This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3009577/open-company/this-is-what-happens-when-publishers-invest-in-long-stories/ <comment><USER2> The site appears to have Google Analytics placed multiple times into its source code. This messes up tracking and artificially dramatically drops bounce rates.

In my experience working with content sites, the real bounce rate reduction you see in moving from shorter articles to longer ones is closer to 5% or so - from, say, 77% to 72%. Still dramatic, but not nearly as dramatic as the drop you'll get by double-inserting GA code.

<comment><USER3> I'm not seeing multiple inserts per page, and I checked their 'stub' pages as well. They only have GA in the head.

<comment><USER4> _utm.gif is apparently requested 3 times with the same google analytics account id.

<comment><USER3> _utm.gif is the generic way that Google Analatics communicates back with its servers---there's no rest API.

So if you're doing things like event tracking, without counting the event as a page view, then you'll still see another request to _utm.gif

They appear to have one normal _trackPageView call in the header, then one or more other calls coming from within minimized JavaScript files.

Here's one:

         _gaq.push(["_trackEvent", e, t, n.toString(), parseInt(r, 10), !0])

This is the signature for _trackEvent

        _trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

!0 evaluates to true in javascript so this event is marked as non-interactive, and thus doesn't count as an extra page view and won't be used in bounce-rate calculations.

Presuming the other calls are identical, then their reported bounce rate should be correct.

<comment><USER4> Looking at the two additional requests, they do currently have the utmni parameter, marking them as non-interactive.

However, the top comment references Google Analytics events on scroll that don't appear to be there now. One of FastCo.Labs folks also made the following comment:

      This made me curious as well. It turns out there was a
      technical change made at around the same time that is
      going to account for some of it. We're running an
      experiment now and will update with results.

I don't see the update from him. Given all of this, I would guess that they were triggering events incorrectly and have since fixed it (the article is 3 months old).

<comment><USER5> That's extremely embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since I became wedded to my Kindle for consuming journalism thanks to the superb sites such as [http://longreads.org](http://longreads.org) and [http://longform.org](http://longform.org) * my reading time has exploded, plus I pay for services where possible as I am in need of their curation. Since using these sites I feel better informed about the world and I have a deep, deep respect for longform journalists. I'd love to see this stub idea extend to the Kindle being able to manage updates - it seems to be an exiting idea for readers and journalists alike and I'd willingly pay a subscription.

*fixed url typo

Also - these sites can send articles directly to my Kindle email, or I use the Readability plugin to right-click on any url and have the contents delivered on demand.

<comment><USER7> Yup, I feel the same way. With Instapaper and my Kindle I'm spending a _lot_ more time reading articles.

If you're interested, I recently started curating my picks here: [http://esd.io/worthreading/](http://esd.io/worthreading/) Some I got from longform/longreads, others I "discovered" on my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love it that these guys are experimenting with content and analytics but the stats look contradictory.

Bounce rate is 1- n_visits_with_more_than_one event/n_visits.

The default GA setup doesn't register any events except page views so "more than one event" means more than one page view.

However the charts in this article showed that while the bounce rate fell, the average pages per visit stayed constant. For bounce rate to drop you'd expect pages per visit to rise... unless there's also a new event being fired.

My guess (as suggested by some commenters here before me) is that they shipped some type of event which fires for a fraction of visitors - scrolling a certain distance down the page perhaps.

If this event fires, the visit won't (by default) count as a bounce. it will also effect time-on-site. Time on site is normally zero _unless_ you visit another page or fire an event. In this case it's determined by the time of the last page view or event that google registers. If they did ship an "on 400px scroll" event (for instance) then for each visitor for whom the event fires for, the "time on site" will be registered as the time of the event.

For my money, I think that bounce rates for content-driven sites _should_ actually be set by a threshold time-on-site. Most visitors don't read more than one page so it's a very weak indicator of a "bounce". Someone could read for 10 minutes and still count as a bounce which isn't a fair appraisal of a very successful article. The raw "bounce metric" makes sense for a transactional site where onepage view == no Revenue but makes little sense for a site where one ten minute read of an article is exactly what the author hopes for.

<comment><USER9> A content site wants them to explore and traverse the rest of the site.

An article that gets read is a success for the article, not for the publisher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous discussion of this item: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689157)

</comment><comment><USER4> There's obviously something wrong with the numbers. It's too dramatic of a change, both in terms of magnitude and in immediacy, for it to be due to a simple content tweak.

Pages/Visit is stable yet Bounce Rate suddenly dropped significantly.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is critical to understand what you are measuring. I see misunderstanding constantly, particularly with GA. Were events being fired prior, because they are now. That alone could account for this behavior.

There are many nuances in regard to how metrics are measured in GA. It is often the case that people think it is measuring one thing, when it is measuring something completely different. I've posted this before, but this GitHub project explains/addresses some of it: [https://github.com/rockymadden/gap](https://github.com/rockymadden/gap)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it necessary to change the URL with each new addition (while keeping that ID the same)? I didn't really get that part.

If so, is there any Wordpress plugin that helps you do that, or how could you achieve that?

<comment><USER13> Having a different URL for each update would allow them to track readers' entry points into the article at a finer-grained level than if there was just one URL.

Not sure about plugins for Wordpress but I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already started working on one.

Regarding the multiple URLs I wonder if it is more just so that they can be posting what look like new stories that ultimately just lead back to these long form story series.

<comment><USER14> The reference number seems to act as a permalink, so

[http://www.fastcolabs.com/3009577/](http://www.fastcolabs.com/3009577/)

leads to the original article, and I assume will continue to link to the article as they add content.

I wonder how the _adding_ of new content rather than the reorganisation and re-editing of the article will work from the point of view of prose style?

<comment><USER12> But isn't that the same as the automatic redirect you have in Wordpress when you change the URL of the post anyway? I'm trying to understand if there's any advantage to having this number stub over how WP redirects the URL's, but I don't think there is one. You're still going to get redirected links either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even assuming the analytics are correct, what is the value in driving down bounce rate? Lower bounce rate doesn't inherently mean more revenue.

I can, of course, use my imagination. But I am more interested in reading why a lower bounce rate is the future for media revenue. The quote near the end from Vox CEO is the best part of the article, but even it doesn't make the bounce = revenue connection explicit.

I will also add that, if those analytics are correct, that is a crazy-low bounce rate. A 50-60% bounce rate seems super strong to me. Dipping well below 50% seems unlikely for any site with significant traffic coming from disparate sources.

</comment><comment><USER16> How exactly do they track if people actually read the entire article? Merely based on time?

<comment><USER17> Google Analytics can track pages and average time spent on page. It can even track visitors flow.

Everyone should get an analytics account and see the insane amount of things that Google can track for YOU, for FREE with just three lines of extra code on your page.

<comment><USER11> It ONLY tracks the latter if they click on another page. A huge difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quote: "So, it's like having many URLs and many headlines which lead back to the same big, multi-faceted article."

Translation: old wine in new bottles.

</comment><comment><USER19> So much for ever shortening attention spans.

<comment><USER20> Good riddance.

If this becomes a business case to bring back something closer to real journalism, it is a good day. The NSA/prism story is really well-suited to this format. Connect the Guardian interview to administration concessions to POTUS conference. Would have been more valuable to the public than the soap- opera story that developed around Snowden's asylum seeking.</comment></comment>


E-learning proves a real class act during outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/25/WS5e546866a310128217279f88.html <comment><AUTHOR> Tens of millions of students are now using this app, DingTalk by Alibaba: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dingtalk/id930368978](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dingtalk/id930368978). [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507) has prior discussion when it was launching.</comment>


Facebook made me choose between being a mom or a data scientist - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/i-am-a-data-scientist-and-mom-but-facebook-made-me-choose/amp <comment><USER2> They give so many parents so many resources (not just the 5k for having a baby or the 155k annual salary +4 months leave) i don't understand why she is complaining when there is already so much support.</comment>


'Hitler Tamed by Prison' (1924) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/04/03/new-york-times-in-1924-hitler-tamed-by-prison/ <comment><USER3> Prison did in fact convince Hitler that armed rebellion was not an effective means to seizing power in post-WWI Germany. He had been jailed for the "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich, which had in turn been inspired by Mussolini's successful "March on Rome".

After his release he decided to focus instead on gaining power through the political system, an effort that was ultimately successful.

So prison "tamed" him in that sense, but of course it did nothing to reduce his political ambitions. If anything the opposite appears to be true - <USER2> wrote "Mein Kampf" in prison, which laid out his vision for what the German state should look like, including such details as gaining "lebensraum" \- more living space for the Germans in the East.

<comment><USER4> Yesterday I was in a theatre for a unique showing (at least where I live) of a documentary on greece's golden dawn party rise to power (they have 17 (18 at first) people in the parliament). Party leaders clearly stated that votes is the path to power and legitimacy. They know this and they use the argument in the rethoric: wer are nationalist, not neo-nazy or racists and people do vote for us.

The fact they are neonazis... I don't see the connection with grabing power through elections (I mean, it's not a neonazy strategy... any parties can do that). But they read mein kampf. But again, I don't know how it plays out in their violence and their conceptions of the state. And yet the parrallels ar striking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that the article seems to state that Hitler AND Luddendorf had led the Beer Hall Putsch, as my understanding is that he sorta fell into it and was pawned.

While Luddendorf was certainly in agreement of Hitler's rhetoric re: restoring Germany's former military might, my understanding was that Luddendorf's role in the Beer Hall Putsch consisted of Hitler waving a gun at him, putting him in another room when he refused to join his movement, and announcing to the audience gathered at the Beer Hall that he Luddendorf had agreed to lead the rebellion.

Luddendorf then agreed to it when he saw the support, and the following day when shooting broke out at a police standoff with some couple thousand Nazi's, Luddendorf strode through the volley of bullets to the police line where he surrendered himself promptly.

Or atleast that was the narrative that was presented to me in William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

It still amazes me today how anyone could walk away from such an incredibly embarrassing failure as the Beer Hall Putsch, but it seems to have been something of an acceptable occurrence at the time. I mean, Hitler often spoke as death as the only alternative to him achieving his revolution, but ran off after the first shot was fired to his country home!

Hitler was even received well when he was tried, and given a very lenient sentence. I guess for Germany coming out of WWI, violence was a far more acceptable and commonplace thing than it is in my world

<comment><USER6> Makes me think of similar events that played out in Japan.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_Incident)

<comment><USER7> > Aside from the murder of the prime minister, the attempted coup d'état came > to nothing, and the rebellion as a whole proved a failure. The participants > took a taxi to the police headquarters and surrendered themselves to the > Kempeitai without a struggle.

Did they wore clown shoes too? This seems almost to silly to be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How well known was Hitler in Germany at this point? He was a relative nobody in WWI, so I'm curious how he can have been a 'demi-god' just 5 years or so later.

<comment><USER9> He was an absolute nobody in WWI.

After WWI, the political situation in Germany was pretty volatile. Lots of extreme politics. Hitler started giving talks about German politics and how Jews were to blame for everything. At this point, his only income was a soldier's pension iirc.

He was the 55th person to join the Nazi party (he later forged his membership card to say he was #7). But the Nazi leadership (more organizers at that point) were impressed with Hitler's speaking abilities and thought they could use him to promote the party. So they started setting him up at different venues and events.

He developed a reputation for being a guy with strong opinions about politics and his speeches were pretty entertaining for people, so more showed up. All of this was pretty local to Munich at this point.

Eventually Hitler and some of his friends got this idea that they could overthrow the government, hence the Beer Hall Putsch. He wasn't really famous at the time, but he was a popular figure in certain circles, so when the Putsch failed, he was sent to prison instead of being executed for treason.

In prison he wrote Mein Kampf, essentially painting himself as a figure who loved Germany persecuted by a government that had sold Germany to foreign powers. As a best selling author, he became a celebrity.

Ian Kershaw's Hitler Hubris and Nemesis is really good if you're interested in the topic.

<comment><USER10> > _painting himself as a figure who loved Germany persecuted by a government > that had sold Germany to foreign powers_

I wonder just how popular the "sold homeland to foreign powers" narrative was throughout history. Kind of reminds me of the sentiment some of the people I know have towards the situation in Poland - the narrative is that all our industry was sold off to foreigners and that the government should reverse this process to bolster the economy.

<comment><USER11> Today the only country in the world that never sold anything to foreigners is North Korea, and it's not a shining model of prosperity.

<comment><USER12> That's not even true, North Korea has many exports. It exports raw materials, textiles, and garments "above board" to China and South Korea. It exports technology and weapons less legally. Drugs, counterfeit currency and pharmaceuticals, small arms, ballistic missiles, fighter jets, etc.

<comment><USER13> While I understand you are listing things in a general sort of way and may not quite mean it but I'd love to see a source that they export (or have developed manufacturing capability) for a fighter jet or jet engine

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> fake news since 1924 :)

</comment><comment><USER15> peace in our time

<comment><USER16> __for __our time.

I just learned this yesterday: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Certainly the authors of that story put in a lot of spin and opinion that did the article a disservice- Should have stuck to the facts.

<comment><USER18> Pure "fact-based" reporting is in no way a solution.

For example, take the following paragraph; "The Fukushima Daiichi reactors suffered a disaster in 2011, causing dangerous radiation leakage. Even six years later, radiation levels are high enough to be instantly fatal. Even brief exposure can cause genetic damage leading to cancer. The radioactive dust from the disaster has been carried eastward, and has been detected throughout the United States. This radioactive dust has likely been deposited in millions of houses across the country. However, the United States has no plans to initiate a domestic cleanup."

There are only facts in that paragraph, but it paints a very misleading picture of a domestic emergency that simply doesn't exist (the domestic radiation levels are so low as to be harmless to humans). Pure "fact" reporting doesn't solve this problem.

<comment><USER19> If you included additional fact that the domestic radiation is not fatal, it does solve the problem.

<comment><USER20> That is the point. Simply by choosing which facts to mention and which to omit you can create an extremely biased news piece.

<comment><USER19> Omission of facts is not reporting the facts. That's the point.

<comment><USER21> Yes it is.

How the hell do you report ALL the facts in any scenario?

Any publication in existance will have to pick and choose what to report in order to keep a article to a manageable level.

Do you think Scientific Abstracts are all factually correct? Hell no. There is actually a very well known issue with scientific experiments and articles where scientists will simply repeat experiments until they get a result that is within acceptable p-values and simply submit an article on that one experiment, ignoring every single time it was wrong.

<comment><USER22> You don't need to report ALL the facts. You just need to report the pertinent ones. And the fact that domestic radiation is not fatal is pretty fucking pertinent to the passage in the OP.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A prescription for the newspaper industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacbee.com/846/story/1784911.html <comment><USER2> This is drivel. The author labels Google "pirates" for linking to AP content and states that there would be no online marketplace for music if the RIAA hadn't sued napster, even though the pirated music marketplace is vastly larger than it was in 1999.

A prescription for newspapers is specialization. Let the AP be replaced by a looser agreement for content sharing between sources. Every paper focuses fiercely on its locality.

And hire some people that understand BOTH journalim and the web.</comment>


Job Post – Hiring My First Employee At $3.00/Hr - <AUTHOR> http://guitarwithrob.com/fun/job-post-hiring-my-first-employee-at-3-00hr/

<comment><USER2> Believe it or not, but $3.00/hr is a decent per hour wage in some countries. Congrats on the first employee and good luck with your project Rob!</comment>


Ask HN: I'm going to CouchConf NYC. Where should I stay? - <AUTHOR>

I'll be attending Couchbase's CouchConf in New York City on October 24th.
I've never been to NYC and am wondering if anyone who lives there or has travelled extensively in NYC can recommend a good place to stay that's within walking distance of the conference.
I've read reviews, etc. but nothing beats a first-hand recommendation!  Thanks!
The conference is happening at Sentry Center, 730 Third Avenue (Midtown East), 17th Floor. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link to conference website: <http://www.couchbase.com/couchconf-nyc>

</comment><comment><USER2> Try Airbnb, I'm currently at an apartment I rented in NYC for a few weeks. So far so good, the subway system is great.

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI, New York has a very good subway system, it doesn't strictly need to be walking distance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I found a place to stay!

</comment><comment><USER4> what price range?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have included that. I'd prefer to pay no more than ~$300 (max is $350) a night before taxes but obviously if I can get something decent for less that would be great. It's just going to be me.

<comment><USER4> The Roosevelt Hotel is at 45th and Madison, ~3 blocks away from your venue, and in that range. It's fairly nice - rooms are small, but clean and sufficient. I've gotten priceline bookings there a couple of times which turned out to be a good deal. In general, if you're not too picky, I'd suggest trying priceline (being sure to select a 3 or 4-star place and specifying the location precisely.)</comment></comment></comment>


Carnegie Mellon's Mayhem AI Wins DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/05/carnegie-mellons-mayhem-ai-takes-home-2-million-from-darpas-cyber-grand-challenge/ <comment><USER2> Hey guys, member of the (currently unverified) third place team, Shellphish. If anyone has any questions, I (or another member of my team) would be glad to answer them. We'll also be giving a talk at DEF CON on Sunday after the CTF ends, where we'll be open sourcing our CRS!

<comment><USER3> What kind of AI was involved in your and competitors systems?

<comment><USER2> If you mean AI in the sense of neural networks, Bayesian inference, etc., absolutely none in our CRS :) In retrospect, we could have made some better decisions about when to patch by using some of the simpler "AI" methods, but in terms of the actual core exploiting and defending, there's not much research into using AI in security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's funny that Brumley's first-place-winning robot CTF team is going to be competing against his first-place-winning human CTF team at DEFCON.

The DARPA team is headed up by professor David Brumley. He also leads the Carnegie Mellon CTF hacker group PPP (Plaid Parliament of Pwning) that often wins at DEFCON's CTFs. This article mentioned that the Mayhem robot is going to be battling the human CTF players at DEFCON. I wonder who he'll be rooting for.

<comment><USER5> As of this afternoon when I walked by Mayhem was in last place, and PPP was in second place

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just came from a full day of talks at DEF CON, and a highlight for me was how the CGC servers were all lit up on stage behind the speakers of one room of the con [1]. It was incredibly stylish and impressive.

[1] [https://twitter.com/joey_rideout/status/761710072237961216?s...](https://twitter.com/joey_rideout/status/761710072237961216?s=09)

</comment><comment><USER7> Video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xek4OcScCh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xek4OcScCh4)

</comment><comment><USER8> This was a really amazing competition. Imagine running symbolic analysis and fuzzing like integration tests as part of a deploy process, then having fixes proposed algorithmically when a vulnerability is discovered.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought that the production of the competition was extraordinary. Seeing everything lit up on stage was straight out of a movie (in a good way). I thought that the event itself at Defcon was super weird, though. A lot of people, myself included, assumed that the event was going to be more real- time. In reality, the servers had been competing for hours already.

That being said, huge props to these amazing teams. It was so fascinating to see how each system reacted to the same situations and then either hunkered down to protect itself or go on the offensive. Really amazing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> I tried browsing the Darpa challenge's website to know more, but I couldn't find any information. Could someone please post a link to a detailed description of the challenge?

<comment><USER5> It is basically computers playing Capture the Flag (CTF) against each other. They are given binary programs with security flaws. They need to identify the flaws automatically and develop a patch for their own system. At the same they go out to crash the other teams. Normally humans do this, but the darpa challenge was to have computer systems do it autonomously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm really surprised they didn't call it Black Ice :-)

That is a pretty amazing result all in all. So at what point do we combine it with DeepMind and have something that owns the Internet?

</comment><comment><USER12> The Mayhem is also competing in the CTF.

<comment><USER13> It's not doing that hot - currently last place, but not very far back in terms of points.

However (and impressively), it did patch at least one bug in a task (LEGIT_00007) before any other human team did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am very impressed by the visualisations - super computers churning data for visualisations!

</comment><comment><USER15> >Not the nicest thing to say about a champion AI that just took first place in an incredibly sophisticated virtual game

what? This was special olympics of CTF. All AI teams played at the same, terribad level, score differences were minimal.</comment>


Hey Apple, let's make better Map apps - <AUTHOR> http://mousebirdconsulting.blogspot.com/2015/06/geospatialkit-suggestion-for-apple.html

<comment><AUTHOR> From a technical perspective, Apple Maps is fine. There are some data problems, but then it's a gigantic task.

The perception that every map app must be google maps is honestly part of the problem. A winner take all approach is not working well for developers or consumers.

So circling back to my own post there, I'm saying break the technology into bite sized pieces so iOS developers can have a crack at it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Possibly the worst tool I've seen come out of Apple has been their Maps app. Useless and constantly malfunctioning, but hey, at least it's pretty. Can't even delete the app from your device!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How Apple could make geospatial apps (maps, mostly) faster, better & cooler to develop.</comment>


What are some new ideas for hiring software engineers? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lifeinafolder/not-so-crazy-ideas-for-hiring-software-engineers-ea5684298502#.92t5avqry <comment><AUTHOR> What new practices or questions are people adopting to improve their interviews?</comment>


Q & A with Shutterfly Data Architect about MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.nosqldatabases.com/main/2011/1/6/q-a-with-kenny-gorman-data-architect-for-shutterfly-inc.html

<comment><USER2> Both this interview and the post ([http://www.nosqldatabases.com/main/2010/12/9/sharing- lifes-j...](http://www.nosqldatabases.com/main/2010/12/9/sharing-lifes-joy- using-mongodb-a-shutterfly-case-study.html)) summarizing his presentation at MongoSV are worth a read for a few reasons:

\- Great use case for MongoDB. Shutterfly is using MongoDB to store the metadata (folder paths, tags, etc) for all uploaded pictures. This falls into one of of the sweet spots for MongoDB - dealing with large amounts of semi- structured data.

\- Why MongoDB matters to relational database users (Kenny is a long time Oracle and Postgres user, and worked at eBay/PayPal).

\- What the path could look like for migrating large mission-critical applications from a RDBMS to MongoDB (or any NoSQL database).

\- Assessment of pros and cons of putting MongoDB into production.

(disclaimer: I work with the MongoDB/10gen team)</comment>


Ask HN: MOOC Opportunities? - <AUTHOR>

MOOCs (and other factors) will cause major changes in the higher education market. It seems like a ripe time to pursue new opportunities in this space.
For instance, one idea I've been mulling over is a network of teachers/mentors that can provide the more personal support that MOOCs are missing. This support could either be online or with in-person "classes". I realize there are a number of Meetups associated with  Coursera and Udacity but these are missing the teacher/mentor component.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you think the higher ed market will unfold [1] and about any opportunities you think will emerge from the changes taking place.
---
[1] I don't think it's quite right to treat the higher ed market as a uniform market. There are many different types of universities and colleges (private versus public, research versus teaching, top tier versus lower tier). And there is quite a bit of diversity within each university/college; e.g., CS department vs. art history. <comment><USER2> Like you say, there would be quite few opportunities in this area. Few I can think of:

1\. Teaching students how to teach well. In a shared learning environment, those who could teach will be rewarded in some way.

2\. There are a million of niche subjects that need to be taught, how do you teach them using the best tools of mooc?

3\. Accelerated learning: how do you find the students who can benefit from it and what value can you offer them?

4\. How do you create and monetize value through shared group projects?

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out what the Minerva Project is doing. It will combine online courses with physical "campuses" around the world where students will have access to peers, mentors, and maybe internship opportunities (the socializing part of college that's equally as valuable as the knowledge, IMO).</comment>


Ask HN: How have you dealt with a team that is afraid of refactoring? - <AUTHOR> When in a position where your company culture embraces code quality, TDD, and other best practices, but some team members seem afraid to refactor in case of breakages, how have you approached shifting the team towards continuous improvement?<p>As I am fairly new on the team, my approach has been to add more and better unit tests, and slowly improve the code via small refactors, and let the results show themselves. This seems like a very long game to play, however, and I'm not sure if it will succeed. <comment><USER2> Almost every team I've worked on has explicitly forbid refactoring, as well as any check in not directly in service to an approved feature addition or bug fix. And the bug fixes generally need to be minimal. A long time ago, I believed I might get somewhere by promoting refactoring. That got me nowhere. Then, I believed it would be best to quit and find a team that liked refactoring. But I didn't find any teams like that. Now, I mostly work alone, so I don't have to give a hoot what the rest of you are doing or fretting about anymore :)

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty much working alone too and I refactor often! There are pros and cons to working alone to be sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are several things you mentioned that I'd encourage you to continue to parse. Breakage, test coverage and code [quality] improvement are three areas you mentioned.

The assumption that refactor leads to breakage doesn't have to be true. It might be, if you are coding in a live environment, if you aren't feature / issue branching, if you aren't breaking up coding work into modular pieces, or any other number of scenarios. If that's the case, the benefits of a modern workflow should be discussed and a new process introduced. Baby steps.

Thorough tests may be a side of a high quality code base. But, the value of them is about reducing bugs / errors. Start with that and lead by example. Once again, have a discussion about the value of adding something.

Same with code quality...however you define it.

Now, since you are new, it seems like you've worked other places that were engineering enlightened and you want to show everyone a better way. Be careful so that your enthusiasm / experience doesn't come across as you being an know- it-all, condescending, superior, etc. First, lead by example. Second, share, preferably when asked. Lastly, teach.

If you weren't hired to modernize practices, and even if you were, you have to become a part of the team first, before you can change it. People have to know you're invested in them before they'll invest in you. Which is so say, no one cares about what you have to say, until they know that you care.

Good luck!

<comment> UK-Al05 The thing is developers as a whole like writing good code.

Code quality is often the result of how much the business values good code. If they don't they will simply want everything done the fasted with no time for refactoring.

That sort of pressure comes from top and is hard for a single dev to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "As I am fairly new on the team"

This is the key point. Yes refactoring is not a bad idea but have you spent enough time with the current codebase to understand why things are done the way they are ? Even if the code is sphagetti, the point is that you may not have all the background yet on things and you need to spend a bit more time understanding everything before you suggest major refactoring. Not to mention that unless it helps with real dollars (more money for the team/company), you may face resistance.

Having said that, don't be afraid to challenge status quo but make sure you have enough background information before making assumptions. It is much easier to come from outside and look at everything being broken (which may very well be but still need to understand it in detail).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really great advice. You're right - it's really easy to make assumptions about the code and it's definitely caught me at least once!

So far I've been trying to keep my changes in service of a specific feature, and keep as light-touch on existing code as possible whole still making improvements. Wrapper classes have helped with this a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Be a boy scout - leave any code better than you found it.

2\. Write functions, components, patterns (etc) that make other people's lives easier.

3\. Earn trust over time in small ways like this, and you will be entrusted with bigger architectural refactoring decisions.

The only reason a refactor will ever get approved is if it can demonstrably lead to increased efficiencies in the near future. This is often true (when done well), but you have to be able to demonstrate why, beforehand - which is the hard part.

</comment><comment><USER7> Refactoring frequently has to compete for resources with new feature requests and bug fixes. Even when team members are sure refactoring will help considerably, it can be hard to get traction.

Performance testing can highlight areas of the code that need help, so work to improve scaling and performance abilities can be used to justify resources to refactor related code.

Sometimes a new feature request can be used similarly where the refactoring and new feature development is a better option than trying to develop only with existing code.

</comment><comment><USER8> _As I am fairly new on the team_

This is the key point, you almost certainly weren't hired to "fix" other members of the team.

 _This seems like a very long game to play, however, and I 'm not sure if it will succeed._

To some extent it shouldn't matter, if you have a long career in this business you will inevitably come across broken teams and dysfunctional organisations. Knowing you are doing good work keeps you sane in these situations.</comment>


Live stream of Web Summit London  - <AUTHOR> http://new.livestream.com/websummit/LWS13

<comment><AUTHOR> Some good speakers throughout the day, including Patrick Collison (Stripe), Ben Huh (Cheezburger) & Andrew Ng (Coursera).

Full schedule here: <http://london.websummit.net/schedule></comment>


Kill -0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.finalcog.com/kill-0-pid

<comment><USER2> kill(pid, 0) is also a classic trick for detecting crappy rootkits; cycle through all ~65k possible pids, and see if the ESRCH results agree with "ps -axo pid". A patched ps, a patched KVM library, or even a patched procfs can still miss the code path used by the kill(2) syscall.

</comment><comment><USER3> How enlightening. I wish sites like commandlinefu.com had more insight into interesting command line tricks like this.

<comment><USER4> When I read that, I thought why didn't I know about this? So I checked the man page (not that I often read the man pages) and, at least on the version for my Mac, the man page doesn't describe signal zero. Sigh. How do people find out about these things?

<comment><USER5> You learn these things when you are a junior X from someone who is a senior X who learned it the exact same way. I bet you can trace these little nuggets all the way back to some junior sysadmin who was looking over Ken Thompson's shoulder at Bell Labs in the early 70s. Other examples include lsof, vmstat, netstat -p, and doing anything useful in a Makefile.

<comment><USER6> Any defined interface is -- by definition -- documented, and any undefined interface (and thus undocumented) can not be relied upon.

Empiric lore is ultimately detrimental to genuine understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm guessing a zombie'd process won't respond either. Which is good if you are checking for validity of a process and not just the mere presence of a pid in the process list.</comment>


Write a web browser in python - <AUTHOR> http://i-miss-erin.blogspot.com/2009/03/write-web-browser-by-python.html <comment><USER2> More like "assemble a web browser in python", IKEA-style. Still, this looks like a nice and easy way to build your application's help browser, among other things.

<comment><USER3> Assemble a web browser in Javascript:

        var ie = new ActiveXObject("InternetExplorer.Application");
        ie.Visible = true;

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A webrowser written _from scratch_ in Python: <http://grail.sourceforge.net></comment>


Apache Kafka – Publish-subscribe messaging rethought as a distributed commit log - <AUTHOR> https://kafka.apache.org/ <comment><USER2> @Aphyr's "Call me maybe: Kafka"[1] blog post is a great reference for what Kafka is and what distributed guarantees it tries to provide.

[1]: [http://aphyr.com/posts/293-call-me-maybe- kafka](http://aphyr.com/posts/293-call-me-maybe-kafka)

<comment><USER3> Good point.

TL;DR: "Kafka's replication claimed to be CA, but in the presence of a partition, threw away an arbitrarily large volume of committed writes. It claimed tolerance to F-1 failures, but a single node could cause catastrophe."

<comment><USER4> I think I see what he's trying to say, but there's a letter that isn't included in the adjective "CA", and that letter is "P". How could it be otherwise? Indeed, from TFA: _" Kafka can do this because LinkedIn's brokers run in a datacenter, where partitions are rare."_

<comment><USER5> You're correct, the system does not advertise partition tolerance, and @Aphyr does indeed confirm that the system is not partition tolerant.

Broadly, I think sacrificing P is pretty deeply misguided. If you run a distributed system at any scale for any period of time, you're going to experience network partitions, even within a single DC. (I speak from experience: I work on a distributed system which runs a whole bunch of machines in a whole bunch of datacentres worldwide. We see a reasonable number of non-trivial within-DC network partitions every year.)

A much more detailed argument of the above: [http://codahale.com/you-cant- sacrifice-partition-tolerance/](http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice- partition-tolerance/)

You really do need to think about what happens to your system when it gets partitioned. This paper has much of interest to say on the topic: [http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf](http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Isn't "a partition-intolerant system" really just another way to say "a non- distributed system"?

<comment><USER7> No, it is just a system that can lose data in the face of a partition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kafka's author wrote a very well motivated and interesting introduction to Kafka-based architectures a few months ago on LinkedIn's blog:

[http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log- what...](http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every- software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying)

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916557)

</comment><comment><USER9> We're using Kafka at Shopify and we're pretty satisfied with it. We wrote a client library for Go: [https://github.com/Shopify/sarama](https://github.com/Shopify/sarama)

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the hattip to Franz Kafka, although I would be wary of submitting An Imperial Message [1] to the queue. It may never make its way out.

[1] [http://www.kafka-online.info/an-imperial-message.html](http://www.kafka- online.info/an-imperial-message.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> If you are interested in a sample project I have one available here for tailing a file into a queue: [https://github.com/rickcrawford/kafka_file_tailer](https://github.com/rickcrawford/kafka_file_tailer)

<comment><USER12> Can Kafka be thought of as a non-hosted version of Kinesis? I thought Kinesis would be a good solution to dump logfile data to for processing and ingestion. Could you explain some technical reasons to use Kafka vs. Kinesis? Thanks.

<comment><USER13> One main advantage is that Kinesis is elastic -- it scales automatically based on load. Managing a Kafka cluster is an unnecessary task with Kinesis available, which alleviates quite a bit of headache.

<comment><USER14> Ehh - this is just my two cents with working on Kafka. When they say it's high performance, they really really mean. I have gotten very high throughputs on just 2 medium machines.

If you process that much data, Kafka is one of the last things which you'll need to scale out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sorry for the dumb question, but can anyone explain how this compares to something like RabbitMQ?

</comment><comment><USER16> How does it compare to beanstalkd ?

</comment><comment><USER17> Using it with C++ is not really on par with using it with Java. Implementing the system itself in Java also looks very questionable, since supposedly performance should be very critical there.

<comment><USER18> Depending on the task Java is actually faster than C++ at times. Garbage Collection, when done right, can for example be faster than manual memory management. And a JIT compiler can do optimizations that a normal C++ compiler could only do with help from the developer.

There is a reason many of these kind of systems are written in JVM based languages. Examples: Hadoop and all of its siblings, Cassandra, Storm, Kafka. So either all of those people in successful projects make "questionable decisions" or your knowledge of Java/JVM performance has been outdated by the new developments of the past few years...

<comment><USER19> I don't particularly agree with the reasons mentioned by you. Most of the existing systems are JVM based due to the excellent tooling/supporting libraries around Java and its ease of use. This enables you to focus more on building the system rather then focus on micro-optimizations around C++.</comment></comment></comment>


Drugs alone won't fix our epidemic of depression - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2018/jul/19/drugs-alone-wont-fix-our-epidemic-of-depression <comment><USER2> For the majority of people, the following should get you straightened out:

Get your diet straightened out. Stop eating so many refined carbohydrates. Eat some green vegetables.

Get more sleep. You get 5-6 hours of sleep a night and wonder why you feel sluggish and shitty every day.

Stop with the stimulants. You drink 36 ounces of coffee a day and wonder why you can't get any sleep.

Get some exercise. You want to sleep better, wear yourself out physically as well as mentally.

Put the screens down. It's fucking up your sleep and giving you a false sense that you're getting the human interaction that you need.

Stop drinking so much alcohol. As a society, we drink too much alcohol. It's no wonder we're fucking depressed, we fill our bodies full of CNS depressants. It fucks up your sleep, increases your stress and anxiety levels and makes you feel really shitty the next day.

There are cases of depression that are caused by legitimate, not self-induced, chemical imbalances. The majority of depression cases are relatively self- induced and could be fixed with simple behaviour modifications.

<comment><USER3> I promise I am not pursuing the tiresome argumentative tactic of demanding formal sources as a way to postpone defeat. But, seriously, do you have a source for

> The majority of depression cases are relatively self-induced and could be > fixed with simple behaviour modifications.

I am _very_ wary of telling a depressed person that it's probably just a matter of making the right lifestyle tweaks.

<comment><USER2> Part of the reason why I quantified it. There are legitimate cases of depression caused by non-self-inflicted chemical imbalances.

I'm not advocating for people who are currently taking anti-depressants to drop their pills tomorrow.

The studies (I'm on the train so I'm not trying to cite these sources, google it) show that lifestyle changes with antidepressants is much more effective than antidepressants alone.

Even if you have a non-self-inflicted chemical imbalance, your shrink is likely to prescribe all of the things I listed.

Source: my shrink, and every shrink worth their salt.

<comment><USER4> _Part of the reason why I quantified it._

You _qualified_ it. If you quantified it, you would have provided numbers backing up your argument.

<comment><USER2> Fewer than 30% of people with MDD episodes have treatment resistance depression. The majority of people with depression respond to treatment. The efficacy of diet, exercise, and sleep are on par with drugs.

<comment><USER5> > The efficacy of diet, exercise, and sleep are on par with drugs

This is simply untrue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> wu-ikkyu I remember my worst bout with depression, it was a downward spiral.

Work and school had me indoors 60+ hours a week, so lots of stress and no Vitamin D.

I had little to no time for cooking, so I ate junk processed fast food for most meals.

All of these things left me so drained that I stopped exercising and didn't have the energy to go to social events. I stopped hanging out with my best friends.

What little time and energy I had left was spent laying on the couch indoors on my phone obsessing over the news (which of course is overtly negative and divisive) and arguing politics on social media.

Anti-depressant drugs provided marginal relief from a complete breakdown but it wasn't until I started "working to live", getting outdoors, eating healthy, exercising frequently, meditating (when needed), quit watching the news and deleted my social media accounts that my mental health returned.

There are a handful of simple things that human beings require for adequate mental health or "chemical balance", and yet there are massive societal pressures and trillions of dollars being spent sabotaging those basic human needs. Unfortunately it's much easier to pop a pill than to confront such difficulties.

<comment><USER6> > it was a downward spiral.

> Anti-depressant drugs provided marginal relief

> Unfortunately it's much easier to pop a pill than to confront such > difficulties

Don't you feel that that final statement is a bit disingenuous considering that for many people (of course can not comment if that was the case for you) medication is the tool that enables them to cut the spiral and start working on their issues.

<comment><USER7> For many people, they believe that it is _the_ final solution, because that is how it is advertized by the drug companies and psychiatrists, and how it is marketed to many doctors. That is how most end up people treating the drug.

The drugs themselves don't actually offer very much. It is the belief that they're working, the placebo effect, that makes them seem to offer relief. Eventually, many negative side effects will rear their ugly heads... and the cycle goes on. They then switch to a different drug or withdraw completely, suffering the negatives along the way, only worsening their mental health.

It's better to not start using the drugs at all, but instead engage with regular face-to-face social connections and a healthy lifestyle of healthy nutrition, more exercise, meditation, socializing, etc. This way, one does not have to deal with any of the potential negatives of the drugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe we can transform our society into one that is less depressing?

<comment><USER9> We can't do anything of the sort. Nobody really has control of society. We're a bunch of bumblebees trapped in a beach ball. Sometimes it goes in the direction we want it to go, other times not.

<comment><USER10> Let me be blunt and say that this attitude is exactly why nobody ever tries to change society. Instead of assuming that because you're one person you don't matter, why not take the attitude that you're one person and what you do has an impact on everyone around you?

You can't change the world by treating everyone well but you can sure as shit make all their days better, and that's what we should be doing. If you want to live in a world that isn't isolating, stop isolating the strangers around you.

<comment><USER11> I generally agree with you that people are apathetic and assume that something can't be done simply because it's hard or they don't feel like trying.

That said I think there's an element of truth that society generally creates incentives that can lead to outcomes nobody wants [1]. You can get equilibriums where without effective coordination people are trapped, sometimes the trapped state can prevent effective coordination itself.

It's not an easy problem to fix.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

<comment><USER10> This isn't an easy problem to fix systemically, but we need to be making different decisions as individuals. Society changes in the little decisions we make every day, and not by leaps and bounds through fiat.

When people chose to smoke pot, knowing that it was illegal, they were normalizing it. Those were small decisions by individuals that snowballed into legalization. Gay marriage and the acceptance of homosexuality followed the same pattern, where individuals decided to be more accepting, and that snowballed into societal acceptance.

Society is made up of individuals, and we are part of society. Throwing up our hands and abdicating responsibility doesn't serve anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are plenty of reasons to believe that drugs are actually making it worse. Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic was the first to make this point. Burden of mental illness has doubled while the antidepressant treatment has been made common place.

We have no long term studies showing SSRIs help in the long term. None. (My brother even wrote a review paper on long term studies of mental health treatments). And we all know people that have troubled with SSRI withdrawal symptoms, had to switch drugs, change doses, add a mood stabilizer to continually manage what in the beginning was a mild depression due to loved one's death or some other temporary condition.

<comment><USER13> This is untrue.

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(17\)32802-7/fulltext)

"All antidepressants were more efficacious than placebo in adults with major depressive disorder."

<comment><USER14> That's not a long-term study. It's a one-off 'meta-analysis'.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's not a long-term study -- it's a summary of 522 studies involving a total of 116,477 people treated for 8 weeks on average.

The authors do note that 8 weeks is not long enough to see some antidepressant side effects, which is a problem, but if they see evidence of improvement after 8 weeks, that's quite different from having no evidence of improvement at all.

Unless you mean to suggest that over the very long term, say several years, people on antidepressants end up no better off? I would be interested to know if that has been studied.

<comment><USER7> > if they see evidence of improvement after 8 weeks, that's quite different > from having no evidence of improvement at all.

There may show that there are short-term improvements, but it says nothing about the medium to long-term effects on depression.

It's therefore worthless for being able to perceive any of the longer-term negative side effectives of the drugs.

It almost seems like a study that the drug companies would find as favourable advertizing for their drugs. It makes me suspicious that it may have been funded by drug company money.

<comment><USER15> > It almost seems like a study that the drug companies would find as > favourable advertizing for their drugs. It makes me suspicious that it may > have been funded by drug company money.

The funding is openly disclosed:

> This study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) > Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre (BRC-1215-20005) and the Japan > Society for the Promotion of Science (17K19808). The views expressed are > those of the authors and not necessarily those of the UK National Health > Service, the NIHR, or the UK Department of Health.

One of the authors, John Ioannidis, is famous as a crusader for better evidence and better statistics in medicine; he's the author of the famous "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" paper about the potential for false positives for medicine. I would be willing to trust the statistical evidence, though I think you're right to be concerned about 8 weeks as too short a time period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No, mindfulness training, exercise and nutrition aren't sufficient to counter the increasing adversity any more than drugs are.

<comment><USER17> Agreed, depression can also be caused by poor environmental conditions. Being depressed can make escaping those conditions harder or even impossible; and that is assuming that the conditions /can/ be escaped in the first place.

My own personal theory is that at least some of the 'depression' we are seeing today is the result of dysfunction in society and the general social contact. People no longer have a place they feel they can belong, a stable /career/ path let alone one that offers actual opportunity to become the best they want to be out of their potential.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps religion plays a role too. I mean, our brains evolved to be religious, and now we're basically shutting that part off, without asking if that's a good idea from a neurological/psychological (scientific) viewpoint.

<comment><USER17> My own beliefs about religion are that it came to be partly as a way of 'binning' 'unsolvable' problems out of the way and also as a way of helping people be less bad to each other.

The trouble starts when you mix different (or groups without) religions; the defect in the meme shows ugly results such as the crusades, etc.

<comment><USER19> It also gives you some way to try to grasp the transcendent and provide meaning to your life. Those things are hard to replace with better science for the hard problems and better ethics/government for the behavior issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Antidepressants can literally save lives; I worry deeply about articles like this scaring away people who need help.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. Antidepressants can be very helpful.

<comment><USER7> The many, unpredictable, and very real, negative side effects of anti- depressants can completely outweigh any of the dubious positives, especially when it's impossible to tell which of dozen or so available marketed drugs will or will not have a greater slew of said effects. It's a nasty game of Russian Roulette which can potentially make the depression far worse than if the sufferer decided to err on the side of caution, and not take them at all.

The negatives have affected many people, and who knows just how many and even how bad the side effects are for people.

Being driven over the edge, to suicide, is horrifying effect of some of the drugs. Others have gone on killing sprees because the drugs drove them insane, while taking them or from the withdrawal effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Depression/Anxiety is often caused by nutrient deficiencies, especially vitamin D and magnesium. Even with bleak prospects or a meaningless life, depression/anxiety becomes mostly cognitive when properly fed/supplemented. "Hey, this idiot just ruined my life," for example, but as vitamin D + K and magnesium are being supplemented, it's like a passing thought slowly creeping in.

I'm mainly referring to general depression that's not clinical. Many get depressed/anxious "for no reason," but it's often due to deficiencies or imbalances. It's not hard to believe when poor sleep, excess stimulant/caffeine use, poor nutrition and eating habits, high stress/drain, insufficient sunlight, etc all combine.

Many would benefit from a high-quality multivitamin, D + K, and chelated/TRAACS magnesium supplement. And maybe DHA + krill oil.

Take enough vitamin D3 to keep _25-Hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D]_ in the 40-60 ng/mL range. Dose calculator: [http://www.vitamindservice.com/node/87](http://www.vitamindservice.com/node/87). Take at least 10 mcg vitamin K2 MK-4 or 2 mcg K2 MK-7 for each 50 IUs of vitamin D3. For example, add at least 1,000 mcg vitamin K2 MK-4 if taking 5,000 IU vitamin D3.

PS: a magnesium deficiency can be corrected by applying an oil spray all over like lotion (rinsing after 20-30 minutes) for a few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER22> Kind of personal story, though not directly about depression. A while back, I noticed my blood pressure skyrocketed. Then a bit later, I started having chest pains. My heart was racing and my heart beat was irregular. Sometimes it felt like it just stopped and then _wham_ it would kick in again. Sometimes it felt like a horse was running around inside my chest. My chest felt heavy, like someone had put a 25 kilo weight on it. Every breath hurt.

I went to the hospital and they hooked me up to every variety of machine imaginable. The result? Apart from my blood pressure, everything was fine. They wired me up to a recorder and recorded my heart for 24 hours. The result? Everything was fine. The symptoms lasted for a week (!) and finally slowly subsided. The blood work they took said that everything was fine.

I don't know what was going on, but my doctor said to me, "It's probably stress. Has it been a stressful time lately?" It really hadn't. Everything was the same as always. True, I had been quite upset about work. But when was I _not_ upset about work? I love working and I'm serious. I go at it full throttle. True, I had been working some stupid hours. I work remotely and I'm 8-9 hours shifted from the rest of the team. I often start at 8 am, work all day and then work again in the evening when the rest of the team gets in. I'm tired at the end of the day, but I like working hard.

But you know, even if all the tests in the world say that I'm fine -- I was definitely _not_ fine. I was convinced I was going to die during that week. A body is not supposed to feel that way. And so I decided to take it easy. I like work, but I like other things as well. I decided to be strict on my hours and rely on my team to fight fires in the evening (even if I started them during the day!). I decided to take a different view of my role on the team. Instead of trying to drive the team to success, I'll let them drive where they want to go and watch out the window. Occasionally I'll say, "Turn left at the next stoplight. I think you'll enjoy the view", but that's the extent of my navigation.

I fee better now than I have in ages. I just want to warn people: stress will kill you. I never really appreciated that before. It will _actually_ kill you, just like any other super killer disease that haunts your nightmares. Be aware of your mental state. You can't go through life thinking your are invincible. Or, you can, but that life will be cut short. A lot of this stuff is in your control and it's simply a choice to be healthy or be ill.

Of course, there are people who have mental illnesses for which they have no control. But there are a lot of people, like myself, who just don't understand the harm that they are doing to themselves by putting themselves in unhealthy places. Just try to be aware and to take action once you see that there is a problem.

I hope that helps some people. I'd rather other people no have the experience that I had.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice strawman you have there in the title Guardian. It is almost as if you were baiting for clicks.

> Unfortunately, the prevalent view of depression as a "Prozac deficiency > disease"

Do you have numbers to back up that statement that such view is _the prevalent_ one?</comment>


Comcast can popup alerts like this in the G+ client for iOS? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+paulbeard/posts/SBikgEj44iB <comment><AUTHOR> As noted on the discussion, it's not positively clear that this is Comcast or perhaps another third party. But HTML injections on a Web client are being done in Comcast's name, and Comcast have claimed this capability. It's an exceptionally strong argument for HTTPS _everywhere_.

Several Googlers on the discussion as well, though speaking for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER2> Doesn't iOS force HTTPS-only connections from within apps?</comment>


Show HN: Pure CSS Threadlines for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/robbiewxyz/hackernews-threadlines <comment><USER2> Gorgeous, thank you! Would recommend people check it out.</comment>


Zawodny on MySQL: Dumber is Faster with Large Data Sets (and Disk Seeks) - <AUTHOR> http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010523.html <comment><USER2> Just wondering, how much of that is due to the query optimizer in MySQL and how much is due to the inherent nature of SQL? It would be interesting to try this on other RDBMSs like postgres and oracle to see what their results are like.</comment>


Ask HN: What industries are underserved by software? - <AUTHOR> Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals. And since people mostly work on what they know (which is good) this seems to leave a lot of industries behind. What blue-collar industries do you know that could really be helped by better software?
For more background, I'm in the early stages of forming a startup, and just narrowing down problems. I'm trying to get a friend on board as a cofounder. He's great at mobile, and I can handle the backend. We also both worked other careers before switching to software (oil and aviation). I've got B2B sales experience.
When you put this all together, it makes an interesting combo of an app for non-office businesses. I'd really like to make something that's more of a tool than just an app. Think "mobile phones in airplanes tracking your rental fleet" over "weather app".
Any direction-pointing is very welcome! <comment><USER2> Agriculture.

There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what _they think_ ag needs. Most of them fail.

Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are _NOT_ dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don't have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corporations with a lot of employees.

They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each year. It's hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what their specific need is, then meet it.

<comment><USER3> >Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees

That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain.

I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something

<comment><USER4> _> industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets_

That would be _all of them_. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers.

Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.

<comment><USER5> > the ultimate measure of business is money / resources

That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc.

Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality.

> Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for > optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the > latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.

A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints.

I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.

<comment><USER3> > I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making > mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business

Another reason would be scale. The flexibility in spreadsheets usually goes hand in hand with having to deal with inconsistencies and from what we've seen that mechanism is usually a person or persons which does eventually break down at a certain volume.

e.g. a farmer getting 20 different purchase orders a week, all in their weird unique format and trying to convert all of it into a single format by hand

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Construction is a big field, and there are many niche industries within it.

I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is:

 _quarries - > factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user_

There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement.

Similarly, there are 10s (if not hundreds) of other niches within construction, each with its own vertical. Tons of niche software is missing.

When I see another niche analytics/forms/site chatbot/automate social media startup, I slap myself to make sure I'm not crazy.

There's a whole ocean out there, but most software startup companies are running into each other in Depoe Bay.

<comment><USER7> the problem is having access to these niche fields and knowing enough to be able to create something useful.

<comment><USER6> agreed, a lot of it is niche knowledge that you could only gain by working in such a field or having close access to a company.

Consulting within a niche is one way to do this.

<comment><USER8> In the eighties, my best friend's father was into organic farming in the following manner : he'd squish the slugs he happened to find while walking through his crops and that was his pest control over the top of great land husbandry in the tenth generation. My friend taught himself turbo pascal then vb and the farm tax deduction provided a 286 of my unfulfilled dreams. The son was shortly trading in commodity supplies and even derivatives and taking delivery of GPS equipped combines. But I doubt he could have been successful had he not grown up with his father's wisdom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a non-trivial amount of work being done at university research labs that has yet to feel the effects of the machine learning revolution because PIs aren't investing (or cannot afford) programmers, and scientific equipment is manufactured by a small handful of companies who have little incentive to innovate.

Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find stills that were in focus.

<comment><USER10> I learned programming in order to do my job more effectively while I was employed as a research assistant in a university neuroscience lab. At some point I realized that programmers in industry get paid 10x more (not an exaggeration, literally 10x) so I left after a couple years.

I enjoyed my time there a lot, I was building tools to help very smart and motivated people solve cool science problems. My users sat across the lab bench from me (the original open office plan?) and iteration/feedback cycles were super fast. People were appreciative and I could see how much time I was saving them. It was very motivating. Some of the more useful stuff I built got picked up by other labs in the group.

Maybe I'll do that kind of thing again someday, if I decide I've had my fill of megacorp programming.

<comment><USER11> Out of curiosity - what are the typical tools that you built? I am in industry but sometimes have a crisis of meaning. I would not be able to sit next to researches but was wondering if there is a gap in open source tools that I (or someone else) could help to cover.

<comment><USER12> There is a _ton_ of this kind of work available. I run into various people online who need a simple automation task done, but either don't know where to start, or start and don't know how to make progress.

e.g., a month ago I made a small machine for a dental research lab that basically added a feature to a piece of test equipment. The feature was so basic and obvious, I have no idea why the equipment didn't already have it. But it was an opportunity for me to step in and make a small piece of hardware to do what they need at little cost.

A few months before that I made a GUI for a customized bit of veterinary equipment, and so on... These jobs are out there. They're quick and easy for an experienced engineer but the problem is finding them consistently. My main focus these days is trying to do just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Successful software companies are mostly founded by software engineers, or at least other white collar professionals_

They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.

<comment><USER14> _They 're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with_

I worked as a contract software engineer and I built quite a few MVPs for niche businesses I would never have thought of. I built a dashboard for rental management companies to track vendors (e.g. plumbers, electricians, pool cleaners) to make sure their licenses, insurance, and background checks are up to date. I built a tool for companies to track and calculate multistate tax withholding for traveling employees (apparently there is a complex algorithm based on the number of days you worked in the state, your home state, etc). There are thousands of these business ideas out there that some domain expert is running in a spreadsheet but could be turned into a SaaS product.

<comment><USER13> _I worked as a contract software engineer_

Did the domain knowledge come from the person paying you, or did you figure it out yourself?

<comment><USER14> The client supplied the domain knowledge...in more than a few cases they were doing things manually, and I automated them. For example the vendor verification involved manually looking up licenses, or doing data entry on ACORD25 insurance forms. I automated it, so that given a license number, trade, and state, a crawler would fetch the data on a schedule. I also wrote a parser that could read insurance data from an ACORD25 form and put it in a database. The client was tracking all of this in spreadsheets, and I just copied the logic from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Was just reading a long list of complaints about poor software quality from a variety of industries' vendors. Might be some good opportunities in there. [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/fdorvf/scum_of_the_earth_xray_vendors/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That thread is gold. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I was contractor I did a lot of niche apps for small businesses. I think it comes down to your ability to sell. I suck at it so not much success for me. But there is a ton of opportunity if you are willing to talk to people about their needs and then go out to sell. You won't be the next unicorn but you can make decent money and it's fun working with small business owners.

Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.

<comment><USER17> Some of my very first consulting gigs were around access and excel automation with VBA. They paid well for being a 19-year-old kid still living with mom and dad.

Now most of my consulting now is:

\- Bringing web-apps up to date (mainly by getting rid of a lot of jQuery that could just be JavaScript, or shockingly common could just be CSS)

\- Refactoring hard/impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least favorite - so risky)

\- And cleaning up the dead-code and inaccurate comments that accumulate over the years from the ghosts of contractors past.

I'm basically a janitor for "enterprise" software code-bases.

<comment><USER18> > _Refactoring hard /impossible to understand 2000+ line methods (least > favorite - so risky)_

Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to do.

Like reaching a big boss in a video game and having to slice pieces off him until he's no longer a problem.

<comment><USER19> > Maybe I'm just weird, but for me that's one of the most satisfying things to > do.

I'm with you, but also agree with the GP. It's super satisfying to get stuff like that cleaned up, but one of the most shocking things I've come across is callers who do absolutely bizarre things that rely on side effects from those methods. More than once, refactoring a big method like that has spiraled out of control fixing all of the callers as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think a better question for 2 experienced guys like you is, "What industries are overserved by software?"

That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at. Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete app.

I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much that the "building upon" step never comes.

As I sit here on a client's system with 14 useless windows open, being bombarded by skype, email, voice, chat, webex, outlook, office, text, jira, confluence, and sharepoint notifications from 14 others with their own 14 useless windows open, none of us getting any real work done, I wonder why 2 guys like you who know how to get shit done don't come in and just fix this for us.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

Couldn't help myself, the number is even the same!

What do you think a solution to this problem (too complex, too many things to monitor) would look like? And all-in-one like Basecamp? Or maybe a super system that puts stuff in one place?

<comment><USER20> Start over. Remove everything and add back only what's actually needed.

It's easier than most people think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house.

My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it _needs_ to be.

<comment><USER22> I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair.

I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just out of alignment.

Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day.

Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused.

<comment><USER23> "Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day."

You're exactly right on this one and it exists in Vancouver, Canada: [https://faberconnect.com/](https://faberconnect.com/)

"Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused."

Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket.

I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Government. Often plagued by bad or outdated software rather than the lack of it

<comment><USER25> That's true, but it's too hard to sell to the government for a small startup.

The RFP process is so long and brutal, and most of the time you need to have a man on the inside and basically go through that process as a formality because you are already guaranteed the contract.

<comment><USER26> What about the RFP process itself then? Can a company make it easier for startups to sell to the government?

<comment><USER27> you would be better off just making an American Indian, female, midget your CEO so you can short circuit the process. If you think that is a joke, it's not, each one of those items scores high points in the RFP process and sets you ahead of the pack. That is the problem with a software solution for it and that is that it is innately a human process. A combination of who you know and who you are. The rest is just fluff on paper.

<comment><USER28> You say that, but take a look at all the biggest companies that supply to governments. There is a very good chance they are run by grey haired white men.

Sure, you can get some points for diversity, but in the end, diversity only gets a few small contracts here and there while the establishment rakes in the Lion's share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage. Also maintenance & repair operations (a whole lot of dirty fingerprints going on there).

<comment><USER30> > If you know aviation, literally anything that will decrease fuel usage

Apart from writing full blown avionics systems for engine/flight control - what are you suggesting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not obviously, but it could be. Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency without changing the airplane. Maybe software could help with those.

Edit: my reply was to the original comment which was something like "how is this a software problem?"

<comment><USER31> > Reducing idling time and improving routes both increase fuel efficiency > without changing the airplane

Do you think idling time is a software problem? Aircraft idle for various time based on other requirements and needs, for example, spooling up the engines or inerting the fuel tanks.

Routes are already optimized by air traffic for the fastest, and cheapest route. They have no incentive to increase flight times as there would be fewer aircraft flying then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Software can't _fix_ aircraft idling, but maybe it can help. And ATC has the final say on routes for IFR aircraft (except emergencies), but there are a thousand VFR airplanes in the air right now. I think it's possible we can do better than GPS direct.

I don't have a solution for either of these things, just enough intuition as a pilot and software engineer to say "maybe there's something there".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you have already expertise in Aviation in-house - why not aviation. It's currently still a very slow moving industry but spacecrafts were once too. Further there's General Aviation which has already a strong software market around tablet/pc based navigation and flight planning but lacks to see anything truly "disruptive".

</comment><comment><USER33> Also keep in mind sometimes... the "undeserved industries" are "undeserved" for a reason... like politics, culture, and or refusal to change etc..

</comment><comment><USER34> I would say finance. Excel has it's uses, but managing a billion dollar portfolio isn't one of them. It's a hard space though, firms have such drastically different needs that tt's difficult to create an app that serves everyone.

<comment><USER35> Finance is a mature and highly regulated market with loads of expensive software and consultants to do all you need. ERPs and off-the-shelf financial software with in-house specific developments do the heavy lifting and spreadsheets macros do the rest.

<comment><USER34> For banks sure. But the PE, VC, and hedge fund space have almost no regulations and very little software to serve their needs. I worked at a startup that provided portfolio analytics software and it never was able to actually break into the market in a real way (our valuation was and still is stuck at 200m for 8 years). It's a really hard problem but if someone can crack it, they potentially could be the next Bloomberg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Most law enforcement applications are the same : a monolithic crud .net client connecting to a version of sql server and each one is god awful. They need strong saas apps, Im tired of managing them.

<comment><USER27> I pick up contracts from a law enforcement software vendor and can confirm that most of the software in the industry is abominable. When I picked up the contract their system was a win32 C/C++ GUI, communicating to a custom built geo server. I felt like I was back in the late 80's early 90's doing development again. Anyways I modernized their stack to web and mobile tech and people in the industry think their are wizards of dark magic. It's amazing how behind the times that industry is.

</comment></comment><comment> n-exploit The non-profit/social sector - and we need it here. Why hire software developers when you can afford 8-10 part-time staff for the same price. Sincerely, a non-profit Technology Director.

<comment><USER37> Could you please provide some examples of tasks that can be improved with software in non-profit/social sector?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, navigation systems for competitive hot air balloons pilots could use some competition. The one widely used is from 1998.

Total market size is about 50 people, though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> What do they need that a modern handheld aircraft GPS doesn't provide?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> There's almost nothing in the manufactured housing (AKA "mobile home", AKA "trailer" AKA "HUD-code home") industry. The industry experienced a severe contraction even before the Great Recession, declining in the 2000's from its most recent boom years of the 90's.

In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom- and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes

By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS products.

As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago.

I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related) industries isn't really a good fit.

I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is too small for them, I'm pretty sure.

I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already.

But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.

</comment><comment><USER40> Hospitals and Healthcare. There is simply too much paper work that goes on.

My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills, prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might as well have online forms and invoices.

</comment><comment><USER41> Healthcare - which affects all of us and is 18% of GDP - is by far the most underserved by software. It is a bad version of the 90's for doctors, nurses, patients and everyone else. There are a number of firms that are trying to make this better.

(plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's independent of the larger point).

<comment><USER42> Commure looks fascinating, I was hoping something like this existed! I work in publicly-funded mental health/social services. Our programs use 5 different EHRs, then we have to interact with 4 more supplied by county funders for billing and compliance. It's a real Tower of Babel shitstorm to transfer data between systems in the absence of interoperability standards like FHIR. As you note, the current fragmented state of health tech has significant human and economic impacts.

<comment><USER41> Thank you, glad to hear you say that - you certainly have a wonderfully colorful way of describing the problem we are trying to fix!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> peter-m80 Lawyers and justice

<comment><USER43> My ex-wife worked for a legal software firm. One thing to note is they were threatened with lawsuits ALL THE TIME, because, after all, their customers were lawyers. So any bug or whatever else would end up with some nasty email from some customer exclaiming, "We're going to sue!" In reality, not many (if any) actually carried through with it, but if that sort of threat makes you queasy, better be (or have) a really good lawyer yourself if you go this route, and not just as a domain expert for the software itself.

<comment><USER44> So true! I built a solution for a legal services outfit a few years ago. First bug they see, they want to sue you. Forget about working with the vendor to refine the solution. They just want to sue you. Never want to work with lawyers again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Most software is written by men for men. Try writing something aimed at women.

<comment><USER46> What does that even mean? Do you want developers to put flowers over their UIs?

<comment><USER47> Women have different hobbies, or indeed careers, than men. Not much competition in the market for manicure salons, for example (I'm aware of Phorest).

The women I know tend to have different creatives hobbies than men's creative hobbies (think crocheting vs woodworking). I'm willing to be there are more woodworking CAD programs than equivalent programs for crocheting in the market.

There are fishing lure design applications. Can you think of something similar for a more feminine hobby?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I just went through extensive home remodeling. This is a big industry and there are a lot of opportunities to improve it by software. It was impossible for me to get a good visualization of what the end state of my home would look like. I needed to hire designers for that. It was difficult to know what various paint options would look like. And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it. It is still based on good old connections and negotiations.

<comment><USER23> _And then there is the whole construction / contractor / material aspect of it._

A big problem with a renovation is the uncertain number of surprises that the contractor will encounter when tearing out the existing material. The contractor doesn't want to get stuck cleaning up that black mold for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Scientific software for doing research is awful in many ways. There is a great deal of need at all levels to upgrade how scientists read, recruit participants, analyze data, and more. However, inside knowledge is needed to be successful. The research field has many unique practices that are important to work around.

</comment><comment><USER50> Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can't imagine who they could be — or you don't remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.

</comment><comment><USER51> The grain industry. Specifically grain elevators.

There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER52> At the risk of sounding less than helpful or pessimistic, the first thing that jumped out at me when reading your post is that you are going about this backwards.

I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea.

But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skillset and motivation to solve it and then you come to the realization that you need to start a business to do that. For founders/entrepreneurs with experience having done that previously, this is likely a scenario with a much higher probability of success.

But I imagine the success rate of people who say "I want to start my own business" and then look for a business to start have much lower success rates.

I'm not trying to rain no your parade at all. Just wanted to give you something to think about before you spend a fortune in time and/or money starting something. I could easily be wrong, though. Just food for thought.

<comment><USER53> It sounds like you are describing the Silicon Valley ideal, but things like "finding a good business to start" are very much a traditional approach, and I am confident they will teach you about how to do market research to this end in business schools.

<comment><USER54> Is it a traditional approach? I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and I have heard of almost nobody starting from "I have started a business, now what should we do" being successful. Bezos arguably took that approach, but that story gets told so much precisely because it was unusual. More often it turns out like Webvan, where the lack of deep domain knowledge means making noob mistakes that kill the business.

And I'm not sure business schools are a big help here. The vast majority of MBAs end up joining mid-sized to large existing companies as high flyers, and I think the curriculum aims to support that.

<comment><USER55> In the US this is precisely the traditional approach. The country was built by immigrants who would arrive in an area -- San Francisco or New York for example -- decide that if they didn't want to work in a sweat shop they would have to start a business, then look around to see what their neighborhood needed, and build it. Laundromat, restaurant, feed store, etc.

They didn't need to be intrigued by a problem or have a background that set them up to solve one. They decided to start a business and began by figuring out in what way their region was underserved, then built something to fill the gap. Voila.

There's no obvious reason this approach couldn't work in tech as well.

<comment><USER54> One, I think starting another instance of a well-known kind of business is very different than creating a new product, especially when one has used that kind of business a lot. So even if what you say were true, I don't think it would be relevant to, "I've started a business, what kind of product should we make."

But two, I'd like to see some evidence that people really did entirely arbitrary things based on demand, without relation to other factors. If we look at a well-known example, the way Indian-Americans have dominated the motel industry, there's pretty clear evidence that wasn't just driven by looking around the neighborhood to see what was needed. E.g.: [https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/06/11/why-indian- am...](https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/06/11/why-indian-americans- dominate-the-u-s-motel-industry/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> There's a lot of software you could build to help grassroots mobilization efforts. However, there's not a lot of money in that business.

</comment><comment><USER57> I know there are lots of players in the field but I know a few lawyers and the software the work with on a daily basis is terrible!

</comment><comment><USER58> Loan servicing.

Navient is terrible. A decent UI would go a long way.

<comment><USER59> As someone creating software in that industry, I agree. Although my team recently made a large dent via a selling a chunk of our software to an industry leader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> A lot of business and accounting is excel hell

</comment><comment><USER61> The justice system

</comment><comment><USER62> Anything that doesn't disturb young minds.

</comment><comment><USER63> agriculture!!</comment>


Against if Statements in Software - <AUTHOR> https://francescocirillo.com/pages/anti-if-campaign <comment><USER2> _Avoid dangerous IFs and use Objects_

First of all, object-oriented programming is impractical because it creates a state machine which is difficult to follow and therefore a nightmare to debug, even with source code.

Second, avoiding if statements is terribly naive as the generated machine code will contain compare instructions, which are if's, which means that it's literally impossible to have code without if statements. And if you don't have the source code, or the compiler has a bug, you'll be forced to deal with cmp instructions debugging machine code anyway.

Believing one will be able to stay away from machine code forever is both silly and naive.</comment>