Fancy Believing in the Goblin King (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://lifeonmagrs.blogspot.com/2017/10/fancy-believing-in-goblin-king-my.html <comment><USER2> The ultimate "hack" is to hack your own brain. It's how the metaphorical man riding the elephant [1] gets the most mileage out of his efforts, figuring out how to manipulate the elephant any way necessary.

The intelligent, rational part of the brain sneers derisively at the invisible mask. It's obviously not there. It obviously can't do anything. It is, in its own way, entirely correct. Yet the elephant does not think that way, and to it, the mask is there and effective, and in its own way, it too is entirely correct.

This is how you break bad habits, make good habits, deal with procrastination, and any number of other life goals the rider may find desirable. You don't just sit there futilely trying to kick the elephant harder directly in the direction you want to go; you figure out how to lead it to want what you want it to want. The rider has an immense amount of control, once the rider embraces how little control the rider has.

(At least for a while, one of the YCombinator entrance questions was to describe a time you hacked a system or something. I think if I were ever to apply, I'd pull my answer from this. One of my biggest personal ones is just telling myself "Look, literally millions of other people have done this (in some cases billions), surely I can manage too?" Is, for example, the first day of college scary in some ways? Sure. But how hard can it _really_ be? An awful lot of people make it through the first day.)

[1]: [http://sourcesofinsight.com/the-elephant-and-the- rider/](http://sourcesofinsight.com/the-elephant-and-the-rider/)

<comment><USER3> Interesting metaphor.

Any links you can share on taming the elephant?

<comment><USER4> Years ago, in possibly Thailand, I went for an elephant ride through the jungle with my early teenaged daughter. She was very much into "how things work". The guide sat up on the elephant's neck and drove by touching her behind the ears with his feet. We sat further back in a pair of seats. At one point the guide got down and ran backwards in front to video my daughter sitting on the elephant's neck and driving. Being who she was she decided actually drive and put her foot against one of the elephants ears just like the guide. Without missing a step the elephant reached around with her trunk, looped around my daughter's leg and placed it gently back on her shoulder. (The elephant's shoulder.)

Ok, this isn't a lot of practical help on taming an elephant, except that maybe "befriending" or "establishing a working relationship with" would be better words than taming.

<comment><USER3> Nice parable :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This reminded me of the psychomagic thing by Alejandro Jodoworsky. It's a therapeutic technique to heal psychological traumas via symbolic acts much like the invisible mask. The premise is that through these symbols one can communicate with the unconscious.

Much like hypnosis or placebos it seems to work on some people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly I've heard this mask meme before - but from a different fantasy author, Terry Pratchett, in _Maskerade_. I wonder if there's a common origin. Either way it's a lovely story and empowering for some who hear it.

<comment><USER6> Definitely shades of Bowie's 'the mask' routine from his mime days [https://vimeo.com/249177125](https://vimeo.com/249177125)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> David Bowie really is neat guy. Him and Trent Reznor used to best pals too. He helped Trent come clean from his smack addiction.

I would also hands down believe this man's story knowing the issues David went through balancing all of his personas.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is beautiful. I love it, and thank you for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great story. And really great of David Bowie to do such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazing! But not Neil Gaiman. Follow the tumblr chain long enough and you find the original source: [http://lifeonmagrs.blogspot.com/2017/10/fancy-believing- in-g...](http://lifeonmagrs.blogspot.com/2017/10/fancy-believing-in-goblin- king-my.html)

This is an absolutely lovely story. Thank you for sharing it. I choose to believe it's true.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, I would say the link should be updated to point to the original. OTOH, this feels gainmanesque enough.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I read the whole thing in Gaiman's voice and it fit perfectly. The only thing that tipped me off was that Gaiman would've probably been less surprised about someone he knew having met David Bowie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since this post is not a story from Neil Gaiman, I figured I'd post one that is—It's a short anecdote about his experience with Imposter Syndrome that I like:

[https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i- read-t...](https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-that- youve-dealt-with-with-impostor)

</comment><comment><USER14> @mods title is incorrect. It's a post by someone else that was re-blogged by Neil.

<comment><USER15> Yes. We've changed it now, and changed the URL from [https://neil- gaiman.tumblr.com/post/166082106996/my-friend-t...](https://neil- gaiman.tumblr.com/post/166082106996/my-friend-told-me-a-story-he-hadnt-told- anyone) to the original source.</comment></comment>


Overpopulation and Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/overpopulation-climate-change-bob-leonard <comment><USER2> Population and migration are free variables in forecasting the impact of Climate Change. Fewer people is good; more people is bad. But the details are confused by the hysteresis both in human reproduction and in the warming caused by per capita emissions.</comment>


Mossberg: Lousy ads are ruining the online experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/1/18/14304572/mossberg-lousy-ads <comment><USER2> At this point the "trust" has been lost with advertisers (if it was ever there to begin with) and any solution to help advertisers will _have_ to include the network equivalent of a house-arrest anklet.

For example, I am not going to start trusting a previously-crappy ad network just because they "promise" to start serving nicer ads now. It would be necessary to enforce a "data cap" on stuff received from that entire ad network, and add other safeguards to ensure that any antics have limited scope at best. That way, if the ad company really _has_ changed and serves small and reasonable stuff, they should have no problem; otherwise, they will.</comment>


Startup Service - Idea Validation to building product, A/B testing and Marketing - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys/Girls,
We are based in India. We have launched 2 web based products - http://www.mingletrips.com and http://www.rishteykonnekt.com .
During this, we have learnt many things: Quickly building landing pages and getting right kind of traffic to validate the idea Designing and building MVP for next level of validation - making sure our service works and thats what the users want Multiple rounds of A/B testing - to get highest conversion rates Conversion centric design Integrating with Payment gateway Managing Google Adwords, FB Ads, etc Promoting the site on FB, Twitter,etc
We want to offer these services to other non-technical people who want to test their ideas for web startups.
What do you think about a service of this kind? Would love to hear your views. Thanks Manas <comment><USER2> I feel like this is the minimum set of skills to be a founder (tech or non- tech) in any startup.

Doing this for a founder doesn't really help them come up with the insights needed to iterate on their idea.

Coaching them through the mechanics of these concepts, as well as providing regular feedback and helping them interpret their results would be infinitely valuable though.

</comment><comment><USER3> for free??

<comment><AUTHOR> nope. not for free :)</comment></comment>


The Death of the Small Guy - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/05/the-death-of-the-small-guy.html <comment><USER2> This is a fascinating post... I have to wonder if the web is going to get more boring, with large companies solidifying their market share.</comment>


Tell HN: 'd' Shortcut - Full screen compose window in GMail - <AUTHOR>

A common complaint of the "recent" GMail redesign was the small compose window. My muscle memory failed me today and I hit the 'd' key to delete a message. To my surprise a full screen compose window opened in a new tab. This shortcut has probably been available forever but I just found it today and figured others might benefit from this as well. It also doesn't have a lot of the GMail elements (chat, tags, etc), making it a rather nice distraction free way to compose email.<p>NOTE: You must have shortcuts enabled in your settings for this to work <comment><USER2> There is an extension available on both chrome and firefox that makes gmail use the old interface.

Restored sanity to my life. What a relief it was.</comment>


JavaScript is overhyped - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/+KennethEndfinger/posts/Qun21H4amPJ

<comment><USER2> Flagged.

If author is going to say bad things about a language, author should at least put some effort into the disparagement.</comment>


Why the Much-Hyped Post-PC Era Never Arrived - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/why-the-much-hyped-post-pc-era-never-arrived.html <comment><USER2> This is like the articles people used to write about the failure of the paperless office to materialize. The revolution wasn't about literally having no paper anywhere in the office; it was about being free to use paper for what it's good for (e.g., cheat sheets, brainstorming, scratchwork) and getting it out of the roles where was terrible (archives, data listings, memos...)

Similarly, "post PC" just means you're no longer chained to a desk or forced to use Microsoft products -- not that the last PC has been stricken from the Earth.

<comment><USER3> Actually more stuff get's printed than ever before.

<comment><USER4> Got a source for that? Almost nothing gets printed in my office.

<comment><USER5> "World demand for paper is expected to grow by 2.1% per year until 2020."[1]

Though that's not exactly fair analysis. See for instance this graph published by the European Commission Joint Research Center [2][3]. Developed countries will use paper 0.5% more per year (less than population growth of 0.8%) but emerging countries (like China at 0.5% population growth) use it at 4% more per year.

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109000227)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/luBKny9.png](http://i.imgur.com/luBKny9.png)

[3] [http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/eur22544en.pdf](http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/eur22544en.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It arrived and we're living in it. The most popular operating system in the world is a mobile OS. So is the second most popular.

This idea that PCs would vanish is a straw man; that's never been part of the "post-PC" concept. Even in a post-PC world PC sales would still be expected to go up over time, simply because of population growth.

> Chris says that this is because there are a lot of jobs that you simply > can't do with a phone. To illustrate that, Michael Dell asked, "When your > kid goes off to college, are you going to give him only a cell phone?"

Ha, this just proves the point. By the time almost any kid goes off to college today, they've already had a cell phone for years. PC is just what they use to do their homework. That is the exact definition of what the post-PC world was predicted to look like.

> As a result, there is no post-PC era, but rather an era in which the device > you use is the one that works the best at the time and under the > circumstances.

Again--this is the exact definition of what people mean when they say post-PC. A decade ago, in the PC era, every single thing you wanted to do on a computer had to happen on a PC. Today there is an explosion of connected devices, and the PC has moved from being the central object, to a specialized tool you use when you need to.

<comment><USER7> > This idea that PCs would vanish is a straw man; that's never been part of > the "post-PC" concept.

That's not what people were saying. Even as recently as December 2013.

> Even in a post-PC world PC sales would still be expected to go up over time, > simply because of population growth.

That's certainly not what people were saying. There were even claims that low volumes would make the PC more expensive, and out of reach of entire groups.

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- PC_era)

This has a good summary of what was actually said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mobile devices are mostly "consuming" devices. If you want to do computer based work, e.g. type a letter, you're going to need a different type of device (i.e. laptop or desktop, one with a decent display and keyboard).

What has changed from the desktop era of the 90's is that there are a lot more consuming devices today. People now have phones an tablets to access the Internet who wouldn't have this type access 10/15 years ago.

<comment><USER9> _> People now have phones an tablets to access the Internet who wouldn't have this type access 10/15 years ago._

Some (hopefully many) of whom will discover what is possible on desktop creative platforms that have less restrictions than phones.

<comment><USER8> Yes, indeed. That might actually be very true. That large group of people who are simply "consumers" today might become "creators" in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Post PC was never about PCs disappearing, it was only about a maturation of that market; we can expect no real growth from PC sales in the future.

IBM just announced a new mainframe yesterday and we've technically been post mainframe since the early 80s. We've been post PC since 2009 or so (earlier for desktops), we'll hit a peak on phones soon enough.

<comment><USER11> >Post PC was never about PCs disappearing

That's exactly what is was about. I don't think its fair to move the goalposts now. I think its clear that the standard bog PC or laptop where the end user has admin rights to modify it, install software from arbitary sources, etc just isn't going to go away and that the mobile/touch format is extremely limiting outside of a certain use cases.

There were minority voices who called this. We said that mobile/touch is wonderful for consuming and trivial tasks, but just can't compete with a big screen, big keyboard, big processor, etc. I remember the Jobsian types yelling us down. I think for all of Apple's innovations, they are still really a consumer/consumption based company. They'll never crack the enterprise productivity egg. There's something odd about seeing so many workers carrying both an ipad and a laptop to business trips. This is also why I think the MS Surface might mature into something that bridges the gap as a single device. I'm not holding my breath, but if I had to buy a new Windows laptop, I might just spring for the Surface, especially after Windows 10 comes out.

<comment><USER12> "When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm, but as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn't care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people."

I don't see any moved goal posts.

<comment><USER13> I do.

That quote doesn't just say that PC demand stagnates, it says it goes down, massively. It says that from X people who, at the time of that speech, use PC's, only 1 in the future use PC's.

And we're seeing that's not true even if X=2. And X was never supposed to be as low as 2.

What we are seeing is that a massive amount of computer USE moved over to phones and tablets -- tons of web browsing, tons of email browsing, calendaring, etc. Probably if you looked at the PC era and the post-PC era in terms of seconds in front of a screen or whatever instead of people, you'd see that 1/X ratio. But for people, it remains useful for almost everyone to have a PC -- even if they use that PC less than they used to.

<comment><USER10> Consumer PC demand has gone off a cliff in the last few years, to the chagrin of companies like Lenovo and HP. Corporate PC use has remained steady and even increased to pick up some of the slack (it helps that these are a bit more profitable than consumer sales).

There is no point in upgrading a PC you hardly ever use, even if you don't toss it out altogether. Better to get a new iToy every one or two years instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It never arrived because touch screens will never out perform a mouse and keyboard. Perhaps in the future when tablets/phones/rifts have a better man machine input interface

<comment><USER15> Lots of companies tried putting keyboards & trackballs on phones. People bought phones with big screens instead.

<comment><USER16> Part of what makes keyboard + mouse so efficient is that you're sitting at a desk while using it. I've never been quite sure how a phone + keyboard/mouse is supposed to work. And if you plug it into a screen and sit at a desk then why not just use a computer?

<comment><USER17> I always figured the future will be a light weight device that you carry which automatically backs itself up to the cloud (like current phones) but with the extra ability to "hook" into simple docking stations for multiple monitors, keyboards, speakers, network, etc when it is needed. This way the little device can work without anything else, but also allow a full user experience of a desktop.

This way I could dock my phone at home or work and have full access to my work without carrying around a big, heavy laptop. Utilizing external docking power (possibly another computer) would be great until phones get all the horsepower we need. Chances are this is one of the goals of the casting devices (Chromecast, Amazon's device, etc).

Streaming and cloud infrastructure still need to get better because American ISPs just put the money in their pockets instead of creating a better product. Chances are this device will show up in foreign markets first. I'm not in EE so I haven't tried to build it yet...but maybe one day for fun.

<comment><USER16> I agree, this sounds like a great future!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a feeling this is one of those things that happens but just not the way many imagined it would.

Like with Linux and Open Source Software in general becoming popular. Many probably thought open source was going to be this new business model powering software companies. People also probably imagined a Linux-based Desktop distribution was going to become more popular than Windows. Instead hardware and service companies adopted open source software and usually as components as part of a proprietary product. While Linux made it's way through to consumers via a phone OS.

Yet the way these things happened doesn't contradict the prediction in anyway. Just because people added on their own speculation doesn't make what was originally said false.

With that said it's going to happen because the PC as we know it doesn't work in people's lives the way they need it to. It works for programmers, designers and writers perhaps but for everyone else is not the right tool for the job. And it's only a matter of when something more suitable is made.

And In many cases a phone is that but due to some artificial constraints (Flash, Traditional website design, and plain old device discrimination) it's not always up to the task.

</comment><comment><USER18> In the car world, one occasionally hears the truism "There is no substitute for cubic inches."

And sometimes in the tech device world there is no substitute for square inches.

<comment><USER19> I've always heard it as, "Ain't no replacement for displacement."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's going to be a long time before keyboards and mice are replaced for things like spreadsheets, graphic design, coding, or writing. If all you're doing is texting or facebook, sure -- tablets are great. But any sort of precision work will require precision input-devices for the forseeable future...

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure that your first sentence follows from the second. It is (probably) true that precision work will always require precision input, but I think to equate 'precision input' with 'keyboard or mouse' ignores possible future revolutions. Who would have thought in the '90's that touch would really be a viable general-purpose input mechanism in the near future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I loved the idea of having a phone that could do everything and waited in anticipation for the atrix 4g webtop application. But it didn't live up to hype.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1opzCFrRkI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1opzCFrRkI0)

<comment><USER9> Hopefully OEMs will make cheaper versions of this Panasonic Windows tablet, which supports a dock with external monitor, kb, [http://liliputing.com/2014/06/panasonic-toughpad- fz-m1-rugge...](http://liliputing.com/2014/06/panasonic-toughpad- fz-m1-rugged-7-inch-tablet-launches-in-june.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A tablet or phone can't truly replace a desktop/laptop. It was a given.

<comment><USER23> Jobs' "truck versus car" analogy. Everyone switching over to cars as their daily driver doesn't eliminate the usefulness and necessity of owning trucks. It's just a new equilibrium.

<comment><USER13> Well... sort of. But it's probably more aptly a bicycle versus car analogy.

Like, suppose that originally there were 1,000,000 people who all owned PCs. There are a few ways that could change:

a. All of those people, or 950,000 of them or some other gigantic number of them, could give up their PCs and start to use a phone and/or tablet instead. This is what you might call the naive death-of-the-PC scenario, in which the PC either disappears or becomes an unusual tool for specialists.

b. 500,000 of those people or somewhere in that vicinity give up their PCs and start to use a phone and/or tablet instead. This is what you might call the realistic death-of-the-PC scenario -- the PC doesn't disappear in any way disappear, but demand for it is permanently massively lower.

c. Few people give up their PCs at all. Instead, large numbers of them get phones/tablets in ADDITION to their PCs, and move some of the work they used to do on their PCs to their phones/tablets, but everyone or a large majority of everyone keeps their PCs and still do some work on them. This is the rise of the smartphone without a corresponding fall of a PC.

I think that scenario C has turned out to be the reality. Smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC heavily for some use cases, but have not replaced the actual device very commonly at all. It's somewhat unlike a car/truck tradeoff -- while some people need trucks, most people don't, and have cars instead. It's more like a car/bicycle tradeoff -- most people who have bicycles, even ones who use their bicycles regularly, also have cars.

<comment><USER24> Nice analogy. Jobs was once quoted saying that computers are like bycicles for the mind. That somehow closes the Jobs-quoting circle, I guess.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The placebo effect is getting stronger over time - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124367058&ft=1&f=1003

<comment><USER2> Surely the correct fact is not the fact suggested by the headline.

<http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4304>

"Let's break this down a bit. First, they found that when you look at any objective or clinically important outcome--the kinds of things that would indicate a real biological effect--there is no discernible placebo effect. There is no mind-over-matter self healing that can be attributed to the placebo effect.

"What the authors found is also most compatible with the hypothesis that placebo effects, as measured in clinical trials, are mostly due to bias. Specifically, significant placebo effects were found only for subjectively reported symptoms. Further, the size of this effect varied widely among trials."</comment>


How to drop out of college and start a venture-backed Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/how-to-drop-out <comment><USER2> Dropping out of college is often seen as a marker of huge success and drive. In reality, it's just one path you can pick when answering the question, "given this dream, how can I maximize my chances of realizing it?"

This is a little more subtle than it sounds. I left school after my sophomore year and went on to raise a $1 million Series A from a blue-chip VC. A year and a half later, I ended up back at University not in defeat, but in realization that for my specific ambition there was more I could get out of the university. I wouldn't call myself a student -- I'll always be a student in that I'll be learning my whole life -- but I have as specific a reason for being at the institution as I did for dropping out. Traditional "students" are those who are in school without a better reason for why they're there.

There are a lot of potential businesses where it makes sense to be affiliated with a university right now. There are also a lot where the right move is to stop out and move immediately to SV. You _could_ drop out and still start a biotech company -- but you'll most likely end up net-negative, spending 6 years quietly hacking away on very limited resources on the fringes before breaking through. You _could_ start a spaceflight company without a degree, but you're taking the hardest possible route to get there. If you're smart enough to do that, you're smart enough to figure out how to do the minimum possible work to get by in your classes, and spend the rest of your time talking the university into giving you access to resources (and credibility) you'd never have otherwise. It's not about the degree: it's about what you can get out of the university while disguised as a student.

It's definitely easier now than ever before for great hackers to do well without a degree. And you can certainly get rich down a lot of those paths. But the really cool companies -- space travel, clean energy, biotech, and so on -- can use the university for a lot for a few years in order to advance the same goals before breaking off on your own. The two more years I have access to subjects with _chips implanted in their brains_ and _tens of millions of dollars of cutting-edge equipment_ is a springboard for any subsequent activities, however inane classes might be. The opportunities are there if you go and take them.

<comment><USER3> Great point, it's also a lot easier to do a medical startup if you have an MD

<comment><USER2> Yeah, like that -- in some extreme cases, it's impossible without the credential. I bet in most of those cases you could slightly redefine your problem to get around it, though. Surgical devices, for example: you could probably develop the technology without a credential and once it demonstrably works, collaborate with surgeons to continue as a business.

It's probably much easier if you've spent time as a doctor yourself, and you're much more likely to get the time of day if you borrow on the credibility of an institution you're affiliated with, but not impossible. Just not the path of least resistance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was an enjoyable read. As someone not yet even out of the gate, I think the biggest take-away from this is that networking is by far the most important skill an entrepreneur must cultivate.

I am technically skilled, but spend much of that skill on private projects, and so have not learned the art of building networks with even technical fellows, let alone business fellows (my business skillset is nonexistent).

The author appears not only to have natural network skills, but also a knack for social organization, which clearly shows through in this article.

I have been slowly circling towards evolving a more social persona, and communicating online seems like a safe first step.

I feel inspired today. Thanks for posting this.

<comment><USER3> That's funny you say that. I definitely have been working a lot on that specifically over the last few years.

I'm actually a hard-core hacker. I'm running technology at Stickybits. I wrote my own Python web framework, and released (what I think is) the best templating framework in any language. (weby templates: [http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/weby-templates-are-easier- fa...](http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/weby-templates-are-easier-faster-and- more-flexible))

<comment><USER4> It was another article posted here (I think) detailing the history of some pretty famous products (I remember the Super-Soaker being among those mentioned) and how these wildly successful products all had rather humble beginnings, and sometimes quite rocky starts.

It was a good read, since it reminds one that when you use someone (something) else's success as a measuring stick you quite often are behaving much like the blind men and the elephant.

I bring that up because while I was reading your post I completely forgot those lessons learned and found myself both envious of your success and disappointed in my relative lack.

Of course reading your reply here only helps to re-ground me yet again.

A funny coincidence, I too have worked on similar Python projects, only never released them. In fact I have a HTML similar template system which made use of '__getattr__' and '__call__' to allow you to produce things like this:

        def pageSidebar():
          html = T.div(id="page-sidebar")(
                  T.div(
                    T.a("Add Page",href="?cont=addPage")
                    ),
                    T.ul(
                      *map(T.li,(nodeUrl for nodeType,nodeUrl in graphData.nodes_iter() if nodeType == 'page'))
                    ))

          return html

Of course this was before I could take advantage of 'with', so my product looks a bit too lispy!

<comment><USER3> Yea, everyone always said that Python is no good for embedding in template languages because of its significant whitespace.

Weby Templates proves that whitespace is actually an asset. A number of Python templaters (like yours), lisp templates, and other language templates have a system like yours, nested lists. But they quickly become unworkable, lack the ability to do if statements (simple branching), and not having to put end tags ("))") is half the reason you use Python!

Python's whitespace proves to make a much better language for templates than any other.

My "success" may look enviable, but it's luck. Except not quite luck. When I visited California, I wrote a script to email over 200 companies. Only a few replied. Is that luck, or did I make that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Step 3: Test your assumptions and Step 6: Do your research

Probably the most important steps in the process, and I'm glad they were addressed here...identifying a potential market, testing the viability of the potential market and coming up with a plan... a plan that doesn't involve set up social network involving "X", tell people about it/advertise, ?? , profit!

I'll admit when I read the title I though it was going to be an article discussing why _not to_ drop out of college and start a venture-backed Social Network, but I'm glad that it was much more realistic and insightful than that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's funny Joe and I BOTH stopped out of college independently at the same time. I saw him in Palo Alto and asked him what he was doing here. He said: Oh, I dropped out of college, joined a startup early on. I said: Oh, me too. We originally met in Miami.

Joe is probably a textbook play on how to go through this. When I saw him again, it was on spring break where he had gone back to college after failing. It was in Miami. He asked me: What are you doing here? I said: I failed, came back to college. He had done the same.</comment>


Font editor FontLab VI is finally released - <AUTHOR> https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-vi/ <comment><USER2> Looks like a great update! Definitely how they re-worked the bezier approach! There are some innovations here which I would love to see in Adobe Illustrator as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, bringing tools like these for drawing better bezier curves in Illustrator would be so so great. :)

I've started making a plugin to help visualise curvature continuity (using the Illustrator C++ SDK). For example: [https://i.imgur.com/4dvV4pN.png](https://i.imgur.com/4dvV4pN.png)

The problem I'm facing is I can't figure out how to make it update live as you drag curve control points around. Currently it only updates once you let go.. :-/</comment></comment>


Remdesivir: Drug has 'clear cut' power to fight coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52478783 <comment><USER2> clear cut?? this paragraph rather puts a damper on the enthusia$m… The study tracked two groups of patients who were hospitalized with Covid-19. One group received a 5-day treatment of remdesivir, while the other group took the drug for 10 days. The researchers said more than half of the patients in both treatment groups were discharged from the hospital within 14 days. They said 64.5% of the patients who received the shorter treatment course were discharged, compared with 53.8% of the group who were treated for 10 days.

This means a shorter course was less dangerous than a longer course—is one way to say it. Without a control arm though, one cannot say that OR that they did "better" than people who received no RDV.

Shoddy "science" does not help patients or physicians to make best treatment decisions. George M. Carter

<comment><AUTHOR> There are multiple studies going on in parallel. Some of them use a 10-day placebo, others compare 5-day and 10-day treatments. [https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press- relea...](https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press- releases/2020/4/gilead-announces-results-from-phase-3-trial-of- investigational-antiviral-remdesivir-in-patients-with-severe-covid-19) [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih- clinical-t...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical- trial-shows-remdesivir-accelerates-recovery-advanced-covid-19) [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)31022-9/fulltext)</comment></comment>


The Startup Scene that's Really Cooking–Food Trucks - <AUTHOR> http://citizenspace.us/coworking/the-startup-scene-thats-really-cooking-food-trucks/

<comment><USER2> Dumb question: So you're working at one of these trucks for an 8 hour shift and chances are at some point you'll need to use a bathroom -- as the operator of the truck what do you do?

<comment><USER3> I live in DC where these things are abundant because of the very strict building codes in downtown. Almost without exception they have at least two people working inside and the lunch rush only lasts for about 2 hours, tops, so that's really the extent of their work day. Which, by the way, this article conveniently leaves out- the major disadvantage of the food truck business- limited hours of service and limited maximum capacity.

<comment><USER4> Lol. The food truck business work day is _much_ longer than 2 hours. The 2-3 hour lunch period is the primary window, but many trucks also do a dinner service for 2-3 hours.

In addition to the service window, there's several hours at the start of the day dedicating to stocking the truck and prepping the food so that it simply needs to be cooked. At the end of the day, leftovers must be disposed and all of the equipment must be cleaned. Both prep and cleanup will take several hours: prep will usually take 3-4 hours, and cleanup will 2-3 hours.

On top of that, there's the transportation time for getting from home base to the day's location(s). In L.A., most trucks operate out of a San Fernando lot, which means 1-2 hours transit time to get to their lunch spot.

All told, the employees may get 8 hour shifts, by the truck managers and owners will be lucky if they work fewer than 12 hours a day.

Sources:

[http://clatl.com/atlanta/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-atlanta- foo...](http://clatl.com/atlanta/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-atlanta-food-truck- mixd-up/Content?oid=5484599)

<http://www.findlafoodtrucks.com/blog/tag/nom-nom-truck/> [http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/6599/Food_trucks_A_d...](http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/6599/Food_trucks_A_day_in_the_life)

[http://mobile-cuisine.com/business/breaking-into-the-food- tr...](http://mobile-cuisine.com/business/breaking-into-the-food-truck- industry-%E2%80%93-part-4/)

 _Komodo, one of the grandaddies of the modern food truck industry, used to have a great post on this but it appears that they have deleted that post._

<comment><USER3> I'm talking about the hours of service, not the hours of prep and cleanup. Prep and cleanup hours don't bring you revenue. In fact they cost you money in fuel and employee expenses. Food trucks may do a dinner service but there is no comparable continuous volume like there is during the lunch hour when there are tens of thousands of people with limited food options in search of food at the same time.

With a restaurant you can prep and serve simultaneously. The ideal setup would be to have a restaurant sourcing a food truck to soak up revenue from additional corners of the city from a central kitchen location.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Programming basics with Swift, free course - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCVAxgiX-15w7XukWR3mIvpNg8-uxQIYj <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

We've recently released a free course on programming fundamentals with Swift. It's meant as a prep course if you want to learn iOS development but have no programming experience.

I know most people here won't need programming fundamentals, but I'd appreciate any feedback. What do you think of the material and structure of the course? Presentation?

The reason I decided to make this course was when I looked at other materials for learning iOS development, they fell into one of the two categories:

1\. Targeted at programmers, or at least people with some prior programming experience. This is cool if you do have programming experience, but problematic for beginners.

2\. Targeted at beginners, but completely unrealistic. Things like we will teach you to become an iOS developer in 4 weeks, no coding experience required, etc. They mostly just fiddle around Interface Builder and glance over a few programming topics but leave you confused and unable to build anything on your own.

So this is meant to help the situation. I strongly believe you need to understand programming basics first before going into details of a technology, and there isn't that much material on that topic. The stuff that is out there is mostly for Python or JavaScript, which is cool if you want to go into web development. But for iOS apps, you then need to switch languages while you are still struggling with basics, which just makes it harder and more confusing.

The link above is for the youtube playlist for the course, but you can get access to it through our website as well, and to also get the source code:

[http://bit.ly/swifty-jr](http://bit.ly/swifty-jr)</comment>


OpenVMS: state of the x86 port - <AUTHOR> http://vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html <comment><USER2> I just hope they are doing drivers only for devices found in mainstream VMs. It would be a fool's errand to try to keep drivers up to date with real hardware. There is no practical benefit to anyone to run VMS outside a VM, but there are still important VMS applications that would run perfectly happily and reliably on maintained equipment in VMs forever.

IBM's AS/400 system (now called i series?) was designed for that from the start. There never was an AS/400 machine, it was always emulated. Programs started in the '80s are still running, migrated from one physical host generation to the next without ever being shut down.

<comment><USER3> Which VM software will allow you to migrate a running VM to another physical host without shutting down? That's sounds awesome

<comment><USER4> Any of the ones frequently used for server virtualization? Live migration is a standard and pretty important feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm genuinely looking forward to this. I used VMS back in the 90's and loved it as an OS. Clustering, versioned file systems, reasonably well formed error messages; it seemed very civilised.

It'd be nice to be able to run it in a VM and see how much I've forgotten. I've got an old workstation in my loft, but haven't really got the room to have it setup.

<comment><USER6> HELP is your friend.

The VMS help system, while far less verbose than Unix man pages was, thanks to its hierarchical organisation really, well, helpful.

<comment><USER7> the VMS HELP system was my introduction to "learn a system by using depth- first HELP". I also recall eventually coming across the page which explained dynamic linking (I couldn't even link hello world with my 2 block disk quota).

<comment><USER6> Same here.

My basic introduction was that my boss sat me in front of a VT220 terminal and told me about the HELP command.

Later I discovered the absolute awesomeness that was VMS (at that time, OpenVMS came later) documentation.

For me and to this day it's the benchmark how documentation should be written an organized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yay!

I hammer at OpenVMS for 40+ hours/week and this is exciting!

We hit 99.99% uptime with new software features being installed being the reason for the downtime we've had (except for one instance a bunch of years ago, but at that time I would have been in middle school. I do worry about a slowly increasing reaction time to user actions though.

Running on X86 we wouldn't have to worry about the future.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > I hammer at OpenVMS for 40+ hours/week and this is exciting!

What's your work like? Or perhaps I should say, what kind of company do you work at to use it?

<comment><USER8> We store the critical customer data (their personal info, what they are paying us for and their settings), build the interfaces for customer service, apis for s that are used on customer web/apps and logic for what is to happen for each call. I'm a dev but including our devs, database and hardware people we are less than 0.05% of the company employees.

I'm the youngest and almost everyone is 2x+ my age. We've lost 40% of the team to retirements since I joined two years ago.

It's a tight team but communication is oh so inefficient whenever someone is working remote and between our two locations.

We have other services now that we make calls to to get for example mail and email sent to customers, but now and then I still see customers receiving plain text email from the production machine D:

<comment><USER9> How good is this for your CV? Do you see yourself working with this tech for the next 20+ years?

<comment><USER8> I have no idea how good it is. Probably not very, but it's a decent paying job where I live, upper levels of what devs make.

I studied business and management. Maybe that will be a pro for a new role if they shut down the VMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A couple years ago I set up VMS on a VAX emulator on Raspbian. In case you're interested, here's the link describing the process:

[http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax- simh.html](http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html)

And I guess the process of requesting and installing a license changes from time to time. This page describes a slightly different process for activating the license which worked for me:

[https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/home/technical- sh-t/installing...](https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/home/technical- sh-t/installing-vms-on-your-raspberrypi)

</comment><comment><USER11> While security is being mentioned as one of the strengths, and I certainly agree with that, there was a version of VMS in the late 80s which wouldn't let you create a password if another account already used it. In a small department it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes to hack into someone's account.

<comment><USER12> Wow. That is security measure so stupid never heard before. Really :-)))))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785504)

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692775)

</comment><comment><USER14> A related presentation from a few months ago which goes into some extra detail: [http://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/webinars/X86_OpenVMS_V9_0_Update...](http://vmssoftware.com/pdfs/webinars/X86_OpenVMS_V9_0_Update_20190722.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's cool that this exists. I might even try to port a program to it, for my own amusement. But I don't see the big draw.

VMS had its pros and cons as compared to Unix/Linux. VMS' help system is really nice. However, VMS filenames are baroquely complex (yes, automatic versioning can be nice, but the rest of it was insane). Even at its height, VMS lost to Unix, and Unix plus Linux are now completely dominant in the areas VMS once filled and has had decades to fill in missing capabilities. I don't see what the big draw of VMS would be over Unix/Linux, at least enough to justify it. The world doesn't need another proprietary operating system, especially one incompatible with what people have now been doing for decades.

<comment><USER16> I don't think its going to get any design starts, nor is that the intent. There are companies with rock solid legacy applications that want to continue to run them on newer hardware. VMS first ran on the VAX (long dead), then Alpha (dead), and finally Itanium (recently dead). x86 will let these legacy apps run for a few more decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This used to be my favorite OS. I am pleasantly surprised to see it is still around. The security model at the time was vastly superior to Unix. I maintained the SMS gateway for a mobile provider on it. OpenVMS on Alpha had incredible performance and stability compared to the Unix system counterparts at the time. (comparing rack space real estate that is)

<comment><USER18> Alpha was an amazing platform. Yet another great technology that HP flushed because they didn't know what to do with it :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm totally looking forward to this. I got access to the VAX and Alpha kits from HPE, but I've always wanted to run it natively on x86. :) OpenVMS rocks.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm very interested to know why this port is taking so long. Few human resources? Not a priority? Lots of assembly code?

<comment><USER21> > I'm very interested to know why this port is taking so long. Few human > resources?

That would be my guess. I don't know how big VMS Software is, but I doubt they are that big. The market they are addressing is limited in size, and is almost certain to shrink rather than grow, so it would be difficult to justify a massive investment in developers.

OTOH, how long did the VAX->Alpha port take? How long did the Alpha->Itanium port take? How long would have HP taken if they'd decided to commit to an x86 port themselves?

<comment><USER22> re: VAX->Alpha

I don't know when they started it - but it was available to customers late 1994 if memory serves.

The Itanium port was announced Sep 2001? A usable version for customers to deal with - spring 2005?

<comment><USER23> Also consider DEC and HP had enormous engineering organizations. And Alpha was designed as extension of the VAX architecture, so presumably the port was less complicated. You can still find references to "EVAX", for "Extended VAX" in some of the headers, along with the EV* CPU model numbers. Itanium I know less about...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What are the things VMS did the best? How it compares to linux nowadays?

What is behind OpenVMS project - nostalgia or some pragmatic reasons?

<comment><USER25> It's still unmatched for seamless language interoperability.

vMotion is a sort of crude version of VMS live process migration between nodes.

The security model is very well thought out, beats rwxrwxrwx and setuid hands down. Versioning filesystem, and RMS means the filesystem is a simple database too.

DCL seems weird but all the commands work the same way, take the same arguments and so on. You can guess with a very high chance of being right. And if you can't the help/error message is actually useful.

Rock solid stability. Generally very easy to manage, one sysadmin can do a lot.

<comment><USER26> > It's still unmatched for seamless language interoperability.

I don't know about how it works on VMS, but Microsoft's COM is the only other attempt of language interop I know of. Recently I implemented a COM server, added `IDispatch` to its interfaces and suddenly I could control and test it from Porwershell with no extra effort on my part. Like, magic.

<comment><USER25> I've used COM (and before that CORBA) but these operate at a different level of abstraction. On VMS calling a Pascal function from FORTRAN "just worked" and then you could pass the return value to a C function or BASIC and it was fine.

VMS IPC was done via mailboxes, send a message to a person or a program was the same. Which sounds weird to anyone used to the way Unix does mail, but it worked very well.

(Yep, VAX BASIC was a serious language used for real, production applications)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't the VMS x86 port called "Windows NT"?

<comment><USER28> Technically Cutler and his team first targeted Intel i860 (N10) and designed the NT kernel multi-arch from the ground up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What serendipity! I was looking at this page last night, looking forward to 2020. Also happy to hear there are at least a few VMS fans here.

</comment><comment><USER23> One of the first multi-user systems I worked with ran OpenVMS, so I have a fondness for it and related nostalgia... DECnet, VAX BASIC, etc. I've run it at home on Alpha and VAX emulators.

</comment><comment><USER29> What will it cost???

<comment><USER30> Everything.

Joke aside, I have no idea how VMS will be run on non hard-realtime hardware.

<comment><USER29> Cool. Do you have any links to real time hardware of the past?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I needed to "get around" on OpenVMS in a previous assignment. Some java processes executed there and needed my attention from time to time. I never became good friend with it and never "saw the light". I much prefer Linux.

<comment><USER32> I think we all prefer what we're most familiar with. VMS hearkens back to an era before tab completion was common and it still throws me when I have to type DIR instead of ls.

But... VMS _does_ have some interesting features. Even if you prefer Linux, it's interesting to compare the two and read about why the VMS designers did what they did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can't even imagine why VMS is relevant in 2019.

<comment><USER25> Linux today can't do half of what VMS could do in 1999.

<comment><USER34> I don't think it is possible to back up that statement. In 1999, machine interoperability was not as critical as it is today.

Last time I worked with OpenVMS was 2014 going into 2015. The system in question was an orders management system for an online pharmacy. It. Was. Hell. The Alpha-based cluster was being rebooted daily because it would run out of memory constantly. They would purchase spare parts for their cluster from a local company that specialized in NOS and recovered boards bought on eBay. We had some laughs about that!

The code was ancient--some of the earliest comments in the sources dated to the 1970s. There was no source control, no modern compiler, no debugger, no anything. We used sockets to communicate to a sort-of SOAP service to get data out for reporting but it was incredibly, tearfully s-l-o-w.

The UI was terrible. The users of it complained endlessly, and rightly so. We're talking about a time when most everything out there was built on a HTML Web-based system for at least a decade already and people were well used to Web interfaces. And here these poor souls were still using terminal emulators to connect to a green screen application and had to to have all kinds of odd work-arounds and policies to get by with all the bugs and strange anomalies. Did I mention the horrible uptime?

The management kept wanting more, more, more out of the enterpise Java team but all the technical limitation were on the VMS side. Meanwhile, the syadmin who ran it was a complete turd of a human being, only trying to keep his job there lest he be forced into retraining into some actually useful technology. Worse, he actively campaigned against any technical changes we wished to make (for fear of losing his fiefdom) and so undermined my team to the point where management became openly distrustful of us. "Can't trust that new-fangled Java stuff!" "You mean the actually reliable, high-performance stuff? That stuff?"

The company unbelievably doubled down on this odious mess by purchasing the source code for the system from the vendor that owned because that vendor wanted to wash their hands of it and get out from under the hell of supporting it. When I heard what my company paid for that code I nearly had a breakdown because it was eye-watering. I could have re-written the thing 5X over and extracted the data for that kind of coin. If that's the kind of idiocy it takes to manage a large corporation in America these days then I should be a CEO because I am far more than qualified! I could show up one day a week and do less damage. Had I had a free hand at that company I could have done incredible things, but it was not to be.

Worse still, now that they owned the sources, they thought they could do something useful with it and hired a contractor who had once sort of worked on this same trash at another firm. He was charging $250/hr to be there and was the most obnoxious developer I have ever worked around. He set the bar very low on personal hygiene, decorum, and general bad behavior around the office. They had to move him out of the cubes and give him his own room because of so many complaints about odors and um, noises.

Looking back, it seems like everything related to VMS was these kind of obnoxious people--I used to hang out with the sysadmins who managed the clusters at the college I attended and they, too, had that VMS/DEC obnoxiousness disease. I don't get it, I'll never get it, am happy to be far away from it. DEC had its day, they failed to adapt and modernize and went away. You don't see this same nostalgia for Wang Computers and Wang was the true original in the mini space.

<comment><USER25> This is kind of a weird story bro. Like you're at a deeply dysfunctional organisation with management and coworkers that you hate (maybe for good reason) but your anger is directed towards an OS that even running on junk hardware is still making your company money with perfect backwards compatibility over 40 years? Huh.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: what creative methods do you use to solve programming problems? - <AUTHOR>

I've talked to a few programmers who have interesting methods for encouraging their subconscious to take over when they hit a frustrating problem (eg: taking a walk, a bathroom break or playing Farmville). Do you have an interesting method you use for this? <comment><USER2> I usually switch into a different task. That tends to work pretty well, and doesn't leave me feel like I'm not making progress.

When I'm completely stumped or frustrated with something, I'll shut everything off for a while. I just go do something. Enjoy dinner, watch TV, play games, hang out with people. Zero thoughts about the problem.

Most of the time, re-approaching after a cold boot like that tends to change my perspective so much that I will typically solve the problem with much less effort than I expected would be required. Sometimes this is just caused by being tired when initially approaching a problem and then conquering it after resting. Sometimes I'll suddenly have a realization subconsciously and I'll realize I figured out a solution to the problem without thinking about it.

This has worked for me since college. Getting one of those nasty algebra or functional analysis problems and being stuck, then realizing in the middle of playing a game later that you suddenly know how to solve the problem is a great feeling. It's like you're doing work without doing work.

<comment><USER3> I do this as well. It's funny when you've struggled with a problem for an hour or so the day before and then the next day you sit down and figure it out in 10 minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a form of rubber-ducking, but I write a question about my problem on Stack Overflow. Often times, I figure out the answer before I finish writing the question.

<comment><USER3> I definitely have more posts where this happens and I delete it than actual posts. It works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm definitely in the taking a walk bunch. Seems like most of my frustrating problems are just a case of looking too hard. I'll get up and (try to) do something completely unrelated like turn on the TV or sit outside, then suddenly the answer comes to me.

When I run into an issue during some late night ooding, the solution is always sleep. Next morning, the answer will come to me a little after I wake up (when the mind is most clear).

</comment><comment><USER6> Sleeping on it is the best solution at least in my opinion. However if you are stubborn like I am and just want to fix the issue, then you would just hit the vending machine and start throwing coins at it. Finally you get to indulge yourself into a great number of chocolates to relieve the stress.

</comment><comment><USER7> Leave your computer for a day. Go outside, enjoy life, and disconnect from your work. Worked every time for me.

If I still couldn't find a solution, I will eventually come up with a workaround during those disconnected times.

</comment><comment><USER8> Writing things down or drawing on paper has always helped me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the comments! Seems like most people have a similar solution - doing something completely unrelated to give your brain a rest.

</comment><comment><USER9> Take a walk, jump in the shower, working on something else that needs to be done, and last but not least - reach for the booze.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stand on my hand. It helps to use a wall if do so.

</comment><comment><USER11> I ask myself: What would Jon Skeet do?</comment>


Tornado on Twisted - <AUTHOR> http://dustin.github.com/2009/09/12/tornado.html <comment><USER2> I can only repeat: Awesome!

I hope the FF guys will work with you to ensure that there will be only one Tornado in the future and not two independent forks.

It always hurts to throw away code that you put your blood and sweat in (in this case their custom network layer). But the advantages of rebasing this onto twisted are overwhelming for both sides.

<comment><USER3> It's not obvious to me that this is a win for Tornado users.

There's a cost to adding a dependency on Twisted. It's one more thing to download. There's more code to understand when something goes wrong. And so on.

What are the benefits to me as a web programmer? If I understand correctly, my application will work as it did before. If that's true, then Twisted did not add any win for me.

<comment><USER4>
      There's more code to understand

No it is not, he stated that overall he removed 1200+ SLOC.

<comment><USER5> And added a 150,000-line dependency.

<comment><USER2> Which has better test coverage and more users than the Tornado stack. Honestly code quality would be the least of my concerns with twisted. If there's a python project where the critical parts can be labeled "mature" then twisted is it.

I criticize twisted for usability and documentation problems. But as the underpinning for something else (with hopefully better usability) it seems perfectly adequate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "although I'm sure there are still lines that need to be deleted before everything works."

That's not something you hear very often :)</comment>


Ask HN: Website testing service, with a focus on improving conversion rates? - <AUTHOR>

There are many website review / testing services that will make a video of a person testing your site and giving feedback, but the feedback is almost always with regard to design.
As many of us who've done conversion optimization for years know, often prettier != higher conversion rates.
Does any review service exist that focuses on giving conversion optimization feedback? Obviously you can test conversions with real users -- but they can't really give you tips. <comment><USER2> usertesting.com

I found it quite insightful

<comment><AUTHOR> Do they focus on improving conversion rates, and have any experience in the area of conversion rate optimization? Or is it reviews by random Mturk freelancers?

Too often, these services end up giving you 10 minutes of whining about petty font adjustments, that provably make no difference in conversion rates of the real users.</comment></comment>


Share your habits and patterns that contribute to your success - <AUTHOR> Could be morning routines, behaviors, diet, anything at all that you believe has had a influenced your success. <comment><USER2> While I'm acquiring a new skill I will think about how to explain the skill to someone else. It helps me acquire new skills quickly.

Similarly, I document a lot of tasks so that it becomes trivial to redo it, rather than having to think through the process every time.</comment>


Flu shots aren't good science - <AUTHOR> http://scott.wiersdorf.org/blarney/091024a.html

<comment><USER3> I don't see the problem as a scientific one if the vaccine is effective against what is't supposed to be effective against.

If the problem is that "people" believe that a vaccine against one flu strain will protect them from getting sick from a variety of _other_ viruses, it's a marketing problem.

<comment><USER4> People believe what their government tells them. In this case it is the CDC, recommending an influenza vaccine for everyone older than 6 months, and particularly for certain at risk groups. The CDC is representing the science as demonstrating a high effectiveness, which as these review articles point out, is not the case.

This is not just a problem of CDC marketing, though. As the Atlantic article points out, the scientists that are publishing research showing a lack of effectiveness in vaccines are not getting equal treatment among their peers who still believe them to effective.

<comment><USER5> The CDC does not advertise high effectiveness. This seems to be a strawman you are knocking down. If you administer a fairly ineffective vaccine, you will still save hundreds of lives. With a very effective vaccine, you'd save even more.

<comment><USER4> If you read the Atlantic article, the CDC believes vaccines to be so effective in the elderly that it would be immoral to do a randomized controlled trial.

You can also see statements like this: <http://www.cdc.gov/FLU/protect/keyfacts.htm>

        The single best way to protect against the flu is to get vaccinated each year.

More frequently washing your hands is more effective against influenza then vaccination.

The purpose of vaccination is not necessarily to save lives- it is most often given to healthy individuals who are not at any kind of risk of death- it is so they can avoid getting sick.

The life-saving claims for the elderly simply haven't been scientifically demonstrated, as the Cochrane review referenced by the Atlantic article points out- studies are below:

doi:10.1002/14651858.CD004876.pub2 doi:10.1093/ije/dyi274

<comment><USER5> Your point is good, and I don't see it as a rebuttal of mine. In particular, a vaccine can be both mildly effective AND, yet, so much more effective _than placebo_ that to perform an RCT is immoral.

<comment><USER4> The above referenced studies point out that the influenza vaccine has not been proven to be more effective than placebo in the elderly, which is one of the groups that CDC thinks it would be immoral to give a placebo.

<comment><USER5> Can you clarify which "above referenced studies" you are talking about? From the same site that you pointed me to (CDC), I find this page <http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaccineeffect.htm> stating "How effective is the seasonal flu vaccine in the elderly? ... the seasonal flu shot is 30%-70% effective in preventing hospitalization for pneumonia (a lung infection) and influenza ... In past studies among elderly nursing home residents, the seasonal flu shot was most effective in preventing severe illness and complications that may follow flu (like pneumonia), and deaths related to the flu. In this population, the shot can be 50%-60% effective in preventing hospitalization or pneumonia, and 80% effective in preventing death from the flu."

Now, that is not a study itself, but a summary of prior studies. If you think the CDC has formed an improper conclusion, that's fine.

Here is the Cochrane review on the effectiveness of vaccines in the elderly: <http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab004876.html>

The summary: "In long-term care facilities, where vaccination is most effective against complications, the aims of the vaccination campaign are fulfilled, at least in part. However, according to reliable evidence the usefulness of vaccines in the community is modest. The apparent high effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing death from all causes may reflect a baseline imbalance in health status and other systematic differences in the two groups of participants."

In other words, like I said, the vaccine doesn't work all that well - <USER2> despite its relatively modest effectiveness, it is still of great importance in the very age group that you singled out as not receiving benefit.

<comment><USER4> The last sentence of that Cochrane review summary points out that no randomized controlled trials have been done, and that the benefit to the elderly may reflect the lack of randomization. The second doi study cited is a study to look at that selection bias, and actually found that the entirety of the protective effect could be due to the bias. This makes it difficult to conclude that the influenza vaccine has any effectiveness in the elderly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not perfect, but better than nothing.

[http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/10/journalists_si...](http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/10/journalists_sink_in_the_atlant.php)

<comment><USER4> That is a whole lot of hand-waving mixed with name-calling to counteract the "story" of the Atlantic article. It basically agrees with the conclusions at the heart of the matter, though, that vaccination has not been proven in the elderly. However the blog seems pro vaccination for those under 50, unlike the Atlantic article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If memory serves me, yearly flu vaccines are formulated based on predictions about which strains will be most common for a given season. Is it really a surprise that they guess wrong sometimes? Easy, 100%-accurate predictions don't really happen much in science outside of Physics 101 homework.

Also, is influenza vaccination really recommended for healthy adults, anyway? My impression was always that it was only worthwhile for people who would be at high risk from the disease.

As for the whole "it's all misguided groupthink, only a few brave people are sacrificing career success to speak truth to power" thing, I kinda have to roll my eyes. Maybe the author of the article is right, but most of the time when I've heard people say things like that, they don't actually understand the ideas they're criticizing and are being reflexively contrarian because that's a good way to make applause lights blink in the heads of their audience. Really, if most specialists in a field agree on something _it's probably because it's true_ , and if you _really_ think you've seen the light where everyone else has gone astray your point will be stronger if it stands on its own without the rah-rah anti-establishment social signalling.

<comment><USER8> I think your reflexive anti-reflexively contrarian reaction is blinding you to the point the author is trying to make. The politics surrounding questioning the flu shot, even within the medical research community, are such that Jackson et al were refused publication despite doing verifiably good scientific research.

From the Atlantic article (<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1>):

 _"People told me, 'No good can come of [asking] this,'" she says. "'Potentially a lot of bad could happen' for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, 'We know that vaccine works.' This was the prevailing wisdom."_

Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times before, as the Atlantic article points out.

 _Really, if most specialists in a field agree on something it's probably because it's true_

You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that _in every field, the average person is mediocre._ This isn't some tautological nonsense; what I'm saying is that if you were told that "most programmers agree that X," your reaction would probably be "yeah, but most programmers are actually crap at their job, why would I listen to them?"

You'd be right in that case, and you'd be right if you replaced programmers with doctors in the above. That most doctors believe in the flu shot isn't a reflection of the flu shot's greatness so much as a reflection of their training to that effect. Coupled with strong political forces pushing current doctrine, you have a situation where scientific research is being systematically subverted.

<comment><USER7> _Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times before, as the Atlantic article points out._

Yes, it's obviously true that anyone going stubbornly against established consensus will get in hot water. This is the case whether their position is correct or incorrect. In the first case, they're heroes; in the latter case, they're crackpots. It's rarely obvious to people outside the field which is which, and there's a lot more of the latter.

The contrarianism that I object to is when people who don't have enough expertise in the field to tell good ideas from bad seem to hold up going against consensus as somehow inherently noble, because most of the time they're just going to be encouraging the crackpots. This especially includes anything that glorifies the Galileo-esque "persecuted genius" archetype.

 _You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that in every field, the average person is mediocre._

Argument from authority is completely valid when the cited authority _is authoritative on the subject under consideration_. If someone justifies a statement about algorithms with "because Knuth said so" and can cite where he said it, that's a pretty solid basis to go on. The very nature of science is such that "widely held consensus of recognized experts" is the ultimate authority on current knowledge. This is not a guarantee of correctness, but it's a strong argument that it's the most likely, reliable answer we have and there's almost never a good reason for people outside the field to reject such consensus.

The programming analogy falls down a bit in that the bar is somewhat lower for being considered "a programmer" than it is for being a reputable specialist in most scientific fields. If you narrow it enough to filter out the kind of "programmers" who fail FizzBuzz exercises, I expect you'd find that anything that 95% of them agree on is, in fact, _far more correct than random chance_.

You and I have enough knowledge of programming to be able to evaluate good vs. bad arguments, and can probably identify lots of places where common wisdom is suboptimal. But what would you tell someone who knows nothing about programming but needs to know how to evaluate ideas about programming? Sure, we know that most programmers are stuck in a rut coding in Blub, but someone outside the field can't tell the difference between "overly structured programming is just obfuscation to create job security, simplify things and use gotos for flow control" and "use first-class functions to make code more expressive and eliminate redundancy".

We'd all roll our eyes at the guy promoting goto statements as a route to more effective programming, right? Well, us dismissing "use more gotos" would look, to someone outside the field, _exactly how doctors' reaction to the flu shot issue looks to you._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are there any negatives to getting the flu shot? For me, if there's a chance that it could prevent me getting the flu, and there are no potential negatives, then at least I may be prevented from certain strains.

<comment><USER4> In the last swine flu vaccination (30 years ago), hundreds of Americans died from receiving the vaccine. You can find the sixty minutes episode on this online.

Vaccines usually come with other toxic substances that will be injected in your body.

The same research articles that show influenza vaccines aren't useful also indicate that the risk of severe side effects (such as death) are low. Those must be weighed against the benefits, which in the case of the influenza vaccine, seem to be mild or unproven.

<comment><USER10> Hundreds? 48,161,019 Americans were vaccinated, 1098 cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) recorded nationwide by CDC surveillance, 532 of which were linked to the NIIP vaccination, resulting in death from severe pulmonary complications for 25 people

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza#1976_U.S._outbr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza#1976_U.S._outbreak)

<comment><USER4> You are quite right, thanks for the correction. However, note that the actual total will always be higher then that which the authorities have officially verified. I will also quote the very next sentence on that Wikipedia article:

       ... the vaccine killed more Americans than the disease did

<comment><USER10> Seasonal flu kills approximately 36,000 _Americans_ annually. Confirmed deaths worldwide for the 2009 H1N1 flu: 5,382

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic>

<comment><USER4> That number for deaths (5,382) is for influenza in general, not H1N1. If you download the referenced source, it states that in 2009 there were less than 300 confirmed h1n1 cases admitted to intensive care worldwide.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry, but the heading on table 2 reads:

Table 2. Reported number of new and cumulative confirmed fatal Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza cases in EU and EFTA countries, as 23 October 2009, 09:00 hours CEST, and in the rest of the world by country, as of 22 October 2009, 16:00 hours CEST.

The total at the bottom of the table is: 5,382

Perhaps you are reading that the total in EU alone is 269?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that was wrong. I was trying to get some real numbers from the report, and having trouble understanding it. I am still unsure of what the real number is. For example, the Brazil number they use is 1,368, but earlier it states that there were 645 deaths with confirmed pandemic influenza.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hot News: Bullshit Metascience Calls Bullshit on Science.

"Odds are, it has." If you're going to call out research as pseudoscience, don't write unvalidated statements like this.

</comment><comment><USER12> The title is completely inaccurate.</comment>


Finally found: best way to discover granted Facebook app permissions - <AUTHOR> http://artchang.com/best-way-to-discover-granted-facebook-app-per

<comment><USER2> Great job guys. As we are building our core app, this is something that we have been committed to do, from day one. I am real glad that we have some precedence now to follow. We believe that an app should ask for the least amount of profile data as possible to do what it needs to do. And if that changes as the app grows, then it should request for additional permission as its defined in a granular manner. Offline Access is a bad idea especially when 99% of apps are those you play with for two days and never ever use again.

Once again, thank you. We look forward to doing the same and giving our users control of their privacy and their data.

</comment><comment><USER3> why not just store the permissions granted on your end as you get them. why do you need to ask facebook?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. There's a few things going on here. If a brand new user comes and you store his initial permissions and also setup the web hook to get updates on user permission changes (such as if she removes offline_access from facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications) then you can just query your backend (which would store this somewhere). Then you won't ever have to do this.

What if, for example, this is a pure client side application that doesn't store anything in a backend database? Everytime a user comes to your site, you can check to see if local storage has anything sure, but if they're on a new computer or have cleared their storage, you're in the dark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, an edge case: If facebook doesn't call your web hook to update your db on the newest permissions before a user revists your site, you may have some bad consequences.

Another edge case: say you have millions of users, only 1000 regularly visit the site. You would have webhooks for a million users updating your backend, rather than just confirming permissions with facebook whenever they arrive to your site. The hop to facebook is probably just as fast, if not faster, than checking in with your own backend. Let Facebook take the brute of the traffic ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feedback appreciated from Facebook API hackers!

<comment><USER4> As a facebook hacker, I'd be interesting in seeing what the instructional popups you made look like.

I think asking for the bare minimum as you need it is absolutely the way to go as tons of people bounce out of apps that need all kinds of permissions before they get to even see the app. I get sick of seeing apps that want offline publish access before I even know what the app is because the developers are lazy and just request all permissions available.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll definitely be able to show you soon. We're finishing up a few final touches on our beta, but signup now and we'll send you a beta invite asap! We should be ready on Monday. <http://feedtopic.com> has a signup on the beta roadblock.

In the meantime, I can give you a quick description of what we have going on: each link that requires an extra permission not asked up front has a listener that will check what permissions are available. If it's missing a permission, we actually trigger a Facebox (from @defunkt's facebook lib). The Facebox defaults are really clean. Light overlay, slight shadow, nothing fancy. We put in different messages for different actions, one for example: "Yes you can like someone's post from FeedTopic! We need a new permission from Facebook to do this for you. Click the 'Add Permission' button to bring up Facebook's Permissions page". We have a button that looks SUPER clickable, like if you didn't click it you'd feel horrible because it has nice css gradients and looks like it's 3D. Underneath we have a message that says: "We won't publish anything without your direct permission to any part of Facebook, promise". Once you click the button, it will show you the FB permission prompt. yes, it's multiple steps, but it's clean and makes people feel really confident. BTW, liking something on feedtopic is probably the last thing people are going to the site for ;) It's just a small piece of info I can give away for now before the launch.</comment></comment></comment>


Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning - <AUTHOR> http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode3/229/ <comment><USER2> I had my son (who is 9) do the first exercise and he had no problems with it. I on the other hand can barely get my feet off the ground without it killing my wrists. It's an interesting approach to working on the core muscles using your own body weight as resistance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I managed to do the first exercise on the third try. The most difficult part was maintaining balance, but I found that I tended to shift my balance backwards (maybe because I was afraid to fall over on my face). Once I put some pillows on the floor in front of me as a precaution, I managed to hold the position for about 15 seconds.</comment></comment>