Ask HN: Why did this article just silently disappear from the front page? - <AUTHOR> I managed to take a screenshot that shows this link on position 9:
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
But after I read it, the 'discuss' link leads to empty page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24014806
Why was it removed? <comment><USER2> In your profile set "Show dead" to "Yes" and two[0] submissions[1] show up ... there may be more. They have been flagged by "the community" and so are dead. As I write this I see that it has been submitted yet again[2].

 _Edit: Now that 's flagged dead as well_

Submissions are sometimes flagged as just being so far wide of the general community interest so as to be irrelevant to the vast majority. But sometimes they're flagged because they are divisive, and known (or expected) to produce flame wars and unpleasant exchanges.

But whatever the reason, it would appear that this article is thought to be interesting by some, and inappropriate by others. That's part of how HN works.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24015300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24015300)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24014806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24014806)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24019257](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24019257)

<comment><USER3> The fate on HN of this well written and intellectually curious article is a neat proof of the point it's making.

<comment><USER4> Beware of "Being downvoted proves I'm right!" \- that way lies madness.

EDIT: My thoughts exactly GP,

> sometimes they're flagged because they are divisive, and known (or expected) > to produce flame wars and unpleasant exchanges.

I had a look at the article. I thought it was well-written and interesting, but already I was imagining and dreading a huge messy HN comment page, with a lot of whited-out comments etc, not really worth reading.

Sometimes I upvote stories/blog posts I think are really bad, but the comments are really good and I want to encourage them. People coming along later saying "I cant believe this crappy story has 500 votes!" or "Why was this flagged??" miss that point - people also vote on the comments as a whole, even if there's none there yet. Many people mostly just read the comments, so not surprising they'd vote on them, not the story.

<comment><USER3> As you say, the article is well written and interesting, it's also about a highly topical issue relevant to many in the tech industry.

It's also about why critical theorists flat out refuse to engage in debate over their beliefs. And Hacker News, a community that has more than its fair share of critical theorists, is witnessing a systematic effort to stop people even meta-debating why critical theorists don't debate.

Obviously defining a flag-worthy story as "one with a lot of flagged comments" is circular logic. The sort of people who want to avoid debate at all costs will certainly white-out and flag people who try to debate them. It's visible on so many threads here. That doesn't mean the article or comments aren't good.

Sad to say but Hacker News is really nowhere near as good at promoting intelligent curiousity as its staff like to believe. The software just isn't good enough to do that and nor do the owners ever upgrade or experiment with it to try and make that situation better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is pretty discouraging to see this kind of censorship happening. The article seems reasonable and if you disagree, good for you, argue about it or just get over it.

This whole woke stuff/cancel culture reminds me of the little red book waving youngsters during the cultural revolution in China.

Very scary to see this happening again.

The fact that this can be so easily be removed, suggest that the algorithm for flagging is not very good and needs to be improved.

As said above, discuss instead hide behind your cancel button.

<comment><USER6> There are plenty of places like TheMotte where you can discuss this. We don't need to discuss every topic on every site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the guidelines[1]:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic._

Maybe enough people flagged it for being off-topic

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER8> I don't like these guidelines because they are vague and subjective -- just because an article does or does not gratify one person's intellectual curiosity, it doesn't mean it won't / will gratify another person.

Flagging is heavy-handed, because it hides the post unless you have showdead enabled, and it prevents the post being able to gain upvotes which would otherwise justify it being posted.

When a post gets 10 upvotes in 50 minutes, it's clearly satisfying _some_ people's curiosity. If you're not interested in the post you can just scroll past it, you don't have to flag it out of everyone else's view...

<comment><USER9> > I don't like these guidelines because they are vague and subjective

They are intended to be subjective: since it's about fit to the audience.

> just because an article does or does not gratify one person's intellectual > curiosity, it doesn't mean it won't / will gratify another person.

One vote/flag doesn't have a giant effect. The idea isn't to have stuff that might appeal to _someone's_ intellectual curiosity, but will do so for the HN community broadly. HN isn't the only community around and isn't intended to be, and it isn't trying to be all things to all people.

> Flagging is heavy-handed, because it hides the post unless you have showdead > enabled, and it prevents the post being able to gain upvotes which would > otherwise justify it being posted.

Tools to adjust the signal-to-noise ratio need to, well, actually have an effect to work.

> When a post gets 10 upvotes in 50 minutes, it's clearly satisfying _some_ > people's curiosity.

Yes, and the formula weighting votes, flags, and activity already considers that.

> If you're not interested in the post you can just scroll past it, you don't > have to flag it out of everyone else's view...

Conversely, if you are interested in content that doesn't appeal to the HN community generally as expressed by the mechanisms established, you are free to use a different link-sharing and discussion site (there are plenty) or set up your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it is quite ironic that an article about an epistemology that rejects criticism of itself was flagged.

<comment><USER6> HN is intrinsically a system of oppression, man.

<comment><USER11> Haha! Thanks for these two posts - made my day!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How any anything that has the word "woke" right there in the title be taken seriously? It's all a bit too Sea Liony. [http://wondermark.com/1k62/](http://wondermark.com/1k62/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Another attempt got to 7 points before being flagged and marked as dead:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24015300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24015300)

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://hckrnews.com](https://hckrnews.com) shows dead discussions.

unfortunately it looks like [http://hnrankings.info](http://hnrankings.info) does not.

i don't think there's a way to find out exactly what happened without emailing the mods: email@example.com. i also doubt they go into the details that much.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can attest to the page disappearing and appearing "empty". The page is now back, although flagged and dead.

</comment><comment><USER15> Tar baby.

</comment><comment><USER16> HN is ran by radical leftists, so no surprise.

<comment> non-entity Yeah, surely the product of a venture capitalist company is run by radical leftists.</comment></comment>


Web benchmark: Dlang (601.74 req/sec) vs. Node.js (300.80 req/sec) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/llaine/benchmarks <comment><USER2> I found so funny that ruby is as always slow. Also this makes me sad as I'm a ruby fun :)

</comment><comment><USER3> ~600 rps is an very low bar to set.

Not to mention that database is the bottleneck in this benchmark.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I "Go Big on Launch"? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working to get my small design studio up and running, and was wondering if any of you could offer me some advice on what to do for launch. We're currently in the 'teaser page' state of things.<p>From what I've been told: go big on launch, find some people to do a giveaway with, and just generally have a good time. I'm not really sure what 'go big on launch' means, though, and if there's anything lacking in what I've got so far in terms of advice. I'm also curious as to what time of year would work best to launch something like this. <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if it would help, but our teaser page is at <http://wearepico.com> \- The about text is a pretty good summary of our goals, I think.</comment>


Hash Functions all the way down - <AUTHOR> http://aras-p.info/blog/2016/08/02/Hash-Functions-all-the-way-down/ <comment><USER2> It'd be interesting to see how the 128-bit Murmur versions compare.

Something not mentioned in the "Quality" section is that FNV and djb2 produce may produce decent results on words/filenames/source code, but they can fail catastrophically (produce far more collisions than expected) on certain patterns of keys - SMHasher is designed not just to check performance, but to try and find patterns of keys that 'break' a hash function.

Murmur3 tries to be short, simple, portable, and efficient on small keys while still passing SMHasher. xxHash, Spooky, and the Farm/City/Metro suite all use a lot of loop unrolling and/or platform-specific optimizations to get the highest possible performance when hashing large chunks of data.

-Austin (author of Murmur and SMHasher)

<comment><USER3> First, thanks for all your work on Murmur and SMHasher!

I wonder if you have any recommendations for a one-byte-at-a-time hash that survives SMHasher? I've been using Jenkins OAAT and haven't bumped into any problems but I've seen conflicting reports about its robustness. Any thoughts on Jenkins OAAT or an alternative one-at-a-time hash would be appreciated :)

<comment><USER2> If you can only hash data a byte at a time, you have bigger problems. ;)

I have no real suggestions, but it would be trivial to feed Murmur one byte per loop iteration and then ditch the 'tail' section.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "ZOMGBadHash" isn't unique to that codebase - it's the hash specified by the ELF ABI (see [http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/ch5.dynamic.html#h...](http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/ch5.dynamic.html#hash) ).

It's not just a random mush of xors and shifts, it's:

      - Add the next character value to the current value;
      - Left-shift the current value by 4 (because most of the entropy in plain text ASCII is in the lower 4 bits);
      - XOR the top 4 bits into the bottom four bits of the current value, because they're going to get shifted out next time; then clear the top four bits.

It's still not a great hash function (obviously). Part of the issue is that with a 32-bit unsigned int it's effectively only a 28 bit hash.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4vxtyz/hash_fu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4vxtyz/hash_functions_all_the_way_down/)

<comment><USER5> What's the point of linking a Reddit submission of the same article?

<comment><USER6> The comments, probably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the title, I was expecting either a discussion of the CPython implementation or an associative memory system.

It would be amusing to have a system with hardware associative memory, where everything is a key-value tuple. Such things have been built (most of an MMU is such an associative memory) but never caught on.

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone isn't familiar with him, Aras is one of the key architects behind the Unity game engine. An excellent hacker. Whenever I see his blog come up, I know it's going to be some awesome technical stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article.

1\. This seems to disagree with Rust's tests for FVN vs xxHash.[1] This article has xxHash winning a bit after 10 bytes. The Rust one has FVN winning until after 32 bytes. Rust recently added FVN. Is someone wrong or am I missing something?

2\. Why is 64-bit slower on asm.js? If the host is 64-bit shouldn't it get 64-bit? I know JS doesn't have proper ints, but I thought asm.js-aware browsers were supposed to handle this well?

Curious: Is there no uniform, fast, way to switch the algorithm for small inputs? Require the caller to hint that the key might be small (<8 or 16 bytes), otherwise in streaming mode, just restart if it turns out you only get <16 bytes. Or will that branching+code kill the gain?

1: [http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/hash- rs/](http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/hash-rs/)

<comment><USER10> as 1) SMHasher is not the right test for performance for a hash function in a hash table. In a hash table FNV will always win over xxHash and all those file digests, which are optimized for aligned larger blocks. SMHasher is a good test for network throughput or hashing files, but not for hash tables.

The reason is that an easily short inlinable hash function like FNV will always win over a big non-inlinable digest like Murmur, xxHash, Farm, Metro ... Furthermore, even if small worse hash functions produce more collisions, their small icache size will still outperform bigger functions with less collisions. More work, but less cache misses. For small hash tables it is even faster to do a linear search because of cache advantages, and also a linked- list of buckets is better be written as array. ("Cache-Conscious Collision Resolution in String Hash Tables" by Nikolas Askitis and Justin Zobel, Melbourne 2005)

ad branching) Google successfully experimented with hash variants based on alignment and size. Newer CPU's explore those branches beforehead, so the overhead was not that big and worth it. See their sparse hashtable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This really needs to take into account hardware instruction support. The hardware instructions are quite fast.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised how fast the iPhone CPU is compared to the Xbox One CPU (for this application).

<comment><USER13> PX4/XB1 use a fairly low-end AMD CPU (Jaguar core, ~1.6GHz). Apparently it also does not quite appreciate heavy use of 64 bit multiplies (as used in xxHash64 for example).

Modern phones (e.g. iPhone 6) in terms of CPU are actually very impressive indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How about Siphash?

</comment><comment><USER15> Wait, don't you want minimum acceptable throughput on security-related hashing, so that it becomes less likely that somebody can just brute-force it?

<comment><USER16> Not everything hashish ends up being salted passwords. Hashing is great for just hashtables and partioning.

<comment><USER15> Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How did they get to a place where there are multiple copies of the same external codebase? Shared libraries FTW.

<comment><USER13> Something like FNVHash is so small (like a handful of lines), that it's extremely easy to just copy-paste the function into some place, without realizing it's already copy-pasted somewhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> it would be interesting check against Java hash implementation. I remember that Java hash was "bad"

<comment><USER19> Was it? The only issue I remember was with String before Java 1.2, where only few characters where used in hash (instead of all) leading to abysmal performance in many applications.</comment></comment>


Implementing a Principal Component Analysis In Python (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://sebastianraschka.com/Articles/2014_pca_step_by_step.html <comment><USER2> If anyone is interested, I also wrote a post on PCA this past weekend, but it uh... didn't get any upvotes :(

[http://michaeljflynn.net/2017/02/06/a-tutorial-on- principal-...](http://michaeljflynn.net/2017/02/06/a-tutorial-on-principal- component-analysis/)

<comment><USER3> One more proof that python > R :)

I guess this kind of tutorials in python are more popular since the R / Matlab people come with statistics background and don't really need the tutorials on PCA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> PCA is basically a decomposition of data into a low rank Euclidean space (where the principal axis accounts for the bulk of the variation in the data and each successive axis is orthogonal and accounts for the remaining variation). Notably though, most problems do not lie in a Euclidean vector space — they often exist on a lower dimensional manifold embedded into such a space. More recent work considers the problem of performing low rank decompositions if you assume _constraints_ on the factors, i.e., general priors. The work on this is quite recent and may be of interest to someone. You can essentially perform PCA with constraints using a message passing algorithm (originally derived from physics applications):

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00858](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00858)

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested, a much faster technique is using the randomized methods from [https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4061](https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4061) \- see e.g. [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.dec...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.decomposition.PCA.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I recently implemented PCA by computing the covariance matrix and using power iteration to obtain the eigenvectors. I found these pages useful for understanding how PCA works:

[http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/uADA/12/lectures/ch18.pdf](http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/uADA/12/lectures/ch18.pdf)

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

I've used it to analyse the Voynich Manuscript: [http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/VoynichPagesPCA.html](http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/VoynichPagesPCA.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Mildly curious question I've read a few papers recently which talk about 'Projection to Latent Structures' (PLS) I know PLS and PCA are related but I'm struggling to understand the differences and when you should use one or the other. Are there any good references people could recommend?

<comment><USER8> I believe PLS is related to PLSR, where the difference is that you are trying to maximize the covariance between the predictor variables and the observed variables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's good for educational purposes, but I would say there isn't much to "implement" since PCA is simply the eigen-decomposition of a matrix.

<comment><USER10> Big difference between knowing the math in theory and actually using it to do something useful with your data.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, but that Sword of Damocles cuts both ways. The thing you do with your data which starts out useful at first can and will easily erode into infrastructural debt if not built on sound foundations, which cannot be found off the shelf in standard scientific computing libraries that have been around for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> you can skip sklear and other packages and just use numpy (which is supported in pypy now), and just do an svd of the input matrix.

U,d,Vt=svd(X)

D=diag(d)

Xhat= U[:,:2].dot(D[:2, :2])

<comment><USER8> in addition if you want a way to project new vectors into a reduced svd space:

l=2 # desired vector space dimension

U,d,Vt = linalg.svd(X,full_matrices=False)

P=(U*(1/d))[:,:l]

xnew = dot(x,P)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know of a similar understandable introduction to Independent component analyis (ICA)?

<comment><USER13> One issue is that ICA covers a few different implementations.

My favourite would be Infomax '95 paper by Bell and Sejnowski. Under this setup:

ICA is a single layer neural network that maps N inputs to N outputs. The loss function being maximised is the mutual info between input and output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> ICA is also pretty neat

<comment><USER4> I agree. I'm surprised with the number of situations where people use PCA when ICA really would be more appropriate. I suppose that's the difference between knowing the tools and knowing the math behind the tools though.

<comment><USER15> The late David McKay said this about PCA:

 _" Principal Component Analysis is a dimensionally invalid method that gives people a delusion that they are doing something useful with their data. If you change the units that one of the variables is measured in, it will change all the "principal components"! It's for that reason that I made no mention of PCA in my book. I am not a slavish conformist, regurgitating whatever other people think should be taught. I think before I teach."_

—[https://www.amazon.com/review/R16RJ2PT63DZ3Q](https://www.amazon.com/review/R16RJ2PT63DZ3Q)

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't read a book from an author who reasons and writes like that.

The issue he is having with PCA can be solved by normalizing the data.

<comment><USER13> McKay did foundational research in machine learning; was a chief scientific advisor to the UK government's department for climate change; created eye tracking user interface software for paralysed people; and wrote an excellent text book on information theory. I.e. a proper Olympian. So when you read a statement like that, you should take it seriously and possibly realign your world-view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's say I'm building something with naive bayes but some of my inputs are correlated. Could PCA help me find an independent set of inputs?

<comment><USER18> Your describing collinearity. Yes, The PCA reconstruction components will not be correlated.</comment></comment>


JavaScript: Better and Faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.bcherry.net/talks/js-better-faster <comment><USER2> Can somebody explain what this is? i've tried opening it in multiple browsers, and though I don't get a javascript error, nothing is happening. Is it a slideshow? if so, how does it work?

<comment><USER3> It's keyboard driven.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else scratching their heads about coin offerings? - <AUTHOR> * Where did the architecture and ideas and accepted rules around ICO's come from? Where were the discussions taking place? I would expect something of this magnitude to have a mailing list at least as active as LKML.<p>* 0xproject on their blog landed 24M in coin funding from 13,000 investors at $1800 each. Where are the online equivalents of roadshows and pitches taking place? Again, where are the free and open discussions around this taking place online? Show me a historic record. Its like these things popped up overnight.<p>* Assume, from above, that at a 3% acquisition rate, to acquire ~15k gross number (as claimed by them) of investors they need to reach an audience of 500,000 potential coin investors. Where are these 500k investors with 1800 to throw away hanging around online? Are they all actively looking at the listings? Talk to anyone who works in private wealth management.. trying to convince someone to invest is hard.<p>* Given the number of ICOs, either the same groups of investors is investing in multiple ICOs or the number of investors is massive. Lets say the latter, we would expect at least 10x the number of 0xproject target audience = 5 Million active ICO investors. Again, where is this happening? It should be possible to confirm/track this on bitcoin at least. Has anyone done the analytics on this?<p>* If these discussions are occurring offline, what group of people are driving this, and why? Are they preparing for an event where fiat currency becomes worthless? Should we be worried?<p>* Why is it that the teams associated with these things come from elite institutions like ivy league unis and investment banks? Look at the teams for coinbase and 0xproject for example, and compare it to the team of an elite deep tech startup for example. You need brains and hard work to create an hard tech startup. You need what to create an ICO funded startup? Looks like elite institution connections.)<p>Thank you. <comment><USER2> There are no rules in general. There is an ERC20 standard, but that is basically "shared API" that all the tokens agree on, and that was created organically. Before ERC standard, people made up their own interfaces to tokens; now, they have a shared API. But these are _technical_ rules. There are no other rules; everyone can create a token and dump it online, with no rules.

The discussions are taking place on Ethereum reddit, I suppose, or maybe on other Ethereum-related subreddits and forums.

Those forums are usually hives of scum and villainy, as you would expect. Scammers scamming other scammers.

Because of existing code, making a new token is relatively easy; you take an existing one and change some variables. Yes, it doesn't do anything useful, but it doesn't need to; you just need a pretty website, where you put """"whitepaper"""" and a pretty photos and some """graphs""", repeat the word "decentralized" a few time and you are ready to dump.

Since there is no regulation, those things are popping up one after the other. Want to create HackerNewsCoin for a new decentralized platform for programming discussion? Why not. Promise a release date for a very vaguely described project, far along in the future that everyone forgets by then, and you are all set. Does it make sense? No, but you get rich out of other people wanting to get rich.

Unlike with investing, there is no actual value being made here. Just people wanting to get rich quickly. There is no substance, just scams on top of scams.

<comment><USER3> > Unlike with investing, there is no actual value being made here.

What's the value being made in investing?

<comment><USER4> People take the invested money and do things with it. They make products and provide services. Public market speculation provides some secondary benefits such as liquidity - the stock market does not function very well if it generally takes weeks or months to pair a buyer with a seller.

There is no product at the end of most of these ICOs - or at least, nothing commensurate with the amount raised. Most of them are _purely_ speculative vehicles where money changes hands from ICO investors to second- and third- tier buyers. They are pyramid schemes that eventually collapse. Or the founders simply abscond with whatever they can. If there is a product at the end of a round of investment, the odds of it seeing the light of day are probably somewhat worse than kickstarter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm just going to drop this in here, this is a quote from Patrick McKenzie during a live chat on Product Hunt [1] that John Collison tweeted out back in April [2]. It's an answer to: "What is one thing you believe that others disagree with you on?"

It's a pretty cynical view, but worth digesting.

> The fundamental innovation in Bitcoin the social dynamics of the gold rush > phase, which distribute cryptocurrency tokens widely for almost free. This > creates a self-organized distributed boiler room to market Bitcoin. Bitcoin > needs nothing else to get as big as it has; this is convenient because it > has nothing else. Bitcoin has no utility as a means of transaction or a > store of value. The blockchain is the world's worst database. The long line > of very smart people on the other side of this bet have been scammed, are > scamming, or both. Bitcoin will, accordingly, go to zero with the > inevitability of gravity.

[1] [https://cards.producthunt.com/cards/comments/452743?v=1](https://cards.producthunt.com/cards/comments/452743?v=1)

[2] [https://twitter.com/collision/status/850454173384454144](https://twitter.com/collision/status/850454173384454144)

<comment><USER6> This has been the dominant view of HN since the beginning. The only reason I didn't buy bitcoin at $1 was because of what I read on HN. Now it's at $4,000.

Not saying you should go out and buy bitcoin now, but logic often doesn't predict human actions.

<comment><USER7> Well if you really believed it was a flawed technology but "fit for speculation" then you could have rationally bought in early just on that basis alone.

It's clear that many people buy a little Bitcoin and then become loud advocates for the currency; repeating the facts they like, ignoring the facts they don't; which has helped to power the increase in valuation so far, but has to run out of steam at some point (perhaps far, far into the future).

The underlying technology has interesting potential but I think we'll see it evolve through several generations before broad consumer utility (either direct, or through platforms) is realized.

<comment><USER6> That's the problem, HN's hivemind was saying it wasn't fit for speculation, and since I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even consider it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think there is a non-trivial amount of money laundering happening through these things–the new markets, wider selection and total lack of regulation of cryptocurrencies give people more avenues to mask the source and destination of money. There is _so_ much money out there that people want to move but can't because of where it came from, government controls, taxes etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, none of these ICO's are generating any real value yet. What is a widely used product that has been funded by an ICO?

Even 0x is a protocol for trading tokens. That implies you need tokens worth trading...

ICO madness is just a symptom of the crypto bubble. Which is itself a symptom of the tech bubble. Who do you think is buying into all these cryptocurrency assets - Software engineers and other tech employees with a large amount of disposable income due to the meteoric rise in tech salaries.

</comment><comment><USER10> My feeling is that the success of ICOs is a side effect of the meteoric rise in value of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

There are many people who have become virtual currency millionaires. At that point anyone would be looking to diversify. Purchasing traditional assets would mean paying taxes on the coins. Purchasing ICOs just diversifies your coin holdings into an even more speculative asset class.

<comment><USER11> > Purchasing traditional assets would mean paying taxes on the coins

Purchasing ICOs would be a taxable event.

<comment><USER12> But one that is currently invisible to tax authorities.

<comment><USER11> Block chain transactions are not as opaque as you think.

<comment><USER12> As long as they are not looking that does not matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It doesn't make sense to me. I thought BTC was supposed to decentralize currency. One currency to rule them all. Having dozens of different ones that fluctuate like this seem counter-intuitive.

Sure, it's still decentralized. But now in order to buy things, we'll have to realize some sort of standardization. Of course, there are things like the Pot Coin, which obviously has only been deployed for a certain purpose.

So maybe everything is relative to BTC anyways, just specialized for different markets.

Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness format.

<comment><USER14> I think we're just in the early days... things will formalize over time just as they have for current fiat currencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't go as far as to compare the minds behind ICOs to the people involved on LKML.

The linux kernel developers that have jumped ship from LKML to bitcoin can be found on the bitcoin-dev mailing list: [https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d...](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin- dev)

Also, bitcoin/linux developers should not be blamed for these ICOs -- many of these schemes are totally unrelated and would just as easily be using centralized databases for their shares.

Altcoins exploded in 2013 with their initial offerings listed here: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0)

.. and since then you can go look up "ERC20" and find some Slack stuff.

</comment><comment><USER16> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump)

<comment><USER17> That's a very un-Wikipedia article.

<comment><USER11> ?

<comment><USER17> The text is much less neutral than normal.

<comment><USER18> Some subjects defy neutrality.

Abject fraud being among the leading contenders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Though the following may not answer many of your questions, I found these three videos to be very illuminating in regards to the blockchain and ICO processes and futures. They really helped me because I knew next to nothing about the whole field but saw lots of talk on social media and wanted to learn more.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1mkxci6vvo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1mkxci6vvo) Investment Panel with Naval Ravikant, Meltem Demirors, and Garry Tan

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnHRnlrO6bQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnHRnlrO6bQ) Payments Panel with Balaji Srinivasan, Elizabeth Stark, and Ryan Charles

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrSn3zx2GbM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrSn3zx2GbM) A conversation with Naval Ravikant (who is very prescient in this field)

</comment><comment><USER20> My previous summary of ICOs: [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/icos-magic- beans-and-bu...](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/icos-magic-beans-and- bubble-machines/)

Truly the least substantial asset I have ever seen. I hope the SEC goes feral on them, and soon.

<comment><USER21> >I hope the SEC goes feral on them, and soon.

Why? Are you concerned about unsuspecting investors being scammed? Or are you hoping the SEC will swoop in and "prove you right" by regulating the value of this ecosystem to zero?

<comment><USER20> The unsuspecting investors. Crypto scammers are now targeting retirees, for example. e-Toro have ads on the tube. I think it's actually unethical to be marketing cryptos to the general public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm also flabbergasted by the amount of cash (seemingly) that is going into this. I bought some ETH and already made like $2K on a $4K "investment". I'm willing to lose it all but feel like it could be around for a while so why not.

As far as the ICOs....yeah I don't get why you'd buy into that unless you truly believe in the vision and team, and so many of these stories are super shallow. I go with what other commenters are saying, that many of them are shams, they go big on FB/Google advertising to attract rubes, or they're being used for money laundering.

However, I also think that there's room for an ecosystem like this eventually, hence my investment. Just seems like early days and a lot of people taking money because they can. And maybe I'm just the rube though!

</comment><comment><USER23> While I'm not part of any, I have heard from members of the existence of underground slack and FB groups of fairly sophisticated investors and early adopters (obv now all closed to public).

Some money is also from investors escaping currency devaluations or restrictions (ex. China). I've heard of quant traders who are porting public equity algos to crypto. Naval R. Also Said on a recent podcast that some cryptocurrency traders meet in person to do trades too.

Would be interested in hearing what other things people have heard (or can confirm). I have a feeling some big whales(or syndicates) are participating in market making bc of the small caps of some of these coins, and that may cause a lot of boom-busts. Regardless, I'm still really bullish on crypto/blockchain as a whole though!

</comment><comment><USER24> Discussion happens on the two main Ethereum related subreddits: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/) and [https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum). At ethtrader, as a community, we've recently had an effort to put forward a set of criteria for evaluating ICOs, a test example of which is [https://np.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6tg8up/ethtrader_...](https://np.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6tg8up/ethtrader_ico_review_for_project_0x_the_form/)

</comment><comment><USER25> they arent your typical investments. id think its more like the millenials version of a horse race tracks as a form of entertainment. it is astounding to see there is a rediculous amount of of money that gets moved around every day, so obviously these arent just your average kids, there are some big hands involved. it should be pretty easy for bankers/whales to get in and manipulate the prices as they please.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Are they preparing for an event where fiat currency becomes worthless

You know what they say about fools and their money. It's taking money in with no actual repercussion if any of your plans fail. It's hilarious how formulaic they are all now. They take some already existent service idea, throw 3 "decentralized ooh ahh" points at the top, and then show pictures of 10 people's faces at the bottom (employees and "advisors").

It's very 2k era dotcom bubble "how do I get rich quick?"

</comment><comment><USER27> Also keep in mind the growth of Cryptocurrency as a whole. New wealth is being created and reinvested.

For example, I participated in a token offering 18 months ago which has produced a sizable value. I then took 20% of the gain and spread it across new token offerings.

At scale, think of everyone whom invested in Bitcoin early and Ethereum at the ICO. Their gains are used to reinvest into the crypto ecosystem at the earliest stages, thus, keeping their fortunes regenerating and growing.

<comment> da-bacon Does not pass the Tulip test:

Also keep in mind the growth of Tulips as a whole. New wealth is being created and reinvested.

For example, I participated in a tulip offering 18 months ago which has produced a sizable value. I then took 20% of the gain and spread it across new tulip offerings.

At scale, think of everyone whom invested in Carolus Clusius early and Bizarden just after Ogier de Busbecq sent the first seeds. Their gains are used to reinvest into the tulip ecosystem at the earliest stages, thus, keeping their fortunes regenerating and growing.

<comment><USER28> I completely agree. Many of the psychological principles that drove the tulip craze are present in the ICO ecosystem: scarcity, promises of skyrocketing value, a steady flow of new entrants, and early investors using gains to further fuel growth. We've seen this movie before. The human brain hasn't changed much since those days, and I have a feeling social psychology textbooks will be adding ICOs right next to the tulipmania section. I think everyone is hesitant to voice their concerns out of fear that they simply don't "get it." When you hear a panel of institutional investors say things like, "We're still figuring it out too, but we're going to make a ton of money!" that should make people gambling with their own money nervous. Early investors in multilevel marketing schemes and Ponzi schemes also make lots of money, but the whole thing ends up being a house of cards that stacks ever higher — often with increasingly financially-vulnerable investors entering the market as it gains a reputation of being a sure-fire way to make money fast. That said, I do think that some of the ICOs have solid teams and a good idea behind them, and the coins provide them with sufficient funding and network validation to have a good chance of building a company of real value. Many more don't have those ingredients and could very well end up imploding. But then again, I could just not "get it."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't have a good sense for the size of the ecosystem. I had assumed that 1.5Bil of some ico coin was X amount of ETH * current ETH exchange rate. But that if you actually tried to sell all of that it would collapse the market, so if gun to your head you tried to cash out with $1.5 billion USD you'd "only" get $100mil or something.

</comment><comment><USER30> I dont know about offline. But this ICOs are investing heavily in various advertising platform. Reddit, FB & Adwords full of ICOs ads if you just search anything about blockchain.

Shameless plug: [https://www.cryptoground.com/what- if?amount=1&coin=all&month...](https://www.cryptoground.com/what- if?amount=1&coin=all&month=Jan&day=01&year=2017) You can check returns of currencies here :P

</comment><comment><USER31> To the beginners - Watch this video - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8OlkkwRpc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8OlkkwRpc)

Highly recommended. It's healthy to take a step back from all the 'money talk' and hear about why blockchain was invented. This is good for Mass adoption. Blockchain is good, the money run on Bitcoin adds it's piece to the pie.

</comment><comment><USER32> These misterious investors could be the people who have large amounts of etc to invest and not interested in mass selling, you know, just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Are they preparing for an event where fiat currency becomes worthless?

Worth less, maybe.

Tensions in North Korea? Maybe South Koreans buy digital currency.

Magnitsky Act or sanctions preventing Russians from moving money to the US or other countries? Maybe they buy digital currency.

Real estate market sky high, maybe people who sell take the profit and use it to buy digital currency, seeing as the stock market is also at an all-time high.

</comment><comment><USER24> This got bumped off the front page rather quickly...

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://coinlist.co](https://coinlist.co) wants to be an ICO platform of preference, their first go is the Filecoin ICO. Issue with them is having to be SEC compliant which makes it pretty much US only (not strictly, however dealing with everything narrows the field vs here is the address, send ETH)

<comment><USER35> I also can't use my unrealized crypto-speculative gains to buy in, meaning that only accredited investors get a chance to pump/dump

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are a lot of people who regret not investing in Bitcoin early and who want to believe they'll get another chance now.

</comment><comment><USER37> The "free and open" discussion is happening on Reddit and on various crypto forums like bitcointalk.org. There's quite a lot of it actually

</comment><comment><USER38> My impression is that ICOs are motivated solely by greed. There isn't a whole lot here other than an insatiable thirst to make money.

<comment><USER39> And most of investments are motivated by what? Altruism ? Maybe 0.1% of all private investments are motivated by something else than "thirst to make money".

<comment><USER40> There are many ways to make money. One is to create real value. Another is to scam people. Still another is to take advantage of opportunities to seek rents or take advantage of non-monetized externalities like dumping pollutants into the environment. Yes, all investors want to make money. But some care about _how_ it's made. Not all profit is created equal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> coin offerings are great, it keeps increasing the value of my bitcoin, so keep it up please.

</comment><comment><USER42> Compare to the dawn of the commercial internet, and it makes a little bit of sense.

Most of us know the internet has been around in different forms for many decades, but it wasn't until the 1990s that commercial use took off. Easy distribution of information was the killer technology: web pages and search engines made instant trips to the library for the silliest questions a normal thing. Amazon was one of the first to get online retail sales right: they picked a fungible type of merchandise (books, which are 99% software and 1% hardware, so you don't really need to try before you buy a specific copy, which means you're fine with a mail-order shopping model). Clearly this wasn't just something cool -- it was a better way of doing things that are a part of everyone's daily life.

But then lots of other folks piled on with increasingly worse "me too!" ideas. Pets.com is the poster child: yeah, you can buy dog food over the internet, but _should_ you? But there was lots of demand in the form of people realizing a little too late that the internet was a huge investment opportunity, and "Amazon except for kitty litter" was close enough to scratch the itch, so the money piled in.

The most positive angle of the dot-com bust is that a lot of incredible technology did come out of it. Google was far from the first search engine, but it had the benefit of learning from the mistakes of Lycos, InfoSeek, Yahoo, AltaVista, and Excite. Facebook was SixDegrees except targeting an amazing combination of elites (top-tier colleges) and young adults experiencing newfound freedom + maximum horniness (college students). Even Microsoft has successfully reinvented itself as a pretty good PaaS provider.

So here we are. Bitcoin started ages ago, in 2009. Some people got it at first, and many to this day still dismiss it as a scam (though I know nobody who understands the technology and thinks it's anything but genuinely revolutionary). But increasingly, people are realizing that, like the internet, Bitcoin has introduced killer technology: decentralized distribution of truth. I haven't yet seen the Amazon of Bitcoin that so obviously connects commercial potential with this new blockchain technology -- perhaps it is Bitcoin itself, where a large percentage of the world stores at least some of its wealth there and it becomes part of the fabric of daily lives -- but there is no doubt that it will arrive, and that there will be more of them soon after that, and that there will be a day in our lifetimes when we can't imagine how we lived our lives needing to consult a government, or an agency, or a giant corporation, or a bureaucracy to learn the truth whether we possess liquid assets, whether we own property, whether we have a professional credential, etc.

Unfortunately (but just like the late 1990s), most of the current ventures are garbage, and nobody knows which is which. Moreover, some of them weren't even created in good faith -- just like IPOs in the late 1990s, some of these offerings are patently absurd. So lots of wealth will be transferred, much unfairly and much semi-randomly. Many people will be hurt.

But out of it will come the next Google, Amazon, and Facebook.</comment>


We don't need Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacoduplessis.co.za/we-dont-need-google/ <comment><USER2> I hate this statement " I don't want Google to sell my data so that they can blow the money on half-baked Google X projects"

Someone please tell me how can I buy your data and who exactly is google selling my personal data to ?

Also google x projects have moved the needle in VR / AR, self driving cars, and in some cities fiber has made a difference. Really I don't get why we'd want to not fund this stuff.

<comment><USER3> It's my hunch that having immense data on all humans in one place, along with the potential to take programmatic action based on that data, may significantly increase the risk of massive, harmful affects on society on the decade to century scale.

This may involve governments or other powerful entities co-opting the data, which there are increasing hints of. It doesn't even have to be some kind of catastrophy. One scenario I imagine would be something mundane like preventing an alternate future where the majority of people are twice as happy and have twice as much autonomy.

Obviously, this can't be proven. But this hunch gives me great pause.

<comment><USER2> >It's my hunch that having immense data on all humans in one place, along with the potential to take programmatic action based on that data

If you understand the Prism program the govt doesn't even need to go to individual companies. They hook directly into the ISP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course you don't strictly need Google. You can live without it.

But will the quality of your internet life be the same? Good luck with alternative search engines result quality.

And the price? Just the email provider you suggest will cost you $48 a year - vs $0 for Google.

Would you like to pay? Fine. The whole point is that Google, in order to provide all those services without paying, actually asks something from you - your data. Just like Facebook and Twitter. Consider G Suite as well, since its privacy guarantees are different from free gmail accounts.

<comment><USER5> I started using DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Initially, I would find myself using Google at least a few times a day if DDG didn't turn up what I was looking for.

As time went on this was less and less the case, and now I hardly ever use Google for web search. DDG results are a lot better than they used to be and almost always as good as Google in my experience.

<comment><USER6> I've also had this experience with DDG. Other people I've turned on to DDG have also experienced this.

I can't tell whether their search algorithms have gotten better or I've gotten used to DDG results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do lots of road trips to places I've never been, and I can't imagine doing it without Google Map. No idea how people in the past did it. For me personally, I could maybe do without other Google services, but without Google Map? Forget it. Actually, Google Search seems irreplaceable either.

<comment><USER8> _I do lots of road trips to places I 've never been, and I can't imagine doing it without Google Map._

You've never heard of Bing Maps, or OpenStreetMap?

Aside from the fact that before 2005 or so, people used to travel to all kinds of fascinating, exotic places around the world with maps made of... get this... paper.

<comment><USER9> Sure, and people used to get around with horses and buggies. But it's not much of an exaggeration to say that for a lot of people in a lot of places, life without the internal combustion engine isn't feasible.

Pointing out that people used to use an inferior tool to do the same thing less effectively is kind of a dumb response to someone mentioning how critical a tool is.

No real disagreement with the Bing/OSM recommendations tho

<comment><USER10> Using a map is not inferior. Quite the opposite. Once thing I noticed with most people who use GPS directions is that they have no idea where they are, no idea of their environment.

When you use a map, you see the geography of the territory as a whole. You know if you go North or North-West, you know what is located near your itinerary and your destination, you know the different possibles ways, which ones are more direct or straight, which ones are longer but less steep and winding (and you know why: because of some geographical obstacle that you will later remember as a landmark as you walk/drive by it), you have a general idea how to recover if you take a wrong direction at some point or if for some reason you have to change your route.

These are quite many points for which the real map is superior.

And please: there is no "critical" tool there.

<comment><USER11> You sound like my grandfather.

Using the mail is not inferior. Quote the opposite. One thing I noticed with most people who use the internet is they have no idea of their environment.

When you use the mail, you get a better understanding of how information travels. You see stamps, feel the paper, get hand cramps when you write too much. You see which post office a letter came from.

These are quite many points for which the real mail is superior.

And please: there is no"critical" tool there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have recently given up Google and most of it's products _. And I find some of the things on this list are not relevant for the average person. Here is my personal list:

Google Search (DuckDuckGo) Gmail (ProtonMail) YouTube (_There's pretty much nothing because of the networking effect YouTube has. But, if you just want something to share videos, there's Media Goblin) Google Drive (NextCloud) Google Keep (Wallabag/Pocket) Google Maps (OpenStreetMap) Google Calendar & Contacts (NextCloud) Google Docs (LibreOffice Online)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the list. Are you running this on a single server and install them manually? How hard do you think this is for the average (somewhat technical) person?

<comment><USER12> Sorry for the late response. Nextcloud is super easy to install. It is as simple as extracting the zip file in your web server directory.

You don't need more hardware to run it either. I have mine running on a raspberry pi 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If someone is interested in kicking Google out of their life, I can recommend reading about how Bryan Lunduke embarked on that mission. He wrote a series of articles in 2015, here are direct links to them:

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2940176/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2940176/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-day-1.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2940569/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2940569/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-part-2-leaving-android-is-not-so- easy.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2941717/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2941717/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-part-3-a-surprise-android-replacement- emerges.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2942161/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2942161/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-part-4-goodbye-gmail.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2946696/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2946696/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-part-5-replacing-google-docs-and- drive.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2949819/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2949819/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-part-6-why-i-prefer-duckduckgo-for- search.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2971168/linux/kicking- go...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2971168/linux/kicking-google-out- of-my-life-part-7-why-i-relapsed-and-will-again-soon.html)

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2977884/opensource- subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2977884/opensource- subnet/kicking-google-out-of-my-life-part-8-will-i-ever-go-back.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Some of these services are roughly interchangeable with competitors; others, not so much.

Vimeo, for example, has nowhere near the (truly insane) variety and depth of YT, content-wise (such that it doesn't even try to compete with them, on that level). If you think you can decide to just "never open a YouTube video, ever"... you're just not going to see a lot of stuff that's happening in the world.

Similarly with Google Docs. Its viability has very little to do with the simple feature of it being a cloud-editable word-like doc -- but rather the fact that it's easily _sharable_ (or "easily enough", provided you have a Google Doc). It's incredibly popular for a whole lot of basic collaboration tasks. If you think you can boycott it... you're just not going to be able to collaborate with a whole lot of people.

Network effects (and in particular, lock-in) are very real. Even though you may not like them very much, pretending that you can just make them go away (by using lesser-known alternatives) just isn't going to work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why was this flagged? It seems relevant to many here and reasonably written.

<comment><USER15> Good question. Seems like people aren't using the flag function responsibly. I would like more transparency on this as well.

It would be cool if the mods would add a required text box for stating the reason something is flagged. HN just makes it too easy to flag something you disagree with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I also don't like how Google makes all this money from advertising and then dumps into their poorly done Google-X projects. That money would be better off spent in the free market it seems.

What is it about Google X that doesn't really lend to either real product development, or even cool tech (of late?). For the amount of money they put into it, I expect a lot more output.

At their core they are still a big company and attract the kinds of people who want to work for a big company. Usually, this at direct odds to people who seek out the startup environment. There are some notable exceptions but the basic premise generally holds true.

<comment><USER17> Please provide some evidence that the majority of Google X projects are "poorly done."

Self-driving cars -> Not only has it become its own company (Waymo) but it also motivated many other companies to tackle the same problem and develop self-driving tech of its own.

Life Sciences, Google Contact Lenses -> Now its own company, Verily.

Google Brain -> I quote Astro Teller "It would be fair to say Google Brain (now called the Neural Network Project) is producing in value for Google something that would be comparable to the total costs of Google X — just that one thing we've spun out." [https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/googles- captain-of...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/googles-captain-of- moonshots-on-making-profits-at-google-x/?_r=0)

Hard science and engineering problems take non-trivial amounts of resources to solve. How many start-ups are tackling the kinds of problems that X is trying to solve?

</comment></comment><comment> Paul-ish I use Android and I'm not interested in messing around with custom ROMs. This really chains me to having a google account unfortunately. I really wish the Firefox phone had worked out. Maybe the Ubuntu phone will succeed there.

<comment><USER18> You don't have to use that account for anything except Google Play. I use Maps and YouTube without being logged in, no GMail. I use Drive for the customers that use it. I don't use Google Now. I do use Google as search engine but in the browser, either Firefox or Opera.

<comment><USER19> Is it possible to use your phone's GPS without sending all data to Google (i.e. enable GPS without also enabling Google Location Services)?

<comment><USER18> I think it depends on the app. I wrote an app that read from the GPS sensor and sent the position to a server of mine. Google didn't get any data. However if you want to use other sources to get a more precise position (example: wifi access points) I think that Google must know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not that Google definitely won't decide to shut down their services (I still remember you, Google Reader!), but I'm extremely hesitant to commit to some alternate services. I've been burned so many times when thinking "ah, what a great service!" and then it vanishes after I've grown used to it an can't imagine my life without it. I'd much rather move to self-hosted for as much as possible. But then that leads to the bother of installing and maintaining things. And then I'm back to being lazy and sticking with Google services. It's my eternal cycle.

</comment><comment><USER21> Would be an interesting project to follow. An even more interesting journey would be to document the entire process and only use/make open source products as a replacement of each Google product.

<comment><USER22> check the French non-profit Framasoft with "degooglisons internet": [https://degooglisons-internet.org/](https://degooglisons-internet.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are any of you familiar with an open source/libre app for public transit routing information that'd replace Google Maps?

<comment><USER24> If your local transit agencies are supported (or you're able to add them to the upstream library they use to collect this data), Transportr seems like a good choice: [https://transportr.grobox.de/](https://transportr.grobox.de/)

Sadly, it doesn't cover any of the agencies in the Bay area, so I've had to rely on Transit (transitapp.com) from the Play Store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just finished most of this transition for my own purposes, with the main difference that I decided to self-host most of the services I was previously using Google for. Some highlights:

* Android: if you really want to divest yourself from Google, Android is going to be a showstopper for any but the most committed people. I'm running LineageOS (nee CyanogenMod) without gapps, using microG as a collection of play services API replacements. While that keeps me from adding a google account to the phone (which is the main thing I'm trying to avoid), I still end up needing something like Yalp Store (available from F-Droid) to download and update Play Store apps, because there are a few I actually can't get by without a huge level of inconvenience. I did all this because I enjoyed the challenge of it; for normal people who aren't intrinsically motivated by this stuff, I suggest buying an iPhone and saving yourself the headache. Seriously.

* Email was the easiest thing to move, and the hardest to get right. I remember when I originally moved my email to Gmail, and noted a marked increase in spam; the same thing happened when I moved off of Gmail last month. A combination of postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, and a lot of tweaking has me mostly back to the point where I was when I was with Google. I've been using Rainloop for a use-anywhere web UI, although I've used Roundcube in the past and was pretty happy with it. On mobile, I'm actually using k9mail, despite how dated it is, because it actually gets IMAP right; both the stock "Email" app and Gmail had sporadic issues with IMAP that I got tired of dealing with.

* Meanwhile, calendaring was the messiest part of the move, mostly because CalDAV is a bit of a mess, and both client and server implementations leave a lot to be desired. I ended up using sabre/dav on the backend because I could tweak and extend it quite a but to do what I need, and because it had baked-in support for CalDAV scheduling, which is something I can't really live without. I'm using DAVdroid on Android for both calendar and contact sync, which is great _except_ for scheduling, which I can't really use. (A combination of what looks to be some misbehavior in davdroid, and android limitations in the calendar API.)

* More calendaring: are you used to having your calendar invites just magically show up in your calendar? Yeah, that's probably not going to work anymore. I'm been writing an itip milter that scans for text/calendar mime parts in incoming email and shoves them in an appropriate caldav store, but it's going to be pretty hacky even if I finish it. ;) If you're looking for better integration here, look at something like Zimbra; it's a huge pain in the ass to run, and it's resource-heavy, but when it's running well it's amazingly polished from the end user's perspective. Or give FastMail some money, because they've been doing this for a long time, and do it really well.

* Docs, photos, file syncing in general: There's a bunch of options here. I almost ended running an instance of NextCloud (nee OwnCloud) for this, because it would cover a few different use cases (document storage, photos, calendaring, contacts, etc), but settled on Syncthing as a general file synchronization tool. I'm hosting a cloud instance that my laptop, mobile devices, etc. can all talk to, as well as an instance on a machine at home, giving me pretty good coverage for on-demand backups. I try to avoid working in heavyweight document formats for personal stuff (markdown and a text editor works for my use case most of the time); for things I have to share or where I need more powerful tools, LibreOffice. I don't have a good photo management solution right now beyond "directory full of photos synced from my phone and camera".

* Books: I had bought a bunch of books on the Play Store. This was a painful lesson in how bad the state of DRM in ebooks is, especially if you don't have a Windows machine lying around. I ended up having to install Adobe Digital Editions under Wine, then used a Calibre plugin to automatically convert DRM'd ebooks via ADE when I have it import them. I share the Calibre collection to my tablet via syncthing, so changes, read positions, etc. sync nicely. (I don't mean to pick on Google on this one; the DRM issue seems to be a mess with every bookseller right now.)

* Music: Exported my music using Music Manager, sync with Syncthing, and access streaming music with Spotify. Done, easy.

* Maps: I use Google Maps, logged out (it's one of the few Google apps that continues to function properly even without a Google account on the device). OsmAnd~ is a great idea, and I use it as a fallback when I'm outside of cell coverage, but I find it almost impossible to use in a day-to-day context (if you have it open gmaps links/intents, it almost never figures out the address I'm looking for, and I've had terrible luck relying on it for navigation). Note that without logging in, you cannot save Google Maps data offline, because apparently gmaps engineers are a little bit spiteful.

* Search: I've defaulted to DuckDuckGo for years. Yes, sometimes I hit "!g" to search Google, but I don't default to them, and haven't for a long time. Also, shock of shocks, bing is getting pretty good.

* Android Pay: I opted out. I have credit and debit cards, and I have cash. Some people might find this to be a deal breaker, I find it hasn't changed my life in any significant way.

* Browsing: Firefox. Not really a change for me.

There's a bunch of smaller one-off services that I've used over time, but those are the big ones from a personal perspective. For some folks, a large chunk of these can be handled by running an instance of NextCloud, and you'll get a polished, fairly integrated experience for the parts they can cover.

At some point, I should probably write this up with more details about the tradeoffs I made with each piece.</comment>


Steve Jobs - is he not being investigated because everyone loves him? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2007/04/26/apple-jobs-1q-2007-earnings/ <comment><USER2> Maybe the problem here is the law. If the intent of the law is to protect the shareholders, lets just dump the law and have the shareholders decide. If they want him punished, they can do that in a number of ways including firing him. If they don't care, thats their prerogative as well. They are, after all, the "victim" if there is one. I think any deception of this kind is a bad thing, and that the shareholders should demand transparency in the management of the company. Maybe the solution would be for Jobs to give back double the amount of stock value for the gain he would have received in the deception as a clear reminder to him and the management in general not to behave in this foolish manner ever again.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a story in NY magazine a few months ago analyzing the option back- dating scandal at Apple.

The author of the piece concluded that because Jobs was so important to the company's worth (the estimate was that if Jobs had to leave the CEO post b/c of legal trouble, the stock price would lose up to half its value in one day), he was not going to be prosecuted, and other executives would take the fall instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, by removing Jobs the SEC would be punishing the very people they claim to protect - the shareholders. However, the SEC doesn't seem to have a problem with this. After all, the massive fines they levy against companies (reducing future shareholder returns) accomplish the same thing.

Regardless, just because Jobs is valuable to the company shouldn't mean he's above the law. It's my understanding that CEOs convicted of securities fraud can still serve their post, assuming their not in jail.

<comment><USER4> It seems not entirely unreasonable for the SEC to enforce a situation where cheating means you and also possibly everybody else loses. It's a bit like a coach saying, if you don't shut up, everybody does fifty pushups; you're more motivated to shut up that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> _you're more motivated to shut up that way._

You're not asking them to shut up. You're asking them to stop stealing from the shareholders. That's what options backdating is - stealing from the company's shareholders.

And by fining companies, the SEC is hurting those shareholders. It's important for the shareholders (you and me) to realize that.

It's like telling a thief: If the police catch you stealing: they're going to fine the victims as punishment. What kind of motivation is that?

<comment><USER4> Well, if it's a choice between that and not punishing cheating period, it might be better to do that. It's a difficult situation, but in general, I'd rather have a system that always punished cheating than one that didn't punish cheating when doing so would have collateral damage, because the latter system means basically that so long as you are important to the company, you're perfectly allowed to cheat.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're definitely right. Like I said in my first post post, Jobs shouldn't be above the law just because he is valuable to Apple.

But try to punish the cheaters, not those who are being cheated. Don't fine the company - fine and/or jail those committing the fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This works both ways. There are lots of laws that are easy to violate and exist almost entirely so unpopular people can get sued (Michael Milken was barred for life from the securities business and fined $600 million for violating an obscure regulation that cost shareholders an estimated $300,000).

Options backdating is tricky, because the cost of backdating is reflected in the company's financial statements whether or not they announce it. It's like paying employees less than standard wages, but giving them lavish perks -- it's all the same on the income statement, so it's closer to PR than to lying.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's just par for the course for super-powerful elites.

Of course others have pointed out that Jobs is so important to Apple that doing anything to him would hurt the shareholders that the laws are supposed to protect, whereas some option backdating -- which isn't even illegal, the problem was a paperwork filing technicality -- did zero harm to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER7> You won't love him if you watch Pirates of Silicon Valley.</comment>


Ask HN: What type of splash page works better? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen the anatomy of a perfect landing page (http://www.formstack.com/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-page). But, I've seen two types of splash pages that have generally worked:
1) Simple straight forward sign-up now page. such as: www.localmind.com and www.dayri.me
2) Content driven splash page. Such as: www.webpop.com and www.thinkfuse.com
So my question is: Which one is more effective? And why?
Thanks in advanced! <comment><USER2> Co-founder of Webpop here. Honored to see our landing as one of your examples :)

We actually had exactly this discussion internally when we created our landing. We even had at least one prototype of the more mysterious kind with little more than a signup form.

I think both can work well, but for our beta we felt it was quite important that our users had an idea about what they signed up for. We're not doing a consumer product, and it wouldn't help us much getting lots of emails from people who would be completely lost when given access to a tool for professional web designers.

I suspect that being more mysterious would work well for sites with more of a social networking or entertainment focus.

<comment><USER3> The mysterious types of landing pages are complete turn-offs for me. If I go somewhere and see a place for my e-mail address with no real information on what I could be signing up for, I just leave and forget.

It takes a strong amount of buzz to override that impulse in me.

<comment><USER2> Feel the same way, but it seems there are quite a few people who are happy to put there email address just about anywhere pretty :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickables:

1) <http://www.localmind.com> and <http://www.dayri.me>

2) <http://www.webpop.com> and <http://www.thinkfuse.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't guess or make assumptions. A/B test both and make a decision based on hard numbers.

<comment><USER2> You need a high level of traffic before you can really start drawing any statistically meaningful conclusions from A/B testing. People don't magically start showing up just because you publish a landing page, so some assumptions are necessary for the first version.

Sites like <http://fivesecondtest.com/> or <http://www.usertesting.com/> are a lot more useful than A/B testing when you're about to launch your first landing.</comment></comment>


How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency - <AUTHOR> http://jshakespeare.com/how-slack-hooks-users-through-artificial-urgency <comment><USER2> Mute all the channels. Ignore messages that don't matter. Configure it to notify you if someone mentions "lunch". Done.

Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.

<comment><USER3> You're going to get a lot of denial, because chatting with colleagues and sharing memes/news is fun -- and hey, it's _related_ to work. And every once in a while, important info is transmitted.

Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't. Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it! That's just the way I am. Whatever works for you, right?" But when it comes to cognitive performance, it's as if the human brain is so diverse that there are no behaviors that objectively impede cognitive functioning in all cases. Multi-tasking _always_ makes _everyone_ less productive. It lowers your (effective) IQ. It makes you slow and dumb. It is also an objective fact that those who multi-task are generally unaware about their drop in cognitive performance. [ * ]

Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.

I wouldn't volunteer to attend a meeting just for fun, nor would I sign up for an open office floorplan, so why spend half the day in a virtual chat when I have work to do.

Once I'm done working, then I can meet with friends at a restaurant or bar, or be on social media.

[ * ] [http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx](http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx)

<comment><USER2> Multi-tasking is insidious because there are plenty of people who can sustain productivity whilst spending a significant amount of time on Slack; their acceptable level of production blinds them to just how much further ahead they could get without Slack(and other distractions), and it can cause others to feel ashamed for their lack of performance. I keep a presence on Slack and do some of the usual fun stuff, but have taken the steps I outlined after I continued to discover just how much of a penalty gets imposed on the brain when it has to frequently switch contexts.

> Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask > someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you > that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in > charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no > well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything > left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.

What you said here is a very astute observation. I'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall.

To be fair, people hate those sorts of physical meetings because they usually don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved. Even when Slack is a distraction, there is a perceived redeeming value to the lack of productivity because posting a meme or a poignant joke can make one appear to be more funny in general. True, a person's Slack persona can affect how others perceive that person in real life, but then you have to wonder just what you're getting for impressing these particular people. TLDR; people actually hate formality.

As I stated before, coworkers are not your friends. I say this as someone who works with an unusually friendly team. We pay Mario Kart after work every few weeks, and we sometimes hang on Saturdays to chill and play Civ V. In fantasy land, these people are my friends. In reality, that friendship would sublimate instantly if I ever left the company. I've never experienced otherwise. It's friendship in the most superficial sense, which isn't a bad thing, but people with similarly _friendly_ coworkers shouldn't sacrifice energy they'd be devoting to their craft for the sake of cultivating fake friendships.

<comment><USER3> _I 'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall._

That's kind of you! Now I wish I'd cleaned it up a bit.

 _they usually don 't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved._

Yes, that's true. Online interactions have this extra layer of karma collection (whether explicit or implicit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It's a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house > party.

I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.

<comment><USER5> Do people not turn them back on?

<comment><USER6> People gravitate toward other people at parties, and if the light's off and nobody's in the room, there's not much incentive to go in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't disagree with the article's premise that Slack hijacks your brain, but as someone who worked for a far-flung company that didn't have Slack, and instead relied on email/phone/web meetings, I NEVER want to go back to that.

<comment><USER8> Even less extreme, I worked at an all remote company that primarily used Skype (pre-Slack). I don't want to go back to that.

<comment><USER9> Skype had one benefit: it was easier to add folks to your DM. Other than that, Slack is better. It's essentially Skype++ for us. Bots ... well they never really did much.

<comment><USER10> More like IRC++, but I read you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When does a conversation stop being about a tool or a platform and become about how it's used?

Slack is not perfectly opinionated. It does not enforce a single way of working on everyone that uses it. One of the weakest areas I have found on HN has been discussion around organizations and how they function. New tools, like Slack, open new doors, but they are not silver bullets. Switching to Slack doesn't solve inherent organizational problems, bad organizational habits, poor management practices, or unrealistic (or misaligned) expectations.

We don't blame email for the emails your boss sends you at 2 in the morning.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product, it's unfair to expect users to accept all the responsibility of mitigating against that. Software companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their success, just usage statistics. So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of working, but it is engineered to consume as much of people's time as possible, for better or worse.

Jason Fried wrote his in his (much more comprehensive) post about group chat pros/cons:

"It's common in the software industry to blame the users. It's the user's fault. They don't know how to use it. They're using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren't intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it's the tool's fault, not the user's fault. If the design leads to stress, it's a bad design."

([https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you- sweat-74...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you- sweat-744659addf7d))

<comment><USER11> > I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a > way as to make people dependent on their product

It's a chat client. It's an addictive medium. It sounds to me like you're shooting the messenger.

Skype, Hangouts, or any IM client wants your attention. Slack is just a better version of all the other IM clients I've used (for work).

If you don't want to be disturbed you close Slack.

I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a problem in the culture of where you work.

Where I work, individual @ mentions are barely used, maybe 0-5 per day. But there's nothing that's written in stone, or ever been discussed, it's just that colleagues respect each other's focus. Then the rest is less important that all can be ignored unless you're not concentrating on something.

<comment><USER12> It can be a little of both.

> I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a > problem in the culture of where you work.

One can work somewhere that has a problem in the culture, and Slack can make that worse. It's been interesting to me to observe when my company changed from hipchat to slack, my productivity went down until I recognized how slack was messing me up (because of the default UI patterns it came with) and I've had to unwind that by changing a bunch of settings and patterns.

It's been a similar change when I moved from a company that used email and tickets for team communication, to one that uses chat.

Yes, the culture if the heart of the problems, but the tools can amplify those problems.

It's like if you can't cut a piece of wood effectively with a handsaw, but I give you a power saw, you may soon have much bigger problems on your hands. (or hand, if you really mess it up)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing. My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only, mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for non-primary teams, and unsubscribe from threads as soon as I'm done in them.

As mentioned elsewhere, if I don't want to do something straight away, I star it for the next morning's run through my starred list, or if it's more particular than that set a reminder or something. It's really not too bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Iit's telling that so many people are commenting in this thread about how Slack isn't that bad because you can customize it to be less attention- grabbing. The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty, but Slack is still a product that is sold for money by a company. It's not in their interests to make it align with your existing workflow if they can upend that workflow entirely. No one's making money from you having a meeting or sending a well thought out email, so I think it's worth being cynical when considering paid alternatives.

I think it's also worth remembering that for hacker type folks like us, customizing software is the norm. But default settings are default for a reason, and they will inevitably end up being the most commonly used. When everyone else in your company expects you to use Slack they way do, i.e. for 8 hours a day with instantaneous reply times, then it becomes hard to push against that and eventually it becomes the status quo

<comment><USER14> > The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of > the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty

But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted, I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not using the settings to the fullest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, artificial urgency is the status quo of modern application design and development. A successful app often takes several cues from gambling, wherein the user gets a dopamine hit with a new notification, and is encouraged to check periodically for the possibility of another hit.

</comment><comment><USER16> Slack for work mostly sucks. It's OK for communities where urgency is obviously not there -- basically as an alternative IRC. I have worked at a couple companies that used IRC. They beauty of IRC is no offline notifications (unless you're using a cloud service, I guess) -- so it was only used during the workday.

I'm not sure if this is the case with other teams, but I've been noticing my team has been using public channels less and less lately, and I guess most slack-based communication must happen in private messages. We could probably change to a traditional IM client and not have to deal with Slack anymore.

<comment><USER17> no offline notifications ... just filter it out.

If slack is only used during the work day then you would have the exact same application without the nice CI/file sharing and all the other bots slack has

How would you change the IM client??? Make it like slack. Just use slack.

"Slack for work mostly sucks." ... Whats your point? People use it after work hours?

Slack is not basically an alternative to IRC it IS an alternative, a better more feature rich one.

Slack has more features than IRC so slack sucks ... this typical tradition speak, fearful of new things. Many techies dont need slack but for those that have yet to take on the message app craze Slack is catalyzing a lot of new non techies.

<comment><USER16> I guess I hit a nerve. FWIW I've been using Slack since 2014, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with it or have been shunning new technologies. I do like it for communities. I just don't like it for work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "What lures people to Slack in the first place is its ability to manufacture > an artificial sense of urgency..."

I think it would be far more accurate to say that it's due to a lack of other products that as easy to use for so many.

I've considered putting my internet savvy parents on Slack, and they are well into their retirement years.

I don't think Slack is addicting as much as most humans enjoy contact with other humans. We are wired to be social. It helped us survive and thrive. Slack et al is simply a symptom of that wiring.

<comment><USER17> i agree but even a nice thing and a more innovative application of slack is making the anti social become social.

If you dont like seeing people face to face and you still need to communicate with team members slack has the ability to be flexible enough to communicate many different ideas very accurately. With bots and file sharing slack is the one stop collaboration board (along with google docs for co file editing)

and for people that are social or non technical slack has that friendly feeling ... its has taken exactly what we have been hoping from the internet , efficient communication and sharing and made it be homey instead of cold.

Slack is just another message board for tech guys but to the rest of the people tech guys have to communicate with (and would want to make this communication as fast and accurate as possible) slack is a world of difference from other chat services.

They took good tech and added the human touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I agree with this article in general, I do believe the distractiveness of Slack can be mitigated by disabling notifications on certain channels while keeping them open on others.

<comment><USER20> It the same reason I close email and chat apps during periods of work to get stuff done.

You have to create and control your own context switches. I also disable email notifications on my cell. This let's me check email outside of work but doesn't force it into my view every moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated alerts

<comment><USER22> Sure, but there are still two major problems IMHO. Firstly, there's no practical and intentional workflow to postpone things (an equivalent of "mark as unread"). Secondly, because a majority of people responds to notifications immediately, it becomes socially unacceptable to not do it in a timely manner.

<comment><USER17> that last one is a feature , that last one is what the company was hoping for when deploying it in your org. Its that feature that makes it actually useful

What good is a messaging app that keeps you from communicating with me. The whole reason we have this app is for us to communicate, quicker and easier.

"Socially unacceptable" ... maybe you are neglecting some important communication? If your answer is no then you should discuss your availability with your team about your slack hours. Its fine to trun off the email and slack. When when you are one work time slack/email make communication better/easier. You should not blame or allow slack to employ a standard you would not be comfortable with even if slack was not invented (ex: your boss calls you at on the phone at 7pm, if thats not ok then you should also tell your boss you dont answer slack after 7pm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I never really understood the hype around Slack. I keep reading articles like this one, I constantly hear people saying "zomg we transitioned to Slack and are having such an awesome time, it's way better then [insert messaging app]!".

I'm probably getting old, but I've been using it for about 3-4 years now (because work) and it seems just like a polished IRC client tied to a proprietary service to me.

<comment><USER23> You say "IRC" to your marketing or sales cohorts and enjoy the contorted face they make.

It's not just a dancey, polished IRC. It _is_ a dancey, polished IRC that invites people from all backgrounds to use it and enjoy it. As a communications glue for a company, I find it to be very valuable in talking not just with other developers, but other departments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love the bot integration with Slack... the ability to follow git commits, build errors, new user signups in an aggregate event view.

Plus, having the ability to comment in response to system events.

But I've worked with some Slack teams that spend hours attempting to communicate via animated GIFs. #InstantMute

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel like the premise of this article is wrong because does slack really care how much you use it? Don't they just get $$$ per seat. They just want businesses to keep buying. This is opposed to Facebook where their business is keeping users engaged.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think personal comms + general channel announcements are OK. Just close slack and when you come back check any specific communications for you asynchronously, or if you want to catch up on "what's been up" you can browse message threads.

On the other hand @here/@channel messages are terrible! Now these are terrible because they confuse the "broadcast" nature messages with personal messages.

<comment><USER11> Then surely agree with the people at your work to never use @channel. It's basically the same as 'Reply All', it's a waste of everyone's time.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I've started to persecute the offenders individually by telling them privately how disruptive their @here messages are.

It's weird though, because sometimes I want to announce things to everyone, e.g., to bring to everyone's attention something that I've done, but I have to follow my own do-not-spam everyone rule.

I guess comms is hard no matter what tools you use. O(n^2) hard, for a team of n people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >> I have probably spent thousands of hours of my life using it. And yet I have absolutely nothing tangible to show for this.

It seems we should have at least as much to show as other forms of group comms tools.

Re urgency : same applies. a group should set standards for urgency based on various human and project needs. Point is these should be set my people not the tool.

</comment><comment><USER28> You also have to take into account is that chatting is how the younger colleagues want to collaborate. Just like email replaced phone calls, chat apps are supplanting email. What's next? Bots.</comment>


Coinbase raises $100M at a $1.6B valuation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/10/coinbase-raises-100m-at-a-1-6b-valuation-amid-explosive-growth/ <comment><USER2> dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14981007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14981007)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just imagine how much they would have raised if they've done an ICO! :)</comment>


Rover acquires DogVacay in all-stock deal - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/rover-dogvacay-merge/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting in that it's written like an acquihire with no price published but they say investors are "extremely happy".

> Further terms of the deal were not disclosed, but "all of our investors are > extremely happy with their return," claimed DogVacay founder Aaron > Hirschhorn.</comment>