Math That Takes Newton into the Quantum World - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/69/patterns/the-math-that-takes-newton-into-the-quantum-world <comment><USER2> This was an interesting read - reminded me of another article [1] I read in 2013 about using a high-dimensional 'jewel' to describe reality, which then turned out to be an extremely efficient way to do the calculations from a Feynman Diagram. I'm still holding out hope that a unified theory will be found within my lifetime, and that these kinds of math will hold the key.

[1] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover- geometry-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-geometry- underlying-particle-physics-20130917/)

<comment><USER3> You might also like [https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that- could-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could- underpin-physics-20180720/)

<comment><USER4> I personally think that the split-octonions[1] hold promise for physics. The subset of the split-octonions where the i, j, k, and l components are 0 have a metric that is similar to that of Minkowski space[2].

      (t + xli + ylj + zlk) * (t - xli - ylj - zlk)
      = t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split- octonion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-octonion) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Why should our universe be so readily governed by mathematical laws? As he put it, "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."_

This is something that gets repeated again and again but I don't find this puzzling at all. Mathematics is an extremely general tool for modeling all kinds of things, so if something follows some sort of rules, you most certainly can use mathematics to describe, model, and analyze it. While I am not aware of any specific results or hypotheses, I would still guess that mathematics - or even some small subset like set theory - is in some sense universal for modeling things in a way similar to universal models of computation like Turing machines or lambda calculus.

I can not even imagine a universe with laws of physics that could not be tackled with mathematics. Even if the universe was pure chaos, everything happening totally randomly without any recognizable rules, we still could try throwing statistics at it, at least ignoring the fact that such an universe would probably not be a place for life to flourish. Finally mathematics does not exist in a vacuum, we invented large parts of it specifically to deal with real world phenomenons. And then of course »some« more that does not describe anything existing in the physical world.

Somewhere deep down below there are certainly many puzzling issues, from why there is a universe at all and why it is the way it is to human consciousness and why and how we are able to make sense of the universe, but that mathematics can describe the universe does not seem to be one of those, at least to me.

<comment><USER6> I think of it in terms of Kolmogorov complexity: The number of mathematical symbols you have to write down to describe some phenomenon of the universe. Given the apparent complexity of the universe, it still amazes me that that number of symbols is so small. There doesn't seem to be a reason why that should be true. We know from complexity science that complexity can arise from simple rules, but there's still no reason why those rules have to be simple in the first place.

<comment><USER7> > Given the apparent complexity of the universe, it still amazes me that that > number of symbols is so small.

Yeah, except, maybe the number of symbols isn't so small. The number of symbols needed to model very simple relationships is small, like the relationship between two gravitational bodies.

Now add a third body, and yes, in some sense this system is still described by the simultaneous relationship between pairs of bodies, but it's not really usable in that form. You've got to explode it, and you've got to do a lot more calculation.

I'm not totally confident here. I do have some intuition that the Navier–Stokes equations, for example, fully describe the motion of a very complex phenomenon in a very small number of symbols. But then if they require so much computation to actually apply, is my intuition wrong that this really counts as a full description of the system?

Is there a distinction between running the equations and running a simulation? And what exactly is the distinction between running a simulation and setting up the system and just seeing what happens?

It's definitely different, but I'm not so sure it's this amazing compression that it's made out to be.

<comment><USER6> > Now add a third body, and yes, in some sense this system is still described > by the simultaneous relationship between pairs of bodies, but it's not > really usable in that form.

The third body makes the system nonlinear and non-analytic, so the equations can only be investigated via numerical simulation. But the number of symbols is still small.

It may be the case that most of the universe is nonlinear and we only pay attention to the linear parts because they're easy. It might also be the case that a lot of the universe requires a lot of symbols to describe but we only pay attention to the other part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In addition to giving some idea about algebraic geometry, I appreciated the insight and honesty it contained regarding how a (high profile) researcher decides to try to learn more about an area, and about how the author was intimidated by it. I appreciated it, but, it is also pretty depressing, in that a professional mathematician of Baez's calibre clearly found it very tough-going just trying to survey the existing knowledge, let alone adding to it.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _algebraic geometry_

Then there's always geometric algebra!

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

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Newton into the Quantum_

Simply put, "the first quantization." (I am amazed how difficult popularizers of science often make it to understand what the hell they are talking about.)

<comment><USER10> If you don't already know what quantization is, that's just jargon though.

<comment><USER11> The problem in the title is that "Newton" just means "Classic Mechanics". Newton has a lot of results, like in gravity, light, mechanics, ... Replacing "Classic Mechanic" with "Newton" looks like the weird replacement tables in some xkcd comics. (Inside the article, the idea is clear, the problem is in the title.)

<comment><USER12> Similar to personalizing all General Relativity advances and issues as being about "Einstein".

Nobody does that for Quantum Mechanics.

<comment><USER11> For what it's worth, I hate the articles with title "Einstein is wrong/right". (Extra bonus hate point for "Scientist say Einstein is wrong/right")

The case of Quantum Mechanics is strange, there is no clear name to choose. I guess Heisenberg an Schrödinger are the best candidates, but their names are associated in popular culture with some specific effect instead of the whole theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone recommend good course notes, books, ... on algebraic topology?

Good reference books?

But first and foremost any recommended _primers_ into algebraic topology?

</comment><comment><USER14> to say that Cartesian geometry is in any way like algebraic geometry is like saying that a skateboard is like a Ferrari

>One reason is that quantum physics is based on algebra, while general relativity involves a lot of topology. But that suggests an avenue of attack: If we can figure out how to reduce topology to algebra, it might help us formulate a theory of quantum gravity.

huh? everything boils down to big matrices and hard differential equations in the end

>My physics colleagues will let out a howl here, and complain that I am oversimplifying. Yes, I'm oversimplifying:

no, you're not making any sense. i stopped reading here

<comment><USER15> I'm in complete agreement. The fact that he entirely glosses over there existing a field like algebraic topology with tremendous application to physics shows the author has little understanding of what he's writing about when it comes to physics.

<comment><USER16> John Baez is one of the most qualified people in the world to talk about mathematical physics. Who are you?

<comment><USER15> That's an appeal to authority if I ever saw one. He may be qualified to talk about it, but he certainly isn't showing that here. The parent comment shows what we're taking issue with.

<comment><USER16> Can you really be that pompous?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to create a project schedule (step by step)? - <AUTHOR> https://www.geniusproject.com/guide/beginner-guide-project-scheduling <comment><USER2> Very good guide! It's clear and present different techniques so you can select the one that best fit your need and then just follow the methodology to set in place a robust project scheduling technique.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an excellent guide and even offers content that's relevant to those who are beyond "beginner" level.</comment>


Open Micro: The World's First Open Source RISC-V-based 32-bit ΜC - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-micro <comment><USER2> Looking forward to the first devices!</comment>


Ask HN: Addressing cold start problems in recommender systems? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All, I have been working on a recommender engine for a while now and have now stumbled across the cold start problem. The problem here is that whatever data I collect is only an indicator of the likes of the user (for eg., if browsing history is taken as a source, then the basic assumption that people don't browse for what they don't like stands true) So in such a case, any ideas as to how I train the system initially for dislikes?? I do know that the system will gradually tune to the user preferences with continuous feedback, but I would not like the first run to be very erratic either by choosing random dislikes... Any ideas folks?? Any help in the matter is greatly appreciated.... <comment><USER2> Many machine-learning systems get bootstrapped by their implementer sitting at a website clicking "Like" and "Dislike" buttons for a large randomly-chosen sample of possible data.

If this strikes you as incredibly boring, you can farm it out with Amazon Mechanical Turk or other crowdsourcing schemes. You could also do cleverer variants of this, like putting image-recognition or OCR training sets into CAPTCHAs, submitting possible links to Reddit or Digg, or hosting Internet surveys with the questions of interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> but the whole idea is... every one has their own notion of likes and dislikes.... am i missing something here?

<comment><USER2> That's why recommendation systems are hard. :-)

You could try to identify a population of users whose likes and dislikes are expected to be "similar" to the user in question, though, and then base your training set off them. I believe that's how actual recommendation engines (eg. Amazon, YouTube) work. Of course, then you have to figure out how to identify similar users, which is another hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I read somewhere about a recommender system for movies (I think) and what they did is force a user to rate 5 random movies as part of the registration process. The movies weren't entirely random, but ones they thought were significant in identifying a user's tastes.

In your example of browsing patterns, maybe you could ask new users if they do or do not like to read certain types of articles. ie: are you interested in technology, sports, entertainment, random pictures of cats etc and seed their profiles based on their expressed level of interest for those things (maybe including dislikes from people who claimed to have similar interests).

But I would think that dislikes are not so important in the beginning. Although I don't know how your algorithm works, if you have a rough idea of what a person likes, shouldn't you be able to recommend things that they might like just based on that? When you end up recommending something that they don't like, you'll get some dislike data and can start factoring that in.

</comment><comment><USER4> My startup faces a variant of this problem. Not exactly a recommender system, but it will get more accurate as time goes on. I am compensating by putting an initial value that is a guess, and then it will adjust as time goes on. Sort of messy but necessary.

It sounds like you're saying that in your case, the value will be different for each person, so you don't have a way of seeding it correctly for different people. I sort of think you have to have SOME info to go off of. Sort of like hunch asks you questions, maybe you could do something like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> well so here is what I am doing instead... I get only a notion of the likes of the user, and since "everything else" is too huge a domain to consider as dislike, I try and rank the user's like concepts and pick the lower one's as the one's they like lesser. This only for initialization, and then I leave the filter to tune itself through feedback. I know it's not the best approach in the world, but let me see how this shapes up. Thanks of course, and any other ideas still welcome!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: anyone know why Burrell Smith designed the Macintosh and not Woz? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Scrooge_McDuck.txt&characters=Burrell%20Smith&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium)

Doesn't say _why_ unfortunately. I think Woz was pretty quickly burned out at Apple. Plenty of other great hackers were working there, so they weren't reliant on him anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably because Woz was the product of millions of years of evolution, not design. Designing a computer would be much easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I confer on you the "Champion Of The Universe" achievement badge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The story is that he just went and started it over Christmas.</comment>


Gaia-X: Technical Architecture [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.heise.de/downloads/18/2/9/0/6/1/1/7/gaia-x-technical-architecture.pdf <comment><USER2> To be clear, this is not a new cloud-hyperscaler.

Rather, different providers can offer services and (compute) nodes with different levels of certification / geographic location.

So a government agency / hospital / critical-Infrastructure on can use cloud offerings without loosing "digital sovereignty" by depending on single providers or outside actors.

<comment><USER3> So, a multi-cloud marketplace with unified API across vendors ? It could be interesting

<comment><USER4> I don't see the "unified API across vendors" there. At least not for the actual cloud part. Unified is only the part interacting with the market place.

Devils advocate: So you get this EU-verified catalogue which lets you pick your vendor lock-in between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google just like before.

<comment><USER5> Yes but user data can be securely accessed between these services too, and fingers crossed the trust mechanisms allow that access to be on a needs basis and incentivised without copying

<comment><USER6> And how is that "secure" achieved. As soon as someone reads your data and has it in their system - poof, the promise of security is gone.

The most common answer to this problem given by the people behind this is "but there is a legal contract backing the data exchange and the governing body". Nothing different than what we have today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're wondering what this is:

> We, representatives of the German Federal Government, business and science > communities, are striving to set up a high-performance, competitive, secure > and trustworthy data infrastructure for Europe. To this end, we have drawn > up the foundations for a federated, open data infrastructure based on > European values, giving it the provisional pro-ject name 'GAIA-X'.

Here's the executive summary: [https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale- Welt...](https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das- projekt-gaia-x-executive-summary.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=6)

<comment><USER4> What they build though is a service catalogue with some metering tooling on top. What is the magic second step which spawns this "high-performance, competitive, secure and trustworthy data infrastructure"?

<comment><USER8> Just sprinkle a little T-Systems and SAP over it et voilá...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, reading through the first parts of this document I'm immediately struck by a 'if they're going to make it this hard nobody is going to use it' feeling.

AWS can be so successful because they do everything themselves as part of an integrated whole. Trying to make disparate (European!) services work together and somehow end up as a cohesive package is a recipe for disaster.

An equivalent European player can _not_ be a bunch of separate companies each doing their own thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can see possibilities, but also can see the classic "apply to some body for permission to do something", particularly "Participants" registering "Services" in "Catalogs" that will require some form of attestation to a not- yet-defined set of standards.

It's there that the old lumbering beasts of EU IT (eg Bull) will turn it into the equivalent of Web Services.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe stupid question, but who assures them that any private company will actually rise up to the task of building out a product set that conforms to the Gaia-X interoperability guidelines? Even if there might launch Partners that have committed to a certain set of services (or Euros spent), what would prevent them from ditching it once they realise that consumers still rather go with AWS? Or is this supposed to be for government institutions which are legally forced to pick a Gaia-X compliant cloud provider? Confused at this point.

</comment><comment><USER12> Starting to see where they are going with this. Quite ambitious. Perhaps overly so.

A searchable catalog of all say virtual machines across countries & providers would be pretty cool for starters.

Don't quite see how they're going to get around stuff being in different physical locations. That creates latency, cost and reliability headaches that AWS/GCP/Azure doesn't need to deal with since you normally put say DB and VM into the same data center

<comment><USER2> Usually you move the computation to the location of the data and not the other way around. That's the basic premise of Hadoop/Spark and many similar big data tools.

GAIA-X self-descriptions give visibility on whether your data is (would be) in a data center that also has GPU-capacities. And if not, what you would have to pay for interconnection.

See this demo for the basic idea of the self-description graph: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f17c3Vpi3rA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f17c3Vpi3rA)

<comment><USER12> It's more of an example really. Patching together multiple provider offerings is going to involve interconnecting them somehow.

Thanks for the vid. The app they're demonstrating seems to be publicly accessible too:

[https://staging.gaia-x-demonstrator.eu/](https://staging.gaia-x- demonstrator.eu/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the doc: "GAIA-X itself does not act as a billing provider or clearing house. But GAIA-X will define standard interfaces and mechanisms for metering to be used by the Consumers and Providers. "

Yea.. so basically you have a catalogue but it's going to be up to the consumers or providers to find a way to stitch up a clearinghouse solution for dynamically orchestrated services from a multitude of providers. This is not only hard. It's near impossible. Without this crucial element, the platform is stillborn.

<comment><USER14> I don't think its like that. My understanding is that they will create a catalog with multiple services you can choose, and service provider will provide an unified API for those.

So you can take your prototype build on a server in $european_country_1 and publish it on the cloud of $european_country_2 once the dev is done without any change except the billing address.

If this is what you propose, this will be yet another stillborn project (Hey AI4EU!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The roadmap seems pretty ambitious. From the concept 3rd quarter this year to a prototype in 1 quarter? With 40 or so companies involved and a massive scope to cover up-front? I've been to openstack core meetings and things do not move that fast even in smaller groups.

I'm also curious how much is this going to be a "openstack does this, let's just adopt it" decision. (The Catalog, some Federation, etc.)

</comment><comment> j-pb They lost me at the UML diagrams. Nothing good can come from a waterfalled system like this.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems that Europe is going in the right direction with GDPR and now GAIA-X project. The fact that GDPR is mentioned a lot in the proposal really make clear their main intentions.

Perhaps the limited presence of big, powerful and influential FAANG like companies significantly reduce the lobby or pressure on the European governments to take the necessary actions to guard and protect their citizens' data.

Hopefully this can provide the right fundamentals and creates impetus for more personal data friendly localhost first and cloud second software paradigm. This paradigm is more natural and secure than the cloud first software paradigm currently being practiced by major software companies (e.g. FAANG).

</comment><comment><USER17> So, it's an open-market AWS with data sharing capabilities, certified third- party services, and RTF APIs.

I tought we agreed the semantic web was a failed experiment? Stop trying to bring it back "because it looks smart"

<comment><USER18> Provide facts and sources or be tagged forever.</comment></comment>


Your dynamic IP address is now protected personal data under EU law - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/10/eu-dynamic-static-ip-personal-data/ <comment><USER2> So what should I do with traffic logs for traffic originating from the EU? As I understand, your servers can't store such logs</comment>


Project MK Ultra - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

<comment><AUTHOR> Since we're talking COINTELPRO[1], might as well pull MK ULTRA into the mix. For the younger folks among us, or those who aren't history buffs, this stuff explains exactly why so many people are distrustful of the US government. It's not just silly paranoia or crazy conspiracy theories... the US government has a demonstrable history of engaging in illegal and unethical behavior.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886672)

<comment><USER2> > the US government has a demonstrable history of engaging in illegal and > unethical behavior.

To be fair, all governments engage in illegal and unethical behavior.

As a fellow old person and a history buff, I'm glad you're posting this info.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pain points for small business accounting software? - <AUTHOR>

I have my consulting company (1 man shop) and even though my accounting needs are not very complex, I still have to do income statements, projections etc. to help with deductions, taxes etc for the year. If it helps, I have an S-corp structure in the US.
I have so far looked at Inquit quickbooks (most widely used but heavily bloated for my needs), wave accounting (decent but has ads since it is free).
I feel that we can do better with this for simpler cases like mine. I know there are tons of other similar accounting software but in terms of UI/UX, i m not convinced. Just wanted to hear from other small bsuiness or 1 man shop owners about pain points. Feel free to share. <comment><USER2> Quickbooks is overkill, not very well designed software and their customer support is horrible. I would use their Quicken Home and Business package if you wanted something simple to use. Of course, if your business grows you would have to move to something else down the road.

I've been using GnuCash and, despite a few quirks, seems to be pretty good and its free.

</comment><comment><USER3> try www.xero.com. been using it for over three years and it works great for me</comment>


Observation of a new particle in the search for the Higgs boson - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214

<comment><USER2> Well, it does go on to say:

> This observation, which has a significance of 5.9 standard deviations, > corresponding to a background fluctuation probability of 1.7x10^-9, is > compatible with the production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson.

Technically it could be another particle with a 126GeV mass, though that's hopefully something more experiments will show one way or the other.

<comment><USER3> I do wonder if the higgs is a funny creature in that it has a sort of quantum echo. By that I mean that it is in more than one place at once, this would also help explain why gravity is as weak as it is. If that is the case then you could think of the higgs as being like a bouncy ball with the decay of the various bounces all actualy happening at once (may explain those fluctuations). Though if you were to observe a bouncy ball and sample its movement slow enough then they would appear to be as one event. Just my theory of things and I hope more is proven given the higgs will help to one day make the theory of gravity a fully understood fact. My physics was formaly high- school level and the rest is from a passing interest of all things science so if I appear to be so wrong then maybe somebody could point out the details so that I may not make the same mistakes again.

<comment><USER4> The Higgs boson is not thought to be related to gravity, beyond giving mass to some particles. The Higgs particle is the "chunky" form of the Higgs field, just like a photon of light is a little chunk of electric field that has broken off and gone into business for itself.

If you have more questions about physics, ask /r/physics on Reddit. They people there are very nice and include several serious physicists.

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much Sir

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "1 the western equivalent value is 1'390 kCHF. 2 the western equivalent value is 5'450 kCHF"

[http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost...](http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost_tdr.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a lot of researchers, 3 Zimmerman's alone! Which 3 get their name on the Nobel Prize when it comes out?

<comment><USER7> Zimmerman, obviously!

On a more serious note, it appears that the Nobel Prize can be awarded to organizations, which would make CERN the most likely recipient. This said, as far as I can say only the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded in such a way in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Higgs wasn't the only predicted particle that evidence has been found for recently. It looks like the Fermi gamma-ray telescope found some decent evidence that cosmological dark matter is composed of neutralinos, which have a rest mass, oddly, about half that of the Higgs:

Evidence for gamma-ray halos around galaxy clusters: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1003>

Evidence for a 130 GeV spike in gamma-ray emissions in certain locales: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1045></comment>


Founders: You don't own your employees - <AUTHOR> http://jasonevanish.com/2013/04/14/founders-you-dont-own-your-employees/

<comment><USER3> This is important enough to me that I have left money on the table so as to not work at a place that requires my signature on an invention assignment agreement.

What I do for fun or profit on my own time is my own business, and the fact that I have a work structure that allows me to do this keeps me happy enough to come back to work the next morning.

<comment><USER4> One of the most refreshing things I found when I started at Netflix was that they actually specifically call out in the employment agreement that what you do on your own time is your own, even if you use your work computer to do it. As long as it isn't direct competition, side projects are explicitly encouraged.

<comment><USER5> CA law says that what you do on your own time with your own materials is yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I get paid a salary to work X hours a week. If you want me to be "all in" and go the extra mile, you need to align my interests with that of the company — through equity or other means.

<comment><USER7> Actually, I think profit sharing (properly structured) is a lot better than equity. I wrote about this, here: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/)

Equity allotments for employees in typical VC-funded startups are pathetic, and have to be that way because VCs set such a small option pool.

Also, payment occurs at profitability (and is immediate and continuous from that point) rather than liquidity so there's an incentive for employees and founders both to do this unstylish (in VC-istan) thing called _actually building a great business_.

I agree with what you are saying, though.

<comment><USER8> _> Actually, I think profit sharing (properly structured) is a lot better than equity._

Towards the end of last year, I spent quite a few hours thinking about a compensation structure that wouldn't completely screw over non-founders in a start-up -> small size company setting.

A "profit sharing" style set up is exactly what I came up with after several days of considering the subject, with departing employees selling their "shares" back to the company at some pre-arranged multiple of earnings or book value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think side projects are very important. It's funny, a lot people have a hard time distinguishing between free time and work, without realizing that for some of the best engineers out there, they are the same. Just because my laptop is open, doesn't mean I have to be working. In the evening, on the weekends, or whatever you consider your free time to be, YOU go to movies, go out for dinner, go to the gym, go skiing, etc. But, as someone who really likes to build things, the time I would be doing those things (yes, I do those as well), I'm writing code.

The key is to hire people you trust to make good decisions when it comes to side projects, and the amount of time they spend on them.

But also on the employers, have you created and maintained an environment that someone wants to work for?

One of the things I think about most often while hiring, because it is true for me is that, I would be half the developer I am without side projects. My college degree and job I had out of college taught me nothing but concepts and theory, and how to be micromanaged. I WANT to hire people that have side projects because it means they ENJOY what they do, they dont just do it because someone is paying them to.

I recently wrote about this myself: [http://ryanabbott.com/side-projects- learning-experience-vs-d...](http://ryanabbott.com/side-projects-learning- experience-vs-distraction)

</comment><comment><USER10> Side projects means that the person in question is investing hens own time learning (more often than not, new) stuff. They don't want their employes learning stuff. Fair enough.

<comment><USER11> "investing hens own time"

what is 'hens'?

<comment><USER12> [http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_s...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html)

<comment><USER13> ..or just use "their"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've written a lot about this in my blog series on the Gervais Principle (21 posts, and 0.8 being worked on).

First, you have the MacLeod hierarchy:

        "Sociopaths" (upper management): strategic + dedicated + NOT subordinate
        "Clueless" (middle management): dedicated + subordinate + NOT strategic
        "Losers" (workers): strategic + subordinate + NOT dedicated

MacLeod Sociopaths aren't all bad people, and Losers are not losers in the sense of being undesirable or unpopular people (in fact, it's often the opposite) but because low-end employment is a losing deal.

Someone who has all 3 is a Protege, but that's rare and conditional. If you don't invest in someone's career, a strategic person will _never_ be subordinate and dedicated both. He'll either optimize for comfort (Loser route) or personal yield/glory (Sociopath route).

Work cultures tend to be defined based on what they value most.

        Subordinacy uber alles: Rank culture (typical corp. environment)
        Dedication uber alles: Tough culture (e.g. Enron, Microsoft's stack-ranking)
        Strategy uber alles: Self-executive culture (e.g. Valve)
        Balance of the 3: Guild culture (rare, not seen in startups)

VC-funded startups tend to be all-Clueless. The Sociopaths are VCs and executive implants who aren't really part of the company. Startups can't stand to have Losers, since they tend to require explicit management and the rules are too ill-defined at that point. So they often end up with the tough culture, which is the opposite of how startups wish to market themselves.

In rank culture, all you need to do to remain employable is get along with your manager; but in tough culture, there's an unwritten rule that everyone must be 100% dedicated to work. Total submission of effort replaces subordination. It's not actually that way-- people aren't actually willing to work 80+ hours without personal benefit-- but people who flagrantly break the rules get shown out.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, but you may be able to convince them that you do!

</comment><comment><USER15> Usually you need a team focused on just one job to get done - <USER2> there's no 100% commitment to your project. You don't want your employees to switch between priorities.

<comment><USER16> "First, telling someone what they should and shouldn't do in their free time is a tremendous insult to them and their personal judgment. It's also incredibly short-sighted."

Read that. Twice. Now, add these words of pearly wisdom to the end: "It's also none of your fucking business."

It's their time, not yours. If your employees aren't giving you 100% at work, you've every right to complain. But it's absolutely none of your business what they do outside of work.

<comment><USER15> That's not what I've meant - I don't allow working after hours in my companies. But I prefer a team, which at work focus just on my project. Side projects interfere with each other and that can be deadly to productivity at work. I wouldn't ever try to tell anybody what to do with their free time, relax man :)

<comment><USER16> Given the context of the blog (free time), it's only natural to assume you were talking about that too, since you don't explicitly state otherwise.

I'm perfectly relaxed by the way. I swore for emphasis, not out of emotional engagement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My data science and A.I. news aggregator - <AUTHOR> https://www.analisted.com <comment><USER2> With respect, I believe this project has an unfortunate name.

Speaking only for myself, I don't think I would want to be anal-isted.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think is preventing you from "thriving" in life? - <AUTHOR> - <comment><USER2> I think the question is flawed from the get-go. Nothing is preventing you – there are blind programmers and amputee mountain climbers. You don't need motivation, what you need is discipline. Find what you want to do and then don't stop.

<comment><USER3> Nothing's wrong. He asks what you _think_ is preventing you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All of the new features I'm introducing are being called bugs. People just aren't appreciating the true value of frequent, random segmentation faults as alternatives to the Pomodoro technique

</comment><comment><USER5> The time needed to build the amount of knowledge needed to act on my dreams.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yourself.</comment>


Indiana House OKs legislation barring companies from microchipping employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/house-oks-legislation-barring-companies-from-microchipping-their-employees/article_6ac2d287-cfd3-52a5-9714-fda79e81497d.html <comment><AUTHOR> > Employees are not required to get the microchips, and Westby told the > station there is no GPS tracking.

From the Reddit thread [0]:

> The problem is that's how it always starts. Over time as people get used to > it they start making it more and more inconvenient to not be chipped and use > peer pressure until basically everyone is chipped because not being chipped > is made as difficult as possible.

> This is an age old tactic. The frog doesn't even realize it's being boiled > alive because the water was heated so slowly that they didn't realize the > danger until it was too late.

> You have to pre-empt these things otherwise it becomes much more difficult > to overturn.

[0]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ev1kyl/indiana_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ev1kyl/indiana_house_oks_legislation_barring_companies/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Egad!</comment>


Inspiration for startup ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.ideaswatch.com/ Hi,
we have launched a new site for young entrepreneurs looking for business ideas. You can share ideas for cool new products or services you don't plan to realize yourself, discuss startup ideas with entrepreneurial and creative minds from all over the world and get in touch with other people passionate about the same idea and start a business together.
Let me know what you think <comment><USER2> why would someone tell there startup idea to the world?</comment>


Why Snack Food Is Addictive: The Grand Unified Theory of Snack Appeal - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnolls.org/2074/why-snack-food-is-addictive-the-grand-unified-theory-of-snack-appeal/ <comment><USER2> Damn. This actually reads like Science, even though the frequent bolding makes it look like an SEO advice email. Guess I'll give the paleo diet a shot.</comment>


Rosencrantz – A Web DSL for Nim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andreaferretti/rosencrantz <comment><USER2> Nim is one of those underpublicized language. It's really good, I will leave it at that. I've used it a few times and it takes maybe 10 minutes to get back into it. It's perfect for making tools.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I also had positive experience with nim. I'm not sure why it's so unknown, maybe because it fits in the same niche between rust and go and not backed up by any major company in industry. But I highly recommend trying Nim out!

<comment><USER4> Nim is great, and I use it (in production), but I know exactly why it isn't as popular: Nim is fucking huge.

Most programmers I know don't even know what a pragma is; Nim uses them extensively. Nim has types, objects, is low level, can be compiled to shared objects (something that didn't come out to Go until 1.5), macros, generics, templates, oh and it compiles to both C and JavaScript (and C++, and Objective C in case you need easy bindings for those), dynamic dispatch, mutually recursive types, pointers, named arguments, tricky hash tables, procedures that look like functions or methods (whichever suits you), and an irrelevant casing (spellLikeThis is the same is spell_like_this - case only matters for the first letter and underscores don't matter), and many more.

All of this on top of a hyper fast (~2x the speed of Go) compiled language.

Most other very complete languages are not compiled so you can kinda muck around in a repl and use introspection to figure out whats going on. Nim isn't like that. You need to think and figure things out when you're first learning it. Furthermore Nim isn't yet at 1.0 and lacks its killer library. Go and Rust are easier to get started with because they are simpler languages. They are easier to teach and easier to write documentation for.

Nim kinda reminds me of Ember or Rails or C++(see note): Huge, but worthwhile to learn because you'll never feel constrained by it. I highly doubt it will ever be as mainstream as Go though. I've generally found that most people are too lazy to learn harder languages / libraries.

Note: I do not like C++ for many reasons. The tooling is crufty, syntax is awful, impossible to reason about a codebase unless its picked a subset of C++; but the one thing I'll grant C++ is that _you can always eventually get what you want done_.

<comment><USER5> What you've just described is a hodgepodge of stuff thrown together. That's a _lack_ of language design with a surplus of features. My readings on older reports for language designs showed the art was figuring out just how much power to include in the language & keeping it all consistent/sensible. One can overdo it.

An example of a clean, carefully-thought language that's low-level, consistent, and very powerful is PreScheme:

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

Modula-3, a C++ and Java competitor, was another where they made careful tradeoffs of features, safety, compile speed, run speed, and ease of learning/reading.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3)

There's also some dialects of Haskell and ML focusing on system level. Didn't hit those levels of maturity though. What I'd like to see is someone take the Nim tech, subset it, change inconsistent stuff to be consistent... basically clean it up into a coherent picture... then deploy that as a new language. It could be pretty awesome if it happens. Right now, it's too complex and incoherent except for people, as you said, willing to do a huge learning curve.

Note: Nim is so huge now that it might be easier to add Ada static checks and Rust dynamic/concurrency checks to PreScheme instead of fixing Nim. You'd have a low-level, safe LISP. Put a 3GL front end on top of it for more adoption. That's what Julia people did.

<comment><USER4> Well I don't have a negative view of Nim in general, and I wouldn't describe it as a hodgepodge. I would describe Nim as a language that doesn't hold you back and doesn't save you from yourself. Personally I refrain from using most of the complex stuff, but when I need it I love how it is there for me. For example, the shared objects make it very easy for me to just roll things in Nim then link them to Ruby through the FFI.

Will your average developer need these features? No. But the average developer writes ASP, PHP, or JavaScript. I'd rather be formidable even if it means doing the work.

<comment><USER5> "and I wouldn't describe it as a hodgepodge. I would describe Nim as a language that doesn't hold you back and doesn't save you from yourself."

That's kind of vague. When I say hodgepodge, I mean they threw in all kinds of capabilities into the language without integrating them into a consistent whole. The examples I gave leave no surprises. What you see reading others' code is even expected. You could do about anything in a variant of PreScheme that you could do in Nim given almost any language feature gets ported to a LISP as a library. Except, it's all consistent in its style, syntax, and techniques for doing whatever it does. Nim seems to lack that very-significant property that affects uptake, ease of formal analysis, and maintenance burden.

So, the language is powerful. People are doing neat things with it. Just lacks design traits that have historically been important for programming languages in terms of getting and keeping developers/users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off-topic but related to Nim. Having been inspired by the Rust community survey we have just created a similar one for Nim. I would appreciate any and all answers, especially if you've never used Nim before!

[http://goo.gl/forms/XJ3TPsaiIQe5HlTB2](http://goo.gl/forms/XJ3TPsaiIQe5HlTB2)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sad to see all these [] and () in Nim, which has such a beautiful syntax to start with.

<comment><USER8> What would you suggest instead? Routes are naturally nested, and overloading [] seemed the best choice

<comment><USER9> I came here to say the same thing as the GP. So while I am not the poster you responded to, I'll pitch in my opinion.

I've written a number of Nim libs at this point. Rosencrantz is missing the idiomatic 'feel' of Nim -- blocks and trees. I would rather see a syntax like this:

        let handler = firstOf:
          get:
            firstOf:
              path("/api/status"):
                ok(getStatus())
              pathChunk("/api/message"):
                accept("application/json"):
                  intSegment(id):
                      let message = getMessageById(id)
                      ok(message)
          post:
            path("/api/new-message"):
              jsonBody(msg):
                let
                  id = generateId()
                  saved = saveMessage(id, msg)
                if saved: ok(id)
                else: complete(Http500, "save failed")

I believe all of that should be possible using templates; grab the AST for the `stmt` passed to each function, then iterate over each node.

<comment><USER8> The problem with this approach is that it would be difficult to make handlers first-class. What if your post routes are a handler imported from another module?

Templates would allow for the syntax you present, but do not combine.

<comment><USER9> That's not at all the case. Templates can return values. So really, you could think of the templates as syntactic sugar around the existing functions you've got right now.

For example, the 'firstOf' template above would be responsible for scanning the AST it's given, taking each node and putting it in to a sequence. Then it instantiates a Handler with that sequence and returns it.

<comment><USER8> Of course template can return values.

The problem is that they need to be given the AST. What if one constructs a handler somewhere in another module (say an authentication handler) and you import it? How can you reuse it, considering that it needs to surround other handlers (that is, if auth fails, you do not go inside inner handlers)?

With Rosencrantz it is easy: if `auth` is our authentication handler, and in your module you define a handler `h`, you can use `auth -> h`, or `auth[h]` if you want to spell `h` inline.

Now, what you could in fact do is write a template `authTemplate` that takes a handler `h` and returns `auth -> h`, so that you can still write in template style. But you have to do this for all handlers.

It could make sense to provide such templates for builtin handlers, though... want to chime in? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not Jester[1]? Jester has a better API, IMO.

[1]: [https://github.com/dom96/jester](https://github.com/dom96/jester)

<comment><USER8> I wrote Rosencrantz because I do not like the Jester API very much.

Jester, like many other frameworks, hardcodes exactly what to do with a Request - say parsing the headers, parsing the form if the content type suggests so, always return a date, and so on.

This is not bad per se, but I prefer to have something I can compose. Say, I have a working route `r`. If I want to add CORS support, for instance, I can just make a handler `h` that adds CORS headers and then use the route `h -> r`.

This is more flexible and leaves fine grained control over which headers to require, or return, how to do content negotiation, and so on. You can separate your routes for `POST` from those for `GET` in different modules and then combine them, or maybe separate your authentication routes from the business logic ones. You can easily create handlers that work as middleware, and so on.

In short, the thing I like about this approach is that handlers become first class objects that you can manipulate and create freely

<comment><USER10> I see. So, hopefully not being too shallow, this is like Jester with middleware support. I'll give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is inspired by Spray, which I just learned about recently. The project is being migrated to Akka, so it's going to have support for the foreseeable future.

It looks like a great fit for Nim though.

</comment><comment><USER12> Now I am waiting for a web server Guildenstern in Nim.</comment>


Basic Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://mbasic.facebook.com/home.php

<comment><USER2> It requires a special kind of engineer and PM to dedicate the time and skill required to make things like this work when most of the rest of the company is working to take advantage of the bleeding edge of technology.

Hats off to that person or team!

<comment><USER3> This is their mid-quality mobile web version (predominantly for smartphone users with non-native apps), they actively maintain it alongside all of their other platforms (including two other quality mobile web versions for less and greater bandwidth).

I think the mentality is about accessibility, not technology, it's just that a lot of what gets focused on coming out of the company is from the high-tech side.

<comment><USER4> They also have a "lite" app that can only be installed if you access the Android Play store from an Asian IP or similar.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.l...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.lite)

I wonder why they bother segregating it like that though. I would love to give it a spin, as i have found their main app to be hogging the CPU one too many times lately.

<comment><USER5> You can download the apk and it will work on any phone. So you can either trust somewhere like [http://www.apkmirror.com/](http://www.apkmirror.com/) or use one of the various methods of ripping the apk from the play store.

I use lite for notifications because my phone has limited space and I find the website to be good enough.

<comment><USER4> About those notifications, apparently Opera Mini support them now.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.mini.native)

Not sure i am a fan of their new interface though, and it is a proxy browser (pages get pre-processed on a Opera run server).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ive been using the basic site ever since I saw since I saw a talk by RMS about the "javascript trap" of unintentially running non-free code in your browser on an otherwise free machine. I have since grown accustomed to it and instead of finding it to be fast, I rather just find the regular site to be horribly slow.

<comment><USER7> >I saw a talk by RMS

Genuinely curious: why are you using Facebook in the first place?

<comment><USER6> I am a musician and to some extent need to use Facebook at some minimal level as it is generally expected in my town. RMS made the argument that if you must use kindred services like youtube and Facebook, that you should at the minimum use the javascript free versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was stuck with notifications I can't delete on one of my fanpages and couldn't find any solutions to fix this bug (anyone who has ever tried to find support on FB can easily understand that we're the things in "break things" )

Until I use Facebook with this old UI. It solves this bug right away ( _Indeed it doesn 't solve anything, it works as expected._) So if you have a problem with Facebook maybe you should try this UI.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's pretty cool how minimal this is. No JS, not even an external CSS file. And it's snappy too. I almost prefer it to the regular Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a trend in video games to rewrite games for old platforms, to get modern functionality using extremely constrained resources (e.g. [http://csdb.dk/release/?id=94672](http://csdb.dk/release/?id=94672) [http://csdb.dk/release/?id=114055](http://csdb.dk/release/?id=114055) [http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2012/10/super-bread-box- preview-c64.ht...](http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2012/10/super-bread-box- preview-c64.html) ).

Here's hoping that web hipsters will start a similar trend.

</comment><comment><USER10> How is this different from [https://m.facebook.com/](https://m.facebook.com/) ? (I access them from desktop [edit: Firefox on Windows 8.1] and they look the same)

<comment><USER11> Weird, the standard mobile site and this basic one are very different for me in Chrome.

This one seems to have much less JS. It looks like the old school static Facebook page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seeing blocky buttons made me feel happy for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems like many of the features of the full Facebook are there. I wonder if they are leveraging their React components to render the same stuff on the server...

<comment><USER14> I'm not quite sure this is necessarily the case - I noticed that on the regular FB site, it has one notification for two friends having a birthday, and yet in this basic version, it claims I have two notifications for the same notification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it the thing for low bandwidth like Africa ect..?

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of this from 2009:

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/facebook-begins-testing- fac...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/facebook-begins-testing-facebook- lite-a-faster-simpler-version-of-the-service/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, that's fast

</comment><comment><USER18> Wish there was a view that would get rid of the "People you may know" sitting above content I care about.

<comment><USER19> I've been playing with Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey plugins and using them to tear out content I dislike in facebook. I currently replace Trending/Suggested For you sidebar with random pictures from /r/aww. I'm sure you could do similar things if you cared to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you use the tinfoil app on android, it has an option for this mode as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> Same as m.facebook.com?

<comment><USER11> No. Visually they're very different.

I can't open the dev console right now, but it appears there's far less JS and "responsive design" on basic mode. m.facebook.com is more dynamic. It's like the Facebook of 2005.

<comment><USER22> Hmm, Visually in my ff browser they appear identical. And looking at the requested JS, they also appear the same. Odd..

<comment><USER21> Same here, FF on Linux Mint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Isn't this the view for older WAP phones?

</comment><comment><USER24> Is this from Facebook or someone's (very good) hack?

<comment><USER18> Well since it's at facebook.com, it would be a _very_ good hack if it was not official.</comment></comment>


Our Regressive Web - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/future-tech-future-market/7b1a7ddb6ffe <comment><USER3> The most interesting part of the article (which is well-written and thought- provoking) isn't the mildly alarmist "regressive web" assertion, but the insight that Reader may have been killed because it was strategically opposed to Google's mission as it enters the mass-market phase of its growth.

Which mirrors the developmentally mass-market phase of the growth of the internet itself.

That doesn't necessarily mean that niche tools won't continue to be available to interested specialists. Ham radio kits are still around, right?

I'm not sure that the macro view of the web is as bleak as it seems. We're seeing mass-market effects take hold in our playground, which is a bummer, but we're also seeing mass-market adoption of tools which help keep information democratized and flowing freely in multiple directions, which is an improvement on the past 2000 years.

<comment><USER4> ___"Ham radio kits are still around, right?"_ __

Amateur radio may be the last bastion of free, decentralized communication. 70 years ago (when the Internet did not exist) Hams could send and receive signals all over the world, and they still do today. They don't need an Internet, a cellular phone infrastructure, etc. And should the Internet become controlled to the point of being useless (by governments and greedy corporations), RF may be the only thing left standing.

73

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, hams don't seem to actually _use_ radio for much except complaining about their ailments and/or Windows 95 PCs.

I say this as someone who went through the trouble of acquiring a license, getting VHF and HF rigs, and then discovering that it's a wasteland of "So what kinda radio you got there?". The government's forbidding of encrypted traffic also helps ensure no-one will use it for anything more important than complaining about "kids these days and their computers".

<comment><USER6> > The government's forbidding of encrypted traffic also helps ensure no-one > will use it for anything more important than complaining about "kids these > days and their computers".

Isn't that pretty much the use case of steganography?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, if you don't have the codebook HAM discussion will be very bland.

Darn kids = Federal government

Computers = Intelligence agencies

arthritis = surveilance

getting old = getting ready to commence with the plan

mortgage = jail term

"Yeah, Dan. I hear you about them darn kids and their computers... I hear Bob's just about got his mortgage paid off finally, but I'm getting old and my arthritis is acting up, so I'm going to sign off for tonight."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The PC revolution is regressing too. We're going back to mainframes and jailed devices.

<comment><USER9> Good point. Not exactly my area of expertise but I should have used that as an example.

<comment><USER10> Pardon my naivete (and disregard for proper accent usage), but I wonder how much Google would accept for their reader service.

<comment><USER9> We saw this with Delicious though. Some rich guys bought it...and made it unusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The demise of USENET was the first great regression for me. I still haven't found a forum quite as convenient as a news client.

<comment><USER12> Part of the reason USENET got abandoned is the same reason that MySpace and Facebook are being abandoned: as newer services came about, the cutting edge flocked to them, which left a high ratio of malcontents, trolls, bullies, assorted dickheads, etc.

<comment><USER13> I don't agree. In fact, the flood of new Usenet users corresponded to an overall flood of new people from all walks of life learning to use the Internet; it wasn't all bad. Also, the structure of Usenet is like that of very-modern Reddit, while the "Eternal September" hypothesis of its demise is premised on an early-Reddit model. I'm sure alt.drugs suffered, but "comp.security.unix" did OK.

The fatal injury from Usenet came from piracy. I ran a competitive† server for the ISP I helped run in Chicago††. The amount of effort it took to host binaries feeds was _unbelievable_ and only got worse as time went on. Usenet is just about the dumbest imaginable way to distribute binaries†††. Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer ISPs offered full-feed Usenet. When an ISP opted (sanely) to go with no-binaries Usenet, their Usenet consumers bolted. Usenet centralized and became less and less available. Usenet software because less and less lucrative to build. Then blogging hit.

This is a little off topic, I know, but I'm bitter about what happened to Usenet, because I really loved it.

† _(we hit the top tier of the Freenix list several times; I believe we were one of the first 3 providers to come up with the INN history cache)_

†† _(EnterAct)_

††† _(imagine an Akamai that had no control over whose content was hosted, but instead had to mirror every bit of porn and warez from every server everywhere to every ISP in the world)_

<comment><USER14> Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam, at least not one that I knew about. It steadily became harder to find the signal in the noise.

It still had the best reader experience. I don't know why modern email clients, for example, don't look more like trn.

<comment><USER15> Usenet had a strict definition for spam, which meant a bunch of stuff got through.

It was also under active attack from Hipcrime and similar.

And no matter how good the killfiles were there were people who wouldn't use them.

I agree about the clients - I really liked slrn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Those services are regressing because the general population of users is no longer dominatated by people who _like to read_. As mainstream consumers flooded onto the internet over the past decade, the demographic changed. Services that give you a lot of stuff to read, no matter how nicely delivered, are not the the services the mainsteam consumers want.

<comment><USER17> Yep. This means you probably can't get Facebook-level users into your service. But the old group of readers is still out there, looking for a good product. And if it was big enough audience to launch products in 2006, why wouldn't it be now?

<comment><USER18> I think you are right.

The demographics have changed percentage-wise but population-wise I don't think the number of people who "like to read" has decreased at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think we are regressing because the AOL of olden days was an indicator of why the Flipboards of today is successful and why Google Reader is dead. We were never progressing to begin with because the mass was not interested in curating their own, rather, they are happy with the apps buttons, the beautiful looking magazines and what not.

<comment><USER20> Google Reader isn't dead, it was killed with _tens of millions_ of users. Three million people have already migrated to Feedly, and that's just the more savvy users.

<comment><USER19> The point is that RSS is dependent upon user's self-creation needs, versus that of a thing created for them by someone else. TV by its very nature a medium which is created for you and Internet was supposed to be the opposite of it. I agree with the gist of the argument presented in the OP's article but my point is that we were never progressing on the Internet for the better although it surely looked like that we are and we will. The lack of adoption of RSS by the mass, is just one evidence of how we use Internet like it is a TV.

<comment><USER20> IMO the lack of adoption of RSS is more due to technical reasons and the complex nature of it than a lack of motive. You use TV as an example, but today YouTube has much more viewers than tv, choosing their own content. Picturing people as a homogenous, brainless mass is very short-sighted.

<comment><USER19> What is technical and complex about self-curation? The whole idea of self- curation is non-technical and anything but complex. One can blame the engineering of RSS and all, and one can even conjure up the conspiracy theories of big media, advertising and such, but the basic fact remains .... people at large are not into curating, finding, searching information on their own. They'd rather other feed information on the plate. There is nothing brainless about such a need. It is just how people wish to evolve.

<comment><USER20> What does the success of Pinterest say about that?

<comment><USER19> Pinterest is a stroefront where people are either selling, or they're window- shopping. How do you arrive at assuming Pinterest as a curation tool?

Look at the earlier version of Delicious. It was a curation tool. Look at it now. Do you see a difference between what Delicious now shows versus what you see see at Pinterest? Throw in clipboard.com. They've at it before Pinterest showed up.

When it comes to accessing information, there is a difference between "saving" information and "acquiring" it. Sites like Facebook, Google+ etc are all into serving you means to "save" and not acquire. If you wish to acquire information, they'd rather you acquire first through their Ads infested window-front store. By the time you get to the meat of any substantive information, you have lost the real opportunity.

The RSS protocol was the real substantive engine of a means to acquire information, an ultimate self-curation tool which empowers one with information and not distraction. Again, you must have noticed, the biggest complaints on the demise of Google Reader came from the typical journalist community and the tech savvy people. The know the value of pipes which was serving them information. The mass never cared and still don't because they'd rather be served. Pinterest and window-shopping sites like these are only creating illusion of curation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One other form of regression: people navigating the web through custom apps on their phone, like "Hail a Cab" or "Shop at Target." The whole idea of the web was to create a neutral platform so that custom software wasn't needed. In addition, this is raising a generation who are illiterate of general computer principles, but have lots of brain-space for specific apps. "I'm really good with Hail a Cab!"

</comment><comment><USER21> This isn't regression: it's _progress_. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - <USER2> because it didn't work - but because it _wasn't worth doing_.

There is an implicit assumption, perhaps borne out of the relatively 'youth' of the information sector that the only criteria for a successful idea is that it's "good". There are plenty of examples of inventions, ideas or concepts that seem destined to succeed and yet, in the long run, prove unsustainable or unsuitable to break through to a wider market.

Reader and Alerts would appear to be classic examples. Highly marginal services (srsly), filling a specialised but unloved niche (sry), for a set of low value customers (orly). And before anyone starts that up again, talk of "alienating the influencers" is highly exaggerated. Google's influencers are low-fi, not the tech-l33t, as much as it might pain HN.

<comment><USER22> Were they really not worth doing? Or just not worth _Google_ doing? The latter has a much higher bar given the rate at which other parts of Google print money.

I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant technical barriers.

<comment><USER23> I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Google Reader seems to cut down on the number of ads a user sees. And seeing as Google is at its heart an advertising company, why would they put effort into maintaining a tool that reduces the number of delivered ads?

<comment><USER9> Ding ding!

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't unfortunate, bad for us and bad for the web in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of a Dilbert comic. To paraphrase:

Boss: "We need to decentralize to remove bottlenecks."

[later]

Boss: "We need to centralize to improve efficiency."

</comment><comment><USER23> Am I the only one who feels like the web is making a transition from being more like a library to being more like television?

The more content is sliced up into little digestible chunks and spread across multiple pages the less useful it is. There will always be great content online, it just seems like it might get harder and harder to find on sites whose layout is driven by pageviews.

<comment><USER25> Pageviews which are counted and monetized by Google's other services. There was another HN submission recently (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476812>) that had a great quote:

"I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to the detriment of us all."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This post ignores one fact: VCs did, in fact, throw millions at Reader-like services and competitors a few years ago, when the RSS scene was hot. Most of them went nowhere, the luckiest got acquired.

A few lifestyle businesses will forever chug along on a few million hardcore fans like me; nevertheless, the overall technology in its current incarnation is an evolutionary dead-end: it's heavy on resources (all that bandwidth!), fundamentally uni-directional and too user-unfriendly to break into the mainstream.

We need to ditch RSS and the current breed of pub/sub tools, rebuild them from scratch with monetization and aggregation in mind (while maintaining a fundamentally decentralised approach), and only then we'll be able to build an ecosystem of easy-to-use apps that can self-sustain in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER27> Everything goes in cycles of human attention span. Technologies become tired and "crufty" because maintainers get bored with them and want the new hotness. This is nothing new and the up-and-down cycle will continue happening over and over. Witness desktop Linux, which has been around for a few decades and yet to this day is constantly being torn down and rebuilt anew because the maintainers (and users!) become too familiar with the problems the technology solves and want a new thing to play with.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article is very true. But this happens everywhere, when a short term commercial interest is more important than user experience and solution of users problems. Take this hardware example. My moms favourite iron is a heavy chunk of metal with no self adjustments, regulations and it does not switch itself off. It is 55 yrs old. It just works. My wife changes modern irons every 2-3 years. It pushes economy forward.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's really all about curation. Early on, it was yahoo's attempt to put all web content in a big hierarchy. dmoz after that. Then RSS let people curate their own content. Now people subscribe to friends that post interesting things. I don't think the appetite for curation has decreased - it's just that the best method of curation subtly changes as content generation styles change.

</comment><comment><USER30> What about new sites like Instapaper and Newsblur?

And Digg (OK, OK), Reddit, Hacker News?

We're losing some things and gaining others. The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.

<comment><USER31> >The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.

If you understood evolution fully, you would know that "the web is regressing" and "the web is evolving", in addition to not being mutually exclusive statements, regression necessarily implies evolution.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_evolution>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> RSS specifically is being replaced by reddit and well.. HN. The leading edge of people who adopted and used it, people like us have moved to HN and subreddits, I'm not sure outside our demographic rss ever caught on to any great extent. Whereas reddit especially is becoming popular with a much wider range of people.

<comment><USER9> There is, nonetheless, a HUGE difference between you pulling content (subscribing) and other people recommending or aggregating content for you. One is subject to the One Off Problem, the other is not. One creates incentives to sensationalize/exaggerate/selectively omit and the other does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> With regards to Google Alerts, wouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a scheduled task using any decent scripting language (or even just standard unix utilities) to just read a text file of search-terms, scrape the results on Google, and email you the results?

HN Challenge: Do the above, in any language, in the smallest number of lines. I have a feeling it can be achieved in one, so we may need to judge by number of characters :-)

And sorry, I don't see discontinuing Google Reader as the death of RSS, no matter what the author may feel. It's really just the death of a nice RSS reader. I do however feel that the author is correct in saying that RSS is not really compatible with Google's advertising business.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if you could create a service which uses RSS, serves ads and gives back royalties to the services subscribed. Think Spotify for RSS. The biggest obstacle would be creating an RSS tool usable enough so that people are willing to consume ads (or pay a (monthly?) fee) in exchange for a truly usable RSS reader.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great article by Ryan! Had to post it. We actually interviewed him last year and some of his advice will be appearing in our book Accelerate that is currently 88% funded on KickStarter. <http://kck.st/ZIgBXE>.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ironically it's published on a site that doesn't have an RSS feed (or atom, remember that debate) published. which is a shame really as the content on medium is usually pretty good but I'll hardly ever remember to go back on a regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER36> It is not just things disappearing with no alternative, it is new "innovations" that are less capable than their predecessors.

-We don't have Flash or Silverlight anymore, we just have HTML5/JS/CSS.

~Well HTML5 is brand new and must be superior to those others right?

-No Both can do all that HTML5 can do and a lot more. Flash could do everything 8 years ago that HTML5 can do today.

~Well can I create my own Markup Language and alternative to HTML5/JS/CSS?

-You can, but most people will spit on you - leave the "innovation" up to the committee. Standard are all that matter to anyone. Just go along with the crowd and be a code monkey, Stick your ambition and innovations into a bottle.

~Is there really no way I can create my own Browser client technology?

-Well, there is one way. Just create your innovative/bleeding edge concept - then make it compile down to JavaScript. That is the only way.

~Wow, that sounds like a workaround/hack just to try bringing new and better ideas to web development. It still gets around the limitations, but sounds very daunting and a like a huge pain in the ass.

-Yeah - I think that this is the idea. Rather than creating a standard for HTML5 AND some sort of VM/API that others can use to create innovative and better technologies. The standards guys' strategy is to remain in a position of power (though it stifles innovation).

~So if I made a suggestion to the consortium to create something like you suggested, do you think that they might listen to me? I really am brimming with GREAT ideas.

-HAHAHA...</comment>


Federal Court accepts Wayback Machine as evidence of content on a specific date - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paulmcgorrery/status/1178561480385421312 <comment><USER2> A couple decades ago I used Wayback Machine to win a DMCA takedown case that almost bankrupted me.

An American military contractor (I'm Canadian) stole a large chunk of content from my site, search/replaced my company name for theirs. They even made really slick PDF files complete with graphics (that were possibly actually theirs) to make it look legit. When confronted, their legal dept claimed I actually stole it from them. I was _FUMING_!

The worst thing was that when confronting their lead techie, I asked him to describe a particular bit of terminology that is very specific to me and my business. He claimed he couldn't because it was proprietary. Of course it was because he simply didn't know anything about that particular term. I guess he thought that would drag things out long enough that I'd eventually drop it. I didn't.

I then demonstrated that this bit of terminology is attributed to _me_ in a published IEEE document that also predated the content appearing on his web page. But for whatever reason, their web page and all their marketing collateral said that _they_ created it all.

Needless to say, they ended up removing the content and paying damages. I couldn't afford to take it further, and given their significant wealth, would have easily quashed me if I tried. I won and got paid for it, so I accepted it was probably the most I could possibly get.

I got the idea based on the "poor man's copyright," which is when musicians, for example, postal mail lyrics to themselves and then store the unopened envelope in a safe in order to prove, via postmark, that the copyright date is legit.

I suspect github could also be used this way. Anything that keeps a strongly maintained timeline.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, in the case of NTP vs. RIM, part of the legal battle was fought in the UK. I was called in as an expert witness on a detail of minutia, as to when certain things had been said publicly, which could be used as evidence of prior art.

They had pulled up copies of the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ, for which I was the maintainer in 95-96. They asked me if a certain section of the document they found was a clear and accurate representation of the way the document actually existed at the time. They contacted me and not Eric Allman, because his role in the maintenance of the FAQ didn't cover the period of time they were interested in, even though I believe he actually wrote that section years earlier. What was important to them was the state of the document at the time, not who wrote what when.

I want back to various archive sources, and confirmed that what they had appeared to me to be an accurate copy of the file from that point in time.

I was literally one day away from having to appear in UK court through a videoconference facility at the offices of a local law firm here in Austin, TX, where I was actually going to testify to that statement. But they settled the case instead.

Ultimately, I think the critical part of the process is to get an expert in the field to be willing to testify as to the material you are showing them, and not so much the source of that material.

</comment><comment><USER3> In order to have the systems testify for themselves, they have to use forensic methods throughout. As much as I love them, that's not the Wayback Machine.

Failing that, I don't see any alternative to having an expert human who can testify that the material presented to them by the Wayback Machine is actually an authentic representation of the content from the time.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can see where it could be argued that content in the Wayback Machine could be edited before being presented as evidence; I know the current case specifically excludes the question of whether the content in the scrapes was edited or not bu what would be a viable scheme for verifying that the content in a scrape hasn't been edited?</comment>


Show HN: My Learning with Arch Linux - <AUTHOR> http://simplysanad.com/blog/2016/11/03/Arch-Diaries-What-to-do-when-your-virtual-hard-disk-is-out-of-memory-in-vbox/ <comment><AUTHOR> Dear HN : Please give me feedback on my first tech blog about my experiences and learnings with Arch Linux</comment>


Stripe raises $18 million from Sequoia - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-09/stripe-said-to-get-funding-valuing-online-payment-startup-at-100-million.html

<comment><USER2> Hey -- just want to say thanks to the people on HN who've given us feedback and encouraged us along the way. We're building Stripe for the kind of people who read Hacker News, and the suggestions we've received here have generally been the most useful feedback we've gotten anywhere.

So, thanks. We're pretty excited about the next few years.

<comment><USER3> Please use the funding to expand to other countries!

<comment><USER4> Seriously please come to Australia!

I have a project ready to go (with the exception of billing). It is almost impossible for an Australian business to easily accept credit card payments in USD.

I have looked at Saasy.com but the lack of data portability makes it an unattractive option.

<comment><USER5> PayPal really is the only solution unless you can get the one bank in Australia to let you open a USD account, you'll also need a modem to check your balance with them online.

This is a good thread [http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach- australia/brows...](http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach- australia/browse_thread/thread/dcc079980b68741d) about the complexities in setting it up in Australia and unfortunately I suspect Stripe will consider the risks outweigh the benefits of providing this sort of functionality in oz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love their name and I especially love their (old?) logo: [http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0012/7313/12...](http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0012/7313/127313v2-max-250x250.png)

<comment><USER7> I'm sure Deutsche Bank were less enamoured with it.

<http://www.tt-orchestra.de/images/logo_deutschebank.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats guys!

There's a lot to like about Stripe, but my absolute favorite under-appreciated thing is their name and domain name.

Hard to quantify just how much it helped, but I seriously doubt they would have had quite this trajectory with a name like Chargerly.com or even possibly Stripe.io.

<comment><USER9> Square seems to do ok ($2Bn valuation) not owning square.com (their domain is <http://squareup.com>)

<comment><USER8> <http://www.square.com/> seems to go to Squareup.com now. They're probably working on acquiring it.

My point is mostly just about the name though. Square is an amazing name. Imagine if _they_ had been called Skware or Swipify?

I think you're better off being called Square and having Squareup.com for a while than settling for Swipify.com.

That is what Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Square, and many others have done.

Bad: Poor name + poor domain.

Good: Great name + poor domain.

Best: Great name + great domain (Stripe).

<comment><USER10> I have to agree with this.

We started out as bfffr (name and domain) and quickly changed to Buffer (domain bufferapp.com).

It's tempting with things like Forrst and Dribbble around though :) (I still love both these startups)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome product, brilliant people, answered all my emails in less than 15 minutes...

I so much want to become a customer that I'm seriously considering incorporating ShiningPanda LLC (or C-Corp) somewhere in the United States for this sole purpose. And probably dissolving ShiningPanda SAS (French equivalent, more or less, of a C-Corp) to reduce the costs, as SAS are pretty expensive to keep around, and it would become largely pointless.

Do someone have experience with such an endeavor? The part that I can't seem to figure out is how to pay foreign people, living abroad, from an American company. All the while avoiding double taxation.

If someone have references toward a good lawyer / accountant / tax lawyer to figure out all that... My email is alexis dot tabary at shiningpanda dot com

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing that YC drills into you is to not settle for B or C class talent. You just have to look at Stripe's team overview to see how talented this company is: <https://stripe.com/about>

Stripe is a lesson on how to build a company from the ground up. Surrounding yourself with incredibly intelligent people tends to have an outcome like this (both product and valuation). Congrats guys!

<comment><USER13> Am I the only one who finds the language "C class talent" really distasteful? I feel like it's worse than referring to your employees as "human resources".

I understand the importance of passing on people who are a close-but-in-the- end-imperfect fit for your organization. But using the concept of class and grading people from A to F just makes my skin crawl, and it makes me want to avoid any company or organization who things about people that way, YC included.

Am I the only one?

<comment><USER14> I would find it unpleasant to be called "C-class talent," but I'd also find it unpleasant to get a C. In both cases, that would prompt me to either step up my game or reconsider my priorities.

People are unequal, and in a business context, that means some people are worth less than others. You can grade them on a curve, but that just means we'll all learn that a "B" means you're a failure, and that really good companies are only recruiting among As and A+s. Differences in ability can't be fixed through semantics.

<comment><USER15> On the other hand we've have noticed people branded as C-class talent kicking ass of A and A+s too, haven't we?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We're in the UK, and would love to move away from Paypal. Please come to the UK!

<comment><USER17> Another vote for Stripe coming to UK :)

<comment><USER18> Yes please :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> First reaction: "Good, maybe now they will expand to Canada!"

:)

Congrats gang. I'm sure it's only partially a manpower issue with international expansion - dealing with institutions only moves so quickly.

<comment><USER20> Totally thought the same thing.

<comment><USER21> Yup, same here!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> $18 million - Wow! Congrats to the Stripe team!

This definitely draws a line in the sand for the online payment provider process. Looks like Paypal has been served.

Disclaimer: my business is a huge Paypal user, but we've been actively looking at Stripe and put in our plans for 2012 to begin to transition to them. Exciting times!

<comment><USER23> Actually, Authorize.net has a lot more to fear from Stripe. Can't wait to switch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love stripe. I got everything setup and accepting payments this morning for a side project in less than 20 minutes before I had to leave for work... It's such a joy to use.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've always been extremely bullish on Stripe, so it's good to see this reaffirm my beliefs. Any investor would be crazy not to get in on this.

Proud to see more Irish founders succeeding in the US, and as I know they'll be reading here: good job guys, keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER26> Congrats guys! I just want to say that I _love_ Stripe. You are really changing the game. I love that you are focusing on developers.

I wonder what might happen down the road when users make mistakes that put themselves in PCI compliance violation (like posting a form to their server with input names, thus sending the card info). What kinds of effects could this have on the business, their image, and the customers?

</comment><comment><USER27> Stripe is a great example of proper developer experience joy. Good job guys!

</comment><comment><USER28> this is good news. i hope stripe uses this opportunity and expands to europe asap.

congrats to the stripe folks!

</comment><comment><USER29> The $100 million valuation doesn't seem _too_ high to me. Especially considering the huge potential market.

</comment><comment><USER30> Woo! Go Stripe! We use them on CloudContacts and love it.

</comment><comment><USER31> We've been using them since they were /dev/payments...best decision of our lives.

</comment><comment><USER32> Thanks to Stripe, I think that we'll start seeing a lot more weekend/hobby projects that charge for their service.

(And I think that's a good thing.)

<comment><USER33> Quite likely. I think Sequoia's bet goes hand in hand with the trend as of late of 'democratizing' programming and CS education (Stanford online classes, Udacity, Codeacademy and others). More and better programming means more projects and more demand for payment platforms like Stripe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I can only hope your service comes to Australia soon. If you ever need Australian beta testers please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER35> Congratulations guys, great work on Stripe and awesome + superb customer service

</comment><comment><USER36> Someone pls come to India. There is a serious need for good payment processor out here. Anybody who comes up with even half-decent solution wins 75% of mkt- share by default without any sales/mktg/BDM efforts.

</comment><comment><USER37> If only stripe was around a couple of years ago, we wouldn't have found ourselves locked down with BOA. Having to pay $500 termination fee sucks.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good job, guys! Congrats! Please, come to Europe soon!

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm about to use Strip for an upcoming project due to the wonderful things I've heard about it on HN. I'm looking forward to giving it a go!

</comment><comment><USER40> Is Techcrunch pissed they didn't break this story?

</comment><comment><USER41> I hope you guys are considering offering payments for marketplaces now as well. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER42> Such a great service, it puts Auth.net to shame. Well done guys, congrats.

</comment><comment><USER43> Congratulations to the Stripe team!

</comment><comment><USER44> wow nice :)</comment>


Ask HN: getsatisfaction vs uservoice - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I am having tough time choosing between getsatisfaction or uservoice for Customer Feedback. What are your recommendations ? <comment><USER2> I've personally used both. Not sure if you're looking for user suggestions about the product (like feature suggestions) or for support related stuff. If you're looking for support, I'd go with Get Satisfaction.

For my product, we're going with Uservoice because we want to have most of our support come through our email and through Zendesk.</comment>


Gum on sidewalk correlated with per Capita Income - <AUTHOR> https://perplex.city/gumspotting-53ea3137087#.pa29az846 <comment><USER2> Not in Singapore: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore) There's a $700 fine for spitting gum on the streets there.

I wish we'd do something similar in the US, but with schoolrooms, particularly in college courses where the salivary chorus of smacking and popping gum can be quite irritating.</comment>


Radical constraints can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348963&story_id=10328123

<comment><USER2> Evan gave a talk on this at Le Web 3.0. It was short and sweet. I liked it, it makes the point well. Found the video online: <http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.392057>

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree that this is the potentially "hottest" statement from the story. Yet only two examples are given: Google and Twitter. Taking away the clutter around the search box was a good idea, but wasn't Google's real innovation something like counting links to pages to judge their significance? The Twitter example is better, but one example is not enough to make the case. Are there others?

<comment><USER4> It's a little more complex than counting links.

Before Google, most search engines only examined the keywords on a given page to determine relevence.

Google improved on this by ranking results according to the "PageRank", which is a probability distribution that represents the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page.

With few exceptions, PageRank doesn't really capture any semantics associated with the links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The idea that constraints are a key to creativity is hardly new, but it is valid.

"... breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things", though? A tad inane.</comment>