Vagrant 1.6 has been released - <AUTHOR> http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

<comment><USER2> What's new: [http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-6.html](http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-6.html)

<comment><USER3> Full changelog is here: [https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/CHANGELOG.m...](https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While Windows guests look interesting how are people going to get the initial box? Is every individual or organization going to have to create their own box or will there be some way to get a box if you are part of MSDN?

<comment><USER5> You have to acquire an ISO in some legal way yourself. Then, you can use something like packer-windows which has pre-built templates for various versions of Windows to build Vagrant-compatible boxes in about 10 minutes: [https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer- windows](https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows)

It isn't as easy as "download pre-built Linux box" but for environments that are using Windows, this workflow has been amazing for them above what they used to do, and is quite fast.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I'm going to give this a look since you can use the trial ISO's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Edit: Bit the bullet and bought myself this bundle pack from Leanpub: [https://leanpub.com/b/vagrant-ansible/](https://leanpub.com/b/vagrant- ansible/) \- Vagrant looks like a great tool to have under my belt. Ansible also looks extremely simple compared to Chef and looks like Vagrant and Ansible compliment each other beautifully.

\---

I guess this a good a place as any to ask, pardon my ignorance. What part of the workflow does Vagrant solve exactly?

For example, I'm building a business-class Rails application - normally I have RVM create a gemset specifically for that application. I also have PostgreSQL and MySQL installed locally for any app that needs it.

How does Vagrant fit into this workflow, what am I missing? Also, since the 'dev box' is now a virtual machine does that mean I can only ssh into it and edit code with something like Vim? Thanks for the information.

<comment><USER7> And how is it different or better than the VirtualBox command line, which is quite extensive?

Vagrant also seems to have something in common with docker, though with VMs instead of containers, though I'm not totally clear on that either.

<comment><USER8> It's different and better because it moves the abstraction layer up a few notches.

First, Vagrant supports much more than just VirtualBox (maybe not a big deal if you only want to use VirtualBox).

Second, Vagrant comes with a nice configuration layer allowing you to specify what OS and VM options you want to use (maybe not a big deal if everyone in your group is already comfortable with the VirtualBox command line).

Third, it handles provisioning new VM's using the provisioner of your choice, like Chef, Puppet, regular old shell scripts, etc. (Maybe not a big deal if everyone in your group is already an expert at using the chosen tool e.g. knife).

Fourth, it wraps up all of the previous steps (plus a bunch more), so that people can just clone the current box and type 'vagrant up', and have a working copy of the production/staging/test/dev network. (Maybe not a big deal if everyone in your group is already an expert at setting up that network).

Anyway, I know that all comes off a bit glib, but Vagrant really shines in automating a bunch of not-necessarily difficult manual steps. I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything that can't also be done through a variety of other mechanisms (being well-versed in the VirtualBox command line, for example), but so far, I've found it to be more pleasant to use than dealing with all those other mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-6.html](http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-6.html)

 _> Boxes can now be compressed with LZMA - LZMA compression can result in much smaller boxes in a lot of cases, and Vagrant can now decompress LZMA- compressed boxes._

any word on how this is enabled, or does it just work? I didn't see anything in the package or box docs.

thanks.

<comment><USER5> Just works. Actually, LZMA compression has always works on Linux/Mac. Vagrant 1.6 is just the first release to also support LZMA compression on Windows as well. Since it is supported on all platforms, we're able to advertise it a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've just started using Vagrant, but am not quite sure how it relates to production.

Can I use Vagrant to build out my production server too? Or would I just use Chef/Puppet/Ansible with the same playbook/recipe on both my Vagrant powered VM and non-vagrant powered production machine?

<comment><USER11> I use Salt (used to use Puppet) to build out my Vagrant box(es) in development.

When I'm good to go, I use Packer with the same Salt configuration to build an image and push it to AWS/DO/RackSpace as needed. Makes it super easy to develop and deploy on _exactly_ the same machine, and the Vagrant/Packer configurations are typically fairly minimal so there's very little set-up time once you've written out your Salt/Puppet/etc configurations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really impressed with Vagrant's documentation: [http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/](http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/) Super clean, easy to read, and well organized. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER13> I could not live without vagrant anymore. Developing inside vm, having a linux env on my windows machine, testing stuff, testing ansible/chef setups with a testing vm... It's so easy :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Love Vagrant, so useful.</comment>


Black People as Scenery - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectacle.org/1295/blacks.html <comment> the-red-herring Blame Hollywood. This is like the whole "Black people die first" thing that still continues to go on.</comment>


GitHub Is Down - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ <comment><USER2> If only there was a version control system for distributed software development that wasn't completely reliant on a centralized client-server model and frequent check-ins.

<comment><USER3> git enables that. git is a dvcs. centralized Github is your bottleneck.

DevOps/SysAdmins usually plan for SPOFs (single points of failures) when using a service, but having github as the central store defeats that purpose. This again comes back to tools and integrations offered.

<comment><USER2> My comment was sarcastic if that wasn't clear, pointing out the massive irony of the entire current development ecosystem that's often highly centralized yet built atop a system designed at a fundamental level to be decentralized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Geeze, so many outages/impacts (12+) in the last 90 days.

The status page looks like a Pez dispenser.

[https://www.githubstatus.com/](https://www.githubstatus.com/)

Usually companies put in place a release freeze or "Code Purple" when there are such demonstrated problems with releasing stable code.

<comment><USER3> These may be the challenges with a "Continous Deployment" approach. Companies usually fill these unknowns.

Gitlab releases a version once every month. Not sure how they deploy on the hosted version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ha, I'd seen all these on HN for the past week or two but was lucky and unaffected. Our CI/CD is currently failing due to an npm dependency that lives on Github. Time to start looking into that NPM mirror thing folks talk about?

</comment><comment><USER6> They must have been anticipating this happening more often, given the replacement of the raging unicorn with a sad squidcat (or is it a catsquid?)

</comment><comment><USER7> first they roll out this awful notification ... idk what to even call it, monstrosity, now they're having issues with availability. I hate Microsoft so much, and I hate the guy who sold it to Microsoft even more.

</comment><comment><USER8> in a middle of a deployment lol move to gitlab and redid my docker image to pull my charts from gitlab lol lesson learned

</comment><comment><USER9> sigh, is it like the third time in a row this week?

<comment><USER10> This is the fourth one.

[https://www.githubstatus.com/#past- incidents](https://www.githubstatus.com/#past-incidents)

<comment><USER9> fourth?! this is outrageous</comment></comment></comment>


How Design Helps Changemakrs be Quotable, Maybe Profitable - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/12/07/how-design-helps-changemakrs-be-quotable-and-maybe-profitable/

<comment><USER2> Apart from the non-conclusion, nice article. Love the Changemakrs site and team.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The story of ChangeMakrs sounds like a Hacker News cliche"...ugggh gigaom

</comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoyed that article until the end. Kind of anti-climactic.

</comment><comment><USER5> So... How does it scale? Seriously deep conclusion</comment>


Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.html <comment><USER2> Startups have become something of a career path or lifestyle. It has developed into a scene, with its own media coverage and drama. I see a lot of clueless college students wanting to "do startups" as if it were any old job.

My perspective is this: Found or join a startup if have a specific product/service you want to build at a large scale. You'll earn your wealth through the equivalent amount of pain (<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>).

But coming to SF and floundering around is no better than aimlessly moving to LA to become a movie star. There are a lot better ways to spend your youth.

Edit to address my last point: Sure, there are many benefits to coming out here. But there's no benefit in coming here to just be a "scenester."

<comment><USER3> _But coming to SF and floundering around is no better than aimlessly moving to LA to become a movie star._

Not to be nit-picky but getting start-up experience isn't quite the same as going to casting calls while working at Olive Garden to make ends meet.

<comment><USER4> What about when you work at a no-name software shop to make ends meet while you pitch to VCs to get your own startup off the ground?

The analogy may be more apt than it first seems! ;)

<comment><USER5> This kind of comment makes me wonder what percentage of HN has zero idea of what's it's like to be legitimately broke/poor. Even if you're joking, since you include the winky face, what about actual poor uneducated people who will never have a chance to work in a no-name software shop?

<comment><USER4> What does that have to do with anything? I'm just bemusedly thinking of the parallels between the kid who moves from Small Town, USA to be a star in Hollywood, and the kid who moves from Small Town, USA to make it big with his own startup in SV.

"No-name software shop" was probably the wrong choice; a closer tech analogue to waiting tables to fund that acting dream would probably be working IT/helpdesk.

<comment><USER6> There is nothing in the corporate tech world that's analogous to trying to live off tips.

<comment><USER7> Counterpoint: salespeople.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many people seem to believe that if you want to do a startup, you have to do it when you're young. Young people can afford to take a lot of risk, because they have few responsibilities to hold them back. And if they fail, there'll be plenty of opportunity to make up for lost time. What few people seem to realize is that there is a second phase in your life where almost exactly the same is true, namely, when you're old. The only thing that is no longer true is that you won't be able to make up for lost time in case of failure. But if you lived a good life, you don't have to, because you've already made up for lost time in the past. And there are some extra perks, like you've probably got money to fund yourself. And you should know a thing or two that you didn't when you were young. And BTW, I'm not just blabbering here. I'm 60 and I'm doing it. Granted, I haven't been successful so far, but having the time of my life anyway. No fears, no regrets, and high like a kite on adrenalin 24/7.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for saying this. I'm an early twenty's kid who's decided to forgo the fashionable startup scene in favor of an extremely well-paid (given my age) position in a top-ten tech giant. I have a hunch that it would be more sensible to sharpen my skills when I'm young, and focus on becoming a happy and fulfilled person, only to emerge as a powerhouse of compounded experience and technical and social skill.

As someone who's already emerged on the other side of that process, can you speak to one's capability to capitalize on that experience and personal growth throughout one's life? Does middle age have to be a time of complacency and conservatism?

<comment><USER8> >> [...] can you speak to one's capability to capitalize on that experience and personal growth throughout one's life? <<

Given the fact that I haven't been successful with a late-in-life startup, some may deny me the credibility to speak to that. That being said, I do believe that yes, you can capitalize on past growth and experience. That's assuming you can pull off that Zen thing of keeping your beginner's mind. Know what you know, know what you don't know, and strive to be an expert with a beginner's mind.

>> Does middle age have to be a time of complacency and conservatism? <<

 _Complacency_ , no, that doesn't sound good to me. I believe you should always be able to describe yourself with an adjective or a combination of adjectives such as "ambitious," "dedicated," and the like. Of course that could be dedication to a family, accompanied by less ambition in your professional life. But that's still different from complacency. _Conservatism_ , yes, that would describe my own middle age pretty well. Everybody's rhythm of life is different of course. But it makes a lot of sense to have one extended period in your life where you plant a tree and watch it grow. The middle of one's life is a pretty good time to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> one point al3x didn't talk to: not all startups will teach you to be an awesome engineer. If a startup is really hiring the best of best, a less experienced programmer is not likely to make the cut. Ever look at your code from 6 months, a year, 5 years ago? and how bad it is? Many tech startups don't have time for that, the quality of your work can make or break a startup. Elite startups want "ex-googlers".

So if you want to get good, you need to work with people that are better than you, who have already learned from their mistakes so you don't have to. Find the strongest shop _that will hire you_. It will not be the best shop. It probably won't be an elite startup. But more mature companies can afford to pay for your learning curve. You also will probably make more money, enough to pay off your student debt and save up to bootstrap when you're more experienced.

<comment><USER11> I run a bootstrapped company and we hire the cheapest engineers we can find. I interview for competence in the one thing they understand, and then just how fast they learn. I cannot overstate the number of people out there that are incredibly smart, but can't describe basic information like how the HTTP protocol works. It is completely baffling. These people can be explained how the protocol works in 10 minutes, and spend 8 hours at home looking at the Chrome web inspector, and completely grock the protocol. I find myself a seed planter. These people are smart enough to figure it out, but for some reason they don't do it without a 10 minute verbal overview.

My advice to any to young person is to judge the job by the quality of the mentor. Smart people feel ecstasy when learning new things, and if you have anxiety about your job, then you are likely in the wrong position.

<comment><USER10> i totally understand and respect your position and that's definitely a strategy that can work.

The other end of the spectrum is, you could contract someone like Tony Morris[1] at $250 an hour for 20 hours a week, and he will build your product faster than a team of untrained engineers, or more likely, build a product that untrained engineers aren't capable of building, with a defect rate close to zero.

Not every strategy is right for every business, but generally, the harder the technical challenges, the more cost effective it is to pay for a superstar.

[1] <http://tmorris.net/posts.html>

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but I think the over-arching idea that the OP was getting at, was "what if we can breed these 'superstars'?"

That would certainly seem feasible if you interview for personality traits, interests and learning skills, more than actual/concrete knowledge and working skills. And of course, this would be a lot more cost-effective as well. In that case, I would say that the key would lie in paying more attention to human psychology/intelligence research than to tech blogs/circles to find out more about 'superstars'.

<comment><USER13> To a point that is possible. However there are key lessons that don't really sink in until after you have made certain mistakes and have seen the consequences. For instance I understood the value of forcing variable declarations, and of having multiple layers of safeguards after a typo in a variable name caused me to take down Bloomberg's ftp server about 15 years ago.

Judging from ability and personality, it was clear at that point that I had potential. And I received some excellent mentoring. But potential and mentoring do not ensure a smooth path to success.

<comment><USER12> While that's true, it still seems a bit orthogonal to the point, because the argument being made is essentially about efficiency, not necessarily effectiveness. If we think about all the people that have had such experience changing epiphanies, then take the subset of those who might actually be able to communicate these valuable experiences across in a programming interview, suddenly your selection pool becomes rather small. Which is oddly reminiscent of the current 'talent shortage' issue. Thus, approaching the problem from a different angle which considers this concept of 'experience' to be more of a byproduct of a certain set of traits than a trait itself, you suddenly open up your list of possible candidates to something a lot more workable.

Because after all, there is nothing preventing people selected for personality traits to reach these same epiphanies that 'experienced' people have (regardless of mentorship), it's just a matter of whether or not you as an employer would be willing to accept this 'risk'. Given the current state of affairs with regards to 'talent', I could see many finding the risk permissible. Not to mention the fact that the set of 'smart people with potential' is not mutually exclusive with the set of 'smart people with experience'; of course, selecting purely from the set of people that meet both criteria would still fall under the realm of chasing unicorns, but the point is that the two are not exclusive.

<comment><USER13> The point that was made was that smart people with potential are cheaper to hire and easy to train. My point is that smart people with potential and training are great, but aren't actually as good as smart people with potential and experience.

The trick is, of course, that smart people with both potential and experience tend to be easy to identify..and very expensive.

<comment><USER12> Well yes, but the fact that they are expensive is a byproduct of their rarity (which results in us talking about cheaper engineers), and that can be symptomatic of a system with an efficiency problem. The argument then is about confirming that it is.

<comment><USER13> Expensive, yes. But expensive compared to value produced?

Every decent programmer has stories of a time they put in 10 hours of work to save a highly paid person 20 hours/month for the rest of time. I say stories because there are many such. On my resume I list a number of cases where I added X millions/year to the bottom line of small-medium companies. It is not a complete list. What value should an efficient market put on a programmer who does that repeatedly?

For those willing to work as an employee in the Los Angeles area, the value the market places is significantly under $200k/year. Now you tell me, is that expensive relative to value?

<comment><USER12> Expense wasn't even remotely the issue I was addressing; the expense of such 'experts' makes sense within the scope of our system. It is the rarity that seems out of place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Maybe the best way to meet your goal is starting a non-profit or going into politics.

I'd like to know whose, or which, goals are better met going into politics.

Politics, at least in America, are a machine that eats good ideas and shits murder, and anybody with half a brain and the desire to change the world should know, from even casual observation, to steer clear.

For example, Elon Musk and entrepreneurs like him have done more to move the world away from fossil fuels and towards alternative energy in the last decade than the U.S. government (at any level) has in the 25 years they've been aware of climate change. Musk is inventing the future, and in Congress they're _still_ arguing over _whether climate change exists or not_. And that's just how fast things move in that arena. It's unavoidable.

At this point in history, even if you don't care about money at all, even if hate for capitalism runs deep in your blood, starting a business is the _only_ means available for make a positive impact in the world on a reasonable time scale.

And I should also point out, going into politics or non-profits means you would actually be spending _more_ time raising money than you would if you were running a VC-backed startup. So, if your goal is to get really good at raising money, the author's sentence makes sense. For _any other meaning_ , it doesn't.

<comment><USER15> > starting a business is the only means available for make a positive impact > in the world on a reasonable time scale

There is a great deal of validity to what you say, but blanket statements like this are absurd. What capitalist venture is going to make an impact on gay marriage? What was the business model of MLK Jr.'s speeches?

<comment><USER14> I would argue that Khan Academy is doing more to correct disparities in our education system, including of the kind caused by centuries of institutionalized racism, by making high-quality tutoring available for free on the Internet, than any modern-day legislator or activist.

Large companies like Google are able to set standards in their industries around things like health benefits, which, while not providing the social recognition many gay marriage advocates are after, does provide one of the material benefits of marriage without waiting for the government's blessing.

And meanwhile, the systems that our government uses to suppress movements like King's (in his day it was COINTELPRO) have gotten _frighteningly_ more effective. The Occupy movement was subject to a massive, coordinated campaign of extreme police repression _before it even started_.

Given how bad police repression of the civil rights movement already was, imagine what would have happened if anything as pervasive as the Patriot Act or computer-assisted social network analysis had been available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Yet, there is no enduring formula for creativity and rebellion."

This is a fine sounding statement, but it's false. We've been accumulating and refining techniques for having new ideas for centuries, at least. Leonardo da Vinci mentioned several in his writings.

<comment><USER17> The word "formula" is very important in his statement - yes we have techniques for coming up with new ideas, but we do not have a formula for it. A formula produces a consistent and reproducible result. If we actually had such a thing it'd be the real-life equivalent of a magic lamp; make a wish for a new idea about x and out it comes.

The reality of the situation is far too messy for such a clean solution to exist. There are an infinite number of variables, biases, and contexts that foster or hinder "creativity" and the very notion of "rebellion" is defined entirely by context. So while we may have techniques that increase our chances of coming up with new ideas, we're no where near a factory for _real_ creativity.

EDIT: I define real creativity as "reasoned new ideas" - it's trivial to write a formula for combining things randomly, but I don't think anyone here would argue that as actual creativity.

<comment><USER18> _make a wish for a new idea about x and out it comes._

Isn't that a description of a YC RFS? It's still too early to tell whether RFS works or not, but it's almost precisely what you've described.

<comment><USER17> I guess you could make the million monkeys argument, but that's just playing with the law of large numbers. The original statement was intended to apply to a single person or at most a small number of individuals.

Even beyond that though, I'm not sure that "ask for ideas" (which is all the RFS is) could really be construed as a formula for creativity. It's a mechanism for surfacing creativity that springs from elsewhere.

You'd have to ask PG whether or not the RFS stuff has really been that helpful. From my experience in YC, the most "successful" companies had nothing to do with the RFSs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel the OP raised 2 strawmen:

1) Many jobs are at startups now, and those startups are roughly similar, therefore it's not cool anymore ("is the novelty even there").

That is just bad logic. It may be that startups replicated high pressure low gratification corporate jobs, but that's not inherent in the argument that there are more startup jobs. It could also be the case that the tech economy has really shifted from large corporations to small agile (and sometimes fun to work at) startups.

2) Startup jobs turn into corporate jobs, so you shouldn't take them in the first place.

That change is not a given, nor is it that the change will be done poorly, nor is it that the employee won't want the change by then. Anyways, if you get 1-3 years of startup experience that you enjoy, make contacts, have a chance at a payout, then there's nothing wrong with taking the startup job with the knowledge it may change and you may want out later--in fact, in every US employment contract, it's a given that the employee or the company may change their minds later.

I do agree with the idea that we need to demystify the startup scene. Being beholden to a VC is no different than to a corporate middle manager, they're both trying to carve out their little empires with your work. I think the interpersonal cost is real in certain cases, and the comment about fetishizing disruption is right on. But the 2 logical errors above weaken the message, especially since they are above the more lucid observations.

<comment><USER20> 1) The author isn't arguing that. He is objecting to the portrayal of startups as more free, open, and fluid than traditional enterprise. Unless I'm bad at reading the author didn't even mention the ratio of startup:traditional jobs, so that isn't relevant. And the objection wasn't to the fact that all startups are roughly equivalent (which was, though, a point made). The objection was that startups are roughly equivalent to traditional enterprise in structure, form, and execution (i.e. Super Cool Startup is just as non-free, non-open, and non-fluid as Enterprise Shop Inc., and this is systemic). The equivalence comes from the startup scene having been wholly co-opted by a system (VC- istan, anyone?) that amounts to traditional enterprise (formulaic, mass- producing, repeatable templates). This is a textbook binary deconstruction: the startup/corporate dichotomy as it exists in popular consciousness is false.

Food for thought, see pg's comment in this thread: apparently there is now a formula for creativity and rebellion. Questions: if you can formulaically rebel, how is that rebellion? By definition your 'rebellion' is deterministic -- how is that possible? If 'creativity' can come by formula, what are you creating? The 'new' is just a function of what you already knew, i.e., it already existed. So the 'new' is by definition not new at all.

2) Again, the author didn't make this point. He argued that people considering taking a startup job should consciously look through popular delusion and consider the bad with the good. There was no mention that one should or shouldn't take a particular kind of job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Really liked this part:

        "As there was in the first dot com bubble
        there is a current proliferation of startups,
        incubators, accelerators, angel/seed funding,
        and so forth. ... accompanied by a shared set
        of values, norms, and language."

I'm currently doing a start-up. I went the University incubator route and have regretted it ever since. Feels so pedantic...

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I understand. Could you please elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I liked this part: "Startups have been systematized, mythologized, culturally and socially de-risked; reduced down to formulas and recipes. Yet, there is no enduring formula for creativity and rebellion."

<comment><USER23> Most of these startups would be just regular corporate projects except for the fact that corporate stinginess and lack of vision is at an all time high. Startup "CEOs" are just project managers on a shoestring race to the bottom, as observed in the long hours and extreme personal sacrifice involved.

The reason the strategy works so well is that corporate politics are even more stifling to experimentation than VC-istan (but not by much).

In ten years, there'll be an open-allocation (Valve style) company that has figured out how to solve this for realz.

<comment><USER24> Some companies seem to be like a VC in disguise: I would think of Supercell([http://blog.idonethis.com/post/48277151394/least-powerful- ce...](http://blog.idonethis.com/post/48277151394/least-powerful-ceo)) and Google when it had 20% free time. I liked the 20% free time model, people have some freedom to pursue their goals without worrying so much about money. It probably leads to more innovation being done as it takes money out of people's concerns. I don't know how it's done now on Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "There are so many ways to make a dent in the world", he says, but fails to suggest any.

So what if the startup thing isn't all it's cracked up to be? It's still better than the alternative. What else are you going to do? Go waste your time in a big corporation learning how to withstand endless, meaningless tedium?

If you're young you can probably afford to take some risk, so go take some risk! Take a shot at accomplishing something cool. The big boring corporations will always be there. If your startup experience sucks, so what? You're still better off than you'd have been if you'd spent the time playing small cog in a big machine.

<comment><USER3> There are plenty of small to medium sized business where you get to learn and have an impact. I tend to favor those - I have the autonomy to contribute without the overhead of 6 different managers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> And this is why I stopped playing that particular game and started playing a very different, but no less systematized and traditional game: being a consultant software developer with clients that pay per project or per hour, rather than in four-year equity vesting cycles.

<comment><USER27> I'd love to read a blog post on how you set this up, and what kind of work you do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Don't start a company because you like coding, Aza Raskin summed it up nicely for designers but same hold trues for programmers ([http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/psychological-pitfalls- and-l...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/psychological-pitfalls-and-lessons- of-a-designer-founder/))

Working for a startup has been a good source of learning new skills for me but as the author notes can be hazardous to the rest of your life...

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a great cautionary polemic to those who may jump in without understanding what they really want. I'm sure it has flaws, but the intent of the author seems to be fair and careful warning to the unthinking. Fine advice, and if you still want to do a startup having analysed this piece, then you're in the right business!

</comment><comment><USER30> Great way to end it:

"If you're not part of the intended audience and are very very mad that a stranger on the Internet has a different opinion than you, I encourage you to direct your energy into an alternative argument that a young person might benefit from reading."

</comment><comment><USER31> As a twenty year old who left school (in late 2011) and is currently working for a startup, the article really struck a chord with me and I must admit that it is very accurate, particularly the section, "Startups have an ongoing interpersonal cost."

That being said, I have very few regrets and have learned more than I could have ever imagined since leaving school. But there are days I wish I stayed for both personal (ex. making friends is hard and it is insanely easy to become woefully lonely) and professional/career (ex. I spend many hours on top of work studying algorithms and mathematics I would have been taught in university) reasons.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't have a lot to add here other than liking the two sides of the coin thing the author mentioned.

With any choice there are pros and cons. Lots of people, not just the young people, tend to look at the pros and pretend the cons don't exist.

<comment><USER33> I really liked this article, it doesn't just apply to startups. Engineers are like the rockstars of today. Instead of the Sunset Strip, everyone is headed to the Bay Area for their own shot at glory.What's to be remembered is that nothing should be done except for the inherent love of what you're doing, and nothing should be done purely for the sake of "success". Be a decent person, have respect and courtesy for others, and you can enjoy life, whatever the vehicle of your creativity is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm a freelancer that has started his own company, and I contract with a lot of companies, one in particular could have been considered a startup at one point, but I'm not sure you'd call it that now.

I think of VC as debt. I've worked really hard to stay out of debt. Apart from a house, my goal is to never take a loan out or borrow money for anything. We have two pretty crappy cars, but we paid cash for them, and honestly, after some repairs and such, they've been running fine.

To bring it home: I treat a lot of my business the same way. I'm extremely skeptical of doing work on "borrowed money." This once-startup contract I have has been profitable (by good margins) for 5 years now, and I've been working on a $2 million project for them about 7 months now, but it was all with money the company already had.

I've turned down lucrative work in the past because they had financiers involved. I tend to work on smaller, more manageable projects (with the exception of the aforementioned example) because of this. Maybe a little more work at times (to find work), maybe a little less money, but I've never had an issue getting paid (except that one time when the business literally got washed away in Hurricane Sandy), I've not had to meet crazy deadlines or feel that sort of pressure, and I'd still consider myself to be doing very, very well.

All that said, and I am a college dropout. But I wouldn't recommend people do drop out of college, especially for a VC gig.

</comment><comment><USER35> Business influence, autonomy, responsibility, variety, opportunity, risk, unclear solutions to open problems : things a small new startup are likely to offer to a 2[0-9] year old and a large business is less likely to.

The question is, do your personality and abilities suit a startup environment? Or is one more fitted to a structured environment? Maybe a short internship would tell.

If someone inexperienced says they want to do a startup, my advice would be to join a business with 40 to 80 employees in a market that interests you, learn how to tell who are the productive people in sales, marketing, operations and development and start a business with a couple of them. Work out which ones are hard working, effective and entrepreneurial and want to begin a business. Knowing who is excellent in areas you are weak in is a critical skill to learn (and I find extremely hard to judge unless working fairly closely with them). Many many businesses don't know who the real key employees are, or are under- valuing/under-appreciating them.

I had opportunity to join the most effective dev and marketer in a business I was working in when 24 and I didn't jump on the opportunity so I missed out (stupid me). I created a similar opportunity many years later, and it is working out very well (although rough for a couple of years).

<comment><USER35> Conversely, learning how to tell who are lemons, and you must not join is also critical. Just because a few people are doing a start-up that sounds good doesn't mean it is a good idea to join those people. One must also learn to have enough insight to work out if one is a lemon oneself - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect>

Another great place to learn these skills and to pick the really skilled is in an incubator or shared space. That has also worked for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have collected my favorite quotes and talking points from this piece, Michael Church's "Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs", and Aza Raskin's "Psychological Pitfalls And Lessons of A Designer-Founder".

Here: [http://www.stevenloria.com/disillusionment-in-startups- colle...](http://www.stevenloria.com/disillusionment-in-startups-collected- quotes/)

I intend to add to this list of quotes, and I also welcome others to email me related bits of wisdom.

<comment><USER9> That is a beautiful website. Is it custom, or is it something I can install myself? Feel free to refuse to answer :P

<comment><USER36> Thanks. It is this: <https://github.com/holman/left> with just a few modifications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In some professions this guy would be considered young. Its kind of amusing to read. He has made it so even though there is some bitterness in his writing, he has obviously benefited from the system, and unlike being a struggling actor you are making some bank at a startup with a potential to make it big. Compare that to making ends meet as a waiter.

<comment><USER38> Any idea how old Alex is? My guess is late 20s to early 30s, which makes me wince at the title.

<comment><USER39> Why? Age is of little importance and can be misleading. It is not uncommon between people here to have started developing software professionally as teenagers or even as kids. By the time someone is in early 30s that someone may as well have been coding for a quarter of a century. And on the opposite, you can have somebody just starting at that age, with minimal or zero engineering experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> You see the same problems in students going to film school because they like to see themselves as a director. You see the same problems in big studios making blockbusters for money.

To be Primer, you have to have a specific, burning idea. To be Fassbinder, you need to have something to say (and be a genius).

Else, you can only aspire to be Cars 2 or The Phantom Menace.

</comment><comment><USER41> I started, and invested my own money (6 figures, that I earned) in a b&m business in my 20s, lost a lot of time, money, and experienced a lot of bullshit... but I learned a lot. That preamble is because, while I have no experience with your typical SV startup, I have put my own time and money at risk.

By joining a startup you are pretty much guaranteed a salary, an office to go to, and you have to weigh the risks of lower salary vs options, but so what? That's no more risk then someone working a corporate 9-5 and chooses to actively manage their portfolio, which really is minimal risk imo (wrong?). As an outside observer it seems to be in the financiers interest to perpetuate the sexiness of startups to "market" their investments. Can someone that is more into the startup culture clear this up for me? What risk is there in joining a startup as an employee other than what I have described?

</comment><comment><USER42> Think of what's being built as a machine for taking several great ideas and spreading them to areas to which they haven't yet spread.

While there's much talk of disruption in startups, their goal isn't to destroy, it's to build something better and the destruction results therefrom. Considered that way, the institutionalization of startups doesn't contradict their mission any more than writing in a higher level language makes one less of a programmer.

I agree with most of the details; most people's incentives aren't pure. While that may not be ideal, yet far it has accelerated innovation.

</comment><comment><USER43> First off, I agree with much of what you said. I think there is a way to be insanely devoted to your craft and still maintain your relationships. Sure, you might not be the social butterfly who goes to parties every night, but if you can't maintain some small semblance of a life, what's the point? Unless you're some entrepreneur martyr..

"A startup is just a means to an end. Consider the end, and don't seek to revel in the means."

-I disagree with this. The journey is often the most exciting, exhilarating part. Creating something from nothing is what I want to live for.

<comment><USER27> To extrapolate form the rest of his post, I think he phrased that part poorly. I think he really meant to advise not to revel in merely being a participant in a startup, as if that should provide you with satisfaction in and of itself. If you're in the startup world and have chosen your position well enough to be enjoying the journey, I don't think you're the target audience. He's really targeting the people who might become entrepreneurial martyrs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am still trying to understand Alex's post well, but it reminds me of a Warren Buffett quote: "Bad things are not obvious when times are good".

</comment><comment><USER45> Good read, pretty relevant to me as a 17 year old entrepreneur. Love the "A startup is just a means to an end." paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER46> "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

</comment><comment><USER47> What's the most entrepreneurial thing you've done to get a job at a start-up?

</comment><comment><USER48> Alex Payne is the best.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how many people get the Rilke reference? Why is it that programmers are not well read?

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste- yo...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-in- crappy-startup-jobs/)

<comment><USER50> Thank you for posting this. I know it's from last year, but there are realities here that should be understood by every engineer who is considering working for a startup.

Be as hard-core about your negotiation skills and awareness of employment terms, as you are about your coding skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> First become _known_ (or even famous) for what you do, _then_ apply yourself to an actual, unsolved problem (in a very small time window) _then_ people with positions and money will notice you, and then _they_ will arrange somehow that Yahoo will buy your shit.)

</comment><comment><USER52> It is strange how anti startup HN seems.</comment>


What went wrong with nuclear power? - <AUTHOR> http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_6424

<comment><USER2> The coal industry.

</comment><comment><USER3> The China Syndrome followed closely by the TMI incident, the wastes problem was never satisfactorily solved either.</comment>


UK: Police services such as crime investigation could be privatised - <AUTHOR> http://www.channel4.com/news/police-services-could-be-privatised

<comment><USER2> Wow. Hugh Laurie and Steven Fry were well ahead of their time. I have to imagine they'll be shaking their heads when they hear of this.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6CkltzGAxY>

<comment><USER3> Robocop.</comment></comment>


Friends Don't Let Friends Clap on One and Three: A Backbeat Clapping Study - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/ethanhein/friends-dont-let-friends-clap-on-one-and-three-a-backbeat-clapping-study <comment><USER3> Duke Ellington routinely gave his audiences a lesson in his inimitable style: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPcZ5ex2t-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPcZ5ex2t-g)

Harry Connick Jr. didn't bother educating his European audience with any explanation. He simply skips a beat, and then they're clapping on 2 and 4. It happens after the first sung chorus. You can see the drummer raise his hands in joy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD3iaURppQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD3iaURppQw)

And, of course, the great Slim Gaillard was so saturated in swing, his predominantly white 1950s television audience SPONTANEOUSLY clapped on the 2 and 4: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdrnTTDTqo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdrnTTDTqo)

<comment><USER4> How can you tell he skips a beat? Or for that matter the difference between beats 1 and 3 vs 2 and 4? Music is such a mystery to me. :/

<comment><USER3> The vast majority of music has what's known as a meter, which is a cyclical pattern. Just like we can think of time in terms of a neverending stream of occurrences, or choose to think in terms of a 7-day week, we simplify the understanding of musical events by counting in a regularly repeating _meter_.

This song's meter is in 4/4, which means you count 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4, etc. along with the very pulse you feel. Tap your foot. Count "1" when he says the word "Come [with me]". You'll find that they clap every time you say 1 and 3.

What he does is the equivalent of cutting out, say, Sunday from one week of the calendar, and so their regularly repeating clap now falls on a different day than it was falling on before. Does that help?

<comment><USER5> After reading your comment, I realized that I was counting at half the speed I was supposed to.

<comment><USER6> Only for common (4/4) time. That's the most popular one though. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> actually the notion that european music is "harmonically rich and rhythmically unsophisticated" is incorrect; it's relatively modern phenomenon that the rhythms in european music were simplified. Traditional eastern european rhythms are incredibly complex and western european liturgical and vernacular music tended to have complex ryhthms until around the 16-17th century.

IIRC this was basically an effect of the church decided to try to monopolize music in the service of liturgy _and_ "dumb down" the music so that everyone could participate in hymnals, etc.

This could also partially be a result of music printing; it's harder to notate complex rhythms - if you've ever sung medieval music that's pushed into modern notation, sometimes wierd things happen, like time signatures that don't quite line up with the all of the music lines because polyphony is going on; invasions of 3/4 measures in an otherwise 2/4 song, etc.

<comment><USER8> This sounds like how the early digital age of computers over-simplified analog processing of audio and video and PDEs (and what other complex phenomenon? Language AI?), and only later started to close the gap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My circle of friends used to joke about the "Republican Test." You administer it like this: play the song "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," ideally the Marvin Gaye version, and ask the subject to "clap along with the music" however he or she feels.

Our unscientific observations showed a high correlation with 1/3 clapping and being old, square, uptight, or an alien from an unfunky and obsolete dying planet.

<comment><USER10> Conversely, how do you detect a Democrat?

Don't worry, it's easy. They go around calling anyone who disagrees with them names, like "old, square, uptight, or alien."

<comment><USER11> Oh.

And we all just learned not to expect Republicans or Libertarians to understand the concept of..."joke".

You just confirmed the parent comment's point.

<comment><USER10> Democrats definitely think that Republicans are morally inferior to them, and vice versa. You can't really make jokes in a context like that because there is no distinction between a joke and an actual malignment. I definitely make jokes about Democrats, just not around Democrats, because there is just no point in maligning people to their face.

<comment><USER9> That should read culturally inferior, not morally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A YouTube link to the Taj Mahal concert mentioned:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQOJQHJ8Sg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQOJQHJ8Sg)

</comment><comment><USER13> The following blog post provides examples of swung beats and clapping, as it pertains to dancing:

[http://vixswingjazz.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/can-you-hear- th...](http://vixswingjazz.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/can-you-hear-the-beat/)

A few songs are missing from the page:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtNC8BwKI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtNC8BwKI0) (Dinah; NSFW)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YqDbd6pUC0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YqDbd6pUC0) (Everything is Jumping)

To get a feel for clapping on the even beats:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_WZenJnT8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_WZenJnT8M) (Shout, Sister, Shout!)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg_pi0r75mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg_pi0r75mA) (Lavender Coffin)

Harry Connick Jr. beat-shifts the audience from clapping on 1 & 3 to 2 & 4 (at 40 second mark):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD3iaURppQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD3iaURppQw)

Usually the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdowns have live music, which induces the audience to clap:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfWA4ClPnxk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfWA4ClPnxk)

A tradition called a jam circle involves encircling dancers who steal the spotlight, with the audience clapping (on even beats) for encouragement:

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

This tradition goes back a long way; see Hellzapoppin' (1941) and Keep Punching (1939):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSAOV6XEjXA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSAOV6XEjXA)

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

<comment><USER14> I play the Lavender Coffin track. I listen to it carefully. I replay it and try to clap on the claps. I fail. I try again. I still fail. I listen to the song again. I replay the track, but this time try to tap my finger (which is easier than clapping) and I still fail.

Will it get easier or am I just "beatdeaf"? (Here I can clearly hear the 1 2 3 4, and the claps, but I just cannot match the claps on 2 and 4.)

<comment><USER13> Try these:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REzz- My2PoI#t=100](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REzz-My2PoI#t=100)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joo90ZWrUkU#t=20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joo90ZWrUkU#t=20)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I)

It takes practice. Newer dancers clap on 1 & 3 until they learn. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to clap quite loudly (almost passively-aggressively so) on the 2 & 4 for the rest of the people to shift over.

<comment><USER7> Oh man, I once went to (unnamed city) and everyone was clapping on 1 & 3, so I _aggressively_ clapped on 2 & 4\. It wasn't enough.

<comment><USER15> Living in the rural midwest, the concept of clapping on 2 and 4 was a foreign concept to most people I knew growing up. I lucked out because my dad was a music teacher. He caught me clapping on 1 and 3 once and promptly fixed it. Thanks Dad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those that didn't make it to slide 28:

Subject 5769, a tabla player only weakly familiar with Western or African music, clapped on displaced backbeats or using complex 16th note rhythms, that, if recorded, "would likely make an enjoyable work of art."

</comment><comment><USER17> This presentation would much better as a youtube video with audible samples of the beats.

<comment><USER18> In case you're not the only one looking for them:

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y#t=0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y#t=0)

The Honey Drippers - Impeach The President: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8#t=0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8#t=0)

Bob James - Take Me to the Mardi Gras: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaoCsmFDLcY#t=0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaoCsmFDLcY#t=0)

James Brown - Funky Drummer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNP8tbDMZNE#t=332](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNP8tbDMZNE#t=332)

The Winstons - Amen Brother: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZuq57_bYM#t=84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZuq57_bYM#t=84)

<comment><USER19> So I watched an old documentary online about the Amen break which was phenomenal, but I've never heard of "Impeach the President" and "The Funky Drummer". And yet, I know those drums like the back of my hand. I love finding where stuff I've heard my whole life came from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interestingly, the Schottische, a 19th-century dance which despite the name originates from Central Europe, has strong and fairly complex backbeats (if danced the traditional way): one-and-TWO, three-and-FOUR, one-AND-two-AND- three-AND-four-AND.

This dance has influenced blues dancing. (Which is a partner dance; African- American slaves had no tradition of partner dancing.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Links to the songs discussed:

* Billie Jean - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y)

* Impeach the President - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8)

* Take me to the Mardi Gras - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaoCsmFDLcY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaoCsmFDLcY)

* The Funky Drummer - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNP8tbDMZNE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNP8tbDMZNE)

* Amen Brother - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZuq57_bYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZuq57_bYM)

</comment><comment><USER22> If you get tired of 2 and 4, try this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVBoDx_1dTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVBoDx_1dTc)

[The First Circle -- Metheny/Mays]

<comment><USER23> For the curious...

||: 12/8 -♪♪-♪-♪♪-♪-♪ | 10/8 -♪♪-♪♪-♪-♪ :||

(- being a 1/8th pause, for the lack of a proper unicode character in whatever font I currently use to type this)

from: [http://www.stuartgreenbaum.com/downloads/files/%20First%20Ci...](http://www.stuartgreenbaum.com/downloads/files/%20First%20Circle- thesis.pdf)

See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_works_in_unusu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_works_in_unusual_time_signatures#22.2F8)

<comment><USER22> Thanks for that. It took me a while, but over time I finally figured out the myriad time changes in that tune, at least for informal clapping purposes anyway. That said, they implemented at least one variation of the rhythm in some of their live concerts (see youtube) that still eludes me.

Pretty amazing that this one tune can result in a 50+ page analysis - <USER2> linked PDF. The composition is a masterpiece, quite possibly the one that the PMG will be most remembered for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Taj Mahal found it distressing when his audience clapped wrong because it felt like a failure to emotionally connect with them."

How do they know this? Did they ask him or is this their assumption based on their expectations. It is annoying enough when researchers impute motive and thought to inanimate things. But people actually have them so it is all the more frustrating if they are assuming they know what he's feeling.

The beat you emphasize has a great effect on the feel of the rhythm. Instead of "feeling like he failed to connect on emotionally," it could just be that he wanted them to hear the song as he intended to play it and without altering it's rhythmic nature.

</comment><comment><USER25> "We can determine the "metric salience" of each event in a rhythmic pattern by"recursively breaking down a musical pattern (with an initially specified length)into subpatterns of equal length." __The more subdivisions it takes to reach a given event __, the lower its metrical salience. In 4 /4 time, the downbeat is themost salient position, followed by beat three. It would seem natural to clap onthe strongest, most salient beat."

Anybody know what this quote is trying to say? What is a "given event"?

<comment><USER26> Roughly, a sound that happens during some measure of music, or an arbitrary point during that duration.

Imagine folding a strip of paper exactly in half. Now you have a crease at the middle of it. If you fold it again, you have a couple more creases at the 1/4 and 3/4 points. The above quote is talking about the same thing, but with a length of time instead of a strip of paper. The more folds you have to make in order to put a crease at a certain point (event), the less salient it is.

Hope that's helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm genuinely grateful for this article, because I'm going to show it to my wife as an explanation why I dance the way I do. (dnb and classical Indian music fan)

</comment><comment><USER28> Here is an excellent 18 minute piece on the Amen Break, mentioned in TFA:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac)

</comment><comment><USER29> The rhythm tengoku series of games will teach you about stuff like this.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMe-j0Lg5w8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMe-j0Lg5w8)

</comment><comment><USER30> Barry Harris tells it like it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjnX_PkDwWs#t=2992](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjnX_PkDwWs#t=2992)

</comment><comment><USER31> And then there's bluegrass clogging...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs2j8f7H2WY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs2j8f7H2WY)

</comment><comment><USER32> Nitpick: The slide author correctly spells "zwei" but deliberately misspells "schwartz" and "vier".

<comment><USER33> Then a nitpick to your nitpick: "schwarze" (no 't')

<comment><USER32> Touché!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well both are wrong. You don't clap on two and four; you click your fingers. I thought everyone knew that...

</comment><comment><USER35> slide 28 (tabla player gets in the groove..) is fascinating.

<comment><USER36> I would like to hear his "complicated sixteenth note patterns."

<comment><USER37> The spoken introduction in this album walks you through some basics of indian classical music. [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Indian-Music-Album- Versio...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Indian-Music-Album- Version/dp/B00137T9SI)

he walks you through the 16 beat cycle and counts things off.

he also make a very interest comment about jazz.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: searching for a product idea - <AUTHOR>

Ideas are worthless and execution is everything, isn't it right?
We're a small capable team based in Kiev, Ukraine. Strong on UI/programming weak on sales and marketing. Looking for the product idea.
Domain: SaaS or a mobile/ipad app for small businesses. Can't afford go for the consumer market.
Product that has clear value to the user, fun to work on, has competition, has no/minimal network effect, has long-term utility to the user and does not require big capital to build.
Sounds easy? Shoot.
PS: first half of May I'll spend in the Valley (for the first time). Tips appreciated. <comment> T-R Jacques Mattheij's ideas list -

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/My+list+of+ideas+for+when+you+are...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/My+list+of+ideas+for+when+you+are+looking+for+inspiration)

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't think that you will find idea this way. Create something that you yourself will use and pay for, and if everything works smooth you will have a validated business idea.

<comment><USER3> I believe you're right. Most inspiration comes to me when I'm thinking about what I dislike, and how I could make it better. (i.e. "dammit! the pizza is late where's MY PIZZA")

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a few ideas, but don't really have time to implement them. On the other hand, there is a long list of ideas posted on this website by Paul Graham. Have you looked at those? There are some really good ones in there!

<comment><USER5> Are you referring to this?: <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

Or is there something more recent you're talking about.

<comment><USER4> Yea, that! :) Thanks for posting the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> budgeting software - needs to do basic debit/credit and then have sophisticated features for budgeting and comparing how you are doing against the budget

commission - calculate sales person commissions and display them real time so salespeople know exactly how much they will get paid and when (i.e. like with car dealerships)

pricing - simple solution to help small businesses test elasticity of pricing to maximize their gross profits

free quickbooks hosting in the cloud - enables some of the above because it allows you to get access to the data

</comment><comment><USER7> Email Me. We are an early startup in the Valley looking for a technical team/co-founder. More info to follow.

email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER8> contact me here, spfedorov at yahoo dot com

<comment><USER4> I wonder when bots will figure out that abc at [common domain name] dot [xyz] can be parsed. It would suck, but just wondering...</comment></comment>


Better Browsing for Ruby Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.omniref.com/blog/blog/2014/08/15/browser-plugins-for-chrome-and-firefox/ <comment><USER2> Omniref looks very nice. My quick (minor) feedback:

1\. I wish I could resize the code/documentation panes to give more space to the documentation, or even collapse the code compeltely

2\. A little syntax highlighting in the method signatures in the documentation would be nice.

<comment><USER3> +1 on 1. I look at Ruby class documentation a lot. I don't think I've ever wanted to look at the Ruby C source. I'm not sure what the point is of seeing them side-by-side. As far as I can tell, there isn't even any vertical correlation between the class documentation and the C code. Just the Ruby docs, please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks very useful.. but does not seem to work on localised google domains.. e.g. google.com.au

Any chance of getting that fixed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. We were too restrictive in our domain settings! We'll be pushing a fix soon, but it will take a little while to work through the approval process. I'll Tweet when there's an update (@omniref).

<comment><USER4> Excellent..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I installed it but don't get annotations on the same page as shown on the screenshot (activerecord/scoping).

<comment><AUTHOR> Send me an email at support@omniref with your browser info (type, version, installed extensions, etc.) and I'll look into it.

That's tricky code to get right; github uses jquery-based fast-loading of their source pages, and the extension security models make it particularly difficult to detect the change events (especially on Firefox :-/).

<comment><USER6> same here. Nothing happens. => [https://cloudup.com/ck9BPBaopFz](https://cloudup.com/ck9BPBaopFz)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're having a different problem, actually -- the OP was having trouble with the GitHub integration. Send me an email at support@omniref with the same information, and I'll look into it.

This is the first wider release of the extensions, so I'm not surprised there are a few bugs. Thanks for bearing with us while we fix them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does every search-term hit an external service to see if it matches something ruby related?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does right now, yes. But it's completely asynchronous and it falls back gracefully, so you shouldn't notice any performance impacts.

<comment><USER8> I think the issue is more that there's this external service that knows all your google searches.

<comment><USER9> Right. A good solution would be a bloom filter that ships in the extension of relevant terms.

<comment><AUTHOR> We thought about that, but we have a _lot_ of content. Perhaps if we just limited the filter to something like method/class/module/gem names it would work, but even that would hit on so many searches that most would be coming back to us. We'd be restricting the utility of the feature without much gain.

That said, we're open to suggestions on how to improve this. We're very respectful of privacy -- omniref is SSL-only, for example, and we don't save anything that could be traced back to a user or an IP.

<comment><USER10> I don't think a product that depends on reading my search history is ready for release. That's a serious invasion of one's privacy and something that will make lots of people (I would hope most) not consider installing it. Perhaps there could be a way to opt-in specific searches (but is it much different from a bookmark with a keyword in that case?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are DuckDuckGo instant answers being considered as well?

</comment><comment><USER12> Wish Python Developers got the same love

<comment><USER13> Check out the Sourcegraph Chrome extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph/dgjhfo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph/dgjhfomjieaadpoljlnidmbgkdffpack?hl=en). It links Python code on GitHub (though it doesn't have the cool feature of inlining a results box on Google searches)

(note: I'm one of the creators of Sourcegraph, would love to hear any feedback!)</comment></comment>


How accurate are the arguments in JWZ's 10-year-old "java sucks" article? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/577943/how-accurate-are-the-technical-arguments-in-jwzs-ten-year-old-java-sucks-article

<comment><USER2> JWZ's complains can broadly be broken into 2 categories: Java lacks advanced programming features, and Java doesn't perform well.

Some of the features have been added (enums, weak pointers, etc) and some will probably never be added because they conflict with the overall design of the language (typedefs, macros, etc).

However, many-to-most of his performance complaints have become irrelevant due to a combination of better hardware (e.g. not needing to worry so much about small memory overheads) and a smarter VM (e.g. hotspot can inline entire branches of a call tree based on metrics it gathers at runtime).

One of JWZ's main Java experiences was trying to program a web browser in Java 1.0, IIRC. Since this was over 10 years ago, his main frustrations seemed to be with the fact that he didn't have enough control over the language to get it to perform well enough for this purpose.

Interestingly, most people I see choosing other languages over Java today don't care that Java performs better than their language of choice (it almost always does), but rather because their language of choice has convenient features which make it easier for them to write code, performance be damned. I came to Python from Java for this exact reason, and despite JWZ's valid frustration with 1990s Java performance, I can't help but read most of his essay and think "how quaint" at his performance concerns.

<comment><USER3> This is kind of off-topic, but I've been considering using Python precisely for the "easier to write code" reason, but I want to be cross-platform. I don't see any good way of making sure I have a Python interpreter of the right version with the appropriate libraries (audio, visual, UI, sci-py, etc.) unless I ship everything--libraries and interpreter. Is there a good way of handling that with Python? It seems like Java makes it a lot easier (except that the UI looks so bad I'd be ashamed to ship anything with it).

<comment><USER4> Another possibility is trying a different JVM language.

Jython, of course, tries to implement Python directly on the JVM. Scala and Clojure are two higher level languages (than Java) that run on the JVM with all the deployment advantages and library availability of Java. One of these might be a good way to have your cake and eat it, too.

(Doesn't help with the UI, though. :) )

<comment><USER5> I'd be similarly ashamed about the way Java UIs tends to look. GTK bindings or bust I always say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summation: There have been modest improvements, but most of the fundamental objections JWZ had are still in force, in particular the ones about the nature of the language itself. After learning Python, Perl, Haskell, and sundry others I've come to consider the "It's hard to live with none of: lexically scoped local functions; a macro system; and inlined functions." criticism the most devastating, and the only progress on that front is that Java may or may not get closures in the future, and if it does they will probably have many issues.

I also think the top answer misses the point of JWZ's criticism about inlining; his complaint is not that JVMs don't inline, but that he can't control it. A commenter further down on the page points out that in C++ it's only a hint and I suspect JWZ wouldn't appreciate that either. Standard caveat: I'm trying to guess what somebody else "really means" and that's always tricky, my apologies if I get it wrong.

<comment><USER7> I am astounded that in response to proposals to add closures to Java, many Java programmers protested that Java didn't need no stinkin' closures.

<comment><USER4> I agree that Java suffers greatly from the absence of closures. However, I also fear that Java is designed in such a way, and has so much existing code, that it may be near impossible to add closures in a way that isn't confusing and doesn't break in unexpected ways.

Joshua Bloch thoroughly covers the relevant issues in these PowerPoint slides.

<http://www.javac.info/bloch-closures-controversy.ppt>

(I'm pretty sure the video is online too, if you Google a little more than I did.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This argument is still 100% true:

"First the good stuff: Java doesn't have free(). I have to admit right off that, after that, all else is gravy. That one point makes me able to forgive just about anything else, no matter how egregious. Given this one point, everything else in this document fades nearly to insignificance."

</comment><comment><USER9> His argument that "there are four completely different things that go by the name 'Java'", and about Sun's incompetence at positioning it is still pretty devastating.

I pine for an alternate universe where Sun deftly parried Microsoft's Java to their benefit instead of repeatedly screwing themselves over. Sure, MS management wanted to fuck over Sun, but the grunts writing the software really legitimately wanted Java to be _the_ best language to write GUI apps in for Windows. Unfortunately the language itself was nowhere near ready for that (much less the standard libraries), so they improved the language. Sun promptly freaked the fuck out.

The end result is that progress was delayed by a decade (especially on Windows), and Microsoft ended up with sole control over the only decent industrial development platform for GUI applications.

The world would be a much better place if C# and the CLR were forks of Java and the JVM, with features percolating in both directions towards eventual standardization.

</comment><comment><USER10> this is hard to follow. i can't tell who is saying what: is it jwz, the question's author, or somebody else who contributed.

<comment><USER11> I agree, I edited it to clean it up a bit</comment></comment>


Twitter is blocked in China, but its state news agency is buying promoted tweets - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/twitter-is-blocked-in-china-but-its-state-news-agency-is-buying-promoted-tweets-to-portray-hong-kong-protestors-as-violent/ <comment><USER2> Twitter just posted this statement: [https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/informati...](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/information_operations_directed_at_Hong_Kong.html)

And a new policy banning all state-controlled media from advertising: [https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertisi...](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertising_policies_on_state_media.html)

I think this is an interesting example of recent discussions about the disproportionate influence of social media companies on information. Obviously, it doesn't seem right for a government to manipulate public conversation. But it's also worrisome that a single company has the power to shut down an entire government trying to spread its ideas. In this instance it's well justified, but it feels a little scary that the flow of information is policed by a couple private individuals with very little oversight. I don't have any particular opinions here on what might need to change, if anything - just thinking out loud.

<comment><USER3> How is this any different than the New York Times or the Nightly News? They control to a large extent the news people see.

<comment><USER4> These are journalistic organizations. Not tech companies selling ads. Sure, newspapers sell a ton of ads, but they tend to balance the news and the commercial sides way better and more delicate than your average SV tech corps.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One could ask, "What would China do to WeChat if they showed sponsored content from the US promoting democratic reforms in HK?"

</comment><comment><USER7> I was recently in Beijing and noticed when posting on Instagram many bot accounts posting "Shame on Hong Kong" in Chinese.

This is a Facebook problem too.

</comment><comment><USER8> "China appears to be making rapid advances in the development of Ben Garrison technology"

[https://twitter.com/hikikomorphism/status/116247064336062054...](https://twitter.com/hikikomorphism/status/1162470643360620544)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think people worry too much about these "misinformation campaigns". I think the idea behind this worry is "most people would not disagree with me unless they were brainwashed - we can't let people I disagree with do that".

I'm more on the free speech side, of course. I'm definitely not a fan of the Chinese government. I like free speech, after all! But I don't really think these promoted misleading tweets are swaying the opinion of most north- americans or europeans. And I don't like this new world order where your message must align with modern liberal western ideas, in order for you to express it on a popular medium. This trend is honestly a bit scary. We're getting into orthodoxy here.

Don't freak out that some people are broadcasting a message you don't agree with on a popular medium, and maybe some other people out there will be influenced by it. Growing up as a geek/nerd, I got accustomed to nobody I was around really understanding and agreeing with me. It's not the end of the world. But orthodoxy is a bit scary.

<comment><USER10> There is so much fallacious thinking here it would make me look like a pedantic doof to list them all. Suffice it to suggest that you consider accounting for the fact that there are real things actually happening outside of your mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Between this, and mainland Chinese protesting while living/studying abroad whereas they wouldn't have the right to do so at home, the irony is palpable.

<comment><USER12> You are onto something which had been bothering me yesterday.

I have a Chinese room mate who yesterday showed me images/videos 'anti- protester'and exclaiming how he wanted to be part of. Note in the past and still continues to be against the Chinese government and expresses disapproval of them.

I found it very odd of him to side with the anti-protestors because 'I love China and these protestors hate Chinese'. I told him, the people of Hong Kong are protesting against the Chinese government and the government does not represent the people. He further added, "people in China love the government". "If people don't like the government, they can kick them out".

I told him I am pretty sure they can't because the regime is not communist but instead totalitarian. Even a month ago, he told you can't speak anything against the government even if you wanted to because of their "3 generation threat".

So your comment must be part I missed in my mind, the Chinese national who sympathize with the government here in the US shouldn't be protesting at all. The government they support, it is against any type of protest and unrest. Can it be said that pro-Chinese government individuals don't really have the right no matter which type of environment they live in?

<comment><USER13> > I told him I am pretty sure they can't because the regime is not communist > but instead totalitarian.

Honest question: which communist government isn't / wasn't totalitarian?

<comment><USER11> Burning man? /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> many sites are blocked too, but the government agents can access them freely all the time, ironic

<comment><USER15> Also ironic is China's elite reaping the benefits of democracy while oppressing their own people.

<comment><USER16> Democracy? I think you mean Capitalism. The two things, although usually existing together, are not the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Many celebrities have also come out against the protests, such as Jackie Chan. I wonder if they were bought out or threatened by the government in order to do that.

<comment><USER18> Jackie Chan has a history of defending the CCP and propagandizing for them.

"Taiwan election biggest joke in the world" [http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/29/content_...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/29/content_318903.htm) [https://archive.fo/QYKF](https://archive.fo/QYKF)

"He was named official Narcotics Control Ambassador by Chinese police in 2009." [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia- china-32620313](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-32620313) [https://archive.fo/hFrnF](https://archive.fo/hFrnF)

"we Chinese need to be controlled" [https://web.archive.org/web/20090421223810/http://news.yahoo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090421223810/http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090418/ap_en_ot/as_china_people_jackie_chan) [https://archive.fo/pigfI](https://archive.fo/pigfI)

"Anger after movie star tells mainland newspaper his hometown has become 'like South Korea' and that it should limit the right to protest" [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1103899/jackie-c...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1103899/jackie-chan-criticises-hong-kong-city-protest) [Note this is about 2012 protests not 2019]

"Jackie Chan back in action, branding US more corrupt than China" [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1125813/jackie-c...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1125813/jackie-chan-back-action-branding-us-more-corrupt-china)

"Parents disliked the presence of Jackie Chan in the program" [https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-netizens-criticize- man...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-netizens-criticize-mandatory- propaganda-program-for-children-and-parents-on-state-media_2640059.html) [https://archive.fo/lKp1J](https://archive.fo/lKp1J)

"The 63-year-old Chan has aligned himself closely with the authoritarian views of the Chinese Communist Party in recent decades and is now widely seen across the Chinese-speaking world as a mouthpiece for the Beijing regime." [https://www.theepochtimes.com/jackie-chan-pushes-to- outlaw-s...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/jackie-chan-pushes-to-outlaw- samurai-code-in-china_2464204.html) [https://archive.fo/Ewked](https://archive.fo/Ewked)

"Jackie Chan's multilingual film Kung Fu Yoga has courted controversy for having an Indian character allegedly praise Chinese President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)." [https://silverscreen.in/news/jackie-chans- kung-fu-yoga-pro-c...](https://silverscreen.in/news/jackie-chans-kung-fu-yoga- pro-china-propaganda-say-critics/) [https://archive.fo/tVsQy](https://archive.fo/tVsQy)

<comment><USER19> Will never watch another of his movies again.</comment></comment></comment>


The truth about toilet swirl (2015) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXaad0rsV38 <comment><USER2> I really can't tell if this is an expensive and sophisticated troll, or they're genuinely bewildered.

Using a graphic showing several thousand kilometre-wide pool with one edge touching a pole is disingenuous. At _that_ scale, yes, you're going to observe Coriolis effect.

Hurricanes don't form within five degrees of the equator -- that provides a useful data point for the lower end of the scale required to see the effect.

Sydney's 34 degrees south, but the velocity delta at 1 metre distance would be dwarfed by various other environmental factors and starting conditions. (Temperature deltas and wind, especially for the outdoor pool, vortices produced by the elbow close to what looks like a 19mm outlet, texture on the PVC liner, etc.)

Plus of course in any dual-pool-emptying experiment, there's a 25% probability of this result.

I'm miffed that a single experiment gets described as 'this is science, dude!'.

<comment><USER3> "I'm miffed that a single experiment gets described as 'this is science, dude!'".

A single data point is still a data point and this is still science.

<comment><USER2> > A single data point is still a data point and this is still science.

Both presenters are enthusiastic and engaging, undeniably. And yes, this is a data point.

But this isn't science.

Partly because they claim they've 'proved it because we eliminated variables' (3'57"), when they clearly haven't.

Partly because one of the basic tenets of science is repeatability. As I noted above, there's a 1 in 4 chance of getting this result if you assume equal probabilities of clockwise / counter-clockwise. That assumption should be the starting point of any experiment around this effect.

Food colouring should have been put in - for some of the repeated experiments at least - _before_ the valve was open, to confirm the water was in fact still motionless. (Or to show that it wasn't.)

Similarly that little match-stick cross on one of the pools - those should have been present on both pools, probably several of them, spread around the surface (though surface motion is not necessarily indicative of sub-surface movements).

I could go on.

<comment><USER4> It really isn't science. It's pop science, and although I do enjoy the Smarter Every Day guy, I do agree it's kinda disservice to understanding how things work. They should have repeated the experiment; gotten some sensor experts to see if they could quantify the "stillness" of the water, etc.

We've had pop science before (Mr Wizard anyone?), and we're just seeing more of it today. Real science is slow, methodical and doesn't infer causality from one experiment. It says, "Maybe x caused y; let's do some more tests." It's the QA person who says "Happy path works. Let's break it and see if we can inject some Javascript."

Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer/comedian/kids host. Tyson is physicists. They're smart, but they're not experts on everything.

Like I said, I like these guys, but I realize it's not science. It's half entertainment/half makes you think. In these videos it's fun, but in the political arena, _science_ presented this way can be weaponized:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yecefLsE44U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yecefLsE44U)

<comment><USER5> "They should have repeated the experiment;"

From the video description:

"For the record Destin and I repeated the experiment 3-4 times each in each hemisphere and got the same results every time."

<comment><USER2> That wasn't mentioned in the video, so I missed that (I usually avoid clicking 'read more' on youtube descriptions).

'3-4 times' sounds a bit wobbly -- I'm hoping that they meant they repeated it 3 times in one place, 4 in the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real truth about toilet swirl is that toilets in Australia don't swirl, they flush: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11zXXEgIes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11zXXEgIes)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, American toilets are weird. First time I saw one (at LAX after flying in from Australia) I thought it was broken - firstly given the huge amount of water in it at the start, and then the way it fills up when you flush it! I really thought it was going to overflow.

<comment><USER8> I guess people are proud of their excements and want to parade them around as long as possible by making it take an unnecessarily long time and wasting as much water as possible. It's like, to them, toilets should have a flush song and they need to selfie vlog dance about their "accomplishment" like saying "first."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am from Australia, have been living in North America for 10 years.

I have also driven across the Equator twice - once in Ecuador[1] and recently in Gabon, West Africa[2].

It's funny to watch the guys standing on the Equator tricking tourists with a swirl of their wrist to supposedly demonstrate this effect.

I thoroughly enjoy watching the stars change as I progress from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, and the water direction slowly change.

[1] [http://theroadchoseme.com/the-equator](http://theroadchoseme.com/the- equator)

[2] [http://theroadchoseme.com/the-equator- gabon](http://theroadchoseme.com/the-equator-gabon)

</comment><comment><USER10> OK that was pretty cool. Props to these guys for taking such simple thoughts/ideas and generating interesting content. Youtubers like this are the modern-day Bill Nye. The faster we all 'cut the cord' and ditch TV, the faster we can force the return of quality creative content like this. Either because TV dies outright, or networks are monetarily forced to put effort into quality programming again.

<comment><USER11> Why would I want to cut the cord and ditch TV? Television is awesome. I wish I had time to watch more of it.

<comment><USER8> Troll.

<comment><USER11> How is that a troll or even provocative? Last Sunday was the Game of Thrones finale and there was a lot of excitement over it. That's not because TV sucks and everybody should ditch it. Tonight I'll watch a baseball game on TV. Over the weekend I had it on more than usual because I was watching the Harvey news.

Television is wonderful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TLDW; They try toilets which dont work so they create a larger vortices in kiddy pools.

just lol, they are so excited... I do hope they realise that there was never any debate about the Coriolis effect being real, cos ya know... math. Only debate was that the effect is not strong enough compared to other forces acting on small vortices in fluids, i.e toilets.

<comment><USER13> Derek Muller, the Veritasium guy, has a PhD in physics and a focus on the use of media for physics education. What you're seeing is his (and Destin's) successful take on how to make learning fun.

<comment><USER14> Muller's PhD is in physics education, not physics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All mention of Coriolis should refer to this 1965 Letter in Nature magazine titled "The Bath-Tub Vortex in the Southern Hemisphere"

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v207/n5001/abs/2071084a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v207/n5001/abs/2071084a0.html)

As you can read below, even with extreme care the Coriolis effect can be overwhelmed by very small perturbations such as how the lid is lifted.

[http://web.aeromech.usyd.edu.au/history- chapters/C3%20Thermo...](http://web.aeromech.usyd.edu.au/history- chapters/C3%20ThermoFluids.pdf) ...

> At Tom Fink's invitation, Professor Lloyd M. Trefethen of Tufts University, > USA, spent a short sabbatical in Mechanical Engineering in 1964/65\. Already > famous for his work on surface tension phenomena, he led us into a repeat of > the experiments on the bathtub vortex that had recently been conducted by > Ascher Shapiro at MIT. After much careful design, a circular tank of some > 2.4m in diameter and 0.4m depth was constructed and installed in one of the > subterranean dungeons of the old Peter Nicol Russell building. Carefully > designed procedures and their diligent execution resulted in absolutely > conclusive results that were published in Nature [Trefethen, et al, 1965). A > re-enactment for the local media was a disaster: Bilger and Tanner muffed > the removal of the covering baffles creating a great vortex in the water > that then went out the wrong way. 'Scientists baffled' cried the media. We > even made Time magazine!

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there more examples of synced videos like these?

</comment><comment><USER17> It has a better looking url: [http://toiletswirl.com/](http://toiletswirl.com/)

Actually, Veritasium merged the two videos into one because it is easier to watch on a smartphone. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXaad0rsV38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXaad0rsV38)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's clickbait to generate youtube views. Seriously how many times have we seen this trick?

<comment><USER19> How many times have you seen the baking soda / vinegar volcano demonstration? The more the better, in my opinion, and I'm a volcanologist.</comment></comment>


Does information theory support design in nature? - <AUTHOR> https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/does-information-theory-support-design-in-nature/ <comment><USER2> The title of the article seems... disingenuous. First, the article doesn't answer that question. Second, the title and the article assume that "design" appears in nature. The article doesn't support this claim.

<comment><AUTHOR> The referenced article has more details. Also the comments have more details.

[https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/does-information-theory- suppo...](https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/does-information-theory-support- design-in-nature/)

I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

<comment><USER2> Sure.

Why is the title of the article so disingenuous?

What design do people think they see in nature?

By what method can I, without referring to someone else's authority, decide that a particular part of nature is "designed"? Without an explicit criteria for "design", the whole thing is just arguing over opinions about what is designed and what isn't. That is, it would become just like Behe's "irreducible complexity". No definite criteria for "irreducible" and no measurement for "complexity".

While you're at it, point me to some PDFs of refereed papers written by Dembski. I'm a smart guy, I can read primary sources. The article doesn't point to any, and a quick duckduckgo for "dembski no free lunch" gets me web pages that provide a critique of Dembski's book (and not on information theoretic grounds, either), and his book on Amazon, but nothing I can print and read and digest. No PDFs.

How does Dembski wave off actual examples of artificial evolution? Tierra ([http://life.ou.edu/tierra/](http://life.ou.edu/tierra/)) seems to evolve little digital pseudo-life that does a specific task. Here's another example: [http://www.genetic-programming.com/jkpdf/alife1990.pdf](http://www.genetic- programming.com/jkpdf/alife1990.pdf) There are more "folksy" reports, too: [https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/293256](https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/293256) . There's an entire field, genetic algorithms/genetic programming, that actually ends up at least some of the time, evolving a solution to the problem. Adrian Thompson's FPGA experiment ([https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Thompson5/public...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Thompson5/publication/285668389_Exploring_beyond_the_scope_of_human_design_Automatic_generation_of_FPGA_configurations_through_artificial_evolution/links/56f0a8bd08ae584badc9389e/Exploring- beyond-the-scope-of-human-design-Automatic-generation-of-FPGA-configurations- through-artificial-evolution.pdf)) is pretty famous. Here's a distillation of the above paper with a few interesting editorial comments: [https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/308/779/an_evolved_cir...](https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/308/779/an_evolved_circuit_intrinsic_in_silicon_entwined_with_physics.pdf)

How does Dembski explain how every system that attempts to "evolve" something by successive generations that inherit and have minor changes ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453), which is a summary of many experiments) end up doing something that's undeniably evolution?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the title, I should have linked to the primary article instead of the one with the discussion. I submitted again with a direct link this time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18449438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18449438)

The design detection is essentially a hypothesis test, and doesn't depend on anyone's authority. I'm happy to answer questions on how this works.

The basic idea is Shannon information says all bitstrings of length N are equally likely, but Kolmogorov complexity says the compressible bitstrings are less likely than the incompressible bitstrings. Therefore, when we see a highly compressible bitstring we infer some cause other than chance. E.g. if someone flips 100 heads in a row, you would be justified in thinking the coin is not fair.

Dembski's work is a generalization of this observation.

You can find a list of Dembski's refereed publications with google scholar. Here is a list of some that I found. A couple address your question regarding evolutionary algorithms.

\- [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5204206](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5204206)

\- [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5345941](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5345941)

\- [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01046100?LI=tr...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01046100?LI=true)

\- [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5442816](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5442816)

<comment><USER2> How do we go from some life thing, designed or not, to a bitstring? Don't say use DNA: representations of it are notoriously compressible, starting with the kind-of-error-correcting encoding ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_codon_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_codon_table)) of amino acid production.

And thank you for the Avida ref. I could not remember its name, nor could I find it in google.

Based on the abstracts of the papers, I can safely say that Dembski is mistaking "search with a goal" with evolution, which seems pretty un-directed almost by definition. His papers are probably true, and may be worth reading, but they're pretty obviously circular if you try to connect them to "design": "Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated queries." That's true: evolutionary computing has a human-decided goal, and therefore each generation is in essence a query of an oracle. Where's the oracle in terrestrial biology? That "oracle" is the "designer", but if the "oracle" is just whatever stays alive long enough to reproduce, his basic assumption of search isn't true: there's no goal.

<comment><AUTHOR> The application of Dembski's ideas is a much more difficult subject, and not one I have enough expertise in to comment, at least in the biological realm. But, the fact that DNA is highly compressible, as you point out, would indicate it is at least not due to a random process.

The article is meant to point out the overall framework is valid within standard information theory. It is not a commentary on whether Dembski's work has been correctly applied or not.

I think the goal in evolution is at least to survive and reproduce.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disclosed – Lifx Security Issue - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/05/disclosed-lifx-security-issue/ <comment><USER2> Thought this was going to be a story about how yet another company decided to ignore a security problem, but was pleasantly surprised. Well done Lifx!

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh! I've published plenty of those - I like to give a shout out when someone does the right thing.</comment></comment>