Rap Genius responds to Heroku's apology - <AUTHOR> http://rapgenius.com/Oren-teich-bamboo-routing-performance-lyrics <comment><USER2> Not sure how this works but... Is the actual response in the green hightlights? Are all the green highlights from the same person? I think they are. But then, who made the yellow highlights?

<comment><USER3> It looks like yellow highlights are external links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love the use of their product to respond. Haha.

<comment><USER5> I noticed that on the original blog post as well. Very clever. Though it seems on the blog posts that some people maybe don't understand what rapgenius does and end up saying things like 'WHAT ARE THESE BOXES WHY AM I HERE WHY DO I NEED TO FILL THIS OUT???' in the context notes. But clever nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most interesting thing about this for me is the YC company vs. YC company fighting.

<comment><USER7> YC invests widely enough that this isn't surprising in the slightest.

Hell, they've funded competing products at least a couple of times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Your Recommended Daily Allowance of Drama."

</comment><comment><USER9> Classless and pointless.

At this point I think rapgenius is just using this as a way to get attention/traffic.

</comment><comment><USER10> > I'm convinced that the best path forward is for one of your developers to > work closely with [redacted] to modernize and optimize your web stack. If > you invest this time I think it's very likely you'll end up with an app that > performs the way you want it to at a price within your budget

So... Heroku's CTO acknowledged there was a problem with their stack, and offered to help RapGenius modernize and optimize it. And RapGenius quibbles on the word "yesterday"?

While I do appreciate RapGenius raising the issue publicly to bring better accountability to Heroku. Their response to Heroku's response ought to have been along the lines of: "Hurray! Everyone's boat is rising with the tide." Not this.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Their response to Heroku's response ought to have been along the lines of: > "Hurray! Everyone's boat is rising with the tide." Not this.

If Heroku actually knew about the problem for a long time and yet didn't officially respond or apologize until we published that post, doesn't that make you take their apology less seriously?

<comment><USER10> Not really no. They offered to help you solve your problem. You received a response from the CTO. One that is favorable to your position. How many other CTOs would have done that? What more did you expect from them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The most amazing part of this situation, to me at least, is that a site devoted to explaining rap lyrics is lucrative enough to pay $20k/month in hosting. Imagine if they actually had a product!

<comment><USER12> I think it remains to be seen if it's lucrative enough to pay for itself as a business.

The $15+ million they raised is currently paying for everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this was necessary. The first post by RapGenius was great and was a really good way to point out an issue with a commonly used product. However now that Heroku has come to them hat in hand and promised some sort of resolution this seemed unnecessarily petty. Especially the one line about the date of the report, that's just pedantic.

At this point in the issue RG and Heroku should be communicating privately, not via blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> When Heroku's apology for misleading its customer is ITSELF misleading.. that's bad

> Especially the one line about the date of the report, that's just pedantic.

What they claim to have known and when is very relevant to how much you can trust them! Here's the timeline from my perspective:

1) In 2011 Tim Watson points out the problem: [http://tiwatson.com/blog/2011-2-17-heroku-no-longer- using-a-...](http://tiwatson.com/blog/2011-2-17-heroku-no-longer-using-a- global-request-queue)

2) Heroku responds but does nothing ([https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/heroku/8eO...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/heroku/8eOosLC5nrw/Xy2j7GapebIJ))

3) On 2/8/2013 I send Heroku full details about the problem including simulations, etc

4) On 2/11/2013 Heroku responds and says the best path forward is for me to optimize Rap Genius and that Adam's done talking about it with me.

5) The Heroku's Ugly Secret article goes up on 2/13/2013

6) Heroku releases BIG apology on 2/14/2013 saying they only learned about the problem on day ago.

Heroku knew about the problem at the LATEST on 2/11, and before we made a big public stink, their response was to say "just make Rap Genius faster"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While RapGenius it right to point out that Heroku was incorrect in describing how their load balancing works. It seems off to blame this exclusively for their performance problems. Plenty of high traffic sites not on Heroku operate just fine using nginx's upstream load balancing, which is simple round robin load balancing, paying no attention to how many requests are being handled currently by a backend.

What seems particularly odd is that rap genius appears to be using their Heroku dynos to serve their css, javascript and certain images. So loading the homepage appears to make about 12 requests that hit their dynos, rather than 1.

If you were looking for low hanging fruit to reduce load on the dinos for a high traffic site, this seems like an obvious place to start, rather than jumping straight to a 'smart' load balancing solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It seems off to blame this exclusively for their performance problems

There are definitely ways to improve the performance, but you can't measure them since Heroku gives you no way of determining how much time requests spend in the in-Dyno queue. Tho you can modify your app to get New Relic to display this info: <http://rapgenius.com/1506509>

> What seems particularly odd is that rap genius appears to be using their > Heroku dynos to serve their css, javascript and certain images. So loading > the homepage appears to make about 12 requests that hit their dynos, rather > than 1.

These assets are Cached in Varnish. We serve them without hitting dynos at all

<comment><USER14> > These assets are Cached in Varnish. We serve them without hitting dynos at > all

Ahh gotchya, was under the mistaken impression that rapgenius.com pointed directly at Heroku. Didn't realize there was a varnish layer in between.

<comment><USER15> With the Bamboo stack, there's a Varnish in front of your servers that you can use to cache responses. So it's part of Heroku. Cedar no longer has Varnish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Come on_ Rap Genius, please stop treating your blog posts like song lyrics.

<comment><USER17> But that's exactly what their product is trying to do! They are saying you can use their tech to comment and explain anything, not just song lyrics. I like that their eating their own dog food. (I can't say the same for their color choices).

<comment><USER16> "Oren Teich – Bamboo Routing Performance"

What does that mean? Look, I love Rapgenius for the lyrics and I am as much a fan of eat your dog food as anyone else. But hopefully they are going to go full circle with the philosophy and also listen to user feedback. This user is very confused.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely confusing – we've got a long way to go before Rap Genius is the perfect platform non-musical textual analysis! (But I still think this is a good way to present our reply since I want to comment on 2 of Heroku's specific claims)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So what is the consensus at this point? Stay away from Heroku if you are running a Rails app?

<comment><USER19> More like, stay away if you are running an app that has limited concurrency per worker dyno (either because your framework is single-threaded, or because your workers are CPU-bound) and you need predictable low latency.

Bear in mind that it's not like Heroku does anything particularly terrible in that use case. As far as I can see, it works about as well as any standard round-robin load balancer would. It's just that if those are your requirements, you have a problem that Heroku can't magically solve for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not sure if this is called for. Heroku has a performance issue and their documentation had a mistake. They accepted everything, apologized and are working to resolve it. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER21> There are two ways to look at this, and depending on your point of view you might be upset.The root of the dispute is how they scale and how that affects latency.

According to these write-ups, Heroku scales performance by doing dynamic scheduling on an array of identical servers (called 'dynos'). The documentation talks about a feature named "Intelligent Routing" which only sends work to a dyno which is available to do work.

That is a pretty ideal setup because in practice it means that you get linear scaling by adding server instances, and since costs are based on total server instances you get both linear scale increase with linear cost increase.

However, there is a very classical problem, first noted by Gene Amdahl, about the cost of figuring out how best to parallelize a stream of requests, vs the rate at which you could satisfy those requests. It became known as "Amdahl's Law"[1]. It limits the practical scalability of a lot of systems.

So at some point, Heroku got big enough, that the cost of figuring out which server instance wasn't busy, was taking "too long". (that cost is the (1-P) part in the Amdahl equation) so they decided to reduce the cost of making the choice by replacing a "data driven choice" with a "statistics driven choice". This too is actually a pretty well known way of doing things (Google and Blekko use it to send search queries to a bunch of waiting backends) But unlike the 'idealized' case which has every server instance handling at most one queue, the value becomes a probability that the server instance is either not-busy, or that the current transaction will finish quickly. This works well for systems where the cost of every transaction is nearly identical, you just add servers until the 90th percentile of requests hits your target, but poorly for systems where each request has a variable amount of work it might do.

I spent a number of years studying these sorts of systems while solving scalability issues at Network Appliance. A file system built out of a distributed set of nodes providing access to a single file system image needs to know a-priori the cost of each transaction flowing through it in order to optimize scheduling. Similarly RAID subsystems need to know which disk I/Os are going to land in the cache or on the disk, and if they land on the disk will they result in a seek or not. You end up with a directed graph of weighted probabilities being shoved through a channel of fixed bandwidth. Its all amazingly fun until someone says "I have to get data back from the disk in no less than 10mS every time" (databases would say stuff like that) and then you start trading dollars for milliseconds as they say.

So Heroku changed their algorithm, didn't tell anyone, and the systemic behavior changed in a very user visible way for large users (in this case Rap Genius). The folks at Rap Genius were pissed off that they made this change without informing them, and they, Rap Genius, looked bad to their customers because of it. Nobody in operations wants to say "Uh, I don't know why your experience with our service is currently sucking."

I can see why Rap Genius is mad, and I can see that Heroku might not have fully thought through the ramifications of their algorithm change.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law>

<comment><USER22> I think the explanation for the change is a bit simpler than that. Someone can correct me if I've misunderstood, but AFAIK it isn't that "Intelligent Routing" was too expensive, but that it depended on simplifying assumptions that stopped being true.

Originally, Heroku was only for Ruby, and it depended on the assumption that a server could only handle one request at a time. All the talk of Intelligent Routing seems to date from this time, so it appears that Intelligent Routing just meant they never routed more than one request at a time to a server. But then Heroku wanted to add support for things like Java and Node.js, which can support multiple requests per server. This meant the simplifying assumption of "1 dyno = 1 request" baked into the old routing algorithm was no longer valid, so they had to switch to something else or they'd be crippling pretty much everything but Ruby.

<comment><USER21> That would make sense, if Heroku didn't know which were ruby requests and which weren't. But it seems like they did. If only as a set of VIPs (virtual IPs) landing on the router being tagged as 'for ruby' or 'not ruby' which could pick the appropriate routing algorithm.

Understand that keeping millisecond accurate state on 10 machines is doable, on 100 machines its hard, and on a few thousand machines? It really starts to break down. One way I've seen that done is that on ingress a request is wrapped in a message for server X which is taken out of the 'free' pool, and then when server X returns the answer back through the router it gets added back into the free pool. But the next order effect is that list insertion / removal has different sorts of behaviors, if you shift frees into the end of the list and pop them from the front (a round robin approach) you get good distribution but sometimes send things 'far' away when they could be served locally. If you push/pop things from the front you get some really hot servers and some really cold servers. Early on Google played some games which were designed to maximize the use of available network backbone bandwidth (its always oversubscribed from the server to the 'net'). Like any of the more interesting problems it starts off easy and then gets harder and harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm confused by this blog format. This seems to be a posting of the apology not a response. Did I miss something?

<comment><USER5> Click on the yellow/green bits. Rapgenius is a lyrics site that allows people to give context to lyrical meanings inline. See alexdevkar's comment below.

<comment><USER24> Aha... but it's not obvious. I thought the highlighted text were links to supporting articles.

<comment><USER4> But now you know how Rap Genius works so their plan was successful.

<comment><USER25> I think UX success is not measured in how many people you've already inflicted a bad design on, but instead by how many you avoid hurting in the first place.

Why not make the rap explanations _look_ different than a style lots of sites use for regular links? (perhaps a big square around the section or something similar)

<comment><USER5> There are green badges next to their added comments. And a big bold part at the top that says "Click the green links below to see our responses", but I'm not sure it was there before or after they saw these reactions.

edit: I agree with you on the UX part. Just wanted to point out that there was _some_ context clues.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Solution to the problem with collaboration tools - <AUTHOR> Many of you must be using collaboration tools at work - Slack, Asana, Smartsheet, Comtify etc. The problem with all these tools is that all of them exist side-by-side emails. This is because none of these tools takes care of external communication and email is the only medium useful to communicate with people out of one's organization.<p>So how if we build a collaboration tool which also serves as an email client / email service provider? Won't it be an ultimate killer app for all collaboration tools / email service providers / email clients? <comment><USER2> It depends on what actually gets built. Building a simple prototype to test the hypothesis might be a good near term goal.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> @brudgers actually I am doing just that. Built a prototype with the name of www.comtify.com. Now was moving in the direction of injecting features of an email client, and so, thought of testing the hypothesis first by writing here.

It proved to be a much more expensive affair though.

<comment><USER2> I think the right people to ask are the users of comitfy.com. If there are not users, there's little point in adding features. It would be better to find users and iterate based on their feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> you would need mass adoption. you also kind of have it it's called facebook/instagram. most people don't care how the message gets to the other person.

<comment><AUTHOR> @sharemywin, I was specifically talking about communication at work. Interaction with client or vendor of an organization still happens on email..</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best Domain Registrar? - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking for a good new domain registrar. I know that a lot of people distrust Go Daddy these days. But who are the good domain registrars? <comment><USER2> Namecheap.com seems like a good option. However, I have a few international TLDs that they don't manage, so I ended up going with Name.com (<http://name.com>). They too ran an anti GoDaddy campaign and the service seems straight forward enough w/o all the stupid upsells that GD does.

<comment><USER3> I've been using namecheap.com for a while and they are, in general, pretty good. One issue I have noticed is that their redirecting service seems to be pretty unreliable. It appears to work 2/3rd of the time. The other 1/3 it gives off all sorts of errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://nearlyfreespeech.net> is good I hear.

</comment><comment><USER5> A friend of mine runs <http://www.namecheap.com> \- I have massive respect for them after they ran an anti-Go Daddy campaign when Bob Parsons posted the elephant killing video, and again when he supported SOPA...

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming you have massive respect for their clever use of a PR opportunity?

<comment><USER5> No. I have massive respect for their clever use of two PR opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Moniker is my favorite hands down: <http://moniker.com> They are also a favorite of domainers for their features and support. In my opinion they have unmatched security, and will fight to keep your privacy when using whois protection (unlike another popular registrar listed here as an alternative to GoDaddy, from my own personal experience).

<comment><USER8> Plus, their control panel pages to assign custom nameservers doesn't work half the time! (or at least, it didn't in 2010 when I used them).

And, should you instead choose their DNS service, they'll throw in some free 3-4 hour total outages with no explanation from customer service! [1]

My recommendation would be to stay as far away from Moniker as you possibly can.

[1] <https://www.google.com/search?q=moniker+dns+outage>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hover.com and ghandi.net aren't the cheapest but they are easy to use and don't bombard you with up sells and ads

</comment><comment><USER10> If you want a registrar and DNS host, I've had great luck with <http://dnsimple.com>

Great customer support, and they're always adding new features. And having 3rd party DNS hosting separate from your server provider makes switching providers easier.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://lithiumhosting.com/> Love it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Definitely not the most full-featured, but dot.tk sells .tk domains for free.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just started using Name.com and it seems great so far.

</comment><comment><USER14> Been using 1and1.com for years. Cheap. No complaints.

<comment> rush-tea i love 1and1 as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> dynadot.com is a good option. Cheap and always do promotions for customers.</comment>


Ask HN: ClojureScript for Clojure newbies? - <AUTHOR>

Is it possible to learn ClojureScript without already having (at least a rudimentary) understanding of Clojure proper? Or Lisp in general?  I have a pretty basic understanding of the ML family of functional languages (through Ocaml and F#), but haven't ventured into Lisp.
I have a strong interest in learning ClojureScript. I've never felt that the DOM translates to objects, so modern javascript/coffeescript frameworks feel a little square peg round hole to me. I'm not sure if the functional paradigm will work better but I'd like to give it a shot.
I've been working mostly on static web sites recently, so learning Clojure proper is unnecessary at this time. I'd like to jump straight into ClojureScript. Is there any guides for doing this, or is ClojureScript too young for an audience such as myself? The wiki seems to assume you are already a Clojure programmer. <comment> saiko-chriskun ClojureScript IS Clojure. Although support isn't totally complete yet, they're the same language. There is no 'Clojure proper' and 'ClojureScript'.</comment>


Show HN: Compare search results from fuzzy|sifter|fuzzyset|lunr|fast-fuzzy|fuse - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fiatjaf/search-comparison <comment><AUTHOR> I had this project somewhat abandoned, but today I needed it to choose which fuzzy search library I would use for a new project, so I added 2 more libraries and made it a little faster and it ended up being very useful.</comment>


New Zealand Prime Minister John Key Resigns - <AUTHOR> http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11760656 <comment><USER2> John Oliver will be devastated ...

Seriously though, this strikes me as a significant blow for New Zealand. From what I've seen of him, Key is one of the better world leaders and seems to have done a good job down there. I'm not surprised the markets reacted with a downgrade of the Kiwi dollar.

</comment><comment><USER3> A cynical perspective might be that he wants to get out of the way of the recession next year when brexit/trump land.

But to be charitable, his stated family reasons are pretty admirable. Eight years is a long time in the public view.</comment>


Taiwan Is Exporting Its Coronavirus Successes to the World - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/09/taiwan-is-exporting-its-coronavirus-successes-to-the-world/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've got this smart and savvy friend. He wrote some of us in an email that he was leaving New York City because coronavirus was going to be really bad. This was super early when few cases had happened.

So where in the world was he headed? He said after much study he was going to Taiwan because it was the safest place. That surprised me but he absolutely called it.</comment>


The Bad News About the News - <AUTHOR> http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/bad-news# <comment><USER2> From the article: "Craigslist has destroyed that business (classifieds) for the Post and every major paper in the country."

Any and all of those local papers could have done their own online classifieds. They could have charged for the ad and both printed it and put it online so it was searchable. They could have charged for one or the other or both. They could have all collaborated and syndicated their individual classifieds into one big database too.

But they did none of this. They fundamentally didn't understand their own businesses in the face of change. And their businesses are failing as a result.

It's sad of course. And it's probably not good for society in the short term. But it's hard for me to get too worked up about it; it's not as though they didn't have HUGE advantages versus craigslist. They just didn't take it seriously and it ate their lunch.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I'm aware of at least one market where a popular local radio/TV media outlet created an online presence before Craigslist got there and still dominates that niche.

I'm also aware of a print shopper with great circulation which had upper management that saw this coming in the mid 90s, and went to their top management with plans to leverage their print business to become a CL and eBay competitor. Upper management shut them down... until about 10 years later (obviously too late).

So you're right. This seems to be pretty self-inflicted. But it doesn't change the fact that these aren't _just_ businesses we're talking about, fungible with any other businesses. They're the businesses we bought our picture of the world from. News organizations having a grassroots revenue stream is a really good way to make sure they're not captured in certain ways.

<comment><USER4> And they're critically important to keep an eye on government. See, for example, the city administrators in CA paying themselves the better part of $1m/year in cash, plus various vote fraud and open records violations.

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

<comment><USER2> Yeah I agree with both of you about the need for investigative journalism. I'm just saying that it's hard to be sad about the papers losing their classified ads. They had a bunch of chances and they screwed them all up.

I think in the long run this'll probably get sorted out. But you are both right that in the short run it sucks.

Personally I'm loving what John Oliver is doing right now; it seems like every week he tackles some kind of genuinely important topic and has such a scathing review of it. They do such a good job that the institution's bad behavior is funny insofar as how misguided it actually is.

It's also depressing that one of the better news sources available right now isn't CNN or some "legacy" media, but rather a guy who came up through The Daily Show.

I think the reason that Last Week Tonight does so well is that they aren't beholden to anyhow. Most legacy media has somehow convinced itself that it needs access to politicians in order to report the news. That has led the reporters to be very deferential to people in power, which prevents them from asking tough questions or for evidence or proof of various assertions by those they quote. And because of that, they've watered down most of the value of their various brands.

It's definitely sad, but I think that in some way these folks did it to themselves. When everyone is reporting "An anonymous government official said Snowden hurt us lots, and he is a bad guy" it's safe to say that they're not really doing their jobs.

<comment><USER5> _> depressing that one of the better news sources available right now isn't CNN or some "legacy" ... the reason that Last Week Tonight does so well is that they aren't beholden to .._

The show runs on HBO, owned by Time Warner, who owns CNN.

<comment><USER2> I'm not really sure what the point you're trying to make is. That Last Week Tonight really is legacy media because it's owned by the same company that owns CNN? In that case, the Washington Post isn't legacy either, because it's owned by Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon, which is slowly destroying brick-and- mortar stores.

I think what I meant was "Last Week Tonight isn't beholden to politicians" (but I didn't get that out quite right) which affords them the luxury of pointing out how stupid a lot of policies are. They don't need to call $politician up for information or a quote or whatever, so it doesn't matter if $politician doesn't like the show and won't play along.

I think the show will continue for quite a while due to excellent ratings, and those ratings are largely because they're doing the actual work that reporters are supposed to do. I think a lot of legacy newspeople confused what you did in order to do your job with the job itself. In other words, that the ends were the results they were after (having an article, getting on TV, etc) rather than having something important enough that there was no alternative but to write an article or what have you. Getting published was the goal, not having something worth publishing.

<comment><USER5> One theory for the editorial independence of LWT on HBO is the absence of advertisers who could pull their advertising in response to content. CNN could create an LWT competitor without political guests, but they would remain beholden to CNN advertisers.

<comment><USER2> An excellent point actually. Similar to the funding model of ordinary people buying papers; there's no one single big sponsor that can get a story shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, so a lot of people are nit-picking this essay by attacking the weaker points (whether the gate-keeper role is one we want centralized, whether news media was truly unbiased etc).

The much stronger central point that needs to be answered is "Where will in- depth investigative journalism get funding to continue?" Yes, in-depth investigative journalism is not all that traditional media does/did. Yes, some of what investigative journalism does can be taken over by better data-mining and cheaper methods these days.

But there remains, after all that, a certain amount that cannot be done by bloggers and data mining. That's the central question posed by this essay that needs answering, and it's obvious there isn't a good answer right now. That doesn't mean saving traditional media is the best way to solve this problem, but it does mean this aspect of traditional media needs a viable replacement we don't have yet.

<comment><USER7> > "Where will in-depth investigative journalism get funding to continue?"

From people like Snowden and Greenwald who are willing to sacrifice their lives to get the truth out. As has always been the case. Media for the most part has been a mechanism for distributing propaganda. That business losing its profitability does not concern me one bit. As for people who want to be reporters losing jobs and not having that as a career option, well this is a systemic problem with the new economy, and that is a much deeper problem than a business model not working any more because of tech.

<comment><USER8> Snowden and Greenwald aren't independently funded, though, so you're not answering the question.

Greenwald is bankrolled by a generous billionaire, for now. Relying on such generosity does not seem wise. Would he be as effective if he had to balance a full time job?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" News as we know it is at risk. So is democratic governance, which depends on an effective watchdog news media."_

Post-Iraq (and in the days of government-backed Snowden-smearing) that's a _problematic_ statement. If the statement is true, democratic governance is already dead (since news media clearly do not see themselves as watchdogs anymore, nor do they act like they were). If the statement is false and democratic governance is still present, then it clearly does not depend on "news as we know it".

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's true that news media "clearly" do not see themselves as watchdogs anymore -- that's a pretty massive generalization.

As the article discussed, the universe of news providers writ large has certainly moved in two directions that are problematic: (1) ideological coverage, i.e. the big cable networks, and (2) "short- form"/entertainment/listicle-style coverage that optimizes for page views instead of content, i.e. Buzzfeed (although they're developing a helluva investigative section and stole Mark Schoofs from ProPublica).

But just because the balance has shifted does not mean that all news media have suddenly abrogated social responsibility. The legacy papers aren't dead yet and their quality hasn't diminished notably; on the new media front, folks at places like Ozy and Vox Media aren't half bad at balancing the pageview- centric culture of most online media with depth and quality of topic selection and reporting.

In short, I don't think that statement is problematic at all. The author is worried about the sustainability of quality news, but it seems wildly inaccurate to deny its current effectiveness at promoting governance.

<comment><USER9> _> The legacy papers aren't dead yet and their quality hasn't diminished notably_

That's a pretty massive generalisation as well. After Judith Miller, Jayson Blair and today's Tom Harper, I would say there is a good amount of data indicating the quality has in fact diminished across the board. The WaPost itself is a symbol of this decay: in 30 years they went from Watergate hounds to Iraq-invasion cheerleaders. If you look at the average column nowadays, it's all a bunch of "senior official sources" briefing utter lies in order to further their agendas.

 _> but it seems wildly inaccurate to deny its current effectiveness at promoting governance._

I guess it depends on what you mean by "governance".

Note that I'm not saying this shift is entirely the result of market pressure; increased knowledge of the mechanisms and inner workings of news media has produced an increased amount of skilful operators, people who know how to manipulate and interact with journalists better than ever. Still, I think the trend is quite clear.

<comment><USER11> > After Judith Miller, Jayson Blair and today's Tom Harper, I would say there > is a good amount of data indicating the quality has in fact diminished > across the board. The WaPost itself is a symbol of this decay: in 30 years > they went from Watergate hounds to Iraq-invasion cheerleaders. If you look > at the average column nowadays, it's all a bunch of "senior official > sources" briefing utter lies in order to further their agendas.

I have no reason to believe it was better in the past. News organizations are human institutions, and like all the others they struggle with corruption and other failings. An major example off the top of my head:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/books/the-journalist- and-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/books/the-journalist-and-the- dictator.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" Editors and producers pursued stories that interested them, without much concern for how readers or viewers might react to the journalism that resulted. Members of this tribe of journalists shared a sense of what "the news" was. The most influential of them were the editors and reporters on the best newspapers, whose decisions were systematically embraced and echoed by other editors and writers, as well as by the producers of television news. As many have noted now that their power has declined, these news executives were gatekeepers of a kind, deciding which stories got the most attention. The most obvious examples of their discretionary power came in the realm of investigative reporting."_

Should I really bemoan the loss of a system in which a handful of individuals picked the news which was deemed worthy of publication or air-time?

<comment><USER11> > Should I really bemoan the loss of a system in which a handful of > individuals picked the news which was deemed worthy of publication or air- > time?

What is a better alternative? I'm not sure I know an answer. Crowd-sourcing editorial decisions doesn't seem useful. The crowd lacks expertise to judge what is important, at least in many fields. Also, they (well, we) censor what is unpopular or uncomfortable. Also, outside algorithmic aggregators like Google News, editors still make the decisions.

Consider tech news. Would the general public do a good job of which tech stories are significant? (Hacker News readers are a specialized subset, and still I don't agree with most editorial decisions.) It's the same in economics, domestic policy, foreign policy, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a long winded version of Clay Shirky's article from 2009 "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". Shirky's site is down so here is an alternative link; [http://edge.org/conversation/newspapers-and-thinking-the- unt...](http://edge.org/conversation/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable)

Its always good to remind ourselves that we are in the middle of the greatest social revolution since the invention of the printing press.

<comment><USER14> "we are in the middle of the greatest social revolution since the invention of the printing press" sets a very high bar. A Google Books search for the phrase 'greatest social revolution' finds many matches, which includes: the US Civil War, the US civil rights movement, the birth control pill, the switch from feudal societies to nation states, the introduction of women to the workforce, the formation of the USSR, and the English Industrial Revolution.

Which current revolution are you considering which surpasses all of those?

[https://books.google.com/books?id=Vc-0lrtU2ZgC&pg=PA486&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Vc-0lrtU2ZgC&pg=PA486&lpg=PA486&dq=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&source=bl&ots=G9kD84WLvT&sig=JXWzocg5RAqa2cevT9JAsTDZR6U&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAWoVChMIz4uSwZSUxgIVQR4sCh3hZgAv#v=onepage&q=%22greatest%20social%20revolution%22&f=false) says that the civil rights movement was the "greatest social revolution our nation has known since the Civil War."

[https://books.google.com/books?id=SoZMO6lYDNIC&pg=PA209&dq=%...](https://books.google.com/books?id=SoZMO6lYDNIC&pg=PA209&dq=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAWoVChMIodWappWUxgIVBlksCh3Xgw0v#v=onepage&q=%22greatest%20social%20revolution%22&f=false) talks about the social revolution from the ancien régime to a new society of individualism and economic ties.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=wff_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PR6&dq=%22...](https://books.google.com/books?id=wff_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PR6&dq=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBmoVChMIodWappWUxgIVBlksCh3Xgw0v#v=onepage&q=%22greatest%20social%20revolution%22&f=false) writes "I hope the republication of this detailed account of the greatest social revolution of the modern age will be of service to students who are interested in the origin, background and early vicissitudes of the Soviet state ..."

[https://books.google.com/books?id=YT- WLCYbLqMC&pg=PT70&dq=%2...](https://books.google.com/books?id=YT- WLCYbLqMC&pg=PT70&dq=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwADgKahUKEwjD0OO_lpTGAhXJlSwKHSxWACo#v=onepage&q=%22greatest%20social%20revolution%22&f=false) comments "The second entrenched reality, this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history. The invention, and popularization in the mid-1960s, of the birth control pill ... meant that for the first time in human history, women could reliably control reproduction without abstinence."

[https://books.google.com/books?id=_6aS8Y4O1MMC&pg=PA220&dq=%...](https://books.google.com/books?id=_6aS8Y4O1MMC&pg=PA220&dq=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBjgKahUKEwjD0OO_lpTGAhXJlSwKHSxWACo#v=onepage&q=%22greatest%20social%20revolution%22&f=false) "Perhaps the greatest social revolution in this century in the United States is the influx of women into the paid labor force."

[https://books.google.com/books?id=gVUKAQAAIAAJ&q=%22greatest...](https://books.google.com/books?id=gVUKAQAAIAAJ&q=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&dq=%22greatest+social+revolution%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CFoQ6AEwCDgKahUKEwjD0OO_lpTGAhXJlSwKHSxWACo) writes "The English Industrial Revolution, Edwards points out, "was probably the greatest social revolution which has occurred on this planet" ; yet there was almost no violence connected with it."

<comment><USER13> Yes, a very high bar indeed. In the broad sweep of history the printing press led to a revolution in science, technology and ultimately the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, as Shirky mentions, it destroyed the monolithic political and social power of the Catholic Church. In its heyday the Catholic Church was the sustainer and maintainer of the culture and social order. Eventually, as the Church's power faded it was the newspapers that served this role and what the internet has broken and not yet replaced with a new cultural and social maypole. All we know now is that it won't be the newspapers.

From a different angle, the Industrial Revolution is to body as the Internet Revolution is to mind. The Industrial Revolution leveraged mechanical power to replace human and animal power in the production of goods. The Internet Revolution is leveraging communication to increase the power of the mind in the production of new ideas and knowledge. This has exciting implications for the future if you understand role of the mind in human development and our history.

<comment><USER14> Yes, quoting now from Bacon:

> Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face > and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the > second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable > changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted > greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical > discoveries.

My goal in giving all those quotes was to suggest that the very phrase "greatest social revolution since the invention of the printing press" is likely hyperbole.

Also, it wasn't until the 1800s that the newspaper in the modern sense it came about. Other pieces of technology which have had caused social revolutions include the telephone, telegraph, radio, television, camera, automobile, train, airplane, and water and sewage treatment. It's hard for me to really tell which is the greatest.

"The Internet Revolution is leveraging communication to increase the power of the mind in the production of new ideas and knowledge"

That comes across like you have left out a chunk of history. The "Internet Revolution" is a subset of the Digital Revolution. Even then, information systems started in the late 1800s, such as the vertical filing system (created by Edwin G. Seibels in 1898) or the Hollerith cards used for the 1890 census.

For that matter, we are still in the Space Age and the Jet Age, and we still use the Information Superhighway, but those terms sound outdated to people who use GPS to figure out directions. "Internet Revolution" to me is starting itself to sound a bit dated.

<comment><USER13> > It's hard for me to really tell which is the greatest.

I think you are getting mired in concretes and missing the forest for the trees. Moreover, I don't know how old you are but I suspect you are too young to realize how the world worked prior to the internet. It is true that "it wasn't until the 1800s that the newspaper in the modern sense it came about" but this is irrelevant to my point. The modern form of the newspapers was the endpoint of a long consolidation -- ripples from the invention of the printing press. Nevertheless the modern form survived for over 100 years.

Once the social role of newspapers was established it was impossible to supplant them prior to the internet. The New York Times (primarily) really replaced the Catholic Church as the cultural maypole. Moreover, if you were even alive in the 60's and 70's you would know that all the major TV networks took their lead from the NYT, they were followers. Old habit die hard so TV continues to follow in the internet age (partly because TV is now just entertainment not a major cultural influence). I think we agree TV was a major technological creation and certainly changed society but it did not challenge the newspapers for social power and influence nor change the power structures of society like the printing press or the internet. Today the NYT is dead as a cultural institution and something WILL take its place but I don't think anyone really knows what that will be.

In any event, my point is obvious to me but won't be obvious to everyone until 100 years out which is the nature of a revolution of this scale.

<comment><USER14> And I think you are standing close to a clump of trees labeled "internet" and mistaking that grove for the entire forest.

FWIW, I'm about as old as ARPANET. I also have a special interest in information systems of the 1950s and 1960s - the era of the "information explosion" \- and have been reading many papers and essays from that era.

What you say about the Gray Lady is true, but only a part of history. I'm also old enough to remember Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is" signoff. You might remember that Johnson is said to have said "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America" after Cronkite's "Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?" editorial.

"The New York Times (primarily) really replaced the Catholic Church as the cultural maypole."

That is nonsense. For one, it's American-centric, as "The Times" of London (and source for Times New Roman) used to be much more important on the world stage than the NYT. The NYT both started later than The Times, and derived its name from the London paper. Remember, it was The Times (of London) which first reported on Krakatoa, which was the first major natural disaster to appear after the world-wide telegraph was put into place. Not the NYT. And London was the world center in telecommunications.

For another, the US was anti-papist long before the NYT started. The Catholic church was not a 'cultural maypole' in the US. (And how delicious to use the pagan maypole to describe the Catholic church! But do you mean 'touchstone'?) We were still wary about Catholicism in 1960, which is why Kennedy declared "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me."

Early American anti-papist leanings come from its British cultural heritage. Great Britain was institutionally anti-Catholic since the Act of Supremacy of 1534 and restrictions against Roman Catholics were still in place until full Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

It's easy to prove me wrong. The NYT started in 1851. Can you demonstrate how the Catholic church was an important 'cultural maypole' in the US before then?

> I think we agree TV was a major technological creation and certainly changed > society but it did not challenge the newspapers for social power and > influence

Yet there are articles like "The Kennedy-Nixon Debates: When TV Changed the Game" describing the growing social power and influence of televion [http://time.com/26035/kennedy-nixon-debates-1960-the-tv- land...](http://time.com/26035/kennedy-nixon-debates-1960-the-tv-landmark- that-changed-the-game/) . And the modern day Hearst is Rupert Murdoch, who started in newspapers (and bought 'The Times' and 'The Wall Street Journal') and also several TV networks, including Fox News, which he uses to help influence US policy.

It's hard to argue that Fox News does not have significant social power in the US.

And the major cultural development, from sports to political debates to "Game of Thrones" to satirical news sources likes "The Daily Show", are still structured as TV shows, even when they are 'broadcast' over the internet.

<comment><USER13> > It's easy to prove me wrong. The NYT started in 1851. Can you demonstrate > how the Catholic church was an important 'cultural maypole' in the US before > then?

Again you need to widen your context to the whole history of Western Civilization. My point compares the Catholic Church prior to the printing press (1400's) and the NYT prior to the invention of the internet (1900's) -- this was Shirky's point too.

<comment><USER14> This has nothing to do with Shirky's essay. You said "The New York Times (primarily) really replaced the Catholic Church as the cultural maypole."

Please demonstrate the validity of that statement.

In the "whole history of Western Civilization", when did the NYT become "the cultural maypole" of Italy, Mexico, and Brazil, and have more cultural influence than the Catholic Church?

How is it that The Times of London did not have similar sway on the world stage in the 1800s, nor the the BBC (especially with the BBC World Service) in the 1900s?

Why do you pick "Western World" when the Catholic church also has a big influence in Africa (140 million members) and the Philippines (80 million). Which has more social influence in the Philippines, the NYT or the Catholic Church? Which has more social influence in India, the NYT or the BBC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's important to distinguish the business model of publishing journalism from actual journalism.

The News Industry is dying. But the creation and effective dissemination of important information is thriving.

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel like much of what was lost wasn't very valuable. How many reporters do we actually need sitting in the room with the Press Secretary? If reporters just report the news and only the news, how many do we need to send to each natural disaster to get the story? If readers can (and will) read only the best report or the one that most closely aligns with their political beliefs, why bother rewriting the same story one hundred times over (every major paper)?

At any rate, there will always be journalism even if it is wildly unprofitable for the same reason there will always be musicians. Long form journalism is often advanced as the biggest loss - I don't see the equivalent of t shirt sales or patronage keeping it around but I haven't seen any numbers either. Anyone know how it is actually doing?

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like the same old story in new clothing: the internet and craigslist destroyed the jobs of those poor little old honest, hardworking newspapermen.

This is a very sexy narrative, especially for newspapermen, but I think it's a false one. The problem hasn't been ad dollars, the problem was that newspapers survived largely because they were a _medium_ and because they had a sort of monopoly on a communication channel that people had come to rely on.

The reality is that newspapers had not been doing a particularly good job for a very long time. The conceit is that the office at a newspaper is a buzz of journalistic activity. The reality is that it was mostly drudge work, just going through the motions to ensure that classified ads, lazy PR puff pieces, marmaduke cartoons, and regurgitated wire reports got churned out day to day. The kernels of quality, original reporting, investigative journalism, have typically been very tiny even at the best newspapers of the 20th century through today, and completely absent at many others. It's foolish to believe that people didn't notice, that the public doesn't care because they are just a bunch of uninterested, unsophisticated louts. The news media spent decades methodically transforming themselves into a useless, valueless tabloid media caricature of themselves.

It's shocking that some of the best journalism in traditional media being done today is being done by comedians. But the narrative that newspapers are dying due to no fault of their own remains firmly entrenched, and for that reason I don't expect them to be able to claw themselves back from the abyss they've found themselves in.

</comment><comment><USER18> Newspapers have never been an unbiased source of information as a public good. My dad was a newspaper journalist and tells a story of almost getting fired for a minor factual error in a story about a major advertiser. Newspapers have always been businesses primarily.

<comment><USER17> Bias isn't necessarily a bad thing in reporting, in many ways it's good to have an agenda (examples: anti-corruption, pro-world peace, pro liberty, etc.) It's when the agenda overrides the facts or when the agenda is covert rather than overt that things get messy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We spent a fair bit of time researching this trend at Google News (former TL), and talking to the industry. I cannot speak for the company anymore, but the major finding was:

"The newspaper industry was not in the business of delivering the news, it was the the business of delivering ads."

News was their product, but they made their money by delivering ads to everyone's doorstep on a daily basis. The subscription rates they charged consumers were insufficient to cover their costs (by a large margin). The rest of the revenue was made up in classified ads, job listings, consumer ads, etc. None of those markets were particularly efficient, and as a result the industry was highly exposed to any changes in those markets.

Enter the internet, and:

1) Craigslist probably dropped the industry revenue about $20B/year.

2) Monster.com and competitors took another $10B/year or so.

3) Google, Yahoo, DoubleClick, etc took another bite. Though less so, ironically, because newspapers are still considered a great vector for brand advertising, and that sort of advertising is still difficult to quantify online.

4) Equal access to worldwide publication means that you (the consumer) are no longer fully reliant on your local paper. You can read the best article from the best source. This has multiple consequences, good and bad for publishers. The good (well, for cost reasons, not quality reasons) is that publications can skip covering events that will be better covered by a syndication partner (like AP), or just re-hash content from the local sources. The bad news is that the local market no longer has to buy your paper, and can now find a better source online.

The industry also continues to make a lot of strange choices, which don't help. For example, they make more with an extra 20% distribution on ads (publication dependent) than they do from the entirety of their subscription revenue. Given the demand elasticity for news content, one would then expect publications to drop subscription fees entirely. That they don't is somewhat mind boggling, but the explanation I received was that "distribution" (printing, shipping, etc) has its own P&L (for historical reasons). The other angle might be "exclusivity" (you value something you pay $6 more than something you get for free), but I am not enough of a brand expert to judge this argument.

The industry also tries to latch onto online subscriptions and micro-payments, which is maybe the stupidest thing I have seen them do from an economics standpoint. The numbers just don't add up (the number of people willing to pay versus the opportunity cost from lost ad revenue). Even if every person on the internet paid into a newspaper subscription fund, we are still back to _the industry was never in the business of selling news_.

<comment><USER20> > News was their product, but they made their money by delivering ads to > everyone's doorstep on a daily basis.

How does Google make money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given that national news seems little more than tired and ridiculous propaganda (for the last decade and a half at least) whatever happens to the outlets is of little concern to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> i wonder if this is why the news media is so hostile to the tech industry and tech workers lately...</comment>


Show HN: PHPunctional, a PHP Functional Programming Library - r-cyr https://github.com/r-cyr/PHPunctional

<comment> V-2 [https://github.com/r-cyr/PHPunctional/blob/master/P/Examples...](https://github.com/r-cyr/PHPunctional/blob/master/P/Examples/Fun.php)

Readable? Concise? Esthetical? :)

FP with PHP is like putting a saddle on a cow.

Interesting as an experiment, but I can't really imagine using it in production - I can't imagine someone preferring to have this version of Fibonacci in their codebase over whatever any sane programmer would write instead

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You should definitely add a link to your examples in your README.

For anyone else looking, they are located here: [https://github.com/r-cyr/PHPunctional/tree/master/P/Examples](https://github.com/r-cyr/PHPunctional/tree/master/P/Examples)

<comment> r-cyr Thank you, just added the link to the README like you suggested

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> You could improve the usability of this library (or FP in PHP in general), by implementing 'string lambdas' such as those found in Oliver Steele's Functional.js[0], which was a clever, if controversial, workaround for Javascript's lack of a concise anonymous function syntax at the time.

For example

        function($n) use ($partial) { return $partial($n - 1) + $partial($n - 2);

could become

       'partial(n - 1) + partial(n - 2)'

Compiling the string lambda to a function can be memoized with the string itself as the key (as many regex implementations do with the regex text) so each is only ever compiled once.

[0] [http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/](http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Quite jolly! I hope that performance impact is negligible.

Now it would be nice to make a wrapper to convert exception-throwing calls into Either-returning calls (or it's there and I missed it?). This would help with accessing standard / third-party libraries.

<comment> r-cyr I will try to profile it soon but basically, until now, it was more about "what's possible" than "how fast can I make it" kind of project. Also, that exception-handling either is a great idea, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you seen this project? [https://github.com/widmogrod/php- functional](https://github.com/widmogrod/php-functional)

Tackle problem same problem as your library, also in PHP.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another awesome functional library / extension for PHP is [https://github.com/lstrojny/functional- php](https://github.com/lstrojny/functional-php)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice work! I'll have to explore a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, when does P#P come out?

<comment><USER8> I've been considering PCP... PHP: Compiled Perl.

Eseentially, you write Perl but get PHP. Or vice-versa. Doesn't really matter because it's a joke anyway.</comment></comment>


Solving a complex problem for adidas with emerging tech - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Jam3/solving-a-complex-problem-for-adidas-with-emerging-tech-6b00744f5abf <comment><USER2> Gamifying buying shoes. We have reached peak marketing hype, and blind consumerism. Artifical demand, virtual gambling, and app tie in. Seriously, this depresses me to no end.</comment>


Ask HN Leaders: What has your point score been worth to you? - <AUTHOR>

Curious to know how much value your score has had in business or in general for you.<p>Ofcourse, its hard to know whether a certain email or sale came about as a direct result of your high score on HN. But from what you can gather. What do you think? <comment><USER2> I had tptacek make a comment and ask a queston related to my karma score if that counts. I'm not sure it does.

I've been on HN for a while and traditionally not done much with it. I read a lot but didn't really try to add much. I decided last month to start making a more conscious effort to give back to HN, so I started by commenting and occasionally posting new links.

I don't think I'll be able to give back on the same scale as patio11, cperciva et al, but I'd like to think that trying to contribute more to the discussion, after a while I'll suck less at it. If I can manage that then maybe I'll suck a little less elsewhere.

Oh there was also a guy who recently got in touch with me after a who's hiring post. I'm working on getting an interview sorted that doesn't involve him travelling across half the country. It might or might not come to something, but I'm grateful for him getting in touch via HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a startup email me out of the blue offering me an interview because they liked my HN comments. Sadly I'm in the UK and they're in the USA, but it was nice of them to reach out.

Other than opportunities like that (which aren't really to do with the karma score as such anyway), it's a meaningless number.</comment>


Obama's Re-Election Path May Be Written in Will St. Clair's Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-14/obama-s-re-election-path-may-be-written-in-will-st-clair-s-code.html

<comment><USER2> come work with us!</comment>


Feck: Swearing from the first F to the 21st C - <AUTHOR> http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/feck-a-history-of-swearing-from-the-very-first-f-to-the-21st-c-1.2676617 <comment><USER2> I'd also like to see some cross-linguistic analysis of swearing.

For example, English uses a nice mixture of profanity (religious references, like "goddammit") and obscenity (sexual words and bodily functions, like "fuck" and "shit"), but not much literal cursing. But not every language does that. Quebecois French, for example, uses profanity almost exclusively (where the worst single word you can say means "tabernacle"), and nobody pays much attention to obscenity. And then there's Dutch, which relies on literally cursing people (among the worst things you can say to someone are to tell them to "catch cholera" or "cancer off", and the worst thing you can call someone means "cancer patient"), while obscenities are minor insults, and while profanities are historically more serious, they're not nearly as common as the curses.

<comment><USER3> Would definitely be interesting to see a comparison of English/European swearing with other languages.

For instance, it's my understanding that in Cantonese, a grave expletive is a phrase that roughly translates to something like "dead chicken" (source: my wife). I'm sure there's an interesting linguistic story behind that phrase, and it's quite different from normal western cursing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm happy to see someone highlight that "swearing" in the biblical sense is not the same as the use of profanity.

"Swearing" in the Bible refers to oaths, promises before God that your words are true or that you will do what you say you will.[FTA]

<comment><USER2> Honestly, when you consider the etymology of "profanity" and "curse word", they all go back to religious roots. Even the use of deliberately misspelled and mispronounced curse words is called a "minced oath".

We don't really have a good word for swearing that's not a religious reference. The closest we have is "obscenity", but that traditionally only refers to sexual words. For example, "fuck" is obscenity, but "goddammit" is profanity.

<comment><USER5> A comparison to other languages and cultures would be useful.

<comment><USER6> In Finnish the origin for "curse word" comes from incantation / casting a spell. At least nowadays the root word means purely a hostile spell, or a hex. I'd say in modern use basically equivalent to "a curse" in English, as the magical aspect isn't really present in the society any more. I can't say if it has originally also included benevolent spells.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The median of a trillion numbers - <AUTHOR> http://matpalm.com/median/question.html <comment><USER2> If you know the range of numbers then I'd do a binary search. Get each server to count how many are higher or lower. Play the high low game. When the two totals are the same you're done. I think this covers the authors edge cases too. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Really? This is 10 minutes in hadoop time if those 1k machines were in the cluster. And 10 minutes is on the top end of the estimate.</comment>


Which LOLCODE interpreter to use? - Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1021118/which-lolcode-interpreter-to-use <comment><USER2> "Are you looking to use LOLCODE in the enterprise?"

omg!</comment>


Is it common not to be able to write a blog? - <AUTHOR>

Dear fellow hackers,
I'm 20 years old, and a pretty inexperienced hacker in terms of finished projects, but I've been coding for a couple of years now, and had been reading source code since I was 12.
I also love writing, but continuously struggle to come up with topics to regularly write about. It always feels like everything has been documented on the web, and I don't think I have any insights to any field that would deeply interest intelligent readers. I make a blog with a single draft and shut it down; it happens every few months.
Anybody having the same feelings? Suggestions, please? <comment><USER2> 1\. Don't underestimate your contribution. Even when you write about something that's been written about a thousand times, you'll bring something of your own to it. How many times have you read blog after blog about something and it not make sense and then finally one blog nails it for you? It's not always that it's better than the other blogs, just that the blogger happens to write like you think.

2\. Writing is fun. Write for the fun of it, not because you think people will read it.

3\. That could have been a blog post in itself (and I suppose is :)

<comment><USER2> oh, also, when I write blog posts it forces me to get my thoughts together on something, which is invaluable (to me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I felt this way for a while. Then I was cleaning my cats' litterbox one day and an idea came to me from nowhere for a writing project, something it was safe to assume no one had done before. I did it for about 12-18 months and then stopped when I had nothing more to say on that topic.

It would be nice if more people asked themselves if they had something unique to say before starting a blog or a blog entry. If you change your mind someday then go for it, but blogging isn't something you have to do for the sake of doing because a lot of other people do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. And I fear having nothing worthy to say will have a negative impact on everything I do.

I guess I should be around cats more often. Or their litterboxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's nothing new under the sun (alright, some exceptions...)- that doesn't mean you can't present interesting thoughts in a unique way. If you find that you can't write, it's probably because you're putting it on a pedestal. Most posts come from everyday experiences that are worth a second thought (many are, if you pay close enough attention).</comment>