Bringing Serverless to a Web Page Near You with Hugo and Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://www.openfaas.com/blog/serverless-static-sites/ <comment><USER2> While the article is a bit informative, it is hard to take it seriously. It claims to bring "serverless" to a webpage near you, yet one of its prerequisites is: "You need to have a Kubernetes cluster up & running.", which implies a server (actually several), so not so "serverless" in the end.

The entire "serverless" movement seems to preach something that is impossible. You can't have internet without a server. You can offload server management and maintenance onto a provider, that is true, but you can't remove it entirely from your stack. So preaching "serverless" architecture is disingenuous and IMHO rather ignorant.

<comment><USER3> I agree the kubernetes part in the article is an overkill, but the serverless movement is here to stay. I used to be a serverless skeptic like you. However, after playing around with "serverless"[1] and AWS CDK[2], I truly believe serverless architecture is not only possible but preferred in many real use cases.

For example, API powered by traditional web cserver + database can be replaced with lambda/function + dynamo/s3/firestore. Cron jobs can be replaced by cloud scheduler + lambda/fargate/cloud run. As a serverless user, you really don't interact with "servers", but instead a highly-available and scalable managed task execution environment.

The only downside is each layer of compute abstraction comes at the cost of spending more and more money.

[1] [https://github.com/serverless/serverless](https://github.com/serverless/serverless)

[2] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/home.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/home.html)

<comment><USER4> And when you want to change from AWS, you are completely locked in, no?

<comment><USER5> If you use one of the open serverless frameworks such as OpenFaaS (which is what this article is about) then no you're not locked in.

BTW my team has investigated OpenFaaS to be able to share code between the cloud and local installations, and if we do OpenFaaS looks promising. The architecture is well documented and makes sense.

<comment><USER6> Using OpenFaaS on AWS doesn't exactly alleviate all of the lock-in. It locks you in to a larger spend. This is because OpenFaaS is heavily dependent on, generally, a k8s cluster that is going to be chewing through bill time 24/7\. I think that's the trade-off: you pay to not be locked into Lambda. Personally I don't think that's a bad thing, but I've seen plenty of times where customers would balk because their initial serverless trials cost $5, $10, $15 a month but when running something that would be better for them longer term it would initially be 4-8x that in opex. So they go the "easier" (cheaper) path and build everything around that lock-in tooling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Article might be a good intro to openFaas but please do not do this in production.

Gitlab Pages and GitHub Pages will gladly host a git branch for you as a static site. Gitlab has built in support for building static sites with any command you want. They have more than enough infrastructure to host a static site for you and it will take <1hr to set it up.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is one brilliant piece of modern technical humoristic literature, a genre that is still rare and should get much more attention!

The author has written that really well, simulating a style that some cloud marketing guys still will take serious. Of course every developer with some background in webdev will start to chuckle after a few sentences, but he keeps the flow on a very high level, great!

I wonder if some kind of NLP was involved and a second article with sources attached will follow.

Very good piece of parody!

</comment><comment><USER9> Or you could just use Netlify with one click ;)

<comment><USER10> Netlify is one of those services that just makes perfect sense. Perfect vertical integration across the web stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am loving the innovation and appreciate that the assumption here is if you've already got Kubernetes then this can be useful. Otherwise, a Kubernetes cluster is quite the pre-req for a static site generator that can run on the command line or on a build server.

<comment><AUTHOR> So if you're new to OpenFaaS, it is a platform for building and shipping applications on Kubernetes. We're talking about the big picture here, if you have Kubernetes, you can now deploy static sites, blogs, micro services, functions and lift+shift just about any other code.

<comment><USER12> Yes it's true, OpenFaas is something everyone should try even if they are a beginner. Alex and the community have tons of blogs, workshops that you can help you learn and implement production-ready solutions. Openfaas is making Kubernetes development Easy. For static blogs, websites its really simple with Openfaas. [https://twitter.com/openfaas/status/1162414762652835841](https://twitter.com/openfaas/status/1162414762652835841)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like a major pain in the ass to manage. Why not use AWS Lambda or other FAAS? And wait, the whole site is hosted with k8s using some Nginx server? Where's the CDN and frankly, object storage like S3 would seem a much better fit for the static assets.

If the point of using this is to learn how to use k8s for FAAS, great. If the point is to save pennies and create a hassle-free deployment, I would rethink the approach. I've heard good things about Netlify, although as a tinkerer myself I used AWS and CloudFormation with Sceptre to create my site. As unrelated note, if you are familiar with React you should probably consider using Gatsby. It's much easier to extend and customize which happens quite often once you start adding your own little cool widgets.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've used Hugo static pages, and I've used Kubernetes. Replacing the former with the latter is _not_ a win for simplicity.

Static pages can easily be maintained well by a single person; Kubernetes is a nasty king rat of pain and complexity which requires a team of highly-skilled engineers and architects to do well. Its complexity _is_ worth it, in many circumstances, but it is _not_ — repeat, _not_ — the first thing one should reach for. Or the second, even.

</comment><comment><USER15> There are a lot better options of you like Hugo or other static site generators...

I have GitHub set up to push my merge requests to AWS Lambda. The lambda downloads the specific Hugo release I deemed to run on, generates my pages, an pushes to S3 + Cloudfront. Takes less than 10 seconds from merge to publish. No servers. No services fees. Costs $13/year (95% domain fee). Truly "serverless".

At some point I want to retry this on Gitlab, it seems to support the same flow

<comment><USER16> On Gitlab the flow is simpler, you can just add a configuration file to run Hugo on the integrated CI and pass the generated files to the hosting:

[https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on- gitlab/](https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-gitlab/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would honestly be interested in what the author(s) consider to be the advantage of such a setup over things like for example GitHub Pages, Netlify, S3 + Cloudfront, a plain Apache Server?

<comment><USER18> There is a note near the beginning:

"The goal of this tutorial is not to show you that you need a Kubernetes cluster to run a static website, it's to show what can be done with OpenFaaS and Kubernetes."

I don't think it is being advocated that you should make this switch, just an informative article showing the steps required to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've seen where someone has "hosted" an entire site on a router. Would that qualify as serverless?

<comment><USER20> Serverless is purely a cloud marketing term for the next rendition of a web CGI like solution we all used to do to make any programming language run behind a web server, e.g. C, Python, and so on.

You can trigger it by other means, such as if a file is added to a cloud based file storage (think Azure Blob Storage, not Google Drive, though it wouldn't surprise me if that's a hook too) or something happens in your cloud based database. Or old school: someone visits a URL.

The whole web aspect of serverless is just the most popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have not looked into it but I feel that the headline qualifies for tech bs bingo...</comment>


Larry Ellison's Oracle Started as a CIA Project - <AUTHOR> http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238/+sambiddle

<comment><USER2> Yet another datapoint on Silicon Valley's collective amnesia about the role that government spending had in getting our industry off the ground.

On a different note, I loved this part: _And Ellison has worked tirelessly to build that all-seeing database, suggesting that he had even given away for free much of the tech necessary for such infrastructure. He 'd only charge the government for additional services and maintenance of the systems, of course._ Any DB company could perfectly well give away its software to sell the services and maintenance (under a mini-monopoly due to vendor lock-in). I suspect the reason why they don't is just to distract the customer from where the money is really made.</comment>


Midget submarine - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midget_submarine <comment><USER2> Well, here is a timely (only 18 hours old as of this post) video about WWII midget submarines [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zt1O8RIX9pw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zt1O8RIX9pw)

<comment><USER3> And a complementary video on the neighboring channel Military History Visualized: "Kriegsmarine's Wunderwaffen or Desperation Weapons?" [1]; showing and describing one of Germany's late war midget submarine models.

[meta] The concept of "submarine articles" [2] comes to mind (sorry).

\--

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF- bnhgZ_mY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF-bnhgZ_mY).

[2] [http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking at North Korea's fleet was an incredibly interesting Wikipedia hole I went down earlier this year (link below). The mixture of indigenous and foreign built, looking at their age and getting an idea of when they built a lot and when they didn't, and looking at totals is interesting. Especially since it's supposed to be a cohesive fleet. This wikihole also pairs well with reading about their naval doctrine.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_ships_of_the_Ko...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_ships_of_the_Korean_People%27s_Navy)

</comment><comment><USER5> A key use of midget submarines was Operation Source against the German's battleship Tirpitz.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> There's 2 WW2 XT class midget submarines in Aberlady Bay in Scotland. They were used for target practise and you can walk out to them at low tide. [http://coastkid.blogspot.com/2012/01/ww2-xt-class- submarine-...](http://coastkid.blogspot.com/2012/01/ww2-xt-class-submarine- wrecks-aberlady.html?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was expecting a submarine built for midgets. It'd be a smaller target and cheaper to build!

</comment><comment><USER8> Japanese midget submarines made it as far as Sydney Harbour in 1942:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> russia uses midget submarines in the baltic region [https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence- news/...](https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence- news/2017/august-2017-navy-naval-forces-defense-industry-technology-maritime- security-global-news/5492-russian-navy-special-forces-to-receive-p-650-midget- submarines.html)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you start charging $2X to an old client? - <AUTHOR>

Out of my many clients, my oldest client still prefers that I charge him $X like the old times. But my number of clients have grown and some are willing to pay me even $3X. Assuming that I still want to work with the old client, how do I get the message across that he should be paying me $2X now in a non-confrontational way? <comment><USER2> "I still want to work with you, but I need to keep my business running. My rates have risen since we worked, but I'm willing to compromise and meet in the middle.

If this works for you, we can move forward now. If not, I need to work on other projects now but I can let you know if I get a break in my schedule for discount work."

<comment><USER3> Sounds about right.

I've also raised rates in the future just by letting clients know months ahead of time that it would happen. It seems to take off the sting somewhat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Read the book, "Value-Based Fees" by Alan Weiss to get some ideas.</comment>


Signs that a business idea will probably fail - <AUTHOR> https://dannorris.me/9-signs-that-your-business-idea-will-probably-fail/ <comment><USER2> One thing that bothers me about silicon valley influenced thinking is that "business idea" always seems to mean "disruptive startup that changes the world and makes billions."

Business doesn't have to mean that sort of business. Some guy making $3000 a month selling t-shirts and coffee mugs on etsy has, what I would think of, as a good business. Someone opening up a hotdog stand making $4000 also has a good business.

I noticed this in Zambia, lots of people standing by the side of the road selling soda pop and cigarettes or dried fish, or whatever they could get their hands on. Great businesses, great ideas, I'm glad they're doing it and I commend them for it.

The signs this article talks about are extremely limiting, to the point where the author is saying most people shouldn't bother. I think they apply for starting a big disruptive tech startup. I don't think they apply to an etsy store or hot dog stand, and those are viable and fairly easy to reach businesses. Personally I'd much rather focus on the easily attainable later sort of business rather than focus my time and energy in a quixotic effort to try and be the next Musk or Zuckerberg.

<comment><USER3> If someone's business is self sustaining and supports somebody's lifestyle, it's successful as far as I'm concerned. Ultimately that should be the basis behind a business. This is just my own likely, uninformed opinion but I feel this attitude of ever constant growth above all else is ultimately harmful and in the end actually ends up stifling innovation and creativity.

A small comfortable business with some extra revenue is probably more likely to take some risks ans come up with something new than a large corporation focussed on maximizing revenue growth. The amount of capital the smaller business has available may be less, but what good is capital if you're not willing to innovate and try new things.

In a lot of ways it's kind of like the indie vs AAA games market. Small indie games may not be as visually impressive or make as much money as those epic AAA games, with photorealistic graphics and Oscar award winning cutscenes, but the good ones sre usually pretty innovative and offer quality gameplay a lot of those larger games focused on wide appeal and maximizing profit.

<comment><USER4> Case in point: who would have ever set out to make Minecraft? The only reason to do it the way it was done was due to the constraints on capital expenditure. Lately I've been playing Dragon Quest Builders 2 and it's awesome. It mixes a block building sandbox game with a more traditional RPG. The thing that makes the game, though, is the blocks. Building with blocks is simple, intuitive and incredibly fun. But I don't think anybody would have sat down and thought "Building with blocks is just good UX" unless they had some reason to try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a bad post. One suggestion that has worked for me to stop me working on dozens of ideas at once is to write them down in detail in an ideas diary. This seems to take away most of the desire to start working on the idea right now.

<comment><USER6> Do you later execute any of them? I feel I need the optimism that I only have when I do not see the details clearly yet to start something.

<comment><USER5> Yes. The last one I executed on was to do in depth fundamental analysis on all the ASX listed biotech/pharma companies (there are about 70 of them). Out of this process I found one very undervalued company that I took a large strategic investment in and joined the board to help turn it around. This has turned into a very good investment, although it has taken up a lot of my time.

<comment><USER6> Nice. What works for someone might not work for someone we can see again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That working on multiple things at the same time one is spot on. That has been the #1 reason I've screwed stuff up.

Something I constantly remind myself: it's not that you're not capable of doing that thing, it's that you don't have the capacity. You may be perfectly capable of doing something, but if you don't have the capacity to do it, there's a good chance you'll blow it. Disconnecting your ego from reality on this one will save you a ton of heartache and stress.

And for those who say "not me," I, too, was an egomaniac and thought everyone else wasn't as good. Pump your brakes and thank me later.

<comment><USER8> Being incapable and having no capacity sounds very similar to me. Could you explain the difference a bit more?

<comment><USER9> I could easily count to 1 billion, but I don't have the time to undertake that task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > That's why entrepreneurs, myself included, waste years of their lives on > shitty ideas that will never work, following the popular trend of "ideas > don't matter, only execution matters".

The saying has to do with just having an idea is worthless in itself, you have to do something with that idea.

He interprets it as a shitty idea will be successful if executed well.

Wow.

<comment><USER11> Directly after the line you quote, the author continues:

> Bullshit.

> Ideas matter a lot, and if yours is a shitty one, for you, at that time, > with the resources you have, it will almost certainly fail.

I think your interpretation of the author's interpretation is flawed.

<comment><USER10> Yes, he called bullshit on it.. on his incorrect interpretation of the saying.

The saying is more along the lines of "An idea without action is worthless"

His rephrasing of it was either a 1) bad interpretation or 2) a purposeful one so he could disagree with it and appear 'edgy'.

<comment><USER12> This is called a straw man. It's a logical fallacy, but unfortunately a very persuasive argument at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A sign that a business will fail: you worship tech heroes instead of being willing to forge your own path and go against the grain (see #3)

</comment><comment><USER14> I very much disagree with:

> 7\. You are operating mainly on assumptions

You'll always be operating mainly on assumptions. Everyone will.

It does help to check your assumptions against external things, so if you're wrong, you can notice faster. But even the process of noticing that the data is confusing is like 99.99% rationalism and only 0.01% empiricism.

<comment><USER15> I spent 2 years building an awesome product, thinking that my future clients would think this product awesome too, and that they would need it.

I was completely wrong. I didn't know my clients and my market. This is the exact definition of operating mainly on assumptions. I lost at least 18 months, since I could have find this out way sooner.

<comment><USER16> Tell us more about the product, market, and clients.

<comment><USER15> I built a copycat of www.bellycard.com for French market. As a software engineer, the technical product was good IMHO. but I spent almost 2 years to build it, without really trying to sell it. My thought was: "if it's sold in US, it will be sellable in France".

Then I found ont the real truth:

\- Merchants won't find your website to buy your amazing product, you need to meet them physically (that can seems obvious but it was not the case for me at that time)

\- Merchants don't care about you or your product. They won't listen to you in deep, except if you have specific social skills (I don't). Every day someone enters in their shop trying to sell them something. If you're not psychologically ready to hear "I don't care" or "is it free?" 9 times on 10, then you can not do that for a very long time.

\- Independant merchants, generally speaking, don't have any marketing skills. What seems obvious for you is not for them. For example, they don't see the powerfulness of getting emails and consuming habits of their own customers. Plus, I'd say 2/3 of them were really suspicious about technology in general.

So what was hard here was not to make a product that have intrinsic value for merchants, but to teach merchants what this value is.

The real need to succeed in this project is absolutely not tech, it's to know the market, and how to convince merchants.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for this. Great write up. Rings absolutely true.

That said, all of this would be as expected, even for a great product, with product-market fit.

Selling is hard, you have to find the right niche of customers, references, and not everyone will love it right away.

Great lesson that you will take with you on the next run.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the support. Yep even for me, now when I tell this story, the mistakes I made seem obvious.

Selling is hard, and becomes close to impossible if like me, you don't know your target, and on top of that, you're socially anxious to talk to strangers and get a "no" as answer.

Client prospection requires specific skills I don't have and I'll probably never get.

Sometimes we (solo-dev people) need to be more humble and accept we can not do everything well. Or as an alternative, we need to find project ideas that suit our skills better (B2C would probably have been easier for me than B2B).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > You are the wrong person for the job

The first rule of "some level of self awareness" is to not completely hand yourself over to survivorship bias. So the argument is that Mark is a smart hacker and possesses "balls of steel" -> Mark is successful? And because you're the opposite way -> you'll fail?

No. He's been completely blindsided by survivorship bias. It's actually the other way, from that Mark became very successful (via good luck which was probably modulated by some highly attainable level of skill in execution) -> everyone thinks Mark is a super hacker with balls of steel.

It's terrible advice which gives you premonitions about yourself which would keep you from even trying. Or maybe the author can actually tell innate potential to some uncanny degree, in which case he should join YC to vet founders.

<comment><USER18> this. Also in point #3 - "these people are not like us" then points #4,#6 using tech idols as role models. If they're not like us then we can stop using them as role models, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> He says this:

"ideas don't matter, only execution matters".

Bullshit.

Ideas matter a lot, and if yours is a shitty one, for you, at that time, with the resources you have, it will almost certainly fail."

But most, if not all of his red flags are execution-centeic.

I'd like to add, it's not that ideas don't matter. They do. However, most of the time a good idea executed well will beat a great idea done poorly. Furthermore, very few ideas are born great. They usually reguire refinement. That refinement process is...execution.

<comment><USER20> I also read somewhere (I think PG said this) that generally speaking it's not obvious which ideas are good _a priori_.

It makes sense if you think about it. If we knew in advance what ideas will work anyone could have a successful product which isn't the case.

<comment><USER19> Just the same, if execution was easy, everyone would be doing it.

A well-played execution process has iteration and refinement baked into it. Few ideas are born fully grown. They evolve; provided they are allowed to do so. That evolution is part of execution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the current economic climate, in the tech sector, the idea doesn't matter. It's almost all about execution and social networks.

Does your business model leverage network effects? Did you get funding from the right investors? Does your business model reward customers for helping you recruit other customers? If so, then your odds are very good regardless of what you do.

If you don't have a network growth strategy, then nobody will know about your startup. You can have the best idea in the history of the universe, it's not going to work because no one has an incentive to use and recommend your product or service but they have an incentive to maintain the status quo.

Investors and users need to stand to gain more from your project than from upholding the status quo. And these days many investors are shareholders or employees of the status quo so this is a difficult thing to pull off.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it just me or the logic in #3 is deeply flawed? I mean who of the author's heroes knew in advance what their companies were going to become (and thus how "special" they were)?

</comment><comment><USER23> 5\. You can't build a story / brand around it

Many articles focus on the idea of building your community etc, but few actually focus on how to do it amidst all the noise

</comment><comment><USER24> > When I think about entrepreneurs who have given large amounts to causes, the > ones I think of like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos

What causes has Bezos given to? He shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence as Gates.

<comment><USER25> This article points out that Bezos has been light on his giving (compared to the richest billionaires) but it also lists out who he has given to, which is a diverse set of interests as well as some princely sums:

[https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news- trends/article/307...](https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news- trends/article/3075956/why-hasnt-jeff-bezos-donated-much-charity-billionaires)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > 3\. You are the wrong person for the job

This is ridiculously bad advice. How can you expect to make a dent in the universe if you can't even manage to believe in yourself?

<comment><USER27> It's weird because it's a valid point, but they go on to elaborate using absurdly misguided arguments.

They're mostly developing on the importance of being smart, all the while misunderstanding what being smart _is_ (it's not grades jesus christ) and failing to establish a correlation between smarts and fitness for a particular task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > 2\. You are working on more than 1 thing

This is so true it's almost a cliché. Too often have I been in organizations that try to do a little of everything I hoped to eventually find something that sticks and it has almost never worked out.

<comment><USER29> He means side projects or businesses. If you want to build Uber, don't try to build eBay or PayPal on the side. Founders and other early employees have to do a little of everything as there isn't anyone else to do HR, sales, marketing...</comment></comment>


The manuscripts of Dijkstra - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/

<comment><AUTHOR> Dijkstra was known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD as prefix. Dijkstra would distribute photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues; as many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copy, the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community. The topics were computer science and mathematics, and included trip reports, letters, and speeches. More than 1300 EWDs have since been scanned, with a growing number transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.

[ from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#EWDs_and_wri...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#EWDs_and_writing_by_hand) ]

</comment><comment><USER2> Most of the manuscripts are good, but I specifically recommend "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science". If you take the time to understand how Dijkstra was thinking when he wrote that, you're already ahead of the vast majority of computer science graduates.

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree, that is what had led me to this site initially !</comment></comment>


How to work with Creative Professionals - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/25B5HsgW My job is in jeopardy for presenting this document in a code review. Most of the communication at my workplace is through teleconferencing, even when people are in the same room. I wrote this in response to the lack of specifications or outcomes for projects which has lowered morale. I'd talk to the CEO or CIO about it, but after working here for over 4 months they have never come in yet, even though they live relatively close.<p>HN's thoughts?<p>- s.a.xanadu <comment><AUTHOR> My job is in jeopardy for presenting this document in a code review. Most of the communication at my workplace is through teleconferencing, even when people are in the same room. I wrote this in response to the lack of specifications or outcomes for projects which has lowered morale. I'd talk to the CEO or CIO about it, but after working here for over 4 months they have never come in yet, even though they live relatively close.

HN's thoughts?

\- s.a.xanadu</comment>


Show HN: Howler AI – Get more press with AI-powered media outreach - <AUTHOR> https://www.howler.media <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

TLDR:

Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.)

\---

Last month we launched Aidem Network: a simple tool to launch your product on hundreds of websites with one click. We expected to get 5-10 customers, but instead got over 50. It was super MVP, so our system (both operations and tech) was primitive––and obviously this amount of demand blew it up entirely.

While we've been drowning in emails and operations backlog, the product still worked really well for most of our customers (especially Bitcoin Regret Club who went viral with features from Mashable, The Next Web, and Tecmundo). We got a ton of feedback on what was wrong with our product and how to improve like:

1\. "I'm doing an ICO, can I choose which media outlets you target? I don't want to waste time pitching to Cosmopolitan." 2\. "I would rather you pitch to 10 hyper-targeted media outlets than 150 general ones." 3\. "If the 150 media outlets don't respond, I want you to iterate the pitch and send it to more." 4\. "I want you to follow up a few times with everyone you've pitched to." 5\. "I don't think I've framed my product well enough to get press. I want an expert to work with me to refine my pitch for a few days before launch." 6\. "I want to see the emails and confirm them before you send." 7\. "I want a report of all the emails you sent with open rates." 8\. "I want to pitch all sorts of media outlets: everything from small niche blogs to CNN. Getting CNN would be great, but so would a few local new stations in Ontario––where our customers are."

With our version 1 system, all the above was either physically or economically impossible. So for the past few weeks we've been working on a pivot away from our original product that solves all this and more.

Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.) Here's how it works:

We personally work with you to refine your pitch to press and framing strategy, build a custom hyper-targeted list of 500 media outlets to pitch to, send your pitch to 500 of the writers (1 writer per outlet), send 2 personalized follow-ups to each of them, then send you a report of everything sent complete with delivery, open, and reply rates. This process takes 1 month and starts at just $149.

We've made Howler this affordable by refining some open-source topic modeling (NLP) algos to scan through pitches and company profiles to match them with outlets in our database of 50k+ journalist profiles. We've also automated all non-essential operating activities (like physically clicking the "send" button on thousands of emails each day) by building a custom system on top of a stitch-together of almost 10 third party tools (thanks Airtable and Zapier). Now the only thing we spend man-hours on is perfecting our customers' pitches and engineering.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! We'd love your feedback. We're also hiring growth hackers with experience in media outreach. @ them here if you know anyone!

PS: All of our past customers will be getting a free month of Howler on us.

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/howler- ai](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/howler-ai)

<comment><USER2> cool product, having worked in advertising this is pretty cool. I was wondering when someone would make something like this.</comment></comment>


California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the state's housing crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-housing-supply/ <comment><USER2> Judging by the endless thread on Nextdoor with people in my East Bay neighborhood complaining about the "Manhattanization" of their small town, due to _7_ units being built on an empty lot, the housing crisis is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

The "FU, I got mine" attitude is going to choke California. How we got here is a fascinating story, and recommend reading literature on it.

<comment><USER3> I don't feel like I'm saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn't have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they're trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I've helped build. Why is that fair?

As I've said in the past, No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places?

I believe that the bulk of the problem starts with the companies in CA. Wages clearly aren't high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down.

Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first?

I'm not sure how one can disagree with my points. So, I'm probably clueless on this issue. Please educate me.

(Clearly, I've angered the mob. Please don't bring torches and pitchforks to my door tonight. I just wanted to get an alternative and unrepresented viewpoint into the discussion.)

<comment><USER4> This is the exact FU attitude that GP is describing. There is nothing about "building the community" that entitles you to prevent other people from living near you.

They aren't trying to use political power to force you to give up what you've helped build, they are trying to buy land and build homes. It simply isn't ok for people to prevent other from living near the so they can turn their "communities" into elitist social clubs.

Foreign buyers are irrelevant. They wouldn't be getting involved at all if homes in CA weren't so absurdly overpriced.

<comment><USER3> Wait, did public opinion and political thought change somewhere within the last two decades such that owning property now doesn't give one rights over that property and rights to shared governance of the incorporated area? Sorry if that comes across as flippant, but it's a really serious question. I kind of bought this property so that I could enjoy it for at least 30 years. It's not my fault that it's appreciated so much. What do you want me to do?

<comment><USER5> Buying a property gives you the right to your property. It shouldn't give you the right to tell other people who live nearby what to do with theirs (i.e. to tell them not to redevelop it at a higher density if they so choose).

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately not the case. Ownership of your property gives you an effective fractional ownership interest in your local radius through zoning and community governance. No amount of state law is going to change that. You can keep fighting the issue (and you might have some traction in a decade or two) or move somewhere more accommodating.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but you don't own that other property. Other people do, and they should be able to do as they please with it, so long as it meets zoning regulations.

I don't think a concept of a fractional ownership exists because, well, it's not yours.

If you really want some guarantee that your immediate radius will meet some sort of standards, it sounds like you'd want to be part of an HOA. I personally would never want to be part of one (who likes being told what to do?) but they could help protect property values from that one neighbor who could be a problem.

<comment><USER8> Neighborhoods and communities are real things. Noise, dogs, trees, etc. don't respect property lines or zoning regulations. That's the sense in which fractional ownership exists: when you are my neighbor, you necessarily invade my space. But good neighbors look out for each other.

"Everyone should maximize the income from their property up to the limit of law" is a recipe for for having no neighborhoods or communities. It's the usual fallacy of treating people as fungible commodities.

HOAs are terrible, they are inevitably staffed with busybodies. We can agree on that!

<comment><USER9> I think that's pretense. Homeowners use zoning primarily to protect property values, not build up communities. The suburb where I live now is incredibly neighborly. There's also a bar within walking distance and a little corner store. Part of the reason is that lots are tiny (about 1/12 of an acre) and there are few cul de sacs so you actually see people walking their dogs, etc. Today, parking, lot size, traffic management, and other regulations would make it illegal to build something like our neighborhood. The minimum lot size is like 1/4 of an acre in our county! You're basically obligated to build suburban hellscapes where you can't even go to a neighbor's house without getting in a car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem isn't housing. The problem is transportation and infrastructure. People need to work for a living. They also don't want to spend a significant amount of time commuting to said work. California's transportation, road, and highway infrastructure is completely and utterly inadequate for the population in the SF and LA areas. This forces people into living situations that are far from ideal and creates a fight over housing.

Create multiple ways for people to commute from 30 miles away in 30 minutes and housing will be much less of a problem with people having many more options.

Proof: If people could instantly teleport between work and home no matter how far apart they are, do you really think they would still cram into SF Bay Area or LA housing? Hell no. Housing is the symptom of poor transportation infrastructure.

<comment><USER11> The next best thing to teleportation is living across the street from work and having an instant commute. No public transit can compete with that.

If you legalize housing next to work, then you reduce the amount of stress on the transit systems we already have. It's just plain more efficient.

<comment><USER12> Well how about, at least in IT and S/W development, we encourage remote working, rather than promoting childish "agile" work practices where people come in at 9 am for a "daily standup" and mess around by writing tasks on sheets of paper like in the last century?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is from June. The bill from Scott Wiener it talks about (SB 35) passed. We'll see what effect it has in reality.

[http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing- legislatio...](http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-legislation- deal-impact-20170915-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> "We've tried everything except building more housing and we're all out of ideas!" I'm baffled how local governments can't seem to connect the supply side.

30k new jobs + 8k new housing units = higher housing prices

Or for a more hilarious ratio, look at Mountain View over the last 15 years. I think for a decade there were effectively zero new units created.

<comment><USER15> And what makes this even more tragic, is that this is happening in a highly educated cities. What's so hard to understand about supply and demand? I think, deep down, they're fundamentally misguided: democrats and liberals think that they're somehow fighting against capitalism, and by limiting developers, they're somehow helping humanity.

Red Cities and red states get it, they generally don't have these problems, even the extremely high growth ones: like Houston.

<comment><USER16> If they were serious about fighting capitalism, they might do more to resist the biggest and most profitable companies in the world expanding their own real estate portfolios and footprint. Instead they have decided to attack the employees. Relatively privileged employees, but workers nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It all comes down the regulatory hurdles. Even land prices are the result of rent-seeking behavior among land-holders due to regulatory impediment.

If California would pass legislation radically limiting regulatory burdens that municipalities and other legislative bodies could pass, this problem would disappear within a year or two.

<comment><USER18> Simply removing regulation is not enough to fix everything. Downtown Los Angeles is a prime example of that. It has been seeing a construction boom in recent year and loosened regulation is probably responsible for part of that boom. However since there is little regulation on the type of housing that is being built, the new construction is all coming in at the top of the market. This is because buying land and building a mid-market apartment building is not much cheaper than buying the land and building a luxury apartment building. The end result is that Downtown Los Angeles is full of luxury apartments with some of the areas highest vacancy rates as landlords are making more money charging high rents at 80-90% occupancy than they would with lower rents at 100% occupancy. Meanwhile these new buildings are replacing much more affordable housing which is pushing lower income renters out of their homes. Eventually those luxury apartments will trickle down to cheaper rent at the bottom of the market, but often times that means forcing a low income family out of their home in a gentrifying neighborhood into a less desirable area that is often farther from amenities the city offers like public transit which objectively make their lives worse.

<comment><USER19> About 10% vacancy seems to be a healthy amount. If that were over the entire city, and not only in new developments, then people would have much more freedom to move. And then prices would go down.

100% occupancy is bad, because it means the city is not flexible to changing demands. Fill up that new development 100%, and then the next person who needs to come in would need to double up, or bid higher and displace somebody.

That is my big problem with the Planning process, trying to manage growth. It's slow and brittle to unanticipated changes.

<comment><USER18> It isn't over the entire city, it is over a small neighborhood within the city. The vacancy rate in that neighborhood was at 12% while the entire city rate was at 4%. That plus the rate being at a 17 year high would seem to indicate a problem. [1]

[1] - [https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/15/16316040/downtown-la-high- va...](https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/15/16316040/downtown-la-high-vacancy-rate- rent)

<comment><USER20> Yes it does. The problem is lack of supply in the overall market to drive the price to a reasonable point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > It gives the public a false sense that a step has been taken toward having > more housing when in fact it's just an illusion.

This is the same anywhere there's direct democracy. 51% of the people vote in the government that perpetuates the ponzi scheme of rising house prices because borrowing from the bank to buy a house then selling it later for a profit is the quickest path to retirement. Restricting housing supply is one easy way to keep house prices rising. The government needs to feed a story to the other 49%, hence these illusions like in California.

Besides restricting supply, another way to keep the prices rising is to boost demand, so the 51% also vote for the governments that increase immigration, which has been especially successful recently in the western US, Canada, and Australia/NZ. Every now and then, a government comes along that attempts to boost housing supply or restrict demand from immigrants or foreigners, but they soon get voted out because early retirement is the top criteria of voting decisions for the 51%. That government's initiative then becomes another carcass used to fool the other 49%.

<comment><USER22> >This is the same anywhere there's direct democracy. 51% of the people vote in the government

Uh, not quite. 51% of the _voters_. I highlight this because it's incredibly important to understand that _only voters have power_ , and if you refuse to vote then you _will_ be screwed by politicians in favour of people who actually keep them in power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> CA doesn't want more homes or people. The old generation and their heirs are firmly cemented in place (prop 13 + 58/193). No one is going to fix shit, and I certainly don't want any more market distorting policies like rent control. My area hasn't built a new home in 15 years.

<comment><USER24> California has 40 million people. We have renewable water resources for 20 million. At this rate we will utterly obliterate our water resources for good. No government can fix that...and no, you aren't going to desal that much water either.

We need to figure out how to get 10 million out of the State.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Height limits and zoning are a good idea. If you don't have limits then you will have only high ugly 25-floor apartment buildings. Like the ones they build in China [1][2] or in Russia.

Look at any old European city like Paris or Amsterdam or Saint-Petersburg. A historical part of the city with 3-5-7 floor buildings looks so much better than modern cities with skyscrapers.

And I am not sure that building new houses will solve the problem. New houses and lower living cost might attract even more people to move to California.

[1] [https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/09.jpg](https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/09.jpg)

[2] [https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/11.jpg](https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/11.jpg)

<comment><USER26> 1\. High-rise building can be build in different styles. I like most Manhattan buildings from 1920s - 1940s. 2\. There are a log of ugly box building built in Russia (and China), because it is a race to the bottom. People can't afford apartments in good looking buildings and can only buy in cheapest ones.

Given how expensive land in California it is unlikely that developers will try to save every cent on buildings them-self.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe replace "tried" with "failed" in the headline?

</comment><comment><USER28> I mean, just pull something from HongKong's playbook? Or Singapore or even NYC.

Why does the government have to be incompetent? Maybe just admit that prop 13 was a bad idea?

</comment><comment><USER29> The Bay Area is an international hotspot. You have people fighting to move in from the whole world. I would expect it to be one of the most expensive places on the planet. And given it is an American city, I expect the worst infrastructure on the planet.

</comment><comment><USER30> So what you're telling me is that people are going to be paying me $15,000/mo if I do get that property

</comment><comment><USER31> > _It requires cities and counties to develop plans every eight years for new > home building in their communities. After more than a year of work and > spending nearly $50,000, Foster City had an 87-page housing plan that > proposed hundreds of new homes, mapped where they would go and detailed the > many ways the city could help make the construction happen. But a crucial > element was missing: Foster City was never going to approve all the building > called for in the voluminous proposal, Perez said._

Why would a municipality spend $50,000 on a do-nothing report? Instead keep the $50,000 and spend $2.00 on a report that says, "It would be best to do something about housing. Someone should build more houses."

Sure, the law is a failure, but the municipalities that spent that kind of money willy-nilly are just as limited in their success.

<comment><USER32> To me the most mystifying part is why the city is involved in any of this planning? I find it utterly appalling that the city is planning housing units. What bizarre planned economy, communist system is this? Americans tend to be very pro-market, but as soon as it's about housing we get this bizarre stuff.

<comment><USER33> Our economy is already highly planned. Particular behaviours are tax advantaged, particular investment in particular industries is centrally planned through government procurement, healthcare prices are controlled through Medicaid/Medicare, almost every corporation heavily practices centralized planning...

The strange part is not that planning happens, its how we are so bad at it when it comes to land ownership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There can nary be such a thing as a 'housing crises'.

California does not have one, in general.

If California municipalities 'don't want to enable building' because their residents don't want it ... well ... then they will have fewer people, probably higher housing costs and that's their choice.

If the 'average bay policeman' or whatever can't afford to buy a home for 100 miles - then the citizens of Cali are going to have to pay their cops more, or, those cops will go elsewhere.

It's a fairly fluid and competitive landscape - more so than most places on earth.

There's a high demand for living in some parts of Cali and it's going to be like that for a long time, even with some building it won't change.

It's a choice Californians seem to be making, it's their choice.

If town councils are arbitrarily messing things up against the will of the people - who want to see high rises everywhere ... well that's another story.

<comment><USER35> Is it too much to ask to have an ideal place to live at a price strictly enforced to be well below its market value but only if you happen to live there already?

<comment><USER22> /s?

<comment><USER35> Yes :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's insane mobile takeover - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2015/01/28/facebooks-insane-mobile-takeover-is-just-beginning/ <comment><USER2> Facebook owning mobile? Not hardly. They have users not because of the quality of their mobile experience. Their main app is still a POS. And, they still seem to have an aversion to native development -- their React "native" play is just a rehash of their earlier HTML 5 experiment. The purchased expertise from Instagram, etc is helping, but they are buying users, not necessarily earning them by creating a superior mobile product. The messenger spin off had minimal purpose except to annoy me. I get message notification on the main app, yet I have to open another app to read them? Who thought that was a good idea? It is almost at the same level of annoyance as the Foursquare spinoff of Swarm. Yes, FB kills it when it comes to users, however the cable companies have a lot of users too; that doesn't mean they're awesome. Financially Facebook might be doing really well, but that doesn't necessarily make them some kind of guru when it comes to mobile. When I think "awesome mobile experience," Facebook isn't what comes immediately to mind.

<comment><USER3> I recently deleted the app and the messaging appendage. When messaging was integrated, I actually had a situation where messages via Facebook were essential, and having the notifications set up to audibly alert me was enough to use up power faster than I could put it back in on a travel day. It seems like the problems of using Facebook are what you'd expect from a lack of engineering maturity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He lost me when he said

"They will add Apps to directly compete with Google, like maps, email, and productivity (think: Evernote). As well as cloud storage."

Did we already forget the fail that was FB email?

<comment><USER5> I'm not even sure why he thinks they're heading in that direction. Until they do something like make a big productivity acquisition, I can't see them shifting over over from social

<comment><USER6> 1\. That's exactly what people said about Google before they launched Google Apps, Docs, etc. "why would Google do this?" \-- the answer was clear: user engagement and the blurring of personal and professional data/personas.

2\. If you hit scale, the best practices is to try and build as full of a stack as possible. That's why Microsoft did a search engine, Google did an Office Suite and why Facebook will do both at some point.

<comment><USER5> 1\. I feel like social and productivity are at two ends of a spectrum. Searc, at least in my mind, is closer to productivity. Still seems unlikely to me that they'd build it from scratch rather than buy someone.

2\. Interesting that you think of the stack that way. So you think Facebook will encroach onto Search at some point? What exactly is in the full stack?

And an obligatory reference to Apple, is Apple a different full stack or are they a short stack without search?

Now I want pancakes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They seem to trying suck up a significant proportion of Android and iOS devs in the London area. They are producing lots of interesting libraries too, shame they are Facebook.

<comment><USER5> They do this everywhere with a major office. Silicon Valley is this plus a handful of other equally huge companies

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've noticed a lot of friends are starting to Facebook message rather than text. You get read receipts, and replies are faster. (I'm in Canada)

<comment><USER9> I don't consider my Facebook application (i.e. wall, timeline, groups, etc.) usage very high, but my Facebook messenger usage is through the roof. I don't even have any other way to reach most of my friends or contacts.

I get the impression this is very common among people in their twenties.

Alternatives like Google Hangouts, Snapchat, Line, WeChat, etc. don't have nearly as many users, at least among my social groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> FB Messenger used to be a part of Facebook. They broke it out into a separate app. According to the author, the mere act of breaking it out suddenly gains Facebook an extra 500 million active monthly users. How does that make any sense? Splitting one app into two doesn't make it worth any more, and double- counting the users seems completely pointless.

<comment><USER6> I make it clear a couple of times that there are duplicate users in those numbers. Additionally, I divide the total user count into FB's unique count, which gives you the number two.

So, of the four Apps Facebook is giving numbers for... users on average are using two.

Google has a dozen Apps in the store, and there is some overlap as well. This is the state of the art: one function per App. We'll see a LOT more of this over time.

In fact, Google just made Docs into a couple of different Apps -- instead of just one with sheets, docs, presentations, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "FB will give Snapchat $20b, 30b, and 40b offers over the next two years. 50-50 they get Evan to sell. "

Does anyone else here think a 40B dollar offer for snapchat is kinda, lets say, out of the realm of possibilities?

<comment><USER6> folks have offered $10b, so 40b is 4x that.

If snapchat grows revenue by 4x they will get that number.

case closed.

<comment><USER11> who has offered 10B for snapchat - i thought the highest number was 3B by facebook

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How much of App Install revenue comes from F2P games?

<comment><USER13> and also, what fraction of mobile is cpi, and of that, what percentage is just recycled vc money? Because we all know what happened to yahoo during the first crash. Facebook not breaking those numbers out makes me strongly suspicious that the number is pretty damn high, and fb mobile revenue -- $2.5B in 4q14, almost 2/3 of ad revenue -- is very dependent on the, at minimum, frothy funding market.

<comment><USER6> It's a good observation. I discussed it with some folks who are... well..... anyway, I discussed it with folks and the "forthy" portion of the install revenue is very low (overall) to FB revenue. If it all went away it would not rock the company... low single digit %.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Now, I would say Twitter's users are worth 2-5x as much as the average FB users because the product is just much more "upscale."_

What a strange claim.

As an aside, recently the Facebook app (at least on Android) embedded its own web browser, so instead of going to Chrome when you followed a web link, it would open in the Facebook app. You can reconfigure it to use the external browser, but the power of defaults mean many won't.

This seemingly small change has a big impact because if you open a link you want to share, the Facebook app restricts you to sharing it via your wall, versus the traditional Android app where you might share it over hangouts, Google+, email, etc.

<comment><USER15> That small change was enough to get me to uninstall the Facebook app on my Nexus 5, and while I imagine there are others that felt that way, it certainly didn't manifest itself in their numbers, leading to some cognitive dissonance on my part.

The incredible staying power of default behavior being what it is, I'm sure these continued attempts to grow FB's mobile control on Android will be ignored/accepted...but it makes me wonder at what point a normal user will say "enough is enough." What's the threshold for abusive default behavior in an app? Or a network/platform, for that matter?

<comment><USER16> When the annoyance outweighs the benefit.</comment></comment></comment>


Whales as ecosystem engineers - <AUTHOR> http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=18797

<comment><USER2> See also: "The Power Of Poop: A Whale Story"

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/04/03/298778615/the-p...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/04/03/298778615/the- power-of-poop-a-whale-story)</comment>


Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ <comment><USER2> I think the solution to this is that science publication needs to be done like science itself. Just as scientists commit to doing experiments without knowing what the results of the experiments will be, publishers need to commit to publishing experiments without knowing what the results of the experiments will be.

Publishers need to be involved earlier in the process. Instead of submitting a completed research finding, scientists should apply to publish research before doing it, and if the topic of research is interesting to the publisher, both scientist and publisher should commit to publish in that journal, no matter what the results are.

Additionally, publishers should commit to publish only something like 1/3 research into new topics, with the other 2/3 being publishing attempt to reproduce previous interesting results. I don't mean a slavish repetition of existing experiments, but taking a critical eye toward testing the same hypotheses with different (hopefully better) methodology.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Inside the Fake Science Factory_ (2018) is an amazing DEFCON talk, by 3 people who stumbled on and investigated an unbelievably huge worldwide network (400,000 scientists involved) of fake-scientific conferences, journals, websites raking in money and enabling people to make claims that their products are scientifically proven. The presenters got hackers to track down the people behind one of the largest organizations, and analyze the huge numbers of conferences/papers. They present/publish nonsensical talks on graphs and bees+cancer to see what peer review there is... A must watch. Very funny, if depressing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q)

</comment><comment><USER4> A nature survey from 2016 among 1500 scientists, revealing a widespread consensus that there exists a reproducibility crisis in science:

[https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid- on...](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on- reproducibility-1.19970)

<comment><USER5> I generally agree with this. The publication game tends to focus on exciting new discoveries way more than reproduced ones. I think this is because universities push you to focus on "original ideas" when publishing theses instead of reproducing other ideas because the former is "harder" than the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most code is buggy despite passing all tests.

Publication is a sign of persistence, plausibility and a minimal quality check. Peer review improves articles, it does not guarantee correctness.

That's also why one should be extremely careful about things that are not peer reviewed. Not because the bar is so high, but because it's so low.

<comment><USER7> Just because the bar is low doesn't mean its height is in any way related to its discernment of quality. Say, for example, the bar was simply based on the institution that the author is employed by. That may be a low bar in that anyone from Harvard can get a paper published, but it also doesn't actually tell us anything about the paper's validity. Whereas I wouldn't be skeptical of a good Rush University paper, simply because its authors weren't prestigious enough for Nature to pay attention to.

<comment><USER6> I was talking about getting your paper peer reviewed, not placing it in a particular journal. If you want to get into PLOS One I don't think your university matters very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Science doesn't seem to have fixed itself since. At this point it is prudent to shift the public's perception from "research is true" to "research is valid". To the extent in which public policy is dictated by research, it should be based, not on journal-published research, but perhaps on meta- analysis or third party research-on-research.

</comment><comment><USER9> As stated, this research finding my be false too ! ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> A couple of other articles of interest:

An empirical estimate: [https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics/article/15/1/1/244509](https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics/article/15/1/1/244509)

And a review with some context: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/050575v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/050575v1)

</comment><comment><USER11> Beware the man of one study: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware- the-man-of-one-...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of- one-study/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Do you think a Github for science would help?

<comment><USER2> If you don't have a clear mechanism by which a startup could solve this problem, I suspect the result would be the same structures that already exist, but with better marketing and a Web 2.0 interface. If anything, this would make the problem worse, because it creates a company that now has a vested interest in keeping the status quo because it's part of the status quo, and that company will be manipulating politics and public opinion with its marketing.

A second problem with this sort of company is that it often doesn't really understand the industry it's "disrupting", so they end up not solving a lot of the problems which older solutions solved.

At a more fundamental level, I think that a company is always going to be motivated to make money rather than solve a problem. Even if intentions start off well, the people in the company will believe that the company is good and needed, so they'll make choices that give up a little of the original purpose of the company to make the company survive, because if the company doesn't survive then it can't do any good, right? And after a bunch of one-degree deviations from its original direction, the company is going a completely different direction than its original purpose and isn't even geared toward solving the problem any more.

Sure, "We're going to save the world" is great marketing, but at this point I simply don't ever believe that a startup is a solution to a major problem like this.

<comment><USER13> Why does everything needs to be a startup?

<comment><USER2> It doesn't, but that's what I took "GitHub for science" to mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (2005)

</comment><comment><USER15> Needs: [2005]

</comment><comment><USER16> Including this one?

<comment><USER17> Can you elaborate as to why? Snark is not really the goal here.

<comment><USER18> It's a perfectly valid, and indeed important question.

Self-application is an important form of scientific methodology. Think e.g. of programming languages development: one of the first things you do is bootstrap a compiler.

<comment><USER19> You're conflating science publishing philosophy with standard software development?

<comment><USER18> Programming language development is not standard software development.

PL research is a discipline with no really feasible empirical methods for robust and replicable evaluation of programming language ideas. Using self- application is a test of internal coherence -- if your new language is not good at writing a compiler, then maybe it isn't such a good idea.

Self-application is a well-known scientific methodology. Would you trust a physical theory that predicted the impossibility of physicists?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I learned this in middle school during the Science Fair. My experiment didn't work. Up against the deadline and not wanting a 0, I simply made up the data. I got a nice big A. Probably exactly what happens in the real world too.

<comment><USER21> If you would have gotten a 0 then your science teachers failed you I'd say. A failed experiment is just as valid a result as a successful one if the goal is to gather data.</comment></comment>


Why most clients will not get a scalable server for just $100 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@p0larboy/why-most-clients-will-not-get-a-scalable-server-for-just-100-299d3b3003bf#.eq6ji7fdy <comment><USER2> TLDR: Outsourcing development is more expensive than doing it yourself if you have better skills...

In the end, there's still some differences, real-time chat has different needs than other types of applications. Scaling chat applications beyond a few million users has it's own complexity... FB spends a _LOT_ of money to scale it's infrastructure. Twitter had a lot of hard growing up in a similar space.

As a hobby endeavor for a free app, it's bound to be harder still. It's a mixed blessing. Maybe time to get a corporate sponsor for the app.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm both surprised and not surprised that a mere 600 hits per second is considered crushing, and needs a $4000/month budget to handle.

In a recently failed startup, I was able sustain a minimum of 5000 live audio streams with dynamic, per-listener ad spots inserted into the stream server- side (the idea being that ads can't easily be blocked by client-side ad blockers). That's 5,000 unique, dynamically-generated audio byte streams; not the same stream with the same ad spot broadcast to listeners, or with ad spots being fetched out-of-band by special client-side code. And it was doing codec and format transcoding so that the same URL generated whatever was natively supported by the client (MP3, AAC, Vorbis codecs; ADTS, Flash, OGG, RTSP formats).

On top of that, you could dynamically inject ad spots per stream, and during each ad spot each context queried a single-threaded logic controller. So every 30 second interval there were about 10,000 small IPC messages passed over sockets between the front-end thread and the controller thread in under 2 seconds. And the controller thread maintained state for each session so for each listener you could see various real-time stats, including the list of ad spots delivered.

And all of that that was on a simple E3 Haswell. The front-end ad splicer and output format transcoder wasn't yet threaded, so the vast majority of the work occurred on a single core of a single E3 CPU. Linux handled NIC IRQs on the same core, so 5,000 wasn't even close to the limit. All-in-all, basically a single core using a single thread to deliver 5,000 streams (with 5,000 * N messages being generated at times) simultaneously using non-blocking I/O; much more work than any chat app would ever be asked to handle anywhere under such constraints.

(Though, to be clear, because it was live streams the codec transcoding didn't need to be done 5,000 times, and the codec of the ad spots could be cached. Rather, in this case there were only about 5 unique codecs for the incoming live stream. The codec transcoding occurred on a couple of back-end threads, with each thread multiplexing several input streams.)

The lesson I had to learn the hard way (_failed_ startup) is that good design and good architecture isn't worth anything. The vast majority of companies succeed with rather poorly written software, and by the time they hit real scalability problems they've already "succeeded" in the most important sense of the term.

So if you want a successful startup, use the environment that you're most productive in and that allows you to churn out features the fastest. Worry about scalability later, because if your competitor is first to market all the scalability in the world matters for precisely naught.</comment>


Realistic Kids "Game" Turns Out to Be Real World - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/kids-tricked-when-realistic-game-turns-out-to-be-actual-forest/ <comment><USER2> > Most Americans live within 100 miles of a natural forest or grassland but > believe that nature is inaccessible and are increasingly less likely to > engage in the great outdoors

100 miles is a 160 kilometers. Such a travel spans over a quarter of my country. It's not exactly a short distance.</comment>


If you can't compete in the open market, you don't deserve a seat at the table - <AUTHOR> http://www.ginzametrics.com/blog/if-you-cant-compete-in-the-open-market-you-dont-deserve-a-seat-at-the-table/ <comment><USER2> > Patents are designed to protect an implementation of an idea, not the idea > itself

Nope. In fact, one doesn't even have to have an implementation whatsoever in order to be granted a patent.

Just reading the rest of the article, it seems like ya'll don't know a whole lot about patent law.

I don't either, but I do know enough to know that forcing patent holders to "go after the largest infringer" is a silly idea. How would you determine "largest"?

<comment><USER3> Actually the idea that they should be forced to go after the largest infringer is a really good one, one which I haven't seen advocated for very much and seeing it there turned my initial first reaction of the piece upside down (nothing personal to original blog author, I just have a strong negative bias towards SEO).

Though you can handwave the idea away by the technicality of it being difficult to determine who the "largest" infringer is, you could achieve the gist of idea by structuring enforcement of the IP protection such that if you know about infringement or can reasonably be assumed to know about infringement (because it is happening very publicly), you must take action or risk losing the protection. This is already how trademarks work, why not patents?

There is some initial bad fallout that would come from a system like this in that there are surely companies who know about infringers of their patents who let it slide for whatever reason and this might force them to act, but I think the eventual positive effects this sort of system would have (IMO) would be worth that initial pain.

<comment><USER2> What you're saying is a terrible idea, because it shifts due diligence to the infringing party. This means that whenever I create something, I'd _have_ to hire a legal team to figure out if I'm infringing on _something_ or not, or risk losing the ensuing lawsuit.

Furthermore, I resent the notion that I'm just "handwaving" at all here. It's not only difficult, but _completely and entirely_ impossible.

It's entirely untenable, and it's a little silly to take patent law reform advice from someone who admits to not knowing much about patent law.

<comment><USER4> > This means that whenever I create something, I'd have to hire a legal team > to figure out if I'm infringing on something or not, or risk losing the > ensuing lawsuit.

What's the difference from the current situation?

<comment><USER2> It's currently... not that way?

<comment><USER5> Of course it is. If you don't want to be hit with or lose a patent infringement lawsuit, you'd damn well better search for applicable patents so you can avoid them.

Perversely, if you simply assume there will be patent lawsuits you will lose, you're better off not finding them, lest you then be hit with treble damages.

For a small entity, of course, it doesn't matter. Your legal bills will bankrupt you anyway.

<comment><USER2> Actually, no, that's not how it works. When being sued for patent infringement, a valid defense is indeed, "I didn't know about that patent."

<comment><USER3> No it isn't. You either infringe a patent or you don't. It is better not to know about the patent if you get caught infringing because of the treble damage possibility that nknighthb referenced, but "I didn't know about that patent" is a meaningless defense, you're still on the hook for the base cost of the infringement, just not 3x whatever that base is.

In either the current situation or the one I think is worth considering, you either infringe or you don't, nothing changes with regard to due diligence. Many patents are infringed every day with the infringing party having no idea infringement occurred (see: Carmack's reinvention of the z-fail stencil shadow system or any of countless other examples); but not knowing of the patent is absolutely not a defense. This is one of the more insidious problems with the current patent system as it relates to software, there are so many broad patents currently active that you basically can't avoid infringing all of them if you write any code at all, even if you never spend a second looking at other people's patents. The only variables are will you ever get big enough to be worth suing or not prior to the lifetime of the many patents you will invariably infringe.

Also, the idea that having a system where the IP holder is essentially forced to act to maintain control of the IP can't, by definition, be "impossible" because it is already how trademark law works in the US.

And as I mentioned in the original post I made on this I recognize there would be some negative fallout from the proposed system, but I think over the long- run it efficiently adds in a lot of features to patents that are currently missing (eg. a lot of people have proposed a yearly fee to renew patents to make sure people don't horde mountains of defensive garbage patents, this would achieve that same goal because they wouldn't want to put the legal resources in worthless suits against known infringers, and thus their garbage patents would very quickly lose their power; also it would make it far easier for many unknowing infringers (see for example the recent audio podcast patent disaster that is still going on) to group up to fight garbage patents because the person claiming patent protection would be forced to pull them all in instead of using the current system which is "go after the small fish, get a victory in East Texas, then use that to bleed everyone else dry".

<comment><USER2> > No it isn't. You either infringe a patent or you don't. It is better not to > know about the patent if you get caught infringing because of the treble > damage possibility that nknighthb referenced, but "I didn't know about that > patent" is a meaningless defense, you're still on the hook for the base cost > of the infringement, just not 3x whatever that base is.

So yes it is, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The carbonated beverage example is an interesting choice, considering that there was a whole lot of patent activity in that industry when it was first born. We just don't remember it because it all went down about 200 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER7> Arguing the ins and outs of patent laws was not the point. I think the point was to say that if you're going to patent something (especially a vague idea) that it comes across as cowardly to only go after one company out of 20 - because obviously you're not in it to protect your idea, more to take down anyone that manages to take any marketshare. Ray's point is that you should maintain marketshare by having the best product, the one people want to use - not by forcing them to use you because you've sued everyone else out of the space.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well-done, and thank you for taking a stand against a broken system.

</comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr - I'm scared. Don't sue us too please.

<comment><USER8> Did you even read the blog post? He's all but daring them to sue him. I congratulate him for taking a stand -- if all of us did the same, this broken software patent business would be much less of a problem, and only worst socially-outcast patent trolls would bother suing anyone.</comment></comment>


Marissa Mayer hates Yahoo Mail as much as you do - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/14/15800348/marissa-mayer-yahoo-mail-gmail <comment><AUTHOR> I get that as a leader you need to set an example but it struck me as curious that she wasn't able to change Yahoo Mail to her needs or that she clearly stuck with it despite frustrations.

<comment><USER2> She would have been fired for spending a lot of money on infrastructure that wouldn't be noticed long before she succeeded in revamping Yahoo Mail.</comment></comment>


AI Lawyer "Ross" Has Been Hired by Its First Official Law Firm - <AUTHOR> http://futurism.com/artificially-intelligent-lawyer-ross-hired-first-official-law-firm/ <comment><USER2> People talk a lot about AI replacing a bunch of professional occupations but to some extent I've always internalized that as some futurist BS that might eventually happen.

Maybe it's going to happen a lot sooner.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome. I could see this being useful in tightly regulated transactional situations as well, like securities.</comment>


Amazon needs a new HQ because it can't convince people to move to Seattle - <AUTHOR> Amazon needs a second headquarters because it can't convince people to move to Seattle where average home prices are $700k. If Amazon moved their HQ to Boston, home inflation would spike to 10-20% annually. Boston ($500k avg) will be Seattle in no time flat. How are you going to recruit outsiders when home inflation is off the charts? I would throw most of Colorado in the same boat as Boston, plus I don't care for the Broncos.<p>Amazon needs a market with some real estate runway: Dallas: $300k, Atlanta $185k. But Dallas is a cluster-f traffic nightmare. Atlanta traffic is a disaster also, but at least you could afford a home there. <comment><USER2> Amazon has burned through thousands of employees trying to keep their dumber managers in power. Amazon HQ is not American friendly either. Americans can quit and therefore are less valued there. Amazon has a large population of immigrant line and middle managers. It is dumb to think those people are going to move east to a red state. And its large population of immigrant workers at its HQ will not work under non-immigrant line managers. Economic conditions in India and China have improved a lot since 1994 as well, so not so many people are eager to become visa slaves in Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER3> They need a new headquarters also because Amazon has such an evil local employer reputation that most new hires are moving in from cheaper real estate markets.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cities are gonna fall all over themselves offering Amazon all kinds of corporate welfare giveaways, but in reality, they should be demanding that Amazon pay for housing and transit improvements. Any mid-size city that takes them is going to have all of its infrastructure stressed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Chicago has a fairly stalled housing market, three two top notch universities churning out cheap smarts, and its the multimodal freight capital of North America. The weather would keep me from moving there, but otherwise i yhink its a great choice for Amazon.

<comment><USER6> Except that it's the state closest to bankruptcy... and has the most underfunded pension system in the country. The state can't go bankrupt, and they can't print money, so they are raising taxes and as a result many people are leaving the state (500K emigrated in the last decade).

<comment><USER7> My wife and I bought a house in May and my mom wanted us to move to Northwest Indiana due to how bad Illinois has become and how hard it will be to sell property in the coming years due to the tax increase to pay off all the debt the state has from a lack of a budget for nearly 2 years.

It has affected public education as well. The school district my wife teaches at relies on state money (she claims it is the only one outside of Chicago that does) and because of lack of budget and various debts the state owes there is not as much money for education. If things don't change shortly the district will have to shut down in February of 2018. If teachers want to stay past that they can but they just won't be paid. Now, granted this is the far southwest suburbs so it may not be exactly where the new amazon workers may live but it is still a reflection as the state as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if they are considering weather as part of the equation? DFW has very nice summers and the week of winter is pretty nice. Lots of land, plenty of wind power, great highways system, lots of talent. Seriously, why would they even consider any where else when more Companies on the S&P 500 call Texas home then any other state.

It's their loss if they go anywhere else.

<comment><USER9> But in Dallas, they couldn't come in and own the entire downtown. So, clearly that is a non-option.

Now, Detroit — they could pretty much buy the entire city for a song, and then destroy whatever they want in order to build the new environment they want to see. But Debt-roit doesn't have the greatest supply of techies, and they would have to spend a lot of money to make it a nice enough place that people would want to live there.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Browser extensions to disable Slack's new WYSIWYG editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pocc/no-wysiwyg <comment><AUTHOR> These extensions have been registered:

      * Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-slack-wysiwyg/
      * Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jenojkbpialbgpbgokiakifhpmoponjn

Based on the script by Kevin Fahy [1] and multiple discussions [2] [3] about Slack's new interface.

Let me know if you have any questions.

      [1]: https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet
      [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647
      [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950

</comment><comment><USER2> See also the bookmarklet [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950)</comment>


Google updated their search UI. I'm not a fan. - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/uzPP4.png

<comment><USER2> Google has been like this for me since last week. It's buggy; the auto- complete box sometimes gets detached and just floats in the page. I hope I can turn the sidebar off in the future.

I do like the softer logo, though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the reasons I stay with Google is because of their minimal design aesthetic. The further they deviate from that, the more likely I am to leave.

Although, I'm not sure where I'd go.</comment>


The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

<comment><USER2> This is _exactly_ how it feels once you get over the initial elation of passing the blasted thing!

Of course, with all the Ph.D.s creating little bumps all over the place, various people have to come along and fill in the gaps between the bumps. They don't get enough credit.

<comment><USER3> _various people have to come along and fill in the gaps between the bumps_

Ah yes, the underpaid overworked summer students.

<comment><USER4> s/summer students/grad students/g

or

s/summer students/postdocs/g

or

s/summer students/full-time research staff/g

<comment><USER3> All true: <http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=701>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do not forget that the boundaries of human knowledge have been surpassed by a healthy amount of individuals that never went the PhD route.

<comment><USER6> It is not that you must have a PhD to push the boundaries of knowledge, it is that you must push the boundaries of knowledge to get a PhD, by definition. Nobody claimed otherwise here.

<comment><USER5> You are right about that - I merely wanted to highlight that there are always other avenues of enlarging the sum of human knowledge. Investing your mental resources into a PhD is only one path a person can choose in order to strive reaching that goal.

That is what I love about HN - Comments are dissected in a constructive manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the best description by far that I've seen of most PhDs. It passes the "Would my mother understand this" test.

I'll be sending this to anyone who asks what a PhD is really like.

<comment><USER8> Did you ever end up finishing yours? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great illustration.

Also why Ph.D is not for me. Too low bang/buck factor. I'd rather know a little about a lot than everything about a little. But, I'm very glad others are the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER10> Now, add a third dimension to that diagram that describes the number of people that know any particular bit of knowledge. That's more accurately what I would describe as the "sum total of all human knowledge." It's not known if no one remembers it!

You can then view the work of a professor as a tension between adding shallow bumps to the perimeter and increasing the depth in the center.

<comment><USER11> That's where wikipedia (without the deletionist), museums, libraries come in. Putting all that old knowledge some place for some one to find them when they have been forgotten.

If it paid the bills I'd become a Computer historian. But the tech isn't old enough yet to be worth stuying ;p

<comment><USER12> > If it paid the bills I'd become a Computer historian

If you ever find a way to pay the bills this way, let me know. There's a lot of history in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> j-g-faustus I think it would work well as a guide for startups too, especially the "how it looks to you" (living inside the dent for the past x years) vs. "how it looks to a VC" (weighing your startup against the sum total of every other product and service in existence).

Except perhaps that only the successful startups get to make that dent.

</comment><comment><USER13> The sum of all human knowledge probably looks more like a million dimensional koosh ball than an circle.

</comment><comment><USER14> I always wondered: where is the list of things we (humans) forgotten/unlearned?

<comment><USER15> I doubt that there is a complete list (we don't even have a list of the books at the library of Alexandria, so we don't know which were lost only that we will never find them again).

But there is a good list at cracked (of all things) [http://www.cracked.com/article_18533_the-6-most-important- th...](http://www.cracked.com/article_18533_the-6-most-important-things- humanity-just-plain-forgot.html) although that is a list of things we forgot and subsequently rediscovered. There is also a list of important books that we have lost, but I can't seem to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's be more realistic if your little bump was built on top of lots of other people's little bumps.

<comment><USER17> It is, because all of the little bumps before you form the outer rim of the circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like to think I've made such dents, but have never been granted a Ph.D.

<comment><USER19> I don't know how to say this without it coming across as baiting you or flaming you. I'm doing neither.

What contributions have you made to the sum-total of human knowledge? I'm really interested.

<comment><USER20> That depends how you define it.

My cat has a skin blemish on its paw. Does documenting this fact add to the sum total of human knowledge? Technically yes, but it's of no interest to anyone.

But there's an even continuum between this and academic papers of great import - what if I figure out the best strategy to defend against a Zerg rush and post it on a forum? What if I figure out a really cool new programming technique and blog about it? What if I write an academic paper on obscure characteristics of hyper-complex non-euclidian non-reimannian Q-manifolds in P-time that has no ramifications for anything and is quickly forgotten? But then what if a tremendously important application is discovered 50 years later?

Especially with the internet, what qualifies as human knowledge becomes completely blurred. Previously the qualification was probably getting published, but now anyone can make information available to anyone else and the rest of posterity.

<comment><USER19> All of your examples involve publishing, but even more incredible is the idea that that circle in the comic represents not just published knowledge but all that any human has ever known and that we can sometimes venture into entirely novel territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Use this mirror link if you can't get to the actual site <http://bit.ly/cUavpF> (matt.might.net.nyud.net)

</comment><comment><USER22> It's a great graphic, but I'll nitpick. There's an important distinction that's left out. During all the stages leading to the Ph.D., all the area covered was just learning, taking in what other people have done. The very last little bump on the other hand actually added new area, so it's a very different thing, you're discovering new knowledge as opposed to just learning about what's already known. I suppose the graphic does capture that in a way but it's subtle.

<comment><USER23> I'm afraid it's anything but subtle. The first line is "Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge". All learning until the Ph.D. is _within that circle_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER25> I get it, So a Ph.D. is like a pimple or an erection?

<comment><USER26> More like the fertilised egg (if you aim the erection properly.)</comment></comment>