A Social Network Doling Out Millions in Ephemeral Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-social-network-doling-out-millions-in-ephemeral-money/?mbid=nl_100417_backchannel_p1 <comment><USER2> Took a look at the "trending" articles on this network. Most of them are about cryptocurrencies, followed by phishing-scam warnings, and finally a smattering of other content. This seems like a network built around the hype of cryptocurrencies that is hyping itself into value.

I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat, but at the same time the more I research the possibilities I'm finding far less opportunity to invest and much more opportunity to get taken.

<comment> aaron-lebo There's no substance. It's multilevel marketing. This is the top post:

[https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on- stee...](https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-steem-with- smts-video)

It's a great way to build a large audience of money hungry people, probably not a great way to build a community with any kind of value. Nice hair.

<comment><USER3> I think that's a bit unfair. The idea that a niche social community would be primarily interested in the things that are unique about their own social community is not exactly a condemnation. Conceptually, a social network that pays people for generating highly-upvoted content is an interesting one, I think. It may turn out to be a disaster, but there's something there IMO. What it'll take to really find out is some degree of mainstream usage. Right now it's all crypto nerds using it and trying to P&D cryptos, but it isn't fair to take that as evidence that the idea is flawed. That's just the nature of the community at the moment.

<comment> aaron-lebo They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software.

Once you've built a core community that is first and foremost interested in ICOs and cryptocurrencies, how do you get out of that?

<comment><USER4> Anybody who has STEEM benefits from increasing the network effect, not just him silly. Bitcoin and Ethereum has the exact same incentive to do so.

The idea is to create thousands of micro community who have their own ideas of where their communities wants to go. They can use their own tokens with their own economics if they happen to not agree with: 1\. The inflation rate 2\. The curation reward curve 3\. The initial distribution

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi there. Some of you know me from HN - this is where the bulk of my effort has gone for most of the last year. The team we're building at Steemit is downright amazing, and the community around it is what keeps me going.

Think reddit, but on a blockchain (the posts, comments, and votes are actually in the merkle tree in consensus), and the upvotes are real money - that's where the majority of the token's inflation (~9% per year, decreasing further over time) goes.

It's sort of like a censorship-resistant, distributed pastebin. You can put arbitrary json into the blockchain, which gets mirrored to hundreds of nodes, permanently, in three seconds. The Shadow Brokers have taken up blogging on Steemit.

We call it censorship-resistant, but I can't think of a way to meaningfully redact content already posted to this blockchain that anyone on Earth could practically implement.

Our second annual Steemfest is in Lisbon 1-5 November and hopefully I will meet some of you there.

</comment><comment><USER6> I built a knowledge sharing startup back in 2001 called Woyano.

One thing we learned, as a general rule, it is difficult to effectively pay people to create good content on a social network.

The best and most knowledgeable people want to create content based on intrinsic motivations rather than financial ones.

One only need look at Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Quora, etc to see intrinsic motivation inspiring good content.

I guess the main point is that once you start paying people then the intrinsically motivated people aren't as likely to post on the same place.

<comment><USER7> What about with moderation?

I've found reddit's "anybody can be a moderator" model to be disasterous myself. It creates cliques founded entirely on fluff and plastic fakery, which is horrible to see.

On the other hand, HN is moderated by a couple of people on payroll.

I understand (might be wrong, but I think this is true) that Imgur uses volunteers, but puts them under NDA. Objectively makes sense for a site aimed for maximum ad impressions above all else, but only objectively.

I would really, really like to find out if it's possible to find a good balance. I'm not sure if the /. model is at the cutting edge (per se) of social/technical interaction.

<comment><USER8> You can always create an alternative frontend, which will moderate content which you like. Steem gives you freedom. You can build on top of it any kind of frontend with any filter.

For example guys from EOS decided to build own forum based on STEEM: [https://eostalk.io/](https://eostalk.io/)

They filter out everything not related to EOS :) Of course all content is available via generic websites/blockexplorers like steemit/steemdb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to be involved in Steemit with some success, mostly by writing articles about the Steem blockchain itself and how to interact with it.

The appeal for me as a developer is that you're working with an unrestricted firehose API. If you want to build something you don't need to worry about limitations or breaking some terms. You can build your own Steemit front-end if you want since the back-end is just another node on the chain.

The community is really nice and I made many good friends. Regardless of the future of Steem I consider it a success and a tell-tale of real life applications for blockchains.

</comment><comment> nv-vn Pretty cool, but in practice Steemit's content is pretty mediocre. There are some high quality articles, but the front page is largely clickbait and articles talking about how successful Steemit is. I tried to write some programming articles (one of which got a lot of traction, actually) but I just got bored of doing that after a little while of getting barely any views. I think Steemit has potential if people begin to use it like Medium, but a lot of people are there as basically a business, running their personal BuzzFeed.

<comment><USER10> Also, Steemit is just a terrible name.

<comment><USER11> I agree and was curious why they picked it. I guess their reasoning is as good as any.

> Steem is a form of esteem, which means to prize or value. Steem is also a > homophone for steam, which is frequently associated with power, and a step > further, steam powered trains gave influence to English idioms, such as > 'this conversation is picking up steam.' The associations with prizing, > language and empowerment only felt right.

[https://steem.io/#faq](https://steem.io/#faq)

<comment><USER12> Still, Steem is an infinitely better name than Steemit.

<comment><USER13> Copycat of Reddit (lol).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I expect that establishing an extrinsic reward (ie: money) will be hugely demotivating and actually diminish activity. Social media become a lot less fun when an hour's worth of effort "earns" you $0.07.

Also, they should expect a tidal wave of bots and fake content. Think about the mess Twitter is in, now add a straight path to cash.

</comment><comment><USER4> This tread is full of ignorant sourpuss who missed the boat.

What people fail to see it that steemit is only 1 of many many websites being built on top of that blockchain. Youtube, twitter, instagram...they can all be built in their own little silos. With SMTs they will even be able to have their own tokens with their own economic models.

Get your head around it. Steemit alone will soon pass you by on Alexa. [https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com) / [https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the exchange rate between Steem and Flooz? Can I finally use my Flooz credits?

<comment><USER16> Buy Beenz!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Andrarchy was trying to share something on this. I'm not sure if you've read it and wanted to post the link here for you all:

[https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/steemit-on-hacker- new...](https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/steemit-on-hacker-news-i-m- commenting-too-fast)

On a side note - I am currently in the process of cashing-out my Steem tokens in order to purchase a 10 oz. bar of silver bullion - which would be my own little "proof of concept" that so-called, "Ephemeral Money," is actually a real and useful vehichle for creating REAL wealth.

\- Bi5h0p

</comment><comment><USER18> So they're still monetizing peoples' attention? I suppose it's more noble to pass proportionate value back to the creators, but that's not a system Facebook et al couldn't quite easily adopt if market pressure forced their hands.

<comment><USER19> In fact, they could use a Smart Media Token to do so :). All joking aside, the structure of such systems are antithetical to the way large corporations operate. That being said if Facebook decided to replicate our model (our protocol is open source and it relies on an open and public database, which is obviously part of the reason they won't)and distribute profits back to its most valuable users, I would count that as a win. I bet they won't. I also bet they won't distribute nearly as large a percentage as we do (100%) because they have expensive data centers to take care of (I think the latest one alone cost $1 billion). New technologies with fundamentally different economics always disrupt large incumbents. It might not be likely, but it is possible and the potential rewards are large and accrue to the earliest stakeholders. Always. I'm not saying people should invest anything they can't afford to lose in crypto projects--whether it's time or money--but if I had listened to all of the naysayers for the past few years who dismissed bitcoin, then ethereum, and now steem, I would be much poorer in many different currencies and I wouldn't be part of an amazing team solving incredibly difficult problems every single day that give it an incredible competitive advantage against anyone who tries to do what we do. So I know Facebook can't do what we do because they don't have us :)

Community Liaison, Steemit

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I started working on a Hacker News interface for Steemit a while back. [https://steemh.com/](https://steemh.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> "A Wireding" reads like a Bene Gesserit activity, and it lacks the thump of "a Slashdotting."

Either way, Steemit isn't handling it right now.

``` HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity Content- Length: 0 Connection: keep-alive ... It's not just you! steemit.com looks down from here. ([http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com)) ```

<comment><USER5> Someone DDoSed us. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of the Brave browser and the basic attention token.

<comment><USER19> Great question! It is vaguely similar but different in many important ways. To be clear we do not see Brave as a direct competitor and wish them success. While they have referred to us as competitors, I believe that is a bit of an overreach. First of all, Steem tokens (and the Smart Media Tokens others will be able to launch on top of Steem in the coming months) can be transferred in 3 seconds with zero fees. This enables us to connect money to "likes" or in the case of Steem "upvotes." Brave is a pay-to-play system that uses an Ethereum token which is both slow (10 minutes) and has fees. Steem, on the other hand, is a protocol which anyone can use to build applications that leverage this crypto fuel engagement without adding paywalls or cognitive load. The crowd acts and money flows the most valuable members as determined by the stake-weighted vote of the users. In short, the Steem blockchain is protocol that the Steemit team launched and leveraged to create steemit.com but anyone can use it to fuel their app, INCLUDING apps that serve the same use case as Brave ... but with real-time fee-less transactions (i.e. better). If you'd like to learn a little more about how the system works you can check out the following video featuring yours truly: [https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA](https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA)

Community Liaison, Steemit

<comment><USER22> Thanks for clarifying the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should definitely checkout Steemit and other services like Busy.org or chainbb.com which are based on decentralized Steem Blockchain :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi, my name is @andrarchy, I'm part of Team Steemit and you can AMA :). This comment was originally intended as a response to aaron-lebo, but as it became quite long, I decided to post it here.

Aaron-lebo says, "They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software."

He's right in a lot of ways and wrong in a lot of ways, but obviously I'm biased :). Regardless of whether we agree or disagree I want to thank anyone who even gives a moment's thought to what we're trying to do at Steemit. So thank you @aaron-lebo.

What's right:

We have decent software. Well, when it comes to offering a free social network that rewards tens of thousands of ordinary people all over the world for their content in a cryptocurrency that can be traded on exchanges and cashed out for fiat currencies, we're the only game in town, so I think we have a pretty strong argument that we have the BEST software. And knowing our engineers I have no problem saying they are the most intelligent, diligent, thoughtful, nice, and hard working people I have ever had the distinct pleasure of working with. IMO they're the best in the world and welcome proof to the contrary.

One common criticism (not made by this commenter) is that most people "don't make a lot." First off I want to highlight exactly what this criticism is saying: some people on steemit make a lot. A lot of other people make a bit. A lot of people make not a lot. This is all true. But these types of comments invariably dismiss the difference that making $5 or $10 on a post (which MANY people DO make) can have on a person's life especially in many of the countries where our users are from like those in Africa, Indonesia, and more. But even with respect to more wealthy nations, I often find the critiques of how much our users make to be remarkably tone deaf. It is certainly true that not everyone can make tons of money on Steemit and you will never see anyone on the team saying anything to that effect. Steemit is definitely NOT a get rich quick scheme. It's only true that you CAN make money on Steemit and people do every single day. That's right, the Steem blockchain distributes thousands of dollars worth of STEEM every single day to users. In fact, ALL of the money created by the Steem blockchain goes to users who provide some service to it whether it's posting articles, comments, curating content, or running a node. Like every other major cryptocurrency/blockchain protocol, the fact that anyone is free to participate in it is part of what makes it anti- fragile. None of that Steem goes to the team, unless of course we do one of those things. I understand the content that is currently on the site might not appeal to many, but the amount of rewards are real (no one denies that) and who is receiving them changes every day. What I recommend is that people view the lack of diversity of content on the site as an opportunity to contribute something new to the platform. That's certainly how I looked at it when I started as a contributer on the platform and worked my way up by creating videos that helped explain the tech to the many lay-people on the platform. Eventually my videos got the attention of the people at Steemit and I was brought on board! That being said, we are still a small social network, so of course our content is not going to be able to match the bigger players. But if people want to look at the data for themselves, project our growth rate, and estimate when we will reach such scale they are welcome to. All the data is on the blockchain which is an open, public and decentralized database.

What's wrong:

We're not soulless. I swear we have souls! :) There are more than 30 people on the team at this point and statistically speaking it's just highly unlikely that we could ALL be lacking in what is typically described as a near human- universal. Unless, of course, you don't believe in souls in which case, yes, this statement is technically true. What I would say is that those in the cryptocurrency sector are often critiqued as being TOO ideological. We all openly advocate for decentralization for the purpose of spreading power (and money) among the people. That's certainly why I got involved in the field and have been blogging and vlogging on the topic for over a year, all of which is immutably preserved on the blockchain for your investigation ;). At Steemit we do want to make steemit.com as big as possible because we all have Steem, but so do all of our users. So, yes, they do too. But to claim that anything else should be the case is like saying that Facebook is better because ONLY Facebook shareholders benefit when Facebook grows. The idea that we are somehow more soulless than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network that wants to grow because their model depends on eyeballs to sell ads to (notice any ads on steemit.com?) is pretty laughable. Yes, we have figured out a sustainable and scaleable way to align the incentives of the creators, developers, and users of an open, public, anonymous, censorship-resistant, and decentralized database protocol so that when it grows everyone benefits. We're not sorry :)

One of the most frequent errors people make (and this is 100% understandable) is that for us it's ALL about growing steemit.com. This couldn't be more wrong. We are interested in growing use of the Steem blockchain protocol (just like the creators of Linux wanted to increase use of their protocol) and the demand for Steem. I'm not saying it's not selfish, I'm just saying it's not accurate ;). But let me be absolutely clear and I will happily hold myself accountable for this claim for all of time: this is because I believe that the Steem blockchain is a force for good. It is an open and decentralized database which is not controlled by any single person, corporation, or government, that anyone can acquire a stake in, that is free to use, that is anonymous, and that is censorship resistant. We see a lot of problems with existing social media solutions (like all of your personal information being held and profited off of by a private company with tight links to authorities) and we sincerely believe we have solved them with Steem. One can argue whether we are right, but I know our beliefs are sincere.

PROOF: Smart Media Tokens

That's exactly why we launched Smart Media Tokens. It was always our desire to get developers to leverage Steem to create their own applications that would reward their users with money while enabling them to retain control over their personal identities and protecting them from censorship, but through conversations with entrepreneurs and developers we learned that there were additional features they wanted. While steemit.com is incredibly important to us and the number of engineers we have working on that site is now greater than ever, we decided to also commit significant resources to designing the Smart Media Tokens protocol precisely because we want to encourage other platforms to leverage our technology. If all we cared about was steemit.com this strategy would make no sense. Once Smart Media Tokens launch, any site (including this one wink wiiiiiiiiiiiiink) will be able to launch their own Steem-like token with; customized parameters, the ability to allocate founders tokens, the ability to raise capital, and more. Shameless plug over ;).

Yes, the system is designed to increase demand for Steem and that will benefit all current Steem holders, including the thousands of people doing the massively valuable work of contributing content to our platform while it is still growing. We are not idealists, but we're not soulless either. We are ambitious and hopeful technologists who are leveraging a revolutionary technology to disrupt a massively centralized, exploitative, and corrupt landscape. You're welcome ;)

If you'd like to learn more, check out this video of yours truly explaining how it all works: [https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA](https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA)

Regardless of your view of steemit, if you've gotten this far, you're amazing. Thanks for reading!

</comment><comment><USER23> Despite all the criticisms here, this just validated Steemit as a real service that is now a real contender.

<comment><USER24> I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit. Disregarding the service is very patronizing to its users. It's obviously giving them something of value but HN is so quick on placing it in the same bag as some random scam ICO. Not saying the model is perfect though.

<comment><USER25> > I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit.

Because people on HN that have been around a while, have seen a dozen variations of this come and go, all the way back to the days of Flooz. Steemit will pop and rot, for exactly the same reasons that not a single system like this has ever worked long-term.

What Steemit actually represents is a signal that the crypto-currency mania is nearing an end for the initial speculative wave. The big dump comes next, in which most crypto-currency experiments that have attention today will die off.

There's nothing special about what Steemit is doing. They're slapping the latest hype train on top of what has been attempted for two decades. It doesn't work for a fundamental reason and there's nothing Steemit can do about that. It doesn't matter if you use a clone of Bitcoin as your foundation or an arbitrary tokenX with a different set of rules governing it. Slapping Bitcoin on the concept doesn't change the underlying broken premise.

<comment><USER24> You make it sound like it's some random social network with an unrelated token connected to it. That's not how it works.

1\. Reward from blocks mined are distributed to the highest voted posts. This is all part of the Steem protocol. Only a small percentage goes to the actual miner.

2\. The whole database sits on the blockchain. It's completely decentralised.

3\. The incentive to have more Steem on your account is that your upvotes are worth more. This is both the blessing and the curse since whales become powerful curators. On the other hand it gives an incentive to hold Steem unrelated to the monetary value. That's why I don't see any dumping happening any time soon unless Steem skyrockets in value.

I simply don't agree that this has been tried before. It's a different story, even if it turns out to be a failure in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's literally a Ponzi scheme.

Where is the money coming from, other than speculation?

It barely even hides this fact, given that all its content is about how to generate more content and keep all the wheels turning.

<comment><USER27> isn't that the same for all cryptocurrencies?

<comment><USER28> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> immediately presented with a sign into facebook popup

</comment><comment><USER30> Its not any more ephemeral than the money that our government prints. In steemits case, they are the government and can arbitrarily "print" money. If the government of steemit crumbles, so will its currency. Just like any other government. Every single currency is ephemeral to some variable degree...

<comment><USER31> I think the difference is that people don't see USD as ephemeral because the chance of the US government collapsing is about 0 while the chance of a cryptocurrency startup collapsing is definitely much greater than 0</comment></comment>


Visual periodic table - <AUTHOR> http://periodictable.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> So I imagine some of you already know about this but I randomly stumbled upon Theodore Gray's 'Wooden Periodic Table' today ( [http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/index.html](http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/index.html) ) which led me to his visual table of elements. Most entries have numerous photographs of various specimens of the given element, I've lost about 3 hours to it today so far and have only looked at a handful of them!

Really neat.</comment>


3M, DuPont Tussle Over 'Mega' Lawsuit on Cancer-Linked Chemicals - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/3m-dupont-tussle-over-mega-lawsuit-on-cancer-linked-chemicals <comment><USER2> There's a terrific documentary from last year on this topic (the chemical is Teflon, BTW). It's called _The Devil We Know._

You'll be horrified at how both these companies knew about Telfon's danger to people yet released it into the water supply anyway as well as put in it thousands of products.</comment>


Show HN: a simple YouTube jukebox built with AngularJS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jgthms/juketube

<comment><USER2> Great work! Lots of little improvements to be made but its a great start. I am glad its in AngularJS and open source, looking forward to see it under the hood.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Can you tell me what kind of improvements can be made? I'm not very acquainted with AngularJS best practices.

<comment><USER2> Well if you plan on expanding the app, you should split the app.js into separate files. The VideosController does not need an init() function. You can simply take those lines out of the init function and delete the call to the init function and leave them separate - they will be called when the app is loaded. Nice work otherwise!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, if the app got bigger, I would probably split the different parts in different files. But this being my first app, I prefered having everything laid down in front of me.

As for the init() function, the tutorial I saw mentioned it, and although I know it's unecessary, I liked the way it encompassed the functions called at initialization. But you're right, I'll probably delete it later.

If you have other suggestions or resource to share, feel free to tell me. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> I am looking to expand on your work by having a server component in the back, most likely nodejs. I thought that the app could be really useful if other people could connect to it and add new songs or rearrange the playlist in realtime, as well as being able to control the music controls remotely. Only the host would be playing the music though. I will let you know if I finish it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes please, that'd be great.

<comment><USER2> Hey just thought I would give you an update on my progress. I have so far covered pretty much all the client functionality that you had and a few added in myself. The functionality is like I said in my previous comment, where the host is the only one that plays the music, but both host and all clients connected can interact with the player/playlist in realtime and all the data is updated in realtime for everyone connected in that room. I will be uploading to github soon after some more testing :)

Here is a screenshot as a teaser: [http://cl.ly/image/1l1Z0i3u1D2W](http://cl.ly/image/1l1Z0i3u1D2W)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coveralls bug shows random commit messages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lemurheavy/coveralls-public/issues/950 <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone can recommend a similar service that plugs and play nicely with TravisCI/Github?</comment>


Vietnam's startup queen - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33828010

<comment><USER2> >> "I don't believe in work-life balance"

I don't believe in the work-life balance, too. It should just be life, no work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know her! She is amicable and super hardworking.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thuy is one of the most hard-working entrepreneurs I know. Having been in the same batch as 500 with her 2 years ago, I have seen the hours she puts in, as well as the distance she goes with employees to make sure they are learning and seeking their own best potential.

Definitely an impressive human being and founder.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can confirm, awesome person. She is always full of energy because she loves her work; she rallies all of her team members to strive for success, and she goes out of her way to care for those around her.

</comment><comment><USER6> Call me skeptical but I think the figures are bloated.

<comment><USER7> Why do you say so ?

7 figure sum acquisition by a large company like Google, Apple or Microsoft doesn't seem that surprising to me ...

<comment><USER8> Because her Tappy app got like 100+ downloads on Google Play Store, and seems like no one use it at all (I tried it and there was like 1 inactive chat room for the whole Ho Chi Minh city area).

If someone pay 7 figure for an app no one use, the whole app developer community are all millionaires by now.

<comment><USER7> Is this the Tappy app ? --- [http://tappy.co](http://tappy.co)

So from what I see , what it does is help the user make games from themes.

I signed up for access, still waiting for confirmation

Looks like a pretty cool concept ... a lot of users like to play mobile games while waiting for their friends or travelling ... I mean, its not on the level of Starcraft or Diablo , but its a pretty neat concept ...

<comment><USER8> No it's not.

This is Tappy: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tappy.app&...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tappy.app&hl=en) \- a location based chat app.

The tappy.co is redirected to weeby.co, which is the company she claimed to have bought Tappy for 7-figure sum.

<comment><USER7> Cool ... how is this different as a social networking working compared to FaceBook ?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you recommend hired.com or similar? - <AUTHOR> The title says it all. What has been the HN community's experience with services like hired.com?
I am interested in both the job-seeker's as well as employer's perspectives.
Here are some points of consideration: - satisfaction with salary - overall process - good for finding senior roles? <comment><USER2> Former Hired engineer- do it, it works. Keep in mind (as a candidate), you are in demand, so don't give up that leverage. If you're a great candidate, you'll get a great salary. Also- clear your schedule.

As an employer- be prepared to make competitive offers. The top candidates are getting interview requests from ~30 employers, including ones with brand name recognition.

<comment><USER3> If I understand it right though, hired focuses on a few key metropolitan areas, like LA, Chicago, Austin, NYC etc. And favors candidates that are wanting to relocate to those cities or already live in them.

So for those of us outside those key areas, or for people only looking for remote work, hired doesn't seem like it adds much value, or am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They didn't accept me in London ( I do currently live & work in London)

I think it's because I need a Tier 2 visa sponsorship... I do have 5 years of experience and seem to be very employable as I get a lot of recruiters outside hired.

</comment><comment><USER5> Only good for specific tech jobs. For sales, marketing, product management, PR, HR, etc... they don't do squat.

Prediction: All these 'hiring startups' will pop like a soap bubble and leave behind as much once their raison-de-etre vanishes and hiring stops being hot.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic service. I went through a batch last fall, and all the interviews where with good companies and smart teams. I think in 4 weeks I had about 20-something interviews.

It was my first time, and it really helped me gauge myself in the market.

Highly recommended if your skills match-up.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have done hired.com twice and though I ended up taking different jobs both times, it was a really good experience. A lot of companies came in with offers around the salary I requested, and they were all senior roles.

</comment><comment><USER8> I believe that you have to pass a programming test upfront. I know people who flunked the test but still got a good job outside. So, while they may be good, you can also by pass them

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd definitely recommend Hired. The offers are real, the companies are legit; it's a very good use of your time.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you have a tech background then you should be fine.</comment>


Google search algo: downgrade pages bloated with ads above the fold - <AUTHOR> http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

<comment><USER2> Remember back in the 70's and 80's before cable TV? We only had channels 3,6, and 7. We loved TV but couldn't stand the commercials every 5 minutes. The internet has turned into one big TV commercial. Websites are now 10% content and 90% ads. It is so sad that we let this get out of control. Don't get me started on social networking and how they exist to be the big TV commercial just to make boatloads of cash.</comment>


Ask HN: Do any open Furby-like projects exist?  - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking of getting a Rasberry-Pi or Arduino type board and playing with creating an open/ programmable soft toy ala Furby or Teddy Ruxpin.
I can't be the first person to think this.
Does anyone know of such a project that already exists that I can start from?
Cheers <comment><USER2> Most of the projects in this vein are defunct, including the Tux Droid, the original Furby, the original Teddy Ruxpin, and the Nabaztag rabbit.

I always felt the story of Felix Gallo's "Poppet" project at Data General was interesting: <http://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/#384503>

An original Teddy Ruxpin doll would probably have been the easiest to hack, replacing the cassette tape with a stereo audio input and generating the pulses necessary to animate him at your discretion: <http://www.illiop.org/workings.html>

The Nabaztag rabbit has been resurrected a few times, it looks like you can buy a new "Karotz" model for US$130, needing only a plush exterior: <http://store.karotz.com/product/22/karotz>

You could stuff another sort of mechanical toy, like a RoboSapien RC robot, into a stuffed animal: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_WJ23Zg1Rg>

There's also a new startup named ToyTalk, which seems to be doing something in this vein: <http://www.toytalk.com/>

You might find it easier to start making something that's not quite as complicated as an animatronic toy. Soft electronics projects and startups have been around for years, with shirts that hug you back and pillows that light up:

Pillow Talk: <http://www.joannamontgomery.co.uk/littleriot/?q=node/11>

Chatter Pillow: <http://sternlab.org/2006/11/chatter-pillow/>

For making one yourself, books on soft electronics might be useful.

Making Things Talk: <http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596510510.do>

Fashioning Technology: <http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514372.do>

Instead of regular Arduinos, you can use sewable electronics specifically designed for this, like the Lilypad, which you can get at SparkFun, in their e-textiles category: <https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/204>

Adafruit also has their own line, just launched, called FLORA: <http://www.adafruit.com/category/92>

There are lots of "robots lite" projects you could wrap in fuzzy fabric, too, like this animatronic head: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jeffkessler/tj-an- animat...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jeffkessler/tj-an-animatronic- puppet)

It really just depends on how complicated you want to get with it. Depending on your experience, it might be best to start small, working through the projects in those books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great links thanks.

One thing I have been wondering is what text to speech synthesis would sound like with non 'human' voices. Most demo's are of course focussed on human voices e.g. <http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html> but it would be interesting to develop some 'creature' ones as per elmo, furby, alvin etc

Have you heard the Karotz rabbit's voice?

<comment><USER2> Nope. Either way, speech synthesis isn't the hard part; having natural cadences and useful things being said is.

The less your animatronic creature does, the greater you project your own emotions onto it, and more likely you are to find it realistic or compelling or interesting or natural. Poor robotic speech instantly kills that empathy. Think about R2-D2's nonsensical beeps (that express emotion tonally) versus C3-PO's obnoxious prattling.

If you're trying to make it be "helpful" by telling you status information, how many times have you been frustrated when someone gives you directions, or is telling you about a problem narratively instead of in terms of reproducible steps? Speech is very inefficient, but for empathizing, Furbish was great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, I remember trying to get my cousins to cut open their stuffed animals so that I could stuff my Lego Mindstorms creations inside. I'll be checking back in this thread, definitely something I'm interested in as well.

<comment><USER4> Ha! How'd that go over with them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Tux Droid, maybe?</comment>


Ask News.YC: I need remedial marketing lessons - <AUTHOR>

I know there are some people on news.yc who are not only hackers, but have business savvy, and I really need some advice.
I started my project because existing photo-sharing sites didn't do what I wanted.  Like a lot of parents, I'm busy and don't have a lot of time to organize photos.  I made a site that automatically organizes in a nice layout that scales easily to several years' worth of photos.  For anybody who has a backlog of photos that tell a story (kids' activities, travel, etc.) I strongly feel I've made the best site.
The problem is I've chosen the worst market.  Yes, there are lots of parents out there with piles of photos on their hard drives.  Yes, they're interested in sharing them.  But no, their hair is not on fire.  Photo sharing is one of many good things they'd like to get around to some day.
I have about ten people actively posting photos to the site, but they're all people I've directly talked to and/or shown the site to.  What does it take to go viral?
Or where do I turn next to find the right customers?  What I've ended up with is a lot like a blogging site, but with much better photo support.  But bloggers tend to pick one platform and stick with it.  Where do new bloggers come from?
Some private schools want to draw parents in more to what's happening inside the school.  School administrators have little time.  I have something that lets you instantly document recent events.  Is that a market I should pursue?
I've integrated with Piclens for slideshows.  I can send traffic their way; perhaps I should get them sending traffic my way.  Are there other services I could integrate with that might boost my marketing/sales efforts?
Is there some other way to go viral with busy parents that I haven't thought of?
If any of you have a few months' worth of digital photos that lend themselves to chronological organization, could you take 5 minutes to try ourdoings.com and see if there are any rough edges, or if you notice any points where I'm missing an opportunity to make things viral?  Any help is greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I bookmarked your site and may get around to trying it sometime, although I may have almost as little time as a new parent. :)

Quick thoughts, no intelligence guaranteed:

Your pricing plans are organized backwards. Click the link, glance at the leftmost column where the cheap option always is, see "$52", have a 500-millisecond heart attack. Then keep reading and notice that it _does_ get cheaper. Great! Except that the damage has been done: the $52 sticks in my brain. Not good.

$52 is too much to quote. Especially with your wacky (nifty?) "pay for what you use" plan. If you have that plan, use it! Quote a price per picture! Or, if that's too late-night-infomercial a tactic for you, quote a price per 250 pictures, which is conveniently about $26. (Price of a 1 year Flickr Pro account with _unlimited_ pictures: $25. Unless I'm missing something. If I am missing something your site needs to explain it to me or I'm just going to buy Flickr.)

"TBD" is bad. Flickr doesn't give me any of this "TBD". I can tell exactly what the limits of my free account are. You should pick a number and put it there... having "TBD" there gives the subliminal impression that you're a newb and haven't figured it out yet. :)

You have a hard row to hoe. Flickr has the mindshare, they've got the network effect, they've got deep pockets in the form of a giant corporate owner who may soon be sold to an even larger corporate owner. You might consider positioning yourself as the perfect place to move to when you get sick of having your Flickr photos owned by Microsoft. I'm only half joking. How's your Flickr import tool? :)

Finally, if you have good photo support for bloggers but can't get the bloggers to move to you, can you move to them? Can you take any small bites of Photobucket's market? Is there any point in a Facebook app? (Doubtful, but what do I know?) A plugin that lets you embed slideshows into a Blogger/Livejournal/MySpace/??? page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point on the TBD. I've changed it.

I'm actually not worried about Flickr. I'm gunning for a much larger competitor: people's hard drives. Flickr is a perfectly fine social network for photography enthusiasts. For normal people who want to share their doings, I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance. Flickr is a grid. OurDoings is an illustrated story. The only problem I expect to encounter related to Flickr is people getting the expectation that your photos won't be organized unless you put effort into it.

That said, your point about MSFT is a good one. Perhaps the time is now to make a Flickr import tool.

<comment><USER2> _I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance._

That presumes that I have seen my photos in both places. I haven't. I barely use Flickr, and I've never used your site.

My glance at your demo didn't sell me on the difference thoroughly enough. Make the demo even _more_ of an illustrated story, perhaps? More timepoints? More captions? A screencast might be nice if you want to show people the automatic-organization feature in action.

Get your first ten users cracking! Get some photosets into the system and showcase them in a box on the homepage! Nothing moves the flock like the sight of other happy sheep. :)

I'd make sure iPhoto import worked well before I went for Flickr. I really am mostly joking about the MSFT thing. I don't actually think that very many Flickr users harbor illusions that their data is private, and getting invested Flickr users to convert is a _completely_ different marketing game from the one you're playing now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I should have said "one" instead of "you".

Screencast of the automatic-organization feature (among other things) is here:

<http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm>

Almost all of my users are using it for non-public photos. One notable exception:

<http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/>

I will improve the demo.

<comment><USER2> Ironically, non-public photos are a great feature. But it doesn't advertise itself! So find some less-shy sample users, or send someone out to a parade or something and document it.

Sorry I missed the screencast, but I guess that's the point of the drive-by demo: to see what casual visitors notice and what they don't. Of course, at this point, I should remind you that _I_ may not be the ideal sample of your target demographic. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The best way to get users is not through marketing jujitsu, but simply by making great things. Word of mouth was good enough for Google. So go talk to your users. What do they like about the site? What would make them like it more? What do you have to do to make the site so great that they not only use it, but gush to everyone they know about it? When you get to that point, your problem is solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you're saying is true, but not simple. Suppose I'm providing a shoe-shine service. I understand my customers well and make every improvement I can think of, but still don't generate excitement. How do I tell if (1) the next improvement will lead to the tipping point or (2) no improvement will generate excitement until I target a different set of people more likely to get excited about shoe shining or (3) Nobody else is as excited about shoe shines as I am, and to generate excitement I need to take my service in a different direction? There are three possible paths. Which one leads to making something great?

<comment><USER3> (1) is the closest to the right path, though it's not phrased as one. And in fact you never do know when you'll hit the tipping point. So you have to work fast.

But your existing users are the place to start. There must be something they like about whatever you have, or you wouldn't be there. So you just have to learn to understand them well enough to turn that like into love. In the process you may appeal to a broader set of users, and as you iterate the "typical" user you focus on can move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [holy geez, this sure turned into a book!]

I'd be interested in working with you more on this. Shoot me an email if you'd like to hear more.

On the site:

On the hosting plans page, you have a long list of features starting with "Auto-organize photos by date" that all of the plans have. There's no need to have 5 columns of all "YES". Just break it out into a subsection below saying "All plans include these great features:"

Also, your design is really great but your text is really...programmery. Make it bigger, make it prettier, make the copy a little friendlier. For instance, "Send attachment-free email updates" could be "All OurDoings emails include picture thumbnails so you don't have to go back to the website" or something. There is big benefit for wordsmithing to match your audience's language. A/B testing will work better than your suspicion.

The navigation is inconsistent and confusing. The only consistent link I saw across all pages was the logo that takes you back to the home page. I'd recommend the following (links, tabs, sidebar, whatever): Home, "Create a new album" (if not signed in) or "Album home" (if signed in), and "Help".

I agree the with m_fish, the pricing is confusing. It looks like $1/500MB for one week, or $0.10/MB/year. This doesn't mean a thing to normal people. Also, the Max price is a nice idea (reassurance against overcharging) but it makes the otherwise identical plans confusing.

Clicking on "Buy" takes you directly to a PayPal login screen - that's horrifying! Hold my hand, please, I don't even understand what's going on here. (that wasn't sarcastic)

Also, the ad supported free account is a good idea, but it's not clear where the ads will be or what they're for. That's a little creepy in context with my kids. Will I be spamming my kids' aunts with your site?

As far as the ads, where are you getting them? Are you putting them in emails? Do you think they would pay well enough to have your service associated with ads?

Your creation pipeline is a little hairy too. The only place to find it is with the Free plan link, then you get a generic login screen that doesn't reassure me that I'm making a photo album and doesn't even tell me I'm creating an account. I don't know what happens after that but I'm too scared to go somewhere so poorly marked.

I'd make a free trial the default, then let people offer to let people upgrade if they want more pictures/fewer ads. 37signals apps like Backpack do a good job of this.

As for getting traffic to the site:

Include a blurb at the bottom of every notification email along the lines of "Like what you see? Wish you could share your pictures like this? Create a trial album at OurDoings.com" and create a landing page where you can track referral sources.

Try to get in the new parents guides that hospitals, parenting magazines, Babies 'R' us, local kid attractions, etc send out. Include a coupon with referral number so you can track effectiveness.

Are you even getting traffic? Is a really leaky funnel that's keeping you from getting paid accounts or just a low flow of potential users?

Make it easy for users to spread the word. Give them credit (affiliate style) for getting new accounts.

Have a contest for the best picture per (week/month/etc).

pg says that making something great sells an app, but he also hired an expensive PR firm and said they were worth the money. I wouldn't hire a firm, but I would put effort into marketing.

Lest you think I'm trashing you, here's the good:

Your site is pretty. That's reassuring and will keep people on your site long enough to give you a chance once you get there.

Once you're actually in an album, the navigation is pretty good.

I think your approach to photo sharing is dynamite - you're clearly not getting into a fight with Flickr that you would lose, and it's such an obvious upgrade over "nothing" which is usually what people are doing with their pics right now.

<comment><USER3> _pg says that making something great sells an app, but he also hired an expensive PR firm and said they were worth the money._

I hired a PR firm in 1997. Things have changed in 11 years. And also, we were fairly established at that point: a year and a half old, with roughly a million in funding in the bank. When we were in the OP's position, we just focused on making users like us, and that was the right thing to do.

<comment><USER4> I just asked because Bruce has 10 users paying < $50/yr.

I always hesitate to ask Viaweb questions because you prob get tired of them, but since you brought it up: :-)

How did you get your first users?

Or did they find you?

How long after you started was it before you had customers?

<comment><USER3> We got our very first users through friends of friends, or by cold-calling them. The first two users were two technical bookstores. One was run by a guy who'd worked at Interleaf at the same time as me. The other one we probably cold-called.

We started working on Viaweb in July 1995, and I think we got the first users in November or December. We didn't publicly launch till January, though, because we felt we had to have 5 or 6 stores already online before we launched, or we'd look lame.

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >>I have about ten people actively posting photos to the site, but they're all people I've directly talked to and/or shown the site to.

I don't know about going viral, but marketing is hard work. You have to budget time for it every day, especially early on. Of course, I'm an advocate of working smart, and hopefully some other people on here will have the kind of tips you're asking for; I'm just saying that pounding the pavement, especially for something that isn't inherently viral, is a necessary but not sufficient part of marketing.

There was a good article on Techcrunch a while back about how most of the "viral" videos you see on the Web actually have had a lot of effort (and in some cases dollars spent) in getting them out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I'm afraid of is that you're totally right. Given the choice between improving the site and pounding the pavement, I'll always be drawn toward improving the site. But maybe I need to change that.

<comment><USER4> It's not an either or, but there needs to be a balance. If you're product is 100x excellent but your marketing makes you 0.001x obscure, you need to play some marketing catchup. Word of mouth is fine, but 10 users is a pretty small user base to expect them to bootstrap your growth for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think going viral works as well with busy parents as it does with teens and college students.

If you want to focus on busy parents, I think working this from a different angle would work best. If your service has any special features that you feel are newsworthy, you could try submitting it to local newspapers (used by busy parents much more than the internet still).

Another angle to consider: What if you could partner with a camera manufacturer to bundle a client-side program that integrated with your site? If you could convince a manufacturer that your service is worth partnering with, you will see a tremendous amount of growth and revenue (if things are done right).

I think in order to successfully market to busy parents, you have to be a seamless link in the chain that links the picture from the moment it's taken to the moment is arrives in grandma's inbox (which represents what the majority of busy parents want to do with their photos - that and archiving). One product I've seen that has this in mind is a wifi-enabled SD card that automatically sent pictures to your network when it was in range. Your service is the next link - the one that brings the images from the computer to the internet, and even to grandma's inbox. Keep that in mind as you go forward and I think you'll do well.

<comment><AUTHOR> The seamless chain is actually what people like about the site. It ends up in grandma's inbox in the best possible way.

Embarrassingly, the camera-to-internet part of the chain is only seamless on Windows right now. It's a little more manual on Linux and OSX. Still, I'm questioning now whether it's another improvement that the site needs, or if it's marketing.

There are even photo frames that support media RSS, so the chain to grandma doesn't have to involve email. I actually give two Media RSS feeds--one text+photos, one photos only.

Further, if grandma is comfortable clicking buttons on web pages, she can take over from mom and dad the job of picking good pictures from among many that were taken. Mom or dad just needs to turn on the option.

<comment><USER6> You know, I would even remove the linux option from view. I doubt that your customers (busy parents) will be dealing with linux installations.

Here's another though I had. Is there a simple rss reader that the grandmothers could install? (I apologize to all who are offended by the term 'grandmothers.' I mean it with the most respect and only to represent the non- technical picture receivers.) You could build something that automatically sends the pictures to the end-user's desktop. Maybe something similar to MSFTs and Google's sidebar program that cycles through the images on the server.

Not only does it make the process of receiving photos from loved ones simple (once the program is installed the user only has to wait for their family to upload new images), but it's also a feature that is almost newsworthy and certainly an advantage over the recognized competitors.

You could even rotate in advertisements between photos for free accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You need to do a better job of convincing users that the product is trying out. Photos grouped by date, is that your biggest selling point? Emailing photos is nice but I wouldn't name it as one of the three selling points. And I'm sure I can upload photos and I'm sure it's safe too - tell me something cool about your site I don't know.

And if you aim for users with a huge backlog of pictures, why don't you mention that? Can I try it out for free for a month? It's not on the front page.

Maybe you need marketing, but you need more work on the selling aspect of your site first.

Get Google Analytics. Measure your bounce rate.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a parent with kids who go to a small private school. All our own photo sharing needs are met with what we have but your private school blogging idea makes more sense to me. There are lots of things you could do.

Your site could accept submissions from parents who want their kids to get attention. Parents could create their own subsets to highlight the events involving their kids. The school could encourage kids to write their own accounts of the events. The best stuff could automatically go into an online yearbook. Sell them a $10 compact disk when their kids graduate.

One thing to keep in mind if you try to sell something to the schools directly is that they have annual budgets. The best approach would not be to ask for money upfront but to charge them at the end of whatever "year" makes sense for them.

One person you may want to focus your efforts on is the school librarian. The one at the my kids school is also in charge of the library web site. I'm pretty sure she would be interested in a system that made it easy to organize pictures and discussions of new books along with pictures of the kids. Something like <http://www.delicious-monster.com>

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey there. I like the site redesign. I think you have a good product and a good looking site. But it doesnt tell a story. You have a great voice on the blog, but that doesnt come through on the site, which seems 'blah.' There is no 'About Us' page, that can help tell your story and why you built it (at least I couldnt find one). Also, you've mentioned so many features and reasons for why you built the product on this page, but I cant see them highlighted on your home page. Tell a story! All that said, good luck and keep going.</comment>


Ask HN: Functionnal programming for UI? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I wanted to make a complete javascript web client. The standard usage with imperative language is to use the MVC pattern. I used object oriented programming but the javascript syntax for OOP was a really poor experience. I had the feeling that using a functionnal paradigm would had fitted better with js.
I know HN was done with Ark a functional programming language. So I wonder if an MVC pattern was done under the hood? May be there is a good recommendation or a known pattern that help making UI under a functional programming paradigm? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what your problem is with the "syntax for OOP". At any rate, I have just finished building an MVC framework for Javascript without any major difficulties. Perhaps you could share an example that has posed you problems?

One thing that I will say about functional programming and UIs is that they can be somewhat antithetical - to get good performance out of UIs, you often need to cache pre-computed results, which is just another way of saying that your code is going to have a boatload of state. Incidently, if anyone knows of a functional solution that overcomes this difficulty, I'd love to hear it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no _major_ problem, but the syntax can be terrible. May be I'm wrong but, the main problem for me was to access the current instance of a class.

1st level : use this 2nd level : var self=this; then use self; 3rd level : var sefl=this; and pass self as parameter.

Typically, when a new view appear, I load dynamically the resources nee: other javascript files and an HTML template file. I use jquery to handle AJAX.

Here is some code:

        ConsumptionView.prototype.show = function(){
            var self=this;

            var files=[];
            var tests=[];

            files.push('/static/js/date.js');
            tests.push('Date.prototype.setISO8601');

            mainApplication.run_after_dependencies( files, tests,
                    function() {
                        $('#content').load("/static/html/user_consumption.html",
                            function(){ self.htmlLoaded(self);});
                    });
        }

the `run_after_dependencies` function will mostly do some getScript only if needed. The last function will do (mostly):

        $.getScript('/static/js/data.js', function() {
            $('#content').load("/static/html/user_consumption.html",
                function() { self.htmlLoaded(self);}
            );}
        );

But in the end, I _have_ to pass 'self' in parameter to 'htmlLoaded' function and I cannot use the 'var self=this;' at the top of the definition of the function html_loaded.

<comment><USER2> OK, you don't like what is happening at level 3, is that right? Well, I see only two possibilities - either your htmlLoaded function has different semantics for its _this_ and the parameter _self_ , or it doesn't need the parameter. In the first case, repetition is necessary, because you might want to do this:

      view.htmlLoaded(other_view);

in the second case the function should be more like:

      ConsumptionView.prototype.htmlLoaded = function()
      {
          this.doStuff();
      }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Programming in a paradigm that your language is not made for is indeed a poor experience. JavaScript is not made for OOP or FP, it is made for prototype- based programming so if you want a good experience that is what you should use.

As for FP/MVC UI have you ever heard of tangible values? <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/TV></comment>


Prove Raft Correct - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/uwplse/verdi/pull/16 <comment><USER2> Amazing job! It has been mentioned on the Raft mailing list that a proof was in a progress, but to be honest I did not expect anything to come up before a year or so. Forgive my lack of faith! :-)

Well done!

edit: to provide some context

\- Raft is a distributed consensus algorithm that is seen by many as a viable alternative to *-Paxos because of its relative simplicity. It was created by D. Ongaro and J. Ousterhout (Tcl/Tk!)

\- D. Ongaro's dissertation includes a TLA+ specifications of Raft; TLA+ is a model checker (see ) for a more detailed explanation of what is a model checker/theorem prover's job

\- TLA+ is a model checker; Coq is a proof assistant. See [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22418448/can-coq-be- used...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22418448/can-coq-be-used-easily- as-a-model-checker) for a more detailed explanation.

\- Verdi is a Coq framework to make formal proof about distributed systems.

\- Doug Woos and James Wilcox, made a proof of Raft using Verdi; Verdi helps you figure whether your implementation of X (in this case X=Raft) meets the specifications (Leader Safety, strong consistency etc..)

Link to the Verdi website: [http://verdi.uwplse.org/](http://verdi.uwplse.org/)

edit: as noted by ahelwer, TLA+ is not a model checker but a language to describe a distributed system's specifications. I was referring to TLC which can work with TLA+.

<comment><USER3> Hey, I'm Doug Woos--thanks for this excellent summary! It's worth noting that the Raft proof was completed by a team of people, including me, my research partner James Wilcox ([http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jrw12/](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jrw12/)), and the other folks listed on our web page at [http://verdi.uwplse.org/](http://verdi.uwplse.org/)

<comment><USER2> Apologies to your research partner for leaving him out, it's edited! Congratulations on the proof by the way, I am looking forward to this week-end so I can have some time to appreciate it with more depth! :-)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Let us know if you have any questions about the proof itself-- unfortunately, it's not particularly well-documented, and Coq isn't super easy to read in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Can you recommend and (1) books and (2) online lectures/courses on proofs which use Coq? Thanks!

<comment><USER3> At this point, the standard intro text is Software Foundations [1]. I highly recommend it; it will teach you Coq and also probably make you a better programmer. After SF, Certified Programming with Dependent Types [2] gets more into the practice of proving serious programs correct. These books are both available online in the form of literate Coq files.

As far as online lectures, OPLSS [3] often has Coq lectures which are quite good.

[1] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html)

[2] [http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/](http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/)

[3] [https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer15/](https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer15/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What isn't yet clear to me about these kinds of proofs: how can you verify that this proof is correct? How can you know there isn't a wrong assumption or wrong bit of 'code' in those 5500 lines? Would it have been impossible for Voevodsky to make his original mistake in such a formalization? Obviously the point of his entire homotopy type theory project is that he thinks he couldn't have. But why are mistakes (near) impossible here?

<comment><USER6> This is a great question that permeates all verification work. In the lingo, we call the set of assumptions a proof makes the "trusted computing base" (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing_base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing_base) ).

I listed some of the assumptions we made in another comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10018985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10018985) .

The question you ask was believed for a long time to be the death knell of formal verification. It was persuasively argued in "Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs" [https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf](https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf) that any proof of a complex system is necessarily at least as complex. Thus there would be no reason to trust the proof any more than the original code.

The breakthrough in verification came when we started using _machine-checked_ proofs. In this approach, you write a short, simple, and trusted proof checker. You can then verify complex systems using complex proofs that are checked by the simple checker. Then the only possible errors in the proof can come from the proof checker being wrong. Because the checker is simple and general (ie, it can check all kinds of proofs, not just proofs about a particular program), it is more trustworthy.

Just to reiterate (including some content from my other comment): we can be wrong only if we have written the wrong definition of linearizability, misstated the correctness theorem, or if there is a bug in the proof checker or in Coq's logic itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Extremely cool stuff.

Questions for the researchers, if they are reading:

\- Does this proof cover any liveness concerns (weak fairness, deadlock freedom, etc) in addition to the safety property of linearizability?

\- If not, what would it take to extend this model to cover liveness? Is this even a good starting point?

<comment><USER3> We are reading! This is a great question. We currently don't prove anything about liveness. We'd love to work on this.

As you probably know, Raft and other consensus algorithms are not guaranteed to be live in all situations. But subject to some assumptions about the frequency of failure, they are guaranteed to make progress.

In Verdi, systems are verified with respect to semantics for the network they are running on. Our semantics currently don't include any restrictions about how often failures can happen; a failure "step" can occur at any time. We're not sure what the best way is to introduce this kind of restriction, but we've got a couple ideas. One would be to guarantee that the total number of failures has some finite bound which is unknown to the system itself but which is available during verification. Another would be to model failure probabilistically. We will probably end up doing at least one of these things in the next year or so :).

<comment><USER7> Thanks. That sounds like extremely interesting research. Being able to say things about liveness relative to probability of failure (or the distribution of probability of failure) would be very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is interesting work. I'm curious how confident we can be that the TLA+ proof from Diego Ongaro was correctly represented in Verdi/Coq. This still seems like a manual, hard-to-verify process.

<comment><USER6> Hey, I'm James Wilcox, another member of the Verdi team.

This is a good question. More broadly, what do you have to trust in order to believe our claims?

In addition to all the usual things (like the soundness of Coq's logic and the correctness of its proof checker), the most important thing you need to trust is the top-level specification. In our case, this is linearizability (have a look at [https://github.com/uwplse/verdi/blob/master/raft/Linearizabi...](https://github.com/uwplse/verdi/blob/master/raft/Linearizability.v#L262-L266) for the key definition; the key theorem statement is at [https://github.com/uwplse/verdi/blob/master/raft- proofs/EndT...](https://github.com/uwplse/verdi/blob/master/raft- proofs/EndToEndLinearizability.v#L396-L403) ). If you can convince yourself that these correspond to your intuitive understanding of linearizability, then you don't need to trust any other theorem statement or definition in the development.

If you actually want to run our code, then you need to make several other assumptions. Our system runs via extraction to OCaml, so you must trust the extractor and the OCaml compiler and runtime. In addition we have a few hundred lines of OCaml to hook up the Coq code to the real world (eg, writing to disk and putting bits on the network).

To respond more directly to your question about Diego's proof, I can tell you we referred to it often to get the high-level idea. But the TLA model differs in several respects from our implementation of Raft in Verdi. Most importantly, our code is an _implementation_ in the sense that you can run it. This means that it resolves all nondeterminism in the specification. Furthermore, there is no need to manually check that what we implemented matches the TLA model, unless that is your preferred means for convincing yourself that we really did implement Raft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What exactly is a consensus algorithm and how do you prove linearizability?

<comment><USER10> Kyle Kingsbury has a good look at linearizability and other forms of consistency: [https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency- models](https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency-models)

<comment><USER9> That was a great read. Thanks for a new blog to put on my RSS feed

<comment><USER11> the call me maybe series there is an absolute must-read for any post-web 2.0 developer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A dev, designer, and a PM are asked the same question: What is UX? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codelitt.com/what-is-ux/ <comment><USER2> "What is UX?"

<five paragraphs that don't answer the question, interspersed with unnecessary banner images>

"We don't know what UX is, everyone who's asked has a different answer, and it ultimately depends on your product and its users."

Sounds about right.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the point of the post to highlight that people in different roles could all be looking at the the same thing but interpret is very differently?

<comment><USER4> (Note: I haven't read the article yet; I'm just commenting on general writing practices)

It's the responsibility of the person trying to gather and present disparate ideas to synthesize them into a coherent conclusion. This is often hard work, and failing to do so diminishes the effectiveness of the rest of the piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Take a pencil, for example. There's the way that the wood, plastic or metal > feels on your hand, the way it falls on your fingers, the feel of the > graphite against the paper ... it's all been thoroughly thought out and > designed, each component a part of the experience of writing with a pencil.

To attempt to parallel the ergonomics of a pencil, good or otherwise, with some grand UX narrative feels inappropriate. If the 'interaction of graphite on paper' is to your liking that is very much an accident of design rather than a result of any pencil designer's intention. 3b, HB, or 3H madam? Methinks that the primary driver of the pencil factory of both yesteryear and today would be maximisation of production vs units of wood, lead, or rubber. The 'way it falls on your fingers' a consequence of resource constraints nothing more.

The experience of writing with a pencil is perhaps the better for not being messed with.

The pencil survives and has survived by being always useful, value for money, and fit for purpose.

Model those attributes and users will accommodate and grow to love your products UX regardless of its failings.

<comment><USER6> The pencil has been iterated upon countless times, by a huge number of individuals and organisations. They also have a huge variety of forms for different uses and contexts: carpenters pencils, steno pencils, charcoal pencils, pencils for users with disabilities, etc.

These factors are influenced by material constraints and opportunities, but don't discount the importance of design iteration in the simplest of objects.

And as someone who has spent a lot of time drawing, the feel and quality of different pencils (wood, graphite hardness etc.) is something people care an awful lot about.

<comment><USER7> Also: isn't the UX of a pencil very close to the UNIX philosophy of having little tools that do one thing and one thing well, and work together with other things?

In that sense most software today isn't a pencil. It is more like a fully furbished office where you are not allowed to use a pencil but you have to use a silly oversized rubber-ballpen with decorative feathers instead. Oh and the paper is made of plastic and you are not allowed to change it because the guy at the door will beat you with a stick. On the bright side the filing cabinet might be the best you have ever seen — but you really aren't enjoying it all that much because you feel forced to write on plastic with a goofy pen that changes colours every 4 months. Ah, and you are forbidden to take the plastic writings out of the room (again the man with the stick).

I cannot believe that it is 2020 and the best thing we came up with is still just a text based shell (nothing against those, they are great, but I'd love to see the same modularity in typical GUI applications).

<comment><USER8> If 2020 Silicon Valley had to invent the pencil, it would be shaped like a smartphone, include chat apps and "social," require special paper to write with, and send everything the user writes back to the company's server.

<comment><USER9> Something like these, perhaps?

[https://www.thearchitectsguide.com/articles/best-smart- pen](https://www.thearchitectsguide.com/articles/best-smart-pen)

(#7 includes saving to Slack)

<comment><USER10> something like these? [https://bestjigsawguide.com/](https://bestjigsawguide.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> UX's meaning (aside from sounding cool) is so unclear that people are writing articles since years, trying to explain it.

It is a useful, buzzword-y term to say: "I care about how users interact with this". Or: "The UX in this part needs improvement".

"UX Design" however is confusing especially when attached to a role. The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI. So they are a UI Designer? Well no, it is all about the "experience"! My UX is pretty bad here because the software is buggy. Is the engineer who fixes the bug a UX Designer now?

You often see the term UX alongside UI, like this: UI/UX. This is because the designer wants to emphasize what they care about, but they secretly know that the thing they design is the actual UI, not the "experience".

<comment><USER12> >The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI.

Not only. For example if you add 2000 ms to 15000 ms of latency after each click then you might think it is still the same UI. In fact in a sense it _is_ still the same UI.

In my opinion by contrast (and contrary to your sentence) the UX designer's output can include the latency budget by which the page must be fully returned. This additional output is captured by a term such as UI/UX.

A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does.

<comment><USER13> > A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does

That is definitely not true. UI design encompasses usability, including interactivity, feedback, animations, etc. Otherwise it's just graphic design.

I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing. Some simple examples: timing and content of emails, purchasing options and how they are displayed, how multiple platforms (mobile, desktop, snailmail, phone) are tied together, content strategy.

You can see that aspiration reflected in the designer responses in the beginning of the article: they are the ones mentioning the business side, and not the managers.

<comment><USER12> >I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing.

Interesting! I'm totally on board with this set of concerns - but can you find any reference for your statement? (Anybody on the web who gave a definition of UX similar to yours?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The first paragraph summarized 3 different ways:

We asked neurologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists about human decision making. * The neurologists focused on stimuli and the brain. * The psychiatrists focused on the behaviors of individuals. * The sociologists focused on interactions between human groups.

We asked physicists, chemists, and biologists about the building blocks of the world. * The physicists focused on forces of nature. * The chemists focused on molecules and their chemical interactions. * The biologists focused on cells and organisms.

We asked engineers, designers, and project managers about UX. * The engineers focused on the interactions between the engineered bits of the UX and the users. * The designers focused on the 2 groups that have opinions about UX design: the company and the users. * The project managers focused on how well the UX got the project done.

</comment><comment><USER15> That this link should currently be showing only a huge '500' with a raw error message as subhead strikes me as apropos, in a sidewise kind of way.

The Internet Archive caught it before it broke: [http://web.archive.org/web/20200709170526/https://blog.codel...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200709170526/https://blog.codelitt.com/what- is-ux/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm an engineer. The only definition I've used is the one pointed out here as the PM perspective: how are your users using the product, what are their pain points, how can you make it more pleasant for them? Understanding how to put yourself into their shoes is the hardest. Understanding how to quantify and measure that experience is even harder.

</comment><comment><USER17> > They cared about making sure that the brand's values were enhancing the > experience.

What does this even mean?

<comment><USER18> Facebook wants to show you ads. You want to see updates from your friends and family. Facebook will come up with a clever way to show you updates from your friends and family but not all at once and not all at the top. So, you'll have to scroll and scroll and scroll to see updates and might even have to visit multiple times to see updates, all the while seeing a lot of ads along the way.

UX enhancing brand values! :D

<comment><USER17> It seems weird that a designer would focus on "brand values" over a good user experience. I guess they are answering in the context of a working for a company and not just being a designer. I assumed "enhancing the user experience" meant making the user experience better, but clearly that's not what it means.

<comment><USER19> Big companies do this weird thing where they get a bunch of passionate people to oppose each other when creating a solution, and then take some weird Frankenstein middle ground that appeals to no one except the budget and timeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Server error at the moment - below is the full text:

* * *

Some weeks ago I asked a few of the Codelitt team members a simple question:

        "What is UX?"

I was happy that no one shied away from answering, and the difference in their responses was incredible:

Engineers focused their answers in very pragmatic areas that all revolved around friction and how to reduce it. The experience "behind the curtain" that helps make interactions smooth was what they thought of. Things like loading times or making sure that buttons were clickable came to their minds.

Designers saw the importance of researching both the users and business who would be investing in the product. They cared about making sure that the brand's values were enhancing the experience. They wanted the users & customers to know exactly what to expect when interacting with their products.

Project Managers focused on understanding and empathizing with the users so that the end product is intuitive and useful to the user.

Simply put, UX means "User Experience": it's the experience that a user has while interacting with a product. UX Design is, by definition, the process by which we determine what that experience will be.

UX Design always happens. Whether it's intentional or not, somebody makes the decisions about how the human and the product will interact. Good UX Design happens when we make these decisions in a way that understands and fulfills the needs of both our users and our business.

UX encompasses so many disciplines that it's unfair to think of it as a sphere within visual design. Quite the contrary! The building of an interface is a subset of that product's experience design.

UX happens whenever a human interacts with a product. Any product. Take a pencil, for example. There's the way that the wood, plastic or metal feels on your hand, the way it falls on your fingers, the feel of the graphite against the paper. Does it have a rubber end or a button you have to press to get the graphite out? In every case, it's all been thoroughly thought out and designed, each component a part of the experience of writing with a pencil.

From the business objective, to the product's stakeholders, designers, engineers and project managers, the experience encompasses every person working on it. It is the culmination of a multitude of disciplines working together. Every decision we make when building a product shapes that experience. UX is at the heart of everything we do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for providing this summary! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "Simply put, UX means "User Experience": it's the experience that a user has > while interacting with a product."

I believe it's broader than that. The experience is a lasting effect. It starts while interacting with the product, but can continue after that moment is over. Like a sip of wine has a post-swallow finish, so does an experience.

For example, I ordered some things for my car this morning from Advanced Auto Parts. I can walk to a B&M location but have sworn off going there after a sloppy clerk over-charged me.

In any case the web experience worse and took far too long. I'm still regretting it. I'll never shop there - online or in store again. I'll even go so far to say I have some ill will for Amex, as it was their perk that go me there.

The product is long gone but my experience lives on.

</comment><comment><USER22> For the visually oriented, this description of UX in image form can't be beat: [https://imgur.com/mAttwt6](https://imgur.com/mAttwt6)

</comment><comment><USER23> Spoiler alert; The answer currently appears to be 500.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, my first thought is still "Unix, obviously" :)

For fun I looked it up on Wikipedia: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UX](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UX) . User experience is not listed under Software but under Science/Computing, so a reader would still first find Unix :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I like to start by explaining that UX has existed for over 5000 years: in the way tools are fashioned, pottery is turned, fields are plowed, food is prepared, instruments are played, lore and laws are written, etc. UX is ubiquitous, and determines how readily a person can internalize and then utilize a new concept.

</comment><comment><USER26> Speaking of UX on their own website, they don't have links to the projects they accomplished in case studies like Halo and Fletcher.

Good luck finding Fletcher in a Google search or even "Fletcher Product Review" or "Fletcher Software Review" or "Fletcher Review" in a search.</comment>


I'm a geophysicist. My signature fieldwork uniform is bright pink - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/11/18220764/mika-mckinnon-stem-pink-uniform-sexism <comment><USER2> I always thought that the standard "olive greens, matte blacks, muddy browns" is not about sexism, these are no manly color. These are lazy colors! It's more difficult to see when the cloth of these colors get dirty. (It's even better if the fabric is not plain, but it has some pattern/camouflage.) ("matte black" is not a good idea)

Use the color you want, but be prepare to spend more money in the laundry to keep it really clean.

</comment><comment><USER3> This would make more sense for proctologists than geophysicists.</comment>


Less is more - <AUTHOR> http://nathanborror.com/posts/2009/dec/1/less-more/

<comment><USER2> This is exactly the gem I was looking for. I had my own implementation of it <http://github.com/snitko/cssdryer2> but this one is obviously so much better. Thanks for the link.</comment>


Ask HN: How different would the world be without the U.N. - <AUTHOR>

It seems the price of admission for even the mildly powerful state in today's world is a perfunctory explanation before the body for unsavory, unilateral transgressions.
Would the geo-political landscape be much different without the United Nations?
How <comment><USER3> I figure there would be a lot more small wars than there are right now.

That said, the UN could be a lot more even handed than it is today.

This letter by Einstein is quite an eye opener:

[http://neutrino.aquaphoenix.com/un-esa/ws1997-letter- einstei...](http://neutrino.aquaphoenix.com/un-esa/ws1997-letter- einstein.html)

It's from a different era but surprisingly accurate even in todays environment.

<comment><USER4> Jacques, thanks for sharing that link and I'm upvoting you. But you know what's funny? I have almost exactly the same set of premises of as that piece, but I come out to almost exactly the opposite position.

> The United Nations now and world Government eventually must serve one single > goal the guarantee of the security, tranquillity, and the welfare of all > mankind.

I think a world government would _rapidly_ become filled with the most politicking, vicious, corrupt, oppressive people unless it was incredibly decentralized and powerless - I don't think you can have a large, powerful government wtih broad-sweeping powers and no opposition that is kind and benevolent. The only large governments/empires in history that were secure, tranquil, and with high levels of general welfare were decentralized.

Every powerful centralized government example I can think of committed all sorts of gross and widespread abuses - I think this is because once you create a mechanism for unchecked power, it inspires the most ruthlessly ambitious power-hungry people to attempt to control it. Those people eventually find themselves their way into high positions - democracy or not. Many brutal madmen believed they were doing the will of the people, and were sometimes legitimately elected. When you create a huge unchecked power structure, you're creating a bright light that attracts the most vicious sort of moth. Eventually one comes into power, and all hell breaks loose. Decentralization seems to be the only way in the long term, even with the equilibrium costs of a minimal defensive military force and coordination problems.

<comment><USER3> Compare those centralized powerful governments with the not so powerful governments in large parts of Asia and Africa and tell me where you'd rather live.

Governments are wasteful by definition, but corruption is rampant in other places as well. The difference really becomes to pay backshees (sp?) vs paying taxes.

Longer term there may be a solution to some of this as we find (finally) a successor to democracy that improves on what we've got, but a democratic world government would be an improvement over the silly nation states that we have today (which, even in their most advanced forms are a holdover from a time when there were more kinds of people).

Corporate domination of politics is one of the hardest things that we need to take care of, this planet is not here for corporations, it is here for all of us, including other species. A late friend of mine had some pretty good ideas on that:

[http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/interview-with-eckart- wi...](http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/interview-with-eckart-wintzen/)

His taxation scheme would be a very large step in the right direction.

<comment><USER4> > Compare those centralized powerful governments with the not so powerful > governments in large parts of Asia and Africa and tell me where you'd rather > live.

I think that's a false dichotomy - but for the record, I was thinking USSR and Nazi Germany as powerful centralized governments, and thinking of Rome, Height of Britain, America before Spanish-American War/World War I/World War II as decentralized governments.

The last powerful centralized African government was Shaka Zulu's bloodbath. By contrast, the two most successful African Empires I'm aware of were much more decentralized - Cartage and Mali.

> Longer term there may be a solution to some of this as we find (finally) a > successor to democracy that improves on what we've got, but a democratic > world government would be an improvement over the silly nation states that > we have today (which, even in their most advanced forms are a holdover from > a time when there were more kinds of people).

This I agree with entirely, yes.

> Corporate domination of politics is one of the hardest things that we need > to take care of, this planet is not here for corporations, it is here for > all of us, including other species.

Here's an interesting thought experiment for you - try replacing "corporations" with "organizations" in any corporate-bashing you read for the next week: You'll find all the statements pretty much hold true. Voting blocs, political parties, religious organizations, even nonprofits often do as much to corruptly impose their agenda on other people as for-profit corporations do.

I agree with you that organizations, coalitions, and other blocs of people shouldn't be able to trample individual's rights - but I think power should be primarily start at the level of individual people, and be reserved to them first and gradually upwards. So authority on decisionmaking goes first to individuals, then to communities, then to towns and city districts, then to large cities, then to states, then and only then to countries - from small to large. Large shouldn't be able to impose on small, whether it be Whole Foods Corporation, or the New York Yankees, or PETA, or the Conservative Party in England, or the Democrats in the USA, or labor unions, or General Motors, or anything. Individuals are the way.

> His taxation scheme would be a very large step in the right direction.

I like some of the ecological merits of it and I agree that taxing productive work is a stupidly bad idea. I bet there'd be some really nasty unanticipated secondary effects with that idea, though. Still would be an improvement over taxing people for doing productive work, which is just crazy on almost all levels.

<comment><USER3> Interesting discussion this!

> I was thinking USSR and Nazi Germany as powerful centralized governments, > and thinking of Rome, Height of Britain, America before Spanish-American > War/World War I/World War II as decentralized governments.

Rome was pretty centralized, so was the British empire at its peak.

America not so much, and even today there is a healthy struggle between federal and state level to determine where the boundary lies. And federal seems to be winning that battle but not in a way that I can understand.

Also it is difficult to compare historic governments with current ones in the same sentence because the circumstances those governments operated in were so dissimilar.

For instance, the 'nation' of Greece back then had a populace that would comfortably fit in a mid sized town baseball stadium. So methods and techniques used in antique times have relatively little bearing on what we can do today.

Agreed on the rest of what you wrote and a nice eye opener about the 'organizations', indeed, individuals are the way, but then individual education is a very big problem on the horizon, and one that so far has not been solved in a way that is satisfactory so that you could put significant power in the hands of individuals by democratic means. It would lead to ruin quite quickly and dramatically so I would imagine.

<comment><USER4> > Interesting discussion this!

Indeed!

> Rome was pretty centralized, so was the British empire at its peak.

You think so? I'm rather under the impression that the Crown set a loose grand strategy, and then let their high ranked officers and local personnel run things as long as things were going according to plan. If taxes were coming in and nothing too crazy was happening, they wouldn't get in and start micro- managing. Rome... lots of different eras of Rome, again I think Rome was more hands-off in its local provinces and would let the local people keep their customs, worship, morality, and rough template of local laws so long as the taxes, infrastructure, supplies, and garrison were generally in order.

> And federal seems to be winning that battle but not in a way that I can > understand.

Cyclical - the federal government collects much higher tax revenues and then makes the states pander to get the money back. So the states are forced to set up the education programs the federal government wants, the driving laws they want, etc, etc. Nominally education is state-run, but in reality it's all handed down by the Board of Education (which is also why it's dysfunctional and ill-catered to individual students). For all the love Reagan gets, a lot of people overlook how he expanded federal powers in morality laws and took that decisionmaking away from individual states. Things like that. If federal taxes went down, I think a number of states would raise local taxes and provide their own services to people who want them. A relatively small reduction in federal taxes could have a huge cascading effect on federal power and give it back to state power.

> Also it is difficult to compare historic governments with current ones in > the same sentence because the circumstances those governments operated in > were so dissimilar.

Yes, very true. Also, the modern historical record is often flawed and misrepresented so you have to dig around in archaic primary sources to get a real idea of how things really happened at different times. It's quite a challenge to understand how things even really were back then, and then extrapolating them to now is a burden too.

> For instance, the 'nation' of Greece back then had a populace that would > comfortably fit in a mid sized town baseball stadium. So methods and > techniques used in antique times have relatively little bearing on what we > can do today.

Yeah, good comment. Looking at history more carefully, I was amazed at how _small_ some of the historical battles were. Oftentimes an elite unit of like 400 troops were the backbone of one a conqueror's army. I think Tokugawa Ieyasu had less than 600 troops for the first half of his career, something like that. Kind of puts it into perspective.

> Agreed on the rest of what you wrote and a nice eye opener about the > 'organizations', indeed, individuals are the way, but then individual > education is a very big problem on the horizon, and one that so far has not > been solved in a way that is satisfactory so that you could put significant > power in the hands of individuals by democratic means. It would lead to ruin > quite quickly and dramatically so I would imagine.

Yeah, education is quite the challenge. I always wonder why Americans wanted direct election of senators instead of indirect election? The ability for corruption, lobbying, and bribery skyrocketed, so did the emphasis on short term decisionmaking. Before that, the people would elect the state legislature, and the state legislature would elect the Senators. A state legislature would have many representatives that were much harder to bribe/lobby... now that money can go directly to senators' campaigns. If you want democracy, why ignore all the lessons of democratic government through the years? Having two layers of elections (people elect state legislators, state legislators elect senate) means the people don't need as much education, as long as even 1/3rd of a state legislature are competent, they can discuss and persuade another 20% and get a competent, uncorrupt senator in, who reports directly to the more-educated-than-average legislature. Why they changed that, I don't know, the results have been predictable - <USER2> increases in lobbying and official and unofficial corruption, much more short term thinking, much more emotional-based unthinking politics...

Anyway, good discussion and lots to think about, cheers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>