What are good resources/links for developing a Sales CRM? - <AUTHOR> I want to create a lead and scheduling based appointments system.
Please recommend good resources which will explain how a crm works and how to design one?
Need to understand both technical and architectural point of view. For example stages of leads and the database structure along with which framework will be best. <comment><USER2> SuiteCRM is a good place to start. It is opensource and based on top of SugarCRM with lot more useful features. With 4 years of experience in working with SuiteCRM and SugarCRM i would really prefer SuiteCRM, even when it comes to adding custom business logic and workflow design.

It also comes with good REST API for all the modules and any custom module you create using the module builder.

The community modules are really good too and [https://www.sugaroutfitters.com](https://www.sugaroutfitters.com) makes some nice paid modules which are useful too.

<comment><USER3> suiteCRM is awesome and very developer friendly

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have tried to build a similar app 3 years ago. I used twitter bootstrap, but unfortunately failed. Bootstrap was the most flexible since the average (open source) CRM solutions have too many features to build an app that meets your requirements for a MVP. You could consider the Appexhange framework from SalesForce to directly push it to a broader audience, but then you have the dependancy of building on an external API. Good luck i truly believe you are on something valuable!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer. Lead life cycle management will be a part of that product I am trying to build, so I dont want to depend on external sevices. That's why I am trying to understand how crm's work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SugarCRM has schema documentation: [http://apidocs.sugarcrm.com/schema/18.104.22.168/ult/](http://apidocs.sugarcrm.com/schema/220.127.116.11/ult/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this. This provides a good overview of the schemas that needs to be used. Any good resource for the lead allocation logic for the crm? As there will be different agents /owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like you need a Customer Relations for Dummies type guide or some time simulating doing CRM work using some open source CRM to a get the feel of what exactly CRM is as well as to foster ideas to make it better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I tried looking for open source solutions but they seemed a bit complicated. I need basic implementation of a CRM

<comment><USER7> The most basic implementation of a CRM could be an Excel spreadsheet. Based on my research as I was doing a similar project, that's what I've been told by business owners.

Depending on how complex you want things to get, you'll need a contact list and their statuses throughout the funnel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can find some good resources here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950874)</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't open source hardware more popular? - <AUTHOR> Long-form Question: Why isn't open source hardware more popular in consumer markets?
Motivation: I've thought for a while about creating an open-source hardware venture, but I'm not sure I fully understand why the market isn't more popular than it currently is.
Considerations:
* Form factor/style? It's no secret that many consumers consider their devices as part of their fashion statement.
* Cost? Open source hardware is typically quite a bit more expensive, probably owing to lower numbers of runs and less automation?
* Capability? Maybe closed-sourced solutions are more polished out-of-the-box?
* After market support? Perhaps people feel left in the dark once they get their product without some dedicated support team? I guess your average consumer may not be happy about submitting a correctly formatted ticket to some Git interface for example.
* Availability? A lot of open source hardware ventures appear to do short runs in order to ensure they sell out the majority of their stock.
All replies are greatly appreciated :) <comment><USER2> Open source hardware is hard to build a viable business off of because any decent manufacturer can create clones from the designs, and sell those at a price that you cannot afford to match them at.

To make it work, you need to do something like Adafruit where people buy from you because of quality and to support your mission to build more open source hardware.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most open source that thrives (with notable exceptions) are things that companies have interest in (e.g., helps them make or save money somehow), so most of the contributions it receives are from people who are getting paid to make that contribution.

For open source hardware, would there be any financial advantage for you? Would someone save/make money by contributing to your open source hardware? Why would someone contribute to your project or simply want to read its source?

I am not saying those answers are "no", I'm genuinely asking you to reflect on that.

Also, it's likely you would have to license other people's IPs and I have no idea if those licenses would forbid you from open sourcing your HW.

<comment><AUTHOR> > most of the contributions it receives are from people who

> are getting paid to make that contribution

I can see this from a software perspective, but is the same true for a tangible device aimed at a consumer?

> Why would someone contribute to your project or simply

> want to read its source?

My answer to this is:

1\. There is a growing number of people who are concerned about security and I believe the general public is becoming more aware of such concerns.

2\. The ability to customize a product or buy some modification and/or make that modification with relative ease and freedom.

3\. Higher quality manufacturing and/or parts, or a unique feature offering not offered in mainstream products.

I'm sure there are other points too, depending on what the target consumer hardware is.

> Also, it's likely you would have to license other people's

> IPs and I have no idea if those licenses would forbid you

> from open sourcing your HW.

Possibly, again depending on the target device. I guess that "open hardware" in this case is "as-open-as-possible hardware".

<comment><USER3> I see that you seem to be giving an answer for the "general case", while I was trying to think about the specifics of a certain piece of hardware.

Regarding point 1, sure, open hardware is indeed a good addition to the privacy and security sectors. If you have hardware focused on those problems, open hardware will definitely be an advantage.

Regarding point 2, the "ease" part in software actually means "really easy" since it only requires you to recompile and redistribute, but with hardware things will definitely become a little harder since it requires making the physical thing. You need an entire ecosystem for that.

3\. None of that requires open hardware. Sure, having the specs allows you to _verify_ the quality to some extent, but I'm assuming only very restricted sectors would care about that.

That said, I would already be happy if the industry simply reverted the current shift of "move everything to closed firmware" that is happening :(. Open drivers with closed firmware is very disappointing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> good timing for this... we (adafruit) have been posting a post-per-day, all month for open hardware month.

[https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23OHM2019](https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23OHM2019)

there are millions of open-source hardware devices out there, so "popular" would need to be more defined for this question, etc. here are all the posts..

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice piece and great work [1] - I will make a point to read all of your posts :)

[1] [https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/10/28/ask-hn-why-isnt-open- so...](https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/10/28/ask-hn-why-isnt-open-source- hardware-more-popular-hacker-news-newsycombinator-ohm2019-oshwa-ohsummit- opensource-opensourcehardware-opensourceorg-adafruit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nature of the industry I'd say.. Cost for eg is a big factor; Hardware inherently requires money to build (materials etc), while software is just an investment of time.

I suppose it's a direct mapping of human nature, where we inherently prioritize return on an investment of money rather than time, which makes sense too

</comment><comment><USER6> Proprietary hardware supports secrets that ACT against people building upon the encrypted (protected by IPR) code. It's an attempt to artificially create a monopoly, for the benefit of the owner, NOT society.

If you are a greedy capitalist, your want to support proprietary source code. If your into state surveillance, you will need it to prevent others auditing your secret code. In fact, proprietary is just off limits for the public to know, to examine, to check, confirm and or establish there isn't any back doors built in.

Open source and open hardware, doesn't want to HIDE secrets, it's about insuring the work gets to be checked, confirmed, proven... imagine building a life support system for a Mars mission, who wants to trust their life with a unknown instructions, and even if the code was decent, it doesn't lend to corrections during the space flight by the astronauts themselves to change, modify or adjust for unknown events, bugs, flaws and design mistakes...

If your going to produce open hardware, NEVER design it for artificial vendor locked in markets, instead support universal hardware that makes it the most used by everyone everywhere, because it permits building upon, auditing, just everything anyone would need to advance, develop and build.

Software engineers should produce the code once, and have it run on every computing device globally.... hence the need for universal hardware, or the implementation of adopting the universal hardware protocol...

These artificial vendor platforms, are nothing but designed exclusively for running monopolies in a money market economy.

The Church did the same long ago, by withholding the knowledge to the commoners. Once the technology of duplicating books became possible by other individuals, an explosion of knowledge could then be shared and developed.

We are entering an intellectual economy, but on the heels of the old gatekeepers, whom wish and want to remains the overlords still. So change will favor their enforcement, but you never change things by just fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete!

Open hardware does that, it makes the old proprietary hardware no longer a monopoly. Why limit hardware to doing just one thing... for one purpose, when open hardware could be reused, recycled, even upgraded and combined with other hardware...

Forcing people to be locked out, requiring jail-breaking their devices is what proprietary code is all about.

Open hardware lets everyone become engineers, because they discover news ways of making things function, work and operate on hardware that builds upon prior work. No 787 aerocraft could be built if it was not for the combined effort given by a great deal of many different individuals over a long period of time to achieve the results so many just take for granted today.

How many other things require previous work to exist in order to develop something better?</comment>


Zappos to employees: Get behind our 'no bosses' approach or leave with severance - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/03/31/zappos-to-employees-get-behind-our-no-bosses-approach-or-leave-with-severance/ <comment><USER2> Metafilter linked to this Re/code article about the holacracy yesterday:

[http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the- fr...](http://recode.net/2014/10/03/holacracy-or-hella-crazy-the-fringe-ideas- driving-the-las-vegas-downtown-project/)

A couple friends and I were talking about whether this is a cult. I said it was missing a religion, because it had optimized out the unnecessary parts of a cult. Another said it was the religion of messianic capitalism.

<comment><USER3> So ordinarily I'd just upvote this comment (and I did), but...this article is so eye-poppingly terrifying that, if accurate--and I have no real reason to believe it's not, it's written in the most kid-gloves style I can think of-- makes me genuinely worried about everyone involved.

Work is a social phenomenon. People aren't robots. What the heck are we doing to ourselves?

<comment><USER2> If you're not worried enough, see the prior article about the suicides.

[http://recode.net/2014/10/01/the-downtown-project- suicides-c...](http://recode.net/2014/10/01/the-downtown-project-suicides-can- the-pursuit-of-happiness-kill-you/)

Fortunately, some smart-thinking entrepreneurs are there to, uh, disrupt depression with a startup mental health clinic and a startup church. Or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My company does this "no bosses/titles" bullshit too. We have, of course a CEO, there is a CTO and a VP and a director of engineering and then me. When I ask for a promotion to Principal Engineer from my current Senior Software Engineer role(that was on my offer letter) they say "we don't have titles"!

It's all bullshit and there is always a hierarchy. My company did it really badly by letting my bosses put titles in their LinkedIn profiles, Zappos may do better in that regard but there would always be someone who overseas you. As other comments mentioned the irony is "the CEO" said all of this!

<comment><USER5> The problem is imho we as society are still shitty in management of knowledge workers:

\- we still think in titles (hierarchy) vs roles (context) \- eg someone can have the role product strategy and that gives him ownership about certain decisions

\- we still thinking of "managing people" like of "managing resources" vs setting up processes and communication when processes fail

<comment><USER6> So, I'm one of the more highly-skilled developers working on X. I'm also needed to help troubleshoot some emergency on Y for a week.

 _Someone_ has to figure out schedules priorities and whatnot. But I don't give a _$#@%_ about that sort of boring people-stuff, because I only care about interesting technical problems.

How does this get handled?

.

People do _not_ always follow the same process over and over again. When they do, that's an excellent candidate for automation.

People can have multiple interests and skill sets, but those won't always include negotiation and constraint optimization. Those tasks still have to get handled _for_ everyone, even the people who won't handle them for themselves.

.

There will always be hierarchies. There are at least two fundamental ones: skill, and scope. Neither maps exactly to management hierarchies.

<comment><USER5> yes but we bundle a lot of things into the term management

hierarchy will always exist (if at least someone has to pay or fire you)

authority will always exist (if at least someone will be more experienced in a topic)

processes will always exist (and someone has to put them in place)

you can have processes in place for emergencies, deciding if those emergencies are worth dropping stuff, for boring bugduties etc

the shift is imho not so much about making everyone his own boss but about pushing decisions as far as possible "down the chain" until you do no longer need to think in "hierarchy chains" but roles and groups of people

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked for a company with a 'flat' hierarchy. There was actually a secret hierarchy, and I got pushed out for defying the secret hierarchy. The structure allowed the 'managers' to avoid any accountability.

<comment><USER8> This is actually a fairly old and well-known idea, first proposed in the 1960s.

"this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

People interested in ultra modern flat management structures would do well to look up the history of communes, collectives, and other experiments in self- organizing.

<comment><USER9> Isn't there often "informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership" hiding within traditional hierachical structures? It's often not fully apparent from the organizational chart who has real power and influence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real question for me is: Has Tony Hsieh completely lost his fucking mind, is this the future and we just don't know it yet, or is this all part of some elaborate plan to fire everybody or stage some sort of internal company cleansing?

Seriously - somebody please tell me.

I don't get it.

<comment><USER11> so what happens when there is a successful business, often times people running that business think that just because they've had some good ideas and successes, all their ideas must be good and profound :) I don't get it either, but maybe I am wrong

<comment><USER11> I just love this:

"A new circle called Reinventing Yourself has been created to help guide former managers to new roles that might be a good match for their passions, skills, and experience. Hollie is the lead link of that new circle"

So, Hollie is a manager of managing former managers' efforts to no longer be managers ?

<comment><USER12> No, not "manager," "lead link." You just don't get it, man. You just do what you're told by the people who are better than you. They're not your managers! They are just 'better' so they deserve to tell you what to do and how to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are democratic, non-heirarchical corporations out there, like Mondragon.

They grew a bit more organically than this, however, so the structural result is very noticably different.

<comment><USER14> > They grew a bit more organically than this, however, so the structural > result is very noticably different.

Perhaps this is similar to the often stated reason for 'failed' democracies: they need to grow rather than be forced upon a population?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So screw over anyone in a lower position than director. Next up, no more hourly employees so they can work then without overtime pay. (oh wait that is now standard)

</comment><comment><USER16> How will they handle accountability without bosses? Decisions are likely to get made by the more outspoken or celebrity personalities. How will they accurately identify weaker decision makers in this category as where they spread influence is a 'group decision'. At 1500+ employees this could easily end up into some political minefield of power struggles and blame/credit games.

</comment><comment><USER17> who is going to write performance reviews? Titles or no titles, whoever writes your review is your manager.

<comment><USER18> Valve has the 'Gabe / Everyone Else' structure. They seem to make it work ok. Performance reviews are written by your peers, usually people who worked with you in some way recently.

[http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_Low...](http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Jeri Ellsworth (ex-Valve employee) will disagree with you here.

 _" There is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company," she claims.

"And it felt a lot like High School.

"There are popular kids that have acquired power, then there's the trouble makers, and then everyone in between. Everyone in between is ok, but the trouble makers are the ones trying to make a difference."_

[http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring- hi...](http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hierarchy- has-hidden-management-clique-like-high-school/0115316)

<comment><USER17> >"And it felt a lot like High School.

"Called "holacracy," the new system replaces the conventional command-and- control workplace with a series of self-governed teams, known as "circles." "

i first read it as "cliques" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Holy crap. Zappos sounds like the unholy spawn of a pyramid scheme and a cult.

<comment><USER21> 'Tis true. I worked there. They notoriously pay poorly and the only people who move up to better pay are FOTs Friends of Tony. All of whom have been there for a minimum of 10 years. BTW-Tony has not changed his title on his LinkedIn, email or business card. He is still CEO. The rest are titleless and looking for other jobs.

We had 3 suicides last year by entrepreneurs tony invested in and took under his wing here in Vegas as part of the Downtown Project dystopian hell he makes zappos employees live in here.

Cult. Pure and simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it is pretty clear Tony Hsieh isn't the right person to lead Zappos at this scale. His craziness got it to where it is today, but what you need from a CEO changes with scale.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does HN need a top banner saying that it's April 1?

</comment><comment><USER24> >Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

Oh the irony. So basically what I gather is Zappos is trying to find a way to drive down the salary of all employees by removing their titles. Except for the executives... because you HAVE to have executives, even with fuedalism... er... "holacracies".

>Hsieh's memo says they will keep their salaries through the end of 2015 and will get guidance for reinventing themselves into new roles at the company.

Yup... "We want to gut all the high paying jobs from our organization by giving the rest of you the job your managers had before. Hope you enjoy the additional job titles, we won't be increasing your salaries".

<comment><USER25> Look at yesterday's top topic here, the new Facebook office "largest open floor plan office, ever". This sort of disrespect, this sort of complete dehumanization of the worker, it's the new normal. "Our employees are our greatest asset" is just something to print in the employee manual.

<comment><USER26> Eh, I don't see any problem with either open-floor-plan offices or with a lack of managers. And I assure you, I'm quite human. The main reason I wouldn't want to work for Zappos is because I don't give a damn about shoes.

These sorts of moves are usually filtering functions on the types of employees you employ. They'll encourage everyone who doesn't fit the company culture to quit - which, ultimately, makes the company stronger. The beauty of our market economy is that you don't have to work in a company whose culture you find offensive, you can find one whose culture is more to your liking.

<comment><USER27> > makes the company stronger

maybe. or just an echo chamber of like minded drones?

<comment><USER26> Like most things in life, it depends on how you look at it. If you see an echo chamber of like-minded drones, it's pretty likely you aren't looking very closely, as even the most homogenous cultures have plenty of room for individual variation. (Although they may not let you, as an outsider, see it.)

<comment><USER27> Sure, but you have to admit it can also product Enron like negative feedback loops where bad behavior is okay, and rewarded, due to culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As usual, Maciej was killing it:

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/582619098921603072](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/582619098921603072) "Anyone claiming there is structure, management, hierarchy, concentration of power or obstacles to freedom at Zappos will be summarily fired"

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/582628592179232769](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/582628592179232769) "We'll know that Holacracy truly works when even the lowliest janitor at Zappos can threaten to fire everyone for not reading a certain book"

<comment><USER29> Firings will continue until morale improves!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Since there are 'no bosses', why does Tony Hsieh have a title like 'CEO'?

<comment><USER17> > why does Tony Hsieh have a title like 'CEO'?

even the ultimate flat organization - Borg - had Queen. The rest - no titles, just roles, and pride themselves on efficiency.

Thinking about it, one can see how modern "open office in the name of collaboration/communication" is just a cave man's replacement of Borg neural field generators for mind-to-mind connection

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Even though I support open allocation, I don't really believe that "no managers" works at all. I think that it's an overcorrection.

You need management, but what you need is a constitutional workplace where there are real protections (e.g. people have the right to choose the team they work on, within reason, and performance reviews are for compensation upgrades _only_ and not part of the transfer packet) that employees get to vote on and that limit management's power. I'd even consider extending that to a profit- sharing model that's more transparent and fairer than startup equity, which is based on some insultingly small percentage of some possibly-huge-but-how- would-you-evaluate-that number in the future.

There are several problems with "no managers". First, many tech companies tell _every_ engineer, down to the junior coming out of college, that he'll be reporting directly to the CTO. Then he gets there and learns that he will actually be evaluated by his tech lead, who answers to a (possibly titled, possibly not) full middle manager... who answers to the CEO. It's dishonest as fuck, but really common in the startup world to use "flatness" to make a position sound closer to the action and to power than it actually is. "Flat" organizations are often alluring lies that hide the real power structures. It doesn't matter if Bob is an idiot who works 15 minutes per week; if the CEO will take Bob's word over yours when it comes to your value to the company, then Bob is your boss.

Second, if there are going to be power relationships anyway (and there are) it's better to answer to a titled manager with a completely different job description, than to someone who's technically same-rank and therefore also competing with you for work. You won't win in that situation.

I'm skeptical because I feel like managers are akin to cops. There are some really shitty cops out there, no question. But you need them, because the alternative is... that a police-like force emerges (organized crime would rather have order than violence) but it's not accountable to the public and the costs are erratic. With public police, you pay taxes and can vote officials out of office if they make bad calls. With emergent private police (thugs) the extortions and bribes can go up from day to day for any reason or no reason at all.

What's wrong in most companies is that the police are making the laws, rather than enforcing them for public benefit. Because most companies don't have any constitutional structure or real protection for workers, the law is "if you have power, you can do it" so middle management ends up making the law up as it goes, in pursuit of its own interests (maintaining and consolidating power). Management is a fine concept if management is put in its place and empowered to enforce but not legislate. I don't know how to put this into practice. It's hard, because you have to fight human nature.

In other words, the problem is the lack of constitutionality in corporate governance. Corporations are pretty much all run as dictatorships. That can work surprisingly well (in terms of efficiency and competitive supremacy) when the dictator has something unique to offer. It ages poorly, because the dictatorial role gets handed over and eventually it's in the wrong hands and everything goes to hell. Imagine what would have happened to Singapore if anyone other than Lee Kuan Yew had been in that position. Dictatorship only works when you have a very rare type of mind and get a true philosopher-king. (It's not about pure intelligence, either. It takes charisma and focus, too.) That doesn't describe most corporations or corporate leaders. For the most part, this dictatorial model leads to low morale, stagnation, and mediocrity.

That's why people hate management: we've all picked up that it's serving its own interests rather than that of the employees or of the company. All of this said, "no management" tends either to produce an emergent and less accountable management/police force or it tends to mean that power is concentrated at the top. So I tend to think that this "no more bosses" movement is somewhat of an overcorrection.

<comment><USER32> I agree that official, legible management structure is usually probably better than the unofficial management structure that will naturally emerge in a supposedly "flat" company.

You mention that most companies don't have "constitutional structure," are you talking about an employee bill of rights?

What would you think of the idea of running a company literally like a representative democracy? A constitution and bill of rights, management as elected officials, employee "voter initiatives", projects compete for talent internally etc?

It might not be perfect either, but perhaps a good middle ground between militaristic top-down bureaucracy and Zappos-style anarchy?

<comment><USER31> Yes, an Employee Bill of Rights.

The middle ground you described is a brilliant idea. What you probably need to enforce it, at first, is an enlightened dictator (i.e. the 1% who won't get power-hungry and fuck everything up).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting your company username on social media - <AUTHOR> I see a lot of popular startups appear who have catchy names/domains of which they obviously bought from a third party with very generic dictionary words or play on words, and subsequently also appear to obtain their original username across these major social platforms of which are nearly impossible to get in actual human contact with -- and I'd like to ask, how?
My company is over 5 years old now and since day 1, our username on Twitter is an account with the real name "Testing 123 123" from 2011 with no followers/follows, and our username on Facebook appears to not be in use yet walls me off when attempting to use it saying "this username is already in use" and email after email, we appear to get botted responses with no light at the end of the tunnel.
Is there any appropriate channel for things like this? Twitter seems to at the very least somewhat be contactable albeit botted responses, but Facebook has no front-facing support for this whatsoever with rather outdated help pages.
At this point, I'd shed tears at the thought of being helped with this by someone in the position to do so. <comment><USER2> Search for "<Facebook|Twitter|GitHub|etc.> trademark policy" on Google ;)

When it comes to legal stuff, it's a lot more easier to find someone to talk to. And most of these sites are providing usernames on a first-come, first- served basis. If someone has it but not actively using it, you can also report this inactivity and ask them to make it available to claim.</comment>


50 years ago, a story describing modern mobile phones and online encyclopedias - <AUTHOR> When the middle class was discovering the fixed phone in the 60', a sci-fi author told stories about people using phones with screens and cameras, that where used to access online encyclopedias.
p38: "Occasionally when orbiting Bennie Noakes punches an encyclopedia connection on his phone and marvels at what it tells him"
p40: "phone efficient with viewscreens"
p61: "Eventually she scribbled a list and reached for the switch of the phone, after another quick glance at herself to make sure the image on the screen would be fitting."
p87: "However, when he had summed up what he could recall of Beninia—privately wondering all the time why Norman didn't simply go to the phone and punch for an encyclopedia"
p129: "He approached the phone. But that wouldn't do—just conversing with an image on a screen. He wanted to see and hear strangers, to be reassured of their independence from himself."
p130: "If that phone were to ring, and the Colonel were on the screen activating me, telling me to report for duty at once"
p176: "Stretched out on the couch naked, hair dyed the fashionable bronze shade that everyone said suited her so well, a screen protecting the majority of her body from the scan of the camera on the phone but bathing her in the blue-white of the sunshine lamps"
p352: ""Same with the screen on your phone."
p418: "Donald drew a deep breath. What he was going to say could have been found as easily through an encyclopedia connection over the phone"
etc, etc... <comment><USER2> Heinlein described mobile pocket phones in 1948, 1953, and 1962. (although they were probably analog)

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=595](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=595)

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing, but a bit different prediction, Heilein (from the link provided) described mobile phones at a time where there was walky-talkies (invented in 1937). The difference between walky-talkies and mobile phones is in the lack of phone switches and base stations, not so much in the terminal.

Brunner described phones (not necessarily mobile) that had a camera and a screen and that were used to access encyclopedias.

There was at that time ATT's picturephone, but it was point to point connections through the switched network. Given it used a Vidicon tube for the camera an a cathodic tube for the screen, it must have been quite large. And it was not used to find information on online encyclopedias.

Hey it was published even _before_ Arpanet was launched!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Science fiction has always been amazing at predicting the future.

Totally amazing how creative our writers and movie makers are and even more amazing how much of it becomes reality.

Hope to see a lot more fiction becoming reality in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar)</comment>


Missing data hinder replication of artificial intelligence studies - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/missing-data-hinder-replication-artificial-intelligence-studies <comment><USER2> Hell, I did an analysis on "Causality in Crypto Markets":

[https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/causality-in- cryptoma...](https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/causality-in- cryptomarkets/)

I provided code and the data (since I knew no one would believe me, without evidence). Why do we believe researchers who have more incentive than I do to publish? Their jobs require publication, or at least are greatly improved by it, thus they have every incentive to be less than honest about their "experiments". Most of the "A.I. revolution" isn't about algorithms, it's about having more data and _the right data_. That's why Google and Facebook can out compete in research, as much as they do. They have all the data.

Personally, I've almost made it a life mission to try and replicate every study I can. After watching people in labs (private and public biology labs), just straight up make up data - I never believe anything.

I also wrote some stuff on backtesting (which in industry is viewed as the gold standard, but IMO is deeply prone to flaws): [https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/perils-of- backtesting...](https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/perils-of-backtesting/)

Having worked in industry and worked in academia... I don't believe 90% of the research I hear.

<comment><USER3> Its gotten to the point where the first thing I do when reading a paper is skim for their training data.

If its not from a public/standard/replicable data source my bullshit meter hops up a couple steps.

"We improved on the current SotA by 15% but you can't see the data or the code - but trust us, its for real"

<comment><USER4> A similar line of thinking to the _always provide the source code behind your paper_ position.

<comment><USER5> In fact, I'd go so far to say that data _is_ source code in the case of Machine Learning; it just goes through a kind of compilation step.

<comment><USER4> Careful now, don't tempt the LISPers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hinted at this issue a few days ago already here on HN:

 _This is why about 90% of the papers Google publishes are useless._

 _They describe deep learning successes, with datasets that aren 't public, on hardware that isn't public, with software that isn't public._

 _They describe technologies, be it spanner, borg, flumejava or others, relying on closed hard- and software._

 _If an average university professor can 't replicate research 1:1 based solely on existing, open technology and the paper, the paper should not be accepted by any journal. In fact, it shouldn't even be accepted on conferences, or be able to get a doi code. That's not worthy of being called science._

And it's problematic when a large amount of AI research happens at Google, Facebook and co., and none of it can be replicated. Science requires replication, if AI research can't be replicated, it's not science.

<comment><USER7> The problem is when BigCo does AI research, they are not doing it for the greater good, they are trying to find a competitive edge. Unfortunately there are no good incentives (besides doing the "right" thing) for companies to open their datasets to the public, so until there is we can expect more of the same...

<comment><USER8> This isn't fair to researchers at companies. While the goal of the organization may be to make money, the goal of the individual researchers who publish the papers is very likely doing it for the greater good.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I don't see that. If you're an employee of a company (not least one who's paying you a very fat salary) there is an expectation that you will do work that benefits the company's bottom line. If that happens to be aligned with the "greater good" then OK, but there is no such guarantee- and if it isn't... well then your research will only benefit the company.

<comment><USER8> Of course your work benefits the bottom line, but being able to publish is often a perk that companies have to give to be able to attract and keep people who care about those things. It's actually incredibly insulting that you would assume you know the motivations of individual employees.

The world isn't as black and white as you'd like it to be.

<comment><USER10> If journals/conferences were to refuse un-replicable results, companies that wish to offer this perk would have to make a sufficient part of their dataset public in order to offer this perk to their employees. This would be a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was shocked in CS graduate school the first time I downloaded the code referred to by a very well-respected paper in the field, and found that it did not even compile. By the 20th time, I was less shocked, but I had lost a lot of respect for CS academia.

The correct standard should be, if you claim you wrote a program that does X, the program should be available along with simple instructions that explain how to run it. The reviewers should then follow the instructions and verify that it actually works, and returns the results described in the paper! This basic process would sadly invalidate most computer science research.

<comment><USER12> The vast majority of such papers don't really involve a claim that they wrote a program that does X. I mean, they probably did write such a program, but that's tangential to the paper and not particularly relevant; the fact that they did isn't one of claims in the paper, it's not something they're trying to prove/show in the conclusions. There are some papers in the style "Software package for doing X", but those are a minority and generally limited to major releases of widely used open source tools for that problem; most CS papers are not about software, just like most astronomy papers are not about telescopes.

E.g. the paper is about some new method to approach X. In general, the paper could be valid even without any program implementation whatsoever; but you'll likely might supplement the method description with some experimental evaluation - but the paper is not about the experimental evaluation or the "experimental apparatus" i.e. the code they used. I mean, the paper is likely making some claims about the method as such, not about any single particular implementation of the method including their own. As a part of the main claim "this method seems good and interesting" they're providing some evidence "we tried, and in certain conditions described here applying method X was 10% better than method Y" \- but the actual code used to do that is just supplementary material; the code is a tool they used in research, not the result of the research they published. The code is the "telescope" you used to make an observation, but the paper is about the observation, not about the telescope.

It's just as with medicine - we generally accept papers that say "well, we tried this procedure on 100 patients and 73 of them got better" without requiring video evidence of those 73 patients actually getting better; in the same manner, we accept CS papers that say "well, we tried this procedure on 100 datapoints and 73 of them got correct results" and don't require the reviewers to reproduce the experiments and verify if the experimental results aren't falsified; just as reviewers don't try to reproduce experiments in pretty much any other science.

<comment><USER13> The difference is that when a medical paper claims

> well, we tried this procedure on 100 patients

"this procedure" is the most important part, and they describe it in detail in the paper, hopefully well enough that someone could attempt to replicate it, and some do attempt to replicate it. (Not that procedure descriptions in such papers are always sufficient for this.)

The difference between that and

> we tried this procedure on 100 datapoints

Is that it's nigh impossible to describe a ML procedure in enough detail to reproduce with just the description in the paper. Tiny changes in the parameters and construction can completely change the result; the only way to be able to reproduce it is if you had the source code. And also the source _data_ which is just if not more important as the source code (see sibling thread).

The opportunity that academic CS has over _every other science_ is that they could empower _every reader_ with the capability to verify the results of _every paper they read_ , and this is _actually attainable_. Reviewers of other sciences don't reproduce findings themselves for purely practical reasons that don't need to exist in CS.

<comment><USER14> To try out a procedure on one dataset amounts to a data point. You need to process a bunch of datasets to establish the performance of the procedure under study.

I though ML folks would have the statistical background to know you cannot infer a true statement from a single occurrence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems pretty straight forward to resolve the, just have conferences say they will add half a point to the average review score for papers with code.

Most reviewers seem to agree that besides the top and bottom 10% of papers the primary differentiator is luck, so might as well add code to that mix.

</comment><comment><USER16> >Gundersen says the culture needs to change. "It's not about shaming," he says. "It's just about being honest."

I think that it should be about shaming. If you shame those that don't provide enough information to replicate you might create an incentive to publish properly.

Replication problems create so much noise for further research that I would classify a researcher who doesn't publish replicable results as hostile to the research community.

</comment><comment><USER17> Welcome to the world of science.... where the data is scant but the results are impressive!

Seriously though, publish your data in the supplementary materials. Quit being afraid of failure or someone catching your mistakes. This is science, not figure skating.

<comment><USER18> I would encourage going one step further, and finding a repository for the data outside of the journal. Journals can be terrible at keeping supplementary files around, and I have people email asking for the supplementary data after a website redesign, or similar. Journals also sometimes do weird things like convert moderate size tables to PDF (making them nearly useless), and it's not clear what's happening when you're submitting the article always.

The other advantage of a repository is that it gets included in large data collections, and is in a standardized format.

Often it's a lot of work to upload to repositories, nearly as much as the analysis (if you have a good analysis pipeline), but is well worth it both for oneself and for the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Missing data hinders generalizability and long term stability of ML techniques even internal to an organization. This is just one symptom of the fact that the "data generating mechanism" changes constantly, in both obvious and subtle ways due to changes in business practice and market conditions.

</comment><comment><USER20> Last few weeks I've been reading a lot of scientific research on speech recognition algorithms and technology. Without open data, open algorithms and open software it's quite impossible to generate any of the results claimed by some articles. I think science, and especially computer science has a fundamental problem in execution and research publishing. We need a novel revolutionary approach beyond peer review where 'reviewability' must be quick and within reach if not instant - as bundled inside research documents.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you're interested in finding out more about data citation, you may find these interesting:

[https://www.crossref.org/blog/the-research-nexus---better- re...](https://www.crossref.org/blog/the-research-nexus---better-research- through-better-metadata/)

(edit - missing data citations from scholarly publications cause/propagate the replication problem described in the article)</comment>


Going down the rabbit hole with go-fuzz - <AUTHOR> https://mijailovic.net/2017/07/29/go-fuzz/ <comment><USER2> Compare Go fuzz to a java fuzzer and there are some interesting differences. For example, in the Go fuzzer, it is looking for panics, _not_ errors. An error is okay, it just perhaps isn't interesting. With a Java fuzzer, it is looking for Exceptions, which aren't as clear. If you get an IOException, is that working as intended, or an actual failure? It's much harder to tell. I attribute this not the the fuzzer, but to the language design decisions.

I tried using Go Fuzz on a small parser I wrote, and was surprised that it found a bug. I was quite pleased, but the input was actually valid, my code was just wrong. One shortcoming of Fuzzing is that it doesn't find Type II errors. It can't find invalid inputs that do succeed. For example, if the input to my parser was actually invalid, but the code didn't crash, the fuzzer would happily continue on. I'm glad I fuzzed my code, but no errors found doesn't mean no errors present.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Errors can be problems in Go as well if they're swallowed and not handled (for example, writing "os.Chdir("/foo");" will silently cause any errors to be ignored). Note that a Java fuzzer that detects uncaught exceptions _would_ notice a failing chdir() written in this way, while the Go fuzzer would not notice this issue.

2\. In Java, it's easy to tell whether, say, an IOException was working as intended or was an actual failure. Just check whether it was caught or not. Granted, that won't handle apps that try to catch wide swathes of exception types, but Go apps can abuse Go's "recover" facility in the same way.

<comment><USER4> There is a useful linter named `errcheck` for Go which looks for swallowed or shadowed errors [1]. It's included in `gometalinter` [2] (which is worth running as part of the CI checks on any Go codebase).

[1] [https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck](https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck) [2] [https://github.com/alecthomas/gometalinter](https://github.com/alecthomas/gometalinter)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, there are a number of correct uses of go that swallow errors. For example, fmt.Println returns an error, but you're just not going to see that error handled. Sometimes, it doesn't matter whether something has failed, because there's not a useful, proportionate thing you can do to respond to that failure. And it's not possible to know from machine examination which cases are which. I'm sure for some programs (grep?) a failure to emit a line to stdout is cause for failure. But for most it is not.

<comment><USER6> `errcheck` ignores unhandle error value of `fmt.Println`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > If you didn't fuzz it, you can't say it's correct.

> — Dmitry Vyukov

I would amend this slightly to state instead "If you didn't fuzz it, you can't say it's [robust]." To invoke correctness seems to suggest that you can do some amount of verification using fuzzing, but that's not really the case (unless you have a reference implementation).

But without fail, fuzzing often evokes a handful of shallow defects. And once those are addressed you can usually dig deeper and find more. I'd be astonished to find a library or program written in C/C++ that has never been fuzzed and undergo fuzzing without any newly discovered bugs.

<comment><USER8> > To invoke correctness seems to suggest that you can do some amount of > verification using fuzzing, but that's not really the case (unless you have > a reference implementation).

Not necessarily. You just need to be able to verify correctness of the output and fuzz the following program:

        y := f(x)
        if (y,x) are not correct then crash

E.g. if you want to verify correctness of the compressor, try to check if a known-good decompressor can always decompress its output to its input. This is simpler than having a reference implementation.</comment></comment>


Data Is Plural – Structured Archive - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/edit#gid=0 <comment><USER2> Hi, author/creator here. Very neat to see this on HN, thanks. The spreadsheet is a byproduct of the weekly newsletter I publish: [https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural](https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural)

The spreadsheet simply contains the text and links from each newsletter edition ... but in a tabular format. (One advantage to the newsletter over the spreadsheet: the links make a bit more sense, since they're associated with specific anchor text.) The "non-structured" archive of previous newsletters can be found here: [https://tinyletter.com/data-is- plural/archive](https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/archive)

Happy to answer any Qs!

<comment><USER3> I'm giving a talk on data journalism to journalists next week and I was already going to recommend they sign up for up for the newsletter. But I'm glad to be reminded how you track its content with a spreadsheet, which means I can mention you again when I talk about creative useful usecases for spreadsheets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice resources.

Made me think that there is still a gap between web publishing tools (like MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal) and online spreadsheets.

Html pages are easier to open and the layout options can provide better usability but spreadsheet are more convinient to maintain.

It is also a danger that big companies like Google Or Microsoft dominate the publishing tools and govern the content.

</comment><comment><USER5> Origin: [https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural](https://tinyletter.com/data- is-plural)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like that meta-dataset. Actual source (newsletters) is at: [https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural](https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural)

I even used it itself as well as one of mentioned datasets (puppies! kittens!) to explain Apache Solr search engine features at the ApacheCon 2018.

So, if you want to play with it, you may find my presentation useful: [https://www.slideshare.net/arafalov/from-content-to- search-s...](https://www.slideshare.net/arafalov/from-content-to-search- speeddating-apache-solr-apachecon-2018-116330553)

Examples: * Slide 45: how to find entries with maximum links * Slide 59: merle puppy!

Matching github repo is: [https://github.com/arafalov/solr- apachecon2018-presentation](https://github.com/arafalov/solr- apachecon2018-presentation) (including the final configuration, if you are not into learning Solr step by step)

I also have an idea of taking datasets from there one by one and doing series of blog posts of how to actually get them into Apache Solr showcase advanced search functions. But it is a lot of effort to prepare and I am not sure how many people would actually find it interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't it be 'Data are plural' then?

<comment><USER8> No. The verb modifies a sort of implied subject. Read it as "The word 'data' is plural", and it makes more sense.

Put another way, using a more standardly-pluaralized word, you would say "puppies is plural", not "puppies are plural".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can we get a canonical url for this? It's a useful resource, but in its current form might disappear at any time.

<comment><USER10> It's a little funny that someone so invested in public and open datasets would embed their own data in a Google Spreadsheet.

<comment><USER3> Serious question: what do you think would be the better alternative? Especially when factoring in ease-of-upkeep (for the creator), convenient and familiar interface for the majority of users, Google's generally good uptime and server performance, and that a Google Sheet set to public access is not closed by a reasonable definition of that word.

I was going to quip about how I am annoyed that Google removed download-as-a- CSV as a URL endpoint, but it appears I misheard about this because /export?format=csv still turns the Google Sheet URL into a direct download link:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4jucl...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/export?format=csv)

<comment><USER10> I personally didn't find it easy to consume, and others here didn't either (see the confusion about what it is, asking for context, etc). The links aren't clickable, there are multiple newline-separated links in a single cell, etc.

I'm not just objecting to the use of Google; part of an open dataset is its ease of use.

As for alternatives, I agree, it's hard to rival Google Sheets in terms of the creator's time. But again, for someone invested in curating open datasets, I'd hope for a bit of time invested in curating their own data — even if it remains within Google sheets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Super neat! This is a compilation of datasets sent out from Jeremy Vine's Data Is Plural Newsletter - [https://tinyletter.com/data-is- plural](https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural)

</comment><comment><USER12> What is the context for this?

<comment><USER13> It looks like a curated list of various open, free to use data sets.

I agree though, while useful, seems like this should be embedded in the context of a short write up somewhere. Or, at least, have a title that's descriptive as opposed to what looks like a vague attempt and branding.

<comment><USER14> I've gone insane. I thought this was a bunch of links supporting the argument that the word 'data' is plural.

<comment><USER13> It's just poor marketing/branding to anyone not in the know. Much like the name of the current site we're on, though maybe that's what they're going for.

Titles like this are absolutely useless. I shouldn't have to click on a link and spend 45 seconds reading spreadsheet entries to figure out what it is I'm reading about.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, the Google Sheet has a "Notes" tab which explains the spreadsheet and its content: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4jucl...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/htmlview?sle=true#)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the 'Notes' sheet, it says we can create a copy of this Google Sheet, but I am having a hard time seeing the Menu to do that. Does anyone have success downloading this sheet into CSV or something? If so, I'd like to know how. Thank you.

<comment><USER3> The submitted URL is the endpoint to view the GSheet as HTML. The canonical URL for the spreadsheet contains the usual menu options and interactive features:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4jucl...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/edit#gid=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It just redirects to a Google Support article ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER17> Usually a cookie problem. Log out of your Google account, clear your cookies, and then it should work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am honestly surprised that Beyonce isn't the top hit for Houston.</comment>


Hiring Contractors: Employment Agreements - <AUTHOR>

I'm a huge fan of outsourcing (elance) and have been working with numerous contractors through them for more than a year. I've spent thousands of dollars and completed dozens of mini projects, and plan on continuing to use their contractors far into the future. However, not once have I had the contractor sign any formal employment agreement/contract. There's a part of me that's saying "c0w, you need to protect yourself. You need contracts!". To those of you who have expertise in this area: what clauses should be in this contract to protect me? In researching this question today I've come up with the following list that seems to be a good starting point:
--Standard employment clauses --Non-disclosure --Non-compete --IP and Trade Secrets --Forum to settle disputes --Non-Disparagement
What am I missing here? Does anyone know of any free sample contracts or templates I could use that are going to protect me and my interests?
I found a site called rocketlawyer.com and they have a number of sample agreements available for free. Has anyone seen these? What's the consensus on them?
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044058&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1 https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044083&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1 https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044085&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1 https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044086&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1
Thanks, -c0w <comment><USER2> Many of these things are covered by elance's Independent Contractor Services Agreement, found here: [https://www.elance.com/p/legal/Independent-Contractor- Servic...](https://www.elance.com/p/legal/Independent-Contractor-Services- Agreement-140127.pdf)

IANAL but supplemental agreements may not even be necessary.

<comment><USER3> [http://help.elance.com/entries/34758-sample-contract- agreeme...](http://help.elance.com/entries/34758-sample-contract- agreements#stage=edit)

elance has a sample nda and mnda available. There must be some use cases where supplemental agreements are useful.</comment></comment>


Do We Overvalue Bike Lanes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.davemabe.com/2017/05/09/do-we-overvalue-bike-lanes/ <comment><USER2> He makes some good points, but here's my take: I used to ride my bicycle to work every day and for general transportation for quite a while (I live in Israel), but I've basically given that up completely because I have to ride on the road, and I've had too many close encounters that it's just too much for me. I've had cars brush up against me, others ignore me completely when taking a left turn from the opposite direction forcing me to brake suddenly, and more.

The worst was when I was riding on a two lane road, approaching an intersection where the right lane could either continue straight or take a right turn. I was going straight, and was just a few meters from the intersection when a female driver overtook me on the left lane and slowed down. I could see her looking at me in her mirror, and right when I was about to reach the intersection she suddenly turned sharply right. I had to brake hard and veer to the right, almost slamming into her car. She flashed an evil smile, and sped away. That was it for me. If drivers are trying to kill me as if it's a sport, I'm out.

Bike lanes aren't better though. There's basically two types where I live: first are bike lanes right on the sidewalks. These have many people walking on them, oblivious or not caring that they're on the bike lanes. Motorcyclists also like to park on them. The second is even worse, where the bike lane is on the right edge of the road, but with parking to the left of it. People don't know how to park, so cars often block the lane, or back up into you while you're riding, or someone on the passenger side suddenly opens the door on you. Couples also like to walk in those lanes as if it's some romantic activity. Seriously, it happens a lot.

Eh, I'll just walk.

<comment><USER3> "female driver"

I suspect her gender had nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER4> It's a statement of fact. I suspect you wouldn't have made your comment if he had written 'some guy cut me off'.

<comment><USER3> But it's superfluous. He (presumably) went out of his way to identify the gender of the driver when it has nothing to do with anything.

You're right - I wouldn't have reacted to "some guy", because you're not calling attention to the person's gender. In fact, given the context, I wouldn't even presume to know the gender of "some guy."

OP's use of "her" throughout the section makes it clear that she was female, and that's fine. But going out of his way to call out that it was a FEMALE driver reinforces stereotypes about women's competency, and that's not OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not a fan of statements of the format 'There are a lot of studies showing X but they are flawed because of A,B or C, but among those, there is one study, which is not flawed in A which shows !X which is the thesis of post, therefore !X'.

</comment><comment><USER6> You don't want bike lanes, you want separate routes. [http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2012/07/unravelling- of-...](http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2012/07/unravelling-of- modes.html)

<comment><USER7> The article says the opposite, claiming that it dooms cyclists to second hand status.

<comment><USER8> I agree with this. We have both here in NYC. First of all, cyclists need a way to get to their destination. Nobody is going to ride on the greenway and then walk a few blocks to their destination. Second of all, motorist behavior has really changed since the lanes were installed. The protected lanes are mostly like a separate route, but they still intersect the same road, and force drivers to mix in with cyclists on some turns. It can be hairy, but it's helped define space for everyone and increase safety for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike by reducing turn speeds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The safest answer is separate bike infrastructure. Full Netherlands style.

[http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/11/first-cycle- sup...](http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/11/first-cycle-superhighway- revisited.html?m=1)

<comment><USER10> Have you ever visited Milton Keynes in the UK. You can get across town without touching a road, as they have a completely separate cycling infrastructure. The red routes. Sadly though as they are out of sight, they are used by hoodlums and gangs at night, to the point people don't want to use them. Shucks, people. They are also used by mobility scooters.

<comment><USER11> A major part of the Dutch system is the bike network has the most direct routes, while cars generally have to go around.

<comment><USER4> Except around highways where bikes have to make ridiculous detours and the car on-ramps are relatively straight.

Near Zaandam there are a couple of really nice examples of this, bike detours easily 1 km for what would have been 200 m at best without the detour. (Onramp of A8, both sides).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> God yes. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. There are bike lanes here and there, and for the most part I stay the hell out of them. Here are common reasons a bike lane is more dangerous than riding in the road:

      - Too narrow
      - Too close to parked cars (being doored is the *most* common collision I hear about)
      - Full of debris that you have to dodge into traffic to avoid, which is super dangerous
      - Full of people picking up passengers (same)
      - They suddenly end at an intersection, or just randomly, so you have to merge with traffic *in* an intersection

If you don't have clear line of sight or it's not a bike lane you're super familiar with? Don't chance it. Take the lane, as is legally permitted. (The law in MA says to ride as far to the right as is safe, and many bike lanes are not.)

As the article stated, they also make drivers think cyclists don't have rights to the full lane, so assholes will try to give me shit about being in the left lane when I'm trying to turn left. I don't need that.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like the problem isn't the existence of a bike lane, but the construction of a really half-assed bike lane. Here in NYC, we have some of those, and I avoid them like the plague. If someone doors me, I'm going flying into traffic. Ridiculous.

But we also have lanes that put parking between the bike lane and the motor lanes, and have a few feet of buffer between to eliminate the door zone. They're pretty fantastic to ride in, except when NYPD parks in them for whatever reason.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I'd at least partly agree with this -- half-assed bike lanes are worse than nothing, and well-made ones are great. But there's not always room for well-made ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was thinking about this the other day:

What if we had a dotted bike lane on _EVERY_ road, so cars could straddle it, but when trying to pass a bike would have a clear indicator of how much space they need to leave.

You could still have dedicated solid-line bike lanes where you had high bike traffic, but you might not need so many of them because the dotted lane would get you part of the safety/bicyclist comfort benefits.

Edit: I guess this exists. It's called "Advisory bike lanes" [http://www.minneapolismn.gov/bicycles/advisory-bike- lane](http://www.minneapolismn.gov/bicycles/advisory-bike-lane)

<comment><USER14> Those "lanes" _decrease_ safety. We have plenty of them here because it's just paint so it costs nothing.

Just look at the picture on the linked site. Left of the dotted line is where I would be _just to keep enough space to opening car doors_. But now there is a dotted line and lots of bicycle symbol paint in it so I get all the nutjobs driving at me to tell me I should ride in that "bicycle lane". And beginner cyclists who do end up riding in that lane get a double whammy, car doors in their face and cars passing way too close because they think the dotted line somehow means you don't need to keep space when overtaking.

Notice that cyclists in those lanes have priority over turning vehicles! You have to be suicidal to get anywhere close in one of them to a vehicle that has "mysteriously slowed" (no signal of course) though. I see bikes in those lanes getting cut off every single commute.

<comment><USER15> Part of what makes them dangerous is that virtually no one performs a legal turn when a bike lane is present. You are supposed to change lanes into the bike lane and then turn after you are driving in the bike lane. Turning across a lane is super dangerous, but everyone does it when the lane is a bike lane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've grown up cycling in a historically cycling-hostile city, I'm used to it, and several years ago when the city jumped on the bandwagon and got serious about cycling infrastructure, I was all like 'I don't need those', for mostly the reasons cited in the article. But I was just being one of those assholes radiating his toxic masculinity.

The lanes have a strong signalling effect, that's the real reason for them. They grant cyclists legitimacy in their minds, and in the minds of drivers. As in 'fuck you, I've got a lane now, I'm riding here, You can't fuck with me anymore!'.

They're working. Whatever myths and superstitions are running through the minds of tentative new cyclists, the lanes get them out riding and not driving. The number of cyclists commuting in and out of the core has visibly doubled each year for the past 4 years, and there is safety in numbers, one thing the studies all agree with.

Otherwise I agree, except on the last point - that lanes make drivers more hostile to cyclists. Driver tolerance of cyclists goes up when they perceive cyclists to be legitimate, and that's what the lanes do.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article cites bike lanes in residential neighborhoods being less safe. I've never found bike lanes to be useful in such an environment anyway. Taking into account traffic and stop signs bikes are effectively already as fast as cars and don't need special treatment. On multi-lane roads with speed limits > 35mph is where bike lanes become more useful.

<comment><USER18> By law bikes in CA are supposed to stop at stop signs [0]. Most cyclists ignore it.

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-cycling- coll...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-cycling- collisions-20131002-story.html)

<comment><USER19> It's less safe for bicyclists to stop because they have to dismount and remount. But even less safe than that is the inconsistency. If the law was that bikes had to slow down within e.g. 50 feet of an intersection to ~8 mph, and then had the right of way like a pedestrian in a cross walk, that would be followed much more consistenty than stop signs applying to bikes.

Some municipalities let bicylists treat stop signs as yield signs, and that's also safer because it's more consistently followed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> OP makes some good points but should go on vacation in the Netherlands. Way ahead in road safety. For example:

[https://youtu.be/FlApbxLz6pA](https://youtu.be/FlApbxLz6pA)

Or more extensively:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4)

</comment><comment><USER21> Here in Germany, all these bike lanes exist and function more or less as well as they can. Taxis tend to play chicken with you a lot, but they also respect your space if you claim it.

The main difference between here and where I learned to drive (CA, US) is driver's education. Bicycles are not treated as second-class in the driving curriculum: you are required to check over your right shoulder every time you take a right turn. The presence of marked bike lanes helps reinforce this notion. You will still find those who park in or walk on them, which is annoying, but overall I feel safer here riding my bike than in the US.

</comment><comment><USER22> What frustrates me most where I live is poorly marked bike lanes/paths. My neighborhood is surround by 'multi-use paths' that consist of a wide finely crushed gravel path next to a double wide sidewalk-like path. These are supposed to be used by cyclists as well as horses and pedestrians, and when used as such are glorious and completely safe.

Problem is, many cyclists don't realize they are for their use, and wind up riding on the narrow, winding, traffic-calmed streets where it's most definitely not safe or convenient for cyclists or motorists.

<comment><USER14> Multi-use paths typically don't go anywhere, are circuitous and have to yield all the time. Of course nobody uses them because well people on bikes are just trying to get to work, too.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the stupidest thing I hear shouted out of car windows is "you belong on the bike path!" (meaning the scenic multi-use path).

(Well you belong on the highway, dipshit, but I'm guessing that doesn't take you to the grocery store either.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm a big fan of protected bike lanes - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6LZ0iRO- TM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6LZ0iRO-TM).

</comment><comment><USER24> I live just off a road that has long been popular with cyclists. I used to bike on it myself. But the towns it connects have grown a lot in the past 10 years and the car traffic on it has grown as well. Last year a woman on a bike was killed on the road. I don't bike on it myself any more. It just isn't safe.

It would be a lot safer with bike lanes, and safer still if there was separate pavement for bikes.

</comment><comment><USER25> No, not at all. The case for protected bike lanes is rock solid, but it's been tread so many times that it's only worth addressing the article itself:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

Remember, in this age conflict, not content, drives journalist profit.

</comment><comment><USER26> Didn't read the article. But the answer is yes.

</comment><comment><USER27> We all know that the law of car-driving-assholes means that any bike lane that a car is capable of entering, will be entered by a car = risk of death/injury. The only way for bike lanes to be a safe method is to introduce barriers so cars CAN NOT ENTER AT ALL. Sadly there are so many roads that are too narrow for these bike lanes to exist as well as allow two way traffic as well as parking that I think the only way is to create one way roads from the old 2 way roads and have a segregated bike lane use up one car space, with barriers to cars, and parking one one side only. They have created trial bike lane on bloor street in Toronto, with only one parking lane (which alternates from side to side.) Bloor still has 2 way car traffic.

I think one way is the way. Then with self driving cars(cab like, but lots cheaper) reducing the numbers of cars will help. [http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=18cc...](http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=18ccded2f6711510VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD)

<comment><USER28> How often do you bike in these protected bike lanes?

My city has them and I intentionally avoid roads with them. It's more dangerous because every intersection the protection is broken for the turning lane and let me tell you, cars do not check for you before jumping in to that turning lane. It's terrifying.

<comment><USER8> I think D.C. has some mixing zones that are gold standard: [https://i0.wp.com/www.streetsblog.org/wp- content/uploads/201...](https://i0.wp.com/www.streetsblog.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/dc_mixing_zone.jpg?w&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2Cpx)

Would love to see this in more places, because seriously, no other method is safe. For me, mixing zones usually mean merging over to the turn lane and riding to the right side of cars turning left (NYC puts bike lanes on the left side of the road).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As always, the answer to all articles titled with a question is "No".

<comment><USER30> Betteridge's law of headlines

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Bike lanes have always been controversial. MIT professor John Forrester has long argued that it is better for people to think that "a bicycle is a vehicle".

Bicyclists often have a fear that somebody is going to hit them from behind, but earlier studies show that the majority of accidents happen around intersections: if bikes are segregated from traffic, often cyclists are invisible at intersections and get hit.

More recent studies in the U.S. south, however, show that bicyclists are more likely to be hit from behind than previous studies -- but that might just be southern culture...

<comment><USER11> America has done the vehicular cycling approach for decades and what we have to show for it is 1% cycling mode share. Vehicular cycling is the transportation policy for the 1% of cyclists (it made sense to me when I was 22 years old and fearless). By contrast Dutch infrastructure is designed for a 60 year old woman with two bags of groceries.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Post Video Updates on Your Facebook Wall - AirGoL - <AUTHOR> https://apps.facebook.com/airgolapp

<comment><USER2> Most awaited app for facebook :)

I guess u guys should also make an mobile app for AirGol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mobile and Web are two different channels , Our first focus is to utilize web channel with webcam that is easily available. Mobile would be awesome no doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> would be awesome if there is a facility to send an update directly to a specific friend?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we are working on it, and available for all very soon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> amazing app...</comment>


Problumz-demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.shreddit-hard-co.re/problumz-demo/

<comment><USER2> I didn't understand what it is.

From the home page of the site, the link says "probabilistic audio generation demo". The problema is that I don't get any sound in Chrome and in IE11.</comment>


A man who paves India's roads with old plastic - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/09/the-man-who-paves-indias-roads-with-old-plastic <comment><USER2> Wasn't this discussed yesterday?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17490990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17490990)

</comment><comment><USER3> But isn't the problem with plastic in the ground that chemicals would leech out of it and debris would break off from it and be ingested by animals and humans? Is a road that much better than dumping it in the ground away from humans and animals? I worry about physical changes to the road over time. Is it safe to inhale the dust that is generated from wheels rolling over a sun- burdened piece of plastic for years?

<comment><USER4> from the article:

To environmentalists who believe that the technology could be harmful because of toxic fumes from plastic residue, Dr Vasudevan points out that the plastic used is softened at 170C. "Plastic decomposes to release toxic fumes only if it is heated at temperatures above 270C (518F). So there is no question of toxic gases being released," he says. Since plastic coats the stone and interacts with the hot bitumen, it's properties change and it doesn't break down when exposed to light and heat.

<comment><USER5> You don't need toxic fumes, plastic doesn't go away. It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces and contaminates the environment.

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

<comment><USER6> >The bitumen-modified plastic improved the tensile strength of the road by making it more durable and flexible. Plastic also prevented pothole formation. When the layer of molten plastic filled the space between the gravel and bitumen it thwarted rain water from seeping in and causing structural defects.

Seems like it would break down less than a regular tar-only road and last longer to boot.

<comment><USER3> It seems like it will help keep the overall rigity of the road but it says nothing about how the material will break into pieces on the exterior layers. Plastics are known to cause cancer and other harm to living things when ingested, and my curiosity is if plastic could be more damaging than the thing it replaces.

<comment><USER6> Myself, I'm not convinced plastic is more harmful to the immediate environment in this application than the tar/bitumen itself. It does seem the issue of plastic shedding into the environment has not been investigated enough, but does tar not leech toxic chemicals as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is terrible. Plastic is forever and breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces entering the environment.

<comment><USER7> It seems from the article, they have considered that and concluded that since plastic becomes part of the bitumen, and does not exist as plastic particles.

<comment><USER5> Unless it has chemically changed considerably it's a problem. My impression is they are saying "don't worry, chunks aren't going to break off because it's melted into the bitumen" and are wholly ignoring the micro scale.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook says Taliban's page 'doesn't contain credible threat of violence' - waqas-

This facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/UmarMedia belongs to TTP (Tehreek e Taliban pakistan), internationally designated terrorist organization. This is one of the dozens of pages run by these loosly affiliated terrorist groups. They use these fb pages to spread propaganda and publish videos of their successful terror operations. I have repeatedly reported these pages, which, even when you take one look at them is obvious that they are run by terror outfits. But facebook says they are safe for families etc etc.
Just today 40 people were killed in Pakistan by these people in a mosque bomb blast, earlier this week 40 were killed in a church bomb blast. A couple of weeks ago they killed a pakistani General, and duly uploaded the video on this page (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=224409671050680). Still facebook says it does not contain credible threat of violence (http://imgur.com/ILkxxJ6). my blood is boiling with rage. What should i do? <comment><AUTHOR> Are the Tal eban not entitled to freedom of speech? I mean do you report the IDF or various US Military facebook fan pages too?

The situation in Afghanistan is not monochromatic and while the actions of these people are detestable what does blocking their access to facebook achieve?

I mean if Im going to be really aggressive then why arent you protesting Americas drone policy which is equally terrifying and indiscriminate.

Im not American but Americans have died for this inane concept of freedom, liberty and expression. The fact that you want to deny those staples to people you despise is telling.

<comment> waqas- facebook has explicitly stated its policy that if a page or a person is involved in violence, or offers a credible threat of violence the page will be shut down. i did not make those rules, facebook did. and these people have nothing to do with USA, TTP and Taleban are completely different entities, TTP is not involved in any freedom struggle, it just routinely kill innocent Pakistani people and never harms any american soldiers.</comment></comment>


Empty trains on the modern Silk Road: when Belt and Road interests don't align - <AUTHOR> https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-the-modern-silk-road-when-belt-and-road-interests-dont-align/ <comment><USER2> This has been rumored for some time on various railfan groups across the web and I've always figured it to be true. In a few instances, people have called out that trains are moving too quickly up grades for their supposed load or are way underpowered for a train if all the containers were full. It's all been a bit suspect.

This has only fueled a lot of skepticism about the BRI. There's a few primary reasons for this:

1\. Break of gauge: Any of the current routes require gauge changes between 5' and 4'8.5". Each time this occurs it incurs either (a) translating costs to move containers from railcar to railcar, or (b) bogie change costs. This both slows it down and adds significant labor expense to the endeavor which reduces competitiveness vs sea. Talgo (in Spain) makes gauge-changing bogies which theoretically can handle this, but they are not designed for the tonnage nor are they particularly well-suited to the extreme conditions found on the routes.

2\. Axle Loading & Loading Gauge: The axle loads across the different networks are highly variable, requiring cars only be as heavy as the lightest network they travel on. In addition, the loading gauges are much tighter in Europe, resulting in only single containers of shorter length being allowed on COFC trains (Container on Flat Car)

This isn't to say the problems aren't surmountable, just that they have not yet been and it is going to be difficult to do so in the future.

<comment><USER3> The explanation is more simple:

1\. Russia

2\. Kazakhstan

Both charge Chinese trains many times more than their own rate. All those mind boggling subsidies basically translate into handing out free money to them for hauling air.

And even if they were to be billed fairly, both Russian and Kazakhstani railways are both living from bailout to bailout themselves as:

1\. Rail infrastructure is falling apart without a single major upgrade since the collapse of the Union

2\. Rail is a patently bottomless watering hole for the bureaucrats running it

3\. Most of money on the rail is spent on maintenance of unprofitable, and deeply underused routes god knows where in order to solicit more bailout money

4\. Everything on Russian rail is done in the most inefficient way possible, also in order to solicit more bailouts. It is 2019, and Russia still uses human signallers, wooden ties, and sand ballast. Even passenger cars are still heated with firewood.

<comment><USER4> With point 4, while I'm assuming it's just inefficient, is it credible this is strategic? In the event of war and EMP or cyber attack their supply lines can function as normal type thing?

<comment><USER2> Russia looks more to the railroads for national security and employment, not profitability. They do work well enough, but in a war would not be nearly as effective as if they'd been properly managed in the first place.

<comment><USER5> They have

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

Beat that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article argues against the premise that the _power and "deep pocket" of the Chinese state can overcome problems that the market cannot solve when left alone_ , but misses the forest for the trees. Obviously China doesn't attempt this category of infrastructure projects because they have to make immediate economic sense. They tackle them for political and long term geostrategic purposes. Some side benefits are that it's cheaper than US-style global military hegemony, far more permanent, and more readily accepted by populations. For example our local project [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKZMB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKZMB) cost USD$18.8B which is less than twelve days of the current US military budget of USD$1.65B per day, a lot cheaper and more acceptable than invading Hong Kong and effectively the crown jewel and literal gateway to one of the most populated areas and busiest shipping lanes on the planet. Plus bragging rights. See also impressive road and rail infrastructure through Yunnan, rail to Tibet and Southeast Asia, etc.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't seem wrong to me. WRT military spending i'm always thinking that "we" as species have the capacity to rain down death and fire over and over again. Yet, when there is a large forest fire somewhere, doesn't matter where, happens all the times, we lack the capacity to effectively rain down water to douse it. Maybe i`ve played too much SimCity, but that's how i see it.

Utter failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, a continuation of the same "construction of the sake of the appearance of growth" phenomena that we saw with ghost cities?

<comment><USER8> Except lots of the original ghost cities are now full.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/04/23/chinas-l...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/04/23/chinas- largest-ghost-city-is-now-90-full-but-theres-a-twist/#6812d9f167c8)

The probably is that a journalist that doesn't understand how China works stumbled onto a construction zone and didn't understand what they saw. Chinese build housing for half a million people at once fairly regularly. I've gone past multiple constructions sites like this.

They also build whole cities (which the ghost cities story was about) and they fill up. A bunch of people pre-buy and once they get a minimum buy-in they start construction. Once the city is mostly finished it still takes a while for everything else to be done inside BUT in China, they don't fence of construction sites at this stage while in developed countries they do. You can just walk in and look around. There are no squatters laws so people cannot just take your property and there are fewer liability issues so they don't really care.

<comment><USER9> Uh... Did you read the article you cited? It literally said the area is still empty they just stopped including it as part of the city and only included the inhabited part, though that part was already full of people before those buildings went up. It's more of a quirk in how cities are defined as administrative regions instead of distinct urban areas. The buildings are still empty though. Like most things in China it's lots of talk and flash, little real magic behind the show.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel after this article, things will change.

</comment><comment><USER11> China's government certainly deserves criticism, but I notice that there has been a big increase in posts critical of China on large forums such as Reddit and Hacker News in the last half-year or so, which leads me to suspect that some such posts may be astroturfed or inspired by astroturfing. The Hong Kong situation could explain some of it, but the increase I refer to began before the recent Hong Kong crisis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since dang apparently decided to enable replying to this comment, let me explain why I submitted the article. I've been following the Panda Paw Dragon Claw blog for about a year because spending time in China has raised my awareness for various ongoing developments there, and I think the blog provides an interesting analytical perspective.

I submitted this article in particular because I think it gives a good description of the various actors involved in the BRI and how their competing interests cause them to undermine each other. I've noticed that many people seem to think of China as a single actor, a brutally efficient totalitarian state controlling everything within its reach, and as a result they don't distinguish clearly between the central government, local governments, state- owned enterprises, private companies and individual Chinese people participating in discussions online. I don't think that is due to malice or disinformation spread by the media, but simply due to a too simple model caused by unfamiliarity.

So my hope is that this article can lift the veil of homogeneity a little bit and help people gain an understanding of the underlying complexity.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good use cases for an NLP Search based data assistant for ur team? - <AUTHOR> https://www.imux.in/
I am Searching for market fit on one of my recent projects. Feedback & Early users are welcome.
Plug the API to your Admin panels,Apps, CRM and ERP  to Search data (without SQL) from specific data sources like your DB, GA, Stripe etc with graphs and share reports to slack, mail etc. SaaS tool available on demand too.
Support most kinds of Relational databases and few integrations too. Check sample demo on the website <comment><USER2> I love the idea of having a personal(custom) search tool, making instant reports/proposals/concepts and able to track data with easy keywords. The only thing, I'm doubtful about is the information accessiblity within the organization and the teams. Can we limit and share relevant information team- wise and individually? Please talk about security of the data with the tool. This tool applies to every sector and that is it's biggest speciality. Would like to explore more.

</comment><comment><USER3> A good fit would be firms that have a large proportion of their work in logistics or operations.

It can also come handy in exploratory analysis stage of data science, however your audience there will mostly be technical who already know SQL. But it doesn't hurt to have something that gets me away with SQL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ujwalsri. I am looking for some data scientists to try this out. will try in logistics space and take their feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting. Does this allow making graphs and other representations without much hassle ? Is so, I guess this make s an ideal tool for such tasks, instead of having a developer make these visualisations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can make them from your backend itself and export to dashboards on our product or export them to your slack.

Can I know exactly what use case it might help you. Daily reporting ?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Generating daily reports, emailing them to relevant teams is process that happens every now and then. While i can change the people who receive the repots, or post it to a slack group, its harder to make change the actual report itself without taking to the ERP developer or a technical person. Also the turn around time for such changes are higher which can be frustrating at times.

<comment><USER4> So if you can provide a simple UX that allows me to make my own reports, it would make lives easier.

<comment><USER5> Nice to hear @thehumblenerd. We are trying to build this layer between the databases & people in the organisation so that the gap is bridged.

Can you tell more about what kind of graphs you use? What does your report contain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks interesting. Can i connect my Google Sheets?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will check on the possibility of google sheet integration. Why would you use it for ? Can I know the Job you wish to accomplish ?</comment></comment>


Playing with Strings and Colors in Python - <AUTHOR> http://thelivingpearl.com/2012/12/28/playing-around-with-strings-and-python/

<comment><USER2> Python is a great language for iterating over collections - lists, tuples, dicts, sets, etc. - and all those elifs don't look very Pythonic to me. Let's clean it up a little:

        colors = ('grey', 'red', 'green', 'yellow', 'blue', 'magenta', 'cyan')
        for char in string:
            print termcolor.colored(char, colors[string.index(char)%7])

<comment><USER3> Better yet use enumerate to save looking up the character index:

        for i,char in enumerate(string):
            print termcolor.colored(char, colors[i%7])

<comment><USER4> You can get rid of that unpleasant indexing:

(3.2)

        from itertools import cycle
        for colour, character in zip(cycle(colours), string):
          print(termcolor.colored(character, colour))

(2.7)

        from itertools import cycle, izip
        for colour, character in izip(cycle(colours, string):
          print termcolor.colored(character, colour)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer Blessings[1] for terminal colors/positioning/etc (except it's limited to platforms that support curses):

        from blessings import Terminal
        t = Terminal()
        print t.bold, 'Hi there!', t.normal
        print t.bold_red_on_bright_green('It hurts my eyes!')
        with t.location(0, t.height - 1):
            print 'This is at the bottom.'

[1] <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/blessings/>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is much much _much_ more entry-level than most of the content posted to HN. Maybe a "Beginners: " label would be appropriate...

<comment><USER7> I would hardly consider myself a python beginner and I was delighted to read this article. I now know how to add some useful "syntax highlighting" to my personal CLI utilities!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure if you were looking for any criticism. I found the way that the way the ATTRIBUTES, HIGHLIGHTS and COLORS dicts are defined to be unnecessarily difficult to read:

        ATTRIBUTES = dict(
            list(zip([
                'bold',
                'dark',
                '',
                'underline',
                'blink',
                '',
                'reverse',
                'concealed'
                ],
                list(range(1, 9))
                ))
            )
        del ATTRIBUTES['']

It may feel like you are being more DRY by not typing the numerical values out. But this is data and it's perfectly fine to explicitly define them. The result is straightforward, more compact and easier to read as a result:

        ATTRIBUTES = {
            'bold': 1,
            'dark': 2,
            'underline': 4,
            'blink': 5,
            'reverse': 7,
            'concealed': 8
        }

<comment><USER9> Or even this if you don't want explicit numbers, but don't want that many zip/list/dict/range/etc.:

        attrs = ['bold', 'dark', '', 'underline', 'blink', '', 'reverse', 'concealed']

        ATTRIBUTES = dict((k,v) for v,k in enumerate(attrs, 1) if k)
        # or
        ATTRIBUTES = dict(zip(itertools.count(1), attrs))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first paragraph read strangely to me... like bot generated content. Like the sentence:

"Python can be written as an algorithm that you can execute."</comment>


Pin-ocular - <AUTHOR> http://pin-ocular.blogspot.com/ <comment><USER2> Presented like this, it looks like a spam post, but actually it isn't. Interesting design. Work on the presentation...

[http://reddyraveesh.blogspot.com/2015/05/pinhole- camera-35mm...](http://reddyraveesh.blogspot.com/2015/05/pinhole- camera-35mm.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUa- noV1tzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUa-noV1tzQ)

<comment><USER3> I agree. The photos in the OP are too big (I think that you can put a medium size photo in the BlogSpot page, and when you click it, it goes to to the full resolution image.)

Also it needs some minimal captions, to explain what is happening. The post at [http://reddyraveesh.blogspot.com](http://reddyraveesh.blogspot.com) is much better, but I think it need even more text.</comment></comment>