Microsoft CEO Nadella: 'Steer AI Away from Replacing People' - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-ceo-nadella-steer-ai-away-from-replacing-people/ <comment><USER2> This assumes that people are currently being used to maximum effect. Most products and services are not so perfect that they couldn't be improved in some obvious way.

The shortage I see is in the number of organizations willing to pay for extra people right now, regardless of job threats. (And by extension, the number of customers willing to pay _much_ more, to ensure that companies can _easily_ afford more workers.)

Imagine what companies could do _RIGHT NOW_ to improve society, if only they were willing:

— Make things faster (e.g. serve lunch in less time; make people wait less for "representatives" on the phone; etc.).

— Make things higher quality (e.g. more testers; more "polish" in products; more customization options).

— Make work suck less (it is hard to imagine overloading people with 80-hour work weeks if the company employs more workers).</comment>


Paying Remote Employees Fairly - <AUTHOR> http://blairreeves.me/2020/05/22/paying-remote-employees-fairly/ <comment><USER3> I think that the article is missing a major point: cultural and soft skills !!!

In a ideal world, coding would be just using some fully specified langage to implement some fully specified specification or feature. However, in real world, a lot is left implicit and the programmer (not talking about more client or contractor facing position, like project manager) will fill the blanks with its own culture...

And that's the moment where living in India, Turkey or US will make a difference ! Not on specific coding skills but on a more general cultural appropriation

In fact, after a lot of offshoring, some companies brang back the jobs in the country because the friction were annihilating the cost gains

So I don't think that the worker pool will grow that much, internationally. However, the competition will grow more inside the different countries, between urban and countryside... and it will be a race to the bottom : why would any company pay 20, 30, 50% more for the same job ?

<comment><USER4> > _In fact, after a lot of offshoring, some companies brang back the jobs in > the country because the friction were annihilating the cost gains_

That's because the offshore companies have engineers who are paid probably ~1/25th of the salary than the 'in shore' ones.

If the salary parity is 1:1 (or adjusted for cost of living), then there would not be any problems with 'off shoring'. The evidence is in the overseas R&D Centers of USA product companies that are already prospering in places like India, East-Europe, etc. These companies are in the league of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Adobe, Intuit, Oracle,.. and then some from well funded valley startups. The 'culture' or 'soft skills' does not seem to be issue as these organizations are making global products.

And above is actually happening now with employees who are getting much less salary (because they are CoL adjusted) even though output and talent are at par. These employees are working out of these locations because of family reasons, or waiting for the right time to emigrate (kids, school, college etc.).

When the salary parity is at 1:1 in any location, for many (if not all) valley area or major USA metro area may not hold any more charm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All of this talk about what companies should pay is missing the point. The market determines what salaries will be. Someone good enough for Facebook is good enough for a number of bay area companies that would pay top dollar, so Facebook has to make competitive offers. If someone lives in a place where she doesn't have access to those other high offers, then she should expect to make somewhat less. It has nothing to do with what people deserve or their value to the company.

<comment><USER4> I guess you are missing the point.

When remote becomes norm, isn't it the case that it would not matter whether the employee is in California, Utah or in Thailand?

So when a rockstar employee of FB decides to work out of Sydney (because sea, sun, fun) at same salary (because remote is norm); what happens when a recruiter finds another great talent at same or some other city in Australia?

<comment><USER6> Businesses hire you with the understanding you'll be working in a specific timezone-- being remote is irrelevant. If you go half way across the world and your team is 12 hours ahead of you, standups (and other synchronous tasks) become impossible. If you need something from that teammate, you send a message, and wait 24 hours for a response. It obliterates collaboration and slows the business down.

<comment><USER7> 12h is maybe too much but I have worked with people from +/-4h, what you want most of the time is a decent overlap between all team members. Besides there are some roles such as SRE that need people 24/7 around the world

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Where you live is, and has always been, a consumption choice.

What? Most people live near where they're born. For people with family, friends, spouses with jobs and children with schools, moving is not a simple matter. Even setting aside social networks, most of us only have one passport and at max a couple languages. Where we live is NOT strictly a consumption issue. I dont think the argument against COLA is as black and white as the author says.

<comment> em-bee within one country, one as large as the USA in particular still has plenty of options to choose where you live.

but i agree with your point.

when people are moving, for many it's not a consumption choice, but a necessity in order to find work, because there is none where they are.

if they can, most people will choose to work from where they are.

and in fact remote working does enable more people to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Be careful what you wish for ... businesses aren't there for your benefit, they are there for theirs.

And this assumes that everyone can work equally well remote or don't have advantages to working at an office.

Personally the "Water cooler" moments give me plenty of original ideas and have resulted in new product ideas and explorations.

<comment><USER10> Having been fully remote for 4 years now, I've had plenty of water cooler type conversations with other remote employees- humans are social creatures, and with an experienced fully remote work force we end up socializing remotely, including coming up with cool Gonzo ideas.

I'm not arguing it's a 1-1 trade off, but it also doesn't go anywhere near zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In a simplistic free market model, both employer and employee aim to optimize their gain.

The employer sets their wages only as high as necessary to attract, motivate and retain, and hires whoever provides the most value over that cost. Wages are not set based on value provided to the company, but by maximizing the spread between cost and value.

On the other side of the table, the employee wants to optimize the combination of their income (after-COL) and other aspects of the job they value which may include their location.

I just made this model up. Assuming it is reasonable, if living back home near the grandparents, likely with a lower COL, has a higher value to them than commuting in a tech hub, it is possible for the company to pay lower wages, and still be equally attractive to labor that is equally valuable. And given it is possible, they will do that.

Evidence : remote developers exist today and they are typically paid local market rate.

<comment><USER12> There is no proper market without all market participants having proper information, and salary information about your peers is typically very spotty.

Evidence: I might be just as productive as a colleague working on the same project in the same company with comparable qualifications, and I would never know if they made 10% more (or less) than me.

<comment><USER11> Job seekers have some competitive salary information though : if they can obtain multiple offers, or the salary is advertised.

<comment><USER12> ... which is why most companies don't advertise salaries. Not even where I live (Austria), although it's required by law.

<comment><USER11> I said offers, not ads. It's pretty common to interview with several employers at a time.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, I misread this. Still, that only gives you a very linited amount of information, and nothing about what existing employees at those companies make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a difference between what may be "fair" and what economics (and the law) allows. Is it fair that teachers are paid $40k? Is it fair that _anyone_ is making over $10 million a year? Is anyone really worth that much?

Cost of living adjustments occur because companies can get away with it. That's pretty much all there is to it. They have additional leverage when a potential employer wants to live in a particular location and that puts the potential employee at a disadvantage.

That said, I actually think most of these companies would prefer to pay everyone equally if they could get away with it as well, because ultimately they will cost the company less in labor. But they can't at the moment. All the talent is concentrated in just a few spots and much of this talent does not want to move. In a hypothetical world where remote work really takes off, location will no longer matter. No company is going to pay someone twice as much just because they want to live in a nice location. It's simply that this is what is required by companies _at the present time_ to keep the employees that they value and have already invested in.

It would be interesting to run some simulations where you vary the desire of a workforce to work remotely and see how it changes the pay required for maximum talent retention. Since widespread remote work is new, we're not anywhere near an equilibrium yet.

<comment><USER14> I feel like this is a major part of the equation. The employee in a tech metro area has non-remote options, and the remote only employee in a non-tech area does not. The company has to compete in every market, and since the majority of employees are concentrated the high cost market gets its price while the low cost market looses out.

Remote still has a host of issues to work out, mostly with time zones that make it less desirable for single geo employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't think you have to fight for employers to give you less money. As remote employment becomes more of the norm, there will be reductions in overall salary.

<comment><USER16> It's all about competition and the ability of companies to attract workers to work they way they want. There's a cost of living in hiring workers and competition pressures. There's a lot of competition for workers in the bay area, that drives up what you can get as a worker (if company x paid much less you'd go somewhere else that paid more). It costs more to live there but is that cause or effect of so many workers. If facebook didn't pay enough to afford to live there then you wouldn't work there. I imagine this happens in NYC yet plenty of people manage to survive on way less than I could.

In the article he says it's not fair to pay more in SF or similar cities but that's somewhat subjective. Since I currently live in a tech city I want them to pay me more, it partly covers the cost of living here.

The author wants more equal pay, to not depend on where you live, I want to be able to move to a random location and work remotely and still get paid the same. But how far out do I live before fb pays me less? You could already be paid a SF salary (in many companies) and commute to work a few days a week and work from home. Big companies probably already have people in every state and many locales. The economy is a barrier to this for smaller companies, having to have a local taxation and perhaps some business licenses plan.

I think at first big cos will reduce pay if you move outside the big city, but they will struggle to define it in a way that satisfies people. Then there will start to be competition for remote workers picking up salaries. But I still expect they'll pay more for people working in big cities because workers there will resist salary deflation.

<comment><USER17> Or, as the author hinted at, they will simply stop hiring in big cities - <USER2> would they want to spend more?

Then you'll have the "choice" of living with the lower salary or moving out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat relatedly, I wonder how Facebook's approach would work in purely practical legal terms. If Alice works at Facebook right now, she presumably has a contract specifying that (a) she earns X money per year, and (b) she is expected to come into the office daily. I guess Facebook can relax (b) unilaterally, since this doesn't put Alice in a worse position than before.

But how can they change (a) unilaterally? Is Facebook just threatening to fire everyone who doesn't accept a worse offer? If it is, how will this fly outside the US, where most places have proper labor laws? Will this formally be an offer from Facebook to "relax (b) _if_ you agree to modifying (a) according to our wishes"? Even that might be difficult in places with strong worker protections.

<comment><USER18> Working from a totally different location (instead of a home location within daily commute distance of the office, which is all that the shelter-in-place laws would require) would be a breach of contract.

Based on media reports, Facebook is voluntarily relaxing that location requirement unilaterally only until the end of the year.

Reducing salaries can be done any time for any lawful reason, and change of location is a lawful reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It will even out. If remote work becomes first class, employers in fly over states will start competing for the best remote devs also. I had been looking for an on-site developer in Houston, but now I am willing to do remote and pay more for a higher skill developer from the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER20> The other factor I'm not hearing in this conversation is that there is a third-party in why the Bay Area has so many high paid tech jobs: the VCs. I know of multiple startups orignally based elsewhere who were pressured to move their company to the Bay Area by the VC. I suspect there are many ways in which the VCs have an invisible hand in creating the Bay Area market.

I don't know how to unwind the VC intanglement when talking about compensation. I do think it should be part of this conversation.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this is based on a misunderstanding of how wages are set. It's never been about an abstract fairness.

If it was based on any sort of abstract fairness, there are a lot of professions that would be making more than they currently do.

You get paid as much as it would take to replace you with another qualified worker. That's it.

</comment><comment><USER22> While I, as a remote employee, certainly want to be payed the same as my colleague in similar roles. But I am certainly not entitled to this; and if the company so choose, it is their right.

</comment><comment><USER23> >Yet in every software company I've worked for, almost everyone's job could be – and sometimes was – done perfectly well online, remotely. Yes, all of them: product, engineering, design, ops, marketing and more. Even skeptics of remote work know this, deep down. And right now, we are seeing a real-life proof of concept for this fact that everyone has sorta known for a long time. Remote teams work just fine. The doubters have been conclusively proven wrong.

This is just a ridiculous premise. This guy has no evidence that remote working is actually as productive as in-office working, and just asserting it is ridiculous. I've been remote working for around 3 months now, and I would say roughly half the people I work with are _desparate_ to go back into the office. They're less productive, they're less happy, core parts of their job just aren't being done at all. Where's the evidence this is working at all?

Frankly it's just bullshit to try and make this claim without actually thinking about this in detail make me think its probably not worth hearing about his baseless speculation about what life is like in the magic remote working lollipop unicorn kingdom.

>the flip side of "why do employees in cheaper areas need as much money" becomes, rather, why does the company need people in San Francisco?

Or maybe it says something about your assumptions that you think copmanies have had an opportunity to save enormous sums on salaries for decades but just didn't bother. When actually, when we see companies look to cost-save they stop people working from home, they tend to actually try and consolidate their employees into fewer, bigger offices because it cuts down on communication and travel ineffiiciencies and lets them get economies of scale.

I just personally think it's ridiculous to try and make out like companies are still going to pretend COVID is happening in 2 years when we have a vaccine and there's no longer the same motivation to allow people to work from home. Not least because the way most companies have had to allow people to work from home has been unplanned and disorganised - so companies aren't even going to be comparing good WFH best practices with the office environment.

<comment><USER24> I think this is the wrong time to be judging remote work. It's being used out of necessity during one of the most stressful and anxious times in this generation's history.

Of course people want to get back into the office when they've been stuck at home for months, possibly with their souse and children. Of course people aren't their most productive when they're preoccupied with a deadly virus, or threat thereof, or getting toilet paper.

As a remote worker of 5 years myself I was concerned when this all started that it would leave remote work in general in a bad light as the masses were involuntary thrust into adapting, and this unfortunately seems to be coming true because we're not taking into account the humanity of the entire situation.</comment></comment>


Pinboard Acquires Delicious - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/ <comment><USER2> I built a five-year career of self-employment on the back of a Mac app called Pukka which was itself built upon Delicious.

[http://codesorcery.net/2006/02/26/hello- world](http://codesorcery.net/2006/02/26/hello-world)

I turned the interest in the app into my first piece of commercial software which, coming from an open source and free software background, was actually pretty daunting. I timidly started charging five bucks in the pre-App Store days, before eventually raising the price over time to make it more sustainable.

[http://codesorcery.net/2006/05/03/so-really-whats-the- deal](http://codesorcery.net/2006/05/03/so-really-whats-the-deal)

I had ups and downs, launched a second app (Meerkat, for SSH tunneling), but eventually realized I wasn't really an indie product person as much as I was a people and services one, so I ended up doing about 80% consulting and 20% Mac software, including Pukka.

I eventually ended up folding up shop after I went to work for Mapbox full- time in 2011.

[http://codesorcery.net/2012/09/06/sunset](http://codesorcery.net/2012/09/06/sunset)

This is something Maciej even wrote about.

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/243511937722376192](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/243511937722376192)

So I'll always have a spot in my heart for Delicious, and this seems a fitting and appropriate end. I'm so glad its content will remain available in perpetuity.

<comment><USER3> > Pinboard works with a variety of outside services, including Reeder, > Delibar, and Pukka. If there is an API feature that you need to make your > app work, just ask!

[https://pinboard.in/tour/#api](https://pinboard.in/tour/#api)

<comment><USER2> I think the subtext here is that Maciej should update the text to remove Pukka! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I honestly didn't realize delicious was still around. It felt really groundbreaking at the time. I loved the ability to tag and search for links by tags to find new interesting content. Perhaps with introduction news mashups like digg it didn't feel as useful anymore. I stopped using delicious soon after it was acquired by yahoo.

Site has been bounced around a bit since.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_\(website\))

"The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.[2][3][4] Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011,[5] and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year.[6] In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc.[7] In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.[8]"

</comment><comment><USER5> I am still waiting for a better experience in save what I like.

Pocket is great for text, but only for that. Pinboard is cool and safe but is not for me. I still use google to find things that I have saved before, since 96, I have countless files called Temp on bookmarkers for things that I need organize, things saved on twitter, Medium, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Keep, HN, Evernote and on mobile, there are tons of screenshots of things that I could use later. And that is for things that I already have seen, but, unfortunately, nothing of this is used to refine my experience in discovery new things that I could, potentially, like to see.

I really hope that more people attempt to compete with Pinboard.

<comment><USER6> Hey there,

I'm one of the earliest users of Delicious who recently built a modern bookmarking platform. It's called Kozmos ([https://getkozmos.com](https://getkozmos.com)). It's a competitor to Pinboard, and its difference is simplifying bookmarking into one heart button, I mean you don't need to fill forms to bookmark a page anymore. It has an advanced search engine that makes you find whatever you're looking for.

I self-funded this project and worked on it past three months. If you are curious about how it looks, you can see this blog post; [https://medium.com/@azerbike/introducing-kozmos-a-new- bookma...](https://medium.com/@azerbike/introducing-kozmos-a-new-bookmarking- platform-75f4df448ccc)

My vision for this project is to not just build a bookmarking platform, to innovate further based on bookmarking.

<comment><USER5> Looks cool. And I was thinking about how a better experience to bookmark could reshape how I use the browser now. Funny how coincidently you went from building a better browser to build a bookmarker. Btw, I used to use Too-Many- Tabs to change from House to Work mode. Now I have 2 logins on Chrome, is there anything like this on kozmos?

<comment><USER6> Yes, so glad other people also see what I see. Bookmarking is like the missing piece of current web.

I don't have that feature in Kozmos but will keep it in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Price: $35,000 confirmed. Not bad!

[https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017/06/01/its-the-end-of-an- era...](https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017/06/01/its-the-end-of-an-era-as- pinboard-buys-and-shutters-del-icio-us/)

<comment><USER8> That has to be a joke by Maciej... right?!

Whatever you may think about delicious past/present, the brand name alone should be worth more than that. Than you add in the domain, the SEO juice that must still remain w/ a ton of delicious URLs, the free marketing that he's generated purely from this acquisition, and I could probably think of 5 other immediate wins that would justify that price.

If seriously just $35K, bravo!

<comment> aaron-lebo Old domains don't matter. He's not going to make 35k from this, at least not any time soon.

The fact that it's been through like four companies at this point and none felt they could make it valuable tells you a lot.

<comment><USER8> No, you're missing the point. Idlewords already has a business doing the EXACT SAME THING, So the domain itself doesn't matter, but the history of delicious and it's decade(?) of existence of SEO history, of backlinks, of blogs, articles writing about 'best bookmarking service' now can essentially be used to redirect to Pinboard.

And I'm sure, Pinboard has a super low run rate . So any additional revenue is likely straight to the bottom line.

Which means, he paid $35K for an immediate 500K new visits(?) to his business today? Plus the continual link and SEO juice he'll get from all future searches that people do for bookmarking service.

And just to note: searched "bookmarking service" . Top link from 2017 points to Delicious still ( no Pinboard ). Next 2 contain links to Delicious, hell even one that is talking about the death of Google's bookmarking service references Delicious.

What. A. Steal.

<comment><USER9> > Which means, he paid $35K for an immediate 500K new visits(?) to his > business today?

And he only needs a little over 3,000 people to sign up to Pinboard to make it back. Assuming new visits of 500k, he only needs a conversion rate of 0.6% to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't stop laughing. After years of laughing at them, mocking them and generally just being a hilarious thorn in their side, he's bought them!

This is just the most fantastic thing I've read today and probably will be all week. Month, for that matter.

I also love his comment "I am the greatest!"

As a customer, yes, yes you are.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've used Delicious for 12 years, with 10,000+ bookmarks in it. Delicious went up and down and was sold, I got nervous and got a Pinboard account as a backup, back when it was doing one-time charges, but inertia kept me in Delicious. The recent downtimes, plus the iOS app no longer working, and Pinboard extensions making saving links easy, pushed me over last month. I was frustrated that the Delicious export went away, so the Pinboard acquisition is going to be perfect for me.

<comment> dyu- > I've used Delicious for 12 years, with 10,000+ bookmarks in it

I've used it for 7.5 years with 22k+ bookmarks.

I stopped using it last year because of the downtimes as well.

> I was frustrated that the Delicious export went away

Too much load on their servers.

Instead of transferring, I simply made a simple bookmarker with similar functionality (allows importing) that I could self-host.

See [https://github.com/dyu/bookmarks/](https://github.com/dyu/bookmarks/) if interested.

Edited: export comment

<comment><USER12> Delicious export was broken long (years?) before the coming acquisition.

Fixing it seems to be on pinboard priority : [https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/870334621648654336](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/870334621648654336) nice !

<comment> dyu- Yea I just read from the comments and updated my comment. It wasn't broken in the first half of last year (I was able to export)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maciej, I'm guessing you now own the `icio.us` domain. Any plans for more subdomains?

I can see several opportunities:

        susp.icio.us
        pern.icio.us
        capr.icio.us
        ausp.icio.us
        avar.icio.us
        lubr.icio.us
        verm.icio.us
        phen.icio.us

<comment><USER13> Damn it, Maciej! [https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/871944794343301120](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/871944794343301120)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to Maciej, I think! What a cool piece of internet history, and a storied brand, to have within your stable.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.

WTF? Is that a challenge? Expect me!

<comment><USER16> Bring it, enzyme face!

<comment><USER17> I hope you're spending your day tweeting "YOU'RE NEXT" at Pocket.

<comment><USER18> Mozilla got there first

<comment><USER19> Still plenty of time for an "incredible journey" post by the new owners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dyu- If anyone wants to export their bookmarks and self-host, try [1]. It has the ability to import from both delicious and chrome.

I've used delicious since 2008 (~22k bookmarks) and stopped using it last year when it was sold to Delicious Media (it was becoming unreliable/unstable).

1\. [https://github.com/dyu/bookmarks/](https://github.com/dyu/bookmarks/)

Disclosure: I started the project

Edited: added timeline

</comment><comment><USER17> I almost can't believe this isn't one of Maciej's snarky satirical posts, if only because there's no way he would do this with stock or debt and so it must be an all-cash transaction, and I didn't realize that he was either pulling in that much or Delicious was that desperate.

I signed up for an archival Pinboard account last weekend though, so maybe it was my $25 that put it over the top ;)

<comment><USER20> He posts his earnings and costs every year-- it's not something you have to guess about.

<comment><USER21> He posts stats every anniversary; costs and earnings specifically are new to his 7th year.

[https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Poor Delicious. They were a victim of web 2.0. Much like Digg.

Delicious vs Pinboard was basically Digg vs Reddit.

The one who focused on the basic core usecase over flashy features and modern/trendy design won.

<comment><USER23> This is an unfair and incorrect assessment. It's all situational and contextual. Reddit was pretty much seen as a copycat failure that sold to a large corp because they couldn't figure themselves out. It was only after Digg messed up on their own they enjoyed their run.

Pinboard is great, but it never competed against Delicious. In fact it came out long timer after people stopped using Delicious.

<comment><USER24> > Pinboard is great, but it never competed against Delicious. In fact it came > out long timer after people stopped using Delicious.

It got a HUGE boost when the announcement of Delicious' sunsetting came out.

<comment><USER25> I remember the announcement and the huge exodus from delicious to pinboard. That's when I heard of pinboard first. The import feature was under heavy load and from what I remember it took a week(or couple of days? ) to import your bookmarks from delicious or was it from an exported file...

<comment><USER26> Here's the blog entry Maciej wrote about the exodus:

[https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/)

My favourite line comes from the tweet storm ([http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/the-small-exodus- from-...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/the-small-exodus-from- delicious-to-pinboard.html)):

> "there are worse things than being DDOS'ed by people trying to give you > money"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard > to keep Delicious down.

Man, I love Maciej's way with words.

<comment><USER28> I loved that line as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> About a year ago I went into my Pocket and Pinboard archives and realized my collection had ballooned to well-over 10,000 items. Yet, I rarely, if ever, went back to dig up old links so I did a mass purging and closed my Pinboard account. I still use Pocket to save links I plan to read within a week, but I no longer archive anything and keep the list to < 10 items.

I'm not sure what the point of this comment was, but lately I've been thinking about physical vs digital hoarding and thought I would share.

</comment><comment><USER30> This demonstrates that there is justice in the world. I love it.

Been using Pinboard since the strange pricing model. It is the only "cloud" service I use, and ever since I wrote some little utilities for searching the automated backup I keep from the command line, I actually mainly use the service because there are tools for easily adding to the store from the browser and an Iphone app.

In general, Pinboard is my idea of how a successful, solid internet service business looks. Find a niche, occupy it well enough that people want to give you money, and continually make it better for the users. (That last bit is important - Google used to be good for me as a user, but they've "improved" to the point that I don't want them in my life.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Truly the end of an era. I'll miss Maciej's delicious Delicious bashing.

<comment><USER32> The hell makes you think he'll stop bashing it now that he owns it? I figure he'll bash it more, and in more detail, now that he has to deal with the code

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm torn. On one hand, a couple years ago when delicious went down for over a week, I paid for an account at pinboard and haven't regretted it one bit. On the other hand, it is sad to see such an old brand mismanaged and unable to survive on its own. I have hope that it is in good hands though.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder how much he paid for it. Last I heard he was making something like 250k per year. I would expect delicious to go for a few million at least. Did he buy it for a song, or did he get investors or funding?

<comment><USER35> 250,000? That's is almost 22,000+ paid accounts. If that is correct, it is a pretty big achievement.

<comment><USER36> Maciej publishes a yearly progress statement [0] with revenues and costs included.

[0][https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Congratulations, Maciej. This is way too funny. I'd love to hear the back story on how you ended up acquiring Delicious at some point.

</comment><comment><USER38> I was a longtime Delicious user, but it really fell apart after the Yahoo acquisition. I'm happy to hear that it won't disappear.

I've recently switched to raindrop.io, which is an excellent replacement. Bookmarking serves two purposes for me:

1) It provides a way to record sites I don't visit often, which I hope I'll be able to find easily in the future if needed.

2) It provides me with easy access to the sites I visit regularly on all devices, without restricting me to a specific browser, and with an aesthetically pleasing and intuitive UI like Speed Dial

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed- dial-2/jpfpe...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speed- dial-2/jpfpebmajhhopeonhlcgidhclcccjcik?hl=en)

I want the record of these two kinds of pages to live in one place, and while Delicious and Pinboard were close, I felt that they never quite met that need.

</comment><comment><USER39> Best product URL ever, [http://del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us)

You will be missed.

<comment><USER40> It's cute, but I don't think it's _good_. I could never remember where the dots went.

<comment><USER41> I think that was the joke - you have to bookmark it in order to get to your bookmarking site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> They once deleted my account, because the email address stoped working and I forgot to change it. I thougth I'd had a backup, but then I realized it was without tags and comments. Since then I mistrust such services, better to store stuff on the own devices.

<comment><USER43> In my humble opinion, you learned the wrong lesson. The right lesson is "keep (and verify) regular backups", doesn't matter if it's a remote or local system. Obviously, if the remote service makes that hard, you probably shouldn't use it, but Pinboard isn't one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Two posts made my day today: this one and the "Fuck Facebook" one.

</comment><comment><USER45> Another should-have-been from the Web2.0 days which Yahoo screwed up.

Delicious should have become Pinterest

Flickr should have become Instagram

</comment><comment><USER46> One thing I always wanted was a personal search engine for my Delicious link content (and Pocket saves).

That way, I would have able to just use that as external memory for those tip- of-the-tongue moments.

<comment><USER47> Pinboard does this. For crypto papers, I search Pinboard about as much as I search Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Love the announcement. It is so clear, direct, and _funny_ and makes almost anything written by a corporation sound weird and artificial.

Also,

> Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.

Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I abandoned Delicious, started using Diigo, and it still works fine [1]. Curious no one's mentioned it here. [https://www.diigo.com/](https://www.diigo.com/)

Edit: [1]: fine, not great. It's got some weird usability flaws that someone thought would be either a good idea or just good lock-in. But they're mostly avoidable.

<comment><USER49> I noticed no one had mentioned diigo as well. I use it primarily for it's ability not just to save bookmarks, but to annotate the few sentences of a link that I want to recall. It's incredibly valuable over time to be able to search what I wanted to remember about a link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Woohoo! Congrats, Maciej!

</comment><comment><USER51> I was sad when Yahoo bought delicious 'cause I knew it was over. But Delicious was the first of its kind, and provided really good discovery. I dont understand why pinboard bought it. To preserve the bookmarks?

<comment><USER52> The financial justification was probably as a way of buying users:

> Users will have an opportunity to migrate their bookmarks to a Pinboard > account, which costs $11/year.

It's also possible maciej wants to ~~do Machine Learning on the data~~, as they have "over a billion bookmarks", but that seems unlikely to me.

I'd bet the "real reason" truly was sentimental:

> Delicious ... is a fascinating piece of web history. ... I bought it in part > so it wouldn't disappear from the web.

<comment><USER53> >It's also possible maciej wants to ~~do Machine Learning on the data~~,

Excuse me? "Unlikely"? Understatement of the thread.

And I wouldn't describe that sentence as a sentimental motivation, but rather an _archival_ motivation. Preserve your history or it will be lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Might be worth noting Pinboard has a history with YC and HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278)

<comment><USER55> Also "The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud" [https://static.pinboard.in/prosperity_cloud.htm](https://static.pinboard.in/prosperity_cloud.htm)

<comment><USER56> Random question to Maciej: looking at [https://static.pinboard.in/prosperity_cloud.htm](https://static.pinboard.in/prosperity_cloud.htm), did anyone apply/win?

<comment><USER57> Six projects were selected: [https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/01/pinboard_co_prosperity_winn...](https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/01/pinboard_co_prosperity_winners/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Maciej, when you finally tame this site, can I email you and see if my old bookmarks are lurking around in there? I've got over 9000 and I have exported them before but somehow all the tags were lost.

<comment><USER16> Sure. Note though that if they predate the Avos sale, they're likely gone unless you opted in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> In my mind I don't bookmark pages as much as sentences or passages from a bookmark which I then go search for, either by keyword or string.

I am a heavy user of Diigo for it's annotation/highlighting feature for that reason. I pretty much can't read or surf online without it.

[https://www.diigo.com/index](https://www.diigo.com/index)

Is there any plan to add this type of feature to Pinboard? Pinboard seems much simpler and more performant and I'd love to have an alternative/backup.

</comment><comment><USER59> BTW: Which Chrome extension do you use to save links? It seems that there are a few different ones.

(For me it's Pinboard Plus, but occasionally it fails.)

<comment><USER60> Maybe take a look at Shiori ([https://aki-null.net/shiori/](https://aki- null.net/shiori/)). It's more of a stand alone app rather than a Chrome Extension but the well crafted solution (afaik works with chrome and safari) combines pretty much all needed features. Basically use it on a daily basis for the saving process although I have to say that I prefer Alfred App scripts to access the bookmarks on my Mac.

</comment></comment><comment> real-hacker This is amazing. One-man operation defeats venture capital backed product. I wonder how many paying users does pinboard have?

<comment><USER61> 24K. See:

[https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> absolutely love pinboard - but it has some cookie timeout thing that I need to log back in more often than I should

also, well played Maciej

</comment><comment><USER63> Congrats! this is excellent news, and simply, well, excellent.

Awaiting the news regarding Bed Bug Registry vs booking.com

</comment><comment><USER64> Recently found this list of 150+ alternative (social) bookmarking services: [https://tagpacker.com/user/social.bookmarking.tools](https://tagpacker.com/user/social.bookmarking.tools)

Finally, I moved my bookmarks to TagPacker.

</comment><comment><USER65> [https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...](https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/) "If you're a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API." [https://del.icio.us/export](https://del.icio.us/export) "We're sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible."

<comment><USER66> If you read further…

"Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.

Please note that there is no time pressure for moving off Delicious."

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> If you aren't familiar with Maciej Cegłowski, the creator and owner of Pinboard, his Twitter feed is worth a follow. He has an excellent sense of humor and timely snark.

[https://twitter.com/pinboard/](https://twitter.com/pinboard/)

<comment><USER68> His speeches (posted on his blog) are great too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'd think/hope that the ultimate resting place of services that have "a fascinating piece of web history" is with the Internet Archive or similar, as an alternative to orphaning a bunch of links.

</comment><comment><USER70> > Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.

that made me laugh! OH NOES ITS A MONORPOLY!!11

</comment><comment><USER71> I remember being very passionate about "folksonomy", tag clouds, microformats and things related to the delicious community. I wonder if that lived on on some corner of the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER72> That's why Maciej wasn't replying to any e-mails recently! Who knows. Maybe "Delicious under new management" will NOT be a "slowest growing unicorn"

</comment><comment><USER73> I am having a hard time understanding why this purchase makes sense, unless one simply wanted to resell the domain name. Pinboard, to me, is more valuable than Delicious is.

<comment><USER74> The seo juice Pinboard can get with a simple redirection, alone, is worth much more than $35k.

<comment><USER73> Okay, that makes some sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> TIL Delicious hadn't already been killed by Yahoo!

All kidding aside though they were one of the first to have a really cool domain name. It will always be del.icio.us to me.

</comment><comment><USER76> How do I export my bookmarks out of Delicious? Option to do that has been removed :(

</comment><comment><USER77> What happened to the delicious.com domain? Is that included in the sale?

</comment><comment><USER78> Will users be able to delete their data like Delicious used to let them?

</comment><comment><USER79> I rarely accessed any of my 5,000 bookmarks anyway.

</comment><comment><USER80> Next acquisition target should be Instapaper.

<comment><USER81> They are owned by Pinterest, so unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I had no idea delicious was still around.

</comment><comment><USER83> Best acquisition letter ever written.

</comment><comment><USER84> How much do you think it cost em?

</comment><comment><USER85> This makes me happy. So happy.

Two thumbs up.

Keep doing what you were doing, Pinboard, do not ever buy into the argument that changed Delicious from what it was.

<comment><USER86> I think Pinboard should totally sell out if someone offers $20 million.

It's $20 million!

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> For the record, Tarsnap has no plans to acquire Dropbox.

<comment><USER88> hahaha.. if that were to happen

Next Story: Tarsnap promptly migrates Dropbox to FreeBSD

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> The coup de grace.

</comment><comment><USER90> TL/DR: Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard

<comment><USER91> This actually wants to make me compete with them more. Challenge accepted

<comment><USER16> BRING IT

<comment><USER91> dude, don't tempt me. I swear I'll do just as soon as I finish reading my book on how to fight chronic procrastination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> This is the greatest thing I've read in a while.

</comment><comment><USER93> > Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.

Wha... not sure if he's letting the success get to his head, or he is actually trying to ward off competitors. Real innovative people are motivated by challenges like this so he's gonna have to eat his hat for saying that.

<comment><USER94> _not sure if he 's letting the success get to his head, or he is actually trying to ward off competitors_

Have you considered the possibility that he's using some humor to point out the fate of all the much-better-funded but now-defunct competitors that a typical HN commenter would've expected to crush Pinboard and win the market?

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Delicious! I thought they were already DEAD, and I wish they were. They messed up my bookmarks once so badly that I really want them out of business.

Ah, and I don't give a damn about Pinboard or Google Bookmarks either.

I only use Pocket.</comment>


Your live coding demo is boring - <AUTHOR> https://inconshreveable.com/11-13-2015/your-live-coding-demo-is-boring/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I agree, live coding, when polished and done right grounds a presentation. Without a live coding element "technical" presentations can quickly devolve into marketing where grandiose claims are often made that are devoid any merit. I think the real gap is most people underestimate how much preparation time must be invested in a live coding demo.</comment>


At the Intersection of AI, Governments, and Google – Tim Hwang [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/at-the-intersection-of-ai-governments-and-google-tim-hwang/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating topic, and I loved hearing from Tim.

Probably wont win me points, but I have to say it: I wish Craig would improve his interview skills. I didn't feel he led the conversation towards the more interesting topics. Most of his comments felt distracting. Since he didnt seem to have deep knowledge in the area, as the audience I want him to stay out of the way.

<comment><USER3> haha. fair enough! I've been trying to keep things more general as - in my opinion - there's a shortage of content that clearly communicates the broader ideas. happy to go deeper on future interviews tho.

and if you have specific feedback my email is firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Craig, this feedback is specific to that one interview. I thought you did a fantastic job with your "Hiring Engineers with Ammon Bartram" for example. I am often critical of interviewers. Someone once told me that might mean I want to do journalism :)

<comment><USER3> get on the podcast train! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be nice to be able to see the whole transcript instead of just that tiny scrollable section.

<comment><USER3> added!</comment></comment>


7 Commandments for Women in Technology and Other Male-dominated Fields - <AUTHOR> http://theoperationsguy.com/commandments-for-women-in-technology

<comment><AUTHOR> Wanted to bring article up now, especially since we are suffering talent shortage in so many of the functional areas and really need to get women back into SMAT and entrepreneurship. CS used to be 40%+ female, but now we are down to 14%. That is going to hurt us bad even worse that it is already.

</comment><comment><USER2> Blurry fonts?</comment>


Ask HN: list of all js - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
  There are lots of js tools releasing almost everyday. Please post in comments of anyone that you might find interesting. Here are some :<p>backbonejs : MVC framework d3js : visualization library Angularjs : MVW framework <comment><USER2> I like knockout.js, meteor is also interesting but I haven't had a chance to do anything beyond the tutorials on their site.</comment>


Dravidian languages originated 4,500 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/3/171504 <comment><USER2> I'm sorry that this news isnt trending in HN.</comment>


Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused – part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://codingnest.com/modern-sat-solvers-fast-neat-and-underused-part-2-of-n/ <comment><USER2> All I can do is recommend people to try out the z3 solver, especially through the Python API. There's no better resource than [https://yurichev.com/writings/SAT_SMT_by_example.pdf](https://yurichev.com/writings/SAT_SMT_by_example.pdf).

<comment><USER3> Using Z3 with Python is like having superpowers. I second the recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A closely related technique to SAT solvers is the "Constraint Satisfaction Problem" which I've been looking into recently.

Constraint Programming and SAT are BOTH NP-complete problems, and as such, they are mathematically equivalent. However, its sometimes more "obvious" to write problems in one form vs the other.

For example, Sudoku is simply written 27 constraints:

* All Different (X11, X12, X13, X14, X15, X16, X17, X18, X19)

* All Different (X21, X22, X23, X24, X25, X26, X27, X28, X29)

...

* All Different (X11, X21, X31, X41, X51, X61, X71, X81, X91)

...

* All Different (X11, X12, X13, X21, X22, X23, X31, X32, X34)

...

etc. etc.

Then define each "X" variable as "between 1 and 9" and bam, you're done with defining the problem in terms of "Constraints".

Representing Sudoku as a SAT problem is possible of course, but its just... harder. It just feels more humanly natural to represent Sudoku in terms of constraints. Or maybe not. Read "Part 1" if you want to see how the original blogger solved it in terms of 3-SAT ([https://codingnest.com/modern-sat- solvers-fast-neat-underuse...](https://codingnest.com/modern-sat-solvers-fast- neat-underused-part-1-of-n/))

\</comment><comment>----

Here's an article from IBM hyping up their "CPLEX" Constraint solver for Sudoku for example: [https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jfp/entry...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jfp/entry/solving_the_hardest_sudoku?lang=en)

\</comment><comment>----

Anyway, just plugging in a similarly fast, neat, and underused (and mathematically equivalent) solver to what the blogpost talks about. I personally don't know too much about SAT-solvers or their algorithms, aside from "They're same same, but different" to Constraint Programming.

<comment><USER5> This is a great related talk that explores how puzzles can be solved using SAT solvers, constraint solvers and dancing links: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA9DBG8x-ys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA9DBG8x-ys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684502)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why would MKS with 4k keys matter? Is that really a real thing that people do? Seems nuts vs just using an electronic system at that point.

Alternatively - can MKS be applied to cool permissions problems not involving physical keys?

<comment><USER8> Yeah - that seems crazy as surely you would have a very limited number of solutions given manufacturing constraints.

So then if a key gets stolen and you have to replace the system it could be literally impossible to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rather than encoding this as SAT, would it be easier to use an actual constrain solver environment here? Like MiniZinc or PiCat.

<comment><USER3> Aren't those modeling languages? I believe they hook up to actual solvers which may or may not be SAT solvers.

<comment><USER9> PiCat seamlessly integrates with solvers. MiniZinc does need a solver capable of processing it, but it's fairly easy to do so. I just thought this kind of problem was a bit easier to describe more generally in a constraint form than SAT (which takes a bit of effort).

<comment><USER3> I see your point -- CNF as a modeling language leaves a lot to be desired. What I like about this article is that it uses CNF anyway and takes you through the hard work you'd have to do to express a problem that way. I didn't know about the Tseytin transformation, for instance, so I'd given up on using CNF because of the exponential blowup in my constraints. I probably still won't be using SAT solvers directly, but it's nice to learn how they work. It's like knowing an assembly language for constraint satisfaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have been delving into Fstar [1] which has an SMT backend and provides a means of program verification. Fstar programs can then be code extracted to OCaml or Fsharp.

I think the combination of SAT solving, and a formal language like F* that can create executable OCaml or Fsharp code will be very useful in creating a pragmatic path to verified programs.

      [1]  https://www.fstar-lang.org/

Edit: I wanted to add that I prefer the Lisp syntax of SMT to the python, but that's based upon personal bias. However, a Lisp-like syntax was chosen due to the ease of parsing Lisp s-expressions.</comment>


On the path to an artificial cell - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-06-path-artificial-cell.html <comment><USER2> The "artificial cell" is a drop of water. Surface tension mimics a cell wall.

The "metabolic function" is a reaction that can happen in water between components that are injected into the water.

At the very least, this is an impressive application of microfluidics and could be used to model some cellular processes.</comment>


Websites with great SEO - <AUTHOR>

Preferably small to medium sized ones which are highly optimized for SEO and get a ton of traffic from search. <comment><USER2> Some sites that I have seen that are well optimized and do well in terms of search traffic are funadvice.com and fanpop.com, and zimbio.com.</comment>


Pipe: Infix syntax for Python - <AUTHOR> http://dev-tricks.net/pipe-infix-syntax-for-python <comment><USER2> that's great! I always wanted something like this for Python

the problem is, I rarely feel like I can just use all these cool-syntax libraries for production, since they don't add a lot of value. why do I need a whole dependency dependency for something that just make one or two line more readable?

I've written a syntax enhancer for PHP once, but it just added one feature (array dereferencing) for a small but noticeable price of setting up; I never considered it for production usage because there weren't enough features to justify it. (CoffeeScript is an example of justifiable price for huge changes and multiple ideas)

for personal just-for-fun projects (like solving project euler problems) it's an awesome idea, though

<comment><USER3> What I would like to see is a way to separate the the syntax of my code from the semantics of my code. Ideally, my code editor should be able to take the same piece of code and display it in a few different styles of syntax.

Then I could write my code in whatever syntax I want, and someone else could flip a switch and change it into their preferred style of syntax.

I am honestly kind of puzzled as to why the concept of MVC disappears as soon as we start writing coding tools. It seems that for any reasonable syntax that you can write a parser for; it should also be possible to write an emitter from an 'intermediate' syntax tree.

<comment><USER4> I've also thought about this a few times. It's a pity that the SCID (Source Code in Database) paradigm never really caught on. It would make things such as representing the same code with different syntax (depending on user preference) possible. It also makes refactoring/renaming easy as names are only stored in one place, the rest refers to the same 'entity'. And you're right, best practices for data formats are applied everywhere except for code. After all, we're now in 2011 and still using old-fashioned text files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ISTR that when people discussed various ways of overloading the pipe on comp.lang.python back in the day, one thing you have to be careful of is that the bitwise OR operator binds relatively weakly [1], and that can result in some surprising behavior if you intuitively assign the | a precedence in your head more suited to the behavior implemented here. In this particular case, though, you probably wouldn't hit this problem very often... though in some ways that can make the problem worse in its own way.

[1]: <http://docs.python.org/reference/expressions.html#summary>

<comment><USER6> This calls for allowing the entirely user-defined $-operator in python 4.

<comment><USER7> What if two Python-based frameworks use $ for separate purposes? (e.g. Django and NumPy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Fibonacci generator hurts my eyes! Here is a cleaner version.

        def fib():
            a, b    = 0, 1
            while True:
                yield a
                a, b    = b, a+b

Anyway, the order of the pipeline-like operation in Python sometimes really bugs me. This one addresses part of it.

Recently I'm playing with Scala and it is really neat to do these stuff:

        // A lazy Fibonacci generator (a Scala Stream)
        lazy val fib: Stream[Long] = Stream.cons(0, Stream.cons(1,
          fib.zip(fib.tail).map(pair => pair._1 + pair._2)))

        fib filter(_ % 2 == 0) takeWhile (_ < 4000000) sum
        // 4613732

</comment><comment><USER9> Coincidentally enough I was looking at <http://code.google.com/p/python- pipeline/> a few days ago. I fully expected them to be related by a fork, but they dont seem to be. Python-pipeline executes a similar idea, but to infix- chain iterators by way of generators. I guess some abstractions are just too handy and useful and the chances are high that they will be implemented/discovered independently. Pipe is just one of them.

</comment><comment><USER10> A similar question was asked on Stackoverflow:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4961017/clojure-style- fun...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4961017/clojure-style-function- threading-in-python)

Some answers seem enlightening:

      While I sympathize with the desire to create cool new language constructs (à la Lisp macros), it is not really the Python philosophy to do this:

        >>> import this
        [...]
        There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

<comment><USER11> Hey, fogus and btilly! Small world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have built something similar, coming at the problem from a different direction. I wanted a Unix-style shell, but piping objects instead of strings. For example, to sum x^2 from the command line, x = 0-9:

        bash$ osh gen 10 ^ f 'x: x**2' ^ red + $

^ is the pipe symbol, red means "reduce", $ means output, and f means apply the given function.

The same capabilities are available as a Python library:

        from osh.api import *
        osh(gen(10), f(lambda x: x**2), red(lambda x, y: x + y), out())

or

        from osh.api import *
        osh(gen(10), f(lambda x: x**2), red('+'), out())

Osh can also run results on multiple hosts at once, in parallel, combining the results in various ways; and integrates database access, piping tuples to and from sql commands.

<http://geophile.com/osh>

<comment><USER13> Nice! Would deserve a github repository and keeping the pypi pakcage up-to- date: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/osh/>

<comment><USER12> Yes, the pypi entry is obsolete. For some reason, I get into some sort of endless lost username/password purgatory whenever I try to register there. I really should bring that up to date and put the package in github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any helper function that convert existing functions into pipe's style?

For instance:

      [1,2,3,4,5] | p(sum)

where p would transform a def(seq, args, kwargs) to def(args,kwargs) and yield the results?

Also, maybe:

      [1,2,3,4,5] >> sum

where that could be made automatically ?

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind I have no idea how this magical code works. In fact I can't even find the pipe character on my keyboard right now (I am copy and pasting it!). But this seems to work:

        @Pipe
        def p(iterable, function, **kwargs):
            return function(iterable, **kwargs)

        In [3]: from pipe import *
        In [4]: [1,2,3,4,5] | p(sum)
        Out[4]: 15

<comment><USER5> "In fact I can't even find the pipe character on my keyboard right now"

On standard US keyboards, it's shift-backslash. YLMV.

<comment><USER15> Ha thank you! I was typing the pipe character that's in the top left (alt gr + `) that looked the same but is clearly a different character code. It's a bew laptop with a new keyboard layout (US).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> github repo: <https://github.com/JulienPalard/Pipe/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Server is unresponsive. Maybe Coral will cache it sometime: <http://dev- tricks.net.nyud.net/pipe-infix-syntax-for-python>

</comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of the threading macros (-> and ->>) from Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder about the usefulness of this. Doesn't the python generator syntax take care pretty well of most use-cases?

The first example could have been written like this, which is much simpler and easier to read than both the prefix and infix versions:

sum(x * x for x in take_while(fib(), lambda x: x < 1000000) if x % 2)

<comment><USER19> Inserting/disabling/swapping intermediate processing steps in between is immensely easier with pipes, and you don't have to take care of balanced parentheses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me of C#'s LINQ, but for Python... PLINQ?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2062540/help-with-linq- ex...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2062540/help-with-linq- expression/2062565#2062565)

<comment><USER21> He mentions in the link that linq is an inspiration.

<comment><USER20> Thanks, I had missed that in the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very nice piece of sugar. Pipes are one of the things I love about f#, and it's nice to have a quick and easy implementation for when I'm playing with Django/App Engine.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wrote a really similar library called Calabash a short while ago: <https://github.com/zacharyvoase/calabash>

It's all fully tested (python setup.py test), and I really like using it, but I haven't done so in any large-ish production app yet because it just looks completely different to the surrounding code. I _have_ used it with success in some small scripts, but that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Remove the pipe symbols and you get Forth syntax!

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice source code, readable, and well documented. The author uses generators when it makes sense.

I try to use ipython and pipe as my shell to see how it feels.

</comment><comment><USER25> Possibly inspired by Pypes: <http://arvindn.livejournal.com/68137.html>

</comment><comment><USER26> Infix notation is more readable then poorly written "classical" prefix notation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thats great, now if they added some of the other lisp features (macros, etc.) I'd consider using python.</comment>


Amazon's advertising business does more revenue than YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://www.kevinrooke.com/post/amazon-subscriptions-and-amazon-advertising <comment><USER2> You left out Alexa / Kindle :-).

<comment><USER3> Also that these results are only for Q4, where Amazon likely had a boost due to the holidays.

YouTube had more ad revenues in FY2019 than Amazon.</comment></comment>


Twitter and SMS Spoofing - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/12/twitter-and-sms-spoofing.html

<comment><USER2> 1\. I didn't know Moxie Marlinspike worked for twitter!

2\. Would it be a huge drag for them to require the mentioned PIN protection for SMS users in areas where only longcodes are available? That would seem to plug the remaining hole in the cases he mentions.</comment>


Teagueduino: Light-based Theremin DrumSynth - <AUTHOR> http://www.teagueduino.org/?p=view&id=61 <comment><AUTHOR> Experimenting with Teagueduino (a simplified Arduino with an awesome UI) and built this in less than an hour over lunch.

Hooray for rapid prototyping! :)</comment>


Show HN: Bimble – For listing and sharing great little places - <AUTHOR> http://bimble.com <comment><USER2> I might make an "emergency bathrooms" list for my city, because that's something everybody actually needs from time to time, fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah we would love that! The more niche the better. Thanks for your support.</comment></comment>


Equifax site to see if you're a victim requires you waive lawsuit rights - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/are-you-an-equifax-breach-victim-you-must-give-up-right-to-sue-to-find-out/ <comment><USER2> Note that just entering your social and last name (to see if your data may have been affected) does not require you to agree to waive any rights, at least as far as I saw.</comment>