on, I think the simplest explanation for this (reducing _default_ bandwidth - note it doesn't prevent people from manually choosing HD - helps the world without costing Google much of anything) is the correct one. Lowering their bandwidth isn't going to make a lick of difference in their overall stock price one way or the other.

<comment><USER9> I don't know that it's calling them out to describe a specific business reason behind a decision. It's not unreasonable for a business to adjust to maintain financial stability, especially for a "free" product served in exchange for ads.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure it would actually save them any money at all. They are still transcoding into the higher quality, so you don't save compute resources. The videos themselves are served from edge CDN nodes. Through peering agreements I doubt Google is paying much for bandwidth.

I'm not sure where this would save Google any money. It seems to just be a helpful (if more symbolic) thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be nice if they have a 0 pixel option. I use YouTube mostly for the music and I let it play in the background

<comment><USER12> I think most "Lyric" videos, where the screen is a single image, or nearly the same image, can be compressed to be almost the size of just the audio.

If not, I would second the "zero pixel" option!

<comment><USER13> Youtube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams. This is to prevent free streaming on devices like Sonos since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos. It's also why when using the free service the app doesn't allow streaming with the screen off.

A 0 pixel video would defeat this by being in effect an audio stream separated from the video. I always wondered why manufacturers don't just resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS.

<comment><USER14> > Youtube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the > free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio > streams.

Isn't this backwards? It seems more likely that the TOS follows the business decision here. I believe old versions of the official mobile apps continued to play the video with the phone screen off.

<comment><USER13> I imagine the ToS were written as such in order to make sure some features can be monetized (like offline or screen-off playback). But this just means they would not offer any feature for free that undermines this decision. A "0px" video would effectively turn it into an audio-only stream and be an "official" way for others to bypass some of those restrictions. It would make streaming to all devices that now require a Premium/Music membership, or stream ripping (something they don't actually sue for but insist it's illegal) fair game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those who only read the title, this is actually only setting the _default_ quality to standard definition.

You can still watch 4k videos by changing the setting manually.

<comment><USER16> That seems exceedingly reasonable. 4k when you need it, by a lower default.

<comment><USER17> 480 instead of 720 seems a bit excessive of a first-step cutback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this ultimately just to free up bandwidth in areas limited by poor last mile infrastructure? The US has some of the cheapest transit network bandwidth costs in the world. Most ISPs can peer to YouTube(Google) for free minus the cost of equipment/data center ports. Thus, is this just addressing the last mile problem again, when the video finally makes it to the neighborhood and you just have too many people on a single DOCSIS node?

<comment><USER19> A well engineered DOCSIS network can really scream. Unfortunately it's way cheaper to oversubscribe since 99.99% of the time no one complains.

<comment><USER20> well-engineered vs oversubscribed is a false dichotomy. A well-engineered network _is_ an oversubscribed one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And if you don't know, you can use Youtube-dl to download videos from most sites for offline viewing.

[https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#description](https://github.com/ytdl- org/youtube-dl#description)

</comment><comment><USER22> What is the primary source on this? None of Alphabet's mouthpieces contain this information. I glanced at Google's own blog, various YouTube blogs, several official Twitter accounts, and SEC filings in EDGAR. I search PR Newswire etc.

<comment><USER23> [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9777243?p=covid19_...](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9777243?p=covid19_updates)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm really glad to hear it. To be honest, I've always seen the race to 4k or whatever else to be inherently decadent.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have noticed Youtube's landing page to be quite slow to load compared to most other sites. I had assumed it was some stupidity in my low-bandwidth network connection: but I now wonder if Youtube's just getting killed by all of us staying at home.

<comment><USER26> Add &disable_polymer=1 to the end of the url and see if it's different.

Here's an add-on to do this automatically:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable- polym...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polymer- youtube/?src=search)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I never imagined the big G would have to worry about scalability

</comment><comment><USER28> I noticed a lot of the recent torrents are smaller than usual.

Not sure if they have regulated themselves or the sources are reduced. Or both.

<comment><USER29> x265 has been gaining in acceptance, and those are noticeably smaller

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's great that I can still override it. Companies are taking away important features, at least this stays (for now)

<comment><USER31> You do understand why they are doing this right?

<comment><USER30> I do, but I usually can't read any of the code examples and small text slides when I don't set the videos to the highest definition :(

I wish they would use special compression for text that's not moving.

Do you have a better suggestion?

<comment><USER32> It's totally okay to manually set the YouTube player to 4K for this use case.

For low-motion static content like a slideshow or console window, a ultra-low frame rate usually results in acceptable fidelity while minimizing bandwidth, but not all hardware decoders (think Chromecasts, TVs) play well with them, so it wasn't possible to go down this road in general.

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and not that of my employer.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://archive.md/aOqCc](https://archive.md/aOqCc)

</comment><comment><USER34> Seems like another thing that would help is every browser and media service adopted AV1 for video and WEBP for images. That itself would save an insane amount of bandwidth (maybe a quarter of the world's bandwidth).

<comment><USER32> AV1 encoding/decoding is still expensive. Netflix only started rolling it out for part of its catalog recently.

It's been interesting watching them scale up Netflix Party in the meantime...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Oh so it's like PornHub on any usual day

</comment><comment><USER36> Url changed from [https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-youtube-standard- definit...](https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-youtube-standard-definition- default-worldwide-coronavirus-covid-19.html), which points to this.

<comment><USER37> You should also change the title to be less misleading. They said they're changing the _default_ quality, not completely limiting quality.

<comment><USER36> Ok, we've stuck a default up there.

<comment><USER38> If it's default then it's not a limit. It should just says YouTube to change default [...].

It mislead me for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Youtube is a lost cause. It has too many ads now, I don't use it anymore.

<comment> t-writescode Just pay for it. If you're using it enough to complain, pay for it. $10 a month.

<comment><USER40> The real 'hack' is to subscribe to Google Play Music All Access. A music streaming service that rivals Spotify, and comes with YouTube Premium (and YT Music) bundled in.

<comment><USER41> What's the library like - if I pick a random artist that has < 50000 monthly listeners on spotify how likely is google play music to have them too?

<comment><USER42> Google Play Music has 40m tracks to Spotify's 50m, but you can upload your own music to fill in any gaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> To be frank, I'd like this all the time. For most videos, buffering is more annoying than resolution, and I don't care about quality.

The only time I care about quality is some educational content where there are e.g. small equations on the screen.

Good call.

<comment><USER44> You do know that you can select the resolution you want, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Symmetric connection speeds we miss you, sorry about taking the internet and turning it into a few mega nodes, we'll learn eventually.

</comment><comment><USER46> Where's the extension that will automatically upgrade my video quality when this happens?

<comment><USER47> This extension should allow you to set basically anything you want for YouTube. Preferred resolution, audio level, playback speed and much more.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer- for-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/)</comment></comment>


Connecteam – Create an Employee App with Ease - <AUTHOR> Connecteam offers companies the easiest, fastest and most affordable way to create their own employee smartphone app. We enable companies to create an employee app in one hour and distribute it to their employees' phones with a click-of-a-button.
The app comes fully loaded with tools to inform, train, supervise and manage non-desk employees more efficiently. We provide managers with the tools to monitor employee performance in real-time
For more information feel free to check out our website: www.Connecteam.com <comment><USER2> 2 thumbs up on this idea.</comment>


Show HN: Added quests to my HTML5 game - <AUTHOR> http://rpg.mo.ee/?hackernews=8

<comment><USER2> How to register? I'm typed random username and password and pressed "Login/Register" - it return "Wrong password" to me.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I get it, usernames I typed was already taken.</comment></comment>


North Americans are the biggest bullshitters - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/04/30/who-are-the-biggest-bullshitters <comment><AUTHOR> Link to study:

[http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf](http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf)

Economist summary:

 _A new study of the phenomenon has found that North America is especially prone to speaking bull. John Jerrim, Phil Parker and Nikki Shure, three academics, have used an educational survey of 40,000 teenage students in nine English-speaking countries to find out who is most likely to spout nonsense. They inserted a section into the questionnaire which asked students how well they understood a collection of 16 mathematical concepts. Some were familiar, such as "polygon" and "probability", but three were fake: "proper number", "subjunctive scaling" and "declarative fraction".

The results show substantial differences between countries. Canadian and American teenagers were especially likely to profess knowledge of these bogus topics, whereas the Scots and Irish were perfectly happy to admit their ignorance. In news that will shock nobody, in every country men claimed to be experts more often than women. The rich were more boastful than the poor. More surprising was the finding that immigrants were generally more likely to bluff about maths than native students were.

What explains these differences? The academics doubt that the bullshitters were simply trying to impress the questionnaire's markers. The students who bluffed about maths were just as likely as the non-bluffers to admit that they had skipped school recently, for example. A more likely answer is that the blaggers over-estimated their own knowledge. They also tended to rate themselves highly when it came to gauging their own popularity, perseverance on academic tasks and problem-solving ability. The data suggest that they might not be consciously lying, but instead be weaving their own fantasies._

</comment><comment><USER2> I wonder how immigrant status works. How much of their bullshit can be explained by non-native language for a test. When you read foreign term for a math notion (or any term from any domain), often you are unable to identify it, while you are know it and all you need is to read wikipedia article and to recognize familiar math constructions.

I might think that the 'proper number' is the 'perfect number', for example. 'Subjunctive scaling' is decidedly is not something I know: it is about logic, I studied it but then successfully forgot after exam. While 'declarative fraction'... What is it? Is it a some way to write down a number in fractional notation and associated set of numbers that can be expressed that way? Probably I know it, just do not recognize the term.</comment>


Ask PG: hidden mod commenting? - <AUTHOR>

When I mod people, sometimes I'd like to explain why.  However, comments become way too cluttered with noise if many people did this, and not everyone leaves contact information.  Would it be simple to add some kind of hidden mod commenting system?<p>I think this would add value to karma (greater weight to mod points with rationale?).  I suspect conscientious people hold off on modding because they want to communicate their intent, whereas others mod freely without caring about the consequences.  Consequently, there are more "noise" points than "signal" points, and the information content of karma is lessened. <comment><USER2> I don't see the point of explaining your mods. I think modding comments is of dubious value by itself.

Private messaging might be helpful, but I don't see an urgent problem to be solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I see your point. pg probably uses a better weighting for submissions, and there usually aren't too many responses to read through.

I do see this weighting scheme being useful for the best comments list, or a meta list weighted entirely this way.

<comment><AUTHOR> And I do still think an explanation for modding has merit. I know, it seems insecure to want an explanation for people's reactions. We macho geniuses are supposed to know it all and have perfect control of the room (especially if pg is around)...or at least we need to give that impression; and what better way to learn how than to get private feedback on hacker news?

Also, why are people modding the grandparent up?

<comment><USER2> Because people agree with me. And that's why modding is so useless. What you want is new insights being modded up - what you get is people being modded up for expressing well what everyone else is thinking, and modded down for dissenting.

I wish I could say that karma left me cold, but it doesn't - if somebody mods me down I feel insulted, if somebody mods me up it feels like praise.

To get on YC-topic, there's room for innovation here...

<comment><AUTHOR> Along those lines, what do you think of a wikiable application for forums such as hacker news?

<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1884>

I think it would be pretty neat for the community here. This would create a small feedback loop for ideas such as yours, and you don't have to bootstrap a new community to test new schemes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had the idea once that when you mod people, you _must_ explain why, or it doesn't count. In fact, commenting and modding would be one and the same--in order to reply to something, you must mod it first; clicking the arrows opens the box. Then, I had the idea that your vote is weighted by what people think of _your_ comment, and so on... eventually the scheme got too complicated to implement.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who would see the comments?

<comment><USER5> Suppose you could make a reply "private", meaning only you and the person you're replying to could see your comment.

Their reply to your private reply should be automatically private, effectively creating an isolated thread.

People who want to disagree indefinitely on some fine point could do so without creating a ruckus.

If anything especially worthwhile came up in the discussion, either party could easily just repost it as an ordinary public reply.

To discourage people from harassing each other with private replies, you should only be allowed to downvote them.

This would also allow people an easy way to say "Thanks" or "I agree" without having those comments pollute the top level space.

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting idea.

News.YC does support sending arbitrary messages to other users. It's just only turned on for us and YC founders. I could turn it on for everyone. Would anyone want that?

The advantage/disadvantage of using messages is that they wouldn't be tied to a particular comment. There's also the disadvantage that everyone would invoke whatever that quote is about every system evolving till it adds messaging...

<comment><AUTHOR> To tie a message to a comment the sender would include the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you are asking for two features - a way to privately exchange contact info and a way to publicly/privately explain rationale for up/downmod.

I really like the former but am fine with the noise of explaining mod- rationale in the comment itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, good clarification, though I would say private messages instead of just contact info.

So, I propose two independent features that seem simple:

1\. Private option on comments the receiver can turn off.

2\. Weighting of points based on whether the moderator responded to the moderated comment. This requires a reflective pause in the person's action if they want it to have greater significance, reducing knee jerk moderation noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While this is a pretty good idea, it adds a significant amount of complexity to news.yc. A lot of the appeal of this site is in its simplicity, and adding this public/private commenting system would kind of sacrifice that feeling.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you say about a simple, self similar surface that allows for deeper layers of complexity, if the user wants?

Perhaps just adding an invisibility option to a comment, which the receiver can deactivate?

<comment><USER7> Hmm. There's very little difference between actual complexity and perceived complexity. If you add options for features that could possibly increase complexity, you also increase the chance that someone feels the perception that the app is complex.

For that reason, I still dislike the idea of hidden/user-activated features.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it was in the text markup, then it wouldn't be perceived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea but it will just end up with tit for tat down modding. It would only work if the down modders idenity was hidden from the person.

I actually think you should get a point for commenting in the first place, this might get more people commenting and joining in.</comment>