Ask HN: How did you meet your co-founder(s)? - <AUTHOR> Curiosity. <comment><USER2> I used to work for eDonkey as their support minion, a file sharing program of yesteryear. We had forums, and a user there was far more helpful to all the newbs than I was. We started chatting from time to time, then more often, he even came up to meet me while I was down in NYC for the summer.

We kept in touch, he helped me manage a dedicated server I'd bought somewhere. I felt bad because he was managing it and I wasn't paying him, he felt bad because he was using it and not paying for it.

Then I started [https://wonderproxy.com/](https://wonderproxy.com/) he was a natural choice for co-founder, and we've been growing ever since.

<comment><USER3> _I felt bad because he was managing it and I wasn 't paying him, he felt bad because he was using it and not paying for it._

Cute, it's like a sysadmin love story

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Met one of my two co-founders during a project. In a room full of argumentative type-A personalities, she was the only one building bridges and moving the project forward. That really stood out for me as a huge asset in any team.

The other co-founder and I met in a hallway at a database conference, then tried our first startup a few months later. It failed - but it was so much fun failing with him that I figured we should keep trying on other projects because at least failing wouldn't feel bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> I met my cofounder for Cyph in kindergarten.

It was immediately apparent that Josh and I were destined for great things when we attempted to plant the world's first pizza tree (by burying pizza crust near the school playground).

</comment><comment><USER6> Blogging.

We both blogged in the same niche for many years and exchanged a few emails, cross-posts and that kind of thing. Last year, I realised I was never going to make a successful business by myself and started to look for a non-technical co-founder - I emailed Geoff because I knew that he knew his stuff in our niche and he seemed like a good bloke.

My email was something along the lines of, "I'm thinking of building something, no idea what, fancy it?", the time was right for him and we have been profitable almost from day one.

</comment><comment><USER7> On /r/startups

It's been 1.5 yrs, have been through hell and back with him, can't imagine a better co-founder. We'll start companies together until we die.

I recognize this is not the recommended way of finding a co-founder; statistically the chances of it turning out like it did are very low. But it worked out, so I don't care.

</comment><comment><USER8> Prison.

<comment><USER9> Upvoting because I like that you found someone else in a usually "not so good" situation and made something from it :)

May I ask what it is you do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Matt and I were intern at Apple in 2006. We shared the same apartment in corporate housing in Cupertino. After that summer, we never talked again for 7 years.

I ended up joining Apple for 4 years in California. He decided to stay in the midwest, eventually got married and settled down in Minneapolis. About 7 years later we reconnected over Twitter and we started working together.

Today we do [http://astropad.com](http://astropad.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> One little question to the posters here: Did you every doubt that your best smart buddy, might not have the same level of dedication?, might not pull through?

<comment><USER12> I'd like to apologize to my friend for whom I was the buddy who didn't pull through. But to be honest, I was at a different point in my life and had super low confidence. I'd like to think it would be different now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At a team day at eBay (Germany). While working there as a frontend dev, I had attended a "team day" which involved stunt driving, and was placed on a team with this new frontend guy who had just started. He told me about his (at the time, free) image optimization API, which is known today as [https://kraken.io](https://kraken.io)

We became friends, having frequent discussions about how such a service could be monetized. Three weeks later, he offered me a 50% split. Shortly afterwards, we founded a company and started serious work on Kraken Image Optimizer, without ever looking back.

</comment><comment><USER14> College. We did a finance case competition and we won, so we thought it'd be a good idea to work together. We wrote/edited a book "Words of the Music Masters" (failed), then we coached a few seminars for college students/recent graduates (failed!) and finally some consulting (sucked). That was 6 years ago. We both took jobs, now we're back. It's really interesting, we've failed miserably together and starved, we're kinda bulletproof now. Besides, being hungry but not alone made us closer, we're like brothers now. seriously.

</comment><comment><USER15> LinkedIn, they sent a mysterious message saying they were looking for someone for a "project". Wouldn't normally answer anyone on LinkedIn but it turned out to be one of the best decisions ever.

</comment><comment><USER16> He's a friend, met him through is brother who is the same age as I, ~6 years ago. So we spend our weeks and weekends, on and off work, together.

</comment><comment><USER17> On a Kloofing trip. I invited a friend who invited her boyfriend who invited my cofounder. My friend never showed up, but her guests did.

</comment><comment><USER18> I met mine at a swing dance event in Pittsburgh, a location more then 7 hours apart from our home cities. Later happened to run into him while we were both at a dance event in Chicago. Started working together 1 week after Chicago.

It may be worth noting that I am not co-founder, but was rather hired on with partial ownership when his side project went to business?

</comment><comment><USER19> Church. She was a teenager and I was in my early 20s. Fast forward 14 years, and we find ourselves starting a company together.

</comment><comment><USER20> One through a warm intro from a mutual professional acquaintance. And another through an awesome project they posted to HN.

</comment><comment><USER21> My SO brought me to a planning meeting for a non-profit, and I met their founder there. We hit it off, and founded a startup together several months later when the time was right. I think it was good to start off being friends first. And having a shared network of friends and business associates helped speed things up.

</comment><comment><USER22> First-first: Friend-of-a-Friend (FoaF). (I didn't have enough of the right kind of friends...)

First-rebooted: Snagged from first/large customer

Second: Snagged from the Series A VC team mid-transaction (that was weird)

Everything else: sometimes my accumulated acquaintance list, sometimes FoaF, and often from a planning-stage target-market customer.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've had 3 cofounders over the years. 1\. school 2\. hired them a few times and added them to the team a couple years later 3\. lean startup and tech event

All in all, I recommend picking someone you have known for a few years. Can be friends but usually best when it is first a business relationship.

</comment><comment><USER24> At a hackathon, we won together. On another one, she pitched her project to me and I decided to join her.

</comment><comment><USER25> I looked through some of the technically minded sub-reddits for people who had posted interesting technology or demonstrations that they had built.

Just so happened that my now co-founder home brewed an in home AR game with a laptop backpack and AR glasses and had put up the demo video.

</comment><comment><USER26> First startup: high-school classmates.

Second startup: they were looking for a technical co-founder and talked to mutual friends of ours (who put us in touch)

Third and current startup: former engineering-school acquaintances, reconnected via LinkedIn when they started looking for a CTO.

</comment><comment><USER27> The founder met me when he was doing some freelance job in a startup where I was working. We are a perfect fit, he is the guy doing Design + Marketing and I am doing everything related to coding.

We founded: nusii.com (Web proposal software)

</comment><comment><USER28> College roommate. We named our two-man agency after our old college apartment.

</comment><comment><USER29> First ones I met in school, next through business partners, none worked out good.

Now I am alone doing much better, starting to see what I did wrong and I am getting ready to consider partnering with others again.

</comment><comment><USER30> University — became best friends in junior year and realised our complementary skillsets (strategy/design, coding) could be put to good use fleshing out whatever startup ideas we had!

</comment><comment><USER31> Still looking.

<comment><USER32> In a HN thread...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> On the school bus; We've been best friends for about a decade.

</comment><comment><USER34> Was scrolling pages after pages of friends in facebook, found a friend who was my junior in college days, we then went on to create www.grepslash.com .

One thing facebook is useful for.

</comment><comment><USER35> At university. Although we rarely interacted in the university, but happened to work on a project about 5 years later and realized we shared passion for startups.

</comment><comment><USER36> He was my first boss when I was a junior out of college. 14+ years later we are starting a venture together. Also my wife who I met when I was in college.

</comment><comment><USER37> A friend of a friend is the CEO, he is a really creative guy and I wanted to work on a new project, the other cofounder was her girlfriend.

</comment><comment><USER38> We hacked the network of our school :). BTW, we have now founded a Cybersecurity company.

</comment><comment><USER39> online, through a job listing website, to start making a prototype. that was 2.5yrs ago!

</comment><comment><USER40> At a tech networking event.

</comment><comment><USER41> High school - he was my friend, now he is my brother-in-law - go figure

</comment><comment><USER42> Previous workplace.

</comment><comment><USER43> via Twitter for a challenge.gov challenge. We ended up winning and turning the software into a company and got a government contract.

</comment><comment><USER44> Univercity

</comment><comment><USER45> at our day job

</comment><comment><USER46> College.

</comment><comment><USER47> Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER48> School

</comment><comment><USER49> in a bar</comment>


The High Price of the Nocebo Effect - <AUTHOR> http://neurosciencenews.com/nocebo-effect-psychology-7673/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+neuroscience-rss-feeds-neuroscience-news+%28Neuroscience+News+Updates%29 <comment><USER2> I haven't read the article but Dr Ben Goldacre has written some great stuff on this. Incidentally he was the first person to get me engaged in science as a teenager, and I love his catchphrase: "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That".

[http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/all-bow-before-the- mighty-...](http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/all-bow-before-the-mighty-power- of-the-nocebo-effect/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Q3jZw4FGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Q3jZw4FGs)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a shameless plug and only marginally related, but I've done a decent amount of self research in buying dumb supplements and hoping they work (especially with nootropics).

I created [https://betterself.io/](https://betterself.io/), open-sourced at [https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself](https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself), but the gist of it was -- how do I find out what supplements are really just the placebo effect versus having a strong correlation (positive or negative) on my productivity/sleep?

Aggregating data across either 7/14 periods removed a lot of noise and let me improve on the supplements I was already buying (and let me dump out a lot).</comment>


Ruby 2.0 speed ÷ Python 3 speed - <AUTHOR> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/ruby.php Yes i know that benchmarks mean fairly little, but Ruby here is WAY off the chart. Wasn't 2.0 suppose to improve on performance? And it is even worst then PHP. <comment><USER2> I use Ruby ALL the time, and I've never once thought, "I wish this was executing faster".

Yes, perhaps it could be more efficient, but I don't use Ruby for speed. The way that I see it, Ruby exchanges execution time for programmer time. Alternatively, If I want something to be fast, I'll spend a few days writing it in C/C++/Assembler, but I'd expect to spend at least an order of magnitude more time writing code.

<comment><USER3> Or you could use something like LuaJit, Node.js, Java or Scala that achieves both goals.

<comment><USER4> None of those languages are equivalent to ruby. They may be faster but they don't support the same features, syntax etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Follow up: The Computer Language Benchmark Game still only marginally relevant to real world use.

<comment><USER6> It's very relevant for some types of programs. For web development, unless you're building the next Twitter, not so important...

...now if you're building a chess engine, that's a different story.

(I just take chess as an example as it's my latest hobby. It's the first and only project where I found it necessary to switch to C because of performance considerations (switched from C#).)

<comment><USER5> For the various tasks involved in a chess engine Python and Ruby are likely to either be performance equivalent (in that performance doesn't really matter) or entirely unsuitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most applications still I/O bound.

Woes of developers who prefer complaining to extracting the CPU bound parts of their app to another language still difficult to worry about.

<comment><USER8> Why "extract parts to another language" in the first place, if the more dynamic language has TONS of headroom to get faster?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Speed still irrelevant in many applications.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about that.

Maybe is fine if you have a controlled traffic, but with better speed you can manage more traffic with the same hardware. That's why Facebook had to build a PHP compiler at some point.

<comment><USER11> For probably almost every website/webapp in the world, the amount of servers you have is 1. Facebook is not a typical application.

Besides, code is written for more than just websites. Chef/puppet/cfengine, one-off scripts you write, etc. There's a whole lot of these types of things that don't matter if your code takes 0.01 seconds or 0.05 seconds.

<comment><USER10> "For probably almost every website/webapp in the world, the amount of servers you have is 1." Still if I can do the same thing in a cheaper server with the same level of productivity, why wouldn't I do that?

"There's a whole lot of these types of things that don't matter if your code takes 0.01 seconds or 0.05 seconds." Yeah but why would you prefer Ruby instead of PHP/Python/Perl for those things then?

<comment><USER12> Because they prefer Ruby? I personally wouldn't choose PHP or Perl unless I had no other choice. Nothing wrong with other people choosing them, but they aren't for me. And given the choice between Python and Ruby, I'll choose Ruby unless there is a compelling reason not to. And saving a few hundred dollars on a commodity server would never be compelling enough for me.

Edit: And when I actually _need_ better performance from a specific piece of code, I can and do drop down to C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I haven't taken a look at the actual programs, but given the nature of the benchmarks the result can probably be interpreted as 'numpy is still quite fast' also?

<comment><USER14> I don't think Numpy is allowed or used in these benchmarks. However GMP is and that's why _pidigits_ is so much slower on Ruby.

<comment><USER15> Of course an advantage of python over ruby (speed-wise) is that you can leverage numpy if you need to do fast matrix operations, whereas ruby has no such library (that I'm aware of).

<comment><USER14> And ditto for Perl: PDL - <http://pdl.perl.org>

However I think the basis of these benchmarks is really to pit languages against each other and not it's frameworks/libraries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's a pretty strong conclusion to draw from these results..

</comment><comment><USER17> Ruby 2.0 was JUST released. It'll get faster, just like it happened for 1.8 and 1.9.

Python was released in what? 2008? 2009? I don't want to be that person, but if we're going to compare language based on benchmarks that are pretty irrelevant to modern uses already (like the CLBG is), at least let's pick "equivalent" languages and let's try avoiding the obvious biases.

<comment><USER18> >It'll get faster,

There's absolutely no reason to believe that's true.

<comment><USER17> JRuby is growing stronger and so is Rubinius. As those implementations grow and mature, they'll get faster because they offer solutions in terms of runtime that piggyback on technologies that are getting better and faster at optimizing the bytecode produced (JVM, LLVM in that case).

I _do_ think Ruby will get faster eventually. Maybe not to the point that Ruby suddenly becomes "fast" of course, but by a margin that can make a difference. This is only my opinion (backed by some benchmarks in -for now- particular circumstances) of course, but I'm hopeful that the situation will improve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Except their benchmarks are full of poo poo. The Python pidigits benchmark uses a third party C extension for high performance math, whereas the Ruby 2.0 pidigits benchmark is pure Ruby.

Of course someone will lose a fight when their opponent is wearing a jetpack and rocket powered shoes.

<comment><USER14> Other languages in those _pidigits_ benchmarks (Perl, Lua, PHP, Racket, Lisp SBCL and probably more) also use the GMP maths library. So there is nothing stopping Ruby benchmarks also using it as well (just need to request relevant Ruby GMP library are installed on the Alioth benchmark machines).

Anyway you didn't seem too fussed about what the Alioth benchmarks showed in the past - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634738> :)

<comment><USER19> Because someone can't change their opinion in 4 years..

I hadn't looked at the source code back then. Only now when this particular variant of the benchmark shows some rather unrealistic results. Another example (binary trees, I believe) has Ruby using a single process whereas the Python example is using multiple processes to spread the load, so even though Ruby wins on CPU time, Python wins with a slightly lower wall-clock time.

And making the Ruby pidigits benchmark use GMP too? That defeats the point of benchmarking one language against another if you can just call out to C libraries for everything (hey, there's an idea.. Ruby could be parallel with C if we just did that). It should be pure language against pure language otherwise it's totally meaningless (and, well, it is, as it stands).

<comment><USER20> What's preventing Ruby 2.0 from "using multiple processes to spread the load"?

>>if you can just call out to C libraries for everything<<

You can't just call out _for everything_.

There have been language implementations that used GMP under-the-covers, so - to level the playing field - everyone can call out for GMP and PCRE.

<comment><USER19> Nothing, it seems. But a benchmark is pointless if you aren't comparing like for like, yet people are clearly taking the results as some sort of serious indicator.

As it is, it's like sending two different cars around two different tracks and comparing how long they took.

<comment><USER20> >>But a benchmark is pointless if you aren't comparing like for like<<

According to you it defeats the point when we do compare like to like -- "if you can just call out to C libraries".

>>yet people are clearly taking the results as some sort of serious indicator<<

Offer them something better.

>>sending two different cars around two different tracks<<

No. It's like saying here's the track - Ruby guy bring out your best cars, Python guy bring out your best cars - and sending them around the same track.

The possible mismatch between programs written for quad-core and those written for single-core is marked.

You can mention the difference between CPU time and wall-clock time because both are intentionally shown, along with "CPU Load" so you can see how much difference quad-core has made.

And as draegtun informed you, there's another set of measurements that removes that difference by forcing all the programs onto a single core.

The problem with the Ruby binary-trees programs is that they run out of memory.

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?tes...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/program.php?test=binarytrees&lang=yarv&id=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, if it ran any faster all those Rails sites would get compromised even quicker, so surely this is a good thing? Brogrammer security through performance woes.

<comment><USER22> ^ Excellent comment right here. +1 for educational value.</comment></comment>


We are selling the source code of our startup (time-tracking on IM) - <AUTHOR> http://timmyontime.posterous.com/timmy-source-code-is-on-sale

<comment><USER2> I find the premise of using IM for time tracking (and hence time management) a flawed idea.

For me, IM is generally a distraction and a timesink, which is why I've opted to uninstall any IM clients and instead do all my interactions through mail, it saves time.

I just don't see how this has any value but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

You mentioned you lost your clients? How? (just curious)

<comment><USER3> I have also disabled all my IM accounts for the same rasons but I did open one new one where I have only non-human contacts. I use it for receiving alerts from different bots and some tests (My work involves a lot of XMPP stuff).

My point is that IM only becomes a distraction and a timesink when you have human contacts (especially ones with too much free time).

<comment><USER2> That's the thing though, yours is an edge case. I see the value of utilising IM as a communication method for keeping an eye on things.

However, I think that in the vast majority of cases, people will have people on their IM clients (which is why I said generally) and that is when things go pear shaped quickly.

It just seems like the idea was poorly conceived

Anyway, I don't mean to take too much of a jab at the OP. I have one of those ideas turned into products under my belt that turned out to be a complete wrong fit for what I was trying to achieve.

I think its best to just move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> nobody is going to buy the code from a failed business. why not open-source it?

<comment><USER5> Why not? Just because the business failed doesn't mean the source is not valuable. As they mentioned this could be a feature someone wants to implement in an existing tool then $25K may be a steal for what they're providing.

I'd want a lot more details though before purchasing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We already had some people asking for details. If you're interested, just write us to email@example.com .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think you are going to get many takers. In a business, the source code is worth much less than say customers, brand name, etc.

A hobby/project becomes a startup when you have paying customers.

Do you have any?

<comment><AUTHOR> We did have clients but, to be honest, we lost them. We're not selling their data, it will be available for them to backup but deleted forever after that.

<comment><USER7> The most valuable thing available here might be the understanding of why/how you lost your clients. Did they sign up and then decide that this methodology just didn't work for them? Or was it something else?

As people are saying, the customers or the business knowledge are the bits here that retain value.

<comment><AUTHOR> We learned a lot through these 3 years and it has its value. I could talk about it but it's more or less what we see each day on HN. We lost our clients because, like we said in our post, our heart isn't in it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, code is a liability because it rots pretty fast and requires frequent maintenance. True value is in understanding the customers problem. If your unit tests accurately capture the customers needs then it has value.

</comment><comment><USER9> The problem is, its a technological stunt, nothing more.

Apparently now, everyone considers things like this startups, in reality, they are just simple technological features, not a business. Not a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right... but still, "startup" is a recognized word. When I use the word "our product", nobody upvoted it. When I changed it to "our startup", it was upvoted.

Use the words that your customers understand they say...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> if you have questions about it, you can ask it here, I will answer

<comment><USER10> Don't sell for less than 100k: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1014108>

<comment><USER11> Am I missing something, what does that HN article have to do with $100k? EDIT - never mind, I missed the connection! Good call.

I like the concept of this app, but it seems from their blog that they were having a hard time charging for this service. Without that model in place, like earle mentioned, this isn't really a startup - but for the right person it could be I think.</comment></comment></comment>


Super Spectacular Server-Side Swift - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/slug-edward-jiang-server-side-swift/ <comment><USER2> Edward Jiang mentions that Swift is more expressive than C# or Java. Thats true. However, Swift is lacking powerful tools like annotations, reflection and so on. Dependency injection is a breeze with java. What about unit and integration testing? What about good IDE support. Xcode can't even handle proper autocomplete. It's a shame how bad Apple treats such a great language.</comment>


Brave's browser has been autocompleting websites with referral codes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/67594/braves-browser-has-been-autocompleting-websites-with-referral-codes <comment><USER2> I honestly assume that 80% of what I've seen pushing Brave against all basic common sense is astroturfing.

Just use Firefox! Why would anyone ever choose Brave when it is proprietary and better free alternatives exist? This company's track record of disrespecting their users and sketchy monetization is so blatant, and its creator is a homophobic tool who is responsible for all of us writing Javascript instead of Scheme.

<comment><USER3> I don't use brave myself, but I appreciate that it's actually taking serious efforts trying to fix the problem of ads. I'm kind of a little surprise hn seems to be so blind to this issue, considering the number of people here who are employed by companies that literally live off of ads. If ads are bad and annoying (which most here would agree they are) but I still want to support certain websites (because some websites produce good content that I value), there's no convenient way to do that right now outside of allowing ads on that website, which is not particularly desirable. Brave seems to be the only one seriously trying to address that.

Do you know of any other major effort being put into alternative (convenient) mechanisms for monetization? I'd be interested in looking into it if you do, since I don't use brave (Firefox has too many useful features to me).

<comment><USER4> I've seen a couple of comments in this direction across sites and would like to take a moment to point out that while advertisements are certainly annoying and a hassle, the root of the problem comes with the mining of behavior data that is then transformed into profile packages sold for advertising (and whatever other) purposes.

So, even if a browser is blocking ads, or changing the way ads are interacted with, the more important worry (imo) is whether the browser (or its features) are successful in blocking the behavior profile being built by aggregators such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

<comment><USER3> Yeah in my view there are 2 main problems with ads. One is as you say - collecting data profiles of people that are shared around with no respect for the user's preferences. The other is they are an unpleasant experience (resource hogs, obscure the content, etc). In my understanding, brave actually tries addressing both. For the issue of data collection, I believe its goal is to eventually enable (if it hasn't already) local profiling, so that you can still build profiles, but none of the data ever leaves your machine (and presumably they'd allow you to disable this feature - also it's open source so worst case you could always hack it out). For the user experience, since the ads (if you enable them) are served locally, they don't incur the same level of performance penalty as normal ads. Or (I believe) you can also just buy bat separate without ever enabling ads and use those to contribute to content creators (this is probably how I'd use it). I might have gotten a few details wrong but I think the overall direction is definitely worth exploring.

As for blocking the existing ads until the unlikely future where the brave style of ads becomes so common that the ads as we know them today entirely disappear - that's definitely a valid question. It doesn't help to be on the brave model if websites are still able to collect your data anyway. I think brave might have some special features helping obscure the data but I'm not too knowledgeable on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brave seems to push the line as to what is acceptable ways to monetize the browser. Every time they will just call it a mistake and "fix" it, but why do they keep trying to push the limit? They had the "safe" ads replacing websites ads. They had the "shadow accounts" wrt the tip thing. Now they're trying to sneak in referral codes. How many "oopsies" do you get in good faith?

<comment><USER6> [https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1269512276605759489?s...](https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1269512276605759489?s=21) Et seq. Stop repeating falsehoods.

<comment><USER5> Well that's not my twitter (nice dox attempt) but since that poster didn't know the history and is here on HN, I've got some links wrt ad replacement [1] and the shadow accounts + tipping where you don't know you aren't even notified you received money until you break a certain threshold and if you don't claim it within a certain amount of time it gets "recycled" back into the growth pool [2] conversation.

I did mention that Brave "fixes" these issues when the public inevitably freaks out, but it's still worth noting the pattern of intent.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/01/mozil...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/01/mozilla-co-founder-unveils-brave-a-web-browser-that-blocks- ads-by-default/?comments=1)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People, especially non-technical people, still don't ask themselves, how can a company be profitable from a browser? Especially if the browser itself is 100% made by another company but the license permits to be used and rebranded by others. Brave browser is nothing but skin and some config modifications to block Google tracking. But how can a company that raised 42 million dollars make money from a skin and some config modifications that can be developed by a student in his weekend?

The real business model of Brave is obviously to gain enough market share by smearing Google, the company that actually created and still developing the browser, and block its main resource of revenue, Adsense and then make money by replacing the blocked ads with their own, of course this time "private" ad platform. In the mean time they can play with cryptocoin scams but in the end this is the only viable business model. Take and rebrand a browser as "private" alternative to evil big corp that created the browser that their entire business relies on, block ads, wait until gain enough market share and then extort publishers and advertisers to migrate to their own ad platform.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can't wait to see what scummy monetization tactic brave is found to be using next.

Here's a question for any employees of brave who happen to be reading this: how did this get out the door? It's not like this is the first time the company has been found doing something that most people disagree with, and the fact that it keeps happening means that the process is still very much broken. I have not yet seen any response from brave that gives me confidence that _the company_ has changed from when they were taking youtube donations of creations not signed up to the BAT program

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see this as particularly problematic if it's not replacing an existing referral code. It should definitely be opt-in and more transparent though.

In fact, as a Firefox user, I would like to be able to activate a feature that would make Firefox the default beneficiary of affiliate rewards linked to my purchases. After all, I would not be visiting this website without it.

Am I missing some way this could be hurting someone?

<comment><USER10> Brave is getting paid for having their referral code used, but they aren't actually referring anyone. The people that accept referral codes are being ripped off in a sense.

<comment><USER11> Brave has a partnership with Binance. They aren't replacing random affiliate links as your comment suggests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027)

The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes (davidgerard.co.uk)

205 points by davidgerard 1 hour ago | 82 comments

<comment><USER6> David is obsessed with smearing me, and fact free high spin as ever. We hijack nothing, no link rewriting. But what is more, based on user feedback, we are flipping the default on Brave site suggestions to "off", even though it was aimed at showing the value of omnibox Binance affiliation where, if it worked, we would share back with users via BAT. Good job tanking this effort, and helping Chrome cement Google's monopoly. (Firefox is dead.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there any good alternatives to Brave? Read the twitter response from their CEO and it was terrible...

<comment><USER14> Pretty nuts, he asked one fellow why he liked his own comment, which seems super juvenile. And, he's just repeating ad nauseam that they will "never revise typed in domains again", which leaves a lot of wiggle room to me in what they will or won't revise with ref codes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If it's associated with a cryptocurrency, it's a scam. Just a matter of uncovering the details.

<comment><USER16> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, or shallow dismissals of other people's work. Maybe you don't owe cryptocurrency better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER17> He's not wrong though.

<comment><USER16> A comment needn't be wrong to be bad.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study resumed after pause - <AUTHOR> https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-oxford-vaccine-trial-back-on-after-pause-for-investigation-over-side-effects-12069919 <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion "AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413629)</comment>


This YouTube channel has become a dark mystery we have only 67 days to solve - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/lol/77-days-pronunciation-book-youtube-countdown-theories/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. My interest is peaked and will be following this story for the next 2 months.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" If this just a prank, it's a scary prank. And maybe that's the whole point."_

Gibson's _Pattern Recognition_ springs to mind. As do Christenberry's Box Brownie pictures of buildings.</comment>


Peter Drucker: How to (Actually) Manage Your Time - <AUTHOR> https://betterhumans.coach.me/peter-drucker-how-to-actually-manage-your-time-6ab54a9236b9 <comment> m-j-fox Outsource walk the dog? It's my one physical activity. Otherwise I'm a brain in a jar.

</comment><comment><USER2> As long as you study all the techniques people talk of, and find one that suits your style of working the closest, and schedule, I think you're good.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another time management method that claims to be different, but really is not.</comment>


Apple Approves Spotify for iPhone : Six Million Songs in Your Pocket - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/six-million-songs-in-your-pocket-apple-approves-spotify-for-iphone/

<comment><USER2> Unless it can play music while you do other stuff, like the iPod app can do, it's not really making iTunes obsolete.

I find that really frustrating, with all the streaming radio apps.

<comment><USER3> I thought the new iPhone allowed background applications...? Why can't they play music all the time?

Edit: No really, I'm just asking. Why can't they? Is it banned? I honestly remember hearing the hoopla around background applications a few months ago.

<comment><USER4> They allowed push notifications, which are a serviceable substitute for some reasons you might want to run in the background. You can not actually have code running when your app isn't in the foreground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was pretty shocked that this was accepted, I've been a longtime spotify fan and assumed I would have to be getting an android to get it on mobile (I'll probably still get an android anyway)

<comment><USER6> Maybe the google voice PR fiasco has caused a review of the approval rules.

Hard to tell with a company that is so opaque.

<comment><USER7> Why would you assume there was a change?

Pandora's been on the iPhone for some time.

<comment><USER6> Because there obviously is some conflict between this application and the iTunes store.

Read here for more info:

[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1913680,00....](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1913680,00.html)

Pandora is closer to a radio station than a music store.

<comment><USER7> Spotify still sounds an awful lot like an IP-radio station. (Albeit, more like a caching radio jukebox). But it still sounds more like Pandora than iTunes.

I simply don't think ad-supported media is ever a _replacement_ threat to a superior ad-free for-purchase alternative.

E.g. HULU is a substantial threat to subscription tv. But no real threat to TV-on-DVD sales. They just aren't the same thing.

<comment><USER5> the iphone application is only available to users who pay for spotify, not ad supported.

and its nothing like radio, I can play what I want when I want, without adverts, apart from the logistics involved in being online, there isnt a practical difference between it and itunes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> John Gruber was claiming recently that the iPhone SDK didn't allow your own codecs:

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/08/24/rhapsody>

Was he mistaken, or has Spotify started streaming songs in a different format from their desktop app that uses Ogg Vorbis?

<comment><USER9> Given most mobile devices have built-in AAC codecs but not Vorbis (Android is the odd one out here, I think, probably Maemo as well) if Spotify starts expanding to mobile devices an AAC stream (maybe lower quality than the Vorbis ones) would make sense.

I sent a mail to Spotify's support to ask, though they probably won't reply.

<comment><USER8> Nokia has always omitted Vorbis (and now Theora) from their Maemo devices for reasons they've never fully explained. You can add them fairly easily, but they don't ship them.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if you'll read this, but I'm pleased to report the Spotify team _did_ indeed reply to my inquiry:

> We aim to tell more about the streaming of Spotify mobile as soon as we can, > please keep an eye on the blog for more information!

No info, but a "stay tuned" reco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really sucks that they don't seem to be able to get an guidance on whether there app will get through or not before they create it. I'd imagine building an app like this one would be a sizable task, even more so in Google voices case.

</comment><comment><USER11> It might just be a mistake on apple's side. They have and will probably continue to revoke apps which have previously been accepted to the App Store.

<comment><USER12> I doubt it's a mistake. The fact the BBC and Wired have reported this so quickly to me indicates the hand of Apple PR, slowly working to turn the tide of negative App Store stories.

<comment><USER13> ... Or the hand of Spotify PR working to try and make it really hard for Apple to remove their app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like Apple has big plans for iTunes, and isn't really worried about this. There's a reason they're building a $1B datacenter.

</comment><comment><USER15> 6 million songs...until you lock the phone or exit the app, deeming it almost useless. So that sucks.

<comment><USER16> If they did it right you can still listen to it while it's locked.

<comment><USER17> They'll probably fix the lock part. However it is no big deal.

The main thing is that as good as Spotify is, it is useless once you close the app. You cannot even access the playlist leave playing musing alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I envy those in UK and Europe.

<comment><USER18> Disclaimer: I work for Grooveshark.

Grooveshark will hopefully have an IPhone app out soon.

<comment><USER17> Hey thanks - I did not knew about Grooveshark and now I am a fan. Its not the same as spotify but it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _In short, Apple has just approved an application which renders iTunes obsolete._

And this is why I can't wait until it shows up in the AppStore.

Edit: Except the "minor" point renkeky brings up.

<comment> bjelkeman-again iTunes obsolete? Nah. I have lots of music I don't have to pay for (already paid for) that I don't need to use or even can use Spotify to access. It is hard to use Spotify on the plane. And when I travel, even if I wanted to, the data rates when roaming in Europe are pretty appalling. €4/MByte, no thanks.

<comment><USER20> These are speedbumps compared to the larger issues that Spotify has faced. For example, Spotify is bigger than iTunes in Sweden, now: [http://www.swedishwire.com/business/687-spotify-overtakes- ap...](http://www.swedishwire.com/business/687-spotify-overtakes-apples- itunes)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best cloud host? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of launching a startup and I've decided on cloud hosting. I tried out AWS and I really like it so far, but I was wondering if anyone had any better choices. Cost isn't too much of a problem but I'm most worried about reliability.<p>Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I have had a great experience with <https://www.stormondemand.com/> so far. They offer both shared and bare-metal dedicated and they always seem to be cheap compared to others. They were rated quite high by the cloudharmony benchmarks. Not to mention their support twitter account, when needed, are really responsive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tend to use heroku's free plan for testing out ideas. I wrote a post detailing how here: [http://rawsyntax.com/post/8737142015/host-your-side- project-...](http://rawsyntax.com/post/8737142015/host-your-side-project-for- free)

</comment><comment><USER4> App Engine has a real solid infrastructure. I find it that it's extremely good at hiding implementation details - I don't care whether my database is Mongo or MySQL, I just want it to work and scale. The APIs never break and it's really cheap.

</comment><comment><USER5> You need to define your interpretation of "cloud host". It varies a lot. Are you looking for a virtual machine host with a decent API? Or are you looking for someone to manage the stack of your software? In which case, what is your stack?

</comment><comment><USER6> We've been using dotcloud (<https://www.dotcloud.com/>) and are quite happy with the results in testing. Haven't gone to production yet though so we'll see how they pan out in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER7> It should be noted that many of the services that have been mentioned (heroku, dotcloud) are built on top of AWS, so they'll be no more reliable than AWS.

Other big players in the cloud space are MS Azure and Rackspace.

</comment><comment><USER8> Trying out ep.io now. Docs are lacking a bit, but support seems superb. Ask again or contact me in a few weeks, I should have more to say then.

</comment><comment><USER9> If project is written in Ruby, take a look at Engine Yard and Heroku (it also supports node.js, Clojure and Java).

</comment><comment><USER10> We've been trying out pagodabox and love it. (PHP)</comment>


Ask HN: Who do you trust more with you data? 1. Apple, 2. Google, 3. Facebook - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I use all of them, I trust none of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really.

But if any, Apple, because I'm a paying customer in my own country.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apple wins, but not by much. They don't make their money selling my information.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's sort of how I feel ... I trust none of them but at least (to my knowledge) Apple's business model doesn't depend on them selling my information to third parties

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do we have to trust any of them more than the others, or any of them at all?

</comment><comment><USER6> They're billion dollar companies, they can't be trusted.</comment>


The Electricity-Generating Bicycle Desk That Would Power the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-electricity-generating-bicycle-desk-that-would-power-the-world/282692/

<comment><USER2> Low Tech Magazine suggests these aren't viable if you generate electricity rather than use the power directly:

[http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/bike-powered- electric...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/bike-powered-electricity- generators.html#more)

Though they avoid the many extra issues that you run into if you built it round an actual bike.

</comment><comment><USER3> I once saw a cast iron pedal powered jigsaw built in the early part of the 20th century (the heyday of mechanical machines!), and the idea has stuck with me ever since. I've tried to hack together a pedal generator with an old bike frame, but to be done right, it needs to be built from scratch by someone who can weld, like these guys did. I'm impressed and tempted.</comment>


A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video] - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/16/01/a-small-2009-car-demolishes-a-1959-chevy-in-a-crash-test <comment><USER4> Your tax dollars at work. The auto industry fought most of the improvements that make that safety improvement possible. They fought seat belts. They fought air bags. They fought crumple zones. They lost.

Except Volvo, which was usually ahead of regulations on safety. They had each of those things before they were mandated.

Volvo's CEO has announced that they want to eliminate all deaths in Volvo cars by 2020. He also says that if a self-driving car has an accident, it's the manufacturer's fault and the manufacturer's financial responsibility.

<comment><USER5> Do you have examples of the auto industry fighting safety features? I used to own an early 70s Oldsmobile Toronado which was available with both ABS and airbags. A quick Google search suggests that Chrysler and Ford had similar braking systems in 1971, possibly even better. ABS was not required by US law until 2011. 40 years after the US domestics first offered it.

I believe Ford made a big deal out of their padded dashboards in the 1950s as well but I would have to dig up references to that.

While Volvo has a great safety record they are not even close to the only manufacturer with a history of adding safety features to their cars. Safety is good business, the US domestics have known this for decades.

The 1971 Oldsmobile Torornado brochure prominently features ABS and specifically calls out the safety features available in that year: [http://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/olds/71toro/bilder/6.jpg](http://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/olds/71toro/bilder/6.jpg)

<comment><USER6> The US auto industry fought air bags for about two decades, saying they were too expensive and that people did not want them: [http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html](http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html)

"Top Ford Motor Company executives went so far as to arrange a meeting with President Nixon to plead against a federal regulation that would have required air bags in all cars, starting with 1973 models. The meeting had the desired effect: Mr. Nixon ordered the regulation quashed. Eleven years after the 1971 meeting, a transcript from secret Oval Office tapes disclosed the conversation."

I believe the Toronado air bags might have been offered just to provide a tool to say consumers did not want them.

Earlier on, they also fought seat belts. Then later, they fought _for_ state laws mandating seat belt use by drivers, just so they could say the airbags were not necessary in the presence of seat belts. And a bunch of other stuff. Classic cartel behavior.

<comment><USER7> I don't even understand their logic. Why not simply ask the government to ban or restrict the use of old cars without those safety features, after a short transition period? That would boost sales by forcing motorists to upgrade. Emission regulations in Europe work that way and they are a boon for the auto industry.

<comment><USER8> > Emission regulations in Europe work that way and they are a boon for the > auto industry.

For some reason, VW didn't see it that way wrt the diesel emissions.

Maybe you need to recheck your understanding of other motivations.

<comment><USER7> I said that auto companies could pursue their self-interest by turning regulations to their advantage, rather than opposing them. I didn't say they would embrace environmentalism in the truest depth of their hearts. Accepting emission standards for the entire industry and then cheating on them is fully consistent for an actor driven by self-interest, as long as they think they won't get caught.

Given the obviousness of the above, the real question is how you came to make such a silly post. My best guess is that you simplified the positions into "companies accept emission standards = companies GOOD on environment, but VW cheating = VW BAD on environment", and that's how you saw a contradiction. Please take a bit longer to think your posts through.

<comment><USER8> O.k. Let me be more explicit. Automobile companies have a different self- interest than you think they should. (As demonstrated by VW's action)

VW has over 450,000 people - all viewing the world differently ( as demonstrated by VW's corporate actions differently)

Out of 450,000+, excluding the dealerships, not one agreed with you enough to blow the whistle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So in 50 years we've traveled light years in safety, but only about thirty miles in naming conventions[1].

[1][https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA/Mal...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA/Malibu,+email@example.com,-118.7482466,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x80c2bd196c4ef2fb:0xe451252bd7d4d458!2m2!1d-118.459463!2d34.1002455!1m5!1m1!1s0x80e81da9f908d63f:0x93b72d71b2ea8c5a!2m2!1d-118.7797571!2d34.0259216)

<comment><USER10> The Malibu name is already over 50 years old, actually. It would have been amusing to redo this test with two Malibus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My wife and I recently finished an introductory auto mechanics class — which was an incredibly fun time and an excellent experience — and one of the recurring themes of the class was just how miserable, unreliable, and dangerous cars were ~50 years ago. This video is a good example of that; it's not just mileage or seat belts or airbags, it's everything from tires to engines to brakes.

<comment><USER12> Wish I could find an adult intro to auto mechanics class around here. That would be massively useful for everyone to learn but it seems like all anyone who already knows basic auto repair says is "YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT?!" with a sarcastic condescending tone, and I guess that attitude filters down to lack of education since it is _obvious_ or whatever.

But on the positive note there is a 101 to gun safety class every two city blocks so I have that going for me...

<comment><USER13> This is going to sound daft at first, but hear me out...

Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 on Steam is actually a reasonable, entertaining way to walk through the basics of auto repair. It will help you learn he names and functions of individual parts and systems as well as how they are interconnected, what they look like, their relative cost, and generally where they are. In the game you will, for example, start with real-life diagnostic codes and then troubleshoot from there, buying parts you hope will fix the issue.

After playing the game if you go to YouTube and search for your exact car (by year, make, and model), you'll find a bunch of repair videos. You'll now have the vocabulary and basic understanding to follow along with any common repair.

<comment><USER14> Also /r/justrolledintotheshop you discover a significant amount of information by looking at that stuff and dropping a comment asking what you're seeing (if somebody hasn't already done that, which has usually happened). The denizens of that subreddit are incredibly nice and the subreddit is halfway hilarious and terrifying: some people drive these things[0]… around you…

[0] [http://imgur.com/90AvmSL](http://imgur.com/90AvmSL)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you saw this video almost 7 years ago there's really nothing new here. At the risk of being redundant, it should have "[2009]" in the title. Here's an article from 2009 with aftermath pics, etc. showing the difference in occupant protection: [http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs- reveals...](http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs-reveals- before-and-after-of-malibu-bel-air-cr/)

<comment><USER16> "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Insurance Institute For Highway Safety."

No one is safe from link rot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They sure don't make 'em like they used to.

<comment><USER18> Thank god.

<comment><USER19> Thank the federal government.

<comment><USER20> Did the federal government invent any safety features, or did they just mandate them once car manufacturers invented them?

<comment><USER19> That's some serious revisionist history, right there: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_response)

<comment><USER20> The section you linked to doesn't seem to say anything about who invented various automobile safety mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To add a personal perspective, when I got my first car in 1970, there were about 50,000 deaths per year for 200 million people. We were driving 75 - <USER2> on the interstates in the midwest on bias-ply tires with drum brakes and solid rear axles. Despite more than a 50% increase in population, total fatalities are under 35K/year, and trending down. By 2013 (the last year in wikipedia), the fatality rate was 2.5X lower than 45 years earlier.

<comment><USER22> I suspect the number of cars (per capita) has dramatically increased too, hilighting the improved safety even more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like how they added the detail of the fuzzy dice for the older car.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish that that someone did some tests between old and new software, I bet uptime of old software/hardware would be higher than our current tech stack.

<comment><USER25> I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.) Hardware-wise, there's memory protection and virtualization, whereas old Unix, Windows, etc. all let you crap all over any piece of memory because there was no efficient way to prevent arbitrary machine code from doing that. Security also improved tremendously, in relative terms.

So we're far from unhackable, never-crashing software, but then cars, too are still relatively dangerous, just much less so than they used to be.

(Now one interesting thing that I wonder about, though, with all those thank yous going out to the government, Ralph Nader and other deities in sibling comments, is just how reliable this crash test is; meaning, what happens if you try other angles, which are not in the _standard_ test.)

<comment><USER26> >I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.)

BTW, Java does have implementation-defined or unspecified behavior (for instance, using the same objects from different threads without proper coordination), but there's much less of it and it's easier to avoid.

<comment><USER25> That's true, and it's true of most languages, and unfortunately people trip over it even when they can totally avoid it by hiding threads behind other abstractions. So yeah, silly of me to have forgotten it.

That said, AFAIK _language-level_ invariants in Java (and Python, etc.) cannot be violated by the lack of thread safety; meaning, you can still inspect every live object and see its state. _Program-level_ invariants might go to heck, for sure. So what I should have said is more along the lines of "memory safety" than "lack of undefined behavior"; I'm not sure what the shortest and most precise way to put it is, though. (It does not quite end with memory safety but it doesn't quite get to lack of undefined behavior, either.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of the classic Chevrolet Corvairs which were equipped with a single-piece steering column that could impale the driver in a head-on collision.

<comment><USER28> Was by no means confined to the Corvair. Early Mustangs (65-most of 67) had non-collapsible steering columns (and 65s didn't come with even lap belts standard [federal mandate in 66]).

65s also had single-circuit brakes, meaning the leak of just one wheel cylinder (not entirely uncommon) could render the entire braking system inoperative, leaving you heading towards a collision with no brakes, a one- piece "Spear-o-matic" steering column and no lap belts. Ugly, so two of the first mods I did to my '65 were dual-circuit braking system and lap belts. (The steering column change is unfortunately quite involved.)

<comment><USER29> Basically everything pre-mid-'60s had this.

<comment><USER14> IIRC it was also common for the engine to follow the steering column into the passenger compartment to polish off the driver and break the passenger's legs in case they hadn't been maimed yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Stupid question: where do they get the 1959 vehicle for these tests? Is it just an old one laying around somewhere?

<comment><USER31> They bought it off a classified ad. The guy they bought it from was pissed when he found out what they did. [1]

[1] [http://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive- histories/automoti...](http://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive- histories/automotive-history-an-x-ray-look-at-gms-x-frame-1957-1970/) Search for "Jim Snell"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Direct link to video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U)

</comment><comment><USER33> Old people: "They sure don't make 'em like they used to!"

Me: Thank goodness.

</comment><comment><USER34> When you start describing midsize family sedans as 'small cars' you cross the line into clickbait.

<comment><USER35> Midsize family sedans have absurdly small interiors these days. Maybe it's the horribly large dash boards, but they just have no room. I hate them.

<comment><USER36> A lot of space is used up on safety equipment. As one small example A-Pillars (at the edges of the windshield) are very large to incorporate the safety cage, rollover protection, and airbags. [1] This leads to a weird problem where the car is very safe in a crash, but slightly more likely to get in an accident due to visibility issues.

There are existing lane change warning systems for rear visibility, I expect there will soon be forward sensing systems as well; and of course SDCs are coming as well.

Seats also take up a significant amount of room - partly to safety considerations, but also a bit to lazy design.

1\. [http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance- safet...](http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-safety- impede-visibility)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We've made enormous progress in holding up under collision, but giant steps back in collision avoidance. I remember around 5 years ago seeing a concept for the "car of the future" as basically a glass box optimizing visibility. In fact we've done the opposite: high beltlines, low and elongated roofs, rear visibility and rear side windows approaching zero.

Volkswagen makes just about the only high-quality compact in the neighborhood of $20k that you can actually see out of. Mazda3, Prius, Elantra, etc. are seemingly part of a concerted effort to make the greatest amount of damage possible to the driver's situational awareness. Why? Just so they can sell you the blindspot monitoring options?

</comment><comment><USER38> If car safety stayed at 1960 levels, there would be about 60,000 car deaths per year. Valuing a human life at about $5 million, those 30,000 extra deaths would have an economic cost of $150 billion per year.

<comment><USER10> It would be a lot worse than that, actually. In 1960 there were about 720 billion vehicle miles traveled in the US, and these days it's about 3 trillion, an increase of a bit over 4x. In 1960 there were about 36,000 traffic fatalities, so given a bit over 4x exposure you'd see about 150,000 traffic fatalities per year today. That's about 120,000 or $600 billion.

<comment><USER39> Even that might be conservative, since it seems reasonable that deaths would increase more than linearly with increased highway traffic density.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's a lot of obsession with head-on collisions in regards to safety but there are two things commonly forgotten about. The ability to stop quickly and rollover risk.

I've always felt a large family sedan like a Ford Taurus was probably the overall safest thing you could drive. Decent stopping distance, low rollover risk and lots of crush zone room for modern engineering to absorb impact.

<comment><USER41> A fully loaded Taurus has all of the safety features (except I'm not sure it has forward collision warning? I think it does)

It's also based on a Volvo platform. And very comfortable. XD

I have no idea why nobody likes them, but they are awesome 2nd owner cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It looks to me like Consumer Reports did an awful lot of cherry-picking of the data in that video.

First, it looks to me like they made the collision happen at the max speed the Malibu could tolerate without collapsing the Malibu's passenger compartment. A slower collision might have been less catastrophic to the antique. A higher speed might have been catastrophic to the Malibu.

Second, they picked an old car built before seatbelt introduction and emphasized that aspect.

Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern cars have been specifically engineered to handle.

Fourth, note how carefully the video is edited so that you cannot see the right side of the antique post-crash either overhead or from the side. The editors didn't want to show _anything_ that would detract from their chosen message.

Modern cars really are a lot safer and _way_ more reliable than cars when I was a kid, and I'm grateful for it. When my wife got pregnant, the first thing I did was sell my 69 Chevy Nova because I felt that to be responsible for my child, I needed to take care of my life by driving a safer car. All that said, it irks me that Consumer Reports treated the production and editing of this film as a propaganda exercise instead of a straight-up tell-the-facts documentary.

<comment><USER43> 1) All the tests they do happen at a defined speed, for the front overlap it's 40 MPH [1] which it looks like the video was doing. Can't really fault them for using their standard tests.

2) It was to show how much better cars have gotten in the 50 years (1959 to 2009 when the video was produced) seat belts didn't even appear as a standard fitting on a car until 1958 on a Saab.

3) New cars are engineered to handle all the types of crashes that the IIHS tests for. I don't see your point.

4) The newer car had basically no damage on the opposite side and I doubt the older car did better than the 2009. It's not shocking at all that the non involved side of the car wouldn't take much damage. They don't even track the movement on that side of the car during their tests.

[1] [http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal- crash-...](http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal-crash-tests)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There is a whole car-culture set around rebuilding these cars to factory spec, but there was a reason people were putting disc brakes from a '75 in a '56\. Dual brake (front & rear) was not a mandatory thing until '69.

</comment><comment><USER45> I do not doubt the premise of the video, but there appears to be a large rust cloud on impact. Did they use a structurally sound old car or did they help prove their point by using a rusted out car?

<comment><USER15> You're seeing the paint (of each car's color) being atomized upon impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is certainly dramatic, but it is important to realize that the majority of automobile safety improvements came before 1960:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#/media/File:USA_annual_VMT_vs_deaths_per_VMT.png)

We've become increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology into vehicles as the returns have diminished dramatically.

This is one reason why automobiles all look the same these days, with gigantic A-pillars, obscured windows views necessitating integrated cameras, and the universal "fat american" bulging sides appearance.

<comment><USER10> A linear scale for a graph like that is terribly misleading. The graph looks almost flat lately, but that's just because it's relatively near zero. Blow that section up to give it some vertical room and it will tell a different story.

Edit: just to put some actual numbers on this, Wikipedia says that deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US was 1.07 in 2014, and 1.44 in 2004. That's an improvement of 25% in just the past ten years. You only have to go back 25 years to reach a fatality rate double that of 2014.

<comment><USER47> Not to mention that the death rate is a tailing indicator for safety - <USER3> were a lot more deathtrap junkers from the 70s and 80s on the road in 2004 then there are in 2016.

<comment><USER10> That's a good point. You could freeze safety at the current model year and you'd still see significant improvements for another decade or two as older cars age out of the fleet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Matt Cutts -- New 30 day challenge: No news - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/no-news-challenge/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mattcutts%2FuJBW+%28Matt+Cutts%3A+Gadgets%2C+Google%2C+and+SEO%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> I've been taking steps to reduce my sources of news to a small group of higher quality, paid sources. I've settled on The Economist for world developments, WIRED for general entertainment, and Hacker News for technology. So far, I've noticed a pretty substantial increase in the quality of reading, and I haven't felt cut off from the new developments. The experiment is going so well that I may even replace HN with issues of Hacker Monthly.

If my experiment is anything to go by, there may be a market for paid news in the future after all.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guess we won't be able to get Google support from Matt on HN this month. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I pretty much read HN, Quora and Reddit. I am trying really hard to drop reddit completely - which makes me have F5-ism on HN and Quora :(</comment>


Google to point extremist searches towards anti-radicalisation websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/02/google-pilot-extremist-anti-radicalisation-information <comment><USER2> so Dont try to fix the problem, just limit the consequences.

this type of action is likely to have the exactly opposite effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Next step, every time you search for a conservative term it redirects you to a mandatory democratic re-education training camp.</comment>


Show HN: Data visualization news - <AUTHOR> http://dvblogger.com/ <comment><USER2> Great! Bookmarking this. Two points of suggestion though.

1\. The antispam filter is a bit confusing. Took me a while to understand that it expects me to input tag number three in the field.

2\. After submitting a link, I received no feedback and at this point, I'm not sure whether it's pending approval or if I did something wrong.

Edit: Ok, so now the submitted link showed up. But not with my Twitter profile. Not that I care, but that's another confusing thing in my view.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestion.

1\. I plan to improve a number of elements (e.g RSS for tags, newsletter, antispam ...) Current state is something like MVP...

2\. Website has no approval mechanism. Your post is visible in five minutes because of website caching.

3\. twitter profile name will be fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An RSS feed or even a daily digest email would be really helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this I have in plan (e.g. best of week/month). But for this I need enough quality content and users.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the site!

Best of week/month will require quality content, I agree. But it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem if people don't remember the site. Having an RSS feed will get you mind share even if posts are sporadic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without a description of what this is, I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be seeing. It's links to random visualization on the web? Is it the empty site hosting the links? I'm sorry, but I don't get it.

<comment><AUTHOR> My plan is to create a community driven site that collects interesting links in the field of data visualization (maps, tools, libraries, infographics, tutorials, ...).

<comment><USER5> I really like the idea and have a couple of build on possibilities (that you may have already considered). 1\. I think this would be awesome in a Pinterest style with the graph as the splash page. 2\. I don't disquis. I love the hacker news local comment model but do not understand the scope and scale of moderation work that comes with it (thanks dang!) 3\. A special flag for projects that git or other hosted source to separate the 'just shiny' from the 'I can learn from the shiny'

Good luck in this space, I think there is a lot of room for a community like this. Also check out datatau for some other story leads that might better fit in your community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this a 100% community driven site, or are there some dedicated editors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently it is list of interesting links that I found (except 4 links). But for the future, I hope it will be community driven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey!

Nice project. It would be nice if you could add the submission dates. As a user I would like to know how current a submission is

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Now are dates available if you click on vote/comment link.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for all your comments and suggestions. I updated the website.

1) you see date added 2) you can subscribe to future planned "best of the month" newsletter 3) twitter names are fixed 4) rss channels was added

</comment><comment><USER8> Great site...looking forward to it..</comment>


Google handed over years of e-mails belonging to WikiLeaks chatroom admin - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/google-handed-over-years-of-e-mails-belonging-to-wikileaks-chatroom-admin/

<comment><USER2> I've never owned a gmail account but have sent to plenty. Gmail is like the 21st century party landline but only a relative few people can listen in.

> Because I talked to Julian Assange, all information held by Google relating > to my user account with them can be handed over to US prosecutors—not just > the contents of my conversations with Julian.

There it is: If you have online contact with someone that's of interest, there's a chance all of your info will be of interest also.

<comment><USER3> Have you considered the possibility that we hear about surveillance of GMail accounts only because so many people happen to use GMail? Is there any particular property of Google that makes it more likely to cooperate with government than any other email provider?

Or, if you're in the "host your own email" crowd, what makes you think your ISP won't cooperate with the government just like Google does?

<comment><USER4> It depends on what you mean by "host your own email." Sure, a server at, say, RackSpace, might be vulnerable to government intrusion without your knowledge, but if you have a physical server at your home, then the best that the government can do (without your knowledge) is to tap your upstream connection, which does little for past emails.

<comment><USER3> >the best that the government can do (without your knowledge) is to tap your upstream connection, which does little for past emails.

Really only applies to emails before Room 641A. It might be easier to go after email at the provider level, but NSA is capable of capturing all internet traffic if it wants to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What could Google have done better?

(Specifically in regards to this case. And assuming they pushed back on orders like this, like they claim to do.)

<comment><USER6> The way I see it, Google set up a system that is _easy_ to conduct surveillance on. Gigabytes of storage, no way to actually delete messages over IMAP or POP3, and in various subtle ways GMail discourages the use of encryption.

This is all probably inadvertent, but it indicates that protecting users from this sort of surveillance is _not_ a priority.

<comment><USER7> I believe you made this claim twice in this thread. Kindly visit your gmail settings, which offers these choices:

When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder:

* Archive the message (default)

* Move the message to the Trash

* Immediately delete the message forever

Ok then.

<comment><USER8> You don't know that actually deletes anything, and defaults matter.

Also, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929421)

<comment><USER9> If you don't believe that they delete it when you tell them to delete it, then using Gmail is already a non-starter. Also, yes, defaults do matter: the outcry from users from not being able to undelete an email would be much louder than those wanting instant deletion.

<comment><USER6> "the outcry from users from not being able to undelete an email would be much louder than those wanting instant deletion."

[citation needed]

Seriously, I have trouble believing that anyone would complain about "delete" carrying any meaning other than "delete." I also find it hard to take such people seriously, given the existence of a Trash folder as a first stop for deleted messages, and All Mail as a second stop (and what is the default for deleting from All Mail? Having the message come right back to All Mail! Brilliant...).

Thanks for the tip on how to fix this behavior. It is an easy option to miss...

<comment><USER9> Using the default Gmail settings of (a) Enable IMAP and (b) Auto Expunge on, I just deleted an email via Sparrow (IMAP). The email instantly went straight into the Trash folder and is not visible in All Mail. I expect the email to be auto-deleted in about 30 days. I agree that the behavior you're describing would be weird, but I'm not seeing it. Can you please double check?

No, I don't have a citation, but is it so hard to believe that lots of people want an undelete? I accidentally delete emails all the time and I go into the trash and fish them out. Not giving users an undo seems ... unfriendly.

EDIT: I see, it applies to Custom Folders and delete only removes the label; doesn't move it to the trash. Here's what Google has to say about it. Is this a default IMAP behavior or Gmail-IMAP specific? [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78755?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78755?hl=en)

<comment><USER6> I just confirmed the behavior: I deleted a message from my Inbox, and my mail client put it in my Trash folder. I deleted the message from Trash, and it was still in All Mail. I deleted from All Mail, and when I refresh the folder it is still there. I checked the network log, and the correct EXPUNGE commands are being sent.

As for "undelete," I believe the purpose of the Trash folder is to support that. I have yet to find the email client that does not, as a default, store deleted messages in the Trash folder. I am not disputing that people _want_ that functionality, what I am saying is that I do not think people want the behavior that I am seeing.

The fact that GMail treats "delete" as "remove labels" is _very_ problematic. IMAP supports labels, including client-defined labels. Treating folders as "labels" only breaks the abstraction IMAP presents. I suppose this was part of Mark Crispin's gripes with GMail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Rouge" whistleblower group? Really Ars? As opposed to what, an NSA approved whistleblower group?

</comment><comment><USER11> The title makes it seem like they did it for fun, rather than as the result of a court order.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can someone clarify if Google had to reveal they had done this? The article implies that they did not, and thus the reveal was a "not evil" gesture of transparency. But I'm wondering if they may have known it would get out anyway and they are just getting in front of it. Anyone have more information?

<comment><USER13> Your wording implies that you think Google has something to hide or to be embarrassed about releasing the data, and that is not the case.

The government asks for people's data all the time, and Google is legally obligated to provide the requested data. They then go the extra step and tell the users as soon as they are allowed to.

There's nothing here to "get in front of."

<comment><USER12> I could have chosen more fair words - that isn't what I meant to say.

Anyway sounds like it's generally a good guy move, just wanted to check what others thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why for heaven's sake does anyone who does anything that might piss of a government use GMail or any hosted mail provider?

This is far beyond me.

<comment><USER15> The definition of "anyone who does anything that might piss off a government" includes a lot of people. What if I become a political activist in 20 years time, I might well piss of a future government, should I stop using gmail now in case that happens?

<comment><USER14> Not now, but exactly at that point in time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The online "territory" will shift away from America eventually, especially for non Americans who are still stuck under the USA's influence.

This is exactly the kind of thing, along with recent events, that will eventually deal a major blow to US based tech.

</comment><comment><USER17> Already thoroughly discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920530) and here: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921005](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921005)</comment>


Show HN: I made a service to order custom SVG illustrations for your website - <AUTHOR> https://updating.design <comment><AUTHOR> This is our side project. We are an in-house team, no 3rd party involved. If you have special requests, please contact us!

<comment><USER2> Do you animate SVG also ?</comment></comment>


Supreme Court Says Kids Can Sue Trump Over Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/07/supreme-court-says-kids-can-sue-trump-over-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> How's that going to work. each child is injured in the amount of 100k in the year 2100.

Great here is a US treasury bond payable in 2100. Now go take that to the bank.</comment>


Economics journal only publishes results that are no big deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/17/18624812/publication-bias-economics-journal <comment><USER2> There are at least a couple of others:

Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis (multidisciplinary, dominated by the social sciences) [0]

New Negatives In Plant Science (biology, discontinued) [1]

Journal of Negative Results (ecology) [2]

At first I thought JASNH was more an art project than a serious journal. Now I'm not so sure.

[0] [http://www.jasnh.com/](http://www.jasnh.com/)

[1] [https://www.journals.elsevier.com/new-negatives-in-plant- sci...](https://www.journals.elsevier.com/new-negatives-in-plant-science)

[2] [http://www.jnr-eeb.org/](http://www.jnr-eeb.org/)

<comment><USER3> > _At first I thought JASNH was more an art project than a serious journal. > Now I 'm not so sure_

Perhaps it started out as such? Even if it did it represents a legitimate need, and if there is any field which could embrace an arts project and take it seriously it's the social sciences. I for one would be happy if they did!

(Thanks for the links!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Academic journals, in general, need to evolve for a lot of fields.

Besides being too closed and a bit crusty, I think journals work well for sciences and possibly also for philosophy. That's not surprising, since they evolved around these. But, for "soft sciences" (economics, psychology, etc.), I don't think the system works very well. Possibly some areas of health/medicine sciences/studies too.

First, they have a lot of problems in practice. The replication crisis is a big example, and it impacted psychology most severely. Economics has this issue, which kind of comes down to ex post hypothesizing.

There are fairly serious issues with generalizability. Even if results of some economic or behavioral study/experiment are good, can it be generalized past the narrowest terms of the experiment.

The publishing system (or, maybe "publishing" is not even the ideal frame) needs to work in a way that promotes accumulation of evidence, data and replication but the system seems to be producing sprawl.

I'm not sure what the answers are, but glad to see there's an interest in change.

</comment><comment><USER5> The effort is admirable, but I don't see this fixing the problem. An important part of the evaluation of academics is the reputation of the journals they publish in, and that reputation is primarily driven by the "impact" of their publications, in the worst cases measured by the Impact Factor [1]. Negative results usually just don't have what is understood as impact by evaluators. This means that there is little incentive to actually publish negative results here, and that those results will likely always be disproportionately outnumbered by selective results - unless the evaluation system changes.

In other words: I don't think scarcity of publication venues is the main reason few negative results get published.

(Disclosure: I'm involved with another project that hopes to alleviate the problem. [2])

[1] [https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that- ca...](https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or- break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a)

[2] [https://medium.com/flockademic/why-replication-studies- are-n...](https://medium.com/flockademic/why-replication-studies-are-not- rewarded-and-how-to-fix-that-523c2387820e)

<comment><USER6> Part of the problem is actually in the process of being solved: the social role that Holy Immaculate Science had been acquiring.

I know this sounds a bit reactionary in times of antivaxers and even flat- earthers, but we cannot afford to trust "Science" in the way we had been doing up to the mid 2010s. How much social policy was being enacted in the name of p-hacked psychology and social science? How much of our baseline ideologies?

Even the first announcement of results from the LHC was botched. Now, you may say "great, this is science, it's supposed to be conjectures and refutations". But then we can't trust it as guarantee of ground truth. Scientific papers can't be used in service of internet debates, etc.

<comment><USER7> > How much social policy was being enacted in the name of p-hacked psychology > and social science? How much of our baseline ideologies?

I'm interested in how often some interest group _pays_ for p-hacked results so that they can use it to strengthen their position in some way?

In my opinion, it's very hard to have good science whenever there is external money in the picture. The temptation/pressure to slightly tweak the variables or scope of the study to achieve a desired outcome for the benefactor is just too high.

The worst part is that this allows people to strengthen their biases by cherry picking "scientific studies" that seem to agree with their position even if intuitively something doesn't seem right. And science is the highest authority you can appeal to, so there is no way to refute it short of funding your own, better study that arrives at the opposite conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very relevant in biology. Countless Honours and MSc students every year try to achieve "results" and probably the majority of these may have as a first result a negative result, or if you will, the _empty_ result.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, it is very useful. Any result that either proves nothing new or doesn't prove or disprove anything strengthens our confidence in the existing data knowledge base. This should even happen at school science fairs: If a student presents to me a study about how bicarbonate of soda does nothing to help plant x with growth, I would probably rate it highly as long as the content is consistent.

It sounds stupid to students, but "proving nothing" is _not nothing_. It is actually another grain of rice in the scale of how we approach topics that have not yet achieved clear results. And sometimes it's more than just a grain, it may be a confirmation of old results that if you had not redone the experiment yourself would remain an abstract or somewhat removed prospect.

<comment><USER9> Agreed and additionally people seem to hold their bachelor and master theses to vigorous standards. My bachelor thesis was better than my masters, but neither are worth anything. Not topically, not didactically, not scientifically. I hope nobody will ever read them again. I still got good grades.

I was already employed while writing both and really didn't put my attention to it. I doubt you can reasonably expect these works to be anything more. At least not if the focus isn't an academic career with further degrees.

Maybe learning to write something formal is worth it, but the results are expected to be disillusioning from a scientific standpoint. Or maybe it is the exceptions that are the goal here.

<comment><USER10> If you ever find yourself in the presence of something novel that you need to report on, your prior training and experience will make your report or writeup more accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two other places where we should be rewarding boredom: finance, and politics. There's no reason why good, important work should be correlated with excitement or interest.

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree with the other commenter that this is a great step forward, but it still doesn't solve the problem of academics being incentivized to publish in the most prestigious journal possible. Magazines like SURE are by design, not going to be nearly as prestigious as others which publish more "sexy" results.

It would be far better if the most prestigious journals pre-committed to publishing studies based on their methodology and hypothesis, before seeing their results.

<comment><USER13> > "problem of academics being incentivized to publish in the most prestigious > journal possible."

Is this a problem? If you have interesting, ground-breaking, or just really surprising results, what is wrong with trying more prestigious journal? Problem is not that there are journals that take only "interesting" results, but that a lot of research is not published at all, just because results are as expected. And this journal fixes that.

> It would be far better if the most prestigious journals pre-committed to > publishing studies based on their methodology and hypothesis, before seeing > their results. This is quite interesting proposal, could work well for > experimental sciences, but worse for stuff like math / computer science, > theoretical physics.

<comment><USER5> > Problem is not that there are journals that take only "interesting" results, > but that a lot of research is not published at all, just because results are > as expected. And this journal fixes that.

It does not fix that because, as GP mentioned, researchers are incentivised to publish in prestigious journals, which this journal won't become. Thus, negative results still won't get published.

<comment><USER14> I've always thought academics need volume as well as quality publications for tenure, this looks like a landing spot for cutting-room-floor CV filler papers that would normally get ignored. Still helpful for career progression @ good universities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Journals can be study-space filters for large-P-value results. Statistically a certain number of these results are by chance, and will prove irreproducible. That can mean, depending on the mean size of studies, that a good fraction of everything in a particular journal is wrong.

<comment><USER16> Like with a funnel plot?

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how the acronym spells out "sure" (guessing it was deliberate).

<comment><USER18> Funny how no other journal has called themselves Series of Highly Impressive Trends.

<comment><USER19> funny this coming from vox

<comment><USER16> Vox publishes it's share of viral clickbait but it also publishes some quite good investigative journalism. Like Sara Kilff's stuff on hospital billing. There are writers at Vox who I think are bad but also writers there good enough for me to put them in my RSS reader. There's less editorial control at Vox which means both that the bad is worse but also that the good is better. And the bad is probably what goes viral on Facebook to pay for the stuff I consume.

<comment><USER20> Vox is the left's version of infowars or breitbart. Why vox is allowed here but their polar opposites are not is beyond me.

Vox and "good journalism" are not words that belong together. Vox is like most "news" today - pure biased agenda. Hopefully, in a few years time, a recession washes away all the trash rotting in the media space today.

<comment><USER21> Who says breitbart is not allowed here?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=www.breitbart&sort=byDate&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=www.breitbart&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice, I never thought there's such a problem to begin with, but it makes sense. Goes broader than just "boring" study results, clickbaits and controversial topics are flooding the news feed, dulls the critical thinking. Reading through something boring at first may give interesting results, learned it first hand studying Hegels dialectics :D

<comment> dao- > Reading through something boring at first may give interesting results, > learned it first hand studying Hegels dialectics :D

Nice. If you enjoyed that, you may want to check out Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment and/or Negative Dialectics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully journals like this will have a huge benefit at helping meta- analysis. As the article describes, mere chance can produce p < 0.5 with enough studies. Without the null hypothesis studies being published/included, meta-analysis can suffer from huge sampling bias and draw horrible conclusions because they treat the outlier as the norm.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you like this, you might also like: [https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice](https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice) \- which tries to tackle over-reaching conclusions from experimentation in mice

</comment><comment><USER25> They should make some kind of pop-sci summary and publish it as a magazine. Serious intellectuals will subscribe and will henceforth be more fun at dinner parties.

"Did you know, dear aunt, that in 1992 a study analysed the relationship between the amount of spiders in College bedrooms and GDP"

"and what did they find? are spiders bad for the economy?"

"well absolutely nothing, of course, not even that there was no relationship, but it's nice they tried and it was a very high quality study".

</comment><comment><USER26> Now that we've got SURE for economics, let's do one for climate change.

After all, "publication bias affects every research field out there."

Vox is basically explaining fake news without any sense of irony about how this plays out in every other industry and field.

> "Let's say hundreds of scientists are studying a topic. The ones who find > counterintuitive, surprising results in their data will publish those > surprising results as papers.

>The ones who find extremely standard, unsurprising results — say, "This intervention does not have any effects," or, "There doesn't seem to be a strong relationship between any of these variables" — will usually get rejected from journals, if they bother turning their disappointing results into a paper at all.

>That's because journals like to publish novel results that change our understanding of the field. Null results (where the researchers didn't find anything) or boring results (where they confirm something we already know) are much less likely to be published. And efforts to replicate other people's papers often aren't published, either, because journals want something new and different."

Very similar to my complaint on this issue: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432720)

Oh, and look, it's sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation, the definition of globalism writ large:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Beginni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Beginnings)

<comment><USER21> How is it similar to your complaint, other than both being about potential biases in the scientific literature? Theirs is about publication bias against null resources, yours is against people without the education background that qualifies them to run a particular study; I don't see how they're that similar.</comment></comment>


TechStar's Brad Feld Discusses Accelerators vs. Incubators - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/wNad4MPWLcY

<comment><USER2> TL;DR:

Accelerators are giving money and investing in companies. Adding value through mentorship, money, etc.

Incubators are taking money and investing in things like infrastructure. Colocation isn't inherently beneficial.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe Brad Feld has an official role with TechStars besides being a mentor (of which there are dozens). He also wrote a book with TechStars founder David Cohen. His main position is with The Foundry Group. Just FYI. <http://www.techstars.com/program/mentors/bfeld/>

<comment><USER4> I believe he's more than a mentor - he founded TechStars.

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

<comment><USER3> Wow, thanks for pointing that out! Interesting to see Congressman Jared Polis on the list too. I'm having trouble finding other sources, but I pulled up the source cited by the Wikipedia article and it says they were partners: <http://www.dailycamera.com/archivesearch/ci_13072183></comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Labs Bring The Webian Shell – A Full Screen Web Browser Concept - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2011/06/06/webian-shell/

<comment><USER2> I downloaded it and gave it a try. I couldn't get over the fact that I can't open things in a new tab and the keyboard shortcuts I'm used to for opening new empty tabs also don't work. Those issues will get fixed soon I assume but it makes this basically unusable for me right now. That said, it's always nice to see innovation in how people interact with browsers and I'm happy that Mozilla is working on this.</comment>